The White House is upset about skepticism over the effectiveness of its Iran strikes carried out by B-2 stealth bombers over the weekend. The aircraft dropped 14 special-purpose munitions intended to penetrate the mountain complex at Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant and destroy Iran’s ability to enrich enough uranium to create a nuclear weapon. But a leaked early intelligence assessment indicated the U.S. strikes did not fully eradicate Tehran’s nuclear program and only set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back by a few months.
About Iran’s nuclear program: “It’s gone for years, years,” President Donald Trump insisted Wednesday during his visit to the annual NATO summit, hosted this year at The Hague. He then verbally attacked three media outlets, calling each “scum,” and said, “They’re bad people. They’re sick. And what they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less.”
- Trump also called for the firing of CNN reporter Natasha Bertrand in a complaint-filled diatribe on social media Wednesday, and ordered his Pentagon chief to hold a “Major News Conference” to “fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots.” (More on that below.)
Notable: An estimated 20,000 uranium centrifuges are believed to have been damaged at two locations inside Iran, Natanz and Fordow, David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security wrote online Wednesday after reports of the initial U.S. intelligence assessment emerged.
However, it wouldn’t take much work to get what Iran needs to proceed to a weapon, argued James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace. “A single cascade of 174 IR-6 centrifuges could produce a bomb’s worth of 90% highly enriched uranium from the 60% enriched material whose location is unknown in 10-20 days,” Acton wrote on social media Wednesday, responding to assertions otherwise from top U.S. officials like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. “Iran doesn’t need to rebuild enrichment facilities on their previous scale to get the bomb,” Acton warned.
Latest: Trump dispatched his defense chief and top military officer to criticize the media Thursday morning at the Pentagon, though neither outright denied the intelligence finding’s existence or argued against it. SecDef Hegseth opened his presser—the second this week, but also just the second of his five-month tenure as Pentagon chief—accusing media outlets of not reporting “big, momentous moments” in developments affecting the Defense Department.
His first example: NATO allies agreed to eventually spend 5% of their GDP on defense during this week’s alliance summit at The Hague. “So I hope with all the ink spilled, all of your outlets find the time to properly recognize this historic change in continental security,” Hegseth said to his audience of reporters before repeating the allegation. “In hunting for scandals all the time in trying to find wedges and spin stories, this press corps misses historic moments,” Hegseth said, “You miss historic moments like 5% at NATO.”
It was a tense, bizarre scene, in part because virtually every major outlet covered that story nearly 24 hours earlier, as a quick Google News search reveals along with publication dates. The Washington Post put it on the front page of their latest paper. Hegseth even went after his former co-worker Jennifer Griffin of Fox, saying, “Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst. The one who misrepresents the most intentionally.”
But Hegseth, a former weekend TV host on Fox, was not done. “You, the press corps,” he said, gesticulating angrily, “it’s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope maybe they weren’t effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration is representing them isn’t true. So let’s take half-truths, spun information, leaked information, and then spin it. Spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the mind—the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful.” Defense One’s Meghan Myers has more from the press conference, here.
As far as we know, no one is claiming the pilots were not successful. Rather, the DIA report—and it is an initial assessment, which could be revised as time passes—conveys the message that Iran’s nuclear program was probably only set back by months as opposed to being completely halted.
New: European countries believe Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the U.S. strikes and remains intact, the Financial Times reported Thursday, citing two unspecified European sources briefed on the intelligence assessments. Those assessments claimed roughly 900 pounds of Iran’s highly enriched uranium had been divided up and sent to multiple locations ahead of the B-2 strikes.
Later today in Washington: Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Caine are set to brief senators about the Iranian strikes.
Tehran reax: Iranian officials are now leaning into counterintelligence operations, “which likely reflects the regime’s paranoia about Israeli infiltration,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote in their latest daily assessment.
At least 700 Iranians have been arrested since the start of the Israeli war two weeks ago, including several from the country’s Kurdish population, according to Reuters. What’s more, “Leader Ali Khamenei recently appointed Brigadier General Mohammad Karami as the IRGC Ground Forces commander, which further illustrates the regime’s concerns about potential domestic unrest, given that Karami was previously involved in suppressing internal dissent,” ISW writes.
Iran’s military chief Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh visited China on Wednesday for a two-day meeting of his counterparts in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. That meeting follows a report of Iranian dissatisfaction over a perceived lack of support from Russia in this conflict.
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 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 1917, U.S. troops of the American Expeditionary Force landed in France, successfully concluding the U.S. military’s first force-projection convoy to Europe.
Around the Defense Department
Developing: The Army’s not sure what its new ‘Executive Innovation Corps’ will actually do, Defense One’s Myers reported Wednesday.
They’re known as Detachment 201, which includes Shyam Shankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer; Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO; Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and OpenAI’s former chief research officer. The four have been recruited to serve as Reserve lieutenant colonels and “work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems,” according to a press release.
But the service hasn’t identified exactly which projects they will work on, Army spokesman Steve Warren told reporters Wednesday. Their first task is to head down to the direct commission course at Fort Benning, Georgia. “So let’s get them in. Let’s, you know, teach them which hand to salute with, fundamentals of being a field-grade officer in the Army first, and then we’ll start working on specific projects,” Warren said.
Notable: This Army plan is almost a reverse version of DOD’s Training With Industry program, which allows service members to go on temporary duty to corporate America—past examples include the NFL, Amazon and FedEx—then bring what they learned about senior management and corporate processes back to their units, Myers writes. (For what it’s worth, one of your D Brief-ers used the Army’s TWI program to begin working in journalism, beginning at the local NPR station WFSS, on the campus of North Carolina’s Fayetteville State University.)
Though the service is short on details, the idea has been percolating for a while. About 18 months ago, the defense secretary’s office floated the idea to the services, and the Army volunteered to get it off the ground as a pilot program, Maj. Matt Visser, an Army spokesman, told reporters. Read on, here.
Update: The U.S. is further militarizing its border with Mexico, expanding territory associated with Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma in Arizona, and Joint Base San Antonio in Texas, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
“With the addition of the two land strips, called national defense areas, there are now four such newly designated military installations,” Eric Schmitt of the Times writes. “Migrants who enter the areas will be considered trespassers and can be temporarily detained by U.S. troops until Border Patrol agents arrive, military officials said.”
Related: “Alarming escalation” in California. Federalized National Guard troops reportedly assisted with DEA raids more than 100 miles east of Los Angeles last week. “This development represents an alarming escalation of President Donald Trump’s efforts to use the military as a domestic police force. Based on currently available information, it appears to be illegal, as well,” warns Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, writing Wednesday for Just Security.
“There is also no applicable statutory authority to federalize National Guard forces for this purpose,” Goitein says. “There is no allegation of protest activity—let alone violent protests—in the region where the drug raid took place. The fact that the marijuana growing operations spanned many acres and the day was hot cannot seriously be posited as a reason why the president could not execute the law without the help of the military,” she writes.
Why it matters: “The use of federal forces to assist with drug raids also represents a massive shift in, and an expansion of, Trump’s domestic use of the military,” Goitein says. “Military participation in routine criminal law enforcement functions like drug raids is precisely the type of activity the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to prevent.”
The potential implications are difficult to understate: “Indeed, if this use of the military were to be upheld by the courts, it is not obvious what would stop Trump from deploying federal forces to accompany almost any federal law enforcement operation—civil or criminal—anywhere in the nation, based on justifications as mundane as temperature or topography,” Goitein warns. Read the rest, here.
Additional reading:
DOD & AI
Declining public trust in AI is a national-security problem. Americans’ trust in artificial intelligence is declining even as global advances in the field accelerate, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports, which points to a potential national-security problem: lawmakers across partisan lines, industry leaders, think tanks, and others have warned that falling behind China on AI would put the United States at a disadvantage.
Negative public sentiment could undermine congressional and financial support for research and development in the field. But some AI companies are modifying their products to give government customers more control—over model behavior, over data inputs, even over the power source that runs the system. Could this mollify the public? Read on, here.
Lastly today: Maxar is launching AI-powered “predictive intelligence” to spot crises before they happen. Tucker has more, here.
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