Bombs rain on Aleppo; Rough day for the Trump transition; Signs of life in Mosul; Royal Navy to go guns-only; and just a bit more...
Bombs from Assad’s allied air force are still raining down on Aleppo, Idlib and Homs provinces. AP reports “20 civilians have been killed by the fierce bombardment that resumed Tuesday after a three-week respite. Local activists counted at least 50 artillery and air strikes since the morning.”
The U.S. says Russia’s renewed air offensives in Syria violate international law, Agence France-Presse reported Tuesday. The U.S. State Department’s read on Tuesday’s air raids across three governorates: “The most recent reported attacks are on five hospitals and one mobile clinic in Syria. We believe it's a violation of international law,” spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said from Washington. She went on to accuse Moscow of “letting eastern Aleppo residents starve while seeking praise from the international community for halting indiscriminate strikes.”
116 UN member states also condemned Moscow’s offensives, with 15 refusing to go that far, and another 49 abstaining from a vote in the General Assembly's human rights committee.
For what it’s worth, Russia “is formally withdrawing its signature from the founding statute of the International Criminal Court, saying the tribunal has failed to live up to the hopes of the international community.” The move is seen as a reaction to a preliminary report released by the ICC on Monday describing what happened in Crimea as “an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” AP reports.
In case you were wondering: The U.S. and China never joined the ICC, U.S. Naval War College's James Kraska reminds us.
Newsflash: Russia is not bombing Aleppo, Kremlin spox Dmitry Peskov said this morning.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump are “natural allies” so long as Trump decides to fight terrorism, Assad said Tuesday in his first reaction to the U.S. election. “We cannot tell anything about what he's going to do, but if...he is going to fight the terrorists, of course we are going to be ally, natural ally in that regard with the Russian, with the Iranian, with many other countries,” Assad told Portugal's RTP state television. That here.
Meanwhile, the folks at IHS Janes may have located at least one Russian Bastion anti-ship missile system in Syria deployed Tuesday against ground targets.
Elsewhere in Syria, Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces are about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the ISIS-held town of al-Bab, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on Wednesday.
Don’t miss: How Turkey and/or the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces could advance on Raqqa, according to the Washington Institute: “In the unlikely event that either side decides to follow through on its declared intentions, each has multiple options for advancing on the Islamic State’s heartland.” That, here.
Also in Raqqa, ISIS is reportedly trying to seal off the city and impose a “media blackout,” AFP writes this morning. More on the Iraq side of the ISIS fight below the fold.
The presidential transition is….not going smoothly. New York Times: “One week after Mr. Trump scored an upset victory that took him by surprise, his team was improvising the most basic traditions of assuming power. That included working without official State Department briefing materials in his first conversations with foreign leaders” some of whom resorted to cold-calling Trump Tower to try to begin building relationships with the president-elect. (Vox’s Andrew Prokop collected many of the chaotic day’s headlines in a screenshot.)
Turmoil on the transition team: Fired: former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Matthew Freedman, “a lobbyist who consults with corporations and foreign governments, were fired.” Rogers had been seen by the natsec establishment as a solid, guiding presence on the transition team.
Hired, as an advisor: former Reagan aide Frank Gaffney/ (NYT: “Mr. Gaffney has long advanced baseless conspiracy theories, including that President Obama might be a closet Muslim. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes.”)
Wired: Sen. John McCain issued a broadside against cozying up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who had phoned his White House-bound admirer to recommend a new reset: “We should place as much faith in such statements as any other made by a former KGB agent who has plunged his country into tyranny, murdered his political opponents, invaded his neighbors, threatened America’s allies, and attempted to undermine America’s elections.”
Undesired: noted neoconservative and #NeverTrumper Eliot A. Cohen, “a former State Department official who had criticized Mr. Trump during the campaign but said after his election that he would keep an open mind about advising him, said Tuesday on Twitter that he had changed his opinion. After speaking to the transition team, he wrote, he had ‘changed my recommendation: stay away. They’re angry, arrogant, screaming ‘you LOST!’ Will be ugly.’” Cohen expanded upon the tweet in a must-read Washington Post oped.
Bottom line: A week after the election, none of the Trump administration’s national-security leaders have been announced, and no one from the transition team has even contacted the Defense Department.
And Trump? “Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” he tweeted last night. “The failing @nytimes is so totally wrong on transition. It is going so smoothly!” he tweeted this morning. (Paging Inigo Montoya…)
From Defense One
We’re 24 hours away the Defense One Summit. Now, more than ever, you’ll want to come hear USAF Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein, Army Secretary Eric Fanning, White House counterterrorism advisor Lisa Monaco, DARPA chief Arati Prabhakar, and many other national-security leaders. Washington D.C., Thurs., Nov. 17, in Washington, D.C Register here.
US Troops Are Still in the Philippines, Despite Duterte’s Insults and Threats // Caroline Houck: PACOM commander Adm. Harry Harris will head to the islands ‘optimistic’ but expecting a ‘refocusing’ of joint exercises.
A Team of Drones Pulls Off a (Staged) Search-and-Rescue Mission // Patrick Tucker: Lockheed Martin-Sikorsky merger leads to unique demonstration involving drones large and small.
How Trump Will Affect the India-Pakistan Balance of Power // Johann Chacko: Human rights promotion and developmental funding are poised to decline under a Trump administration, reducing American leverage in Kabul and Islamabad—and giving China an upper hand.
ICYMI: How Special Operators Trained for Psychological Warfare Before the Mosul Fight // Tucker, again: At a two-day exercise in April, U.S. troops practiced waging warfare on an invisible yet vital battlefield.
Welcome to the Wednesday edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Happy birthday, Tiberius! The Roman general was born this day in 42 BC. (Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
Believe it or not, in some parts of Mosul, neighborhoods are “coming back to life,” Reuters reports in a notable change of tone from last week’s reporting where Iraqi troops described the fighting as a “nightmare.”
Reuters: “In al-Zahraa in eastern Mosul, shopkeepers swept away broken glass and neighbors were starting to interact again, days after Islamic State fighters were ousted from the neighborhood… But there is still an overwhelming sense of uncertainty as parts of the sprawling city slowly come to life and Iraqi special forces press ahead with their offensive on Islamic State's last big stronghold in Iraq.”
Adds AP: Iraqi troops have advanced “northward into the Tahrir neighborhood, where families left their houses to flee the fighting” in Mosul. “Mortars from IS-held territory wounded at least five children trying to flee the fighting, who were evacuated by the troops.”
Archeological sites across the Ninevah Plains are taking damage from fighting against ISIS, Kurdish Rudaw news reports. And Reuters has more on the ancient city of Nimrud, much which now lies in ruins.
Iraqi helicopter gunships are reportedly helping Shi’a Popular Mobilization Units, including Kata’ib Hezbollah, who are attempting to retake an airport at Tal Afar, west of Mosul.
Back stateside, House lawmakers sent a foreign policy message to Syria and Iran, the Washington Post reported Tuesday off the passage of two new bills: one “a 10-year extension of the Iran Sanctions Act [that passed] by a vote of 419 to 1.” The other passed by a voice vote sanctioning “anyone who provides the Syrian government with financial, material or technological support — a category that includes Russia and Iran — in an effort to ‘halt the wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people,’” WaPo writes. More on the likely fate of those bills in the face of an unsupportive lame-duck White House and a wavering Trump campaign whose advisors have lately indicated he might “demand changes to the deal but would not scrap it entirely,” here.
What’s known so far about how Trump views the Middle East “suggest he could radically reorder existing alliances in unpredictable ways,” WaPo’s Liz Sly reported Tuesday.
Some good news: Terrorism deaths in 2015 declined from the prior year — even as the most lethal groups (Boko Haram and ISIS) expanded their global territory, according to the latest Global Terrorism Index (PDF) published by the Institute for Economics and Peace.
Some bad news: The number of attacks in developing countries has risen 650 percent over the same period; and across the world, the economic impact of terrorism was estimated at $89.6 billion for 2015. More from AFP, here.
On this note, ISIS just claimed a motorcycle bombing in Kabul that killed four people and wounded 10 others when the bomber detonated on “a vehicle carrying national security officials” in morning rush hour traffic, Reuters reports.
Did Britain’s Royal Navy just alert the world that it will soon lose the ability to defend its own ships at range? That’s what The Telegraph wrote Tuesday: “The Navy’s Harpoon missiles will retire from the fleet’s frigates and destroyers in 2018 without a replacement, while there will also be a two year gap without helicopter-launched anti-shipping missiles.”
Said one naval source: the decision was “like Nelson deciding to get rid of his cannons and go back to muskets.”
Added another: “We will be losing our missile capability in total for two years. We will still have the gun, but the range of that is about 17 miles, compared to Harpoon, which is about 80 miles.”
Not to put too fine a point on it or anything, but a senior former officer said the loss means the UK’s warships would “no longer be able to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese or Russians.”
What’s going on: “Harpoon missiles are unlikely to be replaced for up to a decade, naval sources said, leaving warships armed only with their 4.5in Mk 8 guns for anti-ship warfare. Helicopter-launched Sea Skua missiles are also going out of service next year and the replacement Sea Venom missile to be carried by Wildcat helicopters will not arrive until late 2020.” Read the rest, here.
China is learning what it’s like to have soldiers return home from combat in caskets, The Wall Street Journal reports off Beijing’s troop activity in South Sudan—noting in the conflict there lies “a terrible irony: According to several U.N. officials, Cpl. Li may have been killed by a Chinese-made weapon, the likes of which China has sold to developing countries including South Sudan for years under its export-driven economic policy.” Story here.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., is a big fan of Sen. Jeff Sessions as Trump’s Defense Secretary, The Hill reported Tuesday.
Hunter’s read on the stakes involved: “Here’s the problem with the Pentagon: The bureaucrats and the lawyers are running the show right now. That’s why the warrior culture has fled the Pentagon.” He said that under the Obama administration, “you have bad rules of engagement, you have sensitivity stuff as opposed to focusing on winning wars, killing our enemies, supporting our allies, [and] projecting American power throughout the world. That’s what the Department of Defense is there to do. It isn’t there to do transgender sex operations.” More here.
ICYMI: Current SecDef Carter said Monday opening combat jobs to women “makes sense.”
And female veterans said they don’t feel their service is valued by their fellow Americans. That from a recent poll written up over at Military.com.
Apropos of nothing: Here’s what it looks like when your aircraft is in the hangar but the aircraft (a C-17 in this case) is a bit too big for the hangar. Military.com’s Oriana Pawlyk snapped the shot from March Air Reserve Base in southern California on Monday.
Will Trump ditch the F-35? “While Trump may not be a big fan of the F-35, he really has very few other options to modernize tactical combat aircraft,” Byron Callan, a defense analyst with Capital Alpha Partners LLC, told Bloomberg.
The stakes: “Under current plans, the U.S. is scheduled to boost purchases of the jet in the fiscal year 2018 budget to 70 from 63 this year. The number is set to increase further to 80 in fiscal 2019. There’s also a pending “block buy” of 450 aircraft in the coming years as the Pentagon seeks a total fleet of 2,443, including 1,763 for the Air Force.”
The uncertainty: “Any potential ramp up of F-35 purchases could quickly compete for funds with Trump’s stated vision for the Army and Navy. He wants to reverse the Army’s planned reduction to 450,000 troops by the end of fiscal 2018 from 475,000 today, eventually boosting it to 540,000. That alone would cost as much as $30 billion over current plans, according to defense analysts.” Read the rest, here.
Lastly today: The world’s first pizza UAV delivery just happened in New Zealand. The company behind it: drone-loving Domino’s.
"This is the future,” said a company official. “Today's successful delivery was an important proof of this concept."
Domino's is also reportedly looking to expand its drone ops to Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Japan and Germany. And lest you forget, “In March, the company unveiled a robot cart being trialled in New Zealand that it claimed was the world's first driverless pizza delivery vehicle.” Story here.