Obama awaiting ‘finalized’ Iraq plan from Pentagon; Will Jeb rally in Europe?; Army website notches web views—in Syria; Return of the AUMF; And a bit more.

Training woes plague Iraq as U.S. searches for a “complete strategy.” One of the five coalition sites for training Iraqi troops hasn’t seen a new recruit in almost a month and a half, The Hill’s Kristina Wong reported yesterday. While the other four sites are working through a total of 2,601 Iraqi trainees (with 8,920 graduated to date), President Barack Obama opened the door to more tough criticism of the coalition’s still “incomplete” strategy, as he described the situation yesterday during a press conference in Germany. The short-term answer, until the Pentagon can give him a “finalized plan,” is extending outreach to Iraq’s Sunni tribes while waiting for Baghdad to get its military act together. Meantime, don’t expect an “overhaul” of the administration’s Iraq strategy, a U.S. official told Reuters’ Jeff Mason.
The Islamic State group is still besieging the Iraqi refinery near the city of Baiji, though Baghdad’s troops have managed to pierce a defensive perimeter and free up an overland resupply route, the Wall Street Journal’s Julian Barnes reported. Shiite militias (with some Iranian-made artillery) and a few Iraqi troops are hoping to retake Baiji. But any effort to retake the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi—much less the prized city of Mosul—remains a long way off.
Old tactic meets modern weapons. ISIS used tunnel bombs in its assault on Ramadi, and it’s not done yet. Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber reports. “Beyond bombs, ISIS is believed to be using tunnels to move weapons and…may even be exploiting Saddam Hussein’s own tunnel network, which is thought to stretch for 60 miles between palaces, military strongholds, and houses...” Read the rest here.

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas seized on Obama’s “incomplete strategy” remarks to push for U.S. ground troops against ISIS, The Hill’s Jordain Carney reported last night. McCain at least acknowledged the tough decision at the heart of their criticism of the White House. “Whenever I and some others say that we need additional U.S. troops, people recoil…[but] what’s going on now is ISIS is succeeding.”
Among the recoilers is Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky: “In the end, the boots on the ground [in Iraq] are going to have to be local boots on the ground, not ours, to engage in combat, to take these areas of Iraq back,” he told Louisville-based talk radio’s The Joe Elliott Show. Carney again has that one, including McConnell’s irritation at “revisionist history” in folks’ second-guessing the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Return of the ISIS war powers debate? A measure to authorize military force against ISIS has been added by Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine and Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake to a State Department bill up for consideration this week. “Kaine and Flake said they hoped their measure, which would sunset in three years and repeal the 2002 AUMF, would be a ‘starting point for debate,’” The Hill’s Wong writes.
One last bit on bills and debates—McCain reminds everyone of the standard lines of argument between Republicans and the White House (GOP wants to keep budget caps in place; Obama wants to remove them and increase domestic spending in line with cap-less spending on defense) on the annual military funding bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. That op-ed ran yesterday in Politico.

Sanctions on Russia will remain in place until Moscow holds up its part of the February Ukraine ceasefire drawn up in Minsk, the G7 members announced yesterday in a communiqué drawn up in Germany. WSJ’s Colleen McCain Nelson has a little bit on that angle here.
And oh by the way—“Crimea is not in Ukraine,” Russia told the U.N. as Moscow refused to sign an annual nuclear report. Moscow’s recalcitrance toward the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday is no surprise, but “raises serious questions about jurisdiction” in and around Sevastopol, Reuters’ Shadia Nasrallah writes from Vienna.

From Defense One

It’s time to bring the Pentagon’s personnel system into the 21st century. Brad Carson, acting defense undersecretary for personnel and readiness, lays out the whys and hows of turning a human-resources system that’s geared for career hoops into one that recognizes, promotes, and adapts to talent. (Carson is also headlining Defense One’s Force of the Future event, which runs today from 8-9:45 a.m. at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City.)

DARPA’s latest robot challenge brought humanoid robots to Los Angeles to complete a series of disaster-relief tasks. But how long before the technology that powers these lurching bipedal droids shows up on the battlefield? Jack Detsch reports for Defense One.

Few in Washington dispute the importance of the U.S.-Egypt relationship, but Neil Hicks says lawmakers vastly undervalue pressure on Cairo to improve its human-rights policies. He argues that Congress should reattach conditions on Egypt’s multibillion-dollar military aid package.

Two years after the Snowden revelations broke, what’s changed? David Fidler of the Council of Foreign Relations has a good rundown in Defense One.

Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson with 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.

Big in Europe? A battered Jeb Bush campaign packs up and heads to Europe to visit three NATO allies—Germany, Poland and Estonia—before announcing his 2016 run for the White House, WSJ’s Patrick O’Connor reports. Bush wants more NATO troops in Eastern Europe but hasn’t gone as far as his GOP colleagues in calling for an escalation in U.S. arms to Ukraine’s military. The five-day trip comes on the heels of Bush ditching his old campaign manager, David Kochel, for Danny Diaz, as NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman reported yesterday. Despite raising more than $100 million for his still-unofficial campaign, Bush is still trailing in the polls, as The Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe and Robert Costa write as the Bush team hopes to shift the narrative to focus on Vladimir Putin.

The stash of hard drives and cell phones seized in the Delta Force raid last month has allegedly proven to be a bounty for U.S. intelligence analysts, NYT’s Eric Schmitt reported yesterday. The movement of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was illuminated, along with a better understanding of how females help facilitate the group’s internal correspondence. Still, given the group’s proven ability to adapt, officials worry this new “trove” of intelligence could become outdated sooner than later, a worry that all but begs for swift action against the group as soon as possible.
Speaking of adaptation—With ISIS’s oil revenue streams hit hard by coalition efforts, the group has predictably taken to pawning off the countless antiquities they’ve reaped from Syrian and Iraqi ruins, WaPo’s Loveday Morris reported in this extensive write-up out of Baghdad last night.

Obama’s “Shiite background” explains Washington’s acquiescence to Iranian-backed Shia militias in Iraq, according to a former Baghdad parliamentarian, as WaPo’s Adam Taylor reports from the Iraqi land of wild speculation.
And CIA Chief John Brennan met with Israel intelligence officials in a planned but allegedly still quite “secret” visit last week to alleviate worries over Tehran’s nuclear program and its military reach throughout the Middle East, Haaretz’s Barak Ravid reported last night.
A host of “friends in high places” rushed to former CIA Director and retired Gen. David Petraeus as he faced charges for leaking classified information to his biographer, Bloomberg’s Terry Atlas and Erik Larson reported yesterday. The names included: “Graham Allison, founding dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat; Stephen Hadley, national security adviser to President George W. Bush; retired Adm. William McRaven, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command; and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

The Army will have a new secretary in about five months after John McHugh announced his imminent departure yesterday after a seven-year run. Defense News reported Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s Chief of Staff, Eric Fanning, currently tops the list of McHugh replacements. Who might replace Fanning—should he get the nod—remains unclear. More here.
Outgoing Army Chief Gen. Ray Odierno is banking on the service buying nearly 50,000 units of the new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle to replace nearly a third of its Humvee fleet, DoDBuzz’s Brendan McGarry reported yesterday: “Overall, the Army and the Marine Corps plan to buy a total of 54,720 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles at an estimated cost of more than $30 billion, or about $559,000 per vehicle.” Odierno’s term is up this September.
“Wow, we finally found someone who wanted to read that site,” said a soldier in the Pentagon yesterday after news broke that hackers from the Syrian Election Army managed to shut down the Army.mil website for a short time on Monday. The staff at Military Times has more on the hack here.

Heroism in Fallujah back in 2004 yields the family of Sgt. Rafael Peralta the second-highest award for valor—the Navy Cross—seven years after the Pentagon denied him the Medal of Honor. AP’s Elliot Spagat has the story from California’s Camp Pendleton here.

And at Washington’s Newseum, slain American journalist James Foley now graces “a towering wall of glass panels featuring 2,271 names of [journalists] who have died since 1837,” AP’s Glenna Hill writes. "Worse than dying or being murdered is being forgotten," Foley’s father, John, told a crowd yesterday at an annual rededication of the memorial. Do find the time to stop by if you haven’t already; it’s sobering, necessary stuff for just about any concerned citizen of the world visiting D.C. this summer.