U.S. Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin hosts his Ukrainian counterpart, Protection Minister Oleksii Reznikov, in a gathering on the Pentagon this afternoon round 1 p.m. ET.
In case you had been curious: “We’re undecided precisely what Mr. Putin is as much as,” SecDef Austin instructed reporters Wednesday on the Pentagon when requested about Russian gear apparently left in place some 160 miles from Ukraine’s northern border, close to Yelnya. The Related Press has a tiny bit extra from that change in Washington, right here.
And ICYMI: Ukraine’s president signed a naval settlement with the UK on Tuesday, the British Ministry of Defence introduced in an announcement. “We’re involved by Russia’s navy build-up and exercise across the borders of Ukraine,” the MoD stated after that assembly in Kyiv, and famous, “Our governments don’t have any want to be adversarial, or search in any method to strategically encircle or undermine the Russian Federation.”
It’s possible you’ll keep in mind the final time UK and Ukrainian protection officers met again in June… The Royal Navy’s HMS Defender and the Royal Netherlands Navy’s HNLMS Evertsen had each pulled into port in Ukraine’s Odessa—however an unknown entity appeared to have spoofed their maritime monitoring indicators, which steered the ships had been subsequent to Ukraine’s Sevastopol naval base, a base that’s been illegally occupied by Russia since its invasion in 2014. U.S. Naval Institute Information recounted that dodgy occasion, right here.
POTUS46’s nationwide safety advisor rang up his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, the White Home introduced in a short readout afterward. The 2 males spoke “in a frank and constructive method” and “mentioned a number of points within the bilateral agenda and regional and world issues of concern.”
From Protection One
Pentagon Scrambles to Defend ‘Juicy Targets’ After Rivals’ House Exams // Tara Copp: U.S. House Pressure is taking Russia’s destruction of its personal satellite tv for pc as a warning.
Are Naval Forces on the Proper Path? Leaders Run Wargame to Test // Caitlin M. Kenney: Evaluation of the labeled, Pacific-focused “World 14” will proceed for weeks or months, a Navy official stated.
As Pentagon Fails 4th Audit, Officers Have ‘No Doubt’ It Will Finally Move // Courtney Bublé: The inspector common and impartial public accounting corporations carried out this yr’s audit of DoD’s $3.2 trillion in property and $3 trillion in liabilities.
The US Should Flip the Tables on Russia’s Psyops // Ivana Stradner: A post-Chilly Conflict fixation on arduous energy has sapped us of the twenty first century’s most potent power.
Welcome to this Thursday version of The D Temporary from Ben Watson with Jennifer Hlad. In case you’re not already subscribed to The D Temporary, you are able to do that right here. On this present day in 1978, the F/A-18 Hornet flew for the primary time at Maryland’s Naval Air Check Heart. The plane entered lively responsibility about 4 years later, in January 1983.
Homeland Safety officers say Virginia’s Fort Lee has resettled all of its Afghan evacuees, which numbered round 2,500, in response to the Protection Division. And general, “greater than 25,000 Afghan evacuees have been resettled in communities throughout our nation,” DHS stated in its assertion Wednesday.
About 45,000 Afghans await resettlement at seven different navy posts, together with Indiana’s Camp Atterbury; New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst; Holloman Air Pressure Base in New Mexico; Fort Bliss in Texas; Fort Pickett, which like its Accomplice namesake Lee, can also be in Virginia; Marine Corps Base Quantico, about 40 miles south of D.C.; and at Wisconsin’s Fort McCoy. Learn extra through DHS’s Operation Allies Welcome, right here.
ICYMI: Here’s a glimpse on the screening course of for Afghan evacuees, shared by the Protection Division’s Inspector Basic Wednesday and flagged on Twitter by Jeff Seldin from Voice of America.
Associated studying:
President Joe Biden welcomes the Mexican and Canadian president and prime minister on the White Home as we speak for a North American Leaders’ Summit—the primary since 2016, earlier than POTUS45 deserted the custom, which started below POTUS43 in 2005. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau drops by 1600 Penn. Ave simply after 1 p.m. ET, adopted by Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador at 3 p.m. The “three amigos” then meet collectively within the East Room at about 5 p.m.
Main Biden’s public agenda: “ending the COVID-19 pandemic”; stimulating “competitiveness and equitable development” between the three international locations; local weather change; and plans to develop some form of “regional imaginative and prescient for migration,” in response to the White Home.
This week we discovered almost all of America’s allies have skilled democratic backsliding since 2010, “and at charges far outpacing common declines amongst different international locations,” in response to Max Fisher of the New York Occasions reporting Tuesday after reviewing reams of latest knowledge from democracy-watchers on the Swedish nonprofit V-Dem.
One large occasion that shifted the post-Soviet democratic trajectories of the Nineteen Nineties: America’s warfare on terror, starting in 2001. On high of this, Fisher writes, “consciousness of the USA’ home issues—mass shootings, polarization, racial injustice—has drastically affected [global] perceptions” of U.S. democracy overseas, as researchers at Pew have documented effectively right here, for instance.
Why it issues (emphasis added): It will appear to “recommend that a lot of the world’s backsliding is just not imposed on democracies by overseas powers, however relatively is a rot rising inside the world’s strongest community of principally democratic alliances,” in response to Fisher. Learn on on the Occasions, right here.
And lastly: Taiwan’s navy blasted dance music basewide because it unveiled its first squadron of upgraded F-16V fighter jets on the Chiayi Air Pressure Base on Thursday. (Discover images of the occasion through President Tsai Ing-wen’s Twitter account, here.)
Context: At a price of about $4 billion, “Taiwan has been changing 141 F-16A/B jets into the F-16V kind, 64 of which have already been upgraded, and has moreover ordered 66 new F-16Vs, which have new avionics, weapons and radar programs to higher face down the Chinese language air power,” Reuters studies from Chiayi.
Taiwan may quickly have the most important F-16 fleet in Asia (at greater than 200) because of an $8 billion cope with the U.S. from 2019. A bit extra from Reuters, right here.
One last item: For 19 consecutive days, China has despatched plane into Taiwan’s ADIZ, or air protection identification zone, in response to Taipei’s protection ministry. On Wednesday, fighter jets made the journey; today it was early-warning and digital warfare plane.
FWIW: Nov. 6 was the final time double-digit numbers of Chinese language plane reportedly entered Taiwan’s ADIZ. (However there’s up to now been nothing just like the waves of plane that swarmed the island’s edges again in early October, drawing worldwide consideration.)