The D Brief: Aid cuts hinder AFRICOM; Fighter-jet warning; State cuts, detailed; Army’s recruiting success; And a bit more.

After Trump pulled aid to allied countries, AFRICOM asks for help deterring terrorism. U.S. Africa Command, which does everything from helping the Somalian military target strikes on al-Shabaab to sending Army civil affairs soldiers to build schools in Cameroon, is working out what their new role on the continent will look like as the U.S. halts aid that was meant to stabilize those countries and make it easier for them to defend themselves, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Thursday. 

“Some things that we used to do, we may not do anymore,” AFRICOM commander Marine Gen. Michael Langley, speaking from the 2025 African Chiefs of Defense Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, told reporters Thursday. “So we're asking you to step up and burden-share with us.”

Langley called the African Sahel region “the epicenter of terrorism on the globe.” The region includes Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. “It is the flash point of prolonged conflict and growing instability,” he said. 

And around the Horn of Africa, which is the stomping ground for al-Shabaab terrorists around Mogadishu, “They're making assumptions that there's going to be gaps in aid in certain regions across Somalia, and there's shadow governments,” Langley said. “They're trying to exploit that scene.” 

In the meantime, China can and has stepped in to provide aid to Africa and otherwise fill gaps left by the U.S., though their influence model depends more on lending to African governments, Myers writes. Read the rest, here. 

The Air Force Reserve is on track to lose nearly half of its fighter jets by the end of the decade, a course its top general warns could sideline the force in conflicts and deepen the military’s pilot crisis, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported Thursday. 

Background: The Air Force is retiring those and other aircraft to free up money for newer technology and modernization, but active-duty forces are prioritized over the part-time Reserve and National Guard components. And unlike the Guard, the Reserve lacks gubernatorial advocacy, making it more vulnerable.

Involved: The F-16 aggressor squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, is to shut down this year. The F-16 unit at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Florida, and the A-10 units at Davis-Monthan, Whiteman, and Moody Air Force Base are slated to close in the following years, Lt. Gen. John Healy, chief of the Air Force Reserve, said during an interview at the Pentagon.

Also notable: Over the past two years, 200 pilots left active duty without moving to the Reserve because of a lack of modern aircraft, the general recently told Congress. As of now, only one Reserve fighter squadron is set to receive new aircraft: the 301st Fighter Wing in Fort Worth, Texas. That unit received its first four F-35s in November, and is slated to have all 26 jets by 2027. Continue reading, here. 

The Army is set to meet its recruiting goal early and could go beyond it this year thanks in part to 14,000 who signed up last year, Military-dot-com reported Thursday. 

Topline read: “As of Monday, the Army had brought in 59,875 new active-duty enlisted soldiers with a total goal of 61,000 for fiscal 2025, which ends Sept. 30,” reporter Steve Beynon writes. The 2024 batch had “delayed shipping to basic training due to school obligations or training capacity issues,” he explained. 

Now officials are talking about how to absorb the excess. “With the Army expected to hit its target in the next week or two, the Pentagon is weighing whether to invoke a little-used and relatively obscure authority that allows the defense secretary to increase a service's end strength by up to 3% without congressional action,” Beynon reports. “The other option, a 4% increase, would require approval from Capitol Hill.” Continue reading, here. 

Commentary: “The U.S. Army is too light to win,” Dr. Richard D. Hooker, Jr. is a Senior Fellow with The Atlantic Council and a Senior Associate with the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, writes for Defense One. 

His advice: Re-equip light brigades with protected, wheeled transport mounting heavy weapons; restore their antiarmor companies; increase the density of Javelin anti-tank and Stinger air defense systems across light formations; replace towed light artillery with wheeled, 155mm systems like the French Caesar or German RCH-155; reverse the deactivation of divisional air cavalry squadrons; and arm divisional UH-60 assault helos with the Hellfire antitank missile system. Read the rest, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Pentagon Plans Fewer PCS Moves for Troops to Cut Costs,” Air & Space Forces Magazine reported Wednesday; 
• “Guam barracks conditions are 'baffling,' Navy admiral says in email,” Task & Purpose reported Thursday; 
• “Pentagon aims to save money by reducing consulting contracts,” Washington Technology reported Thursday; 
• And a Defense Intelligence Agency “Employee Arrested for Attempting to Provide Classified Information to Foreign Government,” the Department of Justice announced Thursday. 

---

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2024, Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to be found guilty in a criminal case when he was convicted of falsifying business records to hide payments made to a pornographic film actress to buy her silence ahead of the 2016 election. 

Industry

Update: Sub-maker General Dynamics' Electric Boat agreed to a 30% wage increase following talks this week with the United Auto Workers, Reuters reported Wednesday. “The ratification comes over a month after members authorized a strike, demanding cost-of-living adjustments to keep up with inflation,” the wire service writes. 

IVAS, resurrected? Palmer Luckey of defense contractor Anduril is working with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg again, this time on a contract to build new headsets for the U.S. Army, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. 

TLDR: “Meta and Anduril have jointly bid on an Army contract for VR hardware devices, worth up to about $100 million,” the Journal’s Heather Somerville writes. “The contract is intended to vet headset prototypes that are part of a larger $22 billion Army wearables project, of which Anduril became the lead vendor in February after Microsoft failed to deliver a functional VR headset.

And if the Army doesn’t want it? “Anduril said the collaboration on the headsets…is going forward irrespective of winning the Army contract. Anduril is betting other parts of the military will also be buyers,” the Journal reports. 

ICYMI: “Anduril is among the leading candidates to help build Trump’s Golden Dome, an elaborate and expansive plan to protect America from high-tech missiles.” More, here. 

In development: Northrop Grumman just put $50 million into a space startup to boost the development of a new rocket, Reuters reported Thursday. The Texas-based startup is called Firefly Aerospace, and Grumman’s “Eclipse” rocket is scheduled to launch off the coast of Virginia sometime in early 2026.

Notable: “Firefly gained prominence in the space race after becoming the second private firm to score a moon landing in a successful first attempt with its uncrewed Blue Ghost spacecraft earlier this year.” More, here. 

Chart crazy: “America Let Its Military-Industrial Might Wither. China’s Is Booming,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (gift link) in an explainer featuring two dozen different charts. 

See also: 

• “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans,” the New York Times reported Friday (gift link) from San Francisco, Washington, and New York; 
• And “The US Is Storing Migrant Children’s DNA in a Criminal Database,” WIRED reported Thursday.

Trump 2.0

The State Department is moving forward with a plan to eliminate or consolidate more than 300 of its offices and bureaus, including various national security offices, as well as units that cover Asia and the Middle East, Eric Katz and David Dimolfetta reported Thursday for Government Executive. 

The plans could lead to a reduction of more than 3,400 employees and 45% of its structural entities, according to documents provided to lawmakers and employees on Thursday. 

Why it matters: The plans presented Thursday offer more detail than those first laid out by State Secretary Marco Rubio in April, though the number of employee reductions was first reported by GovExec earlier this month. For details on which divisions will see reductions, go here. 

Coming soon: Federal job applicants will soon be quizzed on their favorite Trump administration policy as part of the hiring process, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s new “merit hiring plan,” Erich Wagner of GovExec reported Thursday. 

Background: The plan is a hodgepodge of bipartisan reforms developed under both Trump and former President Biden to accelerate and improve the hiring process, alongside plans to eradicate longstanding efforts to make the federal workforce more reflective of the American populace.

OPM said it will expand its recruiting efforts particularly at religious colleges and universities, homeschooling and other faith-based groups, an apparently conservative spin on the Biden administration’s efforts to step up recruitment at historically black colleges and universities. 

The questionnaire also queries job applicants on their patriotism, “commitment to the Constitution” and the country’s “founding principles.” Said one federal human resources official: “Everything in it will make it more difficult to hire, not less. How the f--- do you define if someone is patriotic?” More, here. 

Additional reading:  

• “‘The Federal Government Is Gone’: Under Trump, the Fight Against Extremist Violence Is Left Up to the States,” ProPublica reported Thursday; 
• “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations,” the New York Times reported Thursday on the heels of initial reporting by NOTUS;
• Relatedly, the Cato Institute warned Thursday about the same White House report’s “Premade Conclusions [and] Post-Hoc Data”;
• And with his formal departure from government expected this afternoon, don’t miss reading about how “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama,” via the New York Times, reporting Friday with several new details; 
• In big-picture analysis, “Trump’s big plans on trade and more run up against laws of political gravity, separation of powers,” the Associated Press reported Thursday; 
• See also the economic damage from “Trump's tariff tally: $34 billion and counting, global companies say,” via Reuters, reporting Thursday.

]]>