Senior Defense Department leaders have less than two weeks to submit proposals to shrink and reorganize their commands, agencies, and departments, Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Friday memo that also proffered early-retirement and deferred-resignation deals to eligible civilian employees.
Titled “Initiating the Workforce Acceleration and Recapitalization Initiative,” the memo orders senior Pentagon leaders, combatant commanders, and defense agency and DOD field activity directors to each submit a proposed “future-state organizational chart” to the Pentagon’s personnel undersecretary, according to a March 29 DOD press release. “A summary of all those charts—which should include functional areas and consolidated management hierarchies with positional titles and counts clearly depicted—is due from USD (P&R) to the defense secretary no later than April 11, 2025,” the release said.
This reorganization is kicking off without a confirmed personnel undersecretary, while Hegseth, famously, has managed no organization larger than a pair of nonprofit advocacy groups, one of which “fell into financial difficulty during his time there,” as the Associated Press put it.
The memo launches the latest phase of Hegseth’s rushed and rocky effort to shrink the department’s civilian workforce. When he took office in January, DOD employed about 760,000 civilians; within weeks, officials had announced plans to cut that number by five to eight percent. More, from Defense One’s Bradley Peniston, here.
Family affair(s): Hegseth’s younger brother Phil is now working in the Pentagon as a liaison from the Department of Homeland Security, the Associated Press reported Friday. It is “not common for such a senior position to be filled by family members of the Cabinet heads,” quoting Michael Fallings, a managing partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, which specializes in federal employment law.
Also: Hegseth’s wife attended sensitive meetings. The SecDef “brought his wife, a former Fox & Friends producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed,” the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, adding that attendee lists “are usually carefully limited to those who need to be there and attendees are typically expected to possess security clearances given the delicate nature of the discussions, according to defense officials and people familiar with the meeting.” Read that, here.
Fighter pilots slam Hegseth for spilling secrets, evading accountability. New York Times: “The mistaken inclusion of the editor in chief of The Atlantic in the [Signal chat about Yemen] and Mr. Hegseth’s insistence that he did nothing wrong by disclosing the secret plans upend decades of military doctrine about operational security, a dozen Air Force and Navy fighter pilots said. Worse, they said, is that going forward, they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.” Read, here.
Related reading:
- “Where Was Each Member of the Signal Group Chat?” is the Times’ latest addition to the growing genre of annotations to the chat transcript;
- “How the Trump administration has downplayed the Signal chat scandal,” from the Washington Post
- “Officials say texts sent by Waltz, Ratcliffe in Signal chat may have damaged US’ ongoing ability to gather intel on Houthis,” CNN reported Friday.
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 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 2022, the Ukrainian military pushed Russian invasion forces out of the city of Bucha, where the Vladimir Putin’s soldiers were later revealed to have carried out rape, torture, and executions of more than 400 people.
Around the Defense Department
Developing: Six days after it sank into a bog during a training mission in eastern Europe, the U.S. Army’s M88A2 Hercules “armored vehicle has been pulled out,” Lithuania’s top officer Gen. Raimundas Vaikšnoras announced Monday on Facebook. “I ask for everyone’s respect and solidarity while waiting for additional information from our U.S. colleagues,” he said, and added a note of thanks “to everyone who worked together” in the vehicle recovery efforts since Wednesday.
The 70-ton vehicle was located on March 26, one day after it and the four soldiers inside were declared missing in Lithuania’s Pabrade training area, near the border with Belarus. Army officials said Sunday the vehicle was submerged “around four meters below the water’s surface and [was] encased in about two meters of mud.” Few observers believe the soldiers are still alive, but Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovile Sakaliene said Monday that their fate has yet to be determined. “There’s a strict agreement that the Americans will be the first to make any announcements,” he told Lithuanian public radio, according to Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
Recovering the vehicle has been a multi-national affair, with Americans and Lithuanians joined by Polish rescue workers who brought 13 vehicles, “including four heavy trucks, one engineer workshop/tool truck, one fueler with 10 tons of fuel, and three WZT-3 tracked recovery vehicles (similar to the Hercules),” U.S. Army Europe said on Saturday. For its part, the U.S. military dispatched three CH-47 Chinooks for heavy lift support and two UH-60M Blackhawks for medical evacuation, as well as one UH-60L and two more Blackhawks for lifting and general assistance.
“We cannot thank our Allies enough for everything they’ve done for us to help find our soldiers,” Col. Jim Armstrong, commander of 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, said in a statement Sunday. “They see our Soldiers as their own Soldiers, and we are absolutely in this together,” he added.
Update: The U.S. military’s border-support missions have cost more than $300 million in just the first six weeks since Trump was inaugurated, CNN reported this weekend. Such a pace would eventually cost more than $2.5 billion annually.
Prior recent reporting estimated Trump’s military border support could cost between $1 billion and $2 billion, as CQ Roll Call posted four weeks ago, citing Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed, D-R.I.
“They’re drunk on OCO money,” a U.S. official told CNN, referring to Overseas Contingency Operation funding for military operations separate from the Defense Department’s base budget.
What are these roughly 9,000-plus active duty troops doing? “Building barricades, putting up concertina wire, and generally ‘just standing around,’” one defense official said.
“The total cost of the operation across the federal government remains unclear,” CNN writes. This is because “Those figures do not include money spent by the Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence community and other agencies who have also surged government assets to the border, where President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency.”
Why it matters: “Critics argue that the Trump administration is inflating the nature of the threat relative to other priorities—like countering China and Russia or combatting terrorism—and that shifting military assets away from those efforts risks national security.” More, here.
For what it’s worth: Immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, with 49% of those polled saying they strongly or somewhat approve” of how he’s handling the matter, according to new survey data from the Associated Press-NORC. The country is closely split, however, as 50% of respondents said they “strongly or somewhat disapprove” of how he’s handling immigration.
Related reading: “How Trump Is Leaning on the Military to Fulfill His Hopes of Mass Deportations and an Immigration Freeze,” Military-dot-com reported Friday.
Can a self-powered laser shoot down drones threatening U.S. troops? Maybe a 3D-printed kamikaze drone with a jet engine can help. Those are questions Army officials are pursuing as the service seeks “simple and cheap” technology to help defend against drones, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Friday from AUSA’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Ala.
Myers: One company has a 3D-printed unmanned aerial vehicle on offer as part of the Army’s Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance, or LASSO, program, which is due to put out a request for proposals any day now. Dubbed the Hellhound S3, the turbojet-powered drone doesn’t look like the quadcopter you probably picture when you think of an armed UAV. It looks like a fighter jet, and it can be loaded up with not only weapons but sensors or electronic warfare jammers.
“The idea is one vehicle, multiple payloads, giving the soldier the maximum flexibility to support whatever the mission needs are in the battlefield,” Sheila Cummings, CEO of Cummings Aerospace, told Defense One. Read on, here.
New: Two emerging rocketmakers received a key greenlight on their road to competing for Space Force satellite launches, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported Friday.
Rocket Lab and Stoke Space will join Blue Origin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance as contenders for future launch missions, Space Force officials announced Thursday. The two companies each received $5 million task orders to “conduct an initial capabilities assessment and develop their approach to tailored mission assurance.”
Both companies have been developing medium-lift vehicles to break into the market, with Rocket Lab readying its Neutron rocket and Stoke Space’s Nova rocket. Continue reading, here.
Lastly: A military aircraft nearly collided with a passenger airliner in Washington on Friday. “Delta Flight 2983, an Airbus A319 bound for Minneapolis-St. Paul, had just taken off from DCA at around 3:15 p.m. when the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System” sounded, indicating “the plane was on a potential collision course with another aircraft,” Newsweek reports.
An Air Force T-38 jet flew past the Delta plane at 800 feet while traveling more than 350 miles per hour, tracking data from FlightRadar24 showed. “Four U.S. Air Force T-38 Talons were inbound to Arlington National Cemetery for a flyover at the time of the incident, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement,” Newsweek writes. More, here.
Additional reading:
- “Secret Pentagon memo on China, homeland has Heritage fingerprints,” the Washington Post reported Saturday; see also a new policy paper from the UK’s Royal United Services Institute entitled, “Taiwan’s Evolving Response to China’s Grey Zone Actions,” published Monday;
- “Move fast, kill things: the tech startups trying to reinvent defence with Silicon Valley values,” via the Guardian, reporting Saturday as well.
- See also, “Inside a Marine’s decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter jet and the betrayal in its wake,” via Charleston, South Carolina’s Post & Courier reporting in a #LongRead on Sunday.
The post The D Brief: DOD-shakeup proposals due in days; Border-ops price tag; New Army tech; Rocketmakers’ green light; And a bit more. appeared first on Defense One.
