The D Brief: DOD workforce, whipsawed; Russia cool on ceasefire; Industrial-policy nom; Gitmo migrants sent back to US; And a bit more.

On the personnel cuts: “Understaffing was so rampant already – ‘do more with less’ has been a thing since at least the early 2000s,” an Army civilian said. 

On the firing of probationary employees: One DOD civilian said the new folks tend to be the most productive: “And that’s who we’re firing? Our lowest-paid, most efficient, highly motivated employees who aren’t jaded yet? It’s infuriating.”

On the travel and credit-card freezes: “We have been developing a software program that would streamline our testing process, and now we can no longer travel to the location where it would be deployed to install it,” a Navy civilian data scientist said.

On the what-I-did emails: “I spent hours last Monday drafting the bullets and trying to tie them to SecDef priorities and statutory requirements,” an Air Force civilian said. “This task and the anxious cloud of uncertainty prevented me from being as focused on my actual job as I used to be.”

On the paused deferred-resignation deal: “Can you say proverbial limbo? I am trying to leave and can’t,” a DOD civilian said. “My life is on hold. I cannot put my house on the market, cannot make plans for moving or my future until I know when I will be released.”

Asked whether the anxiety among the DOD workforce was an intended consequence of these policies, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot said that “as we take these important steps to reshape the workforce to meet the President’s priorities, the Department will treat our workers with dignity and respect as it always does. Those who commit themselves to defending our nation deserve nothing less.” Read on, here.

Developing: Hegseth just ordered a “force-wide” review of military standards, to include “physical fitness, body composition, and grooming,” the Defense Department announced Wednesday. “This review will illuminate how the Department has maintained the level of standards required over the recent past and the trajectory of any change in those standards,” Hegseth said in a statement. 

JAG changes coming? Hegseth is also expected to begin “a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the U.S. military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict,” the Guardian reported Thursday, citing people close to the matter. 

Consultant tapped as Pentagon’s industrial-policy chief. It’s Mike Cadenazzi, who began his career as a junior officer in naval intelligence and has spent most of his professional life advising clients, including as founder of VisualDOD, a data-visualization tool he sold in 2015 to McKinsey & Co. He has worked as a forecasting consultant for Toffler Associates, for decision-and-data-science company Govini, and most recently for EY. Cadenazzi was nominated on Tuesday to become the Trump administration’s first assistant defense secretary for industrial-base policy, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports.

Service leaders beg for flexibility as full-year continuing resolution looms. Now that Congress has abandoned its effort to pass a defense budget for the fiscal year that began last October, the vice chiefs of the military services are asking for relief from the strictures of the continuing resolution that passed the House and is being debated in the Senate. 

Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations: “We are seeing an enormous amount of threats emerging every single year, and it is very hard to get after those threats when you have to wait two to four years to get the budget to get after those threats,” he told the Senate Armed Service Committee’s readiness and support subcommittee on Wednesday. D1’s Myers reports.

Related reading: 

• “Additional defense funds in reconciliation bill ‘may not be enough’: SASC chairman” Roger Wicker said Tuesday, via Breaking Defense;
• “Pentagon 'cherry picked' studies to support transgender service member ban, judge says,” ABC News reported Wednesday;
• And don’t forget “The Medal of Honor Recipient Erased in the Pentagon's DEI Purge,” via Military-dot-com’s Blake Stilwell, writing last week. 

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 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 1954, the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ began, ultimately leading to the French withdrawal from Vietnam. 

Ukraine and Russia

Russian leader Vladimir Putin visited frontline troops in Ukraine Russia on Wednesday. He even donned military fatigues for the trip to the Ukrainian-occupied Kursk region, according to footage released by Russian state media. Ukrainian forces have occupied a small chunk of Russian territory since their surprise advance last summer, though their holdings have shrunk from around 500 square miles in August to about 77 today. 

Context: “After clinging for more than seven months to a gradually shrinking area, Ukraine has seen its position worsen sharply in Kursk in the past week after its main supply lines were severed,” Reuters reports. “Kyiv had hoped to use the territory as a bargaining chip in peace talks,” the New York Times reports. 

Putin ordered his troops to push Ukrainians out of Kursk and set up a similar “security zone” on the other side of the border in Ukraine’s Sumy region. 

Developing: A top Russian official says Moscow is not interested in the White House’s 30-day ceasefire plan for Ukraine because “It gives us nothing,” according to senior Putin aide Yuri Ushakov. “It only gives the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup, gain strength and to continue the same thing,” he said on Russian state TV Wednesday. 

Background: “Moscow in the past has repeatedly ruled out an interim cease-fire and voiced skepticism about any peace talks, insisting that a lasting agreement would take time,” the Wall Street Journal reports. 

“This is nothing other than a temporary time-out for Ukrainian soldiers, nothing more,” he said, and added, “Our goal is a long-term peaceful settlement that takes into account the legitimate interests of our country and our well-known concerns,” which include retaining all currently invaded land inside Ukraine. 

Rewind: “Moscow insists on keeping at a minimum the 18% of Ukrainian territory it already controls, an area equivalent to the state of Virginia in size,” the Journal notes. “It [also] wants to reverse policies that have sidelined Russian cultural influence in Ukraine and preclude the country’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”

Ceasefire trivia: “Russia has entered into ceasefire agreements at least 25 times—and violated them almost as many times,” former U.S. Army medic Tim Mak reports in his newsletter, citing Ukrainian officials. 

Developing: Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff is in Moscow today for talks with Russian officials. 

By the way: “The U.S. still has about $3.85 billion in congressionally authorized funding for future arms shipments to Ukraine, but the Trump administration has shown no interest so far in using that authority to send additional weapons as it awaits the outcome of peace overtures,” the Associated Press reports. 

New: Finland just announced another batch of aid to Ukraine, totaling around 200 million euros, as well as closer defense cooperation in the future, Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen said during a visit with his Ukrainian and regional counterparts in Helsinki on Thursday.

“Finland and Ukraine are on the same edge of Europe and, drawing from our historical experience, we share a perception of the threat of Russia,” Häkkänen said in a statement. “We must heed the lessons learned by Ukrainians and make use of their experiences,” he added. 

Related reading: 

• “German Arms Maker Rheinmetall Has Record Sales in ‘Era of Rearmament’,” the New York Times reported Wednesday from Berlin; 
• “Europe’s Idling Factories Eye New Start in the Military,” the Journal reported Thursday; 
• And in video: “Thermal camera footage shows moment cargo ship and tanker collide in North Sea,” via AP, reporting Wednesday evening. 

Trump 2.0

Update: Trump’s ICE just quietly returned all the migrants it had sent to Guantánamo back to stateside facilities, the New York Times reported Wednesday. 

“The government has not announced that it relocated the men to one or more Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Louisiana, nor was the reason for the move clear,” Carol Rosenberg and Charlie Savage write. However, the transfers occurred “days before a Federal District Court judge in Washington is set to hear a major challenge to aspects of the policy.” 

Notable: “It is the second time the administration has brought people to Guantánamo Bay only to remove them after a few weeks, a costly and time-consuming exercise.” Read on, here. 

Lastly today: Many Americans see Trump’s actions on the economy as too erratic, Reuters/Ipsos reported Thursday. That includes “Some 57% of respondents, including one in three Republicans, [who] said the president’s policies have been unsteady as his efforts to tax imports have set off a global trade war, according to the two-day poll that closed on Wednesday.”

Who’s worried about a recession? Not the White House. Billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked by CBS News Wednesday if Trump’s economic policies are worth it even if they cause a recession. “These policies are the most important thing America has ever had,” Lutnick replied, and added, “It is worth it.”

Historian’s reax: “The Trump administration’s hits to the economy have monopolized the news this week, but its swing away from Europe and toward Russia, antagonizing allies and partners while fawning over authoritarians like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is also a radical stand, and one that seems likely to destabilize American security,” Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College wrote Wednesday. 

What’s going on? “In place of the system that has created relative stability for almost a century, Republicans under President Donald Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk are imposing a government that is based in the idea that a government that works to make people safe, prosperous, and healthy is simply ripping off wealthy people,” Richardson writes. 

Related: Musk’s DOGE is overstating its claimed savings by at least 92%, according to available information aggregated into a DOGE tracker updated Tuesday by Judd Legum of Popular Information. He explained in a social media thread on Musk’s own platform that you can review here.  ]]>