Stevenson’s army, December 4

-Despite the Senate’s recent dysfunction, the government is funded until Feb 18. We still don’t know how the debt ceiling will be handled — and the deadline could be as soon as Dec 21. Meanwhile, the armed services leadership, stymied by Senators insisting on having their amendments voted on, is looking to skip Senate amendments altogether. The leaders plan to work out a conference deal on the NDAA, let the House pass it as a new bill, and force the Senate to accept it. FYI, I like this bipartisan idea for  the debt ceiling.

– In a very curious leak, WaPo says Russia has plans to invade Ukraine by late January. The story, attributed only to “US officials”, also included an unclassified document depicting Russian troop movements. The fact of such an unclassified document suggests to me that the administration wants to build a very public case against the Russian moves. Saying Russia has “plans” is also different from saying Russia has the clear intent to act. I suspect the IC has details of a basic plan, accompanied by realistic troop deployments as part of an exercise, which could be turned into an invasion.

-Politico has an unusual piece about Chancellor Merkel with more negatives than positive. Worth reading.

-Good for the EU: more convergence with US on China, and its own BRI.

– Civ-mil problems: dropping confidence in the US military and extremist sentiments in Army & Marine Corps.

– WSJ has section from Prof Brands’ new book on how to contain China.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).