Urgent consultations in Washington, Moscow on reported US-Russian submarines in firefight

First reports reaching DEBKAfile’s military sources say that a US submarine intercepted a Russian nuclear sub in American waters opposite Alaska. The Russian sub escorting the nuclear submarine responded with a Balkan 2000 torpedo and scuttled the US vessel. Urgent consultations in both the White House and the Kremlin were taking place on Tuesday night. US Vice President Mike Pence called off an appearance in New Hampshire after being recalled to Washington for a conference called by President Donald Trump without explanation.

U.S. Expected to Strike Back for Iran’s Downing of Drone

President Donald Trump / Getty Images

 

Trump: ‘Iran made a big mistake’

The United States is likely to take military action against Iran in the coming days for Tehran’s downing a U.S. drone in international airspace on Wednesday near the Strait of Hormuz.

The Central Command said an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone aircraft was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile system while operating in international airspace around 7:35 p.m. on Wednesday.

Chinese Video Urges War With U.S.

 

State-controlled media urges fight ’til end,’ calls for sanctions on U.S. companies

China’s Communist Party-controlled media stepped up a war of words with the United States recently urging an escalation of the ongoing trade dispute into a full-scale conflict.

“China must be prepared to fight a protracted war,” states a four-minute, anti-American video posted five days ago on a Chinese video-sharing service.

“Trump’s ‘outrageous and selfish’ strategy might work for smaller countries, but it will never work for China,” the video warns. “To quote a well-written article in the Global Times: If the Americans want to fight, we will fight them until the end! And we will fight until the Pacific Ocean splits into two!” Global Times is the Communist Party of China’s nationalistic and anti-U.S. news outlet.

Whale with harness could be Russian weapon, say Norwegian experts

Whale in mystery harness harasses Norwegian boats – video (at source)

 

Fisherman raised alarm after white whale sporting unusual strapping began harassing their boats

Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force.

Fishermen in waters near the small Norwegian fishing village of Inga reported last week that a white beluga whale wearing a strange harness had begun to harass their fishing boats.

China’s Acoustic Cannon

FILE – In this Oct. 26, 2009 file photo, security workers guard at construction site of the U.S. Consulate compound in Guangzhou in southern China’s Guangdong province. The State Department said an email notice Wednesday, May 23, 2018, that a U.S. government employee in southern China reported abnormal sensations of sound and pressure, recalling similar experiences among American diplomats in Cuba who later fell ill. (Chinatopix via AP, File)

 

U.S. intelligence and security agencies investigating the mysterious sonic attacks against American diplomatic personnel in China need to look no further than China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The ministry stated in a Nov. 15 report on the use of military technology for civilian projects that one program involves an “acoustic wave cannon.”

The weapon appears to be a variant of the sonic cannon produced by China’s Dongguan 3G Acoustic Technology Co. Ltd.

Trump recognizes Golan to counter Iran’s first steps for annexing Lebanon to Syria

 

US President Donald Trump’s declared recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan on Thursday, March 21, had a time-sensitive object, unconnected to the Israeli election or Binyamin Netanyahu’s run for reelection, as his rivals contended. DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources reveal that it was an arrow aimed by the US president at Iran, Syria, Iraq and Hizballah, and the machinations plotted at Syrian President Bashar Assad’s meeting with Iran’s supreme leader ayatollah Ali Khameini on Feb. 25. Present at their meeting, our sources reveal, were two figures, Al Qods chief Qasem Soleimani, supreme commander of Iran’s Mid East fronts, and, for the first time, a high-ranking Hizballah military official, who is a senior strategic adviser to Hassan Nasrallah.

US Marines are practicing seizing small islands as a possible China fight looms in the Pacific

Lance Cpl. Chris Pedroza, a rifleman with Alpha Company, Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, the “China Marines,” firing an M240G medium machine gun during low-light live-fire machine-gun training at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam on March 11. (Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Harrison C. Rakhshani)

 

• US Marines recently led a simulated assault on a small island in the Pacific, honing skills thought to be essential in a fight with China.
• The exercise, which also involved the Army and the Air Force, was part of the Corps’ efforts to refine the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations concept.
• “This entire mission profile simulated the process of securing advanced footholds for follow-on forces to conduct further military operations, with rapid redeployment,” the service said.
• Last week, Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that the ability to seize advanced bases would be critical in a war with China.

Everything that is old may indeed be new again.

Potential Shifts on US Strategy in Syria

 

The Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs is denying a Wall Street Journal report that claimed at least 1,000 US troops would remain in Syria. Gen. Joseph Dunford released a statement calling the claims “factually inaccurate” and assured the public of the Pentagon’s commitment to a steady withdrawal: “We continue to implement the president’s direction to draw down U.S. forces to a residual presence.” President Trump made waves across the national security community when he announced his original plan in December of the complete withdrawal of all 2,000 US troops from Syria. Later, the administration announced that 400 troops would most likely stay in southern Syria to monitor possible Iranian arms shipments to Lebanese-based terror groups such as Hezbollah. No specific estimates have been made as to the number of troops, although Pentagon officials have confirmed that any new amount will almost certainly will be lower. Although the President initially supported shifting troops from Syria to Iraq, concerns from Iraqi politicians about the US using its regional presence to spy on Iran have negated any support for such an initiative.

The U.S. Will Develop Newly Unbanned Weapons as a Key Missile Treaty Ends

A JASSM missile undergoing launch tests from a F-16 fighter over the Gulf of Mexico, 2018. Image: SMgst Michael Jackson (Air Force)

 

The United States is planning to quickly develop two new missiles previously banned by a 30-year-old arms control treaty. America’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, sparked by allegations of Russian cheating, is paving the way for Washington to match Russian weapons with new missiles of its own. The U.S. will test the missiles as soon as this August, within days of the end of the treaty.

The two missile types, a ground-launched cruise missile and an intermediate-range ballistic missile, were previously banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The INF Treaty, signed in 1987, banned land-based missiles with ranges from 310 to 3,420 miles.

Although the treaty itself didn’t ban actual nuclear weapons, it removed key nuclear delivery systems from the inventories of both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., dramatically lowering the number of nuclear weapons deployed in Europe.

Photos puts China’s ‘galloping military buildup’ on vivid display

Aerial image of the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai

 

China’s military spending for 2019 will increase by 7.5 percent to about $177.61 billion, as revealed on March 3, 2019 by an official at Chinese Communist Party’s annual National People’s Consultative Congress.

Turkey: Putin’s Ally in NATO?

Turkey has NATO’s second biggest army, and its military love affair with Russia may be in its infancy now, but it undermines NATO’s military deterrence against Russia. Pictured: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, on March 10, 2017. (Image source: kremlin.ru)

 

• On March 7, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkey would never turn back from the S-400 missile deal with Russia. He even added that Ankara may subsequently look into buying the more advanced S-500 systems now under construction in Russia.
• With the S-400 deal, Turkey is simply telling its theoretical Western allies that it views “them,” and “not Russia,” as a security threat. Given that Russia is widely considered a security threat to NATO, Turkey’s odd-one-out position inevitably calls for questioning its official NATO identity.
• Turkey has NATO’s second biggest army, and its military love affair with Russia may be in its infancy now, but it undermines NATO’s military deterrence against Russia.

On September 17, 1950, more than 68 years ago, the first Turkish brigade left the port of Mersin on the Mediterranean coast, arriving, 26 days later, at Busan in Korea. Turkey was the first country, after the United States, to answer the United Nations’ call for military aid to South Korea after the North attacked that year. Turkey sent four brigades (a total of 21,212 soldiers) to a country that is 7,785 km away. By the end of the Korean War, Turkey had lost 741 soldiers killed in action. The U.N. Memorial Cemetery in Busan embraces 462 Turkish soldiers.

Iran Building Two New Nuclear Plants

The reactor building at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran / Getty Images

 

Files complaint against U.S. for ‘crimes against humanity’

Iranian leaders announced on Monday the construction of two new nuclear plants, and it remains unclear if the Trump administration views this as crossing a red line since its abandonment of the landmark nuclear deal, which included provisions permitting Iran to work on heavy water nuclear reactors that could provide a plutonium-based pathway to a bomb.

50 Iranian drones conduct massive ‘way to Jerusalem’ exercise – report

A military vehicle carrying Iranian Zoobin smart bomb (L) and Sagheb missile under pictures of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (R) and Late Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during a parade to commemorate the anniversary of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), in Tehran September 22, 2011.. (photo credit: REUTERS/STRINGER)

 

The point of the drill is to showcase Iran’s military prowess. It comes in the wake of a large naval drill in February and frequent new tests of ballistic missiles.

Iran’s Defense Ministry announced on Thursday that it had launched a massive exercise involving 50 drones that are based on a US Sentinel drone the Iranians captured in 2011. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it was the strongest exercise of its kind to date.

Joint Chiefs Chairman: Google ‘Is Indirectly Benefiting The Chinese Military’

WASHINGTON (CBS SF / CNN) — America’s top general said Thursday that Mountain View-based Google’s work in China “is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military.”

“The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military and I’ve been very public on this issue as well,” Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Germany proposes European aircraft carrier

(Photo: UK Defense Journal)

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has endorsed the idea of a joint European aircraft carrier.

…

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the politician that succeeded Merkel last year as leader of the governing Christian Democratic Union in Germany, made the proposal in a weekend response to the French President’s proposals for European reform.