A peace deal reached; Carter would tap Fanning, Lewis; Threading the needle for AUMF; War correspondent Simon dies; CIA leaves Yemen; Could Carter be sworn in on Friday the 13th?; And a bit more.
A peace deal for Ukraine, reached overnight. Reuters this morning: “The leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine have agreed on a deal to end fighting in eastern Ukraine, participants at the summit talks said on Thursday. The deal reached after all-night negotiations in the Belarussian capital Minsk included a ceasefire that would come into effect on Feb. 15, followed by the withdrawal of heavy weapons. The news came as Ukraine was offered a $40-billion lifeline by the International Monetary Fund to stave off financial collapse.
“…The four leaders had committed to respect Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, according to a joint declaration distributed by the Kremlin.
“The Minsk summit agreement offered hope for eastern Ukraine, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said.
Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Twitter: “After 17 hours, negotiations in Minsk have finished: ceasefire from Feb. 15 at zero hours, then withdrawal of heavy weapons. Therein lies hope.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin: "We have managed to agree on the main issues.” More here.
Meantime, even if the U.S. decides to arm the Ukrainians, the Pentagon could have a logistical issue – supply shortages and a “bureaucratic procurement process” – that could delay delivery for months. The WSJ’s Julian Barnes: “…Such logistical delays plagued the delivery of nonlethal aid: After Kiev issued a plea for help early last year, meals ready-to-eat arrived in March. First-aid kits began arriving in June, hand-held radios in July, helmets in August, night-vision goggles in September and radar to locate enemy mortars in November and December.
A senior U.S. official: “If it was that hard to get night-vision goggles to Ukraine, I don’t know how hard it will be to get them Javelin antitank missiles.”
“Other officials say many of the bureaucratic hurdles affecting aid deliveries have been ironed out of the system, and note that Ukraine now is classified as a top-priority recipient.
Lt. Col. “Smokin’” Joe Sowers, a Pentagon spokesman: “It has gotten much more responsive, and much faster… When we align efforts to priorities, the process is more efficient.” Read the rest here.
U.S. will begin training Ukrainian soldiers to battle Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in March. AP via Stripes: “… U.S. Army Europe Commander Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges said a battalion of U.S. soldiers would train three battalions of Ukrainians from the Interior Ministry at the Yavariv training center in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.” More here.
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Carter is expected to tap Eric Fanning and Ron Lewis to lead his front office. Defense Secretary Nominee Ash Carter, expected to be confirmed by the full Senate early afternoon today, is thought to be pulling Eric Fanning, a respected up-and-comer who is now Air Force Undersecretary, over to be his chief of staff, and Maj. Gen. Ron Lewis, now head of Army public affairs, to be his senior military assistant, Defense News’ Paul McLeary and Vago Muradian reported yesterday evening.
McLeary and Muradian: “Fanning ‘has had a terrific tenure in the Air Force,’ said Rebecca Grant, a former Air Force official and president of IRIS Research. ‘He's really been able to operate across the full range, including being involved in the difficult budget meetings in the Pentagon’ over the past several years, she added.”
“Lewis took over the Army's public affairs office in June, fresh off a yearlong deployment to Afghanistan having served as the deputy commanding general (support) for the 101st Airborne Division.
A career Air Cavalry officer, Lewis also served a tour in Iraq and an earlier tour in Afghanistan. Between deployments, Lewis has spent a lot of time at the Pentagon, much of it at Carter's side... More from Defense News on this, here.
Fanning, a former journalist, served for a time served as the Air Force’s only top civilian – occupying both as the No. 2 and acting as the No. 1 civilian before Debbie James was confirmed as secretary.
Lewis, who received his second star just weeks ago, has been close to Carter for years and as The D Brief reported a few weeks ago, has been serving as Carter’s senior military assistant during transition. The question will become if Lewis receives a third star right away, since the Pentagon chief’s “senior military assistant” typically wears three, or not.
The D Brief’s bit on Carter’s transition team Jan. 12, here.
Probably not a deal killer, but noting nonetheless: In the process and form-oriented Pentagon and the tradition-bound Senate, one wonders if the names of two of Carter’s leading men leaking out before he has been officially confirmed could be seen as presumptuous.
BTW, if Carter does get confirmed today, would he be sworn in tomorrow, on Friday the 13th? Likely not. The informed expectation around the Pentagon water cooler is that he’ll be sworn in on Tuesday.
Who’s doing what today? Senate Armed Services Committee talks Afghanistan with Gen. John Campbell at 9:30 a.m. … American Enterprise Institute talks the global fight against Islamic extremism with the House’s Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul at 10 a.m. … U.S. Cyber Command’s Vice. Adm. Jan Tighe gives the morning keynote at the AFCEA/USNI Western Conference and Exposition in San Diego … and AEI returns again at 2 p.m. with USAID’s outgoing Rajiv Shah.
Noting: Campbell, testifying today on Afghanistan, may hint more at his recommendations to slow down the drawdown of troops from Afghanistan. But a more formal announcement of whatever changes may occur there might not happen until Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who strongly supports the U.S. leaving more troops in Afghanistan, appears in Washington sometime next month.
The war powers battle is now officially Congress’ fight. Lawmakers said the new war powers draft from the White House is so broad and imprecise that they don’t fully even understand what they’d be passing without establishing more concrete limitations. Defense One’s politics editor Molly O’Toole: “The president’s authority under the new AUMF would end in three years, and the proposal would repeal a prior authorization Congress passed in 2002 to approve the invasion of Iraq. The new authority does not limit the geographic range of the war, and would not repeal the 2001 AUMF, the legal justification for the Afghanistan war and counterterrorism operations across the globe.”
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff: The war powers language “is very broad and very ambiguous … None of us really know what that means, and it’s deliberately drafted, I think, to be ambiguous.”
Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe: The phrase “enduring offensive ground combat operations” is “ambiguous and could leave us in perpetual debate on what the military is authorized to do.”
President Obama: “As a nation, we need to ask the difficult and necessary questions about when, why and how we use military force.” Read the rest, here.
The Obama White House threaded the needle when it came to language for the AUMF. The NYT’s Helene Cooper: “In formally asking Congress to authorize a three-year military campaign against the Islamic State, [Obama] has carefully worded his request to soothe worried Democrats who do not want another big war. At the same time, he is assuring Republican hawks that the American military will do what it takes to defeat the Sunni militant group. Hence the measure prohibits “enduring offensive ground combat operations.” So, no ground troops to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria or anywhere else? Maybe not.” Read the rest here.
On that new AUMF, The Daily Beast’s Tim Mak and Nancy Youssef make their case for why the next text is “BS.” To wit: “[T]he ongoing congressional debate about the authorization was met with hardly a shrug at the Pentagon on Wednesday. ‘We don’t need a new AUMF to do our jobs’ because the ongoing AUMF has allowed the United States to conduct its war legally, said one defense official who asked for anonymity to speak more candidly. ‘The AUMF is frankly more of a political issue than a military one.’” More of that, here.
Don’t over-value a sunset clause in the AUMF, Ken Gude argues in a new piece in Just Security, here.
Read closely. The last line of Obama’s AUMF draft, according to these guys, deserves very close attention: “‘There is also a chance that we may become embroiled in a geopolitical nightmare until 2040,’ reads the last sentence of the draft… ‘And the cost of such an entanglement could amount to several trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives, too.’” That from The Onion, (remember, it’s a joke!), here.
Want to know what the U.S.-led coalition has been targeting? Defense One’s own chart-happy Kedar Pavgi put this bit together that details the categories of ISIS targets that include some 39 boats, nearly 100 HQ buildings and a staggering 752 “fighting positions.” Click bait, here.
ISIS has prompted a dramatic shift in intelligence sharing between European countries and the U.S. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker: “Some of that intelligence sharing comes from tracking people in transit through new, expanded DHS powers to screen people seeking entry into the U.S., particularly those hailing from one of the 38 countries participating in the Visa Waiver Program.
“[Michael Steinbach, assistant director of counterterrorism for the FBI] called on Congress to stop companies like Google and Apple from offering data encryption solutions to their customers, arguing that encryption makes it impossible for law enforcement to monitor terrorist or extremist talk.” More on the joint efforts to track the 3,000-plus Westerners who have joined ISIS, here.
The CIA has removed many of its personnel from Yemen, throwing its counterterrorism training and drone campaign into a new state of uncertainty. WaPo’s Greg Miller and Hugh Naylor: “The spy agency has pulled dozens of operatives, analysts and other staffers from Yemen as part of a broader extraction of roughly 200 Americans who had been based at the embassy in Sanaa, officials said. Among those removed were senior officers who worked closely with Yemen’s intelligence and security services to target al-Qaeda operatives and disrupt terrorism plots often aimed at the United States.
“U.S. officials emphasized that not all CIA personnel were withdrawn from Yemen, saying that the agency would try to salvage an intelligence network that it had assembled in cooperation with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other allies over the past five years.” More here.
Yemen’s former President, Saleh, still has a grip on power. The WaPo’s Hugh Naylor in Sana, here.
Meanwhile in Baghdad, Jordan’s King Abdullah sent his army chief to offer all of Amman’s military assets to Iraq in their fight against ISIS. AFP, here.
Go get ‘em: The VA’s Bob McDonald gets snappy. The newish Veterans Affairs Secretary, Bob McDonald, the former corporate CEO who has attempted to introduce a new era of transparency and accountability within the massive bureaucracy at VA, got a little defensive during Hill testimony, “snapping at one congressman who suggested he’d accomplished little in his first six months on the job,” according to the WaPo’s Colby Itkowitz.
“[Coffman] pressed McDonald about construction issues with a new VA hospital in his district. McDonald pushed back that he’d only been in the job six months, “you’ve been here longer than I have, if there’s a problem in Denver, you own it more than I do.” More here.
Hunter and West: Why is the Army brass punishing this Special Forces hero? California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter and former Navy official-turned-journalist Bing West ask that question today about Green Beret Major Matt Golsteyn in National Interest, here.
The Pentagon’s “Better Buying Power” initiative is making satisfactory, if incremental, improvements to the weapons acquisition process. Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio with that short hit, here.
How do you address tomorrow’s challenges with today’s budget? For War on the Rocks, Dave Barno and Nora Bensahel’s last line: “…the 2016 defense budget request may be wrongly designed to meet the military requirements needed to sustain U.S. power and influence in this new era. Sustaining outsized conventional investments and legacy force structure choices seems almost assured to fall short in an era that demands more innovative, and often indirect, approaches to addressing the growing number of non-conventional threats to U.S. security interests.” Read their bit here.
Are pleas for more BRAC rounds the definition of insanity? It could be even worse than that, former SASC military advisor Lucian Niemeyer says at Real Clear Defense, here.
Inside NBC, a fierce debate over Williams’ future. But clearly on one side of that debate is the sentiment summed up by this person who is familiar with NBC’s discussions, where the “Iraq fabrication” is seen as very damaging: “When helicopter crew members get shot down and you attach yourself to what they went through, it’s pretty outrageous.” More here.
Reporting from harm’s way: why journalists who really get shot at don’t talk about it. Read Charles Lane’s op-ed, also in the WaPo today: “War reporting, like war itself, involves a high sitting-around-to-action ratio. Once they’ve accepted the extra risk of going to a conflict zone, journalists generally wind up under fire for one of two reasons: sheer bad luck or their own miscalculations — all too often, embarrassingly stupid miscalculations. The first alternative is no reflection on you as a reporter, one way or the other. The second one reflects poorly on you.” More here.
CBS veteran war correspondent and 60 Minutes reporter Bob Simon, dies in a car crash in Manhattan. CBS: “…Simon's career in war reporting was extensive, beginning in Vietnam. While based in Saigon from 1971-72, his reports on the war — and particularly the Hanoi 1972 spring offensive — won an Overseas Press Club award award for the Best Radio Spot News for coverage of the end of the conflict. Simon was there for the end of the conflict and was aboard one of the last helicopters out of Saigon in 1975.” More here.
The push to reform the military’s compensation and benefits fiscal “death spiral” hit more than a few roadblocks on Capitol Hill yesterday. Military Times’ Andrew Tilghman, here.
Cooler than you are. Freshman Sen. Joni Ernst has taken heat recently for saying she is a “combat veteran” despite not actually having been in any firefights while wearing the uniform. It’s a distinction with a difference, sure—but it’s shaping up to be a debate with increasingly adolescent overtones. Or, put differently: Just another day in D.C. politics. Politico’s Adam Lerner, here.
A terminal illness has prompted this Minnesota Air Force veteran to give away everything he owns—including his home and $1 million in retirement savings. Air Force Times’ Oriana Pawlyk, here.