USN sails past fake islands; Obama mulls troops to Syria; Budget breakthrough; Do no-fly zones work?; and a bit more...

U.S. challenges Chinese sovereignty claims on the high seas. The U.S. Navy sailed the guided missile destroyer Lassen to within 12 nautical miles of a small chain of artificial islands near the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea early this morning. It’s a long-teased and much-anticipated move from the Obama administration “that raises the stakes in an expanding, multination territorial dispute” and signals “to the Chinese that most of the rest of the world does not recognize its claim on the island chain,” the Wall Street Journal and New York Times reported.

The Lassen patrolled to within a dozen miles of Subi Reef, an island in the northern Spratlys that China occupied in 1988 and began enlarging last year via industrial-scale sand dredging. A runway also appears to be under construction on the built-up land. Reuters reports the Lassen also passed by the so-called Mischief Reef, which falls within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines, adds the Center for Strategic and International Studies. More on Subi and Mischief from CSIS’s Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, here and here.

A deliberate course: “There were several other routes that the United States destroyer could have used, but the military deliberately chose to enter the waters that China claims as its territory,” a U.S. official told NYT. And similar patrols will follow, U.S. defense officials told the WSJ.

The Chinese reax: Beijing said the “relevant authorities” tracked and warned the USS Lassen as it “illegally” entered waters in the Spratlys without the Chinese government's permission. “We advise the U.S. to think carefully before acting, not to take reckless action and not to make trouble out of nothing,” Beijing’s foreign minister said in a statement.

For what it’s worth: The U.S. Navy last visited the Spratlys three years ago. And the patrol Tuesday morning follows a rare Chinese navy foray into U.S. territorial waters off the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea while President Obama was visiting Alaska in early September. Pentagon officials said at the time “that the Chinese navy ships had passed through the waters but they had complied with international law and didn’t act in any threatening way.”

And the U.S. and China added an amendment to a joint accord on safe conduct between the two nations’ pilots that “calls for keeping a secure distance, communicating clearly and keeping a lid on rude body language.” AP reports, adding that “the amendment was signed shortly before a state visit last month to Washington by Chinese President Xi Jinping.” More here.

Memo to Obama: send U.S. troops closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria. The president’s “most senior national security advisors” have proposed putting “a limited number of Special Operations forces on the ground in Syria and put U.S. advisers closer to the firefights in Iraq,” the Washington Post reports. More troops would be required, but exactly how many—as well consent for the overall plan itself, which has been three months in the making—is still awaiting review by the president. Obama, who made a rare visit to the Pentagon in July, requested new options in Washington’s war against the Islamic State group two months after ISIS seized the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi in the spring.

Still, the plan “would be unlikely to produce any major changes to the political situations in Iraq and Syria that have given rise to the Islamic State,” WaPo adds. Similar questions face the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. More from Afghanistan below.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford will testify before the Senate Armed Service Committee this morning on the Pentagon’s strategy in the Middle East. Stream that live beginning at 9 a.m. EDT, here.

About that notional no-fly zone: Nothing in the historical record shows a no-fly zone would work right now in Syria, says Stephen Wrage, professor of American foreign policy at the Naval Academy, writing in Defense One.

The rub: “If the no-fly zone is a humanitarian instrument aimed at saving innocents (as all four recent no-fly zones—two in Iraq, one in Bosnia and one in Libya—have been), it will not be effective because it cannot separate the killers from their victims. Saddam and Qaddafi were constrained by geography: by Iraq’s Zagros Mountains and the Libyan Desert. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, now protected by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s air cover, would have no difficulty reaching the people he intends to kill.”

While we’re at it: Some 120,000 refugees have fled their homes in Syria since Russia began its airstrikes in support of the Assad regime, the U.N. says. Most of them left Aleppo, Hama and the Idlib governates, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Monday. That here.

Turkish police engaged in a fierce firefight in one of the country’s biggest cities, Diyarbakir, on Monday, killing nine ISIS militants in what amounts to “the deadliest encounter between security forces of the NATO ally and the jihadists so far,” The Daily Beast reports.

And ISIS claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on Monday that killed two and wounded a dozen others at a Shiite mosque in the southern Saudi city of Najran, near the border with Yemen. More here.

Think it’s hot in the Middle East now? Climate change could push temperatures in the Persian Gulf to uninhabitable highs by the end of the century, WaPo reported. “The worst impacts would be felt in low-lying areas from Iran’s southern coast to the great metropolises of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.” That, here.

From Defense One

Next Monday! The Defense One Summit 2015: The Age of Everything. On Nov. 2, top national security leaders from military, government, and politics will gather to discuss how they are confronting today’s threats: from terrorism to cyberattacks, Russia, Iran, and in space, at sea, even in Chattanooga. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper will appear in a live keynote interview. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley will talk about setting his service’s priorities to face ground threats. Join us! Register here.

U.S. military officials have finished assessing two Colorado prisons for their suitability to hold prisoners transferred from the Guantanamo naval station, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday. Officials are now compiling their recommendations in a report for Defense Secretary Ash Carter, whom officials say will prepare it for the White House. The White House intends to then send it on to Congress—whose members have already signaled their intent to deny President Barack Obama’s long-running efforts to close the Guantanamo prison. Ben Watson reports.

Court: DOD sequestration furloughs were fair. A federal appeals court has upheld that the Defense Department acted lawfully in furloughing all employees when sequestration hit in 2013, even those employees whose salaries came from non-appropriated funds. GovExec has the story.

Got a clearance? Getting a job just got harder. The OPM hack has slowed hiring for jobs requiring a security clearance, a recent survey shows. That story from NextGov.

Welcome to the Tuesday edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Tell your friends to subscribe here: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. Want to see something different? Got news? Let us know: the-d-brief@defenseone.com

The Air Force could award its $80 billion-plus contract for a new stealth bomber today, Bloomberg reported Monday. But don’t expect to hear much more than the winning bidder—Northrop Grumman or a Boeing-Lockheed Martin team—and an estimate of program costs. That’s because the project, including its budget, is top secret. Read more here about the secret Pentagon team running the program and what this new bomber will do other than dropping bombs, here.

Budgetary breakthrough. “After five years of bitter clashes, Republican congressional leaders and President Obama on Monday night appeared to settle their last budget fight,” writes the NYT. And read the budget agreement itself, here.

What could this mean for the Pentagon? The House bill lifts defense budget caps by $25 billion in 2016 to $548 billion and by $15 billion (to $551 billion) in 2017, according to a note sent to investors this morning by Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners. It also sets the war budget at $58.7 billion in 2016 and 2017.

The tragic slow-drip from Kunduz continues: The U.S. special forces who requested the Doctors without Borders hospital in the northern city of Kunduz in early October believed the Taliban had overrun the facility. This latest development, while three investigations into the attack which reportedly killed more than two dozen staff and patients are still pending, “adds to a body of evidence that the internationally run medical facility site was familiar to the U.S. military, raising questions about whether the decision to attack it violated international law,” AP writes.

“Another hospital run by Afghanistan's health ministry, a short distance away, had been overrun by the Taliban when insurgents seized the city, a senior U.S. defense official said. The new information raises the possibility that some elements of the U.S. intelligence and military apparatus had confused the two hospitals. But other evidence argues against such confusion.” That story, here.

Kabul’s national security advisor wants more U.S. and NATO help flushing out the growing presence of al Qaeda, the Haqqani network and ISIS in his country. Mohammad Hanif Atmar told the AP “insurgent groups are reinventing themselves, joining forces, and drawing funds and support from outside as they take advantage of a perceived weakness of Afghan forces following the end of the U.S.-led international combat mission last year.” More here.

Elsewhere in the region, the death toll from a 7.5-magnitude quake is well above 200, with most reported deaths coming from Pakistan. BBC has more and WSJ has more than a dozen photos of the devastation and recovery efforts here.

Lastly today—Happy early birthday, U.S. Marine Corps! Your gift: M4s on the house! “Commandant Gen. Robert Neller has signed off on the switch making the M4 the primary weapon for all infantry battalions, security forces and supporting schools no later than the end of September 2016,” Marine Corps Times reports ahead of the Corps’ 240th birthday on November 10. More here.