The D Brief: Trump rebrands housing subsidies as ‘bonus’; Venezuelan navy starts escorting tankers; SOF needs jamming ranges; Big arms sale to Taiwan; And a bit more.
Trump rebrands Congressionally-approved troop housing subsidy as ‘warrior dividend’ holiday bonus. During a prime-time TV address, Trump said he was “proud to announce” that “1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call ‘warrior dividend,’ before Christmas.”
He added that to honor the nation’s founding, “we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.”
Fine print: The checks will come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed to Defense One’s Thomas Novelly following Trump’s televised remarks. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below, the senior administration official said.
“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion” for the Defense Department “to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official explained. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”
The forthcoming entitlement money comes as some service members have struggled amid rapid changes to the housing market, according to a January report from RAND researchers. “BAH is generally adequate for Army personnel, though not necessarily when the housing market is changing rapidly and dramatically, as it has in recent years,” the report said. “Furthermore, while our analysis of housing choices and expenditures among military personnel and of their locational amenities points to an overall positive picture with respect to BAH, a substantial, though minority, share of members report dissatisfaction with BAH.”
Related: Last week, the Defense Department announced 2026 BAH rates, which are set to increase by an average of 4.2 percent on Jan. 1, 2026.
The money comes as some lawmakers have been scrutinizing the Trump administration’s reallocation of military funding. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., issued a report last week highlighting $2 billion diverted away from the Defense Department and Homeland Security Department for border enforcement—including redirecting funds for barracks, maintenance hangers, and elementary schools. Continue reading, here.
American SOF troops want to expand drone and electronic warfare tests inside the U.S., officials told Defense One’s Patrick Tucker this week. The need is urgent, officials from the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, or SWCS, said, because as the war Ukraine illustrates, drones and electronic warfare are soaring in importance.
For a sense of the problem’s scale, U.S. troops say they must learn to operate amid jamming that is far more powerful and ubiquitous than just a few years ago. In Ukraine, this has led to drones controlled by fiber-optic cables or even their own autonomous systems. And some Russian drones use high-powered (and often illicitly acquired) chips to pick out targets based on things like shape and size, reducing their dependence on jammable communications or navigation systems.
However, it is difficult to train for this future on U.S. soil, where civil authorities heavily restrict the use of GPS jammers and other electronic warfare weapons, Tucker writes.
“If this is the future of warfare, then we need to collaboratively find a way to carve out airspace in order to employ these systems,” Lt. Col. Nicholas Caputo, commander of the 6th Battalion, 2nd Special Warfare Training Group, told Defense One. He said the center has submitted the paperwork to get the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and other relevant agencies to increase the number of places where such training could occur, at least temporarily. He hopes to see some of those efforts come to fruition within a year. Read more, here.
Additional reading: “Government admits failures by Army and air traffic controllers in DCA crash,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
New: The Pentagon announced eight pending arms sales to Taiwan totalling around $11 billion on Wednesday. The deals involve Javelin, Harpoon and TOW missile systems, $4 billion in HIMARS weapons, another $4 billion in howitzers, more than a billion dollars for Anduril loitering munitions, and an assortment of helicopter services and network support, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced in a stream of releases Wednesday. Lawmakers could object to the arrangements, though that is unlikely.
Altogether, the sales amount to “the largest ever U.S. weapons package for the island which is under increasing military pressure from China,” Reuters reports. “The announcement followed an unannounced trip by Taiwan's Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung to the Washington area last week to meet U.S. officials,” the wire service adds.
In related developments for Taiwan, the Senate advanced the latest U.S. defense policy bill Wednesday, which includes $1 billion for Taiwan’s security in 2026. That bill already passed the House, and now heads to the White House for the president’s signature.
Drone cooperation coming soon: The National Defense Authorization Act also contains a provision to “enable fielding of uncrewed and anti-uncrewed systems capabilities” for Taiwan by March. George Mason University’s Taiwan Security Monitor has details, here; and Defense Scoop has a bit more, here.
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 1944, the Supreme Court upheld President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 executive order to incarcerate about 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, in internment camps—despite a secret report from the Office of Naval Intelligence stating it had no evidence Americans with Japanese ancestry were spying for Japan. The 1944 decision was overruled 74 years later in 2018 when Chief Justice John Roberts said that it was “gravely wrong the day it was decided,” that it “has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’”
Trump 2.0
Venezuela’s navy begins escorting tankers amid Trump’s partial blockade. On Tuesday, the U.S. president announced that U.S. forces would stop oil tankers that have been sanctioned for illegal international trade heading to or from Venezuelan ports. The following day, Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro ordered the country’s navy to escort at least some tankers: “Several ships sailed from Venezuela toward Asia with a Venezuelan naval escort between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, said three people familiar with the transits. None of the commercial vessels are on the list of sanctioned tankers the United States is threatening to target,” the New York Times reported Wednesday.
Still, the move “increased the likelihood of a violent conflict,” the Times wrote, against the backdrop of Trump’s naval buildup in the Caribbean and the recent revelation by his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, that “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”
White House rhetoric on Venezuela echoes Bush officials’ pre-invasion talk. Writers at Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” compare clips of Bush officials talking ahead of the 2003 Iraq invasion with recent comments by White House officials, including President Trump, and Republican lawmakers such as Lindsey Graham. In several instances, the rhetoric is eerily similar. View the compilation on the show’s YouTube channel, here.
Additional reading:
- “Trump Media is merging with a nuclear fusion company” known as TAE Technologies, The Verge reported Thursday;
- And “Jack Smith says he could prove Trump engaged in 'criminal scheme' to overturn 2020 election,” NBC News reported Thursday;
- Relatedly, “Jack Smith tells lawmakers his team developed 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt' against Trump,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
Conflicts to watch in 2026: Venezuela jumped atop the list of the Council on Foreign Relations’ annual Preventive Priorities Survey, where hundreds of foreign policy experts rank which potential and ongoing topics are most likely to occur in the new year and how they affect U.S. interests. “By far the most prominent new addition is the possibility of direct U.S. military action against Venezuela, which was ranked as a high-likelihood, high-impact contingency,” CFR’s Paul Stares writes in the new report.
Israel is involved in two out of five of the highest-tier conflicts, representing a high likelihood of occurring as well as a high chance of impacting U.S. interests. Those concern probable clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians in the West Bank as well as fighting in the Gaza Strip and the war in Gaza. In addition to Venezuela, Russia’s war in Ukraine and “heightened political antagonism and domestic security deployments” inside the U.S. round out the most volatile and concerning sector in CFR’s survey matrix.
Panning out, “the number of armed conflicts is now at its highest since the end of World War II,” and “An increasing proportion of those, moreover, are interstate conflicts, reversing a post–Cold War trend,” Stares says.
But in a notable change, “For the first time, the possibility of widespread conflict in Afghanistan did not appear…though the risk of further cross-border clashes with Pakistan was included,” according to the rankings.
Stay tuned for more: We’ll be speaking with Stares for our final Defense One Radio episode of the year later this week. In the meantime, you can read the full report on CFR’s site, here.