Apologies for no dispatches on 8/4/23. I was traveling and KAL still has no wifi on its flights.

Quotes of the Day:

“Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, or straightforwardness?”  

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Life is not a problem to be solved by a mystery to be lived.  Follow the path that is no path, follow your bliss.”

 - Joseph Campbell

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” 

- James Baldwin

1. China to attend talks on Ukraine in Saudi Arabia that exclude Russia

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 4, 2023

3. U.S. moves to put Marines on commercial ships to stop Iranian seizures

4. Marine Raiders (MSOC) Complete Exercise Raven | SOF News 

5. Oppenheimer: The Bomb, Morality and Strategy

6. Review | ‘A Compassionate Spy’: Footnote to ‘Oppenheimer’

7. Army's New Enlisted Leader: The Bet a Green Beret Can Lead the Rank and File

8. Opinion: Ukraine Endgame: Policymakers Cite Korea and WWI

9. Poland and Lithuania, on NATO’s eastern flank, warn against ‘provocations’ from Wagner forces in Belarus.

10. This Disinformation Is Just for You

11. Microsoft Exposes Russian Hackers' Sneaky Phishing Tactics via Microsoft Teams Chats

12. The west must match Russia and China in the dark arts of the grey zone

13. Two US Navy sailors arrested on charges of sharing secrets with China

14. Navy Sailors Charged With Allegedly Spying for China

15. Taiwan may get military funds from US, report says

16. Military Justice Reform and Sexual Assault: Now What?

17. The Unpredictable Dictators

18. More Than a Security Pact, the Deal Aims to Transform the Indo-Pacific Order

19. For More Effective Irregular Warfare, Bring Back the MAVNI Recruitment Program

20. War Books: How to Win a Land War in Asia

21. Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present

22. How the U.S. Fumbled Niger’s Coup and Gave Russia an Opening

23. Outlaw Alliance: How China and Chinese Mafias Overseas Protect Each Other’s Interests

24. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: August

1. China to attend talks on Ukraine in Saudi Arabia that exclude Russia

Wishful thinking? Hope is not a course of action:

Ukrainian and Western diplomats hope the meeting in Jeddah of national security advisers and other senior officials from some 40 countries will agree on key principles for a future peace settlement to end Russia's war in Ukraine.

China to attend talks on Ukraine in Saudi Arabia that exclude Russia

Reuters · by Andrew Gray

• Summary
• Chinese move is boost for Ukraine and Saudi hosts
• Russia not invited to talks
• Ukraine hopes to leverage Saudi diplomatic reach

BRUSSELS/LONDON, Aug 4 (Reuters) - China on Friday said it would send a senior official to Saudi Arabia for weekend talks on finding a peaceful settlement to the war in Ukraine, a forum that excludes Russia, in a diplomatic coup for Kyiv, the West and the Saudi hosts.

Ukrainian and Western diplomats hope the meeting in Jeddah of national security advisers and other senior officials from some 40 countries will agree on key principles for a future peace settlement to end Russia's war in Ukraine.

Chinese Special Envoy for Eurasian Affairs Li Hui will visit Jeddah for the talks, China's foreign ministry said on Friday.

"China is willing to work with the international community to continue to play a constructive role in promoting a political solution to the crisis in Ukraine," Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson at the Chinese ministry, said in a statement.

China was invited to a previous round of talks in Copenhagen in late June but did not attend.

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February last year, China has kept close economic and diplomatic ties with Russia and rejected international calls to condemn Moscow.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday he hoped the initiative will lead to a "peace summit" of leaders from around the world this autumn to endorse the principles, based on his own 10-point formula for a settlement.

Zelenskiy's formula includes respect for Ukraine's territorial integrity and the withdrawal of Russian troops, anathema to Moscow which claims to have annexed occupied Ukrainian territory forever.

Ukrainian, Russian and international officials say there is no prospect of direct peace talks between Ukraine and Russia at the moment, as the war continues to rage and Kyiv seeks to reclaim territory through a counter-offensive.

But Ukraine aims first to build a bigger coalition of diplomatic support beyond its core Western backers by reaching out to Global South countries such as India, Brazil and South Africa, many of which have remained publicly neutral.

Earlier this week, the Kremlin said it would keep an eye on the Jeddah meeting, while restating Moscow's position that it currently saw no grounds for peace talks with Kyiv.

"We need to understand what goals are set and what will be discussed. Any attempt to promote a peaceful settlement deserves a positive evaluation," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.

Western diplomats say an endorsement of all of Zelenskiy's peace formula is highly unlikely at the talks. But they want to at least get clear backing for principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter - the founding document of the United Nations - such as territorial integrity.

The U.S. and its allies also have been wary about embracing a Beijing-led peace initiative, and analysts doubted China would look to take a leading role at the conference.

"I don't see the Chinese pushing an agenda," said Jon Alterman, head of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Beijing's participation was more likely motivated by prestige and the opportunity to court Middle East and Global South countries.

SAUDI DIPLOMACY

Saudi diplomacy played a key role in urging Beijing to attend the Jeddah talks, a German official said.

Saudi state news agency SPA on Friday said the kingdom anticipated the meeting would reinforce "dialogue and cooperation... to ensure a solution for the crisis through political and diplomatic means".

Ukrainian and Western officials said Riyadh wants to play a prominent diplomatic role.

The gathering is more palatable to Beijing with Saudi Arabia as host since it will not be seen as engineered by the West, said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

A senior European Union official said Saudi Arabia reached "into parts of the world where (Ukraine's) classical allies would not get to as easily".

In seeking to win over Global South countries, Western officials said they will stress that food prices have jumped since Russia quit a deal to allow safe passage of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea and carried out a string of air strikes on Ukraine's ports.

"We'll be for sure making this point and loud and clear," another senior EU official said.

Additional reporting by the Beijing newsroom, Thomas Escritt, Olena Harmash, Carien du Plessis, Gabriela Baczynska, Daphne Psaledakis, Michael Martina, David Brunnstrom, Laurie Chen, Martin Pollard, the Dubai newsroom and Angus McDowall; Editing by Jon Boyle, Peter Graff and Cynthia Osterman

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Andrew Gray

Thomson Reuters

Andrew is a senior correspondent for European security and diplomacy, based in Brussels. He covers NATO and the foreign policy of the European Union. A journalist for almost 30 years, he has previously been based in the UK, Germany, Geneva, the Balkans, West Africa and Washington, where he reported on the Pentagon. He covered the Iraq war in 2003 and contributed a chapter to a Reuters book on the conflict. He has also worked at Politico Europe as a senior editor and podcast host, served as the main editor for a fellowship programme for journalists from the Balkans, and contributed to the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent radio show.

Reuters · by Andrew Gray

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 4, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-4-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces conducted a series of aerial and naval drone strikes against Russian logistics and port infrastructure in occupied Crimea and Krasnodar Krai (a key Russian naval base) on the night of August 3 to 4.
• Russian milbloggers characteristically lambasted the Russian MoD for lying about the naval drone strikes and called on the Russian military to escalate activities in the Black Sea.
• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on August 4.
• The Kremlin continues to express its unwillingness to return to the Black Sea Grain Initiative in the absence of extensive concessions from the West.
• Tula Oblast Governor Alexei Dyumin reportedly facilitated the reinstatement of the commander of the Russian 106th Guards Airborne (VDV) Division, Major General Vladimir Seliverstov, after meeting Putin’s Chief of Staff Anton Vaino on July 21.
• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on August 4.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, in the Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 4 and made advances in certain areas.
• A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that China’s “temporary” export restrictions on drones may severely impact the ability of Russian volunteers to supply drones to Russian servicemen fighting in Ukraine.
• Russian authorities are continuing to deport Ukrainian children to Russia under the guise of summer camps.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 4, 2023

Aug 4, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 4, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Angelica Evans, Christina Harward, and Mason Clark

August 4, 2023, 6:05 pm ET 

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 1:00pm ET on August 4. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 5 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces conducted a series of aerial and naval drone strikes against Russian logistics and port infrastructure in occupied Crimea and Krasnodar Krai (a key Russian naval base) on the night of August 3 to 4. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian air defenses and electronic warfare units downed up to 13 Ukrainian drones targeting Crimea.[1] Geolocated footage published on August 4 shows Ukrainian drones striking areas near an oil depot in Feodosia, Crimea, although it is unclear whether the drone strikes damaged Russian targets.[2] Geolocated footage published on August 3 and 4 shows Russian forces firing on Ukrainian naval drones near a Russian naval base in Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai, and one of the naval drones striking the Russian Olenegorsky Gornyak Ropucha-class landing ship.[3] The Russian MoD stated that Russian naval artillery fire destroyed two Ukrainian naval drones near the base in Novorossisyk.[4] Geolocated footage posted later on August 4 shows the Olenegorsky Gornyak listing and a Russian support vessel towing the landing ship to the Novorossisyk port.[5] Geolocated footage does not indicate the full extent of the damage to the Olenegorsky Gornyak, and Russian sources claimed that the damage was not critical and that the ship would be operational after an unspecified time of repair.[6] Russian sources claimed that the Russian navy used the landing ship to transport civilian vehicles across the Kerch Strait amidst widespread disruptions to traffic across the Kerch Strait bridge.[7]

Russian milbloggers characteristically lambasted the Russian MoD for lying about the naval drone strikes and called on the Russian military to escalate activities in the Black Sea. Russian milbloggers criticized the Russian MoD for originally claiming that the Russian forces had intercepted all drone strikes instead of admitting that the strikes damaged the Olenegorsky Gornyak landing ship.[8] Russian milbloggers criticized the MoD for previously lying about destroying the Ukrainian drone assembly facilities and claimed that Russian forces must cut Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea in order to prevent naval drone attacks from civilian ships.[9] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russia needs to create a full-fledged monitoring system for the Black Sea to detect Ukrainian boats, as other tactics like striking Ukrainian port infrastructure have not prevented attacks in the sea.[10] Some Russian milbloggers argued that the Russian MoD lacks a cohesive information policy, which creates conditions for public outcry in the Russian information space after every Russian military failure.[11]

Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on August 4. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Berdyansk (Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border area) and Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) directions.[12] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces continue to advance on the southern flank of Bakhmut.[13] Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Vadym Skibitskyi stated that the most important elements of the Ukrainian counteroffensive are unexpectedness and accuracy, not speed.[14] Skibitskyi noted that Ukrainian actions are aimed at cutting off Russian supply routes, destroying Russian stores of weapons and military equipment, and winning counterbattery battles.[15] Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder stated that Ukraine independently decides when and where to employ its significant combat capabilities.[16]

The Kremlin continues to express its unwillingness to return to the Black Sea Grain Initiative in the absence of extensive concessions from the West. The Kremlin released a joint statement on August 4 following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s July 28 meeting with African leaders regarding their newly formally named African Peace Initiative.[17] The document stated that the African leaders called for concrete steps to remove obstacles to the export of Russian grain and fertilizers, and the release and delivery of 200,000 tons of Russian fertilizer stuck in European ports to African countries. These calls suggest that the African leaders support Russia’s conditions for revitalizing the Black Sea Grain Initiative.[18] US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated on August 4 that the United States would continue to do “whatever is necessary” to ensure that Russia can freely export food on the global market if Russia would be willing to revive the Black Sea Grain Initiative and allow Ukraine to export grain safely through the Black Sea.[19] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded to Blinken’s statement by claiming that as soon as the United States fulfills Russia’s conditions, “the deal will immediately be resumed.”[20] These statements give no clear indication that Russia intends to rejoin the Black Sea Grain Initiative and seeks to coerce the West to end limitations on its own exports.

Tula Oblast Governor Alexei Dyumin reportedly facilitated the reinstatement of the commander of the Russian 106th Guards Airborne (VDV) Division, Major General Vladimir Seliverstov, after meeting Putin’s Chief of Staff Anton Vaino on July 21.[21] Russian sources previously claimed on July 14 that the Russian military command dismissed Seliverstov for unknown reasons, but speculated that his removal could have been due to his reputation for speaking up on behalf of his forces.[22] ISW assessed on July 15 that Seliverstov’s claimed dismissal may have been a part of an ongoing purge of insubordinate commanders.[23] An unnamed source told a Russian Telegram channel (reportedly affiliated with the Russian security forces) that Dyumin bypassed the Russian MoD to reinstate Seliverstov via Vaino and the Russian Presidential Administration.[24] The source added that Dyumin’s decision to bypass the military chain of command has already sparked conflicts between the Russian Presidential Administration and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, and that Dyumin is attempting to displace Shoigu from his position. Dyumin reportedly attempted to intervene in Seliverstov’s firing during his visit to Moscow on July 14 but was unsuccessful in reversing the dismissal at that time.[25]

While ISW cannot independently confirm these reports, if true, Dyumin likely advocated for Seliverstov in opposition to Shoigu or Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov or may have simply supported Seliverstov because the 106th VDV Division is headquartered in Tula Oblast. Vaino holds one of the most influential positions within Russian President Vladimir Putin’s circle and has reportedly served as an intermediatory between Putin and figures such as Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin.[26] Dyumin’s successful meeting with Vaino, if true, indicates that select members of the Russian Presidential Administration are able to overrule and undermine decisions made by the MoD. ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin’s chronic disregard for the Russian chain of command is likely hindering Shoigu and Gerasimov in their attempts to suppress insubordination and establish full control over the Russian military in Ukraine.[27]

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces conducted a series of aerial and naval drone strikes against Russian logistics and port infrastructure in occupied Crimea and Krasnodar Krai (a key Russian naval base) on the night of August 3 to 4.
• Russian milbloggers characteristically lambasted the Russian MoD for lying about the naval drone strikes and called on the Russian military to escalate activities in the Black Sea.
• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on August 4.
• The Kremlin continues to express its unwillingness to return to the Black Sea Grain Initiative in the absence of extensive concessions from the West.
• Tula Oblast Governor Alexei Dyumin reportedly facilitated the reinstatement of the commander of the Russian 106th Guards Airborne (VDV) Division, Major General Vladimir Seliverstov, after meeting Putin’s Chief of Staff Anton Vaino on July 21.
• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front on August 4.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, in the Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 4 and made advances in certain areas.
• A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that China’s “temporary” export restrictions on drones may severely impact the ability of Russian volunteers to supply drones to Russian servicemen fighting in Ukraine.
• Russian authorities are continuing to deport Ukrainian children to Russia under the guise of summer camps.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove line but did not advance on August 4. The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked Russian forces near Novoselivske (14km northwest of Svatove) and Novovodyane (15km south of Svatove).[28] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked Russian forces in the direction of Karmazynivka (13km southwest of Svatove) on August 3.[29]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove line on August 4 and reportedly advanced. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces have intensified offensive operations in the Kupyansk, Lyman, and Svatove directions and that Ukrainian forces have repelled all Russian attacks in these areas.[30] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced near Novoselivske along the N-26 (Svatove-Kupyansk) highway.[31] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces continue to advance north of Kupyansk and towards the Oskil River, which runs west of Svatove, on August 3.[32] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian assault detachments of the Western Grouping of Forces conducted offensive operations in the Kupyansk direction on August 4.[33] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted offensive operations in the forest area near Novoselivske and that Russian assault detachments broke through Ukrainian defensive lines north of the settlement on August 3.[34]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Kreminna but did not advance on August 4. A Russian military official claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near the Serebryanske forest area (10km southwest of Kreminna).[35] The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked Russian forces near Bilohorivka (12km southwest of Kreminna), Spirne (25km south of Kreminna), and Vesele (30km southwest of Kreminna) and that Russian elements of the Central Grouping of Forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Kreminna.[36]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Kreminna on August 4 and reportedly advanced. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced and reached the eastern outskirts of Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast, and the Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces took more advantageous positions near the settlement.[37] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces conducted offensive operations south and southeast of Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna) on August 3.[38] Another milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted offensive operations in forest areas near Kreminna and advanced in the forested area south of Dibrova on August 3.[39]

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited the forward command post of the Russian Central Grouping of Forces in the Lyman direction on August 4.[40] Shoigu met with Central Military District (CMD) Commander Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvichev, who also commands the Central Grouping of Forces.[41] Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Mordvichev for his successes in Ukraine during a press conference on July 29, likely referring to recent unverified Russian claims of extensive Russian advances southwest of Svatove.[42] Shoigu likely visited the forward command post to portray himself as an involved manager of the Russian war effort in Ukraine. The recent public promotions of Mordvichev as a successful commander may indicate that the CMD commander has a greater portion of the Russian military leadership’s favor than other military district commanders.

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations around Bakhmut but have not made confirmed territorial gains as of August 4. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces are continuing to advance on Bakhmut’s southern flank through dense Russian artillery fire and mining.[43] Russian milbloggers claimed that the situation on the Bakhmut frontline did not change as of August 4 and that fighting is ongoing near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and the Berkhivka reservoir (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[44] One Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advance by 20 meters per day near Klishchivka during constant assaults and that the southern part of the settlement is under Ukrainian control.[45] Another Russian milblogger claimed that small Ukrainian groups hold positions on the outskirts of Klishchiivka and are not attacking Russian positions in the area.[46] The milblogger claimed that Russian forces repelled minor Ukrainian attacks on the frontline near Kurdyumivka (12km southwest of Bakhmut) and that Russian forces maintain their control over Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut). A Russian source also claimed that the situation in Bakhmut is “more dangerous than it seems” for Russian forces due to Ukrainian strategies and advances on Bakhmut’s northern and southern flanks.[47]

Russian forces continued to counterattack but did not seize new or previously lost positions around Bakhmut on August 4. Malyar stated that Russian forces are unsuccessfully counterattacking Ukrainian positions on Bakhmut’s northern flank in hopes of regaining lost positions in the area.[48] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces restrained Russian forces from advancing south and southeast of Ivanivske (5km southwest of Bakhmut), and near Klishchiivka and Kurdyumivka.[49] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces counterattacked near Kurdyumivka, Andriivka, and Klishchiivka.[50] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces maintained their previously occupied positions northwest and southwest of Bakhmut.[51] A milblogger claimed that artillery and drone elements of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Guards Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) targeted Ukrainian forces as part of the battles near Bakhmut.[52] ISW has previously observed elements of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division largely operating on the Donetsk City line, but it is not clear if some elements deployed to or are operating in the Bakhmut direction.[53]

Russian forces continued to unsuccessfully attack Ukrainian positions on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line but have not advanced as of August 4. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks north and southeast of Avdiivka, southeast of Pervomaiske (10km west of Avdiivka), and near Marinka (22km southwest of Donetsk City).[54]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on August 4 and did not advance. The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked Russian positions near Mykilske (27km southwest of Donetsk City) but that Russian forces held their positions.[55]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations along the administrative border between Zaporizhia and Donetsk oblasts on August 4 but did not make any confirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations in the Berdyansk (Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border area) direction.[56] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful assaults near Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[57] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are not present in Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka), although another milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced further into the settlement on August 3.[58] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian units near Staromayorske retreated to a fortified area near Staromlynivka (15km south of Velyka Novosilka) due to Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.[59] Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces are consistently targeting Russian rear areas along the administrative border between Zaporizhia and Donetsk oblasts, and a Russian milblogger added that Ukrainian artillery and MLRS fire is complicating Russian logistics in the area.[60]

Russian forces conducted limited unsuccessful counterattacks in the Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border area on August 4. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful attempts to regain lost positions west of Staromayorske, east of Urozhaine, and in the direction of Blahodatne (4km south of Velyka Novosilka).[61] The Russian MoD claimed that elements of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces continued offensive operations near Staromayorske and improved their tactical positions in the area.[62] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are conducting rotations in the Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border area, although Russian forces are likely conducting a tactical rotation in place with another unit of the same formation rather than rotating fresh units into the area due to the lack of Russian reserves.[63]

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 4 but did not make any confirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) direction.[64] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian assault near Robotyne (12km south of Orikhiv).[65] Russian milbloggers described Ukrainian offensive activity near Robotyne as limited and claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted assaults without armored vehicle support.[66] Russian sources noted that the tempo of Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in the Orikhiv direction continued to decline for the third day in a row.[67] One milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced east of Robotyne in the direction of Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv) on August 3, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[68]

Russian forces counterattacked in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 4 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful assaults near Novopokrovka (13km southeast of Orikhiv).[69]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued to target rear Russian areas in Zaporizhia Oblast on August 4. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation officials claimed that Russian air defenses shot down up to five Ukrainian drones near Berdyansk.[70]

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafael Grossi stated on August 4 that IAEA experts found no mines on the roofs of two reactor buildings at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).[71] Ukrainian officials previously stated that Russian forces placed explosives on the outer roofs of reactor buildings three and four, but Russian officials prevented IAEA officials from accessing the roofs for several weeks.[72]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that China’s “temporary” export restrictions on drones may severely impact the ability of Russian volunteers to supply drones to Russian servicemen fighting in Ukraine.[73] Chinese authorities announced on July 31 that “temporary” export restrictions primarily regulating drones and drone-related equipment with ‘dual-use” capabilities will take effect on September 1.[74]

The Russian government has reportedly doubled its defense budget for 2023, due to the increasing costs of the war in Ukraine. Reuters reportedly obtained a Russian government document showing that Russia’s original 2023 defense budget was 4.98 trillion rubles ($54 billion) and that the Russian government has recently doubled its 2023 defense budget to 9.54 trillion rubles ($100 billion).[75] Reuters reported that the Russian government spent 5.59 trillion rubles ($58.4 billion) during the first six months of 2023, almost 600 billion rubles ($6.27 billion) more than it originally budgeted for the entire year.[76]

Chairman of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee Andrey Kartapolov stated that the Duma will consider a law proposing punishments for mobilization evasion in the fall of 2023. The law reportedly proposes for Russian officials to charge mobilization evaders with up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 500,000 rubles ($5,200).[77] Kartapolov stated that the law was drafted when partial mobilization was underway in 2022 and that the Russian government is not planning another mobilization wave.[78]

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed three laws related to force generation and mobilization on August 4. Putin signed laws that raise the maximum conscription age to 30, prohibit conscripts who have been served conscription notices from leaving Russia, and allow Rosgvardia to use heavy military equipment.[79] ISW has previously reported on these laws and their potential ramifications.[80]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian authorities are continuing to deport Ukrainian children to Russia under the guise of summer camps. The Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration announced that the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology sent a group of children from Kherson Oblast to the “Zasechnaya Druzhyna” camp in Kaluga Oblast, Russia.[81] ISW has previously reported on similar deportation schemes.[82]

Russian authorities are continuing passportization efforts in occupied territories of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian authorities are stopping, searching, and interrogating non-Russian passport holders at checkpoints in occupied territories of Ukraine.[83] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces at the ZNPP are forcing employees to obtain Russian passports and are destroying their Ukrainian passports.[84]

Russian occupation authorities continue to develop patronage systems with Russian federal subjects to build infrastructure in occupied areas. The Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration stated that the Russian Republic of Mordovia helped fund the construction of social infrastructure in the occupied territories of Kherson Oblast.[85] A representative of the Republic of Mordovia visited a construction site in occupied Kherson Oblast on August 3.[86]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus).

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Nothing significant to report.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

3. U.S. moves to put Marines on commercial ships to stop Iranian seizures

U.S. moves to put Marines on commercial ships to stop Iranian seizures

The plan, if approved, would represent a remarkable escalation in the long-running feud between Washington and Tehran that could put their militaries in direct confrontation

By Dan Lamothe and Missy Ryan

Updated August 3, 2023 at 5:39 p.m. EDT|Published August 3, 2023 at 3:01 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · August 3, 2023

The U.S. military is readying plans to embark armed Marines and sailors aboard the commercial ships of interested private companies after a spate of vessel seizures by Iranian forces in the Middle East, officials said Thursday, a remarkable escalation that could put Washington and Tehran in direct confrontation.

The effort has not yet received final approval, but it has buy-in from senior Biden administration officials and could commence as soon as this month, said one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military planning. Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., have been flown to Bahrain and received related training, with additional personnel due to arrive soon aboard American warships.

“We have a cohort on the ground,” the official said. He added that the “policy decision has pretty much been made.”

A second U.S. official acknowledged the proposal is under discussion at the Pentagon but emphasized that it has not yet been approved.

Asked about the plan, a Pentagon spokesman, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, said Thursday he had no announcements to make.

A spokesman at the White House, John Kirby, directed questions to the Defense Department while noting the Strait of Hormuz, where some of the incidents have occurred, is a “vital seaway.” The United States, he said, has seen threats by Iran to close off this “choke point.” The strait connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, and the open ocean beyond. At least 20 percent of the world’s crude oil is moved through the strategic waterway.

The effort, first reported by the Associated Press, is among a set of muscular actions being pursued by the Biden administration following a purported rise in attempts by Iran to seize commercial tanker ships.

The first official cited July 5 as an inflection point in U.S. discussions on the issue. Iranian forces tried to commandeer two civilian tanker ships that day, firing on and striking one of them, the Richmond Voyager, in its hull, Navy officials said at the time. Iranian forces fled after the arrival of the USS McFaul, a naval destroyer.

In another recent incident, warships from the United States and Britain answered a June 4 distress call from a merchant vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz, where three Iranian fast-attack boats had harassed the civilian ship, Navy officials said. In that case, the McFaul and the Royal Navy frigate HMS Lancaster responded, with the Lancaster launching a helicopter to drive off the Iranian ships.

In May, the oil tanker Niovi was seized by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while in the strait, the Navy said. The civilian vessel had departed Dubai and was traveling to the port of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates when a dozen fast-attack craft surrounded it. In April, Iran made a similar seizure of the oil tanker Advantage Sweet.

Such harassment is part of a pattern dating back years and now requires an “elevated response,” the first official said.

Other recent steps to deter Iran include the deployment of advanced F-35 jets, along with other fighter aircraft and A-10 attack jets, to the Persian Gulf region. The Pentagon also dispatched an additional Navy destroyer to bolster the presence of American military vessels already in the region.

Iranian officials have criticized the deployments, calling them destabilizing and provocative.

The Marines training for the mission in Bahrain are with the 26th Expeditionary Unit, a naval force that typically deploys aboard Navy warships. Other personnel with the unit are aboard the USS Bataan, USS Carter Hall, and USS Mesa Verde, and could arrive in the Middle East soon. The Bataan and Carter Hall arrived recently in Souda Bay, Greece, for a port visit, the unit said in a Facebook post Thursday.

Karen DeYoung and Alex Horton contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · August 3, 2023

4. Marine Raiders (MSOC) Complete Exercise Raven | SOF News

Marine Raiders (MSOC) Complete Exercise Raven | SOF News

sof.news · by DVIDS · August 4, 2023

By Henry Rodriguez.

Before heading out on any deployment, Marine Corps units are required to conduct a pre-deployment training cycle. What this cycle looks like varies greatly depending on the unit, mission, and requirements. For Marine Raiders with Marine Forces Special Operations Command, it includes both individual and unit-level training. Part of that unit-level training is the exercise known as Exercise Raven.

Exercise Raven is a company level unit readiness exercise, designed to evaluate Marine Special Operations Companies and their teams. MSOCs are tested and evaluated on a vast number of potentialities that they could see in a deployed theater.

“Through Raven, the company is able to establish connection points and refine processes that enhance our effectiveness,” said a U.S. Marine critical skills operator.

In addition to honing in on the attributes and capabilities within the teams and companies, other units are integrated to improve the MSOC’s ability to be a connecting force beyond its own structure. Past iterations have collaborated with foreign partners, units from the Fleet Marine Force, Marine Forces Reserve, and members of the joint force.

Recently, Marines with 4th Marine Division, British Commandos, and French soldiers with 6th Light Armoured Brigade worked side by side in a simulated combat theater conducting operations in tandem with one another to achieve a collective goal.

Marines from the MSOC trained to coordinate with a Special Operations Task Force to handle the moving pieces of internal and external forces operating in conjunction with one another, much as they would on an actual deployment.

“Working with our conventional forces and foreign partners just increases our ability to integrate while deployed,” said a critical skills operator. “And them being here just shows their commitment to strengthening that relationship.”

During the exercise, a single MSOC will be given an ever-evolving problem set in which they must effectively utilize their assets and work with partners to solve. As they begin to work through the situation and begin actions on targets, the battlespace and problem set changes, and leaders within the teams and company need to be able to improvise and adjust. The issues that arise are designed to require the company to leverage and utilize all of MARSOC’s capabilities.

The entire time this plays out, members of the exercise control monitor and evaluate the companies to give live feedback to those leaders and better prepare them for their upcoming deployment. In addition, evaluators from the various partner force units attend to observe their training and increase interoperability with MARSOC.

“Being able to evaluate our guys while working with MARSOC and exchanging best practices is great,” said a British Commando and evaluator who recently attended Ex. Raven. “I think there is a lot of benefit to working together.”

Exercise Raven gives live feedback up and down the echelons of command. From the individual critical skills operator to the company commander, every member of the company has something to gain from the training and evaluations provided by Ex. Raven as they prepare to step out and travel overseas for deployment.

*******************

This story by Cpl Henry Rodriguez II of MARSOC was first published on August 1, 2023 by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. DVIDS content is in the public domain.

Photo: U.S. Marines with 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment, Marine Forces Reserve, conduct a direct action raid under the supervision and training of Marine Raiders with Marine Forces Special Operations Command during Exercise Raven, a unit readiness exercise, May 25, 2023. Exercise Raven is a training exercise held to evaluate all aspects of a Marine Special Operations Company prior to a special operations deployment. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Henry Rodriguez)

sof.news · by DVIDS · August 4, 2023

5. Oppenheimer: The Bomb, Morality and Strategy

Excerpts:

‘We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.’

Robert Oppenheimer, ‘Atomic Weapons and American Policy,’ Foreign Affairs, July 1953,

The famous quote at the top of this post provides a compelling metaphor for the nuclear condition. The difference between states and scorpions, however, is that while we can’t be sure that scorpions are aware of their predicament, and can resist stinging each other, government are aware and can show restraint, even at stressful times. In our current situation there are few measures in place that can ensure restraint so we are left relying on the caution resulting from the dire implications of a war ‘going nuclear’.

Oppenheimer: The Bomb, Morality and Strategy

https://samf.substack.com/p/oppenheimer-the-bomb-morality-and?r=7i07&utm

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

AUG 5, 2023

∙ PAID

Robert Oppenheimer discusses the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki

‘We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.’

Robert Oppenheimer, ‘Atomic Weapons and American Policy,’ Foreign Affairs, July 1953,

I enjoyed Oppenheimer. Normally when I watch films with historical themes about which I know something I grumble away because of obvious errors or a wholly distorted narrative. In this case Christopher Nolan has done better than most in putting together a complex story in a way that most historians would consider reasonably authentic. He has used as his bible American Prometheus, the well-regarded biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin. (Bird gave the film a ringing endorsement).

Even when he has not been able to spend time on important aspects of the story Nolan has at least alluded to them. As familiar characters made fleeting appearances – Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Vannevar Bush – my knowledge of their back stories helped me enjoy the film more. I suspect for others it would have been harder to keep track of the long cast of nerdy scientists. The chap playing the bongo drums in the intense glow of the Trinity test, by the way, was the great Richard Feynman.

Errors and Omissions

But there are still issues. Inevitably in any American war story, the British contribution is downplayed. In this case the main role of the British contingent at Los Alamos is to insert a Soviet spy – Klaus Fuchs - into the Manhattan project. Yet not only did other British scientists make important contributions to the project, without the original British work on the feasibility of a fission weapon there might well not have been any project at all. Nolan puts his emphasis on the letter to the President drafted by Leo Szilard and signed by Albert Einstein in September 1939. This gave the US programme a push but it remain lacklustre until it got an impetus from the UK’s MAUD report, which showed a way forward, when it was passed on to Roosevelt’s scientific advisors during the summer of 1941.

Barton Bernstein, one of the premier historians of the early years of the US nuclear programme, with a low tolerance of dramatic license, has pointed to a number of errors, some more serious than others, none of which appear in the Sherwin-Bird biography, and which I confess to have missed completely when watching:

·        An unfair portrayal of Cambridge experimentalist Patrick Blackett as being callous towards the young Oppenheimer;

·        Making up Max Born’s invitation to the dissatisfied Oppenheimer to move to Gottingen;

·        Overplaying the impact of Oppenheimer’s September 1939 paper on massively dying stars (and no one then would have spoken about ‘black holes’);

·        Making up a meeting with Albert Einstein after Edward Teller raised the possibility that a fission-bomb explosion might ignite the atmosphere and destroy civilization. The person Oppenheimer consulted was Arthur H. Compton, another Nobel prize Winner, in charge of the Metallurgical Laboratory. And actually it was Teller who did the best calculations to show that the ultimate catastrophe was impossible, but this detail would have added too much complexity to the portrait of Teller.

·        Claiming that Neils Bohr endorsed the use of the bomb when he visited Los Alamos. He was worrying about a future US-Soviet arms race (a preoccupation which had already led to a testy meeting with Winston Churchill).

These errors deserve to be noted although they are only marginally relevant to the main thrust of the narrative. Elsewhere Bernstein has pointed to a more serious issue, identified after the Sherwin-Bird biography was published, which is that Oppenheimer was lying when he said that he had not been a member of the Communist Party. While no one watching the movie would have doubted Oppenheimer’s left-wing sympathies in the 1930s, his claim that he had never succumbed to peer pressure to join the party, relevant to getting his security clearance in the first place and to the later allegations of his unjust treatment, turns out to be wrong. All this adds to rather than subtracts from the complexity of the man and the tragic aspects of his life (although the 1954 hearing cost him his clearance but not his job). There is still no reason to believe that he was a security risk at that time. Evidence from Soviet archives shows that the KGB put a considerable effort into trying to recruit Oppenheimer and failed.

All movies are going to require some dramatic license. This is not a documentary. The question is whether the errors and omissions are so egregious that it is best viewed as a work of fiction. That is not the case with Oppenheimer. As with any work of history, however, that leads to the next question: does the evidence support the underling argument – that once this wretched ‘gadget’ had been inflicted on the world it really should have kept under better control.

In that respect the movie is timely. In its war against Ukraine, Russia has shown how reckless a nuclear-armed power can be. This has served as a reminder of the tension, with which we have been living since 1945, of accepting nuclear weapons as a source of national security while fearing them as a source of international catastrophe. Oppenheimer personifies the tension. On the one hand he takes on a demanding role and performs it magnificently – and proudly - so that a working bomb is available to end the war in the Pacific. On the other hand he ushers in a world in which mass death is an ever present possibility. Hence the moral qualms, so that he even moans to Truman, who has been taking life and death decisions for months, about having blood on his hands, leading the President to dismiss him as a ‘crybaby’.

There has been a debate raging since Hiroshima and Nagasaki about whether their destruction was really necessary to stop the war. Japan was clearly losing and in addition to the dropping of the bombs it had to face the Soviet Union’s entry into the war. What can be said is that Truman and his advisers believed that everything had to be tried to bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion before it was necessary to mount a full invasion of the Japanese mainland, and after the expense and effort that had gone into the project they were unlikely to hold back when it might make a crucial difference. And it was to these new weapons of unprecedented power that Japanese Emperor Hirohito referred when he broadcast to his people about the need to surrender. Those doubting the importance of the bomb and the difficulty of getting Japan to surrender should read Evan Thomas’s new book on the topic.

An even larger counter-factual is to ask whether nuclear weapons would have been invented without war time conditions, and the incentives generated by the prospect of a Nazi bomb. The possibility of splitting the atom had been demonstrated just before the war began and the implications for weaponry were immediately understood. But without the Manhattan Project it all might have happened in slower time, and without a war it might have been possible to introduce some sort of international control mechanisms. Even absent the bomb, though, the war had already shown that it was possible to cause tens of thousands of casualties and obliterate centres of civilization in a single air raid. As we have seen in the current war, and in many others since 1945, there are many ways of ‘escalating’ and causing immense suffering without resort to nuclear weapons.

The weapons were constructed and shown to work. Many of the scientists involved in the project would have been delighted if they have proved a fission bomb could not be made; others saw this as only an anti-Nazi weapons and were horrified when the project carried on after Germany surrendered. They came up with the idea of a demonstration shot, which was dismissed almost as soon as it was raised, for a variety of practical reasons (what would be the impact if the device turning out to be a dud; what if allied prisoners were taken to the designated area). The issue of how best to get the Japanese to surrender was a strategic one as well as a moral one.

And this was the case with each subsequent nuclear debate. Once the ‘genie was out of the bottle’ the issue – ethical and strategic - was how best to avoid a nuclear war. Ideally that would be achieved by rewinding to a world without nuclear weapons, as if there could be return to the prelapsarian state before the original sin of the bomb’s construction. As that could not be done the options were deterrence, international agreements restricting their use, or a combination of the two. All options would be judged by governments on strategic as well as ethical criteria. They would need to be convinced that the chosen course made them more secure. Disarmament and arms control negotiations could not be straightforward with adversaries considered hostile, sneaky, and totalitarian. However much abolitionists wished to demonstrate that there would be only gain and no risks in pushing these weapons aside, governments believed that they had real strategic value. Oppenheimer accepted this, which made his intellectual agonies and moral qualms more intense.

This is why the campaign to stop the Hydrogen Bomb failed. Once the Soviets had shown that they could master fission technology, the pressure to move to the next stage of thermonuclear weapons with explosive yields measured in millions of tons of TNT (megatons) as opposed to the thousands (kilotons). My late colleague Ken Young wrote a compelling book, based on contemporaneous interviews with many of the participants by Warner Schilling, to the effect that the opposition to this development was naïve and tactically inept. Oddly, prior to the Soviet test, Oppenheimer had been sceptical of the ‘super’ but not deeply opposed. The Soviet test opened up the prospect of an ever-deadlier arms race and it was right to worry about the consequences, but it also strengthened the strategic case for the ‘super’. He tried to dismiss the military value of this ‘weapon of genocide.’ But his proposed alternative (which happened as well) of lower-yield weapons for use in battle carried its own dangers. The proponents’ most compelling argument was that insisting on moral scruples or casting around for some military alternative was pointless if the Soviets were going to press on regardless. It was never likely that Truman would be persuaded to show restraint when there was no guarantee that this would be followed by Stalin.

The lack of an international treaty to control of atomic energy and the prospect of an indefinite arms race dashed Oppenheimer’s hopes, expressed regularly during the war and just after, that the prospect of nuclear catastrophe would encourage efforts for humankind to live in peace without war. For example, he observed in 1946:

‘The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.’

But it turned out not to be the final turn of the screw and the other side of the mountain remained far away,

Oppenheimer versus Strauss

Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s main antagonist in the film, shared none of his agonies or qualms. The conflict between the two is presented largely in personal terms. The mutual animus was certainly present: Strauss was undoubtedly prickly while Oppenheimer could be arrogant. Strauss leaned to the right while Oppenheimer leaned to the left. The main philosophical difference, however, revolved around their opposing visions of how to approach the challenge of nuclear weapons.

Strauss was appointed by Truman to the Board of the Atomic Energy Commission when it was set up in 1947. One of his significant contributions in this role was to urge that the US had a system to check for radioactive particles in the atmosphere to pick up on any Soviet test. This turned out to be a good move and enabled Truman – not Stalin – to announce in August 1949 that the Soviet Union was now in the game. Strauss then weighed in heavily in favour of the ‘super’ while Oppenheimer, chairing the advisory committee to the AEC was in opposition. When Eisenhower became President in 1953 Strauss became Chair of the AEC. He sought to exclude Oppenheimer from any position of influence, which soon led to the episode over his security clearance.

Strauss changed the role of the AEC. The previous Chairman, David Lilienthal, had shared concerns about the consequences of an arms race. With Oppenheimer’s support, he co-authored, with Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a plan for the international control of atomic energy. This eventually became a victim of the developing Cold War. Strauss, by contrast, saw his role as an advocate for nuclear energy. This meant that he deliberately played down the issues of nuclear fallout, especially following the ‘Lucky Dragon’ incident of March 1954, when the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel got radiation sickness after being showered with fallout from the US Castle Bravo nuclear test. As controversies over testing gathered pace during the 1950s, as atmospheric testing was shown to be a source of harmful radioactive pollution, Strauss was to the fore insisting that it was all quite safe, doggedly opposed to proposals for a nuclear test ban.

Morality and Strategy

In the 1960s and 1970s there was progress on arms control – prohibiting atmospheric tests, banning deployment of nuclear weapon in outer space or in the atmosphere, restricting the number of countries who would become nuclear powers, imposing limits on superpower arsenals, providing for emergency communications between political leaders at times. These have had some positive effects, although it remains the case that the best way to reduce nuclear anxieties is for there to be decent relations between the great powers, something notably absent at the moment.

There is no current prospect for the abolition of these weapons. The abolitionists wish to demonstrate that these weapons have no security value and that deterrence is an illusion but governments do not believe them. Russia’s nuclear arsenal must seem to Putin his most vital asset at the moment, already inhibiting NATO’s support for Ukraine. At the same time Western nuclear arsenals limit Russia’s options should it be tempted to take action against NATO countries on its borders. So deterrence does work. That is why states continue to cling to nuclear weapons. That does not mean that deterrence will continue to work in all circumstances, or that this is in any way a satisfactory state of affairs.

The famous quote at the top of this post provides a compelling metaphor for the nuclear condition. The difference between states and scorpions, however, is that while we can’t be sure that scorpions are aware of their predicament, and can resist stinging each other, government are aware and can show restraint, even at stressful times. In our current situation there are few measures in place that can ensure restraint so we are left relying on the caution resulting from the dire implications of a war ‘going nuclear’.

The article from which this quote comes was published in July 1953, months before Oppenheimer lost his security clearance, and still makes for interesting reading. He opens acknowledging the dashed hopes of the nuclear scientists:

‘Partly because of the mood of the time, partly because of a very clear prevision of what the technical developments would be, we had the impression that this might mark, not merely the end of a great and terrible war, but the end of such wars for mankind.’

Sadly the ‘obstacles presented by the programmatic hostility and the institutionalized secretiveness of Communist countries’ added to the ‘more normal and familiar difficulties of devising instruments for the regulation of armaments in a world without prospect of political settlement.’ He described the challenge then faced in terms of a trilemma:

‘There are three things we need to remember, three things that are very sharp. It is perilous to forget any one of them. One is the hostility and the power of the Soviet. Another is the touch of weakness—the need for unity, the need for some stability, the need for armed strength on the part of our friends in the Free World. And the third is the increasing peril of the atom. The problem is straightforward, if not easy, if we forget the last. It is easy if we forget the first. It is hard if we remember all three. But they are all there.’

He had proposals for dealing with the challenge, including a greater emphasis on defences against attack (a policy that his colleagues a decade later would come to consider potentially destabilizing). But one of his themes was also the need for greater information and candour about the many dimensions of the challenge. He alluded to things about which he could not write and the inhibiting consequences of excessive secrecy:

“We do not operate well when the important facts, the essential conditions, which limit and determine our choices are unknown. We do not operate well when they are known, in secrecy and in fear, only to a few men.”

Within months he was to lose his clearance, and so he would no longer be one of those in the know. Over the subsequent seventy years knowledge of the atom and the arsenals and policies of the nuclear powers has grown. Everything is much more transparent. A security clearance is far less important now when it comes to being able to talk sensibly about our nuclear predicament. But we are as unsure as ever about what to do about it.

6. Review | ‘A Compassionate Spy’: Footnote to ‘Oppenheimer’

Conclusion:

“A Compassionate Spy” is less a full companion piece to “Oppenheimer” than an intriguing sidebar. When Ted Hall reminisces about how he sat alone in his room, disturbed, as his Los Alamos colleagues celebrated their team’s 1945 success, it’s hard not to remember those scenes of self-congratulation in “Oppenheimer” — but also to recall Nolan’s film as a better, bigger, bolder and more complex examination of all the nuance and contradiction associated with the dawn of the atomic age.

Review | ‘A Compassionate Spy’: Footnote to ‘Oppenheimer’

Documentary tells the story of physicist Ted Hall, the youngest scientist to work on the Manhattan Project, and a spy

Review by Michael O'Sullivan

August 1, 2023 at 12:22 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Michael O'Sullivan · August 1, 2023

(2.5 stars)

Physicist Ted Hall, who was recruited to join the Manhattan Project after graduating from Harvard at the age of 18, worked alongside J. Robert Oppenheimer at the project’s Los Alamos compound. Although his character is not depicted in “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s sweeping biopic about the director of the Los Alamos lab, Hall’s smaller story — told in the documentary “A Compassionate Spy” — makes for a timely footnote to Nolan’s magnum opus.

As Hall has admitted, shortly before his death in 1999, he gave the Soviets critical information about the implosion technology being used for the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, information that may have helped them in the pursuit of their own nuclear weapon. The decision, he says in an old interview — footage of which, included here, contains his confession and other recollections of the past — was born out of “compassion”: Two superpowers with the same weapon of mass destruction would be less likely to use it against each other.

Suspicions about the loyalty of Oppenheimer — who like Hall and some others at Los Alamos had some sympathies toward leftist causes — figure prominently in “Oppenheimer.” But although Hall was interviewed by the FBI, he was never charged with a crime. By the time the U.S. government’s suspicions about Hall were confirmed (when a misspelled version of his name was recognized in an intercepted communication from Russia), the decision was made not to pursue espionage charges, which would have publicly revealed that the United States had broken Soviet code.

This small detail is actually the most fascinating part of “A Compassionate Spy,” but it is glossed over in the film by Steve James, director of the Oscar-nominated 1994 film “Hoop Dreams.” Instead, the film focuses mainly on an interview with Hall’s widow, Joan Hall, who adds some interesting perspective and insight into her husband’s thinking. Reenactments with actors playing the Halls (J. Michael Wright and Lucy Zukaitis) and Ted’s friend and co-conspirator Saville Sax (Nicolas Eastlund) are occasionally goofy and unnecessary. The threesome, it is suggested, formed a love triangle, so “A Compassionate Spy” is also a kind of romance.

Ted’s motivations are adequately defended, by his own words and Joan’s. But the other side of the moral coin is left largely unexplored, other than a brief clip in which we hear one of the film’s subjects opine that, if he had his druthers, Ted would have been shot as a traitor. Interludes related to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage in 1951 (and executed in 1953), provide some helpful context.

“A Compassionate Spy” is less a full companion piece to “Oppenheimer” than an intriguing sidebar. When Ted Hall reminisces about how he sat alone in his room, disturbed, as his Los Alamos colleagues celebrated their team’s 1945 success, it’s hard not to remember those scenes of self-congratulation in “Oppenheimer” — but also to recall Nolan’s film as a better, bigger, bolder and more complex examination of all the nuance and contradiction associated with the dawn of the atomic age.

Unrated. Available on Apple TV Plus, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube and other streaming platforms; also playing Aug. 3, 10 and 24 at Cafritz Hall of the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C. Contains brief strong language and some disturbing images of radiation burns. 101 minutes.

The Washington Post · by Michael O'Sullivan · August 1, 2023

7. Army's New Enlisted Leader: The Bet a Green Beret Can Lead the Rank and File

Excerpts:

Like Grinston, Weimer believes keeping the ACFT is non-negotiable. But he agrees it can slowly morph over time. Army planners have already been mulling a plan similar to the House's proposal by adjusting the baseline standards for combat arms.

"We absolutely needed to be doing more than sit-ups, push-ups and a two-mile run to be true professionals at warfighting," Weimer said, arguing that the old fitness test was too easy and a poor measure of fitness. "There's some uncertainty in where we are going ... but what we're not having is a question on whether the ACFT is good for the Army.

"We're having some discussions on the standards, and we'll continue to do that," he said.

Weimer previously served as the senior enlisted leader for U.S. Army Special Operations Command. He joined the Army in 1993, earned his Army green beret in 1996, and served as a Special Forces weapons sergeant. He is a graduate of Norwich University, where he earned a bachelor's in strategic studies and defense analysis.

Finally, beards are a subject of much discussion among the rank and file. Sometimes, with a changing of the guard, there is a glimmer of hope in the Army's formations for relaxed grooming standards.

But for Weimer, that's a hard pass.

"No," he said when Military.com asked about beards. "I shave seven days a week. For me, it's about discipline."

Army's New Enlisted Leader: The Bet a Green Beret Can Lead the Rank and File

military.com · by Steve Beynon · August 4, 2023

Sgt. Maj. Michael Weimer has effectively spent his whole Army career in Special Forces, and a large swath of that time in the secretive Delta Force.

He has more than enough combat bona fides -- three Bronze Stars and Joint Service Commendation Medal with valor, along with two Purple Hearts.

On Friday, Weimer took the helm as the new sergeant major of the Army. The service will now see how a Green Beret leads its rank-and-file soldiers.

"My own assessment was, I have the least experience in the total Army compared to others. ... I absolutely do believe I come at problems differently. I love change. I don't like change for change's sake, but I'm not a 'status quo' person," Weimer said in an interview with Military.com. "I think [special operations] helped me in that space.

"We need a fresh set of eyes; we can use a different perspective," he said.

As the service's top enlisted leader, Weimer is in charge of assuring the force is ready for war. But the role is much more than that. He'll be the face of the Army and set the tone while overseeing personnel issues that make up the bulk of the day-to-day concerns of the force.

No one questions Weimer's combat credentials. But he comes into the role with little experience with the conventional Army and all its challenges, frequently different from those faced by special operations, which is often siloed from the regular force.

Out of the previous 16 top enlisted leaders, only three spent time in special operations -- but even they spent much of their careers in the conventional Army.

"I had to reflect on that," Weimer said.

Michael Grinston, the previous sergeant major of the Army, suggested Weimer apply for the role. Roughly 30 command sergeants major applied for the position, with three, including Weimer, being seriously considered in final interviews.

Weimer's Superpower

Weimer, 51, is usually jovial. He walks into a room and makes it a point to acknowledge everyone there, taking the perfect amount of time to ask them how their day is; intensely listening; finding some quick common ground; and moving on. He says his Christian faith is what ultimately grounds him.

He has a knack for remembering faces and names after only a single brief interaction, which one Pentagon staffer described as his superpower.

Weimer often wears a uniform stripped of accolades, rarely wearing his Combat Infantryman or Air Assault badges, awards that are not special in the units he served in. He doesn't even wear a combat patch, a unit insignia on the right shoulder sleeve that shows who a soldier went to war with.

But his formal dress uniform is in perfect condition, stacked with numerous awards and badges, ready for the most nitpicky inspection.

"You're going to see me mix it up. But your character and who you are isn't in your badges. Those are things you accomplished on your journey," Weimer said. "Oftentimes, it was a long time ago. I'm really interested in what you're doing today."

On Fridays, he'll wear a complete uniform because he sees it as the appropriate thing to do, but for him, it remains all about now.

"You got to get up in the morning and bring it again. You can't rest on, 'Well, I brought it 10 years ago,'" Weimer said.

Grinston retired Friday, after enlisting in the Army in 1987 as an artilleryman. He was unusually vocal on social media and uncommonly available to the media during his tenure.

During his four years as sergeant major of the Army, Grinston oversaw some of the most transformative times for the service, including the implementation of its new physical fitness and marksmanship tests, revamping grooming standards for women, and implementing the Expert Soldier Badge. His tenure also overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and the gruesome slaying of Spc. Vanessa Guillén.

Grinston was widely known for wielding social media to reach out to rank-and-file troops and to defend soldiers' rights to serve even as political commentators bludgeoned the force for being more welcoming to women and other historically marginalized groups.

"There was a requirement to be able to do what they did to speak up and advocate, get our messaging out. I give them the big kudos. They were what we call the pathfinders in that space," Weimer said, referring to Grinston and his team. "How it's going to look for me, I don't know. ... We're going to engage, and we're not going to completely withdraw. ... I think it's too important."

Weimer comes in at a critical time for the service. After two decades of the Global War on Terrorism, the Army is in the midst of shifting its policy and doctrine and upgrading its gear for conventional warfare.

"I'm passionate about a warrior mindset," Weimer said. "Now, what does that mean for a cyber warrior [or] logistician? That's the piece I think we've got to really dive down to," Weimer said. "It's truly a mindset. I get up, put on this [uniform] in the morning. How do I fit in that warrior culture? We got to define that and coach, teach and mentor and model it."

Personnel Issues

The force is facing a number of personnel issues that fall directly into Weimer's portfolio, including a huge backlog of aging barracks where junior enlisted troops consistently report mold infestations and other poor living conditions.

The Army has a budget of about $1 billion per year for renovations and new construction, but some estimates suggest that it needs significantly more funds, and it'll be more than a decade until some of its worst barracks are addressed.

The service is also facing a suicide crisis within the ranks, with 255 soldiers dying by suicide last year across the active-duty and part-time service components. The Army has virtually no policy or guidelines for units to handle soldiers with mental health issues or suicidal ideation. Much of that has been left to individual divisions to craft their own ad-hoc regulations after the Army stopped its process of establishing service-wide guidelines that had been at least three years in development.

The service is also eyeing changes in how it feeds troops, either by upgrading nutritional options at dining facilities or allowing soldiers to use military meal cards at restaurants -- the former is struggling to get off the ground and the latter is in the midst of a trial period at Fort Drum, New York.

"We absolutely need the policies, the talent and also the funding. … It's critical. But the fourth piece is engaged leadership, slightly intrusive, just intrusive enough to be involved in the people domain," Weimer said. "That's the piece I'm going to spend a lot of time on while I assist on the policy and resource piece, because I have the ability to do that in this position."

Army Fitness

The two chambers of Congress also have dueling proposals to change the Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT.

The House is aiming to set gender-neutral standards for combat arms, and the Senate wants to revert back to the old fitness test -- something the previous sergeant major of the Army immediately blasted, calling the idea "unreasonable."

Like Grinston, Weimer believes keeping the ACFT is non-negotiable. But he agrees it can slowly morph over time. Army planners have already been mulling a plan similar to the House's proposal by adjusting the baseline standards for combat arms.

"We absolutely needed to be doing more than sit-ups, push-ups and a two-mile run to be true professionals at warfighting," Weimer said, arguing that the old fitness test was too easy and a poor measure of fitness. "There's some uncertainty in where we are going ... but what we're not having is a question on whether the ACFT is good for the Army.

"We're having some discussions on the standards, and we'll continue to do that," he said.

Weimer previously served as the senior enlisted leader for U.S. Army Special Operations Command. He joined the Army in 1993, earned his Army green beret in 1996, and served as a Special Forces weapons sergeant. He is a graduate of Norwich University, where he earned a bachelor's in strategic studies and defense analysis.

Finally, beards are a subject of much discussion among the rank and file. Sometimes, with a changing of the guard, there is a glimmer of hope in the Army's formations for relaxed grooming standards.

But for Weimer, that's a hard pass.

"No," he said when Military.com asked about beards. "I shave seven days a week. For me, it's about discipline."

Editor's note: This story was updated to reflect that Weimer served with U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon.

military.com · by Steve Beynon · August 4, 2023

8. Opinion: Ukraine Endgame: Policymakers Cite Korea and WWI

Conclusion:

While some of these views may seem wrongheaded or naïve to embattled Ukraine leaders, it is worth noting that they may soon be the consensus opinions in Western capitals.

Opinion: Ukraine Endgame: Policymakers Cite Korea and WWI

kyivpost.com · by David Winch

How do American and other Western opinion-makers view the war in Ukraine today, in summer 2023? Are they urging leaders to change course, or persist? To withdraw support, or press on harder than ever?

August 4, 2023, 12:01 pm |

US President Joe Biden (L) and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky leave at the end of an event to announce a Joint Declaration of Support for Ukraine during the NATO summit, in Vilnius on July 12, 2023. PHOTO: Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

While the US President, his Secretaries of State and Defense and NATO leaders are regularly quoted about their views of the war, what are the deeper currents of thought among Western policymakers and thought leaders? In short, what advice are the political leaders getting?

No one has a perfectly clear window into the mind of the foreign-policy establishment in America. But you could do worse than to listen closely to the specialist monthly Foreign Affairs.

Its July-August special issue on Ukraine, titled “Tell Me How This Ends: Is there a path to victory in Ukraine?” includes three major articles by foreign-policy experts and government advisers. There are also related commentaries about the difficulties of political change in Russia and new threats to European security. These views may influence Western policies.

Nobody will be happy

The FA issue reaches no solid consensus: one expert toys with the prospect of a Ukraine breakthrough in the east, but then retreats to conclude it is “An Unwinnable War.” Another writer evokes the history of warfare and how it can spin out of control, drawing in more combatants and expanding against everyone’s best interests, as in the First World War.

One theme recurs: nobody will be happy with this war’s outcome. Negotiations, however discreet or indirect, need to start immediately and to continue even during fighting. These could lead to an armistice, after secondary issues are settled.

Samuel Charap, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation and former State Department official in the Obama administration, is author of the Unwinnable War piece, subtitled “Washington needs an endgame in Ukraine.” He begins by stating that “while the Western response was clear from the start, the objective – the endgame of this war – has been nebulous.”

“It is now time that the United States develop a vision for how the war ends… If the [US and its allies] decide to wait, the fundamentals of the war will likely be the same,” but the human costs will have multiplied. Charap adds that a protracted war can continue indefinitely with no progress, noting that the Iran-Iraq war dragged on for eight years. Such a situation allows, and even demands, military escalation.

He predicts: “The war will end without a resolution to the territorial dispute. Either Russia or Ukraine or, more likely, both, will have to settle for a de facto line of control that neither recognizes as an international border.”

Charap cites as precedent for this “unsatisfactory outcome” the Korean War armistice of 1953. Nobody got what they wanted, but all parties were constrained to accept it anyway. He notes, however, that the military option predominates within the US government: the Security Assistance Group-Ukraine military command there is led by a three-star general with a staff of 300. “Yet there is not a single official in the US government whose full-time job is conflict diplomacy,” laments Charap.

The Korea analogy gets a lot of attention in Foreign Affairs. Carter Malkasian, chair of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, gives a detailed account of that 1950-1953 war in his piece “The Korea Model: Why an armistice offers the best hope for peace in Ukraine.” He notes that the Soviet Union and the US faced off indirectly in that war, each giving enemy sides military and diplomatic support. The threat of nuclear escalation remained visible throughout the conflict.

Soviets became less dogmatic

Those similarities cannot obscure the many differences. US and other allied troops, British and Canadian, fought under the United Nations flag alongside southern Koreans; it was called a “police action” against aggression. China fielded troops in Korea, while the Soviets did not.

Negotiations began after a year of conflict. The UN channel was always open for talks after 1951, encouraged notably by Indian diplomat V.K. Krishna Menon.

In 1952, legendary US general Dwight Eisenhower was elected President. This stiffened American resolve. Perhaps more important, in March 1953 Joseph Stalin died; the Soviet positions became less dogmatic. By June, negotiations focused more seriously on practical and short-term issues, such as the return of prisoners of war.

Gradually, it became a forum for more concrete discussions of how to end the conflict by dividing territory. But nothing was easy: “The Communists wanted the 38th parallel to serve as the cease-fire line. The United States, on the other hand, preferred the frontline (or “line of contact”), which was slightly north of the parallel, where the rugged terrain was easier to defend. On November 27 [1953], after four months of talking and fighting, the two sides agreed that the line of contact would become the cease-fire line,” writes Malkasian.

That line somehow holds today, 70 years later. And there is still no formal end to the war. But North and South Korea have gone on as separate, sovereign States in an unsatisfactory equilibrium.

The most pessimistic take in Foreign Affairs is contributed by historian Margaret Macmillan. An Oxford scholar, she is famed for her account of the 1919 Versailles Treaty that concluded the First World War. Her article, “How Wars Don’t End: Ukraine, Russia and the lessons of World War I” focuses on how unpredictable and volatile wartime developments can be. In 1914, many in France expected a quick end to the border war with Germany, and to be “home for Christmas.” That wasn’t to be, as the two sides dug in for years, made no progress, used prohibited weapons and decimated their societies.

“In 1914 and 2022 alike, those who assumed war wasn’t possible were wrong,” she notes.

She compares Putin’s idea that Kyiv could be rapidly conquered in 2022 to the Schlieffen Plan of Germany, which foresaw its troops quickly running through Belgium to encircle Paris – “all within six weeks.”

Macmillan underlines, too, that “symbolic” battles can overshadow any real military objectives; many First World War battles raged around areas such as Verdun, which she compares to Bakhmut in 2023. Holding those sites was critical to morale, but perhaps less so strategically.

Macmillan stresses the importance of early and ongoing negotiations in war. Even at the worst of times, they can prevent miscommunication and disaster. And humiliating an enemy is not the end of conflict; the postwar peace must be won, too.

While some of these views may seem wrongheaded or naïve to embattled Ukraine leaders, it is worth noting that they may soon be the consensus opinions in Western capitals.

The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

9. Poland and Lithuania, on NATO’s eastern flank, warn against ‘provocations’ from Wagner forces in Belarus.

Poland and Lithuania, on NATO’s eastern flank, warn against ‘provocations’ from Wagner forces in Belarus.

By Monika Pronczuk

reporting from Brussels

• Aug. 3, 2023

The New York Times · by Monika Pronczuk · August 3, 2023

LIVE See more updates: Russia-Ukraine War

Aug. 3, 2023, 4:10 p.m. ET

The notice came a few days after two helicopters bearing Belarusian flags violated Polish airspace.

President Gitanas Nauseda of Lithuania, left, and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland during a news conference on Thursday in northeastern Poland, near both countries’ borders with Belarus.Credit...Artur Reszko/EPA, via Shutterstock

• Aug. 3, 2023, 3:41 p.m. ET

The leaders of NATO members Poland and Lithuania warned on Thursday against “provocations” and “sabotage actions” from neighboring Belarus by relocated members of Russia’s Wagner mercenary force, a warning that comes just days after two Belarusian helicopters breached Polish airspace and heightened jitters in the region.

“Our response to the provocation is to increase the size of the Polish Army on the eastern border of the country by redeploying troops from the west,” Poland’s defense minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, said on Thursday at a televised meeting with troop commanders in Bialystok, a regional capital near the Belarusian border. “In accordance with the applicable law, soldiers in a specific situation can use weapons. They are not defenseless.”

Belarus, a staunch Russian ally, shares sizable borders with both Poland and Lithuania, which support Ukraine.

There are at least 4,000 members of the Wagner mercenary group in Belarus, Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said separately on Thursday, at a news conference with President Gitanas Nauseda of Lithuania at Przesmyk Suwalski, a strategic strip of land in Poland near both the Belarusian and Lithuanian borders as well as that of Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea.

The Wagner group is “extremely dangerous,” Mr. Morawiecki said, and it is “being redeployed to NATO’s eastern flank to destabilize it.”

On Tuesday, local media reported that two helicopters marked with Belarusian flags were seen in the area of Bialowieza, just across the border from Belarus. Although the Polish government at first said it had not detected any intrusion, the Defense Ministry later confirmed that “there was a violation of Polish airspace by two Belarusian helicopters that were carrying out training near the border,” adding that Belarus had informed Poland about the exercises.

Following the incident, Polish authorities alerted NATO and announced that they were deploying extra troops and helicopters to the border.

At the news conference with Mr. Morawiecki, the Lithuanian president warned that the presence of Wagner mercenaries in Belarus was “an additional security risk factor for Lithuania, Poland and NATO allies.” Mr. Nauseda added: “We remain vigilant and prepared for any possible scenario.”

Poland and Lithuania fortified their borders with Belarus starting in late 2021 as Polish and European authorities accused the longtime autocratic ruler of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, of luring migrants from the Middle East and Africa with flights and visas and then pushing them into Poland in order to destabilize the country and gain diplomatic leverage. Poland built an 18-foot razor-wire-topped wall along 115 miles of the border.

Facing similar fears from Kaliningrad last November, Poland installed a fence along 116 miles of that border.

Monika Pronczuk is a reporter based in Brussels. She joined The Times in 2020. More about Monika Pronczuk

The New York Times · by Monika Pronczuk · August 3, 2023

10. This Disinformation Is Just for You

Excerpts:

The Biden administration recently struck a deal with some of the largest AI companies—ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta—that encourages them to create specific guardrails for their AI tools, including external testing of AI tools and watermarking of content created by AI. These AI companies have also created a group focused on developing safety standards for AI tools, and Congress is debating how to regulate AI.

Despite such efforts, AI is accelerating faster than it’s being reined in, and Silicon Valley often fails to keep promises to only release safe, tested products. And even if some companies behave responsibly, that doesn’t mean all of the players in this space will act accordingly.

“This is the classic story of the last 20 years: Unleash technology, invade everybody’s privacy, wreak havoc, become trillion-dollar-valuation companies, and then say, ‘Well, yeah, some bad stuff happened,’” Farid says. “We’re sort of repeating the same mistakes, but now it’s supercharged because we’re releasing this stuff on the back of mobile devices, social media, and a mess that already exists.”

THOR BENSONSECURITYAUG 1, 2023 7:00 AM

This Disinformation Is Just for You

Generative AI won't just flood the internet with more lies—it may also create convincing disinformation that’s targeted at groups or even individuals.

Wired · by THOR BENSON · August 1, 2023

It’s now well understood that generative AI will increase the spread of disinformation on the internet. From deepfakes to fake news articles to bots, AI will generate not only more disinformation, but more convincing disinformation. But what people are only starting to understand is how disinformation will become more targeted and better able to engage with people and sway their opinions.

When Russia tried to influence the 2016 US presidential election via the now disbanded Internet Research Agency, the operation was run by humans who often had little cultural fluency or even fluency in the English language and so were not always able to relate to the groups they were targeting. With generative AI tools, those waging disinformation campaigns will be able to finely tune their approach by profiling individuals and groups. These operatives can produce content that seems legitimate and relatable to the people on the other end and even target individuals with personalized disinformation based on data they’ve collected. Generative AI will also make it much easier to produce disinformation and will thus increase the amount of disinformation that’s freely flowing on the internet, experts say.

“Generate AI lowers the financial barrier for creating content that’s tailored to certain audiences,” says Kate Starbird, an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. “You can tailor it to audiences and make sure the narrative hits on the values and beliefs of those audiences, as well as the strategic part of the narrative.”

Rather than producing just a handful of articles a day, Starbird adds, “You can actually write one article and tailor it to 12 different audiences. It takes five minutes for each one of them.”

Considering how much content people post to social media and other platforms, it’s very easy to collect data to build a disinformation campaign. Once operatives are able to profile different groups of people throughout a country, they can teach the generative AI system they’re using to create content that manipulates those targets in highly sophisticated ways.

“You’re going to see that capacity to fine-tune. You’re going to see that precision increase. You’re going to see the relevancy increase,” says Renee Diresta, the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.

Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, says this kind of customized disinformation is going to be “everywhere.” Though bad actors will probably target people by groups when waging a large-scale disinformation campaign, they could also use generative AI to target individuals.

“You could say something like, ‘Here’s a bunch of tweets from this user. Please write me something that will be engaging to them.’ That’ll get automated. I think that’s probably coming,” Farid says.

Purveyors of disinformation will try all sorts of tactics until they find what works best, Farid says, and much of what’s happening with these disinformation campaigns likely won’t be fully understood until after they’ve been in operation for some time. Plus, they only need to be somewhat effective to achieve their aims.

“If I want to launch a disinformation campaign, I can fail 99 percent of the time. You fail all the time, but it doesn’t matter,” Farid says. “Every once in a while, the QAnon gets through. Most of your campaigns can fail, but the ones that don’t can wreak havoc.”

Farid says we saw during the 2016 election cycle how the recommendation algorithms on platforms like Facebook radicalized people and helped spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. In the lead-up to the 2024 US election, Facebook’s algorithm—itself a form of AI—will likely be recommending some AI-generated posts instead of only pushing content created entirely by human actors. We’ve reached the point where AI will be used to create disinformation that another AI then recommends to you.

“We’ve been pretty well tricked by very low-quality content. We are entering a period where we’re going to get higher-quality disinformation and propaganda,” Starbird says. “It’s going to be much easier to produce content that’s tailored for specific audiences than it ever was before. I think we’re just going to have to be aware that that’s here now.”

What can be done about this problem? Unfortunately, only so much. Diresta says people need to be made aware of these potential threats and be more careful about what content they engage with. She says you’ll want to check whether your source is a website or social media profile that was created very recently, for example. Farid says AI companies also need to be pressured to implement safeguards so there’s less disinformation being created overall.

The Biden administration recently struck a deal with some of the largest AI companies—ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta—that encourages them to create specific guardrails for their AI tools, including external testing of AI tools and watermarking of content created by AI. These AI companies have also created a group focused on developing safety standards for AI tools, and Congress is debating how to regulate AI.

Despite such efforts, AI is accelerating faster than it’s being reined in, and Silicon Valley often fails to keep promises to only release safe, tested products. And even if some companies behave responsibly, that doesn’t mean all of the players in this space will act accordingly.

“This is the classic story of the last 20 years: Unleash technology, invade everybody’s privacy, wreak havoc, become trillion-dollar-valuation companies, and then say, ‘Well, yeah, some bad stuff happened,’” Farid says. “We’re sort of repeating the same mistakes, but now it’s supercharged because we’re releasing this stuff on the back of mobile devices, social media, and a mess that already exists.”

Wired · by Condé Nast · August 1, 2023

11. Microsoft Exposes Russian Hackers' Sneaky Phishing Tactics via Microsoft Teams Chats

Excerpts:

The findings come days after the threat actor was attributed to phishing attacks targeting diplomatic entities throughout Eastern Europe with the goal of delivering a new backdoor called GraphicalProton.

They also follow the discovery of several new Azure AD (AAD) Connect attack vectors that could allow malicious cyber actors to create an undetectable backdoor by stealing cryptographic hashes of passwords by injecting malicious code into a hash syncing process and intercepting credentials by means of an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attack.

"For example, attackers can leverage the extraction of NT hashes to ensure they receive every future password change in the domain," Sygnia said in a statement shared with The Hacker News.

"Threat actors can also use [Active Directory Certificate Services] to obtain AAD Connector passwords, as well as serve as a man-in-the-middle and launch attacks against SSL-encrypted channels in the network by exploiting misconfigurations in certificate templates that have server authentication."

Microsoft Exposes Russian Hackers' Sneaky Phishing Tactics via Microsoft Teams Chats

thehackernews.com

Microsoft on Wednesday disclosed that it identified a set of highly targeted social engineering attacks mounted by a Russian nation-state threat actor using credential theft phishing lures sent as Microsoft Teams chats.

The tech giant attributed the attacks to a group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard (previously Nobelium). It's also called APT29, BlueBravo, Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes.

"In this latest activity, the threat actor uses previously compromised Microsoft 365 tenants owned by small businesses to create new domains that appear as technical support entities," the company said.

"Using these domains from compromised tenants, Midnight Blizzard leverages Teams messages to send lures that attempt to steal credentials from a targeted organization by engaging a user and eliciting approval of multi-factor authentication (MFA) prompts."

Microsoft said the campaign, observed since at least late May 2023, affected less than 40 organizations globally spanning government, non-government organizations (NGOs), IT services, technology, discrete manufacturing, and media sectors.

The threat actor has been observed to utilize token theft techniques for initial access into targeted environments, alongside other methods such as authentication spear-phishing, password spray, and brute-force attacks.

Another known hallmark is its exploitation of on-premises environments to laterally move to the cloud as well as the abuse of service providers' trust chain to gain access to downstream customers, as observed in the SolarWinds hack of 2020.

In the fresh batch of attacks linked to Midnight Blizzard, a new onmicrosoft.com subdomain is added to a tenant previously compromised in attacks, followed by creating a new user with that subdomain to initiate a Teams chat request with potential targets by masquerading as a technical support person or Microsoft's Identity Protection team.

"If the target user accepts the message request, the user then receives a Microsoft Teams message from the attacker attempting to convince them to enter a code into the Microsoft Authenticator app on their mobile device," Microsoft explained.

Should the victim follow through with the instructions, the threat actor is granted a token to authenticate as the targeted user, thereby allowing for account takeover and follow-on post-compromise activity.

"In some cases, the actor attempts to add a device to the organization as a managed device via Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), likely an attempt to circumvent conditional access policies configured to restrict access to specific resources to managed devices only," Microsoft cautioned.

The findings come days after the threat actor was attributed to phishing attacks targeting diplomatic entities throughout Eastern Europe with the goal of delivering a new backdoor called GraphicalProton.

They also follow the discovery of several new Azure AD (AAD) Connect attack vectors that could allow malicious cyber actors to create an undetectable backdoor by stealing cryptographic hashes of passwords by injecting malicious code into a hash syncing process and intercepting credentials by means of an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attack.

"For example, attackers can leverage the extraction of NT hashes to ensure they receive every future password change in the domain," Sygnia said in a statement shared with The Hacker News.

"Threat actors can also use [Active Directory Certificate Services] to obtain AAD Connector passwords, as well as serve as a man-in-the-middle and launch attacks against SSL-encrypted channels in the network by exploiting misconfigurations in certificate templates that have server authentication."

Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.

thehackernews.com

12. The west must match Russia and China in the dark arts of the grey zone

Excerpts:

The non-military means available to advance a country’s strategic interests have expanded in recent years. Our adversaries make effective use of them. Russian and Chinese information campaigns cast blame for the Ukraine war on Nato expansion and the hegemonic “west”. Ukraine’s friends may recognise this as the lie it is, but it resonates in the global south and in enclaves of gullible opinion in Europe and the US.

Weapons, training and intelligence provided to Ukraine are holding off a Russian military victory but, on their own, will lead to a frozen conflict with Russia in indefinite possession of over 15 per cent of Ukrainian territory. That would amount to a victory for Russia. It already occupies 20 per cent of Georgia and 12 per cent of Moldova, and is swallowing Belarus into its “union state”.

Military support alone cannot produce a Ukrainian victory, much less victory in the bigger struggle over the liberal global order. If we wish to preserve this order, we must master the dark arts of the grey zone, using a full arsenal of sub-threshold tools based on the non-military elements of strategic power.

...

The enduring relevance of the grey zone should not be dismissed. On the contrary, it is there that victory will be won in Ukraine and in the wider conflict over the future global order.

The west must match Russia and China in the dark arts of the grey zone

Financial Times · by Michael Miklaucic · July 31, 2023

The writer is a senior fellow at National Defense University and the editor-in-chief of the PRISM journal

Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine grinds into its 18th month. It is a war fought with blood and iron. Shorn of the nuance or ambiguity of the so-called grey zone, this is old-fashioned, heavy metal warfare. Desperate to prevail, Russia has dangled the threat of nuclear retaliation against any western-supported escalation. In these circumstances one might ask if the grey zone remains a valid concept? Are cyber attacks, disinformation and influence campaigns still relevant? The answer is a resounding “Yes”.

Ukraine is but a single front in a larger war on a global scale over what is and is not permissible in international relations. While defending Ukraine’s sovereignty is vital, the war over the future global order is also being fought along many other fronts and Russia is not our only adversary.

Ināra Mūrniece, Latvia’s defence minister, warned recently that it is wrong to think Russia has been weakened by this war and is incapable of strategic surprises. On the contrary, though its military has performed dismally in Ukraine, Russia maintains a robust capacity to subvert our interests with a full range of tools below the threshold of military combat. In 2016 Russian trolls interfered with the US presidential election. In 2017 the Kremlin-backed Sandworm hacker group unleashed NotPetya malware on the online world, costing billions of dollars. Russia’s information warfare machine can sow discord in strong and weak countries alike.

China, too, uses a sophisticated grey zone toolbox, including economic and trade coercion, naval power, a huge fleet of “fishing” vessels to bully neighbours in the South China Sea, militarisation of atolls in the South China Sea, Confucius Institutes at western universities and foreign police outposts which monitor expatriate Chinese. In 2021 China imposed a trade embargo and other sanctions on Lithuania in retaliation for the opening of a Taiwan Representative Office in Vilnius.

The non-military means available to advance a country’s strategic interests have expanded in recent years. Our adversaries make effective use of them. Russian and Chinese information campaigns cast blame for the Ukraine war on Nato expansion and the hegemonic “west”. Ukraine’s friends may recognise this as the lie it is, but it resonates in the global south and in enclaves of gullible opinion in Europe and the US.

Weapons, training and intelligence provided to Ukraine are holding off a Russian military victory but, on their own, will lead to a frozen conflict with Russia in indefinite possession of over 15 per cent of Ukrainian territory. That would amount to a victory for Russia. It already occupies 20 per cent of Georgia and 12 per cent of Moldova, and is swallowing Belarus into its “union state”.

Military support alone cannot produce a Ukrainian victory, much less victory in the bigger struggle over the liberal global order. If we wish to preserve this order, we must master the dark arts of the grey zone, using a full arsenal of sub-threshold tools based on the non-military elements of strategic power.

The portrayal of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, and support for the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, show how the west can do this. As a result of the ICC warrant, Putin was forced to cancel a trip to South Africa’s meeting of the Brics countries. In July, only 17 African heads of state out of 54 attended Putin’s Russia-Africa summit, as opposed to 43 that attended in 2019, limiting his ability to exert influence. To exploit this success, western countries should continue to ostracise Putin and mobilise their full information firepower to portray Putin as the criminal that he is.

The enduring relevance of the grey zone should not be dismissed. On the contrary, it is there that victory will be won in Ukraine and in the wider conflict over the future global order.

Financial Times · by Michael Miklaucic · July 31, 2023

13. Two US Navy sailors arrested on charges of sharing secrets with China

Two US Navy sailors arrested on charges of sharing secrets with China

Reuters · by Raphael Satter

WASHINGTON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Two U.S. Navy sailors have been arrested on charges of handing over sensitive national security material to China, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao, 26, was charged with conspiracy and bribetaking in connection with taking nearly $15,000 in exchange for photographs and videos of sensitive U.S. military information, the officials said. U.S. Navy sailor, Jinchao Wei, whose age was not disclosed, was charged with conspiring to send national defense information to China in exchange for thousands of dollars.

Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen told reporters in San Diego that, because of the men's actions, “sensitive military info ended up in the hands of the People’s Republic of China.”

Zhao is accused of sending his Chinese handler plans for U.S. military exercises in the Indo-Pacific region, electrical diagrams and blueprints for a radar system on a U.S. military base in Okinawa, Japan and security details for U.S. naval facilities in Ventura County and San Clemente Island outside Los Angeles, according to U.S. officials.

Wei is accused of disclosing information about the USS Essex, an amphibious assault ship where he served, as well as other American warships, including dozens of technical manuals laying out the Essex's weapons, power structure and operations.

The USS Essex, a U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship, arrives in Hong Kong harbour for a scheduled port visit, November 16, 2010. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo

Contact details for Wei and Zhao could not immediately be located.

U.S. officials at the press conference condemned China's espionage campaign Thursday.

"There is no bigger, multigenerational threat to the United States" than China, said FBI Special Agent Stacey Moy. Beijing"will stop at nothing to attack the United States in its strategic plan to become the world's sole superpower."

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the allegations.

U.S.-China relations have been tense for years over a range of national security and trade issues. The United States has accused China of espionage and cyberattacks, a charge that Beijing has rejected. China has also declared that it is under threat from spies.

Reporting by Kanishka Singh and Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Mark Porter, Alison Williams, Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Raphael Satter

Thomson Reuters

Reporter covering cybersecurity, surveillance, and disinformation for Reuters. Work has included investigations into state-sponsored espionage, deepfake-driven propaganda, and mercenary hacking.

Kanishka Singh

Thomson Reuters

Kanishka Singh is a breaking news reporter for Reuters in Washington DC, who primarily covers US politics and national affairs in his current role. His past breaking news coverage has spanned across a range of topics like the Black Lives Matter movement; the US elections; the 2021 Capitol riots and their follow up probes; the Brexit deal; US-China trade tensions; the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan; the COVID-19 pandemic; and a 2019 Supreme Court verdict on a religious dispute site in his native India.

Reuters · by Raphael Satter

14. Navy Sailors Charged With Allegedly Spying for China

Excerpts:

Last year, Shapour Moinian, a former Army helicopter pilot and defense contractor, was sentenced to 20 months in prison in a plea deal for providing aviation-related information to his Chinese handlers.

Among the most damaging cases, officials have said, is that of Kevin Mallory, a former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officer sentenced in 2019 to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to transmit national defense information to China. Former officials have said the secrets Mallory transmitted may have helped Beijing uncover Chinese agents working for the United States.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said last year that the Bureau had more than 2,000 investigations involving Chinese attempts to steal U.S. technology, and that two such new cases are opened every day.

A U.S. official said the majority of such cases involve American corporations. There are “a lot in the private sector, and continues to be a steady drip on the government side,” he said.

Navy Sailors Charged With Allegedly Spying for China

The two men are the latest cases of U.S. defense and intelligence officials charged with working on behalf of Beijing

https://www.wsj.com/articles/navy-sailors-charged-with-allegedly-spying-for-china-1e60431c

By Nancy A. Youssef

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 and Warren P. Strobel

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Aug. 3, 2023 8:20 pm ET

Two U.S. Navy sailors were arrested on charges that they provided military intelligence to China, including details of U.S. naval ships’ operating systems and information about upcoming military exercises in the Pacific, officials said on Thursday.

In both instances, according to unsealed federal indictments, a Chinese intelligence officer allegedly approached the junior sailors, suggesting that China is reaching deep within the military ranks in search of information about the Pentagon’s effort to counter perceived threats from Beijing in the Asia-Pacific region. 

China “stands apart in terms of the threat that its government poses to the United States,’’ Randy Grossman, a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, said during a news conference Thursday. “China is unrivaled in its audacity and the range of its malign efforts to subvert our laws.”

While both sailors’ indictments were unsealed on Thursday, a day after they were arrested in California, the amount and type of information they are accused of providing was different, according to the charging documents.

Jinchao “Patrick” Wei, a 22-year-old petty officer second class, served as a machinist’s mate on the amphibious ship USS Essex. He faces four charges, including one that falls under the rarely used Espionage Act. Prosecutors allege that he was part of a conspiracy to send national defense information to Chinese officials.

The USS Essex is under maintenance at Naval Base San Diego, where Wei was arrested as he arrived to work, officials said. He has served in the Navy since July 2021, according to his public service record, and agreed to work with an unnamed Chinese intelligence officer less than a year after joining the Navy, according to the indictment. He continued spying for a year, prosecutors alleged. 

Non-U.S. citizens can join the military if they are legally eligible to work, live in the U.S. and speak English. Wei, who was born in China, allegedly agreed to spy while he was applying to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, prosecutors said. When he became a U.S. citizen in May 2022, his Chinese handler congratulated him, prosecutors said. Wei told his handler that he knew what he was doing would be considered spying, prosecutors said, but accepted several thousands of dollars in payments. 

The second indictment charges a 26-year-old sailor, Wenheng “Thomas” Zhao, with allegedly sending photographs, videos and documents to an unnamed Chinese intelligence officer over a two-year period in exchange for just under $15,000. He is charged with conspiracy and receiving a bribe.

Jinchao ‘Patrick’ Wei, a 22-year-old petty officer second class, was arrested at Naval Base San Diego. PHOTO: SEAN M. HAFFEY/GETTY IMAGES

Zhao, who has been in the Navy since 2017, is a petty officer second class who worked as an electrician and held a secret clearance while he was based in a naval base in Ventura County, Calif. Among the information he allegedly sent were blueprints for a radar system operating on a U.S. military base in Okinawa, Japan. 

In Zhao’s case, many of the documents were classified CUI, or controlled unclassified information, or sensitive but not releasable, according to the charging document. In some instances, the military agrees to release documents classified as CUI, including Zhao and Wei’s service records. 

It is unclear whether the same unnamed Chinese intelligence officer approached the sailors, but in both instances the operative allegedly told Wei and Zhao to destroy evidence to help them cover their tracks, officials said.

Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, said that although China wasn’t aware of the details of the cases, “the U.S. government and media have frequently hyped up cases of ‘espionage’ related to China.’’

He added, “China firmly opposes the U.S. side’s groundless slander and smear of China.”

The Navy referred questions about the cases to the Justice Department, saying in a statement: “We take allegations of misconduct seriously, and the Navy is cooperating with the Justice Department.”

Neither Wei nor Zhao could be reached for comment and it wasn’t immediately clear whether they had legal representation. 

The charges against the two men were the latest in a spate of cases in recent years in which U.S. government defense and intelligence officials have been accused of spying on behalf of China.

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U.S. diplomats have been working to counter Beijing’s influence in ports that increase its economic power and could potentially be used for spying and military purposes. This video looks at China’s global network of ports and how the U.S. is working to stop their expansion in key areas. Illustration/Photo: Michael Tabb

Last year, Shapour Moinian, a former Army helicopter pilot and defense contractor, was sentenced to 20 months in prison in a plea deal for providing aviation-related information to his Chinese handlers.

Among the most damaging cases, officials have said, is that of Kevin Mallory, a former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officer sentenced in 2019 to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to transmit national defense information to China. Former officials have said the secrets Mallory transmitted may have helped Beijing uncover Chinese agents working for the United States.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said last year that the Bureau had more than 2,000 investigations involving Chinese attempts to steal U.S. technology, and that two such new cases are opened every day.

A U.S. official said the majority of such cases involve American corporations. There are “a lot in the private sector, and continues to be a steady drip on the government side,” he said.

Write to Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com and Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

15. Taiwan may get military funds from US, report says

Excerpts:

The US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) says that the US Congress can empower the US president to allot US$1 billion to provide Taiwan with aid in the form of defensive equipment, education and training.

The NDAA would also allow the US Department of State to provide up to US$2 billion per year in foreign military financing until 2027.

“This would be a monumental step that signals how far the US government is now willing to go to accelerate deterrence across the Taiwan Strait,” said Eric Sayers, managing director of the Washington-based Beacon Global Strategies, an advisory firm.

Sat, Aug 05, 2023 page1

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2023/08/05/2003804265

Taiwan may get military funds from US, report says

A FINANCING FIRST? Taiwan could receive arms paid for by US taxes for the first time if the US Congress submits a request this month, the ‘Financial Times’ reported

• 
  
• By Jake Chung / Staff writer
• Taiwan could receive foreign military financing from the US for the first time if Washington seeks to hasten the process of providing the nation with military equipment, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.
• Citing two people familiar with the plan, the newspaper reported that the US Office of Management and Budget is to include funding for Taiwan in a supplemental request as part of an effort to accelerate the provision of weapons.
• The funding would be listed as part of a supplemental budget request for Ukraine that is pending congressional approval, it reported.
• 
  

Military units take part in an anti-landing drill as part of the Han Kuang exercises on a beach in New Taipei City’s Bali District on Thursday last week.

• Photo: CNA
• If passed by the US Congress, Taiwan could for the first time receive arms paid for by US taxpayers.
• “The White House is expected to submit the request this month,” the report said.
• Asked by reporters about potential foreign military financing, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Thursday declined to comment directly, but reiterated the US’ commitment to furnishing Taiwan with necessary defensive equipment under the Taiwan Relations Act.
• Various agencies might implement this commitment and would explore appropriate ways of doing so, Kirby said.
• The request comes on the heels of a White House announcement that the US would for the first time supply Taiwan with US$345 million in weapons under a system known as the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which has been used to send weapons to Ukraine.
• The Financial Times reported that the decision to include funding for Taiwan in the supplemental budget and to use the drawdown authority underscores rising urgency to help Taipei.
• The US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) says that the US Congress can empower the US president to allot US$1 billion to provide Taiwan with aid in the form of defensive equipment, education and training.
• The NDAA would also allow the US Department of State to provide up to US$2 billion per year in foreign military financing until 2027.
• “This would be a monumental step that signals how far the US government is now willing to go to accelerate deterrence across the Taiwan Strait,” said Eric Sayers, managing director of the Washington-based Beacon Global Strategies, an advisory firm.
• Additional reporting by CNA

16. Military Justice Reform and Sexual Assault: Now What?

Excerpts:

Who decides whether sexual assault cases are sent to trial by courts-martial is by far the most significant change to the military justice system enacted by Congress and implemented by the President’s Executive Order. For the first time since 1775, senior military commanders like Franklin will no longer make this decision for sexual assault and several other serious violations of military law. Instead, each military service will appoint a Special Prosecutor who must be at least a 1-star general or admiral and a Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer – a highly experienced military attorney. These officers will, in effect, serve as the “DA” for their respective Services, receiving charges proposed by JAG officers from around the globe and deciding whether the evidence justifies criminal trial.

This change has been the single most controversial aspect of this reform debate, and many veterans of the military justice system (including me) advocated against it (see here). But this train has left the station, and the Services are well on their way to implementing this new process. This leads to the big question: now what?

Military Justice Reform and Sexual Assault: Now What? - SMERCONISH

smerconish.com · by Alice Herrick · August 4, 2023

In 2014, Air Force Lieutenant General Franklin set aside the conviction of a Lieutenant Colonel whom a military jury had convicted of sexual assault. Franklin had ordered the trial, and nothing in the record of that trial indicated a legal error that might justify an appellate reversal. Instead, Franklin was simply not convinced of his subordinate’s guilt and, acting as the proverbial “thirteenth juror,” overrode the military jury’s decision.

The outrage over this decision unleashed a genuine avalanche of scrutiny and criticism of the military justice system. Franklin defended his decision in a comprehensive submission to the Secretary of the Air Force, but nothing he said or could alter the perception of a fundamentally flawed system that discounted the interests of sexual assault victims in the ranks. Curing the perceived defects in this system – most notably the seemingly inexplicable grant of authority to military commanders to make binding prosecutorial and clemency decisions – became the mission of victim’s advocates, long-time critics of military justice, and ultimately a number of Senators and Members of Congress.

The next nine years saw countless studies and reviews of the system, many of which were mandated by Congress. This led to the implementation of substantial changes related to the reporting and processing of allegations of sexual assault and the protection of crime victims, culminating last week with President Biden’s Executive Order implementing the most significant changes to the UCMJ since 1968.

Who decides whether sexual assault cases are sent to trial by courts-martial is by far the most significant change to the military justice system enacted by Congress and implemented by the President’s Executive Order. For the first time since 1775, senior military commanders like Franklin will no longer make this decision for sexual assault and several other serious violations of military law. Instead, each military service will appoint a Special Prosecutor who must be at least a 1-star general or admiral and a Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer – a highly experienced military attorney. These officers will, in effect, serve as the “DA” for their respective Services, receiving charges proposed by JAG officers from around the globe and deciding whether the evidence justifies criminal trial.

This change has been the single most controversial aspect of this reform debate, and many veterans of the military justice system (including me) advocated against it (see here). But this train has left the station, and the Services are well on their way to implementing this new process. This leads to the big question: now what?

Critics of the military justice system have long argued that giving non-lawyer senior commanders the authority to decide what cases go to trial inhibits credible prosecution of sexual assault offenses. Whether or not that was true (many believe the opposite, that these commanders were often more inclined to send difficult cases to trial than the military lawyers advising them) will now be tested, for if the theory is correct, we should see a significant spike in such prosecutions. But what if that is not the result of this change?

We may not be able to predict the future with certainty, but we know a few things. First, the senior JAG officers who will now make prosecution decisions will be guided by the same criteria used by any other District Attorney in the United States: they will have to evaluate the strength of the available evidence and assess the probability of satisfying the burden of proving the alleged offense beyond a reasonable doubt. And like any other District Attorney, they will bear a legal and ethical obligation to decline to prosecute cases that are not supported by sufficient evidence. We also know that, unlike the Generals and Admirals who had to make these decisions prior to this change, there is a very low risk that they will be concerned about the negative career consequences of not sending a case to trial. Unlike a Major General commanding an Army Division or an Admiral commanding a Carrier Task Force, these new Service prosecutors will not face the real possibility of having a promotion held up in the Senate based on criticism they were not “hard” enough on sexual assault cases.

We should also expect that these Prosecutors will make their critically important decisions ethically and honorably, faithful to the law they each swear to uphold. All of this indicates a new era of more aggressive sexual assault prosecutions may be an unrealistic expectation; that the number of cases sent to trial may actually decline. Whatever the numbers turn out to be, this is by far the most laudable consequence of this change: a higher degree of confidence that the decision to send a case to trial – or decline to do so – is based on evidence and law and one we should respect. But from a policy perspective, this may actually contribute to the perception that the system is still flawed. That would be truly unfortunate.

One final aspect of these changes must be emphasized: although controversial, no one should doubt they will be implemented promptly, efficiently, and fairly. Nothing less should be expected of the military legal services and the exceptional men and women who will now be responsible for making what Congress and the President ordered work. Let’s just hope that if the outcome of these changes fails to align with the expectations of those who fought so hard to achieve them that they will accept those outcomes as legitimate.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Geoffrey Corn is the George R. Killam, Jr. Chair of Criminal Law and the Director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law. Corn is a Lieutenant Colonel (retired) having served 22 years in the Army as both a tactical intelligence officer and a military attorney. His career culminated as the Army’s senior law of armed conflict expert advisor. He has authored or co-authored more than 60 scholarly articles and numerous texts, including “The Law in War: A Concise Overview.“

smerconish.com · by Alice Herrick · August 4, 2023

17. The Unpredictable Dictators

Excerpts:

Even the best practices for structuring uncertainty, of course, cannot tell analysts precisely when adversaries will err. As a result, politicians need the intelligence community to keep close tabs on unexpected behavior. The community is well suited to this task; intelligence analysts specialize in looking for indicators that a dictator is about to make a mistake, such as military orders that contradict predictions, or indications that an adversary is mobilizing forces even when doing so does not seem wise. Human and signals intelligence on autocratic leaders can therefore serve as a kind of early warning system, allowing policymakers to expect foolish attacks.

The U.S. intelligence community performed this function in 2021 and 2022, chronicling Russia’s preparations for its ill-fated invasion. In the years ahead, it may have to do so again in the Taiwan Strait. Policymakers might think that Xi will steer clear of war because of how devastating an invasion would be for China’s own people, let alone for the broader region. But they need to understand that, depending on his psychology and assessments in the moment, Xi’s thinking about the island might depart from the rest of the Chinese Communist Party. It certainly could depart from what the West would think is a rational plan.

To divine Xi’s intentions, analysts must keep close track of China’s armed forces and economic plans. Large military buildups and moving troops into offensive positions, for instance, would be an obvious sign that Xi is considering an attack on Taiwan. So would Chinese efforts to increase oil reserves or to stockpile huge quantities of food. And analysts must keep close tabs on psychological indicators, from Xi’s speeches to whatever they can glean about the leader from human intelligence, to see what he is thinking. Leaders in the United States and its democratic allies must then pay attention to such findings so that they will not be caught unprepared. Western policymakers need to bake potential miscalculations into their analysis and commit to being open-minded, even if doing so challenges their worldview.

Ultimately, experts must remember that when it comes to dealing with autocrats, there are no certainties. Leaders will frequently ignore advice given to them or overestimate their abilities and miscalculate risks. In other words, leaders will not always be guided by level-headed rationalism, regardless of what outside observers think. It is a mistake for intelligence analysts and policymakers to assume otherwise.

The Unpredictable Dictators​

Why It’s So Hard to Forecast Authoritarian Aggression

By Keren Yarhi-Milo and Laura Resnick Samotin

August 4, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Keren Yarhi-Milo and Laura Resnick Samotin · August 4, 2023

Until the week before it happened, most people refused to believe that Russia would attack Ukraine. Despite repeated warnings from the Biden administration and widespread evidence that Moscow’s troops were massing on Ukraine’s borders, it was difficult to accept that Russian President Vladimir Putin would try conquering Europe’s largest state. “He won’t be initiating an escalation,” said French President Emmanuel Macron on February 8, just 16 days before the invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was also caught off-guard, saying at the end of January that Biden’s claims of a coming invasion were simply “panic.” The German government was so convinced Russia would not attack that its chief intelligence official was in Kyiv on the day the war began and had to be whisked out by German security personnel.

The invasion of Ukraine is not the first time that officials incorrectly dismissed warnings that a state would strike its neighbor. In 1973, Israeli policymakers rejected reports that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat planned to attack the Sinai, citing the fact that his air force could not strike deep behind their lines. In 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter did not believe Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s warning that China might invade Vietnam because Deng’s statement did not comport with Carter’s worldview. And until the 1991 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait actually began, the United States was convinced that President Saddam Hussein would not attack, even though facts on the ground indicated otherwise.

There is a reason officials fail to anticipate foreign misadventures. Policymakers and analysts typically use a “rational actor model” to make predictions, and per its name, the model holds that policymakers will act rationally. It predicts that leaders will pursue defined goals after carefully searching for all available information and weighing the costs of different actions. But people are prone to make mistakes, and so this model is of limited use when forecasting what governments will do. It does an especially poor job at predicting the behavior of autocrats, who can pursue illogical ideas without domestic pushback.

This insight holds important implications for the way the United States and other democracies think about how to confront their adversaries. It is particularly critical for policymakers considering Beijing’s plans for Taiwan. It is unlikely that China has the military capabilities needed to take the island, which would require carrying out the largest amphibious operation in history. As a result, most analysts tend to believe an invasion is unlikely anytime soon. But this line of thinking assumes that Chinese leader Xi Jinping knows it would be impossible to seize and hold Taiwan without paying an enormously high price. In other words, it assumes that Xi is a rational actor when, in reality, he may not be.

Instead, surrounded by supplicants, Xi could persuade himself that a war for Taiwan would be fast. He could believe, as Putin did with Ukrainians, that Chinese troops would be welcomed by many Taiwanese people. He could decide that neither the United States nor its allies would come to the island’s defense. These assumptions are plainly wrong, but Xi would not be the first leader to make decisions that are disastrously incorrect. Washington, then, needs to be ready for a Chinese attack on Taiwan—even if it defies common sense.

RATIONALITY AND REALITY

It is easy to see why analysts are drawn to the rational actor model. What states do to each other can have tremendous consequences for millions of people. Leaders’ choices can also reshape the overall contours of the international system. Given these stakes, one would certainly like to think that—before making major decisions—leaders weigh the costs and benefits.

But in a world where decisions are made by individuals, rationality has its limits. Leaders, for example, do not usually consider all aspects of a decision they face. They struggle to make the calculations necessary to reviews the costs and benefits of all possible options. And people have difficulty determining what factors are relevant in any given situation.

The rational actor model also assumes there are universal, objective criteria that policymakers use to make choices; in fact, there are not. Different leaders have different priorities, and they pay attention to different pieces of data. Consider, for instance, the Cuban missile crisis. As the political scientist Jonathan Renshon found, U.S. policymakers failed to anticipate the Soviet Union’s decision to station nuclear weapons in Cuba because they did not put themselves in Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s shoes. Instead of fully appreciating the benefits that Moscow might gain—namely, the military and psychological advantages of stationing the missiles just off the coast of Florida’s panhandle—American policymakers focused only on the immense costs and high level of risk, as if Khrushchev viewed the situation in the way they did.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provides another case in point. In the summer of 1989, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate found that, although Saddam might flex his muscles, the Iraqi leader would not attack Kuwait because he would be rebuilding his military after the Iran-Iraq War. Saddam, the estimate argued, would prudently focus on paying back the immense debt he incurred fighting Iran, rather than spending money on a conflict of choice. But from Saddam’s perspective, seizing Kuwait’s lucrative oil resources was the only way to pay off his debts and preserve his regime. And his recent win against Iran, where the Arab world rallied behind him, left Saddam confident that he could annex Kuwait without much external opposition.

There are not universal, objective criteria that policymakers use to make choices.

To better account for adversaries’ perspectives, political scientists have created behavioral models that attempt to calculate how different countries perceive the world. In doing so, researchers have found (not surprisingly) that personality traits and emotions affect decision making in multiple ways. For example, self-monitoring—the ability to track and regulate one’s own emotions and behaviors—makes some national leaders more likely than others to fight over a desire to appear resolute. Leaders prone to defensive avoidance, characterized by efforts to evade or dismiss information that would increase anxiety and fear, often ignore distressing information (such as news about an impending invasion). Feelings can also shape how leaders interpret threats and when they decide to take action. During a crisis, for instance, emotions can make leaders either more reckless or more conservative than a rational actor model would predict

Analyzing emotions can help analysts forecast the future. Such an approach, for example, might have produced a more accurate prediction of Khrushchev’s intentions during the Cuban missile crisis or Saddam’s motivation in the lead-up to his invasion of Kuwait. But even if analysts try to understand situations from an adversary’s point of view, they might make bad forecasts. It is hard to determine how much influence emotions have on a leader’s decision—and whether they pull leaders in a hawkish or dovish direction. Fear, for example, could prompt one leader to flee a dangerous situation while pushing another to fight. The same emotion can even have different effects on the same individual at different times. The reality, then, is that no model—however complex—can truly predict a leader’s actions.

Models fail at forecasting how all kinds of leaders will behave. But they are especially bad at predicting the actions of autocrats. Unlike in democracies, where the political process includes checks and balances that can stop bad decisions, authoritarian regimes have very limited, if any, checks on their leaders. Often, dictators ensconce themselves in an echo chamber that shields them from even hearing dissenting views. In Putin’s case, it appears that only a few top officials knew about his plans to invade Ukraine, and they all shared his beliefs and prejudices about Russia’s chances. In fact, Putin and his generals were so certain of a quick victory that when they invaded, soldiers were told to pack dress uniforms so a victory parade could be held in Kyiv.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

Thankfully, there are ways for foreign-policy officials to account for uncertainty. The first is to game out the universe of mistakes that an adversary could make, consider the range of potential miscalculations, and then prepare various responses. To assess whether Russia might attack a NATO state, for example, analysts could map out the various ways Putin could expand its war beyond Ukraine. Then, they would evaluate the likelihood of each of these actions and consider what miscalculations would lead Putin to take them. Finally, analysts would generate a range of possible Western responses.

Even the best practices for structuring uncertainty, of course, cannot tell analysts precisely when adversaries will err. As a result, politicians need the intelligence community to keep close tabs on unexpected behavior. The community is well suited to this task; intelligence analysts specialize in looking for indicators that a dictator is about to make a mistake, such as military orders that contradict predictions, or indications that an adversary is mobilizing forces even when doing so does not seem wise. Human and signals intelligence on autocratic leaders can therefore serve as a kind of early warning system, allowing policymakers to expect foolish attacks.

The U.S. intelligence community performed this function in 2021 and 2022, chronicling Russia’s preparations for its ill-fated invasion. In the years ahead, it may have to do so again in the Taiwan Strait. Policymakers might think that Xi will steer clear of war because of how devastating an invasion would be for China’s own people, let alone for the broader region. But they need to understand that, depending on his psychology and assessments in the moment, Xi’s thinking about the island might depart from the rest of the Chinese Communist Party. It certainly could depart from what the West would think is a rational plan.

To divine Xi’s intentions, analysts must keep close track of China’s armed forces and economic plans. Large military buildups and moving troops into offensive positions, for instance, would be an obvious sign that Xi is considering an attack on Taiwan. So would Chinese efforts to increase oil reserves or to stockpile huge quantities of food. And analysts must keep close tabs on psychological indicators, from Xi’s speeches to whatever they can glean about the leader from human intelligence, to see what he is thinking. Leaders in the United States and its democratic allies must then pay attention to such findings so that they will not be caught unprepared. Western policymakers need to bake potential miscalculations into their analysis and commit to being open-minded, even if doing so challenges their worldview.

Ultimately, experts must remember that when it comes to dealing with autocrats, there are no certainties. Leaders will frequently ignore advice given to them or overestimate their abilities and miscalculate risks. In other words, leaders will not always be guided by level-headed rationalism, regardless of what outside observers think. It is a mistake for intelligence analysts and policymakers to assume otherwise.

• KEREN YARHI-MILO is Dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations, and author of Who Fights for Reputation? The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict.
• LAURA RESNICK SAMOTIN is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy.

Foreign Affairs · by Keren Yarhi-Milo and Laura Resnick Samotin · August 4, 2023

18. The AUKUS Wager: More Than a Security Pact, the Deal Aims to Transform the Indo-Pacific Order

My question is why is the focus so much on submarines and technology? All three nations have forces that can effectively operate in the human rmdina and partner in ways that can be very effective in strategic competition inthe gray zone.

Excerpts:

Finally, although AUKUS may result in more robust deterrent capabilities in the years to come, it has not yet solved any pressing operational challenges, nor has it created any dilemmas for Beijing beyond the prospect of tighter coordination among Canberra, London, and Washington. Signaling matters, but creating indisputable facts on the ground matters more. This is where Pillar 2—the advanced capabilities pillar that exists adjacent to the submarines—and changes to force posture have the potential to deliver more immediate dividends. Timelines matter here, because there is an immediate deterrence challenge—not one that materializes a decade from now. A useful step, then, would involve bringing government, industry, and the academy together to define operational challenges and to begin sketching innovative solutions to them.

Whether AUKUS will deter China from further acts of aggression and provide stability to the Indo-Pacific region is a question that can likely only be answered by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. After all, deterrence resides in psychological spaces—something that takes place in a government’s calculations about its adversary’s intent and capabilities. AUKUS is a bold and ambitious initiative. It is also an enormous gamble to create, in Biden’s words, “more partnerships and more potential” that can produce “more peace and security in the region.” Providing answers to the questions that continue to challenge the deal’s implementation will be essential to realizing these larger goals. Giving the United States and its allies more capabilities and demonstrating their readiness to run more bureaucratic, political, and ultimately strategic risks is also the surest course for altering Xi Jinping’s calculations.

The AUKUS Wager

More Than a Security Pact, the Deal Aims to Transform the Indo-Pacific Order

By Charles Edel

August 4, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Charles Edel · August 4, 2023

At the end of July, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin traveled to Brisbane, Australia, for a series of high-level meetings with top Australian officials. It was the latest indication of the stepped-up security cooperation that has emerged since the 2021 signing of AUKUS, the tripartite defense collaboration among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This spring, U.S. President Joe Biden met with his Australian and British counterparts, Anthony Albanese and Rishi Sunak to announce the way forward for AUKUS. At a U.S. naval base at the edge of the Pacific Ocean with the USS Missouri, an attack-class submarine looming behind them, the three leaders detailed how they would work together to help Australia acquire, build, and maintain conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarines—a centerpiece of the AUKUS deal. In addition, the three leaders announced a series of other steps related to the deal: U.S. and British submarines are to begin showing up in Australian waters later this year and will establish a rotational presence there, the United States will sell three to five Virginia class submarines to Australia, marking the first time that Washington will transfer these boats to a foreign nation, and all three countries will invest in their own and one another’s submarine industrial capacities—an approach that has never been undertaken before.

Canberra, London, and Washington all have their own specific reasons for signing onto AUKUS, but concerns about Beijing are the common denominator. The accelerating and often nontransparent growth of China’s military, combined with Beijing’s increasingly assertive posture, has shifted the dynamics of regional security, diplomacy, and politics. Any effort by the United States and its partners to effectively compete with China must address the profound degradation in the Indo-Pacific security environment. Perhaps most important, though, they must address the unspoken but growing assumption in the region that China’s advantages are insurmountable and that smaller countries have no agency in their—or the region’s—fortunes.

Although AUKUS has not been the only move to restore strategic equilibrium in the region, it is the most dramatic. It also represents a significant change in the strategic calculation of each of its three member states. For the United Kingdom, it speaks to its ambitions to once again play a global security role; for Australia, it constitutes a decision to play a larger part in shaping its own region; and for the United States, it demonstrates a commitment to strengthen its most trusted allies in the service of collective, rather than unilateral, efforts to maintain a favorable balance of power. Indeed, as important as the initiative itself may be the larger strategic transformation that it ushers in.

AUKUS should be understood simultaneously as part of broader strategic shifts in the Indo-Pacific region, as an effort to spur other countries into action, as an indicator of evolving U.S. defense policy and architecture, and perhaps most importantly as a bet that shoring up deterrence will ultimately help stabilize the region. Few of these objectives are explicit, but that does not make them any less real. Bringing these ambitions into play will necessitate new efforts from the governments, legislatures, and industries of all three nations and will require confronting a range of challenging questions—several of which cannot currently be answered with any level of assurance.

WHEELS AND LATTICES

As much as it is a large-scale defense cooperation pact, AUKUS is also a harbinger of a new approach to U.S. defense policy and architecture. For much of the postwar period, the United States has pursued a policy of primacy or preeminence in the Indo-Pacific. The consistent and long-standing goal of U.S. policy has been to prevent the emergence of another power that can establish a sphere of influence in Asia and set the conditions for American access and influence. But AUKUS underscores how that policy goal is now unrealistic, potentially counterproductive, and probably unnecessary.

Moreover, primacy was built around a hub-and-spoke alliance model, according to which the United States dictated the terms of its security relationship with its allies. That model is no longer practical. As China has grown more powerful, and as American power has fallen in relative terms, Washington is now increasingly invested in allies who can pull their own weight and complement U.S. capabilities. At its core, AUKUS represents a fundamental decision to empower America’s key allies and, in doing so, give them increased capacity to play a larger role of their own in Indo-Pacific security.

At the same time, regional defense architecture is undergoing its own transformation. In the past, the hub-and-spoke model gave American forces access to several strategically located bases. That is now changing in three important ways. First, the hub-and-spoke model is evolving into a more flexible and multifaceted “latticework of alliances and partnerships.” In this updated model, the United States will play more of a supporting and enabling role for its allies. Second, due to the increasing reach of Chinese strike capabilities, regional defense architecture must now prioritize finding new locations to preposition assets, building support infrastructure, and rotating American and other forces. Finally, both Australia and Japan are now actively seeking to make themselves into harder targets by pursuing their own area-denial capabilities, including long-range strike capabilities, that have the potential to constrict Beijing’s ability to project power further afield. Doing so will create mutually contested spaces that in war would put Beijing’s power projection at risk and in peace will reassure friends in the region that China cannot have its way with them.

As Tokyo and Canberra lead regional efforts to harden their own defenses, the U.S. must continue working to organize and knit together sometimes disparate efforts to ensure that the total is greater, more distributed, more networked, and more lethal than the sum of its individual parts. AUKUS will serve as a springboard to advance each of these efforts.

FROM THREE TO MANY

If AUKUS marks the beginning of a fundamentally new approach to defense architecture in the Indo-Pacific region, it also contains the promise of unleashing other investments and partnerships that can help bring stability to the region. For a variety of reasons, the submarine dimension of AUKUS will necessarily remain a limited partnership for the foreseeable future. The sensitivity of the technology being shared, the complexity of the logistical requirements, and the high level of strategic trust required pose serious constraints to any expansion.

But in other respects, AUKUS can act as a catalyst for investments, efforts, and collaborations by other countries similarly concerned by China’s increasingly assertive military. Since the deal was first announced in 2021, London and Washington have signaled their eagerness to extend collaborations with other countries. AUKUS investments can create space for other nations to undertake their own efforts and defense enhancements and work more closely with the three AUKUS governments.

Already, Australia and Japan have undertaken their largest defense transformations since World War II. AUKUS was, after all, an Australian-initiated idea, and in 2020, before its inception, Canberra had announced that it was significantly upgrading its defense capabilities, increasing the size of its defense budget, and pursuing a more forward-postured defense strategy—all decisions which the new Australian government has now promised to bring about at a faster rate. In late 2022, meanwhile, Japan committed to double its defense spending by 2027—giving Tokyo the world’s third-largest defense budget—acquire long-range strike capabilities, and shift missiles to its southwestern islands in a move intended to complicate any Chinese plans to attack Taiwan.

AUKUS could unleash investments and partnerships that can help bring stability to the region.

Other countries have followed suit. The United Kingdom has made significant boosts to its defense budget. India has increasingly shifted its strategic focus, acquisition strategy, and defense planning away from Pakistan and toward China. And South Korea’s new government has expressed a desire to move beyond its traditional focus on the Korean peninsula and play a larger security role in the region. Decisions across Southeast Asia have been more varied, but the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam have all demonstrated a willingness to strengthen their own defense capabilities and augment their defense partnerships. These changes have not been made collectively but rather as independent sovereign determinations in multiple capitals, which have each concluded that it is necessary to take action to address a deteriorating security environment. AUKUS has the potential to empower other countries that wish to do the same.

AUKUS has also raised expectations around Pillar 2—the still underdeveloped part of the agreement intended to drive cooperation on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, hypersonics, quantum computing, cyber, unmanned underwater vehicles, and electronic warfare. This is part of a broader effort to catalyze technological integration, industrial production, and strategic innovation. Given the significance of advanced and emerging technologies to the prosperity and security of nations in the twenty-first century, it is unsurprising that prominent voices in France, India, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea have also signaled interest in finding ways to join these efforts.

The hope of these initiatives is to create a virtuous circle: the more that the United States and its closest partners lean in to actively enhance security in the Indo-Pacific region, the more other countries will be willing to lean into their own, or joint efforts. And the more resources that are invested, the greater the overall capacities that will be generated.

THE FORTY-YEAR WAGER

But even more than a deal, a hope, or a harbinger, AUKUS, at its core, fundamentally represents a bet. It is a bet that promoting, enabling, and further enhancing Australian and British capabilities will cause the overall regional balance of forces and power to reach a more favorable and sustainable footing, resulting in collective deterrence. It is also a bet because it remains unclear if the deal will work in the long run—whether it will create a sufficient number of constraints on Beijing’s actions to truly deter China.

To increase their odds in this bet, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States will need to address a host of challenging questions. The first is whether they can maintain bipartisan political support and public enthusiasm for the deal in all three countries over the next several decades. There will be multiple administrations of different political persuasions over the life of the initiative, and if the enthusiasm of the current governments is not sustained, AUKUS is unlikely to survive.

Related to this challenge is the question of whether the deal will receive the funding necessary to rapidly expand the industrial base and shipbuilding capacity of all three nations. This project is enormously expensive—the Australian government has pegged the initiative as costing it between $178 billion and $244 billion, and analysts have estimated that total U.S. shipbuilding costs will average nearly $30 billion a year for the next 30 years. This project is enormously expensive, and without sufficient investments, its lofty ambitions will meet with disappointment. Some of those investments will be to produce and maintain submarines, but as much attention needs to be given to more mundane details such as worker recruitment, creating AUKUS-class visas, and even the provision of affordable housing, parking, and childcare near shipyards.

A U.S. amphibious military vehicle in Bowen, Australia, July 2019

Anaid Banuelos Rodriguez / U.S. Navy

To ensure that both grand and mundane details are addressed, AUKUS needs a better administrative setup and governance structure. During the initial 18 months after the deal was announced, Canberra, London, and Washington stood up a joint steering group to determine the optimal pathway for Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. That work was well done by a small and able group, but now those efforts need to expand to ensure that they are coordinated, provide oversight, and possess appropriate authorization to reach into and coordinate with other government agencies whose work will be critical—these include the departments of labor, education, health, energy, and state in all three countries.

Making that coordination happen will require rethinking how the United States shares, and how Australia and Britain safeguard, sensitive technology. The export control regime that the United States—and its allies—utilize was built for the Cold War and was intended to prevent the proliferation of weapons systems and protect the intellectual property of American businesses. Unless its new model of technology transfer has political support, bureaucratic buy-in, and legislative backing, AUKUS will almost certainly fail to produce the collaborations it needs to sustain cutting-edge innovation and increased industrial capacity in all three nations.

Part of that challenge is a failure to define what the Australians have labeled “interchangeability.” The aim of this concept is sound enough—to address the problem that current platforms and systems are not sufficiently interoperable to fully support enhanced collaboration among these three allies. In fact, Canberra, London, and Washington are trying to achieve something far more ambitious. Interchangeability begins to get at the scale, sustainability, synergy, and redundancy AUKUS might offer, but the concept remains underdeveloped. A starting point would be to detail which areas need to be more interchangeable among the three allies, such as people, places, and platforms.

CHANGING CHINA’S CALCULUS

Fundamentally, these challenges must be squarely addressed by the leaders of all three AUKUS countries themselves. Extraordinary efforts and extraordinary expenditures require clear, urgent, and forceful explanations if they are to succeed in breaking down outdated processes and be sustained in the long run. All three leaders have discussed how ambitious the deal is and have noted its potential to spur significant new growth in their industrial and technology sectors. But they have not yet made a sustained public case detailing either the purpose or the strategy behind AUKUS. In Washington, this is a conversation that demands more detailed focus on deterrence and competitive advantage. In Canberra, it entails more explicit discussion of China and the types of activities Australia would like to forestall. And in London, it requires a more sustained argument for why the Indo-Pacific is worthy of the United Kingdom’s time, attention, and resources.

Finally, although AUKUS may result in more robust deterrent capabilities in the years to come, it has not yet solved any pressing operational challenges, nor has it created any dilemmas for Beijing beyond the prospect of tighter coordination among Canberra, London, and Washington. Signaling matters, but creating indisputable facts on the ground matters more. This is where Pillar 2—the advanced capabilities pillar that exists adjacent to the submarines—and changes to force posture have the potential to deliver more immediate dividends. Timelines matter here, because there is an immediate deterrence challenge—not one that materializes a decade from now. A useful step, then, would involve bringing government, industry, and the academy together to define operational challenges and to begin sketching innovative solutions to them.

Whether AUKUS will deter China from further acts of aggression and provide stability to the Indo-Pacific region is a question that can likely only be answered by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. After all, deterrence resides in psychological spaces—something that takes place in a government’s calculations about its adversary’s intent and capabilities. AUKUS is a bold and ambitious initiative. It is also an enormous gamble to create, in Biden’s words, “more partnerships and more potential” that can produce “more peace and security in the region.” Providing answers to the questions that continue to challenge the deal’s implementation will be essential to realizing these larger goals. Giving the United States and its allies more capabilities and demonstrating their readiness to run more bureaucratic, political, and ultimately strategic risks is also the surest course for altering Xi Jinping’s calculations.

• CHARLES EDEL is Senior Adviser and Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He served on the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff from 2015 to 2017.

Foreign Affairs · by Charles Edel · August 4, 2023

19. For More Effective Irregular Warfare, Bring Back the MAVNI Recruitment Program

Language is important. Damn important. Immigrants are critically important to our national security. But we need a program better than MAVNI. I believe the Lodge Act was more effective (and simpler). But the bottom line is we need to more effectively employ the full range of capabilities from our immigrants. And I will accept the counterintelligence risks. We can do better in that area too.

I also recall the Afghan Hands program. At the time I asked why there is not a China hands, or north Korea Hands or Iran hands program? It is because we always implement these initiatives after crises occur. It reminds me of the old adage, when is the best time to plant a tree? The answer is 20 years ago so you can enjoy the tree now. When is the next best time? RIght now. We need a new and better program than MAVNI for all the reasons outlined in this essay.

Excerpts;

This polemic leads to the third reason that Congress and the US military should act to restore MAVNI: in an operational environment with an ever-increasing emphasis on information and image-projection, US treatment of immigrants sends a profound message to the world about who we are and what we stand for. Margaret Stock, an attorney who built the MAVNI program while serving as an Army officer, said in an interview with the author that the Chinese government, which initially opposed the MAVNI program to the point of targeting Stock in social media posts, has viewed its end under a cloud of suspicion as a propaganda victory. The PRC can now play up the undercurrents of xenophobia to feed a narrative that Americans cannot be trusted and sow internal division in the United States. “It’s to their interest to have everybody in America think everybody who’s Chinese is dangerous,” Stock said in the interview.

Beyond Chinese-US relations, a primary American strength and asymmetric advantage lies in its ability to welcome the foreign-born, extend to them the full benefits and opportunities offered by this country, and become stronger by integrating their skills and experience. As technological parity with near-peer competitors looms, what will continue to distinguish the US is our ability to become stronger through diversity. While non-citizen underrepresentation in the military ranks is a numbers problem amid a recruiting crisis – the Army also reestablished accelerated naturalization for Lawful Permanent Residents last year as it continues its push to bring in more enlistees – it is more meaningfully a perception problem. A renewal of MAVNI would demonstrate the US military’s true commitment to the goals described in the NDS regarding deeper investments in allies and partners. It would also send a message to immigrants that their knowledge is valued and integral to the country’s success on the battlefield and beyond.

For More Effective Irregular Warfare, Bring Back the MAVNI Recruitment Program - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Hope Hodge Seck · August 4, 2023

With an annual budget in excess of $300 million and an immersive, full-time approach to instruction, the Defense Language Institute is rightly regarded as one of the nation’s premier foreign language instruction programs in rigor and throughput. But how effective is that world-class language training when it comes to developing rapport with partners for security force assistance? Not very, according to a data analysis published in November 2022 at the Modern War Institute.

According to this analysis, which included interviews with service members who participated in Special Forces training and advisory missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Colombia, and the Philippines, most interviewees described language skills as inessential for effectively developing the capacity and capability of foreign security forces. Some even cited the risks of non-fluent speakers attempting to build rapport in ethnolinguistically diverse nations or regions, describing, in one case, a US Army officer in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands Program who in a well-intentioned but gauche bid to build rapport with an Afghan Tajik, addressed him in Pashto rather than Dari. Instead of fostering goodwill, the effort was counterproductive and he was instead castigated for “speaking the language of the enemy.”

The interviews revealed one exception to the general findings: the partner force development effort in Colombia from 2002, when that nation’s Commando Conjunto de Operaciónes Especiales was established, to 2016. US Special Forces advisors there were able to leverage greater language fluency, including a more significant proportion of native speakers, to collaborate successfully, and even develop a norm of communicating in Spanish without the help of an interpreter.

As Paul J. Angelo put it in his book about US security assistance efforts in Colombia and Mexico, “Although the transmission of capabilities doesn’t require proficiency in host-nation languages, the United States makes a considerably more compelling case for being the partner of choice by tailoring security assistance to local conditions. Cultural and linguistic competence signals respect, empathy, and solidarity — qualities that collectively build camaraderie, engender loyalty, and facilitate access.”

Other factors color the picture of success in the above case study: Spanish is an easier language to master and more commonly spoken in the US; and Colombia lacks the ethnolinguistic diversity that can make communicating in other parts of the word politically fraught. The paper goes further: excepting the Latin America-focused 7th Special Forces Group, “No [Army SF] group has strong enough language skills to add significant value in an advisory mission.” This research appears to show that, while communicating with partner-nation troops in a native language is an asset, doing so poorly, or without the proper cultural context, can become a liability.

Shortfalls of Language Training

Given the difficult, arduous, and time-consuming process of developing high-level foreign language proficiency in adults, the finite resources available to impart language training, and the inevitable lag between the emerging need for proficiency in specific languages and the surge in training to meet that need, training non-native speakers in foreign languages is, at best, an insufficient approach. In light of the 2022 National Defense Strategy’s emphasis on “fluency in critical languages” to develop deeper knowledge and understanding of both friends and adversaries and the requirement to be a “trusted defense partner” in Africa, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific, the Defense Department cannot afford to leave a vital resource for building language and cultural proficiency on the table.

The Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) was a Defense Department program begun in 2008 in which “legally present non-citizens” possessing certain high-demand skills, including specific medical training and proficiency in one of 50 DoD-identified languages, could enlist for periods of three or four years in exchange for an expedited path to US citizenship. The program was forced into hiatus following the 2009 terrorist attack at Fort Hood (the shooter, Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was an American-born US citizen, but as court documents would later attest, “many people thought he was a MAVNI soldier because he had a foreign-sounding name”). The program resumed in 2012 and ran until 2016, at which point it was closed indefinitely to new applicants pending review. The fiscal year 2019 John McCain National Defense Authorization Act went further, effectively eliminating the program by requiring MAVNI enlistees to enlist directly to jobs employing their “critical skill or expertise.” Nearly all of these jobs, such as linguist positions, have a US citizenship prerequisite. MAVNI came to a halt with more than 4,000 recruits “in limbo” awaiting action from the US government; their cases were only resolved last year following litigation.

MAVNI’s Success Stories

During its relatively brief active period, MAVNI enabled numerous successes, both in turning out exemplary troops and in accomplishing the mission of delivering linguistic and cultural competency to the armed forces. In 2012, a MAVNI Army enlistee from Nepal, Sgt. Saral Shrestha, was named the service’s Soldier of the Year. The same year, Kenyan-born MAVNI soldier Augustus Maiyo took first place in the Marine Corps Marathon. Capt. Anna Davalos, born in Moscow, joined the Army Reserve through MAVNI as a certified registered nurse anesthetist, supporting stateside medical response during the COVID-19 pandemic and recently deploying to United States Hospital Kuwait.

MAVNI’s intent was achieved through contributions from professionals like Indonesian-born Army Sgt. Aditya Utoyo, a native Bahasa speaker, who was hailed as “one of the most valued participants” at Exercise Gema Bhakti 2022 in Jakarta, where he served as interpreter and cultural expert for US forces. A MAVNI airman, “Dino” Dannawi, has used his fluency in eight Arabic dialects to serve as an interpreter for Air Force Special Operations Forces at joint exercises including Eager Lion in Jordan.

MAVNI ended amid intensifying political polarization in the United States around immigration. Despite countless examples of MAVNI contributions, one foreign agent was identified and apprehended. Ji Chaoqun, a Chicago resident and Chinese national, enlisted in the Army Reserves under MAVNI in 2016 and he was sentenced this year to eight years in prison for providing information to PRC intelligence organizations. Advocates for MAVNI argue the rigorous screening systems already established within the program – systems that some have criticized as unduly exacting and burdensome to candidates – worked exactly as intended in this case. The continuous monitoring applied to MAVNI troops uncovered a bad actor’s true intent and kept him from using his position for harm.

But the damage was done nonetheless. As the US military grapples with a historic recruiting crisis that has forced the various service branches to revisit numerous exclusionary policies in order to increase the enlistment-eligible population, the foreign-born remain critically underrepresented in the ranks. They make up nearly 14% of the US population, but only about 3-4% of first-term recruits. And MAVNI, a critical pathway to citizenship that would leverage these vital language skills and cultural knowledge, remains effectively closed to this segment of the population, barring congressional intervention.

The time to act to restore MAVNI is now, for three pressing reasons.

Strategic Priorities: Partnerships

First, the intent behind MAVNI closely aligns with the Defense Department’s current strategic priorities. The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) places a foot-stomping emphasis on improving relationships and interoperability with allied and partner militaries, promising to treat alliances and partnerships as “a center of gravity” for the strategy overall. To this end, the NDS continues, “We will strengthen major regional security architectures … based on complementary contributions; combined, collaborative operations and force planning; increased intelligence and information sharing; new operational concepts; and our ability to draw on the Joint Force worldwide.” Effective partnerships require effective communication, grounded in mutual understanding. The gray zone operations that emerge as a particular focus in the NDS demand carefully built and well-established relationships, rather than fickle surges of investment and interest.

Language fluency supports that goal, often with the bonus of engendering goodwill, fostering mutual understanding, and capturing nuance in today’s complex and dynamic security environment. Retired Lt. Gens. John Mulholland and Benjamin Freakley, who communicated with the author for this piece, recall a MAVNI recruit from Kenya who deployed with the US Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group only to find himself operating in a village near where he was raised, and thus was able to develop a uniquely warm rapport between its residents and the unit.

As this anecdote suggests, SOF units may benefit most from the talent brought in by a MAVNI-like program as they conduct security force assistance, foreign internal defense, and other unconventional warfare missions, and work with partners to develop “robust resistance” to strengthen the barrier of deterrence against near-peer threats like Russia and China. Moreover, efforts to make deploying special operations units leaner and more self-sustaining also strengthen the argument for programs like MAVNI as it could add greater language proficiency to units and free operators from long language-learning pipelines, thus enabling them to focus on other mission-relevant tasks and training.

Language as Force Multiplier

A second argument for restoring MAVNI is the growing awareness among military leaders of the force-multiplying impact of native speakers, and the emergence of initiatives seeking new ways to employ them. One example is the Air Force’s Language Enabled Airman Program (LEAP), an outgrowth of the Air Force Language and Culture Center that was established in FY13 but has risen in prominence in recent years and now boasts more than 3,600 airmen and Guardians proficient in some 90 languages. The program harnesses “language-enabled, cross-cultural scholars who can operate seamlessly with partner nation military forces and civilians around the world,” and will, for example, embed an airman whose first language is Tagalog with a Marine Corps team deploying to the Philippines, thus opening “a floodgate” of mutual understanding and goodwill.

More recently, a cohort of LEAP scholars born in Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and other Eastern European and Central Asian counties worked together over two weeks to produce a faithful translation of “Zov,” a disillusioned Russian soldier’s memoir of the war in Ukraine. First published on social media in 2022, the account was rife with technical language and slang terms that thwarted online translation machines. This demonstrates not only the value of written foreign language fluency in addition to spoken, but also the reality that, even with leaps forward in artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is no substitute for nuanced human language and cultural fluency.

The Army, in recognition of critical recruiting shortfalls and operational needs, last year rolled out a new Foreign Language Recruiting Initiative offering prospective recruits with a non-English primary spoken language to receive English-language training prior to attending basic combat training, potentially removing a barrier to some otherwise qualified enlistees.

At the practitioner level too, the call is growing to harness and foster available language skills to support the complex and information-heavy operations that are central to warfare today. In a 2021 Proceedings article, Lt. Seth A. Steber and Chief Petty Officer Aaron D. Utsler argue the Navy must better harness foreign language proficiency in order to excel at information warfare, saying the service is “under-invested in routinely training its members in particularly useful languages.” This piece, however, depends heavily on foreign language training as a solution to shortfalls, which we have already seen to be a flawed approach.

The same year, Navy Cmdr. Collin Fox, himself a Defense Language Institute graduate, argued in Proceedings specifically for a reinstitution of MAVNI to address the sea services’ language woes, saying that only harnessing native language proficiency would achieve the desired effect of shaping conflict in emerging theaters in real time. Fox also argued that former US interpreters, such as the ones who undertook great risk to support US troops in Afghanistan, would be ideal candidates for a MAVNI path to service and citizenship.

Living Out Our Values

This polemic leads to the third reason that Congress and the US military should act to restore MAVNI: in an operational environment with an ever-increasing emphasis on information and image-projection, US treatment of immigrants sends a profound message to the world about who we are and what we stand for. Margaret Stock, an attorney who built the MAVNI program while serving as an Army officer, said in an interview with the author that the Chinese government, which initially opposed the MAVNI program to the point of targeting Stock in social media posts, has viewed its end under a cloud of suspicion as a propaganda victory. The PRC can now play up the undercurrents of xenophobia to feed a narrative that Americans cannot be trusted and sow internal division in the United States. “It’s to their interest to have everybody in America think everybody who’s Chinese is dangerous,” Stock said in the interview.

Beyond Chinese-US relations, a primary American strength and asymmetric advantage lies in its ability to welcome the foreign-born, extend to them the full benefits and opportunities offered by this country, and become stronger by integrating their skills and experience. As technological parity with near-peer competitors looms, what will continue to distinguish the US is our ability to become stronger through diversity. While non-citizen underrepresentation in the military ranks is a numbers problem amid a recruiting crisis – the Army also reestablished accelerated naturalization for Lawful Permanent Residents last year as it continues its push to bring in more enlistees – it is more meaningfully a perception problem. A renewal of MAVNI would demonstrate the US military’s true commitment to the goals described in the NDS regarding deeper investments in allies and partners. It would also send a message to immigrants that their knowledge is valued and integral to the country’s success on the battlefield and beyond.

Hope Hodge Seck is an award-winning freelance defense reporter and the former managing editor of Military.com. She is the editorial director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative.

Main image: U.S. Marines hold American flags during a naturalization ceremony hosted at the Community Center on Camp Foster, Okinawa, Japan, Feb. 23, 2023. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Alex Fairchild)

20. War Books: How to Win a Land War in Asia

War Books: How to Win a Land War in Asia - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by T.S. Allen · August 4, 2023

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“The only test of generalship is success, and I had succeeded in nothing I had attempted.”

— The future Field Marshal Viscount Slim, then commanding British Empire forces in Burma, 1942

Every American strategist knows the famous warning: “Don’t fight a land war in Asia.” Unfortunately, sometimes they are unavoidable. Fortunately, on balance Western military powers have a very good record in winning land wars in Asia, if less so since 1945. One of the most interesting and successful ground campaigns of the twentieth century was the British-led effort to defend India from Japanese invasion via Southeast Asia from 1941 to 1945. A million Allied troops of the Fourteenth Army fought the Japanese for control of Burma over a 700-mile battlefront—the largest in any theater of World War II. During this campaign, special operations forces made their Asian debut, in the form of the famous Chindits. For much of the war, the fate of India, then still part of the British Empire, hung in the balance. While often referred to as the “forgotten war,” in fact, the British high command recognized that victory in Southeast Asia was critical to victory in World War II. It was also a crucial factor in the decline and fall of the British-led world order: the costs of defending India in a modern war were so unsustainable they made empire economically unattractive for the first time, and contributed to the formal end of the British Empire with Indian independence in 1947.

The Fourteenth Army had more than its fair share of literary talent, being commanded by a pulp fiction writer who would go on to become a field marshal. For anyone who, like Slim’s Fourteenth Army, needs to win a land war in Asia, here are four books to inspire them:

Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945, by Field Marshal Viscount Slim (1956)

Slim’s account of the Southeast Asian campaign is one of the finest military memoirs ever written. When he arrived in Burma in 1942, Slim took command of a force which had been mismanaged by five different higher headquarters in sixteen months, “and for practically the whole of that time administrative had been separated from operational control.” Slim, who despised inefficient headquarters, rapidly imposed order on the command structure, but found the intelligence bad, his troops ill-equipped for jungle warfare, morale low, and the Burmese population hostile. The result was a string of defeats in 1942 and 1943, including failed long-range raiding by the Chindits, which Slim admitted were wasteful but considered important for boosting morale by striking a blow against the Japanese. However, Slim began systematically re-equipping and training his forces to win wars in the green hell of the Burmese jungle, and slowly but surely set conditions for victory.

In March 1944 Japanese forces reached the gates of India at Imphal. Slim—who credited the Chinese Nationalists with demonstrating how to exploit Japanese tactical inflexibility—and his rebuilt Fourteenth Army turned them back and chased them all the way to Rangoon over the next year. He ended the war in Singapore, receiving a Japanese general’s sword in surrender.

Slim commanded the most remarkable multinational forces of World War II, incorporating troops from India, Great Britain, East Africa, Australasia, Nationalist China, and the United States. He has important lessons for Americans operating in multinational environments today, writing for example that “the Americans had availability a quantity of machinery that made our mouths water.” Tensions over unequal resources remain troublesome for the Special Relationship to this day.

Slim’s war memoir is also a delight to read, perhaps because of the author’s second career. In 1935, then-Maj. Bill Slim of the 6th Gurkha Rifles, disappointed by army pay, considered resigning his commission, and would have done so had he not picked up a side-gig writing pulp magazine fiction under the name Anthony Mills. Regrettably, I have never been able to find any of his early work.

The Road Past Mandalay, by John Masters (1961)

In between Slim and the privates stumbling around the Burmese jungle, there were thousands of staff officers writing orders and briefing each other. Their critical work is often forgotten, falling as it does in between the glorified commanders and the abstractly commemorated enlisted soldiers. The Road Past Mandalay is the greatest literary memoir of a staff officer at war. Its author, John Masters, was an Indian Army officer who later became a noted novelist. While Masters did spend part of the war in acting command of a Chindit brigade, he ended the war as the chief of staff of an infantry division, and it is his account of staff service that stands out. Masters makes dull staff work interesting, and identifies so strongly with his unit that he admits struggling to use the vertical pronoun “I” in place of we at times. An operations order, shockingly brief by contemporary US Army standards, is reproduced as an appendix. Masters also provides a memorable description of the course at the Indian Army’s Staff College at Quetta in the seventh chapter, which will be of interest to any student of professional military education.

Quartered Safe out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser (1992)

George MacDonald Fraser is famous as the author of the Flashman series of novels, about a Victorian anti-hero who achieves renown on colonial battlefields despite being a braggart and a coward. Fraser introduces his own memoir of service as a lowly private fighting under Slim in the jungles of Burma by warning of “how dehumanized military history has to be.” He then proceeds to describe, with his brilliant eye for detail and the absurd, the difference between “maps with red and blue arrows and oblongs” and “weary, thirty men with sore feet and aching shoulders,” as he once was. “Eleven hundred Japanese died in that battle,” Fraser notes, “the official history records the fact, but it doesn’t tell you how.” The war that Slim and Masters described is all still here, but it is different. Whereas Slim writes loftily that the British Army prioritized supply over mobility as a result of the Crimean War, and Masters calculates supply requirements in tons, Fraser records that British soldiers were taught the mantra that every single bullet cost three pence and had to be hauled halfway around the world, in order to cut down on ammunition waste.

Fraser considers his experience of war stranger than history or fiction. He notes that many of the events he experienced in Burma—such as watching a shot colleague rolling on the ground shouting “They got me! The dirty rats, they got me!” and an infantryman with a kukri parrying a Japanese officer armed with a samurai sword—were clichés that “you couldn’t get away with in fiction.” And his memoir, he admits, is basically “random.” Precisely because of that, Fraser’s memoir illustrates the role of chance and nature in the Burma war in a way that much more senior figures could not. The monsoon that Slim and Masters were worried would bog their forces in the mud was a strategic event precisely because it rotted equipment and feet, and it takes a private to explain that in a way that lets you smell it.

Slim wrote that “the most important thing about a commander is his effect on morale.” It is interesting to note that Fraser agrees. Fraser also gives the commander immense credit, noting his soldiers “believed every word [Slim said]—and it all came true,” and claiming Slim give the Fourteenth Army its “overwhelming confidence.” Fraser concludes: “No general ever did more with less.” It is hard to argue otherwise.

Harp of Burma, by Takeyama Michio (1946)

For Slim to win, Japan had to be psychologically defeated. Harp of Burma explains how that occurred. It is the finest literary memoir of the kyodatsu condition, the incomparable exhaustion and despair that pervaded Japan after its defeat in World War II. Its theme—ambitious for what was meant to be a children’s novel—is the transcendence of defeat through Buddhist contemplation. Through the odyssey of a company of the Imperial Japanese Army, Takeyama Michio compares Japanese civilization, which sent its soldiers to be destroyed in a foreign land, with Burmese civilization, where their defeat and ensuing captivity occurs (much as former American soldier James Jones would do with Polynesian civilization in The Thin Red Line). The Burmese, Takeyama thinks, are “weak,” “lazy,” and worst of all “colonized,” but do not hopelessly “try to change [the world] according to one’s own designs” and are thus infinitely happier. The author reveals the intense socialization for death (to borrow Tsurumi Kazuko’s phrase) of the Japanese soldiers, and juxtaposes them with Burmese who “do not fear death.” “Which civilization is more advanced?” Takeyama asks, but the question remains unanswered. In any event, neither of them won.

T.S. Allen is a former intelligence officer in the US Army. Follow him on Twitter @TS_Allen.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by T.S. Allen · August 4, 2023

21. Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present

Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present - Politics Today

politicstoday.org · by Politics Today · August 3, 2023

Books In-BriefBy Politics Today

August 3, 2023

Insurgency Warfare provides a global perspective and shows how conflicts influence contemporary military strategies.

Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present Book cover

Insurgency and counterinsurgency are two interconnected and age-old facets of warfare that have shaped the course of history in numerous regions around the world. Rooted in the struggle for power, resources, or ideological dominance, insurgencies represent the defiant uprisings of dissatisfied groups or individuals against established authority.

In response, counterinsurgency emerges as the strategic and tactical efforts of governments or ruling entities to quell these revolts and maintain control. Throughout history, we have witnessed the emergence of countless insurgencies and the subsequent attempts to suppress them. The complexities and challenges inherent in addressing insurgencies underscore the importance of understanding the historical, political, and socio-cultural factors that drive these movements.

In Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present, military historian, thinker and strategist Jeremy Black presents a comprehensive historical account of insurgencies and counterinsurgency warfare worldwide. Departing from the typical focus on Western perspectives, the book emphasizes the significance of situating the experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq within a broader global context. Rather than following the conventional route that centers on the American and French revolutions, the author delves back into ancient times to trace the origins of pre-modern warfare.

By skillfully weaving together both thematic and chronological narratives, Black thoroughly explores the enduring correlations between beliefs, events, and individuals, juxtaposed against the evolutionary changes that have occurred over time. Throughout the book, he delves into the evolution of politics, technologies, and ideologies, giving rise to new parameters and paradigms that have profoundly influenced both governmental and public viewpoints on warfare.

Tracing insurgencies across diverse regions from China to Africa to Latin America, Black illuminates the varying military and political dimensions inherent in each conflict. He adeptly assesses the reasons behind the acquisition of lessons in insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare, meticulously examining how these lessons were not merely learned but actively asserted. At every stage, the book delves into the emergence of norms within militaries and societies, exploring their impact on doctrine and policy.

This sweeping study of insurrectionary warfare and its counterpart, counterinsurgency, proves indispensable for anyone with an interest in military history. By shedding light on the lessons learned by contemporaries and the development of norms within different contexts, the book enriches our understanding of the intricate dynamics of warfare across time and regions.

Black’s approach transcends traditional military history, incorporating a global perspective that sets this book apart. Its meticulous analysis of various insurgencies and counterinsurgency campaigns adds depth to the comprehension of how these conflicts have shaped the world and continue to influence contemporary military strategies and policies.

Overall, Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present stands as a comprehensive and thought-provoking exploration of the complex relationship between insurgency and counterinsurgency, providing readers with a profound appreciation for the multifaceted aspects of warfare throughout human history.

Jeremy Black, Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023) ISBN: 978-1-5381-7941-3, 338 pages

Written by Dilara Özer

RevolutionmilitaryCulture WarsstrategyResistanceMilitary CoupCounterterrorism

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politicstoday.org · by Politics Today · August 3, 2023

22. How the U.S. Fumbled Niger’s Coup and Gave Russia an Opening

How the U.S. Fumbled Niger’s Coup and Gave Russia an Opening

A week of missteps and communication breakdowns pushed an important American ally toward the Kremlin

By Drew HinshawFollow, Benoit FauconFollowand Joe ParkinsonFollow

Aug. 4, 2023 2:15 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/niger-coup-us-russia-africa-86cf1454?utm

Niger’s president hid behind a bulletproof door of his official residence and talked over a phone he assumed was monitored. To anxious French and American allies, he repeated assurances that the army would soon rescue him from an unfolding coup. 

Outside the ground floor safe room Mohamed Bazoum had recently renovated to protect himself from such an event, mutineers from his presidential guard fanned out across the presidency compound, furious about a proposal to replace their longstanding commander, according to Nigerien, U.S. and European officials. Hunkered over the phone beside his wife and son, Bazoum delicately encouraged advisers to send the army’s regular units.

At around noon, his cellphone rang with a call from a former U.S. ambassador, who was about to board a flight on his vacation. The ambassador was worried one of Washington’s closest allies in Africa could become the latest in a string of regional states to fall into the hands of coup leaders sympathetic to Russia.

Everything is fine, the imprisoned president carefully intoned. 

A week later, Bazoum is still imprisoned in his palace, junta leaders are seeking aid from Vladimir Putin’s regional partners and America is on the verge of losing its most important ally in a crucial and unstable part of Africa. An obscure personnel dispute within Niger’s presidential guard has now become what appears to be a geopolitical win for Russia and its Wagner Group paramilitary company in their bid to flip Western allies.

The situation could yet turn into open military conflict. Eleven West African countries, led by Nigeria, have threatened to use force to restore Bazoum to power if the coup isn’t reversed by Sunday. In return, the pro-Russian leaders of Mali and Burkina Faso have vowed to defend Niger. Officials in the U.S. and Europe are scrambling for ways to return Bazoum to power but concede the window is closing.

The Kremlin on Friday warned against any intervention.

Col. Amadou Abdramane, the coup’s spokesman, during a televised statement July 26. PHOTO: ORTIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The coup, if successful, could lead Russia to pick up some of America’s most important drone bases, used to fly missions across the Sahara between Libya and Nigeria. Wagner’s mercenaries have previously taken over former U.S. and French outposts in Syria and Mali.

This outcome wasn’t predestined. A week of missteps and communication breakdowns pushed the vast nation of Niger toward Russia. Nigerien, American, European and other West African security officials, as well as Nigerien soldiers, described a series of unexpected blunders that now threatens to turn West Africa into a theater for regional war. 

Washington, caught without key personnel in its Africa posts, failed to anticipate what is now the seventh coup in the region since 2020—not including a failed attempt in Niger two years ago. While Bazoum sat in his safe room calling for help, America and its allies struggled to react as the conflict escalated into threats of war between Russian-backed countries and West Africa’s biggest military, Nigeria. 

A Cascade of Coups

Coups d'état have been common in Africa’s Sahel, an arid region between the Sahara Desert to the north and savannahs to the south.

Countries in the Sahel that have experienced successful coups since 2020

2020

2023

ALGERIA

LIBYA

EGYPT

SAHEL

MALI

NIGER

SUDAN

CHAD

BURKINA

FASO

GUINEA

NIGERIA

ETHIOPIA

500 miles

500 km

Source: United Nations

Jake Steinberg/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The U.S. has spent more than $500 million arming and equipping Niger’s military. Yet the country’s special forces, trained for nearly every counterterrorism eventuality, had no answer for Sunday’s coup—West Africa’s most enduring security threat. The forces were left chatting over WhatsApp groups over whether to intervene.

The U.S. and Europe have made Niger the centerpiece of their fight against the spread of Islamic State and al Qaeda in Africa’s Sahel, a 3,000-mile semiarid territory on the southern shore of the Sahara that also includes Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad. They are some of the world’s poorest and fastest-growing populations, in failing states. Nearly half of Niger’s budget comes from foreign aid.

“This is your strong ally, your reliable ally, you have invested a lot and then there is a coup without any reason,” said Kiari Liman Tinguiri, Niger’s ambassador to Washington, who was fired by the junta overnight. “It’s very nice to be friends of the West, but it may not be helpful when hard times come.”

U.S. State and White House officials have said they still think there’s a narrow opportunity for a peaceful resolution that would retain Niger’s democracy.  

“While we are giving diplomacy a chance and have ongoing diplomatic engagements at the highest levels, we are continuing to review all options around our cooperation with the Nigerien government,” a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council said. “Our focus is to help the people of Niger preserve their hard-earned democracy.”

Demonstrators in Niamey hold a Russian flag and a banner with images of Niger’s Gen. Omar Tchiani and other African leaders on Thursday. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The U.S. said Friday that it will pause some foreign aid to Niger’s government. Humanitarian and food assistance will continue.

Saharan citadel

The coup began with an idea for a personnel change, mulled over months by Bazoum and his aides, to replace the leader of the presidential guard that held watch over the country’s 63-year-old commander-in-chief.

U.S. and French intelligence officers had long known about the president’s plan to reshuffle his security detail and the risks it entailed. The presidential guard felt marginalized after vast sums of military assistance poured into the country’s counterterrorism units, two people familiar with the situation said. 

The French intelligence service DGSE warned Paris of the risk, but neither France nor the U.S. took significant action to defend their ally in Niamey, according to French and West African intelligence officials. 

Bazoum, elected in 2021 in Niger’s first democratic transfer of power, had been feted in Washington as a reliable partner against the twin threats of jihadist attacks and Russia’s growing influence.

Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum speaks at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington last year. PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN/PRESS POOL

In sonorous French, the former interior and foreign minister would hit some of Washington’s favorite notes. He rattled off gender-inequality statistics at events hosted by the State Department and the Gates Foundation, and regaled audiences with his efforts to educate girls in a country whose birthrate is the world’s highest, at seven children for every woman. 

After coup leaders in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso shifted toward Russia, Bazoum made clear he stood with America. 

Niger registered just 114 attacks from jihadist groups last year, while Burkina Faso and Mali combined registered some 2,000, according to data collected by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and analyzed by the Pentagon-funded Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

“More bases? We don’t need them,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal shortly after he was elected.

Some of Niger’s military leaders saw him as an interloper with an Arab background. Niger’s majority Hausa ethnic group predominates the military. 

In April, Bazoum replaced the army chief of staff and the head of the national gendarmerie, hoping to place more trusted officers in their ranks, according to European and West African security officials. That stirred suspicion within his presidential guard. On July 24, Bazoum directed an aide to draft a decree to dismiss the guard’s leader.

Gen. Tchiani, who was declared as Niger’s new head of state by leaders of a coup, in Niamey last week. PHOTO: REUTERS

Gen. Omar Tchiani had protected Niger’s leaders for 12 years, with a unit of some 700 elite soldiers backed by armored cars. Tchiani’s unit had stopped a coup attempt against Bazoum days ahead of his inauguration. As Bazoum built up the country’s counterterrorism forces, Tchiani’s guard lost out on resources and stature. The president had been weighing for months whether to fire the 57-year-old general, according to people familiar with the matter. 

At 3 a.m. on July 26, the general’s men drove up to the presidential palace, a white stucco arabesque estate overlooking the Niger River. Inside, gazelles and goats slept in the manicured gardens, animals Bazoum and his wife brought with them when he took office. 

Tchiani’s men, carrying heavy weaponry, disarmed security officers equipped only with handguns and walked past the presidential garden to Bazoum’s residence. 

Bazoum fled into the safe room across the hall from his office and phoned aides to say he was confident that U.S.-trained elements of his army would rally to his rescue. 

In a twist, some of the best U.S.-trained special forces among Niger’s regular army units were on counterterrorism missions in the distant desert regions of a country twice the size of Texas, with few roads.

Niger Coup: U.S. and Europe Order Evacuation of Foreign Nationals

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Play video: Niger Coup: U.S. and Europe Order Evacuation of Foreign Nationals

European governments and the U.S. ordered the evacuation of their citizens from Niger after last week’s coup in the West African country. The leader of the junta said the military won’t bow to pressure to reinstate ousted president Mohamed Bazoum. Photo: Sam Mednick/Associated Press

The lightly armed units in the capital weren’t in a position to assault the palace and the chain of command broke down. Rank-and-file soldiers said they debated over WhatsApp groups what to do. They received no formal instructions from their commanders, who appeared to be waiting to see which faction had the momentum. Bazoum, who still had full control of his communications in the safe room, phoned international allies and ambassadors in Niger’s embassies in the West. He stressed over phone and video calls that the coup had no basis—it was a personnel dispute and could easily be reversed. His U.S. envoy rushed to let the State Department know what was happening.

Though the U.S. had spent hundreds of millions of dollars transforming Niger into its top military outpost in the Sahara, it didn’t have an ambassador in the country.

The Biden administration didn’t formally nominate one until eight months after the previous ambassador left, only to face opposition from Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who has put holds on State Department appointees until the White House releases intelligence he believes could show Covid-19 leaked from a Chinese lab. 

Washington also has no ambassador at the African Union or in neighboring Nigeria—or anybody in a special envoy post that it had created to deal with the region’s deterioration. The relevant Africa desk at the National Security Council was in flux, held by a short-term temporary post that was due to hand off to another temporary caretaker within days.

“This is extremely frustrating. This was not a widely supported coup—it was one unit that had its grievance for years and we should have done more to act,” said J. Peter Pham, former U.S. special envoy to the Sahel under President Trump. In the early hours, he added, “his exfiltration could have been organized relatively easily…. The golden hour has passed.”

Supporters of the coup attack the headquarters of the Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism, the party of overthrown President Mohamed Bazoum, in Niamey. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Bazoum contacted allies in France, which had about 1,500 troops in the country. A decision would have to come from President Emmanuel Macron, who was traveling in the South Pacific, 12 time zones ahead. France’s government declined to comment.

Junta leaders headed to a state TV station and stood around a table where a stone-faced spokesman said the military could no longer “witness the gradual and inevitable demise of our country.” 

If Bazoum was going to be freed, it would have to come from outside.

Guns of August

Macron had just landed in the South Pacific island of New Caledonia when he spoke to his top defense and diplomatic officials, who laid out options to free Bazoum. 

For years, the French president had been briefed on a growing protest movement against France in the cities of its former West African colonies​.

Young men jam-packed into those cities had come to see France’s military presence as an unwelcome imposition after years of al Qaeda attacks. Viral social-media posts and videos accused the French army of pursuing ulterior aims on Africa’s natural resources. 

In Mali, then Burkina Faso, coup leaders seized power and justified their takeovers as an act of liberation from France, before turning to Russia as their protector and benefactor.

The French president ruled out sending a unilateral force to usher a democratically elected president to power—as France did in 2011 in Ivory Coast. Instead, he wanted to assist Nigerien armed forces that remained loyal to Bazoum, an option that vanished as the country’s military command acquiesced to the coup.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the South Pacific as well, warning the people of the island country of Tonga that China was practicing economic coercion. By the time he and Bazoum connected, the coup was complete. 

Russia was in an excellent position to step into the vacuum. 

Vladimir Putin was already receiving African leaders invited to a Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg due to start the following day. 

Bazoum had refused the invitation, but the Kremlin-backed leaders of Mali and Burkina Faso, Assimi Goita and Ibrahim Traore, gathered for meetings in the halls of the Constantine Palace. As news of the coup trickled in, their intelligence chiefs met under Russian auspices to agree on a coordinated response. 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken greets Nigerien President Bazoum in March. PHOTO: BOUREIMA HAMA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg last week. PHOTO: SERGEI BOBYLEV/PRESS POOL

Officials in Mali and Burkina Faso didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In another room, Traore, the world’s youngest head of government, at 34 years old, told Putin that the people of his country supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The question that my generation poses to itself, if I can summarize it, is how can Africa, with so many resources under our soil, with such a natural abundance of sun and water, still today remain the poorest continent?” he told a St. Petersburg panel. “We haven’t had any answer until today. But now, we have an opportunity to form new relations.” 

The junta, which included recipients of U.S. training and largess, hadn’t shown particular interest in pivoting toward Russia. The military itself let U.S. counterparts know they wanted to keep the American aid flowing, military officers said. But the Kremlin eyed an opportunity. 

Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner mercenaries are protecting the leaders of Mali and the Central African Republic, offered to help the putschists in Niger, hailing their overthrow of a pro-American government.

“What happened in Niger is nothing other than the struggle of the people of Niger with their colonizers,” he said in a voice-mail message posted in a Telegram account.

Protests, organized by an opposition movement, thronged France’s embassy in Niger. Several in the crowd waved Russian flags. France sent military planes to evacuate its citizens. The U.S. moved its 1,100 troops, sent there to fight Islamist insurgents, inside American-built drone and special-forces bases. The State Department held off on calling the upheaval a coup, a designation that could, under U.S. law, sharply restrict America’s ability to keep funding, training and equipping Niger’s military.

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu at a meeting with West African leaders, July 30. PHOTO: KOLA SULAIMON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The stakes were becoming more serious for the African giant to Niger’s south. Nigeria was once the world’s 33rd richest country per capita, until decades of military coups and misrule left it among the poorest. Its leaders feared a domino of coups would topple more civilian governments. 

On Sunday, July 30, Nigeria’s new president, Bola Tinubu, gathered with presidents and foreign ministers from 11 West African states, along with a representative from Bazoum’s government, in a glass-paneled building in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. Tinubu, who had risen to prominence campaigning against military rule in Nigeria, said that after coups in Mali and Burkina Faso—both supported by Russia—as well as in Guinea and Chad, the one in Niger was the last straw. If they accepted this coup, more would come.

After their meeting ended, the West African leaders issued an ultimatum: Tchiani had one week to return power to the democratically elected president or face the possible use of military force.

The State Department wasn’t sure it backed the idea, senior U.S. officials said. But Washington also wanted to show support for the West African governments. Blinken issued statements of general support for the Nigerian-led idea. A Nigerian government spokesperson declined to comment.

On Wednesday, Tchiani sent one of his junta leaders on a secret flight to Mali to meet the country’s pro-Russian leader. 

Defense chiefs from the West African states that oppose the coup met in Nigeria. Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer flew to Abuja to meet Tinubu, Nigeria’s president, who said the coup should not stand.

The Biden administration favored diplomacy but worried the junta intended to force Nigeria to make good on its threat of military force, concerns that came up in the meeting. Few in Washington felt confident Nigeria’s military had the capacity to pull off an intervention. But at this point, the U.S. conceded, there were few options left. 

Demonstrators in Niamey on Thursday. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

On Thursday the junta announced on state TV it had terminated military cooperation agreements with France. 

From his palace, Bazoum phoned his ambassador to the U.S. to dictate an op-ed that appeared in the Washington Post calling for international intervention. 

“My country is under attack and I’ve been taken hostage,” he said. “In our hour of need, I call on the U.S. government and the entire international community to help us restore our constitutional order.”

By the time it published, parts of the country were in the dark. Nigeria, which provides some 75% of Niger’s electricity, had cut off one of its main transmission lines, plunging villages and towns into blackouts. The presidential residence lost power as well. 

Bazoum’s phone remains charged, his aides said Friday. If it goes out, the U.S. could lose its ability to reach the president. “I hope he has a lot of lithium batteries,” one former official said. 

Vivian Salama and Noemie Bisserbe contributed to this article.

Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com, Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com and Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the August 5, 2023, print edition as 'How the U.S. Fumbled Niger’s Coup'.

23. Outlaw Alliance: How China and Chinese Mafias Overseas Protect Each Other’s Interests

An interesting long read. I missed this last month.

Outlaw Alliance: How China and Chinese Mafias Overseas Protect Each Other’s Interests

ProPublica · by Sebastian Rotella

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

PRATO, Italy — On a rainy June afternoon, six Chinese mobsters hurried across the plaza of a drab apartment complex near the medieval gates of this Tuscan textile capital.

Their targets, two gang rivals in their early 20s, were eating in a small Chinese diner. Drawing machetes, the attackers stormed in.

They hacked one man to death, splattering tables and walls with gore. The second victim fought his way out. Trailing blood in the rain, he staggered through the plaza pursued by his killers, who finished him off on the sidewalk around the corner.

The slaughter on Via Strozzi in 2010 was part of a startling escalation of mob violence in Prato, which has one of Europe’s biggest Chinese immigrant communities. The ensuing police investigation was long and difficult, leading as far as China. For the first time, Italian police mapped the rapid spread of the Chinese mafias that were terrorizing immigrant enclaves and leaving a trail of casualties across Europe.

As the investigation culminated in 2017, detectives made another ominous discovery: The kingpins in Italy had high-placed friends in Beijing. Telephone intercepts detected a meeting between an accused crime boss in Rome, Zhang Naizhong, and a member of a high-level Chinese government delegation on a diplomatic visit to Italy, senior Italian law enforcement officials say.

“A guy like Zhang does what the consulate doesn’t do, or does it better,” a senior Italian national security official said. “If you want in-depth street information, intelligence, you go to a guy like Zhang. He has a network, power, resources. He knows the diaspora. He is feared and respected.”

As the regime of President Xi Jinping expands its international power, it has intensified its alliance with Chinese organized crime overseas. The Italian investigation and other cases in Europe show the underworld’s front-line role in a campaign to infiltrate the West, amass wealth and influence, and control diaspora communities as if they were colonies of Beijing’s police state.

Around the world, China’s shadow war of espionage, long-distance repression, political interference and predatory capitalism is drawing attention and alarm. Governments and human rights groups have denounced in recent months a global network of covert Chinese police stations that spy on Chinese migrant communities and persecute dissidents — wherever they live. As ProPublica has reported, the Chinese state has sent illegal undercover teams to chase down fugitives in wealthy U.S. suburbs, surveilled and silenced Chinese students on foreign campuses, and allegedly supported the Chinese money laundering underworld that fortifies cartels inundating the Americas with deadly drugs.

But the rise of Chinese organized crime in Europe has caught authorities largely off-guard. An examination of it offers an unusually vivid look at a covert alliance in action. ProPublica has documented a pattern of cases, some of them unreported and others little-noticed internationally, in which suspected underworld figures in Europe have teamed up with Chinese security forces and other state entities.

The partnership appears to mix geopolitics and corruption for mutual benefit. Gangsters help monitor and intimidate immigrant communities for the regime in Beijing, sometimes as leaders of cultural associations that are key players in China’s political influence operations and long-distance repression, Western security officials say. ProPublica has learned that suspected underworld figures in Italy and Spain took part in launching several of the secret Chinese police stations that caused an uproar when their existence became public last year.

A Chinese police station in Prato was launched by leaders of the Fujianese community including Zheng Wenhua. He is one of the top defendants accused in the China Truck case, in which Italian anti-mafia authorities charged dozens of people in 2018. Credit: Steve Bisgrove, special to ProPublica

The Chinese Communist Party “takes the most powerful, richest, most successful figures overseas and recognizes them as the nobility of the diaspora,” said Emmanuel Jourda, a French scholar on Chinese organized crime. “And it doesn’t matter how they made their money. The deal, spoken or not, is: ‘You gather intelligence on the community, we let you do business. Whether legal or illegal.’”

In exchange for their services as overseas enforcers and agents of influence, the Chinese state protects the mobsters, Western national security officials say. Although supposedly wanted in China, a top figure in the Italian case traveled freely to his homeland and oversaw his European rackets from China without interference from authorities there, according to court documents and law enforcement officials. And in Europe — as in the United States — national security chiefs say the Chinese government refuses to cooperate with their investigations of Chinese organized crime.

Money is another driving force in the alliance. Diplomatically delicate prosecutions in Italy, Spain and France have resulted in convictions and fines against Chinese state banks that worked with Chinese criminals to launder the proceeds of widespread tax evasion, customs fraud and contraband. Chinese mafias have also become the preferred money launderers for the Continent’s drug traffickers, whose onslaught poses an unprecedented threat to several governments.

Stretching across Europe, the underground Chinese money networks pump billions of illicit dollars into China’s economy. During one recent year, police at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport arrested 16 couriers carrying a total of more than $41 million bound for China.

“It is hard to imagine that this activity is not welcomed by the Chinese authorities,” said the chief prosecutor in Prato, Giuseppe Nicolosi. “Large amounts of money are returning to China.”

The implications for the United States are urgent, authorities say, because the same tactics and networks plague Chinese American communities. U.S. law enforcement has tracked interactions between Chinese government operatives and Chinese American mobsters who harass dissidents, engage in political interference and move offshore funds for the Communist Party elite, U.S. national security officials say.

“Organized crime is doing services for the Chinese government” on both sides of the Atlantic, a veteran U.S. national security official said. “There are deals between organized crime and the Chinese government. The government tasks them to expand influence and become eyes and ears overseas. Once they get themselves established, there are locals they can corrupt. It’s a classic modus operandi.”

U.S. national security officials are also concerned because Europe is a vulnerable front in China’s offensive to divide and weaken the West. Until recently, Chinese malign activities were not a priority in Europe. Although U.S. intelligence agencies warned European counterparts about intensified contacts between the Chinese state and underworld, most security forces were busy with Islamist terrorists and Russian spies during the past decade, Western national security veterans said.

“When they started recognizing the threat, they didn’t have the resources,” said Frank Montoya, a former FBI counterintelligence chief.

Today, governments are scrambling to respond to what Europol, the agency that coordinates police cooperation on the Continent, has called “an increasing threat to Europe.” They have realized that the problem reverberates beyond Chinese immigrant neighborhoods and challenges national security and the rule of law.

“There was a lack of awareness of the danger,” said the chief anti-mafia prosecutor in Florence, Luca Tescaroli, whose jurisdiction includes Prato. He has created a unit to fight Chinese mafias. But, he said: “We cannot criminalize the Chinese community. We know they are also victims of intimidation, extortion and violence.”

The Chinese embassies in Italy, Spain and France did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. In the past, Chinese diplomats have denied involvement in transnational repression and other illegal activities abroad.

To assemble a picture of the intertwined agendas of the Chinese regime and its expatriate mafia groups, ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen current and former national security officials in Europe and the United States, as well as Chinese immigrants, human rights advocates and others. ProPublica granted anonymity to some sources because of safety concerns or because they were not authorized to speak publicly. In addition, ProPublica reviewed court documents, reports by governments and nongovernmental organizations, academic papers, press reports and social media posts.

The Boss From Beijing

Prato’s Chinatown starts just outside the stone ramparts, narrow lanes and Romanesque cathedral of the city’s historic center.

Its immigrant energy extends to the Macrolotto industrial park on the edge of town, where signs on warehouses and workshops mix Chinese words with names like Flora, Kitty and Style. More than 6,000 Chinese-owned businesses give Prato an outsized role in the diaspora.

Numbers like that tell the story of the second-biggest city in Tuscany.

Via Pistoiese in Prato’s Chinatown Credit: Steve Bisgrove, special to ProPublica

Via Antonio Marini in Prato’s Chinatown Credit: Steve Bisgrove, special to ProPublica

In 1990, there were 520 residents of Chinese origin, according to an Italian government study. Today, officials say Prato has one of the largest Chinese communities in proportion to the city’s size in Europe: close to 40,000 out of a total population of about 200,000. That includes as many as 10,000 undocumented immigrants. Italy has Europe’s third-largest Chinese population after the United Kingdom and France.

The immigrants came initially to work in the mills and factories of this longtime hub of the textile and garment industries. Gradually, they became owners and employers. In 2019, voters elected two Chinese Italians to the City Council — a first.

Chinese employees at work in a textile company in the Macrolotto industrial park on the edge of Prato. The city has been a longtime hub of the textile and garment industries. Credit: Marco Bulgarelli/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Still, life for many Chinese residents feels like a crossfire. Although the newcomers have invigorated the economy, some Italians accuse Chinese merchants of evading taxes, paying low wages and other shady practices. Non-Chinese robbers and thieves prey on them because of the belief that they carry large amounts of cash.

And Chinese immigrants, of course, were the prime victims of the rise of Chinese organized crime in the 2000s. As mobsters established themselves, unprecedented violence broke out among warring factions from Fujian, a coastal province known for smuggling and migration. Police in Prato started calling Fujian the Calabria of China, likening it to the mafia hotbed located in the toe of the Italian boot.

After the double murder on Via Strozzi in 2010, the half-dozen detectives of the local anti-mafia squad began an investigation christened China Truck. Despite the daunting language barrier and a lack of expertise on Asian mafias, it evolved into an all-out, eight-year effort to dismantle a criminal organization.

In 2011, witnesses told police about Lin Guochun, aka Laolin, the reputed boss of Prato, court documents say.

Lin had made his way from Fujian to Italy via Portugal and the Czech Republic, where he had allegedly ordered the murder of a rival smuggler of migrants, according to Italian court documents and Italian law enforcement officials. His empire encompassed extortion, gambling, contraband, prostitution and drugs. In Prato, he held court in his nightclub, a grim locale with dark glass walls that offered package deals of prostitutes and ketamine. His swaggering crew ruled Chinatown, court documents say.

In 2013, the father of a massage parlor owner told prosecutors that two of Lin’s thugs had demanded 100,000 euros and given him a beating that put him in the hospital with skull trauma and a broken nose, court documents say.

“My countrymen are afraid of them,” the battered extortion victim said, according to court documents. “They are part of an organization of cruel people who threaten and demand money ... if someone challenges them, they beat and wound and use other violent methods.”

Surveillance led to another breakthrough even higher in the criminal hierarchy. Police identified the alleged boss of bosses in Rome: Zhang Naizhong.

Zhang, a trim and dapper trucking executive, was from Zhejiang, a more prosperous province next to Fujian that sends many immigrants to Europe. After the slaying of one of Zhang’s rivals in Naples in 2006, a court convicted him of helping the accused killers escape, but appellate judges overturned the verdict, court documents say.

During conversations intercepted on the phone and in his BMW, Zhang described himself as a ruthless “madman” and ordered henchmen to threaten people, court documents say. Expounding on the “rules of the mafia,” he told a subordinate in 2013 that true loyalty meant being “ready to go to prison and to kill people,” court documents say.

“I’m the most powerful boss in Europe,” Zhang declared, according to court documents. “Ask anyone ... if you’re not a friend, you’re an enemy ... if you’re an enemy, then you’re finished! ... A guy can point a pistol at me and because of my personality ... I’ll tell him: ‘Pull the trigger!’ You understand, brother? ... I am the boss and so the boss can decide anything.”

Zhang teamed with Lin to conquer the market for the distribution of goods among Chinese business enclaves in Europe, court documents say. Working with police in other countries, Italian detectives charted the kingpins’ alleged war on competing transport companies, court documents say: murders in Italy; shootings and stabbings in Spain, France, Germany and Portugal; a litany of arson attacks, assaults and threats.

Back in Prato, though, the accused gangsters did not keep a low profile. In fact, some of them were active in the array of Chinese cultural associations that shape the social landscape in diaspora communities. The associations, often named for the province immigrants came from, do good works: sponsoring cultural and sports activities, distributing protective equipment during the pandemic, raising money for charity causes in their home provinces.

But suspected underworld figures and their associates held posts in the Fujian Overseas Chinese Association in Italy that enhanced their power on the street and at a political level, according to court documents, Italian law enforcement officials and Chinese media. Lin, the alleged Fujianese boss of Prato, appeared on a list of “consultants” to the association in 2016. Wiretaps, surveillance cameras and media reports documented meals, events and phone conversations in which Lin and other targets in the China Truck case interacted with prominent leaders of the Chinese community, Italian politicians, Chinese diplomats and visiting Chinese government officials.

In 2012, the president of the Fujian association in Prato intervened to resolve an underworld conflict involving Lin’s son, according to court documents and law enforcement officials. That same leader of the association later attended a conference in Beijing with top officials of the United Front Work Department, the arm of the Chinese Communist Party dedicated to political spying and interference overseas, according to photos and media reports. The United Front has become a dominant force in the diaspora, which it exploits to gain political and economic influence.

Such well-placed homeland connections appeared to pay off. Although Lin was wanted by Chinese police for past extortion offenses in China, he spent long periods there unmolested by authorities while he supervised his criminal enterprises in Italy by phone, according to Italian court documents and senior Italian law enforcement officials. He also enriched himself with investments in the Chinese mining sector, court documents and senior Italian law enforcement officials say.

Lin “succeeded in resolving the judicial cases in which he was charged, and was thus able to resume thriving economic activities” in China, a court document says.

As the investigation peaked in late 2017, detectives stumbled onto startling evidence of Lin’s influence in high places.

In interviews with ProPublica, Italian law enforcement officials said a series of intercepted phone calls revealed how close the Prato mob chief was to Chinese political figures. According to the Italian officials, on the morning of Dec. 11, Lin placed a call from Beijing to Zhang in Rome. Lin said an important friend, whom he described as a “boss from Beijing,” was visiting Rome. The boss had a busy schedule of meetings with Italian politicians, Lin said. But it would be good if Zhang could take him to dinner, see the sights, maybe a soccer game. Zhang then called his secretary and driver to organize excursions to the Vatican and the Colosseum for the VIP visitor. That evening, Zhang had dinner with him, Italian officials said.

Analyzing translations of the calls afterward, detectives came to an alarming conclusion: The “boss from Beijing” was a member of a Chinese delegation that had met with Italy’s prime minister at the time, Paolo Gentiloni, and his cabinet ministers. Led by China’s Vice Premier Ma Kai, the delegation included senior officials in China’s ministries of foreign affairs, development, industry and commerce.

“It’s very probable that Zhang hosted and dined with a senior official from the delegation,” a senior Italian law enforcement official said. “We suspect that it was a prominent member of the delegation.”

Police reconstructed the episode based on the translated conversations rather than physical surveillance, law enforcement officials told ProPublica, and could not identify the visitor or the reason for the sit-down. But the analysis indicated he was a government official, national security sources said.

Italian and Chinese diplomats declined to comment on the episode, which was first reported in Italian media.

Chinese state-mafia contacts like the one that allegedly took place in Rome are not unusual, Western national security officials said.

“China uses a range of proxies and cutouts, and organized crime is one of those proxies,” a U.S. intelligence official said. “We see a growing brazenness in [Chinese] malign influence operations.”

Sometimes, expatriate gangsters even set themselves up in foreign countries with the blessing and support of corrupt allies in the Communist Party elite back home, a veteran U.S. national security official said.

“The gangsters are told to go establish themselves in a certain country, given different business opportunities,” the veteran U.S. national security official said. “Transportation help, getting consumer goods out of China, the government helps organized crime there. Chinese corrupt officials can make it easy to move goods out of China.”

The Chinese politicians who meet with Chinese gangsters overseas “represent their government as well as their own self-interest,” he said.

Weeks after the mysterious encounter in Rome, Italian investigators rounded up dozens of suspects on mafia-related charges resulting from the China Truck investigation.

A police team swarmed a discreet hotel in Prato where Zhang was staying and arrested him and his adult son, Zhang Di, rousting them from their beds at dawn. The son got agitated and shouted at the officers, police said.

But his father, the accused boss of bosses, stayed cool while officers took him into custody.

Zhang Naizhong, a trucking magnate and accused mafia boss who is a top defendant in the China Truck case. “If you want in-depth street information, intelligence, you go to a guy like Zhang,” a senior Italian national security official said. “He has a network, power, resources. He knows the diaspora. He is feared and respected.” Credit: Via YouTube

Zhang and his son have pleaded not guilty. Their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Prosecutors also charged Lin, but he remains at large. Lin’s son was not charged.

The China Truck prosecution painted the first detailed picture of alleged mob activity among Chinese immigrants in Italy. Soon, even more evidence would emerge of a brazen alliance between accused expatriate gangsters and the Chinese security forces.

Outlaw Police

The headquarters of the Fujian Overseas Chinese Association in Italy occupies a corner building on Via Orti del Pero in the heart of Prato’s Chinatown.

The two-story structure looks bedraggled. It has blue steel doors, barred windows and fading sand-colored walls.

But in March of last year, the place made headlines. Chinese media announced “good news” from Prato: the inauguration of the Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station in the Fujian association’s headquarters. Leaders of the association would work with officers of the Municipal Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, to enable immigrants to renew Chinese driver’s licenses and do other bureaucratic tasks in Prato, a Chinese media report said.

The inauguration of the Fuzhou police station in Prato in March 2022. Among those at the opening was Zheng, also known as Franco, second from left.

Among six community leaders pictured beneath the station’s blue banner was the association’s executive vice president at the time: Zheng Wenhua.

Zheng, also known as Franco, seemed a puzzling choice to open a police station. Four years earlier, Italian authorities had accused him of being a top figure in the Prato underworld.

Investigators first identified him in 2011 when police stopped him in his Jaguar accompanied by an alleged enforcer for Lin, the reputed Fujianese mob boss, court documents say. Officers found a clasp knife and a marijuana cigarette in the car and confiscated Zheng’s license, court documents say.

In 2013, Zheng allegedly became involved in the aftermath of the incident in which two thugs beat up the father of a massage parlor owner. Zheng tried to silence the battered extortion victim by sending a “volunteer” interpreter into a police interview to control what he said, court documents say. In a phone call recorded by police, Zheng warned the victim not to implicate bosses, court documents say.

“Come on ... this could have consequences for Laolin...,” he said, according to the documents. “...And that would not be a good thing.”

During the China Truck raids in 2018, authorities charged Zheng with “a prominent role” in Lin’s crew overseeing the “management of clandestine gambling dens and exploitation of prostitution,” court documents say.

Yet Zheng remains a civic leader. He has met with visiting Chinese dignitaries including the mayor of Fuzhou, spoken at community events and attended a gala in February featuring the mayor of Florence and the Chinese consul, according to media reports and photos. In March, he was elected president of the Fujian association. (Zheng has pleaded not guilty and is free awaiting trial. He and other representatives of the Fujian association did not respond to requests for comment.)

And Zheng wasn’t the only one with alleged ties to both the underworld and the new Fuzhou police station in Prato. China Truck prosecutors charged another vice president of the association with helping Lin obtain fraudulent immigration papers. Photos at the Fuzhou police station show three more community leaders whose personal and business links to gangsters surfaced during the investigation, according to court documents and senior law enforcement officials. None of them were charged, though authorities seized five bank accounts belonging to one man.

Despite the celebratory Chinese media reports, the station was part of a global campaign of repression, according to Western officials and human rights advocates.

“You have criminals who terrify the community involved in a police station that further terrifies the community,” a senior law enforcement official said.

Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group, has revealed a network of more than 100 covert stations overseen by Chinese provincial police forces in more than 50 countries. Based in cultural associations, businesses and homes, the outposts help persecute dissidents and support Operation Fox Hunt, which deploys undercover police and prosecutors illegally across borders to track down people accused of crimes — justifiably and not — and take them back to China, according to Western officials and human rights advocates.

In Madrid, a video showed community leaders at a covert station of the Zhejiang provincial police talking via videolink with a fugitive in Spain and law enforcement officials in Zhejiang. In a typical pressure tactic, Chinese police and prosecutors back in Qingtian County sat with a relative of the fugitive, who eventually returned home and accepted a plea deal, according to Chinese media reports cited by the human rights group.

In Aubervilliers, a gritty Paris suburb, a Chinese French garment executive who managed a station admitted in a published interview to helping Chinese police “persuade” a fugitive to return to China in 2019, Safeguard Defenders found. Although no further details about the case were available, a senior French national security official told ProPublica that undercover Chinese police came to France and illegally repatriated two people during that time. The senior official did not say whether the head of the Aubervilliers station was involved.

After Safeguard Defenders issued its report last year, at least 12 countries began investigations. The U.S. reaction was the strongest. Targeting an illegal station in New York, federal prosecutors charged two Chinese American leaders with stalking and harassing dissidents for Chinese authorities including the Fuzhou police — the same force involved in the Prato station. (United Front officials also helped set up the New York station, U.S. authorities say.)

First image: Federal prosecutors say Chinese police used office space in this building in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown as a secret station in order to monitor and repress dissidents living in the United States. Second image: The exterior of the building, center. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

“It is simply outrageous that China’s Ministry of Public Security thinks it can get away with establishing a secret, illegal police station on U.S. soil to aid its efforts to export repression and subvert our rule of law,” the acting head of FBI counterintelligence, Kurt Ronnow, said at the time of the arrests in April.

In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused U.S. authorities of making “groundless accusations.”

“There are simply no so-called ‘overseas police stations,’” Wang said. “China adheres to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, strictly observes international laws and respects the judicial sovereignty of all countries.”

The Chinese Embassy in Rome did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.

Some European national security officials downplayed the disclosures about the stations, echoing the Chinese government’s line that the outposts offer convenient consular-type services. The response to the problem in Europe has often been handled quietly by counterintelligence agencies rather than law enforcement. But most European officials interviewed by ProPublica said the stations aid spying.

“The suspicion is that the goal of these stations is to enable Chinese authorities to control and monitor the Chinese diaspora community,” Tescaroli, the Florence prosecutor, said.

There are 11 Chinese police outposts in Italy, more than any other country, and three in Prato. They multiplied during past Italian governments, which had notably close relationships with Beijing.

In 2016, Italy began a program that allowed visiting Chinese police officers to conduct joint uniformed patrols with Italian police. The stated goal was to improve protection of Chinese tourists and immigrants, but the patrol program fomented the spread of the unofficial stations, said Laura Harth, the campaign director of Safeguard Defenders. Photos show Chinese officers at the stations, sometimes joined by Italian police.

“They used the joint patrols to launch pilot stations,” Harth said. “China described it as one of its biggest achievements.”

Italian and Chinese police on a joint patrol in Milan in 2018. Italian national security officials said the patrols were largely symbolic, but they added that they have caught Chinese officers using visits as a cover to pursue people in the diaspora. Credit: Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images

Although Italian national security officials told ProPublica the patrols were largely symbolic, they said they have caught Chinese police officers using authorized visits as a cover to pursue people in the diaspora.

“But when they tried to do anything more than patrol, they were warned to stop,” a senior Italian national security official said.

The policing alliance was “a bad idea” because it “reinforced the fear” in the Chinese Italian community, a senior Italian law enforcement official said.

Across the Mediterranean, Spain is another place where the secret Chinese stations allegedly converge with the criminal underworld.

In Barcelona, two covert stations operate a mile apart in a translation agency and a restaurant, according to human rights activists and Spanish security officials. The stations are based in the Eixample, a central area of tree-lined avenues, stately modernist architecture and octagonal intersections.

As in Prato, the Fuzhou police administrate the Barcelona facilities from afar, and the staff are mostly Fujianese members of groups including the Association of Fujianese Entrepreneurs in Catalunya, according to Spanish officials and human rights advocates.

And as in Prato, community leaders affiliated with the stations appear in the organized crime files of law enforcement, according to the police of the Catalan autonomous region, a force known as the Mossos d’Esquadra.

At least five of those community leaders have records in Spain for crimes including human smuggling, falsification of documents, receiving stolen property, labor law violations and fraud, Catalan police officials told ProPublica. Police have detected at least two of those people at meetings with suspected Chinese mob figures, the police officials said.

The leaders involved in running the stations interact frequently with Chinese diplomats as well as Spanish politicians, according to police officials.

“These are people of great relevance in the Chinese community,” a police official said. “The local politicians may not always realize who they are meeting with.”

Representatives of associations and businesses tied to the Barcelona stations did not respond to requests for comment. The Chinese Embassy in Madrid also did not respond to a request for comment.

In France, authorities already knew about the Chinese stations and monitored them for intelligence purposes, a French national security official said.

After the revelations last year, French officials met with representatives of the Chinese Embassy and the Chinese community and told them to curtail the covert activities, a senior French national security official said. The senior official said a Chinese police attaché insisted he knew nothing about the matter — until French officials showed him a photo of himself at one of the stations.

China’s embassy in Paris did not respond to a request for comment.

Across Europe, investigators have discovered that the Chinese underworld makes itself useful to the Chinese state in another, crucially important arena: money.

River of Money

Imagine a vast river of cash flowing from Europe to China.

It flows from the booming marijuana industry in and around Barcelona, where Chinese mobsters are players in illegal growing and international trafficking.

It flows from the garment industry in the Aubervilliers area (the site of a covert Chinese police station and the French branch of Zhang’s trucking empire), where merchants have been charged with laundering money for drug lords.

Italian police count cash confiscated during a China Truck raid in Prato. Credit: Via YouTube

And it flows from shops, nightspots and warehouses in Prato and other Italian cities where the Guardia di Finanza, the agency that fights financial crime, has discovered a veritable underground banking system based on tax evasion, customs fraud and contraband.

This illegal machinery has pumped billions of dollars into the Chinese economy, authorities say. Although China has the most formidable police state in the world, law enforcement chiefs in Europe complain about its steadfast resistance to helping their investigations into organized criminal activity by Chinese migrants.

“We get no cooperation from the Chinese government,” said Tescaroli, the chief anti-mafia prosecutor in Florence.

Worsening suspicions of official complicity, Chinese state banks in Europe have emerged as active partners of money laundering organizations.

Exhibit A: the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a state-owned institution, the biggest bank in the world based on total assets.

In 2011, ICBC opened a branch in Madrid on a thriving downtown boulevard filled with museums, luxury hotels and cafe terraces. The bank’s visiting global chairman marked the occasion with Spain’s economy minister, who said the new branch would be a bridge to emerging markets.

A branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China opened in Madrid in 2011. Spain’s economy minister said the new branch would be a bridge to emerging markets. Credit: Juan Medina/Reuters

Five years later, a dramatic scene played out when Spanish police officers raided the bank, seized piles of documents and arrested executives, escorting suspects out with their heads covered.

Spanish officers carried out a raid at the ICBC branch in Madrid in 2016. Credit: Juan Medina/Reuters

The bank had surfaced during investigations of Chinese criminal groups that smuggle contraband and evade taxes and customs duties — activities that generate stockpiles of cash. Surveillance of suspects moving cash led police to the ICBC branch in Madrid.

Thanks to wiretaps and an inside witness, police learned that bank executives set up an audacious system in which criminals delivered suitcases and boxes full of euros to the bank day and night, court documents say. The bank sent hundreds of millions to China through illegal mechanisms such as fake identities and fraudulent invoices. Managers advised crime bosses about how to transfer funds to China covertly. The Madrid branch did not issue a single alert about suspicious financial operations to Spanish authorities between 2011 and 2016, court documents say.

During the investigation, the top ICBC executive in Madrid became general manager at the bank’s European headquarters, indicating potentially wider corruption, prosecutors said.

“The close connection between this Spanish branch and the headquarters in Luxembourg indicates that this illicit conduct could repeat itself in other European branches,” prosecutors warned in court documents.

Chinese diplomats complained publicly and in talks with Spanish leaders about the case, according to Spanish national security officials. But in 2020, the general manager in Luxembourg and three Madrid executives pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. The Spanish court imposed sentences of three to five months and a $25 million fine. ICBC issued a statement saying the bank was law-abiding and had cooperated with authorities.

It was not an isolated case.

In France, the Bank of China paid a $4 million fine in 2020 to settle a prosecution for aggravated money laundering. Authorities charged that the state bank failed to notify French tax authorities about more than $40 million sent from 168 accounts during a two-year period. The money came from fraud, tax evasion and other illicit activities by Chinese entrepreneurs based in France, prosecutors said. Bank of China officials said in a statement that the settlement was not an admission of guilt.

In Italy, the Bank of China paid $22 million in 2017 to settle a case in which a whopping $4.7 billion went illegally to China. Executives aided and concealed transfers of cash from Prato and Florence during a four-year period, authorities said. The former director general in Milan and three other employees received two-year suspended sentences in the aptly named “River of Money” prosecution.

The bank said the settlement was not an admission of guilt.

The river of money has many tributaries, law enforcement experts say. Italian investigators have detected bulk cash loads smuggled to China in maritime containers, express mail packages and the luggage of airline passengers.

And police forces across Western Europe track couriers driving shipments of criminal proceeds east to Turkey, Bulgaria and especially Hungary, where it is easier to deposit and repatriate the funds in banks with little interference on either end, according to Italian prosecutors and other European officials. In a Spanish case, a jailed Chinese suspect told interrogators that a network smuggled cash “hidden in goods transported in vans” and used “passports of Chinese citizens to send the money as immigrant remittances” from the “Chinese Bank in Budapest, Hungary” to China, court documents say.

Italian investigators identified another bank in Hungary, China’s closest ally in Europe, that received more than $1.2 billion in clandestine cash deliveries from across the Continent and wired the money to China between 2017 and 2018.

Chinese financial crime networks pose “an elevated threat” in Europe, according to a recent French law enforcement report. They have become the preferred money launderers of the drug trade and act as brokers for international deals, delivering cash on demand so that cartels don’t have to transport funds across borders, European security officials say.

The clients are top drug traffickers: Italians, Albanians, Latin Americans and a violent Morocco-connected cartel, the Mocro Maffia, that has become a national security threat in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The trend resembles the rise of Chinese money laundering groups that have transformed the U.S. drug trade by giving fast and cheap service to Latin American cartels. As ProPublica has reported, U.S. national security officials say the Chinese state supports that activity.

European authorities have similar suspicions.

“It is a kind of state criminality,” a senior Italian law enforcement official said.

Striking Back

Five years after Italian police rounded up the accused gangsters in 2018, the continuing saga of the China Truck case illustrates progress and setbacks in the response to a threat that caught Europe largely unawares.

A total of 79 defendants are still awaiting trial in Prato. The proceedings have been slow because of the sheer scope of the case, the labyrinthine justice system and the laborious demands of translation. An acute lack of interpreters continues to plague the case. During the investigation, police at one point had to suspend wiretaps because taped conversations in the Fujianese dialect were piling up untranslated.

It is also Italy’s first prosecution of a Chinese organization for mafia-level conspiracy, which is a complex offense to prove. Appellate panels have questioned the evidence for the mafia-related charges, releasing defendants from pre-trial custody.

Last September, a court convicted some defendants for individual offenses and acquitted others such as Zhang, the alleged boss in Rome. In the case of Zheng, the community leader involved in the Prato station, the statute of limitations ran out on some charges against him. Lin is no longer facing trial because his whereabouts are unknown.

But Zhang, Zheng and the others still face trial on the mafia conspiracy charges.

Although it has been an uphill battle, authorities say they have disrupted the underworld.

“Like the Italian mafias, the Chinese mafia has understood, or is coming to understand, that if you are too violent, the police react,” a senior Italian law enforcement official said. “It is bad for business. Violence attracts attention. It has happened less since the China Truck prosecution.”

Europe is hurrying to respond to China-related threats. After an investigation, the United Kingdom’s minister of state security recently announced that the government had ordered China to shut down unauthorized police stations, calling them “unacceptable.”

Officials of the municipal police in Fuzhou, China, (top center panel) hold a videoconference with leaders of Chinese immigrant communities who operate stations for the Fuzhou police force in five cities including Barcelona, Spain, (bottom left panel) and New York City (top left panel). Credit: Via Fuzhou Public Security Bureau

The new Italian government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has taken a tough line. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have created units focused on Chinese organized crime and malign influence. A parliamentary anti-mafia commission will examine alleged wrongdoing in Prato’s Chinese manufacturing sector and illicit money flows to China. Public attention has led to the shuttering of the Fuzhou station in Prato.

As for the double homicide on Via Strozzi, the case opened a door into a secret world. Prosecutors charged 20 people in the murder and related crimes, winning convictions in the latter cases.

But the accused killers remain out of reach, authorities say, in China.

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

ProPublica · by Sebastian Rotella

​24. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: August

Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: August

fdd.org · · August 2, 2023

John Hardie

Russia Program Deputy Director

Trend Overview 

By John Hardie 

Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch. 

Looking to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. military kicked off the biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise, in which a record 30,000 troops from 13 countries participated. At the same time, the administration is also seeking to rebuild a “working relationship” with Beijing, with little apparent success.  

At the NATO summit in Vilnius, the allies pledged further support for Ukraine but declined to grant Kyiv’s request for a clear roadmap toward NATO accession. The allies also committed to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense and formally agreed on military plans to defend against a potential Russian attack. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced a deal to eliminate Turkey’s roadblock to Sweden’s NATO accession, although the Turkish parliament has yet to ratify it. Earlier in the month, the administration made the controversial decision to send Kyiv cluster munitions, aimed at sustaining Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive. 

The administration continues to struggle to advance U.S. interests at the United Nations, with a Chinese candidate winning re-election to lead the Food and Agriculture Organization. Meanwhile, the administration further relaxed sanctions against Iran. The U.S. military did, however, dispatch additional forces to the region to deter Iranian threats to commercial shipping. 

Check back next month to see how the Biden administration deals with these and other challenges. 

China

Craig Singleton

China Program Deputy Director and Senior Fellow

Trending Negative

Previous Trend:Negative

In a bid to “establish a working relationship with China,” President Biden dispatched top aides, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, to Beijing for meetings with Chinese officials. The White House claims these exchanges are necessary to defuse crises between the two superpowers. However, these recent engagements produced few, if any, tangible results. Nor have they led to meaningful changes in Beijing’s behavior, as evidenced by China’s decision this month to deploy a record number of warships in and around Taiwan’s territorial waters. Indeed, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has refused to speak with Biden since last November, instead tasking his subordinates to convince Washington to abandon policies aimed at curtailing China’s access to U.S. capital and technology.

While the White House pursues rapprochement with Beijing, hackers associated with China’s military and spy services penetrated the unclassified email accounts of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other State and Commerce Department officials, including U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns. The Biden administration has not provided a detailed accounting of which officials were targeted by the hackers. Also unclear is whether Washington raised concerns about the espionage operation with Beijing. Although Raimondo acknowledged the hack represented a serious “infringement on our security,” she nevertheless remains committed to traveling to China this year for meetings.

Regrettably, the Biden administration’s passivity may lead Beijing to embrace ever bolder tactics to achieve its objectives. In the immediate future, China seeks to prevent Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te from transiting the United States in August while en route to Paraguay’s presidential inauguration.

Cyber

RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery

CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow

Michael Sugden

Research Analyst

Trending Positive

Previous Trend:Neutral

The Biden administration released the National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan, which provides a comprehensive roadmap for how the administration will accomplish the objectives outlined in the strategy, which was released in March. The administration also announced a new cybersecurity certification and labeling program that will attach a “U.S. Cyber Trust Mark” to internet-connected consumer devices that adhere to the cybersecurity guidelines published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This program will inform consumers which products take their safety seriously, hopefully driving consumer demand for secure-by-design products.

The administration also submitted a long-overdue nomination for national cyber director, held by an interim appointee since the previous director left in February. Harry Coker, the nominee, has had a distinguished career in national security and is well qualified for the job. A permanent director will once again bring clarity to the future of the office.

To combat the rapid rise in cryptocurrency theft, the Justice Department announced that it would be revamping the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET). The move will roughly double the number of NCET staff who handle cryptocurrency cases and provide greater resources to combat cybercriminals.

In worse news, Microsoft announced that the U.S. government again fell victim to a significant hack by a Chinese threat group. The group used a Microsoft vulnerability to hack into emails, focusing on espionage, data theft, and credential access. The National Security Council claims no classified networks were accessed in the attack, but senior U.S. officials reportedly had their emails pilfered. Investigations to uncover more details are ongoing.

Defense

Bradley Bowman

CMPP Senior Director

Trending Neutral

Previous Trend:Positive

President Biden attended the NATO summit in Vilnius on July 11-12. Alliance leaders welcomed Finland as a full member, discussed with Turkey a path forward for Sweden’s accession, committed to invest at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, and agreed on important steps to strengthen deterrence on the alliance’s eastern flank.

The summit communiqué reiterated that Russia bears “full responsibility for its illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine,” and called on Moscow to “completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its forces” from Ukraine. Such words were little consolation to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was clearly frustrated by the decision to not offer Kyiv a clear path and timeline to alliance membership.

To deter Iranian efforts to harass and seize commercial vessels, the Biden administration significantly increased U.S. combat power in the Middle East in July. The additional forces sent to the region include F-16, A-10, and F-35 aircraft from the U.S. Air Force; a U.S. Marine Corps Amphibious Readiness Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit; and the USS Thomas Hudner (DDG-116), a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer.

The F-35s may also prove useful in countering increasingly aggressive Russian behavior in Syria. A Russian fighter jet used flares on July 23 to damage a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone operating in Syria in support of the defeat-ISIS mission. That was the sixth reported incident in July in which Russian aircraft flew dangerously close to U.S. manned or unmanned aircraft. Moscow and Tehran share the goal of pushing U.S. forces out of Syria.

Europe

John Hardie

Russia Program Deputy Director

Trending Neutral

Previous Trend:Positive

Ahead of the July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius, Ukraine petitioned its Western backers for a clear roadmap laying out the timeline and prerequisites for its accession to NATO, as well as security guarantees in the interim. While recognizing that accession will not happen while the war continues, many allies supported Kyiv’s request for a roadmap. Washington, however, opposed it, reportedly fearing Russian escalation.

Instead, the summit communiqué essentially reiterated the alliance’s vague 2008 promise that Ukraine will eventually join NATO. The allies did drop the requirement that Ukraine first complete a Membership Action Plan, but accession will still ultimately depend on political consensus within the alliance. In a largely symbolic move, the allies also upgraded the NATO-Ukraine Commission into the NATO-Ukraine Council. Finally, the allies pledged to develop a “multi-year programme” to “help rebuild the Ukrainian security and defence sector and transition Ukraine towards full interoperability with NATO.”

In concert, the G7 nations pledged to work with Kyiv to establish “bilateral, long-term security commitments and arrangements,” loosely modeled on U.S. military aid to Israel. These commitments will focus on supporting Ukraine’s military, defense-industrial base, and economy as well as meeting Kyiv’s immediate “technical and financial” needs.

The summit’s outcome frustrated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who indicated that he wanted Ukraine’s alliance status taken off the table before any potential peace talks. However, Kyiv can take some solace in the fact that increasingly, the question is more “when and not if” Ukraine will join NATO, as UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said after the summit.

Gulf

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

Research Fellow

Trending Positive

Previous Trend:Positive

Washington intensified its diplomatic efforts to expand peace between Israel and Arab countries. On July 27, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman in Riyadh, where they discussed “initiatives to advance a common vision for a more peaceful, secure, prosperous, and stable Middle East region interconnected with the world,” per a White House readout.

To secure Saudi normalization with Israel, the Biden administration is reportedly weighing three potential concessions to Riyadh: First, Washington would bless Saudi Arabia’s development of a civilian nuclear program under U.S. monitoring. Second, the two countries would sign a mutual security treaty. Finally, Riyadh would be able to buy more advanced U.S. weapons, such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense surface-to-air missile system.

For its part, Riyadh would commit never to denominate its oil sales to China in the renminbi and would distance itself from Beijing and eject Chinese tech giants like Huawei. The Saudis would also offer the Palestinian Authority a large aid package and sign a peace treaty with Israel. Meanwhile, Israel would pledge to preserve the pathway for a two-state solution, including promising not to annex any land in the West Bank.

The Saudi position on normalization with Israel has been evolving since the beginning of this year. In January, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal Bin Farhan said his country would sign a peace treaty with Israel only after the Palestinians get a state. In June, Saudi Ambassador in Washington Reema Bint Bandar said Riyadh was working toward an “integrated Middle East,” including “a thriving Israel.” Last month, Saudi Arabia welcomed Israel’s national soccer team to an international tournament in Jeddah.

Indo-Pacific

Craig Singleton

China Program Deputy Director and Senior Fellow

Trending Neutral

Previous Trend:Positive

Amid a marked uptick in Chinese military activity in the Taiwan Strait, the Biden administration recommitted itself to bolstering U.S. and allied deterrence in the region. Notably, a record-setting 30,000 troops from 13 countries participated in the U.S.-led Talisman Sabre military exercise in Australia, which began on July 22 and will end on August 4. During the drills, which simulate a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the servicemembers practiced amphibious landings and complex ground maneuvers as well as air combat and maritime operations.

The exercise occurred amidst a flurry of associated diplomatic activity in the Indo-Pacific. Secretary of Defense Austin traveled first to Port Moresby to celebrate a newly inked U.S.-Papua New Guinea defense cooperation agreement. Afterward, he joined Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Canberra for the 33rd annual Australia-U.S. ministerial consultations. For his part, Blinken made stops in Tonga and New Zealand to discuss countering China’s growing influence in the region. Meanwhile, the State Department notified Congress about plans to hire 40 staffers over the next five years for each of four recently opened or soon-to-be-opened U.S. embassies in the Pacific.

America’s allies, in close coordination with Washington, also stepped up their Indo-Pacific outreach in July. Canada’s Defense Minister reaffirmed Ottawa’s plans to continue conducting freedom-of-navigation exercises in the region, just as Germany for the first time deployed 240 soldiers to Australia for military drills. French President Emmanuel Macron also toured the region, making stops in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. These and other moves mirror growing concern from NATO about China’s “coercive” posture against the alliance.

International Organizations

Richard Goldberg

Senior Advisor

Trending Very Negative

Previous Trend:Negative

Former Chinese official Qu Dongyu was re-elected to lead the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) after the Biden administration failed to recruit an opponent. Qu’s re-election followed a German news report detailing how Qu uses his position to advance China’s Belt and Road Initiative and help Chinese agribusinesses. With control of both FAO and the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, China may expand its UN partnership on “big data,” which Beijing exploits to advance Chinese interests.

Meanwhile, a Panamanian candidate surprised most observers by winning an election to head the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Panama remains a jurisdiction of significant concern for registering so-called “ghost ships” that carry illicit cargo around the world. The country’s increasingly close relationship with China has led to suspicions that Panama’s victory came with Chinese support once it was clear Beijing’s own candidate could not win. The Biden administration did, however, successfully lobby the IMO to block Iran from hosting an official event amid Tehran’s continued harassment and seizing of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.

Separately, the United States formally re-entered the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), claiming that engagement in the agency will help counter Chinese influence within the United Nations. That decision, however, tacitly legitimizes UNESCO’s recognition of a Palestinian state outside a negotiated peace settlement with Israel. The organization also denies Jewish connections to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where Jewish history dates back thousands of years.

Iran

Behnam Ben Taleblu

Senior Fellow

Richard Goldberg

Senior Advisor

Trending Very Negative

Previous Trend:Very Negative

As Tehran intensified its crackdown on women and dissidents, the Biden administration provided Iran with additional sanctions relief. The administration issued a waiver allowing Iraq to deposit payments for Iranian electricity into bank accounts outside Iraq instead of requiring that payments be made to an escrow account in Baghdad. The waiver came after Iraq announced it had agreed to trade its oil for Iranian natural gas, which would typically violate U.S. sanctions unless otherwise authorized by the Treasury Department.

Earlier in July, an Iranian official claimed that Washington had enabled Tehran to access all its frozen funds in Iraq. Meanwhile, Iranian oil exports reportedly reached a five-year high of 1.6 million barrels a day — a level nearly impossible to achieve without willful non-enforcement of U.S. sanctions. By relaxing sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration likely hopes to persuade Iran not to produce weapons-grade uranium, seize oil tankers in the Gulf, attack U.S. forces in Syria, or provide ballistic missiles to Russia for use against Ukraine.

Following recent Iranian threats to maritime commerce in the Gulf, the United States deployed F-35 and F-16 fighter jets, a U.S. Navy destroyer, and a Marine Amphibious Readiness Group/ Marine Expeditionary Unit to the region to help deter Iranian aggression. However, the administration is still poised to allow the UN missile embargo on Iran to expire in October, even after CIA Director Bill Burns revealed U.S. concern over increased Russian support for Iran’s space launch vehicle program — a cover for Iran’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Israel

David May

Research Manager and Senior Research Analyst

Trending Neutral

Previous Trend:Negative

The Knesset passed legislation on July 24 eliminating the Israeli Supreme Court’s power to overturn legislation and government actions on the grounds of “reasonableness.” In response, the White House released a statement criticizing the Israeli government for pushing the vote through despite the lack of a national consensus on the issue. Amid this tension, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with President Biden on July 17. The two leaders will meet later this year.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog traveled to Washington to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress on July 19. Biden touted the “unbreakable” friendship between the two countries in a meeting with Herzog. Ahead of a separate meeting, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $70 million joint U.S.-Israel venture on food security and climate resilience initiatives.

Meanwhile, the United States and Israel conducted the bilateral Juniper Oak 23.3 military exercise from July 10 to 14. The multi-domain exercise focused on an array of capabilities crucial to striking against Iran’s nuclear program, sending a powerful message to Tehran.

The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security welcomed Israeli moves to ease travel for U.S.-Palestinian dual citizens. But both departments declared that Israel has yet to meet eligibility requirements for joining the U.S. visa waiver program.

Finally, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan traveled to Saudi Arabia on July 27 to encourage the Gulf kingdom to normalize ties with Israel.

Korea

Anthony Ruggiero

Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program Senior Director and Senior Fellow

Trending Negative

Previous Trend:Neutral

North Korea celebrated the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean War with a military parade that included intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Senior Russian and Chinese officials attended the event. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu led his country’s delegation, marking the first visit by a Russian defense minister since 1991. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un gave Shoigu a tour of a defense exhibition that included ballistic missiles and drones. Russia and North Korea have strengthened their relationship, with Pyongyang providing materiel for Moscow’s war in Ukraine in exchange for sanctions evasion and commodities. Kim also met with a Chinese Politburo member who led Beijing’s delegation. Both China and Russia have dropped any pretense that they will implement UN Security Council sanctions prohibiting Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

On July 18, Washington and Seoul held the first meeting of their Nuclear Consultative Group. The two allies had pledged to establish the group following South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s state visit in April. A White House readout said the group will serve as an “enduring mechanism for strengthening the U.S.-ROK Alliance and enhancing our combined deterrence and response posture.” As a public show of Washington’s commitment to Seoul’s defense, two U.S. nuclear-capable submarines visited South Korea.

North Korea threatened to shoot down U.S. reconnaissance flights. On July 12, Pyongyang tested its solid-propellant ICBM. The Biden administration responded with a strongly worded statement. The last U.S. sanctions on North Korea were issued on June 15.

Latin America

Carrie Filipetti

Emanuele Ottolenghi

Senior Fellow

Trending Negative

Previous Trend:Neutral

Washington continues to struggle to secure Mexican government cooperation against drug cartels. In his latest spat with American authorities, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) dismissed the Drug Enforcement Administration’s estimates of Mexican cartels’ strength, arguing Washington lacks “good information.” Earlier this year, AMLO criticized the indictment of 28 cartel members implicated in fentanyl trafficking, decrying DEA investigations in Mexico as “illegal” and “the work of foreign agents.”

The administration has temporarily halted its satellite monitoring of coca crops in Colombia, apparently in deference to Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s decision to halt Colombia’s decades-long policy of coca eradication. Petro’s stance is part of a broader plan to offer both cartels and anti-government militias a path to national reconciliation. However, his son’s recent arrest on money laundering and corruption charges, including for taking money from cartels, casts a shadow on Petro’s policy and the White House’s support for his anti-narcotics strategy.

In late June, Bolivia announced deals with Russia and China to develop its lithium reserves. U.S. companies are losing the lithium race in Argentina and Chile as well, a significant setback to the Biden administration’s climate strategy. In July, Bolivia confirmed it was in talks with Iran to buy drones. Iran will also provide cybersecurity assistance and overhaul Bolivia’s military and civilian aircraft. The deal has caused concern in neighboring Argentina but has garnered little pushback from Washington.

Finally, sanctions against Venezuela continue to erode. On July 16, Venezuela’s vice president attended the European Union-CELAC summit in Brussels despite U.S. and EU sanctions banning her international travel.

Lebanon

Tony Badran

Research Fellow

Trending Very Negative

Previous Trend:Very Negative

On July 11, Amos Hochstein, the U.S. special presidential coordinator for global infrastructure and energy security, arrived in Israel to discuss, among other things, tensions at the border with Lebanon. The previous month, Hezbollah had set up an encampment several meters inside Israeli territory in the Mount Dov region. Throughout June and July, Hezbollah staged a series of provocations along the border. In several instances, Hezbollah personnel were joined by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which assisted the group in blocking Israeli military engineering work along the border fence.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah-dominated government relayed to Western interlocutors, including Washington, Hezbollah’s demand that Israel withdraw from Lebanese-claimed territory. Hochstein reportedly carried the proposal to the Israelis, underscoring the Biden administration’s desire that Israel avoid escalation in Lebanon. Hezbollah is employing the same strategy it used during Israel and Lebanon’s maritime border delineation talks last year, brokered by Hochstein. During those negotiations, the terror group and the Lebanese government each played their part in a division of labor, while the administration’s pressured Israel to seal the deal.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military continues to support the LAF despite its collusion with Hezbollah. Even as LAF personnel posed for pro-Hezbollah TV stations with their weapons pointed at Israeli soldiers, the U.S. ambassador sat alongside the LAF command while observing a U.S.-LAF combined maritime exercise. Likewise, although the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has manifestly failed to restrain Hezbollah, the Biden administration will almost certainly vote to renew UNIFIL’s mandate in late August.

Nonproliferation and Biodefense

Anthony Ruggiero

Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program Senior Director and Senior Fellow

Andrea Stricker

Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program Deputy Director and Research Fellow

Trending Very Negative

Previous Trend:Very Negative

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Russia had likely placed anti-personnel mines along the periphery of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) in Ukraine. IAEA personnel are stationed at ZNPP to observe the plant’s safety and security. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated that the presence of explosives was “inconsistent with [IAEA] safety standards and nuclear security guidance and creates additional psychological pressure on plant staff.” He noted, however, that “any detonation of these mines should not affect the site’s nuclear safety and security systems.”

The United States sent two nuclear-powered submarines to South Korea, fulfilling a pledge under the U.S.-South Korean “Washington Declaration” signed in April. North Korea fired two ballistic missiles into the sea in response, and its defense minister threatened that U.S. displays of military power could trigger Pyongyang’s use of nuclear weapons.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization claimed that Tehran had provided the IAEA with new documentation regarding Iran’s activities at two sites under IAEA investigation for potential undeclared nuclear weapons work. Iran typically makes a show of cooperating with the agency to avoid IAEA Board of Governors censure of Tehran’s non-compliance, but Tehran does not actually meaningfully cooperate. The next IAEA board meeting is in September. At that session, Washington and its fellow board members should provide a deadline for Iran’s compliance and demand a halt to the regime’s provocative nuclear advances.

Russia

John Hardie

Russia Program Deputy Director

Trending Positive

Previous Trend:Positive

As part of a July 7 aid package, Washington pledged to send Kyiv cluster munitions that can be fired by Western artillery systems donated to Ukraine. These rounds, known as dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs), are controversial because they scatter smaller submunitions, some of which often fail to detonate and can later harm civilians or friendly forces. While not without risks, DPICMs are necessary to prevent Ukraine’s counteroffensive from culminating prematurely. They can also help destroy dug-in Russian forces.

Ukraine had been requesting DPICMs since last summer to alleviate its “shell hunger.” Although Turkey provided some, the Biden administration initially demurred, citing opposition from allies. However, Kyiv’s counteroffensive has consumed more ammunition than U.S. planners apparently anticipated, leading American officials to worry that Ukraine would run out. Since Western stocks of traditional, “unitary” shells are running low, Washington tapped its large DPICM stockpile. The administration says it sees DPICMs as a temporary “bridge” intended to buy time until Western shell production ramps up enough to sustain Ukraine’s needs, although that could take years.

To minimize risk to civilians, Kyiv has promised not to use DPICMs in urban areas. In addition, the Pentagon says the particular DPICM rounds transferred to Ukraine have a “dud” rate of just 2.35 percent. Cluster munitions that Russia and Ukraine have already employed have far higher dud rates. To facilitate eventual demining efforts, which Washington will support, Ukraine will record where it uses DPICMs. Ukrainian territory is already littered with mines and other unexploded ordnance that will have to be cleared once the war ends.

Sunni Jihadism

Bill Roggio

Senior Fellow and Editor of FDD's Long War Journal

Trending Negative

Previous Trend:Very Negative

The Biden administration continues to engage the Taliban despite the fact that it continues to shelter and support al-Qaeda, the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, and a host of other terror groups. Thomas West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, and Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights, met with “a delegation of Taliban representatives and technocratic professionals from key Afghan ministries to discuss critical interests in Afghanistan,” per a State Department readout. Al-Qaeda leaders are embedded in key Afghan ministries, and the group runs training camps, safe houses, and a media operations center in multiple Afghan provinces. Meanwhile, the Taliban continues to deny the presence of foreign terror groups in Afghanistan, including the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan. President Biden wrongly claimed that al-Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan and that the Taliban has been an effective partner.

The U.S. military continues to support the Somali government’s faltering efforts to drive al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s branch in East Africa, from central and southern Somalia. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) launched four “self-defense strikes” against al-Shabaab as Somali forces battled the terror group. AFRICOM continues to describe al-Shabaab as “the largest and most kinetically active al-Qaeda network in the world.” On July 27, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the financial emir for the Islamic State’s Somali Province. Treasury noted that the province’s founder and previous emir has been promoted to lead the Islamic State’s al-Karrar office, which funds Islamic State branches in large swathes of Africa.

Syria

David Adesnik

Senior Fellow and Director of Research

Trending Negative

Previous Trend:Neutral

Throughout July, Russian planes harassed U.S. aircraft in the skies over Syria. In the sixth incident of the month, on July 27, a Russian jet launched flares that hit an MQ-9 Reaper drone. The most dangerous incident took place on July 16, when a Russian jet forced a manned U.S. aircraft to fly through the turbulence of its wake, endangering the crew. For years, a deconfliction mechanism has prevented accidents in the air over Syria, where both U.S. and Russian planes operate. The six incidents in July thus point toward a deliberate provocation by Moscow. In June, Russian aircraft repeatedly flew over U.S. bases in northeast Syria, sometimes carrying air-to-ground weapons. In response, the Pentagon deployed additional fighter jets to the region, but there has been no visible response to Moscow’s latest escalation.

On July 11, Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have authorized nine additional months of humanitarian aid deliveries in northwest Syria, where more than 4 million residents inhabit one of the last enclaves under the control of Sunni Islamist rebels. Moscow has continually leveraged its veto to impose additional restrictions on UN aid shipments. Washington has repeatedly condemned this policy as heartless, as Biden’s envoy to the United Nations did before the Security Council on July 24. Yet the administration has not developed any leverage of its own to counter Russian gambits. Experts from across the political spectrum have repeatedly called for the United States and its allies to initiate an aid program outside the UN framework, which would not be subject to a Russian veto.

Turkey

Sinan Ciddi

Non-Resident Senior Fellow

Trending Neutral

Previous Trend:Neutral

The Biden administration believed that it finally secured Turkey’s support and approval for Sweden’s accession to NATO at the alliance’s annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. The breakthrough was announced by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, signaling that Ankara would drop its objections to Swedish membership, which Turkey has blocked for 12 months. Ankara has consistently cited numerous terrorism-related “security concerns” that it wanted Stockholm to address before Turkey would approve Swedish membership.

However, less than 24 hours after the summit, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated ratification of Sweden’s accession would have to wait until October due to the Turkish parliament’s summer recess. This indicates that Erdogan first wants to secure U.S. assurances that Congress will approve Ankara’s plans to acquire F-16 fighter jets. Although the U.S. government has never officially linked Sweden’s accession and the F-16 deal, Erdogan had sought to use the former as leverage to extract the latter.

Despite Erdogan’s machinations, it remains unclear whether Congress will approve the F-16 sale. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reiterated the administration’s support for the deal. But Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ) remarked that Turkish ratification of Sweden’s accession would be a necessary but insufficient move to persuade him to approve the sale. For the sale to proceed, Menendez and other key congressional actors want assurances from Ankara that any military equipment sold to Turkey will not be used to antagonize other allies, principally Greece.

fdd.org · by Krystal Bermudez · August 2, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com