The D Letter: Austin to the Pacific; North Korean drones; Reforming the way the USAF purchases weapons; The number of suicides is increasing in Defense; And a little more.

SecDef Austin’s final Pacific swing. Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin departed this morning for his twelfth and likely final trip as US Secretary of Defense to the Asia-Pacific region.

It starts with a visit to Darwin, Australia, for a trilateral meeting with Australian and Japanese officials – the latter of whom is expected to announce that Japan will begin integrating forces into US-Australian exercises held by Marine rotational force-Darwinsenior defense officials said.

Then it goes to the Philippines to meet President Bongbong Marcos and Secretary of National Defense Gilbert Teodoro and celebrate the opening of a new US-funded information fusion center.

Next up is a visit to Laos for the ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting Plus, a meeting attended by every US Secretary of Defense since its creation in 2010, and finally to Fiji, to initiate negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement intended to lay the foundation for greater defense cooperation . D Short-er Bradley Peniston travels with the SecDef; stay tuned for more coverage.

North Korea has ordered “full mass production” of so-called “suicide attack drones.” state media KCNA reported Friday. The country’s dictator Kim Jong Un called the drones “an essential requirement in military aspects” and said North Korean production facilities “have the potential to produce and introduce various types of drones” in the coming months.

At least three different types of North Korean drones were demonstrated on Thursday. This is evident from selectively blurred photos posted in the Pyongyang Times. One was a smaller fixed-wing drone; another was a larger model similar in appearance to the Russian Ranchet 3; and the third, larger one, was reportedly designed for long-range attacks, a South Korea-based analyst said Wall Street Journal.

Rewind: “In July 2023, North Korea unveiled two types of new reconnaissance and multi-purpose attack drones at a weapons exhibition and a military parade,” that of South Korea Yonhap reports news agency. “The North also sent five drones over the border with South Korea in December 2022, one of which entered a no-fly zone close to Seoul’s presidential office.”

From the region:

And ICYMI: US authorities have discovered ‘a broad and significant cyber espionage campaign’ carried out by actors linked to China, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement Wednesday.

The operation affected “several telecommunications companies” and “enabled the theft of customer telephone call data, compromising private communications of a limited number of individuals primarily engaged in government or political activities, and copying certain information that was subject to U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders,” the statement said. That last detail could refer to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows US authorities to spy on the communications of people suspected of working for foreign countries.

“We expect our understanding of these tradeoffs to grow as the investigation continues,” the FBI and CISA said.

Development: CISA is under threat under new Republican leadership. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who is set to take over as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, which oversees CISA, said Politics he would like to “eliminate” it because of the work they are doing in tackling foreign election interference, especially from Russia.

You may remember President-elect Donald Trump collided with CISA about its oversight of the 2020 election. (CISA has said that both the 2020 and 2024 elections were secure, despite efforts by foreign influence.) While Trump can’t simply shut down CISA, Democratic lawmakers can. reportedly worried he could weaken it through personnel decisions.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Briefbrought to you by Ben Watson, Bradley Peniston and Patrick Tucker. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations or feedback here. And if you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here. On this day in 2012, Xi Jinping take office as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, beginning what has since become at least twelve years of consecutive rule.

The long-rumored prospect of a future war between the U.S. and China has prompted Air Force officials to change the way they buy weapons. and that drives defense companies to pursue new ways to make money, Defense Oneby Audrey Decker reported Thursday. Since the U.S. military will have to operate thousands of interconnected systems over vast distances during a conflict in the Pacific, this dynamic poses new challenges for the Pentagon’s acquisition community, Andrew Hunter, the service’s acquisition chief, said at a meeting in the USA event Wednesday organized by Defense One in Washington.

For example, the service first invests in the mission systems of an aircraft or platform, and building direct relationships with suppliers rather than working through the big defense companies to manage suppliers. This means that general contractors, who have historically benefited from control over the entire architecture, must give up some control, Decker writes.

To consider: “Every time we convince ourselves that we’ve found a program (where) the risk is actually so small that we can probably use fixed-price contracts here, even during the development phase, we end up running into risks that we don’t appreciate stated. Hunter said. He pointed to two Boeing programs in which the agency vastly underestimated development risks: the T-7 trainer and the KC-46 tanker. Both fixed-price contracts resulted in huge losses for Boeing and delayed capacity for the Air Force. Read more, here.

Suicide rates in the Army, Navy and Air Force continued to rise in 2023. according to the latest annual report (PDF) published Thursday by the Ministry of Defense. During that 12-month period, “523 service members died by suicide, which is more than the previous year (493),” the Pentagon said. said. That included 363 on the active side; 69 in the reserves; and 91 among the National Guard.

‘Young soldiers were responsible for the largest number of suicide deaths’ and they most often used a firearm in the completed act, which is consistent with previous years, the report said (poisoning is the most common way military personnel attempt suicide). The highest figures were among men under 30; and overall, more than 9 in 10 people who died by suicide were men, compared to less than 7% among women.

Although the Marine Corps’ suicide rate has not increased in 2023, the service still has the highest rate of any branch. News from the US Naval Institute reports with associated slide data. “However, short-term comparisons, between 2023 and 2022, showed that no service had a statistically significant difference in suicide rates,” the report authors write. The Associated press has more.

Additional information:

Etc.

Report: Israeli forces attacked an Iranian nuclear weapons research facility in October. Sources within the Israeli army report this Axios that they had hit the Taleghan 2 facility, about 20 miles south of Tehran, during the attack on Iranian targets on October 25. U.S. and Israeli government sources said they began detecting new activity at the site earlier this year and that the work “could lay the groundwork for the production of a nuclear weapon.” The program was so secret that many in the Iranian government did not even know about it, the officials said.

And finally, DHS just released guidance on using AI in critical infrastructure. Next Government/FCW report that the new voluntary guidance will help infrastructure managers design, deploy, and securely monitor AI models for security and operations. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters that the framework “provides specific recommendations that every participant in the ecosystem can and should implement to ensure the safe deployment of AI in critical infrastructure.” More here.