The D Brief: Ceasefire pact in Lebanon; US strike in Syria; New SecNav tapped; Space execs’ pleas to NATO; And a bit more.
Ceasefire pact for Israel, Lebanon
Israel and Lebanon agreed to a U.S.- and France-brokered ceasefire with the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah on Tuesday, raising hopes that civilians can return safely to their homes across southern Lebanon. The ceasefire began at 4 a.m. local time Wednesday. But Israel and the terrorist group Hamas are still a long way away from a cessation of hostilities, the New York Times reported Wednesday from Jerusalem.
According to the terms of the deal, Israel must remove military elements from Lebanon by January 26, while the Lebanese military secures territories that were under Hezbollah control, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. As part of the agreement, The U.S. will also chair a newly-formed UN mechanism to monitor for ceasefire violations, and the U.S. will work with the Lebanese Armed Fores to make sure they can respond to violations and deter future ones. But President Joe Biden on Tuesday emphasized that no U.S. troops will be on the ground in Lebanon.
Why now? Israel’s war on Hezbollah, and particularly its targeted assassination of Hezbollah leaders, has severely hampered the organization, which is one of the reasons White House officials said Tuesday they think this ceasefire will be permanent.
“If it holds, the ceasefire would bring an end to nearly 14 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which escalated in mid-September into all-out war and threatened to pull Hezbollah’s patron, Iran, and Israel’s closest ally, the United States, into a broader conflagration,” the Associated Press reports.
Expert reax: “This ceasefire and its terms are tantamount to a Hezbollah defeat,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote Tuesday afternoon. However, “The ceasefire contains several elements that will prove difficult to implement,” ISW adds. That includes the involvement of Lebanon’s military, which has “been in southern Lebanon since 2006, but ha[s] failed to prevent Hezbollah from using the area to attack Israel.”
For what it’s worth: Ceasefire violations have already been observed allegedly by both Israel and Hezbollah, according to PBS Newshour’s Leila Molana-Allen. “Both parties have 60 days to fully comply,” she adds. The BBC has the latest.
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and 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 2020, Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated while traveling on a rural road outside of Tehran.
Mideast developments
New: U.S. forces attacked a weapons depot at an undisclosed location inside Syria on Tuesday, officials at Central Command announced afterward. “The strike is in response to an Iranian-aligned attack against U.S. forces in Syria [Monday],” CENTCOM said.
By the way: President-elect Donald Trump again wants to remove all U.S. troops from Syria, as he did five years ago when the declared American presence fell to 900 from 2,500 troops. But that would be a mistake, Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute argued Friday.
“While ISIS has conducted just 53 attacks in Iraq so far in 2024, it has been behind more than 600 next door, in Syria,” Lister writes. Relatedly, “ISIS is doubling its attack tempo across Syria compared to 2023, while tripling it in northeast Syria, where US forces operate alongside our Syrian Democratic Forces partners.”
ISIS has reconstituted itself in regime-held areas of Syria, but Central Command has responded more directly in recent weeks, “launching three rounds of heavy strikes on ISIS training camps that, until then, had been left alone by Assad, Russia, and Iran,” Lister says.
Why bring it up: “Given the chaos that prevails across Syria and the regime’s inability to deal with the terrorist group, US troops are the glue holding together the only meaningful challenge to an ISIS resurgence,” Lister argues. And that glue is a bargain for the money, he says.
The Syria mission accounts for just 0.2% of the total U.S. defense budget, Lister estimates. And “The counter-ISIS mission in Syria and Iraq has also grown more cost efficient, with today’s overall budget being 60% less than in 2019.” That means, “For a US taxpayer, the Syria mission currently costs approximately $8 per year, or 67 cents a month,” says Lister. And as such, “Syria offers a case study of extraordinary success achieved at record low levels of expense and risk,” he writes. But perhaps most importantly, “To abandon the mission now would bring no meaningful benefit to the US, but it would swiftly and significantly empower America’s adversaries, like ISIS, Iran, Russia, and Assad’s regime.” Read the rest, here.
Elsewhere in Syria, an alliance of militants and terrorists renewed their fight against the Assad regime and Russian troops. The latest flareup appears to have occurred in northwestern Syria around Aleppo, and its the first of its kind in four years, Lister reported separately Wednesday.
That impromptu offensive “appears to have overrun a Russia special forces position, as Assad regime forces collapsed,” Lister said, with supporting open-source imagery. “Make no mistake, this is a potentially transformative moment in Syria’s ‘frozen conflict,’ which truthfully has never really been frozen,” he wrote.
Trendspotting: Iraqi militias have been quietly reducing their attacks against Israel for the past several weeks, analyst Mike Knights of the Washington Institute noted on social media Tuesday. Overall there have been “fewer claims and less solid-looking claims,” as well as “more exaggeration,” he writes alongside a chart illustrating these metrics.
One big change seems to have occurred nine days ago, “when Israel openly warned Iraq to stop the militia drone attacks,” said Knights. “And right after, a downward slop[e] becomes a cliff: attacks all but stop,” and the remaining “7x claims are somewhat dubious,” he added. As his colleague Hamdi Malik observed the day after Israel’s warning, “the militias don’t seem to know how to react publicly to Israel’s warning: they want to sound tough, but they don’t want to be targeted.”
On the bright side, “They like drinking coffee in hotels and being playboys: they’re mostly not real resistance men,” said Knights. What’s more, “Iran doesn’t want them wrecked either.” And “That all adds up to good prospects for de-escalation,” he argued Tuesday.
Trump 2.0
Transition teams cleared to enter Pentagon, other federal agencies. Seven weeks after the recommended date, President-elect Trump has reached an agreement with the Biden administration that will allow staffers to meet with assigned career senior executive staff, receive briefings on agency activities, and exchange information about existing projects and future priorities, reports GovExec’s Eric Katz.
Still missing: related agreements. Trump has signed no agreement with the General Services Administration, so his transition team lacks access to government office space and to IT services such as official .gov email addresses. Nor has signed the customary agreement that enables the Justice Department to conduct background checks on staff and appointees. Read on, here.
For SecNav, Trump picks a donor with no naval or government experience. It’s John Phelan, a private-equity investor who once managed the fortune of the Dell Technologies founder. Navy Times: “If confirmed, Phelan would be the first permanent Navy secretary without military experience since 2009, when Donald Winter finished up his three-year term in the role. Unlike Winter, who previously had worked within the Pentagon and on Navy contracts at major defense firms, Phelan has little public connection to the sea service. Of the 26 men to be confirmed as Navy secretary over the last 70 years, all but six have been veterans.”
Commentary: Will Musk’s ‘Algorithm’ reduce military inefficiency—or increase risk? Seeking to understand how Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy might approach their avowed effort to cut defense spending, AEI’s Todd Harrison looks at the “Algorithm” that the SpaceX CEO has used to streamline operations elsewhere. Don’t miss it, here.
The business of space
If NATO’s European members want to fully harness commercial-space offerings, the alliance must lower an assortment of bureaucratic and financial barriers, industry executives told Defense One’s Audrey Decker this week. She spoke to the execs about the findings of a recent survey by NATO’s Industrial Advisory Group, which sought input from industry to inform the alliance’s effort to develop a commercial-space strategy in time for the alliance’s next summit in June.
What kind of barriers? Allegedly “Cumbersome procurement processes, overclassification of information, financial uncertainty and long timelines for contracts, and a lack of protection or insurance if their systems get attacked by adversaries,” Decker reports.
Why it matters: NATO has no orbital assets of its own, and relies on contributions from member nations, particularly the United States, as well as the commercial industry. But if an Indo-Pacific conflict diverts U.S. capacity, NATO could be left in the lurch—a prospect that’s pushing European nations to figure out how to buy from commercial space companies. Continue reading, here.
Related reading:
That’s it for us this week. We’re taking off for the Thanksgiving holiday. You can catch us again on Monday!
