Carter unsold on ceasefire terms; DPRK accelerates uranium enrichment; Boeing needed help on T-X jet; Philippines seeks Chinese, Russian gear; and a bit more.
The Pentagon is not terribly comfortable with the Syrian ceasefire pact, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The agreement’s still-secret text has “widened an increasingly public divide between [State Secretary John] Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, who has deep reservations about the plan for American and Russian forces to jointly target terrorist groups.”
Carter’s reservations are built on months (years, really, when one pans out to include the illegal annexation of Crimea) of Kremlin deception and unpredictable behavior.
“The divide between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Carter reflects the inherent conflict in Mr. Obama’s Syria policy,” The Times writes. “The result is that at a time when the United States and Russia are at their most combative posture since the end of the Cold War, the American military is suddenly being told that it may, in a week, have to start sharing intelligence with one of its biggest adversaries to jointly target Islamic State and Nusra Front forces in Syria.”
Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, air commander for U.S. Central Command, told reporters on Tuesday: “It would be premature to say that we’re going to jump right into” that Joint Intelligence Group with Russia’s military, he said. “And I think it would be very premature for me to get into any details on what those specifics are, because we've got to work our way through that.”
Why the reluctance to look even five days ahead? “We’ve got to get through these first seven days of cessation,” Harrigian said. “I’m not going to say I trust them [Russia].”
The kicker: “It is a measure of the sensitivity of the agreement — for Washington, for Moscow and for an array of other countries and opposition groups — that the State Department has not released text of the agreement with the Russians, or even a fact sheet summarizing it,” The Times adds.
There are quite few legal and liability questions from the terms of the ceasefire that are still outstanding, AP reports. Those include: “The first hurdle is that Congress has enacted a law prohibiting any military cooperation with Moscow in the wake of Russia's annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine...Another nagging question revolves around whether America could be held responsible if a Russian airstrike — approved by the U.S. as part of the military cooperation at the heart of the deal — kills civilians.”
And on how that Joint Intelligence Group could work, “Two senior administration officials, however, said the U.S. will bear no responsibility for any strikes made by Russia or deaths that result. And neither country will be able to veto strikes the other wants to conduct.” More from AP, here.
Meantime, Russia this morning is reportedly trying to coax rebels to stop paling around with “terrorists” in Syria while they work to convince the UN that they’ve secured routes like Castello Road to deliver aid to Aleppo. That effort hasn’t yet produced satisfactory results, a UN official told AP, which writes that “some 20 trucks carrying U.N aid and destined for rebel-held eastern Aleppo remained Wednesday in the customs area on the border with Turkey ‘because of lack of de facto assurances of safe passage by all parties,’” Jens Laerke, deputy spokesperson for the U.N. office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
Violations of the ceasefire continue to come in, though none so damaging that parties are ready to speak of stepping back from the ceasefire. The Russian defence ministry said Tuesday it had recorded 23 rebel violations, AFP reported, while “opposition forces said they had recorded some 28 various violations by government troops on Tuesday,” AP reported, with an official from the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights saying, “The violations are negligible. Most importantly, there were no Syrian civilian deaths.”
North Korea is enriching uranium at a rate that could give it 20 nukes by the end of the year. “North Korea has an abundance of uranium reserves and has been working covertly for well over a decade on a project to enrich the material to weapons-grade level,” Reuters reports. “That project, believed to have been expanded significantly, is likely the source of up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of highly enriched uranium a year, said Siegfried Hecker, a leading expert on the North’s nuclear program.”
That much uranium “is enough for roughly six nuclear bombs, Hecker, who toured the North's main Yongbyon nuclear facility in 2010, wrote in a report on the 38 North website of Johns Hopkins University in Washington published on Monday.”
If you add all that to the North’s “estimated 32- to 54 kilogram plutonium stockpile,” that yields “sufficient fissile material for about 20 bombs by the end of 2016, Hecker said.”
U.S. State Secretary John Kerry is heading to New York this weekend to meet at the UN General Assembly with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts for what to do next with North Korea. Short preview of that trip, here.
From Defense One
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Boeing Needed International Help to Build New Training Jet // Global Business Editor Marcus Weisgerber: A decade of layoffs forced the US giant to seek engineering and manufacturing talent from partner Saab.
Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1812, France’s Grande Armée entered Moscow. (Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.)
French security forces are still arresting jihadis at quite a clip, including a 15-year-old boy this morning. A security official told Reuters “that the unnamed boy has links to jihadi Rachid Kassim, who officials say is a French Islamic State member tied to at least four plots to attack France since June.”
Recall that over the weekend, French officials arrested three female members of a “commando” cell in Paris. “The three women were charged with criminal terrorist association linked to the discovery of an abandoned car filled with gas cylinders near Notre Dame Cathedral, and to another pending attack,” AP reported Tuesday.
The roll-up: “The women identified as Ines M., 19, Sarah H., 23, and Amel S., 39, were arrested last Thursday southeast of Paris in a police operation during which two of them were accused of attacking police officers with knives. Ines M. and Sarah H. were also charged with attempted terrorist murders of public officers and Amel S. with being an accomplice to those attempts, the office said. In the same case, a 23-year-old man, identified as Mohamed Lamine A., was charged with not reporting a pending terrorist crime to authorities. Mohamed Lamine A., who was engaged to Sarah H., was arrested on the same day northwest of Paris. Separately, a 15-year-old male teenager, arrested in Paris two days later, was charged with criminal terrorist association. Officials alleged that the boy planned to carry out a knife attack in a public place last weekend.”
And for a sense of the scale of France’s terror tracking: “Earlier this week, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that ‘every day attacks are foiled’ and that nearly 15,000 people in France are being tracked because they are suspected of being in the process of radicalization.” More from AP, here.
Before we leave Europe, the EU is now talking about forming a military HQ, AFP reports this morning from European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker’s annual state of the union address: “We don't have a permanent structure and without that we are not able to work efficiently and so we must have a European HQ and...work towards a common military force,” Juncker said.
BBC reports Juncker said a common military force “should be in complement to Nato’” and “more defence in Europe doesn't mean less transatlantic solidarity.” As well, “a European Defence Fund would stimulate military research and development.” All that and more, here.
Philippines’ turn to Chinese and Russian military gear to fight drug traffickers and insurgents. Yesterday we flagged the latest from Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte when he told the world his navy is not interested in joint patrols in the South China Sea that’s not (in Manila’s view) part of their territory. However, we didn’t get into the second half of Duterte’s remarks—but fortunately, The Wall Street Journal’s Trefor Moss has, writing that Duterte has ordered “his defense secretary to seek gear from suppliers in China and Russia to fight drug traffickers and insurgents.”
The past: “Until now, the Philippines has bought the gear needed to fight such battles from suppliers in the U.S. and its Asian allies such as South Korea.”
What lies ahead, perhaps: “I want weaponry and armaments,” he said. “We don’t need F-16 jets, that is of no use to us... We don’t intend to fight any country. Let’s content ourselves even with propeller-driven planes that we could use extensively in anti-insurgency.”
Why the sudden shift? China and Russia are reportedly offering “soft loans payable in 20 to 25 years.”
The big picture take for the U.S.: ““There are two camps in Washington—one that thinks Duterte is about to push the alliance off a cliff and there is nothing U.S. policy makers can do about it, and one that continues to argue that the alliance is just too important to both countries and so a way forward must be found,” said Gregory Poling of the Center for International and Strategic Studies. “But that latter group is losing the argument day by day as Duterte continues this anti-American rhetoric.” Read the rest, here.
Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell get the Wikileaks treatment, Buzzfeed reports after getting their hands on some of Powell’s personal emails via the website DCLeaks.com. So what’s inside? An exchange between Rice and Powell lamenting Rumsfeld’s stubborn mentality—a point that’s already been well-documented elsewhere, including Errol Morris’s 2013 documentary (at around the 55:30 mark), “The Unknown Known,” which was an extended interview with Rumsfeld.
Elsewhere in Buzzfeed, they’ve written up another set of Powell’s emails that purportedly show him calling Donald Trump a “national disgrace” embarking on a “racist” movement in the U.S.
As one observer wrote on Twitter: “I'm not sure I understand how it helps Russian interests to leak Colin Powell's annoyed emails...”
Powell’s response to Buzzfeed: “I have no further comment. I’m not denying it.”