US beefs up NATO’s rapid reax force; Washington, Beijing behind closed doors; The military jobs robots will not be taking; A Green Beret’s board of inquiry; And a bit more.
U.S. and Chinese military officials met at the State Department yesterday as part of their governments’ 7th annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue. This year’s event has brought nearly 400 officials “from every major Chinese agency” to Washington, where cyber security and maritime expansion in the South China Sea top the U.S. list of priorities for the closed-door talks, which involve eight U.S. cabinet secretaries.
Meanwhile in the Asia-Pacific, China appears to have finished the perimeter of one of its “fake islands,” along with some large buildings to top it, IHS Janes reported yesterday, offering some fresh imagery to back up their case. Solar and wind turbines are in place on the island, though so far there’s “no evidence that weapons systems have been installed.”
Japan and the Philippines are watching those Spratly Islands closely. The two nations just kicked off a joint search-and-rescue drill nearby, much to China’s agitation this morning.
A bit more on the Philippines: Defense firms from across the globe are eyeing the northwestern Bataan province for new operations as soon as the region is rezoned, possibly as early as August. Reuters has more.
While a U.S. congressional vote looms over a key Pacific trade deal, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Joshua Kurtlantzick explains how Washington’s security commitments to allies in the region do not live and die on the Trans-Pacific Partnership that faces a fraught future this week on Capitol Hill.
Another “mid-level” insurgent bites the dust. The Pentagon yesterday said a U.S. drone strike last week killed a Tunisian man who helped the Islamic State connect with North African extremists. Airstrikes in Mosul, Iraq, killed Ali Awni al Harzi, one of the first jihadists named for their participation in the 2012 raid on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and whom the UN and U.S. State Department just designated as a terrorist in April. Long War Journal offers this lengthy bio.
In Syria, Kurdish fighters from the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, have closed to within 30 miles of Islamic State headquarters in Raqqa, AP reports this morning: “The U.S. has found a reliable partner in the YPG,” which is composed of “moderate, mostly secular fighters, driven by revolutionary fervor and deep conviction in their cause. They are backed by Arab tribesmen, Assyrian Christian gunmen and members of the rebel faction known as Burkan al-Furat—Arabic for the ‘Volcano of the Euphrates.’”
“The taking of the base is the second blow inflicted on IS fighters by the Kurds in a week, after the capture of Tal Abyad, on Syria’s border with Turkey,” AFP adds.
About Washington’s “moderate” partners in Syria—the Pentagon has begun paying the local fighters it is training for battle in Syria, USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook reported. The checks run anywhere from $250 and $400 per month, depending on “skill, performance and leadership,” a defense official said. The Pentagon expects to churn out 3,000 fighters by year’s end. For what it’s worth, the first group of 90 began training in June; and some two-thirds of the 6,000 who have volunteers have yet to even be vetted.
NATO’s excessively titled Very High Readiness Joint Task Force just got a matériel boost from U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter. “As many as 1,200 vehicles, including tanks and artillery, will be located in six European nations,” WSJ’s Gordon Lubold reports this morning on location with Carter in Germany. On Monday, Carter pledged surveillance assets to the rapid response force, as well as “special operations forces, logistics, transport aircraft, and a range of weapons support that could include bombers, fighters and ship-based missiles. It would not provide a large ground force,” AP’s Lita Baldor reported yesterday.
So how does alliance-wide defense spending stack up? Defense One’s Kedar Pavgi worked up these two charts to show how Russia’s annexation of Crimea hasn’t reversed what’s now looking like three consecutive years of decline in collective defense spending.
From Defense One
The Pentagon would like its unmanned aerial vehicles to be a lot more unmanned—up to 150 people are needed to maintain, operate, and gather intelligence from a drone—but that’s not happening any time soon, says the Air Force scientist who’s trying to automate various drone-related functions. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker reports.
House Republicans are pushing harder for new nuclear weapons than their counterparts in the Senate, whose version of the defense authorization bill calls merely for “a thorough net assessment of the new nuclear environment,” National Journal’s Fawn Johnson writes.
ICYMI: A CSIS scholar yesterday released a long-in-the-making report calling for many new nukes. Get the full report here.
Long-sought changes to military retirement may come this year. Both the House and Senate versions of the defense authorization bill would allow servicemembers to contribute to a 401(k)-type retirement fund, but would cut into today’s 20-year retirement package. Johnson, again, here.
From the Arab Spring and into the arms of al-Qaeda in Syria. After pro-democracy protests failed in Jordan, one teenager’s drive to improve the world led him down a very different—and ultimately fatal—path than he’d initially planned. Journalist Alice Su files this report from Amman on the Hashemite Kingdom’s troubled efforts to curb violent extremism.
Welcome to Tuesday's edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Brad Peniston. Our subscribe link is right 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.
After months with no press secretary, Defense Secretary Carter filled two key public affairs posts in four days. Yesterday’s news that Maura Sullivan, a former Marine and Iraq War veteran, will be Carter’s new public affairs assistant follows Friday’s news that Bloomberg TV’s Washington correspondent, Peter Cook, will be the new civilian face for the Pentagon. Sullivan will slide over from her current job as the top public affairs advisor to VA Secretary Bob McDonald, The Hill reports.
The quiet reformer. In an organization known for thwarting efficiency, Carter has a fairly short window to implement his ambitious reform agenda, and he’s moving quickly to rotate in a new team of leaders, Defense News’ Aaron Mehta writes. “Over the course of his roughly two years in office, Carter will have a say in an unusually large number of top positions, including the entirety of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And that may be where his biggest chance to affect the Pentagon lies.”
While new faces may be en route to the Pentagon, the same budget fight that we see every year is playing out on Capitol Hill, Military Times’ Leo Shane III reports in this look-ahead at the bipartisan defense authorization bill that has faced a White House veto threat every year of the Obama presidency—but that threat has never once materialized.
Want to see what the Navy’s new $13 billion warship looks like? Business Insider’s Jeremy Bender gathers up photos of the new USS Gerald Ford, which will be the world’s largest warship when it goes operational for the Navy in less than a year.
In case you were wondering—fallout from the OPM hack appears to be growing (still). The National Archives and Records Administration is now looking into “recently detected unauthorized activity” with many of the same features that defined the OPM hack, NextGov’s Aliya Sternstein reported yesterday.
And here’s an alarming post-mortem take on the hackers who warned Congress as far back as 1998 that these things would happen—and there’s little Washington can do to stop it. WaPo’s Craig Timberg and Jorge Ribas deliver in this multimedia Tuesday #LongRead.
Cybersecurity isn’t the problem, writes Adam Elkus for War on the Rocks. It’s basic cyber-incompetence in holding officials and organizations accountable, he argues. “No amount of money, new cybersecurity authorities and organizations, or smart hackers lured away from Silicon Valley firms will compensate for the depressingly obvious realization that our government does not care about technical expertise or cybersecurity outcomes writ large and is not at all interested in accountability.”
And here’s a bit of the obvious for any Joes with half an eye on their future—a median salary of $133K awaits veterans entering the workforce with degrees in cybersecurity, Military Times reports.
Today on Fort Bragg, a Green Beret O-4 faces his board of inquiry for war crimes allegations. And Iraq war vet and California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter has a few things he thinks you ought to know about U.S. Army Maj. Matthew Golsteyn, who faces charges he violated the rules of engagement five years ago in Afghanistan when he killed a known bomb-maker in the Helmand city of Marjah. The Army stripped Golsteyn of his Special Forces tab and a Silver Star after he told CIA officials during a job interview that he killed the unarmed bomb-maker in a twist that suddenly found him facing war crimes allegations.
“Few details are known publicly about what the Army accuses Golsteyn of doing,” Amanda Dolasinski writes for The Fayetteville Observer, based just outside of Fort Bragg. “What is known has come from the office of California Rep. Duncan Hunter.”