April 22, 2025

Welcome to this Tuesday 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. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here.

Turmoil atop the Pentagon

President Trump’s White House is asking around for someone who could replace Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, NPR’s Tom Bowman reported Monday, citing a U.S. official. However, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt disagreed, and called the report “FAKE NEWS based on one anonymous source who clearly has no idea what they are talking about.”

“He's doing a great job,” Trump said Monday of his defense secretary. “Ask the Houthis how he's doing,” referring to the U.S. military’s monthlong airstrike campaign in Yemen known as Operation Rough Rider.

Rewind: Hegseth found himself in the spotlight again this week when news broke of yet another messaging thread in which the secretary may have shared information on an unsecured device about future Yemen strikes, this time with his wife and brother. Hegseth’s spokesman, Sean Parnell, blamed “disgruntled former employees…who were fired this week” for making the new allegations public.

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Also: Parnell is reportedly getting more face time with Pete, according to Tara Copp of the Associated Press, who added on social media, “A fourth defense official disputed that Parnell’s role was substantially changing and said he would continue to advise the Secretary.”

“It’s just fake news,” Trump said of the new allegations. “Sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing. You don’t always have friends when you do that.”

Hegseth himself blamed “the media.” “This is what the media does,” he said Monday. “They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.” It’s “Not going to work with me,” he added.

New: Retired Air Force general and GOP Rep. Bacon became the first Republican lawmaker to call for Hegseth’s resignation. “If it’s true that he had another [Signal] chat with his family, about the missions against the Houthis, it’s totally unacceptable,” Bacon said Monday. “I’m not in the White House, and I’m not going to tell the White House how to manage this…but I find it unacceptable, and I wouldn’t tolerate it if I was in charge.”

“He’s acting like he’s above the law, and that shows an amateur person,” Bacon said. “Russia and China are all over his phone, and for him to be putting secret stuff on his phone is not right,” he added. Politico has more.

But Oklahoma GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin jumped to Hegseth’s defense on social media, writing Monday morning as if recalling a past war, “I will lead the breach. I will lay down cover fire. I will take the high ground. I’ll expose myself to enemy fire to communicate. We must bring back integrity, focus, and put the Warfighter first inside DOD. I stand with @SecDef @PeteHegseth.” (Mullin has no military experience, but does have an assigned seat on the Armed Services Committee.)

Additional reading:

“Joint Chiefs Chairman Caine Decides Not to Keep Senior Enlisted Adviser, Breaking with Past Precedent,” Military.com reported Monday;
“Under Hegseth, Chaos Prevails at the Pentagon,” the New York Times reported Tuesday morning;
And satirical news site The Onion filed this Monday, “Pete Hegseth: ‘There Are No State Secrets In A Healthy Relationship.’”

Industry

The U.S. Army took a major step in replacing the aging Patriot air defense missile system, with the selection of a new radar from Raytheon,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports. The industry titan’s Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor was cleared for initial production as part of the Army’s two-part approach to modernizing its ground-based air defense capabilities, officials announced Monday.

Background: The service first awarded Raytheon a contract to develop radar prototypes in 2019. At the time, the Army was looking for a single system to replace the Patriot, which was first deployed in 1984. Since then, there have been a handful of different plans for replacing it, including most recently a competition that the Army canceled in October.

“Raytheon will deliver radar seven and eight later this year and is producing radars for the U.S. Army and Poland that were contracted for in August 2024,” the firm said Monday. Continue reading, here.

Golden Dome watch: Need a review of what we know so far about Trump’s ambitious, space-based missile defense program known as Golden Dome? Reporter Geoff Brumfiel has emerged from NPR’s Science Desk to describe “what it would take” to pull off this technological marvel that has evaded American scientists for nearly 40 years.

Why bring it up? More than 180 companies have reached out to the Pentagon in the hopes of one day playing a part in this sprawling network featuring thousands of satellites, at a minimum. Reuters reported last week that Elon Musk’s SpaceX could play a role, too.

Consider this: “Earlier this year, an independent panel set up by the American Physical Society...concluded a constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to attempt to counter a rapid salvo of about 10 solid propellant ICBMs similar to North Korea's Hwasong-18 missiles,” Brumfiel writes. “Separately, the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton recently unveiled a proposal for a system of 2,000 anti-missile satellites it said could provide a good initial defense, in conjunction with other systems” at a cost about $25 billion.

But not everyone is convinced. For example, that Booz system “would require new satellites to be continually added, because gradually these satellites would fall out of their orbits,” Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute for Strategic Studies explained. “That's $4 to $5 billion a year just to sustain,” he estimated.

And the knock-on effects could be disorienting as nations adjust to the capability. “We will end up with vastly larger Russian and Chinese nuclear forces. We will end up with the Russians and the Chinese having all kinds of crazy sci-fi weapons,” Lewis predicted. “In short we will end up spending tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to be in, at best, the same place we are today, and most likely a much worse place.” But other think tankers in Washington were less pessimistic. Read on at NPR, here.

Additional reading: “Boeing Sells Jeppesen Unit to Thoma Bravo for $10.6 Billion,” Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Around the world

U.S. to allies: Don’t use Chinese satellite services. The State Department is urging other countries to avoid doing business with Chinese satellite firms, arguing that such contracts fuel military development and help Beijing gather sensitive intelligence from allies. “It is important to ensure satellite services provided by untrusted suppliers, such as those from China, are not permitted to operate in your country,” said an undated memo that laid out talking points for U.S. officials. A copy was obtained by Nextgov/FCW and Defense One. Read on, here.

The Nordic nations are moving swiftly to combine their military and defense-industrial efforts, the Wall Street Journal writes in an eye-opening report. The Nordics—Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden (minus Iceland, which has no standing military—“have combined their air forces, establishing a Joint Nordic Air Command in 2023. Last year they set out a vision for common defense through 2030 under the Nordic Defense Cooperation, or Nordefco,” the paper writes.

“To be sure, the Nordics are compensating for decades of disarmament following the end of the Cold War. The need to rearm has only grown amid Europe’s fading trust in the U.S. as a reliable ally under President Trump.” Read on, here.

Etc.

Commentary: I went to the Naval Academy to defend freedom, not to dismantle it. “I didn’t join the Navy to fight for a country that bans books. I joined to defend one that never would,” writes Jon Duffy, a retired Navy captain whose 30-year career included the command of two warships and a squadron of destroyers, as well as policy positions in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, and on the National Security Council in the White House. “I am appalled by the recent decision to remove nearly 400 books—many addressing issues of race and gender—from the shelves of the Academy’s Nimitz Library. This is not just an overcorrection. It is a betrayal.” Read his op-ed at Defense One, here.

And lastly, a leading Republican senator shared debunked, conspiratorial views about the 9/11 attacks on right-wing influencer Benny Johnson’s YouTube show Monday. Hours after hijackers flew planes into the two towers in New York City on Sept. 9, 2001, adjacent World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed from structural damage after fires that couldn’t be extinguished due to water pressure complications. That was the conclusion the National Institute of Standards and Technology documented in its investigation, published in November 2008. You can view a diagram laying out the buildings’ proximities on page 44 of the investigation (PDF).

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin: “I don’t know if you can find structural engineers other than the ones that had the corrupt investigation inside NIST that would say that thing didn’t come down in any other way than a controlled demolition,” the lawmaker said in the YouTube interview. “There’s an awful lot of questions,” he added, and—seeming to ignore the 130-page report from NIST—asked, “Where’s all the documentation from this investigation?”

“My guess is there's an awful lot being covered up, in terms of what the American government knows about 9/11,” Ron Johnson said. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has more.