P4’s plan to hire AQ to defeat ISIS; China steals another US military tack; The warship of the future; And a bit more.
China is reportedly on the verge of restructuring its military—a “sweeping overhaul,” Bloomberg calls it—“moving it closer to a U.S.-style joint command structure” so that, as President Xi Jinping said, it can “fight and win a modern war” by “shift[ing] from a land-based military to one able to project force far from its coastline.” China’s inability to fight a joint battle—or, meaning with more than one military service—has long been the Pentagon’s “don’t worry about China” card. The People’s Liberation Army still would lack one key component: experience.
What’s new? China’s army, navy, air force and missile corps would fall under one command, according to Bloomberg’s unnamed sources, while also “thinning the ranks of officers and traditional ground forces, helping elevate the role of the navy and air force.” China’s seven military regions would also be collapsed into just four, according to a blueprint Xi will reportedly unveil after Thursday’s WWII victory parade in Beijing.
What’s not new? The broad strokes of the plan were initially laid out nearly two years ago, but the effort has been “delayed for months as anti-graft investigators swept up dozens of current and retired generals.”
A consolidation of this magnitude “would be the most significant changes to the PLA’s command organization since 1949,” according to the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress, submitted in May.
ICYMI: China’s stock market woes are the fault of a financial journalist, that according to a “confession” broadcast by Chinese state media. That dubious whopper, via The Washington Post, here.
America’s Asian pivot update: On Monday, the USS Ronald Reagan became “the new face of American naval power in Asia,” The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Reagan—considered America’s “most up-to-date aircraft carrier after two recent multimillion-dollar upgrades”—replaces “the carrier George Washington, which is coming home to Virginia for a mid-life overhaul of its nuclear core. The GW had been the U.S. aircraft carrier stationed in Japan—the Navy calls it ‘forward deployed’—since 2008.”
This as Japan plans its largest-ever defense budget as a deterrent to China, The Guardian reported Monday. Japan’s defense “ministry has asked for 5.09 trillion yen ($42 billion) for the financial year starting in April 2016...Japan’s biggest ever, after the fourth increase in as many years. The budget will be drafted into a bill in December and submitted to parliament for approval.”
What’s on Tokyo’s wish list? Amphibious assault vehicles, stealth planes, Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, F-35s and an advanced Aegis radar-equipped destroyer, Guardian reports, “as well as Global Hawk drones and surveillance helicopters to defend far-flung islands along an 870-mile stretch of ocean between the Japanese mainland and waters off Taiwan.”
Speaking of wish lists, “A group of British designers with the Startpoint group have revealed concept art for a future warship called Dreadnought 2050,” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports.
“The ship is powered by hydrogen fusion—or if that proves unworkable, then at least by ‘highly efficient turbines driving silent electric motors to waterjets.’ The hull is composed of ‘ultra-strong’ composites of the finest acrylic. Out back, there’s a floodable dock for launching Royal Marines and swimming drones, a deck for launching armed aerial drones, and 3D printers to make more as needed. The designers don’t specify the size of their new dreadnought, but they imagine it would replace a ship with a crew of about 200—perhaps making it comparable to the U.S. Navy’s 15,000-ton Zumwalt-class destroyer.”
How does one steer this warship of the future? “By interacting with elaborate holograms,” naturally. But the big question, of course, hinges on how realistic all this snazzy stuff really is. And Tucker answers that one in his full report, which you can read here.
And while we’re on the future, China may be as little as a year away from completing an “unhackable” 1,240-mile quantum communication network ferrying data at the speed of light. Beijing could also soon “be the first country to put a quantum communications satellite in orbit.” That one via the International Business Times, here.
Retired Gen. David Petraeus has a new (scratch that—old) plan to defeat ISIS—and it’s possibly even crazier than you might guess. “The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been quietly urging U.S. officials to consider using so-called moderate members of al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria,” The Daily Beast’s Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef report.
“The heart of the idea stems from Petraeus’s experience in Iraq in 2007, when as part of a broader strategy to defeat an Islamist insurgency the U.S. persuaded Sunni militias to stop fighting with al Qaeda and to work with the American military.”
“Petraeus’s play, if executed, could be enormously controversial,” Harris and Youssef write. “It would also face enormous legal and security obstacles...Yet Petraeus and his plan cannot be written off [since] he still wields considerable influence with current officials, U.S. lawmakers, and foreign leaders.” Read the rest, here.
From Defense One
Norfolk has a rising seas problem and city officials are racing to figure out how to deal with harsher storms and potentially catastrophic flooding for the home of the world’s largest naval base, a town that rests just 13 feet above sea level. Route Fifty’s Dave Nyczepir has the story.
ISIS has rattled the West African nation of Ghana—for years a relative island of stability and democracy in the region—after a 25-year-old graduate of one of Ghana’s leading universities informed his family he left to take up the terrorists’ cause.
ICYMI: The U.S. Air Force wants to know if the A-10 is better than the F-35 at defending ground troops—not that they’re in any hurry to find out. Tests won’t begin for another three years. That one, from The Atlantic’s Russell Berman, here.
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Kevin Baron. 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.
Bangkok bombing suspect nabbed. Authorities in Thailand claim to have arrested a man who resembles the yellow-shirted fellow wanted for the Bangkok bombing that killed 20 this month. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha “said the man is a foreigner and was detained in eastern Thailand near the Cambodian border, one of several border crossings where authorities set up checkpoints,” AP reports.
In Somalia, al-Shabaab militants could be on the verge of capturing an African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, base some 60 miles south of Mogadishu after ramming a car bomb into the gates and bombing a nearby bridge to prevent troops from escaping, AP reports.
“Eye-witnesses said the Shebab had taken over the camp and were looting the weapons stores, but [AMISOM] insisted it was in control of the base,” AFP reports. “An AMISOM spokesman said the Janale camp was manned by up to 150 Ugandan soldiers but could not confirm any casualty figures as he was ‘still waiting details’ from the area commander.”
What prompted the attack? “The killing of seven civilians by Ugandan troops at a wedding in the town of Merka in July,” al-Shabab told AFP. “But the 22,000-strong AMISOM force has also made significant gains against the Shebab [since June], pushing them out of several strongholds in the southwest of the country.”
Back stateside, Senate Armed Services Committee leaders are indignant over “massive cost discrepancies in the [Air Force]’s cost estimates for the Long Range Strike Bomber program,” according to a letter Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the SASC, and Jack Reed, D-R.I., ranking member, sent to Defense Secretary Ash Carter last week, Military Times reports.
“The senators pushed for a detailed explanation of the 21 percent increase from the 2015-2024 period, as well as information about why the Air Force expects the corrected 10-year estimated costs to remain at $41.7 billion from FY 2015 to FY 2016 without any typical increases due to inflation and other factors. The senators also requested a detailed assessment of the impact to the LRS-B program of the increased cost estimates, as well as the Pentagon's ability to fund the program.”
But that’s not all. McCain and Reed also want “an explanation of how the 10-year cost estimate is calculated, how the error occurred, and what actions the Air Force plans to take to prevent future mistakes.”
McCain’s also none too pleased with continued delays and cost overruns on the Air Force’s KC-46A tanker program. “McCain’s remarks come just weeks after Boeing was forced yet again to postpone a key milestone of its tanker test plane. First flight of the aircraft has been repeatedly delayed over the past year: The milestone was initially scheduled for 2014, then pushed back to April, then postponed again to this summer.” That story, here.
For those of you who spent time on Cyprus—and you know who you are—comes word that unification is looking more and more possible. “United Nations-sponsored talks on reunifying Cyprus, set to resume on Tuesday, have been advancing,” reports The New York Times. The article focuses on the island’s economic decay, dwindling population and stagnant state of affairs. It’s of serious interest to the tourism industry—and a few three-letter agencies around Washington, we’re sure.
Lastly today—In Iran, an old zinger returns. Don’t be fooled by the convergence of American and Iranian interests in battle against ISIS, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard, said this morning. The U.S. is “still the Great Satan,” AP reports Jafari as saying, adding that “‘the enmity against Iranian nation by the U.S. has not lessened and it has been increased.’ However, he reportedly said Iran is not worried about any military threat from the U.S.” So at least there’s that.