Russia alters Syria bombing plan; Taliban are not interested in peace; DoD playing the long game in Asia; USAF open to F-22 restart; and a bit more.
Iraqi PM to Green Zone protesters: give us this Friday off so we can kill ISIS in Fallujah. “”Extra security forces are usually deployed around the Green Zone and other key areas, blocking major roads and paralyzing parts of the capital,” AP reports. But Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said from a facility known as the Fallujah Operation Command: “All our security forces are preoccupied with liberating Fallujah and nearby areas, and imposing pressure on them in Baghdad and other provinces to protect the demonstrations will affect this issue (the Fallujah offensive).” More from AP, here.
ISIS is facing mounting pressure from the U.S.-led coalition at two key points on the wider Iraq-Syria battlefield, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Location 1: “Kurdish-led forces [fighting ISIS] on the northern outskirts of the group’s self-declared capital of Raqqa—part of a push announced Tuesday meant to shape an eventual march on the city itself.”
Location 2: “Iraqi police, meanwhile, said on Wednesday that they took control of villages east of Fallujah as part of a campaign launched on Monday by U.S.-backed Iraqi forces and Shiite militias to encircle the city and then recapture it. Both Raqqa and Fallujah sit on the Euphrates River, which spans Syria and Iraq.”
The offensives are independent of each other, U.S. officials told the Journal, as “local forces in both places were moving at their own pace to exert pressure on Islamic State.”
For what it’s worth: In the past 24 hours, strikes have been ringing Raqqa governorate in Syria, and have been concentrated largely in Tal Afar, Mosul and Fallujah, according to DOD figures.
Keeping track: U.S.-backed forces are involved in four offensives across the two countries right now—Fallujah (air support), regions near Mosul (air and artillery support), Raqqa (air and advisory support), and near the so-called “Mara line” in NW Syria, near Aleppo.
The Pentagon says it’s doing a much better job striking ISIS nowadays, The New York Times reports. “Nearly two years into the American-led air war against the Islamic State, military officials say they have corrected the poor intelligence collection and clumsy process for identifying targets that initially plagued the campaign, and are now hitting targets like oil rigs and secret cash coffers that finance the terrorist group’s war machine.”
The biggest hits have come to the group’s ability to pay, govern and recruit, according to Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who commands the coalition’s air campaign.
The damage: “The Pentagon estimates that the coalition’s land and air operations have reclaimed 45 percent of the territory the Islamic State seized in Iraq in 2014, and 20 percent in Syria. The group’s oil production has fallen about 30 percent (over 400 oil tanker trucks have been destroyed), with revenue from oil sales down as much as 50 percent, the Pentagon says. The Islamic State has slashed fighters’ salaries in Raqqa, the group’s de facto headquarters in Syria, by up to 50 percent, American intelligence analysts say.” Read the rest, here.
Russia says it will temporarily hold off bombing al-Qaeda in Syria so that other occasionally AQ-aligned rebels can separate from the group, the Washington Post reports. “The move comes less than a week after Moscow proposed conducting joint airstrikes in Syria with a U.S.-led coalition that is attacking the Islamic State militant group there,” the Post’s Hugh Naylor reports from Beirut. “U.S. officials have rejected that idea, even as coordination with Russia over a partial truce in the country apparently has increased.”
Slight complication: “Rebel fighters contacted by telephone, however, denied any communication with Russia, which began a campaign of airstrikes last fall on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian warplanes have dealt crippling blows to opposition forces.”
About that offer to coordinate: Here’s why that didn’t work: Section 1246 of the FY16 NDAA.
Russia claims Turkey is providing IED material to ISIS. The Post again: Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin “said an analysis of chemical components of explosives captured from Islamists in the region of the Iraqi city of Tikrit and the Syrian city of Kobani, and a review of conditions for selling the components, ‘indicates that they were either manufactured in Turkey or delivered to that country without the right of re-export.’”
He went on to accuse five Turkish companies of “delivering aluminum powder, ammonium nitrate, hydrogen peroxide and other material produced by various Turkish and foreign companies to the Islamic State group,” the AP writes.
Turkey’s reax: Hogwash.
Churkin pointed to what he said were parts manufactured by U.S., Swiss and Swedish companies, detonation cords in particular. Difficult to know how credible the claims are, of course, since it comes from a defense ministry known to play fast and loose with “proof” when it comes to the war in Syria.
Meanwhile, Syrian rebels reportedly have no interest joining the transitional government State Secretary John Kerry is pushing ahead of his August 1 deadline to begin a power transition away from Assad. That from Voice of America, here.
Kabul to the Taliban’s new leader: come to the negotiating table or face probable death, al-Jazeera reports this morning.
Taliban reax: You’ll just have to kill us, because we’re not negotiating, CNN reports.
The group does, however, seem to be preparing for the next leader after Mullah Haibatullah was named as a replacement on Wednesday—with AJ reporting the Taliban has named a couple new deputies since former leader Mansour’s death on Saturday. More here.
From Defense One
America’s new special operations commander wants to predict the future. With so many elite troops fighting ‘an extremist phenomenon that's gone rabid’ in failed states, Gen. Tony Thomas wants to get his operators ahead of the curve. “‘Left of bang’ is less a technological approach than a people-access approach: being there ahead of time, having relationships there ahead of time,” Thomas says. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker reports from SOFIC in Tampa, Fla.
Pentagon playing the long game in the South China Sea. Defense Secretary Ash Carter expect that for China, like the old Soviet Union “internal logic” will dictate a change—eventually. Deputy editor Bradley Peniston reports from the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., here.
Join us for our first-ever Defense One Tech Summit on June 10, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and some of the brightest minds in military and consumer technology will be on-hand to discuss the future of innovation and national security. Reserve your seat here.
Welcome to Thursday’s edition of The D Brief, by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1865, Union forces accepted the surrender of the last Confederate full general to do so, in Galveston, Texas. Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
Air Force chief open to restarting the F-22 Raptor production line: “I don’t think it’s a wild idea,” said Gen. Mark Welsh, who went on to tout the F-22’s combat performance in Syria. The service, in response to Congress, is currently studying what it would take to do that. (Here’s a good overview by Global Business Editor Marcus Weisgerber.) Welsh spoke this morning at a breakfast sponsored by the Air Force Association.
Let’s face it, folks: the U.S. is in a state of perpetual war, and there are more dangerous consequences to this than you might realize at first blush, argue retired Lt. Gen. Dave Barno and Dr. Nora Bensahel, both nonresident senior fellows at the Atlantic Council, writing in War on the Rocks.
A group of Republican senators want to send ISIS fighters to Guantánamo Bay by way of an amendment to their draft version of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. The lawmakers are led by Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana.
Also on board: Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, Ted Cruz of Texas, Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts of Kansas, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Oklahoma’s James Inhofe, and South Carolina’s Tim Scott.
Their plan “keeps in place restrictions on using funds to transfer detainees to the U.S. or to construct or modify facilities in the U.S. to house detainees but allows for the administration to use funds to plan and design such a facility,” The Hill’s Kristina Wong writes. “Gardner, whose state is being considered as a location to house the detainees, has also co-sponsored another amendment which would strip out the provisions allowing the administration to use money to plan and design an alternative facility.”
Kirk also threw his name behind an amendment that will cut aid to foreign nations who lose track of terrorists formerly held in the facility in Cuba.
Said Senator Kirk, in a statement to The D Brief: “There needs to be real accountability after the Administration transferred Ibrahim al-Qosi to Sudan, and Sudan let the former Guantanamo terrorist detainee re-emerge as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s chief recruiter. While Gitmo remains the safest and most secure place on the planet to lock up enemy combatants like al-Qosi, any country that accepts Gitmo transferees and loses control of these terrorists should face severe consequences.”
Finally today: Is it time to amend the Espionage Act to allow an opening for a “public interest” defense? That’s the idea being put forward by author and journalist Mark Hertsgaard, who has a book coming out on “Whistle Blowing in the Age of Snowden.”
See also this take on how a whole new front has opened in the White House’s war on whistleblowers, from GovExec’s Charlie Clark, writing in Defense One earlier this week.