Quotes of the Day:
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop… I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King
“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.”
- John Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
- Plutarch
“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.”
- Aristotle
1. Opinion | Ukraine Doesn’t Need the West to Defend It. We Need Help Preparing for War.
2. Sweden sends troops to Gotland as Russia increases activity in Baltic Sea
3. Putin Wants NATO to Back Off but Is Achieving ‘Exactly the Opposite,’ Says Alliance Chief
4. Washington’s Missing China Strategy
5. Time for NATO to Close Its Door
6. What’s Past Omicron’s Peak?
7. Ex-Pentagon strategist Elbridge Colby bells the dragon
8. Team USA warns athletes about Chinese phone surveillance at Olympics, encourages 'burner phones': report
9. Blockchain, NFTs and the New Standard for Identity and Security
10. ‘War Is Coming’: Mysterious TikTok Videos Are Scaring Sweden’s Children
11. FedEx Wants To Equip Airbus A321s With Anti-Missile Laser Countermeasures
12. Texas rabbi: Security training paid off in hostage standoff
13. Drinking water, ash big concern as Tonga assesses damage after tsunami
14. For Oath Keepers and founder, Jan. 6 was weeks in the making
15. Belt and Road Comes to the Heartland
16. Assessing the Cognitive Threat Posed by Technology Discourses Intended to Address Adversary Grey Zone Activities
17. US media launches war propaganda campaign against Russia as CIA prepares to back an “insurgency” in Ukraine
18. The complicated legacy of Dick Marcinko and the early days of SEAL Team 6
19. FOLLOW-UP: Green Beret allowed to retire after sexually assaulting woman in Thailand
1. Opinion | Ukraine Doesn’t Need the West to Defend It. We Need Help Preparing for War.
Good headline. We should keep this in mind. As a good friend of mine who works in Ukraine wrote to me, the Ukrainans do not want foreigners to die for them, they want to defend themselves.
Opinion | Ukraine Doesn’t Need the West to Defend It. We Need Help Preparing for War.
Guest Essay
Ukraine Doesn’t Need the West to Defend It. We Need Help Preparing for War.
Jan. 16, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET
Ukrainian reservists training near Kyiv.Credit...Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA, via Shutterstock
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Ms. Getmanchuk is the director of the New Europe Center think tank.
KYIV, Ukraine — It’s a shame that Ukraine was largely absent from talks last week among American, European and Russian diplomats. Especially since it is our future that is at stake — and Kyiv’s asks might come as a surprise.
Our country is not brimming with hope about a Western savior or a NATO rescue in the face of a Russian invasion. What we want from our Western partners that share our desire for us to be a true democracy free from Russia’s yoke is help in preparing for war so we might stand a chance if Moscow invades.
While we Ukrainians appreciate that American leaders take pains to say, “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” that’s not exactly happening. Our voice is often drowned out amid the rhetorical volleys being traded by the United States, its NATO allies and Russia.
To be clear: Talks aren’t simply “talks” when you have a gun to your head. And that’s what’s happening to us in Ukraine now.
Whether he invades or not, we know that President Vladimir Putin is most likely using this troop buildup to ultimately force Europe and the United States into a renegotiation of the power balance on the continent.
But we are not a political football. Western leaders should remember that the real victim in this story is Ukraine. It is troubling that these talks are ostensibly to address the security concerns of Russia, the aggressor, even though ours should come first. Western leaders should avoid a situation where avenues for dialogue outnumber avenues to deter Russia — and that’s the situation right now.
Of course, diplomacy is critical, and we all know how realpolitik often runs the show. But it’s also naïve to assume that Russia will be negotiating in good faith. The United States, for instance, has accused Moscow of sending saboteurs into eastern Ukraine to stage an incident that could provide Mr. Putin with a pretext for invasion.
So the talks should have been accompanied by clear actions to enhance Ukraine’s resilience, like providing additional security and military assistance — specifically, air defense.
Ukraine is not asking for the West to defend it. Rather, it is asking for help to prepare for this fight by bolstering our military capacity. Moreover, the best way to defend Ukraine is to defend Western doctrines and values, including the “no spheres of influence” principle barring large countries from dominating their neighbors and NATO’s “open door” policy of welcoming new applicants to the alliance. Close cooperation between Ukraine and the alliance — like military exercises, which enhance the Ukrainian Army’s ability to work with NATO member states and also remind Russia that Ukraine is not alone — should continue.
While we understand the discussion about the risks of admitting Ukraine to NATO, there also should be discussion among NATO member states about the risks of not doing so. Blocking Ukraine’s accession could give Russia the perception it has a veto right in NATO or stands to benefit from instigating conflicts in other countries seeking membership in the alliance.
These are our asks. And in the meantime, we are preparing for the worst.
Until very recently, polls showed Ukrainians were largely afraid of rising utility bills and the deteriorating economy, and less than half said that a war was possible. That’s because after nearly eight years of Mr. Putin’s aggression, Ukrainians have gotten used to his (unfortunately) successful use of saber rattling as a tactic to get an invitation to negotiations with the West on his own terms.
But now, Ukrainians are increasingly preoccupied by the prospect of a new invasion. They don’t believe the talks with Mr. Putin will be productive, which means Russia will see military action as the only way to bring Ukraine back into Moscow’s sphere of influence. These concerns echo in my work at a think tank here and in conversations with friends and family.
Not surprisingly, a popular topic these days is how to join civilian “resistance” units to complement the military in case of an invasion. Billboards in many Ukrainian cities and on highways urge people to join the ranks, with a phone number to enlist. I’ve seen Facebook posts pop up about the necessity for a so-called emergency bag of essential items to grab when an invasion starts.
Even Kyiv — which has been considered almost a safe haven, distant from the war in the east and occupied Crimea — is on edge over fears Mr. Putin could attack Ukraine.
Updates on the diplomatic talks dominate the evening news and animate Facebook conversations. As one of our polls has shown, a majority of Ukrainians are convinced that Mr. Putin would continue to needle Ukraine even if it gave up its hopes of joining NATO or the European Union in the future.
Western leaders at the negotiating table should remember that Ukrainians deserve to be able to plan their lives according to their dreams, not according to Mr. Putin’s imperialistic obsessions. And that Ukraine’s failure would be not just a win for Mr. Putin’s regime but also a blow to global democracy.
Alyona Getmanchuk (@getmalyona) is the director of the New Europe Center, a think tank focused on strengthening connections between Ukraine and Europe.
2. Sweden sends troops to Gotland as Russia increases activity in Baltic Sea
Excerpts:
Sweden has increased its defence spending significantly in recent years after a series of embarrassments including not being able to scramble jets as Russia simulated an attack on Stockholm as it was the Easter weekend, and searching unsuccessfully for a suspected Russian submarine in the archipelago outside the Swedish capital.
The three Baltic countries, which are members of Nato, had long urged Sweden to take the security of Gotland more seriously, and Swedish forces — together with a large contingent of US troops — held their biggest exercise for decades in 2017 including an attack on Gotland, which one US general called “an unsinkable aircraft carrier”.
Sweden sends troops to Gotland as Russia increases activity in Baltic Sea
Non-militarily aligned country has stressed it retains the option to apply for Nato membership
Sweden has sent hundreds of troops to reinforce a crucial island in the Baltic Sea as its defence minister warned that the Scandinavian country should not be naive and could be attacked.
An emergency contingency unit of Sweden’s armed forces landed on Gotland on Friday and Saturday by plane and passenger ferry, bringing troops and equipment to an island many have compared to an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Baltic Sea.
The deployment comes amid rising jitters in Nordic and Baltic countries about Russia’s intentions on its border with Ukraine, and how that could spill over to neighbouring countries. Swedish media noted at the weekend increased Russian naval activity in the Baltic Sea as troops were sent to Gotland.
“It is clear there is a risk. An attack against Sweden cannot be ruled out . . . It’s important to show we are not naive. Sweden will not be caught napping if something happens. It is important to send signals that we take this situation seriously,” defence minister Peter Hultqvist told radio station Ekot on Saturday.
Russia’s deployment of more than 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border and its harsh diplomatic rhetoric has led Sweden and Finland, both militarily non-aligned, to stress that they retained the option to apply for Nato membership.
A majority in Sweden’s parliament is in favour of membership of the military alliance, but the ruling centre-left Social Democrats are not and without their support Sweden is unlikely to join.
Experts said that Sweden, which had no permanent military presence on Gotland from 2005 until 2016 as it decreased defence spending after the cold war, was forced to act so visibly owing to the relative weakness of its armed forces.
It took similar action in August 2020 sending over armoured vehicles alongside holidaymakers’ campervans on the ferry to the popular tourist island as Russia held a number of military exercises in the region.
Sweden has increased its defence spending significantly in recent years after a series of embarrassments including not being able to scramble jets as Russia simulated an attack on Stockholm as it was the Easter weekend, and searching unsuccessfully for a suspected Russian submarine in the archipelago outside the Swedish capital.
The three Baltic countries, which are members of Nato, had long urged Sweden to take the security of Gotland more seriously, and Swedish forces — together with a large contingent of US troops — held their biggest exercise for decades in 2017 including an attack on Gotland, which one US general called “an unsinkable aircraft carrier”.
Even as the extra troops arrived at the weekend, defence chiefs on Gotland tried to sooth the nerves of local residents. “I sleep rather well at night, and the risk of armed conflict is low,” said Mattias Ardin, head of the Gotland regiment.
Swedish police also reported on Friday unidentified drones flying over at least one and possibly as many as four nuclear power plants. Police, who informed Sweden’s armed forces, said they viewed the possibly connected events as “extremely serious”.
3. Putin Wants NATO to Back Off but Is Achieving ‘Exactly the Opposite,’ Says Alliance Chief
Per the subtitle, looking back over the past three decades, should we have divested so many US military facilities and reduced force structure in Europe?
Excerpts:
The alliance’s expansion has involved the dispatch of thousands of U.S. and allied troops to Poland and the Baltic states alongside new deployments of advanced weapons. NATO members have increased military spending by $260 billion over the period and are continuing to boost their military budgets.
“There are more U.S. soldiers in Europe now than seven years ago,” Mr. Stoltenberg said of Russia’s impact on NATO. “We actually do more together, in North America and Europe, than we’ve done for many decades.”
NATO planners are assessing how best to supplement forces in member countries if Mr. Putin takes action against Ukraine, Mr. Stoltenberg said.
“Of course, if Russia once again uses force, we will step up again,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “Exactly how—with what kind of capabilities and where—well, that is something we have to decide in light of what actually happens.”
Putin Wants NATO to Back Off but Is Achieving ‘Exactly the Opposite,’ Says Alliance Chief
U.S. has most troops in Europe since Cold War because of Russia’s actions against Ukraine and West in recent years
WSJ · by James Marson and Daniel Michaels
To Western diplomats, the divergence between Mr. Putin’s demands that NATO retrench and Russia’s actions, prompting the alliance to reinforce its front lines, has deepened doubts about Moscow’s sincerity in recent talks. Russia has demanded that NATO commit never to include Ukraine or other new members, pull back forces from its east and roll back to its smaller, post-Cold War size.
Many alliance officials say they believe Russia knows its demands are nonstarters and is only looking for a pretext to attack Ukraine.
After talks with NATO last week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko noted that the Baltic members of the alliance are close to St. Petersburg. “If NATO moves eastward, what should we do?” he said to reporters.
“If NATO moves to a policy of containment” against Russia, Mr. Grushko said, “from our side it will be counter-containment.”
Since Russia in 2014 seized the Crimean peninsula and fomented separatism in Ukraine’s east, NATO has significantly increased deployments of troops and equipment in its eastern members. Other Russian actions since then, including suspected cyberattacks and operations in the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, have prompted NATO to expand its presence in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which were once part of the Soviet Union, and in other former Soviet satellite states, such as Poland.
Mr. Putin has long said NATO threatens Russia and he wants a smaller allied presence near Russia’s border.
“If his intention was to get less NATO close to his border, he has achieved exactly the opposite,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “Every time he’s aggressive, he gets the opposite.”
For Mr. Putin, the threat of stronger NATO forces on Russia’s western flank is worth the risk, said Daniel Szeligowski, senior research fellow on Ukraine at the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw. He sees Mr. Putin as motivated less by fear of NATO than a desire to bring Ukraine back under Russia’s control.
Russian officials have said that they are concerned the West wants to turn Ukraine into a sort of anti-Russia on its borders by providing sophisticated weaponry, economic support and political direction. For Russia, regaining broader control over Ukraine beyond Crimea and the eastern breakaway regions would nullify that Western threat while allowing Moscow to project power to its south and west.
Mr. Putin is motivated by factors other than security. He routinely expounds on the closeness of the two countries’ languages and cultures, tracing Russia’s history back to Kyiv and saying Russians and Ukrainians are one people.
“Ukraine is the jewel in the crown” for Mr. Putin, said Mr. Szeligowski. “He has never accepted Ukraine as a sovereign country.”
NATO in 2008 offered Ukraine eventual membership, but the U.S. and other alliance members have made clear they won’t fight a war over it or defend it as they would protect a current NATO member. Instead, they have threatened economic sanctions on Russia and other measures, as well as an acceleration of NATO’s revamp that began after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.
That aggression “triggered the biggest reinforcement of NATO since the end of the Cold War,” said NATO’s Mr. Stoltenberg.
The alliance’s expansion has involved the dispatch of thousands of U.S. and allied troops to Poland and the Baltic states alongside new deployments of advanced weapons. NATO members have increased military spending by $260 billion over the period and are continuing to boost their military budgets.
“There are more U.S. soldiers in Europe now than seven years ago,” Mr. Stoltenberg said of Russia’s impact on NATO. “We actually do more together, in North America and Europe, than we’ve done for many decades.”
NATO planners are assessing how best to supplement forces in member countries if Mr. Putin takes action against Ukraine, Mr. Stoltenberg said.
“Of course, if Russia once again uses force, we will step up again,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “Exactly how—with what kind of capabilities and where—well, that is something we have to decide in light of what actually happens.”
WSJ · by James Marson and Daniel Michaels
4. Washington’s Missing China Strategy
Seems like a no brainer. What do we want? Or more specifically what is the acceptable durable political arrangement that will serve, protect, sustain, and advance US interests?
Excerpts:
The United States and the world can live with a powerful China that does not attempt to overturn key principles of the liberal order. At the moment, however, that possibility seems remote. The military balance in the Indo-Pacific is shifting away from the United States and its allies and toward Beijing. China is becoming increasingly economically dominant in Asia, with Washington absent from any real leadership on trade. Chinese diplomacy is growing more coercive and more focused on the internal affairs of other countries, undermining their sovereignty and independence. Although cooperation with Beijing is desirable and theoretically possible, it is in very short supply, even in areas in which U.S. and Chinese interests seem to overlap, such as climate change and pandemic disease. The overall picture is quite appealing to Beijing: a steadily eroding U.S. role in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, accompanied by a steadily growing Chinese presence.
Reversing that trend is no easy task. It will take years and involve risks. Diplomacy can help mitigate these risks, but only to a limited degree; the United States will need to accept increased tension in the medium term in order to achieve a more stable equilibrium with China in the long term.
Every month, it seems, U.S. policymakers sound the alarm about the U.S.-Chinese relationship with greater volume. Across party lines and branches of government, many policymakers now endorse a major response to the China challenge. The watchwords are more resources, more speed, more vigor. All of this is appropriate. But Washington would do well to clarify what, precisely, this national effort aims to achieve.
Washington’s Missing China Strategy
To Counter Beijing, the Biden Administration Needs to Decide What It Wants
The Biden administration has repeatedly identified China as the United States’ foremost foreign policy challenge. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has referred to China as the Pentagon’s top priority. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described China as “the biggest geopolitical test” of the twenty-first century. And President Joe Biden himself has stated that he envisions “extreme competition” between Washington and Beijing. As his administration prepares to issue a raft of strategy documents—including for national security, national defense, and the Indo-Pacific—it is widely expected to single out China for special attention.
To invoke the U.S.-Chinese rivalry as a defining feature of today’s world is now commonplace, and analysts and policymakers across the political spectrum support the United States’ shift away from engagement and toward competition. Jettisoning Washington’s previous strategy of cooperation and integration, premised as it was on the eventual transformation of Chinese behavior, is a rare point of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations.
That is a welcome shift, given the paucity of positive results yielded by the previous approach. China and the United States are in a largely competitive relationship, and U.S. policy aims to respond to Chinese actions more than to shape them. A strategy grounded in this reality—one that combines a U.S.-led coalition with targeted, issue-specific efforts to contest Chinese assertiveness—is now emerging to protect U.S. interests and values.
There is, however, a glaring omission in the new policy: an objective. Competition is merely a description of U.S.-Chinese relations, not an end in itself. Conspicuously absent from the flurry of recent pronouncements is the endgame that Washington ultimately seeks with China. Without a clearly defined goal, any overarching strategy is likely to waste resources, frustrate attempts to track progress, and elude the broad-based domestic support necessary to sustain it. U.S. allies and partners wish—and deserve—to know the objective of the coalitions in which Washington increasingly seeks to enlist them. The absence of a clear goal for its self-proclaimed top priority is a liability for the Biden administration—and one that it should urgently work to address.
EYES ON THE PRIZE
Good strategies articulate a desired end state and outline how to attain it. In his famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article, for instance, the diplomat and historian George Kennan argued for “either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power,” to be pursued through a policy of containment and an effort to increase the strains under which the Soviets operated. Establishing such an objective, as the United States did early in the Cold War, explicitly ruled out other possible goals, such as a partnership and political intimacy between Washington and Moscow on the one hand or the active rollback of communism on the other. Having identified the collapse or moderation of Moscow’s regime as their aim, U.S. officials pursued containment as the strategy most likely to yield those positive results.
After the end of the Cold War, the United States established a set of objectives for China and theorized about how to achieve them. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton said that Washington’s goal vis-à-vis Beijing “is not containment and conflict; it is cooperation,” noting that “a pragmatic policy of engagement” was most likely to bring that about. By engaging Beijing, primarily but not exclusively through trade, the Clinton administration aimed to cultivate a “stable, open, and non-aggressive” China. U.S. policymakers postulated that such openness might even foster liberalization and political pluralism within China itself.
The George W. Bush administration largely retained the goal of a cooperative and liberalizing China, adding to it a wish that the country would become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. Washington would seek areas of active cooperation with Beijing across the spectrum of global challenges from terrorism to energy conservation in hopes that Chinese leaders would become invested and active in addressing them. Perhaps less certain than its predecessor in the prospects for cooperation, the Bush administration hedged its bets by boosting U.S. military capabilities and bolstering alliances and partnerships throughout Asia.
Competition is merely a description of U.S.-Chinese relations, not an end in itself.
The Obama administration shared many of the Bush administration’s objectives, but it hedged even more heavily as doubts about Beijing’s direction and goals grew. Still, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected the notion of an adversarial Beijing, saying that it was “essential” for the United States and China to have “a positive, cooperative relationship.” The administration announced a “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia aimed at forging such a relationship by embedding it in a “regional framework of security alliances, economic networks, and social connections” that would strengthen the United States’ position.
President Donald Trump ushered in a new era of U.S.-Chinese relations. His administration neither sought a cooperative relationship with Beijing nor pursued engagement as a central means of securing U.S. interests. Rejecting the notion that integration into the global order would spur either Chinese liberalization or responsible international behavior, the Trump administration labeled Beijing a “revisionist power” with which the United States would have a fundamentally competitive relationship. Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy, declassified in the waning days of his presidency, takes malign Chinese activity as a given to be resisted, often in concert with partners. The Trump administration was no model of message discipline, however, and key policymakers differed on the desired end state. Whereas Trump predicted in 2020 that his bilateral trade deal would “bring both the U.S. and China closer together in so many other ways,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that same year that the United States “must induce China to change” and suggested that efforts to replace the regime in Beijing might be on the table.
To be sure, any brief review of the past several administrations’ China policies risks attributing a coherence and continuity to their strategies that did not always exist. Governments are not unitary actors, objectives and approaches change with shifting circumstances and players, and public pronouncements can conflict with private aims. Yet for much of the time since the end of the Cold War and, particularly, during the years of U.S. engagement with China, Washington’s objectives with regard to Beijing were generally explicit. That is simply not the case today.
FROM THE BOTTOM UP
The fate of the U.S.-Chinese relationship has profound global implications, and so the objective of U.S. policy should flow from the kind of order Washington wishes to obtain—and the kind of threat China poses to that order. The United States generally seeks to maintain a global order governed by rules rather than by brute power, one in which countries enjoy sovereignty, disputes are resolved peacefully, markets are open to trade, human rights are considered universal, and democracy can flourish. Although the United States’ own track record in upholding such principles is hardly perfect, the country has nevertheless championed them as ideals that should govern international behavior. Since the 1940s, Washington has opposed hostile spheres of influence emerging in Eurasia precisely because they threaten the United States’ desired rules-based order. The overarching goal of U.S. policy today should be to preserve the core pillars of the international order, even as specific rules and institutions change and adapt.
From that overarching goal should flow the objective of U.S. policy toward China. Given China’s growing military and technological power, its assertive behavior, its economic interdependence with the United States and its allies, and the incompatibility of many Chinese actions with the existing order, it is past time for Washington to articulate an objective that is both realistic and protective of its people. The aim of U.S. policy toward China should be to ensure that Beijing is either unwilling or unable to overturn the regional and global order.
China might cease trying to overturn elements of the liberal order if its leaders come to see the strength of the countries that are committed to them and the vigor with which they oppose China’s efforts to disrupt them. Beijing might someday even see its own future in the preservation of the liberal order. And even if it does not, it could grow incapable of undermining the order for any number of reasons: due to Beijing’s own weaknesses, the unpalatability of its authoritarian vision in other countries, or a relative strengthening of the powers committed to the liberal status quo.
The objective of U.S. policy should flow from the kind of order Washington wishes to obtain.
A China that is unwilling or unable to undermine the regional and global order is a fairly abstract goal for U.S. policy, but it would nonetheless rule out several other potential objectives. Washington would not aim to transform China into a liberal power or a responsible stakeholder in the international system. Washington would not work toward Cold War–style containment or regime change in Beijing. And it would not aim to stop China’s rise but rather oppose Beijing’s efforts to disrupt existing international arrangements in ways that damage the United States and its partners.
Progress toward this objective would almost certainly be a matter of degree, but it could be measured (unlike progress toward the broad notion of competition). China’s approach to global rules and norms is varied, however. Beijing does not seek to simply repeal and replace what currently exists but rather to reject some principles, accept others, and rewrite the remainder. Such subtlety should help define U.S. priorities, as Washington should focus on preserving those elements of the liberal order that are simultaneously of greatest importance to U.S. interests and under the most threat from Chinese behavior.
A new medium-term policy agenda would naturally flow from such a goal: the United States would seek to improve its military position in the Indo-Pacific relative to China; contest China’s use of economic coercion, including through an ambitious regional trade policy that aims to reduce countries’ reliance on the Chinese market; build new technology partnerships to ensure the free flow of information; and focus existing alliances on protecting democracies from external interference. Washington would, in other words, continue many of the efforts that currently fall under the broad umbrella of competition, but it would channel them toward resisting Chinese attempts to upend key elements of the liberal order.
All of this would entail a shift in how the Biden administration communicates—and thinks about—its China policy. The United States would not strictly be competing against China but would rather be working toward the preservation and extension of core international values that serve many other nations well. U.S. partners would not be required to break their ties with China in order to join a unified bloc, but they would be encouraged to join coalitions aimed at resisting Beijing on specific issues, such as economic coercion, military aggression, the spread of illiberal technologies, and human rights abuses. The accompanying message, despite Beijing’s claims to the contrary, would be that Washington does not seek to suppress China’s rise but rather to establish a U.S.-Chinese equilibrium in the long term.
RECKONING DAY
The United States and the world can live with a powerful China that does not attempt to overturn key principles of the liberal order. At the moment, however, that possibility seems remote. The military balance in the Indo-Pacific is shifting away from the United States and its allies and toward Beijing. China is becoming increasingly economically dominant in Asia, with Washington absent from any real leadership on trade. Chinese diplomacy is growing more coercive and more focused on the internal affairs of other countries, undermining their sovereignty and independence. Although cooperation with Beijing is desirable and theoretically possible, it is in very short supply, even in areas in which U.S. and Chinese interests seem to overlap, such as climate change and pandemic disease. The overall picture is quite appealing to Beijing: a steadily eroding U.S. role in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, accompanied by a steadily growing Chinese presence.
Reversing that trend is no easy task. It will take years and involve risks. Diplomacy can help mitigate these risks, but only to a limited degree; the United States will need to accept increased tension in the medium term in order to achieve a more stable equilibrium with China in the long term.
Every month, it seems, U.S. policymakers sound the alarm about the U.S.-Chinese relationship with greater volume. Across party lines and branches of government, many policymakers now endorse a major response to the China challenge. The watchwords are more resources, more speed, more vigor. All of this is appropriate. But Washington would do well to clarify what, precisely, this national effort aims to achieve.
5. Time for NATO to Close Its Door
Conclusion:
Closing NATO’s open door will not resolve Washington’s problems with Russia. These problems go far beyond the alliance. But ending NATO expansion would be an act of self-defense for the alliance itself, giving it the gifts that greater limitation and greater clarity confer.
But if we do this now won't the timing make Putin believe his strategy is successful? And if so what will be his next objective?
Time for NATO to Close Its Door
The Alliance Is Too Big—and Too Provocative—for Its Own Good
The NATO alliance is ill suited to twenty-first-century Europe. This is not because Russian President Vladimir Putin says it is or because Putin is trying to use the threat of a wider war in Ukraine to force neutrality on that country and to halt the alliance’s expansion. Rather, it is because NATO suffers from a severe design flaw: extending deep into the cauldron of eastern European geopolitics, it is too large, too poorly defined, and too provocative for its own good.
Established in 1949 to protect Western Europe, NATO was a triumph at first. It held an advancing Soviet Union at bay, kept the peace, and enabled the economic and political integration of Western Europe. After the end of the Cold War, the United States and various countries in central and southeastern Europe encouraged a dramatic enlargement of the alliance, opening NATO’s doors to more than a dozen nations in successive rounds of expansion. Today, the alliance is a loose and baggy monster of 30 countries, encompassing North America, western Europe, the Baltic states, and Turkey. This expanded NATO wavers between offense and defense, having been involved militarily in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya. The sheer enormity of the alliance and the murkiness of its mission risk embroiling NATO in a major European war.
To simplify its strategic purpose and to improve its defensive capacities, NATO should publicly and explicitly forswear adding any more members. The alliance should make clear that its long phase of expansion is over. Ending the open-door policy, tricky as it would be to execute, and rethinking the security architecture of central and eastern Europe would not be a concession to Putin. To the contrary, it is necessary in order for the most successful alliance of the twentieth century to endure and prosper in the twenty-first.
BIGGER ISN’T BETTER
The original NATO alliance served three main functions. First and foremost was defense. The Soviet Union had moved swiftly westward during World War II, swallowing independent nations and entrenching itself as a major European power. NATO did not reverse this trend but rather managed it by setting up a perimeter beyond which the Soviet Union could not go. Second, NATO resolved the endemic problem of Western European security and, in particular, the problem of alternating French, German, and British antagonism. Transforming France, Germany, and the United Kingdom from periodic enemies into steadfast allies was a recipe for lasting peace. Finally, NATO guaranteed U.S. engagement in European security, precisely what World War I and its confusing aftermath had failed to do.
From 1949 to 1989, NATO fulfilled all of these core functions. The Soviet Union never sent its tanks through the Fulda Gap. Instead, it fashioned a Soviet version of NATO, the Warsaw Pact, which was dedicated to countering American power in Europe, to restraining Germany, and to solidifying a Soviet military presence from East Berlin to Prague to Budapest. In Western Europe, NATO kept the peace so effectively that this function of the alliance was almost forgotten. War between France and Germany became inconceivable, enabling the eventual creation of the European Union. Despite the Vietnam War, despite Watergate, and despite the energy crisis of the 1970s, the United States never withdrew from Europe. Washington was no less invested in European security in 1989 than it was in 1949. In other words, the NATO alliance had worked brilliantly.
But then came a dramatic period of redefinition. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush based their NATO policy on two assumptions. The first was that NATO was the best vehicle for guaranteeing European peace and security. The spirit of French-German reconciliation could be expanded together with NATO, so the thinking went, reducing the risk that a nonaligned European state would acquire nuclear weapons and go rogue. In a similar vein, NATO expansion was seen as a hedge against Russia. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and many eastern European leaders sensed that the 1990s were anomalous and that Moscow would return to form sooner or later. When it did, an expanded NATO could be the bulwark against Russia that the original alliance had been against the Soviet Union.
The second assumption behind NATO expansion followed from optimistic ideas about the international order. Perhaps Russia was on the path to democracy, and a Russian democracy would naturally enjoy cooperating with NATO. Perhaps Russia was not becoming a democracy, but it would nevertheless be beholden to an American-led order. In 2003, the U.S. State Department’s Office of Policy Planning generated a paper titled “Why NATO Should Invite Russia to Join.” This was not to be, but U.S. policymakers assumed that the magnetic Western model would attract Russia to Europe as it would an array of countries not yet in NATO: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. NATO and the Western political model would walk forward hand in hand. Given how well NATO had worked so far, more NATO would by definition equal more peace, more integration, more order.
NATO is not the cause of instability in eastern Europe, but it cannot be separated from the region’s instability.
Both of the assumptions behind NATO expansion turned out to be off the mark. A structure created for midcentury Western Europe made little sense for post–Cold War eastern Europe. The original NATO had been delimited—by the Iron Curtain, by geography, and by politics. Outside NATO, Austria and Finland were not up for grabs: they were formally neutral but made their allegiances clear by quietly supporting the imperatives of Western security. Moreover, the horrors of World War II had tamped down nationalism in Western Europe, which has a history of strong nation-states. After 1945, there were no outstanding questions about the borders among them. No outside power, not the Soviet Union, not China, was willing to change the borders of Western Europe. Thus could NATO excel at being, as it was supposed to be, a defensive military alliance.
An expanded NATO operates entirely differently in eastern Europe. There is in 2022 no equivalent to the Iron Curtain, and in Europe’s east geography does not constrain NATO expansion. Instead, the alliance is awkwardly and haphazardly sprawled across eastern Europe. The Kaliningrad region is a small island of Russia within a sea of NATO territory, which runs in a swerving line from Estonia down to the Black Sea. Twenty-first-century NATO is enmeshed in the tortuous question of where Russia’s western border ends and Europe’s eastern border begins, a question that since the seventeenth century has been the cause of countless wars, some of them emanating from Russian imperialism and some from Western invasions. NATO randomly crosses dozens of dividing lines in the ruthless playground of empires, nation-states, and ethnicities that is eastern Europe. The alliance is not the cause of regional instability, but as a nonneutral presence and an object of Russian enmity, it cannot be separated from this instability. Perhaps if all European countries (other than Russia) were NATO members, the alliance could be an effective bulwark against Moscow, but this is far from the case.
The unanticipated perils of expanding NATO have been compounded by the open-door policy, which renders the alliance’s eastern flank incomprehensible. NATO’s declaration in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia will someday become members was at best aspirational and at worst insincere. Yet the potential for the eastward movement of NATO’s border is very real, as recent talks about the potential accession of Finland and Sweden have underscored. Moreover, the Ukrainian government’s drive to enter NATO has embroiled the alliance in the region’s most explosive ethnonationalist conflict, even if advocates of NATO autonomy see Ukrainian membership as purely a matter of respecting the alliance’s charter, which enshrines the open-door policy, or of Kyiv’s God-given right to choose its allies. A defensive alliance is unequipped to handle a conflict between a nonmember seeking membership and a nuclear power hell-bent on denying that membership. That is a conflict NATO can only lose and one that might even threaten the existence of the alliance if a member state such as Poland or Lithuania were pulled into the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
An additional risk to an expanding NATO is the international order around it. Rather than wishing to join the U.S.-led order in Europe, Russia seeks to build an international order of its own and to contain American power. Ironically, NATO expansion or the promise of it aids Putin in this effort. It supports his narrative of Western betrayal and justifies Russian interventionism to the Russian public. In Russia, NATO is perceived as foreign and unfriendly. Its expansion is a pillar of Putin’s domestic political legitimacy. Russia needs a leader, so Putin’s logic runs, who can say no to an alliance constructed to say no to Moscow.
BACK TO DEFENSE
NATO must change course by publicly and explicitly refusing to add any more member states. It should by no means go back on its commitments to countries that have already joined—U.S. credibility in Europe depends on honoring them—but it must revisit the assumptions that undergirded NATO expansion in the 1990s. With the alliance already overextended in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods, incorporating Ukraine would be strategic madness. The theater-of-the-absurd quality of the West’s attachment to the open-door policy is itself insulting to Ukraine (and to Georgia) and will over time generate ill will toward Washington. Even if everyone knows that what they say is at odds with reality, Ukrainians and Americans alike muddy the waters and invite distraction by not speaking candidly.
The United States needs a new strategy for dealing with Russia in eastern Europe, one that does not rely primarily on NATO. The alliance is there to defend its members, and closing the open door would help it do so. No doubt, ending expansion would require difficult diplomacy. It would contradict the often-repeated promises of U.S. and European officials and break with precedent. But an alliance that cannot act in its own interest and that clings to disproven assumptions will undermine itself from within. Survival demands reform, and finalizing NATO’s membership would enable an approach attuned to the region’s complexities, to an international order in which the Western model does not reign supreme, and to the revisionism of Putin’s Russia, which is not going away any time soon.
The United States and its European allies and partners should at the same time propose a new institution for deliberations with Russia, one that would focus on crisis management, deconfliction, and strategic dialogue. NATO should play no part in it. It is worth sending the message to Moscow, perhaps for the leader who comes after Putin, that NATO is not the be all and end all of European security. Most important, Washington should proceed with caution. The status quo is precarious, and any inch that can be gained from U.S.-European-Russian diplomacy is worth gaining. The odds that such diplomacy will succeed are small, but to not give it a chance would be an unforgivable error.
Instead of relying on NATO, Washington should use economic statecraft in the coming conflicts with Russia. Along with the European Union, the United States could employ a combination of sanctions, measures to block the transfer of technology, and efforts to isolate Russia from European and American markets to pressure Russia on Ukraine and on other areas of disagreement. This is hardly a novel idea, but Russia’s less-than-modern economy and relative financial weakness make it a good target for such measures.
In the event of a new military conflict with Russia, the United States should form an ad hoc coalition with allies and partners to deal with possible threats instead of directly involving NATO (unless Russia attacks a NATO member). Since 1991, NATO’s track record on non-NATO territory has been checkered, featuring failed missions in Afghanistan and Libya. These out-of-area misadventures prove that the alliance should be playing defense, not offense.
Closing NATO’s open door will not resolve Washington’s problems with Russia. These problems go far beyond the alliance. But ending NATO expansion would be an act of self-defense for the alliance itself, giving it the gifts that greater limitation and greater clarity confer.
6. What’s Past Omicron’s Peak?
Another ominous warning.
What’s Past Omicron’s Peak?
A long descent from a peak in cases could exact a larger toll than even Omicron’s blistering ascent.
Just weeks into its staggering ascent in the United States, Omicron appears to maybe, maybe, be taking its leave of a few big urban centers up and down the East Coast. Documented coronavirus infections seem to be leveling off, even falling, in cities such as Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.—a possible preview of what the country’s been waiting on tenterhooks for: the beginning of the end of the Omicron wave.
The pattern fits with what recent models predict. National case counts will hit a maximum this month, maybe a touch later. (Some think that the peak is already behind us.) It’s all a bit squishy still, but epidemiologists such as Justin Lessler of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are “pretty confident” that the American apex is nigh. Peak could then give way to plunge, as it did in South Africa. It’s tempting, then, to imagine Omicron loosening its vice grip on the United States just as quickly as it latched on. February will be better; March, rosier still. Americans will get something like a Hot Post-Omi Spring.
A symmetrical, V-shaped rise and fall is a very nice and neat story. It is also probably wrong.
Before I stuff my foot completely inside my own mouth, let me be clear: This is not a Full-Blown Pandemic Prediction™. I personally do not know exactly what is on the other side of the Omicron peak. Neither do the experts. Actually, no one does. The back ends of curves can mirror the fronts, but they don’t have to—it depends on us and our immunity, on the virus and its hijinks, and on the frequency and intensity at which host and pathogen continue to collide. The decline could be sharp and fast, or sputtering and slow. It could start off steep, then lose steam. It could plateau—or even reverse course and tick back up.
What we can say is that the higher a wave crests, the longer and more confusing the path to the bottom will be. We need to prepare for the possibility that this wave could have an uncomfortably long tail—or at least a crooked one. “I do think the decline is unlikely to be as steep as the rise,” Saad Omer, an epidemiologist at Yale, told me.
During outbreaks, the only truly certain things are those “in hindsight,” Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease modeler at Georgetown University, told me. And even the recent past is cloudy right now. We’ve lacked the test-and-trace infrastructure to fully track Omicron’s spread, which has seriously messed with our ability to forecast what the virus might do next. Most scientists are not even all that certain about where we stand in relation to the peak. And “the further into the future we want to project, the more uncertainty there is,” Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, told me.
Even with the murkiness ahead, how we exit this wave will certainly be affected by how we entered it. On its record-shattering sprint upward, Omicron had certain advantages: The virus seems to thrive in the upper airway and become contagious fast; it’s ace at dodging a lot of the antibodies in vaccinated and previously infected people, giving it a larger pool of hosts to work with than Delta. In the United States, Omicron also arrived at an especially opportune time: Americans, many of them older, unvaccinated, or with a chronic health condition, were sick of masking, and were barreling into their holiday-heavy winter. The fleet-footed virus slammed into a susceptible population that, behaviorally, was quite amenable to slathering it around. That dangerous combination spurred our wave, then skyrocketed it.
When this tide turns hinges on when Omicron starts to run out of new people to infect—either because it has burned through everyone it can or because we, through our behaviors, starve it of hosts. Cases crater; the curve, in turn, crashes. A version of this seems to have unfolded in South Africa, where recorded cases peaked around mid-December, then fell, and fell, and fell. (The United Kingdom, whose wave is a couple of weeks behind South Africa’s, seems poised to turn a corner too.)
How those foreign free falls play out is instructive, “but we also need to recognize that the U.S. is not South Africa,” Maia Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Harvard, told me. Even subtle differences in host populations can massage a wave into a different shape—a rounder pinnacle, a more leisurely wane. Yes, the United States’ population is more vaccinated than South Africa’s, but it’s also older. (And lots of Americans over 65 aren’t boosted.) The two countries’ health profiles, medical infrastructures, and approaches to controlling SARS-CoV-2 differ; so do the behaviors of their residents. Omicron also caught South Africa as it was heading into summer; the United States may have a tougher time unsticking itself from the virus during colder months. And Delta, which was already driving surges of its own before Omicron arrived, hasn’t yet disappeared here.
The United States is also an especially sprawling and diverse place, as Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute pointed out on Twitter. Viruses thrive on human interconnectedness, and an early surge in big cities can front-load cases so much that the national narrative booms, then starts to bust. After we pass the summit, “I think at least the initial downslope will be precipitous,” Yonatan Grad, an infectious-disease expert at Harvard, told me. But as the virus continues to trickle into more rural, sparsely populated parts of the country, that story gets more complicated: a smattering of regional peaks could slow and lengthen the overall decline. We tend to talk about “the peak” as if it’s one monolithic thing, but it’s an aggregate of asynchronous outbreaks; each community will experience its own, unique Omicron spike, Grad said. The national trajectory depends heavily on “how long it takes to percolate into different parts of the country,” Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University, told me. A cliff-like drop might give way to a series of rolling hills. (Scarpino thinks that South Africa’s decline, which has recently slowed, may now be exhibiting this geographical flattening effect.)
How we react to the curve could also stretch it out, and that’s the biggest wild card of all. When people hear that we’ve skittered past the top of a peak, “psychologically, they loosen up,” UNC’s Lessler told me. (This is something that many epidemic models don’t account for.) Masks come off. Schools, workplaces, and leisure venues reopen. People rejoin social circles, or kick-start new ones. Smaller shifts such as these, multiplied by millions, can turn a waterfall decline into molasses. “So much of susceptibility is tied up in behavior,” Majumder said. And as people get further out from their most recent vaccination or infection, their risk of catching the virus goes back up.
A lethargic decline is a costly one. Already, health-care systems around the country are being pummeled by record-breaking cases. In many states, hospitals are hitting capacity; people are struggling to access care for all sorts of sicknesses. Hospitalization and death waves are smaller in magnitude than infection waves, and lag behind them, but they’re “much more protracted,” UT’s Meyers said. The sheer height of our infection peak is already poised to haunt us. There have been so many infections that cases, hospitalizations, and deaths won’t return to November’s pre-Omicron levels— let alone the numbers of last year’s early-summer lull—for a long time. “It’s going to get much worse before it gets better,” Meyers said. Even if the United States’ curve turns out to be symmetrical, half of this wave’s infections, and more than half of its hospitalizations and deaths, are still ahead, past the peak of cases. Adding any more weight to the curve’s far side just makes that picture uglier.
On the more optimistic flip side, behavior can also curb transmission—enough to keep the overall number of infections lower than it might otherwise be. We heard this lesson early on in the pandemic, when cases were first rising at alarming rates: mask up, hunker down, flatten the curve. It’s still true now. The hope is that the lower the peak, the fewer unnecessary infections can occur after it, Lessler said.
A horizontal squish does delay the peak and stretch out the wave. But it also buys us time to vaccinate more people and roll out treatments, and reduces the burden on the health-care system at any single point. We missed our chance for an early pancaking effect in many big cities, but smaller, rural parts of the country can still take heed, and it’s probably especially important that they do so. Those regions tend to have lower vaccination rates and lack “the capacity for a fast-running surge,” Anne Sosin, a public-health researcher at Dartmouth College, told me. If they’re not buffered from their own Omicron waves, the variant could concentrate in the parts of the country that can least afford to absorb it.
What lies beyond the peak isn’t out of our control either. The decline can be sped up by the same mitigation behaviors that temper the rise, Majumder said. Curves can get flatter. They can also get shorter. And minimizing cases on the wave’s far side will still blunt the impact on the health-care system, and lessen the variant’s social toll. The key here, then, is to avoid seeing “past the peak” as a cue to relapse into riskier behavior. “The start of a decline is not sufficient to think we’re out of the woods,” Georgetown’s Bansal said. Every step we take now will determine how long we stay high up on this curve and, eventually, where we land—as well as what condition we’ll be in when we arrive at the bottom.
7. Ex-Pentagon strategist Elbridge Colby bells the dragon
Excerpts:
Colby’s book helps us understand the obliviousness of 1914 all too clearly.
Colby proposes that an American-led coalition impose a strategy of denial on China, blocking China’s ability to traverse the 80 miles of the Taiwan Strait. How to put the bell on the cat?
“Defending forces operating from a distributed, resilient force posture and across all the war-fighting domains might use a variety of methods to blunt the Chinese invasion in the air and seas surrounding Taiwan.”
The US and its allies might “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips. The defenders might also try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control … And once Chinese forces entered the Strait, US and defending forces could use a variety of methods to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft.”
Colby leaves what means we might employ here to the imagination.
Ex-Pentagon strategist Elbridge Colby bells the dragon
Colby’s heralded new book asserts the US can fight a limited war with China but gives the reader little reason to believe him
Elbridge Colby’s much-heralded and widely-praised book “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict” is a disappointment – not only a disappointment, but a dangerous amalgam of dodges that points down the slippery slope towards war.
Colby claims the United States can fight a limited war with China, but gives us little reason to believe him. We read the accounts of the summer of 1914 and shudder at the obliviousness of European leaders as they set in motion World War I, and ask ourselves: What could they have been thinking? If they were sleepwalking, as Christopher Clark put it, what were they dreaming? Didn’t they have a clue about the consequences of their actions?
Colby’s book helps us understand the obliviousness of 1914 all too clearly.
Colby proposes that an American-led coalition impose a strategy of denial on China, blocking China’s ability to traverse the 80 miles of the Taiwan Strait. How to put the bell on the cat?
“Defending forces operating from a distributed, resilient force posture and across all the war-fighting domains might use a variety of methods to blunt the Chinese invasion in the air and seas surrounding Taiwan.”
The US and its allies might “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips. The defenders might also try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control … And once Chinese forces entered the Strait, US and defending forces could use a variety of methods to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft.”
Colby leaves what means we might employ here to the imagination.
There follows a peroration about Gettysburg, Charles XII of Sweden, the Trojan War, the American invasion of Okinawa, the Maginot Line and other bits and snatches of war history – but little about the likely nature of warfighting today.
It isn’t so much that Colby gives the wrong answers. He fails to ask pertinent questions about Chinese intent and technological capability. Instead, he gives us a pastiche of generalities that obscure rather than clarify the strategic issues at hand.
In brief, Colby depicts China as an expansionist power eager to absorb territory, citing alleged Chinese designs on the Philippines and Taiwan on a half-dozen occasions – as if China’s interest in the Philippines were equivalent to its interest in Taiwan.
But China’s strategy is not a board game whose goal is power aggrandizement as such. China is not a nation-state but an empire in which Mandarin is a minority language, and one “rebel province” (as Beijing characterizes Taiwan) sets a precedent for many.
This fleet of Chinese ships has sparked a diplomatic row last year after parking at a reef off the Philippines for weeks. Photo: AFP / National Task Force-West Philippine Sea
Whether China really wants to control the Philippines may be debated, but the eventual integration of Taiwan is a Chinese raison d’état, an existential issue over which China will fight if it must.
One recalls Clausewitz’s maxim that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Colby has nothing to say about the politics. Nowhere does he mention the One China policy, the basis of Richard Nixon’s 1972 restoration of diplomatic relations with Beijing.
China in his account is simply an expansionist blob indifferent to whether it ingests Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam or Malaysia. To be sure, China for centuries has taken the posture of an imperial suzerain towards countries on its border, and its bullying of the Philippines and Vietnam raises the risk of war in East Asia.
But Taiwan is a different matter. China’s aggressive behavior in the South China Sea follows the maxim, “kill the chicken while the monkey watches.” If the US is willing to fight over uninhabited atolls in the South China Sea, Beijing says in so many words, all the more so will we fight over Taiwan.
Never does Colby ask why China would take the risk of invading Taiwan. As long as the West adheres to the One China policy, Taiwan’s eventual unification with the mainland is all but assured.
Western analysts make a great deal of China’s demographic problems, but Taiwan’s are far worse. With a total fertility rate of only one child per female, Taiwan will run out of workers in a generation and will have to import people from the mainland.
If the West abrogates the One China policy and promotes Taiwanese sovereignty – for example, by attempting to make the island impregnable to a Chinese invasion – China will pre-empt Western efforts to reinforce the island and exercise its option to use force before it expires.
There is a close analogy here to the outbreak of war in 1914. An American attempt to deny China access to Taiwan would have the same effect as the Russian mobilization that triggered the conflict, in Christopher Clark’s authoritative account.
If one side mobilizes, the other must also to avoid a catastrophic disadvantage – and this is how great powers “sleepwalk” (Clark) into wars they do not want and cannot win.
Soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army take part in a military parade to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the PLA, at the Zhurihe military training base in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China, on July 30, 2017. Photo: Agencies
China’s tech advantage
On the development of military technology, Colby has only this to say: “But the need for an attacker to have something approaching naval and air dominance before undertaking an invasion by sea is even more acute today, under what has been termed the ‘mature precision-strike regime.’
This phrase refers to the great advances in modern militaries’ ability to strike precisely at targets, including moving targets, at greater ranges and under more conditions.”
He appears to envision American F-18 Hornets or submarines picking off Chinese landing craft as they chug across the Taiwan Strait towards Taipei. He appears to presume that China will not sink American fleet carriers, or blind American GPS and communications satellites, or destroy the American base at Guam with long-range missiles, or neutralize Taiwan’s military resources with massed missile attacks, but, rather, will fight a limited war according to rules amenable to Washington.
This, I believe, is delusional.
Missing entirely from Colby’s account is the revolution in military technology during the post-Cold War era, or indeed any substantive discussion of the decisive role of military technology.
It is irresponsible to discuss strategy with respect to China without first taking stock of the technological balance.
Graham Allison and Jonah Glick-Unterman published a commendable summation of the military balance for Harvard’s Belfer Center in December 21: “The Great Military Rivalry: China vs the US,” including Chinese missile, AI and other high-tech capabilities.
They warn: “If in the near future there is a ‘limited war’ over Taiwan or along China’s periphery, the US would likely lose – or have to choose between losing and stepping up the escalation ladder to a wider war.”
Colby is thanked in the acknowledgments. It is baffling that he ignored these issues in his book.
Advances in technology decided the outcome of numerous wars. Prussians armed with the Dreyse breechloader inflicted a nearly five-to-one casualty ratio on Austrians armed with muzzle-loaders at Königgrätz in 1866.
Four years later Prussia’s breech-loading artillery provided a winning advantage over the French. Radar saved Britain in the air war of 1940.
Japan’s bombers and torpedo planes sank Britain’s older capital ships in December 1941, nullifying Britain’s dominant position in Asia.
Russian surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery shot down 100 American airframes in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and Israel probably would have lost without emergency resupply from the US.
Israeli chief of staff in a meeting in the Northern Command during the Yom Kippur War.
In 1982, a combination of American avionics including look-down radar and Israeli drones reversed the position, destroying nearly 100 Russian airframes over the Beqaa Valley.
There is a strong possibility – in my view a high probability – that in any military engagement with China close to its shores, the United States would be in the unenviable position of the Austrians at Königgrätz, the French at Sedan or the British at Singapore.
Like the British, the US’ far-flung battle line incorporating more than 700 foreign bases projects power around the world which it has used to fight the 21st century equivalent of colonial wars. It is ill-prepared to take on a technologically sophisticated adversary with the home advantage of short logistical lines.
Of course, America in theory could emplace anti-ship missiles (for example Lockheed’s Long Range Anti-Ship Missile) in Taiwan, mine the Taiwan Strait, or deploy other anti-access/area-denial weapons.
To assume China would sit on its hands and watch this occur, though, is fanciful. In all likelihood, it would respond the same way Germany and Austria did to Russia’s mobilization in 1914.
Limited war with China?
Colby presumes that brave little Taiwan will fight to the death and that America’s allies will risk war with China by joining our containment effort. In fact, Taiwan requires of its young men only four months of military service.
The American strategist Edward Luttwak tweeted on December 14, 2021: “If attacked, Taiwan must be defended by the Taiwanese with support from abroad not by Americans while Taiwanese watch video games. Feasible if pretty uniforms are cashed in for universal, short, intense military training to defend locally, everywhere with UAVs & portable missiles.”
But Taiwan has deliberately kept its weaponry below the threshold required to offer serious resistance to China because its military has no intention of offering serious resistance.
The first question Colby should have asked is how America might respond if China were to sink an American fleet carrier with the loss of thousands of American lives.
“A limited war,” Colby declares, “is fundamentally about rules. It may be thought of as a war in which the combatants establish, recognize and agree to rules within and regarding the ends of the conflict and acknowledge or seek to have acknowledged that transgressing those rules will constitute an escalation that is likely to incur retaliation or counter escalation.”
He is after all a lawyer, not a soldier. The trick, he avers, is to stack the rules in one’s favor.
For the United States and any engaged allies and partners to prevail in a limited war with China, three conditions must be met: 1) the war must remain limited in both means and ends; 2) the United States must be able to achieve its political ends by operating within those limitations; and 3) Beijing must agree to de-escalate or end the conflict on terms acceptable to the United States.
But war isn’t an exchange of legal briefs. China could escalate a “limited” war with the United States in a dozen ways that fall short of nuclear attack but nonetheless inflict terrible damage on the United States, including the destruction of America’s satellite network and cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.
The whole history of warfare militates against the conceit that the US and Chinese militaries can play a gentleman’s game of graduated escalation. America won the Cold War not because it set out to win a limited war (it lost the only one it ventured, in Vietnam), but because it proved to Russia in the 1980s that the West could defeat Russia in an all-out conventional war.
The Arleigh-Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry conducts operations in the South China Sea in 2020. Photo: AFP / Samuel Hardgrove / US Navy
Like the British in Asia in 1941, the US has an army that knows how to fight colonial wars, not a high-tech war with a superpower. When Colby advocates limited war, he means the kind of war the US military knows how to fight.
There is an argument for going to war with the army you have, and it is dead wrong. Sometimes the right choice is not to go to war at all. The US military is hollowed out. Every general officer now serving was promoted for doing things the wrong way.
The US commitment to technological advances has dwindled; the federal development budget has fallen to just 0.27% of GDP in 2019 from 0.8% in 1984. The Pentagon buys the same systems from military contractors that it did a generation ago, and flag officers have become probationary lobbyists for the defense industry.
The US has coasted on our Cold War success for 30 years while China has devoted enormous resources to preventing us from projecting power to its coastline.
It will take a trillion dollars of high-tech R&D funding and several years to counter China’s missile, cyberwar and other offensive capabilities. The US needs the visionary approach that defense secretaries like Harold Brown and James Schlesinger brought to the Pentagon, buoyed by a great national goal on par with Kennedy’s Apollo Program or Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
Don’t expect to find this sort of vision in the Washington think tanks that live off scraps from the Pentagon or the defense contractors. It can only come from a president of the United States with an evangelical fervor for national renewal.
If you want peace, prepare for war. If you want war – and a losing war – provoke a powerful adversary without preparation. That is where Colby’s limited-war illusion will take the US. The US needs to step back, take stock and prepare.
Review: The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, by Elbridge Colby. Yale University Press, 2021.
This is a shortened version of a review that first appeared on the website of Law&Liberty. The original can be found here.
Follow David P Goldman on Twitter: @davidpgoldman
8. Team USA warns athletes about Chinese phone surveillance at Olympics, encourages 'burner phones': report
This is not a surprise to anyone who has traveled to China. More than a decade ago I accompanied 15 students to China (my last TDY trip in the Army) and we only took a burner phone and no computers. You have to assume that every electronic device you take into China will be compromised.
Team USA warns athletes about Chinese phone surveillance at Olympics, encourages 'burner phones': report
Former U.S. Olympics Committee member Jeanne Murphy says the athletes are ‘well protected’ due to COVID protocols at the Beijing Olympics.
Team USA is preparing to send its athletes to the Beijing Olympics with the games a few weeks away, but the trip is reportedly coming with a dire warning: keep your personal phones at home.
The U.S. Olympic team warned athletes traveling to Beijing to be wary of potential digital surveillance from the Chinese government while abroad, USA Today reported Thursday.
A woman wearing a face mask to protect against COVID-19 sits near landscaping decorated with the logos for the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics on a pedestrian shopping street in Beijing, Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
"Like computers, the data and applications on cell phones are subject to malicious intrusion, infection and data compromise," Team USA’s advisory reportedly stated, adding that "burner phones" were "encouraged."
Beijing’s Olympic Organizing Committee told the newspaper China takes seriously the importance of protecting personal data.
Student activists wear masks with the colors of the pro-independence East Turkistan flag during a rally to protest the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games outside the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)
"Personal information collected by Beijing 2022 will not be disclosed unless the disclosure is necessary," the committee said. "Information of accredited media representatives will only be used for purposes related to the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games."
Team USA was hardly the only country warned about potential Chinese surveillance.
Canadian athletes were also cautioned.
Sports Minister Pascale St-Onge told The Canadian Press that protecting laptops and cellphones was a priority.
The Dutch Olympic Committee said it was "anticipating Chinese surveillance during the games."
Olympic Rings assembled atop a tower stand out near a ski resort on the outskirts of Beijing, China, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
The Olympics are set to begin Feb. 4.
9. Blockchain, NFTs and the New Standard for Identity and Security
A useful overview/guide for people like me who are digital immigrants or digital aliens.
Blockchain, NFTs and the New Standard for Identity and Security
Blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are two of the most popular technological innovations in recent years. In today's world, where data is frequently hacked, and identity theft is on the rise, blockchain and NFTs are providing a new level of security and identification.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
Blockchain technology uses cryptography to generate an unchangeable record of transactions that can't be tampered with. NFTs are represented by unique cryptographic tokens that provide an added layer of security by ensuring that each asset is tracked and verified. Also, they are designed to serve as a type of digital asset, which represents rights and privileges.
They can also be utilized to virtually depict something scarce, such as in-game items or collectibles. Due to their uniqueness, they allow for more complex identification and security.
NFTs enable businesses to create a system where digital assets can be securely stored and transferred between users. This is a fantastic tool for keeping sensitive information safe, it has the potential to revolutionize how we use the internet.
How Blockchain Technology Sets New Standards in Cyber Security and Identity Management
Blockchain technology has established new standards in cyber security. By providing a decentralized platform for the safekeeping of data, it protects various organizations from cyber assaults. It may also be utilized to keep track of people's identities. It embodies security innovations through the following aspects:
Security through Blocks
Blockchain technology, as a distributed database, maintains a continuously growing list of data records called blocks. Each block includes a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Its immutability is one of its most prominent features. Furthermore, it is used to verify users and confirm that their identities are not compromised.
Private and Public Blockchains
A private blockchain is a database that allows enterprises to communicate information without a central authority. On the other hand, a public blockchain is accessible to anybody on the internet to be viewed and used. Both are safe and tamper-proof since due to their transparent and secure nature. As a result, they're perfect places to store sensitive data.
Decentralized Technology
The blockchain network allows users to store data decentralized and may be used for high-level encryption. The decentralized nature assures that any one entity cannot control the hacker's identity or card information. Hacking attacks on the network are now impossible since they would have to attack 51% of the system simultaneously.
Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are self-executing contracts that employ blockchain technology to enforce the terms of a deal automatically. They build trust and enforce security in a business by being tamper-proof and transparent. Additionally, investors may use them to manage identities. This aids in the prevention of identity theft and fraud.
How NFTs Are Influencing Cyber Security and Identity
As the world becomes increasingly digital, keeping data private is more critical than ever. NFTs are one method that entities use to accomplish this. Kwiktrust is one entity that utilizes NFTs to secure data. It's a digital security firm that specializes in offering secure file sharing and storage solutions. They utilize blockchain-based technologies to create tamper-proof records of transactions.
The following are a few examples of how NFTs are being used to promote cybersecurity:
Integrated Security Features
NFTs work in tandem with other security elements to promote and affect cyber security. These include, but are not limited to, an encrypted messaging service, an encrypted data storage platform, and the ability to generate digital signatures on transactions. NFTs may interact with identity providers via authentication, ensuring that users are not impersonated.
NFTs improve cyber security because they are difficult to duplicate and link to other digital assets. The use of cryptography also enhances protection. They are also versatile, which means users may utilize them in a variety of ways. Furthermore, NFTs provide a supplementary layer of security for enterprises and individuals who want to secure their digital assets.
Smart Encryption and Validation
NFTs employ a "smart encryption and validation" method to improve the security of digital assets. Their programmed system is simple and elegant, allowing anybody with an internet connection to acquire and trade them easily. Smart encryption and validation are used in NFTs to improve security and identification in public and private blockchains.
As much as Blockchain technology could be reliable, the sector is still new to many people. There are chances that one could lose money investing in NFTs, but leveraging platforms like KwikTrust could shelter investors from such dark clouds. KwikTrust is an e-validation platform that proves ownership of NFTs and digital assets via self-certified and third-party validation files stored in blockchain networks.
NFTs' encryption and validation technology are unrivaled. Each unit has a digital signature, making it impossible to reproduce. Such technologies are raising the bar for the statistics sector, which is concerned with database access security. NFTs prevent others from stealing the artwork of others. Each work has its digital signature, which identifies a project to its owner.
Offering Secure Storage
Blockchain technology's key characteristics make it an ideal platform for non-fungible tokens. Blockchain is decentralized, making it resistant to hacking and corruption. Additionally, it is immutable, which implies that data cannot be altered or erased once recorded.
Lastly, the blockchain is completely transparent, allowing everyone on the network to see all transactions and data. Blockchain's immutability, security, and transparency make it an excellent storage option for NFTs since they may be kept securely and with surety that they will not be tampered with.
Securing Digital Ownership of NFTs and Digital Assets
Keeping track of all the activities undertaken in a day may be difficult. With blockchain technology becoming more popular every day, there are various methods to safeguard your digital assets. As much as Blockchain technology may be trustworthy, it is still relatively new to many individuals.
There is a need to maintain the integrity and security of transactions. Several projects have employed NFTs to represent tokens to their networks, including Request Network, POA Network, Civic, etc.
10. ‘War Is Coming’: Mysterious TikTok Videos Are Scaring Sweden’s Children
I am sure this is only the tip of the influence iceberg. Sweden may be a laboratory. Can we learn from it?
Excerpts:
So who’s behind the frightening videos? As with most other disinformation, no country has claimed responsibility, but Russia has a clear interest in sowing fear and confusion in a country that has in recent years begun to rebuild its defenses. Just last week Sweden moved additional soldiers to its Baltic Sea island of Gotland. The source of the TikTok fear campaign could, of course, also be another country wishing to weaken Sweden’s resolve—China comes to mind—or it could simply be TikTik malcontents with nothing better to do. But in the fight against disinformation, the most pressing goal isn’t finding the perpetrator, it’s finding an antidote to the lies.
Fortunately, Sweden has a new psychological defense agency tasked with doing precisely that. The Swedish Psychological Defense Agency was launched on New Year’s Day to strengthen the public’s resilience to disinformation. Importantly, it will also conduct the complicated work of identifying and exposing the perpetrators of disinformation. With the TikTok disinformation campaign in full swing, the Psychological Defense Agency will need to swiftly issue advice – on TikTok perhaps – to children, teenagers, parents, and teachers.
Indeed, other countries should consider a similar move. If the war-anxiety machine hasn’t already reached their children, it will soon. Social media makes the adage that all is fair in love and war easier than ever to implement.
‘War Is Coming’: Mysterious TikTok Videos Are Scaring Sweden’s Children
The campaign offers an early test for the country’s new anti-disinformation agency.
In Sweden, an unusual anxiety is afflicting children and young teenagers. Some can’t sleep. Some ask their parents if Russia is about to attack their country. Where did they get that idea? TikTok.
“War is coming,” say some of the videos that the social-media platform is feeding to young Swedes. Other videos tell their Swedish users that Russian forces will bomb their country or even invade. No wonder the children are becoming anxious. The Chinese-owned, algorithm-driven platform is, in fact, the perfect tool for a country wishing to weaken another country’s morale.
This weekend a question posted on Twitter turned into a gathering of adults concerned about things they’d been picking up from their nine-, ten-, eleven, twelve-year-old children and pupils. Is it true that information saying that war is coming to Sweden is being pumped out on TikTok? a Twitter user asked. The question drew dozens of parents to report that their young children had suddenly begun asking if Russia was about to invade.
“My 11-year-old was extremely frightened yesterday and asked whether there was going to be war soon,” one mother wrote.
Other parents reported that their children suddenly seemed anxious. When they asked what was the matter, it turned out the kids had been seeing the same kind of videos on TikTok. Elementary-school teachers reported that pupils had mentioned similar fears. Other parents checked with their children and sure enough, they’d seen them too.
On Saturday, the Swedish daily Aftonbladet reported that BRIS – a nationwide Swedish organization that advocates for children’s rights and operates a hotline for children and teenagers – had begun receiving phone calls from children and teenagers anxious about an impending invasion. BRIS social worker Marie Angsell told the newspaper that TikTok’s efficient algorithm, which has perfected individualized feeds, means that children and teenagers who view such videos once are consequently fed more of the same and end up overwhelmed by fear of a looming conflict. Angsell recommended that adults tell the children in their lives how the app works, to defuse the sense of impending calamity.
Children and teenagers suddenly overcome by fear of war, in a country that last saw a war more than two centuries ago and last mounted major territorial defenses in the 1980s? Someone is trying to weaken Sweden’s resolve by frightening children. To be sure, anyone might be concerned by news reports of the past week’s failed NATO-Russia negotiations, Russia’s veiled threat of “catastrophic consequence”, and Poland’s warning that Europe is on the brink of war. But few children, tweens, and teens read the newspaper: in Sweden, three percent do so on a daily basis. Some 30 percent, by contrast, use TikTok.
So who’s behind the frightening videos? As with most other disinformation, no country has claimed responsibility, but Russia has a clear interest in sowing fear and confusion in a country that has in recent years begun to rebuild its defenses. Just last week Sweden moved additional soldiers to its Baltic Sea island of Gotland. The source of the TikTok fear campaign could, of course, also be another country wishing to weaken Sweden’s resolve—China comes to mind—or it could simply be TikTik malcontents with nothing better to do. But in the fight against disinformation, the most pressing goal isn’t finding the perpetrator, it’s finding an antidote to the lies.
Fortunately, Sweden has a new psychological defense agency tasked with doing precisely that. The Swedish Psychological Defense Agency was launched on New Year’s Day to strengthen the public’s resilience to disinformation. Importantly, it will also conduct the complicated work of identifying and exposing the perpetrators of disinformation. With the TikTok disinformation campaign in full swing, the Psychological Defense Agency will need to swiftly issue advice – on TikTok perhaps – to children, teenagers, parents, and teachers.
Indeed, other countries should consider a similar move. If the war-anxiety machine hasn’t already reached their children, it will soon. Social media makes the adage that all is fair in love and war easier than ever to implement.
11. FedEx Wants To Equip Airbus A321s With Anti-Missile Laser Countermeasures
Wow. This would be quite a development.
FedEx Wants To Equip Airbus A321s With Anti-Missile Laser Countermeasures - Todayuknews
Despite their proliferation, U.S. Air Force veteran Michael Pietrucha, who served as an irregular warfare operations officer, argued in a piece for War on the Rocks that MANPADS are “difficult to employ and relatively easy to defeat,” adding that “In the tens of thousands of sorties flown in the last two decades by U.S. and NATO aircraft in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, only four fixed-wing combat aircraft have been hit (and two downed) by MANPADS.” At the same time, MANPADS performance in the early stages of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine was more effective and deadly.
As the FAA’s filing suggests, though, these systems still pose at least some degree of threat to commercial air traffic. Given that FedEx is applying for special conditions to fit a DIRCM system aboard an aircraft they aren’t yet flying, it could be that the freight company is eyeing the system for use only in specific cases or routes. This would be a beneficial capability serving high-risk areas. With such little to go on other than the filing, however, it’s impossible to know the extent to which FedEx intends to use the system.
For now, the FAA filing is another reminder of the dangers posed by air defense systems falling into the wrong hands. It will be interesting to see what comes of the FAA’s request and if other commercial airlines or freight companies follow FedEx’s lead.
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12. Texas rabbi: Security training paid off in hostage standoff
There is a lot to be said for training and preparation. Too often we believe it won't happen here or won't happen to me.
Texas rabbi: Security training paid off in hostage standoff | AP News
AP · by JAKE BLEIBERG and ERIC TUCKER · January 17, 2022
COLLEYVILLE, Texas (AP) — U.S. and British authorities Monday continued an investigation into the weekend standoff at a Texas synagogue that ended with an armed British national dead and a rabbi crediting past security training for getting him and three members of his congregation out safely.
Authorities identified the hostage-taker as a 44-year-old British national, Malik Faisal Akram, who was killed Saturday night after the last hostages ran out of Congregation Beth Israel around 9 p.m. The FBI said there was no early indication that anyone else was involved, but it had not provided a possible motive.
The investigation stretched to England, where late Sunday police in Manchester announced that two teenagers were in custody in connection with the standoff. Greater Manchester Police tweeted that counter-terrorism officers had made the arrests but did not say whether the pair faced any charges.
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Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker said security training at his suburban Fort Worth congregation over the years is what allowed him and the other three hostages to make it through the 10-hour ordeal, which he described as traumatic.
“In the last hour of our hostage crisis, the gunman became increasingly belligerent and threatening,” Cytron-Walker said in a statement. “Without the instruction we received, we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself.”
Video of the standoff’s end from Dallas TV station WFAA showed people running out a door of the synagogue, and then a man holding a gun opening the same door just seconds later before he turned around and closed it. Moments later, several shots and then an explosion could be heard.
Authorities have declined to say who shot Akram, saying it was still under investigation.
Akram could be heard ranting on a Facebook livestream of the services and demanding the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist suspected of having ties to al-Qaida who was convicted of trying to kill U.S. Army officers in Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden called the episode an act of terror. Speaking to reporters in Philadelphia on Sunday, Biden said Akram allegedly purchased a weapon on the streets.
Federal investigators believe Akram purchased the handgun used in the hostage taking in a private sale, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. Akram arrived in the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York about two weeks ago, a law enforcement official said.
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Akram arrived in the U.S. recently on a tourist visa from Great Britain, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was not intended to be public. London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement that its counter-terrorism police were liaising with U.S. authorities about the incident.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Matt DeSarno had said Saturday night that the hostage-taker was specifically focused on an issue not directly connected to the Jewish community. It wasn’t clear why Akram chose the synagogue, though the prison where Siddiqui is serving her sentence is in nearby Fort Worth.
On Sunday night, the FBI issued a statement calling the ordeal “a terrorism-related matter, in which the Jewish community was targeted.” The agency said the Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating.
Michael Finfer, the president of the congregation, said in a statement “there was a one in a million chance that the gunman picked our congregation.”
Akram used his phone during the course of negotiations to communicate with people other than law enforcement, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Multiple people heard the hostage-taker refer to Siddiqui as his “sister” on the livestream. But John Floyd, board chair for the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations — the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy group — said Siddiqui’s brother, Mohammad Siddiqui, was not involved.
Texas resident Victoria Francis, who said she watched about an hour of the livestream, said she heard the man rant against America and claim he had a bomb. Biden said there were apparently no explosives, despite the threats.
“He was just all over the map. He was pretty irritated and the more irritated he got, he’d make more threats, like ‘I’m the guy with the bomb. If you make a mistake, this is all on you.’ And he’d laugh at that,” Francis said. “He was clearly in extreme distress.”
Colleyville, a community of about 26,000 people, is about 15 miles (23 kilometers) northeast of Fort Worth. Reached outside his home Sunday, Cytron-Walker declined to speak at length about the episode. “It’s a little overwhelming as you can imagine. It was not fun yesterday,” he told the AP.
Andrew Marc Paley, a Dallas rabbi who was called to the scene to help families and hostages upon their release, said Cytron-Walker acted as a calm and comforting presence. The first hostage was released shortly after 5 p.m. That was around the time food was delivered to those inside the synagogue, but Paley said he did not know if it was part of the negotiations.
Cytron-Walker said his congregation had received training from local authorities and the Secure Community Network, which was founded in 2004 by a coalition of Jewish organizations and describes itself as “the official safety and security organization” of the Jewish community in North America. Michael Masters, the CEO of the organization, said the congregation had provided security training in August and had not been previously aware of Akram.
The standoff led authorities to tighten security in other places, including New York City, where police said that they increased their presence “at key Jewish institutions” out of an abundance of caution.
___
Tucker reported from Washington, D.C. Also contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Paul J. Weber and Acacia Coronado in Austin; Michael Balsamo in Washington; Colleen Long in Philadelphia; Elliot Spagat in San Diego; Jennifer McDermott in Providence, Rhode Island; Michael R. Sisak in New York; Holly Meyer in Nashville, Tenn.; and Issac Scharf in Jerusalem.
AP · by JAKE BLEIBERG and ERIC TUCKER · January 17, 2022
13. Drinking water, ash big concern as Tonga assesses damage after tsunami
Drinking water, ash big concern as Tonga assesses damage after tsunami
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- Summary
- Australia, NZ send reconnaissance flights to Tonga
- Red Cross says scale of devastation could be immense
- One British woman missing
- Ash clouds from eruption moving towards NZ, Australia
SYDNEY/WELLINGTON, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Australia and New Zealand sent surveillance flights on Monday to assess damage in Tonga, isolated from the rest of the world after the eruption of a volcano that triggered a tsunami and blanketed the Pacific island with ash.
Australia's Minister for the Pacific Zed Seselja said initial reports suggested no mass casualties from Saturday's eruption and tsunami but Australian police had visited beaches and reported significant damage with "houses thrown around".
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"We know there is some significant damage, and know there is significant damage to resorts," he said in an interview with an Australian radio station, adding that Tonga's airport appeared to be in relatively good condition.
One British woman was reported missing, he said.
The surveillance flights would assess the situation in outer islands where communication is completely cut off.
Tonga's deputy head of mission in Australia, Curtis Tu'ihalangingie, asked for patience as Tonga's government decides its priorities for aid.
Tonga is concerned about the risk of aid deliveries spreading COVID-19 to the island, which is COVID-free.
"We don't want to bring in another wave - a tsunami of COVID-19," he told Reuters by telephone.
"When people see such a huge explosion they want to help," he said, but added Tonga diplomats were also concerned by some private fundraising efforts and urged the public to wait until a disaster relief fund was announced.
Any aid sent to Tonga would need to be quarantined, and it was likely no foreign personnel would be allowed to disembark aircraft, he said.
The eruption of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano triggered a tsunami on the shores of Tonga and cut off phone and internet lines for the entire island.
International communication has been severely hampered by damage to an undersea cable, which could take more than a week to restore, and Australia and New Zealand were assisting with satellite calls, he said.
Telephone networks in Tonga have been restored but ash was posing a major health concern, contaminating drinking water.
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An eruption occurs at the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai off Tonga, January 14, 2022 in this screen grab obtained from a social media video. Video recorded January 14, 2022. Tonga Geological Services/via REUTERS
"Most people are not aware the ash is toxic and bad for them to breath and they have to wear a mask," Tu'ihalangingie said.
'COMPLETELY DESTROYED'
The Ha’atafu Beach Resort, on the Hihifo peninsula, 21 km (13 miles) west of the capital Nuku’alofa, was “completely wiped out”, the owners said on Facebook.
The family that manages the resort had run for their lives through the bush to escape the tsunami, it said. “The whole western coastline has been completely destroyed along with Kanukupolu village,” the resort said.
British woman Angela Glover was missing after she was washed away by a wave when she and her husband, James, who own the Happy Sailor Tattoo in Nuku'alofa, had gone to get their dogs.
The husband managed to hold onto a tree but his wife, who runs a dog rescue shelter, and their dogs were swept away, New Zealand state broadcaster TVNZ reported.
The Red Cross said it was mobilising its network to respond to what it called the worst volcanic eruption the Pacific has experienced in decades.
Katie Greenwood, the Pacific head of delegation for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told Reuters up to 80,000 people could have been affected by the tsunami.
The damage was centred along the western coast, where there are many resorts, and the waterfront of the capital, Nuku'alofa, the New Zealand High Commission in Tonga said. A thick layer of ash remained across the island.
Scientists were struggling to monitor the volcano, after the explosion destroyed its sea-level crater and drowned its mass, obscuring it from satellites. read more
Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai has erupted regularly over the past few decades but the impact of Saturday's eruption was felt as far away as Fiji, New Zealand, the United States and Japan. Two people drowned off a beach in Northern Peru due to high waves caused by the tsunami.
More than a day after the eruption, countries thousands of kilometres to the west have volcanic ash clouds over them, New Zealand forecaster WeatherWatch said.
Early data suggests the eruption was the biggest blast since Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines 30 years ago, New Zealand-based volcanologist Shane Cronin told Radio New Zealand.
"This is an eruption best witnessed from space," Cronin said.
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Reporting by Praveen Menon and Kirsty Needham; Editing by Michael Perry, Robert Birsel and Philippa Fletcher
14. For Oath Keepers and founder, Jan. 6 was weeks in the making
Looking back it was not hard to see the preparation. It was broadcast all over social media.
For Oath Keepers and founder, Jan. 6 was weeks in the making | AP News
AP · by COLLEEN LONG · January 16, 2022
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Two days after the election on Nov. 3, 2020, the Oath Keepers were already convinced that victory had been stolen from President Donald Trump and members of the far-right militia group were making plans to march on the U.S. Capitol.
“We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, wrote fellow members, according to court documents. “Too late for that. Prepare your mind. body. spirit.”
Four days later, when The Associated Press and other news outlets declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner, the documents say Rhodes told Oath Keepers to “refuse to accept it and march en-masse on the nation’s Capitol.”
But the documents also show how quickly Trump’s most fervent and dangerous supporters mobilized to subvert the election results through force and violence, even though there was no widespread election fraud and Trump’s Cabinet and local election officials said the vote had been free and fair.
Hundreds of people have been charged in the violent effort to stop the congressional certification of Biden’s victory. Many were animated by Trump’s speech at a rally near the White House, just before the riot, where he said: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
But for Rhodes and others, there was no need for Trump’s words of encouragement. Action was already planned.
___
Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, 56, founded the Oath Keepers in 2009. He and some friends decided they would form an organization around the perception of “imminent tyranny,” concerned about federal overreach and a series of unrecognized threats, like the government was planning to attack its own citizens. He recruited current and former military, police and first responders.
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He went to night school at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. His first job in politics was supervising interns for Ron Paul, who was then a Republican congressman from Texas. Rhodes later went to Yale Law School, graduating in 2004 and clerking for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Michael Ryan.
Rhodes moved to Montana and relocated his defense practice there but took a “hard right turn away from politics” the SPLC said, and launched the Oath Keepers.
He has said there were about 40,000 Oath Keepers at its peak; one extremism expert estimates the group’s membership stands at about 3,000 nationally. Before long, Rhodes was neglecting his law practice to work on the Oath Keepers. He was disbarred in 2015.
Members pledge to “fulfill the oath all military and police take to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’” and to defend the Constitution, according to its website.
Their motto: “Not on our watch!”
The Oath Keepers engaged in a series of confrontations with the government during years of Barack Obama’s presidency. The most notable was an armed standoff against the federal government at Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada.
Then Trump was elected in 2016. While Rhodes insisted the Oath Keepers were nonpartisan, they came to the nation’s capital in January 2017, when Trump took office, to protect peaceful “American patriots” from “radical leftists.”
“During this time, Rhodes became increasingly conspiratorial, adopting and peddling a number of fringe right-wing conspiracy theories with the assistance of his friend Alex Jones,” according to the book “Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group,” by University at Albany assistant professor Sam Jackson. Jones is a conspiracy theorist and Infowars host.
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On Nov. 9, 2020, Rhodes instructed his followers during a GoToMeeting call to go to Washington to let Trump know “that the people are behind him,” and he expressed hope that Trump would call up the militia to help stay in power, authorities say.
“It will be a bloody and desperate fight,” Rhodes warned. “We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided.”
The Oath Keepers worked as if they were going to war, discussing weapons and training. Days before the attack on the Capitol, one defendant suggested in a text message getting a boat to ferry weapons across the Potomac River to their “waiting arms,” prosecutors say.
On Dec. 14, 2020, as the electors in the states cast their votes, Rhodes published a letter on the Oath Keepers’ website “advocating for the use of force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power,” according to the documents.
As that transition in Washington drew close, Oath Keepers spoke of an arsenal they would keep just a few minutes away and grab if needed. Rhodes is accused of spending $15,500 on firearms and related equipment including a shotgun, AR-15, mounts, triggers, scopes and magazines, prosecutors said.
Others came prepared, too.
“Everyone coming has their own technical equipment and knows how to use it,” wrote Edward Vallejo, who also was charged in the conspiracy.
Oath Keepers staged the guns in hotels just outside of the District of Columbia. Rhodes said they were “QRFs” —military-speak for quick reaction force, according to court papers.
___
On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Vallejo and others were on a podcast discussing the possibility of armed conflict. Members turned up wearing camouflaged combat attire and in helmets. They entered the Capitol with the large crowds of rioters who stormed past police barriers and smashed windows, injuring dozens of officers and sending lawmakers running.
The indictment against Rhodes alleges Oath Keepers formed two teams, or “stacks,” a military term. The first stack split up inside the building to separately go after the House and Senate. The second stack confronted officers inside the Capitol Rotunda, the indictment said.
Other Trump supporters were getting in the fray, too.
The building was breached. The congressional certification had stopped. Rumors circulated that the left-wing antifa had breached the seat of American democracy. “Nope. I’m right here, these are Patriots,” Rhodes wrote to his leadership group in a secure chat.
“All I see Trump doing is complaining,” Rhodes wrote, according to prosecutors. “I see no attempt by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it in their own hands. They’ve had enough.”
One of the stacks hunted for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., but could not find her. Members of Congress were cowering in fear and Pelosi had been sent to a secure location. The siege continued for hours, until law enforcement finally gained control.
“We are acting like the founding fathers” one wrote in the throes of the melee. “Can’t stand down.”
___
An Oath Keeper was the first defendant to plead guilty in the Jan. 6 melee. Jon Ryan Schaffer also agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation and the Justice Department has promised to consider putting him in the witness security program, suggesting it saw him as a valuable cooperator in the probe.
Other cracks in the group are showing. Before his arrest, Rhodes sought to distance himself from those who have been arrested, insisting the members went rogue and there was never a plan to enter the Capitol.
Court documents show discord among the group as early as the night of the attack. Someone identified in the records only as “Person Eleven” blasted the group “a huge f—n joke” and called Rhodes “the dumba— I heard you were,” court documents say.
After the riot, the North Carolina Oath Keepers branch said it was splitting from Rhodes’ group. Its president told The News Reporter newspaper it wouldn’t be “a part of anything that terrorizes anybody or goes against law enforcement.”
A leader of an Arizona chapter also slammed Rhodes and those facing charges, saying on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the attack “goes against everything we’ve ever taught, everything we believe in.”
The Oath Keepers are having money troubles, too. The group lost the ability to process credit card payments online after the company demanded that Rhodes disavow the arrested members and he refused, Rhodes said in a March interview for far-right website Gateway Pundit. People are instructed instead to mail in applications and dues.
___
But as the months wore on it seemed increasingly unlikely anyone would face anything more serious like sedition — when two or more people in the United States. conspire to “overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force” the government, or to levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.
That’s in part because such charges are rarely used and hard to win. The last time U.S. prosecutors brought a seditious conspiracy case was in 2010 in an alleged Michigan plot by members of the Hutaree militia to incite an uprising against the government. But a judge ordered acquittals on the sedition conspiracy charges at a 2012 trial. The last successful prosecution was in 1995 when an Egyptian cleric and nine followers were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges in a plot to blow up the United Nations, the FBI’s building, and two tunnels and a bridge linking New York and New Jersey.
The Jan 6 investigation has been long and tedious. The FBI is still looking for suspects and agents have combed through a mountain of evidence to link people with images from the day.
So far, more than 700 people have been charged. Most face lower-level crimes of entering a restricted building. About 150 people have been charged with assaulting police officers at the Capitol. And members of another far-right group the Proud Boys have been indicted on simple conspiracy charges that bring five years behind bars if convicted.
Jackson, the author of the Oath Keepers book, said Rhodes has been good at staying out of trouble in the past, but his public rhetoric became much more inflammatory leading up to Jan. 6 attack.
“This is entirely speculation on my part, but perhaps Rhodes felt like he would no longer get the attention that he needed if he continued to be moderate and had to become more inflammatory in his rhetoric,” he said.
___
Associated Press writers Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland, Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix, Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City, Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston, Jake Bleiberg in Dallas and Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.
AP · by COLLEEN LONG · January 16, 2022
15. Belt and Road Comes to the Heartland
Hmmmm....
Belt and Road Comes to the Heartland
The Peculiar Story of Fufeng Group and Grand Forks
The onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 has exposed numerous structural weaknesses in how the nations of the world provide food, energy, water, and consumer goods for their people. In the main, these supply chain disruptions are tightly correlated to the manufacturing and export capacity of a single nation – the People’s Republic of China. In the United States, this is especially true for amino acids, specifically of the type used in animal feed. Though little-known amongst the general population, synthetic amino acids such as lysine and threonine play a crucial role in managing animal health and growth. Relatedly, as the use of soybean meal for a primary protein source has increased in feed rations, amino acids become even more important.
These products, generally produced from corn (though cassava root and sugarcane may also be used), require substantial investment into a complex manufacturing process built around fermentation of the corn’s starch. It is also energy intensive, requiring high heat to produce and dry the product. Given the constant attention paid to its food security, China leads the world in research, subsidies, and investment into manufacturing these critical components in the food supply chain, with control of up to 65% of global market share in lysine, perhaps the most widely-used and critical of the amino acid complex.
As many in the feed industry are aware, the most recent bio-fermentation plant proposed in the US is to be built and controlled by Fufeng Group, one of China’s dominant players in the amino acid sector. In the recent past, Fufeng Group has looked at opening production facilities for their bio-fermented products (MSG, xanthan gum, lysine, threonine, tryptophan, valine, isoleucine) in Ukraine, India, and several other countries – as of yet, with no success. These countries are attractive for their generally low energy costs and abundance of starchy raw material. And given the exploding transportation costs for energy and grain commodities worldwide, the need is greater than ever for a manufacturer to locate close to supplies of both. After these failed attempts, it seems Fufeng has now found fertile soil in the city council of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and the state’s governor Doug Burgum.
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum participating in the China General Chamber of Commerce-hosted breakout session at the 2018 National Governors Association summer meeting. CGCC is a known affiliate of the CCP United Front influence network.
The new plant is estimated to consume 25,000,000 bushels of corn for less than one hundred jobs - 250,000 bushels (or 14,000,000 pounds) of American corn per year, per job. Moreover, the Grand Forks City Council and CCP-favorite Governor Burgum are promising to build and subsidize a $150 million natural gas pipeline, and will spend an additional tens of millions of dollars to subsidize construction of Fufeng’s new plant. Fufeng Group will also be offered a “temporary” tax break for years (or decades) to come. Rather than boosting the local economy, the plant will be leeching from it.
One might wonder if Fufeng Group’s founder and chairman, Li Xuechun, shared with the North Dakota luminaries his intention to convert most of the plant’s production to export sales no later than 2025, only a few months after anticipated conclusion of the plant’s buildout? American-made amino acids being sent at the lowest profitable cost possible to feed the swine, beef, and poultry industries of Mexico, Canada, and Brazil, all of whom are much friendlier to China with regard to finished meat exports than the United States is. It’s a canny strategic maneuver, and as is unfortunately typical of our political leadership, the short-term promise of profits, fundraising, and (perhaps) future jobs is a leash with which Chinese companies manipulate their American running dogs.
Also troubling is Fufeng’s plausible connections to the use of forced labor in Xinjiang Province. The primary arm of Fufeng in the province is Xinjiang Fufeng Biotechnologies Co. Ltd, with its manufacturing hub located just west of the Urumqi Export Zone. This site is responsible for a reported $21 million in vitamin and amino acid sales directly to the United States for the first six months of 2021, according to a disclosure filed by Fufeng Group on 28 December 2021 in response to President Biden signing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act on 23 December 2021.
Curiously, Fufeng’s production facility in the Toutunhe District sits less than two miles from Toutunhe Facility #2, a Tier-4 detention, forced labor, and re-education camp focused on subjugating the Uyghur population in the area. The approximate location of Fufeng’s manufacturing plant is also very near to where a Ugyhur neighborhood was razed to the ground, including a mosque and other cultural sites. Given the $21 million haul in the first half of 2021, and how demand and prices both spiked throughout the second half of the year, it’s not unlikely that Fufeng likely generated in excess of $40 million in trade with the US from this site in 2021. Per Fufeng’s financial reports, the average profit margin for their products averaged 17% in 2020, or $6.8 million if the same margin held into 2021. However, with prices more than doubling for multiple months in the back half of 2021, it’s plausible that sales to the U.S. from the
Xinjiang site exceeded $9 million in profit.
Lastly, it must be a very curious coincidence indeed that Fufeng Group zeroed in so quickly on Grand Forks, ND. The nearby US Air Force installation, Grand Forks AFB, is a critical component in the USAF’s strategic basing network for ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) assets. Further, the base is home to the 10th Space Warning Squadron, a major node in the U.S’ early warning and detection network for ballistic missile threats against North America. It’s also a key element in the USAF Space Surveillance Network, which is tasked with monitoring targets and potential threats in space. Such a short line of sight to the base from Fufeng’s proposed location on the northwest side of Grand Forks makes signal intercept a relatively simply task using low-observable technology mounted unobtrusively to the plant’s superstructure. Perhaps we could consider this a fluke, except another recent high-profile situation would argue that CCP-aligned assets intend to acquire land and infrastructure directly adjacent to important U.S. military installations for purposes potentially ranging from digital snooping to outright sabotage.
It’s frankly astonishing that given the data laid out here, Governor Burgum and the Grand Forks City Council have continued to press ahead with bringing in a CCP-aligned entity to co-opt American resources and families in pursuit of China’s hegemonic goals.
Here, then, is the new Chinese modus operandi: externalize their energy consumption into the US and exploit more readily-available raw materials for China’s benefit. Such a model drives the local prices of energy up long-term, another indirect subsidy paid by North Dakota’s taxpayers, while ensuring that China’s foreign partners have access to exported feed ingredients at the expense of the United States’ meat producers. Even more, the location of Fufeng’s intended site is at best an extremely worrisome coincidence, given many viable alternatives that make more sense from a supply chain standpoint. Taken together, this absolutely follows the playbook of China’s ongoing expansions of the Belt and Road Initiative, and perhaps for the first time, represents a stealth implementation of the project on the United States’ own soil.
American corn.
American energy.
American labor.
American subsidies.
All the raw materials needed for repatriated Chinese profits and export of American food and national security.
16. Assessing the Cognitive Threat Posed by Technology Discourses Intended to Address Adversary Grey Zone Activities
Conclusion:
The first error of misinterpreting the meaning and bounds of cognitive insecurity is compounded by a second mistake: what the military enterprise chooses to invest time, attention, and resources into tomorrow[18]. Path dependency, technological lock-in, and opportunity cost all loom large if digital information age threats are misinterpreted. This is the solipsistic nature of the cognitive threat at work – the weapon really is you! Putting one’s feet in the shoes of the adversary, nothing could be more pleasing than seeing that threat self-perpetuate. As a first step, militaries could organise and invest immediately in a strategic technology assessment capacity[19] free from the biases of rent-seeking vendors and lobbyists who, by definition, will not only not pay the costs of mission failure, but stand to benefit from rentier-like dependencies that emerge as the military enterprise pays the corporate sector to play in the digital age.
Assessing the Cognitive Threat Posed by Technology Discourses Intended to Address Adversary Grey Zone Activities
Zac Rogers is an academic from Adelaide, South Australia. Zac has published in journals including International Affairs, The Cyber Defense Review, Joint Force Quarterly, and Australian Quarterly, and communicates with a wider audience across various multimedia platforms regularly. Parasitoid is his first book. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.
Title: Assessing the Cognitive Threat Posed by Technology Discourses Intended to Address Adversary Grey Zone Activities
Date Originally Written: January 3, 2022.
Date Originally Published: January 17, 2022.
Author and / or Article Point of View: The author is an Australia-based academic whose research combines a traditional grounding in national security, intelligence, and defence with emerging fields of social cybersecurity, digital anthropology, and democratic resilience. The author works closely with industry and government partners across multiple projects.
Summary: Military investment in war-gaming, table-top exercises, scenario planning, and future force design is increasing. Some of this investment focuses on adversary activities in the “cognitive domain.” While this investment is necessary, it may fail due to it anchoring to data-driven machine-learning and automation for both offensive and defensive purposes, without a clear understanding of their appropriateness.
Text: In 2019 the author wrote a short piece for the U.S. Army’s MadSci website titled “In the Cognitive War, the Weapon is You![1]” This article attempted to spur self-reflection by the national security, intelligence, and defence communities in Australia, the United States and Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom. At the time these communities were beginning to incorporate discussion of “cognitive” security/insecurity in their near future threat assessments and future force design discourses. The article is cited in in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Cognitive Warfare document of 2020[2]. Either in ways that demonstrate the misunderstanding directly, or as part of the wider context in which the point of that particular title is thoroughly misinterpreted, the author’s desired self-reflection has not been forthcoming. Instead, and not unexpectedly, the discourse on the cognitive aspects of contemporary conflict have consumed and regurgitated a familiar sequence of errors which will continue to perpetuate rather than mitigate the problem if not addressed head-on.
What the cognitive threat is
The primary cognitive threat is us[3]. The threat is driven by a combination of, firstly, techno-futurist hubris which exists as a permanently recycling feature of late-modern military thought. The threat includes a precipitous slide into scientism which military thinkers and the organisations they populate have not avoided[4]. Further contributing to the threat is the commercial and financial rent-seeking which overhangs military affairs as a by-product of private-sector led R&D activities and government dependence on and cultivation of those activities increasingly since the 1990s[5]. Lastly, adversary awareness of these dynamics and an increasing willingness and capacity to manipulate and exacerbate them via the multitude of vulnerabilities ushered in by digital hyper-connectivity[6]. In other words, before the cognitive threat is an operational and tactical menace to be addressed and countered by the joint force, it is a central feature of the deteriorating epistemic condition of the late modern societies in which said forces operate and from which its personnel, funding, R&D pathways, doctrine and operating concepts, epistemic communities and strategic leadership emerge.
What the cognitive threat is not
The cognitive threat is not what adversary military organisations and their patrons are doing in and to the information environment with regard to activities other than kinetic military operations. Terms for adversarial activities occurring outside of conventional lethal/kinetic combat operations – such as the “grey-zone” and “below-the-threshold” – describe time-honoured tactics by which interlocutors engage in methods aimed at weakening and sowing dysfunction in the social and political fabric of competitor or enemy societies. These tactics are used to gain advantage in areas not directly including military conflict, or in areas likely to be critical to military preparedness and mobilization in times of war[7]. A key stumbling block here is obvious: its often difficult to know which intentions such tactics express. This is not cognitive warfare. It is merely typical of contending across and between cross-cultural communities, and the permanent unwillingness of contending societies to accord with the other’s rules. Information warfare – particularly influence operations traversing the Internet and exploiting the dominant commercial operations found there – is part of this mix of activities which belong under the normal paradigm of competition between states for strategic advantage. Active measures – influence operations designed to self-perpetuate – have found fertile new ground on the Internet but are not new to the arsenals of intelligence services and, as Thomas Rid has warned, while they proliferate, are more unpredictable and difficult to control than they were in the pre-Internet era[8]. None of this is cognitive warfare either. Unfortunately, current and recent discourse has lapsed into the error of treating it as such[9], leading to all manner of self-inflicted confusion[10].
Why the distinction matters
Two trends emerge from the abovementioned confusion which represent the most immediate threat to the military enterprise[11]. Firstly, private-sector vendors and the consulting and lobbying industry they employ are busily pitching technological solutions based on machine-learning and automation which have been developed in commercial business settings in which sensitivity to error is not high[12]. While militaries experiment with this raft of technologies, eager to be seen at the vanguard of emerging tech; to justify R&D budgets and stave off defunding; or simply out of habit, they incur opportunity cost. This cost is best described as stultifying investment in the human potential which strategic thinkers have long identified as the real key to actualizing new technologies[13], and entering into path dependencies with behemoth corporate actors whose strategic goal is the cultivation of rentier-relations not excluding the ever-lucrative military sector[14].
Secondly, to the extent that automation and machine learning technologies enter the operational picture, cognitive debt is accrued as the military enterprise becomes increasingly dependent on fallible tech solutions[15]. Under battle conditions, the first assumption is the contestation of the electromagnetic spectrum on which all digital information technologies depend for basic functionality. Automated data gathering and analysis tools suffer from heavy reliance on data availability and integrity. When these tools are unavailable any joint multinational force will require multiple redundancies, not only in terms of technology, but more importantly, in terms of leadership and personnel competencies. It is evidently unclear where the military enterprise draws the line in terms of the likely cost-benefit ratio when it comes to experimenting with automated machine learning tools and the contexts in which they ought to be applied[16]. Unfortunately, experimentation is never cost-free. When civilian / military boundaries are blurred to the extent they are now as a result of the digital transformation of society, such experimentation requires consideration in light of all of its implications, including to the integrity and functionality of open democracy as the entity being defended[17].
The first error of misinterpreting the meaning and bounds of cognitive insecurity is compounded by a second mistake: what the military enterprise chooses to invest time, attention, and resources into tomorrow[18]. Path dependency, technological lock-in, and opportunity cost all loom large if digital information age threats are misinterpreted. This is the solipsistic nature of the cognitive threat at work – the weapon really is you! Putting one’s feet in the shoes of the adversary, nothing could be more pleasing than seeing that threat self-perpetuate. As a first step, militaries could organise and invest immediately in a strategic technology assessment capacity[19] free from the biases of rent-seeking vendors and lobbyists who, by definition, will not only not pay the costs of mission failure, but stand to benefit from rentier-like dependencies that emerge as the military enterprise pays the corporate sector to play in the digital age.
Endnotes:
[3] “us” refers primarily but not exclusively to the national security, intelligence, and defence communities taking up discourse on cognitive security and its threats including Australia, the U.S., U.K., Europe, and other liberal democratic nations.
[4] Henry Bauer, “Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 18 (December 1, 2004); Matthew B. Crawford, “How Science Has Been Corrupted,” UnHerd, December 21, 2021, https://unherd.com/2021/12/how-science-has-been-corrupted-2/; William A. Wilson, “Scientific Regress,” First Things, May 2016, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress; Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart (Harvard University Press, 2011).
[5] Dima P Adamsky, “Through the Looking Glass: The Soviet Military-Technical Revolution and the American Revolution in Military Affairs,” Journal of Strategic Studies 31, no. 2 (2008): 257–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390801940443; Linda Weiss, America Inc.?: Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State (Cornell University Press, 2014); Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (Penguin UK, 2018).
[8] Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, Illustrated edition (New York: MACMILLAN USA, 2020).
[9] For example see Jake Harrington and Riley McCabe, “Detect and Understand: Modernizing Intelligence for the Gray Zone,” CSIS Briefs (Center for Strategic & International Studies, December 2021), https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/211207_Harrington_Detect_Understand.pdf?CXBQPSNhUjec_inYLB7SFAaO_8kBnKrQ; du Cluzel, “Cognitive Warfare”; Kimberly Underwood, “Cognitive Warfare Will Be Deciding Factor in Battle,” SIGNAL Magazine, August 15, 2017, https://www.afcea.org/content/cognitive-warfare-will-be-deciding-factor-battle; Nicholas D. Wright, “Cognitive Defense of the Joint Force in a Digitizing World” (Pentagon Joint Staff Strategic Multilayer Assessment Group, July 2021), https://nsiteam.com/cognitive-defense-of-the-joint-force-in-a-digitizing-world/.
[11] For more on this see Zac Rogers, “The Promise of Strategic Gain in the Information Age: What Happened?,” Cyber Defense Review 6, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 81–105.
[14] Jathan Sadowski, “The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism,” Antipode 52, no. 2 (2020): 562–80, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12595.
[17] Emily Bienvenue and Zac Rogers, “Strategic Army: Developing Trust in the Shifting Strategic Landscape,” Joint Force Quarterly 95 (November 2019): 4–14.
17. US media launches war propaganda campaign against Russia as CIA prepares to back an “insurgency” in Ukraine
Propaganda from the World Socialst Web Site alleging propaganda by US media.
US media launches war propaganda campaign against Russia as CIA prepares to back an “insurgency” in Ukraine
Jason Melanovski, Clara Weiss
15 January 2022
On Thursday and Friday, hours after a series of negotiations over Ukraine between Russia and NATO failed, the US intelligence apparatus and media have launched a massive campaign aimed at preparing public opinion for a military escalation of the conflict.
The talks had been set to fail from the beginning since both NATO and the United States made clear that Russian proposals on NATO expansion were “non-starters” after Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly begged NATO to give Russia “something, at least something.”
On Friday, CNN carried a report, based on an unnamed United States intelligence official, claiming that the US had uncovered a covert group of Russian operatives preparing to carry out a “false flag” operation in eastern Ukraine in order to justify a supposedly pending invasion.
SSO fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine during training [Credit: Wikipedia/ArmyInform]
As with all war propaganda pieces that rely on leaks from the US intelligence, the sources remained anonymous, no other evidence for the claims made was provided, and little was revealed about the exact nature of the allegedly impending attack. This allows the US to pin the blame on Russia for any escalation that may occur in eastern Ukraine in the coming weeks and months.
The New York Times followed up the initial CNN story with a piece by David Sanger, a longtime “insider” of the US intelligence and military apparatus and author of countless pieces of war propaganda. Sanger quoted several Biden administration officials who fully endorsed the intelligence leaks.
“Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion,” White House Press Secretary Jan Psaki said, “including through sabotage activities and information operations, by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.”
The Kremlin has rejected the veracity of the reports with Press Secretary Dmitri Peskov stating, “So far all these statements have been unfounded and have not been confirmed by anything.”
Over the past months, NATO, with the US taking the lead, has pushed for an escalation of tensions with Russia, including through the deployment of military ships to the Black Sea and announcements that it would provide further military assistance to Ukraine.
In response, Russia has sent tens of thousands of troops to its border with Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin recently warned that in Ukraine, Russia has “no way further to retreat.” He explicitly indicated that the Kremlin oligarchy fears a repetition of the Yugoslavia scenario on a much grander scale in Russia: that is, the disintegration of the country through a combination of bombing raids and civil war, fueled by the promotion of various nationalist, separatist and religious forces by the imperialist powers.
Within this context, the current outpouring of war propaganda reports has a highly calculated and provocative character. They are designed to enflame what is already an explosive situation.
The “false flag” reports were preceded on Thursday by a Yahoo report, which revealed that the CIA is overseeing “a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel.” The report was based on claims by five former intelligence and National Security officials, who again remained anonymous.
While the sources claimed the program was defensive in nature, it is clearly intended to prepare and assist Ukrainian paramilitary forces in fighting Russian troops. One former CIA official plainly stated, “The United States is training an insurgency” in order “to kill Russians.”
On Friday, the New York Times quoted at length James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who previously served as the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO. Pointing to the US support for the muhajedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s, Stavridis said, “The level of military support” for Ukraine “would make our efforts in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union look puny by comparison.”
As noted by the WSWS such a campaign falls in line with a policy recently expressed by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy who stated, “Ukraine can become the next Afghanistan for Russia if it chooses to move further.”
These threats have to be taken as a serious warning by the international working class. US imperialism has a long record of “false flag” operations, which it has orchestrated and helped carry out in various parts of the globe, including in Vietnam, Iraq and Syria. The death toll of these imperialist interventions numbers in the millions.
In fact, a “false flag” operation played a role in the 2014 US- and EU-backed coup against elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. As has since been shown by Canadian Political Science Professor Ivan Katchanovski, US-aligned forces carried out a “false flag” operation by opening fire on Maidan protesters. The shootings, which were falsely blamed on the Yanukovych regime, were the immediate precursor for its violent overthrow.
The coup resulted in an ongoing civil war in eastern Ukraine that has killed over 14,000 people over the past eight years. Since 2014, the United States has given Ukraine another $2.5 billion in military assistance. Far-right and neo-Nazi forces played the central role in both the coup and the ensuing civil war, enjoying the direct support and protection from the Ukrainian state.
The imperialist buildup of far-right paramilitary forces in Ukraine has a long history. German imperialism could count on the support of fascist forces during its occupation of Ukraine in World War II. In the immediate years following the world war, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies supported the remnants of the collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed offshoot, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
The US Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in Munich protected infamous OUN leader Stepan Bandera from arrest by the Soviets. That Bandera was an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator and that the UPA carried out the massacre of Jews and Poles during World War II were of little importance to the CIA, which was hoping to employ Ukrainian nationalists in order to help them “roll back” the Soviet Union.
It is on these forces that any US-backed “insurgency” in Ukraine will primarily rely. Both the “false flag” and CIA “insurgency” reports come on the heels of another propaganda effort, designed to portray Ukrainian far-right forces as supposed freedom fighters against Russia, a trope that was pioneered by the Ukrainian far right itself during and after World War II.
Earlier in December the New York Times published a story titled “Training Civilians, Ukraine Nurtures a Resistance in Waiting.” In his glowing portrayal of “volunteer brigades,” the author, Andrew E. Kramer, failed to mention the role of the country’s far-right paramilitary groups, such as the Azov Battalion and Right Sector, in leading such “volunteer” efforts in a clear attempt to conceal and whitewash their political and social background.
Meanwhile, the government of President Voldymyr Zelensky, while corroborating the “false flag” claims of the United States, has made a last-ditch effort at negotiations with Russia and the US. According to Zelensky administration head Andriy Yermak, Zelensky proposed three-way talks between himself, Biden and Putin in a telephone call with Biden.
Speaking with the Atlantic Council, a hawkish think tank in Washington D.C., Yermak acknowledged that he was not sure the United States even supported such a meeting. Russian Press Secretary Dmitri Peskov has stated Moscow had not heard anything yet from the United States regarding Zelensky’s proposed three-way party talks.
The crisis over Ukraine is a direct outcome of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the US drive to encircle and prepare for war against Russia in the last three decades. Ridden by internal crisis and terrified by the prospect of an emerging movement of the working class against its criminal response to the pandemic, the US ruling class, in particular, is seeking to divert the enormous social tensions outward.
The Russian oligarchy has no answer to the war drive except a combination of desperate diplomatic maneuvers that are aimed at achieving a deal with the imperialist powers, on the one hand, and the promotion of nationalism and preparations for war at home, on the other. The only force capable of stopping the threat of a catastrophic war is the working class, armed with an international socialist political program and leadership.
18. The complicated legacy of Dick Marcinko and the early days of SEAL Team 6
The complicated legacy of Dick Marcinko and the early days of SEAL Team 6
The recent death on Christmas Day of former Navy SEAL and founder of SEAL Team 6, retired Commander Richard “Dick” Marcinko, marked the loss of one of the SEAL community’s most famous (some might say infamous) and commanding personalities. Perhaps the most widely-recognized picture of Marcinko was the photograph that graced the cover of his 1992 bestseller, “Rogue Warrior.”
The flint-eyed, bearded, muscular Marcinko stares right through the camera lens and into your soul. His black, Trident-adorned shirt — unbuttoned to reveal a patch of steel wool chest hair — is so deeply charcoal-colored that it fades almost into the background, matched only by the deep dark of Marcinko’s merciless eyebrows. If the photo makes a hardened Marcinko look like he was just released from prison, that is because the photo was taken after Marcinko was, in fact, just released from prison.
And therein lies the paradoxical essence of “Demo Dick” Marcinko: a fierce, dedicated American commando, who stood up one of the nation’s premier counter-terrorism and special missions units, and who was also a convicted felon who ran that same unit, at times, like an outlaw motorcycle gang.
I won’t completely rehash the formation of SEAL Team 6 here, as the official account can be found in a number of books and other documents. However, I will share a bit of the SEAL Team lore that surrounded Marcinko’s founding of ST-6, and its earliest days in the 1980s. Don’t, by any means, take this as gospel truth, but more as an oral history that has come down from contemporaries of Marcinko back in those first couple decades of the SEAL Teams.
When Commander Dick Marcinko was given the responsibility of forming SEAL Team 6 in the wake of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, he was in a staff position at the Pentagon, having already previously served as the commanding officer of SEAL Team 2. He knew he needed to form the command quickly, and get it off the ground and operating, if it were to be seen as successful.
A much more clean-cut Marcinko for his official Navy portrait, 1978
With that in mind, Marcinko took a core of SEALs from ST-2, who were part of a dedicated counterterrorism-trained unit within the team, and made them the initial nucleus of ST-6. Included in that Team 2-comprised nucleus was then-Lieutenant Commander Norman Carly, who was selected as the first Executive Officer (XO) of the Team, and thus Marcinko’s second-in-command. According to legend, Marcinko then hand-picked a variety of his “drinking buddies” and closest friends from SEAL Teams on both the East and West Coasts to fill out the rest of the Team.
Carly, as the first XO of ST-6, very much saw his job as keeping Dick Marcinko out of jail, according to some SEALs from that era. Not only did Marcinko encourage a flouting of Navy regulations with regard to grooming, uniform use, and military bearing and decorum, but he also played fast and loose with the law, seeing himself and his new unit as somehow exempt from the rules that governed the rest of the mere mortals. This attitude would, of course, later land him in jail, as he was convicted in 1990 of conspiracy to defraud the government. After he was released from incarceration, he would go on to write “Rogue Warrior” with co-author John Weisman (and the aforementioned cover featured a photo of the prison-hardened Marcinko).
Marcinko was known as a charismatic storyteller and, by all accounts, a magnetic personality. Even later in his life, this remained true, as he frequently regaled attendees of the SEAL reunions with his colorful and profane stories. He both inspired and demanded fierce loyalty and dedication from his men. During his time as ST-6 CO, this went so far as Marcinko springing surprise “training ops” on his men — ostensibly to test their response time to being called in for an urgent operation — that would quickly turn into beer-soaked benders punctuated by bar fights and brushes with the law. In Marcinko’s view, this was all in the name of building unit cohesion and camaraderie, and testing the toughness and resolve of his men.
While a polarizing and controversial figure in Navy SEAL history, there’s no questioning Marcinko had a significant impact (Rogue Warrior Dick Marcinko- Facebook)
Not surprisingly, some within ST-6 in those early days did not see it that way. Specifically, a handful of officers who served with Marcinko there were appalled by his behavior, and the willfully cavalier way that he ran the unit. SEAL Team 6’s second commanding officer, then-Commander Robert Gormly, reportedly described what Marcinko left in his wake as “a mess.” A later ST-6 commanding officer even allegedly went so far as to ban Marcinko from the ST-6 compound because his influence and attitude had become so negatively pervasive.
Suffice it to say, SEAL Team 6 went on to outgrow many of Marcinko’s worst impulses, while some would say that other facets of its creator’s influence would metastasize throughout the command well into the modern era. Regardless, the man’s impact on the SEAL Teams — and SEAL Team 6, in particular — was inarguably profound. Personalities like Dick Marcinko rarely come along, or leave as lasting an impression. Some of it was good, a lot of it was bad, and none of it will likely be forgotten within that community for a long time.
Rest In Peace.
Read more from Sandboxx News:
Feature image: Composite from “Rogue Warrior Dick Marcinko” Facebook page
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19. FOLLOW-UP: Green Beret allowed to retire after sexually assaulting woman in Thailand
I have permission from both the author of this follow-up story as well as the victim herself to share this story. This tells the story of a good man, the late SSG Mike Simpson (KIA in Afghanistan) and the important relationship he had with the victim. And it tells about how the victim felt about him.. As an aside his father was my company commander when I was a young team leader.
I choose to think about Mike rather than the criminal who disgraced the regiment, the army, and the US in the story below.
A little "rest of the story" for you guys. I was in Bangkok awhile back during an IPC while still working for AWG. I'm sitting at a table with my 7ID counterparts and their Thai interpreter walks up and joins us. I break out my Thai and chit chat a little, turns out she's worked with several of my former SF Brothers in Arms, I recognize a few of the guys that she recalls having worked with in the past on various JCETs, she gives me an update on what she's been up to lately, etc, etc.
Then I see she's wearing what looks like a spoon around her wrist like a bracelet. Since I can't recall anyone ever wearing a spoon as fashion jewelry, I ask her what gives. She says she worked with Mike Simpson during a JCET and that he took her under his wing during the trip, made sure she knew all the vocabulary, helped her out in various ways so that she could do her job as best as possible with all the technical terms that she had to learn. It was stupid hot at the time and the team would always stop for ice cream on the way back from training - and she constantly found herself without a spoon! Mike finally just stopped by the store and bought her one, told her to keep it with her since she's invariable going to need it again during their trip.
Fast forward a bit, Mike is KIA and she learns through the terp network that her "Khun Mike" had been killed. As a personal tribute, she took that spoon that Mike had given her and crafted it into a bracelet as her own unique memorial, wears it similar to how we wear our own KIA/MIA bracelets. Was still wearing it several years later when I met her in that conference room...
Not long after I met her, an SF NCO gets up in front of his Thai counterparts and decides that it would be funny to slap her ass while teaching a class. Later he grabs her tits during the closing ceremony party. The resulting investigation ultimately results in the NCO getting a reprimand, and then he is allowed to retire. Just putting this out there, in case anyone sees his name pop up on job applications, etc. Needless to say... she feels let down by 1SFG.
https://taskandpurpose.com/.../army-special-forces.../...
Green Beret allowed to retire after sexually assaulting woman in Thailand
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The Army will allow a Special Forces soldier to retire with a written reprimand over allegations he sexually assaulted a translator in Thailand more than a year ago, Task & Purpose has learned.
The Thai translator, who asked not to be named to protect her career, said that Sgt. 1st Class Kurt Williamson of 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) inappropriately touched her on multiple occasions during military exercises in August 2020. Shortly afterward, she contacted a Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok to file a sexual assault complaint against Williamson.
“While I love my job and many of the people I have worked with over the years, these conditions are hostile in nature,” the translator wrote in her complaint, which was obtained by Task & Purpose. “They spell danger for both ongoing and future involvement with the US military, the US Army & 1st SFG(A) [1st Special Forces Group (Airborne)] because of individuals such as SFC Williamson. Ultimately, I wish that other female interpreters will not have to suffer similar indignities, dehumanization, nor face the same situations that I have had to endure in the future.”
Attempts to reach Williamson for comment through his command were unsuccessful, but Maj. Dan Lessard, a spokesperson for 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), confirmed that Williamson had been disciplined over the incident. “We take all allegations of sexual assault seriously, and we took appropriate administrative action following those specific allegations in August of 2020,” Lessard said. “The service member in question remains on active duty.”
U.S. Special Forces and their Thai counterparts conduct a Stress Shoot Training in Bangkok, Thailand, July 26, 2017.(U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Kwadwo Frimpong.)
Williamson’s command decided against separation or further punishment since the translator did not press charges against him, Task & Purpose has learned. Another factor driving his command’s decision was that Williamson was so close to his retirement date that Army Human Resources Command would have had to approve any decision to kick him out of the service.
The translator said she decided not to ask that Williamson face charges because she did not want to hire an attorney, which would have cost her a lot of money. The translator also said that her only evidence against Williamson came from witness statements, and she was concerned that the case would have fallen apart if any of those witnesses had recanted.
“I’m just a terp sir,” she told Task & Purpose. “If I charged him, God knows how long it’s gonna take for this to be over.”
Task & Purpose obtained an email from Capt. Rebecca Baker, the judge advocate for 1st Special Forces Group, who told the translator the military could not retain an attorney for her because she is not an American service member and the case was not going to trial.
The United States has designated Thailand a major non-NATO ally and Green Berets routinely deploy there to train Thai special operations forces on close-quarters battle drills, crisis response planning, marksmanship, combat casualty care, and other combat skills. All Special Forces go through language and cultural training so they are mindful of the local customs when they train indigenous forces. But the translator said Williamson was anything but professional when he touched her inappropriately.
Balance Torch 20-2
Special operators from the Royal Thai Army Special Warfare Command and 1st Special Forces Group – Airborne recently conducted comprehensive partnership training. Sharing cultures and practices is important for when we operate together anywhere worldwide. #FriendsPartners #FreeandOpenIndoPacific Partnership in Action U.S. Indo-Pacific CommandUnited States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)U.S. Army Special Operations Command, 1st Special Forces Command – Airborne
Posted by Special Operations Command Pacific on Friday, February 14, 2020
Baker sent the translator another email over the summer saying that Williamson had received a general officer memorandum of reprimand for touching her inappropriately that would be included in his permanent military records.
“This means any promotion or awards board will see the reprimand and be able to utilize it to determine his future in the military,” Baker wrote. “It is very likely that SFC Williamson will face being separated from the Army in the near future.”
Yet the translator was not surprised when Task & Purpose told her that Williamson would not be separated since he is a well-respected instructor, she said.
“I wish they could have done more; actually, just educate people – the soldiers, the personnel – to act more professionally,” she said. “That’s what we expected. I should be safe working with them. I shouldn’t have to worry about this stuff at all.”
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is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com, direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
