A huge explosion targeted a NATO convoy near the U.S. Embassy in the Afghan capital of Kabul this morning. The attack, which involved a suicide car bomb, has killed at least five Afghan civilians and wounded another 19, including three women and four children. A NATO spokesman says no coalition troops were harmed in the attack, which took a decent chunk out of the front end of an MRAP, which you can see via AFP here.
A second suicide car bomb attack took place outside the main police station in southern Helmand province’s capital of Lashkar Gah, killing two (including a female) and wounding another 51 (including women and children), CNN reports.
Both attacks occurred hours after President Ashraf Ghani told a crowd in Kabul that “despite growing violence, political instability and the emergence of the Islamic State in his country, Afghanistan will not collapse as a country,” the Washington Post reports. Ghani appealed to regional players, including Russia and India, to help “forge a consensus” on Afghanistan’s security amid stepped up Taliban attacks during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and in the midst of Ghani’s work to leverage Pakistan in the hopes of reaching a peace deal with the militant group.
And in the north, Afghans protested after American troops destroyed a weapons cache while raiding a compound belonging to a former mujihadeen commander-turned-local-strongman in Parwan province on Monday morning, the New York Times reports. The strongman, Jan Ahmad, had expressed loyalty to Ghani’s righthand man, Abdullah Abdullah.
Meantime, a beleaguered program embedding U.S. social scientists with troops in Afghanistan was quietly shut down last fall, USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook reported yesterday. An Army spokesman said that Afghan commanders “no longer had a need for the advice of civilian anthropologists” from the program, known as the Human Terrain System. Social scientists, on the other hand, feared a “militarization of their field and the potential that their work would be used to target insurgents, a violation of their ethical code not to hurt those they study,” Vanden Brook writes.
“Why it was defended and continued in the face of shrinking budgets and alternate priorities is beyond me, but it’s good to see the Army step up and do the right thing,” Iraq war veteran Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said.
It’s deadline day for the Iran talks, and the U.S. is taking a firm line on the preliminary agreement reached two months ago in Switzerland, NYT’s Michael Gordon and David Sanger write. “We do see a path forward to get a comprehensive agreement that meets our bottom lines…This path forward has to be based on the Lausanne parameters. Period,” said a senior U.S. official.
“I already had a mandate to negotiate and I am here to get a final deal and I think we can,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif this morning upon his arrival back to negotiations in Vienna after a brief chat with leaders in Tehran.
What are the deal’s main sticking points? Inspections (Iran’s supreme leader doesn’t want them on military sites); sanctions (Iran wants an immediate lift; the U.S. wants a phased process); and good old-fashioned trust between both parties, WaPo reminds readers.
And of course, don’t be surprised if the process drags on beyond today’s deadline, AP reports this morning.
Regional security overrides human rights concerns for Washington’s Middle East ally, Bahrain. Four years after Bahrain’s harsh crackdown on dissent during the Arab Spring protests, the country is back in the White House’s graces after the State Department announced a lifting of military aid restrictions on Monday, Marcus Weisgerber reports.
The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a military command that oversees American ships in the Middle East, has been hosted at Bahrain since the end of World War II, Weisgerber writes. “About 7,000 Americans are based there, including the forward headquarters of U.S. Marines in the region,” along with Pentagon “F-16 and F/A-18 fighters and P-3 surveillance planes [staged] at Isa Air Base in the southeast.”
“The items released on Monday included antitank missiles and Humvees. Bahrain also will be able to request additional arms from the U.S. as part of the move to normalize security cooperation between the two countries,” WSJ added.
From Defense One
Nearly $7 billion in revenue from 50 scheduled missions hang on Space-X’s Falcon 9 rocket program, which exploded this weekend upon launch. Quartz’ Tim Fernholz rolls up how Space-X isn’t the only company eager to see how owner Elon Musk can pick up the pieces of his much-hyped venture.
Office of Personnel and Management Chief Katherine Archuleta pitched a 15-point plan to restore a bit of security and trust in the organization that’s suffered perhaps the largest U.S. government data breach yet. But it may not be enough to save her job, NextGov’s Aliya Sternstein reports.
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of The D Brief, from Ben Watson and Marcus Weisgerber. Why not pass it on to a friend? You’ll find our subscribe link here. (Want to read it in your browser? Click here.) And feel free to send us what you like, don’t like, or want to drop on our radar right here at the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
At least 116 are feared dead after a 51-year-old Indonesian air force C-130 crashed about two minutes after takeoff and erupted into a fireball, AFP reports this morning. “No survivors, I have just returned from the site,” said Air force chief Agus Supriatna.
Yemeni forces fired another Scud missile toward Saudi Arabia today, Reuters reports relaying the words of a military spokesman on Yemeni state news. The missile launch follows reports the Islamic State claimed responsibility for a car bombing in the capital of Sana’a that wounded at least 28 people.
See also Thomas Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the regional security implications of the first reported Scud launch from Yemen in early June.
The Pentagon’s Pivot to the Pacific is happening, but is it effective? Since 2011, the year the pivot, or rebalance as some administration officials prefer, “has provided at least $9 billion more to U.S. Pacific Command over the past four years, although experts have difficulty gauging the initiative’s actual success,” Stars and Stripes reports. The number of American troops in the region jumped by 22,000, the Navy has forward deployed three additional ships, Marines are now rotationally deployed to Australia and Army has doubled its funding for training allies there. More here.
Speaking of the Pacific, it’s another win for Airbus in its ongoing war with Boeing to sell aerial tankers to the air forces of the world. South Korea will buy four Airbus A330 tankers for $1.3 billion. In the Asia-Pacific region, South Korea joins Australia (which operates five) and Singapore (which has ordered six) to choose the A330 over Boeing’s 767.
What’s the overall score in the tanker war? Including Seoul’s order, Airbus has booked orders for 39 aircraft, delivering 24, according to the company’s most recent data from March. Boeing has a total of 26 orders for its 767 tanker, delivering four to Japan and four to Italy. The U.S. Air Force has purchased 18, but plans to buy 161 more, which will replace Eisenhower-era KC-135s.
Is Russia’s new T-14 Armata tank spurring a tank arms race in Europe? Not entirely, but the desire for heavy armored vehicles has risen noticeably, Vice News reports. And Chinese manufacturer, Norinco, has taken to their own social media to boast about their new VT-4 tank in the face of an embarrassing debut of the Russian T-14 in early May.
Back stateside, the fallout from the hack into the OPM computer network continues as the agency’s background check website will be down for as many as six weeks for security improvements. This means government job applicants and contractors will not be able fill out background check questionnaires. More from the Washington Examiner here.
Republicans will have their 14th official candidate for a 2016 run at the White House with today’s entry of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, WaPo’s Robert Costa reports from Trenton.
“As a centrist candidate from the Northeast, he would have an exceedingly narrow path to the Republican presidential nomination under the best circumstances,” the NYT’s reports. “He faces a wide field of candidates, including several who are better financed and more beloved by mainstream donors (Jeb Bush), hold greater appeal to conservative voters who dominate the primary process (Scott Walker), are agile public speakers with persuasive biographies (Marco Rubio), or are better liked by Republican voters (all of the above).”
After announcing at his old high school today, Christie takes his campaign show to the battleground state of New Hampshire for a week, where his “hawkish foreign policy — he has spoken derisively of noninterventionists and critics of the National Security Agency” is expected to play well, writes Costa. “His slogan, ‘Telling It Like It Is,’ reiterates the message that his aggressiveness is an asset.”
Talk about an uphill climb: “A staggering 55 percent of Republican primary voters say that they cannot envision voting for Mr. Christie, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll” from June 21.
A decorated former Green Beret accused by the Army of illegally killing an unarmed, suspected bomb-maker during a deployment to Afghanistan in 2010, should be given a general discharge from the military, according to an Army inquiry board. That means Maj. Mathew Golsteyn “would retain most of his retirement benefit under a recommended general discharge under honorable conditions. While cleared of a law of armed conflict violation, the board did determine his conduct was unbecoming.” More from Military Times here and WaPo over here.
Tom Cruise could return to the big screen as Maverick in “Top Gun 2,” more than 30 years after he and Goose felt the need for speed at the Navy Fighter Weapons School in Miramar. While the sequel has been in the works for almost five years, a screenplay is now being written by Justin Marks. The plot will involve the rise of drone warfare and the end of an era of dogfighting and fighter pilots, Skydance CEO David Ellison told Collider.
It’s an interesting twist from three years ago when the then head of Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter program said Cruise would return in the Top Gun sequel as an F-35 test pilot and that a production crew would start filming at Lockheed’s Fort Worth factory within months. But that visit never happened, a Lockheed spokesman tells The D Brief. The company has had no talks with the Top Gun 2 filmmakers for the past two years.
So what planes will make it in the sequel? Ellison references drones and fifth-generation fighters in the Collider interview, so the F-35 will probably make some sort of appearance. The X-47B, the wing-shaped unmanned aircraft, is the only drone can land and take off for an aircraft carrier, so it could conceivably make it into the film, assuming the writers don’t make so fictional aircraft. Attention Justin Marks: Do not make up some fictional drone! It will be interesting to see if the F/A-18 Super Hornet makes it in.
The F-14 Tomcat was the centerpiece of the first film putting what your D-Brief-ers think should be a minimum onus on its making a cameo in the sequel. So, how about this: It’s sunset at Naval Air Station Fallon, the new home of Top Gun. Maverick is coming to grips with the fact that his days of flying go-fast jets are gone, even though that need for speed won’t go away. He’s pouring his heart out to his love-interest of the moment in front of an F-14, now part of a historic display at Fallon, when he looks at the plane says: “She always took care of me,” or something that Justin Marks will certainly write better himself. Right, Justin? Ok, back to business.
Have an extra $41K lying around? Dodge all the boring bureaucracy of your old motor pool with any one of these surplus Humvees the Defense Logistics Agency began selling off in December, as Fox News reports. That $41K price tag is admittedly on the high end of what’s on offer, but more than 1,100 have already been sold, “and thousands more are on the way.”
And finally this morning, Walmart will not bake cakes with Confederate flags—but the ISIS flag, that’s OK? The retailer is apologizing saying an employee at the Louisiana store did not know what the flag meant. From ABC News: “Chuck Netzhammer said he ordered the image of the Confederate flag on a cake with the words, ‘Heritage Not Hate,’ on Thursday at a Walmart in Slidell, Louisiana. But the bakery denied his request, he said. At some point later, he ordered the image of the ISIS flag that represents the terrorist group.”