Georgia starts to reopen despite warnings, too few tests; DoD to Mexico: please restart arms factories; Is Kim Jong Un gravely ill? And a bit more.
The Pentagon wants Mexico to restart the factories that make parts for American weapons. U.S. defense officials didn’t know just how much they rely on their southern neighbor for components of various weapons, particularly aircraft, until they tried to assess the pandemic’s effect on upcoming arms deliveries. “I think one of the key things we have found out are some international dependencies,” Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, told reporters Monday at the Pentagon.
That’s now a problem as Mexican factories have suspended operations to stem the spread of COVID-19. Lord said she discussed the problem with Christopher Landau, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, and has decided to write Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard “to ask for help to reopen international suppliers” in Mexico.
Flashback to 2013: “U.S. and foreign aerospace component suppliers have been increasingly locating production facilities in Mexico,” the United States International Trade Commission said in a report from the U.S. Office of Industries that February. Among the big U.S. defense firms that operate subsidiaries in Mexico, the report noted, are General Dynamics, General Electric, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Safran, Rockwell Collins (now Raytheon Technologies), and Textron. Boeing has successfully encouraged its suppliers to make parts there as well. Marcus Weisgerber has more, here.
COVID’s overall impact on arms deliveries: Lord said she expects three months of “schedule delays and inefficiencies and so forth” on Major Defense Acquisition Programs. Here’s a list of those.
From Defense One
The Defense Department Needs a Technology Strategy // Paul Scharre and Ainikki Riikonen: To succeed in a long-term competition with China, the Department needs a transparent process to set spending priorities — not conflicting guidance and a shifting range of interests.
Pentagon Urges Mexico to Reopen COVID-Closed Factories That Supply US Weapon Makers // Marcus Weisgerber: A surprising number of America’s defense manufacturers rely on parts made south of the border.
The U.S. Army Is Racing to Build Makeshift Coronavirus Hospitals // Kathy Gilsinan, The Atlantic: The Corps of Engineers is converting dozens of American hotels and convention centers. Can it do it fast enough?
Without More Tests, America Can’t Reopen // Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Paul Romer, The Atlantic: And to make matters worse, we’re testing the wrong people.
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Send us tips from your community right here. And if you’re not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. On this day in 1926, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II was born in London. She celebrates her 94th birthday today with silence, AP reports, “as the nation in lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic forgoes the usual gun salutes and ringing of bells.”
Georgia’s governor is reopening gyms, barbers and hair stylists on Friday, he said in a press conference on Monday. That establishment list also includes bowling alleys, nail salons and massage therapists. Restaurants and movie theaters can open back up on Monday, so long as patrons maintain social distancing. According to Gov. Brian Kemp, "favorable data, enhanced testing and approval of our health care professionals" convinced him now is an okay time to lift restrictions on places like churches, for example — so long as social distancing is maintained.
Kemp’s decision doesn’t seem to be supported by at least one key White House metric. NPR reports “according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in Georgia and number of deaths attributed to the virus there, have been steadily increasing in the last month.”
Related: Atlanta’s mayor is mystified by Kemp’s decision, Politico reports.
Also related:
- South Carolina’s governor is reopening beaches and retail stores today.
- Tennessee is reopening state parks on Friday.
- Nebraska is resuming elective surgeries in two weeks (May 4).
- Texas began relaxing restrictions last Friday, AP reported at the time. A bit more on the southeastern states from NBC News, here. And more still on all of that from AP, here.
"There are more important things than living." Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick spoke to Fox’s Tucker Carlson Monday evening to again deliver his take on economics and public health in this time of the coronavirus. Recall that Patrick already made headlines in March for saying, “those of us who are 70 plus, we will take care of ourselves but don't sacrifice the country. Don't do that. Don't ruin this great American dream.”
Patrick was back Monday evening with a similar message, which — judging by protests over the weekend and the media attention they received — it would seem at least a small percentage of Americans sympathize with; here’s Patrick last night on Fox:
- "When you start shutting down society and people start losing their paychecks and businesses can't open and governments aren't getting revenues… There are more important things than living, and that's saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us. I don't want to die, nobody wants to die but man we have got to take some risk and get back in the game and get this country back up and running."
Also on Monday, Trump claimed to not remember his own campaign rally last month, saying he does not recall the March 2 event in Charlotte, and that he hasn’t left the White House “in months” except for one trip to Virginia in late March. CNN describes Trump’s remarks about the March 2 rally as a “laughably obvious false claim” that was “one of several false claims at his White House coronavirus briefing on Monday.” There are five other significant false claims from the president on Monday, including his dislike for state governors concerned about lacking COVID-19 tests and more, here.
Reminder: “The battle to prevent Americans from understanding what went on [from] January to April is going to be one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in modern US history,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweets routinely, highlighting various news articles that illustrate his point. “So much has come out about it that confusion will have to made massive.”
And ICYMI: The Atlantic has been maintaining a tracker of Trump’s deceptions and misdirections related to his White House’s coronavirus response going back to at least February 7, here.
FWIW: Here’s Trump on Monday reacting to what he perceives as unfair media coverage of the ongoing pandemic:
- “I do think that the press, the media foments a lot of anger. I really believe it foments tremendous anger. For instance, I’ll be asked a tremendously hostile question from somebody, and then I’ll answer it in a hostile way, which is appropriate. otherwise you look foolish. Otherwise it looks like just walk off the stage and bow your head. I can’t do that. You know? I just can’t do that. But a lot of these questions that are asked from certain networks are so hostile and there’s no reason for it. There’s no reason for it. We are in a war. This is a World War II. This is a World War I, where by the way, the war essentially ended because of a plague.”
Side note: This may go without saying (e.g., for history buffs and Defense One Radio podcast listeners) but there is a great deal more to why WWI ended than a plague — which, by the way, came in three waves, the last of which erupted after U.S. troops broke quarantine on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. More to that episode in our shared history, here.
PSA: Not enough tests to go around. On March 6, President Trump promised Americans “Anybody that needs a [coronavirus] test, gets a test.” And yet, as Michael Socolow of the University of Maine points out in the Washington Post, “there’s no evidence that sufficient tests exist even today, 46 days later.”
In unwelcome but informed news about the future, the New York Times this weekend spoke to "more than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history" to warn "Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us." More from that #LongRead, here.
Three-star uses question about the border wall to emphasize pandemic safety. President Trump interrupted his own COVID-19 update briefing Monday to ask the Army Corps of Engineers’ Chief, Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, how building Trump’s wall with Mexico is coming along. Semonite focused his answer on protecting his soldiers and civilians first. And here’s how that exchange proceeded:
Trump: “The general’s in charge of the wall on the southern border, and we want to build 450 miles of wall and it’s very much under construction. You might give them a little bit of an update. How are we doing with the wall?”
Semonite: “So, sir, I think the most important thing, and you stressed this and Secretary Esper stressed this, there’s really several different priorities here. Our number one priority in [the] Department of Defense and the Corps of Engineers is to protect the team, protect the force. No matter what we do, we’ve got to continue to take care of our civilians and our service members out there, and so every single thing we’re doing, whether we’re building for the VA, or we’re building for civil works projects, or for the Department of Defense, or building on the southwest border, we are going out of our way. I talked to my commanders this morning, we’ve got over 4,000 contractors that are on the ground out there and we’ve had no positives as of this morning, knock on wood. Same thing with my 400 employees. We’re testing them. Not necessarily one of the more stringent tests, but with temperatures, to be able to make sure that everybody’s safe and everybody goes out of their way to do things the right way. Construction is going very, very smooth. What we’re seeing is our contractors are extremely focused. Now that we’ve got a good clear path both on the CBP program as well as some of the DOD program[s]. We, I think, very well postured; it’s a very, very aggressive build, but we’re well postured to be able to meet your expectations, sir, of 450 by the end of December 2020.”
The State Department alleges China is using COVID-19 to “coerce its neighbors,” Reuters reports today. This comes after police in Hong Kong “arrested 15 people on Saturday, just days after a senior Beijing official called for the local government to introduce national security legislation ‘as soon as possible.’”
“China has also been flying regular fighter patrols near Chinese-claimed Taiwan, to the island’s anger,” Reuters writes, “and has sent a survey ship flanked by coast guard and other vessels into the South China Sea, prompting the United States to accuse Beijing of ‘bullying behaviour.’”
Worth noting: The U.S. Navy has sent its own vessels near Taiwan and the South China Sea in recent days — all without apparent incident. More here.
And finally today: North Korea’s dictator is believed to be “in grave danger” after a recent surgery, CNN reported Monday evening. Kim Jong Un “reportedly received a cardiovascular system procedure on April 12," according to South Korea-based Daily NK, which reports he's now being treated at a villa in Hyangsan County, in central North Korea.
South Korean officials, however, aren’t convinced. AP has that angle, here.
Said White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien today, when asked about North Korea/Kim Jong Un succession planning: “Basic assumption would be maybe it would be someone in the family but again it's too early to talk about that because we don't know what condition Chairman Kim is in.”
By the way: President Trump said Monday that he rejected South Korea’s financial offer to keep the American military in South Korea, confirming an April 10 Reuters report that he refused at least a 13 % increase over the previous year. So that lingering negotiation grinds on well in the second quarter of the year. Recall that last year, the two countries finally agreed to a $924 million deal on Feb. 10. There’s still no word yet on how soon a 2020 deal might be finalized. More from Reuters, here.