All U.S. Army squads could be equipped with small attack drones by the end of next year as the Pentagon looks to expand drone production and cut red tape under a new directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He wrote of the importance of modern drone warfare in a memo on Thursday that chided the Biden administration for failing to provide U.S. service members with the necessary equipment.

“While global military drone production skyrocketed over the last three years, the previous administration deployed red tape. U.S. units are not outfitted with the lethal small drones the modern battlefield requires,” Mr. Hegseth wrote. “I am rescinding restrictive policies that hindered production and limited access to these vital technologies, unleashing the combined potential of American manufacturing and warfighter ingenuity.”

He added that U.S. Indo-Pacific Command units should be prioritized during the initial rollout. The memo follows Mr. Trump’s June 6 executive order that focused on enhancing domestic production of unmanned aerial systems. Mr. Hegseth is using that executive order to rescind a series of Biden-era restrictions on drone production and procurement.

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, Mr. Trump spent the week pushing for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. But no breakthrough was reached and Mr. Netanyahu headed home Friday to a Middle East where the threat of renewed conflict looms.

Mr. Trump’s ability, or inability, to strike an Israel-Hamas truce will reveal the boundaries of his influence with Mr. Netanyahu, especially after last month’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities that both leaders touted at the White House this week. A precarious Israel-Iran ceasefire continues to hold, but indirect blowback from the conflict has emanated this week from Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi militants have renewed their attacks on commercial ships passing through the Red Sea.

At the same time, mixed assessments have emerged regarding the June 23 missile attack that Iran launched on the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar that houses the forward headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command. While initial assessments were that Iran’s missiles caused little damage, the AP reports that satellite images show the attack likely hit a geodesic dome housing equipment used by American forces for secure communications.

U.S. intelligence agencies have completed only the initial assessment of the June 21 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and Pentagon officials say the final battle damage assessment won’t be finished “for some time.” 

The June 21 mission, codenamed Operation Midnight Hammer, targeted the Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan using B-2 Spirit bombers and submarine-launched cruise missiles. The 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) was used in the mission.

Defense Department officials said seven B-2s dropped more than a dozen GBU-57 bombs on Fordo and Natanz. It was the first time the “bunker buster” bomb was used in combat. The GBU-57 was developed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and tested at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Agency officials said they are eagerly awaiting to learn how much damage was caused by their creation.

Charles Krulak and Anthony Zinni, both retired Marine Corps generals, write that they “have a different perspective on the capabilities and capacity of the Marine Corps than the one expressed in Bill Gertz’s recent article, ‘Marine commandant: Corps to focus on advanced weapons and contested logistics in prep for war.’”

“The Marine Corps’ role in national security has always been as a global crisis response force, placed into law as an ‘expeditionary, combined arms force in readiness’ that is ‘to be most ready when the nation is least ready,’” Messrs. Krulak and Zinni write in an op-ed for The Washington Times.

“Unfortunately, in response to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the Marine Corps hastily reorganized and restructured from an effective and offensively oriented global expeditionary crisis force in readiness to a defensive, narrowly focused regional force,” they write. “This restructuring included an ill-advised move to fund the envisioned future capabilities by shedding a significant amount of combined arms warfighting capability, including armor, cannon artillery, bridging equipment, mine clearing equipment, aviation assets, logistics and — importantly — the ‘trigger pullers,’ our individual Marines.”

They add: “By pursuing a bankrupt philosophy of ‘divest to invest,’ the Marines jettisoned combat capabilities needed to fight and win in the Indo-Pacific and in other theaters.”

The “greatest threat” to the Chinese government is its own population, “which is why the government has throttled dissent, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly in the past few years,” according to Daniel R. Green, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

“There is serious discontent with the Chinese people against their communist form of government and its leaders, who are unaccountable to their people. Many of these frustrations may also exist among Chinese military personnel, which could be exploited,” writes Mr. Green.

“As part of an information operations effort, the U.S. should explore what a post-communist and [post-Xi Jinping] China would look like,” he writes. “A think tank dedicated to such an effort could possibly be created to highlight corruption and abuse within the regime, explore areas for reform, coalesce opposition elements, draw attention to poor governance and facilitate a peaceful transfer of power from the Communist Party to a more pluralistic system. The goal of these efforts would be to leverage the strength of ideas to weaken the communist regime.”

• July 13-17 — GenAI Summit, GenAI Week

• July 15 — Drone Warfare and Securing America’s Military Against Emerging Threats with Sen. John Boozman, Hudson Institute

• July 15 — Sen. Jeanne Shaheen on U.S. Soft Power and Competition with China, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• July 15 — Rare Earth Mining and Conflict Economies in Northern Myanmar, Stimson Center

• July 15 — Countering Communist Cyborgs: China’s Dystopian AI Ambitions and the Robotics Race, Hudson Institute

• July 15-18 — Aspen Security Forum, Aspen Institute

• July 16 — Fortifying Deterrence through Logistics: A Conversation with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Patrick Kelleher and Maj. Gen. David Sanford, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• July 16 — Global Swing States and the New Great Power Competition, Center for a New American Security