CJCS DENIES WSJ REPORT: The chairman of the the Joint Chiefs issued a rare Sunday night denial after the Wall Street Journal reported the U.S. military is crafting plans to keep nearly 1,000 forces in Syria, far more than the White House originally intended.
The official statement from Gen. Joseph Dunford seemed aimed at heading off a narrative that could have made it look as though the Pentagon was working to undermine President Trump’s order to withdraw most U.S. troops from Syria, leaving only a small residual force behind.
The Journal cited U.S. officials saying that the failure to reach an agreement with Turkey over the establishment of a safe zone in northeastern Syria meant the United States had to consider the possibility it would have to leave more troops behind, not only to work with Kurdish fighters but to ensure they are not attacked by Turkey.
“A claim reported this evening by a major U.S. newspaper that the U.S. military is developing plans to keep nearly 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria is factually incorrect,” said Dunford in his statement issued last night. “There has been no change to the plan announced in February and we continue to implement the President’s direction to draw down U.S. forces to a residual presence.”
Dunford also denied that negotiations with Turkey over a safe zone have collapsed. “We continue to conduct detailed military planning with the Turkish General Staff to address Turkish security concerns along the Turkey-Syria border,” he said. “Planning to date has been productive and we have an initial concept that will be refined in the coming days.”
READING BETWEEN THE LINES: Notably, the Pentagon has never said how many troops will stay in Syria. The White House initially said about 200, and then officials leaked that it will be more like 400.
All the while Pentagon has steadfastly refused to give any number, not wanting to be locked in. “The Pentagon isn’t trying to, you know, keep something from any of you or the American people,” Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told reporters traveling with him to NATO last month. It’s just that the number keeps changing, he seemed to be saying.
“I think it’s important to be able to tell people, you know, what our posture is, what we’re doing in terms of sizing,” he said. “But I want to really want to get out of this thing of like, did you say 200 or did you say 300? Or is it 250 or 275?”
So has the Pentagon, which likes to be known as a planning organization, ever thought about what it would need if there is no agreement with Turkey? It’s hard to believe it was never considered in various contingency planning. But Dunford’s denial would seem to indicate it’s not an active option now.
WHERE’S THE LIST?: As members of Congress consider whether to override the president’s veto of a bill revoking his border emergency declaration, Democrats are complaining that they’re missing a crucial bit of data that could influence the vote, namely which military construction projects in which congressional districts would be affected.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who said he “kind of blew up” at Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan at last week’s Armed Services Committee hearing, said he suspects the inability of the Pentagon to identify projects that are potentially on the chopping block is an intentional dodge.
“This is not the secretary of defense, in my view, said Kaine. “This is the White House wanting to hold the list back because they worry that if senators and House members saw the potential projects that were going to be ransacked to pay for the president’s wall, they would lose votes. And I think they’re going to try to hide the list until that veto override vote occurs in the House and then in the Senate.”
THERE IS NO LIST: Later in the broadcast, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney insisted that no programs would be affected because military construction funds are authorized to be spent over a five-year period, and only funds that are not obligated to be spent this year will be tapped.
“Here’s why,” Mulvaney said. “What’s happening is that — we’ve already told Congress this — which is that none of the programs that were scheduled to be started or what we call obligated in 2019, so between now and the end of September, will be impacted at all.”
The president’s proposed 2020 budget would “backfill” the $3.6 million in construction funds shifted to border barrier construction before it is actually needed, Mulvaney argued.
“If it’s going to be a project that would have been funded, say, in 2021, OK, it gives us another couple of years to what we call backfill. Congress will pass another appropriation this year, next year, so that ultimately none of the programs would be impacted,” Mulvaney said. “There is no list of projects that are absolutely going to not be funded so that the wall can be,” Mulvaney said. “I know of no list. And if anybody should know, it would be me.”
Good Monday morning and welcome to Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense, written and compiled by Washington Examiner National Security Senior Writer Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) and edited by Kelly Jane Torrance (@kjtorrance). Email us here for tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email and we’ll add you to our list. And be sure to follow us on Twitter: @dailyondefense.
DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT: President Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton is warning the North Koreans not to restart missile tests amid the current impasse in denuclearization talks.
“They issued an unhelpful statement saying they were thinking of going back to nuclear and ballistic missile testing, which would not be a good idea on their part,” Bolton said in an interview with John Catsimatidis, a New York-based radio host, on AM 970.
After the breakdown in talks in Hanot last month, in which President Trump said he had no choice but to walk away, the North Koreans blamed Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for taking a hard line in refusing to agree to lift sanctions in return for the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear facility at Yongbyon.
Bolton insisted it was North Korea that sunk the deal. “The North Koreans really, unfortunately, were not willing to do what they needed to do,” Bolton said. “President Trump wants to see this threat resolved through negotiation,” he added. “He’s made a number of proposals to Kim Jong Un. … It hasn’t worked out yet, but the president still is willing to try and do it. He wants North Korea to be free of nuclear weapons, that’s for sure.”
NEW NATO COMMANDER: Trump has tapped Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters, commander of the U.S. Europe and Africa air forces, to be the next Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, or SACEUR, the top military commander of the 30-nation alliance. The announcement was made after NATO agreed to the appointment.
Wolters will succeed Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who is retiring. There be a wholesale turnover in four-star commanders in the coming months, as many come to the end of their regular terms. Among those retiring are Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford and Vice Chairman Gen. Paul Selva.
5 THINGS? OR 5 LIES?: An advocacy group for transgender rights, the Palm Center, is taking issue with an infographic the Pentagon posted on its website, offering a point-by-point rebuttal to “5 Things to Know About DOD’s New Policy on Military Service by Transgender Persons and Persons With Gender Dysphoria.”
It argues the “5 things” are actually “5 lies” and has created an infographic of its own in response.
The Pentagon says the new policy is not a ban on transgender troops because current service members are exempted, and new troops who identify as transgender can serve in their gender assigned at birth.
The Palm Center disputes the idea that transgender troops have been given any special accommodations or don’t have to meet the same standards as other troops, as well as the notion that gender dysphoria is a medical condition that must be treated differently from any other medical condition. Because the policy treats transgender troops taking hormone therapy differently from non-transgender troops taking hormones, the Palm Center says, it is in fact a ban.
WHAT WOULD ‘COST PLUS 50’ COST?: Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan last week poured cold water on reports quoting unnamed officials saying the White House was going to bill allies such as Germany and Japan the full cost of hosting U.S. troops, plus a 50 percent surcharge.
“We won’t do cost plus 50 percent,” Shanahan testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday. “We’re not going to run a business and we’re not going to run a charity,” he said, calling the media reports “wrong.”
“The important part is people pay their fair share and payment comes in lots of different forms,” he said. “Not everyone can contribute, but it is not about cost plus 50 percent.”
Still, Rick Berger, a defense policy and budget analyst over at the American Enterprise Institute, crunched the numbers and says even in the most benign scenario, “cost plus 50” would double Japan’s and South Korea’s payments for U.S. forces and quadruple Germany’s.
Writing at War on the Rocks, Berger says if you count the cost of the pay for U.S. troops, Germany’s bill would jump 926 percent.
And if allies balked and the United States pulled out its troops, that would also be costly. “Withdrawal of U.S. forces from these countries would certainly cost the United States itself several billion dollars upfront, with the likely immediate bill rising into the tens of billions of dollars to provide new basing, housing, and training ranges for American forces at home,” Berger writes. “Replacing the value of U.S. forward basing with U.S.-based military capabilities would almost certainly be so expensive and complicated that it would make execution of the National Defense Strategy impossible, thereby necessitating a wholesale change in American security policy.”
McCAIN DEFENDED: Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., — an occasional critic but still one of Trump’s most reliable allies in Congress — rushed to the defense of his close friend the late Sen. John McCain when McCain again came under Twitter attack from the president over the weekend.
“As to @SenJohnMcCain and his devotion to his country: He stepped forward to risk his life for his country, served honorably under difficult circumstances, and was one of the most consequential senators in the history of the body,” Graham said on Twitter. “Nothing about his service will ever be changed or diminished,” he added in a second post.
In a series of tweets, Trump reacted to court documents released last week regarding the so-called Steele dossier that contained unverified claims about his ties to Russia and McCain’s role in turning over the file to the FBI.
“So it was indeed (just proven in court papers) ‘last in his class’ (Annapolis) John McCain that sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election,” Trump said Sunday. “He & the Dems, working together, failed (as usual). Even the Fake News refused this garbage!”
McCain often joked about being “fifth in his class” at the U.S. Naval Academy — fifth from the bottom but not last.
In his 1995 biography of McCain, author Robert Timberg discussed McCain’s academic failing at Annapolis:
Despite his woeful class standing, McCain was smart, quick, and thoughtful, if not intellectual. So how did he wind up scraping bottom at the Academy? For one thing, class standing was not solely a function of academic performance. A grease grade, relating to conduct and leadership, was also cranked in, and those factors dealt McCain’s standing a severe body blow. He piled up an astonishing number of demerits, though always just below the threshold that meant dismissal.
As McCain later put it, while a midshipman “I acted like a jerk.”
Meghan McCain, the late senator’s daughter, also took to Twitter to defend her dad. “No one will ever love you the way they loved my father…. I wish I had been given more Saturday’s with him. Maybe spend yours with your family instead of on twitter obsessing over mine?”
“My father lives rent free in your head,” she added in a tweet she later deleted.
TRUMP’S CLASS STANDING UNKNOWN: It should be noted that while Trump attacked McCain, his own academic record and class standing remain a closely guarded secret. Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen testified before Congress last month that Trump took extraordinary steps to ensure his records were never released, calling Trump a “conman.”
“When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the college board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” Cohen said before the House Oversight Committee.
POMPEO AWAITS SIGN FROM GOD: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not counting out a political future in his home state of Kansas. “I try to just avoid ruling things out when there’s others who are in control,” Pompeo said in a interview with the Wichita Eagle published Sunday. “The Lord will get me to the right place.”
Pompeo, a conservative, represented Kansas’ 4th Congressional District from 2011 to 2017 before joining the Trump administration. He’s ruled out a Senate run in 2020, but Kansas Republicans speculate that Pompeo could be eyeing his other political options. Those include a bid for the Senate in 2022, a run for Kansas governor that year, or even a presidential campaign in 2024.
FEAR THE TYRANT: In an essay titled “The strongmen strike back,” Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that “authoritarianism has reemerged as the greatest threat to the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. And we have no idea how to confront it.”
“Authoritarianism has now returned as a geopolitical force, with strong nations such as China and Russia championing anti-liberalism as an alternative to a teetering liberal hegemony. It has returned as an ideological force, offering the age-old critique of liberalism, and just at the moment when the liberal world is suffering its greatest crisis of confidence since the 1930s. It has returned armed with new and hitherto unimaginable tools of social control and disruption that are shoring up authoritarian rule at home, spreading it abroad and reaching into the very heart of liberal societies to undermine them from within.”
Kagan’s essay, part of the Brookings foreign policy project “Democracy and Disorder,” was published last week in the Washington Post, where he is a contributing columnist.
The Rundown
Omaha World Herald: One-third of Offutt underwater; at least 30 buildings damaged in flood
Military Times: With lawsuits on the horizon, DoD looks for ways to cut contaminated water cleanup costs
New York Times: The team that killed Jamal Khashoggi was part of a wider push to crush Saudi dissent that involved at least a dozen operations since 2017
Military Times: There are mounting signs of military planning for Venezuela
Navy Times: Why The Truman Is Back At Sea, Again
Forbes: Plan To Retire USS Truman Early Makes No Sense, Which Is Why The Navy Doesn’t Really Want To Do It
Washington Post: Trump Administration’s New Arctic Defense Strategy Expected To Zero In On Concerns About China
New York Times: Allies Spurning Campaign by U.S. To Block Huawei
NBC News: America’s first black Navy SEAL is on mission to diversify unit
Reuters: India, Pakistan threatened to unleash missiles at each other: sources
AP: Congressman pitches Louisiana for Trump’s Space Force locale
AP: Afghan Troops Go Missing After Fleeing Battle with Taliban
AP: Veterans court may be collateral damage in immigration fight
Calendar
MONDAY | MARCH 18
10 a.m. 1030 15th Street N.W., 12th Floor. “The U.S.-French Defense Relationship in a Changing World.” www.atlanticcouncil.org
10 a.m. 1789 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. “Building better Arab armed forces: A conversation with Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland.” www.aei.org
11:45 a.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave N.W. Hudson Institute forum “Europe’s Expanding Role in the Indo-Pacific.” Speakers: Patrick Cronin, Asia-Pacific Security chair, Hudson Institute; John Hemmings, director, Asia Studies Centre of Henry Jackson Society; Aparna Pande, director, Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia, Hudson Institute; Satoru Nagao, Visiting Fellow, Hudson Institute, Liselotte Odgaard, Visiting Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute. https://www.hudson.org/events
12:30 p.m. 1779 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. “Marking A Year of Protest in Gaza.” carnegieendowment.org
TUESDAY | MARCH 19
8 a.m. 1779 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. “Religious Authority in the Middle East: Implications for U.S. Policy.” www.carnegieendowment.org
9:30 a.m. 2301 Constitution Avenue N.W. “Crimea after Five Years of Russian Occupation.” www.usip.org
10 a.m. 1775 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. “Defense spending in the 50 states.” www.brookings.edu
10:30 a.m. 1779 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. “Tokyo’s Views on the Growing U.S.-China Rivalry.” www.carnegieendowment.org
11:45 a.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave N.W. Hudson Institute Ambassadors Series: The Romanian Presidency and the European Union. Speakers: George Maior, Romanian ambassador to the U.S.; Walter Russell Mead, Hudson Institute. https://www.hudson.org/events
WEDNESDAY | MARCH 20
9:00 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. N.W. “CSIS Strategic National Security Space: FY 2020 Budget and Policy Forum.” Speakers include Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., chairman, House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces; Todd Harrison director, CSIS Aerospace Security Project; Director, CSIS Defense Budget Analysis, and Retired Lt. Gen. James “Kevin” McLaughlin, former deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command. www.csis.org
11 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. N.W. Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan speaks at “CSIS Strategic National Security Space: FY 2020 Budget and Policy Forum.” www.csis.org
12:30 p.m. 1211 Connecticut Ave N.W., 8th Floor. “The Future of Nuclear Arms Control.” www.stimson.org
5:00 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave N.W. Center for Strategic & International Studies Schieffer Series: China’s Rise. Featuring Michael Collins, deputy assistant director of the CIA’s East Asia and Pacific Mission Center; Margaret Brennan, CBS senior foreign affairs correspondent, and moderator of Face the Nation; Christopher Johnson, senior adviser and Freeman Chair in China Studies, CSIS; and Victor Cha, senior adviser and Korea Chair, CSIS. Moderated by Bob Schieffer, CSIS Trustee. Live streamed at www.csis.org
THURSDAY | MARCH 21
10:30 a.m. 1030 15th Street N.W., 12th Floor. “US Military Strategy and Great Power Competition with Gen. Joseph Dunford.” www.atlanticcouncil.org
11:45 a.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave N.W. Hudson Institute forum “Securing the Peace in Oceania and the Pacific Islands.” Speakers: Hideshi Tokuchi, Former Japanese Vice Minister of Defense for International Affairs; James Clad, senior fellow, American Foreign Policy Council, and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia Pacific Security Affairs; John Lee, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute; Anna Powles, Massey University, Prof. Noriyuki Segawa, Kindai University; and Eric Brown, senior fellow, Hudson Institute. www.hudson.org/events
5:30 p.m. 2425 Wilson Blvd. Association of the United States Army Institute of Land Warfare Lyman L. Lemnitzer Lecture series. Retired Col. Joseph Celeski speaks about his book The Green Berets in the Land of a Million Elephants: U.S. Army Special Warfare and the Secret War in Laos 1959-74. www.ausa.org
FRIDAY | MARCH 22
10 a.m. 1775 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. “The end of an era? The INF Treaty, New START, and the future of strategic stability.” www.brookings.edu
MONDAY | MARCH 25
1 p.m. 1775 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. “Securing maritime commerce: The U.S. strategic outlook.” www.brookings.edu
TUESDAY | MARCH 26
8:30 a.m. 2301 Constitution Avenue N.W. “Overcoming War Legacies: The Road to Reconciliation and Future Cooperation Between the United States and Vietnam.” www.usip.org
WEDNESDAY | MARCH 27
9:30 a.m. SD-G50, Dirksen. Mark Esper, Secretary of the Army, and Gen. Mark Milley, chief of staff of the Army, testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. www.armed-services.senate.gov
10 a.m. SR-232A, Russell. James F. Geurts, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development, and acquisition; Vice Admiral William R. Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems; Lt. Gen. David H. Berger, commanding general, Marine Corps Combat Development Command testify before the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee. www.armed-services.senate.gov
2:30 p.m. SR-222, Russell. Kenneth Rapuano, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and global security; Gen. John W. Raymond, commander, Air Force Space Command; Lt. Gen. John F. Thompson, commander, Space And Missile Systems Center, Air Force Space Command; and Cristina T. Chaplain, director, Acquisition And Sourcing Management, Government Accountability Office, testify before the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. www.armed-services.senate.gov
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I know of no list. And if anybody should know, it would be me.”
White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” denying the Trump administration is hiding a list of military projects that could be cut or delayed by reprogramming $3.6 billion in construction funds.
