South Korean president impeached; 2,500 more soldiers head to ISIS war; Generals plead: don’t cut State; What AFRICOM needs now; and just a bit more...
South Korean President Park Geun-hye was unanimously impeached this morning, prompting calls for “watertight vigilance” as the military continues its two-month exercise with U.S. counterparts—and the world waits to see what the international response will be to North Korea’s four-missile launch Sunday into the Sea of Japan.
Park was removed for “her role in a corruption and influence-peddling scandal,” the Washington Post reports. “The impeachment marks a historic moment in a country that adopted democracy only 30 years ago. In sharp contrast with South Korea’s history of military coups, peaceful protests this time led to the removal of an elected leader. But supporters of Park wasted no time in venting their anger Friday morning, clashing with riot police and breaching cordons around the court. Two people were reported to have died during the protests.”
What to expect from here: “The latest polls put [Moon Jae-in], a progressive from the Democratic Party who ran against Park in the last presidential election, in the lead, although he is facing a surprise primary challenge from An Hee-jung. Moon has taken a much more conciliatory approach toward North Korea than the conservative governments that have held power since 2008, and his election would likely see the resumption of a ‘sunshine policy’ of engagement with the North.” More from WaPo, here.
Aside from that two-month Foal Eagle exercise, the U.S. and Japanese military just wrapped up weeklong drills in the East China Sea, “where tensions have risen with China over the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands,” Stars and Stripes reports. “The exercise, led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, included communication drills, precision ship maneuvers, combined flight operations and liaison officer exchanges...Also participating in the drills, which ended Friday, was the guided-missile destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer and aircraft from Carrier Air Wing 2. Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force vessels included the JS Sazanami and the JS Samidare.” More here.
The US is sending 2,500 more troops to help accelerate the war on ISIS, Army Times reported Thursday. "The deployment will include elements of the 82nd Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, which is based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. About 1,700 soldiers from the same unit are overseas now, spread between Iraq and Kuwait.” The new troopers will head to a staging base in Kuwait, where they will be “‘postured there to do all things Mosul, Raqqa, all in between,’ Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, the Army's deputy chief of staff for operations, told House lawmakers Wednesday."
To review the situation: “Today, there are about 6,000 American troops spread between Iraq and Syria, where this week Marine Corps artillery crews established a fire base from which U.S. forces intend to attack ISIS targets in and around Raqqa. Additionally, a team of Army Rangers was dispatched to the city of Mabij to prevent Turkish troops and Syrian Kurdish militias — both key U.S. allies in the counter-ISIS mission — from fighting one another. Meanwhile, Russian military elements, in support of troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al Assad, also are present on the city's outskirts.” More from Army Times, here.
More American troops could be needed to stabilize Syria, CentCom Commander, Gen. Joseph Votel, warned lawmakers Thursday. Stars and Stripes has that, here.
Need a review of the fraught situation in the vicinity of the northern Syrian town of Manbij? U.S. News’ Paul Shinkman has just your thing, here.
In Syria, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces say they have enough troops to take on ISIS-held Raqqa, AP and Reuters report this morning.
We also have a bevy of new stats from the war on ISIS in Syria, via various parties in the fight:
- Turkish forces have reported killed “2,647 IS militants and 425 Syrian Kurdish fighters in Syria” and have retaken “more than 2,000 square kilometers (772 square miles) in northern Syria."
- Russian military officials say they've "killed more than 600 militants" this week in Syria with the help of "452 airstrikes in support of the Syrian government forces."
- And “Syrian government forces have recaptured 92 towns and villages across a territory of 479 square kilometers, or 185 square miles, from IS in the past week,” according to Russian Col. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi. A tiny bit more on those numbers, reported by AP, here.
President Trump’s decision on how to proceed in Raqqa isn’t expected “for weeks,” The Wall Street Journal’s Dion Nissenbaum reports, citing “internal divisions” that are bogging down plans. “The Trump administration is facing internal divisions over the strategy for pushing Islamic State out of Raqqa without alienating Turkey, a vital North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally that opposes America’s ongoing work with Kurdish fighters in Syria that Ankara views as terrorists. Because of Turkey’s opposition, the new administration may not finalize its plans for taking Raqqa until Turkey votes April 16 on a referendum that would give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sweeping powers, according to U.S. officials involved in the internal debate.” More here.
Speaking of Turkey, Syria wants the UN to make its northern neighbors and their allied rebels (Syrian state media called them “invasion forces”) leave Syria, Reuters reports.
And that means it’s time for another Putin-Erdogan chat on the future of Syria, which AP reports is happening today in Moscow.
In other ISIS strategy sessions, “The Trump administration has invited more than 60 nations and international organizations to Washington later this month for a strategy session on how to counter the Islamic State” after (hopefully) retaking Raqqa, WaPo reported Thursday. “The March 22-23 meeting will be the largest since the inaugural session and comes as the Islamic State appears to be losing ground militarily.” More here.
From Defense One
ISIS War Generals to Congress: We Need the State Department // Caroline Houck: One week after Trump proposed shifting billions from the State Department to the Pentagon, two of the top U.S. generals in the Middle East and Africa say they need diplomatic help.
What If Intelligence Agencies Can't Secure Their Own Hacking Tools? // Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez: The Wikileaks dump makes it harder to argue that concealing vulnerabilities keeps us safer.
The Global Business Brief: March 9 // Marcus Weisgerber: How will Trump affect international defense firms?; Lockheed plans airborne 'Shark Tank' at SXSW; B-21 status check; and more.
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. #OTD1945: U.S. Army Air Corps B-29s firebomb Tokyo, killing 100,000 in the deadliest air raid in history. (Got a tip? Let us know by clicking this link to email us: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.)
The carrier debate, 2017 edition: Some missiles from China, Russia and Iran render America’s aircraft carriers vulnerable at sea, Reuters writes in what some have lambasted as a tired rehash of an old and, some say, futile debate. What’s new in all this today? A few of the weapons, for one thing, and they include “land-based ballistic missiles, such as China’s Dong Feng-21 anti-ship missile, which has a claimed range of 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometers) and moves at 10 times the speed of sound. Certain Russian and Chinese submarines can fire salvoes of precision-guided cruise missiles from afar, potentially overwhelming carrier-fleet anti-missile defense. Russia, China, Iran and other countries also have so-called super-cavitating torpedoes. These form an air bubble in front of them, enabling them to travel at hundreds of miles per hour. The torpedoes cannot be guided, but if aimed straight at a ship they are difficult to avoid.” Read on here.
Elsewhere in the region, “China has put into service its new generation J-20 stealth fighter, a warplane it hopes will narrow the military gap with the United States,” Reuters reports. “In a report late on Thursday, state television's military channel confirmed that the J-20 had now entered service, though it gave no other details. The aircraft was shown in public for the first time in November at the Zhuhai airshow and was first glimpsed by Chinese planespotters in 2010. However questions remain whether the new Chinese fighter can match the radar-evading properties of the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor air-to-air combat jet, or the latest strike jet in the U.S. arsenal, Lockheed's F-35. The F-22, developed for the U.S. Air Force, is the J-20's closest lookalike.” More here.
The Philippines will patrol the South China Sea region alongside Malaysia And Indonesia, AFP reported Thursday from Manila. "We are inaugurating some time in April or May a joint patrol of the three nations in that area," [Philippine Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana] said in a news conference.
The prompt: “Abu Sayyaf, a kidnap-for-ransom network that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group, has been kidnapping sailors on fishing vessels and cargo barges including an elderly German whom it beheaded last month after ransom demands were not met.” More here.
Lorenzana also said was "disturbed" by Chinese survey ships probing the Philippines’ 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone for possible submarine routes in the Pacific, Reuters reports. "I am disturbed by China's presence there, it is annoying if they will claim the area," he told Reuters. That, here.
Wikileaks says it will share leaked CIA code so tech firms can patch vulnerabilities. Reaction gathered by the Washington Post ranged from “Great!” to “They should have done this already” to “As we’ve said previously, [Wikileaks founder] Julian Assange is not exactly a bastion of truth and integrity,” that last from the CIA. WaPo: “The CIA continues to have no comment on the authenticity of the documents released, which WikiLeaks said is the first tranche of more to come.” Read on, here.
How worried should users be about these hacking tools? Not terribly, writes UNC professor Zeynep Tufekci, who makes her case in a New York Times op-ed and sums it up in a tweet: “An accurate WL release would say: ‘CIA has underwhelming tools, many known, to laboriously hack phones one by one. Update your software!’”
Still, the Vault7 leak has reignited the debate over whether the U.S. government should be doing more to help tech firms patch security holes. Among the questions that inform this debate: how devastating are zero-day exploits? A new RAND report appears to offer the most thorough (public) analysis of zero-days. Read it, here.
Meanwhile, DHS is working on ways to ward off ever-more-powerful DDoS attacks, including the kind that have knocked out 911 call centers. Read, here.
And in perhaps the least surprising news of the day, the Pentagon’s top testing office finds that U.S. combatant commands remain vulnerable to cyber attacks. The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation’s FY 2016 Annual Report offers some praise for security advances, but FCW reports that “cyber red teams are still able to gain the upper hand in major training exercises, and combatant command missions ‘remain at risk when subjected to cyber-attacks emulating an advanced nation-state adversary.’” Read, here.
Marines' nude photo investigation widens. All four service branches are now looking into a variety of websites on which photos of servicewomen were posted, many by their male colleagues, CNN reports.
In Mosul, ISIS mortars and snipers are becoming joint threat No. 1 for advancing U.S.-backed Iraqis, Reuters reports from the city. Federal Police took control of the Mosul museum, one officer told Reuters, “but any new advances were being made difficult by snipers who had taken up positions in the Assyria Hotel, less than 200 meters (yards) away, he said.” More here.
ISIS is using “Mad Max-style” tactics to defend its last smack of turf in west Mosul—cranking out white-painted, up-armored vehicles to fool surveillance aircraft in the hopes of a sneak attack via suicide car bombs, Buzzfeed’s Mike Giglio reports from the city. The group is also painting fake windows and doors and tires on suicide vehicles, as these photos show.
AFRICOM’s big challenges right now: “Inadequate surveillance, poor supply chain networks and an inefficient personnel-rescue system,” Stripes reported from AFRICOM Commander Gen. Thomas Waldhasuer’s annual posture statement to Congress. How bad is it? “only some 20 percent to 30 percent of the command’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance requirements are being met...AFRICOM also relies heavily on contracted search-and-rescue assets because of a lack of resources. In Somalia, U.S. special operations forces advising Somali and African Union troops operate near the front lines in the fight against the militant group al-Shabab, and they now find themselves at increased risk as they support indigenous forces.” More here.
U.S. lawmakers wants answers on “the Defense Department's troubled anti-propaganda efforts against the Islamic State,” AP reports this morning. “The investigation by the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee follows reporting by The Associated Press in January that uncovered critical problems with the program known as WebOps and revealed conflicts of interest in a new contract potentially worth $500 million to expand psychological operations against terrorist groups. The AP found the WebOps program is so beset with incompetence and flawed data that multiple people with direct knowledge of it say it's having little impact.” More here.
The U.S. military is done investigating the Yemen raid, CentCom’s Votel said Thursday: "Votel, who presided over an internal review, said he was 'looking for information gaps where we can't explain what happened in a particular situation or we have conflicting information between members of the organization. I am looking for indicators of incompetence or poor decision making or bad judgment throughout all this.' In the end, he said, 'I was satisfied that none of those indicators that I identified to you were present. I think we had a good understanding of exactly what happened on this objective and we've been able to pull lessons learned out of that, that we will apply in future operations.' He said there was no need for an additional investigation." That, here.
Blinding flash of the obvious: “Afghanistan Is Now Trump’s War,” The New York Times editorial board writes this morning off Votel’s testimony before the Senate Thursday. Votel was asked if he supported Afghan war commander, Gen. John Nicholson’s recent testimony that the war needed more U.S. troops in an advise-and-assist role after U.S. troop levels declined and Afghan troop deaths increased during the same time. Votel’s answer: “yes.”
Replied Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: “I foresee a train wreck here.”
The NYT’s BLUF: “Before he agrees to increased troop numbers, Mr. Trump would be wise to order a full assessment of the war to consider whether sending in more Americans can reasonably be expected to succeed in weakening an insurgency that has sprung back after earlier increases of American force. Unless the Pentagon delivers a strategy that is significantly different from previous ones, Mr. Trump would be sending more men and women into a deadly war zone while, at best, only temporarily delaying Afghanistan’s descent into further chaos and violence.” That, here.
We end this week with a “fascinating” jaunt into the unconventional: “Alternative tools of diplomacy, with Dennis Rodman.” It’s actually video of a March 3 panel at West Point’s Modern War Institute. Rodman was joined on stage by “former mixed martial artist Chris Volo, who represents Rodman as his agent and accompanied him to North Korea, and Dr. Joe Terwilliger, a statistical geneticist at Columbia University who has traveled to and worked in North Korea more than a dozen times,” MWI writes in their post-event promo.
Writes Doctrine Man of the discussion: “Unconventional? Maybe. But fascinating as hell.” Check it out, here.