Assange arrested; Space Force windfall; F-35s or F-15s?; Huawei’s underwater cables; And a bit more.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was arrested and “taken into police custody on Thursday after being evicted from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London,” The New York Times reports this morning.

On what grounds? “[T]hat Mr. Assange had been arrested by officers at the embassy on a warrant issued by Westminster Magistrates’ Court in 2012, for failing to surrender to the court,” according to a statement from the UK’s Metropolitan Police.

BTW: The U.S. has officially requested Assange’s extradition, The Guardian reports. The Washington Post has a bit more on what could come next, here. And The Independent has the arrest footage, here.

Why Assange might be wanted: “The United States Justice Department has filed criminal charges against Mr. Assange, 47, related to the publication of classified documents, a fact that prosecutors accidentally made public in November,” the Times writes. “He also faces a charge in a British court of jumping bail. Mr. Assange is also suspected of aiding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by releasing material stolen from the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.” A bit more on his background, here.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is concerned for Assange, and “hope[s] that all of his rights will be observed” by UK authorities, AP reports.

Otherwise in Russia, "lawmakers approved Thursday a bill that would expand government authority over the internet and whose opponents fear heralds widespread censorship," AP reports separately today. "Advocates say the bill is intended to address concerns that Russia could be cut off if the United States engages in a cybersecurity offensive."  

Check out what “teams of Russian 'tourists' and 'observers'” were doing in Madagascar in the lead-up to the country’s 2018 presidential elections. The BBC investigated and found a few common threads, including: cash, event promotions, bodyguards and more. Review the highlights, here; or watch the final almost half-hour BBC video on YouTube, here.

From Defense One

The US Air Force Needs F-35s, Not the F-15EX // Larry Stutzriem: Only about 20 percent of USAF fighters are fifth-generation aircraft. Winning tomorrow’s wars depends on growing that share faster, not slower.

Defense Companies Already Preparing for Space Force Windfall // Marcus Weisgerber: Satellite makers big and small say they’re already seeing the Pentagon awarding contracts faster, but still aren’t sure to expect.

CIA Considering Cloud Contract Worth ‘Tens of Billions’ // Frank Konkel, Nextgov: The agency is hungry for more commercial cloud.

The US Can't Out-China China on 5G. We Need a National Strategy. // Dan Mahaffee: A recent report from the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board should be a wakeup call about today's most important emerging technology.

NSA Gave Contractors $630M in Incentives. Its Watchdog Has Questions. // Charles S. Clark, Government Executive: More than half of the incentive-based contracts reviewed by the agency's inspector general lacked proof that such incentives were necessary.

Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson. Thanks for reading! And if you’re not subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1945, the U.S. Third Army liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany.

Happening today in Washington: President Trump meets with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, “the first meeting for Moon and Trump since the failed summit in Hanoi, which ended with no agreement from Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un on denuclearization,” NPR reports in a preview piece this morning.
How CNN is framing today’s Trump-Moon talks: “The high-stakes meeting Trump hopes will help end the North Korea stalemate”
Did someone say denuclearization? If so, no one can say what that means, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told senators Wednesday at a hearing on Capitol Hill — dutifully tracked by Foreign Policy’s Robbie Gramer. Sen. Ben Carden, D-Md., asked Pompeo if the U.S. has reached an agreement yet with North Korea on the definition of denuclearization.
Pompeo’s reply: "I can't answer that question yes or no."
Said MIT’s Vipin Narang: “That means no.”
Another notable line from that hearing: "You do not have our permission to go to war with Iran," Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Pompeo. Read more from Gramer’s highlight thread that begins here.

Otherwise on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Trump’s attorney general tried to toss some shade on the Trump-Russia investigation. There, U.S. Attorney General William Barr compared the FBI’s Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation to the U.S. government’s surveillance of protestors and civil-rights activists in the 1960s, and promised lawmakers he’d would look into its “genesis.” CNN can bring you up to speed on that hearing, here.
AP’s headline: Barr says he thinks ‘spying’ occurred against Trump campaign

TDY and DJT properties. “Defense Department personnel have charged more than $300,000 at Trump-branded properties since the start of Donald Trump's presidency through last November,” CNN reported Wednesday off a FOIA request. A bit more, here.

President Trump said the U.S. military “can’t act as a military would act” at the southern border “because if they got a little rough, everyone would go crazy,” he told reporters Wednesday at a roundtable event in Texas. NBC News has the clip, here.
Replied former SecDef William Perry on Twitter: “The U.S. Armed Forces are not hired thugs to be used to ‘rough up’ non-violent civilians for political games, and expressing the desire to utilize them as such disrespects the dignity and honor of our men and women in uniform.”

The Pentagon can now proceed with its $10 billion JEDI cloud-computing contract, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. That leaves Amazon.com and Microsoft as the final two dogs in the fight.
Reminder of the drama behind all this: “allegations the acquisition process for the contract [was] tainted by alleged conflicts of interest,” some of which you can revisit in this August 2018 Defense One report, “Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract.”
What next? “the soonest the contract will be awarded is mid-July.” Read on at Bloomberg, here.

After more than two years of no one on the job, the U.S. finally has an ambassador to Saudi Arabia: “retired four-star general, John Abizaid,” AP reported Wednesday after a 92-7 vote in the Senate. “Abizaid was the longest-serving commander of U.S. Central Command, holding that post from 2003 until he retired in 2007. He served in Grenada, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. has been without an ambassador in Saudi Arabia since Joseph Westphal, who was picked for the job by President Barack Obama, left in January 2017.” A bit more, here.

Developing: Sudan’s 30-year president may be about to step down in Khartoum, the Associated Press reports from a country where protests have steadily increased since December and reached a boiling point just a few days ago. The country’s military has reportedly “forced longtime autocratic President Omar al-Bashir” to leave after three decades of rule, and this morning that army is “in talks about forming a transitional government.”
Still unknown so far: Where President al-Bashir is, exactly. Or even approximately.
Reminder of this guy’s past: “Al-Bashir came to power in a 1989 coup, leading an alliance of the military and Islamist hard-liners. Since then, the military has stuck by him, even as he was forced to allow the separation of South Sudan and as he became a pariah in many countries, wanted by by the international war crimes tribunal for atrocities in Darfur.”
Echoes of 9 years ago. “Word of al-Bashir’s removal comes just over a week after Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in power for 20 years, resigned in response to similar demonstrations,” AP writes. “The mass protests bear striking resemblances to the popular uprisings in 2011 that swept across several Arab nations and ousted leaders in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen.” A bit more to this developing story, here.

Shakedown for “justice”? Iraq wants “to put hundreds of accused foreign jihadists on trial in Baghdad in exchange for millions of dollars” from the U.S.-led counter-ISIS coalition, Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday from Baghdad from undisclosed sources. One of those said “Iraq had proposed a rate of $2 million per suspect per year, calculated based on the estimated operational costs of a detainee in US-run Guantanamo,” AFP writes. “A second official said Iraq had requested $2 billion to try the suspects as ‘one of several options,’ and could ask for ‘more money to cover the costs of their detention.’”
One big problem: "setting up the court could be complicated, the official said, with questions over whether international funding for it would preclude any implementation of the death penalty.” Read on, here.

Nigeria’s military just evacuated a town of 10,000 people ahead of an offensive against Boko Haram, UN officials told Reuters today.
Location: Jakana, about 25 miles from the larger city of Maiduguri. “Jakana residents said the military was screening the population for Boko Haram members.” Tiny bit more, here.

Stavridis: Worried about China’s 5G gear? Worry more about its underwater cables. Even as concern spreads about next-gen mobile-communications equipment made by Huawei, former admiral and Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis says there’s a part of the world’s data infrastructure where Beijing’s spies can get “a much bigger bang for the buck”: internet cables.
Made by Huawei: “Under its Huawei Marine Networks component, it is constructing or improving nearly 100 submarine cables around the world. Last year it completed a cable stretching nearly 4,000 miles from Brazil to Cameroon. (The cable is partly owned by China Unicom, a state-controlled telecom operator.) Rivals claim that Chinese firms are able to lowball the bidding because they receive subsidies from Beijing.” Read on at Bloomberg, here.

And finally today, a #LongRead on “The man behind Huawei,” a huge feature from six reporters and two designers at the LA Times.
The gist: “Ren Zhengfei turned a company with no intellectual property into the world’s largest telecom and made China a global leader in 5G technology. Washington says he had help from Beijing.”
Some of what you’ll learn:

• Huawei’s “annual revenue rose almost 20% in 2018 to $105 billion.”
• Huawei filed "for more patents than any other company in the world last year, with 5,405…  early double that of the closest rival, Mitsubishi Electric."
• Huawei “recently opened [a] $1.5-billion, Disney-like campus in Dongguan, north of Shenzhen, [which] includes 12 replica European towns inspired by the likes of the Heidelberg Castle in Germany and the red-tile-roof buildings of Verona, Italy… connected by a red tram cloned from Switzerland.”
• “Officials in the U.S. say Ren was a high-ranking intelligence officer with the People’s Liberation Army and that his connections played a role in Huawei being plied with government support to help China overcome its reliance on foreign telecommunications gear.”
• “The full transition into the 5G age could take a decade.” Grab a mug of coffee and read on, here.