Is Washington souring on China?; Taliban spar over new chief; GOP debate guide, natsec edition; A SEAL and an engineer walk into Silicon Valley; And a bit more.
As U.S. officials promised and Beijing feared, State Secretary John Kerry asked China to respect international law amid “rising tensions over disputed claims in the South China Sea and China’s large-scale reclamation, construction and militarization of features there,” AFP reports from the sidelines of Association of Southeast Asian Nations foreign minister talks in Malaysia. Beijing had hoped that Kerry would leave the issue unmentioned, preventing “ASEAN from presenting a more united front.”
Japan joined the critique: State Minister Minoru Kiuch expressed “deep concern” over “large-scale land reclamation, the construction of outposts and their use for military purposes,” according to a statement from Tokyo.
The larger point. The OPM hack and South China Sea aggression seem to be changing China’s perception in official Washington, away from “competitor” and toward “adversary,” writes former Marine officer Robert Haddick in War on the Rocks. He starts on Capitol Hill, where the Navy’s next chief of naval operations, Adm. John Richardson, said China was “‘a complex nation,’ doing some things that possessed an ‘adversarial nature.’” It’s a subtle escalation of rhetoric, but it could signal new pressures on China ahead of President Xi Jinping’s visit to the U.S. in September.
Little-known fact: Military-to-military contacts between the U.S. and China have been shooting up since 2010, and are on pace to reach historic highs, Defense One’s Kedar Pavgi reports. In the past, mil-to-mil contacts have been among the first ties severed when things went south between Washington and Beijing. So what’s behind the recent sustained momentum? And how will the mil-to-mil relationship help shape the course of national security? Pavgi explains, along with a chart that traces two decades of the U.S.-China mil-to-mil relationship. All that begins, here.
Is the roughly 375-member National Security Council a Kafka-esque maze of bureaucracy? Despite National Security Advisor Susan Rice’s efforts to trim staff numbers, the NSC’s size “has come to symbolize an overbearing and paranoid White House that insists on controlling even the smallest policy details, often at the expense of timely and effective decisions,” the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung reports.
“In addressing challenges where there is internal disagreement or there are no good options — civil war in Syria, Russians in Ukraine and military dictatorship in Egypt, for example — policymaking has been ‘sclerotic at best, constipated at worse,’ according to a senior Defense Department official…Grumbling about how the White House operates is far from unique to the Obama administration, and the NSC staff has grown substantially under virtually every successive president since Jimmy Carter. But the size and intrusiveness of Obama’s NSC has made it a prominent target,” DeYoung writes.
“Any little twerp from the NSC can call a meeting and set the agenda,” groaned another anonymous State Department official. Read the rest in DeYoung’s Wednesday #LongRead.
ICYMI—the Islamic State or al-Qaeda: who poses a bigger threat to the U.S.? The Obama administration’s chief intelligence and counterterrorism officials can’t agree, and “This is not an academic argument,” writes Eric Schmitt of the New York Times.
“It will influence how the government allocates billions of dollars in counterterrorism funds, and how it assigns thousands of federal agents, intelligence analysts and troops to combat a multipronged threat that senior officials say is changing rapidly.”
A visit to the Pentagon’s new Silicon Valley office finds an engineer and a Navy SEAL already hard at work wooing the government-weary tech community, Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber reports from his travels with Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work and Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall in California.
What are they up to? “The Silicon Valley office — located next to a military airfield now leased by Google — is part of a broader push by the Pentagon to find technologies that will give troops an edge on the battlefield of the future. Among the technologies being eyed are in the areas of robotics, additive manufacturing, big data analytics and cyber…But tech firms have been skeptical of the Pentagon’s outreach for numerous reasons..” Read Weisgerber’s report in full here.
Meanwhile on the East Coast, a “wave of companies with ties to the intelligence community is winning over the world of finance,” WSJ reported Sunday. “After the terror attacks of September 2001, a private-equity arm of the CIA known as In-Q-Tel began seeding companies that could help it sift through vast repositories of data to quickly identify threats...Of 101 companies publicly seeded by In-Q-Tel, 33 have taken on Wall Street clients in recent years…”
“We see ourselves as the Darwinian outcome of billions of dollars of intelligence spending post-9/11,” said Tim Estes, who created software to scan text for patterns unseen by the human eye.
“Financial firms aren’t looking for terrorists, but good customers and attempts at fraud,” said a former chief technology officer of the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine services.
From Defense One
9 reasons the Iran deal makes sense: Graham Allison, the Harvard professor whose landmark Essence of Decision shaped the way we understand the Cuban Missile Crisis, goes through the nuclear agreement and concludes that no better terms could have won the approval of both Tehran and America’s negotiating partners. His reasoning, here.
The strange detente of cyberspace. For all the headlines about cross-border server breaches and data theft, it is striking that online incidents do not escalate into all-out cyber war. “States operating in cyberspace react differently than in most strategic domains” for two reasons: “the dynamics of restraint and the development of cyber norms,” write the Council on Foreign Relations’ Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness: Here’s what they mean.
Where are pop culture’s women warriors? Hollywood leaves female troops off its made-up battlefields — and that matters to audiences and vets themselves, writes Gayle Tzemmach Lemmon. The “victim narrative has overtaken all others in recent years when it comes to the story of women in uniform. There have been precious few depictions of women in uniform doing their actual jobs, most noticeably when it comes to the movies.” More here.
Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Brad Peniston. Want to share The D Brief with a friend? Find our subscribe link 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.
The appointment of a new leader for the Taliban is already said to be causing rifts across the group. The chief of the Taliban’s official diplomatic delegation in Qatar, Tayeb Agha, publicly resigned on Monday, NYT reports. Agha is credited with coordinating the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, and is seen as a longtime confidante of the former leader Mullah Omar, who was declared dead by U.S. and Afghan officials last week, more than two years after he is believed to have died. Agha’s coziness with Omar is not sitting kindly with the group’s new chief, Mullah Mansour—whose new appointment Agha called a “historical mistake” on par with the “selection of Afghan communist leaders in Moscow.”
And just yesterday, “A group of nearly 200 religious leaders and tribal elders traveled from Peshawar…to Quetta and met with the brother and son of Mullah Omar, asking them to end the dispute with Mullah Mansour,” according to the NYT.
Meantime, civilian casualties in Afghanistan are at “record high levels,” according to a new report from the UN. “The casualty figures were slightly higher than the first half of last year and higher than any similar period since 2009,” WaPo reports this morning. “While about 70 percent of the deaths and injuries were caused by anti-government forces, mainly the Taliban, the report noted ‘with concern’ that there had been a 60 percent increase in casualties caused by pro-government forces.”
“On a positive note, the report found a 21 percent decrease in the number of casualties from explosive devices, due to fewer being detonated from remote-controlled devices. On the other hand, it documented a 38 percent increase in casualties from pressure-plate explosives.” Read the full UN report here.
First 2016 debate lineups: Fox News announced late Tuesday who made the cut and who has been relegated to the kids’ table for the first 2016 GOP presidential debates on Thursday in Cleveland. (NYT: “The process has been fraught with complaints, but driven by the reality of dealing with a candidate field far bigger than was ever anticipated.”) Here are the rosters, with handy links to a sampling of Defense One Politics Reporter Molly O’Toole’s coverage of their national security stances:
A-Team debate, 9 p.m. ET: Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and John Kasich.
B-Team debate, 5 p.m. ET: Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore.
See where voters currently stand, in one concise, dramatic chart from AFP. And be sure to look for Defense One’s breakdown of all things national security during the debate on Thursday.
Friends on different sides: In the corners for two frontrunners — former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — will be a pair of old friends and law-firm partners who decided to back different candidates. Look for their story, and what it says about the future of the Republican Party, later today at Defense One.
Meanwhile, the FBI is looking into the security of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail setup. Read that triple-bylined Washington Post piece, here.
We’re hitting the campaign trail: As Congress and most of Washington gets out of town this August, Defense One will be heading off to follow the candidates. Iowa State Fair snack suggestions, anyone?
Could a large Army exercise in California reveal changing expectations about future wars? Now underway in the Mojave Desert, the Operation Dragon Spear drill showed a pivot from preparing for counterinsurgency to more conventional, high-intensity conflicts, Vice News’ Ryan Faith writes. Tonight, Vice will be live broadcasting the exercise’s highlight—a nighttime airborne assault—but you can catch Faith’s preview here.
And oh by the way—the Army actually grew in the month of June. “There were 491,177 Regular Army soldiers on active duty July 1, which, despite the drawdown, was 851 more than were in service June 1,” Army Times reported Tuesday.
For a little context: “Army recruiting was sluggish this spring, so much so that the service missed its accessions goal for May by 5,200 soldiers. However, strong recruiting in June and July have pushed the year-to-date total to 44,000, which is just 15,000 shy of the 59,000 year-end goal for fiscal 2015.”
Tattoo crackdown, reversed: Army chief Gen. Ray Odierno stepped up to take the blame for the branch’s much-lampooned policies imposed during former enlisted chief Raymond Chandler’s era. That, here.
And lastly today, we celebrate Jon Stewart’s final appearance on The Daily Show tomorrow with this compendium of nine “essential moments” from the show’s history. There are thousands of clips you could watch, sure; but one of our recent favorites is this one from February 2014 when then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the Army would be shrinking to levels not seen since World War II.