The D Brief: Wanted: faster deterrence; Trade rules, eased; Navy’s multi-amphib buy; Taliban takeover, mapped; And a bit more.
CJCS Brown: The Pentagon needs to speed up its integrated-deterrence efforts. When the Biden administration rolled out its integrated deterrence concept in 2022, it took a while to explain just what this new concept entailed, and longer to begin to understand how to employ it. Now the Defense Department needs to get faster at adapting it to ever-evolving threats, Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. CQ Brown said Wednesday.
“We needed a deterrence strategy to be integrated by design to deal with these modern challenges, and I would argue we need to be faster at developing and applying our new framework,” Brown said at U.S. Strategic Command’s Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, Nebraska. He also called for the restoration of some Cold War-era practices, but did not say which ones. Defense One’s Audrey Decker, who flew with Brown to Omaha, has more, here.
US, UK, Australia loosen mutual export controls. Such a move was long expected by the three members of the AUKUS pact, who have said they cannot achieve their industrial-cooperation goals without dialing back on limitations intended to reduce weapons proliferation and safeguard technological secrets. Still, the scope of Thursday’s announcement took some by surprise, lifting inter-AUKUS restrictions on 70 percent of items subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, and 80 percent subject to Export Administration Regulations.
This is “actual generational-level change,” one former senior defense official told Defense One’s Patrick Tucker. More, here.
Related reading:
This afternoon, Air Force chief Gen. David Allvin is set to speak at a Hudson Institute event entitled “Focusing the Force.” Hudson Senior Fellows Bryan Clark and Timothy Walton will join him for that one, which begins live streaming at 1:15 p.m. ET. Details here.
Welcome to this Friday 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 1960, U.S. Air Force Capt. Joseph Kittinger parachuted from a helium balloon over New Mexico, setting three records that stood for the next 52 years, until 2012: High-altitude jump (at 19.47 miles above the Earth), free fall (4 minutes and 36 seconds), and highest speed by a human without an aircraft (614 miles per hour).
Postponed again: Iraqi officials were about to announce a withdrawal date for U.S. and allied counter-ISIS troops, “but due to recent developments, the announcement of the end of the international coalition’s military mission in Iraq was postponed,” Baghdad’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday (emphasis added). CNN has a bit more.
A translation, by regional analyst Mike Knights of the Washington Institute: The “U.S. was nowhere near leaving, but [the government] of Iraq can now blame trigger-happy militias for that.”
Background: “Escalating Mideast tensions” have been the region’s top headline going back to at least late July when Israel carried out two assassinations of regional terrorist leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in Tehran and Fouad Shukur of Hezbollah in Beirut.
At least two Washington-based think tanks have been tracking attacks on U.S. troops in the region via various militias, nearly all of which are believed to be backed by Iran. The Washington Institute has (to our knowledge) kept theirs running the longest, but the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have launched one as well. The former says it’s tracking 190 related episodes; the latter has documented 167, as of Tuesday, with fewer than a dozen official U.S. actions in response to those attacks.
Most of those attacks (like one Tuesday) turned out to be harmless, but not all, including one last Friday in Syria that injured eight service members, three of whom returned to duty, according to Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder. Four days before that, five U.S. personnel were wounded in an attack at western Iraq’s at Al-Assad base on August 5. Two returned to duty, while three were medically evacuated to Germany. One of those returned to duty, while the other two were transferred to the U.S. for additional treatment, military officials said this week.
In case you’re wondering: “There are approximately 40,000 U.S. personnel in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility,” Pentagon spokesman Tom Crosson said in a statement Thursday.
You may recall about 1,000 troops were sent to the region to build an improvised pier to accelerate the delivery of humanitarian aid to besieged Palestinians in Gaza. Somewhere around 340 soldiers and 200 sailors from that mission have returned to their home stations, Crosson said. The remaining 500-plus “are scheduled to return by mid-September,” he said Thursday.
New from Yemen: U.S. forces in the Middle East say they “destroyed one Iranian-backed Houthi ground control station” inside Yemen on Thursday, according to Central Command. The Houthis have used ground control stations to guide their drone attacks on commercial and U.S.-allied vessels transiting just off the Yemeni coast for the past 10 months, and U.S. forces have attacked several such stations going back to at least early February.
And lastly this week: It’s been three years since the ignominious fall of Kabul into the hands of the Taliban. But now you can relive the fall of Afghanistan in a series of maps assembled into an illustration thanks to Bill Roggio’s multi-year work with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.
There will no doubt be lots of related reading when it comes to the Taliban’s anniversary between now and the end of the month, when U.S. and allied troops finally departed the country after two decades of failed occupation back in 2021. Here are a few of the headlines that caught our eye this week:
Have a safe weekend, everyone! And you can catch us again on Monday.
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