The D Brief: NDAA deets; Boat-strike tug-of-war; DOD’s AI plans; GD’s collaborative lab; And a bit more.

Five days after President Trump said he was ok with releasing video of the U.S. military’s first attack on alleged drug trafficking boats off the Latin American coast, he backed away from that pledge Monday, telling reporters he’d let his embattled Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth decide. 

Dec. 3: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem,” Trump told reporters (read a transcript via Roll Call, here). 

Dec. 8: On Monday, a reporter asked the president if he still felt that way. “Mr. President, you said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on Sept. 2 off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth now says—” the reporter said before the president interrupted her. 

“I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that,” Trump responded. “This is ABC fake news. I said, whatever Hegseth wants to do is OK with me.”

SecDef Hegseth’s latest position: “Whatever we were to decide to release, we’d have to be very responsible” about it, he said Saturday on the sidelines of the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California. 

Why it matters: The strike in question reportedly killed two survivors aboard the boat on Sept. 2, according to the Washington Post, which noted the operation was carried out on Hegseth’s orders. “I watched it live,” the secretary told Fox the following day. But he changed his account after details of the operation became public. Last week, the Pentagon chief told reporters that he “watched that first strike live” but “didn’t stick around” for subsequent strikes. In the days since, several lawmakers have called for the release of surveillance footage of the attacks, which the Post reports involved four strikes in total: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.” 

Killing survivors of a strike at sea could be a violation of the laws of war, multiple legal experts have argued since the Post published its report just after Thanksgiving.

Lawmakers of both parties want the public to see the videos, and are planning to withhold one-quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget until he releases them, Politico reported Monday after House and Senate negotiators agreed on a compromise version of the 2026 defense policy bill (PDF). House lawmakers are expected to approve the final draft this week, with Senate approval expected shortly afterward. 

Also included in the pending NDAA: 

• $400 billion for Ukraine through a provision to pay U.S. companies for the sale of weapons to Kyiv; 
• $175 million to help boost Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia's defense against Russian aggression; 
• $200 million for Israeli missile defense as well as $80 million for anti-tunneling operations and $70 million for joint counter-drone programs;
• $1 billion intended for Taiwan's military to help defend against a possible Chinese attack or invasion; 
• $1.5 billion in support for the Philippines; 
• And 4% pay raise for U.S. troops. 

Notably, the NDAA does not fund Trump’s plan to rename the Defense Department to the “Department of War,” which NBC News reported last month is estimated to cost $2 billion. (Hat tip to Reuters.)

Additional reading: 

• “Pentagon would have to explain future JAG firings under NDAA provision,” Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Monday; 
• “House strips its own provision protecting Defense civilians’ union rights from NDAA,” Government Executive reported Monday; 
• And after a review of archival footage, CNN Monday reported “Hegseth in 2016 repeatedly warned of Trump issuing unlawful military orders.” 

Coverage continues below…

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 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 1938, the first operational shipboard radar was installed aboard the battleship USS New York.

Developing: The Pentagon will widely deploy new AI tools for logistics, intelligence analysis, and combat planning in mere days or weeks, its research-and-engineering chief said Monday, adding that wide deployment of artificial intelligence now tops his list of “critical technologies,” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. 

The department has chosen Gemini for Government as the platform that will support DOD’s first department-wide rollout of AI tools, Google and defense officials announced Tuesday morning. The moves come after the Defense Innovation Unit, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO, and others were combined under Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, in a bid to accelerate deployment of AI and other technologies. He said that he will likely reduce the number of technology areas that DIU is working on as well.

The advent of large-language-model tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have made it possible—and necessary—to develop AI tools faster, Michael told reporters at the Defense Writers Group on Monday. “The explosion of capabilities has been enormous, and we're just catching up to that,” he said. “Now we can take CDAO and actually try to use it to push the capability into the Department for actual use cases.” Read more, here. 

Big-picture analysis: The U.S. military needs to reinvent itself to deter future wars, the New York Times editorial board argues in a new roundup of many national security dynamics Defense One readers will be probably familiar with. A few of the more salient points include the following reminders: 

• The Pentagon has an “overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones.”
• “An entrenched oligopoly of five large defense contractors, down from 51 in the early 1990s, has an interest in selling the Pentagon ever-costlier evolutions of the same ships, planes and missiles.”
• The “Ford [carrier], which is currently deployed in the Caribbean, is fatally vulnerable to new forms of attack. China in recent years has amassed an arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons, which can travel at five times the speed of sound and are difficult to intercept. Other countries possess quiet diesel-electric submarines capable of sinking American carriers.”
• And as the latest NDAA makes its way through congress, the Times editorial board notes “The Trump administration wants to increase defense spending in 2026 to more than $1 trillion. Much of that money will be squandered on capabilities that do more to magnify our weaknesses than to sharpen our strengths.”

“This is the first of a series of editorials examining what’s gone wrong with the U.S. military—technologically, bureaucratically, culturally, politically and strategically,” the Times writes. Read the rest, here. 

Additional reading: 

• Tom Wright of Brookings argues the White House’s new strategy “Ignores the Real Threats” facing the U.S., including “silen[ce] on Beijing’s ambition to displace Washington as the world’s leading power,” and “nothing about the Russian threat to U.S. interests.” Read his Monday response in The Atlantic, here.
• See also “The Origin of Hegseth’s Anti-Beard Obsession,” via former Pentagon official Alex Wagner, writing Saturday in The Atlantic;
• And “General Dynamics wants to turn competitors into teammates,” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Monday. 

Trump 2.0

“Worst of the Worst” site skips evidence. A new Department of Homeland Security website purports to list the worst “criminal aliens” arrested by ICE. The website names more than 9,800 of the “hundreds of thousands” of people taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the past 11 months. Each name is presented, information-card style, with their countries of origin and one or more alleged crimes. Most include a formal or informal mug shot; some, oddly, do not.

For the vast majority of people, no corroboration is given of their purported criminality. Among the first 1,200 names, just 4% link to DHS press releases; no other kind of documentation is offered. (The site is “all about transparency,” a DHS spokesperson said in a press release.)

Best of the worst of the worst? Many of the names are listed with one or more awful crimes: homicide, sexual assault, human trafficking, and more. But the sample also includes more than a handful of people whose only listed crimes were far more minor: shoplifting, marijuana possession, traffic offenses. Nearly 5% were accused solely of (felony) illegal re-entry.

Finally, more than two dozen names have quietly been removed from the site since it went up on Monday, according to a Defense One analysis of the site. No explanation is given. 

Most people arrested by ICE this year had no criminal record at all, Axios reported last week off a new tranche of data released by the agency. That wasn’t the case until May, when the White House reportedly ordered ICE to triple its daily quota of arrests from 1,000 to 3,000. “Now, agents have a broader mandate and have been encouraged to make more ‘collateral arrests,’ apprehending undocumented people who happen to be with someone on a target list, such as people in the same household,” Axios wrote.

That’s especially true in Washington, D.C., the first city to see an unprecedented deployment of federal troops under Trump. “More than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in D.C. during the surge in federal law enforcement this year had no prior criminal record,” the Washington Post reported on Thursday. 

“The new data confirms that the Trump administration isn't focused on legitimate public safety risks, but rather on hitting politically motivated arrest targets,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told Axios last week.

Related reading: 

• “Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide,” Boston’s WGBH reported Saturday; 
• “Video shows masked Border Patrol agent chasing [U.S.-born] woman back to her Louisiana home,” NBC News reported Saturday; 
• “Ring camera captures Burnsville ICE raid that leaves 7-year-old without parents, according to family,” Minneapolis St. Paul’s KARE11 reported Sunday;
• And “Arrests of Afghans increase as ICE steps up enforcement, immigration lawyers say,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday from Sacramento.  

Additional reading:  

• “Trump-brokered truce under threat as Thailand-Cambodia fighting reignites,” Reuters reported Monday; 
• “Trump’s attacks on Minnesota’s Somali community cast a spotlight on fraud cases,” AP reported Monday from Minneapolis; 
• And “Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal,” ProPublica reported Monday.