Trump contradicts top general on border troop numbers, tent cities

BEHIND THE CURVE: One day after U.S. Northern Commander Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy said he had no idea where anyone got the idea that he was preparing to send as many as 14,000 troops to the southern border, his boss, the commander in chief, floated an even higher number. “As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out,” President Trump told reporters at the White House yesterday as he prepared to leave for a rally in Florida. “We'll go up to anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 military personnel on top of Border Patrol, ICE and everybody else at the border.”

On Tuesday, O’Shaughnessy said the total number of active-duty troops to be deployed to the border had not been determined, but he flatly dismissed the 14,000 number as “not consistent with what's actually being planned.” The number was reported by Newsweek on Monday night. “I honestly don't even know where that came from. That is not in line with what we've been planning.”

ABOUT THOSE TENTS: Trump yesterday repeated his plan to hold any members of the migrant caravan who legally apply for asylum at the border in tent cities until their cases are adjudicated. “We're not doing any releases anymore. We're not going to release and let them never come back to trial. We'll build tent cities, we'll build whatever we have to build in terms of housing, but we're not doing releases,” he said.

Again, one day before, O’Shaughnessy insisted he had no orders to build tent cities for migrants. “With respect to Operation Faithful Patriot as it sits right now, the request that we have from Department of Homeland Security and [Customs and Border Protection] is to build tents to support CBP personnel and our military personnel,” he said. “As these conditions change, there very well could be further requests at which we will respond to, if required, to build additional or separate facilities.”

‘WE DON’T DO STUNTS’: With the potential military deployment now outnumbering the size of the caravan by more than 3-to-1, critics have argued the threat from the caravan is being hyped, and that the military response is at best unnecessary and at worst a political stunt.

“We've asked a lot of our service members, men and women and their families over the last 17 years,” retired Marine Col. Dave Lapan said on CNN last night. “This is not a needed deployment wherein we need to pull them away from their homes, their families and their regular jobs and their training to send them down to something that's not really a national security threat,” said Lapan, a former Pentagon Department of Homeland Security spokesman.

“We don't do stunts in this department,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday during a meeting with his South Korean counterpart. “The support that we provide to the secretary for homeland security is practical support based on the request from the commissioner of customs and border police.”

Lapan says he understands Mattis is in a tough spot. “My belief is that Secretary Mattis is looking at this as a lawful order from the commander in chief. As the secretary of defense, he and his department are going to carry out that order to the best of their abilities,” he said. “I guess the point I would make is can the U.S. military undertake this mission and do it successfully? Yes. Should they do it? I would say no.”

‘VERY BAD THUGS’: Trump continued to portray the thousands of migrant asylum seekers walking north from southern Mexico as rife with “some very bad thugs and gang members,” as he put it in tweet yesterday. “They've got a lot of rough people in those caravans. They are not angels,” he said at his rally in Estero, Fla.

The Pentagon has not confirmed that the group includes criminal and terrorists, but O'Shaughnessy did say this is different from past demonstrations. “I think what we have seen is we've seen clearly an organization at a higher level than we've seen before,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We've seen violence coming out of the caravan and we've seen as they've passed other international borders, we've seen them behave in a nature that has not been what we've seen in the past.”

Good Thursday morning and welcome to Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense, compiled by Washington Examiner National Security Senior Writer Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre), National Security Writer Travis J. Tritten (@travis_tritten) and Senior Editor David Brown (@dave_brown24). Email us here for tips, suggestions, calendar items and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email and we’ll add you to our list. And be sure to follow us on Twitter @dailyondefense.

MORE KOREAN ‘WAR GAMES’ COULD BE CANCELED: After the cancellation of Ulchi Freedom Guardian and the upcoming Valiant Ace, Mattis and South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo said they will decide by December whether to cancel next year’s major joint military exercises on the peninsula amid negotiations with the North over its nuclear weapons. Analysts say prolonged cancellation of the major U.S.-Korea exercises could eventually erode the two countries’ readiness for war, and avoiding that will mean focusing on smaller-scale exercises.

Mattis denied the cancellations have had much of an effect so far, but also indicated the Pentagon has workarounds. “We are not right now concerned with a loss of combat capability. Clearly, as we go forward, we'll have to make adaptations to ensure we don't lose that capability,” Mattis said. “This is not a total suspension of all collaboration and military exercises. Certainly, large ones were put on hold, suspended temporarily in order to give the diplomats the best possible effort because we were making a good-faith effort on the military side.”

“I would first like to point out that these combined exercises occur year-round and out of these exercises only a part of these has been suspended at the moment,” said Jeong through a translator. “We'll continue to seek ways in which we can continue to maintain our current level of combined defense posture as well as our military readiness and for our future extra major large-scale exercises.”

TEMPERATURE LOWERED: Mattis also indicated Trump’s policy of engagement with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is paying off, at least in the short term. “Clearly the threat from North Korea at least as expressed by Chairman Kim has been significantly reduced,” Mattis said. But he also pointed out that the North’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, including intercontinental ballistic missiles that could strike the U.S., is still a concern.

“The capability still exists and that is why the minister and I talked on every detail about our collaboration,” Mattis said. “Our goal here is to ensure that our diplomats speak from a position of strength and we continue to protect the people of the Republic of Korea from any threat from the North.”

TAKING THE FIGHT TO THE TALIBAN: A more aggressive approach toward combating the Taliban is being carried out to respond to massive casualties among Afghan Security Forces, according to Gen. Scott Miller, commander of NATO-led Resolute Support Mission and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.

“We are more in an offensive mindset and don’t wait for the Taliban to come and hit [us],” Miller said in an interview with NBC News in Kabul. “So that was an adjustment that we made early on. We needed to because of the amount of casualties that were being absorbed.”

Mattis revealed Monday night that Afghan Security Forces suffered 1,000 casualties in August and September, a number that is usually withheld at the request of the Afghan government.

Miller told NBC he is a realist on the issue of possible reconciliation with the Taliban. "I don't want to be Pollyannaish about this," he said. “I see paths, some of them are risk-filled. So rather than optimistic, I say pragmatic."

HOW ARE ADVISERS DOING? HARD TO SAY: While U.S. commanders and top Pentagon officials continue to portray the strategy in Afghanistan as making slow but steady progress in its goal of forcing the Taliban to reconcile, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has issued another scathing report. John Sopko has been a constant thorn in the side of the Pentagon, consistently issuing audits debunking the upbeat messaging from the military.

The latest report concludes Pentagon, Congress and U.S. taxpayers lack the information necessary to assess the impact the advising effort has made in building the capacity of the Ministry of Defense (MOD) and Ministry of the Interior (MOI) or the effectiveness of its $421 million advising contracts.

“Although the advising effort at the MOD and the MOI is one of DOD’s primary missions in Afghanistan, SIGAR found that DOD has not fully evaluated these efforts, and does not know whether the advisors assigned to MOD and MOI are meeting goals and milestones because it has not assessed, monitored or evaluated the advising efforts as required by its own guidance.”

The independent audit also found U.S. military personnel and defense contractors are often deployed without adequate training on how to advise the Afghans despite the high cost and importance of these operations. In an anonymous survey conducted by SIGAR, nine out of 20 deployed U.S. military personnel serving in advising roles indicated that they did not receive any adviser training before deploying. Furthermore, according to officials interviewed, the uniformed advisers tend to have the least specific training.

INHOFE TO CALL FLEET HEARING: When the Senate returns after the midterm elections, Sen. Jim Inhofe said he will call an Armed Services Committee hearing on Trump’s pledge to grow the Navy to 355 ships after being pressed by conservative radio pundit Hugh Hewitt. The president’s promise on multiple occasions to greatly increase the fleet has “fallen behind a little bit” because senators have been busy filling readiness holes caused by former President Barack Obama, Inhofe, who is the committee chairman, told Hewitt during the radio interview.

“Now, I don’t criticize Obama for this because he is an in-the-heart liberal who really, you know where their priorities are, and it’s not in defending America,” Inhofe told Hewitt. “But what we inherited from him, we were in our Army brigade combat units, as an example, we were down to only 33 percent of those could be deployed.”

The hearing will be scheduled in consultation with Sen. Roger Wicker. Inhofe, who ascended to Armed Services chairman after the death of John McCain, also disclosed that Wicker will stay on as seapower subcommittee chairman in the new session of Congress. Wicker helped formalize the Navy’s plan to reach 355 ships in the coming decades.

THANKS, OBAMA: It’s no secret the chairman is no fan of Obama, who is one of his favorite targets for criticism. During the Hewitt interview, Inhofe also blamed the former president for migrants and the deployment of more than 7,000 active-duty and National Guard troops at the Mexico border.

“These people who are asylum-seekers, they are coming up here at the invitation of Obama. He invited people from Guatemala and Honduras and Nicaragua and all those places to come up, and obviously if I were down there and the president of the United States said, ‘The doors are open, come up here and seek asylum, and you’ll be happy,’” Inhofe told Hewitt.

THE RUNDOWN

CNN: Key US allies 'temporarily' halt campaign against ISIS in Syria following clashes with Turkey

Military Times: Deployed border troops are preparing for militias stealing their gear, protester violence, documents show

Foreign Policy: Pentagon’s NATO Policy Chief Steps Down

Reuters: Rare NATO-Russia Talks Address Military Drills, 1987 Missile Treaty

New York Times: ‘Cold War’ Takes New Meaning For American Marines At A NATO Exercise

Wall Street Journal: Pompeo To Meet North Korean Counterpart On Denuclearization

Air Force Magazine: Final F-22s Get Ready to Take Off from Tyndall as Base Continues Recovery from Catastrophic Hurricane

New York Times: On a Tiny Finnish Island, a Helipad, 9 Piers — and the Russian Military?

Stars and Stripes: Air Force fires three Laughlin AFB commanders over 'chronic leadership failures'

Task and Purpose: Advice For US Troops Sent To The Mexican Border In An Age Of Terrible Leaders

Bloomberg: Textron's Landing Hovercraft Cut 20% in U.S. Navy Five-Year Plan

Nextgov.com: Pentagon Doesn’t Want Real Artificial Intelligence In War, Former Official Says

THURSDAY | NOV. 1

7 a.m. 7525 Colshire Dr. 2018 Cyber-Augmented Operations Division Fall Conference. ndia.org

8 a.m. 1001 16th St. NW. 28th Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law Conference. americanbar.org

12:30 p.m. 1333 H St. NW. Examining US–Saudi Arabia Relations. aei.org

6 p.m. 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW. Stalin’s Propaganda and Putin’s Information Wars. cato.org

FRIDAY | NOV. 2

7:30 a.m. 2101 Wilson Blvd. Health Affairs Breakfast featuring John Tenaglia, Deputy Assistant Director of the Defense Health Agency. ndia.org

8 a.m. 300 First St. SE. Space Training and Exercises Discussion with Brig. Gen. DeAnna Burt, Director of Operations and Communications at Headquarters Air Force Space Command. mitchellaerospacepower.org

8 a.m. 1777 F St. NW. A Conversation with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. cfr.org

9 a.m. 1775 Massachusetts Ave. NW. Assessing the Readiness of the U.S. military. brookings.edu

11 a.m. 1211 Connecticut Ave. NW. Course Change or Full Speed Ahead? Post-Midterm U.S Foreign Policy's Impact on Indo-Pacific. stimson.org

MONDAY | NOV. 5

10 a.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Artificial Intelligence and National Security: The Importance of the AI Ecosystem. csis.org

12:15 p.m. 740 15th St. NW. Afghanistan: What’s Next After Parliamentary Elections. newamerica.org

3 p.m. 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Book Launch: The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World with Author Robert Kagan. csis.org

TUESDAY | NOV. 6

6:30 a.m. 2425 Wilson Blvd. Institute of Land Warfare Breakfast with Lt. Gen. Aundre Piggee, Army Deputy Chief of Staff. ausa.org

9 a.m. 529 14th St. NW. Elections Under Threat? A Global Comparative Analysis of Cybersecurity of Elections. press.org

10 a.m. 214 Massachusetts Ave. NE. Iran: Renewed Sanctions and U.S. Policy. heritage.org

5:30 p.m. 2425 Wilson Blvd. Institute of Land Warfare Hosts Douglas Mastriano, Author of Thunder in the Argonne. ausa.org

WEDNESDAY | NOV. 7

6:45 a.m. 1250 South Hayes St. Special Topic Breakfast with Lt. Gen. Brian Beaudreault, Marine Corps Deputy Commandant for Plans, Policies and Operations. navyleague.org

Noon. 1030 15th St. NW. How Iran Will Cope with U.S. Sanctions. atlanticcouncil.org

Noon. Howard University. Army Senior Leader Development Conference with Rep. Anthony Brown, Lt. Gen. Charles Luckey, Chief of Army Reserve, and others.

12:30 p.m. 1619 Massachusetts Ave. NW. The Impact of War and Sanctions on the Russian Economy. sais-jhu.edu

THURSDAY | NOV. 8

9:15 a.m. 1789 Massachusetts Ave. NW. Back to the (Army’s) future: A conversation with Army Secretary Mark Esper. aei.org

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth. And sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful.”

President Trump, in an interview with ABC News.

Let's block ads! (Why?)