Turkey joins ISIS fight; Carter praises Peshmerga; DOD fixes anthrax blame; ’80s-riffic Coast Guard video surfaces; And a bit more.
In a long-sought shift in Ankara’s reluctance to engage the Islamic State, three Turkish F-16s flying out of Diyarbakir airbase in southeast Turkey bombed two ISIS “command centers” and a gathering point inside Syria this morning, killing nearly three dozen militants, AP reports. The jets reportedly never entered Syrian airspace and their strikes were “a pre-emptive measure based on intelligence about a planned attack on Turkey,” a government official told the New York Times.
Meanwhile, Pentagon and Obama administration officials on Thursday confirmed Turkish media reports earlier in the week that Ankara is opening up its Incirlik and Diyarbakir air bases for U.S.-led coalition jets to strike ISIS—putting warplanes some 250 miles from Islamic State headquarters in Raqqa, Syria, and shortening what had previously been for some strikes a 1,200-mile journey, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker and Marcus Weisgerber report. “The agreement that opened the base to strike missions is a few weeks old, the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reported. ‘The two sides agreed in principle about the use of the İncirlik base in Adana during talks on July 7-8,’ it said.”
“We have decided to further deepen our cooperation in the fight against ISIL. Access to Turkish bases such as Incirlik air base will increase the coalition’s operational efficiency for counter-ISIL efforts, including airstrikes,” said Capt. Jeff Davis, Pentagon spokesman, in a statement provided Thursday to Defense One. The new agreement is nothing short of a “game-changer,” as one Obama administration official told the NYT.
On top of these moves, Turkish police also detained more than 250 people across 13 provinces this morning. “But it was unclear how many of the detainees were Kurdish separatists or had links to the Islamic State,” as the Washington Post’s Erin Cunningham writes.
All this stateside news about Turkey comes one day after a recent poll from the Pew Research Center revealed that just 30 percent of Americans say the U.S. military campaign against ISIS is going “very well” or even “fairly well.” Americans are also increasingly worried U.S. military action in Iraq and Syria won’t go far enough to stop ISIS—with 48 percent saying as much compared to 32 percent when asked the same question in August. Also, nearly two-thirds of Republicans favor U.S. ground troops in the fight, whereas the same percentage of Democrats are opposed. Quite a few more minute takeaways can be found over here.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter arrived at Irbil in Iraq’s Kurdistan region this morning where he’s “expected to meet the Kurdistan region's President Massoud Barzani as well as U.S. forces advising and training the Kurdish region's security forces, known as peshmerga,” Reuters’ Phil Stewart reports. “Friday's talks are likely to include regular Kurdish requests for arms and equipment. The Pentagon has said it is examining Kurdish requests, including for mine-resistant vehicles,” Stewart writes.
The “secret sauce.” Carter called the Peshmerga “‘the model of what we are trying to achieve’ with a strategy of enabling capable and motivated local forces in northern and western Iraq to take the ground combat lead,” AP’s Bob Burns writes this morning from Irbil. “We're trying to get a defeat that sticks,” said Carter. “And that can be delivered only by the people that live here…that’s the secret sauce.”
To the south in Anbar province, Baghdad has deployed some 3,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi troops to the outskirts of Ramadi, where an offensive to retake the city is expected some time in the next two months, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. About 500 Sunni tribal fighters are also being deployed to the fight for Ramadi, where Pentagon officials estimate as many as 2,000 ISIS fighters are holed up.
U.S. troops could step up their role in Iraq’s plans “when and if [Iraqi forces] develop capable and motivated forces of their own that can take territory and hold territory,” Carter said told Iraqi leaders, including Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
ICYMI: U.S. Army Chief Gen. Ray Odierno echoed the view of many officials that ISIS is “a 10-year problem at least,” telling Fox News this week that if the U.S. had “stayed a little more engaged [in Iraq], I think maybe it might have prevented” the rise of ISIS. Nevertheless, he added, “Middle Eastern countries have to solve this problem. We have to build their capability, their capacity to solve that problem. We certainly can assist them, but they’ve got to want to solve this problem.”
Not that that’s stopped Republican governor and 2016 GOP hopeful John Kasich from throwing his support behind U.S. ground troops taking the fight to ISIS. “This is something that has to be done—let’s just do it,” he told a group of about 100 supporters in New Hampshire on Wednesday. That bit here.
Meantime on Capitol Hill, an indignant Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., told State Secretary John Kerry about the Iran deal, “I believe you’ve been fleeced. And in the process of being fleeced what you’ve really done here is turn Iran from being a pariah to now Congress being a pariah,” Defense One’s Molly O’Toole reports.
Kerry cited U.S. military leaders’ assessments that kinetic options would not be effective, O’Toole writes. “It can’t be guaranteed by military action alone,” Kerry said. “Our own military tells us that. That is an overriding national security priority and it should not be at risk.”
Said Corker to Defense One: “I don’t think anybody in the hearing today indicated that we’re strongly desirous of going to war, but if you say that we’re gonna negotiate a deal that doesn’t meet the standard, and if you don’t agree with that then you must want war…It’s rhetoric used to divide, which I know the president has been very good at doing throughout the period of time he’s been president, but it certainly has no place in this debate.” Read the rest, here.
From Defense One
A military human intelligence organization that has faced headwinds is still growing, the Pentagon’s former intelligence chief said on Thursday. The original vision for the Defense Clandestine Service was scaled back — its workforce was once expected to match the CIA’s — but Michael Vickers says the new agency is still building up. Defense One’s Kedar Pavgi reports from the Aspen Security Forum.
The Pentagon’s accidental-anthrax report is out. It says faulty procedures for killing spores were responsible for the live anthrax that got shipped to dozens of labs in eight countries. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has the details, here.
Trying to figure out who to listen to about the Iran deal? The Atlantic’s Peter Beinert has a suggestion: see what they said in the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “To a degree that will baffle historians, the political-intellectual complex that made the Iraq War possible remains intact and powerful,” he writes.
Welcome to Friday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Brad Peniston. Want to share The D Brief with a friend? Find our subscribe link here. (And if you want to view today’s edition in your browser, you can do that here.) And please tell us what you like, don’t like, or want to drop on our radar right here at the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
The chief of al-Qaeda’s “suicide and explosive operations” was killed in an airstrike over southeastern Afghanistan’s Paktika province on July 11, the Pentagon said this morning, the WSJ reports.
The senior AQ leader, Abu Khalil al-Sudani, “was ‘directly linked to external attack planning against the United States,’ meaning plans for attacks on U.S. or western soil. Officials said the militant had attacked foreign forces in Afghanistan and had close ties to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri,” according to WaPo.
Speaking from Iraq, Ash Carter added that al-Sudani maintained a close association with Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al-Qaida. He was killed along with two other unnamed “violent extremists,” AP adds, quoting a U.S. military source who said “Al-Sudani had also been close to Osama bin Laden before his death, and had fought alongside bin Laden in the 10-year anti-Soviet war that followed the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.”
In the wake of the tragic shooting rampage in Chattanooga, Tenn., last week, the U.S. Army’s Recruiting Command has told its troops to avoid the armed citizens volunteering their security services outside recruiting centers across the country, Stars and Stripes reported.
All Marine recruiters are back in their uniform, Marine Corps Times’ Gina Harkins reports this morning. “Only a small number of recruiters were told to temporarily switch out of their uniforms following last week's attack on two military facilities in Tennessee, despite reports from the Pentagon that all were told to don civilian clothing,” Harkins writes.
What’s at stake? Nothing less than the future of the force. “We can't recruit from behind fences or locked inside offices,” said Maj. Garron Garn, a spokesman for Marine Corps Recruiting Command. “Therefore, we will make every effort to remain engaged with local communities through our outreach efforts.”
And on Thursday in Washington, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved President Obama’s nomination of Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sending the vote to the full Senate.
Speaking of Marines, responses continue to roll in over the late June firing of Lt. Col. Kate Germano, who commanded female boot camp training at Parris Island, S.C., amid complaints of a toxic work environment. Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand even flagged the topic (beginning around the 1:44:00 mark) during Thursday’s SASC confirmation hearing for Lt. Gen. Robert Neller as the new Corps’ commandant. Replied Neller: “I want every Marine to have the best opportunity to be successful...it’s going to take close scrutiny, it’s not anything anyone takes lightly.”
Get up to speed on the controversy—and an increasingly illuminated corner of the gender integration debate within the military—via Marine Corps Times, NYT, the San Diego Union-Tribune, or from Germano’s own hand, here.
Taxpayers get their first up-close look at their trillion-dollar F-35 Lightning II. The aircraft formerly known as JSF made its civilian-airshow debut this week in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, showing off in the air and on the ground. Here’s a slideshow from Aviation Week’s John Morris.
We close this week with a truly fabulous peek into the archives of military advertising: “This is why we don’t talk about the Coast Guard in public,” one observer said of a so-awful-it’s-great Coastie promo video from the...late ’80s? Kudos to Marine broadcaster Clayton Filipowicz for dusting it off and sharing it on Facebook. Go on and watch to the end. (Tip: Muting helps.) Have a great weekend, everyone.