U.S. troops attended Russia-Belarus war games on Monday, Pentagon officials confirmed after news organizations photographed them attending Zapad-2025, Reuters reported Tuesday. It was the first time U.S. representatives have attended the sprawling exercise since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Belarus described the U.S. troops’ appearance as an unexpected addition to the 22 other foreign militaries represented at the wargames, including NATO’s Hungary and Turkey, the Telegraph reported Monday.
“Mr Trump is said to want to reopen the American embassy in Minsk as part of a wider strategy for cultivating ties with one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies,” the British paper reported, adding, “Just last week, the US president sent [Belarus leader Alexander] Lukashenko a hand-written note” via Trump’s envoy John Coale.
This year’s joint, multidomain Zapad exercises, which began on Sept. 11 and stretch from Belarus to the Arctic, involved some 40,000 troops, far fewer than in pre-invasion years. The Telegraph has a separate look at what’s happening, and what it might mean.
Watching closely was Lt. Gen. Dariusz Parylak, NATO’s commander in Poland and the Baltics. “We will have a kitchen-window observation on how Russia is transferring lessons from Ukraine to training,” Parylak said earlier this month. “That’s vital because it shows how their thinking is developing, how modernisation processes are going and the evolution of their tactics, techniques and procedure doctrines.” More, here.
The U.S. Air Force must move on from decades-old assumptions, says Lt. Gen. David A. Harris, the service’s deputy chief of staff for futures, in a Defense One op-ed. A2/AD tactics have made Bagram-style air bases untenable, and so leaders must develop options for agile, light-footprint operations. In spirit, if not technology, the service must continue the fierce innovation of Gen. Pete Quesada and the 9th Air Force, which put liaison officers in tanks for groundbreaking combined-arms operations. Read that, here.
AFRICOM says it targeted an “al Shabaab weapons dealer” in an attack near Badhan, Somalia last Saturday. The airstrikes were done in coordination with the Somali government, U.S. Africa Command said in a Wednesday press release.
The strikes reportedly targeted Abdullahi Omar Abdi, whom the Ottawa-based Hiiran Online called “the first Somali elder publicly acknowledged to have been killed by a US strike, an escalation that has fueled anger among traditional leaders.” Read on, here.
Lawmaker to Trump’s Pentagon: “There seems to be some confusion this morning, because several of you mentioned that you are going to work for a department that doesn’t exist,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told Defense Department officials at a hearing Thursday on Capitol Hill, alluding to the administration’s determination to call it the War Department.
“The name of the department is the Department of Defense,” King said. “That was established in the National Security Act of 1947, amended in 1949. I’ll commend to you 10 U.S. Code § 111. If the name of that department is going to be changed, it has to start right here,” King said. “Congress has established the name of the department. It’s the Department of Defense, and I hope that you understand that that’s who you’re going to work for, not some other department that several of you mentioned in your testimony.”
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 Meghann Myers. 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 78 years ago, the National Security Act of 1947 took effect, dropping the “Department of War” from the U.S. military’s formal title, replacing it with the short-lived National Military Establishment—or NME, which if read aloud, one can understand why that was later changed to the Department of Defense two years later.
Middle East
New: More than 10 years after its debut against Hezbollah drones, Israel’s laser-based “Iron Beam” interception system was officially declared operational this week, the Times of Israel reported Wednesday. After several weeks of tests, Israeli officials say the system proved itself against dozens of targets including rockets, mortars, and drones.
In case you’re curious, “The Iron Beam is not meant to replace the Iron Dome or Israel’s other air defense systems, but to supplement and complement them, shooting down smaller projectiles and leaving larger ones for the more robust missile-based batteries such as the David’s Sling and Arrow systems,” the Times reports. i24 News has a bit more.
From the region: The State Department designated several more Iran-backed groups as foreign terrorist organizations on Wednesday. The militias include Harakat al-Nujaba, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, and Kata’ib al-Imam Ali. “Iran-aligned militia groups have conducted attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and bases hosting U.S. and Coalition forces, typically using front names or proxy groups to obfuscate their involvement,” the State Department said in its announcement.
Expert reax: The new designation “is both justified and long overdue,” said Joe Truzman of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
However, he warns, “[T]he move risks straining U.S.–Iraq relations” due to “Iraq’s controversial [Popular Mobilization Forces] law, [which was] amended to fold the militias into the state’s security apparatus. This is a step Washington views as a dangerous legitimization of Tehran’s influence. By issuing FTO designations, the United States appears intent on drawing a line, signaling that Baghdad’s embrace of Iranian-aligned forces is incompatible with a stable partnership with Washington,” Truzman told The D Brief.
Trump 2.0
Cocaine has become much cheaper in the U.S. amid President Trump’s focus on immigrants and fentanyl, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. “Cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half to around $60 to $75 a gram compared with five years ago, said Morgan Godvin, a researcher with the community organization Drug Checking Los Angeles.”
Contributing factors: “The president’s campaign to deport immigrants in the U.S. illegally has taken federal agents away from drug-traffic interdiction,” including in Arizona, where “two Customs and Border Protection checkpoints along a main fentanyl-smuggling corridor from Mexico have been left unstaffed. Officers stationed there were sent to process detained migrants,” the Journal reports.
Also: “Colombia is producing record amounts of cocaine, and the volume of the drug arriving in the U.S. is driving down prices, the people familiar with cartel operations said.”
Vice President JD Vance joked about extrajudicial killing Wednesday. Referring to recent U.S. military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats that have killed more than a dozen people so far, Vance told a crowd in Michigan, “I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.”
Reminder: The people on these small boats could easily have been stopped by the U.S. Navy, but the Trump administration chose instead to kill rather than arrest them. Retired Navy Capt. Jon Duffy elaborates on those considerations in an op-ed published last week in Defense One.
Indeed, “Some military lawyers and other Defense Department officials are raising concerns about the legal implications” of Trump’s war on drug cartels, but some of those lawyers and officials “believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
And: “People should not be able to celebrate others’ deaths in a very public way and then keep their jobs,” White House Faith Director Jenny Korn said in a Wednesday interview. Korn was referring to ABC’s suspension of TV host Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday after FCC commissioner Brendan Carr threatened to pull ABC’s broadcast license over Kimmel’s monologue about the death of Charlie Kirk.
Recommended reading: “Free Speech and Me Speech,” by U.S. historian Tim Snyder writing last week in the wake of Kirk’s death.
The National Guard’s “crime-fighting” mission to pick up trash and blow leaves in DC is costing taxpayers about $2 million per day, USA Today reported Wednesday.
The gist: “So far, the DC National Guard has spent more than $45 million on the deployment, with $18.8 million going toward operations and $26.6 million toward pay and allowances for soldiers, according to the internal tally. That price tag does not include the cost to deploy the more than 1,300 National Guardsmen from eight states that are also stationed in Washington,” which means the final price tag is almost certain to rise.
As of Tuesday, Guard soldiers have “cleared 1,015 bags of trash, spread 744 cubic yards of mulch, removed five truckloads of plant waste, cleared 6.7 miles of roadway, and painted 270 feet of fencing,” the Guard said in a Tuesday update.
Expert reax: “$200 million is a lot of money, but it tracks,” said Virginia Burger of the Project on Government Oversight. “A domestic deployment of that scale is not cheap.”
ICYMI: “Trump deploys National Guard to Memphis, calling it a ‘replica’ of his crackdown on Washington,” the Associated Press reported Monday.
Historian reax: “We have to be watchful of our reflexive American militarism,” said Tim Snyder, writing Thursday. “It moves us, mindlessly, towards fascism,” he warned.
“By sending troops to city after city, Trump is creating the statistical likelihood that something will happen—a suicide of a service member conflicted by an illegal and immoral mission, a friendly fire incident, the shooting of a protestor—that they can use to manufacture some greater crisis by lying about it. Or they can wait for their Russian friends to stage something, or for one right-wing person to shoot another, and then blame the opposition.”
Update: About 40 troops with the Virginia Air and Army National Guard began supporting ICE this week, Norfolk-based WHRO reported Tuesday. “The Virginia troops are authorized to perform administrative and logistics support tasks, including answering phones, data entry, appointment scheduling, biometric collection, performing basic vehicle maintenance and tracking fleet expenses and utilization,” but they “will not perform law enforcement functions or aid in arrests, according to the governor’s office.”
The Guard’s Virginia support to ICE is scheduled to run until mid-November, while the Guard’s DC deployment is authorized to run until the end of November.
Study: Mass deportations do not broadly improve Americans’ job prospects, according to the work (PDF) of Washington College economics professor Robert Lynch, who is testifying this morning before a Democratic-led “shadow hearing” on Capitol Hill.
- You may wonder: What is a “shadow hearing”? It occurs when the minority party in Congress will not discuss a particular topic, and the content of this hearing does not become part of the congressional record. Semafor has a bit more, writing in April.
Lynch reviewed U.S. deportations in the 1930s, the 1960s, and between 2008 and 2015. “The most studied measures, employment and unemployment among the U.S. born, were consistently lower for employment and higher for unemployment across these episodes,” Lynch wrote in his report on the topic, published in 2024. He added, “Other measures, such as GDP, also were found to worsen. These adverse effects were the result of native-born workers’ job dependency on the deported immigrant workforce and the loss of immigrant spending in communities which led to economic retrenchment.”
Marine Corps veteran Janessa Goldbeck also spoke about ways she believes National Guard deployments are hurting the people they’re meant to serve, how domestic deployments are taking them away from their families, and often harming the immigrant communities where they live.
“There are two stories that really stand out to me,” Goldbeck said. “One is in California where ICE agents arrested Narciso Barranco, a father of three active-duty U.S. Marines while he was out doing landscaping work. He had no criminal record. His sons have served this country honorably—they’re still serving. Yet their father was pinned to the ground and hauled off like a criminal. He spent nearly a month in detention before being released on bond. For those Marines and every service member who sees this story, the message is clear: Your service doesn’t protect you or your family. And that betrayal cuts deep.” (The New York Times published a profile of Barranco’s story on Wednesday; you can find a gift link for that here.)
“There’s also the story of Alma Bowman in Georgia. She’s the daughter of a U.S. Navy veteran and has lived here for decades,” Goldbeck said. Bowman “was born in the Philippines while her father was serving. She was detained at an ICE check-in despite strong evidence that she is a U.S. citizen by birth. She’s now in a wheelchair struggling with diabetic neuropathy, yet she’s still held in detention.”
The detention of Barranco and Bowman “shakes all veterans’ faith in the system and that they will be protected,” said Goldbeck.
An Army veteran also warned in a commentary this week, “I’m a U.S. citizen who was wrongly arrested and held by ICE. Here’s why you could be next.” It’s the story of 25-year-old George Retes, a security guard who was arrested during a federal immigration raid at a cannabis farm in California on July 10 as California National Guard troops stood guard. As he showed up to work in his car that day, he says the occupying troops gave him conflicting orders to both back up his car and open his door.
“Suddenly, an agent smashed my window and pepper-sprayed me. I was pulled from the car, and one agent knelt on my neck while another knelt on my back,” Retes writes in the San Francisco Chronicle. “My wallet with my identification was in the car, but the agents refused to go look and confirm that I was a citizen. Instead, I sat in the dirt with my hands zip-tied with other detainees for four hours. When I was sitting there, I could hear agents asking each other why I had been arrested. They were unsure, but I was taken away and thrown in a jail cell anyway.”
After three days and nights in detention, “I was just let go, with no charges, no explanation for why and no apology,” Retes says. Why bring up his case? “To me, it feels like the system isn’t working,” he writes. “By letting masked agents stop people based on how they look, talk or where they work, protection has become persecution.” But more than that, “I’m concerned that the court didn’t have a full view of what is happening in our state,” he says.
Retes: “I served my country. I wore the uniform, I stood watch, and I believe in the values we say make us different. And yet here, on our own soil, I was wrongfully detained. Stripped of my rights, treated like I didn’t belong and locked away—all as an American citizen and a veteran. This isn’t just my story. It’s a warning. Because if it can happen to me, it can happen to any one of us.” Read the rest, here.
Extremism in the U.S.
Update: At least 8 American service members have been punished for social media comments about Charlie Kirk’s death, Task & Purpose reported Wednesday. That includes “at least five Army officers and an Air Force senior master sergeant have been suspended from their jobs” for such posts, in accordance with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s social media post ordering such a review last Thursday.
Noted: Kirk often made “incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences,” the Guardian reported last Thursday.
Despite Trump’s framing, “most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism,” University of Dayton sociology professors Art Jipson and Paul Becker explained Wednesday for The Conversation.
In addition, “Right-wing extremist violence has been deadlier than left-wing violence in recent years,” they write. “Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001…By contrast, left-wing extremist incidents, including those tied to anarchist or environmental movements, have made up about 10 to 15% of incidents and less than 5% of fatalities.”
Also: The BBC arrived at a similar conclusion. Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh has more, reporting Wednesday on X, here.
Worth noting: “Politically motivated violence in the U.S. is rare compared with overall violent crime,” Jipson and Becker write. “Political violence has a disproportionate impact because even rare incidents can amplify fear, influence policy and deepen societal polarization.” Read the rest, here.
Related reading:
Read the full article here