More US troops to Syria?; Germany joins the fight; McChrystal pushes national service; US sent junky gear to Ukraine; and a bit more...
More U.S. troops may be headed to Syria. President Barack Obama’s late- October decision to send fewer than 50 special operations forces to prop up local forces inside northern Syria is viewed inside the Pentagon as a possible precursor to more troops, USA Today reported Monday. “Sending that initial force amounts to ‘breaking the seal’ on inserting special operations forces in Syria and could lead to further deployments,” a senior defense official said.
The determining factor: whether the Syrian Democratic Forces, consisting of Arab and Kurdish elements in the north, can take and hold turf from the Islamic State. In recent weeks, those forces have reportedly expanded the ground they’ve seized from ISIS from some 200 square kilometers to roughly 500, largely in the northeast.
This morning: Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford are presenting these considerations to an antsy House Armed Services Committee at 10 a.m. EDT. Catch a livestream of that here.
How do HASC leaders feel about more U.S. troops? “Fifty guys to be deployed is not going to turn the tide of this battle…Send however many guys or assemble whatever coalition is necessary” to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS, Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, told USA Today.
Thornberry isn’t the only one who has grown impatient with the Obama administration’s cautious approach to the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and Syria. On Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told CBS: “A group of 50 is fine for what they’re doing so far, but it’s not going to solve the problem.”
For what it’s worth: 20,000 U.S. troops is the number Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are pushing in this Monday interview with CNN from Irbil, Iraq.
Whatever the number, the U.S. needs more SOF and more raids—as Carter advocated in late October—if it’s really serious about the ISIS threat, Robert Martinage, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations in the Obama administration, told Bloomberg.
Germany is in—sort of, but it’s still a big move for them. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet “agreed to send Tornado reconnaissance jets, refueling aircraft, a frigate to protect a French aircraft carrier, and up to 1,200 soldiers to the region,” Reuters reports from Berlin. But they won’t be directly joining the airstrike campaign over Syria. More here.
Obama on Monday urged Turkey, Russia to stop quibbling and focus on ISIS. That bit of delicate diplomacy comes from the sidelines of the climate summit in Paris where Obama met separately with leaders of both countries to show his support for Turkey in the wake of competing claims over last week’s downing of a Russian jet after it allegedly entered Turkish airspace—a decision that Turkey refuses to apologize for, calling it an example of their army “doing its job.”
Gen. Dunford took the initiative to phone his Russian counterpart on Monday, a move Defense News says marks “the highest military-to-military communication between the two nations since August 2014.” A Joint Chiefs spokesman called the chat “short” but said it spanned a “range of issues,” but declined to comment further. (Did someone read our “It’s High Time for US, Russian Militaries to Start Meeting Again”?)
Some new developments surely on both militaries’ minds: Russian S-400 surface-to-air missiles that the Pentagon confirmed Monday are en route to a Syrian base near the border with Turkey—not that the Pentagon openly views that as a threat, just merely a “concern.” That via Stars and Stripes, here.
And don’t look now, but Russian Su-34 jets are now flying the Syrian skies loaded with air-to-air missiles. More on that, here.
ISIS is getting its bullets through a shady network of Middle Eastern arms dealers. (Never mind the rifles; they looted plenty of those in Iraq months ago.) Financial Times provides a clearer picture of how the ammo-to-ISIS network operates. “Pro-government militia in Iraq sell some supplies to black marketeers, who then sell on to Isis dealers...Most of all, Isis fighters rely on their rivals in Syria’s three-way war between President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and the rebels fighting to topple both him and Isis. This is where Syrian arms dealers play a critical role,” FT writes.
“We could buy from the regime, the Iraqis, the rebels — if we could buy from the Israelis, they wouldn’t care, as long as they got the weapons,” one dealer said. More here.
Speaking of shady dealings—the U.S.-backed Kurds in northern Iraq are allegedly torturing captured ISIS fighters, The Daily Beast reported, adding this caveat: “don’t expect the U.S. to look too hard into the allegations.” That, here.
Some telling numbers from the U.S. on how many ISIS fighters have been killed and how many are believed to remain: “Top military officials estimate that the campaign has killed 23,000 Islamic State fighters, raising their death toll by 3,000 since mid-October,” USA Today reported Monday. Yet the U.S. believes ISIS “continues to field about 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, and they hold key Iraqi cities of Mosul and Ramadi, and large portions of Syria.”
From Defense One
Next Monday—Dec. 7: Defense One Leadership Briefing with Jeh Johnson: How prepared is the U.S. to prevent, defend against, and respond to an attack from ISIS? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson sits for an intimate conversation with Defense One, on Monday, Dec. 7, to discuss how threats are moving 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.
Stan McChrystal has a new mission — expanding national service. “Right now, less than 1 percent of our population serves in the military and, in my view, we need to rethink and create a system where every young American has an opportunity to serve their nation in other ways,” he wrote yesterday at Defense One.
McChrystal went on to headline a panel discussion with former Pentagon policy chief Michele Flournoy and Rep. Seth Moulton (moderated by our own Kevin Baron and produced with the Aspen Institute). Watch that, here.
And today, Moulton adds his own oped: “What can you do for your country? For starters, tell Congress to support national service.” Read and share, here.
The U.S. military just ditched plans to launch satellites with F-15s. DARPA was looking for a way to get small sats into orbit more quickly, but the fuel proved too dangerous. Read on at Quartz, here.
OPM just now figured out how much data it owns. Months after it announced it was hacked, the agency has finally put together an inventory of its own servers. The Atlantic’s Kaveh Waddell reports, here.
Welcome to the Tuesday edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Tell your friends to subscribe here: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. Want to see something different? Got news? Let us know: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
The U.S. embassy in Kabul is bracing for an “imminent” attack following credible reports that such an event could happen in 48 hours, officials said Monday.
And Afghanistan and Pakistan are trying to restart (yet again) the ever-flailing peace talks with the Taliban. “The reconciliation talks were shelved after Kabul said in July that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had long been dead, precipitating a power struggle within the leadership of the insurgent movement. In the weeks and months that followed, the insurgency pressed an aggressive offensive across Afghanistan, prompting the government in Kabul to call for Pakistan to go on the offensive against the Taliban instead of bringing them to the negotiating table.” More from the Wall Street Journal, here.
And anti-Taliban militias riding horseback and armed with RPGs are taking shape on Afghanistan’s border with Turkmenistan—not that that’s entirely a good thing for Kabul as it continues to struggle with how to handle rural security, Agence France Presse reports this morning.
Back stateside, the Senate finally confirmed a new head of USAID—Gayle E. Smith, a former national security aide to President Obama—in a 79-7 vote Monday. “Ms. Smith is a specialist on Africa who also worked in the Clinton administration as special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council. She succeeds Dr. Rajiv Shah, who left the agency in February after five years on the job,” the New York Times writes. “According to her White House biography, Ms. Smith was based in several African countries — Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya — for over 20 years as a journalist covering military, economic and political affairs for news organizations including the BBC, The Associated Press, Reuters and The Boston Globe. She is a founder of the Enough Project, a nonprofit organization devoted to ending genocide.”
State Secretary John Kerry: “I can vouch for the fact that the prospects for progress on virtually every major international challenge we face—from terrorism to climate change to emergency preparedness to human rights to the empowerment of women—are enhanced by the work that USAID professionals undertake every day of the year. So it matters a great deal who leads these efforts, and that is why the Senate’s confirmation of Gayle Smith is such good news, not only for USAID, but also for our country and the world.” More here.
And lastly: the U.S. sent crappy military gear to the Ukraine army, the Washington Post reports. “Three of the Humvees had plastic doors and windows — barely any protection at all. The tires on one of the trucks blew apart after driving only a few hundred kilometers, the result of sitting in a warehouse too long, said one mechanic. Another infantry unit of approximately 120 men received from the Pentagon a single bulletproof vest — a type that U.S. troops stopped using in combat during the mid-2000s,” WaPo’s Thomas Gibbons-Neff writes.
“If the Americans are going to send us equipment, don’t send us secondhand stuff,” one Ukrainian special forces commander said.
The U.S. response: “We wanted to get things there as fast as possible and we had no money appropriated for this crisis…Does that means everything was perfect? Of course not.” More here.