Turkey escalates its war on ISIS; #SAS16 livestream; Beijing setting the stage for war; The return of painted warplanes; Milley’s warning on land wars; And a bit more.
Catch today’s Sea-Air-Space Expo 2016 here. Join us today through Wednesday as we stream the three main sessions at this year’s SAS conference, featuring Defense Secretary Ash Carter and more than 150 speakers from across the U.S. military and private sector — including Defense One Deputy Editor Bradley Peniston, who’ll be moderating the leadoff panel with CNO, CMC, USCG commandant, and head of the Maritime Administration. The event will be livestreamed exclusively on Defense One, in a new media partnership with the Navy League. Global Business Editor Marcus Weisgerber and Technology Editor Patrick Tucker will be at the show scouring the exhibits and briefings for the latest.
CNO: Allies are key to maritime supremacy. Expect to hear Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, foot stop that a time or two throughout the Sea-Air-Space convention. Writing in Defense One, Richardson stressed the importance of international partnerships for the Navy. “As we face this new reality, we must recognize that the Navy is a node in many networks — from our sister services to industry, academia and research facilities, and of course, our international allies and partners. Our Navy will be stronger if we recognize these interconnections and work with both new and established partners to support our mutual interests.” More here.
Five possible futures for the Navy. Mark Hagerott, a retired Navy captain who is now a non-resident cyber fellow at New America, writes in Defense One: “With the rise of ever more intelligent machines, and the ability for fleets to act at increasing distances, the relationship between the human operator and technology is in a state of rapid change. Cumulative advances in artificial intelligence could produce a qualitatively new level of reliance on autonomous machines that challenges fundamental theories of war as a human and machine endeavor.” More here.
Russia and China are reshaping naval strategy. Robert Farley in Defense One: “Fundamentally… the purpose of the U.S. Navy is to ensure the ability of America, its allies, and its trading partners to enjoy use of the oceans.” More here.
NATO needs sub-hunting planes. The alliance should pool its resources to buy aircraft to track Russia’s increasingly active submarine force, the Atlantic Council’s Magnus Nordenman writes in Defense One. Nordenman likened the effort to the Strategic Airlift Capability—12-NATO members, plus Sweden and Finland, which have pooled resources to buy and fly C-17 cargo planes. More here.
There’s still a broken Littoral Combat Ship in Singapore. It’s been sitting there since January. And it took the Navy four months to figure out how it would fix the USS Fort Worth. Naval expert Chris Cavas’ take: “Just Make a Decision.” In a commentary piece for Defense News, Cavas writes, “it’s clear that when the Fort Worth was hurt Jan. 12 the Navy’s decision-making apparatus was unprepared and unable to come to a quick and clear consensus.
LCS lessons from Larry Korb. The senior fellow at the Center for American Progress analyzes the events of the past 15 years reveals at least four reasons for the current mess. More here.
Defense News’ Cavas has a interview with Mike Petters, the president and CEO of Huntington Ingalls Industries, the Navy’s largest shipbuilder. More here.
ISIS complex attack hits Taji gas plant. The group brought at least two waves of bombings: a car bomb first to breach the entrance at a state-owned natural gas plant north of Baghdad in Taji on Sunday—followed immediately by as many as eight suicide bombers who entered the facility and fought with Iraqi troops before detonating and killing at least a dozen people and wounding another 24 after managing to set ablaze three gas storage tanks, The Wall Street Journal reported. CNN has a more modest summary (fewer suicide bombers credited, for example), here.
In northern Syria, Turkey and the U.S.-led coalition brought artillery, rockets and airstrikes on ISIS positions north of Aleppo, killing more than two dozen militants. “Five fortified defense posts and two gun posts were destroyed, while 27 fighters were killed in areas less than 10 km (6.2 miles) from Turkey's Syria border,” Reuters reports this morning of the town of Kilis, which lies just across the frontier from Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria.
And in a reflection of the tensions facing Turkey as it escalates its war next door, a “homemade device” detonated in Istanbul, wounding four overnight, AP reports.
Ankara also struck Kurdish PKK positions near the border with Iran in the Turkish city of Yüksekova, killing 16 fighters, Turkey’s military told Reuters.
Here’s a window into Turkey’s somewhat cautious escalation in and around the Syrian battlespace—via the Journal’s Dion Nissembaum, reporting from Istanbul. “As the next generation of Turkish military officers has moved to rebuild, it has established strong ties with the U.S. and NATO, which are working closely with Turkey in the fight against Islamic State,” Nissembaum writes of Turkey’s military, “which has forced four civilian governments from power since 1960.”
The main man: “U.S. military and diplomatic officials credit Turkey’s top general, Hulusi Akar, with boosting the military’s influence. Mr. Akar, chief of the general staff, speaks English and served in various NATO posts where he established close ties with his military counterparts. Mr. Akar, who took the post in August, also has a strong relationship with Mr. Erdogan, and served this past weekend as an official witness when a defense-industry scion married one of the president’s daughters.” Read the rest, here. More on the ISIS fight below the fold.
From Defense One
Beijing is setting the stage for war in the South China Sea. Indeed, it might even be counting on it, Quartz’s Steve Mollman reports ahead of an upcoming ruling at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in The Hague, under the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Is there a Hillary doctrine? The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg sits down with Mark Landler, the New York Times reporter who has covered the Obama White House and the Clinton State Department and who recently published a book, Alter Egos, that explores these differences through the prism, mainly, of the Middle East crises that have consumed the Obama administration. That, here.
Meet Guantanamo’s detainee with no country—and the 79 others still there. They include Yemeni-born Mohammed Ali Abdullah Bwazir, who refused to get on his plane when cleared for release from GTMO back in mid-January. His reaction highlights the complexities of emptying the prison opened after 9/11 to house dangerous terrorism suspects, carrying with it a host of legal, political, and diplomatic implications. The Atlantic’s Marina Koren has more, here.
As the threat of Russian missiles rise, NORAD looks to the future—commanded now by Air Force Gen. Lori J. Robinson, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker writes.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, by Ben Watson and Marcus Weisgerber. On this day 30 years ago, “Top Gun” premiered nationwide after initial screenings in New York and Los Angeles. Get your own call sign here, Ghost Rider. Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
Al-Qaeda is rising in Syria—and has plans to get ISIS out of the picture, The New York Times reports after the group “secretly dispatched more than a dozen of its most seasoned veterans there,” according to U.S. and European intelligence and counterterrorism officials. It’s a point Middle East analyst Charles Lister has been hitting on for months, including in a recent Foreign Policy piece here, which notes AQ is working to set up a northern Syrian emirate. But back to the Times: “The operatives have been told to start the process of creating an alternate headquarters in Syria and lay the groundwork for possibly establishing an emirate through Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, to compete with the Islamic State, from which Nusra broke in 2013. This would be a significant shift for Al Qaeda and its affiliate, which have resisted creating an emirate, or formal sovereign state, until they deem conditions on the ground are ready. Such an entity could also pose a heightened terrorist threat to the United States and Europe.”
For what it’s worth: State Secretary John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are linking up today in Vienna ahead of Tuesday’s co-chaired “meeting of the International Syria Support Group, which includes Arab League and European Union countries as well as Turkey, Iran, and China,” Reuters reports.
Back stateside, the U.S. military will harden U.S. base security against the threat from the Islamic State and other terrorist groups, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Friday, as part of a $180 million spending effort over the next three years to better protect troops from attacks. The funds will go to reinforce doors, improve exits and procedures, install better alarms and access controls, and set up an “early warning” system to pass the word about threats and incidents to all military personnel within 20 miles of a military facility inside of 10 minutes. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.
Pentagon releases detailed info on China’s fake islands. The before-and-after satellite images, diagrams and other data, were released on Friday afternoon in the Defense Department’s annual report to Congress on China’s military. More here.
A traveling man. Despite international arrest warrants for alleged war crimes in Darfur, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir gets around, The Washington Post reports. It reminds your substitute D Briefer of the time he interviewed Sudan’s Defense Minister Abdel-Rahim Mohammad Hussein, another man wanted by The Hague.
Painted planes make a comeback in U.S. Air Force. Shark teeth on the A-10 Warthog have nothing on an Air National Guard F-15 in Oregon. From Air Force Times: “It took 31 days to transform this otherwise dull gray F-15 Eagle into a colorful abstract worthy of its noble avian namesake. The powerful warplane is adorned with wisp-like feathers that stretch across its 43-foot wingspan and onto its fuselage.” While perhaps more common overseas, the painted planes are popping up more often on U.S. aircraft, which is welcome news to some. As nose art aficionado (and NPR natsec editor) Phil Ewing points out on Twitter: “These Euros have been eating our lunch in the aircraft art game!”
Lastly today: Milley’s warning. The last decade and a half the U.S. military has spent fighting terrorism may have put the force on its heels when it comes to planning for your more straightforward, conventional wars, Army Chief Gen. Mark Milley said in a recent trip to Tanzania. “As General Milley plunged into three days of talks with senior military officials from 38 African countries, the biggest question facing him was not how the United States would work with those militaries to contain the threats,” NYT's Helene Cooper reports. “Instead, the question was whether the new focus on the ever-widening terrorist threat in Africa — not to mention the focus on the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and the continuing war in Afghanistan — is taking away from the Army’s ability to fight a land war against a more traditional military adversary.”
His solution (one option, anyway): Increase training days for the National Guard. “Its members now train 39 days a year, which allows them to be ready to deploy within four months if called up. ‘I do not think we will have the luxury of four to five months lead time if a significant contingency comes up,’ General Milley said.” Read the rest here.