BEHIND THE CURVE: President Trump didn’t consult with Jim Mattis before he impulsively ordered a spectacular military parade to be thrown à la France’s Bastille Day extravaganza. And he didn’t consult with his defense secretary when he just as impulsively canceled it. Mattis was in South America all last week when the story broke about the sky-high cost estimates, and he admitted to reporters as he flew back to Washington Friday that he wasn’t fully informed when he said the day before there were no such estimates.

HAPPENING TODAY, DEFENSE SPENDING DEBATE: Senators are set to resume debate today on the 2019 appropriations bill to fund the Pentagon. The $675 billion in defense money is wrapped up in a “minibus” package that includes additional funding for the departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services. Three amendments are already teed up for today and more are likely to come to the floor this week before the Senate takes a final vote on the minibus. Sen. Chris Murphy announced he is floating an amendment blocking U.S. support of Saudi coalition forces in the Yemen war. The legislation comes after a recent Saudi strike on a school bus reportedly killed 51 people including 44 children.

“Either the Pentagon should be 100 percent certain that U.S. weapons and funding aren’t being used to commit war crimes in Yemen, or we should cut off U.S. support right now. Forty-four innocent kids are now dead, joining the thousands of other civilians who have been murdered by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen,” Murphy said in a statement. The U.S. provides aerial refueling and intelligence to Saudi Arabia as it battles Houthi rebels in the three-year-old war. Congress also added a provision in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that could cut off funding for the U.S. refueling mission.

BREAKING: A helicopter crashed in Iraq last night, killing a coalition service member, according to Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Col. Sean Ryan. The nationality of the service member was not released. “While the incident was not a result of enemy fire, it further demonstrates the sacrifices of #Coalition service members & and the danger they face everyday,” he tweeted. Several other service members were injured.

PRIVATIZING AFGHANISTAN: Asked about whether the president was seriously considering a proposal from Erik Prince, the former head of Iraq war security firm Blackwater, to replace military personnel in Afghanistan with private contractors, Mattis again pleaded ignorance. “You’ll have to, you know, pass that over to the White House,” he said. “I’m not familiar with the details, what Erik said, or where he said it, or the context.” Mattis insisted he’s been given no sign that the president is growing impatient with the current strategy, which the Pentagon admits may take years to bring peace to the country. “I have never had that feeling from the president,” he said.

Meanwhile on ABC, national security adviser John Bolton was not ruling the idea out. “There are always a lot of discussions. I find it helpful, I’m always open to new ideas,” he told Martha Raddatz. “But I’m not going to comment on what the thinking is. That’ll ultimately be the president’s decision.”

NBC reported Friday that Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, had reprised his idea of replacing American troops with private military contractors who would work for a special U.S. envoy who would report directly to the president. Trump, according to NBC, has been “increasingly venting frustration to his national security team,” over the lack of progress in Afghanistan as the war approached the 17-year mark.

TALE OF TWO GHAZNIS: In an opinion piece yesterday in the Washington Post, contributor  Jason Lyall described the recent Taliban attempt to seize the strategic Afghan city of Ghazni this way:

“On Aug. 11, more than 1,000 Taliban fighters stormed Ghazni, a city of some 270,000 Afghans less than 100 miles from Kabul, quickly overrunning its defenders. Over the next five days, Taliban forces sacked government buildings, seized the central prison, and looted and burned police stations. Driving the Taliban out required more than three dozen airstrikes as well as house-to-house fighting that left an estimated 250 civilians dead, hundreds of Afghan soldiers and police casualties, and large areas of downtown Ghazni destroyed. Humanitarian operations have been halting; the Taliban mined many of the central approaches, including the key Highway 1 linking Kabul to Ghazni, and clearing operations still continue.”

I asked Lt. Col. Martin O’Donnell, spokesman for the NATO Resolute Support mission, for his perspective. “In military parlance, I ‘non-concur’ with its rightness,” he said in an email from Kabul this morning

He did say some of the details were accurate. A police station was burned when a Molotov cocktail was thrown at it, but not destroyed; clearing operations do continue; and the Taliban did mine some of the central approaches.

But he took issue with some of the other descriptions. “Only about half the supposed number of Taliban attacked (500 as opposed to 1,000); no government buildings, including the prison, were seized; and the death toll appears widely over-exaggerated based upon Afghan government and civilian accounts,” O’Donnell said. “The Afghan government for example announced that they lost 170 (100 soldiers and 70 police), not ‘hundreds’ in the attack. And we only conducted 32 strikes, not ‘more than three dozen.’” And he insisted while humanitarian aid has ebbed and flowed during and after the five-day attack, it has not halted it.

“The Taliban purport to have civilians’ best interests at heart and they repeatedly told the people of Ghazni that they wouldn’t be harmed, yet they cowardly chose to hide themselves in people’s homes and shops to attack Afghan forces, endangering civilians and their livelihood,” he said. “As a result, deliberate Afghan force clearing operations will take time.”

BOLTON ON BRENNAN: In his interview on ABC, Bolton said he’s been in John Brennan’s shoes. Like the former CIA director, Bolton was accused of abusing his security clearance from his time as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. “I was accused by a senior State Department official of criticizing the administration’s policy on North Korea and using classified information,” Bolton said. “And it happened he was half right, I was criticizing the Bush administration, but I was not using classified information. Had I been, it would have been a different story.”

But Bolton could not give an example in which Brennan had divulged any classified information in his unrelenting harsh criticism of Trump. “I think a number of people have commented that he couldn’t be in the position he’s in of criticizing President Trump and his so-called collusion with Russia unless he did use classified information,” Bolton said. “But I don’t know the specifics.”

Meanwhile over on NBC, Brennan said he is willing to mount a legal challenge to the revocation of his security clearance, arguing it was done purely to silence a political critic. “I am going to do whatever I can personally try to prevent these abuses in the future, and if it means going to court, I will do that,” Brennan said on “Meet the Press.”

NO MORE REPORTS: Mattis should “stop releasing” assessments of China’s military, the Communist power said in response to a new Pentagon report on the regime’s air force.

“We call on the U.S. to abandon its Cold War mentality, regard China’s defense and military construction in an objective and rational way,” the Chinese Defense Ministry said in a statement carried by Global Times, a state-run outlet. “We also request that the US stops releasing the related reports and safeguards the stable development of the two countries’ military with real actions.”

TRUMP’S TRANSGENDER CORRESPONDENCE: Troops and rights groups who are suing Trump and the Pentagon over proposed restrictions on transgender military service may be closer to forcing the White House to turn over internal correspondence over how the policy was developed. Two federal courts have now ruled that the administration must comply with requests from the plaintiffs to see internal communications as Trump announced the ban on Twitter last summer and later issued memos on the policy.

Plaintiffs argue the emails and other documents can show whether Trump consulted with generals and military experts, as he claimed he did, or whether made the decision to discriminate against transgender troops on his own.

SYRIA SWITCH: Trump’s administration is using international contributions to replace $230 million of its own foreign aid to Syria, the State Department announced Friday.

The department plans to withhold the money following new pledges of $100 million and $50 million from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, respectively. U.S. officials have raised about $300 million internationally for Syrian aid since April, when the American contribution was placed “under review” by the administration.

STEALTH SAVINGS: Here’s a novel accounting method for saving hard-earned taxpayer dollars propose an expensive project and then, before spending any money on it, cancel it. Instant savings! As we pointed out Friday, the high-end estimate for the now defunct military parade was more than $90 million, about the same as the sticker price on the standard A-model of the F-35 joint strike fighter.

Trump in his tweet Friday seemed to confirm that figure, suggesting the savings would be put to good use. “Now we can buy some more jet fighters!,” he tweeted. Because the money was never allocated and never spent, the effect of the parade cancellation is largely, in the lexicon of Washington, “budget neutral.” Except, of course for the time and energy that went into the planning effort.

The fact is it was hard to find anyone in the Pentagon who thought the parade was a good idea. “Whatever the costs are … I think those costs, those funds can be put to better use,” said former Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen on Fox. “The military is the best military in the world. It’s the best I’ve ever seen and support of them in terms of their pay and their benefits, et cetera, and what they are doing is what’s really critical. I don’t think a parade does much for them in that regard.”

THE RUNDOWN

Washington Examiner: Senators want answers from Army after report of lead poisoning at bases

War on the Rocks: McRaven’s Rousing Protest: Are Civil-Military and Democratic Norms in Tension?

Reuters: Afghanistan announces Muslim Eid holiday ceasefire with Taliban

Washington Post: The secret app that gives Syrian civilians minutes to escape airstrikes

New York Times: Who Is Winning the War in Afghanistan? Depends on Which One

Wall Street Journal: Military Faces a Sweeping Turnover Among Upper Commanders

LA Times: Trump backed ‘space force’ after months of lobbying by officials with ties to aerospace industry

Bloomberg: Navy’s Troubled $11 Billion Carrier Falters on Another Milestone

Military Times: Women with military service take on politics

CNN: Bolton: China, Iran, North Korea meddling in midterm elections

Washington Post: ‘Fat Leonard’ scandal grows with indictment of three more retired Navy officials

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