CIA vs. Obama’s ‘optimistic’ ISIS talk; New DIA chief speaks; After Mullah Omar; Carter to arm recruiters; Hacking infrastructure; US-trained Syrian rebels kidnapped; And a bit more.
Multiple U.S. intelligence assessments contradict the Obama administration’s “optimistic line” on ISIS and on how much the Islamic State has been degraded across Iraq and Syria, according to the Associated Press. Catch that dismal roll-up from “the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others” over here. “‘We've seen no meaningful degradation in their numbers,’ a defense official said,’” AP reports.
Goodbye, Mullah Omar. Hello, Mullah Mansoor. Roughly 48 hours after news broke of Mullah Omar’s death, the Taliban announced Friday morning they have a new #1. AP reports: “Mullah Mohammad Akhtar Mansoor…has been an ‘active director’ of the jihad, or holy war, for some years.”
“The new leader of the Taliban is seen as close to Pakistan, which is believed to have sheltered and supported the insurgents through the war, now in its 14th year. This may put him in a position to revive the peace talks,” AP adds, though negotiations scheduled for today in Pakistan have been cancelled indefinitely by Islamabad.
The murky, delayed revelations of Omar’s death highlight the chronic strains in the U.S.-Pakistan intelligence relationship, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reports. As far back as January 2011—more than two years before Omar is now believed to have died—CIA Director Leon Panetta asked Pakistan’s president directly about reports Omar was being treated in a Karachi hospital for possible kidney failure and meningitis. One reason why the inquiry into Omar’s whereabouts at the time floundered: agency resources were being devoted to investigating a certain compound in Abbottabad. Two weeks later, CIA contractor Raymond Davis was apprehended after killing two Pakistani men in Lahore.
Did Pakistan knowingly harbor another terrorist leader? “There is no certainty about the date or place of [Omar’s] death,” a spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Washington told Miller, noting that the Taliban’s statement “categorically mentions that Mullah Omar never left Afghanistan.”
With Omar gone, another nightmare may be only beginning for Afghanistan and NATO, says David Rohde, former Taliban captive and Reuters investigative reporter. What will happen with Taliban peace talks? “Omar’s 26-year-old son, Yaqoob, and other hardliners oppose the peace talks….” but Mansoor supported them.
Which all adds up to this ugly truth: “As odd as it may seem to some Americans, reports of Omar’s death could not come at a worse time… A rare moment of consensus among international powers and their longtime Afghan proxies exist. But it may be too late to halt the centrifugal forces unleashed in Afghanistan by both internal and external actors over the past 40 years.” Read the rest, here.
Before we leave Afghanistan, here’s an $825 billion sobering Friday factoid from the SIGAR, America’s Afghanistan reconstruction watchdog, John Sopko: “All told, the U.S. has spent about $110 billion rebuilding Afghanistan, with some $15 billion appropriated but not yet spent, on top of $700 billion for U.S. military operations in the country.” That from two days ago via Roll Call’s John Donnelly, here.
DIA's cyber counterintelligence teams recently "surfaced some things that concerned us" after new Director Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart ordered a sweep for compromises in the agency's networks. Stewart dropped that nugget at his first public appearance on stage at the latest INSA Leadership Dinner, Thursday in Pentagon City. Speaking to a friendly crowd of intelligence community professionals and veterans, the Marine Corps general mostly stuck to safer issues of the IC's workforce and budget, but he admitted the agency's 16,000 workers around the globe are still wrestling with their mission and purpose, comparing today’s world to 1981, the year DIA was founded, according to Defense One, who attended. So, intel workers should expect job cuts and organizational changes. Stewart avoided any hard news questions about, oh, say the war on terrorism. But he did say DIA was gathering a senior leader seminar in Tampa at the end of August to analyze what the Middle East may look like "when dust settles." No rush, fellas.
Stuck using "cans and string" and "smoke" signals? Stewart also complained of entering an outdated office and budget. "I walk into DIA and we have more antiquated equipment than I had in the Marine Corps," he said. Stewart said he would push to update the agency's hardware, but noted he needed help from Congress. "I gotta say, I love John McCain," he joked, about the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee overseeing the DOD budget.
Intel job cuts coming. Stewart, in his unscripted remarks, said bluntly that he would be cleaning DIA's house of underperforming workers, whom he was happy to help find jobs in other agencies. He especially called out older analysts he argued seemed unable to see the world as it was changing (citing Cuba analysts, in particular.) Stewart also said the IC needed to get over their opposition to professional certifications for intelligence analysts. And you can expect the intelligence gathering artform housed at DIA known as MASINT to slowly go the way of the Dodo, he indicated.
DIA chief's love note to defense contractors: "Quit protesting everything," he said. Losing defense contractors are adding six months of unnecessary delay before DIA can acquire new capabilities, he said, because every losing award is automatically protested by their lawyers.
#ScudLaunch: DIA's first indication of the Houthi scud missile launched from Yemen into Saudi Arabia, Stewart said, was when they saw it mentioned on social media. "First warning of that event? Hashtag 'scudlaunch,'" he said. "That's how we started the search for that act."
A “How-To Guide” for hacking critical infrastructure. “At next week’s Black Hat and Def Con cybersecurity conferences, two security consultants will describe how bits might be used to disrupt physical infrastructure,” Defense One Tech Editor Patrick Tucker reports.
“A hacker bent on destruction might try various methods,” Tucker writes. “There are ‘water hammers,’ a method of destroying piping structures by closing valves too fast. There are three-phase attacks that cause gears to spin too quickly, too slowly, or out of sync with other vital pieces of equipment. (The so-called Aurora vulnerability is one of these.) And there are collapse attacks, where the hacker fills a round tube or container with hot liquid, rapidly closes the lid and waits for the liquid to cool to create a vacuum.”
As if the U.S. needed more reminders, analysts stress that these dire assessments clearly point to the need for the U.S. to bolster its cyber defenses, beginning with “a comprehensive overview of plant cyber security, better sensors inside the facility, better control processes, and much better sensitivity to small abnormalities.” It’s what one expert calls “process security—protecting the overall plant. Traditional IT security is insufficient, she said.” Read Tucker’s full report, here.
The Air Force and DARPA are working on how to track the murky path of malicious code across the web before it latches onto its intended target. It’s a $4.2 million program called “THEIA – named for the Greek goddess of shining light,” Military Times reports.
From Defense One
On Sunday, U.S. State Secretary John Kerry heads to Egypt for the first “strategic dialogues” with Cairo since 2009. The Atlantic Council’s Amy Hawthorne previews the trip’s goals here.
From NSA whistleblower to working the Apple store. The Justice Department prosecuted a former NSA exec for talking about old surveillance programs with a Baltimore Sun reporter in 2010. What’s he up to now? He’s selling MacBooks in Bethesda, Md. Government Executive’s Charlie Clark has the story of “persona non grata” Thomas Drake’s attempts to rebuild his life while staying true to what convinced him blowing the whistle was the right thing to do.
Welcome to Friday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Kevin Baron. Want to share The D Brief with a friend? Find our subscribe link 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.
Pentagon to arm recruiting centers—In the wake of Chattanooga, Defense Secretary Ash Carter authorizes the arming of additional troops stateside “based on the threat and the immediate need to protect DoD assets and lives… [amid] the continuing threat to DOD personnel in the U.S. homeland posed by homegrown violent extremists.”
“The plans would apply ‘particularly with recruiting that exists outside of actual bases. So this is recruiting stations, ROTC units, and reserve centers, and there are about 7,000 of these throughout the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told The Hill.
New reporting deadline for the service chiefs: Each now has “until Aug. 21 to submit ‘action plans’ for beefed-up security of personnel, buildings and other physical facilities,” McClatchy’s James Rosen reports.
Carter also wants those plans to address how to “improve off-installation site security, including practical physical security upgrades and procedural improvements.” He also called for a review of “mass warning notification systems and regional alert systems,” Military Times reported yesterday.
Take 2: Slotkin Re-nominated. Obama is trying again to get Elissa Slotkin confirmed to be the Pentagon’s new #2 policy official as the assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs. The White House announced Thursday they’d sent her nomination to the Senate. Slotkin failed to clear committee in December when McCain called her “unqualified” and asked for more of her thoughts on Iraq while hinting her re-nomination this year would do the trick. Not waiting around, Slotkin already has been operating as “acting” ASD for ISA since the departure of former Assistant Secretary of Defense Derek Chollet (who, full disclosure, is a paid Defense One contributor.) The post recently has been a true right-hand man...or woman… to the SecDef, especially during international travel. Slotkin was one of the handful of Americans in the room with Carter when he met with Saudi King Salman this month.
“Elissa is one of the most experienced Middle East experts in the administration,” a defense official told Defense One, “and at a time when ISIS continues to dominate headlines her nomination demonstrates Ash Carter's desire to have best people on hand to deal with most complex challenges.” Slotkin already has “strengthened her hand in Europe” after several trips to visit senior defense policymakers and has “personally organized both of Carter's political-military conferences in Kuwait and Stuttgart.”
Kidnappings mar U.S. training mission in Syria. Nusra Front fighters have kidnapped about two-dozen U.S.-trained rebels in Syria, the New York Times reported yesterday. “The biggest kidnapping prize on Thursday was a leader of the trainees, Nadeem Hassan. When the Pentagon announced the program last year, Mr. Hassan helped to gather several groups totaling 1,200 insurgents, who were already fighting in Syria and willing to join the training. They began fighting together as a unit called Division 30. Also abducted were at least six other fighters from Division 30, but an American official said they were not among the graduates.”
The entire group of rebels the U.S. trainers are working with is made up of “just two main clusters…marginal players acting on local considerations. One is from Deir al-Zour, an eastern desert province with little government presence where the Islamic State has massacred resistant tribes. Nawwaf al-Basheer, their leader, said 1,100 men were ready, but training has been postponed until September. Then there is Mr. Hassan’s group, mainly Turkmen, an ethnic minority, from a small patch of Aleppo Province.
Hassan said that he asked his U.S. military trainers “if they are going to protect us” and never received a straight answer. He was kidnapped two days later.
Complicating Washington’s already flagging Syrian training mission: better-financed groups are paying fighters more than the U.S. at $225 per month.
How can the U.S. improve pitch to Syrian rebels? “Several insurgent leaders, interviewed in the Turkish border town of Antakya, said the Pentagon should market its program as ‘protecting civilians,’ from both the Islamic State and government forces. ‘It would be more convincing,’” one Syrian military defector said.
Meantime, McCain is not happy that for two months this fall the U.S. will have no aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. At Thursday’s confirmation hearing for Adm. John Richardson to become the next chief of naval operations, or CNO. “The exchange was the exception to a generally receptive confirmation for the chief of naval operations nominee,” Navy Times reported.
Brrrrrrrrrt alert: Did the U.S. Air Force public affairs folks at Ramstein just leap into the meme and listicle game? It’s Friday so go ahead and dive into their clickbait roll-up titled “9 reason [sic] we love the A-10.”
Dempsey’s pipes. We leave you today with the Pentagon’s top military officer, Gen. Martin Dempsey, connecting with the kiddos at a recent Military Families Forum. It should be said that the Joint Chiefs chairman has a fine singing voice, especially on the Irish ditty called “The Unicorn Song.” He hits a few other bars—some with more panache than others—including a brief try at Bruno Mars’ once-ubiquitous “Uptown Funk.” And if you don’t believe it, well there’s always the original song. Have a great weekend, folks.