Air Force cancels plans to create a command focused on competing with China. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly: “Ending the creation of a permanent Integrated Capabilities Command—a major command slated to be led by a three-star general focused on modernizing and prioritizing the service’s future acquisitions—reverses a key initiative by former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.”
A provisional ICC was established in November to help lift acquisition responsibility from major commands to help them focus on other priorities. But the effort was paused by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in February. On Wednesday, service officials said the ICC’s responsibilities will by April 1 be folded into the existing Air Force Futures organization. Known as A5/7, it will gain a “Chief Modernization Officer” focused on strategy and force design, mission integration, capability development, and modernizing the service’s platforms.
Defense budget experts weren’t surprised by the decision to end the ICC, saying it followed a trend of the Air Force casting aside parts of the Biden-era reorganization plan. “This is really a course correction on the whole reorganization that Frank Kendall put in place,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Novelly has more, here.
The Army’s new tank will roll out a decade early, its manufacturer said Wednesday. Last year, service acquisition leaders shifted course when they awarded the contract for the M1E3 tank. “Rather than pick out every single communications system and sensor that would go into the next Abrams for the rest of its service life, the Army is opting for an open system that will allow new software to be plugged in as needed,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported off comments by Danny Deep, General Dynamics’ executive vice president for global operations. That means soldiers are expected to be riding in the M1E3 next year, well ahead of the tank's planned 2030s arrival. Read on, here.
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. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so 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 1962, the Cuban missile crisis began.
Trump 2.0
Developing: President Trump now seems to want to go to war to implement regime change in Venezuela. U.S. officials told the New York Times that the White House “has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert action in Venezuela…stepping up a campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the country’s authoritarian leader.”
“We are certainly looking at [airstrikes on Venezuelan] land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” Trump told reporters after confirming the Times reporting Wednesday.
To be clear, “The Trump administration’s strategy on Venezuela, developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with help from John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, aims to oust Mr. Maduro from power,” U.S. officials told the Times.
By the way: American B-52 bombers were spotted in the air near Venezuela on Wednesday, according to public flight-tracking sites, the UK Defence Journal reported. On the one hand, “The flight profile is somewhat consistent with long-range training and deterrence patrols routinely conducted by B-52s from Barksdale Air Force Base across the Caribbean.” However, “The flight path brought the bombers close to La Orchila and Gran Roque, both Venezuelan islands with military facilities,” which along with their “visibility on open tracking platforms suggested a deliberate signalling exercise.”Trump also said he’s ordered the military to attack those small boats without due process—killing more than two dozen people in at least six watercraft to date—because prior U.S. Coast Guard interdictions of alleged drug traffickers “never worked when you did it in a very politically correct manner.”
Reminder: Neither the White House nor the Defense Department has yet offered proof that any of the six boats it has destroyed were in fact trafficking drugs, insisting instead that unreleased “intelligence” confirms their allegations.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee: “I support cracking down on the cartels and traffickers. But the Trump Administration’s authorization of covert C.I.A. action, conducting lethal strikes on boats and hinting at land operations in Venezuela slides the United States closer to outright conflict with no transparency, oversight or apparent guardrails. The American people deserve to know if the Administration is leading the U.S. into another conflict, putting servicemembers at risk or pursuing a regime-change operation.”
For what it’s worth, Trump promised during last year’s presidential campaign that he was “not going to start a war.” He also promised to end Russia’s Ukraine invasion in a single day, to end inflation, and lower grocery prices for Americans. But nine months into his second term, none of those three promises have materialized. He and Republicans in Washington have, however, initiated what Trump promises will be the largest mass deportation operation in history, and those operations—as predicted here, here, here, and here, e.g.—have worsened the economic outlook for everyday Americans and slowed the global economy, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest forecast.
As Ukraine’s president heads to the White House Friday, Spain is facing a new threat from its chief NATO ally in Washington. “Spain was the only member of the 32-nation alliance not to commit to increasing military spending to 5% of GDP,” Reuters reported Tuesday. The western European nation is currently spending 1.3% on defense, with a promise to raise that number to 2% by the end of the year.
“I'm not happy with Spain…I was thinking of giving them trade punishment through tariffs because of what they did, and I think I may do that,” Trump suggested to reporters on Tuesday. Another possible response from Trump “would be moving the naval and air bases the US has in southern Spain to Morocco—an idea floated by former Trump official Robert Greenway—which would damage the local economies through the loss of thousands of indirect jobs,” al-Jazeera reports.
Madrid’s reax: “We are committed to the defense, to the security of NATO and, at the same time, we are equally committed to the defense of our welfare state,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said after Trump’s tariff threat.
Semi-related new polling: “Far more Americans think the United States should mainly make important foreign policy decisions with major allies (60%) versus on its own (21%),” the Chicago Council announced in a new report published Tuesday.
Also notable: “The highest levels of Americans yet recorded in Chicago Council polling think US security alliances in Europe (68%), Asia (72%), and the Middle East (67%) benefit the United States alone or the United States along with its regional allies,” the Council’s pollsters write. Read more, here.
Additional reading:
At the Pentagon
Most of the reporters who cover the Pentagon turned in their access badges on Wednesday afternoon rather than agree to new reporting rules. Associated Press: “News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information—classified or otherwise—that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.” Hegseth has called the new rules “common sense” to help regulate what Trump has called a “very disruptive” press. More, here. (Defense One reporters were among those who declined to sign the Pentagon’s new agreement; the publication co-signed a statement with several other defense-oriented newsrooms, here.)
- Read the Pentagon’s agreement, annotated by the New York Times, here.
“[M]ake no mistake, today, Oct. 15, 2025 is a dark day for press freedom that raises concerns about a weakening U.S. commitment to transparency in governance, to public accountability at the Pentagon and to free speech for all,” the Pentagon Press Association said in a statement Wednesday. Trump’s Defense Department “did this because reporters would not sign onto a new media policy over its implicit threat of criminalizing national security reporting and exposing those who sign it to potential prosecution.” Nevertheless, the group added, “The Pentagon Press Association's members are still committed to reporting on the U.S. military.”
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Army veteran and Democrat from Illinois: “The American people deserve transparency from their government—especially from an Administration that brags about being ‘the most transparent Administration in history’ and from a department with a nearly $1 trillion budget funded by taxpayer dollars.”
“You don’t hide and avoid accountability when you’re proud of what you’re doing,” Duckworth said. “You hide when you know what you’re doing is wrong. These sort of un-American restrictions on the free press could be expected from an authoritarian regime, but Pete Hegseth should know they simply have no place—and are not necessary—from the United States government.”
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