The D Brief: Moscow under attack; C-UAS, lumberjack edition; New US nuclear strategy toward China; USAF’s big Pacific exercise; And a bit more.
At least 10 drones were shot down over Moscow early Wednesday. “This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow with drones ever,” said Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, writing on Telegram six different times over a 90-minute period beginning at about 3 a.m. local.
No casualties were reported from the attacks on Russia’s capital city. More than 30 other drones were reportedly used to attack other points inside Russia overnight, including 23 that “destroyed over the Bryansk region, six UAVs were destroyed over the territory of the Belgorod region, three over the Kaluga region and two over the Kursk region,” Russia’s Defense Ministry wrote on Telegram at about 7 a.m. Moscow time.
Developing: Ukrainian troops advanced incrementally inside Russia on Tuesday, “continuing efforts to strike Russian pontoon bridges and pontoon engineering equipment west of the current Kursk Oblast salient over the Seim River,” analysts at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington wrote in their latest assessment.
Worth noting: Russian invasion forces have also advanced incrementally inside Ukraine, near Toretsk, Pokrovsk, and Donetsk City on Tuesday. These are some of the troops Ukraine is reportedly hoping to lure away from the front lines and back across the border to places like Kursk.
Frozen front lines? The Defense Intelligence Agency recently assessed that neither the Ukranians nor the Russians have the capacity to mount significant new offenses against one another, Anthony Capaccio writes for Bloomberg. Ukraine still doesn’t have the munitions to match Russia’s 10,000 daily artillery fires, but Kyiv has shown that it can use longer-range ATACMS missiles to present Russian forces with new dilemmas. Relatedly, Russia is now reinforcing Crimean airspace with its most advanced air defense system, the S-500 for example, according to DIA.
Russia has tasked a bevy of officials with various aspects of responding to Ukraine’s cross border incursion into Kursk, which has now been ongoing for more than two weeks. According to ISW, “complex and overlapping responsibilities and the seemingly ever-growing list of actors the Kremlin has tasked with responding to the Ukrainian incursion impede Russia’s ability to establish effective joint [command and control] structures.”
View from the Pentagon: “Russia has really struggled to respond [in Kursk], and you continue to see some Ukrainian advances in that regard,” Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Tuesday. But while Russia has moved “a small number of forces into Kursk,” Ryder declined to elaborate, despite several solicitations from reporters.
“Our focus continues to be enabling Ukraine to be a free and sovereign country that can deter Russian aggression in the future,” said Ryder. “But when it comes to what their longer term objectives are [in Kursk], that’s something that we’re still discussing with them.”
Expert reax: Ukraine’s Kursk incursion may have put Vladimir Putin in a tight spot, argued Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. From her perspective, “It’s now evident that Moscow doesn’t have an effective or swift military solution to this situation,” she wrote Monday.
“Redirecting troops from the main front would mean falling into a well-laid trap,” Stanovaya said. But “Announcing an urgent mobilization (and it’s not feasible to send new recruits straight into battle) would lead to a conflict with society. I’m not sure Putin is ready for that just yet.”
“This implies that the Ukrainian presence in Russian border regions could persist for months, if not years, and eventually, people may become accustomed to it,” she speculated. But from the Kremlin’s POV, “Putin’s focus is on the collapse of the Ukrainian state,” so he’s likely not terribly worried since “he believes [a Ukrainian collapse] will automatically render any territorial control irrelevant,” said Stanovaya.
Is Moscow growing desperate for recruits? “The average regional signing bonus for Russian soldiers is 596k rubles,” and that average has “more than tripled from the beginning of the year,” rising from 363k to 996k, German economist Janis Kluge wrote Tuesday. (And after assessing the fiscal opportunities for these new recruits, he concluded sardonically, “It is impossible not to become cynical when analyzing Russian policy.”) Take a closer look at the data behind all that, here.
In photos: Russian military counter-drone defenses, lumberjack edition. While it’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen these battlefield adaptations, there do seem to be more of them nowadays. (Hat tip to Rob Lee.)
New: NATO’s acquisition agency just greenlit a three-year counter-drone contract with a Danish firm MyDefence, which makes a radio frequency drone detector called Wingman. “The contract was awarded via Cobbs Belux BV, a Belgian distributor of defense equipment, enabling it to offer both the Wingman product and DroneShield’s Dronegun Mk4 to NATO nations,” Breaking Defense reported Tuesday.
ICYMI: The Pentagon’s arms export agency announced several pending deals with NATO allies this month that we had not yet flagged here. That includes Excaliburs and precision guidance kits to Denmark; Sidewinders to Canada; MQ-9s to Italy; and Patriot missiles to Germany.
But there are still gaps in the way the United States tracks weapons going into Ukraine, sometimes due to poor communication between the State and Defense Departments, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker explains, here.
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Patrick Tucker. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day seven years ago, the Navy’s USS John S McCain collided with the M/V ALNIC MC tanker vessel at the entrance to the Singapore Strait, killing 10 American sailors.
New and secretive (not anymore): President Biden authorized a new nuclear strategy toward China in March, David Sanger of the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing former Pentagon official Vipin Narang as well as Pranay Vaddi, who is the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation.
What’s new? It’s hard to say precisely since, as Sanger notes, we’re talking about “a highly classified nuclear strategic plan,” which is formally known as the “Nuclear Employment Guidance.” For example, “The document, updated every four years or so, is so highly classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.” Still, Sanger reports the new plan “reorients America’s deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal,” which is allegedly proceeding much faster than U.S. officials estimated just two years ago. Continue reading, here.
Coming soon: The U.S. Air Force will send units from across the United States to the Pacific next summer for an exercise designed to test the way it plans to deploy forces in a potential conflict with China, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported Tuesday.
The 14-day exercise will bring forces from Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the continental United States together to practice operating in a complex environment while supporting operations across vast distances, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said Friday.
The drills, known as REFORPAC, will be rolled into a large-scale Pacific exercise the U.S. conducts with Australia, called Talisman Sabre, because the U.S. knows it will have to fight alongside allies and partners, Allvin said. More, here.
Related reading:
Developing: The Iran-backed Houthis appear to have just disabled another ship in the Red Sea. About three in the morning, the commercial vessel was approached by about 16 men in two boats while transiting about 80 nautical miles west of the Houthi-controlled port city of Hodeidah. There was then a “brief exchange of small arms fire,” followed by a two-hour period of little notable activity, according to British maritime authorities.
Then the ship was hit by two projectiles at 5 a.m., and a third about 50 minutes later. The vessel is now “drifting and not under command” while a fire was reported onboard, according to the Brits.
En route to the region: The U.S. Navy’s Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and guided-missile submarine USS Georgia. “They are still in transit…but I do anticipate they’ll be arriving soon,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Ryder said Tuesday.
The current state of a Gaza ceasefire deal varies depending on who you ask. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that there was “no time to delay” back in May. He says that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accepted the latest version. But a U.S. senior official also complained of Netanyahu’s “maximalist” approach to negotiations, which caused Hamas to reject the most recent version of the agreement over the weekend, according to Axios.
Sideline: Netanyahu met with former U.S. President Donald Trump back in July. PBS reporter Judy Woodruff on Monday said that the two have spoken since and Trump has urged Netanyahu to take a harder stance. Both Trump’s campaign and Netanyahu’s office denied that conversation took place.
Lastly today: Big data loves soldiers. For more than a year, soldiers with the Army’s 4th Infantry Division have been experimenting with data to predict developments that were previously unpredictable—like how weather, sleep, operational tempo and other factors can lead to serious (and preventable) incidents. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams explains following her recent trip to Colorado’s Fort Carson.
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