More ISIS than expected; DOD targets projects; AF1 gets pricier; Japan’s new bases; And a bit more.

U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic forces say they’ve captured ISIS fighters responsible for the Manbij bombing that killed four Americans in January, the Associated Press reports this morning from Baghouz, Syria. That’s the latest as the drive to kill or capture the remaining ISIS fighters in Baghouz inches slowly to its conclusion.

Worth noting: “The sheer number of people who have emerged, nearly 30,000 since early January according to Kurdish officials, has taken the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces by surprise. Most have been women and children whose existence in a labyrinth of underground caves and tunnels was unknown to the U.S.-backed fighters.”

See a video of dozens upon dozens of alleged surrendering ISIS fighters reportedly lined up outside of Baghouz, here.

A new precedent may just have been set regarding the fate of some ISIS foreign fighters, The Telegraph’s Josie Ensor noticed after reading this on “Belgian ISIS fighter Bilal al-Marchohi — [who was] among first foreigners handed over to Iraq by SDF — [and] has been sentenced to death in Baghdad. Interesting to see if UK (which objects to death penalty) will allow its nationals to be transferred.”  

Meantime, the population in al-Hawl camp — where Baghouz refugees have been routed for the past three months — is now 68,000, which is well above its max capacity of 55,000, The Guardian reports on location. “Up to 5,000 children in the camps are believed to be foreign nationals… But the exact numbers are difficult to assess, said Khush, due to the sheer number of people arriving every day.”

And ISIS digital teams are still pushing PR products out quick as they can, including this video from Baghouz (including recycled imagery because the caliphate’s down to a junkyard); this photoset purportedly from its wilayat in Niger; and this speech from the group’s current spox, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, including the by-now standard call for new attacks by ISIS followers around the world. Read a bit more brief analysis from SITE Intel’s Ritz Katz, here.

ISIS spox also cited the New Zealand Christchurch attack last week as evidence its followers “will never be accepted in the West,” according to terrorism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam.  

Speaking of far-right terrorism, “Here are some factors fueling” it, according to Peter R. Neumann of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, writing in the Washington Post this morning:

• “On the far right, recent years have seen a profound shift away from the traditional focus on race toward supposedly more inclusive ideas such as identity and culture. The ‘identitarian’ movement emerged in France but has strongly influenced the U.S. alt-right. It no longer speaks about color of skin but expresses its agenda in cultural and civilizational terms — as a duty to preserve a so-called European identity against an aggressive assault by ‘non-European’ cultures, in particular Islam.” Read on, here.

ICYMI: The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood read over the Christchurch attacker’s manifesto “so you don't have to.” What you’ll learn from that: mid-20th-century fascist ideologies have definitely not gone away — like Neumann argues this morning in WaPo — and we should be very wary of that fact moving forward. More here.

See also: This piece from terrorism scholar Colin P. Clarke in Slate about “The Cult of [Norwegian mass murderer Anders] Breivik.”

For your ears only: Listen to Clarke in conversation with BBC’s The World on the dangers of underreporting right-wing extremism, here.

One last thought, via terrorism researcher Amarasingam:

• “Think about how a random knife attack on a NYC subway (or wherever) is seen as “an ISIS attack” either because of (a) a political message (you attack us, we attack you), (b) a pledge of allegiance, or c) even because of something the attacker was reading or listening to. Parallels exist in almost every single far-right attack so far, but we still don’t talk about these attacks the same way as, in Clint Watt’s typology, either “directed, networked, or inspired.” We’re able to - in multiple sectors of government and policy - able to connect random knife attacks inspired by ISIS to a global terrorist movement with some ease. But we struggle to do this with white nationalism, the alt-right, etc. We need to quickly rethink this blindspot.”

Related: Seven active-duty U.S. troops are allegedly part of a white nationalist group called Identity Evropa, the Huffington Post reported Sunday evening. They accused include “Two Marines, two Army ROTC cadets, an Army physician, a member of the Texas National Guard and one member of the Air Force.” Read on for how they were discovered, here.

From Defense One

Air Force One: Total Cost Rises Nearly ⅓ Under New Estimate // Marcus Weisgerber: The $5.3 billion price tag is the Pentagon’s first public accounting to include the new hangars and various other costs.

French MOD Rebukes Trump Administration for Arms-Sales Focus // Katie Bo Williams: “NATO’s solidarity clause is called Article 5, not Article F-35,” French armed forces minister Florence Parly said Monday.

The USAF Shouldn’t Narrow Competition for Its Satellite Launches // Barbara Comstock: The service’s plan to reduce launch-contract eligibility from three providers to two would reduce incentives to innovate and keep costs down.

Trying to Kill the Iran Deal Could End Up Saving It // Kathy Gilsinan: Trump administration officials are publicly united on their policy of punishing the Islamic Republic. But cracks are showing over just how far to go.

Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief by Bradley Peniston and Ben Watson. Thanks for reading! And if you’re not subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1919, Congress established time zones across the United States, as well as daylight saving time. Listen to a history of why the decision was made over at NPR in a nearly five-minute piece, here.

National emergency vs. military construction projects. Lawmakers have waited a month since President Trump declared a national emergency in order to hear which military construction (aka "MILCON") projects would be raided to pay for Trump’s wall.
Now the list — or, at least, a list — is out. Instead of telling lawmakers which projects are getting the axe, the Defense Department on Monday sent a 21-page list of possible targets whose total value is about four times more than the $3.6 billion Trump says he needs, and includes projects in Arizona that Acting SecDef Shanahan said last week to lawmakers were safe.
How they’ll be selected: A DOD fact sheet says the Joint Staff and US NORTHCOM will look at a list of border-barrier projects from DHS to see which ones “support the use of the armed forces.” (A DHS spokesman told the Los Angeles Times that it has not yet provided that list.)
We can make this all go away: The memo continues, “If the Department’s FY 2020 budget is enacted on time as requested, no military construction project used to source [the emergency projects] would be delayed or cancelled.” Read the memo, here.
HASC Chair replies. When Shanahan arrives to testify next week, Chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in a statement Monday night, “We look forward to hearing how he intends to pilfer the military construction accounts, circumvent the intended nature of the law, while simultaneously abusing the trust of the American people.”

Bad news in Afghanistan: "Authorities in Afghanistan confirmed Monday that the Taliban captured 58 government forces during recent fighting in a northwestern district bordering Turkmenistan," Voice of America reports. Now "a search operation was underway in the border district to free the hostages." More here.
The U.S.-Taliban talks latest: “The Afghan government is running short on time, friends and options,” the Washington Post reports in a dismal forecast from the Afghan capital.

Japan opens bases in a southern island chain. Three bases hosting a few hundred troops plus surface-to-air missiles are to begin operations March 26 “in response to military threats from China,” Japan Times reports. “A chain of islands from Amami Oshima to the main island of Okinawa and the Sakishima Islands, including Miyako, Ishigaki and the Senkakus, almost overlaps the so-called first island chain that is strategically important to China.” Read on, here.

China: magnetized plasma is the key to super-long-range artillery. No one’s really been able to make electromagnetic railguns work, but Chinese researchers are trying a new idea: “coating” the inside of the gun barrel with matter in the high-energy plasma state to smooth the firing of the projectile. Via Task & Purpose, here.

Midwest floods, seen from space: Check out before-and-after photos of Nebraska’s inundated Offutt Air Force Base, where record Missouri River floodwaters covered one-third of the base and damaged 30 buildings. Explains NASA, “Extreme cold earlier in the winter set the stage by preserving a significant amount of snow; it also created a thick layer of ice on waterways and made the ground less permeable than usual. When an intense storm brought downpours and unusually warm air to the region in March, it rapidly melted much of the snow and ice, producing enormous runoff in a short period.” Photos and more, here.

Beginning Wednesday in Washington: The 2019 Directed Energy Summit. Details for the two-day event — which features CNO Adm. John Richardson and DOD’s Michael Griffin — here.

And finally today: don’t expect a team armed with atom bombs to save the Earth from a killer asteroid. Mechanical engineers at Johns Hopkins recently simulated an “Armageddon”-style explosion on a massive incoming rock, and found that the shattered fragments would probably hold together well enough to inflict extinction-level damage. Read their article, which appears in the July issue of the physics journal Icarus.
Why we’re contemplating this: One of the largest meteor impacts in modern history occurred over Russia on Dec. 18, 2018. No one saw it coming, and hardly anyone even noticed when it exploded over the Bering Sea with the power of 10 nuclear bombs. More, here.
And don't miss all the “Fireballs Reported by US Government Sensors” over at NASA's site, here.