The D Brief: Biden’s natsec legacy; Russia advances on supply hub; Ukraine’s anti-drone sensor net; UK-show news; And a bit more.

By admin On Jul 22, 2024

Biden’s drops out, endorses VP Harris: Not since Lyndon Johnson has a commander in chief declined to run again, as President Joe Biden did on Sunday. He began his single term in office amid the COVID pandemic and led a $1.9 trillion aid effort that sent inflation soaring but enabled the U.S. economy to recover faster than the rest of the world.

SecDef Austin: Biden “has a secure place in American history as one of our great foreign-policy presidents,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a Sunday statement that offered these arguments:

“Biden renewed, deepened, and broadened the unmatched global network of alliances and partnerships that makes America more secure”;
“He rallied the world to defend Ukraine after the Kremlin’s indefensible, all-out invasion in 2022”;
“He positioned America to succeed in our strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China”;
“He dramatically strengthened U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific”;
“He bolstered, united, and expanded NATO”;
“He shored up Israel’s security after Hamas’s vile October 7th terrorist assault and worked tirelessly to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza”;
“He ended America’s longest war”;
“He helped the United States and the world recover from the COVID pandemic that killed more than a million Americans”;
“He launched the historic trilateral AUKUS partnership to make the Indo-Pacific region more secure”;
“And at a time when autocrats brag of being the wave of the future,” Austin said, Biden “showed the world the resilience and the resolve that only a democracy can muster.”

No president has seen more money go to the military than Biden, including $841 billion from the most recent FY2024 budget, the president’s Pentagon chief emphasized.

Biden also “made history by breaking barrier after barrier, including appointing Kathleen Hicks as the first female Deputy Secretary of Defense, Christine Wormuth as the first female Secretary of the Army, Admiral Lisa Franchetti as the first female Chief of Naval Operations and the first woman on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and myself as the first Black Secretary of Defense,” said Austin.

On the other hand, according to the Associated Press: “The president also faced criticism over his handling of the southern border with Mexico as illegal border crossings led to concerns about his handling of immigration. He also found himself embroiled in a series of global conflicts,” in Ukraine and Israel “that exposed further domestic divisions.”

What comes next? In the near term, uncertainty, AP’s Isabel Debre writes. “Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the U.S. presidential race injects greater uncertainty into the world at a time when Western leaders are grappling with wars in Ukraine and Gaza, a more assertive China in Asia and the rise of the far right in Europe.” Read that, here.

Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1993, about 70 or so residents in the Illinois town of Kaskaskia Island were forced to evacuate to Army Corps of Engineers barges after Mississippi River flood waters ruptured the town’s levees.

Ukraine latest: Russian troops press toward Pokrovsk, a Ukrainian logistics hub. “Ukraine’s top commander said on Monday that Russian forces were staging relentless assaults to try to advance towards the town of Pokrovsk, a logistics hub in the east, and that there was active fighting taking place along the entire front line,” Reuters reports.

Ukraine’s current military situation, in brief: “Though Kyiv’s weary troops have been on the backfoot this year with Russia again on the offensive and keeping up the pressure, Moscow’s progress has been slow.”

Update: Russia controls an estimated 17.68% of Ukrainian territory, up from 17.61% on Jan. 1, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Friday. Reuters has more, here.

FWIW: That overall percentage hasn’t substantially changed since November 2022, when Ukraine had reclaimed about half of the territory seized by Russian forces earlier in the year. The New York Times has maps, here.

New: Cheap sensors are helping Ukraine fight off Russian drones, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports from the 2024 Royal International Air Tattoo event, which was last week’s air-force-themed conference in Britain.

The gist: “Ukraine has a network of almost 10,000 acoustic sensors scattered around the country that locate Russian drones and send targeting information to soldiers in the field who gun them down,” Decker reports.

Dubbed “Sky Fortress,” the concept was developed by two Ukrainian engineers in a garage who put a microphone and a cell phone on a six-foot pole to listen for UAVs, said Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa. By combining the data from groups of sensors, Ukrainians can track incoming attacks, and get ready to fend them off. Read more, here.

In hindsight: Why did Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive result in so few gains? A variety of factors coalesced to virtually doom the operation, including several that had taken root before the mission began and numerous others that resulted from poor decisions from Ukrainian commanders, according to a recent analysis from Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk, and Nick Reynolds of the Royal United Services Institute, based in London.

Short version: The failure to make significant gains resulted from “a lack of personnel and critical materiel, inadequate time to train and cohere the relevant forces, the misallocation of personnel to the identified axes, and a lack of solutions to several identified tactical problems,” the three analysts write.

What this means for Ukraine’s allies: “Provision of artillery ammunition and long-range strike systems are most important” for Kyiv presently. They should also prioritize “effective counter-reconnaissance capabilities, and the ability to protect the logistics routes in support of offensive operations” as Russia continues its long-range bombing campaign across Ukraine (see the link below on Russia’s 3-ton glide bomb, e.g.). There’s much more in RUSI’s report, which you can read over in full here.

Spanish authorities this weekend arrested three pro-Russia hackers who’d been conducting distributed denial-of-service attacks against NATO governments and industries of European countries supporting Ukraine. The arrests were announced Saturday by Spain’s Civil Guard, which said the hackers were part of the NoName057 (16) collective, which the Institute for the Study of War describes as a Russian “hacktivist” organization that emerged just weeks after Russia’s full-scale Ukraine invasion in early 2022.

Additional reading:

In a new first, Israel bombed an oil facility and a power station in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah on Saturday, killing six people and wounding more than 80, medical sources in Yemen told Reuters.

The Israeli strikes were a direct response to a Houthi missile attack in Tel Aviv Friday (allegedly via Sudanese airspace) that killed one person and wounded four others. Israel says it shot down another Houthi missile launched from Yemen Sunday. The Houthis claim to have launched “a number of ballistic missiles and drones” in the attack, which does not appear to have had much effect, possibly due to Israel’s robust air defense systems.

The Houthis’ leader announced an escalated, new operation against Israel described as “Operation Jaffa” on Sunday. The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War didn’t find much novel in the Houthis’ new phase of operations, and noted an apparent deception from Houthi leader Abdulmalik al Houthi, who claimed his terrorists’ new “Jaffa” drone used in the July 18 attack on Tel Aviv was “purely“ Yemeni made. However, ISW notes, that drone “appears to be a modified variant of the Iranian-designed Samad-3 drone.” Read more, here.

U.S. forces near Yemen destroyed four drone boats and another aerial drone over the Red Sea this weekend. Meanwhile, U.S. Central Command chief Army Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla dropped by Egypt for talks with military officials Sunday. And Kurilla was in Israel last week discussing “broader regional security concerns” with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and others.

Today in Washington, Iraqi officials are visiting for talks on the future of the counter-ISIS mission, which has been ongoing since 2014. The discussions are formally known as the U.S.-Iraq Joint Security Cooperation Dialogue.

By the way: Here’s a classic chart illustrating Middle East security dynamics, including which groups have conducted hostilities toward other groups in the region over just the past nine months. (Hat tip to Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute.)

Boeing’s defense business will report more losses on the Air Force One program this quarter as the company works through major challenges while building the presidential jets, Ted Colbert, CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, told reporters during a briefing in London on Sunday ahead of this week’s Farnborough Air Show. Defense One’s Audrey Decker was on hand for the remarks.

What lies ahead: Expect continued bleeding when Boeing reports its financial standing in its second-quarter earnings call next week as it goes “through some more challenges on the fixed-price development programs,” Colbert said.

He also said the second-quarter results will resemble those of last year’s third quarter, when the defense division took nearly $1 billion in losses. That’s partly because second-quarter charges will be from a mix of Boeing’s big fixed-price development programs and “continued operational challenges,” Colbert said. Read more, here.

More from the UK’s RIAT and Farnborough shows:

Defense One