"Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, or straightforwardness?" 
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

"Until you learn to teach yourself you will never be taught by others." 
-  J .F.C. Fuller

"The problem with smart people is that they are used to seeking and finding the right answer; unfortunately, in strategy there is no single right answer to find. Strategy requires making choices about an uncertain future. It is not possible, no matter how much of the ocean you boil, to discover the one right answer. There isn't one. In fact, even after the fact, there is no way to determine that one's strategy choice was "right," because there is no way to judge the relative quality of any path against all the paths not actually chosen. There are no double-blind experiments in strategy."
- Roger L. Martin, Harvard Business Review, June 12, 2014

1. Hong Kong issues arrest warrant for U.S. citizen under new national security law
2. Where the System May Break (Election Wargame)
3. How ISIS Made Money on Facebook
4. 75 years after atomic bombs fell on Japan, these authors say there's more to the story
5. The Worm is in the Fruit: A Rising Strategic Foe Inside NATO
6. Retired general appointed to Trump administration in position that won't require confirmation
7. Sending Special Operations Forces into the Great-Power Competition
8. 30 years after our 'endless wars' in the Middle East began, still no end in sight
9. Security for Whom? The Case for a Decolonial IR
10. WHO calls COVID-19 'once-in-a-century health crisis'
11. 'Clean Up This Mess': The Chinese Thinkers Behind Xi's Hard Line
12. Army Guard begins to reorganize force into eight divisions to prepare for possible fights with Russia and China
13. Watch: Chinese scientist claims Covid-19 started in 'military lab' after fleeing to US
14. US Strategic Command now analyzes daily deterrence risks for all combatant commands
15. Debate begins for who's first in line for COVID-19 vaccine
16. Washington isn't listening to the Air Force and Space Force
17. Chinese Propaganda Campaign Blames Pandemic on U.S. Army Facility Closed in 1969
18. Army's Top General Says He's Reassured Allies That US Troops Will Stay Out of Policing
19. Managing Chaos: Biosecurity in a Post-COVID-19 America
20. Operation Burnham: the New Zealand military's self-inflicted wounds will not heal by themselves



1. Hong Kong issues arrest warrant for U.S. citizen under new national security law
I am surprised it took this long.  I fear for all US citizens in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong issues arrest warrant for U.S. citizen under new national security law

CNBC · by Eric Baculinao and Adela Suliman · August 2, 2020
A U.S. citizen is among six pro-democracy activists to have arrest warrants issued for them by Hong Kong police for suspected violations under a  new national security law, Chinese state media reported late Friday.
, the managing director of the D.C.-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, an advocacy group, wrote on Twitter that he "woke up to media reports that I am a wanted fugitive."
He added that he had been an American citizen for 25 years.
"If I am targeted, any American/any citizen of any nation who speaks out for Hong Kong can and will be too. We are all Hong Kongers now," he wrote.
Chu was among six prominent activists named by Chinese broadcaster CCTV and other state media outlets, to have arrest warrants issued for them under the legislation that came into effect  on June 30. The individuals were wanted on suspicion of secession or collusion with foreign forces - crimes that the new security law punishes with up to life in prison.
More from NBC News:
"These are trumped-up charges," said activist Nathan Law on his  Facebook page, after he got news of his arrest warrant.
Law recently fled to Britain from Hong Kong after the security legislation was enacted by Beijing. He briefly met with Secretary of State  Mike Pompeo in London, last month.
"That Hong Kong has no place for even such moderate views like ours underscores the absurdity of Chinese Communist rule," Law said. Vowing, nonetheless, to continue his "advocacy work overseas" adding that he had already severed communications with his family in Hong Kong for their safety.
China imposed the contentious security law on its freest city around one month ago, circumventing the local legislature, a move  condemned by the U.S. and some Western governments, rights groups and activists in the territory.
Several countries have since suspended their extradition treaties with Hong Kong, including Britain, Australia, and most recently Germany, as a possible safeguard against attempts to use the national security law to round up activists abroad.
Several countries, including the U.K. have offered Hong Kongers an expedited path to full  citizenship.
Critics of the security law fear it will  crush freedoms in a city that is a global financial hub, while supporters say the legislation is needed to restore stability to the former British colony, after a year of sometimes violent anti-government protests.
Along with Law and Chu, Chinese state media named Wayne Chan Ka-kui, Honcques Laus, Simon Cheng and Ray Wong Toi-yeung as the other four individuals Hong Kong authorities were seeking to arrest.
China's state-run  Global Times newspaper said on Saturday the police notice was the first issued against people who had fled Hong Kong. One commentator told the newspaper that the move sent a clear signal to those who violate the security law that they will be subject to punishment no matter their whereabouts.
News of the warrants came hours after Hong Kong's Chief Executive Carrie Lam delayed  upcoming elections for the city's Legislative Council by a year, citing concerns over the  coronavirus pandemic.
Her announcement came around 24 hours after  12 pro-democracy candidates - including prominent activist - were blocked from standing in the elections for reasons including opposing  the national security law. Wong said the move was a further indication of Beijing's tightening hold on the city.
In response to Lam's postponement of the election, Germany became the latest country to suspend its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.
"We have repeatedly made our expectation clear that China lives up to its legal responsibilities under international law," German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Friday.
China's embassy in Germany hit-back condemning Berlin's decision, saying it grossly interfered with its internal affairs, according to a  statement on its website. China "reserves the right to respond further," the statement added, without elaborating.
Last month, President Trump signed into law a bipartisan bill that sanctions Chinese officials who  undermine the rights to free speech and assembly in Hong Kong. Trump also signed an executive order that ended Hong Kong's special trade treatment, an escalation in an increasingly  hostile relationship between Washington and Beijing.
Eric Baculinao reported from Beijing and Adela Suliman from London.
Reuters contributed to this report.
CNBC · by Eric Baculinao and Adela Suliman · August 2, 2020


2. Where the System May Break (Election Wargame)
Every government official, federal, state, and local should be committed to ensure the integrity of our election system.  This should not be a partisan issue (but I know that is a naive thought).

Where the System May Break

A war-game exercise simulating the 2020 election unmasked some key vulnerabilities.

defenseone.com · by David Frum
This story was updated on July 31, at 4:12pm.
On the same morning that the United States government reported the steepest economic collapse in U.S. history, President Donald Trump mused on Twitter about postponing the 2020 election. Trump is getting desperate, more desperate by the day. What might he do? What should Americans fear?
Earlier this summer, 67 former government officials and academic students of government gathered over four sessions of the nonpartisan  Transition Integrity Project to analyze those questions. They included Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee; John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff who chaired Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign; former Republican members of Congress; and a host of former elected officials, government staffers, consultants, and even journalists. I joined two of the sessions.
The sessions began with scenarios of what might happen on Election Day-a big Biden win, a narrow Biden win, a Trump win in the Electoral College coupled with a loss in the popular vote-and then played war games to ponder what might follow. The goal was not to make predictions, but rather to test scenarios and identify potential weak points in the system. The approach is common in the national-security world, but has not often before been applied to domestic politics.
The organizers of the event will in time produce a formal report on the results. But in light of the president's ominous tweet yesterday, it's worth summarizing some of what we found, while respecting the rules under which the event was held-which allowed for the disclosure of the substance of the exercise, but not what individual participants said.
The good news is that Trump cannot postpone the election or the next presidential inauguration; he has no means to do either of those things. Those dates are set by law or in the text of the Constitution.
Nor can Trump somehow cling to power after Inauguration Day once the electoral vote is certified against him. If the Electoral College certifies Joe Biden the winner when its votes are counted in Washington, D.C., on January 6, then at noon on January 20, Donald Trump ceases to be president. His signature loses all legal effect, the officer carrying the nuclear football walks away, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff does not take his call.
The bottom line: There do exist outer legal boundaries to the mischief that can be done by even the most corrupt president.
The bad news is that there is a  lot of mischief that can be done within the legal boundaries by a determined president, especially with the compliance of the attorney general and enough political allies in the state capitals.
The worst news is that, faced with presidential lawlessness, few of the participants at the Transition Integrity Project found effective responses. The courts offered only slow, weak, and unreliable remedies. Street protests were difficult to mobilize and often proved counterproductive. Republican elected officials cowered even in the face of the most outrageous Trump acts. Democratic elected officials lacked the tools and clout to make much difference. Many of the games turned on who made the first bold move. Time after time, that first mover was Trump.
And even in the scenarios in which Biden's team eventually won-that is, secured possession of the White House at noon on Inauguration Day, 2021-Team Trump by then had thoroughly poisoned the political system.
It diverted public resources to Trump personally.
It preemptively pardoned Trump associates and family members, and tried to pardon Trump himself from criminal charges including money laundering and tax evasion.
It intentionally tried to cause long-term economic damage so as to prevent early economic recovery-and boost Republican chances in the 2022 elections.
It destroyed, hid, or privatized public records.
It tried to sabotage the census to favor Republican redistricting after 2020.
It refused to cooperate with the incoming administration during the transition period, in ways that aggravated both the pandemic response and economic recovery.
And it sowed pervasive mistrust in the integrity of U.S. elections in ways that would polarize and embitter U.S. politics long after 2020.
Despite the president's personal unpopularity as measured by polls, Trump's side possessed-and used-important tactical advantages.
Those advantages start with the institutional powers of the presidency, notably the power to federalize the National Guard and take military control of state voting sites. They include also the asymmetry of the U.S. party system, and especially the fiercer team-mindedness of Trump loyalists and pro-Trump media.
The most persistent and powerful advantage, however, was the overconfidence of the legally minded Biden team that the Trump team would respect some norms and limits on its behavior. That expectation was again and again refuted by experience.
All of this, again, was just a tabletop exercise, specifically designed to test extreme scenarios-not a prediction of how things will play out. Perhaps everything will go smoothly. But as the president suggests postponing the election, it's important to understand the hazards ahead, and the timelines and decision points that may prove crucial.
The voting period
The days of early voting, Election Day itself, and then the period of vote-counting that will follow offer fruitful possibilities for mischief.
In one of our scenarios, the attorney general sent federal marshals backed by the National Guard to seize vote-by-mail ballots, triggering a constitutional catastrophe that delayed the outcome of the count for weeks.
Local Republican officeholders have wide scope to burden voting by what they deem undesirable voters, especially ethnic minorities. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has more or less entirely abandoned the field of voting rights. In the Trump era, the division has shifted its effort toward litigating in support of claims of religious discrimination.
In the exercises, when the vote went against Trump, his team tried to convince his supporters that they had been robbed-and that they were therefore entitled to take extreme, even violent, actions. In our exercises, however, the game-winning strategy was to goad the  other side into violence. This was particularly true for Team Trump, whose supporters already fear violence from anarchists and antifa.
The meeting of electors in the states
Under current law, all disputes over vote-counting are supposed to be resolved by December 8, 2020. The electors are supposed to convene on December 14 in their state capitals, where they will sign their electoral ballots. The days from December 8 to December 14 offer Team Trump the last clear chance to alter the outcome.
In some of our scenarios, local Republican officeholders sowed enough confusion to justify sending  two slates of electors to Washington to be adjudicated. That was a high-risk tactic that did not usually pay off, but could tempt some pro-Trump state governments.
The meeting of electors in Washington, D.C.
This normally ceremonial event is scheduled for January 6, 2021. It will be presided over by the incumbent vice president, Mike Pence. We tested what might happen in a close result-one in which the Republicans hold on to the Senate and Trump falls short of an Electoral College majority by just a single state's vote-if Pence somehow tried to insist that the pro-Trump slate of electors was valid.
This did not usually work. Pence was a weak link in the Trump team, too concerned about his own future and his own reputation to go all-out in the way the core Trump team wanted.
Generally, once we got past the December 8 date, the Trump team's options for keeping power dwindled to zero. What was left then was scorched-earth self-enrichment, self-protection, and spite.
The transition of power
The Obama administration took office amid a national crisis in January 2009, after what is generally regarded by experts as the smoothest and most successful transition in presidential history. The outgoing Bush team kept the Obama team closely informed about decision making after the financial crisis struck in October 2008-and the incoming Obama team scrupulously followed the "one president at a time" rule of crisis management.
Nothing like that can be expected this winter. Instead, we are likely to see a recurrence of 1932-33, when the defeated Herbert Hoover tried to sabotage the incoming Roosevelt administration in hopes of preparing his own comeback in 1936. Trump will soon be fantasizing about running again in 2024. If his health does not permit it,  his children may envision a dynasty of their own. These are not realistic plans. The Trump brand will be toxic in U.S. politics after the catastrophes of 2020. But the Trump inner circle will not believe that-and its members may hope that if they can cause Biden to stumble out of the gate, they will benefit.
The Bush administration helped the Obama administration to be ready on day one. The Trump administration may not return that courtesy. In one of our scenarios, Trump moved permanently to Mar-a-Lago the day after the election and never returned to the White House again. The whole government had to operate around a lame-duck president who simply refused to do any work at all.
But we also discussed whether Trump's need to satisfy his ego and his desire for money might not cause him to foment a transition-season crisis-especially one that would gain him some credit with Russia or the oil states. Postpresidential Trump will face extreme legal and business troubles, including the ruin of the hospitality industry. The flow of payments to his businesses from U.S. taxpayers, from Republican campaigns, from favor-seeking corporations, and from foreign governments will all cease.
What would Trump do to maximize his cash flow before it stops? As lurid as our imaginations were over the four days of disaster planning, on this question, at least, we probably underestimated the dangerous possibilities.
This story was originally published by  The AtlanticSign up for their newsletter.

3. How ISIS Made Money on Facebook
Follow the money.  I just did not think you would have to follow-it on Facebook.

How ISIS Made Money on Facebook

The Islamic State turned the social platform into a global marketplace for looted artifacts-until a group of vigilante archaeologists took matters into their own hands.
defenseone.com · by Jenna Scatena
One afternoon last winter, Adnan Al Mohamad sat across from me at an Istanbul cafe, wearing a tweed blazer and an oxford shirt embroidered with olive branches. He sipped tea from a tulip-shaped glass and recounted the years he'd spent risking his life trying to stop Syria's artifact-trafficking networks.
In 2012, he was living with his wife and children in Manbij, an agrarian region outside Aleppo. It was a beautiful place to raise a family: Ancient Roman roads laced through the farmland, a reminder of its legacy as a global trade route, and the hills surrounding Al Mohamad's home grew barley, olives, and figs, some of Syria's main exports at the time. Beneath the fertile topsoil lay a trove of ancient artifacts of the region's long history: Byzantine mosaics, statues of Hittite goddesses, funerary busts, Roman tombs filled with gold coins.
One day, Al Mohamad noticed that the hills were honeycombed with holes. At the time, he was working as an archaeologist at Aleppo's Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums in the Department of Excavation, and he immediately recognized the holes as a sign: looters. He reassured himself that although the artifacts had immense cultural value, they weren't worth much on the market: A mosaic could maybe go for $15, if anyone even wanted to buy it. Extracting, transporting, and selling it for that price hardly seemed worth the risk for looters.
Yet when he investigated the ditches, he found that the artifacts were indeed disappearing. So, using his background as an archaeologist, he posed in person and online as an artifact appraiser. Soon enough, people started asking him for advice on pricing and connections outside Syria. He invited them to send him photos on WhatsApp of artifacts they planned to sell, and cataloged them as evidence.
As the civil war escalated in Syria, the Islamic State moved in and claimed Manbij as part of its caliphate; eventually, in 2014, Al Mohamad's family fled to Turkey, while he stayed. Over months, he established a network of about 100 informants throughout the region who tipped him off to who was digging for the artifacts and where. Through these networks, he started to hear what was going on: The looters were finding buyers abroad who were willing to pay exorbitant prices for looted artifacts. They were using a website called Facebook.
Before the war, almost no one Al Mohamad knew used Facebook. But as conflicts displaced communities, people across the Middle East turned to the social network to stay in touch with family and friends: From 2011 to 2017, users in Syria increased 1,900 percent.
During this time, ISIS was searching for more ways to finance its self-proclaimed government. Aleppo doesn't have much oil, and operating a militant caliphate is expensive. So it expanded its revenue streams to include  the extraction of Syria's cultural-artifact reserves, eventually establishing a Department of Antiquity that managed the process and taxed looters 20 percent on all sales. On Facebook, it found a perfect place to sell its spoils. Online, looters now had access to a wide network of deep-pocketed dealers and collectors in America, France, Dubai, and elsewhere, and they could connect with many of them at once, Al Mohamad learned, simply by posting a photo of a looted artifact in a group. A mosaic that would sell for only $15 in Syria could fetch more than $35,000 from a buyer on Facebook; other artifacts could sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And because Facebook did not prohibit selling historical artifacts on its site, almost nothing was stopping ISIS from  destroying UNESCO World Heritage sites and ransacking museums.
By 2014,  the group had turned Facebook into a vertically integrated one-stop shop for looted items: It was not only the best place to sell them, but the best place to research and verify an artifact's authenticity, assess its monetary value, and recruit and train new looters and smugglers inside and outside Syria. Looting soon became one of ISIS's main income sources in regions such as Aleppo, and one of the only job options for residents trapped in these ISIS-controlled territories. This January, the UN Security Council released a  report on terrorism financing, citing Facebook as "a tool for the illicit trafficking of cultural property" that benefits ISIS. It adds that authorities "report difficulties combating online radicalization, recruitment and fundraising via social media platforms, in particular Facebook." (Representatives from Facebook declined to comment on the report, or this characterization.)
A decade and a half into its existence, Facebook has clearly succeeded in its mission to  bring the world closer together: It has connected friends and families across the globe, and it has also united and empowered criminal networks. And in the years after ISIS's antiquities trade took off, it allowed Al Mohamad and a small group of vigilantes to track those criminals, using the same online tools the networks were using. Facebook reflects and occasionally amplifies the biggest issues in the world- white supremacydisinformationharassmentpolitical polarizationillicit trade-but it has long  taken  a  hands-off  approach  to  regulation on its platform. As a result, people such as Al Mohamad have found themselves forced into the role of amateur detective, lobbyist, police officer, taking it upon themselves to fight not only with the bad actors themselves, but with the social network that gives them space.
Al Mohamad has black hair and gentle, lunar eyes, and he takes his work seriously. "I became an archaeologist because I love my heritage," he told me in Istanbul. He hated what he was seeing in Facebook groups and in the pockmarked hills outside Aleppo: Centuries of history-his family's heritage-sold to the highest bidder, via a platform that had made it unprecedentedly lucrative and scalable, but appeared to him to be indifferent to the consequences. "Facebook is how our community has stayed connected during the war, but at the same time, it's also helped destroy it," he said. "For Syrians, this is real life, not an online life. Smuggling and trafficking these artifacts is a war crime, so why isn't Facebook held to the standard of international law?"
Al Mohamad spent eight years documenting the looting, in hopes of ultimately persuading Facebook to change its policy and ban the sale of historical artifacts on its platform. It was risky; ISIS regularly posted bounties on Facebook for people it suspected of similar acts. When the organization discovered that Palmyra's antiquities chief, Khaled al-Assad, had spirited away museum artifacts for their protection,  it beheaded him.
But Al Mohamad was worried Syria would lose its artifacts forever. So he collected data and evidence, and stored it on a memory card he kept hidden in his home. Every few months for more than three years, he would tuck it into his jacket's inner pocket, rev up his motorcycle, and smuggle it through five ISIS checkpoints to Jarablus, a Syrian village on the bank of the Euphrates less than one kilometer from Turkey-so close he could see the Turkish military officers stalking the border. Through friends, Al Mohamad had gotten a Turkish cellphone, and in Jarablus, he was close enough that he could catch a signal from a Turkish cell tower-out of reach of ISIS, which controlled the internet in its Syrian territories. Al Mohamad would insert the memory card into the phone and wait for the signal to catch. When it did, he'd send all the files to his wife, who was living just over the border. Then he'd wipe the memory card clean, and drive back to Manbij. His wife would then transfer the files across the globe to Portsmouth, Ohio, to a man named Amr Al-Azm.
met Al-Azm Last november over a Turkish breakfast of diced tomatoes and feta at his hotel in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district, a quarter studded with neoclassical consulates. He had a cumulus of white hair and a baritone voice made to carry through lecture halls, and he picked at his plate as we carped about jet lag. Syrian by heritage, he's now in exile, shuttling between Ohio, Istanbul, and Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the Syrian border, where he leads an unprecedented effort to track artifact trafficking. Al-Azm's ancestors ruled Damascus for a period in the Ottoman era, building princely limestone palaces and hammams that remain historic landmarks. He was drawn to archaeology and eventually earned a doctorate in the field from the University of London, before becoming a professor at the University of Damascus, and the director of conservation at the Syrian government's Department of Antiquities and Museums from the late '90s to the mid-aughts. But, sensing rising political tensions, he left Syria in 2006 with his family for a teaching position at Brigham Young University in Utah.
Six years later, the civil war ripped Syria apart, and when it did, a group of Al-Azm's former colleagues and students, including Al Mohamad, called in an SOS. They told him that while a humanitarian crisis unfolded, Syria's cultural heritage was also falling casualty to the war. "I knew it would all be gone if we didn't act," Al-Azm said. He was animated by the same desire to protect his culture as Al Mohamad, but he also saw a practical upside to protecting these artifacts: "Safeguarding cultural heritage plays an important role in post-conflict stabilization," he told me.
He began assembling a grassroots team of Syrian activists, and trained them to conduct a range of interventions for "emergency" artifact preservation through the  Day After Heritage Protection Initiative, which he co-founded in 2012. Since then, the group has worked to inventory and protect antiquities, and gone undercover at antique markets abroad looking for looted artifacts. It has partnered with similar-minded organizations, such as the Los Angeles-based  Arc/k Project, to  document Palmyra Castle using photogrammetry, and the British crime-prevention firm  SmartWater, to develop a new technology that covertly marks artifacts with a traceable code. And it has undertaken countless intelligence-gathering missions, like the ones Al Mohamad embarked on.
In his home office, in a small city near the Ohio-Kentucky border where he now  teaches at Shawnee University, Al-Azm pieced together the information he received from Al Mohamad and other sources, sifting through violent extremist content, scanning satellite images of looted terrain and crumbled buildings, and monitoring the internet. "By 2014, social media was being rapidly flooded with looted antiquities. The more we looked, the more we found. It was spreading like a virus," he said. "That's when it hit me: Facebook is advertising the very same artifacts we've dedicated our lives trying to save."
That same year, Al-Azm met Katie A. Paul, a D.C.-based anthropologist and research analyst, at a roundtable on trafficking networks. Inspired by her family's Greek heritage, Paul has wanted to be an archaeologist since she was 7 years old; she had been on her way to earning her doctorate when the Arab Spring happened. "I saw people risking their lives to protect their heritage," she recalled to me over the phone. "I joined what I thought were these Facebook heritage-monitoring groups, but they ended up being trafficking groups. I couldn't believe what was happening in front of me: There seemed to be thousands more traffickers than activists."
Paul abandoned her doctorate in order to monitor these trafficking networks. "The research has taken over all of my nights and weekends," she said. "Every data point I can find, I record; every post, every single comment, recordings, time stamps, I screenshot-yes, it's data, but it's also criminal evidence."
In 2018, Al-Azm and Paul co-founded the  Alliance to Counter Crime Online with a team of online-trafficking and policy experts, as well as the  ATHAR Project. Over two years, Al-Azm and Paul monitored a sample of 95 Facebook looting groups across the Middle East and North Africa, which included 488 administrators and nearly 2 million members. For every group or page they discovered, Facebook's "recommended pages" directed them to three more, uncovering a circuit that looks less like an unconnected set of lone amateurs than an organized criminal network governed by the same rules, and using a common code to signal to buyers that they are selling historical artifacts. Their Facebook pseudonyms reference artifacts, and many of them list their profession as "archaeologist." Every time a sale is made, these admins earn a 20 percent commission-just as ISIS had through its Department of Antiquities. Paul and Al-Azm used their on-the-ground intel to verify and cross-reference what they were tracking online, including the names of looters and their affiliations with ISIS and other Islamist militant groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra.
"This isn't like the story of the  Dead Sea Scrolls," Al-Azm said, referencing the account of a shepherd boy who unwittingly stumbled upon one of history's most valuable archaeological discoveries. "They do internet market research and check Sotheby's to see what similar things are selling for-it's a sophisticated network."
Facebook groups, Al-Azm and Paul found, aren't just being used to facilitate sales, but to help train a generation of looters, providing a place where members can share techniques, excavation tutorials, and pricing guidelines. One Facebook user in Tunis annotated a satellite-image screenshot with instructions for how to use Google Earth to identify promising archaeological sites for looting; another in Egypt offers a tutorial on building a pump to remove groundwater from looting pits. "It's almost like an accelerator program for looters," Paul said. (A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment about this assertion.)
The sales are held as online auctions, in which looters post photos and videos of artifacts, or hold Facebook Live sessions, and members bid on them in the comments. Group members also submit requests for specific items, which looters then go out and hunt for. "An admin will put out an open call to the group for in-demand items, like manuscripts or mosaics, then members will post photos of what they find, along with their WhatsApp numbers," Paul said. Some looters offer their services for hire; ATHAR found one enterprising scuba diver in Egypt offering to break into underwater tombs for the right price.
Ancient mosaics-of peacocks, of Hercules, of erotic mermaids-are particularly popular; looters roll them up like carpets and smuggle them out of Syria through Turkey and Lebanon. Paul and Al-Azm also documented Pharaonic tombs plundered in Egypt, church bells pilfered from Libyan basilicas, Tunisian cemeteries raided for tombstones, and a human-skull cup stolen from Tibet. One man attempted to smuggle mummy remains in a speaker system from Egypt to a Facebook buyer in Belgium. According to the UN, artifacts have been hidden in consignments of vegetables and sewn into the lining of smugglers' garments, then dispersed to buyers via yachts and trucks.
ATHAR found that more than one-third of all artifacts advertised in Facebook groups came from conflict zones. Yet foreign governments lack the authority to moderate content on Facebook's platform, and nations in conflict have even fewer resources to fight these networks on the ground. So some countries hard hit by looting have resorted to petitioning the U.S. State Department to impose stricter import restrictions on historical artifacts, through a memorandum of understanding. Syria, in particular, has been so affected by looting that in 2016 the U.S. passed a law banning the import of all ancient Syrian art and artifacts, in order to discourage looting and curb ISIS's cash flow. But smugglers found a loophole: Now, they traffic them into Turkey to disguise their origin, and art dealers advertise them to Western buyers as Mesopotamian or Byzantine. The FBI warned art collectors and dealers that illicit artifacts were flooding the U.S. market, circulating through e-commerce sites, to private collectors, at antique stores and loosely regulated art trade shows where they become impossible to trace. The final owner may never know that what they bought was trafficked and possibly used to finance terrorism. "People assume if they find an artifact for sale inside the U.S., it must be legit, when that's not, in fact, the reality," Paul said.
In June 2019, ATHAR released a 90-page report titled  "Facebook's Black Market in Antiquities: Trafficking, Terrorism, and War Crimes." In it, Al-Azm and Paul propose that Facebook prohibit the promotion of illicit cultural property in its community standards, and, rather than delete content that violates those terms, share it with experts and law-enforcement officials, who can use it as criminal evidence as they prosecute the actors involved and return confiscated artifacts to their origins.
Facebook's data-use policy already allows it to submit to law enforcement content that may serve as evidence, and the company  regularly turns over such information as it relates to other crimes on the platform. Facebook posts are becoming more commonly used in trials; in 2017, the International Criminal Court brought a warrant for war crimes against a Libyan general  based solely on videos uploaded directly to Facebook. But in the summer of 2019, instead of documenting evidence of looting, Facebook began deleting groups. Al-Azm was dismayed: "Facebook is a record keeper whether they like it or not," he told me. "They have a moral obligation, if not a legal obligation, to preserve this data for proper use."
In October, Paul and Al-Azm received a phone call from Facebook's public-policy team, including Vittoria Federici, who has a background in Middle East conflict and policy. According to Paul, Federici explained that Facebook had been removing historical artifacts for sale when it was "absolutely clear that such items have been looted," in accordance with the company's community standards on " coordinating harm and publicizing crime." But Federici said she recognized the need for a policy specific to illicit cultural property and told them that Facebook was ready to create a plan."The people we spoke with showed a deep understanding of these challenges, thinking about the right issues and asking all of the right questions," Paul recalled of that conversation. (Federici could not be reached for comment.)
Paul and Al-Azm didn't hear from Facebook again until this spring, when the social network told them it had consulted with a handful of other experts such as heritage lawyers, museum curators, and auction houses, and were in the final stages of drafting a policy.
Before the company could finish, the COVID-19 crisis hit. With the world sheltering in place, looters struck vacant archaeological sites and unguarded artifacts. According to ATHAR, at least five new trafficking groups launched in the Middle East in the early days of the pandemic; one group gained 120,000 new members in a single month, from mid-April to mid-May-exactly when lockdowns were initiated in the region. With heritage sites around the world suddenly unprotected, establishing a policy became more urgent than ever.
Finally, in June-nearly a decade after the looting had first been documented, and a year after ATHAR's report-Facebook released a policy on historical artifacts. "We now prohibit the exchange, sale or purchase of all historical artifacts on Facebook and Instagram," Greg Mandel, a public-policy manager at Facebook, wrote to me in an email. This includes archaeological discoveries and ancient manuscripts, tombstones, coins, funerary items, and mummified body parts.
Paul and Al-Azm had gotten what they wanted-kind of. While Facebook now bans the sale of historical artifacts in its written policy, it does not proactively enforce it-instead, it acts only if a user reports the content, which Paul argues is unlikely to happen, because most trafficking occurs in private groups. "This is why we see everything from wildlife to drugs to conflict antiquities continue to flourish on the platform," she said in a call to me the day the policy was released. "Whether there is a policy against it or not."
In the weeks after Facebook updated its policy, Paul reported 11 posts as "unauthorized sales," including an antique sword, historic religious artifacts of human remains, and an Egyptian coffin that had been advertised in a group called "Pharaonic Antiquities for Sale" in Arabic. Seven of those reports were met with a response stating that the post had been reviewed by Facebook and was not determined to violate its Community Standards, and three with a message that Facebook "couldn't prioritize" the report because of a shortage of moderators due to COVID-19. Only one post, featuring  Benghazi coins, was removed. "We're committed to enforcing the policy; because the policy is relatively new, we are compiling training data to inform our systems so we can better enforce. It's an area where we are going to improve with time," a Facebook spokesperson commented.
"Facebook is the largest social-media company in the world, and it needs to invest in teams of experts to identify and remove networks rather than playing whack-a-mole with individual posts and accounts," Al-Azm told me. "Otherwise, nothing will change."
Facebook's business model is  dependent on maximizing engagement, which means cultivating as many groups, connections, and users as possible. But its content moderation systems tend to place the onus on individual users to monitor a diffuse and ever-growing body of rule-violating posts, while the systems that create those posts hide in plain sight. "The effort to police antiquities, hate speech, or harassment rests heavily on reporters and users to expose problems," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of  Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. "It has 2.7 billion users uploading ads and content in more than 100 languages every second of every day. Facebook could not possibly hire enough people who speak all those languages to keep the service crime-free. So policing Facebook will always be a frustrating, cosmetic, and unsuccessful endeavor."
Al-Azm and Paul plan to continue monitoring the looting networks and present their findings to the UN, UNESCO, and other authorities, with the goal of pressuring Facebook to adopt and enforce an effective policy. And Al Mohamad stopped doing his reconnaissance work when he reunited with his family in Istanbul, where they now live in a district nicknamed "Little Syria." When we met, we talked about all that's been lost during the nine-year civil war, and what will likely never be returned, and at some point in the conversation, he lost his appetite. He told me about how, in Syria, when he couldn't sleep, he would sneak out in the middle of the night to shovel dirt over mosaics to conceal them from looters, like an on-the-ground content moderator. Sometimes, he considered scraping together money to buy some of the artifacts being advertised on Facebook himself. He said he would have, if the proceeds wouldn't have gone to ISIS. If his work saved even one, he told me, it was worth it to him. "Many people think that artifacts are for the past, but they're also for the future," he said. "The work that I did, and the risks I have taken, was all to save our heritage. In the end, I did it for my children."
This story was originally published by  The AtlanticSign up for their newsletter.

4. 75 years after atomic bombs fell on Japan, these authors say there's more to the story
Interesting review essay of some new books.  Some interesting histories.

75 years after atomic bombs fell on Japan, these authors say there's more to the story

dailynews.com · by Stuart Miller · August 2, 2020
Seventy-five years ago, the United States ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wreaking havoc and destruction like nothing ever before seen. The bombs killed perhaps 200,000 civilians and radiation sickness harmed thousands more, ushering in the Atomic Age and hastening the start of the Cold War.
The anniversary has already brought new books that recount the events or re-frame the narrative:
"The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War," by Fred Kaplan; "Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the 116 Days That Changed the World," by Chris Wallace and Mitch Weiss; "140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon," by David Dean Barrett; "On The Horizon," a children's book by Lois Lowry.
Greg Mitchell, author of "The Beginning Or the End: How Hollywood-and America - Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (Courtesy of The New Press)
Now two books take unique angles to go behind the scenes in exploring what happened - from the impact of Russia's planned invasion of Japan to the Japanese government's actual readiness to surrender - and how and why the United States government worked so hard to cover up the truth.
What follows are two interviews with authors who have written new books about these events: Lesley M.M. Blume's "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World" and Greg Mitchell's "The Beginning or The End." Each spoke about their books and the events of 1945 are still timely today; the interviews have been edited for space and clarity.
* * *
Lesley M.M. Blume had written the book "Everybody Behaves Badly" about Ernest Hemingway and was looking for a newsroom story - her father was a TV journalist and she started her career at ABC News.
"I have been enormously disturbed for the last four or five years by the unprecedented assault on our free press and the designation of journalists as 'enemies of the people,'" she said.
She was searching for a historical narrative tied to World War II when her husband suggested she look into how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were covered in the immediate aftermath. That idea bloomed into "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World," a behind-the-scenes look at what it took for John Hersey, author of "Hiroshima," and his editors at the New Yorker to tell the true story of what really happened when America dropped its atomic bombs.
Were you surprised by the extent of the government's effort to keep journalists away and cover up the devastation caused by the bombs and by the radiation afterward?
I was stunned by the extent of it. By covering the journalists, I saw the suppression, corralling, bullying and the expulsion of journalists. I saw the mechanisms of the cover-up and how all the minutiae was controlled because of how the U.S. wanted to keep a lid on this atrocity story.
Did your research change your views on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
There's still a predominant narrative in America that the bombs were a lifesaving mechanism, but after you have spent the amount of time I have on the entreaties to the Soviets the Japanese were already making about surrendering before the bombs were detonated, and about the aftermath of the bombs, it's hard to conclude they were necessary.
While there are arguments that can be made to defend the bombing of Hiroshima, the bombing just three days later of the civilians of Nagasaki has increasingly come to be seen by some as a war crime. Do you think that's fair?
That's what Hersey felt. When he heard about Hiroshima, he had very mixed feelings about it - he had covered the Pacific theater and had written about "the tenacity of the Japanese soldier" so there was a measure of relief. But when he heard about Nagasaki, he really felt that was a criminal action.
Hersey's early war coverage was pro-American but also contained racist and demeaning descriptions of the Japanese. How did that influence his writing of Hiroshima?
It's really rare that anyone changes their mind because to do so you have to admit you were wrong or ill-informed in the first place. Hersey had the character to say, 'I was wrong,' and admitted to being ashamed about his initial attitudes. A big part of writing "Hiroshima" was about how the racial dehumanization allowed the use of the bomb in the first place. He felt strongly that the only hope humankind had for survival in the atomic age was to see each other in human terms.
The government felt compelled to respond to Hersey's article by pushing back with an article by former Secretary of War Henry Stimson. What impact did that have?
It was a very glossy response. It tried to out-Hersey Hersey by seeming to give a dispassionate review of facts, but it never mentioned the radioactive qualities of the bomb and the agonies it inflicted on this largely civilian population. And it never addressed the US government covering up the aftermath and the nature of the aftermath.
Yet it was still partly successful. The predominant feeling today is that the bomb saved lives and ended the war.
While that's fairly widely accepted, now people are starting to look more at the human cost of how the war was won - people were not as willing to do that when they had a personal connection to the event or to the era.
Could the Truman Administration have been honest about how devastating the bombs were but said it was necessary to punish the Japanese and send a message to the Soviet Union?
America was sensitive to its global reputation. The war was a hard-earned physical and moral victory, and after the firebombing of Tokyo we were already concerned - as Stimson had said, we didn't want to 'get a reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities.' The government had used experimental mega-weapons without understanding what they would do but it also wanted an unqualified moral victory.
It's ironic that a government concerned about an unqualified moral victory felt the solution was to lie to the American people.
It didn't exactly portend well for an honest narrative with the American people going forward when it came to global military affairs.
Hersey thought the bombings themselves and his story prevented further nuclear war. Do you agree?
His writing is one of the pillars of deterrents. But some experts think the dropping of the bomb set off the Cold War and the nuclear arms race that exists to this day and maybe heading into its most dangerous phase yet.
Can this kind of cover-up happen now, or in today's politics is it all about controlling the narrative?
My book documents a cover-up of a deadly existential threat, and right now we're looking at a government that is trying to corral CDC statistics to make sure that death toll statistics go to a private company instead of straight to the CDC. It has all the hallmarks of another cover-up.
* * *
"The Beginning or The End" author Greg Mitchell became editor of "The Nuclear Times" in 1982 and, like many in the anti-nukes movement of the 1970s and '80s, he was initially focused only on stopping the arms race.
But a journalism grant for a monthlong trip to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where he met with experts and survivors, opened his eyes and re-shaped his career, leading to three books: "Hiroshima in America: A Half-Century of Denial" (with Robert Jay Lifton) and "Atomic Cover-Up" (which he has now made into a documentary), and now "The Beginning or The End," which recounts Hollywood's attempt to tell the story of the Manhattan Project, the dropping of the bomb and how the government and military interfered with the film (also called "The Beginning or The End").
What would "The Beginning or the End" have been like without interference from the White House and General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the development and dropping of the bomb?
MGM originally played it down the middle: We'll have the military point of view and the scientists' point of view. The early scripts had a scene with generals touring Hiroshima seeing dead bodies and dead babies and having moral reflections. There was a scene where [atomic scientist] Robert Oppenheimer testified before Congress, warning them about the path we were on.
But once they basically gave script approval to Groves and Truman, they totally lost control. Groves was so involved in every little detail, forcing dozens and dozens of revisions, some of them very minor. They had to re-shoot one whole scene after Truman or his aide saw it, with the actor playing Truman being fired.
Why did the government interfere?
Public opinion really supported the use of the bomb because it seemed like we were facing a drawn-out war and then it ended suddenly, so people said, "Thank god for the atomic bomb.'
But the narrative about Hiroshima and the whole future of nuclear weapons was really still up for grabs. People were very nervous about atomic energy. So there was fear in the government that people could turn against U.S. plans for building more and being the big boss in the postwar world.
There was concern about controlling the narrative.
People said, "How can you question the military," but General Eisenhower had been against using the bomb and the government's Strategic Bombing Survey said it wasn't necessary. Then Hersey's article came out and it did pose a threat.
In forcing the script revisions the White House and Groves revealed how defensive they were - there were falsifications, justifications and gilding the lily. They deleted any mention of Nagasaki in the movie - let's pretend it didn't happen. It shows either residual guilt or concern that eventually the full story was going to come out about the 200,000 civilians who died, and if we were not right to do it there were going to be massive questions.
What might have happened - to Truman's presidency, to the atomic age, to the Cold War - if the more honest movie had come out right in the aftermath of Hersey's article?
You wouldn't want to put too much on a Hollywood movie, but all those revisions caused delays and it didn't come out until 1947. It's possible that coming out in September right after Hersey's article would have made a big difference. But what makes this story interesting are the steps taking to undermine the movie and how it succeeded.
They won, they set the narrative in stone. It has been chipped away at but it has endured to this day: The majority American opinion is still that the bomb was necessary and the only thing that could have ended World War II.
People don't know that Truman begged the Russians to enter the war against Japan and they agreed; he had two separate journal entries that indicate that Russian entry alone would end the war soon, absent the bomb. That's pretty tough evidence. But the media coverage has not changed: Chris Wallace's book makes the same old tired arguments but it got positive reviews and coverage and hardly anyone in the mainstream media pointed that out.
Does the lack of nuclear attacks since 1945 justify, to any extent, bombing Hiroshima, even if Nagasaki can't be excused?
That's mainly rationalizing. We could have released footage of the Trinity test or dropped a bomb in demonstration off the coast of Japan, which is what most of the scientists wanted. And we kept the footage of the aftermath under wraps for decades so it wasn't like the US was showing these images as a warning. We were trying to cover it up.
The bombs were dropped 75 years ago. Why does it matter now?
The US still has a first-strike policy, which very few people know about. Any president has the okay to use the weapons first, not just in retaliation, but even just because of a threat. So we could attack Iran or North Korea.
Recent polls show 40 to 50 percent of Americans would endorse an attack, which you don't see elsewhere in the world. The reason is the continued endorsement of the bombings in 1945. People say, 'We must never use them again' but justify those because 'we were trying to end the war and save American lives' but that will be in play today. Those bombings set a precedent that has not been refuted.
Its an old issue, but that's only true until we have one nuclear crisis or launch - then its the most important issue ever. We'll go from, 'I don't want to think about it' to 'Oh my God, we're all going to die,' and that can happen in a heartbeat. So I think it's worth looking back to move ahead.

  •  
5. The Worm is in the Fruit: A Rising Strategic Foe Inside NATO
Spoiler alert: Turkey.

The Worm is in the Fruit: A Rising Strategic Foe Inside NATO

rusi.org · July 31, 2020
The recent  naval incident in the Mediterranean between French and Turkish warships is another dramatic development in an already deteriorated situation involving a neo-Ottoman Turkey with growing geopolitical ambitions colliding with the core security interests of many European countries.
On 10 June, the merchant vessel  Cirkin - sailing under the Tanzanian flag, escorted by Turkish warships and suspected of smuggling weapons into Libya in contravention of the UN  Security Council Resolution 2473, imposing an arms embargo on all the protagonists in the Libyan war - was challenged by the French frigate  Courbet, which was taking part in NATO's  Operation Sea Guardian, whose task is to work with the Mediterranean to maintain maritime situational awareness, as well as deter and counter terrorism. Earlier in the day, an unsuccessful challenge attempt on the  Cirkin had been made by a Greek frigate. This frigate was part of the EU's  Operation Irini,  whose purpose is to implement the UN-mandated arms embargo.
In reaction to the  Courbet getting closer to the  Cirkin, the Turkish warships flashed their fire-control radars with crews putting on bulletproof vests and standing behind their light weapons. Even by the standards of Cold War confrontations between Western navies and the then Soviet Navy's so-called  Mediterranean Eskadra, the Turkish Navy's behaviour was extremely aggressive.
Immediately thereafter, France requested a NATO Council meeting to discuss the incident and asked for an official inquiry by the Alliance. Interestingly, whereas 10 NATO members supported France's demand (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the UK), none of the Alliance's eastern flank (Slovakia excepted) or Nordic members did.
The perspective of Turkey relenting on its longstanding opposition to approving NATO's defence plans for Poland and the Baltic states may have played a role in those countries' official silence, yet none of these considerations apply to the US's astounding silence. It is notable, however, that all of NATO's European Mediterranean countries (except Croatia and Albania) supported France's request.
France also suspended its participation in  Sea Guardian and asked for the Alliance to collectively adopt some measures, including:
  • An official reaffirmation by NATO of the respect of the embargo.
  • A clear rejection of the use of NATO call signs by Turkish ships if/when they do not comply with UNSCR 2473.
  • Reinforced cooperation between NATO and the EU in the Eastern Mediterranean.
  • The establishment of deconfliction procedures at sea.

Long-Term Implications

No one should underestimate the seriousness of the tactical standoff that occurred on 10 June, with its risks of escalation. But the growing strategic divide between NATO members that these events underline is even more concerning for the future of the Alliance.
The situation in 2020 can hardly be compared to the one of 1974, a year which saw Ankara invading the northern part of Cyprus and tensions with Greece spiralling dangerously. At that time, the lethal threat emanating from the Soviet Union was still providing the glue which bound the Allies together. Since then, however, circumstances have dramatically changed: a disastrous Trump presidency has hurt the credibility of the US as a guarantor of decent behaviour within the organisation, and has raised doubts about Washington's commitment to action in the event of an attack against a NATO member. And notwithstanding NATO summit declarations and Moscow's rogue international behaviour, it is a fact that the Russian threat is no longer perceived with similar intensity by all NATO members.
One NATO summit after another, the relevance of NATO's added value on its southern flank is regularly questioned. Even though a paragraph of each official communiqué always religiously includes a nod to the issue by evoking NATO's '360-degree approach to security', the reality is that the slogan still lacks significant substance when one looks at NATO's concrete added value in facing some important risks on its southern flank. Among the three core tasks of the  2010 Strategic Concept - collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security - crisis management is the weaker link, which in turn makes the common denominator of strategic interests more tenuous.
Today, through his active military involvement in support of one of Libya's belligerents and its Islamist proxies, and through his contempt of a UNSCR, Turkey's authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is feeding the image of a resurgent imperialist country whose agenda directly impinges on European security interests.
Last month's incident only adds to an already long list of unfriendly if not provocative Turkish actions, which include the  acquisition of the sophisticated S-400 Russian anti-air system, the recurrent  threat to terminate the €6 billion subsidy agreement with the EU and to open the Turkey's borders to millions of Middle Eastern refugees towards Europe, as well as the January 2019 military attack against our Kurdish allies in northern Syria - our best and more effective partners in the fight against the Islamic State - after the inexplicable 'green light' given by Donald Trump without any previous collective consultation among the Allies.
To this egregious behaviour, one should also add: the 2018 harassment by the Turkish Navy of ENI and Total oil and gas exploration ships in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the Republic of Cyprus; the subsequent deployment of a Turkish research vessel in the same Cypriot waters in 2019; the  Turkish claims on Gavdos, a Greek island free of any Turkish 'heritage', only for the purpose of vastly extending the Turkish EEZ in the south of Crete; and the recent and legally baseless  agreement concluded with the political authorities in the Libyan capital of Tripoli which would result in 'sharing' almost the entire Eastern Mediterranean between the two countries.
To be clear, a resurgence of terrorist entities in northern Syria and a reinforcement of the most radical factions in Libya through the recent  export by Ankara of thousands of Syrian Islamist mercenaries would constitute worrisome scenarios for Paris and most other European capitals. Indeed, this would carry the risk of spreading more instability in the Sahel region.
All this adds acrimony to the obvious divergence on values between Turkey and the rest of Europe. Erdogan's  attacks on Turkish democratic institutions are of another magnitude than the already worrisome trends that we can observe in a few Eastern European democracies. Journalists, judges and lawyers are prosecuted and jailed, while hundreds of  Turkish officers who have served within NATO commands have been purged from the military and jailed in many cases.
So, what kind of message does Erdoğan's Turkey want to pass to NATO? And what is the critical breaking point when the interests of having Turkey inside NATO are superceded by the blows which it inflicts on Europe's geopolitical interests? The answer to this won't be identical in every European country, but that in itself puts NATO at risk.
If NATO membership would result in effectively shielding Turkey's threatening actions in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and North Africa from any concrete consequences, this would be seen as less and less acceptable by the government in Paris. And that is the true subtext of what France's authorities are saying in Brussels.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the magnitude of France's frustration. Nor should it be forgotten that France ranks as the third contributor to NATO's common budget and, above all, is considered by many analysts as the second most militarily credible member of the Alliance.
The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.
BANNER IMAGE:  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Courtesy of US State Department / flickr.

6. Retired general appointed to Trump administration in position that won't require confirmation
I guess President Trump really wants BG Tata in the Pentagon.


Retired general appointed to Trump administration in position that won't require confirmation

Retired general appointed to Trump administration in position that won't require confirmation
The Washington Post
A retired Army general whose controversial nomination for a senior civilian position at the Pentagon was put on hold last week has withdrawn from consideration, and will instead take an appointment that does not require Senate approval.
Anthony J. Tata withdrew his name from consideration for undersecretary of defense for policy, after the Senate Armed Services Committee canceled his confirmation hearing on Thursday amid signs that he did not have enough votes to be confirmed. He instead has been tapped as the official performing the duties of the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, a temporary position that does not require  Senate confirmation.
"He looks forward to continuing to help implement the President's National Security agenda," the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday confirming the appointment.
Tata's nomination was controversial following statements he made that included calling former president Barack Obama a "terrorist leader," suggesting that former CIA director John Brennan should prepare for execution or suck "on a pistol," and saying that Islam is the "most oppressive violent religion I know of." His comments that came under scrutiny included both tweets and things he said as a national security analyst in interviews.
Tata retired as a brigadier general in 2009 under a cloud after the Army inspector general found that he had at least two extramarital affairs, despite adultery being a crime in the military.
President Trump had pressed Senate Republicans to hold a hearing for Tata, 60, who frequently appeared in conservative media as an analyst. But some senators - including those facing reelection this fall - raised concerns about him as the hearing closed in.
Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, once a person is nominated to fill a position on a permanent basis, the president may not appoint him or her to fill that same position on a temporary basis. In Tata's case, his new position falls just below the undersecretary position for which he originally was nominated.
The disclosure of Tata's new position brought an immediate condemnation from Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
"If an appointee cannot gain the support of the Senate, as is clearly the case with Tata, then the president should not put that person into an identical temporary role," Smith said. "This evasion of scrutiny makes our government less accountable and prioritizes loyalty over competence."
Smith added that vacant positions in the Defense Department have hit a record high under Trump, limiting the Pentagon's ability to fulfill its duties and missions, and posing a "threat to our national security."

7. Sending Special Operations Forces into the Great-Power Competition
I am reminded of some of the thinking that took place in the 1980's when SOF in particular SF were trying to ensure relevance.  The author seems to assume the only employment of military forces will be in conventional conflict and he of course wants to have SOF shift focus to support that.  

But great power competition is so much more and there is going to be a lot of conflict and competition below the threshold of conventional combat operations. 

The author does not mention either of the SOF "trinities" and the comparative advantage of SOF.  Irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare and the comparative advantages of SOF in influence, governance and support to indigenous forces and populations to support the national security and defense strategies.



Sun, 08/02/2020 - 5:53pm
Sending Special Operations Forces into the Great-Power Competition
By Tim Nichols
What caused the strategic defeat of US efforts in Syria?  Was it the U.S. special operations forces overseeing the military effort?  Certainly not.  They routed the terrorists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in every skirmish, they captured Raqqah as planned, and they successfully targeted key terrorist leaders.  No.  The failure to attain strategic objectives in Syria results from the immersion of special operations forces, skilled in counterterrorism, into a different type of adversarial conflict - the emerging great-power competition.  Candidly, it was Russian president Putin who derailed our strategy.  He indemnified Syrian president Assad, deployed Russian forces to increase the complexity of ground operations, and employed information operations to weaken the resolve of US and partner forces.  Through this painful example, our special operations forces received an early taste of the great-power competition.
Great-power competition reflects the recognition that emerging powers like Russia and China have strategic objectives that conflict with the those of the United States.  Mainly, the concept dismisses the false notion that nations are either in conflict or at peace.  Between those realms exist infinite possibilities for "competition" without breaching a threshold for conventional warfare.  In Syria, Putin simply decided that president Assad would remain in power and that Syria would remain a nation under Russian influence.  In the South China Sea, Chinese naval and paramilitary forces are slowly increasing their influence through militarized islands and harassment of vessels and aircraft transiting the international domain.  Complementing these efforts, the Chinese employ diplomacy and their economic prowess to increase their influence in the region.  While none of these examples appears to be particularly troubling in isolation, the combined effect translates to loss of U.S. influence, the undermining of US-backed norms (i.e. freedom of navigation in the South China Sea), and a growing campaign to erode the relationship between the United States and its regional partners.  Thus, our nation finds itself in need of new ways to compete against authoritarian states.
Great discussions have transpired about "what's next" for the U.S. military and, more specifically, its special operations forces.   At the political level, our national security and defense strategies clearly suggest a pivot towards emerging great-power challengers.  At the operational level, our senior military commanders are stretched between dealing with contemporary challenges of terrorism, instability, and conflict while contemplating doctrinal and resource adjustments necessary to address the growing influence of competitors like Russia and China.  At the tactical level, special operations forces are preparing for their next deployments in familiar ways with familiar training.  Little has changed. 
The discussion has begun within the special operations forces about preparing for the great-power competition, but the topic remains ethereal.  Perhaps this reality exists because special operations forces hold an outsized role in the "forever wars" in which our country remains. 
To that end, the next few years will present an ideal window for special operations leaders to move the ongoing discussions of great-power competition into a clearer reality. They should recognize and adapt to the strategic shift that is underway.  The production of counterterrorism capability, a mainstay of the special operations community for nearly two decades, requires re-evaluation and reduction.  Indeed, a candid analysis of the emerging great-power challenges calls for a more stratified, less homogeneous special operations force.  Future forces should offer a broader array of special capabilities to be employed against authoritarian state adversaries.
Understandably, resources will have to be adjusted, roles and missions will have to be recalibrated, and, most importantly, the training and preparation for future deployments should necessarily change.  To nudge the discussion out of the ether, I offer four foundational ideas that may benchmark the transition.  Afterwards, I offer suggestions as to how special operations capabilities can contribute to great-power competition as well as some of the actions necessary for transition.
Preparing Special Operations Forces for Big Changes
The jump from counterinsurgency/counterterrorism to great-power competition should not be viewed as a modest alteration of current focus; instead, it denotes a rupture.  To remain relevant, dormant special operations capabilities need revitalization, new capabilities await, and doctrinal adjustments should be considered.  Here are the first adjustments:
First, special operations forces should relinquish "thought leadership" in the great-power competition.  During two decades of counterterrorism, special operations guided the nation's response to 9/11, employed the resources, and delivered tactical results.  Clearly, the Global War on Terror was anchored on kinetic action, and special operators spearheaded these efforts.  Additionally, they championed intelligence fusion, a counterterrorist targeting cycle, interagency task forces, partner-force operations, and precision tactical strike capabilities.  Diplomatic and economic efforts were deprioritized in favor of aggressive tactical action; the proof lies in the budget and the exploding size of the U.S. Special Operations Command.  On 9/11, special operations forces number approximately 33,000; today they number well over 70,000.  Additionally, over the last few years, the special operations budget has steadily increased by over a billion dollars per year.  The nation relied on special operations forces to lead the way.  Progress was measured in body counts, the capture/kill of high value targets, and the capture of terrain. These measurable results became veritable catnip to senior officers and politicians, and special operations forces delivered them daily.  Tactics became strategy, and senior political and military leaders were content with such an approach.  It is not within the scope of this essay to deconstruct the flaws in this approach, but the primacy of special operations during this era is inarguable.
That cannot be the case for the great-power competition because military action is, at best, a peripheral aspect in posturing against near peer challengers.  This, in fact, will be the hardest paradigmatic adjustment to make.  In great-power competition, special operations forces should not have a central role in strategic design.  Instead, the U.S. leaders will ultimately look to models of diplomacy (alliance building, soft power, and economic security), deterrence (nuclear forces, global posturing, and conventional alliances), and influence (covert action and strategic communications) to seek advantage and protect vulnerabilities against nation state challengers.  There will be many opportunities for peripheral contributions to these emerging challenges, but special operations forces will certainly and appropriately find themselves relegated to a supporting role.  Admitting this will be a hard pill for military leaders to swallow, but the prognosis and remedy are clear. 
Next, special operations leaders ought to openly and publicly acknowledge the end of "unipolar military doctrine."   After the collapse of the Soviet Union, US military doctrine--anchored on the assurances of air, ground, and maritime superiority-framed the use of military force in future conflicts in a linear, phased manner.  Conflicts would begin with activities like "shaping operations" and end with "stabilization operations" and, ideally, the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces.  Essentially, the "go, win, return" doctrine that derived from and was indemnified by the U.S.'s period of unmatched primacy has concluded.  Great-power competition offers more opportunities for struggle with fewer opportunities for decisive endings; it presents challenges that defy the aforementioned model because our competitors actively seek opportunities to alter the status quo in their favor.  Importantly, challenges of this nature rarely end with a winner and loser; instead, they are more likely to manifest in the increase or decrease of U.S. influence.  So, special operations forces, in their training and in their organizational culture, should embrace and adopt the "competition" mindset.  To the credit of the Joint Staff, their recent publication, Competition Continuum (Joint Doctrine Note 1-19, June 2019) succinctly conveys the necessity for this change.  This concept deserves to be a central tenet in the conversion of the special operations formation for the great-power competition.
Third, special operations leaders should abandon the ill-defined and problematic idea of special operations forces as a deterrent capability.  This concept belies a misunderstanding of deterrence theory and a misunderstanding of key tenets of special operations employment.  Terms like "unorthodox deterrence" convey flawed operational concepts that are both a distraction and likely to fail, if tested.  Deterrence is most effective when the target understands the exact consequence of a desired behavior, is able to weigh the consequence against the desired outcome and chooses whether to act based on a rational understanding of perceived cost/benefit.  Special operations efforts to conceal operations, to achieve moments of relative superiority through surprise, and to enjoy compounded impacts relative to the size of the force are important qualities, but they are not suitable qualities for deterrence.  Instead, special operations leaders should embrace the punitive capability and the intentional uncertainty associated with special operations as they reflect an important offering in the great-power competition, but they should not be construed, taught, or trained as deterrence.
Finally, leaders should drive to aggressively address the most palpable and disconcerting impacts on their formation resulting from two decades of land-based counterterrorism efforts: capability overlap, excess capacity, and the establishment of intractable, counterproductive micro-economies that inhibit change.  Candidly, leaders at the policy and flag officer level should expect to encounter heavy resistance to these changes.
Had the global war on terrorism lasted only two years, leaders would have witnessed a reversion to pre-9/11 unit-specific capabilities at the conflict's conclusion.  Instead, special operations forces writ large have formally and informally adopted counterterrorism roles beyond their doctrinal missions and distant from their unique offerings, and these roles have solidified through tailored funding and years of repetition.  Additionally, special operations units have permanently added peripheral capabilities (intelligence, communications, mobility, support, etc.) in a permanent fashion to reduce reliance on adjacent or external units.  As the aforementioned "thought leaders" in the counterterror wars, special operations forces levied requests for growth in people, resources, and capabilities and enjoyed unmatched approval.  This inclination will prove costly at the tactical level as leaders may find it increasingly difficult to just "manage" their unwieldy conglomerates-ultimately dulling the blade they hoped to sharpen. 
Does this expansion and consequential overlap of capabilities make every special operator good at everything?  Unlikely!  Well, units designed for unilateral operations are conducting partner operations.  Units designed for partner operations are doing unilateral operations.  Navy SEALs have de-emphasized maritime operations in favor of frequent land-based deployments.  Recent research highlights a deep-seated identity crisis in the Green Berets over what their mission is and should be.  Ultimately, the generation of excess capacity in one mission area creates shortfalls in others.  Acknowledging the time and resources needed to make a special operations professional, renewed efforts to recruit, select, and train individuals for a broader array of mission areas should begin immediately.  The great-power competition requires this adjustment.
An excess of special operations capability in certain mission areas notably creates ambiguity as to "who" should do "what."  The recent SOCOM Comprehensive Review observed that "leaders developed within training and deployment environments focused solely on [counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and direct action] core activities - more specifically, unilateral and foreign partnered raids and execution of the find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze (F3EA) targeting cycle."  The negative result of creating excess capacity in this narrow mission area was "perpetuating a force structure that focuses on [counterinsurgency and counterterrorism] while not developing special operations forces and special operations forces leaders for the full spectrum of special operations forces core activities and component specific skills and capabilities."  With great-power competition emerging as a looming challenge, the excess capacity of special operations forces in the wrong mission areas demands leadership attention.  While there are a number of important albeit overly gentle recommendations in the Comprehensive Review, decisive change and the realignment of capabilities remain distant concepts.  Chad Pillai offered similar suggestions in a previous article on the transition of  special operations forces-emphasizing the need for rigorous prioritization.
The capabilities overlap and excess capability create another impediment to rapid transition to the coming great-power competition.  Namely, twenty years of generous funding established a vast array of counter-terrorist-focused micro-economies that now depend on the status quo for perpetuation.  Contracts abound, new buildings and training areas have been completed, and the size of the special operations forces supporting establishment (civil service and contractors) has blossomed.  At its essence this reflects Eisenhower's concerns of a "military industrial complex," just localized in the special operations formation.  To realistically change the direction of special operations forces and prepare them for great-power competition, the journey begins with the micro-economies.  Bureaucracies exists to perpetuate the status quo (capability overlap and excess capacity), and change foreshadows economic and structural disruption.  Senior leaders should understand and acknowledge that overinvestment in counterterrorist capability is a sunk cost.  Subsequently, they should acquiesce to the removal of training, deployments, and equipment that perpetuate these overages. 
The New Special Operations Menu - in Clear Language
As discussions ensue as to the role of special operations in the great-power competition, it would seem appropriate to boil down likely contributions into simple, clear statements that policymakers and appropriators can comprehend.  There are generally four main themes that characterize such contributions: getting information, working with others, crisis response, and the strategic raid. 
Getting Information
If we acknowledge that the great-power competition will involve a continuous struggle between competent, nation-state adversaries-manifesting in distinctly fluid results, then the requirement for streams of information flowing from the "contact layer" to the policy maker will profoundly increase.  Special operators can aid policymakers in better understanding the environment in competition areas so that they, the national leaders, can more accurately evaluate policy options.  Peripheral observations like the attitudes of foreign forces or the decrease in local favor towards the government complement other collection efforts being managed by the Intelligence Community (IC).  Special operations forces gather this type of information as a byproduct of their overseas presence.  In other situations, special operators remain prepared to conduct unilateral reconnaissance against facilities, people, or events to add to the understanding of policymakers. 
Importantly, special operations leaders should embrace intelligence differently than during the predominant counterterrorist era.  Much of the collection today links to subsequent military action.  Today's professionals discuss "targeting cycles" and "sensor-shooter optimization" as the central vein of their intelligence efforts.  The great-power competition, however, excites an appetite for intelligence that, while not actionable in the aforementioned manner, contributes crucially to understanding our adversaries.  In short, the current approach makes special operators more the consumers of intelligence they generate.  In the great-power competition, special operators will collect intelligence-either through direct tasks or through incidental, proximity-based observations-that feeds a different, strategic customer.   
This is not to say that special operations intelligence efforts should supplant the ongoing work by the Intelligence Community; instead, they will need to retool to better contribute to the strategic intelligence picture.  Observation and reporting skills are integral to the operator culture, so this adaptation shouldn't be difficult.  The more challenging issue will be the refinement of tasking and reporting channels that better connect the requirements and outputs to the Intelligence Community.  There's quite a bit of unharvested potential in special operations information gathering capability, and the great-power competition will require more of it albeit in a different manner.
The sprouting of intelligence commands within the special operations formation-tasked to collect, analyze, and organize targeting information for operator use-will need a critical re-evaluation as they enter the great-power competition.  The results of such an evaluation should help leaders align structure and priorities against emerging threats instead of receding counterterror priorities.  Finally, in the coming era, counterintelligence and operations security will undergird much of the information gathering efforts.  Nation-state adversaries have repeatedly demonstrated their effectiveness in penetrating and reporting on US activities overseas, and special operators, like the Intelligence Community, should redouble efforts to contend with this extant threat.
Working with Others
The available lexicon describing US forces working with foreign state and non-state entities continues to grow.  Such phrases as "advise and assist" or "by, with, and through" or "building partner capacity" validate a continuing need for US military forces to interact with foreign military elements in pursuit of US interests.  At the highest level, we enjoy alliances.  Special operations forces train with professional, government forces from allied nations; they share lessons and innovation; and they stand ready to join them in combat if the alliance is threatened.  After two decades of fighting next to one another in various coalitions, these relationships are strong and resilient.  In the great-power competition, competent, proven special operations elements from allied nations will form the foundation for any other type of military operation.  Clearly this an area for additional investment.
Coalition relationships are built on a narrower footing.  The special operations coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate innate complexity due to the profound disparities in capabilities, authorities, and the specific national interests undergirding each participant.  While a series of efforts to "right size" various elements is underway, this conceptual construct will likely transfer into the great-power competition.  The struggle for influence in partner and non-allied nations will form a vital component of competition, so special operations forces should pursue additional capabilities in this subset of working with partner nations.  Efforts will need to be more efficient (in terms of cost and manpower) and do a better job at remaining aligned to the intended US political objectives because the relationship is, by nature, temporal. 
Finally, select special operations elements may connect with non-state and irregular forces.  There are numerous examples (Northern Alliance, Syrian Democratic Forces) where special operators entered into partnerships when the interests of the US and the non-state entity were aligned.  As Jeff Goodson argues, this function is also likely to carry over into the great-power competition, and the United States will need special operators to spearhead such efforts.  Despite the propensity for the US to lean toward this manner of partnership, it is, by nature, transactional.  In that light, special operations forces will need additional training and skills to carefully work with non-state partners and adhere to the 2018 NDAA definition of "activities in support of predetermined United States policy and military objectives conducted by, with, and through regular forces, irregular forces, groups, and individuals participating in competition between state and non-state actors short of traditional armed conflict."  To assist non-aligned, non-state, or irregular forces that are engaged in a competition-a competition that aligns with US interests-will require a redoubled training regimen for our special operations professionals. As the US competes for influence in the great-power competition, this specific capability may entail their greatest and most used contribution.
Crisis Response
International crises will continue to challenge U.S. interests during the era of great-power competition.  During the forever wars, crisis response revolved around counterterrorist targets, emergent threats, or fleeting opportunities to advance US interests.  Fortunately, special operations culture reinforces the characteristics necessary in crisis response scenarios: empowered individuals, flattened decision-making structures, truncated response times, strategic mobility, and mature tactical skills.  While not all special operations units should bear a crisis response mandate, those that do should continue to refine and improve their ability to respond quickly into uncertain situations in order to promote US political objectives through the employment of military capabilities.  Crisis response will remain a national mainstay in the future, and leaders will need to update and resource relevant capabilities.
The Strategic Raid
In 2012, Secretary of Defense Panetta openly confronted the threat of Anti-Access/Area Denial efforts posed by emerging great-power challengers.  Accordingly, he directed the military to "invest as required to ensure its ability to operate effectively in anti-access and area denial environments."  While Anti-Access/Area Denial presents challenges for all elements of the military, there is a particularly important role for special operations forces: the strategic raid.  Unlike crisis response, the strategic raid involves a deliberate, planned effort to access a target, conduct a tactical military action against the target, and then depart.  Such raids may include high-risk infiltration (Son Tay 1970, Iran Hostage Rescue 1980, Abbottabad 2011), a moment of relative military superiority amidst a much larger opposition, and a planned withdrawal.  While not all special operations units should bear the responsibility for strategic raids, and while the strategic raid, due to issues of political risk, will likely occur less frequently in the coming era, the capability should reside within the special operations formation.  The great-power competition will introduce new challenges in the areas of counterintelligence, cyber detection, and layered defense, so the evolution of strategic raid forces in the Anti-Access/Area Denial environment will require substantial resource and training investments.
Those opposing this simple prescription for sending special operations forces into the great-power competition argue that there are vastly more offerings for policy makers and that current capabilities are so advanced that they remain central to the awaiting challenges.  This perspective reflects where special operations is today rather than where they should be for tomorrow. Today, they are optimized for the rotational counterterrorism fight.  Today, the formation is replete with individuals selected, assessed, habituated, and trained for the forever wars.  Tomorrow will require enhanced and distinct selection pathways, right-sizing to omit excess capacity, reinforcement of and resourcing for doctrinal mission sets, the reduction of mission overlap, and vastly different training protocols.
Looking Ahead
While US counterterror efforts in the forever wars are demonstrably ebbing, they have not stopped.  Integral to the aforementioned transition lies the acknowledgement that some portion of special operations should not transition and instead continue to manage the counterterror effort.  Terror networks will need to be detected and countered.   Partners will require continued assistance, and threatened Americans require vigilant, responsive protection.  Suppression of the terrorism blight can be accomplished with shrinking numbers, efficiencies can be realized, and ever more units can be pulled from counterterrorist rotations.  The special operations mindset of "everyone gets a counterterrorism combat tour" can come to a halt, and elements can begin to revitalize core competencies for the aforementioned great-power challenges.  Additionally, the right-sized special operations contribution to the counterterror effort--aligning tactical efforts to reasonable, achievable political outcomes-enables the rest of the US government to transition more quickly.  Moving from discussion to action requires special operations leaders to acknowledge the misalignment, the structural pitfalls, and the disparities between counterterrorist capacity and great-power competition capacity.  Our nation faces emerging challenges of a different ilk, and our special operators should prepare to meet them.

About the Author(s)

Tim Nichols is a Visiting Professor of the Practice and the Executive Director of the Counterterrorism and Public Policy Fellowship Program in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.  His research and teaching interests include: intelligence policy, counterterrorism policy, great-power competition, and the US national security apparatus.













8. 30 years after our 'endless wars' in the Middle East began, still no end in sight
What is the long arc of history bending toward?  More endless war?

30 years after our 'endless wars' in the Middle East began, still no end in sight

The Brookings Institution · by Bruce Riedel · July 27, 2020
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 marked the beginning of America's "endless wars" in the Middle East. Before that point, American combat operations in the region had been generally temporary and short-term. President George H.W. Bush wanted to continue that pattern when he responded forcefully and appropriately to Iraq's aggression, but it did not work out that way. Four presidents since have discovered it's hard to get home.
Americans - including my father - fought the Nazis in North Africa in World War II, but the first combat operation in the Middle East proper did not come until July 18, 1958, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent Marines ashore in  Beirut, Lebanon. Operation Blue Bat was prompted by a coup, not in Lebanon but in Iraq. On July 17, 1958, the Iraqi army overthrew the most pro-Western government in the Middle East, the Hashemite monarchy that then ruled both Iraq and Jordan. King Faisal II and his family were brutally murdered.
The normally cautious Ike panicked and sent the Marines to Beirut to prop up a Maronite Christian president facing a popular revolt against his effort to get a second and unconstitutional term in office. President Eisenhower was worried that the whole region was about to fall into the hands of the charismatic Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, hailed throughout the Arab world as an anti-colonialist who was routing the forces of Western imperialism. Nasser was a Soviet proxy, Ike believed, but he had not been behind the coup in Baghdad. In fact, Nasser was as surprised as Eisenhower.
On the ground, the heavily armed Marines rushing ashore were met by vendors selling Coca-Cola and girls sunning in bikinis. It was a bit of a farce, but it was also extremely dangerous and could have turned into a quagmire. Fortunately, cooler heads in the American Embassy prevailed and made a deal with the opposition, and then Washington backed down. Another Maronite was selected president and the civil war ended peacefully. Only one American soldier died in combat, and after 102 days ashore the Marines left Lebanon. Only five years old, I was there in Beirut in July 1958; my father was serving with the United Nations.
The author and his mother in Beirut, Lebanon in 1958.
The next combat operation also involved fears of Nasserism and the Russians. Egypt and the Soviets intervened in Yemen in 1962 to support a republican coup against a monarchy. Saudi Arabia and Jordan backed the royalists against Egypt and civil war ensued. The Egyptians bombed royalist camps in Saudi Arabia, and King Faisal appealed to John F. Kennedy for help.
JFK sent the United States Air Force to protect the Saudis in mid-1963. Operation Hard Surface lasted six months. U.S. Air Force jets flew combat air patrols along the border with Yemen. No actual combat took place, as Nasser did not want to take on the Americans and Kennedy did not want a war.
In the years after 1964, American combat operations in the region were usually short-lived. We did lose troops. Thirty-four crewmen were killed on June 8, 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty. Two hundred and forty-one Marines and sailors died back in Beirut on October 23, 1983, when Ronald Reagan foolishly intervened in another Lebanese civil war. Reagan then wisely pulled out of Lebanon.
Reagan got involved in the region's longest modern conventional war, the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. After Iraq attacked the USS Stark in May 1987, killing 34 sailors, the Reagan administration blamed Iran for the war. The U.S. Navy fought an undeclared naval war in the Persian Gulf for over a year against the Iranians. It ended when Iran and Iraq accepted a ceasefire. The navy largely left the Gulf, leaving only a small base in Bahrain. In 1990, that was the only American military base in the Middle East outside Turkey.
The Iran-Iraq war cost Iraq a fortune, including tens of billions in loans from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein decided in July 1990 to rob the bank to escape his self-made financial crisis. On the evening of August 1-2 in Washington, I became deputy task force chief in the CIA to provide intelligence to the Bush team. We immediately warned that Saudi Arabia was Saddam's next target and Operation Desert Shield followed. Americans have been in combat ever since. Today American military personnel are  in most Middle Eastern countries, including all the Gulf monarchies, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Afghanistan.
The author briefing President George H.W. Bush in August 1990 in the CIA's Operations Center Source: Author's personal collection.
The Kuwait crisis came with little warning. I was in Baghdad and Kuwait in June 1990; I do not recall anyone mentioning the risk that Iraq might move south on Kuwait. Our focus was on Saddam's threats to "burn" Israel and the construction of launch sites for Scud missiles in western Iraq to hit Tel Aviv. But by mid-July we detected the Iraqi build-up along the Kuwaiti border. We told the president that Kuwait thought the Iraqis were bluffing; we did not.
Bush and his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft created a coalition to fight Iraq that included dozens of countries with major troop contributions from Britain and France in particular, as well as Egypt and Syria. Over a half-million American troops were deployed to the Gulf. More went to Israel after the war began and Saddam fired his Scuds at Israel.
Bush tried to avoid an open-ended war. He wisely did not invade Iraq after the liberation of Kuwait, but he created a no-fly zone in northern Iraq, Operation Provide Comfort, that led to years of combat patrols over Iraq. The northern zone was extended to include another no-fly zone in the south, Operation Southern Watch, to protect Iraqi Shiites and keep the Iraqis away from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, at least in the air. Thankfully, no Americans were shot down by the Iraqis, although tragically two American helicopters were shot down over Kurdistan on April 14, 1994 by Air Force jets, killing 26 Americans on board. I had been on one of those helicopters two weeks before the accident.
George W. Bush took us back to Iraq in 2003. He ignored  a warning from Scowcroft that it would divert critical resources from the fight against terrorism. He dismissed intelligence that said Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. The invasion has been called the worst decision in American foreign policy ever.
August 1990 was a turning point for Americans. Bush did the right thing, but as ever in war there were unanticipated consequences to the use of force. President Barack Obama and his Vice President Joe Biden tried to get out of Iraq but were drawn back in by ISIS. President Donald Trump has talked about leaving the endless wars, but has actually put more troops on the ground, including sending them back into Saudi Arabia after we left the kingdom in 2005. Washington has discovered getting in is easy, getting out is seemingly impossible.

9. Security for Whom? The Case for a Decolonial IR
Lots of schools of thought in security. Everyone in the security field should be a "gatecrasher."

Security for Whom? The Case for a Decolonial IR

georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org · by Emma Jouenne · August 1, 2020
Photo Credit: London School of Economics Department of Government Blogpost
The United States is coming to a crossroads today. With COVID-19 killing more people every day and Black Lives Matter protests happening all around the U.S., the conversation about systemic racism is more relevant than ever. Academia highlights the need to address the diversity of opinions in academic programs. Schools and universities are opening the conversation with experts and students in attempts to decolonize the curriculum through the introduction of spaces, resources and dialogues among all members of the university on how to envision different cultures and knowledge systems in the curriculum. The field of International Relations (IR) is at the center of this debate. Traditional IR theories have, for long, been introduced as the core of our understanding as to the ways by which countries interact with one another. Realism, liberalism and constructivism all bring certain perspectives to the fore. However, today, many experts and scholars have warned against the dangers of only teaching those traditional theories. Postcolonial IR theory is a good way to analyze the limitations of our current leading theories. By mentioning the shortfalls of traditional security theories, such as realism and liberalism, critical security theories have emerged to fill in the gaps and produce theoretical explanations that are more applicable to diverse societies across the world.

Explaining IR as It Stands

One of the main critiques of mainstream IR theories is their ethnocentrism. Amitav Acharya, a Professor of International Relations at American University and eminent scholar of postcolonial theory, uses Ken Booth's definition of ethnocentrism ("the inability to see the world through the eyes of another") to show that most theories of international relations produced so far have only focused on the interests of the United States, or at least the "West." Among other eminent scholars, Vivienne Jabri, Tarek Barkawi, Mark Laffey, Lee Jarvis and Jack Holland discuss the shortcomings and dangers of trying to create all-encompassing theories that only relate to certain parts of the world. One important strength of their work is the causal effect they draw between the historical context that led to the emergence and popularity of certain theories. Postcolonial theory teaches us how the hegemony of political realism in the Cold War era led to a shift in focus from individuals to states in security studies discourse. Because the scholars of this movement were Anglo-American and focused on great power competition, this led to the framing of security threats in relation to their own experience and history in terms of war and society. There was this strong conviction that the stage of world politics was mostly located in Europe or "the Global North," because it was where power was centralized, and that their experience of the world was everyone's.

The Consequences of the Absence of Postcolonial Literature

The world is not only made of and for the Global North, however. It is much more complex and diverse, which is why postcolonial theorists aim to explain the importance of diversifying scholarship to promote a more holistic understanding of the consequences and situations that lead to war and peace. Adopting a solely Eurocentric approach is dangerous: it causes scholars to dismiss important dynamics in conflicts and provides a distorted narrative of history. For example, the view that Europe is separate from its colonies and self-producing, renders invisible this mutual constitution of core and periphery characteristic of great powers. Eurocentrism also overlooks the agency of non-state actors that falls outside the realm of realism, like the undeniably important role that the late Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro played in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and finally, it maintains those boundaries between "us," the Global North, and "them," the rest of the world. Power dynamics and relations are central to security debates, but they become completely invisible in Eurocentric writings, such as Foucault's writings on the Iranian revolution. Imperialism is used by both Barkawi and Jabri to exemplify the limits of Eurocentric approaches- by failing to acknowledge the consequences of imperialism on the colonized countries and denying them autonomy, great colonial powers did not realize they were alienating populations and creating new enemies.
Waleed Hazbun, Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama, gives us a good example of this ethnocentrism when analyzing Former U.S. President Barack Obama's speeches in 2009 and 2011. He argues that even though his recognition of Arab states' "self-determination" was seen as revolutionary in US foreign policy, it was only an adaptation to their interests in the region. By centering his discourse around America, and how they can use those changes as vehicles for US intervention, Obama proves how US-centric his interests are. It exemplifies this construction of the Arab world as "the other" by putting "American values" as opposed to "Muslim values," he creates two different blocs of ideas and values. This is why he asserts the need for postcolonial approaches to analyze and understand international relations from a multipolar perspective rather than ethnocentric one.

The Role of Security Studies Programs

One of the classes offered at the Georgetown Security Studies Program (SSP) is "International Security," which requires students to read the following excerpt: "Whose security? Our focus in this book is on security as it is conceived in the developed world. We are in other words primarily concerned with the meaning of security in advanced market democracies...Our focus is, in part, a simple reflection of the fact that we ourselves live in the developed world." Approaches like these, despite being honest, prove problematic in a class on international security. The failure to integrate and write for larger audiences prevents us from acquiring a holistic understanding of the different dynamics in security.
Jarvis and Holland ask a crucial question: "security by whom and for whom?" Without postcolonial theory and other critical theories produced by the Copenhagen or the Welsh schools, we cannot fathom the idea that security might mean something for different people, and how certain institutions of the security apparatus can be oppressive and synonymous with danger for certain individuals. The death of George Floyd because of police brutality ends up being dismissed as irrelevant to the discipline of Security Studies if we do not teach and are taught that systemic racism within security forces exists and remains a critical issue. What we teach and what we omit from the curricula is of central importance, as it determines what is relevant and what is not. If, in programs designed to provide expertise in the field of security, certain issues are not raised, such as the intersection of race and security, or how colonization deeply changed the relationships between countries, this will never be a consideration for the future policymakers in those programs, and systemic racism will remain a critical national security problem. The symbol of moving certain issues outside of the "Security Studies" discipline is important. Georgetown is a good example of that, showing how a class on "Critical and Human Security" is part of the Arab Studies Program and not offered in the Security Studies Module List. The lack of critical theories in the theoretical foundations of a security studies program can hinder our ability to understand the relevance of ideas brought up by those theories when faced with security challenges.
By reviewing the different trends in Critical Security Theories and their development since the end of the Cold War, David Mutimer, a Professor at York University whose research focuses on critical social theory, argues that there is a very broad range of different schools of thought. By seeking to make changes from the present situation in order to free the oppressed in the future, critical theories aim to emancipate individuals from the chains of mainstream, ethnocentric approaches. "Gatecrashers" are individuals willing to emancipate themselves from exclusionary theories. Everyone in the security field, especially at the university level, ought to be a gatecrasher.
Ken Booth. (1991). "Security and Emancipation". Review of International Studies. 17(4): 313-326.
Amitav Acharya. (2000). "Ethnocentrism and Emancipatory IR Theory", in Samantha Arnold and J. Marshall Bier, eds. Displacing Security, Toronto: Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, pp. 1-18.
Lee Jarvis and Jack Holland,  Security: A Critical Introduction (New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Introduction & Chapter 1 (What is Security): 1-20; 21-67.
Tarek Barkawi and Mark Laffey. (2006). "The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies". Review of International Studies, 32(2), p.331.
Barkawi and Laffey, p. 335.
Barkawi and Laffey, p.346.
Barkawi and Laffey, p.329.
Jarvis and Holland, p.1.
Vivienne Jabri. (2007). "Michel Foucault's Analytics of War: The Social, the International, and the Racial."  International Political Sociology, 1: 79.
Walid Hazbun. (2013). "The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Challenge of Postcolonial Agency: International Relations, US Policy and the Arab World" in  Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. by G. Huggan, Oxford University Press, pp. 217-234.
Jarvis and Holland, p.3.
David Mutimer, "Critical Security Studies" in  The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies, ed. Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Victor Mauer (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 45-55.

10. WHO calls COVID-19 'once-in-a-century health crisis'


WHO calls COVID-19 'once-in-a-century health crisis'

donga.com
Posted August. 03, 2020 07:42,
Updated August. 03, 2020 07:42
WHO calls COVID-19 'once-in-a-century health crisis'. August. 03, 2020 07:42. by Youn-Jong Kim zozo@donga.com.
As the global transmission of COVID-19 has accelerated, the number of cumulative confirmed cases has topped 18 million. The World Health Organization has expressed concern, calling the pandemic a "once-in-a-century health crisis."

According to international statistics site Worldometer, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases exceeded 18 million as of Saturday. The milestone came just three days after the number topped 17 million last Wednesday, while the global death toll has topped 688,000 as of Sunday.

The coronavirus has spread rapidly in the three countries with the highest cumulative confirmed cases, namely the U.S., Brazil and India. Around 10,000 cases are being reportedly daily in South Africa, Mexico and Colombia, and Japan saw the number of confirmed cases exceed 1,500 for two consecutive days on Friday and Saturday.

In the fourth meeting of the WHO's emergency committee on Friday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the pandemic "once-in-a-century health crisis." "The pandemic's effects would be felt for decades," the WHO chief warned. The WHO has agreed that the pandemic remains a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), which was declared on January 30.
한국어

11. 'Clean Up This Mess': The Chinese Thinkers Behind Xi's Hard Line
This conclusion quote seems to explain it all:  "Sorry, the goal now is not Westernization; it's the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."


'Clean Up This Mess': The Chinese Thinkers Behind Xi's Hard Line

The New York Times · by Chris Buckley · August 2, 2020
Chinese academics have been honing the Communist Party's authoritarian response in Hong Kong, rejecting the liberal ideas of their youth.
Tian Feilong, a Chinese intellectual in favor of Hong Kong's new national security law, in Beijing. As a graduate student, he attended a traditionally more liberal university. Credit...Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
HONG KONG - When Tian Feilong first arrived in Hong Kong as demands for free elections were on the rise, he said he felt sympathetic toward a society that seemed to reflect the liberal political ideas he had studied as a graduate student in Beijing.
Then, as the calls escalated into protests across Hong Kong in 2014, he increasingly embraced Chinese warnings that freedom could go too far, threatening national unity. He became an ardent critic of the demonstrations, and six years later he is a staunch defender of the  sweeping national security law that China has imposed on the former British colony.
Mr. Tian has joined a tide of Chinese scholars who have turned against Western-inspired ideas that once flowed in China's universities, instead promoting the proudly authoritarian worldview ascendant under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party leader. This cadre of Chinese intellectuals serve as champions, even official advisers, defending and honing the party's hardening policies, including the  rollout of the security law in Hong Kong.
"Back when I was weak, I had to totally play by your rules. Now I'm strong and have confidence, so why can't I lay down my own rules and values and ideas?" Mr. Tian, 37, said in an interview, explaining the prevailing outlook in China. Witnessing the tumult as a visiting scholar in Hong Kong in 2014, Mr. Tian said, he "rethought the relationship between individual freedom and state authority."
"Hong Kong is, after all, China's Hong Kong," he said. "It's up to the Communist Party to clean up this mess."
While China's Communist Party has long nurtured legions of academics to defend its agenda, these authoritarian thinkers stand out for their unabashed, often flashily erudite advocacy of one-party rule and assertive sovereignty, and their turn against the liberal ideas that many of them once embraced.
A panel of scholars and experts discussed Hong Kong last year during a briefing in Beijing organized by the State Council Information Office. A generation of Chinese academics has turned against Western-inspired ideas.
They portray themselves as fortifying China for an era of deepening ideological rivalry. They describe the United States as a  dangerous, overreaching shambles, even more so in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They  oppose constitutional fetters on Communist Party control, arguing that Western-inspired ideas of the rule of law are a dangerous mirage that could hobble the party.
They argue that China must reclaim its status as a world power, even as a new  kind of benign empire displacing the United States. They extol Mr. Xi as a historic leader, guiding China through a momentous transformation.
A number of these scholars, sometimes  called "statists," have worked on policy toward Hong Kong, the sole territory under Chinese rule that has been a stubborn enclave for pro-democracy defiance of Beijing. Their proposals have fed into China's increasingly uncompromising line, including the security law, which has swiftly  curbed protests and  political debate.
"We ignore these voices at our own risk," said  Timothy Cheek, a historian at the University of British Columbia who helps run  Reading the China Dream, a website that translates works by Chinese thinkers. "They give voice to a stream of Chinese political thought that is probably more influential than liberal thought."
As well as earnestly citing Mr. Xi's speeches, these academics  draw on ancient Chinese thinkers who counseled stern rulership, along with Western critics of liberal political traditions. Traditional Marxism is rarely cited; they are proponents of order, not revolution.
The scholars extol the proudly authoritarian worldview ascendant under Xi Jinping, China's top leader. Credit...Roman Pilipey/EPA, via Shutterstock
Many of them make respectful nods in their papers to Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist who supplied rightist leaders in the 1930s and the emerging Nazi regime with arguments for extreme executive power in times of crisis,  Ryan Mitchell, an assistant professor of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,  documented in a recent paper.
"They've provided the reasoning and justification," Fu Hualing, a  professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, said of China's new authoritarian scholars. "In a way, it's the Carl Schmitt moment here."
China's ideological landscape was more varied a decade ago, when Mr. Tian was a graduate student at Peking University, a traditionally more liberal campus. Censorship was lighter, and universities tolerated guarded discussion of liberal ideas in classrooms.
Many scholars, including Mr. Tian's dissertation adviser, Zhang Qianfan,  argued that Hong Kong, with its robust judicial independence, could inspire similar steps in mainland China. "I had also been nurtured by liberal scholars." Mr. Tian said.
Such ideas have gone into sharp retreat since Mr. Xi took power in 2012. He  began a drive to discredit ideas like universal human rights, separation of powers and other liberal concepts.
Dissenting academics are maligned in the party-run news media and risk professional ruin. Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, was  detained in July and  dismissed from his job after writing a stream of essays condemning the party's direction under Mr. Xi.
Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University, was detained by the police in Beijing in July and lost his job. Credit...The New York Times
The education authorities generously fund pro-party scholars for topics  such as how to introduce security laws in Hong Kong. Chinese and foreign foundations that once supported less orthodox Chinese scholars  have retrenched because of tightening official restrictions.
More than fear and career rewards have driven this resurgence of authoritarian ideas in China. The global financial crisis of 2007, and the United States' floundering response to the coronavirus pandemic, have reinforced Chinese views that liberal democracies are decaying, while China has prospered, defying predictions of the collapse of one-party rule.
"China is actually also following a path that the United States took, seizing opportunities, developing outward, creating a new world," Mr. Tian said. "There is even a fervent hope that we'll overtake the West in another 30 years."
China's authoritarian academics have  proposed policies to assimilate ethnic minorities thoroughly. They have defended Mr. Xi's  abolition of a term limit on the presidency, opening the way for him to stay in power indefinitely. They have argued that Chinese-style "rule by law" is  inseparable from rule by the Communist Party. And more recently they have served as intellectual warriors in Beijing's efforts to subdue protest in Hong Kong.
"For them, law becomes a weapon, but it's law that's subordinated to politics," said Sebastian Veg, a professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris who has studied the  rise of China's statist thinkers. "We've seen that at work in China, and now it seems to me we're seeing it come to Hong Kong."
For Hong Kong, these scholars have supplied arguments advancing Beijing's drive for greater central control.
Under the legal framework that defined Hong Kong's semi-autonomy after its return to China in 1997, many in the territory assumed that it would mostly manage its own affairs for decades. Many believed that Hong Kong lawmakers and leaders would be left to develop national security legislation, which was required by that framework.
But Mr. Xi's government has pushed back, demanding greater influence. The authoritarian scholars, familiar with both Mr. Xi's agenda and Hong Kong law, have distilled those demands into elaborate legal arguments.
Several Beijing law professors earlier served as advisers to the Chinese government's office in Hong Kong, including Jiang Shigong and Chen Duanhong, both of Peking University. They declined to be interviewed.
"The survival of the state comes first," over individual rights, wrote Chen Duanhong, professor of law at Peking University, who served as an adviser to the Chinese government's office in Hong Kong.
"I don't think they're necessarily setting the party line, but they're helping to shape it, finding clever ways to put into words and laws what the party is trying to do," said Mr. Mitchell, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "This is all happening through legislation, so their ideas matter."
Chinese government paper in 2014, which Professor Jiang is  widely credited with helping write, asserted that Beijing had "comprehensive jurisdiction" over Hong Kong, dismissing the idea that China should stay hands off. The framework that defined Hong Kong's status was written in the 1980s, when China was still weak and under the sway of foreign liberal ideas,  he later said.
"They treat Hong Kong as if it were part of the West, and they treat the West as if it were the entire world." Professor Jiang  recently said of Hong Kong's protesters. "China's rise has not, as some imagined, drawn Hong Kong society to trust the central authorities."
After protesters occupied Hong Kong streets in 2014, he and other scholars  pressed the case that China had the power to impose national security legislation there, rejecting the idea that such legislation should be left in the hands of the reluctant Hong Kong authorities.
"The survival of the state comes first, and constitutional law must serve this fundamental objective," Professor Chen, the Peking University academic,  wrote in 2018, citing Mr. Schmitt, the authoritarian German jurist, to make the case for a security law in Hong Kong.
"When the state is in dire peril," Professor Chen wrote, leaders could set aside the usual constitutional norms, "in particular provisions for civic rights, and take all necessary measures."
Professor Chen submitted an internal study to the party's policymakers on introducing security legislation for Hong Kong, according to a  Peking University report in 2018, over a year before the party publicly  announced plans for such a law.
Since China's legislature  passed the security law in late June, he, Mr. Tian and allied Chinese scholars have energetically defended it in dozens of articles, interviews and news conferences. Chinese intellectuals, Mr. Tian suggested, will next confront worsening relations with the United States.
"We have to choose what side we're on, including us scholars, right?" he said. "Sorry, the goal now is not Westernization; it's the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."
Amber Wang contributed research from Beijing.



12. Army Guard begins to reorganize force into eight divisions to prepare for possible fights with Russia and China
Are we itching to violate the Princess Bride's admonition and have a land war in Asia?



Army Guard begins to reorganize force into eight divisions to prepare for possible fights with Russia and China

Stars and Stripes
WASHINGTON - The Army National Guard will move most of its brigades under the command of its eight division headquarters as it reorganizes its fighting formations to give the force more combat power and some soldiers new career opportunities, officials said.
The Guard move will mark a substantial increase in the number of fully manned divisions that the Army can deploy, as only the service's 10 active-duty divisions are now filled out with subordinate units, said Lt. Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the director of the Army National Guard. The increase to 18 complete Army divisions comes at a time when service officials believe a major conflict with a near-peer rival - namely Russia or China - would require the employment of full divisions, he said.
For the last two decades, the Army has focused on its smaller brigade combat teams as its primary fighting elements for counterterrorism operations and deployments focused on assisting the forces of other nations.
"When you look at the [2018] National Defense Strategy and competition among near-peer competitors, peer competitors - that great power competition, there is a potential for large-scale combat operations ... [and] it could actually be division level fights," Hokanson said in an interview Thursday ahead of the Guard's planned announcement Saturday. "We wanted to make sure that everything that the Army National Guard did was in support of the total Army and the NDS, and one issue was that our divisions are just headquarters they don't have brigades under them."
The National Defense Strategy, crafted by former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, guides the Pentagon on future planning, placing the potential for major conflict with rivals China and Russia as the nation's primary national security threat. For the two decades prior, the military had focused almost exclusively on fighting transnational terrorist organizations, which the strategy defined as a lesser threat than those posed by nation-state competitors.
The Army National Guard now has eight headquarters elements stationed in Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Kansas, Indiana, California and New York, which are each made up of about 300 or so soldiers. Some have established relationships with subordinate units, but none are manned in the way the Regular Army has built its divisions, which boast about 20,000 soldiers.
After studying the formations, Hokanson found the Army Guard had plenty of brigades and battalions to staff those divisions, which would allow the formations to train together and establish critical bonds should they be needed to deploy together into combat.
The actual division alignments have yet to be finalized. This week, officials notified key lawmakers and stakeholders in the 54 U.S. states and territories that host Army Guard formations about the plans, Guard officials said. They will require governors and other top state leaders to agree to partnerships with some units falling under the control of headquarters in other states.
But Hokanson said the new alignment will have no impact on the governors' and state adjutant generals' control of the forces assigned to their home states. He also said the National Guard has not asked Congress to provide additional funding for the changes.
The plan calls for more brigades to align with other divisions in their general regions of the nation.
In one example, Hokanson said New Mexico's 1-200th Infantry Battalion would become part of the 41st Infantry Brigade Combat Team based in Oregon, which would become part of with the 40th Infantry Division based in California.
The new alignment, the general said, will actually provide new opportunities for soldiers serving in units such as the 1-200th, where states have no higher headquarters in a combat unit. Under the reorganization, a battalion commander or a battalion sergeant major who performed well would have an opportunity for promotions to serve in higher commands within the new division - potentially even becoming a brigade commander or division commander of a unit based in another state.
"So, if you've got a lieutenant colonel or sergeant major out there in New Mexico, and one of them is absolutely, potentially the best battalion commander or senior [noncommissioned officer] in the entire division [right now] really wouldn't matter - there's no opportunity for them to advance," Hokanson said. "This would provide us the ability to better manage our talent across the National Guard by providing opportunities to those officers and NCOs that demonstrate the greatest potential and capability - we then give them the potential for opportunities beyond where they might normally get if they just stayed in their [home] state."
He said he hopes to have all the National Guard divisions established in the coming months and reach initial operating capability - meaning they have trained enough together to be certified as minimally effective to deploy and fight as a unit - by Oct. 1, 2021.
Hokanson on Monday will receive a fourth star as he is promoted to the director of the National Guard, making him one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The new plan will then be overseen largely by his replacement, Maj. Gen. Jon Jensen, who is now adjutant general for Minnesota. Jensen will be promoted to lieutenant general and also become Army Guard director Monday.
Like the bigger Army, Hokanson pointed out the National Guard has been heavily used during the last 20 years, at home - where Guard soldiers have responded to myriad natural disasters, civil unrest and the recent coronavirus pandemic - and abroad, where they have regularly deployed to the Middle East and Afghanistan. He wants those units to be well-prepared for the next kind of fight they could encounter with a major military power.
"We never want to fight," he said. "The goal is to prevent conflict."
But if that fight does come, he wants the Army Guard soldiers ready to deploy as a full division that has spent time working together, instead of having to piece together a division at the last minute. He compared it to a basketball team where the players have spent years playing together as opposed to a pickup game where teammates might not know one another.
"When you go out on the playground and everyone picks players and you just go versus having a team, and you may only practice once a month and two weeks over the summer, but over the course of months and years you know your strengths and weaknesses, you've worked together and as a team, you would play much better together," Hokanson said. "That's what we're looking at with this."




13. Watch: Chinese scientist claims Covid-19 started in 'military lab' after fleeing to US

Watch: Chinese scientist claims Covid-19 started in 'military lab' after fleeing to US

nzherald.co.nz
A Chinese medical expert, who fled to the US, has backed claims that the Covid-19 pandemic began in a military lab and was covered up by Chinese officials.
Dr Li Meng-Yan, a virology specialist from Hong Kong, fled to the US in fear she would be "disappeared" by Chinese forces over her findings and beliefs.
She told Fox News the Chinese government censored her work, and her findings could have saved lives across the globe.
"This is a huge pandemic we have seen in the world," Yan Li-Meng told host Bill Hemmer.
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"It's more than anything we've known in human history. So, the timing is very, very important. If we can stop it early, we can save lives."
Dr Li Meng-Yan, a virology specialist from Hong Kong, fled to the US in fear she would be "disappeared" by Chinese forces over her findings and beliefs. Photo / Fox News
Meng-Yan told Fox News she believes the Chinese government knew about Covid-19 at least a month before publically acknowledging there was an outbreak.
She said her supervisor first asked her to conduct a "secret" investigation into the new virus at the end of last year.
Then she claimed her supervisors, known as some of the top experts in the field, ignored her own research and said to not cross the government's "red line" and to "keep silent and be careful".
"I have to hide because I know how they treat whistleblowers, and as a whistleblower here I want to tell the truth of Covid-19 and the origin of the SARS-2 Covid virus," Yan told Fox News Digital.
One of Dr Meng-Yan's core claims is that while studying person-to-person transmission of the virus, her findings indicate it came from a research facility linked to the People's Liberation Army.
She said the Wuhan wet market was "used as a decoy".
Dr Li said she her supervisor first asked her to conduct a 'secret' investigation into the new virus at the end of last year. Photo / Getty
Dr Meng-Yan told Hemmer the government knew in December more than 40 citizens had been infected by Covid-19 and that "human-to-human transmissions were already occurring" at the time.
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Several governments around the world have criticised China's reluctance to share information about the virus.
An intelligence dossier compiled by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies which was leaked to an Australian newspaper in May stated that Chinese authorities denied that the virus could be spread between humans until January 20, "despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December". As late as January 14, the World Health Organisation had stated that there was "no clear evidence" for human-to-human transmission of Covid-19.
While the current believed theory is that Covid-19 was not manmade or genetically modified, US President Donald Trump has raised the issue of human interference more than once.



14. US Strategic Command now analyzes daily deterrence risks for all combatant commands
Probably one of the hardest things to do is measure deterrence and risk because it is really based on human psychology and decision making.  We can have the best algorithms and AI but it is difficult to predict what kind of decision, Xi or Putin or the reiges in Iran and north Korea are going to do and to know what really deters them and what is their threshold for pain.  But the analysis must be done (or attempted) even if it is not an exact science.

US Strategic Command now analyzes daily deterrence risks for all combatant commands

Defense News · by Aaron Mehta · July 31, 2020
WASHINGTON - In the last six months, U.S. Strategic Command has begun performing daily analysis on the state of nuclear deterrence in each of the regional combatant commands, STRATCOM commander  Adm. Charles Richard said Thursday.
Richard described the "risk of strategic deterrence failure" effort as a "new type of analysis" that allows STRATCOM to present, on a day-by-day basis, "a formal estimate of the risks that deterrence is going to fail" around the globe.
"I acknowledge this is an analytic process getting after something that is fundamentally subjective," Richard said at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute. "But the assertion here is, this risk carries so much consequence that I need to be able to describe to the [defense] secretary and the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] at all times, under all conditions, what risks we're taking with regard to deterrence failing, and then inside that, nuclear deterrence failing."
The new analysis pulls in information from the Joint Staff and  other combatant commands. Richard said the threat of deterrence failure is "currently low."
"We have some great formal mechanisms with all the combatant commands to pull in what they see and what they're doing, put it into my best possible emulation of the other guy's decision calculus, and then be able to provide the department: 'All right, here's where we sit. Here's the risk, here's the margin,' " Richard explained.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who  leads the Mitchell Institute, said the day-to-day assessment design described by Richard is "unique" and could have great value.
"He is applying an outcome-oriented assessment to strategic deterrence that may have been implied in the past, but he is making a concerted effort to identify the impact of strategic deterrence in a much more qualitative and quantitative fashion," Deptula said.
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" 'Deterrence' is challenging to quantify, but by committing to assessing the impact of deterrent effects," Richard is creating a more deliberate process, Deptula added. "I really think he is establishing a process of how to best determine the impact of actions that STRATCOM is taking in the decisions that it is making."
Richard also stressed that defining deterrence in 2020 can be difficult, noting that "strategic deterrence is more than just nuclear deterrence, particularly now, today. It is non-kinetic space, cyber; it is your conventional piece of this."
"All of this  has to be integrated together. It's not just a STRATCOM job, it is all combatant commands. And we have to be able to rethink the way we do business," he said. "We're going to have to change the way we think about deterrence."
One of the commands providing daily input is U.S. Space Command, which,  until its creation as a standalone command, fell under STRATCOM's purview.
Richard described the relationship between the two as "closely coupled," noting that SPACECOM still has a major role in ensuring nuclear command and control, and that STRATCOM continues to handle some bureaucratic functions for the newest command.

15. Debate begins for who's first in line for COVID-19 vaccine

Debate may not be a strong enough word.  When the plans for vaccination are released and the priorities established it will probably generate controversy on a level we have not seen lately

Debate begins for who's first in line for COVID-19 vaccine

AP · by LAURAN NEERGAARD · August 2, 2020
Who gets to be first in line for a COVID-19 vaccine? U.S. health authorities hope by late next month to have some draft guidance on how to ration initial doses, but it's a vexing decision.
"Not everybody's going to like the answer," Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently told one of the advisory groups the government asked to help decide. "There will be many people who feel that they should have been at the top of the list."
Traditionally, first in line for a scarce vaccine are health workers and the people most vulnerable to the targeted infection.
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But Collins tossed new ideas into the mix: Consider geography and give priority to people where an outbreak is hitting hardest.
And don't forget volunteers in the final stage of vaccine testing who get dummy shots, the comparison group needed to tell if the real shots truly work.
"We owe them ... some special priority," Collins said.
Huge studies this summer aim to prove which of several experimental COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. began tests last week that eventually will include 30,000 volunteers each; in the next few months, equally large calls for volunteers will go out to test shots made by AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax. And some vaccines made in China are in smaller late-stage studies in other countries.
Full Coverage:  Racing for a Remedy
For all the promises of the U.S. stockpiling millions of doses, the hard truth: Even if a vaccine is declared safe and effective by year's end, there won't be enough for everyone who wants it right away -- especially as most potential vaccines require two doses.
It's a global dilemma. The World Health Organization is grappling with the same who-goes-first question as it tries to ensure vaccines are fairly distributed to poor countries -- decisions made even harder as wealthy nations corner the market for the first doses.
In the U.S., the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is supposed to recommend who to vaccinate and when -- advice that the government almost always follows.
But a COVID-19 vaccine decision is so tricky that this time around, ethicists and vaccine experts from the National Academy of Medicine, chartered by Congress to advise the government, are being asked to weigh in, too.
Setting priorities will require "creative, moral common sense," said Bill Foege, who devised the vaccination strategy that led to global eradication of smallpox. Foege is co-leading the academy's deliberations, calling it "both this opportunity and this burden."
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With vaccine misinformation abounding and fears that politics might intrude, CDC Director Robert Redfield said the public must see vaccine allocation as "equitable, fair and transparent."
How to decide? The CDC's opening suggestion: First vaccinate 12 million of the most critical health, national security and other essential workers. Next would be 110 million people at high risk from the coronavirus -- those over 65 who live in long-term care facilities, or those of any age who are in poor health -- or who also are deemed essential workers. The general population would come later.
CDC's vaccine advisers wanted to know who's really essential. "I wouldn't consider myself a critical health care worker," admitted Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a pediatrician at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Indeed, the risks for health workers today are far different than in the pandemic's early days. Now, health workers in COVID-19 treatment units often are the best protected; others may be more at risk, committee members noted.
Beyond the health and security fields, does "essential" mean poultry plant workers or schoolteachers? And what if the vaccine doesn't work as well among vulnerable populations as among younger, healthier people? It's a real worry, given that older people's immune systems don't rev up as well to flu vaccine.
With Black, Latino and Native American populations disproportionately hit by the coronavirus, failing to address that diversity means "whatever comes out of our group will be looked at very suspiciously," said ACIP chairman Dr. Jose Romero, Arkansas' interim health secretary.
Consider the urban poor who live in crowded conditions, have less access to health care and can't work from home like more privileged Americans, added Dr. Sharon Frey of St. Louis University.
And it may be worth vaccinating entire families rather than trying to single out just one high-risk person in a household, said Dr. Henry Bernstein of Northwell Health.
Whoever gets to go first, a mass vaccination campaign while people are supposed to be keeping their distance is a tall order. During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, families waited in long lines in parking lots and at health departments when their turn came up, crowding that authorities know they must avoid this time around.
Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's effort to speed vaccine manufacturing and distribution, is working out how to rapidly transport the right number of doses to wherever vaccinations are set to occur.
Drive-through vaccinations, pop-up clinics and other innovative ideas are all on the table, said CDC's Dr. Nancy Messonnier.
As soon as a vaccine is declared effective, "we want to be able the next day, frankly, to start these programs," Messonnier said. "It's a long road."
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
AP · by LAURAN NEERGAARD · August 2, 2020

16. Washington isn't listening to the Air Force and Space Force
I just hope it will listen to the real Space Force and Air Force and not the ones on the Netflix show "Space Force."  That show is the most irreverent satire I have seen in a long time.

Washington isn't listening to the Air Force and Space Force

Defense News · by Col. Keith Zuegel (ret.) · July 31, 2020
After more than 20 years of advocating for the U.S. Air Force, I continue to be surprised how the world's most dominant air force has been taken for granted, and even ignored, in Washington, D.C. Congress remains  fixated on shipbuilding, and the ground services dominate the military's senior positions, policy and defense budgets.
The Department of the Air Force, responsible for training and equipping two military services -  the Air Force and the Space Force - has been underfunded for decades, resulting in significant shortfalls in readiness and modernization. While the Air Force forfeited future modernization to pay for current operations, China and Russia made great strides toward parity.
Politicians protect airplanes on military installations to prevent closures, so the U.S. Air Force has been unable to right-size its basing and has been stonewalled in managing its force structure.
For the past couple years, the Air Force requested funding to grow its force by 23 percent to 386 squadrons. Congress authorized it - but fails to provide the commensurate funding.
Air Force leaders have long insisted that the service needs investment; however, their requests go largely ignored. The force has grown too old, too small and not ready to meet future global threats. Meanwhile, China and Russia increased investments in technology and are leaping ahead in capabilities such as hypersonics.
An intercontinental ballistic missile lifts off from a truck-mounted launcher somewhere in Russia. The Russian military said the Avangard hypersonic weapon has entered combat duty. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)
The U.S. Air Force is continually forced to choose: Win today's fight, or modernize for tomorrow's conflict. To fund newer aircraft, it must divest resource-draining legacy aircraft - designed for past conflicts and unable to penetrate modern defenses. Yet, Congress continues to force the service to keep dated aircraft, or even procure more old fighters.
After 1991's Operation Desert Storm, the Air Force was downsized by a third. It is now too small for our nation's requirements. Of all the services deployed to the Persian Gulf in 1990, however, only the Air Force has yet to return - 30 years of continuous combat operations.
The need for modernization grows more dire each year. The Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile force is now beyond repair and must be replaced. Ninety percent of Air Force bombers predate stealth technology and are unable to penetrate modern air defenses.
The Defense Department's budget is confusing - and misleading. On the surface, it appears that the departments of the Air Force, Army and Navy receive comparable shares of the budget.
That's false.
There is a little-understood provision, referred to as the " pass-through," which quietly transfers more than 20 percent of the Department of the Air Force's budget to programs outside its control. Pass-through funds that seemed to go to the Air Force for space were inaccessible for Air Force space investment.
Meanwhile,  COVID-19 has exacerbated readiness challenges for the military. Four huge stimulus funding bills will jeopardize future defense budgets, and the Department of Defense will assuredly be the major bill payer for future federal spending.
The Air Force is not without fault. Its messaging must be more persuasive and consistent. The F-35 program was slow out of the box, and the KC-46 air refueling tanker, arriving years late, still can't reliably pass fuel to other aircraft. Yet, the Department of the Air Force is far too modest to boast about all it does so well.
The Space Force is the sixth branch of service that was established during the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act on Dec. 20, 2019. (Tech. Sgt. Robert Barnett/U.S. Air Force)
The Air Force provides the airlift to the joint force and is the nation's primary deterrent to both nuclear and conventional war, possessing two-thirds of the nuclear triad and almost all of the nuclear command-and-control systems; it also provides much of the nation's forward presence, and is the reliable provider of precision strike capability, day or night, around the globe.
The new Space Force was carved entirely from the Air Force, and provides intelligence and communications for the joint force. It offers GPS to billions, providing accurate signals for navigation and timing that fuels whole industries and ensures the accuracy of ATM withdrawals.
America's dominance in the air, space and cyber realms can no longer be taken for granted. The National Defense Strategy Commission stated: "Regardless of where the next conflict occurs or which adversary it features,  the Air Force will be at the forefront."
The nascent Space Force needs investment to increase capability and the authorities to organize for efficacy to meet the capabilities that were promised when it was founded in December 2019. It needs to become joint - not just have personnel change name tags from U.S. Air Force to U.S. Space Force. And the National Reconnaissance Office should be part of the Space Force.
The Department of the Air Force needs stable and predictable funding - at adequate funding levels. Continuing resolutions degrade readiness. Currently, two services - both the Air Force and the Space Force - must train and equip their forces within the Air Force's original budget level.
To ensure our military is ready, it must take care of its people - active, Guard, reserve and civilians. That means commensurate pay,  preserving medical billets, maintaining access to medical services and facilities, eliminating restrictive licensure requirements that limit the ability of military spouses to  transition to new professional jobs after moving, sufficient child care centers, and adequate military housing.
Planned reforms of the DoD's Military Health System would eliminate up to 18,000 military medical personnel - 4,000 from the Air Force, 7,000 from the Army and 5,000 from the Navy. Dozens of military treatment facilities would be downsized, with access limited to active-duty personnel.
The services need legislative relief to overcome a six-month restriction before hiring military retirees possessing a security clearance.
The U.S. Air Force remains the world's predominant air force; however, its dominance is endangered.  Air superiority is not a birthright. The fledgling U.S. Space Force remains the world's leader in military space; however, without resources and congressional focus, it will be challenged by other world powers.
This is the fourth quarter of the budget season, so Congress should recognize and support  both services now - before it's too late.
Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Keith Zuegel served in combat operations during Desert Storm, during which he received a Silver Star. Most recently, he was the senior director of government relations at the Air Force Association.
Defense News · by Col. Keith Zuegel (ret.) · July 31, 2020


17.  Chinese Propaganda Campaign Blames Pandemic on U.S. Army Facility Closed in 1969

Yes, but...  Fort Detrick was never closed.  The best propaganda always has elements of truth. Few are going to parse it and note that it was only the offensive bio-weapons lab that was declared closed in 1969.  But the basic idea of the article is on the right track - China will admit nothing, deny everything and make counter accusations. 

Chinese Propaganda Campaign Blames Pandemic on U.S. Army Facility Closed in 1969 - Washington Free Beacon

freebeacon.com · by Yuichiro Kakutani · August 2, 2020
Coronavirus

Regime officials, propaganda outlets seek to dodge China's role in coronavirus outbreak

Getty Images
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Chinese propagandists are casting blame for the coronavirus pandemic on a U.S. military research lab that shuttered its biowarfare division more than 50 years ago.
Chinese diplomats and state-run media outlets have repeatedly spread the conspiracy that the coronavirus originated in Maryland's Fort Detrick research lab, often in response to criticism about the country's response to the pandemic.
"Speaking of the truth, we would like the U.S. government to tell the truth about the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, to U.S. and the international community," Wang Wenbin, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said on July 22.
But President Richard Nixon closed down Fort Detrick's offensive biowarfare division in 1969-50 years before the first coronavirus cases were reported in Wuhan, China. Fort Detrick now focuses on defensive biological research as well as cancer research. U.S. officials have frequently criticized the Chinese government for using the Fort Detrick conspiracy theory-and other unproven allegations-to blame the outbreak on the United States.
"To have somebody ... from the Chinese government come out and make a statement like that [is] completely ridiculous and it's irresponsible, and it doesn't get us to where we need to be,"  said Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in March.
Chinese propaganda organs have floated other countries as possible origins of the coronavirus, with a similar lack of evidence.  Global  Times, a leading mouthpiece for the regime, once insinuated that the virus could have originated in  Spain, citing one research article that has not been peer-reviewed. The same outlet also  claimed that the coronavirus was detected in Brazilian sewage back in November 2019.
Chinese social media accounts and U.S. conspiracy theorists have also  smeared American military personnel as part of their Fort Detrick conspiracy, accusing one soldier of bringing the virus to China when she competed in the World Military Games held in Wuhan in late 2019. Chinese authorities, who exercise near-total control over what is disseminated on the Chinese internet, have allowed the rumors to spread.  Global Times also  covered the conspiracy theory in March, demanding that the United States release information about the U.S. delegation to the sports competition.
Yuichiro Kakutani is a reporter at the Washington Free Beacon. He recently graduated from Cornell University, where he studied government and history. He previously served as editor for The Cornell Daily Sun. He's a proud New Yorker - and by that he means, New York City. He can be reached at kakutani@freebeacon.com.

18. Army's Top General Says He's Reassured Allies That US Troops Will Stay Out of Policing
It is interesting that our allies are concerned about this.  But here is the buried lede: "In the Indo-Pacific region, the Army's top priority is developing long-range, precision-fire artillery and missiles to counter China, and securing basing rights from allies for the weapons systems, McConville said."

Army's Top General Says He's Reassured Allies That US Troops Will Stay Out of Policing

military.com · by Richard Sisk · August 1, 2020
Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said Friday that he has sought to ease allies' concerns about the U.S. military becoming involved in law enforcement actions in response to nationwide protests.
"As we talk to other countries and other militaries, we have that discussion to make sure they understand that the purpose of the U.S. Army is to protect the nation, not police the nation," he said. "We should leave policing the nation to law enforcement."
"When it comes to the military, we need to do the right thing, the right way, in all circumstances," McConville said in response to questions at a Center for Strategic and International Studies forum on the Army's role in the Indo-Pacific region.
He had been asked whether the turmoil across the nation is affecting the "U.S. brand" overseas and possibly raising questions among allies about military-to-military partnerships.
"We did not  deploy regular Army troops" in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere during disturbances, McConville stressed, although such units were briefly poised at bases on the District's outskirts in early June.
"As far as employing regular Army troops" for domestic law enforcement, "that's only to be done as the absolute last resort. Even the  National Guard should only be employed as a last resort," he added.
In the Indo-Pacific region, the Army's top priority is developing long-range, precision-fire artillery and missiles to counter China, and securing basing rights from allies for the weapons systems, McConville said.
"We know we need long-range precision fires," including extended-range artillery, he said, adding that the Army will seek to protect the weapons systems should defense budgets decline in coming years.
To back up the long-range weapons, "We're standing up a new organization. It's called multi-domain task forces that provide the ability to do long-range precision effects," McConville said. Where the new weapons would go in the region has yet to be decided, he added.
"That's something we're still working on," he explained. "As far as the exact positioning, we do have some capability in the extremely long-range precision fires to give us certain effects, but that capability as far as exact positioning is still being determined."
-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.



19.  Managing Chaos: Biosecurity in a Post-COVID-19 America
We need to be conducting the AAR for COVID-19 with the idea that this is a rehearsal for a bio-weapons attack on many levels - look at the strategic effects - crippling our economy - to the tactical and operational issues for our military - can we learn to "fight through" actual attacks in the future?  Our adversaries are looking at this and trying to determine the efficacy of employing biological weapons (probably not a man made COVID attack but biological weapons on some scale if they believe they can achieve. an advantage in support of strategic objectives.

Managing Chaos: Biosecurity in a Post-COVID-19 America

thestrategybridge.org · August 3, 2020
Bilva Chandra and Andrew Gonzalez

The Current U.S. Security Environment is Ripe for Disruption

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has asserted new pressures on the United States' national security space due to the exponential nature of biological threats and the lack of a coordinated response. The response has publicly demonstrated the United States' failure to  develop and implement a coherent plan, leading the Trump Administration to cease U.S. funding of the World Health Organization, exposing the Administration's tendency for harried decision-making processes. More alarming is how the United States' adversaries seek to exploit similar threats of biological warfare using emerging technologies. These topics are intimately interconnected, and this current crisis elucidates the United States' fragile ability to handle biological threats.
Early on in the crisis, the U.S. dithered in implementing  stringent travel restrictions and  limitations on social interactions to slow the spread of infection and mitigate economic damage simultaneously. Indecisiveness led to the worst of both worlds, in which the infection rate and economic loss outpaced political action. The spread of the coronavirus is not limited to the domestic front. The coronavirus spread and infected over 1,000 sailors  aboard critical U.S. Navy warships within only a few days of initial detection. This puts U.S. forward military capabilities in question, creating tactical ambiguity and perceptions of temporary weakness. For U.S. adversaries, this is the perfect storm: irresolute leadership, the appearance of preoccupied military forces, and an incapacitated workforce. The United States has managed domestic crises in prior years, from terror attacks to natural disasters, but COVID-19 is an aberration due to the scale and scope of disruption to American society, revealing a previously untested Achilles heel in the form of biological threats.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt off Manila Bay in 2018. The captain, facing a growing outbreak of the coronavirus, asked the Pentagon for permission to move most of his crew to shore. (Bullit Marquez/AP)

Emerging Technology is the Ideal Enabler

Emerging technologies, including biotechnology, accelerate the lethal use of unconventional weapons due to its increasingly disruptive capabilities. It is their synergistic properties that make threats enabled by emerging technologies more tangible today. Artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, and biotechnology are precisely the hazardous triumvirate that has raised concerns in the technology and national security communities. These emerging technologies can enable our adversaries, both state and non-state actors, to more effectively and expediently develop unconventional weapons advantages under the radar. The trend of technology democratization is exhaustive and, in the case of biotechnology, produces ominous implications. For example,  additive manufacturing reduces the barriers to entry for a variety of technological fields and allows malicious state actors to accelerate the production and weaponization of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. In the post-COVID-19 world, these technologies will raise the stakes associated with preventing and mitigating the disruptive effects of biological threats, due to the simultaneous lack of controls on them and the United States' readiness to respond. Artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing can enhance our adversaries' ability to develop biological weapons and exploit the United States' national security vulnerabilities, currently exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recently, dialogue regarding emerging technology by scholars at the  RAND Corporation and the  Federation of American Scientists has centered on the growth, acquisition, and evolution of artificial intelligence, and its potential to create unintended consequences and undermine the United States' strategic stability. Artificial intelligence encompasses an overarching umbrella of technologies that enable machines to simulate the behavior of human beings. The commercialization of this technology has resulted in its democratization. As posited by  Michael C. Horowitz, there are clear first-mover advantages in employing narrow artificial intelligence technologies, especially within military institutions that can affect the global balance of power. States with demure conventional capabilities compared to the United States can gain access to artificial intelligence due to its commercial nature and affordability. For example, many  deep learning frameworks-such as  TensorFlow, and PyTorch-are open-source information, and their algorithms are accessible to the public. Advancements in bio-warfare can be further empowered by artificial intelligence, as it facilitates better data insights, automates parts of the testing process, and makes the creation of biological agents and weapons more efficient, and affordable. For example, analyses of genetic data using  machine learning techniques would only take a few days, instead of a status-quo operation of several months through traditional processes. This method of optimization enables the rapid creation of effective bioweapons. Biotechnologies like synthetic biology serve a  dual-purpose, because they are commercially-driven in sectors such as medicine and agriculture, and possess military applications due to their ability to create biological agents and diseases. The capability of artificial intelligence to accelerate the growth of the future biotechnology space, especially in its military application is extensive and worrisome.
Additive manufacturing and biology (Cellink)
Additive manufacturing, commonly referred to as 3D printing, is the other emerging technology changing the landscape of biotechnology capabilities. This technology encompasses a variety of processes in which a synthetic or other material is layered to create a three-dimensional object. In recent years, 3D printers became capable of printing objects with several material inputs including metal, plastic, ceramic, cement, wood, and-most importantly here-bio-organics. Much like artificial intelligence, the democratization of 3D printing is already underway, with innovative and advanced capabilities rapidly emerging from both private labs and hobbyist communities. Medical researchers are  creating synthetic organs using bio-organic printing material, an innovation that can grow organic incubators for lethal pathogens. Organic fermenters, which are used as a crude dispersal device, were  developed and tested by engineers using 3D printers at the University of Seattle in 2017. While these blueprints are proprietary, they  are poised to become open-source. This development creates a significant issue for international weapons control regimes that goes beyond the dilemma of dual-use technology. Reliable methods for detecting the production of biological weapons become less useful as production facilities are effectively miniaturized, leaving weapon stockpiles as the only evidence of their existence. In combination with genome sequencing enabled by artificial intelligence, the development of specialized viral and bacterial pathogens is within reach of knowledgeable adversaries. For now, such capabilities still require robust biological and material engineering experience, though this is achievable by any reasonably advanced country.

The Adversarial Advantage

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, such threats could be waved away as unlikely, given the difficulty involved in developing and deploying a biological weapon, the potential for self-harm, and the strength of international norms and institutions against its use. Today, the threat is closer to reality than expected because the United States' current situation illustrates the potential pay-off. A distracted U.S. provides an excellent opportunity for its  adversaries to conduct risky military operations or engage in escalatory behavior that would typically elicit a retaliatory response.
U.S. adversaries have quickly learned from this extended period of vulnerability. They are using it to undermine American cohesion and international influence. After being criticized for its slow response, China promulgated narratives portraying  its COVID-19 response more positively and characterized itself as a  generous provider of medical supplies and expertise. In conjunction with Russia and Iran, China has also  propagated conspiracies about the origin of COVID-19, denying its  emergence in Wuhan and suggesting the  U.S. deployed the virus as a biological attack. Not only does this disinformation damage the United States' reputation abroad, it also contributes to a weakening of norms against the use of biological weapons through the mere insinuation a nation-state would conduct a biological attack. China has pushed the boundaries on ethical applications of biotechnology, threatening to take the lead in shaping the norms and principles around its use.
Vulnerabilities displayed by the coronavirus pandemic coupled with opportunistic and capable adversaries produce a new threat environment in which emerging technology-enabled bioweapons figure more prominently. In recent years, Russia has demonstrated a lack of concern for the ban on chemical weapons, using them in  clandestine assassinations and  covered up Syria's use of them in 2018. China has also bucked ethical norms on biotechnology and floated ideas of  using bioweapons enabled by emerging technology in offensive military actions.
Chemical weapons were used in Syria in 2018. (Time/AFP/Getty)
The future of the biological warfare environment and the costs it imposes on the United States, both material and strategic, are mainly dependent on how its adversaries mobilize their state apparatuses to expand their bioweapons capabilities. In the past, Iran has provided the Houthi rebels in Yemen with  missiles and munitions, and it is also known for its special relationship with Hezbollah. Though it is improbable Iran would break international norms and pass its bioweapons to its proxies, the security of its bioweapons programs is still in question. There are Israeli intelligence reports and reporting by Al-Siyasa, a Kuwaiti newspaper, suggesting Hezbollah  stockpiled chemical weapons in Southern Lebanon in 2009. With proxies operating in proximity and with privilege, they can take advantage of their position. With a  quarter of the world's biological weapons facilities centered in the Near East, the frequency of regional instability creates opportunities for non-state actors to overstep their bounds.
Direct non-state acquisition could be more probable if tensions continue to accelerate with Iran and its proxy forces, especially with the democratization of emerging technology challenging the attribution tracking process, and increasing production efficiency. Though the circumstance of non-state actors acquiring bioweapons seems improbable, with state support the possibility of this situation is frighteningly realistic. More importantly, there is a  new paradigm of non-state actors gaining the technological aptitude to conduct terror attacks independently. Since 2014,  the Islamic State has used chlorine and sulfur mustard within battlefield environments in both Iraq and Syria. The growth of accessible emerging technologies is a change agent that will empower non-state actors to resort to unconventional attacks. Biological warfare involving both state and non-state proxy forces would produce catastrophic consequences.

What the Future Holds

Going forward, the threat emanating from bioweapons enabled by emerging technology will create unprecedented national security risks. Historically, these threats were not as prolific as conventional threats due to the difficulty of carrying out an attack, but these barriers to access are falling. The proliferation of emerging technology is lowering the threshold of bioweapon acquisition for state and non-state actors who seek to disrupt and exploit their adversaries. Emerging technologies extricate malicious state and non-state actors from a sundry of previous limitations, such as weapons detection and vulnerable human-centered pipelines. The efficacy of these weapons lends to intermittent use, which returns when preparedness is low and used in conjunction with information operations and conventional military capabilities for more significant effect.
COVID-19 is an understated watershed moment in U.S. national security, whereby a naturally-occurring virus has thrown individual citizens and the highest levels of leadership into disarray. The COVID-19 pandemic is driving perceptions of U.S. susceptibility to immensely disruptive biological threats and increases the likelihood of an artificial attack. This monumental shift in threat perception creates appealing circumstances for U.S. adversaries to experiment with emergent biotechnology. The United States national security apparatus should hold these considerations in high regard, to prevent the peril of a fractured biosecurity environment in a post-COVID-19 era.
Bilva Chandra  is an Analyst with One Defense.  Andrew Gonzalez  is an Associate with One Defense.
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Header Image: An artist's rendering of the Coronavirus (Budenheom)
20. Operation Burnham: the New Zealand military's self-inflicted wounds will not heal by themselves
We can all learn from this.

Operation Burnham: the New Zealand military's self-inflicted wounds will not heal by themselves

theconversation.com · by Alexander Gillespie
The old maxim that truth is the first casualty of war has been borne out by the damning  Report of the Government Inquiry into Operation Burnham.
It is almost ten years ago to the day that the fateful military operation took place in Afghanistan in 2010, and over three years since the book  Hit & Run alleged there were civilian casualties, torture of detainees and a subsequent cover-up.
The result for the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) is humiliating and will almost inevitably mean it is stripped of the relative autonomy it has enjoyed to this point.

The military betrayed the public trust

While not all of the assertions in Hit & Run were upheld, its main themes certainly have been. The Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) has proved itself untrustworthy in three crucial ways:
  1. it made mistakes and did not fix them
  2. superiors failed to question information, despite contradictory material being presented, and did not attempt to determine the truth
  3. those same people made a series of erroneous and misleading public statements about the possibility of civilian casualties, preferring to repeat a false narrative and incorrect statements.
These were not small oversights. Rather, the evidence suggests systematic failures in key areas, including inaccurate and disingenuous communication with the minister of defence.
That is a disaster. Despite the NZDF's  recent success in Iraq in sustaining no casualties while part of the bulkhead that defeated ISIS, it has now bombed its own position as the trusted military arm of the state.
The NZDF's Lieutenant General Tim Keating addresses the media in 2017 to deny allegations made in the book Hit and Run.  GettyImages

The military damaged its own reputation

Deception by any military in a democracy is dangerous. Furthermore, the actions of a few have caused untold damage to a reputation for integrity and honour proudly created over generations.
There is also a strong element of stupidity involved. The NZDF did not need to be deceptive about one of the central claims against it: that its forces were engaged in acts of retaliation, untethered by the laws of war.
That assertion was not upheld. The inquiry found the conduct of the soldiers involved in Operation Burnham was professional, not motivated by a desire for revenge, and pre-operation intelligence (that there were armed insurgents in the villages) was correct.
Although there were serious questions about decisions made during the operation, the bottom line is that all of the actions complied with the applicable rules of engagement. Many will find the result of these actions harsh (as war is), but the actions were not unjustifiable, nor unduly reckless, negligent or indiscriminate.

The torture findings are damning

Where the NZDF may have wanted to hide the truth was over allegations of torture. Although our soldiers may not have tortured prisoners themselves, they did hand some over to forces who did. This was clear in the case of one man, Qari Miraj, and possibly other instances involving hundreds more.
The book that caused the inquiry.  Potton & Burton
With each transfer, our authorities appear to have turned a blind eye or failed to meet the  standards expected of them when they knew (or should have known) there was a real risk of torture.
Even when the NZDF knew torture had occurred, senior leaders and ministers were not briefed. Nor were any further steps taken to investigate, to state New Zealand's position on torture, or to review its policy on detention.
This is a terrible finding. Any possible complicity in situations involving torture is abhorrent. If it is correct, apologies and compensation for the victims or their families should be offered.

The NZDF cannot police itself

Three of the inquiry's four recommendations are the predictable slaps on the wrist we expect from official forums such as this: internal changes to ensure the NZDF comes up to international best practice for administration and record keeping; clear orders established for dealing with allegations of civilian casualties; and improved detention policies and procedures.
The other recommendation, however, is the most critical. It calls for the establishment by law of an independent inspector-general to oversee the NZDF. Such positions are created, as happened with both the  police and the  security intelligence agencies, when an organisation has proved unfit to govern itself.
The government has promised to implement the recommendations if it is re-elected, but it should be a priority for whichever party or parties win power. Only then can progress be said to have happened.
And let's not forget, this would not have happened by itself. It took the brave investigative journalism of Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, a government willing to critically examine the charges against its own defence force, and finally an excellent enquiry by Sir Terence Arnold and Sir Geoffrey Palmer.
We should hope that when these law changes are made the country will regain its confidence and pride in the NZDF. Never again should truth be the first casualty.



De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Phone: 202-573-8647
Web Site:  www.fdd.org
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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."