Senseless killings in France, Kuwait, and Tunisia; Advise-and-assist over Skype?; Putin phones Obama as Marines, armor head to Bulgaria; A cannon for your office; And a bit more.
French authorities have arrested one of two alleged assailants who rammed their car into the gate of a U.S. gas company near the southeastern city of Grenoble about 4 a.m. EDT, attempting to breach the entrance in what President Francois Hollande called a “pure terrorist attack,” CNN reports.
A severed head with Arabic writing on it was pinned to the factory gates beside an “Islamist flag,” AFP and CNN’s French affiliate report as authorities have elevated security across “sensitive sites” near the factory.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for a bombing outside a Shiite mosque in Kuwait City that has left at least 15 dead and another 50 wounded, according to early reports.
Et Tunisia: Gunmen opened fire on tourists at a beach in the resort city of Sousse this morning, killing at least 27 people—and the toll is expected to grow, Al-Arabiya reports. One gunman is reportedly dead and police are still chasing a second, AP reports this hour.
And in Syria, nearly 150 civilians have died in roughly 24 hours during ISIS’ latest campaign to retake the border town of Kobane, Reuters reports this morning. Militants reportedly executed residents in their homes and killed scores via snipers and rockets, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights tells AFP.
Russian President Vladimir Putin phoned the White House yesterday to chat with President Barack Obama for the first time in four months, the New York Times reported. As is often the case in these high-level phone chats, there is little to sink our teeth into. The White House said Putin wanted to talk about the ISIS war in Syria and Iran nuclear negotiations, and that “may reflect a desire to assert his continuing importance on the world stage despite Russia’s isolation and failure to break the Western consensus on sanctions,” the NYT writes.
U.S. Marines are bringing tanks, armored vehicles and artillery to Black Sea-flanking state of Bulgaria, Marine Corps Times reported yesterday. The deployments are among U.S. efforts to reassure allies in the face of a revanchist Russia, and aren’t set to begin until September. More than 150 Marines with the Black Sea Rotational Force— and authorized as part of the White House’s $1B European Reassurance Initiative—will operate out of the Novo Selo Training Area.
NATO will fund the defusing of IEDs and mines across Ukraine, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said yesterday. There will also be more data-sharing between air traffic controllers across Poland, Norway and Turkey, he said. And in case you were wondering: Russia is up to its usual business of ferrying soldiers and weapons into Ukraine, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, reminded folks for the umpteenth time in Brussels yesterday.
Moscow is “playing with fire” by trying to frighten Washington and its allies into submission with their nuclear saber-rattling in Crimea and the Baltic states, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work told lawmakers yesterday on Capitol Hill. Reuters reported: “‘Anyone who thinks they can control escalation through the use of nuclear weapons is literally playing with fire,’ Work said. ‘Escalation is escalation, and nuclear use would be the ultimate escalation.’”
Begone, ye devils. Russian-backed separatists are destroying whatever modern art they can find that contains anything resembling sexually suggestive content in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. The reason: “such ‘perverted’ art had kept the region’s young people from having healthy and productive sexual lives,” NYT’s Robert Mackey reports.
From Defense One
China’s the “leading suspect” in the OPM hack after all. One day after the NSA chief warned against assuming that Beijing was behind the theft of 18 million Americans’ information, the nation’s top spymaster said out loud what nameless U.S. officials had only whispered anonymously. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker has the news here.
The next best thing to being there? JIEDDO, the counter-IED agency, wants to give Iraqi soldiers cellphones and tablets so they can video chat with U.S. trainers when, say, they run across a new kind of roadside bomb. The gear is already being tested in Afghanistan, Global Business Reporter Marcus Weisgerber reports.
What’s worse than the NSA spying on Americans? Foreign autocrats spying on Americans, says the Atlantic’s Moisés Naim. Democracies are at a disadvantage in this new brand of asymmetric warfare, and so they must band together to fight off authoritarian states “that can be more institutionally flexible, opaque, unaccountable, and corrupt,” he argues here.
Everybody calm down about Russia’s new ICBMs, says Adam Mount of the Council of Foreign Relations. Despite the Western outcry after Putin announced plans to deploy 40 new missiles, he says those weapons will merely replace, not augment, existing ones — and actually may be more vulnerable to attack. Read Mount’s argument, here.
Welcome to Friday'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.
U.S. Marines watched as about 200 students flooded the U.S. Embassy in the capital of the East African nation of Burundi yesterday. Authorities are in crackdown mode ahead of a vote in parliamentary elections slated for Monday and roughly three weeks ahead of a presidential vote in mid-July. “Burundi’s opposition parties announced Friday they will boycott all upcoming key elections, saying it was not possible to hold a fair vote following weeks of violence over President Pierre Nkurunziza’s bid to cling to power,” AFP reports this morning.
With thousands more Marines headed to the Asia-Pacific in the coming years, the Corps needs to fix its logistics shortfall if it wants to efficiently carry out crisis-response missions in the region, Gen. Joseph Dunford said yesterday.
“Cronyism and tribalism” are plaguing U.S. efforts to train the Iraqi security forces to fight ISIS, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Daniel Allyn told an Army Times editorial board at the Pentagon yesterday.
Quick reminder: “This is a decade-long campaign and not a day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month issue,” Allyn said. He added that the dysfunctional Iraqi leadership issue is “particularly challenging at the battalion, brigade, division level…that's got to be something that's a critical focus for Iraq's leadership,” he said.
ICYMI—The U.S. needs actual combat boots on the ground in Iraq now, and Michèle Flournoy and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security offered up a plan for how to spread them out to the greatest effect in this op-ed in The Washington Post on Wednesday.
On the 2016 campaign trail, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 rival and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley will deliver the morning keynote today at the Truman National Security Project’s annual conference in Washington. O’Malley’s senior foreign policy advisor Doug Wilson (also chair of Truman’s board of advisors) bills the speech as the candidate’s “most comprehensive remarks to date on U.S. foreign policy, national security and America’s role in the world.”
O’Malley “will outline a framework for U.S. foreign policy based on reducing new threats to our national security and supporting the rise of a global middle class, both fundamental objectives to keeping America safe and helping to establish stability and prosperity around the world,” Wilson said.
Vice President Joe Biden hinted there might be some daylight between himself and President Obama when it comes to Ukraine. Addressing the issue of providing lethal aid to Ukraine, Biden told the TruCon conference audience last night. “Everyone knows my view on that, but I have not prevailed yet,” he said.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., followed Biden at the podium—and may soon follow the former senator in another way, Defense One’s Politics Reporter Molly O’Toole reports. Kaine jabbed fellow lawmakers for dodging their responsibility in debating war powers to fight ISIS, but played nice on the issue of Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House—a campaign that’s rumored to be considering the Virginia Democrat for vice president. While other countries around the world still treat women as second-class citizens, Kaine said, “We may soon have our first woman president.”
And for your weekend #LongRead, here are five short quotes from our politics reporter Molly O’Toole’s investigation into the future of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility:
1. “These idiots tend to talk as soon as you get them—you don’t have to do anything to them,” said SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. John Kelly.
2. “With the World Trade Center still smoldering in December, it would not have been popular to move 1,000 suspected al-Qaeda members to the U.S,” said former Bush official John Bellinger.
3. “Largely what you’re doing is incinerating people,” said Ben Wittes, co-founder of the Lawfare blog.
4. “We’re getting close. I’m confident that Gitmo will be closed in this administration,” said Paul Lewis, envoy for Guantanamo closure at the Defense Department.
5. “This is probably the last chance,” said. House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash.
Take a look at the F-35 Lightning II jet’s possible new engine. According to this article, it’ll be more fuel-efficient and have more power. No word on whether a new propulsion option would raise costs on the famously expensive weapon.
And lastly, the perfect gift for the “Christmas in July” fans in your life (Note: this product was not pitched to us)—It’s a tiny .30-caliber cannon that you can use to shoot targets at a range of “up to 100 yards,” or—as you can see in this video—to sink model ships contained glass bottles out to two inches.