Today In Issues:
FDD Research & Analysis
The Must-Reads
‘Our artillery is starving:’ Ukraine holds its breath as US set to approve $60bn of military aid U.N. finds Palestinian refugee agency suffers from political bias Iran's Israel strike coincided with crackdown on dissent at home, activists say Satellite photos suggest Iran air defense radar struck in Isfahan during apparent Israeli attack Bloomberg’s Javier Blas: The US should enforce, not increase, Iranian oil sanctions National Interest’s Ahmad Sharawi: Understanding Israel-Hezbollah clashes since October 7 Iraq's Kataib Hezbollah denies saying it resumes attacks on US forces Germany spying: Far-right party aide held in China spy probe North Korean leader Kim leads rocket drills that simulate a nuclear counterattack against enemies U.S. takes aim at Chinese banks aiding Russia war effort Bloomberg’s Karishma Vaswani: Blinken needs to show China there’s a way out 3 people injured after vehicle attack in JerusalemIn The News
Israel
Israel’s military operations in Gaza have weakened Hamas. Most Hamas battalions have been degraded and are scattered. Thousands of its members have been killed, and at least one senior military leader has been eliminated. – New York Times
The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency must do more to ensure its employees are politically neutral and aren’t teaching biased content in its schools in Gaza and the West Bank, a U.N.-ordered investigation found Monday. – Wall Street Journal
The Elkobis are among the tens of thousands of people who have recently returned to Sderot—part of a revival of small Israeli communities near the Gaza border that constitutes a tactical victory for Israel’s government, even as it speaks to the pull of ordinary life. – Wall Street Journal
Israeli leaders said they will fight against sanctions being imposed on any Israeli military units for alleged human rights abuses after media reports said Washington was planning its first sanctions against the country’s defence forces. – Reuters
The Israel Defense Forces is readying to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Gaza’s southernmost city in Rafah ahead of its planned offensive there against Hamas, according to a report Monday. – Times of Israel
Two years before its October 7 assault on southern Israel, Hamas drafted a “strategic vision” for the governing of “liberated Palestine” after the supposed inevitable demise of the State of Israel. – Times of Israel
Amid reports over the past few days of an imminent US announcement regarding a decision to sanction the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion over alleged human rights abuses, a US official tells The Times of Israel that the framing of the move as “sanctions” is incorrect. – Times of Israel
Steven Stalinsky writes: The collaboration between senior terrorists and their growing list of friends in the U.S. and the West has real-world consequences. These groups are designated terrorist for a reason. They don’t plan marches and rallies—they carry out terrorist attacks. And when the U.S. and Western activists, including college students, see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals, they may consider their next steps—which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping. – Wall Street Journal
Jonathan Chait writes: The pro-Palestinian groups have chosen to embrace violent fundamentalist death cults as their allies. They have chosen to spurn compromise and coexistence. The gaping void of a humane, universalist, liberal movement to advocate for the cause of Palestinian freedom is their failure, and its fruit is the rancid antisemitism that, despite their feeble denials, has sprung up everywhere since October 7. – New York Magazine
Iran
Satellite photos taken Monday suggest an apparent Israeli retaliatory strike targeting Iran’s central city of Isfahan hit a radar system for a Russian-made air defense battery, contradicting repeated denials by officials in Tehran of any damage in the assault. – Associated Press
The same day Iran launched its first ever direct attack on Israel it embarked on a less-noticed confrontation at home, ordering police in several cities to take to the streets to arrest women accused of flouting its strict Islamic dress code. Iranian authorities insist that their so-called Nour (Light) campaign targets businesses and individuals who defy the hijab law, aiming to respond to demands from devout citizens who are angry about the growing number of unveiled women in public. – Reuters
Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif vowed on Monday to boost trade between the neighbouring nations to $10 billion a year, as Raisi commenced a three-day visit amid tight security in the Pakistani capital. – Reuters
European Union sanctions announced following Iran’s attack against Israel are “regrettable” because the country was acting in self-defence, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian posted on X on Tuesday. – Reuters
Iran recently introduced a new, enhanced version of its Bavar-373 long-range air defense system that Tehran officials claim can intercept American stealth jet fighters. – Newsweek
Javier Blas writes: The act would also require the US State Department to deliver a “strategy to counter the role of” China in the “evasion” of US sanctions, with a focus on the number of vessels involved in oil smuggling between Iran and China and any “interference” from Beijing preventing the US from enforcing the embargo. The legislation is a step in the right direction. But it comes too late, with too many caveats, and leaves way too much discretion to the White House. Until the November elections, Tehran still has a green light to export as much oil as it can. After that, we shall see. – Bloomberg
Shoshana Bryen writes: In addition to going after the Islamic Republic directly, Israel also targeted proxies in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And someone destroyed an IRGC headquarters in Iraq — one might assume that whoever did it had the same motivation. Deterring Iran will not be easy. Israel took the first step, but only with a common understanding and mutual support will it be possible for the US and its allies to end Iran’s war. We’re not there yet. – Algemeiner
Nile Gardiner writes: On both sides of the Atlantic it is time for our governments to wake up on Iran, impose the aggressive and forceful sanctions that are needed against Tehran, and drop the fiction that the West can negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear program through the JCPOA. This is a moment to fully stand with Israel in its darkest hour. The United States and the United Kingdom must back Israel’s just response to Iranian aggression, instead of seeking to constrain the Benjamin Netanyahu government from taking necessary action in order to defend the people of Israel. – Heritage Foundation
Russia & Ukraine
A Moscow court on Monday sentenced a man to five years of compulsory labor for giving an antiwar comment to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) two years ago — a criminal prosecution that showed the Russian government intensifying its crackdown on dissent and that could have a chilling effect on international media still operating in the country. – Washington Post
Russia launched a drone attack on Ukraine that injured nine people in the Black Sea port of Odesa, four of them children, and also targeted Kyiv, the capital, Ukraine’s military officials said early on Tuesday. – Reuters
Russia said on Monday that U.S., British and French military support for Ukraine has pushed the world to the brink of a direct clash between the world’s biggest nuclear powers that could end in catastrophe. – Reuters
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday he expressed gratitude to U.S. President Joe Biden for support and leadership in a telephone conversation. Zelenskiy, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said he noted in the conversation the role of House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries in securing passage of a major military aid bill to Ukraine. – Reuters
The European Union’s next package of sanctions should include steps against a shadow fleet of tankers moving Russian oil to circumvent sanctions, Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. – Reuters
Russia now has grounds to confiscate Western assets after the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that would allow the potential transfer of seized Russian assets to Ukraine, a top Russian lawmaker said on Monday. – Reuters
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will announce a 500 million pound ($617 million) uplift in military support for Ukraine on a visit to Poland on Tuesday, warning that Russia must be defeated to prevent its troops from pressing further into Europe. – Reuters
Gerard Baker writes: Nor should the continuing scale of U.S. power let allies off the hook for their own defense. One distinct benefit that has come from the failure of the Republican-led House to augment support for Ukraine in the past 16 months is that it has finally jolted our European allies out of their complacency. We shall see if they make good on their promises, but so far they seem to be slowly coming to understand that the defense of their Continent is primarily their responsibility. […]But addressing those pathologies doesn’t require us to disown our leading global role. It needn’t force us to abandon our willingness to use our unrivaled resources to defend ourselves from the rising threats to our global security. In fact the two are complementary. – Wall Street Journal
Tom Rogan writes: Top line: If Ukraine is to succeed, and it can succeed, Kyiv and its European neighbors must recognize that this U.S. aid package is unlikely to be repeated in scale. Ukraine must adapt its strategy, and Europe must get real about Russia’s renewed challenge to the European continent. – Washington Examiner
Tom Rogan writes: The DI has a robust intelligence network on U.S. soil, particularly in Florida, and operates numerous espionage efforts on U.S. soil. These include election interference and the recruitment/handling of agents inside the U.S. government. For a country as small as Cuba, the DI has shown an impressive, sustained ability to recruit career U.S. officials in the State Department and intelligence community. But the DI is particularly valuable to Moscow in terms of its ability to facilitate Russian operations in the U.S. and share intelligence. Key concerns here include Russian efforts to find defectors living in the U.S. and conduct activities related to the so-called Havana Syndrome. – Washington Examiner
Mackenzie Eaglen writes: This supplemental funding will also allow further transfer of long-range strike capabilities like the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) been successfully employed by the Ukrainian to strike targets in the Russian rear and score critical victories. With funds to backfill these weapons, the U.S. Army can more rapidly move to modernize and ramp up production of long range fires. These equipment transfers to Ukraine have not only allowed the U.S. to cripple the Russian military at the cost of three percent of our defense budget, but they have also provided an opportunity for the Pentagon to modernize the Army’s aging arsenal. – The National Interest
Hezbollah
A source close to Hezbollah said an Israeli strike deep into Lebanon killed a fighter of the Iran-backed militant group on Tuesday as he was travelling in a vehicle. – Agence France-Presse
A barrage of some 35 rockets were fired from Lebanon at the northern community of Ein Zeitim near Safed on Monday evening as Jewish Israelis sat down for the Passover Seder meal. – Times of Israel
Ahmad Sharawi writes: It is difficult to say how long the fight’s third phase will continue on the northern front. In Israel, speculation looms over an expanded IDF operation deep inside Lebanese territory. Conversely, Iran may activate Hezbollah to expand strikes on Israel following Tehran’s salvo of more than three hundred missiles and drones on April 13. Dramatic changes could happen at a moment’s notice, as they did on October 7. – National Interest
Iraq
U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria faced two separate rocket and explosive drone attacks in less than 24 hours, Iraqi security sources and U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday, in the first such incidents reported after a near three-month pause. – Reuters
Iraqi armed faction Kataib Hezbollah has denied issuing a statement saying it had resumed attacks on U.S. forces, a statement from the group issued on the Telegram messaging app said. – Reuters
Oil exports from Kurdistan to Turkey through a pipeline that’s been shut for more than a year will take longer to resume, a Iraqi government spokesman said. – Bloomberg
Middle East & North Africa
French President Emmanuel Macron held phone calls on Monday with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to discuss ways of avoiding an escalation in the Middle East crisis, said France and Egypt. – Reuters
Most stock markets in the Gulf closed lower on Monday as geopolitical strife in the region remained an area of concern, while uncertainties surrounding the U.S. Federal Reserve’s monetary policy path added to the worries. – Reuters
Despite the Gaza war’s evisceration of Israel’s image throughout the Arab world, Saudi Arabia has continued holding high-level discussions with the White House in recent weeks aimed at brokering a normalization agreement with Jerusalem, three US officials told The Times of Israel. – Times of Israel
Allison Minor writes: A stronger, unified Security Council approach to the Houthi attacks would need to begin with Saudi Arabia, with support from the Emiratis. Saudi Arabia’s cautious public stance on the attacks is understandable given the sensitivities of the situation in Gaza. But Saudi Arabia understands that the Houthi maritime threat is not limited to the current Gaza conflict. Saudi Arabia must make it clear to the Houthis that they will not engage in a side deal that jeopardizes the U.N.-led political process or enables the Houthis to seize Yemen’s oil and gas fields. – War on the Rocks
Korean Peninsula
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised salvo launches of the country’s “super-large” multiple rocket launchers that simulated a nuclear counterattack against enemy targets, state media said Tuesday, adding to tests and threats that have raised tensions in the region. – Associated Press
U.S. and South Korean officials will meet in Hawaii this week for talks on sharing the cost of keeping American troops in South Korea, with the U.S. seeking “a fair and equitable outcome” that will strengthen the alliance, the U.S. State Department said on Monday. – Reuters
Britain said North Korea had breached multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions after it fired a ballistic missile on Monday, and called for Pyongyang to “stop such provocations” and “return to dialogue.” – Reuters
China
The U.S. military commander in the Indo-Pacific said he didn’t believe the economic growth figures reported by China and described the country’s economy as failing. – Wall Street Journal
The U.S. is drafting sanctions that threaten to cut some Chinese banks off from the global financial system, arming Washington’s top envoy with diplomatic leverage that officials hope will stop Beijing’s commercial support of Russia’s military production, according to people familiar with the matter. – Wall Street Journal
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. – Reuters
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is starting three days of talks with senior Chinese officials in Shanghai and Beijing this week with U.S.-China ties at a critical point over numerous global disputes. – Associated Press
Simmering tensions between Beijing and Washington remain the top worry for American companies operating in China, according to a report by the American Chamber of Commerce in China released Tuesday. – Associated Press
A former researcher working in the U.K. Parliament and another man have been charged with spying for China, British prosecutors said Monday. – Associated Press
China needs to take a stand over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rein in its enormous trade surplus with the European Union if it is committed to improving relations, the bloc’s top diplomat in Asia said. – Bloomberg
The Biden administration is unlikely to ease high-level travel warnings for China unless the country takes concrete steps to address safety concerns, a senior administration official told The Hill ahead of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing this week. – The Hill
Editorial: The secretary should have no hesitation telling China’s leaders that Mr. Lin was not engaging in fraud in his effort to worship God outside close state control. Beliefs and convictions are universal human rights, not a reward to be bestowed or withheld by the Chinese Communist Party and its overweening state. – Washington Post
Karishma Vaswani reports: There is nothing more important to the Chinese Communist Party than its survival. The pressures on Xi and his regime are mounting on multiple fronts. If the US really wants to get China on its side to work on resolving some of the most urgent issues of our time, like climate change, the war in Ukraine and a potentially explosive Middle East, then more cooperation rather than confrontation could help to achieve that. The US has put together a lot of compelling sticks lately that have got China’s attention. Now is the time to dangle some carrots — perhaps in the form of further AI collaboration, countering the illicit drug trade, and improving people-to-people ties. – Bloomberg
Chrissy Houlahan and Dan Crenshaw write: The joint counter-narcotics working group established between the U.S. and China is a step in the right direction, but unless we take a more aggressive posture, tens of thousands of Americans will continue to suffer. We thank our colleagues in the Senate for passing our important counter-narcotics provision and the president for signing it into law to give our intelligence agencies the authorities they need to stop the deadly flow of fentanyl. – Fox News
Elizabeth Economy writes: Finally, to avoid unnecessary friction, the United States should continue to stabilize the U.S.-Chinese relationship by defining new areas for cooperation, expanding civil society engagement, tamping down needless hostile rhetoric, strategically managing its Taiwan policy, and developing a clear message on the economic tools it uses to protect U.S. economic and national security. This will enable the United States to maintain relations with those in China who are concerned about their country’s current trajectory, as well as give Washington room to focus on building up its economic and military capabilities while moving forward with its own global vision. – Foreign Affairs
South Asia
Political opponents accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of “hate speech” after an address during an election rally when he seemingly cast Muslims as taking the wealth of other Indians. – Washington Post
The U.S. State Department’s annual human rights assessment, opens new tab found “significant” abuses in India’s northeastern Manipur state last year and attacks on minorities, journalists and dissenting voices in the rest of the country. – Reuters
Pakistani security forces killed eleven militants in two raids Monday targeting their hideouts in the volatile northwest region bordering Afghanistan, the military aid in a statement. – Associated Press
Asia
For months now, these hills of Karenni State in eastern Myanmar have been severed from modern communications. The military junta that seized power in a coup three years ago, plunging the country into civil war, has cut off the populations most opposed to its brutal rule. In these resistance strongholds, where people from around the nation have congregated, there is almost no internet, cell service or even electricity. – New York Times
Lawyers for Armenia asked the top United Nations court on Monday to throw out a case filed by Azerbaijan over the Karabakh region that accuses Armenia of ethnic cleansing. – Associated Press
China has accused the United States of “stoking military confrontation” with the recent deployment of a powerful missile launcher capable of firing weapons with a range of up to 1,600 kilometers to exercises in the Philippines. – CNN
Europe
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has staked his political survival on getting planes of asylum seekers off the tarmac and on their way to Rwanda. He will get it done, he vowed Monday, with the first flights airborne in “10 to 12 weeks.” – Washington Post
Leaders of a new pro-Russian electoral bloc opposed to Moldovan President Maia Sandu’s plans to seek European Union membership said on Tuesday they were deliberately delayed and harassed at the airport on their return home. – Reuters
Voters go to the polls in North Macedonia this week for the first round of the presidential election — […]The brief campaigning period has focused on North Macedonia’s progress toward joining the European Union, the rule of law, fighting corruption, combating poverty and tackling the country’s sluggish economy. – Associated Press
Poland’s president says the NATO member would be ready to host the nuclear weapons of the military alliances’s other members in response to Russia’s moving its nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus. – Associated Press
Delegations from Greece and Turkey were meeting in Athens on Monday as part of long-standing efforts to improve often tense relations between the two neighbors, days after Turkey voiced objections over Greece’s plans to create marine nature reserves in the Ionian and Aegean seas. – Associated Press
Britain’s Home Secretary, James Cleverly, is visiting Italy as part of the U.K. government’s efforts to crack down on migrants arriving by small boats. – Associated Press
Britain said on Monday it would proscribe the Terrorgram collective, an extreme right-wing online network, as a terrorist organisation, meaning it would become a criminal offense in the country to belong to or promote the group. – Reuters
Lee Hockstader writes: Promoting more stable jobs for young workers could help, along with boosting Spain’s spending on families with children, which, as a percentage of economic output, is half the outlay in many northern European nations. The baby bust is here to stay. Spain is showing how to manage it. – Washington Post
Paula Erizanu writes: Today her words ring truer than ever. It is because of the frozen conflict that Moldova is still under Russian influence, with its constant threats and endless jeopardy. Yet Moldovans fear escalation not because we haven’t sat down at negotiation tables with Russians but because we have, and the result was deeply damaging. Ukraine must not make the same mistake. – New York Times
James Crabtree writes: It is possible to imagine a different German trip, in which Scholz coordinated with European partners and Washington, arrived in Beijing with his most capable ministers, and was willing to state a joint policy firmly in public, complete with clear carrots and sticks. Instead, Germany’s approach seemed to lack long-term strategic acumen. Its policymakers bristle at the notion that Germany’s economic and foreign policies are set in corporate boardrooms, rather than the chancellery and ministries in Berlin. But it is hard to explain Scholz’s trip—and, dispiritingly, much of Germany’s China policy—in any other way. – Foreign Policy
Africa
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress lost a second court case against a new rival party fronted by former President Jacob Zuma on Monday. – Associated Press
Deadly floods are wreaking havoc in many parts of East Africa that face torrential rainfall, with Burundi calling for international help to deal with the aftermath. – Associated Press
The United States has begun talks with Niger to withdraw the roughly 1,000 American troops in the country, a State Department official confirmed Monday. – The Hill
Roger Kaplan writes: It may be wise for the U.S. to cease its facile concern for democracy and gender ideology, evidently State Department priorities these days, and go to bat for an African future based on security and prosperity. Even if U.S. foreign-policy makers viewed with favor the emergence of a philosemitic, pro-Western and liberal country such as Kabylie in a strategically important part of Africa, there are no foreign policy precedents to ditch a security partner—Algeria, with whom we need to cooperate—for an unknown quantity. – Wall Street Journal
The Americas
By mid-2024, Claudia Sheinbaum will most likely become Mexico’s first female president. She would also be its first leader with a Jewish background in a country that’s home to nearly 100 million Catholics. – Associated Press
Thousands of Indigenous people began gathering in Brazil’s capital on Monday for what was expected to become a protest against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s unfulfilled promises to create reserves and expel illegal miners and land-grabbers from their territories. – Associated Press
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with the head of the International Criminal Court as he faces an ongoing investigation by the tribunal into crimes against humanity for his crackdown on anti-government protests. – Associated Press
Panama recalled its ambassador to Nicaragua on Monday for consultations, citing the government’s “energetic protest” against what it called the illegal protection afforded to a former Panamanian president at its embassy in Panama City. – Reuters
Haiti’s capital is almost completely cut off by air, sea and land blockades as gang violence intensifies, stopping aid from getting to 58,000 children with the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, the head of the U.N. children’s agency warned on Monday. – Rueters
United States
President Joe Biden on Monday met with U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and two other prominent liberal lawmakers opposed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Gaza bombing campaign. The meeting came as Biden’s support for Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack has divided Democrats, fraying Biden’s coalition of voters ahead of November’s presidential election. – Reuters
The Senate is returning to Washington on Tuesday to vote on $95 billion in war aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, taking the final steps in Congress to send the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk after months of delays and contentious internal debate over how involved the United States should be abroad. – Associated Press
House Republican conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik and every New York GOP House lawmaker demanded on Monday that Columbia president Minouche Shafik resign immediately for failing to crack down on “a large unauthorized antisemitic riot” that has engulfed the university’s campus. – New York Post
Walter Russel Mead writes: Paradoxically, Mr. Biden’s foreign-policy failures are responsible for the fear that now hands him political victories in Congress. The horrifying consequences of his administration’s failures to deter Russia in Ukraine and Iran in the Middle East, and fears of what a similar failure of deterrence could mean in the Indo-Pacific, have created bipartisan majorities for a more activist, better-armed American presence on the world scene. America needs to be stronger and do better. That is the message Congress is sending the White House by passing these bills. One can only hope Team Biden is listening. – Wall Street Journal
Nadia Schadlow writes: If new administrations commit to starting with right question: “What has been done before and why did those efforts fail,” they can help break this crisis of repetition. The Defense Industrial Strategy aims to “catalyze generational rather than incremental change,” but revisionist powers like China have mobilized their industries to support military modernization on a vast scale. Washington doesn’t have a generation to wait. The sooner policymakers stop repeating analyses and focus on overcoming obstacles to implementation, the sooner the United States will be ready to out-compete its rivals. – Breaking Defense
Marc Lynch writes: The White House is still acting as if none of this really matters. Arab regimes will survive, anger will fade or be redirected to other issues, and, in a few months, Washington can get back to the important business of Israeli-Saudi normalization. That is how things have traditionally worked. But this time may well be different. The Gaza fiasco, at a moment of shifting global power and changing calculations by regional leaders, shows how little Washington has learned from its long record of policy failures. – Foreign Affairs
Cybersecurity
Chinese universities and research institutes recently obtained high-end Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab artificial intelligence chips through resellers, despite the U.S. widening a ban last year on the sale of such technology to China. – Reuters
The Biden administration should adopt less-strict standards about what triggers a proposed prohibition on data brokers selling bulk sensitive information to adversarial foreign entities, industry groups argued in public comments due last week. – CyberScoop
Through its first program of record to scale artificial intelligence into weapons and other systems — Project Linchpin — the Army is hustling to enable an operational pipeline and an overarching infrastructure for trusted environments where in-house and third-party algorithms can be developed and validated in a responsible, secure manner. – DefenseScoop
Researchers at Microsoft say they have uncovered a malicious tool used by Russian state-sponsored hackers to steal credentials in compromised networks. – The Record
Belarusian politically motivated hackers have claimed to attack the country’s largest state-run manufacturer of fertilizers, Grodno Azot, for its alleged involvement in political repression, sanctions evasion, and human rights violations. – The Record
The chief executive of UnitedHealth Group will testify in Congress in May about the ransomware attack on a subsidiary that led to nationwide issues for the healthcare industry. – The Record
The partnership between law enforcement and the technology industry is “at risk” due to end-to-end encryption, warned a joint declaration on Sunday from European police chiefs. – The Record
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi writes: As we seek to prevent, deter, and counter CCP cyber operations, it is essential that we expand our efforts now before it is too late. The CCP’s long-running cyber strategy involves pre-positioning its assets and capacity to potentially damage American infrastructure years ahead. To stop the cyber attacks of tomorrow, our work must begin today. – C4ISRNET
Defense
The U.S. Navy’s supply corps will spend the next two years applying lessons from the service’s aircraft fleet to surface ship readiness. – Defense News
The Space Development Agency’s plan to field hundreds of missile warning and communication satellites in the coming years is still in the early days of execution, but one lesson defense firms are drawing from the effort is the importance of fostering a reliable supply chain. – Defense News
A pilot sits in an F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter cockpit, scanning for cruise missiles fired by an adversary. The pilot spots one, shooting it down before it can hit the aircraft carrier they are protecting. […] This is the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE) at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division at Naval Station Patuxent River, Md. – USNI News
The Navy has convicted a chief petty officer of attempted espionage, among other charges, at a court-martial in San Diego after the sailor was charged with sharing classified documents under the guise of writing research papers. – Military.com
Jack Reed and Roger Wicker write: It is time to break the bureaucratic logjam and build a full-scale approach to the threat of small drones. Developing these solutions will improve our ability to defend service members and civilians. The growing dangers posed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea demand much of our defense focus. Nonetheless, we cannot forget that national security begins at home. – Washington Post
Long War
The Israeli authorities said they had arrested two men in Jerusalem on Monday after a vehicle was used to ram into pedestrians, injuring at least three people, in what the police called a terrorist attack. – New York Times
Philippine troops killed the leader of a small Muslim rebel group and eleven of his men blamed for past bombings and extortion in a clash in the country’s south, military officials said Tuesday. – Associated Press
The Pentagon said Monday that it is not abandoning the counterterrorism mission in West Africa even as it begins negotiations to withdraw the U.S. military presence in Niger and questions are arising over military operations in neighboring Chad. – Military.com