Dramatic changes coming to US hostage policy; DOD puts space-war plans in high gear; Assad, #tonedeaf on tourism; Another nuclear wrinkle from Iran; And a bit more.
Sea change on U.S. hostage policy. The White House is releasing its “hostage policy review” today that would let American families pay ransoms to terrorist groups without fear of reprisals from U.S. authorities, AP reports. President Barack Obama is expected to announce the creation of a new hostage recovery “fusion cell” for coordinating the interagency response. A new State Department special envoy post is also expected to take the administration lead in future negotiations with foreign governments like Qatar, for example, which helped secure the August release of American Theo Curtis from his captors in Syria.
“Two U.S. officials familiar with the review said there will be no formal change to the law that explicitly makes it a crime to provide money or other material support to terror organizations. However, the administration will make clear that the Justice Department has never prosecuted anyone for paying ransom and that that will continue to be the case.”
Five families, one businessman, and a remembrance—in the name of better policy. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker penned a sobering, no-nonsense deep-dive into how the families of Kayla Mueller, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, James Foley and Theo Padnos raced against the clock—and in all but one case, fate—to bring their children home from their terrorist captors abroad. Wright begins the story at the home of David Bradley (disclosure: he owns Atlantic Media Group and Defense One), who went to extraordinary lengths to fill a U.S. policy gap after learning that the U.S. government refused to negotiate the return of American hostages when Atlantic freelancer Clare Gillis was captured in Libya in 2011.
Today, the Senate is expected to vote to give the president expanded trade powers that would bolster America’s Asian pivot, prying open greater access to roughly 40 percent of the global economy, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Will Washington’s cybersecurity beef with Beijing get in the way of $590B in two-way trade with China? Unlikely, Reuters reports after day 2 of U.S.-China closed-door talks in Washington. While U.S. officials have repeatedly shown vague disgust toward hackers believed to be operating out of China, that doesn’t appear to be altering negotiations. Beijing officials, meanwhile, are viewing this week’s talks largely “as a preparation for a visit to Washington by President Xi Jinping in September.”
“The greatest cyber risks to U.S. national security involve about a third of the country's 16 critical infrastructure sectors,” InsideCybersecurity’s Chris Castelli writes after using FOIA to get his hands on a 2013 executive order that lays out “61 entities in five critical infrastructure sectors” that should be locked down from this devastating new form of espionage.
And speaking of espionage, France is sending National Intelligence Coordinator Didier Le Bret stateside for talks with U.S. officials after Wikileaks published documents late last night that it claims show the NSA spied on the last three French presidents, AFP reports. U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley has also been summoned to discuss the matter today with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. The release comes “a day before the French Parliament was expected to pass a bill legalizing broad surveillance of terrorism suspects,” the New York Times reports.
War in space is not just for movies anymore. To fend off attacks on its ever-more-critical satellites, DoD is going to open a new space-ops center—possibly near Washington?—and will “develop the tactics, techniques, procedures, rules of the road that would allow us … to fight the architecture and protect it while it’s under attack,” DepSecDef Bob Work told a crowd at the GEOINT conference (on through tomorrow at the Washington Convention Center). Work, who named China and Russia as potential threats to U.S. communications and intelligence satellites, said the center would also help coordinate all U.S. agencies’ space efforts. Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber and Patrick Tucker report, here.
From Defense One
I want to say just one word to you: hoverbikes. DoD and British firm Malloy Aeronautics have teamed up to create quadrotors that can carry soldiers into battle, and eventually commuters to work. The company says it already has a one-third-scale prototype that flies up to 9,000 feet high, and aims to introduce the real thing in three to five years. Read the story by Quartz’ Gabriel Fisher—and watch the video—here.
Daylight between U.S. and Israel policies. There’s always been some, despite former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s recent and well-aired criticisms of the Obama administration. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven A. Cook lists enough to disprove Oren’s assertion, here.
Welcome to Wednesday's edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Brad Peniston. Why not pass it on to a friend? You’ll find our subscribe link here. (Want to read it in your browser? Click here.) And feel free to send us what you like, don’t like, or want to drop on our radar right here at the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
Tanks’ll show ’em. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter gave a rough estimate of the U.S. equipment the Pentagon will stage across Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania in the hopes of discouraging any further Russian incursions into Eastern Europe, The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold reported ahead of Wednesday’s meeting of NATO defense ministers to discuss how to counter Russia’s conventional military and nuclear saber-rattling.
“We’re talking about 250 armored vehicles, tanks, Bradleys and howitzers that would not fill up the parking lot of your average high school and they will be distributed in formations in several different countries,” said a senior military official. “That’s the scale we’re talking about.”
Gitmo latest. In Estonia yesterday, Secretary Carter told CBS that even as he's working with the White House on a plan for Congress to close Guantanamo, he's skeptical it can be done before President Obama leaves office. “I'm not confident, but I am hopeful. I think we'll have a good proposal, and I think we're hoping it wins the support that it needs in Congress, so that we can move forward,” Carter told CBS News. “There are people in Guantanamo Bay who cannot and should not be released because they will return to the terrorist fight. And therefore we need a place where we can detain them in the long term,” he said, adding U.S. law bars transfers to U.S. soil. Carter suggested the plan couldn't come soon enough “so that the next President doesn't have to deal with this situation.” Watch this space later this week for an in-depth take on the evolution of the White House’s effort to close Guantanamo, from Politics Reporter Molly O’Toole.
The U.S. homegrown terrorism threat that the police know well—but that the public may not. A new tally from researchers at New America reveals that “since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people [48 to 26] have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims,” NYT’s reports. “A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed ‘Al Qaeda-inspired’ violence.”
“We understand white supremacists…We don’t really feel like we understand Al Qaeda, which seems too complex and foreign to grasp,” said William Braniff, the executive director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
The Islamic State group just released its most gruesome video yet, NYT’s Ben Hubbard writes. Dozens of captives that ISIS accused of spying for the U.S. are filmed being drowned in a cage together; trapped in a car that is blown up by an RPG from roughly 20 feet away; and seven men are decapitated with explosive cord. The video also calls out an Iraqi police lieutenant who has been trying to convince Iraqis near Mosul to take a stand against the group.
The lieutenant’s father was among those killed in the video, which appears to suggest a new level of paranoia among the group as it grapples with a series of setbacks in recent days with the Kurdish advance on the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad and Ein Eissa, roughly 30 miles from ISIS headquarters in Raqqa, Syria. For what it’s worth, the Kurdish fighters have said they have no plans to take Raqqa anytime soon.
Despite what you may have heard, U.S. troops are not sharing their new Taqqadum training site (between Fallujah and Ramadi) with Iranian-backed militias, Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio reported yesterday. But it is a subtle distinction, as Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said some Iraqi Shiite militia members “in the low double-digits” are serving at the base as liaisons to Baghdad—but “it’s not a unit,” he said Tuesday.
Iran’s Supreme Leader just threw another wrinkle into the ongoing negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program, NYT’s reports. The biggest new wrinkle stems from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s insistence that a lifting of sanctions not occur in line with Iran’s dismantling of centrifuges. He also ruled out freezing Iran’s nuclear enrichment for a decade—contrary to a preliminary agreement reached in April—and he objected to “unconventional inspections, interrogating certain Iranian individuals and inspecting military sites.” Analysts view the Ayatollah’s statements as an unsurprising appeal to Tehran’s hardliners and military leaders.
So what now? “It is possible that Iran will reach an understanding with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, but not ‘sign’ the agreement for months,” NYT’s Thomas Erdbrink and David Sanger write. “That would give Iran time to come into compliance with the terms, allowing President Obama to ‘lift’ oil and financial sanctions on the first day of the accord.”
“Can we have a national conversation about building new nuclear weapons?” asked House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, yesterday at the Atlantic Council in Washington. US News’ Paul Shinkman rolls up Thornberry’s concerns of Russian nuclear intimidation after nearly six years of de-prioritizing America’s nuclear arsenal since Obama took office.
Ahead of Thursday’s House Armed Services hearings (morning and afternoon) on America’s nuclear posture, Todd Harrison and Evan Braden Montgomery of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments just released this 25-year look-ahead at the cost of America’s aging nuclear forces (with investments poised to peak in FY27 before coming back down). The skinny: “Funding the nuclear modernization programs currently planned for the 2020s and beyond would require gradually increasing the overall defense budget by less than two percent above the BCA budget caps over the next decade, offsetting cuts of this amount within the budget, or some combination of the two. Thus, the issue is not affordability—rather, it is a matter of prioritization.” Get the full report here.
The Brits got a look at how the F-35B might launch from their ramped aircraft carriers during recent tests at Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River, IHS Jane’s reported yesterday. A ski-jump “will be used to launch jets from the decks of the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales carriers being built for the UK Royal Navy, and may be adopted by other customers such as Italy. Phase I testing will continue for two weeks, ahead of the Phase II trials to take place through the third quarter of the year.”
Meantime, the U.S. Navy’s second new Ford-class aircraft carrier is getting more expensive—to the tune of some $235 million over a congressionally-mandated budget cap. For the latest on the USS John F. Kennedy, Bloomberg has this.
Moving on up: Boeing’s next CEO will be vice chairman Dennis Muilenburg, who ran its defense business before being named vice chairman in 2013, the company announced Tuesday. WSJ has that one here.
And lastly, this morning: What could possibly go wrong for Syrian President Bashir al-Assad’s #SummerinSyria social media campaign, which touts all that the country has to offer tourists? Turns out—as with much of Syria these days—rather a lot, as pictures began pouring in with nearly every ugly facet of the country’s civil war on full display and easily sortable. Buzzfeed has the story here. #tonedeaf