The D Brief: Israeli strikes in Lebanon, Syria; More Red Sea attacks; Bad online trends; Space plane’s new trick; And a bit more.

Israeli forces grind on in Lebanon: Nearly two dozen people were killed and at least 130 others wounded in an overnight attack by Israeli forces in Beirut. According to Reuters, “Security sources said the target was senior Hezbollah official Wafiq Safa, and that he had survived.”

New: The United Nations says two of its peacekeepers were injured Friday “after two explosions occurred close to an observation tower” in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces are trying to force residents to flee while they hunt suspected Hezbollah militants. 

UN spox, speaking to the BBC: “It looks more of a deliberate attack against our troops, who have been in the south to try to bring back stability at the moment, and it’s very, very challenging,” Andrea Tenenti said Friday. “How can this be a mistake from an army that is pretty well prepared, and they know what they’re doing?” he asked. 

Also new: Israeli tanks also broke into a UN position elsewhere in Labbouneh on Friday. “This is a serious development, and [UN forces in Lebanon, aka UNIFIL] reiterates that the safety and security of UN personnel and property must be guaranteed and that the inviolability of UN premises must be respected at all times,” the UN said Friday. 

“Any deliberate attack on peacekeepers is a grave violation of international humanitarian law and Security Council resolution 1701 (2006),” UN officials said. 

Israeli military reax: “Hezbollah operates from within and near civilian areas in southern Lebanon, including areas near @UNIFIL posts,” the Israeli Defense Forces said Thursday on social media, without offering supporting evidence in this instance. After confirming its troops were indeed near that position in Labbouneh, the IDF said it had “instructed the UN forces in the area to remain in protected spaces, after which the forces opened fire in the area.” 

• Read more on why Israel is undeterred by the allegations, according to Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, here. 

A separate UN report Thursday accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza “with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities,” officials announced from Geneva. “Children in particular have borne the brunt of these attacks, suffering both directly and indirectly from the collapse of the health system,” the UN said. 

UN: “Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles while tightening their siege on Gaza and restricting permits to leave the territory for medical treatment. These actions constitute the war crimes of wilful killing and mistreatment and of the destruction of protected civilian property and the crime against humanity of extermination.”

Separately, “Male detainees were subjected to rape, as well as attacks on their sexual and reproductive organs and forced to perform humiliating and strenuous acts while naked or stripped as a form of punishment or intimidation to extract information,” the UN said.

“The lack of accountability for actions ordered by senior Israeli authorities and carried out by individual members of Israeli security forces and the increasing acceptance of violence against Palestinians have allowed such conduct to continue uninterrupted, becoming systematic and institutionalized,” said Navi Pillay, who chaired the commission that investigated the alleged war crimes.  

Israeli reax: “This U.N. report is detached from reality and includes baseless claims about Israel,” said Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon. 

Stateside observation: “So far the penalties or accountability measures the IDF and Netanyahu government experience for failure to meet [the State Department’s] basic expectations regarding civilian safety are invisible, if they exist at all,” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker wrote this week on social media. 

And in case you missed it, “Israel’s air campaign across Syria last week was the most aggressive seen in the 13yr crisis—with 17 rounds of strikes in 7 [out of] 14 of Syria’s provinces,” Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute noted Thursday on social media. Read more in his paid newsletter Syria Weekly.  

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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 night in 1942, the Battle of Cape Esperance took place at the Solomon Islands amid what we now refer to as the Guadalcanal campaign.

U.S. forces at Central Command have been awfully quiet lately despite recent Houthi calls to continue attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea and along Yemen’s coast. The European Union’s regional naval mission EUNAVFOR ASPIDES has been similarly quiet about action off the Yemeni coast over the past several days.

New: British maritime authorities say another ship was hit with unspecified projectiles (reportedly drones) off Yemen’s coast Thursday, near the Bab el Mandeb strait. The vessel “sustained damage,” but no fires broke out and no one was harmed. 

About the targeting location: The Bab el Mandeb “is a place where one can bottleneck and quite precisely predict a tankers movement based on bearing and speed,” regional analyst Mike Knights writes. “An anti-ship ballistic missile needs under 120 secs to reach the target loc from launch sites north of Taizz,” he adds. 

Targeted: The chemical tanker Olympic Spirit as it traveled from Egypt’s Port Said to Muscat, Oman, according to regional security analyst Basha. The Houthis claim to have used 11 ballistic missiles and two drones in their attacks on Olympic Spirit. The Houthis also say they struck a different container ship (St. John) using a “winged missile” on Thursday. 

Context, via Reuters: “Houthi fighters in Yemen have carried out nearly 100 attacks on ships crossing the Red Sea since November and say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Israel’s year-long war in Gaza. They have sunk two vessels, seized another and killed at least four seafarers.”

NATO’s commercial-space strategy will resemble the Pentagon’s six-month-old strategy, said Maj. Gen. Devin Pepper, deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and policy at NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. 

Set for release next year, the alliance strategy will reflect a growing commercial market, and the need for a “new relationship” between the military and industry, NATO officials said in an Oct. 2 release.

The U.S. strategy aimed to define what needs industry could fill, and opened the door for military protection of industry assets, but was criticized for breaking little ground, and lacking a specific roadmap. 

DIA’s AI-powered intel repository heads to the cloud. “We expect” the Machine-assisted Analytic Rapid-repository System to be approved to run on the SIPRNet “within the next few weeks, actually,” said Doug Cossa, chief information officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency, speaking at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance virtual event on Tuesday.

MARS will replace the MIDB—the late-1990s Modernized Integrated Database—as the Pentagon’s main repository for “foundational military intelligence,” the info collected on other countries’ militaries and infrastructure.

A year behind? Last November, the DIA’s then-chief said MARS would hit full operational capability in 2025. This week, DIA officials said in separate statements that “the scheduled FOC is 2026” and then that it would be reached “as early as 2025, but no later than 2026.”

Secret space plane tests new orbit-switching maneuver. One of the Space Force’s X-37Bs will try aerobraking—using the Earth’s gravity and atmosphere to change orbits—in a maneuver that promises to use less fuel that the usual firing of rockets. D1’s Audrey Decker has a bit more, here. (Fans of 1980s sci-fi may recall the aerobraking scene in “2010: The Year We Make Contact.”)

Update: Drownings of 2 Navy SEALs were preventable, military investigation finds. AP obtained a redacted version of the investigators’ report into the Jan. 11 drowning of two members of SEAL Team 3 on a mission to intercept arms being smuggled to Houthi fighters in Yemen. Investigators concluded that the drownings of  Chief Special Warfare Operator Christopher J. Chambers and Navy Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Nathan Gage Ingram were due to “glaring training failures and a lack of understanding about what to do after falling into deep, turbulent waters.” Read on, here.

Several online trends are making Americans more susceptible to rumors and lies, and that’s not good news for democracy or the U.S. military. That’s the common thread through three recent studies of online behavior, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. 

One recent study found that people’s views of reality are increasingly shaped by the online groups they identify with. A second found that views of society are shaped by the extreme voices that dominate social media. And a third found that groups that use encrypted messaging apps are becoming more insular. Their findings hold clues to the future of authoritarian currents and extremist political violence in the United States. Read more, here.

(Extended) Weekend reading: We have two new reports regarding Russia’s ongoing Ukraine invasion, thanks to think tankers on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Exhibit 1 is entitled, “Ore to Ordnance: Disrupting Russia’s Artillery Supply Chains,” and it comes from the London-based Royal United Services Institute in conjunction with the Open Source Centre. Three key conclusions, according to the authors: 

• “More than 70% of Russia’s computer numerical control machines come from China, 55% of its chromium is imported, and its imports of nitrocellulose have increased by 70% since 2022, for example.” Those are the chief vulnerabilities identified by RUSI and OSC.
• “There is redundancy within the supply chain, and even a complete disruption of the Plastmass ammunition plant – a major producer – would not lead to a collapse in Russia’s ammunition supply.”
• “Russia’s defence industry is expanding, with major works identified at the Perm and Kazan Gunpowder plants, Izhevsk Unmanned Systems Research and Production Association, several armoured-machine repair plants and Kurganpribor. However, the industry faces challenges such as a lack of personnel and a crumbling rail infrastructure…as well as the need for imported machinery to meet its aggressive expansion goals.”

Exhibit 2 is called “The Central Brain of the Russian Armed Forces:The Modern Russian General Staff in Institutional Context,” and it comes from two researchers at the Virginia-based Center for Naval Analyses. The idea there is to provide “a primer on the Russian General Staff for a public audience,” CNA says. 

That’s it for us this week. Thanks for reading, and you can catch us again on Tuesday—when AUSA week begins in Washington. Stay tuned…

Defense One