Afghan forces repel attack on parliament; Small nukes for peace?; NATO’s quest for a ‘hybrid war’ playbook; Hackers ground flights in Poland; And a bit more.
Taliban fighters launched a complex attack on the Afghan parliament building in Kabul this morning as lawmakers met to confirm the country’s new Defense Minister, Masoom Stanekzai, the Wall Street Journal reported. Security officials said all seven Taliban fighters were eventually killed in the assault, which began with a suicide car bomb and ended when fierce resistance from Afghan security forces pushed the attackers into a nearby construction site. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the morning attack, which wounded 18 civilians, including two women and two children. BBC has photos of the attack’s aftermath, here.
In northern Afghanistan, the Taliban seized control of two provincial districts of Kunduz in two days—Chardara on Sunday, Dashti Archi on Monday. The fighting has trapped some 150,000 citizens, according to AP: “Mohammad Yusuf Ayubi, head of the provincial council, said the insurgents attacked Dashti Archi from four sides, setting off heavy fighting before seizing full control of the area early Monday. He said local forces suffered casualties but did not have a precise count.”
NATO needs to plan beyond Vladimir Putin’s tenure in Moscow to avoid getting dragged “back into the past,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in Berlin this morning, Reuters reports. Carter’s latest remarks came mere hours after he said NATO needs to abandon its rigid “Cold War playbook” to counter the blend of unidentified troops, propaganda and economic pressure—aka “hybrid warfare”—the Kremlin has deployed on Europe’s eastern flank, WaPo reports this morning.
Carter is set to view the alliance’s rapid response force later today; he’ll also “climb aboard a U.S. warship in Estonia fresh from Baltic Sea drills,” Reuters writes. Later, “in Brussels, he will meet NATO defense chiefs, and could offer more details on plans to pre-position heavy military equipment.”
For a quick roll-up of the tensions Carter is navigating in Europe, here’s a review from former Pentagon official Derek Chollet for Defense One.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., dropped in on Kiev this weekend to lampoon Washington’s European allies for not doing more to help Ukraine, AP reported in this short hit.
Only five nations—the U.S., Britain, Greece (yes, Greece), Poland and Estonia—will hit the oft-touted, rarely delivered defense spending target of 2 percent GDP, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said this morning.
Meanwhile, European Union officials formally extended sanctions on Russia for another six months to encourage accelerated compliance with a Ukraine ceasefire drawn up in February, AFP reports from Luxembourg. For what it’s worth, on Friday EU officials voted to extend an entirely separate set of sanctions related to Russia’s annexation of Crimea until June of next year.
And U.S. Marines and their Ospreys from the Spain-based crisis response force just wrapped up their first deployment to Romania as part of an alliance exercise in May called Platinum Eagle 15, Marine Corps Times’ James Sanborn reports. While Ospreys are noted for quick infil and exfil, they currently lack the armor and heavy weaponry that might make the aircraft a more formidable deterrent to continued Russian aggression, Sanborn writes.
Despite almost three months of unrelenting Saudi-led airstrikes against Houthis in Yemen, the rebel group is increasing its cross-border attacks into Saudi Arabia, WaPo’s Ali al-Mujahed and Hugh Naylor report from the capital of Sana’a: “Since early May, the rebels and their allies have launched near-daily attacks over the mountainous frontier into Saudi Arabia, even firing a Scud missile, according to Houthi fighters and foreign analysts...Analysts say the Houthis may be trying to provoke the Saudis into launching ground attacks in northern Yemen…[while also attempting] to strengthen the rebels’ bargaining position at U.N.-sponsored peace talks that began Tuesday.”
About that Scud—“Besides adding the Saudis to the very short list of states that have intercepted a ballistic missile fired in anger,” the episode highlights a neglected aspect of Iran nuclear talks—Tehran’s longer-range ballistic missiles—warns Thomas Karako, visiting fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for Defense One.
And WikiLeaks on Friday posted what they claim are thousands of documents from the Saudi foreign ministry, most of which—insofar as reporters have combed through them—add little to our understanding of Riyadh’s diplomatic relations in the greater Middle East, or to well-known dissatisfaction toward Tehran, the WSJ reported.
From Defense One
It’s not every day that you come across a think tank report advocating for new nuclear weapons, but that’s what Clark Murdock from CSIS argues in Project Atom, a new report being rolled out this morning. Murdock calls for new low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons to deter countries from seeking nuclear weapons of their own argues that the U.S. should base more nuclear weapons around the world to better deter attacks. The report comes as U.S. policy makers face a host of decisions about replacing weapons and the aircraft, submarines and ICBMs in the American nuclear arsenal. Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber has exclusive details of the report here.
Natsec Election or Not? Even as her GOP rivals pound away at foreign policy, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton barely mentioned national security at her official campaign launch last week. Why? National Journal’s Jon Krashauer explores the two parties’ electoral expectations here.
Welcome to Monday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Brad Peniston. Why not pass it on to a friend? You’ll find our subscribe link here. (Want to read it in your browser? Click here.) And feel free to send us what you like, don’t like, or want to drop on our radar right here at the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
Army two-star departs Iraq after a three-year investigation found he had steered contracts to former West Point colleagues, WaPo’s Craig Whitlock reported last night. “Maj. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard…long considered a rising star in the Army, returned to the United States in April from his headquarters in Kuwait… The investigation into Pittard began in 2011 after an anonymous whistleblower alleged that the general had ‘abused his authority by awarding lucrative renewable energy contracts [worth nearly $500,000] to his friends’ while serving as the commander of Fort Bliss in Texas…The contract was an initial step in a $250 million project to make Fort Bliss, one of the Army’s largest installations, self-sufficient in energy usage.”
A drive-by shooting in Baghdad killed two policemen and a civilian this morning, AP reports. Another three civilians were killed and eight others wounded when a bomb exploded outside a market in Taji this morning as well.
Instability across Iraq, coupled with dwindling resources, could force the World Health Organization to close its network of 77 clinics, BBC reports.
“Money and weapons alone won’t be enough to repair the mistrust between Baghdad and the Sunni tribes it now needs to battle the Islamic State group,” AP reported Saturday from the scene of a training site in Habaniyah, where some 80 U.S. troops just arrived as part of the new contingent of 450 new American advisors to help Baghdad take back the key Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi, which fell to the Islamic State group in May.
Obama-Netanyahu proxy slapfight: The strained relations between the leaders took an odd turn last week after a former Israeli ambassador criticized Obama in a WSJ op-ed, which drew rebuke from the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, which — skip ahead a few tit-for-tats here — seems to have ended in low-level apologies from the Israeli side. WaPo’s William Booth reports.
Meanwhile, France is asking for its turn to try solving the Israel-Palestinian dilemma, a proposal met with hostility in Tel Aviv, a “polite but distant” reception in Gaza, and vagueness in Washington. Booth, again, reports here.
For the first time, Japan is sending troops to train with U.S. Marines in Australia in early July. Three dozen Japanese will join more than 33,000 U.S. and Australian forces to practice responding to military and humanitarian crises. “In years past,” Marine Corps Times reports, the training scenarios have included “a joint U.S.-Australian task force taking on a fictitious aggressive island nation.”
“The framework gives Japan a larger role on the global stage, including allowing it to act in defense of allies…[in] one of the first developments to emerge following [a] new, robust military agreement” between Washington and Tokyo signed in April. For a bit more on that, head over here.
And speaking of Marines in the Pacific, the service’s special operations component—previously known as MARSOC—has a new name that salutes its storied past: the Raiders. Marine Corps Times’ Hope Hodge Seck recounts the unit’s heroism (seven Medals of Honor, 141 Navy Crosses and 330 Silver Stars) and reputation earned from island raids and courageous amphibious assaults more than 70 years ago.
In “the first attack of its kind,” hackers delayed the flights of more than 1,400 passengers trying to depart Warsaw, an official said yesterday. The online assaults on a Polish airline’s ground operations system cancelled flights for five hours Sunday, AFP reports.
14 million. That’s the latest total of how many citizens’ personal information was exposed by the hack into U.S. Office of Personnel Management systems that yielded the “mother lode of espionage data,” Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher reports.
Has American society reached “peak indifference” toward surveillance? New America’s Peter Singer and Christian Science Monitor’s Sara Sorcher investigate in this podcast over at SoundCloud. Along with scifi author Cory Doctorow, the hosts also take a crack at envisioning what World War III might look like, and discuss DARPA efforts to shape America’s burgeoning “internet of things” and make breaches like the OPM hack a thing of the past.