The D Brief: US halts Ukraine aid; Defense policy nom testifies; China’s wedges between allies; Another base unrenamed; And a bit more.

Three years into Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and less than two months into Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. president has ordered a pause of all U.S. military support to the embattled European democracy. 

That includes “all pending military assistance until Trump determines Ukraine’s leaders demonstrate a good-faith commitment to peace” and after a review “to make sure [U.S. weapons are] contributing to a solution to the conflict,” a senior Defense Department official told Bloomberg on Monday. 

Affected: More than $1 billion in arms that had been “in the pipeline and on order,” the New York Times reports from Kyiv. After the White House announcement, Ukrainian lawmakers met in an emergency session Tuesday to try to forge a way forward. 

“We need peace—real, fair peace—not endless war. And we need security guarantees,” Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy said Tuesday. 

Some Republicans broke from the White House, the Wall Street Journal reports. “There is an invader and a victim, there is a democracy and a dictatorship, there is a country who wants to be part of the West and one who hates the West,” Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska said. “We should be unambiguously for the good side,” he added. But Illinois Rep. Mary Miller felt differently, saying, “If Zelensky wants to continue fighting an endless war, let him do it himself.” 

Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee called it a “callous decision [that] will only endanger innocent Ukrainians and encourage Russia to escalate its attacks,” he said at a hearing Tuesday morning in Washington. “The Administration’s actions are doing great harm to America’s standing in the world—showing anyone who is paying attention that the United States can no longer be trusted,” said Reed. 

“By freezing military aid to Ukraine, President Trump has kicked the door wide open for Putin to escalate his violent aggression against innocent Ukrainians,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire Democrat and ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “The repercussions will undoubtedly be devastating,” she predicted.

“America’s values lie with the free world, not autocrats and murderous dictators,” Shaheen said. 

U.S. think-tank reax: “Curtailing aid to Ukraine would risk diminishing US influence in the world and emboldening US adversaries,” the Institute for the Study of War wrote over the weekend, after the development was first teased to the Times and Washington Post. “Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the People's Republic of China (PRC) have formed a bloc aimed at defeating the United States and its allies around the world and are currently testing the limits of US commitment to its allies in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region.

“U.S. aid to Ukraine is a demonstration of the United States' commitment to defending democracies against ongoing and future aggression around the world, including but not limited to Ukraine, Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan,” ISW advised. “The Russia-led bloc will likely see the United States abandoning Ukraine as an indicator that the United States will abandon its other allies and will seek to test the limits of U.S. commitment around the world.” In this way, “Cutting U.S. aid to Ukraine plays directly into these adversaries' goals and is a step toward curtailing US influence in the world,” ISW said. 

British think-tank reax: “The nightmare scenario is that the U.S. and Russia announce a [Ukrainian settlement] soon, and then tell Ukraine and Europe to ‘take it or leave it’,” Malcolm Chalmers of the London-based Royal United Services Institute said in a statement. Looking forward, “What will count most of all is how far the UK and Europe are prepared to help Ukraine in defiance of the U.S.,” he said. 

“Recent estimates suggest that only 20% of total military hardware supplied to Ukrainian forces is now from the U.S.,” Chambers noted. Some “55% is home-produced in Ukraine and 25% from Europe and the rest of the world, but the 20% is the most lethal and important.”

Forecast: “Ukraine will not collapse—they already experienced an aid cutoff last year, but the effect will be cumulative,” Chambers predicted. 

Today on the Hill, Elbridge Colby is testifying to be the Pentagon’s next defense undersecretary for policy. A former Pentagon official who helped draft the 2018 National Defense Strategy, Colby is a noted China hawk who supports Trump’s hawkish, anti-China positions regarding the Panama Canal. 

Colby has been lobbying the GOP to turn from Ukraine and toward China since at least 2023. One Georgetown professor wrote recently that Elbridge is among a cadre of GOP experts referred to as “New Asia Firsters,” advocating the U.S. “drawdown in Europe, settle with Russia, [and] focus on China.”

“Lightning rod.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board on Monday described Colby’s ideas as “less about restoring American power and more a counsel of U.S. decline and retreat,” and called the man “a lightning rod in the fight between the GOP’s peace-through-strength wing and its retreat-from-the-world faction…But Senators should care because they’ll need allies at the Pentagon to make the case for reviving America’s military strength and global deterrence.”

In unrelated developments from Capitol Hill: “Ethical Concerns Surround Sen. Joni Ernst’s Relationships With Top Military Officials Who Lobbied Her Committee,” ProPublica reported Tuesday morning. 

Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Bradley Peniston and Ben Watson. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1957, the Navy airship Snow Bird departed Boston on a record-setting 264-hour flight, passing the northwestern African coast before landing in Miami. 

Around the services

Air Force, Space Force chiefs lean into SecDef Hegseth’s “warrior ethos.” The tone of the service chiefs’ speeches at the AFA Warfare Symposium was markedly more aggressive than in recent years, an adjustment to the priorities and rhetoric of new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Air Force Chief Gen. David Allvin described his service’s job as putting “warheads on foreheads,” and Space Force Chief Gen. Chance Saltzman spoke more openly about offensive operations and using “military force to control the space domain.” 

But fewer people were there to hear it than would have been the case last year, thanks to the Trump administration’s new travel restrictions. Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports from Aurora, Colorado.

Related: “Chinese info ops, military sales driving ‘wedges’ between US and partners in the Middle East,” Decker reports from the conference, adding: “Concerns come as the Trump admin slashes USAID—leaving space for more Chinese influence globally.” 

The travel restrictions and the list-your-accomplishments emails that went out on Monday are part of Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts, which are having their own problems. NYT: “Late Sunday night, the group erased or altered more than 1,000 contracts it had claimed to cancel, representing more than 40 percent of all the contracts listed on its site last week. The deleted items included five of the seven largest savings that it had claimed credit for just last week. At the same time, the group added about 1,000 additional canceled contracts, worth smaller total savings. It was the second time in a week that DOGE had deleted some of its greatest claims of success.” Read on, here.

And lastly today, another U.S. military base is unrenamed. Hegseth ordered the Army to change the name of Georgia’s Fort Moore back to Fort Benning “in honor of Cpl. Fred G. Benning, a Distinguished Service Cross recipient, who heroically served in Machine-Gun Company, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Division, American Expeditionary Forces, in France during World War I,” Army officials said in a statement Monday.  

“On October 9, 1918, the enemy killed Cpl. Benning’s platoon commander and disabled two senior noncommissioned officers in action south of Exermont, France,” the statement reads. “The Army awarded Cpl. Benning the DSC for his heroic actions that day as he courageously led the remaining 20 men through heavy fire to their assigned objective in support of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.” 

Army: “Secretary Hegseth’s directive honors the warrior ethos and recognizes the heroes who have trained at the installation for decades. The Secretary of the Army will take immediate action to implement this decision.”

Rewind: In May 2023, Benning was renamed Fort Moore, in honor of decorated Army Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and his wife Julia, after a Congressionally-authorized panel of experts spent more than a year considering who and what to honor across 10 Army bases and training grounds (PDF). Those sites had previously been named for treasonous soldiers from America’s Civil War, or the war of “Northern aggression,” as slave-owning southerners like the fort’s original namesake Confederate Brig. Gen. Henry Benning and his comrade A.P. Hill described it. 

Here’s a note from Hal and Julia’s son, Steve, writing last month for The War Horse: “Those who advocate for changing the name to honor a person solely because they happen to be named ‘Benning’ ignore the values and character of Hal and Julie Moore as well as their courage, competency, and dedication to the nation and Army families. Yes, Hal and Julie Moore. The post was named for both of my parents. The intent was to recognize Dad as a decorated and highly regarded commander of the Vietnam War, and Mom, who was equally distinguished as a leader of Army family programs and who changed how the military cares for the widows of fallen soldiers.” (Tip of the hat to Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post for sharing that one.)

Last month, Hegseth ordered the unrenaming of North Carolina’s Fort Liberty, this time, honoring Pfc. Roland L. Bragg instead of Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg. Find a list of the eight other renamed sites and facilities here.

One online response from Monday: “How many more bases are they going to name after soldiers who won the company potato peeling competition who just happen to share a name with famous Confederate generals?” ]]>