Iran "put on notice"; Fighting continues in long-quiet Ukraine; Trump’s rocky Australian call; Defining “extreme vetting”; and just a bit more...
President Donald Trump and his National Security Advisor Mike Flynn have "officially put Iran on notice." The why is simple enough: It was "for firing a ballistic missile" on Sunday, Trump declared this morning on Twitter. "Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal," Trump added in a second morning tweet on the subject. This early morning messaging comes more than 12 hours after Flynn stood at the podium at the White House Briefing Room to announce the "notice." Flynn, writes the Washington Post, "blamed the previous Obama administration for failing to confront Iran forcefully enough over its ‘malign actions’ and said Trump was changing course."
What does "on notice" mean, exactly? White House officials couldn’t say, but the Wall Street Journal describes it as "a more confrontational approach to Tehran that lays the groundwork for a potential early clash between the two countries."
To be sure, the Trump White House has already shown initiative in the proxy war with Iran that is the conflict in Yemen. And both the White House and the Pentagon are still sorting out the details of the Sunday raid in south-central Yemen that killed more than a dozen al-Qaeda fighters, but led to the death of one Navy SEAL and this: "Casualties may include children," CENTCOM said in a release Wednesday afternoon.
Tensions are continuing to grow over that mission, as more information comes out and more officials speak anonymously about it. Yesterday, "U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations. As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists."
Adds the New York Times: "Through a communications intercept, the commandos knew that the mission had been somehow compromised, but pressed on toward their target roughly five miles from where they had been flown into the area."
In short order, Marine helicopter gunships and Harrier jump jets were called in, along with "two MV-22 Osprey vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to extract the SEALs. One of the two suffered engine failure, two of the officials said, and hit the ground so hard that two crew members were injured, and one of the Marine jets had to launch a precision-guided bomb to destroy it."
Said William Wechsler, a former top counterterrorism official at the Pentagon, to the NYT: "You can mitigate risk in missions like this, but you can’t mitigate risk down to zero." More here.
Meanwhile, Trump White House is changing the Obama administration’s counter-extremism program to focus solely on Islam, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing five people briefed on the matter. "The program, ‘Countering Violent Extremism,’ or CVE, would be changed to ‘Countering Islamic Extremism or ‘Countering Radical Islamic Extremism,’ the sources said."
Said Will McCants, who runs the Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World: "The rebranding will make it harder for Muslim groups to work with US gov. But Islam-only focus was already a problem under Obama."
Noteworthy: The program will "no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States," Reuters adds.
Fighting continues today in eastern Ukraine, where a largely frozen war was reignited on Sunday amid some 2,300 explosions from artillery, mortars and rocket fire in and around the government-held town of Avdiivka, north of the separatist-held city of Donetsk. At least a dozen Ukrainian soldiers are reported dead amid the clash of government forces and Russian-backed separatists. Foreign Policy’s Paul McLeary calls it the Trump administration’s "first major test on the international stage," here.
Yesterday, former CIA Director David Petraeus framed the Ukraine fight as part of a larger plan by Putin to destabilize the major Western alliances. "While conventional aggression may occasionally enable Russia to grab a bit of land on its periphery, the real center of gravity is the political will of the major democratic powers to defend Euro-Atlantic institutions like NATO and the EU," Petraeus told a House Armed Services panel. Read on, here.
In Avdiivka, where 20 houses were destroyed, apparently, by indiscriminate separatist shelling on Tuesday, civilians have died and others are fleeing. "It's impossible to sleep now because of the shelling," Ania Bohatysh, 69, told CBC, "and it's so much worse than it has been since 2015. There's no electricity, there's no water, there's no heat, so they had to leave."
The fighting, which shattered a ceasefire that had largely held for two years, resumed the day after Putin spoke with U.S. President Donald Trump for an hour by telephone. The leaders discussed the Ukraine only briefly, with Trump calling it "a tough issue," the Washington Post reported.
Trump has hinted that he might unilaterally lift sanctions imposed by Western countries on Russia in response to the 2014 seizure of Crimea. But in the wake of Saturday’s phone call, Republican leaders in Congress — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Armed Services chair John McCain, and House Speaker Paul Ryan — have warned Trump against the move, which — per Petraeus and others — might undermine the European security consensus.
Ukraine appears to have shifted troops first, but it’s Russia that seems to have the most to gain. The hostilities cut short a Tuesday meeting between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. As well, NATO officials put off a plan to meet with officials in Kiev about potentially basing missile-defense batteries in Ukraine. Nevertheless, Poroshenko declared his intention to hold a national referendum on joining NATO, and to abide by its outcome.
Want a larger view on the situation? Check out CSIS’ "Kremlin Playbook," the fruit of a 16-month look at Russian moves to influence Central and Eastern Europe, here.
From Defense One
Northrop Scratch-Built a Jet to Bid on an Air Force Contract. Now It's Dropping Out. // Marcus Weisgerber: The decision leaves three, or maybe four, potential bidders on the 350-plane T-X program.
Some DHS Employees Are Suspicious of 'Extreme Vetting' // Patrick Tucker: The Department of Homeland Security has 30 days to figure out what "extreme vetting" means. Some DHS officials and counterterrorism experts find the concept dubious.
A Suspicious Death and Three Cyber Arrests Point to a New Twist in the US Election Hack // Steve LeVine: Some wonder why the Kremlin wanted this news out. Others called it 'too big not to leak.'
Duterte's Forces Are Secretly Being Paid Per-Kill Bonuses, Says Watchdog // Steve Mollman: Police are paid $160 to $300 secretly for each extrajudicial killing disguised as a legitimate operation, and zero for arrests, according to Amnesty International.
CIA, ODNI Get Exemption from Trump's Hiring Freeze // Eric Katz: Agency leaders are told that if someone would work during a government shutdown, their job can be filled during the freeze.
How the Navy's Warship Shop Uses Data to Do More with Less // Frank Konkel: A Navy program office turned to an analytics and visualization tool to help optimize complex tasks.
It’s Groundhog Day, but the news sure doesn’t feel like it. Welcome to Thursday’s edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 2004, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, admitted to supplying "designs, hardware and materials used to make enriched uranium for atomic bombs to Iran, Libya and North Korea." (Got a tip? Let us know by clicking this link to email us: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.)
Diplomacy in the Trump era is rocky business. That’s the line following two Wednesday reports that the president conducted tense conversations with the leaders of Australia and Mexico over the weekend. The Washington Post: "President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it. At one point, Trump informed Turnbull that he had spoken with four other world leaders that day — including Russian President Vladimir Putin — and that ‘this was the worst call by far.’"
Notes the Post: "The depictions of Trump’s calls are also at odds with sanitized White House accounts. The official readout of his conversation with Turnbull, for example, said that the two had ‘emphasized the enduring strength and closeness of the U.S.-Australia relationship that is critical for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region and globally.’" More here.
And CNN tempered earlier reporting Wednesday by the Associated Press reported after AP claimed it had gotten its hands on a transcript of the weekend call between Trump and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. The AP’s story: Trump warned "he was ready to send U.S. troops to stop ‘bad hombres down there’ unless the Mexican military does more to control them."
CNN said that’s not correct, according to a separate transcript they received.
Both White House officials and a spokesman for Mexico's presidential office denied the alleged hostile tone and content of the AP’s reported conversation.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported that the NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM chiefs met with their Mexican counterparts in southern Mexico on Tuesday. The focus of the talks, according to Reuters: "Mexico's commitment to securing its southern border to keep out criminals and illegal immigrants." More here.
In other diplomatic news, President Trump’s pick to lead the State Department, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, was approved in the Senate by a 56-43 vote Wednesday afternoon.
In the war on ISIS, Germany says "nein" to Turkey’s demand for aerial imagery, Reuters reports. "A Defence Ministry spokesman declined comment on a Der Spiegel magazine report quoting a German diplomatic cable as saying that Turkey had linked its approval of German housing investments at the air base to getting access to the imagery...The cable described Turkey's push to tie the imagery issue to German plans to build new housing at the base as 'blackmail,' according to the magazine report. It said two senior Turkish officials, a senior military officer and Erdogan's policy adviser Bo Arslan had personally issued the demand."
Why it matters now: "The issue, emerging a few days before Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to travel to Turkey to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, could cause further strains in the already frayed relationship between the two NATO allies." More here.
For what it’s worth: Turkey has banned breaking news for broadcasters reporting on terrorist attacks. That, here.
Remember all those reports about "distorted intelligence" during the Obama’s administration’s efforts to degrade the group? That wasn’t entirely true, according to a report from the Pentagon’s IG, released Wednesday.
The skinny: "In sum, we did not find systematic distortion of intelligence...However, we did find a strong perception of such distortion among many analysts and managers working on those products." WaPo has more, here.
Elsewhere across the ISIS battlespace, the forces of "rogue general" Khalifa Hiftar (also spelled Haftar) are flying their wounded to Russia in what Reuters calls a growing sign of their military cooperation. "An official from Haftar's forces' committee for the wounded said the fighters had left for Russia via Egypt, but did not provide any details."
However, "A military source confirmed the transfer of 70 patients by plane from Benina airport in Benghazi to Egypt, from where they were taken to Russia. The source said this would not be the last such operation for LNA wounded."
In case you’re just catching up: "Haftar, whose forces have been fighting against an alliance of Islamist militants and former rebels in Benghazi for two years, enjoys close ties to Egypt and the United Arab Emirates," Reuters reports. "He has cultivated his friendship with Russia, visiting Moscow twice last year to ask for military aid. Haftar, a one-time ally of Gaddafi who returned to join the uprising in 2011, has largely shunned attempts to shore up the U.N.-mediated peace deal. He accuses the government of aligning itself with some of the country's Islamist-leaning forces." More here.
Lastly today: Don’t miss this superb report from the frontlines of Mosul, brought to us by PBS and The Guardian. “Filmed on 360° cameras, it follows Iraqi-born reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad as he makes a dangerous trip inside Mosul to witness the fight firsthand. From a panoramic view of vast oil fields that were set on fire by ISIS, to a journey inside a network of tunnels built by ISIS to hide from airstrikes, to a camp that’s become home to thousands of displaced civilians, Battle for Mosul is a haunting look inside a once-thriving city that’s now a key battleground in the fight against ISIS.” Worth your time, here or here.