Today's D Brief: 3rd COVID wave?; ODNI: White-supremacist threat ‘elevated’; Info ops warning; Natsec pros decry anti-Asian-American bias; And a bit more.

Officials on both sides of the Atlantic are now worrying about a “third wave” of COVID infections. Fourteen U.S. states are seeing at least a 10% rise in infections, and half of those are rising by more than 20%, CNN reports off data maintained by Johns Hopkins University. 

Meanwhile much of Europe — particularly France, Germany and Italy, but notably not the UK — is experiencing what the BBC calls a “stuttering rollout” exacerbated by a seeming overabundance of caution about a blood clot side effect of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine with an incidence rate of 0.000218%, CNBC and Forbes reported Tuesday. 

Why else is Europe faring so poorly? 

• It has “Too much bureaucracy”; 
• It has also “put a big emphasis on negotiating a low price for vaccine doses”; 
• And a concerning number of citizens are vaccine skeptics, according to the New York Times, reporting Tuesday.

Back stateside, cases in Michigan are rising the fastest, followed by Delaware, Montana, Alabama and West Virginia, according to CNN. One Michigan health official cited “Covid fatigue,” a growing failure to wear masks, increasingly rolled-back restrictions, and a prison outbreak as the leading contributors in her state. 

Coming soon in the U.S.: “more accessible, inexpensive coronavirus tests,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told lawmakers Wednesday at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing.

For the record, 22% of Americans have received at least one vaccine dose, which is more than 73 million residents. And 12% (or almost 40 million) are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Update: Nearly 1,400 soldiers are helping with COVID vaccination efforts across seven states and the Virgin Islands, the U.S. Army announced Wednesday. And that’s an almost 50% increase from the last count on March 8, which then stood at about 950 soldiers assisting in Illinois, New Jersey, Texas, California, Florida and St. Thomas. 

Two mass vaccination sites in Ohio and Georgia have since been added, including at Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center and at Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz Stadium. 

From Defense One

Key Official: Defense Information Operations ‘Not Evolving Fast Enough’ // Patrick Tucker: China will soon harness AI to supplant Russia as the world leader in information warfare, a DIA leader said.

Lawmakers Slam Army CID Chief One Year after Spc. Guillen’s Death // Elizabeth Howe: A hearing saw bipartisan disappointment in apparent lack of reform.

National Security Professionals Call for Action on Hate Crimes and Racism Against Asian-Americans // Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in National Security: Our objective is to advance a much-needed discourse on combating the surge of hate crimes and racism against Asian-Americans in the United States — including the deadly March 16 shootings in Atlanta. 

Bum-Rushing Extremists From the Military Might Not Help// Todd C. Helmus, Ryan Andrew Brown, and Rajeev Ramchand: Interviews with a former neo-Nazi indicate that pre-discharge education and deradicalization might hinder extremist groups' recruiting efforts.

The Pandemic Mistake America Can’t Repeat // Derek Thompson, The Atlantic: More, better, and faster testing might have averted the worst of what America faced in 2020.

Welcome to this Thursday 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 1865, the Confederate States Congress in Richmond, Va., was finally disbanded after four years. It was dissolved at last on May 5. The war would end four days later.

White supremacists are chief among American extremists that “pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021,” according to an unclassified joint assessment (PDF) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security released Wednesday.
Agitating factors include “Newer sociopolitical developments,” the three agencies warn. And those include “narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence.”
The most lethal? “Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and militia violent extremists,” particularly those “who promote the superiority of the white race,” according to the four-page document.
And of those, “lone offenders” and “small cells” are the most worrisome, at least in part because such scenarios seem to play out independent of a single leader or a robust hierarchical command structure. Read on, here.
National security professionals are calling for discussion and action discrimination and hate crimes against Asian-Americans. More than 100 have signed a statement that begins: “Our objective is to advance a much-needed discourse on combating the surge of hate crimes and racism against Asian-Americans in the United States — including the deadly March 16 shootings in Atlanta.” Read it here.

A 31-year-old veteran from Texas was detained by the Secret Service just outside the Naval Observatory, near Vice President Kamala Harris’s official residence, on Wednesday. Inside his car, "Police found a rifle, a large amount of ammunition [113 rounds] and several [five 30-round] gun clips" as well as "what police called a large capacity ammunition feeding device," CNBC reported Wednesday.
The man’s mother “called Capitol police after he made statements that worried her,” triggering a “region-wide lookout” that ended just outside the VP residence, Houston’s ABC13 News reports.
He was reportedly medically discharged from the Army in 2014 after four years of service, including at least some time as a trained drone operator based in the U.S. A bit more here. 

It’s gonna be “tough” to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, President Biden told ABC News in an interview that aired Wednesday (transcript here).
Why will it be tough? “The fact is that that was not a very solidly negotiated deal that the president, the former president worked out,” Biden told George Stephanopoulos. “And so we're in consultation with our allies as well as the government. And that decision's gonna be, it's in process now.”

The U.S. Army declined to restore the “long tab” for a former Green Beret that POTUS45 pardoned for alleged murder back in November 2019. The Army reportedly rejected the now-retired soldier’s appeal to return his valor medals, according to USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook, who obtained the documents.
Involved: Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who "was charged with killing a suspected bomb maker who had been ordered released after questioning in Afghanistan in 2010," Vanden Brook writes. "Golsteyn admitted during an interview to join the CIA that he had killed the man. That launched an Army investigation that culminated in the murder charge, but Trump's pardon canceled his court martial." Read on, here. 

Lastly today: Citing U.S. national security risks, the Commerce Department just subpoenaed “multiple Chinese companies that provide information and communications technology and services in the United States,” Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced Wednesday.
“Trusted information and communications technology and services are essential to our national and economic security and remain a top priority for the Biden-Harris administration,” Raimondo said in a statement.
In case you’re wondering, the companies have not (yet) been publicly named. “In issuing subpoenas today,” Raimondo continued, “we are taking an important step in collecting information that will allow us to make a determination for possible action that best protects the security of American companies, American workers, and U.S. national security.”
One way to read this news: The Commerce Department's actions "suggest that the Biden administration generally is aiming to stick to the tough line on Chinese tech that the Trump administration took, after some initial uncertainty," the Wall Street Journal reports.