Esper becomes the 27th secretary of defense. He adjusted his Twitter handle to reflect his new status, and last night he tweeted his thanks to the Senate Armed Services Committee for expediting his confirmation in record time. “Thank you to Chairman @JimInhofe and Ranking Member @SenJackReed for my swift confirmation process. And thank you, @POTUS, for the opportunity to serve,” he tweeted.

THE NAYSAYERS: Of the eight votes cast in opposition to Esper, five were from Democrats running for president. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California, and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, all 2020 presidential hopefuls, all voted nay.

Warren aggressively sparred with Esper at his confirmation hearing, saying his refusal to agree to ethics restrictions beyond those required by law “smacks of corruption plain and simple.” Republicans accused her of grandstanding and apologized to Esper for what chairman Jim Inhofe called “unfair” treatment.

GRASSLEY’S LAMENT: Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, whose pet cause is waging war against waste, fraud, and abuse in the massive Pentagon bureaucracy, issued a statement saying that after meeting with Esper personally, he was encouraged by his “commitment to rein in wasteful spending and get the Pentagon’s financial problems in order.”

But every new Pentagon chief pledges to be a careful steward of the taxpayer’s money, as Grassley, who has been around a while, well knows. “Secretary Esper has the experience and qualifications to succeed,” Grassley said, and then letting his cynicism slip added, “Of course, in the past this has proved challenging for other Secretaries of Defense despite similar commitments.”

SPEAKING OF WHICH: A Reuters-CBS News report alleging Balfour Beatty Communities falsified maintenance records at an Oklahoma base to help it qualify for millions of dollars in bogus bonuses has stoked bipartisan outrage at the Senate Armed Services Committee. The report said the Air Force has suspended $4.3 million in incentive fees at 21 military housing bases operated by the landlord.

“It appears that military families were getting short-changed so that some of these managers could pocket bonuses. If that is the case, they need to be held accountable and taxpayer money should be clawed back,” said Rhode Island’s Jack Reed, ranking Democrat on the committee.

“The Air Force has done the right thing by suspending all incentive fees to Balfour Beatty, and this should remain the case while the FBI and other proper military authorities investigate these practices,” said Chairman Inhofe of Oklahoma. “if these allegations are substantiated, my committee will do everything within its power to ensure any wrong-doers are punished to the fullest extent of the law.”

Good Wednesday morning and welcome to Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense, written and compiled by Washington Examiner National Security Senior Writer Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) and edited by Kelly Jane Torrance (@kjtorrance). 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.

Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine and get Washington Briefing: politics and policy stories that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Daily on Defense will be on summer hiatus the week of Aug. 5 to 9. It will return to your inbox beginning Monday, Aug. 12.

HAPPENING TODAY: It’s David Norquist’s turn. Once Esper was confirmed, the White House sent the Senate the president’s formal nomination of Norquist to be deputy defense secretary, just in time for his 10 a.m. hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. As of yesterday afternoon, Richard Spencer ceased serving as acting defense secretary and is performing the duties of deputy defense secretary in place of Norquist, in addition to his duties as Navy secretary.

And now that Esper is no longer Army secretary, Undersecretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy is now acting Army secretary.

WINNERS, LOSERS IN BUDGET DEAL: Analysts have been pouring over the bipartisan two-year, $1.3 trillion budget deal, announced Monday, which would suspend the debt ceiling, add $320 billion in new spending, and set the Pentagon’s budget for FY 2020 at $738 billion.

Rick Berger at the American Enterprise Institute has compiled a short list:

Winners:

• Nancy Pelosi: By getting $10 billion more in non-defense spending over the course of the deal, the House speaker can “credibly claim to have broken the longstanding principle of ‘parity’ in budget deals,” in which defense spending and non-defense spending are matched 50-50.
• Mitch McConnell: The deal arrangement buys the majority leader stability, avoiding a sequester, a shutdown, and a one-year continuing resolution. “The new July 2021 debt ceiling deadline sets up either a chance for a newly re-elected Trump to work with Senate Republicans on a true debt reduction pact or to force a Democratic president to squander the most valuable first-term political capital,” Berger writes.

Losers:

• Fiscal hawks: The reaction from fiscal hawks can be summed up by Rep. Mark Walker’s tweet featuring the Joker standing next to a pile of money on fire. The Committee on a Responsible Federal Budget calls it “the worst budget agreement in our nation’s history.”
• Progressives: Left-leaning Democrats in Congress aren’t thrilled about a verbal agreement from Pelosi to keep “poison-pill” riders out of appropriations bills to restrict the president’s latitude on border wall issues. Still smarting after what they feel was a betrayal on the humanitarian aid package for the border, Progressive Dems are “unlikely to go quietly into that good night.”

Split Decision:

• Defense hawks: Berger argues the deal was a Pyrrhic victory for defense hawks, such as Sen. Jim Inhofe and Rep. Mac Thornberry. They avoided a one-year continuing resolution and across-the-board cuts to the military twice the size of the 2013 sequester but didn’t get their $750 billion for defense and have to settle for $738 billion in 2020, only $5 billion more than the House Democrats’ preferred level and about 1% real growth.

OPPOSITION BUILDING: Trump heralded it as a true compromise, but will he still feel that way when he reads the fine print and budget hawks in his own party begin whining that he got played by Pelosi and company? “The president tentatively agreed to a compromise, which he could ditch at any moment,” says Berger.

“The budget deal reached by congressional leadership is yet another disgrace that will leave the American taxpayer to foot the bill,” said Adam Brandon, the president of FreedomWorks. “Washington has all but abandoned economic sanity. With this ‘deal,’ GOP ‘leadership’ has ceded its ground on fiscal responsibility, which for years was supposed to be a core tenet of the party.”

OUT IN THE COLD: A group of 10 Senate Democrats have written President Trump to complain they are being frozen out of talks about how or whether to sanction Turkey for its S-400 missile purchase, beyond kicking the NATO ally out of the F-35 program.

“We understand you are meeting exclusively with Republican Senators to discuss the Administration’s response to this unprecedented development which has raised bipartisan concern.” The letter states. “If you were to engage with Democratic Senators on this issue, you would learn that our members agree with many past and present members of your administration, as well as many Republican Senators.”

The letter is signed by Bob Menendez, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and nine other Democrats: Ben Cardin, Jeanne Shaheen, Chris Coons, Tom Udall, Chris Murphy, Tim Kaine, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, and Cory Booker.

Trump is reportedly reluctant to impose additional economic sanctions on Turkey, insisting that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was stiffed by President Barack Obama on the purchase of U.S. Patriot missiles.

BUYERS READY FOR TURKEY’S F-35s: Lockheed Martin expects no problem finding other buyers for the 100 F-35 joint strike fighter jets Turkey committed to buy before the United States booted it out of the program last week, writes James Langford in the Washington Examiner.

Lockheed is on track to deliver 131 of the jets this year and to lower the price below a longstanding target of $80 million each, CEO Marillyn Hewson said yesterday. Turkey had been slated to receive 8 F-35s a year in the near future, and Hewson noted Poland is already expressing interest in buying 32 of the jets.

SYRIA SLAUGHTER: The Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, UOSSM, reported Monday that at least 37 people, including women and children, were killed in Syria when multiple airstrikes targeted a busy marketplace in Idlib province.

“Among those killed was a Syrian Civil Defense volunteer (White Helmets) as he was working to save victims of the first attack (known as a ‘double tap’ attack),” the humanitarian group reported.

Yesterday the United States condemned the strikes, blaming Russia and the regime of Bashar Assad. “These attacks by Russia and the Assad regime continue to deliberately strike civilian infrastructure — which is a blatant violation of international law — they hit medical facilities of which coordinates have been shared with the UN, in an effort to protect civilians,” said a State Department statement. “Attacks by Russia and the Assad regime also continue to kill and maim humanitarians such as ambulance drivers, health workers, and White Helmets volunteers.”

“There is no military solution in #Syria. We call for an immediate ceasefire & a return to the political process. End this humanitarian disaster,” tweeted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

TWO DRONES DOWNED: U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Frank McKenzie tells CBS News that Marines aboard the USS Boxer likely brought down two Iranian drones using state-of-the-art electric jamming technology.

“As always it was a complex tactical picture, we believe two drones. We believe two drones were successfully — there may have been more that we are not aware of — those are the two that we engaged successfully,” McKenzie told CBS’s David Martin.

Sailors and Marines aboard the ship reportedly saw one of the drones go down while the other disappeared from radar and is believed to have crashed.

AFGHANISTAN CAVE?: President Trump is engaged in wishful thinking when he treats Pakistan’s new prime minister, Imran Khan, as a trusted ally, argues Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of FDD’s Long War Journal.

Roggio notes that Trump’s conciliatory comments and “acquiescence to Pakistan” are a dramatic reversal from the belligerent stand he took in his Aug. 2017 speech and a tweet in Jan. 2018, in which he accused Pakistan of giving the United States “nothing but lies & deceit.”

“Trump is commending Pakistan despite the most recent Country Reports on Terrorism, which notes that Pakistan continues to provide safe haven and support for the Taliban and the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network,” writes Roggio.

“Trump has signaled that he seeks to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan,” he concludes. “It appears as though Trump is willing to deal with Pakistan, which he accused of perfidy just 18 months ago, to accomplish this goal.”

REVISIONIST HISTORY: Khan is also peddling a false, self-serving narrative about the 2011 U.S. raid that killed al Qaeda leader Obama bin Laden, write Russ Read and Jerry Dunleavy in the Washington Examiner.

In an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier, Khan claimed it was Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, that gave up bin Laden’s location and that Pakistan should have been the ones to “take him out.”

“Bin Laden was found through old-fashioned detective work and long, painstaking analysis by CIA experts,” wrote former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his 2015 book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. Gates said the real concern was the ISI would protect bin Laden and U.S. commandos could end up detained by Pakistani forces.

Read and Dunleavy lay out the whole story for anyone who wants a lesson in history and how myths get spread.

SUMMER READING: Our friends retired Lt. Gen. David Barno and Nora Bensahel, contributing editors at War on the Rocks, are out with their fourth annual summer reading list for national security nerds.

It’s an interesting, eclectic mix of fiction, nonfiction, podcasts, articles, and streaming video. Among the suggestions:

• “The Metamorphosis,” by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, in the August 2019 issue of The Atlantic.
• The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel by Jeffrey Lewis.
• The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon, a satirical novel by Kathleen J. McInnis.
• The “Rational Security” podcast from the highly regarded Lawfare blog.
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, who argues that generalists are often more creative, insightful, and effective than those who are highly specialized in one specific area.
• Chernobyl, streaming on HBO. “Painful but essential viewing, with lessons for every organization whose responsibilities may put lives in danger — including the Department of Defense.”
• Check out the whole list, which includes a link to my favorite Duffleblog post of the year, “Fans excited for final season of Afghanistan.”

The Rundown

Washington Examiner: North Korea’s not-so-new sub could be a game changer

AP: British vessel transits strait where Iran seized tanker

New York Times: Iran Tells Boris Johnson It Doesn’t Want Confrontation, But Will Protect Itself

Washington Post: Drones watch every U.S. ship in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s navy chief claims

Fox News: Russia expresses ‘deep regret’ over South Korea airspace violation, Seoul says

Reuters: Russia, South Korea trade conflicting claims over airspace dispute

New York Times: China Hints at Use of Force in Hong Kong and Says U.S. Is Undermining Stability

Reuters: China warns of war in case of move toward Taiwan independence

Washington Examiner: China warns US: ‘Hong Kong belongs to China’

Washington Post: ‘I just don’t want to kill 10 million people’: Trump’s comments reverberate in Afghanistan

Stars and Stripes: Turkey Hints At Pulling Access To Incirlik And Kurecik If U.S. Acts Over Russian Weapons Purchase

Military.com: No Telling How Long U.S. Troops Will Stay On Southern Border: NORTHCOM Commander

Military Times: Lawmakers Nominate Far More Men Than Women For Military Service Academies Each Year: Report

Defense One: Has Lockheed Replaced Boeing as Trump’s Favorite Defense Firm?

Seapower Magazine: Navy Selects Lockheed As Future Frigate’s Combat Systems Integrator

Defense One: How AI Will Help Radar Detect Tiny Drones 3 Kilometers Away

Miami Herald: Official Says U.S. Willing To Guarantee Maduro He’ll Be Left Alone If He Leaves Venezuela

AP: Analysis: Budget deal is epitaph for bid to control spending

Forbes: Using Commercial Satellites To Control Nuclear Weapons Is A Bad Idea — But It’s Being Discussed

Task & Purpose: Why Maverick is still a captain 30 years after ‘Top Gun,’ according to the Navy

Calendar

WEDNESDAY | JULY 24

8 a.m. 2044 Rayburn. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger speaks off the record to the Navy League of the United States and the Shipbuilders Council of America’s annual Shipbuilding Caucus breakfast event.

8:30 a.m. 300 First Street S.E. Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies breakfast forum on “A Review of the Nuclear Posture Review, National Security Strategy, and Nuclear Deterrence,” with Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Stephen Wilson. www.mitchellaerospacepower.org/events

9 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. N.W. Center for Strategic and International Studies’ ninth annual South China Sea Conference, with retired Adm. Scott Swift, former commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet, and others. www.csis.org/events

9:45 a.m. 1800 M Street N.W. Foundation for Defense of Democracies breakfast conversation on “The Future of Democracy in Venezuela,” with Carlos Vecchio, Venezuelan ambassador to U.S.; Elliott Abrams, special representative for Venezuela; and John Hannah, FDD. www.fdd.org

10 a.m. SD-G50. Dirksen Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on the nomination of David Norquist to be deputy secretary of defense. www.armed-services.senate.gov

10:15 a.m. 419 Dirksen. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on “Reviewing Authorities for the Use of Military Force,” with David Hale, undersecretary of state for political affairs, and Marik String, acting legal adviser at the State Department. foreign.senate.gov

Noon. 1201 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. Hudson Institute event: “Dialogues on American Foreign Policy and World Affairs: A Conversation with U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse,” with Walter Mead of the Hudson Institute. www.hudson.org/events

3:15 p.m. Pentagon Briefing Room 2E973. Defense Department briefing with senior enlisted advisers on readiness, with Army Command Sgt. Maj. John Troxell, senior adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Sgt. Maj. Daniel Dailey, Navy Master Chief Petty Officer Russell Smith, Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Kaleth Wright, Coast Guard Master Chief Petty Officer Jason Vanderhaden, and incoming Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Troy Black. Live streamed at www.defense.gov/Watch/Live-Events.

4 p.m. 1521 16th Street N.W. The Institute of World Politics lecture on “Artificial Intelligence Initiatives: U.S. and Chinese Strategies,” with Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Fritz Barth. www.iwp.edu/events

4:15 p.m. Pentagon Briefing Room 2E973. Defense Department briefing with senior enlisted advisers on joint operations, global integration, and international partnerships, with Army Command Sgt. Maj. John Troxell, senior adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Sgt. Maj. Anthony Spadaro, Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Philip Easton, Marine Sgt. Maj. Bryan Zickefoose, Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Paul McKenna, Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Gregory Smith, Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Patrick McMahon, Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Jason France, Army Command Sgt. Maj. Timothy Metheny, and Army Command Sgt. Maj. Walter Tagalicud. Live streamed at www.defense.gov/Watch/Live-Events.

THURSDAY | JULY 25

8:30 a.m. 300 First Street S.E. Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies forum on “Nuclear and Missile Proliferation: Iran and North Korea,” with Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio. www.mitchellaerospacepower.org/events

FRIDAY | JULY 26

4 a.m EDT/10 a.m CET. Patch Barracks, Stuttgart, Germany. U.S. Africa Command change of command ceremony where Army Gen. Stephen Townsend assumes command from retiring Marine Gen. Thomas Waldhauser. The defense secretary is scheduled to preside over the ceremony.

8:15 a.m. American Enterprise Institute discussion on “The value of our veterans” about reforming the Veterans Affairs Department. Speakers: Rep. Mike Levin, D-Calif.; Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio; Leo Shane, Capitol Hill and White House bureau chief at Military Times; Cynthia Gilman, senior vice president for strategic initiatives at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine; Mike Hutchings, chief development officer at Combined Arms; Rory Riley-Topping, founder of Riley-Topping Consulting; and Rebecca Burgess, director of the AEI Program on American Citizenship.

www.aei.org/events

8:30 a.m. 2101 Wilson Blvd. National Defense Industrial Association discussion on “DevOps in the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise,” with Lt. Cmdr. Gregory Contreras, program manager for defense intelligence information enterprise framework at the Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic.

TUESDAY | JULY 30

9:30 a.m. SD-G50. Dirksen Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Vice Adm. Michael Gilday to be chief of naval operations. www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings