As before, Trump alleges those on the boat were affiliated with “a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking…off the Coast of Venezuela,” he wrote online Tuesday. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route,” Trump said. 

Reminder: It still appears Trump does not have the authority, under Article II of the Constitution, to order these killings, former State Department counsel Brian Finucane explained as part of a recent longer discussion with colleagues at Just Security. To date, more than two dozen people have been killed in these U.S. attacks. 

National Guard soldiers are patrolling Beale Street as immigration enforcers have been conducting “mass pullovers” in Memphis while other Guard forces have been spotted “walking along the Mississippi River, and visiting the Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid,” the local Commercial Appeal reported Tuesday. 

The Guard presence began on Friday, and the city’s mayor says it’s unclear how long the soldiers will patrol Memphis. The Guard’s domestic deployment is ostensibly part of the Trump administration’s alleged effort to crack down on crime, though some critics view it more as a means of accelerating immigration enforcement. 

Five other states have timelines for their domestic Guard deployments to Washington, D.C. Eight states have sent a total of 2,300 soldiers to the nation’s capital at Trump’s request—which was based on false and exaggerated crime statistics. Those states include Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana and South Dakota. South Carolina expects to end their DC deployment by the end of the month, while Ohio, Georgia, Mississippi, and West Virginia are targeting the end of November for a withdrawal of their forces from Washington, according to the Associated Press. (Alabama, Louisiana and South Dakota have not yet provided an end date.)

Mounting costs: The Guard “deployments could wind up costing Americans roughly two-thirds of a billion dollars,” Marc Novicoff Friday for the Atlantic. In addition to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, “Tens of millions of dollars—perhaps hundreds of millions in total—will be spent on deployments to Chicago, Portland, and Memphis, if Trump’s plans for those cities proceed,” Novicoff writes, and puts it all together to note, “it is hard to think of a less efficient way of doing so than shifting funds away from violence prevention and local law enforcement and toward troops who stand in low-crime areas and don’t make arrests.”

Why bring it up: “These expenses would seem to undermine an administration that has claimed to go after ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ wherever possible…if that’s the goal, the method the administration has settled on is highly inefficient,” Novicoff writes. And ICYMI, “While some types of crime—especially gun offenses—have become less frequent since Trump ordered troops into the city, overall violent crime hasn't changed that much” since the troops arrived in Washington two months ago, Reuters reported 10 days ago. 

We have a few new snapshots of Guard forces on the job in Washington thanks to some police-report sleuthing this week by Brad Heath of Reuters. For example, on October 5, “a 7-11 manager flagged down soldiers to report that a man who tried to pay $2 for $4.50 worth of pizza. He also threw pizza at the manager, then his friend stole two slices of pizza. Soldiers pursued and detained both accused pizza thieves.” 

The next day, “police approached a man suspected of kicking the glass door of a McDonald's until it broke. He tried to walk away from the officers, but stopped when National Guardsmen cut him off,” Heath writes. And the week before that, “soldiers from West Virginia patrolling D.C.'s Navy Yard area observed a man masturbating in public. The soldiers ‘advised [him] to stop.’ Police officers arrested him a little while later after they said they saw him peeing in front of a restaurant.” Read over two more episodes, here. 

Related reading: 

• “How the Pentagon sidelined lawyers while testing the legal limits of military action,” via CNN, reporting Wednesday;
• “Los Angeles County declares state of emergency over immigration raids,” ABC News reported Tuesday; 
• And “Can The National Guard Detain And Arrest You? Here Are Some Surprising Facts,” HuffPost reported in an explainer published Monday. 

Welcome to this Wednesday 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 1990, Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

AUSA developments

China is ‘pacing threat,’ Army Secretary says—while backing Trump’s homeland defense push. “I think my understanding of the administration's priorities and the Secretary of War is [that] China is the pacing threat,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said on the sidelines of the annual Association of the U.S. Army’s conference in Washington, D.C. 

But Driscoll stopped short of calling China the top priority, adding that “we are also, at the same time, in parallel, executing on providing security and maintaining what the president has done at the border.” Strategic documents have detailed the shift in military focus from China to border enforcement, countering drug trafficking, and backing the Department of Homeland Security. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly has more from that sidelines conversation, here.

More Defense One reporting from AUSA:

• “Dismount before contact: Learning to fight with the infantry squad vehicle,” by Meghann Myers.
• “Army wants to break ground for a microreactor on a US base by 2027,” from Novelly.
• “It took 45 days to rush drone defenses to CENTCOM. That’s no longer good enough: Army vice chief,” by Myers.
• “Counterdrone tech has a production problem,” from Lauren C. Williams.

Pentagon media policy

Today’s the deadline for most Pentagon reporters to sign an agreement accepting unprecedented restrictions on covering the military or turn in their badges. Washington Post: “Fox News, along with ABC, CBS and NBC, did not sign the Defense Department’s press policy by Tuesday’s deadline, having earlier in the day denounced the new regulations in a joint statement that included CNN, which previously said it would not sign.

Fox: “Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues,” the news networks wrote. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press.” The Post’s article includes a list of dozens of media outlets and their stances; only One America News has declared it will sign.

Defense One and seven other defense trade publications are declining to sign; they issued this joint statement on Wednesday morning. Trump, who last week seemed lukewarm on Hegseth’s new policy, seemed more supportive on Tuesday, and even suggested he could move the White House press corps “across the street.” 

And Hegseth repeated a misleading statement about the current rules for reporters. “Maybe the policy should look like the White House, or other military installations where you have to wear a badge that identifies that you’re press, or you can’t just roam anywhere you want,” he said; in fact, reporters are required to wear badges in the Pentagon like anyone else, and may not enter restricted areas. Mediate has more, here.  

Backgrounder: Read a bit more about Defense Secretary Pete “Hegseth’s legal fixer at the center of [the] Pentagon’s new media restrictions,” via Dan Lamothe’s Wednesday reporting at the Washington Post.

In solidarity with the Pentagon Press Corps, Clayton Weimers, the U.S.-based executive director of Reporters Without Borders, released a statement Tuesday writing, “On a daily basis, the US military is responsible for the lives of millions of Americans, combat operations around the world, and nearly a trillion dollars of US taxpayer money. The Pentagon cannot evade accountability or criticism by crushing the independence of the media in clear violation of the First Amendment.”

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee: “A free and fair press is essential to our nation, but Secretary Hegseth is attempting to shut down independent reporting with these coercive restrictions…Hegseth and his team have missed the mark legally and morally, and they should immediately abandon this policy and restore the Pentagon’s longstanding commitment to independent press access. The Secretary of Defense should lead by example with seriousness and integrity, not secrecy and suspicion.”

Big-picture analysis: “What Trump and Hegseth are doing…represents a threat to democracy—and a profound test for service members, who do not swear a personal loyalty oath to the president but to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States,’” says Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing Wednesday in Foreign Affairs “By trying to politicize the military, the Trump administration is breaking trust with the men and women in uniform and driving talented leaders out of the force. The dearth of military pushback, then, begs the question of how effectively Trump and Hegseth have cleaned house, rooting out those who might disagree with them.”

The People's Liberation Army is building an “invisible net” across the western Pacific, a five-layer, seabed-to-space sensor architecture known as the Transparent Ocean strategy that challenges the ability of U.S. and allied submarines (our “black sharks”) to maneuver and hide.

The threat was on display in August during the PLA Navy and Russia's Joint Sea-2025 exercises near Vladivostok. In joint anti-submarine warfare drills, Chinese and Russian forces linked their communications and shared hydro-meteorological and air-sea tracks in real time. The goal, according to Chinese state media, was to leave deep-diving submarines with nowhere to hide. 

This exercise served as an early demonstration of a mature, automated kill web that China plans to spread across multiple seas and oceans. Intended to enable persistent, real-time tracking across vast areas, the web will consist of five layers:

• Ocean Star Cluster (space): A constellation of satellites, centered on the Guanlan interferometric radar altimetry and ocean-profiling lidar system. This layer provides wide-area surveillance and flags specific locations, cueing the lower layers to wake up and focus.
• Air-Sea Interface (surface/near-surface): Smart buoys, wave gliders, and unmanned surface vessels hold station across vital straits and shelves. They sample the upper ocean and act as crucial routers, translating slow underwater acoustic data packets into high-bandwidth satellite or cellular bursts for transmission ashore.
• Starry Deep Sea (water column): Deep floats, long-range gliders, and autonomous underwater vehicles patrol below the mixed layer for weeks, profiling the ocean environment and towing acoustic payloads. They fill the gaps identified by the orbital layer.
• Undersea Perspective (seabed): This is the backbone of the entire grid. Connected by undersea cables, observatories and hubs host passive arrays, precise clocks, and navigation beacons. They provide essential docking, data offload, and recharging for visiting vehicles, allowing unmanned submarines to loiter quietly and redeploy without surfacing, which drastically extends their endurance and reduces exposure.
• Deep Blue Brain (data fusion): The core command layer that fuses the entire picture and orchestrates sensing. It's the tasking and decision-support hub that merges data from space, air, surface, and seabed, ready to hand targets to combat networks.

In an influential primer, “From Kill Chain to Kill Web,” PLA theorists warn that a traditional, linear “kill chain” collapses when a single node is destroyed. Their response is the “maritime adaptive kill web,” a resilient, mesh-style network that offers multiple paths from sensor to shooter and promises instant bypasses for any node failures.

A mature Transparent Ocean system is designed to automate this flow at scale. For instance, a Dalian Naval Academy study demonstrated a space-guided sea strike model that can compute 45 alternative paths and rank them by strike power and closure time. A PLA team developed an algorithm that reassembles broken chains by matching surviving nodes to the next‑best route. This ability to instantly reroute broken kill paths, a measurable metric for the PLA, is key to keeping the web fighting under fire. 

This concept has moved quickly from the lab to the ocean, with a number of building blocks in the Transparent Ocean blueprint coming to fruition over the last decade. It also shows the sea-bed side of civil-military fusion efforts. 

On the sensor side, Zhejiang University’s Zhairuoshan observatory first linked seabed probes to shore in 2014 and proved real-time undersea data flow. Today, the China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology runs a cross-domain maritime network that spans space, air, shore, surface, and subsea platforms to support situational awareness and environmental monitoring. Ocean University of China reported building the first Kuroshio Extension observation system, a chain of anchored moorings and repeat stations complemented by a roaming layer that keeps watch on one of the Western Pacific’s busiest water highways. 

China’s extra-large uncrewed undersea vehicle, or XLUUV, effort is also maturing, with multiple large prototypes and a growing undersea force that provides the test beds to refine payloads, autonomy, and logistics for vehicles that will seed and service the sensor web. With backing from the government’s “Deep Sea Key Technologies &  Equipment” initiative, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shenyang Institute of Automation kicked off “Project 912“ in 2018 to build an Orca-class XLUUV. More recently, Tianjin University’s Haiyan deep-sea gliders have shown ultra-long endurance in the Pacific, while Blue Whale wave-gliders act as surface relays, holding station for weeks and backhauling data from subsurface nodes to shore. Advances in quieting, batteries, and acoustic arrays have since moved from labs and academic settings into PLA trials, which is exactly what a kill web needs: more sensors, more routes, and faster handoffs.

The relay tier is also growing. New cross-domain buoy designs and systems can switch among satellite links, cellular networks, and acoustic modems, closing the gap between UUVs, seabed sensors, and coastal command posts. The PLA Navy has also begun collaborating with various state-sponsored institutions to develop algorithms that enable communications buoys to select the best link on the fly and move data in real time from the water column to shore, a potential sign that a fieldable relay layer exists today.

China is also working to develop the power systems needed for Transparent Ocean. Chinese studies stress that persistent deep-depth UUVs patrols will rely on endurance and efficiency. This mirrors Western research efforts on long-duration UUV autonomy and energy harvesting. As a result, China’s near-term priorities in the power realm include higher-specific-energy batteries, seawater metal-air cells for expendable nodes, and pierless recharging at seabed docks and cabled hubs. 

Reliability remains the bottleneck in contested waters. Optics need clear water and precise alignment. Cellular communications die offshore. Acoustics degrade in cluttered littorals. Hence the emphasis on multi-pipe relays and “wake-up” schemes that sip milliwatts of power until needed. Recent Chinese studies describe cross-domain communication buoys that select the best link in real time, whether satellite, cellular, or acoustic. Likewise, Harbin Engineering University patents detail ultra-low-power acoustic wake-ups that let dormant nodes sleep for months and join the net only when cued. 

The U.S. and its allies should watch for Transparent Ocean work, especially in key choke points such as the South China Sea, waters around Taiwan, the Luzon Strait, the Straits of Malacca, and approaches to Guam.

A wider, denser and more effective Chinese sensor network will leave allied submarines with fewer places to hide, while faster cue-to-fire loops shrink the window within which they can be targeted. This will significantly complicate operations not just in a potential future war, but also peacetime covert and intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance operations. 

To contend with the changing seas, the United States and its allies should adopt a “mesh-vs-mesh” approach that recognizes that hiding is a shrinking option and instead builds on twin pillars of counter-sensing and counter-UUV operations. Each will require the U.S. Navy and its allies to develop new tactics and doctrine. Sensors can be foiled with deception and jamming, along with building more resilient, interoperable communications. In turn, UUVs can themselves be hunted, disrupted or even defeated through both kinetic and electromagnetic means. 

Working with partners in the region will also be essential to out-cycle Beijing’s new web of observation. Australia’s Ghost Shark can send payload-capable UUVs forward, while Japanese investments in long-range underwater communications can strengthen command and control around the Ryukyu Arc. 

Allies should stitch these efforts into more cohesive acquisitions and a shared, rehearsed playbook. Near-term priorities must include joint deception drills and seabed docking trials that remove human logistics from long-endurance UUV operation, as well as being prepared to deploy or even pre-position counter-UUV patrol boxes where PLA buoys and gliders already operate.

Tye Graham is a Senior Researcher with BluePath Labs and a retired U.S. Army Foreign Area Officer.

P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security, including Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, Burn-In, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.