A Navy F-35 crashed close to Naval Air Station Lemoore, in central California on Wednesday evening around 6:30 p.m. local. Fortunately the pilot ejected and is safe, base officials announced on Facebook.
The aircraft was assigned to the VFA-125 Rough Raiders, which is tasked with training pilots on the Navy’s F-35C variant. See video of the crash’s fiery aftermath via a clip posted to social media, here.
The crash was the second for an F-35 since late January when an A-variant crashed at Alaska’s Eielson Air Force Base. An F-35B crashed in New Mexico in May 2024, though the pilot was injured in that incident. Review additional reported F-35 crashes, involving both the U.S. and allies’ aircraft going back to 2014, here.
The aircraft, which rings in at about $100 million per jet, is flown by the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, and 17 countries, but has come under scrutiny for cost overruns and poor reliability and availability.
Update: Imprecise altitude readings contributed to the Army’s fatal Black Hawk helicopter collision with a passenger jet over Washington, D.C., in January, according to the first day of National Transportation Safety Board hearings Wednesday.
But the altitude measurement wasn’t the only factor, the Associated Press reports from the hearings. “The Army acknowledged that their Black Hawks altimeters might be more than 100 feet (30 meters) off, but they seemed to say that was acceptable because their pilots’ goal is to maintain altitude within 100 feet of a limit.”
Army officials pointed to “the lack of separation between landing aircraft and helicopters flying on approved FAA routes near the airport,” which Army officials said “was up to the air traffic controller to keep helicopters from flying on that route anytime planes were taking off or landing.”
What’s more, according to an NTSB report (PDF) released Wednesday, “All aircraft could hear the controller, but helicopters could only hear other helicopters on their frequency and airplanes only other airplanes.” As a result, “helicopters and airplanes were not aware when the other was communicating,” the report said.
The U.S. Army’s counterdrone mega-exercise in Europe, Project Flytrap, isn’t over just yet, but at least one thing seems clear: senior officers need more data training, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Wednesday.
The drills have been running for the past five months, involving soldiers from Australia, Poland, the U.S., and the United Kingdom. Acquisition officials and industry representatives also joined the event, whose fourth phase wraps up today—with plans to add two more phases in fiscal year 2026. But one big lesson so far has been that senior leaders, which means lieutenant colonels and above, need training to manage the troves of data collected and detected in a drone-heavy battlefield, 2nd Cavalry Regiment commander Col. Donald Neal told reporters. Read more, here.
Army rescinds West Point role for ex‑CISA director after pressure from far-right activist Laura Loomer. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said he had rescinded the appointment of Jen Easterly, a West Point grad and former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as the new Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in its Department of Social Sciences. Loomer had highlighted the hiring on social media.
Nextgov: “CISA has been the target of the Trump White House for myriad reasons. In 2020, Trump falsely claimed the election that year was rigged and stolen from him. After former CISA director Chris Krebs said the election was the “most secure in American history,” the president fired him. Krebs, as well as his former private-sector employer, have since been targeted by the second Trump administration.” More, here.
Related reading:
The Senate Armed Services Committee is considering four key Defense Department nominees this morning, including Michael Powers to be the Pentagon’s next comptroller; Amy Henninger to be the department’s new testing and evaluation director; David Denton as General Counsel for the Navy; and Benjamin Kohlmann to be the Navy’s Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. That began at 9:15 a.m. ET. Details and video here.
Additional reading:
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 and Audrey Decker. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2007, the British Army’s longest-ever deployment came to an end with the formal conclusion of Operation Banner in Northern Ireland.
Trump 2.0
Under Trump, ICE now has more money to spend each year than all but 15 of the world’s militaries. At $27.7 billion annually, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is newly offering $50,000 signing bonuses, student loan repayment and forgiveness options, and even “patriotic recruitment posters and benefits to attract the next generation of law enforcement professionals to find, arrest, and remove criminal illegal aliens,” the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday.
Bigger picture: “ICE is set to get $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its current annual budget,” AP reported Wednesday. “Some $45 billion will go toward increasing detention capacity. Nearly $30 billion is for hiring 10,000 more staff so the agency can meet its goal of 1 million annual deportations.”
One former ICE official “estimated it would take three to four years to actually hire and train” those 10,000 new employees. Meantime, ICE is expected to “rely on private contractors, National Guard troops and other federal law enforcement officers to meet the administration’s goal of 3,000 arrests a day,” AP writes. Politico has more.
Developing: ICE is already operating at least nine large detention facilities for migrants in Louisiana, the New York Times reports in a multimedia feature published Thursday. One such facility in Alexandria—a former Air Force base until 1992—is now, as Times puts it, “the deportation capital of America.”
About the Alexandria, La., facility: “More deportation flights have taken off from there than from any other place in the United States, and more domestic ICE flights have passed through there than anywhere else, according to a widely cited database of ICE flights,” the Times reports.
Notable: “With cheap labor and real estate, the daily cost of holding an ICE detainee in the region is roughly a third of the average daily cost elsewhere. The highest court in the region—the federal appeals court based in New Orleans—is particularly Trump-friendly, and the state’s top elected officials, all of whom are Republicans, have put up no opposition.” Continue reading (gift link), here.
By the way: The Trump administration is running “a bit of a [legal] black hole” with its Everglades migrant detention facility, a federal judge said Monday. At the facility, known as “Alligator Alcatraz” to the Trump administration, “detainees have been barred from meeting attorneys, are being held without any charges and that a federal immigration court has canceled bond hearings,” AP reported Monday.
The judge warned at the Monday hearing “The court may be walking into a bit of a black hole about the interplay between the federal and state authorities and certainly jurisdictional concerns,” and added, “That’s part of the problem—who is doing what in this facility?”
Additional reading:
- “Trump Administration Told Taiwan’s President to Avoid New York Stopover,” the New York Times reported Wednesday;
- “Top White House pandemic preparedness official resigns, officials say, in sign of broader disarray,” STAT reported Wednesday;
- “US government will ingest all federal data into AI models, WH tech director says, adding that that’s one of the national-security reasons the U.S. needs to lead the world in AI; that via Nextgov;
- “The federal government is paying more than 154,000 people not to work,” thanks to its workforce-slashing efforts, the Washington Post reported Thursday;
- And “Despite grand claims, a new report shows noncitizen voting hasn’t materialized,” NPR reports off the latest study to show this.
Etc.
Turnabout for the chip industry? After years in which Western security agencies warned that network gear from Chinese firms might be used against its customers, Beijing has summoned Nvidia officials to explain why China should not fear backdoors in the U.S.-made chips. The Wall Street Journal reports, here.
ICYMI: Coast Guard says it chased off a Chinese icebreaker in U.S. waters last week. “A Coast Guard C-130J Hercules fixed wing aircraft from Air Station Kodiak responded to the Xue Long 2, an icebreaker operated by the Polar Research Institute of China and 130 [nautical miles] inside the [extended continental shelf] boundary” north of Alaska, the service said in a July 26 statement. “The U.S. has exclusive rights to conserve and manage the living and non-living resources of its ECS.” CBS had a bit more, here.
Ukraine charges air force officer with spying on fighter jets. Reuters: “Ukraine’s domestic security agency has detained an air force officer on charges of having spied for Russia by leaking the location of prized F-16 and Mirage 2000 fighter jets, officials said on Wednesday. The unidentified officer, a flight instructor holding the rank of major, stands accused of helping Russia carry out air strikes by providing coordinates and suggesting strike tactics, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said in a statement.”
Lastly: “Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs,” reports the AP, which says a routine check at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., found a nest with 10 times the allowable level of radiation, according to a July report from the U.S. Department of Energy. Officials said there is no danger to anyone, but Tom Clements of the Savannah River Site Watch watchdog group, called the report incomplete at best. “I’m as mad as a hornet that SRS didn’t explain where the radioactive waste came from or if there is some kind of leak from the waste tanks that the public should be aware of,” Clements said. More, here.
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