Quotes of the Day:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
- United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”
- Oscar Wilde
“[No] social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.”
- Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought
1. For Putin, Propping Up Allies Is Turning Into a Perilous Bargain
2. Grid, a ‘Fuller Picture’ News Site, Goes Live
3. Two decades after 9/11, there are more safe havens than ever
4. In Afghanistan, a humanitarian ‘inferno’ — and tough questions for the U.S.
5. Reforming the Defense Department's Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Process
6. US military links prolific hacking group to Iranian intelligence
7. Human Rights Watch criticises Biden, others for weak defense of democracy
8. FDD | It Is Time to Counter China’s Data Strategy
9. From the Jaws of Retreat - Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Persistence of American Ambition
10. More Odysseus, Less Achilles: Developing Special Operations Forces for the Challenges Ahead
11. The Nonproliferation Regime Is Breaking
12. Analysis: China's ex-Washington envoy resurfaces with an important message
13. Military Chiefs Sound Alarm at Proposal to Hold 2022 Spending to Last Year’s Level
14. Making ‘Quad Plus’ a Reality
15. Cyber innovation and partnerships are key to future deterrence
16. Iran’s Mohsen Rezaee Should Face Justice
17. A More Just Drone War Is Within Reach
18. Underwater drones herald sea change in Pacific warfare
19. Biden mulled reducing support for France’s military operations in Africa. Instead, he doubled down.
20. The West Is Right to Deny Russia a ‘Sphere of Influence’
21. Science Just Discovered Your Brain Really Hates PowerPoint
22. China tries to tone down war talk as military tells Taiwan to "surrender"
1. For Putin, Propping Up Allies Is Turning Into a Perilous Bargain
For Putin, Propping Up Allies Is Turning Into a Perilous Bargain
The Interpreter
The Russian leader is fighting fires on multiple fronts, illustrating the danger of his strategy of relying on force to aid his autocratic neighbors.
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A state media photo of President Vladimir V. Putin attending an emergency meeting on Monday of the Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization to discuss the situation in Kazakhstan.
By
Jan. 13, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET
From Eastern Europe to the oil fields of Central Asia, President Vladimir V. Putin is straining to maintain a sphere of influence that will keep the forces of history at bay.
The Russian leader’s allies, perched atop former Soviet republics, are growing old in office or face rising discontent. The bulwarks they have provided against the expanding frontiers of democracy and Western military power look increasingly shaky.
Coercing allies is hardly unusual for great or regional powers. The Soviet Union, whose loss Mr. Putin often laments, sent tanks into Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Still, it bonded its empire through Communism, which instilled a common mission and a sense of existential conflict with the capitalist West.
Now, with capitalism and at least pretensions of democracy the norm on both sides of the old Iron Curtain, there is little to justify fealty to Moscow beyond the shared desire of post-Soviet strongmen to help one another cling to office.
“There’s no real ideological glue to hold together this motley alliance of people with very different interests,” said Timothy M. Frye, a Columbia University political scientist.
Mr. Putin’s sphere of influence, for all the trouble it causes the West, is increasingly a cage of his own making. The more that he relies on force to prop up aging, unpopular autocrats on his periphery, the more besieged his alliance becomes, both by dissent at home and Western pressure abroad.
As a result, the very threats that Mr. Putin hoped to avert are instead growing. Ukraine is rushing into the West’s arms. Provocations by Belarus, rooted in its crackdown on rising dissent, are uniting Europe against its pro-Moscow leader. And protesters in long-stable Kazakhstan are demanding change.
Mr. Putin has sought to turn his reactive escalations into a strength at home, portraying his interventions into those countries’ problems as reclaiming Soviet greatness.
But a tepid public reaction, as well as the Kremlin’s recent crackdowns on civil society and political rivals, Dr. Frye said, indicated that “the usual narratives that Putin has used to shore up his rule are just not working as well.”
Russian riot police disperse opposition protesters in downtown Moscow in May 2012, on the eve of Mr. Putin's inauguration as president. He returned to the office after a four-year stint as prime minister.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev/Associated Press
Imposing Loyalty
Mr. Putin’s fear of democratic encroachment is often traced to the so-called color revolution democratic uprisings that swept several former Soviet republics in the 2000s. He and his deputies still speak often of those events, usually as Western plots to subvert Russian power.
But Mr. Putin’s response did not crystallize until 2012, when he cracked down violently on protests against him in Russia. Many of the demonstrators belonged to the Russian middle class that had once widely backed him. This elevated hard-liners within his administration, while also leading Mr. Putin to shift his power base to security services.
The Kremlin, increasingly hawkish and nationalistic, even paranoid, settled on a strategy of propping up neighboring leaders who would control dissent and oppose the West.
As a result, Mr. Putin came to believe that only leaders who look like him — autocratic strongmen — could be trusted to keep the dangers of democracy and Western influence at bay.
Any others would have to be forced into loyalty.
After Ukrainian protesters ejected their country’s pro-Moscow president in 2014, Mr. Putin did not seek to persuade newly empowered Ukrainian voters to align with Moscow. Rather, hoping to strong-arm Ukrainian leaders into obedience, Russia invaded and annexed one part of Ukraine and sponsored separatists in another.
So far, this strategy has largely backfired. Western powers increased their support for Ukraine, and Ukrainian voters, once divided over relations with Russia, turned sharply against it. But Mr. Putin, perhaps unable to see a neighboring democracy as anything other than a threat, has only escalated his efforts, and is now threatening a major invasion of Ukraine.
This may well forestall overt alignment between Ukraine and the West, or even force Washington to redouble its acknowledgment of Russian interests there. But one danger for Mr. Putin is that it may not work forever and, once failed, could see yet another former Soviet republic join the European institutions that he insists are a threat to him.
A burned-out police bus in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Saturday.Credit...Vasily Krestyaninov/Associated Press
A Shrinking Circle
Mr. Putin’s reliance on fellow strongmen has proved nearly as risky.
Strongman-ruled countries, which concentrate power in one person’s hands at the expense of governing institutions, tend to be more unstable, more corrupt and less economically effective, all of which deepen public dissatisfaction.
The dangers of this can be seen in Kazakhstan, where a carefully planned transition from one leader to the next broke down into violent unrest.
Understand the Protests in Kazakhstan
Card 1 of 5
What led to the protests? The protests began when the government lifted price caps for liquefied petroleum gas, a low-carbon fuel that many Kazakhs use to power their cars. But the frustration among the people runs deep in regards to social and economic disparities.
What do the protesters want? The demands of the demonstrators have expanded in scope from lower fuel prices to a broader political liberalization by seeking to oust the autocratic forces that have ruled Kazakhstan without any substantial opposition since 1991.
Why does the unrest matter outside this region? Until now, the oil-rich country has been regarded as a pillar of political and economic stability in an unstable region. The protests are also significant for Vladimir Putin, who views Kazakhstan as part of Russia’s sphere of influence.
How has the government responded? President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has called the protesters “a band of terrorists,” declared Kazakhstan under attack and asked the Russian-led military alliance to intervene. Officials have instituted a state of emergency and shut off internet access.
Mr. Putin sent a Russian-led force of 2,500 troops to Kazakhstan to help put down the turmoil, at a time when tensions with Ukraine and Belarus were already simmering. It has been an illustration of the perilous bargain holding Mr. Putin and his allies together, in which they are essentially obligated to guarantee one another’s rule by force.
Strongman leaders are also likelier to start conflicts and likelier to lose them, Erica Frantz, a Michigan State University scholar of authoritarianism, said she has found in her research.
“Personalists don’t have to bargain over policy, and lack of accountability leads to riskier behavior,” she said, using a formal term for such leaders.
While their fear of democracy makes them useful allies to Mr. Putin, the downsides of their rule increasingly bedevil his informal alliance.
“Provocations are what we would expect. We’d also expect some of his moves to be bad choices,” Dr. Frantz said.
Even with democracy’s global travails, it has nonetheless remained widely accepted since the Cold War’s end, beyond a handful of countries like China or Cuba, as the default, forcing even unabashed dictators to at least pretend at democracy.
The result is a circle of pro-Moscow strongmen who frequently struggle to persuade their citizens why it is necessary to accept fewer freedoms than those in neighboring countries.
Belarus exemplifies the dangers. Last year, as dissent rose over the government’s failures to address the pandemic, the president’s escalating crackdowns became a source of diplomatic conflict with the rest of Europe, which ensnared Mr. Putin.
Some Belarusian opposition activists, aware of Russia’s influence, signaled their openness to working with Moscow. But, in what may be a reflection of the Kremlin’s narrow insistence on familiar autocrats, for all their missteps, it has ignored their outreach.
Much as with Ukraine, Mr. Putin is left with a strategy in Belarus or Kazakhstan of ever-escalating coercion, albeit conducted through his allies in office.
These cycles, of shoring up a sphere of influence built on distrust and intimidation, can take on a logic of their own. So the strategy is pursued even when it appears likely to produce the opposite of Mr. Putin’s hoped-for results: both inviting the very threats he fears and eroding the alliance on which he has rested so much of his future.
“It will certainly produce more militarization of the alliance’s eastern flank,” Emma Ashford, a researcher at the Atlantic Council research group wrote of NATO’s likely response to Russia’s threats against Ukraine. “Just because we think it’s a stupid, self-defeating move on the part of Russia doesn’t mean they won’t do it.”
2. Grid, a ‘Fuller Picture’ News Site, Goes Live
I will next forward the first article I read from Grid. It is by John McLaughlin. I hope this becomes a useful source of news.
Excerpt:
Unlike many other new digital publications, Grid does not have a paywall. Mr. Bauman said the site would bring in money through advertising, with a goal of creating subscription products and potentially branching out into consulting and software.
“We’re writing for anyone who wants or needs greater clarity on the most important stories of the day, and we think there are millions of people out there who fit that description,” Mr. Bauman said.
Grid, a ‘Fuller Picture’ News Site, Goes Live
The latest media start-up, with millions in funding and a team of more than 20 journalists, aims to bring clarity to weighty issues.
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Laura McGann, formerly of Vox, is running Grid’s newsroom. Mark Bauman, a former ABC News reporter, is in charge of the business side.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times
By
Jan. 12, 2022
Grid, a news site more than a year in the making, went live early Wednesday, with the goal of becoming a one-stop media shop for detailed renderings of the biggest stories of the day and why they matter.
Mark Bauman, who covered war and genocide around the world for ABC News before becoming a top executive at National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution, started Grid because, he said, he had become frustrated with the coverage of important issues.
“A lot of my friends and I bounce between more than a dozen sites a day, trying to make sense of what’s become an increasingly complex news cycle, and that’s hardly a unique experience,” he said in an interview. “I mean, a medical report on one site will tell me how the latest Covid variant will affect my health but won’t say anything about how it affects the supply chain.”
Mr. Bauman, who started the project in August 2020, said he had raised about $10 million in the first round of funding from Abu Dhabi-based International Media Investments and Brian Edelman, a tech executive. In March, he hired Laura McGann, formerly an editorial director at Vox, to build the newsroom and establish Grid’s editorial identity.
“Our job is not to incrementally cover the news,” Ms. McGann said in an interview. “We think that lots of places do that well. We’re watching the news and thinking, ‘OK, how can we freeze-frame and help people see a fuller picture?’”
The digital publication’s magic bullet is a story format that Ms. McGann calls “a 360,” which examines a single topic from a variety of viewpoints. An article published Wednesday, for instance, looks at the issue of Covid-19 vaccination refusals by pregnant people with contributions from reporters who specialize in science, misinformation, politics and race.
“We can give you a story that shows you what you need to know from different angles and prioritizes what really matters, not necessarily what’s new or what just happened,” Ms. McGann said.
She added that she encouraged her reporters from different beats to join forces on their stories, creating an interdisciplinary approach that is meant to set Grid apart from other sites, along with an emphasis on infographics.
There is no shortage of competition. In addition to the big news organizations and seasoned online publications, media start-ups of recent vintage include Axios, the quick-hit Washington news site founded by the Politico alumni Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz; Air Mail, a general interest weekly led by the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter; Puck, co-founded by the editor Jon Kelly, who worked under Mr. Carter at Vanity Fair; Punchbowl News, an insider-y Washington publication started by three former Politico journalists; Lookout Local, a local news company backed in part by the Knight Foundation and led by the media analyst Ken Doctor; and Substack, the digital newsletter platform that is home to Glenn Greenwald, Heather Cox Richardson and Bari Weiss.
Capital B, a nonprofit news outlet for Black communities led by Lauren Williams, a former editor in chief of Vox, is scheduled to arrive this year. And Ben Smith, the former New York Times media columnist, and Justin Smith, a former Bloomberg Media chief executive, announced plans last week for a global news site with ambitions of reaching 200 million readers.
Based in Washington, Grid is starting with a staff of more than 20 journalists, and it is still hiring. The team includes Chris Geidner, a former MSNBC columnist and BuzzFeed News editor; Kay Steiger, a former Vox Washington editor; and Tom Nagorski, a former ABC News managing editor. The Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias will be an editor at large and will host a Grid podcast with Ms. McGann, while continuing his Substack newsletter.
Unlike many other new digital publications, Grid does not have a paywall. Mr. Bauman said the site would bring in money through advertising, with a goal of creating subscription products and potentially branching out into consulting and software.
“We’re writing for anyone who wants or needs greater clarity on the most important stories of the day, and we think there are millions of people out there who fit that description,” Mr. Bauman said.
3. Two decades after 9/11, there are more safe havens than ever
This is the first article I have read from Gird, the new news website.
Excerpts:
Strategically, the objective must be to make better use of international partnerships as force multipliers, as the Biden administration has emphasized in its diplomatic and defense strategies. For counterterrorism, this involves training and equipping intelligence and special operations forces in partner countries; they must serve as extensions of U.S. capability for both detecting and disrupting terrorist operations.
The strategic objective that will be more difficult — simply because of the magnitude and complexity of the problem — involves coordinating development and assistance policies internationally to improve governance, border controls, legal standards and other societal conditions in those areas with conditions conducive to extremism. In other words, a strategy to counter the economic circumstances that allow extremist groups to recruit and to prosper. This will require more persistence, patience and doggedness than the U.S. typically displays; it is the work of generations.
As always with terrorism, there are no panaceas. Despite our progress over the last two decades, it is almost certain that at some point, foreign terrorists will push a deadly operation past our strong defenses. To avoid overreaction if that moment comes, political leaders will need to give Americans a clear-eyed view of the problem and build a shared sense of resilience — something we did not have at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Two decades after 9/11, there are more safe havens than ever
A former CIA leader looks at why terrorists have more places to take refuge — and what the U.S. and the rest of the world should do about it.
Special Contributor
When the Biden administration unveils its first formal National Security Strategy in early 2022, the document will likely stress U.S. domestic renewal while shifting foreign priorities toward major competitors such as China and Russia. Counterterrorism will take something of a back seat, other than some reference to domestic extremist groups.
Such a shift is a product of success; the U.S. has made headway over 20 years in degrading international terrorist groups, for many years the key focus of U.S. national security. But as we rebalance our priorities, it is important to confront an uncomfortable and worrisome reality: After two long wars, and smaller-scale operations in dozens of other countries, extremists today have more favorable conditions — and more geographic locations — in which to recruit, plan and plot than they did before the 9/11 attacks. Having fought to eliminate safe havens for terrorists, the U.S. must face the fact is that there are now more safe havens than ever.
How did this happen? And what to do about it? It’s worth stepping back and gauging our progress against what I’ve always seen as three imperatives of successful counterterrorism: destroying terrorist leadership, denying terrorists’ safe havens and changing the conditions that give rise to the phenomenon.
Bin Laden and his lieutenants
We have been most successful at the first.
Since the 9/11 attacks, one of the world’s most perilous occupations has been the job of al-Qaeda operations chief: The U.S. has killed or captured most of them, one after the other, along with dozens of other al-Qaeda leaders — and of course Osama bin Laden himself fell in 2011. Leaders of the Islamic State have suffered a similar fate, most notably the demise of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a 2019 U.S. Special Forces raid.
Taking out leaders disrupts terrorist planning and operations temporarily, but the other two imperatives — denial of safe haven and altering the underlying causes — have far greater impact over the long term. On these fronts, we have not only come up short; the situation has grown worse over the last decade — against a backdrop of global trends that, left uninterrupted, will cause conditions to deteriorate further.
Safe Havens: The Sahel
“Safe haven” is a critical condition for terrorists’ regeneration and growth; the term was used often in the aftermath of 9/11, referring to any terrain where would-be terrorists might find comfort and safety. It was the claim made repeatedly for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — safe havens in those countries would be denied — and it has been the argument for smaller-scale missions in Somalia, Yemen, and many other countries in the Middle East and Africa.
Two decades later, safe havens have come roaring back.
Small terrorist cells can find safe haven deep inside urban areas, but in larger numbers they are most comfortable in territory that is essentially ungoverned — land where state sovereignty is absent or scarcely exercised — or in borderlands that are poorly patrolled and highly permeable, but where they can still find essential goods and raise money.
These conditions have multiplied dramatically since 9/11.
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This means terrorism no longer has a center of gravity, as it did in bin Laden’s day. Back then, the nexus of terrorist activity was the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Iraq War was only the most obvious way in which events after 9/11 shattered that paradigm, opening terrain for terrorism to take root. The Arab Spring — the 2011 uprisings across much of the Middle East — also contributed; the various rebellions upended state control and created space for terrorists via the resulting civil war in Syria, the turmoil in Libya after Muammar Gaddafi’s fall, the civil war in Yemen and the Egyptian revolution, which led to a spike in terrorism in the Sinai Peninsula — where only 1.4 million of Egypt’s 102 million people live, scattered across a desert the size of West Virginia.
In all these places, terrorists now go largely unnoticed. They blend in or exploit conditions over large stretches of territory that are either in dispute, neglected by fragile governments or simply too large for such governments to monitor. This is the case with Libya — 90 percent of which is a vast desert — and neighboring Algeria; the border between the two countries is poorly monitored, as are their respective frontiers with Mali and Niger. It is no accident that the borderlands between Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso (the Sahel region’s heartland) have become terrorist hotbeds, with attacks doubling every year since 2015. Three-hundred officials, community leaders and family members have been assassinated or abducted in the Sahel since 2018. This is also the area where ISIS’s West Africa affiliate claimed responsibility for a 2017 attack that killed four U.S. Special Forces soldiers.
The wide-open nature of the region was driven home to me in 2014. I was helping a Western energy company improve security, following the capture of its natural gas facility near the Libya-Algeria border and the resulting death of 37 hostages. The killers had been led by a breakaway al-Qaeda operative whose gang comprised a mini-U.N. of terrorism — they hailed from Algeria, Mali, Libya, Niger, Egypt, Canada, Mauritania and Tunisia. It is still that way today.
Safe Havens: The Middle and Near East
In Syria and Iraq, meanwhile, though U.S. and Russian operations broke up the territorial “caliphate” ISIS assembled beginning in 2014, the U.N. estimates the group still counts more than 10,000 fighters in those two countries. Most operate in small cells. I doubt anyone knows how much money the group still has from the huge war chest it amassed; in 2018, the RAND Corporation put the figure at around $400 million — vastly more than al-Qaeda ever raised. ISIS’s strategy is also more sophisticated and ambitious geographically than al-Qaeda’s, comprising three concentric circles (local, regional, global) with different objectives at each level.
And now — again — there is Afghanistan. This pre-9/11 safe haven may soon be a safe haven once more. In the wake of the 2021 U.S. and Allied withdrawal, Afghanistan is again a nation where the government’s writ barely extends beyond major urban settings. The Taliban considers the affiliate Islamic State Khorasan Province an enemy, but with the Taliban struggling merely to govern and feed the populace, its ability to fight ISIS-K is questionable. The prospect of widespread hunger has been added to an already volatile mix of trained fighters and widely available weapons — a clear recipe for radicalizations. Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, remains in league with the Taliban, and one of al-Qaeda’s closest partners, Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the Pakistan-based network of that name, is Interior minister in the new Taliban government. And the U.N. reported that in the months before the U.S. withdrawal, 8,000 to 10,000 jihadi fighters had streamed into Afghanistan from Central Asia, Russia’s Caucasus region, Pakistan and Xinjiang in western China.
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Threat to the U.S.?
As these safe havens multiply, do we still have to worry about attacks on the homeland? In a word, yes. While our defenses are vastly improved, and terrorist groups seem oriented for the moment on indigenous targets or U.S. interests overseas, attacking Americans inside the U.S. remains the brass ring for many groups. According to the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, the intelligence community estimates that ISIS-K in Afghanistan, unless disrupted, will generate the capacity for external attacks, including in the U.S., within six to 12 months of the August 2021 withdrawal — in other words, now — and al-Qaeda will be able to do the same within one to two years of our departure. In my view, both groups will aim to do so.
We also know that smaller organizations such as Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Taliban harbor similar ambitions. A reminder last year came in the form of the Justice Department’s indictment of an operative of the al-Shabaab group; he was allegedly seeking pilot lessons in the Philippines, with the intention of flying an aircraft into a building in the U.S.
The underlying cause
The third and last counterterrorism imperative — altering conditions that nourish the movement — may prove most challenging of all. This problem is best illustrated in the Sahel’s key countries of Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad — all of which rank among the bottom 20 nations in the U.N.’s Human Development Report. The region is also home to some of the highest population growth rates in the world — about 7 percent annually. This combination — low economic growth, high unemployment and strained services — offers fertile recruiting grounds for extremism.
Equally worrisome, the Middle East remains home to the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. The population has grown by 70 million since the Arab Spring and is expected to increase by an additional 120 million by 2030, according to World Bank figures and U.N. forecasts. Jobs have not kept pace; youth unemployment has worsened over the past 10 years — increasing from 32.9 percent in 2012 to 36.5 percent in 2020, according to the International Labor Organization.
What to do about it
What can the U.S. and the rest of the world do about these trends? Striking the right balance between a return to high-profile counterterrorism and sounding the all clear will involve a complex mix of strategies and approaches.
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On the tactical side, the most important step must be protecting, and perhaps increasing, intelligence resources for counterterrorism. By this I refer to absolutely essential eyes and ears in these many corners of the world where extremism and terror are thriving, at a moment when Pentagon attention and funding are shifting toward conventional competitors, mainly China and Russia. I have no quarrel with that shift, but it must not preclude attention to counterterrorism.
One very specific tactical matter: We must ensure that artificial intelligence and machine learning are fully integrated into counterterrorism analysis and operations. Success in these areas relies increasingly on data collection and fusion, which have become much harder as terrorists have burrowed into social media and other 21st century technologies — which themselves can provide a kind of safe haven unless aggressively exploited.
Strategically, the objective must be to make better use of international partnerships as force multipliers, as the Biden administration has emphasized in its diplomatic and defense strategies. For counterterrorism, this involves training and equipping intelligence and special operations forces in partner countries; they must serve as extensions of U.S. capability for both detecting and disrupting terrorist operations.
The strategic objective that will be more difficult — simply because of the magnitude and complexity of the problem — involves coordinating development and assistance policies internationally to improve governance, border controls, legal standards and other societal conditions in those areas with conditions conducive to extremism. In other words, a strategy to counter the economic circumstances that allow extremist groups to recruit and to prosper. This will require more persistence, patience and doggedness than the U.S. typically displays; it is the work of generations.
As always with terrorism, there are no panaceas. Despite our progress over the last two decades, it is almost certain that at some point, foreign terrorists will push a deadly operation past our strong defenses. To avoid overreaction if that moment comes, political leaders will need to give Americans a clear-eyed view of the problem and build a shared sense of resilience — something we did not have at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
4. In Afghanistan, a humanitarian ‘inferno’ — and tough questions for the U.S.
More from Grid.
Excerpts:
The sheer scope of the crisis brings the conversation back to those billions in Afghan reserves and to the American sanctions. And this, inevitably, returns the spotlight to Washington.
The U.S. may have ended its “forever war” in Afghanistan, but it remains the most important player in determining the nation’s immediate future. Washington, that ICG report said, is still “the principal arbiter of Kabul’s economic relationship with the world.” And when it comes to the Taliban, the ICG’s Graeme Smith says the U.S. should put aside its legitimate concerns to help resolve the crisis. “The Taliban deserve worse,” Smith wrote in Foreign Affairs, “but that does not matter. After generations of suffering, the Afghan people deserve better.”
In Afghanistan, a humanitarian ‘inferno’ — and tough questions for the U.S.
The U.S. refusal to recognize the Taliban — and free up billions of dollars in frozen funds — has led to a financial crisis for the nation.
Deputy Global Editor
In Afghanistan, it is no longer about what might happen. It’s already happening.
When the last U.S. soldiers left Kabul, President Joe Biden pledged to “stand by the Afghan people,” who, already ground down by years of war, drought and persistent poverty, faced uncertainty, Taliban rule and the prospect of wholesale destitution. Just three months later, according to a World Food Programme (WFP) survey, 98 percent of Afghans didn’t have enough to eat. Seven in 10 were borrowing food to survive.
Hear more from Nikhil Kumar on this piece:
Fueling this humanitarian inferno is an unprecedented economic collapse triggered after the U.S. delivered a parting gut punch.
In the aftermath of the American withdrawal and Taliban takeover, much of the world’s attention focused on the evacuations and the fate of ordinary Afghans — women, journalists and other vulnerable groups — under the new regime. But there was another, silent crisis looming — and now that crisis has arrived. The U.S. and other countries refused to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government, thereby blocking the country’s new leaders from accessing more than $9 billion in Afghan government reserves housed abroad. Meanwhile, U.S. sanctions against the Taliban meant foreign banks and donors risked blowback if they engaged with the new regime.
For Washington, the rationale for freezing the billions is twofold: First, the money should be used as leverage, to pressure the Taliban to change its ways. Second, it’s too early to accept and recognize the legitimacy of the Taliban — a group that provided al-Qaeda with a base to plot the 9/11 attacks and then terrorized Afghans and Americans alike in the two decades that followed.
The result: Ordinary Afghans have been buried under the debris of a collapsing economy. Basic services — from healthcare to banking to sanitation — have broken down. Significant gains made during the U.S. occupation — in those service areas as well as in education, press freedom and human rights — are at risk. Famine isn’t so much knocking as banging on the doors of ordinary people. Already battered by poverty, the coronavirus pandemic and drought, the country has a deepening desperation that is evident inside and out: At least 300,000 Afghans have fled to neighboring Iran since the U.S. left, part of a wider exodus since August.
Now a growing chorus — Afghans, humanitarian organizations, other nations, members of Congress and former U.S. diplomats and commanders — is calling on the U.S. to moderate its stance.
The Biden administration has loosened some restrictions, but the fundamental question remains unresolved: What to do now that the Taliban — the United States’ sworn enemy — and the Afghan government, which relied on U.S. military and economic patronage to function, are one and the same?
Billion-dollar questions
For the 20 years of the American presence, the Afghan state relied to a staggering degree on international support. The math was straightforward and mind-boggling: The Kabul government spent around $11 billion a year; its revenues were about $2.5 billion, according to the World Bank. The remainder — nearly $9 billion — came from international donors, the vast majority from the U.S. The money funded everything from government salaries to electricity supplies to infrastructure maintenance. Civilian salaries alone accounted for around $1 billion a year.
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In other words, three-quarters of what it took to keep the country going — to fund the government payroll, pay for its security services and keep the day-to-day business of a state together — came from international grants and donors, led by the U.S.
When the U.S. left and the Taliban took power, the economy was effectively placed in financial quarantine. The $9 billion-plus in reserves was frozen. Other funding was cut. U.S. policy influences other international players: The International Monetary Fund blocked the Taliban from accessing hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency reserves, and the World Bank suspended payments to the country. The combination of existing sanctions and the withholding of formal recognition meant that any international transactions with a Taliban-run Afghanistan were now suspect — and potentially criminal.
“The U.S. took the most drastic possible step,” Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Asia Program, told Grid. “No one is under any illusion about what [the Taliban] are. But another choice that the U.S. and its partners had was to freeze some but not all of the assistance, and then threaten to freeze the rest if the Taliban didn’t do certain things.”
The consequences became clear almost immediately. Prices for basic goods soared. Hospital workers, teachers and tens of thousands of civil servants went without pay. Aid agencies entered the business of administering payroll: In November, the U.N. took over the disbursement of millions of dollars of healthcare aid across the country, including paying the salaries of some 23,000 health workers. Meanwhile, fears of legal blowback spread among outside lenders.
“The [global] banking industry is reading this as, ‘the entire government is now the Taliban,’” a former U.S. Treasury Department official was cited as saying in a recent International Crisis Group (ICG) report.
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Though still poor, Afghanistan had made great strides over the last two decades in areas such as living standards and healthcare. Maternal mortality rates improved by some 50 percent compared with the 1990s, when the Taliban last held power. The banking system had been another example of progress; before 2001, people in Afghanistan typically relied on informal financial networks.
In a matter of months, all these gains have been called into question.
“It’s very bad. Even bad is probably not the right word to describe it,” M. Ashraf Haidari, a former Afghan diplomat and ambassador under the U.S.-backed government, told Grid. “Any economic activity has come to a standstill. The banking sector is completely collapsed.”
A group of more than 40 Democratic members of Congress has called for a release of the frozen funds. Whatever the official view of the Taliban, they wrote in a letter to Biden, “punitive economic policies will not weaken Taliban leaders, who will be shielded from the direst consequences, while the overwhelming impact of these measures will fall on innocent Afghans who have already suffered decades of war and poverty.”
David Beasley, the former Republican governor of South Carolina who now leads the World Food Programme, told the New Yorker that “If you unfreeze the money, then you can put liquidity back into the marketplace, and the economy will start to come back up. If you don’t … this country will absolutely collapse.” And last month, several former U.S. military commanders and ambassadors who served in Afghanistan implored the White House to act. “Ordinary Afghans deserve access to their own funds, now frozen in banks wary of U.S. and international sanctions,” they wrote in a letter published by the Atlantic Council. “The longer decisions are postponed, the more difficult it will become to prevent the looming humanitarian catastrophe in the country and the deaths of many Afghans.”
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The U.S. and the Taliban
The U.S. has eased some restrictions while holding fast to the principle of pariah status for the Taliban. The Treasury has issued general licenses, giving aid groups latitude to operate in Afghanistan without risking breaches of the sanctions regime. The U.N. Security Council cleared a resolution that gave breathing space to humanitarian groups, exempting them from international sanctions targeting the Taliban and others. Backed by the U.S., a World Bank-administered fund has also released $280 million to the WFP and UNICEF.
Other aid commitments have been made. As of this week, U.S. contributions and pledges of aid since the troop withdrawal amount to more than $780 million. The European Union, meanwhile, has promised more than $1 billion, and a group of Islamic nations pledged in December to set up a fund to assist with humanitarian operations.
But these measures are limited in scope and reach. They are designed to allow the flow of aid and help with humanitarian work, but they continue to limit the Taliban’s access — by extension, the new Afghan government’s access — to other funds. And the aid pledges come nowhere near the billions of dollars still frozen. Nor do the policy tweaks do anything to restore the banking sector or remove the uncertainty plaguing the wider Afghan economy.
For the U.S., accepting the Taliban as legitimate custodians of Afghanistan would mean recognizing a government that features cabinet members known for attacks on U.S. forces. The FBI currently offers $10 million “for information leading directly to the arrest of Sirajuddin Haqqani,” a man described in a U.N. report last year as “a member of the wider Al-Qaida leadership.” Today, Haqqani is the Interior minister in the new government.
It would also mean recognizing a group that continues to turn back the clock for women and girls, whose freedoms have been severely curtailed since August. Rights groups have documented incidents of violent retribution against those linked to the previous regime. What had been a vibrant free press — a standout achievement under the U.S.-sponsored Afghan state — is now a shadow of its former self. Since the Taliban’s arrival in Kabul, more than 40 percent of Afghanistan’s media outlets have closed and thousands of journalists have lost their jobs, according to Reporters Without Borders.
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For the Biden administration, all this rules out recognition, no matter the trauma affecting the nation.
“We’re also talking to the Taliban and telling them that to the extent they would like direct assistance from any country, including the United States, they need to live up to their basic obligations,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said at the Council on Foreign Relations in December, “their international humanitarian obligations, their human rights obligations, and their commitments on questions of counterterrorism.”
For many, that stance is too rigid. “I think the question goes beyond the frozen funds,” John McLaughlin, a former acting director of the CIA, told Grid. “The question to ask is how will we engage with the Taliban?”
Many former officials believe the Biden administration should work with the Taliban to restore basic services — and that failure to do so risks not only humanitarian disaster but the likely aftereffects: a spike in the drug trade, mass migration and violent extremism.
“We need, first, to accept the reality that they are in charge and then to sort out how to have a relationship with the Taliban that isn’t based entirely on hostility,” McLaughlin said. “Don’t just sit there and have your whole policy be, ‘They’re bad.’ We also need to acknowledge that this is a situation we helped create.”
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The 9/11 families
More recently, a new wrinkle has appeared in the form of a completely different group laying claim to those frozen funds.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, some relatives of victims sued several parties, including the Taliban, and were awarded damages that are now worth around $7 billion, according to a New York Times calculation. The ruling was seen at the time as purely symbolic; the Taliban was a group of insurgents, far from the reach of the law. But the group’s new status as the government in Kabul opened an avenue for the families and their lawyers; they argued that the frozen funds were meant for the government of Afghanistan, that the Taliban is now running that government, and so the money belongs to the Taliban. Thus, the argument goes, the funds can be targeted and accessed for the 9/11 families.
The White House has pointed to the case as one reason the frozen money can’t simply be handed to the new Afghan authorities. “The Taliban remains sanctioned by the United States as a ‘specially designated global terrorist group.’” White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said. “But this is, of course, complicated by the ongoing litigation over those funds.”
Many Afghans — including fierce opponents of the Taliban — argue that under no circumstances should any of the funds be diverted from Afghanistan itself. “It’s money meant for the Afghan people, whoever their leaders are,” Saad Mohseni, CEO of the MOBY Group, which owns Afghanistan’s largest independent news organization, told Grid. “And right now the Afghan people are starving.”
Race against time
While these debates roil international capitals, Afghan banks are running low on cash, hospitals are failing, and children and their parents are worrying about their next meals. All this is unfolding in the depths of a harsh winter season.
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Before the Taliban takeover, winter tended to bring a reduction in violence, as snow and icy temperatures put the insurgency on the back foot. This year, winter is magnifying the already urgent humanitarian crisis. As the ICG report put it, “hunger and destitution following the Taliban’s takeover of the country seem poised to kill more Afghans than all the bombs and bullets of the past two decades.”
The sheer scope of the crisis brings the conversation back to those billions in Afghan reserves and to the American sanctions. And this, inevitably, returns the spotlight to Washington.
The U.S. may have ended its “forever war” in Afghanistan, but it remains the most important player in determining the nation’s immediate future. Washington, that ICG report said, is still “the principal arbiter of Kabul’s economic relationship with the world.” And when it comes to the Taliban, the ICG’s Graeme Smith says the U.S. should put aside its legitimate concerns to help resolve the crisis. “The Taliban deserve worse,” Smith wrote in Foreign Affairs, “but that does not matter. After generations of suffering, the Afghan people deserve better.”
5. Reforming the Defense Department's Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Process
The problem is we spend all our time on programming and budgeting and not enough time on planning and execution. And we ought to find a place to work in strategy. But we run the Department of Defense on programming and budgeting and not enough time applying the intellectual rigor and discipline to strategy, planning, and execution, in my humble opinion.
I recall working an issue in Korea (for special operations support throughout Asia). There was a $5 million dollar bill that was being disputed by the Army and the Air Force. I was at a Pentagon meeting as a new lieutenant colonel in the 1990s that consisted of the Army and Air staffs, USSOCOM, PACOM, and US Forces Korea. I naively asked how the Army and Air Staffs could deny the support required when there are three CINCs (back then we called the CINCs) that have the requirement to support multiple war plans in Korea and throughout the Pacific theater? A colonel responded to me and said I just did not get how it worked. He said there are only two things that are important in the pentagon -force structure and budgeting. They do not give a damn about war plans. (it was about protecting service equities).
Reforming the Defense Department's Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Process - War on the Rocks
Last year, the U.S. defense budget eclipsed $700 billion. Most metrics would put it among the largest enterprises in the world. Nevertheless, the Defense Department’s planning, programming, budgeting, and execution (PPBE) process that governs how the department decides to allocate its resources is a relic of the past. It is a very slow process that relies on predictability when no such predictability exists. Further, to its critics among Washington policy wonks, the system represents the root cause of many ills: The slowness of the defense acquisition system, the lack of military agility in adopting new technologies compared to our own civil society, waste and bloat, and infighting leading to suboptimal decision-making.
This isn’t an academic problem. An unresponsive or slow defense resourcing process can lose lives and wars. If the Department of Defense fails to field a promising new technology while America’s adversaries succeed, it could be decisive. In perhaps the most recent example of a military that failed to adapt to changing circumstances, Azerbaijan methodically destroyed Armenian ground platforms using Turkish drones and Israeli loitering munitions in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. Failure to anticipate and adopt emerging technology cost Armenia dearly. It is hubris to think that something similar cannot happen to the United States.
The final version of the National Defense Authorization Act establishes a commission to “examine the effectiveness of the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution process and adjacent practices of the Department of Defense, particularly with respect to facilitating defense modernization.” The stage is set. Now the hard work begins.
Reforming the PPBE process is a mammoth task — what design thinkers refer to as a “wicked problem”: It’s difficult to frame, it’s described differently by differing stakeholders, and what constitutes success is challenging to define. These are problems for which there is no one optimal solution.
The clock is already running for the commission. It is required to submit an interim report on Feb. 6, 2023, and its final report on Sept. 1, 2023. Given the magnitude of the task, time is short. If the commission hopes to produce meaningful reform recommendations within its short lifespan, it should approach the challenge with a clear definition of the problem that it is trying to address, specific targets, a focus on the end state of an agile and accountable military, and realize that you cannot stop the defense budget process while you fix it.
Trying to Control a Gigantic Organization
Three core processes drive the Defense Department: the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, the acquisition system, and the PPBE process. The latter is arguably the most important as it directly controls the resources that make everything else happen.
As it stands, the process is geared toward facilitating and centralizing the decision-making process of senior Pentagon leaders. It offers a department built over time from different military services with their own processes and cultures a unified set of rules and formats for budgeting. Charles J. Hitch, the Pentagon’s comptroller who created the process, described the goal as giving “the secretary of defense the necessary tools for exercising his authority to unify the activities of the military services.”
Air Force budget analyst Abigail Zofchak describes PPBE as
four distinct stages that progress sequentially: planning outlines the future security environment, programming proposes programs for investment, budgeting develops a detailed budget request according to fiscal guidance, and execution constantly reviews and realigns funds as the [d]epartment spends the resources eventually appropriated by Congress.
Created in the 1960s, the PPBE system is based on the rational design model, then a state-of-the-art technique for organizational management. That model relies on predictability and consistency of outputs. The approach works just fine for a mid-century automotive factory producing a narrow number of car models with limited color choices. However, in defense matters, predictability and consistency were barely a thing in the past, let alone in the contemporary world. Game-changing technological advances come rapidly nowadays. Witness China’s recent unanticipated test of a fractional orbit bombardment system — or how the military is struggling with its adoption of cloud computing even though it is commonplace in civil society.
To be fair, the 1960s PPBE process has seen changes through time. In the 1970s, Melvin Laird instituted the Program Objective Memorandum, which served to bring service-level resource guidance and materials further in line with the Office of the Secretary of Defense-level process. The services detailed all their plans in the new Program Objective Memorandum document, which was required to fit under a previously directed budget ceiling. This brought a balance of centralized guidance and decentralized execution. In the early 2000s, Donald Rumsfeld stressed execution, which resulted in the “E” being added to the process and brought a new focus on allocating appropriated funds.
The PPBE system is not established by law, per se. While it responds to statutory requirements governing the defense budget, it consists largely of internal regulation and processes set by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and its supporting organizations. As currently constructed, the system is essentially a set of cascading internally driven processes that flow from one phase into the next.
Main Criticisms of the Process
PPBE deserves some criticism for being a linear and sequential process with phases that are dependent on one another. Due to the sequential nature of the system, if changes are made to the assumptions made early in the planning phase, all the subsequent phases will be impacted. Similarly, if Congress appropriates at a different level from which the Department of Defense had budgeted, the Pentagon must revise all the previous phases of the ongoing cycle to reconcile the process for future cycles.
One consistent criticism of the process is that it substantially increases the timeline needed to acquire any capability. A recent Hudson Institute study found that following the regular acquisition process can take between nine and 26 years for a needed capability to progress from an identified capability gap into an actual capability at the hands of the warfighter. The initial four to six years are directly attributed to the rigidity of the requirement and resourcing systems. This lethargic pace is unacceptable in the current technological environment.
Another major criticism concerns the lack of agility in being able to resource emergent needs during the year of execution, especially when it comes to reprogramming funds. Moving funds from one appropriated account to another often consumes between three and six months of a 12-month fiscal year. This makes it challenging to move funds to higher priorities and to make the best use of these resources. When the Army needed $27 million to continue development of an offensive cyber capability for Cyber Mission Forces, it had to wait months for approval as part of the huge 97-page summer 2021 omnibus reprogramming request.
Principles for the Commission
For maximum efficiency, the congressionally established PPBE Reform Commission should guide its work using five principles: properly scope the problem before jumping to fixes, recognize they are working on a system that undergirds the daily defense of the country, establish specific targets, select the right commissioners and staff, and focus on the end goal — a capable, agile military with adequate oversight.
Scope the Problem
The PPBE process has many functions and serves many differing needs, from planning hardware procurement quantities in 2025 to tracking fiscal execution rates for the current fiscal year. Given its relatively short lifespan, the commission will be tempted to jump right in and start developing recommendations before arriving at an understanding of all the diverse purposes that the process serves.
However, optimizing one aspect of PPBE could easily undermine another. For example, the commercial shipyards that support the Navy pour-over out-year shipbuilding plans to understand where to apply their capital expenditures. Reducing the fidelity of those plans would frustrate investment. At the risk of sounding overly bureaucratic, the commission needs to map the functions and stakeholders that PPBE services so it can understand challenges and the impact of changes. Simply put, it is essential to properly understand the issues that the commission is going to tackle, because misunderstandings or omissions can lead to very different answers.
Creating a proper and quick feedback loop that integrates congressional budgetary changes into the planning and programming processes requires a different solution than the problem of accelerating the programming and budgeting phases. The commission should outline the different shortcomings of the system and decide which problems can be solved and, of those, which would lead to the most substantial improvements if fixed.
Work Within the System in Place
The commission’s recommendations should apply to the existing system. It cannot — nor should it try to — develop a “clean-sheet” design supported by an ideal financial management system. If the commission organizes itself around the idea that it should completely abandon the current system and rebuild from the ground up, it will immediately consign its final report to the graveyard where blue-ribbon commission reports go to die.
For example, many have advocated that the Defense Department shift to a system of activity-based accounting, where costs are better aligned with the desired outputs. Such a system would, for example, bundle all the planned and spent recruiting funds (e.g., recruiting stations, recruiter pay, information technology, marketing and advertising) and manage them as one pot. It’s a wonderful idea but likely impossible to achieve in the short term, since it would require Congress to completely overhaul how it does oversight and change thousands of careers inside the Pentagon. It could be done, but it would take a long time and require a great amount of change from many entrenched interests and actors.
The commission should avoid recommendations that require a total overhaul or a fundamental change in the behavior of an interested party (e.g., asking Congress to abandon its oversight role). The deadlines and time pressures of the fiscal calendar require a functioning process at all times — while you can make changes to a plane in flight, it still needs to take off and land.
Be Specific and Realistic with Its Targets
The legislation creating the commission is perhaps necessarily vague about which problem(s) it is supposed to solve. How the commission defines the problem(s) will define its results. For instance, if one of the identified problems concerns the lack of funding flexibility in the year of execution, the commission will be driven to focus on how funds are allocated and disbursed and how reprogramming requests are processed. Within that tedious process, there are multiple organizations that derive considerable institutional power and are vested in the current system.
On the other hand, if the goal is to increase the speed of the programming process, an entirely different cadre of institutions and professionals would be affected. They would have to be convinced to change their processes to account for a vastly shorter period (or to be completely omitted from the process) to exercise their part of the system. The commission needs to define these actors and goals so there is specificity and responsibility on who and what needs to change its processes and inputs into the budgetary system.
A fundamental question revolves around whether Congress is willing to tolerate additional flexibility in the defense budget. After all, Congress is the main customer and evaluator of what is enough accountability and transparency to satisfy its oversight mission. There is a perennial balance between oversight and autonomy that needs to be negotiated among the different players involved, mainly Congressional overseers. Many have advocated the idea of portfolio versus specific program funding. The concept involves funding for a category of systems (e.g., Army rotary-wing aircraft) managed as a whole rather than by specific program. That way, during the year of execution, the Army would be able to shift money from the Black Hawk to the Apache program without going back to Congress. Such an idea is attractive but would require Congress to relinquish a measure of its current authority.
In the name of reform and predictability, the Pentagon and Congress have also tried submitting biennial budgets, one budget for two years. However, the small off-year budget revision that was to replace the budget in one of the years become too big and too laborious due to both the demands of the Pentagon and Congress. In essence, the exception “ate the rule.” The off-year budgets came to resemble the on-year budget because leadership proved unable to enforce the discipline necessary to minimize changes in off-years. This example proves that any solutions recommended by the commission need to be evaluated to be sure they are actually implementable.
Right Commission Members and Staff
Picking the right members will, to a great extent, dictate how successful the commission will be. The legislation requires that commission members have knowledge of the Defense Department PPBE process, innovative private sector budgeting and resource allocation, iterative design and acquisition processes, or budget or program execution data analysis. These are indeed useful backgrounds for commission members, but the key to success lies in achieving the right mix. Add too many people invested in the current system, and it becomes a recipe for perpetuating the status quo. Pour in an overabundance of people with innovative private sector experience, and the solutions will turn out to be wholly unworkable in the Pentagon.
It will be crucial that the commissioners are free enough of political constraints to be able to discuss the real issues and obstacles that plague the system. Frankly, it would be fruitful to have a mix of individuals who no longer have any ambition of working inside the department with some who still have that desire. Optimally, members will be appointed with experience in different portions of PPBE and different parts of the defense enterprise. Someone who worked with budget execution at the service level will have a substantially different perspective from someone who worked with planning at the secretary of defense level.
The supporting staff will be equally important. They will do much of the work of distilling the commissioners’ ideas and insights into the reports. To be able to hit the ground running, the commission’s executive director will need to be someone already knowledgeable about the public discussion on how to reform the defense budget process. Further, he or she should have enough knowledge of the defense community to be able to call upon external and internal experts who can contribute to the work and who would be invested in implementing the commission’s recommendations.
Proper End State
At the end of the day, America requires a capable military that operates with the necessary agility under sufficient oversight. The commission’s focus needs to be on injecting agility and responsiveness into the system. Gen. John Hyten, the recently retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, consistently spoke about the need to increase the speed in which the Department of Defense develops and adopts new technologies. He bluntly stated that “[t]he answer to every question on how long it’s going to take to get a follow on capability is 10 years or 15 years.” Any technology that is 10 years old is simply obsolete.
To get to an end state of increased speed and responsiveness, the commission will have Congress’ attention twice in 2023 — once when it presents its interim report and then when it presents its final report. On both these occasions, it should present actionable recommendations which can be directly incorporated in versions of the National Defense Authorization Act. These will be the windows of opportunity for action that need to be taken full advantage of.
Further, Congress and the commission should be willing to try out pilot programs and learn from previous experiments, such as the experiences of the Defense Innovation Unit and the different software factories. In determining best practices, it would be useful for there to be variance in the processes used by the different services or defense agencies. Similarly, PPBE processes do not need to be the same for all fiscal accounts. For example, military construction and personnel could use different processes. The important element is to keep the common reporting threads that tie it all to the Office of Secretary of Defense and Congressional overseers.
Conclusion
The Department of Defense cannot change its ways overnight, no matter how artful the recommendations developed by the commission. However, done correctly, the PPBE Reform Commission can place the department on the road to necessary changes to the underlying resource management culture and the oversight relationship between Congress and the department. The commission represents the best opportunity in a decade for the Pentagon to improve its resourcing processes and regain the agility needed to compete effectively on the world stage.
Thomas Spoehr, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, is the director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense. Frederico Bartels is the center’s senior policy analyst for defense budgeting.
6. US military links prolific hacking group to Iranian intelligence
US military links prolific hacking group to Iranian intelligence
CNN · by Sean Lyngaas, CNN
Washington (CNN)The US military's Cyber Command on Wednesday detailed multiple hacking tools that officials say Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security has used against computer networks "around the world."
It's the first time, according to a command spokesperson, that the US government has explicitly connected Iran's intelligence ministry with a prolific espionage group known as MuddyWater that has in recent years tried to siphon data from telecom firms and other organizations across the Middle East.
It's part of a regular effort by Cyber Command and other US agencies to highlight hacking tools allegedly used by foreign intelligence services from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea to blunt the effects of their spying operations.
Cyber Command published several samples of malicious code allegedly used by the Iranian hackers, to help organizations in the US and elsewhere defend themselves from future intrusion attempts. A Cyber Command spokesperson declined to comment on whether the malware had been used against US organizations recently.
A spokesperson for Iran's mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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"Iran fields multiple teams that conduct cyber espionage, cyberattack and information operations," said Sarah Jones, senior principal analyst at cybersecurity firm Mandiant. "The security services that sponsor these actors, the MOIS and the IRGC, are using them to get a leg up on Iran's adversaries and competitors all over the world."
MuddyWater has been a key component of Iran's cyber-espionage apparatus, according to analysts. The hackers, for example, carried out a months-long effort to breach government networks in Turkey, Jordan and Iraq that began in 2019 and continued after the US military's killing of a top Iranian general in January 2020.
The group has also tried to breach organizations in North America, but there is less publicly available information on those hacks.
CNN · by Sean Lyngaas, CNN
7. Human Rights Watch criticises Biden, others for weak defense of democracy
Excerpts:
In contrast to what Human Rights Executive Director Kenneth Roth described as former U.S. President Donald Trump's "embrace of friendly autocrats", Biden took office in January 2021 with a pledge to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy.
"But he continued to sell arms to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel despite their persistent repression," Roth wrote in Human Rights Watch's annual World Report, released on Thursday.
"Other Western leaders displayed similar weakness in their defense of democracy," Roth wrote, naming French President Emmanuel Macron and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Human Rights Watch criticises Biden, others for weak defense of democracy
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U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the December 2021 jobs report during a speech in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 7, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Human Rights Watch on Thursday criticised U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders for a weak defense of democracy and for failing to meet challenges from the climate crisis and COVID-19 pandemic to poverty, inequality and racial injustice.
In contrast to what Human Rights Executive Director Kenneth Roth described as former U.S. President Donald Trump's "embrace of friendly autocrats", Biden took office in January 2021 with a pledge to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy.
"But he continued to sell arms to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel despite their persistent repression," Roth wrote in Human Rights Watch's annual World Report, released on Thursday.
"Other Western leaders displayed similar weakness in their defense of democracy," Roth wrote, naming French President Emmanuel Macron and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Roth also said that during key summits Biden "seemed to lose his voice when it came to public denunciation of serious human rights violations."
"The U.S. State Department has issued occasional protests about repression in certain countries, and in extreme cases the Biden administration introduced targeted sanctions on some officials responsible, but the influential voice of the president was often missing," he wrote.
U.S. officials have defended the Biden administration's record, saying diplomats have frequently raised human rights concerns with foreign leaders, including in difficult talks with adversaries including China and Russia.
"If democracies are to prevail in the global contest with autocracy, their leaders must do more than spotlight the autocrats' inevitable shortcomings. They need to make a stronger, positive case for democratic rule," Roth said.
Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Mary Milliken and Karishma Singh
8. FDD | It Is Time to Counter China’s Data Strategy
Excerpts:
Yet American private industry holds valuable trade secrets, intellectual property, and national security-sensitive information. Therefore, Washington should provide guidance to U.S. entities about the security risks they may incur if they disclose their vulnerabilities to their Chinese partners.
More broadly, the U.S. government should consult private-sector stakeholders while developing Washington’s larger strategy to counter China’s data collection efforts. Finally, Washington should work with partner nations and private industry to secure core global internet infrastructure in order to prevent Beijing from undermining the principles of a free and open internet.
FDD | It Is Time to Counter China’s Data Strategy
Dr. Georgianna Shea
CCTI and TCIL Chief Technologist
Trevor Logan
Research Analyst
fdd.org · by Dr. Georgianna Shea CCTI and TCIL Chief Technologist · January 12, 2022
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) closed public feedback last month on a draft regulation to secure and manage data according to its importance to national security. While ostensibly a technical measure to enhance privacy protections, the regulation is part of China’s strategy to strengthen its power in cyberspace through large-scale data collection.
The draft regulation proposes that Beijing’s data handlers identify and track personal information and other data that could endanger national security if leaked or stolen. The draft regulation builds on Beijing’s efforts over the past five years to use legislative mechanisms to authorize the state to amass data. For example, the regulation would require Chinese companies to store data locally and to provide the government with access to it.
According to the new regulation, Chinese companies must also assess the data security, management practices, and trustworthiness of all foreign parties that receive Chinese data. To conduct these assessments, Chinese companies will need their foreign partners, potentially including U.S. companies, to provide China with CAC-approved assessments of their own security. With this information about foreign companies, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will be able to identify security vulnerabilities of organizations that process or store data originating from China. The CCP’s hackers could use this information to identify potential avenues for future exploitation and illegal data exfiltration from the foreign data recipients.
Buried within the regulation is another important provision: Article 41 requires routing controls that would ensure that network data originating in China stays within its borders. This is noteworthy because China is attempting to protect its data from the kind of vulnerabilities its own hackers exploit. The CCP leverages technologies at the core of global internet infrastructure to hijack foreign data to ensure it travels through Chinese-controlled servers.
The movement of data across the internet is controlled by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP functions like an international post office, digitally linking the internet together so that data can traverse the globe. However, BGP operates like a tourist asking a stranger for directions rather than consulting a map. Thus, while BGP ostensibly picks the most efficient route to send information from one point to another, the system remains susceptible to abuse by malign actors.
China has exploited BGP’s vulnerability by acting as a stranger giving bogus directions to reroute digital traffic through its networks for collection. As a result, traffic originating in the United States and destined for another American location can traverse a route through China without the sender’s knowledge or ability to ensure the route’s efficiency and security.
In Section 1527 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, Congress took the first step to address this problem by requiring the development of a policy and processes that secure the routing infrastructure within the Department of Defense. However, Congress failed to apply this provision to the entire federal government, as proposed in an amendment by Senator Angus King (I-ME).
Yet American private industry holds valuable trade secrets, intellectual property, and national security-sensitive information. Therefore, Washington should provide guidance to U.S. entities about the security risks they may incur if they disclose their vulnerabilities to their Chinese partners.
More broadly, the U.S. government should consult private-sector stakeholders while developing Washington’s larger strategy to counter China’s data collection efforts. Finally, Washington should work with partner nations and private industry to secure core global internet infrastructure in order to prevent Beijing from undermining the principles of a free and open internet.
Dr. Georgianna Shea is the chief technologist of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Trevor Logan is a cyber research analyst. The authors also contribute to FDD’s China Program. For more analysis from the authors, CCTI, and the China Program, please subscribe, HERE. Follow Trevor on Twitter @TrevorLoganFDD. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Dr. Georgianna Shea CCTI and TCIL Chief Technologist · January 12, 2022
9. From the Jaws of Retreat - Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Persistence of American Ambition
Excerpts:
Today, the world is witnessing what some have called a new cold war between the United States and China, even as it is experiencing the deadliest pandemic in a century. So far, Washington and Beijing appear to be focused on finger-pointing and nationalist competition. Still, just like half a century ago, the two great powers today have a shared interest in ending the pandemic, their scientists can speak to each other (and have long been doing so, when permitted), and the WHO, whatever its flaws, still allows the two countries to coordinate their efforts along with those of dozens of other countries. The current pandemic, then, would seem to present an ideal opportunity for the sort of collaboration amid conflict that enabled the eradication of smallpox.
More broadly, if Americans see it as in their interest to promote positive change in the Global South, as they should, this history suggests that the best way to do so is not with unilateral military force or even bilateral aid agreements. Rather, the most successful programs have been broad multinational collaborations and have often incorporated public-private partnerships. Although cooperation with China might be lacking at the moment, the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines would represent ambition akin to the eradication of smallpox. Bold multilateral action on climate change could have an impact on the order of the green revolution. After the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington appears to be headed for retrenchment, as it was, at least temporarily, in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. But as history shows, this does not mean that ambitious global efforts are out of reach.
From the Jaws of Retreat
Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Persistence of American Ambition
Foreign Affairs · by The Development Century: A Global History · January 12, 2022
The history of the United States in the postwar era is replete with American efforts to change other nations. These projects often failed to achieve their goals, but few so completely as the recent one in Afghanistan. After 20 years, a great many lives lost, and untold billions spent, the Taliban—the very same group that the United States had intervened to remove at the outset—returned to power while U.S. personnel were still mid-evacuation.
The retreat from Afghanistan follows a pattern in U.S. policy toward the part of the world that in the past was known as the Third World but is now more commonly referred to as the Global South. In the decades since the United States became a global superpower in the 1940s, its approach to that large swath of the world, which encompasses much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has shifted between two poles. At times, Washington, so it claimed, tried to use its power to make countries in those regions more prosperous and democratic, as it did most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. At other times, U.S. policy eschewed such transformative ambitions. Instead, it prioritized stability, which often meant supporting undemocratic regimes if that served Washington’s interests.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, U.S. policymakers were generally sympathetic toward the aspirations of Third World peoples, as, for example, with the liberation of India and Indonesia from colonial rule. As the Cold War intensified, however, U.S. policy priorities shifted toward the containment of communism. Thus, in the 1950s, Washington was perfectly willing to work with authoritarian governments (such as those in South Korea and Taiwan) as long as they were dependably anticommunist and to help overthrow democratically elected ones (such as in Iran and Guatemala) if they appeared to be otherwise. In the name of anticommunism, the United States also backed the French war to regain and defend France’s colonial rule in Indochina. When the French suffered the decisive defeat at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, Washington assumed the burden of containing communism in Southeast Asia.
In The End of Ambition, the historian Mark Atwood Lawrence argues that the election of the young, charismatic John F. Kennedy as U.S. president brought another brief burst of optimism about the transformative potential of U.S. relations with the Third World. As newly sovereign states rapidly replaced retreating European empires, especially in Africa, the U.S. administration voiced support for the aspirations that Third World peoples expressed for democracy and development. But with Kennedy’s assassination and the escalation of the war in Vietnam, Washington’s approach started to shift. By the end of the decade, with Richard Nixon in the White House, the United States was again openly prioritizing anticommunism over liberation in the Third World.
John F. Kennedy’s presidency sparked optimism about U.S. relations with the Third World.
Lawrence traces the brief rise and rapid decline of Washington’s support for newly independent Third World countries in the 1960s. Although his book begins with Kennedy’s election and ends with the rise of the Nixon Doctrine, its core chapters zero in on the presidency of Lyndon Johnson—when, Lawrence argues, the retreat from the ambition of the Kennedy years began.
Lawrence points to the escalation of the American war in Vietnam as a major reason for the dissipation of the high hopes of the Kennedy years. The war kept U.S. policymakers distracted and sullied the United States’ image abroad, making it more difficult for Washington to present itself as an ally to Third World countries. Later, the humiliating defeat in that war would sour the American public on military interventions abroad and bring about, even if only temporarily, a determination to retreat from foreign entanglements.
Yet if the Vietnam War distracted U.S. policymakers from their more high-minded ambitions in the Third World, the focus on that conflict in most histories of U.S. foreign relations has overshadowed the many other ways in which Americans were engaging with the world. Viewing U.S. foreign relations solely through the lens of the White House, the National Security Council, and the State Department—important as these organs are—tends to obscure the global ambitions and impact of other parts of the U.S. government and of other U.S.-based entities that operated abroad, such as philanthropies and nongovernmental organizations. Such actors played important roles in massively ambitious, transformative initiatives that took place in the Third World in that era, including the green revolution in agriculture and the global eradication of smallpox.
Today, media coverage and academic analysis of American foreign policy also tend to concentrate on U.S. military activities and on the high-level debates in Congress and the White House. As with commentary during the Vietnam era and the histories of that time that followed, this focus draws attention away from ambitious work that other parts of the U.S. government and other sectors of American society are carrying out in the Global South—work that may prove, in the long run, to have a greater impact on the U.S. role in the world than the stories in the headlines.
The Rule of Four
In The End of Ambition, Lawrence delves deeply into the perspectives and deliberations of top policymakers in the White House and the State Department. Following the old Washington adage that “personnel is policy,” he carefully tracks who rose and who fell in those agencies across the 1960s and how those changes help explain policy decisions. Officials in the Department of Defense, the military, the CIA, and Congress also make appearances, although less often. Moreover, rather than survey U.S. policy toward the Third World in its entirety, Lawrence concentrates on relations with five countries, selected for their geographic diversity and geopolitical significance: Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and the white-minority regime in what was then Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe.
Lawrence is especially interested in the outlooks that guided top U.S. decision-makers in forming policy toward the Third World in the 1960s, and he offers a useful taxonomy of four different approaches toward these regions. He calls one group “the globalists.” This category included officials such as Chester Bowles and John Kenneth Galbraith, both of whom served as ambassador to India in this period; Adlai Stevenson, who was U.S. ambassador to the UN; and the Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. They opposed European imperialism, supported self-determination and the UN, and thought that postcolonial nations should largely be allowed to find their own paths of political and social development. The globalists had Kennedy’s ear, but the president worried about the domestic political risks of their approach, which critics saw as too sanguine about the dangers of communism, so he kept them at arm’s length. Under Johnson, their influence declined even further. Despite their prominence in elite circles, then, the globalists appear to have had relatively little influence on policy decisions in this era.
The second group were “the nation-builders,” most notably represented by Walt Rostow, who served as the director of policy planning in the State Department and later as Johnson’s national security adviser. The nation-builders shared some basic premises with the globalists but were much more worried about communist expansion and did not think newly independent countries could be left to their own devices to stop it. Rather, such states needed firm U.S. guidance delivered through comprehensive aid programs that would steer them onto the right course. Yet time and again, the nation-builders’ efforts to cajole or coerce Third World governments to move in a desired direction failed. Instead, postcolonial leaders deftly played the superpowers against each other to preserve their freedom of action.
U.S. soldiers patrolling in Vietnam, January 1967
Robert Ellison / Camera Press / Redux
The third group Lawrence describes are those who adopted what he calls “the ‘strongpoint’ outlook.” These were officials who thought, quite simply, that the Third World did not matter much to U.S. interests; Washington, therefore, should not get too entangled in it. What mattered were U.S. alliances in the industrialized world, primarily with Japan and countries in Western Europe. Lawrence sees Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Undersecretary of State George Ball as leading exponents of this outlook. Despite occupying the commanding heights of the foreign policy establishment throughout much of the 1960s, these officials were continually frustrated in their efforts to keep the United States out of Third World entanglements, most notably in Vietnam. In the end, they, too, could not escape the pervasive hold of anticommunism in U.S. politics in the Cold War era.
Finally, Lawrence describes a fourth group, “the unilateralists,” represented primarily by military and intelligence officials. They discounted cooperation with other governments, even core allies. Instead, they preferred the direct application of U.S. power, whether through military action or covert operations. This approach receives less attention than the other three in the book, which focuses more on officials in the White House, the National Security Council, and the State Department than on those in the military or the CIA. This is not atypical; after all, the latter tend to publish fewer books and make fewer speeches that historians can cite, and their organizations’ archives, too, are often far less accessible. Yet arguably, the unilateralists had the greatest impact on U.S. policy in the Third World in this era. It was their outlook, after all, that produced the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and, a few years later, played a major role in escalating the American war in Vietnam.
Stuck with Containment
In framing his book’s argument, Lawrence stresses how Washington’s policy in the Third World shifted in the course of the 1960s from the great promise of the Kennedy years to wary disengagement under Nixon. Lawrence emphasizes that the shift began under Johnson, who, compared with Kennedy, was more transactional in his approach to foreign policy and therefore less keen to give U.S. aid to governments, such as India’s, that refused to toe Washington’s Cold War line.
Yet as the book turns to a detailed account of U.S. policy in its five case studies, these distinctions—between different administrations, between different policy approaches—often seem to be overshadowed by the relentless slog of policymaking amid shifting, complex, and ambiguous circumstances. The picture that ultimately emerges is one in which, despite some changes in tone and personnel as the decade progressed, U.S. policy toward the five countries on which Lawrence focuses did not change as much as one might have expected.
Each case was different, of course, but several common threads emerge. First, throughout the 1960s, disagreements within the foreign policy establishment often fostered ambivalence and hedging. Second, perceptions of domestic political risk led even officials sympathetic to Third World aspirations to tread carefully lest they be tarred with coddling communism. Finally, and perhaps most important, Third World leaders, jealous of their hard-won sovereignty, resisted U.S. efforts to shape their behavior, whether with carrots or sticks. For example, Lawrence finds that when Washington tried to use increased development aid to draw governments closer to its orbit, the result was often the opposite: postcolonial leaders instead reached out to other powers, often the Soviet Union, in order to balance against U.S. influence and preserve their freedom of action.
Under President Nixon, the United States openly prioritized anticommunism over liberation in the Third World.
To the extent that a consistent through line emerges in Washington’s policy toward these places, it can be summed up in one very predictable word: “containment.” Nearly every decision on whom to support, how much aid to give, and what public rhetoric to deploy seems to have been calculated to ward off any risk of communist gains, or the appearance of such gains. In fact, the impression one gets from the detailed narrative in this book is that whatever sympathies Kennedy, or Johnson, or some of their advisers may have had for the ambitions of Third World peoples, the political exigencies of containment tightly circumscribed their policy choices.
Herein lies an irony. Lawrence argues that the escalation in Vietnam, and Cold War concerns more generally, made U.S. policymakers less responsive to the aspirations of Third World peoples and that, therefore, there was a “lost opportunity” to forge better relations with those peoples and help them make gains in democracy and development. Yet the story he tells suggests that, judged strictly by the standard of containment, the U.S. position in all five cases improved in the 1960s. Brazil and Indonesia both saw military coups that replaced leftist governments with pro-Western generals. Iran, already leaning toward the United States in the early 1960s, was even more firmly ensconced in its camp at decade’s end. India, an avatar of forceful neutralism early on, saw its influence diminished by regional conflict and domestic troubles. And southern Africa, where white-minority rule had appeared likely to cause a regional conflagration, seemed to have largely stabilized by the end of the decade, at least from Washington’s perspective. In short, if the 1960s showed that support for friendly dictators helped Washington contain communism in the Third World, it is hardly surprising that, as Lawrence concludes, the incoming Nixon administration committed even more firmly to that strategy.
Yet if one peers just beyond the chronological scope of this book, it becomes clear that the retrenchment of the Nixon Doctrine turned out to be only temporary. In fact, the zeal to change the Third World soon returned to Washington in the Carter and Reagan years, first in the form of a crusade for human rights and then as a posture of muscular anticommunism that saw the proliferation of U.S. military entanglements across these regions, often justified in the name of promoting American values.
The end of the Cold War ignited even greater ambition in Washington. The Gulf War of 1990–91, which President George H. W. Bush framed as a defense of Kuwaiti self-determination in the face of Iraqi aggression, was followed by U.S. interventions in Somalia, the Balkans, and elsewhere. Then came the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where Washington’s ambition reached another tragic climax as the United States sought to restructure entire societies in the name of prosperity and democracy (and, of course, counterterrorism). Only in the last half decade or so, with the ignominious collapse of these projects, has the United States again turned back toward retrenchment, at least for now.
Varieties of Ambition
A somewhat different view of the history of U.S. engagement in the Global South emerges if one looks beyond the policymakers in the White House and the exercise of U.S. military power. During the 1960s, Johnson and his foreign policy mandarins became increasingly entangled in Vietnam and retreated from any expansive liberal ambitions in the Third World in favor of working with friendly dictators. At the same time, however, a substantial number of other Americans, along with a great many others across the world, were deeply engaged in two of the most ambitious and consequential global efforts of the last century.
The first was the green revolution, which introduced into the Global South a range of new agricultural technologies that massively expanded the global food supply and earned the American agronomist Norman Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. The second was the World Health Organization’s Smallpox Eradication Program, headed by the American epidemiologist Donald Henderson, which not only rid the world of smallpox, a deadly virus that had afflicted humanity for centuries, but also helped bolster vaccination initiatives across much of the Global South by setting the groundwork for the WHO’s Expanded Program on Immunization. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Communicable Disease Center (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) played crucial roles in these efforts, as did foundations, research institutes, and expert networks that were based in the United States or funded with U.S. money, both public and private.
The most successful programs in the Global South have been headed by broad, multinational collaborations.
This perspective holds lessons for the current moment. Perhaps, if the pattern of U.S. foreign policy that The End of Ambition highlights holds, the debacle in Afghanistan, like the one in Vietnam, will merely signal another act in the familiar drama of intervention, retrenchment, and back again. But as was the case in the mid-twentieth century, this pattern represents only one part of the interactions between the United States and the Global South.
Take the example of global health, which the COVID-19 pandemic has brought starkly to the fore. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States collaborated with the Soviet Union, as well as many other countries, on smallpox eradication even as Washington was waging a brutal war in Southeast Asia. The two superpowers could cooperate in this way even amid strategic conflict because they both had an interest in eradicating smallpox in the Global South (national vaccination programs had earlier eliminated it from the Global North), because their scientists could speak to each other and work together, and because there existed an international organization, the WHO, through which they could coordinate these efforts with each other and with dozens of other countries.
Today, the world is witnessing what some have called a new cold war between the United States and China, even as it is experiencing the deadliest pandemic in a century. So far, Washington and Beijing appear to be focused on finger-pointing and nationalist competition. Still, just like half a century ago, the two great powers today have a shared interest in ending the pandemic, their scientists can speak to each other (and have long been doing so, when permitted), and the WHO, whatever its flaws, still allows the two countries to coordinate their efforts along with those of dozens of other countries. The current pandemic, then, would seem to present an ideal opportunity for the sort of collaboration amid conflict that enabled the eradication of smallpox.
More broadly, if Americans see it as in their interest to promote positive change in the Global South, as they should, this history suggests that the best way to do so is not with unilateral military force or even bilateral aid agreements. Rather, the most successful programs have been broad multinational collaborations and have often incorporated public-private partnerships. Although cooperation with China might be lacking at the moment, the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines would represent ambition akin to the eradication of smallpox. Bold multilateral action on climate change could have an impact on the order of the green revolution. After the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington appears to be headed for retrenchment, as it was, at least temporarily, in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. But as history shows, this does not mean that ambitious global efforts are out of reach.
Foreign Affairs · by The Development Century: A Global History · January 12, 2022
10. More Odysseus, Less Achilles: Developing Special Operations Forces for the Challenges Ahead
Or we could heed the advice of some great special operators.
"Irregular Warfare far is more intellectual than a bayonet charge.”
T.E. Lawrence
(Worth reading this article from 1920 - http://www.telstudies.org/writings/works/articles_essays/1920_evolution_of_a_revolt.shtml)
“Who thinks, wins...”
General Downing
“Train for certainty. Educate for uncertainty.”
General Schoomaker
Conclusion:
As recent Joint Chiefs guidance put it, “There is more to sustaining a competitive advantage than acquiring hardware; we must gain and sustain an intellectual overmatch as well.” To make this a reality, the US military needs to develop a different kind of special operator. This cadre must not perpetuate the myth that technology will solve every problem but rather rely on deep knowledge, cunning, wit, adaptation, and instinct. On the battlefields of the future, SOF operators will need to emulate Odysseus to survive—let alone to win.
More Odysseus, Less Achilles: Developing Special Operations Forces for the Challenges Ahead - Modern War Institute
This view is misguided. Rather than funneling ever more investment to technologies such as big data processing, exoskeletons, drones, or satellites, Western special operations forces should spend more time and money on improving the minds of future operators.
To understand the realities of warfare, Western special operations forces would do well to reacquaint themselves with the lessons of Greek mythology—and in particular the story of the Greek heroes Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles was the finest warrior on the battlefield, a demigod among men. Odysseus was a strategic and operational magician, more cunning than fearsome. Achilles killed champions, princes, and kings. Odysseus won wars. Today, Western special operations forces, collectively, look too much like Achilles, and not enough like Odysseus.
The March of Technology
SOF have been at the core of US military interventionism since President John F. Kennedy. Under subsequent administrations, counterterrorism missions displaced SOF’s initial focus on unconventional warfare due to decades of murders and kidnappings of US diplomats, soldiers, and citizens. This transformation was accelerated following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, after which the clear focus of special operations became direct action and capture/kill missions. Underpinning these missions was a doctrine of raiding in darkness where speed, surprise, and superior firepower could overcome mass and the defensive positions of adversaries. Missions became a scientific calculation of variables.
But while technology may have helped at the tactical level, it has led to no greater strategic success. The United States and its allies have spent twenty years developing a SOF ethos that has encouraged a transformation into a digital Achilles: uber warriors, enabled with a supposed all-seeing eye, perfect situational awareness, beautiful weapons, and infallible intelligence, capable of decapitating adversaries and thereby collapsing their organizations, regimes, and ideologies. In the process, the defense apparatus has created SOF operators who are overly dependent on technology and connectivity.
This development did not represent adaptation to a changing character of war. Ignoring their adversaries’ votes, this was a specialization of forces for wars and types of warfare that senior military leaders and policymakers thought they could and should prosecute—as opposed to those they are likely to face. But Western militaries have been unable to “tech” their way to victory. It is improbable that they ever will.
That’s because promised advances in science rarely materialize as anticipated (certainly not on time on budget), only occasionally live up to expectations, and have mostly been countered, bypassed, or superseded, especially amid a great democratization of advanced weapons and capabilities. Real and sustained technological advantage does not persist because war is a reciprocal dynamic with adversaries.
Mind Over Matter
History suggests that SOF and their forebears have found most success not as Achilles but as the other Greek hero, Odysseus. Odysseus was a cunning, conniving, cheating scoundrel who relied on his mind, lies, wit, and instinct to turn the course of campaigns where Achilles had proved unsuccessful. Think of the sacking of Troy, a true competition of great powers: the coalition of Greek city-states and island armies fighting a massive expeditionary campaign together under a single cause against the mass of Troy—a people on the defensive, but whose own modernization and mastery of technology made them a peer.
Achilles and his Myrmidons were the SOF of the day. They were the best warriors the world had ever seen, trained for nothing but high-tempo action, wreaking death and destruction with efficiency and lethality. Their mastery of dismounted close combat, ambush, open warfare, maneuver, movement, and concealment gave them no equals. And yet they failed. By contrast, the campaign was won by the guile and wit of Odysseus, the king of a small and insignificant island with no ancestral mastery of warfare, whose deception campaign and exploitation of the best of allied strengths helped steer the Greeks to victory.
Today, we might equip a contemporary Odysseus with technology, but it will be the mind that is more likely to determine the outcome of future interventions and engagements. Rather than invest in huge amounts of technology, data processing, drones, or satellites, the United States should invest in the minds of its warriors. The entire SOF training and education infrastructure requires modernization and overhaul to present more realistic and complex challenges for SOF members. Starting from the basics—like the US Army’s Special Forces Qualification Course—training scenarios must reflect the characteristics of real adversaries’ specific concepts, such as China’s Unrestricted Warfare and Russia’s New Generation Warfare, as well as the capabilities and limitations of their weapons and equipment. SOF operators must become well versed both in the theoretical approaches of their future enemies and in what they can do during real operations. And the concepts and capabilities of the allies and partners that the United States is likely to fight alongside must also be included in the SOF training regime. The most important of these concepts is the “Total Defense” strategy that some smaller US allies have adopted, which requires US SOF to better understand how to enable these small countries’ resistance forces in twenty-first-century urban environments without all the combat support and combat service support they have become accustomed to in recent decades.
SOF training should also focus on developing skills that enable SOF operators to effectively use commercially available, nonstandard, foreign-produced platforms to deliver strategic effects even in the absence of traditional military support. These fundamental scenario changes would also require major changes in the existing training infrastructure, including the development of much larger and more complex urban training facilities where training should be supported by hundreds of role players familiar with the specific conditions of specific countries. SOF training should consider abandoning the idea of training operators who have a mile-wide but inch-deep skill set and instead focus on developing highly specialized experts. To achieve this level of expertise, regional alignment might be replaced by country-specific alignment in some strategically important regions and the majority of SOF training could take place on foreign soil. Finally, processes should be in place to allow former adversaries or foreign countries’ militaries to teach at US military educational institutions. Learning how they developed solutions in resource-scarce environments to mitigate modern militaries’ capabilities would serve as an invaluable advantage for future SOF against both state and nonstate adversaries.
As recent Joint Chiefs guidance put it, “There is more to sustaining a competitive advantage than acquiring hardware; we must gain and sustain an intellectual overmatch as well.” To make this a reality, the US military needs to develop a different kind of special operator. This cadre must not perpetuate the myth that technology will solve every problem but rather rely on deep knowledge, cunning, wit, adaptation, and instinct. On the battlefields of the future, SOF operators will need to emulate Odysseus to survive—let alone to win.
Dr. Peter Roberts is the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, having been the Senior Research Fellow for Sea Power and C4ISR since 2014.
Dr. Sandor Fabian is a former Hungarian Special Forces lieutenant colonel with twenty years of military experience. He is also a non-resident fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute and a Curriculum Developer and Advanced Studies Team Leader at LEIDOS supporting the NATO Special Operations School.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
11. The Nonproliferation Regime Is Breaking
Excerpts:
Making this enhanced nonproliferation system work won’t be easy. Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States will first need to adopt new, specific nuclear monitoring measures that go beyond AUKUS. They will then need to secure the cooperation of China, Russia, and other countries that have nuclear weapons to make sure they all adopt the same rigorous practices and support international efforts to institutionalize them. And it will be difficult to get nonnuclear states to agree to new transparency expectations let alone empower any international body to routinely collect more information about programs with possible weapons aims.
But that doesn’t make it impossible. States might find more monitoring acceptable if it is incorporated into the IAEA’s State-Level Approach and used to inform the agency’s routine work surrounding safeguards, with additional inquiries only on a case-by-case basis. These measures could all eventually be enshrined by the IAEA Board, the annual NPT Review Conference, the G-20, and in UN Security Council resolutions. To obtain buy in from nonnuclear states that might be subject to new levels of scrutiny, leading nuclear powers could guarantee that they will not push for any new international legal instruments or institutions; the revised regime would run entirely through existing frameworks. They will also have to make clear that nonweapons states will not be subject to any new expectations, so long as they do not scale up uranium enrichment. For states that do opt to use enriched uranium, the expectations of greater forbearance and transparency will be tied to the scope and scale of their proliferation activities.
Finally, leading nuclear powers could provide new incentives to adhere to the enhanced framework by expanding export policies and assistance programs to states seeking nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Liberalizing exports of nuclear material might seem to go against the aims of nonproliferation, but it could serve as a powerful inducement for nonproliferation compliance and also enhance the international response to the climate crisis. Nuclear power has been identified as an important element in the transition to renewable energy, but it presents difficult financial and technological hurdles for many countries.
Before the nuclear regime frays further, states must make an urgent effort to reinvigorate the NPT bargain. This work is essential both to stopping and rolling back future proliferation and to eventual disarmament—in other words, to a world in which nuclear technology doesn't contribute to geopolitical instability.
The Nonproliferation Regime Is Breaking
Fixing It Will Require Tougher, Smarter Inspections
January 13, 2022
The global system to prevent nuclear proliferation and promote disarmament is beginning to fray. Although the nonproliferation regime has held together for more than half a century, more countries are acquiring sensitive nuclear material and technology through illicit acquisition and preferential trade. In May 2021, for instance, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran had accumulated ten kilograms of highly enriched uranium and severely restricted access to its nuclear sites. And in October 2021, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States announced a new strategic partnership (AUKUS) that will make Australia the first ever nonnuclear state to receive highly enriched fuel for nuclear-powered submarines. It is unlikely Australia would divert this uranium to make bombs, but it establishes a dangerous precedent.
These two cases typify the growing challenges faced by the nonproliferation system. Historically, the framework set in place by the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) relied on development limits and international monitoring of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing to succeed. But the spread of these sensitive nuclear materials and technologies is substantially degrading both processes. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between nuclear programs designed for peaceful purposes and those that aim to yield bombs. The IAEA toolkit to detect concerning activity, flag it, and address it diplomatically risks obsolescence.
To restore the nonproliferation regime’s role as a bulwark of global stability, international nonproliferation institutions and states need new ways to track and tackle the development of nuclear weapons. This requires an innovative approach to monitoring and constraining dangerous activity. But given that more countries are acquiring or producing highly enriched uranium, material constraints alone are not enough. Monitors will need fresh tools to credibly track additional indicators of potential bomb activity that are hard to pass off as peaceful in nature, such as weaponization: the development and manufacture of nuclear warheads for missiles or other delivery vehicles. Monitoring this kind of activity, in particular, goes beyond the traditional focus of nuclear observers, but it may now offer the best, most reliable way to know whether states are trying to acquire nuclear weapons.
Given the global rise in nuclear activity, the world should move quickly to create such a system. When existing powers are less able to prevent uranium enrichment—and even hand over highly enriched material to other countries—it incentivizes competitors to double down on their programs. When new states develop bombs, it further encourages proliferation. Especially in an era of growing geopolitical competition, the international community needs more indicative information on the spread of nuclear weapons so that diplomacy can head off destabilizing proliferation and arms races.
SHIELDING THE WORLD
The NPT is the cornerstone of the nonproliferation order. It requires that nonnuclear states avoid acquiring weapons (Article II), allows all states access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes (Article IV), and commits the signatories with nuclear weapons—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—to eventually disarm (Article VI). In practice, this regime limits state possession of and the operation of technology used to produce the fissile materials needed for nuclear weapons: highly enriched uranium and plutonium. And it empowers the IAEA to stringently scrutinize nuclear research and energy programs, enforce nuclear safeguards, and detect clandestine production. Although its powers of enforcement are limited, the NPT has endured due to a combination of IAEA monitoring, strict nuclear trade regulations by multilateral institutions, and commitments by individual member states to abide by the rules.
The United States has historically played an important role in leading and augmenting this regime, mostly with the Soviet Union and later with Russia. To uphold the NPT bargain, Washington cooperated with many partner countries through the Atoms for Peace program, sharing technology and materials to advance nuclear energy and research in states that swore off atomic weapons. U.S. agencies also operated programs to constrain the spread of enriched uranium and nuclear production technology, promote transparency in civilian nuclear material, and convert research reactors from high- to low-enriched fuel. By doing so, Washington further slowed the accumulation of fissile and sensitive technology. Other nuclear states supported or at least acceded to these efforts, tightly restricting the flow of key materials and technologies.
The system isn’t perfect. There are inherent tensions in the NPT bargain, which allows some states to hold weapons while banning others from acquiring them. The world has experienced periodic proliferation crises that exposed gaping holes in the regime, such as in 1991, when observers discovered that Iraq had a clandestine program for producing nuclear weapons. Sometimes, the NPT has failed to stop weapons development altogether, as happened in North Korea, which withdrew from the treaty when its program was exposed. And three nuclear-armed states—India, presumably Israel, and Pakistan—never joined the NPT.
But remarkably, this package has generally held together for decades. Most countries that at one time had nuclear weapons aspirations walked them back, such as South Korea, Sweden, and Switzerland. South Africa voluntarily disarmed, dismantling the six nuclear bombs it had secretly built, and joined the NPT as a nonnuclear state. The world averted close calls, including one resulting from the demise of the Soviet Union, which could have easily yielded four nuclear states instead of one, and another in Iran, which was stopped en route in 2003. If anything, the norm against proliferation has grown stronger over time. Today, only six states without nuclear weapons have the indigenous capability to produce fissile materials—Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Iran, Japan, and the Netherlands—a testament to the efficacy of the regime. But there are multiple signs that this record may not continue.
DANGEROUS DECAY
Some of the recent problems with the nonproliferation system derive from the stalled progress toward nuclear disarmament by states with nuclear weapons. After Russia and the United States dramatically slashed their Cold War nuclear arsenals by retiring obsolete systems, arms reductions have come to a standstill in both countries in the last decade. Now, they are modernizing their arsenals, as are China, India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. This has prompted many nonnuclear states to push forward a nominally complementary but practically competing UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. (The treaty calls for a categorical ban on the possession of nuclear weapons by the signatories, and it has been rejected by all nuclear weapons states and their allies.) Other issues come from the behavior of nuclear states outside the system, most problematically North Korea. But the most worrisome problem is that the barrier between peaceful nuclear activity and weapons development is eroding.
Most of the damaging erosion has been done by the weapons states themselves, via ad hoc arrangements to advance other strategic interests. Notably, the 2005 U.S.-Indian nuclear deal, endorsed in 2008 by the Nuclear Suppliers Group—one of the principal institutions that regulates nuclear sales—enabled the United States and others to trade technology with India alongside carve-outs that permitted unsafeguarded Indian nuclear activity for weapons development. Then, the NPT’s 2010 Review Conference affirmed that states pursuing nuclear energy had an unconditional right to fully access nuclear technology, regardless of necessity.
The barrier between peaceful nuclear activity and weapons development is eroding.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, capped Iran’s uranium enrichment program but walked back an earlier understanding (in the preliminary 2013 Joint Plan of Action) that Iranian enrichment activities would be limited to what Tehran needed for its peaceful program. Both the United States and Iran have since undermined the deal, leaving Iran, according to IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, enriching uranium to concentrations that “only countries making bombs are reaching.”
There are other prominent carve-outs in the system. In 2010, China violated supplier rules by agreeing to construct additional nuclear power reactors in Pakistan, and in 2010 and 2017, Russia signed nuclear deals with Turkey and Egypt, respectively, without requiring (as far as is publicly known) that Ankara or Cairo forego developing fissile materials. Washington’s efforts to promote a “gold standard” for nuclear trade, in which recipients renounce the ability to produce enriched plutonium and uranium, foundered after it was introduced, in 2009, due to opposition from most prospective clients, including Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. government’s own desire to revitalize the domestic nuclear industry through power plant exports.
Collectively, this decay in the NPT’s rules has made it easier for nonnuclear states to obtain fissile materials, blurring the primary distinction between peaceful nuclear programs and military ones. Countries with weapons aspirations can now more easily hide their ambitions—and progress—in plain sight.
STANDARDS AND SIGNS
To stop proliferation and reestablish a pathway for rolling back nuclear weapons, states and nonproliferation institutions will need to take multiple steps. They can start by promoting better norms around the acquisition of enriched uranium. Responsible countries should unilaterally commit to avoid procuring or enriching nuclear materials not needed for peaceful purposes. States that insist on exercising their “inalienable right” to possess sensitive nuclear materials and technologies for peaceful purposes should affirm their bona fides by undertaking additional transparency and verification measures, such as implementing the IAEA Additional Protocol, which requires states to provide the agency with far greater access to and information about their nuclear activities. They should also accede to and properly implement every nuclear convention and best practice in the areas of nuclear safety, security, liability, and environmental protection.
To enforce these practices, the international community could use positive and negative incentives, including trade rewards and penalties, to induce compliance. Over time, states could codify such behavior in bilateral cooperation agreements and in the outcomes of multilateral meetings, such as G-20 communiques, NPT Review Conference statements, or UN Security Council resolutions.
Although it may seem to run contrary to the aims of nuclear nonproliferation overall, the new AUKUS deal offers an opportunity to strengthen the nonproliferation system. Australia is a state that had past interest in nuclear weapons but has evolved over the years into a champion of nonproliferation with an unblemished track record. It would therefore be well within Australia’s character and interest to assume unprecedented formal constraints and transparency measures on its indigenous nuclear pursuits both within and outside the submarine deal in exchange for the new security guarantees that the deal provides. These constraints would not only reassure other states about Australia’s exclusively peaceful nuclear intentions but also establish an approach for others to emulate if they pursue nuclear-powered submarines.
Nonproliferation institutions must increase their tracking of missile development.
Norms, however, only go so far. Some countries will want to evade increased standards, and national intelligence agencies and international institutions—primarily the IAEA but also nuclear supplier regimes (such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group)—need better ways to evaluate the purpose of nuclear programs, especially now that the possession of fissile materials is no longer a sufficient or timely indicator of weapons intent. Thankfully, there are promising alternative metrics. For countries that acquire fissile materials, the primary technical barrier remaining to nuclear weapons acquisition is creating a workable warhead. That means nonproliferation institutions must increase their tracking of weaponization and delivery vehicle development.
There are precedents for how they can do so. In 2006, for instance, the Security Council empowered a comprehensive IAEA effort to ascertain the nature of Iran’s nuclear program. As part of its work, the agency thoroughly investigated Tehran’s entire program to design, develop, build, and test the mechanisms that package fissile materials into a warhead. Future, similar efforts could be naturally folded into the IAEA’s State-Level Approach: a methodology for assessing nuclear and nuclear-related activity in a specific country using a broad range of information. Independent national intelligence efforts would complement and inform IAEA activities, and both could advance special data mining and analytical tools to help strengthen tracking and analysis, even when on-the-ground monitoring is limited.
Warheads are not the only item that states need to transform fissile materials into deliverable nuclear weapons. They must also build or acquire advanced missiles, and transnational institutions can focus on identifying which states appear to be pursuing nuclear-capable ones, concentrating especially on features that distinguish them from other types of launch vehicles, including those for satellites. An effective detection system would prove immediately valuable, given that a number of states, ranging from Saudi Arabia to South Korea, are making or acquiring the means to produce ballistic and cruise missiles capable of delivering nuclear bombs. Many of these same states have also flirted with developing nuclear weapons.
There are additional indicators that nonproliferation monitors can use to distinguish peaceful nuclear programs from military ones. A working nuclear arsenal requires a setup beyond just warheads and missiles, including an elaborate system of command and control; rigorous personnel screening; nuclear safety procedures and emergency response capabilities; exceptional security measures; employment and use doctrines; trained personnel; and dedicated facilities that can store, maintain, and launch weapons. All of these activities leave traces, and as international monitors evaluate nuclear programs, they should seek to assess whether governments are advancing several of these capabilities, as well.
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT
Making this enhanced nonproliferation system work won’t be easy. Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States will first need to adopt new, specific nuclear monitoring measures that go beyond AUKUS. They will then need to secure the cooperation of China, Russia, and other countries that have nuclear weapons to make sure they all adopt the same rigorous practices and support international efforts to institutionalize them. And it will be difficult to get nonnuclear states to agree to new transparency expectations let alone empower any international body to routinely collect more information about programs with possible weapons aims.
But that doesn’t make it impossible. States might find more monitoring acceptable if it is incorporated into the IAEA’s State-Level Approach and used to inform the agency’s routine work surrounding safeguards, with additional inquiries only on a case-by-case basis. These measures could all eventually be enshrined by the IAEA Board, the annual NPT Review Conference, the G-20, and in UN Security Council resolutions. To obtain buy in from nonnuclear states that might be subject to new levels of scrutiny, leading nuclear powers could guarantee that they will not push for any new international legal instruments or institutions; the revised regime would run entirely through existing frameworks. They will also have to make clear that nonweapons states will not be subject to any new expectations, so long as they do not scale up uranium enrichment. For states that do opt to use enriched uranium, the expectations of greater forbearance and transparency will be tied to the scope and scale of their proliferation activities.
Finally, leading nuclear powers could provide new incentives to adhere to the enhanced framework by expanding export policies and assistance programs to states seeking nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Liberalizing exports of nuclear material might seem to go against the aims of nonproliferation, but it could serve as a powerful inducement for nonproliferation compliance and also enhance the international response to the climate crisis. Nuclear power has been identified as an important element in the transition to renewable energy, but it presents difficult financial and technological hurdles for many countries.
Before the nuclear regime frays further, states must make an urgent effort to reinvigorate the NPT bargain. This work is essential both to stopping and rolling back future proliferation and to eventual disarmament—in other words, to a world in which nuclear technology doesn't contribute to geopolitical instability.
12. Analysis: China's ex-Washington envoy resurfaces with an important message
Excerpts:
Cui's warning reflects a strong sense of caution over the international coalition against China that has been formed by the Biden administration's strengthening of ties with allies such as Britain, Japan, Australia and Chinese neighbor India.
Like the ABCD encirclement -- a series of embargoes against Japan by America, Britain, China and the Dutch before World War II -- the international coalition against China could deliver a severe blow.
Waiting ahead could be a battle for technological supremacy and divisions in supply chains, which could be a drag on the Chinese economy over the medium to long term.
Diplomacy and the economy are closely linked. Xi has said, "Time and momentum are on our side," and remains bullish. But it is also true that the Biden administration's China strategy is biting, as evidenced by Cui's do-or-die candid advice.
It is unclear if Cui's words will trigger a policy change, but the fact that there is an atmosphere in which remarks like Cui's are allowed -- at least in moderation -- and widely spread already represents a slight change. This also applies to remarks on the economy.
For Xi, who aims to secure a third term as leader at the party's National Congress this coming autumn, the biggest challenges remain the China-U.S. relationship and the slowing economy. All eyes will be on his every move.
Analysis: China's ex-Washington envoy resurfaces with an important message
Cui Tiankai says war of anger does not help the national cause
KATSUJI NAKAZAWA, Nikkei senior staff writer
JANUARY 13, 2022 04:07 JST
Katsuji Nakazawa is a Tokyo-based senior staff writer and editorial writer at Nikkei. He spent seven years in China as a correspondent and later as China bureau chief. He was the 2014 recipient of the Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist prize.
After disappearing from the public eye half a year ago, Chinese diplomat Cui Tiankai made a sudden appearance last month in Beijing, delivering what would become a widely talked about keynote speech.
The former Chinese ambassador to the U.S. sounded alarm bells about Beijing's current inability to fully cope with Washington's strategic and extensive measures to contain his country.
It was a dig at China's recent "wolf warrior diplomacy," hinting that it is being swayed by U.S. provocations. Peppered with words like "careless" and "incompetent," the remarks have attracted tremendous interest in Chinese political and diplomatic circles.
Cui's keynote came on Dec. 20, delivered to a symposium co-hosted by the China Institute of International Studies, a think tank under the Foreign Ministry. The venue -- the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, which is used to entertain foreign dignitaries -- underscored the prestige of the event.
"We need to be clearheaded and fully prepared to deal with the twists and turns of China-U.S. relations and even the roller-coaster scenario in the future, and resolutely safeguard our sovereignty, security and development interests," Cui warned. "In principle, we should not fight a war we are not prepared for, a war we are not sure of winning, a war of anger and attrition.
Cui Tiankai says racism is a feature of American policy toward China, "although people don't say it." (File photo by Reuters)
"Every ounce of our peoples' gains has been hard-won, and we must not allow them to be plundered by anyone or suffer losses due to our own carelessness, laziness and incompetence."
In a not-so-subtle jab at China's wolf warriors, Cui added, "In the face of complex situations, we must always have the country at large in mind, and not always think about being an internet celebrity."
Naturally, Cui showed deference to President Xi Jinping by repeatedly mentioning his name. The main thrust of the speech is a criticism of the U.S., including a controversial analysis that racism features in American policy toward China, "although people don't say it," he noted.
But a deeper look at Cui's remarks shows the diplomat clearly differs from other Chinese government bureaucrats who play up to the top leader.
Cui presented a sharp analysis of problems with China's diplomacy.
Some in China have noted that he speaks in a manner somewhat similar to Zhang Wenhong, a university professor widely revered as an authority on measures against infectious diseases.
Zhang came under a barrage of criticism about half a year ago after publicly proposing an early switch from a "zero COVID" policy to "living with COVID" based on scientific knowledge.
Zhang Wenhong speaks at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in September 2020. Zhang has since come under criticism for publicly proposing a "living with COVID" policy. (File photo by AP)
China's current tough line on the U.S. has been spearheaded by top diplomat Yang Jiechi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party's powerful Politburo, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
But it is Xi who makes the final decision on all important policies. Therefore, while reflecting on his own mistakes as the former ambassador to Washington, Cui was also making a veiled criticism of Xi's tough line on the U.S.
Cui's message was that China's current diplomacy is missing the grand picture as it busily engages in a war of words. The goal should not be a tit-for-tat slapping of sanctions but "to realize the people's longing for a better life and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," the veteran diplomat suggested.
Rather than shoot back at the U.S. with retaliatory sanctions, which are largely a save-face measure, it would be more prudent, Cui's message indicated, to establish an environment that allows American companies to remain in China and flourish, rather than allow the U.S. government to leash tech companies like Apple and Intel and take them back home.
Cui is well-versed in U.S. affairs. He became the longest-serving Chinese ambassador to the U.S. in modern Chinese history. He held the post for as many as eight years. He also once served as China's ambassador to Japan.
During his time as China's representative in Washington, he observed changes in the U.S.'s China policy under three successive presidents -- Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Cui was present at the March 2021 clash of U.S. and Chinese diplomats in Alaska, the first face-to-face engagement under the Biden administration.
"There's no room for China to compromise or make concessions" on core interests, Cui told reporters on the sidelines. "That is the position we will make clear in this meeting."
Yang Jiechi, center, director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office, and Wang Yi, to Yang's right, China's state councilor and foreign minister, sit down with their U.S. counterparts in Anchorage, Alaska, the U.S., on March 18, 2021. © Reuters
What is noteworthy is that Cui is one of Xi's most trusted, favorite retainers.
In August 2011, then-Vice President Biden visited China. He stayed in Beijing for three days, holding talks with then-Vice President Xi. He later traveled to Sichuan Province. His six-day China trip was a relaxed one. Xi accompanied Biden on his long tour as his Chinese counterpart.
Cui, who was then serving as vice foreign minister, accompanied Xi and Biden as a de facto interpreter.
"Xi's confidence in Cui strengthened through this long journey, leading to Cui being put in charge of diplomacy toward the U.S. in Washington for an unusually long period, all under Xi," a source said.
But by the time Cui left Washington in June, relations between the U.S. and China had plunged into crisis. The situation was reportedly so harsh that he was even denied meetings with major U.S. figures to bid them farewell before leaving Washington.
That Cui returned to the public to deliver this message is noteworthy. Especially notable are his words about not fighting a war China is not prepared for, a war China is not sure it can win, a war of anger and attrition.
First and foremost, this means China should avoid actual warfare with the U.S.
But what Cui actually wanted to do was give candid advice about China's current diplomatic strategy toward the U.S. He indicated that China has locked itself in a "war of attrition" without making careful preparations, driven by emotion.
What is this war of attrition, then?
Xi Jinping, Joe Biden and their interpreters walk across the Dujiangyan Irrigation system in Dujiangyan, outside Chengdu, in China's southwestern province of Sichuan, on Aug. 21, 2011. © AFP/Jiji
Cui's warning reflects a strong sense of caution over the international coalition against China that has been formed by the Biden administration's strengthening of ties with allies such as Britain, Japan, Australia and Chinese neighbor India.
Like the ABCD encirclement -- a series of embargoes against Japan by America, Britain, China and the Dutch before World War II -- the international coalition against China could deliver a severe blow.
Waiting ahead could be a battle for technological supremacy and divisions in supply chains, which could be a drag on the Chinese economy over the medium to long term.
Diplomacy and the economy are closely linked. Xi has said, "Time and momentum are on our side," and remains bullish. But it is also true that the Biden administration's China strategy is biting, as evidenced by Cui's do-or-die candid advice.
It is unclear if Cui's words will trigger a policy change, but the fact that there is an atmosphere in which remarks like Cui's are allowed -- at least in moderation -- and widely spread already represents a slight change. This also applies to remarks on the economy.
For Xi, who aims to secure a third term as leader at the party's National Congress this coming autumn, the biggest challenges remain the China-U.S. relationship and the slowing economy. All eyes will be on his every move.
13. Military Chiefs Sound Alarm at Proposal to Hold 2022 Spending to Last Year’s Level
Excerpts:
Several factors make this year different from the past 12 of 13 years in which Congress passed a continuing resolution. First, inflation grew 7 percent in 2021, the highest increase in nearly four decades.
"If we have a year-long CR, it takes a substantial amount of money out of the Pentagon's budget," said Eric Fanning, the CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group that represents defense firms and military contractors.
Another unique aspect of this year’s continuing resolution is that the fiscal 2021 budget included billions of dollars for the Afghan security forces, which collapsed last year. The Pentagon can’t spend that money on other items without Congress’ approval.
"When you're planning your budget in the Pentagon, you try to avoid doing anything new in the first quarter of the year because you just assume you're going to have a CR for at least a quarter,” said Fanning, who served as Army secretary during the Obama administration. “So there are all these disruptive elements of CR in a normal year, but when you have a year where the defense budget is going up, then you're also losing that increase."
Military Chiefs Sound Alarm at Proposal to Hold 2022 Spending to Last Year’s Level
By MARCUS WEISGERBER and TARA COPP
JANUARY 12, 2022 05:13 PM ET
In Wednesday testimony to lawmakers, service leaders decry what would be a record-breaking continuing resolution.
The recent passage of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act showed overwhelming bipartisan agreement that the Pentagon needs more money. But military leaders are sounding alarm bells as the defense appropriations bill remains stalled amid larger budget fights and support grows for the notion of freezing the rest of the year’s defense spending at last year’s levels.
“A yearlong [continuing resolution] is completely new territory that we have not dealt with before that will have significant impacts across our military,” said Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said Wednesday at a House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing.
The Pentagon has been operating under a continuing resolution ever since fiscal 2022 began on Oct. 1. The current one expires on Feb. 18.
One by one, the uniformed leaders of each branch of the military told Congress what a year-long continuing resolution would do.
The Marine Corps would have to delay and cancel personnel transfers and reduce incentive pay and bonuses. Its modernization plans would stall, which Commandant Gen. David Berger said would increase risk.
“We’ve already divested of old and begun to reinvest in new,” Berger said, who has led his service to retire its M1A1 Abrams tanks, M88A2 Hercules Recovery Vehicles and AN/TPS-59 radars. “Under a full-year CR we will delay acquisition of critical Marine Corps force design programs.”
The Navy’s Gilday said a year-long CR would dangerously delay efforts to replace its Ohio-class nuclear submarines and upgrade its naval shipyards, just when China’s submarine technology is moving briskly ahead.
“The once-in-a-century work we are doing on our public shipyards will come to a stop,” Gilday said, including on the new Columbia-class ballistic missile subs.
“That program has no margin, as it replaces submarines that have been in the water for four decades,” he said.
Gilday also said a year-long CR would force the Navy to reduce the number of new sailors by 75 percent and halve the number of planned personnel transfers around the fleet.
Gen. C.Q. Brown, the Air Force chief of staff, said that a year-long continuing resolution would cost the service $3.5 billion; the service’s enacted 2021 budget is about $152.8 billion, according to fiscal year 2022 budget documents. It would freeze 78 “new start” programs, including the new Ground Based Strategic Deterrent ICBM, which would be delayed past its planned 2029 start. The B-21 new strategic bomber would also be delayed by up to a year, Brown said.
Such a CR would likely drain $1 billion from Air Force spending on personnel, Brown said. Among other effects, training for service members in the Air National Guard and reserves “would be curtailed or canceled,” he said.
As well, training programs targeting sexual assault and diversity efforts would be eliminated “at a time when they are most needed,” Brown said. Incentive and retention bonuses would also be affected, and flight training hours would likely be reduced.
Gen. John Raymond, the chief of space operations, said a year-long continuing resolution would reduce the Space Force’s budget by $2 billion; its enacted 2021 budget is $15.4 billion according to fiscal year 2022 budget documents.
Raymond said that would force the service to cancel two of this year’s five planned national security space launches cut $800 million in classified development programs meant to deter rising threats in space from China and Russia; and reduce research and development of early missile warning and missile tracking capabilities, protected satellite communication capabilities, and precision navigation.
Gen. Joseph Martin, vice chief of staff for the Army, said a full-year CR would cost the service $12.9 billion; its 2021 budget is $177 billion. Martin said the cuts would reduce flight training hours for Army pilots, hurt the Army’s ability to send soldiers to professional military education, and shrink base operations support programs.
Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord said a full-year CR would most deeply hurt weapon projects—including hypersonic missiles and space satellites—necessary to keep pace with Chinese and Russian advancements.
“The areas where you're trying to go the fastest, where you have the most change, are what's impacted the most by the requirement that you do what you did last year at the rate that you did it last year at the funding level they did [it at] last year,” McCord said.
The Pentagon’s budget is often a bargaining chip in annual federal spending negotiations. Democrats will often be OK with a defense spending increase as long as unrelated social programs get an equal boost.
But the most recent budget negotiations have been different. President Biden proposed a $715 billion budget for the Pentagon in fiscal 2022, about the same in real terms as the $705 billion Congress approved for fiscal 2021. But this year’s drive to add to the White House proposal was smoothed byDemocrat-led panels in the House and Senate, which approved a $25 billion increase to Biden’s request.
That increase has been passed by the House and Senate in the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act But Congress has yet to pass the annual appropriations bill.
Some in Congress have suggested Congress pass a yearlong continuing resolution. In December, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, said: “Republicans should be in favor of CRs until Biden is out of office. That would be the proper Republican thing to do and anybody saying otherwise is deeply foolish.”
A continuing resolution freezes spending at the prior -year’s level. There’s no adjustment for inflation. New projects can’t begin. And ones that are finished cannot end. Over the past decade, Congress has passed an annual appropriations bill before the end of the fiscal year just once. Since 2010, the average continuing resolution has lasted four months. In 2019, lawmakers managed to pass the appropriations bill only after seven months of its fiscal year had elapsed.
Several factors make this year different from the past 12 of 13 years in which Congress passed a continuing resolution. First, inflation grew 7 percent in 2021, the highest increase in nearly four decades.
"If we have a year-long CR, it takes a substantial amount of money out of the Pentagon's budget," said Eric Fanning, the CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group that represents defense firms and military contractors.
Another unique aspect of this year’s continuing resolution is that the fiscal 2021 budget included billions of dollars for the Afghan security forces, which collapsed last year. The Pentagon can’t spend that money on other items without Congress’ approval.
"When you're planning your budget in the Pentagon, you try to avoid doing anything new in the first quarter of the year because you just assume you're going to have a CR for at least a quarter,” said Fanning, who served as Army secretary during the Obama administration. “So there are all these disruptive elements of CR in a normal year, but when you have a year where the defense budget is going up, then you're also losing that increase."
14. Making ‘Quad Plus’ a Reality
Excerpts:
Against this scenario, the Quad Plus can emerge as an intermediary or pacifier with its intent to go beyond the China trope: While accepting realistic national security threats, a Quad Plus system allows participating nations to create a strategic alignment that might indicate a growing, or temporary, embrace of a U.S.-led order in the Indo-Pacific region while still not becoming part of a set “alliance framework.” Here, it is important to remember that countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Vietnam were largely included in the format because of their success in handling the COVID-19 pandemic within their borders.
However, should the Quad Plus format gain new impetus and new objectives, these states will likely not be willing to openly participate in or espouse any format that appears to be China-centric (or rather, anti-China), while they share elaborate economic ties with Beijing. Even though economic and trade ties with China are witnessing more scrutiny in the post-COVID-19 order, with nations aiming to create more resilient and sustainable supply chains, China’s vise-like hold on the world economy is unlikely to be upended. Nonetheless, there are ways to reduce the global reliance on China – as the SCRI highlighted through its efforts to explore possibilities for diversification via collaborations of like-minded countries and public-private partnership programs. Additionally, the Quad Plus could also consider making room for China, which is still a dominant economic force, in its dialogue mechanism so as to promote China-U.S. bonhomie in the interest of safeguarding regional prosperity and stability.
Ultimately, the Quad Plus format is now its nascent stages; however uncertain, its future holds immense potential. In a post-COVID-19 world, where the pre-existing economic and political vulnerabilities have exacerbated and created havoc, this kind of alternative framework could not only help facilitate the provision of global public goods, but also reconfigure the global governance systems – and therein lies the essential capital of a Quad Plus grouping.
Making ‘Quad Plus’ a Reality
Japan’s hosting of the Quad summit this year is the perfect opportunity to bring other partners on board. But how?
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On January 6, 2022, Japan and Australia signed a “landmark” defense treaty, the Reciprocal Access Agreement, to elevate their bilateral defense cooperation in the face of China’s increasingly aggressive posture in the Indo-Pacific region. The joint statement explicitly mentioned the growing collaboration among the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) nations –Australia, India, Japan, and the United States – to “drive forward coordinated responses to the most pressing challenges” in the region. The “informal grouping” – sometime known as the Quad 2.0 – was revived in 2017 after a 10-year gap, and has since redoubled efforts to consolidate security partnerships and regional cooperation between members. The recently-concluded Australia-Japan treaty aims to inject further momentum to the Quad 2.0, which held its first-in-person leaders’ summit in September 2021, albeit under the shadow of the AUKUS (Australia-U.K.-U.S.) defense pact announcement. Notably, Tokyo is set to host the second Quad summit in 2022.
In this context, the concept of the “Quad Plus,” which has been in circulation for quite some time but remained abstract so far, becomes increasingly important in the current geopolitical scene, where post-AUKUS tensions are running high even among allies. How can the Quad Plus move beyond an abstract idea and consolidate as a regular political grouping?
In 2020, the Quad Plus framework found its first footing outside the parameters of roundtable conferences (where the idea has been in motion since 2013). On March 20, representatives from South Korea, Vietnam, and New Zealand were included in the weekly Quad meeting. In May, the intent for the Plus format was strengthened when the United States hosted a meeting of Quad nations, which also included Brazil, Israel, and South Korea, to discuss a global response to COVID-19.
The importance of multi-sectoral cooperation and convergence in the larger interest of the global community among like-minded countries is the need of this fragile post-COVID era. This is nowhere more apparent than in the Indo-Pacific, where the Quad intends to write “shared futures” through “new collaboration opportunities.”
The Quad Plus can represent one such critical opportunity. Moving forward, the Plus format can be framed as a “conjectural alliance” that abides by universalism, rule of law, democratic ideals, and free and open maritime domains. Overall, the idea of Quad Plus refers to a minilateral engagement in the Indo-Pacific that draws from the Quad to include other crucial emerging economies. At the same time, it offers a multipolar lens through which we can view, analyze, and assess the strategic multilateral growth of the nations involved.
Hence, it is not necessary to view the Quad Plus as an extension of the Quad. While the former has largely focused on creating a cooperative framework to tackle shared international challenges, like the pandemic-induced economic and public health concerns, the Quad has remained a more strategic dialogue that has looked at maritime, technological, infrastructural, and health challenges through the lens of security. Concurrently, the need to view the Plus framework in isolation is equally incorrect, especially with the release of the “Spirit of the Quad” joint statement, which highlighted the Quad’s own growing focus on avenues like global health, vaccination, infrastructure, critical technologies, and climate.
Rather, the Quad Plus must be viewed as link between the four founding nations and emerging global powers (via new joint initiatives or programs) that are relevant to regional prosperity, peace, and stability. Such a connect could perhaps first emerge on a rotational basis through bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral cooperation. The Quad’s outreach should not be limited to regional states (like Vietnam or South Korea) either, but also include like-minded partners in other regions such as the European Union and the U.K., which are stakeholders in the Indo-Pacific. The EU, for example, is a natural candidate owing to its close partnerships with India, Japan, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), particularly after the release of its Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific and the 300 billion-euro global connectivity strategy, Golden Gateway. So is the U.K., which has recently unveiled its Global Britain program that contains its own vision for the Indo-Pacific.
Expanding the Quad’s Horizons
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The format will potentially expand the Quad’s horizons in terms of pluralism and inclusivity by inviting new and emerging powers to the fold. Such states can collaborate with the Quad’s new and niche initiatives (including its new working groups on climate and critical and emerging technology) to support, strengthen, and enhance value-driven, sustainable shared interests globally, as well as reiterate the support for ASEAN centrality. Moreover, Quad Plus partners can be included via newly-instituted projects like the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative (SCRI, comprising Japan, Australia, and India), which seeks to reduce dependence on China and build resilient supply chains in the Indo-Pacific region.
Further, the implementation of national initiatives by Quad partners has enhanced the sphere of influence they wield, both individually and as a grouping, in the Indo-Pacific. By way of the Quad Plus narrative, an expanded outreach of ventures like Japan’s Expanded Partnership for Quality Infrastructure (EPQI), the U.S.-led Group of Seven (G-7) venture Build Back Better World (B3W), India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI), Australia’s Pacific Step-Up, and the multilateral SCRI can, and must, be promoted. Quad Plus countries like Vietnam, New Zealand, Brazil, Israel, and South Korea can become crucial partners within such national initiatives.
Moreover, in the aftermath of the AUKUS announcement, which has caused a rift in Transatlantic ties, re-energizing Europe’s growing demands for strategic autonomy, the Quad Plus emerges as an expansion – not necessarily an extension – of the Quad. It will allow the creation of a “continental connect” and “corridor of communication,” revealing independent and direct links to Asian economies for the EU, beyond a U.S.-led entry.
Beyond Anti-China Rhetoric: Gains From Quad Plus
The Quad is a not a formal military alliance, even as it holds military/maritime drills like MALABAR among like-minded partners. However, in recent years, as the global geopolitical situation has worsened, the ongoing China-U.S. trade war has reignited the debate on the “Thucydides Trap.” At the same time, the post-COVID order has emphasized the “Kindleberger Trap” that posits China as a weak power in terms of providing public goods. Therefore, the Quad’s resurgence amid an increasingly volatile world and a militarist – though “weak” – China has given it a “new focus” to enhance “economic and environmental resilience,” as well as bolster “security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.”
The Quad has been particularly critical in escalating the bilateral and trilateral security cooperation between member states. Although the September 2021 Quad leaders’ joint statement doesn’t mention China explicitly, countering China is implicit in its strong tone pledging its commitment to security, “rooted in international law and undaunted by coercion.” Earlier, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the Quad 2.0 “an Indo-Pacific NATO” that “trumpet[s] the old-fashioned Cold War mentality to stir up confrontation among different groups.” The Chinese state media has called it “an empty talk club,” where “an anxious US wants to take charge”; while most recently, China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying termed it an “exclusive clique.”
Against this scenario, the Quad Plus can emerge as an intermediary or pacifier with its intent to go beyond the China trope: While accepting realistic national security threats, a Quad Plus system allows participating nations to create a strategic alignment that might indicate a growing, or temporary, embrace of a U.S.-led order in the Indo-Pacific region while still not becoming part of a set “alliance framework.” Here, it is important to remember that countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Vietnam were largely included in the format because of their success in handling the COVID-19 pandemic within their borders.
However, should the Quad Plus format gain new impetus and new objectives, these states will likely not be willing to openly participate in or espouse any format that appears to be China-centric (or rather, anti-China), while they share elaborate economic ties with Beijing. Even though economic and trade ties with China are witnessing more scrutiny in the post-COVID-19 order, with nations aiming to create more resilient and sustainable supply chains, China’s vise-like hold on the world economy is unlikely to be upended. Nonetheless, there are ways to reduce the global reliance on China – as the SCRI highlighted through its efforts to explore possibilities for diversification via collaborations of like-minded countries and public-private partnership programs. Additionally, the Quad Plus could also consider making room for China, which is still a dominant economic force, in its dialogue mechanism so as to promote China-U.S. bonhomie in the interest of safeguarding regional prosperity and stability.
Ultimately, the Quad Plus format is now its nascent stages; however uncertain, its future holds immense potential. In a post-COVID-19 world, where the pre-existing economic and political vulnerabilities have exacerbated and created havoc, this kind of alternative framework could not only help facilitate the provision of global public goods, but also reconfigure the global governance systems – and therein lies the essential capital of a Quad Plus grouping.
GUEST AUTHOR
Jagannath Panda
Dr. Jagannath Panda is a research fellow and center coordinator for East Asia at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. Panda is also the series editor for “Routledge Studies on Think Asia.”
15. Cyber innovation and partnerships are key to future deterrence
Excerpts:
With the planned new weapons system, Ground Based Strategic Deterrence, they now know NC3 will dramatically increase its use of digital technologies to enhance efficiency and reliability. This makes the cybersecurity of NC3 an even more pressing need.
Cyber defense and functional analysis of these systems is critical to effective operation of the world’s most powerful weapons, and ensuring a viable deterrence capability for the future of America. With limited resources, the 341st’s Communications Squadron’s Mission Defense Team is working to protect nuclear deterrence. In order to do so, we are seeking new partnerships and will continue to rely on innovation and initiative to deliver results and our part to ensure a robust deterrence exists for the nation.
Cyber innovation and partnerships are key to future deterrence
With a U.S. national strategy laser-focused on China and Russia, ensuring a robust and effective deterrence capability is a must. In 2019, U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy David Trachtenberg called nuclear deterrence the bedrock for national security, stating “our nuclear deterrent underwrites all U.S. military operations and diplomacy across the globe.”
Most people naturally think of deterrence in terms of weaponry. However, an effective deterrence also relies on preventing aggressive nations from operating at will in the cyber domain. Outthinking the enemy, fostering innovation, and embracing initiative is an imperative, especially in the cyber arena. When it comes to safeguarding the world’s most powerful weapons, nothing can be taken for chance or for granted.
Within Air Force Global Strike Command, seven civilian airmen serve as the front line of defense against cyber attacks against the world’s most powerful weapons system, the intercontinental ballistic missile. As I like to refer to them, these “Seven Spartans” are at the hot gates and represent not only the base, but the entire mission defense team, for all Air Force Global Strike Command ICBM operations. They push every day to develop cyber blueprints to preserve and protect American’s nuclear-capable platforms and critical infrastructure.
Working closely with missileers, security forces professionals, and intelligence leaders, they are forging new pathways and developing a specialized cybersecurity core — defining what cyber defense can mean to Air Force Global Strike Command and identifying needs while protecting and defending against potential attacks. This is incredibly important work, especially considering the fact that operational warheads, delivery platforms, and early warning satellites are all linked through a nuclear command, control, and communication network.
Over the last 60 years, the weapons system has matured with updates and additions; but with a change in technologies, the need for innovation and initiative became apparent.
RELATED
The authors propose concepts to address a gap in discourse on "integrated deterrence" in the upcoming National Defense Strategy.
By Katie Crombe, Steve Ferenzi and Robert Jones
As the cyber defense lead for the Global Strike missile wings, the 341st Communications Squadron Mission Defense Team is assessing technological change and its impact to U.S. nuclear deterrence assets. They are studying dependencies of the ICBM weapon system and considering more than just the launch of the weapon. The team quickly identified cyber-related dependencies crossing into the expertise and duties of every unit on Malmstrom Air Force Base and beyond — dependencies that are required to ensure those supporting technologies and organizations can provide credible nuclear deterrence through maintenance, physical security, nuclear surety, and of course, the ability to launch if ever needed.
Even though the ICBM mission defense team is new, the team members have already made significant changes to the way ICBM operations are conducted, demonstrating how a pioneering spirit can rapidly make improvements.
The team recently learned about an emerging challenge in the missile complex related to voice communications.
The analysis determined there are previously undocumented critical communications dependencies in the Launch Control Center, all complex and unique. In addition, they discovered the requirements for a reliable telephone service had changed over the years and elevated current needs for consideration. Malmstrom AFB altered its procedures for critical ICBM communications and made a significant change in the way radio communication training is conducted while imparting lessons across all three Air Force missile bases. It delivered improvement.
As a result of the initial analysis, the mission defense team will look at the way data moves from location to location in the missile field and help determine the functionality and reliability of infrastructure that has been in place since the early 1960s.
This work is increasing mission assurance in a no-fail nuclear mission. Because of the support and promotion of innovation in AFGSC, the team has received requests for integration with operators, maintainers, defenders, Office of Special Investigations, and command representatives. Their work comes at a time of unprecedented cyber threats to military and civilians alike, and parallels with the Defense Department’s shift to near-peer competition with the Chinese and Russians.
The team recently helped U.S. Strategic Command redefine cyber exercise procedures during the Global Thunder 22 exercise — an annual command and control exercise designed to train U.S. Strategic Command components, units and task forces while assessing joint operational readiness. With the mission defense team’s help, U.S. Strategic Command was able to confront newfound issues.
RELATED
Today, nuclear deterrence is more important than ever, which is why we must prioritize efforts to modernize the triad.
By Former U.S. Air Force secretaries and chiefs of staff
With the planned new weapons system, Ground Based Strategic Deterrence, they now know NC3 will dramatically increase its use of digital technologies to enhance efficiency and reliability. This makes the cybersecurity of NC3 an even more pressing need.
Cyber defense and functional analysis of these systems is critical to effective operation of the world’s most powerful weapons, and ensuring a viable deterrence capability for the future of America. With limited resources, the 341st’s Communications Squadron’s Mission Defense Team is working to protect nuclear deterrence. In order to do so, we are seeking new partnerships and will continue to rely on innovation and initiative to deliver results and our part to ensure a robust deterrence exists for the nation.
Lt. Col. B. Seth Bennett is the 341st Communications Squadron Commander. He commands 74 total force personnel fulfilling cyber and information technology requirements across the Air Force’s largest missile complex.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, or U.S. armed forces.
16. Iran’s Mohsen Rezaee Should Face Justice
Conclusion:
Criminals like Rezaee should not receive a free pass to jet set. That Nicaragua and Venezuela, two close allies of Tehran and themselves rogue regimes run by brutal dictators, are giving him carte blanche to travel is to be expected. But the United States, and those nations that might let him fly across their airspace, should make sure a wanted fugitive faces justice.
Iran’s Mohsen Rezaee Should Face Justice
If Rezaee travels with impunity, Iran will seek to further push the limits, and legitimize the accused in the same way that it has done with near impunity in the nuclear file.
On January 8, a Dassault Falcon 900EX executive jet (tail number EP-IGC) owned by the Iranian government took off from Tehran, heading west. Aboard the plane was an Iranian delegation traveling to Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, where the local dictator, Daniel Ortega, was to be inaugurated to his fourth term as president two days later.
But this was no ordinary delegation. At its helm was Mohsen Rezaee, the former commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Tehran’s current vice president for economic affairs, who helped plan the 1994 bombing of the AMIA, the Buenos Aires Jewish cultural center. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the Western Hemisphere before 9/11, killing eighty-five people and wounding 229 others.
The victims’ families have been waiting for justice for twenty-eight years. Rezaee belongs in a courtroom, not at a presidential inauguration. Countries should not welcome him; they should arrest him.
In 2007, Interpol issued a red notice issued for Rezaee for “aggravated murder and damages,” after, in 2006, Argentina had issued an international arrest warrant for his role in the AMIA bombing. In 2019, Argentina also added him to its terrorist list. In 2020, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Rezaee. In 2019, Washington designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization.
These developments may explain why Rezaee’s plane made a circuitous journey. It first crossed the airspace of Turkey and Greece, flew over southern Italy, then Tunisia, on to Algeria, before entering Mauritania’s airspace. After less than two hours on the ground, the Dassault Falcon took off again. Destination: Caracas, Venezuela. Its flight path studiously avoided the Republic of Cape Verde. From Caracas, Rezaee’s plane flew to Managua, this time avoiding Colombia’s airspace.
The flightpath quirks suggest that Rezaee feared that some countries would force his aircraft to land in order to arrest him. Such an occurrence would have precedents. In June 2020, Alex Saab, a Venezuelan regime crony in charge of coordinating sanctions evasion with Iran, was arrested during a technical stopover in Cape Verde while on his way to Iran. A few months later, in October 2020, Cape Verde authorities prevented the landing of an Iranian cargo plane owned by the IRGC. The airline was likely carrying weapons from Iran to Venezuela.
As we write, flight tracking websites indicate that Rezaee’s executive jet is still on the runway of Managua’s international airport. But his presence in Managua has become public knowledge and triggered condemnation from Argentina’s government. His journey back, even without stopovers, needs to cross the sovereign airspace of numerous countries in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. Many are U.S. allies. All are members of Interpol.
Will they deny him transit rights or force him to land so that he can be arrested and finally face his day in court? Will the United States, the only country with the leverage and means to produce such an outcome, use its diplomatic influence to ensure Rezaee’s journey home never happens? Or will the Biden administration, currently entangled in a race to conclude nuclear negotiations with the clerical regime in which Rezaee serves, choose to let him go?
Iran is testing not only the will of the United States but of the international community. If Rezaee travels with impunity, Iran will seek to further push the limits, and legitimize the accused in the same way that it has done with near impunity in the nuclear file. Interpol’s own credibility is at stake as well.
In previous diplomatic rounds with Tehran, Washington sacrificed principle and compromised justice, with little tangible benefit. During the run-up to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Washington slow-rolled and mothballed investigations against Iran-backed Hezbollah’s narco-trafficking and money laundering activities in Latin America, for fear of crossing Iranian negotiators. In recent months, the Biden administration has failed to enforce key sanctions against Iran and to impose meaningful military consequences for Iranian provocations against U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Criminals like Rezaee should not receive a free pass to jet set. That Nicaragua and Venezuela, two close allies of Tehran and themselves rogue regimes run by brutal dictators, are giving him carte blanche to travel is to be expected. But the United States, and those nations that might let him fly across their airspace, should make sure a wanted fugitive faces justice.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Toby Dershowitz is senior vice president for government relations and strategy. FDD is a non-partisan, Washington-based research institute focused on national security and foreign policy. Follow them on Twitter @eottolenghi and @TobyDersh.
Image: Reuters.
17. A More Just Drone War Is Within Reach
Excerpts:
If a higher targeting threshold succeeded in reducing civilian casualties in Pakistan without endangering Americans, there is reason to believe that similar targeting adjustments could yield the same results in other countries where the United States is currently conducting drone strikes. One complicating factor is the presence of significant numbers of U.S. forces on the ground. In declared theaters of operation, strikes are often conducted in support or defense of U.S. soldiers. As a result, critics of the tighter targeting standards caution that these standards could expose U.S. soldiers to greater battlefield risks, since commanders could be restricted in their ability to use drone strikes for close air support. This tradeoff is less pronounced in undeclared theaters of operations, where there are fewer U.S. boots on the ground. Still, the Biden administration will have to strike the right balance between military necessity and protecting civilian lives in its ongoing review of the United States’ drone program.
Regardless of the specific theater of operations, limiting civilian casualties in war should be an end in itself, not just because the United States is bound to do so under international law but because civilian casualties are thought to make it easier for terrorists to recruit followers. Our analysis suggests that reducing civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes doesn’t have to come at the cost of effective counterterrorism. A tighter threshold for U.S drone strikes can reduce civilian casualties without emboldening the enemy.
A More Just Drone War Is Within Reach
The Case for Tighter Targeting Restrictions
January 12, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Paul Lushenko, Sarah Kreps, and Shyam Raman · January 12, 2022
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this past August brought an end to a 20-year war. But as a series of recent investigations by The New York Times has underscored, it also marked the beginning of postmortems about what the United States did right and, in some cases, did wrong.
Drawing on Pentagon documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Times revealed that U.S. drone strikes killed an alarming number of civilians in Afghanistan—likely hundreds more than the 188 the Defense Department has acknowledged killing in such strikes since 2018—a pattern that appears to be consistent with U.S. operations in Iraq and Syria. Targeting decisions were sometimes marred by confirmation bias: Pentagon analysts saw what they expected to see, often identifying civilians rushing to help those hit by U.S. strikes as terrorists and striking them, as well. This reporting is an important first step toward accounting for the shortcomings of the drone war that Washington launched after 9/11, one that President Joe Biden’s administration should build on as it concludes its own review of drone strikes outside conventional—or declared—war zones.
But no accounting of the drone war would be complete without determining whether policies intended to reduce civilian casualties from U.S. strikes ever worked. To answer that question, we studied strike data from Pakistan, where the Pentagon and the CIA reportedly conducted nearly 400 strikes in the ten-year period before President Barack Obama’s administration tightened its targeting requirements. In 2013, the administration officially shifted its standard from “reasonable certainty” of zero civilian casualties to “near certainty.” Our analysis shows that this policy change dramatically reduced civilian casualties in Pakistan without giving terrorists an appreciable advantage, suggesting that similarly stringent targeting standards might save innocent lives in theaters such as Iraq and Syria, too.
IN PURSUIT OF PRECISION
According to the nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which collects data from news reports, official statements, press releases, and other documents, U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen from 2002 to 2020 killed between 10,000 and 17,000 people. Between 800 and 1,750 of the dead are thought to have been civilians, the highest percentage of them in Pakistan. But these aggregated data mask differences in the rate of killing over time—and in the criteria that different U.S. administrations used to balance the need to target suspected terrorists with the requirement to protect civilians.
The last year of President George W. Bush’s administration saw a tenfold increase in strikes from the previous three years combined. The Obama administration accelerated this trend, conducting three times as many strikes in its first two years as the Bush administration conducted in its entire second term. The accompanying surge in civilian casualties, which amounted to three civilian deaths per strike in 2009, drew criticism from the United Nations and from watchdog groups such as Amnesty International. It was against this backdrop that Obama adopted a set of more stringent requirements for U.S. strikes in undeclared theaters, including Pakistan.
Critics have suggested that the policy achieved little. The legal expert Jameel Jaffer argued in his 2016 book, The Drone Memos, that Obama’s “stricter limitations on drone strikes seems to have had an effect only at the margins.” Such analysis is based on overall civilian casualty figures, however, rather than the rate of change in civilian deaths over time. It also does not look at the mechanisms through which Obama’s near certainty standard may have affected results on the ground. By 2017, moreover, the question of the effectiveness of Obama’s policy appeared moot, since President Donald Trump returned to the more permissive reasonable certainty standard.
U.S. drone strikes have killed an alarming number of civilians in Afghanistan.
Our analysis takes a different approach, focusing on the effect Obama’s near certainty standard had on the rate of reported civilian casualties following U.S. drone strikes as well as the rate at which strikes hit their intended targets. Beginning in 2011, U.S. officials began debating more restrictive targeting guidelines, and Obama appears to have begun ratcheting up requirements for strike approvals in undeclared conflict zones—namely, Pakistan. Unlike U.S. strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq, which continued under the more permissive reasonable certainty standard because they were often in defense of U.S. soldiers, strikes in Pakistan began to be conditioned on near certainty of no collateral damage. Obama’s ultimate goal, senior officials responsible for drafting, implementing, and auditing the reform told us, was to encourage commanders and intelligence officials to conduct more precise strikes, which would also help rehabilitate the United States’ image abroad following the public outcry over civilian deaths.
Almost immediately after the administration began its policy deliberations in 2011, civilian casualties from U.S. strikes in Pakistan markedly decreased. On average, our analysis of strike data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveals that the deliberations and subsequent policy shift resulted in a reduction of 12 civilian casualties per month or two civilian casualties per strike. In doing so, the policy increased the precision of U.S. strikes—the proportion of casualties that were the intended targets of strikes—to 95 percent in Pakistan. In other words, under Obama’s policy, U.S. strikes in Pakistan approached near perfect accuracy.
Had Obama not changed the policy, we estimate that U.S. strikes in Pakistan would have resulted in several hundred more civilian deaths between 2011 and the end of his second term in 2017. The decline in civilian casualties is more than a statistical artifact: it followed a deliberate effort by the Obama administration to impose stricter targeting procedures, including delegating fewer strike decisions to commanders in the field who, according to The New York Times, often misidentified combatants due to cognitive bias. Obama’s policy was explicitly designed to inculcate a culture of “effective and discriminate use of force” to overcome such bias, which can result from battlefield pressures such as anxiety, fear, and the desire to protect friendly forces even if doing so means putting civilians at greater risk.
FALSE DILEMMA
The case of Pakistan shows that a standard of near certainty for U.S. drone strikes can reduce civilian casualties. But such a stringent standard imposes tradeoffs. Moving targeting decisions up the chain of command can result in longer approval timelines for strikes. One policy analyst we interviewed cautioned that Obama’s policy resulted in “missed opportunities” to take out terrorists. But our research shows that instances in which time is truly of the essence are rare. The typical strike benefits from “red teaming,” a practice that involves bringing in an outside group of analysts and commanders to question the merits of a strike based on the full body of intelligence, taking into account any information gaps. The fact that there were no major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil during Obama’s presidency suggests that his higher targeting threshold in Pakistan did not come at an appreciable cost to national security.
A tighter threshold for U.S drone strikes can reduce civilian casualties without emboldening the enemy.
If a higher targeting threshold succeeded in reducing civilian casualties in Pakistan without endangering Americans, there is reason to believe that similar targeting adjustments could yield the same results in other countries where the United States is currently conducting drone strikes. One complicating factor is the presence of significant numbers of U.S. forces on the ground. In declared theaters of operation, strikes are often conducted in support or defense of U.S. soldiers. As a result, critics of the tighter targeting standards caution that these standards could expose U.S. soldiers to greater battlefield risks, since commanders could be restricted in their ability to use drone strikes for close air support. This tradeoff is less pronounced in undeclared theaters of operations, where there are fewer U.S. boots on the ground. Still, the Biden administration will have to strike the right balance between military necessity and protecting civilian lives in its ongoing review of the United States’ drone program.
Regardless of the specific theater of operations, limiting civilian casualties in war should be an end in itself, not just because the United States is bound to do so under international law but because civilian casualties are thought to make it easier for terrorists to recruit followers. Our analysis suggests that reducing civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes doesn’t have to come at the cost of effective counterterrorism. A tighter threshold for U.S drone strikes can reduce civilian casualties without emboldening the enemy.
Foreign Affairs · by Paul Lushenko, Sarah Kreps, and Shyam Raman · January 12, 2022
18. Underwater drones herald sea change in Pacific warfare
Imagine this scenario. Who "turns the keys" on underwater drones? Obviously that must be done remotely.
More significantly, underwater drones can become strategic weapons when loaded with nuclear weapons. Such nuclear-armed underwater drones can bypass enemy missile defenses by traveling underwater, slipping near or into major coastal cities, ports and naval bases for attack purposes.
One such weapon is Russia’s Poseidon drone, which gives Russia a credible second-strike capability in the event of a nuclear attack.
Underwater drones herald sea change in Pacific warfare
US, UK, China and Russia are all developing and deploying underwater drones to gain a subaqueous advantage
The drones that have changed the complexion of war from the sky are being replicated at sea, as great powers develop and deploy unmanned underwater vessels (UUVs) to gain a strategic edge in the Pacific and beyond.
The United States, United Kingdom, China and Russia are all developing and deploying the vessels, indicating the “dronification” of future maritime warfare.
The UK, which is expanding its military presence in the Pacific, is set to operate its first extra-large underwater drone to complement its Astute-class submarines. The Royal Navy’s efforts to design, build, and test such a drone have been designated Project CETUS, and aim to produce a 27-tonne, 12-meter Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) demonstrator.
The contract for Project CETUS is projected to be finalized in financial year 2021-2022, with a projected cost of 21.5 million pounds (US$29.3 million.)
The Royal Navy is also working on the Manta underwater drone, an unmanned version of the existing S201 manned submersible made by MSubs, a British manufacturer.
The Orca can be used for mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, electronic warfare and strike missions without risking the lives of its operators.
China is also known to be using underwater drones, with Indonesia seizing three Chinese drones labeled “Shenyang Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences” near South Sulawesi’s Selayar Island in December 2020.
China’s HSU001 unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) is capable of launching a smaller underwater drone. Image: Getty via AFP
Moreover, China operates the HSU-001 underwater drone, which is roughly analogous to the Project CETUS, Manta, and Orca drones. The HSU-001 was reportedly tested off Fujian or the Taiwan Strait, simulating anti-submarine operations.
The proliferation of underwater drones in the Pacific region is changing the complexion of underwater warfare, as the region’s maritime environment poses unique operational challenges to underwater operations.
The contested South China Sea is a semi-enclosed body of water with numerous unmapped underwater features and shallows, which makes navigation hazardous for both crewed surface and underwater combatants.
At the same time, the South China Sea provides an ideal operating environment for shallow-water conventional submarines, as the area’s underwater features and high shipping traffic enables such vessels to stay undetected for prolonged periods by using environmental factors to mask their signatures.
By extension, the South China Sea is an ideal proving ground for underwater drones, as they can perform underwater tasks that may be too dull, demanding, dangerous or even dirty for humans.
Underwater drones can be used for bathymetric mapping, alongside recording the thermal, magnetic, and acoustic properties of specific underwater passages to find blind spots where submarines can travel undetected safely.
As such, this capability is particularly suited for use in the South China Sea, which is among the most challenging bodies of water for submarine navigation due to its shallow waters, numerous underwater peaks and sandbars.
The recent collision of the USS Connecticut submarine with an unmapped seamount in the South China Sea illustrates the danger. In addition, these drones can also find submarine hiding spots to serve as staging areas for underwater operations, or sanctuaries to avoid enemy anti-submarine warfare operations.
The Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut departs Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington state for sea trials after maintenance in December 2016. Photo: US Navy / Thiep Van Nguyen II / Wikipedia
They can also potentially be used for mine-hunting and minelaying operations. Underwater drones can scout underwater minefields and possibly disarm naval mines. They may reduce, but not eliminate, the need for specialized diver teams to reconnoiter, identify, and demine potential landing beaches for amphibious warfare operations.
The drones can also perform anti-submarine operations by actively searching and tracking enemy submarines, without endangering manned surface vessels or submarines. The 1971 sinking of the Indian frigate INS Kukri by the Pakistani submarine PNS Hangor illustrates the possibility of anti-submarine warships becoming easy prey for enemy submarines.
The use of underwater drones for anti-submarine purposes will thus minimize the need to commit manned warships for such operations.
More significantly, underwater drones can become strategic weapons when loaded with nuclear weapons. Such nuclear-armed underwater drones can bypass enemy missile defenses by traveling underwater, slipping near or into major coastal cities, ports and naval bases for attack purposes.
One such weapon is Russia’s Poseidon drone, which gives Russia a credible second-strike capability in the event of a nuclear attack.
19. Biden mulled reducing support for France’s military operations in Africa. Instead, he doubled down.
Biden mulled reducing support for France’s military operations in Africa. Instead, he doubled down.
When five members of an Islamist militant group piled into a tan Toyota Land Cruiser and drove across a remote stretch of central Mali in mid-October — they weren’t alone.
Above them was a MQ-9 Reaper drone equipped with technology to collect information on the passengers and cross-reference it to a terrorism database.
The drone, operated by the U.S. military, identified one of the passengers as an explosives expert for an al-Qaeda affiliate operating on Mali’s border with Burkina Faso.
The next day, a French military unit engaged the pickup, first trying to pull it over and then launching two airstrikes that destroyed the vehicle, killing everyone in it.
The operation, described to The Washington Post by French military officials and confirmed by U.S. officials, is hailed by Paris as a model for U.S.-French counterterrorism cooperation at a time when Islamist groups are proliferating across Africa’s Sahel region, a vast and dry stretch of land south of the Sahara Desert.
The Biden administration appears to agree, despite criticism from analysts that terrorist attacks and violent incidents have only increased since France began its military campaign in the region eight years ago.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin informed his French counterpart in the fall that the United States would continue to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support to the French mission using Washington’s advanced drone and satellite technology. The United States also said it would assist France with air refueling, medical evacuations and other logistical support.
The Biden administration’s decision followed one of the most rancorous public spats in U.S.-French relations in recent memory. In September, Paris recalled its ambassador from Washington for the first time in history after the United States secretly negotiated a deal to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. The U.S. agreement effectively sank a French contract worth billions to sell diesel-powered submarines to Australia. France’s foreign minister called the maneuver a “stab in the back.”
Scrambling to end the dispute, the White House turned to U.S. intelligence support in the Sahel, then under review by the Pentagon and National Security Council, and decided to reinforce the effort rather than scale it back.
“France has an historic presence in the region,” Cynthia King, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in a statement last week. “The U.S. supports French efforts in the region as our interests addressing significant terrorist threats align.”
The episode demonstrates the Biden administration’s sensitivity to accusations of mishandling relations with a key ally — an attack President Biden frequently leveled at his predecessor Donald Trump, especially regarding NATO. It also underscores how a diplomatic row in one part of the world can influence U.S. policy in another.
“Because we screwed the pooch on the submarine deal, we were looking for a way into France’s good graces,” said Cameron Hudson, an Africa scholar at the Atlantic Council.
“Biden’s decision to recommit short-circuited an interagency process to fundamentally rethink U.S. involvement in the Sahel,” he added. “They were reviewing whether to move away from a securitized strategy to a more development- and government-based strategy.”
A senior U.S. official acknowledged that Washington wants to see reforms in Paris’s approach to the Sahel mission. But the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy matters, said the White House based its decision on the shared goal of violence-reduction and a promise from the French to put a greater focus on governance and development issues.
A debate over how the United States should support France’s efforts in Africa has been going on since Paris launched its military intervention in the Sahel in 2013 at the request of the Malian government. At the time, France sent troops to oust Islamist militants from towns they had seized across northern Mali. The French mission eventually morphed into Operation Barkhane, a 5,000-strong deployment of French troops to Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and other neighboring countries where the militants posed a threat.
Despite the French intervention, radical groups continued to mount attacks against government forces across the region as well as carry out deadly assaults on civilians.
By the time Biden came into office, the outlook in the Sahel looked bleak. Hundreds were dying in a spate of massacres along the border of Niger and Mali.
French public support for the mission, which was widely popular at first, was beginning to slip. And in the summer, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a decision to withdraw more than 2,000 troops by early 2022 and reorient the French presence toward military training and bolstering the democratic institutions of partner countries.
“France doesn’t have the vocation or the will to stay eternally in the Sahel,” said Macron. “We are there because we’re asked to be.”
Supporters of the U.S.-French collaboration acknowledge past setbacks but say the collaboration harnesses France’s knowledge of its former colonies and doesn’t require the United States to send ground troops.
“Cutting off the French is not in the U.S. interest,” said Michael Shurkin, a former CIA analyst and director at 14 North Strategies, a research firm. “France’s strategy in the Sahel is failing because of the disinterest and inability of Malian leaders to do all they need to do. We can fret but have no better ideas than the French, and, frankly, we have very little leverage with local leaders.”
Critics of the French approach say the emphasis on tracking and killing terrorists is radicalizing the local population, creating more militants and more supporters of violent Islamist groups.
“The intervention is objectively a failure,” said Alioune Tine, an independent human rights expert for the United Nations and founder of the AfrikaJom Center think tank. “Far from defeating or weakening the terrorist attacks or wiping them out, we have unfortunately witnessed their reinforcement and their extension. Today, the threat extends to coastal countries, to Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Togo, Ghana and even Senegal.”
Although governments in the Sahel sought France’s military help, some Africans see the French presence as a vestige of French colonial rule and believe international assistance would be better directed at improving government services and investing in schools and hospitals.
“The failure of the armed intervention in the Sahel has had perverse effects on Malian and African opinion, which is hostile to France, and has fostered anti-French sentiment among young people,” Tine said.
What is not in dispute is the value France places on its support from the United States.
Brig. Gen. Cyril Carcy, the defense attache at the French Embassy in Washington, said the assistance the United States provides to France is “paramount.”
He pointed to France’s killing of Islamist militants in the Toyota Land Cruiser in mid-October. The key target in the strike was Nasser al-Tergui, a senior member of Katiba Serma, an al-Qaeda affiliate responsible for numerous attacks on government troops, civilians and U.N. workers in the Sahel. Before the strike, French forces provided U.S. counterparts with intelligence on Tergui’s pattern of life and area of operation.
Using that information, U.S. drones were able to locate Tergui, and officials were then able to “cross-check” the images and phone data they collected, Carcy said. French officials subsequently confirmed the identity of Tergui and his fellow passengers in the pickup using human sources.
U.S. military personnel then provided targeting guidance to the French in their air assault on the vehicle.
“When we have the U.S. drone, it is definitely much easier,” Carcy said.
20. The West Is Right to Deny Russia a ‘Sphere of Influence’
The West Is Right to Deny Russia a ‘Sphere of Influence’
NATO, the U.S. and the EU can’t just hand Eastern Europe to Vladimir Putin as his fief. It’s not theirs to give.
January 13, 2022, 1:00 AM EST
We’ve been here countless times in history. Once again, diplomats representing great and antagonistic powers are meeting to decide the fate of nations not even sitting at the table. Some are hoping to prevent war. Others are betting that war, or the threat of it, is a fair price to secure their country’s “sphere of influence.”
Such a sphere — a geopolitical zone of control to the exclusion of rivals — is what Russian President Vladimir Putin yet again demanded in two draft treaties he published last month: One was addressed to the U.S., the other to NATO. Together these amount to blackmailing the entire “West” and mocking whatever remains of the rules-based international order. Grant me my fief, he’s saying, or I attack.
Putin wants commitments that NATO will never, ever, admit Ukraine or any other country in the region as a member, no matter what the nation in question prefers. And he demands that the alliance in effect demilitarize countries already in NATO that used to belong to the Soviet Union, such as Estonia or Latvia, and others. Forgive the play on a famous quote, but Putin is looking at Eastern Europe and wants the West out, the Russians in, and the Ukrainians down.
If that mentality sounds understandable to some pundits, it’s because for most of history it was the default. As Thucydides described, competing spheres of influence drove Athens and Sparta into their 27-year clash. Later rivalries started the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome (initially over the island of Sicily), and many other conflicts down the ages.
Viewed from Moscow or Beijing, the countries that today think of themselves as the West are therefore being hypocritical, because they were the ones to elevate this approach to world politics into an art form.
Early U.S. foreign policy was based on the Monroe Doctrine, which told the European powers to stay out of the “new world” because that was America’s hemisphere. The European powers in turn merrily carved up all of Africa and much of Asia. The first treaties explicitly referring to “spheres of influence” were signed between the U.K. and Germany when they divvied up the Gulf of Guinea in the 1880s.
In the 20th century, the habit turned diabolical. In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, carved up Eastern Europe between them. Their victims: Finland, Estonia and Latvia (assigned to Joseph Stalin’s sphere), Lithuania (initially in Adolf Hitler’s), Poland (shared between the two), and so forth. Many of these nations are once again growing anxious.
During the Cold War, the entire globe was in effect divided into only two spheres of influence. But simultaneously, a project was born that eventually became the European Union. This new confederation, built on the ruins of the old Europe, defined itself as a rebuke to the odious power politics of yore. Like idealists throughout the ages, these Europeans dreamed of an order in which the large (like Germany or France) cannot dominate the small (like Luxembourg or Malta), and where authority derives from rules rather than brute force.
After the Cold War ended, the Americans, too, espoused that aspiration. “Power is defined not by spheres of influence . . . or the strong imposing their will on the weak,” said former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Even post-Soviet, pre-Putin Moscow appeared to subscribe to the ideal. NATO and Russia seek “a common space of security and stability, without dividing lines or spheres of influence limiting the sovereignty of any state,” reads a joint declaration of the two from 1997.
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In retrospect, those words have the ring of a more innocent era, or of naivete. Scholars of international relations today think that Americans, Europeans and others at best imagined that spheres-of-influence thinking could be overcome. In reality, for a brief moment in history, there was only one sphere, and it was American. Any order based on rules, goes the thinking, needs policing by a so-called hegemon. Take away this hegemony — a Pax Romana, Pax Britannica or Pax Americana — and international relations will turn atavistic.
This logic offers one explanation for the recent return of spheres-of-influence diplomacy and saber-rattling. The relative might of America is declining, just as China is rising in Asia and Russia, Turkey and other powers are growing irredentist in their neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the EU is discovering that, unbacked by American hegemony, its lofty ideals confer no hard power to speak of.
The coming weeks, months and years will tell whether the world is headed into another era of realpolitik and might-makes-right — whether we are destined to return to the amoral and cynical approach to international relations that reduces small countries to pawns on the chessboards of the great powers.
Is the South China Sea worth dying for if China tries to seize it? What about Ukraine, Moldova, or Estonia, if Putin wants to dominate them? The great powers of the West may yet decide to let them go. But they should be under no illusion what kind of world they’d be giving up — and what sort they’d get instead.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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21. Science Just Discovered Your Brain Really Hates PowerPoint
Excerpts:
In other words, when your brain hears words and sees different words, either your brain simply short-circuits (in which case you zone out) or your brain toggles between the two set of words, garbling both. This is why virtually all PowerPoint presentations are boring and forgettable.
Your brain can, however, multitask when multitasking puts demands on different parts of your brain. That's why you can drive a car safely while listening to a podcast .
Science Just Discovered Your Brain Really Hates PowerPoint
- PowerPoint-style presentations force you to multitask in ways that your brain can't really handle.
"Your [brain's] language regions are processing the sounds, the words, the meaning of the sentences. Imagine a circuit where you've got multiple inputs and multiple outputs, but they share the same wires."
In other words, when your brain hears words and sees different words, either your brain simply short-circuits (in which case you zone out) or your brain toggles between the two set of words, garbling both. This is why virtually all PowerPoint presentations are boring and forgettable.
Your brain can, however, multitask when multitasking puts demands on different parts of your brain. That's why you can drive a car safely while listening to a podcast .
A large number of high successful entrepreneurs, such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, have intuitively concluded what science has since suggested and are reputedly no longer unwilling to sit through PowerPoints.
- If you need to discuss and decide, use a briefing document. This is a short (3 page maximum) document that everyone in the meeting reads at the beginning of the meeting. Important: don't assign the document as pre-meeting homework because almost nobody will read it.
- If you're teaching and training, create interactive experiences. This means workbooks, group exercises, and especially note taking--always with a pencil or pen and never with a computer. Note-taking on paper vastly increases retention because it draws on multiple parts of your brain--the PowerPoint effect in reverse.
- If you want to entertain or inspire, give a speech.With a group too large to participate in interactive exercises, think TED Talk rather than college lecture. If there's an image that's crucial to understanding your speech, display it, but never, ever display bullet lists. Think: have you ever seen a bullet list on a TED Talk?
22. China tries to tone down war talk as military tells Taiwan to "surrender"
China tries to tone down war talk as military tells Taiwan to "surrender"
Newsweek · by John Feng · January 13, 2022
A Chinese official downplayed more nationalistic war talk from the country's military on Wednesday after a viral video—seen to be directed at Taiwan—told "enemy" forces to put down their weapons and surrender to Beijing.
Propaganda footage shared by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) 81st Group Army, based in north China, featured a large-scale training exercise dated January 4. A female narrator promised preferential treatment to any prisoners of war.
"Surrender now! Hand in your weapons and you won't be killed. We treat prisoners well!" the commentary said. "Your defenses have collapsed; resistance is futile."
The viral video—carried by local media including China's official press agency Xinhua on January 5—was recorded in Mandarin Chinese, but the phrases were also repeated in Hakka and Minnan, two Chinese dialects spoken by a combined 15 million people—or some 65 percent—of Taiwan's population.
Pointed Message to Taiwan
Social media users on Weibo, China's main social media service, viewed the inclusion of the popular dialects as a pointed message to the island, a self-governing democracy that Beijing has claimed for more than seven decades, and which it has vowed to take by force if necessary. In Taiwan, news outlets interpreted the video as the Chinese military seeing Taiwanese people as the enemy.
At a twice-a-month press conference in Beijing, China's Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) sought to tone down the bellicose rhetoric behind the video. Its spokesperson, Zhu Fenglian, described the PLA as "a guardian of the Chinese nation's interests" across the Taiwan Strait.
"PLA training exercises target an extremely small minority of Taiwan independence separatists, their separatist activities and interference by foreign forces," said Zhu. "They are absolutely not aimed at the vast majority of compatriots in Taiwan."
"We would never treat compatriots in Taiwan as the 'enemy,'" she said.
Regular public surveys in Taiwan have found little interest in being ruled from Beijing under its proposed "one country, two systems" model—the same currently used to govern Hong Kong. Chinese officials in general and those at the TAO in particular have dismissed the Taiwanese public's preference as a view held only by a select few in the government, despite its election on a popular mandate.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping's insistence that Taiwan will be "unified" with the mainland, and that it is also the desire of the general public on the island, has led to the emergence of extreme domestic nationalism among certain sectors in China, resulting in loud calls—especially online—for a military solution in the near future.
Grassroots Nationalism
The topic of ultranationalism in China was one referenced by Chinese professor Yan Xuetong during a political science seminar on January 8. Yan, 69, is dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Discussing political attitudes to international relations among Chinese students born after 2000, Yan said they display "a strong sense of superiority and self-confidence" while holding "condescending" views of other countries. His younger students believe China can easily achieve its foreign policy goals, a phenomenon he described as "wishful thinking."
7 Out of 10 in Taiwan Would Fight China To Stop Forced Unification—Poll
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They tend to divide the world into two groups—China and everyone else. Universal values such as peace, morality, fairness and justice, he said, are seen as uniquely Chinese. China is righteous and innocent; all others, particularly the West, are "evil" and have a natural hatred of China.
Yan found China's youths to be "deeply influenced by concepts online," treating popular ideas such as economic determinism, conspiracy theories and the weaponization of debt as common knowledge. Among his suggestions for teaching international relations to younger students was the introduction of more current events to help them "understand current objective truths and avoid blind self-confidence."
His comments—viewed by some online as controversial and possibly an affront to Xi's foreign policy approach—were reported by public WeChat social media account New Youth in International Relations on Wednesday
China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers assemble during military training at the Pamir Mountains in Kashgar, Xinjiang, China, on January 4, 2021. The PLA's bellicose rhetoric against self-ruled Taiwan led Beijing to downplay the military's fighting talk during a press conference on January 12, 2022. STR/AFP via Getty Images
Newsweek · by John Feng · January 13, 2022
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
