Female SEALs could happen; ISIS gains Uzbek allies; Kurds under fire; Putin plays Cousteau; And a bit more.
The Ranger effect is spreading. The U.S. Navy SEALs could soon see female sailors attempt a run through their training program, as well. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, said the Navy’s “very objective analysis” revealed that if you’re a women who can meet the training standards, “then you can become a SEAL.” The announcement comes after the world learned the names of the two women—Lt. Kristen Griest and Capt. Shaye Haver—set to graduate from the U.S. Army’s Ranger School on Friday.
“Those two women are legit and would have had outstanding careers in the military with or without a tab,” said Sgt. Maj. Colin Boley, the operations sergeant major for the Airborne and Ranger training brigade. Defense One’s Gayle Tzemach Lemmon and Kevin Baron have this first-hand account of Griest and Haver on the course.
“Haver was the most intense; she was the most vocal, she wasn’t afraid to speak up…Greist was more quiet. But she was great at planning. Her op orders that she gave were very thorough. She didn’t leave out anything,” said Sgt. First Class Tiffany Myrick, a military police noncommissioned officer who served as an observer and advisor at Ranger Schools.
The next step: Defense Department officials, who began reviewing military jobs in January, have so far have approved 111,000 of them for women, with 220,000 to go. Each job approval requires 30-day Congressional notice, and the final approvals and exceptions to the rule will be announced “on or about” Jan. 1, 2016, says Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis.
Move over Taliban; here comes the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The group, which pledged an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State group, or ISIS, earlier this month, is tying Afghanistan more closely to the security dynamics in nearby Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and, of course, Uzbekistan. That’s the word from the Wall Street Journal.
“The Afghan government says the IMU, with thousands of fighters, is among the largest and most active in its territory,” WSJ reports. Founded in part by a former Soviet paratrooper, the IMU “originated in the 1990s in Uzbekistan with the aim of overthrowing President Islam Karimov, the onetime Communist Party boss of the former Soviet republic, and establishing an Islamic state. Mr. Karimov responded to the group’s unsuccessful attempts to assassinate him with a ruthless crackdown on all his political opposition, sending many IMU members fleeing to neighboring Afghanistan, which was then ruled by the Taliban.”
Why the sudden rise in the IMU’s profile? The death of former Taliban chief, Mullah Omar, which has bumped their leader, Uthman Ghazi, closer to ISIS.
Where you may have heard of them recently: They abducted 31 ethnic Hazaras from south-central Afghanistan’s Zabul province in May. And in June 2014, “the IMU claimed responsibility for a spectacular attack on the airport of the Pakistani city of Karachi, highlighting the group’s wider ambitions.”
Prospects for Afghan peace talks grow even more complicated. “The IMU is one of several groups of foreign Islamic extremists who are active in Afghanistan, along with al Qaeda, Chinese Uighurs and militants of Pakistani origin. Any effort by the Kabul government to start a reconciliation process aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan would exclude such groups.”
Meantime, the Taliban is gaining ground in the north. Fears that unregulated militias are destabilizing already contested regions of Afghanistan have returned, The New York Times reports from northern Afghanistan Faryab province, where Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum abandoned “months of mostly fruitless pleading” with Kabul to lead his own ensemble of troops to push back against Taliban gains.
“The Taliban in the province are numbered at about 3,000 local fighters, security officials said, and are aided by about 500 foreign militants, largely from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan… The Taliban have been gaining ground, despite an estimated 5,000 militia fighters called in desperation to help.”
The Bales report is in, finally. U.S. Central Command officials on Tuesday released the long-awaited report into one of the worst crimes committed by an American soldier: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ 2012 massacre of 22 Afghans in remote Kandahar.
“The AR 15-6 into the shooting was conducted immediately after the incident, but the report was only released Tuesday by U.S. Central Command after a long-standing Freedom of Information Act battle with The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington,” Military Times writes.
The findings: Despite multiple belligerent warnings signs, which were easier to isolate and scrutinize in retrospect, Bales was described in the report as “one of our best in our company,” whose members could not have predicted “the extremely violent acts” of March 11, 2012. But clear warning signs emerged that Bales was known to be drinking, using steroids and was violent. Bales pled guilty to the charges in 2013 and is currently serving a life sentence in prison.
From Defense One
There’s a clash of two fundamental American principles taking place inside the CIA today: protecting national security secrets and serving the public’s right to know—and it all adds up to the need for the intelligence community to do more to engage the press. How, exactly? Former CIA-ers Aki Peritz and Kevin Strouse explain, here.
In Germany, officials are racing to establish a suitable legal framework for cybersecurity across a range of critical industries. But the Germans are learning tough lessons other nations would be wise to heed as the draft measure evolves, argues a former hacktivist and strategic advisor to NATO, Sandro Gaycken, today a senior researcher at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin.
How is Turkey’s war on the Kurds playing out inside their borders? As nothing less than a desperate “fight for Kurdish dignity,” one women told journalist Lauren Bohn, reporting from the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakır. And it’s also a petulant war with increasingly profound implications for Middle Eastern security as Kurds represent a 40-million strong stateless group spread out across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Check out Bohn’s #LongRead report in full, here.
Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Defense One. Want to share The D Brief with a friend? Here’s our subscribe link. And please tell us what you like, don’t like, or want to drop on our radar right here at the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
And speaking of the Kurds, they now have custody of Umm Sayyaf, wife of the ISIS “oil and gas emir” killed in a U.S. raid last May—and The Daily Beast reports on exactly why such a move made sense to U.S. and Iraqi officials, especially after recent, unsettling revelations about American hostage Kayla Mueller’s time in ISIS captivity prior to her death.
Meanwhile: ISIS claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing outside a Kurdish security agency in northeastern Syria that killed 11 people and wounded nearly 30 others this morning, Reuters reports.
While we’re on ISIS, Libya just received the endorsement of the Arab League to arm Libya’s military in the face of the Islamic State group affiliate threat inside their borders—but, the 22-nation alliance stopped short of any immediate steps to lighten Libya’s burden. The problem is, “Shipping arms to Libya would undermine ongoing United Nations-led peace talks,” a Western official told the WSJ.
So what now? “The Arab League said it would meet again on Aug. 27 to discuss progress in forming a joint Arab military force, which had been proposed in March by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.”
In Egypt, “The Obama administration is quietly reviewing the future of America’s three-decade deployment to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, fearful the lightly equipped peacekeepers could be targets of escalating Islamic State-inspired violence,” AP reported Tuesday.
Meanwhile in Yemen, all sides have committed war crimes through indiscriminate attacks on civilians, Amnesty International said in a report released yesterday.
“In a second report about the Yemen crisis, Unicef reported Tuesday that an average of eight children are killed or maimed every day in the country, and that nearly 400 have been killed and more than 600 wounded over the past five months,” according to NYT.
Remember Boko Haram? They’re still killing scores of Nigerians, this time at least 60 in the northeastern village of Kukuwa. The group’s return to headlines began anew with the release of a video showing the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, reminding everyone that—contrary to claims last week by the Chadian president—he is in fact still alive.
How their most recent violence took place: “The Islamist insurgency rode Toyota pickup trucks and motorcycles into the village of Kukuwa [last Thursday]…and shot haphazardly at civilians. Many of those who died were villagers who drowned trying to swim through a surging river that had flooded after days of rain.”
The U.S. Marines, meanwhile, have consolidated their Europe and African forces under a single two-star command, Marine Corps Times reported.
What’s the benefit? “More intensive oversight of special-purpose Marine air-ground task forces and other units that fall under their command” totaling more than 1,750 Marines—including “the Spain-based unit that responds to crises in Africa, the Italy-based Marines who conduct theater security cooperation missions with African allies, the Romania-based Black Sea Rotational Force, and a new Bulgaria-based Combined Arms Company.”
U-2 spy plane successor in the works. “Lockheed Martin Skunk Works is designing a next-generation high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) surveillance airplane, known internally as RQ-X or UQ-2, as an optionally-manned successor to the U-2 and Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk,” FlightGlobal reports this morning.
What’s new about this one? It will be “powered by the same General Electric F118 engine and optimised to fly at 70,000 ft. or higher [and] it would carry many of the same sensors, since those are already calibrated for use at that altitude. The biggest difference will be the aircraft’s low-observable characteristics.” Read the rest here.
Flash of the obvious. The global market for unmanned systems is set to triple in the next decade, according to a new report from Teal Group consultants, FlightGlobal reported Tuesday.
And the U.S. Air Force is set to ramp up its own investment in smaller UAS after the release of a “long-awaited strategic vision document” sometime later this year. That story, also via FlightGlobal, here.
And oh, hey look: the Ashley Madison.com numbers are out. Here’s a breakdown for the dot-mil audience: us.army.mil (6788); navy.mil (1665); usmc.mil (809); mail.mil (206); gimail.af.mil (127); and pentagon.af.mil (5). Source here.
Russia’s aggression at sea is prompting the U.S. Navy to seek out better sub-hunting technology, Bloomberg reports. “The Navy is seeking to deploy a sophisticated surveillance device made by Lockheed Martin Corp. in the Atlantic Ocean. The device, towed by a ship, already is in use in the Pacific. As soon as mid-2016, the service also wants to send to the Atlantic a prototype networked ‘undersea sensor system’ that ‘addresses emergent real-world threats,’ according to a Defense Department budget document.” Read the rest, here.
And who just plunged to the bottom of the Black Sea for a submarine photo op? Who else but Vladimir Putin, of course, exploring a 10th-century Byzantine ship downed off the coast of Crimea. For what it’s worth, AP notes, “On previous trips deep underwater, Putin has explored the Gulf of Finland and Lake Baikal in submersibles. He also went scuba diving in the Kerch Strait that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, where he brought up fragments of ancient Greek jugs, or amphorae, that his spokesman later admitted had been planted.”