WELCOME TO SHUTDOWN MONDAY: It’s technically Day 3 of the partial government shutdown, but today is the day hundreds of thousands of civilian federal employees will report to work, only to likely turn around and go home, unless a vote scheduled for noon in the Senate produces an unexpected breakthrough. “We will begin the process of an orderly shutdown, once directed,” said Cmdr. Patrick Evans, a Pentagon spokesman. “If directed, then non-excepted employees will be furloughed and allowed to perform minimal activities as necessary to execute an orderly suspension of agency activities.” The Pentagon has posted all the relevant shutdown guidance documents on the main page of its website, including a memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday that the shutdown will have serious ramifications for the military, impacting intelligence gathering, repair of aging equipment, and training for reserve troops. “Our maintenance activities will probably pretty much shut down. Over 50 percent altogether of my civilian workforce will be furloughed, and that’s going to impact our contracting,” Mattis said, adding that the biggest impact will be on morale. “‘How long can you keep good people around when something like this happens’ is always a question that’s got to hover in the back of my mind.”
KEEP CALM, CARRY ON: Nevertheless, Mattis sent a memo to the troops telling them to carry on and stay alert. “We will continue to execute daily operations around the world — ships and submarines will remain at sea, our aircraft will continue to fly and our warfighters will continue to pursue terrorists throughout the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. While training for reservists must be curtailed, active forces will stay at their posts adapting their training to achieve the least negative impact on our readiness to fight.”
HOW DOES THIS END? On this first day of the work week, everything hinges on Democrats and Republicans reaching an agreement to deal with protection for immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, either as part of a temporary spending bill, or separately before current protections expire March 5. “We have yet to reach an agreement on a path forward that is acceptable to both sides,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said last night.
The biggest problem is the high level of acrimony and distrust on both sides. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared to offer the Democrats what they want, a promise to vote on extending the Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals program, in return for passing a continuing resolution to keep the government open until Feb. 8. “Assuming the government remains open. It would be my intention to proceed the legislation to address DACA, border security and related issues.” McConnell said on the Senate floor last night. But Schumer and the Democrats don’t trust him. They want a guarantee that any DACA bill would also be taken up by the House, otherwise the promise is just legislative sleight-of-hand.
GRAHAM VS. MILLER: Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been at the forefront of trying to broker a compromise deal, began to name names yesterday as his frustration with dealing with the White House boiled over. “The White House staff, I think, is making it very difficult,” Graham said. “Every time we have a proposal it is only yanked back by staff members. As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere. He has been an outlier for years.”
To which White House spokesman Hogan Gidley replied: “As long as Sen. Graham chooses to support legislation that sides with people in this country illegally … we’re going nowhere. He’s been an outlier for years.”
WEAPONIZING THE SHUTDOWN: President Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney promised that the administration would not do what he accused President Barack Obama of doing in 2013, namely deliberately making the shutdown as painful as possible to “weaponize” it. “We’re going to manage the shutdown differently. We are not going to weaponize it. We’re not going to try and hurt people,” Mulvaney said at a White House briefing Friday.
So some members of the military cried foul over the weekend when American Forces Network, which provides news, entertainment, sports and command information to U.S. service members around the world, went dark the day before the big NFL championship playoff games. Angry comments on Facebook accused the Pentagon of playing politics by cutting off the popular sports broadcasts to overseas troops and their families.
It took a day but the Pentagon did an about-face and announced that it had “determined the operational necessity of television and radio broadcasts constitutes them as essential activities,” and said some creative accounting would put AFN back on the air. Once it decided “news” was essential, then it decided with “minimal manning” it could also keep the sports channel up “without incurring any additional cost, and thus would comply with shutdown guidance.”
PAYCHECKS DELAYED, POSSIBLY DENIED: Uniformed military and Defense Department civilians faced slightly different situations regarding when and if they will be paid. Troops will be paid, but not necessarily on time, if the shutdown goes another week or so. Civilians who are furloughed will be paid for lost time only if Congress authorizes it.
Saturday morning Sen. Claire McCaskill proposed fast-tracking a bill that would have ensured everyone’s paychecks continued. But the move was opposed by McConnell who was still holding out for a comprehensive deal.
During the 2013 government shutdown, Congress passed legislation in advance that kept troops paid and allowed about 350,000 furloughed Defense Department civilians to return to work. This time bills were filed in both the House and Senate in the hours before the deadline went nowhere.
The next military pay date is Feb. 1, so there is no immediate threat to military paychecks. But Mattis noted the potential hardship in his Friday memo. “You have my personal commitment that the department’s leadership will do our best to mitigate the impacts of the disruptions and any financial burdens to you and your families,” he said.
Good Monday morning and welcome to Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense, compiled by Washington Examiner National Security Senior Writer Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre), National Security Writer Travis J. Tritten (@travis_tritten) and Senior Editor David Brown (@dave_brown24). 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.
TRAVEL AS USUAL: Mattis, clearly an essential DoD employee if there ever was one, embarks on an overseas trip to Asia today. The Pentagon has not announced his itinerary for the weeklong trip, but in his Friday speech on his new defense strategy, Mattis let it drop that he was going to Indonesia and Vietnam.
He said his mission will be to support the diplomatic goals of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. “Before I go, I sit down with Secretary Tillerson, and he actually sends to me in writing, at some point after we’ve talked, what are the foreign policy parameters, what are the priorities he has while I’m visiting those countries.” Mattis said. “I think that probably the most important thing is to ensure that, in everything we say and in everything we do, we are reinforcing our diplomats. That’s the way it works when you’re doing foreign policy, and we’re an instrument of foreign policy.”
Mattis, a legendary Marine commander who spent 41 years in uniform, never served in Vietnam. This will be his first visit there.
TURKEY TARGETS KURDS: Turkey is in the third day of an offensive against Kurdish YPG fighters in the Afrin region of Northern Syria, including some fighters who were previously backed by the United States in the fight against the Islamic State. Turkey considers the YPG to be a terrorist organization and the U.S. alliance with the Kurdish faction has been the source of considerable tension between Ankara and Washington.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to crush the YPG in Afrin and then target the Kurdish-held town of Manbij to the east, according to Reuters. “That raises the prospect of protracted conflict between Turkey and its allied Free Syrian Army factions on one side and on the other the Kurdish YPG, who spearheaded the U.S.-backed campaign to drive Islamic State out of its Syrian strongholds last year,” the news agency reports.
ATTACK IN KABUL: The Taliban launched a deadly attack at Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel over the weekend. The 13-hour-long standoff claimed 18 lives, including 14 foreigners, reports the AP. “The siege ended on Sunday with Afghan security forces saying they had killed the last of six Taliban militants who stormed the hotel in suicide vests late the previous night, looking for foreigners and Afghan officials to kill,”
F-35 SALE CLEARED IN BELGIUM COMPETITION: A potential $6.5 billion sale of Lockheed Martin F-35 joint strike fighters to NATO ally Belgium has been cleared by the State Department. “This proposal is being offered in the context of a competition,” according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. The Belgium government is looking to replace its F-16 fighter jet fleet and Lockheed’s F-35 is in the running along with the Eurofighter Typhoon. The sale would be for 34 F-35 conventional take-off and landing models and four spare Pratt & Whitney F-135 engines. Belgium has a mid-February deadline for deciding on a replacement aircraft, defense-aerospace.com recently reported.
SASC MOVES FORWARD IN McCAIN’S ABSENCE: During a Senate Armed Services hearing Thursday, Sen. Angus King joked that “if Sen. [John] McCain were here, he’d be talking about accountability. He’s always looking for who we can fire.” The joke caused laughter but was also a poignant reminder. McCain, 81, the fiery and seemingly tireless Armed Services chairman now battling brain cancer, was absent from his committee’s first hearing of 2018. It remains uncertain when McCain may return to Washington and Armed Services after he was hospitalized and then returned home to Arizona in December. The senator remained in the political fight from afar, issuing a statement praising Mattis’ new defense strategy and tweeting a string of warnings about a government shutdown.
But in the meantime, his Armed Services committee is moving ahead with its business despite uncertainty around McCain’s return to Washington. The hearing last week, where King joked about the chairman’s absence, may advance four more Pentagon nominees. Armed Services has also announced two more hearings in the coming week. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and famed elder statesman, will testify along with George Shultz and Richard Armitage to the committee on Thursday about the U.S. national security strategy and global challenges. It is the kind of hearing McCain might relish and likely will begin laying the foundation for the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. Last week, Graham, a committee member and one of McCain’s closest friends, told CNN that he visited the chairman in Arizona. “I was very pleased with his progress. He’s making progress,” Graham said. “We laughed a little bit. We cried a little bit. I admire him greatly and I’m hoping he can come back and be with us.”
McCAIN STILL FIRING BROADSIDES: Even as he recovers at home, McCain is as feisty as ever, issuing a sharply-worded rebuke to his congressional colleagues via Twitter. “Secretary Mattis’s newly released National Defense Strategy – aimed at addressing the readiness crisis and restoring our military advantage – is meaningless if we can’t fund it,” McCain wrote in a series of tweets.
The strategy’s aim of rebuilding the military and refocusing on competition from other advanced nations such as Russia and China will require the new funding, tweeted McCain. Mattis introduced the shift away from terrorism as the top U.S. security concern and the first major rewrite of strategy in years during a speech Friday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Mattis himself made a similar observation during a Q&A following his speech unveiling the NDS. “If you don’t get the resources, then your strategy is nothing more than a hallucination, because, without the resources, there’s just so much brave young men and women can do.”
NOT A PIVOT, JUST A SHIFT: Most of the National Defense Strategy is classified, but the main point Mattis made in rolling out the strategy is that he sees great power competition, mostly from Russia and China as the primary threat to America’s long-held status as the preeminent military power in the world. “Though we will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security,” he said in his Friday speech.
MIXED REVIEWS: We did a quick poll of policy experts around town, and got a variety of perspectives on the Mattis doctrine. You can hear what the analysts had to say in their own words here.
CRYPTOCURRENCY CRACKDOWN: Two U.S. senators want to know what Steve Mnuchin and his Treasury Department are doing to counter the “nefarious” use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin by Venezuela, Russia and North Korea. Sens. Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez sent a letter to Mnuchin warning that Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro was planning to create his own digital currency, called the “petro” after the country’s oil wealth. They want Mnuchin to reply by the end of the month whether Treasury can modify existing sanctions on Venezuela to block Maduro. “We are concerned that cryptocurrency could provide Maduro a mechanism by which to make payments to foreign lenders and bondholders in the United States, actions that would clearly thwart the intent of U.S.-imposed sanctions,” Rubio and Menendez wrote.
Russia and North Korea, who are both also targets of U.S. sanctions, have also shown interest in taking advantage of cryptocurrency amid the recent global boom in bitcoin, according to the senators. Bitcoin and other new types of cryptocurrency exist only in the virtual world and are traded outside the traditional banking system on ledgers called blockchain, making them hard to regulate and enticing to rogue regimes and terror groups alike. “Russia and North Korea will be watching Maduro and any U.S. response closely, both are looking into developing their own cryptocurrency or exploiting existing currencies such as bitcoin for ‘nefarious’ purposes,” Rubio and Menendez told Mnuchin.
PENCE TELLS TROOPS IT’S THE DEMS’ FAULT: Speaking to U.S. troops at an undisclosed military facility near the Syrian border, Vice President Mike Pence yesterday said he and the president are fighting for their interests and portrayed the shutdown as a choice between supporting troops or “illegal immigration.”
“Despite bipartisan support for a budget resolution, a minority in the Senate has decided to play politics with military pay. But you deserve better,” Pence told the troops. “You and your families shouldn’t have to worry for one minute about whether you’re going to get paid because you serve in the uniform of the United States.
“We’re going to demand that they reopen the government. In fact, we’re not going to reopen [negotiations] on illegal immigration until they reopen the government and give you, our soldiers, and your families the benefits and wages you’ve earned,” Pence continued to applause.
Critics said it was inappropriate to strike such a partisan tone on a troop visit. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling tweeted: “A lesson for all public affairs officers: You should NOT allow any politician – GOP or Dem -to use troops as a backdrop! It takes personal courage, but only bad things can happen.”
FIGHTING WORDS: Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who lost both her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq in 2004, lit into Trump on the Senate floor over the weekend, insulting him in very personal terms, calling him “Cadet bone spurs,” and “a five-deferment draft dodger.”
“I spent my entire adult life looking out for the well-being, the training, the equipping of the troops for whom I was responsible,” Duckworth said Saturday. “Sadly, this is something that the current occupant of the Oval Office does not seem to care to do. And I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft dodger.
“And I have a message for Cadet bone spurs: If you cared about our military, you’d stop baiting Kim Jong Un into a war that could put 85,000 American troops, and millions of innocent civilians, in danger,” she added.
THE RUNDOWN
AP: 50 years after key Vietnam battles, Mattis seeks closer ties
New York Times: Siege at Kabul Hotel Caps a Violent 24 Hours in Afghanistan
Washington Post: Under Trump, the Pentagon brass plays to an audience of one
USA Today: North and South Korea agree: Neither wants defections during Olympic Games
Wall Street Journal: Turkey Launches Strikes on Kurdish Targets in Syria
Reuters: Spurned by Trump, Europeans ponder how to meet Iran ultimatum
USNI News: USS Little Rock Stuck in Montreal, Ship Might Not Leave Until Spring
Stars and Stripes: Nonprofit steps in to aid military death benefits during shutdown
Defense One: How Should the Pentagon Reshape Its Mideast Posture? Four Indicators to Watch
Foreign Policy: U.S. Government Faces Critical ‘Brain Drain’ of Sanctions Experts
AP: Iran may try to loosen Revolutionary Guard’s grip on economy
Air Force Times: Air Mobility: A clear need for future environments
AP: Doctor who aided hunt for bin Laden languishes, forgotten
Calendar
MONDAY | JAN. 22
10 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Charting a New Course for the Defense Industrial Base. csis.org
4:30 p.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Book discussion of 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder with author Arthur Herman. hudson.org
TUESDAY | JAN. 23
11 a.m. Livestream only: Intelligence beyond 2018: A conversation with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. aei.org
12 p.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Turkey, the Kurds, and the Struggle for Order in the Middle East. hudson.org
12 p.m. A conversation with Daniel Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel. defenddemocracy.org
12:30 p.m. 1777 F St. NW. Foreign Affairs Issue Launch with Former Vice President Joe Biden. cfr.org
WEDNESDAY | JAN. 24
10 a.m. Dirksen 342. ROUNDTABLE – Reauthorizing DHS: Positioning DHS to Address New and Emerging Threats to the Homeland. hsgac.senate.gov
2:30 p.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. U.S. Responses to the North Korean Threat: A Conversation with Sen. Ted Cruz. hudson.org
3 p.m. Russell 222. Officer Personnel Management and the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 1980 with Lt. Gen. Thomas Seamands; Vice Adm. Robert Burke; Lt. Gen. Gina Grosso; and Lt. Gen. Michael Rocco. armed-services.senate.gov
5:30 p.m. 1667 K St. NW. Book Talk “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump” with author Hal Brands. csbaonline.org
THURSDAY | JAN. 25
9 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Discussion with Gen. Robert Neller, commandant of the Marine Corps. csis.org
9:30 a.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Women and War: Securing a More Peaceful Future with Sherri Goodman, former deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security. wilsoncenter.org
10 a.m. Dirksen G-50. Global Challenges and U.S. National Security Strategy with former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state. armed-services.senate.gov
10 a.m. 1775 Massachusetts Ave. Multi-domain battle: Converging concepts toward a joint solution with Gen. James Holmes, commander of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command. brookings.edu
2 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. Distributed Defense: New Operational Concepts for Integrated Air and Missile Defense with Will Roper, director of the Strategic Capabilities Office; Lt. Gen. James Dickinson, commander of Army Space and Missile Defense Command; and Brig. Gen. Clement Coward, director of the Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization. csis.org
FRIDAY | JAN. 26
10 a.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Sustaining U.S. Leadership Against Nuclear Terrorism and Proliferation: Monitoring and Verification in the Digital Age. hudson.org
3:30 p.m. 1030 15th St. NW. President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Visit to the US and the UN – Assessment and Outlook. atlanticcouncil.org
MONDAY | JAN. 29
12 p.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Maritime Strategy in a New Era of Great Power Competition. hudson.org
1 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Russia’s Electronic Warfare Capabilities to 2025. csis.org
1 p.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Korean Unity at Pyeongchang: Prospects for Dealing with North Korea. wilsoncenter.org
