THE LAST TRANSITION DAY: President-elect Trump flies back to Washington today on a military aircraft to attend some pre-inaugural events and prepare for his swearing on the west steps of the Capitol.
Also flying into Joint Base Andrews is Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, who returns from meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels to attend the inauguration. As the senior military adviser to both the president and the secretary of defense, Dunford will provide continuity during the transition period, where many civilian political posts at the Pentagon remain unfilled.
Speaking to reporters before departing Belgium for Washington, Dunford said his first meeting with Trump came late last week. “My only formal engagement with the national security adviser, deputy national security adviser and the president-elect was last Thursday when I went to New York to talk about some things from a military perspective that the president-elect and vice president-elect would want to know on Day 1,” Dunford said. “My responsibility is to share options that the next leadership team can choose and to identify both the risks and the opportunities associated with the various options.”
Pentagon officials confirm Dunford has a range of options to offer the incoming Trump administration to intensify the war on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but the chairman was tight-lipped about what they might be. He said he would brief the options first to his new boss, James Mattis, who has also expressed a desire to accelerate the campaign. “My job is to provide options to the secretary of defense and the president and we will be prepared to do that,” Dunford said.
(A tip of the hat to Jim Garamone of DoD News, Defense Media Activity, traveling with Dunford for a fill on the chairman’s remarks.)
CARTER: MORE TROOPS NOT THE ANSWER: Ash Carter won’t be around to share his views with his successor, but in an exit interview with the Associated Press, the outgoing defense secretary opposed sending thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq or Syria, arguing that would push U.S. allies to the exits, create more anti-U.S. resistance and give up the U.S. military’s key advantages. Carter told the AP that while he’s all for looking at ways to speed up the counter-ISIS campaign, he insisted local Iraqi and Syrian forces must set the pace.
“If we were to take over the war in Iraq and Syria entirely ourselves, first of all, in the near term it would be entirely by ourselves, because there is no one else volunteering to do that,” Carter said. “We could get past that. But secondly, we would risk turning people who are currently inclined to resist ISIL” or to join ranks with the coalition, “potentially into resisting us, and that would increase the strength of the enemy.”
PENTAGON CLOSING EARLY: The Department of Defense effectively closes at 4 p.m. today, as most DoD workers have been told to clear out and not come back until Monday. The sprawling parking lots are being commandeered as staging areas for inaugural events, and the Pentagon Metro station will be closed all day tomorrow. Not everyone is gone, of course. The super-secure National Military Command Center in the subbasement will be fully manned, but in most of the building’s 17 and half miles of corridors, you could roll a bowling ball down the hall and no one would notice.
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COTS OPTIONS: Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said Wednesday that he’s starting to go to industry to see what commercial off-the-shelf aircraft they have that could fill the need for the 300 “low-cost, light-attack” aircraft Sen. John McCain called for in his white paper this week. One platform under consideration is the Scorpion jet from Textron AirLand.
FULL STEAM AHEAD: The Senate Armed Services Committee cleared Mattis’ nomination to be defense secretary yesterday, expediting the vote in the full Senate on Friday shortly after Trump is sworn in. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was the only “no” vote, and the former Marine is expected to be easily confirmed. You can expect his name plate to be mounted on the SecDef’s third floor office by the end of the day tomorrow.
FAST TRACK CONFIRMATIONS: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer may have called Trump’s nominees for key administration posts a “swamp Cabinet,” but didn’t rule out that Democrats could allow a handful of national security nominees to be confirmed on Inauguration Day, Susan Crabtree writes. Schumer on Wednesday complained about Senate Republicans efforts to rush through many nominees without thorough vetting, but he said his top concerns did not extend to the nominations of Rep. Mike Pompeo to be CIA director, Mattis to be defense secretary or retired Gen. John Kelly to become homeland security secretary.
“Those three nominees were not on the list of the nine that we had the most trouble with and wanted the most extensive hearings,” he told reporters. “We are discussing that with Sen. [Mitch] McConnell and some of the folks in the White House right now,” he said when asked if those three nominees could be confirmed on Friday.
QUESTIONS OVER GABBARD TRIP: Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard made a secret trip to Syria recently in order to meet with government officials about the country’s civil war, but her office won’t say if she met with President Bashar Assad. Foreign Policy magazine reported Wednesday that Gabbard, a Hawaii veteran of the Iraq war, “just departed” the war-torn country still wrapped up in an almost six-year conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead.
Gabbard is one of the few lawmakers in favor of leaving Assad in power in order to end the conflict.
MANNING FALLOUT: President Obama on Wednesday said his decision to commute the sentence of WikiLeaks leaker Chelsea Manning after sanctioning Russia for allegedly handing information to the same government transparency group did not constitute hypocrisy, as some have charged, Gabby Morrongiello writes. “I don’t see a contradiction,” the outgoing president said at his final press conference.
“First off, I haven’t commented on WikiLeaks generally,” he continued. “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russia hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was winning or not in being the conduit of information through which we heard about the Democratic National Committee emails that were leaked.”
As for sending the wrong signal to potential future leakers, “Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence, so the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished I don’t think would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served,” Obama said. Manning will have served seven years of a 35-year sentence when released in May.
In an interview with CNN, Carter says he did not support the president’s decision. “It was not my recommendation.”
PUTTING THE “BRIEF” IN BRIEFING: When it comes to his daily intelligence briefing, Trump prefers to keep things simple, Gabby Morrongiello writes. The incoming Republican president has received a briefing from intelligence officials several times a week since his victory in November, and says he likes the briefing to be delivered to him in one page or less. “I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” Trump told Axios in an interview published Wednesday. “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.”
FINAL SALUTE: The Air Force saluted Vice President Joe Biden when he made his final Air Force Two landing at Joint Base Andrews yesterday afternoon. In line with the service tradition of “hosing down” someone when he or she leaves the service, airmen hosed down the entire plane with fire truck hoses, according to a pool report.
KERRY AIN’T COMING: Secretary of State John Kerry won’t be attending Trump’s inauguration on Friday, according to the State Department, Pete Kasperowicz writes. “The secretary will not attend the inauguration,” a State Department official told the Washington Examiner. The official had no comment on why Kerry wouldn’t attend.
HALEY’S COMMENTS: South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley argued Wednesday that the United States cannot trust the Russians and President Vladimir Putin, and said the U.S. must use caution while dealing with Russia. “Russia is trying to show their muscle right now. It is what they do, and I think we always have to be cautious,” said Haley, who is Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. “I don’t think that we can trust them,” she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pointing to Russia’s actions in Syria. “I think that we have to make sure that we try and see what we can get from them before we give to them. We have to continue to be very strong back and show them what this new administration is going to be, and it is going to be an America that shows exactly where we stand, what we are for, what we are against, and how we’re going to proceed.”
She also called called the recent Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction “a kick in the gut,” though she said she also opposes the settlement expansion. “What I think happened with 2334 was a kick in the gut to everyone,” Haley said. “And so we can think what we want to think on settlements, but you have to think that the U.S. abstention … was wrong.”
As for U.N. funding, Haley said she opposes any “slash and burn” of U.S. funding for the U.N., and assured Congress that Trump’s national security team would “educate” the incoming president about foreign policy issues. “I know that [Trump] had made comments about the U.N., but those are not my feelings and I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen,” Haley said.
ADDING TO THE RED LINE ARGUMENT: One of the reasons Obama decided not to escalate American military intervention in Syria was the fear he could be impeached over it, Kyle Feldscher writes. Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to Obama, told Politico Magazine White House staff took congressional warnings against intervening in Syria very seriously. “We had no international support. The only country in the world that was prepared to join us was France. And we had no domestic legal basis,” he said. “We actually had Congress warning us against taking action without congressional authorization, which we interpreted as the president could face impeachment.”
GETTING PUNCHY: Trump’s pick for secretary of the Army was accused last summer of punching a concessions worker at a racehorse auction in upstate New York, Anna Giaritelli writes. Police reports state an employee at the Sarasota Springs, N.Y., establishment said Vincent Viola, a billionaire Wall Street trader, gave him a “swollen bloody lip” on Aug. 8. Viola told law enforcement that the man he punched had pushed his wife, prompting the former Army officer to respond physically, according to a report published Wednesday evening. The unidentified victim said he never pushed Viola’s wife.
Saratoga Springs Police Chief Greg Veitch said officers “determined that both incidents involved actions that could have been charged as harassment, a violation level offense in New York State.” However, charges were never brought on either allegation. “Mr. Viola will always stand up and defend his wife, and in this case there was a simple disagreement with the matter being dropped and no charges were filed,” Viola’s spokesman said in a statement. “Mr. Viola notified the transition team of the disagreement early on in the process and we consider this matter closed.”
TRUMP PROMISES PARADES: In an interview with the Washington Post, the president-elect made one of those cryptic statements that we’re still trying to decipher about military parades: “Being a great president has to do with a lot of things, but one of them is being a great cheerleader for the country,” Trump said. “And we’re going to show the people as we build up our military, we’re going to display our military.” “That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military,” he added. BuzzFeed has a story on why that’s expensive, and why troops will hate it.
COOK TIMER: Today, we officially retire our “Cook Timer,” which was always intended to be a good-natured poking of fun at the Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook’s seeming inability to start any of his scheduled briefings on time. This morning, he briefs at an unusually early time 10:30 a.m. (Or 10:30ish). On his last full day on the job, we asked Cook for some parting thoughts.
Hardest part of learning the job? “The sheer volume of issues you have to deal with. The DoD is a massive organization and on any given day many parts of the department are making news or doing things the world needs to know about. I have had a great team supporting me every step of the way but getting up to speed on so many topics was a challenge especially in the beginning.
Best part? “Meeting and working with so many dedicated servicemembers and civilians both in the Pentagon and around the world. It is energizing to be around them, and I will miss that. There is a sense of mission and commitment that permeates the institution every day. Flying in an Osprey also never gets old.”
Advice for your successor? “When in doubt engage. The Department of Defense is always in a better place when we are proactively talking about what we are doing on behalf of the American people.”
Future plans? “First off, it’s been an honor and a privilege to serve Secretary Carter and represent the men and women of the Department of Defense. I am going to take a little time off to catch up with my family, and then I will figure out my next step. My wife promises to hide my phone for at least a week.”
THE RUNDOWN
New York Times: Trump National Security Team Gets a Slow Start
War on the Rocks: Let’s make a (nuclear) deal
Defense One: We Have ‘Very Robust Defenses’: An Exit Interview with Obama’s Top Cyber Official
Defense News: Senate Armed Services Makes Leadership Changes
Breaking Defense: Fear China Most, ‘Flip’ Russia, Beware Iran: CSBA
Reuters: Exclusive: Pentagon, Lockheed near deal on $9 billion F-35 contract – sources
UPI: Israeli air force conducts first F-35 night sortie
USNI News: Delay in Aircraft Carrier Ford Testing Could Compress Workups for First Deployment
Yonhap News Agency: N. Korea Has Likely Built 2 ICBMs, Placed Them On Mobile Launchers: Sources
Wall Street Journal: U.S. Officials Say Sizable Arab Force Identified For Raqqa Campaign
Washington Post: In Afghanistan, Trump Will Inherit A Costly Stalemate And Few Solutions
New York Times: ‘Learning Curve’ as Rick Perry Pursues a Job He Initially Misunderstood
Military.com: Fanning Steps Down as First Openly Gay Service Chief
Marine Corps Times: Marines in Norway will learn to ski, fight and survive in arctic cold
Task & Purpose: Exclusive: The 75th Ranger Regiment Is No Longer An All-Male Unit
Calendar
THURSDAY | JANUARY 19
10:30 a.m. Pentagon Briefing Room. Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook gives his last briefing for reporters.
11:30 a.m. 1667 K St. NW. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments releases a new report titled “Preserving the Balance—A Eurasia Defense Strategy.” csbaonline.org
MONDAY | JANUARY 23
10:30 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. A panel of think tank experts talks about prospects for the defense budget in the Trump administration. csis.org
TUESDAY | JANUARY 24
8:30 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, speaks on a panel about U.S. defense priorities in the Arctic. csis.org
2:30 p.m. Dirksen 342. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a vocal critic of the overseas contingency operations account, has his confirmation hearing to serve as the direction of the Office of Management and Budget. hsgac.senate.gov
5:30 p.m. 1789 Massachusetts Ave. NW. Reporter Graeme Wood talks about his first-hand encounters with the Islamic State. aei.org
WEDNESDAY | JANUARY 25
9:30 a.m. Senate Visitor’s Center 203. The Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace releases a new study on the value of ICBMs and the new ground-based strategic deterrent. mitchellaerospacepower.org
3:30 p.m. 1030 15th St. NW. A panel of experts predicts what relations with Iran will look like under the Trump administration. atlanticcouncil.org
