“The number of sailors who deserted the Navy more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, while desertions in other military branches dropped or stayed flat, pointing to a potential Navy-wide mental health crisis amid a spate of recent suicides,” NBC News reports.

“I spent a decade working in counterterrorism. The rhetoric we are seeing from leaders of my party — the Republican Party — is directly fueling violence and a spike in domestic terrorism. This is not a partisan observation. This is a public safety warning.”

— Former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, on Twitter.

Playbook: “The war in Ukraine has seen the U.S. share unprecedented levels of intelligence with Kyiv. And Western governments have stepped up preemptive public disclosures of intelligence to undermine Russian messaging.”

“But this week, the White House has started to worry that the intel is getting too public.”

Tom Friedman reports that Biden said “in the strongest and most colorful language that this kind of loose talk is reckless and has got to stop immediately — before we end up in an unintended war with Russia.”

“The staggering takeaway from these leaks is that they suggest we are no longer in an indirect war with Russia but rather edging toward a direct war — and no one has prepared the American people or Congress for that.”

“More than 200 sailors have moved off the USS George Washington aircraft carrier after multiple deaths by suicide among the crew, including three in less than one week in April,” CNN reports.

Gizmodo: “In December of 1986, the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, the Department of Energy, and just about every other federal agency you can think of came together in Indianapolis for an enormous training exercise code-named Mighty Derringer. The plan was to simulate a nuclear terrorist incident and explore how every agency would react and whether they would cooperate.”

“To enhance the verisimilitude of the war games, the U.S. government went so far as to record a fake news broadcast about a nuclear bomb exploding in Indianapolis. Until now, no one outside of the government has seen the video.”

“The U.S. Army would fall below 1 million soldiers for the first time in two decades under a new budget proposal as leaders struggle with recruitment in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic,” Bloomberg reports.

“The active-duty Army would drop from the 485,000 soldiers Congress authorized for this year to 473,000, a reduction of 12,000 people, as part of the service’s fiscal 2023 budget proposal. When combined with flat National Guard and Reserve forces, the service would have a total of 998,500 soldiers.”

Wall Street Journal: “Since 2018, the Pentagon’s strategy has defined China and Russia as primary concerns and North Korea, Iran and violent extremism as secondary threats. That “two-plus-three” approach—two chief adversaries with three secondary ones—was expected to be supplanted by a ‘one-plus-four’ strategy, which put China first and placed Russia among the lesser threats.”

“Despite the heightened focus on Moscow, a new U.S. defense strategy, which was due to be released earlier this year, had been held up as the Russia crisis brewed. Policy makers all but finished the document late last year and tweaked the language slightly after the invasion, officials said. But they didn’t do a wholesale rewrite of the document, and when it is released in the coming months, the strategy will still assign Russia a secondary priority behind China, according to the Pentagon official.”

“We had thought with the ending of the war in Afghanistan, we could push for a real reduction in the defense budget, and there will be another opportunity. But look, this is an epic battle.”

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), quoted by the New York Times.

President Biden will be convening a National Security Council meeting on Ukraine on Sunday, The Hill reports.

“President Joe Biden is expected to ask Congress for a U.S. defense budget exceeding $770 billion for the next fiscal year as the Pentagon seeks to modernize the military, eclipsing the record budget requests by former President Donald Trump,” Reuters reports.

The Pentagon said that decades of mergers in the American defense sector have left the U.S. military less well-equipped and needlessly overburdened taxpayers, the Financial Times reports.

The Department of Defense report, released on Tuesday, detailed the post-Cold War surge in mergers which has shrunk the number of American defence prime contractors from 51 in 1990 to 5 today: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Boeing.

Roll Call: “Defense spending appeared set for a larger-than-authorized increase in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 as part of a ‘framework’ appropriators agreed to Wednesday, though the pact’s contents remained a mystery as stakeholders scrambled to figure out what’s in store for a massive omnibus package being written in secret.”

“Speculation was rife on Capitol Hill and K Street that national defense and related programs would see a $30 billion boost above President Joe Biden’s budget request, or $5 billion more than even the fiscal 2022 defense authorization law outlined.”

“This horrible terrorist leader is no more.”

— President Biden, quoted by the Washington Post, on the U.S. Special Operations mission overnight in Syria that killed Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of the Islamic State.

Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of national intelligence, said “the U.S. intelligence community’s approach to classifying vast amounts of information is so flawed that it harms national security and diminishes public trust in government,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Said Haines: “It is my view that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner.”

The Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin saying that Russia would consider conducting a cyberattack on the U.S. homeland if Moscow perceived that a U.S. or NATO response to a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine “threatened Russia’s long-term national security,” CNN reports.