Carter pitches Iran deal, but SecDef has made little impression; Iraq counteroffensive bogs down; Quantum science, explained; And a bit more.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter took to the pages of USA Today this morning to sell a skeptical American electorate on why the negotiated accord to curb Iran’s nuclear program is far better than a military strike. His pitch comes less than two days after the White House appears to have lined up enough Democratic support to overcome a Republican veto.
“While I am responsible for [the military] alternative and know that it would be effective at setting back Iran’s nuclear program,” Carter writes, “it would do so with potentially serious second- and third-order repercussions, and the likely need to repeat attacks once Iran sought to rebuild its capability…Indeed, the reality is that any prospective military option, if called for, will be more effective under this deal — not less. Iran will have a smaller and more concentrated civil nuclear program, and the deal’s verification provisions will give us more information with which to plan.”
Carter: Rest assured, Gulf pals—we got your back. “No one is saying this deal will fix every problem with Iran or in the Middle East…But because the deal places no limits whatsoever on the United States military, it will not hinder America’s strategic approach to the region or our military’s important work to check those destabilizing activities and stand by our friends in the Middle East.” Read his take in full right here.
For the record, nearly half of U.S. troops and national security employees say they still have no opinion about Ash Carter, a Defense One survey finds.
After six months on the job, the secretary registered a lowly 38 percent approval rating in a new poll of U.S. troops, Defense Department civilians and other national security personnel—“a stark revelation and a potentially complicating factor for Carter, who frequently says he has less than two years to make an impact as Pentagon chief, assuming his term lasts until the end of the Obama administration,” Defense One Executive Editor Kevin Baron writes.
“Carter’s public image has not overcome what some see as a stumbling start out of the gate,” writes Baron, “and it has not been helped by the loss of some of the most experienced and senior public affairs talent in the Defense Department.”
The good news? “His numbers are improving. In May, less than three months after Carter took office, a Defense One poll found just 24 percent approved of him, 11 percent disapproved, and 65 said they did not have an opinion.” Read the rest, here.
Back to Iran briefly, where Bibi’s full-court press against the deal continues—with diminishing returns on Capitol Hill. The Wall Street Journal’s Adam Entous detailed the steady and “unprecedented” push from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sink the deal in August meetings with U.S. lawmakers.
“This deal will bring war, more rockets, more aggression. It will start a nuclear arms race,” Netanyahu said, according to a U.S. delegate. “At one point,” Entous writes, “Mr. Netanyahu drew a gun on the white board. This is no regular gun, he told the lawmakers. He called it a ‘nuclear gun’ which shoots ‘nuclear bullets.’” When asked what Bibi’s “plan B” was if the deal cleared Congress, “We will figure out what we do if we lose the vote,” he said.
The net result to date? “Of the 22 Democrats who met with Mr. Netanyahu on Aug. 9, seven have so far declared their support for the nuclear deal and two have said they would oppose it.” Read the rest from Entous, here.
Big day for U.S.-Saudi relations as Riyadh’s King Salman and his entourage have poured into D.C., booking an entire Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown, replete with gilded furniture, red carpet, lots of gold—the stuff of kings, basically, as Politico reported.
Driving the agenda: the Iran deal, of course, WSJ reports. The White House “has offered new U.S. military assistance and enhanced security cooperation to try to cement Saudi Arabia’s support for the nuclear deal and ease concerns that the agreement will embolden Iran to challenge America’s Gulf state allies. At the same time, the president is seeking to move beyond the nuclear deal to press King Salman toward working with the U.S. and Russia to reach a resolution to the conflict in Syria and to address growing humanitarian concerns in Yemen.” Read that bit, here.
What’s in that weapons package Obama wants on offer to Riyadh? “Joint Direct Attack Munitions with GPS satellite guidance...a resupply of Raytheon Co.’s Paveway bombs,” both of which “may presage more advanced systems to be proposed in coming months,” Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio reports.
What’s already been cleared for sale by Congress? 600 Patriot PAC-3 air defense missiles worth a potential $5.4 billion. “That’s in addition to a prior sale of 202 missiles,” Capaccio writes.
Ahead of today’s visit, Saudi state TV announced Riyadh’s security forces just killed a terrorist in the country’s oil-rich Eastern province, though details remain sketchy, Reuters reports this morning. “Al-Ikhbariya TV cited unnamed sources as saying that there was no ‘terrorist organizations’ in Abqaiq but a person was surrounded and killed after attacking a security man. It gave no more information.” More—though not a great deal beyond that—here.
In Syria, Bashir al-Assad says he’s ready for a power-sharing agreement with a “healthy” opposition. That according to Assad spokesman—er, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Reuters reports.
Putin also called for “some kind of an international coalition to fight terrorism and extremism,” he told reporters this morning. Putin also told them he’s spoken to U.S. President Barack Obama, as well as Assad on the matter.
In Egypt, four American troops and two others from the multinational force based in Sinai were wounded yesterday in two IED blasts in the northeastern region of Sinai.
“The two international troops hit an improvised explosive device with their vehicle, and then the four Americans were hit with a second explosion on another vehicle while attempting to respond and provide help,” The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe reports.
“We are considering what, if any, additional measures might be needed to ensure force protection. This includes bringing in additional equipment if necessary,” a Pentagon spokesman said.
Meanwhile in Iraq, the big offensive in and around the contested Anbar capital of Ramadi is “going nowhere,” WaPo’s Loveday Morris reports from Baghdad. “The operation to retake Ramadi is being led by U.S.-backed forces, with Iraq’s Shiite militias largely excluded amid concerns about stoking sectarian tension.” But three months after the city’s fall, “Iraqi forces have not yet surrounded the city 80 miles west of Baghdad, commanders say, the first stated aim of the counteroffensive.”
What’s the hold-up? Too few coalition airstrikes, according to Iraqi Maj. Gen. Qasim al-Mohammadi, the head of Anbar Operations Command. “The coalition isn’t available all the time for Ramadi. They are busy [elsewhere in Iraq] and in Syria, so there’s a lack of strikes.”
The U.S. response: The offensive has been slowed “by a number of factors, including severe heat in recent weeks and the extensive fortifications and booby-traps that militants have laid around the city,” Morris writes. Read his report in full, here.
ICYMI: Brooking’s Will McCants offers perhaps the most comprehensive bio of Islamic State leader and “true believer” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, here. McCants has a book coming out Sept. 22. More on that over here.
From Defense One
Quantum science: it’s not just for sci-fi anymore. The real-world potential remains a mystery, but the U.S. and China are betting millions on the promise of this newish field: unhackable communications, radars that see underground, supercomputers that make today’s machines look like toys. Defense One Technology Editor Patrick Tucker explains what it all means, and what its prospects are.
The UK will decide whether to open combat jobs to women next year. As the U.S. nears its own decisions, the British Army is considering allowing women into infantry and armor positions, Penny Mordaunt, the British minister of state for the armed forces, said Thursday. Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber has the story.
A Network Age twist on the old problem of intelligence: if tipping off the private sector about upcoming cyber attacks would compromise sources, when should the government act? There’s a nascent debate over whether the U.S. should use hidden data to warn industry. NextGov’s Camille Tuutti reports.
Welcome to Friday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Brad Peniston. 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.
After dipping its toes into U.S. territorial waters on Thursday, the five Chinese naval vessels headed back home. “China's Defense Ministry, in a statement sent to Reuters on Thursday, said the ships were in the Bering Sea as part of a routine drill following the completion of military exercises with Russia.”
No big deal; everyone can relax. “They already had one of their icebreakers up in that area, and they weren't that far away with an exercise, and they've already started their return transit,” Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy’s sub fleet in the Pacific has a new commander. “Rear Adm. Frederick Roegge, who most recently served in the Pentagon, took over from Rear Adm. Phillip Sawyer during a ceremony at Pearl Harbor,” AP reported.
Quds, Kurds—what’s the difference? That’s the latest foreign policy wisdom from GOP 2016 front-runner Donald Trump, which you can hear on the conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt’s program here. WaPo and NYT have the less-than-reassuring context for that one here and here, respectively.
Hillary opens up—but not on national security (just yet). Today Hillary Clinton will give a rare national interview (airing at noon) to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell to mark the 20th anniversary tomorrow of her Beijing speech on women's rights. Defense One is told Clinton won't be rolling out a revamped “Hillary Doctrine” just yet, but her campaign plans to focus the first few weeks of September on national security and foreign policy, with a speech on the Iran deal at the Brookings Institution on Sept. 9. According to her campaign, the election cycle hasn’t focused on these issues enough, though the former Secretary of State, too, has kept her own relatively safe distance from the topics early in her campaign's messaging.
And on the same day VP Joe Biden told reporters he honestly still doesn't know whether he will enter the race, continuing to soul-search whether he and his family have the emotional endurance, Clinton's camp said the entrance of the sitting VP would certainly “shake things up”—not that anyone should expect a change in Clinton’s strategy.
Lastly today, sometimes the U.S. military’s best ideas bubble up from below. That’s the insight shared by Bryce Hoffman in Forbes, writing on U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Robert Brown—once “a colonel leading a Stryker brigade in northern Iraq [where] his unit was one of the first to be issued its very own RQ-7 Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle.”
“The drone’s feed was only viewable through a pair of secure display boxes,” Hoffman writes. “One of those was always down, and the other was usually in the wrong place... ‘We brought in experts — all the experts we could — to figure out how to get this feed to more systems,’ Brown recalled. ‘None of the experts could figure it out.’”
“Then a young soldier, a signals specialist, remembered going to a baseball game back in the States where he had noticed that a live video feed was being broadcast to monitors in every hotdog stand in the stadium. He guessed that the same technology, known as VBrick, could be used to transmit the drone feed throughout the Stryker brigade. He was right.” Read the rest of the story over here. And have a great weekend, everyone.