The D Brief: Second carrier to Mideast; Hormuz closure; AI fallout at DOD; El Paso drone weapon; And a bit more.

As a second American aircraft carrier races to the Middle East, Iran says it has briefly closed portions of the Strait of Hormuz for live-fire military exercises as it continues negotiations over its nuclear program with U.S. officials Tuesday in Geneva. After weeks of threats aimed at Iran’s leaders by American President Donald Trump, the Associated Press calls the strait closure “a further escalation in a weekslong standoff that could ignite another war in the Middle East.” 

Rewind: The U.S. joined Israeli attacks against Iran during a single-morning assault last June. The operation, called “Midnight Hammer,” used F-22 and F-35 aircraft as well as submarine-launched cruise missiles and long-range B-2 bombers that dropped munitions in a mission designed to cripple Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran responded by firing missiles at the U.S. military’s at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, with minimal damage. After the exchange of fire, experts assessed Iran’s nuclear infrastructure had been damaged by the U.S.-Israeli attacks, but warned it could still be reconstituted. 

Latest: The U.S. military has been preparing for what could be “weeks” of new operations against Iran, two U.S. officials told Reuters Friday. “In a sustained campaign, the U.S. military could hit Iranian state and security facilities, not just nuclear infrastructure,” the officials said. Trump is also reportedly “considering options that would include sending American commandos to go after certain Iranian military targets,” the New York Times reported last week.  

Under such a scenario, “the United States fully expected Iran to retaliate, leading to back-and-forth strikes and reprisals over time,” Reuters reports. This could help explain why recent satellite imagery over al-Udeid showed U.S. troops have put Patriot anti-missile units on trucks to increase uncertainty for possible Iranian targeting in a future conflict. Other U.S. bases in the region are also vulnerable, including locations across Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. 

A dozen U.S. warships are already in the region. That includes the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Another carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, has been rerouted from the Caribbean Sea to the Middle East as well, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The chief of naval operations said in January, Defense One reported, that he would push back against extending Ford, which left Norfolk in June, saying the move would be “quite disruptive” to planned maintenance for the ship and to the lives of its sailors.  

To get a sense of the air and naval power the U.S. is bringing to the region, open-source monitor Ian Ellis drew up this busy map and chart. 

Iranian reax: “An aircraft carrier is certainly a dangerous piece of equipment,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech Tuesday before talks began in Geneva. “But more dangerous than the carrier is the weapon that can send it to the bottom of the sea,” he added. 

Iran’s navy chief said Tuesday the Hormuz Strait will remain under “24-hour surveillance” as Iran continues naval drills in the waterway the Reuters calls “the world's most vital oil export route.”  

Big picture: “The Iranian government is under considerable pressure to agree to a deal,” the Times reports. “Iran’s economy has struggled under crippling international sanctions, which helped ignite the latest wave of protests against the country’s authoritarian government.” However, “Iranian officials have argued they will not make concessions on nuclear enrichment without sanctions relief. Iran’s deputy foreign minister told state media that in return Tehran could offer Washington lucrative investment opportunities in sectors like oil, gas, and mining.” 

Elsewhere in the region, the U.S. military says it recently carried out 10 strikes in 10 days in its ongoing war against ISIS in Syria. Read a bit more about that from Central Command, here.

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 and Meghann Myers. 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 1865, retreating rebels burned two-thirds of Columbia, South Carolina, to the ground as Gen. William Sherman’s U.S. Army swept through the region in the final months of the American Civil War. The city would later host the nearby U.S. Army base Fort Jackson, which was established in 1917.

Around the Defense Department

The Pentagon is facing blowback after reportedly using AI firm Anthropic’s Claude software during the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last month, Axios reported over the weekend. “The military has used Claude in the past to analyze satellite imagery or intelligence,” however two sources told the outlet “Claude was used during the active operation, not just in preparations for it.” Claude is also reportedly the only AI model used in the military’s classified systems. 

Anthropic’s chief concern in this context: “that its technology is not used for the mass surveillance of Americans or to operate fully autonomous weapons,” Dave Lawler and Maria Curi of Axios write. Military officials have countered that those concerns are “unduly restrictive.”

Update: Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is now reportedly on the verge of cutting ties with Anthropic, which are estimated to cost about $200 million. (Anthropic says it generates about $14 billion in annual revenue.) Hegseth is also considering designating the firm a “supply chain risk,” Axios reported Monday, and noted, “That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries.” Read the rest, here. 

The U.S. military killed three more alleged drug-traffickers in another boat strike in the Caribbean Sea on Friday. That raises the Pentagon’s death toll to 133 people U.S. troops have killed without a trial across nearly 40 strikes since September. 

Trump told soldiers they “have to” vote for the GOP during a speech Friday at an army base in North Carolina. “You have to vote for us,” the president told a crowd of soldiers at Fort Bragg, a base where regulations prohibit partisan displays. 

“Most service members refrained from cheering,” the Washington Post reported after the president’s remarks. “They mostly left the applause and cheers to his staff and the assembled Republican politicians” from the state that had gathered at the army base for Trump’s speech. 

Hegseth pushed out a senior Army spokesman who once worked for former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, a target of President Trump’s ire after having installed him during the president’s first term, Fox News reported. Col. Dave Butler had been nominated for a promotion to brigadier general, but sources told Fox that the defense secretary ordered the Army secretary to fire him last week.

Earlier this month, Hegseth told a crowd at the Pentagon, “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’” It’s been a common refrain for Hegseth over the past several years, and an extension of the Trump administration’s culture-war assault on diversity following nationwide protests against police brutality in the final year of Trump’s first term. Trump began his second term by firing the Black general who was Joint Chiefs chairman because he allegedly promoted diversity, while Hegseth cut celebrations of Black History Month and restored the titles of Army bases named after Confederate soldiers. 

A historian noticed Hegseth’s recent remarks at the Pentagon, and penned a retrospective flagging “an extensive literature that tracks the ways in which concepts of diversity have stood at the heart of the United States of America from the founding.” According to Kevin Kruse of Princeton University, “We only need to take a look at the propaganda posters that the USA employed during World War I and World War II to see that diversity was very much seen as a strength by American leaders in those conflicts,” he wrote Sunday.  

Relatedly, “Immigrant soldiers, for instance, made up about a full sixth of the U.S. Army forces during the conflict,” Kruse adds. And “the War Department (as it was actually known back then) knew incorporating these foreign-born soldiers was so important to their work that it launched the Foreign-Speaking Soldier Sub-Section,” known as FSS.  

Citing several posters from the era, “Even more than the WWI effort, American propaganda during WWII leaned into the idea that diversity—not just in terms of white ethnics, but all races and both genders too—was an asset to be exploited, not a deficit to be overcome,” Kruse writes. Continue reading, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Pentagon may bar tuition aid for top universities in Hegseth’s crackdown on ‘biased’ schools,” CNN reported Friday; 
• And “Trump administration ordered to restore George Washington slavery exhibit it removed in Philadelphia,” AP reported Tuesday.  

Deportation nation

The Homeland Security Department has subpoenaed Google, Meta, Discord and Reddit for the identities of users whose accounts track or comment on ICE activity, the New York Times reported. Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, sources said. Some users were notified of the subpoenas and given 10 to 14 days to fight them in court.

DHS appears to be breaking many of its own use-of-force policies against ICE protestors, according to a review of dozens of incidents by NBC News. “Less lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and flash-bangs have been deployed “inappropriately and indiscriminately” according to court cases in at least four states. “I’ve never seen federal agents so out of control and acting in such a malicious manner,” Rubén Castillo, a former federal prosecutor and federal judge who now leads the Illinois Accountability Commission, a state effort to review allegations of abuse against immigration officers, told NBC. “They said they were going after ‘the worst of the worst,’ then they became the problem.”

El Paso counter-drone weapon update: When the federal government shut down El Paso’s airspace last week, they were responding to the firing of a counter-drone laser “without sufficient coordination,” sources told Axios. Customs and Border Protection had fired AeroVironment’s LOCUST system at what Trump administration officials called “a cartel drone swarm.” It was on loan from the U.S. military. More, here. 

Additional reading: 

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Noem's use of Coast Guard resources strains her relationship with the military branch, sources say,” NBC News reported Tuesday; 
• "Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped," Reuters reported Saturday; 
• "U.S. Deports Nine Migrants in Secret, Ignoring Legal Protections," the New York Times reported Saturday;
• See also “How a Planned Disney World Vacation Turned Into Four Months in Immigration Detention,” via ProPublica reporting Saturday.