White House: talk nice about China; Philippines eyes non-US ties; The Debate, natsec edition; A new slogan for the Marines?; and just a bit more.
White House to Pentagon: You will now use new, nicer talking points on China. For starters, strike “great power competition” from your notes. Navy Times reports that “the National Security Council ordered Pentagon leaders to strike out that phrase and find something less inflammatory, according to four officials familiar with the classified document.”
The purported reason: “Obama administration officials and some experts say ‘great power competition’ inaccurately frames the U.S. and China as on a collision course, but other experts warn that China’s ship building, man-made islands, and expansive claims in the South and East China seas are hostile to U.S. interests. This needlessly muddies leaders’ efforts to explain the tough measures needed to contain China's rise.”
One senior admin official: “Nothing is preordained about this relationship… We don’t buy into the notion that an established and rising power are destined for conflict.”
The term has been used multiple times by Pentagon officials in recent months, including Defense Secretary Ash Carter; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford; and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, who has perhaps the closest eye on developments in and around the South China Sea.
The Pentagon reax: “The US-China relationship is composed of competitive and cooperative elements,” said Navy Cmdr. Gary Ross in an email. “It is only natural that, as the deterrent arm of the United States government, the Defense Department is prepared for the possibility of conflict with any potential aggressor. At the same time, we have worked hard at reducing tensions and increasing transparency with China by implementing confidence building measures in both the maritime and air domains. We also have a long-standing military to military relationship. We will continue to engage with China as appropriate, while being open and clear about our differences.”
An alternate take: “What this means is we will spend at least the next 90 days with an administration that’s just trying to tread water,” said Bryan McGrath, a naval expert and retired destroyer skipper. Read the rest, here.
A Philippines-China-Russia axis? U.S.-Philippine relations are at the “point of no return,” says President Rody Duterte, so he wants to test the waters on new alliances with China and Russia, Reuters reported Monday. But U.S. officials so far say this is all news to them.
Hard to tell exactly how serious Duterte is, but this morning his special envoy to China just canked a trip to Beijing, saving it for “when the time is right.”
And on the U.S.-China relationship front, Beijing is buckling under allegations some of its banks perhaps inadvertently colluded with the North Korean regime by “using front companies to evade sanctions on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.”
The Chinese reax: Keep your “long arm jurisdiction” out of our country. That from Reuters, here.
Speaking of nuclear material, SecDef Carter dropped by Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota on Monday, in part, to praise the progress made on restoring order and respectability to maybe the most important segment of U.S. national defense—the nuclear arsenal—after a string of bad news stories from the AP’s Bob Burns between 2013 and 2014, including allegations of LSD use (!). Burns returns to Minot to lay out the “progress” Carter saw—adding, for what it’s worth, “Pentagon officials believe it will take about three years to see measureable improvements in the nuclear force and 15 years to determine whether the changes had the intended effect.”
Take a second look at Minot through the lens of the nuclear triad and Carter’s “full-throated defense of the need to modernize all three” legs in upcoming budgets, via Defense News, here.
About that first presidential debate... of which national security discussion occupied about one-third: On ISIS, Donald Trump again accused HIllary Clinton of helping the terror group get started: “President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq, because…the way they got out was a disaster.” What would he have done differently? “But they wouldn't even have been formed if they left some troops behind, like 10,000 or maybe something…or if we had taken the oil.” Clinton noted, among other things, that the withdrawal of U.S. troops had been negotiated with the Iraqi government by the George W. Bush administration. Read more from Military Times, here.
On cyber: amid Trump’s talk of 200 admirals, 400-pound hackers, and his 10-year-old son, he did eventually get around to a policy statement: “We have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare.” The Verge has a transcript of his cyber words, here.
Trump also reiterated a campaign promise to make U.S. allies pay more, or perhaps just pay up, for their defense. This led to a remarkable moment in presidential debate history: the former Secretary of State turning to the camera to reassure people and governments beyond U.S. shores that she “and I think a majority of Americans” want the United States to be a country that keeps its word to them.
From Defense One
Report: Weapons AI Increasingly Replacing, Not Augmenting, Human Decisionmaking // Tech Editor Patrick Tucker: A new survey of existing and planned smart weapons finds that AI is increasingly used to replace humans, not help them.
Rein in the National Security Council // Daniel DePetris: Created as a coordinating body, the NSC has become a policymaking powerhouse whose White House status hides it from oversight.
On the Cyber Frontier, Hacking Back is Ethical — and Even Desirable // Patrick Lin, via the Council on Foreign Relations: Governments could treat retaliatory cyberattacks as 'frontier' incidents, which are not necessarily escalatory.
Beating Terror, Indonesian Style // The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman: Jakarta's battle against Islamic terrorist groups has seen improvisation and missteps, but also five key factors.
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1956, Capt. Mel Apt, a USAF test pilot, became the first person to go Mach 3. (Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.)
Aleppo offensive plods on, yet Syria says the cease-fire is not dead. The Syrian regime’s allied armies snagged a district overnight in the “old quarter” of Aleppo, storming ahead with Assad’s plan to retake every square inch of rebel-held turf in his country. News of the advance comes from Syrian state TV, and both AP and Reuters offer spot-takes on it here and here, respectively.
In case you were wondering, the Iran-Russia-Syria machine runs on Iranian intelligence, The Long War Journal reports after a “top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander told Iranian media last week that the Guard and allies supply intelligence to Russia for airstrikes in Syria.”
Cutting through the rhetoric, LWJ writes that the officer “overplays the role that the Syrian Arab Army and the IRGC-backed Syrian National Defense Forces, a pro-regime militia, have played in the recent battles for Aleppo in order to bury the extent to which Assad relies on foreign patrons as foot soldiers and planners in arguably the most important battle of the civil war yet. The ground forces in Aleppo have been primarily led by Iranian military officers in coordination Russian and Syrian officers. The deaths of senior IRGC commanders attest to the their involvement.” That, here.
Elsewhere in the region, Turkey just hurled another warning to the U.S. military, about using the Kurdish-aligned YPG militia to retake Raqqa from ISIS. The rebuke: using the YPG would endanger the future of Syria.
And Ankara’s post-coup crackdown still has some gas in the tank: Erdogan just dropped 87 members of the country’s national intelligence staff. More here.
The idea of an EU military moves ahead, despite objections from the UK. The Associated Press: “With Britain leaving the EU, France and Germany have been spearheading moves to boost Europe's capacity to run its own security operations. Britain insists the NATO military alliance is the only forum for European security, and London has routinely blocked deeper EU cooperation in the past.” That, here.
There’s an aerial arms race under way across the globe, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The skinny: “The U.S. still maintains an edge—its radar-evading planes are operational, while Russia and China are still developing theirs. But it isn’t just new aircraft raising concerns.”
Complicating the business are surface-to-air systems from Beijing (with its HQ-9) to Moscow (its S-400).
The F-22, F-35, Eurofighter, Rafale, T-50—see how they all stack up in a nifty graphic from the WSJ team, here.
The U.S. Army just dropped Smith & Wesson from its new pistol search, TheFireArmBlog.com reported off a recent SEC filing. No reasons were given for the drop. Still in the running: Glock, Sig Sauer, Beretta and FN Herstal.
Finally today: “The few, the proud” may be ready for a new slogan, Marine Corps Times reported Monday. It’s a great slogan, said Lt. Col. John Caldwell, a spokesman for Marine Corps Recruiting Command, “but it doesn’t say anything about what we do or why we exist... We believe the new campaign products require a unique tagline to achieve the effort’s objectives.”
We don’t know what the new slogan will be, but here are the three ideas officials say will be included in the new one: “fighting self-doubt to become a Marine, fighting the nation’s battles and fighting for what’s right in our communities.”
One thing it won’t be is one “that is more inclusive to women, who can now train for all combat jobs,” MCTs writes.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with that,” Caldwell said. “It has everything to do with clearly defining who we are and what we do as United States Marines. It’s all about our irreducible fighting spirit. That’s the fighting spirit of the organization and that’s the fighting spirit of all its Marines.” Read the rest, here.