DMZ de-escalation deal; INF pullout; Saudis’ new Khashoggi story; Wounded US general, ID’d; And a bit more.
Two Koreas agree to de-escalate along the DMZ, the South Korean defense ministry announced this morning. Involved (via Reuters):
- “...withdraw[-ing] 11 guard posts within a 1-km (0.6-mile) radius of the Military Demarcation Line on their border by the end of the year;”
- “They also plan to pull out all firearms from a Joint Security Area at Panmunjom;
- And the two countries will reduce “to 35 each the numbers of personnel stationed there and share information on surveillance equipment.”
ICYMI: The U.S. and RoK militaries decided to cancel their upcoming joint air exercise, Vigilant Ace, which was slated for December, the Pentagon announced on Friday. “Vigilant Ace was last carried out in December, involving more than 230 warplanes and around 12,000 personnel. The exercise drew keen attention because it came shortly after the North conducted its third test of an intercontinental ballistic missile and declared the completion of its ‘nuclear force,’” writes RoK’s Yonhap News agency.
Because of course they did: North Korea defied UN sanctions by purchasing some $640 million in Chinese luxury products in 2017, Reuters reports separately this morning.
What sort of luxury items does a man like Kim Jong-un buy for his pals? A seaplane, as well as “expensive musical instruments, high-quality TVs, sedans, liquor, watches and fur.”
For the record: “The 2017 luxury trade volume was down from the 2014 peak of $800 million, but was only a 3.8 percent drop from $666.4 million in 2016...The luxury items accounted for 17.8 percent of North Korea’s entire imports from China last year which totaled $3.7 billion." More here.
On this week’s Defense One Radio podcast:
- Cornell Anthropology Professor Magnus Fiskesjö talks with Editorial Fellow Paulina Glass about how developments in a remote province in western China are setting off alarm bells in the White House and in the international community.
- Then we’ll get some strategic perspective on the actual and overblown threats posed by the rising power of China’s military and economy — with Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky.
- And we’ll end with a look at some of the latest research in coal — with UK’s Jim Hower, Jack Groppo and Daniel Mohler — and how elements left behind by burning the stuff winds up powering some of today’s most important military equipment, as well as the device you might be using right now.
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From Defense One
Nothing About Trashing the INF Treaty Makes the US Safer // Michael Krepon: From the strategic and diplomatic realms to the budgetary and tactical levels, Trump's decision makes no sense.
The Week That Tied Mideast Experts in Knots // Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies: Sanctions are not always bad, engagement is not always good, and transactional policy cuts both ways.
Pompeo's Foreign Policy? Follow Trump's Lead // Uri Friedman: Pompeo has responded to the Khashoggi affair in lockstep with Trump.
How the Joint Staff Calculated a Defense Program's Return on Investment // Oleg Svet and Col. Garrett Heath: As our office computed the utility of its wargaming grants and library, we learned some things that others in DoD may want to copy.
Mattis Asks Trump to OK US Space Command, Pick Leaders // Marcus Weisgerber: The Pentagon has made a number of internal moves to create the 11th combatant command.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. If you find this useful, please consider forwarding it to a friend or colleague. On this day in 1951, the first known failure of a U.S. nuclear test happened when a Petite Plutonium fission bomb failed to ignite at Nevada Test Site, Area 7.
World reacts to U.S. decision to withdraw from INF Treaty. One day after the news broke in The New York Times, Trump told reporters after a Nevada campaign rally that he would withdraw the United States from its Intermediate Forces Treaty with Russia. “We’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we're not allowed to,” Trump said, alluding to Russia’s Novator 9M729.
Another concern: China. White House officials told the Times that the withdrawal will also free the U.S. to counter China’s growing arsenal of medium-range missiles. Beijing is not a party to the 1987 pact, which forbids the deployment (but not the development) of ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between about 300 and 3,400 miles.
Where would the U.S. deploy its new weapons? Neither European nor Asian allies are likely to welcome U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles, the Stimson Center’s Michael Krepon writes at Defense One. “Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam all seem unlikely to host these missiles. That would leave Guam, which sits 4,000 kilometers from Beijing and 3,000 kilometers from Shanghai — hardly a decisive strategic counter. The only argument for putting land-based missiles there is that they would reach targets in China much faster than weapons hoisted aloft by Guam-based aircraft. They would still be slower than sea-based options.” Read Krepon’s “Nothing About Trashing the INF Treaty Makes the US Safer.”
A sampling of international reaction, via Quartz:
- UK defence secretary Gavin Williamson: “We of course want to see this treaty continue to stand but it does require two parties to be committed to it and at the moment you have one party that is ignoring it.”
- German foreign minister Heiko Maas: The move is “regrettable” and “poses difficult questions for us and Europe.”
- Konstantin Kosachev, a senior Russian lawmaker: A withdrawal would mean “mankind is facing full chaos in the nuclear weapons sphere.”
Traveling architect of withdrawal: Quartz: “U.S. national security adviser John Bolton will visit Moscow Oct. 22-23 and inform Russian officials of the decision.” Those officials may include Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has said he intends to meet with Bolton on the matter.
Thursday’s insider attack in Afghanistan that killed the police chief also wounded a U.S. general. The New York Times first reported the injured included an American general; then the Washington Post got a name: Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Smiley.
About this GO: He “became a general in May” and “deployed in Afghanistan this summer, taking command of a unit with headquarters in Kandahar known as Train, Advise, Assist and Command-South. The headquarters is largely composed of members of the 40th Infantry Division, a unit of the California Army National Guard. Smiley has commanded Guard units in California for years.” A tiny bit more, here.
After two weeks of strenuous denials, the Saudis on Friday said journalist Jamal Khashoggi was indeed killed — after a fistfight in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey.
As well, CNN adds, “Saudi Arabian authorities announced a purge of officials, the detention of 18 people and an overhaul of the intelligence services headed by the country's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — whom US officials privately believe must have been aware of the operation to target Khashoggi.”
Said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) of the Saudis after Friday’s ok-maybe-Khashoggi-died-in-our-embassy narrative change of heart: “I feel completely betrayed.”
So how many U.S. jobs have come from Trump’s arms deals with the Saudis? If you ask the president, it’s either 40,000 — or “over a million,” Axios’s Jonathan Swan writes this morning in a bit of Twitter scraping. That 40,000 figure came from Trump’s mouth in March.
Then in the span of a week beginning October 13, he went from telling people 450,000 American jobs were created from those arms deals — to that “over a million” total from Friday evening at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona.
To borrow that logic for just a moment, we’d like to thank all 4 million of our readers this morning — let’s make that six million — for choosing to get your daily national security news roundup from us.
And we end this morning with a remembrance: 99-year-old Joachim Roenneberg passed away Sunday in his home country of Norway. Roenneberg is perhaps best remembered for his role as a daring 23-year-old in the employ of the British Special Operations Executive, or SOE — the precursor to today’s U.S. special operations forces of the Green Berets and the CIA and others. For his mission, he parachuted into the snow, and then used skis to reach his target.
Joachim was part of a team that destroyed “key parts of the heavily guarded plant in Telemark, in southern Norway, in a raid in February 1943,” the Associated Press writes this morning. That plant produced heavy water, and its loss deprived “Nazi Germany of a key ingredient it could have used to make nuclear weapons.”
The mission — Operation Gunnerside — is recounted many places. But you can read two quick accounts here (Atomic Heritage Foundation) and here (NatGeo).