Army helo, passenger jet collide over DC: Three soldiers on a Black Hawk and all 64 people aboard an airliner are feared dead after the UH-60 and an American Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet collided, then crashed into the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport, on Wednesday night around 8:48 p.m. The helicopter, of the Army’s 12th Aviation Battalion’s B Company out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, was on an “annual proficiency training flight,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video posted to X on Thursday morning. “It was a fairly experienced crew that was doing an annual night required evaluation.” Their names were being withheld pending next-of-kin notification.

The battalion is on a “48-hour pause on contingency missions” and a senior team from “our aviation safety center” has begun investigating, Hegseth said.

Ron McLendon II, Deputy Director, JTF-NCR/USAMDW Public Affairs: “The FAA, NTSB and the United States Army will investigate. The NTSB will lead the investigation. We are working with local officials and will provide any additional information once it becomes available.” More from Defense One and the Washington Post.

Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1968, North Vietnamese forces launched the Tet Offensive, often cited as an example of a tactical failure that yielded strategic success.

Deportation nation

Trump wants to detain thousands of “criminal illegal aliens” at the Naval facility at Guantanamo Bay, where today 15 prisoners are held in facilities staffed by around 800 troops and civilians. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order to expand the base. In remarks earlier in the day, he appeared to conflate his desired expansion with the actual state of the facility: “We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” he said, alleging, “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.” He did not cite examples or elaborate.

A U.S. official told CNN: “There’s no way there’s 30,000 beds anymore,” adding that the overall base was that large in the 1990s but is no longer.

SecDef Hegseth, in his Wednesday morning post: “I just got off the phone with the SOUTHCOM commander and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs talking about our efforts at Guantanamo Bay. That is ongoing. We're leaning forward and supporting the president's directive to make sure that we have a location for violent criminal illegals as they are deported out of the country.”

The idea: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House border czar Tom Homan said they plan to “expand an existing migrant detention center at [Guantanamo], building out the temporary housing and other facilities for thousands more people,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Some history: The facility has most recently been known as a military detention site for accused terrorists going back to the Bush administration’s War on Terror. But even before that, “In the 1990s, the base was overwhelmed by more than 45,000 people fleeing crises in both Haiti and Cuba,” the New York Times reports. “They were housed in crude tent cities on the populated side of the base, which housed both families and single men.”

Today, an estimated “40,000 immigrants have been held in private detention centers and local jails around the country as funding constraints have limited the number of detention sites,” the Times explains, noting, “Adding 30,000 beds would dramatically expand the government’s detention capacity.” And it could be especially useful while the Trump administration pursues its goal of deporting “millions” of immigrants from the country in the months ahead.

What do Americans think? So far, there is no majority opinion. According to new polling data published Wednesday by researchers at Quinnipiac University:

44% of Americans support deporting all undocumented immigrants;
And 39% support deporting only the ones convicted of violent crimes.

Second opinion: “The Trump administration may find the symbolism of sending migrants to Guantanamo darkly appealing; its practical result would be more injustice, waste, and self-inflicted loss of credibility,” Sue Hendrickson of Human Rights First told the Journal.

Also: 60% of Americans surveyed say they support sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, according to that survey from Quinnipiac University. The Trump administration has promised to send 10,000 or so troops to assist Homeland Security officials along the border. Around a thousand new soldiers and 500 Marines have been dispatched so far — on top of the 2,500 or so that had already been deployed for related support going back more than a decade. And that’s all in addition to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star* anti-immigration initiative, which since 2021 has involved an estimated 10,000 Texas National Guardsmen.

Some history: U.S. troops have been deployed to the country’s southern border going back to at least 1994’s Operation Gatekeeper. President George W. Bush ordered 6,000 Guard troops to the border for Operation Jump Start around 2006. President Obama dispatched troops there as well under Operation Phalanx before Trump ordered an additional 4,000 active duty troops to the region for logistics assistance in 2018.

But U.S. troops are doing far more today than helping DHS and CBP with ground logistics. Air Force C-17s are transporting restrained migrants by the dozens, which is a task previously handled largely with civilian planes. And according to Reuters, citing U.S. and Guatemalan data, those flights can be more costly than the traditional chartered alternatives.

The new flights may even cost more than first class: “Trump's military deportation flight to Guatemala on Monday likely cost at least $4,675 per migrant,” Reuters reported Thursday. “That is more than five times the $853 cost of a one-way first class ticket on American Airlines from El Paso, Texas, the departure point for the flight, according to a review of publicly available airfares.”

Those C-17s cost about $28,500 per hour to operate. And “The flight back and forth to Guatemala, not including time on the ground or any operations to prepare the flight for takeoff, took about 10-1/2 hours in the air to complete,” a U.S. official told Reuters. By contrast, ICE in 2021 said some flights cost $8,577 per flight hour; and officials said in April 2023 deportation flights cost about $17,000 per flight hour to transport 135 deportees in a process that “typically lasted five hours,” according to Reuters.

*Related reading: “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants $11 billion federal reimbursement for Operation Lone Star,” CBS News reported Sunday.

Trump 2.0

Trump/Hegseth’s anti-DEI crusade marches on at DOD. Defense Secretary Hegseth announced a new Pentagon task force focused on promoting “merit-based, color-blind policies,” which include “potential changes to military promotions and job assignments,” Leo Shane of Military Times reported Wednesday.

Hegseth also announced a redundant-sounding “Restoring America's Fighting Force” Task Force, which he said is “charged with overseeing the Department's efforts to abolish DEI offices and any vestiges of such offices that subvert meritocracy, perpetuate unconstitutional discrimination, and promote radical ideologies related to systemic racism and gender fluidity.” Read over the memo for yourself, here.

Counterpoint: “America is an idea, not an ethnic identity,” writer Paul Rosenberg observed on social media. Consider the Polish general Thaddeus Kościuszko, who helped fight the British in the Revolutionary War; or Marquis de Lafayette, who also volunteered to join George Washington’s Continental Army, Rosenberg pointed out.

Today on Capitol Hill, Trump’s nominee to lead the Army is testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Catch the livestream, here.

Update: Trump’s former Army secretary-turned-Pentagon chief Mark Esper has had his portrait taken down from its prior display inside the Pentagon. “His Secretary of Defense portrait in the SecDef hallway was still up as of 30 or so minutes ago,” CNN’s Haley Britzky reported shortly before noon Wednesday.

Marco Rubio heads for Latin America in first trip abroad as Secretary of State, stopping first in Panama where he is expected to discuss Trump’s designs on reclaiming the Panama Canal for the United States. Rubio will continue on to El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

Rubio’s strategic aims include countering Chinese influence in the region and reducing migrant flows. Early Trump moves have alarmed regional leaders, “angered Brazilians by returning migrants in shackles and briefly imposed crushing sanctions and tariffs on Colombia in a tussle over deportee flights,” Reuters reports.

Also on Rubio’s plate: Trump’s desire to acquire Denmark’s not-for-sale Greenland.

By the way: 85% of Greenlanders don’t want to become part of the U.S., and 45% view Trump's interest as a threat, Reuters reported Wednesday.

And 53% of Americans don’t support acquiring Greenland, according to USA Today/Suffolk University polling earlier this month. Another 29% considered it a good idea but don’t believe it will happen; and just 11% said they support acquiring Greenland any way possible, which is less than the percentage of Americans who say they believe in alien abductions. (Quinnipiac found similar results, with 55% opposed to the U.S. acquiring Greenland and only 28% approving.)

Said one Trump voter from North Carolina: “I thought it was funny at first, him joking about [annexing Greenland]. But once he started actually talking about military deployment…no, I cannot get behind that.”

And the Gulf of Mexico/America renaming effort? 70% of Americans do not support it, according to Reuters, while just 25% approve. As Tufts University’s Dan Drezner observed, “It’s even less popular than ending birthright citizenship — which is still very unpopular, with 59% opposed and only 36% supporting.”

About that birthright citizenship revisionism, that is to say Trump's desire to end birthright citizenship by reinterpreting the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment, here's an interesting note of contrast by Lily Mason, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, “This is, if we saw it in another country, we would say the ethnic majority, which is soon to be an ethnic minority, is trying to—is trying to protect its power by rejecting democracy itself and imposing an authoritarian order to maintain the power of the future ethnic minority.”

“That’s not like the be-all, end-all explanation for everything that’s going on,” Thomas Zimmer, Georgetown University historian, replied. “But I think that’s a good—if you put that at the center of your interpretation of what’s going on, I think you’re on the right track,” he said. Hear their conversation in full at their "Is This Democracy" podcast.

Additional reading:

“The West’s Arctic Defenses Rely on Some Sled Dogs and Aging Ships in Greenland,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, accusing Denmark of “skimp[ing] on military spending”;
“As a Rising Political Star, Gabbard Paid to Mask Her Sect’s Ties to Alleged [Hong Kong-based] Scheme,” the Journal reported earlier this week;
And ICYMI, “U.S. sending [around 90] Patriot missiles from Israel to Ukraine,” Axios reported Tuesday, noting Israeli leaders authorized the deal in late September.

Etc.

How China’s new DeepSeek AI tool may shape national security. “While companies like OpenAI achieved their results based on huge data sets, very large models, and ever-expanding computer resources, the next phase of AI will likely usher in smaller models that need fewer compute resources,” writes Defense One’s Patrick Tucker. “That might bode poorly for large enterprise cloud providers, including many of the tech giants whose leaders attended Trump’s inauguration.” But it might be good for troops who “want to tap into the most robust tools in places where power and connectivity to big cloud resources are patchy” and for Pentagon AI buyers looking for more AI bang for their buck. Read on, here.

Related reading: “Chinese and Iranian Hackers Are Using U.S. AI Products to Bolster Cyberattacks,” from the Wall Street Journal.

Lastly today: A building-sized asteroid has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2032. An automated sky search system in Chile detected YR 2024 in late December. Chances are low—“An asteroid up to 100 metres wide has a 1-in-83 chance of impacting Earth on 22 December 2032,” New Scientist reported—but the discovery triggered global planetary defence response procedures for the first time. Ben Affleck was not immediately available for comment. Read on, here.

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