Under President Trump, there are now more troops in the Middle East than when he took office, and he has continued the mission for tens of thousands of others far from the wars of 9/11.
American military personnel in Logar Province, Afghanistan, in 2018.CreditOmar Sobhani/Reuters
President Trump has repeatedly promised to end what he calls America's "endless wars," fulfilling a promise he made during the campaign.
No wars have ended, though, and more troops have deployed to the Middle East in recent months than have come home. Mr. Trump is not so much ending wars, as he is moving troops from one conflict to another.
Tens of thousands of American troops remain deployed all over the world, some in war zones such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and - even still - Syria. And the United States maintains even more troops overseas in large legacy missions far from the wars following the Sept. 11 attacks, in such allied lands as Germany, South Korea and Japan.
Although deployment numbers fluctuate daily, based on the needs of commanders, shifting missions and the military's ability to shift large numbers of personnel by transport planes and warships, a rough estimate is that 200,000 troops are deployed overseas today.
Afghanistan: 12,000 to 13,000 troops
At the height of the war, in 2010 and 2011, there were more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. When Mr. Trump took office, that number was hovering around 10,000. A new strategy, announced in August 2017, added thousands more.
Mr. Trump has long bemoaned the length of the 18-year conflict, with Pentagon officials worried that, at a moment's notice, one tweet could end the mission.
The current commander, Gen. Austin S. Miller, has slowly
dropped troop numbers to between 12,000 and 13,000 over the past year.
American and Afghan officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the plan, said the eventual American force size could drop to 8,600 - roughly the initial reduction envisioned in a draft agreement with the Taliban before
Mr. Trump halted peace talks last month. Rather than a formal withdrawal order, they are reducing the force through a gradual process of not replacing troops as they cycle out.
Syria: About 200
What started as 50 Special Operations soldiers in late 2015 ballooned to more than 2,000 in 2017 when American troops and Kurdish and Arabic local fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, were battling the Islamic State in Raqqa, its de facto capital.
In December 2018, before the Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliphate collapsed, Mr. Trump issued his first of several orders to pull all American troops from the country. In turn, the Pentagon tried to shore up a plan to withdraw roughly 1,000 troops while keeping the rest spread out across the country's northeastern corner.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump ordered those remaining troops out, leaving a small detachment of around 200 in southern Syria - at a small outpost on the Jordanian border. Mr. Trump is also said to be
in favor of leaving about 200 Special Operation forces in eastern Syria to help combat Islamic State guerrilla fighters and to block Syrian government forces and their Russian advisers from seizing several coveted oil fields in the east.
The other troops who left northern Syria in the past several days did not return to the United States, as Mr. Trump said they would. They are now based in western Iraq.
Iraq: About 6,000
The war that began as Operation Iraqi Freedom and lasted from 2003 to 2011 peaked at about 150,000 troops. Only a small detachment remained when American troops left altogether in 2011. In 2014, the Islamic State poured over the Syria-Iraq border and routed the Iraqi Army from Mosul, once the country's second-largest city, and pressed south to the outskirts of Baghdad, the capital, before being repelled.
With ISIS fighters closing on Erbil, President Barack Obama started his campaign against the terrorist group, which would come to be known as Operation Inherent Resolve. The small contingent of ground troops, helping hunt terrorist targets and advise the morale-stricken Iraqi Army, grew to around 5,000 in 2016.
That number has only increased, to roughly 6,000, as American troops move from northern Syria to western Iraq.
Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations: 45,000 to 65,000
In response to Iranian attacks and provocations since May, the Pentagon has deployed about 14,000 additional troops to the Persian Gulf region, including roughly 3,500 to Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. Those forces include airborne early warning aircraft, maritime patrol planes, Patriot air and missile defense batteries, B-52 bombers, a carrier strike group, armed Reaper drones and other engineering and support personnel.
But, at any given time, between 45,000 and 65,000 American troops are in the region, spread out between Jordan and Oman, assigned to operate airfields, run key headquarters, sail warships and fly warplanes, and stage for deployments to places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers change substantially depending on the presence of an aircraft carrier strike group or two in the region, and whether a large group of Marines is afloat in those waters.
Africa: 6,000 to 7,000
There are between 6,000 and 7,000 American troops spread across Africa, with the largest numbers concentrated in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. In Somalia, there are about 500 Special Operations troops, fighting the Qaeda-linked terrorist group, the Shabab, from small outposts alongside local troops.
In the Sahel, in countries like Niger, Chad and Mali, there are several hundred. The Air Force recently built a large drone base, known as Air Base 201, near the city of Agadez, Niger. Last year, Jim Mattis, the defense secretary at the time, ordered the military command that oversees troops on the continent, known as Africom, to shrink its forces by several hundred Special Operations troops as part of the Pentagon's strategy to focus more on threats from Russian and China around the world.
The current commander of Africom, Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, is completing a sweeping review that will probably mean the reduction of more troops.
Japan and South Korea: About 78,000
Since the end of World War II and the Korean War, the United States has maintained a large military presence in Asia. More than 28,000 United States troops are stationed in South Korea, many living with their families. The United States and South Korea have
suspended major training exercises over the past year as a concession to North Korea, but the two militaries continue to carry out smaller drills.
In Japan, the Pentagon maintains about 50,000 troops at roughly two dozen bases across the country. About 25,000 of those troops are stationed on Okinawa. Violence committed by American service members or related personnel on the island has long caused friction between Washington and Tokyo.
NATO nations: More than 35,000
The Cold War put as many as 300,000 American troops across Europe to defend against the Soviet Union. That presence eventually plummeted to about 30,000 soldiers after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.
Over the past year, the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization completed positioning about 4,500 additional soldiers in the three Baltic States and Poland, and they have stationed several thousand other armored troops mostly in Eastern Europe as a deterrent to Russian aggression.
Despite recent tensions with Turkey over its offensive into northern Syria, the United States flies combat and support aircraft from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. The Pentagon also stores about 50 tactical nuclear weapons at Incirlik.
Elsewhere: More than 2,000
The Pentagon has deployed troops to other locations around the world. There are about 250 troops, mostly Special Forces, in the Philippines in part to help with counterterrorism operations. In the past six years, about 2,000 Marines have regularly deployed to northern Australia to act as a response force for the Pacific region.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a reporter in the Washington bureau and a former Marine infantryman.
@tmgneff
Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes.
@EricSchmittNYT
2. Erdogan's Ambitions Go Beyond Syria. He Says He Wants Nuclear Weapons.
Excerpts:
It was not the first time Mr. Erdogan has spoken about breaking free of the restrictions on countries that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and no one is quite sure of his true intentions. The Turkish autocrat is a master of keeping allies and adversaries off balance, as President Trump discovered in the past two weeks.
"The Turks have said for years that they will follow what Iran does," said John J. Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense who now runs the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "But this time is different. Erdogan has just facilitated America's retreat from the region."
"Maybe, like the Iranians, he needs to show that he is on the two-yard line, that he could get a weapon at any moment," Mr. Hamre said.
If so, he is on his way - with a program more advanced than that of Saudi Arabia, but well short of what Iran has assembled. But experts say it is doubtful that Mr. Erdogan could put a weapon together in secret. And any public move to reach for one would provoke a new crisis: His country would become the first NATO member to break out of the treaty and independently arm itself with the ultimate weapon.
...
But Mr. Erdogan's recent statements were notable for failing to mention NATO, and for expressing his long-running grievance that the country has been prohibited from possessing an arsenal of its own. Turkey has
staunchly defended what it calls its right under peaceful global accords to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel, the critical steps to a bomb the Trump administration is insisting Iran must surrender.
Turkey's uranium skills were highlighted in the 2000s when international sleuths found it to be a covert industrial hub for the nuclear black market of Mr. Khan, a builder of Pakistan's arsenal. The
rogue scientist - who masterminded the largest illicit nuclear proliferation ring in history - sold key equipment and designs to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Erdogan's Ambitions Go Beyond Syria. He Says He Wants Nuclear Weapons.
A month before invading Kurdish areas in Syria, Turkey's president said he "cannot accept" the West's restrictions that keep him from a bomb.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey addressing legislators from his ruling party this month in Ankara, Turkey.CreditBurhan Ozbilici/Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants more than control over a wide swath of Syria along his country's border. He says he wants the Bomb.
In the weeks leading up to his order to launch the military across the border to clear Kurdish areas, Mr. Erdogan made no secret of his larger ambition. "Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads," he
told a meeting of his ruling party in September. But the West insists "we can't have them," he said. "This, I cannot accept."
With Turkey now in open confrontation with its NATO allies, having gambled and won a bet that it could conduct a military incursion into Syria and get away with it, Mr. Erdogan's threat takes on new meaning. If the United States could not prevent the Turkish leader from routing its Kurdish allies, how can it stop him from building a nuclear weapon or following Iran in gathering the technology to do so?
It was not the first time Mr. Erdogan has spoken about breaking free of the restrictions on countries that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and no one is quite sure of his true intentions. The Turkish autocrat is a master of keeping allies and adversaries off balance, as President Trump discovered in the past two weeks.
"The Turks have said for years that they will follow what Iran does," said John J. Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense who now runs the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "But this time is different. Erdogan has just facilitated America's retreat from the region."
"Maybe, like the Iranians, he needs to show that he is on the two-yard line, that he could get a weapon at any moment," Mr. Hamre said.
If so, he is on his way - with a program more advanced than that of Saudi Arabia, but well short of what Iran has assembled. But experts say it is doubtful that Mr. Erdogan could put a weapon together in secret. And any public move to reach for one would provoke a new crisis: His country would become the first NATO member to break out of the treaty and independently arm itself with the ultimate weapon.
Already Turkey has the makings of a bomb program: uranium deposits and research reactors - and mysterious ties to the nuclear world's most famous black marketeer, Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan. It is also building its first big power reactor to generate electricity with Russia's help. That could pose a concern because Mr. Erdogan
has not said how he would handle its nuclear waste, which could provide the fuel for a weapon. Russia also built Iran's Bushehr reactor.
Experts said it would take a number of years for Turkey to get to a weapon, unless Mr. Erdogan bought one. And the risk for Mr. Erdogan would be considerable.
"Erdogan is playing to an anti-American domestic audience with his nuclear rhetoric, but is highly unlikely to pursue nuclear weapons," said Jessica C. Varnum, an expert on Turkey at Middlebury's James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. "There would be huge economic and reputational costs to Turkey, which would hurt the pocketbooks of Erdogan's voters."
"For Erdogan," Ms. Varnum said, "that strikes me as a bridge too far."
There is another element to this ambiguous atomic mix: The presence of roughly 50 American nuclear weapons, stored on Turkish soil. The United States had never openly acknowledged their existence, until Wednesday, when Mr. Trump did exactly that.
Asked about the safety of those weapons, kept in an American-controlled bunker at Incirlik Air Base, Mr. Trump said, "We're confident, and we have a great air base there, a very powerful air base."
But not everyone is so confident, because the air base belongs to the Turkish government. If relations with Turkey deteriorated, the American access to that base is not assured.
Turkey has been a base for American nuclear weapons for more than six decades. Initially, they were intended to deter the Soviet Union, and were famously a negotiating chip in defusing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when President John F. Kennedy secretly agreed to remove missiles from Turkey in return for Moscow doing the same in Cuba.
But tactical weapons have remained. Over the years, American officials have often expressed nervousness about the weapons, which have little to no strategic use versus Russia now, but have been part of a NATO strategy to keep regional players in check - and keep Turkey from feeling the need for a bomb of its own.
When Mr. Erdogan put down an
attempted military coup in July 2016, the Obama administration quietly drew up an extensive contingency plan for removing the weapons from Incirlik, according to former government officials. But it was never put in action, in part because of fears that removing the American weapons would, at best, undercut the alliance, and perhaps give Mr. Erdogan an excuse to build his own arsenal.
For decades, Turkey been hedging its bets. Starting in 1979, it began operating a few
small research reactors, and since 1986, it has made reactor fuel at
a pilot plant in Istanbul. The Istanbul complex also handles spent fuel and its highly radioactive waste.
"They're building up their nuclear expertise," Olli Heinonen, the former chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview. "It's high quality stuff."
He added that Ankara might "come to the threshold" of the bomb option in four or five years, or sooner, with substantial foreign help. Mr. Heinonen noted that Moscow is now playing an increasingly prominent role in Turkish nuclear projects and long-range planning.
Turkey's program, like Iran's, has been characterized as an effort to develop civilian nuclear power.
Russia has agreed to build four nuclear reactors in Turkey, but the effort is seriously behind schedule. The first reactor, originally scheduled to go into operation this year,
is now seen as starting up in late 2023.
The big question is what happens to its spent fuel. Nuclear experts agree that the hardest part of bomb acquisition is not coming up with designs or blueprints, but obtaining the fuel. A civilian nuclear power program is often a ruse for making that fuel, and building a clandestine nuclear arsenal.
Turkey has uranium deposits - the obligatory raw material - and over the decades has shown great interest in learning the formidable skills needed to purify uranium as well as to turn it into plutonium, the two main fuels of atom bombs. A 2012 report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "
Turkey and the Bomb," noted that Ankara "has left its nuclear options open."
Hans Rühle, the head of planning in the German Ministry of Defense from 1982 to 1988, went further. In
a 2015 report, he said "the Western intelligence community now largely agrees that Turkey is working both on nuclear weapon systems and on their means of delivery."
In a 2017 study, the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks the bomb's spread,
concluded that Mr. Erdogan's efforts to consolidate power and raise Turkey's regional status were increasing "the risk that Turkey will seek nuclear weapons capabilities."
In response to the German assertion and other similar assessments, Turkey
has repeatedly denied a secret nuclear arms effort, with its foreign ministry noting that Turkey is "part of NATO's collective defense system."
But Mr. Erdogan's recent statements were notable for failing to mention NATO, and for expressing his long-running grievance that the country has been prohibited from possessing an arsenal of its own. Turkey has
staunchly defended what it calls its right under peaceful global accords to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel, the critical steps to a bomb the Trump administration is insisting Iran must surrender.
Turkey's uranium skills were highlighted in the 2000s when international sleuths found it to be a covert industrial hub for the nuclear black market of Mr. Khan, a builder of Pakistan's arsenal. The
rogue scientist - who masterminded the largest illicit nuclear proliferation ring in history - sold key equipment and designs to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
The most important items were centrifuges. The tall machines spin at supersonic speeds to purify uranium, and governments typically classify their designs as top secret. Their output, depending on the level of enrichment, can fuel reactors or atom bombs.
According to "
Nuclear Black Markets," a report on the Khan network by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think tank, companies in Turkey aided the covert effort by importing materials from Europe, making centrifuge parts and shipping finished products to customers.
A riddle to this day is whether the Khan network had a fourth customer. Dr. Rühle, the former German defense official, said intelligence sources believe Turkey could possess "a considerable number of centrifuges of unknown origin." The idea that Ankara could be the fourth customer,
he added, "does not appear far-fetched." But there is no public evidence of any such facilities.
What is clear is that in developing its nuclear program, Turkey has found a partner: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. In April 2018, Mr. Putin traveled to Turkey
to signal the official start of construction of a $20 billion nuclear plant on the country's Mediterranean coast.
Part of Russia's motivation is financial. Building nuclear plants is one of the country's most profitable exports. But it also serves another purpose: Like Mr. Putin's export of an
S-400 air defense system to Ankara - again, over American objections - the construction of the plant puts a NATO member partly in Russia's camp, dependent on it for technology.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New York.
David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent. In a 36-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is "The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age."
William J. Broad is a science journalist and senior writer. He joined The Times in 1983, and has shared two Pulitzer Prizes with his colleagues, as well as an Emmy Award and a DuPont Award.
@WilliamJBroad
3. For Trump the Dealmaker, Troop Pullouts Without Much in Return
Frankly speaking, one of my biggest fears is the President negotiates a deal with north Korea that involves the withdrawal of US troops over the objections of his advisers who know the outcome of such a move would be catastrophic for not only South Korea but for US interests in the region. Fortunately we have a system of checks and balances and seeing as how Korea has been on of the most bipartisan issues Congress may step in to prevent a precipitous withdrawal.
For Trump the Dealmaker, Troop Pullouts Without Much in Return
The president has sought to scale back America's military presence around the world without waiting to negotiate concessions from foes like the Taliban or North Korea.
American military personnel flying over Afghanistan last month. Although peace talks fell apart, the Trump administration is drawing down troops there anyway.CreditJim Huylebroek for The New York Times
WASHINGTON - The Taliban have wanted the United States to pull troops out of Afghanistan, Turkey has wanted the Americans out of northern Syria and North Korea has wanted them to at least stop military exercises with South Korea.
President Trump has now to some extent at least obliged all three - but without getting much of anything in return. The self-styled dealmaker has given up the leverage of the United States' military presence in multiple places around the world without negotiating concessions from those cheering for American forces to leave.
For a president who has repeatedly promised to end the "endless wars," the decisions reflect a broader conviction that bringing troops home - or at least moving them out of hot spots - is more important than haggling for advantage. In his view, decades of overseas military adventurism has only cost the country enormous blood and treasure, and waiting for deals would prolong a national disaster.
But veteran diplomats, foreign policy experts and key lawmakers fear that Mr. Trump is squandering American power and influence in the world with little to show for it. By pulling troops out unilaterally, they argue, Mr. Trump has emboldened America's enemies and distressed its allies. Friends like Israel, they note, worry about American staying power. Foes like North Korea and the Taliban learn that they can achieve their goals without having to pay a price.
"It's hard for me to divine any real strategic logic to the president's moves," said John P. Hannah, a senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. "The only real connective tissue I see is the almost preternatural isolationist impulse that he invariably seems to revert to when left to his own devices internationally - even to the point that it overrides his supposed deal making instincts."
Reuben E. Brigety II, a former Navy officer and ambassador to the African Union under President Barack Obama who now serves as dean of the Elliott School for International Affairs at George Washington University, said just as worrisome as the decisions themselves was the seemingly capricious way they were made.
Mr. Trump, he said, often seems more interested in pleasing autocrats like Kim Jong-un of North Korea and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey than in organizing any kind of coherent policymaking process to consider the pros and cons.
"When he canceled the South Korea military exercises, the only person he consulted was Kim Jong-un," Mr. Brigety said. "The decision to abandon the Kurds came after a brief phone call with Erdogan. So they weren't taken because he had personally reflected on the strategic disposition of American forces around the world. They were taken after he took the counsel of strongmen over that of his own advisers."
All the complaints from the career national security establishment, however, carry little weight with Mr. Trump, who dismisses his critics as the same ones who got the country into a catastrophic war in Iraq. While that may not be true in all cases, Mr. Trump makes the case that 18 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it is time to pull out even without extracting trade-offs in return.
"When I watch these pundits that always are trying to take a shot, I say - they say, 'What are we getting out of it?'" Mr. Trump told reporters on Monday as he hosted a cabinet meeting. "You know what we're getting out of it? We're bringing our soldiers back home. That's a big thing. And it's going to probably work. But if it doesn't work, you're going to have people fighting like they've been fighting for 300 years. It's very simple. It's really very simple."
The United States has about
200,000 troops stationed around the world, roughly half of them in relatively less dangerous posts in Europe or Asia where American forces have maintained a presence since the end of World War II. Tens of thousands of others are deployed in the Middle East, although only a fraction of them are in the active war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
It took only a few dozen Special Forces operators near the border in northern Syria to deter Turkey from assaulting America's Kurdish allies there, but soon after Mr. Trump talked with Mr. Erdogan on Oct. 6, the president announced on a Sunday night that they would be pulled back. Turkey then launched a ferocious attack on the Kurds, and by the time a convoy of American troops moved away over the weekend, they were shown in a widely circulated video being pelted by angry Kurds throwing potatoes to express their sense of betrayal.
Mr. Trump did not ask Mr. Erdogan for anything in exchange. Instead, the diplomacy came only after the Turkish incursion began when he sent Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Ankara to
broker a cease-fire to give the Kurds time to evacuate a new safe zone to be controlled by Turkey along the Syrian border.
Mr. Erdogan essentially got what he wanted.
In Afghanistan, Mr. Trump's special envoy spent months negotiating a peace agreement with the Taliban militia that would provide guarantees that the country would not be used as a base for terrorist attacks against the United States if it reduced its troop presence to around 8,600.
The talks fell apart, but Mr. Trump is
drawing down American forces anyway, pulling out 2,000 troops in the last year, leaving 12,000 to 13,000. Plans are to keep shrinking the force to around 8,600 anyway.
In Asia, Mr. Trump voluntarily
canceled traditional large-scale joint military exercises with South Korea at the behest of Mr. Kim even though the two have yet to reach any kind of concrete agreement in which North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons. The decision frustrated not only allies like South Korea and Japan but senior American diplomats and military officers, who privately questioned why North Korea should be given one of its key demands without having to surrender anything itself.
"Trump is a win-lose negotiator," said Wendy R. Sherman, a former under secretary of state under Mr. Obama who helped broker the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran that Mr. Trump abandoned last year. "That's what he did as a real estate developer. He doesn't see the larger landscape, the interconnections, the larger costs, the loss of greater benefits."
But in addition to the collapse of the Afghan talks, he has gotten nowhere in nuclear negotiations with North Korea, made no progress in a long, drawn-out Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative, has yet to even reach the table with Iran despite his stated desire and remains locked in a high-stakes, big-dollar negotiation with China over tariffs.
For Mr. Trump, though, the desire to "
end the endless wars," as he puts it, may override his instinct for deal-making. He talks repeatedly about the misery of families whose loved ones have been killed in the Middle East or elsewhere, and he seems to put decisions about deployments in a different category than trade deals or other negotiations. Getting them out of harm's way is an end to itself.
"We're going to bring our soldiers back home," Mr. Trump said on Monday. "So far, there hasn't been one drop of blood shed during this whole period by an American soldier. Nobody was killed. Nobody cut their finger. There's been nothing. And they're leaving rather, I think, not expeditiously - rather intelligently."
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of five books, most recently "Impeachment: An American History."
A version of this article appears in print on of the New York edition with the headline: Making Deals, And Mistakes
4. Pompeo: Trump 'fully prepared' to use military force if necessary
Pompeo: Trump 'fully prepared' to use military force if necessary
President Trump "is fully prepared" to use military force should it be "needed," Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo said Monday when asked about Turkey's invasion of Syria.
CNBC's Wilfred Frost in an interview with Pompeo addressed the recent U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Syria that Ankara had agreed to last week. The journalist asked Pompeo what might warrant a military response.
"Where we see American interests at stake or fundamental norms around the world that need to be enforced, we'll use all the powers that we have,"
Pompeo told Frost on "Closing Bell."
"We prefer peace to war. But in the event that kinetic action or military action is needed, you should know that President Trump is fully prepared to undertake that action," he added.
It wasn't clear that Pompeo was referring specifically to Turkey. Trump has faced widespread condemnation following his decision earlier this month to pull U.S. troops from northeast Syria, essentially giving Turkey the green light to launch an invasion against Syrian Kurdish fighters and civilians. The U.S. has counted on the Kurds as a vital partner in the fight against ISIS, though Turkey sees them as part of a terrorist arm known as the PKK.
More than 100 Syrian Kurdish civilians have been killed in the Turkish strikes, though Trump has insisted the U.S. bears no responsibility.
"We never agreed to protect the Kurds," Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. "We supported them for 3 ½, four years. We never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives."
He also said he doesn't believe it will be necessary to leave U.S. troops in Syria except to secure oil fields.
Pompeo would not say what would warrant a military response from the U.S. but noted that "we've done it before," a reference to when the Trump administration struck Syria government facilities in 2017 and 2018 after Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against civilians.
"We did it, and the world should know that we will continue to do that," Pompeo said before adding that the administration would prefer to use economic or diplomatic means/
He added that did not want to "get out in front of the president's decision about whether to take the awesome undertaking of using America's military might."
The administration last week announced it would impose sanctions on Turkey over its Syria incursion before announcing days later that it would not impose them after the NATO ally and Kurdish forces agreed to a five-day cease-fire. The 120 hours would allow the Kurdish fighters to evacuate a safe zone roughly 20 miles from the Turkey-Syria border.
The deal was quickly
panned by lawmakers, including Republicans who regularly back Trump, who said it abandoned a U.S. partner with no repercussions for Turkey.
Pompeo, however, said he was "fully convinced that that work saved lives."
5. Facebook Discloses New Disinformation Campaigns From Russia and Iran
Say it ain't so.
Do we really think labeling will help? We have to be defenders of free speech but we also need consumers of "speech" to be critical thinkers and not accept everything they read as true and accurate - especially when they are reading it within the ecosystem of their own echo chamber and simply confirms existing biases.
Excerpts:
To that end, Facebook will now apply labels to pages considered state-sponsored media - including outlets like Russia Today - to inform people whether the outlets are wholly or partially under the editorial control of their country's government. The company will also apply the labels to the outlet's Facebook Page, as well as make the label visible inside of the social network's advertising library.
"We will hold these Pages to a higher standard of transparency because they combine the opinion-making influence of a media organization with the strategic backing of a state," Facebook said in a blog post.
The company said it developed its definition of state-sponsored media with input from more than 40 outside global organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, the European Journalism Center, Unesco and the Center for Media, Data and Society.
The company will also more prominently label posts on Facebook and on its Instagram app that have been deemed partly or wholly false by outside fact-checking organizations. Facebook said the change was meant to help people better determine what they should read, trust and share. The label will be displayed prominently on top of photos and videos that appear in the news feed, as well as across Instagram stories.
Facebook Discloses New Disinformation Campaigns From Russia and Iran
Three of the campaigns
originated in Iran, and one in Russia, Facebook said, with state-backed actors disguised as genuine users. Their posts targeted people in North Africa, Latin America and the United States, the company said.
At the same time, the social network unveiled several new initiatives to reduce the spread of false information across its services, including an effort to clearly label some inaccurate posts that appear on the site.
The moves suggest that while Facebook is amping up its protections ahead of the 2020 United States presidential election, malicious actors wanting to shape public discourse show no signs of going away.
Facebook, by far the world's largest social network, faces a near-daily torrent of criticism from American presidential candidates, the public, the press and regulators around the world, many of whom argue that the company is unable to properly corral its outsize power.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, recently accused Facebook of being a "
disinformation-for-profit machine." The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are conducting investigations into Facebook's market power and history of technology acquisitions.
Facebook generally takes a hands-off approach toward users sharing false or inaccurate information on the site. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive,
delivered a robust defense of the company's policies, including users and politicians' ability to publish inaccurate posts. He said that Facebook had been founded to give people a voice.
The company does not want to be the arbiter of what speech will be allowed on the platform, Facebook executives have said. But the people and accounts posting to the network, they said, should be clearly identifiable.
To that end, Facebook will now apply labels to pages considered state-sponsored media - including outlets like Russia Today - to inform people whether the outlets are wholly or partially under the editorial control of their country's government. The company will also apply the labels to the outlet's Facebook Page, as well as make the label visible inside of the social network's advertising library.
"We will hold these Pages to a higher standard of transparency because they combine the opinion-making influence of a media organization with the strategic backing of a state," Facebook said in a blog post.
The company said it developed its definition of state-sponsored media with input from more than 40 outside global organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, the European Journalism Center, Unesco and the Center for Media, Data and Society.
The company will also more prominently label posts on Facebook and on its Instagram app that have been deemed partly or wholly false by outside fact-checking organizations. Facebook said the change was meant to help people better determine what they should read, trust and share. The label will be displayed prominently on top of photos and videos that appear in the news feed, as well as across Instagram stories.
The Americans and Iranians actually share some similar attitudes to proxy war because the costs of direct military intervention in blood and treasure are so steep. Rather than committing large numbers of their own troops to grueling ground wars, both Iran and the United States have adopted strategies of working "by, with, and through" local partners. Both deploy small numbers of special-operations forces to train and advise these partners, and use their military and technological prowess to provide "key enablers" such as intelligence, air strikes, and logistical support to propel their proxy's operations. But here is where the similarities end, in two key ways.
First is why Iran and the United States intervene in the first place.
Tehran aims to exploit chaos and turmoil to build long-term influence. After meeting the pressing security need on the battlefield, Iran turns its focus to building its proxies into strong domestic political-military actors for hard, strategic benefit. After initial small investments, Hezbollah is now a powerful faction in the Lebanese cabinet and a regional military power in its own right, providing Iran's "forward defense" against Israel. Iraq's Shia Popular Mobilization Force (
PMF) militias offer Iran committed fighters and political allies on its border; the Syrian regime serves as the Levantine linchpin, connecting Tehran to Beirut; and the Houthis allow Tehran to inflict pain for relatively low cost on Saudi Arabia, which by contrast has spent
billions on the war in Yemen.
U.S. intervention, on the other hand, tends to be for discrete military or counterterrorism goals, be it in Syria, Libya, Yemen, or Somalia. While
U.S. forces do train local partners on how to secure and govern their areas, the mission is a distant second to the immediate combat operation. That much was clear with the
SDF, as there was no political vision or broader
U.S. Syria policy guiding the partnership. The investment is primarily military and short-term, with no grander strategy or regional diplomatic and security plan to which the campaign is meant to tie in. Once the mission is achieved, American forces scale down or withdraw, leaving their proxy no clear political path forward in its host nation. The
SDF's Kurdish leaders now find themselves in the precarious situation of having no powerful patron, internal or external to Syria, who supports their goal of a semiautonomous Kurdish state or even a future role in the Damascus government.
Second is who the
U.S. chooses to enable. Iran enjoys a natural choice for its partnerships: an array of Shia partners and proxies cultivated over decades across the Middle East. These groups share not only the Iranian regime's unique Shia ideology, but a shared identity as members of an "axis of resistance" to Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. This ideological affinity has deepened through the cauldron of multiple wars, while the unifying narrative instills motivation and loyalty to Iranian goals.
...
As painful as it is to admit, the United States should learn from Iran. Achieving both short-term victory and long-term security will remain a hard if insurmountable challenge without enduring military and diplomatic support to local partners-the kind Iran provides to Hezbollah. Only by shifting the focus of our partnerships from the immediate and tactical to the strategic and enduring can the U.S. hope to do it-if not in Syria now, then there or on another battlefield in the future.
My thoughts here:
From the Gray Zone to Great Power struggle is a spectrum of cooperation, competition, and conflict in that space between peace and war. We seek and desire cooperation, we have to be able to compete, and while we want to avoid conflict we must prepare for it. One of the important forms of conflict can be described by revolution, resistance, insurgency, terrorism, and civil war (RRIT & CW)) with our adversaries from AQ to ISIS to the Russian Little Green Men to the Iran Action Network or China's PLA all executing strategies of modern unconventional warfare, with their own unique characteristics to include application of conventional force, to exploit the conditions of revolution, resistance, insurgency, terrorism and civil war (RRIT &CW) to achieve their strategic political objectives.
For us, war is politics by other means. For our adversaries politics is war by other means.
What the US Can Learn From Iranian Warfare
Tehran's approach to proxy wars offers a surprising lesson.
BY BRIAN KATZFORMER SYRIA DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, THE ATLANTIC
In July 2006 in south Beirut, Qassem Soleimani was facing death. In a rare interview published earlier this month, the shadowy commander of Iran's Qods Force, the elite paramilitary arm of the Iranian regime's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,
revealed for the first time that he was in Lebanon during the 33-day war between Israel and Hezbollah to direct Iran's support to its decades-long Shia proxy-turned-ally in Lebanon. Soleimani recounted a harrowing (aren't they all) escape from swarming Israeli drones, targeting him and Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. As the Israeli campaign intensified, Soleimani shuttled between Lebanon and Iran to relay battlefield updates to Tehran and rally support to the group. Asked if anyone in Tehran questioned Iran's commitment to Hezbollah at the risk of a direct war with Israel, particularly if the commander of the vaunted Qods Force was killed, Soleimani said, "No one hesitated," starting with the supreme leader.
Contrast that (at least partly nonfictional) scene in Beirut to today's in northeast Syria. There, the United States, at the direction of President Donald Trump, has abandoned its local partner, the Syrian Democratic Force, in its time of need. Like Hezbollah did for Iran against Israel, the
SDFwaged the bulk of America's ground war against its enemy, the Islamic State. At America's assurance, they gave up border fortifications that were protecting them against the Turks. And then they lost
U.S. protection altogether. Now they face a Turkish onslaught that has
killed hundreds so far and
displaced tens of thousands more, and given a new opportunity for regional supremacy to
U.S. foes, Russia, Iran, the Syrian regime, and the Islamic State.
With skill and strength honed in the fight against
ISIS, the
SDF could choose to fight on, bringing another bloody, protracted war to Syria. Or the
SDF could continue to cut deals with Damascus, handing over the land they conquered from
ISIS with the
U.S. coalition to the Assad regime and his Russian and Iranian backers. In other words, the United States will, in hindsight, have served as Assad's clearing force against
ISIS. After billions of dollars spent to arm and enable the
SDF to defeat and sustain victory against
ISIS, the United States appears to be, after one phone call from Turkish President Erdoğan, throwing it all away. As America withdraws, an Islamic State already reemerging as a rural insurgency will now resurge as a terrorist army, swelling its ranks with thousands of hardened
ISIS prisoners now breaking free from
SDF captivity.
As backers of butcherous regimes, perpetrators of wars, and oppressors of its own people, about 99 percent of what the Iranian Qods Force does, the United States should never emulate. But the Iranian approach to proxy warfare and how they cultivate binding partnerships with local actors offers lessons the United States can learn from. I derive these lessons from my experience as a
U.S. policy maker, having advised the counter-
ISIS campaign while serving in the Pentagon, and as an analyst, having covered Iran and its allies at the
CIA. It's clear that Iran's focus on building strategic, long-term relationships stands in stark contrast to our transactional approach, with partners abandoned when the immediate mission is met or political winds change in Washington.
By, with, and...who?
The Americans and Iranians actually share some similar attitudes to proxy war because the costs of direct military intervention in blood and treasure are so steep. Rather than committing large numbers of their own troops to grueling ground wars, both Iran and the United States have adopted strategies of working "by, with, and through" local partners. Both deploy small numbers of special-operations forces to train and advise these partners, and use their military and technological prowess to provide "key enablers" such as intelligence, air strikes, and logistical support to propel their proxy's operations. But here is where the similarities end, in two key ways.
First is why Iran and the United States intervene in the first place. Tehran aims to exploit chaos and turmoil to build long-term influence. After meeting the pressing security need on the battlefield, Iran turns its focus to building its proxies into strong domestic political-military actors for hard, strategic benefit. After initial small investments, Hezbollah is now a powerful faction in the Lebanese cabinet and a regional military power in its own right, providing Iran's "forward defense" against Israel. Iraq's Shia Popular Mobilization Force (
PMF) militias offer Iran committed fighters and political allies on its border; the Syrian regime serves as the Levantine linchpin, connecting Tehran to Beirut; and the Houthis allow Tehran to inflict pain for relatively low cost on Saudi Arabia, which by contrast has spent
billions on the war in Yemen.
U.S. intervention, on the other hand, tends to be for discrete military or counterterrorism goals, be it in Syria,
Libya,
Yemen, or
Somalia. While
U.S. forces do train local partners on how to secure and govern their areas, the mission is a distant second to the immediate combat operation. That much was clear with the
SDF, as there was no political vision or broader
U.S. Syria policy guiding the partnership. The investment is primarily military and short-term, with no grander strategy or regional diplomatic and security plan to which the campaign is meant to tie in. Once the mission is achieved, American forces scale down or withdraw, leaving their proxy no clear political path forward in its host nation. The
SDF's Kurdish leaders now find themselves in the precarious situation of having no powerful patron, internal or external to Syria, who supports their goal of a semiautonomous Kurdish state or even a future role in the Damascus government.
Second is who the
U.S. chooses to enable. Iran enjoys a natural choice for its partnerships: an array of Shia partners and proxies cultivated over decades across the Middle East. These groups share not only the Iranian regime's unique Shia ideology, but a shared identity as members of an "axis of resistance" to Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. This ideological affinity has deepened through the cauldron of multiple wars, while the unifying narrative instills motivation and loyalty to Iranian goals.
Lacking such geographic proximity and historical bonds, the
U.S. selects partners based on their capability and will to fight
right now. The problem is that both those things can shift or atrophy over time. Although militias may clear terrorist-held territory very ably, they may be ill-suited to hold, defend, police, and govern it, particularly when they are not from that area. While sharing an immediate motivation to fight a common foe, the proxy may have other enemies to whom it will ultimately direct its arms and attention that may not necessarily be in line with
U.S. aims. Such is the case with the
SDF. They were committed to the fight against
ISIS, but the
SDF's Kurdish leaders also used the campaign to expand the emerging Kurdish statelet, Rojava, much to the fury of Turkey, a
NATO ally. From the beginning of the U.S.-
SDF partnership, this fundamental misalignment in ultimate aims was understood but discarded, in the name of operational expediency. As the
SDF and Turkey go to war, this fissure is laid bare.
Axis and allies
Slowly but surely, Iran has transformed its "axis of resistance" with Hezbollah and the Syrian regime into a regional alliance spanning from Iraq to Yemen. No longer simply Iranian proxies, groups like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi
PMF now form a group of ideologically aligned, militarily interdependent, political-military actors committed to one another's mutual defense-a resistance
NATO, so to speak, with military footholds across the region, political influence in key Arab capitals, and a network of dedicated partners. Indeed, Iran's return on investment has been high. Tehran can now better deter its adversaries, fight them when it suits its goals, and more generally steer policies and events in the region in its favor.
For instance, the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif was quick to
proclaim the United States "an irrelevant occupier in Syria-futile to seek its permission or rely on it for security," and generously
offered to "bring together the Syrian Kurds, the Syrian Govt, and Turkey so that the Syrian Army together with Turkey can guard the border." What could go wrong? While Zarif works to assuage the press and diplomatic corps, his Qods Force colleague, Qassem, will work the ground game, leveraging newly acquired regime areas from the Kurds to expand its weapons pipeline into Syria and Lebanon.
We also saw this in the fallout over the
U.S. imposition of sanctions on Tehran and the administration's "maximum pressure" campaign. Iran, despite some
thinly veiled denials, hit back by launching attacks against tankers, downing a
U.S. drone, and orchestrating a sophisticated attack against Saudi oil facilities-confident that the U.S., with the president's aversion to military campaigns, would not strike back. In fact, Trump called off a strike at the last minute, and the response to the Saudi Aramco attack has been a somewhat tepid maritime-security plan and the potential deployment of thousands of American troops whose primary mission is to deter further action from Iran and reassure Saudi leaders-not to directly confront them.
Iran's "resistance axis" provides multiple options for pressure and retaliation.
For the United States, the short-term, mission-centric, transactional approach to proxy warfare, too, has its benefits and is perhaps aligned with the American public's aversion to getting "bogged down" in "forever wars." But a perpetual focus on military objectives at the expense of a political strategy and the long-term future viability of proxies means battlefield victories can be pyrrhic or reversible. Nowhere is this clearer than in northeast Syria, where the ongoing Kurdish-Turkish war will propel
ISIS's resurgence.
As painful as it is to admit, the United States should learn from Iran. Achieving both short-term victory and long-term security will remain a hard if insurmountable challenge without enduring military and diplomatic support to local partners-the kind Iran provides to Hezbollah. Only by shifting the focus of our partnerships from the immediate and tactical to the strategic and enduring can the
U.S. hope to do it-if not in Syria now, then there or on another battlefield in the future.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author's views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
7. Thailand's king strips 'disloyal' royal consort of titles and military ranks
I have no comments on this.
Thailand's king strips 'disloyal' royal consort of titles and military ranks
The Guardian · by Agence France-Presse in Bangkok · October 21, 2019
An official photo of Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi released when she was appointed Thailand's royal noble consort in July. Photograph: Handout/Thai royal office/EPA
King Maha Vajiralongkorn of
Thailand has stripped his 34-year-old consort of all titles for "disloyalty" and apparent "ambition" to match the queen's position, a royal command said, less than three months after Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi was bestowed with the honour.
Wongvajirapakdi - known by her nickname Koi - was gifted the title on the king's 67th birthday on 28 July, the first time in nearly a century a Thai monarch had taken a consort.
Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi with King Maha Vajiralongkorn.
A few days later the palace released images of Sineenat in combat fatigues shooting weapons, flying a jet and preparing to parachute from an aircraft, as well as holding the king's hand. It was an intimate and rare glimpse into the private life of Thailand's powerful, ultra-wealthy and inscrutable monarch.
On Monday Sineenat's swift and public downfall was relayed on national television.
She was dismissed from the rank of "Chao Khun Phra" - or noble consort - for "disloyalty to the king" according to the command, as well as "acting against the appointment of Queen [Suthida] ... for her own ambitions".
Suthida was made queen in May, becoming Vajiralongkorn's fourth wife.
The Thai monarchy is protected by a harsh defamation law, making open discussion on the institution for the public and media based inside the country all but impossible.
The king has dramatically bolstered his authority since his 2016 ascension to the throne, pulling the immense wealth of the crown under his direct control and restructuring key army units to his command.
Sineenat, a qualified pilot and former army nurse, was the first woman to receive the consort title in nearly a century.
Q&A
What are Thailand's lese-majesty laws?
ShowHide
Her actions show "she does not give any honour to the king and does not understand royal tradition ... her actions are to benefit herself", the statement said, adding she was attempting to elevate her position to the same as Queen Suthida.
It added that her behaviour is "deemed disrespectful to His Majesty's grace ... and caused divisions among courtiers and misunderstanding among the people". She was stripped of all military ranks, decorations and royal titles, it said.
Sineenat wearing a military paratrooper outfit. Photograph: Handout/Thai royal office/AFP via Getty Images
Sineenat, born in the northern province of Nan on 26 January 1985, graduated from the Royal Thai Army Nursing College at the age of 23.
She has also trained as a pilot in Thailand and abroad and served in the king's royal bodyguard unit. In May she was awarded the rank of a major-general.
During the elaborate three-day coronation ceremony of the king in May, Sineenat marched in full military uniform in a procession that travelled from the palace to several Buddhist temples.
Her prominence stunned the Thai public, who often glean clues of the royal family's secretive ongoings through imagery and symbolism relayed by the palace.
Her dramatic fall from grace is likely to be as carefully dissected over coming days.
"The abrupt move by the king tells us that he wishes to be seen as a very in-charge monarch who will not put up with possible divisions in the royal institution," said Paul Chambers, an analyst at Naresuan University.
Vajiralongkorn and Suthida grant a public audience on the final day of his royal coronation in Bangkok. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images
Buttressed by the conservative arch-royalist military, which has carried out a dozen coups since the 1932 establishment of a constitutional monarchy, frank discussion of palace affairs is rare among the Thai public.
Vajiralongkorn came to power in 2016 after the death of his father,
Bhumibol Adulyadej, a man widely revered by Thais and considered a figure of moral authority.
The new king - a cycling and aviation enthusiast - is a more remote figure to the public, having spent much of his time abroad, particularly in Germany. His three-day coronation gave many Thais their first full glimpse of the new monarch, as he was carried on a palanquin in full regalia around Bangkok's historic quarter.
8. A West Point cadet - and a rifle - have been missing since Saturday
The U.S. Military Academy reported a cadet and an M4 rifle missing Saturday morning after a multiagency search didn't find either.
"The cadet is not believed to have any magazines or ammunition," the academy said in a
statement released Monday, and law enforcement officials don't think he poses a threat to the public. "But he may be a danger to himself."
The teenager, a member of the class of 2021 whom the academy has not named, was said to have been last seen on campus about 5:30 p.m. Friday. Classmates began looking for him after he missed a military skills competition scheduled over the weekend, officials said.
Military, federal, state and local agencies have made extensive search efforts, including aerial sweeps, and have contacted hospitals.
"We will continue to search with all means possible, on and off U.S. Military Academy," said Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the 60th superintendent at the U.S. Military Academy. For now, the academy said, it will operate with "an increased force protection status."
"Safely locating the cadet remains our focus and number one priority," Williams said.
The light unmanned aircraft made hundreds of supply drops during recent Australian live-fire wargames.
In August, over the dusty fields of Australia, highly autonomous drones made more than 380 deliveries of blood and other medical supplies to troops amid a live-fire exercise with U.S., Australian, and other forces.
The drones were from a small startup called
Zipline, hired by the Defense Innovation Unit and the Naval Medical Research Center's Naval Advanced Medical Development to show how next-generation delivery drones could bring medical and other supplies to the front lines. Over a set of four exercises -
Bundey I,
Koolendong-19, Bundey
II, and Crocodile Response - the Zipline drones flew under live rounds to drop small parachute bundles at their destinations. All told, they flew 461 day and night sorties and made 381 drops. It was the first time a
U.S. Marine Air-Ground Task Force had incorporated autonomous drone delivery into their
high availability, disaster recovery planning.
The Marines have used drones for cargo delivery before. Between 2011 and 2015, two unmanned K-
MAX helicopters flew nearly 1,000 cargo missions in Afghanistan. The Marines are still using the K-MAXes, which are currently being
fitted with more autonomous capabilities, but the Zipline drones offer a new realm of delivery options.
Next to a 3-ton K-
MAX helicopter, which can carry its own weight in payload, the fixed-wing Zipline drones are tiny, with a wingspan of around seven feet and a payload of just 4.5 pounds. Rechargeable batteries fly them up to 100 km per hour, about two-thirds the cruise speed of a K-
MAX. But they are far easier to load and operate, which allows them to make a lot more drops than the K-
MAX. A Zipline distribution center, essentially a drone hub, can cover more than 8,000 square miles, the company said in a statement. They also don't need to loiter in place to make a delivery. Instead, they fly over the site, open a small center bay, and drop a parcel that parachutes to a landing.
The company has been doing medical supply drops over Rwanda since 2016. In April, they set up their first distribution center in Ghana; in September, they announced a separate deal with the Indian government.
A year ago, the
U.S. military asked Zipline to demonstrate how quickly they could set up to fly supply missions. The company responded by quickly dispatching eight drones on 227 sorties in rain, darkness, fog and other conditions over an undisclosed location over the United States. One 79-mile round trip set a
U.S. record for the longest commercial drone flight.
"It fills a gap in a capability we don't have, and that's to rapidly resupply life-saving medical supplies," said Lt. Shane Kim, of the Marine Corps' Combat Logistics Battalion One, in a statement.
With further research and development of range, payload, and hardening up the logistics hub for expeditionary missions, "it could absolutely be implemented further down the road," Kim said.
Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He's also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, ... Full bio
10. U.S. Withdrawal from Syria Gathers Speed, Amid Accusations of Betrayal
Excerpts:
President Trump's withdrawal of most American troops from Syria, which cleared the way for Turkey to attack Kurdish forces, has prompted Republicans and Democrats alike to accuse him of
abandoning a United States ally. A coalition of Syrian Kurdish fighters, Americans and other foreign troops had fought the Islamic State there since 2014.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper confirmed on Monday that the United States was considering keeping a small force in northeastern Syria, alongside the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, to prevent oil fields there from falling into the hands of the Islamic State. The Times reported that
Mr. Trump was leaning in favor of leaving perhaps 200 troops there.
The withdrawal, which began Oct. 6, has drastically reduced American clout in Syria,
ceding more control and influence to the Syrian government, Russia and Iran. It has also raised fears of a revival of ISIS, the extremist group that once controlled an area in Iraq and Syria that was the size of Britain.
U.S. Withdrawal from Syria Gathers Speed, Amid Accusations of Betrayal
More than 100 American military vehicles entered Iraq on Monday, accelerating a pullout that greatly reduces American clout in Syria.
A convoy of United States military vehicles near Bardarash, Iraq, on Monday after leaving northern Syria.
QAMISHLI, Syria - A long convoy of United States troops crossed into Iraq from Syria early Monday, accelerating a withdrawal of American forces from northern Syria that set the stage for
the Turkish invasion of Kurdish-controlled land.
More than 100 American military vehicles left Syrian Kurdish territory in the early hours of the morning, according to a cameraman for the Reuters news agency who was at the border crossing.
President Trump's withdrawal of most American troops from Syria, which cleared the way for Turkey to attack Kurdish forces, has prompted Republicans and Democrats alike to accuse him of
abandoning a United States ally. A coalition of Syrian Kurdish fighters, Americans and other foreign troops had fought the Islamic State there since 2014.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper confirmed on Monday that the United States was considering keeping a small force in northeastern Syria, alongside the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, to prevent oil fields there from falling into the hands of the Islamic State. The Times reported that
Mr. Trump was leaning in favor of leaving perhaps 200 troops there.
The withdrawal, which began Oct. 6, has drastically reduced American clout in Syria,
ceding more control and influence to the Syrian government, Russia and Iran. It has also raised fears of a revival of ISIS, the extremist group that once controlled an area in Iraq and Syria that was the size of Britain.
Around 1,000 American troops are being withdrawn. Though Mr. Trump has characterized the move as bringing troops home, Mr. Esper said on Sunday that most forces would be redeployed to western Iraq, where they would continue operations against the Islamic State.
In an earlier phase of the withdrawal, coalition forces bombed their own base and arms cache in northern Syria to prevent enemies from using it.
Small groups of residents in northeastern Syria protested the American withdrawal, footage broadcast by Syrian television networks showed. One group stoned an American armored vehicle as it passed through Qamishli, a major city in Kurdish-held territory, while another tried to block the convoy's progress by standing in its path and holding placards of protest.
"The Americans are running away like rats," one man could be heard shouting.
Some Syrian Kurds
see the withdrawal as a form of betrayal, since it has enabled Turkish-led forces to invade the area and potentially force Kurds from their ancestral homes.
"There will be ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish people from Syria, and the American administration will be responsible for it," Mazlum Kobani, whose Kurdish-led force fought the Islamic State in Syria,
said on Sunday in an interview with The Times.
Turkish officials say their campaign is targeting only Mr. Kobani's militia, rather than Syrian Kurds at large. Over 200 Syrian civilians have died since the invasion began, while at least 20 have died in Kurdish counterattacks in southern Turkey. More than 170,000 people have been displaced, according to estimates by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Until this month, northeastern Syria had largely been under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia that had used the chaos of the eight-year civil war to establish an autonomous region that operated independently of both the central government in Damascus and Syrian Arab rebel fighters.
The American-led campaign against the Islamic State, a militant group also known as ISIS, allowed the Kurdish force to expand its territory and take over the governance of land seized from the extremists.
But the creation of an American-backed and Kurdish-held canton along the Turkish-Syrian border became a source of great anxiety for the Turkish government, which considers the Kurdish militia a threat to national security. The militia is an offshoot of a guerrilla movement that has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
The American withdrawal has allowed Turkish troops and its Syrian Arab proxies to seize control of more than 900 square miles of territory once held by Kurds, according to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
After a stuttering start to an American-mediated cease-fire, Turkish and Kurdish fighters are largely now adhering to a five-day truce that is to last until Tuesday evening. Sporadic skirmishes continue, but Kurdish fighters have been able to withdraw from a strategic town on the Syrian border.
Mr. Erdogan has said that all Kurdish fighters must retreat from a central pocket of former Kurdish-held territory by Tuesday night, and he has threatened to expand the Turkish invasion if any Kurdish fighters remain.
Mr. Erdogan wants to use the land to create a sphere of Turkish influence in northern Syria in which Syrian refugees who currently live in Turkey can be resettled.
Ben Hubbard reported from Qamishli, and Patrick Kingsley from Istanbul. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.
Ben Hubbard is the Beirut bureau chief who has spent more than a decade in the Arab world, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen.
Patrick Kingsley is an international correspondent, based in Berlin. He previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian.
@PatrickKingsley
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
