The D Brief: India-Pakistan tensions rise; China’s ‘ChatGPT for robots’; Golden Dome price tag; Robot-wingman reversal; And a bit more.

China’s military aims to harness the coming “ChatGPT for robotics.” Several burgeoning techniques are enabling researchers and companies to train robots to be far more flexible, Josh Baughman and Peter W. Singer report in the latest edition of The China Intelligence. 

“A key example is vision-language-action models, which ingest images, data, and information from a robot’s internal sensors, the degree of rotation of different joints, and the positions of actuators. This enables robots to adapt and learn from their environment rapidly, creating a level of “common sense.” Now the People’s Liberation Army and its industry supporters are looking to use these advances to make humanoid robots for the battlefield. Read on, here.

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 and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1960, Navy submarine USS Triton completed the world’s first submerged circumnavigation.

Even more Hegseth comms problems

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used an unsecured internet line to access the message app Signal from his office inside the Pentagon, the Associated Press reported Thursday, extending an already troublesome narrative of lax security protocols that would cost most other personnel in the U.S. military their jobs. 

Rewind: Hegseth drew unwanted attention last month after sharing sensitive details of an ongoing Middle East military operation in a thread on Signal that inadvertently included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Hegseth’s texts in that thread—allegedly taken from the military’s top commander in the Middle East, who shared the information on a classified system—seemed to violate Pentagon security protocols for information sharing. But in the weeks since, Hegseth reportedly shared similar information with his wife and brother over Signal as well, drawing additional unwanted attention to his first 100 days running the Defense Department under President Trump. 

Why it matters: “The existence of the unsecured internet connection…raises the possibility that sensitive defense information could have been put at risk of potential hacking or surveillance,” Tara Copp of AP writes. What’s more, “A ‘dirty’ line—just like any public internet connection—also may lack the recordkeeping compliance required by federal law,” a senior U.S. official said. 

Worth noting: The Pentagon’s acting inspector general has launched an investigation into Hegseth’s use of Signal during the March episode, as requested by the chair and ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Pentagon reax: Hegseth’s “use of communications systems and channels is classified,” spokesman Sean Parnell told AP. He added, “we can confirm that the Secretary has never used and does not currently use Signal on his government computer.” (For what it’s worth, AP reported Hegseth accessed Signal from a personal computer.)

But that’s not all. “Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March, potentially exposing national security secrets to foreign adversaries,” the New York Times reported Friday, citing cybersecurity analysts and the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. 

Fine print: “It has now become routine for government officials to keep their personal cellphones when they enter office, several defense and security officials said in interviews. But they are not supposed to use them for official business, as Mr. Hegseth did.” Read more at the Times, here. 

Hegseth also accused Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs ​​Adm. Christopher Grady of leaking stories to the press last month, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. “I’ll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!” Hegseth shouted at Grady, who was then the acting Joint Chiefs Chairman. According to the Journal, “Grady was never subjected to a polygraph, and Hegseth would go on to accuse a number of other people for the leak…But for Hegseth, the episode marked a turning point in an already rocky tenure.” Story (gift link), here. 

Update: Hegseth’s chief of staff Joe Kasper is leaving the Pentagon, not just moving to a different post inside the building, Politico reported Thursday. 

Background: “A former longtime chief of staff to indicted Rep. Duncan Hunter, Kasper was a leading figure in the firings of senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg. The trio were ousted last week in a leak investigation,” Daniel Lippman and Jack Detsch write. Kasper told Politico he’s currently “planning to go back to government relations and consulting.” USA Today has more.

And Thursday was “bring your child to work day” at the Pentagon, whose military photographers snapped and shared about 65 images of the occasion online at DVIDS. Organizers also led the children into seats inside the briefing room where Deputy Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson held “a packed press briefing with the most adorable reporters!” as external engagement official Tami Radabaugh posted to social media afterward. 

“The Pentagon has now had as many press conferences for kids as they have for the actual press,” Konstantin Toropin of Military.com noted on Day 95 of the Trump-Vance administration.

What does Hegseth’s Friday look like? He’s traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border strip known as the Roosevelt Reservation, which was recently transferred to U.S. military control. “We will fully SEAL the border & REPEL all illegals attempting to cross,” he wrote on social media. 

Additional reading: 

• “Pentagon to resume medical care for transgender troops,” Politico reported Thursday following a federal appeals court decision; The Hill has similar coverage, here;
• “Inside the Fiasco at the National Security Council,” via Isaac Stanley-Becker writing Thursday for The Atlantic;
• “Paranoid Hegseth Plasters Pentagon With Photos of Controversial Wife,” The Daily Beast reported Friday;
• And “Jimmy Kimmel Mocks Pete Hegseth’s Rumored Pentagon Makeup Studio,” the New York Times reported in its “best of late night” segment. Here’s one of Kimmel’s jokes about Hegseth’s camera-shy predecessor: “Lloyd Austin, he is a four-star general. He was the previous secretary of defense. You ever seen him before? No. You know why? He was inside the Pentagon doing his job; he was not on TV.”

Around the Defense Department

Developing: We may have our first “Golden Dome” price tag. Lawmakers want $150 billion in additional defense spending in their reconciliation bill this year, and at least $27 billion of it could go towards the Trump administration’s sprawling space-based missile defense project, Reuters reported Thursday. The measure “will be in addition to the approved $886 billion national security budget for 2025,” Mike Stone writes. 

The Golden Dome money is for “more missile interceptors and the purchase of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) antiballistic missile batteries,” Stone reports. 

“This is part of a plan to prevent war,” said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

Additional allotments in the bill: 

• “$29 billion for the procurement of 14 new ships”;
• $11 billion for aircraft, including “the purchase of about 40 Boeing Co F-15EX fighter jets”;
• Around $20 billion for munitions production; 
• “$14 billion to fund the adoption of artificial intelligence and to expand the production of new low-cost weapons”;
• $6 billion in weapons for U.S. forces in the Pacific region; 
• $5 billion for autonomous systems, and more.

The USAF has changed tack on its next batch of robot wingmen. Now it’s seeking simpler and cheaper CCAs rather than more capable and expensive ones, Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, director of Air Force force design, integration, and wargaming said Tuesday during an event hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association. And those drones could find themselves flying along not just fighter jets but the E-7 radar plane and B-21 bomber. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has a bit more, here.  

The projected cost of America’s nuclear arsenal has risen again, CBO says. The Congressional Budget Office says its current estimate of the cost to operate, sustain, modernize, and replace today’s nuclear weapons over the next decade is $190 billion—about one-quarter—more than last year’s estimate of $756 billion for 2023–32. “Of that amount, $157 billion comes from differences in CBO's current and 2023 estimates of budgeted amounts for nuclear forces, and $33 billion comes from differences in the agency's estimates of potential additional costs based on historical cost growth.” More, here.

Additional reading: 

• “DIU barrels ahead with tri-regional expansion plans,” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Thursday; 
• And “The Pentagon Can’t Be Run Like a Business,” former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities Mara Karlin writes this week in Foreign Affairs.

Trump 2.0

New: Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts to the U.S. government didn’t account for the costs of firing workers, the New York Times reports. 

And those costs could eat up $135 billion of his $150 billion in claimed savings, which is “about 15 percent of the $1 trillion he pledged to save, less than 8 percent of the $2 trillion in savings he had originally promised and a fraction of the nearly $7 trillion the federal government spent in the 2024 fiscal year,” Elizabeth Williamson reported Thursday for the Times.  

Expert reax: “Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, which arrived at the $135 billion price tag. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”

Reminder: DOGE’s cuts to the IRS are expected to reduce tax revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars. 

White House reax: “Doing nothing has a cost, too, and these so-called experts and groups are conveniently absent when looking at the costs of doing nothing,” spokesman Harrison W. Fields told the Times. Read more (gift link), here. 

Additional reading: 

• “As Tesla profits plunge 71%, Elon Musk says he'll spend less time on DOGE,” NPR reported Wednesday; 
• “Trump Takes a Major Step Toward Seabed Mining in International Waters,” the Times reported Thursday; 
• And ICYMI, “Trump Is Attempting to Use Wartime Powers in the United States,” Katherine Yon Ebright and Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice explained Thursday for The Atlantic.