Dead Drop: June 28 - July 4

A RECRUITMENT INCENTIVE TO DIE FOR: Russia is reportedly having trouble finding men who are willing to die for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, and the math may explain why. According to Russian military bloggers - cited by historian Peter Frankopan in Foreign Policy - the average new Russian recruit can expect to survive between 10 days and three weeks from arrival at a training ground - to death in a combat zone. Once on the battlefield, that window narrows to somewhere between 20 and 35 minutes. Moscow is said to be offering bonuses of up to $80,000 in cash and $140,000 in debt relief. These are incentives that, measured against the actuarial reality, work out to a fairly aggressive hourly rate for however long the recruit manages to remain alive.

THE APOLITICAL OPERATIVE: Bill Pulte, the acting Director of National Intelligence, capped an intelligence community celebration of America's 250th birthday last week with a message of reassurance for the assembled spy chiefs, cabinet members, and foreign agency representatives. "My message was simple," Pulte wrote on X following the June 25 event, "we are focusing DNI on being an apolitical intelligence agency that gives the President the best intel and operates based on the law and the statute." The next day, The New York Times reported that Pulte had installed as his ODNI chief of staff Christina Norton, a former Republican National Committee official whose recent work for the GOP centered on election issues, including overseeing poll-monitoring efforts during the 2024 presidential election. According to former U.S. officials cited by the Times, Norton had previously served as Pulte's chief of staff at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the perch from which Pulte launched a series of mortgage fraud referrals against prominent Trump critics before being tapped to run ODNI. It was not Pulte's first public declaration of political neutrality. He told the Detroit Free Press in 2021 that he discouraged people from baiting him into politics. "I stay apolitical," he said.