Today's D Brief: SecDef’s Asia swing; US-China talks; Army tracking vaccine refusers; Ransomware hits brewery; And a bit more.

The Asia-Pacific will dominate SecDef Austin’s itinerary over the next several days as he begins his first overseas trip as defense secretary on Saturday. But before all of that, President Joe Biden met virtually this morning with the prime ministers of Japan, India and Australia — aka “the Quad.” (See photos from inside the White House via Jeff Mason of Reuters.)

One big takeaway from POTUS46’s meeting: “[T]he Quad nations will announce financing agreements to support an increase in manufacturing capacity for coronavirus vaccines in India, something New Delhi has called for to counter China’s widening vaccine diplomacy,” Reuters reports. 

Also in attendance for Biden’s morning VTC: 

• Vice President Kamala Harris;
• Secretary of State Tony Blinken;
• Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan;
• Jeff Zients, who is coordinating the White House's COVID-19 efforts;
• Kurt Campbell, the National Security Council's Indo-Pacific coordinator;
• and Sumona Guha, who is the NSC's senior director for South Asia.

On Saturday, Austin heads first to the Indo-Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii. Then it’s off to Japan with SecState Blinken for talks with their counterparts. South Korea is next, where the Austin-Blinken formula continues; and India is the final stop, though Blinken isn’t expected to tag along for that one. 

Next week, U.S. and Chinese officials are to meet in Alaska. That’s scheduled for Thursday. China’s foreign ministry said today it expects those talks to be “difficult,” and, according to Reuters, it also warned the U.S. to stay out of Hong Kong’s affairs. 

Why Beijing brought up Hong Kong: On Thursday, China’s National People’s Congress “approved electoral changes that would put pro-Beijing loyalists firmly in charge of the city and squeeze opposition groups from elected office,” the Wall Street Journal reports. And this means Chinese officials will have “much greater control over local elections that were meant to be partly democratic—thanks to an effective veto against candidates deemed unpatriotic.”

“China’s parliament remakes Hong Kong in its own image,” is how the BBC covered the developments Thursday. More from CNN, here.

From Defense One

Pentagon Officials, Uniformed Leaders Slam Fox’s Carlson Over Female-Troop Comments // Elizabeth Howe: “What we absolutely won't do is take personnel advice from a talk show host,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Thursday.

Shoring Up The Metals Supply Chain // Thomas M. Kostigen: The Biden administration is bent on increasing critical metals supplies, but it’s overlooking an obvious source: the ocean.

Approve Lockheed’s Purchase of Aerojet Rocketdyne  // Howard P. “Buck” McKeon: The deal would bolster the rocketmaker’s ability to serve aerospace and defense clients and shore up a shaky industrial base.

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson. 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 1993, North Korea announced it was withdrawing from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. 

HASC’s top Democrat and GOP lawmakers are calling for a “measured drawdown” of National Guard troops from the U.S. Capitol complex. Financial costs are mounting for these deployments that will now extend through May, and Guard readiness is being impacted adversely, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said Thursday in a formal statement from the House Armed Services Committee.
Update: The Guard’s deployment is expected to cost $521 million, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday evening — tacking on an additional $38 from the last public estimate, which you can read about via Stars and Stripes, reporting in early February.
The “present security posture is not warranted at this time,” the two lawmakers said, carefully but vaguely noting (emphasis added) that “there is no doubt that some level of support from the National Guard should remain in the National Capital Region to respond to credible threats against the Capitol.”
What now, then? It’s “time for us to review what level of security is required” at the Capitol complex, Smith and Rogers said, “so [Guard troops] can return home to their families and communities.” 

The U.S. Army is tracking how many soldiers decline the COVID-19 vaccine, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville told a Defense Writers' Group meeting on Thursday. But Defense One’s Katie Bo Williams, who sat in on the meeting, says McConville downplayed the utility of that mystery number — which he did not share — calling it “very small” on the one hand, while at the same time saying it’s likely an undercounting.
By the way, and perhaps this is more for the uninitiated, but the U.S. Army tracks virtually everything about its soldiers. And because of this detailed tracking during the last big global pandemic, the 1918 flu, medical researchers were later able to isolate a likely origin point for that virus at one particular Army camp in Kansas (Funston). More about all that in our podcast from April, here.
Also on Thursday, McConville confirmed the Army is finalizing its report on those low-hovering helicopters used to disperse protesters during the June 1 George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C., which was nearly 10 months ago. 

Here’s a partial list of the U.S. military leaders who have spoken out against Fox TV host Tucker Carlson, whose inflammatory comments this week about women in the U.S. military triggered outrage and headlines that threatened to crowd out more useful news such as the $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus bill’s passage on Wednesday. 

There’s good news for veterans in the new COVID stimulus bill that President Biden signed into law on Thursday. The New York Times reports that Congress finally “close[d] a loophole that gave an incentive to for-profit schools to enroll veterans” at places like ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges, e.g.
About that loophole: The Higher Education Act contained “A longstanding mandate, the so-called 90/10 rule, requires for-profit schools to take in at least 10 percent of their revenue from funding other than federal student loans. The intention was to force schools to prove that they could attract other sources of support,” the Times writes. “But the law’s text allowed schools to count student aid from the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs, including G.I. Bill funds, toward their 10 percent threshold.”
Worth noting: The law won’t take effect until 2023. Read on here.

Gunmen have abducted 30 more students in Nigeria, which is the fourth such episode since December, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal report today. “Military and police attempts to tackle the gangs have had little success,” Reuters writes, “while many worry that state authorities are making the situation worse by letting kidnappers go unpunished, paying them off or providing incentives.”

NASA launched a satellite for Myanmar on Feb. 20. That would be the same Myanmar whose military took over in a coup d'etat on Feb. 1.
Now that satellite is being held by Japanese astronauts on the International Space Station. “The $15 million satellite was built by Japan’s Hokkaido University in a joint project with Myanmar’s government-funded Myanmar Aerospace Engineering University,” Reuters reports from Tokyo. “It is the first of a set of two 50 kg microsatellites equipped with cameras designed to monitor agriculture and fisheries.”
“We won’t get involved in anything that has to do with [Myanmar’s] military,” one official from Hokkaido University said. “The satellite was not designed for that.”
So, now what? “We are discussing what to do, but we don’t know when it will be deployed,” he said, adding, “If it is halted, our hope is that the project could be restarted at some point.” More here.

And finally this week: A cyber attack has hit beer-maker Molson Coors Beverage Company, disrupting “brewery operations, production, and shipments,” the Chicago-based company said in a filing (PDF) with the SEC on Thursday. According to Fox6 out of Milwaukee, “this hack is crippling,” and “the company can’t produce beer until it’s fixed.”
Aside from the Coors brand of beers, Molson also distributes Miller Lite, Pilsner Urquell, Blue Moon, Peroni, Grolsch, Killian's, and Foster's, according to ZDNet and Fox Business.
BTW: This is not a first for a beverage maker, ZDNet reports. Arizona Beverages was hit with a ransomware attack almost exactly two years ago. And more recently, “In November, Campari Group, the famed Italian beverage vendor behind brands like Campari, Cinzano, and Appleton, was hit with a ransomware attack that took down a large part of its IT network.” Read over the SEC filing, here. 

Have a safe weekend, everyone. And we’ll see you again on Monday!