Quotes of the Day:

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society, gathers wisdom.”

– Isaac Asimov

"Rest, nature, books, music, such is my idea of happiness."

– Leo Tolstoy

“Thanks to the realistic ideas handed down by culture, mankind has survived and, in certain fields, progresses. But thanks to the pernicious nonsense drummed into every individual in the course of his acculturation, mankind, though surviving and progressing, has always been in trouble. History is the record, among other things, of the fantastic and generally fiendish tricks played upon itself by culture-maddened humanity. And the hideous game goes on.”

– Aldous Huxley

1. The war in Gaza may widen. The Biden admin is getting ready for it.

2. The Pentagon is Trying to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy

3. Why America fell out of love with its Army

4. China Has New Full-Scale Target Of America's Ford Supercarrier

5. Russia fires missiles supplied by North Korea into Ukraine, says U.S. intelligence

6. Marine Corps using exercises to mature new Information Command

7. Special Operations Command's commando aircraft are in jeopardy

8. L3Harris secures near half a billion-dollar USSOCOM contract for tactical radios - Army Technology

9. The Hamas 'CEO' who payrolled October 7 rapists and murderers

10. Survivor of Hamas Oct. 7 Music Festival Slaughter Recounts Horrific Rape, Murder of Female Attendee

11. Israel's Plans for Post-War Gaza Begin to Come Into View

12. Water increasingly at the center of conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East

13. Houthis have attacked ships in the Red Sea 25 times since November

14. U.S., Partners Committed to Defensive Operations in Red Sea

15.  A Ukrainian Saboteur Traveled 900 Miles to A Snowy Russian Airfield And, In The Dead Of Night, Lit A Russian Sukhoi Fighter-Bomber On Fire

16. China’s Attempt To Increase Regional Influence

17. How Far-Right Terrorists Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Bomb

18. U.S. Special Ops Team Pioneers Donation Initiative in Thailand

19. Arms and Influencers: Leveraging the Social Media Stars in the US Military’s Ranks

20.  The Ukraine-Taiwan Tradeoff

21. Why America’s National Security Establishment Keeps Falling Short

22. The U.S. Military’s Personnel Crisis

23. Shooting down Russia's overhyped missiles with Patriots is a win for more than just Ukraine. The war is an 'intelligence bonanza' for the West.

24. 3 Steps to Take Instead of Complaining about Gen Z’s Fragile Mental Health

25. GRAND STRATEGY: A SHORT GUIDE FOR MILITARY STRATEGISTS

26. Russia issues no comment over rumours Putin's top war commander General Valery Gerasimov has been killed in Ukrainian missile strike on Crimea

1. The war in Gaza may widen. The Biden admin is getting ready for it.

If we do not take some decisive action soon against threats, particularly those in the Red Sea, we are likely to see other elements (countries and violent extremist organizations) keep escalating conflict. Our fear of escalation likely contributes to escalation.

But in terms of escalation, the enemy has a vote.

Conclusion:

“Although the U.S. has been trying to avoid having the war in Gaza from turning into a regional one, ultimately that decision is not entirely up to us,” said Mick Mulroy, a former Marine, CIA officer and Pentagon official under Trump. “The signs are blinking red for this to erupt into a regional war.”

The war in Gaza may widen. The Biden admin is getting ready for it.

By ERIN BANCO, LARA SELIGMAN and ALEXANDER WARD

01/04/2024 07:09 PM EST

Politico

That could put President Joe Biden in the center of a messy Middle East conflict in the midst of a bruising re-election campaign.

In this image provided by the U.S. Navy, the amphibious dock landing ship USS Carter Hall and amphibious assault ship USS Bataan transit the Bab al-Mandeb strait on Aug. 9, 2023. | Mass Communications Spc. 2nd Class Moises Sandoval/U.S. Navy via AP

01/04/2024 07:09 PM EST

Biden administration officials are drawing up plans for the U.S. to respond to what they’re increasingly concerned could expand from a war in Gaza to a wider, protracted regional conflict.

Four officials familiar with the matter, including a senior administration official, described internal conversations about scenarios that could potentially draw the U.S. into another Middle East war. All were granted anonymity to speak about sensitive, ongoing national security discussions.

The military is drafting plans to hit back at Iran-backed Houthi militants who have been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea, according to three U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the discussions. That includes striking Houthi targets in Yemen, according to one of the officials, an option the military has previously presented.

Intelligence officials, meanwhile, are coming up with ways to anticipate and fend off possible attacks on the U.S. by Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria, according to one of the officials. They are also working to determine where the Houthi militants may strike next.

The U.S. has for months behind the scenes urged Tehran to persuade the proxies to scale back their attacks. But officials say they have not seen any sign that the groups have begun to decrease their targeting and worry the violence will only surge in the coming days.

It’s an escalation that could result in President Joe Biden becoming more deeply embroiled in the Middle East just as the 2024 campaign season heats up and his campaign pushes to focus on domestic issues.

The potential for wider conflict is growing, officials said, following a series of confrontations in Iraq, Lebanon and Iran over the past several days. Those have convinced some in the administration that the war in Gaza has officially escalated far beyond the strip’s borders — a scenario the U.S. has tried to avoid for months.

The developments are perilous not just for regional security but for Biden’s reelection chances. He entered office with vows to end wars, realized with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that removed the U.S. from 20 years of fighting. Biden now ends his first term as the West’s champion for the defense of Ukraine and key enabler of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas.

Even without U.S. troops in either conflict, voters may see 2024 as their chance to weigh in on the key foreign policy question of this election: how involved should America be in foreign wars?

Biden has vowed to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes” while standing staunchly behind Israel. Former President Donald Trump, Biden’s most likely Republican rival, has boasted he could end Russia’s invasion in mere hours and argued the U.S. should take a hands-off approach to the Israel-Hamas fight.

“Incumbents get blamed for bad things, whether they’re his fault or not. This is the downside of the imperial presidency,” said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. “Trump will campaign on a ‘remember the glory days’ message, arguing that Russia wouldn’t be in Ukraine, Israel wouldn’t have been attacked, and China wouldn’t be leaning into Taiwan had he been in charge.”

“Biden will have to say, ‘yes they would, and none of it was my fault,’” Logan continued. “It’s not a good subject for Biden. But unless things get a lot worse, to include U.S. troops dying, foreign policy is still unlikely to factor heavily in this election. It almost never does.”

Still, a Quinnipiac poll in November showed that 84 percent of Americans were either very or somewhat concerned that the U.S would be drawn into the Middle East conflict. And with each passing month, more and more Americans fear the Biden administration is offering too much material support to Ukraine.

A person close to the Biden campaign, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press, argued that “an incumbent will always face foreign policy events,” noting George W. Bush contended with the Iraq War and Barack Obama oversaw the end of the Arab Spring during their reelection bids. The campaign confidant said Biden is focused on issues more important to voters like the economy, the future of democracy and abortion rights.

But as campaign season ramps up, the administration is increasingly being forced to address flashpoints across the Middle East.

Over the weekend, Houthi rebels targeted a commercial freighter, forcing U.S. Navy helicopters to target and sink three of their boats. On Tuesday, Hamas accused Israel of killing a top commander in Beirut. Dozens of people were killed Wednesday during a series of explosions at the tomb of Qassem Soleimani, the late Iranian military commander who was killed in a 2019 U.S. drone strike, in Kerman, Iran. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

Tensions in the region ratcheted up even higher on Thursday after the Biden administration launched a drone strike in Baghdad that killed the Iran-backed militia leader Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi, or “Abu Taqwa,” and at least one other militant, according to two Defense Department officials.

The president convened his national security team on the morning of New Year’s Day to talk about the situation in the Red Sea, to discuss options and a way forward, said another senior administration official. One of the outcomes of that meeting was a joint statement issued simultaneously by the U.S. and a dozen of its allies warning that the Houthis would face “consequences” if they continue to “threaten lives” and disrupt trade flows in the Red Sea, said the senior official.

Another U.S. official stressed that the administration’s concerns about a wider war in the region aren’t new. The official said the U.S. has for weeks been worried about the war in Gaza escalating and that there was no indication that the threats to U.S. troops overseas had expanded in recent days.

However, there are other signs the administration is worried about those threats increasing. In the aftermath of the attack in Iran on Wednesday, officials across the administration from the Pentagon to the State Department to the intelligence agencies began assessing how Iran or its proxy forces in the Middle East could directly target the U.S. or its allies in the region.

Such contingency planning is normal in states of heightened tension in the Middle East, officials said. But the scramble inside the administration to draw up reports on potential points of attacks and possible U.S. responses this week came as a result of orders from the top echelons of the administration over fears that the violence in the region will only continue to grow and that Washington will eventually have to intervene.

Of particular concern is the potential for escalation in the Red Sea. Houthi attacks against merchant vessels there prompted the U.S. last month to announce the start of a new international maritime coalition to deter these attacks. The coalition, which now involves more than 20 countries, has allowed roughly 1,500 merchant ships to safely transit these waters since operations began on Dec. 18, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. 5th Fleet, told reporters Thursday.

Still, as of Thursday, there had been 25 attacks against commercial ships transiting the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, Cooper said. On Thursday morning, the Houthis for the first time detonated a small, one-way attack, unmanned surface vessel in international shipping lanes, he said, posing a new threat.

Already, the Houthi attacks have forced major shipping companies that represent a significant portion of the international maritime economy to reroute their vessels, adding costs and delays. Officials are concerned about further escalation.

“From our perspective, the most worrying thing is that the Houthis might sink a ship. Then what happens?” said one of the U.S. officials.

And there’s the ongoing fear that the violence in Gaza could spread to the West Bank and Lebanon. Already, Lebanese Hezbollah and Israel are trading fire on the border, and there have been reports of attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank. Those concerns could grow after the suspected Israeli killing of a Hamas leader in Lebanon on Tuesday; so far though, the U.S. has not seen any signs Hezbollah wants a wider war.

“Although the U.S. has been trying to avoid having the war in Gaza from turning into a regional one, ultimately that decision is not entirely up to us,” said Mick Mulroy, a former Marine, CIA officer and Pentagon official under Trump. “The signs are blinking red for this to erupt into a regional war.”

Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.

POLITICO

Politico

2. The Pentagon is Trying to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy

Can we? Will we? I do believe that today the Arsenal of Democracy cannot be built by America alone. We will have to integrate and depend on our allies for their contributions to the arsenal. 

The Pentagon is Trying to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy

It’s not just one war or two. How do you fight three at once?

By Jack Detsch

Foreign Policy · by Jack Detsch · January 12, 2024

January 4, 2024, 6:00 AM

If U.S. President Joe Biden wants to check the pulse of the arsenal of democracy, all he has to do is look at Bill LaPlante’s wall in the Pentagon. The U.S. Defense Department industrial chief’s office is covered with production charts for every weapon that the United States is building to fend off a potential war with China while helping countries such as Ukraine and Israel fend for themselves in wars of their own.

It’s like an electrocardiogram of the U.S. defense industry: There’s a line going up to count the number of units moved and a line going sideways for the time that it took to move them. There are production rates for the Patriot missiles that the United States has sent to the Middle East to provide backup for Israel, the sea-launched Standard Missile-6 that the United States has deployed to the Indo-Pacific to potentially bloody China’s nose if it launches an assault on Taiwan, and the guided multiple launch rockets—known as GMLRs—that helped the Ukrainians liberate Kherson and the areas around Kharkiv in a one-two punch to the Russian army in 2022.

“It’s a whole stair step,” LaPlante told a small gaggle of reporters at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California in early December 2023. The chart, he said, “keeps going and going.”

And even though business is booming, Defense Department officials are facing a problem from hell. How can the Pentagon mobilize the U.S. defense industry to respond to not just one conflict or two, but potentially three wars? Foreign Policy talked to a dozen defense ministers, officials, and experts across the NATO alliance. They described an almost Sisyphean task to rebuild the trans-Atlantic—and trans-Pacific—defense industrial base to fight three wars not during a world war, but when much of the Western world is at peace.

“We are moving from a just-in-time, just-enough economy model to a peak demand model,” said Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, the chairman of NATO’s military committee, in an interview in his office at the alliance’s Brussels headquarters in October. Much like the manner in which the Western world had to convert factories at dizzying speed to produce protective medical equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic, Western leaders need to “make sure everybody understands the sense of urgency of where we are,” Bauer said.

Officials are still trying to figure out what the right number is for every weapon on LaPlante’s chart. What makes planning especially difficult is the friction of war. Nobody expected the war in Ukraine to suck up thousands of artillery shells every single day, year after year. Few thought that Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip would exhaust precision-guided munitions in a couple of months. If the United States were in a war with China over the Taiwan Strait, it could run out of long-range precision munitions within a week, according to one study.

There was a time when the United States could turn plowshares into swords; in the Second World War, the United States built more of pretty much everything than any other combatant, from tanks to planes to ships to landing craft. Then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it the “arsenal of democracy” because it was. In five years, U.S. factories built 141 aircraft carriers, 88,410 self-propelled guns and tanks, and 257,000 artillery guns.

Now, Washington is trying to get back in business after three decades of post-Cold War belt-tightening that saw companies merge and production lines slow down. LaPlante said that the Pentagon has built a facility in Texas that has the capacity to surge 155 mm artillery shells as needed. Boeing is growing its capacity to build sensors for Patriot missiles at its Huntsville, Alabama, facility by nearly a third.

In Europe, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are becoming major producers of ammunition. Germany is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of artillery shells while Rheinmetall sets up shop inside Ukraine. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have begun jointly procuring 155 mm barrels for Ukraine. And the Swedish manufacturer Saab—which no longer makes cars—is producing so many diesel-electric submarine hulls that it’s even looking at Southeast Asia as potential clients.

Building industrial muscle means that the Pentagon needs to rebuild long-atrophied bureaucratic muscle, too. LaPlante has deputized a so-called “joint production cell” within the Pentagon, comprising defense officials who are visiting production floors. It’s not just a question of getting scientists and dollars, but also of getting factories full of skilled welders, assemblers, and foremen.

“It’s dusting off a lot of skills that we’ve had in this country that we haven’t used in a while,” LaPlante said.

But there’s a bigger problem, too: It’s one thing to assemble shells and missiles, and another thing altogether to assemble higher-end gear such as the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, which runs at about $750 million per airplane, with a production line that snakes across three U.S. states. Building the aircraft is so complex that U.S. officials have compared it to the nearly four-decadeslong process of building the interstate highway system.

Some of the weapons still have to be funded. Congress has already agreed to fund SM-6 and GMLRS. Other projects, such as the Pentagon’s plan to get up to 100,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery produced by 2025, need Congress to pass the supplemental budget, LaPlante said. With Congress out for the holidays, that’s on hold until at least January. And across the Atlantic, the European Union has fallen far behind its target of producing 1 million artillery rounds per year to feed Ukraine’s voracious appetite for ammunition while replenishing NATO stockpiles.

But when LaPlante and other Pentagon officials go into meetings with industry and members of Congress to tout their plans, they face two big questions about the United States’ military-industrial buildup. Are they going to pull the plug, especially as Congress wavers on additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel? And even if they’re for real, are their plans even enough?

When it comes to putting shells in barrels, since December 2022, the U.S. industrial base has doubled its output of 155 mm ammunition, growing it from 14,000 rounds per month to between 28,000 to 30,000, LaPlante said. U.S. Army officials hope to get to 60,000 rounds per month by September 2024, and to the magic number of 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025.

The Pentagon has put about $3 billion toward the ramp-up so far, the price of about four B-21 bombers, sprinkling contracts across five U.S. states and three countries.

The European Union is producing between 600,000 and 700,000 artillery shells per year, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told reporters in November, well short of the 27-nation bloc’s 1 million shell goal, which it hopes to reach next year. To support Ukraine and recapitalize its own stockpiles, Europe will have to reach about 3 million rounds per year in the next 10 years, Pevkur said.

But Ukraine’s appetite for artillery ammo is voracious, about 6,000 shells per day at the peak of fighting this year— and the shortage of U.S. military aid is already causing troops to hold their fire on the front lines. The pain of growing the arsenal is hard, Western officials concede, but the pain of losing the war would be far worse.

“There is no option but to rise to the occasion in this regard,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson said in an interview with Foreign Policy.

And when it comes to so-called smart bombs—weapons with GPS guidance kits built in—the situation is even more dire. Despite the United States allowing Israel to raid precision munition stockpiles in the region, more than half of the air-to-ground weapons fired into the Gaza Strip since October have been unguided “dumb bombs,” according to U.S. intelligence reports.

All of that is without accounting for the weapons needed to fight the next war: ships, submarines, sea-based missiles, and coastal defenses. China has done everything short of invading Taiwan, though it has vowed to do so at some point soon. In a naval fight, shipyards count as much or more than hulls in the water, and there the United States is beached. Even when it comes to what the United States is really good at—building and operating high-end nuclear submarines—they are artisanal affairs. The rest of the U.S. Navy is shrinking while China’s is growing.

“We’re spending 3.3 percent of GDP on national defense and you’re building a paltry 1.2 subs” a year, said U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I don’t think that is making [Chinese President] Xi Jinping quake in his boots.”

The United States has to outsource its defense procurement, as do most countries—which, in the long hangover of the post-Cold War era, means a very rude awakening. Some NATO countries, such as Poland, which keeps more of its defense industry in state hands than most other member countries, can expand production lines on the back of public spending.

The United States can only prod and pray—the Pentagon’s own soon-to-be-released industrial strategy indicates that defense companies wouldn’t be able to respond fast enough for the U.S. military to fight a modern war.

For instance: The biggest bottleneck in sending GMLRS and 155 mm ammo to Ukraine is the lack of rocket motors, said Heidi Shyu, who oversees the Pentagon’s technology strategy. So the U.S. Defense Department has initiated a parallel effort to make sure that rocket motors get built, too. But it’s a slog.

“Ramping up production is not like a light switch, where you can flip the switch and bang, you can tenfold your production,” Shyu said. “You just can’t do that. Every country that has the ability to ramp up production is in the process of ramping up.”

Further down the food chain, the U.S. Defense Department is running into problems; there aren’t enough testing beds for new weapons systems, for example. There aren’t enough good programmers to write good code. And there aren’t enough little things that go boom up and down the U.S. supply chain to feed all of the Ukrainian gun barrels, let alone those of other allies.

Europe is feeling the same crunch.

“What are the smaller obstacles? First, fuses. Second, gunpowder. Third, shells.” said Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister. “You have to be able to solve all of these small details in order to be ready to produce more rounds.”

U.S. partners are getting creative, given the lack of backup. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced a 1-million-drone target to build one-hit kamikazes that can strike Russian troops deep behind their lines. They’re conducting do-it-yourself air defense with obsolete Soviet-era munitions. And Taiwan, still stuck in a billion-dollar backlog of U.S. weapons sales, has started doing F-16 maintenance on its own.

But none of that is going to restore the arsenal of democracy, whose shelves—already bereft, if not barren—aren’t getting restocked like they used to.

“There is an end to every stockpile,” Bauer said. “There’s an end to it.”

Foreign Policy · by Jack Detsch · January 12, 2024

3. Why America fell out of love with its Army

From the Quincy Institute.

Excerpts:

If market dynamics are not the underlying cause of the crisis, what is? I believe that the Army fails to meet its recruiting goals not because of a challenging market environment, but rather because a sizable portion of the American public has lost trust in it and no longer sees it as an institution worthy of personal investment.

Professor of sociology Piotr Sztompka defines trust as “a bet about the future contingent actions of others.” He presents the concept of trust in two components: beliefs and commitment. Essentially, a person trusts when they believe something about the future and they act in accordance with this belief. This is directly relevant to recruiting: in a high trust environment, people are more likely to enlist because they have a reasonable expectation of future benefit.

Unfortunately, anyone considering service today can look to myriad examples of the Army failing to meet their end of the bargain. Whether it is a lack of adequate and safe housing for soldiers and their families, the persistence of sexual assault, an inability to address suicide rates or to accurately account for property and funds — or even to develop a comprehensive physical fitness test — the Army, and the Department of Defense more broadly, consistently fail to achieve results.

But these shortcomings, while disastrous, pale in comparison to the Army’s ultimate failure: the failure to win wars.

...

To earn back the trust of the American people and solve the recruiting crisis, the Army is going to have to do what everyone else has to do when relationships are broken: accept responsibility and begin to show, by deeds not words, a commitment to change.

Senior Army officials could immediately improve by critically examining the “unquestioned assumptions that form the basis of…American grand strategy,” reevaluating military officer professional development models, and understanding how misaligned military incentive structures work against achieving policy goals. Regardless of the approach, it should be laser-focused on delivering the ethical, effective and efficient service to the nation mentioned above.

If the Army lets this opportunity pass them by, however, claims that the military and the broader defense establishment are in a position to decisively win the nation’s wars lack credibility, as the American public will understandably remain uneasy about making a personal investment in the Army.

Why America fell out of love with its Army

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Justin Overbaugh · January 4, 2024

A lack of truth and accountability tends to have a bad effect on trust, and as it turns out, recruitment, too

1. military industrial complex
2. us military

Jan 04, 2024

For the past several years now, a phalanx of defense officials and retired senior officers have been lamenting the dearth of people willing to serve in the U.S. military.

The problem is particularly acute for the Army, the largest of the U.S. forces, which fell short of its target by 25,000 recruits over the past two years. The situation is so grave that experts claim it imperils the all-volunteer force, an institution that has provided manpower for the American military for half a century.

Why does the Army, an organization that prides itself on achievement, fail at this fundamental task? Excuses tend to focus on market dynamics such as shrinking recruiting pools, lack of knowledge among American youth about service opportunities, and impacts from COVID 19. These factors are undoubtedly relevant, but are they the actual cause of the Army’s failure?

Current officials seem to think so. After failing in 2022, the Army increased its efforts to convince young people to serve. This, combined with a campaign to overcome “misperceptions” about life in the military, was a primary focus of the branch’s $104 million advertising budget in 2023.

Additionally, the Army estimated it invested over $119 million in the future soldier preparatory course. This new program enabled young Americans, initially disqualified because of low aptitude scores or high body-fat results, the opportunity to improve their marks. The Army claimed over 8,800 recruits completed the course and moved on to basic combat training. In the end, however, none of these initiatives enabled the force to achieve its quotas.

If market dynamics are not the underlying cause of the crisis, what is? I believe that the Army fails to meet its recruiting goals not because of a challenging market environment, but rather because a sizable portion of the American public has lost trust in it and no longer sees it as an institution worthy of personal investment.

Professor of sociology Piotr Sztompka defines trust as “a bet about the future contingent actions of others.” He presents the concept of trust in two components: beliefs and commitment. Essentially, a person trusts when they believe something about the future and they act in accordance with this belief. This is directly relevant to recruiting: in a high trust environment, people are more likely to enlist because they have a reasonable expectation of future benefit.

Unfortunately, anyone considering service today can look to myriad examples of the Army failing to meet their end of the bargain. Whether it is a lack of adequate and safe housing for soldiers and their families, the persistence of sexual assault, an inability to address suicide rates or to accurately account for property and funds — or even to develop a comprehensive physical fitness test — the Army, and the Department of Defense more broadly, consistently fail to achieve results.

But these shortcomings, while disastrous, pale in comparison to the Army’s ultimate failure: the failure to win wars.

In his book, “Why America Loses Wars,” Donald Stoker reminds us that winning in war means, “the achievement of the political purpose for which the war is being fought.” Judging by this standard, the Army has clearly failed at its raison d’être, to fight and win the nation’s wars, over the past two decades. This failure has come at catastrophic cost: the loss of over 900,000 lives, the death of over 7000 U.S. service members, and the depletion of eight trillion dollars. Additionally, on the international scene, the U.S. has bled influence, and levels of violence are on the rise.

Considering the wreckage listed above, it is little wonder that the American people have markedly lost confidence in the institution and its leaders in recent years and could explain the unwillingness to volunteer for service. Essentially, signing up for the military is starting to look like a really bad bet.

Adding insult to injury, a recent survey of military members indicates their enthusiasm to recommend military service has also declined significantly. While quality of life issues are highlighted as a concern, one cannot ignore the impact of failed wars on this trend. The 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, leaving the Taliban in control of the country after 20 years, has left veterans feeling betrayed and humiliated, and naturally, unlikely to encourage others to follow their path in life.

Instead of flailing about trying to overcome challenging market dynamics, therefore, the Army should immediately commit to fixing itself. It can start by admitting its significant failures and its baffling inability to be honest with the American public about them. There are plenty of retired officers who have had public epiphanies about these systematic failures, but this kind of candor and responsibility needs to propagate among currently serving senior officials across the defense enterprise and the political establishment.

Once honesty is re-established as a core value, and the Army has come to grips with the fact that it failed, it can then begin to explore the reason why.

Simply put, the Army fails because it is set up to fail. It was asked to accomplish objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq that it could not possibly hope to achieve. Professors Leo Blanken and Jason Lapore point out what every senior defense official should clearly understand by now: that despite its impressive capabilities, the U.S. military is of limited utility in the type of non-existential conflicts we have fought in the past two decades. This is because the U.S. military is built for and excels at “battlefield dominance,” yet it was saddled with conducting counterinsurgency, reconstruction and building democratic institutions, tasks it was not trained for or prepared to accomplish.

These revelations are not new, senior defense officials should have understood these dynamics all along, and speaking frankly, they did. From General Shinseki’s ignored warnings about the number of troops at the beginning of the Iraq invasion, to ongoing assessments throughout both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it seems that it was clear throughout the defense establishment (at least behind closed doors) that the U.S. military could not and would not achieve the nation’s political objectives.

Yet despite this, top defense officials assured the American public that the U.S. military was “making progress” towards its goals, right up to the point that it was manifestly evident that they were not. And yet, at precisely the moment the American public is looking for accountability, many of the same senior officials who failed to achieve results for the nation, are instead rewarded with lucrative positions in the defense industry and with foreign countries.

Seeing that the military refuses to hold itself accountable, it is unsurprising that by withholding their most precious resources, their sons and daughters, the American public is.

The service’s leadership handbook states that “trust is the foundation of the Army’s relationship with the American people, who rely on the Army to ethically, effectively and efficiently serve the Nation.”

To earn back the trust of the American people and solve the recruiting crisis, the Army is going to have to do what everyone else has to do when relationships are broken: accept responsibility and begin to show, by deeds not words, a commitment to change.

Senior Army officials could immediately improve by critically examining the “unquestioned assumptions that form the basis of…American grand strategy,” reevaluating military officer professional development models, and understanding how misaligned military incentive structures work against achieving policy goals. Regardless of the approach, it should be laser-focused on delivering the ethical, effective and efficient service to the nation mentioned above.

If the Army lets this opportunity pass them by, however, claims that the military and the broader defense establishment are in a position to decisively win the nation’s wars lack credibility, as the American public will understandably remain uneasy about making a personal investment in the Army.

Justin Overbaugh

Justin Overbaugh is a Colonel in the U.S. Army with experience in Combat Arms, Special Operations, Intelligence, and Talent Acquisition. In his 25-year career, he led operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and across Europe and he commanded the Tampa Recruiting Battalion from 2017-2019. This article reflects his own personal views which are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Army or the Department of Defense.

A female US Army (USA) Drill Sergeant (left) provides security for the Color Guard as they post the colors at the start of the graduation ceremony for the Recruits \\graduating at the end of the nine-week Basic Combat Training (BCT) program at Fort Jackson, Columbia, South Carolina (SC) in 2006. (Photo SSGT STACY L PEARSALL, USAF)

4. China Has New Full-Scale Target Of America's Ford Supercarrier

Photos at the link: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/china-has-new-full-scale-target-of-americas-ford-supercarrier?mc_cid=1dae48a980&mc_eid=70bf478f36

China Has New Full-Scale Target Of America's Ford Supercarrier

China’s huge investment in denying U.S. carriers proximity to its shores continues with a familiar-looking new target in its western desert.

BYJOSEPH TREVITHICK|PUBLISHED JAN 4, 2024 7:40 PM EST

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · January 4, 2024

China has constructed a new aircraft carrier target on a sprawling range in the northwestern end of the country that is a dead-ringer for the U.S. Navy's newest supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford. The target underscores the People's Liberation Army's continued focus on expanding and refining its ability to engage American carriers and other warships over long distances, which includes a growing arsenal of anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles. This is all part of China's evolving anti-access and area denial strategy across much of the Western Pacific.

The image of the new carrier target on the range in the Taklamakan Desert in China's Xinjiang province was taken on January 1 by Planet Labs. A full-scale black-colored silhouette in the shape of the USS Gerald R. Ford, and future carriers in that class, roughly 1,085 feet long, is plainly visible. There is also a structure in the same position as Ford's island, as well as four catapult tracks marked on the 'deck' in the same places they appear on the real ship. The unique sponsons and other outcroppings, including a broader, squared-off stern, that are found on the Ford are also present in the target silhouette.

A side-by-side comparison of the new carrier target in China's Taklamakan Desert, at top, and the USS Gerald R. Ford, at bottom. PHOTO © 2024 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION / USN

Various masts can be seen dotted around the new Ford target. Generally speaking, these masts are used as radar reflectors, which can be used in combined form to mimic the real ship's full radar signature. This, in turn, would help create a full 'phantom' carrier in the desert without the need for more extensive construction. The masts can also be used as surrogates for separate features if used in smaller groups.

Some of the masts could also be topped with antennas or other equipment for various testing purposes. Masts like this have been observed on other targets at the Taklamakan Desert range, as well as elsewhere, including at sea. In the past, The War Zone has highlighted how these features are particularly relevant to the development of new and improved radar seekers for weapons, other sensors, countermeasures, and electronic warfare systems.

A close-up look at some of the masts that are visible on the carrier target, including on the island structure. PHOTO © 2024 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION

Work on the new carrier target began in November 2023. A review of past satellite imagery available through Planet Labs also shows that a rough outline of a carrier has been present there for some time. Several smaller aircraft carrier silhouettes have also been erected within the larger outline and subsequently removed at this site in the Taklamakan Desert on multiple occasions since 2021.

Two smaller carrier targets, as well as the outline of a larger one, can be seen in this satellite image taken on July 28, 2023. This is the same location where the larger Ford target is now present. PHOTO © 2024 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION

The U.S. Navy took delivery of Ford in 2019 after years of technical issues and other delays. The real carrier is currently on its way back to its homeport in Norfolk, Virginia, after concluding its first fully deployment. Ford's time at sea had been extended due to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The site of China's new Ford target is just under 2.8 miles (around 4.5 kilometers) southeast of another full-scale carrier target in the Taklamakan that garnered significant attention back in 2021. That target also has the same general dimensions as a Ford class carrier, but still lacks any significant structural additions.

Additional ship-type targets, including others meant to represent aircraft carriers and ones that look to be based around U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke class destroyers, dot the Taklamakan range. Satellite imagery shows that at least one of the destroyer targets, which had previously been just a silhouette with various radar reflector masts, has now been upgraded with additional structure features. Similarly enhanced destroyer targets have been observed on this range in the past.

The destroyer target with structural improvements is seen in this image taken on January 1, 2024. PHOTO © 2024 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSIONPHOTO © 2024 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION

The Taklamakan range complex is also home to at least one very large rail-based mobile ship target that you can read more about here.

All of this reflects a steady trend on the part of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) to create higher and higher fidelity land-based naval targets to train and test against over the past few decades. The new Ford target is a world apart from the concrete rectangles and other crudely ship-shaped targets that Chinese forces used years ago. Using targets that are more representative of the real thing helps produce more accurate data during testing. They can also add additional realism during training exercises, though ranges like the one in the Taklamakan Desert are more focused on supporting research and development and test and evaluation activities.

Older ship silhouette targets arrayed as part of a mock port facility at a Chinese range in the Gobi Desert. Google Earth via The Federation of American Scientists

The new targets also underscore the PLA's significant and ongoing investment in capabilities to neutralize U.S. Navy carriers and their associated strike groups. China's anti-access and area denial arsenal continues to expand with a particular focus on anti-ship capabilities. The country has a growing array of air-launched and land and sea-based anti-ship ballistic missiles. This is on top of increasingly advanced anti-ship cruise missiles that can be fired from more and more capable aircraft, ships, and submarines, as well as ground-based launchers. Hypersonic anti-ship cruise missiles are on the horizon for the PLA, too.

At the same time, the PLA's ability to detect and track carriers and other warships, and do so persistently further and further away from its shores, has grown in recent years. Drones are an ever-more important part of this equation for China. The PLA also has a still-expanding array of space-based surveillance and intelligence-gathering assets that increasingly rivals that of the United States. These are all capabilities that could be particularly critical to the targeting process for longer-range weapons, such as anti-ship ballistic missiles.

A picture of a Chinese WZ-7 surveillance drone taken from the cockpit of a Japan Air Self-Defense Force aircraft during an intercept last year. Japanese Ministry of Defense

"Recent improvements to China's space-based ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] capabilities emphasize the development, procurement, and use of increasingly capable satellites with digital camera technology as well as space-based radar for all-weather, 24-hour coverage. These improvements increase China's monitoring capabilities – including observation of U.S. aircraft carriers, expeditionary strike groups, and deployed air wings," the Pentagon's most recent annual report on Chinese military capabilities, released last October, explained. "Space capabilities will enhance potential PLA military operations farther from the Chinese coast. These capabilities are being augmented with electronic reconnaissance satellites that monitor radar and radio transmissions."

All of this comes amid a now decades-long modernization push by PLA. This has produced significant results, especially in terms of its naval capabilities, something The War Zone has explored in depth previously. In addition to new anti-ship capabilities, the PLA Navy (PLAN) has been working steadily increasing the size and capabilities of its own surface warship and submarine fleets. It now moving ever closer to commissioning its third aircraft carrier, Fujian, which will be its most capable to date, as you can read more about here. There is already talk about an even more advanced nuclear-powered flattop, as well as smaller drone carriers, being in the PLAN's future.

In recent years, there has also been a surge in concerns among U.S. officials about the potential for a future high-end conflict with China in the Pacific, possibly over the status of Taiwan or another flashpoint, such as the hotly contested South China Sea. The PLA routinely harasses American ships and aircraft operating in international waters and the airspace above them across the Pacific, and has reportedly conducted mock attack runs on Navy warships in the past.

Still, even with all of these other developments, the new target in the Taklamakan Desert representing the USS Gerald R. Ford makes clear the PLA continues to put great emphasis on being able to challenge American carriers in any future conflict.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · January 4, 2024

5. Russia fires missiles supplied by North Korea into Ukraine, says U.S. intelligence

An indication of Russian desperation? And it is an opportunity for Kim to get hard currency as well as political support and acquiring advanced military technology.

As a good friend and north Korean expert pointed out to me, the missiles provided could be the KN -23 which is a north Korean modified or re-engineered Iskander which of course comes from Russia. The Irony. This will be helpful to north Korea as it will allow the missile to be tested in combat while filling shortfalls and gaps in Russian capabilities. 

Russia fires missiles supplied by North Korea into Ukraine, says U.S. intelligence

Ballistic missiles provided by Pyongyang to Moscow are now being used on the battlefield, according to U.S. officials

By John Hudson and David L. Stern

Updated January 4, 2024 at 4:23 p.m. EST|Published January 4, 2024 at 1:08 p.m. EST

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · January 4, 2024

Russia has begun firing ballistic missiles provided by North Korea into Ukraine, the latest sign of cooperation between two of Washington’s archnemeses, the White House said Thursday.

Russia’s deployment of North Korean-supplied ballistic missiles, first reported by The Washington Post, indicates North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s growing support for Moscow’s war effort. It also shows Moscow’s ability to lean on pariah countries to make up for deficiencies in its own arsenal as the war in Ukraine approaches its third year.

“Russia has become increasingly isolated on the world stage and they’ve been forced to look to like-minded states for military equipment,” said White House spokesman John Kirby, who partially attributed Russia’s limited options to sanctions imposed by Washington.

Kirby presented a map showing the trajectory of Russia’s first known use of North Korean missiles on Saturday, launching from southern Russia and landing in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region — an area of intense fighting between Kyiv and Moscow.

The first strike landed in an open field, Kirby said. A second strike Tuesday was part of a larger overnight aerial attack that the United States has less information about. “We’re still assessing the impacts of these additional missiles,” Kirby said.

North Korea recently provided Russia with ballistic missile launchers and several dozen ballistic missiles, said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. intelligence.

“We expect Russia and North Korea to learn from these launches — and we anticipate that Russia will use additional North Korean missiles to target Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and to kill innocent Ukrainian civilians,” Kirby said.

Kirby said that the missiles have a range of roughly 550 miles and that their transfer violates multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. He vowed that the United States would raise the issue at the United Nations and impose sanctions against individuals facilitating arms transfers between North Korea and Russia.

“We will not allow countries to aid Russia’s war machine in secret,” Kirby said.

U.S. officials believe that in exchange for the ballistic missiles, North Korea is seeking a variety of military equipment from Russia, including fighter aircraft, surface-to-air-missiles, armored vehicles, ballistic missile production equipment and other advanced technologies.

Michael Kofman, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Russia’s war effort is being bolstered by imports of weaponry.

“Russia’s mobilized defense industrial production is now producing significantly more missiles per month than it was before the war. However, this is still not sufficient relative to its needs and can’t replace the stockpile of missiles it’s expended over the course of the last two years,” he said. “That means that Russia would benefit from having access to an additional stockpile from countries like North Korea.”

While officials said Pyongyang had provided “several dozen ballistic missiles” thus far, the extent of the weapons North Korea sent and how much it plans to provide in the coming months remain unclear.

In November, South Korea accused North Korea of supplying several types of missiles to Russia, including antitank missiles, portable anti-air missiles, ballistic missiles, and rifles, rocket launchers, mortars and shells.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Russia began receiving shipments of North Korean ballistic missiles several weeks ago.

The grinding war in Ukraine has seen little movement along the front lines since Kyiv’s stalled summer counteroffensive. But with the advent of winter, both sides have continued to pummel each other with missile and drone attacks.

On Thursday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that its air defenses had repelled a major missile attack by Ukrainian forces on Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014 and Russian forces used as a staging ground for its full-scale invasion in 2022.

Russian antiaircraft systems shot down 10 Ukrainian “aircraft-guided missiles,” the ministry said.

Mikhail Razvozhayev, governor of the Sevastopol region in Crimea, said on Telegram that the missile attack was the “most massive in recent times” on the peninsula, adding that one person was injured by falling shrapnel.

Ukraine’s military said in a statement that it had successfully struck “a command post of a formation of the Russian occupation forces near Sevastopol.”

The Russian and Ukrainian claims could not be independently verified.

Separately, a Russian missile attack on the southeastern Ukrainian city of Kropyvnytskyi on Thursday killed one person and injured eight, Ukraine’s State Emergency Services said.

Debris from a missile also damaged a repair and production facility of Ukraine’s state energy operator Ukrenergo, the company said in a statement.

Kostiantyn Khudov, Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · January 4, 2024

6. Marine Corps using exercises to mature new Information Command

There is no mention of influence or psychological operations (e.g., influencing target audience behavior) in this article.

For this "information" organization it is cyber, intelligence, and space, not a focus on influencing the human domain. I am beginning to think we should just apply "information" to all the technical fields of EW, cyber, intelligence, space etc and separate all of that form influence and psychological operations. Perhaps if we left influence to the psychological operations and removed influence from all those who focus on "information" we could be more effective at both influence and the technical aspects of information which is really what the services want to focus on. The bottom line is we should consider not lumping influence and psychological operations under "information." And we should not allow those who are not specifically organized, trained, educated, equipped, and optimized to conduct influence operations. We need to get this right.

Excerpt:

The MCIC, activated in January 2023, is designed to more tightly link the service’s information forces — including cyber, intelligence and space — in theater with the broader joint force.

Marine Corps using exercises to mature new Information Command

Marine Corps Information Command is looking to mature regionally first, with eventual aspirations for global integration.

BY

MARK POMERLEAU

JANUARY 4, 2024

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · January 4, 2024

A year after being established, Marine Corps Information Command is focusing on maturing regionally — specifically in the Pacific — with the longer-term goal of global integration and synchronization of information capabilities with traditional military operations.

The MCIC, activated in January 2023, is designed to more tightly link the service’s information forces — including cyber, intelligence and space — in theater with the broader joint force.

The organization is still at initial operational capability and is using a variety of exercises to build up its prowess and relationships.

“It grows with every exercise. Our ability to do it globally [is] not there. Trying to get [it] to regional, start with a couple exercises, and then really start to focus on a particular region and get good there and be able to pick up and pivot,” Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, commander of Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace and Marine Corps Forces Space Command, said in a December interview.

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Heritage, who was selected to be the next deputy commandant for information, is also the head of the MCIC.

As the U.S. military gears up for potential conflicts with technologically sophisticated nation-states, it is imperative that capabilities from all domains — including the non-kinetic areas of cyberspace, space and the electromagnetic spectrum — are integrated. The Pentagon refers to this concept as “multi-domain operations.”

The MCIC was necessary, officials have stated, as a means of informing commanders about what types of capabilities — and in some cases, more importantly, authorities — exist for non-kinetic tools.

At the joint level, there are many authorities that have to be coordinated, especially in the non-kinetic and digital realms as it pertains to intelligence collection — which is very heavily regulated under spying authorities known as Title 50 — and operations within cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum meant to disrupt an adversary’s operations, known as Title 10 or general warfighting authorities.

The emphasis for maturing the MCIC has been on working with combatant commanders to understand the authorities and command relationships, starting with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

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The goal, ideally, is to start at the planning process to work with relevant stakeholders so they know what types of forces to request and what forces must be readied to deploy in support.

Following those planning conferences, they then can talk about who has the authority to deploy. This could be remote support or forces that actually deploy as part of MARFORCYBER or MARFORSPACE.

“This goes to how do we mature as we grow. If we have folks that are working back here at the Fort [Meade in Maryland], they’ll have a different perspective and they’ll know where different expertise resides — as opposed to somebody who’s perhaps at the tactical level,” Heritage said. “How do we leverage, I’ll call them, interior lines that we have here at MARFORCYBER and the MCIC with other different organizations across the [intelligence community], interagency and [Department of Defense] when we deploy as part of a MCIC? Those relationships remain absolutely essential and again, those planners go with all that information into the conference.”

They are still working on what forces and authorities may deploy in practice.

“The intent is, we haven’t codified this in any fashion, but when you talk about multi-domain effects teams as a model which we’re looking at, is can you provide a multi-domain effects team under the various hats that I wear to either the fleet marine force or the joint force commander?” Heritage said. “If you can, what’s part of that multi-domain effects team? Space, [information operations], cyber, defensive cyber? Then whose authorities do they show up with geographic combatant commanders’ [areas of responsibility] and who do they leverage?”

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The two main components of the MCIC include the Marine Corps Information Operations Center and the service’s cryptologic component.

Being a service-retained entity, as opposed to the cyber forces that the Marines and the other services provide to U.S. Cyber Command to conduct cyber operations, allows the MCIC to be part of the global force management process to attach certain forces and deploy them in support of a combatant command.

“It is not intuitive yet, which is why we’re trying to work it out one exercise at a time,” Heritage said, acknowledging they’ve “still got a ton of work to go.”

Some of that has manifested in attempting to support the objectives of various combatant commands — such as Indo-Pacom, Cybercom and Space Command — participating in a single exercise, all of which have their own milestones they need to hit.

“It’s small but it’s growing,” Heritage said of support to help each command meet their objectives.

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Heritage noted there have been some “quick wins” with the MCIC and experimentation recently.

“We have been able to deploy Marines from all of our hats into exercises, bringing those authorities and walk those through the planning and execution phase in an exercise scenario,” he said.

Additionally, officials have begun working with Training and Education Command to take lessons and observations from exercises to instill at the Marine Air Ground Training Center at Twentynine Palms, California, to enable the all-domain training they provide for the rest of the Marine Corps.

“We’re integrated Training and Education Command’s initiatives on building service-level training events at Twentynine Palms,” Heritage said. “Now, Training and Education Command has another organization which they can reach up to and say, ‘We’re looking for your support from a [signals intelligence] perspective, from information operations, cyber and space. Help come down and enable the training there at Twentynine Palms for … [the forces] that flow through there on a regular basis.’”

Written by Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare and cyberspace.

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · January 4, 2024

7. Special Operations Command's commando aircraft are in jeopardy

Data, data everywhere and not a drop to assess.

Photos at the link: https://www.sandboxx.us/news/special-operations-commands-commando-aircraft-in-jeopardy/?mc_cid=1dae48a980&mc_eid=70bf478f36

But what data do we use? How do we develop data from past experience to show us what we must anticipate that we need? If we need data to prove what we need for future conflict we will have to wait until we first lose that future conflict to prove what we should have actually developed in anticipation of that future conflict (note my semi-sarcasm).  

We cannot predict the future of course and we cannot predict how the next war will be fought, but as the late Michael Howard wisely cautioned us, we have to ensure we just do not get it too wrong.

Excerpts:

More data needed for Armed Overwatch

The Armed Overwatch program remains key for the special operations community.

In its assessment titled Special Operations Forces: DOD Should Slow Acquisition of Armed Overwatch Aircraft Until It Conducts Needed Analysis, GAO found that SOCOM and AFSOC could do with a much smaller fleet, though the report didn’t specify exactly how many aircraft would suffice.

Now the ball is back in SOCOM’s court, and it will need to justify the 75 aircraft to move the program forward or propose an adjusted number.In its assessment titled Special Operations Forces: DOD Should Slow Acquisition of Armed Overwatch Aircraft Until It Conducts Needed Analysis, GAO found that SOCOM and AFSOC could do with a much smaller fleet, though the report didn’t specify exactly how many aircraft would suffice.

Now the ball is back in SOCOM’s court, and it will need to justify the 75 aircraft to move the program forward or propose an adjusted number.

...

Don’t get it wrong. The special operations community needs the Armed Overwatch program. Operators will tell you that the safety net of an AC-130 gunship, AH-6 Little Bird, or AH-64 Apache overflying the battlefield is invaluable when the going gets tough. However, it looks like SOCOM and AFSOC will need to find exactly how many aircraft are realistically needed and what exactly their capabilities will be otherwise the overall program will be jeopardized.Don’t get it wrong. The special operations community needs the Armed Overwatch program. Operators will tell you that the safety net of an AC-130 gunship, AH-6 Little Bird, or AH-64 Apache overflying the battlefield is invaluable when the going gets tough. However, it looks like SOCOM and AFSOC will need to find exactly how many aircraft are realistically needed and what exactly their capabilities will be otherwise the overall program will be jeopardized.

Special Operations Command's commando aircraft are in jeopardy

sandboxx.us · January 3, 2024

One of the US special operations community’s most important programs might be in jeopardy according to the government watchdog’s latest assessment.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommends the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) slow down its Armed Overwatch program and conduct further planning and analysis of the command’s actual requirements.

The Armed Overwatch program plans to acquire 75 AT-802U Sky Warden light aircraft to provide close air support capabilities to special operations forces around the world.

More data needed for Armed Overwatch

The Armed Overwatch program remains key for the special operations community.

In its latest report on the Armed Overwatch program, GAO found that when SOCOM and the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) conducted their analysis on how many aircraft they would need for the Armed Overwatch program they “relied on unproven assumptions” that don’t justify the number of 75 aircraft that they have requested.

In its assessment titled Special Operations Forces: DOD Should Slow Acquisition of Armed Overwatch Aircraft Until It Conducts Needed Analysis, GAO found that SOCOM and AFSOC could do with a much smaller fleet, though the report didn’t specify exactly how many aircraft would suffice.

Now the ball is back in SOCOM’s court, and it will need to justify the 75 aircraft to move the program forward or propose an adjusted number.

The AT-802U Sky Warden aircraft. (L3 Harris Technologies)

The Armed Overwatch program has been in the works for several years, and only in 2022 did SOCOM select the single-engine, two-person AT-802U Sky Warden by L3 Harris Technologies and Air Tractor as its candidate for the program. The program is set to begin in fiscal year 2025 and cost approximately $2.2 billion through fiscal year 2029.

Don’t get it wrong. The special operations community needs the Armed Overwatch program. Operators will tell you that the safety net of an AC-130 gunship, AH-6 Little Bird, or AH-64 Apache overflying the battlefield is invaluable when the going gets tough. However, it looks like SOCOM and AFSOC will need to find exactly how many aircraft are realistically needed and what exactly their capabilities will be otherwise the overall program will be jeopardized.

What commandos on the ground need

Special Operations Terminal Attack Controllers call in close air support from an A-10C Thunderbolt II at Moody Air Force Base, GA, May 10, 2021. The training gave the SOTACs an opportunity to call in CAS from various aircraft. This reinforces past knowledge to ensure proficiency in the operational environment. (US Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Ethan Green)

Sandboxx News spoke to current and former special operators with close air support experience to get an understanding of what the users are looking to get from the Armed Overwatch program.

“A good [close air support (CAS)] platform is both a weapon and a sensor for the ground guys,” a former Air Commando told Sandboxx News.

“It needs to have the proper arsenal to deal with several potential threats on the ground, including concentrations of enemy troops, individual enemy fighters, fortified positions, etc. But it also needs to be able to use its sensors to provide timely and accurate information on the ground,” he said. “Is there a group of fighters moving in the opposite direction of the ground force? Is an individual hiding in a compound waiting to ambush the operators? A good CAS platform will be able to provide that information and also have the necessary munitions to take care of business if necessary,” the former Air Force special operator added.

Another thing that is important for a close air support platform is loiter time, which is the time the aircraft can remain flying over a target. An aircraft needs to be able to remain overhead for long periods so that there is no gap in coverage.

“I want my CAS platform to be able to quickly assess my situation and be empathetic and on the same page. Things can get hairy pretty quickly and the number one thing I want a CAS platform to do is to recognize what’s going on and be thinking a few steps ahead. However, the ground force commander still has the final say, so I also need those aircraft to be willing to hear out our strategy,” the former Air Commando added.

Read more from Sandboxx News

• US Navy helicopters sink 3 Houthi attack boats attempting to seize cargo ship
• GE’s hypersonic rotating detonation engine breakthrough could change aviation forever
• Fighter pilot breaks down how aerial refueling works
• How an F-16 dodged 6 surface-to-air missiles in an airstrike gone wrong
• The Air Force created a F-35 ‘Frankenbird’ for the first time – with help from the A-10

sandboxx.us · January 3, 2024

8. L3Harris secures near half a billion-dollar USSOCOM contract for tactical radios - Army Technology

L3Harris secures near half a billion-dollar USSOCOM contract for tactical radios - Army Technology

army-technology.com · by Harry McNeil · January 5, 2024

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L3Harris Technologies Inc. has been granted a contract by USSOCOM, which could potentially be worth $479m. Source: L3Harris

Rochester-based L3Harris Technologies Inc. has clinched a contract with the USSOCOM to continue procuring tactical communications radios and associated support services.

The single award, indefinite-delivery contract spans seven one-year periods with a potential maximum value of $479m.

The contract focuses on the continuous procurement of next-generation tactical communications radios, emphasising the role of these technologies in modern military operations. Alongside acquiring the radios, the agreement includes associated sustainment and support services.

This approach ensures that USSOCOM not only acquires equipment but also benefits from ongoing maintenance and support, maximising operational efficiency.

GlobalData’s “The Global Tactical Communications Market 2021-2031” report highlights L3Harris’s historical relationship with the US military. In January 2017, the US government awarded a contract to L3Harris Corporation of $403m to provide spare parts to support various tactical radio systems for the US Defense Logistics Agency.

Fiscal 2024 procurement funds totalling $2,515,260 have been obligated, underlining the immediate financial commitment to advancing military communication capabilities. The funding structure for the contract encompasses various sources, including procurement, operations, and maintenance funding, as well as research, development, testing, and evaluation funding where appropriate.

This contract was awarded under the Competition in Contracting Act, except to full and open competition, under Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1. The decision underscores the specialised nature of the equipment and the unique capabilities that L3Harris Technologies brings to the table.

On 4 October 2023, L3Harris Technologies was awarded full-rate production orders for Manpack and Leader radios by the US Army under the Handheld, Manpack & Small Form Fit (HMS) programme, totalling over $247m.

L3Harris Technologies also secured a role in the US Army’s Combat Net Radio modernisation programme, winning a $6bn indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract to deliver advanced tactical radios.

USSOCOM, based at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, is the contracting activity responsible for overseeing the execution of this defence contract. The award further solidifies L3Harris’s position as a partner in delivering solutions to support the mission-critical needs of the US Special Operations Command.

army-technology.com · by Harry McNeil · January 5, 2024

9. The Hamas 'CEO' who payrolled October 7 rapists and murderers

Why don't Hama leaders live in Gaza? (a sarcastic question).

The Hamas 'CEO' who payrolled October 7 rapists and murderers: Former gang leader Zaher Jabarin runs terror group's financial operations from Turkish office and runs half-a-billion-dollar empire

• Zaher Jabarin, 55, is said to be responsible for enabling Hamas financially
• He was once jailed for murder and borrowed money from his mother to buy guns 

By CHRIS JEWERS

PUBLISHED: 06:41 EST, 5 January 2024 | UPDATED: 07:44 EST, 5 January 2024

Daily Mail · by Chris Jewers · January 5, 2024

In its mission to eradicate Hamas, Israel has vowed to hunt down every member of the terror group involved in the October 7 attack - no matter where they are.

Just this week, the deputy head of the Iran-backed group was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, demonstrating that Israel is not afraid to strike targets outside the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

And in comments on Wednesday, the chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence service suggested the country would be willing to go further.

While a small number of its military leaders are believed to still be inside the Gaza Strip itself, others are sheltering in other Arab states, such as Qatar and Turkey.

And although there are more senior members in Hamas's organisational structure, one in particular is believed to have financially enabled the deadly October 7 attack from outside of Gaza: Zaher Jabarin, the 'CEO of Hamas'.

Zaher Jabarin, 55, oversees the Hamas finance empire that is estimated to be worth half a billion dollars, and which funds the group's military operations.

According to the publication, Jabarin's influence is thought to be so great that US and Israeli security officials believe he enabled Hamas to pay for the weapons and wages for its fighters who mounted the shocking October 7 attack (pictured)

Jabarin, 55, oversees the Hamas finance empire that is estimated to be worth half a billion dollars, and which funds the group's military operations.

He manages the terror group's financial relationship with Iran - its main benefactor - and handles the process of moving cash from Tehran to the Gaza strip, officials say.

The group does this via money transfers using the informal hawala system, and more recently cryptocurrencies, the Wall Street Journal reports.

On top of that, he also looks after a portfolio of companies that deliver annual income for Hamas as well as running a network of private donors and businessmen who invest in the Islamist group that is hell-bent on destroying Israel.

As a result, he was personally sanctioned by the United States in 2019, but has nevertheless been able to continue operating.

According to the publication, his influence is thought to be so great that US and Israeli security officials believe he enabled Hamas to pay for the weapons and wages for its fighters who mounted the shocking October 7 attack.

Heavily armed gunmen assaulted southern Israel, killed around 1,200 people and kidnapped 240 more, dragging them into Gaza.

Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed more than 22,400 people, more than two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.

'Jabarin played a huge role because he handles all of Hamas' finance outside Gaza,' Uzi Shaya, a former Israeli security official who has researched illicit finance, told the Journal. 'Jabarin is the CEO of Hamas.'

Jabarin was close to Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas official killed on Tuesday in a precision strike in Beirut, attributed to Israel.

Together, Jabarin and Arouri helped found Hamas's military wing in the West Bank - the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades - and both have ties to Iran.

Arouri even wrote the introduction to a book that Jabarin published after his release from prison in 2011, as part of a prisoner exchange that saw Israel swap 1,000 Palestinian inmates for one Israel soldier.

Yahya Sinwar, the current leader in Gaza, was also released under the same deal.

'Days have not weakened his resolve,' Arouri wrote of Jabarin, the Journal reports. 'He is continuing, god willing, to complete this journey, which is the path of jihad.'

eople gather outside a damaged building following a massive explosion in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, Lebanon, Tuesday. The suspected Israeli strike killed Saleh al-Arouri - the deputy head of the Iran-backed group - demonstrating that Israel is not afraid to strike targets outside the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank

Saleh al-Arouri was killed in the stroke in Beirut in what is believed to have been an Israeli strike

Israel has vowed to hunt down all Hamas leaders responsible for the October 7 terror attack. Pictured: Yahya Sinwar, head of the political wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, attends a rally in support of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque in Gaza City in 2022

According to his book, seen by the Journal, Jabarin was born in 1968 and grew up in Salfit, a town in the northern West Bank.

He found religion as a boy and attended the local mosque, reading works by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is an offshoot.

According to an interview he gave, he led a gang in his late teens called 'The Shooting Squads' and joined the 1987 uprising against Israel, known as the first intifada. He told Felesteen newspaper that he wrote anti-occupation graffiti in Salfit.

But he soon turned to more violent means, obtaining weapons, some of which he purchased by borrowing money from his mother.

The Journal reports that one of his early contributions to Hamas was recruiting a Palestinian named Yahya Ayyash, who learned how to make explosive devices.

Jabarin was arrested in 1996 over the killing of an Israeli soldier, was convicted of murder and handed a life sentence.

While behind bars, he learned Hebrew, studied for a degree, and began writing his book - published the year after his release in 2011.

Meanwhile, during his 15-year imprisonment, Hamas grew into the group that it is today - a popular faction in the West Bank and Gaza and an internationally recognised terror organisation which took control of the coastal strip in 2007.

This allowed it to levy taxes in Gaza, boosting its ability to raise funds.

By the time Jabarin was released, Hamas had established a network of companies that provided the group with the income it needed, as well as a method with which to launder money so that it wasn't associated with the group to avoid sanctions.

US officials say the base of operations was at first in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

There, Hamas is said to have moved millions of dollars from Iran to its military operations in Gaza. However, under US-imposed pressure, Saudi Arabia forced Hamas's finance officials from the country's capital.

But they soon found a new home in the form of Turkey.

Hamas's financial office is now based in a building in Istanbul where the group holds stakes in companies, including shares in a real-estate firm listed on Turkey's stock exchange, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing US sanctions.

Jabarin has for years evaded Western sanctions to use financial systems in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the UEA, Sudan and Turkey to found companies and move money into the hands of Hamas, a source told the Journal.

The US imposed sanctions on him directly in 2019, saying he had become the architect behind 'a financial network that allowed Hamas to raise, invest and launder vast sums of money' from the headquarters in Turkey.

A few years later, the US said that Jabarin - working with other Hamas officials - had developed a real estate portfolio which makes up the bulk of the group's $500 million worth of assets around the world.

The Hamas financial machine is so strong in fact, that officials in the US and Israel fear that even if the group is defeated on the battlefield in Gaza, Hamas will still have deep coffers to draw from in order to continue attacks and rebuild.

And in poverty-stricken Gaza, the promise of a regular paycheck from Hamas means the group is able to easily recruit more soldiers to its cause.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to eradicate Hamas and its leadership

In an interview, Jabarin told the journal that he sees it as an 'honour to get funds for Hamas,' but denied his own involvement in raising money for the group.

He admits to now being part of the Hamas as a political party, and not the organisation's military al-Qassam Brigades.

Politically, he told the publication, Hamas has relationships with many countries including Turkey, Iran and Russia, but distances the group from the military wing.

'Israel tries to mix apples and oranges,' he said, according to the Journal. 'Al-Qassam has its own ties, far away from Hamas the political party.'

Daily Mail · by Chris Jewers · January 5, 2024

10. Survivor of Hamas Oct. 7 Music Festival Slaughter Recounts Horrific Rape, Murder of Female Attendee

We must not be silent about the brutality of Hamas.

"Mass sexual violence." Repeat those words over and over again.

Is that the new character of modern warfare? (of course war has always included brutal war crimes to include rape, but has it ever been this calculated and deliberate and not a result of indisipline or poor leadership.)

Survivor of Hamas Oct. 7 Music Festival Slaughter Recounts Horrific Rape, Murder of Female Attendee

The attack left some 1,200 people dead and involved mass sexual violence by members of Hamas

Published 01/04/24 11:25 PM ET|Updated 9 hr ago

Eli Walsh

themessenger.com · January 5, 2024

Warning: This story contains graphic details about sexual assault and body mutilation that some readers may find disturbing.

A group of Hamas fighters sexually assaulted and murdered a woman, then raped her again, during the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, a survivor said in an interview with CNN that aired Thursday.

Raz Cohen was attending the Nova music festival with his girlfriend at the time of the attack, which left some 1,200 people dead and involved mass sexual violence by members of Hamas. Israel has since retaliated by invading Gaza and killing more than 22,000 Palestinians.

During the attack on the festival, Cohen hid under a bush in a dried-up streambed when a white van parked nearby and five Hamas gunmen spilled out before capturing a woman.

“After they pulled the clothes off, one of them started to rape her,” Cohen said, according to CNN. “It was something like 40 seconds. After he raped her, he takes a knife and kills her, murdered her. After he did it, he continued to rape the dead body.”

Cohen added that the other men laughed during the attack on the woman, then killed another woman and a man with knives and an ax, CNN reported, though CNN noted it could not independently verify Cohen’s account of the Oct. 7 attack.

Cohen ultimately waited nine hours in the bush before Israeli rescuers arrived.

themessenger.com · January 5, 2024

11. Israel's Plans for Post-War Gaza Begin to Come Into View

Israel's Plans for Post-War Gaza Begin to Come Into View

Israeli defense minister lays out next steps ahead of visit from US secretary of state

Published 01/05/24 05:43 AM ET|Updated 2 hr ago

Associated Press

themessenger.com · January 5, 2024

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel's defense minister on Thursday laid out his vision for the next phase of the war in Gaza, describing how Israeli forces would shift to an apparently scaled-down "new combat approach” in northern Gaza, while continuing to fight Hamas in the south of the territory “for as long as necessary.”

Ahead of a visit by the U.S. secretary of state, Yoav Gallant also outlined a proposal for how Gaza would be run once Hamas is defeated, with Israel keeping security control while an undefined, Israeli-guided Palestinian body runs day-to-day administration, and the U.S. and other countries oversee rebuilding.

Israel has come under heavy international pressure to spell out a post-war vision but so far has not done so. The issue is likely to be on the agenda in Secretary of State Antony Blinken's talks this weekend in Israel and other countries in the region. The United States has pressed Israel to shift to lower-intensity military operations in Gaza that more precisely target Hamas, after nearly three devastating months of bombardment and ground assaults.

The vagueness of many of Gallant’s provisions made it difficult to assess how much they mesh with the U.S. calls.

The document issued by Gallant was titled a “vision for Phase 3” of the war, and Gallant's office said the phase had not yet begun. It also said the ideas were Gallant's and not official policy, which would have to be set by Israel's war and security cabinets.

Gallant, who is a member of both cabinets, may be aiming to put his personal plan before the Americans ahead of others in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition, which includes hard-right members likely to want a tougher approach.

Israel's campaign in Gaza has killed more than 22,400 people, more than two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. The ministry's count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after its Oct. 7 attack, in which militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted around 240 others.

Much of northern Gaza, which troops invaded two months ago, has been flattened beyond recognition. Associated Press footage from Gaza City showed people wandering through a shattered landscape with large fields of broken concrete and splintered wood and streets lined with toppled buildings.

With the focus now in the south, Israeli forces are battling Hamas militants in the city of Khan Younis and in urban refugee camps in the center of the territory.

Some 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes and squeezed into smaller slivers of the territory. Israel's siege of the territory has caused a humanitarian crisis, with a quarter of the population starving because not enough supplies are entering, according to the U.N.

At the same time, airstrikes and shelling across Gaza continue to destroy houses, burying families taking shelter inside.

An Israeli strike Thursday flattened a home in Muwasi, a small rural strip on Gaza’s southern coastline that Israel’s military had declared a safe zone. The blast killed at least 12 people, Palestinian hospital officials said. The dead included a man and his wife, seven of their children and three other children ranging in age from 5 to 14, according to a list of the dead who arrived at Nasser Hospital in nearby Khan Younis.

There was no immediate response from Israel’s military.

Palestinians inspect the rubble of a building of the Al Nawasrah family destroyed in an Israeli strike in Maghazi refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, Monday, Dec. 25, 2023.AP Photo/Adel Hana

Gallant's vision

Gallant's statement underlined that the war would go on until Hamas' military and government capabilities are eliminated and the more than 100 hostages still in captivity are returned.

In the north, the statement said, forces will shift to a new approach that includes raids, destruction of tunnels, “air and ground activities and special operations.” The aim would be “the erosion” of the remaining Hamas presence.

There was no word whether northern Gaza's population, which has almost entirely been driven south, would be allowed to return.

The statement did not clarify how the new approach would differ from current operations, but Gallant has previously said it would be a lower scale. Israel began last week to withdraw some troops from northern Gaza, where the military says it has largely gained operational control after weeks of heavy fighting with Hamas. Still, Gallant has said several thousand Hamas fighters remain there.

In the south, he said, fighting would continue “as long as is deemed necessary.”

After the war, the statement said, Israel will keep security control, taking military action in Gaza when necessary to ensure there are no threats and maintaining inspections of all goods entering the territory.

Gallant said there would be no Israeli civilians in Gaza, ruling out calls by some in Israel's far-right for a return of Jewish settlers to the territory.

Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year presence.

Palestinian entities — apparently local civil servants or communal leaders— would run the territory, with Israel providing “information to guide civilian operations,” the statement said without elaborating. A multinational task force, led by the U.S., would be in charge of rebuilding.

The apparent picture of an Israeli-dominated Palestinian administration for Gaza differs starkly from U.S. calls for a revitalized Palestinian Authority to take control of the territory and a start to new negotiations toward creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have rejected that idea.

Fears of wider war

An apparent Israeli strike that killed a top Hamas leader in Beirut has stirred fresh fears that the conflict could expand into other parts of the Middle East — a prospect that is also likely to be high on Blinken's agenda.

The killing of Saleh Arouri prompted warnings of retaliation from Hamas’ ally, the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. But there was no immediate escalation in the daily exchanges of rocket fire and shells between Hezbollah and the Israeli military over the two countries’ border. Regional tensions climbed as a U.S. airstrike killed an Iranian-backed militia leader in Iraq and as Yemen's Houthi rebels continued attacks on ships in key Red Sea shipping lanes.

At the same time, Israel has stepped up warnings of tougher military action against Hezbollah unless it pulls its fighters out of the border region, as called for under a U.N.-brokered 2006 cease-fire. Israel says that is the only way tens of thousands of Israelis who evacuated from communities in the north can return.

Gallant said Thursday that there was a “short window of time” for diplomacy with Hezbollah. But he said Israel was determined to bring about “a new reality in the northern arena, which will enable the secure return of our citizens.”

themessenger.com · January 5, 2024

12. Water increasingly at the center of conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East

When I read this article I was reminded of Robert Kaplan's Coming Anarchy (access it here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/). When I was at CGSC in 1994-95 the two most important articles that were debated throughout the year in multiple classes were Kaplan's and Huntington's Clash of Civilization. What I recall most about that year at CGSC was that we were constantly debating the future character of war and those two articles (published in 1994) were two of the most important that we read. I thought that the professors and administration were pretty flexible and ensured that our readings and discussions were relevant to future warfighting. That is why I differ with those who criticize CGSC as not being current and relevant. I found it very current and relevant. 

Water increasingly at the center of conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East

BY IAN JAMESSTAFF WRITER Graphics by ANA ELENA AZPÚRUA

DEC. 28, 2023 3 AM PT

Los Angeles Times · by Ian James · December 28, 2023

Six months ago, an explosion ripped apart Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, unleashing floods that killed 58 people, devastated the landscape along the Dnipro River and cut off water to productive farmland.

The destruction of the dam — which Ukrainian officials and the European Parliament blame on Russia, even though the structure was under Russian control — was one in a series of attacks on water infrastructure that have occurred during the Russia-Ukraine war.

Alongside those strikes, violence linked to water has erupted this year in other areas around the world.

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In countries including India, Kenya and Yemen, disputes over water have triggered bloodshed.

And on the Iran-Afghanistan border, a conflict centering on water from the Helmand River boiled over in deadly clashes between the two countries’ forces.

These are some of the 344 instances of water-related conflicts worldwide during 2022 and the first half of 2023, according to data compiled by researchers at the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank. Their newly updated data, collected through an effort called the Water Conflict Chronology, shows a major upsurge in violent incidents, driven partly by the targeting of dams and water systems in Ukraine as well as an increase in water-related violence in the Middle East and other regions.

An Afghan farmer uses a donkey to carry water canisters across a dry riverbed, near Sang-e-Atash, Afghanistan.

(Mstyslav Chernov / Associated Press)

“It’s very disturbing that in particular attacks on civilian water infrastructure seem to be on the rise,” said Peter Gleick, the Pacific Institute’s co-founder and senior fellow. “We also see a worrying increase in violence associated with water scarcity worsened by drought, climate disruptions, growing populations, and competition for water.”

Gleick has been tracking cases of water-related conflict for more than three decades and cataloged the latest incidents with other researchers at the Oakland-based institute.

The database now lists more than 1,630 conflicts. Most of the cases have occurred since 2000, and there has been a rising trend over the last decade, with a spike the last few years.

The researchers collect data from news reports and other sources and accounts. They classify instances into three categories: where water or water systems have been a trigger of violence, used as a “weapon” or have been targeted and become a “casualty” of violence.

Not every case involves injuries or deaths, but many do.

In African countries including Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan, fighting has erupted between farmers and herders over water sources and land.

“There have been a growing number of incidents where drought has led to violence associated with disputes over control and access to freshwater,” Gleick said.

In South Africa, protests over lack of access to clean water have turned volatile, with people burning tires and throwing rocks at police. During droughts in Iran and India, protests over water shortages have also sparked violence.

“We know that climate change is worsening severe droughts, and that makes me worry that these kinds of incidents will become more common,” Gleick said.

A child stands in filthy water surrounded by garbage in a slum in Lagos, Nigeria.

(Sunday Alamba / Associated Press)

Parsing the mix of factors that lead to water conflicts is complicated and an area Gleick and his colleagues plan to study further — including the role climate change is playing in worsening scarcity and contributing to violence.

During the last two years, they have also seen a large increase in the number of “casualty” incidents, in which water infrastructure is targeted.

The latest additions to the database include 56 incidents from the Russia-Ukraine war, many of them involving attacks on water infrastructure.

In 2022, Russian troops bombed a water system in Kherson and a pumping plant in Chernihiv, and were blamed for deliberately cutting off the water supply to the city of Mykolaiv. Ukraine’s military also flooded lands north of Kyiv to block a Russian assault on the capital.

This year, Russian forces destroyed dams and other infrastructure, and disrupted water supplies for 35,000 people during an assault on Marhanets.

The destruction of Kakhovka Dam has eliminated irrigation for large areas of agricultural land in southern Ukraine, harming food production and the Ukrainian economy.

Many of these attacks appear to violate the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties that prohibit attacks on civilian water infrastructure during war, Gleick said.

The latest data show there have been 107 conflicts over water reported in the Middle East since the start of 2022, with about 60% of those involving incidents between Israelis and Palestinians.

In various cases in the West Bank, Israeli military forces have destroyed Palestinian-owned wells and water systems. Israeli settlers have demolished water tanks and pipes belonging to Palestinians, and seized control of wells and water sources.

And Palestinians have repeatedly clashed with Israeli troops in disputes over wells and springs, including a case in which violence erupted after troops prevented Palestinians from digging a well.

Camels drink from a puddle in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank.

(Ohad Zwigenberg / Associated Press)

Because the researchers have yet to analyze reports of conflicts during the last six months, they don’t have detailed information about water-related violence in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

In the West Bank, incidents involving the destruction of orchards, irrigation systems and water tanks have been happening for years, “but it picked up a lot in the last two years,” said Morgan Shimabuku, a senior researcher at the Pacific Institute.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, there have been deadly fights over control of water sources in Yemen, bombings of water infrastructure in Syria, and clashes during protests over lack of water in Iraq.

Shimabuku said efforts to ease conflicts will require “protecting civilian water infrastructure and resources and developing water-governance structures that are just and equitable.”

Different patterns of violence have emerged in other regions. In Latin America, hundreds of environmental activists have been killed in recent years, including many Indigenous activists.

In one of the most infamous cases, Honduran Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres was shot and killed in 2016 after years of threats over her work to stop a dam project on the Gualcarque River.

There have been many more killings in the last few years. Those listed in the database include the assassinations of a Honduran activist who protested an open-pit mine in 2020, a Honduran activist who was fighting a new dam on the Ulua River in 2021, and an activist in Cuernavaca, Mexico, who had led protests over inadequate water service.

In various cases, Shimabuku said, Indigenous people have been involved in violent conflicts over water and land protection where “government-backed corporate entities are committing violence.”

“A lot of those are people protecting water, because they don’t want a dam built, they don’t want their forests to be destroyed, and their rivers to be destroyed,” Shimabuku said.

A fisherman walks across a dry patch of land in the marshes in Dhi Qar province, Iraq, during a severe drought in 2022.

(Anmar Khalil / Associated Press)

Gleick said one of the goals in tracking data about conflicts is to shed light on connections between water and peace and security.

“Understanding what’s driving these events can help us develop strategies to reduce the risk of violence over water,” Gleick said.

The history of water-related conflicts and the recent rise in violence are among the subjects Gleick analyzes in his book “The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future.”

In it, Gleick presents a wide-ranging and meticulously researched examination of humans’ relationship to water throughout history, from ancient Mesopotamia to the present, and shares a hopeful vision for how societies can address water challenges and move toward a more sustainable future.

He calls for new thinking and approaches to address lack of water access, worsening pollution, overtapped rivers and aquifers, and collapsing ecosystems. He also envisions a peaceful future where conflicts are dealt with peacefully and water-related violence is fading.

Gleick traces the history of conflicts to the first known war over water nearly 4,500 years ago between the ancient Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma in what is now southern Iraq. The conflict’s history was carved into clay tablets and limestone monuments that archaeologists excavated in the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

He discusses other conflicts over water through the centuries, including the recent example of Syrian civil war, which was ignited in 2011 by a mix of factors including anger at the repressive government, years of drought and the worsening impacts of climate change.

Boys pull containers filled with water as they return from a well in the village of Ntabasi, Kenya, amid drought in 2022.

(Brian Inganga / Associated Press)

Gleick writes that today violence triggered by water is worsening around the world for reasons including “weak or corrupt governments and water laws, uneven access to scarce water, inequitable distribution of water rights, and extreme droughts that threaten the health and stability of economies and communities.”

Gleick says he believes that “just as water has been a source of conflict and violence, it can be a source of peace, cooperation and sustainable development.”

He described it as an effort to avoid the sort of dystopian future of fighting over water depicted in movies such as “Mad Max.”

Gleick pointed out that in the past there has been bloodshed over water in the western United States, including a conflict between ranchers in 1892 in Johnson County, Wyo.

There are few recent U.S. conflicts in the database. Part of the reason such violence has faded, Gleick said, is because U.S. laws and institutions are stronger than they once were.

“We’ve moved to the courts,” Gleick said. “And while there’s still too many conflicts over water, fighting over things with lawyers is better than fighting over things with guns.”

A woman carries a jug as she walks home after collecting drinking water from a mobile water tanker in New Delhi.

(Altaf Qadri / Associated Press)

Globally, many conflicts triggered by water happen where institutions are weak, water management is poor, water rights are disputed, or laws are unfairly enforced. A solution, he said, “is to make sure that everyone has access to safe water and sanitation, basic needs, and that the institutions for sharing and allocating water resources, and resolving disputes over water resources, are strong.”

In the book, Gleick writes that our age, which he calls the Second Age of Water, is coming to an end in a series of crises. He offers his vision for how to move toward a more sustainable and peaceful Third Age of Water, calling for multiple solutions, such as ending “water poverty” for the many who lack access to safe water, carrying out an “efficiency revolution” in water use, reforming water institutions, and reaching more water-sharing agreements among countries.

“The overarching point is that what appears to be a growing trend of violence associated with water is a symptom of the broad water crises we face,” Gleick said. “But it’s also an opportunity to tackle the underlying problems of water poverty, of poor institutions, of weak governance, of inequitable access to water and inadequately enforced water laws. And if we can address those challenges, we really have an opportunity to reduce violence associated with water problems.”

Los Angeles Times · by Ian James · December 28, 2023

13.  Houthis have attacked ships in the Red Sea 25 times since November

25 actions justifying decisive kinetic responses.

Houthis have attacked ships in the Red Sea 25 times since November

militarytimes.com · by Meghann Myers · January 4, 2024

The Yemen-based Houthi militia launched another attack on shipping lanes in the Red Sea on Thursday morning, the commander of 5th Fleet confirmed to reporters, bringing the total number of attacks since Nov. 18 to 25.

The attack was conducted using a one-way unmanned surface vehicle, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper said, the first attack of this kind since the Houthis began targeting the Red Sea in the fall.

“Fortunately, there were no casualties and no ships were hit, but the introduction of a one-way attack USV is a concern,” he said, adding that it was unclear what the drone was targeting.

A one-way USV can be launched and then loiter in place for hours while operators search for a target.

Around 55 countries have been affected by the attacks so far, Cooper said, either because of the ships’ flags, the origin or destination of the goods on board, or the nationalities of the crew.

RELATED

US, allies promise larger military response if Red Sea attacks persist

A coalition of 13 nations warned of increased military response if Houthi assaults on commercial ships continue.

And because the attacks are not precise and ships are traveling in such close proximity, “any ship really at any time is at risk of collateral damage when passing through the Houthi controlled territory in the vicinity of the southern Red Sea,” Cooper added.

The multinational response, known as Operation Prosperity Guardian, includes commitments by several countries’ navies to patrolling that part of the Red Sea consistently, Cooper said.

“And together we now have the largest surface and air presence in the southern Red Sea in years,” he said, noting a force that includes five international warships, manned and unmanned reconnaissance aircraft and tactical aircraft from the deployed aircraft carrier Eisenhower.

“Since the start of the operation, there’s been no Houthi UAV or missiles actually fired into international shipping lanes that have actually hit any merchant vessels,” Cooper said.

Some munitions have come close, he added, but 1,500 vessels have been able to safely transit the Bab el-Mandeb strait since the beginning of the operation.

Operation Prosperity Guardian is a purely defense effort, but international leaders have promised retaliation if the attacks do not cease.

“The Houthis’ reckless attacks continue, as you know, and there are no signs that their irresponsible behavior is abating,” Cooper said.

About Meghann Myers

Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.

14. U.S., Partners Committed to Defensive Operations in Red Sea

I look forward to reading the following headline: "The US and its partners are Committed to Offensive Operations in the Red Sea and wherever the Houthis are operating from."

U.S., Partners Committed to Defensive Operations in Red Sea

defense.gov · by Joseph Clark

USS Carney

Sailors assigned to the USS Carney respond to a small-craft vessel during an antiterrorism drill in the area of operations of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, Dec. 6, 2023.

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Photo By: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Aaron Lau

VIRIN: 231206-N-GF955-1026Y

The U.S. remains committed to providing a persistent defensive presence in the Red Sea alongside allies and partners, the commander of Naval Forces Central Command said today.

Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper said about 1,500 merchant ships have safely transited the Red Sea since mid-December when the U.S. launched Operation Prosperity Guardian. The operation is a multinational, maritime security initiative responding to the recent escalation in Houthi attacks originating from Yemen.

"We are certainly mindful of the continued threat and expect the Houthi attacks may continue," he said. "I think really importantly, though, our actions in this defensive operation are not just through words, but through deeds."

Since mid-November, Houthi rebels have launched 25 attacks against merchant vessels operating in the Red Sea. Those include the detonation of an unmanned surface vessel in international shipping lanes earlier today.

While no ships were hit in the most recent attack, Cooper said that the persistent threat from the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in an international shipping lane is a vital concern.

"Our assessment is that 55 nations have direct connections to the ships who've been attacked, whether through the flagging state, where the goods were produced or destined, or the nationalities of the innocent mariners aboard each vessel," Cooper said.

"The impacts of these attacks stretch across the globe," he said. "This is an international problem that requires an international solution."

On Wednesday, the governments of the U.S., Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement condemning the attacks and warning the rebel group against further escalation.

"Ongoing Houthi attacks in the Red Sea are illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing," the statement read in part. "There is no lawful justification for intentionally targeting civilian shipping and naval vessels."

The group of nations warned that the Houthis "will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy and [the] free flow of commerce in the region's critical waterways."

"We remain committed to the international rules-based order and are determined to hold malign actors accountable for unlawful seizures and attacks," the statement concluded.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III departs Naval Support Activity Bahrain after participating in the Virtual Red Sea Security Summit, Dec. 19, 2023.

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VIRIN: 231219-D-TT977-1222Y

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III announced the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian on Dec. 18, while on a multiday trip through the Middle East.

The operation brings together forces from several nations to address the challenges in the region and ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

The forces will operate under the umbrella of the Combined Maritime Forces and the leadership of Task Force 153, a U.S. Navy-led initiative focused on maritime security in the Red Sea.

USS Carney

Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of Naval Forces Central Command, speaks with sailors assigned to USS Carney during an award ceremony in Bahrain, Jan. 2, 2024.

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Cooper said that since the start of the Operation Prosperity Guardian, the U.S.-led coalition has shot down 19 drones and missiles and sunk three small boats launched by the Houthis against vessels operating in the Red Sea.

Of the drones and missiles shot down, 11 were uncrewed, aerial vehicles; two were cruise missiles; and six were antiship cruise missiles.

"I think the relationships that have always been strong are even stronger," Cooper said. "Our industry partners have said back to us that Operation Prosperity Guardian is contributing to their sense of security and freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden."

defense.gov · by Joseph Clark

15. A Ukrainian Saboteur Traveled 900 Miles to A Snowy Russian Airfield And, In The Dead Of Night, Lit A Russian Sukhoi Fighter-Bomber On Fire

In my comments recently I emphasized the importance of understanding and conducting irregular warfare. A number of friends (correctly) commented and admonished me that it is not either/or (conventional or irregular warfare) but rather both/and. This anecdote illustrates the use of resistance or a special operations capability in support of major combat operations. By reducing Russian air power through operations like these contributes to success on the battlefield as well as defense of the homeland.  

So I couldn't agree more that it is both conventional and irregular warfare that are important.

Some musings: All conventional warfare will likely contain elements of irregular warfare. However, irregular warfare does not necessarily include conventional warfare or large scale combat operations per our doctrine particularly when conducted in support of political warfare in the gray zone of strategic competition. . But irregular warfare could evolve to large-scale combat operations per Mao's doctrine on protected warfare. To be militarily successful a resistance or insurgency may have to evolve from so-called guerrilla warfare (Phase II) to maneuver or mobile warfare (Phase III). The paradox is that we genuinely do poorly at irregular warfare but we are far superior at large scale combat operations. Perhaps we should allow the resistance or insurgency to progress to mobile or maneuver warfare and mass its forces to conduct large scale combat operations to take and hold ground. Once they move to that level of warfare they will be defeated. I think when we assess ISIS actions in Syria this is what happened. Once they massed and tried to take and hold ground our superior conventional capabilities could be effectively employed with great effect. So the lesson might be to stay out of irregular warfare and allow it to progress to large scale combat operations where we can achieve decisive defeat of an opposing military force. Unfortunately that will not be politically acceptable in most cases. We tend to believe we have to intervene in Phase II (guerrilla warfare) which is also known as the stalemate phase. Why is it a stalemate? Because we cannot defeat the guerrillas and they cannot evolve to major combat operations in maneuver or mobile warfare.

A Ukrainian Saboteur Traveled 900 Miles to A Snowy Russian Airfield And, In The Dead Of Night, Lit A Russian Sukhoi Fighter-Bomber On Fire

Forbes · by David Axe · January 4, 2024

Russian Su-34s.

Aleksandr Markin via Wikimedia Commons

A Ukrainian agent slipped into Russia, traveled 900 miles to Chelyabinsk air base just north of Kazakhstan, sneaked onto the snow-covered tarmac under the cover of darkness and lit a fire on a Russian air force Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber.

It’s not the first act of sabotage by a Ukrainian agent inside Russia, but it might be the most daring. And it may have cost the Russian air force yet another of its increasingly endangered Su-34s.

The Ukrainian intelligence directorate claimed the twin-engine, two-seat Su-34 belonged to the 21st Composite Aviation Division, a known operator of the type. “The reasons for the plane catching fire are being clarified,” the directorate quipped.

The last time a Ukrainian agent sneaked onto a Russian airfield, near Pskov in October 2022, it was to blow up a Kamov Ka-52 attack helicopter. Pskov is 500 miles from the border with Ukraine.

Ukraine has other methods of striking Russian air bases from hundreds of miles away—drones and missiles—but direct sabotage might be the most embarrassing for the Russians. Where was air base security? The Russians know they’re at war, right?

It’s obvious why the Ukrainians would target Chelyabinsk and its Su-34s. The supersonic fighter-bombers are among the best in the Russian air force—and the most active along the 600-mile front line of Russia’s 23-month wider war on Ukraine.

Su-34s fly nearly daily missions lobbing 25-mile-range satellite-guided glide-bombs at Ukrainian positions. The powerful glide-bombs are “one of the biggest fears” among Ukrainian troops, according to Ukrainian soldier Olexandr Solon'ko.

Ukrainian forces are doing everything they can to shoot down every Su-34 they can. Rapidly repositioning long-range air-defenses in southern Ukraine last month, the Ukrainian air force shot down four Su-34s in the span of a week. If the sabotaged jet is a write-off, the Russians might be down to 125 or so Su-34s out of a pre-war fleet of no more than 150.

Ukraine’s sabotage campaign is effective but risky. More than a few Ukrainian saboteurs have been caught and killed. Perhaps most recently, Russian troops back in August reportedly intercepted a Ukrainian sabotage team sneaking across the border near Bryansk—and killed two of the saboteurs.

Forbes · by David Axe · January 4, 2024

16. China’s Attempt To Increase Regional Influence

Army TRADOC's Foreign Military Studies Office is a hidden gem of the US Army and the entire US military. (I was fortunate enough to work with COL Charles E. Johnston of FMSO in 1996 when I wrote my second SAMS monograph on the catateoptichic collapse of north Korea - FMSO resources and expertise were invaluable).

An assessment does not get any clearer or more succinct than this. I think I will be citing Ms. Cindy Hurst (https://fmso.tradoc.army.mil/about/full-time-staff/ms-cindy-hurst/) and this line often: 

“China is attempting to erode the United States’ status as the world’s leading military power and largest economy by pushing “militarily-motivated” regional economic cooperation around the world”

Its new edition of OE Watch is just out and available at this link with articles on China, Russia, Iran, Terrorism and Transnational Crime and the Global Operational Environment (my only criticism is that they did not address my bias - north Korea )

https://fmso.tradoc.army.mil/oe-watch-issue-10-2023/

China’s Attempt To Increase Regional Influence

https://fmso.tradoc.army.mil/2024/chinas-attempt-to-increase-regional-influence/

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Cindy Hurst

First and Second Island Chains

“China is attempting to erode the United States’ status as the world’s leading military power and largest economy by pushing “militarily-motivated” regional economic cooperation around the world”

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) wrote in a recent report that China is trying to erode U.S. military dominance and economic power through a “covert military agenda,” according to Taiwan state-run press agency Focus Taiwan. The MND bases its conclusion on several phenomena, including China’s expanding influence beyond the Second Island Chain,[i] which sees Beijing courting military allies through economic inducements. According to the article, China has pushed to establish a military base in the Solomon Islands, with which it plans to form a strategic partnership, particularly based on economics. China established official diplomatic relations with Solomon Islands in 2019, following the Solomon Islands’ cutting of ties with Taiwan. In celebrating the shift, the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated the new ties with China will bring the Solomon Islands “unprecedented development opportunities.”[ii] The article expresses concern that establishing a military base in the Solomon Islands will help China to better project power past the Second Island Chain. China is also using cognitive warfare, gray zone tactics and intimidation, to gain the upper hand over the United States. This includes deploying naval forces and maritime police and militia to interfere with freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Recent reports, such as the second article excerpt, published in the independent Philippine Daily Tribune, underscore this reality. The article argues that China is combining lawfare[iii] and gray zone tactics to wear down its neighbors in the South China Sea and is waiting for “a suitable administration in the United States, which would give less importance to America’s stabilizing role in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Sources:

Matt Yu and Sean Lin, “China Pushing Military Agenda Behind Economic Exchanges: Defense Ministry,” Focus Taiwan (Taiwan state-run press agency), 11 October 2023. https://focustaiwan.tw/cross-strait/202310110023

China is attempting to erode the United States’ status as the world’s leading military power and largest economy by pushing “militarily-motivated” regional economic cooperation around the world, as evidenced by its plan to set up a military base in the Solomon Islands, which seeks to expand its power projection past the Second Island Chain, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND).

In a report delivered to the legislature on Wednesday, the MND pointed out that China has a “covert military agenda” aimed at diminishing U.S. military dominance and economic power under its Belt and Road Initiative.

For instance, China has in recent years attempted to establish a military base in the Solomon Islands to consolidate the two countries’ strategic partnership, which is a move aimed at expanding Chinese power projection past the Second Island Chain, according to the report.

In addition, China has adopted aggressive maneuvers in an attempt to establish control over issues relating to the South China Sea, including engaging in “gray zone” activities by deploying its naval forces and maritime police and militia to interfere with other countries’ freedom of navigation in the region, the report said.

“Long-Game Scenario,” Daily Tribune (an independent Philippine daily newspaper), 17 October 2023, https://tribune.net.ph/2023/09/21/long-game-scenario/

The tactic (lawfare and grey zone) involves wearing down its opponents in the South China Sea conflict while waiting for a suitable administration in the United States, which would again give less importance to America’s stabilizing role in the Asia-Pacific region.

China’s preparations for a protracted conflict are evident in its latest moves, from making public the 10-dash line claim, the absence of Chinese President Xi Jinping from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in Jakarta, and the water spraying by a Chinese Coast Guard vessel of a Philippine Navy boat on a mission to resupply the grounded Sierra Madre.

Regional analysts said China is employing a combination of lawfare, which is the use of legal systems and institutions to undermine an opponent, and gray zone tactics, which are maneuvers short of war that point to a conflict for the long haul.China’s drafting of a new map was timed to reassert its territorial claims and flex its muscles ahead of the ASEAN and G20 Summits.

Notes:

[i] China’s Island Chain strategy is a maritime strategic concept that the country adopted in the 1980s. For most of its history, China focused on its internal and continental security issues. Then, as China began to open to the rest of the world, it recognized that to be a viable power, it would have to extend out into the maritime domain. The First Island Chain, which consists of the Kuril Islands, the Japanese archipelago, the Ryuku Islands, Taiwan, northern Philippines, and Borneo is the line of defense to which China would project power to protect, deny, and contest other strategic powers. The Second Island Chain reaches out to the Japan Bonin Islands, the Marianas, the western Caroline Islands, and Western New Guinea. The Third Island Chain is the Aleutian Islands, the center of the Pacific Ocean through Oceania, the Hawaiian Islands, American Samoa, New Zealand, and Australia. See Beatrice Heuser and Paul O’Neill, “Episode 5: Admiral Liu Huaqing and China’s Island Chain Strategy,” RUSI, 9 August 2022. https://rusi.org/podcasts/talking-strategy/episode-5-admiral-liu-huaqing-and-chinas-island-chain-strategy

[ii] “2019年9月17日外交部发言人华春莹主持例行记者会 (On September 19, 2019, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying Hosted a Regular Press Conference),” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC, 17 September 2019. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/fyrbt_673021/jzhsl_673025/201909/t20190917_5418035.shtml

[iii] Lawfare, or legal warfare, is the use of legal systems to damage or delegitimize an opponent. China is said to have the most advanced lawfare strategy, which it incorporated as a major military strategy as early as 1999. An example of China’s use of lawfare is when it drafted a new map to reassert its territorial claims and flex its muscles prior to the ASEAN and G20 Summits. Lawfare is one of China’s “Three Warfares” strategy, used to drive the country’s military influence operations. (The other two “warfares” are public opinion warfare and psychological warfare). States. See: Jill Goldenziel, “Law as a Battlefield: The U.S., China, And the Global Escalation of Lawfare,” Cornell Law Review, Vol. 106, 23 September 2021. https://www.cornelllawreview.org/2021/09/23/law-as-a-battlefield-the-u-s-china-and-the-global-escalation-of-lawfare/

Image Information:

Image: First and Second Island Chains

Source: Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geographic_Boundaries_of_the_First_and_Second_Island_Chains.png

Attribution: DoD

This entry was posted in China, OE Watch and tagged Asia-Pacific region, China, Japan, Taiwan, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) by Cindy Hurst. Bookmark the permalink.

17. How Far-Right Terrorists Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Bomb

Two of our nation's best scholars on terrorism (current and future generation.)

Terrorism from across the spectrum of ideologies. 

Excerpts:

But perhaps the most important reason to better mitigate the threat of mass shooting terrorist attacks is because of the range of other equally serious threats confronting U.S. law enforcement. While firearms attacks, as this essay argues, may have become the favored tactic of domestic far-right terrorists nowadays, they are by no means the only tactic or terrorist category threatening the country. If left unchecked, they risk diverting attention from other, potentially even more serious terrorist threats. Attacks on infrastructure, such as the thwarted plot by a former leader of the Atomwaffen Division in February 2023 that would have plunged Baltimore into darkness, underscore the diversity of threats and complex detection and defensive measures required. Similarly, the potential repercussions of the conflict in Gaza on terrorism in the United States was recently underscored by the arrest of a New Jersey man who was charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist in hopes of implementing his plans to bring “jihad … to a US location near you.” And, of course, there is still the omnipresent danger of another Oklahoma City-like mass-casualty bombing, such as the 1995 incident that claimed 168 lives.

Accordingly, if mass shooting terrorism has become the easiest attack to stage, it should receive the requisite attention to diminish its frequency, so that resources can be focused on perhaps less frequent but even more consequential other threats.

How Far-Right Terrorists Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Bomb - War on the Rocks

BRUCE HOFFMAN AND JACOB WARE

warontherocks.com · by Bruce Hoffman · January 5, 2024

On Sept. 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon slowly made its way down New York City’s Wall Street. It came to a stop at the Financial District’s busiest corner, just opposite the J. P. Morgan bank headquarters. And exploded. Thirty people were killed and nearly 150 others wounded. For most of the ensuing century, bombing was the preferred terrorist tactic in the United States. During one 18-month stretch between 1971 and 1972, there were an astonishing 2,500 bombings. Many were committed by radical left-wing groups such as the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the New World Liberation Front. Others were orchestrated by such diverse actors as Puerto Rican independistas, Croatian separatists, anti-Castro Cubans, and a militant Jewish organization.

Today, however, the terrorists’ preferred tactic is the mass shooting. As we argue in our new book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, assault-style rifles have replaced explosives. And the perpetrators come mostly from the far right. Eschewing the time-intensive preparations involved in the careful construction and placement of explosive devices — as seen in Oklahoma City in 1995 and at the Atlanta Olympics the following year — domestic terrorists now prefer shooting, a far simpler tactic that is facilitated by the Second Amendment and entails simply opening fire on a group of ordinary citizens going about their daily lives.

Become a Member

The mass shooting — whether politically motivated (and therefore terrorism) or apolitical — has sadly become a regular occurrence in America. Armed attackers can now create havoc and bloodshed on a scale completely divorced from their training or expertise, in turn making terrorism more accessible to violently inclined persons with a political axe to grind. This threat calls for better enforcing existing gun control laws and enacting reasonable new measures to restrict access to specific types of weapons and ammunition.

New Methods

John Earnest, the 19-year-old who attacked a Jewish synagogue outside of San Diego in April 2019, encapsulates this new breed of terrorist: A young, lone actor, radicalized online, committing a mass shooting at a place of worship. Earnest was at least on the surface an all-American teenager, having grown up in the idyllic suburb of Rancho Peñasquitos, California — or “Commiefornia,” as he called it. Earnest radicalized rapidly — as he noted in his own manifesto. “If you told me even 6 months ago that I would do this I would have been surprised,” he wrote. Earnest admitted to having only limited firearms training when he decided to launch his attack. This piano prodigy’s lack of technological expertise with firearms likely contributed to his gun jamming, but he was still able claim one life, injure three more, devastate a community he hated, and broadcast his ideology to an audience far beyond his San Diego suburb. Earnest used the firearm now almost synonymous with the American mass shooting: the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, the civilian version of the U.S. Army’s standard M-4 carbine and its predecessor, the M-16. As a Washington Post deep-dive revealed, the gun is particularly adept at massacring as many people as possible in almost no time.

Firearms are particularly attractive because they are often seen as central to America’s Revolutionary War and pioneering ethos. They also figure prominently for the country’s far-right extremist fringe. In fact, the trigger for the dreamed-of second civil war — variously termed the Racial Holy War or Boogaloo — is usually predicted to be federal government gun confiscations. Three decades ago it was also the issue that radicalized Timothy McVeigh and led eventually to the Oklahoma City bombing. Indeed, for the would-be accelerationist who seeks to spark chaos in order to engineer a systemic rebellion against the U.S. government, mass shootings with a demonstrable political motive have the additional benefit of further tearing at the fabric of American society and dividing communities into polarized camps based on an individual’s support or rejection of the Second Amendment.

Brenton Tarrant, an Australian who attacked two mosques in New Zealand in March 2019, actually planned his attack with the impact it would have on opinion in the United States in mind. “I chose firearms for the affect [sic] it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide and the affect it could have on the politics of United states and thereby the political situation of the world,” he wrote. “This attempted abolishment of rights by the left will result in a dramatic polarization of the people in the United States and eventually a fracturing of the US along cultural and racial lines.” As part of his attack, Earnest also launched an accelerationist appeal to acolytes of the Turner Diaries, one of the defining works in white supremacist literature: “Some of you have been waiting for The Day of the Rope for years. Well, The Day of the Rope is here right now — that is if you have the gnads to keep the ball rolling.” Accordingly, he deliberately copied Tarrant by using firearms as a means to achieve dramatic political effects. “I used a gun for the same reason that Brenton Tarrant used a gun,” Earnest explained. “In case you haven’t noticed we are running out of time. If this revolution doesn’t happen soon, we won’t have the numbers to win it. The goal is for the US government to start confiscating guns. People will defend their right to own a firearm — civil war has just started.”

New Context

The shift towards firearms terrorism is intimately connected to at least three other developments in far-right terrorism. Firstly, the movement has been empowered by social media, which has provided a revolutionary boon to all terrorist radicalizers and recruiters. In the far-right universe, this trend has been especially prominent among teenagers on the internet, especially in gaming and social media platforms. In these online milieus, young people — particularly those who lack a sense of belonging, community, or mentorship in their offline lives — are often groomed by older extremists with the ideological legitimacy to impart compelling tales of the adventure and excitement of life underground. Youngsters also have independently banded together to create their own extremist forums. The phenomenon has led to all-youth white-power groups, such as the British Hand, a neo-Nazi group led by a 15-year-old. Perhaps the most shocking example of youth radicalization was provided by Feuerkrieg (“Fire War”) Division, an offshoot of the Atomwaffen Division, located in the Baltics. When the authorities arrested the leader of the group in Estonia, he was found to be 13 years old.

Social media is also providing extremists with a means to speak directly to the psychologically vulnerable and lonely — especially those going through a difficult adolescence. During its short-lived reign, the Atomwaffen Division, for instance, was responsible for five murders (four involving firearms), perpetrated by three different killers. News reporting surrounding the individual cases confirms that each of the group’s killers — Devon Arthurs, Nicholas Giampa, and Sam Woodward — as well as the group’s founding leader, Brandon Russell, all suffered from an array of mental health issues, including in every case varying levels of autism, in addition to schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, and depression. During Russell’s trial, his mother tearfully explained how “he was always looking for something to belong to.” (As if himself personifying the shift from explosives to firearms, Russell was initially sentenced in 2018 for possession of explosive devices, before being re-arrested in early 2023 for a plot to open fire on power substations around Baltimore.) In another Atomwaffen case, the defense attorney described her client as “susceptible to radicalization” because “he has never felt like he fit in.” Christian Picciolini, a former white-power rocker now involved in efforts to turn youngsters away from violence and extremism, claims that almost three-quarters of the far-right extremists he has worked with suffered from autism spectrum-related disorders.

The connection is so strong that Picciolini encourages each new person he works with to see a psychologist or counselor. With social media and extremist forums now pervasive, vulnerable young people are more easily exposed both to radical rhetoric and a variety of radical communities. And with terrorism no longer exclusively the domain of organized groups with coherent ideologies (especially in the domestic space), mentally ill lone actors have come to play a larger role in domestic terrorism everywhere — in turn raising questions about whether the terrorism label might even apply in such cases.

Secondly, the entrenchment of leaderless resistance, first articulated by Louis Beam in 1983 and reiterated in 1992, as the chosen strategy of extremist coordination has led to less complex attacks requiring less planning and logistical preparation than ones using explosive devices. And contemporary social media has empowered extremists to circulate it to an array of lone actors seeking agency and influence by turning their lethal fantasies into real-life violence. Today, even the more organized far-right networks usually prefer the leaderless resistance strategy to the traditional top-down/command-and-control model of terrorism. “The man that is strongest alone is the prime recruit!” Atomwaffen Division’s German offshoot asserted in its internal action plan, which was posted onto open Telegram channels in early 2020. Indeed, all the acts of violence linked to the Atomwaffen Division’s once extensive network — most notably the stabbing murder of a gay Jewish undergraduate in California in January 2018 — were perpetrated by lone actors, without any known coordination by or direction from the group’s leaders. In 2020, the Atomwaffen Division’s successor group, National Socialist Order, re-affirmed, in a document viewed by the authors, “We are dedicated to promoting radical autonomy while fomenting a revolutionary atmosphere.”

Lone-actor mass shootings, then, are the tactical manifestation of this shifting strategic environment. They present an especially formidable challenge to those charged with countering this threat. First, there is limited intelligence value in the capture of a lone actor, who likely has little specific information to share about the organization or ideology influencing him, given that there are often few connections to a broader network or group or anything similar to a traditional terrorist organization’s hierarchy. Second, in a social media world, lone actors have the technology and expertise to create their own propaganda platform. Tarrant’s livestream was shared on Facebook 1.5 million times during the first 24 hours, depriving government and media organizations of the ability to contain this unimpeded broadcasting of wanton death and injury.

Finally, and most importantly, lone-actor terrorism turns counterterrorism into a needle-in-the-haystack exercise of identifying one individual intent on violence amidst a vast digital universe of voices. That challenge has been made more difficult by modern internet culture. Extremists hide behind a façade of “shitposting,” the practice of sharing increasingly inflammatory, extreme, violent, and often humorous material online. Those who take offence or flag concerns are mocked as “liberal snowflakes” or “social justice warriors.” But through that smokescreen, bonds inside the in-group are strengthened and distrust and hatred of the out-group crystallizes, as connections solidify between geographically vast and diverse extremist networks.

Finally, the persistence of mass shooting as America’s preferred domestic terrorist tactic has produced significant changes in the targets — and victims — of this violence. In previous terrorism waves, government facilities were often targeted as symbolic representations of the alleged repression that was at the heart of extremist grievances. Courthouses, Internal Revenue Service offices, and buildings housing government agencies were attacked. McVeigh’s preoccupation with the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building is the most notable case-in-point: It contained an office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco, one of the leading organizations involved in the federal responses at Ruby Ridge and Waco. McVeigh, accordingly, fastened on an improvised explosive device as the best means for inflicting maximum damage to the government and making his point. As security was tightened at government buildings throughout the country in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, these facilities thus became harder targets to access and therefore attack. Eric Rudolph, for instance, targeted non-governmental facilities with his bombs: a public concert venue in a park just outside the Atlanta Olympics compound, abortion clinics, and a gay bar.

In recent years, however, American far-right terrorists have continued to focus almost exclusively on the same type of publicly accessible soft targets: places of worship. In a recurring trend spanning the religious spectrum, Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, Islamic mosques, and Sikh gurdwaras, as well as community centers linked with these faiths, have been repeatedly targeted. Those who forgo places of worship might look for other locations where their target community typically gathers. Patrick Crusius, for instance, drove 10 hours from his home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to commit his attack at an El Paso Walmart that he believed would be full of Latino shoppers. It is unclear whether Crusius considered other targets, although he did write in his manifesto that “the Hispanic community was not my target before I read the Great Replacement” — Tarrant’s manifesto. They key to effective targeting had been laid out years before by James Mason in his white-supremacist newsletter, Siege: The far-right terrorist’s “greatest concern must be to pick his target well so that his act may speak so clearly for itself that no member of White America can mistake its message.”

New Responses

The mass shooting model that John Earnest adopted and furthered has struck communities including Christchurch, New Zealand; Baerum, Norway; Halle, Germany; and Buffalo, New York. It poses a range of new counterterrorism challenges, not least by hiding behind constitutional promises and turning any community site into a potential battlefield. And, given its catastrophic success, it shows no signs of slowing.

The most obvious countermeasure — enforcing existing statutes designed to better monitor firearms sales and possession — is often denigrated as the least feasible. However, a more nuanced approach could perhaps surmount previous legislative inertia and dilatory enforcement. Debates over gun control have too often devolved into black-and-white, all-or-nothing shouting matches. Instead, given this rise of mass shootings, the U.S. government should focus on both preventing and thwarting acts of mass-casualty violence, while simultaneously protecting law-abiding individual gun-owners’ rights to self-defense and guaranteeing Second Amendment freedoms.

A more exhaustive and better-enforced gun licensing system, including enhanced and more rigorously conducted background checks, prohibitions against unregistered sales and transfers of firearms, and stronger bans on straw purchases are among the reasonable legal means to address this threat that should be pursued. Potential measures could include discouraging or disincentivizing the private ownership of specific types of high-capacity, high-velocity, rapid-fire weapons, and laws to restrict the sale of the most lethal, so-called “cop-killer” ammunition that can pierce even reinforced ceramic plates. Sensible firearms laws that better protect society but preserve Second Amendment rights should be bipartisan and delicately framed so as to assuage the concerns that coalesced to produce national tragedies like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. They should also be designed in a way that deprives violent extremist groups of a powerful, emotional argument with which to rally support and attract recruits. The Biden administration’s bipartisan gun control legislation, which was signed into law in June 2022 and promised enhanced background checks for young gun-buyers and expanded mental health services, was an important first step in this direction.

But perhaps the most important reason to better mitigate the threat of mass shooting terrorist attacks is because of the range of other equally serious threats confronting U.S. law enforcement. While firearms attacks, as this essay argues, may have become the favored tactic of domestic far-right terrorists nowadays, they are by no means the only tactic or terrorist category threatening the country. If left unchecked, they risk diverting attention from other, potentially even more serious terrorist threats. Attacks on infrastructure, such as the thwarted plot by a former leader of the Atomwaffen Division in February 2023 that would have plunged Baltimore into darkness, underscore the diversity of threats and complex detection and defensive measures required. Similarly, the potential repercussions of the conflict in Gaza on terrorism in the United States was recently underscored by the arrest of a New Jersey man who was charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist in hopes of implementing his plans to bring “jihad … to a US location near you.” And, of course, there is still the omnipresent danger of another Oklahoma City-like mass-casualty bombing, such as the 1995 incident that claimed 168 lives.

Accordingly, if mass shooting terrorism has become the easiest attack to stage, it should receive the requisite attention to diminish its frequency, so that resources can be focused on perhaps less frequent but even more consequential other threats.

Become a Member

Bruce Hoffman is senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council of Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University.

Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and DeSales University.

Together, they are the authors of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America (Columbia Univ. Press).

Image: Chad Davis on Flickr

Uncategorized

warontherocks.com · by Bruce Hoffman · January 5, 2024

​18. U.S. Special Ops Team Pioneers Donation Initiative in Thailand

We do not hear enough about the important work of our Civil Affairs teams.

U.S. Special Ops Team Pioneers Donation Initiative in Thailand

https://bnnbreaking.com/world/thailand/u-s-special-ops-team-pioneers-donation-initiative-in-thailand/

By: BNN Correspondents

Published: January 4, 2024 at 7:04 pm EST

Between November 29 and December 1, the U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific Civil Affairs Team-Thailand (CA Team-Thailand) conducted a donation initiative in the Chiang Mai Province of Thailand. The team distributed utility equipment, medical supplies, and educational materials to numerous organizations in the region. The effort formed part of a broader commitment to enhance the local community’s quality of life and bolster the region’s development.

Boosting Health Facilities

Among the beneficiaries were two immigration facilities, the Chiang Khong and Mae Sai Department of Disease Control (DCC). The CA Team-Thailand endowed these institutions with crucial medical supplies to augment their capacities in administering life-saving treatments and first aid. The equipment is expected to elevate the handling of various medical conditions, including the ongoing battle against COVID-19.

Enhancing Education

Three schools in the region – Wat Suan Dok School, Wat Ketkarm School, and Ban Na Ma-Un School – also received significant contributions. The CA Team-Thailand bestowed these institutions with computers, buttressing the Thai Ministry of Education’s initiative to augment distance learning capabilities. The donations will facilitate students’ access to online English language courses, including a special program inspired by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Infrastructure Improvement

Further, the Ban Na Ma-Un School, situated in a remote mountainous region, received solar-powered water pumps and solar-powered rechargeable battery packs. These additions will help mitigate power supply inconsistencies, thereby enhancing the reliability of the educational experience. This infrastructure improvement aligns with the Ministry of Education’s objectives and underscores the CA Team-Thailand’s commitment to fostering sustainable development.

U.S. Army Capt. Mark Curran, leader of CA Team-Thailand, and Mrs. Hathairat Chansri, deputy director of Chiang Mai Primary Educational Service Area Office 1, lauded the initiative. They expressed gratitude for the focus on children and youth, asserting that the resources would catalyze learning opportunities and create a ripple effect of positive change in the community.

BNN CORRESPONDENTS

Founded by visionary entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal, BNN Newsroom has risen to prominence as a powerhouse in the international journalism landscape. With a global news desk that operates in over 200 markets, BNN provides up-to-the-minute breaking news, sophisticated data analysis, and thorough research to keep audiences informed and engaged. Upholding a commitment to integrity and unbiased reporting, BNN proudly operates a conflict-free platform, ensuring that its coverage remains free from external influences and dedicated to the truth.

19. Arms and Influencers: Leveraging the Social Media Stars in the US Military’s Ranks

Conclusion:

Certainly, successful social media efforts in the global information environment require a basis in a comprehensive communication strategy. The proposed social media influencer network is not a strategy in itself. But neither is it simply a temporary tactic or technique. In a broad sense, the ability to understand and develop targeted social media messaging, to recruit authentic influencers within appropriate communities, and to coordinate and shape their messages is something that the services need to build. Social media on its own is not the ultimate weapon in the global information environment, but the strength of its military influencers can be developed and channeled by the Defense Department to boost recruiting, facilitate retention, and compete in the cognitive dimension.

Arms and Influencers: Leveraging the Social Media Stars in the US Military’s Ranks - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Mike Knapp · January 4, 2024

The US military has a social media problem. And, no, it’s not an addiction to doomscrolling or botching the latest TikTok dance in public. The Defense Department, as an institution, is unlikely to select the correct photo filter, craft the next popular hashtag, or achieve the right selfie angle when posting on social media. Even setting aside one-off social media flubs, the armed services have struggled more broadly to craft the authenticity necessary on these platforms to influence audiences—like potential recruits. Often, the services’ outreach and strategic messaging efforts fall on deaf smartphones. Luckily, scores of social media–savvy influencers have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution already. Personally, I understand the potential asymmetric messaging effects of a personal social media account based on my own experience as an Air Force pilot and minor Instagram influencer. The Defense Department should recognize its organic talent pool and adequately train and equip its service members for public messaging campaigns. A decentralized network of social media influencers can assist in recruiting diverse talent, retaining current defense personnel, and even combating disinformation in the information environment.

More and more of the world’s population stays informed of current events via social media rather than traditional news sources. In the United States, of Americans under the age of thirty—a demographic accounting for half the total US population—more than a third turns to social media as its preferred news source. While a growing percentage of the world engages with social media daily, it is essential to highlight that these users do not view all content through the same lens.

Importantly, social media users assign greater merit to authentic user-generated content than traditional sources of information. Deloitte conducted a global survey and found that 27 percent of millennial and Gen Z respondents harbored zero trust in traditional media. It follows that audiences rarely perceive an institution’s social media account to be as genuine as an individual’s social media account, regardless of whether the content spotlights a food review or dairies daily college life. A military component’s Instagram account can post recruiting advertisements but will fail to engender trust with its audience due to being a faceless organization. Despite the public’s distrust of government institutions, the public still very much trusts individuals, especially military service personnel. Consequently, the Defense Department should train, coordinate, and channel a network of individual military social media influencers to amplify key messaging across broad audiences and combat recruiting and retention challenges.

Regarding recruiting, Defense Department officials acknowledge the need to engage with key youth influencers to overcome accession shortfalls. The services rely on traditional influencers like teachers, religious leaders, or older family members to communicate the benefits of military service to potential recruits. Unfortunately, these conventional influencers may convey a distorted message about today’s military experience based on imperfect information or poor perceptions. Moreover, potential recruits may not even have an in-person influence network: a 2021 RAND study discovered that those youth who enlisted had limited in-person information networks, like coaches or guidance counselors, and were less inclined to even build such information networks. Although some youth lacked an in-person information network, the same RAND report found that some female recruits gained “a sense of belonging and confidence that they could be successful in the military” after watching others “like them” vlog about their daily life in the military on YouTube. From my own Instagram experience, I frequently received messages and engagement from potential recruits enamored with aviation and interested in military service. My personal brand of humor connected with certain audiences that may not have had the opportunity to interact with an official Air Force recruiting account. And, at times, I labored to find the right answers to the questions they peppered me with. Similarly, other accounts like mine regularly connect with audiences that official accounts do not; the Defense Department must leverage every opportunity to communicate, capitalize on this organic talent, and connect with the public.

It is critical to note, however, that social media utilization is not uniform across demographic groups. For instance, seven out of ten teenage girls use Instagram compared to only half of boys. Likewise, teen boys use Twitch and Reddit at double the rate of girls. Notably, 81 percent of Black teens use TikTok regularly compared to 62 percent of White teens. And today, half of all US adults sometimes or often receive their news from social media. Ignorance of social media usage and audience differences among platforms could hamper messaging efforts. Of course, the recruiters should continue public outreach with novel ideas like esports teams, but military departments should also coordinate an influencer network attuned to the nuances of various social media apps. By informally organizing social media influencers across myriad platforms, the services can maintain an authentic, agile messaging network adjusted to each platform’s audience to properly inform the traditional influencers of youth as well as the youth themselves.

Social media influencers can expand the services’ reach by messaging diverse audiences, but how can those influencers be utilized to educate and retain service personnel? Simply, by being brokers of valid information. Now, service members hunt through unofficial, informal online sources for answers to pay issues, healthcare, or even suicide prevention. And they already subscribe to their favorite military social media stars to witness reaction videos to the latest military rumor or international event. In response, the Defense Department should adequately train and equip these military social media stars with current talking points or links to online resources so the influencers can, in turn, provide accurate information to their networks of followers.

To be clear, the military should not dictate the content influencers produce—a network of manufactured influencers will appear inauthentic and lose the trust of its followers. Instead, the services can provide an influencer toolkit for their social media stars and utilize their official public affairs credentials to authenticate and elevate organic influencer talent. First, an influencer toolkit could offer up-to-date information about US government efforts in current regional conflicts or provide reminders about available mental health tools online. Armed with this information, the military influencer could avoid spreading disinformation or even assist a follower in mental distress if needed. Likewise, this informal network of social media influencers can help propagate information that educates service members on more benign topics like how airmen can rent unneeded childcare capacity from another Air Force family, how to increase contributions to the Thrift Savings Plan, or how the influencer successfully navigated personnel systems to change his or her military occupation.

Second, the services should coordinate with app providers like Meta or TikTok to authenticate and verify their social media influencers. Scammers regularly concoct social media accounts based on real service members. At best, the member’s likeness is used to engineer a miliary romance scam. At worst, the bogus account spreads misinformation across social media. Protecting the informal network of real members’ social media accounts bolsters official messaging and combats disinformation.

Third, the Defense Department can use its established public affairs capabilities to connect military and civilian social media influencers in collaborative posts. For example, a Navy culinary specialist could host a live stream with a YouTube chef, or an F-16 crew chief could collaborate with an Instagram dancer while marshaling a fighter jet on the flightline. Collaborations between influencers with similar audience interests expand the military influencers’ reach, showcase a positive military image, and increase the impact of Defense Department messaging to audiences that otherwise may not interact online with service personnel.

That said, there are multiple challenges the Department of Defense must navigate when curating this network of military influencers. First, collaborating with an influencer network does not alleviate the services of educating rank-and-file personnel on operational and informational security to prevent classified information leaks online. Instead, the military will have to provide advanced training for social media influencers about posting photos around military equipment or in military training areas, such as how to strip metadata from pictures or post asynchronously from real-world operations. Second, the military should reexamine ethics and its online social media policy. Specifically, do military social media stars unethically benefit from their positions when posting in uniform or doing some eye-popping, unique activity not generally seen by the public? While advertising or sponsoring a specific product or service in uniform may be illegal, simply gaining a following by posting about a military career is likely not. Last, the influencer network must remain independent and distinct from official communication efforts. By bifurcating official messaging channels and an informal social media network, the military protects the authenticity of both its public affairs professionals and social media stars and avoids legal objections that could be raised, for example, when blocking or deleting harmful comments from other users on social media sites.

Certainly, successful social media efforts in the global information environment require a basis in a comprehensive communication strategy. The proposed social media influencer network is not a strategy in itself. But neither is it simply a temporary tactic or technique. In a broad sense, the ability to understand and develop targeted social media messaging, to recruit authentic influencers within appropriate communities, and to coordinate and shape their messages is something that the services need to build. Social media on its own is not the ultimate weapon in the global information environment, but the strength of its military influencers can be developed and channeled by the Defense Department to boost recruiting, facilitate retention, and compete in the cognitive dimension.

Lieutenant Colonel Mike Knapp is a US Air Force pilot stationed in the Washington, DC area. As a social media specialist, he authentically influences his network of Instagram followers via aviation-themed dad jokes as the face of @vectors_to_final.

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

Image credit: Jason Kriess, US National Guard

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Mike Knapp · January 4, 2024

20. The Ukraine-Taiwan Tradeoff

Excerpts:

Fortunately, there are encouraging signs that at least some of the limitations in the supply of weapons are being addressed. In 2023, the Department of Defense created the Joint Production Accelerator Cell, a new part of its acquisition office tasked with “building enduring industrial production capacity, resiliency, and surge capability for key defense weapon systems and supplies.” Moreover, the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress passed in December authorizes the Pentagon to issue multiyear contracts while procuring munitions. In the past, it could typically do so only when buying large weapons such as ships and airplanes, but the change gives defense contractors greater confidence that the Defense Department will buy key precision-guided munitions and therefore incentivize increased production of them.

With respect to allies, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and other European countries have pledged to ramp up the production of weapons for Ukraine. In December, Finland announced that it will boost production of ammunition to support Ukraine for the foreseeable future. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, elected in December, has promised to increase military assistance to Ukraine after the previous Polish government threatened to curtail certain kinds of assistance.

Another reason why policymakers should prioritize resolve is that the United States has global commitments and reputational stakes beyond China. Prematurely abandoning Ukraine to preserve resources for Taiwan could embolden other adversaries. It might, for example, signal to Iran and North Korea that the United States does not have the appetite to support the victims of aggression once a conflict becomes protracted, or at the very least that it cannot defend more than one country in one region at a time. All this could encourage further adventurism. By continuing to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression, the United States can send a powerful signal to a broader range of rivals: unprovoked aggression will not go unpunished.

The Ukraine-Taiwan Tradeoff

U.S. Support for Ukraine Diverts Weapons From Taiwan but Demonstrates Resolve to China

By Michael Poznansky

January 5, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Michael Poznansky · January 5, 2024

One of the chief justifications for sending military aid to Ukraine turns on deterrence. Proponents of Western support contend that it is essential for showcasing resolve. The United States and its allies, the argument runs, need to demonstrate to the world, and especially to Chinese President Xi Jinping, that they are willing to put muscle and resources behind efforts to combat unchecked aggression. But a growing chorus of voices argues that continued support to Ukraine is detracting from the real threat—namely, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. All this assistance, they claim, is depleting valuable resources needed to deter an attempted takeover and defeat China should a war occur.

Framing the debate this way obscures a fundamental but uncomfortable truth: prioritizing one form of credibility can undermine the other. One camp privileges the “would” part of the deterrence equation—does China, or any adversary for that matter, believe that the United States would respond militarily to aggression? The other camp prioritizes the “could” part—does China believe that the United States could respond militarily if necessary to aggression? Both are invoking credibility, but they are talking about different things.

These distinctions matter because of opportunity costs. Doing more to demonstrate resolve in Ukraine today might undermine the United States’ physical capacity to respond to crises tomorrow, even if it wanted to. Alternatively, husbanding resources in the present to preserve capabilities might increase the United States’ physical capacity to respond to future crises but reduce the perception by rivals that it actually would. In short, deterrence can fail in two discrete ways: rivals believe that Washington would respond but can’t or that it could but won’t.

The first step in wrestling with potential tradeoffs between bolstering resolve and bolstering capabilities is to identify them. In a world of finite resources, policymakers will have to make tough choices about what to allocate, where, and for how long. These decisions will only grow more salient as the White House and Congress continue to debate funding to Ukraine and how to deal with China and Taiwan. Ultimately, however, policymakers should prioritize resolve. They should privilege the priceless asset of reputation while spending what they can to improve capabilities, maintaining the flow of aid to Ukraine despite the downsides.

FIGHTING FOR CREDIBILITY

Two years into the war in Ukraine, proponents of continued aid to the country argue that the United States and its allies must stand firm against Russian aggression for the sake of deterring rivals. “The credibility of the U.S. deterrent is only as strong as our actions,” Jack Reed, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued in October. “Our would-be partners around the world are also watching closely at what we are doing. Will we have their backs if they are attacked? We must show that we are a steadfast ally, not hamstrung by the whims of fringe politicians.” Senior Taiwanese officials have made similar arguments. In May, Hsiao Bi-khim, then serving as Taiwan’s representative to the United States, told an American audience, “International support for Ukraine is … essential in affirming the credibility and reliability of the United States and your allies.”

But as the war in Ukraine has dragged on, critics of continued aid are arguing that the United States must prioritize military assistance to Taiwan to deter a Chinese invasion and defeat one if it occurs, even if it comes at the expense of helping Ukraine. Seeing Taiwan and Ukraine as competing over a limited pool of American aid, some congressional Republicans believe that the former must win out over the latter. In May, two Republican foreign policy hands, Elbridge Colby and Alex Velez-Green, wrote that the United States must focus its “resources on Taiwan’s defense against China, by far the United States’ strongest rival, while relying primarily on European allies to defend against a weakened Russia.”

Both of these competing arguments touch on dynamics relevant to deterrence. Whether Xi believes that the United States would come to the defense of Taiwan, or at least provide it with the resources needed to defend itself through requisite military assistance, is critical. At the same time, it also matters whether Xi believes that the United States has the capacity to provide the necessary resources. Both dynamics are about credibility—the credibility that one has the will to act and the credibility that one can actually do so.

In a world of finite resources, policymakers must come to terms with painful tradeoffs between these twin goals. Devoting scarce supplies to bolster resolve may reduce the capacity to respond to crises elsewhere. Conversely, jealously guarding military supplies to preserve as much capability as possible can undermine perceptions of resolve more broadly. Many in the resolve camp and the capabilities camp, however, are in denial about the tradeoffs with respect to Ukraine, but in different ways. Proponents of aid to Ukraine claim that the United States can do it all. Skeptics of it hold that there are no reputational consequences for abandoning Ukraine. But both are overstating their case.

WHY AMERICA STILL CAN’T HAVE IT ALL

Although they would be loath to admit it, those in the resolve camp are essentially arguing that the United States can do it all. The basic logic is that Washington can continue supporting Ukraine with military assistance while also preparing for potential conflict in Asia. Remarks made last August by William LaPlante, a top Pentagon official, are emblematic of this view. The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff review “every item that is decided and taken from the U.S. stock and provided to the Ukrainians,” LaPlante claimed. If those officials think that removing a given item would have “any impact” on readiness or “increases risk,” he continued, the materiel will not be handed over.

The reality, however, is more complicated. As a Center for a New American Security report has noted, although there are important differences between the kinds of weapons that the United States is providing to Ukraine and the types of weapons that would be needed to stymie a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, there is certainly some overlap. This is especially true in the case of air defense systems of various kinds—capabilities that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has pleaded for.

There is even more overlap once one considers the types of weapons Taiwan would need to continue on the fight following a successful Chinese landing. Although the kinds of weapons the United States would need to defend an initial air and sea assault are relatively distinct from those now being sent to Ukraine, it’s a different story when it comes to the weapons the Taiwanese would use to counter Chinese forces on the island itself. These weapons include a variety of missiles and missile systems, such as ATACMS, Javelins, Patriots, and Stingers. Thanks in part to Ukrainian demand, their supplies are increasingly limited.

There are already signs of competition between Taiwan and Ukraine over certain assets. In 2022, for instance, Taiwan had to buy additional HIMARS—a multiple rocket launcher—to compensate for delays in Paladin mobile howitzers, a weapon the United States provided to Ukraine. Increasingly, the arms Washington and its allies are sending to Ukraine are the very ones Taiwan wants most: not just HIMARS but also Abrams tanks, F‑16 fighter jets, and ATACMS. The backlog in delivery of U.S. weapons to Taiwan—which has grown to over $19 billion—predates Russia’s invasion, but Western support to Ukraine has exacerbated the problem.

There is another wrinkle when it comes to arming Taiwan: speed is of the essence. Once hostilities broke out over the island, it would mostly be too late to do much, since the United States and its allies would have great difficulty sending weapons to the Taiwanese. So there is an urgent need to stockpile relevant weapons now. But as Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has found, many of the weapons needed, including portable missiles, take years to produce, even if the defense industry worked at surge capacity. Supply chain problems create more bottlenecks, and some essential components for weapons—such as the engines for certain missiles—are produced by a single manufacturer.

THE RELEVANCE OF RESOLVE

If those in the resolve camp are not fully coming to terms with the tradeoffs of their preferred strategy, the same is true of the capabilities camp. Many of these critics of aid to Ukraine overlook the effect that their preferred approach would have on perceptions of American resolve, including in the very region they are most interested in, Asia. Some even deny the existence of any tradeoff at all, contending that resolve, reputation, and credibility are ephemeral. Writing in Foreign Policy, Rajan Menon and Daniel DePetris claimed, “What the U.S. government may or may not do in one region of the world tells us next to nothing about what it might do in another.”

Scholars have spent decades trying to understand whether and how reputations for resolve form and what relevance they hold for future crises and decision-making. Although there are many nuances, recent research suggests a few things. Most important, reputations for resolve matter. Showing signs of being irresolute can signal weakness that adversaries take note of. Put differently, past actions inform perceptions of future actions, especially when the two scenarios are reasonably analogous. This is especially true for individual leaders.

These insights have major implications for questions about how arming Ukraine could affect perceptions of the United States’ resolve generally and its willingness to defend Taiwan specifically. First, it stands to reason that if Washington had never supported Ukraine’s defense in the first place, Xi might not have concluded that it was simply safeguarding scarce resources that may be needed for Taiwan, as skeptics would seem to suggest. Instead, he might have concluded the United States lacked the resolve to commit money and arms and risk escalation to resist unprovoked aggression.

Perhaps more important, whether or not the skeptics like it, the United States has been supporting Ukraine since the start of the war. Prematurely abandoning it would not only increase the odds of a Russian victory but send a signal that the United States lacks the willpower to endure a protracted fight. Giving up would raise questions about whether a future U.S. president could sustain expensive military assistance beyond an initial honeymoon period. It would raise even more doubts about whether the United States would actually intervene in the event of a war with Taiwan. If the United States can’t even sustain its indirect involvement in Ukraine, then why should Xi expect it to muster the courage for direct involvement in Taiwan? Even if Xi believed the United States would participate directly, he might conclude it would do so only briefly.

Cutting bait and getting out of Ukraine now in the name of safeguarding resources would also be particularly damaging given the innumerable public statements that U.S. officials have made about why defending Ukraine is essential for protecting the rules-based order. Washington has hyped the stakes of Ukraine. Abandoning a country that was the victim of unprovoked aggression from a revisionist power that has been identified as a core threat would be a far more consequential act than withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021, a move that marked the end of nearly two decades of counterinsurgency in a strategically marginal region.

KEEP IT COMING

No matter what policymakers decide about Ukraine, there will be tradeoffs. The central question, then, is which of two options is preferable. Should the United States keep aiding Ukraine, at least for the time being, both to help resist Russian advances and to bolster resolve, even if it comes at some cost to preparedness in Asia? Or would it be better to safeguard resources for Taiwan, even if the United States takes a hit to its reputation for resolve? There are no perfect answers, but there are good reasons why policymakers should opt for the former course.

First, it is at least possible to devote additional resources to shore up the United States’ defense industrial base, whose deficiencies are largely responsible for prospective shortfalls in weapons platforms and munitions of various kinds. To compensate further, Washington can enlist partners and allies. What no amount of money can buy is resolve. Convincing adversaries that the United States has the fortitude to stand up to unprovoked aggression is linked to the actions it takes in Ukraine.

Fortunately, there are encouraging signs that at least some of the limitations in the supply of weapons are being addressed. In 2023, the Department of Defense created the Joint Production Accelerator Cell, a new part of its acquisition office tasked with “building enduring industrial production capacity, resiliency, and surge capability for key defense weapon systems and supplies.” Moreover, the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress passed in December authorizes the Pentagon to issue multiyear contracts while procuring munitions. In the past, it could typically do so only when buying large weapons such as ships and airplanes, but the change gives defense contractors greater confidence that the Defense Department will buy key precision-guided munitions and therefore incentivize increased production of them.

With respect to allies, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and other European countries have pledged to ramp up the production of weapons for Ukraine. In December, Finland announced that it will boost production of ammunition to support Ukraine for the foreseeable future. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, elected in December, has promised to increase military assistance to Ukraine after the previous Polish government threatened to curtail certain kinds of assistance.

Another reason why policymakers should prioritize resolve is that the United States has global commitments and reputational stakes beyond China. Prematurely abandoning Ukraine to preserve resources for Taiwan could embolden other adversaries. It might, for example, signal to Iran and North Korea that the United States does not have the appetite to support the victims of aggression once a conflict becomes protracted, or at the very least that it cannot defend more than one country in one region at a time. All this could encourage further adventurism. By continuing to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression, the United States can send a powerful signal to a broader range of rivals: unprovoked aggression will not go unpunished.

• MICHAEL POZNANSKY is an Associate Professor at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are his own.
• MORE BY MICHAEL POZNANSKY

Foreign Affairs · by Michael Poznansky · January 5, 2024

21. Why America’s National Security Establishment Keeps Falling Short

Excerpts:

In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Collins (Bill Murray) got to escape the time loop, but so far, we are stuck. Anger over the latest “forever wars” shadows the 2024 elections, as do proxy wars and new entanglements. The way out is, first, to accept that the U.S. “national security establishment” is not up to the task of political-military leadership. Yes, the United States won the Cold War. But that was a generation ago, and victory entailed countless diversions, including 100,000 dead on the Pacific Rim.

There’s always much talent among the country’s high-powered foreign policy enthusiasts but also much delusion in their attempts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force. The examples of winter 2023-2024 include collapsed approaches to Ukraine and the Middle East. Whatever the compelling doctrines of such experts, most of them are winging it when in office, as did earlier high political appointees like Bundy, Kissinger, and Rice.

A lifetime of recurring moral and practical failures can be averted. Steps include a more restrained approach to the nation’s security and political fixes like limiting patronage positions in State, Defense, and other parts of the politico-military bureaucracy. Doing so in no way undercuts U.S. advantages of industrial, financial, commercial, and cultural engagement with the world. On the other hand, failing at a fifth misguided war could be the end of the story.

Why America’s National Security Establishment Keeps Falling Short

There’s always much talent among the country’s high-powered foreign policy enthusiasts, but also much delusion in their attempts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force.

The National Interest · by Derek Leebaert · January 3, 2024

The last months of 1953, and the early ones of 1954, are a Groundhog Day of disappointments. After summer’s Korean Armistice Agreement, Americans came to realize what it was like to fail at war. Yet for a lifetime to come, they would wake again, and again, and again to discover that they had failed once more, and for the same reasons. The time loop that has led to four failed wars in a row continues, largely unrecognized.

In Korea, fighting had stopped on July 27, roughly along the lines where it had begun three years earlier. A peace conference was supposed to follow. Instead, China, the prime opponent, laid down conditions in mid-September. Subsequent talks went nowhere. Worse, only 4,482 of the 8,177 American prisoners thought to be held by North Korea and China were returned.

Beyond Western Europe, where the NATO alliance was coalescing, Americans realized they would be on their own against Soviet Russia and Communist China. U.S. troops, under the banner of the United Nations, had intervened in Korea by late June 1950. Except “UN coalition forces” turned out to have been far less than expected. So testified General Douglas MacArthur, first head of the UN Command, who called them “token forces at best.”

“Failure” in Korea meant that the war had ended up unrecognizably, disastrously far from the mission declared at the start. Initially, during the summer of 1950, South Korea had been rescued from Kim Il-sung’s invasion at the cost of 5,394 Americans dead. Four months after Kim’s Soviet-choreographed attack, however, a U.S.-led counter-invasion to “liberate” North Korea ended up with 28,345 more Americans lost. In this light, the war was a catastrophe.

Seventy years ago, on January 26, 1954, the Senate ratified a mutual defense treaty with Seoul. By then, a new slogan had entered U.S. politics, taken from a general’s memoir: Never Again: would the United States allow itself to be trapped in a limited, losing war in the back of beyond?

Nonetheless, Korea was to be followed by Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. After 2021’s debacle in Kabul, we can see that three key influences have afflicted every conflict: delusional objectives, a belief that victory was to be easy, and the fact that the officials who got the United States entangled in the first place were considered celebrities. An array of lesser influences also exists in each case: recurring hopes placed in “coalition forces,” misplaced faith in high tech, and a belief in the malleability of foreign cultures. Obtuse historical analogies get added to a movie script that Americans have been unable to rewrite.

“Liberating North Korea”

Today, foreign policy experts forget that the U.S. mission in Asia had, by October 1950, ballooned from just defending South Korea. It had shifted to not only “liberating” the North but to “liberalizing“ it as well. MacArthur promised “complete victory” by Christmas, and his staff planned a victory parade in Tokyo.

That October, Kim Il-sung’s army was reeling after MacArthur’s brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon weeks earlier. From his Tokyo headquarters, MacArthur told Congress and the Pentagon that the United States could do more than just rescue South Korea. Ten million North Koreans could be saved from communism as well. China wouldn’t intervene, he added. Should it try, his B‑29 Superfortresses would turn the Yalu River, which divided China from North Korea, into “history’s bloodiest stream.” Defense Secretary George Marshall and the Joint Chiefs had their doubts, as did President Harry Truman, yet they approved a counter-invasion.

The purpose was to build a united, prosperous, and democratic Korea and to do so within half a year. The dams and power plants of the North were to be used for reconstructing the devasted South. A unified, democratic Korea seemed feasible. After all, the Marshall Plan was recasting Western Europe while West Germany and Japan had become well-tutored democracies.

However, no one involved had a clue about Korea. Exhibit A is the career of Donald Nichols. This thirty-six-year-old motor pool sergeant with a sixth-grade education attained immense responsibility. At least he had learned Korean, which helped him to influence South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee. As a result, much of the Fifth U.S. Air Force was at Nichols’ disposal, plus whatever troops he required. The list of “country experts” was thin.

As U.S. forces advanced up the peninsula toward the Yalu River, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was slipping 300,000 battle-hardened veterans into the northern mountains under the cover of night and fog. History’s greatest ambush was sprung in late November, causing the longest-ever U.S. military retreat back to the 38th Parallel.

MacArthur was a larger-than-life figure celebrated as the “American Ceasar” of victory in the Pacific and Japan’s occupation. Few dared to refute his bold decisions. Secretary of State Dean Acheson labeled him a political “sorcerer” after Inchon, and most Americans revered MacArthur. For a fateful time, the country went along and backed the counter-invasion.

“Containing China”

Ten years after the laments of the winter of 1953-1954, elite opinion had shifted. Pledges of “Never Again” were forgotten. Instead, memories of a very partial victory—the rescue of South Korea—shaped the decision to escalate in Vietnam. To be sure, it would be done “step-by-step” so as not to provoke China again.

It is forgotten that President John F. Kennedy used the dreadful phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” in October 1963 to promise success in South Vietnam. Upholding its government in Saigon, he told newsmen, would block Mao Zedong from devouring all of Indochina, plus Thailand and Malaysia. If South Korea could be held against a conventional Communist attack, his thinking went, surely Green Berets and SEALs could defend South Vietnam against Soviet and Chinese-backed guerrillas.

When Lyndon Johnson came to office six weeks later, the aims of U.S. intervention began to expand. They became as grandiose as in Korea. His officials at the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Pentagon believed South Vietnam to be primed for economic development, with democracy to follow. They spoke of a Marshall Plan and a public works program modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority. And perhaps a Marshall Plan could even include North Vietnam if only its leader, Ho Chi Minh, gave up his dream of uniting the nation.

Another war of murderous naivete escalated, stoked by fanciful objectives and visions of easy victory.

This time, policymakers and military planners expected helicopters to be the decisive high-tech wizardry. Hueys, Cobras, and Chinooks did, in fact, provide radically mobile and dispersed airborne assault capacities unknown to the French, who had lost their own Vietnam war in 1954. General Paul Harkins, an early U.S. commander in Vietnam, promised to crush the Viet Cong guerrillas “by Christmas” of 1963. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, forty-two, recently a Harvard professor, expected U.S. casualties to be roughly comparable to the annual traffic-related toll in Washington, DC.

Yet hopes fizzled. Washington landed army and marine divisions in 1964 and began an air war over North Vietnam in February 1965. However, bombing a preindustrial society proved no more conclusive than against North Korea.

Again, a coalition was assembled. The Pentagon labeled it the Free World Military Assistance Force, which, in theory, included 68,889 men. Yet Johnson muttered that it was smaller than the “token” coalition in Korea.

That third consistent reason for failure—the influence of celebrated, irrefutable decisionmakers—became a byword of the Vietnam War.

Kennedy and Johnson’s national security cadre got stamped eternally as “the best and the brightest” by reporter David Halberstam. Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara knew little of the world. Yet, as the recent president of Ford Motor Company and star of the Fortune 500, he crowed that “any problem can be solved.” Bundy had his own certainties, though he concluded by 1965 that “this damn war is much tougher“ than he had anticipated.

Cheerleading came from General William Westmoreland, the daunting commander of U.S. operations in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. He was Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” for 1966, which lauded him as the “Guardian at the Gate.” And who was to rebut Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Maxwell Taylor, whom the New York Times said existed “somewhere between Virgil and Clausewitz”?

As in Korea, no one at the top knew enough about the Vietnamese. McNamara bemoaned that ignorance decades later.

When Richard Nixon’s presidency began in 1969, another eminent professor came down from Harvard for his first Washington job. By autumn, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was fuming, “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point.”

Kissinger and Nixon knew as little about the hard men in Hanoi as MacArthur and Truman had of those in Beijing. Therefore, the war continued, despite a spurious peace deal in 1973, to ultimately extract a toll of 53,849 American dead by April 1975 when the world saw helicopters evacuating U.S. personnel from a Saigon rooftop.

“Realigning” the Middle East

America’s first clash with Iraq occurred sixteen years later and can’t be described as a “war.” The Pentagon might as well be shuttered if an authentic, half-million-strong U.S.-led coalition in 1991 couldn’t trounce within hours an army of Iraqi conscripts strung out in the Kuwaiti desert. By the time U.S. forces finally did charge into Iraq in early March 2003, the notion of a “best and brightest” in Washington had lost all sense of irony.

President George W. Bush had assembled what he styled a war cabinet following Al Qaeda’s September 11 attack in 2001. Journalists called its members a “dream team” because of their glittering credentials. For a while, they were celebrities—men like CIA director George Tenet, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the secretary of defense himself, Donald Rumsfeld. Before long, a CIA inspector general’s report blamed Tenet for allowing the agency to be taken by surprise on 9/11; Congress recognized that Wolfowitz had lost count of the American dead in Iraq, the correct number being 51 percent higher than he testified. Rumsfeld would be fired outright in 2006 as Iraq and Afghanistan spiraled downward.

For a while, however, the “dream team” outweighed its critics. On the cusp of invading Iraq, a naysayer might facetiously call Bush’s advisors “the best and the brightest.” But Vietnam had become ancient history. Instead, other officials, think tankers, and reporters nodded their heads in friendly agreement. Yes, how fortunate the nation was to be guided by these extraordinary public servants.

As U.S. forces entered Iraq, Bush spoke of the triumph that had already occurred in Afghanistan: the Taliban had merely been “the first regime to fall in the war on terror.” In fact, a victory parade was planned for New York.

Winning in Iraq was supposed to be as easy as in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld insisted that taking over the Arab world’s most populous oil-producing state would last “six days, six weeks”—at worst, “six months”—before a satisfying departure. Washington wrangled up a coalition of fifty-four nations, with most, like Micronesia, being “tokens” indeed.

U.S. objectives were even vaster than those of Korea and Vietnam. America was to “realign” the Middle East, said one member of the dream team, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. And Iraq—the pivot of such a realignment—was expected to have a thriving tourism industry soon. So promised one academic, Frederik Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, before heading to Kabul in 2009 as part of what the military called its “pundit group.” Basically, it was to do public relations for the top commander, Stanley McChrystal, a legendary special operations officer.

Like before, the silver bullets of high tech were expected to hasten victory, though General McChrystal added, contrary to all evidence, that “political will and demonstrated resolve are the most powerful thing we bring” to the fight. Hopes in drones and computer-laden net-centric warfare mirrored earlier faith in B-29s for Korea and helicopters in Vietnam.

That stew of far-fetched objectives, notions of easy victory, and the naivete of star decisionmakers again brought failure. Bush also pledged a “Marshall Plan” for Iraq and Afghanistan. As disclosed in 2023, Pentagon officials argued that a three-year timeline to reconstruct Iraq was too long. Democratization and all else had to be accomplished in less than a year.

By 2007, Rice, by then secretary of state, concluded of the war in Iraq, “I didn’t think it would be this tough.” She might as well have been complaining about Afghanistan, too.

Reliving the Past

Each time Americans awaken to failure, they hear experts insist that it was the particulars of a war that had gone wrong, not that the overall objective was misconceived.

After the Korean Armistice, for example, MacArthur’s friends on Capitol Hill kept asserting that he should have been allowed to win through escalation with China. Never mind that China itself had barely begun to intervene while 500,000 Red Army soldiers hovered near Russia’s twelve-mile border with North Korea. Still, the argument keeps being repeated.

Kissinger amplified it in his first book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957): “We could have achieved a substantial military victory” in Korea had America just committed but four more divisions against China’s PLA (which was limitless). And, in 2016, another eminent professor, who had served as a Bush appointee at the State Department, reflected that MacArthur “would probably“ have pushed the PLA back to the Yalu if only Truman had allowed him to resume the offensive. The Joint Chiefs and the Senate Armed Services Committee knew otherwise at the time.

The time loop continues regarding Vietnam. Fighting a “better war” would have achieved the mission. It’s the title of a seminal book by soldier-scholar Robert Sorley (1999). South Vietnam, this version goes, could have been saved if Westmoreland just hadn’t adopted what the army called a “war of attrition” against the victors of Dien Bien Phu. The better tactics of Westmoreland’s successor, Creighton Abrams, it’s argued, should have been applied from the start.

Similar regrets arise from Iraq and Afghanistan. If only the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority hadn’t demobilized Saddam Hussein’s army overnight in 2002, we hear, or—to believe General David Petraeus, the most political general since MacArthur—a big, last-minute military commitment in 2021 “might have precluded withdrawal entirely“ from Afghanistan.

On balance, how could any of those original propositions that took the United States into war not have been sound? Surely, we merely bungled the follow-through. Therefore, new shibboleths arise as we repeat with a revived certainty that—next time—America will get things right.

While Americans licked their wounds into the winter of 1953-1954, the Eisenhower administration courted trouble.

Vice President Richard Nixon visited Indochina from October 30 to November 4, while touring the Far East. It was the first of his eight visits to Vietnam, the last in 1969. His statements in Saigon and Hanoi were designed to offset France’s disillusionment with what was already a seven-year-long, U.S.-financed war. He intended to quash any inclinations in Paris for a settlement, as had just occurred in Korea.

Eisenhower and Capitol Hill wouldn’t let an armistice without a victory happen twice. To this end, adamant U.S. backing of France’s bloody mountain and jungle campaign continued through the winter of 1954, which the United States chose so confidently to inherit a decade later.

“I want them to send more troops,” Ho Chi Minh said to the astonished Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin in 1963 when he was warned about the consequences of defying the Americans. He could not have devised a better strategy to cripple his giant opponent. Washington played into its enemy’s hands when it swamped South Vietnam with a half million men. A dozen years earlier, it had played into China’s when 200,000 GIs, Marines, and South Korean soldiers marched to the Yalu. Ho Chi Minh’s insight about getting the United States to work against itself peaked during the “Global War on Terror.” By then, it was Osama bin Laden’s wishes that were fulfilled when the United States embarked on remaking Iraq, Afghanistan, and the entire Middle East.

In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Collins (Bill Murray) got to escape the time loop, but so far, we are stuck. Anger over the latest “forever wars” shadows the 2024 elections, as do proxy wars and new entanglements. The way out is, first, to accept that the U.S. “national security establishment” is not up to the task of political-military leadership. Yes, the United States won the Cold War. But that was a generation ago, and victory entailed countless diversions, including 100,000 dead on the Pacific Rim.

There’s always much talent among the country’s high-powered foreign policy enthusiasts but also much delusion in their attempts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force. The examples of winter 2023-2024 include collapsed approaches to Ukraine and the Middle East. Whatever the compelling doctrines of such experts, most of them are winging it when in office, as did earlier high political appointees like Bundy, Kissinger, and Rice.

A lifetime of recurring moral and practical failures can be averted. Steps include a more restrained approach to the nation’s security and political fixes like limiting patronage positions in State, Defense, and other parts of the politico-military bureaucracy. Doing so in no way undercuts U.S. advantages of industrial, financial, commercial, and cultural engagement with the world. On the other hand, failing at a fifth misguided war could be the end of the story.

Derek Leebaert is the author of Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, among other books. He was a founding editor of International Security and is a co-founder of the National Museum of the U.S. Army.

The National Interest · by Derek Leebaert · January 3, 2024

22. The U.S. Military’s Personnel Crisis

Conclusion:

Militaries fight battles, but societies wage wars. It is for their defense that armed forces are created, and it is a society’s vitality that sustains the armed forces, in the form of material support and manpower. If a society declines, its armed forces will inevitably decline as well. For 50 years, the U.S. government has asked nothing of most Americans when it has entered conflicts. At the same time, policymakers have reduced investment in the American people. The long-term effects of this disengagement between state and society are becoming painfully apparent. More than ever, the U.S. military is struggling to recruit from a society whose young people are increasing unable and unwilling to fulfill the most fundamental civic duty: defending their country.

The U.S. Military’s Personnel Crisis

Improving the Quality of the All-Volunteer Force Begins With Reinvesting in Social Welfare Programs

By Juan Quiroz

January 5, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Juan Quiroz · January 5, 2024

A country’s military and its society have a symbiotic relationship. The society provides the human and economic capital to supply the military; the military protects the society. In 1973, in response to societal unrest caused by the Vietnam War–era draft, the United States transitioned its armed forces to an all-volunteer model, staffing it only with recruits who joined by choice. At the same time it did away conscription, however, the government began scaling back federal social welfare programs. The inadvertent result: a dearth of qualified people willing to join the military.

Although a voluntary force has considerable advantages over one filled partly through conscription, inadequate welfare policies have undermined U.S. manpower. Poverty, poor childhood nutrition, and withering ties between the military and society have led to a depleted recruiting pool. This decades-long neglect is becoming apparent at a time when competition with China and Russia increases the need for a strong military, which in turn must recruit more highly skilled service members.

But it’s not too late to reinvest in future recruits. The U.S. government will need to take the long view, starting with increasing funding for nutritional programs for children, a policy that will enhance educational outcomes and reduce obesity. And the military should expand its outreach to high school students, to give more young Americans an accurate understanding of life in the armed forces. By expanding the ranks of young people eligible for military service and encouraging them to serve their country, the United States can repair military-civilian ties and attract top-tier talent.

ROUGH DRAFT

The all-volunteer force solved a recruitment crisis created by civilian policymakers’ misuse of conscription. When the United States entered the Vietnam War, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, seeking to avoid political backlash, refused to activate reserve and National Guard units, relying instead on conscripts. He believed it was better to draft people from across the country instead of activating hundreds of men from communities that had National Guard units. But the conscription process had been broken for some time. In the decade of relative peace following the Korean War, the system had begun granting too many deferments, which were disproportionately used by white and wealthy Americans. As U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, increasing demand for troops exposed inequities in the system as conscripts were more likely to be poor, Black, or Hispanic, be relegated to combat roles, and suffer casualties. For instance, 64 percent of eligible Black Americans were drafted in comparison to 31 percent of eligible white Americans. Black troops made up 31 percent of combat battalions and 24 percent of the war’s casualties despite constituting only 12 percent of the U.S. population. Opposition to the war increased skepticism of the draft, and as legislative attempts at reform failed, conscription became politically toxic.

The switch to an all-volunteer force was also meant to raise the military’s esprit de corps. In 1968, William Westmoreland, freshly recalled as the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam and kicked upstairs to serve as army chief of staff, ordered a series of studies to determine the root cause of declining morale and discipline in the army. The studies concluded that conscripts were responsible for infecting the armed forces with the social ills roiling 1960s America, such as drug abuse and racial tensions. Army leadership resolved to use an all-volunteer model to weed out “undesirables.”

There are benefits to an all-volunteer force. Today’s recruits boast significantly higher high school graduation rates, standardized test scores, and retention rates than conscription-era troops. In the last 50 years, policymakers have employed this better-credentialed, professionalized force in a variety of situations, from quick campaigns in Grenada and Panama to decades’ long commitments in the Middle East, without having to ask the wider public to endure sacrifices. But the switch to an all-volunteer force happened at the same time that the United States began to scale back welfare programs. The Carter and Reagan administrations cut funding for much of the assistance that was established under Johnson, including cash transfer programs to families with children, food stamps, housing aid, Medicaid, and community service grants to states. In particular, these cuts hurt Black families and single-mother households. Their cumulative effects can be felt today.

UNFIT TO SERVE

Fifty years of domestic divestment have shrunk the U.S. military’s pool of human capital. A 2020 study by the Pentagon found that 77 percent of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible for military service without a waiver, up from 71 percent in 2017. The most common reasons for ineligibility were obesity, drug abuse, and mental and physical health conditions. Almost half of young Americans are ineligible for multiple reasons. The United States’ military manpower is declining because policymakers have failed to invest in the health and nutrition of its potential recruits during their formative years.

The U.S. armed forces have also come to overrely on recruits who are familiar with military service through family or geographic connections. More than 80 percent of new recruits have a family member who served, with almost half having a parent who did. The military is becoming a family business instead of a civic duty, expanding the disconnect between the armed forces and the rest of society. According to surveys conducted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the percentage of Americans who reported having a “great deal of confidence” in the armed forces dropped from 70 percent to 48 percent between 2018 and 2023. Reliance on family connections for recruitment may also prove unsustainable, as a declining number of service members and their families would recommend others to enlist: 63 percent did in 2021, down from 75 percent in 2019, according to the Military Family Advisory Network, an advocacy group.

The lack of eager and qualified potential soldiers leaves the United States and its armed forces in a precarious position as it navigates the most challenging geopolitical environment since the end of the Cold War. With fewer Americans willing or able to serve, the U.S. military will have to rely more on U.S. allies and partners, whose interests are not always aligned with those of the United States.

The military is becoming a family business instead of a civic duty.

The first step to rebuilding the United States’ manpower is for the U.S. government to invest in its future recruits. Childhood poverty increases the incidence of obesity, health problems, and risky behaviors. These outcomes not only render American youth ineligible to serve but also undermine their prospects to thrive in civilian life. Army leaders have recognized that declining eligibility is related to these societal trends and have introduced preparatory courses to help potential recruits overcome obesity and academic issues. But this program helps only those recruits who are on the cusp of eligibility. It is not enough to stop decades of worsening socioeconomic conditions that created the eligibility crisis in the first place. To repair that damage, civilian policymakers must invest in nutrition and education, expand the military’s outreach, and reform the Selective Service.

About 22 percent of Americans aged 2 to 19 are obese, according to the nonprofit group Mission: Readiness. Much of this has to do with poor nutrition. Federal policymakers should offer each American child attending public school three meals at no cost. This would guarantee that every student has a chance to receive the nutrition necessary for learning and healthy development, regardless of their family’s socioeconomic standing. Over the long run, it would reduce obesity rates in the United States’ pool of potential recruits.

Today’s armed forces rely heavily on technical expertise and critical thinking, making it all the more important that recruits are educated. Furthermore, to take advantage of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the U.S. military requires highly credentialed candidates that private sector firms are also eager to hire. But the U.S. military is at a disadvantage for recruiting well-educated people for several reasons. Those who have already completed higher education tend to be less interested in one of the main attractions of military service: the educational benefits. Even when the military finds and trains promising recruits, they often leave for the higher-paying private sector, a struggle that has plagued U.S. Cyber Command in particular. According to a 2016 study by Air University, civilian information security analysts earned, on average, 130 percent of what their enlisted counterparts did.

Instead of engaging in a bidding war with private firms over a small pool of skilled workers, policymakers need to help equip more young Americans with skills in software development, data science, data engineering, cyber physical systems, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The Department of Defense should collaborate with the Department of Education to establish middle and high school programs that teach young Americans these critical skills, which both private and public sectors require to remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving technology environment. At a minimum, the Pentagon must establish these programs within its own schools. Through its Education Activity agency, the Defense Department manages 160 schools with over 66,000 students that are all children from military families, the group most likely to serve later in life.

ALL FOR ONE

Eligibility is not the military’s only recruitment problem. Just nine percent of Americans ages 16 to 21 express any interest in joining the U.S. military. Although the armed forces need to recruit only a fraction of this population to fill its ranks, the widespread apathy to national service suggests a disconnect between society and the military. To rebuild ties between the two, the U.S. government should expand the Selective Service system to include women. Today, the Selective Service—the federal agency that keeps a record of potential draftees—requires only men aged 18 to 25 to register their contact information. Excluding women is antiquated, given that women have been allowed to serve in combat roles since 2015. Men who refuse to register with the Selective Service may be imprisoned or fined. And they are rendered ineligible for educational grants, government employment opportunities, and federal job training benefits.

To give young people a better understanding of life in the armed forces, the U.S. government should make those same federal educational and employment benefits contingent upon participation in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, a program that aims to instill civic values in high schoolers mainly through courses on military history and physical fitness. Currently, only 3,500 out of 23,500 U.S. public high schools offer a JROTC program. JROTC should be expanded into all high schools so that young Americans from all walks of life would be afforded the opportunity to interact with veterans who could provide a grounded portrayal of military service. JROTC should also add to its curriculum the quality-of-life programs that are available to current service members, such as financial counseling and substance abuse recovery courses. This re-imagined JROTC curriculum could complement schools’ academic and life skills courses while also rebuilding the ties between the U.S. military and American society—ties that have been neglected for over 50 years.

Militaries fight battles, but societies wage wars. It is for their defense that armed forces are created, and it is a society’s vitality that sustains the armed forces, in the form of material support and manpower. If a society declines, its armed forces will inevitably decline as well. For 50 years, the U.S. government has asked nothing of most Americans when it has entered conflicts. At the same time, policymakers have reduced investment in the American people. The long-term effects of this disengagement between state and society are becoming painfully apparent. More than ever, the U.S. military is struggling to recruit from a society whose young people are increasing unable and unwilling to fulfill the most fundamental civic duty: defending their country.

• JUAN QUIROZ is a U.S. Army Civil Affairs officer. The views expressed here are his own.
• MORE BY JUAN QUIROZ

Foreign Affairs · by Juan Quiroz · January 5, 2024

​23. Shooting down Russia's overhyped missiles with Patriots is a win for more than just Ukraine. The war is an 'intelligence bonanza' for the West.

Shooting down Russia's overhyped missiles with Patriots is a win for more than just Ukraine. The war is an 'intelligence bonanza' for the West.

Business Insider · by Chris Panella

Military & Defense

Analysis by Chris Panella

2024-01-04T20:58:58Z

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The Patriot missile system is a ground-based, mobile missile-defense interceptor deployed by the US.

U.S. Army Security Assistance Command

• Ukraine says it has shot down 25 Russian Kinzhal missiles with Patriot systems since last May.
• Any such kill improves the Patriot's accuracy and algorithms, benefiting other users of the system.
• It's invaluable intelligence for the West and further highlights the need for more air defenses.

Ukraine's made good use of its Western-provided Patriot air-defense systems, shooting down plenty of Russian missiles, aircraft, and drones, including some advanced, albeit overhyped, weaponry.

But the intercepts, while a win for Ukraine, are also gathering hoards of data for other Patriot operators, making the system smarter and better. It's just one example of how the war in Ukraine is, as one missile-defense expert told Business Insider, an "intelligence bonanza."

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.And as Ukraine defeats threats, there's also a growing recognition of the importance of robust air and missile defenses, vital for defending and deterrence and, in Ukraine's case, survival amid an increase in missile and drone attacks.

On Tuesday, Ukraine said it shot down all 10 of the new Kinzhals fired during a vicious air assault, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine praising the incident as "what heroism supplied with advanced systems looks like." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too, hailed Western-provided air defenses like Patriots, IRIS-T, and NASAMS for saving "hundreds of lives."

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The reported kills nearly doubled the tally of Kinzhals destroyed in the war. Just Sunday, Ukraine said it had shot down 15 Kinzhal missiles using Patriot batteries since the first recorded intercept last May, which was confirmed by the Pentagon.

The Patriot air-defence system during Polish military training at the airport in Warsaw, Poland, in February of last year.

REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

A Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson, Col. Yurii Ihnat, praised the Patriot's ability to counter a variety of missile threats. The rate at which the Patriot may have intercepted Kinzhals indicates Ukraine has learned well how to operate its Western air defenses and developed a strong defense against the missile the Russians have touted as an unstoppable hypersonic weapon.

But Ukraine is not the only one benefiting from these engagements. For other Patriot operators, such as the US, new data about how to counter specific threats, such as the Kinzhal, is incredibly useful information.

"Every Ukrainian downing of Russian hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kinzhal with the Patriot missiles will improve the Patriot missile intercept algorithm — and increase accuracy for all Patriot systems, a benefit for the US, the rest of NATO, and other Patriot AD users," Jan Kallberg, a senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis who was a professor at West Point, posted on X.

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That data is valuable for both the US and its NATO allies, giving them a rare opportunity to live test systems and learn more about how not only to engage but also defeat Russian weaponry.

"The larger point is the intelligence bonanza that we are capitalizing on by observing or capturing Russian systems" without actually having any troops on the ground, Tom Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who's the director of the Missile Defense Project there, told Business Insider. He said the opportunity was giving the US valuable data on Russia for potential future conflicts.

US soldiers with the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment after a routine inspection of a Patriot missile battery at a military base in Gaziantep, Turkey.

US Army photo

Russia's Kinzhal is an advanced air-launched ballistic missile that has been celebrated by Kremlin officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, for its "unique flight characteristics," high speed, maneuverability, and ability to "overcome all existing" and "prospective antiaircraft and antimissile defense systems," characteristics that supposedly make it unbeatable.

The MIM-104 "Patriot" air-defense battery, an older system that first entered service in the 1980s but has nonetheless been praised by the Pentagon as "one of the world's most advanced air-defense systems," arrived on the battlefield in April 2023. The system, once operational, quickly put an end to Russian narratives about the Kinzhal, shooting one down in early May.

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Later that month, Ukraine said its Patriot air defenses eliminated six more of these missiles.

The Kinzhal is an advanced capability, but so far, it hasn't really lived up to its overhyped narrative of being an unstoppable hypersonic missile.

"The Kinzhal doesn't fit into the category of either a scramjet cruise missile or a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle," Karako explained.

He added that the term "hypersonic," when used to refer to the Kinzhal missile, tended to be in a more literal sense, as in it could exceed speeds of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound.

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But while the Kinzhal is going fast, "it doesn't really constitute sustained and controlled flight in the hypersonic flight regime," Karako explained, adding that "it's essentially a somewhat maneuvering ballistic missile."

Maj. Peter Mitchell, an air-defense officer who's an instructor at West Point, previously characterized Russia's Kinzhal as "more akin to a giant lawn dart loaded with explosives," saying it wasn't capable of sharp turns or quick changes in flight direction.

That doesn't mean Ukraine's reported wins aren't impressive — or that it's not a boon for the US and its partners to see Russia use the Kinzhal. Instead, it's quite the opposite.

Similar to just about any data collected in the war, whether it's information on how Russia's operating its Shahed one-way exploding drones, defending against Ukrainian strikes, or pounding Ukrainian defenses, the takeaway is a beneficial one for the West: By helping defend Ukraine, they learn more about how their enemy could fight them in the future.

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The Patriot system firing in Greece in November 2017 as part of a NATO exercise.

Sebastian Apel/U.S. Department of Defense, via AP

Ukraine's successes with the Patriot and other Western systems also highlight the enormous importance of air and missile defenses.

While the drone war being fought between Ukraine and Russia has been eye-opening for many armies, including the US, the air campaigns have also reinforced the realization of how much armed forces need robust air defenses.

The successful engagement of "high-end missile threats from a major power like Russia is ratifying and bolstering the demand signal for both the Patriot family and other air defenses more broadly," Karako said.

During his December visit to Washington to plead for more aid amid Republican roadblocks in Congress, Zelenskyy expressed a dire need for more Patriot batteries in Ukraine. But the demand goes beyond that.

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Take, for example, recent news of a handful of NATO nations' plans to buy 1,000 Patriot missiles or Japan's landmark decision to remove its self-imposed ban on weapons exports to transfer dozens of missiles to the US. Other air-defense systems, too, have been prioritized, as seen in the US aid packages to Israel in recent months.

"We're seeing an increased salience and demand for air and missile defense because missiles have become 'weapons of choice,'" Karako said. He said air and missile defense was not a peripheral concern but rather a central concern.

Business Insider · by Chris Panella

24. 3 Steps to Take Instead of Complaining about Gen Z’s Fragile Mental Health

3 Steps to Take Instead of Complaining about Gen Z’s Fragile Mental Health

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-steps-take-instead-complaining-gen-zs-fragile-kolenda-ph-d--m778e/

Christopher Kolenda, Ph.D.

Warrior-Diplomat-Sage. I help courageous leaders create the future. Leadership Expert and Consultant for CEOs and Coaches #veterans.

January 4, 2024

Open Immersive Reader

Do you have Gen Z employees (most of your twenty-somethings) whose mental health is fragile?

They want feedback but only the positive kind; they’re frequently taking mental health sick days and have difficulty recovering from setbacks. The result is lower productivity, increased workplace drama, and more stress for everyone else.

I hear leaders complaining about Gen Z’s poor resilience and work ethic. You might be correct, but that’s irrelevant.

Here’s the deal: if you cannot inspire your Gen Z employees to contribute their best to your company’s success, the fault is in the mirror.

You can have the best processes and plans in the world, but if you cannot gain the buy-in of the people in front of you, then all you have are interesting theories and ideas that don’t work.

When I worked with the Cleveland Browns a few years ago, the tight ends coach told me he coached at Army in the 1980s under legendary coach Jim Young. I was a cadet then and remembered we were 2-9 my freshman year. It was ugly.

The coach said after the season that Young got them together and said, “This was our fault.” They brought their winning system from the University of Arizona to West Point and expected it to work fine there, too.

Army could not field quarterbacks with cannons for their arms, grow 300+lb linemen who could hold blocks, or receivers who could outrun opposing cornerbacks.

It was a great system at Arizona but an epic fail at West Point.

Instead of complaining about the talent they didn’t have, Young and his staff examined the talent in front of them. They were smaller than their opponents but quick, agile, disciplined, and made good decisions.

The best offense for Army’s talent was the so-called wishbone. It amplified their strengths and masked their limitations. Army went 8-3-1 the following year, tying Tennessee in Knoxville and winning a bowl game.

Your Gen Z employees grew up with the toxic effects of social media, online bullying, and snowplow parenting (where parents violently blast away any obstacles in their children’s lives so they never encounter any difficulties). Mental health challenges among teens skyrocketed after 2012.

You handle social media and online bullying okay because you’ve built life experience and resilience beforehand. Many in Gen Z never had that opportunity.

It’s not their fault.

If you cannot adapt your practices to the talent in front of you, it’s your fault, not theirs.

Here are some things you can do:

1. Feeding Forward. Most employees get defensive when you rake them over the coals for mistakes. Many Gen Zs shut down. Instead of harping on past mistakes, focus on improving future performance. Ask these questions:What went well that you want to sustain? (This discussion focuses on the behaviors you want them to repeat in the future).In what ways did you improve over the last time? (This discussion helps them visualize their improvement, so they keep doing it.)What would you like to improve for next time? (This discussion gets them to focus on how to improve instead of what they did wrong).What does ideal support from me look like? (This question elicits a specific response and lets them know you want to support them).
2. Weekly 1-1 check-ins. Spend 15 minutes one-on-one with each direct report, setting them up for success. Hit reply if you’d like a copy of the format I recommend.
3. 90-day Updates. Spend an hour once per quarter with each direct report, discussing how they’ve improved and want to improve over the next 90 days. It’s also an opportunity to update their Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Yes, I have a format for this one, too, that I’m happy to share.

These three simple practices will help your Gen Z (and other employees) contribute their best while reducing sick days and workplace anxiety.

For a copy of my resources or for more discussion on leading your Gen Z employees, send me an email or schedule a call.

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Christopher Kolenda, Ph.D.

Christopher Kolenda, Ph.D.

Warrior-Diplomat-Sage. I help courageous leaders create the future. Leadership Expert and Consultant for CEOs and Coaches #veterans.

Warrior-Diplomat-Sage. I help courageous leaders create the future. Leadership Expert and Consultant for CEOs and Coaches #veterans.

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25. GRAND STRATEGY: A SHORT GUIDE FOR MILITARY STRATEGISTSGRAND STRATEGY: A SHORT GUIDE FOR MILITARY STRATEGISTS

​And the two comments are interesting too.

Excerpts:

Military strategists must distinguish between these two definitions of grand strategy—both of which are valuable—as they go about fighting and winning the nation’s wars.

The older meaning describes how national leadership considers the use of all of its resources—diplomatic, information (psychological), military, economic, financial—toward winning a war and securing a more favorable peace. Military strategists—in developing, distributing, and applying the military means toward victory—must try to fit their work into the larger grand strategy for war, even as they do not have the lead in crafting that grand strategy.

When it comes to the newer meaning, military strategists also have a limited role in developing grand strategy as a nation’s theory for security. Instead, their job is to understand. If the theory that is grand strategy animates policy and war is a continuation of policy by other means, it follows that the theory influences the why, for what, with what, and how the United States fights specific wars. Understanding such a theory is essential for military strategists seeking victory in any war.

GRAND STRATEGY: A SHORT GUIDE FOR MILITARY STRATEGISTS

 THOMAS BRUSCINO  JANUARY 4, 2024 7 MIN READ

https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/grand-strategy-for-military-strategists/

The idea of “grand strategy” that is so important to national security must also be important to military professionals.

For decades, the security studies community has argued that America needs a “real,” “new,” or at least “good” grand strategy, and the debate shows no sign of slowing down. The idea of “grand strategy” that is so important to national security must also be important to military professionals. But before military strategists can do their work within the context of “grand strategy,” they should be clear about what the term “grand strategy” means, which is particularly tricky because policymakers and theorists alike often combine and confuse its two main meanings. The purpose here is to offer a guide to both meanings and their significance to military strategy.

Wartime Grand (or National) Strategy

The earlier meaning of grand strategy focused on the overall national and coalition approach to winning a specific war. Often called “national strategy” by Americans, this version of grand strategy came “not from the military chiefs but from the war cabinets and their advisers, above all the Prime Minister or President”(vii). B.H. Liddell Hart called this sort of grand strategy “war policy,” a “higher strategy…to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band of nations, towards the attainment of the political object of the war” (335-336, 366).

For example, the military leadership of the United States in the Civil War launched multiple mutually supporting army campaigns and blockaded and attacked key southern ports with the navy, while the government mobilized troops and materially support forces in the field, developed policies for emancipation of slaves and mobilization of freedmen, and continued diplomatic efforts to prevent foreign recognition of and aid to the rebellion.

The Civil War generation even used the term “grand strategy” to describe these activities. General William Sherman wrote two essays on the subject of “The Grand Strategy of the War of the Rebellion,” explaining how President Abraham Lincoln developed a vision for the overall conduct of the war. This vision took until 1864-65 to come together because it required the coordinated efforts of his cabinet chiefs, his chief-of-staff, and Commanding General Ulysses Grant to design and execute the vast military approach.

Little changed in the general use of the term between the Civil War and World War II. A chapter in Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s memoirs titled “The Army and Grand Strategy” dealt with unified allied command and the major decisions of World War II. The British agreed with the usage: The official histories of the United Kingdom in the Second World War included a six-volume series on wartime Grand Strategy.

New Grand Strategy

The second meaning of grand strategy goes beyond war—becoming akin to overall security policy. This meaning, which became common after World War II, differed from, but originated in, the first. Liddell Hart pointed toward the change in emphasizing that wartime grand strategy also involved “the prolongation of that policy through the war into the subsequent peace” (366). As Edward Meade Earle argued in his introduction to the first edition of Makers of Modern Strategy, the scale and complexity of modern industrialized war required grand strategy as “not merely a concept of wartime, but…an inherent element of statecraft at all times” (viii).

For historians, this newer version of grand strategy entailed studying and evaluating examples of “the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all of the elements, both military and non-military, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests” (5). Those examples tended to be a mix of the older and newer definitions—grand strategies in specific wars and grand strategies guiding peace and war policies.

Valuable as such studies have been in providing familiarity with the broad security approaches of nations, they have been less helpful in providing a generalizable definition for the newer grand strategy concept. For that, political scientists have done better. To paraphrase Barry Posen: grand strategy is a polity’s theory about how to provide for its security and prosperity all the time, in peace and war.

There have been many debates over the specifics of the definition, but most people using “grand strategy” today mean something like Posen’s theory for security, which is meant to guide peacetime and wartime policies.

This simple concept of grand strategy, however, can quickly become confusing. First, security professionals often mix grand strategies with international relations theories such as realism and liberal internationalism, which themselves are a mix of descriptive and prescriptive ideas. Second, many observers try to describe or propose an American grand strategy, which is difficult given America’s vast and complicated power, reach, and interests.

When making important foreign and military policy choices, Australia’s leaders try to balance their interests with American interests, which makes for hard decisions.

With other polities the concept becomes more accessible. Australia, for example, has tended to follow a grand strategy of what political scientists call “bandwagoning.” That theory means that given resource constraints, Australian leaders align their foreign and military policies with a likeminded great power—previously the United Kingdom and now the United States. The application of this grand strategy is not simple. When making important foreign and military policy choices, Australia’s leaders try to balance their interests with American interests, which makes for hard decisions. For example, how much of an Australian contribution to American military operations is enough to not overextend itself while still maintaining U.S. support for Australia? That dilemma played out in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and has led some Australians to consider adopting a “balancing” grand strategy, whereby their policies seek more of a middle ground among great regional and global powers.

There are other examples. For most of the modern era, Great Britain followed a more complicated theory involving maintaining control of the seas, first around the British Isles and then along paths to overseas possessions. Their theory also required keeping a balance of power on the European continent so no one power could dominate European land commerce or become militarily strong enough to cross the English Channel.

The specific application of this theory (large main battle fleets, control of chokepoints, direct vs. peripheral wartime strategies, etc.) and the policies derived from it (colonies, mandates, or commonwealth relationships with overseas possessions; financial, material, or direct military support for weaker European powers in peace and war; bilateral or multilateral engagements on the continent; etc.) varied greatly over time. But this grand strategy tended to be the guide for British action until the Cold War.

American Grand Strategy

What is American grand strategy in the second meaning? Rather than propose a new American grand strategy, here is a brief look at American historical patterns of security decisions and actions that together constitute a theory for how the United States has provided for its security:

1. Starting with the Monroe Doctrine and continuing to the present day, American policymaking has been driven by preserving western hemispheric autonomy from external great power influence.

2. American policymaking has in general sought free sea, air, and increasingly cyber and space lanes for commerce—preferably for everyone, but at a minimum for Americans.

3. American policymaking has maintained freedom of decision making and action, originally by acting unilaterally in the world. The United States has increasingly worked with friendly and likeminded powers, but almost exclusively in coalitions and alliances where the United States is the lead or where the agreements are not so binding as to challenge American sovereignty.

4. When the United States has militarily intervened in foreign lands, whatever the cause, the policy for post-intervention conditions in those lands has trended heavily toward reinstituting or emplacing more liberal and democratic systems of government, regardless of difficulty.

There have been additional approaches—containment of communism, for example—and no doubt there will be others in the future. However, these persistent patterns offer a description of American grand strategic theory that has guided American security policies in the past and seems to be behind many policies of the present day.

Now What for Military Strategists?

Military strategists must distinguish between these two definitions of grand strategy—both of which are valuable—as they go about fighting and winning the nation’s wars.

The older meaning describes how national leadership considers the use of all of its resources—diplomatic, information (psychological), military, economic, financial—toward winning a war and securing a more favorable peace. Military strategists—in developing, distributing, and applying the military means toward victory—must try to fit their work into the larger grand strategy for war, even as they do not have the lead in crafting that grand strategy.

When it comes to the newer meaning, military strategists also have a limited role in developing grand strategy as a nation’s theory for security. Instead, their job is to understand. If the theory that is grand strategy animates policy and war is a continuation of policy by other means, it follows that the theory influences the why, for what, with what, and how the United States fights specific wars. Understanding such a theory is essential for military strategists seeking victory in any war.

Thomas Bruscino is a Professor in the Department of Military, Strategy, Planning and Operations at the U.S. Army War College and the Editor of the DUSTY SHELVES series.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of PxHere

Tags: civ-mil relations diplomacy grand strategy History international policy military history Military Strategy and Campaigning National Security Policy and Strategy strategy

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2 thoughts on "GRAND STRATEGY: A SHORT GUIDE FOR MILITARY STRATEGISTS"

1. Mike Marra says:
2. January 4, 2024 at 10:29 am
3. Nice job, Tom – you should consider a short book to help make issues like this understandable and far less complicated than other books have made them. Thanks.
4. Reply
5. charlie parker says:
6. January 4, 2024 at 10:53 pm
7. ..Thanks Tom….After noting on my calendar a political party meeting I want to attend I read your article…And it made me think….
8. If I was a moderator of presidential debates I would ask the candidates what their polittical and miltary strategies would be?….
9. The answers would be interesting…and important for voters to know…
10. Thanks…
11. Reply
12. 
    

26. Russia issues no comment over rumours Putin's top war commander General Valery Gerasimov has been killed in Ukrainian missile strike on Crimea

Oh no. Not the great General Valery Gerasimov who gave us little green men, non linear warfare, new generation warfare and the Gerasimov doctrine.

Russia issues no comment over rumours Putin's top war commander General Valery Gerasimov has been killed in Ukrainian missile strike on Crimea

• Gerasimov has not been seen since December 29 at a military award ceremony

By WILL STEWART

PUBLISHED: 09:12 EST, 5 January 2024 | UPDATED: 09:28 EST, 5 January 2024

Daily Mail · by Will Stewart · January 5, 2024

Russia has yet to comment on a swirl of unconfirmed rumours that Vladimir Putin's top war commander General Valery Gerasimov was killed in a strike on a military command post in Crimea on Thursday.

An explosion and a trail of smoke were visible in a clip of a suspected Storm Shadow strike at the military site in Yukharin Balka. Another target in the village of Uyutnoye, near Yevpatoria was also reportedly hit.

A flow of ambulances was reported by Ukrainian sources at both locations, and Putin-appointed Sevastopol governor Mikhail Razvozhayev said: 'It was the most massive [attack] in recent times.'

Gerasimov has not been seen since December 29 when footage showed him presenting awards to 'military personnel who distinguished themselves during the liberation of Marinka' in occupied Donetsk region, Ukraine.

Ukraine claims to have struck two major Russian military bases in the occupied Crimea, in what Putin-appointed Governor Mikhail Razvozhayev described as 'the biggest attack to date' on Crimea

Russia has yet to comment on a swirl of unconfirmed rumours that Vladimir Putin's top war commander General Valery Gerasimov (pictured) was killed in one of the strike

General Valery Gerasimov with Vladimir Putin

Ukrainian outlets have reported the rumours, and air force commander in Kyiv, Lt-Gen Mykola Oleshchuk praised the 'impeccable combat work' of his crews.

However, Ukraine has not outwardly made a claim that 68-year-old Gerasimov - who is also Putin's first deputy minister of defence - was at the command post, or that he was killed.

Nataliya Humenyuk, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian southern defence forces, said: 'We are collecting the information that you are currently interested in. As soon as it has appropriate confirmation, it will be made public.

'At the moment, we can only state what is already known - the control point has been hit.'

The rumour of Gerasimov's death appears to have begun circulating after a Russian Telegram channel called 'Ordinary Tsarism' posted an unconfirmed report.

It read: 'According to preliminary data, Valery Gerasimov, who was in a command post near Sevastopol at the time of the attack, was killed in the attack on Crimea.'

The message then disappeared, with the channel giving no evidence for the claim.

Putin's senior war commander and head of the Russian armed forces - has not been seen since December 29, when he presented military awards

The rumour of Gerasimov's death appears to have begun circulating after a Russian Telegram channel called 'Ordinary Tsarism' posted an unconfirmed report

There is no independent evidence that the general - a foe of slain warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin - was in Crimea, nor that he was hit in the Crimean strike

Ukrainian Telegram channel Crimean Wind said: 'The media write that Valery Gerasimov died during yesterday's attack in Crimea.

'He is the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and the First Deputy Minister of Defence of Russia.

'At the moment, the information has not been officially confirmed.'

RBK-Ukraine reported: 'Information began to spread on the Internet today that the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Valery Gerasimov was allegedly killed as a result of yesterday's strikes on Crimea.'

There is no independent evidence that the general - a foe of slain warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin - was in Crimea, nor that he was hit in the Crimean strike.

Soon after the strike, Oleshchuk was quoted saying: 'I once again give thanks to the [Ukrainian] Air Force pilots and everyone who planned the operation for their impeccable combat work.'

He warned Russian propaganda may give misleading accounts of the strikes.

'I expect the same epic report from enemy propaganda from Sevastopol and Yevpatoria on January 4 [as on earlier denials of Ukrainian strikes],' he said.

Daily Mail · by Will Stewart · January 5, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com