Braxton Taylor
Army designating Reserve units for repeat deployments to INDOPACOM. As Army units from Washington state to South Korea prepare themselves for a potential war with China, the service has decided that it would like some of its reserve units to have that same Indo-Pacific expertise, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Thursday from AUSA’s Land Forces symposium in Honolulu.
“We ask our reserves to be globally available, but I want them to be regionally aligned,” Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, the head of the 8th Theater Sustainment Command, said Thursday. “We don’t want to just keep rotating different units through this theater, because…if you keep changing the faces, you’re not going to build the readiness that we want to do collectively.”
The next step would be having those units keep some of their equipment in those partner countries, so that they don’t have to pack it in and out with each deployment. Read on, here.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1916, the Brits and French signed their secretive Sykes-Picot agreement partitioning the Middle East into spheres of influence.
What Ukraine needs
Mark Montgomery recently returned from another trip to Ukraine, where the retired U.S. Navy rear admiral had several discussions with military officials from the defense ministry, Kyiv’s general staff, and more. Montgomery is the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington.
“They need two things from us. Just stone cold, need them,” he told The D Brief this week. “If they don’t have them, they’ll still survive, but there’ll be a lot more Ukrainian deaths.” And those things are:
- “Persistent intel support, particularly for the defense—warning and maneuvering themselves to be in a better position on the defense; but also it helps on the offense,” he said.
- “Specific munitions that only come from our [Defense Industrial Base, or] DIB. Trump has got to let the Europeans or Ukrainians be able to buy from our DIB. For all the European jaw, jaw, they’re not building any Patriot [missile defense systems or munitions for those systems]. They’re not building any [Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles, or] AMRAAMs. They’re not building enough 155mm artillery shells. They’re going to have to buy it from us using European money, or that frozen Russian money or Ukrainian money.”
“I can tell they’re conserving munitions when it comes to shooting down ballistic and cruise missiles,” Montgomery said. And this is incredibly unfortunate, he observed, because “Ukraine just does not move the needle” in terms of press coverage and international attention anymore. “I’m shocked at the lack of press. I’m in Israel a lot. I’m in Taiwan a lot. But the amount of cruise and ballistic missile attacks—you know how they had the April attack in the October attack in Israel? That attack was a consolidated three or four days of any three or four days in Ukraine. But they’re just getting it again and again and again, you know, every three or four days. And we don’t cover it much, and they’re making hard choices” in terms of what to shoot down and what to let slam into Russia’s intended targets.
“Here’s one of the things they’re kicking ass with: shooting down drones and cruise missiles with F-16s,” he said. “The plane was made for it. It’s fantastic. But what they really need, though, is to not use AIM-9 Xs and guns. It’d be great if we gave them a system called the APKWS—it’s like a 2.75-inch rocket. If you remember the old Zuni rockets, I know that’s a long time ago, but they’re fired from like a barrel launcher that the plane carries. The rockets are laser-guided.” But most notably, “They’re cheap—in the $10,000 to $20,000 range. And it’s not a technology issue, because we’ve already sold them to their army,” Montgomery said. “Now we need to sell them to their air force; they’re cheap enough. They could sell them those things and they’d have a great cost benefit on shooting down a cruise missile. It’s even cheaper than a Shaheed [suicide drone].”
“I spent some time with the F-16 unit, and my first impression was that our Air Force did a great job training” the Ukrainians, he said. “These guys were converts from planes, but they were good and smart and use the weapons systems really well. We need to be creative and innovative and continue to help them, because they will hold off the Russians. Their resilience will outlast the Russians. But it can be brutal, even more brutal than it’s been if we don’t do that intelligence support.”
“Their drone industry is obviously impressive,” he said while cautioning, “We would have trouble completely replicating it, because I think they still use a lot of Chinese parts. However, they’re working on that. They’re innovative in these systems. They’re innovative in some of the kinetics, some of the weapon systems I see in building munitions. There’s gonna be some great opportunities for [the U.S.] and the Ukrainians and maybe Taiwan too, to really create some useful carryover weapons.”
One key to all this: “I think congressional support would go a long way,” Montgomery said. “I don’t think there’s opposition inside the administration; there just may not be momentum. But senators can provide the impetus to get working—these senators and congressmen like [Nebraska GOP] Rep. Don Bacon can get there and get the ball moving so that the administration then has to take some action.”
Despite more than three years of constant missile and drone attacks, “The Ukrainians are not going to buckle,” Montgomery said after this latest visit. “I’ve seen nothing like it. I don’t see any trend other than they’re resilient, they’re dogged, they’re committed. In fact, I would tell you this time I saw more kids out than I’ve ever seen out. I mean, you know, they strike me as a big middle finger to Putin.”
Additional reading:
Trump 2.0
“Ram This Through”: Working closely with executives at Starlink, the U.S. government has made a global push to help expand Musk’s business empire in the developing world,” ProPublica reported Thursday after traveling to Gambia to confirm that Trump’s State Department conducted a monthslong campaign to push a small African country to help Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink.
Why it matters: “The saga in Gambia is the starkest known example of the Trump administration wielding the U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus to advance the business interests of Musk, a top Trump adviser and the world’s richest man.” The Washington Post previously reported certain details about the White House’s State-Starlink efforts abroad; ProPublica gathered more.
Expert reax: “If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, a former high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption,” he added. Another called it “bad on every level.” Full story, here.
And lastly: How does the repetition of lies reinforce them? How do malign actors posing as ordinary users manipulate information on social media? We won’t know the answers to those questions anytime soon because they are among 1,400 scientific research grants the Trump administration has cancelled at universities across the country, the New York Times reported Thursday.
Why cancel these studies? “Officials at the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation contend that the research has resulted in the censorship of conservative Americans online, though there is no evidence any of the studies resulted in that,” the Times reports.
Ostensibly, “The cuts are part of the administration’s broader push to cut federal spending,” the Times writes, “but they also reflect a conviction among conservatives that the government used researchers at universities and nongovernmental organizations as proxies to restrict content on Facebook, X, YouTube and other social media platforms.”
Said one researcher: “I’m almost certain this is going to lead to a vastly more polluted information environment.” Read more (gift link), here.
Read the full article here