Six F-35Bs were spotted landing in Puerto Rico on Saturday as the Trump administration continues using the military to fight drug trafficking around Latin America, Reuters and The War Zone reported Saturday. Four more are reportedly on the way.
President Trump last week ordered 10 of the cutting-edge aircraft to the region just days after the U.S. military said its troops killed 11 people in a speedboat allegedly transporting drugs to the U.S., though no evidence has been provided to back up those claims, as the New York Times reported Wednesday following a Pentagon briefing on Capitol Hill.
For what it’s worth, “the F-35s seen landing…have no unit markings on their tails. This could be [a] force protection/security tactic, but the reason isn’t clear at this time,” TWZ’s Howard Altman observed.
There are already at least eight U.S. Navy vessels in the region, including a nuclear-powered submarine. “A second flight of four F-35s from MCAS Yuma is also headed toward Puerto Rico,” Altman reported, citing open-source flight trackers like this.
New: Venezuelan officials say the U.S. Navy raided a tuna boat in Venezuelan waters on Saturday. Eighteen U.S. troops reportedly boarded the vessel during an “illegal” search that lasted around eight hours, the Associated Press reports, citing Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil. The nine fishermen onboard the vessel “were then released under escort by the Venezuelan navy,” AP writes.
Welcome to this Monday 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. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1916, tanks were first used in war at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette during the Battle of the Somme.
Around the world
Another Russian drone breached NATO airspace last week, prompting Romania to scramble two F-16 fighter jets after radar detected a Russian drone in Romanian airspace at about 6 p.m. local time.
The drone incursion lasted 50 minutes, and didn’t cause any damage or casualties, Foreign Minister Oana-Silvia Țoiu said.
“This is Russia’s second incursion into NATO airspace over the course of four days,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted in their latest assessment. It’s also the 11th incursion into Romanian airspace since Russia launched its full-scale Ukraine invasion in 2022, Romanian officials told ABC News. Reuters has a bit more.
Update: Trump backed off his latest promise to sanction Russia further, writing Saturday online that he wants all NATO allies to stop buying Russian oil and place 50 to 100% tariffs on China first—then he said he’d be “ready to do major Sanctions on Russia.” The New York Times reports “The condition is almost certain not to be met, which Mr. Trump and his advisers know.”
Background: “The European Union had been heavily dependent on Russian energy before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. It has taken steps to reduce those purchases, but they have not disappeared entirely,” NPR explains. For example, behind China and India, Turkey is Russia’s third-largest importer of oil, followed closely by Hungary.
Panning out: “Trump has repeatedly threatened to punish Russia with new sanctions if it refuses to reach an agreement with Ukraine, but has failed to follow through as Moscow has ignored several deadlines,” Time magazine writes.
Big-picture consideration: “Trump telegraphed great strength and vowed he could end Russia’s war against Ukraine with a single phone call,” Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson explained Saturday. “When he failed to get any buy-in at all from Russia’s president Vladimir Putin for his proposals, Trump threatened to impose strong new sanctions against Russia. This afternoon he backed away from that altogether,” she said, citing Saturday’s developments.
Meanwhile for Ukraine, future attack drone swarms may come in the form of first-person-shooter drones produced in the country, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. Those swarms could also come via new platforms Western defense companies are putting into the mix. But it’s also possible they’ll be a combination of both—old and new drones working together with minimal human interaction, according to a Ukrainian startup called Swarmer, which is pioneering software that can work with virtually any platform.
The drones linked together via Swarmer’s software can “exchange the targets, or they can choose the appropriate payload. Different drones can use and carry different kinds of payloads for different targets,” founder Serhii Kupriienko told Tucker. “They can execute complicated scenarios like [target] discovery, and they can give you visual confirmation of the damage [after the strike]. It could be done by the group of drones.” Continue reading, here.
Typhon missile debuts in Japan, drawing China’s ire. Monday’s appearance of the U.S. Army’s newest intermediate-range missile system in an exercise in Western Japan “underscor[es] Washington and Tokyo’s growing willingness to field weapons that Beijing has condemned as destabilising,” writes Reuters. That follows the launcher’s 2024 deployment to the Philippines, “a move that drew sharp criticism from Beijing and Moscow, which accused the U.S. of fuelling an arms race.”
Expert reax: “In the past, these deployments would have been nixed by DC and Tokyo bureaucrats out of fear of the Chinese reaction. You can see that’s less of an issue than it was, say five years ago,” said Grant Newsham, a Japan Forum for Strategic Studies research fellow and retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel who worked alongside the Japanese military. Read on, here.
From the region: “Australian government pledges $12B to nuclear submarine precinct ahead of PM’s US visit,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported Saturday.
Around the Defense Department
Drone boats, new landing craft get Army Pacific tryouts. “Robot boats. Counter-drone systems. A prototype Army landing craft. A million dollars in cash prizes. It’s all part of the Army’s effort to overcome logistics challenges in the Indo-Pacific and get new technology in the hands of soldiers more quickly,” writes Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad, reporting from Honolulu. Read on, here.
What does the White House’s “Department of War” push mean for the Pentagon’s networks? Officials aren’t quite sure. The short-notice and so-far-unofficial change has IT leaders scrambling to rename networks and services—and avoid unfortunate rebrandings such as “DOWNet” for the nascent DODNet network. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has more on the uncertainty, here.
Trump 2.0
After declaring nine “national emergencies,” Trump on Monday threatened to declare a tenth—this one doubling down on the “crime emergency” declared for the District of Columbia. The reason? The mayor said last week that its police would not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“If I allowed this to happen, CRIME would come roaring back,” the president wrote on his social media platform Monday morning. “To the people and businesses of Washington, D.C., DON’T WORRY, I AM WITH YOU, AND WON’T ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN. I’ll call a National Emergency, and Federalize, if necessary!!!”
Rewind: Just last month, Reuters reminds readers, Trump ordered “the metropolitan police department under direct federal control and sent federal law enforcement, including members of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to police the streets. It is unclear when their mission will end.”
It’s also not clear just what role ICE has played in arrests during the takeover, the Washington Post reported Sunday in an analysis of arrest statistics.
Reminder: Trump offered false and exaggerated crime statistics to justify the National Guard’s deployment to D.C. and a takeover of the local police.
Related reading: “How Trump’s Crime Crackdown Muted Other Parts of D.C. Life,” via the New York Times, reporting Thursday.
A study finds more than 100 court cases in which the Trump administration has undermined the “presumption of regularity,” a legal doctrine that prescribes a benefit of the doubt for the U.S. government—or, as the study’s half-dozen authors write for Just Security, an assumption that Justice Department officials act inside the courtroom “with procedural regularity and with bona fide, non-pretextual reasons.”
Among the findings:
- Judges said they did not trust information from the Trump administration in more than three dozen different cases, including allegations of “false sworn statements, contradictions with the record, refusals or inability to answer basic questions,” and more;
- Courts found administration officials acted in either an “arbitrary” or “capricious” manner in more than 50 cases;
- And courts found administration officials did not comply with judges’ orders in at least 15 cases involving an explicit violation of a court order—either through “willful disobedience, ignoring court-imposed deadlines, [and/or] refusing to provide court-ordered information.”
Why it matters: In short, it breaks long-held norms that helped the executive branch move cases along. Or as the authors write, “since the presumption of regularity is based on the notion that agencies generally follow regular procedures, what happens if the baseline order of business is different? What if arbitrary and capricious conduct was instead widespread or pervasive?” In those instances, “The application of the presumption would lose the basis for its support,” and the administration may have to work harder to justify its allegations in court.
Additional reading:
- “Mass Firing of Probationary Federal Employees Was Illegal, Judge Rules,” the New York Times reported Saturday;
- “Judge extends temporary measures protecting Guatemalan children from deportation,” the Associated Press reported Saturday;
- “Right-winger films Pritzker’s home, stokes concern by asking followers to ‘take action’ after Kirk death,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported Friday;
- “Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade apologizes for saying mentally ill homeless people should be executed,” AP reported Sunday;
- “Denver school shooting suspect posted online about mass shootings and neo-Nazi views, report says,” AP reported separately Sunday, citing this report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism;
- And ICYMI, “The school shooting industry is worth billions, and it keeps growing,” NPR reported last Monday.
Read the full article here