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      Musk Set to Get Access to Top-Secret U.S. Plan for Potential War With China

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      The Pentagon is scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.Another official said the briefing will be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.Providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to President Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.The top-secret briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Arlington Cemetery Website Loses Pages on Black Soldiers, Women in Military and Civil War

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      Materials on the Arlington National Cemetery website highlighting the graves of Black and female service members have vanished as the Trump administration purges government websites of references to diversity and inclusion.Among the obscured pages are cemetery guides focused on Black soldiers, women’s military service and Civil War veterans. Some of the materials were still online Friday, but they were no longer easily accessible through the cemetery’s website.A part of the site devoted to segregation and civil rights was largely scrubbed. That section once included a walking tour focused on Black soldiers and a lesson plan on reconstruction.The cemetery, which is operated by the Army, said in a statement on Friday that it remained committed to “sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism” and that it was working to restore links to the content.“We are hopeful to begin republishing content next week,” Kerry Meeker, a cemetery spokeswoman, said in an email on Friday.On Friday, the cemetery’s website still had an active page describing Section 27, which includes the graves of thousands of African Americans freed from slavery. Another active page listed prominent African Americans — including Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall and Colin L. Powell — buried on the grounds.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hegseth Closes Pentagon Office Focused on Future Wars

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      Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the shuttering of the Office of Net Assessment, a small, often secretive and sometimes opaque office that for more than 50 years has helped the Pentagon’s most senior leaders think about the future of war.The office costs about $10 million to $20 million a year — a fraction of the Pentagon’s $850 billion annual budget — but its work and staff of about a dozen civilians and military officers has often had an outsize impact on how the Pentagon prepares for possible conflicts.In a short note posted on Thursday, the Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell suggested that the office would be restructured and then reopened with a new focus on the country’s most “pressing national security challenges.” He did not explain how the office’s new mission would differ from its previous approach.For most of its history, the Office of Net Assessment was run by Andy Marshall, its founder, who pioneered an innovative and somewhat mysterious approach to comparing the strength of U.S. forces with that of its potential enemies. The office also developed inventive ways of fighting adversaries. Jim Baker, a retired Air Force colonel, succeeded Mr. Marshall in 2015.The office’s influence often depended on the defense secretary’s priorities and personal relationship with its director. In the early 2000s, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld relied heavily on Mr. Marshall to develop ways of fighting that relied on speed, precision munitions and rapidly improving surveillance capabilities to quickly defeat adversaries.More recently, the office focused on developing concepts for a possible war with China. It championed a concept called Air-Sea Battle, which envisioned an initial “blinding campaign” by stealthy U.S. bombers and submarines that would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar followed by a larger naval assault.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fort Liberty Set to Be Renamed Fort Bragg, Fulfilling a Trump Promise

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      In 2020, Congress pushed past the president’s veto of a military policy bill to rename the base, which was originally named for a Confederate general.The Trump administration will officially reinstate the name of an Army base in North Carolina on Friday to Fort Bragg, which was originally named for an incompetent Confederate general who owned enslaved people.The base’s name was changed to Fort Liberty in June 2023 as part of the U.S. military’s examination of its history with race. But President Trump campaigned on a promise to restore the old name.The official ceremony at the military base on Friday will cement a political victory for Mr. Trump, who suffered a legislative defeat in 2020 when Congress pushed past his veto of a bill with a provision to rename nine Army bases that had honored treasonous Confederate generals who fought against the United States to preserve slavery and white supremacy.The original naming of those bases was part of a movement to glorify the Confederacy and advance the Lost Cause myth that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” and not slavery.The reversion of Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg is part of a larger effort by Mr. Trump to purge the military of top officers, diversity initiatives, transgender service members and other things that he said had made the armed forces “woke.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Flow of U.S. Weapons to Ukraine Has Nearly Stopped and May End Completely

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      President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine entered the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump on Friday knowing that the flow of weapons and military hardware from the United States to his country had essentially stopped.By the time he left, after a televised argument between the two leaders, the situation appeared even more dire.As the two men met, it had been 50 days since the Pentagon had announced a new package of weapons to Ukraine and the new administration had said little about providing any more.A Trump administration official said later on Friday that all U.S. aid to Ukraine — including the final shipments of ammunition and equipment authorized and paid for during the Biden administration — could be canceled imminently.After Russia’s full-scale invasion of that country in February 2022, such shipments of military hardware from the United States were announced roughly every two weeks during the Biden administration, and sometimes just five or six days apart.According to the Pentagon, about $3.85 billion remains of what Congress authorized for additional withdrawals from the Defense Department’s stockpile. A former senior defense official from the Biden administration said the last of the arms Ukraine had purchased from U.S. defense companies would be shipped within the next six months.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Defense Secretaries Call Trump’s Firing of Military Leaders ‘Reckless’

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      Five former defense secretaries condemned President Trump’s firing last week of senior military leaders as “reckless” and urged Congress not to confirm their successors.In an extraordinary letter to lawmakers on Thursday, the five men — including one who served under Mr. Trump during his first term — asked that the House and the Senate hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.”The letter is signed by defense secretaries who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents since 1994: William J. Perry, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, Lloyd J. Austin III and Jim Mattis, Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary.In a purge of the military’s senior ranks last Friday, Mr. Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a four-star fighter pilot who was only the second African American to be the Joint Chiefs chairman, saying he would be replaced by a little-known, retired three-star Air Force general, Dan Caine. In all, six Pentagon officials were fired, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of Naval Operations, and Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.“Mr. Trump’s dismissals raise troubling questions about the administration’s desire to politicize the military and to remove legal constraints on the president’s power,” they said in the letter. “Talented Americans may be far less likely to choose a life of military service if they believe they will be held to a political standard.”Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the firings are within the president’s right to choose who he wants in these positions.The five former defense secretaries urged Congress to “hold Mr. Trump to account for these reckless actions and to exercise fully its constitutional oversight responsibilities.” More

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      Number of Trans Troops Far Lower Than Estimated, Pentagon Figures Show

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      The Defense Department said 4,240 service members, or about 0.2 percent of those in uniform, have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Previous estimates had put the number at triple that figure.The military released on Thursday the number of transgender troops currently serving in the armed forces, revealing a population much smaller than recent estimates. Currently, according to those figures, 4,240 people in the military — about 0.2 percent of the 2 million people in uniform — have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.That diagnosis is the best way the military has of tracking the number of trans troops in the force. Previous estimates usually put the number of trans troops at about 15,000.The Trump administration has implemented new policies that bar trans troops from serving, citing disruption in the ranks and the cost of medical care as primary reasons. President Trump has characterized the cost of providing care as “tremendous.” And in an executive order last month, the administration asserted that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.”The military also released for the first time figures on the cost of providing gender-affirming medical care for trans troops. They show that since 2015, when trans troops were first allowed to serve openly, the military has spent $52 million on their care, including psychotherapy, hormone therapy and surgery, or about $9,000 per trans service member. The total is a fraction of the $17 billion annual budget for the Defense Department’s health agency.The Defense Department data shows that about half of the troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria required no medical care at all. About a quarter required surgery.For years, the military insisted that it had no way of tracking figures related to transgender troops. The Pentagon released the numbers after a federal judge ordered the Defense Department on Thursday to provide data on trans service members, ruling in a lawsuit filed by a group of trans service members who challenged the Trump policies barring them. More

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      Pushback to Latest DOGE Demand May Signal Limits for Elon Musk

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      Pushback against Elon Musk’s latest demand to government employees reveals potential limits to his harsh approach to management and cost-cutting.Federal workers are on edge over Elon Musk’s latest demand that they justify their employment.Eric Lee/The New York TimesA clash over Musk’s latest missiveMonday could bring a standoff between Elon Musk and huge swaths of the federal government, including Trump-appointed agency leaders.The fate of the latest example of Musk’s brutal management style — having government workers justify their employment by midnight or risk being fired — may reveal the limits of President Trump’s cost-cutter-in-chief’s efforts.“For now, please pause any response,” a top Pentagon official told employees this weekend, adding that the Defense Department “will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures.” Similar messages went out from Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence; Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I.; the State Department; and more.What’s notable is that Trump loyalists lead many of those organizations. But The Times reports that many agency leaders are “tired of having to justify specific intricacies of agency policy and having to scramble to address unforeseen controversies” raised by Musk, especially after the billionaire’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency gained unprecedented access to government systems.It raises the prospect that the Musk approach has its limits. Yes, Musk made a similar move at the social network once known as Twitter. But the federal bureaucracy moves much more slowly than a private company — and has unions who can push back.The president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest such union, declared Musk’s missive “plainly unlawful” and added that the Office of Personnel and Management was being directed by “the unelected and unhinged Elon Musk.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More