Situation Report: More on bombers to Australia; Chinese drones to Jordan; and European forces to Libya

By Paul McLeary with Ariel Robinson

The flap over Down Under. The comments by a senior U.S. Defense Department official about American B-1 bombers and surveillance planes possibly being stationed in Australia have caused quite a stir Down Under, where defense officials maintain that “the official misspoke.”

But neither Australian nor American officials will deny that talks over the planes are ongoing, and sources on both sides admit that the Australian-U.S. security relationship continues to grow, and the expansion of American presence in the region will continue. They just won’t say exactly how.

One Pentagon official told FP that the deployment of bombers and spy planes are “in the plans, but it’s not yet planned.” Implication: talks are ongoing but nothing has been finalized.

U.S. Air Force Capt. Ray Geoffroy of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces Command emailed us that the Air Force “has routinely deployed bomber assets through Australia in the past, including a B-52 visit last December.”

“With regard to our force posture initiatives in Australia,” Geoffroy wrote, the Defense Department “is currently exploring a range of options for future rotations with our Australian counterparts. The specifics of future force posture cooperation are yet to be finalized.”

The controversy began when the Pentagon’s Assistant Secretary for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs David Shear told a Senate panel on Wednesday that B-1s and surveillance planes will soon be deployed to Australia.

Not so fast. In an interview with FP’s Colum Lynch, Libya’s U.N. ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi said he wasn’t so sure about a new resolution by the U.N.’s Security Council’s four European members — Britain, France, Spain and Lithuania — that would give the Europeans the authority to use military force to seize suspected smuggling ships in the Mediterranean, and even chase down the smugglers in Libya. (Although how much appetite Europe actually has to put boots on the ground in a country still being torn apart by rival factions is another story.)

“Dabbashi expressed deep reservations about the European plan,” Lynch writes, “which he said could violate Libya’s sovereignty. He also fretted that Libyan fishermen might get caught up in the international operation and have their boats, their only source of income, destroyed.”

A new trade war? Chinese officials are currently in Jordan on a mission to sell Amman  an array of armed drones, a U.S. congressman charges in a letter to President Barack Obama obtained by FP — and Washington needs to get out ahead of the problem before that relationship grows stronger.

“I am now aware that China is presently in Jordan to discuss operations, logistics and maintenance associated with the urgent sale of weaponized unmanned systems,” California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter wrote in the May 14 letter.

On March 9, Hunter and 22 congressional colleagues sent a letter to the White House asking that Amman be allowed to, essentially, lease U.S. Air Force MQ-1 Predator drones in an arrangement where Jordanian pilots the birds, but they remain U.S. property.

Having received no answer to the proposal, Hunter now writes that “allowing Jordan to obtain Chinese assets––simply due to delays in U.S. considerations and process—is a serious mistake,” Hunter wrote. “Not only will a new market exist for China to export its technology, any incorporation of Chinese assets will directly harm U.S. interoperability.” He again called for the MQ-1’s to head to Jordan.

It’s early in the morning and that means it’s time to stare bleary-eyed at your phone at another edition of the Situation Report. Have anything new? See anything interesting? Send it along to paul.mcleary@foreignplicy.com, or on Twitter: @paulmcleary.

Who’s Where When

12:00 p.m. Gerald Roberts, section chief of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, speaks on “Money Flow in the Age of ISIS” at The Washington Institute.

Cyber

New America released a podcast on Thursday called “Stuxnet, Sexism, CEOs and Surveillance,” in which Amanda Gaines, John Williams, and Peter Singer discuss security and cyber warfare with scholars and industry experts.

Russia

The Kremlin announced on Wednesday that its land forces would be joining troops from Belarus, China, India, and Mongolia in a series of ‘anti-terrorism’ and ‘peacekeeping’ exercises, Radio Free Europe reports.

Lebanon

In Ain el Hilweh, a cramped Palestinian refugee camp of 100,000 in Lebanon that has been long known as a hotbed of militancy, peace deals between Hamas and Fatah, Marxists and Islamists are taking place because they all fear the Islamic State. Thanassis Cambanis files a dispatch for FP from the scene.

Burundi

Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza left Wednesday’s meeting of East African Community leaders after receiving news of a coup in his home country. It’s still unclear what exactly is happening in that country, but it doesn’t look like anyone at the summit misses him. As one headline from Mail & Guardian Africa stated, “Nkurunziza leaves Tanzania after ‘coup’; regional frenemies laughed and cut him from summit photos.”

The Sahel

An extremist group operating in the Sahara formally allied with Al-Qaeda has switched sides, according to the AP. The group, known to have carried out attacks in Algeria, Mali, and Niger, announced via a Mauritanian news agency that they are now allied with Islamic State.

Iran

An Iranian patrol boat fired on a cargo ship in the Arabian Gulf on Thursday, the AP reports, making this the third incident between the Iranian military and commercial shipping in the Gulf in recent weeks. The shots came after an apparent dispute over damage to an Iranian oil platform.

Ukraine

Nolan Peterson has written one of the only accounts of what it looks like for U.S. Army troops to train the Ukraine National Guard in western Ukraine for The Daily Signal. “Unlike U.S. missions to train Afghan and Iraqi soldiers, the U.S. Army paratroopers will not be fighting alongside Ukrainians, leaving the U.S. soldiers in the unfamiliar position of training for a fight in which they don’t expect to have a direct role,” he writes.

The business of defense

If you can’t get the private sector to do something, you just have to do it yourself. So the saying goes in defense labs, where scientists work to do things the private sector either can’t, or won’t — like militarizing jetskis Sandra Erwin writes for National Defense.

And finally…

How’s this for something to end your week with? A awkward rendition of “We Are the World,” sung by a group of NATO officials. It happened. And there’s video that shows the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg hating every second of it with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns.