"Let's be clear that North Korea's "willingness for talks" doesn't mean an openness towards good-faith negotiation, but rather a discussion of the terms of US capitulation to a new status quo defined by Pyongyang's priorities and prerogatives."
- Edward Oh
"It is always dangerous for soldiers, sailors or airmen to play at politics. They enter a sphere in which values are quite different from those to which they have hitherto been accustomed" - Winston Churchill
1. The United States National Security Council Needs an Information Warfare Directorate
2. Along The Russian Border, Norway Holds The Northern Line
3. Trump suspends plan to classify Mexican cartels as terrorist groups
4. CBP Reverses Course on Mandatory Facial Scans for US Citizens
5. Who's Really to Blame for the 'Ukraine Did It' Conspiracy Theory?
6. The New Kind of Warfare Reshaping Global Politics
7. Report: 'Smishing,' Deepfakes to Continue to Rise in 2020
8. In Push for Africa, Russia's Wagner Mercenaries Are 'Out of Their Depth' in Mozambique
9. Victor Sheymov, KGB officer who defected from Soviet Union, dies at 73
10. Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor
11. U.S. is seen as a top ally in many countries - but others view it as a threat
12. What the Hell Are Ukrainian Fascists Doing in the Hong Kong Protests?
13. The Generals Tried to Keep Trump in Check. What Happens to Foreign Policy Now That They've Left?
14. The Pentagon's War on Transparency
15. Trump Is Waging War on America's Diplomats
1. The United States National Security Council Needs an Information Warfare Directorate
Or a Political Warfare Directorate or an Irregular Warfare Directorate. Or an Unconventional Warfare Directorate.
Excerpts:
Moving Forward: Information Warfare Requires Transformational Leadership
In providing an update to the thirty years of Goldwater-Nichols reform, James Locher III cautioned congressional leaders that organizations must evolve to meet the challenges of their environments.[14] This charge was previously lobbed at the Department of Defense, which Locher concluded had become organizationally ill-equipped to handle emerging twenty-first century threats that were increasing in complexity and volatility. This caution can now be broadened to include the whole national security apparatus. As the United States grapples with various domestic and international challenges emanating from Russia and China, this assertion becomes even more alarming. Arguably, the United States is entering a phase of turmoil unfamiliar to its senior political leadership, a phase that may be every bit as difficult to fight as any conventional battle. The United States will undoubtedly sustain great losses from a combined information warfare effort by Russia, China, and their allies.[15] And a fragile United States would provide fertile ground for other anti-United States nations to join the effort.
The United States National Security Council Needs an Information Warfare Directorate
How should the United States prepare for a future information warfare conflict against its adversaries, and how should it organize? These questions are being explored across multiple defense agencies, think tank organizations, and the military. Conrad Crane, Chief of Historical Services for the United States Army Heritage and Education Center, U.S. Army War College, has made a case for establishing an information warfare command.[1] Fundamental to his critique was the need to restructure Army Cyber Command to prepare for large-scale information warfare operations, in part because possible U.S. adversaries now realize the utility of integrating and synchronizing information and communication technologies to execute such activities. In Crane's view, evolving Army Cyber Command into an information warfare command would prompt decision makers to think critically about information warfare as a holistic subject, not as an afterthought.
Crane's proposition situates him in a long line of academic and defense professionals who recommend determining how best to curtail influence activities emanating from adversarial nations such as Russia and China. Recommendations include instituting an irregular warfare curriculum within professional military education, sharing political warfare threats across Departments of Defense and State, and establishing an information warfare center.[2] Russia's interference in the 2016 United States presidential election also spurred policymakers to call on Defense and State agencies to craft a coherent counter-information warfare plan that focuses on enhancing cyber defense tools, collaborating with European allies and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on cyber security initiatives,
and educating people and organizations to avoid becoming targets of malign cyberspace influence by Russia and China.[3]
Today each of these initiatives are being implemented to some extent. Yet little compelling evidence indicates such efforts are effectively curtailing Russia's or China's illicit activities against the United States. Consider the Center for Strategic and International Studies publication that tracked cyber attacks since 2006.[4] Attacks on infrastructure, use of disinformation activities, theft of intellectual property, and other illegal activities have increased, not decreased. Equally alarming, James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence; Marcel Lettre, former Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Admiral Michael Rogers, former Commander of the United States Cyber Command and Director of the National Security Agency, jointly cautioned that cyber threats have become more complex, more varied, and more lethal.[5] These concerns suggest a substantial dose of skepticism over the efficacy of America's ability to counter adversarial information warfare activities and further underscore the capability of Russia, China, and their allies to impose considerable policy dilemmas on this front.
U.S. Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcel Lettre, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and National Security Agency Director U.S. Navy Admiral Michael Rogers testify before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on foreign cyber threats in January 2017 (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Because information warfare is likely to be a mainstay of warfare for the near future, the National Security Council should consider establishing an information warfare directorate. The directorate's intent should be to:
conduct periodic holistic reviews of U.S. information warfare effectiveness;
determine the role and responsibility for each involved department and agency;
identify the best institutional arrangements for sharing sensitive information across the government; and
determine the best way to integrate the president's political and military policy objectives into a coherent, all-government, counter-information warfare plan for action.
The directorate should provide principal National Security Council staff members with pragmatic policy recommendations that can be readily implemented to defend the United States, its allies, and interests. This article further suggests that countering adversarial information warfare expands beyond the precinct of the Departments of Defense and State.
A Limiting Factor for the Departments of Defense and State
Despite the recurring recognition by senior political leaders in the United States that information warfare presents a serious national security concern, this complex issue has been largely relegated to the Departments of Defense and State to address. For instance, the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act tasked the two departments to develop a plan to counter Russian information warfare.[6] In fiscal year 2020, the act was expanded to include China. Notwithstanding the mandate by various domestic agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to provide a report to various House and Senate intelligence committees, the lead role for identifying, preventing, responding, and upsetting
adversarial influence has largely been relegated to the Departments of Defense and State.[7] Because information warfare expands beyond the Departments of Defense and State and into the domestic arena, this strategy needs to be approached more practically by relying on interagency cooperation for effective support.
Admittedly, war and diplomacy have traditionally been the respective responsibilities of the Departments of Defense and State. When conflicts, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, presented the military with a different warfare paradigm, the United States adapted its civilian and military force structure to meet those challenges. Information warfare, however, presents unique challenges because it does not fit neatly within the U.S. defense framework. Specifically, conventional armies seem to be less of a target of interest to adversaries than the nation's population and critical infrastructure. In fact, a nation's society, water and power systems, banking systems, and corporate network infrastructure are now common targets of adversarial information warfare campaigns to influence domestic and foreign policy.[8]
It is becoming increasingly clear that information warfare is a different phenomenon from traditional warfare: in information warfare, there are no sideliners, everyone is a target, and everywhere is the battlespace. Thus, any attempt to put the burden on just the Departments of Defense and State to counter information warfare efforts is likely to be fraught with complex authority issues about which domestic department or agency is charged with various information warfare tasks.[9] Here, the Department of Homeland Security, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and various domestic intelligence agencies will undoubtedly have roles to play. The challenge is to precisely identify those roles.
Need for an Information Warfare Directorate in the National Security Council
Reflecting on the National Security Council's development, Robert Cutler, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's former special assistant, raised an important question: What is the best way to address emerging domestic and national security issues affecting the United States? The question is especially pertinent when adversaries increasingly rely on disinformation, propaganda, and cyber attacks to influence U.S. policy. In Cutler's view, the Council should comprise individuals who-because of their experience and office-could provide the president with sound practical policy recommendations on national security. In the face of geopolitical challenges, the question of information warfare and its adverse implications is very much an appropriate topic for the National Security Council to take up.[10]
President Eisenhower meets with National Security Council at Camp David in 1955 (Wikimedia)
Instituted under President Harry S. Truman in 1947, the National Security Council is the principal forum for national security and policy experts to assist the president in making informed decisions about domestic and foreign policy issues. The Council's purpose is to solicit policy recommendations from various defense, foreign, economic, and intelligence departments and agencies. Ideally, policies cascade through the executive branch to shape the programmatic actions that each department and agency executes to fulfill the president's policies. The National Security Council, as Cutler observed, is thus the country's most influential governing body when it comes to devising policies that protect the United States from both internal and external threats.[11]
In tackling the complex topic of information warfare, the National Security Council should establish a directorate to enable principal advisors to think more clearly about how adversarial foreign powers use the information sphere to undermine America's competitive advantage. Ideally, the directorate would meticulously comb research and studies about information warfare, as well as establish an expectation that subject matter experts in the subject of information warfare serve in roles guiding national security policy.
The consequences of advanced twenty-first century disruptive digital technologies illustrate the point neatly. Too little attention is paid to the consequences of disruptive technologies in a large-scale information warfare campaign against the United States and its allies.[12] To this author's knowledge, no wargaming or thorough analysis exists that has cogently conveyed the consequences of a well-coordinated, synchronized, large-scale, information warfare attack against a civilian population: power, water, and electric systems; financial industry; private and public companies; and defense community. What are the security implications of information and communication technologies, as they carry the potential to create mass disruptions across the social, economic, political, and military domains?
Other questions the directorate might explore are many and varied. What are the roles and responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security, the plethora of domestic and foreign-focused intelligence agencies, and the military in an offensive and defensive information warfare scenario, and how might this change existing policies or authorities for these organizations? What are the domestic and foreign policy implications for a catastrophic event? How should sensitive information be shared among all the relevant government and civilian institutions without being inadvertently disclosed to the wrong people or organizations?
An information warfare directorate within the National Security Council could help tease out answers by relying on expert briefs from the defense community, think tanks, corporations, and academia. In turn, the directorate could provide careful summaries to the National Security Council's core members, allowing them to truly begin to enumerate the pragmatic policy options. Ideally, after frank debates among principal National Security Council members, resolutions for action should emerge and shape presidential policy.
One can argue the intelligentsia, think tanks, and many Defense institutions are tackling bits and pieces of this puzzle.[13] However, their findings likely have not been adequately digested by the National Security Council to determine what meaningful policies need to be implemented. Thus, legislating several cyber security policy measures or executing one-off or ad hoc counter-influence activities in the absence of a clear understanding of modern information warfare sounds impractical. Specifically, a net assessment of the adverse effects of information warfare against the United States is missing. Such an assessment would bring to the fore whether a re-look at the current defensive and offensive posture is warranted.
Moving Forward: Information Warfare Requires Transformational Leadership
In providing an update to the thirty years of Goldwater-Nichols reform, James Locher III cautioned congressional leaders that organizations must evolve to meet the challenges of their environments.[14] This charge was previously lobbed at the Department of Defense, which Locher concluded had become organizationally ill-equipped to handle emerging twenty-first century threats that were increasing in complexity and volatility. This caution can now be broadened to include the whole national security apparatus. As the United States grapples with various domestic and international challenges emanating from Russia and China, this assertion becomes even more alarming. Arguably, the United States is entering a phase of turmoil unfamiliar to its senior political leadership, a phase that may be every bit as difficult to fight as any conventional battle. The United States will undoubtedly sustain great losses from a combined information warfare effort by Russia, China, and their allies.[15] And a fragile United States would provide fertile ground for other anti-United States nations to join the effort.
James Locher III testifying on Capitol Hill in 2009 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Perhaps the congressional mandate for the Departments of Defense and State to counter information warfare might lead to some success. Should the U.S. continue down this path, however, it should not be surprised to find the solutions generated to have minimal effect.
President Eisenhower believed the National Security Council was the right coordinating body for senior United States policy and military officials to discuss and generate the most practical solutions to America's most pressing security issues-independent of the department or agency they represent. Given today's complex operating environment, what is required is an inclusive information warfare directorate, led by the National Security Council that identifies the appropriate means to protect the United States public and allies in an increasingly chaotic and dangerous era. It will require what Joseph Nye referred to as
transformational leadership-the ability to cogently understand the trajectory of events in order to develop appropriate soft- and hard-power strategies that can evolve into sound policy.[16] In the defense sector, where bureaucratic, institutional, and human factors often combine to frustrate progress, this quality is in short supply and high demand.
Peter Wilcox is an officer in the United States Army. The views expressed are his alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Cyber Security (International Telecommunications Union)
Notes:
[1] Conrad Crane, "The United States Needs an Information Warfare Command: A Historical Examination,"
War on the Rocks, June 14, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/06/the-united-states-needs-an-information-warfare-command-a-historical-examination/.
[2] Seth Jones, "The Future of Warfare Is Irregular,"
The National Interest, August 26, 2018, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/future-warfare-irregular-29672?page=0%2C1; Linda Robinson et al.,
Modern Political Warfare: Current Practices and Possible Response (Santa Monica, CA:
RAND), 2018,
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1772.html.; Crane, "United States Need an Information Warfare Command."
[4] Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Significant Cyber Incidents," Washington, DC, September 2019, https://www.csis.org/programs/technology-policy-program/significant-cyber-incidents.
[6] House of Representatives. "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018: Conference Report to Accompany H.R. 2810."
[7] Ibid.
[8] Brett van Niekerk and Manoj S.Maharaj, "Relevance of Information Warfare Models to Critical Infrastructure Protection,"
Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 52-75.
[9] For homeland defense against terrorism, major attacks on critical infrastructure, and cyberspace attacks, the Department of Homeland Security is the lead agency under the Homeland Security Presidential Directive-5, Management of Domestic Incidents. The Defense Support of Civil Authorities does, however, permit the Department of Defense to lend support to the Department of Homeland Security with approval from the Secretary of Defense or the sitting U.S. president. Within this directive the Department of Defense plays a support function, and not a primary one. See Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office [GPO], 29 October 2018, Joint Publication 3-24, Defense Support of Civil Authorities,
https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp3_28.pdf. Interestingly, this directive could provide a NSC IW directorate the unique opportunity to think about how the DHS, FBI, CIA, DIA, and the DoD might coordinate, synchronize, and streamline decision-making/authorities to counter adversarial information warfare.
[12] T. X. Hammes, "Technologies Converge and Power Diffuses: The Evolution of Small, Smart, and Cheap Weapons," Cato Institute Policy Analysis 786, January 27, 2016.
[14] James R. Locher III, "Statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee; 30 Years of Goldwater-Nichols Reform," November 10, 2015.
[15] A CSIS report by Mr. Eric Jacobson argues that there is a "Sino-Russian convergence in the military domain" that poses great risk to the U.S.'s national security (See: https://www.csis.org/npfp/sino-russian-convergence-military-domain). While no direct formal agreement between Russia and China exists on this front, Mr. Jacobson shows how both have tacitly applauded each other's national defense strategies that aim to curtail U.S. influence abroad. More specifically, both China and Russia share a convergence of interest in order to undermine U.S. national interests.
[16] Joseph S. Nye Jr., "Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy,"
Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2006-07-01/transformational-leadership-and-us-grand-strategy.
2. Along The Russian Border, Norway Holds The Northern Line
Norwegian soldiers patrol near the Russian border high above the Arctic Circle.
GARRISON SOR-VARANGER, NORWAY: A toxic brown haze blankets the Russian industrial city of Nikel, hiding its Soviet-era smokestacks from our view as Norwegian soldiers manning this watchtower keep their eyes fixed on the border, about a mile away. Every now and again a soldier will point out the black factory towers in the distance as the wind shifts.
Between Nikel and the Bjørnsund observation tower lies a vast, snowy expanse that runs the length of the rugged Pasvik Valley high above the Arctic Circle, where Norway meets Russia along a 125-mile frontier. A string of small towers tucked into the thickly-forested hillsides house a handful of Norwegian troops monitoring what is arguably the most militarized area in the vast Russian interior.
Russia's Kola Peninsula is home to the prized Northern Fleet and some of Moscow's most advanced long-range weaponry, assets that can move quickly and without much warning from the high north down the Norwegian coast and into the North Atlantic.
Norwegian soldiers in front of one of their border watchtowers.
The guards here, who spend weeks at a time in these small cabins, watch for any suspicious movements along the valley; they admit things are mostly quiet. But back at the nearby base supporting these outposts, bristling with snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles, and hundreds of troops ready to push into the rugged Arctic hills if the signal is sent, the reality of the force on the other side of the border weighs heavily.
The Norwegian troops here are fully aware they're outmanned and outgunned by the thousands of mechanized Russian forces arrayed just over the border. They've trained to disperse rapidly and fight what amounts to a spoiling action, using their knowledge of the terrain, Javelin missiles, and small arms to keep the enemy off balance while reinforcements are mobilized.
Officials in Oslo are quick to point out they see little reason for Russia to mount a frontal assault across this jagged landscape, capped by steep hills and sliced by rivers and deep ravines. But they're also aware that any NATO confrontation with Moscow would almost certainly spill into the strategic Arctic region.
Oslo is under no illusions when it comes to its presence in the high north, however. Multiple officials referenced the troops here as a "trip wire" that would trigger a larger response from Norwegian jets based further south, along with an expected NATO response.
But, as one government official said, in the capital "there is a sentiment that we cannot rely on our allies to do everything." In response, Norway is doing what it can.
"Russia, without violating borders, can dominate the area using
multilayered systems," base commander Lt. Col Jan Marius Nilsen told me during a visit sponsored by The Atlantic Council last month. The Russians have placed "early warning radars, air-defense, land based missile stations, and other sea and air assets" within minutes of the border fences, Nilsen said. "They can activate this very rapidly. We just need to be present in key areas."
Lt. Col Jan Marius Nilsen points out positions to Norway's Chief of Defense Adm. Haakon Bruun-Hanssen during his visit to the Arctic outpost.
His concern was starkly illustrated this past weekend, when Russian news agencies
reported a Kola-based MiG-31K test fired a
Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missile nearby. The nuclear-capable missile, derived from the ground-launched Iskander-M, was one of the six new weapons President Putin boasted of during his
infamous sabre-rattling March 2018 speech. The range of the missile, somewhere between 900 and 1,200 miles, puts all of Norway well within its sights.
The key areas Nilsen mentioned are spread out along the Norwegian high north, and the five infantry companies under his command take turns rotating between a series of small observation posts along Norway's 125-mile border with Russia. The troops, mostly conscripts, are bolstered by a seasoned Ranger company and soon, specially-trained troops known as JTACs (Joint Terminal Attack Controllers) capable of calling in precision airstrikes from NATO aircraft.
"Norway has an exclusive and outsized role in NATO's deterrence posture in the High North," said the Atlantic Council's Chris Skaluba, who worked on NATO and European policy at the Pentagon until recently. But the light military posture Norway keeps on the Russian border "is a signal to Russia that Norway (and therefore NATO) does not expect tension or hostilities" in the region, he added.
While the Norwegian government has made a decision not to overly militarize the border, Oslo has a ready force in reserve in the form of the Home Guard, a 40,000-strong civilian militia ready to spring into action if the balloon goes up. Visitors get few details, but the locals around the Finnmark region and the Norwegian town of Kirkenes would act as a guerrilla force, using local contacts and their knowledge of the terrain to harass a Russian force, blowing bridges and sabotaging roads.
The scenario is something the garrison trains for regularly. Looking at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where they use
electronic jamming to blind Ukrainian forces and turn off their ability to communicate, Nilsen said in a fight, "potentially I will not have comms, so I need to use small unit tactics and disperse, and I have to act differently from other units."
Home Guard also has a partnership with the Minnesota National Guard that stretches back to 1974, when Home Guard troops
began traveling to Minnesota to train with US guardsmen, with Minnesota guardsmen traveling to Norway each year to train. (Hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans
claim Norwegian ancestry, and ties between Norway and the state are close.)
While there is no significant ethnic Russian population here for Moscow to help feed disinformation and stir discontent, shops in Kirkenes heavily rely on Russians crossing the border to buy goods they can't get at home, local officials say. And the local Norwegians and the Russians share a unique history dating back to the Second World War.
In 1944 the Red Army fought a bloody battle to to push German troops out of the town, and they were greeted as liberators by the locals who hated their Nazi occupiers. Unlike Eastern Europe, where the Soviets set up their own repressive regimes dependent on Moscow, the Red Army actually went home at the end of the fight, a withdrawal that is warmly remembered here and celebrated each October.
This year, Norway's royal family, along with Prime Minister Erna Solberg. Foreign Minister Ine Søreide, and Chief of Defense Adm. Haakon Bruun-Hanssen met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergi Lavrov and Northern Fleet Commander Vice Adm. Aleksandr Moiseyev to mark the 75th anniversary of the 1944 battle. The unique relationship is something that Olso has to keep in mind when dealing with the region, and protecting its border.
The arrival of JTACS next year will provide some cover for both the base and the border outposts dotted amid the valleys and heavily forested hilltops along the border. The border is generally quiet, soldiers at one outpost told me, and the Russian border guards - controlled by Moscow's FSB spy agency - also have their eyes more closely trained on the Russian interior, as opposed to peering into Norway.
Just over the border sits the Russian 200th Motor Rifle Brigade, which has experience in Ukraine and fields dozens of tanks and Grad rocket launchers, and the 61st Naval Infantry Brigade, which consists of veterans from Ukraine and Syria. One Norwegian official called the units "highly trained and potent Russian forces" that can move quickly and strike from the ground, sea, and air.
The powerful Russian Northern Fleet is also headquartered nearby, and flexed its muscles in late October when it pushed 10 submarines into the North Atlantic where they conducted live fire tests while playing a game of cat-and-mouse with US and NATO subs and sub-hunting aircraft.
The military power coiled on the peninsula led one US observer who works on these issues and asked to speak anonymously to suggest that, despite all of the concern over the militarization of the Arctic region, the issue is actually far more localized: "NATO has a Kola Peninsula problem rather than an Arctic problem."
The activity this fall in and around Norway is notable. The day before my visit to Garrison Sor-Varanger, three US B-52 bombers skirted the Norwegian coast accompanied by several
Norwegian F-16s from the Bodo Air Station, in a show of force that's becoming increasingly common.
USS Minnesota
The public US muscle flexing demonstrations were hardly over. On Nov. 21, the US 6th Fleet
tweeted photos showing MK-48 Advanced Capability torpedos being loaded aboard the USS
Minnesota, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, at Haakonsvern Naval Base on Norway's west coast. Prodding Moscow, the service
wrote that "many thought 1xUSsub was tracking #Russian activity. Not so fast! There were TWO (maybe more)."
On Nov. 26, the 6th Fleet
then promoted a port visit by the guided-missile destroyer USS Gridley in Tromso, Norway before it
participated in a multinational exercise off the Norwegian coast
The Northern Fleet's big show validates Oslo's recent purchase of five P-8 aircraft, officials here said, and underscores the need for more anti-submarine technologies on surface ships and helicopters. Defense Minister Frank Bakke Jensen earlier this year announced that he is working on a significantly larger and more ambitious budget plan set to be submitted to Parliament in the spring that includes growing the end strength of the armed forces, adding five new submarines - one more then currently planned - and increases in the number of medium and short-range air defenses, a key technology that could make a major difference in the high north.
Overall, Adm. Bruun-Hanssen has said he needs about $2.7 billion more by 2028 in order to meet modernization goals, or about $300 million more per year. The 2020 defense budget is about $6.6 billion, placing Norway, for the moment, under the NATO goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, a goal still some time off, even with the planned spending increases.
The Army is contributing Long-Range Army Fires, troops on the ground, and Sentinel radar. The Navy is bringing F-35Cs and a destroyer; and the Air Force will bring F-22 and F-35 fighter jets.
3. Trump suspends plan to classify Mexican cartels as terrorist groups
The United States will not classify Mexican drug cartels as international terrorist organizations - at least for now.
President Trump tweeted Friday afternoon that he was holding off on the designation at the request of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, "a man who I like and respect, and has worked so well with us."
The decision came a day after U.S. Atty. Gen. William Barr met in Mexico City with López Obrador.
After that meeting, the Mexican president said he was confident that Barr understood that the prospective designation - and the possible deployment of U.S. troops on Mexican soil - would be a breach of Mexican sovereignty.
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"Our constitution establishes ... that we cannot permit that foreign forces use our territory for military purposes," López Obrador told reporters Friday morning.
In his Twitter message, Trump said that "all necessary work" had been completed to classify Mexican drug gangs as terrorist groups, but that both nations had instead agreed to "step up our joint efforts to deal decisively with these vicious and ever-growing organizations!"
It was not immediately clear whether Mexico had made any new promises. López Obrador has signaled his openness to enhancing binational security efforts.
When Trump first floated the idea of the terrorist designation in a radio interview with conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly, it caused a furor in Mexico.
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Any U.S. interference in domestic affairs is a political red line in Mexico, where interventions in the 19
th and 20
th centuries are still viewed as humiliating episodes in the country's history.
Following Trump's announcement on Friday, the Mexican foreign secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, tweeted: "Cooperation won out and there will be good results."
Tens of thousands of Mexicans have been killed in recent years in cartel-related violence, despite an enforcement strategy relying on the military. López Obrador, who took office a year ago, has largely rejected the militarized approach as counterproductive.
Despite his cordial relations with López Obrador, Trump is still deeply unpopular here for what many view as his Mexico-bashing rhetoric, including his signature border wall initiative and his public denigration of Mexican immigrants in the United States as criminals and rapists.
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez in Mexico City contributed to this report.
4. CBP Reverses Course on Mandatory Facial Scans for US Citizens
A small victory against big brother.
CBP Reverses Course on Mandatory Facial Scans for US Citizens
After criticism from Congress and privacy advocates, the border security agency says it will pull back a proposed rule change.
In this Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2019, file photo, travelers walk through a security checkpoint in Terminal 2 at Salt Lake City International Airport, in Salt Lake City.
By Aaron Boyd Senior Editor, Nextgov, Nextgov Read bio
December 6, 2019
After criticism from Congress and privacy advocates, the border security agency says it will pull back a proposed rule change.
Customs and Border Protection reversed course on a proposed plan to require all
U.S. citizens to participate in its facial recognition entry/exit programs-a move that would have removed the ability to opt out.
The agency is testing
facial biometric programs at more than 20 ports of entry, including land crossings, seaports and airports. At the latter, airlines have teamed with
CBP to use its algorithm as part of
the boarding process, matching in-motion images captured of travelers against the photos in the flight manifest.
Since
CBP's facial recognition program
began in September 2018,
U.S. citizens and green card holders have technically been exempt from participating, though those passengers have to actively opt out.
A notice posted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs' website
showed the agency intended to change that policy. Though the notice only began the rule change process-a
CBP spokesperson stressed to
Nextgov that the decision was far from made-privacy advocates were outspoken against the change.
On Thursday, the agency said it officially decided to rescind the proposed change.
"There are no current plans to require
U.S. citizens to provide photographs upon entry and exit from the United States," a
CBP spokesperson said in a statement. "
CBP intends to have the planned regulatory action regarding
U.S. citizens removed from the unified agenda next time it is published."
The agency's original plan was designed to streamline the biometric entry/exit process, the spokesperson said, which aligns with the goal as
stated in the notice:
To facilitate the implementation of a seamless biometric entry-exit system that uses facial recognition and to help prevent persons attempting to fraudulently use
U.S. travel documents and identify criminals and known or suspected terrorists, [the Homeland Security Department] is proposing to amend the regulations to provide that all travelers, including
U.S. citizens, may be required to be photographed upon entry and/or departure.
However, after hearing from private sector privacy advocates and members of Congress,
CBP decided not to pursue the change.
"This is a victory for every single American traveler who flies on a plane, and a reminder that we must remain vigilant protectors of our right to privacy," said Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who was vocal in his opposition to the proposed change. "Thanks to swift and public pressure, Homeland Security is reversing course and not moving forward with its dystopian facial recognition proposal at U.S. airports."
Markey called the reversal a win but said the war continues.
"We cannot take our right to privacy for granted," he said. "Americans still need protection from facial recognition technology, and I still plan to introduce legislation to ban this kind of invasive biometric surveillance."
Aaron Boyd is an award-winning journalist currently serving as senior editor for technology and events at Nextgov. He primarily covers federal government IT contracting and cybersecurity issues affecting both civilian and defense agencies. As a lifelong nerd and policy wonk, he feels right at ... Full bio
5. Who's Really to Blame for the 'Ukraine Did It' Conspiracy Theory?
I think this is some very important analysis.
But here's the essential point. Even if Kilimnik's evidence-free statement that Ukraine hacked the DNC was a crucial seed of today's toxic conspiracy theory (which seems unlikely), and even if some Russian handler instructed him to place that seed into Manafort's mind (which is unproven), then alt-right amateur sleuths, American conspiracy theorists, Trump aides, and his unswerving congressional backers had to circumnavigate a large and growing mountain of hard evidence that implicated Russian intelligence in the 2016 active-measures campaign. They had to come up with ever more twisted ways to explain that evidence away. And they had to work tirelessly to spread their alternative theories.
American conservatives and elected officials are not passive, remote-controlled dummies that can be swayed with one distant statement or obscure social-media post-and thus absolved of responsibility for peddling and improving on outlandish conspiracy theories. Blaming domestic ills on foreign interference is a temptation that befits weakening democracies.
Again, perhaps American intelligence agencies have solid evidence that Russia had a pivotal role in developing the Ukraine conspiracy theories. If so, they need to deliver the goods, and show at least some of this evidence to Americans in an official public statement. Countering disinformation with, in effect, more disinformation is counterproductive, even dangerous; indeed, it is not too dramatic to say that this tendency plays right into the Kremlin's hands.
Russian intelligence agencies have historically designed and modified ongoing operations so Russia's adversaries would overestimate its strength, and come to believe that Moscow was more influential than it actually was. Russian active-measures operators know, and we should learn, that exaggerating the effects of disinformation means amplifying the effects of disinformation.
Who's Really to Blame for the 'Ukraine Did It' Conspiracy Theory?
In her eloquent impeachment testimony last month, Fiona Hill, a recently departed official at the National Security Council, criticized President Donald Trump and his supporters for parroting that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 elections. "This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves," Hill said on November 21. The next day,
The New York Timesreported that senior intelligence officials had briefed senators that Russia, "starting at least in 2017," had tried to frame Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 election.
Within days, the narrative that Russia framed Ukraine became conventional wisdom among leading journalists and commentators in Washington, D.C. "This 'it was Ukraine narrative' may go down in history as the most successful disinformation campaign by the Russian intelligence agencies,"
wrote Alina Polyakova of the Brookings Institution, in response to Republican Senator John Kennedy calling into question that Russia hacked the DNC on Fox News.
TheWashington Post's Shane Harris, one of the nation's most respected national-security reporters,
reminded Kennedy that the U.S. "has intelligence, which members of Congress have access to, that the Ukraine-did-it story was concocted and peddled by Russia."
Perhaps the CIA or NSA has indeed assessed-informed by secret intelligence, with high confidence-that Russia planted the idea in Trump's mind that Ukraine interfered in his election, and that the Kremlin thus triggered a history-making impeachment vote. It's hard to know what we don't know. But neither Fiona Hill nor the
Times offered the concrete details, direct quotes, or names that would ordinarily back up such a grave claim.
Disinformation campaigns are almost always designed for publicity, and therefore leave public traces. Judging solely on the basis of publicly available evidence, the fictional narrative about Ukraine was concocted and propagated first and foremost by American conspiracy theorists, not Russian disinformation puppeteers.
The conspiracy theory that "Ukraine did it" comes in three progressively more extreme versions, and each time the "it" that Ukraine "did" is different. The first version is that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton; the second version is that
somebody in Ukraine, not Russia, hacked Democratic computer networks in 2016; and the final version is that
CrowdStrike, the security firm that helped the DNC, somehow is "
Ukrainian-based" or "owned," and that the DNC server is in Ukraine. (For the record: CrowdStrike was never based in Ukraine, or owned by anybody Ukrainian, and one physical DNC server never existed, because the infrastructure in question was cloud-based.) I'll refer to those three theories as Ukraine-interfered, Ukraine-hacked, and Ukraine-owned.
Trump, since at least April 2017, subscribes to a mix of all these Ukraine conspiracy theories, as suggested by the summary of his July 25, 2019, call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and by his
53-minute conversation with
Fox & Friends on November 22.
So when and how did these three layers of conspiracy theories emerge?
The Ukraine-interfered narrative originated, legitimately, in Ukraine itself. By the end of May 2016, the paper
Ukrayinska Pravda reported on the so-called black ledger, a 22-page document that revealed corruption under Viktor Yanukovych, a former pro-Russian president of Ukraine. On August 14, 2016, the
Timesbroke the story that the handwritten ledger listed Paul Manafort, then Trump's campaign manager, as the recipient of $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from Ukraine's pro-Russian political party. Less than a week later, Manafort resigned. Another week later, on August 28, a
Financial Times headline read: "
Ukraine's Leaders Campaign Against 'Pro-Putin' Trump"; the piece argued that Ukrainian politicians were "intervening" in a U.S. election. Trump's confidant Roger Stone read the FT piece, republished it on his personal website, and shared it on September 6 with his then 79,000 followers on Twitter-an entire month before the John Podesta leaks even started. "The only interference in the US election is from Hillary's friends in Ukraine," Stone
said. The Ukraine-interfered idea further
gained steam in early 2017, thanks to a now-infamous
Politico investigation, which was circulated, in turn, by the far right.
Russian disinformation actors active in the 2016 campaign, including both the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg and Military Intelligence in Moscow (GRU), indeed boosted the Ukraine-interfered narrative. But they did so rather late in the game, about half a year after it had first appeared, IRA activity released by Twitter shows. "Where's the outrage over Clinton and her campaign team's collusion with Ukraine to interfere in the US election?" tweeted @USA_Gunslinger on July 13, 2017, one of the IRA's main fake-conservative accounts. None of the IRA's Facebook ads mention Ukraine. One
known GRU front, CyberBerkut, attempted to promote the Ukraine-interfered narrative with a blog post in June 2017. It would appear that Russian actors did not "concoct" this version of the theory; they parroted the American far right.
The Ukraine-hacked narrative has a murkier origin story. In a
document release last month, the FBI revealed one notable detail: During an interview with the FBI, Rick Gates, Manafort's former deputy, recalled that Konstantin Kilimnik, one of Manafort's business partners with alleged links to Russian intelligence, advanced
the narrative that Ukraine had a role in the DNC hack. "Gates recalled Manafort saying the hack was likely carried out by the Ukrainians, not the Russians, which parroted a narrative Kilimnik often supported," according to an FBI document, which then adds, confusingly, that "Kilimnik also opined the hack could have been perpetrated by Russian operatives in Ukraine." It is unclear from Gates's recollection when exactly this statement was made, and how persistently Manafort in turn repeated it.
The Ukraine-hacked conspiracy theory is usually combined with a version of the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, in which the cybersecurity firm somehow engineered the DNC leak while framing Russian intelligence. Kilimnik, notably, does not appear to have advanced this far more common version of the theory.
Of all the Ukraine conspiracy theories, the Ukraine-owned narrative received the most attention early on. It appears to have originated in the first days of January 2017, both on the far right and the far left, almost at the same time-in response to a
Ukraine-related Department of Homeland Security intelligence
release and a Ukraine-related CrowdStrike
report from late December.
In the wee hours of January 3,
Washington's Blog, a
popular, now defunct alt-right site, ran a rambling, 5,600-word piece
titled: "Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart." The piece quoted a litany of rumors, and then homed in on Dmitri Alperovitch, a founder of CrowdStrike: "He isn't serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine."
That same day,
The Nation published its own
article focused on CrowdStrike. The magazine pointed out that Alperovitch is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and that the D.C. think tank was funded in part by "the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk," thus insinuating that CrowdStrike was somehow linked to Ukrainian money and secret influence.
Washington's Blog picked up the Pinchuk allegation two days later, and
Breitbart News also started
looking into CrowdStrike.
Known Russian disinformation outlets neither engineered the Ukrainian-owned theory, nor did they amplify it effectively. CyberBerkut never mentioned CrowdStrike, despite pushing the Ukraine-interfered narrative. I analyzed more than 10 million IRA tweets, and found that fewer than 100 mention CrowdStrike. Out of those, only one alludes to "ties" to a Ukrainian billionaire-and that post was late, from March 2017, and simply retweeted a U.S.
account that was linking to U.S.
content.
Context is crucial here. The GRU, the most important disinformation agent in 2016, came up with an early counterclaim to CrowdStrike's correct revelation that Russian military intelligence had hacked the DNC: the
Guccifer 2.0 persona claimed, in an expletive-laden post seemingly written in haste, that a Romanian "lone hacker" had breached the DNC. The GRU was still sticking to this version of the story by mid-January 2017, when the CrowdStrike-is-Ukrainian narrative had already emerged organically and established itself in the United States. "Here I am again my friends,"
Guccifer 2.0 wrote on January 12, 2017, posing as a Romanian hacker. "I have totally no relation to the Russian government."
But here's the essential point. Even if Kilimnik's evidence-free statement that Ukraine hacked the DNC was a crucial seed of today's toxic conspiracy theory (which seems unlikely), and even if some Russian handler instructed him to place that seed into Manafort's mind (which is unproven), then alt-right amateur sleuths, American conspiracy theorists, Trump aides, and his unswerving congressional backers had to circumnavigate a large and growing mountain of hard evidence that implicated Russian intelligence in the 2016 active-measures campaign. They had to come up with ever more twisted ways to explain that evidence away. And they had to work tirelessly to spread their alternative theories.
American conservatives and elected officials are not passive, remote-controlled dummies that can be swayed with one distant statement or obscure social-media post-and thus absolved of responsibility for peddling and improving on outlandish conspiracy theories. Blaming domestic ills on foreign interference is a temptation that befits weakening democracies.
Again, perhaps American intelligence agencies have solid evidence that Russia had a pivotal role in developing the Ukraine conspiracy theories. If so, they need to deliver the goods, and show at least some of this evidence to Americans in an official public statement. Countering disinformation with, in effect, more disinformation is counterproductive, even dangerous; indeed, it is not too dramatic to say that this tendency plays right into the Kremlin's hands.
Russian intelligence agencies have historically designed and modified ongoing operations so Russia's adversaries would overestimate its strength, and come to believe that Moscow was more influential than it actually was. Russian active-measures operators know, and we should learn, that exaggerating the effects of disinformation means amplifying the effects of disinformation.
Thomas Rid is a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS. His upcoming book,
Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, is out in April 2020.
6. The New Kind of Warfare Reshaping Global Politics
And the author notes the key point and irony about the "Gerasimov doctrine:"
After all, this is not the first time the U.S. has faced a shrewd enemy that had overcome its conventional military inferiority with innovative tactics. During America's greatest conflict, the Civil War, the Confederacy had won a series of stunning victories with bold, unorthodox maneuvers, frustrating Northern generals and leaders alike and leading to a sense that the North could not win the war. So, when Ulysses S. Grant took over the demoralized Army of the Potomac, after yet another defeat at the hands of Robert E. Lee, he told his officers:"I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do... try to think what are we are going to do ourselves." That is the spirit the West needs to rediscover to win in the gray zone.
Helpfully, Russia and China have been quite clear about their approach. In 2013, General Gerasimov, the Chief of the Russian General Staff, gave a speech that set out what became known as the Gerasimov doctrine, although he portrayed-quite ironically-that these were in fact Western tactics aimed against Russia.
He described the future of conflict as "shifting towards the widespread use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian and other non-military measures implemented with the use of the protest potential of the population. All this is complemented by covert military measures, including the implementation of information warfare and the actions of special operations forces."
The New Kind of Warfare Reshaping Global Politics | Washington Monthly
Why the U.S. needs a proactive policy for winning in the gray zone.
Russian internet trolls interfering in the 2016 US election; Russian hitmen murdering Putin's opponents abroad; Chinese spies manipulating Australian politics while the country's coast guard ships harass Japanese fishing fleets. These are not random acts of autocratic aggression. They are examples of a new form of warfare that is becoming a bigger challenge for the United States and its western allies: gray-zone conflict.
Once an obscure Russian military concept, the gray zone is now one of the hottest topics in Western strategic debate. As Hal Brands, professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins explains: "Gray zone conflict is best understood as activity that is coercive and aggressive in nature, but that is deliberately designed to remain below the threshold of conventional military conflict and open interstate war." Gray-zone tactics are ambiguous and incremental, including the use of information operations (a term of art for fake news), psychological manipulation, corruption, economic coercion, and covert paramilitary activities, like the "little green men" Russia sent in to invade Crimea.
There is plenty of academic debate over the exact nature of this term, but little disagreement that the United States, and the West generally, is on the losing side in an increasingly bitter competition with a belligerent Russia, as well as a subtler but equally determined China. From Ukraine to the South China Sea, these two nations' bold gambles appear to have paid off. Eastern Ukraine remains in chaos and Crimea firmly in Russian hands, while China's Navy intimidates its neighbors, ignoring international legal rulings. Now, other revisionist powers like Iran are learning to emulate their tactics: use deniable proxy forces, drone strikes, and cyber-attacks to improve their position without risking all-out war.
Despite the early success these rogue nations have had through adopting gray-zone strategies, defeatism in the face of this challenge is foolish; with skill and focus, the United States can win this conflict.
After all, this is not the first time the U.S. has faced a shrewd enemy that had overcome its conventional military inferiority with innovative tactics. During America's greatest conflict, the Civil War, the Confederacy had won a series of stunning victories with bold, unorthodox maneuvers, frustrating Northern generals and leaders alike and leading to a sense that the North could not win the war. So, when Ulysses S. Grant took over the demoralized Army of the Potomac, after yet another defeat at the hands of Robert E. Lee, he told his officers:"I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do... try to think what are we are going to do ourselves." That is the spirit the West needs to rediscover to win in the gray zone.
Helpfully, Russia and China have been quite clear about their approach. In 2013, General Gerasimov, the Chief of the Russian General Staff, gave a
speech that set out what became known as the Gerasimov doctrine, although he portrayed-quite ironically-that these were in fact Western tactics aimed against Russia.
He described the future of conflict as "shifting towards the widespread use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian and other non-military measures implemented with the use of the protest potential of the population. All this is complemented by covert military measures, including the implementation of information warfare and the actions of special operations forces."
The Chinese approach to the gray zone-referred to as the doctrine of
Three Warfares-concentrates on the psychological media and legal tools needed to win without fighting. As Professor Stefan Harper explains, "It is uniquely suited to an age where success is often determined by whose story rather than whose army wins."
In other words, both countries rely on the ability to shape the specific populations' information environments through manipulation, corruption, and targeted violence, effectively winning by demoralizing their opponents.
These unconventional methods, from fake news to
little green men, aim to destabilize a target without provoking an armed confrontation, which authoritarian regimes know they would lose. This is a serious challenge to democratic stability: Russia has already invaded and occupied parts of a sovereign neighbor, supported extremist parties in Europe, and interfered in U.S. elections. China, for its part, has been refining and exporting surveillance technologies, bullying companies and governments who dare to challenge it, as the NBA has recently learned, and expanding its reach by building illegal artificial islands across the South China Sea.
But democracies often undermine authoritarian rule often without even realizing it-merely by offering an attractive alternative to a system built on oppression and lies. Despotic rulers tend to see this threat as part of a conspiracy against them, or at least, they want their people to see it as such.
The Chinese Communist Party's
complaint that the rise of androgynous celebrities is the result of a CIA conspiracy is one of the more absurd examples. Putin's
claim that the Internet is a CIA plot is another, as was his
furious reaction to the Panama Papers, which exposed the fortunes his cronies had hidden away. Meanwhile, the example of nearby democracies like Ukraine and Taiwan challenge the entire legitimacy of authoritarian rule.
While there are areas in which democracies and autocracies can collaborate, the tension is inherent between incompatible systems. For the democracies, building good defenses against gray-zone tactics is a necessary starting point. Countries like Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Denmark, for instance, have launched successful media literacy programs to help their citizens recognize Russian media manipulation and call out fake news. As a result, they are largely immune to this tactic.
But stronger defenses are not enough. Following General Grant's example, democracies also need to increase the pressure on authoritarian regimes and go on the offense
against the gray zone. Some interventions are direct, like the U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Asia's Uighur language radio, which provides an independent news source to China's oppressed Uighur minority. Others are subtler. Standing up for the human rights of dissidents and oppressed minorities-from Tibet and Hong Kong to the brave protesters in Moscow-is not only a moral duty but also good policy. If nothing else, it undermines the authoritarian regimes in power. This requires U.S. presidential leadership squarely anchored in democratic values, from a president who believes in them. We may have to wait until 2021 for that-though let's hope not until 2025.
Beyond a direct response to gray-zone attacks, there are a series of policies, which Western democracies should be following in any case, that have the added benefit of increasing pressure on authoritarian regimes. Russian government
accounts show that 60 percent of its GDP comes from oil and gas resources. Rapid de-carbonization, particularly in Europe, threatens the economic basis of Putin's rule. Therefore, moving away from dependence on Russian gas and toward a carbon-free energy system should be a priority for all European countries-and one that the US should support.
Similarly, China's aggressive moves to develop, and export, a
model of technologically enabled authoritarian control-and its use of economic leverage to squash dissent-is a central element of the Communist Party's approach to exerting power. It needs to be challenged. The European Union's
work to defend online privacy is a helpful start.
China uses its increasing economic might as leverage. When the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobao, China retaliated by imposing an economic embargo for six years until Norway promised not to interfere in Chinese affairs again. The lack of support from Norway's allies was shameful and only encouraged more of this kind of behavior. Any future administration must recognize how understanding the
tools of weaponized economic interdependence-and how to use them-has to be a core capability of the United States.
A great weakness of modern autocracies is their reliance on the support of corrupt oligarchs, who steal at home and then hide much of their wealth in the West. Laws that promote financial transparency can put pressure on them while reducing their ability to corrupt Western accomplices. Some interesting recent examples include the U.S .Corporate Transparency Act, legislation that would
ban shell companies; the EU's efforts to
eliminate money laundering sanctuaries; and the UK's Unexplained Wealth Order that
allows a court to investigate and freeze the assets of a suspected foreign criminal, or someone politically connected to them. These reforms all build on the success of the Magnitsky Act, which remains to date the most powerful financial tool against murderous Russian kleptocrats. Finally, there is still a military component to gray-zone conflict. The United States and European allies will need to provide fledgling, vulnerable democratic partners with defensive military assets to deter and, if needed, defeat subversion, sabotage, and armed confrontation. The West, however, should be careful not to reduce this challenge to just its military dimension.
General Grant would have understood that the position of democracies in this conflict is considerable. With clarity and determination, they can move from a purely reactive approach and make autocrats worry more about maintaining their hold on power than on how they can sow chaos abroad. If they do, they will make the world a safer, and more decent, place.
7. Report: 'Smishing,' Deepfakes to Continue to Rise in 2020
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American
consumers and
agencies were exposed to a wide range of
phishing threats over the course 2019-but in 2020, there'll be a new, related danger on the horizon: smishing, or text-based phishing.
According to consumer credit reporting company Experian's
2020 data breach industry forecast, smishing is the top threat individuals will likely be targeted by in the coming year, followed by drones that steal consumer data, disruptive deepfakes, hacktivism, and identity theft through mobile payment systems.
"Cybercriminals will leverage text-based 'smishing' identity theft techniques to target consumers participating in online communities, such as those supporting presidential candidates, with fraudulent messages disguised as fundraising initiatives," officials wrote in the report.
As bad actors become more sophisticated in their attempts to spoof or manipulate Americans for money or information, smishing efforts-a portmanteau of "SMS" and "phishing"-are expected to be on the rise. Experian notes that hackers and other cybercriminals will likely capitalize on the fact that it's an election year and try to trick voting communities through spoofed texts to garner financial support.
"As candidates build out online communities, a campaign page can be easily spoofed-soliciting donations via a fake email, and a smishing text message designed to look like it comes from a fellow campaign supporter can gain trust even faster," the company notes.
Much like traditional phishing scams, smishing may include misspelled words, poor grammar and unnecessary requests for users to share their personal information like credit card or social security numbers. Experian notes it's generally best not to respond from texts if receivers do not recognize the senders.
Next year, another top threat could come from drones with attached devices that can steal consumer data from free public Wi-Fi networks. To prevent the emerging threats, the company recommends implementing two-factor authentication and other password protections on all personal devices.
"To keep sensitive data on your smartphone secure from drones and other aerial devices, it is important to use Wi-Fi wisely," officials note. "Accessing public Wi-Fi in areas such as malls, parks and even coffee shops can open the door to hackers stealing your personal information in a matter of seconds."
The company also predicts that
deepfakes, or manipulated videos that can cause disinformation to rapidly spread, will continue to be weaponized to disrupt financial markets and create confusion across the geo-political landscape. Burgeoning companies and industries like cannabis retailers and cryptocurrency entities will also likely see a rise in hacktivism in the coming year.
And, as mobile payment options continue to rise at large and medium venues, Experian also predicts that there'll be a significant spike in identity thefts as cybercriminals tap into those mobile means.
"Mobile payments are here to stay, but in a rush to adopt these new payment platforms retailers need to be careful that they don't take one step forward and two steps back when it comes to security, and consumers need to be vigilant, too," officials wrote.
8. In Push for Africa, Russia's Wagner Mercenaries Are 'Out of Their Depth' in Mozambique
From the Moscow Times.
In Push for Africa, Russia's Wagner Mercenaries Are 'Out of Their Depth' in Mozambique - The Moscow Times
When John Gartner, a former Rhodesian soldier who now heads the military security company OAM, was approached by a Mozambican official to help fight the Islamist insurgency in the country's north, he thought he was about to win a lucrative contract.
"We presented them with a first-class proposal in early August. We have so much experience in operating in Mozambique and know the tough environment very well. Trust me, we would have done an excellent job," he told The Moscow Times.
Dolf Dorfling, an ex-colonel in the South African army and founder of the Black Hawk private military contractor, likewise submitted a "strong" proposal for a country he knows "like the palm of his hand."
They both lost out to a new player in town - the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group, believed to be owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman with close links to Russian President Vladimir Putin often referred to as "Putin's Chef" because of his catering business.
While the veteran mercenaries admitted they couldn't match Wagner's low costs and high-level political connections, they cast doubt on the Russian company's ability to operate in Mozambique because they say it knows neither the terrain nor the politics.
"Look, it's money and politics, it was clear we couldn't compete with Wagner," said Gartner, "But now they are in trouble there, they are out of their depth."
Cabo Delgado.Google Maps / MT
In September, about 200 Russian Wagner mercenaries arrived in Mozambique's capital Maputo, news first reported by The Times of London and independently confirmed by The Moscow Times.
Since arriving, they have been engaged in a fierce fight with an Islamic State-linked insurgency in the country's gas-rich, Muslim-majority Cabo Delgado region, which has claimed over 200 deaths since 2017.
Black Hawk and OAM are two of the many private military contractors operating in Sub-Saharan Africa. Their rise has been linked to the end of apartheid in South Africa, which released many skilled soldiers eager to be paid to help African governments struggling to curtail internal rebellions. Many are now aged between 55 and 65, but say they have the knowledge and experience to keep working in Africa.
Gartner said he had proposed to bring around 50 highly qualified experts to Mozambique at a cost of between $15,000 and $25,000 per person per month.
While no public information is available on how much Wagner pays its mercenaries, Yevgeny Shabayev, a former Russian military officer and self-appointed spokesman for the group, told The Moscow Times that on average, a lower-rank Wagner soldier receives between 120,000 and 300,000 rubles per month ($1,800 - $4,700).
Perhaps more important, the military contractors said, is the political backing Wagner has attracted compared to traditional mercenary groups.
Prigozhin is emerging as a key figure in Russia's increasingly expansive foreign policy in Africa, and Wagner troops have been reported operating in Sudan, the Central African Republic and Libya.
Last week, The New York Times reported that following a meeting in Moscow between Putin, Prigozhin and Madagascar's then-president Hery Rajaonarimampianina, Russian operatives were sent to the country with the aim of influencing the local elections. Their security was reportedly provided by mercenaries from Wagner.
Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security affairs, says that Wagner's unique blend of proximity to the Kremlin and low costs make it attractive.
"They are cheap and come as part of a package of regime-support services, including political technologies."
Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi flew to Russia and met Putin at the end of August - two months before the country's October presidential elections - where he signed a number of energy and security agreements.
While there is no evidence to suggest Russia sent operatives to influence the Mozambican elections, companies linked to Prigozhin have been accused of propping up Nyusi and his party.
In the run-up to the elections, a think tank called Afric conducted a poll that predicted victory for Nyusi. As the publication of election polls is illegal during the campaign period in Mozambique, its founder Jose Matemulane published it on the International Anticrisis Center website, a Russian NGO linked to Prigozhin. The poll ended up being widely shared across social media in Mozambique.
Afric's page was eventually suspended by Facebook at the end of October after Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, said the entity was associated with Prigozhin and had attempted to interfere in the domestic politics of African countries.
The U.S.-based Stanford Internet Observatory research center also identified four separate Prigozhin-linked Facebook pages created on Sept. 23, 2019, which frequently posted identical content. They lauded the government's success in fighting the Islamist insurgency in Cabo Delgado and criticized the main opposition party Renamo.
In over their heads
A few weeks after Wagner's arrival in September, reports started coming out of Mozambique that the group's mercenaries were being ambushed, killed and beheaded in Cabo Delgado.
Two Mozambique army sources told The Moscow Times in October that at least seven Russians had been killed by the insurgency that month. Over a dozen independent analysts, mercenaries and security experts working in the region have since told The Moscow Times that Wagner is struggling.
Cabo Delgado is one of the poorest and least developed areas in the region.Stig Nygaard / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
"You have to realize this is one of the toughest environments in the world," said Al Venter, a veteran South Africa journalist who has written extensively about mercenaries on the continent.
"The consensus is that Wagner has almost no experience of the kind of primitive bush warfare being waged in there. They are going to come very badly unstuck," he added.
Cabo Delgado is one of the poorest and least developed areas in the region. It has limited basic infrastructure, including a lack of roads and hospitals, that makes it an environment that is "ideal" for ambushes, according to a Mozambican intelligence specialist based in the area who wished to remain anonymous.
"The undergrowth is so thick there that all the high-tech equipment Wagner brought ceases to be effective. The Russians arrived with drones, but they can't actually use them," the specialist said.
The environment is not the only problem Wagner faces.
Two sources in the Mozambique military, also speaking under condition of anonymity, described growing tensions between Wagner and the Mozambique Defense Armed Forces (FADM) after a number of failed military operations.
"We have almost stopped patrolling together," one of the two soldiers said.
Jasmine Opperman, a terrorism expert based in South Africa, believes "a perfect storm" has formed around Wagner in Mozambique.
"The Russians don't understand the local culture, don't trust the soldiers and have to fight in horrible conditions against an enemy that is gaining more and more momentum. They are in over their heads."
Growing pains
Wagner's problems in Mozambique raise bigger questions about the company's rapid growth, according to Galeotti.
"They have clearly had to expand since their early Syrian days and also have to make a profit. This means being less picky with recruits. They are increasingly operating in theaters where they don't have much expertise."
Shabayev, who says he is in regular contact with Wagner soldiers, echoed these sentiments. He expects the death toll for Wagner soldiers to rise across the world in coming years, but said it will be hard to glean concrete information given Wagner's secrecy.
He said the first bodies of Wagner soldiers who died in Mozambique have already arrived in Vladimir, a region outside Moscow, where families have been given hefty compensation in return for silence.
The Moscow Times was unable to independently confirm this.
For now, Gartner and Dorfling are on standby, monitoring developments in Mozambique closely.
"Once Mozambique realizes that Wagner won't be able to do the job alone, we will be back in demand," said Dorfling.
Sources told them that Wagner has started to look around for local military expertise, although they haven't heard anything yet.
"If you could let Wagner know we are available to help, that would be great. We would like to come in and do what we do best," said Gartner, before hanging up.
Islamic State is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.
9 Victor Sheymov, KGB officer who defected from Soviet Union, dies at 73.
I strongly recommend the Billion Dollar Spy.
He tried to have a minor traffic accident with a U.S. diplomatic car, only to have the driver make an evasive move to avoid the collision. Finally, while on a KGB assignment in Poland, Mr. Sheymov walked to the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw.
"Are you a cipher clerk?" he was asked.
"No, I am responsible for the security of the KGB cipher communications abroad," Mr. Sheymov replied.
"The Americans were dumbstruck," Washington Post journalist David E. Hoffman wrote in his 2015 book "The Billion Dollar Spy." "A man with the keys to the kingdom, the ultrasecret codes to Soviet communications, was volunteering to defect."
In Moscow, the CIA assigned Mr. Sheymov the code name of "CKUTOPIA." His CIA handler, David Rolph, gave him a miniature camera and told him, according to Hoffman's book: "Photograph the most highly classified papers you have. Don't take chances with other people around. But you have to prove to us that you are who you say you are."
The pictures proved Mr. Sheymov's credibility. He told Rolph that he wanted to flee the Soviet Union, but would not leave without his wife and 5-year-old daughter.
Victor Sheymov, KGB officer who defected from Soviet Union, dies at 73
Throughout the 1970s, Victor Sheymov rose quickly through the hierarchy of the KGB, the spy agency of the Soviet Union. He was assigned to the Eighth Chief Directorate, perhaps the KGB's most secretive unit, which handled communications, ciphers and codes.
By the time he was 32, Mr. Sheymov had reached the rank of major and was in charge of monitoring the KGB's flow of information from around the world. But he was growing increasingly disenchanted with his employers and with life under the Communist regime, especially after suspecting the KGB of killing one of his friends, who had questioned the Soviet way of life.
At great risk, Mr. Sheymov decided to reach out to U.S. intelligence officers, finally making a daring escape across the border with his wife and daughter in 1980. It was the CIA's first successful extraction - or exfiltration, as the agency calls it - of a defector from Soviet soil, and it turned out to be one of the most significant defections of the Cold War.
Mr. Sheymov, who spent the rest of his life in the United States, died Oct. 18 at his home in Vienna, Va. He was 73.
His wife, Olga Sheymov, confirmed the death, which has not previously been reported. The cause was complications from pulmonary disease.
After he was brought to the United States, Mr. Sheymov spent a year debriefing intelligence officials about the KGB's worldwide cryptological network and other secrets.
"My goal was to inflict as much damage on the communist system as I possibly could," he told The Washington Post in 1990, when he went public after 10 years in hiding. "The peculiar thing about me was that I was in the inner sanctum of the KGB, so I knew the whole system, including the cipher system."
Among other things, Mr. Sheymov disclosed that the KGB hatched a plot to kill the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, who was shot and wounded by a Turkish assailant in 1981.
"The task was to find out how to get physically close to the pope," Mr. Sheymov said in a 1990 Washington news conference. "In the KGB slang, it was clearly understood that when you say 'physically close,' there was only one reason to get close."
He revealed that the KGB assassinated Afghan President Hafizullah Amin in 1979. He said two members of the U.S. State Department were spying for the KGB, and that he knew of at least one mole in the CIA.
He also warned that the U.S. Embassy, built by Soviet workers in Moscow in the early 1980s, would have so many bugs and listening devices that "you won't have a single secret in the building." Several years later, the entire building was razed, and a new embassy was built by U.S. construction crews.
Mr. Sheymov received the U.S. Intelligence Medal and was praised by the federal government for his "valuable contribution to our country and national security."
Victor Ivanovich Sheymov was born May 9, 1946, in Moscow. His father was an engineer, his mother a cardiologist.
He graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, an elite science and engineering college, where he was also a standout athlete. His wife said he was a boxer and skier and held the school record in the 100-meter dash for more than 20 years.
Mr. Sheymov excelled in mathematics and studied in a program specializing in missile and spacecraft design before joining the KGB in 1971. In Beijing, he solved a long-standing mystery at the Soviet embassy, concluding that when the building was constructed in the 1950s, the Chinese had installed hidden acoustic conduits that could transmit sound without electronic amplification.
He was promoted to a sensitive job in the KGB's top-secret communications and coding branch, helped prepare daily briefings for members of the Politburo and was part of the spy agency's inner circle.
"You begin to see independent information available to a few 'trusted' people that contradicts what you were taught before," he told The Post in 1990. "You are in a position to see what the KGB does. It is supposed to defend the Soviet people, but it doesn't. It works against them and the whole world."
When a friend (and fellow KGB officer) was killed after voicing dissident views, Mr. Sheymov sought to flee the Soviet Union and take its secrets with him.
It turned out to be harder to make a connection with U.S. intelligence officers than he thought. He carried a note reading, "Hello, I am a KGB officer with access to highly sensitive information," but never met anyone he could give it to.
He tried to have a minor traffic accident with a U.S. diplomatic car, only to have the driver make an evasive move to avoid the collision. Finally, while on a KGB assignment in Poland, Mr. Sheymov walked to the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw.
"Are you a cipher clerk?" he was asked.
"No, I am responsible for the security of the KGB cipher communications abroad," Mr. Sheymov replied.
"The Americans were dumbstruck," Washington Post journalist David E. Hoffman wrote in his 2015 book "The Billion Dollar Spy." "A man with the keys to the kingdom, the ultrasecret codes to Soviet communications, was volunteering to defect."
In Moscow, the CIA assigned Mr. Sheymov the code name of "CKUTOPIA." His CIA handler, David Rolph, gave him a miniature camera and told him, according to Hoffman's book: "Photograph the most highly classified papers you have. Don't take chances with other people around. But you have to prove to us that you are who you say you are."
The pictures proved Mr. Sheymov's credibility. He told Rolph that he wanted to flee the Soviet Union, but would not leave without his wife and 5-year-old daughter.
Mr. Sheymov received his instructions in a letter written in invisible ink. (The writing appeared when the page was moistened.) When he was ready to leave Moscow, he was told, he should mark the letter "V" on a plaster pillar outside a bakery. He borrowed a waterproof marker from another KGB office and scrawled the "V" with his back to the pillar.
It took more than two months before the escape plan, detailed in Hoffman's book, was ready. The CIA gave Mr. Sheymov five varieties of sedatives to determine which would be the safest for his daughter, to keep her asleep as they were smuggled out of the country.
On May 16, 1980, the Sheymovs sneaked away from their apartment, leaving teacups on the table, an open newspaper and an unmade bed. Clothes and family heirlooms were in their usual places, so as not to arouse suspicion.
"I didn't leave a goodbye note," Mr. Sheymov wryly said in a 1990 interview.
They took two trains, fearing that anyone they met could turn them in, before arriving in a remote town. They climbed into a nondescript car, Mr. Sheymov wrote in his 1993 book, "Tower of Secrets," driven by a man with a Polish accent.
Mr. Sheymov concealed himself and his sedated daughter, Elena, in a hidden compartment between the car's trunk and back seat. His wife, Olga, sat in the front seat, posing as the driver's girlfriend.
At one checkpoint, a guard demanded that the driver give him the Billy Joel tape he was playing in the car.
The exact location of the border crossing has never been divulged: Hoffman suggested in his book that it may have been Finland. Olga Sheymov said in an interview that it was in the Carpathian Mountains, a range that stretches more than 900 miles across several countries, most of which were part of the Soviet bloc.
Once they were across the border, the Sheymovs were taken to a safe house, then flown to the United States. They had no further contact with their families until after the collapse of communism a decade later. Mr. Sheymov became a U.S. citizen and was reunited with his parents and a sister in the early 1990s, when they resettled in Northern Virginia.
Over the years, Mr. Sheymov maintained that he had been promised $1 million for defecting and free lifetime health care. The CIA disputed that claim. After hiring former CIA director R. James Woolsey to represent him, he reached a settlement with the CIA in 1999.
In addition to "Tower of Secrets," Mr. Sheymov wrote three other books, including a novel and technical works on technology and security, and launched a cybersecurity firm, Invicta Networks. He had several patents for inventions related to software protection.
Survivors include his wife of 45 years, the former Olga Voight, an artist and television producer, of Vienna; a daughter; a sister; and a granddaughter.
During his final days with the KGB in Moscow, Mr. Sheymov said he wasn't sure if he was being helped by the CIA or duped by the Soviet Union.
"The one thing that proved to me you were CIA and not KGB," he told Rolph, according to Hoffman's book, "is when you gave me those medicines to test on my daughter. Because the KGB is heartless. They would have given me one pill and said,
do it. I knew I was working with a humane organization when you gave me five medicines."
10. Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor
Ouch! What a scathing critique. I wonder how accurate this is. I do not have any personal experience with McKinsey,
I have been frustrated to see contract consultants come in to "check our work." I remember one incident where are action officers conducted an excellent staff analysis and recommended a course of action. The command two levels up decided they needed to have an outside look. So the consultants came in and interviewed all the actions officers, obtained their data and briefing slides and then made a presentation to the high command that was nearly identical to our action officers' with the major change that they put their company logo on each slide.
Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you'd like to sign up, you can do so
here. Or just read on...
A few days ago, Ian MacDougall came out with a New York Times/ProPublica
piece on how consulting giant McKinsey structured Trump immigration policy. Lots of people cover immigration. I'm going to discuss why the government buys overpriced services from McKinsey. (Spoiler: It goes back to, of course, Bill Clinton.)
First, I'll be doing a book talk in D.C. on the evening of Dec 10th and one in New York on the evening of Dec 18th for my book
Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. There's info below my signature with details. Business Insider
namedGoliath one of the best books of the year on how we can rethink capitalism. If you have thoughts on the book, as always, let me know.
As regular readers of BIG know, my basic theory of the world is that most of our political economy problems are caused by these guys being in charge of everything.
The Point of McKinsey: Charging $3 Million a Year for the Work of a 23-Year Old
McKinsey has a lot of high-flying rhetoric about strategy, sustainability, and social justice. The company ostensibly pursues intellectual and business excellence, while also using
its people skills to help Syrian refugees. That's nice.
But let's start with what McKinsey is really about, which is getting organizational leaders to pay a large amount of money for fairly pedestrian advice. In MacDougall's article on McKinsey's work on immigration, most of the conversation has been about McKinsey's push to engage in cruel behavior towards detainees. But let's not lose sight of the incentive driving the relationship, which was McKinsey's political ability to extract cash from the government. Here's the nub of that part of the story.
The consulting firm's sway at ICE grew to the point that McKinsey's staff even ghostwrote a government contracting document that defined the consulting team's own responsibilities and justified the firm's retention, a contract extension worth $2.2 million. "Can they do that?" an ICE official wrote to a contracting officer in May 2017.
The response reflects how deeply ICE had come to rely on McKinsey's assistance. "Well it obviously isn't ideal to have a contractor tell us what we want to ask them to do," the contracting officer replied. But unless someone from the government could articulate the agency's objectives, the officer added, "what other option is there?" ICE extended the contract.
Such practices used to be called "honest graft." And let's be clear, McKinsey's services are
very expensive. Back in August, I
noted that McKinsey's competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey's pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey "business analyst" - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.
How does McKinsey do it? There are two answers. The first is simple. They cheat. McKinsey is far more expensive than its competition, and is able to get that pricing because of its unethical tactics. In fact, the situation is so dire that earlier this year the General Services Administration's Inspector General
recommended in a report that the GSA cancel McKinsey's entire government-wide contract
. Here's what the IG
showed McKinsey was eventually awarded.
The Inspector General illustrated straightforward corruption at the GSA, which is the agency that sets schedules for how much things cost for the entire U.S. government (and many states and localities, who also use GSA schedules).
What happened is fairly simple. McKinsey asked for 10-14% price hike for its already expensive IT professional services (which is a catch-all for anything). The government contracting officer said no, calling the proposal to update the firm's contract schedule with much higher costs "ridiculous." So McKinsey went to the officer's boss, the Division Director. In 2016, a McKinsey representative sent the following email to the GSA Division Director.
We would really appreciate it if you could assist us with our Schedule 70 application. In particular, given that you understand our model, it would be enormously helpful if you could help the Schedule 70 Contracting Officer understand how it benefits the government.
The pestering worked. The GSA Division Director seems to have had the contract reassigned and granted the price increase McKinsey wanted. The director also seems to have been lying to the inspector general, as well as manipulating pricing data, breaking rules on sole source contracting, and pitching various other government agencies, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to buy McKinsey services. Eventually the director straight up said, "My only interest is helping out my contractor."
From 2006 when McKinsey signed its original schedule price, to 2019, it received roughly $73.5 million/year, or $956.2 million in total revenue from the government. The inspector general estimated the scam from 2016 onward would cost $69 million in total overpayments. It's a scandal. But still, something about it doesn't quite make sense. Why would a government division director at the GSA seek to increase costs for the government? It's not bribery, since the IG didn't recommend firing or arresting the government official who pushed up costs (or at least that's not in the IG report).
The Industrial Funding Fee
And this gets to the second reason why McKinsey can charge so much, which has to do less with McKinsey and more with an incentive to overpay more generally. It's more likely something called the '
Industrial Funding Fee,' or IFF. The GSA's Federal Acquisition Service gets a cut of whatever certain contractors spend using the GSA's schedule, and this cut is the IFF. The IFF is priced at .75% of the total amount of a government contract. In the case of McKinsey, since 2006, "FAS has realized $7.2 million in Industrial Funding Fee revenue."
In other words, the agency of the government in charge of bulk buying isn't paid for saving money, but for spending too much of it. The IFF also incentivizes the GSA to get the government to outsource to contractors anything it can, simply to get more budget. The IFF has been creating problems like the McKinsey over-payment for a long time. In 2013, the GSA Inspector General
traced a similar situation with different contractors. Managers at GSA overruled line contracting officers to
raise prices taxpayer pay for contractors Carahsoft, Deloitte and Oracle. Government managers at GSA micro-managed and harassed their subordinates and damaged the careers of contracting officers trying to negotiate fair prices for the taxpayer.
How did the GSA get such a screwed up incentive as the Industrial Funding Fee? Well, in 1995, to get the government to become more entrepreneurial as part of its "Reinventing Government" initiative, Bill Clinton's administration implemented the Industrial Funding Fee structure. It worked in generating money for the GSA. It worked so well that Congress's investigative agency found in 2002 that the GSA
stopped having to rely on Congressional appropriations. It had so much extra money that it started to spend lavishly on its "fleet program," which is to say vehicle purchases. In other words, the GSA earned so much money by outsourcing the work of other government agencies to high-priced contractors that it just started buying fleets of extra cars.
By 2010, GSA had "
sales" of $39 billion a year. While the GSA is supposed to remit extra revenue to the taxpayer, it often just stuffs the money into overfunded reserves. More fundamentally, the culture of the procurement agencies of government has been completely warped. The GSA's entire reason for existing was to do better purchasing for the government, using both expertise and mass buying power to get value. But now officials try to generate revenue by getting the government to spend more money on overpriced contractors. Like McKinsey.
Does McKinsey do a good job? The answer is that it's probably no better or worse than anyone else. I'm sure there are times when McKinsey is quite helpful, but it's in all probability vastly overpriced for what it is, which is basically a group of smart people who know how to use powerpoint presentations and speak in soothing tones. You can just go through news clippings and find areas McKinsey did cookie cutter nonsense. For instance, McKinsey
helped ruin an IT implementation for intelligence services. In the immigration story, MacDougall shows that the consulting firm encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees. That's cruelty, not efficiency.
Still, it's not all on McKinsey. The Industrial Funding Fee is one reason paying $3 million a year for a 23-year old McKinsey employee instead of hiring an experienced person directly to do IT management has some logic to a government procurement division head. The policy solution here is fairly simple - kill the IFF fee structure and finance government procurement agencies through Congressional appropriations directly. Also follow the IG's recommendation and cancel McKinsey's contracting schedule.
At any rate, at some point decades ago, we decided that most political and business institutions in America should be organized around cheating people. In this case, the warped and decrepit state of the GSA leads to McKinsey-ifying the entire government. Mr. Clinton, you took a fine government that basically worked, and ruined it. McKinsey sends its thanks.
Thanks for reading. And if you liked this essay, you can sign up
here for more issues of BIG, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. If you want to really understand the secret history of monopoly power, buy my book,
Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
cheers,
Matt Stoller
P.S. I'll be giving book talks in D.C. and New York. Info is below.
December 10 (Tuesday)
Washington, D.C.
Book talk at Public Citizen at 5pm
1600 20th St., NW, Washington, DC 20009
Please RSVP to Aileen Walsh at [email protected].
December 18 (Wednesday)
Brooklyn, NY - Old Stone House from 6:30-8pm
A Conversation with Matt Stoller, author of "Goliath", and Zephyr Teachout
336 3rd Street
Brooklyn, 11215
INFO
11. U.S. is seen as a top ally in many countries - but others view it as a threat
Interesting data.
DECEMBER 5, 2019
U.S. is seen as a top ally in many countries - but others view it as a threat
The United States stands out to many around the world as the country their own nation can rely on most, according to
a new Pew Research Center survey. Pluralities or majorities in around half of the 17 countries where an open-ended question was asked named the U.S. as their most dependable ally going forward. At the same time, substantial shares of people in some countries also perceive Washington as their greatest threat.
Israelis are the most likely to name the U.S. as a reliable partner (82%) among the countries surveyed. In fact, no more than 2% of Israelis name any other country as a dependable ally.
In recent years, Israelis have diverged from people in most other countries surveyed with their widespread sense that relations with the U.S. have improved in recent years and that the U.S. is doing more to address global problems.
Many of China's neighbors name the U.S. as their most dependable ally by a wide margin, including South Korea (71%), the Philippines (64%) and Japan (63%).
People in Australia and Canada - countries that, like South Korea, are American allies by treaty - are also more likely to name the U.S. as their top ally than any other country, though fewer than half hold that view. In Canada, this reflects a drop of 8 percentage points since people were last asked their top ally in 2007, from 54% to 46%. At the same time, large minorities of people in these treaty ally countries say the U.S. represents the greatest
threat to them going forward, including 20% of Canadians, 13% of South Koreans and 12% of Australians.
There is much more ambiguity over the role of the U.S. in the Latin American and sub-Saharan African countries surveyed. While the U.S. tends to be seen as an ally by the largest share in each of these countries, only around a third or fewer say that (in part because substantial numbers in many of these countries do not offer a response). And, in countries like Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, nearly as many name China as their most dependable ally as name the U.S. In Kenya, there was a 28 percentage point drop in those naming the U.S. as an ally since 2007 (35%, down from 63%). Only in Lebanon, Tunisia and Turkey do fewer name the U.S. as their most dependable ally than other countries.
Substantial shares in some countries also perceive Washington as their greatest threat - even in some in which the U.S. is the most named top ally. In Mexico, 56% say the U.S. is the greatest threat to their country, while 27% cite the U.S. as their most dependable ally (around 5% say both, concurrently). Recent Pew Research Center surveys found that Mexicans have almost
no confidence in U.S. President Donald Trump, and there is
widespread opposition to the proposed border wall. The other countries with the biggest shares of people naming the U.S. as a threat include Turkey (46%), Argentina (40%), Brazil (18%), Nigeria (14%) and Tunisia (12%).
China
Majorities in most countries agree
China's influence on the world stage has grown markedly, and nearly as many see China as the world's leading economic power as the U.S. But in no country surveyed does more than a third see China as their country's top ally. Across the 17 non-U.S. countries surveyed, only a median of 6% cite China as their most dependable partner, compared with 27% who name the United States.
China stands out as a danger particularly among its regional neighbors. It is the country most named as a threat by 62% of Filipinos, 50% of Japanese, 40% of Australians, 32% of South Koreans and 21% of Indonesians. In South Korea and Indonesia, perceived threats from China have also increased by 15 points and 11 points, respectively, since the countries were last asked in 2014. Over the same period, the perceived threat in Japan has fallen 18 percentage points.
China is also the top named threat in both the U.S. (24%) and Canada (32%), up substantially since 2007 in both countries (by 12 and 20 points, respectively). These increased threats are accompanied by
record-high unfavorability numbers in both countries and
trade-related tensions with the U.S.
Russia
Recent surveys find that
Russia's global image is poor, even as people see it playing a more important role in international affairs today than it did a decade ago. But, outside of India (15%) and Turkey (9%), no more than 4% in any country surveyed name Russia as their most dependable ally.
While around a quarter of Americans cite Russia as the greatest threat facing the country, few other countries see Moscow's role in comparable terms. For example, in Canada, 10% name Russia as their country's greatest threat - fewer than the 20% who name the U.S. or the 32% who say the same of China.
North Korea
While many in 2018 saw
North Korea's nuclear program as a major threat to their country, no country surveyed in 2019 names North Korea as the
top threat. In Japan, the perceived threat from North Korea (20%) trails that of China (50%) by a wide margin. In the United States, North Korea is the third-most named country, following both Russia (24%) and China (24%). Even in South Korea - a country frequently within the
flight path of North Korean test missiles - North Korea only rates as the third-most named country (21%), following both China (32%) and Japan (23%).
North Korea is not named as a top ally by more than 1% in any country surveyed except South Korea, where 4% name their neighbor.
Pakistan, Iran, Israel and Somalia
While China and the United States are seen as the top threats for most countries surveyed, there are a few regional threats that are of particular concern to specific publics. For example, 60% of Indians name Pakistan as the country that most threatens their own - and this is up from the 45% who said the same in 2014. There is a
growing sense that relations in Kashmir - a disputed region between the two powers - has gotten worse in recent years.
Israelis are most apt to name Iran as the greatest threat facing their country (58%), while few in any other country surveyed say the same (only 10% of Lebanese and 6% of Americans cite Iran). Outside of Iran, only Syria (7%) is named by more than 5% of the Israeli population. In contrast, Israel itself ranks as the top threat for Lebanese (49%) and one of the top most named threats in the other majority-Muslim countries surveyed: Turkey (10%), Tunisia (5%) and Indonesia (3%).
Kenyans are most likely to name their neighbor, Somalia (26%), as the top threat facing their country.
Hong Kong's pro-democracy activists were initially welcoming to the burly young Ukrainians who arrived on the front lines of their protests Sunday.
Then they noticed the swastika tattoos.
In photos that swiftly circulated on social media, it was clear the visitors' political allegiances were radically incompatible with Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement. One of the men had
two swastikas tattooed behind his ear, while another had the
white power symbols "14 88" tattooed on his shoulders and the initials WPSH (white power, skin head or sieg heil) across his stomach.
As the photos spread, so did the questions. Who exactly were these Ukrainian fascists, and what the hell were they doing wandering around the protest front lines in Hong Kong?
"Nobody here knows who they are. Nobody invited them," said Hong Kong Hermit, a prominent online activist who tweeted out a warning about the fascist "protest tourists" Monday (he doesn't want to be identified by name because he regularly receives threats from hard-line Chinese nationalists over his activism.)
"Once people were informed they are neo-Nazis, my mentions have been full of Hong Kongers outright rejecting them," he told VICE News.
The men, it turns out, are well-known figures in Ukraine's far-right scene, former soldiers for the ultranationalist Azov Battalion who fought Russian-backed separatists in the east. While they say they're just tourists, their presence in Hong Kong has sparked concerns that they may be there to glean lessons from this city's protest movement to push their ideology back home.
The men's backgrounds are in Azov, the ultranationalist military and political movement that's notorious for its far-right ideology, including explicitly neo-Nazi views among its members. The leader of the group that visited Hong Kong, Serhii Filimonov, was until last year head of the Kyiv chapter of Azov's political wing, National Corps, while two others accompanying him have given firearms training to National Corps activists, according to a
Bellingcat investigation last year.
Since splitting from Azov about a year ago, they're now affiliated with the hooligan-based street protest movement Honor.
The Ukrainian nationalist group, which styles itself as a civic activist movement, has organized street protest workshops, which it advertised with posters featuring Molotov cocktails. Filimonov, Honor's leader, is currently facing charges for an alleged assault of a policeman, while its members have made posts encouraging violence against authorities, such as: "The only good cop is a dead cop."
Filimonov told VICE News that while he supports Hong Kong's protests, his group was just tourists. They had no plans to participate in the protests, he said, as they understood "this may hurt the protesters more than help them."
But, he said, his group was "very interested in what is happening."
"We participated in the revolution in Ukraine and we see many similarities," he said. "It is interesting to see how they are organized."
That interest has concerned far-right experts like Mollie Saltskog, an intelligence analyst at strategic consultancy firm The Soufan Group. She told VICE News the group's presence in Hong Kong suggested they were likely seeking to learn lessons from the six-month anti-government protests to bring home to their own movement.
"We participated in the revolution in Ukraine and we see many similarities"
She said Ukraine's far right had proven itself to be internationally minded, with groups like Azov
actively courting connections with like-minded groups in other countries to network and share strategies. She said the group from Honor had also networked widely in Europe, and were likely in Hong Kong to try to learn successful techniques from the city's protest movement firsthand.
"They'll go wherever violence is and learn whatever tactics there are to learn to bring it back to their own fight," she said.
Saltskog said two of the group in particular were well-known figures on Ukraine's far right with extensive social media followings.
Filimonov has more than 20,000 followers on Instagram, where posts featuring his family and Honor associates are interspersed with shots of him giving firearms instruction holding a rifle, wrestling with police officers, and engaging in violent street clashes.
Often featured on his feed is a fellow Honor member known as "Maliar," another Azov veteran among the group in Hong Kong. Maliar - who has swastika tattoos on his head - was revealed in a
2018 Bellingcat investigation as having received military training in Poland from private military company the European Security Academy. Subsequently, along with another member of the group in Hong Kong, he gave firearms training to National Corps activists in 2017 and 2018.
Maliar is also a notorious figure in the football hooligan scene. In May 2015, he was photographed running on to the pitch of a Europa League semifinal in Kyiv brandishing a white supremacist Celtic cross banner. Five months later, he was reportedly involved in a racist attack on a black Chelsea fan at a Dynamo Kyiv match.
Despite Honor members' explicitly neo-Nazi body art and documented involvement in racist hooligan violence, Filimonov denied that his group harbors racist or extremist ideology.
"We are not neo-Nazis, we do not hate minorities. We have neither the time nor the desire to hate people who have done us no harm," he said, attempting to explain the neo-Nazi tattoos as nothing out of the ordinary.
"The majority of us were brought up in the football fan scene where such symbols aren't unusual."
He describes Honor - which uses a fascist-style logo of three upraised daggers, and whose name many members have tattooed on their bodies - as a "new youth civic movement that focuses on the problems of the capital" and whose guiding ideology is the "struggle for justice and Ukrainian independence." Despite the violent imagery in its propaganda, he denied the group espoused violent tactics.
"They are clearly interested in building their brand"
Analysts said such denials don't square with the men's clear track record of far-right ideology. Still, Filimonov's spin reflects a strategic shift for the far-right group. Vyacheslav Likhachev, research analyst the ZMINA Center for Human Rights, told VICE News that the group had deep roots in the far-right hooligan scene but was attempting to shake its extremist public image and gain a measure of acceptance as a legitimate player in Ukraine's civil society.
Matthew Schaaf, director of the Ukraine office of human rights watchdog Freedom House, told VICE News that the group has positioned itself as an anti-government street protest movement and a defender of civic activists. Its members had acted as security at mainstream civil society protests, apparently with the aim of "insinuating themselves into respected civil society in Ukraine."
"They are clearly interested in building their brand," he said.
If their trip to Hong Kong was also intended as one such PR exercise, it doesn't appear to have worked. Hong Kong Hermit said that while Hong Kong protesters were sympathetic to Ukraine, seeing parallels between their struggle and the Euromaidan protests, they had spurned the "unwanted and uninvited parasites" once their extremist affiliations became known.
Filimonov, for his part, said the group had gained little from their trip that could help their movement.
"We have not met with anyone," he said. "Frankly, we did not see anything new."
Cover: Riot policemen try to disperse pro-democracy protesters on a street following a protests in Hong Kong, Sunday, Dec. 1, 2019. Thousands took to Hong Kong's streets Sunday in a new wave of pro-democracy protests, but police fired tear gas after some demonstrators hurled bricks and smokes bombs, breaking a rare pause in violence that has persisted during the six-month-long movement. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
13. The Generals Tried to Keep Trump in Check. What Happens to Foreign Policy Now That They've Left?
The Generals Tried to Keep Trump in Check. What Happens to Foreign Policy Now That They've Left?
Early in his presidency, in mid-April 2017, Donald Trump and his top national-security officials gathered in the Oval Office for a briefing on North Korea. Trump sat behind his massive Resolute desk as officials crowded in around him. The briefing consisted largely of highly classified images of North Korea's nuclear facilities and military sites. The briefers knew Trump was more a visual learner than a briefing-book kind of guy, so the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had made a three-dimensional model of a secret North Korean facility that they brought to the Oval Office.
Trump was also shown a well-known satellite image of North Korea at night. On North Korea's northern border was China awash in pinpricks of light, while to the south was South Korea also all lit up at night. Between China and South Korea was an almost entirely dark North Korea with only a tiny, faint light emanating from its capital, Pyongyang. The image eloquently told the story of the almost total failure of the North Korean economy.
Killed at Pearl Harbor, It Took 78 Years to Bring Him Home
Trump focused on the image of South Korea and its capital, Seoul. The distance from the North Korean border to Seoul was only 15 miles.
Trump remarked, "Why is Seoul so close to the North Korean border?"
The President had been regularly briefed that North Korea possessed vast artillery batteries that, in the event of war, could kill millions in Seoul. The photo seemed to bring the briefings home.
"They have to move," he said, referring to the inhabitants of Seoul.
The officials in the Oval Office weren't sure if Trump was joking. Trump repeated, "They have to move!" Seoul, with a population of 10 million, has roughly as many residents as Sweden. Was the President seriously suggesting 10 million people needed to leave their homes in Seoul and move elsewhere? No one knew what to say.
In this previously unreported episode, Trump demonstrated what his supporters admired so much about him: his unorthodox thinking. To his critics this was the kind of idea that underlined just how ignorant and impetuous the President was.
President Trump during a meeting with U.S. military leaders in 2018
Win McNamee-Getty Images
Trump is the first American President not to have previously served in public office or in uniform, so when he first assumed the presidency he needed the cover of senior officers around him with plenty of fruit salad (as medals are jokingly called) on their chests. No modern President has appointed so many generals to Cabinet posts: retired general Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense, retired general John Kelly first as Secretary of Homeland Security and later as chief of staff, and retired Army lieut. general Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser, who was then replaced in that role by Lieut. General H.R. McMaster.
At first Trump reveled in the generals on his team, especially the "killers." Trump respected the raw power embodied by the U.S. military, and he needed Cabinet officials around him who understood how the levers of national-security power actually worked and who had experience in America's long-running wars on terrorism.
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In the beginning Trump's alliance with the generals worked well, and they guided him to some sensible decisions. Trump's first inclination was to pull out all the American troops in Afghanistan, but the generals led by McMaster made the case that a precipitous withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS would exploit. In August 2017 Trump announced an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan as well as a small surge of troops in order to combat the resurgent Taliban.
For a year and a half until May 2018, the generals-along with another member of the so-called axis of adults, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson-were able to persuade Trump not to scrap the Iran nuclear deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency had repeatedly certified that Iran was sticking to the agreement and wasn't developing nuclear weapons. Mattis wanted to stay in the Iran deal not only because it was working but also because it had been negotiated by the U.S. together with close American allies-the British, French and Germans. In Mattis' view, if the U.S. had made an agreement, you should stick to it. Otherwise, you risked eroding what America's word meant. Mattis lost that fight when Trump announced that he was pulling out of the nuclear deal.
Even on Russia, despite Trump's repeated kowtowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump's Administration actually followed a tough line at times-when, for instance, the U.S. expelled 60 Russian diplomats in March 2018 after Russian intelligence's attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom using a nerve agent.
But Trump's romance with his generals eventually turned disastrously sour. The differences between Trump and U.S. military leaders were partly stylistic: Trump's lack of decorum and rudeness are certainly at odds with the military's honor-based values. But the differences were also about policy; Pentagon officials want to sustain overseas military commitments, which they see as vital to securing world order, whether that is to defeat ISIS, contain a nuclear-armed North Korea or prevent Afghanistan from reverting to control by the Taliban. Trump believes that he was elected to end foreign entanglements and that alliances like NATO are financially ripping off the U.S. The generals knew that NATO allies had fought shoulder to shoulder with them in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks.
Trump fixated on getting close NATO allies like Germany to "pay up" even when they didn't owe any money. He found it particularly irksome that while the Germans had the second largest economy in the alliance, they ponied up only around 1% of their GDP on defense while the U.S. spent around 4%. On March 17, 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Washington on her first official visit to President Trump. Trump interpreted the Germans' underspending on defense as if he were a landlord collecting overdue rent, which drove the Germans nuts. Trump's staff produced a chart showing that Germany was purportedly $600 billion in arrears. Trump waved the "invoice" at Merkel, who told Trump, "Don't you understand this is not real?" This was the kind of performance by the President that the generals found deeply puzzling.
And then there was the manner in which Trump conducted himself personally. In an astonishing display of insensitivity, during a 2017 meeting about how to best prosecute the Afghan war, Trump said in Kelly's presence that the young American soldiers who had died in Afghanistan had died for a worthless cause. Trump said, "We got our boys who are over there being blown up every day for what? For nothing. Guys are dying for nothing. There's nothing worth dying for in that country." Kelly had lost a son in Afghanistan, 29-year-old Marine First Lieutenant Robert Kelly. Trump either didn't know or didn't care.
Trump set records for the level of turnover at the White House and in his Cabinet. Flynn was fired within a month of Trump's assuming office for lying to Vice President Mike Pence. McMaster, who never really connected with Trump, was pushed out after just over a year as National Security Adviser. Kelly left when he was no longer on speaking terms with the President, which made his job as chief of staff untenable. Mattis resigned after two years because of Trump's cavalier treatment of American allies.
Will Trump Close the Deal to End Afghanistan's Long War?
Trump's split with Mattis was a long time coming; they had fundamental policy differences that began to add up over time. The Saudi-led blockade of neighboring Qatar in June 2017 was one of the first. As the former Central Command commander, Mattis knew that in many ways the most important American base overseas was Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, as this was where the wars against ISIS and the Taliban were coordinated. Yet initially Trump heartily endorsed the blockade because of his close alignment with the Saudis.
White House officials became increasingly frustrated with what they believed to be Mattis' efforts not to provide a range of military options to the President, in particular for any kind of potential showdown with Iran. When it came to Iran, Mattis simply ignored the President's directive to develop military options.
Similarly, when Vice President Pence and McMaster planned for a war game at Camp David in the fall of 2017 so they could better understand the military options the U.S. had in North Korea, Mattis never sent any military planners for the war game and so the session never happened, an episode recounted here for the first time.
Mattis believed that at any moment the President could do something irrational, so he had to be the force for reason. Mattis often said, "We have to make sure reason trumps impulse." White House officials realized that Mattis believed Trump was a loose cannon and didn't want to enable any bad decisions by providing military options that Trump could seize upon. White House officials started to refer to "Mad Dog" Mattis as "Little Baby Kitten" Mattis.
By the end of 2018 the axis of adults-Kelly, Mattis, McMaster and Tillerson-had all departed. Kelly saw his tenure in the White House as best measured by what he had prevented Trump from doing-for instance, pulling out of Afghanistan, as was the President's first instinct; withdrawing from NATO; or pulling American forces out of South Korea, according to an interview he gave the Los Angeles Times.
Trump could change his mind on a dime about any issue, something more likely to happen after the departures of the axis of adults. This was demonstrated by his abrupt decision to pull U.S. forces out of Syria in December 2018. Trump changed his mind on Syria, opting to leave a residual force there, then changed his mind again, announcing a total withdrawal in October. He then re-reversed himself by leaving several hundred soldiers in Syria. On Iran, he whipsawed between offering talks with the Iranian regime and authorizing a military strike against Iranian military targets, which he then called off.
The consistent inconsistency left both allies and enemies puzzled about his intentions. If geopolitics were as relatively simple as a Manhattan real estate deal, a whiplash strategy might have been effective. Instead, over time, America's enemies such as the Iranians, North Koreans and Russians pegged Trump as an inconsistent bully whose bark was far worse than his bite, and adjusted their policies accordingly. North Korea started testing ballistic missiles again and continued nuclear-weapons production, while Iran started enriching uranium beyond the limits of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and Russia persisted in its large-scale information operations against the U.S.
With the departures of the generals, the world got to see Trump increasingly unplugged. Meetings between Trump and Kim Jong Un in Vietnam and at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea yielded no tangible results. Newly imposed sanctions on the Iranians certainly had begun to bite, but Iran also restarted its uranium-enrichment program. The Trump Administration announced a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and conducted peace talks with the Taliban with no input from the Afghan government. But then, on Sept. 7, 2019, Trump surprised even his close advisers with a tweet that "the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday." Trump wrote that he had "cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations," because the Taliban had "admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great soldiers." The Afghan war grinds on with the Taliban more empowered and the Afghan government weaker.
Trump was now surrounded with yes-men and was running his Cabinet as he had run his real estate company, as a one-man show. The danger of having Trump surrounded by a team of acolytes was underscored by what became potentially the greatest threat to his presidency-the call he made on July 25, 2019, to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when Trump asked the Ukrainians to investigate Joe Biden as well as his son Hunter. Kelly says he warned Trump during his final days as his chief of staff not to hire a "yes-man" to replace him, saying he risked being impeached if he did.
The generals who had once guided his national-security policies were all now long gone from his Administration. What remained was a chief executive who thrilled to the ceremonial aspects of being Commander in Chief but was generally reluctant to send American forces into harm's way, inconsistent in his strategy and given to second-guessing the military (as he did in issuing pardons to convicted soldiers). What still isn't clear is how the mercurial President might react to a genuine crisis.
Trump did score a real win in October when he authorized the operation in Syria in which the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, died. There were significant risks, because U.S. Special Operation forces deployed for the operation had to fly across "denied" Syrian airspace controlled by the Russians, who have sophisticated air-defense capabilities. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, called his Russian counterpart to warn him that the U.S. would be conducting an operation in his airspace. After al-Baghdadi blew himself up with a suicide vest, Trump held a press conference saying the ISIS leader had "died like a dog." Trump used these words deliberately as a message to young men who might be contemplating joining ISIS. He told his advisers, "I don't need people to walk back what I said."
The teenager who had reveled in his time at the New York Military Academy boarding school- "I felt like I was in the military in a true sense"-was now finally his own general.
It'll take more than press briefings to reverse the Department of Defense's troubling retreat into secrecy
By Jason Paladino
|Filed under analysis |
(Photo of James Mattis:
DOD / Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith; illustration: CJ Ostrosky / POGO)
On August 28, Mark Esper
held the first televised press briefing by a sitting secretary of defense in
over a year. His predecessor, James Mattis, had stopped televised press briefings , favoring informal but on the record conversations with reporters.
Across the DOD, basic information is becoming harder to find, forcing journalists and the public to rely on leaks, whistleblowers, and the official narrative.
During the briefing, which was reportedly
packed, Esper spoke of his apparent desire to improve the department's relationship with the public. "The United States military has a proud history and a great story to tell," he said. "It is my commitment to the American people, who entrust us with their sons and daughters, to keep them informed of the work that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Department of Defense civilians do every day to keep our nation safe."
Weeks later on September 19, Jonathan R. Hoffman, chief spokesman for the department, took to the podium to
hold a televised press briefing, breaking a 15-month silence by his predecessor. "Keeping with our regular briefing schedule, we will see you guys again next September," he joked at the end.
While the reintroduction of press briefings is a welcome development, the reality is that it will take much more than that to pry open doors nailed shut under Mattis. There are already signs that despite Esper's touted commitment to openness, he is continuing some of Mattis's more secretive practices.
Defense Going Dark: A Timeline of Secrecy Increases at the Pentagon
POGO has compiled a timeline of events to document the changes to Department of Defense and national security policy that may undermine public access to information and harm transparency.
A timeline created by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO)
shows that under Mattis and the Trump administration, a wave of increased secrecy swept through the Department of Defense. An analysis by POGO of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data from the Department of Defense shows a similar trend. From fiscal year 2014 through the end of fiscal year 2018, even as total FOIA requests were down by almost 7%, information withholding went up 16%. In 2018, the government used FOIA exemptions to redact information in over 60% of requests, a five-year high, compared to in 47% of requests in 2014. Some of that withholding may have gone too far: The data also shows a large spike in administrative appeals that resulted in a total reversal of the agency's initial decision to conceal the information.
This chart reflects the number of DOD FOIA decisions that were completely remanded on appeal; that is, the number of times that the DOD denied a FOIA request, then that decision was appealed, and the appeal decision completely overturned the denial. A remand may indicate that the DOD's decision to withhold the information was improper.(Chart created by CJ Ostrosky for POGO, and uses data from the Department of Justice, obtained by POGO)
And even though requests were down, the department's FOIA backlog increased. By the end of 2018, the FOIA backlog was 11,391, the highest in almost a decade. It seems unlikely that the backlog size is due to insufficient resources, as the department's data showed a big boost in FOIA personnel. From 2017 to 2018, staffing jumped from 712 to 954 full-time FOIA employees, the biggest increase since 2011. It is unclear why the backlog has grown so dramatically despite more FOIA employees to handle requests. The department failed to respond to multiple inquiries by POGO.
From a high of 74,117 in FY 2011, total FOIA requests to the DOD have fallen by 23%, according to the most recent data available.(Chart created by CJ Ostrosky for POGO, using data from the Department of Justice, obtained by POGO)
Even though FOIA requests were down over the past ten years, the department's FOIA backlog increased. By the end of 2018, the FOIA backlog was 11,391, the highest in almost a decade.(Chart created by CJ Ostrosky for POGO, using data from the Department of Justice, obtained by POGO)
Creeping secrecy is, of course, not unique to the current administration. Under President Barak Obama, who on the second day of his presidency
committed to "an unprecedented level of openness in Government," several indicators suggest he didn't live up to that promise. A scathing Committee to Protect Journalists
report pointed at the administration's "aggressive" prosecution of leakers and whistleblowers, reduced White House access to the press, warrantless spying, and secrecy around the drone assassination program. During George W. Bush's presidency, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, there was a predictable explosion of secrecy given the intelligence failures and vulnerabilities the attacks exposed, with broad laws expanding what information was able to be withheld from the public. For example, Bush issued Executive Order 13292, which among other things eliminated the "presumption of disclosure" of government records. The number of original classification decisions soared, and agencies were given more authority to classify documents. The PATRIOT Act, passed during the Bush administration, allowed secret surveillance and warrantless searches of business records, and moved once public processes into the dark.
The legacy of post-9/11 secrecy is still with the United States today, but there is evidence of a renewed push for secrecy under the Trump administration.
The push began sometime around March 1, 2017, when then-Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson issued
a memo to his senior civilian staff and flag officers that included a forceful reminder. "Sharing information about future operations and capabilities, even at the unclassified level, makes it easier for potential adversaries to gain an advantage."
The National Interest obtained an email dated March 2 to public affairs officers across the Department of Defense, this time from the Pentagon's then-spokesman Jeff Davis. The email took a similar tone:
While it can be tempting during budget season to publicly highlight readiness problems, we have to remember that our adversaries watch the news too. Communicating that we are broken or not ready to fight invites miscalculation. Know that he [the enemy] is well aware of our readiness shortfalls, as are our elected leaders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. They don't need news stories to remind them. Help is on the way.
When asked about the memo, said to be interpreting guidance directly from Mattis, Davis told
The National Interest, "I'm glad you got it and I hope you do quote from it because we stand by it."
A number of lawmakers across the political spectrum appeared to see this as a departure from normal operations. As Republican Representative Mike Gallagher
told Defense News, "It is precisely because of the scale of the challenges before us that transparency is more important than ever. I worry that by failing to discuss problems, we will only ensure there is no public pressure to fix them." Similarly, Democratic Representative Adam Smith
called the changes "chilling" and wrote that they were "efforts to wrap the Pentagon in a blanket of unaccountability."
In the months preceding this guidance, press reports were documenting low readiness rates and a sharp increase in military aviation accidents. According to a House Armed Services Committee
fact sheet, "In 2017, nearly four times as many members of the military died in training accidents as were killed in combat." As
Real Clear Defensereported that same year, "Navy and Marine Corps have suffered enough accidental fatalities since 2015 to eclipse the total number of all uniformed American personnel killed in Afghanistan through both hostile and non-hostile action over the last three years."
"It's an arbitrary move that simply tends to decrease public awareness of the scope of U.S. operations in those areas."
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy
While the true root causes of the crisis are debatable,
some point to the 2011 Budget Control Act, and the Pentagon and its boosters jumped at the opportunity to call for increased spending. Yet over the next three years, Mattis and his subordinates would deny the public the ability to understand the Pentagon, the health of the military, and the country's military activities abroad. Bit by bit, the Pentagon has become more secretive, in stark contrast with its
"Principles of Information," which states that "Information will not be classified or otherwise witheld [sic] to protect the government from criticism or embarrassment."
Mattis made his interpretation of these principles clear when he sent an unwavering
memorandum, dated October 3, 2017, addressed to all Department of Defense employees:
We must be vigilant in executing our responsibility to prevent disclosure of any information not authorized for release outside of the Department of Defense: All hands must be alert to prevent unauthorized disclosure of non-public information for any reason, whether by implied acknowledgement or intentional release. Misconduct cannot be tolerated and suspected or confirmed disclosure must be reported at once.
The tone of the memo is unmistakably blunt. And Mattis uses the term "non-public information" rather than classified information, effectively widening the bubble of secrecy not only to classified information, but to include any information produced within the walls of the world's largest office building.
These events are detailed in the timeline of events compiled by POGO.
One of the earlier and more surprising changes following these policy directives was
reported by Tara Copp, then a reporter at
Military Times. Sometime before Copp reported the story in April 2018, the Pentagon decided the public shouldn't be allowed to know the number of troops deployed in active warzones around the world, broken down by country. Historically, the department had posted each quarter's data after a 3-month delay. The data, previously posted on a website maintained by the Defense Manpower Data Center, appeared to be missing the numbers of troops deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. A
note at the bottom of the spreadsheet now reads: "with ongoing operations, any questions concerning DoD personnel strength numbers are deferred to OSD Public Affairs/Joint Chiefs of Staff."
Active duty troop numbers in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan were available to the public at a 3-month delay, prior to the Pentagon's decision to withhold this information.(Source: screenshot of a download of data from The Defense Manpower Data Center, obtained by MilitaryTimes)
The data as it appears now, without the figures for active duty troop numbers in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. A note at the bottom of the spreadsheet now reads: "with ongoing operations, any questions concerning DoD personnel strength numbers are deferred to OSD Public Affairs/Joint Chiefs of Staff."(Source: screenshot of a download of data from The Defense Manpower Data Center, obtained by MilitaryTimes)
When POGO inquired about the most recent releasable troop numbers, the Office of the Secretary of Defense refused to give numbers for Syria, citing "operational security concerns," and gave only approximate numbers for Afghanistan (14,000) and Iraq (5,200). A few weeks ago, the House passed legislation
condemning the president's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. The American public has been denied the ability to have an informed debate about a topic of extreme gravity-where and how many U.S. armed forces are deployed. Instead, the public must rely on vague or piecemeal information. While the department refused to disclose troop numbers in Syria, the
Washington Post estimated the number of troops arriving based on photographs of U.S. convoys emerging from the region.
The Defense Manpower Data Center appears to have briefly erased and then
reentered the historical troop level data a few days later, Copp reported on Twitter.
"There is such a thing as operational secrecy that does provide a tactical or strategic edge, but this isn't it," Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, told POGO. "It's an arbitrary move that simply tends to decrease public awareness of the scope of U.S. operations in those areas."
On May 10, 2018, a month after the data removal became known, members of the House Subcommittee on National Security of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wrote a letter to Mattis denouncing the change.
"In the interest of continued force protection, transparency, and accountability relating to our military presence in key combat zones, we respectfully request that you immediately reverse this policy," wrote Representatives Stephen Lynch (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA), Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), and then-Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD).
Earlier in August 2017, Trump, during remarks on his
Afghanistan policy, hinted at his plan to increase secrecy around troop deployment.
"I've said it many times how counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to begin, or end, military options. We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities," he said, echoing an earlier sentiment.
"The secrecy bit is always bullshit-the Taliban is not changing its strategy if it hears we've got 11,000 vs. 15,000 troops in Afghanistan," said Jason Dempsey, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and an Army infantryman with two deployments to the country, in an interview with POGO. Dempsey, who worked on veterans' issues under the Obama administration, has written extensively on the relationship between the military and the public.
"That absolutely is something the American public needs to know ... we need to know which sons and daughters are being put in harm's way and for what purpose and for how long," Dempsey said.
The squeeze on information is apparently being felt inside the Pentagon as well. John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, published his concerns in his public
quarterly report in October 2017 that the department was overclassifying information about Afghan forces' capabilities. Key measures of progress were suddenly classified or restricted, hampering the mission of the office. Although his team could use the data internally, it could not make that data public.
"We're having trouble getting information, although we can get classified information. It's just that we cannot share it with the American people who ultimately are paying for the Afghan military, the Afghan police, their salaries, weapons, et cetera," Sopko
told NPR in January 2018. By then, Sopko was also forbidden from publishing data on the territorial gains and losses in the country. Removing this information, Center for Strategic and International Studies national security analyst
Anthony Cordesman told the New York Times, meant "there now is no official estimate of progress in the war."
Things didn't get any cheerier for Sopko, who watched as whole categories of information became classified. Sopko spoke frequently to the press about how the push for secrecy was making his oversight mission more difficult.
"The classification, in some areas, we think is needless, but we don't have classifying authority," Sopko
told Military Times this April. "The only people who don't know what's going on are the people who are paying for all of this and that's the American taxpayer," he added.
Although overclassification got worse under Mattis and Trump, it's not a new issue. During the Obama administration, Sopko took issue with the sudden classification of data that had been public for six years prior. The Pentagon
backed down a week later, after Sopko criticized the classification decision in a quarterly report.
Secrecy without justification seems to have become the new normal. In the spring of 2018, the Department of Defense
refused to declassify the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, reversing a seven-year trend. The Obama administration
began declassifying the total size of the arsenal in 2010, in hopes that other nuclear-armed nations would follow suit. "Increasing the transparency of our nuclear weapons stockpile, and our dismantlement, as well, is important to both our nonproliferation efforts and to the efforts we have under way to pursue arms control that will follow the new START treaty," the Pentagon
told reporters at the time.
Declassification requires sign off from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, according to Aftergood. When the Federation of American Scientists requested the data for 2018, the Department of Energy authorized the release. The Pentagon, in
a letter with no explanation, denied the request.
"The logic is opaque to me. Does this increase readiness? Does it increase deterrence? I would say no, and no. It increases ambiguity. And ambiguity is normally not what you want in nuclear weapons policy, you want clarity," Aftergood told POGO, who had requested the data be made public. "I don't really know how to assess DOD's thought process that led to this conclusion but it occurred within the climate that Mattis established."
Nuclear weapons policy wonks have historically been able to guess the size of the stockpile using open source methods. In 2010, for example, Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris of the Federation of American Scientists were off by only 87 warheads. (
They guessed 5,200, it turned out to be 5,113.) But once again, the effect is that the public and experts are left with piecemeal information and estimates, and ultimately are unable to hold the government accountable.
This is true of the Navy as well. In 2018, the Navy
removed data on aviation accidents from a public facing website, and offered no explanation. This change was made as the Navy faced an 82% spike in accidents between fiscal years 2013 and 2017,
Military Times first reported. A Navy public affairs officer denied the change had anything to do with the Pentagon-wide Mattis guidance, saying it was part of a website redesign.
The creeping secrecy has since extended to the military's public acknowledgment of air strikes. Prior to 2019, the Air Force and Central Command released fairly detailed summaries of air strikes. Details like location, intended target, and number of enemy combatants killed or targets destroyed are crucial for human rights and watchdog groups that attempt to investigate reports of civilian casualties.
Brass Parachutes: The Problem of the Pentagon Revolving Door
Pentagon officials captured by the contractors they oversee is skewing our spending priorities and foreign policy.
As the military began ramping up its airstrikes in Syria and Iraq this year, the releases have gone from weekly to biweekly and don't include key details, instead
summarizing the airstrikes. Groups that track and investigate the aftermath of U.S. and coalition airstrikes were alarmed at the changes. Airwars
tweeted that "[the U.S.-led coalition] has abandoned its 52-month record of saying where and on which dates it strikes in either Iraq or Syria - a major blow for public accountability." The group estimates that, as of October 8, 2019, between 8,214 and 13,125 civilians have been killed, contrasted with the U.S.-led coalition's estimate of 1,335, according to
their website.
"In the period that we stopped releasing information we actually significantly ramped up airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and there was a significant increase in civilian casualties from U.S. coalition strikes," said Emily Manna, a policy analyst at Open The Government, in an interview with POGO, "so it's a really devastating loss of information for the groups trying to match reports of civilian harm with information that the U.S. military can actually confirm."
According to Manna, this data collection and analysis is crucial because the Pentagon does not do on-the-ground assessments of civilian harm.
As data on U.S. military operations becomes less available, reporters and the public will likely become more reliant on official narratives through public affairs personnel.
In March 2018, the Air Force decided to "retrain" their public affairs staff, citing concerns of "operational security," according to
a memo obtained by
Defense News. "As we engage the public, we must avoid giving insights to our adversaries which could erode our military advantage. We must now adapt to the reemergence of great power competition and the reality that our adversaries are learning from what we say in public," the memo reads.
As John Donnelly, president of the Military Reporters and Editors Association, told Federal News Network
at the time, "Given the ambiguity about what's allowed and the message from the top stressing secrecy, officials who are wary about their careers may err on the side of withholding information. And in a worst case scenario, such guidance could be used to justify keeping out of public view data that may simply be embarrassing to the Air Force but that the U.S. citizenry needs to know."
"I think Mattis was terrible on transparency and access," Donnelly told POGO, when asked to reflect on the general's legacy. "He sent a chilling signal through the Defense Department when it comes to press access."
Across the Department of Defense, basic information is becoming harder to find, forcing journalists and the public to rely on leaks, whistleblowers, and, as long as they continue, the regularly scheduled press briefing. If Esper and his staff are serious about transparency, they'll have to do much more than appear in front of a podium to undo the corrosive effects of the Mattis directive.
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And the impeachment inquiry is only making things worse. With new figures and fresh horror stories, Julia Ioffe reports on how the president is politicizing our embassies, alienating our allies, and decimating the ranks of the foreign service.
Last year, just before Halloween, Lewis Lukens, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London, visited a pair of English universities where he spoke about the importance of international cooperation, beseeching students not to "swipe left" on the historic "special relationship" between the U.K. and America. The speeches were-according to a copy of the remarks that Lukens provided to
GQ-fairly anodyne, reprising all the things Americans and Brits had learned from each other, all the ways we've helped each other over the years, disagreements notwithstanding. At the time, things between the two countries had been strained-in part because President Trump had attacked British leaders, including
Prime Minister Theresa May and
London Mayor Sadiq Khan-but Lukens, the second-most-senior American diplomat to the United Kingdom, had a request for the students who had gathered to see him: "Don't write off the special relationship."
A week later, Lukens says, his boss, the U.S. ambassador Woody Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and a Trump political appointee, told him that he was done, firing Lukens from his post seven months ahead of when he was scheduled to leave for a new assignment. After nearly 30 years as a foreign service officer, his State Department career was over. The reason? Lukens says he had unwittingly committed a fatal error in his speech: He had mentioned former president Barack Obama.
Lewis LukensAndrew Matthews / Getty Images
To open the speech, Lukens, who had worked for presidents of both parties, used an anecdote from his time as ambassador to Senegal to illustrate how allies can handle disagreements. He mentioned
Obama's 2013 visit to the country. "There was incredible excitement," Lukens said in his speech. "He had a guard of honor, crowds shouting his name, street vendors selling WE LOVE OBAMA T-shirts. It was really amazing. And the president had really great talks with the Senegalese president, Macky Sall. They got on really well. But what I remember most of all was the disagreement they had-as friends." Lukens explained that during the trip, an American journalist had asked Obama whether he had pressed the Senegalese leader on LGBT rights-a provocative topic in a country where same-sex relationships are criminalized as "unnatural" and where the LGBT community
faces widespread discrimination. Lukens told the students that Obama handled the thorny question well. And then he moved on to the rest of the speech, not realizing the damage he'd done with a single anecdote. (When asked about the episode and Lukens's ouster, the State Department declined to comment. The American embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment.)
This incident, which has not been previously reported, offers a stark example of the politicization of the foreign service under Trump. It's also a grim illustration of how the administration-through three years of attempted
budget cuts,
hiring freezes, and grotesquely personal attacks-has eviscerated the country's diplomatic corps and put highly sensitive matters of national security in the hands of politically appointed novices. They are people like Gordon Sondland, the Trump donor who became America's ambassador to the European Union, who is now playing a starring role in the Ukrainian imbroglio that imperils the Trump presidency. It is no accident that impeachment hangs on a matter of diplomacy-and a stand-off between the country's top foreign policy professionals and the president's political allies, national security amateurs installed to do Trump's bidding rather than the country's.
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Gordon SondlandDrew Angerer / Getty Images
It's not uncommon that a new president will come to office wary of the State Department, a large bureaucracy that does not owe the president any special loyalty. Historically, Republican presidents have been even more suspicious of the worldly polyglots at Foggy Bottom. But no president has been as nakedly hostile to America's diplomats as Donald Trump, who ran on an anti-elitist, anti-"globalist" platform and saw the intelligence community's
report on Russian election interference as a "deep state" conspiracy against him. And the foreign service is nothing if not a group of elite, globalist bureaucrats-especially in the view of Trump and his allies.
When Rex Tillerson became secretary of state in early 2017, he immediately got to work shaping the president's distrust into reality. He set about slashing the ranks of the State Department, both through attrition and through proposed budget cuts. The first few months of Tillerson's tenure was marked by an across-the-board hiring freeze and an exodus of senior, high-profile foreign service officers, people like Victoria Nuland, who had been the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, and Daniel Fried, who designed America's sanctions on Russia. Much of this-as in the case of Nuland and Fried-stemmed from political disagreement and the officers'
not wanting to serve Donald Trump. Other senior foreign service officers, though, had no intention of leaving and were pushed out by the use of State Department regulations.
For instance, Senate-confirmed ambassadors returning from abroad have 90 days to find a new State Department assignment. If they do not receive another posting, they're required to retire. During Tillerson's tenure, returning career foreign ambassadors were offered a choice: take a menial post reviewing Freedom of Information Act requests, or face retirement. "Several of our members who were finishing their assignments as ambassadors overseas were told that the only job available when they came back was reviewing documents for declassification," says Eric Rubin, a senior foreign policy officer and president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA). "If they refused that assignment, they would have to retire under a rule that says returning ambassadors have only 90 days to be reassigned or they have to retire."
In practice, two foreign service officers told me, that job meant reviewing Hillary Clinton's e-mails. "Thanks to Judicial Watch, that's what most of the FOIA requests were," one of the officers said, referring to a conservative activist group that has spent the past few years propagating various Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories.
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When Tillerson was fired by tweet and his successor, Mike Pompeo,
vowed to bring the "swagger" back to the State Department, he reversed many of Tillerson's slash-and-burn policies. Still, foreign service veterans say, the damage was done.
Robert Wood JohnsonStefan Rousseau / Getty Images
What's more, the attrition continues unabated. Career foreign service officers work long hours in difficult conditions, making less money than they would in the private sector. Often, they are driven by their sense of mission-say, promoting American values abroad-but when President Trump began attacking the pillars of American national security and smearing diplomats by name on Twitter, "suddenly," says one senior foreign service officer who was pushed out on a scheduling technicality, "the equation didn't make sense anymore." What had started as a trickle of people leaving at the highest levels-often, people who were close to retirement-has turned into a flood of mid-career and junior officers heading for the door. The departure of top talent, people who had decades' worth of wisdom that could have passed on to people below them, as well as the exodus of mid-level officers who had years to go before their retirements, will continue to resonate for quite a while, says Nicholas Burns, a retired career foreign service officer who is now at the Harvard Kennedy School. "That gap will show up years later," he told me.
"What's striking is both the decapitation of the State Department and the loss of people who should have been the next leadership of the department," says the foreign service officer who was forced out. "It's a hollowing out of the foreign service. You can't replace those mid-level people easily at the numbers at which they're losing them. That will take a generation to rebuild."
Previously unpublished data from the AFSA shows that the foreign service is losing people at an alarming clip. In the first two years of Trump's presidency, nearly half of the State Department's Career Ministers retired or were pushed out. Another 20 percent of its Minister Counselors, one rank level down, also left.
There are no official numbers yet for 2019, but one former career foreign service officer I spoke with offered a telling piece of data that speaks to the unease. Last December, this ex-foreign service officer created a Facebook group aimed at connecting fellow FSOs looking to transition out of the service and into the private sector. In less than a year, this former FSO told me, the group has accumulated over 1,000 members. In the two months since the impeachment inquiry began and Trump started smearing career FSOs like
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and
Jennifer Williams, more foreign service officers have begun looking for an exit. Another 100 FSOs have requested to join the Facebook group since the impeachment proceedings began, the source told me, asking other group members to help them dust off their résumés or meet them for informational interviews.
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"We're worried about the effect this can have on recruitment, where people say, 'Is this what could happen to me?' " says Rubin. "People think, 'I could be subpoenaed, I could be ruined with legal bills, I could end up vilified on TV when all I did was my job.' "
This comes on top of American diplomats feeling like the Trump administration has been even more focused on controlling foreign policy than past administrations, pushing foreign service professionals to the side using a variety of methods. "The administration's strategy is to isolate career people from the policymaking process as much as possible, and where that's not possible, to stifle dissent through character assassination and to let that have a chilling effect," says the foreign service officer who was forced out, adding, "God, it makes me want to vomit. Because what country are we talking about?"
In fact, recruitment has already fallen off dramatically. Ten years ago, in 2009, about 21,000 people took the test to join the American foreign service. Today, according to AFSA's analysis of internal State Department data, that number is just over 9,000-less than half. And that was before the impeachment inquiry began.
All of this has created alarming gaps all over the world. Trump was slow to fill diplomatic appointments, and with time a clear preference has emerged for
"acting" secretaries and ambassadors who are accountable not to the Senate but to him. According to AFSA, 20 ambassadorships remain unfilled. One-third of foreign service jobs in overseas U.S. embassies and consulates sit empty. The work of filling those jobs has ground to a halt because of impeachment proceedings.
There's a hope that, if Trump doesn't win re-election, many of the departed foreign service officers will return to the State Department. Elizabeth Warren's
plan for restructuring the State Department includes a provision to lure back diplomats who have left or were pushed out during the Trump years. "The practical reality is it's hard to bring people back," says a senior foreign service officer. "There's a reason they left; they've rebuilt their lives. Some proposals, including Warren's, are not realistic."
Meanwhile, China continues staffing up across the world, including in Africa, where the U.S. has an especially high number of unfilled jobs. According to Australia's Lowy Institute, which issues an annual Diplomacy Index,
China just surpassed the United States in diplomatic muscle. The United States, which for decades after World War II had the highest number of embassies and consulates, has been outpaced by a rising adversary.
American diplomatic strength, foreign service veterans say, is further undercut by the high number of political appointees Trump has named to ambassadorships. While many political appointees are quick studies and do a good job of representing American interests abroad-career FSOs point to Kay Bailey Hutchison, Trump's ambassador to NATO, as an example of excellence-many others are woefully unprepared for the job. Unlike career foreign service officers who are often experts in the country in which they are stationed, political nominees are usually top campaign donors and lack the knowledge of either the country to which they're posted or the diplomatic protocols on which host countries insist. One foreign service officer described a politically appointed ambassador inquiring about the difference between the NSA and CIA.
And yet Trump has appointed more political allies to ambassadorships than any other postwar president. According to AFSA, 52 percent of America's ambassadors are political appointees. This is the highest proportion since AFSA started keeping count in 1960. The last time the number of politically appointed ambassadors was this high was Ronald Reagan's second term, when the proportion of political ambassadors peaked at 37 percent. "We are concerned that the percentage of political appointees is the highest it's ever been," says Rubin, the AFSA president. "This really hurts us overseas to carry out the president's policy and to defend national security interests."
After all, these political appointees, who are often diplomatic novices, are usually facing off against highly trained, disciplined, professional diplomats from countries like Russia and China, which don't have any politically appointed ambassadors. "China has only professional, not political appointees, and our ambassadors are not always taken seriously," says one current foreign service official. "We are very often outmatched and outgunned and frequently outmaneuvered these days."
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The political appointees are also usually President Trump's ideological allies, who see the deep state everywhere. Before Ambassador Johnson called Lukens in and fired him, Lukens told me that embassy staffers had heard the ambassador tossing the term "deep state" around, questioning the patriotism of employees he didn't feel were sufficiently loyal to the president. Lukens was already suspect because, in June 2017, when he was the acting ambassador (Trump still hadn't named anyone for the job), a terror attack hit London: A man with a knife and a truck mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge, killing eight and injuring 48 more. Trump immediately
lashed out at Sadiq Khan, London's first Muslim mayor, and Lukens used the U.S. Embassy Twitter account to send a message of support to Londoners and their mayor in fairly mild diplomatic language. "I commend the strong leadership of the
@MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack," Lukens
wrote. Breitbart immediately
spotted the tweet, and Lukens says he was subjected to several days of virtual abuse.
"There's a higher level of mistrust from political ambassadors of career FSOs than I've ever seen in my life," Lukens told me. "Many of Trump's political ambassadors have an unfounded belief that government bureaucrats are overwhelmingly Democrats and liberals and working against Trump's agenda, and that's just not the case."
It didn't help that, when Trump attacked then prime minister Theresa May, Lukens also passed along a message to the White House from the highest levels of the British government. "The message was, 'Can you guys cut it out?' " Lukens recalls. "The response from Washington was that, short of taking the president's phone away, we don't really have anything we can do."
More and more, American diplomats abroad find themselves cleaning up the fallout from the president's tweets or off-the-cuff remarks. When Trump
said he didn't want any immigrants from "shithole countries," several ambassadors in Africa were called in by their host countries' foreign ministries and asked for an official explanation.
"We're punching below our weight and not taken seriously," says a senior foreign service officer. "We're getting into squabbles with the host country, which is one thing if it's Russia and China. It's another if it's our allies."
After his dismissal, Lukens was eventually able to find work in the private sector and decided to stay in the U.K. But the incident was incredibly traumatic, he says. "I was really upset," he told me recently on the phone from London. "It was a really difficult time."
Then Lukens suffered another loss: The day after he left the London embassy for the last time, his father,
Alan Wood Lukens, died. The senior Lukens was a World War II veteran-he had fought at D Day and the Rhine Valley. His unit helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp. When he returned home, he decided to continue his service abroad and joined the foreign service, where he served for 35 years. Lewis had grown up mostly in Africa, where his father served in various high-level posts. "So that's what I thought I would do," Lukens told me. "Dad got me into the foreign service."
Yet his father's last impressions of the foreign service under this president were confusing ones. "He didn't understand President Trump, didn't understand that version of America First," Lukens says. "We're all America first; we've all worked and fought for America. But America first doesn't mean America alone. President Trump seems determined to make it alone by alienating our allies. I think my dad had a really hard time with that."
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
Many of China's neighbors name the U.S. as their most dependable ally by a wide margin, including South Korea (71%), the Philippines (64%) and Japan (63%).
