Russia says airliner was bombed; SecDef challenges allies to step up; The facts on Syrian refugees; Billy goats on Navy boats; and a bit more...
Russia says it has evidence that a bomb brought down Metrojet 9268 over the Sinai 18 days ago: “Traces of explosives” were found on suitcases and aircraft debris.
“We can definitely say that this is a terrorist attack,” Russia’s intel chief, Alexander Bortnikov, said during a Monday night meeting with his president, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The explosive was smuggled on the plane and detonated with the power of roughly 1.5 kilograms of TNT, Bortnikov said. His Federal Security Service told Russia’s Interfax news there’s a cool $50 million reward for information that leads to the perpetrators of the attack.
“We will be looking for them wherever they have hidden. We will find them in any place on the planet and will punish them,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said. “Our combat operation of aviation in Syria should not be simply continued, it should be intensified in the way that offenders understand that the vengeance is inevitable.”
And Egyptian authorities this morning have detained two ground crew workers for questioning at a Sinai airport. “Seventeen people are being held, two of them are suspected of helping whoever planted the bomb on the plane at Sharm al-Sheikh airport,” Reuters reports.
Closed-circuit TV footage “showed a baggage handler carrying a suitcase from an airport building to another man, who was loading luggage onto the doomed airliner from beneath the plane on the runway,” an Egyptian official said. But Cairo is still not willing to go as far as Western and now Russian officials, refusing to confirm just yet that a bomb was responsible, preferring to wait until investigations are completed.
Paris has requested EU assistance in its renewed airstrike campaign against the Islamic State. Both France and Russia pounded ISIS HQ in Raqqa, Syria, last night—with Russia deploying more of its cruise missiles for the task. A U.S. intelligence source confirmed to Defense One Monday night that Washington knew the cruise barrage was coming. ABC News this morning also reports Russia gave notice to the U.S. ahead of time.
In Brussels, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian “invoked the EU’s mutual assistance clause for the first time since the 2009 Lisbon Treaty introduced the possibility, saying he expected help with French operations in Syria, Iraq and Africa,” Reuters adds. “The 28 EU member states accepted the French request but it was not immediately clear what assistance would be forthcoming.” Meantime, French authorities continued their hunt for accomplices of the Paris attacks, conducting another 128 overnight raids this morning (on top of the 168 the previous night). More here.
Back stateside, at the request of House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., FBI Director James Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson will conduct a classified briefing on the Paris attacks tonight at 5:30 p.m. EDT.
Don’t miss this Dec. 7 event: Defense One Leadership Briefing with Jeh Johnson: Is an ISIS attack on Washington next? How prepared is the U.S. to prevent, defend and respond to it? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson sits for an intimate conversation with Defense One, on Monday, Dec. 7, to discuss how threats are transitioning from the battlefield to the homefront, and how DHS is working with the military, Defense Department, intelligence community, and other agencies for a whole-of-government defense against terrorism, cyber attacks, and more. Defense One Executive Editor Kevin Baron moderates the event, 8 a.m. EDT at Washington's District Architecture Center. Register for your spot here.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter to allies: Time to step it up, gang. Carter told a crowd at the Wall Street Journal Chief Executive Officer Council annual meeting in Washington Monday night that the Paris attacks haven’t shown him anything new about the group—but he hopes Washington’s allies will be galvanized enough now to “get in the game as well.”
Carter said there’s “no question” ISIS has improved their ability to dodge surveillance by Western intelligence officials, but he added “a Paris-style attack would be less likely in the United States,” CNN reports. “The more immediate danger we face is more of a lone wolf kind,” said Carter, referring to the attack in Chattanooga, Tenn., as the more high-risk threat at this stage. He also took a sec to ding the Russians (again) over their “doomed” strategy of propping up Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, saying they’d best “get on the right side” of a sustainable plan to crush ISIS and help transition Syria away from Assad’s rule and into a more inclusive government in the months ahead.
And that transition—coupled with the current contingent of roughly 3,500 U.S. troops—remains central to the Obama administration’s strategy in Syria, said President Barack Obama as he laid out a broad defense of his ISIS war plan Monday at the close of the two-day Group of 20 meeting in Antalya, Turkey.
“It is not just my view, but the view of my closest military and civilian advisers, that (sending more U.S. troops) would be a mistake,” Obama said.
More U.S. ground troops would be a mistake, Obama said, “not because our military could not march into Mosul, or Raqqa, or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL.” An operation on that scale, he said, would ultimately fail because it would not reflect any of the lessons learned from the Iraq invasion of 2003, which deposed a leader and left no “local populations that are committed to inclusive governance and who are pushing back against ideological extremes.”
He also cited visits to wounded troops at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., as further cause for reluctance to initiate yet another 21st-century ground war in yet another country. Such a move, he said, would mire the U.S. in a new precedent that the military and the country just can’t afford.
“Let’s assume we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria,” he said. “What happens when there is a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya, perhaps. Or if there’s a terrorist network that’s operating anywhere else in North Africa or Southeast Asia. So a strategy has to be one that can be sustained.”
For exactly what that current strategy is, read on, here.
And that plan falls pretty close to what American voters want out of the counter-ISIS war, Reuters reported in a new poll. “The new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 60 percent of Americans think the United States should be doing more to attack Islamic State… A small majority said they support using airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, but about 65 percent oppose sending special forces to the region, a move that has already been taken by Obama. When asked about regular ground troops, the opposition grew stronger with 76 percent opposing deploying troops.” For a bit more on how the poll results could shape the 2016 race, Reuters has this.
For what it’s worth—the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group departed Norfolk, Va., early Monday to fill the “carrier gap” left since mid-October when the Theodore Roosevelt departed the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet area of operations. Navy Times has more, here.
FYI: the Truman carrier-group deployment will be the first one in years to be capped at seven months, Navy officials tell Defense One.
From Defense One
If 9/11 “changed everything,” what will Paris change? Obama administration officials say the war in Syria was already so complicated that “this doesn't change anything.” Defense One’s Gayle Tzemach Lemmon traces the adminstration’s reticence, even now, to get more involved in Syria, here.
Assad and ISIS both hate France’s Mideast stance — so what is it? “After Friday’s attacks in Paris, two sides that don’t usually agree on anything found common ground on one issue: Both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ISIS said the attacks were retaliation for France’s own foreign policy.” The Atlantic’s David Graham explains, here.
Some high-profile unity is emerging among formerly tense geopolitical rivals. In the wake of the Paris attacks, Obama and the head of the CIA are calling for better info-sharing with Moscow, writes GovExec. Also, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad “improbably seems much less odious, and most likely now has a lifeline to continued power.” Read on, here.
You got a better idea? Obama and his national-security team consistently underestimate ISIS — but their critics aren’t any better when it comes to explaining how they’d lead a war-weary U.S. public against the terror group, says National Journal’s Ron Fournier — who proceeds to dismantle a post-Paris op-ed by Mitt Romney. Read that, here.
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CIA chief on Paris: we must defeat strong commercial encryption. John Brennan and others wasted no time in fingering hidden communications as a factor in the attacks, and Defense One Tech Editor Patrick Tucker reports that the attacks may shift the debate.
Brennan and others also renewed their assertions that Edward Snowden’s revelations tipped off the terrorists to U.S. surveillance powers. The Intercept lays out a history of such claims, and concludes: “Any terrorist capable of tying his own shoe — let alone carrying out a significant attack — has known for decades that speaking on open telephone and internet lines was to be avoided due to U.S. surveillance...The revelations were significant because they told the world that the NSA and its allies were collecting everyone else’s internet communications and activities.”
As of Monday evening, at least 23 governors declared their states would shut their doors to Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris attacks. They range from Arkansas and Alabama, where they’ve accepted few, to Illinois, Michigan and Massachusetts, where they’ve taken far more. New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, who announced last month she’s challenging Republican Kelly Ayotte for her seat in the U.S. Senate, was the only Democrat. They followed a string of Republican presidential candidates, including Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Sunday Syrian Muslims should be barred but displaced Christians welcomed.
“There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” he said. “If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation.”
President Obama, at the G20 conference in Turkey, pushed back hard. “And when I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims; when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution—that’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
Fact check: The U.S. has one of the most exhaustive security clearance processes in the world for refugees. And as Department of Homeland Security officials told Defense One last month: “There is no particular trend that we have seen in the refugee population, nor has recent history shown—and open source reporting speaks to this—that with refugees who have entered [the U.S.] there has been a prevalence, a proclivity toward terror-related activities.” Read more from that special report on refugees, here. And check out Defense One later for more on the gap between rhetoric and reality on Syrian refugees.
President Obama is in the Philippines this morning kicking off “five days of presidential diplomacy aimed at bolstering America’s allies in the region against China’s economic and military might,” the New York Times reports. He’ll be making his sell for the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, even though Congress has not yet approved the deal.
But he’s also keen on flagging South China Sea concerns with allies, “pointedly visiting the main warship of close ally the Philippines shortly after he landed in Manila,” Reuters reports. The ship? The “Gregorio del Pilar, a Philippines navy frigate that was a U.S. Coast Guard cutter until 2011 but on Tuesday flew the flags of the two allies.”
Obama: “My visit here underscored our shared commitment to the security of the waters of this region and to freedom of navigation.”
For the record: “The United States and the Philippines agreed last year to a landmark deal that would reopen some Philippine bases to American military equipment and personnel,” writes the NYTs. “But that agreement has been held up in the Philippines’ Supreme Court, and American officials said they did not expect a major announcement during Mr. Obama’s visit.”
By the way, the Philippines has just received two ships from the U.S.—“one U.S. Coast Guard cutter, one research vessel,” the Associated Press reports. More here.
Lastly today—what’s the U.S. Navy’s deal with goats on boats? In short, there’s a long tradition “dating back to the days before refrigeration when sailors needed livestock on ships for milk and meat,” Navy Times’ David Larter writes. The question comes on the heels of the U.S. cruiser Lake Erie’s former goat, Master Chief Charlie—who is now “rumored to be grazing on an undisclosed San Diego farm.” Points to Larter for this doozy: “Charlie may have been good for morale, he had become b-a-a-a-d distraction.” Catch his explainer in full, here.