Today's D Brief: Joint Chiefs chair meets Taliban; COVID deaths hit new high; New sea-services strategy; AI flies on a U-2; And a bit more.

America’s top military officer just met with the Taliban for the second time. For two and a half hours on Tuesday, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley met with Taliban negotiators in Doha, Qatar, amid an ongoing U.S. troop drawdown from Afghanistan and rising violence in the southern parts of the country, Defense One’s Katie Bo Williams reports traveling with Milley. “It was Milley’s second unannounced meeting with the Taliban’s negotiating team; the first, in June, also in Doha, had not been reported until now,” the Associated Press’s Bob Burns reports, also traveling with Milley. 

Milley also met Wednesday with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul, as part of a four-day swing through the region that comes just weeks before a new administration takes office. 

Big picture: The trip resulted in "no breakthrough," AP writes, but Milley's "Taliban meetings represent a remarkable milestone" all the same.

So what’d they talk about? “The most important part of the discussions I had with both the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan was the need for a reduction in violence,” Milley told reporters. “Everything else hinges on that.”

The U.S. wants to secure a nationwide ceasefire hopefully in the next 40 days, Williams reports; and that would put it right around President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration in Washington. 

Afghan officials also really want a ceasefire, Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation, said today. More from Tolo News, here. Pakistan’s prime minister says he wants to help make that ceasefire a reality, too. 

For the record, there are about 4,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, and President Donald Trump still wants that number to go down to 2,500 by January 20. 

And like the Iraq withdrawal seven years ago, the U.S. plans to destroy some of its equipment and infrastructure brought to Afghanistan. An unspecified quantity will be transferred to the Afghans; but for what will remain, “It’s more efficient and cost-effective to just destroy it,” Milley told reporters. 

What’s next for Afghanistan, provided there are no big surprises ahead? “A complete drawdown of U.S. forces by May 2021 if the Taliban meets certain conditions, including reducing the violence and renouncing al Qaeda, which it has not yet done,” Williams reports. And the Taliban have threatened to resume attacks on U.S. and coalition forces if Biden doesn’t stick to that May timeline. However, “The [current] level of violence makes it extremely difficult for any Afghan leaders to go very far down the road in these peace talks,” said Amb. Ross Wilson, the U.S. chargé d’affairs in Afghanistan. Continue reading, here. 

From Defense One

The Air Force Used AI to Operate the Radar on a U-2 Spy Plane // Patrick Tucker: Officials tout ARTUµ algorithm as a step toward a “new era of warfare.”

Keep Politics Out of National-Security Advisory Boards // Karen Tandy and Sarah Morgenthau: Trump’s appointment of loyalists to a DOD board sets a dangerous precedent.

We Need a Goldwater-Nichols Act for Emerging Technology / John Shanahan,Laura Junor: The 1986 law made joint experience a prerequisite for high rank. We must do the same for technological facility.

The World’s Most Important Body of Water / Daniel Yergin: More than most, four men shaped the oft-cited “strategic tensions” over the South China Sea.

Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson and Katie Bo Williams 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 1981, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. James Lee Dozier was kidnapped by attackers with the Italian far-left terrorist group the Red Brigades. At the time, Dozier was deputy Chief of Staff for NATO's Southern European land forces, headquartered at Verona, Italy; his kidnappers posed as plumbers and hit him in the head with a pistol before moving him about an hour east to the city of Padua. After 42 days in captivity, he was rescued by a team of Italian special operators, which "broke down the door of the five-room apartment and confronted the five terrorists, including a woman, who surrendered immediately," the BBC reported.

China’s no-show with the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command. The Chinese military “declined to participate” in a video planning session with American officials at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command that was scheduled for this week. That’s according to Indo-PACOM, which announced the news Wednesday.
The meeting was known as the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, and it’s happened regularly since 1998, Indo-PACOM says. The apparent fact that China chose to skip this particular meeting “goes against the call it made earlier for military dialogue to maintain stability amidst the current political tension,” regional specialist Collin Koh tweeted.
The Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard’s new strategy document puts sharper focus on “day-to-day competition” with China and Russia. Dubbed “Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power,” the joint strategy is the sea services’ first since 2015. “We must operate more assertively to prevail in day-to-day competition as we uphold the rules-based order and deter our competitors from pursuing armed aggression,” says the 36-page document, signed by the heads of the three services and released this morning.
Acquisition priorities: “The strategy notes that, in trying to find the funds to pay for fleets that can fulfill this vision, the services must prioritize sea control and sea denial over other missions,” USNI News reports: Read that, here.
Naval analyst Bryan McGrath’s quick take: “...Solid treatment of conventional deterrence, discussions of transition to war and war-fighting—but little or nothing on war termination. Seapower has a gigantic role in war-termination.”
By the way: China’s probe has returned from its first mission to the moon, where it was tasked with bringing back some 4 pounds of soil. The rocks were taken from a “volcanic area called Mons Ruemker in the Oceanus Procellarum...which was previously unexplored,” Agence France-Presse reports. More here. 

Across the United States, 3,611 people died on Wednesday alone, a new record. “The number of new cases has risen 51 percent over the past month,” the New York Times’ David Leonhart reports, adding, “The causes are not a mystery. The U.S. still lacks a coherent testing strategy, and large parts of the country continue to defy basic health advice.” More, here.

Two key U.S. officials who have defied basic health advice: 

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is now quarantining after coming into contact with someone with COVID and hosting large holiday parties at the State Department.
• Paul Alexander, who as a Trump administration science adviser urged the deliberate infection of millions of Americans as a means to develop herd immunity, Politico reported Wednesday. “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected,” Alexander wrote in July to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.

President-elect Biden will receive his COVID vaccination next week, and VP Pence will get his on Friday. President Trump is in a different treatment category since he already contracted the virus in the fall. More on that from CNN, here or Reuters, here. 
Twitter will more aggressively remove COVID-19 misinformation, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Here are three specific categories of misinformation Twitter says it will remove: 

• “False claims that suggest immunizations and vaccines are used to intentionally cause harm to or control populations, including statements about vaccines that invoke a deliberate conspiracy”;

• “False claims which have been widely debunked about the adverse impacts or effects of receiving vaccinations”; and
• “False claims that COVID-19 is not real or not serious, and therefore that vaccinations are unnecessary.”

Tweeters who violate the new rules “will be required to delete [the offending tweet] before they are able to tweet again,” AP reports from the announcement. And “Before the offending tweet is removed, Twitter will hide it from view.” More from Twitter, here. More from AP, here.

The U.S. Army finally has its own mask for soldiers and recruits, and it took less a year to bring it from idea to reality, the service boasted Wednesday. (FWIW, the Army says “It normally takes 18–24 months for [the Defense Logistics Agency] to have the item available for order once the technical description, design, and components are approved and submitted.) 

French President Macron tested positive for COVID-19 today. Now his aides are tracing his contacts and already they’ve got a very high-profile list of contacts Emmanuel Macron spoke to in just the past 10 days, Reuters reports from Paris.
Macron met “all but two of the European Union’s 27 leaders at a summit in Brussels late last week to discuss climate change, the EU budget and Turkey,” Reuters writes. More here.
COVID infections are rising sharply in Germany and South Korea, the Associated Press reports. So far, more than 23,000 Germans and 630 people from South Korea have died from COVID-19. And in Japan, where the pandemic’s toll has passed 2,700, Tokyo’s mayor is asking residents to step up their protection measures as daily infections reached a new high. 

Back stateside, the U.S. could save $2.6 billion if Biden stops Trump’s border wall production on Jan. 20, the Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing estimates from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The gist: “The U.S. Army Corps estimates show there will be about $3.3 billion in unused funds in the project’s accounts on January 21. Army Corps officials have engaged in a series of meetings in recent weeks about how to end the contracts — and what can be done legally, and when.”
Where this seems to come from: “Corps commanders met with members of the Biden transition team last week to discuss the border wall project,” the Post reports. Read on, here. 

Former Trump homeland security adviser: SolarWinds hack means we must treat all networks as compromised — and replace a ton of computers. In a NYT oped, Thomas Bossert urges a dire response to the SolarWinds hack: “The remediation effort alone will be staggering. It will require the segregated replacement of entire enclaves of computers, network hardware and servers across vast federal and corporate networks. Somehow, the nation’s sensitive networks have to remain operational despite unknown levels of Russian access and control. A ‘do over’ is mandatory and entire new networks need to be built — and isolated from compromised networks.” Read on, here.

And finally today: Here’s an interesting #LongRead all about Russia's future in the 21st century — when climate change is expected to dramatically reshape agricultural dynamics across the globe.
“[N]o country stands to gain more than Russia,” writes ProPublica’s Senior Environmental Reporter Abrahm Lustgarten in this feature for the New York Times Magazine. “Across Eastern Russia, wild forests, swamps and grasslands are slowly being transformed into orderly grids of soybeans, corn and wheat. It’s a process that is likely to accelerate: Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.” Begin reading here.