CentCom knocks Turkey for strikes; Military to set anti-ISIS force size; Russian spy ship sinks; How to treat our military robots? and just a bit more...
Syrian Kurdish forces want President Trump to set up a no-fly zone to protect them against Turkey. Turkish and Kurdish soldiers exchanged artillery and mortar fire along Syria’s northeastern border on Wednesday, extending the tensions re-ignited by Turkish jets bombing Kurdish positions inside both Iraq and Syria on Tuesday, killing nearly three-dozen. As result, “Hundreds of civilians gathered in northeast Syria on Wednesday to call for a no-fly zone across the country's north, echoing a YPG demand in response to Turkey's deadly bombing raids,” Agence France-Presse reported.
The U.S. military on Wednesday spoke out against Turkey for those airstrikes, with coalition spokesman Col. John Dorrian saying Ankara gave “less than an hour of notification time before the strikes were conducted, that's not enough time.”
CentCom went a bit further, taking to Twitter to reiterate Dorrian’s words thusly: “Our partner forces have been killed by Turkey strike, they have made many sacrifices to defeat ISIS.”
Big FML change in the war on ISIS. “After years of tight White House management, the Pentagon will now have a freer hand in deciding how many of its troops are deployed in the war against ISIS and when they are sent there,” Buzzfeed News’s Nancy Youssef reported Wednesday. “Mattis, after receiving the delegation of authority from the White House on April 20, drafted a classified memo, dated April 26th, to the department ordering a review of FML. That review will include an audit of current force accounting to determine how the military will define force levels, what the department will release to the public, and how. The secretary requested the change, in part because he wants a more transparent process, defense officials said.”
Youssef writes the new approach could include "announc[ing] the type of expertise the troops going abroad would provide and rough size of a given unit at the time they leave...Then, at some regular frequency – weekly, monthly or quarterly – the department will announce the total number of troops deployed, including most of those once exempted from the FML number."
One big drawback for the public interest: "The press and public would be left to figure out the totals themselves in this version." Read on, here.
The exodus from ISIS is getting dramatic. “Two Britons and one U.S. citizen are among dozens who have surrendered or been caught at Turkish border,” The Guardian reported Wednesday in a wider take on how the “caliphate” is crumbling. “Stefan Aristidou, from Enfield in north London, his British wife and Kary Paul Kleman, from Florida, last week surrendered to Turkish border police after more than two years in areas controlled by Isis, sources have confirmed to the Guardian. Aristidou, who is believed to be in his mid-20s, surrendered at the Kilis crossing in southern Turkey along with his wife – said to be a British woman of Bangladeshi heritage – and Kleman, 46.”
But here’s the kicker: “The American had arrived at the border with a Syrian wife and two Egyptian women, whose spouses had been killed in Syria or Iraq,” The Guardian reported, citing Turkish officials, who said, “Prosecutors in the country are seeking sentences of between seven and a half years and 15 years for the British man and the American if convicted.”
But panning out more broadly, “an increasing number of Isis operatives who have joined the group since 2013 have contacted their embassies looking to return. Other, more ideologically committed members are thought to be intent on using the exodus to infiltrate Turkey and then travel onwards to Europe to seek vengeance for the crumbling caliphate, raising renewed fears of strikes on the continent.” Read the rest, here.
It’s looking very much like Israeli jets carried out more airstrikes in Syria overnight, Reuters reports after “an arms supply hub operated by the Lebanese group Hezbollah [was struck] near Damascus airport on Thursday.” View purported footage of the strikes’ aftermath, here.
Happening this morning: the House Foreign Affairs Committee talks Syrian policy options “after the missile strikes” on the Shayrat airfield in early April. Catch the livestream, here.
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Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. #OTD1995: the U.S. Air Force declared GPS fully operational. Got tips? Email us at the-d-brief@defenseone.com. (And if you’re reading this on our website, consider subscribing. It’s free.)
Russian spy ship sinks in the Black Sea. Today 15 Russian soldiers were reported missing and another 45 rescued after Moscow’s intelligence vessel Liman hit a Togo-flagged cargo vessel in the Black Sea, The Telegraph’s Josie Ensor reports this morning. The Russian defense ministry says the Liman is at risk of sinking in its current location about 25 miles northwest of the Bosphorus Strait, according to CBS News.
Update: The Russian intelligence vessel has sank, Reuters reports. More here.
Take a look at a speed graph of the Turkish vessel, which also shows the apparent time of the incident, via Bosphorus Naval News, here.
Other recent high-seas mishaps: Just yesterday, a U.S. Navy helicopter from the destroyer USS Dewey crashed in the Pacific Ocean about 24 miles East of Guam on Thursday, Fox News Lucas Tomlinson reported: “The entire crew, which included two pilots and one air crewman, was safely recovered by USS Dewey after their MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter went down. The crew did not sustain any serious injuries in the crash. It is not immediately clear what caused the helicopter to crash. There is an investigation underway.” More here.
And last Friday, a U.S. Navy pilot was forced to eject from his F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter jet while attempting to land aboard the USS Carl Vinson south of the Philippines in the Celebes Sea, the U.S. Navy reported at the time. The pilot was recovered and the cause of that incident is under investigation. More from Fox News, here.
For your eyes only: Check out photos of “a rare pack of at least four North Korea PRC Type-033 / FSU Romeo class submarines” taking part in a recent live fire exercise. Imagery via IISS’s Joseph Dempsey, here.
An infamous Afghan general is helping harbor former Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province via a somewhat improvised “safe zone,” AFP reports this morning.
The general: Kandahar's powerful police chief Abdul Raziq, whom one of your D Brief-ers fought alongside with USSOF in multiple Kandahar districts six years ago. Raziq burnished a divisive reputation over the two decades he’s risen from volunteer Achakzai fighter to Afghan Border Police commander, and now security chief for Kandahar.
Since Raziq pitched his plan for a Taliban safe zone back in December, “around two dozen insurgents have sought sanctuary in the southern province -— from senior commanders to low-level fighters—with Raziq's trusted aide, Sultan Mohammed, instrumental in getting them to leave Pakistan,” AFP writes. “Three of them spoke to AFP by telephone from secret locations in Kandahar. All say they have been granted de facto amnesty, and some given housing and cash handouts in exchange for not returning to the battlefield.” More here.
Yemen’s Houthis have one less Iranian-engineered kamikaze boat drone after dispatching one toward Saudi personnel for the second time in 2017, NBC News reported Wednesday. “The Saudi Interior Ministry said Wednesday its security forces had stopped an attack on an Aramco oil distribution terminal in the Red Sea on the Saudi coast just north of Yemen. Had the attack succeeded, say analysts, it could have shaken the world crude oil market. The explosive-packed skiff was a mile from the terminal's off-loading buoys when stopped by gunfire.”
Here’s alleged footage of the boat’s destruction, via Al-Arabiya. More from AFP, here.
White House launches national security probe into aluminum. President Trump’s commerce chief has invoke a “cold war law aimed at protecting high-grade smelting” for the U.S. defense industry, “the latest of several potential US actions aimed at stemming a rising tide of aluminium imports,” The (UK-based) Guardian reported Wednesday.
The justification: “US combat aircraft such as the Lockheed Martin F-35 joint strike fighter and the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet require high-purity aluminium that is now produced only by the Century Aluminum smelter in Hawkesville, Kentucky. [Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross] said that company could probably meet peacetime needs, but not if the US needed to ramp up defence production for a conflict. The same high-purity aluminium goes into armor plating for military vehicles and naval vessels.” More here.
Drone maker creates no-fly-zones over Iraq, Syria. China’s DJI makes the popular Phantom series of drones, beloved of hobbyists and aerial photographers — and occasionally modified by ISIS weaponeers to drop explosives. But a recent software update to the control software makes it at least a little more difficult to fly their drones over ISIS-controlled parts of Iraq and Syria, the Register reports. It’s no permanent panacea — even the article itself hints at ways to get around this geofence — but it’s a fascinating bit of help from a Chinese firm to the anti-ISIS coalition. Read, here (ht @CrispinBurke).
Jargon Watch: CRBM. PACOM’s Adm. Harry Harris used the term in his House testimony Wednesday. It means close-range ballistic missile, one that flies less than 300 km. See also this PDF from DOT&E (ht @nktpnd).
Lastly today: What do you do when you can’t get a security clearance in Hungary? Buzzfeed News’ Mitch Prothero has the #LongRead on how Sebastian Gorka “failed his way upwards to the White House, having been denied security clearance to work in the Hungarian parliament, defeated in a local mayoral race in the 2000s, and widely dismissed as an opportunist.”
Prothero: “Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president who focuses on counterterrorism, was denied security clearance in 2002 to serve on a committee investigating the then-Hungarian prime minister’s past as a communist secret police official during Soviet times. That denial, local security officials and politicians told BuzzFeed News, effectively ended his career as a national security expert in Hungary.”
But lucky for Gorka, “Washington’s standards may be lower than Budapest’s,” Prothero reports. Read on, here.