Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“The person who writes for føōls is always sure of a large audience.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer

“Sooner or later, the local associates go too far and the connection has to be broken, so that the Americans end with their erstwhile friends as their enemies The most pathetic aspects of the question are the belief of the average American that he deserves to be liked, and his inability to understand why he is not when the fact becomes too obvious to be overlooked any longer.”

- Sir Alec Kirkbride, British ambassador to Libya, on US incompetence at choosing local military partners in asymmetric and indirect strategies (July 3, 1953)

"Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times."

- Winston Churchill

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 8 (Putin's War)

2. U.S. Will Continue Taiwan Strait Transits, FONOPs in Western Pacific Despite Growing Tension with China

3. Taiwan holds drills, says China seeks control of seas8/9/22 Korean News and Commentary

4. The SciOps Conundrum: A Case Study on Applied Analytics (USAJFKSWCS)

5. $1 Billion in Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine

6. USD (Policy) Dr. Kahl Press Conference

7. Thailand, China to resume air force exercises after pandemic pause

8. It’s Time to Respond to Iran’s Bad-Faith Negotiations

9. Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way

10. CIA-JSOC convergence impedes covert action oversight, researcher warns

11. Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals

12. Ukrainian resistance grows in Russian-occupied areas

13. Russian disinformation spreading in new ways despite bans

14. Zelensky calls on West to ban all Russian travelers

15. Dozen Pentagon nominees stalled as Senate leaves for August recess

16. The Rise and Fall of Village Stability Operations in Afghanistan: Lessons for Future Irregular Warfare Campaigns

17. An Alternative History of AirLand Battle, Part II

18. The Wrong Way to Compete With China

19. Stop Tiptoeing Around Russia by Alexander Vindman

20. "My Copilot Just Ran Out The Back Of The Plane"- Chilling Audio From Aerial Incident Near Fort Bragg

21. New Chinese Drills Spark Fears Of Prolonged Squeeze On Taiwan

22. Beijing’s Taiwan Aggression Has Backfired in Tokyo

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 8 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-8

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 8

Aug 8, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Layne Philipson, Katherine Lawlor, Karolina Hird, George Barros, Angela Howard, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 8, 7:00 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.

Western and Ukrainian outlets circulated a report, likely false, of a Russian general allegedly threatening to destroy Europe’s largest nuclear facility, the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), if Russia could not hold the plant. Multiple news outlets shared a screenshot from the Russian social networking site Vkontakte that claimed to cite the Russian head of the Zaporizhia occupation garrison, Major General Valery Vasilev, stating that Russia had mined the Zaporizhzhia NPP and that the plant would be “either Russian land or a scorched desert.”[1] The screenshot appeared to be a news report posted in a Vkontakte group run by Russian outlet Lenta Novosti Zaporizhia. The outlet itself claimed that the screenshot was from a faked group and denied writing the report.[2] The Russian Ministry of Defense condemned the report and screenshot as a “fake” and claimed that Vasilev was in Uzbekistan at the time he was purported to have made the statement to forces at Zaporizhzhia.[3] Regardless of the origin (or existence) of the original post, the reporting is unreliable. It is indirect and does not claim to cite an official statement or a statement made on any official Russian news or government website.

This likely misreporting distracts from the very real risks of Russia’s militarization of the Zaporizhzhia NPP, which may include mining the plant and almost certainly includes the unsafe storage of military armaments near nuclear reactors and nuclear waste storage facilities.[4] Bellingcat geolocated a drone video of the Zaporizhia NPP that was shared by Russian opposition outlet The Insider on August 5. The video depicts Russian military vehicles moving in and around the plant, including military trucks and armored vehicles moving around and into the building containing the first of the plant’s six nuclear reactors.[5] Russian forces have also dug trenches in and around the plant and may have established firing positions.[6] Russian officials claim that Ukraine has repeatedly attacked the plant, while Ukrainian officials claim that Russian forces are attacking Ukrainian positions from within the plant, preventing Ukrainian return fire and essentially using the plant as a nuclear shield.[7] Russian forces have repeatedly shelled the nearby Ukrainian-controlled town of Nikopol, likely from positions in or around the NPP, since July.[8]

ISW continues to assess that Russian forces are likely leveraging the threat of nuclear disaster to degrade Western will to provide military support to a Ukrainian counteroffensive.[9]

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.

Key Takeaways

Reporting of a likely falsified Russian statement distracts from the real risks of a Russian-caused nuclear disaster at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Russian forces continue to conduct attacks from and store military equipment near the plant’s nuclear reactors, likely to play upon Western fears of a nuclear disaster and degrade Western will to provide additional military support to Ukraine.
Russian forces conducted ground attacks northwest of Slovyansk and northeast and southeast of Bakhmut.
Russian forces continued ground attacks northwest and southwest of Donetsk City.
Russian officials postponed reopening the Antonivskyi Bridge after a Ukrainian strike damaged the bridge and nearby construction equipment.
Russian forces are deploying less-professional occupation forces and increasing pressure on Ukrainian populations in occupied areas.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those 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 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.

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed advances northwest of Izyum on August 8. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted an airstrike on Zalyman, approximately 30 km northwest of Izyum, and shelled settlements north of Izyum, including Husarivka and Asiivka.[10]

Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack northwest of Slovyansk on August 8. The Ukrainian General staff reported that Russian forces conducted a failed offensive to improve their positions near Bohorodychne.[11] Russian forces continued to shell settlements between Izyum and Slovyansk along the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border and additionally conducted an artillery strike directly on Slovyansk.[12] Russian journalist and milblogger Evgeniy Poddubniy claimed on August 7 that Ukrainian forces are continually forming new brigades in Kharkiv Oblast despite continuous Russian strikes and projected that this force generation shows that Ukrainian forces can simultaneously conduct advances in the Kherson direction and in Kharkiv Oblast.[13]

Russian forces conducted ground assaults to the east of Siversk on August 8. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces attempted failed offensives in the direction of Verkhnokamyanskye (5 km east of Siversk) and four other unnamed settlements but retreated with losses.[14] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai also reported that Ukrainian forces neutralized Russian reconnaissance groups near unspecified settlements.[15] Russian forces continued to shell Siversk and nearby settlements with tank, tube, and rocket artillery and targeted neighboring villages, Hryhorivka and Ivano-Darivka, with airstrikes.[16]

Russian forces continued ground attacks to the east and south of Bakhmut on August 8. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces defeated Russian reconnaissance groups of unspecified echelons near Bakhmutske, and Yakovlivka—villages approximately 15 km northeast of Bakhmut—and that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground assaults near Zaitseve and Vershyna—villages approximately 10 km southeast of Bakhmut.[17] Russian forces likely seek to establish control over Soledar to Bakhmut’s north and Zaitseve to Bakhmut’s south to set conditions to disrupt Ukrainian control over the T0513 trunk road that supports Ukrainian frontline positions in northeast Donetsk Oblast.

Russian forces continued ground attacks to the northwest and southwest of Donetsk City on August 8. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attempted to advance toward Avdiivka (5 km north of Donetsk City) Pisky (5 km northwest of Donetsk City), and Nevelske (12 km northwest of Donetsk City).[18] Social media footage posted on August 7 previously showed Russian forces advancing within Pisky itself and, taken in tandem with the vague language of the Ukrainian General Staff report, Russian forces are likely focusing on advancing northwest through Pisky from positions in the center of the settlement.[19] Russian troops additionally conducted localized ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City near Maryinka and Shevchenko.[20]

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks northeast of Kharkiv City and focused on maintaining their current lines on August 8.[21] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted airstrikes and UAV reconnaissance northeast of Kharkiv City.[22] Russian forces also struck residential areas near central Kharkiv City with multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) and continued to strike Kharkiv City and surrounding settlements with S-300 missiles, mortars, tanks, and tank, tube, and rocket artillery.[23]

Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)

Russian forces continued focusing efforts on maintaining their current positions and preventing Ukrainian advances along the Southern Axis on August 8.[24] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued shelling civilian and military infrastructure using tank, tube, and rocket artillery and intensified aerial reconnaissance using UAVs along the entire line of contact.[25] Russian forces also conducted airstrikes on Lozove and Andriivka, both on the eastern bank of the Inhulets River, and Olhyne, located along the northern part of the T2207 highway.[26] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces also conducted airstrikes in Prechistivka, Volodymyrivka, Novomykhailivka, and Poltavka.[27]

Russian forces continued to target settlements in Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, and Odesa oblasts with artillery and missiles. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces launched two Kh-59 cruise missiles at Kamianske and continued shelling Nikopol, Zelendolsk, Marhanets, and Velika Kostromka, Dniprotrovsk Oblast.[28] Russian forces also continued shelling settlements on the outskirts of Mykolaiv City but did not launch any strikes directly on Mykolaiv City.[29] Odesa officials reported that Ukrainian air defense forces shot down four Russian Kalibr missiles fired from the Black Sea.[30]

Ukrainian forces continued targeting Russian military positions and ammunition depots in Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts. Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported that Ukrainian high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) strikes destroyed a “significant amount of” Russian military equipment and manpower concentrations in industrial districts throughout Melitopol at night on August 7-8.[31] Fedorov also noted that Russian forces transferred a significant part of their air defense systems from Melitopol to Kherson during the week of July 31-August 7.[32] Ukrainian officials confirmed that Ukrainian forces struck the Antonivsky and Kakhovka bridges at night on August 7-8.[33] Russian Deputy Head of the Russian Occupation Administration in Kherson Oblast Kirill Stremousov stated that Russian officials will postpone reopening the Antonivskyi bridge, scheduled for August 10, due to the damage to construction equipment near the bridge.[34] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Vladislav Nazarov reported that Ukrainian airstrikes hit two Russian strongholds in the Kherson and Berislav districts and that Ukrainian indirect fire destroyed a Russian ammunition depot in Charivne, approximately 65 km northeast of Kherson City on August 7.[35]

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

Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov stated that a Russian Special Forces volunteer group completed a two-week accelerated tactical and fire training course at the Russian Special Forces University in Gudermes, Chechnya.[36] Kadyrov stated that a flight of volunteers departed the Grozny airport for deployment to an unspecified area in Ukraine on August 8.[37]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on August 8 that Russian forces are deploying less-professional occupation forces and increasing pressure on local populations. The GUR reported that Russian occupation forces are increasing pressure on civilians at checkpoints in Kherson Oblast, particularly in Hola Prystan. The GUR reported that Russian forces deployed a newly mobilized battalion of Russian convicted criminals (likely pardoned for their service) to Balaklia, Kharkiv Oblast, and that cruelty, “immoral behavior,” and aggressive attitudes toward the local population “increased sharply” upon their arrival.[38] This report demonstrates one effect of Russia’s wide-ranging attempt to mobilize as many Russians as possible, regardless of fitness for service. The GUR also reported that racialized conflicts between Russian occupation units of different ethnicities are increasing, affecting the safety of civilians in occupied areas. The GUR claimed that Russian forces shot and killed the Chechen deputy commander of a unit in Zaporizhia for ethnically motivated reasons. The GUR also reported that an intoxicated Russian soldier driving an armored personnel carrier (APC) knocked down an electrical pole in Zelenopillya, Luhansk Oblast, cutting off electricity to the town.

Newly mobilized Russian battalions are likely worse trained, less professional, and more brutal to occupied populations than professional Russian soldiers or even conscripts who completed formal military training prior to their deployments. Russian forces may increasingly deploy low-quality, poorly trained units, like those made up of convicts, to control populations in occupied parts of Ukraine. Such deployments may reduce the competence of occupation authorities and counter-partisan operations and may increase Ukrainian support for movements that resist Russia’s occupation.

Russian occupation officials are beginning to issue formal orders to prepare for sham annexation referenda. The head of the Russian Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Administration, Yevheny Balitsky, said on August 8 that he ordered the oblast’s central election commission “to start working on the issue of organizing a referendum on the reunification of Zaporizhia Oblast with the Russian Federation.”[39] Balitsky claimed that he signed the order after 700 delegates voted “unanimously” at the “We Are Together with Russia” event held in Zaporizhia Oblast on August 8. ISW has previously assessed that the Kremlin likely founded, coordinates, and promotes the “We Are Together with Russia” organization to create a facade of public support for the annexation and integration of occupied Ukrainian oblasts into Russia.[40] Other Russian occupation officials amplified Balitsky’s referendum preparation and congratulated him for ”following the path of Crimea.”[41] The Russian deputy head of the Kherson Occupation Administration, Kirill Stremousov, posted video footage on Telegram that he claimed showed residents of Kherson Oblast claiming that they are ready to vote in a referendum to join Russia.[42] Stremousov claimed that Kherson "has already been liberated from slavery and the colonial regime of the collective West.” Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov announced on August 8 that residents of Kherson and Zaporizhia want to hold referendums to join Russia and claimed that “It's not us [the Kremlin] who are holding the referendum.”[43]

Russian occupation officials are also attempting to incentivize Ukrainian cooperation with Russian data collection efforts that occupation officials will likely use to falsify the results of the sham annexation referenda but are facing resistance. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on August 8 that Russian occupation forces in Kherson are expanding the number of “one-time financial assistance” locations at which civilians in occupied areas can receive 10,000 rubles (approximately 165 USD) in exchange for their passport data.[44] The Resistance Center reported that this approach has not generated as much data collection as occupation officials had planned, leading them to expand the number of locations throughout occupied Kherson Oblast.[45] Ukrainian partisan Telegram channel Yellow Ribbon called on Kherson Oblast residents to mobilize and prevent Russians from holding an annexation referendum on August 8 and asked civilians in occupied areas to provide information on Russian planning, collaborators, and troop movements.[46] Yellow Ribbon also shared images of partisan supporters posting partisan posters and slogans in Kherson, Nova Kakhovka, Melitopol, and Crimea on August 8 and called on Ukrainians to resist Russian “passportization” efforts.[47]

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-disaster-miraculously... ua/uk/voennye-novosti/524694-tut-budet-russka-zemlya-ili-vyzzhennaya-pustynya-komandir-okkupantov-na-zaporozhskoy-aes; https://antikor dot com.ua/ru/articles/565687-tut_budet_russkaja_zemlja_ili_vyhhennaja_pustynja__komandir_okkupantov_na_zaporohskoj_aes; https://news dot uaportal.com/section-telegram-news/news-tut-budet-ili-russkaya-zemlya-ili-vyizhzhennaya-pustyinya-okkupantyi-prigrozili-vzorvat-zaporozhskuyu-aes-v-sluchae-nastupleniya-vsu-08-08-2022.html; https://t.me/u_now/62146; https://t.me/orlovdmytroEn/780;

[2] https://zp-news dot ru/other/2022/08/08/14127.html; https://vk dot com/public213127547; https://vk dot com/public213127547?w=wall-213127547_3075

[34] https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/15419365

[35] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1012950379374222&ref=sharing; https://suspilne dot media/268843-udari-zsu-na-hersonsini-vplivaut-na-moralnij-stan-ta-boezdatnist-vijsk-rf-gumenuk/; https://t.me/zalpalyanytsya/1288;

[38] https://gur dot gov dot ua/content/zrostaie-tysk-rashystiv-na-mistseve-naselennia-tymchasovo-okupovanykh-terytorii.html

[43] https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/15421435?; https://tass dot ru/politika/15420573

[44] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov dot ua/2022/08/08/rosiyany-stvoryuyut-merezhu-dlya-zboru-pasportnyh-danyh-meshkancziv-tot/

[45] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov dot ua/2022/08/08/rosiyany-stvoryuyut-merezhu-dlya-zboru-pasportnyh-danyh-meshkancziv-tot/

understandingwar.org

2. U.S. Will Continue Taiwan Strait Transits, FONOPs in Western Pacific Despite Growing Tension with China

As we should.

U.S. Will Continue Taiwan Strait Transits, FONOPs in Western Pacific Despite Growing Tension with China - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Heather Mongilio · August 8, 2022

Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG-65) on June 24, 2022

U.S. warships will continue to make Taiwan Strait transits and perform freedom of navigation operations in the Indo-Pacific despite the recent Chinese live fire drills, the undersecretary of defense for policy told reporters Monday.

The U.S. Navy is expected to conduct some freedom of navigation operations in the region in the coming days, Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, said during a press briefing. It is important for Beijing to understand that the United States will continue to sail in international waters where it is allowed.

“We will continue to stand by our allies and partners. So even as China tries to kind of chip away at the status quo, our policy is to maintain the status quo with [a] free and open Indo-Pacific which frankly, is when I think most of the countries in the region would prefer,” Kahl said.

China is continuing to drill near Taiwan, with another series announced Monday, according to The New York Times. There were nearly 13 Chinese warships near Taiwan, the country’s defense ministry said. The defense ministry also reported approximately 40 sorties near the island.

USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli (LHA-7) have been in the area since Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan, sparking the tension between China and the U.S., USNI News previously reported. Both ships are currently in the Philippine Sea, according to USNI News’ Fleet Tracker.

The drills last week started shortly after Pelosi left Taiwan. Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan caused tension between Beijing and Washington after China expressed ire over the visit.

“Legislatures from around the world go to Taiwan. Our Congress is an independent body of our government. Nothing about the visit and visit change one iota of the U.S. government’s policy toward Taiwan or towards China,” he said.

“Clearly, the PRC is trying to coerce Taiwan… Clearly they’re trying to coerce the international community. And all I’ll say is, we’re not going to take the bait, and it’s not going to work. So it’s a manufactured crisis, but that doesn’t mean we have to play into that.”

news.usni.org · by Heather Mongilio · August 8, 2022

3. Taiwan holds drills, says China seeks control of seas

The excerpt below makes me wonder. I would like to know from the Chinese military experts their assessment of whether these "drills" were pre-planned or really executed solely based on the Speaker's visit to Taiwan? If they were put together at no-notice in response to the visit it might indicate a pretty agile and responsive military. If these are pre-planned with the plans and orders "on the shelf" that still indicates a good planning and execution process. Or were these regularly scheduled "exercises" with only the timing altered? And if they were pre-planned did our intelligence community know about them and did it provide an assessment to the White House and the Speaker? Did we anticipate the effects?

Excerpt:

China says its drills were prompted by the visit to the island last week by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but Wu said China was using her trip as a pretext for intimidating moves it has long had in the works. China also banned some Taiwanese food imports after the visit and cut off dialogue with the U.S. on a range of issues from military contacts to combating transnational crime and climate change.

Taiwan holds drills, says China seeks control of seas

AP · by JOHNSON LAI · August 9, 2022

PINGTUNG, Taiwan (AP) — Taiwan’s foreign minister said Tuesday that China is using military drills to rehearse an invasion of the self-governing island democracy, while Taiwan’s military began its own live-fire exercises in a show of readiness to thwart off a potential attack.

Joseph Wu said Beijing aims to establish its dominance in the Western Pacific and annex Taiwan, which it claims as its own territory. That would include control of the East and South China Seas via the Taiwan Strait and preventing the U.S. and its allies from aiding Taiwan, he told a news conference in Taipei.

China says its drills were prompted by the visit to the island last week by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but Wu said China was using her trip as a pretext for intimidating moves it has long had in the works. China also banned some Taiwanese food imports after the visit and cut off dialogue with the U.S. on a range of issues from military contacts to combating transnational crime and climate change.

The U.S. has no formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan in deference to Beijing, but is legally bound to ensure the island can defend itself and to treat all threats against it — including a blockade — as matters of grave concern. That leaves open the question of whether Washington would dispatch forces if China attacked Taiwan. President Joe Biden has said repeatedly the U.S. was bound to do so, in comments swiftly walked back by his staff.

Taiwan

The exercises show China’s “geostrategic ambition beyond Taiwan,” Wu said.

“China has no right to interfere in or alter” the Taiwanese people’s democratic process or interaction with other nations, he said, adding that Taiwan and the mainland are separate jurisdictions with “neither subordinate to the other.”

Since Thursday, China has sent military ships and planes across the midline in the Taiwan Strait and launched missiles into waters surrounding the island. Ignoring calls to calm tensions, Beijing has extended the exercises that amount to a blockade without announcing when they will end.

The drills have disrupted flights and shipping in one of the busiest zones for global trade. Taiwan has put its forces on alert, but has so far refrained from taking active counter measures.

On Tuesday, its military held live-fire artillery drills in Pingtung County on its southeastern coast.

The army will continue to train and accumulate strength to deal with the threat from China, said Maj, Gen. Lou Woei-jye, spokesperson for Taiwan’s 8th Army Command. “No matter what the situation is ... this is the best way to defend our country.”

A visitor from the nearby port city of Kaohsiung said the exercises were necessary to “let China know we are prepared.”

“I hope both sides can exercise restraint. Fighting a war is not good for the ordinary people,” said the man, who gave only his surname Chen.

Taiwan, a former Japanese colony with only loose connections to imperial China, split with the mainland amid civil war in 1949. Despite never having governed the island, China’s ruling Communist Party regards it as its own territory and has sought to isolate it diplomatically and economically in addition to ratcheting up military threats.

Taiwan is a crucial provider of computer chips for the global economy, including China’s high-tech sectors. An extended crisis in the Taiwan Strait, a major thoroughfare for global trade, could have major implications for international supply chains at a time when the world is facing disruptions and uncertainty.

AP · by JOHNSON LAI · August 9, 2022

4. The SciOps Conundrum: A Case Study on Applied Analytics (USAJFKSWCS)

Interesting work being conducted at Fort Bragg at the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.

The advice and recommendations would seem to me to apply well beyond the SOF community.

The SciOps Conundrum: A Case Study on Applied Analytics

By Maj. Gen. Patrick B. Roberson, Maj. Stuart Gallagher, and Maj. Kurtis Gruters, PhD

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/sciops-conundrum-case-study-applied-analytics

The year is 2030. The troops stand in precise rank and file, ready for inspection. Their pristine metallic forms reflect the bright lights of the staging hangar where they await orders for their next mission. After days of patient waiting, the elite T-1000s receive their much anticipated download. Green light: Return to 1995 – engage and eliminate John Connor.

Hollywood loves its military use of artificial intelligence (AI),[1] but reality may comfort movie buffs and doomsday seers alike: AI and other advanced analytics have far more mundane uses in routine military processes. From managing and shaping human talent to predictive maintenance of vehicles and equipment,[2] data and analytics remain pragmatic and practical. That pragmatism is due in part to what is realistically possible from the scientific perspective, and in part to what is actually useful from the operational perspective. Fully autonomous hunter-killer robots are scientifically possible, but raise a tremendous host of ethical, moral, and operational issues that make them highly controversial and operationally useless in modern warfare. Meanwhile, time travel might be operationally valuable, but is not scientifically possible...yet. For those concerned about Mr. Connor, take heart: neither are likely to change in the near future.

Technology has become more routine in everyday life, driven largely by what we like to refer to as tiny, rapid, incremental gains (TRIGs) within the civilian sector. This is happening at a time when the world is entering a new phase of Strategic Competition between major military states — particularly, the US, China, and Russia — perhaps driven by the proliferation of these same TRIGs across competitive global civilian markets.

As technology proliferates, it will become increasingly more important to effectively integrate hard science into operational practice. This does not mean that operational units should be looking to build sophisticated moon-shot labs; they still have a job to do. Emphasizing scientific advancement, as opposed to utilization, will distract from the mission. Instead, it means that scientists must become organic assets to operational units in support of the core mission of that unit. This sets up a conundrum: how does a unit allow their scientists to think, dream, and push the boundaries of implementing scientific and technological capabilities while also focusing and constraining that work based on operational requirements and realities?

This article discusses a case study of just such a process at the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (SWCS), the primary training center for Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF). The intent is to capture and convey our lessons learned in building this organic integration of operations and science, thus demonstrating how SWCS began to navigate the SciOps conundrum.

Background and History

SWCS’s official mission is to “assess, select, train, and educate the U.S. Army Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations, and Special Forces by providing superior training and education, relevant doctrine, effective career management, and an integrated force-development capability.” Put another way, SWCS is directly responsible for talent acquisition through assessment, selection, and initial training of new ARSOF soldiers, as well as advanced training of the operational force. Additionally, SWCS supports US Army Recruiting Command’s Special Operations Recruiting Battalion (SORB) and 1st Special Forces Command (1SFC) with recruitment and retention respectively. In all, SWCS handles a similar student load to that of a mid-sized college, educating over 20,000 students annually.

SWCS’s processes have historically been well grounded in science and data, owing many of the training principles and processes to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). During World War II, the OSS was charged with generating a force to conduct unconventional warfare and intelligence collection behind enemy lines, under extremely dangerous conditions and with a high degree of uncertainty. To do this, they developed a scientifically rigorous approach to selecting and training personnel that has developed into the modern processes for generating ARSOF.

Until recently, this process has generally used data to address a specific question at a specific time. This transactional approach to data tends to be somewhat more reactionary and leaves the major decision making to human knowledge and intuition. While this has served the leadership — and the nation — well historically, modern-day demands and challenges in talent production and management are becoming more complex, requiring more comprehensive, yet subtle solutions.

These new requirements have driven the demand for a switch from transactional to transformational data use – an approach that proactively anticipates and solves problems in advance to supplement human knowledge and inform decision making. It is the approach of continuing to find value in data well after the data is used for its initial transactional purpose. This transition is a significant cultural and administrative shift for such a large organization. It has not been until recently that technology has reached a point where it is both possible and beneficial to make the change.

The solution to this transformation was first conceived in 2020 in the newly formed G35 or Plans and Analysis section (a subsection of SWCS G3 Operations). The shop was tasked by the command with modernizing data access and use by, with and throughout the command. After analyzing the problem for approximately four months, it was recognized that SWCS had many information management systems, but no way for decision makers to efficiently and effectively consume or analyze that information. What SWCS needed was an information system designed specifically for process management. This led to the development of SOFMIS — or the Special Operations Forces Management Information System — a data architecture on the surface, but more importantly a mindset and approach to consolidating and processing data to inform decision making.

Development of a Data Strategy

The development of SOFMIS began by first considering how to more effectively and efficiently collect and store data at an enterprise level. The prevailing paradigm of transactional data use supported this step without significant challenge to the culture. However, it soon became apparent that this approach was not sufficient for the desired end-state of actually putting the data to use at scale.

To address this concern, the Plans and Analysis section acquired an information scientist who had previously been working on talent management related data analytics projects at the United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC). He was able to provide the scientific expertise necessary to compliment the operational capability already on the team. In turn, this allowed the team to develop a comprehensive data strategy that would soon pave the way for a cultural transition to transformational data use.

The ensuing discussions about how to frame a comprehensive data strategy set a precedent that would prove highly effective in building SOFMIS both digitally and conceptually. Indeed, the team has felt it valuable enough to capture explicitly for posterity. On the surface, it is the common-sense application of separate, but complimentary roles: Allow operations to guide scientific development, but allow scientists to lead the science. In theory this sounds simple; in practice, however, this is a far more nuanced challenge that requires significant trust and understanding between operational and scientific experts and has profound implications on command structure and its interactions.

The core SOFMIS strategy can be summarized as a form of Lean Six Sigma approach that reduces cost while increasing quality and optimizing output (not increasing output for the sake of increasing output as has sometimes been inferred in the past). Again, on the surface this is not particularly profound; one can find this strategy in any production system, whether focused on goods or human capital. For a data strategy, however, this needs to be operationalized in a meaningful and feasible way, particularly when it requires deep cultural change at the same time.

To develop this strategy, the Plans and Analysis section interfaced closely with leadership, staff and academics alike to understand and frame the operational intent. Meanwhile, the information scientist considered how to turn this intent into feasibly testable hypotheses. Importantly, projects were limited to those with operationally useful outcomes while avoiding those questions that may be interesting but not explicitly meaningful at that particular time.

Given the state of the organization, this last requirement limited the scope of the “sexier” machine learning or artificial intelligence problems, which the culture was not ready to embrace. Instead, the emphasis in early projects was on more traditional statistical methods and process simulation. The ongoing goal here was, and continues to be, to build trust and organizational capability allowing for more complex analyses in time — driven, as always, by operational need and feasibility.

Ends-Ways-Means in Data Strategy

In order to develop the data strategy, the SOFMIS team adopted the Ends-Way-Means strategic framework. Although the Ends-Ways-Means methodology is usually utilized for strategic military planning, it was found to be quite useful in building a data strategy as well. Briefly, the Ends is the ultimate goal, defined by the strategic needs and intent. The Ways are the actions taken to get to the goal, and the Means are the resources available to achieve said ends; in the data domain, these are all things analytics and all things data respectively.

Quality, Throughput, and Efficiency: The Ends

The explicit end-state of the SOFMIS strategy is to reduce cost while raising quality and optimizing output at the school house. Individual projects feeding that are generally broken down into three categories: 1) Articulating risk that some process or decision will not result in forward progress toward that end-state; 2) Balancing the availability of information to all parties involved in the process, including recruits, students, operational soldiers, and commanders; and 3) Ensuring appropriate data and resource availability. Without these Ends, the Ways and Means would not have a focused purpose.

Analytics: The Ways

Analytics is what turns data into actionable knowledge in support of the strategic ends. In these Ways is where the interaction between scientists and operational leaders becomes so important. The operational leader should provide intent, then act as the gravitational force to keep the scientist focused on the intent; however, that leader should also try to avoid leading questions. The scientist, meanwhile, should always be looking for the intent behind a question and should be willing and allowed to challenge the premise of the question. This two-way trust is essential to framing and answering the correct questions rather than answering the wrong question(s) perfectly.

As a simple example, we might consider a commander asking what the ASVAB’s GT score (that is, the General Technical scale from the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery; a test administered by the United States Military Entrance Exam Processing Command to determine qualification for enlistment) threshold should be for a recruit. This is not a meaningful scientific question, nor is it operationally relevant as stated, yet questions of this nature are extremely common. Consider the intent of the GT threshold: to ensure that those who are recruited are sufficiently intelligent to do the job. We know this is not a hard line, and that those with low GT scores may have higher risk of failure, but there is no singular threshold where those above will succeed and those below will fail.

The question grounded in operational intent, therefore, should be phrased as, “How can GT show me risk on a recruit?” Scientifically, this can be articulated with the testable question: “What is the relationship between GT and risk of mission (or training) failure?” One might also ask, “What is the cost of accepting greater risk on the GT to bring someone into training versus not bringing the person to training at all?” Either question (or both) addresses the operational relevance of the problem and allows the commander to consider where and how to accept risk rather than remain beholden to some arbitrary line in the sand.

Consider a second example with respect to balancing information. A potential recruit is going to have some opinion of ARSOF, good, bad, or otherwise. In this case, it is important to make sure the recruit is informed about ARSOF and ARSOF about the recruit before deciding to invest in each other. The operational intent, therefore, is to provide a balanced and accurate portrayal of the organization to the candidate and vise-versa. There is a tendency to emphasize collecting data on the candidate, but analyzing, understanding, and marketing the organizational culture is equally important, particularly in a tough recruiting environment.

Both examples can easily misrepresent the underlying problem. The operational leader can ask a well-intentioned, but misleading question, while the scientist can easily chase irrelevant threads. Through trust and open discussion, the two can leverage their respective expertise to keep the solution focused on the strategic (or operational) end state while keeping it scientifically feasible and testable.

For leadership, the following specific recommendations have been useful with regards to interactions between operations and science:

Ensure that you have at least one true scientist with deep and comprehensive research background on staff. This is different than having someone with an interest in numbers and a knack for Excel. It is instead a PhD with demonstrable capability and a desire to support the mission. Consider the difference between hiring a medic versus a surgeon; investing in this level of talent is an investment into an organization’s future readiness.

Give intent and boundaries, not specific questions. This allows the scientist to develop the problem into testable hypotheses, articulate the requirements, and help prioritize problems based on resourcing.

Expect results backed by sound science. Hold the scientific team accountable and set expectations. If necessary, allow the scientist to go into detail so that he/she can articulate the logic, even if leadership does not care for that level of specificity.

Understand that every request takes time and resources. Do not expect miracles, but when something just shy of a miracle is needed, be willing to put the resourcing behind it.

Likewise, the following points are recommended for scientists:

Communicate, do not lecture. Avoid giving a deeply detailed academic brief. Trust your operational counterpart(s) to help understand what level of detail is important from an outsider’s perspective, even if more detail feels necessary (often, it is not).

Build trust. This can mean many things: get wins that leadership cares about; be candid with feedback and honest with results; be ethical in developing research protocols.

Practice within the scope of your training. Be humble and honest with your background and do not fall into the trap of over promise, under deliver. Not only does that degrade trust in the research team, but it also destroys trust in the field and the process as a whole.

Practice down and into the organization, network up and out. Unless you are part of a major research organization, you are not likely to have a large team working on revolutionary problem sets that will change the world. Focus on your organization’s data and problems, and build relationships with others who are working on relevant projects outside of your organization.

These common sense recommendations have proven vital for SWCS and set the guiding principles for its work. Most success was realized when, across the board, the organization has stuck to these points.

Data: The Means

Data should be treated as a strategic resource, not just a nicety. Collecting too little data results in insufficient ability to build and test models and hypotheses. Failing to collect data now means it will not be available to use in the future. In general, storing data is cheap. As the old Army saying goes, “it is better to have and not need, than need and not have.”

However, saying “collect all of the data” is also not a useful approach. Too much data can become burdensome: At best, it is redundant, but more likely, it distracts efforts and takes resources away from collecting, processing, and analyzing relevant data. Focus on measuring what matters. Of course, this depends on available resourcing. More resources allows the team to collect and process more data, even if more data after a certain point provides diminishing returns for more cost. If a set of data is collected inappropriately, it still cannot be used just as if it were never collected, but now it has cost both time and other resources. Before initiating a line of data collection, be sure sufficient capability and resourcing is available to process and make use of the data, and that the data will serve the strategic ends of the organization.

The question of how much is the right amount again comes back to a discussion between operational and scientific leadership. It is easy for operational leaders to advocate for some wearable device or to monitor one more variable in routine data collection without understanding the resourcing needed to do so. The scientist should be willing and able to articulate what that will involve and whether it is likely to give enough value to validate the investment. The team may decide to pilot test a data collection method to test if the required resourcing and expected return can scale. Ultimately, the data demands are driven by the current posture of the organization’s culture and resourcing. What it infeasible today might be totally worth the effort tomorrow, but moving too soon might prevent the organization from ever getting there at all.

Closing thoughts

The world is changing fast and tiny, regular, incremental gains in the digital domain are at the heart of this change. Although we may not (and should not) be at a point where we can field anything resembling the T-1000, the impact of technology on national defense is no less the stuff of Hollywood’s finest techno-thrillers. As civilian technological development bleeds more and more into strategic posturing and pre-kinetic conflict, it is a sure bet that the same technology will become increasingly more relevant in readiness for, and execution of, kinetic operations. The ability to efficiently collect and get value out of data is becoming an operational imperative, requiring that operational leaders learn how to incorporate scientific practice into routine processes and that scientists learn to work seamlessly alongside operational leaders. There will always be room for world-changing military research at dedicated labs, but trickle-down technology can no longer keep up with the pace of operational needs. SWCS has come a long way in the past two years since starting this journey, but there is still a long way to go in this fast-paced and ever changing world. Hopefully SWCS’s lessons learned can continue to speed the transformative process while simultaneously leading the way for other government organizations to do the same.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ghost-in-the-sell-hollywood-rsquo-s-mischievous-vision-of-ai/

[2] https://medium.com/@spartascience_/the-modernization-of-the-military-machine-learning-and-predictive-maintenance-df3630f79ed5

About the Author(s)

Kurtis Gruters

Maj. Kurtis Gruters, PhD, is the Chief Science Officer for the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Operations Center and School. He has previously served in various research and analysis positions around US Army Special Operations Command and remains active in brain health studies in the command and outside of the military. His PhD is in systems neuroscience from Duke University where he was commissioned through ROTC, and he holds a Masters of Science in computational analytics from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Stuart Gallagher

Maj. Stuart Gallagher is the Chief, G3/5 Plans and Analysis for the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Operations Center and School. His former assignments include: Senior PSYOP Observer Coach Trainer at the Joint Multinational Training Center, Hohenfels, Germany, Company Commander, 6th PSYOP Battalion, Ft. Bragg, NC and Military Advisor to the US Department of State, Washington D.C. Major Gallagher is a graduate of Marist College holding a degree in Russian Area Studies and National Defense University holding a Masters of Arts in Strategic Security Studies.

Patrick B. Roberson

Maj. Gen. Patrick B. Roberson is the Commander and Commandant of the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. His former assignments include: Commander, Special Operations Joint Task Force-Operation Iraqi Resolve, Deputy Chief of Staff, United States Army Reserve Command, and Deputy Commanding General – Operations, 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), where he also served as the Deputy Commanding General for the Special Operations Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve. Maj. Gen. Roberson is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Advanced Military Studies War College Fellowship.

5. $1 Billion in Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine

$1 Billion in Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine

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Release

Immediate Release

Aug. 8, 2022

Attributed to Acting Pentagon Press Secretary Todd Breasseale:

Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announces the authorization of a Presidential Drawdown of security assistance valued at up to $1 billion to meet Ukraine’s critical security and defense needs. This authorization is the Biden Administration’s eighteenth drawdown of equipment from DoD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021. It is the largest single drawdown of U.S. arms and equipment utilizing this authority, and this package provides a significant amount of additional ammunition, weapons, and equipment - the types of which the Ukrainian people are using so effectively to defend their country.

Capabilities in this package include:

Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
75,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition;
20 120mm mortar systems and 20,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition;
Munitions for National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS);
1,000 Javelin and hundreds of AT4 anti-armor systems;
50 armored medical treatment vehicles;
Claymore anti-personnel munitions;
C-4 explosives, demolition munitions, and demolition equipment;
Medical supplies, to include first aid kits, bandages, monitors, and other equipment.

In total, the United States has now committed approximately $9.8 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden Administration. Since 2014, the United States has committed more than $11.8 billion in security assistance to Ukraine.

To meet Ukraine’s evolving battlefield requirements, the United States will continue to work with its Allies and partners to provide Ukraine with key capabilities calibrated to make a difference.

ukraine response

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6. USD (Policy) Dr. Kahl Press Conference

These concluding remarks provide some insight into the administration's thinking.

But let me conclude on this -- look, the fundamental driver of the President's decision to complete the withdrawal from Afghanistan that was negotiated by the Trump administration under the Doha Agreement was a recognition that America's strategic priorities had shifted. That the United States had to prioritize the challenge -- our pacing challenge posed by the People's Republic of China. That we had to be prepared to focus more on the threat to European security represented by the acute threat that -- that Russia poses. That for too long, we had been bogged down in a particular part of the world at the expense of other, more pressing strategic priorities.

And I think the events we've been talking about today, whether it's across the Taiwan Strait or in Russia-Ukraine, validate that assessment -- that the world has changed and we need to focus on the biggest threats to our security in the contemporary environment.

But the other thing the President believed was that we could withdraw thousands of troops Afghanistan and still protect our vital national interests when they are threatened from something emanating from Afghanistan.

And, you know, frankly, a lot of our critics didn't believe that was possible, they didn't think that you could do things over-the-horizon, that we couldn't achieve, you know, counter-terrorism objectives, at least the objective of protecting the American homeland if we didn't have thousands of boots on the ground in -- in Afghanistan.

That's not what the President's view is and I think, in the last 10 days, in the strike that was carried out on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaida and the most wanted terrorist on planet Earth and one of the two co-planners for the 9/11 attacks, what we've demonstrated to Al Qaida, but also to other terrorist organizations is that we can still reach out and touch them and protect our vital national interests, even though we no longer have thousands of troops in Afghanistan.

USD (Policy) Dr. Kahl Press Conference

defense.gov

STAFF: All right, good afternoon, everyone.

Joining us today is Dr. Colin Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy. Dr. Kahl will open with a statement which highlights the next round of security assistance for Ukraine under the presidential drawdown authority. We'll then open up to the room and to the phones for Q&A. We have around a 30-minute hard stop today, so we'll do our best to get around as best we can.

And with that, Dr. Kahl, over to you, sir.

UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE (POLICY) COLIN KAHL: Great. It's good to see all of you. Good afternoon. It's been a while. It's good to see all of you again. I -- I last saw you, I think, on June 1st for the announcement of the 11th presidential drawdown package. We are now on PDA package 18. As we have made clear at every level of this administration, we're committed to continued security assistance for Ukraine as they stand up to Russia's unprovoked and unjustified invasion.

Today, President Biden directed the 18th drawdown of an additional $1 billion in weapons and equipment from the Department of Defense inventories. This is the largest single drawdown of U.S. arms and equipment utilizing this authority to date. The package provides a significant amount of additional ammunition, weapons and equipment, the types of which the Ukrainian people are using so effectively to defend their country.

The capabilities in this package include the following: additional ammunition for High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, 75,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition, 20 120mm mortar systems and 20,000 rounds of associated mortar ammunition, munitions for national advanced surface-to-air missile systems, or NASAMS, 1,000 Javelin systems and hundreds of AT-4 antiarmor systems, 50 armored medical treatment vehicles, Claymore antipersonnel munitions, C-4 explosives, demolition munitions and demolition equipment and medical supplies, to include first aid kits, bandages, monitors and other equipment. These are all critical capabilities to help the Ukrainians repel the Russian offensive in the east, and also to address evolving developments in the south and elsewhere.

The United States has now committed approximately $9.8 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration, including $9.1 billion since the beginning of Russia's most recent unprovoked invasion in February. The United States continues to work with its allies and partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its evolving battlefield requirements, and our allies and partners have stepped up to provide billions of dollars in their own assistance. We will continue to closely consult with Ukraine and surge additional available systems and capabilities in support of its defense. Secretary Austin remains in routine dialogue with his counterpart, Minister Reznikov of Ukraine, and our support for Ukraine and that of the international community for Ukraine remains unwavering.

At every stage of this conflict, we have been focused on getting the Ukrainians what they need, depending on the evolving conditions on the battlefield. We are working around the clock to fulfill Ukraine's priority security assistance requests, delivering weapons from the United States' stocks when they are available and facilitating the delivery of weapons by allies and partners when their systems better suit Ukraine's needs.

At least 50 countries have now provided security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded. More than 50 countries have participated in the Ukraine Defense Contact Group that Secretary Austin regularly convenes. Our continued joint and unified efforts ensure that Ukraine can be successful today and build enduring strength for the future.

I would just like to close by repeating something that I said at my last briefing: It's important as we focus on these numbers and capabilities to remember the massive behind-the-scenes efforts involved, from our servicemembers, civilians and contractors who are working to obtain and move this equipment; from the individual bases sourcing our drawdown packages to the Transportation Command providing movement support; to our servicemembers on rotation in support of our enhanced presence across US European Command; and to our own policy professionals right here in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The department has come together in extraordinary ways to support this historic effort. Without our most valuable resource, the never-ending dedication and support of our employees and contractors, this response would not have been possible.

And with that, I'm happy to take the first questions. Thanks.

STAFF: Great, thank you, sir. We're going to start with the AP, who I believe is on the phone.

Ellen, over to you.

Q: Hi there, and thank you for doing this. I'm sorry if you said this already, but how many rockets for the HIMARS are included in this package?

DR. KAHL: Yeah, so we've never given precise numbers of the rockets. We don't want to tip off the Russians to every last detail. But what I can say is since we provided the HIMARS and the associated munitions, which are referred to as GMLRS, which stands for Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems -- these are precision-guided missiles with about a 70-km range -- we've provided multiple hundreds of these systems in the past few weeks. But I'm not going to go into the details of the specific number in this package.

STAFF: Back to the room here, Idrees.

Q: Kyiv has said the casualty numbers are about 100 to 200 per day. Do you believe those are sustainable numbers?

And on a separate topic on China and Taiwan, prior to Speaker Pelosi's trip Gen

Milley had said he did not believe China would try to militarily seize Taiwan in the next few years. He said two years, specifically. After Speaker Pelosi's trip and China's reaction, do you still believe China will not militarily seize Taiwan in the next few years?

DR. KAHL: Yeah, good question.

So as it relates to Ukrainian casualty numbers, I mean, obviously the fighting has been intense for some period of time now in the east, fighting is intensifying also in the south. I think the numbers of casualties have gone up and down.

I can't speak to the veracity of those particular numbers. I will say this though -- first, that the Ukrainian morale and will to fight is unquestioned and much higher, I think, than the average morale and will to fight on the Russian side. So I think that gives the Ukrainians a significant advantage. After all, more than 40 million Ukrainians are fighting -- the stakes are existential for them. They are fighting for the survival of their country.

I'll also say the Russians are taking a tremendous number of casualties on the other side of the equation. You know, precise figures, there's a lot of fog in war, but, you know, I think it's safe to suggest that the Russians have probably taken 70 or 80,000 casualties in less than six months. Now, that is a combination of killed in action and wounded in action, and that number might be a little lower, a little higher, but I think that's kind of in the ballpark, which is pretty remarkable considering that the Russians have achieved none of Vladimir Putin's objectives at the beginning of the war. I mean, his overall objective was to overrun the entire country, to engage in regime change in Kyiv, to snuff out Ukraine as an independent, sovereign and democratic nation. None of that has happened.

The initial thrust on Kyiv was completely thwarted and rolled back by the Ukrainians. The Russians then shifted to the east. They have made some incremental gains in the east, although not very much in the last couple weeks, but that has come at extraordinary cost to the Russian military because of how well the Ukrainian military has performed and all the assistance that the Ukrainian military has gotten.

And I think now, conditions in the east have essentially stabilized and the focus is really shifting to the south, and in part, that's because the Ukrainians are starting to put some pressure down south and the Russians have been forced to redeploy their forces down there.

So yes, both sides are taking casualties, the war is the most intense conventional conflict in Europe since the Second World War, but the Ukrainians have a lot of advantages, not the least of which their will to fight.

I will say this, as it relates to China and Taiwan -- the crisis, you know, across the Strait is essentially a manufactured one by Beijing. Speaker Pelosi's visit is not the first time that a Speaker of the United States House of Representatives has traveled to Taiwan. Certainly, congressmen and women from the United States regularly go to Taiwan. Legislatures from around the world go to Taiwan. Our Congress is an independent body of our government.

Nothing about the visit changed one iota of the U.S. government's policy toward Taiwan or towards China. We continue to have a One China policy and we continue to object to any unilateral change in the status quo, whether that be from the PRC or from Taiwan.

So really, China's reaction was completely unnecessary. Clearly, they weren't happy with the Speaker's visit. And so you saw a series of live fire demonstrations, including, you know, something around a dozen missile exercises that kind of bracketed the island. You've seen an increased pace of naval and air activities in the Strait, including those that cross over the -- the so-called center line or the median line between mainland China and Taiwan.

Clearly the PRC is trying to coerce Taiwan, clearly they're trying to coerce the international community, and all I'll say is we're not going to take the bait and it's not going to work. So it's a manufactured crisis. That doesn't mean we have to play into that. I think it would only play to Beijing's advantage.

What we'll do instead is to continue to fly, to sail and to operate wherever international law allows us to do so, and that includes in the Taiwan Strait, and we will continue to stand by our allies and partners in the region, and I think there's a lot of confidence in that U.S. commitment.

STAFF: Thank you, sir. Jen, Fox News?

Q: So Idrees didn’t ask whether it was a manufactured crisis by China, he asked whether there was a new assessment as to whether China would take Taiwan militarily in two years. What's the answer to that?

DR. KAHL: No.

Q: Okay. And in terms of the Russian casualties, how long do you assess that Russia can sustain this level of casualty?

DR. KAHL: It's an interesting question and not one I can answer with a high degree of certainty. Obviously, Russia's a very large country. Now, you know, a lot of it would depend, I think, on the political decisions that Vladimir Putin will make ultimately about whether he can continue to recruit and send additional forces to the front, whether he was at some point, you know, willing to engage in national mobilization or some other effort.

But, you know, he's tried to describe this all-out invasion as a special military operation and has thus far been hesitant to mobilize his entire country toward the effort. So, I don't know and a lot depends on ultimately decisions that they will make.

But I will tell you this -- the Russian military has been treated badly. I think that they certainly assumed that they could steamroll over Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks. It now turns out to have been a profound miscalculation. The Ukrainians are doing more than holding their own and I expect that that trend will continue.

STAFF: All right. Sylvie, AFP?

Q: Thank you, sir. I have a small question about the package. The C-4 explosives, what is it for and is it the first time you send that?

And second, about China and Taiwan -- does U.S. assess that some Chinese planes flew over Taiwan? Because it was something that the Japanese said, that the -- does U.S. assess that and is it the first time?

DR. KAHL: So, I don't know that we assess that any manned Chinese aircraft have flown over any areas claimed by Taiwan. I don't have any information to report on that. Of course, there were five missiles that China launched as part of their exercises and live fire demonstrations that landed in Japan's EEZ, their Exclusive Economic Zone, which was, I think, a sign of kind of how reckless the PRC reaction was and I think it's a sign that actions like this are not what mature, responsible powers do and I think are a challenge to a free and open Indo-Pacific, which is something that not only we care about but Japan cares about and our other allies and partners care about.

But beyond that, I don't have specific information about whether there was an overflight of any small island or feature that Taiwan claims.

The C-4 explosives, we have provided before, and a lot of this is used for demolition work by -- by Ukrainian special operations forces and others.

STAFF: Yes. Nancy of the Wall Street Journal. Nancy.

Q: I wanted to come back to a couple things you've said. One thing that public has heard is how effective the HIMARS have been and strengthening Kyiv's hand and I wonder if you could give us some insight in terms of why that was not part of this current aid package?

And then I'd like to go back to your very direct answer to Jen Griffin kind of about what we learned about Chinese capabilities, vis-a-vis the Taiwanese trade. I understand that your conclusion is that they couldn't take the island in two years.

But during the exercise we saw them have economic impact on Taiwan in their ability to slow down ships entering into the Taiwanese trade. And so I'm curious from your perspective given that China said they'll be doing more of these exercises, at what point does it become a security threat to the Taiwanese economy to the world market?

DR. KAHL: Yes, good question. So on the HIMARS effectiveness, they have proven -- you know HIMARS is just a truck, right. It's a truck that has a canister on the back that launches guided rockets. The munitions themselves, these GMLRS that I referred to earlier, are having a very profound effect.

I mean, this is a 200 pound war head. It's kind of the equivalent of an airstrike, frankly, a precision guided airstrike. These are GPS guided munitions, they've been very effective in hitting things that previously the Ukrainians had difficulty hitting reliably. So command and control nodes sustainment and logistics hubs, key radar systems and other things.

And what it's done is it's made it more difficult for the Russians to move forces around the battlefield. They've had to move certain aspects back, away from the HIMARS. It's slowed them down; it's made it harder for them to resupply their forces. So I think it's having real operational effects. Now the question is why aren't there more GMLRS in the package and the reason is actually pretty straight forward.

We provided a tremendous number of GMLRS in the last PDA package and we are now on a rhythm of shipping it so that things are arriving on a steady cadence. So I think you can expect that in the next PDA package there will be the next increment of GMLRS.

So, you haven't seen the last of the GMLRS.

Q: And on Taiwan?

DR. KAHL: Yes, on that. So I defer to our counterparts at the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department on the impact, but my sense, at least from reading what they say, is that there hasn't been much of an effect on Taiwan's economy or the international economy.

You didn't see a dramatic reaction by the markets. I think that's largely because even though Beijing was trying to manufacture a crisis, we didn't rise to the bait and so it didn't, I think, you know look to the international community as if this was some spiraling or escalating moment.

We were very conscious to not send that signal because it would not be productive for anybody. Now of course as the operational tempo of PRC activity has increased in and around Taiwan, you know there's enormous amount of global commerce that passes through the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan itself is, you know, among the most impactful economic entities on planet Earth. I mean it proves something like 70 to 90 percent of the most advanced semiconductors that everybody's iPhone and laptops and everything else runs on. So obviously there could be a point at which the PRC could engage in activities that would have economic consequences not just for Taiwan but for the world economy.

And that's, I think, one of the key reasons why there is a global consensus that there needs to be stability across the Taiwan Strait and that conflict across the Taiwan Strait is in nobodies interest. And it's certainly not in the U.S. interest.

And so, you know, we'll keep our eye on it but right now I don't think the consequences have been all that profound.

STAFF: All right, we'll go to Oren, CNN.

Q: A China question and a Ukraine question. You described Speaker's Pelosi's visit as standard or routine saying other speakers have visited and CODELs go fairly frequently. If that's the case then why did the military not want Speaker Pelosi to go? President Biden was specific in his wording there.

And then the Ukraine question, you're sending ammo for the M777s, the 1555 and for the HIMARS, but you're not sending more systems. I was wondering if you've reached a limit of what you can pull directly from DOD inventories on that?

DR. KAHL: Sure. So on your first question about the military views, look, I'll -- I'll let the president's words speak for themselves. From the very beginning the Pentagon was committed to making sure that if the Speaker decided to go, which was her right to make that decision, that we would provide here the support required.

We provided an aircraft. We had forces in the region in the event that something unanticipated happened. Thankfully none of that -- none of that happened.

Look, I did think that we anticipated that, you know, the visit would make news and that the leadership in Beijing would present it as being provocative and would seek to manufacture the crisis that we now see unfolding before us.

I mean nothing that's happened was unanticipated. In fact, we predicted it precisely as it was going to happen and the days before Speaker Pelosi's CODEL to Taiwan we said that China was preparing to do these live fire exercises and a higher tempo of air in maritime activities including activities that were closer to -- to Taiwan.

So nothing that China has done has surprised us. So look, we're at a moment of profound international tension. We're talking about Russia in Ukraine. There are developments elsewhere. I think there was a sense that, you know, the world didn't require another instance of rising tensions but it is what it is and the speaker had every right to go and when she made the final decision we were fully supportive.

And I think we've managed it well so that this kind of manufactured crisis by Beijing hasn't produced more consequences than any of us would like. Why aren't we seeing more HIMARS and more M777 howitzers as opposed to the ammunition and the GMLRS; right now, I think -- you know first of all, we sent 16 HIMARS systems, which is actually quite a lot.

Again, these are not systems that we assess you need in the hundreds to have the type of affects they are. These are precision guided systems for very particular types of targets and the Ukrainians are using them as such.

The Brits have also provided three M270 MRS systems, which essentially if the HIMARS is a truck the M270 is the exact same system but it's on the chassis of an armored vehicle, essentially like a Bradley fighting vehicle and it can carry two canisters instead of one but it's the same missiles that get fired from it. The Brits are providing three -- or have provided three so far. The Germans have also committed to provided three.

So our assessment actually is that the Ukrainians are doing pretty well in terms of the numbers of systems and really the priority right now is making sure that they have a steady stream of these GMLRS. And the same is true on the M777 howitzers front where really we've provided a very large number of systems. So have allies and partners and that right now the priority is to make sure that the Ukrainians have the ammunition to keep them in the fight.

STAFF: All right. Tony.

Q: Sir, Tony Capaccio at Bloomberg.

You talked a lot about the -- Russia's attrit -- the attrition of their troops. Can you talk a little bit about their supplies or stacks of PGMs, unguided munitions, tank and artillery? Are they running out in the colloquial, or you know, what resupply efforts are you seeing? Are they pulling from Asia or the Baltic areas? And I have a quick Taiwan follow.

DR. KAHL: Okay, well, let me do that, and then we'll come back to you for the Taiwan follow-up.

So I think on it, certainly the Russians are expending a lot of munitions. I think our assessment is that they have attritted a significant percentage of their precision-guided munitions and their standoff munitions, so think air-launched cruise missiles, sea-launched cruise missiles, things like that. And I think we've actually seen a reduction in how often they're using those because they're running low. But in terms of exactly how much they have left, and also, what their assessment is, what they need to keep in reserve for other contingencies, but certainly on the PGMs and the standoff munitions, those have been substantially consumed, attritted.

Now, I will say the other important fact to consider is that in addition to the crippling sanctions that have been put on Russia, there are these export controls that limit certain critical technologies, especially components like microchips that are essential for Russia to recapitalize its PGMs and standoff munitions. So it's not just that their stockpiles have gone down appreciably because of how much that they've expended during the conflict, but it's just going to be a lot harder for them to rebuild the high-end pieces of their military because of the international export controls that the United States has championed, so I think that's important.

As it relates to other types of ammunition, my sense is they have a lot of kind of dumb artillery rounds and other munitions like that. I don't think we have any assessment to suggest they're reaching some inflection point where they're about to run out of that.

As it relates to tanks and armor, I mean, I think to this point, the Russians have probably lost 3- or 4,000 armored vehicles in Ukraine, which is a lot. Now, a lot of that is because of the antiarmor systems like Javelin, like the AT-4s, which are in this package, but also, frankly, because of the creativity and ingenuity in the way the Ukrainians have used those systems, especially early, in the early phase of the conflict when the Russians were stymied in the thrust towards Kyiv. So that's what I would say on that.

You wanted to add something, though, on Taiwan?

Q: You mentioned that the Chinese bracketed Taiwan with missiles. Can you confirm that actually miss -- Chinese missile actually flew over Taiwan for the first time?

DR. KAHL: You'll recall China put in place the half a dozen exclusion zones that completely surrounded -- we know a number of missiles flew into an area where it would look like the track might be passing over Taiwan. But the reason I'm a little cautious here is because over depends on the loft and trajectory and what you consider to be over, and whether that's the first time or not the first time. So I don't have the physics of it in front of me, so I'm going to be a little cautious of that. But we do know that Chinese missiles landed kind of north and east of the island, and if you look at a map you can kind of see where the flight trajectories would've been. But beyond that, I don't want to comment.

STAFF: Yeah, we have time for a couple more.

Nick Schifrin with PBS.

Q: Let's do one on Ukraine and one on F-16s. General Brown, of course, said this publicly. Even if there's no plan or training on, substantially, that's expanded out to Western jets, even if no plan had gotten it, certainly the top members of this building or to the president, can you talk about some of the work being done to consider training more Ukrainians on Western jets, and possibly even sending them?

And Taiwan, you know, you've pointed out, you guys predicted what Beijing was going to do, but there are missiles that flew from the mainland that landed on the other side of Taiwan, there were missiles that landed inside Taiwanese waters, there was a disruption to Taiwanese shipping and aircraft around there. It seems like Beijing's creating the new status quo, at least trying to normalize this. What can you or Taiwan do to stop that?

DR. KAHL: Yeah, great questions. So on the F-16s, a couple of things. As you can appreciate in the PDA package, it makes clearer our overwhelming priority right now is getting the Ukrainians things that are relevant for the current fight.

So right now, the fight is in the east and increasingly in the south. We need to get them capabilities that deliver on a timeframe that's relevant to that. So we're focused on these types of capabilities, not something that might deliver in a year, two, three years, et cetera.

That said, there is work being done here at the Pentagon and elsewhere out in Europe, at EUCOM and elsewhere, to help work with the Ukrainians to identify their kind of medium to long term requirements. So think of things that aren't in the kind of measured in days and weeks but measured in months and a handful of years.

And I think there, there are real questions about what would be most useful in terms of assisting the Ukrainian Air Force and improving its capabilities. It's not inconceivable that down the road, Western aircraft could be part of the mix on that, but the final analysis has not been done.

I will say, though, in the near term, we've been doing lots of things to make Ukraine's existing Air Force stay in the air and be more capable. I would just point to two things.

One, you know, a lot was made about the MiG-29 issue several months ago. Not very much has been noticed about the sheer amounts of spare parts and other things that we've done to help them actually put more of their own MiG-29s in the air and keep those that are in the air flying for a longer period of time.

And then also, in recent PDA packages, we've included a number of anti-radiation missiles that can be fired off of Ukrainian aircraft that can have effects on Russia radars and other things. So there are also things that we're doing to try to make their existing capabilities more effective.

In terms of what is China trying to accomplish? I mean, I think it's right there in your question. Our policy hasn't changed. We have a One China policy. We also have a commitment under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the capability to defend itself, and frankly, for the United States to have capabilities to preclude a kind of -- you know, the use of violence to force a change in the status quo across the Strait.

We don't support China using its military actions against Taiwan, we don't support Taiwan moving towards independence. Our policy has not changed its support for the status quo. China's policy is what's changed, and clearly, what they're trying to do is salami slice their way into a new status quo.

I mean, I think a lot has been made of them -- of the missile strikes, but really, it's the activities in the Strait itself -- the sheer number of maritime and air assets that are crossing over this kind of de facto center line, creeping closer to Taiwan's shores, where it's clear that Beijing is trying to create a kind of new normal, with the goal of trying to coerce Taiwan, but also frankly, to coerce the international community, given the importance of the Taiwan Strait to the global economy -- and we talked about that a little bit earlier.

What's important for us right now is to make sure that Beijing understands that our forces in the region will continue to operate, to fly, to sail wherever international waters allows. That includes the Taiwan Strait.

I think you should expect that we will continue to do Taiwan Strait transits, as we have in the past, in the coming weeks. We will continue to do freedom of navigation operations elsewhere in the region. We will continue to stand by our allies and partners.

So even as China tries to kind of chip away at the status quo, our policy is to maintain the status quo of a free and open Indo-Pacific, which frankly is what I think most of the countries in the region would prefer.

STAFF: All right. The last one -- Tara Copp.

Q: Thank you very much. Is this the first time NASAMS have been part of the package to Ukraine and can you talk a little bit about what limitations there will be on them and have the systems from Norway actually been delivered to Ukraine? And then I have a second one on Afghanistan.

DR. KAHL: Sure. So there are no NASAMS in this package. There are are AMRAAM missiles for the NASAMS. So the NASAMS that are in the pipeline, we think will probably arrive in the next few months, and the AMRAAM missiles that are in this system, which can be used for the NASAMS, they will take some period of time -- they'll have to be looked at to make sure all of the missiles are in good shape, and then they'll get there in time for the NASAMS' arrival. So just to clarify on that specifically.

But you wanted to ask a question on Afghanistan?

Q: Since we’re about a week away from the fall of Kabul, I wanted to get your thoughts on what this building is doing as far as another after action review? Are we expecting a report? And have there been discussions within the building as to whether it was a policy mistake not to leave a small footprint of U.S. forces in Afghanistan?

DR. KAHL: So I'll say this -- there are ongoing lessons learned and after action reviews here in the Pentagon, elsewhere in the government as well. There's obviously been some media coverage of the after action review that Secretary Austin commissioned out a number of months ago. That review is completed. It remains classified and the Secretary is looking at it, and when we have more to report on the status of that report, we will.

I do think it's an obligation for all of us to take a hard look not just in the final days of Afghanistan but 20 years of the conflict. That's a -- that's, I know, something that's important to the Secretary of Defense, important to the White House, it's important to members of Congress, and I hope, to the degree that it's possible, we try to take that assessment out of politics and the desire to score points and really just to reflect on the lessons from America's longest war.

But let me conclude on this -- look, the fundamental driver of the President's decision to complete the withdrawal from Afghanistan that was negotiated by the Trump administration under the Doha Agreement was a recognition that America's strategic priorities had shifted. That the United States had to prioritize the challenge -- our pacing challenge posed by the People's Republic of China. That we had to be prepared to focus more on the threat to European security represented by the acute threat that -- that Russia poses. That for too long, we had been bogged down in a particular part of the world at the expense of other, more pressing strategic priorities.

And I think the events we've been talking about today, whether it's across the Taiwan Strait or in Russia-Ukraine, validate that assessment -- that the world has changed and we need to focus on the biggest threats to our security in the contemporary environment.

But the other thing the President believed was that we could withdraw thousands of troops Afghanistan and still protect our vital national interests when they are threatened from something emanating from Afghanistan.

And, you know, frankly, a lot of our critics didn't believe that was possible, they didn't think that you could do things over-the-horizon, that we couldn't achieve, you know, counter-terrorism objectives, at least the objective of protecting the American homeland if we didn't have thousands of boots on the ground in -- in Afghanistan.

That's not what the President's view is and I think, in the last 10 days, in the strike that was carried out on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaida and the most wanted terrorist on planet Earth and one of the two co-planners for the 9/11 attacks, what we've demonstrated to Al Qaida, but also to other terrorist organizations is that we can still reach out and touch them and protect our vital national interests, even though we no longer have thousands of troops in Afghanistan.

Thanks, everybody.

STAFF: All right. Thank you all.

34:30

defense.gov

7. Thailand, China to resume air force exercises after pandemic pause

One of our five INDOPACIFIC treaty allies.

Excerpt:

The "Falcon Strike" exercise has taken place four times since 2015 and will run for 11 days from Aug 14 at a base in northeastern Udon Thani that was home to U.S. forces during the Vietnam War.

Thailand, China to resume air force exercises after pandemic pause

foxnews.com · by Reuters

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An annual joint fighter jets exercise between Thailand and China will resume later this month after being put on hold for two years during the pandemic, the Thai air force said, with a former U.S. air base chosen to host the event.

The "Falcon Strike" exercise has taken place four times since 2015 and will run for 11 days from Aug 14 at a base in northeastern Udon Thani that was home to U.S. forces during the Vietnam War.

The drills, the dates for which were decided in June, take place in a month when China is holding major exercises in the sea and airspace around Taiwan, in a show of military power following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the self-ruled island, which Beijing regards as its own.

CHINA ANNOUNCES MILITARY EXERCISES AROUND TAIWAN WILL BE EXTENDED

TAIPEI, TAIWAN: Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), speaks after receiving the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon, Taiwan’s highest civilian honor. (Handout/Getty Images)

Thailand is the oldest U.S. ally in Asia but ties were complicated by a 2014 military coup. Thailand has sought to strengthen its relations with China and has made several defence procurements.

CHINA LAUNCHES MILITARY EXERCISES IN SOUTH CHINA SEA AS BIDEN VISITS ASIA

Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest point from Taiwan, in Fujian province on August 4, 2022, ahead of massive military drills off Taiwan following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the self-ruled island. (HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

The Thai air force, one of the most equipped in the region, has historically used U.S. hardware and is seeking to procure F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin Corp to replace some of its aging F-16 models.

WHITE HOUSE SUMMONS CHINESE AMBASSADOR AMID MILITARY EXERCISES, DIPLOMATIC RETALIATION FOR PELOSI TAIWAN VISIT

A Tactical Control Party Airmen and qualified Joint Terminal Aircraft Controller assigned to the 9th Air Support Operations Squadron at Fort Hood, Texas, directs an A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft during a close-air-support exercise at Fort Hood, Texas Oct. 30, 2020. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. JT May III)

According to an air force source, who asked not to be named because he was unauthorized to speak to media, Thailand will not deploy its F-16s for the exercises with China but will use its Saab JAS-39 Gripen fighters as well as German-made Alpha Jet light attack aircraft.

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It was not clear what type of fighter jets China would use, the source said.

foxnews.com · by Reuters

8. It’s Time to Respond to Iran’s Bad-Faith Negotiations

Excerpts:

To be sure, Russia and China will block the passage of any new Iran resolution, so board referral is mostly a procedural step to pave the way for other countermeasures: Namely, Washington and Europe should trigger the snapback mechanism contained in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231—the JCPOA’s implementing resolution—which permits signatories to the nuclear deal to reinstate all prior U.N. sanctions. Notably, this would also restore the previous U.N. standard prohibiting any uranium enrichment in Iran. The United States and Europe should act on the basis that Iran is in violation of its NPT commitments and is not interested in nuclear restraint or transparency.

The Biden administration tried the diplomatic path, but Iran has not acted in good faith. State Department Spokesman Ned Price said last month that the administration will “pursue alternatives” to the 2015 nuclear deal when “it’s no longer in our interest to pursue a mutual return to compliance.” That time is now. Washington and Europe must act soon to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb.

August 8, 2022 | The Dispatch

It’s Time to Respond to Iran’s Bad-Faith Negotiations

The Islamic Republic has flouted its nonproliferation obligations and is moving closer to the nuclear threshold.

Andrea Stricker

Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program Deputy Director and Research Fellow

Anthony Ruggiero

Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program Senior Director and Senior Fellow

fdd.org · August 8, 2022

The Biden administration scored a diplomatic victory in June when Washington and its European allies spearheaded the international censure of Iran for failing to cooperate with an investigation into Tehran’s past nuclear activities. That positive momentum was short-lived. Last month, Mohammad Eslami, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), rejected cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), declaring that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran absolves his country of probes into past nuclear work. He said those issues are “closed” and “will not be reopened.”

Tehran’s response is not surprising after years of non-cooperation with the IAEA inquiry. The clerical regime has drawn out talks aimed at restoring the 2015 deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to approach the threshold of an atomic weapons capability. At a new round of negotiations in Vienna last week, Iran doubled down on its demand that the IAEA close its probe before Tehran agrees to revive the accord. Washington and Europe should not take the bait. They should end the talks and call a special IAEA meeting to give Iran a firm deadline to meet its nonproliferation obligations. If Tehran does not comply, they must snap back the international sanctions against the regime.

As a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran is legally required to declare all sites where it makes nuclear material and to cooperate with IAEA inquiries aimed at ensuring the peacefulness of its atomic program. This obligation is entirely separate from commitments made under the JCPOA. Yet the Islamic Republic has failed to answer the IAEA’s questions about the presence of man-made uranium particles the agency found in 2019 and 2020 at three Iranian sites, and has not answered inspectors’ questions about a fourth site. In June, the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors finally passed its first censure of Iran in two years, calling on Tehran to act “without delay” and “resolve all outstanding safeguards issues.”

That was a step forward, but President Joe Biden created most of the roadblocks to holding Iran accountable. Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to blame Iran policy failures on President Trump’s 2018 JCPOA withdrawal, Tehran’s most egregious nuclear advances happened during Biden’s presidency. The president entered office promising to lift Iran sanctions in exchange for a return to the deal. He then gave Tehran breathing room from U.S. sanctions, which ultra-hardliners used to solidify ties to China and Russia and fortify their resistance economy.

The clerical regime clearly wants Biden to end the IAEA’s probe just as the Obama administration stopped a similar investigation to ensure the implementation of the 2015 nuclear deal. Under the terms of the nuclear accord, world powers instructed the IAEA to issue a “final report” assessing the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran stonewalled the investigators, but the IAEA Board of Governors voted in December 2015 to suspend the inquiry lest it prevent implementation of the JCPOA. AEOI chief Eslami was referring to this decision when he claimed the JCPOA had immunized Iran from probes of past nuclear activities.

The folly of ignoring past violations became clear in 2018, when Israel stole a tranche of Iran’s nuclear weapons files, proving beyond doubt that Tehran had a nuclear weapons program up until 2003, despite the regime’s denials. The documents showed that senior Iranian officials plotted to downsize and better hide their nuclear efforts after the work was exposed. The IAEA assessed the files to be authentic and has investigated information about undeclared sites, nuclear material, and activities ever since—but with very limited cooperation from Tehran.

The showdown at nuclear talks over the IAEA’s investigation is occurring in the shadow of Iran’s unprecedented nuclear advances and the Islamic Republic’s efforts to severely limit IAEA monitoring of its atomic program.

Iran is steadily moving closer to the nuclear threshold, the point at which Tehran’s close proximity to atomic weapons may render ineffective foreign action to stop a breakout. In April 2021, the month nuclear talks began, the regime enriched uranium to 60 percent purity—close to 90 percent or weapons-grade. Overall, it now has enough enriched uranium for five nuclear bombs. The regime has also installed and operated hundreds of advanced centrifuge machines for uranium enrichment, and has manufactured uranium metal, a material used in the core of nuclear weapons. It could make weapons-grade uranium within weeks, and its timeline to exploding a working nuclear device may be under six months.

Amid these rapid advances, Tehran has dramatically curtailed IAEA monitoring, prompting its director general, Rafael Grossi, to lament the agency’s limited oversight in Iran with all manner of illustrative analogies: the IAEA is “flying in heavy clouds” or “on a ventilator”; the JCPOA has been dealt a “fatal blow”; and Iran’s nuclear program is “galloping ahead.” In short, the effectiveness of international monitoring is open to doubt.

In February 2021, Iran ended IAEA access to sites related to production of centrifuges, mining and milling of uranium, and an array of other sensitive activities. It pledged to retain video monitoring and data recording of events at nuclear sites, but only to turn over footage and information once it received sanctions relief. After the IAEA’s resolution in June, Iran retaliated by switching off dozens of IAEA cameras and data collection devices at atomic sites and put in question whether it would ever turn over safeguards information. The AEOI’s Eslami ratcheted tensions further, stating that Iran will not turn on the watchdog’s cameras “until the other side [the West] returns to the nuclear deal.”

Despite the seriousness of these developments, the Biden administration seemingly does not have a plan. It seems content to allow the European Union, the mediator between the United States and Iran, to push for a renewed nuclear deal without any regard for Tehran’s continued escalations and demands that the IAEA close its inquiry. All the waiting, however, only increases the danger posed by the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and presumably strengthens Tehran’s temptation to make a dash to weapons. Meanwhile, the JCPOA’s provisions are expiring and Iran’s technical advances have rendered defunct most of the deal’s value, even if it were restored.

It is time for Washington and Europe to staunch the bleeding and remind Iran that they still have leverage over Tehran’s momentum toward the bomb and its flouting of nonproliferation obligations.

The United States should begin by exiting the nuclear talks and calling a special IAEA board meeting to denounce Iran’s continued non-compliance with the IAEA’s investigation, Iran’s expanding nuclear program, and Iran’s reductions in IAEA monitoring. The June 2022 board resolution focused on Tehran’s obstruction of the investigation, but failed to even mention Iran’s nuclear advances or obstruction of monitoring activities. It is unclear why the resolution omitted these key issues, but the United States and its European partners have been reluctant to tackle these matters for fear of upsetting negotiations on a return to the JCPOA. The parties must rectify this mistake.

A new resolution must give Tehran a deadline to cooperate with the IAEA and should require the regime both to explain what it did at the sites in question and to restore agency monitoring. If Iran fails to meet the deadline for compliance set by the board, the board must refer Iran’s case to the U.N. Security Council.

To be sure, Russia and China will block the passage of any new Iran resolution, so board referral is mostly a procedural step to pave the way for other countermeasures: Namely, Washington and Europe should trigger the snapback mechanism contained in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231—the JCPOA’s implementing resolution—which permits signatories to the nuclear deal to reinstate all prior U.N. sanctions. Notably, this would also restore the previous U.N. standard prohibiting any uranium enrichment in Iran. The United States and Europe should act on the basis that Iran is in violation of its NPT commitments and is not interested in nuclear restraint or transparency.

The Biden administration tried the diplomatic path, but Iran has not acted in good faith. State Department Spokesman Ned Price said last month that the administration will “pursue alternatives” to the 2015 nuclear deal when “it’s no longer in our interest to pursue a mutual return to compliance.” That time is now. Washington and Europe must act soon to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb.

Andrea Stricker is deputy director of the nonproliferation and biodefense program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Anthony Ruggiero is senior director of the program and served as the National Security Council’s senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense in the Trump administration. Follow Andrea and Anthony on Twitter @StrickerNonpro and @NatSecAnthony. FDD is a Washington, D.C.-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.

fdd.org · August 8, 2022

9. Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way

Excerpts:

It did not have to turn out this way. I do not mean simply that there were reasonable alternatives to withdrawal that were not adequately considered, alternatives that would have led to better results than what we see today—though there were, and they would have.

Rather, I mean that it did not have to be this way at all; that despite the selfless, courageous, and professional service of our military and civilian elements, and also of our coalition partners—as well as that of innumerable great Afghans—we underachieved in Afghanistan. In fact, across our 20 years there, we made significant mistakes and fell short over and over again. Had we avoided, or corrected, enough of our missteps along the way, the options for our continued commitment to Afghanistan would have been more attractive to successive administrations in Washington—and might have precluded withdrawal entirely. Afghanistan was not going to transform into a prosperous, thriving, liberal democracy in the foreseeable future. But its prospects certainly were brighter than they are today. Moreover, as a result of our intervention in 2001, we had a responsibility to continue to help it along that path, however long it took.

What follows is not an exercise in relitigation or finger-pointing (though, inevitably, there will be some of that). Neither is it about absolving myself. I was as much a part of our efforts, in the middle years at least, as anyone else.

Instead, I want to contribute to an effort to learn from our experience in Afghanistan. Faced with a revanchist Russia, a more assertive China, an aggressive Iran, a dangerous North Korea, and Islamist extremists in various places around the world, more and more of our allies and partners look to us for resolve, a commitment to fight aggression and terrorism, and support of the democratic values we hold dear. We can provide the leadership needed only if we learn from our past endeavors.

...

The desire of multiple U.S. presidents of both parties to end endless wars and focus on nation building at home rather than abroad is more than understandable, especially to those like me who served in those wars and know firsthand the costs and sacrifices of them.

The problem is that it is not clear that our withdrawal from Afghanistan has ended the endless war there, or even ended our involvement in it. And there is nothing to say we won’t get drawn back in somehow. As my exceptional colleague Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who led our diplomatic missions in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, among others, used to observe, “You can leave the movie theater, but the movie continues to roll.”

Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way

If we are to sustain our position as the leader of the Western world, we must understand why one of our signature campaigns resulted in such frustration.

By David Petraeus

AUGUST 8, 2022, 6 AM ET

The Atlantic · by David Petraeus · August 8, 2022

A year after the chaotic scenes at Kabul airport, the outcome of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is heartbreaking and tragic for many Afghans and devastating for their country. The Afghan government that fell, leading to the return of the Taliban, was maddeningly imperfect, full of frustrating shortcomings, and, in various respects, corrupt. Yet it was also an ally in America’s effort to combat Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and the region, it celebrated many of the freedoms we cherish, and it wanted to ensure them for the long-suffering Afghan people. It was certainly preferable to what replaced it.

Recent decisions by the Taliban, particularly its treatment of women and girls, confirm the trajectory of a regime that seems intent on returning Afghanistan to an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam. It will be incapable of reviving the Afghan economy, which has collapsed since Western forces withdrew. Although the Kabul strike that killed the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was a tremendous achievement by our intelligence and counterterrorism communities, Zawahiri’s very presence in Kabul demonstrated that the Taliban is still willing to provide sanctuary to Islamist extremists. In short, a country of nearly 40 million people—individuals whom we sought to help for two decades—has been condemned to a future of repression and privation and likely will be an incubator for Islamist extremism in the years ahead.

Adam Serwer: What the war in Afghanistan could never do

The fact and manner of America’s departure also enabled our adversaries to claim that the United States is not a dependable partner and is instead a great power in decline. In an era in which deterrence is of growing importance, that is not trivial (though our efforts to support Ukraine following Russia’s invasion show that the U.S. can still lead effectively when it seeks to do so). Nor is it trivial that we left behind hundreds of thousands of Afghans who shared risk and hardship with our soldiers, diplomats, and development workers, and whose lives are now endangered, along with those of their family members.

It did not have to turn out this way. I do not mean simply that there were reasonable alternatives to withdrawal that were not adequately considered, alternatives that would have led to better results than what we see today—though there were, and they would have.

Rather, I mean that it did not have to be this way at all; that despite the selfless, courageous, and professional service of our military and civilian elements, and also of our coalition partners—as well as that of innumerable great Afghans—we underachieved in Afghanistan. In fact, across our 20 years there, we made significant mistakes and fell short over and over again. Had we avoided, or corrected, enough of our missteps along the way, the options for our continued commitment to Afghanistan would have been more attractive to successive administrations in Washington—and might have precluded withdrawal entirely. Afghanistan was not going to transform into a prosperous, thriving, liberal democracy in the foreseeable future. But its prospects certainly were brighter than they are today. Moreover, as a result of our intervention in 2001, we had a responsibility to continue to help it along that path, however long it took.

What follows is not an exercise in relitigation or finger-pointing (though, inevitably, there will be some of that). Neither is it about absolving myself. I was as much a part of our efforts, in the middle years at least, as anyone else.

Instead, I want to contribute to an effort to learn from our experience in Afghanistan. Faced with a revanchist Russia, a more assertive China, an aggressive Iran, a dangerous North Korea, and Islamist extremists in various places around the world, more and more of our allies and partners look to us for resolve, a commitment to fight aggression and terrorism, and support of the democratic values we hold dear. We can provide the leadership needed only if we learn from our past endeavors.

We were right to invade Afghanistan when we did. Eliminating the sanctuary in which al-Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks was essential to our national security, and toppling the Taliban showed our enemies that we would not tolerate those who provided a haven for terrorists who targeted our country and killed our countrymen. Our subsequent efforts also proved that we believed in the promise of freedom and democracy, and that those values are universal, however difficult it may have been to implement them in the shadow of the Hindu Kush.

But even as we acknowledge the good work that we did in Afghanistan, and recognize the sacrifice that it entailed, we must accept as well the shortcomings of our campaign there and appreciate what we got wrong, for how long, and at what cost. Ultimately, if we are to sustain our position as the leader of the Western world, we must understand why one of our signature campaigns resulted in such unending frustration.

Northern Alliance troops exchange fire with Taliban troops on the front-lines 25 km outside Kabul, October 2001. (Ron Haviv/VII/Redux)

US forces strike Taliban positions on the frontlines near the Old Kabul road. October, 2001. (Ron Haviv/VII/Redux)

Our foundational mistake was our lack of commitment. In essence, we never adopted a sufficient, consistent, overarching approach that we stuck with from administration to administration, or even within individual administrations.

We were reluctant even at the outset of the intervention in Afghanistan, in late 2001, to establish a substantial military headquarters on the ground. And even after we did so the following year, we quickly shifted focus to Iraq. By the time attention and resources were once again truly devoted to Afghanistan, some eight years after the initial invasion, we had missed an opportunity to take advantage of a protracted period of relatively little violence in Afghanistan, during which time the Taliban and other insurgent elements regrouped in Pakistan and then Afghanistan, and during which we could have made considerably greater strides in developing Afghan forces and institutions than we did.

As Admiral Mike Mullen often observed after becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2007, “In Iraq, we do what we must; in Afghanistan, we do what we can.” Frankly, “what we can” was never remotely enough. In fact, when I conducted an assessment of the situation in Afghanistan at Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s request in September 2005, I was struck by how far behind Iraq the efforts in Afghanistan already were, even though we had toppled the Taliban regime more than 15 months prior to our invasion of Iraq.

After Barack Obama took office and thoroughly reviewed the situation in Afghanistan, we did finally get the inputs roughly right for the first time, though even when the president announced a buildup of forces, he also outlined when the drawdown would begin. Regardless, by late 2010, we had finally established the right big ideas and overarching strategy; deployed reasonably sufficient forces to halt and roll back the Taliban’s momentum; increased civilian capacity to complement our military efforts; established the right organizational structures; made much-needed adjustments to the push to train Afghan forces; developed a structured program to transition select Afghan districts to Afghan control; commenced an organized effort to reconcile with the Taliban rank and file while negotiations were pursued with the Taliban leadership; and took on the issues of civilian casualties, corruption, and cultivation of illegal narcotics, among other problems.

Unfortunately, this period lasted less than a year. In June 2011, the White House released the details of the drawdown in Afghanistan that the president had previously outlined would begin that summer. As it became clear that we could not deliver a knockout blow to the Taliban and other insurgent and extremist groups, we decided that withdrawal was preferable to a lengthy, frustrating commitment. Basically, we reverted to what became our pattern in Afghanistan: not long-term nation building, but repeated exit seeking, even though nation building did continue. (And, here, for those who might contend that we shouldn’t have engaged in nation building, I would ask, once you have intervened as we did, how else do you help build the forces and capabilities that allow you to hand off crucial tasks—such as denying sanctuary to terrorists, securing the population and infrastructure, and running the country and its myriad institutions? Nation building was not just unavoidable; it was essential.)

Thus, when we recognized that we couldn’t “win” the war, we did not even seriously consider that we might just “manage” it. In fact, some senior officials, including me, had cautioned that we would not be able to do in Afghanistan what we had done in Iraq—that though we might be able to drive violence down, we would not be able to “flip” the country, as we had during the surge in Iraq, and provide it a whole new beginning. The conditions and context were too different and too challenging.

To be sure, managing the situation would have required a sustained, generational commitment, one that would have continued to be frustrating and inevitably less than ideal; nonetheless, it would have been markedly better than leaving the country and its people to the Taliban and its insurgent partners, as should be obvious now. And, because of improvements in the use of technologies such as drones and precision munitions, as well as keeping U.S. forces in “advise, assist, and enabling” roles rather than on the front lines, it could have been sustainable in terms of the expenditure of blood and treasure.

The lack of sufficient commitment over the years had innumerable knock-on effects. Having leaders of successive U.S. administrations of both parties repeatedly stating that we wanted to leave, often regardless of the conditions on the ground, undermined our negotiating position with the Taliban and had a corrosive impact on our relations with our Afghan partners, our coalition allies, and the countries in the region, especially Pakistan. However understandable the publicly stated desires to draw down were, the negative implications of them were substantial and pernicious.

From the March 2022 issue: The betrayal

Moreover, the ultimate peace deal that we reached with the Taliban in 2020 that committed the U.S. to withdrawal the following year, which we negotiated without the elected Afghan government at the table, has to rank among the worst diplomatic agreements to which the U.S. has ever been a party. We acquiesced to Taliban demands because the resulting agreement gave us, in the narrowest sense possible, what we wanted: a defined timeline for our departure and a Taliban promise not to attack our forces (which was already quite difficult to do as, by that point, American soldiers were seldom on the front lines) in the interim. Of course, our enemies knew we wanted to leave, because our leaders had repeatedly expressed that desire. And knowing that, the Taliban realized they had to give up little of value in return. In fact, to induce the Taliban to agree to what they wanted—our departure—we forced the Afghan government to release more than 5,000 Taliban detainees, many of whom quickly rejoined the Taliban’s ranks and helped enable the offensive that toppled the Afghan government after our forces withdrew. The timeline that had the U.S. withdrawing during the height of the fighting season was a major mistake, as well.

Throughout, but particularly in the final few years of our involvement in Afghanistan, we also repeatedly failed to appreciate the damaging effects of our stated desire to leave on the psyche of Afghan political and military leaders and those in the rank and file. After all, why should they truly partner with and invest in the solutions we promoted if we were leaving soon anyway? Given our lack of appreciation of the effect of our rhetoric and our actions, we thus failed to anticipate that Afghan forces—who until then had generally fought bravely, and had sustained battlefield losses that were some 26 times those sustained by American troops—could suffer a collapse in the face of simultaneous Taliban offensives around the country when it became clear to those forces that no one was coming to the rescue.

In the end, the outcome came down to a lack of American strategic patience, evident right up to our final moments there—when instead of withdrawing, we could have adopted an approach that kept U.S. troops on the ground, enabled by an armada of drones and coalition forces already deployed there from countries that broadly wanted to stay, as well as the crucial contractors needed for training and maintenance.

In essence, then, from the beginning through to the end—but especially at the end—American commitment was lacking.

A US Marine commander talks to Afghan locals at the Safar Bazaar. August,2010.(Hossein Fatemi/Panos/Redux)

Boys and their flock of sheep are seen through the window of a US military vehicle. August 2010. (Hossein Fatemi/Panos/Redux)

We also clearly fell short when it came to the use of resources. Not only did we not devote enough of our own capabilities for a sufficient period of time; we also improperly allocated some of what we had, and frequently failed to appreciate, or provide, what our Afghan partners actually needed.

As I noted earlier, it took nine years for us to finally deploy roughly the level of resources—military, civilian, and financial—needed in Afghanistan, and we kept the military component of those resources in place for only eight months or so before beginning to draw down. Beyond that, we sometimes failed to use the resources that we had as effectively as we might have, throwing money at problems and trying to do too much too quickly. I was certainly party to this. To some degree, this was because we knew that we were always on a path to withdrawal and thus needed to move quickly while we had the funding and other resources needed. Yet all of this unquestionably contributed to corruption (which we tried to identify and combat, though it was maddeningly difficult to root out), and the development of an unsustainable wartime economy. It also led us to rush to complete projects using Western materials and methods rather than Afghan alternatives that might have taken longer to finish but would have been more viable over time.

We also did not always deliver what the Afghan military needed or should have had. Instead, we gave them what we thought they needed and, under pressure from the U.S. Congress, we sought to buy American, even when U.S. systems, such as our helicopters, were too complex for the Afghans to maintain. Had we helped the Afghan military along a path where it acquired less complex (typically non-American) equipment, we might have built it into a more sustainable fighting force, but one that remained nearly as capable and would have been more able to operate independently of us. In particular, we made the Afghan security forces heavily reliant on U.S.-provided air assets that were more technically complex than the Afghans could maintain without substantial help from Western contractors, who had to leave once our forces departed. Ironically, the Afghans might have been able to carry on without U.S. and coalition forces, but they could not do without the well over 15,000 contractors who helped keep their air fleet and other U.S.-provided systems operational. (For those who suggest “We should have made the Afghans more like the insurgents,” it is important to remember that the Afghans were, by necessity, the counterinsurgents and had to defend population centers and infrastructure, not just operate at a time and place of their choosing, as the insurgents did.)

In the Afghan national-defense construct, the air force and commando reserves were the crucial elements. Afghanistan is a large, very mountainous country with limited road infrastructure, so aerial capabilities were essential to transport reinforcements and provide medical evacuation, emergency resupply, and close air support for forces fighting on the ground. But we need not have forced U.S. helicopters, in particular, on them, and instead should have helped them buy or maintain more of the refurbished Soviet and Russian systems that they were experienced with, and that were much easier to maintain and keep operationally ready. Indeed, that is what I recommended continuing to provide when I was the commander in Afghanistan.

Tom Nichols: Afghanistan is your fault.

Given the centrality of the Afghan reserves and the air assets needed to transport them to areas under attack, the collapse of the Afghan forces should not have been a complete surprise. In fact, I publicly noted at least a month prior to the withdrawal that I feared a psychological collapse of the Afghan forces if they knew that reinforcements and air support were not coming. (The failure of government leaders in Kabul to design and implement a realistic defense plan and then provide the kind of energy, example, direction, and inspiration that President Volodymyr Zelensky and his ministers have provided in Ukraine was a major factor as well.) Hence, the inability of the Afghans to maintain the sophisticated U.S. helicopters we forced upon them to help build up their military in no small part contributed to the collapse of that very military.

May 1, 2017, Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers train at the Kabul Military training centre (KMTC) on the outskirts of Kabul. (AFP/Getty)

Compounding these two issues—the lack of strategic resolve and a failure to commit and properly allocate resources—was the fact that we often lacked sufficient understanding of the local and regional context with which we were dealing, and were unable to deal with certain aspects of that context even when we did clearly grasp them.

At the highest levels, at the outset, we saddled Afghanistan with governing structures and principles that gave more power to the central government than should have been the case. We also missed opportunities to incorporate reconcilable elements of the Taliban in the early years of our intervention. Finding the right balance between Kabul and Afghanistan’s provinces and districts has been a difficult endeavor throughout Afghan history, but my sense was that we did not get it sufficiently right, particularly in our early years there.

We also undermined the effectiveness of Afghan leaders at various levels by working around them, rather than empowering them, and by conducting military or civilian programs that did not have their full buy-in, either because we did not trust them or because we did not think them capable of assisting. And despite considerable efforts to avoid mistakes in our military operations, we inevitably took actions that resulted in civilian casualties and made other errors that strained relationships with our Afghan partners. Indeed, some of our operations tragically created more enemies than they took off the battlefield, despite increasing emphasis over the years on avoiding such outcomes, and such incidents put undue pressure on Afghan leaders.

Of enormous importance, as well, is that we repeatedly failed to persuade or compel Pakistan to eliminate the sanctuaries on its soil established by the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and other extremist and insurgent networks that carried out campaigns and attacks in Afghanistan. We were also never able to sufficiently disrupt or degrade those sanctuaries with unilateral operations, because of Pakistan’s limits on our activities.

In fact, as I reflect on the myriad challenges of Afghanistan, the sanctuaries in Pakistan were the most important and most vexing of the many differences between our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the most crippling aspect of the context in which we and our coalition allies and Afghan partners operated. That difference, more than all of the others, was likely the one that ultimately meant that we could not achieve in Afghanistan what we had accomplished in Iraq during the surge and the years immediately following it.

Here, too, our public statements about wanting and intending to leave Afghanistan likely undermined our efforts. The Pakistanis sensed that, at some point, the U.S. would depart Afghanistan, whether or not the conditions warranted such action, and so Pakistani leaders did not want to antagonize the groups that would likely end up ruling at least part, if not all, of Afghanistan. Once again, then, we return to the issue of inadequate strategic patience.

There are plenty of other reasons for why we ultimately underachieved in Afghanistan. There were overly rosy assessments of the situation in the country at various junctures, especially in the years prior to our ultimate withdrawal, which, set against the violence that followed, undermined the confidence our leaders and citizens had in our ability to achieve our objectives. There were also, of course, many failures of the Afghan government itself, some of them incredibly frustrating episodes involving government formation, major malfeasance by immediate family members of top government leaders, and self-inflicted political crises that sapped support in Kabul and in Washington, not to mention throughout Afghanistan. Finally, there was the seemingly endemic corruption that, over time, led many Afghans to be disillusioned by promises made by their leaders. Those issues pose lingering questions about whether we could have, and should have, done more to rectify those shortcomings—or whether they were inescapable and damaging features of the overall endeavor.

At the end of the day, however, the three issues I have described—our lack of strategic resolve, our unwillingness to commit the resources required and to allocate properly the resources we had, and our failure to appreciate fully and deal with adequately the country and region in which we were operating—are what precluded achieving a better situation.

We very much need to learn from what transpired in America’s longest war. Though we may understandably shrink from such ambitious endeavors again, there are numerous situations in which these lessons will be of value. Irregular warfare in various forms has certainly not disappeared from the world, nor have the ambitions of autocrats, such as Vladimir Putin, who have proved they will intervene in disputes well beyond their borders or invade countries that aspire to align with the West, as many Afghans certainly wished to do. Beyond that, one clear lesson of the past 20 years—and of recent weeks, given the operation that brought Zawahiri to justice, as well as Islamic State attacks in Afghanistan—should be that Islamist extremists will seek to exploit ungoverned, or inadequately governed, spaces, and that we need to keep pressure on them, albeit as efficiently and economically as possible.

Read: Why has America stopped winning wars?

In the case of Afghanistan, sadly, what is likely to transpire looks to be exceedingly dire, and the situation there will likely continue to be a significant concern for America. In fact, it will at the very least require continued military, diplomatic, development, intelligence, financial, and humanitarian resources and attention so that Islamist extremists are not able to reestablish sanctuaries—but also so that Afghans do not experience widespread starvation and so that refugees from Afghanistan do not become the kind of problem for our regional partners and European allies that Syrian refugees became in the previous decade. Beyond that, we also still need to meet the moral obligation we have to Afghans we left behind, in particular the Afghans who earned the right to migrate to America with their families in return for their service alongside our men and women in uniform as battlefield interpreters.

An Afghan child walks near military uniforms as he with elders wait to leave the Kabul airport in Kabul on August 16, 2021. (Wakil Kohsar / AFP/ Getty).

The desire of multiple U.S. presidents of both parties to end endless wars and focus on nation building at home rather than abroad is more than understandable, especially to those like me who served in those wars and know firsthand the costs and sacrifices of them.

The problem is that it is not clear that our withdrawal from Afghanistan has ended the endless war there, or even ended our involvement in it. And there is nothing to say we won’t get drawn back in somehow. As my exceptional colleague Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who led our diplomatic missions in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, among others, used to observe, “You can leave the movie theater, but the movie continues to roll.”

The Atlantic · by David Petraeus · August 8, 2022

10. CIA-JSOC convergence impedes covert action oversight, researcher warns

Unfortunately the journal article by Dr. Jennifer Kibbe that this refers to is behind the paywall.

CIA-JSOC convergence impedes covert action oversight, researcher warns

intelnews.org · by Joseph Fitsanakis · August 8, 2022

August 8, 2022 by

A GROWING CONVERGENCE BETWEEN the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United States military has been one of the most notable changes in American intelligence after 9/11. Some argue that the resulting overlap between the CIA and the military, in both capabilities and operations, has altered their character —perhaps permanently. The CIA has become more involved than ever before in lethal operations, while the military has embraced intelligence work with unprecedented intensity.

Today, more than two decades after 9/11, joint activities between the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) have become customary. JSOC was founded in the aftermath of operation EAGLE CLAW —the failed attempt to free US diplomatic personnel held in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis. Its mission is to bring together the Special Operations Forces (SOF) elements across the US military. In addition to ensuring inter-operability and standardization between these elements, JSOC oversees the operations of elite joint SOF units that perform highly classified activities around the world.

Increasingly since 9/11, the CIA and JSOC have been launching combined counter-terrorism operations and have learned to compete less and collaborate more —though turf wars between them are not uncommon. Today it is not unusual for CIA civilians to gather intelligence on a particular target before hand it over to JSOC, which in turn tasks its military personnel to use lethal force against the target. This type of collaboration may bear fruits in the counter-terrorism domain, but also makes it difficult for the US political leadership, primarily Congress, to exercise appropriate oversight over covert action.

Partial Oversight

In an article published on Sunday, Dr. Jennifer Kibbe, Professor of Government at Franklin and Marshall College, and a specialist on the oversight of intelligence operations, explores the effects of the CIA-JSOC convergence on democratic accountability. The article, “CIA/SOF Convergence and Congressional Oversight”, appears in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence and National Security. If features statements from interviews by current and former Congressional staffers with experience in working for the intelligence committees of the US Congress.

Kibbe finds that the system of compartmentalization, which has traditionally secluded the activities of Congressional committees, coupled with the CIA-JSOC convergence, presents significant challenges for oversight. Presently, the Congressional intelligence committees oversee the activities of the CIA, while JSOC reports to the armed services committees. This poses problems in cases when, for instance, the CIA leads the front end of an operation and then hands it over to JSOC. This means that the intelligence committees in the House or Senate get access to only half of the operation and are unable to share their findings with the armed services committees. Conversely, the armed services committees are not privy to the CIA-led segment of the operation. This happens because of built-in compartmentalization procedures, but also because committee staffers tend have different clearance levels.

The Future

It is clear that the convergence between the CIA and JSOC is a product of the peculiar counter-terrorism environment that developed in response to the attacks of 9/11. Arguably, therefore, as Washington continues to shift its focus away from non-state actors, and concentrate instead on great-power competition, the CIA will return to its traditional intelligence role. In turn, its special operations wings, which have been involved in lethal operations since 9/11, will atrophy. It follows that the CIA-JSOC convergence, which makes it difficult for Congress to keep an eye on intelligence operations, is likely to subside and may even disappear altogether.

Kibbe strongly rejects this scenario, calling it “naïve”. She argues that, although it does not currently pose existential threats to the US, international terrorism will continue to be on the radar of American policy makers for the foreseeable future. Additionally, the ‘gray zone’ activities of the Kremlin, which have become a standard feature of great power competition in our time, invite covert action as an instrument of policy. Finally, she argues that the rapidly growing field of cyber operations is likely to feature prominently in “that area between diplomacy and war”, in which the CIA and SOF elements of the military are most useful to American policy makers.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 08 August 2022 | Permalink

intelnews.org · by Joseph Fitsanakis · August 8, 2022

11. Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals

Long read.

This is stirring up the civil-military relations debate. This is getting a bit of press. There are three forfour articles in my news feeds this morning.

My favorite excerpt (among many). This says it all.

It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”

“Which generals?” Kelly asked.

“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.

Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals

How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief.

By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker

August 8, 2022

The New Yorker · by Peter Baker · August 8, 2022

In the summer of 2017, after just half a year in the White House, Donald Trump flew to Paris for Bastille Day celebrations thrown by Emmanuel Macron, the new French President. Macron staged a spectacular martial display to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the American entrance into the First World War. Vintage tanks rolled down the Champs-Élysées as fighter jets roared overhead. The event seemed to be calculated to appeal to Trump—his sense of showmanship and grandiosity—and he was visibly delighted. The French general in charge of the parade turned to one of his American counterparts and said, “You are going to be doing this next year.”

Sure enough, Trump returned to Washington determined to have his generals throw him the biggest, grandest military parade ever for the Fourth of July. The generals, to his bewilderment, reacted with disgust. “I’d rather swallow acid,” his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, said. Struggling to dissuade Trump, officials pointed out that the parade would cost millions of dollars and tear up the streets of the capital.

But the gulf between Trump and the generals was not really about money or practicalities, just as their endless policy battles were not only about clashing views on whether to withdraw from Afghanistan or how to combat the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran. The divide was also a matter of values, of how they viewed the United States itself. That was never clearer than when Trump told his new chief of staff, John Kelly—like Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general—about his vision for Independence Day. “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.

Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are—and they are buried over in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead interred there.

“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

The subject came up again during an Oval Office briefing that included Trump, Kelly, and Paul Selva, an Air Force general and the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kelly joked in his deadpan way about the parade. “Well, you know, General Selva is going to be in charge of organizing the Fourth of July parade,” he told the President. Trump did not understand that Kelly was being sarcastic. “So, what do you think of the parade?” Trump asked Selva. Instead of telling Trump what he wanted to hear, Selva was forthright.

“I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” Selva said. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added, “It’s not who we are.”

Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So, you don’t like the idea?” he said, incredulous.

“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”

The four years of the Trump Presidency were characterized by a fantastical degree of instability: fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals. At first, Trump, who had dodged the draft by claiming to have bone spurs, seemed enamored with being Commander-in-Chief and with the national-security officials he’d either appointed or inherited. But Trump’s love affair with “my generals” was brief, and in a statement for this article the former President confirmed how much he had soured on them over time. “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system,” he said.

It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”

“Which generals?” Kelly asked.

“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.

By late 2018, Trump wanted his own handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had tired of Joseph Dunford, a Marine general who had been appointed chairman by Barack Obama, and who worked closely with Mattis as they resisted some of Trump’s more outlandish ideas. Never mind that Dunford still had most of a year to go in his term. For months, David Urban, a lobbyist who ran the winning 2016 Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, had been urging the President and his inner circle to replace Dunford with a more like-minded chairman, someone less aligned with Mattis, who had commanded both Dunford and Kelly in the Marines.

Mattis’s candidate to succeed Dunford was David Goldfein, an Air Force general and a former F-16 fighter pilot who had been shot down in the Balkans and successfully evaded capture. No one could remember a President selecting a chairman over the objections of his Defense Secretary, but word came back to the Pentagon that there was no way Trump would accept just one recommendation. Two obvious contenders from the Army, however, declined to be considered: General Curtis Scaparrotti, the NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told fellow-officers that there was “no gas left in my tank” to deal with being Trump’s chairman. General Joseph Votel, the Central Command chief, also begged off, telling a colleague he was not a good fit to work so closely with Mattis.

Urban, who had attended West Point with Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and remained an Army man at heart, backed Mark Milley, the chief of staff of the Army. Milley, who was then sixty, was the son of a Navy corpsman who had served with the 4th Marine Division, in Iwo Jima. He grew up outside Boston and played hockey at Princeton. As an Army officer, Milley commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, led the 10th Mountain Division, and oversaw the Army Forces Command. A student of history who often carried a pile of the latest books on the Second World War with him, Milley was decidedly not a member of the close-knit Marine fraternity that had dominated national-security policy for Trump’s first two years. Urban told the President that he would connect better with Milley, who was loquacious and blunt to the point of being rude, and who had the Ivy League pedigree that always impressed Trump.

Milley had already demonstrated those qualities in meetings with Trump as the Army chief of staff. “Milley would go right at why it’s important for the President to know this about the Army and why the Army is the service that wins all the nation’s wars. He had all those sort of elevator-speech punch lines,” a senior defense official recalled. “He would have that big bellowing voice and be right in his face with all the one-liners, and then he would take a breath and he would say, ‘Mr. President, our Army is here to serve you. Because you’re the Commander-in-Chief.’ It was a very different approach, and Trump liked that.” And, like Trump, Milley was not a subscriber to the legend of Mad Dog Mattis, whom he considered a “complete control freak.”

Mattis, for his part, seemed to believe that Milley was inappropriately campaigning for the job, and Milley recalled to others that Mattis confronted him at a reception that fall, saying, “Hey, you shouldn’t run for office. You shouldn’t run to be the chairman.” Milley later told people that he had replied sharply to Mattis, “I’m not lobbying for any fucking thing. I don’t do that.” Milley eventually raised the issue with Dunford. “Hey, Mattis has got this in his head,” Milley told him. “I’m telling you it ain’t me.” Milley even claimed that he had begged Urban to cease promoting his candidacy.

In November, 2018, the day before Milley was scheduled for an interview with Trump, he and Mattis had another barbed encounter at the Pentagon. In Milley’s recounting of the episode later to others, Mattis urged him to tell Trump that he wanted to be the next Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, rather than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Milley said he would not do that but would instead wait to hear what the President wanted him to do. This would end whatever relationship the two generals had.

When Milley arrived at the White House the next day, he was received by Kelly, who seemed to him unusually distraught. Before they headed into the Oval Office to meet with Trump, Milley asked Kelly what he thought.

“You should go to Europe and just get the fuck out of D.C.,” Kelly said. The White House was a cesspool: “Just get as far away as you can.”

In the Oval Office, Trump said right from the start that he was considering Milley for chairman of the Joint Chiefs. When Trump offered him the job, Milley replied, “Mr. President, I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.”

For the next hour, they talked about the state of the world. Immediately, there were points of profound disagreement. On Afghanistan, Milley said he believed that a complete withdrawal of American troops, as Trump wanted, would cause a serious new set of problems. And Milley had already spoken out publicly against the banning of transgender troops, which Trump was insisting on.

“Mattis tells me you are weak on transgender,” Trump said.

“No, I am not weak on transgender,” Milley replied. “I just don’t care who sleeps with who.”

There were other differences as well, but in the end Milley assured him, “Mr. President, you’re going to be making the decisions. All I can guarantee from me is I’m going to give you an honest answer, and I’m not going to talk about it on the front page of the Washington Post. I’ll give you an honest answer on everything I can. And you’re going to make the decisions, and as long as they’re legal I’ll support it.”

As long as they’re legal. It was not clear how much that caveat even registered with Trump. The decision to name Milley was a rare chance, as Trump saw it, to get back at Mattis. Trump would confirm this years later, after falling out with both men, saying that he had picked Milley only because Mattis “could not stand him, had no respect for him, and would not recommend him.”

Late on the evening of December 7th, Trump announced that he would reveal a big personnel decision having to do with the Joint Chiefs the next day, in Philadelphia, at the hundred-and-nineteenth annual Army-Navy football game. This was all the notice Dunford had that he was about to be publicly humiliated. The next morning, Dunford was standing with Milley at the game waiting for the President to arrive when Urban, the lobbyist, showed up. Urban hugged Milley. “We did it!” Urban said. “We did it!”

But Milley’s appointment was not even the day’s biggest news. As Trump walked to his helicopter to fly to the game, he dropped another surprise. “John Kelly will be leaving toward the end of the year,” he told reporters. Kelly had lasted seventeen months in what he called “the worst fucking job in the world.”

For Trump, the decision was a turning point. Instead of installing another strong-willed White House chief of staff who might have told him no, the President gravitated toward one who would basically go along with whatever he wanted. A week later, Kelly made an unsuccessful last-ditch effort to persuade Trump not to replace him with Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina who was serving as Trump’s budget director. “You don’t want to hire someone who’s going to be a yes-man,” Kelly told the President. “I don’t give a shit anymore,” Trump replied. “I want a yes-man!”

A little more than a week after that, Mattis was out, too, having quit in protest over Trump’s order that the U.S. abruptly withdraw its forces from Syria right after Mattis had met with American allies fighting alongside the U.S. It was the first time in nearly four decades that a major Cabinet secretary had resigned over a national-security dispute with the President.

The so-called “axis of adults” was over. None of them had done nearly as much to restrain Trump as the President’s critics thought they should have. But all of them—Kelly, Mattis, Dunford, plus H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, and Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State—had served as guardrails in one way or another. Trump hoped to replace them with more malleable figures. As Mattis would put it, Trump was so out of his depth that he had decided to drain the pool.

On January 2, 2019, Kelly sent a farewell e-mail to the White House staff. He said that these were the people he would miss: “The selfless ones, who work for the American people so hard and never lowered themselves to wrestle in the mud with the pigs. The ones who stayed above the drama, put personal ambition and politics aside, and simply worked for our great country. The ones who were ethical, moral and always told their boss what he or she NEEDED to hear, as opposed to what they might have wanted to hear.”

That same morning, Mulvaney showed up at the White House for his first official day as acting chief of staff. He called an all-hands meeting and made an announcement: O.K., we’re going to do things differently. John Kelly’s gone, and we’re going to let the President be the President.

In the fall of 2019, nearly a year after Trump named him the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley finally took over the position from Dunford. Two weeks into the job, Milley sat at Trump’s side in a meeting at the White House with congressional leaders to discuss a brewing crisis in the Middle East. Trump had again ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, imperilling America’s Kurdish allies and effectively handing control of the territory over to the Syrian government and Russian military forces. The House—amid impeachment proceedings against the President for holding up nearly four hundred million dollars in security assistance to Ukraine as leverage to demand an investigation of his Democratic opponent—passed a nonbinding resolution rebuking Trump for the pullout. Even two-thirds of the House Republicans voted for it.

At the meeting, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, pointed out the vote against the President. “Congratulations,” Trump snapped sarcastically. He grew even angrier when the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, read out a warning from Mattis that leaving Syria could result in the resurgence of the Islamic State. In response, Trump derided his former Defense Secretary as “the world’s most overrated general. You know why I fired him? I fired him because he wasn’t tough enough.”

Eventually, Pelosi, in her frustration, stood and pointed at the President. “All roads with you lead to Putin,” she said. “You gave Russia Ukraine and Syria.”

“You’re just a politician, a third-rate politician!” Trump shot back.

Finally, Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader and Pelosi’s No. 2, had had enough. “This is not useful,” he said, and stood up to leave with the Speaker.

“We’ll see you at the polls,” Trump shouted as they walked out.

When she exited the White House, Pelosi told reporters that she left because Trump was having a “meltdown.” A few hours later, Trump tweeted a White House photograph of Pelosi standing over him, apparently thinking it would prove that she was the one having a meltdown. Instead, the image went viral as an example of Pelosi confronting Trump.

Milley could also be seen in the photograph, his hands clenched together, his head bowed low, looking as though he wanted to sink into the floor. To Pelosi, this was a sign of inexplicable weakness, and she would later say that she never understood why Milley had not been willing to stand up to Trump at that meeting. After all, she would point out, he was the nonpartisan leader of the military, not one of Trump’s toadies. “Milley, you would have thought, would have had more independence,” she told us, “but he just had his head down.”

In fact, Milley was already quite wary of Trump. That night, he called Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who had also been present. “Is that the way these things normally go?” Milley asked. As Smith later put it, “That was the moment when Milley realized that the boss might have a screw or two loose.” There had been no honeymoon. “From pretty much his first day on the job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Smith said, “he was very much aware of the fact that there was a challenge here that was not your normal challenge with a Commander-in-Chief.”

Early on the evening of June 1, 2020, Milley failed what he came to realize was the biggest test of his career: a short walk from the White House across Lafayette Square, minutes after it had been violently cleared of Black Lives Matter protesters. Dressed in combat fatigues, Milley marched behind Trump with a phalanx of the President’s advisers in a photo op, the most infamous of the Trump Presidency, that was meant to project a forceful response to the protests that had raged outside the White House and across the country since the killing, the week before, of George Floyd. Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.

In the morning before the Lafayette Square photo op, Trump had clashed with Milley, Attorney General William Barr, and the Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, over his demands for a militarized show of force. “We look weak,” Trump told them. The President wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and use active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted ten thousand troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne called up. He demanded that Milley take personal charge. When Milley and the others resisted and said that the National Guard would be sufficient, Trump shouted, “You are all losers! You are all fucking losers!” Turning to Milley, Trump said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Eventually, Trump was persuaded not to send in the military against American citizens. Barr, as the civilian head of law enforcement, was given the lead role in the protest response, and the National Guard was deployed to assist police. Hours later, Milley, Esper, and other officials were abruptly summoned back to the White House and sent marching across Lafayette Square. As they walked, with the scent of tear gas still in the air, Milley realized that he should not be there and made his exit, quietly peeling off to his waiting black Chevy Suburban. But the damage was done. No one would care or even remember that he was not present when Trump held up a Bible in front of the damaged church; people had already seen him striding with the President on live television in his battle dress, an image that seemed to signal that the United States under Trump was, finally, a nation at war with itself. Milley knew this was a misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a “road-to-Damascus moment,” as he would later put it. What would he do about it?

In the days after the Lafayette Square incident, Milley sat in his office at the Pentagon, writing and rewriting drafts of a letter of resignation. There were short versions of the letter; there were long versions. His preferred version was the one that read in its entirety:

I regret to inform you that I intend to resign as your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thank you for the honor of appointing me as senior ranking officer. The events of the last couple weeks have caused me to do deep soul-searching, and I can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.

Second, you are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people—and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people. The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.

Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal. All men and women are created equal, no matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or something in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose not to believe. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve.

And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.

The letter was dated June 8th, a full week after Lafayette Square, but Milley still was not sure if he should give it to Trump. He was sending up flares, seeking advice from a wide circle. He reached out to Dunford, and to mentors such as the retired Army general James Dubik, an expert on military ethics. He called political contacts as well, including members of Congress and former officials from the Bush and Obama Administrations. Most told him what Robert Gates, a former Secretary of Defense and C.I.A. chief, did: “Make them fire you. Don’t resign.”

“My sense is Mark had a pretty accurate measure of the man pretty quickly,” Gates recalled later. “He would tell me over time, well before June 1st, some of the absolutely crazy notions that were put forward in the Oval Office, crazy ideas from the President, things about using or not using military force, the immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, pulling out of South Korea. It just went on and on.”

Milley was not the only senior official to seek Gates’s counsel. Several members of Trump’s national-security team had made the pilgrimage out to his home in Washington State during the previous two years. Gates would pour them a drink, grill them some salmon, and help them wrestle with the latest Trump conundrum. “The problem with resignation is you can only fire that gun once,” he told them. All the conversations were variations on a theme: “ ‘How do I walk us back from the ledge?’ ‘How do I keep this from happening, because it would be a terrible thing for the country?’ ”

After Lafayette Square, Gates told both Milley and Esper that, given Trump’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior, they needed to stay in the Pentagon as long as they could. “If you resign, it’s a one-day story,” Gates told them. “If you’re fired, it makes it clear you were standing up for the right thing.” Gates advised Milley that he had another important card and urged him to play it: “Keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go they all go, so that the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.”

Publicly, Lafayette Square looked like a debacle for Milley. Several retired generals had condemned his participation, pointing out that the leader of a racially diverse military, with more than two hundred thousand active-duty Black troops, could not be seen opposing a movement for racial justice. Even Mattis, who had refrained from openly criticizing Trump, issued a statement about the “bizarre photo op.” The Washington Post reported that Mattis had been motivated to do so by his anger at the image of Milley parading through the square in his fatigues.

Whatever their personal differences, Mattis and Milley both knew that there was a tragic inevitability to the moment. Throughout his Presidency, Trump had sought to redefine the role of the military in American public life. In his 2016 campaign, he had spoken out in support of the use of torture and other practices that the military considered war crimes. Just before the 2018 midterms, he ordered thousands of troops to the southern border to combat a fake “invasion” by a caravan of migrants. In 2019, in a move that undermined military justice and the chain of command, he gave clemency to a Navy SEAL found guilty of posing with the dead body of a captive in Iraq.

Many considered Trump’s 2018 decision to use the military in his preëlection border stunt to be “the predicate—or the harbinger—of 2020,” in the words of Peter Feaver, a Duke University expert on civil-military relations, who taught the subject to generals at command school. When Milley, who had been among Feaver’s students, called for advice after Lafayette Square, Feaver agreed that Milley should apologize but encouraged him not to resign. “It would have been a mistake,” Feaver said. “We have no tradition of resignation in protest amongst the military.”

Milley decided to apologize in a commencement address at the National Defense University that he was scheduled to deliver the week after the photo op. Feaver’s counsel was to own up to the error and make it clear that the mistake was his and not Trump’s. Presidents, after all, “are allowed to do political stunts,” Feaver said. “That’s part of being President.”

Milley’s apology was unequivocal. “I should not have been there,” he said in the address. He did not mention Trump. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” It was, he added, “a mistake that I have learned from.”

At the same time, Milley had finally come to a decision. He would not quit. “Fuck that shit,” he told his staff. “I’ll just fight him.” The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his Commander-in-Chief. Yet the Constitution offered no practical guide for a general faced with a rogue President. Never before since the position had been created, in 1949—or at least since Richard Nixon’s final days, in 1974—had a chairman of the Joint Chiefs encountered such a situation. “If they want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it,” Milley told his staff. “But I will fight from the inside.”

Milley’s apology tour was private as well as public. With the upcoming election fuelling Trump’s sense of frenetic urgency, the chairman sought to get the message to Democrats that he would not go along with any further efforts by the President to deploy the machinery of war for domestic political ends. He called both Pelosi and Schumer. “After the Lafayette Square episode, Milley was extremely contrite and communicated to any number of people that he had no intention of playing Trump’s game any longer,” Bob Bauer, the former Obama White House counsel, who was then advising Joe Biden’s campaign and heard about the calls, said. “He was really burned by that experience. He was appalled. He apologized for it, and it was pretty clear he was digging his heels in.”

On Capitol Hill, however, some Democrats, including Pelosi, remained skeptical. To them, Lafayette Square proved that Milley had been a Trumpist all along. “There was a huge misunderstanding about Milley,” Adam Smith, the House Armed Services Committee chairman, recalled. “A lot of my Democratic colleagues after June 1st in particular were concerned about him.” Smith tried to assure other Democrats that “there was never a single solitary moment where it was possible that Milley was going to help Trump do anything that shouldn’t be done.”

And yet Pelosi, among others, also distrusted Milley because of an incident earlier that year in which Trump ordered the killing of the Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani without briefing congressional leaders in advance. Smith said Pelosi believed that the chairman had been “evasive” and disrespectful to Congress. Milley, for his part, felt he could not disregard Trump’s insistence that lawmakers not be notified—a breach that was due to the President’s pique over the impeachment proceedings against him. “The navigation of Trumpworld was more difficult for Milley than Nancy gives him credit for,” Smith said. He vouched for the chairman but never managed to convince Pelosi.

How long could this standoff between the Pentagon and the President go on? For the next few months, Milley woke up each morning not knowing whether he would be fired before the day was over. His wife told him she was shocked that he had not been cashiered outright when he made his apology.

Esper was also on notice. Two days after Lafayette Square, the Defense Secretary had gone to the Pentagon pressroom and offered his own apology, even revealing his opposition to Trump’s demands to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the active-duty military. Such a step, Esper said, should be reserved only for “the most urgent and dire of situations.” Trump later exploded at Esper in the Oval Office about the criticism, delivering what Milley would recall as “the worst reaming out” he had ever heard.

The next day, Trump’s latest chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called the Defense Secretary at home—three times—to get him to recant his opposition to invoking the Insurrection Act. When he refused, Meadows took “the Tony Soprano approach,” as Esper later put it, and began threatening him, before eventually backing off. (A spokesperson for Meadows disputed Esper’s account.) Esper resolved to stay in office as long as he could, “to endure all the shit and run the clock out,” as he put it. He felt that he had a particular responsibility to hold on. By law, the only person authorized to deploy troops other than the President is the Secretary of Defense. Esper was determined not to hand that power off to satraps such as Robert O’Brien, who had become Trump’s fourth and final national-security adviser, or Ric Grenell, a former public-relations man who had been serving as acting director of National Intelligence.

Both Esper and Milley found new purpose in waiting out the President. They resisted him throughout the summer, as Trump repeatedly demanded that active-duty troops quash ongoing protests, threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, and tried to stop the military from renaming bases honoring Confederate generals. “They both expected, literally on a daily basis, to be fired,” Gates recalled. Milley “would call me and essentially say, ‘I may not last until tomorrow night.’ And he was comfortable with that. He felt like he knew he was going to support the Constitution, and there were no two ways about it.”

Milley put away the resignation letter in his desk and drew up a plan, a guide for how to get through the next few months. He settled on four goals: First, make sure Trump did not start an unnecessary war overseas. Second, make sure the military was not used in the streets against the American people for the purpose of keeping Trump in power. Third, maintain the military’s integrity. And, fourth, maintain his own integrity. In the months to come, Milley would refer back to the plan more times than he could count.

Even in June, Milley understood that it was not just a matter of holding off Trump until after the Presidential election, on November 3rd. He knew that Election Day might well mark merely the beginning, not the end, of the challenges Trump would pose. The portents were worrisome. Barely one week before Lafayette Square, Trump had posted a tweet that would soon become a refrain. The 2020 Presidential race, he warned for the first time, would end up as “the greatest Rigged Election in history.”

By the evening of Monday, November 9th, Milley’s fears about a volatile post-election period unlike anything America had seen before seemed to be coming true. News organizations had called the election for Biden, but Trump refused to acknowledge that he had lost by millions of votes. The peaceful transition of power—a cornerstone of liberal democracy—was now in doubt. Sitting at home that night at around nine, the chairman received an urgent phone call from the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. With the possible exception of Vice-President Mike Pence, no one had been more slavishly loyal in public, or more privately obsequious, to Trump than Pompeo. But even he could not take it anymore.

“We’ve got to talk,” Pompeo told Milley, who was at home in Quarters Six, the red brick house that has been the official residence of chairmen of the Joint Chiefs since the early nineteen-sixties. “Can I come over?”

Milley invited Pompeo to visit immediately.

“The crazies have taken over,” Pompeo told him when they sat down at Milley’s kitchen table. Not only was Trump surrounded by the crazies; they were, in fact, ascendant in the White House and, as of that afternoon, inside the Pentagon itself. Just a few hours earlier, on the first workday after the election was called for Biden, Trump had finally fired Esper. Milley and Pompeo were alarmed that the Defense Secretary was being replaced by Christopher Miller, until recently an obscure mid-level counterterrorism official at Trump’s National Security Council, who had arrived at the Pentagon flanked by a team of what appeared to be Trump’s political minders.

For Milley, this was an ominous development. From the beginning, he understood that “if the idea was to seize power,” as he told his staff, “you are not going to do this without the military.” Milley had studied the history of coups. They invariably required the takeover of what he referred to as the “power ministries”—the military, the national police, and the interior forces.

As soon as he’d heard about Esper’s ouster, Milley had rushed upstairs to the Secretary’s office. “This is complete bullshit,” he told Esper. Milley said that he would resign in protest. “You can’t,” Esper insisted. “You’re the only one left.” Once he cooled off, Milley agreed.

In the coming weeks, Milley would repeatedly convene the Joint Chiefs, to bolster their resolve to resist any dangerous political schemes from the White House now that Esper was out. He quoted Benjamin Franklin to them on the virtues of hanging together rather than hanging separately. He told his staff that, if need be, he and all the chiefs were prepared to “put on their uniforms and go across the river together”—to threaten to quit en masse—to prevent Trump from trying to use the military to stay in power illegally.

Soon after Miller arrived at the Pentagon, Milley met with him. “First things first here,” he told the new acting Defense Secretary, who had spent the previous few months running the National Counterterrorism Center. “You are one of two people in the United States now with the capability to launch nuclear weapons.”

A Pentagon official who had worked closely with Miller had heard a rumor about him potentially replacing Esper more than a week before the election. “My first instinct was this is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard,” the official recalled. But then he remembered how Miller had changed in the Trump White House. “He’s inclined to be a bit of a sail, and as the wind blows he will flap in that direction,” the official said. “He’s not an ideologue. He’s just a guy willing to do their bidding.” By coincidence, the official happened to be walking into the Pentagon just as Miller was entering—a video of Miller tripping on the stairs soon made the rounds. Accompanying him were three men who would, for a few weeks, at least, have immense influence over the most powerful military in the world: Kash Patel, Miller’s new chief of staff; Ezra Cohen, who would ascend to acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security; and Anthony Tata, a retired general and a talking head on Fox News, who would become the Pentagon’s acting head of policy.

It was an extraordinary trio. Tata’s claims to fame were calling Obama a “terrorist leader”—an assertion he later retracted—and alleging that a former C.I.A. director had threatened to assassinate Trump. Patel, a former aide to Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, had been accused of spreading conspiracy theories claiming that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 election. Both Trump’s third national-security adviser, John Bolton, and Bolton’s deputy, Charles Kupperman, had vociferously objected to putting Patel on the National Security Council staff, backing down only when told that it was a personal, “must-hire” order from the President. Still, Patel found his way around them to deal with Trump directly, feeding him packets of information on Ukraine, which was outside his portfolio, according to testimony during Trump’s first impeachment. (In a statement for this article, Patel called the allegations a “total fabrication.”) Eventually, Patel was sent to help Ric Grenell carry out a White House-ordered purge of the intelligence community.

Cohen, who had worked earlier in his career at the Defense Intelligence Agency under Michael Flynn, had initially been hired at the Trump National Security Council in 2017 but was pushed out after Flynn’s swift implosion as Trump’s first national-security adviser. When efforts were later made to rehire Cohen in the White House, Bolton’s deputy vowed to “put my badge on the table” and quit. “I am not going to hire somebody that is going to be another cancer in the organization, and Ezra is cancer,” Kupperman bluntly told Trump. In the spring of 2020, Cohen landed at the Pentagon, and following Trump’s post-election shakeup he assumed the top intelligence post at the Pentagon.

Milley had firsthand reason to be wary of these new Pentagon advisers. Just before the election, he and Pompeo were infuriated when a top-secret Navy SEAL Team 6 rescue mission to free an American hostage held in Nigeria nearly had to be cancelled at the last minute. The Nigerians had not formally approved the mission in advance, as required, despite Patel’s assurances. “Planes were already in the air and we didn’t have the approvals,” a senior State Department official recalled. The rescue team was kept circling while diplomats tried to track down their Nigerian counterparts. They managed to find them only minutes before the planes would have had to turn back. As a result, the official said, both Pompeo and Milley, who believed he had been personally lied to, “assigned ill will to that whole cabal.” The C.I.A. refused to have anything to do with Patel, Pompeo recalled to his State Department staff, and they should be cautious as well. “The Secretary thought these people were just wackadoodles, nuts, and dangerous,” a second senior State Department official said. (Patel denied their accounts, asserting, “I caused no delay at all.”)

After Esper’s firing, Milley summoned Patel and Cohen separately to his office to deliver stern lectures. Whatever machinations they were up to, he told each of them, “life looks really shitty from behind bars. And, whether you want to realize it or not, there’s going to be a President at exactly 1200 hours on the twentieth and his name is Joe Biden. And, if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.” Cohen denied that Milley said this to him, insisting it was a “very friendly, positive conversation.” Patel also denied it, asserting, “He worked for me, not the other way around.” But Milley told his staff that he warned both Cohen and Patel that they were being watched: “Don’t do it, don’t even try to do it. I can smell it. I can see it. And so can a lot of other people. And, by the way, the military will have no part of this shit.”

Part of the new team’s agenda soon became clear: making sure Trump fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to withdraw American troops from the “endless wars” overseas. Two days after Esper was fired, Patel slid a piece of paper across the desk to Milley during a meeting with him and Miller. It was an order, with Trump’s trademark signature in black Sharpie, decreeing that all four thousand five hundred remaining troops in Afghanistan be withdrawn by January 15th, and that a contingent of fewer than a thousand troops on a counterterrorism mission in Somalia be pulled out by December 31st.

Milley was stunned. “Where’d you get this?” he said.

Patel said that it had just come from the White House.

“Did you advise the President to do this?” he asked Patel, who said no.

“Did you advise the President to do this?” he asked Miller, who said no.

“Well, then, who advised the President to do it?” Milley asked. “By law, I’m the President’s adviser on military action. How does this happen without me rendering my military opinion and advice?”

With that, he announced that he was putting on his dress uniform and going to the White House, where Milley and the others ended up in the office of the national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien.

“Where did this come from?” Milley demanded, putting the withdrawal order on O’Brien’s desk.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen that before,” O’Brien said. “It doesn’t look like a White House memo.”

Keith Kellogg, a retired general serving as Pence’s national-security adviser, asked to see the document. “This is not the President,” he said. “The format’s not right. This is not done right.”

“Keith, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Milley said. “You’re telling me that someone’s forging the President of the United States’ signature?”

The order, it turned out, was not fake. It was the work of a rogue operation inside Trump’s White House overseen by Johnny McEntee, Trump’s thirty-year-old personnel chief, and supported by the President himself. The order had been drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and a Trump favorite from his television appearances, working with a junior McEntee aide. The order was then brought to the President, bypassing the national-security apparatus and Trump’s own senior officials, to get him to sign it.

Macgregor often appeared on Fox News demanding an exit from Afghanistan and accused Trump’s advisers of blocking the President from doing what he wanted. “He needs to send everyone out of the Oval Office who keeps telling him, ‘If you do that and something bad happens, it’s going to be blamed on you, Mr. President,’ ” Macgregor had told Tucker Carlson in January. “He needs to say, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ ”

On the day that Esper was fired, McEntee had invited Macgregor to his office, offered him a job as the new acting Defense Secretary’s senior adviser, and handed him a handwritten list of four priorities that, as Axios reported, McEntee claimed had come directly from Trump:

1. Get us out of Afghanistan.

2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.

3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.

4. Get us out of Africa.

Once the Afghanistan order was discovered, Trump’s advisers persuaded the President to back off, reminding him that he had already approved a plan for leaving over the following few months. “Why do we need a new plan?” Pompeo asked. Trump relented, and O’Brien then told the rest of the rattled national-security leadership that the order was “null and void.”

The compromise, however, was a new order that codified the drawdown to twenty-five hundred troops in Afghanistan by mid-January, which Milley and Esper had been resisting, and a reduction in the remaining three thousand troops in Iraq as well. The State Department was given one hour to notify leaders of those countries before the order was released.

Two nightmare scenarios kept running through Milley’s mind. One was that Trump might spark an external crisis, such as a war with Iran, to divert attention or to create a pretext for a power grab at home. The other was that Trump would manufacture a domestic crisis to justify ordering the military into the streets to prevent the transfer of power. Milley feared that Trump’s “Hitler-like” embrace of his own lies about the election would lead him to seek a “Reichstag moment.” In 1933, Hitler had seized on a fire in the German parliament to take control of the country. Milley now envisioned a declaration of martial law or a Presidential invocation of the Insurrection Act, with Trumpian Brown Shirts fomenting violence.

By late November, amid Trump’s escalating attacks on the election, Milley and Pompeo’s coöperation had deepened—a fact that the Secretary of State revealed to Attorney General Bill Barr over dinner on the night of December 1st. Barr had just publicly broken with Trump, telling the Associated Press in an interview that there was no evidence of election fraud sufficient to overturn the results. As they ate at an Italian restaurant in a Virginia strip mall, Barr recounted for Pompeo what he called “an eventful day.” And Pompeo told Barr about the extraordinary arrangement he had proposed to Milley to make sure that the country was in steady hands until the Inauguration: they would hold daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows. Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the “land the plane” phone calls.

“Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the twentieth of January,” Milley told his staff. “This is our obligation to this nation.” There was a problem, however. “Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.”

In public, Pompeo remained his staunchly pro-Trump self. The day after his secret visit to Milley’s house to commiserate about “the crazies” taking over, in fact, he refused to acknowledge Trump’s defeat, snidely telling reporters, “There will be a smooth transition—to a second Trump Administration.” Behind the scenes, however, Pompeo accepted that the election was over and made it clear that he would not help overturn the result. “He was totally against it,” a senior State Department official recalled. Pompeo cynically justified this jarring contrast between what he said in public and in private. “It was important for him to not get fired at the end, too, to be there to the bitter end,” the senior official said.

Both Milley and Pompeo were angered by the bumbling team of ideologues that Trump had sent to the Pentagon after the firing of Esper, a West Point classmate of Pompeo’s. The two, who were “already converging as fellow-travellers,” as one of the State officials put it, worked even more closely together as their alarm about Trump’s post-election conduct grew, although Milley was under no illusions about the Secretary of State. He believed that Pompeo, a longtime enabler of Trump who aspired to run for President himself, wanted “a second political life,” but that Trump’s final descent into denialism was the line that, at last, he would not cross. “At the end, he wouldn’t be a party to that craziness,” Milley told his staff. By early December, as they were holding their 8 A.M. land-the-plane calls, Milley was confident that Pompeo was genuinely trying to achieve a peaceful handover of power to Biden. But he was never sure what to make of Meadows. Was the chief of staff trying to land the plane or to hijack it?

Most days, Milley would also call the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who was hardly a usual interlocutor for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In the final weeks of the Administration, Cipollone, a true believer in Trump’s conservative agenda, was a principal actor in the near-daily drama over Trump’s various schemes to overturn his election defeat. After getting off one call with Cipollone, Milley told a visitor that the White House counsel was “constructive,” “not crazy,” and a force for “trying to keep guardrails around the President.”

Milley continued to reach out to Democrats close to Biden to assure them that he would not allow the military to be misused to keep Trump in power. One regular contact was Susan Rice, the former Obama national-security adviser, dubbed by Democrats the Rice Channel. He also spoke several times with Senator Angus King, an Independent from Maine. “My conversations with him were about the danger of some attempt to use the military to declare martial law,” King said. He took it upon himself to reassure fellow-senators. “I can’t tell you why I know this,” but the military will absolutely do the right thing, he would tell them, citing Milley’s “character and honesty.”

Milley had increasing reason to fear that such a choice might actually be forced upon him. In late November, Trump pardoned Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russia. Soon afterward, Flynn publicly suggested several extreme options for Trump: he could invoke martial law, appoint a special counsel, and authorize the military to “rerun” an election in the swing states. On December 18th, Trump hosted Flynn and a group of other election deniers in the Oval Office, where, for the first time in American history, a President would seriously entertain using the military to overturn an election. They brought with them a draft of a proposed Presidential order requiring the acting Defense Secretary—Christopher Miller—to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” voting machines and provide a final assessment of any findings in sixty days, well after the Inauguration was to take place. Later that night, Trump sent out a tweet beckoning his followers to descend on the capital to help him hold on to office. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” he wrote at 1:42 a.m. “Be there, will be wild!”

Milley’s fears of a coup no longer seemed far-fetched.

While Trump was being lobbied by “the crazies” to order troops to intervene at home, Milley and his fellow-generals were concerned that he would authorize a strike against Iran. For much of his Presidency, Trump’s foreign-policy hawks had agitated for a showdown with Iran; they accelerated their efforts when they realized that Trump might lose the election. In early 2020, when Mike Pence advocated taking tough measures, Milley asked why. “Because they are evil,” Pence said. Milley recalled replying, “Mr. Vice-President, there’s a lot of evil in the world, but we don’t go to war against all of it.” Milley grew even more nervous before the election, when he heard a senior official tell Trump that if he lost he should strike Iran’s nuclear program. At the time, Milley told his staff that it was a “What the fuck are these guys talking about?” moment. Now it seemed frighteningly possible.

Robert O’Brien, the national-security adviser, had been another frequent cheerleader for tough measures: “Mr. President, we should hit ’em hard, hit ’em hard with everything we have.” Esper, in his memoir, called “hit them hard” O’Brien’s “tedious signature phrase.” (O’Brien disputed this, saying, “The quote attributed to me is not accurate.”)

In the week of Esper’s firing, Milley was called to the White House to present various military options for attacking Iran and encountered a disturbing performance by Miller, the new acting Defense Secretary. Miller later told Jonathan Karl, of ABC, that he had intentionally acted like a “fucking madman” at the meeting, just three days into his tenure, pushing various escalatory scenarios for responding to Iran’s breakout nuclear capacities.

Miller’s behavior did not look intentional so much as unhelpful to Milley, as Trump kept asking for alternatives, including an attack inside Iran on its ballistic-weapons sites. Milley explained that this would be an illegal preëmptive act: “If you attack the mainland of Iran, you will be starting a war.” During another clash with Trump’s more militant advisers, when Trump was not present, Milley was even more explicit. “If we do what you’re saying,” he said, “we are all going to be tried as war criminals in The Hague.”

Trump often seemed more bluster than bite, and the Pentagon brass still believed that he did not want an all-out war, yet he continued pushing for a missile strike on Iran even after that November meeting. If Trump said it once, Milley told his staff, he said it a thousand times. “The thing he was most worried about was Iran,” a senior Biden adviser who spoke with Milley recalled. “Milley had had the experience more than once of having to walk the President off the ledge when it came to retaliating.”

The biggest fear was that Iran would provoke Trump, and, using an array of diplomatic and military channels, American officials warned the Iranians not to exploit the volatile domestic situation in the U.S. “There was a distinct concern that Iran would take advantage of this to strike at us in some way,” Adam Smith, the House Armed Services chairman, recalled.

Among those pushing the President to hit Iran before Biden’s Inauguration, Milley believed, was the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. On December 18th, the same day that Trump met with Flynn to discuss instituting martial law, Milley met with Netanyahu at his home in Jerusalem to personally urge him to back off with Trump. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley told him.

Two days later, on December 20th, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq fired nearly two dozen rockets at the American Embassy in Baghdad. Trump responded by publicly blaming Iran and threatening major retaliation if so much as a single American was killed. It was the largest attack on the Green Zone in more than a decade, and exactly the sort of provocation Milley had been dreading.

During the holidays, tensions with Iran escalated even more as the first anniversary of the American killing of Suleimani approached. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that “those who ordered the murder of General Soleimani” would “be punished.” Late on the afternoon of Sunday, January 3rd, Trump met with Milley, Miller, and his other national-security advisers on Iran. Pompeo and Milley discussed a worrisome new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. But, by the end, even Pompeo and O’Brien, the Iran hawks, opposed a military strike at this late hour in Trump’s Presidency. “He realized the clock ran out,” Milley told his staff. Trump, consumed with his election fight, backed off.

At the end of the meeting with his security chiefs, the President pulled Miller aside and asked him if he was ready for the upcoming January 6th protest. “It’s going to be a big deal,” Milley heard Trump tell Miller. “You’ve got enough people to make sure it’s safe for my people, right?” Miller assured him he did. This was the last time that Milley would ever see Trump.

On January 6th, Milley was in his office at the Pentagon meeting with Christine Wormuth, the lead Biden transition official for the Defense Department. In the weeks since the election, Milley had started displaying four networks at once on a large monitor across from the round table where he and Wormuth sat: CNN and Fox News, as well as the small pro-Trump outlets Newsmax and One America News Network, which had been airing election disinformation that even Fox would not broadcast. “You’ve got to know what the enemy is up to,” Milley had joked when Wormuth noticed his viewing habits at one of their meetings.

Milley and Wormuth that day were supposed to discuss the Pentagon’s plans to draw down U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as the Biden team’s hopes to mobilize large-scale Covid vaccination sites around the country. But, as they realized in horror what was transpiring on the screen in front of them, Milley was summoned to an urgent meeting with Miller and Ryan McCarthy, the Secretary of the Army. They had not landed the plane, after all. The plane was crashing.

Milley entered the Defense Secretary’s office at 2:30 p.m., and they discussed deploying the D.C. National Guard and mobilizing National Guard units from nearby states and federal agents under the umbrella of the Justice Department. Miller issued an order at 3:04 p.m. to send in the D.C. Guard.

But it was too late to prevent the humiliation: Congress had been overwhelmed by a mob of election deniers, white-supremacist militia members, conspiracy theorists, and Trump loyalists. Milley worried that this truly was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” the crisis that would allow the President to invoke martial law and maintain his grip on power.

From the secure facility at Fort McNair, where they had been brought by their protective details, congressional leaders called on the Pentagon to send forces to the Capitol immediately. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were suspicious of Miller: Whose side was this unknown Trump appointee on? Milley tried to reassure the Democratic leadership that the uniformed military was on the case, and not there to do Trump’s bidding. The Guard, he told them, was coming.

It was already after three-thirty by then, however, and the congressional leaders were furious that it was taking so long. They also spoke with Mike Pence, who offered to call the Pentagon as well. He reached Miller around 4 p.m., with Milley still in his office listening in. “Clear the Capitol,” Pence ordered.

Although it was the Vice-President who was seeking to defend the Capitol, Meadows wanted to pretend that Trump was the one taking action. He called Milley, telling him, “We have to kill the narrative that the Vice-President is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that the President is still in charge.” Milley later dismissed Meadows, whose spokesperson denied Milley’s account, as playing “politics, politics, politics.”

The Guard finally arrived at the Capitol by 5:40 p.m., “sprint speed” for the military, as Milley would put it, but not nearly fast enough for some members of Congress, who would spend months investigating why it took so long. By 7 p.m., a perimeter had been set up outside the Capitol, and F.B.I. and A.T.F. agents were going door to door in the Capitol’s many hideaways and narrow corridors, searching for any remaining rioters.

That night, waiting for Congress to return and formally ratify Trump’s electoral defeat, Milley called one of his contacts on the Biden team. He explained that he had spoken with Meadows and Pat Cipollone at the White House, and that he had been on the phone with Pence and the congressional leaders as well. But Milley never heard from the Commander-in-Chief, on a day when the Capitol was overrun by a hostile force for the first time since the War of 1812. Trump, he said, was both “shameful” and “complicit.”

Later, Milley would often think back to that awful day. “It was a very close-run thing,” the historically minded chairman would say, invoking the famous line of the Duke of Wellington after he had only narrowly defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Trump and his men had failed in their execution of the plot, failed in part by failing to understand that Milley and the others had never been Trump’s generals and never would be. But their attack on the election had exposed a system with glaring weaknesses. “They shook the very Republic to the core,” Milley would eventually reflect. “Can you imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could have done?”

This is drawn from “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.”

An earlier version of this article mistakenly attributed a quote to Mark Esper’s book.

The New Yorker · by Peter Baker · August 8, 2022

12. Ukrainian resistance grows in Russian-occupied areas

Resistance. Among the population. Against an invading and occupying power. Just as important in the 21st Century as throughout all the preceding centuries.

Ukrainian resistance grows in Russian-occupied areas

AP · by YURAS KARMANAU and HANNA ARHIROVA · August 9, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — In a growing challenge to Russia’s grip on occupied areas of southeastern Ukraine, guerrilla forces loyal to Kyiv are killing pro-Moscow officials, blowing up bridges and trains, and helping the Ukrainian military by identifying key targets.

The spreading resistance has eroded Kremlin control of those areas and threatened its plans to hold referendums in various cities as a move toward annexation by Russia.

“Our goal is to make life unbearable for the Russian occupiers and use any means to derail their plans,” said Andriy, a 32-year-old coordinator of the guerrilla movement in the southern Kherson region.

A member of the Zhovta Strichka — or “Yellow Ribbon” — resistance group, Andriy spoke to The Associated Press on condition of not being fully identified to avoid being tracked down by the Russians. The group takes its name from one of the two national colors of Ukraine, and its members use ribbons of that hue to mark potential targets for guerrilla attacks.

Ukrainian troops recently used a U.S.-supplied multiple rocket launcher known as HIMARS to hit a strategic bridge on the Dnieper River in Kherson, severing the Russians’ main supply link. The city of 500,000 people, seized by Russian troops early in the war, has been flooded with leaflets from the resistance, threatening Moscow-backed officials.

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Just before the bridge attack, leaflets appeared, saying, “If HIMARS can’t do it, a partisan will help.”

“We are giving the Ukrainian military precise coordinates for various targets, and the guerrillas’ assistance makes the new long-range weapons, particularly HIMARS, even more powerful,” Andriy told the AP. “We are invisible behind the Russian lines, and this is our strength.”

As Ukrainian forces step up attacks in the region and reclaim some areas west of the Dnieper River, the guerrilla activity also has increased.

They coordinate with the Ukrainian military’s Special Operations Forces, which helps them develop strategies and tactics. Those forces also select targets and set up a website with tips on how to organize resistance, prepare ambushes and elude arrest. A network of weapons caches and secret hideouts was established in occupied areas.

Bombs have been placed near administrative buildings, at officials’ homes and even on their routes to work.

An explosive placed on a tree went off as a vehicle carrying Kherson prison chief Yevgeny Sobolev passed by, although he survived the attack. A police vehicle was hit by a shrapnel bomb, seriously wounding two officers, one of whom later died. The deputy head of the local administration in Nova Kakhovka died of wounds after being gunned down over the weekend.

Guerrillas have repeatedly tried to kill Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Kherson region’s Russia-backed temporary administration, offering a bounty of 1 million hryvnias (about $25,000). His assistant, Pavel Slobodchikov, was shot and killed in his vehicle, and another official, Dmytry Savluchenko, was killed by a car bomb.

The attacks have prompted Moscow to send anti-guerrilla units to Kherson, Saldo said.

“Every day, special units from Russia detect two or three caches with weapons for terrorist activities,” Saldo said on his messaging app channel. “The seizure of weapons help reduce the threat of sabotage.”

Early in the occupation, thousands of residents staged peaceful protests. But the Russian military quickly disbanded them and arrested activists, radicalizing the resistance.

Wedding photographer-turned-activist Oleksandr Kharchikov, 41, of Skadovsk, said he was beaten and tortured after being arrested in a Russian security sweep.

“The Russians tortured me for a long time. They beat me with a baseball bat, they pinched my fingers with pliers and tortured me with electric shocks,” Kharchikov said in a telephone interview. “I suffered a concussion and a broken rib, but I didn’t give them any information, and that saved me.”

Kharchikov spent 155 days under Russian occupation until he escaped.

“The repressions are intensifying. They are creating unbearable conditions for the Ukrainians, making it increasingly difficult to survive under Russian occupation,” he told the AP.

The Russians were offering 10,000 rubles ($165) to anyone applying for Russian citizenship to strengthen their grip on the region, he said.

Moscow has introduced the ruble, set up Russian cellular networks and cut off Ukrainian television in the area. Giant screens showing Russian TV broadcasts have been placed on the main squares of cities.

Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov, who also spent a long time in Russian captivity, told the AP that about 500 Ukrainian activists were detained, with many tortured. Some vanished for months after their arrest.

In May and June, guerrillas blew up two railway bridges in Melitopol and derailed two Russian military trains, Fedorov said.

“The resistance movement is pursuing three goals -- to destroy Russian weapons and means of supplying them, discrediting and intimidating the occupiers and their collaborators, and informing Ukrainian special services about enemy positions,” he added.

Russia responded by bolstering patrols and conducting regular sweeps for those suspected of guerrilla links. During such raids, they check phones and arrest those with Ukrainian symbols or photos of relatives in military uniforms.

“In a mopping-up operation, the Russians seal the entire neighborhood, halt traffic to and from it, and methodically go from one apartment to another. If they find any Ukrainian symbols or any link to the Ukrainian military, they put all family members in a filtration camp,” Fedorov said.

“In the best case, people are told: ‘Get out of here if you are against Russia,’ but it also happens that some people disappear,” he said.

Of Melitopol’s prewar population of 150,000, more than 60,000 people have left.

Pro-Moscow officials are preparing for a possible referendum on Melitopol and other occupied areas joining Russia, conducting security raids and handing out Russian passports, Fedorov said.

“We will thwart the Russian referendum. We won’t allow voting under Russian gun barrels,” he said, adding that no more than 10% of the population sympathizes with Moscow, and half has fled.

Guerrillas have tied yellow ribbons on buildings where voting is to be held, warning residents that they could be targeted by bombs during balloting.

The resistance ranges from radical activists to teachers and retirees who sing Ukrainian songs in parks and secretly wear yellow and blue ribbons.

“The Russians were expecting that they would be met with flowers, but they faced the fact that most people consider themselves Ukrainians and are ready to offer resistance in various forms — from collecting information to burning and blowing up the occupiers,” said Oleksii Aleksandrov, who owned a restaurant in the southern port of Mariupol.

In one recent gesture of defiance in Mariupol, a young man wrapped in a Ukrainian flag stood on a street next to the theater destroyed by Russian bombs. The photo spread through Ukrainian media, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed him in an address to the nation.

“It was a very brave thing to do, and I would like to thank him for his action,” Zelenskyy said. “This man is one of many people who are waiting for Ukraine’s comeback and won’t accept the occupation under any circumstances.”

Although pro-Moscow sentiment is strong in Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland of the Donbas, a guerrilla movement also has emerged there.

Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said six Russian troops were wounded last month when their vehicle was blown up by guerrillas in the city of Sievierodonetsk soon after its seizure. They also have targeted railways, disrupting Russian munitions shipments and other supplies.

“The guerrillas have acted quite successfully,” Haidai told the AP. “They haven’t only spread leaflets. They also have destroyed infrastructure facilities. It helps a lot to slow down the Russian attacks and advances.”

Observers say the guerrilla movement varies by region and that it is in the interest of both sides to exaggerate its scope.

“The Russians do it to justify their repressions on the occupied territories while the Ukrainians seek to demoralize the Russian forces and extol their victories,” said Vadim Karasev, head of the Kyiv-based Institute of Global Strategies think tank. “It’s hard to believe the tales about Ukrainians feeding Russian soldiers with poisoned cakes, but sometimes myths work better than facts.”

___

Yuras Karmanau reported from Tallinn, Estonia.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · by YURAS KARMANAU and HANNA ARHIROVA · August 9, 2022

13. Russian disinformation spreading in new ways despite bans

I know that every time I read Russian disinformation" I tend to post this excerpt from the 2017 NSS. But they are words worth heeding.

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

Russian disinformation spreading in new ways despite bans

AP · by DAVID KLEPPER · August 9, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — After Russia invaded Ukraine last February, the European Union moved to block RT and Sputnik, two of the Kremlin’s top channels for spreading propaganda and misinformation about the war.

Nearly six months later, the number of sites pushing that same content has exploded as Russia found ways to evade the ban. They’ve rebranded their work to disguise it. They’ve shifted some propaganda duties to diplomats. And they’ve cut and pasted much of the content on new websites — ones that until now had no obvious ties to Russia.

NewsGuard, a New York-based firm that studies and tracks online misinformation, has now identified 250 websites actively spreading Russian disinformation about the war, with dozens of new ones added in recent months.

Claims on these sites include allegations that Ukraine’s army has staged some deadly Russian attacks to curry global support, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is faking public appearances, or that Ukrainian refugees are committing crimes in Germany and Poland.

Some of the sites pose as independent think tanks or news outlets. About half are English-language, while others are in French, German or Italian. Many were set up long before the war and were not obviously tied to the Russian government until they suddenly began parroting Kremlin talking points.

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“They may be establishing sleeper sites,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. Sleeper sites are websites created for a disinformation campaign that lay largely dormant, slowly building an audience through innocuous or unrelated posts, and then switching to propaganda or disinformation at an appointed time.

While NewsGuard’s analysis found that much of the disinformation about the war in Ukraine is coming from Russia, it did find instances of false claims with a pro-Ukrainian bent. They included claims about a hotshot fighter ace known as the Ghost of Kyiv that officials later admitted was a myth.

YouTube, TikTok and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, all pledged to remove RT and Sputnik from their platforms within the European Union. But researchers have found that in some cases all Russia had to do to evade the ban was to post it from a different account.

The Disinformation Situation Center, a Europe-based coalition of disinformation researchers, found that some RT video content was showing up on social media under a new brand name and logo. In the case of some video footage, the RT brand was simply removed from the video and reposted on a new YouTube channel not covered by the EU’s ban.

More aggressive content moderation of social media could make it harder for Russia to circumvent the ban, according to Felix Kartte, a senior adviser at Reset, a U.K.-based nonprofit that has funded the Disinformation Situation Center’s work and is critical of social media’s role in democratic discourse.

“Rather than putting effective content moderation systems in place, they are playing whack-a-mole with the Kremlin’s disinformation apparatus,” Kartte said.

YouTube’s parent company did not immediately respond to questions seeking comment about the ban.

In the EU, officials are trying to shore up their defenses. This spring the EU approved legislation that would require tech companies to do more to root out disinformation. Companies that fail could face big fines.

European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova last month called disinformation “a growing problem in the EU, and we really have to take stronger measures.”

The proliferation of sites spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine shows that Russia had a plan in case governments or tech companies tried to restrict RT and Sputnik. That means Western leaders and tech companies will have to do more than shutter one or two websites if they hope to stop the flow of Kremlin disinformation.

“The Russians are a lot smarter,” said NewsGuard’s other co-CEO, Steven Brill.

AP · by DAVID KLEPPER · August 9, 2022

14. Zelensky calls on West to ban all Russian travelers

An interesting proposal.

Zelensky calls on West to ban all Russian travelers

The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · August 8, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine — The way to stop Russia from annexing any more of Ukraine’s territory, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday, is for Western countries to announce that they would ban all Russian citizens in response.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, Zelensky said that “the most important sanctions are to close the borders — because the Russians are taking away someone else’s land.” He said Russians should “live in their own world until they change their philosophy.”

Russian leaders have signaled they could hold annexation votes in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s east and south — in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions — on Sept. 11, alongside regional elections already scheduled to take place. Russian officials say those votes would legitimize Russia’s claim to those areas, but critics say the votes would be a Russian-manipulated farce.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and senior White House officials have warned that any attempted land grab through “sham” referendums would bring “additional costs imposed upon Russia.”

It is unclear what those consequences would be. Much as they did before Russia invaded on Feb. 24, Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials are pushing their Western partners to announce sanctions as a deterrent. Zelensky told The Post on Monday that the sanctions already imposed on Russia for its unprovoked war in Ukraine are “weak” compared with closing borders to Russian citizens for one year and a full embargo on the purchase of Russian energy.

Russian airlines have been banned from flying over most of Europe and North America, which has made it more challenging for Russians to travel abroad. But there is no blanket ban in place such as Zelensky is suggesting; Russian citizens are still free to apply for a visa to visit the United States, for example.

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told reporters Monday that she believes issuing tourist visas to Russians should be restricted and called for a European Union-wide ban.

Some critics have argued that banning all Russians would unfairly impact those who have left the country because they disagree with President Vladimir Putin’s government and his decision to attack Ukraine.

Zelensky said such distinctions don’t matter: “Whichever kind of Russian … make them to go Russia.”

“They’ll understand then,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘This [war] has nothing to do with us. The whole population can’t be held responsible, can it?’ It can. The population picked this government and they’re not fighting it, not arguing with it, not shouting at it.”

“Don’t you want this isolation?” Zelensky added, speaking as if he were addressing Russians directly. “You’re telling the whole world that it must live by your rules. Then go and live there. This is the only way to influence Putin.”

Zelensky spoke for an hour in his presidential office, where hallways are kept dark and lined with sandbags to protect against attack. Zelensky wore a black T-shirt with the Ukrainian trident symbol, rather than his usual military-green fatigues. He was leaning forward and animated as he answered questions, gesturing with his hands, tapping the white table to make his points.

One challenge for Ukrainian officials pushing for strong measures to prevent a referendum is explaining why it would mark a turning point in the war. The vast majority of the international community wouldn’t recognize such a vote or Russia’s subsequent annexation. But analysts say that once Russians have officially laid claim to territory and declared it part of Russia, it would erase any possibility of Russian troops withdrawing without being forced out militarily.

Ukrainian officials understand Russia’s thinking from experience. Russian forces invaded Crimea in 2014, held a vote that was dismissed internationally and have had control of the peninsula ever since. Officials in Kyiv still complain that the Western response wasn’t strong enough then.

Annexation would also complicate matters for Western countries that have been providing Ukraine with weapons. Officials in Washington and European capitals have carefully sought to limit the weapons they provide for strikes on Russian forces inside Ukraine. But if Moscow considered strikes in post-referendum Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as the targeting of Russian territory, it could risk dragging NATO countries into the conflict.

Zelensky has said that annexing territory would rule out negotiations with Russia.

Ukrainian officials are also concerned that Russia will move up its referendum timetable in response to Ukraine threatening a military counteroffensive in the region. Ukrainian forces have been steadily gaining back ground around the city of Kherson, the first major city Russia captured and the only regional capital.

Military advances are often one small village at a time. That progress has been aided some by Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS launchers, to damage Antonovsky Bridge, which is key to Russia’s efforts to resupply its troops.

Russia appears to be shifting its troops and equipment south in response, potentially setting up a military conflict for the key Black Sea port that analysts say could be key to the trajectory of the war.Zelensky said he wanted Russia to know that regaining control of Kherson was just a first step: “Let them know that as soon as we have enough forces and means, we’re going to de-occupy all of our territories.”

The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · August 8, 2022

15. Dozen Pentagon nominees stalled as Senate leaves for August recess

Politicians being political.

Dozen Pentagon nominees stalled as Senate leaves for August recess

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · August 8, 2022

WASHINGTON – The Senate on Sunday adjourned for the monthlong August recess without confirming any of the 12 Defense Department nominees that have become log-jammed in the Senate amid Republican holds.

The nominees include key Defense Department positions such as the inspector general, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, an acquisitions official and another who would oversee industrial policy.

“It leaves big gaps, particularly in many of the key acquisition positions,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., told Defense News. “And of course, it takes away time from other people who have to fill in.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has blocked unanimous consent requests on the Senate floor for most of these otherwise noncontroversial nominees as part of his year-long hold on confirming all Pentagon and State Department nominees in protest of the administration’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.

And Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, announced a hold last month on the three nominees in the Armed Services Committee who would work on defense acquisitions and industrial base policy.

Sullivan placed the holds in protest of the Biden administration s decision to stall Alaska’s Ambler Mining District industrial access road, which he said would inhibit the mining of critical minerals – a market where China’s domination has created several vulnerabilities in the defense supply chain.

“This decision was a huge setback for our domestic critical mineral supply chains, really undermining our national security,” Sullivan said last month. “I haven’t been able to get answers from anybody in the Pentagon or at the Department of the Interior.”

The nominees that Sullivan has held over in committee include Radha Plumb as deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and Laura Taylor-Kale as assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy. He is also holding Brendan Owens as assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment.

Sullivan called all three nominees “well-qualified” but vowed to keep the holds in place until the Biden administration answers his queries as to why it blocked the industrial access road for the Ambler Mining District.

“One of the discoveries we’ve made – that everyone’s made – is that our industrial base is not as strong as we thought it was,” said Reed.

The Hawley Blockade

Reed went on the Senate floor last month in an attempt to confirm three other key Defense Department nominees by unanimous consent, only for Hawley to stymie his efforts.

Hawley’s objection to Reed’s request blocked the confirmation of Robert Storch to serve as the Defense Department’s inspector general – a key post that has not had a Senate-confirmed official since January 2016. Hawley also blocked Reed from confirming Tia Johnson as a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces and Russell Rumbaugh as the Navy comptroller.

“I have always said that it is better for national security and for our country to have Senate-confirmed officials leading the Department of Defense,” James Inhofe, R-Okla., the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, told Defense News. “Every member has a right to ask for a vote, and it’s up to the Majority Leader to schedule those votes, so of course I’d like to see those votes happen soon.”

Byzantine Senate procedures ensure that floor votes eat up hours or even days of valuable floor time that can slow-walk the majority party’s agenda. This makes the majority party reluctant to use precious floor time on noncontroversial, lower-level nominees that would typically pass with bipartisan unanimous consent requests.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., did schedule a floor vote in May for Christopher Lowman to serve as the assistant secretary of defense for sustainment – a position deemed particularly vital given its role in overseeing Ukraine aid delivery logistics.

The Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Lowman to the post 94-1. Hawley was the lone no vote after blocking several requests to confirm Lowman by unanimous consent in the months before the floor vote.

Hawley first insisted he would keep his holds in place until Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken resign over the Afghanistan withdrawal.

In recent months, he has scaled back his ultimatum and now says he will lift the hold in exchange for a public hearing on last year’s Abbey Gate attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport that killed 13 American service members and more than 160 Afghan civilians.

“We need to have a hearing in public – not behind closed doors, not closed press – we at a minimum need to have a hearing on CENTCOM’s report on the Abbey Gate disaster,” Hawley told Defense News. “And we need to have the principals testify.”

Reed has pushed back against scheduling such a hearing, noting that the Senate has held a combined total of seven public and private hearings since the withdrawal and that the Fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act mandates quarterly briefings on the security situation in Afghanistan. But Hawley remains unsatisfied.

“They don’t want to talk about the withdrawal,” said Hawley. “They don’t want any public accountability. They will do it behind closed doors, but they don’t want any public accountability.”

About Bryant Harris

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and national security in Washington since 2014. He previously wrote for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

16. The Rise and Fall of Village Stability Operations in Afghanistan: Lessons for Future Irregular Warfare Campaigns

What most of these analyses overlook is what Special Forces were doing in the spring of 2002. Although not named VSO they were conducting these types of operations. In actuality they were conducting a variation of US FID doctrine of "remote area operations." BUt when the Joint Task Force 180 arrived in the summer of 2002 they were no longer authorized to conduct such operations.

Remote area operations are operations undertaken in insurgent-controlled or contested areas to establish islands of popular support for the HN government and deny support to the insurgents. They differ from consolidation operations in that they are not designed to establish permanent HN government control over the area.

Remote areas may be populated by ethnic, religious, or other isolated minority groups. They may be in the interior of the HN or near border areas where major infiltration routes exist.

Remote area operations normally involve the use of specially trained paramilitary or irregular forces. SF teams support remote area operations to interdict insurgent activity, destroy insurgent base areas in the remote area, and demonstrate that the HN government has not conceded control to the insurgents. They also collect and report information concerning insurgent intentions in more populated areas. In this case, SF teams advise and assist irregular HN forces operating in a manner similar to the insurgents themselves, but with access to superior combat support (CS) and combat service support (CSS) resources.

(From FM 3-05.202 Foreign Internal Defense 2007.) (NOTE: No longer in current FID Doctrine)

I would submit that if this had been the template for SF operations in Afghanistan we might have seen some different outcomes at least in local remote areas.

The Rise and Fall of Village Stability Operations in Afghanistan: Lessons for Future Irregular Warfare Campaigns - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by Sam Wilkins · August 9, 2022

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In 2009, as American interest focused once again on Afghanistan, seasoned special operations forces (SOF) commanders conceived a plan they believed could transform the floundering war effort. Fueled by frustration with the status quo, the difficulty of holding terrain after clearing operations, and a belief that “there has to be more to solving this problem than killing people,” they called for a return to the Vietnam-era experience of the special operations community by arming progovernment militias to secure rural areas. This bottom-up local defense initiative that resulted took shape as the Village Stability Operations (VSO) and Afghan Local Police (ALP) programs. Both active from 2010 to 2020, the two programs were closely linked—VSO was the tool with which SOF worked to set the conditions for ALP to be established in Afghan districts, and the two programs were largely interdependent and operationalized in tandem.

This innovative approach achieved tangible security outcomes in key and contested districts. While systematic examination of the VSO and ALP programs remains limited, research from RAND and a working paper by Stanford PhD student Jon Bate find a reduction in insurgent attacks in districts where ALP units were set up. American commanders, including General David Petraeus, offered effusive praise for the program, noting its ability to flip key districts away from supporting the Taliban. Sviewed ALP units as, in the words of one analyst, “enemy number one” due to their ability to detect and stop attempts to infiltrate local communities.

A large part of VSO/ALP’s success depended upon the careful condition setting, training, and oversight by SOF. However, due to the pressure to achieve results prior to the Obama administration’s planned conclusion of the American combat mission in 2014, VSO/ALP morphed from a targeted program to an industrial-scale enterprise, with deleterious effects. Scaling up a program of this nature proved dangerous in the absence of deliberate monitoring and evaluation efforts. Leveraging local forces should remain a key element of US irregular warfare (IW) capabilities, but for such efforts to succeed, practitioners must remember the second SOF Truth—“Quality is better than quantity.” Future bottom-up security programs will require discrimination and patience, given the dangers inherent in arming local forces.

Origins and Program Design

The US military entered 2009 frustrated with ongoing efforts in Afghanistan but hopeful that new resources and tactics could turn the tide of the war. Influential defense thinkers and practitioners argued that the top-down efforts to build a centralized regime and national army remained out of step with Afghanistan’s cultural traditions and fragmented politics. “Politics remains a local game,” RAND’s Seth Jones wrote in 2009. Instead of copying the top-down model, which doomed efforts from reformist kings like Amanullah Khan to the Soviet-backed governments, Jones and others called for a bottom-up strategy.

SOF commanders echoed these concerns, angry with the limited progress despite repeated deployments to Afghanistan. “For years we talked about clear, hold, and build,” one commander complained in 2008. “Hold?” he continued. “We had never done it—and we weren’t going to do it without locals.” This frustration and desire for a new approach gave rise to VSO/ALP.

VSO planners envisioned small SOF teams embedded in villages and partnering with locals to resist Taliban control. This approach sought to adapt American strategy to the reality of Afghanistan’s highly localized and often fissiparous politics. By empowering local actors, planners also believed they could counteract the Taliban’s appeal to Afghanistan’s disadvantaged minority tribes and subtribes—groups traditionally ignored (or preyed upon) by the central government and wary of government control.

These planners sought to impose careful constraints, such as the use of a district-level shura, or consultative council, to vet and approve all recruits and commanders, to prevent the emergence of rogue militias and predatory warlords. The fledgling program stressed selectivity. Plans outlined how commanders should establish locations both based on their strategic relevance and in response to requests from locals for assistance in protecting their communities against the Taliban. Given limits in special operations manpower, planners emphasized that “we cannot establish [village stability platforms] everywhere.”

The program spread from a highly successful pilot effort in the tough security environment of Wardak province in 2009 to eleven key districts across the country by April 2010. Based on the tangible security progress achieved at the initial sites, then Brigadier General Austin “Scotty” Miller approved a national-level version of the program, which subsequently received endorsements from the theater commander, Petraeus, as well as Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Karzai agreed to authorize a force of ten thousand local policemen across the country, but insisted that the program fall under the Ministry of the Interior as an additional check on the reemergence of warlordism.

From Local to Industrial

This targeted, small-scale, and village-based approach, however, quickly expanded and evolved. In the fall of 2010, Petraeus sought, and Karzai approved, an increase in the program’s target size from ten thousand to thirty thousand local policemen. To support this growth, the special operations component in Afghanistan nearly doubled in size, from 2,900 servicemembers to over 5,400 by mid-2012. Miller received an additional thirteen SOF tactical teams from US Special Operations Command to execute this expansion. Petraeus also asked the Pentagon for two infantry battalions to augment the program and “extend security while we can, while we have the forces.” Of note, contemporary US Army Special Operations Command senior leadership reportedly opposed this decision to employ conventional forces to grow VSO/ALP due to fears of diluting SOF capabilities.

By March 2011, this beefed-up force created a total of forty-six VSO/ALP sites. At the tactical level, these sites produced security gains, measured in both increased territorial control and a reduction of Taliban attacks on coalition and Afghan forces. According to a 2012 RAND study, within ten months of VSO/ALP site establishment, violence levels (measured in attacks against civilians or coalition forces) decreased by a statistically significant amount. More recently, Jon Bate’s preliminary findings suggest that site establishment caused what he calls tactical substitution, a reduction of direct-fire attacks but an increase in attacks using improvised explosive devices, as well as geographic substitution, a phenomenon where insurgents shifted attacks to neighboring districts without ALP. However, due to a lack of systematic evaluation using common metrics, the program’s tactical and strategic impacts—to say nothing of ALP’s impact on villager well-being—remains unclear.

The May 2011 raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the subsequent announcement from the White House of the impending end of America’s combat mission in Afghanistan by the end of 2014 augured new changes to the program. But instead of focusing on improving existing sites in preparation for a US departure, the program would instead double in size over the next year. While VSO planners envisioned the program as a response to genuine local requests for defense, in practice most sites in this period were selected by American commanders. In many cases, units cut corners in the nomination and vetting processes. When then Major General Tony Thomas assumed command of an expanded special operations headquarters in Afghanistan in March 2012, he inherited 103 VSO/ALP sites. These sites were now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, including twenty-seven sites in the then comparably tranquil Regional Command North and Regional Command West.

The accelerated American withdrawal spurred further modifications to the VSO/ALP program. Many VSO sites would now open and “transition” within a six-month timeframe—the length of a tactical special operations unit’s deployment—leaving the newly created local police operating independently of SOF mentorship and oversight. In other areas, SOF teams began living in larger conventional bases for force protection and commuting to their villages, which were sometimes in different districts altogether. Training for ALP also transitioned out of their home villages and into provincial training centers.

Overexpansion and its Adverse Effects

This imperative for speed led some leaders in 2011 and 2012 to bypass key VSO/ALP safety measures such as shura vetting, living in villages, and continued monitoring and evaluation. This rapid growth caused significant problems—especially as local US commanders diverged from the program’s careful template in the haste to rapidly establish new sites. General Petraeus later noted to the Special Investigator General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that “VSO expansion was absolutely driven by the timeline.” One anonymous official told SIGAR that “both at the strategic and the operational level, doing it right took a backseat to doing it fast.” For example, in Zabul’s Shajoy District, local leaders told analysts that American commanders simply announced the ALP commander in 2011 without vetting by a tribal shura. This individual reportedly held previous connections with SOF from his time in the Afghan National Police. He proved deeply corrupt and predatory—driving many locals to embrace Taliban rule.

The rapid expansion of the program also reflected the genuine enthusiasm of tribal and ethnic leaders for ALP, particularly as the reality of the US withdrawal came into focus. These tribal local power brokers, however, sometimes proved more interested in using the ALP program to aggregate power for their tribal, local, or ethnic groups than in employing this capability against the Taliban. Research by anthropologists such as David Edwards and Thomas Barfield indicates that this type of behavior is inherent to, and rewarded by, the tribal system. Indeed, Afghans expect their tribal leaders to use their influence and position to aggregate power and prosperity for the tribe.

The principal-agent dilemma as applied to counterinsurgency environments, pioneered by Stephen Biddle and others, further illuminates these dynamics. This argument posits that differences in objectives between the foreign sponsor (the principal) and host-nation elites (the agent) can badly skew counterinsurgency efforts. In the case of VSO/ALP, both principal (the US military) and agent (tribal leaders) proved eager to create ALP. However, US objectives—the creation of a bottom-up rural security force to check Taliban gains—frequently diverged from the interests of Afghan tribal leaders.

In many areas in the country’s north, influential Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek warlords and local commanders reflagged their existing militias under the ALP program. Reflagging provided a measure of official impunity for predatory actions—to say nothing of American financial and material support. In other areas, the program counteracted efforts to empower Afghan government actors, such as district governors and Afghan National Army commanders. Tribal power brokers took full advantage of these discrepancies. In Garmser district in 2011, for instance, Carter Malkasian and other US advisors convinced Wakil Manan, an influential tribal leader, to disarm his militia, only to see him resurrect this force under the ALP program six months later.

The demands of the American withdrawal created new pressures on the program. Major General Edward Reeder told SIGAR that by 2013, “ALP became outer-ring security to protect urban areas along the ring road,” referring to the critical Highway 1 that connects Afghanistan’s regions. Several unnamed SOF officials interviewed by SIGAR echoed this assessment and noted that “by September 2013, the priority of VSO shifted to keeping the lights on and keeping HWY 1 open.” Other officials described to SIGAR their frustration at ALP being increasingly used in static checkpoints away from their villages—despite Ministry of the Interior regulations that later required ALP to be used within one kilometer of their home villages. Unsurprisingly, the employment of ALP on roadside checkpoints exacerbated incidents of predatory corruption and illegal taxation.

Nevertheless, senior commanders, such as General John Allen, who led the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from 2011 to 2013, viewed ALP as a vital counterinsurgency tool. Allen later praised the program as “one of the most effective” stabilization programs initiated by ISAF. Allen recognized that “we went from an end-state to an end-date,” but saw an expanded ALP as a vital component of his overall strategy. Meanwhile, some Taliban leaders viewed the program as highly disruptive due to ALP members’ knowledge of local and tribal dynamics. According to intelligence disclosed in US congressional testimony, one Taliban commander told his forces that “if you can kill an ALP commander it’s worth 10 coalition soldiers.” Neutral observers like the United Nations Assistance Mission–Afghanistan also praised the program, noting in 2014 that “most communities continued to welcome the stability and enhanced security provided by the ALP.”

While ALP in some areas continued to represent a valuable bulwark against the Taliban, credible reports of abuses by ALP increased as the safety measures installed by VSO/ALP’s designers eroded. The rapid expansion of VSO/ALP and corresponding weakening of programmatic safety measures diminished US oversight and proved counterproductive for America’s long-term stabilization goals. At some hastily created sites, local vetting disappeared entirely. Some of these rapidly created and unsupervised ALP increasingly preyed upon the civilian population, engaged in tribal infighting, and smuggled opium. Ultimately, one 2013 study with extensive access to American SOF leaders estimated that roughly one-third of ALP units increased the security of their communities, one-third proved counterproductive and predatory, and one-third sat somewhere in the middle.

Lessons for Future Irregular Warfare Campaigns

Careful examination of the VSO/ALP program illuminates several insights into the potential and pitfalls of bottom-up IW efforts. Working by, with, and through local and tribal forces remains a potent—but potentially perilous—approach. When considering such programs in the future, American military leaders should carefully consider three insights from the experience of VSO/ALP.

The first is to resist the industrialization of SOF efforts. While US Special Operations Command morphed into an immense enterprise in post 9/11 era, SOF efforts are still best applied discriminately and patiently. This emphasis on selectivity—of partners, of terrain, and of effort—ensures that limited SOF resources are wisely employed. Adherence to the second SOF Truth that “quality is better than quantity” can prevent risky expansions of carefully designed programs. With quality as the goal, future SOF leaders should abstain from the temptation to employ conventional infantry forces to amplify IW programs. Additionally, while centralized training centers may be appropriate for partnered infantry or commando forces, a train-and-release model is poorly suited to developing and monitoring irregular forces. As one recent Joint Special Operations University study of the program aptly noted, “over time,” the desire to mass-produce ALP “outpaced an understanding of what VSO was all about.” While increased quality control would have reduced the number of available VSO platforms to around sixty (from the over 170 ALP sites eventually created), it could have served as a forcing function to ensure both continual monitoring and placement in only the most strategically significant districts.

A quality-centered approach also eases the difficulty of the second key task, ensuring local efforts are sustainable. Such IW programs must be designed to endure over long time horizons and withstand changing strategic conditions. As a recent Center for Army Lessons Learned study of ALP concluded, these programs must include deliberate transition plans to either integrate formations into regular military elements of the partner nation or demobilize fighters. In the case of ALP, fewer outposts might have proved sustainable beyond the withdrawal of the bulk of American conventional forces in 2014. Retention of a select number of robust ALP sites under US supervision could have served several purposes. First, it would have limited the worst abuses of the tribal system by providing better monitoring and mentorship of tribal forces. While this would not have stopped all predatory behavior by ALP, it would have better mitigated the risk of civilian harm. Second, these sites might have served as sentinels for a lighter but more sustainable US presence. Such a constellation of SOF-ALP outposts might have helped hold key terrain and limited the need for SOF-partnered Afghan commando forces to recapture districts from the Taliban from 2014 to 2020.

A third insight is that continual mentorship by SOF in the field is typically required to mitigate the principal-agent problems involved in the divergent interests of US and host-nation forces. Despite technological advances that enable remote advising, accompanying local forces into combat remains the gold standard for developing and mentoring partner forces. Such efforts should remain tightly controlled, amply resourced, and sustainably scaled. Accompaniment of a select number of partners means deeper relationships, more capable partners, more enabler support (such as intelligence, medical teams, artillery, and air support) per site, and a lower likelihood of abuses by the partner force. These conditions allow for continued security gains, while mitigating the risks to US forces engaged in these efforts.

A Potent Tool, but No Panacea

Like much of America’s war in Afghanistan, the VSO and ALP programs remain underexamined. A complete assessment of their strengths, weaknesses, and impact remains unwritten, although recent efforts represent a solid foundation for future work. IW practitioners and scholars should integrate this analysis with the emerging body of social science literature and data that examine the impact of progovernment militias, paramilitary groups, and state-sponsored proxy forces.

This body of early reflection, however, suggests the importance of deliberate site selection, sustainability, and continued boots-on-the-ground advisor presence when designing bottom-up irregular warfare efforts. Addressing these considerations will not ensure success in future conflicts, given war’s unpredictable and inherently political nature. Counterinsurgency, foreign internal defense, security force assistance, and unconventional warfare are all tremendously difficult enterprises in which no magic programmatic bullet guarantees success. However, if employed judiciously, bottom-up IW approaches represent a potent tool to help US policymakers meet future security challenges in a locally aligned and sustainable manner.

Sam Wilkins is an active duty US Army Special Forces officer with deployments to Somalia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. Sam holds an MA in international affairs from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a 2021 Next Generation National Security Fellow at the Center for New American Security.

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

Image credit: Petty Officer 2nd Class David Brandenburg, US Navy

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mwi.usma.edu · by Sam Wilkins · August 9, 2022

17. An Alternative History of AirLand Battle, Part II

Excerpts:

Our sense is that great attention needs to be paid to understanding how Russia and China will learn from this war and matching ourselves up against what they have the potential to be in the future. Whatever emerging concepts and programmed capabilities are up to the challenge should be accelerated. Those that are not must be ruthlessly identified and modified or eliminated. Finally, if the Russo-Ukrainian War shows that we are not fully prepared for future competition and conflict with China and Russia, then we should be learning from it with the sense of urgency it deserves.

Our concern is that the policymakers, given the abysmal Russian performance, will see little to learn from the war beyond minor adjustments to existing concepts and capabilities. Furthermore, the American public may lose interest in the war and perhaps believe it less consequential than its effects on the important issues of inflation and the world food supply. Thus, our goal with this essay is to provide a warning not just about the present but about the future.

The Russians will learn from this war, as will the Chinese. We need to get ahead of them in grasping the gravity of this war, understanding the challenges our preconceived notions pose to our understanding of its implications, and finally, to providing a path forward for its rigorous assessment to identify and correct our own deficiencies.

An Alternative History of AirLand Battle, Part II - War on the Rocks

DAVID JOHNSON AND ZACH ALESSI-FRIEDLANDER

AUGUST 9, 2022

warontherocks.com · by David Johnson · August 9, 2022

Editor’s Note: Do not miss the first part of this essay.

We hope, to paraphrase Santayana, that are we not doomed to repeat our alternative histories. That is our purpose as an answer to those who might ask why we engaged in this exercise when we know what really happened. The first part of our story about how the Army might have modernized as the final drawdown began during the Vietnam War shows the inclination of vested interests, wittingly or unwittingly, to draw lessons that support that they are on the right track. We believe that this fictional step back provides a useful, and perhaps cautionary, lens through which to view how the U.S. military might approach identifying and assessing lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War.

In some ways, the alternative history we pose is where we find ourselves today. The ongoing modernization efforts in the U.S. military began in response to a policy change — the pivot to Asia — or to aggression without any direct threat to the United States — the 2014 Russian takeover of Crimea and its encroachment into Eastern Ukraine. Nevertheless, they served an important institutional purpose in shifting the mindset of the force from its near-total focus on counterinsurgency to peer warfare as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were clearly winding down.

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Furthermore, U.S. capabilities and preparations during the Afghan and Iraq Wars focused on, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insisted, “current war demands, even if it means straining the U.S. armed forces and devoting less time and money to future threats.” The Defense Department, particularly the Army, found itself in a circumstance similar to that of the Army at the end of the Vietnam War, in that they “had lost a generation’s worth of technical modernization there while gaining a generation of nearly irrelevant combat experience.” The U.S. military realized that it had to look to the future.

Our alternative history just pushes the timeline back from 1973 to 1970. It assumes that the Army realized that it had to do something to demonstrate relevance as the United States began withdrawing from Vietnam and in the face of a new national strategy with less demand for the Army. The 1967 Six-Day War was the perfect case study, for similar reasons that the later 1973 conflict offered: preparation for the defense of NATO. The clear difference is that the 1967 war was an Israeli triumph that never called into significant question U.S. capabilities. Consequently, it did not create the demand for introspection and the sense of urgency that an Israeli near-defeat did in 1973.

In the face of the 1973 war, the Army would have had two choices: view it through an unobstructed lens in an attempt to understand what might be wrong with its new approach, or utilize the conflict to validate the decisions it had already made. The validation approach is simultaneously more satisfying and less risky than seeing one’s own errors in the mistakes of either side in the war. First, validation shows all the hard work has been paying off. We are on the right track. Second, findings that question the current path put the credibility of the institutions and senior leaders who determined that course at risk. They can also challenge the significant investments made in programs that might be deemed irrelevant to the war’s lessons.

Now, we turn our attention to the allure of validation in the case of Ukraine. Additionally, we offer recommendations on how to analyze the war in Ukraine in a way that incorporates service perspectives to achieve a joint solution that puts the Department of Defense clearly in the lead.

What Has Any of This Got to Do with the War in Ukraine?

The creation of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 1970 would have created strong biases that could have skewed the key lessons from the 1973 War. The reputation of the Army as an institution, not to mention those of its most senior leaders, was at stake. This is not to say that their behavior was disingenuous. It was not. It is, however, a warning that well-meaning leaders who deeply believe in the results of their hard work are hard to convince that their efforts are wrong, even in the face of new evidence. This is particularly true if the new reality could upend hard-won gains in the budget battles or service relevance.

With the war in Ukraine ongoing, the services now find themselves in a 1973 moment again. One option, as alternative history, uses the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine to validate its ongoing efforts to prove its relevance in a large-scale war and justify its investments. The Army is heavily invested in the lessons of 2014, modeling itself, it believes, on the service’s approach during the 1970s. In 2018, it created a new four-star headquarters — U.S. Army Futures Command — assuming from U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command the responsibility for concept development, organizational design, and materiel modernization.

U.S. Army Futures Command notes with justifiable pride what it has accomplished since its inception in July 2018:

The Army is nearly four years into the biggest transformational change since the early 1980s, modernizing and building a multi-domain-capable force that delivers speed, range, and convergence of emerging technologies.

What has resulted is a new concept — multi-domain operations and several large materiel development efforts that span the key deficiencies the Army believes it needs to correct for large-scale combat operations. All of these initiatives began years before the current war in Ukraine. Indeed, the multi-domain operations concept, now being turned into doctrine, predates U.S. Army Futures Command itself, having first been published by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2017 as Multi-Domain Battle: Evolution of Combined Arms for the 21st Century, 2025-2040.

The unique challenge the Army faces in its current effort at transformation is that it must now prepare for two very different peer competitors: China and Russia. Russia, a land power, is seemingly right up the Army’s alley. China, however, is a harder case in which to demonstrate Army relevance. This is the key difference between now and the 1970s: The United States faces two very different peer competitors in widely separated theaters. The last time such a reality faced the United States was during World War II, with operations against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. It is an open question whether or not multi-domain operations and related materiel development efforts are equally suited against Russia and China.

This is particularly important to the Army because the clear policy of the United States is that China is the greatest long-term threat to American security and the nation’s most difficult military challenge. Furthermore, the prevailing and deep belief in the Army is that you cannot have two different armies at the same time. Apparently, this remains the belief even in the face of the radically different military problems posed by Russia and China based on their place, the specific adversary, and that adversary’s capabilities. We believe that the Army can play an important combat role in the Pacific if it looks beyond its current preconceptions while also taking a long view of what might be possible in the deeper future.

We believe that it is too early to draw “lessons learned” from Ukraine or, for that matter, the earlier Nagorno-Karabakh War that received so much attention before Ukraine. A clear example of why rigorous analysis is necessary before jumping to premature conclusions was the rush during both of those conflicts to proclaim the end of the role of the tank on future battlefields. A representative article asserted that “the annihilation of Russian mechanized formations in Ukraine where the power of the defense and the lethality of light infantry armed with modern anti-tank weapons [e.g., Javelins and Switchblades] defeated Russia’s assaults.”

Ironically, this is not dissimilar to what happened in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Sagger anti-tank guided missile was widely touted as signaling the death knell of the tank. In this case, the obituary was premature. The Israelis and other armies fielded better armor and improved their combined arms tactics, thus providing technical and tactical solutions to guarantee tank survivability.

In the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the Kornet anti-tank guided missile with its dual-warhead wreaked havoc on Israeli tanks. Once again, this was the end of tank warfare. However, just like after the 1973 war, the solutions were technical and tactical. The Israelis fielded the Trophy active protection system to protect against the weapons. They also reemphasized combined arms tactics and high-intensity warfighting skills, after years of focusing on irregular warfare, to improve their ability to suppress Hezbollah weapons and fighters.

There are likely similar solutions for the lessons about tank survivability in the face of drones and light anti-tank weapons. A technical solution would be the extension of a Trophy-like system to defeat top attack weapons. Tactically, competent execution of combined arms to suppress drone and anti-tank guided missile locations and defeat enemy light infantry enhance tank survivability and utility. This was something the Israelis were not trained for in 2006 and, as we are seeing in Ukraine, nor are the Russians.

Investments in tank survivability were made because only the manned tank at this point in time provides mobile, protected lethality to enable maneuver on the battlefield. That may not be true in the future, but it is now. It is not yet the age of drones and light anti-tank weapons.

This case regarding a single weapon system highlights the importance of actually “learning lessons” from a war. The aforementioned article that argued the vulnerability of tanks in Ukraine was made to buttress the already-made decision to rid the Marines of their tanks. That decision was made before the war, based on the reality that the modernized Army M1 Abrams tanks the Marines had employed had become too heavy to be of use in Marine concepts.

Finally, learning lessons effectively includes attending to what really happened, especially from the perspective of Ukraine. A senior advisor to Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, emphasized that although “anti-tank missiles slowed the Russians down … what killed them was our artillery. That was what broke their units.” Ongoing operations in Eastern Ukraine buttress this observation about the significant role of artillery.

One should not impute any malice to conclusions about the value of anti-tank weapons and the possible end of the tank, but this case shows that one has to be aware that there is a strong proclivity to look for lessons that support already-made decisions. For example, senior Army leaders were confidently noting as early as May that “its massive modernization effort, which predated the Russian invasion and ranges from helicopters to secure communications, has been validated by the conflict.”

Initial assessments about drones in the Nagorno-Karabakh, which seemingly foreshadowed a revolution in military affairs, become less dire in the face of deeper analysis as well, as seen in an article by Israeli analyst Edo Hecht:

For decades the Israeli army has been used to fighting without looking up to see whose aircraft was rumbling overhead, knowing with virtually 100% certainty it was Israeli. It can no longer be certain of that and must prepare to operate under unfriendly skies … air defence [sic] forces and ground forces, even of armies that have advanced air forces, must take into account and prepare to meet a new threat that enables poorer and even primitive military forces to create an aerial threat that did not exist before.

What lessons have been observed so far still await objective, rigorous analysis to understand their significance. This will be difficult if the institutional imperative is to look for lessons that support and validate, rather than challenge current efforts. These decisions, based on premature, faulty assessments, can become baked in and not reexamined, given that they were “proven” in combat and are supportive of the current path.

Consequently, the Ukraine war lessons-collection process is important enough that it should be a priority of the Department of Defense to get it right. The services will understandably look at the war from their own perspectives. That is to be expected and reasonable, because warfighting expertise in the various domains resides within the individual services. But the Department must also recognize that the services will apply filters, either wittingly or unwittingly, to many of their individual observations.

Indeed, at its extreme, a conflict may elicit very different conclusions and recommended solutions, depending on the service making the assessment. Here, another Army case is instructive.

During the interwar period, the branch chiefs held great authority over their branch’s doctrine, personnel, and materiel requirements. The Air Force had not yet gained its independence and was a branch of the Army. In February 1942, Maj. Gen. John Herr, the U.S. Army chief of cavalry, met with Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall. He truly believed what he told Marshall: “In the interest of National Defense in this crisis, I urge upon you the necessity of an immediate increase in horse cavalry.” From his perch, and with the experience of a full and successful career, Herr viewed horse cavalry as a key reason for German successes in Poland and France. He honestly believed what he told Marshall, and Germany did have cavalry formations. Thus, if you looked for validating observations, you could find them and laud their importance.

The other Army branches also searched for supportive lessons from these early German successes. The chief of infantry highlighted the contributions of German infantry, while the Army Air Corps contended that the strategic bombing of Warsaw had been central to the German victory over Poland. Finally, the chief of the newly formed Armored Force, who was basing his concepts largely on the cavalry tactics he had developed in the 7th Cavalry Brigade (Mechanized), saw the use of tanks by the Germans as a validation of his approach.

They all missed the reality of the blitzkrieg because it combined armor and air power. Indeed, the Armored Force doctrinal manuals did not require air support for operations. Consequently, the Army, less the disbanded horse cavalry, took its existing concepts and weapons into the war where they suffered unnecessarily for their parochial decisions. However, it is important to understand that all of these senior officers believed their validating observations. It would be difficult to expect them to see and believe something that conflicted with what they had spent their careers mastering.

There is also a positive lesson to be drawn from how the Army dealt with the lessons of the Yom Kippur War, in that it is a good model of how to ensure interservice collaboration on assessing and institutionalizing lessons from the Ukraine War. In 1973, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and U.S. Air Force Tactical Air Command began a decade-long process to reach an agreement on how to collaborate and eliminate redundancies in key service programs.

The resulting agreements between the two service chiefs were a recognition that neither service could independently solve the challenges the Soviets posed to NATO. Eventually, they agreed to 31 initiatives that permitted the fuller integration of air and land capabilities and concepts into AirLand battle. However, the 31 Initiatives effort was about much more than service capabilities integration or interdependence. Henceforth, each service would rely on the other for capabilities, and each eliminated programs for capabilities that they agreed the other service could better execute. Unfortunately, with the end of the Cold War, this interservice agreement dissolved and the Army and Air Force again went their own ways in the absence of the shared problem.

Given the scope of the challenges posed by China and Russia, we believe that a truly joint approach must be taken to ensure their resolution. The rationalization of service approaches into a joint warfighting concept is no longer sufficient. What is required is an overarching joint concept that serves as the blueprint for service contributions. Furthermore, this concept should respond to the unique needs of the combatant commands.

Where to?

The 31 Initiatives effort, albeit important, was a bi-service effort completed before the passage of the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act in 1986. Since then, the Joint Staff and the Joint Requirements Oversight Council have been statutorily charged with executing what was a voluntary, ad hoc collaboration between the Army and Air Force on the 31 Initiatives. This is ostensibly where joint concepts and capabilities are developed in support of the regional combatant commanders’ requirements. It is also the venue where service concepts and capabilities are supposed to be vetted to ensure they support the overall direction of the joint force.

In the absence of compelling national security threats, there has not been a forcing function to demand focused collaboration. Regrettably, what passed for “jointness” during operations in the aftermath of 9/11 against completely overmatched adversaries prompted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to deactivate the Joint Forces Command, which was essentially a joint U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.

Since the dissolution of the Joint Forces Command, the services have dominated the development of concepts and capabilities. They are ostensibly exercising their Title 10 authorities to train, organize, and equip the forces that they will provide to the combatant commanders to meet their operational requirements. As a result of the existing practice, the overall joint warfighting concept is an amalgamation of service concepts and capabilities, rather than a foundational concept that drives and integrates the services’ efforts.

This shortfall has been obvious in the wars the United States has fought since the demise of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the joint plan executed in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom could be simply characterized as: “Army, stay on the left of the Euphrates; Marines, stay on the right; and Air Force, go where the Army and Marines allow.” Each service exercised its own concept within its area of operations. Such a campaign plan was possible because a U.S. military designed and trained to fight the Soviet Union completely overmatched the Iraqis. In the case of Desert Storm, the resounding victory validated all the hard work done since the 1973 Yom Kippur war. There was little to be learned and it did not particularly matter given the reality that with the demise of the Soviet Union the U.S. military was without even a near-peer competitor.

Any inclination to understand the lessons of the lopsided defeat of the Iraqis in Operation Iraqi Freedom vanished with the onset of the post-victory insurgency. Consequently, the U.S. military has not thoroughly examined a large-scale conventional war between two closely matched adversaries since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And the last time it analyzed its own combat against peer competitors that could challenge it in all the domains was in the aftermath of World War II.

The Ukraine war, as a harbinger of the potential realities of large-scale combat operations against a nuclear-armed state competitor, should serve as a catalyst to rejuvenate the role of the Secretary of Defense, the combatant commanders, and the joint staff.

We are generally averse to creating blue-ribbon panels or other committees to examine issues. That said, the United States is clearly at an inflection point. The war in Ukraine has shown that competition and conflict between major states are not theoretical or, unfortunately, unlikely. We should model the analysis and response to the Ukraine war on the spirit embodied in the 9/11 commission’s charter. The commission to study the Ukraine war should be intergovernmental and directed under the auspices of the National Security Council.

The Department of Defense should clearly have representation on this commission. There is a unique military dimension to this war that demands introspection and analysis by the Pentagon. Accordingly, the secretary should establish an independent commission to examine the Ukraine war in detail. It should be co-chaired by the deputy secretary of defense and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its composition is extremely important. The commission must have hand-picked and thoroughly vetted senior-level representation from all the services as well as individuals extremely familiar with current service doctrine, concepts, and existing and envisioned capabilities. Only with this kind of representation can the commission view the war through the multiple lenses it will take to understand its implications for the entire, integrated joint force. One should expect that each lens will distill many of the observations in very different ways and often reflect a bias towards showing how each service believes it can uniquely solve the problem. This should be encouraged. The resolution of these varied perspectives will yield a better joint solution.

The question before the Department of Defense as it grapples with the implications of the Ukraine War is whether it will treat that conflict as it would have in 1973, based on an assessment of the 1967 Six-Day War as postulated in this alternative history? Or will it react to the Ukraine War as a conflict similar in consequence to what spurred its actual response to the 1973 war? If the former path is taken, one could reasonably expect military service leaders to mine any “lessons” to support and validate the hard work that is been done since the pivot to Asia and the initial 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea in Ukraine. If the latter, the Department of Defense can assess what needs to be done against a peer competitor to prevail in the future. The question before us is which path will be taken?

The stakes are high. To be sure, the Chinese and the Russians are studying the Ukraine war, as they did perhaps more rigorously than the United States did in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. While the United States took a victory lap, the Chinese and the Russian militaries looked at the war to understand our capabilities to not only close the gaps but to eventually surpass us. In short, the United States viewed post-Cold War conflicts as validation of existing concepts and capabilities, while our adversaries saw them as a crisis and a call for action.

One should recall that our assessment of the Chinese and Russians in 2000 dismissed them as significant threats. This can be seen in the fact that they were not even one of the two major theater wars that served as the basis of the U.S. force-sizing construct. For those that believe that the Ukraine War shows the rank incompetence of the Russians, we should remember that the Russian Army that was annihilated in the initial stages of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 was occupying Berlin in the spring of 1945. More recently, the 1994 First Chechen War was a disaster: In 2000 the Russians occupied Grozny. Furthermore, the war in Ukraine is not over and could yet upend the varied predictions of its outcome. The Russians are still in it and neither they nor the Ukrainians show any signs of capitulation.

In our own history, we might recall that the American military that had its share of defeats at the beginning of World War II, learned from those defeats, and was occupying Germany and Japan as victors in 1945. We, as did the Russians, learned hard lessons during World War II out of necessity: they were wars of survival.

Our sense is that great attention needs to be paid to understanding how Russia and China will learn from this war and matching ourselves up against what they have the potential to be in the future. Whatever emerging concepts and programmed capabilities are up to the challenge should be accelerated. Those that are not must be ruthlessly identified and modified or eliminated. Finally, if the Russo-Ukrainian War shows that we are not fully prepared for future competition and conflict with China and Russia, then we should be learning from it with the sense of urgency it deserves.

Our concern is that the policymakers, given the abysmal Russian performance, will see little to learn from the war beyond minor adjustments to existing concepts and capabilities. Furthermore, the American public may lose interest in the war and perhaps believe it less consequential than its effects on the important issues of inflation and the world food supply. Thus, our goal with this essay is to provide a warning not just about the present but about the future.

The Russians will learn from this war, as will the Chinese. We need to get ahead of them in grasping the gravity of this war, understanding the challenges our preconceived notions pose to our understanding of its implications, and finally, to providing a path forward for its rigorous assessment to identify and correct our own deficiencies.

Become a Member

David Johnson is a retired Army colonel. He is a principal researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is the author of Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917-1945 and Learning Large Lessons: The Evolving Roles of Ground Power and Air Power in the Post-Cold War Era. From 2012-2014 he founded and directed the Chief of Staff of the Army Strategic Studies Group for General Raymond T. Odierno.

Zach Alessi-Friedlander is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, having served in tactical, operational, and strategic assignments in light infantry and armored cavalry units. He was a member of General Odierno’s inaugural Strategic Studies Group and participated in the Art of War Scholars program at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He is currently a Ph.D. student in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Image: ArmyInform

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by David Johnson · August 9, 2022

18. The Wrong Way to Compete With China

Conclusion:

If Washington really wants a new Sputnik moment to help America compete more effectively with China, it must learn the period’s most important lesson: When it comes to technological competition, some things matter more than federal funding.

The Wrong Way to Compete With China

By Scott Moore Monday, August 8, 2022, 8:01 AM

lawfareblog.com · August 8, 2022

More than two years after it was first proposed, Congress has finally passed one of the most anticipated legislative efforts of the Biden presidency: a bipartisan bill to help the United States compete more effectively with China. The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America (CHIPS) and Science Act, which is expected to soon be signed by President Biden, promises to invest tens of billions of dollars in public funds to develop advanced technologies—most notably to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree the act is sorely needed. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) proclaimed that the CHIPS Act is “needed to outcompete China.” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), meanwhile, explained her support for the bill by evoking the Cold War: “I believe this is a Sputnik moment, where it is clear to Americans that we are falling behind on innovation and we can’t risk falling further behind.”

There is, however, one major problem with this ambitious, multibillion-dollar plan to compete with China on advanced technology: It won’t work, at least not on its own. And, ironically, given that CHIPS Act champions have cited as an inspiration the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, the U.S. response to that launch provides insight as to why the act risks failing to boost American innovation as much as its supporters hope. The lesson of the United States’ Sputnik moment 65 years ago is that when it comes to technological competition, money isn’t everything, and subsidies are often wasteful ways to encourage innovation. People, culture, and institutions matter as much as, if not more than, money in stimulating technological innovation. And unfortunately, there are worrying signs that these key ingredients in America’s special sauce for innovation are growing scarce.

Today, the Sputnik moment of 1957 is remembered as a shining example of Washington at its best. Congress responded to the launch of Sputnik by dramatically increasing federal support for science and technology and creating new, technology-focused agencies such as NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency—all in less than a year. A little over a decade later, and largely thanks to this burst of federal action, the U.S. won the space race by beating the Soviets to the moon. But the history of this period tells us that if Congress really wants to stimulate American innovation, it can’t rely solely on subsidies and state direction.

It is often forgotten that the Eisenhower administration’s initial response to Sputnik was marked more by annoyance than alarm. President Eisenhower was particularly concerned that a post-Sputnik spending spree would distract from other priorities, including what he believed to be more militarily significant technology. At a press conference held just a few days after Sputnik entered orbit, Eisenhower was dismissive, referring to the satellite as merely “one small ball in the air.” Later, in his first major speech about Sputnik, delivered from the Oval Office on Nov. 7, 1957, Eisenhower attempted to frame growing calls for investment in science and technology as misguided. “Certainly, we need to feel a high sense of urgency,” he conceded, “but this does not mean that we should mount our charger and try to ride off in all directions at once.” Instead of a call to arms, Eisenhower proposed “selectivity in national expenditures of all kinds.” Most of his suggested responses to Sputnik sounded downright dull, including the “pooling of scientific effort” with American allies—which Eisenhower was quick to note would entail “no cost.”

But faced with a public and Congress seized by panic, Eisenhower tried another tactic, seeking cheaper ways to respond to Soviet technological advances that relied less on government and more on the country’s private enterprise and civil society. In a second speech, while boasting that the federal government was “stepping up its basic research programs,” the president emphasized that “the biggest share of the job is in the hands of industry and private organizations.”

Eisenhower may have been motivated primarily by budgetary concerns. But six decades later, China’s own struggles to boost innovation suggest that he was on to something when it comes to the nonfinancial catalysts of successful innovation. Beijing has funneled huge sums of money into research and development in recent decades, but the results have been generally underwhelming. Studies suggest that crucial innovation processes in China are undermined by pervasive corruption, an over-reliance on state control and direction, and an organizational culture that disincentivizes collaboration. The biggest informal constraint on innovation in China, though, is the authoritarian control of information and expression, which stifles new ideas. In a sign that China’s rulers recognize the linkage between free expression and robust innovation, Beijing passed legislation, the 1993 Scientific and Technological Progress Law, that explicitly guaranteed freedoms for researchers and inventors. But in practice, censorship and restrictions on internet access continue to hamper innovation. As one Chinese academic commented, “[I]t is very difficult to achieve world-leading results or to be a frontrunner in global scientific research without any knowledge of [other countries’ achievements] and without comparison.”

The contrast between the United States’ reaction to the launch of Sputnik and the case of China today holds two crucial lessons for the CHIPS and Science Act and other efforts to compete more effectively when it comes to science, technology, and innovation.

First, there is a big difference between investment in basic research and development, which tends to confer long-term benefits, and subsidies, which often do not. Second, Eisenhower’s restrained reaction highlights the fact that government plays an important, but only partial, role in fostering innovation. Indeed, thoughtful accounts of the development of Silicon Valley and other highly innovative ecosystems emphasize that it is the combination of public investment in basic research, culture, values, and institutions that make up the secret sauce of innovation. Other research has found that the U.S. Cold War-era space program succeeded where its Soviet competitor failed primarily because of its superior organizational ability to marshal the combined ideas and resources of government, industry, and academia.

These informal norms, values, and institutions are extremely difficult to engineer or to legislate—and they rely as much on the energies of the private sector and civil society as on government efforts. This is why even as China increasingly challenges the technological leadership of developed democracies, it might never entirely catch up. Yet the reverse is also true: If the U.S. wants to remain ahead, it needs to strengthen liberal values and institutions, which will foster collective and coordinated leadership by government and civil society in science, technology, and innovation.

Unfortunately, there are growing signs that the United States’ innovative culture may be eroding. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, focus on innovation appears to be declining across a large swath of American businesses, and new business formation has been declining for decades. While the causes are complex, many observers and scholars of American innovation agree that part of the problem is cultural and are issuing warnings to that effect: “We are losing our collective sense of purpose along with our fire, ambition, and determination to achieve,” said author John Kao. Most worrying of all, America’s political dysfunction and the perception that it is straying from long-held liberal values may be dimming the attraction of the United States as a destination for work and study for would-be innovators from across the globe.

In this context, the CHIPS and Science Act’s shortcomings are notable. The bill is centered on the subsidy approach and relies largely on federal agencies like the Commerce Department to get America’s innovative juices flowing. In fairness, the bill makes major, laudable investments in basic research and development. These investments might promote advances in technological research and production in the near term. But the bill’s emphasis on subsidies and state action threatens to crowd out cheaper approaches that might facilitate more sustainable technological innovation in the near term and the long term. Education and training is a good example: In the CHIPS and Science Act, a commitment to invest in semiconductor workforce training is authorized at $200 million, compared to $39 billion to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing. Perhaps most glaring of all, the bill does little to address the critical role that America’s broken immigration system plays in maintaining its competitive edge.

To boost American innovation and compete effectively with China in advanced technology, legislation must do more than shovel money into manufacturing. In particular, Congress must take three additional steps to strengthen America’s innovation ecosystem. First, America needs a serious investment in K-12 education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), including at the elementary level. A national teacher shortage and gaping inequality among school districts necessitate a major effort to boost teacher recruitment in STEM fields, especially in rural areas.

Second, Congress must make it easy for foreign students in tech-friendly fields to work and gain permanent residency in the United States after graduation. In many fields, America’s innovation edge depends on access to foreign talent—which the pandemic and other pressures threaten to disrupt. New legislation is needed to streamline the path to permanent residency and citizenship for students with crucial STEM skills.

Third, America’s political leaders need to recommit to basic values like academic freedom. Partisan attacks on scientists and academic researchers must stop. America cannot be a leader in science, technology, and innovation if its political leaders target and undermine science and scientific researchers.

If Washington really wants a new Sputnik moment to help America compete more effectively with China, it must learn the period’s most important lesson: When it comes to technological competition, some things matter more than federal funding.

Scott Moore is a political scientist and author of “China’s Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China’s Rise and the World’s Future.”

@water_futures

lawfareblog.com · August 8, 2022

19. Stop Tiptoeing Around Russia by Alexander Vindman

Excerpts:

To ensure the triumph of democracy in Ukraine, the United States must first change its thinking patterns and learn from decades of mistakes. Recognizing the poisonous Russocentrism of U.S. foreign policy is the first step toward a better approach to U.S.-Ukrainian relations. As Russia’s war effort falters and the prospect of a direct confrontation between the United States and Russia begins to look unthinkable once again, it will be tempting to revert to old ways of thinking and plan for normalized relations with a post-Putin Russia. But such an outcome would once again risk privileging Russia over Ukraine. Even if Putin is deposed or replaced through some other means, the United States should not assume Russia can change for the better; rapprochement must be earned, not given. By freeing itself from its Russocentrism, Washington will also be better able to engage with and listen to its partners in Eastern and northern Europe, which have greater proximity to and more clarity on national security threats from Russia. Their knowledge and expertise will be critical to Ukraine’s victory over Russia, future Ukrainian reconstruction, the prosecution of war crimes, prosperity in Eastern Europe, and eventually, the establishment of thriving democracies across Eurasia.

Beneath the United States’ misplaced aspirations for a positive relationship with Russia lies immense hubris. Americans tend to believe they can accomplish anything, but perpetually discount the agency of their interlocutors. In truth, the United States never had the influence to unilaterally change Russia’s internal politics. But it did have the ability to nurture a more promising outcome with a more willing partner in Ukraine. Unless the United States fundamentally reorients its foreign policy, away from aspirations and toward outcomes, it will miss an even bigger opportunity to bring about a peaceful, democratic Eastern Europe.

Stop Tiptoeing Around Russia

It Is Time to End Washington’s Decades of Deference to Moscow

By Alexander Vindman

August 8, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Vindman · August 8, 2022

For the last three decades, the United States has bent over backward to acknowledge Russia’s security concerns and allay its anxieties. The United States has done so at the expense of relations with more willing partners in Eastern Europe—Ukraine in particular. Instead of supporting the early stirrings of Ukrainian independence in 1991, for example, Washington sought to preserve the failing Soviet Union out of misplaced fear that it might collapse into civil war. And instead of imposing heavy costs on Russia for its authoritarianism at home and antidemocratic activities abroad, including in Ukraine, Washington has mostly looked the other way in a fruitless effort to deal cooperatively with Moscow.

The justification for this Russia-centric approach to Eastern Europe has fluctuated between hopes for a good relationship with the Kremlin and fears that the bilateral relationship could devolve into another cold war—or worse, a hot one. But the result has been U.S. national security priorities based on unrealistic aspirations instead of actual outcomes, particularly during moments of crisis. Even as evidence mounted that Russia’s belligerent behavior would not allow for a stable or predictable relationship, U.S. policy stayed the course, to the detriment of both U.S. national security interests and the security of Russia’s neighbors.

One would think that Russia’s war in Ukraine would have demanded a shift in U.S. strategic thinking. Instead, whether out of habit, reflex, or even prejudice (thinking of Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” or of Ukrainians as “little Russians”), the primary decision makers in charge of U.S. foreign policy still privilege Russia over Ukraine.

The war has now reached an inflection point. The United States must decide whether it will help Ukraine approach the negotiating table with as much leverage as it can or watch Russia reorganize and resupply its troops, adapt its tactics, and commit to a long-term war of attrition. If Ukrainian democracy is going to prevail, U.S. foreign policymakers must finally prioritize dealing with Ukraine as it is rather than Russia as they would like it to be.

“THE UNGROUP” AND ITS LEGACY

Prioritizing Ukraine will require breaking the long-standing tradition of Russocentrism in trilateral U.S.-Ukrainian-Russian relations. In its contemporary form, that tradition dates back to 1989, when senior members of U.S. President George H. W. Bush’s administration set up a secret group of interagency staff members to plan for the possible dissolution of the Soviet Union. On July 18 of that year, Robert Gates, who was then deputy U.S. national security adviser, sent a memo to Bush titled “Thinking About the Unthinkable: Instability and Political Turbulence in the USSR.” As Gates recalled in his 2007 memoir, From the Shadows, he argued that the United States “should very quietly begin some contingency planning as to possible U.S. responses, actions and policies in the event of leadership or internal policy changes or widespread ethnic violence and repression—and consider the implications for us of such developments.”

Soon thereafter, Gates tasked Condoleezza Rice, then the senior director for Soviet and East European affairs on the National Security Council, with assembling an “ungroup” that would take on this “unthinkable” task. (At the time, official U.S. policy still focused on preserving the Soviet Union and supporting reform efforts, so the ungroup’s name reflected both its seemingly impossible mandate and its Top Secret status.) The team Rice pulled together included trusted officials from the Department of Defense, Department of State, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Among them were Dennis Ross, then the director of policy planning at the State Department; Fritz Ermarth, the chair of the National Intelligence Council; Robert Blackwill, the national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union; Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense for policy; and Eric Edelman, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for Soviet and East European affairs.

Working in secrecy, these officials considered possible scenarios for Soviet collapse and potential U.S. responses. Written evidence of the group’s deliberations—or even its existence—is sparse. (I have mainly relied here on memoirs by people who served as high-level officials in the George H. W. Bush administration, some of which contain details of the ungroup without explicitly naming it, and on interviews with five former officials who were either participants in the group or had direct knowledge of its work.) But the conclusions the ungroup reached are clearly imprinted not just on U.S. foreign policy in the last years of the Soviet Union but also on U.S. priorities in the newly independent Soviet republics. The three greatest threats the United States would face in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the ungroup predicted, would be the proliferation of new nuclear weapons states; “loose nukes,” or the loss, theft, or sale of weapons-grade fissile material, especially to nonstate actors or countries with clandestine nuclear weapons programs; and conflicting loyalties in the Soviet military that might lead to civil war in the newly independent republics or in Russia itself.

U.S. policymakers must deal with Ukraine as it is rather than Russia as they would like it to be.

When the unthinkable became inevitable and the Soviet Union began to crumble, mitigating these threats became the overarching goal of U.S. policy toward the former Soviet bloc. The United States pursued denuclearization in the former Soviet republics and partnership with an ideally strong, centralized Russian government in Moscow. If both goals could be accomplished, so the thinking went, then widespread ethnonationalist conflicts could be averted and command and control of the former Soviet arsenal could be maintained in a stable, whole Russia, thereby reducing the risks of a nuclear catastrophe.

The ungroup didn’t oppose the independence of the Soviet republics, but its fear of worst-case scenarios contributed to missteps and missed opportunities. For instance, it is hard not to hear echoes of the ungroup’s warnings in Bush’s infamous “Chicken Kyiv” speech in the Ukrainian capital on August 1, 1991. Mere weeks before Ukraine’s parliament adopted an act declaring the country’s independence, Bush declined to support the country’s right to self-determination, warning instead of “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” In line with the ungroup’s thinking, he privileged a carefully managed Soviet decline over the wishes of Ukrainians, who would go on to overwhelming vote for independence in a referendum at the end of the year.

Bush’s words provoked a visceral response from Ukrainians. For the Ukrainians who still remember the speech, or at least know of it, Bush’s explicit preference for the Soviet Union’s survival and his willingness to openly reject Ukrainian aspirations for statehood and independence were symbolic failures and practical indicators of where Ukraine fell in the hierarchy of U.S. relationships. One might argue that it was reasonable for the Bush administration to prioritize its relationship with the Soviet Union, which was, by any measure, a greater power than any of its potential successor states. It had enormous energy resources, a colossal military-industrial complex, and the ability to create massive headaches for Washington. But managing Soviet and later Russian threats did not have to come at the expense of engagement with the republics. Washington could have pursued both objectives at the same time, adapting to the Soviet Union’s decline while also hedging against future Russian irredentism by supporting self-determination in the emerging post-Soviet states.

Bush’s speech in Kyiv was an ignominious start to the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship.

Instead, Bush’s speech in Kyiv was an ignominious start to the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship that could have easily been avoided. Bush could have stuck to platitudes about the promotion of peace, democracy, and self-determination and omitted the patronizing warning about civil conflict. After all, the United States had little influence over Ukraine’s decision to seek independence or the Soviet Union’s longevity. In the end, neither outcome conformed to U.S. policy preferences.

The Bush administration wasn’t fully united behind this overly cautious approach toward the collapsing Soviet Union; there were dissenters, both inside and outside the ungroup. For instance, as Michael McFaul and James Goldgeier note in Power and Purpose, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney advocated policies that would prevent the reemergence of a Soviet or post-Soviet threat in Eurasia. He thought the United States should seize the opportunity to undermine a great power rival and extend democracy and Western security institutions farther east.

Cheney’s arguments stopped short of predicting a Russian resurgence—something that was difficult to conceive of against the backdrop of immense economic, social, and political problems in Russia—but they foreshadowed key developments in U.S. foreign policy during the post-Soviet years. One episode from Gates’s memoir stands out: On September 5, 1991, a month after Bush’s Chicken Kyiv blunder, Cheney clashed with Secretary of State James Baker over the effects of the Soviet Union’s impending collapse. According to Gates, Cheney argued that the breakup was “in our interest,” adding that “if it is voluntary, some sort of association of the republics will happen. If democracy fails, we’re better off if the remaining pieces of the USSR are small.” Baker’s response was indicative of the more dominant strain of thinking within the ungroup: “Peaceful breakup is in our interest, not another Yugoslavia.”

According to the former officials I interviewed, those more in line with Cheney’s thinking, including Wolfowitz and Edelman, came to view post-Soviet European security as a zero-sum game with an enfeebled but still dangerous geopolitical rival in Moscow. They also saw a newly independent, vulnerable Ukraine in need of assistance and recognized that, if strengthened, it could serve as a bulwark against Russian revanchism. But these were minority views. Most influential players in the national security establishment agreed with Baker that U.S.-Russian relations had to form the bedrock of any post–Cold War security structure. They believed that if they could get Russia right, the country would become a bastion of stability in the region and even contribute to positive outcomes in Ukraine and elsewhere.

BLINDED BY THE MIGHT

This fixation on dealing with Moscow has proved remarkably durable. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all built their regional policies around their hopes and fears for Russia—hopes for a cooperative relationship and fears of another cold war. Now, President Joe Biden’s administration has come full circle with a risk assessment of Russia’s war in Ukraine that could have been drawn up by the ungroup, one that is more focused on the internal Russian consequences of the conflict than on the consequences for Ukraine itself. The Soviet Union is long gone, but concerns about instability, Russia’s nuclear arsenal, regional conflict, and bilateral confrontation remain. To avoid provoking Moscow, the United States has implicitly acknowledged Russia’s influence in an imagined post-Soviet geopolitical space in Ukraine. It has also often filtered its decisions about Ukraine policy through the prism of Russia, balancing its objectives in Ukraine against its need for Russia’s cooperation on arms control, North Korean and Iranian nuclear proliferation, climate change, the Arctic, and space programs, among other things.

By comparison, the United States has been largely ambivalent toward Ukraine. It has engaged with the country when the two countries’ interests and values aligned. For instance, during the Clinton era, the United States made a clear push for democratization and denuclearization. But once denuclearization was attained and democratization had stagnated under Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, the impetus for bilateral engagement declined. During Clinton’s second term and during the Bush and Obama administrations, the United States shifted away from Kyiv and toward collaboration with Moscow.

Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington, Virginia, June 2010

Sergei Guneyev/Ria-Novosti/Redux

Misguided hope for a strategic partnership with a reformed Russia—or at the very least, a stable and predictable relationship with Moscow—seemed to outweigh much more achievable U.S. interests and investments in Ukraine in these years. The United States bought into the myth of Russian exceptionalism and deluded itself with distorted visions of the bilateral relationship, largely ignoring the signs of authoritarian consolidation within Russia and failing to heed the warnings from partners in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. Even worse, because of its desire to accommodate Russia, the United States dismissed democratic progress in Ukraine—for instance, in the aftermath of pro-democratic movements in 2004–5 and 2013–14—and undermined prospects for a more fruitful long-term relationship with Kyiv. U.S. policymakers justified this approach on the grounds that drawing Russia in as a responsible member of the international community would enable democratization in the region. Later, when Russia’s lurch toward authoritarianism became undeniable, they justified it on the basis of stability, succumbing to fears of a return to Cold War–era tensions.

The United States was not necessarily wrong to pursue a mutually beneficial relationship with Russia. Where it erred was in continuing to pursue this objective long after there was no realistic chance of success, which should have been obvious by 2004, when Russia interfered in Ukraine’s elections on behalf of its preferred candidate, or at the very latest by 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia. Instead of looking for more cooperative partners, however, U.S. policymakers continued their futile courtship of Kremlin leadership. As a result, they passed up opportunities to invest in the U.S. relationship with Ukraine, which was always a more promising engine of democratization in the region.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

For most of the last 30 years, Kyiv has been a more willing U.S. partner than Moscow. But Washington chose not to see this. Had it been more receptive to Ukrainian overtures and sensitive to Ukrainian concerns, the United States might have offered something more than vague “security assurances” in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which accompanied Ukraine’s fateful decision to give up the nuclear weapons it inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, the agreement—signed by Russia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States—required only consultations and a commitment to seek UN Security Council action in the event of violations (an obvious flaw, considering Russia’s veto power in that institution).

Other early attempts at bilateral cooperation came only at Ukraine’s insistence. In 1996, for instance, Kuchma requested the establishment of a special binational commission, named for him and U.S. Vice President Al Gore, to increase cooperation on trade, economic development, and security issues, among other things, as part of a closer strategic partnership. Although the Gore-Kuchma Commission was modeled after a similar U.S.-Russian commission, the dialogue it spawned never produced a real strategic partnership. Engagement with Russia was a major U.S. priority; engagement with Kyiv was an afterthought. After all, outcomes in Ukraine were still viewed as dependent upon outcomes in Russia.

The 2004–5 Orange Revolution offered another opportunity for cooperation. After thousands of Ukrainian demonstrators took to the streets to protest a fraudulent presidential runoff election, paving the way for a free and fair vote two months later, the United States could have provided greater financial and technical assistance to Ukrainian reform efforts and nurtured Ukrainian ambitions for European and transatlantic integration. A stronger partnership might have prevented the political infighting and failed reforms that eventually fueled popular disappointment with the pro-European government of President Viktor Yushchenko.

For most of the last 30 years, Kyiv has been a more willing U.S. partner than Moscow.

Instead, the United States opted for a policy no man’s land. At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration pushed for the alliance to welcome Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO. But the United States and other NATO members declined to spell out what Ukraine would need to do to accede, and they refused to draw up a membership action plan. The resulting declaration produced the worst possible balance of provocation and assurance, giving Russia a new grievance to exploit but making Ukraine no more secure.

These failures had painful consequences for Ukraine. If Yushchenko’s reforms had generally succeeded, Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian candidate who was defeated after the Orange Revolution, might not have won the 2010 presidential election. Without a Yanukovych presidency, the Ukrainian government and armed forces might not have atrophied, and a rapacious kleptocracy might not have taken hold. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity, also known as the Euromaidan Revolution, might not have become necessary and Ukraine might not have become vulnerable to Russian aggression and Western ambivalence. The costs of Russia’s 2014 incursion into eastern Ukraine would have been significantly higher if the Ukrainian government and military had been intact and developing. Moreover, Russia would have had to contend with a stronger Western reaction and international opprobrium had the United States and the other signatories of the Budapest Memorandum demonstrated a stronger long-term commitment to Ukrainian democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.

Even if none of this had happened, the West could have responded more forcefully to Russia’s 2014 invasion. A tougher reaction might have deterred further Russian aggression or at least better prepared Ukraine for a larger conflict. The United States and its allies helped modernize Ukraine’s military, but because they did not want to provoke Moscow, they declined to impose stiff-enough sanctions on Russia or provide heavy equipment or extensive training to Ukrainian troops. Russian President Vladimir Putin escalated anyway. Now, the West is scrambling to make up for lost time.

The United States doesn’t deserve all the blame for these missed opportunities. Rampant corruption, political infighting, and abysmal leadership hamstrung Ukraine’s efforts at reform and development for years before the Orange Revolution. And it wasn’t until the 2013–14 revolution that Ukraine truly pivoted toward reform, transparency, democracy, and European integration. But even in the moments when Ukraine was a willing and able partner, the United States was reluctant to cooperate or upgrade U.S.-Ukrainian relations. Apprehension about the political response from Moscow always precluded a closer relationship with Kyiv.

The United States opted for a policy no man’s land toward Ukraine.

This historical failure has become more evident as former U.S. government officials have been forced to defend their records on U.S. policy toward Ukraine. There are very few who can honestly say they did all they could in the eight years since Russia’s first invasion to aid Ukraine’s reform efforts, hasten the country’s integration with Europe, harden its defenses, and bolster deterrence. Whether that is because of willful ignorance or an institutional predilection for coddling Russia, there is no excuse for neglecting Ukraine.

Part of the problem may be a decades-long hangover from the Cold War during which the expertise, education, and training of Eurasia specialists in the national security establishment have atrophied. Moreover, virtually all the experts who have worked for the U.S. government over the last 30 years were trained Sovietologists, not Ukrainianists. As a result, they were ill prepared to recognize and understand Ukraine as a fully distinct cultural, ethnolinguistic, historical, and political entity. Rather, these Sovietologists, and the Russianists and Kremlinologists who filled their shoes, saw Russia’s “near abroad” as always having been in Moscow’s orbit. The physical borders of a newly independent Ukraine might have been clearly demarcated, but the mental boundaries of Ukraine’s geopolitics were still fettered to the imperial center in Moscow.

To make matters worse, area studies also declined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to a dearth of funding for the languages and specialized knowledge needed to develop regional expertise. Those Soviet studies programs that survived were rebranded as Russian and Eastern European studies, Russian and Eurasian studies, or some other variant of this formulation, suggesting an equally privileged position for Russia relative to the rest of Eurasia.

With a few exceptions (most notably, Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute), most U.S. universities train their students in the Russian language, with a focus on Russian history, culture, and literature. Although the Slavic academic community has begun to reevaluate Russocentric approaches to the study of Eurasia, this shift has not yet been felt within the U.S. government. Russian and Eastern European expertise—or what little of it exists in government—has been treated as a proxy for knowledge of Ukraine. In the time I spent on the National Security Council, from 2018 to 2020, the results of this cumulative bias in national security education became obvious. Very few officials had specialized knowledge of the region, let alone of Ukraine, and among those, even fewer had Ukrainian language skills.

UNGROUP THINK ENDURES

The bias against Ukraine and toward Russia continues to this day. The Biden administration seems unable to accept that as long as Putin is in power, the best the United States can hope for is a cold war with Russia. In the meantime, Washington should be making every effort to prevent the conflict in Ukraine from turning into a long war of attrition that will only increase the risks of regional spillover as time passes. That means supporting Ukraine in full and giving it the equipment it needs to force Russia to sue for peace, not quivering in fear every time Putin or one of his mouthpieces says something about Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. The United States is a superpower. Russia is not. The Biden administration should act as if it knows the difference and deploy its vast resources so that Ukrainians can dictate the outcome in Ukraine.

But old habits die hard. According to two former senior U.S. officials who worked on Ukraine policy, including one who served in the Biden administration, the senior leadership of the National Security Council has acted as a spiritual successor to the ungroup. NSC officials have sought to limit military support for Ukraine based on a familiar logic—that it might escalate tensions with Moscow and upset remaining hopes of normalizing relations with the Kremlin. Even as Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have pledged to give Ukraine all the support it needs to win the war, NSC officials blocked the transfer of Soviet-era jets to Ukraine, declined to provide Ukraine with sufficient long-range air defenses to clear the skies of Russian planes, withheld the quantities of long-range rocket systems and munitions needed to destroy Russian targets within the theater of war, and halted discussion on the transfer of manned and unmanned aircraft required to neutralize Russian long-range attacks on Ukraine’s cities.

According to former officials, the NSC leadership believes that the war will pose significantly greater risks to the United States and global stability if Ukraine “wins too much.” They wish to avoid the collapse of Putin’s regime for fear of the same threats the ungroup identified three decades ago: nuclear proliferation, loose nukes, and civil war. And they have sought to reduce the likelihood of a bilateral confrontation between the United States and Russia, even at the risk of greatly overstating the probability of conventional and nuclear war. “While a key goal of the United States is to do the needful to support and defend Ukraine, another key goal is to ensure that we do not end up in a circumstance where we’re heading down the road towards a third world war,” said Jake Sullivan, who heads the NSC as Biden’s national security adviser, at the Aspen Security Forum last month. In this excessive concern over how Russia might react to U.S. policies, one can see the shadow of the ungroup.

The senior leadership of the NSC has acted as a spiritual successor to the ungroup.

Planning for every contingency is a responsible way to manage national security threats, but lowest-probability worst-case scenarios should not dictate U.S. actions. By looking for off-ramps and face-saving measures, the ungroup’s successors are perpetuating indecision at the highest levels of the Biden administration. Time that is wasted worrying about unlikely Russian responses to U.S. actions would be better spent backfilling allies’ weaponry, training Ukrainians on Western capabilities, and expediting more arms transfers to Ukraine.

The United States is slowly coming around to providing some of the right capabilities, but not in the necessary quantities and not before U.S. torpor degraded Ukraine’s ability to hold and reclaim territory in southern Ukraine and the Donbas. After months of deliberation, the Biden administration finally agreed to transfer high-mobility artillery rocket systems known as HIMARS, but it has refused to provide the longest range munitions needed to hit Russia’s long-range strike capabilities and military stockpiles. It remains unclear whether the administration will eventually send the munitions that can travel 190 miles, a significant improvement over the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System munitions it is currently providing, which can travel only about 45 miles. The United States has also shied away from providing Ukraine with medium- and long-range surface-to-air missiles that could target Russian aircraft, missiles, and in the worst-case scenario, delivery systems for any possible tactical nuclear weapons. Ukraine could force Russia to the negotiating table faster if it had such capabilities. And providing sufficient weapons wouldn’t significantly undermine resourcing worst-case-scenario war plans against Russia. The U.S. government can do both.

The Biden administration has rightfully, if belatedly, begun to speak about a policy of Ukrainian victory on the battlefield, but it still has yet to match this rhetoric with the requisite military support. Thus far, the Biden administration has transferred a modest $8 billion in weapons to Ukraine. Additional security assistance has been blocked or delayed by the NSC or bogged down in the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense. Congress has passed a Lend-Lease Act for Ukraine, reviving a World War II–era program that gives the president enhanced authority to lend or lease large quantities of defense hardware to Ukraine. The Biden administration should be making greater use of this authority. It should also be leading the effort to establish logistical and sustainment centers within Ukraine, not hundreds of kilometers away in Poland and Romania but as close as possible to the eastern and southern battlefields. If Ukraine wins this war, it will be thanks not just to weapons and will but to staying power.

Biden authorizes new military aid to Ukraine at the White House in Washington, DC, March 2022

Kenny Holston / Redux

The United States should also do more to resolve the issue of grain exports. Russia’s blockade of Ukraine has disrupted global food-supply chains and prompted a growing list of countries to impose grain export bans. This problem will only intensify as Russian forces continue targeting grain storage facilities and transport networks and loot Ukrainian harvests in occupied territories. Providing escorts for Ukrainian merchant vessels and opening a humanitarian shipping corridor is one potential solution, albeit a risky one. More likely, grain shipments will continue to be transported slowly and inefficiently by rail, barge, and truck to countries such as Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria. Ukraine uses a wider rail gauge than its EU neighbors, and while rail capacity is up, the current speed and volume of rail transports is insufficient to remove the existing export backlog.

Transportation costs as well as the availability of trucks, barges, and suitable rail cars is another problem. The European Union has rolled out a plan for “solidarity lanes”—alternative logistics routes for Ukrainian agricultural exports through the EU to third countries—but this ad hoc emergency response is emblematic of the West’s failure to plan for long-term contingencies. In the two months since these lanes have been established, they have failed to clear shipping bottlenecks and left agricultural produce stranded short of its destination. On July 22, Russia agreed to allow grain exports to proceed. But just one day later, Russian missiles struck Ukraine’s largest seaport and cast the deal into doubt. Depending on when one starts counting—the 2014 seizure of Crimea or the February invasion—the United States and the EU have had either five months or eight years to plan for major export disruptions of this sort, so it is disappointing that they have had to scramble to piece together a patchwork solution to a predictable problem.

Again, however, this lack of preparation is more understandable when viewed through the West’s Russocentric lens. Planning for major disruptions in agricultural exports made little sense as long as a wider war was inconceivable. And even in the event of a war, the overriding Western assumption was that Russia could conquer Ukraine or force Kyiv to capitulate in short order; business would find a way to continue with only minimal disruption. The same faulty logic explains how Europe allowed itself to become dependent on Russian oil and gas—and how it has struggled to wean itself off these resources even after the danger they pose has been revealed. The United States and the EU must learn from these failures and interrogate the assumptions that blind them to potential threats, no matter how far-fetched those threats may seem in peacetime.

A FOOTHOLD FOR DEMOCRACY

The Biden administration has made democratic renewal a cornerstone of its domestic and foreign policy agendas. There is no better way to demonstrate democratic resolve than by defending U.S. values and interests in Ukraine. A Ukrainian victory would not only limit Russia’s capacity for future military aggression but also cement democracy’s foothold in Eastern Europe, offering a powerful lesson to would-be authoritarian aggressors and democratic nations alike. A Ukrainian loss, by contrast, would signal an acceleration of the wave of authoritarianism and democratic decline that has washed over the globe in the last decade.

To ensure the triumph of democracy in Ukraine, the United States must first change its thinking patterns and learn from decades of mistakes. Recognizing the poisonous Russocentrism of U.S. foreign policy is the first step toward a better approach to U.S.-Ukrainian relations. As Russia’s war effort falters and the prospect of a direct confrontation between the United States and Russia begins to look unthinkable once again, it will be tempting to revert to old ways of thinking and plan for normalized relations with a post-Putin Russia. But such an outcome would once again risk privileging Russia over Ukraine. Even if Putin is deposed or replaced through some other means, the United States should not assume Russia can change for the better; rapprochement must be earned, not given. By freeing itself from its Russocentrism, Washington will also be better able to engage with and listen to its partners in Eastern and northern Europe, which have greater proximity to and more clarity on national security threats from Russia. Their knowledge and expertise will be critical to Ukraine’s victory over Russia, future Ukrainian reconstruction, the prosecution of war crimes, prosperity in Eastern Europe, and eventually, the establishment of thriving democracies across Eurasia.

Beneath the United States’ misplaced aspirations for a positive relationship with Russia lies immense hubris. Americans tend to believe they can accomplish anything, but perpetually discount the agency of their interlocutors. In truth, the United States never had the influence to unilaterally change Russia’s internal politics. But it did have the ability to nurture a more promising outcome with a more willing partner in Ukraine. Unless the United States fundamentally reorients its foreign policy, away from aspirations and toward outcomes, it will miss an even bigger opportunity to bring about a peaceful, democratic Eastern Europe.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and former Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, is a Doctoral Candidate and Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Foreign Policy Institute, a Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute, and a Senior Adviser to Vote Vets.
MORE BY ALEXANDER VINDMAN

Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Vindman · August 8, 2022

20. "My Copilot Just Ran Out The Back Of The Plane"- Chilling Audio From Aerial Incident Near Fort Bragg

Just a bizarre case.

"My Copilot Just Ran Out The Back Of The Plane"- Chilling Audio From Aerial Incident Near Fort Bragg

New radio audio emerges from bizarre incident in which a pilot fell to his death from his plane that was about to make an emergency landing.

JOSEPH TREVITHICK

AUG 8, 2022 8:42 PM

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · August 8, 2022

A recording of radio calls between an air traffic controller at Raleigh-Durham International Airport and the pilot of a stricken CASA C-212 twin-engine turboprop light cargo plane involved in a fatal incident on July 29 has now emerged online. The pilot can be heard explaining multiple times that his co-pilot got up and jumped out of the back of the aircraft, which was missing a main landing gear wheel and was about to attempt an emergency landing, without a parachute and was likely dead. The clip adds new, if still perplexing details to this already bizarre story, which you can get up to speed on first by reading The War Zone's initial reporting.

The C-212, which carries the U.S. civil registration code M497CA, is registered to a company called Spore Ltd LLC, which appears directly related to contractor Rampart Aviation, was able to make a successful emergency landing with the pilot remaining onboard only suffering minor injuries. Authorities subsequently conducted a search of the surrounding area where the other pilot jumped in Wake County, North Carolina, and found what was initially said to be the body of a 27-year-old male. The deceased was subsequently identified as 23-year-old Charles Hew Crooks. At the time of writing, the surviving pilot does not appear to have been named publicly. He and Crooks have both been identified as Rampart Aviation employees.

N497CA at Raleigh-Durham International Airport after the fatal incident on July 29, 2022. Reader submission

Publicly available air traffic control audio recordings had previously revealed details about the basic circumstances of the incident. N497CA, which was using the callsign Shady 02 at the time, had lost its right main landing gear wheel during a rough landing or touch-and-go and had diverted to Raleigh-Durham to make an emergency landing. That clip had also confirmed that two individuals were on board after the wheel broke off.

The exact circumstances surrounding Crooks' subsequent exit from the plane, which has a rear ramp, remain something of a mystery. In the new air traffic control recording of the conversation between the pilot and Raleigh-Durham's tower, which you can listen to here, both individuals, the remaining pilot and the air traffic controller, sound somewhat in shock.

A full transcript of the clip, which is only one minute and 15 seconds long, and appears to come right before the plane made its emergency landing, is as follows:

Pilot (P): "Raleigh Approach, Shady 02."

Raleigh Approach (RA): "Shady 02, Raleigh"

P: "My co-pilot just ran out the back of the plane."

RA: "Shady 02, what now?"

P: "He just ran out the back of the plane."

RA: "So you don't have a co-pilot on you, sir?"

P: "No, he just jumped out the back of the plane."

RA: "Uh, roger."

P: "Would you like me to circle where he leapt at?"

RA: "Uh, say that again?"

P: "Would you like me to circle where he got out at, or you got me on track?"

RA: "We've still got you on track, but did you need something else?"

P: "No, the dude literally jumped out the back of the plane without a parachute."

*Seven seconds of total silence*

RA: "Shady 02, did you need to do something else, circle or something, or-"

P: "No, I need to land. I'm just making you aware you're gonna have a dead body out where I just called you at. He just jumped out the back of the plane."

RA: "Roger, continue on your heading 0-5-0."

P: "Roger, 0-5-0, 0-2."

This is almost certainly what prompted Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees in the tower at Raleigh-Durham to subsequently call 9-1-1 to report that an individual had jumped from the airplane. A recording of that call emerged publicly last week, a portion of which can be heard in the video below.

The War Zone reached out to Rampart Aviation about the incident after it happened and has not yet received a response. Rampart is on contract to provide parachute training and other airdrop services to elements of the U.S. military, including U.S. Special Operations Command. The aircraft appears to have been supporting training of some kind linked to the U.S. Army's nearby Fort Bragg, a hub for the service's airborne and special operations units, at the time of the incident.

Photographs subsequently provided to The War Zone by a reader, seen at the top of this story and below, show the C-212 at Raleigh Durham with either the original right main landing gear wheel reattached, significantly repaired, or a new one installed in its place. Those pictures also show a missing portion of the landing gear sponson on that side of the aircraft.

A close-up of N497CA's right main landing gear after the incident on July 29. Reader submission

FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are currently investigating the incident. Police at Raleigh-Durham Airport questioned the pilot after the emergency landing and turned the contents of that interview over to FAA and NSTB investigators, according to WRAL-TV, a Capitol Broadcasting Company-owned television station in the Raleigh-Durham area.

At the time of writing, no official statements appear to have been made by any of the relevant authorities regarding the ongoing investigation. Family and friends of Crooks have publicly said they are hoping answers regarding his death will ultimately emerge.

Contact the author: [email protected]

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · August 8, 2022

21. New Chinese Drills Spark Fears Of Prolonged Squeeze On Taiwan

New Chinese Drills Spark Fears Of Prolonged Squeeze On Taiwan

The Pentagon warns that China’s military actions are trying to intimidate Taiwan and the West and create a “new normal.”

HOWARD ALTMAN

AUG 8, 2022 6:57 PM

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · August 8, 2022

A day after the scheduled end of its large-scale military exercise in the sea and air around Taiwan, China announced it was conducting a new series of combat drills.

Though scant details were announced, the continued presence of Chinese military so close to Taiwan seems aimed at showing that China can strangle Taiwan, potentially through a naval and air blockade, if need be.

"Drills like these will not stop and are expected to become routine until reunification, as the Chinese mainland shows its determination to push forward the reunification process after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's provocative visit to the island last week that seriously violated China's sovereignty and territorial integrity," China's Global Times stated Monday, citing "experts." The outlet is directly tied to the Chinese Communist Party.

China's Eastern Theatre Command said it would conduct joint drills focusing on anti-submarine and sea assault operations Reuters reported Monday.

During Monday's drills, "the Type 052C guided missile destroyer Changchun operating in waters southwest to Taiwan island coordinated with several Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft and formed an anti-submarine combat formation together with the Changchun's Ka-28 vessel-based anti-submarine helicopter," Global Times reported, citing China Central Television (CCTV).

On Sunday, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency reported that Taiwan's army would conduct live-fire artillery drills in southern Pingtung County on Tuesday and Thursday, in response to the Chinese exercises, The Associated Press reported.

The drills are expected to include snipers, combat vehicles, armored vehicles as well as attack helicopters, said the report, which cited an anonymous source.

China's new drills raise fears that its aggressive actions toward Taiwan have not only not subsided, but may come with increasing frequency.

Taiwan's foreign ministry condemned the move, saying China was deliberately creating crises. It demanded Beijing stop its military actions and "pull back from the edge."

"In the face of military intimidation created by China, Taiwan will not be afraid nor back down, and will more firmly defend its sovereignty, national security, and free and democratic way of life," the ministry said in a statement.

China's threat to Taiwan is "more serious than ever," but the island will stand firm to protect its freedom and democracy - including by welcoming those who support it, Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told CNN in an interview Monday.

"China has always been threatening Taiwan for years and it's getting more serious in the last few years," Wu told CNN. "Whether Speaker Pelosi visits Taiwan or not, the Chinese military threat against Taiwan has always been there and that is the fact that we need to deal with."

The New York Times suggested that China’s military buildup has reached a point “where some commanders and analysts think an invasion is an increasingly plausible, though still highly risky, scenario. Even if imminent conflict is unlikely, the exercises are putting the region on edge.”

The Taiwanese Ministry of Defense (MOD) reported that on Monday, 13 People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships and 39 Chinese aircraft were detected around Taiwan Monday.

The Taiwanese MOD said of those, it detected 21 aircraft - eight Su-30 Flanker fighter jets, six J-11s, two JH-7s, four J-16s as well as a Ka-28 Anti-Submarine Warfare helicopter - had flown in the east part of the median line of the Taiwan Strait and the southwest Air Defense Identification Zone (SW ADIZ).

ROC armed forces “have monitored the situation and responded to these activities with aircraft in [combat air patrol], naval vessels, and land-based missile systems.”

A day earlier, the PLA sent a total of 66 fighter aircraft to carry out training activities around the Taiwan Strait, according to the Taiwanese MOD.

Of those, eight Su-30 fighter jets and four J-11 fighter jets crossed the northern end of the so-called median line. There were six sorties of J-16 fighter jets, three sorties of Xian H-6N bombers, and one sortie of a Yun-8 anti-submarine aircraft that entered the southwest ADIZ.

It appears that among the Chinese ships taking part in the action on Sunday was the Type 052 Luyang III class Guided Missile Destroyer Hefei.

During a Monday press conference, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said there was no change in the Biden administration's assessment that China will not try to take Taiwan by force in the next two years. U.S. officials, as well as their Taiwanese counterparts, have been repeatedly warning in recent years that the PLA is working to at least be in a position by 2027 when it will feel confident in its ability to successfully carry out a military intervention on the island. Of course, there is no concrete evidence, at present, that the Chinese military is working on a firm schedule to execute such an operation in the next five years.

But while Chinese missiles flying over Taiwan last week were a concern, an even bigger concern is Beijing's creeping presence around the island.

"The sheer number of maritime and air assets that are crossing over this kind of de facto center line, creeping closer to Taiwan shores," is making it "clear that Beijing is trying to create a kind of new normal, with the goal of trying to coerce Taiwan, but also, frankly, to coerce the international community given the importance of the Taiwan Strait to the global economy," Kahl said.

To date, any Chinese effort to choke off the Taiwanese economically has yet to pan out, Kahl noted. But there is reason to be concerned about the future.

"There's [an] enormous amount of global commerce that passes through the Taiwan Strait," he said. "Taiwan itself is among the most impactful economic entities on planet Earth and it provides something like 70% to 90% of the most advanced semiconductors that everybody's iPhone and laptops and everything else runs on. So obviously there could be a point at which the PRC could engage in activities that would have economic consequences, not just for Taiwan, but for the world economy. That's one of the key reasons why there is a global consensus that there needs to be stability across the Taiwan Strait and that conflict across the Taiwan Strait is in nobody's interest."

Kahl reiterated the U.S. support for a "One China" policy and said that China was engaging in a "manufactured crisis." But despite China's increased activity in the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. will continue to support its ally and partners in the region.

"So you know what's important for us right now?" he asked rhetorically. It's "to make sure Beijing understands that our forces in the region will continue to operate, to fly, to sail, wherever international waters allows. That includes the Taiwan Strait. I think you should expect...we will continue to do Taiwan Strait transits as we have in the past and in the coming weeks, we will continue to do freedom of navigation operations elsewhere in the region. We will continue to stand by our allies and partners so even as China tries to kind of chip away at the status quo."

President Joe Biden said that while he is "concerned" about the new Chinese exercises, he does not think they will lead to a larger military action against Taiwan.

Despite China’s move to continue combat drills around Taiwan, air traffic has resumed, Reuters reported.

The previous drills led some airlines to cancel flights to Taipei and to alter flight paths between Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia to avoid the affected area.

"Beijing-issued notices to airmen (NOTAM) had declared temporary danger areas for airlines to avoid during the exercises that encircled much of Taiwan. The final NOTAM covering a section of airspace east of the island expired on Monday at [10 a.m. Taipei time]. After China's military announced fresh drills in the seas and airspace around Taiwan on Monday, no new NOTAM was issued and there were no signs on flight tracking service FlightRadar24 of airlines adjusting routings."

Taiwan's transportation ministry said earlier "most scheduled flights to and from the island had continued to operate during the Chinese military exercises that began on Aug. 4, averaging around 150 departures and arrivals per day."

The announcement by China that it will conduct new combat drills around Taiwan comes two days after Taiwan’s MOD reported that Chinese forces made a possible simulated attack run against a “high-value asset” in the Taiwan Strait.

The ministry reported on Saturday that some of these forces crossed the median line, the de facto boundary between the island and the mainland. Taiwan sent alert broadcasts, patrolling aircraft, and warships to counter the move, but it is not clear what the simulated attack targeted.

Last Thursday, the Chinese military launched short-range ballistic missiles, or SRBMs, directly over Taiwan, starting its planned four-day series of live-fire exercises close to the island. On Friday, a record-breaking number of Chinese aircraft, plus warships, entered the area. Beijing also severed some of its relationships with the United States on a range of important issues.

At the same time, however, the United States has taken measures to try and reduce tensions with China, including postponing a planned test of an LGM-30G Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The recently concluded Chinese live fire drills, that kicked off in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Aug. 2 visit to Taiwan, took place in six areas around the island.

“The six major areas are the training areas closest to Taiwan Island, forming a situation of encirclement on Taiwan Island, which is conducive to reshaping the unified strategic pattern,” Maj. Gen Meng Xiangqing, a professor at the National Defense University, told China's official CCTV.

One zone covers the narrowest part of the Taiwan Strait, The New York Times reported. Others could be used to block a major port or attack three of Taiwan’s main military bases. Another, facing southern Taiwan, could block an escape route.

Meanwhile, as China tightens its noose around Taiwan, it continues working with partners in Asia.

On Monday, Thailand said its Royal Thai Air Force (RTAF) will be conducting a training exercise with China later this month, the Bangkok Post reported, citing an unnamed source.

The Royal Thai Air Force (RTAF) and its Chinese counterpart "will hold a 10-day joint air exercise in Udon Thani, a source said yesterday. China has confirmed that it will join 'Falcon Strike 2022' which is set to take place from Aug. 14-24 at Wing 23."

A Royal Thai Air Force (RTAF) SAAB JAS 39 Gripen fighter aircraft performs an aerial display during a media preview for the Singapore Airshow in Singapore on Feb. 4, 2018. (ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP via Getty Images)

China is expected to send a fleet of "six J-10 C/S multirole fighter jets, a JH-7AI fighter-bomber and a Shaanxi KJ-500 airborne early warning and control aircraft to take part in the exercise, the source said. Chinese Su-27 fighter jets will not be involved in the drill. The RTAF will deploy five Gripen aircraft, three Alphajet trainers/light attack aircraft, and a SAAB 340 AEW early warning and control aircraft. The U.S.-made F-16 jets will not participate, the source told the Bangkok Post. The drill is the fifth of its kind since 2015. The previous round was held in 2019 also at Udon Thani-based Wing 23."

So far, China has refused to adhere to Taiwan's request to stand down its forces. And while the Pentagon said it will continue to conduct freedom of navigation operations in the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in the region, it remains to be seen just how close the U.S. will come to Chinese forces while they remain ensconced around Taiwan.

Contact the author: [email protected]

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · August 8, 2022

22. Beijing’s Taiwan Aggression Has Backfired in Tokyo

Blowback and second and third order effects.

Beijing’s Taiwan Aggression Has Backfired in Tokyo

Foreign Policy · by William Sposato · August 8, 2022

Analysis

Military exercises have stiffened Japanese resolve.

By William Sposato, a Tokyo-based journalist.

Two unidentified military vessels off Taiwan

Two unidentified military vessels sail in waters near the east coast of Taiwan on Aug. 7. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images

TOKYO—China’s four days of military exercises encircling Taiwan in response to a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week has clear ramifications for Japan. The show of military muscle just 70 miles from Japanese territory and the firing of ballistic missiles into waters controlled by Japan were clearly meant as a warning that the country risks being dragged into any future conflict in the region.

While China’s motives in indirectly targeting Japan are not known, the results are pretty clear. The surprisingly extensive military action is bringing a new sense of urgency to heighten Japan’s defense capability, substantially raise the defense budget, and, potentially, institute new rules that would for the first time allow preemptive military steps if Japan is at risk. It’s hard to see how any of these meet Beijing’s policy goals.

The military exercises included the firing of five missiles that overflew Taiwan and landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said the firings represented “serious threats to Japan’s national security and the safety of the Japanese people.” China’s foreign ministry brushed aside Japan’s protests. It said that there was no EEZ, because Japan had failed to negotiate with China over proper boundaries between Chinese territory and the string of islands that stretch from Japan’s Okinawa region, with the westernmost isle just 70 miles from Taiwan. Beijing, which claims 90 percent of the entire South China Sea as its own, is no stranger to sweeping maritime claims.

Japanese analysts saw China’s actions as a direct warning, especially in relation to Japan’s hosting of more than 50,000 U.S. service personnel, the largest offshore deployment of U.S. forces in the world. “The purpose of those kind of threatening [actions] is … make Japan recognize that if Japan cooperates with the United States to contain China or to block China conducting the unification operation of Taiwan, then Japan must be involved in the war, must be damaged by the Chinese military operation,” Bonji Ohara, a senior fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, told NHK television.

But, as Chinese officials should know well, intimidation seldom produces moderation from the other side. Witness the efforts to scare Taiwan in 1996 with missile launches a few weeks ahead of the country’s first direct presidential election. The result was a clear victory for the independence-minded Lee Teng-hui.

The new threats could instead create a “Finland moment” for Beijing. After threatening his neighbors, this year Russian President Vladimir Putin got what he least wanted: a massive expansion in NATO, with long-neutral Finland and Sweden moving to join the military alliance. The landing of missiles in waters close to Japanese territory, coupled with various threats and a claim that Japan is somehow responsible for the Taiwan situation, will do little to improve relations. It doesn’t help that China is in the middle of a surge of anti-Japanese public feeling, leading to the cancellation of cultural festivals and anime conventions across the country.

The new missile launches come at an important time for Japan. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, fresh from a strong showing in parliamentary elections, has promised a significant increase in Japan’s defense spending. Japan’s military (officially the Self-Defense Forces) is one of the largest and considered among the most capable in the world, but the spending level has been unofficially capped at around 1 percent of annual GDP, half the level requested for NATO countries and well below the 3.7 percent racked up by the United States in 2020. Some influential members in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have called for it to be doubled over the next five years. Kishida has been more circumspect, no doubt considering the implication for Japan’s already massive debt load at an estimated 250 percent of annual GDP. In addition to the fiscal impact, opponents of higher spending fear a return to Japanese militarism and see the potential for a new arms race. The pressure will now be on, however, for Kishida to come up with something sizable at the very least.

“When you look at the problems in Taiwan, the stronger the recognition that Japan is in a very harsh international environment. As a result, I think the debate about strengthening Japan’s defense capabilities will intensify,” Harukata Takenaka, a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, said on TV Tokyo.

As always in a country given to gradualist politics, the move toward a stronger military has been gaining traction for many years. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, killed in an attack last month, had pushed through legislation in 2015 that allows Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to take part in collective defense with its U.S. allies. The move was highly controversial in light of Japan’s constitution that bans the use military force except in direct defense of the country.

With that bedded down (and the concept now given an inadvertent boost by Beijing), defense hawks within the ruling LDP, many from the faction previously headed by Abe, are now pushing the envelope further to authorize preemptive strikes against a country threatening Japan. The ostensible target is nuclear-armed and always bellicose North Korea (largely forgotten recently as global attention has shifted to Taiwan). But the rules could conceivably apply more broadly. Polls show fairly solid support for the concept, although advocates prefer calling it “counterstrike capabilities” to avoid the image problems raised by the idea of a preemptive attack.

The Chinese action also serves as something of a vindication for former Prime Minister Taro Aso, who said a year ago when he was a deputy prime minister that an attack on Taiwan would represent a threat to Japan. The remarks were criticized at the time, but the recent Chinese military actions show that his analysis was correct. More controversially, he also said that “if that is the case, Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together.”

Japan has long-term ties to Taiwan, formerly a Japanese colony. China-Japan tensions are not new, coming to a near boiling point in 2012 over the islands in the East China Sea, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, that are under Japan’s control but are also claimed by China (as well as Taiwan). The unpopulated islands, totaling around 3 square miles, are largely meaningless in strategic terms. All this prompted the Economist to ask at the time: “Could Asia really go to war over these?” But it wouldn’t just be Asia. The Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations in the United States have all said that the islands are covered by the U.S.-Japan security alliance.

The latest tensions were on full display at a foreign ministers’ meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Cambodia, which took place during Pelosi’s landing in Taiwan and subsequent meetings in Tokyo with Kishida, among others. Angered by Japan’s support for a G-7 statement expressing concern over China’s live-fire exercises, China canceled a planned meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi on the sidelines of the ASEAN meeting. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov both walked out when Hayashi addressed the group.

“China somehow is targeting Japan very strongly, even though we didn’t do anything. This is a very difficult and interesting situation. Why does the Japanese government have to be criticized so much?” Ryo Sahashi, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo’s International Relations Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, said in an interview.

Hayashi, who comes from a moderate group within the ruling party, kept his usual calm demeanor during the ASEAN meeting. Speaking with reporters, he acknowledged that the two men were “out for a certain period of time” during his remarks. More importantly, he seemed eager to lower the temperature. “In times like this, when the situation is tense, communicating well is important. Japan is always open to dialogue with China,” Hayashi said.

But the mood is clearly darkening. “It is a very malicious and dangerous act for China to fire as many as five missiles into the Japanese EEZ in one day,” LDP policy chief Sanae Takaichi said on her Twitter feed. She called for urgent senior-level meetings with Washington and other allied countries on the issue.

Takaichi is one of a new generation of hard-liners on defense issues, following in the footsteps of Abe, himself a strong Taiwan supporter. At the same time, her views reflect a growing public frustration over what is seen as Beijing’s high-handed methods. Even before the latest rise in tensions, a Pew Research Center survey of views on China found that 87 percent of Japanese held an unfavorable view of China, the highest among any country in the poll. Australia, which has faced Beijing’s wrath, including direct trade embargos over a series of perceived slights, was at 86 percent, while the United States came in at a remarkably subdued 82 percent.

And China made clear on Monday that it will not leave things where they are, announcing fresh military drills. Analysts expect that Beijing will keep up the pressure, pulling from its playbook employed against Tokyo in the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. After a flare-up when the islands were purchased by the Japanese national government in 2012, China began a steady drip of regular incursions into the EEZ and territorial waters. It is still at it, and in June China sailed coast guard ships within 2 miles of land, well within the 12-mile territorial limit, remaining for a record-long 64 hours. With Taiwan, the Pelosi visit is as much an opportunity as a problem for Beijing.

“What we really wanted was to have is a quiet environment that would enable us to prepare for a better security environment over the next five to 10 years,” said the University of Tokyo’s Sahashi. “We wanted to quietly get ready within Japan, with the United States and also with Taiwan. I think Pelosi’s visit was really strategically unnecessary.”

Kathleen Benoza contributed reporting to this article.

William Sposato is a Tokyo-based journalist who has been a contributor to Foreign Policy since 2015. He has been following Japan’s politics and economics for more than 20 years, working at Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the co-author of a 2021 book on the Carlos Ghosn affair and its impact on Japan.

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Beijing’s Taiwan Aggression Has Backfired in Tokyo

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Military exercises have stiffened Japanese resolve.