Carter, India, & armed UAVs; NorK’s big-deal engine test; Navy officer charged with spying; Yemen blows another ceasefire; and a bit more.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter is swinging through the Asia-Pacific this week, where he’s in India to discuss New Delhi’s possible purchase of up to 140 Predator drones—including 40 for surveillance and the rest of the armed C Avenger variant that can carry Hellfire missiles.
“U.S. defense manufacturers hope closer ties will boost their own prospects in India, which is one of the world’s biggest defense spenders but still has major gaps in its military capabilities,” Reuters reports. “India has been looking to rebuild its aging air force and last week Lockheed Martin and Boeing pitched their fighter planes to its defense ministry. In a statement, Boeing said it was in talks with India about the possibility of making F/A-18E/F Super Hornet aircraft in India. A Lockheed spokesman said the company also took part in talks last week between India and the United States on fighter jet production opportunities.”
What’s in the way of the drone acquisition? India would need “clearance from the Missile Technology Control Regime group of 34 nations as well as approval from U.S. Congress before any transfer of lethal Predators could happen,” officials told Reuters. Read why that proposed sale has India cautious and Pakistan nervous, here.
SecDef’s schedule: “India is the first stop on a two-week trip Carter is making to Asia and the Middle East,” adds the AP. “He is also planning stops in the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, where he will attend a meeting of Gulf Cooperation Council defense ministers ahead of President Barack Obama's participation in the U.S.-GCC Leaders' Summit.”
Carter canked the Beijing leg of his Asia-Pacific tour, The Wall Street Journal reported just hours before he departed on Saturday. Beijing officials were informed “several weeks ago” of the cancellation—a “scheduling issue,” U.S. defense officials called it. Adds the Journal: “It was not clear whether the schedule change was intended to send a message from Washington to Beijing.” More (though not a lot more) here.
China’s “great firewall” need not interrupt commercial dealings with Beijing—the wall is only in place to keep out Western propaganda, the Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times reportedly reminded citizens this morning after “eight of the top 25 highest-traffic global websites are now blocked in China.”
What’s more: “China’s concern over U.S. soft power even extended to the new Disney children’s movie ‘Zootopia.’ The military-backed People’s Liberation Army Daily warned last week that viewers should guard against the movie’s stealthy promotion of Western values.” That slowly-escalating info skirmish, here.
Elsewhere in the region: “The DPRK announced a static engine test. It’s kind of a big deal,” writes self-professed Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis: “The new series of the road-mobile intercontinental-range ballistic missiles… are far more capable than more conservative estimates that assume a pair of Nodong engines [noted in previous launch tests]. The range/payload curve for these missile will jump...That means that, rather than simply hitting the West Coast, an operational North Korean ICBM could probably reach targets throughout the United States, including Washington, DC with a nuclear weapon. In other words, the Map of Death is real. We can stop laughing any time now. The joke is on us.”
And speaking of NorK: “Two senior North Korean officials, including an army colonel specializing in espionage against the South, defected to South Korea last year, the Seoul government said on Monday.” Reuters has that, here.
John Kerry became the first U.S. State Secretary to visit the atomic bomb memorial in Hiroshima. What he wrote in the guest book: “Everyone in the world should see and feel the power of this memorial. It is a stark, harsh, compelling reminder not only of our obligation to end the threat of nuclear weapons, but to rededicate all our effort to avoid war itself.”
From Defense One
Nailed it: SpaceX’s reusable rocket makes historic landing. Falcon 9 delivered a payload to orbit, then touched down on a robot barge. Can it bring the cost of space access down to earth as well? Via Quartz, here.
Welcome to the Monday edition of The D Brief, by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1951, President Harry Truman fired 5-star Gen. Douglas Macarthur for failing to “respect the authority of the President.” Don’t fail to subscribe to the D Brief: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. Got news? Let us know: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
It’s a packed week for Congress’ armed services committees as they talk ISIS, the Middle East or terrorism on four separate occasions, and missile defense on three others. They’re also preparing to mark up the authorization bill April 20 (House) and mid-May (Senate). Military Times’ Leo Shane reports and provides a schedule of upcoming hearings, here.
Shebab militants detonated a car bomb outside a packed restaurant at lunchtime in the Somali capital of Mogadishu today, killing five. Earlier in the day, Somali officials publicly executed a Shebab spokesman, former 30-year-old journalist Hassan Hanafi, by firing squad on charges he ordered the death of six journalists.
The U.S. military has been quietly killing a dozen of the world’s most eminent jihadists—and it has occurred in just one country (Syria) over just one month (largely in March), Middle East analyst Hassan Hassan wrote Sunday. The takeaway at this juncture: “Operationally, organisations such as Al Qaeda and ISIL have adapted over the years to survive the targeting of their leaders. Most members and leaders are effectively expendable and the group can exist without them. So the high-level killings over the past month may not have a significant impact on the battlefield. They might, however, leave a dent on the changing ideological outlook, particularly because the targets included religious giants in this field.”
Warring factions in Yemen just blew past another ceasefire date, and the conflict still raging. “The war-damaged capital Sanaa spent a quiet night, witnesses said, but residents said fighting flared in the southwestern city of Taiz soon after the planned start of the cessation of hostilities at 2100 GMT on Sunday,” Reuters reports.
And Iran is finally receiving that Russian advanced air-defense system, the S-300, in installments from Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaber Ansari said this morning. More here.
U.S. Navy officer charged with espionage, most likely to either China or Taiwan, ABC News reported this weekend: “Lt. Cmdr. Edward C. Lin, a Taiwanese-born flight officer [was] assigned to a Naval reconnaissance unit. Lin was arrested eight months ago but his case did not become public until a pre-trial hearing this past Friday that will determine whether he will face a court martial.”
What he’s facing: “According to the [heavily redacted] charge sheets, the officer has been charged with five counts of espionage and attempted espionage. The documents allege that on ‘divers occasions’ the officer did ‘with intent or reason to believe it would be used to the advantage of a foreign nation, attempt to communicate SECRET information relating to the national defense to a representative of a foreign government.’ He was also charged with four counts of a violation of a Lawful General Order by ‘wrongfully transporting material classified as SECRET.’” More here.
Friday’s apparent murder-suicide at Lackland Air Force Base centered around a former FBI agent working with a U.S. Air Force special operations training unit, the Washington Post reported this weekend. “Tech. Sgt. Steven D. Bellino, 41, killed Lt. Col. William A. Schroeder, 39, at the Medina Training Annex of Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas before turning a gun on himself, U.S. officials said. Bellino joined the Air Force in June 2015 and was a student with the 342nd Training Squadron, Air Force officials said. The unit provides training and screening in pararescue, combat control, explosive ordnance disposal and other skills used by elite units in Air Force Special Operations Command.”
Bellino “had previously worked for less than two years in the FBI, partly in the New York field office,” the Post reports. “It was not immediately clear how Bellino obtained the rank of technical sergeant, a mid-ranking enlisted airman, after serving in the Air Force for less than a year. But the Air Force does have a program that allows veterans with previous military experience to join the service full time to take specific jobs that are hard to fill, including pararescueman.” Read the rest, here.
Like Uber for shipping. That’s the vision of a maritime consortium working to put an unmanned cargo vessel to sea by 2020, reports The Telegraph. “This is happening. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” said Oskar Levander, head of innovation for the marine unit of consortium lead Rolls-Royce. “We will see a remote controlled ship in commercial use by the end of the decade.” Read on, here.