Braxton Taylor
48 days to arm Kyiv
The Biden administration is racing to send weapons to Ukraine before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. An estimated $725 million in arms was announced Monday, including “substantial quantities of artillery, rockets, and air defense capabilities,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a statement.
There are two sources of military aid totaling nearly $10 billion still available to Ukraine, Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Monday. That includes “the remainder of the Security Assistance Initiative funding, which is approximately $2.21 billion,” and there’s still $6.8 billion in presidential drawdown authority yet to be distributed. The PDA support is usually delivered much faster than SAI funding because “the Defense Department already has the articles or services in-hand,” the State Department said in a statement Monday.
When asked if the U.S. can distribute that much in such a short time, Ryder didn’t answer directly. “We understand the urgent situation in Ukraine and the president’s direction and will continue to do everything we can to ensure that Ukraine is getting the aid that it needs.”
White House: “Between now and mid-January, we will deliver hundreds of thousands of additional artillery rounds, thousands of additional rockets, and other critical capabilities to help Ukraine defend its freedom and independence,” Sullivan said. It’s all part of a “surge” in Congressionally-authorized military aid first announced in September that’s intended “to put Ukrainian forces in the strongest possible position before [Biden] leaves office,” said Sullivan.
“The bottom line is: at the president’s direction, we will spend every dollar that Congress has appropriated for Ukraine and to replenish our stockpiles,” Ryder said.
Zelenskyy’s peace pivot: Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy is reportedly floating a slightly different approach toward a possible future settlement with Russia over invaded territory inside Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The old and the new: “For most of the war, Zelensky had insisted that his country would keep fighting until it had reclaimed the roughly 20% of the country now under Moscow’s control,” the Journal writes. But “Now, Zelensky is suggesting that he could accept a cease-fire that effectively would leave occupied territory in Moscow’s hands if the rest of Ukraine were given protection by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
The big problem for Zelenskyy: NATO members appear to be in no particular hurry to admit Ukraine into the Russia-focused alliance, which treats an attack on one member as an attack on all. That dynamic that could quickly engulf most of Europe in a possible continent-wide war with the most nuclear-armed nation on the planet, should Russia decide to press a new invasion further into Ukraine after a settlement is reached.
NATO reax: “The main issue with Ukraine has to be, ‘How do we get more military aid into Ukraine?’ That’s priority number one, two and three,” alliance Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Monday, which was not exactly a warm reception to Zelenskyy’s proposal.
One notable wrinkle for Russia: “The ruble has tumbled recently, pushing up inflation and interest rates and further crimping the parts of the economy not dedicated to defense,” the Journal reports.
Related reading:
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1929, President Herbert Hoover produced America’s first State of the Union address, which was written and not actually delivered to a live audience.
Pacific
South Korea declares martial law. President Yoon Suk Yeol issued the declaration on Tuesday, saying that the country’s first such declaration since the 1980s is needed to “eradicate pro-North Korean forces and protect the constitutional democratic order.”
AP: “It was not immediately clear how long Yoon’s martial law declaration could stand. Under South Korean law, martial law can be lifted with a majority vote in the parliament, where the opposition Democratic Party holds a majority” and even his own party’s leader denounced the decision.
But: “Cho Kuk, a leader of a minor opposition party, said there were not enough lawmakers present to vote down the martial law declaration, as police blocked the entrance.”
More from AP: “Yoon — whose approval rating has dipped in recent months — has struggled to push his agenda against an opposition-controlled parliament since taking office in 2022” and amid “ calls for independent investigations into scandals involving his wife and top officials.” Read on, here.
His defense minister ordered the military to be on emergency guard and summoned key commanders for a meeting, Yonhap reports.
From the region:
Mideast developments
Now might be a good time to review who exactly is HTS, aka Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the militant group that led a rebel advance on Syria’s northwestern city of Aleppo late last week.
Pentagon spox Pat Ryder: HTS was “formerly known as Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. But [the] bottom line is [they are] still a designated terrorist organization,” Ryder told reporters Monday.
HTS is led by a 42-year-old insurgent veteran named Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, whose name longtime Defense One readers will recognize from the first few years of the Syrian Civil War, and for the group’s durability in the nearly 14 years since it began. In short, Jawlani was born Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, and later “adopted the nom de guerre of Jawlani, a reference to his family’s roots in the Golan Heights that Israel seized from Syria in 1967,” the Wall Street Journal reported in a profile on Monday. “The militant leader broke with Islamic State in 2012. He cut ties with al Qaeda in 2016, and since then he has fought both organizations in bloody campaigns.”
Jawlani is allegedly not interested in international jihad. “Instead of the banner of Islam, HTS troops choose to fight under the Syrian flag that dates back to the republic that existed before the 1963 Baath Party revolution that eventually brought the Assad family to power,” the Journal reports. “Jawlani is not a cleric, he is a politician who is ready to strike deals and is very compromising on a lot of things—except fighting against the regime. Don’t underestimate this guy’s ambition,” one expert advised.
Former Army general reax: The fact that Syria’s resistance “appears to be spearheaded by HTS is yet another reminder of something we learned many times during the war-on-terror,” that is “that the single richest ‘growth medium’ for violent extremism is anywhere a population loses faith in its own government,” Mike Nagata, a retired Army three-star, told Defense One’s Patrick Tucker on Monday. “The Syrian people today, in places like Aleppo, hate their government more than any other predation they must suffer,” with the Syrian people viewing “a violent Islamist group [as] preferable to Assad,” Nagata said.
The latest: Over the course of just six days, “Syria’s armed opposition has captured 237 cities, towns, villages & military bases — more than doubling the territory in its control,” the Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister wrote on social media Tuesday.
Additional reading:
Around the Defense Department
Senate approves Lt. Gen. Donahue’s promotion. A fourth star for the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan had been jeopardized by Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., a Trump ally who did not explain why he lifted his hold on Lt. Gen. Mark Donahue. The Washington Post reports.
The Army wants hundreds of combat-arms lieutenants to join support communities. Those in armor, infantry, combat engineer and field artillery can apply early next year to transfer to adjutant general, air defense, finance, logistics, and signal corps—and the service is also looking to fill jobs in space operations, public affairs, simulations operations, and information technology fields, Military.com reports off a November press release.
Behind the headline: “Service planners routinely adjust the number of troops within the ranks, which can sometimes be difficult to calculate years ahead of time. In recent years, the service overinvested in combat arms roles—highly sought-after and competitive branches for cadets—while underinvesting in support roles.” Read on, here.
Former Army officer Pete Hegseth had a particularly dismal tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America from 2013 to 2016, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported in a profile Sunday. Mayer revealed the details of a previously undisclosed whistle-blower’s report and other documents that suggest that Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon was forced to step down from previous leadership positions in the face of allegations of financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly drunk on the job.
Capitol Hill reax: “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure,” Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said of Hegseth’s embarrassing escapades as president of CVA.
Some in the Pentagon are also puzzled over Hegseth’s nomination. “I don’t know why—if your defense strategy is supposedly all China China China—I don’t know why you pick an Army guy to lead the Defense Department,” one Navy officer told Defense One.
Did you miss our big Navy shipbuilding explainer? As our colleague Dan Darling said recently, the U.S. has never lacked for naval innovation or design creativity, yet right now, it can barely build a single Navy submarine in a single fiscal year. What’s going on and why? Read more (or listen via our latest podcast) here.
This afternoon in Washington: Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti is scheduled to talk about “Building America’s Warfighting Navy” with retired Navy Adm. Michelle Howard in an event hosted by the Stimson Center at 3 p.m. ET. Details and RSVP, here.
Related reading:
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