ISIS launches 4-pronged attack in Iraq; Carter in Afghanistan; Drug lords spoofing DHS drones; Marines get high-tech mortars; and a bit more...

Unlike Afghanistan, there’s no such thing as a fighting “season” in Iraq. Seventeen hours of French, British, and Canadian airstrikes killed 180 of some 300 Islamic State fighters who had engaged in a four-pronged attack that the Washington Post says “kicked off the most intense fighting that northern Iraq has seen this year.” The Wall Street Journal notes ISIS deployed car bombs, suicide bombers, small arms and even bulldozers in the attack—which began Wednesday and lasted through Thursday morning. It was ultimately repelled by Iraqi Kurdish security forces, but not before raising more concerns about the terrorist groups’ resiliency after nearly 18 months of airstrikes from some of the world’s most technologically-advanced militaries.

Speaking of which: A drone was heard flying overhead before one of the attacks, said the former governor of Iraq’s Ninevah province—whose personal militia is being trained by Turkish forces. “We thought that it belonged to the coalition, but we contacted them and it didn’t,” he said, concluding that it had been flown by Islamic State militants to spot their positions. “It continued to feed them targets.”

Col. Steve Warren, coalition spox in Baghdad: “This was the hardest punch ISIL had thrown since this summer, and the peshmerga defeated them,” but not before losing at least 18 peshmerga fighters in the process.

For what it’s worth: “Brig. Gen. Mark Odom, the top U.S. military official in northern Iraq,” writes WaPo, “declined to disclose whether U.S. or allied personnel took part on the ground in the defense of the Kurdish ­forces.”

And today, representatives from more than a dozen countries—under the umbrella of the International Syria Support Group—are meeting at the UN in New York to talk ISIS and the broader war in Syria. The three main topics on the agenda: “There are at least three unresolved issues: which groups in Syria should be defined as terrorists, whether the Council will recognize the bloc of Syrian opposition groups that came together in Saudi Arabia last week, and whether President Bashar al-Assad should be allowed to run for another term.” More on that, here.

Why is Obama hesitant to send more U.S. troops to fight ISIS? The New York Times reports it’s “rooted in the grim assumption that the casualties and costs would rival the worst of the Iraq war. In such a scenario, he said, a renewed commitment could take up to $10 billion a month and leave as many as 500 troops wounded every month in addition to those killed, a toll he deemed not commensurate to the threat.” Read on for a deeper dive into the dynamics at home and the politics of escalation abroad, here.

Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says the White House stabbed him in the back with anonymous comments in newspapers on his way out. FP’s Dan DeLuce has the exclusive interview, here.

SecDef Ash Carter dropped by the remote FOB Fenty in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province this morning. Why Fenty? “Because it is one of the few bases the Obama administration has agreed to leave open outside of Kabul past 2016,” the WSJ’s Gordon Lubold reports, traveling with Carter. The base is “also a key logistics and train-and-advise location for the U.S., as well as sitting at the gateway of a variety of ‘threat networks’ emanating from the border region.”

Complicating that threat network is the rising presence of ISIS wannabes in the province, where “until now, most Islamic State-affiliated forces in Nangarhar have been Afghan Taliban defectors, Pakistan-based militants and Islamist fighters from Uzbekistan,” notes WaPo, adding, “Three days ago, in a sign of its growing reach, the Islamic State launched a radio broadcast in Nangahar, called ‘The Voice of the Caliphate,’ which urges young men to join its holy war and issues propaganda against the government.”

“Nangahar is the region that most distresses us now,” said Gen. Dawlat Waziri, spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense. He told WaPo that “Afghan forces had defeated the Islamic State in several other provinces and are now aggressively fighting them in four districts of Nangahar, where they have killed between 300 and 400 militants in recent months.”

On the bright side, the U.S. is about to send Afghanistan’s air force “a batch of about eight A-29 Super Tucano planes, the military’s first fixed-wing, close air support aircraft. By 2018, the Afghan Air Force is expected to have a total of 20 of the props.” More from WSJ, here.

Also in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force is flying the Gorgon Stare wide-area airborne surveillance (WAAS) system on its MQ-9 Reaper drones, IHS Janes reported this week. “While the baseline system uses five monochrome charge-coupled device (CCD) daylight cameras and four thermal cameras built into a 25-inch EO/IR turret built by Exelis, the newer Increment II uses an EO sensor turret derived from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and BAE Systems' Argus technology (featuring 192 separate cameras), and an IR sensor manufactured by Exelis.” More on that system, here.

France just ordered its third Reaper drone from the U.S., Flightglobal reported Thursday. It already has one operating in Africa, and the second Reaper is due to arrive next year.

And speaking of new military toys— The future of defense may include robot wars with China and autonomous swarming drone boats...but it also includes big-ass mortars. And the U.S. Marines are getting these doozies after they “awarded a $98 million contract to Raytheon Missile Systems to build more than 3,000 Precision Extended Range Munitions…[a] 120mm mortar round [that] will double the current range to 16 kilometers, or 10 miles, and provide GPS accuracy well within 10 meters of the target.” More from Marine Corps Times, here.

From Defense One

DHS: drug traffickers are spoofing our border-watching drones. The agency, already reeling from a drone effort deemed a partial failure, is now looking to harden its smaller drones against cyber attack — but that comes at a price. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker has the story, here.

U.S. may use portable DNA labs and iris scans to vet Syrian refugees: “Throughout the Syrian civil war the UN has relied on portable eye-scanning machines to register fleeing Syrians, but the U.S. has yet to make use of that data,” reports NextGov’s Aliya Sternstein, here.

Ignoring Guantanamo won’t make it go away, writes The Atlantic’s Scott Beauchamp. Fixing the mistakes of Gitmo will require Americans to step up and shoulder the burdens of war.” Read, here

Rand Paul is offering a principled realism in his 2016 bid, argues The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf: “On ISIS, the Kentucky senator steers a distinctive course between his party's neoconservatives and its bellicose populists.” Read that, here.

Meanwhile, Trump and Cruz’s “protectionism” reveal a GOP national security identity in tatters. National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein: “The insular vision of the two top-polling can­did­ates poses a sharp chal­lenge to the usual in­ter­na­tion­al­ism that has long dom­in­ated the Republican party.” Read on, here.

Battle for the White House, a new ebook from Defense One. If you want to know the future of U.S. national security strategy, look to the 2016 presidential election. Whoever wins the White House will inherit the wars President Obama had pledged to end, along with dozens of ongoing counterterrorism operations in overlooked countries and an increasingly complex global security environment. This ebook wraps up the essential reporting you need to understand where the race is, and where it’s going. Buckle up and download it here.

Welcome to the Friday edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Tell your friends to subscribe here: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. Want to see something different? Got news? Let us know: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.

It wouldn’t be an omnibus without a little bit of drama. Several Republicans — from 2016 candidate Marco Rubio of Florida to Richard Shelby of Alabama, a senior appropriator — threatened the $1.1 trillion bill for not including tightened restrictions on refugees. But after House leaders secured a time agreement that essentially made any stalling mechanism moot, and aggressively whipped votes into the night, the House is set to pass the bill this morning, followed by the Senate this afternoon. We can already smell the jet fumes from here. It's happy holidays already on the Hill.

OPSEC alert: A Facebook posting preceded a U.S. special forces team’s removal from Libya on Monday, Stars and Stripes reports this morning. “What I can tell you is that with the concurrence of Libyan officials, U.S. military personnel traveled to Libya on Dec. 14 to foster relationships and enhance communication with their counterparts in the Libyan National Army,” said Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, an AFRICOM spokesman.

About that Facebook posting: “On Monday, a group of U.S. troops was pictured at an airstrip not far from the town of Sabratha, an Islamic State stronghold in western Libya. Pictures of the troops were posted to a Facebook page purported to belong to the Libya air force. The men were dressed in civilian clothes and armed with assault rifles.” More from S&S, here.

ICYMI: U.S. troops are in Cameroon helping the fight against ISIS-aligned militants, and CBS News went along with some of them. You can find their report, here.

Sabre-rattling in the SCS: China’s navy dispatched warships, submarines and fighter jets to simulate cruise missile strikes on enemy ships in the South China Sea, Beijing’s defense ministry said this morning.

And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is fuming over the Pentagon’s reluctance to report on its recent naval patrol near the contested Spratly Islands. “Five weeks to respond to a simple letter is too long,” McCain said in a statement. “Whether these delays are the result of the micromanagement of the National Security Council or the bureaucracy of the Pentagon, they are unacceptable nonetheless.” The Hill has more, here.

The folks at the Heritage Foundation just released a report on China’s naval modernization, a program that has accelerated in recent years. Find that, here.

Also: The U.S. Navy doesn’t plan anymore patrols through the South China Sea through the end of the year, Reuters reported this week.

That news comes the same week that the U.S. closed a nearly $2B arms deal with Taiwan involving two decommissioned Navy frigates, air and ground missiles, amphibious vehicles and communications systems. The deal irked China, not that Beijing has many options in the way of protest. WSJ has more, here.

And before we leave the region, Japan is “stringing a line of anti-ship, anti-aircraft missile batteries along 200 islands in the East China Sea stretching 1,400 km (870 miles) from the country's mainland toward Taiwan,” Reuters reports this morning. “While the installations are not secret, it is the first time such officials have spelled out that the deployment will help keep China at bay in the Western Pacific and amounts to a Japanese version of the ‘anti-access/area denial’ doctrine, known as ‘A2/AD’ in military jargon, that China is using to try to push the United States and its allies out of the region.” More on that, here.

Lastly today: Don’t %^*#@ brief this to the commander. The three-star deputy commander of USSOCOM in Tampa, Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, had a regrettable fit of anger during a command briefing more than a year ago, and the Defense Department’s IG just released its investigation into the episode.

The language in the report is too profane to excerpt in full here, but you can review the scene beginning on page 5, here. Said one U.S. military official to The D Brief: “Most people don't really understand the raw intensity of a person like that who acts in an ‘official’ capacity. But this episode definitely teaches you to focus on what is actually important to the reality you're in… You never know what the future holds, and you have to maintain your composure when these folks can't maintain their own.”