Go after Assad? No, says White House; No more injury reports from ISIS fight; NGA taps into virtual reality; Another Gitmo transfer; and a bit more.
Obama administration: there’s no clear legal authority to go after the Assad regime—nor an obvious line where broadened U.S. military intervention should stop. After Tuesday’s reports of growing pressure on the White House to widen its anti-ISIS campaign to include Syrian troops, spokesman Josh Earnest laid out three reasons the administration isn’t too keen on the notion just yet: “First of all, how do you do that without harming innocent civilians? Second of all, I’m not sure exactly what legal authority the president would rely on to do something like that. And three: It seems like a slippery slope.”
Earnest kept returning to the administration’s main line on its involvement in Iraq and Syria: the current intervention is aimed at destroying ISIS, not the Assad regime. How “exactly that is going to apply additional pressure against ISIL, which is the extremist organization that we obviously are quite concerned about?” he asked reporters when pressed on the administration’s next move in the war that has killed nearly half a million people so far. The Washington Examiner has more on that exchange from Wednesday, here.
Don’t be fooled by the “false lure of military intervention in Syria,” The New York Times’ Editorial Board writes this morning. Their jumping-off point is the State Department memo signed by more than 50 diplomats advocating action against Assad’s troops. “The essence of the diplomats’ case, made in an internal memo, is that no peace deal is possible if the Assad regime is not confronted with the threat of military force,” they write. “They were careful to advocate only the use of weapons like cruise missiles that would keep Americans out of the range of Syrian retaliation. They also rejected the idea of a large-scale American invasion. But what if the “limited” airstrikes did not work? And however calibrated the operation, would it not inevitably draw America into another Middle East morass and, quite possibly, a military confrontation with Russia?”
Like Earnest’s remarks above, the authors also dig into the thorny legal implications of escalation, as well as the difficulty of working within any “no-fly zone”—all that and more to say, essentially: interventionists need to make a much stronger, much more thorough and considered case before launching the U.S. into another war in the Middle East. Read that take, here.
After a week of waiting and planning, the U.S.-backed force in northern Syria has pushed into the ISIS-held town of Manbij, 25 miles south of the Turkish border, Reuters reports. “The British-based Observatory for Human Rights said heavy clashes were taking place in western districts of Manbij after the alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters swept into the city near the Kutab roundabout, almost 2km from the city center… If successful it could cut the militants’ main access route to the outside world, paving the way for an assault on their Syrian capital Raqqa.” More here.
Speaking of U.S.-backed forces already inside Syria, we have a bit more information on that Russian Su-34 bombing run that killed American-backed rebels in the south last Thursday. Here are a couple of those takeaways from the OSINT investigators at Bellingcat: “First off, the bombs used were clearly cluster bombs as multiple unexploded cluster bomblets can be seen scattered around al-Tanf… Examining the tail fin we can see that these bombs are Russian RBK pattern cluster bombs. Looking at the writing on the unexploded bomblets we can see that these are AO-2.5 RTM bomblets. This conclusively proves that the bombs dropped on the NSyA are none other than Russian/Soviet manufactured RBK-500 AO-2.5 RTM cluster bombs.”
Further, and perhaps most importantly: “There are two issues with this claim, if we accept that Russia did not know that al-Tanf was controlled by a US backed group, then they simply decided to bomb a random outpost in the Syrian desert without having any idea of what was there. A more likely answer is that Russia deliberately bombed the New Syrian Army knowing that they were a US backed group.” More here.
The U.S. military will not be telling you when its troops are injured fighting ISIS. From an information operations standpoint, it’s fundamental (don’t give your enemy any upper hand); but from a transparency standpoint, it’s not the best news for an American public already largely in the dark about a war halfway across the globe that has run up a tab of more than $7 billion.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the decision is consistent with previous U.S. conflicts, Stars and Stripes reports.
Adds Military Times: “It’s an apparent reversal from only three weeks prior, when military officials publicized that two Americans had be injured as a result of by ISIS activity — one in Syria, the other in Iraq.” More here.
But we will still hear about U.S. weaponry in heavy use against ISIS, like those old B-52s the U.S. sent to the region in April to backfill the departure of B-1B Lancers. The message on that air frame’s activity: It has dropped over 700 bombs on ISIS since mid-April, Bloomberg reports, adding the U.S. Air Force may be looking to add a bit of good “advertising for its coming bomber, the B-21, to be built by Northrop Grumman Corp.” That, here. More on the ISIS fight below the fold.
From Defense One
The U.S. military can’t train to fend off the worst cyber attacks on infrastructure — yet. Digital wargames that ‘truly represent a realistic and relevant threat’ are coming in 2019. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker reports, here.
As defense markets shift, it’s time to stiffen anti-corruption rules for middlemen. Third-party agents, who are crucial to arms makers’ sales efforts in the global south and east, are also relatively free to misbehave. Here’s what needs to happen, write Transparency International’s Hilary Hurd and Michelle Man, here.
Virtual reality comes to U.S. military’s mapping agency. U.S. officials abroad may soon be able to use their smartphone cameras to help swiftly reconstruct a bomb scene for eyes wrapped in Oculus 3-D headgear back in Washington. From NextGov, here.
Welcome to the Thursday edition of The D Brief, by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1865, the last Confederate army surrendered at Fort Towson in Oklahoma. Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
Down on the ground in Iraq, The New York Times’ Brian Denton and Tim Arango entered the city of Fallujah and brought back disturbing descriptions to back up the photo spread, including: “Beheaded and decaying bodies. Clumps of facial hair from fighters who shaved their beards to blend in with fleeing civilians. A prison where detainees were held in cages suitable for a medium-sized dog.”
The Italian police have taken on a bigger role in the ISIS fight than you may have thought, the Washington Post reports this morning. “It’s not the first time Italy has dispatched Carabinieri, who have carved out a niche in training foreign police in places including Kosovo, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and now Iraq. From 2004 to 2006, Italians trained police in Nassiriya south of Baghdad. Then, in 2007, they set up a facility at ‘Camp Dublin,’ attached to Baghdad’s airport, where they conducted training until the withdrawal of foreign forces in 2011.” Read Missy Ryan’s report in full, here.
And here’s an updated roll-up of Italy and all the rest who have contributed troops to the counter-ISIS coalition: Italy (440); Finland (50); U.K. (240); Poland (50); Germany (120); Hungary (120); Netherlands (130); Norway (80); Australia (460); Spain (340); New Zealand (110, 143 total newly authorized on June 20); Denmark (130); Latvia (10); Sweden (30); Canada (70); Belgium (20); France (240); Portugal (30); and of course the U.S., with 4,087.
Russia reportedly wants to put nuclear-capable missiles on NATO’s eastern border, at its “European exclave of Kaliningrad,” and they expect to do it in 3 years, Reuters reports this morning. The news comes a week after President Vladimir Putin ordered snap inspections of Russian military readiness across the entire force, Reuters reported at the time. Interestingly enough, the Iskander’s possible deployment kind of doesn’t matter since “the targets it will cover can be struck by longer-range Russian missiles anyway.” More on that, here.
The Heritage Foundation has a few ideas for the NATO-Russia calculus. It involves faster response times for air defense assets (not just air policing missions over the Baltics); permanently-stationed U.S. forces in the Baltics; and the alliance should plan regular exercises “focused on quickly deploying large number of troops to the Baltic region on short notice.” Find a more full explanation here.
Finally today: The U.S. has begun what the Associated Press calls “an expected series of releases from Guantanamo prison,” after last night’s word from the Pentagon that it shipped a Yemeni citizen to Montenegro. The man’s name is Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab Al Rahabi, and The Long War Journal describes him as a “possible 9/11 hijacking recruit” and a former body guard for Osama bin Laden.
Al-Rahabi’s departure now brings the count down to 79, the Pentagon said. And that includes “29 who have been cleared to be sent home or to other countries for resettlement,” adds the AP. “Officials expect to release most of those cleared in the coming weeks, leaving mostly men who have been charged or convicted by military commission for war crimes or who authorities believe are too dangerous to release.” More from the AP here; and you can read NYT’s dossier on al-Rahabi over here.