What ‘storm’ was Trump talking about? Take your pick

The cryptic interchange comes as two nuclear crises are looming: North Korea and now Iran, which the president is reportedly ready to “decertify” as not in compliance with the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration and six world powers. “They have not lived up to the spirit of their agreement,” Trump said before last night’s dinner with service chiefs and combatant commanders. “We must not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.” When asked directly by a reporter if he had come to a decision on Iran, Trump replied, “You’ll be hearing about Iran very shortly.”

According to a report in the Washington Post, Trump is expected to announce next week that the Iran nuclear deal does not meet the legal threshold for the United States to remain with the pact, and then leave it to Congress to decide what next steps to take.

Trump also charged his commanders to provide him a “broad range of military options at a faster pace,” to deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “We cannot allow this dictatorship to threaten our nation or our allies with unimaginable loss of life,” Trump said. “We will do what we must do to prevent that from happening. And it will be done, if necessary — believe me.”

McMASTER, MATTIS, TILLERSON: What’s not clear is what advice Trump is getting on the Iran deal from his inner circle. CNN quotes Democratic sources who say national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster is not sold on the decertification, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis testified this week that the deal is “something that the president should consider staying with.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was also reported to be working the issue behind the scenes.

Yesterday, Sen. Bob Corker, Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, cited Trump’s team as a bulwark for stability. “I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis and Chief of Staff Kelly are those people that helped separate our country from chaos,” he said. Corker has announced he will not be running for reelection in 2018.

Sen. Jack Reed, ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, was among those who agreed. “I think what the president does is to create incoherence on a policy,” Reed told CNN. “You have Secretary Tillerson in China making statements including opening up communications with North Korea, and then he’s undercut. That’s not the way to conduct diplomacy. And I think it happens too often. And as a result, we’re relying on people like Secretary Tillerson and General Kelly and Secretary Mattis to provide more coherence, more continuity and more capacity.” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, said he saw the comment more as reflecting a chaotic world, not a chaotic president. “I think the president is doing a good job, great people around him on foreign policy that are advising him and I think he recognizes what he doesn’t know and leans on those people,” Kinzinger told CNN.

PREPARING FOR WAR: At an event yesterday at the Heritage Foundation, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry called for massive reinforcement in the Asia-Pacific region to increase deterrence, and prepare for war if necessary. “I believe we’ve got to put more planes, more ships, more I Corps, more missile defense, more munitions in place in Korea, because we don’t know where this is going to go,” Thornberry said. The U.S. needs to “send a clear message” not only to North Korea but also to China and others in the region that America is “deadly serious” about defending itself and its allies, he said. “This is a crisis that could potentially erupt at any time, and so laying back and waiting and just seeing what happens is not a good option,” Thornberry said.

PEACE PRIZE TO ANTI-NUCLEAR CAMPAIGN: This morning the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, an advocacy group behind the first treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. The coalition of disarmament activists was honored for its work to advance the negotiations that led to the treaty, which was reached in July at the United Nations. The Nobel Committee does not release names of those under consideration, but said 215 individuals and 103 organizations were nominated. The Syrian volunteer humanitarian organization White Helmets was seen as among the possible contenders, along with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini for their work on the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program, which Trump appears eager to exit.

Good Friday 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.

THE CR CRISIS: At a rare formal briefing in the Pentagon’s lightly used briefing room, chief spokesperson Dana White issued another plea for Congress to get its act together and pass a real budget and not another continuing resolution or CR. “Over the last decade, the department has operated under a CR for over 1,000 days. That’s nearly three full years,” White said. “Continuing resolutions hurt the readiness of our forces and their equipment. The longer the CR lasts, the more damage they do,” she said. “As Secretary Mattis testified earlier this year, ‘No enemy in the field has done more to harm the combat readiness of our military than sequestration.’ ”

At the Heritage event, Thornberry was also bashing the CR. “Sunday we’re on a new fiscal year and for the ninth consecutive year we started with a continuing resolution. Now what that means is you got to spend exactly the same amount of money on exactly the same things in exactly the same quantities now that you spent all of last year,” he complained. “And it doesn’t matter if you, if the world has changed, it doesn’t matter if your needs have changed, it doesn’t matter if you don’t need to spend the money on whatever you spent last year. You still have to spend the money on the same things in the same quantities.”

THE CAPS WILL GO: That said, Thornberry predicted that a bipartisan compromise would be found this year to lift or end mandatory budget caps that have prevented agreement on a full-year budget up to now. “I believe there will be a deal. I can’t give you the contours of that agreement, whether just the sequestration part goes away, or the budget caps are lifted, the budget caps are repealed, all of those are options,” Thornberry said during a q-and-a session after his speech. “I suspect there will be a domestic and a defense component to any final agreement, but I think it will happen, and as far as I’m concerned the sooner it happens the better.”

MILITARY MISHAPS AND VEGAS: During his keynote speech, Thornberry noted a string of military mishaps this year has killed roughly the same number of troops as victims in the Las Vegas shooting. “Just this week we’ve lost another training airplane, and if you go back and look at the accidents … not all those accidents have got that much attention,” Thornberry said. A tally from the Armed Services Committee came up 57 troops killed in accidents this year, including the Navy T-45 Goshawk training crash in Tennessee on Sunday that killed two. Lone gunman Stephen Paddock killed 58 and injured 489 on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday.

The somewhat sensational message from the typically low-key chairman came in a speech marking the release of Heritage’s fourth annual Index of Military Strength, which soberly concludes “America’s military has undoubtedly grown weaker.”

TRUMP’S NEW TOP LINE, $700 BILLION: Congress has until December to reach a budget deal that could lift a $549 billion spending cap and make Thornberry’s $696 billion defense policy bill a reality. As part of the stepped-up efforts mentioned at Heritage, Thornberry rallied 152 House Republicans to send a letter to Trump on Thursday praising him for supporting a $700 billion defense budget in a speech to the United Nations in September. “We write to commend your explicit endorsement for funding our national defense at $700 billion this year,” they wrote. Trump also used the $700 billion figure last night during his photo-op with military leaders.

Amid much fanfare, Trump unveiled his own $639 billion defense request in May. In his first speech to the U.N. General Assembly last month, the president’s comment that “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission” drew much of the attention. But Trump also said, “It has just been announced that we will be spending almost $700 billion on our military and defense.” The comment likely referred to the $700 billion National Defense Authorization Act spearheaded by Sen. John McCain and passed by the Senate at the time of the U.N. speech. For much of this year, Thornberry and McCain have criticized Trump’s defense spending plans as inadequate.

SHADOWY MISSION IN NIGER: The Pentagon was tight-lipped yesterday about the details surrounding the deaths of three U.S. Army Green Berets in Niger. “They were on a security assistance advise mission,” said Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie at an afternoon Pentagon briefing. “I don’t have any further particular operational detail on this, but it’s a pretty broad mission with the government of Niger in order to increase their capability to stand alone and to prosecute violent extremists in the region,” he said. Several hundred U.S. troops are in the country, including some operating a drone base, but the Pentagon provided almost no details yesterday about how the U.S. troops were killed. “Not gonna share the nature of what the patrol’s doing, what the operation was doing at the time that it came under fire,” McKenzie said. “I don’t think it’d be useful to share that information.”

NOT SO FAST: McKenzie did reveal that despite all the fanfare about dispatching roughly 3,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan as part of Trump’s revamped strategy, only a handful have arrived. The number of U.S. troops on the ground still stands just north of 11,000. The reason for the delay: hurricane relief operations in Puerto Rico are taking priority. “There’s a finite number of transport aircraft that U.S. Transportation Command has. We’re moving things to Puerto Rico, we’re doing a variety of things to help down there,” McKenzie said. “Forces continue to flow, but there has been a slight delay. It’ll take a little bit of time to build up a force in Afghanistan.”

THE FALL OF HAWIJA: Trump last night cited the “tremendous progress” that has been made with respect to the Islamic State. “I guess the media is going to be finding out about that over the next short period of time.”

Yesterday, the top U.S. commander in Iraq congratulated Iraqi forces for their “swift and decisive victory” in liberating Hawija, the last major bastion of Islamic State control in Iraq. “Today’s victory demonstrates we are stronger together, and this coalition remains committed to supporting our partners in the tough fight ahead as we continue our mission to defeat ISIS,” said Lt. Gen. Paul Funk in a statement. The fall of Hawija leaves ISIS in control of only a small sliver of desert in Iraq’s Anbar province, a roughly 60-mile corridor from Rawah to Al Qaim, near the Syrian border. The battle lasted 14 days and ended Thursday with the reported surrender of more than 1,000 dispirited ISIS fighters.

DOJ DEFENDS TRUMP’S TRANSGENDER BAN: The Trump administration has made its first legal defense of the president’s order to roll back open transgender military service by asking a federal court to toss out a lawsuit by a group of transgender troops. The Department of Justice filed a motion late Wednesday in D.C. district court arguing that the plaintiffs in Doe v. Trump — five active-duty transgender troops, a Naval Academy midshipman and an ROTC student — have not been harmed because no new personnel policy is in place yet. The civil suit is “premature and should be dismissed for many reasons, including that the Defense Department is actively reviewing such service requirements, as the president ordered, and because none of the plaintiffs have established that they will be impacted by current policies on military service,” Lauren Ehrsam, a DOJ spokesperson, said.

Plaintiffs in Doe v. Trump, most of them anonymous, are under deadline to respond to the DOJ dismissal motion later this month. The case was the first to be filed out of four pending lawsuits stemming from Trump’s tweets in July that transgender troops will no longer be allowed to serve in any capacity and a subsequent order to Mattis to come up with a plan to roll back the Obama administration initiative by February.

FANNING SPEAKS OUT: The DOJ filing prompted a response from former Army Secretary Eric Fanning, who criticized Trump’s effort to curb transgender service as damaging to military readiness. “Any time you take a group and imply … that they are different or set apart for reasons unrelated to their ability to serve and meet the requirements, it’s harmful for the force,” Fanning told the Washington Examiner. “It’s harmful to the individuals, but it is harmful to the force as a whole.” Fanning, along with Obama-era Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, filed statements with the court in August supporting the Doe v. Trump lawsuit. “Frankly, my preference is the courts, the Congress and the American public are all aligned on issues. But each of those elements is an important tool in the fight to advance civil rights,” Fanning said. “Right now … I think of all those elements the courts are the one that can move the fastest to sort of put a stop on this because this is having an impact today on people in uniform.”

Fanning, who served under former President Barack Obama as the first openly gay service secretary, also told the Washington Examiner about his initial reaction to Trump’s unexpected Twitter announcement in July declaring a ban on transgender service in any capacity. “I was also shocked at how far the president went in his tweets to say that there is no place for transgender Americans in uniform including those who are already serving,” he said. “That is an incredibly disruptive thing to take people who are already serving, they’ve been recruited, they’ve been trained, they are in jobs, many of them deployed, and to pull them out of the force.” He said it’s likely most uniformed military leaders did not want to revisit the issue. “The uniformed leadership most of them I think believe, ‘Look, we debated this, we decided this, we made a decision, it’s not right to go back. We have other things to worry about that we need to focus on,’ ” Fanning said.

MEGA BREACH: Russian government workers were able to steal information about America’s foreign computer networks and cyberattack defense systems from a National Security Agency contractor’s home computer after the employee transferred the highly classified material to his home computer, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The hacking has yet to be formally disclosed but could be among the most significant security breaches in recent history. U.S. officials believe the hackers were able to go after the contractor because he or she used a Russian-made antivirus software by Kaspersky Lab.

KELLY HACKED? White House officials believe that the personal cellphone of White House chief of staff John Kelly was compromised, possibly dating back to December, according to a report Thursday. Prior to assuming his position as chief of staff in July, Kelly served as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and as a result, there are concerns about whether hackers or foreign governments obtained information on Kelly’s phone during his time in the Trump administration, a report from Politico and the Project on Government Oversight said.

Kelly submitted his phone to White House tech support over the summer and said it hadn’t been working properly for months or updating software, which led tech support staff to uncover a suspected breach.

THE XBOX SOLUTION: In his Heritage speech yesterday, Thornberry told a tale of Navy acquisition that could go down in Pentagon lore along with the $640 toilet seat, and $35 claw hammer, but in a good way. “I just have to say I was struck by the Navy’s announcement that to operate periscopes on new submarines they’re going to use Xbox 360 controllers, which cost about $30 apiece, rather than the specially designed controllers that cost $38,000 apiece, partly for cost but mainly because the guys who were coming in to run those periscopes already know how to work those controllers and they work fine.” Thornberry cited the decision to go with cheaper commercial off-the-shelf technology as just the sort of “agility and innovation” that is  required “across the board.”

ABOUT THAT STORM: Amid all the speculation about what Trump was hinting at last night, we should point out that Tropical Storm Nate is expected to make landfall on the Gulf Coast this weekend. Just in case he wasn’t using a metaphor.

THE RUNDOWN

AP: APNewsBreak: US military halts exercises over Qatar crisis

Daily Beast: Slain Green Berets were outnumbered 4 to 1

Military Times: Mattis warns DOD against leaks in new memo

Foreign Policy: Niger ambush highlights growing U.S. military involvement in Africa

Wall Street Journal: NATO to increase counterterrorism funding in line with Trump agenda

DefenseTech: JSTARS replacement decision due by end of October

War on the Rocks: Puerto Rico shows why the Army needs to look beyond helicopters

USNI News: John McCain says negotiating with North Korea is ‘odious option’

Defense News: Lawmakers to U.S. Army: If network programs worth $6B are discarded, what’s next?

UPI: Boeing to acquire Aurora Flight Sciences

Defense One: Pentagon: We’ll keep buying software that Russian spies have looked through

New York Times: What is the Iran nuclear deal? And why does Trump hate it?

Bloomberg: U.S. Intelligence Sees China’s Military Expanding Bases Globally

Reuters: Pakistan’s Top Diplomat Pushes Back On U.S. Claims Of Militant Support

Calendar

SUNDAY | OCT. 8

1 p.m. 801 Mt Vernon Place NW. 2017 Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting and exposition with keynote speech by retired Gen. Carter Ham, association president. ausameetings.org

MONDAY | OCT. 9

7 a.m. 801 Mt Vernon Place NW. 2017 Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting and exposition with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Gen. Robert Abrams, leader of Army Forces Command; and Gen. James C. McConville, Army vice chief of staff. ausameetings.org

TUESDAY | OCT. 10

7 a.m. 801 Mt Vernon Place NW. 2017 Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting and exposition with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley; acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy; and Sergeant Major of the Army Daniel A. Dailey. ausameetings.org

8 a.m. 1919 North Lynn St. Quarterly procurement division meeting. ndia.org

9:30 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Formulating national security strategy with retired Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle, the former deputy director of DOD’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation; Andrew Hoehn, senior vice president at the Rand Corp.; and Christine Wormuth, former under secretary of defense for policy. csis.org

10 a.m. 1775 Massachusetts Ave. NW. The path forward for dealing with North Korea. brookings.edu

10:30 a.m. 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW. Afghanistan going forward, whether to surge, negotiate or get out, with Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; Stephen Biddle, professor at George Washington University; and Maxwell Pappas, a U.S. Army major with three combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. cato.org

11 a.m. 1030 15th St. NW. The Kurdish crisis: Baghdad, Irbil, and institutional reform in Iraq with Stuart Jones, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq. atlanticcouncil.org

2 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Book discussion on “Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State” with author Carter Malkasian. csis.org

3:30 p.m. Cannon 121. The Iran nuclear deal and assessing the impact of de-certification. cato.org

5 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. The National Security Council at 75 and charting the future of America’s security with H.R. McMaster, national security advisor, and former national security advisors Henry Kissinger, Stephen Hadley, and retired Gen. James L. Jones. csis.org

5:30 p.m. 1234 9th St. NW. Cocktails and conversations: Lessons from the Eastern front with Col. Patrick Ellis, commander of the Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment, and Maj. Gen. Steven Shapiro, commanding general of the Army’s 21st Theater Sustainment Command. defenseone.com

WEDNESDAY | OCT. 11

7 a.m. 801 Mt Vernon Place NW. 2017 Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting and exposition with Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan; Ellen Lord, under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics; acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy; and Gen. Robert Brown, commander U.S. Army Pacific. ausameetings.org

8 a.m. 12777 Fair Lakes Circle. TRI-Association Small Business Advisory Panel (TRIAD) conference. ndia.org

8:30 a.m. 1740 Massachusetts Ave. NW. A discussion with Rep. Rick Larsen and Rep. Don Bacon on U.S. defense needs and priorities. brookings.edu

9 a.m. 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW. Global business briefing with Michael T. Strianese, chairman and CEO of L3 Technologies. defenseone.com

2 p.m. 1211 Connecticut Ave. NW. Drones under Trump. stimson.org

2 p.m. Rayburn 2172. U.S. policy toward Lebanon with Michael Ratney, deputy assistant secretary of state. foreignaffairs.house.gov

5 p.m. 815 Connecticut Ave. NW. Cyber risk Wednesday: Building a more defensible cyberspace. atlanticcouncil.org

THURSDAY | OCT. 12

8 a.m. 2401 M St. NW. Defense Writers Group breakfast with Maj. Gen. Stephen Farmen, Army Security Assistance Command. centermediasecurity.org

11 a.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Is This the beginning of the end for the Iran nuclear accord? wilsoncenter.org

12 p.m. 214 Massachusetts Ave. NE. What’s next for the U.S. Iran policy. heritage.org

2 p.m. House Visitor Center 210. Empty threat or serious danger: Assessing North Korea’s risk to the homeland. homeland.house.gov