Tag: pentagon

Pentagon Names Alibaba, Baidu, And BYD In Updated Chinese Military Companies List As DoD Contracting Bans Loom

The Department of Defense has filed a major update to its official list of “Chinese military companies” operating in the United States, formally naming or reaffirming high-profile firms including Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, BGI Group, and Autel as companies linked to Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy.

The notice, filed on Monday and scheduled for Federal Register publication on June 10, comes just weeks before new restrictions on Department of Defense contracting with listed entities take effect on June 30. The companies are alleged to have ownership or ties to SASAC (State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission), affiliations with MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology), PLA connections, support from China’s “Little Giant” industrial program, or a presence in military-civil fusion zones.

Section 1260H requires the Pentagon to identify Chinese companies that conduct commercial business while also supporting or being affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army or China’s defense-industrial base. The list has existed for years, but the consequences are now becoming more significant. Effective June 30, the DoD will be barred from entering into, renewing, or extending contracts directly with listed companies or entities they control. A broader indirect ban – covering goods or services that incorporate products from these firms – follows in June 2027. Additional rules restrict DoD contractors from working with entities that lobby on behalf of listed companies.

In short, the Pentagon is putting major Chinese companies on notice that it views them as potential extensions of China’s military and defense ecosystem, even if those companies are better known globally for consumer products, cloud services, electric vehicles, drones, or biotech.

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Dept. of War removes Wicca, about 180 other belief systems as recognized religions

The Department of War recently dropped approximately 180 belief systems from its list of recognized religions for U.S. military personnel, including Wicca and other neo-pagan faiths.

A May 20 memo issued by the Undersecretary of War Elbridge A. Colby and signed by Anthony Tata, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, trimmed the list from 211 faiths to 31, according to Military.com.

The move intends to “streamline the DoW collection of religious preferences for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy,” said the memo, which ordered the revision of the “religious affiliation codes” to go into effect within 60 days.

“The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices,” the memo added.

Some of the belief systems that have been removed from the list include atheism, which was replaced by a general “no religion” or “agnostic” designation; pagan or Earth-based faiths such as Wicca, Druidism, Heathenism and members of The Troth; New Age beliefs such as Eckankar, Rosicrucianism, shamanism and spiritualism; as well as other alternative belief systems, including Deism, Unitarian Universalism and practitioners of “magick.”

The religions that remain are various denominations of Christianity, Buddhism, Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and the Baha’i faith.

The directive ultimately came from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who pledged last year to overhaul the military’s Chaplain Corps by refocusing it on religious ministry and eliminating what he called secular influences.

Hegseth announced the initiative in a video message on Dec. 16, 2025, that promised to “make the Chaplain Corps great again” and condemned New Age notions in the “Army Spiritual Fitness Guide” that he ordered eliminated.

Hegseth, an Evangelical whose church is affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), has repeatedly promised to root out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and other “woke garbage” from the Pentagon. He has drawn scrutiny during his tenure as Secretary of War for his use of Christian rhetoric, such as invoking imprecatory psalms against the enemies of the United States, weeks after the U.S.-Israeli attack against Iran.

An anonymous U.S. Army veteran who is ordained as a priest in Wicca and the neo-pagan faiths of Ásatrú and Druidism expressed anger to Military.com about the new list. The individual, who served three tours in Iraq, claimed it “rekindled that anger” they felt upon allegedly being discriminated against by military chaplains 20 years ago for being a self-described pagan.

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Angry Pentagon Sources Leak Report Of Israel’s ‘Unhinged’ Spying On US Officials

It’s no secret that Israeli spying and surveillance is pervasive, and it is often even directed at its most powerful ally and backer, the United States. But the phenomenon has escalated of late, outraging Washington intelligence officials.

Behind the scenes of this alliance which mainstream media and pundits typically project as essentially untouchable, deep-seated friction is boiling over. In an unprecedented move, the Pentagon has officially elevated Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to its highest possible category, driven by surging internal alarm that this primary Mideast regional ally is aggressively ramping up espionage operations targeting senior US officials – even Trump’s own top Iran negotiator.

The intelligence warning, freshly reported this weekend by NBC News and The New York Times, highlights a profound rift within the national security apparatus as tensions mount between the Trump administration and Israel over the ongoing joint war on Iran.

The revelation’s timing is interesting, given it comes after Axios reported at the start of this month that on a phone call President Trump ‘steamrolled’ Prime Minister Netanyahu. Trump is said to have been “pissed” and at one point yelled and berated Netanyahu, saying “What the fuck are you doing?”

And now, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is broadcasting an internal alert raising Israel’s specific threat designation to “critical”. According to details revealed in a Sunday NBC report:

The designation stems from concerns within the Pentagon that Israel is making a particular effort to surveil top U.S. officials to get information on the Trump administration’s internal deliberations and decision-making on the conflicts in the Middle East, the officials said.

The DIA assessment includes a seven-page document and features a chart, according to one of the current U.S. officials. The document says the assessment of Israel is that its ability to conduct human espionage and technical collection is at a “critical level,” according to the official.

And parallel to this, a report by the NY Times lists out names that are very high level within the Trump administration. Israel has allegedly focused its electronic and human efforts to eavesdrop on the following officials (likely among others):

  • Steve Witkoff, Trump’s premier regional negotiator.
  • Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official.
  • Michael P. DiMino IV, one of Colby’s primary deputies.

The Israeli embassy in Washingtons has slammed the reports as ‘completely false’: “This entire story is false and sourced to someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of what’s going on,” it said in a statement.

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NBC Report: Pentagon Raised Threat of Israeli Spying on US to Highest Level – White House Denies Report

The Pentagon has designated Israel at the highest counterintelligence threat level amid increasing concerns that the top Middle East ally is spying on US officials to gather information on Trump’s decision-making as it pertains to Iran, two US officials reportedly claim, according to NBC News. 

An Israeli Embassy spokesperson denied that Israel spies on the United States, describing the notion as “completely false.”

“Israel does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone US government officials. Israel intelligence collection efforts are aimed at its enemies, not its allies. Any claims to the contrary are either misinformed or politically motivated,” the spokesperson said.

The White House further denied the report, saying, “This entire story is false and sourced to someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of what’s going on.”

The report from NBC cites two unnamed US officials and one former US official and points to past instances of Israel and the US both spying on allies, including Jonathan Pollard, who spent 30 years in prison for selling US intelligence to Israel.

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US Service Members Targeted Via Commercial Location Data, Pentagon Tells Senators

Adversaries have used commercially-available location data to attack individual US service members in war zones, according to a report furnished by the Department of Defense to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, and first reported by Reuters. Wyden is a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee. 

Responding to four questions Wyden had posed about this potential avenue of vulnerability for service members deployed to the Middle East, the Pentagon said that US Central Command “has received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater. The Threat Fusion Cell identified, tracked, and disseminated these threats through the USCENTCOM Threat Working Group and to component force protection personnel.” 

Elaborating on the nature of the threat, the Pentagon noted that: 

“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries ​to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes.” 

The Pentagon’s brief set of responses did not provide details on any specific incidents. Early in the US-Israeli war on Iran, two DOD officials were wounded in an Iranian drone strike on a Crowne Plaza hotel in Bahrain. After the strike, a senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Iran had built a “target bank” of both American and Israeli personnel.  “The fact that they’ve now pinpointed the residences/locations of some of these forces has really caught the Americans and Israelis off guard,” the official said, without detailing Iran’s methodology. He did say the building of the target bank began after the 2025 12-Day War.   

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Pentagon Cuts the Faith-Code Maze From 200-Plus to 31

The Pentagon just cut its list of religious affiliation codes for service members from over 200 down to 31. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the reform in March as part of a broader effort to refocus the Chaplain Corps.

Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata later released the memo making the change official. The old system had sprawled into a giant administrative junk drawer, stuffed with codes many troops never used and chaplains didn’t need to serve the force. From Just the News:

Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata released the memo, stating the change will “streamline the DoW collection of religious preferences for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy,” according to Military.com.

“The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices,” Tata said. 

Hegseth said the previous system had grown to “well over 200 faith codes,” called it “impractical and unusable,” and noted many codes were never used at all. He also said 82% of religious service members use only six of the codes. From Religion News Service:

Hegseth has been explicit about his Christian faith. He worships at a church run by a self-described Christian nationalist and has held Christian worship services at the Pentagon. He has pushed social media messages that mix war preparations with Bible verses as well as official statements that champion a disputed, faith-focused version of U.S. history.

In 2017, during the first Trump administration, when the military expanded the number of recognized religious faiths it said it was doing so to provide “more accurate demographic data for religious groups,” to enable “better planning for religious support to the force” and to provide “a better assessment of the capabilities and requirements of each Military Service’s Chaplain Corps.”

The reform renames the old “faith and belief coding system” as “religious affiliation codes” and returns the list to a simpler purpose: providing chaplains clear information so they can support troops in line with their stated faith background and practice.

The new list keeps broad religious categories that cover the faith service members report most often. The list includes Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, agnostics, and major Christian groups such as Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and others.

The dropped codes include atheism, Asatru, Eckankar, New Age churches, paganism, spiritualism, Troth, Unitarian Universalism, and several Wiccan groups.

It’s time to cue the usual panic choir, warming up somewhere between “theocracy” and “how dare the database stop flattering my boutique label.”

There’s an argument that the change could make smaller faith groups less visible in the military system, where Hegseth’s chaplain reforms are part of a wider Christian emphasis at the Pentagon.

Those concerns deserve a hearing, but the policy doesn’t ban any service member from worshipping, seeking accommodation, speaking with a chaplain, or holding any belief.

A code list isn’t the First Amendment.

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Goldman Sits Down With Anduril As ‘War Unicorns’ Reshape Defense Tech

Palmer Luckey’s defense startup, Anduril, is emerging as the Department of War’s answer to the urgent need for affordable, scalable advanced weaponry produced at lightning speed, rather than through the slow, over-budget procurement cycles that have long defined the legacy primes.

The twin conflicts raging across Eurasia and the Middle East, from the Russia-Ukraine war to the U.S.-Iran war, have forever altered modern warfare, with drones, seaborne drones, ground robots, and AI kill chains now reshaping the battlefield.

The quick rise of Anduril, something we call a “war unicorn,” has attracted the attention of Goldman analysts, who recently felt compelled to sit down with Anduril executives to better understand the story and how it will play a major role in the next phase of rebuilding America’s defense-industrial base.

Analyst Noah Poponak recently hosted Anduril co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf and head of investor relations Allison Lazarus in New York to gain more color on how the defense company is solving the defense industry’s biggest bottleneck, speed.

Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey, who founded the company in 2017, has focused on building lower-cost, scalable systems in categories such as drones, counter-UAS, and missiles, positioning itself against a legacy defense-industrial base that includes Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and many others.

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Appeals Court Sides with Crazed Biden Judge, Rules Pentagon Illegally Banned Transgender Troops – Hegseth Responds

A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that the Pentagon illegally banned transgender troops.

In a 2-1 ruling, the DC Circuit Court Appeals sided with crazed Biden judge Ana Reyes and said the Trump Administration’s transgender troop policy violated the Constitution.

The Associated Press reported:

A Trump administration policy illegally banned transgender troops from military service, a divided panel of federal appeal court judges ruled on Monday.

The majority opinion by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit largely upholds a March 2025 ruling by U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C. Reyes concluded that President Donald Trump’s executive order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violates their constitutional rights.

The administration appealed after Reyes issued a preliminary injunction requested by attorneys for six transgender people who are active-duty service members and two others seeking to join the military. The appeal court’s majority decided that the injunction should be narrowed to the plaintiffs currently serving in the military but not those seeking to join.

In January 2025, President Trump signed the “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” executive order and the “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” executive orders, which direct every element of the U.S. military to “operate free from any preference based on race or sex” and root out gender insanity and made up pronoun usage, respectively.

Last March, Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee from Uruguay, issued a temporary nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s transgender military ban.

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Pentagon puts building blocks in place for Cuba invasion

The Pentagon has spent months positioning the troops and weapons needed for the U.S. to launch a military attack on Cuba — all it needs is a final go-ahead from Donald Trump.

The president has floated an invasion of the island after economic and political pressure failed to topple the Communist government. But the Navy’s built-up presence in the region — the largest in the world outside the Middle East — would allow the U.S. to act immediately.

These strategically placed assets set the table for military action, from a capture of Havana’s leadership much like the seizure of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, to a series of precision strikes. And they open the possibility that the U.S. throws itself into the third international conflict of the Trump administration.

Cuba is “in a lot of trouble,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday at a full Cabinet meeting. “Having a failed state 90 miles from our shores is a threat to the national security of the United States.”

The armada in the region is slightly smaller than it was in January when the U.S. captured Maduro. But the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group entered the Caribbean in May, along with several guided missile destroyers and cruisers that can launch precision missiles at targets onshore. An array of advanced American drones and surveillance aircraft have also circled Cuba for months, according to flight tracking sites. The USS Kearsarge amphibious ships and escorts, which carry 2,500 Marines, are off the coast of Virginia preparing for a new deployment, and could replace some ships heading home.

The surge provides a variety of military options, although the Pentagon would need additional troops for a massive ground invasion.

The Nimitz arrived in the region on the same day as the U.S. indicted former president Raul Castro, in what appeared a public show of force. “The Nimitz is likely there primarily for intimidation, though it could be used in a military operation if needed,” said Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon official and now a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The ship, along with fighter planes based in Florida and Puerto Rico, would probably play a role in any military action in Cuba, he said. “Air strikes are possible to take out their air defenses to allow broader air operations or, perhaps, destroy their leadership with the idea of establishing a relationship as we have with Venezuela. Raul Castro would be their first target.”

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Hegseth outlines record-breaking defense budget featuring largest military pay raise in decades

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has unveiled a historic, generational investment aimed at modernizing America’s warfighters, transforming the Pentagon’s business model and revitalizing the domestic defense manufacturing sector.

On Thursday, Hegseth highlighted that of the proposed $1.5 trillion military investment for Fiscal Year 2027, $90 billion would be allocated toward revitalizing barracks and facilities. In the video, Hegseth said the funding “will get rid of all substandard and failing barracks.”

Under the proposed framework, military personnel would also receive a targeted, tiered pay increase: a 7% raise for those in grades E-5 and below, a 6% increase for grades E-6 to O-3, and a 5% bump for O-4 and above.

Beyond direct compensation, the budget channels $35 million into robust family support systems. This includes fully funding military healthcare — with the strategic goal of making Tricare a more desirable option than Medicare — while simultaneously investing in base childcare, youth programs, upgraded commissaries, and enhanced military schools. Additionally, permanent change of station (PCS) task forces and spousal employment initiatives will receive dedicated capital to ensure smoother transitions during relocations.

“Taking care of our troops isn’t just about doing the right thing; it’s about military readiness,” Hegseth asserted. “When our warfighters know their families are safe, secure, and provided for, they can maintain total focus on the mission.”

According to Hegseth, the massive funding injection is designed to simultaneously address service member quality of life, remediate substandard military barracks, and rapidly put the defense industrial base back onto a wartime footing. The secretary framed the historic top-line request as the definitive execution of President Donald Trump’s America First agenda.

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