Putin says trust between Russia and US has ‘degraded’

In an interview broadcast today by the Russian state television channel Mir, President Vladimir Putin said, “It can be said that the level of trust at the working level, especially at the military level, has not become better but most likely has degraded,” adding that he believes Syria has complied with an agreement to dispose of it chemical weapons “so far as we know.”

Former State Department and U.S. NATO ambassador Nick Burns doesn’t envy Tillerson’s task. “I support what he is trying to do, and that is to move the Russians off this warlike position to international negotiations,” Burns told MSNBC yesterday, but said he thinks Tillerson’s going to have “a very rough time” in Moscow. Burns points out that Syria’s Bashar Assad gives Moscow a foothold in the region with a naval base and airpower, as well as alignment with Iran and Hezbollah. “The Russians want to keep that,” Burns said. “And so I don’t think that will be a winning hand for the administration.”

NOT GOING INTO SYRIA: In an interview with Maria Bartiromo that aired this morning on the Fox Business Network, President Trump said despite quick response to Syria’s chemical weapon use, he’s not inclined to go to war with Assad. “We’re not going into Syria,” Trump said, not mentioning the 500 U.S. special operations forces on the ground, advising and assisting Syrian Arabs and Kurds waging the war against ISIS. But Trump repeated that he was moved to act because he saw the Assad regime “using horrible, horrible chemical weapons, which they agreed not to use under the Obama administration.

“I mean even some of the worst tyrants in the world didn’t use the kind of gases that they used. And some of the gases are unbelievably potent,” Trump told Fox. “So when I saw that, I said we have to do something.”

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BABIES: At his first Pentagon news conference since being sworn in as defense secretary Jan. 20, Jim Mattis said the cruise missile strike was not about who was being killed, or how many, but rather the use of banned weapons. “The purpose of this attack was singular, against the chemical weapons use,” Mattis said. “And the reason for the strike was that alone. It was not a harbinger of some change in our military campaign,” which he said remain focused on “breaking ISIS.”

At the late afternoon briefing I asked Mattis directly, “Can you help us understand why the death of innocent men, women and children from a chemical weapon warrants a U.S. military response, but the deaths of far more men women and children in Syria from conventional weapons such as barrel bombs does not warrant a military response?” Mattis replied, “I think what we have to look at here, Jamie, is a policy decision by the United States. There is a limit, I think, to what we can do. And when you look at what happened with this chemical attack, we knew that we could not stand passive on this. But it was not a statement that we could enter full fledged, full bore into the most complex civil war probably raging on the planet at this time.”

IS CHLORINE GAS A CHEMICAL WEAPON? Mattis was deliberately vague about whether chlorine gas dropped in barrel bombs would constitute a chemical weapons attack, and therefore trigger another U.S. attack. “But as far as barrel bombs with chlorine, I mean, chemical weapons are chemical weapons,” Mattis said. “It is not about whether it’s delivered with an artillery shell or it’s delivered by a helicopter with a barrel bomb, or a fighter aircraft with a bomb. It’s about chemical weapons.” But pressed to say if Assad’s use of barrel bombs with chlorine gas is the new red line, Mattis refused to be pinned down, presumably not to tell Assad what he can and cannot do, and not to commit his boss to action he might not want to take. Later while talking to reporters informally after his news conference, Mattis admitted he did not want to clear up the confusion.

Speaking on CNN, just after the Mattis news conference, former State Department spokesman John Kirby, now a CNN analyst, said there should be little question that chlorine, while not a banned substance, can be a banned weapon. “If it’s weaponized, we would consider it as a chemical weapon,” Kirby said. “If you drop a barrel bomb full of chlorine on people, that in fact becomes now a chemical weapon and should be considered that.”

WHAT WOULD McCAIN AND GRAHAM DO? “What is needed now is a strategy that secures U.S. and allied interests in Syria — ending the conflict, dealing a sustainable defeat to ISIL and Al-Qaeda, and beginning to repatriate Syrian refugees to their homes,” said Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham in a joint statement issued yesterday. “We urge the President to take greater military action to achieve our objectives, including grounding the Syrian air force and establishing safe havens inside Syria to protect Syrians. There will never be a diplomatic solution as long as Assad dominates the battlefield.”

MEANWHILE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD: North Korea reacted Tuesday with threats of nuclear war to the U.S. deployment of the USS Carl Vinson strike group toward the peninsula, but Mattis portrayed the movement of Vinson as nothing out of the ordinary. Mattis, referring to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and its accompanying guided-missile destroyers and cruiser as “she,” said the military felt rerouting the strike group Saturday from a planned visit to Australia was the most prudent decision and declined to link it to growing tensions with the North Korean regime over its advancing nuclear missile program. “She’s stationed there in the western Pacific for a reason. She operates freely up and down the Pacific, and she’s just on her way up there because that’s where we thought it was most prudent to have her at this time,” Mattis said. “There’s not a specific demand signal or specific reason why we’re sending her up there.”

THE U.S. ‘ARMADA’ — SUBS vs CARRIERS: In that Fox Business interview that aired this morning, Trump referred to the U.S. carrier strike group “an armada,” and warned North Korea is “doing the wrong thing.” “We are sending an armada, very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful. Far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you,” Trump said.

It’s not clear what Trump was told by his military advisers. A U.S. aircraft carrier strike group typically includes a nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) attack submarine. An attack sub can fire torpedoes and cruise missiles, but doesn’t pack nearly the combat firepower of a U.S. supercarrier with its deck full of warplanes. Ballistic missile submarines, on the other hand, do carry nuclear Trident missiles. However, these larger submarines patrol the seas on their own, not with a strike group.

Good Wednesday 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.

HAPPENING TODAY: Dorrian’s back. Air Force Col. John Dorrian, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, has returned from leave and will brief Pentagon reporters on the latest in the offensives to retake Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria. Live streamed from Baghdad at 11 a.m. at defense.gov. Yesterday, Gen. Joseph Votel, top U.S. commander for the region, said the war plan remains on track. “The campaign plan remains where we thought that it would be at this particular point,” Votel said. “We’re obviously engaged in very, very difficult fighting in both Mosul and around the Raqqa area, which is where we expected to be at this time.”

UPON FURTHER REVIEW: Votel also provided an updated assessment about the accuracy of last week’s U.S. cruise missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat airfield, from which a Syrian Su-22 was tracked and then observed dropping a poison gas bomb on the town of Khan Sheikhoun. The U.S. military initially claimed a 100 percent success rate, but Votel said that after a booth review it now appears 57 of the 59 cruise missiles hit their marks. “We assessed that we achieved our stated objective and the regime’s ability to generate offensive military capability from Shayrat airfield, which we assess, was the launching point for this chemical attack has been severely degraded.”

Mattis also qualified his initial statement that the strike disabled or destroyed 20 percent of Syria’s operational aircraft. “I thought it was about 20 percent,” Mattis said. “I think it’s around 20 aircraft were taken out. … I probably shouldn’t have used the 20 percent.” But Mattis added that given the sorry state of Syria’s air force, 20 aircraft could equate to that. “The Syrian air force is not in good shape. It’s been worn down by years of combat plus some significant maintenance problems.” Mattis blamed the confusion on “the challenges of trying to get it accurate, but get it out as quickly as we can actually give you some fidelity.”

NOMINEE UNDER FIRE: Two groups are aiming to derail the nomination of Mark Green, Trump’s pick for Army secretary, due to his stances on gay and transgender rights. The American Military Partner Association and the Human Rights Campaign are calling the Tennessee state senator “radical” and point to critical comments he made last year to a state Tea Party group about the Obama administration’s push for transgender bathroom rights. At one point, Green told the crowd, “If you poll the psychiatrists, they are going to tell you that transgender is a disease.” The groups want the Senate to reject the nomination. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democratic member of the Armed Services Committee, called the comments “deeply troubling.” Other Democrats on the committee are likely to seize on the issue when a confirmation is held for Green, who is a businessman and former Army special operations flight surgeon. But a rejection by the committee is still unlikely. Trump’s nominee for Air Force secretary, Heather Wilson, passed the initial vote with an overwhelming bipartisan majority and is now headed to a Senate floor vote.  

CARTER PAGE: The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of Carter Page, an adviser to then-presidential candidate Trump, as part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, the Washington Post reported last night. The paper quotes law enforcement and other U.S. officials as saying the FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia.

UNMASKING UPDATE: Neither Republican nor Democratic lawmakers, or their aides, have found any evidence suggesting that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal by requesting the “unmasking” of US individuals’ identities, CNN reports. The report quotes “multiple sources in both parties” who say the findings contradict Trump’s allegations that former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice broke the law by requesting some individuals in the intelligence reports be identified, or “unmasked.” One congressional intelligence source told CNN the requests made by Rice were “normal and appropriate.” Another source said there’s “absolutely” no smoking gun in the reports, urging the White House to declassify them to make clear there was nothing alarming in the documents, which were first disclosed by Rep. Devin Nunes.

SMOKING GUN ON SARIN: A senior administration official told reporters yesterday that Assad specifically used sarin gas on civilians last week in Idlib province. Physiological samples from victims of the attack were “very consistent with nerve agent and sarin exposure,” the official said. “Victimology also shows that those people don’t have other wounds that would be consistent with another attack.

“We saw miosis. We saw frothing at the nose and mouth [and] twitching,” the official explained. “All of those are consistent with nerve agent, they are not consistent with chlorine.” That official, who did the briefing on background, then went on to accuse Russia of helping Syria cover it all up. “In terms of the Russian narrative … across the board, starting in 2013 and then since, we’ve seen both the Russians and the Syrians have a very clear campaign to try to obfuscate the nature of attacks, the attackers and what has happened in each particular incident.”

MONTENEGRO JOINS THE CLUB: Trump signed a resolution yesterday approving Montenegro’s request to become a member of NATO, after the small Balkan nation cleared a key hurdle in the Senate last month. “The NATO alliance has been central to ensuring peace and security on the European continent,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday. After all NATO nations approve the accession, Montenegro will become the 29th country to join the Western military alliance.

“President Trump looks forward to the May 25 NATO Leaders Meeting in Brussels and the opportunity to reaffirm those fundamental and enduring transatlantic values,” the White House said in a statement. “Montenegro will be there as well, signaling to other NATO aspirants that the door to membership in the Euro-Atlantic community of nations remains open.”

IVANKA’S POWER: Eric Trump thinks his sister Ivanka played a big role in their father’s decision to launch a missile strike on a Syrian air base in response to the government’s use of chemical weapons on its citizens. “Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said ‘listen, this is horrible stuff.’ My father will act in times like that,” President Trump’s 33-year-old son told The Daily Telegraph.

Eric Trump noted that in the past his father had been against military action in Syria, but the images of dying and wounded children “deeply affected” him.

YOU KNEW WE’D BRING IT UP: We all know about Spicer’s gaffe yesterday, but it would be weird not to include it. So here it is, in case you missed it or feel like reading it all over again. While briefing reporters, Spicer tried to illustrate Assad’s depravity by saying Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” Which of course he did. Asked about it later in the briefing, Spicer stammered through a response involving “Holocaust centers,” then his office followed up with a clarification that he was in no way trying to “lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust.” That statement went through some revisions as well. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called on Trump to fire Spicer, as did the Anne Frank Center. Then Spicer appeared on CNN, where he apologized, but then seemed to say Trump was trying to “destabilize” the Middle East. CNN later clarified that Spicer meant to say “stabilize.”

One of the most biting critiques came from Rep. Adam Smith on CNN. “It’s obvious that Sean Spicer needs to know a lot more about history when he’s making his comments; and those comments were insensitive and ignorant without question,” Smith said. “Spicer was freelancing there, and obviously, he was out of his depth, you know. I don’t know if he needs to be fired or not, but he certainly does need to get better at his job.” Smith also noted the obvious, “Assad does not have to be worse than Hitler in order to be a real problem, in order to be somebody worthy of our condemnation.”

The videos are in the links above, but better practice your cringe face first.

SO WHAT WAS SPICER THINKING? If you connect the dots, it would appear that Spicer got his talking point from Mattis, who delivered a more artful version at his Pentagon press conference later that afternoon that wisely omitted any reference to Hitler. Here’s how Mattis put it: “Even in World War II, chemical weapons were not used on battlefields. Even in the Korean War, they were not used on battlefields, since World War I; there’s been an international convention on this. And to stand idly by when that convention is violated, that is what we had to take action on urgently in our own vital interest.”

Note that Trump also used a version of the talking point in his Fox interview, when he said, “Even some of the worst tyrants in the world didn’t use the kind of gases that they used.”

THE RUNDOWN

Associated Press: Trump’s intelligence doubts parroted by Russia

BuzzFeed: White House: Russia is spreading “false narratives” about Syria’s chemical attack

CNN: Haley says Russia is ‘nervous’ and an ‘island’ after Assad attack

USA Today: U.S. troops may not be needed in Afghanistan by 2020, ambassador says

Wall Street Journal: Trump issues new warning to North Korea

Foreign Affairs: Trump’s small change: why U.S. defense spending will continue to muddle through

Foreign Policy: Europe and U.S. move to fight Russian hybrid warfare

Washington Post: What is Tulsi Gabbard thinking on Syria?

USNI News: Destroyer USS Porter returns to homeport following Tomahawk strike

Air Force Times: Air Force kicks off Atlantic Trident exercise with the F-35 and British and French partners

War on the Rocks: Mirages of war: Six illusions from our recent conflicts

New York Times: In Syria and Nigeria, Trump faces the limits of American power

USA Today: For North Korea, sanctions are safer than a strike, experts say

Marine Corps Times: West Coast, Hawaii Marines begin arriving in Australia for six months of training

Associated Press: Explosion at Army ammunition plant in Missouri kills 1

Defense News: Singapore moves six F-15s to Guam for joint training with US forces

Calendar

WEDNESDAY | APRIL 12

9:30 a.m. 1501 Lee Highway. A Discussion with Lt. Gen. Mark Nowland, deputy chief of staff for operations at the Air Force, about the service and the future force. mitchellaerospacepower.org

10 a.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Book launch for Al-Qaeda’s Revenge: The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings. wilsoncenter.org

10 a.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. A look at what’s next for Afghanistan-Pakistan relations with Daud Khattak, senior editor at Radio Free Europe, Omar Samad, the former Afghan ambassador to France, and Joshua White, associate professor of practice and fellow at Johns Hopkins University. wilsoncenter.org

11 a.m. 214 Massachusetts Ave. NE. Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, talks about rebuilding his service branch. heritage.org

12 p.m. 2101 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 700. David Hoffman, deputy general counsel of the Defense Contract Audit Agency, speaks at a quarterly procurement division meeting. ndia.org

6 p.m. 1777 F St. NW. Perspectives on Russia from Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Alexander R. Vershbow, distinguished fellow with the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, and Rita Hauser, president of the Hauser Foundation. cfr.org

THURSDAY | APRIL 13

7:30 a.m. 1401 Lee Highway. Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks at an association breakfast. afa.org

8:30 a.m. 1777 F St. NW. A series of morning panels on the origins of modern Russia in the collapse of the Soviet Union, current trends in the country today and the future of foreign policy toward Moscow. cfr.org

12:30 p.m. 1030 15th St. NW, 12th Floor. Former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway and a panel discuss advanced energy innovation and national security. atlanticcouncil.org

3:30 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Avenue, NW. CIA Director Mike Pompeo discusses national security. csis.org

3:30 p.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Book launch for Konrad Wolf’s But I Saw It Myself, This is the War: War Diary and Letters, 1942-1945. wilsoncenter.org

MONDAY | APRIL 17

10 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Avenue, NW. Sergey Denisentsev, a senior research fellow at the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, discusses Russia’s arms exports. csis.org

TUESDAY | APRIL 18

7 a.m. 7525 Colshire Drive. The beginning of a three-day annual summit on systems engineering cyber-resilient and secure weapon systems. ndia.org

7 a.m. 300 5th Ave. SW. The National Defense Industrial Association kicks off its three-day science and engineering technology conference. ndia.org

6:30 p.m. 529 14th St. NW. A premiere screening of Danger Close film and Q&A with war reporter Alex Quade. press.org

TUESDAY | APRIL 18

9 a.m. 1211 Connecticut Ave. NW. The difficult road toward stabilizing Iraq and the Gulf region. stimson.org