Spending bill draws veto threat; McMaster out, Bolton in; Another FONOP; Guccifer reportedly as Russia spy; and just a bit more...

A lot of big news broke Thursday, most of it stemming from developments in Washington. Here’s a quick lightning round of the major events:

• The U.S. Congress passed an enormous $1.3 trillion spending bill, including about $670 billion for the Defense Department and $30 billion for nuclear weapons work at Energy, narrowly avoiding what would have been the third government shutdown in less than a year.
• President Trump announced new tariffs on about $50 billion in Chinese imports, triggering huge declines in U.S. and Asian stock markets.
• The U.S. Navy carried out the 6th freedom of navigation operation of Trump’s tenure in the contested South China Sea (the last one was in mid-late January).
• Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster was let go as President Trump's National Security Adviser.
• Former Bush administration Attorney John Bolton was hired as Trump’s third NSA in a year (more on Bolton below).
• President Trump's lawyer John Dowd resigned amid a shakeup of POTUS's legal team; Dowd had been reportedly handling the Russia probe on behalf of the president;
• Speaking to reporters, the president again teased his willingness to testify before Special Counsel Robert Mueller;
• DNC hacker "Guccifer 2.0" was outed as a Russian intelligence officer, The Daily Beast reported in an exclusive;
• And the White House told Congress it wants to sell $1 billion in new arms to Saudi Arabia, including some 6,700 anti-tank missiles.

But wait! This morning there’s a new twist: President Trump has threatened to veto the spending bill in — what other medium? — a tweet only about an hour ago.

In his own words: “I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded.”

This perspective would seem to clash with the Thursday input of Trump’s Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., CBS News’ Mark Knoller tweeted this morning in response.

A big fan of the veto: Senate Foreign Relations committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. Said Corker, in his own tweet: “Please [veto], Mr. President. I am just down the street and will bring you a pen. The spending levels without any offsets are grotesque, throwing all of our children under the bus. Totally irresponsible.”

Which all means, for now “the entire federal government on hold for possible shutdown tonight,” Defense One’s Kevin Baron says. Stay tuned...

From Defense One

The War in Iraq Isn't Done. Commanders Explain Why and What's Next // Kevin Baron: Senior US and Iraq officers say the 15-year fight isn't quite finished and they need to ensure that another ISIS can't rise.

Defense Hawks Soak Up Defense Spending Win. Now What? // Caroline Houck: The backs of the men and women in uniform — which defense hawks say have so long borne the weight of Congress's fiscal stumbles — helped carry the $1.3-trillion 2018 spending bill over a key hurdle on Thursday.

What John Bolton's Appointment as National Security Adviser Means // The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman: Until today, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster was considered Trump's most militant adviser on North Korea.

For Special Operations Forces, Fighting WMD Means Getting Deeper Into Enemies' Heads // Patrick Tucker: SOCOM is getting more intel and gear as it settles into its role as the Pentagon's anti-WMD coordinator.

Global Business Brief // Marcus Weisgerber: Frank Kendall dispels acquisition 'myths'; How the service secretaries want to save money; New VC investments, and more.  

How Much Does Artificial Intelligence Threaten National Security? // Nextgov’s Jack Corrigan: One lawmaker proposed a commission to examine the emerging tech through a national security lens.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Email us. And if you find this useful, consider forwarding it to a friend or colleague. They can subscribe here for free. OTD1983: President Ronald Reagan proposes space-based missile defenses.

McMaster out, Bolton in. The replacement of Trump’s second national security adviser with a third had been rumored for a week — last Friday, Richard Painter, ethics counsel to President George W. Bush, tweeted “John Bolton was by far the most dangerous man we had in the entire eight years of the Bush Administration. Hiring him as the president's top national security advisor is an invitation to war, perhaps nuclear war” — but the news still came as a bit of a shock to official Washington. Here are a few reactions:
An odd choice for a president who blasted the Iraq War. Politico: Bolton continues to defend Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, but as  “recently as March 4, Trump called the invasion of Iraq ‘the single worst decision ever made.’...’It is a very odd choice for someone who says he was against going to war in Iraq,’ said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a center of Republican foreign policy scholarship who served as a senior adviser to the U.S. government in Iraq during the George W. Bush administration. ‘It is a damn strange pick.’”
A man who argued recently for a preemptive attack on a nuclear state. The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman: “On Thursday, Donald Trump replaced a man who built the case for war with North Korea as a last resort with a man who just made the case for war with North Korea as more of a first resort.”
Remembering Bolton’s tenure as an ambassador who disliked diplomacy: Writing in the Daily Beast, Mark Leon Goldberg: “Bolton’s time at the UN suggests that, to him, the natural give and take of diplomacy is akin to “surrender” and must be avoided at all costs.”

U.S., Saudi meeting of the minds on Yemen. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis met with Saudi Crown Prince Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Thursday at the Pentagon. In remarks to reporters during the meeting, Mattis promised, “We are going to end this war, that is the bottom line. And we are going to end it on positive terms for the people of Yemen but also security for the nations in the peninsula.”
Speaking to MBS, Mattis added, “We must also reinvigorate urgent efforts to seek a peaceful resolution to the civil war in Yemen and we support you in this regard.” A bit more from Reuters, here. And even more from the Middle East Eye, here.
What’s the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen’s perspective? NPR’s Steve Inskeep sat down with Amb. Matthew Tueller to find out. Listen to that nearly four-minute conversation, here.

Another day; another mission in Afghanistan. The U.S. and Afghan militaries want the Taliban to give up their weapons and reintegrate back into Afghan society. To achieve that, the U.S. military is planning on taking a bigger role in the hopes some groundwork for peace can be established, the Associated Press reports from Kandahar Air Field. More here.

Eyes on the Pacific. The U.S. is sending more Marines to Australia than it did last year. And that’s an indication, Reuters reports, that Washington and Canberra are escalating their effort to “counter what it describes as Chinese aggression in the region.”
By the numbers, 1,587 U.S. Marines will soon begin their six-month training rotation near Darwin, Australia, a 27 percent boost over the previous year.
Adds Reuters: “In a move likely to irk Beijing, the U.S. Marines will train with personnel from Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, several nations that also have claims in the South China Sea.” A bit more, here.

Apropos of nothing (other than possible war with North Korea): Here’s some f**king swearing about weapons systems, via Kelsey Atherton — writing about drones and our sometimes very unrealistic expectations of what they can do — over at Task & Purpose. Dive in, here.

And finally this week, even though it happened exactly one week ago, check out video footage from Durham, North Carolina’s famous “can opener” bridge at the South Gregson Street train overpass. The Drive picks up the story of “The otherwise-unremarkable 11-foot-8-inch bridge [that] rose to prominence in recent years after a webcam was installed back in 2008 to watch for wayward trucks. Since then, 130 vehicles ranging from box trucks to RVs to, apparently, Medium Tactical Vehicles have ignored the height warnings and driven straight into the metal structure.”
The short story of what happened last Friday: “A six-axle military truck whose roof-mounted weapons rig” failed to respect the “OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN” sign in a fairly quiet, but still apparently destructive fashion. Catch footage of the incident, here.
As always, have a safe weekend, gang. We’ll see you again on Monday!