The D Brief: Sentinel’s progress; Buildup near Iran; Canada’s decoupling plan; Russia targets Ukrainian energy; And a bit more.

Initial Sentinel ICBM expected by early 2030, Air Force says. Service leaders say that the program will enter its engineering and manufacturing development phase this year, one year earlier than recently expected. The program was awarded to Northrop Grumman in 2020, but by 2024 had blown its budget and schedule so badly that the decision to enter the EMD phase was rescinded. 

The program has made “considerable progress over the last 12-18 months,” Air Force leaders said on Tuesday, including successful ground tests, solid rocket motor qualifications, and critical design reviews. 

Somewhat improbably, the service leaders said that the acceleration was partially due to the December appointment of a Pentagon overseer for Sentinel and several other top-priority Air Force programs. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly has more, here.

See also: The Government Accountability Office has updated its latest report on the Sentinel program.

The Navy struck three more boats on Feb. 16: Two in the “Eastern Pacific” and one in the Caribbean, killing “eleven male narco-terrorists,” according to a Tuesday press release from the U.S. military’s Southern Command. 

ICYMI: “A broad range of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians—even suspected criminals—who do not pose an imminent threat of violence,” the New York Times notes in its updated tracker. 

The Pentagon launched a competition for voice-controlled drone swarms. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI have both said they will join the fray, Bloomberg reported Monday.

Related: “The El Paso No-Fly Debacle Is Just the Beginning of a Drone Defense Mess,” WIRED reported Tuesday, citing the difficulty of defending densely-populated cities.

DARPA’s futuristic drone concept moves one step closer to flight. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s X-68A LongShot, which is pitched as an air-launched drone armed with air-to-air missiles, just completed “full-scale wind tunnel tests and successful trials of the vehicle’s parachute recovery and weapons-release systems,” officials said in a statement. 

The drone is intended to extend the lethality of F-15 aircraft, “fly[ing] ahead of follow-on forces, and engag[ing] enemy targets with its own air-to-air missiles” while allowing pilots “to remain farther from the front lines,” DARPA said. 

General Atomics, selected to develop the idea in 2021, is leading the design, build, and demonstration of the unmanned drone concept, Defense One’s Novelly reports. In tech-speak, “LongShot burns down significant technical risk and presents a viable path for the military services to increase air combat reach and effectiveness from uninhabited, air-launched platforms,” Col. John Casey, DARPA LongShot program manager, said in the news release. Read more, here.

Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston and Thomas Novelly. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to 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 1955, the U.S. military staged 900 troops 2.8 miles south of a still-forming mushroom cloud—and in the known fallout path—to observe the response to a nuclear detonation 750 feet above the ground in Nevada as part of Operation Teapot. Subsequent tests would place troops much closer—for example, Shot Tesla on March 1 put some people just 1.4 miles from ground zero. 

Around the world

Satellite imagery this week shows the U.S. Navy’s Abraham Lincoln carrier off the coast of Oman, which is about 440 miles from Iran, the BBC reported Monday. Several other U.S. ships and destroyers are staging in Bahrain, much closer to Iran. 

The sides appear not “to have agreed on anything substantial” at Tuesday’s U.S.-Iran talks in Geneva. One mediator did claim “good progress towards identifying common goals and relevant technical issues,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote in their Tuesday afternoon assessment. The White House wants to stop Iran’s nuclear enrichment process for at least three years, and possibly as many as five; Iran has said publicly it would only consider a three-year halt but only in exchange for considerable economic relief, including unfreezing $6 billion held in Qatar. U.S. officials, on the other hand, are reportedly worried that money would go directly to bolstering Iran’s vast missile program. 

Iranian naval drills in the Hormuz Strait continued into Wednesday. Those operations, which began Monday, have included “deploying fast attack craft and testing unspecified missiles and drones,” ISW reports. 

Meantime, “What we are seeing isn’t just strike preparation” from the U.S. Navy near Iran, “but rather a broader deterrent deployment capable of being scaled up or down,” Justin Crump of the risk intelligence firm Sibylline told the BBC. “This means it has more depth and sustainability than the force packages arranged for either Venezuela or [the joint Israeli-U.S. operation] Midnight Hammer last year. It’s designed to sustain an engagement and counter all potential responses against U.S. assets in the region and, of course, Israel.”  

India’s Coast Guard seized three vessels with cargo allegedly linked to Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, nearly two weeks after the ships were captured northwest of Mumbai and Feb. 6. “A British maritime security company, identified them as the Al Jafzia, the Asphalt Star and the Stellar Ruby. All three tankers were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury last year, when using different names, for allegedly transporting Iranian oil,” the Journal reports. 

“The Stellar Ruby had just received a cargo of Iranian asphalt from the Asphalt Star, which came from Iran,” while the “Al Jafzia was loaded with naphtha, a crude byproduct it had received mid-January from another vessel…under U.S. sanctions that was loaded in Iran and wasn’t detained.” 

Missile watch in the Pacific: The U.S. is planning to “increase deployments of U.S. cutting-edge missile and unmanned systems to the Philippines,” the State Department announced Tuesday—likely extending the Typhon missile system first deployed to the region in April 2024. Similar systems were observed in the Philippines the following January, Australia in July, and in Japan this past September. 

The Typhon system is lauded for its anti-ship capability and uses modified Navy SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles, with estimated 290- and 1,000-mile ranges, respectively. 

The system’s presence in the Pacific is widely seen as challenging to China and Russia, the Congressional Research Service notes in its report on the Typhon published last fall. Observers could see the system in use during the upcoming joint U.S.-Philippine Balikatan exercises, scheduled later this spring. Read more from the State Department, here.  

Canada has a new defense-industry plan to reduce its reliance on the U.S., including a goal of doubling its own exports and creating more than 120,000 jobs over the next decade, the Globe and Mail reported Sunday. For some perspective, “Canada’s defence sector is made up of nearly 600 companies, which contribute more than $9.6-billion to the country’s GDP and 81,200 jobs,” the paper writes. Relatedly, about 70% of its acquisitions have been purchased from U.S. firms, but Ottawa now wants that same percentage to come from Canadian firms within 10 years. 

America’s northern neighbors also plan to spend 5% of their GDP on defense by 2035; it currently allocates 2% of GDP on defense expenditures. “This will mean spending $180-billion on defence procurement, $290-billion on defence-related infrastructure and $125-billion on downstream economic activity,” the Globe and Mail reports from the new strategy document. For many of these planned changes, Canada expects to tap its aerospace and ammunition-production industries, as well as sensors, drones and digital systems, which includes AI and quantum computing. 

Canada also wants to launch its own version of DARPA, known as the Bureau of Research, Engineering and Advanced Leadership in Innovation and Science, “with the first round of projects selected by late 2026.” 

The plans were formulated “so we are never hostage to the decisions of others when it comes to our security,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday according to Politico. “There are many strengths to this partnership that we have with the United States, but it is a dependency,” he said. 

Update: Russian officials indeed murdered leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny with a poison while he was serving time in Siberian penal colony two years ago, the British government said in a statement this past weekend. 

“Consistent, collaborative work has confirmed through laboratory testing that the deadly toxin found in the skin of Ecuador dart frogs (epibatidine) was found in samples from Alexei Navalny’s body and highly likely resulted in his death,” 10 Downing Street said Saturday. “Only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Navalny during his imprisonment in a Russian penal colony in Siberia, and we hold it responsible for his death,” they added. 

Investigators from Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Germany teamed up with the Brits to arrive at this conclusion. “This alarming pattern of behaviour follows the targeting of the Skripal’s with Novichok on the streets of Salisbury in 2018 and Russian troops’ frequent use of chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine,” the statement says. Read more, here. 

While Russian-Ukrainian talks drag on, Russia’s military continues to pound Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with a barrage of missiles and drones, including more than 400 overnight Monday. 

“Russian forces have been launching large strike packages in recent months in the days before and after bilateral and trilateral negotiations but are likely refraining from fully maximizing Russia’s strike capabilities in order to avoid upsetting US President Donald Trump,” analysts at ISW wrote in their Tuesday assessment. “The Kremlin may seek to portray its compliance with another moratorium on energy strikes as a major Russian concession while preparing to launch another devastating strike against Ukraine in the near future.”

Also notable: “Russian forces have been altering their strike tactics, warheads, and the composition of their strike packages in order to maximize damage and disproportionately impact civilians, especially as Russia has intensified its efforts in recent months to collapse the Ukrainian energy grid,” ISW warns. And Russian officials continue to signal they are uninterested in compromising any of their initial goals with their Ukraine invasion, including giving up occupied territory. Continue reading, here. 

Related reading: “Europe Has Received the Message // Without America to rely on, the EU is gearing up to be a global power in its own right,” Joseph de Weck wrote Tuesday for The Atlantic.