The Bunker: Green All Over

The Bunker, delivered to our subscribers Wednesdays at 7 a.m., is a newsletter from the desk of National Security Analyst Mark Thompson. Sign up here to receive it first thing, or check back Wednesday afternoon for the online version.

This week in The Bunker: The U.S. push to swallow Greenland; the strange way the Air Force’s newest fighter became the F-47; the Signal snafu proves once again it’s not the initial stupidity that wreaks havoc but the fumbles that follow; and more.

GREENLAND

Rising like an iceberg

The Bunker reads the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community like National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are now reading Scams, Hacking, and Cybersecurity: The Ultimate Guide to Online Safety and Privacy. The intel report is important because, for good or for ill, it tracks the purported threats to the U.S. that drives Pentagon spending. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the latest version (PDF) March 25.

The 30-page report mentions Greenland four times.

That’s surprising, given that the Danish territory was MIA in the threat assessments for 2024, 2023, or 2022 (all PDFs). In contrast, “greenhouse,” as in greenhouse gases and their role in climate change, appeared five times in those three earlier reports; it is absent from the most recent one. The disparity only highlights the sheer arbitrariness associated with yardsticking the threats facing the U.S., and the billions of dollars we throw at them.  

Greenland is a preoccupation of President Donald Trump. This new report by the normally straight-arrow intelligence types reflects that. “The novel emphasis raises questions about how the analysts compile their reports,” David Ignatius of the Washington Post dryly noted. One clue: Greenland surfaces only in connection with small-bore Chinese and Russian activities there. Fair point, but such antic Arctic actions have been happening for years.

This is rooted in Trump’s 19th century lust for American expansionism. “We need Greenland for international safety and security. We need it. We have to have it,” the president said March 26. “I hate to put it that way, but we’re going to have to have it.” He has not ruled out using force to take the island.

We have a boorish bully for a president. Beyond Greenland, he craves Canada and pines for the Panama Canal. His rapaciousness stands on its head the U.S. policy that has generally favored self-determination around the globe. As a loyal and patriotic American, The Bunker cringes at this moldering manifest destiny.

Vice President JD Vance visited a U.S. military base on Greenland March 28. He scolded NATO ally Denmark (the two nations were founding members of the alliance on April 4, 1949) for not defending it. “Denmark has not kept pace and devoted the resources necessary to keep this base, to keep our troops, and in my view, to keep the people of Greenland safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, from China and other nations,” he said.

A January poll found that 85% of Greenlanders don’t want to become Red, White, and Blue. Who can blame them? In 1953, the U.S. kicked a village off the land where the U.S. base that Vance visited now sits. In 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear bombs crashed in Greenland, contaminating the area with radiation. It has no desire to become the 52nd state (after Canada, of course).

But Trump doesn’t care. “If we don’t have Greenland,” he declares, “we can’t have great international security.” But the world will never achieve such a utopia. The fact that the current U.S. president doesn’t know that makes him a green hand when it comes to national security.

MACHINELAND

About that new F-47 fighter

The Pentagon has tapped Boeing to build its latest fighter because the once-iconic plane builder desperately needs the $20 billion development contract. It represents the first clean-sheet fighter ever designed by Boeing, which inherited its F-15 and F-18 production lines when it bought McDonnell Douglas in 1997.

That’s not necessarily to say it’s a bad buy (design, cost, and quantity TBD). There are plenty of other reasons, too, depending on one’s point of déjà vu. First of all, it’s a crewed aircraft, something DOGE chief Elon Musk derides as “obsolete” in drone-filled skies. Secondly, it’s built for missions — dogfighting and attacking enemy targets in hostile airspace — that are either antediluvian or could be done more safely by long-range missiles or kamikaze drones.

But most depressingly, the new warplane (originally dubbed the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter) has been labeled the F-47, in honor of the current commander-in-chief. The Air Force says Trump’s presidential position — #47, this term — is one of three reasons cited for the plane’s branding. Air Force tradition generally has plane models numbered sequentially. “It’ll be known as the F-47 — the generals picked a title — and it’s a beautiful number, F-47,” Trump said in an unusual Oval Office press conference with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General David Allvin, the Air Force chief of staff, at his side.

Allvin, according to his spokesperson, picked the number “in consultation with the Secretary of Defense” to honor “the 47th President’s pivotal support for development of the world’s first sixth-generation fighter.” The nomenclature is also a bow to the Air Force’s 1947 founding, and World War II’s P-47 fighter. Roger that. But designating a warplane for a sitting president is a militarized form of the Stockholm syndrome, where the oppressed unwittingly form a positive psychological bond with their abuser (a condition named for the capital of Sweden, NATO member since 2024).

SPLEENLAND

The Gang That Couldn’t Text Straight

Readers asked last week why The Bunker hadn’t weighed in on the Signal-chat snafu that walloped the Trump administration. Such news is generally outside of The Bunker’s ambit. Besides, it would surely blow over quickly, once the adults responsible acknowledged their screwup. That would allow pretty much everyone — including Jeffrey Goldberg — to move on. He’s the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine who was mistakenly invited by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to read texts written by Trump’s war-fighting high command as they planned and carried out attacks on Houthi rebels inside Yemen.

But the Trump administration is the grift that keeps on giving. It has refused to concede error, denied that war plans were involved, and cast Goldberg as the bad guy. As a result, the story lives on. There’s now a call for a congressional investigation and — far more politically poisonous — late-night TV jibes like Saturday Night Live’s most recent cold opener.

You can’t learn from your mistakes if you refuse to admit them.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ About that missing F-35 fighter…

Inside a Marine’s decision to eject from his jet, and the betrayal that followed, by Tony Bartelme in the March 30 Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C.

→ Cash-and-carrier

The day after the Government Accountability Office blasted Navy shipbuilding, U.S. shipbuilders stormed Capitol Hill seeking $600 million more for a new aircraft carrier, Defense One reported March 26.

→ Shield of dreams…

The former chief of the Missile Defense Agency, now working for consultancy Booz Allen, recommends a $25 billion mega-constellation of satellites be launched as part of Trump’s Golden Dome missile-defense system, Space News reported March 27.

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Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.