The D Brief: Chinese-Russian flight near Alaska; Warships chased from Azov?; B-2 tests cheap shipkiller; France’s big deployment; And a bit more.
Chinese and Russian aircraft were intercepted in Alaska’s air defense identification zone on Wednesday, coming as close as 200 miles from the U.S. coast, North American Aerospace Defense Command officials said Wednesday.
Involved: Two Russian TU-95 and two PRC H-6 military aircraft. “The Russian and PRC aircraft remained in international airspace and did not enter American or Canadian sovereign airspace,” NORAD said in a statement, adding, “This Russian and PRC activity in the Alaska ADIZ is not seen as a threat, and NORAD will continue to monitor competitor activity near North America and meet presence with presence.”
SecDef Austin: “This is the first time we’ve seen those two countries fly together like that,” but it “was not a surprise to us,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a press conference Thursday. “Our forces are at the ready all the time and we have very good surveillance capabilities,” he added.
B-2 tests cheap anti-ship weapon against ex-Navy ship. In the latest effort to figure out just how the U.S. military might fight a war that requires vast quantities of munitions, the Air Force is working on kits that can transform an ordinary 2,000-pound bomb into a shipkiller that costs a lot less than a Mk 48 torpedo or an Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile. A B-2 test-dropped one recently during an exercise that sank the ex-Tarawa, an amphibious assault ship.
Also: “This is a sign of the Air Force’s renewed focus on maritime strike, which it had walked away from after the Cold War ended,” Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Read that, here.
Navy warships can’t rearm at sea...yet. Reloading the vertical missile tubes that give modern U.S. surface combatants much of their punch is a delicate business, requiring a pierside crane to dangle, say, a Standard or Tomahawk as crew carefully guide it into place. “This is valuable time lost,” wrote Ens. Anna Hoang in a prize-winning essay for Naval Institute Proceedings. “In the Pacific, it can take up to two weeks to travel to port to rearm, three if a ship reloads at San Diego. This warfighting-to-rearming ratio is at best 1:6, even worse than the aircraft carriers in World War II.”
Of course, the concern extends far above her paygrade. In 2022, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro vowed to develop a sea-going missile-reloading system before he left office.
Now a system to do just that has been successfully tested on land, the Navy said in a Wednesday press release, and an at-sea test is planned for later this year. Read more from the Times of San Diego, here.
Update: The Air Force won’t hit its goal for networking airlifters and tankers, but it won’t miss by all that much. And the data-linking systems are already showing their value, the head of Air Mobility Command told lawmakers Wednesday.
Background: The service had aimed to link up one-quarter of its mobility fleet by year’s end, but will probably have about 20% done by then, Gen. Mike Minihan testified during a House Armed Services joint subcommittee hearing on the survivability of aircraft in contested environments.
“We've got instant connectivity” when, say, an airplane takes off from Europe to fly to Niger, Minihan said. “We know the current status of the airfield. We know the current status of the joint force on those airfields. We know the security measures. We know the fuel state. We know the cargo state. And that ability is an absolute game-changer,” he said. D1’s Lauren Williams has more, here.
Additional reading:
- “Unpacking Harris' record on defense civilians and workforce,” a look at the presumptive Democratic nominee for president from D1 sister pub GovExec;
- “Air Force colonel fired days before handing off command duties,” Military Times reported Monday;
- “Woman who stole almost $109 million from Army to buy mansions, jewelry and cars sentenced to prison,” CBS News reported Wednesday;
- “3 Army Officials Punished After Investigation of Maine Reservist's [2023] Mass Shooting Finds Numerous Failures,” Military.com reported Tuesday; Stars and Stripes, Task & Purpose, and CNN have similar coverage;
- And “Marine accused of Nazi salute at Capitol riot sentenced to prison,” Marine Corps Times reported Monday.
Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston and Lauren C. Williams. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1946, the U.S. conducted the world’s first underwater nuclear weapon test.
New: Russia has moved all of its warships out of the Sea of Azov, Ukrainian military officials claimed Wednesday evening on Facebook. Russia reportedly moved those vessels “after Kyiv's forces struck and damaged Russia's Slavyanin ferry in the port of Kavkaz in Russia's Krasnodar region on Tuesday,” Newsweek reports.
Also new: The Dutch and Danes say they’ll transfer 14 German-made Leopard 2A4 tanks to Ukraine this summer, Netherlands Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans announced Thursday.
Developing: Germany needs to acquire 27 more Patriot air defense systems to meet new requirements for European defense as drawn up in new classified plans for the NATO alliance, Reuters reported Wednesday from Brussels. It’s part of what’s being billed as the biggest military shakeup in three decades, and it calls for lots more long-range missiles and as many as 105,000 to 350,000 additional troops in Europe.
The plans also get down to the granular level of bridge strength in multiple locations across Europe. “Whereas tens of thousands of NATO and Soviet troops faced off directly along the inner-German border during the Cold War, deploying troops now will take longer with the frontline of any conflict likely to be further east—up to 60 days, including the time to get a political decision,” one planner told Reuters. Continue reading, here.
Prediction: As the pace of Putin’s Ukraine invasion currently stands, “it would probably take the Russians five years to grind their way to their minimum objectives of the four oblasts” partially occupied in Ukraine, British Army chief Gen. Sir Roly Walker said at this week’s Land Warfare Conference in London. Those four partially-occupied regions include Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to the south.
Editor’s note: “This is all with the assumption that the ammo keeps flowing, of course,” said Defense One’s Sam Skove. That is “Not impossible, but also not guaranteed.”
And the human cost to Russia’s military? “At the current rate of attrition of dead and wounded, that puts them probably well north of 1.5 million people—casualties—to achieve that with untold billions of [pounds of] lost equipment,” Walker said. He added in a somewhat puzzled manner, “There has got to be more things for Russia to worry about than losing the best part of 1.5 to 1.8 million people for a slice of Ukraine with the way the world is going.”
“It's hard to see how this is going in Russia's favor,” he said, acknowledging, “Maybe their calculus is different to ours.” The UK’s Sky News has more.
This week in France, 75,000 troops will be deployed for the Olympics, which begin Friday in Paris. That troop count sets a new record for the largest peacetime deployment of forces in French history, the BBC reported Tuesday.
Around 1,900 foreign police will also help, including forces from Spain, Germany, South Korea, Qatar and more than three dozen other nations.
“We have demining teams. We have dog teams. There are anti-drone systems, radars, and divers patrolling the River Seine,” a French general said. “We’ve spent more than two years preparing for these Games,” one unit commander said. “Let’s hope we will not have to take any action,” he added. Read on, here.
By the way: France says it has blocked 1,000 people from attending the Olympics based on allegations of spying. That’s the result of screening about a million volunteers and would-be workers for this summer’s games. About 5,000 of those were blocked from attending, according to Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin; and of those blocked, “there are 1,000 people whom we suspect of foreign interference—we can say spying,” Darmanin said. He declined to name names or nationalities. The Associated Press has more, here.
Relatedly, a Russian chef was arrested in Paris Sunday on allegations of espionage. “We think very strongly that he was going to organise operations of destabilisation, interference, spying,” Interior Minister Darmanin said, according to the Guardian. Latvia-based investigative outlet The Insider has much more on the accused 40-year-old chef, reporting Thursday.
Additional reading:
- “Romania says more Russian drone debris from the Ukraine war has landed on its territory,” the Associated Press reported Thursday from Bucharest;
- “Japan protests against Russia’s entry ban on 13 mostly business leaders over [Ukraine-related] sanctions,” AP reported separately Wednesday from Tokyo;
- And “UK, Germany sign joint defence declaration for closer cooperation,” Reuters reported Wednesday from Berlin.
Illinois just launched a massive quantum computing project at the former U.S. Steel South Works Site on the water's edge in Chicago, California-based computing firm PsiQuantum announced Thursday morning. The site will be known as the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, and PsiQuantum has been named the “anchor tenant,” Defense One’s Lauren C. William reports.
Why it matters: Both state and federal agencies are teaming up with PsiQuantum as well as with the Argonne National Laboratory, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Universities of Illinois, Chicago, Northwestern and others to construct what’s being billed as the nation’s first utility-scale quantum computer.
The state of Illinois will also contribute $500 million to the facility. The announcement follows a similar $140 million investment by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“Considering the endless potential quantum computing technology holds, it is crucial that we commit to quantum partnerships, research, and infrastructure across our nation,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said in a statement. “This monumental project will revolutionize the fields of medicine and clean energy, creating countless jobs and driving economic growth,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said in his own statement.
Wanna learn more about quantum technology and how it intersects with the military? Check out Defense One’s quantum coverage, here.