|
Quotes of the Day:
"In the middle of a difficulty lies opportunity."
- Albert Einstein
"The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete."
- Lao Tzu
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
- Samuel Adams, speech to Second Continental Congress on August 1, 1776.
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 12, 2023
2. US spies lag rivals in seizing on data hiding in plain sight
3. Pentagon Says Policy on Taiwan Strait Transits Is Unchanged Despite 2022 Decline
4. The World Needs More Nuclear Power
5. Ukraine's Battlefields Are Freezing. Here's What That Means for the War.
6. Russia says its forces capture Soledar in east Ukraine
7. China COVID peak to last 2-3 months, hit rural areas next - expert
8. The PLA’s People Problem
9. More can be done to ban US government use of Chinese drones
10. Ukraine live briefing: Russia’s Defense Ministry claims control of Soledar; Civilians trapped in ‘bloodbath’
11. Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread in U.S.
12. What is the Wagner Group, the mercenary organization working for Russia in Ukraine?
13. Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Meeting With Japanese Minister of Defense Hamada Yasukazu at the Pentagon
14. Crenshaw, Waltz introduce joint resolution to give Biden military authority to combat cartels
15. The propaganda of “propaganda”
16. Taiwan must not suffer the same fate as Ukraine
17. Moscow Shakes Up Command of Its Forces in Ukraine (Again)
18. Army special operators face drug investigation at Fort Bragg
19. House China committee’s mission: Military imbalance is foremost among many challenges
20. No Escape: Camp Survivor Describes Life Under House Arrest in Xinjiang
21. Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 12, 2023
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-12-2023
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces have likely captured Soledar on January 11, but this small-scale victory is unlikely to presage an imminent encirclement of Bakhmut.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin likely seeks scapegoats for the Russian defense industry base’s struggle to address equipment and technological challenges, and retains unrealistic expectations of Russian capacity to rapidly replace losses.
- Ukrainian intelligence confirmed that senior Russian military leadership is preparing for significant military reforms in the coming year, though ISW continues to assess Russia will struggle to quickly—if at all—implement planned reforms.
- Russian and Ukrainian forces reportedly continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and west of Donetsk City.
- Russian forces continued defensive operations on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River.
- Russian officials and occupation authorities may be preparing for the mass deportation of Ukrainian citizens from occupied territories to the Russian Federation.
- Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrei Kartapolov announced that Russian military recruitment offices may increase the age of eligibility for conscription as early as this spring’s conscription cycle.
- Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Ground Forces, Oleg Salyukov (who was appointed as one of Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov’s three “deputies” as theater commander in Ukraine), arrived in Belarus to take control of combat coordination exercises for the joint Russian-Belarusian Regional Grouping of Forces (RGV).
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 12, 2023
understandingwar.org
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 12, 2023
Riley Bailey, Madison Williams, Layne Philipson, Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, Karolina Hird, and Mason Clark
January 12, 7pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian forces’ likely capture of Soledar on January 11 is not an operationally significant development and is unlikely to presage an imminent Russian encirclement of Bakhmut. Geolocated footage posted on January 11 and 12 indicates that Russian forces likely control most if not all of Soledar, and have likely pushed Ukrainian forces out of the western outskirts of the settlement.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks against Sil in Donetsk Oblast—a settlement over a kilometer northwest of Soledar and beyond previous Ukrainian positions.[2] The Ukrainian General Staff and other senior military sources largely did not report that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults against Soledar on January 12 as they have previously.[3] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces are still clearing Soledar of remaining Ukrainian forces as of January 12.[4] Russian milbloggers posted footage on January 12 of Wagner Group fighters freely walking in Soledar and claimed that they visited the settlement alongside Russian forces.[5] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has not announced that Russian forces have captured Soledar, but Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov congratulated Russian forces for successful offensive operations in the settlement.[6] All available evidence indicates Ukrainian forces no longer maintain an organized defense in Soledar. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s January 12 statement that Ukrainian forces maintain positions in Soledar may be referring to defensive positions near but not in Soledar.[7]
Russian information operations have overexaggerated the importance of Soledar, which is at best a Russian Pyrrhic tactical victory. ISW continues to assess that the capture of Soledar—a settlement smaller than 5.5 square miles—will not enable Russian forces to exert control over critical Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) into Bakhmut nor better position Russian forces to encircle the city in the short term.[8] Russian forces likely captured Soledar after committing significant resources to a highly attritional tactical victory which will accelerate degraded Russian forces’ likely culmination near Bakhmut.[9] Russian forces may decide to maintain a consistently high pace of assaults in the Bakhmut area, but Russian forces’ degraded combat power and cumulative exhaustion will prevent these assaults from producing operationally significant results.[10]
Russian President Vladimir Putin likely seeks scapegoats for the Russian defense industrial base’s struggle to address equipment and technological shortages. Putin publicly criticized Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov for aviation industry enterprises not receiving state orders during a cabinet of ministers meeting on January 11.[11] Putin stated that some enterprises have yet to receive state orders for 2023 and are not hiring more staff or preparing to increase output for potential orders in the future. Putin also interrupted Manturov’s explanation that the ministry had already drafted orders for civil and military industries, leading Manturov to admit that Russia had not issued a portion of documents for aircraft manufactures that would approve state funding for their projects. Putin argued that the enterprise directors informed him that they had not received any state orders amidst current “conditions” in Russia and urged Manturov to not “play a fool.” Manturov attempted to soften the demand by stating that the ministry will “try to do everything possible,” to which Putin responded that he should not try his best but instead complete the task within a month. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov later downplayed the altercation as “a normal workflow.”
This incident is likely part of an ongoing Kremlin information campaign to elevate Putin’s image as an involved wartime leader. The Kremlin could have cut out the disagreement from its official transcript (as it often does for most of Putin’s meetings, which are heavily edited and stage managed), but chose to publicize Putin’s harsh response, possibly to identify other officials within the Kremlin as the culprits for Russian defense industrial base’s challenges and possibly to threaten other officials. ISW previously reported that Putin began making more public appearances—including visiting defense industrial enterprises—in December and January, despite previously limiting his engagements throughout the span of the war in Ukraine.[12] Putin is also likely attempting to appease Russian milblogger critiques regarding the lack of advanced military equipment and Russia’s inability to task its defense industrial base to accommodate the war effort. ISW had also previously reported that some private armament manufacturers have criticized the Kremlin for failing to arrange any state contracts with their firms on their Telegram channels, feeding in their critiques into the milblogger discourse.[13]
Manturov’s attempts to soften Putin’s timeline indicate his uncertainty that the Kremlin has the capacity to administer these contracts in a short time period. Manturov tried to explain to Putin that the ministry will authorize additional contracts “based on the opportunities that are formed by the budget, including the preferential program of the National Wealth Fund,” highlighting the differences between the Russian financial reality and Putin’s unrealistic objectives for a short-term revitalization of the Russian defense industrial sector.
Ukrainian intelligence confirmed that senior Russian military leadership is preparing for significant military reforms in the coming year, though ISW continues to assess Russia will struggle to quickly—if at all—implement planned reforms. Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Ukrainian General Staff, Brigadier General Oleksiy Hromov, stated on January 12 that Russian military leadership plans to increase military personnel to 1.5 million (from roughly 1.35 million as of September 2022) and form at least 20 new military divisions in 2023, which Hromov noted indicates “the Kremlin's intentions to engage in a long-term confrontation and preparations for conducting large-scale hostilities.”[14] Hromov stated that Russia’s significant personnel, weapons, and equipment losses; the effects of international sanctions; and structural weaknesses in the Russian military apparatus have reduced Russia’s force generation capabilities and ultimately raise doubts about whether Russian forces can implement these reforms within undisclosed deadlines.[15] Hromov’s statements come the day after the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced a major restructuring of the senior command structure for Russian operations in Ukraine and suggest that the Russian military apparatus writ large is engaged in a concerted campaign to reform and restructure multiple tactical, operational, and strategic aspects.[16] ISW has also previously reported that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu proposed the expansion of the size of the Russian military and the formation of 17 new maneuver divisions at a Russian MoD Collegium in Moscow on December 21, 2022—it is unclear what additional 3 divisions Hromov is referring to.[17] ISW assessed that the Russian MoD has been steadily reversing the 2008 Serdyukov reforms (which sought to streamline the Russian ground forces and move to a brigade-based structure) by restoring maneuver divisions across Russian military districts since 2013, but that the Kremlin is unlikely to implement these reforms on a timeline that is relevant for Russia’s war on Ukraine.[18] Restructuring of senior command structures, coupled with efforts to expand the military base in 2023, suggest that Russia is setting conditions for a long-term, concerted effort in Ukraine. The Russian MoD may also hold highly unrealistic expectations of its own ability to quickly restructure its ground forces.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces have likely captured Soledar on January 11, but this small-scale victory is unlikely to presage an imminent encirclement of Bakhmut.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin likely seeks scapegoats for the Russian defense industry base’s struggle to address equipment and technological challenges, and retains unrealistic expectations of Russian capacity to rapidly replace losses.
- Ukrainian intelligence confirmed that senior Russian military leadership is preparing for significant military reforms in the coming year, though ISW continues to assess Russia will struggle to quickly—if at all—implement planned reforms.
- Russian and Ukrainian forces reportedly continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and west of Donetsk City.
- Russian forces continued defensive operations on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River.
- Russian officials and occupation authorities may be preparing for the mass deportation of Ukrainian citizens from occupied territories to the Russian Federation.
- Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrei Kartapolov announced that Russian military recruitment offices may increase the age of eligibility for conscription as early as this spring’s conscription cycle.
- Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Ground Forces, Oleg Salyukov (who was appointed as one of Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov’s three “deputies” as theater commander in Ukraine), arrived in Belarus to take control of combat coordination exercises for the joint Russian-Belarusian Regional Grouping of Forces (RGV).
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
- Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)
Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)
Russian and Ukrainian forces reportedly continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line on January 12. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault near Stelmakhivka (16km west of Svatove).[19] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces destroyed Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups within 44km northwest of Svatove near Kyslivka, Vilshana, Tabaivka, Krokhmalne, and Pershotravneve in Kharkiv Oblast.[20] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault near Kreminna, which may indicate that Ukrainian forces have made further advances towards the settlement.[21] The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported that heavy fighting continued on the approaches to Kreminna over the last two days and that Russian forces have transferred elements of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division of the Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) to the vulnerable Kreminna sector of the front line.[22] The UK MoD suggested that Russian commanders are attempting to deploy VDV units in their doctrinal role as an elite rapid reaction force, instead of the past Russian practice in Kherson Oblast of deploying these formations as long-term, ground-holding forces.[23] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated that Ukrainian forces improved their tactical positions near Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna) and are preventing Russian forces from attacking the settlement.[24]
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
See topline text for information regarding Russian offensive operations in Soledar.
Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on January 12. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bakhmut itself; within 19km northeast of Bakhmut near Rozdolivka, Sil, Krasna Hora, Paraskoviivka, and Pidhorodne; and within 22km southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and Mayorsk.[25] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are storming Ukrainian positions near Blahodatne (11km northeast of Bakhmut) and that Wagner Group elements are attempting to advance in the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.[26] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces completely captured Opytne (4km south of Bakhmut), although ISW cannot independently verify that Russian forces have done so.[27] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces are conducting assaults on Bakhmut from the direction of Opytne and circulated footage purporting to show Russian forces engaging in small arms fire with Ukrainian forces in southern parts of the city.[28]
Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on January 12. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Pervomaiske (12km southwest of Avdiivka) and near Krasnohorivka (23km southwest of Avdiivka).[29] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces attempted to attack near Vodyane (8km southwest of Avdiivka) from Opytne (4km southwest of Avdiivka) and conducted an assault in the direction of Nevelske (15km southwest of Avdiivka).[30] Another Russian milblogger posted footage on January 11 purporting to show Russian forces on the western outskirts of Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka) and claimed that he was able to walk around the western outskirts as Russian forces now completely control the settlement.[31] ISW cannot independently verify that Russian forces have completely captured Marinka. Geolocated footage posted on January 11 shows that Russian forces hold positions further west of Novoselivka Druha (10km northeast of Avdiivka).[32] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued routine indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[33]
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian forces continued defensive operations on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River on January 12. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 12 that Russian forces constructed a network of trenches and dugouts in Radensk, Kherson Oblast (25km southeast of Kherson City along the E97 Kherson City-Kalanchak highway), using shipping containers that they had previously used at hospitals in the surrounding areas.[34] Russian sources claimed on January 12 that Russian forces still control part of Velyki Potemkin Island, southwest of Kherson City in the Dnipro River delta, although ISW cannot independently verify these claims.[35] Russian forces continued routine strikes on the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast on January 12.[36]
Russian forces are continuing efforts to establish further control over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) as of January 12. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian forces are bringing engineers from Russia to the ZNPP as existing ZNPP workers continue to refuse to sign a contract with Rosatom.[37]
Russian forces continued routine artillery and MLRS strikes west of Hulyaipole in Zaporizhia Oblast and in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on January 12.[38] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Zaporizhzhia City and Marhanets, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[39]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian officials continue to institute measures suggesting they are preparing for a second wave of mobilization. A Russian Telegram channel, citing unspecified internal sources, claimed on January 11 that preparation for a second wave of mobilization is well underway in the upper echelons of the Russian state.[40] The report stated that officials are already visiting residences in Crimea and handing out mobilization summons, and that the local military registration and enlistment office in Saratov Oblast is preparing an order for a printing house to issue a large batch of summonses.[41] Another Russian source reported that employment advertisements for positions in military enlistment and registration offices across Russia have been popping up en masse since December 2022.[42]
Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrei Kartapolov announced on January 11 that Russian military recruitment offices may implement Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s December 21 suggestion to increase the age of eligibility for conscription as early as this spring’s conscription cycle.[43] Kartapolov stated that the full transition to the new system will take place in three years and raise the minimum age of conscription from 18 to 21 years old and the maximum from 27 to 30 years.[44] Karatapolov noted that the full transition to this system would require “a whole range of amendments to the existing legislation,” particularly on the law on military duties and military service.[45] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on January 12 that Russian President Vladimir Putin conceptually supported the idea of raising the conscription age but noted that the concept would first have to be presented to the Russian MoD.[46] ISW previously reported that Putin signed a decree on December 30, 2022 that suspended the previous age limits for mobilization in occupied territories until 2026.[47] The apparent discrepancy between mobilization policies for Russia and occupied territories of Ukraine suggests that Russian military leadership views occupied areas as a colonial resource from which to limitlessly exploit force generation capacity.
The Russian government may exempt IT workers that have fled Russia from conscription in an effort to lure them back into the country. Russian media sources reported on January 11 that the Russian Ministry of Digital Development began holding meetings with representatives from the Russian IT sector on how to incentivize the return of the Russian IT specialists who fled the country earlier in 2022 due to the war in Ukraine.[48] Representatives from the Ministry of Digital Development reportedly stated that these meetings have the purpose of “developing additional measures to support the development of IT companies operating in Russia" and that the Ministry of Digital Development is working to offer a guaranteed protection against conscription into Russian forces for Russian IT specialists.[49]
Russian soldiers continue to complain about poor living conditions and mistreatment on the front. A video published on January 11 shows Russian troops from the 10th company of the 3rd battalion of the 392nd Motorized Rifle Regiment appealing to military leadership concerning their unlivable conditions and “lawlessness” at the front.[50] The video shows troops trying to break through the ice in frozen trenches, admitting to stealing funds to supply themselves with equipment, and complaining that they have been “living like this for 11 months.”[51]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian officials and occupation authorities may be preparing for the mass deportation of Ukrainian citizens from occupied territories to the Russian Federation. Bloomberg reported on January 6 that Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin issued a government order in mid-December on “revenue mobilization” that allocated 175 billion rubles ($2.6 billion) in extra spending for the potential resettlement of 100,000 residents from Kherson Oblast to the Russian Federation. [52] Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk responded to the Russian government’s order on January 12 and stated that Russian officials and occupation authorities may be planning to deport more than 100,000 Kherson Oblast residents to Russia under fears that Russian forces may lose further territory in Kherson Oblast.[53] Vereshchuk also stated on January 11 that Russian officials have forcibly resettled an unspecified number of Ukrainian citizens to 57 regions in Russia, including those in the Far East and Siberia.[54] ISW continues to assess that the forced deportation of Ukrainian citizens to the Russian Federation likely amounts to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign, in addition to apparent violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[55]
Russian forces and occupation authorities are continuing efforts to consolidate economic control in occupied territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian occupation authorities published an inventory of residents’ immovable and movable property and classified the inventory as nationalization in an unspecified settlement in the occupied Kakhovka district of Kherson Oblast.[56] Kherson Oblast Administration Advisor Serhiy Khlan stated on January 12 that Russian occupation authorities are failing to remove the hryvnia from circulation in occupied territories because Ukrainians continue to circulate hryvnias through local businesses.[57] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated on January 12 that Russian occupation authorities are checking the phones of residents in occupied territories and demanding that Ukrainians delete all Ukrainian applications from their phones, particularly targeting applications for Ukrainian banks.[58] The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated on January 12 that Russian occupation authorities are citing decrees on transitioning occupied territories to the ruble zone as cause for searching the phones of residents in occupied territories.[59]
Russian forces and occupation authorities continue to intensify law enforcement measures to identify pro-Ukrainian civilians and partisans in occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on January 12 that Russian forces are actively searching citizens, conducting raids, and checking phones at checkpoints as Russian occupation authorities have strengthened the police-administrative regime in occupied territories.[60]
Russian forces continue to face logistical issues in treating wounded Russian servicemen in occupied territories. Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated on January 12 that Russian forces are running out of space to house and treat wounded Russian servicemen in Luhansk Oblast and emphasized that Russian forces are importing doctors from Russia.[61]
Russian occupation authorities are continuing to target Ukrainian children in an effort to consolidate social control in occupied territories. Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushenko stated on January 12 that Russian occupation authorities in Mariupol are prioritizing lessons in Russian history and the Russian language as they continue to proliferate Russian propaganda in Mariupol schools.[62]
ISW will continue to report daily observed indicators consistent with the current assessed most dangerous course of action (MDCOA): a renewed invasion of northern Ukraine possibly aimed at Kyiv.
ISW’s December 15 MDCOA warning forecast about a potential Russian offensive against northern Ukraine in winter 2023 remains a worst-case scenario within the forecast cone. ISW currently assesses the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine from Belarus as low, but possible, and the risk of Belarusian direct involvement as very low. This new section in the daily update is not in itself a forecast or assessment. It lays out the daily observed indicators we are using to refine our assessments and forecasts, which we expect to update regularly. Our assessment that the MDCOA remains unlikely has not changed. We will update this header if the assessment changes.
Observed indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported on January 12 that Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Ground Forces, Oleg Salyukov (who was appointed as one of Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov’s three “deputies” as theater commander in Ukraine on January 11), arrived in Belarus to take control of combat coordination exercises for the joint Russian-Belarusian Regional Grouping of Forces (RGV).[63] The MoD claimed that Russian forces will continue intensive combat training at Belarusian training grounds but did not specify the exercises’ parameters.[64] ISW will expand its assessment of Salyukov’s arrival to Belarus in a January 15 special edition update.
Observed ambiguous indicators for MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Ukrainian General Staff, Brigadier General Oleksiy Hromov, stated on January 12 that Russian forces will break its established pattern for annual strategic command staff exercises and will conduct Zapad (West) 2023 exercises with Belarusian forces instead of the previously planned Center 2023 exercises.[65] The last Zapad exercises—which historically occurred once every four years—were in 2021.[66] Hromov stated that Russian and Belarusian forces additionally still plan to conduct Union Shield-2023 exercises and that Russia will continue deploying forces to Belarus for Zapad 2023 and Union Shield 2023.[67]
- Hromov stated on January 12 that Belarusian authorities extended restrictions on civilian aircraft in Brest and Gomel Oblasts until April 1, 2023.[68] Hromov stated Russian forces are organizing an aviation group in Belarus under the guise of conducting joint tactical flight exercises from January 16 to February 1 and deployed at least 10 Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters to the Machulishchi airfield in Minsk Oblast in the past week.[69]
- Belarusian units continue conducting exercises. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense reported that elements of the Belarusian 19th Separate Guards Mechanized Brigade conducted exercises on January 12.[70] The Belarusian Ministry of Defense reported that elements of the 11th Separate Guards Mechanized Brigade conducted exercises as part of the RGV on January 12.[71]
- Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Kingdom Vadym Prystaiko stated on January 11 that Ukrainian forces deployed formations to northern Ukraine because an “attack from Belarus is possible.”[72] Prystaiko stated that a Belarusian invasion of Ukraine would lead to the collapse of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s government and that Russian forces are deployed to Belarus in a likely effort to fix Ukrainian forces to the northern border.[73]
Observed counter-indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- Ukrainian Joint Forces Commander Lieutenant-General Serhiy Nayev stated on January 12 that the situation in Belarus is not a direct threat to Ukraine and that Ukrainian officials have not observed changes in the quantity or quality of Belarusian military units deployed along the border with Ukraine.[74]
- Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Ukrainian General Staff, Brigadier General Oleksiy Hromov, stated on January 12 that there are currently no signs of Russian forces forming a strike group in Belarus.[75]
- The Ukrainian General Staff reiterated that it has not observed Russian forces in Belarus forming a strike group as of January 12.[76]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
[4] https://t.me/miroshnik_r/10171; https://t.me/sashakots/38011 ; https:... ***GRAPHIC*** https://t.me/vysokygovorit/10486 ; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/16786099 ;
[5]
[6] https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/16785405
[7] https://www.president.gov dot ua/en/news/obovyazkovo-nastane-den-koli-ukrayinskij-prapor-bude-narivni-80353
[11] https://www.vedomosti dot ru/politics/articles/2023/01/12/958741-putin-raskritikoval-manturova; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70338
[37] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/12/okupanty-vidzhymayut-kvartyry-v-energodari-shhob-rozmistyty-tam-rosiyan/
[38] https://t.me/mykolaivskaODA/4017; https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/01/12/rashysty-zavdayut-udariv-po-ochakivskij-gromadi-z-kinburnskoyi-kosy/; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0xxUkTneZiz3r8Way81y... https://t.me/zoda_gov_ua/15984
[42] https://t.me/mobilizationnews/7032; https://vkto dot gov70.ru/dolzhnosti.htm; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-jan-10-11
[43] https://www.pnp dot ru/social/povyshat-prizyvnoy-vozrast-khotyat-nachat-uzhe-v-etom-godu.html
[44] https://www.pnp dot ru/social/povyshat-prizyvnoy-vozrast-khotyat-nachat-uzhe-v-etom-godu.html
[45] https://www.pnp dot ru/social/povyshat-prizyvnoy-vozrast-khotyat-nachat-uzhe-v-etom-godu.html ; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/01/11/glava-komiteta-gosdumy-po-oborone-ob-yavil-o-planah-zabirat-v-armiyu-lyudey-do-30-let-uzhe-vesenniy-prizyv-2023-goda
[46] https://tass dot ru/politika/16785399
[48] https://www.kommersant dot ru/doc/5759974; https://www.banki dot ru/news/lenta/?id=10978427&source=smm_truelentach-lenta_news_&utm_source=truelentach&utm_medium=cpa&utm_campaign=smm_truelentach-lenta_news_; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-jan-10-11
[49] https://www.kommersant dot ru/doc/5759974; https://www.banki dot ru/news/lenta/?id=10978427&source=smm_truelentach-lenta_news_&utm_source=truelentach&utm_medium=cpa&utm_campaign=smm_truelentach-lenta_news_; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-jan-10-11
[53] https://minre.gov dot ua/news/vidpovidatymut-vsi-vid-vysokoposadovciv-do-vodiyiv
[54] https://suspilne dot media/357128-rf-deportuvala-ukrainciv-do-57-regioniv-veresuk/
[58] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/7942; https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/11/rosiyany-na-tot-vymagayut-vydalyaty-dodatky-ukrayinskyh-bankiv/
[59] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/11/rosiyany-na-tot-vymagayut-vydalyaty-dodatky-ukrayinskyh-bankiv/
[60] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/01/11/rosiyany-na-tot-vymagayut-vydalyaty-dodatky-ukrayinskyh-bankiv/
[65] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-zrD8HxE7k&ab_channel=%D0%92%D1%96%D0%B... https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/01/12/zamist-navchannya-czentr-2023-vorog-planuye-provesty-manevry-zbrojnyh-syl-rf-ta-bilorusi-zapad-2023/
[67] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-zrD8HxE7k&ab_channel=%D0%92%D1%96%D0%B... https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/01/12/zamist-navchannya-czentr-2023-vorog-planuye-provesty-manevry-zbrojnyh-syl-rf-ta-bilorusi-zapad-2023/
https://t.me/modmilby/21647
[75] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-zrD8HxE7k&ab_channel=%D0%92%D1%96%D0%B... https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/01/12/zamist-navchannya-czentr-2023-vorog-planuye-provesty-manevry-zbrojnyh-syl-rf-ta-bilorusi-zapad-2023/
understandingwar.org
2. US spies lag rivals in seizing on data hiding in plain sight
Excerpts:
That echoes what many current and former intelligence officials are increasingly warning: The $90 billion U.S. spy apparatus is falling behind because it has not embraced collecting open-source intelligence as adversaries including China ramp up their efforts.
This doesn’t diminish the importance of traditional intelligence. Spy agencies have unique powers to penetrate global communications and cultivate agents. They scored a high-profile success when the Biden administration publicized ultimately correct intelligence findings that Russian President Vladimir Putin intended to invade Ukraine.
...
Carmen Medina, a retired CIA deputy director of intelligence, now studies how spy agencies can incorporate outside ideas and encourage employees to be more creative and intuitive.
She suggests a pilot program in which a cell of open-source analysts would compete for a number of years against the regular output of people with top-secret clearances.
Medina and others who have worked in top positions and briefed White House officials think that on most days, an open-source group would be competitive and might even produce better analysis using information that’s broadly available.
“You can’t make sense of the world today by just packaging tidbits,” she said. “I’ve come to believe that almost all of the time, the open source way of thinking about it is correct.”
US spies lag rivals in seizing on data hiding in plain sight
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · January 12, 2023
WASHINGTON (AP) — As alarms began to go off globally about a novel coronavirus spreading in China, officials in Washington turned to the intelligence agencies for insights about the threat the virus posed to America.
But the most useful early warnings came not from spies or intercepts, according to a recent congressional review of classified reports from December 2019 and January 2020. Officials were instead relying on public reporting, diplomatic cables and analysis from medical experts — some examples of so-called open source intelligence, or OSINT.
Predicting the next pandemic or the next government to fall will require better use of open source material, the review found.
“There is little indication that the Intelligence Community’s exquisite collection capabilities were generating information that was valuable to policymakers,” wrote the authors of the review, conducted by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.
ADVERTISEMENT
That echoes what many current and former intelligence officials are increasingly warning: The $90 billion U.S. spy apparatus is falling behind because it has not embraced collecting open-source intelligence as adversaries including China ramp up their efforts.
This doesn’t diminish the importance of traditional intelligence. Spy agencies have unique powers to penetrate global communications and cultivate agents. They scored a high-profile success when the Biden administration publicized ultimately correct intelligence findings that Russian President Vladimir Putin intended to invade Ukraine.
Biden political future clouded by classified document probe
Biden, Kishida to discuss Japan 'stepping up' security
Speaker McCarthy's tidy 1st week disguises trouble ahead
Garland appoints special counsel to investigate Biden docs
But officials and experts worry that the U.S. hasn’t invested enough people or money in analyzing publicly available data or taking advantage of advanced technologies that can yield critical insights. Commercial satellite imagery, social media and other online data have given private companies and independent analysts new powers to reveal official secrets. And China is known to have stolen or acquired control over huge amounts of data on Americans, with growing concerns in Washington about Beijing’s influence over widely used apps like TikTok.
“Open source is really a bellwether for whether the intelligence community can protect the country,” said Kristin Wood, a former senior official at the CIA who is now chief executive at the Grist Mill Exchange, a commercial data platform. “We collectively as a nation aren’t preparing a defense for the ammunition that our adversaries are stockpiling.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Intelligence agencies face several obstacles to using open source intelligence. Some are technological. Officers working on classified networks are often not able to easily access the unclassified internet or open data sources, for example. There are also concerns about civil liberties and protecting First Amendment rights.
But some experts also question whether agencies are held back by a reflexive belief that top-secret information is more valuable.
Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat and longtime Intelligence Committee member, said he believed there needed to be “some cultural change inside places like the CIA where people are doing what they’re doing for the excitement of stealing critical secrets as opposed to reviewing social media pages.”
ADVERTISEMENT
In one 2017 test held by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a human team competed against a computer programmed with algorithms to identify Chinese surface-to-air missile sites using commercial imagery.
Both the humans and the computer identified 90% of the sites, Stanford University professor Amy Zegart wrote in the book “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms,” but the computer needed just 42 minutes — and it took the human team 80 times longer.
Reports created using commercial satellites, online posts and other open sources — like the daily analyses on Russian and Ukrainian military tactics published by the Institute for the Study of War — are widely read by lawmakers and intelligence officials.
“There is a lot of open-source capability that the U.S. intelligence community can pretty much rely on to be there,” said Frederick Kagan, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who oversees the creation of those reports. “What it needs to do is figure out how to leverage that ecosystem instead of trying to buy it.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Most of the 18 U.S. spy agencies have open-source programs, from the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise to a 10-person program in the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence arm. But top officials acknowledge there isn’t consistency across those programs in how they analyze open-source information or how they use and share it.
“We’re not paying enough attention to each other and so we’re not learning the lessons that different parts of the (intelligence community) are learning, and we’re not scaling solutions,” said Avril Haines, the U.S. director of national intelligence, at an industry event last year sponsored by the Potomac Officers Club. “And we’re not taking advantage of some of the outside expertise and information and work that could be taken advantage of.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The Open Source Enterprise headquartered at the CIA is the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, where for generations employees monitored broadcasts to translate them for analysts.
Much of that work was transformed in the last decade. Where people once had to travel long distances to pick up tapes of radio broadcasts in remote places or areas where Americans weren’t welcome, sensors now transmit more signals automatically. And machine translation has largely taken the place of people who had to listen to the tapes and transcribe them.
But officials acknowledge they have to do more.
Haines has begun multiple open-source reviews since becoming director of national intelligence and is expected to finalize recommendations this year. Some people involved in those reviews have suggested that the Open Source Enterprise no longer be designated as leading OSINT efforts across the spy agencies, said people familiar with the reviews who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations.
Three people familiar with Open Source Enterprise say the center had cut its budget for multiple years running prior to last year. They argue that’s a sign that open-source work has not always been prioritized at a consistent level.
The CIA recently appointed new leadership for the Open Source Enterprise and in 2021 created a “mission center” dedicated to technology.
“We recognize the importance of open source is only growing as the sheer volume of data openly available increases,” the agency said in a statement. “CIA is working not just to keep pace with this trend, but to get ahead of it — and ahead of our adversaries who also utilize open-source information.”
There’s no consensus on whether the U.S. should create a new open-source agency or center. Supporters say a new organization could focus on adopting advanced technologies and creating more useful products, while opponents question whether it would be unnecessary bloat and take away resources from other agencies.
Carmen Medina, a retired CIA deputy director of intelligence, now studies how spy agencies can incorporate outside ideas and encourage employees to be more creative and intuitive.
She suggests a pilot program in which a cell of open-source analysts would compete for a number of years against the regular output of people with top-secret clearances.
Medina and others who have worked in top positions and briefed White House officials think that on most days, an open-source group would be competitive and might even produce better analysis using information that’s broadly available.
“You can’t make sense of the world today by just packaging tidbits,” she said. “I’ve come to believe that almost all of the time, the open source way of thinking about it is correct.”
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · January 12, 2023
3. Pentagon Says Policy on Taiwan Strait Transits Is Unchanged Despite 2022 Decline
Pentagon Says Policy on Taiwan Strait Transits Is Unchanged Despite 2022 Decline
ByNick Wadhams
January 11, 2023 at 1:59 PM EST
The US hasn’t changed its policy on sending Navy vessels through the Taiwan Strait, the Pentagon said, describing a decline in the number of transits last year as nothing out of the ordinary.
“Many factors affect the planning and execution of these operations including ship and aircraft availability, other military operations and exercises both in the Indo-Pacific and around the world, weather, and geopolitical events,” Pentagon spokesman John Supple said in a statement.
Supple was responding to a query from Bloomberg News about data that showed the number of US naval transits through the strait fell to the lowest level in four years in 2022 even as China steps up military pressure on the island.
Data compiled by Bloomberg showed the US 7th Fleet sent nine warships through the waters separating China and Taiwan last year. The Navy also conducted four “freedom-of-navigation operations” through the South China Sea, the fewest in six years, trips it says show its dedication to a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Why Taiwan’s Status Risks Igniting a US-China Clash: QuickTake
Supple said Taiwan Strait transits were “consistent with historical norms.” He said the number of freedom of navigation exercises was “consistent with the historical average number of operations conducted over the past 10 years.”
The decline in US naval activity contrasts with the roughly 1,700 warplanes that China sent into Taiwan’s sensitive air-defense identification zone last year, almost double the number from 2021.
4. The World Needs More Nuclear Power
Excerpts:
In addition to making a massive contribution to reaching net zero, World Bank financing for nuclear projects would allow for a greater potential level of involvement by the IAEA to exercise more hands-on oversight during the life cycle of a nuclear project from conception through operations to decommissioning, which can range from 60 to 100 years. Today’s status quo is a lack of transparency on nuclear projects undertaken by China (in Pakistan) and Russia (in Iran), with the United States and Europe potentially being locked out of involvement with these programs for decades. Even if the bank provided financing only to assist in the creation of nuclear regulatory oversight activities for the host country seeking to build new nuclear generation, as opposed to funding the actual projects, it would increase Western involvement and enhance the global nonproliferation regime.
Similarly, funding nuclear research reactor projects that are involved with the production of radioisotopes, which have important medical uses, would create a triple win, and it would be akin to what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower initiated during the Atoms for Peace Program in 1953. These projects could enable the establishment of independent, effective nuclear regulators; create an initial development project that could enhance indigenous nuclear capacity-building (including the development of local nuclear engineering and construction programs); and allow for the deployment of lifesaving health technologies. All of this could be accomplished in a manner fully consistent with maintaining nuclear safeguards.
An all-of-the-above green energy strategy is essential and means that much more nuclear power needs to happen, and quickly, for the world to stay anywhere close to a trajectory of net zero by 2050. This requires helping countries finance new projects. A good place to start is at the multilateral level via the World Bank, which could create new co-financing opportunities with the private sector as well as spur a change at the African Development Bank and the other multilateral regional development banks, in addition to the DFC and the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Given the reality of net zero math and the change of heart about nuclear energy in Europe, the Bank should have a robust discussion about its nuclear policy. It is a fortuitous time for this debate to take place because the bank is seeking new ways to expand its lending capacity to address climate change. Changing the World Bank’s policy to provide funding for nuclear projects would be the quickest and easiest way to advance the net zero effort in the developing world while also increasing security, safety, and prosperity.
The World Needs More Nuclear Power
Why the World Bank Needs to Get in the Game
January 12, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by DJ Nordquist and Jeffrey S. Merrifield · January 12, 2023
Any serious effort to grapple with climate change must begin by reckoning with the math involved in transitioning to so-called net zero carbon emissions—that is, the point at which humans are removing as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they are adding to it, stopping humankind’s contribution to climate change. This transition to green energy is complicated by the fact that even energy sources widely considered to be “green” have negative externalities, despite what many policymakers may wish. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, children as young as seven mine cobalt, which is needed to make electric car batteries. In China, which controls 80 percent of all solar panel manufacturing, the solar industry relies on Uyghur slave labor. To put it simply, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Although the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) revised 2022 energy outlook raises some of these issues, it nonetheless lays out a path to net zero by 2050 that, as one would expect, maximizes wind and solar power while assuming countries can find and extract the required minerals at economic prices. But even under these optimistic assumptions, an often overlooked zero-carbon energy source still does much of the heavy lifting: to reach net zero by 2050, the IEA says nuclear energy capacity will need to double. Its model assumes an annual average of 30 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity coming online starting in the 2030s, and staying on that track until 2050.
Nuclear fission, the process that creates nuclear energy, produces abundant power while emitting essentially zero greenhouse gases, similar to wind, solar, and hydroelectric. Moreover, it is a safe and proven technology that already provides over half of U.S. carbon-free energy generation while operating nonstop instead of at the whim of Mother Nature.
What would a doubling of nuclear power require? According to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, the world would need to build 235 new reactors in the next eight years alone just to hit net zero by 2050. Since 440 reactors now operate globally and 60 new ones are under construction, the world would therefore need to construct and have online the equivalent of 180 more 1,000-megawatt reactors, or 25 more new reactors per year, by 2030, with further growth afterward to hit the 2050 target. This is a heavy lift, considering the many roadblocks that antinuclear groups put up to stop this zero-carbon power production, in addition to the lengthy permitting processes and the time and expense needed to bring a plant online.
There is also another hurdle in the way: the world’s largest multilateral green energy financier, the World Bank, has steadfastly refused to finance or co-finance nuclear projects. This self-imposed policy means that energy-hungry, developing countries have had to turn to authoritarian regimes for the financing and technology needed to build nuclear power plants. It is time for the bank to reverse this outdated, counterproductive policy, especially given its focus on climate change mitigation. Countries should no longer be denied one of the key tools needed to solve the ambitious math of net zero.
RECONSIDERING NUCLEAR
Although a few countries, such as Austria and Australia, stubbornly remain opposed to nuclear power, Japan and France, which had planned to shut down a portion of their nuclear reactors, reversed course last spring after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Germany, which was scheduled to close all of its reactors by the end of 2022, temporarily halted the shutdown of its final two reactors to avoid energy shortfalls resulting from the war in Ukraine. Still other European countries, including Poland and Romania, are going further by committing to purchase nuclear reactors made in the United States. For similar reasons, the Czech Republic selected Westinghouse as one of three finalists (along with companies from France and South Korea) for a current tender for new nuclear generation. Even more noteworthy, developing countries, including Ghana, Kenya, and the Philippines, announced within the last three months that they intend to construct new nuclear power plants to meet their economic development and clean energy goals.
From the 1960s through the first decade of this century, U.S. firms were the largest exporters of nuclear technologies worldwide, but over the last decade, developing countries have looked to Russia and China for help building new nuclear energy projects. Russia’s principal nuclear supplier, Rosatom, has signed memorandums of agreement with over 30 countries to provide nuclear development assistance and currently Russia is building nuclear reactors in Bangladesh, Belarus, China, Egypt, India, and Turkey. For its part, China has only exported its technology to Pakistan, but it is actively pursuing other projects around the world. Developing countries have had to turn to Russia and China after the World Bank made it clear in 2013 that it would continue not to fund any nuclear projects.
At the time, the bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, effectively banned financing nuclear projects, saying “Nuclear power from country to country is an extremely political issue. The World Bank Group does not engage in providing support for nuclear power. We think that this is an extremely difficult conversation that every country is continuing to have.” His public comments built on prior bank statements including one in 2009, when the bank said that financing nuclear “would engender serious risks related to proliferation, safety, and waste disposal.” More recently in 2021, it argued that financing nuclear is “not in its expertise.” These justifications were inaccurate then and continue to be so today.
The World Bank has steadfastly refused to finance or co-finance nuclear projects.
To begin with, the World Bank cannot blame its decision on a lack of expertise. The World Bank is part of the UN system and thus under the same umbrella as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose head, Rafael Grossi, has lobbied for the bank to end its ban. The bank can access this deep font of nuclear expertise in the same way it consults with outside experts and entities for projects in areas as diverse as air pollution management in Egypt, irrigation in Pakistan, and public administration modernization in Djibouti, not to mention more complex green energy projects all over the world, such as hydropower and geothermal engineering. National institutions, such as the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which do have nuclear expertise and have provided significant lending capabilities for nuclear projects, could also serve as a resource for the bank.
The other justifications the World Bank offers for its nuclear ban are just as specious. The IAEA has worked for over 70 years to establish a framework to prevent nonproliferation. This system includes a wide range of safeguard measures, including real-time electronic monitoring, which provides an effective means to identify and prevent nuclear proliferation. Furthermore, civilian nuclear energy is not an easy gateway to nuclear weapons. The fuel generated from civilian light-water nuclear power plants, such as those in the United States, is not an effective source of potential weapons material. A country would require highly sophisticated and expensive capabilities to make it useful for military purposes.
What about other safety concerns? Opponents of nuclear power raise three famous nuclear disasters. The first is the Three Mile Island accident, which occurred in 1979 and was caused by deficient control room instrumentation and inadequate training on emergency procedures. While the event did result in the release of a small amount of radioactive gas—below background levels—the containment structure of the plant prevented a large release of radioactivity, and, according to the U.S. government, no one was killed or seriously injured as a result of the accident. Chernobyl, the most famous and devastating nuclear disaster, occurred in 1986. It was the result of a poor design (one that was not used outside of the Soviet Union), reckless low power testing of the reactor without the review or approval of the designer, and a failure to warn the public about radioactive releases in a timely manner. Finally, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, resulted from ignoring historic tsunami data and building the plant too close to the ocean where the needed safety equipment was vulnerable to flooding.
These three accidents could have been avoided. For additional context, 600 civilian nuclear power reactors have operated since the 1960s (not to mention hundreds more military reactors). All in all, this track record is very good, especially when compared with the effects from comparable forms of energy. Indeed, when considering deaths per unit of electricity generated, nuclear energy has resulted in 99.8 percent fewer than coal, 99.7 percent fewer than oil, and 97.6 percent fewer than gas. In addition, a 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research paper estimated that Germany’s planned nuclear phaseout would cost more than 1,100 additional deaths each year as a result of increased air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels. Germany, for the time being, has halted the closure of its final three nuclear power plants, thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A nuclear power plant near Landshut, Germany, August 2022
Christian Mang / Reuters
In part, as a result of the lessons learned from the three accidents described above, the over 450 nuclear power reactors that make up today’s international nuclear industry have operated at exceptionally high safety levels under the watchful eyes of both national nuclear regulatory authorities, as well as the World Association of Nuclear Operators, a self-regulatory body. The industry has generally earned a well-regarded track record for safety, critical self-assessment, and a willingness to share best practices among all civilian nuclear peers worldwide.
Additionally, the latest generation of nuclear reactors being designed in the United States are smaller (typically a quarter or less of the size of reactors currently being marketed by Russia and China), easier to construct and finance, and possess enhanced levels of safety. These reactors are particularly desirable given that their size and cost make them more attractive to countries less able to afford 1,200-megawatt (or more) nuclear projects.
Finally, the concerns that the World Bank has raised about waste are also misguided, since nuclear fuel is the most highly regulated metal in the world as a result of the careful oversight by the civilian nuclear regulators of each nuclear power country. Whether it is stored in spent fuel pools at the reactors or in dry storage canisters away from the reactors, it has a track record of being effectively managed and stored; no civilian has been killed or even seriously injured from its storage. Although there have been significant political challenges to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site in Nevada, Finland will be opening its permanent waste repository in 2024 and will lead the way in demonstrating that used nuclear fuel can be safely managed underground, even for 100,000 years. France has been recycling used fuel since the 1960s and within several years will follow Finland’s lead in opening its own permanent repository. This not only takes advantage of reusing the 96 percent of the energy that remains after the fuel has been used in a reactor, but it has also significantly reduced France’s generation of high-level waste, including plutonium. Other opportunities to address this issue, including developments in deep borehole technology (where the fuel is disposed of four to five miles underground) and the ongoing deployment of nuclear reactor designs that burn used nuclear fuel also provide examples of technology developments that can safely address concerns about high-level radioactive waste.
FUND THE FUTURE
At last year’s UN climate conference, known as COP27, industrialized economies (except China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases) promised to pay developing countries for their "loss and damage" from climate change. Developing countries felt it was an important step, but these countries need something better: cheap, reliable, abundant energy, including from all types of green energy, particularly those with steady baseload power such as nuclear. As the Egyptian economist Abla Abdel Latif told a U.S. congressional delegation at COP, Africa wants and needs financing to develop badly needed power. Perhaps it is one of the reasons Egypt ended up taking a loan from Rosatom (and got locked into Russian technology for decades) for its new nuclear plant.
Instead of paying for loss and damage from climate change, which amounts to only pennies per person affected in the developing world, the World Bank and its funders should deploy those billions of dollars as low-interest loans for nuclear projects by secure, nonauthoritarian providers that will help these countries escape energy poverty with safe and reliable zero-carbon power.
In this effort, the bank could follow the lead of the United States, which finally ended its own ban on financing foreign nuclear projects in 2020, when the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) agreed to lend for nuclear projects because they are viewed as being renewable energy sources. As the DFC rightly said in its announcement: “This change will also offer an alternative to the financing of authoritarian regimes while advancing U.S. nonproliferation safeguards and supporting U.S. nuclear competitiveness.” Unfortunately, under the Biden administration, the DFC has yet to finance a single nuclear project.
The DFC should lean forward, as its colleagues at the Export-Import Bank of the United States have done, and provide funding for U.S.-sponsored nuclear projects internationally. This could encourage the World Bank to do the same. The United States should also push for the World Bank’s policy to be reversed, as proposed by Representative Patrick McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina and the incoming chair of the House Financial Services Committee. His bill, the International Nuclear Energy Financing Act, or H.R. 1646, is expected to be reintroduced this year.
The World Bank cannot blame its decision on a lack of expertise.
Even the European Parliament redefined nuclear energy as green in a landmark vote in July 2022. By correctly changing the taxonomy of nuclear to environmentally friendly, European countries now have access to hundreds of billions in cheap loans and state subsidies. Thus, as Europe now has embraced nuclear (and even gas) as green, it continues to deny it to the developing world via its stance against nuclear at the World Bank and other multilateral regional development banks, ensuring Russia and China remain the only game in town.
In addition to making a massive contribution to reaching net zero, World Bank financing for nuclear projects would allow for a greater potential level of involvement by the IAEA to exercise more hands-on oversight during the life cycle of a nuclear project from conception through operations to decommissioning, which can range from 60 to 100 years. Today’s status quo is a lack of transparency on nuclear projects undertaken by China (in Pakistan) and Russia (in Iran), with the United States and Europe potentially being locked out of involvement with these programs for decades. Even if the bank provided financing only to assist in the creation of nuclear regulatory oversight activities for the host country seeking to build new nuclear generation, as opposed to funding the actual projects, it would increase Western involvement and enhance the global nonproliferation regime.
Similarly, funding nuclear research reactor projects that are involved with the production of radioisotopes, which have important medical uses, would create a triple win, and it would be akin to what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower initiated during the Atoms for Peace Program in 1953. These projects could enable the establishment of independent, effective nuclear regulators; create an initial development project that could enhance indigenous nuclear capacity-building (including the development of local nuclear engineering and construction programs); and allow for the deployment of lifesaving health technologies. All of this could be accomplished in a manner fully consistent with maintaining nuclear safeguards.
An all-of-the-above green energy strategy is essential and means that much more nuclear power needs to happen, and quickly, for the world to stay anywhere close to a trajectory of net zero by 2050. This requires helping countries finance new projects. A good place to start is at the multilateral level via the World Bank, which could create new co-financing opportunities with the private sector as well as spur a change at the African Development Bank and the other multilateral regional development banks, in addition to the DFC and the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Given the reality of net zero math and the change of heart about nuclear energy in Europe, the Bank should have a robust discussion about its nuclear policy. It is a fortuitous time for this debate to take place because the bank is seeking new ways to expand its lending capacity to address climate change. Changing the World Bank’s policy to provide funding for nuclear projects would be the quickest and easiest way to advance the net zero effort in the developing world while also increasing security, safety, and prosperity.
- DJ NORDQUIST is former U.S. Executive Director of the World Bank. She is on the board of ClearPath, a clean energy advocacy group, and is a Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
- JEFFREY S. MERRIFIELD is former Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He leads the energy section at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and is on the boards ClearPath and the United States Nuclear Industry Council.
-
MORE BY DJ NORDQUISTMORE BY JEFFREY S. MERRIFIELD
Foreign Affairs · by DJ Nordquist and Jeffrey S. Merrifield · January 12, 2023
5. Ukraine's Battlefields Are Freezing. Here's What That Means for the War.
Ukraine's Battlefields Are Freezing. Here's What That Means for the War.
military.com · by 12 Jan 2023 Bloomberg News | By Marc Champion and Alberto Nardelli · January 12, 2023
Temperatures in eastern Ukraine have been well below freezing in recent days, hardening the ground and opening a window for potential winter offensives by both sides.
But such pushes may not come, either now or during a more sustained cold spell.
Military analysts within and outside Ukraine say that while the shift from muddy to frozen terrain is important in enabling the use of wheeled combat and support vehicles, it’s just one of many factors commanders would consider before risking a major new assault.
More important are the availability of reserves, equipment and ammunition, and the need to create weak spots to exploit in enemy lines.
Both sides are being stretched by slow, but resource-sapping offensives already underway. Russian forces are trying to take Bakhmut and nearby Soledar, while Ukrainian troops are attacking Kreminna and Svatove; all are small-to-mid-sized towns in the eastern Donbas region that Russia claims to have annexed, but only partially occupies.
“The situation around Soledar and Bakhmut is forcing our command to use more reserves in this direction, so it may be that in the close future there won’t be enough left to conduct a big offensive in the south, from Zaporizhzhia, or anywhere else,” said Igor Levchenko, head of strategic modeling at New Geopolitics, a Kyiv-based think tank.
How the conflict evolves over the coming months is likely to be determined less by changes in weather than by the relative success each side has in wearing down the other’s forces and reconstituting their own by spring, Levchenko said.
The risk for Russia, according to a European defense official, is that in Bakhmut it makes only a minor tactical gain at the cost of huge personnel losses. A similar mistake in the summer left Russian forces exhausted and over stretched, opening the door for Ukraine to launch successful counter offensives in the fall.
Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said on TV on Tuesday that Soledar, 10 km (6 miles) from the outskirts of Bakhmut, was close to being taken, though “at a very high price.” Claims later in the day from the Wagner mercenary group to be in control of all but a pocket in the center of Soledar could not be verified.
Though poorly trained, recently mobilized troops have shored up defenses around Kreminna and Svatove, slowing Ukraine’s advance. Taking Svatove would allow Ukraine to cut a key Russian logistics route for operations in the Donbas.
Newly announced supplies of armored fighting vehicles from the U.S., Germany and France, as well as growing signs that NATO standard tanks could follow, would better equip Ukraine for a fresh offensive. Officials in Kyiv, meanwhile, have expressed concern over the possibility of a renewed Russian attack from Belarus, just 150 km (93 miles) north of Ukraine’s capital.
Ukraine’s general staff have been “masters of operational design” to date and will spend weeks or months setting conditions for the next, decisive phase of the campaign, said Ben Hodges, a former U.S. Lieutenant General and commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, in emailed comments from Tbilisi, Georgia.
While Russia may aim to use mobilized recruits to prolong the war until support for Ukraine from its allies crumbles, “I don’t see that happening in 2023,” Hodges said. “Rather I see Ukraine liberating Crimea by the end of August.”
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, turning it since into a support base for his forces in the rest of occupied Ukraine. Some military analysts have expressed skepticism at Ukraine’s capacity to retake it.
While falling temperatures have been hardening the ground in the east since Jan. 6, at -8 to -14 degrees Centigrade they’ve also been too low for soldiers to fight effectively while spending days away from shelter, as any offensive breakthrough would require.
“The human factor is far more important than the vehicles they can move” in winter, said Ed Arnold, a former British infantry officer now at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. In freezing weather, morale, mobility and logistics all can get hammered, he said.
Frozen batteries for drones and radio sets have to be recharged twice as often, while low visibility can render unusable the surveillance drones needed for artillery to target defenses. With both sides running low on artillery shells, the need for precision offered by drones has already at times silenced guns along the front.
“What we call the ‘find’ aspect you need for any operation just becomes much more difficult,” said Arnold. “Even foot patrols that can normally cover 15-20 km in a day can suddenly only cover five, because they’re burning more calories, need to carry more food and just can’t do as much in the difficult conditions.”
Very low temperatures also can favor defensive troops that enjoy effective logistics, according to Arnold, enabling them to maintain warmth and stockpile food at frontline positions for as many as 20 days. Those are luxuries unavailable to an advancing force, which has to be resupplied in real time by trucks that use the same makeshift tracks repeatedly, quickly degrading them.
The cold also can force errors, such as Russia’s decision to concentrate hundreds of troops in the relative warmth and comfort of a dormitory in Makiivka, within range of Ukraine’s HIMARS rockets. That saw 89 killed in a New Year’s attack, according to Russia’s defense ministry, many more according to Ukraine.
Most worrying to military planners, according to Arnold, is that a freeze can suddenly turn to thaw, leaving offensive troops exposed and unsupplied as wheeled support vehicles again become stuck in Ukraine’s notoriously glutinous mud. Tracked vehicles, such as tanks, can still operate, but not if fuel tankers can no longer reach them.
Soldiers, similarly, would then be left without food, and artillery without ammunition or the ability to quickly move position after firing, so as to evade counter-battery fire. Temperatures in the east are forecast to rise above freezing again as soon as next week.
“The Ukrainians have a much better option,” said Arnold. “I would say that with what they already have and everything the West is giving them, they have one chance at a big push — so don’t go early.”
The Bakhmut fighting is likely to remain intense regardless of weather, because Russian commanders have shifted tactics, relying on foot soldiers to punch through defenses, rather than the massive artillery barges followed by mechanized assaults that slugged their way through Ukrainian lines in the Donbas last summer.
While Bakhmut has relatively small strategic significance, Russian commanders appear determined to take it regardless of cost, while Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valeriy Zaluzhnyi said in a December interview with The Economist that his nation’s top priority was to cede no more territory. “It is ten to 15 times harder to liberate it than not to surrender it,” he said.
___
©2023 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
military.com · by 12 Jan 2023 Bloomberg News | By Marc Champion and Alberto Nardelli · January 12, 2023
6. Russia says its forces capture Soledar in east Ukraine
Excerpts:
Soledar, with a pre-war population of just 10,000, sits above cavernous salt mines. Bakhmut, ten times larger, is a substantial provincial district hub.
"Even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fall to the Russians, it's not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself," U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House on Thursday, "and it certainly isn't going to stop the Ukrainians or slow them down."
The Wagner ultra-nationalist mercenary company run by an ally of President Vladimir Putin had claimed to have captured Soledar on Wednesday, but until now Russia's defence ministry had stayed silent.
"The night in Soledar was hot, battles continued," Ukraine's Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
"The enemy threw almost all the main forces in the direction of Donetsk and maintains a high intensity of offensive. Our fighters are bravely trying to maintain the defence," she said, referring to the Donetsk region which includes Soledar.
Russia says its forces capture Soledar in east Ukraine
Reuters · by Pavel Polityuk
- Summary
- Companies
- Seizing Soledar would be first big Russian success in months
- Ukraine earlier said it was holding on after 'hot' night
- U.S. says Russian capture would not change course of war
KYIV, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Russia said on Friday that its forces had taken control of the salt-mining town of Soledar in eastern Ukraine overnight after days of relentless fighting, claiming Moscow's first big battlefield gain after half a year of military setbacks.
Reuters could not immediately verify the situation in the town. Earlier on Friday, Kyiv said fighting was still continuing there after what it described as a "hot" night.
Russia said the capture of Soledar would make it possible to cut off Ukrainian supply routes to the larger nearby city of Bakhmut, and trap remaining Ukrainian forces there. Russia has been trying to seize Bakhmut for months in brutal warfare.
"The capture of Soledar was made possible by the constant bombardment of the enemy by assault and army aviation, missile forces and artillery of a grouping of Russian forces," Moscow's defence ministry said.
Kyiv says Russia threw wave upon wave of soldiers and mercenaries into a pointless fight for a bombed-out wasteland at Soledar and U.S. officials said a Russian victory there, or even in Bakhmut, would make little difference to the overall war.
Soledar, with a pre-war population of just 10,000, sits above cavernous salt mines. Bakhmut, ten times larger, is a substantial provincial district hub.
"Even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fall to the Russians, it's not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself," U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House on Thursday, "and it certainly isn't going to stop the Ukrainians or slow them down."
The Wagner ultra-nationalist mercenary company run by an ally of President Vladimir Putin had claimed to have captured Soledar on Wednesday, but until now Russia's defence ministry had stayed silent.
"The night in Soledar was hot, battles continued," Ukraine's Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
"The enemy threw almost all the main forces in the direction of Donetsk and maintains a high intensity of offensive. Our fighters are bravely trying to maintain the defence," she said, referring to the Donetsk region which includes Soledar.
[1/25] Ukrainian army, of the 43rd Heavy Artillery Brigade fire a German howitzer Panzerhaubitze 2000, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, near Soledar, Ukraine, January 11, 2023. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo
"This is a difficult phase of the war, but we will win. There is no doubt."
Outside Soledar on Thursday, Ukrainian soldiers were dug into well-fortified trenches in the wintry woods. Explosions echoed in the distance.
A 24-year-old soldier using the call-sign BUK, told Reuters the intensity of shelling had risen by around 70 percent, but forces were still holding their positions.
"The situation is difficult but stable. We're holding back the enemy ... we're fighting back."
Ukrainian officials said on Thursday more than 500 civilians were trapped inside Soledar, including 15 children.
In an overnight video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked two units in Soledar he said were "holding their positions and inflicting significant losses on the enemy." He did not give more details.
MEAT GRINDER
The front lines in Ukraine have barely budged for two months since Russia's last big retreat in the south. Meanwhile, the battles around Bakhmut and Soledar became what both sides called a "meat grinder" - a brutal war of attrition claiming the lives of thousands of soldiers needed for decisive battles ahead.
The new year has brought important pledges of extra Western weapons for Ukraine, which is seeking armour to mount mechanised battles against Russian tanks. Last week, France, Germany and the United States pledged to send armoured fighting vehicles.
In recent days, the focus has been on main battle tanks, which Western countries have yet to provide. On Friday, Finland joined Poland in promising to send German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine as part of a Western coalition. That requires the permission of Berlin, which has so far been hesitant but has lately signalled a willingness to allow it.
Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, saying Kyiv's ties with the West threatened Russia's security, and Russia has since claimed to have annexed four Ukrainian provinces. Ukraine and its allies call it an unprovoked war to seize territory, and Kyiv says it will fight until it recaptures all its land.
Reporting by Reuters bureaus; writing by Peter Graff; editing by Philippa Fletcher
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Pavel Polityuk
7. China COVID peak to last 2-3 months, hit rural areas next - expert
And what will be the global effects as Chinese citizens travel?
China COVID peak to last 2-3 months, hit rural areas next - expert
Reuters · by Bernard Orr
- Summary
- Companies
- Peak of COVID wave seen lasting 2-3 months - epidemiologist
- Elderly in rural areas particularly at risk
- People mobility indicators tick up, but yet to fully recover
- One case of the XBB subvariant discovered in China
BEIJING, Jan 13 (Reuters) - The peak of China's COVID-19 wave is expected to last two to three months, and will soon swell over the vast countryside where medical resources are relatively scarce, a top Chinese epidemiologist has said.
Infections are expected to surge in rural areas as hundreds of millions travel to their home towns for the Lunar New Year holidays, which officially start from Jan. 21, known before the pandemic as the world's largest annual migration of people.
China last month abruptly abandoned the strict anti-virus regime of mass lockdowns that fuelled historic protests across the country in late November, and finally reopened its borders this past Sunday.
The abrupt dismantling of restrictions has unleashed the virus onto China's 1.4 billion people, more than a third of whom live in regions where infections are already past their peak, according to state media.
But the worst of the outbreak was not yet over, warned Zeng Guang, the former chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a report published in local media outlet Caixin on Thursday.
"Our priority focus has been on the large cities. It is time to focus on rural areas," Zeng was quoted as saying.
He said a large number of people in the countryside, where medical facilities are relatively poor, are being left behind, including the elderly, the sick and the disabled.
The World Health Organization this week also warned of the risks stemming from holiday travelling.
The UN agency said China was heavily under-reporting deaths from COVID, although it is now providing more information on its outbreak.
"Since the outbreak of the epidemic, China has shared relevant information and data with the international community in an open, transparent and responsible manner," foreign ministry official Wu Xi told reporters.
Chinese virologists said on Friday they have discovered one infection with the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which has been described by WHO scientists as the most transmissible sub-variant so far after its rapid spread in the United States in December. There is no evidence yet that it is more severe.
Health authorities have been reporting five or fewer deaths a day over the past month, numbers which are inconsistent with the long queues seen at funeral homes and the body bags seen coming out of crowded hospitals.
China has not reported COVID fatalities data since Monday. Officials said in December they planned monthly, rather than daily updates, going forward.
Although international health experts have predicted at least 1 million COVID-related deaths this year, China has reported just over 5,000 since the pandemic began, one of the lowest death rates in the world.
DIPLOMATIC TENSIONS
Concerns over data transparency were among the factors that prompted more than a dozen countries to demand pre-departure COVID tests from travellers arriving from China.
Beijing, which had shut its borders from the rest of the world for three years and still demands all visitors get tested before their trip, objects to the curbs.
Wu said accusations by individual countries were "unreasonable, unscientific and unfounded."
Tensions escalated this week with South Korea and Japan, with China retaliating by suspending short-term visas for their nationals. The two countries also limit flights, test travellers from China on arrival, and quarantine the positive ones.
Parts of China were returning to normal life.
In the bigger cities in particular, residents are increasingly on the move, pointing to a gradual, though so far slow, rebound in consumption and economic activity.
An immigration official said on Friday 490,000 daily trips on average were made in and out of China since it reopened on Jan. 8, only 26% of the pre-pandemic levels.
Singapore-based Chu Wenhong was among those who finally got reunited with their parents for the first time in three years.
"They both got COVID, and are quite old. I feel quite lucky actually, as it wasn’t too serious for them, but their health is not very good," she said.
CAUTION
While China's reopening has given a boost to financial assets globally, policymakers around the world worry it may revive inflationary pressures.
However, December's trade data released on Friday provided reasons to be cautious about China's recovery pace.
Jin Chaofeng, whose company exports outdoor rattan furniture, said he has no expansion or hiring plans for 2023.
"With the lifting of COVID curbs, domestic demand is expected to improve but not exports," he said.
Data next week is expected to show China's economy grew 2.8% in 2022, its second-slowest since 1976, the final year of Mao Zedong's decade-long Cultural Revolution, according to a Reuters poll.
Some analysts say last year's lockdowns will leave permanent scars on China, including by worsening its already bleak demographic outlook.
Growth is then seen rebounding to 4.9% this year, still well below the pre-pandemic trend.
Additional reporting by the Beijing and Shanghai newsrooms; Writing by Marius Zaharia; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Bernard Orr
8. The PLA’s People Problem
Excerpts:
Overall, the PLA is having trouble competing with the very same high-technology economy that is driving China’s rise as a global power. Competition from the private sector, especially in high-tech areas and areas with civilian-applicable skillsets, and employment incentives for veterans also contribute to poor retention.
All in all, the challenge of personnel will likely remain a bottleneck in the PLA’s quest for military supremacy in the Indo-Pacific in the coming years. It also points to how thinking about analysis of China’s military rise would be well served by viewing not just through the lens of its new equipment, but also the people behind that equipment.
The PLA’s People Problem
China’s military has long struggled to field quality personnel.
defenseone.com · by Taylor A. Lee
Too much Western analysis and debate about China’s impressive military buildup focuses on its equipment and weapons, and too little on its people. Yet personnel recruiting, training, and retention issues might be exactly what holds China back in the “marathon” it is racing against the United States.
For instance, the Defense Department’s annual China Military Power Report goes into considerable detail about the PLA’s new equipment, but makes almost no mention of personnel. The same is true of congressional testimony by government and non-government officials, as well as statements by politicians everywhere from the hearing room to cable news. And like those who expected a swift Russian victory in Ukraine, the new cottage industry of think tank reports and wargames on a potential Taiwan war count ships, planes, and tanks, while spending less time on the skill and will of the people in them.
The PLA has long struggled to field quality personnel. In its early years, most personnel were illiterate, including officers. (This mirrored even the most senior CCP political leaders; for instance, Chen Yonggui rose to Vice Premier despite not being able to read.) Into the 2000s, a plurality of PLA conscripts only had a ninth-grade education, while one-third of PLA officers lacked even the most basic higher education.
PLA strategists recognize these problems as obstacles to building a world-class military. “We have developed and deployed many cutting-edge weapons, including some that are the best in the world, but there are not enough soldiers to use many of those advanced weapons,” one PLA academic wrote in 2016. “In some cases, soldiers lack knowledge and expertise to make the best use of their equipment.”
Even China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has called for a greater “sense of urgency” toward military-personnel modernization, which he discussed at the 19th and 20th Party Congresses. China’s top general, CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia, has concurred, saying that human talent matters to the PLA “more than at any other time in history.”
Thus the issue is increasingly being messaged across the force. Just weeks after the 20th Party Congress, an article in the PLA’s official newspaper, the PLA Daily, declared that China trails the West in talent, especially in how it is applied to force development in unmanned systems and other new high-tech fields.
The example of unmanned systems illustrates how the PLA’s increasing focus on people is, in fact, driven by the very same high technology acquisitions that draw so much attention in Western debate and wargames. A ninth-grade education was adequate when PLA doctrine centered on massed infantry, but the increasingly high-tech demands of the modern battlefield will require personnel with “scientific literacy and technological know-how,” as Xi put it.
So the PLA has been working to recruit more-skilled and better-educated personnel, especially in technical fields. For example, starting in 2016, the Central Military Commission announced that military academic institutions would admit 16 percent more students in high-tech sectors of urgent need, such as space intelligence, radar technology, and drones; 14 percent more students in the aviation, missile, and maritime fields; and 24 percent fewer students in more traditional fields like infantry, artillery, and logistics.
Even the PLA’s enlisted recruiting reflects a drive for college students, especially those with science and engineering backgrounds, graduates of advanced technical schools and technician colleges, and those with high-tech skills. Anecdotal reports indicate the PLA wants at least 70 to 75 percent of new recruits to have at least some college education. Recent years have seen increases in local quota targets for recruiting college students and graduates, including those with associate’s and technical degrees.
The PLA has also experimented with new methods for attracting people with these skills, such as by going out and directly finding and recruiting civilians who already had needed expertise. For example, in 2016, a Chongqing recruiting center said it was directly recruiting 194 new NCOs, including in high-tech specialties such as computers, automation, communications, electronic information, medical technology, energy, mechanical and electrical equipment, and mechanical design and manufacturing.
The PLA is also increasingly emphasizing direct recruitment of civilian college graduates as officers, with a focus on science and technology. Last March, the CMC announced that the PLA and People’s Armed Police would directly recruit more than 3,600 new college graduates (including graduate-degree-holders) as officers, with a focus on majors in science, technology, and other needed disciplines.
Weighing whether these various initiatives are paying off for the PLA is complicated. China’s decennial census found that almost 57 percent of PLA personnel had at least some post-secondary education in 2020, up from about 47 percent in 2000. Likewise, the number of PLA personnel with only a ninth-grade education has been reduced to less than 4 percent. This indicates that the PLA has clearly had success in recruiting more educated personnel, even if it has not met its high quotas.
But acquiring better human talent is not the same as keeping it, and there is also evidence that the PLA is struggling to retain its highly skilled officers and enlisted personnel. There is frequent discussion of how college-educated personnel struggle to integrate into PLA military life, and of resentment about being treated like their less-educated counterparts. For instance, a program to educate PLA officers at civilian universities (roughly akin to the U.S. ROTC program) was scrapped in 2016, having failed to properly integrate the civilian officers, who were viewed as inferior and treated as second-class citizens within the PLA hierarchy. Such military cultural attitudes do not change overnight.
The more educated recruits also frequently complain that the PLA has no system for placing them into billets where their skills are properly used. For example, more than 30 college-educated enlisted personnel were assigned to a radar brigade (likely the Air Force’s 14th Radar Brigade under the Western Theater Command) in Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert. Yet none chose to re-enlist after their mandatory two years of service, due to the harsh conditions they endured in the desert as well as general dissatisfaction with military life. A subsequent brigade investigation found that more than 80 percent of college-educated soldiers have been unwilling to re-enlist in recent years. More broadly, a 2021 survey of highly educated soldiers in one unit showed that only 35 percent of college students who completed their two years in the PLA wanted to remain on active duty, while the percentage of college graduates who wanted to stay was even lower. To try to mitigate this, the PLA has begun allowing previously demobilized personnel to re-enlist for a second time and has allowed NCOs to stay on beyond their maximum age.
Overall, the PLA is having trouble competing with the very same high-technology economy that is driving China’s rise as a global power. Competition from the private sector, especially in high-tech areas and areas with civilian-applicable skillsets, and employment incentives for veterans also contribute to poor retention.
All in all, the challenge of personnel will likely remain a bottleneck in the PLA’s quest for military supremacy in the Indo-Pacific in the coming years. It also points to how thinking about analysis of China’s military rise would be well served by viewing not just through the lens of its new equipment, but also the people behind that equipment.
Taylor A. Lee is a research analyst at BluePath Labs. This article is drawn from research by BluePath Labs analysts’ report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Personnel of the People’s Liberation Army
defenseone.com · by Taylor A. Lee
9. More can be done to ban US government use of Chinese drones
Excerpts:
Referencing these counterintelligence threats, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has correctly noted: “Any technological product with origins in China or Chinese companies holds a real risk and potential of vulnerability that can be exploited both now and in a time of conflict.”
Though nominally recreational systems, the Russian military has employed DJI drones to target Ukrainian civilians and their infrastructure.
The U.S. national security community must eschew CCP-controlled companies and supply chains infected with Chinese products. By embracing Section 817 of the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress has substantially advanced U.S. national security interests.
The next step should be to end their use by civilian federal agencies — such as the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of the Interior — along with state and local governments. U.S. taxpayers should not have to purchase the same systems the CCP buys to police Uighurs or kill Ukrainians.
More can be done to ban US government use of Chinese drones
Defense News · by Richard Weitz · January 12, 2023
The recent outage of a Federal Aviation Administration flight system reminds us of the imperative of having a safe and secure airspace over the United States. In this regard, we should welcome congressional inclusion of Section 817 in the recently enacted James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act.
Enjoying bipartisan support, Section 817, which prohibits the Department of Defense and its contractors from using Chinese-made surveillance drones, strengthens Americans’ security in multiple ways.
Thanks to China’s lavish subsidization of its high-tech sector, Chinese manufacturers of unmanned aerial systems can often underprice foreign competitors to build market share. In the United States and other foreign countries, drones by the manufacturer DJI have attracted many consumers due to their low price, ease of use, widespread marketing and lavish lobbying.
Yet, Chinese-made drones are primed with problems. The U.S. Defense Department and other federal and congressional actors have repeatedly raised concerns about how the Chinese government controls even nominally Chinese-owned companies. The ruling Chinese Communist Party controls the government and can compel Chinese companies to share data with the government and the party.
The Washington Post and the IPVM video surveillance research group have extensively analyzed DJI records, Chinese media coverage and other sources. They have found that, while the DJI tries to conceal its ties to the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army, the drone maker receives substantial state funding and support.
The CCP can leverage this funding, data exchanges and other means to shape the companies’ policies to China’s advantage at the expense of the United States. Furthermore, police agencies monitor Uyghurs in the CCP concentration camps in Xinjiang by employing DJI systems.
Chinese companies and the PLA readily exchange foreign technologies to enhance the country’s economic and military competitiveness. These interlocking ties are the foundation of China’s military-civil fusion strategy, in which Chinese companies and other formally civilian Chinese actors augment the PLA by sharing advanced technologies and expertise.
Additionally, the CCP seeks data on foreign as well as Chinese citizens — what they do, how they think, whom they love — to model and manipulate their behavior.
Fears of the security threat presented by DJI drones have been growing. In 2020, the U.S. Commerce Department placed DJI drones on its entity list, which imposes extra licensing requirements for technology transfers to these foreign entities.
In July 2021, the Pentagon issued a special statement reaffirming its view that DJI systems are “potential threats to national security.” In December of that year, the Treasury Department banned U.S. investment in DJI.
Last October, the Defense Department included DJI on its “Chinese military companies” list. This list strives to highlight firms that support the PLA, remove these companies from U.S. supply chains and make the U.S. defense-industrial base more secure. Congress has also been holding recurring investigatory hearings on the issue.
Furthermore, the locally made software in Chinese-made UAS could be hacked or manipulated by the Chinese government or other foreign adversaries. This presents safety and security problems. According to Congressional analyses, DJI drones are frequently hacked to enable them to bypass restricted airspace, such as the no-fly zones around Washington, D.C. YouTube videos explain how to circumvent safeguards such as geofencing to restrict their flying over sensitive areas.
As a result, these drones provide potential platforms for Chinese espionage. Their high-resolution optical and thermal cameras, advanced sensor packages, access to wireless networks, small size, and high maneuverability make them sophisticated systems for spying. Through their frequent overflights of national security and high-tech targets, Chinese UAS can map U.S. critical infrastructure, identify network vulnerabilities for potential exploitation, steal Americans’ intellectual property, and conduct other espionage or cyberattacks.
Referencing these counterintelligence threats, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has correctly noted: “Any technological product with origins in China or Chinese companies holds a real risk and potential of vulnerability that can be exploited both now and in a time of conflict.”
Though nominally recreational systems, the Russian military has employed DJI drones to target Ukrainian civilians and their infrastructure.
The U.S. national security community must eschew CCP-controlled companies and supply chains infected with Chinese products. By embracing Section 817 of the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress has substantially advanced U.S. national security interests.
The next step should be to end their use by civilian federal agencies — such as the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of the Interior — along with state and local governments. U.S. taxpayers should not have to purchase the same systems the CCP buys to police Uighurs or kill Ukrainians.
Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he leads the think tank’s Center for Political-Military Analysis. He previously worked at the U.S. Defense Department.
10. Ukraine live briefing: Russia’s Defense Ministry claims control of Soledar; Civilians trapped in ‘bloodbath’
Ukraine live briefing: Russia’s Defense Ministry claims control of Soledar; Civilians trapped in ‘bloodbath’
By Erin Cunningham, Andrew Jeong and Ellen Francis
Updated January 13, 2023 at 6:43 a.m. EST|Published January 13, 2023 at 2:08 a.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Erin Cunningham · January 13, 2023
By
and
Andrew Jeong
January 13, 2023 at 2:08 a.m. EST
The nearly 600 civilians trapped in Soledar, as reported by Ukrainian media, are trying to survive a “bloodbath” as Russian forces pummel the eastern salt mining town, an official said Thursday. Russian forces “are burning everything on their way,” the Kyiv-appointed governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said in televised remarks.
He said Ukrainian forces could not evacuate the civilians amid the heavy fighting. The battle for the town — just a short distance from Bakhmut — has intensified in recent days as Russian soldiers and Wagner Group mercenaries attempt to encircle Ukrainian units there.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
1. Key developments
-
Ukraine said Thursday that its forces in Soledar were holding their positions against Russia’s assault and had not yet withdrawn — even as the Wagner Group continued to claim control of the town. In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked two units he said had inflicted “significant losses on the enemy.”
-
Even if Russian forces were to take Soledar, “it’s not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself,” John Kirby, communications coordinator for the U.S. National Security Council, told reporters in a briefing Thursday. “It certainly isn’t going to stop the Ukrainians or slow them down in terms of their efforts to regain their territory,” he said, adding “don’t count the Ukrainians out.”
-
Taylor Dudley, 35, a U.S. citizen who had been detained in Russia for nine months, was released Thursday, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter. He was released at a border crossing with Poland and was traveling to the United States with a team working for former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, according to a statement from his center, which negotiates for the release of hostages and prisoners abroad. U.S. officials confirmed the release. Dudley served briefly in the U.S. Navy in 2007.
2. Battleground updates
-
Russian forces probably control most if not all of Soledar and have likely pushed Ukrainian forces out of the western outskirts of the town, the Institute for the Study of War said Thursday. The assessment conflicted with Ukraine’s claims that its forces were holding out against the assault. “All available evidence indicates Ukrainian forces no longer maintain an organized defense in Soledar,” the ISW wrote.
-
Russia’s chief ground forces commander traveled to Belarus, Ukraine’s northern neighbor, to inspect units of a joint military force stationed in the former Soviet republic, the Belarusian state news agency said. Kyiv has warned that Russia intends to use Belarus to open a new front in the war along Ukraine’s northern border.
-
Russia is seeking to raise the minimum age for conscription from 18 to 21, Russian media reported, citing a senior Russian lawmaker. Russian President Vladimir Putin supports the idea, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Tass news agency.
3. Global impact
-
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk warned Moscow against deporting Ukrainians living in occupied territories to Russia, in response to reports that Moscow has those plans for 100,000 residents of Ukraine’s Kherson region. “Think carefully before doing it. Not only Russia as a state will be responsible. Everyone involved will be held accountable — from those who made the decision to the drivers who were involved in transporting Ukrainians to the territory of Russia,” she said.
-
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is set to arrive at the White House on Friday to discuss global security issues, including Ukraine, The Washington Post reported. “I intend to affirm our common understanding regarding the current situation, including that we are now in a severe security environment, with Russian aggression against Ukraine among other factors, and that the global economy is also facing the possibility of downside risk,” Kishida said Sunday.
-
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will greet his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amirabdollahian in Moscow on Jan. 17, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday. Iran’s nuclear program as well as Syria and Afghanistan will be on the agenda, she said, though she did not mention Ukraine as an agenda item. Washington and Kyiv have accused Moscow of receiving military aid from Tehran, accusations that Iran has sought to downplay.
-
A majority of Republicans want their member of Congress to oppose further Ukraine funding, according to a CBS News-YouGov poll this week, the first to test the issue since Zelensky spoke before Congress in December. The poll is the latest to track pessimism among Republicans about Ukraine’s ability to win the war. More Republicans now favor making concessions to Russia in the name of ending the conflict, The Post’s Aaron Blake reports.
4. From our correspondents
Russia’s new commander reflects Putin’s plan to push for victory in Ukraine: With the appointment of Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s highest-ranking military officer, as direct operational commander of the troubled war in Ukraine, Putin has doubled down on his conviction that the invasion’s objectives can be achieved without new leadership — and is now turning to a trusted confidant who will carry out his orders without question.
Gerasimov, 67, an army general and deputy defense minister, has been chief of the General Staff for more than a decade and is a Kremlin insider who had a key role in planning the war, The Post’s Francesca Ebel reports. As head of the joint forces in Ukraine, he replaces Gen. Sergei Surovikin, who in three months leading the war effort was credited with stabilizing Russia’s positions after Ukraine recaptured large swaths of territory.
The Washington Post · by Erin Cunningham · January 13, 2023
11. Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread in U.S.
Troubling graphics at the link to go on with the report of this troubling information. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/01/12/antisemitism-anti-defamation-league-survey/
Excerpts:
The vast majority of U.S. Jews told Pew in 2020 that antisemitism had increased in the past five years, and a slim majority said they personally feel less safe.
Alvin Rosenfeld, director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University at Bloomington, said antisemitism never goes away but morphs in its own unique ways.
In the West it has ancient roots in Christian teachings of Jews as satanic Christ-killers. In modern times, “religious bias gives way to racialized notions of Jewish inferiority or supremacy,” he said, noting this year is the 120th anniversary of the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an influential document falsely purporting to be a Jewish plan for world domination.
Then came Holocaust denial and types of critiques of Israel that are antisemitic.
“So the 'new’ antisemitism dates way back. Charges of Jewish conspiracy, Jews in control of the media, politics, entertainment, the money world — all of that dates back way back. It’s multicausal today,” Rosenfeld said. “When hatred is so diverse, it’s more potent and dangerous.”
Survey finds ‘classical fascist’ antisemitic views widespread in U.S.
By Michelle Boorstein and Scott Clement
January 12, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Michelle Boorstein · January 12, 2023
At points in the past half-century, many U.S. antisemitism experts thought this country could be aging out of it, that hostility and prejudice against Jews were fading in part because younger Americans held more accepting views than did older ones.
But a survey released Thursday shows how widely held such beliefs are in the United States today, including among younger Americans. The research by the Anti-Defamation League includes rare detail about the particular nature of antisemitism, how it centers on tropes of Jews as clannish, conspiratorial and holders of power.
The survey shows “antisemitism in its classical fascist form is emerging again in American society, where Jews are too secretive and powerful, working against interests of others, not sharing values, exploiting — the classic conspiratorial tropes,” Matt Williams, vice president of the ADL’s year-old Center for Antisemitism Research, told The Washington Post.
The study uses a new version of surveys the ADL has been doing in America since the 1960s in order to get at the specific nature of antisemitism, and what makes it different from other types of hate. Its new metric is centered on affirming or rejecting 14 statements, including whether Jews: “have too much control and influence on Wall Street,” “are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want,” or are “so shrewd that other people do not have a fair chance.”
The ADL’s center was created in response to a spike in the past few years of reported incidents of antisemitic violence and harassment, as well as a rise in antisemitic rhetoric from high-profile public figures.
That includes a march by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017 that turned deadly and attacks on Jewish targets in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, Calif., and Monsey, N.Y. in 2019. It also includes antisemitic comments, including from former president Donald Trump in October, when he attacked American Jews in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying Jews in the United States must “get their act together” and show more appreciation for the state of Israel “before it is too late.” Trump has multiple times raised the old antisemitic trope that U.S. Jews hold, or should hold, a secret or dual loyalty to Israel rather than or in addition to the United States. Almost 4 in 10 Americans believe it’s mostly or somewhat true that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America,” according to the ADL researchers. In the fall, the rapper and designer Ye — formerly known as Kanye West — said that Jews exploit Black people for financial gain, that African Americans are the legitimate descendants of Jews of the Bible and that there is some “financial engineering” to being Jewish.
The survey found that about 7 in 10 of Americans believe Jews stick together more than other Americans do and that more than one-third think Jews don’t share their values and “like to be at the head of things.” About 1 in 5 believe Jews have too much power in the United States today, don’t care what happens to others and are more willing than other Americans to use “shady practices to get what they want.”
It is difficult to assess whether antisemitic views have increased over time, given changes in the survey’s response options as well as how respondents were sampled. The survey was conducted in September and October among a national sample of 4,007 adults online through AmeriSpeak, a randomly sampled panel of U.S. households maintained by NORC at the University of Chicago.
Williams and some experts who helped review the study noted that it shows the views of Americans under 30 and those of Americans over 30 are very similar. Of Americans ages 18 to 30, 18 percent said six or more of the statements were true, while among those 31 and older, 20 percent did. Of younger Americans, 39 percent believed two to five statements, while among the older group, 41 percent did.
“It used to be that older Americans harbored more antisemitic views. The hypothesis was that antisemitism declined in the 1990s, the 2000s, because there was this new generation of more tolerant people. It shows younger people are much closer now to what older people think. My hypothesis is there is a cultural shift, fed maybe by technology and social media. The gap is disappearing,” said Ilana Horwitz, one of the survey’s reviewers, and an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Tulane University.
The “pervasiveness” of antisemitic tropes the study shows is what’s most interesting, Horwitz said. Even the fact that 3 percent of Americans say all of the original statements are “mostly or somewhat true” is alarming, she said.
Three percent of all American adults is a little less than 8 million people — well over the 5.8 million American adults who say they are Jewish.
“I like to tell my students: Kanye has more followers on Instagram than there are Jewish people in the world. So the extent to which Americans seem to believe these conspiratorial views about Jews is alarming,” she said. Ye has more than 18 million followers on Instagram alone.
The new research also delved into the differences between believing anti-Jewish tropes and negative sentiment toward Israel and its supporters.
“One of the findings of this report is that antisemitism in that classic, conspiratorial sense is far more widespread than anti-Israel sentiment,” Williams said.
The report highlighted that 90 percent of Americans agreed Israel “has a right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it” and that 79 percent agreed Israel is a “strong U.S. ally in the Middle East.” However, 40 percent at least slightly agreed that Israel “treats Palestinians like Nazis treated the Jews,” and 17 percent disagreed with the statement “I am comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.”
Alan Cooperman, director of religion research at the Pew Research Center and an adviser on the ADL project, said Judaism’s long history includes periods of ebbs and flows in antisemitism — sometimes long ones.
He noted that in 2013, Pew convened a dozen or more top experts on American Judaism for a survey and asked about their priorities and what areas needed more information and attention. The consensus at the time was that antisemitism was at a historic low in the United States and that, while it still existed, it wasn’t a pressing concern. When Pew talked to experts in 2020, their attitudes were “a complete sea change. They told us antisemitism is a very pressing issue and we need to devote a lot of attention to understanding it.”
The vast majority of U.S. Jews told Pew in 2020 that antisemitism had increased in the past five years, and a slim majority said they personally feel less safe.
Alvin Rosenfeld, director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University at Bloomington, said antisemitism never goes away but morphs in its own unique ways.
In the West it has ancient roots in Christian teachings of Jews as satanic Christ-killers. In modern times, “religious bias gives way to racialized notions of Jewish inferiority or supremacy,” he said, noting this year is the 120th anniversary of the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an influential document falsely purporting to be a Jewish plan for world domination.
Then came Holocaust denial and types of critiques of Israel that are antisemitic.
“So the 'new’ antisemitism dates way back. Charges of Jewish conspiracy, Jews in control of the media, politics, entertainment, the money world — all of that dates back way back. It’s multicausal today,” Rosenfeld said. “When hatred is so diverse, it’s more potent and dangerous.”
Polling analyst Emily Guskin contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Michelle Boorstein · January 12, 2023
12. What is the Wagner Group, the mercenary organization working for Russia in Ukraine?
Excerpts:
Raman-Wilms: Wow. Okay. How many people are in the Wagner Group?
McFate: So it’s been around since 2014, 2013, depending on who you talk to. My sources tell me that before the Ukraine war, they said about 10,000 to 15,000 people have gone through the doors of Wagner. That’s a big number. Most mercenary groups are, you know, much like 100 or less.
Raman-Wilms: What sort of accountability is there for a group like this, Sean?
McFate: There is no accountability for a group like this. Look at the Colombian mercenaries who assassinated the president of Haiti [in 2021]. We caught those mercenaries. We still don’t know who hired them. They don’t know who hired them. So somebody out there in the world assassinated a sitting head of state and cleanly got away with it. International laws are very weak on mercenaries, to be honest. There’s no precise definition of it. And even if you had good laws, who’s going to go into Ukraine and arrest all those mercenaries? Not the United Nations, not NATO. And also mercenaries can shoot the law enforcement dead. So because of these factors, growing clientele both in states and nonstates, the fact that international regulation is pretty powerless to stop it means that we’re seeing a trend line in the last 10 years of the growth of a mercenary industry in the 21st century.
What is the Wagner Group, the mercenary organization working for Russia in Ukraine?
The Globe and Mail · by Menaka Raman-Wilms · January 12, 2023
A man wearing a camouflage uniform walks out of PMC Wagner Centre during the official opening of the office block in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Nov. 4, 2022.IGOR RUSSAK/Reuters
Please log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free Account
Allegations of war crimes and human rights abuses in Ukraine by the invading Russian forces continue to pile up, and some of these incidents have been linked to a mercenary organization called the Wagner Group.
Sean McFate is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order. He’s also a U.S. Army veteran and former military contractor, which he acknowledges is another term for a mercenary.
McFate spoke with me for our daily podcast The Decibel in May, about the Wagner Group: how it operates, what members of the group have said to him, and why hiring mercenaries might become more common.
Raman-Wilms: So let’s just start with the basics here. What is the Wagner Group?
McFate: The Wagner Group is a mercenary organization that works for Russia. But it’s not like a legal entity. It doesn’t have a legal charter anywhere. It’s owned and controlled by a Russian oligarch whose name is [Yevgeny] Prigozhin, and he is close to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. Basically, the Wagner group does the Kremlin’s dirty work overseas, and it’s been their weapon of choice the last eight years when they’ve expanded into Africa and expanded into the Middle East. And Russia’s not doing this with Special Forces or sort of some ex-KGB organization. They’re using the Wagner Group.
Raman-Wilms: What sort of work is this group typically hired to do?
McFate: So typically, they’re hired to do direct action or combat or assault. They’re doing that in Ukraine right now. They also do training and equipping, which they’ve done in the Central African Republic. They do regime security in, for example, Mali. Mali has had two coup d’états, there’s a military junta that’s in charge of Mali, and to coup-proof themselves, you know, they’ve hired the Wagner group to do it. So Wagner Group is giving the coup leaders high-end bodyguard details and they’re training and equipping a special sort of elite militia that’s just loyal to the coup leaders. In exchange for all these services, they get mining rights. We see that in Central African Republic, and in Mali. They get oil rights in Syria. And in Syria, they were asked just to simply kill ISIS [Islamic State], and they did that very effectively, with a lot of collateral damage. And so that’s another thing that they do: They commit war crimes. And again, because of the plausible deniability, even though we might all sort of snicker and say we know exactly who did that, like in Bucha, the massacre in Ukraine, it’s hard for international law to prove anything.
Raman-Wilms: And you call this a mercenary group? I feel like this is kind of an old term that we don’t use that much these days. What exactly is a mercenary?
McFate: A mercenary is exactly what people think about. These are foreign fighters who are going abroad to participate in other people’s wars, chiefly for profit. And they’re using force in a military or paramilitary way. These are not sort of gate guards at the shopping mall. These are sort of, you know, commandos or even infantry. There’s a lot of questions about what’s the difference between a private military company like Blackwater and a mercenary company like the Wagner Group. Academics and lawyers spill volumes of ink on this question, but basically it’s the same. I’ll add that I used to be in this industry myself for many years. And I can tell you from the inside, it’s just a term of art at the end of the day. Of course, I would describe myself as a private military contractor. But ultimately, you know, the Wagner Group, they are mercenaries.
Raman-Wilms: So you yourself were a private military contractor. Could you just expand on that?
McFate: So I used to be in the U.S. Army paratroopers as an officer, and then I left that and joined a private military company that worked chiefly, if not exclusively, for the United States of America. And I was their man in Africa. And I did things that would have traditionally been outsourced to, say, the CIA or special operations forces. And then I left working for the U.S. government clients and I worked sort of free market, for oil companies and stuff like that. And then I had this epiphany where I realized that there are no old people in my industry, or at least none that I liked. And I started to question my life choices and decided to leave. So I’m here now trying to pull back the curtain on this mysterious world. I write a lot about it. I track it. I talk to mercenaries around the world, including people in the Wagner Group.
Raman-Wilms: What has this group been accused of doing? Maybe we can start with Mali.
McFate: Well, Mali, Central African Republic, Syria, wherever they go, there’s a trail of things like rapes and murders and excessive force against civilians. Things that we in the West, even our military, we’re like, we don’t do that. But when you hire the Wagner Group, one of their chief selling points is human rights violations, because sometimes soldiers just don’t want to do that. Whereas if you’re a mercenary, that’s kind of part of the job.
Raman-Wilms: Let’s just back up a bit because everyone describes the Wagner Group as a Kremlin-linked organization. But Putin denies any connection to them. So how do we know that it’s tied to Russia and to Putin?
McFate: And also Prigozhin, who owns it, denies any knowledge of this. And that’s absurd. Putin’s legacy item is to recreate the Russian empire. And he’s taken great steps in recent years, most notably in Ukraine, to try to resurrect the superpower that was the USSR, but not under some sort of communist ideology, but under like, Czar Putin. He likes mercenaries because they give you plausible deniability. So if things go badly someplace or you want to commit human rights abuse as a policy, if they get caught, you can always back away and say, well, we don’t know who those Russians are. And as absurd as that sounds, it kind of works, believe it or not. So, you know, meanwhile, we have a lot of ties between the GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence organization, handling and even intelligence sharing with the Wagner Group.
Sean McFate speaks with The Decibel's Menaka Raman-Wilms about a mercenary organization called the Wagner Group. Subscribe for more episodes.
Raman-Wilms: This group has also been accused of operating in Ukraine and specifically in Bucha, where civilians were really brutally targeted. What do we know about how the Wagner Group was involved there?
McFate: We know from the past, like in Syria, that they engage in capture, torture and kill. In Syria and in Bucha, you see people with their hands tied behind their backs, shot to the head, to the neck. In Syria, they decapitated them. Some people might say, well, these are really sociopath rogue warriors. That is true. But it’s also true that this is a Russian policy, too. So German intelligence has intercepted a command from the GRU, the Russian military intelligence that traditionally handles – they don’t own them – they handle a volunteer group to do these types of things. But I do want to emphasize it’s not just the Wagner Group doing these horrific war crimes. It’s largely the Russian army.
Raman-Wilms: What does the Russian government gain if their army is doing similar things? What do they gain from having a group like [the Wagner Group]?
McFate: Well, before Putin’s blunder-ridden invasion of Ukraine, he used the Wagner Group to extend Russian influence in the shadows because of the plausible deniability. Now, Ukraine’s a different situation. As we all know, Putin thought this invasion would take three days and now it’s not. And so Putin is desperate, he needs soldiers. And if you can outsource it, you can conceal the costs of the conflict. So right now, hiring mercenaries allows Russia to keep on extending the conflict and minimizing Russian soldiers going home in body bags, which is a big problem for Putin’s domestics. But of course, the Wagner Group is getting killed. A lot of their new role in Ukraine is not really what it’s been in the last couple of years.
Raman-Wilms: Sean, how do you actually figure out what this group is up to and what they’re doing?
McFate: I mean, first of all, you’ve got Ukrainian sources, but you can’t trust them either because controlling the information space is controlling the narrative, the information. So Russia’s downplaying it, saying they’re not there. Ukraine’s up-playing it, saying they’re everywhere. But we have things like German intelligence agencies and others intercept messages and make them public without revealing the sources and methods. You have people like myself; I’ve been a close tracker of this group since 2013, 2014. And there are, you know, investigative journalists like Bellingcat who have sources and human networks on the ground. So all of us actually keep in quite close contact and we kind of pass around and verify or try to verify things we’ve heard, seen. And of course, I talk to members of Wagner, not members who are on the ground right now, but members who are elsewhere. And they kind of tell me a couple of things, too.
Raman-Wilms: What are they telling you about what they’re doing?
McFate: Most of them, they’re ex-soldiers from around the Russian-speaking world. They do it because they need the money. Some of them do it because they don’t know what to do with their life. Some of them do it because they’re sociopaths, you know? And what they’re telling me right now is that the war in Ukraine is going really badly. They know they’re cannon fodder. And the group has changed a lot as a result. Nobody’s happy in the Wagner Group. They’d all rather be working for like some Saudi prince someplace who pays a lot of money and just wants you to guard oil infrastructure. And there’s no real danger. But the way that Russia keeps the Wagner Group mercenaries from going abroad is that ironically, Russia has very strict anti-mercenary laws on their books. And even though the Kremlin hires these mercenaries to do their dirty work, if these mercenaries start looking for other clients outside of Russia, they arrest them and throw them in jail as mercenaries.
Raman-Wilms: So they’re hiring mercenaries here. But if these mercenaries are stepping out of line, they are charging them and penalizing them for being mercenaries.
McFate: It’s a very Russian solution. That’s right.
Raman-Wilms: Wow. Okay. How many people are in the Wagner Group?
McFate: So it’s been around since 2014, 2013, depending on who you talk to. My sources tell me that before the Ukraine war, they said about 10,000 to 15,000 people have gone through the doors of Wagner. That’s a big number. Most mercenary groups are, you know, much like 100 or less.
Raman-Wilms: What sort of accountability is there for a group like this, Sean?
McFate: There is no accountability for a group like this. Look at the Colombian mercenaries who assassinated the president of Haiti [in 2021]. We caught those mercenaries. We still don’t know who hired them. They don’t know who hired them. So somebody out there in the world assassinated a sitting head of state and cleanly got away with it. International laws are very weak on mercenaries, to be honest. There’s no precise definition of it. And even if you had good laws, who’s going to go into Ukraine and arrest all those mercenaries? Not the United Nations, not NATO. And also mercenaries can shoot the law enforcement dead. So because of these factors, growing clientele both in states and nonstates, the fact that international regulation is pretty powerless to stop it means that we’re seeing a trend line in the last 10 years of the growth of a mercenary industry in the 21st century.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Listen to The Decibel every weekday for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Globe and Mail · by Menaka Raman-Wilms · January 12, 2023
13. Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Meeting With Japanese Minister of Defense Hamada Yasukazu at the Pentagon
Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Meeting With Japanese Minister of Defense Hamada Yasukazu at the Pentagon
defense.gov
Release
Immediate Release
Jan. 12, 2023 |×
Share
Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder provided the following readout:
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III hosted Japanese Minister of Defense Hamada Yasukazu at the Pentagon for a bilateral meeting, January 12, following the U.S.-Japan 2+2 Security Consultative Committee (2+2) Meeting, January 11.
Expressing full support for Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and Defense Buildup Program, Secretary Austin welcomed Japan’s decision to strengthen its defense, including in its Southwest Islands, and to acquire counterstrike capabilities. The two leaders reaffirmed the necessity of optimizing Alliance force posture and enhancing our response capabilities through readjustments in the laydown of U.S. forces in Japan, in accordance with the basic tenets of the 2012 Realignment Plan.
They heralded the stationing of the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment in Japan by 2025, with advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, anti-ship, and transportation capabilities, as well as associated posture initiatives as a historic step for the U.S.-Japan Alliance.
Secretary Austin underscored the unwavering U.S. commitment to the defense of Japan, including U.S. extended deterrence provided by the full range of conventional and nuclear capabilities. The Ministers affirmed that the Alliance is stalwart in the face of challenges and steadfast in support for shared democratic values and norms that underpin the rules-based international order.
They welcomed increased co-development opportunities and supply chain security cooperation with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding for Research, Development, Test and Evaluation Projects (RDT&E) and the Security of Supply Arrangement (SOSA). Both leaders reaffirmed the strategic alignment between the United States and Japan, as well as our shared goals to modernize the Alliance, bolster integrated deterrence, and ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific region in collaboration with like-minded partners.
defense.gov
14. Crenshaw, Waltz introduce joint resolution to give Biden military authority to combat cartels
Crenshaw, Waltz introduce joint resolution to give Biden military authority to combat cartels
Crenshaw quipped he's 'giving the Democrat president authority to look good for the American people'
foxnews.com · by Houston Keene | Fox News
Video
Luis Chaparro: Cartels have managed to get strong links in the US
WARNING-Graphic Footage: Journalist and producer Luis Chaparro takes a look inside Mexican drug labs on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.'
FIRST ON FOX: Two Republican lawmakers introduced a joint resolution to give President Biden the military authority to combat transnational cartels smuggling fentanyl into the U.S.
Reps. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and Michael Waltz, R-Fla., introduced a joint resolution authorizing Biden to use military force to combat the cartels pumping fentanyl and other similar, dangerous substances across the border.
Crenshaw, the architect of the bill last Congress, told Fox News Digital that the cartels "are responsible for about 360,000 homicides this year in Mexico" and that they are "militaristic in nature," mirroring "an all-out civil war" in many cases.
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT REVIVED WITH NARCAN AFTER USING VAPE SUSPECTED TO BE LACED WITH FENTANYL
Reps. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, pictured on the left, and Michael Waltz, R-Fla., not pictured, introduced a joint resolution authorizing President Biden to use military force to combat the cartels pumping fentanyl and other similar, dangerous substances across the border. (Thomas Phippen/Fox News)
The Texas Republican also said the "same level of cooperation" America saw with the Colombian government under former President Clinton isn’t being mirrored by Mexico "to the extent it needs to" and that the big difference between that situation and today’s is the fentanyl factor.
"What we’ve been dealing with for a while now, and nobody wants to talk about it too much, is a potentially failed narcoterrorist state at our border," Crenshaw told Fox News Digital in a Wednesday phone call.
"And when you have 80,000 Americans a year dying from fentanyl overdose, oftentimes not even knowing they were taking fentanyl, that to me is active hostilities against the American people," the congressman continued.
Crenshaw said he did not believe the Mexican government’s "claim that the son of El Chapo’s arrest was not related to [President] Biden’s visit" and that the U.S. needs "to pressure them to do more."
"They can do more. Under President Trump, they were shown that they would do more if we leverage them," Crenshaw said. "And this is some pretty serious leverage."
The congressman also said that the joint resolution "is not some messaging bill" and is "a very serious conversation about what needs to be done to address this threat."
The Texas congressman also noted that he previously introduced the Declaring War Against Cartels Act last Congress and that the Mexican government "used to play ball a lot more, and they’ve done it a lot less.
Waltz told Fox News Digital that the resolution is needed because the cartels "have exceeded the capability of law enforcement" and are a "paramilitary arm armed with armored vehicles, heavy weapons, and billions at their disposal." (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Crenshaw said the Mexican government "is fairly transactional and fairly prone to leverage" and said the joint resolution is "leverage," adding the U.S. is "done having nice conversations where we all shake hands at the end and put our different flags behind us."
"We are really, really serious about this. You guys have threats within your country that are becoming serious threats to our country, killing tens of thousands of Americans a year. And we need to address it. So it's a carrot and a stick. We want to help them, but we need that strong language in there, too."
Crenshaw said that his GOP colleagues in the House are showing interest in the resolution and quipped that his "message to Democrats" is he’s "giving the Democrat president authority to look good for the American people."
"Why don't you take me up on that? How about that? Because this is a problem that faces every American. This is not partisan," Crenshaw said. "You know, this is not a partisan bill. This is a strong national security bill."
Waltz told Fox News Digital that the resolution is needed because the cartels "have exceeded the capability of law enforcement" and are a "paramilitary arm armed with armored vehicles, heavy weapons, and billions at their disposal."
"And we've even seen collaboration with international terrorist groups and the Chinese Communist Party with these groups," Waltz said in a Wednesday phone interview. "So, we believe that we need to start using military assets to address this national security threat."
"That does not have to mean troops on the ground," the Florida Republican continued. "That can be cyber, that can be drones, that can be military surveillance assets, space assets, you name it."
The resolution would give Biden the military authority to go after cartels engaging in fentanyl trafficking. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
"But we have to start disrupting them, dismantling them, and targeting their leaders," he added.
Waltz pointed to the U.S.’s "tremendous success" with Plan Colombia under former President Clinton and America needs to look at the issue of cartels as a national security issue, not a law enforcement issue.
The Florida Republican also said that he and Crenshaw want to begin offering the Mexican government "assets and offering them help" and that "cooperation with the United States" is necessary "to defeat" the cartels.
"But obviously, the Biden administration is going to have to take this on board and the Obrador administration is going to take it on board," Waltz said. "I don't want to wait until we have… even more casualties than we already have. I want to start pushing this effort while we have a Republican-led Congress and as we're heading into 2024."
Waltz said the "cartels have declared war against us" and that "it’s time to hit back."
Crenshaw initially drafted the resolution last Congress and is introducing the legislation with Waltz as the Republican-controlled 118th Congress kicks off.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
The military authorization would give Biden the authority to go after nine cartels — including the influential Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels — engaging in fentanyl trafficking and the trafficking of related substances, and are destabilizing the Western hemisphere.
The bill also includes a sunset clause of five years, requiring a revisitation to the situation after the time period expires. Waltz said the sunset clause was responsive to the previous military force authorizations that led to "20-something-long years" of military action.
Houston Keene is a politics writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Houston.Keene@Fox.com and on Twitter: @HoustonKeene
foxnews.com · by Houston Keene | Fox News
15. The propaganda of “propaganda”
If you missed this previously it is worth pondering. Matt Armstrong is one of our nation's rue experts on propaganda and all that is related to it.
Excerpts:
My tortured point (and congratulations for reading this far) is the meaning of “propaganda” is elusive. While substantive definitions exist, Doob’s 1935 comment that “In America, the word ‘propaganda’ has a bad odor” seems like a severe understatement nearly ninety years later as the gap between academic discussions and the view of the street, so to speak, has likely grown. If you ask your coworker, neighbor, classmate, or random stranger whether “propaganda” is bad or good, I doubt many would respond with “it is good” or “it depends.”
It is easy to call something propaganda, but the stunning lack of precision and constraints in the definition, whether a precise definition or merely a commonly accepted view of the word, is why entire books are written to define and assign parameters to what is and is not propaganda. Applying the label without specificity is potentially misleading as it will likely impart a negative view of the “propaganda” and the “propagandist” being discussed and analyzed.
If there is one takeaway from this dispatch, I hope it is this: Be careful calling something propaganda, doing so might make you a propagandist.
What are your thoughts?
The propaganda of “propaganda”
mountainrunner.us · by View all posts by Matt Armstrong
This post first appeared at mountainrunner.substack.com on 13 December 2022. It appears here with minor edits. Be sure to check there for comments on the article and subscribe to my substack for timely follow-ups and new posts through the substack app, through email, and to participate in chats. It’s free!
I heard long ago the lathe was the only machine capable of making itself. I don’t know if that was true, but it stuck with me. I mention that because it seems like there is a loose parallel between that statement and the word “propaganda.” Propaganda is interesting in that it may be the only word in the English language that, when used, may be an act of the very word. In other words, calling something propaganda may be propaganda.
For nearly twenty years, I worked around the word “propaganda” academically and professionally. Whether I facilitated propaganda is a fair discussion, but whenever I was called a propagandist, the term was used as a pejorative and arguably an act of propaganda itself. It was merely a blanket label based on the notion that any communication, active or passive, deserved the title. The flip side of each of these engagements often (nearly always) absolved other actors from the label.
In public diplomacy, for example, the propaganda label frequently appears in law review articles analyzing the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. I briefly reflect on this issue in recent dispatches, calling out “Apple Pie Propaganda” by Weston Sager from 2015 and “The Smith-Mundt Act’s Ban on Domestic Propaganda” by Allen Palmer and Edward Carter from 2006 as two oft-cited culprits here and here. The authors here employ the word casually, without clarification or specificity, in a wink-and-nod that while it is definitionally neutral, its everyday use is definitively pejorative. The pejorative is easily inferred as the authors’ framing concerns a “ban” on seeing or hearing the “propaganda.”
Propaganda is an easy word to toss out. This or that is propaganda. But being so easy, it lends itself to mischaracterizations and abuse. Is everything propaganda? Is this note propaganda because I intend to change your opinion? What if I was merely informing you, laying out the information for you to make your own choice? Would it then be propaganda? Is it not propaganda because I’m not a government actor?
Noah Webster, William Torrey Harris, and Frederic Sturges Allen, Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language: Based on the International Dictionary of 1890 and 1900 (London, Springfield, Mass.: G. Bell & Sons and G. & C. Merriam Company, 1911).
What do we mean by propaganda? Let’s step back to when, in US English, the word propaganda was not inherently negative. Over a century ago, the word wasn’t very important in American English. There was also a time when it did not appear in American English dictionaries, and when it did, it crept in like, “oh, here’s another definition.” In the 1911 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language: Based on the International Dictionary of 1890 and 1900 (yes, in fact, I do have a copy of this enormous two-volume tome on my shelf), see the picture above and go to 2b to find, “The doctrine or principles thus propagated.” It is worth a moment to glance at the whole definition.
In 1920, a fellow named George Creel wrote a book extolling his virtues and why he should be hired due to his awesomeness as a marketer. (This book has been received incorrectly as a factual and complete account of the Committee on Public Information’s purpose, work, reach, and effects, though that is all outside the scope of this write-up). In this book, we find a seemingly oft-cited statement by Creel: “We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption.” Cool, except Creel went on to use propaganda more than one hundred times in the pages that followed to describe truthful and honest information and disinformation, thereby fudging his claim.
In 1922, a Funk & Wagnall’s dictionary, The College Standard Dictionary of the English Language, still did not have a separate entry for “propaganda.” Instead, under propagate, there was a part 2 with “propagating a doctrine” and a part 3 with “gaining public support for an opinion or course of action.”
That year, Walter Lippmann described propaganda as an “effort to alter the picture to which men respond.” While this sounds like a description of any communication and applicable to everything Lippmann wrote, he added effective censorship was necessary for the label to apply. In this definition, it is not merely the intent, but parameters around the reception matter.
Edward Bernays followed up three years later and removed the need for selective hearing: “Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or group.” This led to the idea a message is propaganda if it is part of a mass engagement, though the size requirement isn’t specified.
A decade later, in 1935, Leonard Doob, opened his book Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique, saying, “In America, the word ‘propaganda’ has a bad odor.” This suggests a lack of inherent neutrality of the term, which probably contributed to the label propaganda being accompanied by a qualifier, like “good,” “bad,” “our,” or “their.”
For example, testifying before Congress on February 19, 1946, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes spoke on the applicability of the propaganda label and the need for a qualified use concerning the pending Bloom bill to authorize the State Department’s global informational efforts through the provision of libraries, speakers, posters, news releases, and more (the Bloom bill had previously been introduced by Rep. Karl Mundt and called the Mundt bill before being renamed the Bloom bill; in 1947, it was reintroduced by Mundt at the request of the State Department and later became the Smith-Mundt Act):
Let us look at the word “propaganda.” We would defeat our objectives in this program if we were to put forth lies, or in distorted or biased selection of the facts, or engage in special pleading. Our purpose is, and will be, solely to supply the facts on which foreign peoples can arrive at a rational and accurate judgment. A fair and balanced picture of American policies, and of the national life that lies behind those policies, is all we want or need to convey. If that is propaganda, it is honest propaganda.
Dishonest propaganda isn’t worth the money or effort spent on it. It is easy to detect and expose where any measure of freedom exists. The audience for it is small and growing smaller. But the audience for honest information is large; the world is hungry for reliable information about America. That is what we have been supplying…
(The above two paragraphs immediately preceded quote #7 in the “Who said it, when, and why” quiz a few weeks ago.)
A week later, Elmer Davis, formerly the head of the Office of War Information, emphasized that propaganda was not inherently bad: “The truth is that a fact — an incontrovertible fact — is often the most powerful propaganda.” (This was quote #10 in the Who said it, when, and why quiz.)
In 1951, the need for a qualifier continued. The US Advisory Commission on Information, established by the Smith-Mundt Act as an oversight body over the government’s international information programs to advise Congress, the Secretary of State, and the President, used the word propaganda:
No propaganda can be any stronger than the policy from which it springs. Thus the information specialists should be at all times and at all levels just as close as they possibly can be to the making of policy… Since most foreign policy is made by the State Department, the closer the information program can be to the State Department, the more effective the propaganda will be.
The 1946 edited book Propaganda, Communication, and Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, edited by Bruce Lannes Smith, Harold D. Lasswell, and Ralph D. Casey (Princeton University Press), stated, “Not all use of language is propaganda.” They segregated certain uses, like diplomacy, while applying criteria, like “aimed at large masses” and the intention is to “influence mass attitudes on controversial issues” (italics in the original). To these authors, the “clumsy vehicle of words” meant that “Every government on the globe, whether despotism or democracy, whether at war or at peace, relies upon propaganda—more or less efficiently harmonized with strategy, diplomacy, and economics—to accomplish its ends.” The label propaganda would become a more “clumsy vehicle.”
A close reading of the countless examples of qualifiers accompanying propaganda suggests Doob’s 1935 observation was accurate. So, why did the word choice persist? Likely because it encapsulated so much, allowing authors to skip discussions about influence, intentions, persuasion, and so on. Propaganda is just this relatively neat package, but is it?
What is propaganda, is it something known when seen, echoing Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 comment about pornography obscenity? This suggests the receiver or witness defines propaganda, and the intent or structure has little to no bearing. Such a broad and subjective interpretation is not helpful (and is quite lazy).
Is it simply about the intent to influence? Can one inform without influence? Say the audience is large, and you are intentionally affecting behavior and opinions, is it possible this is not influence? Would this be propaganda?
Let me offer an example I’ve used in discussions around the ability (spoiler: inability) to “inform without influence” for more than a dozen years. Imagine you are the public affairs officer at a large military base in the United States, and there will be a major construction project at the main gate. This effort will cause significant travel problems for the surrounding communities and not just for the personnel and vendors trying to get on the base. Naturally, you work with the local community to identify ways to mitigate the negative impacts on commuting and travel near the base. You probably help develop and communicate alternative routes and options or encourage the development and communication of alternatives to ease the impact on travelers and businesses. Part – perhaps the majority – of your incentive to engage with the community on this issue is a consideration of the importance of their perception of the base and its personnel. The base maintaining good relations with the community is good politics, the base is a government institution, and the public affairs officer is a government employee, so this must be political communication and propaganda, right?
(My past use of this PAO and the base gate closure example was to suggest public affairs officers can and do influence public opinion and effect behavior, both of which are notionally things “only PSYOP does” since public affairs can magically “inform without influence.”)
Modern definitions seeking precision vary, but let’s check on Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell’s definition in their fourth edition of Propaganda and Persuasion(2006):
Propaganda is the deliberate, systemic attempt to shape percpetions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.
The focus here is the intent and means of the “propagandist.” Without qualifying parameters drawn from motives, this definition situates the PAO example above as propaganda by a propagandist. This leads us back to the need to add whether propaganda is good or bad.
Consider efforts to transmit factual, truthful, and honest news (“straight news”). Since the need for a motive is absent from the definition, calling this function propaganda seems appropriate, including when sending information to empower people with factual and truthful information to, for example, undermine the disinformation or misinformation they are otherwise living with. Certainly, the gatekeepers trying to ensure only the disinformation is received would claim the true and accurate news is propaganda, and in absolute terms, they’d be right. Is propaganda only when a government sends the information? What if the information is from a commercial news service or the content and transmission are controlled by a commercial entity? It would seem the sender doesn’t matter.
We can apply the Jowett-O’Donnell definition backward to Paul Blackstock in The Strategy of Subversion: Manipulating the Politics of Other Nations (Quadrangle Books, 1964) in his description of the application of “non-military tools of foreign policy”:
In practice, the use of any of these methods of political warfare has been accompanied by propaganda activities ranging from straight news services and cultural relations programs to the most scurrilous forms of “black” or non-attributable proapganda and rumor mongering.
It’s all propaganda. But it’s not, and Jowett and O’Donnell don’t claim everything is. They go to great lengths to consider differences, bringing in “rhetoric” as an alternative label. In their Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion (2006), they argue for a distinction between rhetoric and propaganda that would place my examples of the PAO and the base gate and “straight news” outside of the scope of propaganda. After all, there must be some way to counter this statement, shared by Donald C. Bryant in his 1953 “Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope” article:
Propaganda, after all, is only a word for anything one says for or against anything. Either everything, therefore, is propaganda, or nothing is propgaganda, so why worry?
My tortured point (and congratulations for reading this far) is the meaning of “propaganda” is elusive. While substantive definitions exist, Doob’s 1935 comment that “In America, the word ‘propaganda’ has a bad odor” seems like a severe understatement nearly ninety years later as the gap between academic discussions and the view of the street, so to speak, has likely grown. If you ask your coworker, neighbor, classmate, or random stranger whether “propaganda” is bad or good, I doubt many would respond with “it is good” or “it depends.”
It is easy to call something propaganda, but the stunning lack of precision and constraints in the definition, whether a precise definition or merely a commonly accepted view of the word, is why entire books are written to define and assign parameters to what is and is not propaganda. Applying the label without specificity is potentially misleading as it will likely impart a negative view of the “propaganda” and the “propagandist” being discussed and analyzed.
If there is one takeaway from this dispatch, I hope it is this: Be careful calling something propaganda, doing so might make you a propagandist.
What are your thoughts?
mountainrunner.us · by View all posts by Matt Armstrong
16. Taiwan must not suffer the same fate as Ukraine
Excerpts:
President Joe Biden’s repeated statement that the US will help Taiwan if China were to attack is also important. It shows that strategic ambiguity has been replaced with strategic clarity. To paraphrase the famous maxim, the best way to preserve peace is make clear you are prepared to go to war.
The final and most important way to deter a Chinese move on Taiwan is to ensure a Ukrainian victory in the current conflict. If Russia can gain territory and establish a new status quo by force, it sets a dangerous precedent. China and other autocratic powers will learn that the democratic world’s resolve is weak and that nuclear blackmail and military aggression work. The lesson we learn from history is that appeasement with dictators does not lead to peace, it leads to war and conflict. That is why all those who believe in a democratic Taiwan and a rules-based international order must work to ensure Ukraine prevails.
If the democratic world learns these lessons and acts now, Taiwan can avoid the horrors being inflicted on Ukraine. Through our support, we can empower the people of both Taiwan and Ukraine to decide their own future. One based on the principles of freedom, democracy and self-determination.
Taiwan must not suffer the same fate as Ukraine
The parallels between Russia and China are hard to ignore — allies must act now to deter an invasion
Financial Times · by Anders Fogh Rasmussen · January 12, 2023
The writer is a former Nato secretary-general
This week China embarked on significant military exercises around the coast of Taiwan. It was the second such drill in less than a month and the latest in a series of provocations by Beijing designed to intimidate Taipei. This was the backdrop for my visit to Taiwan last week, the first official one by a former Nato secretary-general. I was there to declare my full support for freedom, democracy and the right of the Taiwanese people to decide their own future, in peace.
It was my second time on the island. I originally visited in 1994 as a young member of the Danish Parliament. Since then, Taiwan’s economy has boomed, becoming a leader in cutting edge technologies and an indispensable link in global supply chains. Even more importantly, its democracy has become a beacon of liberty not only in Asia but for the entire world.
Taiwan’s democratic transformation would be impressive under any circumstances. The fact it has happened while facing daily provocations from a nuclear armed neighbour makes it remarkable. Here, the parallels with Ukraine and Russia are hard to ignore. An authoritarian leader turning increasingly repressive at home and aggressive abroad, revanchist rhetoric about reuniting the motherland, a build-up of military equipment and personnel aimed menacingly at a smaller democracy next door. The democratic world failed to deter a Russian attack on Ukraine — we must not make the same mistakes with China. We must learn the right lessons from the war in Ukraine to prevent one in the Taiwan Strait.
The first lesson is that Ukraine remains a free country because its people were prepared to fight. Weapons supplies have only proved effective because the Ukrainian people were willing to die to protect their homeland. Deterring an attack by China relies on the credible belief that any invasion would come at an immense cost. The decision by the Taiwanese President to extend military service from four months to one year is important. It sends a signal that Taiwan is serious about its own defence and its people are willing to fight for a free and democratic future.
The second lesson is the importance of a strong and unified response from the democratic world. Since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s allies have supplied weapons and imposed economic sanctions. If we had shown this unity of purpose after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, it could have deterred a full-scale invasion. Democratic leaders must make clear that any attempt by China to forcibly change the status quo in Taiwan would spark an equally unified response.
European politicians must stop sending mixed signals. China relies on exports to global markets to fuel its growth. It is far more entwined in global supply chains than Russia, so spelling out the economic consequences of an attack in advance can act as a powerful deterrent.
Third, ultimately weapons are what counts. Ukraine managed to stop the initial Russian invasion and turn the tide of the war thanks to the supply of superior military equipment from its allies, particularly the US. If Ukraine had had these capabilities before the war, Putin may have thought twice before launching a full-scale invasion.
That lesson is even more important for Taiwan, whose island geography will be difficult to resupply in a time of war. To be an effective deterrent, we should give Taiwan the weapons it needs to defend itself now. Xi Jinping must calculate that the cost of an invasion is simply too high.
President Joe Biden’s repeated statement that the US will help Taiwan if China were to attack is also important. It shows that strategic ambiguity has been replaced with strategic clarity. To paraphrase the famous maxim, the best way to preserve peace is make clear you are prepared to go to war.
The final and most important way to deter a Chinese move on Taiwan is to ensure a Ukrainian victory in the current conflict. If Russia can gain territory and establish a new status quo by force, it sets a dangerous precedent. China and other autocratic powers will learn that the democratic world’s resolve is weak and that nuclear blackmail and military aggression work. The lesson we learn from history is that appeasement with dictators does not lead to peace, it leads to war and conflict. That is why all those who believe in a democratic Taiwan and a rules-based international order must work to ensure Ukraine prevails.
If the democratic world learns these lessons and acts now, Taiwan can avoid the horrors being inflicted on Ukraine. Through our support, we can empower the people of both Taiwan and Ukraine to decide their own future. One based on the principles of freedom, democracy and self-determination.
Financial Times · by Anders Fogh Rasmussen · January 12, 2023
17. Moscow Shakes Up Command of Its Forces in Ukraine (Again)
Excerpts:
Shoigu may have convinced Putin to make the change by playing to the Russian leader’s desire to resume large-scale offensive operations in Ukraine. In its press release yesterday, the MoD said Gerasimov was appointed commander because Russia needs a more senior figure to handle an “amplified range of tasks,” bolster “cooperation between services and branches of the Armed Forces,” and “improv[e] the quality of all types of maintenance and efficiency of commanding the groups of forces.”
That explanation may echo Shoigu’s own arguments to Putin — that empowering him and Gerasimov will enable them to reverse Russia’s fortunes in Ukraine.
Ironically, the move may achieve the opposite effect. Whereas Surovikin has proven himself to be a competent commander who can deliver bad news to Putin when necessary, Shoigu and Gerasimov’s track record suggests otherwise.
For Ukraine, of course, that is good news.
Moscow Shakes Up Command of Its Forces in Ukraine (Again)
fdd.org · by Jack Sullivan · January 12, 2023
Moscow announced yesterday that the chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, had been appointed commander of Russian forces in Ukraine. Gerasimov’s appointment reasserts his and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s role in Russia’s so-called “special military operation,” but it bodes poorly for Moscow’s war effort.
The Ministry of Defense (MoD) said the previous commander, General Sergei Surovikin, who also heads the Russian Aerospace Forces, will now serve as a deputy commander under Gerasimov. General Oleg Salyukov, the commander-in-chief of Russia’s Ground Forces, and Colonel General Aleksey Kim, a deputy chief of the General Staff, will also serve as deputy commanders, the ministry said.
The day prior, Russian media reported that Colonel General Alexander Lapin had been appointed as Ground Forces chief of staff, although the Kremlin declined to confirm or deny those reports. Lapin previously led Russia’s Central Military District and “Center” grouping of forces in Ukraine but was fired in October. His removal came amid intense criticism from Ramzan Kadyrov, head of Russia’s Chechen Republic, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin-connected businessmen who funds Russia’s Wagner military contractor group.
If those reports are true, Lapin will apparently be taking over for Kim. The latter was appointed as Ground Forces chief of staff a few months ago but has evidently received another promotion to the Russian General Staff, as the MoD statement indicates.
Gerasimov’s appointment is the latest in a long string of command shake-ups in a war effort often plagued by Kremlin micromanagement and a lack of unity of command.
Russia initially had no single commander responsible for the entire operation. Instead, the heads of Russia’s eastern, western, central, and southern military districts independently commanded their respective groupings of forces, likely coordinated to some degree back in Moscow. At times, they have reportedly received orders directly from President Vladimir Putin.
Back in April, U.S. officials said Putin had tapped General Alexander Dvornikov, the then head of Russia’s Southern Military District and “Southern” grouping of forces in Ukraine, to serve as overall commander. But Dvornikov did not last long. Some analysts believe Colonel General Gennady Zhidko, who led the MoD’s Main Military-Political Directorate, succeeded him. But neither his nor Dvornikov’s appointments were officially confirmed. Moscow has also sacked a number of other, more junior commanders throughout the war.
Surovikin officially received the reins in October and was likely the operation’s first true unified commander. Why Putin decided to replace him with Gerasimov is unclear.
Surovikin’s performance thus far does not warrant demotion. On the contrary, he has brought more competent leadership to Russia’s war effort. Notably, the general apparently convinced Putin to accept a militarily prudent but politically painful withdrawal in Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, then successfully completed that retrograde operation, which could have resulted in heavy losses if not executed well.
Since then, he has managed to stabilize Russia’s defensive lines. On New Year’s Eve, Putin appeared to signal his confidence in Surovikin by presenting him with the Order of St. George, third class.
The command shake-up may reflect internal power politics. Gerasimov and his ally Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, were previously rumored to have been sidelined and have taken heavy criticism from war hawks such as Kadyrov and Prigozhin, who have conversely praised Surovikin. By communicating directly with Surovikin and other Russian generals in Ukraine, Putin bypassed Shoigu and Gerasimov. Gerasimov’s appointment thus reasserts his and Shoigu’s place in the war effort and in Putin’s court.
Shoigu may have convinced Putin to make the change by playing to the Russian leader’s desire to resume large-scale offensive operations in Ukraine. In its press release yesterday, the MoD said Gerasimov was appointed commander because Russia needs a more senior figure to handle an “amplified range of tasks,” bolster “cooperation between services and branches of the Armed Forces,” and “improv[e] the quality of all types of maintenance and efficiency of commanding the groups of forces.”
That explanation may echo Shoigu’s own arguments to Putin — that empowering him and Gerasimov will enable them to reverse Russia’s fortunes in Ukraine.
Ironically, the move may achieve the opposite effect. Whereas Surovikin has proven himself to be a competent commander who can deliver bad news to Putin when necessary, Shoigu and Gerasimov’s track record suggests otherwise.
For Ukraine, of course, that is good news.
John Hardie is the deputy director of FDD’s Russia Program and a contributor to FDD’s Long War Journal. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Jack Sullivan · January 12, 2023
18. Army special operators face drug investigation at Fort Bragg
Another terrible scandal for the Regiment.
Army special operators face drug investigation at Fort Bragg
Stars and Stripes · by Corey Dickstein · January 11, 2023
More than a dozen Fort Bragg special operations soldiers were recently detained by Army officials investigating drug allegations at the North Carolina installation. (Logan Mock-Bunting, Getty Images/TNS)
ATLANTA — More than a dozen Fort Bragg special operations soldiers were recently detained by Army officials investigating drug allegations at the North Carolina installation, military officials said Wednesday.
Criminal Investigation Division officials have questioned 15 soldiers assigned to U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, said Lt. Col. Mike Burns, spokesman for the command. The soldiers were released to their chains of command following the interviews, and two were cleared of wrongdoing, he said.
“The use of illegal drugs or any other illegal activity goes directly against [Army special operations forces] values and does not reflect the behavior we demand from every soldier in our formation” Burns said in a statement. “USASOC maintains a strict policy against the use of any illegal drugs. Illegal drug use is not acceptable nor is it tolerated.”
It was not immediately clear Wednesday what sparked the investigation. A spokesman for CID did not return a request for further comment.
No soldiers had been charged with a crime related to the probe as of Wednesday, Army officials said.
Burns said the probe was continuing and it “would be inappropriate” to comment further on the allegations or the soldiers questioned in the matter.
“All soldiers have the right to due process, including the presumption of innocence under the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” he said.
USASOC would continue to cooperate with CID, Burns said.
The allegations are the latest in a string of recent incidents within the Pentagon’s special operations community that have included other allegations of drug use. Special operators in recent years have also faced other accusations including sexual misconduct and the use of alcohol on deployment and extrajudicial killings. Four special operators — two Navy SEALs and two Marine Raiders — pleaded guilty in the death of an Army Green Beret killed on a deployment to Mali in 2017.
A review of ethics within the special operations community ordered in 2019 found there was not a systemic problem within the Pentagon’s elite forces, but that high operations tempos and a lack of high-level oversight had contributed to problems with some special operators.
U.S. Special Operations Command, which is based at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., and oversees all U.S. special operators, said in a statement that it was aware of the allegations against soldiers at Fort Bragg.
“Illegal activity by any member of the special operations forces community undermines everything we stand for as an organization,” according to the USASOC statement issued Monday. “As a professional and disciplined force, we are committed to addressing harmful behaviors that affect our people — our most important asset — and upholding the high standards of conduct displayed by the vast majority of SOF members every day.”
Corey Dickstein
Corey Dickstein
Corey Dickstein covers the military in the U.S. southeast. He joined the Stars and Stripes staff in 2015 and covered the Pentagon for more than five years. He previously covered the military for the Savannah Morning News in Georgia. Dickstein holds a journalism degree from Georgia College & State University and has been recognized with several national and regional awards for his reporting and photography. He is based in Atlanta.
Stars and Stripes · by Corey Dickstein · January 11, 2023
19. House China committee’s mission: Military imbalance is foremost among many challenges
Excerpts:
The China Select Committee’s horizon is broad. It likely will consider all manner of issues, ranging from Chinese influence operations in the U.S. to Sino-American trade policy and the legal framework for U.S. financial engagement in China.
In a competition as complex as the Sino-American rivalry for Eurasia, every aspect is relevant.
But Rep. Gallagher and his future colleagues should not lose sight of the fundamental facts of Sino-American competition. The U.S.-China conventional military balance is the foundation of today’s Indo-Pacific situation; this balance has shifted against the U.S. over two decades, encouraging Chinese probes, if not outright aggression.
The U.S. can correct this, but only with prudence, foresight and a commitment to expand its military and industrial capacity alongside effective diplomacy. The China Committee’s fundamental task, then, is to begin the correction of the balance.
House China committee’s mission: Military imbalance is foremost among many challenges
BY SETH CROPSEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 01/12/23 11:30 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3810357-house-china-committees-mission-military-imbalance-is-foremost-among-many-challenges/
The House of Representatives finally has a Select Committee on China, a sorely-needed instrument to drive China policy debate in Congress and, if its agenda is set properly, prompt the White House to consider its approach to Beijing in a clearer light.
As committee chair, Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) will set the panel’s mission. Its central task should stem from geopolitical reality. The military balance has shifted severely against the United States after decades of neglect, particularly naval neglect. This shift has undermined the strategic status quo in Europe and in Asia. Unless the U.S. addresses it, primarily through a major expansion of naval forces and a commensurate increase in defense industrial capacity, it is a matter of time before an element of the strategic status quo cracks. The most likely fissure will involve Taiwan.
The success of Ukrainian resistance has blinded the U.S. and its allies to strategic history. Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine was only its latest move in the struggle for Eurasian mastery that resumed early in the last decade. At the time, the global financial crisis, America’s withdrawal from Iraq and military spending cuts reduced U.S. power; defense spending as a percentage of GDP dropped to 1990s levels by President Obama’s second term. Yet the 2010s were not the 1990s, and Putin’s Russia overran Crimea and deployed to its “near abroad.”
The most severe modifications, however, occurred in Asia, where growing Chinese power — and declining American capabilities — have upended the status quo without even a small military confrontation.
Rep. Gallagher’s charge as China Committee chair is to grapple with this reality.
Taiwan in context
The U.S. does not defend Taiwan primarily because of its democratic bona fides. The Taiwan-U.S. defense relationship extends back to the 1950s, when Taiwan was decidedly undemocratic but still preferable to Maoist China. When the Eisenhower administration concluded the 1954 Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, it did not expect Taiwan to reclaim the Chinese mainland. Nor is the issue relevant now: Even those among Taiwan’s nationalist Kuomintang party who retain an affinity towards the mainland do not seriously expect to displace the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and rule China.
Rather, the issue is strategic. Taiwan lies at the heart of the First Island Chain, the string of archipelagoes that restricts Chinese access to the world’s oceans. This has commercial relevance, given the Taiwan Strait is the focal point of all north-south traffic in east Asia. This also has military relevance: The Luzon Strait and Bashi Channel are the most viable deep-water links between China’s littoral seas and the Philippine Sea, and thus crucial for Chinese submarine operations. Taiwan in Chinese hands would serve as a gateway into the Western Pacific – Chinese missiles and aircraft forward-deployed to Taiwan could dominate the Philippine Sea, splitting Japan and the Philippines off from the United States.
The Taiwan-U.S. relationship, then, stems from considerations of military strategy. Taiwan is the keystone of the U.S. defense system in Asia. Without it, ensuring Philippine, Japanese, Korean and Australian membership in a U.S.-led alliance is impossible, at least barring a major fleet action in the Philippine Sea during which the U.S. would lose (based on historical parallels) around 10,000 men in victory, and even more in defeat.
In turn, Taiwan’s status rests squarely upon American power. Taiwan alone always would have struggled to repel a Chinese invasion, although the cost of a strictly Sino-Taiwanese war would have been high, given China’s limited naval capabilities. U.S. forces, however, had to be included in the balance and, until this century, they held the balance quite decisively.
Naval parity?
The United States resolved the first three Taiwan Straits crises because of conventional capabilities. Nuclear use was considered in the 1954 crisis, but it was the U.S. Navy’s support for Taiwanese forces, not U.S. nuclear brinksmanship, that halted Chinese aggression beyond Taiwan’s outlying islands. In the 1958 crisis, U.S. air-naval power also was decisive; the U.S. broke China’s blockade of Taiwan’s outlying islands through a convoy operation and provided Taiwan with newly developed air-to-air missiles that tipped the aerial balance in its favor. In the 1995-96 crisis, the U.S. sailed a carrier battle group through the strait to demonstrate China’s impotence against U.S. power.
Today’s balance is radically different.
China’s navy now has more ships than the U.S. Navy, making it notionally capable of a long-term blockade against Taiwan. America’s capital ships — the aircraft carriers and big-deck amphibious warships that form the core of its combat power — still provide a tonnage advantage. But China’s navy and air force can, at minimum, reach parity with any U.S. air “surge” to the Taiwan Strait; long-range Chinese missiles can target U.S. carriers well into the Philippine Sea.
Hitting and sinking a warship at sea remains a tall task, but the U.S. carrier air wing, lacking effective organic refueling capability and long-range strike platforms, may need to push closer to Taiwan to counter a Chinese invasion, thereby risking the loss of a capital ship.
China’s marine corps, airborne forces and army have limited amphibious and air assault capabilities, and still rely on civilian ships and aircraft to ensure heavy lift. But unlike at any other point since 1950, China has a fighting shot in a cross-strait war. It needs either better nerves than the U.S. to blockade Taiwan and compel the U.S. to back down, or a few lucky hits on U.S. warships in Japanese ports and U.S. bases on Guam and elsewhere to keep America out of the fight.
Indeed, that China can, with fortune and fortitude, gain several weeks of dominance in the Taiwan Strait should shock any observer. It demonstrates that the foundation of the cross-strait status quo — U.S. conventional dominance — has vanished. Combined with China’s failure to attract Taiwanese unification through economic inducements, Taiwan’s de facto independence, and the Taiwanese population’s increasing willingness to distinguish itself from mainland Chinese, and it all points to the use of military force.
Our Pacific allies understand
China may repeat two contrary propositions — that the cross-strait situation is untenable, and that time remains on China’s side. It has held the same propositions for decades. But today, time is on China’s side only if the conventional balance tips decidedly in its favor. The most likely result of a Taiwan war is a long, bloody conflict that China may win, but at immense cost. Unless the path of U.S. and Chinese arming changes in five, ten, or 20 years, China is likely to outclass the U.S. military in-region.
U.S. regional allies, particularly Japan, understand the existential stakes of the Taiwan question and are moving to bolster Taiwan’s defense more directly. South Korea, has expanded its military-industrial capacity; Australia, under the AUKUS pact, is poised for a defense industrial expansion. India, through the Quad and its own interest in countering China, is at minimum a sympathetic power in any anti-Chinese coalition, as is Vietnam. The political and strategy dynamics for an encircling coalition are in place.
If China’s bet against the U.S. is wrong, if the U.S. system can mitigate its domestic divisions, revitalize its defense capacity and undergird this coalition, then China faces a potentially intractable long-term strategic problem.
It is this problem — the potential for an encircling coalition backed by American naval power — that will deter China from assaulting Taiwan or defeat China if it does.
Focus on the fundamentals
The China Select Committee’s horizon is broad. It likely will consider all manner of issues, ranging from Chinese influence operations in the U.S. to Sino-American trade policy and the legal framework for U.S. financial engagement in China.
In a competition as complex as the Sino-American rivalry for Eurasia, every aspect is relevant.
But Rep. Gallagher and his future colleagues should not lose sight of the fundamental facts of Sino-American competition. The U.S.-China conventional military balance is the foundation of today’s Indo-Pacific situation; this balance has shifted against the U.S. over two decades, encouraging Chinese probes, if not outright aggression.
The U.S. can correct this, but only with prudence, foresight and a commitment to expand its military and industrial capacity alongside effective diplomacy. The China Committee’s fundamental task, then, is to begin the correction of the balance.
Seth Cropsey is founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of “Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy” (2013) and “Seablindness: How Political Neglect Is Choking American Seapower and What to Do About It” (2017).
20. No Escape: Camp Survivor Describes Life Under House Arrest in Xinjiang
Excerpts:
Zhumatai does not know if she will ever be able to speak out again, but she does not regret going public “Thank you for speaking to me and getting my story out,” she said. “I have a wish that all the whole world knows about my case – not only for me but for all the Kazakh nomadic people who have suffered.
“Every second I am living in fear. I am an independent and strong woman but I cannot [bear to] see my mother crying.”
Zhumatai even hopes the Chinese central authorities will become aware of her case, believing that they too would be aghast at her treatment. She wants high-level Chinese officials to become aware of the corruption and illegal human rights violations posed against the Kazakh people in China who, like Uyghurs, only want to live a free and peaceful life.
She ended with a plea to the world: “Women’s rights groups, human rights [groups], the U.N., and the international community must speak out against what they are doing. I want everyone to know my story.”
No Escape: Camp Survivor Describes Life Under House Arrest in Xinjiang
Zhanargul Zhumatai, a Kazakh artist and former editor, lives in fear of being rearrested by the Chinese authorities at any time.
thediplomat.com · by Tasnim Nazeer · January 10, 2023
Advertisement
“I live in utter fear,” Zhanargul Zhumatai told me. She is under constant surveillance by the Chinese authorities and knew this might be the last time she could speak to a foreign journalist.
Speaking from her apartment in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Zhumatai pleaded for help. She currently feels she cannot even step outside of the house where she is staying without being targeted by authorities. Chinese police have threatened her mother and siblings and have said they will send Zhumatai to a psychiatric hospital against her will, despite her not having any mental health problems.
Beijing has cracked down on ethnic Kazakhs, in addition to Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups, over the years, making life “absolutely unbearable,” Zhumatai said. The government is even more “brutal” to those who speak out against their alleged corruption. That group includes Zhumatai, a singer, former editor of National TV of Kazakhstan, director, and artist.
On September 26, 2017, Zhumatai was arrested without warning by Chinese authorities, after speaking out in defense of Kazakh nomadic farmers, whose land was being unlawfully taken from them by Beijing under the guise of “grassland protection laws.” The Kazakh nomadic community did not have a means to speak up, but found hope in the form of Zhumatai, who did all she could to help them get the rights to their land.
This angered Beijing. The authorities had created national parks on the traditional lands of Kazakh nomadic farmers, many of whom were forced into poverty after they were forbidden access to their customary lands.
Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
The injustices that the Kazakh nomadic community faced were too much for Zhumatai to bear, and she raised the human rights violations with the local authorities. This caused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to set their sights on Zhumatai. She was detained for two years in an internment camp; the official explanation was that Zhumatai had social media software Instagram and Facebook – both of which are banned in China – on her phone while she was visiting Kazakhstan.
While Zhumatai was in Kazakhstan, the Chinese authorities kept calling her to come back to Urumqi, under the guise of doing an “artistic musical project.” However, to her horror, she was arrested as soon as she landed back in Xinjiang and promptly sent to an internment camp – one of an estimated 1 million people unlawfully detained on nebulous national security charges in Xinjiang.
Official documents leaked from Xinjiang reveal that people were detained for such trivial causes as having traveled abroad or simply possessing a passport, communicating with people overseas, performing daily Muslim prayer rituals, or wearing a veil.
Advertisement
In the camp Zhumatai faced inhumane and brutal conditions. She said she was beaten and tortured with no access to medical facilities. Her description could not be independently verified, but matches with numerous testimonies given by camp survivors to NGOs and the United Nations.
In an emotional testimony, Zhumatai remembered her time in detention: “Every day I felt depressed and was wondering why they arrested me and why I was here. They were trying to force me to say that I am guilty, but I would never say that when I am an innocent person. They told me that the CCP was trying to correct the ideologies that I had.”
On October 18, 2019, she was suddenly released without warning. Despite that, Zhumatai quickly realized that her life was now under the control of the authorities. She had no access to her own money; her phone was disconnected. She also faced allegations of “criminality” despite never having been put on trial, leaving her unable to get a job.
For the three years since her release, she has been hounded by Chinese police. Zhumatai cannot visit any public place without an alarm being set off due to facial recognition technology, which prompts hours further police interrogation. She cannot even receive medical care; if she is unwell the hospitals refuse to treat her. She was confined within the walls of her home like a prisoner.
Chinese authorities claim that the detention camps in Xinjiang, which Beijing describes as “vocational training centers” necessary to combat terrorism ideologies, have all been closed, and the “trainees” reintegrated into society. Zhumatai’s plight, however, drives home the bitter fact that release from the camps does not mean an end to suffering. Even after being released, former detainees continue to be closely surveilled and tracked for any activity that displeases the authorities. Like Zhumatai, many live in fear of being thrown back into the camps.
Zhanargul Zhumatai, in an undated photo posted to social media.
Faced with dire prospects, Zhumatai attempted to get her passport back from the authorities and go to live in Kazakhstan. She was told that she would need to sell her property first. But after she did so, the authorities forbade her from going. Having sold her house in the hopes of leaving Xinjiang, Zhumatai found herself homeless, with no prospects of earning a salary.
Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
She now resides with her 77-year-old mother, who is unwell and in need of medical treatment but cries that she cannot go out. The mother fears that the second she leaves, her daughter will be taken by the Chinese police against their will.
In complete and utter desperation, Zhumatai reached out to a former colleague and renowned singer in Kazakhstan, who published testimony describing her plight on a Kazakh website.
After the testimony was made public, her colleague got in touch with Serikzhan Bilash, the exiled leader of the Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights organization. Atajurt provided a crucial early window into the atrocities happening in Xinjiang, focusing on the testimonies of ethnic Kazakhs. But in 2019 Bilash was arrested on charges of inciting ethnic hatred and forced to end his activism, before he decided to flee abroad.
Advertisement
Bilash shared Zhumatai’s story on social media in a bid for the media to get her story out before it’s too late.
However, the CCP was furious that Zhumatai was speaking about her situation in Xinjiang and tried to silence her, insisting that she “cooperate with the government.” Authorities accused her of making “anti-government statements.”
“They [the Urumqi police] asked me why I published government secrets but I said, ‘These are not government secrets. This is what I am experiencing. I am speaking the truth,’ ” Zhumatai said.
On January 2, police in Urumqi threatened all of Zhumatai’s relatives, calling for her to be taken to a psychiatric hospital and falsely accusing her of conspiring with international spies. They accused her of slandering the state of China.
Police went to her brother’s house and threatened him, saying that he must agree that his sister should be taken to a psychiatric hospital under all circumstances. Her relatives refused to be swayed by the threats and all agreed that they would never hand her over.
“I am an innocent person; I have not committed any crime. I don’t know what will happen to my life,” Zhumatai told me.
“I want the international community to know my story. Should something happen to me, the world must do more to raise awareness and hold the authorities to account.”
With her life hanging in the balance, and with police pursuing her, Zhumatai fears that if she is taken she may be given an injection that would really make her unwell.
Her fears stem from having been forced to consume an “unknown medication” while in the internment camp that made her vomit uncontrollably and become weak. Again, this could not be independently verified but matches with other testimonies from camp survivors, who describe being given mystery pills or injections that caused numerous side effects.
Zhumatai does not know if she will ever be able to speak out again, but she does not regret going public “Thank you for speaking to me and getting my story out,” she said. “I have a wish that all the whole world knows about my case – not only for me but for all the Kazakh nomadic people who have suffered.
“Every second I am living in fear. I am an independent and strong woman but I cannot [bear to] see my mother crying.”
Zhumatai even hopes the Chinese central authorities will become aware of her case, believing that they too would be aghast at her treatment. She wants high-level Chinese officials to become aware of the corruption and illegal human rights violations posed against the Kazakh people in China who, like Uyghurs, only want to live a free and peaceful life.
She ended with a plea to the world: “Women’s rights groups, human rights [groups], the U.N., and the international community must speak out against what they are doing. I want everyone to know my story.”
GUEST AUTHOR
Tasnim Nazeer
Tasnim Nazeer is an award-winning journalist and Universal Peace Federation Ambassador for Peace.
thediplomat.com · by Tasnim Nazeer · January 10, 2023
21. Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track
Excerpts:
I’ve bludgeoned you with statistics in order to make a point: Pessimism about our future is unwarranted. You may think that one major American political party has gone crazy, and I will agree with you. You can point to all of the ways in which life in America is infuriating and unjust, and I will agree with you there too. But the story of America is a story of convulsion and reinvention. We go through moments when the established order stops working. People and movements rise up, and things change. The culture is a collective response to the problems of the moment; as new problems become obvious, the culture shifts. We’ve been in the middle of one of those tumultuous transition periods since, I’d say, 2013. But 2022 evinced hopeful signs that we’re coming out of it.
If there is one lesson from the events of the past year, it is that open societies such as ours have an ability to adapt in a way that closed societies simply do not. Russia has turned violent and malevolent. China has grown more authoritarian and inept. Meanwhile, free democratic societies have united around the Ukrainians as they battle to preserve the liberal world order. And American voters seem to finally be adapting to the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy, forming a robust anti-Trump coalition that will significantly lessen his chances of ever working in the White House again.
America is a wounded giant, and many of its wounds are self-inflicted. But America has always been a wounded giant. And it has always stumbled forward, driven by an inner turbine of ambition and aspiration that knows no rest.
Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track
Yes, America is a wounded giant—but it always has been, and the case for optimism is surprisingly strong.
By David Brooks
The Atlantic · by David Brooks · January 13, 2023
Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality. In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest way to build an audience is to write stories that make people terrified or furious. This is not rocket science: Evolution designed humans to pay special attention to threats. So, unsurprisingly, the share of American headlines denoting anger increased by 104 percent from 2000 to 2019. The share of headlines evoking fear surged by 150 percent.
If any event deserves negative coverage, the terrible coronavirus pandemic is it. And in the international media, 51 percent of stories in the first year of the pandemic were indeed negative, according to a 2020 study. But in the United States, a stunning 87 percent of the coverage was negative. The stories were negative even when good things were happening, such as schools reopening and vaccine trials. The American media have a particularly strong bad-news bias.
This permanent cloud of negativity has a powerful effect on how Americans see their country. When Gallup recently asked Americans if they were satisfied with their personal life, 85 percent said they were, a number that has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years. But when Gallup asked Americans in January 2022 if they were satisfied with the direction of the country, only 17 percent said they were, down from 69 percent in 2000. In other words, there was a 68-percentage-point gap between the reality people directly experienced in their daily life and the reality they perceived through the media filter.
Read: The power of negative thinking
According to Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on poll data, the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people—the people, that is, who spend more time engaging with news media. The American right, for instance, finds itself in a state of perpetual apocalyptic alarm these days. Streeter observes that it’s not the poorer members of the conservative coalition who are pessimistic; it’s the affluent white Republicans who watch Tucker Carlson and believe the nation is on the verge of total destruction. Many of them believe that radical action, even violence, may be necessary to save it.
The first problem with all this pessimism is that it is ahistorical. Every era in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and in every era, the air has been thick with gloomy jeremiads warning of catastrophe and decline. Pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil.
But in all of those same decades, you will also find, alongside the chaos and the prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and leaping progress. For example, the current historic moment is frequently compared with the 1890s, another period of savage inequality, rapid technological disruption, pervasive political dysfunction, and controversial waves of immigration. Someone alive in 1893—as unemployment surged from 3 percent to almost 19 percent among working-class Americans, as populism rose and spread, as class conflict and horrendous poverty became more rampant—might easily have concluded that this country was coming apart. And yet, the 1890s didn’t lead to American decline—they led to the American Century.
The second problem with the decline narrative is that it distorts reality. I’ve written my share of pessimistic stories over the past several years; no one can accuse me of being a Pollyanna. My basic take is that life in America today is objectively better than it was before but subjectively worse. We have much higher standards of living and many conveniences, but when it comes to how we relate to one another—whether in the realm of politics, across social divides, or in the intimacies of family and community life—distrust is rife, bonds are fraying, and judgments are harsh.
But that doesn’t mean the future isn’t going to be brighter than the present, or that America is in decline. The pessimists miss an underlying truth—a society can get a lot wrong if it gets the big thing right. And that big thing is this: If a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted.
The economist Tyler Cowen suggests a thought experiment to illustrate this point.
Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.”
Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when they lose energy. And creative energy is one thing America has in abundance.
Let’s look at all the ways humanity in general and America in particular continue to unleash human creativity:
First, over the course of many centuries, humanity has steadily reduced the amount of time wasted on drudgery. Turning on a tap is more time-efficient than drawing water from a well. Finding the closest ATM is more time-efficient than waiting in line at the bank. That’s oodles of time freed up to do something creative.
Read: We need a new science of progress
Productivity levels and living standards have increased so dramatically that it takes people less time to earn the money to buy the things they need. During the Middle Ages, an English laborer had to work 80 hours to pay for a pound of sugar. By 2021, an English laborer had to work only 1.89 minutes to do that. In 1800, it took 5.4 hours of work to buy 1,000 lumen-hours; in 1992, it took only 0.00012 hours of work for someone to light their home for six weeks.
From 1980 to 2018, the average amount of time a person had to work to afford the basket of commodities—energy, food, raw materials—that make up a typical middle-class lifestyle fell by 72 percent, according to the book Superabundance, by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley. That, too, frees up a lot of time and resources that can be spent on other things.
Second, America invests an enormous amount in education. In 2018, Americans spent, on average, $14,400 on each elementary- and secondary-school student—34 percent more than the average for democracies with market-based economies. Americans spent $35,100 on every postsecondary-education student, double the average.
It’s hard to argue that that money is being efficiently spent. But one result of all of this spending is a significantly better-trained workforce: Since 1970, the share of American workers in high-skill jobs has increased from roughly 30 to 46 percent. Another result has been the continued superiority of the American university system. According to U.S. News & World Report’s rankings, eight of the top 10 universities in the world are American.
A better-educated workforce is a better-paid workforce. In the 1970s and ’80s, as America deindustrialized, wages did stagnate or decrease. But as the economy has more fully moved into the information age, that stagnation has dissipated. Michael R. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute notes, based on Congressional Budget Office data, that real median household income grew by 26 percent from 1990 to 2019. When you throw in social benefits such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, median household income increased by 55 percent. For those in the bottom fifth of household income, the after-tax and transfer-income growth during that period was 74 percent. Strain observes in his book The American Dream Is Not Dead that three-quarters of adults raised in working-class homes have a higher inflation-adjusted income than their parents did. In 1993, 28 percent of American children lived in poverty. By 2019, that number was down to 11 percent. A better-educated society is a richer and more creative society.
We talk a lot about income inequality in this country. And it’s true that from 1979 to 2007, inequality widened. But since then, income inequality has fallen as working-class wages have risen and recent administrations have moved to redistribute wealth downward.
Throughout most of American history, white men have been the beneficiaries of big education investments. That has left the creative potential of most Americans unfulfilled. Today, we are doing a much better job of investing in people across the board. The gains are there for all to see.
For example, in 2004, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote a book called Who Are We?, in which he argued that Mexican Americans were failing to climb the education and opportunity ladder the way previous immigrant groups had. That argument could not be made today, because all of the evidence points in the opposite direction. In 2000, roughly a third of Hispanic students dropped out of high school. Sixteen years later, only 10 percent did. Around the turn of the 21st century, only a third of Hispanic high school graduates aged 18-24 were enrolled in college; today, nearly half are. Hispanic college-enrollment rates surpassed white enrollment rates in 2012. The incomes of Hispanic people rose faster than those of any other major group in America from 2014 to 2019. These trends mean that the U.S. has a lot more people with the skills to start companies, innovate, and create new things.
The third way society unlocks creativity is by helping people live healthier, longer, and more energetic lives. American longevity rates have taken a beating recently because of deaths of despair—alcoholism, opioid overdoses—and because of the pandemic. But the long-term trend is still positive. In 1960, the average American lived 70.1 years; by 2015, that figure was 78.9. From 1990 to 2017, lung-cancer-death rates among men fell by 51 percent. In roughly the same time period, breast-cancer-death rates among women fell by 40 percent, and prostate-cancer-death rates fell by 52 percent.
From the October 2014 issue: What happens when we all live to 100?
We have essentially created a new stage of life. Americans retire, on average, by their early to mid-60s, yet many now remain vibrant into their mid-80s. As a society, we haven’t begun to build the institutions to harness all of this talent. But those latent abilities are out there, waiting to be put to better use.
Fourth, the United States has an excellent innovation infrastructure. America ranks second in the Global Innovation Index, behind only Switzerland. It leads the world in the amount of foreign direct investment it attracts. It hosts the world’s most important capital markets, and they are growing. In 2011, for example, $45.4 billion of venture capital was invested in young, innovative American firms. In 2021, $332.8 billion was invested in such firms.
Especially since 2020, the U.S. has seen a surge in small-business formation. It turns out that if a pandemic drives people indoors and gives them little to do, a significant portion of those people will do something entrepreneurial: The number of Black small-business owners, for example, was 28 percent higher in the third quarter of 2021 than it was pre-pandemic. A study by the economists Ryan A. Decker and John Haltiwanger found that these new businesses were not just individuals selling knickknacks on Etsy. “Our findings strongly suggest that the pandemic surge in business applications was followed by true employer business creation with significant labor market implications,” they wrote.
These investments and entrepreneurial energies produce such a steady stream of innovations and improvements that it is easy to take them for granted. From 2008 to 2017, the U.S. economy expanded by 15 percent, but total energy consumption went down. Carbon emissions per capita have plummeted this century; we are now back down to levels from the 1910s. The cost of flying across the country has fallen roughly fivefold since the mid-1970s.
Not so long ago, if you wanted to keep up with the Joneses in your entertaining life, you needed a whole room full of equipment: a TV, a VCR, a game console, a stereo system, a telephone, a camera. Now it’s possible to replace all of that equipment—plus maps and atlases, magazines and newspapers, even books—with a single smartphone.
And I’ve yet to mention the two most impressive innovations of recent years—mRNA vaccines and the stunning gains in artificial intelligence. Who knows where AI will take us, but in the short term, it means that everybody can have a somewhat well-informed personal research assistant. As Tyler Cowen notes, we’re in the middle of a radical increase in the amount of intelligence in the world.
This growth has a healing effect. During the misery years of deindustrialization, factories closed, especially across the Midwest. Towns and cities were decimated, but many of those places have since recovered: Strain writes, citing a 2018 Brookings Institution report, that 62 percent of the most affected counties successfully transitioned to new industries; a further 22 percent of those counties enjoyed had strong economic performance over the previous two decades while maintaining their old manufacturing sectors.
We seem to be in the middle of a surge in manufacturing employment. During the first few months of COVID, American manufacturers cut about 1.3 million jobs. By the fall of 2022, those manufacturers had added about 1.4 million jobs, a net gain of 67,000 manufacturing jobs. That number could further rise as firms bring more manufacturing back home to reduce their exposure to Chinese supply chains.
This fall, Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, gave a fascinating talk to foreign correspondents in Tokyo about the global investments flowing into the United States from places such as Japan: Panasonic is investing $4 billion to make batteries in Kansas; Honda announced a $700 million investment in Ohio. The most striking element of the presentation was the maps showing where investments are being made. One map showed the locations of 56 mega-investments of more than $1 billion each—investments in auto, semiconductors, clean energy, and the like. Only two of those investments are in California; six are in Illinois, and five are in Iowa. After years of capital and wealth fleeing to the coasts, there are now signs of a rebound in the places that were left behind.
I’ve bludgeoned you with statistics in order to make a point: Pessimism about our future is unwarranted. You may think that one major American political party has gone crazy, and I will agree with you. You can point to all of the ways in which life in America is infuriating and unjust, and I will agree with you there too. But the story of America is a story of convulsion and reinvention. We go through moments when the established order stops working. People and movements rise up, and things change. The culture is a collective response to the problems of the moment; as new problems become obvious, the culture shifts. We’ve been in the middle of one of those tumultuous transition periods since, I’d say, 2013. But 2022 evinced hopeful signs that we’re coming out of it.
If there is one lesson from the events of the past year, it is that open societies such as ours have an ability to adapt in a way that closed societies simply do not. Russia has turned violent and malevolent. China has grown more authoritarian and inept. Meanwhile, free democratic societies have united around the Ukrainians as they battle to preserve the liberal world order. And American voters seem to finally be adapting to the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy, forming a robust anti-Trump coalition that will significantly lessen his chances of ever working in the White House again.
America is a wounded giant, and many of its wounds are self-inflicted. But America has always been a wounded giant. And it has always stumbled forward, driven by an inner turbine of ambition and aspiration that knows no rest.
The Atlantic · by David Brooks · January 13, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
| 
