Big cuts to Big Army; Pentagon shifts big $$ for Ukraine; Dunford’s big day on the Hill; Flash crashing NYSE?; Hagel’s caution on ISIS; And a bit more.

Today’s the last day to close a nuclear weapons deal with Iran before a U.S. Congressional review clock doubles from 30 to 60 days, and puts one of the higher-profile issues of the Obama presidency in even greater peril at home. Negotiators in Vienna this morning remain stalled on the prospect of lifting a U.N. arms embargo on Iran and sanctions on Tehran’s missile program. Those hang-ups aside, the main text of the agreement is “around 96 percent complete,” Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told Reuters.
“In another hint that the talks might soon wrap up, the White House late Wednesday issued a brief statement saying President Barack Obama had conferred with the U.S. negotiating team through a secure video call… The last time Obama held a secure conference call with his negotiators on the road was shortly before the framework for a final accord was reached on April 2 in Lausanne, Switzerland,” AP’s Matt Lee writes.

The Pentagon is quickly working to beef up military equipment to counter the Russian military, Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber reports. That and much more inside the Pentagon’s annual reprogramming request, where it asks Congress for permission to shift, this year, $4.8 billion that it wants to spend in new ways.
“The Army wants to spend $160 million to put ‘increased lethality’ 30mm cannons on its Stryker armored vehicles based in Europe. The new weapons ‘support an urgent Operational Needs Statement … to fill a capability gap,’ one document says.
“Then there’s $5 million to develop sub-hunting acoustic sensors, which ‘addresses emergent real-world threats.’ …There’s also $24 million for a sub-detecting sonar system that is towed behind a Navy ship… Other requests would improve communications for detecting and launching nuclear strikes, including $42 million for upgrades at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon’s nuclear command center in Colorado. And there’s $10 million to modernize the red phones inside ICBM silos.” Read the rest—and there’s quite a bit more—here.

Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford’s confirmation hearing for the Joint Chiefs chairman job is this morning, and in his 75-page pre-hearing questionnaire Dunford warned lawmakers that reducing the number of U.S. troops in the Middle East would leave Iran an opening to consolidate and grow its Shiite presence in Iraq, Bloomberg reports. Tune in today at 9:30 a.m. EDT for the hearing on Capitol Hill.
Food for thought. Here are 36 questions analysts and researchers from the Heritage Foundation would pitch Dunford today.
Wait, really? Last year Forbes magazine ranked Dunford 7th among its “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” NPR’s David Welna reminds listeners in this preview of today’s hearing that aired this morning.

The Army is set to lose another 40,000 troops and 17,000 civilians in response to congressionally mandated budget caps, and few stateside are particularly sanguine about it—not that either side in the Pentagon’s budget wars are budging an inch, The Hill reports after USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook initially broke the story.
“Planned reductions in Army force levels have been public for some time,” House Armed Services Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said yesterday.
“I want to be very clear about why this is happening,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said. “Even though the Republican budget added money for the military, they did it through a gimmick [and] the military cannot pay for ground strength through a contingency fund.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called it “another dangerous consequence of budget-driven strategy” pursued by President Obama.
What’s really going on here: “I think the Army is making it news because they want to get people worked up,” Todd Harrison, everybody’s favorite defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington told Bloomberg.
“The hardest hit bases include Fort Benning, Georgia, and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska,” Reuters reports: “Army officials planned to convert a 4,000-member brigade combat team at each base into a 1,050-member battalion task force, a loss of nearly 3,000 soldiers apiece, according to an Army document seen by Reuters.”

From Defense One

The best arguments against a deal with Iran over its nuclear program are all wrong. So says Harvard’s Graham Allison in this piece, which rebuts five reasons people say the U.S. can’t possibly reach an advantageous deal with Tehran.

The further talks in Vienna progress beyond the initial June 30 deadline, the more the U.S. side remains at the negotiating table—tacitly calling Iran’s bluff, Quartz’s Steve LeVine writes explaining how the pressure is building on Tehran more than any party at the table.

“There is no alternative to going in on the ground and pulling the [Islamic State group] up by the roots. If that scares you, don’t vote for me,” South Carolina Senator and GOP 2016 hopeful Lindsey Graham told an audience at the Atlantic Council yesterday. Graham also called for some 20,000 U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria in one of the more robust plans to come out of the campaign trail to date.

Defense One’s Molly O’Toole had an impromptu walk-and-talk with former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to the congressional commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War on Wednesday. Hagel shared a brief lesson from that war he fought for the current military operation against the Islamic State, which you can read here.

FBI Director James Comey brought his war on encryption to Capitol Hill yesterday, and claimed ISIS uses the contentious privacy tool to order assassinations and recruit new followers. National Journal’s Dustin Volz has the story.

Foreign hackers won’t be deterred even if U.S. lawmakers can pass two pieces of stalled cyber legislation, 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said in her most detailed take on cybersecurity from the campaign trail in Iowa. NJ’s Volz again with that one, here.

Welcome to Thursday's edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Defense One. Want to share The D Brief with a friend? Find our subscribe link here. (And if you want to view today’s edition in your browser, you can do that here.) And please tell us what you like, don’t like, or want to drop on our radar right here at the-d-brief@defenseone.com.

Back in Ukraine, U.S. Army Chief Gen. Ray Odierno was in country, where the U.S. military has begun planning to expand its training for non-NATO nation troops, WSJ’s Julian Barnes reports. “We haven’t faced something like this ourselves for a while,” Odierno said.
Among other escalations Ukraine wants from the U.S. side, Kiev is seeking “to bring their conventional army troops and special-operations forces to the training center [in the western city of Lviv] to run through the course taught by U.S. soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade.”

Negotiations in Vienna reached a particularly heated stage on Monday when U.S. State Secretary John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif were admonished to quiet down after shouting over one another in the meeting room. That same night, “European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini threatened to leave the negotiations, prompting a shouted response from Mr. Zarif to never threaten an Iranian. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov added ‘nor a Russian,’” the Wall Street Journal reports.
For the record—as recently as Tuesday, the U.S. negotiating team in Vienna had gone through 10 pounds of Twizzlers (strawberry), 20 pounds of string cheese, and 200 Rice Krispies treats, the Boston Globe’s Matt Viser reported. And of course, without naming any names, “when the Iran talks are in town, ‘business is booming,’” the manager of a brothel in Vienna told Reuters on Sunday.
Think Iran is “on the march” and expanding its influence in the Middle East? Many take this point for granted when arguing against a deal with Tehran. But J. Dana Shuster of the National Security Network argues that “Iran’s foreign policy has actually done pretty poorly the past few years and its influence and power have, I think, actually declined.” Their new policy brief, here.

Major computer problems at United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange frightened travelers, investors, and anyone watching cable news yesterday morning, but were likely not the result of deliberate hacks, said White House and Department of Homeland Security officials.
At 8:26 a.m., the FAA issued a full ground stop for United Airlines when a problematic router made it impossible for the airline to check no-fly lists, according to CNN. The stop was lifted by 9:47 a.m. but delays rippled throughout the day. Shortly after, at 11:30 a.m., trading on the New York Stock Exchange, or NYSE, was halted.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson reassured the public that World War III had not broken out. “It appears from what we know at this stage that the malfunctions at United and at the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor.”
The NYSE outage appeared similar to an incident that took place on May 6, 2010, a so-called “flash crash” in which sophisticated high-velocity trading algorithms resulted in wild swings on the exchanges and a 1,000-point drop in stock prices in just 36 minutes, resulting in a trading stop.
If you’re in the mood for a conspiracy, it’s worth noting that while hacking into an actual airplane is extremely difficult and has never been demonstrated, hacking an airline reservation system is an easier target. The NSA has done it, and so has German VoIP developer Hendrik Scholz. As for the Flash Crash, in April of this year, the FBI charged a 36 year-old British man named Navinder Singh Sarao with 22 criminal counts, including fraud and market manipulation for the use of “spoofing” algorithms that may have “contributed to market conditions” surrounding the crash, Bloomberg reports.
No official sources have yet surfaced to explain exactly what happened in yesterday’s anomalies. But on Tuesday evening, several days before the event, the hacker group Anonymous tweeted a cryptic warning: “Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street....we can only hope.”

Syrian sanctions, Syrian shmanctions. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad signed a law that'll give his government access to a $1 billion credit line from Iran. “A Syrian official told Reuters at the time that the new credit line would be used ‘to secure the flow of essential goods and materials,’ for Syria.”

In Africa today, Navy Secretary Mabus arrives in the western Republic of Guinea-Bissau where he’ll meet with President Vaz, Prime Minister Pereira and the country’s military leaders. This is the first stop on a trip in Western and Southern Africa to increase naval cooperation and maritime partnership opportunities.
Also today, the Stimson Center launches a new report by the Commission on Global Security Justice and Governance at 2 p.m. today. Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, will be on hand; as well as Jane Holl Lute, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security and Steve Clemons of The Atlantic. The report focuses on “pragmatic recommendations to reform the U.N. and other institutions to address new global challenges posed by conflict–affected states, climate change, and the hyper-connected global economy,” we’re told. You’ll find the full report here.

Lastly this morning, here’s one that’s really out there—The U.S. military is reportedly tracking some 17,000 objects in orbit around the earth, and you can glimpse what that looks like in a neat visualization right here.
ICYMI: The Pentagon and the intelligence community are rapidly developing war plans to fend off Chinese and Russian attacks on U.S. military satellites in space. And a new operations center to step up the defensive effort on this front is set to open in roughly six months. More on that over here. Have a great day, everyone. With any luck today, the markets and the satellites will all be just fine today...