A deadly day stateside; Carter’s full plate at Shangri-La; Hi-tech Navy bullets may outlive railgun; Taliban gain in south Afghanistan; and a bit more.
“The profession of arms is dangerous in both peace and war,” U.S. Army aviator Maj. Crispin Burke wrote last night after three separate fatal and near-fatal accidents befell American troops in Texas, Tennessee and Colorado on Thursday.
Five soldiers are dead, three were rescued and four others are missing at Fort Hood after their truck overturned in excessive floodwaters during a training exercise, NBC News reports with the latest info on that incident this morning. “Aircraft, boats, dogs and ‘heavy ground equipment’ were deployed by multiple agencies to search for the missing soldiers, who were from the 3rd Battalion, 16th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. The unit had returned from a nine-month deployment in South Korea earlier this year. Their truck — a Light Medium Tactical Vehicle — was swept away at Owl Creek during what has been a period of historic flooding across the entire state.”
And that search could get complicated today, as more rains are forecast through the next two days.
In Tennessee, Blue Angels pilot “Marine Capt. Jeff Kuss was killed Thursday when his jet crashed at 3:01 p.m. just off Smyrna Airport,” AP reported. “Kuss and five of his colleagues in matching blue jets were in the air practicing for the Great Tennessee Airshow this weekend,” The local Tennesseean newspaper reports this morning. “The fatal crash was the first in nearly a decade involving the Navy’s acrobatic performance jets, whose flights are meant to showcase pride in the military. Local and federal investigators rushed to the scene looking for the cause.”
Said Kuss’s grandfather, Dolph: "It's hard to put into words right now, but it's beautiful that a person can live and die engaged in their life's pursuits. This was his dream since he was a child, to be an aviator, a flier."
Kuss hailed from Durango, Colo., and joined the Blue Angels in September 2014. He had flown more than 1,400 hours, about 150 hours more than is required to join the elite flying team, The Tennesseean writes, adding he also served a tour in Afghanistan before joining the elite flying team.
In Colorado, an F-16 crashed after flying over the Air Force Academy’s graduation ceremony where President Obama was in attendance, the Washington Post reported. The F-16 was a part of the Air Force’s demonstration squadron, the Thunderbirds. The pilot ejected safely, then was greeted by Obama after receiving medical attention.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has a full plate ahead of him in Singapore today ahead of the Shangri-La dialogues: there’s the thorny matter of Beijing’s island-building in the South China Sea—as well as reports they’ve added drones to Woody Island; Beijing’s cyber espionage; the fate of U.S. troops in the Philippines now that Manila has a new president; and now managing the involvement of the Chinese navy in the annual RIMPAC exercise, which runs from late June through early August.
Not on the docket: THAAD missile defense talks with South Korea, though Seoul said the discussion isn’t entirely off the table. It’s just not gonna happen in Singapore.
It’s time for the U.S. and China to start talking about how to move forward on the SCS, writes Sharon Burke and Barry Lynn of New America, along with Zheng Wang, who directs the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Seton Hall University, and who is also a Carnegie Fellow at New America. Their prescription: “The current slew of bilateral engagements, including the Shangri-La stare-down, and the coming U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, do not offer a platform for the deep and prolonged discussion this issue requires, particularly given Washington’s stated reluctance to engage bilaterally on what it considers a regional issue. The South China Sea is an issue ripe for a so-called ‘Track Two’ or unofficial dialogue.” Read the rest, here.
Meanwhile, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain is also in Singapore this morning pressuring allies to back the upcoming UN ruling on competing SCS turf claims by China and the Philippines.
Speaking of which, Beijing took a rhetorical swipe at Manila this morning over that court case, calling it a “violation of international law.” Reuters has a bit more on that predictable and somewhat logically puzzling outburst that has China taking the Philippines to task over the definition of a “reef.”
And on U.S.-Philippine relations, Ash Carter may have to do his best Henry Clay impression as he negotiates the way ahead for American troops based on the island, Stars and Stripes reports. “We have this pact with the West, but I want everybody to know that we will be charting a course of our own,” President-elect Rodrigo Duterte said. “It will be a line that is not intended to please anybody but Filipino interest.”
However, Stripes’ Tara Copp writes while traveling with Carter, “the initial rotation of [275 military personnel, special operations aircraft and A-10 attack planes as part of the U.S.-Philippines Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement] has left the Philippines,” a defense official said, adding, “talks about follow-on forces are ongoing.” That, here.
From Defense One
Join us in person or online next Friday for our first-ever Defense One Tech Summit on June 10. Come hear speakers from Silicon Valley to Crystal City — Ash Carter, DOD, NSA, DARPA, USAF, and more — at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Get the full schedule, registration page, livestream link — here.
The Pentagon’s futuristic electromagnetic railgun may be obsolete before it arrives. But its high-tech bullets may yet find a home in warships’ magazines. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker reports, here.
Gunfight! Does the Navy’s little warship need a bigger gun? Size matters to gunmakers competing to arm the Littoral Combat Ship against pirates, China, and Iran. Global Business Editor Marcus Weisgerber has the story, here.
Welcome to Friday’s edition of The D Brief, by Ben Watson, Bradley Peniston, and Marcus Weisgerber. On this day in 1940, the “miracle at Dunkirk” ends with the evacuation of thousands of French troops. Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
The Taliban are gaining ground in south Afghanistan, using a new tactic: seize a government roadway checkpoint, prevent supplies from moving in and ultimately forcing villagers out. AP reports, here.
In Syria, the UN isn’t going to do aid airdrops, allowing a two-week ceasefire of sorts to expire without sending in the much-discussed aid. More on that from NYT, here.
Meanwhile, the Russia-backed Syrian Army is advancing on ISIS positions near Raqqa — an area where U.S.-backed rebel factions have also been mounting attacks on IS. Reuters reports, here.
And thousands of miles away in Washington, Syrian leader Assad continues a PR blitz. Read more from NYT and WSJ.
The Hillary Clinton foreign policy speech that wasn’t quite. Clinton “delivered her most robust attack yet on her likely Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, declaring him temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief,” writes NYT. “But although her campaign had described the speech as a major foreign policy address, Mrs. Clinton spent more time ridiculing and dismantling Mr. Trump’s statements than she did elucidating her positions.” But you can read the NYT’s breakdown of what she did (and did not) say Thursday, here.
Panetta, Hayden join McCain on the question of whether the U.S. should purchase more Russian rocket engines for its space launches. “Five veteran U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former CIA Director Michael Hayden, have endorsed Senator John McCain’s push to curtail the Pentagon’s dependence on Russian engines to power U.S. national-security space launches,” Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio reported Thursday. “The former officials wrote in [a] letter dated May 20 that ‘for years, Russia has helped fund its growing military with capital derived’ from RD-180 sales and has leveraged the Pentagon’s ‘dependence’ as a ‘bargaining chip in unrelated foreign policy disputes.’ The letter also was signed by former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell; retired Admiral James Stavridis, who was NATO commander; and former House Intelligence Committee chairman Michael Rogers of Michigan.” Read the rest, here.
“18 ways the Army wants to make you deadlier” is Army Times’ please-click-me headline on a brisk wrap-up of upcoming developments in soldier rifles, handguns, body armor, and more. That, here.
Finally this week—we’re 7 days late to this ourselves, but here’s an outstanding and provocative look (er, listen) into the complicated business of kidnapping in Syria. In particular, the folks at NPR’s On the Media dive into the terribly conflicted fate of living British ISIS abductee-turned-PR-man, John Cantile. The implicit question hanging over much of the first half of the hour-long episode: What would you do to save your own life while in the hands of ISIS? There are no easy answers. But there is one powerful hour of radio that you ought to make time for this weekend, here.