Pentagon seeks flexy electronics; NATO preps for hybrid war; Tbilisi’s surprising contribution; JSOC insider pulls back the curtain; And a bit more.

Bendable electronics—think touchscreens that wrap around your arm, or aircraft wings made of sensors—that’s the next step in Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s rapid campaign to invite Silicon Valley companies to help the U.S. create a next-gen military, Defense One’s Kevin Baron and Patrick Tucker report. For the consumer market, breakthroughs in flexible electronics could foster an explosion in wearable computers. For the Defense Department, the potential applications start with slashing the size and power consumption of the devices that troops carry.
What are these flexible electronics? “Ultra-thin silicon bits printed or pasted onto stretchable substrates, freeing computers, their parts, and other electronics from stiff circuit boards and chipsets,” Baron and Tucker write. “One major application could be new types of computer displays that could fold like a fabric sleeve around a soldier’s arm, replacing heavy and bulky computer equipment.”
Who could benefit the most? “Aircraft-makers, who could use flexible electronics to fit a lot more stealth, electronic warfare, and communications capabilities onto jets, spy planes and drones.”
The $cope of the project. “Over the next five years, the Defense Department will contribute $75 million via the Air Force Research Laboratory, while 96 companies, 11 labs and universities, and other state and local government partners will pitch in $90 million in funding for a new research institute to be run by the FlexTech Alliance, a San Jose-based public-private consortium founded to invent and improve ‘flexible hybrid electronics.’” Catch the full report, here.

NATO is getting ready for its most complex military drills in decades, featuring more than 36,000 NATO troops from 27 member countries and seven partner nations, along with more than 140 aircraft, 60 ships and submarines. The forces will be confronted with a range of hybrid combat scenarios the alliance might face in the near future, Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber reports. The exercise is called Trident Juncture and it will take place in and around Spain, Portugal, and Italy during October and November. “The last time NATO assembled so many forces for a wargame was in 2002; this year’s event is considered even more complicated,” Weisgerber writes.
“In terms of intensity, this exercise is stronger than NATO has been training [for], perhaps since the end of the Cold War,” said French Air Force Gen. Jean-Paul Paloméros, leader of the NATO command that coordinates alliance training.
A diminished role for COIN. The goal of Trident Juncture is to re-train in maneuver warfare, “which is an expertise that we have lost for the last two decades because of the nature of operations in which we were involved,” Paloméros said. By contrast, NATO forces have spent most of the past decade fighting counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The next exercise like this will include an Article 5 scenario, in which the alliance must respond to an attack on a NATO country, Paloméros said. That’s set to take place in Norway, the Baltic Sea and North Sea—but likely not until 2018. Read the rest, here.
NATO just opened a new joint training base in non-NATO member country, Georgia—where Russia still occupies some 20 percent of Georgian territory since their 2008 occupation, the Wall Street Journal’s Julian Barnes reports from Brussels.
Underappreciated fact: “Georgia has been the most active partner of the alliance, and currently provides the second highest number of troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan.” According to the latest figures from the alliance, Georgia contributes 885 troops; second to the U.S. contribution 6,827.
Meantime in the Balkans, the alliance’s air policing mission is declining from 16 to 8 jets beginning in September. But NATO officials aren’t calling it a “reduction but rather a rationalization of the mission to balance the number of NATO fighters needed against the threat from Russia,” IHS Janes reports.
Russia’s weakening economy is forcing it to pump the brakes on multi-billion dollar plans to upgrade its military, WSJ’s Thomas Grove reports from Moscow. What’s getting cut? “The number of Sukhoi T-50 stealth fighters it will buy in its initial order from as many as 100 to 12” amid reports “industry officials say state defense and security firms have been asked to reduce their expenditures by 10%.” Not that any of this kept Moscow from showing off its wares what Grove called a “biennial air and space extravaganza.” More on that here.
ICYMI: Were Russian military casualty figures from Ukraine just revealed? An article entitled “Increases in Pay for Military in 2015” posted in a Russian finance daily called Business Life (Delovaya Zhizn) may have inadvertently revealed “what appear to be official figures on the number of Russian soldiers killed or made invalids ‘in eastern Ukraine,’” Forbes’ Paul Roderick Gregory writes. “Russian censors quickly removed the offending material but not before it had been webcached by the Ukrainian journal Novy Region (New Region).”

Turning now to Syria, the UN has begun the tricky business of getting warring parties to consent to an investigation of new allegations chemical weapons were used on the battlefield. “The Syrian government denies using chemical weapons but the United States and other Western nations contend Syria's government is to blame, especially for barrel bombs containing chlorine and other toxic agents dropped by helicopters, since the opposition doesn't have aircraft,” AP reports.
In Turkey, PKK militants continued their attacks on Ankara’s troops, attacking a military base in the southeastern city of Cizre, killing seven people with rocket launchers. That from Reuters.
And there’s a bit more info on the work of alleged former leader of the Islamic State group’s hacking arm, British citizen Junaid Hussain of the so-called Cyber Caliphate. WSJ reports “Mr. Hussain developed a hacking tool, or malware, that could be used to spy on other machines, called a remote access Trojan, or RAT. He was training other Islamic State members in how to use hacker techniques,” and may have helped influence an ISIS-wide ban of Apple products in December—a ban which, in May, extended to Samsung Galaxy smartphones as well. That story, here.
Uzbekistan gets a multi-faceted invite to the anti-ISIS party. The coalition, of course, has a military component, a counter-illicit financing component, a foreign fighter tracking facet and about a half-dozen other “lines of effort,” and “Uzbekistan or any other country can choose to contribute to one or more of those elements,” Daniel Rosenblum, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia, told reporters during a visit to the Uzbek capital Thursday.

From Defense One

Don’t miss this inside look at how JSOC harnessed networks to take on terrorists. Chris Fussell, a former SEAL and aide to the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, outlines how the organization altered its culture to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. Moving to network-enabled action is necessary to fight ISIS, and a lot more besides. Read his piece in Defense One, here.

A critic has 10 questions for President Obama about the Iran deal. They’re from Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who laid out his misgivings earlier this month and has now expanded upon them in conversations with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Read them, here.

Here’s a twist. NSA let German spies use one of its most powerful internet surveillance tools. Germany’s internal spy agency traded surveillance data on its citizens for access to XKeyscore, Die Zeit newspaper says. It’s an unexpected development; the countries’ diplomatic relationship has been strained by revelations of American spying on its European ally. National Journal’s Dustin Volz has the story.

A new approach to preventing terrorism needs an international organization to focus the effort. That’s the argument from Khalid Koser and Amy E. Cunningham, who say such a body could help the “countering violent extremism” movement reduce redundancy and promote buy-in.

What is CVE? “Unlike counterterrorism approaches that rely on broad security legislation or heavily-militarized responses, CVE focuses on prevention by trying to alleviate underlying causes of injustice — endemic poverty, ethnic and religious tensions, and political marginalization — with the goal of building more conflict-resilient communities.” Read their whole piece, here.

Welcome to Friday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Brad Peniston. Want to share The D Brief with a friend? Here’s our subscribe link. 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.

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman will drop by the White House next Friday, “less than two weeks before a possible U.S. congressional vote on last month's landmark nuclear agreement between six world powers and Iran,” Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, 2016 hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are teaming up to lampoon the Iran deal in a Washington rally “tentatively set for September 9,” NBC News reports. How Trump describes it: “It’s essentially a protest against the totally incompetent deal that we’re making with Iran.”
Friends with benefits: “We want to win over all the supporters of other candidates,” Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said earlier this month. “[Trump] has the most voters that we hope to eventually win their support.” More on that from The Washington Post, here.
Scott Walker escalates his national security rhetoric. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is set to deliver a speech today at The Citadel in South Carolina that his campaign says is titled, “The Retreat is Over: America Will Not Be Intimidated.” In excerpts provided to The Washington Examiner, Walker is heavy on use of the word “evil” to describe Iran and ISIS, but there’s little in the way of plans on either front short of the easy-to-utter promise that “America can and will defeat this threat and eradicate this evil.”
And on the Democratic side—the Democratic National Committee’s “Veterans and Military Families” website, in particular—party officials would be advised to double-check their photo spreads. That is, if their desire is to truly connect with U.S. veterans and not those from Poland. That’s the blunder at the heart of this Military Times report from Leo Shane III.

In the world of new military gear, Boeing unveiled a laser cannon “specifically designed to turn unmanned aircraft into flaming wreckage,” Wired reports. “Wednesday morning, the company showed off its Compact Laser Weapon System for media in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a much smaller, significantly more portable version of the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) Boeing demonstrated last year. This setup looks like an overgrown camera, swiveling around on a tripod.”
The whole set-up is “small enough to fit in four suitcase-sized boxes and can be set up by a pair of soldiers or technicians in just a few minutes.” Read the rest here.

And here’s this for your weekend #LongRead: “Is America an Empire?” The inquiry over at War on the Rocks involves a variety of international relations buzz words and phrases—unipolarity, hegemony, the war on terror, new imperialism—and former Air Force officer Tyrone Groh and Embry-Riddle University’s College of Security and Intelligence lecturer James Lockhart look to correct the record in a debate over interpretations that’s “already ‘verging on dogma’ in the American historical profession.” That view from the ivory tower can be found right here. Have a great weekend, everyone.