Air Force brings great-power conflict concept to the Caribbean. When Kentucky Air National Guard troops recently “seized” an airport on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, they were practicing Agile Combat Employment, a maneuvering scheme intended to enable the Air Force to generate combat power despite the anti-access/area denial efforts of China, Russia, and others. But experts said the wargame—part of the larger, long-planned Emerald Warrior exercise organized by Air Force Special Operations Command—might also serve as a message to drug cartels and unfriendly governments in the region. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here.
Commentary: Mexico’s new president is trying to fight the cartels; a U.S. invasion would do more harm than good. That’s the argument in Foreign Affairs from a group of counter-terror policy practitioners led by CSIS’s Ryan Berg; read on, here.
Special-ops helicopter crash: Four members of the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment were in a Black Hawk that went down outside Olympia, Washington, on Wednesday evening, Army officials said in a statement. Few other details have been released; local police say they’ve found the crash site. Task & Purpose rounds up what we know, and provides some context, here.
Get a better handle on lasers versus drone swarms via a new industry explainer on the growing trend, published Thursday by the New York Times.
Mentioned: The “Apollo” 100-kilowatt laser from Australia’s Electro Optic Systems, and Israel’s Iron Beam, which was declared operational earlier this week. Also, the U.S. military “is working to develop a one-megawatt weapon next year,” which “potentially could shoot down ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons.”
Lasers of this sort are “going to be a total revolution in the history of warfare,” said Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israeli weapons supplier Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. “This is just the beginning of the beginning,” he said.
Related reading: “The US Military Used Lasers to Shoot Down a Drone in 1973,” Paleofuture reported almost 10 years ago.
Trump wants Bagram again? Five years after he signed a deal to withdraw from Afghanistan, President Trump on Thursday said he wanted to take Bagram Air Base back from the Taliban. Speaking to reporters during a visit to Windsor Castle in the UK, Trump said, “Bagram, the big air base, one of the biggest air bases in the world, we gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back by the way, okay? That could be a little breaking news. We’re trying to get it back because they need things from us, we want that base back.” It’s unclear to whom Trump was referring to with “they.”
“One of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” Trump said—echoing a line he’s first known to have spoken in April 2022, and again this past February when he told reporters, “it’s exactly one hour away from where China makes its nuclear missiles.” It’s not clear what he’s referring to, but Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has pointed out that Afghanistan is somewhat close-ish to China’s nuclear test site at Lop Nur—though the site is much closer to Mongolia and even Russia than Bagram.
“That was gross incompetence to give [Bagram] up” when the U.S. military left in August 2021, Trump told reporters on Air Force One later Thursday. “It’s one of the most powerful bases in the world in terms of runway strength and length. The strength and length, you can land anything on there.”
But the Air Force is working to move away from giant bases, which service leaders call untenable in the face of new weapons and tactics. One day before Trump’s remarks, the three-star in charge of Air Force futures wrote, “No longer can the Air Force rely on Bagram-style air bases as sanctuaries, thanks to anti-access and area-denial capabilities developed by China and others. To deter and defeat adversaries, the service must focus on agility, adaptability, and operating with a smaller footprint in austere environments.” Read that in Defense One, here.
Expert reax: The Taliban can’t be trusted, warns Bill Roggio of the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “President Trump should take care to not repeat the mistakes of both his first administration and the Biden administration in believing that the Taliban is a partner that can be trusted,” Roggio told Defense One. “The Trump administration’s mistake in negotiating with the Taliban and signing the Doha Agreement in Trump’s first term set the stage for the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal,” he noted.
Also: “The Taliban fought for 20 years to eject the United States and it will not permit the U.S. to return,” Roggio pointed out.
Then there’s China: “Even if the Taliban considered this, China most certainly would do everything it can to entice the Taliban to keep the U.S. out of Afghanistan and has far more leverage and enticements to make this happen,” Roggio predicted, and ended with a final warning, “The Trump administration should be very careful not to grant the Taliban concessions only to be prevented access to Bagram in the end.”
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 with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2019, an errant U.S. military drone strike killed 30 Afghan farmers and wounded more than 40 others.
Around the world
Ukraine has received its first arms through a new NATO aid pool: the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, an unnamed alliance official told the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine.
No details were immediately available, but in a press conference, President Volodymr Zelenskyy said the first PURL shipments would contain interceptors for Patriot air defense systems and HIMARS munitions, the Associated Press reported.
$3.5B expected: Zelenskyy said the pool contains about $2 billion and another $1.5 billion is expected by next month. Read more, here.
Explainer: How PURL works, from The Gaze, a Ukrainian-government site.
Ukraine arms-industry expansion is being funded by European governments that want to deter Russia—and eventually buy Ukrainian arms for their own militaries. AP reports: “Ukraine’s weapons industry now meets nearly 60% of its army’s needs, up from 10% when Russia’s full-scale invasion began 3 1/2 years ago, according to its defense minister. But its military budget—$64 billion in 2024—is less than half the size of Russia’s, which is why it turns to Western allies for weapons and, increasingly, money.” More, here.
Related reading:
Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan on Thursday, which is “a week after Israel’s strikes on Qatar upended the diplomatic calculus in the region,” Reuters reports. “This is a comprehensive defensive agreement that encompasses all military means,” the Saudis said. Wider context: The Wall Street Journal described it as “the first recent significant example of a longstanding U.S. partner in the Middle East seeking to move away from dependence on Washington for national security.”
The pact also “marks a blow for a U.S.-led plan to integrate Israel more closely into a Middle East security partnership to contain Iran,” the Journal reports.
For what it’s worth, “Saudi Arabia has loaned Pakistan $3 billion, a deal extended in December, to shore up its foreign exchange reserves,” Reuters notes. More, here.
A Taiwan arms expo on Thursday “double[d] its previous number of exhibitors, as firms flock for a slice of the island’s increased defence spending,” Reuters reported from the capital city. “The Taipei Aerospace and Defence Technology Exhibition features 490 exhibitors at 1,500 booths, up from 275 exhibitors at about 960 booths in 2023, when it was last held,” the wire service explained.
Several weapons deals are expected to be finalized soon, including “with U.S and Canadian companies for weapons such as anti-drone rockets from Canada’s AirShare and underwater surveillance drones from U.S. firm Anduril.” More, here.
What weapons should Taiwan consider to help thwart an invasion from Beijing? We discussed the question last year on the Defense One Radio podcast, featuring Dmitri Alperovitch and retired Australian Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan.
Related reading: “What the rapid pace of AI means for China’s threats toward Taiwan,” via Defense One’s Patrick Tucker, reporting Thursday.
And lastly, there’s a new thriller coming out about nuclear weapons, missile defense, and human psychology. It comes from “Zero Dark Thirty” director Kathryn Bigelow, and it’s called “A House of Dynamite,” which will begin streaming on Netflix October 24.
The tagline for the movie is “Not if. When.” The longer description is as follows: “When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.” It stars Rebecca Ferguson from the “Mission: Impossible” films and Idris Elba, who we often associate most with HBO’s Baltimore-based drama series “The Wire.”
The film is generating Oscar buzz, Variety reported Thursday.
Critical reax: “Bigelow’s ability to take a series of hypotheticals and render them into narrative actuality has never been more pinpoint accurate or merciless,” Glenn Kenny of RogerEbert.com writes, “One irony of the scenario is that the personnel depicted here have been thoroughly trained to deal with this eventuality. But once the eventuality is ongoing, these folks can’t help but fall apart.”
Read the full article here