The D Brief: Pentagon’s industry performance reviews; CNO’s fighting instructions; Marine Corps’ clean audit; DOD’s new AI tool; And a bit more.
Update: The Pentagon will reportedly carry out performance reviews of major U.S. defense firms and plans to make “noncompliance determinations” in the weeks ahead, The Hill and the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
The reviews come on the heels of an executive order President Trump signed last month vowing closer scrutiny of the industry as he pushed for a 50-percent boost to the Pentagon budget—to $1.5 trillion—in the year ahead.
Some defense firms have already responded to the executive order. Indeed, “During quarterly earnings calls late last month, executives from RTX, General Dynamics and other contractors boasted about billions of dollars in capital investments their companies have made to expand weapons manufacturing and defended dividend payouts,” the Journal notes.
Read more about the latest earnings calls from leaders at Boeing, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Booz Allen Hamilton and more here via Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams, who writes our weekly Defense Business Brief each Wednesday.
New: CNO’s “fighting instructions” call for condition-dependent deployments. These instructions to the fleet were released on Monday by Adm. Daryl Caudle during a speech at the Naval War College.
Caudle wants to move away from the standard six- or seven-month deployments that are now routine for aircraft carriers and most surface warships. Instead, he explained to USNI News, the fleet will plan to deploy ships for shorter periods of time when needed, and according to their physical and warfighting condition.
“Naval analysts have long warned that the one-size-fits-all model of carrier strike group deployment is reaching its limits, stretching the tolerance of crews and ships and leading to maintenance delays, long gaps between carrier deployments in theater and a routine of extended deployments,” USNI News writes. Read more, here.
Developing: Connecticut submaker General Dynamics Electric Boat says it will hire 8,000 workers this year, which is a “significant ramp-up compared to the 3,000 hires” planned in 2025, local news The Day reported on Saturday. An estimated 3,500 of those new jobs are expected at EB’s Quonset Point facilities in Rhode Island. A further 2,500 are planned for Groton, “another 1,000 would be divided between engineering and design,” and the remaining 1,000 are expected to be spread “throughout other aspects of the company,” according to a memo from EB President Mark Rayha.
Panning out: “Hiring of such magnitude could increase total employees by more than 25%, depending on how much attrition occurs this year. EB, a division of General Dynamics Corp., last year settled with two of its unions to increase pay and benefits significantly,” The Day reports.
Related: “HII CEO touts productivity gains—but says new contracts are needed to sustain progress,” Lauren Williams reported for Defense One on Thursday.
ICYMI: Some U.S. defense firms have joined a parade of “honorary” donations to Trump for Kennedy Center renovations. After the president fired board members at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and became the new chairman, “companies from defense contractors to tech giants and law firms became new donors to the center,” and others went public with their donations “after linking their gifts to Trump and top White House officials,” Donald Shaw of the nonprofit newsroom Sludge reported Monday.
Why it matters: “Several of the companies that are new Kennedy Center donors or that are now explicitly linking their donations to Trump also have substantial business interests that have been directly affected by Trump administration actions.”
“Among the companies newly appearing as Kennedy Center donors since Trump’s inauguration are Anduril,” Shaw reports. Anduril last year won “a $363 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security for border surveillance towers and a $94 million with the Pentagon for its Altius drone systems,” in addition to contracts related to Trump’s unproven and still-developing Golden Dome missile defense program. Congressional experts and former Pentagon officials estimate that system could wind up costing U.S. taxpayers between $542 billion and $3.6 trillion over the next two decades.
RTX also reported a $500,000 honorary donation for the Kennedy Center, which the defense contractor made in May. That accounted for all but $3,000 of the firm’s disclosed contributions for 2025, Shaw reports. RTX is also involved in development work related to the sprawling Golden Dome program.
Many other non-defense firms made donations as well. That includes “social media giant Meta, which faces ongoing antitrust scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission (at least $250,000),” and Chevron, which “disclosed more than $1.15 million in donations to the Kennedy Center late last year.” The White House “rescinded and later reissued Treasury Department licenses governing Chevron’s ability to operate in Venezuela,” and Chevron is now “expected to be among the largest beneficiaries of Trump’s January 2026 actions in Venezuela,” Shaw reports.
Coverage continues below…
Welcome to this Tuesday 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 1962, the U.S. exchanged captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for captured American U2 spy-plane pilot Gary Powers.
The Marine Corps says it just passed an audit for the third year in a row. “Independent auditors verified that the Marine Corps’ financial records are materially accurate, complete, and compliant with federal regulations and issued an unmodified opinion for Fiscal Year 2025,” the service said in a statement Monday.
The Marine Corps is the second-smallest branch of the military, with 171,000 active-duty forces. That places it well ahead of the Space Force’s 10,000 Guardians, which operate in close conjunction with the Air Force and its 318,000 troops. The Navy ranks second at 343,000 and the Army is the largest service with 456,000 active-duty soldiers as of Nov. 30, 2025.
DOD says a new AI is bringing “decision superiority” to the military. The Defense Department on Monday said it has launched a partnership with Sam Altman’s OpenAI “to integrate ChatGPT” into the military’s generative AI platform GenAI.mil. The process “is already accelerating operational tempo and sharpening the decision superiority of its users,” according to a statement Monday. It also said “comprehensive training for all Department personnel will continue, empowering them to effectively learn the platform and integrate AI capabilities into their daily workflows.”
The OpenAI partnership is an extension of the Pentagon’s AI Acceleration Strategy released in January—which is the military’s third AI-acceleration strategy in four years, as Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported. Read more, here.
In other AI reporting this week, as the technology increasingly finds its way into the American healthcare system, “reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts,” four journalists write for Reuters in a special report published Monday.
Shutdown coverup? “Some Army civilian employees who were supposed to be furloughed during the recent shutdown went to work anyway, then were instructed to fill out time cards stating that they had not. Now the workers fear that this violated standard procedures and forced them to break the law,” report GovExec’s Eric Katz and Defense One’s Thomas Novelly. Story, here.
Watchdog: Pentagon’s #2 official Feinberg appears in 20 documents throughout the Epstein files. The Project on Government Oversight on Friday flagged another military official whose name appears inside the FBI’s repository of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide while incarcerated late in Trump’s first term.
“DOD Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg is referenced in 20 documents in the Epstein files, while the company he founded, Cerberus, appears in 360 files,” POGO’s René Kladzyk reported Friday. “The Epstein files also include emails about Cerberus sent by higher ups from Deutsche Bank, the beleaguered financial entity which managed Epstein’s investments from 2013 to 2018 and allegedly played an ‘essential role’ in Epstein’s sex-trafficking scheme.” More, here.
Trump 2.0
European security report describes Trump as a “wrecking ball” let loose on the world. After observing now five years of Trump in the White House, and coming off the heels of his assertive and combative foreign policy regarding Venezuela and Greenland, European officials this week warn “The U.S. approach to European security is now perceived as volatile, oscillating between reassurance, conditionality, and coercion,” according to the latest annual report from researchers and former officials working at the Munich Security Conference, which is hosted each February in Germany.
Topline: “The world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics. Sweeping destruction—rather than careful reforms and policy corrections—is the order of the day” while the U.S. president tries to break free “from the existing [world] order’s constraints and rebuild a stronger, more prosperous nation.”
With Trump’s rejection of the “rules-based order” that emerged in the wake of the Second World War, some experts are preparing for the emergence of a “deals-based order” stemming from his coercive and transactional foreign policy—most recently evidenced in his extractive approach toward Venezuela’s interim leadership after the U.S. abduction of President Nicholas Maduro last month. The result would be “a world shaped by transactional deals rather than principled cooperation, private rather than public interests, and regions shaped by regional hegemons rather than universal norms. Ironically, this would be a world that privileges the rich and powerful, not those who have placed their hopes in wrecking-ball politics,” the report warns.
And because the White House now seems to ape Moscow’s approach toward international borders and national sovereignty, this decidedly different approach from the U.S. has set many across Europe on edge. “Trump and his team often display an unsettling affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the report’s authors write. “To many in Europe, it feels like their long-time captain has joined their archrival’s team.” As European countries continue to pour money and arms into Ukraine’s defense against a Russian invasion, “It is thus far from clear whether the wrecking-ball politics applied by the US administration will really clear the ground for creative construction that ultimately benefits the many. Instead, it looks as if it is simply leaving a world of rubble.”
A similar outlook is emerging in the Pacific, a region where “the US claims to be countering Chinese dominance, [but] regional players view its recent actions as contradictory to that goal,” the report says.
What’s more, conflict forecasts are not encouraging. “According to the AI-driven conflict forecasting system of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the highest battle-related death tolls this year will be witnessed in precisely the conflicts that Trump had promised to end, among them those in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and Sudan.”
What then are the options for those on the margins of Trump’s orbit? In short, they will need to make building—that is, reforms and repairs—more enticing and effective than the wrecking ball of Trump’s deconstruction. “Containing the worst expressions of a policy of destruction will require these actors to step up,” the authors write. And that includes “by significantly investing in their own power resources and pooling them through closer cooperation,” but they “will also have to credibly demonstrate that meaningful reforms and political course corrections are viable—and much more likely to satisfy growing demands for improvements than a policy of widespread destruction.” Read over the full report (PDF), here.
Related reading: Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton warns “The world is threatened by the president’s self-absorption and incoherence,” writing Tuesday in a piece for The Atlantic entitled, “A Foreign Policy Worse Than Regime Change.”