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FROM RUSSIA WITH NO LOVE: If the premise of the Trump administration’s latest nuclear posture review needed validation, Russia President Vladimir Putin delivered it today in blunt language, along with an animated depiction of a new nuclear cruise missile he said can evade any U.S. defenses. The Pentagon’s new nuclear policy includes plans for new, lower yield options meant to counter Russia’s growing arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. Speaking in a nationally televised address, Putin taunted the U.S., according to news reports from Moscow. “Efforts to contain Russia have failed, face it,” Putin was quoted as saying by Bloomberg, which noted Putin punctuated his nearly two-hour address with video clips of new weapons, including underwater drones, intercontinental missiles and a hypersonic system he said “heads for its target like a meteorite.” The Guardian reported that Russia developed the weapons due to the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty signed with the Soviet Union. “You didn’t listen to our country then,” Putin said, “Listen to us now.” NUKING RUSSIA? Yesterday, Russia’s foreign minister accused the Trump administration of helping European countries get ready to use “tactical nuclear weapons against Russia.” “It should be clear to one and all that the U.S. military thereby prepares the European countries for using tactical nuclear weapons against Russia,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during a United Nations conference on disarmament. Lavrov reiterated Russia’s belief that NATO nuclear exercises involving non-nuclear European countries violate international law restricting the spread of nuclear weapons. He accused the United States of taking “an outspokenly aggressive stance” by deploying nuclear weapons in Europe — a posture he portrayed as a vivid threat of attack against Russia. PACKING HEAT AT WORK: President Trump says he still thinks it’s crazy that military personnel, especially those who are trained marksmen, are barred from carrying guns in the workplace on domestic military bases and at other Department of Defense facilities. During yesterday’s televised meeting at the White House with Republican and Democratic lawmakers, Trump again evoked the 2015 shootings at a Naval Reserve Center and storefront recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tenn. He repeated an argument he first made last week, that if anyone should be able to have guns at work, it should be members of the U.S. military. “In fact I’m looking to get rid of gun-free zones in the military. We have military bases with gun free zones,” Trump told the members of Congress seated around a large table. “We had five incredible soldiers, three of whom were championship shooters, that were nowhere near their gun, and this whack-job walked in and killed all of them,” Trump said, “And they were defenseless. And if they had their guns he would have been gone in a second.” The 2015 attacks actually killed four Marines and a sailor, and prompted a complete Pentagon review resulting in a revised, highly-detailed policy governing when U.S. military and DoD personnel can carry either their own firearms, or government-issued ones, at work. AWAITING ORDERS THEY HOPE WON’T COME: Meanwhile, it’s been a week and the Pentagon has still not received any orders to review the gun policy again, and privately some officials tell me they hope this is another presidential trial balloon that pops before too much work has to be done. As shocking as it may sound, most military leaders think having everyone carrying guns on base or in government offices is a prescription for accidents, and that security is best left to trained law enforcement. Take the Pentagon, for example. There are 24,000 military and civilian personnel who work in the massive building and no matter the rank or job, no one carries a gun at work, except for police and security personnel. As we reported this week, the current policy, which runs 26 pages, does have exceptions for cases in which no security forces are close by, or when someone faces a unique threat, but generally leaves the gun-toting to law enforcement. HIGH STAKES, HARD BARGAINING OVER NEXT F-35s: The three-star admiral who oversees the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program ever ($400 billion and rising) is promising to get a better deal for the taxpayers in negotiations with Lockheed Martin over the price for the next batch of F-35 joint strike fighters. In an hour-long session with reporters yesterday, Vice Adm. Mat Winter said Lockheed Martin is playing hardball, and so is he. “Lockheed Martin is negotiating in good faith. We’re negotiating in good faith. We continue to make good progress,” Winter told reporters, but he also indicated the talks are not as friendly as they could be. “They could be much more cooperative or collaborative and we could seal this deal faster. We could. They choose not to, and that’s a negotiating tactic.” The last batch of 105 planes has a negotiated unit price of $94.3 million for the A-model of the stealthy jet, the most common variant that will be used by the Air Force. Winter is promising the next buy of 130 planes will have an even lower price tag. And he warned the current crop of F-35s are still too pricey to continue to buy and operate. “The price is coming down, but it is not coming down fast enough,” Winter told reporters. “If it’s the same cost ratio into the future, as our fleet grows from the 280 aircraft to the 800-plus that we’ll have by the end of 2021, we will be unaffordable.” WINTER’S SECRET WEAPON: Last year, Trump personally intervened with the head of Lockheed Martin as the deal was being wrapped up, and took credit for shaving a few million off the sticker price. Yesterday, asked if he could use a little help from the negotiator in chief this time around, Winter boasted that he had a “phenomenal” negotiator on his staff, a public servant he identified only as “Julie.” “She will be negotiating not only lot 11, but all my future contracts for as long as I can keep her in government,” Winter said. “She will stare down anybody, and more important, she comes prepared with facts.” Of course, if negotiations fail the Pentagon has the option of imposing a unilateral settlement, something Winter called a last-resort tactic. “We’re nowhere near that,” he said. Winter is scheduled to testify on the state of the F-35 program before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces next Wednesday. Good Thursday 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. |
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HAPPENING TODAY: NAKASONE ON THE HOT SEAT: The Senate Armed Services Committee holds a hearing at 9:30 on the nomination of Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, who was picked by Trump to replace Adm. Mike Rogers as the chief of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency. Nakasone currently heads up Army Cyber Command. The committee will also consider Brent Park to be deputy administrator at the National Nuclear Security Administration, and Anne Marie White to be assistant secretary of energy for environmental management. NUCLEAR POSTURE FORUM: The Center for Strategic and International Studies is holding a half-day forum today on the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review. The event starts at 1:30 and will include a keynote and discussion with John Rood, the undersecretary of defense for policy. Later in the day, Rep. Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, will give a keynote presentation. SPACE CORPS II: A NEW HOPE: Reps. Mike Rogers and Jim Cooper lost their first major legislative battle over creating a new Space Corps inside the Air Force last year, but they are not giving up and may have a new ally in the Pentagon. The bipartisan lawmakers, who lead a House Armed Services strategic subcommittee, say they are betting on Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan to shepherd through a reorganization of the military’s space operations. “He is a corporate guy, he has our confidence. He gets it, he wants to fix it and we have been staying in regular contact with him on this and we are going to stay in regular contact with him,” Rogers said during a Wednesday talk at CSIS. Rogers and Cooper have accused the Air Force of mismanaging military space operations and allowing dangerous vulnerabilities to continue as Russia and China develop their own tech. In turn, the service pushed back hard last year and helped shoot down the Space Corps. The Senate was not on board either. But Rogers said the new service could still be up and running in three to five years. Congress has asked Shanahan to hire a Federally Funded Research and Development Corporation for an independent report detailing how the military would create a new space service, and it is due in December. DOD BUDGET FLEXIBILITY COMING: The House is on track to give the Pentagon flexibility in spending its operations and maintenance money this year, Thornberry told reporters yesterday. “We don’t know exactly what that will look like but there will be some flexibility and everybody I know of has been supportive of that,” he said. Supporters include Rep. Kay Granger, the House Appropriations Committee chairwoman, and House Speaker Paul Ryan. An omnibus appropriations bill with annual defense funding is expected by March 23. If it follows the National Defense Authorization Act passed in December, the omnibus could include $241 billion in O&M money. But the Pentagon will have just over six months to spend the funding before it expires Oct. 1. Thornberry said the House is looking at various options, including a provision that limits the Pentagon from spending more than 20 percent of funding in that last two months of the fiscal year. Army Secretary Mark Esper recently told Travis that he was asking Congress for authority to spend O&M funds over multiple years. Thornberry said the Pentagon needs the funding but does not even have enough contracting officers to process it in the months remaining in the fiscal year. “The readiness issues are there today. The percentage of airplanes that can’t fly, the ships that need repair, all of that, and they are not going to go away because we don’t have enough contracting officers to write contracts. The key to fixing things, training, etc., is to use these resources that will finally come through this omnibus in a good productive manner and it’s got to be done carefully.” OUTING THE RUSSIANS: Thornberry also said he supports exposing Russian hacking and influence operations in the United States, but warned it might come with a cost. Public talk of Moscow’s meddling could also expose how the U.S. collects intelligence on its old Cold War adversary. “I am very much on the side of calling them out and exposing what they are doing,” Thornberry said. “[But] you always have a tension about revealing what you learn through classified measures, because the risk is you expose what you know and how you know it.” Rogers, the CYBERCOM chief, told the Senate that Trump never ordered any retaliation for ongoing Russian hacking and online bot operations aimed at stoking domestic unrest, and that Putin believes there will be no consequences. That angered Democrats on the committee. Thornberry said Moscow is following an old playbook. “An aggressor will always push forward and do more until he meets resistance. We’ve seen that time and time again over history. There has to be a price to be paid,” he said. But the chairman also cautioned that retaliation could be complicated and that the country is not prepared. “It’s not just a question of give an order, stop it, because after everything we’ve been through with all the leaks and people being afraid about their emails to grandma getting read by the government and all of these complications, we are woefully behind in coming to grips with what is a domain of warfare just like the other forces.” BAD CLIMATE FOR COOLING: A top adviser to the commandant of the Marine Corps was suspended Tuesday following allegations he created a hostile work environment. The Corps announced Wednesday that Brig. Gen. Norman Cooling, who served as a legislative assistant to Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, had been suspended pending a Pentagon review of the accusations against him. The Senate Armed Services Committee asked Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to probe the environment Cooling created while leading the Marine Corps’ Office of Legislative Affairs. THE RUNDOWN Bloomberg: Saudi Prince’s Big Military Revamp Means Billions to Business Air Force Times: US Strategic Command chief: It’s taking way too long to get space-based missile defense AP: Kushner’s clearance downgrade could leave him ‘flying blind’ Defense One: The Pentagon Just Revealed How Much It Spends Helping Foreign Militaries Military Times: Wife of 7th Special Forces Group vet faces deportation under tighter immigration rules Business Insider: Marines released from the hospital after 11 people showed symptoms after opening suspicious letter on military base New York Times: In Peace Overture, Afghan President Offers Passports to Taliban Daily Beast: ‘The Looming Tower’ Takes Aim at U.S. Intelligence Agencies for Failing to Prevent 9/11 Roll Call: Inhofe Returns From Asia With Warnings About China, North Korea Army Times: Cyber Command granted new, expanded authorities Breaking Defense: STRATCOM Wants Space-Based Midcourse Tracking Vs. Missiles: Hyten Foreign Policy: For Whom the Cell Trolls Navy Times: U.S. Navy nominates its next fleet boss |
CalendarTHURSDAY | MARCH 1 8 a.m. 2401 M St. NW. DARPA Director Steven Walker at the Defense Writers Group Breakfast. 9 a.m. 1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW. Return of Global Russia with Sen. Mark Warner. carnegieendowment.org 9:30 a.m. Dirksen G-50. Nominations hearing for Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, To Be General And Director, National Security Agency / Chief, Central Security Service / Commander, United States Cyber Command; Brent Park, To Be Deputy Administrator For Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, National Nuclear Security Administration; and Anne Marie White, To Be Assistant Secretary Of Energy For Environmental Management. armed-services.senate.gov 11 a.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Restoring Trust in Euro-Atlantic Relations: A Conversation with OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger. Wilsoncenter.org 12 p.m. Pentagon Briefing Room. Dana White, Pentagon chief spokesperson conducts regular Thursday briefing. Live streamed on www.defense.gov/live. 1 p.m. 214 Massachusetts Ave. NE. A conversation with Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson. heritage.org 1:30 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Assessing the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review with John Rood, undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and Rep. Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. csis.org 2 p.m. 529 14th St. NW. State of the Coast Guard Address with Adm. Paul Zukunft. press.org 3:30 p.m. 1030 15th St. NW. Afghanistan: Assessing Progress and Prospects for Regional Connectivity with Mohammad Qayoumi, chief advisor on Infrastructure to President Ashraf Ghani. atlanticcouncil.org FRIDAY | MARCH 2 8 a.m. 300 First St. SE. The Mitchell Space Breakfast Series with Maj. Gen. Joseph Guastella, Director of Integrated Air, Space, Cyberspace, and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Operations, at Air Force Space Command. mitchellaerospacepower.org 9 a.m. 1201 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Reuniting Ukraine through International Cooperation: Options in Donbas with Amb. Kurt Volker, U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations. hudson.org MONDAY | MARCH 5 12 noon. Senate Visitor Center 201. Ending the North Korea standoff. defensepriorities.org TUESDAY | MARCH 6 6 a.m. 920 Jones Branch Dr. Cyber-Enabled Emerging Technologies Symposium with Gen. Stephen “Seve” Wilson, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, and Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, U.S. Cyber Command Deputy Commander. 8 a.m. 1315 K St. NW. McAleese/Credit Suisse 2019 “Defense Programs” Conference with Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson; Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Sen. Roger Wicker; Rep. Adam Smith; Gen. Glenn Walters, assistant Marine Corps commandant; and others. mcaleese.com 9:30 a.m. Hart 216. Hearing on worldwide threats with Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. armed-services.senate.gov 10 a.m. Rayburn 2118. National Security Challenges and U.S. Military Activities in Africa with Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, commander of U.S. Africa Command. armedservices.house.gov 10 a.m. Rayburn 2154. Subcommittee hearing examining the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. oversight.house.gov 1 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. A discussion with Robert Citino, author of “The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand.” csis.org 2 p.m. Rayburn 2118. Subcommittee hearing on Navy posture with James Geurts, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; Vice Adm. William Merz, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations; and Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh, Commanding General Marine Corps Combat Development Command. armedservices.house.gov 2:30 p.m. Russell 232-A. Subcommittee Hearing on Navy and Marine Corps Aviation Programs with Vice Adm. Paul Grosklags, Commander of Naval Air Systems Command; Lt. Gen. Steven Rudder, Marine Corps Deputy Commandant For Aviation; and Rear Adm. Scott Conn, Director of Navy Air Warfare. armed-services.senate.gov 3:30 p.m. Rayburn 2212. Subcommittee Hearing on Marine Corps Readiness Posture with Lt. Gen. Brian Beaudreault, Deputy Commandant; Lt. Gen. Michael Dana, Deputy Commandant; and Lt. Gen. Rex McMillian, Commander of Marine Forces Reserve. armedservices.house.gov WEDNESDAY | MARCH 7 7:30 a.m. 1250 S Hayes St. Genus Machines: The Next Decade of Artificial Intelligence. defenseone.com 8 a.m. 1401 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Michael J. Zak Grand Strategy Lecture. cnas.org 9:30 a.m. 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Climate Change and Conflict: New Research for Defense, Diplomacy, and Development. wilsoncenter.org 10 a.m. Rayburn 2118. Assessing Military Service Acquisition Reform with Bruce Jette, Assistant Secretary of the Army; James Geurts, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; and Will Roper, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force. armedservices.house.gov 10 a.m. House 140. Subcommittee Hearing on the Fiscal Year 2019 Budget for the Navy and Marine Corps with Navy Secretary Richard Spencer; Gen. Robert Neller, Commandant of the Marine Corps; and Adm. John Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations. appropriations.house.gov 10:30 a.m. Dirksen 608. Department of Defense Audit and Business Operations Reform at the Pentagon with DOD Comptroller David Norquist and John Gibson, DOD Chief Management Officer. budget.senate.gov 11:45 a.m. 214 Massachusetts Ave NE. A Conversation on the 2019 NDAA With Rep. Mike Gallagher. heritage.org 2 p.m. Rayburn 2212. Subcommittee Hearing on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program with Vice Adm. Mathias Winter, Program Executive Officer of the F-35 Joint Program Office; Lt. Gen. Steven Rudder, Marine Corps Deputy Commandant; Rear Adm. Scott Conn, Director of Navy Air Warfare; and Lt. Gen. Jerry Harris, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans. armedservices.house.gov 3:30 p.m. Rayburn 2118. Subcommittee Hearing on U.S. Strategic Forces Posture and the Fiscal Year 2019 Budget Request with Gen. John Hyten, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, and John Rood, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. armedservices.house.gov THURSDAY | MARCH 8 9 a.m. Rayburn 2118. Subcommittee Hearing on Mobility and Transportation Command Posture with Gen. Darren McDew, Commander of U.S. Transportation Command, and Mark Buzby, Administrator of the Maritime Administration. armedservices.house.gov 9:30 a.m. Dirksen G-50. Hearing on United States European Command with Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti. armed-services.senate.gov 10:30 a.m. Subcommittee Hearing on Arlington National Cemetery – Preserving the Promise. armedservices.house.gov 11:30 a.m. 1700 Army Navy Dr. Expeditionary Warfare Division Annual Meeting with Gen. Robert Neller, Marine Corps Commandant. ndia.org 5:30 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Intelligence, Innovation, and Inclusion: A Conversation with Sue Gordon, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. csis.org
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