The D Brief: Rebels take another Syrian city; China’s big hack; Next DepSecDef?; NatSec poll results; And a bit more.

Syrian troops retreat from Hama

New: Just a week after taking Aleppo, jihadists and rebels seized another major city in Syria on Thursday. Government troops confirmed their departure from the west-central city of Hama on Thursday after forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham entered the city center, al-Jazeera reported on location. 

But it’s not just HTS in Hama, Aleppo, and the Idlib countryside. “Other groups backed by Turkey and based in Syrian territory just south of the Turkish border have also joined in the fight,” the New York Times reports. The city of Homs is reportedly next, Charles Lister of the Washington-based Middle East Institute reports. 

Accelerated pace: From 2011 to 2023, forces loyal to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad “lost control of two provincial capitals — Raqqa & Idlib,” Lister wrote on social media Thursday morning. But “In the space of 8 days, he’s just lost two more — Aleppo & Hama, Syria’s 2nd & 4th biggest cities.”

Also notable: HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jawlani (also spelled Jolani) told Iraqis not to come to Syria to help the fight against the Assad regime, according to a video released Wednesday. Jawlani himself is a Syrian who traveled to Iraq to fight the U.S. and coalition invasion back in 2003. He was later captured and imprisoned in a U.S. military facility for five years before leading a local branch of al-Qaeda militants in the first few years of the Syrian Civil War. 

Expert forecast: “Big question going forward for HTS is if they can continue to scale up w/out diluting professionalism/discipline we’ve seen so far,” said terrorism researcher Aaron Zelin. “Only gets harder once they get into core regime territories” closer to Damascus. “Even if HTS takes those areas, [it] might have to then deal with [an] insurgency against them.”

Meanwhile in Damascus, “Shops are deserted except for grocery stores, where people are rushing to stock up,” and “A drone was just shot over the city but it's not clear where it came from,” one academic reports on location. There are several military entities tasked with defending the capital city, he writes, including Syria’s best-regarded troops as well as Iranian-backed militias and fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. 

Big-picture consideration: “As the United States shifts its focus to great-power competition with nations such as China, it leaves behind a Middle East where populations and regional countries no longer see groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham merely as terrorists but as political actors filling the void left by failing states,” Syrian scholar Hassan Hassan wrote Thursday in the New York Times. “Their goals are no longer about global jihad but regional dominance — a strategy that makes them harder to dislodge. Western policymakers must grapple with this new reality,” he advised. 

“Western nations have a choice,” Hassan says. That is, “create a moderate alternative that can govern effectively, or acknowledge that such groups will continue to rule in a world that is far from perfect.” Read on, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “How Syria’s ‘Diversity-Friendly’ Jihadists Plan on Building a State,” Zelen wrote on Tuesday for the Washington Institute; 
• “Syrian Rebels’ Surprise Offensive Highlights Assad Regime’s Weakness,” Natasha Hall of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in an explainer published Monday;
• And from the region: “Trump's Middle East envoy in diplomatic push to reach Gaza ceasefire before inauguration,” Reuters reported Thursday from Qatar. 

Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. 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 1964, U.S. Army Capt. Roger Donlon's special forces detachment was attacked by Viet Cong troops well before sunrise at their camp about 15 miles from the Laotian border. For five hours, Donlon scrambled to direct the camp's defensive response, killing attackers, moving ammunition and weapons, providing cover fire for evacuating comrades, and rendering first aid to the wounded—all while under intense grenade, mortar and heavy weapons fire and after having suffered several wounds himself, including injuries to his leg, stomach, shoulder and face. He would become the first Green Beret to receive the Medal of Honor. Donlon passed away in January at the age of 89.

Salt Typhoon cut deeper than thought

China’s Salt Typhoon hack has penetrated eight telecom firms, affecting the U.S. and dozens of other countries, a White House official told reporters on Wednesday. According to the Associated Press, “Deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger offered new details about the breadth of the sprawling Chinese hacking campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans.” 

Among the hacked telecoms: AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies, officials with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters Tuesday. 

But there could be more: “Officials who briefed reporters on the recommendations said the U.S. still doesn’t know the true scope of China’s attack or the extent to which Chinese hackers still have access to U.S. networks,” AP reports.

The hackers have accessed three types of information, U.S. officials said:

1. Call records showing the numbers that phones called and when. (The hackers focused on phones in the Washington, D.C., area, the officials said.)
2. Live phone calls of some specific targets. (The presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as the office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y, have been informed that they have been targeted.)
3. Systems that U.S. law enforcement uses to wiretap Americans’ communications under the 1994 CALEA law.

FBI, CISA guidance: The agencies issued cybersecurity guidance for companies to “help root out the hackers and prevent similar cyberespionage in the future.

And Americans in general should use encrypted apps for communications, the officials said. “Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here: encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication. Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible,” Jeff Greene, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, said on a press call Tuesday, per NBC News.

So, what apps are encrypted? It’s a bit complicated. Signal is “end-to-end” encrypted, meaning that even its parent company can’t read your messages—but only if you use it to message other Signal users. Same with Apple’s iMessage: blue bubbles mean encrypted messages, green ones don’t. And same with Google Messages, except there’s no indication when it sends an insecure text. And WhatsApp says it has E2EE but there have been exceptions. 

China’s denial: A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington denied the country was behind the hacking campaign, telling NBC News in an email that “China firmly opposes and combats all kinds of cyber attacks.”

Around the Defense Department

The Pentagon’s next No. 2 may be a wealthy investor with deep ties to the defense industry. To be sure, those ties suggest potential conflicts of interest; but billionaire Stephen Feinberg’s familiarity with the Pentagon’s acquisition system could be helpful, too, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Wednesday.

As co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, Feinberg directed the firm's investments toward the defense sector across a range of areas, from armored vehicles to aviation services to undersea cables.

He’s also taken a particular interest in aerospace, through positions in companies like Vivace—a producer of specialty propulsion tanks—and investments in hypersonic missile testing businesses, Tucker writes. What’s more, the company’s acquisition of CalSpan led to the creation of a business called North Wind, which aims to “drive the expansion and modernization of our nation’s valuable test infrastructure with a focus on hypersonics.”

How could Feinberg help the Pentagon’s hypersonics ambitions? Continue reading, here. 

Armenian Defense Minister Suren Papikyan is visiting the Pentagon for talks with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Aside from the six-week war with its neighbor Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, Armenia rarely makes international headlines. And Turkish leaders in Ankara, whose Ottoman Empire oversaw the genocide of more than a million Armenians in 1915 and 1916, aren’t in any particular hurry to change that. In fact, Turkey has closed its borders with Armenia and hasn’t had formal relations with the country since 1993. 

Panning out: Armenia occupies a precarious place in the South Caucasus, where Eastern Europe meets West Asia. Sandwiched between Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Iran, Armenia has become “a flashpoint in the broader Russia-West standoff,” two scholars, Philip Gamaghelyan and Nigar Göksel, write this week in War on the Rocks. “Moreover, Armenia’s membership in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, which involves a mutual defense clause, failed to prevent Azerbaijan’s limited incursion into Armenia proper in 2022,” Gamaghelyan and Göksel explain. “Thus, Armenia has suspended its participation in the organization and has sought to develop relationships with the European Union and the United States, capitalizing on their geopolitical competition with Moscow.”

Latest: Armenia’s prime minister flagged the ongoing tensions with Russia in remarks to lawmakers Wednesday. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty has a bit more on that recent development.

One last note about Armenia’s obscurity: “No matter what happens to Armenians, it doesn’t get in the news,” American comedian James Adomian joked in a recent stand-up special. “You tune in to CNN and they're like, ‘The Armenians—we've heard the word, we don't know what they are…’” Catch the rest of his bit via YouTube, here. You can also see Adomian discuss the country with now-deceased raconteur and travel writer Anthony Bourdain over plates of Armenian food at Sahag’s Basturma sandwich shop in northwestern Los Angeles, Calif. That five-and-a-half minute video is also on YouTube, here. 

Additional reporting from around DOD: 

• “Army, Marine Corps want more ground vehicle simulators,” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Wednesday from the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, or I/ITSEC, in Orlando; 
• “Wanted: realistic simulations for digital warfare,” Williams reported separately from I/ITSEC on Wednesday; 
• See also “New joint data standards could come in early 2025,” also via Williams at I/ITSEC; 
• And don’t miss, “Can OpenAI power military drone defenses? New partnership with Anduril offers clues,” via Defense One’s Patrick Tucker, reporting Wednesday. 

Etc.

After four years under President Biden, Americans are feeling more confident in the U.S. military than they have in years, with record-high support for U.S. leadership abroad and increasing defense spending, according to an annual survey published Thursday by the Ronald Reagan Institute.

“Fifty percent of Americans overall—61 percent of Trump voters—they prefer more of an engaged, internationalist American leadership approach on the international stage,” Rachel Hoff, the institute’s policy director, told reporters Tuesday. 

Both of those figures are all-time highs from the survey’s six years of polling, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports. Respondents also favored a bump in defense spending, as well as continued U.S. military basing around the world.

On the other hand: Results were less enthusiastic for continued spending when it comes to sending weapons to allies, Myers writes. Forty-three percent supported foreign spending, down 5 percent from last year. Within that group, 54 percent support sending weapons to Israel and 55 percent support sending weapons to Ukraine, both slightly down from previous surveys.

Other takeaways: 

• 27 percent of respondents said the U.S. should focus its forces on the Indo-Pacific region. Another 25 percent ranked the Middle East as the highest priority, while 18 percent pointed to Europe.
• 60 percent support for NATO as an alliance, with about three-quarters of respondents supporting the mandate to intervene in its defense.

Read more here, or check out the complete survey results for yourself here.