With multiple naval assets in place and more on the way, the U.S. military is “prepared to strike Iran as early as this weekend,” CNN reported Thursday, one day after top national security officials met in the White House’s Situation Room.
“Trump has not yet made a final decision about whether to strike,” CBS News reported Thursday as well, noting “the timeline for any action is likely to extend beyond this weekend.”
U.S. and Iran negotiators met Tuesday in Geneva for indirect talks about the future of Iran’s nuclear program. That meeting was inconclusive, and follow-on talks have not yet been scheduled.
The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, Ford, was spotted Wednesday off the coast of West Africa, near Gibraltar, and “could arrive in the region as soon as this weekend,” CNN reports. In addition, Air Force refueling tankers and fighter jets “are being repositioned closer to the Middle East, according to sources familiar with the movements.”
The U.S. also has the carrier Abraham Lincoln and a dozen other ships already in the region, as the New York Times illustrated in a map updated Thursday.
Update: Iranian officials have added “a concrete shield over a new facility at a sensitive military site and covered it in soil,” Reuters reported Thursday, supported by recent satellite imagery of the Parchin military complex, about 20 miles southeast of Tehran.
Iran also blocked several entrances to its Isfahan nuclear complex, which contains “an underground area where diplomats say much of Iran’s enriched uranium has been stored,” Reuters reports. Covering those entrances “would help dampen any potential airstrike and also make ground access in a special forces raid to seize or destroy any highly enriched uranium that may be housed inside difficult,” analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security said on Feb. 9. Read more, here.
From the region: The U.S. military carried out its 36th airstrike of the year in Somalia on Tuesday. That operation targeted at least one alleged al-Shabaab fighter in the south, near Kismayo. A previous strike the day before occurred in the far north and targeted ISIS militants near the Golis Mountains, according to Africa Command. It’s unclear how many people were killed or wounded in either strike; U.S. Africa Command stopped releasing those details last spring.
Panning out: “African Union peacekeeping forces are gradually drawing down and Somalia is assuming greater responsibility for its own security,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday from Mogadishu. However, after two decades of counterinsurgency, “al-Shabab is still able to reach vast parts of central and southern Somalia” and “remains one of Africa’s most resilient militant groups.”
That resilience is in addition to the small but durable ISIS presence in the north, which outlasted the busiest year of U.S. airstrikes across Somalia this century, as David Sterman of New America illustrates in this periodically-updated series of charts.
Welcome to this Thursday 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. 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 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the incarceration of some U.S. citizens on the basis of their ethnic background.
Around the Defense Department
The Pentagon’s top officer for Latin America made a surprise visit to Venezuela on Thursday, Reuters reported shortly afterward. The Thursday visit “is the first by a U.S. military delegation since U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in an audacious raid last month,” the wire service notes.
The U.S. military’s Southern Command published photos of Marine Gen. Frank Donovan’s arrival at an airport in Caracas to meet with U.S. diplomats and “Venezuelan interim authorities,” according to a press release from SOUTHCOM. That delegation included interim President and oil minister Delcy Rodriguez, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, according to Reuters. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright visited Caracas last week as well.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was photographed doing pull-ups on a tree with Dr. Oz for the two men’s social media feeds Wednesday. The Pentagon chief had stopped by for what Oz described as “a beachside brunch,” which included “a cold plunge, and a Mediterranean feast!”
Meanwhile, Army Secretary Driscoll is in Switzerland this week for talks about ending Russia’s Ukraine invasion, which the Washington Post reports is “an unusual diplomatic role for the head of a military service.” Hegseth recently fired one of Driscoll’s top advisors because he had previously worked for former Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley. “Driscoll is seen as a powerful figure in President Trump’s military and a potential rival to Hegseth, who has been embroiled in scandals over the past year,” The Hill reported this week.
ICYMI: Trump’s top diplomat spoke to European allies in Munich on Saturday. In his remarks, State Secretary Marco Rubio praised America’s “allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”
“We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir,” Rubio said in Munich.
He echoed one of conservatism’s dominant themes in the wake of America’s 21st-century wars in the Middle East, which have helped trigger massive outflows of refugees into Europe. “Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.”
“Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia,” Rubio said Saturday. “It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so…is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.”
Rubio wasn’t as confrontational as JD Vance during the vice president’s speech at Munich last year, Thomas Wright of Brookings observed, writing this week in The Atlantic. But as a man with the most concurrent jobs in the Trump administration, Rubio was careful to stay on-brand while conveying the president’s combative approach toward allies—e.g., when he warned audience, “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.” Instead, “we want an alliance that boldly races into the future,” and “does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite pretense that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts.”
The Trump administration’s approach, Rubio said, “will restore to us a clearer sense of ourselves. It will restore a place in the world, and in so doing, it will rebuke and deter the forces of civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike.”
Second opinion: “The real problem was not what Rubio got wrong about Europe. It was what he chose not to say at all,” Wright argues in his piece for The Atlantic. “The big geopolitical story of this moment, other than Trump, is the increasing alignment and cooperation between Russia, China, and North Korea,” he said. “This authoritarian alignment is the most profound threat that the United States and its allies, in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, face. Yet there was no mention of Russia or China in Rubio’s speech…This seems to be part of a pattern for the administration.”
Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare was more direct, and published a response this week that he said “translates” Rubio’s message into “plain, simple English.” Here’s Wittes paraphrasing Rubio: “Let’s collectively indulge the polite fiction that we have more in common than we do. Let’s overstate a shared history. Let’s pretend we agree on shared challenges. And let’s pretend I’m not saying that the basis for our future cooperation is that you submit to our will.”
New: A JAG officer has been held in contempt and forced to pay $500 daily for violating court orders in Minnesota, Paul Blume of Fox9 out of Minneapolis-St. Paul reported Wednesday.
What happened: The judge ordered an immigrant who has been detained in El Paso to “be released in Minnesota with all of his identification papers,” but Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials released the man “with none of his papers, forcing his attorney to find him a shelter for the night and flight back to Minnesota,” Blume reports. The JAG officer, Matthew Isihara, now faces a $500 fine each day the man does not have his papers, beginning today (Thursday). According to Blume, Isihara blamed the “situation on case overload” and said “he has picked up nearly 130 habeas cases in just [the] last month.”
Expert reax: Hundreds of habeas cases are overwhelming local courts, and dozens of Justice Department lawyers have quit in disgust, Aaron Reichin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained on social media after the contempt ruling. In response, as Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported last month, JAGs were brought in to cover and help prosecute the massive immigration backlog exacerbated by the administration’s recent Operation Metro Surge crackdown in Minnesota.
Officials in Cameroon detained and then slapped a reporter “investigating a secretive Trump administration effort to deport migrants to the African nation” this week, the New York Times reported Wednesday. “None of the deportees are Cameroonian citizens. And almost all had received protection from American courts, which banned the government from sending them back to their home countries, where they would most likely face persecution,” the Times reports.
“The expulsions have raised concerns about human rights and the secrecy of President Trump’s approach to global deportations,” Pranav Baskar of the Times writes. The reporters were later released after authorities in Cameroon confiscated their equipment.
Related reading: “US judge throws out immigration board’s ruling endorsing Trump mass detention policy,” Reuters reported Wednesday in a case “that covers migrants nationwide.”
Industry
The Pentagon says it’s getting its AI providers on “the same baseline” regarding expectations, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports from an Amazon Web Services conference in West Palm Beach, Florida. Over the past year, DOD has signed contracts with Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI, Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering told venture capital investors on Tuesday. “Now we want to deploy [them] on our system so other people can build agents and pilots, and deploy it,” he said.
Tucker: “In other words, after months of exercises and experiments, the Pentagon is looking to allow different command elements and business entities to build AI agents that can perform a wider variety of tasks with minimal human oversight.”
Michael and Anthropic appeared eager to downplay recent reports that the Pentagon is “close” to cutting ties with the company over various disagreements. More, here.
Lastly today: Boeing is moving its defense HQ back to St. Louis. A quarter-century after the aerospace giant shifted its defense-business headquarters to Arlington, Virginia, Boeing announced on Wednesday that it would move Defense, Space & Security back to the midwestern home of its fighter-jet production lines and Phantom Works lab. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has a bit more, here.
