The D Brief: 3 Americans killed in Syria; Ukraine peace talks; Germany on Russian sabotage; Scharre on AI in war; And a bit more.

Two U.S. soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in Syria on Saturday by what officials said was a lone ISIS gunman. Part of the Pentagon’s much-reduced yet enduring counterterrorism mission in the country, they were the first troops to die there since the fall of dictator Bashar Al-Assad last year. Three more U.S. troops and two Syrian security personnel were wounded in the attack, U.S. officials and Syrian state media said. 

President Trump vowed “very serious retaliation.” Read a U.S. Central Command statement and coverage by the New York Times.

Also from the region: To the southwest, where Israeli forces have occupied Syrian territory for a year, conducting armored patrols and counterterrorism raids, there are concerns that Israel intends to maintain a permanent presence in the country. The Associated Press has more, here.

No clear plan for what happens next with Trump’s military campaign in the Caribbean. If phase one is “killing alleged drug smugglers and pushing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to leave office” and “The end goal—let’s call it phase three—is to work with a new government to gain access to the country’s oil and rare earth minerals,” phase two is “an open question,” write Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick for The Atlantic in a broad look at the facts, possibilities, and concerns.

The pair report that “Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as acting national security adviser, has taken the lead in planning for a variety of contingencies,” although officials “said that the planning is restricted to a very small group of senior officials around the president and that they couldn’t provide any details. Other officials involved in Venezuela discussions told us that if there is any substantive planning being done, it was news to them, and that they had little understanding of what the administration intends to do in the event that Maduro is toppled. (The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.)”

Anonymous quote: “This is a shakedown—a financial shakedown,” another official said, one that is “being done primarily for profit.”

What happens if Maduro leaves? “The department has a contingency plan for everything—we are a planning organization,” DOD spokesperson Kingsley Wilson said. She did not provide any details. Read more (gift link), here. 

Airliner near Venezuela avoids “midair collision” with Air Force tanker.  On Friday, the pilot of JetBlue Flight 1112 from Curaçao to New York City’s JFK airport told air traffic controllers that “We almost had a midair collision up here...They passed directly in our flight path....They don’t have their transponder turned on, it’s outrageous.” The pilot said the Air Force plane then headed into Venezuelan air space. DOD and Air Force officials had no comment by press time, the Associated Press reported.

Additional reading: 

• “Why Did the United States Seize a Venezuelan Oil Shipment?” the Center for Strategic and International Studies explores the question in a recent explainer;
• “Next presidential jet will arrive a bit earlier than projected, Air Force says,” Thomas Novelly reported Saturday for Defense One; 
• And ICYMI, “New GAO, Navy reports warn of serious V-22 Osprey safety risks, with some fixes stretching into 2030s,” Novelly 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. 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 1948, the U.S. Navy and State Department signed an agreement that would lead to the Marines guarding U.S. embassies around the world.

Europe and Ukraine

Ukraine’s president is meeting with U.S. envoys in Berlin for the latest round of talks toward ending Russia’s Ukraine invasion. President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff are leading the U.S. side while President Volodymir Zelenskyy is handling matters for Kyiv. 

Reportedly not present for those talks: U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who had played a starring role in recent talks, as AP and Axios reported, including presenting the Trump administration’s 28-point plan to Zelenskyy just last month. Driscoll has reportedly been “reeled in” by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, unnamed sources told the British newspaper Telegraph last week. “He was seen to be exerting himself a bit too much, and he had his hand slapped,” one of the sources said. 

Other European leaders are also meeting in Berlin for related but separate talks, Reuters reports from the German capital. “European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and the leaders of Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden are among those expected” in Berlin. 

Notable: Zelenskyy has reportedly agreed to drop Ukraine’s request to join NATO, but it has no interest in giving up invaded territory to Russia as part of concessions from the developing peace talks, Reuters reports. Relatedly, 75% of Ukrainians surveyed said giving up land to Russia or capping Kyiv’s military was “completely unacceptable,” according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. A further “63% of Ukrainians are ready to endure war as long as necessary,” the survey says. Read more, here. 

Commentary: “On Europe, the Trump administration is out of step with Congress, Americans,” Cameron McMillan and Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote Friday in Defense One. 

Their lede: “The Trump administration sent shockwaves across the Atlantic last week with its new National Security Strategy. The strategy’s dismissal of the threat from Russia and harsh criticisms of Europe and NATO led the German chancellor to describe elements of the strategy as ‘unacceptable,’ and to call for Europe to become ‘much more independent of the United States in security policy.’” 

Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the strategy was “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision, which is never a good sign, McMillan and Bowman write. “Thankfully, bipartisan majorities of Americans and their representatives in Congress remain clear-eyed about the threat from Moscow and believe supporting NATO and Ukraine serves American interests.” Read the rest, here. 

By the way: German intelligence officials say they’ve gathered proof Russia has been behind cyberattacks, sabotage, and disinformation campaigns, all of which “clearly [bear] Moscow’s signature,” the Foreign Ministry announced Friday in Berlin. 

“We can now clearly attribute the cyberattack against German Air Safety in August 2024 to the hacker collective APT28, also known as Fancy Bear,” the official said at a press briefing. “Our intelligence findings prove that the Russian military intelligence service GRU bears responsibility for this attack.” What’s more, “we can now state definitively that Russia, through the Storm 1516 campaign, sought to influence and destabilize the most recent federal election,” he added, according to France’s Le Monde. Germany’s Deutsche Welle has more.

Why it matters: “The accusation of sabotage is the latest in a sequence of similar claims in Europe, where officials have blamed Russia for drone flights over Danish and Belgian airports, the jamming of aviation-navigation systems over Sweden and using cans to smuggle explosives into Poland,” the New York Times reported, noting, “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said this month that his country was ‘ready’ for war if Europe started it.”

Additional reading: “Europe starts learning how to shoot down drones,” the Economist reported Sunday. 

Artificial intelligence, in focus 

Generative AI use in the American workplace is rising modestly, the polling firm Gallup reported Sunday from survey data gathered in August. 

Those who said they use AI applications at least a few times a week rose from 19% to 23% from roughly January to June, “while daily use moved less, ticking up from 8% to 10% during the same period,” Gallup research associate Andy Kemp writes. And among those surveyed who say they use AI at least a few times a year rose from 40% to 45%. 

Using it how? “More than six in 10 U.S. employees who used AI at work reported using chatbots or virtual assistants. AI writing and editing tools were the next most commonly used tools (36%), followed by AI coding assistants (14%),” Kemp reports. However, while more may be using AI, “What employees reported using AI for did not change meaningfully from Gallup’s initial measure in Q2 2024,” Gallup notes. 

• Also: The use of AI chatbots has occasionally yielded laughable results like this video of two polite bots that seemingly do not know how to end a conversation. 

Note of caution: The trend may not be so clear-cut. Indeed, “Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening,” the Economist reported just before Thanksgiving. Stanford researchers recently found AI use fell 10 percentage points (46% to 36%) from June to December. The Economist also reported “Ramp, a fintech firm, finds that in early 2025 AI use soared at American firms to 40%, before levelling off.” Meanwhile nationwide, “The share of workers who use AI every day is still pretty small—just 10% in the third quarter” of 2025, Axios reports off the new Gallup polling. 

But there are others who are more bullish and inclined to dismiss lingering cautions. As an outlet, Axios has been notably eager to push the trend, which is backed by billions of dollars and reportedly propping up much of the U.S. economy. “Yeah, I remember back when in 2002, everyone was like, ‘God, the Internet is nothing but like a weird site where you can buy like second-hand Pez dispensers and stuff. This hype thing is crazy right now; it's bullshit, and I’m not even going with it,’” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker said in a recent podcast on the topic. “Yeah, it turns out that people actually did figure out new stuff to use it for,” he added. As the Economist points out, “history suggests that technology tends to spread in fits and starts. Consider use of the computer within American households, where the speed of adoption slowed in the late 1980s. This was a mere blip before the 1990s, when they invaded American homes.”

Why bring it up: It’s nothing less than “the most important question in determining whether or not the world is in an AI bubble,” the Economist wrote in late November. Indeed, “From today until 2030 big tech firms will spend $5trn on infrastructure to supply AI services. To make those investments worthwhile, they will need on the order of $650bn a year in AI revenues, according to JPMorgan Chase, a bank, up from about $50bn a year today. People paying for AI in their personal lives will probably buy only a fraction of what is ultimately required. Businesses must do the rest.”

New podcast: How will AI reshape the future of warfare? Paul Scharre, executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, joined us to tackle the topic in our most recent Defense One Radio episode, posted Friday. 

Scharre is the author of two books on the topic: “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” and “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War.” 

You can hear our Friday conversation, which also featured Defense One’s Patrick Tucker, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or on our website here.