INTER-KOREA SUMMIT DAY: With the 13-hour time difference between Washington and Seoul, the historic summit between South Korea’s Moon Jae-in and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will happen late tonight East Coast time. The highly-choreographed meeting will be rich in symbolism as Kim will step across the military demarcation line between the two Koreas, the first North Korean leader to do so, and along with Moon plant a pine tree before getting to work.

HAPPENING TODAY: MATTIS AND DUNFORD TESTIFY: After closed budget testimony Wednesday to senators, Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will sit down in front of the cameras at 9:30 a.m. for public testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. It could be among the last of the committee’s hearings before it does its annual defense budget markup this month.

FIRST QUARTER EARNINGS: Major defense contractors are releasing their quarterly earnings this week. A major defense spending increase, combined with higher profitability from commercial airplanes, helped Boeing boost its full-year earnings target 3.6 percent to $14.50 a share on Wednesday. The company easily surpassed projections on its earnings per share and is building airplanes at a record pace, CNBC reported. Leaders said the company’s outlook for the rest of the year has improved, due mostly to cost controls, according to CNN.

Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics also beat earnings estimates, Investor’s Business Daily reported. But Northrop declined to bid on the Air Force’s next GPS 3 satellites, and neither it nor General Dynamics are being rewarded by investors. Raytheon is set to release its first quarter earnings this morning.

HOUSE BUMPS UP LCS BUY: After an outcry from lawmakers and shipyards, House Armed Services unveiled a 2019 defense budget proposal Wednesday that calls for the purchase of three littoral combat ships. The subcommittee proposal marks a major increase over the Navy’s plans to buy a single ship and will be rolled into the annual National Defense Authorization Act. It’s also a signal that Congress will follow analysts’ predictions and keep production humming next year at the shipyards in Wisconsin and Alabama that build the LCS. Lawmakers from Wisconsin and Michigan, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, wrote a letter last week to Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer warning a single LCS purchase could cause “irreversible harm” to a shipyard in the region.

“Put simply, one LCS in Fiscal Year 19 will result in shipyard layoffs. And that’s a highly-skilled workforce that can’t simply be spun back up,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin told Spencer during a Senate hearing this week. The Freedom-class variant of the ship is built at the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin by Lockheed Martin, and the trimaran Independence-class variant is built in Mobile, Ala., by Austal USA. “We will watch everything we can do to make sure that the workers — that the skilled workers we have do have work. While I say that, we are not in it for corporate welfare, to be very frank with you, and everybody has to get onboard with the program, both the suppliers and the Department of Defense. And we will work forward and earnest to attain that goal,” Spencer told Baldwin.

HASC MARKUPS: The three littoral combat ships were part of the NDAA proposals released Wednesday by six House Armed Services subcommittees. It is the next step in writing the massive annual policy bill. The committees released their markup bills and are slated to hold votes throughout the day today. Once the markup bills are passed out of committee, they will be compiled to form the foundation of the so-called “chairman’s mark” version of the NDAA, which will be debated and amended by the full committee in two weeks.

Here is a rundown of what is in the House Armed Services subcommittee markup bills:

Seapower:

• Sets Navy ship purchases at 13, bumping up the Navy’s request by three ships.
• Purchase of the fourth Ford-class aircraft carrier, CVN 81, which has not been named and is expected to cost about $15 billion. The carrier will be built by Huntington Ingalls.

Military Personnel:

• No increase in troop numbers over what the Trump administration requested.
• Withholds marketing money for recruiting from the Army until it fixes management and other problems unearthed by a recent audit of that spending.

Strategic Forces:

• Establishes U.S. Space Command as a new sub-unified command within U.S. Strategic Command.
• Requires the Air Force to establish a new numbered Air Force unit responsible for space warfighting operations.

Tactical Air and Land:

• Directs the Air Force to recapitalize its E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS, aircraft fleet, despite its decision to cancel the program.
• Requires Pentagon to show it has upgraded military aircraft including the T-45 trainer jet and the F/A-18 with equipment that will help limit instances of pilot hypoxia.

Emerging Threats:

• Requires Mattis to come up with a plan within a year to close the Strategic Capabilities Office, which was founded in 2012 to wring new innovations out of existing military technology.
• Creates a Pentagon artificial intelligence and machine learning oversight council to speed up those cutting-edge technologies.

Readiness:

• Limits the amount of time a Navy ship can be deployed overseas to no more than 10 years.
• Requires Navy inspections of ships with no notice and makes details of the inspections unclassified and available to the public.

BIG MISTAKES IN NIGER: A classified Pentagon report argues poor training, complacency, and a culture of excessive risk were factors in the deaths of four U.S. soldiers in Niger last fall, according to the Wall Street Journal. Officials familiar with the findings of the investigation described multiple errors and negligence of military procedures and of the chain of command.

For example, the 6,000-page report said at least one officer copied and pasted orders for a separate mission into the concept of operations for the October mission that ultimately resulted in the four deaths. Nevertheless, the Journal reports the investigation does not recommend punishment for anyone.

ALLEGATIONS PILE UP FOR JACKSON: Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, the longtime White House physician nominated to be the secretary of Veterans Affairs, prescribed “a large supply” of Percocet to a White House military office staffer, according to a summary of concerns compiled by the Democratic members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. The two-page document summarizes three groups of accusations: prescription practices, hostile work environment, and drunkenness. The summary references conversations with 23 current and former colleagues of Jackson’s.

CIRCLING THE DRAIN? Last night the Washington Post, quoting “two White House officials with knowledge of his deliberations,” reported Jackson has grown frustrated and has told colleagues he may remove his name from consideration.

THE RUNDOWN

Reuters: Understanding Kim: Inside the U.S. effort to profile the secretive North Korean leader

Defense One: Thornberry Is Getting Rolled by the Services

Bloomberg: Pentagon Classifies Study of F-35 Jet’s Challenges in Pacific

AFP: A look at Kim Il Sung’s old holiday home

Breaking Defense: Pentagon-Run AI Center Coming, Hypersonics Work in Progress

Defense News: These two drones are leaders in accident rates. How is the US Army responding?

Defense News: Air Force to start transforming tankers into WC-135 ‘nuke sniffers’ in FY19

Foreign Policy: China’s New Aircraft Carrier Is Already Obsolete

Military Times: Senator questions pay, benefits status for Guardsmen serving on southern U.S. border

New York Times: Closing of Philippine Tourist Hub Stirs Fears of Military Takeover

Task and Purpose: 3 Reasons The B-52 Bomber Will Outlive All Of Us

The Hill: House subpanel continues space reforms after Trump ‘Space Force’ comments

Defense Tech: Russia May Gift S-300 Anti-Air Missiles to Syria to Beef Up Defenses

New York Times: A Comic Strip About the Marines: The Few, the Proud, the Bored Out of Their Minds