A U.S.-flagged oil tanker also outran Iranian gunboats Tuesday in the Strait of Hormuz, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Context: “The downing of the drone comes at a moment of heightened tension in the region, as the U.S. military builds up forces for a possible confrontation with Iran,” the New York Times reports. “Last month, President Trump threatened to attack the country after its government brutally crushed anti-government protests that began in late December.”

Trump has since “shifted his focus to demanding a deal that would end Iran’s nuclear program and its support for proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis operating in Yemen,” the Times writes. “Talks between Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi; Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy; and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, are scheduled to take place in Istanbul this week. But regional officials and diplomats have described the plans for the negotiations as tenuous.”

Satellite imagery shows the U.S. military buildup, as the Washington Post lays out, here. But at least one component was missing—at least as of Sunday, the Journal reports. “American airstrikes on Iran aren’t imminent, U.S. officials say, because the Pentagon is moving in additional air defenses to better protect Israel, Arab allies and American forces in the event of a retaliation by Iran and a potential prolonged conflict.” Read on, here.

The Pentagon announced nearly $20 billion in Middle Eastern arms sales since Friday. That includes $12 billion from the Saudis for 730 PAC-3 missiles and F-15 aircraft servicing; and $7 billion from Israel for more than 3,000 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, 30 Apaches, AW-119Kx light utility helicopters, and Rolls Royce power packs for armored personnel carriers.

The sales come amid a shaky ceasefire for Gaza, where “big challenges await in its next phases, including the deployment of an international security force to supervise the deal and the difficult process of disarming Hamas,” the Associated Press reported Friday. 

Update: Democratic lawmakers warn the Trump family has allegedly taken a “bribe” from UAE officials, Senate Foreign Relations Committee members said in a statement Tuesday after the development surfaced in Wall Street Journal reporting Saturday. 

Recap: Emirati Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan secretly purchased a major stake in a Trump-family cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial four days before President Trump’s inauguration. A few months later, the White House approved the sale of advanced U.S. artificial intelligence chips for the UAE.

“Trump appears to have been enriching his own family to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars through secretive deals with foreign power brokers who have significant business before the U.S. government,” the lawmakers said in their statement. “That is not public service—it is a pay-to-play scheme that puts personal profit ahead of the national interest.” 

“The national security implications are just as alarming” as this development follows years of warnings about sensitive U.S. technology “flowing through the UAE and ultimately ending up in China,” the group of lawmakers said. That group includes Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen, Nevada’s Jacky Rosen, Chris Coons of Delaware, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, Virginia’s Tim Kaine, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. In response, they promised to “use every tool at our disposal now—and when we are in the majority— to bring full transparency and accountability to the American people.”

In other international arms developments, Pakistan is fielding growing interest in its JF-17 fighter jet following its skirmish last year with India, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. However, “That sudden demand may put the country’s defense industry in a crunch.”

Commentary: The U.S. should deepen its defense-industrial ties with Pakistan, argues Joe Buccino in an oped for Defense One. Buccino, a retired Army colonel, formerly served as CENTCOM spokesman. 

For what it’s worth: The Vietnamese military is preparing for a possible American “war of aggression” amid tensions with China as the U.S. is now viewed as a “belligerent” power, AP reported Tuesday from Hanoi. According to an internal document obtained by a human rights organization, “due to the U.S.'s belligerent nature we need to be vigilant to prevent the U.S. and its allies from ‘creating a pretext’ to launch an invasion of our country,” Vietnamese military planners warned. Read more, here. 

And don’t miss Tom Nichols’ warning about “The End of the Nuclear-Arms-Control Era,” with the expiration Thursday of the New START treaty between the U.S. and Russia. The agreement capped long-range missiles and bombers, but Trump said last month he was not concerned. “If it expires, it expires,” he told the New York Times. 

Coverage continues below…

Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1992, Hugo Chávez led a failed coup d'état against Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez.

Twenty-five defense firms have been invited to the Pentagon’s one-way attack drone competition later this month at the Army’s base in Fort Benning, Georgia. 

The U.S. military wants to spend more than a billion dollars over four phases of development as part of its Drone Dominance Program. That effort aims to replicate the cheap and effective drones produced by Iran, which has exported the technology to Russia as part of its ongoing invasion and occupation of Ukraine. The U.S. military wants to begin “fielding hundreds of thousands of weaponized, one way attack drones ready for combat” by 2027, the Pentagon said Tuesday. 

Review the 25 vendors participating in the first phase of the competition, known as the Gauntlet, here. 

Culture wars update: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office is now threatening a children’s organization. That threat this week was directed at the leadership of Scouting America for allowing girls to join after changing its name from the “Boy Scouts” in 2024, the Washington Post reported Tuesday—following up on a proposal NBC News first reported in April. Hegseth’s spokesman Sean Parnell issued his warning Monday night in a statement posted to social media.  

“For more than a decade now, Scouting America's leadership has made decisions that run counter to the values of this administration” and the Defense Department, “including an embrace of [diversity, equity, inclusiveness] and other social justice, gender-fluid ideological stances. This is unacceptable,” Parnell declared. “Scouting America and the Department of War are near a final agreement,” he said “as long as the organization rapidly implements the common-sense, core value reforms.” The largest impact seems to be the organization’s National Jamboree celebration, “a massive 10-day summit scheduled for July and expected to draw more than 15,000 Scouts from throughout the country to West Virginia,” the Post reports. “In the past, upward of 500 National Guard personnel, military reservists and active-duty service members have provided a range of equipment and logistical support for the event—all now in doubt if the organization does not meet the Pentagon’s demands.”

“They are on the clock, and we are watching,” Parnell warned in his note Monday night on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

Reminder: The Pentagon is using Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot, which has been producing sexualized images of people and children even when instructed that subjects do not consent, Reuters reported Tuesday. 

By the way: Elon Musk’s X offices were raided in France this week as prosecutors investigate child abuse images produced by Grok, AP reported Tuesday. French prosecutors “also said both Musk and former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino had been summoned to appear at hearings in April,” the BBC reports. British officials also announced a probe into Grok regarding its “potential to produce harmful sexualised image and video content.”

Musk has called the investigations a “political attack” and an effort “to suppress free speech.” 

But French officials strongly disagreed, and replied directly to Musk on Tuesday, “Investigating child sexual abuse material isn’t controversial. Turning it into political theater is manipulation. Maybe that logic flies on some island. Doesn’t fly in France.”

Related reading: 

• “Grok is in, ethics are out in Pentagon’s new AI-acceleration strategy,” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported three weeks ago;
• And read about Musk, Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bill Gates and other Silicon Valley titans who spent time with Jeffrey Epstein “years after his release from prison,” via the Guardian, reporting Tuesday. 

Deportation nation

After immigration agents drew their weapons on observers and arrested them in Minneapolis Tuesday, New York’s attorney general launched an official “observation project” to monitor federal immigration enforcement in the state of New York.

Background: “A federal judge last month put limits on how officers treat motorists who are following them but not obstructing their operations,” AP reports. Safely following agents “at an appropriate distance does not, by itself, create reasonable suspicion to justify a vehicle stop,” the judge wrote in the order. But it was later appealed and set aside temporarily, which is contributing to the scenes filmed Tuesday in Minneapolis and elsewhere around the state last week. 

Get to better know Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s troops from BORTAC and SRT, which WIRED calls “paramilitary tactical units [that] behave not like local police, but instead like special forces in Iraq, Afghanistan.” Personnel from those two units are reportedly the ones who killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti last month. 

Why it matters: “The brutal tactics of SRT and BORTAC units seem to have spread into ICE and CBP as a whole,” WIRED’s Ali Winston writes. 

Expert reax: “These teams are our equivalent of special operations command,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former CBP commissioner from 2014 through 2017. “BORTAC in particular is used to operating in the desert. They are not trained for urban policing. They’re absolutely the wrong tool for the job. It’s like using a chain saw to mow your lawn.” Read more, here. 

“We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said Tuesday while announcing the new Legal Observation Project. The idea is “to examine federal enforcement activity in New York and whether it remains within the bounds of the law,” she said. 

Purple vests: “When necessary, OAG will send teams of legal observers to the location of reported immigration enforcement activity, outfitted in easily identifiable, purple OAG-branded safety vests, to witness and document enforcement actions,” James said. “Observers will not interfere with enforcement activity; their role is solely to document federal conduct in a safe and lawful manner.”

Her office also launched a “secure online portal” for sharing video of ICE arrests and encounters, which can later be reviewed for compliance with the law. More, here. 

ICE agents left “death cards” in arrested immigrants' cars in Colorado, so six state lawmakers are calling for an investigation into the matter. “The ICE-branded ace of spades cards, similar to the ‘death cards’ left on corpses by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War, were stamped with ‘ICE Denver field office’ and the address and phone number for the immigration detention center in Aurora,” the Denver Post reported Tuesday.

“The ‘death cards’ have a history of being used by white supremacist groups to intimidate people of color,” the six lawmakers wrote to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General in a letter Tuesday. “This behavior undermines public trust in law enforcement, raises serious civil rights concerns, and falls far short of the professional standards expected of federal agents,” they added. 

Texas National Guard members are wearing civilian clothes while “embedded” at immigration detention facilities in Texas, Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro said Monday on Facebook after personally visiting the facilities. 

The soldiers are there on state Gov. Greg Abbott’s orders. “He has forced the Texas National Guard to do deportation work at these detention centers. So the Texas National Guard is not in their uniforms,” Castro said. “They’re basically camouflaged as civilians in these detention centers.” The San Antonio Express-News has more.

Also: A new study shows how “The U.S. immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government every year from 1994 to 2023.” That’s according to a new analysis published Tuesday by the libertarian Cato Institute. Additional takeaways include: 

• Between 1994 and 2023, “immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.”
• And “Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.”

What’s more, those estimates “represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis,” the study’s authors write. Details here. 

And lastly today: DHS has begun targeting citizens critical of the administration using a secretive legal weapon known as an administrative subpoena, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. 

It’s a tool for digital surveillance and review that “federal agencies can issue without an order from a judge or grand jury,” and it’s now being “weaponized…to strangle free speech,” the Post’s John Woodrow Cox reported from Philadelphia in the case of a 67-year-old who wrote to DHS in defense of an Afghan immigrant facing deportation. 

Expert reax: “There’s no oversight ahead of time, and there’s no ramifications for having abused it after the fact,” said Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union. “As we are increasingly in a world where unmasking critics is important to the administration, this type of legal process is ripe for that kind of abuse.” Read the full story (paywall alert), here.