Defense One

The latest iteration of the Army’s Project Convergence imagined that the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., had been captured by an enemy force, with the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force joining to take it back. Read the story:

The White House says it has proposed the first trillion-dollar defense budget, but some senators and budget analysts aren’t buying it. Read the story:

The Army got a long list of marching orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday, with deadlines for fielding new weapons and technology, directives to unload old equipment, and orders to merge the service’s futures and doctrine organizations. Read the story:

The Army got a long list of marching orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday, with deadlines for fielding new weapons and technology, directives to unload old equipment, and orders to merge the service’s futures and doctrine organizations. Read the story:

The U.S. military’s fleet of V-22 Ospreys won’t be able to fly without restrictions until 2026—about a year later than originally planned—as officials work to upgrade flawed gearboxes that have caused several mishaps. Read the story:

As China applies increasing military pressure against Taiwan, it’s worth considering an earlier era when conditions were much worse. In the fall of 1958, four countries—United States, Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan)—found themselves on the brink of nuclear war. The incident, which would later be known as the second Taiwan Strait Crisis, led to a rupture in Sino-Soviet relations and altered the trajectory of the Cold War. Revisiting it reminds us of an element of deterrence that is getting short shrift today. Read the commentary:

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As the 101st Airborne Division prepared last year to receive their first M10 Bookers—armored combat vehicles designed specifically for infantry forces—staff planners realized something: eight of the 11 bridges on Fort Campbell would crack under the weight of the “light tank.” It turns out that though the vehicle was initially conceptualized as relatively lightweight—airdroppable by C-130—the twists and turns of the Army requirements process had rendered the tank too heavy to roll across the infrastructure at the infantry-centric Kentucky post, and nobody had thought about that until it was too late. Meghann Myers has more at: https://lnkd.in/dy6sSQMc

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. On this day in 1945, former Italian journalist-turned-fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was shot and killed near Lake Como one day after his capture by the Italian resistance movement.