Braxton Taylor
Give carmakers a shot at making weapons, deputy defense secretary nominee says. U.S. defense contractors beyond the traditional primes—like General Motors, for example—should get Defense Department money to take a crack at building weapons, even at the expense of near-term competition, Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, told senators during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.
GM already does business with the military. But Feinberg said his point was that the Pentagon needs to “find ways,” perhaps through rapid or sole-source contracting, to hand weapons contracts to big manufacturers that can produce more and faster than traditional defense primes.
“They are at a disadvantage competing with the big defense companies,” Feinberg said, and emphasized, “We’ve got to make it easier for them. Maybe not the most competitive answer on the surface, but will lead to much more [competition] in the future.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has more, here.
More money should go to develop hypersonic missiles, autonomous systems, and AI tools, Feinberg also said. “We have to develop hypersonics. We can’t allow the Chinese to be faster than us, both in their weaponry and aircraft.”
Feinberg didn’t say how he would accelerate development, an effort hobbled across administrations by a lack of testing ranges and other factors, but he did acknowledge the obstacles. “Limited access to test assets or aging test infrastructure, as well as failures to prioritize certain technology areas, are all challenges DOD faces in technology development,” Feinberg said in written responses to committee questions. (Read those responses, here.)
Update: Army vet Driscoll confirmed as service secretary. The Senate confirmed Dan Driscoll with a comfortable 66-28 majority, with several Democrats crossing party lines to support the Army lieutenant-turned-law school classmate of JD Vance-turned-businessman. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.
Other services: Trump’s Navy secretary pick, financier John Phelan, will sit for Senate questioning on Thursday. The Senate Armed Services Committee hasn’t yet scheduled a hearing for Air Force secretary nominee Troy Meink, a former National Reconnaissance Office deputy director.
Space Force sets up team to sort out support for Iron Dome for America Golden Dome. A “technical integrated planning team” will gauge which of its current programs can help build out President Trump’s recently renamed missile-defense vision—and what still needs to be developed, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters Monday.
The effort will include the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor satellite and the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.
The planning team will finish up in “a matter of weeks” and identify which Space Force programs could directly support the effort, and what gaps remain for building the missile defense system, a senior Space Force official told reporters Monday. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.
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 and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1993, Pakistani terrorist Ramzi Yousef organized and carried out an attack on the World Trade Center using explosives detonated inside a van beneath the North Tower, killing six people and wounding more than 1,000 others.
Ukraine developments
Zelenskyy will visit the U.S. on Friday. The Ukrainian leader is headed to Washington for talks with President Trump, who has been pressing a deal with Kyiv that would give the U.S. access to certain of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for … well, it’s not clear what it would be in exchange for so far, the New York Times reports, citing a copy of the U.S.-Ukraine agreement, which may not be the final draft.
The latest: “A draft of an agreement calling for Ukraine to hand over to the United States revenue from natural resources includes new language referring to security guarantees, a provision Kyiv had pressed for vigorously in negotiations,” the Times reported Wednesday morning. However, “the reference is vague and does not signal any specific American commitment to safeguarding Ukraine’s security,” the paper notes.
Fine print: “[A]ccepting the agreement was a necessary precondition of Trump’s invitation to Zelenskyy to meet on Friday,” a White House official told the Associated Press.
“This agreement may either be a great success or quietly fade away,” Zelenskyy said Wednesday. “And I believe success depends on our conversation with President Trump.”
Changing winds? European countries provided more military aid to Ukraine last year than the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing European officials. But going back to the start of the full-scale Russian invasion three years ago, the U.S. has done more than Europe in terms of military support, totaling almost $70 billion from the U.S., which the Journal notes “is more than all of Ukraine’s other Western allies combined,” according to data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Also worth noting: “Ukraine currently builds or finances about 55% of its military hardware. The U.S. supplies around 20%, while Europe supplies 25%,” an unnamed Western official told the Journal.
Today at the White House, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is dropping by for talks with Trump. Starmer’s team just announced plans to raise UK defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027.
The Brits also said “the definition of defence spending will be updated to recognise what our security and intelligence agencies do to boost our security, as well as our military,” as this more accurately reflects “the modern hybrid threats we face, from cyber-attacks to sabotage,” officials said Tuesday. “This change means that the UK will now spend 2.6% of GDP on defence in 2027,” they added.
Starmer said the increases will be paid in part by a 40% decrease in international aid. As planned, it would also represent “the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War,” the prime minister said.
For the record, “Britain’s defence ministry said it spent 53.9 billion pounds [or about $68 billion] in the 2023/24 financial year,” Reuters reports. The new plans mean the UK will spend 13.4 billion pounds (or about $17 billion) on defense in 2027.
For Ukraine’s radar: Starmer is also bringing to the White House “a European initiative to field a 30,000-strong peacekeeping force” to help manage what happens next with Russia’s Ukraine invasion, the Times reports.
One possible catch: The plan “would nonetheless require an American ‘backstop’ of military assistance, such as American satellite surveillance, air defense or air force support.” And it’s unclear how Trump will respond to that.
Related reading: “Under Trump, America’s New Friends: Russia, North Korea and Belarus,” Peter Baker of the New York Times reported in an analysis piece published Tuesday.
Etc.
Retreat from great power competition? “Seems pretty clear that the Trump administration’s strategic orientation ain’t gonna be ‘great-power competition,’” Dan Nexon, a professor in the School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown University, wrote on social media this week. So far, “the policies adopted by the administration simply aren’t compatible with that,” he wrote in a thread on social media Tuesday. “Trump’s tariff plans for Mexico and Canada, as currently formulated, don’t just [****] up U.S. alliances — they’re structured in ways that encourage import substitution toward China.”
As a result, “The Trump administration seems prepared to concede large swaths of the globe and entire sectors of global governance to China. That’s not a GPC strategy,” said Nexon. “What we’re seeing now looks a lot like Russia’s vision of international order, in which members of the “great power club” act as a cartel while respecting one another’s privileged spheres of influence,” he said, which echoes what another policy analyst (Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) observed a few weeks ago.
“The ‘twist’ here is that Trump’s foreign-policy views are also authoritarian and patrimonial in outlook—hence the emphasis on interpersonal ties to foreign leaders, especially autocrats, and the subordination of [U.S. foreign policy] to self-aggrandizement and even financial gain,” said Nexon.
Lastly today: Public-opinion check-in. A review of 300 or so surveys (data here) conducted between January 20 and February 24, 2025, shows, according to 538 pollster G. Elliott Morris, that “Americans voted for Trump, but don’t support his agenda.”
Support for his foreign policy is at -15, with 33% approving and 49% disapproving. The only two issues with more disapproval are his handling of crime (at -24) and healthcare (at -27).
Trump’s only significantly popular policy concerns his efforts to curb the civil rights of LGBT+ people, which registers as a net +16 approval across the surveys Morris assessed. (The three other issues in net-positive territory are energy at +5, environment at +3, and immigration at +2.)
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