The agreement in June by NATO leaders that all member nations will spend 5% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2035 marks the most serious push in decades to get Europe to shoulder the costs of its own security, but it has also exposed a range of creative accounting maneuvers by several European countries.

Threat Status special correspondent Joseph Hammond reports in a dispatch that while NATO members have agreed to the larger budgets in principle, the reality of the spending plans is far murkier.

Roughly 3.5% of the 5% figure is intended to be core defense spending, which includes weapons, salaries and equipment. But a further 1.5% of GDP is to be set aside for critical infrastructure, civil defense and cybersecurity. While these measures are meant to increase European defense resilience to the threat of war, the situation has drawn scrutiny from Washington.

U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said last week that new defense spending should not include “bridges that have no strategic military value.”

The defense arm of the California-based aerospace company Teledyne Technologies has unveiled a new portable drone platform that can launch and retrieve drones while troops are on the move.

The SkyCarrier drone launch platform was revealed by Teledyne FLIR Defense at the Defense and Security Equipment International, or DSEI, trade show in London, detailing how the fully autonomous system can assist in the launch and retrieval of Teledyne’s SkyRanger and SkyRaider drones.

The development fits within a widening American defense industry pattern in which several companies are shifting attention, time and investment dollars away from large, expensive systems to small, relatively cheap, attritable unmanned assets that can be produced and deployed in bulk.

Threat Status was given an exclusive video look in July, when Florida-based L3Harris Technologies unveiled its new Wolfpack system, featuring vehicles that resemble missiles compact enough to fit onto a desk or table that can be launched from multiple platforms in the air, at sea or on land.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement swarmed deportation officers to Illinois on Monday, kicking off a massive operation to arrest unauthorized immigrants whom the agency said had been protected by the state’s sanctuary laws.

Homeland Security officials dubbed the push “Operation Midway Blitz” and said it’s meant to counter “criminal illegal aliens” who have moved to Chicago to take advantage of its refusal to turn migrants over to ICE. Department officials particularly name-checked Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a vocal Trump critic, for defending the sanctuary policies.

The development comes as NBC News reports that ICE has ended a requirement in which officers previously had to fill out a form with details about their target — name, appearance, known addresses and employment, immigration history, any criminal history and more — and give it to a supervisor for approval.

European nations are preparing to push for recognition of a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly later this month, notes Aviva Klompas, who writes in a Washington Times column that “the impulse is understandable: The Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip has been horrific, and the status quo is intolerable. Recognition feels like a morally satisfying action.

“What would recognition actually achieve? Would it create a lasting peace in the Middle East? Would it end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza? The answers to these questions reveal that the ‘two-state solution’ has become a slogan in search of a reality,” writes Ms. Klompas, a former director of speechwriting at the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations and co-founder of the nonprofit Boundless Israel. “That’s because European governments cannot simply conjure into existence a Palestinian leadership that is willing, able, let alone elected, to peacefully govern such a state.

“Such leadership,” she writes, “will never come into being until Palestinian political culture buys into an even more unshakable reality: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and it is not going anywhere.”

President Trump recently “chastised South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and the Democratic Party of Korea for their efforts to oppress all right-wing ideology in South Korea and persecute their political opponents,” writes William Barclay in The Times.

“Mr. Lee and his government have feigned ignorance and attempted to explain away their misdeeds as the necessary result of his predecessor’s so-called self-coup,” writes Mr. Barclay, an award-winning political theorist and policy expert. “[But] it is evident that Mr. Trump is absolutely correct: Right-wing ideology is being relentlessly purged from South Korea.

“Yet South Korea is by no means an outlier in international politics,” he writes. “In fact, virtually every nation that has been forced to endure the advent of a left-wing regime over the course of the past decade has vividly oppressed and persecuted right-wing ideology and politics.”

• Sept. 9 — Will ‘Peace’ in Ukraine Lead to More War? Chatham House

• Sept. 9 — From Monroe to the Golden Age: Charting America’s Path in Latin America, Alexander Hamilton Society

• Sept. 15 — Securing America’s Technological Edge: A Conversation with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office acting Director Coke Stewart, Hudson Institute

• Sept. 17 — New Visions for Grand Strategy, Stimson Center

• Sept. 20-21 — AFA National Convention 2025, Air & Space Forces Association

• Sept. 22-23 — Cyber Defense Summit 25, Mandiant & Google Threat Intelligence

• Sept. 23-25 — National Cyber Summit