Pentagon says ‘disinformation,’ not vaccine mandate, has had ‘minimal impact’ on recruiting

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who hopes to be speaker come January, told Fox News on Monday that he spoke to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Sunday night after he told President Joe Biden “there’s no way” the mandate will survive. “Wait till we’re in charge. I told the president, ‘If we don’t have the lifting of the vaccine, I’ll do it in January.’”

PENTAGON DISPUTES READINESS, RECRUITING CLAIMS: In a briefing yesterday, Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh took issue with claims by McCarthy and other Republicans that the vaccine requirement was discouraging people from joining the military at a time when all the services are having trouble meeting their recruiting goals.

“Generally speaking, the vaccine mandate appears to have very minimal impact on recruiting,” said Singh, who was then immediately challenged by reporters who noted that Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, speaking at Reagan National Defense Forum over the weekend, said the mandate is affecting recruiting in parts of the country where “there are still myths and misbeliefs about the backstory behind [the vaccine].”

“I think what the commandant was saying … was that disinformation around the vaccine created confusion, which can of course lead to less people wanting to take it, which could lead to less people wanting to maybe enlist,” Singh said. “We have not seen the data that Kevin McCarthy cited.”

At a news conference on Tuesday, Austin also denied a cause-and-effect relationship between the vaccine mandate and recruiting challenges. “I’ve not seen any hard data that directly links the COVID mandate to an effect on our recruiting.”

BIDEN WOULDN’T VETO THE NDAA, WOULD HE? The NDAA is what’s known as “must-pass” legislation. When former President Donald Trump vetoed the NDAA in 2020 over various objections, including the renaming of Army bases honoring Confederate generals, Congress promptly and decisively overturned his veto by a wide bipartisan margin.

But when pressed about whether Biden might veto this year’s NDAA over the vaccine mandate, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby refused to rule it out. “We’ve noted the conference language, but there’s still a legislative process ahead of this,” he said on a conference call with reporters. “I just won’t get ahead of where we are right now.”

“I think what I would say is that we continue to believe that repealing the vaccine mandate is a mistake,” Kirby said. “Republicans in Congress have obviously decided that they’d rather fight against the health and well-being of those troops rather than protecting them.”

A veto seems unlikely given that Democrats who usually support the president have wearied of fighting the cultural resistance to forced inoculations. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-WA), soon to be ranking member, was quoted by Politico as telling the House Rules Committee that the mandate was “absolutely the right policy” at the beginning of the pandemic but has outlived its usefulness. “Is it still the right policy? We don’t believe that it is, and I don’t believe that it is,” Smith reportedly said.

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HAPPENING TODAY: The Pentagon has scheduled a briefing for 2 p.m. to explain its rationale behind the decision to spread the award of the $9 billion contract to build its cloud computing network among four different companies.

The Pentagon announced yesterday contracts for what’s known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability would shared by Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon, a decision that is a departure from a previous strategy of awarding the cloud contract to a single company, which resulted in a protracted legal battle.

“JWCC is a multiple-award contract vehicle that will provide the DoD the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers at the speed of mission, at all classification levels, from headquarters to the tactical edge,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

Translation: The military needs a secure way to store and share access to unclassified, secret, and top-secret data in order to conduct operations around the world.

The new war cloud replaces the so-called JEDI, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, concept that would have awarded a single contract to Microsoft but was stalled when Amazon Web Services complained that Trump tainted the award process by publicly complaining about Amazon and its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, which published numerous articles critical of Trump.

Briefing the press today will be John Sherman, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, Lily Zeleke, DOD deputy chief information officer for information environment, and Sharon Woods, director of the DISA Hosting and Compute Center.

PUTIN RESIGNED TO ‘PROTRACTED’ WAR: In Vladimir Putin’s latest public comments on the war in Ukraine, the Russian president seemed resigned to the uncomfortable reality that his “special military operation” has become unwinnable anytime soon.

Speaking in a televised meeting in Russia with members of his Human Rights Council, Putin insisted that the invasion has produced significant gains for Russia but said, “Of course, it could be a lengthy process.”

“We will proceed from the current reality. There can be only one answer from us: Russia will consistently fight for its national interests,” he said, according to an English translation on the Kremlin website. “We have no choice. We will defend ourselves with everything we have.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin is setting conditions for a protracted war of conquest in Ukraine,” said an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War. Putin again compared himself to one of his favorite historical figures, Czar Peter the Great, noting that the Sea of Azov “has become Russia’s internal sea.”

“Putin is conditioning Russian domestic audiences to expect a protracted, grinding war in Ukraine that continues to seek the conquest of additional Ukrainian territory,” said the ISW.

PUTIN SAYS THREAT OF NUCLEAR WAR IS INCREASING, BUT THERE IS A DETERRENT

EASIEST PREDICTION EVER: If anyone was ever a lock for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2022, it had to be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The criteria for the honor include the person “who or what most influenced the events of the past 12 months, for good or for ill,” which is how Putin was selected in 2007.

“This year’s choice was the most clear-cut in memory,” wrote the magazine’s editors. “Whether the battle for Ukraine fills one with hope or with fear, Volodymyr Zelensky galvanized the world in a way we haven’t seen in decades. In the weeks after Russian bombs began falling on Feb. 24, his decision not to flee Kyiv but to stay and rally support was fateful.”

“From his first 40-second Instagram post on Feb. 25 — showing that his Cabinet and civil society were intact and in place — to daily speeches delivered remotely to the likes of houses of Parliament, the World Bank, and the Grammy Awards, Ukraine’s President was everywhere. His information offensive shifted the geopolitical weather system, setting off a wave of action that swept the globe.”

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The Rundown

Washington Examiner: Putin says threat of nuclear war is increasing, but there is a deterrent

Washington Examiner: Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians performing daily tasks killed, UN says

Washington Examiner: White House has ‘not encouraged’ Ukraine to strike Russian-based military bases

Washington Examiner: Pope Francis likens Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine to Holocaust

Washington Examiner: Inside Heinrich XIII’s plot to restore Germany’s imperial throne

Washington Examiner: The winners and losers of Congress’s NDAA fight

Washington Examiner: In and out: The pet policies that survived inclusion in the $858 billion major defense policy bill

Washington Examiner: Opinion: Why the US should be wary about going to war over Taiwan

Defense News: China May Have Surpassed US in Number of Nuclear Warheads on ICBMs

The Hill: Biden administration signs off on $425M in arms sales to Taiwan

Washington Post: As Finland and Sweden wait to join NATO, Turkey extracts concessions

Air & Space Forces Magazine: Congress Unveils Compromise NDAA; Here’s How It Would Affect the Air Force Fleet

Air & Space Forces Magazine: AFMC Boss Tells Supervisors to ‘Revisit’ Telework Posture

Air & Space Forces Magazine: Air Force ‘Building the Airplane as We Fly It’ on New Operational Concepts, Wing Commander Says

Air Force Times: Pilot Program for F-35 Maintainers Ends With Little Fanfare

Defense News: Congress would approve A-10 retirements, more F-35s in defense bill

Defense News: After a Spike in Sexual Assaults on Troops, Is Real Change on the Way?

Task & Purpose: ‘Land, load ’em, go’ — How Army helicopter crews risked their lives to save 10,000 during Afghanistan evacuation

19fortyfive.com: B-21 Raider Stealth Bomber: Everything We Know Right Now

19fortyfive.com: Ukraine Is Crushing Russia in a Drone War

19fortyfive.com: Did Putin Just Make a Nuclear War Threat Over Ukraine Again?

19fortyfive.com: Putin Is Losing in Ukraine and Might Mobilize More Soldiers

19fortyfive.com: No F-35 Stealth Fighter for Germany?

The Cipher Brief: Deep Tech Dominates Future Trajectory of Commerce, National Security

The Cipher Brief: Abundant Promise and Challenge in Deep Tech

The Cipher Brief: Does China Have the Military Wherewithal to Match its Ambitions?

The Cipher Brief: What Taiwan’s Election Results Really Mean

Forbes: Opinion: The Army Needs A Long-Term Plan For Keeping Its Apache Helicopters Lethal And Survivable

Calendar

THURSDAY | DECEMBER 8

7:15 a.m. 2425 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Virginia — Association of the U.S. Army Coffee Series event with Army Lt. Gen. Charles Hamilton, deputy chief of staff https://www.ausa.org/events/ausa-coffee-series

8 a.m. 2401 M St. N.W. — George Washington Project for Media and National Security Defense Writers Group conversation with Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger Contact: Thom Shanker at [email protected]

8 a.m. 1700 Richmond Hwy., Arlington, Virginia — Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association Northern Virginia Chapter Air Force IT Day 2022 forum, with Air Force Chief Information Officer Lauren Knausenberger; Air Force Maj. Gen. John Olson, acting chief digital and artificial intelligence officer; Thomas Sasala, Navy chief data officer; and Kristyn Jones, comptroller and assistant Air Force secretary for financial management https://afceanova.swoogo.com/AirForceITDay2022

9 a.m. 801 Wharf St. S.W. — Aspen Strategy Group’s “Aspen Security Forum: D.C. Edition,” with Kathleen Hicks, deputy defense secretary; David Turk, deputy energy secretary; Sen. Todd Young (R-IN); Pekka Haavisto, Finnish foreign affairs minister; Zbigniew Rau, Polish foreign affairs minister; Tobias Lindner, German minister of state; Enrique Mora, deputy secretary-general, European External Action Service; Arati Prabhakar, director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; and Zoe Baird, senior counselor to the secretary for technology and economic growth, U.S. Department of Commerce https://web.cvent.com/event

9 a.m. House Triangle, U.S. Capitol — House Republican Texas delegation news conference to unveil a “border security plan,” with Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). Contact: [email protected]

10 a.m. 1789 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. — American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research discussion: on “Unpacking the Pentagon’s 2022 China Military Power Report,” with Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for China Michael Chase; Assistant Defense Secretary for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner; Zack Cooper, AEI senior fellow; and Mackenzie Eaglen, AEI senior fellow https://www.aei.org/events/unpacking-the-pentagons-2022-china-military-power-report

10 a.m. — U.S. Institute of Peace virtual discussion: “The History and Future of U.S. Sanctions Policy: What the Evolution of U.S. Sanctions Can Tell Us About Promoting Peace in Ukraine and Beyond,” with former Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation Stephen Rademaker, senior counsel at Covington; former White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley; and Lise Grande, president and CEO of USIP https://www.usip.org/events/history-and-future-us-sanctions-policy

11 a.m. — Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe virtual briefing: “Demining Ukraine: A Prerequisite for Recovery,” with Michael Tirre, program manager for Europe in the State Department’s Political-Military Affairs Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement; Todd Biggs, vice president for munitions response at Tetra Tech; and Tony Connell, Ukraine country director at the Swiss Foundation for Demining DATE: Dec. 8, 2022 https://ushr.webex.com/webappng/sites/ushr/meeting/register

12 p.m. 1000 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. — Cato Institute discussion: “How Much Does China Really Spend on Defense,” with Eric Heginbotham, principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Frederico Bartels, consultant at Pantheon Integrated Solutions; and Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute https://www.cato.org/events/how-much-does-china-really-spend-defense

3 p.m. — American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research event: “Standing Up to China Means Standing with Taiwan, with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Dan Blumenthal, senior fellow, AEI https://www.aei.org/events/a-conversation-with-sen-dan-sullivan

3 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. N.W. — Center for Strategic and International Studies discussion: “Understanding the Broader Transatlantic Security Implications of Greater Sino-Russian Military Alignment,” with Max Bergmann, director of the CSIS Europe Program; Jude Blanchette, CSIS chairman in China studies; Bonny Lin; director of the CSIS China Power Project; and Brian Hart, fellow at the CSIS China Power Project https://www.csis.org/events/understanding-broader-transatlantic-security-implications

3:30 p.m. — Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe virtual briefing: “Russia’s Infrastructure Terrorists,” with Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Infrastructure Oleksandra Azarkhina https://tinyurl.com/447w272w

5 p.m. 111 Broadway, New York, New York — The Common Good virtual discussion with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Gillian Sorensen, member of the Common Good’s Honorary Advisory Board and former assistant secretary general special adviser for public policy at the U.N. https://www.thecommongoodus.org/upcoming-events/un-ambassador-linda-thomas-greenfield

6 p.m. — Economic Club of Washington, D.C., discussion: with French Ambassador to the U.S. Philippe Etienne https://www.economicclub.org/events/he-philippe-etienne

FRIDAY | DECEMBER 9

9: a.m. — German Marshall Fund of the U.S. virtual discussion: “A Marshall Plan Blueprint for Ukraine,” with Ukraine Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova; John Hewko, general secretary of the Rotary International and the Rotary Fund; David Ignatius, columnist at the Washington Post; and Heather Conley, GMFUS president https://www.gmfus.org/event/marshall-plan-blueprint-ukraine

WEDNESDAY | DECEMBER 14

2 p.m. — Stimson Center forum: “North Korea: Is Denuclearization Dead?’ with Robert Gallucci, distinguished professor, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service; Siegfried S. Hecker, senior fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University; Sharon Squassoni, research professor of international affairs, George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs; and Joel Wit, distinguished fellow in Asian and Security Studies, Stimson Center https://www.stimson.org/event/north-korea-is-denuclearization-dead/