China buzzes 2nd US spy plane; Wargames on Russia’s doorstep; FBI ups anti-ISIS stings; France’s terror-attack app; and a bit more.

Tensions are rising in the air above the East China Sea. For the second time in a month, the U.S. military is reporting an unsafe intercept of an American reconnaissance plane near the Chinese coast. “The jet was one of two Chinese J-10 fighters that intercepted a U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane on routine patrol Tuesday, the Pacific Command said in a statement,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

PACOM: “One of the intercepting Chinese jets had an unsafe excessive rate of closure on the RC-135 aircraft...Initial assessment is that this seems to be a case of improper airmanship, as no other provocative or unsafe maneuvers occurred.”

China: “The U.S. continues to carry out close reconnaissance activities against China, which severely undermines China’s maritime security,” said foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei, who refused to address whether the intercept was timed to coincide with the U.S.-China talks in Beijing. “I think you need to ask the U.S. about that,” he said.

A bit more on the location of Tuesday’s encounter: “The East China Sea is a sensitive area for China and Japan, an American treaty ally. Islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China, a group of uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea, are the center of a bitter territorial dispute between the two countries, which regularly dispatch patrol ships close to them.”

Tuesday’s episode is also the “second such incident since Beijing and Washington agreed in September on rules of behavior for air encounters—an agreement hailed by both sides as an important step in stabilizing military relations.” More from the Journal, here.

Wargames on Russia’s doorstep. “The biggest military exercise in eastern Europe since the Cold War kicked off in earnest Tuesday as roughly 2,000 NATO paratroopers were set to fill the skies over Poland,” the Washington Post reported.

“Thirty-five U.S. paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division’s quick reaction force—cheeks, foreheads and necks slathered in green-brown camouflage paint—jumped into Poland Tuesday in a tightly timed sequence that lasted only 22 seconds,” Bloomberg adds. “They were in the lead plane of six C-17s that dropped more than 400 Americans in a simultaneous operation with Polish and British paratroopers to show the allies could deter an assertive Russia after President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine. It’s being run in combination with a major Polish land exercise called ‘Exercise Anakonda.’”

Simultaneously, “adjacent to Anakonda, a large-scale amphibious exercise, known as Baltops 2016 is underway in the Baltic Sea. Now in its 44th year, Baltops 2016 began on June 4 and includes 17 countries and more than 6,000 troops.

Timed ahead of an alliance summit: “Anakonda and Baltops 2016 are scheduled just weeks before NATO’s July summit in Warsaw,” writes the Post, “where it is expected that NATO will agree to deploy almost 5,000 troops from Britain, the United States and Germany to Poland.”

More than 30,000 troops from 24 different countries, “including non-NATO states such as Finland and Kosovo, are set to participate in a series of events spread across Poland. The exercise is designed to emulate a “joint defensive operation on a large scale,” the U.S. Army’s statement read.

Involved: “live-fire training, the deployment of air defenses, bridging operations across the Vistula river, operating in an electronic warfare environment and unspecified ‘cyber’ operations.”

Also involved: More than 450 U.S. Airmen, Air Force Times adds, along with “Twenty U.S. F-16s from the 31st Fighter Wing out of Aviano Air Base, Italy, and the 138th Fighter Wing, Tulsa Air National Guard Base, Oklahoma, are at Lask air base, as part of Aviation Detachment 16-3, the latest rotation, U.S. Air Forces Europe officials told Air Force Times Tuesday. Separately, four KC-135s from the 100th Air Refueling Wing, RAF Mildenhall, U.K., and from the 434th Air Refueling Wing, Grissom Air Reserve Base, Indiana, are at Powidz air base.”

The Post also has a vaguely dismissive response on all the maneuvering from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov near the bottom of their report, here.

In Iraq, reports of abuse are plaguing the Fallujah offensive while Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi just sacked his intelligence chief, CNN and the WSJ reported. Abadi’s move to ditch Zuhair al-Gharbawi follows another decision to dismiss the head of Iraqi state media as well as directors at six state-owned banks, part of a broader move “to push through government reforms in the face of growing popular protests,” the Journal writes. “Mr. Abadi agrees with the need to shuffle his cabinet, but efforts to do so have stalled in parliament. A majority of Iraq’s 328 parliamentarians must approve new cabinet members. Parliament is currently out of session and hasn’t met since April, when hundreds of Mr. Sadr’s followers broke into Baghdad’s heavily fortified International Zone and stormed the parliament building. Ihssan al-Shemari, an Iraqi political analyst, said Tuesday’s dismissals were one way Mr. Abadi was appeasing protesters while the political process was on hold.”

And to Fallujah now, where the UN says civilians escaping the ISIS-held city “face the possibility of ‘severe physical abuse’ and even summary execution at the hands of armed groups allied with the Iraqi government,” CNN reported. “Though the U.N. statement does not name any specific groups, Shia militias known as the Popular Mobilization Units have been supporting the Iraqi army and security forces in the ongoing battle to retake Falluja from ISIS, which has held the city since 2014.”

And in Syria, here’s disturbing video acquired by the BBC from the city of Aleppo, where Syrian and Russian warplanes have escalated their air campaign dramatically—and, judging by the footage, rather indiscriminately—in recent days. Warning, the footage shows badly wounded children among many others buried and sometimes pulled from rubble.

From Defense One

In 48 hours: Join us at the Newseum or online for Defense One’s first-ever Tech Summit on Friday, June 10. Keynoted by SecDef Ash Carter, the agenda includes speakers from Silicon Valley to Crystal City, including DOD, NSA, DARPA, USAF, and more. Get the full schedule, registration page, livestream link, here.

Afghanistan needs a settlement, not another troop-withdrawal deadline. The U.S. objective in Afghanistan is not to leave; it is to end the war on terms Americans and Afghans can live with. CFR’s Stephen Biddle makes the argument against war-on-the-clock, here.

Now China’s fake island has a farm. Hospitals, gardens, lighthouses, and Céline Dion cover artists are some of the softer elements joining the jets and runways on the contested Fiery Cross Reef. Via Quartz, here.

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of The D Brief, by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1959, the guided missile submarine USS Barbaro and the U.S. Post Office attempted the first and only trial of Missile Mail. Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.

The FBI is fighting ISIS wannabes by increasing the number of stings, The New York Times reports. “Undercover operations, once seen as a last resort, are now used in about two of every three prosecutions involving people suspected of supporting the Islamic State, a sharp rise in the span of just two years, according to a New York Times analysis.

Agents have reportedly helped “people suspected of being extremists acquire weapons, scope out bombing targets and find the best routes to Syria to join the Islamic State,” the Times writes. “Charges have been brought against nearly 90 Americans believed to be linked to the group.”

The problem: “The increase in the number of these secret operations, which put operatives in the middle of purported plots, has come with little public or congressional scrutiny, and the stings rely on F.B.I. guidelines that predate the rise of the Islamic State.” More here.

France just built an app to help citizens during terror attacks, the Journal reports this morning ahead of the Euro 2016 football, er, soccer, tournament that begins Friday—the first major tournament held in western Europe in eight years.

“The app, called SAIP (Système d’alerte et d’information des populations)... geolocates users who are near a potential attack and sends them an alert within 15 minutes with safety instructions, France’s interior ministry said Wednesday. The app is free and available in French and English for Apple and Android phones, the interior ministry said.” Authorities are hoping that, in event of an attack, telephone hotlines will become at least a little less overwhelmed than they were during the last attacks to hit Paris. More here.

Croatia, Tunisia to get recently-retired U.S. Kiowa armed scout helicopters. “Croatia became the first nation to acquire excess Kiowas when its defense ministry signed a letter of offer and acceptance for 16 helicopters in mid-February... In early May, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) notified Congress of the possible FMS to Tunisia of Kiowa Warrior equipment, training and support, including 10 AGM-114R Hellfire missiles and 82 Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System rounds, in a transaction valued at $100 million. Under a separate notification, Tunisia was approved to receive 24 OH-58Ds through the Excess Defense Articles program. That use case ‘is approved and set for execution,’” the Army said in response to an Aviation International News inquiry.

The U.S. Army is rolling out a new “all-in-one hearing system that not only boosts the hearing of troops in the field, it also acts to cut down the noise of battle,” Popular Mechanics reports. Known as the Tactical Communication and Protective System, or TCAPs, they cost $2k a pop and are designed to stifle noises “that reach a set decibel threshold. The wearer can still hear gunshots and estimate their direction, but the noise is dampened to a non-damaging level thanks to microphones that detect the noise, and internals that use sound canceling technology to modify it for a wearer's ears. At the same time, the decibel cap allows TCAPS-equipped soldiers to hear the voices of others around him, including through radios and other communications equipment.”

What’s more: “Not only is TCAPS a safety device, it’s also an acoustic sensor: The same microphones the system uses to constantly detect and screen noise can be turned up to detect sounds even the naked human ear would have trouble finding.”

So far, “about 20,000 TCAPS units have been deployed Army-wide. That's enough to equip about three divisions' worth of combat troops with the $2,000 device.” Read the rest—or watch a video of the device at work—here.

Ever wondered what it’s like to fly an F/A-18 sortie? CNN did, so they went inside one and brought back footage. Find that, here.

Finally today, if you’ve ever wanted to ride in a tank and shoot up a team of 15 other tanks, you can do that now—virtually, anyway. It’s in a video game rather directly titled, “World of Tanks,” and the folks at the military entertainment site We Are the Mighty got paid to play the game and tell you all about it: “The game features 450 tanks complete with their own handling, armor, and weapons characteristics as well as notes about their history and development. Historical accuracy is important to “World of Tanks,” and the tanks and weapons are carefully created to match their real-world counterparts. The game does take some liberties with the historical accuracy, though, tweaking some weapons and stats to keep the game balanced and fun.” A bit more on that diversion from reality, here.