The D Brief: A chem attack in Iraq? Will Hagel serve Turkey? Flournoy on what Congress should do; No more ISIS candy; and a bit more.

ISIS may have just attacked Iraqi police with chlorine gas. Eleven Iraqi officers were sickened and this could be one of the first effective attacks and heighten fears of the dangers U.S. troops face, even if they are not technically in combat. Loveday Morris for the WaPo: from Balad, Iraq: “…The chlorine attack appears to be the first confirmed use of chemical weapons by the Islamic State on the battlefield. An Iraqi Defense Ministry official corroborated the events, and doctors said survivors’ symptoms were consistent with chlorine poisoning…

“'It was a strange explosion. We saw a yellow smoke in the sky,' he said. The wind carried the fog toward their lines. The men say it hung close to the ground, consistent with the properties of chlorine gas, which is heavier than air. 'I felt suffocated,' Jabbouri recalled. 'I was throwing up and couldn’t breathe.'… The Islamic State’s reported chlorine attacks appear to have been largely ineffectual. The attack on the police officers last month is the only one officially documented.” More here.

Yesterday, “U.S. military officials” at Central Command in Tampa hosted more than a dozen Pentagon reporters to give them their view of the fight against the Islamic State. The generally press-wary command, now led by Gen. Lloyd Austin, the defacto war commander who has briefed just once at the Pentagon, invited reporters to talk about the war effort in Iraq and Syria. Reporters always love context, but it wasn’t clear many came away with much earth-shattering news.

But is the IED-laden approach to Bayji a bellwether for a broader coalition assault on ISIS in Iraq? CENTCOM thinks so. The WaPo’s Missy Ryan, who went to Tampa: “U.S. officials described Iraqi forces’ struggle to clear the explosives and advance into contested areas around the strategic Baiji oil refinery as the start of what they expect will be a years-long endeavor to break the Islamic State’s hold on a vast area across Iraq and Syria. ‘We’re seeing now . . . how they defend,’ a U.S. military official said. ‘We got a good lesson on how they attack, but how they defend—we’re getting a good lesson in now.’

"...the overall campaign is only at ‘the first couple of minutes of the first quarter.’… Officials cautioned it could take many months before Iraqi forces were ready to attempt a recovery of important areas such as Mosul, a major northern city that is comfortably in Islamic State hands, or contested Anbar province in western Iraq.” More here.

Back to Iraq? Will Chuck Hagel be serving turkey in Iraq this year? Unclear if Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will visit Iraq, perhaps for Thanksgiving, though after his conversation yesterday with Iraq’s Minister of Defense, it’s clear he’s been invited. The optics of such a visit—a Defense Secretary serving Thanksgiving dinner to troops at a KBR mess hall—might not be great for a White House that to many seems to be in denial that it is at war with jihadists there. But as the U.S. spends nearly $8 million per day and there are now nearly a couple thousand U.S. troops in Iraq, Hagel may be forced to go. Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby told reporters yesterday that he had “nothing to announce” about Hagel’s travels, though he did confirm that Hagel had been invited by the Iraqis for a visit.

It’s time we talk about what escalation will look like in Iraq and Syria, says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “…The U.S. air campaign has turned into an unfocused mess as the U.S. has shifted limited air strike resources to focus on Syria and a militarily meaningless and isolated small Syrian Kurdish enclave at Kobani at the expense of supporting Iraqi forces in Anbar and intensifying the air campaign against other Islamic State targets in Syria… It is one thing to work with an Iraqi government and key factions over time with some credible chance of success. It is another to offer false hope and leave the resulting mess to the next president.” More here.

Kobani may or may not be a strategic prize to the Islamic State, but it is a test of the U.S. strategy in Syria. The Pentagon said this week that the situation remains tenuous and contested. Why it’s important, from the NYT editorial board this morning, here.

Qatar and Kuwait aren’t pulling their weight in terms of cutting off financing to the Islamic State, Treasury’s David Cohen said yesterday. The WSJ’s William Mauldin: “…U.S. officials lauded the cooperation from wealthy Persian Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in efforts to stop donations to Islamic State and allied groups and help enforce U.S. and United Nations sanctions. But Qatar and Kuwait are still “permissive jurisdictions for terrorist financing,” said David Cohen, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.” The rest of that here.

If you’re still interested in the whole exchange between John McCain and Pentagon Presssec Rear Adm. John Kirby, here is a bit in National Review Online that highlights the answer Kirby gave about the U.S. strategy in Iraq and Syria, and here is the youtube clip of what McCain said—where he called the Pentagon Press Secretary  an “idiot.”

Who wants chocolate from ISIS? Not enough people to keep a business afloat, it turns out. So now they’ll have to get it from Belgium chocolate maker Libeert—a company that’s had to change its name now twice in the last year. Reuters has this: “‘We chose ISIS as that was the brand name of our pralines and tablets,’ marketing manager Desiree Libeert told Reuters by telephone on Thursday. ‘Had we known there was a terrorist organization with the same name, we would have never chosen that.’” More here.

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An American doctor who returned from Africa now has Ebola and is quarantined in a New York hospital. Read that bit from Reuters this hour here.

The U.S. is intensifying the fight against Ebola. Defense One’s own Ben Watson: “…A 30-person team of medical specialists training at Fort Sam Houston in Texas are expected to wrap up on Saturday, DOD spokesman Lt. Col. Tom Crosson said. The group—the Pentagon’s equivalent of a medical SWAT team—consists of 15 members of the Army, nine from the Navy and six from the Air Force.

They will then enter “on-call status,” ready to deploy within a 72-hour notification anywhere in the United States to train and assist civilian medical personnel should Ebola emerge, as it did at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas in late September.” Read the rest here.

Ebola, of course, isn’t the only problem in Africa – Boko Haram is back at it, kidnapping more girls. ABC, here.

The Pentagon needs more eyes in the sky. Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber: “…Andrew Hunter, the head of the Pentagon’s Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell, says the Pentagon will still rely heavily on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in the years to come. “You can ask the question: Is enough ever enough? “ Hunter said. “We don’t seem to have found that point yet from my perspective.” In the past eight to 10 years, the office has fielded about 500 different types of technologies to warzones. The office at the Pentagon is now working on about 30 requests, Hunter said. Most of what the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell does is classified…

Chris O’Donnell, staff specialist for the Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise and Tactical Warfare Systems (Land Warfare and Munitions), will take over as the acting director of the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell.” 

Europe’s observer mission in Ukraine launched its first drones yesterday. From the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe: “The UAVs, the Schiebel CAMCOPTER® S-100, are being provided, flown and maintained by an Austrian company Schiebel under contract to the OSCE.” More here.

Who's doing what today: Hagel and Kerry welcome their counterparts from Seoul to State at 9 a.m., roughly a half an hour before Michael Lumpkin and Maj. Gen. James Lariviere testify before the House on the U.S. interagency response to Ebola. U.S. Forces Korea commander Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti will brief the Pentagon press corps at 11:30 a.m. today. Then the Pentagon’s medical “SWAT” team at Fort Sam Houston opens up to the media for the first time at 1 p.m. And President Obama reviews the administration’s ISIS strategy in a closed door meeting with his security council at 2:15 p.m.

New research links mental issues with service in the military. Recruits in the Army enter the service with the same mental health problems that civilians have, and at the same rates—but those problems are essentially exacerbated by military service, according to new research. The NYT’s Benedict Carey: “…Enlistees ‘are not much different from civilians’ in terms of mental health, said Anthony J. Rosellini, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and lead author of the paper on mental disorders. ‘We suspect what’s going on is that disorders that appeared in childhood or adolescence might become more persistent in the context of the demands of the Army.’” More right here.

‘Bunch of losers.’ After hanging up on an alleged veteran with the condition, conservative radio host Michael Savage said he’s had enough with the way PTSD and depression are used by America’s ‘weak, narcissistic’ men. David Ferguson for The Raw Story, here.

Will it ever happen for South Korea? The transfer of control of the military in is delayed once again. South Korea wants a little more time before it assumes responsibility for its own forces if war were to break out on the Korean peninsula—meaning the U.S. will remain in charge if North Korea starts a war, as it has since 1950.

The BBC: “The US will maintain control of South Korean troops in the event of war with the North, the two sides say, delaying again a long-planned command transfer. Both sides attributed the delay to "an evolving security environment" and an ‘intensifying’ threat from Pyongyang. The transfer had been due to take place in 2012 and was then delayed until 2015. No new date has been set for it to occur.” More here.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon yesterday, standing beside Minister of Defense Han Min Koo:  “While this agreement will delay the scheduled transfer of operational control, it will ensure that when the transfer does occur, Korean forces have the necessary defensive capabilities to address an intensifying North Korean threat.” Full transcript of that briefing here.

Pentagon Pressec Rear Adm. Kirby, when asked about the same issue on Tuesday: “Well, I'm not going to get ahead of the talks.”

Unseen before: American photogs shoot pics from inside North Korea, here.

Michele Flournoy this week called on Congress to do more to help the Pentagon to fight the Islamic State under sequestration. At an event Wednesday at the Bipartisan Policy Center moderated by Defense One’s own Kevin Baron, former Pentagon policy chief Michele Flournoy (the next SecDef under a Pentagon with Hillary as Prez?) argued strenuously for Congress to give the Pentagon what it wants, in terms of closing unnecessary bases, compensation and healthcare reforms, for example. Eric Edelman, another former Pentagon policy chief, worried aloud that the Pentagon was holding back on airstrikes against the Islamic State for fear that sequestration could hamstring its budget come January – though offered no specific evidence that that was happening.

Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber attended the event and sent us this bit: “You can’t expect to defend the nation under sequestration,” [Flournoy] said at the Bipartisan Policy Center event when talking about the National Defense Panel’s assessment of Pentagon’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review. “Congress has got to give the Pentagon the authorities to reform; to be able to spend its money smarter and more efficiently and arrest cost growth in certain areas,” Flournoy said. DOD needs to be able invest more in readiness and capabilities for the future, she added.

More from Marcus on this bit: “Speaking about the defense industry, Flournoy said that budget uncertainty is preventing the Pentagon running stable multiyear programs. ‘We are doing a series of one-year programs where every year everything is renegotiated, redesigned, [and] the requirements are reset. … So that horrible turbulence and uncertainty is preventing us from doing things efficiently and ultimately it’s getting us less capability for our investment,” she said. Because of this, she believes defense firms are “keeping some of their capital on the sidelines.’ The industry is not going to increase its investment in new technologies, a top priority of Pentagon leaders, until it gets more clarity into future levels of defense spending. Still, Flournoy said, companies should be positing themselves by investing in technology research and development so they are ‘ready to launch’ when defense spending increases.” Watch the video of the whole discussion here.

The Pentagon needs better relationships with companies like Google if it wants to make it through the current budget storm, writes Bill Lynn, the former DepSecDef who is now CEO of Finmeccanica North America and DRS Technologies, Inc., in Foreign Affairs: “Taken together, commercialization and globalization—coupled with a decline in U.S. defense spending—have ushered in a new era for the U.S. defense industry. In the past, the industry has adapted well to change, allowing the United States to maintain its military dominance. In weathering the current transition, however, the Pentagon is off to a slow start.” More here.

Speaking of DRS… Another NSA official resigns over possible conflict of interest. Buzzfeed’s Aram Roston: “In September, BuzzFeed News reported that a SIGINT ‘contracting and consulting’ company was registered at [former SIGINT director Teresa] Shea’s house, even while she was the SIGINT director at NSA. The resident agent of the company, Telic Networks, is listed as James Shea, her husband. Mr. Shea is also the vice president of a major SIGINT contractor that appears to do business with the NSA. The company, DRS Signals Solutions, is a subsidiary of DRS Technologies, which itself is a subsidiary of Italian owned Finmeccanica SPA.” More here.

If the campaign RV were just a little bit bigger, a GOP candidate in Iowa would still be a conservative. Defense One’s own Molly O’Toole spotted this and sent us this note a few days ago: “There’s been a ton of coverage on the politics side over the last couple days of Joni Ernst, GOP candidate for Senate in Iowa. She’s a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard, and is putting her combat boots front and center as she talks about how she could flip the Senate. But a few reporters have predictably picked up on her tagline, plastered on her RV, but quoted it as: “Mother. Soldier. Independent Leader.” But during the primaries it was ‘Mother, soldier, conservative’” Molly followed up with Ernst’s communications director, Gretchen Hamel, on the apparent change from the word “conservative” during the primaries to “independent” now on the side of the RV. Hamel wrote Molly back: “Yes, we do use ‘independent leader,’ but for space reasons it [the RV] just says leader.”

The SEC just got their own cybersecurity group up and running. Inside Cybersecurity’s Christopher J. Castelli has this: “In August, [SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar] told Inside Cybersecurity that a working group was needed to ‘holistically review issues posed by cyber threats and to consider the agency's role in helping organizations respond to such threats.’” First few grafs here, more behind a paywall.

A Los Angeles Times writer takes oil giant BP to task for the piece written this week by former Pentagon Presssec Geoff Morrell, now at BP, for his piece in Politico mag, here.