On the eve of a Wednesday meeting of alliance defense ministers in Brussels, Secretary-General Mark Rutte argued to his colleagues that shooting down Russian crewed aircraft over NATO territory would show weakness, not strength. Across the Atlantic a day later, Danish Army chief Maj. Gen. Peter Harling Boysen had a more aggressive message for allies: “Shoot down Russian drones, period.” To be sure, alliance policy may differ for manned and unmanned incursions—but members are still arguing about the policy. 

The disagreement is even sharper behind closed doors, according to two officials from alliance-member governments. They pointed to a recent Article Four consultation in Tallinn and a NATO ministers’ meeting in Riga, where some nations said incursions should receive stronger responses and others wanted to build up defenses before taking steps that could lead to war.

Last month, Russia sent some two dozen unarmed drones into Polish airspace; Poland shot down up to four of them. Days later, when Russian fighter jets flew across the Estonian border, Tallinn elected to do no more than escort them back out—drawing criticism from some allies.

Czech President Petr Pavel, for example, said members must show more willingness to shoot down not just drones, but also planes. Asked about Pavel’s comments a bit later, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur visibly bristled.

No standard NATO policy covers such incursions, which are being handled case by case by nations in different circumstances, said one senior official from an ally.

“Some nations may be more proactive in their willingness to shoot at Russian assets,” that  official said.

One senior NATO military official told Defense One in Riga that questions about various countries’ rules of engagement were “mostly being smoothed out.”

Another area of disagreement is the pace and scope of counter-drone defenses. The entire European Union has signaled their support for the “drone wall” concept much-discussed in recent weeks. But there is some divergence of opinion on whether EU members should prioritize money for new drone defenses over conventional capabilities like tanks. German leaders have concerns that an attempt to build an impenetrable sense-and-shoot network might be an expensive failure.

However, some military officials and the senior NATO government official said recent developments are shifting German thinking.

The recent incursions likely reflect a Russian campaign to sow discontinuity among allies, Boysen and others said Wednesday.

They're just gonna drive a break in between us. I think that's one thing they're trying to do,” the Dutch general said Wednesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C.. “ I think they're trying to put headlines on our inability to act and their ability to act very, very quickly on the presidential order.”

Norway’s Lt. Gen. Pasi Välimäki agreed. 

“What Russia is trying to do is to undermine the aligned cohesion, and also to undermine the support to Ukraine,” Välimäki said at AUSA.

Maj. Gen. Lars Lervik of Finland went a step further, describing Russia’s escalating incursions as war below the threshold of armed conflict. 

“Basically, [Russia] is boiling the frog, moving the position incrementally over time,” Lervik said at AUSA. 

Disagreements also exist on just how quickly to send military aid to Ukraine. Eastern European nations such as Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, which have long been more aggressive on NATO funding and deployment, are seizing the momentum from more risk-averse countries, such as Germany, European government and military officials say.

European pledges of aid to Ukraine had fallen earlier this year. Pledges made at Wednesday’s summit reverse that trend:

*Germany: €2 billion for Patriot interceptors, radar systems, ammunition, and precision-guided artillery rockets, as well as $500 million in financial aid.*Denmark: $171 million for training and repairs.*Lithuania:  $30 million to buy U.S. weapons for Ukraine.*Estonia: $12 million and drones “worth millions.”

That presented something of a win for the White House, or at least those White House players who have favored continued support for Ukraine. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in Brussels, “Our expectation today is that more countries donate even more, that they purchase even more, to provide for Ukraine, to bring that conflict to a peaceful conclusion.”

The United States is presenting its own challenge to NATO unity. The Pentagon’s upcoming national defense strategy will reportedly turn the focus of the U.S. military toward the Western Hemisphere. The senior European government official said many U.S. officials and power brokers around President Trump “refuse to see this strong link between the security of Europe, that attacks on democratically aligned nations could affect other countries where the United States has interests.” 

So European members are girding for a potential withdrawal of more U.S. troops from the continent—even though Trump recently promised Poland, specifically, he’d shield it from any cuts. 

The sheer unpredictability of U.S. support is deepening European urgency to cohere on policy. At AUSA, Boysen was asked about Trump’s threats to seize Greenland. The Danish general called them a “wake-up call” that had helped to spur defense spending. 

European officials are cautiously optimistic that Trump is learning to see Russia as a threat,  the senior European government official said.

“We'll see in a couple of weeks, I guess.”

Context: The Trump administration has sent thousands of troops to the region, along with at least eight warships and a submarine—ostensibly to fight fentanyl trafficking off the coast of Venezuela, including military strikes on at least a half-dozen alleged small boats, which have killed more than two dozen people without due process, according to the White House and Defense Department. 

Why leave early? “It was unclear why Admiral Holsey is suddenly departing, less than a year into what is typically a three-year job, and in the midst of the biggest operation in his 37-year career,” but he had reportedly “raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats,” the Times reported Thursday. 

Read over Holsey’s fairly ordinary public statement announcing his departure, delivered via social media on SOUTHCOM’s account Thursday, here. 

Panning out: “Admiral Holsey, who is Black, becomes the latest in a line of more than a dozen military leaders, many of them people of color and women, who have left their jobs this year,” the Times notes. “It was not clear on Thursday who would replace Admiral Holsey, who just this week visited the island countries Antigua and Barbuda, and Grenada.”

“[T]his unexpected resignation is troubling,” observed Sen. Jack Reed, ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. “At a moment when U.S. forces are building up across the Caribbean and tensions with Venezuela are at a boiling point, the departure of our top military commander in the region sends an alarming signal of instability within the chain of command,” he said in a statement Thursday. 

“Any operation to intervene militarily in Venezuela—especially without congressional authorization—would be unwise and dangerous. Admiral Holsey’s resignation only deepens my concern that this administration is ignoring the hard-earned lessons of previous U.S. military campaigns and the advice of our most experienced warfighters,” said Reed. 

New: The U.S. military attacked another alleged drug boat in Latin America, but this time it left survivors, a U.S. official told Reuters on Thursday. 

“[I]t was not clear that the strike had been designed to leave survivors,” the official said, which Reuters reports “raises new questions, including whether the U.S. military rendered aid to the survivors and whether they are now in U.S. military custody, possibly as prisoners of war.” 

Developing: The U.S. Army’s “elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment appears to have flown within 90 miles of Venezuela,” the Washington Post reported Thursday as the White House signals a newly-aggressive approach toward Venezuela, including reportedly authorizing CIA operations inside the country.  

Commentary: How to foster a warrior ethos in the workforce: expand the Defense Civilian Training Corps, a scholarship-for-service program that helps undergraduate students learn the skills that will help them succeed as acquisition professionals. Two fellows of the Acquisition Innovation Research Center make that argument, here.

Additional reading: 

• “Army begins construction of $50M border fence along Arizona military training range,” reports Defense One’s Meghann Myers. The fence will replace existing easily penetrable mesh fencing in Arizona along the border with Mexico. Jordan Gillis, assistant Army secretary for energy and installations, told reporters on Thursday that illegal border crossings had interrupted training at the Barry M. Goldwater Training Range in Yuma; he could not say how many incursions have shut the range over the past year.
• “The Netherlands joins US Air Force’s robot wingman program,” both to operate future CCAs and to “shift the burden a bit” from the U.S. to Europe, Gijs Tuinman, Dutch State Secretary for Defense, told reporters Thursday. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports.
• “You Only Need $750 of Equipment to Pilfer Data From Satellites, Researchers Say,” Gizmodo reported Tuesday off a new study that discovered ubiquitous unencrypted satellite communications.
• “The Australian does a U-turn on controversial Pentagon press rules,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported Thursday evening. That further shrinks the small minority of news organizations that have accepted the new rules.

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. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so 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 2017, the U.S.-led Syrian Democratic Forces captured the last ISIS stronghold in Raqqa, Syria. Just this week, those same SDF troops agreed on a plan to merge their forces with Syria’s newly-formed military—less than a year after dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country as Islamic fighters with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham marched into the capital Damascus and took over.

Trump 2.0

A federal appeals court has again paused Trump’s deployment of National Guard forces to Chicago, maintaining a hold put in place by District Judge April Perry over the White House’s objections on October 9. 

Rewind: “The Trump administration has argued that the bolstered military presence is needed to protect federal property and employees,” ABC7 Chicago reports. “But the judge said the government's claims about an out-of-control public on the brink of rebellion were not credible.”

“The facts do not justify the President’s actions in Illinois,” the panel of judges wrote in their Thursday decision (PDF). “Even applying great deference to the administration's view of the facts, under the facts as found by the district court, there is insufficient evidence that protest activity in Illinois has significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute federal immigration laws.”

“Political opposition is not rebellion,” the panel declared. Next up, a hearing is scheduled for Wednesday to consider an extension to the temporary restraining order currently in place. Reuters has a tiny bit more.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker held a meeting of retired generals, rear admirals, and veterans Thursday to discuss the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics in Chicago. 

Regarding ICE agents wearing combat fatigues and boots, “I think the modern term is cosplaying,” said William Enyart, a retired major general with the Illinois National Guard. “They're not soldiers. And it is, it is a smirch on the National Guard's reputation for them to be wearing the same uniform as we are,” he said. 

“When we blur that line, we risk turning our own streets into battlefields and our citizens into potential enemies,” said Randy Manner, a retired U.S. Army two-star.

“One thing is evident: this effort to deploy troops in American cities is not normal,” Pritzker said afterward. “There is no justification for such a deployment, and it echoes the rise of authoritarian regimes throughout world history.” 

“Illinois is not a place you can conquer. And our people are not your subjects. Period,” the governor said. ABC7 Chicago has a bit more.

For your radar: Trump said this week he wants more National Guard forces occupying more U.S. cities, he told reporters Wednesday at the White House. “This is an amazing thing, and we’re just at the start. We’re going to go into other cities that we’re not talking about purposely. We’re getting ready to go in. We’re going to have a surge of strong, good people, patriots, and they get to go in. They straighten it all out,” said Trump. 

And don’t miss a new on-the-ground dispatch from the windy city: “The Conquest of Chicago,” by veteran immigration reporter Nick Miroff, reporting Thursday for The Atlantic. 

Shutdown update: Even though it is against the law, the White House says it’s going to pay furloughed troops with money Congress appropriated for research, development, testing, and evaluation for the current fiscal year.

The law that would violate is the Antideficiency Act, which “prohibits the government from spending money that Congress has not appropriated for that purpose, or agreeing to contracts that spend money Congress has not appropriated for that purpose,” historian Heather Cox Richardson explained in her column Thursday. 

“There is more at stake here than a broken law,” she writes, and says “Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776. The Founders stood firm on the principle articulated all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215 that the government could not spend money without consulting those putting up that money by paying taxes. That principle was at the heart of the American Revolution.” 

Report: “Accelerating authoritarianism” in America. More than 340 former U.S. intelligence officers from the CIA, NSA, State Department and elsewhere warned Thursday “the nation [is] on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”

Topline read: “U.S. drift towards authoritarianism has accelerated this year, a trend characterized not by an abrupt seizure of power but by an erosion of democratic norms and institutional checks and balances,” the authors write in their 29-page report. “The erosion of public trust, attacks on academic freedom and the free press, and a growing public tolerance for authoritarian tactics contribute to this slide…Recognizing this multifaceted attack and actively resisting the erosion of these foundational principles is crucial to defending and restoring liberal democracy in the US.” Read over the report in full, here. 

As Ukraine’s president travels to the White House today to talk about Tomahawk missiles, Trump is already looking forward to his next meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. 

The president announced Thursday that Hungary has agreed to host the next Trump-Putin meeting following talks next week “led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with various other people, to be designated,” Trump wrote on social media. “President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end,” he said. 

About those Tomahawks: Rumors began circulating that the U.S. could send Ukraine these 1,500-mile range cruise missiles at least a month ago, prompting Russian officials to warn the U.S. over the risks of escalation—as Russian officials have done repeatedly regarding possible U.S. weapons deliveries (like F-16s, Abrams tanks, and ATACMS, e.g.) over the course of Putin’s stalled invasion, which is now in its 44th consecutive month. 

A week after Russia’s protests over the Tomahawks, Trump told reporters, “I want to find out what they're doing with them,” referring to Ukraine. “Where are they sending them? I guess I'd have to ask that question. I would ask some questions. I'm not looking to escalate that war.”

Expert reax: “It does seem that Putin's outreach is perhaps designed to thwart the potential transfer of Tomahawks to Ukraine, so Putin is wanting to put that back in the box. It strikes me as sort of a stalling tactic,” Max Bergmann, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters this week. 

Related reading: 

• “How Ukraine Turned the Tables on Russia,” by Robert F. Worth, writing 10 days ago for The Atlantic; 
• Counterpoint: Russia is laudably adapting, and spreading these lessons to China, Iran and North Korea, argued Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing the following day in  Foreign Affairs;
• “Ukraine’s New Strategy for Keeping the Lights On Through a Winter of War,” via the Wall Street Journal, reporting earlier this month as well;
• And “Ukraine’s Secret Weapons Spending Faces Questions After Internal Review,” the New York Times reported from Kyiv on October 6.

Middle East

Houthis signal wary acceptance of Israel-Hamas ceasefire. In a Thursday speech, leader Abdulmalik al Houthi said the group will watch closely to see whether the ceasefire “actually stops Israel’s assault and allows aid into Gaza” which “is what we hope for.” If it doesn’t hold, they will “continue on our path of support and backing, always ensuring it escalates… and work relentlessly…to develop our military capabilities.” (Text of al Houthi’s speech from Saba, with translation by Google).

Al Houthi also announced the death of the group’s military chief of staff, which Israeli officials said was caused by their August 28 strikes that killed 12 Houthi officials.

Some thoughts from Bridget Toomey, FDD research analyst focused on Middle East militant groups:

• “The killing of Houthi military Chief of Staff Mohammad al-Ghamari indicates Israel’s strikes were more successful in targeting key military leaders than previously assumed during the war. While Israel is unlikely to continue air strikes against the Houthis during the ceasefire in Gaza, successes like killing Ghamari increase Houthi paranoia about Israeli intelligence capabilities in Yemen.”
• “The Houthis immediately announced Ghamari’s replacement, Yusuf al-Madani, another prominent military leader with close ties to Iran and a U.S. designated terrorist. Madani’s recent experience leading forces in key offensives and frontline areas in Yemen is of significance as the Houthis may use the ceasefire in Gaza as an opportunity to refocus their efforts on territory they have been eyeing at home.”
• “The late announcement of Ghamari’s death, while typical, raises the question if other Houthi military leaders may have been killed, particularly as some have not been seen in recent months.”