Deadly day in Manila; Trump, climate change, and American leadership; Navy sends wishlist to Congress; Poland preps for a new era of Russian tensions; and just a bit more...
A gunman, a raging fire, three dozen deaths—but no terrorism in Manila. A lone gunman stormed into a casino in the Philippine’s capital city, “setting gaming tables alight and killing at least 36 people who suffocated in thick smoke, in an attack claimed by Islamic State but which officials believe was a botched robbery,” Reuters reports this morning from a chaotic scene yesterday in the Philippines.
Officials were adamant the attack was not the result of an ISIS-linked plot, despite a loose claim to as much from an ISIS supporter in the southern Philippine city of Marawi, according to SITE Intelligence Group’s Rita Katz—and a follow-on claim by ISIS this morning.
President Donald Trump even stepped into the “terrorism” debate by mentioning the T-word Thursday.
Said Philippine National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon: "If the lone gunman was really an IS terrorist, why did he not shot and kill people in the casino? He only went for the casino chips."
Ronald dela Rosa, chief of police, added: "What caused their deaths is the thick smoke. The room was carpeted and of course the tables, highly combustible."
And how did the alleged lone gunman die? “At dawn, the body of the suspected gunman was found in a hotel room in the smoldering complex,” Reuters reports. "He burned himself inside the hotel room 510," dela Rosa said. "He lay down on the bed, covered himself in a thick blanket and apparently doused himself in gasoline." Read the rest, here.
Duterte’s army just relieved the general leading the fight against ISIS affiliates in the southern city of Marawi, Reuters reports this morning. “A military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Fortes was dismissed because not all his forces were in the city when the rebels began their rampage, even though military intelligence had indicated that Islamist militants, including foreign fighters, were amassing there. The source said that some of Fortes' forces were busy fighting a small band of communist insurgents in a nearby town when some 400 militants overran Marawi City on May 23 after a botched military raid to capture their leader, Isnilon Hapilon.”
So far in fighting at Marawi, “Thirty-nine members of the security forces have been killed,” along with “19 civilians and 120 rebel fighters.”
Seen in the skies above Marawi: OV-10 Bronco planes, “circling the city then diving steeply before dropping their ordnance,” Reuters reports.
Catch purported footage of one of those Broncos, here.
The OV-10s were not the planes involved in the friendly fire strike earlier this week that killed 10 Philippine soldiers, according to the military. Those planes were Italian-made SF 260s. A bit more on those guys, over here.
A growing problem in Marawi: Snipers. The threat also clears the way for a heavier air campaign in the city, where Reuters reports some 2,000 citizens remain trapped from the fighting—now in its 11th consecutive day. More here.
From Defense One
Poland is Preparing for 15 Years of Rising Tension with Russia // Patrick Tucker: The future battles of Eastern Europe will be fought be with lasers, cheap missile-drones, and surgical strike units.
US Navy Sends Congress $5.3B Wishlist of Planes, Ships and More // Marcus Weisgerber: The 48-item 'unfunded priorities list' arrived a week after the service's $172 billion budget request for 2018.
Stinger Missiles Can Now Shoot Down Small Drones // Marcus Weisgerber: A missile that gained notoriety in the 1980s has been updated for today's battlefield.
Trump's Paris Decision Hurts More than the Climate // Robinson Meyer: America's withdrawal will leave the world hotter, more erratic, politically fractured, and facing toward Beijing.
Global Business Brief // Marcus Weisgerber: Opening the missile defense discussion; Budget winners and losers; Canada throws some shade, and more.
Fortress Britain's Coming Crackdown // Feargus O'Sullivan: In the wake of the Manchester attack, the U.K. government is stationing troops in cities and fast-tracking new laws to access encrypted messages.
US Intel Community Launches Face-ID Contest // Mohana Ravindranath: Wanted: algorithms that can identify people from security-camera footage.
What Xi Jinping Wants // Graham Allison: China's leader is determined to turn his country into 'the biggest player in the history of the world.' Can he do it while avoiding a dangerous collision with America?
Welcome to Friday’s edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. #OTD1942, American and Japanese aircraft carriers were heading toward Midway Island. Got tips? Email us at the-d-brief@defenseone.com. (And if you’re reading this on our website, consider subscribing. It’s free.)
Pulling out of Paris. In a Rose Garden ceremony, President Donald Trump said the nonbinding climate-change agreement placed unfair burdens on the United States. His plans to withdraw were widely criticized by experienced national-security and foreign-policy hands, who said they would diminish America’s ability to protect its interests. (Meanwhile, the CEO of General Electric and other business leaders said the decision would hurt America’s economy.)
Putin stirs the cyber pot. “Patriotically minded” private Russian hackers might have interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, comparing them to artists.
Putin: “(Artists) may act on behalf of their country; they wake up in good mood and paint things. Same with hackers, they woke up today, read something about the state-to-state relations. If they are patriotic, they contribute in a way they think is right, to fight against those who say bad things about Russia," Putin told reporters at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.
Related reading: Get a glimpse inside the “secretive, paranoid” world of RT (formerly Russia Today), from former RT staff who spoke with the Moscow Times.
WaPo gets its hands on flight records that suggest “Explanations for Kushner’s meeting with head of Kremlin-linked bank don’t match up,” the Washington Post reported Thursday following up on Jared Kushner’s reported meeting in December with Sergey Gorkov, a graduate of the academy of the Federal Security Service and the CEO of Russian state-owned bank Vnesheconombank.
The discrepancies: “The bank maintained this week that the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business. The White House says the meeting was unrelated to business and was one of many diplomatic encounters the soon-to-be presidential adviser was holding ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.”
How the Post grew skeptical of that portrayal: “A 19-seat twin-engine jet owned by a company linked to VEB flew from Moscow to the United States on Dec. 13 and departed from the Newark airport, outside New York City, at 5:01 p.m. Dec. 14, according to positional flight information provided by FlightAware, a company that tracks airplanes. The Post could not confirm whether Gorkov was on the flight, but the plane’s previous flights closely mirror Gorkov’s publicly known travels in recent months, including his trip to St. Petersburg this week. After leaving Newark on Dec. 14, the jet headed to Japan, where Putin was visiting on Dec. 15 and 16. The news media had reported that Gorkov would join the Russian president there.” Full story, here.
American officials think the Kremlin is quietly mapping the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure, Politico’s Ali Watkins reported Thursday. Her jump: “Russian diplomats, ditching travel rules, have been found wandering around deserts and beaches—where fiber optics cables lie underground.”
State Department officials pushed back against an early Trump White House push to ease sanctions on Russia, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff reported Thursday.
“Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow. These efforts to relax or remove punitive measures imposed by President Obama in retaliation for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and meddling in the 2016 election alarmed some State Department officials, who immediately began lobbying congressional leaders to quickly pass legislation to block the move.” Story here.
Speaking of secret talks: The U.S. and Russia held secret talks about safe zones in southern Syria, al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen reported Thursday, citing a former diplomat. “Last week, the Americans and Russia met in Jordan with the Jordanians to discuss these zones in the south,” the former diplomat said. “The meeting in Jordan was one part where the US and Russia, Israel and Jordan can work together to have [a] de-escalation zone in the south of Syria.”
Names given: “Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy to the global coalition against the Islamic State, and US Syria envoy Michael Ratney.”
“They met more than once,” another diplomat who allegedly works in Syria told Rozen.
Said Czech Ambassador to the United States Hynek Kmonicek: “The American side wants to create islands of stability. De-escalation zones. The Russians are thinking, very funny, islands of stability — for jihadis. …. So, they must persuade each other. My feeling: The Russians need a political settlement, to get out. They are eager to have something.” Read the rest, here.
ICYMI: Jesse Marks of the Council on Foreign Relations has written on how the U.S. might build on the Russian-negotiated de-escalations zones. Read here, and here.
Some leisure legal reading for your weekend: When collusion with a foreign government becomes a crime, according to an obscure campaign finance law. The take comes to us via former White House Counsel Bob Bauer, writing in Just Security this morning, to explain the formalities surrounding “11 CFR 110.20 - Prohibition on contributions, donations, expenditures, independent expenditures, and disbursements by foreign nationals (52 U.S.C. 30121, 36 U.S.C. 510).”
The law, Bauer writes, “prohibits foreign nationals from providing ‘anything of value … in connection with’ an election.” Read his interpretation in full, here.
How to reach a 355-ship Navy? Start by figuring out how existing ships might outlast their planned lives by a decade or more, says Naval Sea Systems Command. USNI News reports, here.
Meanwhile, in China: Remember the Arsenal Ship touted by CNO Adm. Mike Boorda in the late 1990s? Beijing is reviving the concept — as a submarine. Peter W. Singer reports in PopSci, here.
The C.I.A. just named a new Iran operations chief “in a sign of Trump’s hard line,” The New York Times reports. His nickname: the “Dark Prince” or “Ayatollah Mike,” and he’s a convert to Islam. Newsweek has a short profile of the man—Michael D’Andrea—and why you may have already heard of him, here.
The need to knows: “In the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. D’Andrea was deeply involved in the detention and interrogation program, which resulted in the torture of a number of prisoners and was condemned in a sweeping Senate report in 2014 as inhumane and ineffective,” the Times writes. “He took over the agency’s Counterterrorism Center in early 2006 and spent the next nine years directing the hunt for militants around the world...But there were also setbacks. Mr. D’Andrea was at the helm when a C.I.A. source secretly working for Al Qaeda blew himself up at an American base in Afghanistan, killing seven agency operatives.”
Then more setbacks. “[I]n January 2015, a drone struck a Qaeda compound in Pakistan where, unbeknown to the C.I.A., the militants were holding two hostages: Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker and economic adviser, and Giovanni Lo Porto, 37, an Italian. Both men were killed in the strike. A few months later, Mr. D’Andrea moved to a new post reviewing the effectiveness of covert action programs,” according to the Times. About his new gig, “Former agency officials said Mr. D’Andrea’s new job overseeing Iran operations was better suited to his talents.” More here.
Finally this week: Take a look at “an enormous rocket-launching plane touted as future of space travel.” It’s called the Stratolaunch, and it was spotted for the first time this week in California's Mojave desert, AFP reported Thursday. The Washington Post has a bit more on the aircraft, the brain child of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen: “the plane has some impressive stats: a wingspan of 385 feet, or longer than a football field, and a height of 50 feet. Unfueled, it weighs 500,000 pounds. But it can carry 250,000 pounds of fuel, and its total weight can reach 1.3 million pounds.”
The business side of the story: “Allen’s Stratolaunch company has partnered with Orbital ATK to ‘air launch’ the Dulles-based company's Pegasus XL, a rocket capable of delivering small satellites, weighing as much as 1,000 pounds, to orbit,” the Post reports. “The rockets would be tethered to the belly of the giant plane, which would fly them aloft, and once at an altitude of 35,000 feet or so, the rockets would drop and ‘air launch’ to space.”
The air-launch method, the company believes, “is a cheaper and more efficient way to get satellites into space than rockets that launch vertically and can be extraordinarily expensive.” More to the story, here.