Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

Albert Camus, author of The Stranger, said “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy”

On the night of December 29, 1940, theaters and restaurants across the country emptied as Americans gathered around radios to hear President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deliver one of the most famous of his beloved fireside chats. His topic was a somber one for the holidays. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now,” the president said.

World War II was underway, though America had not yet entered the fight. Germany and its allies had overrun much of Europe and Asia. The British, Greeks, Chinese, and a few other nations struggled to hold back the Axis assault. If Great Britain fell, FDR predicted, Americans “would be living at the point of a gun.” (That very night, German bombs fell on London, engulfing many buildings in flames.)

“There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness,” Roosevelt warned. “There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.”

The president explained that America had no choice but to use its industrial might to arm nations battling the Axis powers. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” he said. “We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.”

In the following months, American factories began pumping out planes, tanks, guns, and ships to aid the Allies. Between 1940 and 1943, the United States increased its war output by a stunning 25 times. As the British journalist Alistair Cooke wrote, “The Allies would not have won the war . . . without the way the American people, with amazing speed, created an arsenal no coalition of nations could come close to matching.”

This content is courtesy of The American Patriot's Almanac

1. To Address the Irregular Warfare Elephant in the Room, Sacred Cattle Must First be Slain

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 6, 2023

3. These Engineers Want to Build Conscious Robots. Others Say It’s a Bad Idea.

4. Marders, Leopards, Abrams, Bradleys: What's All This New Western Weaponry Being Sent, Or Not Sent, To Ukraine?

5. How Elon Musk’s satellites have saved Ukraine and changed warfare

6. Lessons for the Next War From Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: 12 Experts Weigh In

7. The Missing Minerals

8. PC giant Dell will reportedly stop using Chinese chips as soon as next year, and it shows how Washington-Beijing tensions are forcing companies to diversify their supply chains

9. American Democracy Is Still in Danger

10. WhatsApp adds feature to bypass internet censors in repressive regimes

11. U.S. sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine signals prolonged war

12. Q&A: China's Vast Influence Campaign in Canada

13. A looming threat, and a hollow force

14. Taiwan Must Heed the Wake-Up Call From Ukraine

15. What We Know About U.S.-Backed Zero Units in Afghanistan

16. Viasat to Continue Network, Communication Support for SOCOM

17. Ukrainian citizen uprising is the war Russia didn’t see coming

18. US cybersecurity director: The tech ecosystem has ‘become really unsafe’

19. The Greatest Threat America Faces Is China

20. Cold War II

1. To Address the Irregular Warfare Elephant in the Room, Sacred Cattle Must First be Slain

Fri, 01/06/2023 - 9:16pm

To Address the Irregular Warfare Elephant in the Room, Sacred Cattle Must First be Slain

By Tom Ordeman, Jr.

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/address-irregular-warfare-elephant-room-sacred-cattle-must-first-be-slain

Author’s Note: This essay is written in response to a December 14th, 2022 article in The Hill, penned by LTG Charles T. Cleveland (Ret.), et. al.; and January 3rd, 2023 Small Wars Journal submissions by James Armstrong and Charlie Black.

In recent weeks, the topic of the DoD's mastery of Irregular Warfare (IW) - one flavor of this being counterinsurgency (COIN) - has received some long overdue discussion, initially in an article in The Hill penned by a team of authors including LTG Charles T. Cleveland (Ret.), former commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command; and COL David Maxwell (Ret.), a distinguished former Army Special Forces officer and Editor-in-Chief of the Small Wars Journal. Discussion continues in several contributions to the latter publication.

The initial article focused upon the DoD's long-term failure to master IW, and advocated for the designation of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) to lead the DoD's efforts to master IW, establishment of an Irregular Warfare Functional Center (IWFC), and supplementation through partnerships with one or more American universities. A January 3rd article by MAJ James Armstrong (Ret.) questioned the wisdom this arrangement, given USSOCOM's and Joint Special Operations Command's (JSOC) primacy in the Afghan and Iraq Wars, and their apparent failure to deliver on desired strategic outcomes. Armstrong's commentary invited several critiques, to include a formal submission by Charlie Black. Cleveland, et. al., highlight USSOCOM's role in IW, while Armstrong and Black seem to agree on what Black describes as "the U.S. Army’s rightful place to lead IW," a role underscored by Armstrong in his citation of the Army as the "primary land force."

With due respect to the aforementioned commentators, all of whom (save for Black; and Daniel Egel, PhD, one of the original article's co-authors) served in the U.S. Army, please allow a former contractor to slaughter two sacred cattle in the interest of taking aim at the proverbial "elephants in the room":

1) the U.S. Army's prolonged resistance to accept IW as a core function, co-equal to those conventional operations often described as "combined arms maneuver," also characterized in recent years as "near-peer competition"; and

2) the failure of the DoD to employ USSOCOM and JSOC assets in a manner consistent with the doctrinal functions that could have played a war-winning role in recent US Central Command (USCENTCOM) based operations. (The degree to which this was a failing of top-level DoD leadership, or a reflection of USSOCOM's operational or parochial priorities, is ripe for debate.)

A central illustration of these factors can be summarized with a classic military adage: "Train how you fight." No one who witnessed a post-9/11 Army combat training center (CTC) rotation could say in good faith that the Army ever mounted a serious effort to pivot from a conventional focus to an irregular one. Soldiers were not made to learn Arabic, Dari, Pashtu, or Urdu. While Brigade Combat Teams were familiarized with some tactical skills relating to IW - notably, IED defeat efforts focused on force protection - no one would dare compare a two-week CTC exercise to the extensive training that Green Berets undergo before embarking on an A Team's core mission of training, advising, and assisting proxy forces. As Army aviator Crispin Burke noted in a 2011 blog post:

"At a US Army Combat Training Center, an informal poll of Observer-Controllers, many of whom had just returned from counterinsurgency conflicts and had advised units of counterinsurgency tactics, only twenty percent admitted to reading [COIN field manual] FM 3-24. Perhaps the problem with counterinsurgency lies with us, not with the doctrine?"

This failure to prepare in training continued with an overarching failure to adapt to the fundamental needs of the campaigns in question. For example, in a development predicted by critics in the academic community, the Army-led Human Terrain System turned into a de facto targeting program before ultimately being shuttered. COIN field manual admonitions to avoid ostentatious displays of wealth, and to provide equipment that could be serviced by the economies of developing nations, were ignored. Civilian casualties, often written off as “collateral damage,” became so prevalent that host nation officials managed to secure broad political support by calling for the expulsion of American troops.

This failure to take IW/COIN seriously was supplemented by an active lobbying campaign by influential Army officers against continued focus on IW. As early as 2008, COL Gian Gentile, at the time a history professor at the U.S. Military Academy and now an analyst at RAND, became the figurehead for an influential cadre of Army officers - dubbed "COINtras" - whose sustained critiques lamented a perceived atrophy in conventional warfighting skills. Less than three years before America's ill-fated 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, CTC rotations had recalibrated to focus on hybrid warfare, the first step in a desperate effort to abandon IW. In his 2014 memoir, LTG Daniel Bolger (Ret.) claimed that COIN "had been tried and found wanting," and U.S. Army LTC Daniel L. Davis penned a December 2014 article in The American Conservative entitled "COIN Is a Proven Failure" - a claim which was refuted in a 2015 Small Wars Journal article, on the grounds that the DoD's

By 2015, the Army's focus on force-on-force training had resumed apace. The DoD writ large, but particularly the Army - notably, in the 2015 Operating Concept, “Win in a Complex World” - have spent most of the preceding decade advocating for a wholesale abandonment of IW, premised upon perceived (but largely unsubstantiated) threats from "near-peer" competitors. This is generally assumed to be a euphemism for Russia and China, though the strategic credibility of the former actor in particular has suffered a fatal downfall since February of 2022.

This renewed focus on conventional operations seemed to intentionally ignore American experience during the Cold War, as well as comparable historical examples, which indicate that so-called "great power competition" against "near-peer competitors" is often waged through low intensity proxy engagements - essentially, irregular warfare. To his credit, Armstrong's narrative notes the apparent tension between the formation of the Army’s Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFAB), and the parochial interests of USSOCOM and/or U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC). However, as Joint Staff policy advisor Dr. Austin Long noted in a 2020 interview:

"I think the SFAB was a good idea, but it was a good idea that was executed principally to preserve Army force structure in a post-sequestration environment. If you look at what they are, they're basically Army brigades. They don't have the stuff you would really want. So, I'll just highlight one: they don't have a huge counterintelligence or intelligence element, which is exactly what you need to do SFAB type stuff, right? So, they have all of these enablers that have to be hung on them to do what's their alleged job."

Claims that “Big Army” ever truly took IW seriously as a core function are simply not in evidence. If the DoD - or even a subset - can be expected to master IW, the Army has made it clear that they are not interested in playing a leading role.

This leads us to consider the post-9/11 exploits of USSOCOM generally, and JSOC more specifically. In theory, two concepts should be in evidence. First: United States Army Special Forces, the "Green Berets," whose core mission is to train, advise, and assist proxy forces, were employed in this capacity during the post-9/11 era. Second: that other special operations forces (SOF) units who count Foreign Internal Defense/COIN, Security Force Assistance, and Unconventional Warfare as their core competencies - theoretically, the Navy's SEAL teams and the Marine Corps' Force Reconnaissance battalions - supplemented the Green Berets' efforts to train foreign proxies. Given the criticality of the training missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, one might assume that this key skill set was applied judiciously.

Of course, anyone who paid attention during the last twenty years knows that training, advising, and assisting proxy forces comprised a minority of the SOF community's remit. Navy SEALs and Recon Marines - the latter of which were notably pillaged to build the Marine Raider battalions, for whom engagement with proxies is not a core competency - lack training or tasking in the Green Berets' mission set. In recent years, they have been employed primarily in direct action (DA) and strategic reconnaissance functions. Notably, a 2011 article chronicling the exploits of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment's 2010 deployment to Sangin, Afghanistan, suggested that lower end DA missions could have conceivably been performed by conventional units, allowing SOF units to focus on more strategically valuable tasks. However, rarely was this the case.

For their part, Green Berets' utilization in their traditional training, advisory, and assistance roles - most notably, their partnership with the Afghan Northern Alliance in late 2001 - also appear to have been something of a rarity. Instead, they seem to have been tasked to Combined Joint Special Operations Task Forces (CJSOTF), in which they seem to be treated as somewhat interchangeable with other SOF units. This tasking structure led to Green Berets' assignment well outside the critical foreign proxy support mission set, and included such documented examples as a Green Beret major hunting for Taliban weapons caches, Green Berets participating in the raid to rescue Private Jessica Lynch from Iraqi custody, and a Green Beret quick reaction force that reinforced an A Team under fire at the 2016 Battle of Boz Qandahari.

In cases where the Green Berets acted in their traditional training, advisory, and assistance roles, they seem to have spent most of their time training the most elite Afghan and Iraqi troops, whereas support to conventional proxy units fell to more ad hoc rotations of conventional Army and Marine Corps forces. To their credit, the Green Berets oversaw the development of the Afghan National Army Commando Corps and the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service, both of which fought valiantly when called upon. However, in 2014/'15 against the Islamic State group, and later in 2021 against the resurgent Taliban, these units proved too limited in number to triumph - the apparent result of building small, bespoke units of extreme quality, rather than operationally significant units of adequate competence.

Conversely, in his 2016 book, Sean Naylor documents GEN Stanley McChrystal's reorientation of JSOC from its original focus on short notice hostage rescue scenarios, to a post-9/11 focus on intelligence collection and exploitation to drive an unprecedented surge in DA missions. Notably, having previously existed as an elite airborne infantry unit whose doctrinal purposes included seizing enemy airfields and acting as a security element for first tier DA units (notably Delta Force), Naylor highlights the 75th Ranger Regiment's effective conversion into a DA unit in its own right.

Many Delta Force operators are drawn from the Special Forces Groups. One might reasonably question what might have been had JSOC been farmed for qualified 18 series personnel in a manner similar to the Marine Corps' harvest of the Recon battalions to constitute the Raiders; these and other Green Berets been tasked with training Afghan and Iraqi conventional units; the 75th Ranger Regiment trained and tasked with training elite Afghan and Iraqi units; and more DA missions tasked to elite conventional units.

Thus, recent events compel us to consider alternative options. To this end, a sort of reverse precedent merits consideration: that of the British Army, prior to the First World War.

Prior to the Great War’s outbreak, a series of British officials had reformed the British Army, culminating with the Haldane Reforms of 1906 to 1912. Prior to 1905, British soldiers served largely as an imperial constabulary. Following the Second Boer War of 1899-1902, and influenced by the Moroccan Crises of 1905 and 1911 and the Balkans War of 1912-’13, Secretary of State for War Sir Richard Haldane recognized the increasing likelihood that British troops might be called upon to intervene in some conflict in Europe - between "near-peer competitors," as it were - and his subsequent reorganization led to the formation of an expeditionary force whose focus was less upon colonial administration and more upon a corollary to the conventional, force-on-force conflicts on the European continent. Despite punching above its proverbial weight during the initial days and weeks of the Great War, the British Expeditionary Force proved tiny by comparison with the armies of continental Europe. Many colonial units were subsequently recalled, retrained, and pressed into conventional service, either on the Western Front or in other theaters. Thus, prior to 1914, the United Kingdom could be argued to have fielded, in effect, two armies: a conventional force focused upon great power competition, and a colonial force focused upon maintaining order throughout the British Empire. The Great War, and the subsequent threat from the Axis Powers that culminated with the 1939 outbreak of the Second World War, compelled British officials to expand and sustain their conventional force, while the postwar dissolution of their empire eventually led to the accompanying atrophy of their capacity to conduct small wars. At present, the opposite dynamic is at play in America: a recognition of the need for long-term mastery of IW, coupled with obstacles to right-sizing such a capability as co-equal with requirements pursuant to conventional readiness and deterrence.

Enter the United States Marine Corps, which has usurped the Army’s alleged rightful place as the service that should lead America’s efforts to master IW.

By contrast with the Army's record in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Marine Corps not only performed admirably, but also proved willing to adapt. It was the Marine Corps, operating in Iraq's restive Anbar Province, that recognized the opportunity, posed by disaffected Sunnis, that was eventually exploited to build the "Sons of Iraq" movement that turned the tide in that conflict. Marines led the way in the procurement of MRAPs to meet a strategic force protection need, and in the implementation of Female Engagement Teams. These are only a few examples of the Marines’ propensity for IW. Whereas the Army adopted a sort of temporary IW/COIN facade as a reaction to conditions in USCENTCOM, the Marine Corps committed to substantive adaptation in their effort to meet the strategic need.

In the aforementioned 2020 interview, Dr. Austin Long attributed this difference in culture first to the differing formative experiences of the Army and Marine Corps; and second, to the Marine Corps' pragmatic propensity to rely upon and partner with other organizations due to its comparatively modest size. The Army operates as a gargantuan, independent entity, reminiscent of their formative experience waging a massive total war against the Confederacy during the American Civil War. By contrast, the Marine Corps has been called "the State Department's Army" due to the Marines' close relationship with America's diplomats, a relationship that precipitated the Corps' formative experience fighting "small wars" in America's near abroad.

The acknowledged need for an organization to lead the joint force in IW comes at a pivotal moment for the Marines, who have having been pressed into service as a so-called "second land army" for two decades. Thus, the Marine Corps has spent more than a decade working to re-assert its independence and unique character relative to their Army colleagues. In a November 2012 address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Commandant James F. Amos sought to highlight the Marine Corps' role as America's crisis response force, in contrast to the perceived function as a second land army; and current Commandant David H. Berger has utilized the controversial "Force Design 2030" concept as a blueprint both for reforming the Corps, and for exerting its uniqueness. Acknowledgement both of the Marine Corps' traditional expeditionary character, and of their disproportionate success in modern IW/COIN operations, recommends a subsequent acknowledgement that it is Marines, rather than soldiers, whose "rightful place" it is to lead the DoD in mastering IW.

Additionally, the Marine Corps deploys in the scalable and customizable Marine Air Ground Task Force (MAGTF) structure, a formation whose versatility the Army and Air Force have tried, with only moderate success, to emulate. The MAGTF combines command, ground combat, aviation, and sustainment elements, and can operate independent of outside support for fifteen, thirty, or sixty days, depending upon the MAGTF's size. The modern incarnation of the MAGTF, particularly the Marine Expeditionary Unit (built around a reinforced infantry battalion), also boasts the capability to conduct a limited range of special operations. With some development, this model would be ideal for offering persistent support to America's IW/COIN mission footprint.

This would, inevitably, warrant further adjustments to an American force structure that has endured, with minimal evolution, since the end of the Second World War. To a great degree, the DoD generally, and the Army specifically, treats this force structure as sacrosanct. However, given the collapse of Russia as a credible opponent, and the likely limited and amphibious nature of a notional conflict with China, the Army's remit and force size may be more realistically scoped to conflicts approximating the 1982 Falklands War. Consolidation of the existing Special Forces Groups into the Marine Corps might also merit consideration, among other more controversial suggestions. While such suggestions may seem controversial, if the DoD’s track record during the preceding decades isn’t sufficient grounds for the first fundamental reconsideration of American force structure in nearly three generations, what might merit such reconsideration?

In closing, several aspects of this discussion should be obvious:

First: the Army's decades-long track record decades long track record of unequivocal resistance to deviation from conventional operations constitutes the de facto surrender of its alleged "rightful place to lead IW."

Second: the SOF community's apparent prioritization of DA missions, to the detriment of strategically critical SFA efforts, necessarily exclude them from leading the DoD in the mastery of IW, though certain elements may still play a key role.

Third: despite an American preference for what LTG Bolger described as "decisive conventional operations against a uniformed foreign enemy," American forces are likely to encounter irregular challenges for the foreseeable future, either in the form of sub-state actors, or from proxies to "near-peer" and "great power" competitors. Thus, the Pentagon must succeed at mastering IW if Washington expects to maintain its indispensable role as the leading global power.

Fourth and finally: while force structures of long standing, up to the service branch level, may seem sacrosanct, the time for a fundamental reconsideration of these structures in light of recent events, pursuant to continued American strategic dominance into the foreseeable future, is now long overdue.

About the Author(s)

Tom Ordeman, Jr.

Tom Ordeman, Jr. is an Oregon-based information security professional, freelance military historian, and former federal contractor. A graduate with Distinction from the University of Aberdeen’s MSc program in Strategic Studies, he holds multiple DoD and industry security certifications. Between 2006 and 2017, he supported training and enterprise risk management requirements for multiple DoD and federal civilian agencies. His research interests include the modern history of the Sultanate of Oman, and the exploits of the Gordon Highlanders during the First World War. His opinions are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of any entity with which he is associated.

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 6, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-6-2023

Key Takeaways

Russian officials and milbloggers largely did not react to the US announcement of more than $3.75 billion in new military assistance to Ukraine.
Russian officials and milbloggers continued to respond negatively to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s January 5 ceasefire announcement as hostilities continued in Ukraine on January 6.
Certain hardline elements of the Russian information space seized on Putin’s statement to propagate the narrative that Putin is a protector of religious values.
Prominent Russian milbloggers continue to use their platforms to advocate for the eradication of Ukrainian cultural and ethnic identity.
Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Kreminna and Svatove.
Russian sources claimed that Russian forces made gains in Soledar as Russian offensive operations continued around Bakhmut and the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.
Russian authorities and military leaders continue to face backlash for their responses to the December 31 Ukrainian strike on a Russian base in Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast.
Russian forces and occupation authorities are continuing to target Ukrainian children to consolidate social control in occupied territories.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 6, 2023

Jan 6, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 6, 2023

Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Layne Philipson, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

January 6, 8:45 pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Russian officials and milbloggers largely did not react to the US announcement of more than $3.75 billion in new military assistance to Ukraine, further highlighting that the Kremlin and the Russian information space selectively choose when to portray Western military assistance as an escalation. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on January 6 that the assistance would provide Ukraine with Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, armored personnel carriers, surface-to-air missiles, and ammunition.[1] Russian officials and milbloggers scarcely reacted to the latest announcement of military assistance, even though the Kremlin most recently portrayed the transfer of purely defensive Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine as an escalation.[2]

The lack of Russian reaction to the US announcement of military assistance that Ukrainian forces could use to support counteroffensive operations supports ISW’s previous assessment that the Kremlin is more concerned with its information operations and the effect that Western military aid can have on specific Russian military operations in Ukraine than with any particular weapons systems, red lines, or the supposed Russian fears of putative Ukrainian offensive actions against the Russian Federation itself using Western systems.[3] The Kremlin selectively responds to Western military shipments and assistance to Ukraine to support information operations that aim to frame Ukraine as lacking sovereignty and to weaken Western willingness to provide further military assistance by stoking fears of Russian escalation.[4] The Kremlin and the Russian information space will likely seize upon future Western military aid that they believe can support these information operations rather than as a reflection of any actual Kremin red lines or specific concerns about the potential threat Western weapons systems may pose. ISW has previously noted that these observations are worth considering in the context of the Western discussion of providing Ukraine with Western tanks, long-range attack systems, and other capabilities.

Russian officials and milbloggers continued to respond negatively to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s January 5 ceasefire announcement as hostilities continued in Ukraine on January 6. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin remarked that a ceasefire does not mean that Russian troops will stop responding to "provocations by Ukrainian troops," or else Russian forces run the risk of affording Ukraine the opportunity to improve their positions in critical areas of the front.[5] Pushilin’s statement was an implicit criticism of the ceasefire announcement and exemplifies the fact that the announcement was poorly received by Russian military leaders. Former commander of militants in Donbas in 2014 and prominent milblogger Igor Girkin called the ceasefire "a bold and decisive step towards defeat and surrender" for Russian forces and criticized Russian leadership for failing to learn from the outcomes of previous ceasefires over the last eight years.[6] Other prominent milbloggers seized on the ceasefire announcement to criticize the Kremlin’s conduct of the war and accuse Russian leadership of directly placing Russian soldiers in harm’s way.[7] The ceasefire announcement will likely continue to serve as a point of neuralgia for voices in the information space that have historically enjoyed a mutually reinforcing relationship with Putin.

While many voices in the Russian information space strongly criticized the ceasefire announcement, certain hardline elements seized on Putin’s statement to continue to propagate the narrative that Putin is a protector of religious values and morals. Deputy Chairman of the Russian Federation Security Council Dmitry Medvedev stated on January 6 that Putin offered "the hand to Christian mercy" to Ukraine and that Ukraine rejected it because Ukraine lacks faith.[8] Commander of the Chechen Akhmat Special Forces, Apti Alaudinov, responded to the ceasefire with glowing praise for Putin, whom he called a "true believing Christian," noted that Jesus is a revered prophet in Islam, and accused Ukrainian "Satanism" of being the reason why Kyiv refused to accept the truce.[9] Alaudinov‘s praise of the ceasefire on religious grounds is part of a specific and long-running Kremlin information operation that seeks to cater to various religious minority groups in the Russian Armed Forces by framing Ukraine as an immoral enemy whose lack of faith transcends offends Christians and Muslims alike.[10]

Prominent Russian milbloggers continued to use their platforms to advocate for the eradication of Ukrainian cultural and ethnic identity. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) commander Alexander Khodakovsky claimed on January 6 that Russia and Ukraine share a "common gene pool" and "spiritual space" that Ukraine is destroying as the war continues.[11] Khodakovsky’s statement is a clear rejection of the Ukrainian people as sovereign and distinct from Russia. Similarly, another prominent milblogger claimed that the idea of a Ukrainian ethnicity has never existed and was manufactured by Ukrainian "nationalists."[12] The milblogger invoked the concept of "Malorossiya"- the imperial Russian ideation of Ukrainian territory as entirely part of and subordinate to Russia.[13] Another Russian war correspondent amplified the pre-February 24 fiction that Ukraine is oppressing Russian speakers and claimed that the war must continue in order to restore the Russian language to the "territory of the soon-to-be-former Ukraine."[14] These prominent and widely followed voices in the Russian information space continue to openly advocate for the dehumanization and destruction of the Ukrainian people. So long as the Kremlin continues to provide space for such voices as it ruthlessly censors views that stray from its own information lines, the intent behind Putin’s war remains clear.

Key Takeaways

Russian officials and milbloggers largely did not react to the US announcement of more than $3.75 billion in new military assistance to Ukraine.
Russian officials and milbloggers continued to respond negatively to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s January 5 ceasefire announcement as hostilities continued in Ukraine on January 6.
Certain hardline elements of the Russian information space seized on Putin’s statement to propagate the narrative that Putin is a protector of religious values.
Prominent Russian milbloggers continue to use their platforms to advocate for the eradication of Ukrainian cultural and ethnic identity.
Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Kreminna and Svatove.
Russian sources claimed that Russian forces made gains in Soledar as Russian offensive operations continued around Bakhmut and the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.
Russian authorities and military leaders continue to face backlash for their responses to the December 31 Ukrainian strike on a Russian base in Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast.
Russian forces and occupation authorities are continuing to target Ukrainian children to consolidate social control in occupied territories.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Svatove on January 6. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted a limited ground attack near Stelmakhivka (15km northwest of Svatove).[15] A Russian milblogger claimed that both Russian and Ukrainian troops are conducting positional battles in the Svatove direction and that Ukrainian troops unsuccessfully attacked Russian positions near Kuzemivka (13km northwest of Svatove).[16] Russian milbloggers also indicated that elements of the Western Military District—particularly the 27th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 1st Guards Tank Army and 3rd Motor Rifle Division of the 20th Combined Arms Army—are active near Svatove.[17]

Russian and Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Kreminna on January 6. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks near Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna) and Ploshchanka (16km northwest of Kreminna).[18] A Russian milblogger indicated that elements of the 752nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment of the 3rd Motor Rifle Division of the 20th Combined Arms Army are fighting near Makiivka.[19] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attempted several unsuccessful counterattacks to regain lost positions along the Balka Zhuravka River that runs between Ploshchanka and Kreminna.[20] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups are active southwest of Kreminna between Serebrianka and Hryhorivka.[21] Russian sources continued to claim that Russian forces are fighting for Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna).[22]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces made gains in Soledar on January 6. Several milbloggers reported that Wagner Group forces stormed Bakhmutske (10km northeast of Bakhmut and just south of Soledar) on the night of January 5 to 6 and broke through to the center of Soledar.[23] One milblogger posted footage of a Wagner Group fighter reportedly in the center of Soledar, although the fighter says that it is too early to say that they have captured Soledar entirely.[24] One milblogger claimed that Russian troops advanced as far as Krasnopillia, 4km northwest of Soledar, and that the Ukrainian grouping in Bakhmut is under threat of encirclement as a result.[25] ISW has not yet observed visual information that corroborates these Russian claims. Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin notably emphasized that exclusively Wagner troops are responsible for these claimed gains, but that discussion of the total capture of Soledar is premature.[26] Prigozhin continues to position himself and Wagner Group forces as the sole actors responsible for gains in the Bakhmut area, as ISW has previously noted.[27]

Ukrainian troops continued to defend positions northeast and south of Bakhmut on January 6. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks on Bakhmut itself; northeast of Bakhmut near Spirne (30km northeast), Soledar, Krasna Hora (5km north); and south of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka (7km southwest) and Kurdyumivka (13km southwest).[28] The Ukrainian State Border Guards Service emphasized that Ukrainian forces neutralized a Russian grenade launch point in the Bakhmut direction to prevent preparations for another Russian counterattack in the area.[29] Russian milbloggers continued to discuss fighting to the south and northeast of Bakhmut.[30]

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the western outskirts of Donetsk City on January 6. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops attacked near Pervomaiske (on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City) and Marinka and Pobieda (on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[31] A Russian milblogger also reported fighting northwest of Donetsk City near Nevelske and southwest of Donetsk City near Novomykhailivka.[32] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) People’s Militia posted graphic video footage reportedly of the aftermath of an attack by the DNR 5th Brigade on a Ukrainian grouping in Marinka.[33] Milbloggers amplified the footage to highlight the intensity of operations in Marinka.[34]

Russian forces did not conduct any claimed or confirmed ground attacks in western Donetsk or eastern Zaporizhia oblasts on January 6 and continued routine shelling along the line of contact in this area.[35] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) highlighted the use of thermobaric artillery systems in western Donetsk Oblast, indicating that Russian forces may be employing this military district-level asset to prioritize operations in this area.[36]

Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted operations on the Kinburn Spit in Mykolaiv Oblast and hold positions on an island in the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast on January 6. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are currently conducting reconnaissance activities in the area of the Kinburn Spit.[37] Another Russian milblogger amplified footage on January 6 reportedly of Russian Spetsnaz units firing on Ukrainian positions on Velyki Potemkin Island southwest of Kherson City in the Dnipro River delta.[38] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces maintain positions on the island on January 5.[39] Russian sources used footage posted on January 5 to claim that Russian forces captured the island, but later geolocation of the footage shows that Russian forces were actually operating south of Velyki Potemkin Island on the right bank of the Konka River near Kardashynka, Kherson Oblast (9km south of Kherson City).[40]

Ukrainian forces continue to strike Russian positions in rear areas of southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces struck Russian forces in Havrylivka Druha, Kherson Oblast on January 5, seriously injuring 100 Russian servicemembers.[41] Russian milbloggers claimed on January 6 that Ukrainian forces shelled Oleshky and Kakhovka in Kherson Oblast as well as Tokmak and Dorozhnianka in Zaporizhia Obalst.[42] A Kherson Oblast Telegram channel amplified local reports on January 6 that residents heard explosions in the vicinity of Radensk, Kherson Oblast.[43] Ukrainian Berdyansk Head Viktoria Halitsyna reported on January 6 that residents heard 11 explosions in Berdyansk, Zaporizhia Oblast.[44]

Russian forces continued routine artillery strikes west of Hulyaipole, on the right bank of the Dnipro River in Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson oblasts, and in Mykolaiv Oblast.[45] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Kherson City, Beryslav, Nikopol, and Ochakiv.[46]

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

Russian authorities and military leaders continue to face backlash for their responses to the December 31 Ukrainian strike on a Russian base in Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast. Samara Oblast residents wrote a petition demanding that Russian authorities publish the list of the service members killed in the strike, after Samara Oblast Governor Dmitry Azarov confirmed on January 2 that mobilized personnel from Samara Oblast died in the strike.[47] A mobilized Russian servicemember who survived the strike in Makiivka posted a video on January 3 in which he argues that the commanders of the Russian battalion and regiment involved in the strike are responsible for the incident.[48] ISW assesses that the Russian information space continues to seize upon the Ukrainian strike in Makiivka to criticize endemic issues in the Russian military apparatus.[49]

Official Ukrainian sources continue to report that Russian forces and occupation officials are preparing for another wave of mobilization in occupied Ukrainian territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 6 that occupation employees of military recruitment offices in Donetsk City started collecting information about residents who are 17 years old for military registration on January 1.[50] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on January 6 that Russian forces are taking body armor away from occupation civil servants to provide the armor to personnel mobilized in the next wave.[51] The Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation military recruitment offices in Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast presented a plan to mobilize 2,000 residents from the city and that Russian forces have increased patrols in the city to prevent residents from evading the new wave of mobilization.[52]

Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov continues to expand his parallel military structures. Kadyrov claimed on January 6 that over 9,000 fighters have trained at the Special Forces (Spetsnaz) University in Gudermes, Chechnya.[53] The facility offers a two-week accelerated tactical training course to volunteers who later deploy to Ukraine alongside Russian forces.[54] It is unclear in what capacity and with what Russian military formations volunteer graduates of the facility are currently serving in Ukraine. ISW assesses that Kadyrov routinely promotes his efforts to create Chechen-based parallel military structures to curry favor with Russian President Vladimir Putin and expand his political and military influence.[55]

Russian military volunteer formations are reportedly struggling with accessing provisions and equipment. A BARS-13 (Russian Combat Reserve) affiliated source stated on January 5 that the BARS-14 Battalion formed of BARS-13 volunteers needs financial support to acquire winter uniforms, generators, gas stoves, and other basic supplies.[56] The BARS-13 affiliated source claimed that the BARS-14 Battalion is currently serving in a difficult sector of the Svatove front in Luhansk Oblast.[57] The Russian Military launched the initiative to create Russian Combat Army Reserves in the fall of 2021 and aimed to recruit 100,000 volunteers, but largely failed to do so prior to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.[58] These BARS formations have recently been active in Luhansk Oblast along the Svatove-Kreminna line.[59]

Tensions between parastatal and conventional Russian forces in Ukraine may be increasing. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on January 6 that conventional Russian mobilized personnel are increasingly upset that Wagner Group personnel and Chechen forces have priority in accommodations and in receiving ammunition and other military equipment.[60] ISW previously assessed that the Russian military’s reliance on both conventional and parastatal forces such as the Wagner Group and Chechen units will likely continue to damage combat capability.[61] Heightened tensions between these conventional and parastatal forces would likely further degrade Russian forces’ combat capabilities in Ukraine.

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian forces and occupation authorities are continuing to target Ukrainian children to consolidate social control of occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on January 6 that Russian forces are taking Ukrainian children to Moscow, Rostov, and other large Russian cities en masse to celebrate the New Year and take part in holiday events to convince them that life in the Russian Federation is better than in Ukraine.[62] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported on January 6 that Russian medical personnel escorted the children from Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast, to participate in holiday events in Rostov Oblast, Russia.[63] Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushenko stated on January 6 that security guards dressed in Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) police uniforms are continuing to search the bags of students in Mariupol schools in a likely effort to seize items related to Ukrainian heritage.[64]

Russian occupation authorities continued to intensify law enforcement measures in occupied territories on January 6. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 6 that Russian occupation authorities intensified administrative and counterintelligence operations in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast, after successful Ukrainian strikes in surrounding areas.[65] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported on January 6 that Russian occupation authorities are checking the phones of Starobilsk residents, paying particular attention to those with contacts who are subscribed to Ukrainian telecommunications operators.[66]

Russian occupation authorities continued measures to control movement in occupied territories on January 6. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov stated on January 6 that the occupation administration has begun to issue passes allowing vehicles to travel in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[67] Rogov stated on January 6 that any resident seeking a pass must visit a Russian military commandant office in Melitopol, Berdyansk, Tokmak, or Vasylivka and provide passports and vehicle documents.[68] Rogov stated on January 6 that these passes will soon be mandatory for unimpeded movement within Zaporizhia Oblast.[69]

Russian occupation authorities are continuing efforts to ban the circulation of the Ukrainian hryvnia from occupied territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on January 6 that Russian occupation authorities are threatening to seize money and goods associated with the hryvnia when raiding trade houses in Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast.[70]

ISW will continue to report daily observed indicators consistent with the current assessed most dangerous course of action (MDCOA): a renewed invasion of northern Ukraine possibly aimed at Kyiv.

ISW’s December 15 MDCOA warning forecast about a potential Russian offensive against northern Ukraine in winter 2023 remains a worst-case scenario within the forecast cone. ISW currently assesses the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine from Belarus as low, but possible, and the risk of Belarusian direct involvement as very low. This new section in the daily update is not in itself a forecast or assessment. It lays out the daily observed indicators we are using to refine our assessments and forecasts, which we expect to update regularly. Our assessment that the MDCOA remains unlikely has not changed. We will update this header if the assessment changes.

Observed indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

Nothing significant to report.

Observed ambiguous indicators for MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

Russia deployed more armored elements to Belarus on January 6. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted photos on January 6 showing that Russia deployed at least one train with military equipment, including armored personnel carriers and trucks, to Baranovichi, Belarus.[71]The Belarusian MoD claims that these Russian elements will conduct combat exercises with Belarusian forces as part of the combined Russian-Belarusian Regional Grouping of Forces (RGV). Independent Belarusian monitoring organization the Hajun Project reported that three trains with Russian equipment arrived in Belarus on January 6.[72] One train reportedly arrived in Baranavichy from the Kantemirovka train station in Boguchar, Voronezh and two other trains arrived in Baranavichy and Slonim from unspecified locations in Russia. The Russian train from Boguchar may have transported elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army that were previously operating in Luhansk Oblast. OSINT analysts on social media identified likely elements of the 15th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 2nd Motorized Rifle Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army at the 230th Combined Arms Obuz-Lesnovsky Training Ground in Brest, Belarus, on January 6.[73]
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko paid an ostentatious visit to Russian and Belarusian troops at the 230th Combined Arms Obuz-Lesnovsky Training Ground in Brest, Belarus, on January 6.[74] Lukashenko’s visit was likely part of a standing Russian information operation designed to convince Ukraine and the West that Russia will attack Ukraine from Belarus again given he emphasized the Russian deployments.
Deputy Belarusian Defense Minister Andrei Zhuk stated on January 6 that the combined Russian-Belarusian RGV is ready to defend the Union State.[75] Zhuk stated that one of the Belarusian and Russian objectives is to have a unified tactical training for Russian and Belarusian forces.[76] Zhuk stated that Russian and Belarusian elements below the battalion level will continue training in summer 2023 and that Russia and Belarus will conduct a joint command staff exercise to support the quadrennial Russian-Belarusian "Union Shield -2023" exercise.[77] Russian and Belarusian elements may possibly exercise as combined battalions or combined platoons in these exercises.[78]

Observed counter-indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:

The Ukrainian General Staff reiterated that it has not observed Russian forces in Belarus forming a strike group as of January 6.[79]

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[33] *GRAPHIC* https://t.me/nm_dnr/9701

[51] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/01/06/v-mezhah-pidgotovky-do-mobilizacziyi-okupanty-znimayut-bron-z-derzhsluzhbovcziv-na-tot/

[52] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/01/06/v-mezhah-pidgotovky-do-mobilizacziyi-okupanty-znimayut-bron-z-derzhsluzhbovcziv-na-tot/

[60] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/01/06/sered-okupantiv-zbilshuyutsya-napruga-cherez-nerivnomirne-rozpodilennya-bk-ta-miscz-roztashuvannya-osobovogo-skladu/

[62] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/01/06/rosiyany-vykorystovuyut-novorichni-svyata-yak-zasib-promyvky-mozku-ukrayinskym-dityam/

[63] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/01/06/rosiyany-vykorystovuyut-novorichni-svyata-yak-zasib-promyvky-mozku-ukrayinskym-dityam/

[75] https://www.belta dot by/society/view/k-zaschite-sojuznogo-gosudarstva-gotova-zamministra-oborony-o-rezultatah-slazhivanija-regionalnoj-543494-2023/?utm_source=belta&utm_medium=news&utm_campaign=accent; https://t.me/readovkanews/50231; https://ria dot ru/20230106/gruppirovka-1843254181.html

understandingwar.org

3. These Engineers Want to Build Conscious Robots. Others Say It’s a Bad Idea.

Just a reminder.

Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These Engineers Want to Build Conscious Robots. Others Say It’s a Bad Idea.

The pursuit of artificial awareness may be humankind’s next moonshot. But it comes with a slurry of difficult questions.

nytimes.com · by Oliver Whang · January 6, 2023

A robot prototype being developed by Yuhang Hu, a doctoral student in the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, where engineers are exploring the possibility of self-aware robots.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer who directs the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, has shaped most of his career around what some people in his industry have called the c-word.

On a sunny morning this past October, the Israeli-born roboticist sat behind a table in his lab and explained himself. “This topic was taboo,” he said, a grin exposing a slight gap between his front teeth. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.”

That was back in the early 2000s, when Dr. Lipson was an assistant professor at Cornell University. He was working to create machines that could note when something was wrong with their own hardware — a broken part, or faulty wiring — and then change their behavior to compensate for that impairment without the guiding hand of a programmer. Just as when a dog loses a leg in an accident, it can teach itself to walk again in a different way.

This sort of built-in adaptability, Dr. Lipson argued, would become more important as we became more reliant on machines. Robots were being used for surgical procedures, food manufacturing and transportation; the applications for machines seemed pretty much endless, and any error in their functioning, as they became more integrated with our lives, could spell disaster. “We’re literally going to surrender our life to a robot,” he said. “You want these machines to be resilient.”

One way to do this was to take inspiration from nature. Animals, and particularly humans, are good at adapting to changes. This ability might be a result of millions of years of evolution, as resilience in response to injury and changing environments typically increases the chances that an animal will survive and reproduce. Dr. Lipson wondered whether he could replicate this kind of natural selection in his code, creating a generalizable form of intelligence that could learn about its body and function no matter what that body looked like, and no matter what that function was.

Hod Lipson, the director of the Creative Machines Lab. “This is not just another research question that we’re working on — this is the question,” he said. Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

This kind of intelligence, if possible to create, would be flexible and fast. It would be as good in a tight situation as humans — better, even. And as machine learning grew more powerful, this goal seemed to become realizable. Dr. Lipson earned tenure, and his reputation as a creative and ambitious engineer grew. So, over the past couple of years, he began to articulate his fundamental motivation for doing all this work. He began to say the c-word out loud: He wants to create conscious robots.

“This is not just another research question that we’re working on — this is the question,” he said. “This is bigger than curing cancer. If we can create a machine that will have consciousness on par with a human, this will eclipse everything else we’ve done. That machine itself can cure cancer.”

The Creative Machines Lab, on the first floor of Columbia’s Seeley W. Mudd Building, is organized into boxes. The room itself is a box, broken into boxy workstations lined with boxed cubbies. Within this order, robots, and pieces of robots, are strewn about. A blue face staring blankly from a shelf; a green spiderlike machine splaying its legs out of a basket on the ground; a delicate dragonfly robot balanced on a worktable. This is the evolutionary waste of mechanical minds.

The first difficulty with studying the c-word is that there is no consensus around what it actually refers to. Such is the case with many vague concepts, like freedom, meaning, love and existence, but that domain is often supposed to be reserved for philosophers, not engineers. Some people have tried to taxonomize consciousness, explaining it away by pointing to functions in the brain or some more metaphysical substances, but these efforts are hardly conclusive and give rise to more questions. Even one of the most widely shared descriptions of so-called phenomenal consciousness — an organism is conscious “if there is something that it is like to be that organism,” as the philosopher Thomas Nagel put it — can feel unclear.

Wading directly into these murky waters might seem fruitless to roboticists and computer scientists. But, as Antonio Chella, a roboticist at the University of Palermo in Italy, said, unless consciousness is accounted for, “it feels like something is missing” in the function of intelligent machines.

The invocation of human features goes back to the dawn of artificial intelligence research in 1955, when a group of scientists at Dartmouth asked how machines could “solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.” They wanted to model advanced capacities of the brain, like language, abstract thinking and creativity, in machines. And consciousness seems to be central to many of these capacities.

But trying to render the squishy c-word using tractable inputs and functions is a difficult, if not impossible, task. Most roboticists and engineers tend to skip the philosophy and form their own functional definitions. Thomas Sheridan, a professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that he believed consciousness could be reduced to a certain process and that the more we find out about the brain, the less fuzzy the concept will seem. “What started out as being spooky and kind of religious ends up being sort of straightforward, objective science,” he said.

(Such views aren’t reserved for roboticists. Philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland and the neuroscientist Michael Graziano, among others, have put forward a variety of functional theories of consciousness.)

Dr. Lipson and the members of the Creative Machines Lab fall into this tradition. “I need something that is totally buildable, dry, unromantic, just nuts and bolts,” he said. He settled on a practical criterion for consciousness: the ability to imagine yourself in the future.

According to Dr. Lipson, the fundamental difference among types of consciousness — human consciousness and octopus consciousness and rat consciousness, for example — is how far into the future an entity is able to imagine itself. Consciousness exists on a continuum. At one end is an organism that has a sense of where it is in the world — some primitive self-awareness. Somewhere beyond that is the ability to imagine where your body will be in the future, and beyond that is the ability to imagine what you might eventually imagine.

“So eventually these machines will be able to understand what they are, and what they think,” Dr. Lipson said. “That leads to emotions, and other things.” For now, he added, “we’re doing the cockroach version.”

The benefit of taking a stand on a functional theory of consciousness is that it allows for technological advancement.

One of the earliest self-aware robots to emerge from the Creative Machines Lab had four hinged legs and a black body with sensors attached at different points. By moving around and noting how the information entering its sensors changed, the robot created a stick figure simulation of itself. As the robot continued to move around, it used a machine-learning algorithm to improve the fit between its self-model and its actual body. The robot used this self-image to figure out, in simulation, a method of moving forward. Then it applied this method to its body; it had figured out how to walk without being shown how to walk.

This represented a major step forward, said Boyuan Chen, a roboticist at Duke University who worked in the Creative Machines Lab. “In my previous experience, whenever you trained a robot to do a new capability, you always saw a human on the side,” he said.

Recently, Dr. Chen and Dr. Lipson published a paper in the journal Science Robotics that revealed their newest self-aware machine, a simple two-jointed arm that was fixed to a table. Using cameras set up around it, the robot observed itself as it moved — “like a baby in a cradle, watching itself in the mirror,” Dr. Lipson said. Initially, it had no sense of where it was in space, but over the course of a couple of hours, with the help of a powerful deep-learning algorithm and a probability model, it was able to pick itself out in the world. “It has this notion of self, a cloud,” Dr. Lipson said.

Was it truly conscious, though?

The risk of committing to any theory of consciousness is that doing so opens up the possibility of criticism. Sure, self-awareness seems important, but aren’t there other key features of consciousness? Can we call something conscious if it doesn’t feel conscious to us?

Dr. Chella believes that consciousness can’t exist without language, and has been developing robots that can form internal monologues, reasoning to themselves and reflecting on the things they see around them. One of his robots was recently able to recognize itself in a mirror, passing what is probably the most famous test of animal self-consciousness.

Joshua Bongard, a roboticist at the University of Vermont and a former member of the Creative Machines Lab, believes that consciousness doesn’t just consist of cognition and mental activity, but has an essentially bodily aspect. He has developed beings called xenobots, made entirely of frog cells linked together so that a programmer can control them like machines. According to Dr. Bongard, it’s not just that humans and animals have evolved to adapt to their surroundings and interact with one another; our tissues have evolved to subserve these functions, and our cells have evolved to subserve our tissues. “What we are is intelligent machines made of intelligent machines made of intelligent machines, all the way down,” he said.

This summer, around the same time that Dr. Lipson and Dr. Chen released their newest robot, a Google engineer claimed that the company’s newly improved chatbot, called LaMDA, was conscious and deserved to be treated like a small child. This claim was met with skepticism, mainly because, as Dr. Lipson noted, the chatbot was processing “a code that is written to complete a task.” There was no underlying structure of consciousness, other researchers said, only the illusion of consciousness. Dr. Lipson added: “The robot was not self aware. It’s a bit like cheating.”

But with so much disagreement, who’s to say what counts as cheating?

Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has written about artificial consciousness, said that the issue with this general uncertainty was that, at the rate things are progressing, humankind would probably develop a robot that many people think is conscious before we agree on the criteria of consciousness. When that happens, should the robot be granted rights? Freedom? Should it be programmed to feel happiness when it serves us? Will it be allowed to speak for itself? To vote?

(Such questions have fueled an entire subgenre of science fiction in books by writers such as Isaac Asimov and Kazuo Ishiguro and in television shows like “Westworld” and “Black Mirror.”)

Issues around so-called moral considerability are central to the animal rights debate. If an animal can feel pain, is killing it for its meat wrong? If animals don’t experience things in the same ways that humans do, does that mean we can use them for our own enjoyment? Whether an animal has certain conscious capacities often seems to come to bear on whether it has certain rights, but there is no consensus around which capacities matter.

In the face of such uncertainty, Dr. Schwitzgebel has advocated for what he calls “the design policy of the excluded middle.” The idea is that we should only create machines that we agree definitely do not matter morally — or that definitely do. Anything in the gray area of consciousness and mattering is liable to cause serious harm from one perspective or another.

Robert Long, a philosopher at the Future for Humanity Institute at Oxford University, supports this caution. He said that A.I. development at big research labs and companies gave him the sensation of “hurtling toward a future filled with all sorts of unknown and vexing problems that we’re not ready for.” A famous one is the possibility of creating superintelligent machines that could annihilate the human population; the development of robots that are widely perceived to be conscious would add to the difficulties of tackling these risks. “I’d rather live in a world where things are moving a lot more slowly, and people think a lot more about what’s being put in these machines,” Dr. Long said.

But the downside of caution is slower technological development. Dr. Schwitzgebel and Dr. Long conceded that this more deliberate approach might impede the development of A.I. that was more resilient and useful. To scientists in the lab, such theorizing can feel frustratingly abstract.

“I think that we are not close to this risk,” Dr. Chella said when asked about the risks of creating robots with conscious capacities similar to humans. Dr. Lipson added: “I am worried about it, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks. If we’re going on this pathway where we rely more and more on technology, technology needs to become more resilient.”

He added: “And then there’s the hubris of wanting to create life. It’s the ultimate challenge, like going to the moon.” But a lot more impressive than that, he said, later.

In one of the workstations in the Creative Machines Lab, a self-aware robot arm started moving. Yuhang Hu, a graduate student in the lab, had initiated a mechanical sequence. For now, the robot wasn’t watching itself and forming a self-model — it was just moving around randomly, twisting or shifting once every second. If it could be conscious, it wasn’t yet.

Dr. Lipson leaned back in his chair and looked at the robot, then said to Mr. Hu, “Another thing we need to do is have this robot make a model of itself by just bumping into things.”

Mr. Hu, his hair tussled, put his chin in his hand. “Yes, that’s interesting,” he said.

Dr. Lipson continued, “Because even someone who is blind can form an image of itself.”

“You can just put a box over it,” Mr. Hu said.

“Right,” Dr. Lipson said. “It has to be a rich enough environment, a playground.”

The two scientists sat there thinking, or appearing to think, staring at the robot that continued to move on the table.

This, Dr. Lipson noted, is how research is done in his lab. The researchers look inward and notice some element of themselves — a bodily self-awareness, a sense of their surroundings, a self-consciousness around other people — and then try to put that element into a machine. “I want to push this as far as I can,” Dr. Lipson said. “I want a robot to think about its body, to think about its plans.”

In a sense, it is the simplest of all robotics exercises, like something elementary school children do with old electronics. If you can do it with a retired printer, why can’t you do it with your mind? Break it down, see how it works, and then try to build it back up again.

nytimes.com · by Oliver Whang · January 6, 2023

4. Marders, Leopards, Abrams, Bradleys: What's All This New Western Weaponry Being Sent, Or Not Sent, To Ukraine?

Lions and tigers and bears. oh my... (Sorry I could not resist the attempt at humor).

Marders, Leopards, Abrams, Bradleys: What's All This New Western Weaponry Being Sent, Or Not Sent, To Ukraine?

January 06, 2023 17:00 GMT

By Robert Coalson

rferl.org · by Robert Coalson

In a flurry of announcements, some of Ukraine's major Western allies pledged this week to send advanced armored combat vehicles to help Kyiv in its fight against Russia's invasion.

Both the United States and Germany said they would provide new powerful weapons to Kyiv: 50 M2 Bradley fighting vehicles from Washington and 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles from Berlin.

The January 5 announcement came a day after France made a similar pledge to send new weapons -- AMX-10 RC armored reconnaissance vehicles -- in a development that marks a clear escalation of Western military support.

Washington was expected to reveal details of its latest military-aid package on January 6.

While representing a significant upgrade in military aid, the Bradley vehicles are not atop Kyiv's main wish-list: main battle tanks, such as the U.S.-made M1 Abrams or the German Leopard.

"There is no rational reason why Ukraine has not yet been supplied with Western tanks," Zelenskiy said in a video address on January 4.

The U.S. Bradley armored personnel carrier has been the workhorse of the U.S. military since the 1980s.

The developments come as Europe's largest military conflict since World War II approaches its first anniversary on February 24. Intense fighting continues in eastern and southern regions, with Moscow regularly carrying out missile and drone strikes targeting Ukraine's civilian energy infrastructure and causing regular cutoffs of electricity, heating, and water across the country.

Ukrainian officials have also been warning that Moscow could be planning a major offensive in coming weeks.

But what exactly is the West providing now, and are its infantry fighting vehicles a step toward providing the heavy armor that Kyiv craves?

Tank Killers

The Bradley has been the workhorse of the U.S. military since the 1980s. The vehicle destroyed more enemy tanks in combat in Iraq than the Abrams tank, according to Military-today.com.

"The Brad...is NOT a tank," wrote retired U.S. Lieutenant General Mark Hertling on Twitter," but it can be a tank killer…and a troop carrier."

Bradleys can provide "support of both offensive and defensive operations, providing a level of firepower and armor that will bring advantages on the battlefield as Ukraine continues to defend their homeland," Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder said on January 5.

"The Brad...is NOT a tank," wrote retired U.S. Lieutenant General Mark Hertling on Twitter," but it can be a tank killer…and a troop carrier."

Germany's Marder, meanwhile, is also considered an effective antitank weapon, according to experts, supporting an antitank missile system called the MILAN, in addition to a 20-millimeter cannon.

The French vehicles, sometimes classified as a "light tank," are a highly mobile vehicle -- with wheels, not treads -- that are built around a turret-mounted 105-milimeter gun.

Hertling described the French AMX-10 RC as a "tank killer," adding it is "a great piece of kit." The vehicle is also often described as a tank "hunter."

"These are also low-maintenance, high-mileage, easy to support, and great cross-country on any kind of terrain," he added.

The West has already sent tens of billions of dollars of weaponry and military equipment to Ukraine dating even before the February 24 invasion.

WATCH: In the battle for the eastern city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian gunners are hitting Russian troops with Soviet-era Akatsiya artillery, coordinating their accuracy with multiple spotter drones, they say.

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Over the summer, Washington, which alone has sent $20 billion in equipment since the invasion, took a leap forward in its armaments when it shipped sophisticated long-range artillery systems called HIMARS to Ukraine. HIMARS are widely believed to have played a decisive role in Ukraine's counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson.

Still, Ukraine has been asking for more, including heavy tanks to go head-to-head with Russia's own formidable tanks, which have played a significant part in its invasion force since the beginning. The workhorse of Russia's armored personnel carrier fleet has long been the BMP-3.

Before the invasion, Ukraine's own armored vehicle arsenal numbered around 6,500 tanks, according to official statements, plus around 7,000 combat vehicles. The overwhelming majority of that was aging, Soviet-era equipment, sometimes in dubious repair.

In the past 10 months, Ukraine has also received more than 230 Soviet-era tanks from the Czech Republic and Poland.

The French AMX-10 RC vehicles, sometimes classified as a "light tank," are a highly mobile vehicle -- with wheels, not treads -- that are built around a turret-mounted 105-milimeter gun.

Ukraine's military claims to have destroyed over 3,000 of Russia's tanks. And the independent Dutch research group Oryx, which keeps a running total of documented incidents of Russian military equipment knocked out of commission, puts the figure at about 1,600 tanks.

In addition to directly confronting that threat, experts said the Western infantry fighting vehicles will give Ukrainian ground troops relatively safe and speedy mobility. The vehicles are intended to enable infantry to keep up with and support armored attacks by heavy tanks.

While the new equipment does not answer Kyiv's pleas for tanks, it could pave the way for such a move in the future by giving Ukraine's military the tools need to support its own tank fleets and deploy them more effectively.

'The Time For Taboos Has Passed'

Despite this clear escalation of military assistance, the West remains reluctant to provide the heavy tanks for which Kyiv has been clamoring. Kyiv has also been asking for advanced fighter jets, like the U.S. F-16.

"Disappointing signals from Germany while Ukraine needs Leopards and Marders now," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba posted on Twitter in September, before the Marder package materialized. "Not a single rational argument on why these weapons cannot be supplied, only abstract fears and excuses. What is Berlin afraid of that Kyiv is not?"

How Elon Musk’s satellites have saved Ukraine and changed warfare

And the worries about what comes next

The Economist

IT IS ONE of the wonders of the world—or, more accurately, off the world. The Starlink constellation currently consists of 3,335 active satellites; roughly half of all working satellites are Starlinks. In the past six months new satellites have been added at a rate of more than 20 a week, on average. SpaceX, the company which created Starlink, is offering it as a way of providing off-grid high-bandwidth internet access to consumers in 45 countries. A million or so have become subscribers.

And a huge part of the traffic flowing through the system currently comes from Ukraine. Starlink has become an integral part of the country’s military and civil response to Russia’s invasion. Envisaged as a celestial side-hustle that might help pay for the Mars missions dear to the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, it is not just allowing Ukraine to fight back; it is shaping how it does so, revealing the military potential of near-ubiquitous communications. “It’s a really new and interesting change,” says John Plumb, America’s assistant secretary of defence for space policy.

Appropriately enough, the story started with a tweet, one sent by Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, two days after the invasion:

@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars —Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space—Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.

Mr Musk replied to him within hours, saying that the Starlink service had been turned on over Ukraine and that the hardware would follow. Within days lorries full of the pizza-sized flat dishes used to access the satellites began to arrive in Ukraine.

By May around 150,000 people were using the system every day. The government quickly grew to rely on it for various communication needs, including, on occasion, the transmission of the nightly broadcast by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. Because the dishes (some of which are round and some rectangular) and their associated terminals are easily portable and can be rigged to run off a car battery, they are ideal for use in a country where the electricity and communication networks are regularly pounded by Russian missiles. When Kherson was liberated in November Starlink allowed phone and internet services to resume within days.

Crucially, Starlink has become the linchpin of what military types call C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). Armies have long relied on satellite links for such things. An hour before Russia launched its attack, its hackers sought to disable thousands of modems associated with the terminals which provide access to the main satellite used by Ukraine’s army and government, among many other clients. But the capabilities Russia sought to degrade in that pre-emptive strike were far less advanced than the capabilities Ukraine enjoys today.

Starlink does not just provide Ukraine’s military leaders with a modicum of connectivity. The rank and file are swimming in it. This is because of the singular capacities of the Starlink system. Most satellite communications make use of big satellites which orbit up at 36,000km. Perched at such a height a satellite seems to sit still in the sky, and that vantage allows it to serve users spread across very large areas. But even if such a satellite is big, the amount of bandwidth it can allocate to each user is often quite limited.

The orbits used by Starlink’s much smaller satellites are far lower: around 550km. This means that the time between a given satellite rising above the horizon and setting again is just minutes. To make sure coverage is continuous thus requires a great many satellites, which is a hassle. But because each satellite is serving only a small area the bandwidth per user can be high. And the system’s latency—the time taken for signals to get up to a satellite and back down to Earth—is much lower than for high-flying satellites. High latencies can prevent software from working as it should, says Iain Muirhead, a space researcher at the University of Manchester. With software, rather than just voice links, increasingly used for tasks like controlling artillery fire, avoiding glitches caused by high latency is a big advantage.

Seeker to shooter

Franz-Stefan Gady, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank, recently visited the Ukrainian front lines and saw an example of what cheap, ubiquitous connectivity makes possible: a sort of Uber for howitzers. Ukrainian soldiers upload images of potential targets via a mobile network enabled by Starlink. These are sent to an encrypted group chat full of artillery-battery commanders. Those commanders then decide whether to shell the target and, if so, from where. It is much quicker than the means used to co-ordinate fire used up until now.

The system also makes drone warfare much easier. In September a Ukrainian naval drone washed up in Sevastopol, the Crimean headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with what looked like a Starlink terminal attached to its stern. In late October seven similar drones were used to mount a successful attack on the port. Ukraine published a video of the attack shot from the boat’s bow. “Ukrainian military operations are hugely dependent on having access to the internet,” says Mr Gady, “so Starlink is a most critical capability.” A Ukrainian soldier puts it more starkly. “Starlink is our oxygen,” he says. Were it to disappear “Our army would collapse into chaos.”

This kind of connectivity is something no previous army has enjoyed. Western armies fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq had access to some vast flows of data. For the most part, though (with special forces being the notable exceptions) they found it very hard to get that information to where it was needed in a timely manner.

One former member of the British armed forces recounts an operation he conducted a decade ago to find some explosives. While he flew to the site where they were thought to be, a surveillance drone showed them being moved elsewhere. Brigade headquarters, which could see the drone’s feed, passed on the intelligence to his company command over a satellite channel by voice. The company command then relayed the news to his helicopter by high-frequency radio. Each hop added time and confusion. In today’s Ukraine, he notes, he could simply have accessed the live drone feed himself.

Such frustrations led the Pentagon to start talking of “Joint All-Domain Command and Control” (JADC2, for those keeping score at home), an approach which would allow information from more or less any drone, plane or soldier to be easily sent to whatever missile, gun or aircraft might be best placed to use it. If that sounds familiar, it should. “What we are seeing with Starlink is where the US wants to be in terms of connectivity,” says Thomas Withington, an expert on battlefield communications. Developing such a capability within the military-industrial complex has been slow; the bureaucracy has proved predictably resistant. Now it seems all but available off the shelf.

This would be of only theoretical interest if Starlink, conceived as a civilian service, were an easy target in times of war. So far it has not been. Russia’s armed forces have lots of electronic-warfare equipment that can locate, jam or spoof radio emissions. But the Starlink signals are strong compared with those from higher flying satellites, which makes jamming them harder. And the way that the dishes use sophisticated electronics to create narrow, tightly focused beams that follow satellites through the sky like invisible searchlights provides further resistance to interference. “Unless you can get a really good bead on where that beam is coming from, it’s very hard to get a jamming signal into the receiver,” says Mr Withington.

If its signals cannot be jammed, the system itself could be attacked instead. In September the Russian delegation to a UN working group on space security hinted that, despite its status as a nominally civilian system, Starlink might be considered a legitimate military target under international humanitarian law—which is probably a fair assessment. In May researchers affiliated with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army published a paper calling for the development of “countermeasures” that could be used against Starlink.

Cyber-attacks like the one aimed at Ukraine’s legacy satellite system on February 24th are one possibility. So far, though, similar sallies against Starlink appear to have been ineffective, in part thanks to SpaceX’s ability to quickly update the system’s software. Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare for the Office of the Secretary of Defence, has said the speed of the software response he witnessed to one attack was “eye-watering”.

Physical attacks are also possible. Starlink satellites relay signals they receive to fairly nearby “ground stations”. They in turn send the data on to the internet or back up to another satellite, depending on where the intended recipient is. They thus represent a vulnerability. But with ground stations which handle the traffic to and from Ukraine on NATO soil, a physical attack would be a severe escalation.

And then there are the satellites themselves. America, China, India and Russia have missiles that can shoot satellites out of the sky. Again, though, using them would seem a severe escalation. It would also be a lot less useful against a constellation like Starlink than against older systems. Knocking out a single Starlink would achieve more or less nothing. If you want to damage the space-based bit of the system, you need to get rid of lots of them.

Scorched orbits

One possibility would be to try to trigger a chain reaction in which the debris from one target goes on to destroy secondary targets, debris from which spreads the destruction yet farther in a sort of scorched-orbit strategy. Such a wholesale attack on a global commons would be a desperate measure. Experts contacted by The Economist were also unconvinced that it would be of military benefit. For one thing, debris clouds would start out mostly confined to particular orbits, and expand only gradually. “It’s not obvious to me that, even if you deliberately set out to create as much debris as possible, that you could deny the use of Starlink on a timescale that was relevant to a war,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard who keeps a census of objects in orbit

For another, if debris is tracked, smart satellites can dodge it. Debris created by an irresponsible Russian missile test in November 2021 came within 10km of a Starlink satellite some 6,000 times, according to COMSPOC, a firm which monitors satellites and debris. But no harm has been done, partly because Starlink satellites can tweak their orbits to reduce the risks from incoming debris. They did so 7,000 times in the six months from December 2021.

And when satellites are small and mass-produced, as the Starlink ones are, they can be replaced with much less fuss than would previously have been the case. Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, an ngo, reckons that Starlink’s use in Ukraine marks “the beginning of the end” for the value of anti-satellite missiles. “[It] turns out they’re only useful if your adversary relies on small numbers of really large/expensive satellites.”

A good indicator that adversaries do not see Starlink as fatally vulnerable is that they are scrambling to develop similar things themselves. In 2020 China filed documents with the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body, for a 13,000-satellite constellation of its own. Russia has ambitions for a 264-satellite constellation designed to operate in higher orbits than Starlink. America’s allies are enthusiastic too. In 2020 Britain’s government, Bharti, an Indian multinational, and Eutelsat, a satellite operator, rescued OneWeb, a firm which had gone bankrupt building a constellation of Starlink-like satellites. In November 2022 the EU agreed to begin developing its own low-orbit communications system, IRIS2. Starlink also has an American would-be competitor in the form of Kuiper, a planned constellation bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and of Blue Origin, a rocket firm.

But Starlink has a huge advantage: SpaceX’s launch capacity. SpaceX has the world’s best satellite-launch system, the partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. That allows it to launch satellites at an unmatchable rate. There were 61 Falcon-9 launches in 2022. The company is talking of getting its Falcon-9 launch rate up to two rockets a week this year, with one a week devoted to Starlink. Each such launch will add another 50 or so satellites.

Starships and enterprise

More is to come. The company is working on a much larger, fully reusable spacecraft called Starship which would be capable of launching some 400 Starlinks at a time, and thus taking the constellation from thousands of satellites to tens of thousands. The long-delayed first attempt to get a Starship out into space and back is expected this year. The programme has seen explosive failures in the past and may well do so in the future; among other things Starships will have to re-enter the atmosphere at much higher speeds than the first stage of a Falcon 9 does. But investors in the company, which is privately held, seem confident. SpaceX raised $2bn in 2022; it is said to be in the process of raising more at a price which values the company at $137bn.

Meanwhile other launch systems are either unavailable, undersized or have yet to get up and running. American rules stop Western companies from buying launch services from China, and since the war began launch contracts with Russia have been cancelled. OneWeb, which relied on Russian launchers for its launches until this year, now uses SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and a launcher developed by India.

The United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin which is SpaceX’s only direct American competitor in the launch market is retiring its current launchers in favour of a new one, the Vulcan Centaur, which has yet to fly. Much the same is going on at Arianespace in Europe. The first flight of the New Glenn launcher being developed by Mr Bezos’s Blue Origin is not expected to take place until the end of the year, if then.

Reinforcements ready to deploy

This means that Mr Musk currently has a dominant position in both the launch market and satellite-internet operations. This concentration of power provides three causes of concern. Mr Musk is an unaccountable single individual; Mr Musk’s other business interests may play a role in his decisions; and Mr Musk is Mr Musk.

In September Ukrainian officials told The Economist that Mr Musk had rejected a Ukrainian request to allow Starlink to be used in Crimea, a part of Ukraine which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, and where Ukraine has conducted numerous raids on ports and air bases. In October Mr Musk polled his followers on Twitter as to whether Ukraine should cede territory to Russia as part of a peace deal, which provoked outrage from the country’s leaders. Mr Musk replied by suggesting that SpaceX would stop carrying the costs for Ukraine’s use. But he quickly changed course, and relations seem to have settled down since. “I’m super grateful to them for what they’re doing for us,” says Mr Fedorov, the minister for digital transformation. Still, SpaceX has continued to restrict the use of Starlink in Russian-occupied territory, according to Ukrainian officials, a power that is unusual for a commercial company, to say the least.

Per bellica ad astra

If service is denied in some places, it can be permitted in others, even if it is unwelcome. Some countries do not want Starlink services making the internet uncontrollable, and so do not allow the company to operate within their borders. But this can be circumvented when ground stations in neighbouring countries are close enough. Starlink services are currently being used by protesters in Iran, says Mr Musk, despite the country not officially allowing the technology in. In future, service will be possible even in places with no convenient ground stations nearby; the next generation of satellites is intended to be able to pass messages between themselves, rather than sending them back down to the nearest ground station, creating a network which could be much more unevenly tethered to the Earth.

But that does not mean countries will be forced to accept Starlink; some will have ways to fight back. Given the importance of its Shanghai gigafactory to the fortunes of Tesla, Mr Musk’s car company, for example, it would be something of a surprise to see Starlink being made available to internal opponents of the Chinese state. And could Taiwan, if push came to shove, depend on Starlink in the way that Ukraine has come to? Just conceivably not—which may explain why the island is accelerating efforts to develop its own satellite constellation.

All that said, Mr Musk also has reason to keep on the right side of the government closest to him: America’s. And that might make good business sense. SpaceX already gets a lot of money from government contracts—it is NASA’s biggest commercial supplier, and launches big satellites for the country’s soldiers and spooks.

And for all Starlink’s impact in Ukraine, it is not as yet a commercial success. Flat antennae which can scan the skies currently cost more than most customers are willing to pay; the company is subsidising them in the hope that, as the market grows, the costs will fall. But military users of the system can be expected to pay full price, and then some, from day one. In December SpaceX revealed the existence of Starshield, a subsidiary aimed explicitly at serving such customers. It is hard to doubt that the decision to help Ukraine was idealistic. But it could well prove to have been a fortuitous loss-leader, too.■

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

The Economist

6. Lessons for the Next War From Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: 12 Experts Weigh In

A long read. A wide range of views. A lot to ponder here.

Lessons for the Next War From Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: 12 Experts Weigh In

Twelve experts weigh in on how to prevent, deter, and—if necessary—fight the next conflict.

Foreign Policy · by Anders Fogh Rasmussen · January 5, 2023

By Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Anne-Marie Slaughter, David Petraeus, Lee Hsi-min, Graham Allison, Rose Gottemoeller, Elisabeth Braw, Craig Singleton, Chris Krebs, Tai Ming Cheung, Maria Shagina, Mauro Gilli, and Vance Serchuk

NEW FOR SUBSCRIBERS: Click + to receive email alerts for new stories written by Elisabeth Braw Elisabeth Braw

Predictions about the future of war follow narratives and intellectual fashions. At the beginning of the millennium, the emergence of high-tech drones—the U.S. military’s all-seeing eyes in Afghanistan—fueled futuristic visions of battles contested by robots and computers. By the mid-2010s, the success of Russian information operations, election interference, and weaponized corruption in Europe and the United States had given rise to the idea that even a major country could be controlled without the use of force. Others thought that mutual dependence on trade and commerce in a globalized age would render a major war unlikely—or keep it locally contained.

The outbreak of the largest and most brutal European war since 1945 has once again reminded us not to project our wishful thinking or extrapolate from the past. So much of what pundits, politicians, and journalists predicted in the early hours of Russia’s three-pronged attack on Ukraine was wrong: that Russia’s military machine would be overwhelming, that Ukraine would quickly collapse, and that the West’s response would be weak. Those were just the first surprises. Who’d have thought trenches and artillery would feature so prominently in a 21st-century war?

This article appears in the Winter 2023 print issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Drawing the right lessons from the first 10 months of the Russian invasion, then, not only matters for the survival of Ukraine. It is also vital for deterring and preventing a future conflict—and, if necessary, fighting one. The most obvious potential hot spot and one that involves even greater stakes is, of course, Taiwan. Yet for every parallel between Russia’s designs on Ukraine and China’s on Taiwan, there is a difference. Taiwan is a small island, whereas Ukraine is the second-largest country on the European landmass. China is a large and technologically sophisticated adversary, whereas most of us have been stunned to see how technologically, organizationally, and tactically unsophisticated the Russian military really is. Some of the lessons emerging from Ukraine will therefore be only marginally relevant. Others should be quite useful.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not the only ongoing war in the world today, nor is Taiwan the only potential future one. What marks today’s conflict as generational is its nature as a war of conquest by a nuclear-armed power, its deadliness, and the fact that it has drawn in dozens of countries—if not as combatants, then as supporters. It is vital for humanity far beyond Ukraine that a war of this scale not become a new norm.

With the caveat that these are necessarily snapshots, Foreign Policy asked 12 experts to give us their views on the most important lessons of Russia’s war. Each writer is a prominent specialist in his or her field, and they answer a broad range of questions. Why did prevention and deterrence fail? What have we learned about strategy and technology on the battlefield? How do we deal with the return of nuclear threats? Some of these lessons are general, while others apply specifically to a potential conflict in Asia.

At the same time, the epic failure of Moscow’s war plan in Ukraine may also be a lesson for future aggressors about the many things that can go unpredictably wrong even for a major power with a bristling arsenal. If we’re lucky—and depending on the extent to which Russia realizes any of its aims via negotiation or in battle—this war may have made a future one just a little less likely. If so, that would be a very good lesson indeed.—Stefan Theil, deputy editor

ALLIANCES

An illustration shows a hand representing China reaching toward a sun-flag-shaped porcupine representing Taiwan.

Sébastien Thibault illustration for Foreign Policy

Turn Taiwan Into a Bristling Porcupine

By Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO secretary-general and founder of the Alliance of Democracies

It is impossible not to draw parallels between Russia’s attack on Ukraine and China’s ambitions for Taiwan: a nuclear-armed autocracy threatening a smaller democracy, revanchist rhetoric about reuniting the motherland, a leader turning increasingly repressive at home and aggressive abroad. However, for every similarity there is a significant difference. China is now one of the world’s two predominant powers, and the global consequences of a war in the Taiwan Strait would be manifestly greater. A China-Taiwan war would quickly draw in other countries.

Both Ukraine and Taiwan sit outside of formal treaty alliances, and neither benefits from a security guarantee like NATO’s Article 5. This makes it even more important that the free world learns the right lessons from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine if it wants to deter any attempt by China to take Taiwan by force.

First, when you do not have a treaty to rely on, words matter. In the buildup to the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his ambitions explicit: “True sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia,” he wrote in July 2021. Days before the invasion, he called Ukraine an “inalienable part of [Russia’s] history, culture, and spiritual space.” Putin repeatedly denied Ukraine’s right to exist, yet Western leaders ignored the risk of a full-scale invasion.

The world cannot make the same mistake with China. When Chinese President Xi Jinping says Beijing has the right to use all measures necessary to “reunite” Taiwan with China, we should take him seriously. As we should when a Chinese ambassador says Taiwanese citizens will need to be reeducated after reunification. China’s actions in Hong Kong show what the “One China” principle means in practice. There should be no doubt of China’s ambitions or what they will mean for the people of Taiwan.

Second, any strategy for Taiwan to deter and, if need be, defeat an attack must be based on technological superiority. It was the Ukrainians’ bravery that repelled the initial advance, but turning the tide of the war was achieved with superior Western-made weapons. Meanwhile, Russia has increasingly turned to crude Soviet-era equipment, not least due to the Western sanctions now hobbling the Russian arms industry.

China, despite making significant progress in recent years, is still crucially dependent on the United States and its allies for the most advanced microchips and the machinery to develop them. The United States’ economic and technological advantages over China give the democratic world a significant military edge. Maintaining this edge will be vital to deterring any efforts to take Taiwan by force.

Third, allies and partners must act together. The free world has shown impressive unity in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine—a unity Putin surely did not expect. Significant sanctions were agreed in record time, not only by NATO allies but also by South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other countries. China, which is far more reliant than Russia on global supply chains, must understand that any attack on Taiwan would spark an equally unified response.

The lesson from Russia’s invasion is that deterrence will fail unless the messaging is strong and united before war starts. That’s why the economic consequences of a move against Taiwan must be made clear to Beijing now. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to Beijing last November with a group of CEOs in tow sent the opposite message. Xi is actively working to address China’s supply chain vulnerabilities—can Taiwan and its partners say they are doing the same?

Fourth, weapons are what counts. Although sanctions are important, it is the vast military aid provided predominately by the United States that has changed the reality on the ground in Ukraine. Superior weapons allowed the Ukrainians to repel the initial Russian advance and take back large swaths of territory. If Ukraine had had these capabilities before the war, Putin may have thought twice before launching a full-scale invasion. The same lesson applies to Taiwan. With the help of its partners, the island must become a porcupine bristling with armaments to deter any possible attempt to take it by force. China must calculate that the cost of an invasion is simply too high to bear.

Finally, the most important way to deter a Chinese move on Taiwan now is to ensure a Ukrainian victory. If Russia can gain territory and establish a new status quo by force, China and other autocratic powers will learn that the democratic world’s resolve is weak. That in the face of nuclear blackmail and military aggression, it chose appeasement over confrontation.

This outcome would make the entire world a more dangerous place. That is why all those who believe in a democratic Taiwan and a rules-based international order must work to ensure Ukraine prevails.

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ECONOMY

An illustration shows hands choking off supply to a China star representing economic sanctions.

Sébastien Thibault illustration for Foreign Policy

To Deter War, Have a Better Sanctions Plan

By Maria Shagina, research fellow on sanctions at the International Institute for Strategic Studies

Despite threatening Russia with massive sanctions in the run-up to its full-scale attack on Ukraine, the West failed to deter the Kremlin. Whether Moscow did not think the threats were credible or the signaled costs weren’t high enough, sanctions are now aimed at a different purpose: constraining Russia’s financial, economic, technological, and military capabilities as the war goes on.

China, Taiwan, and the West are each drawing their own lessons. Western governments, for one, have learned that sanctions alone are unlikely to prevent or stop military aggression. Russia has shown a high threshold for pain. China, too, would be willing to accept significant economic costs to pursue its declared goal of unification with Taiwan, by force if need be.

For the West to use economic statecraft against China, whose GDP is 10 times as large as Russia’s, would be exceedingly difficult. Unlike Russia, China is so enmeshed in the global economy that any attempt to wage economic war would create considerable backlash, putting Western unity to the test. While Russia can weaponize energy and other commodities, China has many more options for retaliation. Cutting ties with China could turn into the economic version of nuclear war: mutual assured destruction where everyone loses.

But if China’s global integration now works like a shield for Beijing, the tide is gradually turning as more Western countries reconsider their exposure. Identifying chokepoints and decreasing vulnerabilities will enable the West to exert pressure more assertively. As the Europeans are learning this winter with respect to Russian energy, domestic resilience is the bedrock of statecraft.

The Russian case has shown the importance of a broad sanctioning coalition. This not only sent a strong symbolic message to Moscow, but it was also instrumental in freezing more than $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves and cutting off Moscow’s access to advanced Western technology. To target China, building a multilateral coalition would be just as essential but much harder. Bringing Asian and European allies on board would be particularly tricky due to their close economic relations with Beijing. With so many economic interests at stake, crafting exemptions—and the right combination of flexibility and toughness—would be key to keeping a sanctions coalition together.

For now, the United States is going ahead unilaterally using its unique position in semiconductor supply chains. Washington’s sweeping export controls on advanced computing chips to China will stifle the country’s ability to advance its capabilities in emerging technologies—including those with military applications.

Taiwan, keenly aware of the failure of deterrence as it pursues its contingency planning in case of an invasion, has been working on assembling a coalition of like-minded countries to stand up against China. In particular, the Taiwanese government is keen to build a multilateral sanctions coalition to send a strong message to Beijing about the high costs incurred by any potential aggression.

Beijing, in turn, has been carefully watching the sanctions against Russia unfold—in particular, the West’s weaponization of finance—in order to prepare its own strategy regarding Taiwan. China is very conscious of its weakest spot: its high reliance on dollars and other Western currencies for international trade and foreign reserves.

China has taken several steps to reduce its exposure to the dollar system. For the first time since 2010, China now holds less than $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds. As part of China’s financial decoupling, five state-owned enterprises voluntarily delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, including energy giants PetroChina and Sinopec. The Chinese Communist Party has banned its officials from owning foreign accounts and other property abroad, a step aimed at minimizing the impact of future sanctions. Beijing is also advancing the digital yuan, which would be independent of the existing global payments network and could help China evade the sorts of sanctions introduced against Russia.

However, seriously reducing dollar dependence would require many other regulatory, governance, and institutional changes that Beijing does not appear ready to implement—not least because the leadership has prioritized political stability. Still, Western financial sanctions have given Chinese efforts a boost insofar as they have raised the yuan’s appeal for other countries hoping to sanction-proof their economies. Any development to price oil or other commodities in yuan—as opposed to merely using the yuan as a settlement currency—has the potential to trigger a snowball effect in de-dollarizing other sectors.

The limitations of Western economic statecraft against China make planning all the more important. The United States and its allies should start to design a proactive policy of economic statecraft today. As Russia’s war in Ukraine makes clear, not having a credible sanctions coalition and endgame in place greatly reduces the chance of deterring, stopping, or winning a war.

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TREATIES

An illustration shows missile-shaped scopes trained on each other to indicate nuclear treaties and oversight.

Sébastien Thibault illustration for Foreign Policy

A New Push for Nuclear Guardrails

By Rose Gottemoeller, lecturer at Stanford University and former NATO deputy secretary-general

The world needs a Russia that is not playing with nuclear escalation and threatening nuclear holocaust. If Russia continues on its present course, we will be dealing with a very large nuclear pariah state with thousands of warheads and the missiles to deliver them. A major goal of U.S. policy must therefore be to move Moscow away from nuclear saber-rattling and back to the more responsible role it has played since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis in controlling nuclear weapons and avoiding their proliferation. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union cooperated to avoid nuclear escalation.

The United States has also been looking for ways to talk to China about its nuclear intentions, but thus far, Beijing has kept silent. The Chinese are pursuing a rapid nuclear modernization, including the construction of more than 300 new silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles and a major expansion of their warhead arsenal, from fewer than 500 today to more than 1,000 by the 2030s.

The meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, last November hopefully broke the ice. Although the two leaders did not announce any planned nuclear talks, they did discuss nuclear policy, agreeing that a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought—and that nuclear weapons should not be used in Eurasia, widely seen as a direct reproof to Moscow. China also endorsed a statement by the G-20 that threatening the use of nuclear weapons, as Russia has done, is “inadmissible.”

Perhaps the renewed specter of nuclear weapons use during the war in Ukraine will open the door to nuclear consultations with China. An interesting place to begin would be the proposal that Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin put on the table in February 2022, as they met in Beijing just before Russia’s invasion. In their joint declaration, the two leaders broached the idea of a moratorium on intermediate-range missiles in Europe and Asia, an agreement that could replace the now-defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

China owns a significant number of intermediate-range missiles and might be willing to consider some controls on them—in return for reciprocal controls on U.S. and Russian weapons. That will depend, of course, on what exactly Xi had in mind when he suggested a moratorium on such missiles in Asia.

With both Russia and China, the goal should be to move both countries away from threatening nuclear behavior and back toward a shared interest in controlling nuclear weapons and avoiding their proliferation. This goal will be easier to accomplish if negotiators can focus, at least to begin with, on pragmatic and narrow objectives—resuming inspections under the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, resolving Russian concerns about U.S. implementation of the treaty, figuring out what makes sense for a new treaty, and understanding the ideas behind China’s proposed moratorium. Grander, more ambitious discussions of what makes for nuclear stability in the future can wait.

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STRATEGY

Members of a Ukrainian drone unit watch the sky while hunting for Russian positions to target.

Members of a Ukrainian drone unit watch the sky while hunting for Russian positions to target with artillery during a battle near the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region on Oct. 20, 2022. Finbarr O’Reilly photo

Counter Russia’s and China’s Playbook

By David Petraeus, former CIA director and retired U.S. Army general, and Vance Serchuk, executive director of the KKR Global Institute

One of the most powerful military lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine is that China’s, Russia’s, and Iran’s strategy to keep the United States out of their respective backyards can also be employed against these revisionist powers in defense of the U.S.-led world order.

The concept of anti-access/area denial, or A2/AD, first emerged in the late 1990s, as Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran sought to devise asymmetric ways to thwart Washington’s ability to deploy its forces into what these geopolitical rivals considered their rightful spheres of influence. Having watched the United States decisively evict Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 and sail the U.S. 7th Fleet unmolested around Taiwan during the 1995-96 crisis over the self-governing island, U.S. adversaries went to school on the U.S. way of war and began investing in systems designed to disrupt that model at its weakest points.

In particular, China, Russia, and Iran started amassing large numbers of ever more capable precision-guided munitions, including cruise, ballistic, and surface-to-air missiles, hypersonic weapons, and, more recently, drones and loitering munitions, along with over-the-horizon targeting capabilities. These armaments offered the tantalizing promise of overwhelming the relatively small number of U.S. military bases and aircraft carrier strike groups that form the backbone of U.S. power projection in the Persian Gulf, Western Pacific, and other regions and of closing the skies to U.S. aircraft. Better yet, these weapons could be acquired at a fraction of the cost of the exquisite U.S. assets they put at risk. Thus, the many and the cheap began to stack up favorably against the few and the expensive.

In an ironic twist, however, it is the Ukrainians who have now successfully thrown up a kind of A2/AD bubble to frustrate the Kremlin’s power projection. Rather than attempting to match Moscow with aircraft, ships, and combat vehicles in a head-to-head contest, Ukraine has devastated the Russian invasion force and its vulnerable supply lines through relentless, large-scale application of short- and long-range precision firepower. This includes anti-tank guided missile systems, guided multiple launch rocket system rounds, precision artillery munitions, suicide drones, guided anti-aircraft missiles, and anti-ship missiles such as the Neptune cruise missile that sunk the prized flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in April 2022.

Also indispensable to Ukraine’s battlefield success has been the tactical virtuosity with which its soldiers have wielded these asymmetric weapons. Throughout history, military struggles have often been decided less by the balance of material resources than the creativity and determination with which they have been employed. By making its units both dispersed and highly mobile—firing and then rapidly repositioning themselves—Kyiv has been able to carry out relentless, withering strikes on Russian targets while evading counterfire. Conversely, Russian forces have achieved their greatest success in their ruthless attacks on Ukraine’s critical civilian infrastructure—stationary, vulnerable targets such as power stations, water treatment plants, and electrical grids. But while the Russian attacks are inflicting terrible suffering on the Ukrainian population, they appear to have strengthened public resolve to liberate the country from the Russian invaders.

The Western Pacific is very different from Ukraine: predominantly maritime, encompassing vastly greater distances, and contested by combatants with far more technologically advanced capabilities. Yet the principles of A2/AD to deter and, if necessary, defeat aggression are equally applicable. In particular, Ukraine points to the imperative for the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies to prioritize the near-term ability to field large numbers of relatively inexpensive, highly mobile anti-ship and anti-air missiles that can be dispersed and maneuvered throughout the first and second island chains against Beijing’s increasingly formidable naval and air forces. Large quantities of unmanned air, sea, and ground systems can amplify these missiles in the U.S. order of battle.

Russia’s war also underscores the need for an allied industrial base that can sustain production of these weapons at scale and with speed. Kyiv has been rescued by the impressive willingness of Washington and other Western backers to draw down their own arsenals to arm Ukraine, as well as by its land borders with NATO countries, which facilitate this resupply. But in the event of conflict in the Western Pacific, no one will come to the rescue of an understocked U.S. military that runs out of munitions. Russia’s invasion has thus delivered an invaluable wake-up call to Defense Department planners and congressional appropriators that the post-Cold War defense industry infrastructure and workforce are inadequate for the kind of sustained warfare that the new era of great-power competition may compel.

Lastly, the devastating effects inflicted by long-range fire in Ukraine are likely to spur even greater focus on significantly upgrading the protection, resilience, and redundancy of critical U.S. and allied bases, headquarters, and logistical depots, as well as the development of more effective integrated anti-missile and counter-drone defense systems—including accelerating disruptive defensive technologies such as directed energy and high-power microwave weapons. These may hold the greatest long-term potential to disrupt the current military balance favoring A2/AD weapons by providing inexpensive and affordable ways to interdict them.

Out of the tragedy unleashed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, it is possible to envision the emergence of a set of military capabilities that not only beat back Russia’s assault on Ukraine but also dim other revisionist regimes’ dreams of conquest. If so, the West will owe thanks to the Ukrainians for showing how the A2/AD playbook developed to defeat the United States and its allies on the battlefield can instead prove their salvation.

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REFORMS

Ukrainian soldiers train in the Kharkiv region.

Ukrainian soldiers train in the Kharkiv region on May 23, 2022. Amnon Gutman photo for Foreign Policy

Taiwan Must Make Up for Lost Time

By Lee Hsi-min, former chief of the general staff of the Taiwanese armed forces

The most important lesson from Russia’s war in Ukraine concerns the role of time. After licking its wounds following heavy losses to Russia in 2014, Ukraine implemented sweeping reforms to its military force structure and training to enable the resistance we are seeing today. This did not happen overnight. To be similarly ready to resist a Chinese attack, Taiwan needs to seriously prepare now.

Ukraine began its defense reforms with holistic, interagency reviews at the strategic, operational, tactical, and—importantly—institutional levels. The 2016 Strategic Defense Bulletin identified key shortcomings in Ukraine’s national security architecture and priorities for transformation, including alignment with NATO principles and standards as well as reforms to force planning, cybersecurity, C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), procurement, logistics management, military training, and more. Among many important changes, a reserve force was established to augment and fill gaps in the regular military’s operations during war.

Ukraine’s reforms were initiated with clearly stated strategic and operational objectives and expected outcomes, alongside institutional and legal changes that would support their implementation. They were complemented with frequent, realistic training to practice and test operational concepts. Training was bolstered by U.S. and other NATO militaries through initiatives such as the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine, established in 2015. Mentoring and advising Ukrainian military trainers as well as implementing effective training systems and facilities bolstered Ukraine’s self-reliance on the battlefield. Command post exercises with allies and partners laid the groundwork for future communications and intelligence sharing.

Reforms and training take time to implement and institutionalize. Without time, Ukraine would not have achieved the level of combat readiness to resist Russia that it has today. Taiwan, facing an existential threat from Beijing, should learn from this example and clarify its defense strategy now, integrating three key elements: effective equipment, effective training, and strengthened will to resist.

An asymmetric defense strategy, like Taiwan’s Overall Defense Concept, is anchored on denial and buoyed by mobile, dispersed, lethal, and survivable defense systems. It remains the basis for Taiwan’s ability to resist an all-out invasion by China. Taking into account escalating Chinese coercion, Taiwan’s military should allocate its limited resources toward weapons systems most suited for Taiwan to defend against both invasion and coercion. The joint operational plan should be flexible to accommodate different wartime scenarios. Taiwan’s military must be able to fight under decentralized command in a communications-denied environment. An all-volunteer territorial defense force should be established to train civilians in crisis responses, educate the public on national defense, and strengthen the will to fight. This would lay the groundwork for an all-of-society response during war.

In Russia’s war of attrition in Ukraine, stockpiling and the constant flow of military supplies have benefited from Ukraine’s unique geographic advantages, including its vast territory and land borders with NATO countries. Taiwan, on the other hand, sits 100 nautical miles off China’s coast and would be cut off for resupply at the onset of war. Therefore, Taiwan must stockpile munitions, spare parts, other key military equipment, fuel, and food to survive a prolonged conflict—and build hardened, distributed facilities to protect this materiel. Even if Taiwan receives billions of dollars in security assistance from the United States and other like-minded nations, the first time a U.S. ship delivers supplies to Taiwan should not be during war. Communications and logistics networks, including access to commercial ones such as the Starlink satellite network, would be difficult to introduce and set up in the heat of war. In fact, Chinese countermeasures against Starlink are already being discussed, making it urgent for Taiwan to develop counter-countermeasures and redundant communications. China presents a more technologically and militarily sophisticated threat to Taiwan than Russia is for Ukraine, and its intentions cannot be calculated accurately. Timely stockpiling and other preparations need to be undertaken now.

Taiwan must reorient its priorities as soon as possible, and the United States could support reforms as it did for Ukraine after 2014. A U.S.-Taiwan joint working group could be established at both the policy and working levels to support reforms of force structure, weapons acquisition, military doctrine, operational planning, logistics management, tactics, and training. Bilateral contingency simulations and exercises could identify key operational challenges and guide this transformation. With an almost $19 billion backlog in U.S. weapons deliveries to Taiwan, a bilateral steering group on defense industrial cooperation and supply chain security could better identify and streamline processes for maintenance, repair, and overhaul, as well as joint manufacturing of weapons in Taiwan and collaborative research and development. Moreover, U.S. support could signal other allies to lay the foundation for intensified cooperation with Taiwan.

Russia made a strategic error when it attacked Ukraine in 2014. Ukraine’s defeat laid bare its mistakes and shortcomings, and the devastation caused by Russia’s invasion strongly motivated Kyiv to overhaul its military and prepare it for the fight we are witnessing today. While lessons from the current invasion are still being written, it is becoming abundantly clear that the Chinese Communist Party cannot afford to give Taiwan the time to reflect and rebuild as Ukraine was able to do. This could very well be the reason why China has incrementally raised the level of coercion against Taiwan, while keeping it below a threshold that would raise panic in Taiwan and elsewhere. For its part, Taiwan cannot afford to wait for a catastrophe like Ukraine’s to stimulate the massive but slow-moving reforms it needs. Taiwan needs to act now to be ready for when Chinese leader Xi Jinping decides to attack.

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INFO WAR

An illustration shows missiles shooting out of a bullhorn to represent the weaponization of information.

Sébastien Thibault illustration for Foreign Policy

Ukraine’s Victory in the Information Space Is No Reason for Complacency

By Elisabeth Braw, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and columnist at Foreign Policy

On Dec. 3, 2021, the Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence was predicting an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. When December came and went without an attack, people began dismissing the reports—until the spies were proved right on Feb. 24. But the United States’ willingness to share its detailed knowledge of Russia’s war plans with the world put the Kremlin on the back foot from the start. Since most military attacks depend on the element of surprise, U.S. intelligence sharing made Russia’s invasion far less potent than it could have been.

Strategic communications—the delivery of a unified message by governments through formal channels and information operations—have always been a powerful tool in war. But today, with belligerents and other interested parties able to target their messaging directly at population groups of their choosing, these kinds of information operations stand to become an even more crucial weapon.

Today, belligerents in a war can spread deception, flooding the information space with disinformation that at least some in the targeted audience will believe. Russia was long seen to have mastered the dark art of strategic communications laced with falsehoods, a key factor in its successful 2014 takeover of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, during which many Western audiences were confused by competing claims. This time, Kyiv’s communications teams have handsomely beaten Moscow’s with their upbeat messaging focusing on the Ukrainians’ strengths. While the Russians primarily rely on traditional communications, such as news outlets Sputnik and RT (now banned in many Western countries), in addition to stilted posts on social media, Ukraine’s communicators excel in Hollywood-style videos, catchy memes, and messaging full of up-to-date colloquialisms and even humor. They’ve succeeded in making the Russians look as modern and credible as Brezhnev-era Soviets.

None of this, however, can prevent falsehoods—including those shared by social media users in the belief that such content helps their side—from contributing to a dangerous fog of war that muddies the perception of publics and decision-makers alike. The limitless availability of information and citizens’ inability to verify it (how many of you have completed information literacy training?) only compound the problem. What if people can’t tell whether a war has broken out in their country? That’s exactly what happened in Poland in mid-November, when a missile struck Polish soil and killed two people. For a few febrile hours, Poles feared their country was at war, a feeling fueled by news and social media around the world. Only when U.S. President Joe Biden and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg explained that it was most likely a Ukrainian air defense missile that had strayed across the border did Poles feel safe.

Imagine if China wanted to frighten Taiwan into submission. Freedom House ranks Beijing’s influence on Taiwanese media as being “very high,” so China could begin by spreading, via Taiwanese media and on social media, accounts of Taiwanese government ineptitude and incompetence. Beijing could then share accounts of Chinese plans to attack Taiwan. Ordinary citizens would not be in a position to judge the difference between a credible military plan and mere deception. If an attack were to take place, China would then count on many Taiwanese to be too dispirited to contribute to the island’s defense.

Just as a military’s readiness to defend against an attack depends on constant exercising, ordinary citizens can train their information defense. In 2018, as Russian aggression above and below the military threshold was growing, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency published “If Crisis or War Comes,” a leaflet that teaches the country’s population about crisis preparedness and how to know whether a war has started. Swedes now know that their government will communicate an attack via radio, television, and push notifications on mobile phones. Imagine if every liberal democracy had similar leaflets and instructions. Instead of relying on media speculation and Twitter hysterics—possibly influenced by a belligerent state and its sympathizers as part of an information operation—citizens would know exactly what to look for. Citizens would also have a better idea of how to verify information. “What is the aim of this information? Who has put this out?” the Swedish leaflet asks. That kind of information literacy is good advice for peacetime and war alike.

While some countries, such as Finland, teach information literacy in schools and consider it a civic competence, many others lack a comprehensive strategy to help their citizens understand the information coming at them. This informational chaos is fertile ground for subversive efforts by state and nonstate actors. Taiwan, too, has recognized this risk and launched a string of media literacy initiatives in 2021. One can only hope they take root very soon.

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ARMS SECTOR

A multiple rocket launcher fires toward Russian positions near the front line in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

A Ukrainian BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launcher fires toward Russian positions near the front line in Ukraine’s Donetsk region on July 27, 2022. Amnon Gutman photo for Foreign Policy

Lessons for China’s Defense Industry

By Tai Ming Cheung, director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation

The Russia-Ukraine war has cast a dismal light on the state of the Russian defense industry, especially the limitations of its conventional weapons sector. The wide range of arms and equipment produced by the aerospace, naval, ordnance, electronics, and information warfare sectors have not provided the decisive edge for Russia to defeat a far smaller and technologically inferior enemy. As Russia’s stocks of advanced weaponry have dwindled, its forces are increasingly relying on old Soviet-era arms that are far less reliable and precise. Russia’s strategic weapons systems, however, have performed with devastating effect, as cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles pummel cities, civilian infrastructure, and military targets.

With the establishment of a special coordination council in October 2022, Moscow has begun the urgent task of revamping its defense industrial base to meet the expansive needs of the armed forces in the ongoing war. This initial step will likely lead to a far-reaching makeover of Russia’s conventional defense industry in order to meet the enormous task of thoroughly rebuilding and rearming a broken military establishment.

For the Chinese defense industry, the starting question in assessing the war’s implications is the extent to which it is a useful template for future military conflict. Beijing’s pathway of long-term defense technological and industrial development is largely laid down by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) doctrine of “informatized local wars”—a term describing high-tech intensive wars in an information-centric environment with limited attention paid to industrial-era mechanized warfare. This is fundamentally the inverse of the Russia-Ukraine war—a classic industrial-era attritional war with pockets of 21st-century innovation, such as the creative use of drones. China’s military doctrine draws more on lessons of conflicts such as the U.S.-led campaigns against Iraq in 1991 and 2003. As China has already invested considerable effort and resources to build a defense industry whose central focus is information-centric warfare, increasingly deploying various disruptive technological capabilities emerging in the artificial intelligence age, the long-term impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on Chinese defense planning may be limited.

One obvious lesson for the PLA from this war is the need to ensure adequate munition stockpiles for a prolonged war. As China has not fought a major war since invading Vietnam in 1979, it has little institutional know-how on how to sustain a war.

For all of Beijing’s efforts to forge an indigenous defense industrial base, the Russian defense industry and its Soviet predecessor still cast a long and influential shadow on the Chinese system. The organizational and industrial foundations of the Chinese defense-industrial complex were imported almost wholesale from the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and China has imported tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, components, technological know-how, and industrial capacity from Russia since the early 1990s, both legally and illicitly. Russia’s military-technological imprint is clearly visible across the PLA’s front-line arsenal, in which numerous types of Chinese fighter aircraft, transport planes, air defense systems, and naval vessels are derived from Russian models.

As the Russia-Ukraine war and Western sanctions will likely turn Russia into a net military importer for the foreseeable future, a golden opportunity has opened up for China to displace Russia as a top-tier arms exporter. The timing could not be better, as the Chinese defense industry is in the process of upgrading its brand image from a manufacturer of good-enough, lower-quality, affordable arms to a supplier of higher-end weapons. If this market grab is successful, it could create a highly lucrative income stream to help support China’s ambitious defense transformation.

For now, the Russia-Ukraine war has paused the Sino-Russian defense industry relationship as Beijing has sought to avoid getting dragged into the conflict and to protect its companies from becoming entangled in Western sanctions on Russia. But this hiatus is likely to be short-term. The question is not if but when, at what scale, and in which domains Sino-Russian cooperation on defense technology will resume.

The development of strategic deterrence capabilities, primarily directed against the United States, is where there appears to be the greatest convergence of mutual interests between the two countries. Moscow’s latest defense modernization plans have placed top priority on the development of new generations of intercontinental ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, laser weapons, nuclear submarines, and autonomous systems—all areas of great interest to Beijing.

The Chinese and Russian leaderships know they have a far better chance of successfully meeting the challenges posed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and intensifying techno-military competition with the United States together than separately. If their similarly state-directed defense industries are able to forge an effective and enduring defense technological and industrial relationship, they will pose a far more complex and credible military challenge to the United States.

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HYBRID OPERATIONS

A Ukrainian soldier peers out of a captured Russian tank near the front line in the Donetsk region.

A Ukrainian soldier peers out of a captured Russian tank near the front line in the Donetsk region on Nov. 22, 2022. Libkos/AP

Don’t Fight the Last War

By Craig Singleton, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war. But Chinese leader Xi Jinping likely understands that he cannot wage a future conflict over Taiwan by replicating the strategy that failed Russia in Ukraine. Instead, rather than risk a similar stalemate, Xi will almost certainly double down on the nonmilitary, less visible, and more cost-effective war that Beijing is already waging—and, in many ways, winning.

By declaring last September that the United States would defend Taiwan if China attacked, U.S. President Joe Biden complicated Xi’s calculus about an amphibious invasion—Beijing’s most ambitious and aggressive option to pursue reunification. No doubt the military balance of power in the Taiwan Strait is trending in China’s direction. One day, the pace of China’s military modernization and the poor state of Taiwan’s defenses could render an invasion a rational decision for Beijing.

For Chinese leaders, however, the war in Ukraine has laid bare the undeniable risks and prohibitive costs associated with a full-scale assault on Taiwan. Trying to distill only the military lessons of Russia’s war therefore distracts from much more likely Taiwan scenarios.

Indeed, Beijing has long recognized that a direct military engagement with Washington and its allies over Taiwan could result in a decisive defeat for China or lead to nuclear war. Beijing likewise understands that conventional conflict escalation often leads to strategic and political failure—even for a superpower. With these lessons in mind, China has hewed closely to a broad-spectrum gray-zone campaign focused on disrupting the Taiwanese government’s functions, paralyzing the island’s infrastructure, and leveraging an unrelenting disinformation campaign to undermine Taiwan’s political processes and bolster pro-unification narratives.

Yet the status quo remains politically untenable for China, as Taiwanese sentiment on reunification drifts ever further from Beijing’s goals. Moreover, China’s short-of-war strategy, in which pressure necessarily begets more pressure, has thus far failed to achieve the degree of political control or military supremacy that Beijing requires to shift its focus toward more conventional military operations. Russia demonstrated the importance of establishing these prerequisites when it successfully invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. In all likelihood, therefore, Beijing’s coercive campaign against Taiwan will reach new heights in 2023.

To undermine the Taiwanese public’s faith in the ability of the armed forces to protect the island’s sovereignty, China’s near-daily aerial and naval incursions will likely increase in number and intensity. So, too, will media images broadcast by Beijing about threatening military exercises—for instance, depicting Chinese forces storming a replica of Taiwan’s presidential palace. Beyond straining Taiwan’s defenses, such actions relentlessly reinforce China’s narrative that reunification is inevitable, one way or the other. Nevertheless, what seems like the next logical step in the coercion campaign—applying an aerial or naval blockade—appears less likely, because doing so could galvanize separatist sentiment and international sympathy for Taipei, neither of which Beijing is currently prepared to counter.

With an imminent military scenario increasingly unlikely, the bulk of China’s strategy will fall to its Central Propaganda Department, which trains cyberarmies and disseminates disinformation aimed at demoralizing and dividing Taiwanese society. In further weaponizing the information space, Beijing will progressively leverage social media platforms, online chat groups, and traditional media companies to bolster its reunification narrative. It will also use these channels to draw investment and tourists away from Taiwan and toward China. Additionally, Beijing will escalate cyber- and other network attacks against Taiwan’s critical infrastructure, financial institutions, and other targets. The goal is to exploit the island’s asymmetric economic dependence on China to pressure its politicians from pursuing policies that would bring Taiwan closer to formal independence.

Lastly, China will escalate its nonmilitary war of attrition on Taiwan’s political processes and international standing. Beijing will continue covertly funding pro-unification political parties and candidates before Taiwan’s next national election in 2024. China will similarly sustain its efforts to diplomatically strangle Taiwan, principally by degrading its participation in international forums and further winnowing down the small number of countries that recognize Taiwan.

Xi’s problem in all this—which he may not yet realize—is that China’s aggressive attempts at maneuvering below a crisis threshold could have the unintended effect of catalyzing the very superpower crisis he seeks to avoid. Gaming out these gray-zone efforts suggests that seriously escalating these provocations could lead the United States and its allies to embrace more forceful counter-responses in the future. In other words, unchecked hybrid war against Taiwan runs the real risk of resulting in a hot war with Washington, perhaps sooner rather than later. Should that happen, all bets are off. Just ask Russia.

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CYBERDEFENSE

An illustration shows ones and zeros with zeros in the shape of coffins to represent the gravity of real war over cyberwar.

Sébastien Thibault illustration for Foreign Policy

Real War Trumps Cyberwar

By Chris Krebs, partner at Krebs Stamos Group and former director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

An especially intriguing aspect of the Russia-Ukraine war is the apparent absence of Russian cyberwarfare success. Many cybersecurity experts have been wondering why. Did we overestimate the abilities of the Russian cyberjuggernaut? Were the Russians simply incompetent? Or is there something about the Ukrainian defenders? The answer may provide valuable lessons going forward—not just for the current war but a potential future one as well.

There is no question Russia has demonstrated prior ability to disrupt systems. Russian cyberattacks shut down the Ukrainian electricity grid in 2015 and 2016. In 2017, the NotPetya attack on Ukrainian banks, ministries, and other targets, ultimately spreading to many other victims, caused more than $10 billion in total damages. At the start of the invasion last February, Russia was therefore expected to integrate cyberattacks into the conflict. But the Russians were no longer operating against unsuspecting, unprepared, and overmatched opponents. The Ukraine of 2022 was no longer the Ukraine of 2014.

Scoring the impact of cyberattacks in conflict is always a challenge. What we know is that Russia deployed several destructive attacks at the onset of hostilities. They knocked Ukrainian government websites offline, disrupted telecommunications capabilities, and paralyzed key government and industry networks. The cybersecurity industry immediately swooped in to tear apart the Russian malware, revealing an array of powerful toolkits that suggested years of development, diversification, and refinement. Moscow’s failure to disable communications networks allowed the Ukrainian government to coordinate military defenses, communicate with Ukrainian citizens, dominate the information space, garner international support, and battle on.

What explains the Russians’ lack of cyberdominance? Did their teams lack the necessary time to plan and get in position? Was it their hubris, thinking Ukraine would be easily occupied in a matter of days? Did they want the networks to be intact for their own use after the invasion? All are possible, and only the Kremlin knows the answer.

Part of the answer may lie on the side of the defenders. Like their military preparations, the Ukrainians had improved the nation’s cyber-resilience. It’s well known in the tech industry that Ukrainian software engineers are some of the best around, so it should come as no surprise that they were able to stand up and defend their digital sovereignty. Also new to the equation were U.S. Cyber Command’s Defend Forward teams, which had moved into Ukraine as war seemed imminent in December 2021. They helped kick Russian hackers out of vulnerable Ukrainian networks in advance of Russian military operations.

The private sector, too, sprang into action. Companies tooled up to protect their own operations in Ukraine and throughout Europe. Where Ukrainian domestic capacity wasn’t enough, the global cybersecurity community stepped up. Innovative new partnerships emerged to help defend Ukrainian networks, including the Cyber Defense Assistance Collaborative, which brought together more than a dozen companies.

This defensive surge paid off. Even under constant Russian attacks, Ukrainian network defenders avoided catastrophe. One key lesson: Preparation, prevention, and resilience are possible in the face of a digital onslaught by a formidable adversary. Russia’s persistent engagement with Ukrainian networks over the years allowed Ukrainians to practice defending against them.

When considering China’s designs on Taiwan, there is no doubt they are both learning from Russia’s experience in Ukraine. Although it is not certain that China will invade, the costs of being wrong are high. Defensive measures in the digital domain won’t snap into place overnight, so planning and implementation by governments and businesses must begin now.

The main takeaway from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might be that cyberwarfare is more of a contributing factor than a deciding one, although even contributing factors can make an impact. The Ukrainians understood this relationship and, with help, prepared accordingly. In the absence of a clear, decisive, cyber-enabled victory over Ukraine, the Russians have demonstrated the most important limitation of cyberwarfare: In war, violence still dominates.

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TECHNOLOGY

Police officers look at collected fragments of Russian rockets that hit Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Police officers look at collected fragments of Russian rockets that hit Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Dec. 3, 2022.Libkos/AP

Beware of Wrong Lessons From Unsophisticated Russia

By Mauro Gilli, senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich

The starting point for drawing lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war is the fact that Russian forces were significantly limited by the insufficient quality and quantity of their technology and capabilities. China, Taiwan, and the latter’s allies are technologically more sophisticated and, most importantly, possess precise munitions. Looking at how accuracy and precision in battlefield sensors and munitions have shaped the war, we can extrapolate trends and derive important implications for the Taiwan Strait.

Modern sensors and precise munitions have made close combat extremely deadly, a trend that began with the firepower revolution of the late 19th century. Today, ground forces are exposed to a multitude of active and passive sensors that can detect their presence and expose them to enemy fire. Small commercial drones and larger military drones, for example, have played a critical role in the war by scouting the territory, detecting and geolocating enemy forces, and enabling precise targeting with various weapons systems. Satellite-based radars have also played an important role, including radars that can penetrate tree foliage, which deprives ground forces of an easily accessible option for concealment. The posting of videos and photos in soldiers’ social media accounts and the creation of online baits have created new opportunities for geolocating enemy forces, which further exposes them to fire.

Russia’s lack of technological sophistication and capabilities should not obscure the fact that all weapons are targetable. With modern sensors and munitions, any platform that is not survivable in contested territory is a target. This trend started in the 1950s and became self-evident in the 1970s, when U.S. Army strategist William DePuy wrote: “What can be seen, can be hit. What can be hit, can be killed.” Recent technological advances have further strengthened these trends. The Ukrainian government, for example, developed a mobile app that allows its citizens to provide real-time information about incoming missiles and aircraft flying at low altitude to avoid other forms of detection.

The growing availability of sensors, drones, and satellites, as well as advances in artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning, will further enhance the ability to detect and locate enemy targets. Whether the target is a drone, a piloted aircraft, a ship, an artillery unit, a multiple rocket launcher, or an air defense system, any conventional military platform is vulnerable to being detected, identified, tracked, geolocated, and targeted by counter-battery fire, surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, and the like. That’s why widespread hype about “game-changing” weapons systems (such as Turkish TB2 long-endurance drones) is dangerously misplaced. No single system can, by itself, win battles, let alone wars.

The implications of these dynamics for a future conflict are straightforward. First, the overwhelming technological imperative driving military engagements will continue to be the competition between, on the one hand, detecting and precision-targeting the enemy at increasingly longer range and, on the other, avoiding detection by enemy sensors. This is true for land, air, and naval forces. For Taiwan, this imperative entails deploying air defense and sea denial assets that can threaten incoming Chinese air and sea power while avoiding suppression and destruction by Chinese fire.

Second, the competition between hiding and finding requires, first and foremost, highly competent, proficient, and disciplined personnel. As the historian Kenneth Werrell put it in his book Archie to SAM: “High-technology weapons demand high-quality personnel.” As Russia’s war in Ukraine has shown, the lethality of modern precision weapons has dramatically shrunk the margin for error; a single cellphone on a public network, for example, can quickly doom a unit. This is why, in addition to supplying weapons, the United States has also helped Taiwan with training in recent years.

Third, in the age of long-range engagements, communications are going to play an even more critical role in military operations; providing accurate real-time information about incoming missiles and other weapons, for example, is a necessary condition for survival.

Fourth, the role of sensors and real-time targeting will make reliability and redundancy in communication networks even more important in future conflicts, which in turn requires competition in electronic warfare. In 1973, Soviet Navy Adm. Sergei G. Gorshkov predicted that “the next war will be won by the side that best exploits the electromagnetic spectrum.” Gorshkov’s prediction proved right in Syria in 1982, in Iraq in 1991, and in Ukraine in 2022. The Russian military’s technological backwardness shouldn’t distract the parties in any future conflict from this essential fact.

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DOCTRINE

An illustration shows a nuclear cloud rising from the dustbin of history.

Sébastien Thibault illustration for Foreign Policy

Nuclear Weapons Still Matter

By Graham Allison, professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to strike Ukraine with nuclear weapons are like a flash of lightning illuminating the international chessboard. They provide a stark wake-up call to the brute fact that nuclear arsenals containing thousands of warheads remain foundational in shaping relations among great powers. While experts, commentators, and many others have been urging Washington to discount or even ignore Putin’s threats, U.S. President Joe Biden and his team know better. Claims that Ukraine lacks good targets, Russian bombs might not work, Putin’s officers could refuse to execute orders, or the risk of radiation spreading into Russia would be unacceptable are dangerous wishful thinking. Biden, CIA Director William Burns, and U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan have concluded that Putin is deadly serious. As Sullivan acknowledged last September, “We have communicated directly, privately, at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia.”

What does Biden know that makes him take Putin’s threats so seriously, and what does that tell us about any future conflict? First, Putin commands a nuclear arsenal that can literally erase the United States from the map. During the Cold War, strategists coined the acronym MAD—mutual assured destruction—to make vivid the ugly reality that a major nuclear power can destroy its adversary but doing so would trigger a retaliatory response in which the attacker would be destroyed as well. Even in the 21st century, we must still survive in a MAD world.

Second, U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s grand imperative still holds: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Why is the United States not sending Americans to fight on the battlefield alongside Ukrainians? Because that would mean killing Russian troops, and as Biden has repeatedly insisted, the United States will not fight World War III for Ukraine. In considering whether and how the United States enters a future conflict—say, against China over Taiwan—U.S. presidents know that Americans’ essential national interest is the survival of their country.

Third, Putin’s nuclear arsenal includes about 1,900 tactical nuclear weapons designed for use at shorter range. With an explosive impact equivalent to the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, a single weapon striking Kharkiv or Kyiv in Ukraine could match the 140,000 deaths caused by the first atomic bomb.

Fourth, as students of strategy know, nuclear weapons are a weaker power’s equalizer. During the Cold War, when NATO faced 100 Soviet divisions poised to attack West Germany and reach the English Channel in less than a week, how did the United States attempt to deter them? By deploying hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons to stop the Soviet advance—and announcing its readiness to use them. While the United States has largely phased out tactical nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, Russia has made them a major pillar of its security posture.

Fifth, seven decades after the first and last use of nuclear weapons in war, what is now called the “nuclear taboo” has led many to believe that nuclear weapons are no longer usable in war—despite the fact that both the United States and Russia continue to rely on the threat to use nuclear weapons to defend themselves. This is the essence of nuclear deterrence. Moreover, the United States also provides a nuclear umbrella to protect treaty allies that choose not to acquire their own nuclear weapons by guaranteeing that the U.S. arsenal will be used to defend them. Ukraine, Georgia, and Taiwan, however, have no commitment from the United States to use nuclear weapons in their defense.

Finally, it is hard to deny an uncomfortable echo of similarity between Washington’s nuclear umbrella over NATO allies and Putin’s threat of nuclear retaliation against any attack on newly annexed territory. Both cases raise questions of credibility. During the Cold War, West Germans wondered whether the United States, in responding to a Soviet invasion, would really risk Boston for Bonn. If U.S.-backed Ukrainians overrun Ukrainian territory that Putin now calls Russia, would Putin order nuclear strikes to stop them? Until it is challenged, it is difficult to distinguish between a serious threat and a bluff.

The United States is fortunate to have a seasoned Cold Warrior at its helm, applying lessons of statecraft and strategy from the defeat of the Soviet Union, recognizing the unique danger posed by nuclear weapons, thinking clearly about vital U.S. interests, and, at the same time, finding ways to meet challenges like Putin’s without stumbling into nuclear war. Russia’s war in Ukraine has taught us that the nuclear age did not end with the Cold War. As far as any eye can see, nuclear arsenals will remain a major pillar of the international security order.

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DETERRENCE

An illustration shows pixelated pointer icons leaving rocket-like trails over a cityscape to represent the use of cyberwar as a deterrent in place of nuclear weapons.

Sébastien Thibault illustration for Foreign Policy

Put an End to Brinkmanship

By Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America

2045 will mark the first century of the nuclear age. The nations of the world should come together to make it the last. They should look at the Russian brinkmanship over Ukraine and past nuclear standoffs and say: enough.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened nuclear escalation, emphasizing that “this is not a bluff.” If Russia were to cross the threshold—most likely with a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield, rather than an intercontinental strategic nuclear weapon—the United States would most likely respond with a conventional attack on a target in Russia or on the Russian navy. And the world would once again hold its breath as the clock ticks toward Armageddon.

Even as Putin wields his threats, Iran continues its march toward nuclear power status, and North Korea steps up its missile tests designed to remind neighboring nations of the consequences if those missiles were nuclear-tipped. It is just such proliferation that led former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Sen. Sam Nunn to publish a joint call for a “world free of nuclear weapons” in 2007. They warned of a world of 30 or more nuclear powers and concluded that relying on nuclear weapons to deter war was becoming “increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.”

The Kissinger-Shultz-Perry-Nunn declaration contrasts sharply with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s 1967 speech announcing that humanity’s future would be “overshadowed with the permanent possibility of thermonuclear holocaust.” To forestall that eventuality, he said, the United States had developed an “assured-destruction capability” vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The era of mutual assured destruction—rightly known as MAD—was officially launched. Despite arms control negotiations, treaties, and the appeals of statesmen and activists, it is still with us.

A principal legacy of Russia’s war in Ukraine should be the replacement of MAD with MAC—mutual assured cyberdestruction. Countries of all sizes can now develop the capability to bring one another’s societies to a grinding halt by depriving them of electricity, including the backup generators that keep vital emergency services running. In the coming era of electric vehicles, such an attack would bring transport to a halt as well.

If physical bombs destroy physical highways, digital bombs destroy data highways. Banking would stop, manufacturing would stop, and the delivery of medicines to pharmacies would stop. Grocery stores would run out of inventory and be unable to restock. Water treatment plants would cease to function. Communications would cease. Imagine the pandemic lockdown—but without internet, phones, transport, or essential services.

The resulting chaos would be the slower-acting equivalent of a neutron bomb, killing people while leaving buildings untouched. Death would be indirect, caused by the failure of systems designed to keep people alive rather than by actively killing them. The survivors of this mass death would gradually be able to return to preindustrial ways or, where there is enough nondigital resilience built into existing systems, to a pre-cellphone, pre-internet era. Either way, the economic and social devastation would end life as we know it.

Military planners around the world have long assumed that the opening move of any conflict is to knock out enemy communications by disabling satellites, cutting undersea cables, destroying cell towers, paralyzing internet servers, and so on. Russia preceded its invasion of Ukraine with multiple cyberattacks on Ukrainian government websites and has waged a cyberwar against the Ukrainian energy, media, finance, business, and civil sectors, even as it continues its attacks on the government.

To date, these attacks have succeeded, above all, in stiffening the Ukrainian people’s will to resist. Hacks can be repaired, and defenses against them can be steadily strengthened. Like the evolution of nuclear doctrine, effective cyberdeterrence depends on the ability of each adversary to deliver a knock-out first strike. States are thus racing to perfect electromagnetic pulse bombs and other weapons that would paralyze the digital flows keeping infrastructure and economies alive.

This new arms race has plenty of dangers. The growing capacity of some powers to threaten others with total cyberdestruction could become more credible than the threat to use nuclear weapons, thereby destabilizing the balance of power. But compared with the use of even a fraction of today’s nuclear arsenals, all-out cyberattacks would be more manageable. MAC is still safer than MAD.

Even as the Russia-Ukraine war grinds on, as Ukrainians push Russians out of territory they have occupied, and as governments begin to imagine what a postwar peace might look like, it is not too soon to look further down the road. It is time to end the specter of thermonuclear holocaust once and for all.

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Foreign Policy · by Anders Fogh Rasmussen · January 5, 2023

7. The Missing Minerals

Conclusion:

To secure oil in the twentieth century, the United States relied on coercive force, destabilizing oil-producing regions and saddling itself with strategic, economic, and political burdens. The Biden administration must not go down that path again. Working to increase U.S. access to critical minerals both at home and abroad by building diverse, resilient, and secure supply chains would help safeguard the United States’ energy security while staving off the danger of climate change.

The Missing Minerals

To Shift to Clean Energy, America Must Rethink Supply Chains

By Morgan D. Bazilian and Gregory Brew

January 6, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Morgan D. Bazilian and Gregory Brew · January 6, 2023

After decades of foot-dragging in the United States, there is now momentum to tackle climate change. In August 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark piece of legislation that directs more than $1 trillion in subsidies and incentives toward clean energy production. This follows legislation such as the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. All include investments in clean energy. Elsewhere, countries such as China, Japan, and Korea announced net-zero carbon emissions goals. The European Union, meanwhile, has been a leader on climate change for years, as evidenced most recently by the European Climate Law, which explicitly set out the goal to be carbon neutral by 2050.

This is welcome and overdue progress. But implementing plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could be stymied in part by a material obstacle: the procurement of critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper that are essential to clean energy systems. Several of these mineral and metal inputs now make up the bulk of the cost of electric vehicle (EV) batteries and copper is ubiquitous in the generation and transmission of electricity. All will be needed in large quantities, and demand is outpacing supply.

The way the United States seems intent on obtaining these minerals, however, is myopic. U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign-policy priorities suggest that energy policy will be shaped by great-power competition, aiming to strengthen domestic U.S. energy output, improving energy security and resilience against disruptions such as Russia’s war on Ukraine, and making the United States less reliant on supply chains controlled by potential adversaries.

This approach is aimed squarely at the ongoing economic warfare with China. To win the energy battle of the twenty-first century, the United States must avoid repeating the policy mistakes of past eras and focus on increasing domestic production and advanced manufacturing at home, while establishing secure and resilient supply chains with allies—and even foes—abroad.

The Mining Gap

Shifting to a clean energy economy will require a decades-long investment in technologies such as solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and batteries. All this infrastructure will require massive quantities of critical minerals. According to the International Energy Agency, the world will require four times more critical minerals in 2040 than are currently mined, from roughly seven million tons to 28 million tons. By that point, energy transition needs will consume 40 percent of the world’s copper production, 60 to 70 percent of its nickel and cobalt production, and almost 90 percent of its lithium production. For lithium, demand is expected to be 13 times greater in 2040 than it was in 2020. Over the last 5,000 years, the human race has mined 700 million tons of copper. That is roughly as much as will be needed over the next 22 years to meet global energy transition targets.

This level of supply production does not yet exist. New mines will have to be dug, and processing and refining industrial complexes will need to be built—both exceedingly difficult to do with existing permitting rules. The existing facilities, moreover, are almost entirely outside of the United States. The production of critical minerals is concentrated in a handful of countries. Indonesia makes 30 percent of the world’s nickel, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies 70 percent of the world’s cobalt. The processing of critical minerals and manufacturing of finished goods is overwhelmingly concentrated in China, which refines 59 percent of the world’s lithium and closer to 80 percent of the bulk of the other critical minerals, and holds more than three-quarters of the world’s advanced manufacturing capacity for electric vehicle batteries. The United States, by contrast, produces a relative pittance of most of these critical minerals and refines even less.

The United States faced an analogous quandary in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, the domestic supply of oil failed to keep up with demand, forcing the United States to rely on oil imports. The Arab oil embargo of 1973–4 and the twin oil-price shocks of 1973 and 1979 revealed that reliance on overseas supplies could pose considerable security risks. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter committed the United States to securing Persian Gulf oil through military force: any threat to the region, he said, would be considered “an assault on the vital interests of the United States.” For 40 years, the Strait of Hormuz remained open and Persian Gulf oil flowed to economies in the West and East Asia, fueling an increase in global oil consumption from 60 million to 100 million barrels per day.

But the so-called Carter Doctrine was problematic because it ultimately entangled the United States with autocratic states such as Saudi Arabia that do not share U.S. security interests. Multiple military interventions, particularly the 2003 invasion of Iraq, cost trillions of dollars and further disrupted the Middle East’s fragile security.

The contest over critical minerals recalls the twentieth-century struggle for oil.

As the United States reconsiders its relationship with the Middle East petrostates, the contest over critical minerals has come to reflect the twentieth-century struggle for oil. The White House perceives the problems of climate change and energy security as bound up in the new reality of great-power competition, with China as the clear antagonist. The Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy revealed as much, calling for the United States to be “clear-eyed” about tackling the challenges of “climate change . . . energy shortages, or inflation” within a “competitive international environment.”

The competition extends beyond the Indo-Pacific. In an effort to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign—specifically Chinese—clean energy supply chains, the Inflation Reduction Act offers subsidies to domestic industries that increase investment in energy transition production and manufacturing. At the COP27 climate conference in November, European leaders denounced the act as protectionist and argued that U.S. subsidies for its own domestic energy industries violated the terms of the World Trade Organization charter. EU leaders particularly take issue with a provision supporting EV battery manufacturing, as it would make European EVs less competitive in the U.S. market.

In sum, the United States will be navigating the clean energy transition amid heightened geopolitical competition. The Biden administration will have to develop a strategy to deal with potential adversaries such as China, hostile powers such as Russia, and allies such as Australia, Canada, and the European Union.

Trying Not to Repeat Past Mistakes

To accomplish this feat, Washington should avoid the counterproductive strategies of the oil era and adopt a varied approach combining domestic policy options with a flexible foreign policy. The goal should be to build a secure position for itself and its allies, reduce dependence on Chinese supplies, and recognize the competitive environment without resorting to brute force or nationalistic tendencies.

First, the United States should accelerate development of its own critical mineral resources. This process has already begun: the Department of Energy’s Loan Office, for example, has made several investments in clean energy companies focused on processing critical minerals. To meet current energy supply demands, the Biden administration could utilize the Defense Production Act (DPA), which Congress adopted in 1950 to ensure the availability of industrial resources during the Korean War. The DPA was used in the 1950s to enhance U.S. oil production and expand refinery capacity. It could play a similar role this decade to expand domestic supply chains, particularly for lithium mining and electric battery manufacturing. This process is already underway. In 2020, former U.S. President Donald Trump used the DPA to boost domestic production of rare earth minerals; more recently, Biden utilized it to increase production of minerals for EV and storage batteries. Biden could build on that precedent and authorize the rapid construction of new mines, refineries, and manufacturing centers.

To further expand mining capacity, the United States should streamline the permitting process for new mines. Currently, the process for making a new mine operational can take ten to 15 years. There is, furthermore, only one active lithium mine in the United States and some 17,000 prospecting claims, or permits to search for economically exploitable mineral deposits. A faster permitting process would allow domestic critical mineral capacity to increase quickly. Engaging with local communities and Native American tribes will be essential. The United States needs to consider a new institutional structure analogous to the former Bureau of Mines, which was dissolved in 1996, to help spearhead and monitor domestic production.

The United States should accelerate development of its own critical mineral resources.

Second, the United States should work with allies to develop supply chains for critical minerals. This includes bilateral agreements with critical mineral suppliers. The Biden administration is already taking steps in this direction: in December, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed memorandums of understanding with officials from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, two major cobalt producers, demonstrating the United States’ desire to import greater amounts of cobalt and other minerals for EV battery manufacturing. The United States should work through the Mineral Security Partnership—a new pact that comprises Australia, Canada, France, and the United States—to fund overseas mining operations through the Export-Import Bank.

Third, the United States and its allies should work to regulate critical minerals markets, which are prone to frequent bouts of volatility. In early 2022, an intense burst of speculation rocked the global nickel market, sending nickel prices soaring to over $100,000 per ton—roughly three times the price from a year before—before the London Metal Exchange was forced to suspend trading. The United States and its allies must work to bring critical minerals markets under control, allowing capital to meet demand and ensure price spikes do not disrupt the global energy transition.

To secure oil in the twentieth century, the United States relied on coercive force, destabilizing oil-producing regions and saddling itself with strategic, economic, and political burdens. The Biden administration must not go down that path again. Working to increase U.S. access to critical minerals both at home and abroad by building diverse, resilient, and secure supply chains would help safeguard the United States’ energy security while staving off the danger of climate change.

MORGAN D. BAZILIAN is the Director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and Professor of at the Colorado School of Mines.
GREGORY BREW is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University.
MORE BY MORGAN D. BAZILIAN MORE BY GREGORY BREW

Foreign Affairs · by Morgan D. Bazilian and Gregory Brew · January 6, 2023

8. PC giant Dell will reportedly stop using Chinese chips as soon as next year, and it shows how Washington-Beijing tensions are forcing companies to diversify their supply chains

PC giant Dell will reportedly stop using Chinese chips as soon as next year, and it shows how Washington-Beijing tensions are forcing companies to diversify their supply chains

Business Insider · by Huileng Tan

PC giant Dell is diversifying its supply chain away from China.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Dell is planning to halt the use of Chinese semiconductor chips by 2024, per Nikkei.
The move also applies to chips made in the China-based factories of non-Chinese companies.
The PC giant also plans to slash the amount of other made-in-China parts in its products.

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American tech giant Dell is planning to halt the use of Chinese semiconductor chips as soon as next year, and will slash the amount of other made-in-China parts in its products, Nikkei reported Thursday, citing three sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

The move underscores a shifting of supply chains out of China as companies seek to end their reliance on the manufacturing giant as geopolitical relations between Washington and Beijing sour, and as factory operations in China continue to be hit by the country's COVID-19 policies.

It's not just made-in-China chips made by Chinese companies. Dell — the world's third-largest computer maker after Lenovo and HP — has also told suppliers that it plans to cut its use of made-in-China chips that are produced by non-Chinese firms, according to Nikkei.

Other than chips, Dell has also asked suppliers of other electronic parts — such as modules and circuit boards — to ramp up production capacity in countries outside China, per Nikkei.

"We continuously explore supply chain diversification across the globe that makes sense for our customers and our business," Dell told the Nikkei. Dell did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment sent outside regular business hours.

Dell's supply chain strategy reflects growing concerns among companies as the the Biden administration cracks down on China's strategic chip sector — which Beijing is counting on, to dominate the world's tech industry.

However, in October the US imposed export controls on shipping equipment to Chinese-owned factories making advanced logic chips. In December, the US Commerce Department added Chinese memory chipmaker YMTC and 21 companies in China's artificial intelligence chip sector to a trade blacklist.

To navigate Washington-China tensions, companies from Apple to Nike have been making contingency plans to shift production out of China to other low-cost locations in Asia. This is especially as Beijing's pandemic policies drove home the uncertainty of depending on just one country for their supply chains.

For much of 2020 to 2022, China's strict pandemic containment measures disrupted factory operations and logistics. Even tech giant Apple was burned late last year when its iPhone output was hit by the country's zero-COVID drive.

And then, Beijing abruptly rolled back its zero-COVID policy, in turn triggering a wave of infections that is wrecking havoc on economic activities in China right now.

The extent of the outbreak in China is not clear because Beijing has stopped publishing COVID case numbers and deaths from December 25. However, hospitals and funeral homes are reportedly overwhelmed.

Beijing only acknowledged six new coronavirus deaths since December 6, when the country U-turned on its zero-COVID policies. But Airfinity, a UK health data company, estimated on December 29 that around 9,000 are dying from COVID each day in China.

Business Insider · by Huileng Tan

9. American Democracy Is Still in Danger

Calling for the ban of TikTok? Does not sound democratic to me. We need to justify the threat to the people who actually use it and believe they benefit from using it. Those who think they benefit cannot be convinced of the threats and the danger.

Excerpts:

In concert with its democratic partners, Washington should also look for new ways—technologically and geopolitically—to help closed societies transcend Internet censorship and social media surveillance. When citizens in autocracies gain access to independent and truthful information and communicate more securely with one another, the regimes they live under will be on shakier ground. Freedom of information also requires engaged and coordinated diplomacy among democracies to ensure that autocracies do not hijack global standards and protocols for the Internet. Social media companies must also do more to counter malign manipulation of their platforms by foreign governments, at least by identifying and labeling sources whenever possible, and removing the most blatantly false and dangerous content. And the United States and other democracies should reinforce those efforts with stronger regulation of social media. The first step should be banning TikTok from American devices.

The United States must also reinvigorate its democracy, and there are some promising signs that the country has entered an era of democratic reform. Many states have modernized their voting procedures and made it easier to register and to vote. Some have eliminated partisan gerrymandering of electoral districts and taken steps to make campaign finance more transparent. Momentum is gathering behind electoral reforms, particularly Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV. Under this system, voters rank their preferred candidates and then, if no candidate receives a majority, lower-ranked candidates are eliminated and a more broadly acceptable winner is selected through a series of instant runoffs. RCV rewards moderation and enables independent and third-party candidates to get a serious hearing. After growing use at the municipal level, it was adopted by voters in Maine in 2016 and 2018, in Alaska in 2020, and in Nevada in November 2022 (though the last is a constitutional amendment that must be approved by the voters a second time). Support for RCV is also growing in Oregon and in Minnesota, which may soon become the first in the nation to adopt it by a vote of the state legislature.

But American democracy is not safe. Legislation intended to reduce the influence of money, strengthen and expand voting rights, end gerrymandering, ensure ethical standards for elected officials, and enhance the security of elections failed in the last Congress and has little prospect of passage in the next. Worse, many states have moved to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more difficult for minorities to vote. Most alarming, some Republican-controlled state legislatures, led by North Carolina, are seeking to establish a theory of “independent state legislatures” that would enable these bodies to gerrymander districts and even rig electoral rules for partisan advantage, with no check by the courts, governors, or redistricting commissions. The United States cannot challenge autocracies globally if its politics degenerate into a collection of one-party states domestically. Successfully combating autocratic disinformation will depend upon success at home, and on the renewal of American democracy.

American Democracy Is Still in Danger

Foreign Affairs · by Erin Baggott Carter, Brett L. Carter, and Larry Diamond · January 6, 2023

Two years ago, the United States’ democratic system of government faced an unprecedented test when supporters of President Donald Trump sought to overturn his election defeat—some through extralegal schemes, others through a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. Since that historical low point, American democracy has begun to function better, and its prospects have begun to improve. The 2022 elections were conducted successfully and extreme election deniers lost in key swing states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol authoritatively documented the riots that attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and former U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s role in fomenting them. In Brazil and France, candidates with dubious commitments to democracy were defeated in presidential elections, and peaceful elections were held in Colombia.

Meanwhile, the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes are struggling. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calamitously conceived and executed war in Ukraine shattered the myth of a resurgent Moscow. China’s bid to become the world’s largest economy and most influential power has foundered on the shoals of President Xi Jinping’s disastrous mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. China’s real estate bubble, a 20 percent youth unemployment rate, a politically motivated crackdown on the private sector, and ballooning local government debt have further undermined Xi’s domestic appeal.

That said, although Beijing and Moscow are weakened, they still pose a serious threat to democracy. The more desperate their domestic problems become, the more they will need to discredit alternative systems of government and denigrate their democratic adversaries. It is for this reason that Beijing and Moscow are waging a global disinformation war that both exploits and heightens the fragility of American democracy. Within China and Russia, this disinformation war aims to suppress demands for democratic reforms by discrediting Western-style democracy. Globally, it seeks to install and support friendly governments, counter a growing sense that engagement with Beijing and Moscow has adverse consequences for local citizens, and ultimately create a new, fragmented international order that privileges “national sovereignty” over human rights.

Beijing and Moscow are helped in this task by the weakness of Western democracies. Trump continues to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and he could soon face criminal charges. The next two years on Capitol Hill could well be dominated by gridlock, purely partisan investigations and impeachment bids, and cynical new efforts to undermine, rather than restore, faith in the American electoral process. Social media remains a sewer of disinformation and conspiracy theorizing, and corporate efforts to moderate content have been inadequate. The assault on truth is about to get exponentially worse with the rapid advance of generative AI software, capable of producing deepfakes, in which public figures will be seen to be saying and doing things they never said or did. All of this is a godsend for the world’s two disinformation superpowers, China and Russia. The more credible the content, the more persuasive the propaganda.

Democratic erosion in America helps Beijing and Moscow discredit the idea of democracy. If American democracy is to serve, once again, as an example capable of inspiring others, it must be strengthened at home. Only then can Washington win the battle for global soft power.

SMEARING DEMOCRACY

“There are certain rules of any dictatorship,” the exiled Russian dissident Garry Kasparov, now chair of the Human Rights Foundation, once observed. Among the most important is “never save money on police or propaganda.” This rule serves as a lodestar for Chinese and Russian leaders. Beijing is pioneering pervasive digital surveillance, and Moscow has intensified its repression to contain opposition to the war in Ukraine. But all dictatorships require at least some degree of either popular support or acquiescence. When citizens evaluate their government’s performance, they compare it to that of other countries. It is for this reason that Beijing and Moscow devote roughly a fifth of domestic propaganda to foreign governments. They trash Western-style democracy as corrupt, unresponsive, and unworthy of sacrifice, and claim that “real” democracy exists at home.

This is the first reason why democratic erosion in the United States advances the interests of Beijing and Moscow: it provides content for their domestic propaganda. At home, Putin’s narrative of international politics has three broad themes: democratic decay in the West, the failures of Western foreign policy, and the decline of the liberal international order. In 2016 and 2017, Trump featured in 80 percent of all international coverage in Russia. State media delighted in his predictions that the 2016 election would be rigged, reported on the U.S. electorate’s polarization, and suggested that the aftermath could turn violent. Following Trump’s 2016 election victory, it speculated that “the forces behind Hillary Clinton” could change the outcome. American elections, in this telling, are plagued by fraud and can easily be compromised.

European integration is also a target for Putin’s domestic propaganda, which it derides as an elite-driven project. The European Union, Russians are told, forces a “neoliberal ideology” on ordinary Europeans that is incompatible with the “traditional values” of “European civilization.” This elite is in thrall to the United States, not the European people. The desire to please Washington caused the migrant crisis of 2015 and numerous terrorist attacks. In Moscow’s telling, Washington’s dominance also produced the sanctions against Russia that have undermined the European economy. The heroes in this depiction of the struggle for Europe’s soul are its far-right, Euroskeptic parties, which are “challenging the dictatorship of liberal democracy” and saving their “compatriots from Brussels.” The European Union is “a house of cards” that will soon collapse.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takes a different approach. Although it routinely tells the Chinese people that democracy already exists in China, it refrains from covering international electoral politics in detail, lest it remind citizens of their inability to vote. Instead, it focuses on Washington’s corruption and inability to govern. “Electoral democracy in the United States,” the People’s Daily (the CCP’s official newspaper), observed in 2017, is “a money-burning contest between candidates, each of whom cater to the financial elite.” Since Democrats and Republicans rely on the same financial backers, “campaign platforms are gradually becoming similar.” With no real policy differences, “more time is spent on personal attacks than policy debates,” and “public opinion has little effect on government policy.” Meanwhile, Rome burns. America’s gun violence epidemic figured in five percent of the People’s Daily’s international coverage between 2016 and 2017. Following the spread of COVID-19, the newspaper told readers that “the epidemic went out of control and turned into a human tragedy due to the U.S. government’s reckless response.” On race, the People’s Daily’s warnings are near existential: “Racial discrimination is tearing the United States apart.”

The CCP’s propaganda apparatus emphasizes the flaws of other democracies, as well. Although it seldom covers Taiwan’s politics, since doing so might suggest that democracy could work on the mainland, it often states that “South Korea’s domestic politics is a mess.” In 2016 and 2017, it focused heavily on the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye for corruption. But, as in Moscow, the CCP’s primary narrative focus is the failures of American democracy.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

Beijing and Moscow craft propaganda narratives not just for their own citizens but for a global audience, as well. As of 2015, Beijing allocated more than $10 billion annually to its global propaganda operations. In 2011, the Russian government spent at least $380 million on Russia Today (RT). Beijing and Moscow invest heavily in propaganda for foreign audiences because they need friendly governments abroad if they are to buttress their political positions at home, and ultimately to reshape the post–Cold War international order. This is why the disinformation war has gone global: to make the world safe for autocracy.

This desire underpins Russian and Chinese global propaganda. In response to years of sanctions and NATO expansion into eastern Europe, Moscow is committed to electing Western politicians whose dedication to democracy is shallow and who will acquiesce to Russia. Moscow is also keen to secure natural resources, especially Africa’s gold mines, which were used to insulate Putin’s government from sanctions in the run-up to the war in Ukraine. China has similar objectives. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative is driven as much by the CCP’s domestic imperatives as by Xi’s geopolitical ambitions. It aims to stimulate foreign demand for domestic industry and to provide an outlet for foreign exchange reserves. Beijing and Moscow both want to fragment the Internet into national spheres of information that are easier to shape and censor and to eviscerate international norms of human rights and the rule of law. Their common goal is to create a new international order that will advance their domestic interests and global ambitions behind specious claims to “national sovereignty.”

In Africa, views of China have grown less favorable as engagement with China has deepened. Moscow’s record in Africa is even worse. Russian agents have helped prop up repressive governments, helped suppress popular protests, and committed atrocities, including a massacre that killed up to 380 people over a four-day period in Mali in March 2022. Such real assaults on national sovereignty are rarely reported in these lower-income countries, where Chinese and Russian propaganda pushes disinformation about Western transgressions. This perverse imbalance urgently needs correcting.

CCP propaganda has been shown to reduce support for democracy.

In Western democracies, the Putin government backed politicians including Trump in the United States, the nativist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in France, and former Italian deputy prime minister and xenophobe Matteo Salvini in Italy. Putin also threw his support behind Brexit in the United Kingdom and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party. These individuals and political movements are skeptical about the post–Cold War international order, and are unenthusiastic about promoting democracy abroad—and, in some cases, about democracy at home. Moscow has been even more brazen in its support for partner governments in the “global South,” producing action movies, erecting billboards, providing campaign finance, and waging the same social media campaigns.

Beijing’s global media footprint is larger than Moscow’s. In addition to its social media operations, Beijing operates English-language radio stations, prints a range of propaganda newspapers, provides free content to local newspapers, and has even purchased leading media platforms outright. Beijing’s propaganda promotes the “China Dream,” and declares that the CCP’s most egregious human rights violations—such as the Tiananmen Square massacre and the ongoing genocide against ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang—are fictitious allegations spread by Western governments to undermine China.

It’s easy to dismiss the global disinformation war. “If Russia Today is Moscow’s propaganda arm,” The Washington Post claimed in 2017, “it’s not very good at its job.” But the evidence suggests otherwise. In the United States, exposure to RT leads Americans to support withdrawing from a position of global leadership. In Brazil, India, and South Africa, CCP propaganda has been shown to reduce support for democracy. In 19 countries across six continents, CCP messaging has been shown to triple the number of people who regarded the “China model” as superior to American-style liberal democracy.

THE HEALTH OF DEMOCRATIC NATIONS

The health of American democracy is both a domestic and a national security concern. China and Russia—the United States’ principal authoritarian adversaries—have been using (and exacerbating) America’s democratic divisions and travails to gain advantage in the competition for global leadership. To regain the advantage, the United States must both repair its own democracy and reinvigorate its voice for democracy in the global arena. Democracy must go on the offensive.

This will require a large investment in American soft power. Since 1980, U.S. government spending on public diplomacy peaked at $2.5 billion in 1994 (adjusted for inflation), and almost reached that level in 2010 and 2011. But since then, as the challenges have proliferated, American efforts have stagnated, with total spending reaching only $2.23 billion in 2020.

Washington must rejoin the battle for global soft power, in a manner that reflects American values. It must transmit the truth, and in ways that engage and persuade global audiences. The goal must be not only to counter disinformation persuasively with the truth but to promote democratic values, ideas, and movements. In order to counter disinformation and report the truth that autocracies suppress, multiple credible streams of information are needed. Furthermore, they must be independent; while the U.S. government may provide material support, these outlets must operate free of editorial control. That way, they will be seen to be independent because they are.

One possibility would be to transform the Voice of America into something more closely resembling the British Broadcasting Corporation. It should have a mission to model the values of the American democratic experiment by providing fully independent reporting on countries around the world, including the United States. But winning the information war requires more than truth, independence, and professionalism in reporting. It also requires a pluralistic and decentralized web of quality media. Local journalists in autocracies are uniquely well placed to document and disseminate evidence of corruption, human rights abuses, and egregious policy errors. The United States and its democratic allies need to elevate and empower besieged local media that are struggling to report the news and convey critical commentary in the absence of media freedom. This will require billions of dollars in funding for public interest media around the world (including media working in exile), much of which should be channeled through the nongovernmental International Fund for Public Interest Media. The fund is an apolitical consortium of international foundations that can finance local independent media while ensuring their autonomy.

The United States cannot challenge autocracies if it degenerates into a collection of one-party states.

In concert with its democratic partners, Washington should also look for new ways—technologically and geopolitically—to help closed societies transcend Internet censorship and social media surveillance. When citizens in autocracies gain access to independent and truthful information and communicate more securely with one another, the regimes they live under will be on shakier ground. Freedom of information also requires engaged and coordinated diplomacy among democracies to ensure that autocracies do not hijack global standards and protocols for the Internet. Social media companies must also do more to counter malign manipulation of their platforms by foreign governments, at least by identifying and labeling sources whenever possible, and removing the most blatantly false and dangerous content. And the United States and other democracies should reinforce those efforts with stronger regulation of social media. The first step should be banning TikTok from American devices.

The United States must also reinvigorate its democracy, and there are some promising signs that the country has entered an era of democratic reform. Many states have modernized their voting procedures and made it easier to register and to vote. Some have eliminated partisan gerrymandering of electoral districts and taken steps to make campaign finance more transparent. Momentum is gathering behind electoral reforms, particularly Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV. Under this system, voters rank their preferred candidates and then, if no candidate receives a majority, lower-ranked candidates are eliminated and a more broadly acceptable winner is selected through a series of instant runoffs. RCV rewards moderation and enables independent and third-party candidates to get a serious hearing. After growing use at the municipal level, it was adopted by voters in Maine in 2016 and 2018, in Alaska in 2020, and in Nevada in November 2022 (though the last is a constitutional amendment that must be approved by the voters a second time). Support for RCV is also growing in Oregon and in Minnesota, which may soon become the first in the nation to adopt it by a vote of the state legislature.

But American democracy is not safe. Legislation intended to reduce the influence of money, strengthen and expand voting rights, end gerrymandering, ensure ethical standards for elected officials, and enhance the security of elections failed in the last Congress and has little prospect of passage in the next. Worse, many states have moved to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more difficult for minorities to vote. Most alarming, some Republican-controlled state legislatures, led by North Carolina, are seeking to establish a theory of “independent state legislatures” that would enable these bodies to gerrymander districts and even rig electoral rules for partisan advantage, with no check by the courts, governors, or redistricting commissions. The United States cannot challenge autocracies globally if its politics degenerate into a collection of one-party states domestically. Successfully combating autocratic disinformation will depend upon success at home, and on the renewal of American democracy.

ERIN BAGGOTT CARTER is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
BRETT L. CARTER is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
LARRY DIAMOND is William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
MORE BY ERIN BAGGOTT CARTER MORE BY BRETT L. CARTER MORE BY LARRY DIAMOND

Foreign Affairs · by Erin Baggott Carter, Brett L. Carter, and Larry Diamond · January 6, 2023

10. WhatsApp adds feature to bypass internet censors in repressive regimes

A corporation making a difference?

WhatsApp adds feature to bypass internet censors in repressive regimes

The Washington Post · by Andrew Jeong · January 6, 2023

WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Meta, has introduced a feature to help users bypass attempts to disrupt access to its services, as repressive governments around the world increasingly use internet controls to clamp down on dissent.

The messaging service will allow people to configure the app to access the internet through proxy servers, which function as intermediaries between users and internet services, and can help disguise traffic and avoid controls. (Users will have to research their own proxy servers, many of which are provided free by volunteers and organizations around the world.) The company specifically mentioned Iran, which launched a brutal security crackdown — and disrupted residents’ access to WhatsApp and fellow Meta platform Instagram — after anti-government protests broke out in September.

WhatsApp, which is also a sister company of Facebook, is not the first service to support internet users living under censorship. But its move is significant because it is the most popular messaging service in many countries. The service says it has more than 2 billion users in 180 countries.

“Our wish for 2023 is that these internet shutdowns never occur,” the company said in a statement, adding that it was hopeful its solution would help in event of shutdowns. WhatsApp also separately announced the launch of its new feature in Persian, the language used in Iran.

Park Hyon-do, an Iran expert at South Korea’s Sogang University, said making access to WhatsApp easier to Iranians would help young and internet-savvy protesters by making information more readily available and connecting people with shared grievances. He noted that such moves largely reflected the hopes of those living outside the country to inject more momentum into the protests.

WhatsApp referenced a recent United Nations report on internet shutdowns that mentioned disruptions in Myanmar (also known as Burma) and Sudan, where rights violations and poverty have triggered popular unrest. At least 44 governments imposed internet blackouts in the past five years, according to internet services company Surfshark, adding that regimes were increasingly turning to less disruptive censorship measures, such as controls on specific websites and services.

Providers of proxy servers and virtual private networks have a history of helping people dodge state-sponsored internet controls. (VPNs and proxy servers have some similarities, but the former also encrypt data.) In 2012, when Tehran imposed a partial internet blackout, use of such services increased dramatically. Last year, WhatsApp competitor Signal, which was started by an encryption advocate and emphasizes privacy in its marketing, said it would support volunteers in setting up proxy servers for people in Iran.

WhatsApp said people accessing its service via proxy servers would have the same “high level of privacy and security” that is provided to other users, including default end-to-end encryption. But it has also been criticized by privacy advocates for sharing certain customer information with other Meta companies. The platform says it assesses requests from non-U.S. law enforcement to share details of account records based on whether the demands “are consistent with internationally recognized standards including human rights, due process, and the rule of law.”

While WhatsApp’s new feature aims to help people in developing economies circumvent repressive regimes, its corporate sibling Facebook has a history of weak moderation controls that made it vulnerable to abuse and disinformation at the hands of authoritarian governments and other bad actors, The Washington Post has reported. A group of Rohingya refugees sued Facebook for $150 billion in 2021, alleging that its algorithm amplified hate speech and helped perpetuate genocidal actions by the military junta in Myanmar.

The company declined to comment on the lawsuits at that time, but Myanmar’s authoritarian government now relies heavily on internet shutdowns to conceal its brutality against democracy activists and other civilians, rights groups say. Meta didn’t immediately return a request for comment early Friday.

The Washington Post · by Andrew Jeong · January 6, 2023

11. U.S. sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine signals prolonged war

The Ukrainian president seems to have an end state in mind.

U.S. sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine signals prolonged war

Absent an end-state strategy, this path toward escalation risks a longer confrontation

washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

OPINION:

The Biden administration’s recent decision to provide the Patriot missile system — a surface-to-air guided missile defense system — to Ukraine represents a notable turning point in the conflict.

While many applaud this move as an important sign of America’s commitment to Ukraine, this provision represents a new crossroad in the conflict, in which the Biden administration is now arming Ukraine with military equipment they had previously ruled out for fear that it would curtail a peace treaty, as negotiations between Russia and Ukraine appear unlikely. This move signals that the Biden administration plans to provide increasingly advanced weapons systems to Ukraine, including the possibility of long-range weapons, which could open new fronts to the war. Absent an end-state strategy, this path toward escalation risks prolonging the war.

Throughout this conflict, the Biden administration has avoided arming Ukraine with advanced military equipment, including the Patriot system and long-range missiles, for fear that Ukraine could use these missiles to strike targets in Russia and escalate the conflict. The Biden administration, for example, altered the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System’s range capabilities before giving them to Ukraine to prevent them from being fired into Russia.

This decision was based on the need to arm Ukraine with the defensive capabilities required to thwart Russia’s invasion while ensuring that a path to negotiations remained a viable option.

While the Patriot is a defensive system, the greatest risk of the United States sending the Patriot to Ukraine is not the system itself, but what it represents: The U.S. is now moving in lockstep with Ukrainian requests for advanced weapons systems to use against Russia, as neither Ukraine nor the United States appears to view negotiations as the solution to the conflict.

This matter comes in the wake of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to Congress in which continued military engagement with Russia via U.S. military equipment and financial aid was reiterated rather than a path to negotiations.

Had the Patriot system been provided in conjunction with President Biden or Mr. Zelenskyy’s pragmatic steps toward negotiations, the United States would be enabling Ukraine to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength. Yet no feats have been accomplished by either Mr. Biden or Mr. Zelenskyy toward this aim.

While Ukraine has expressed the desire to enter peace talks over the war mediated by the United Nations, they have established that Russia’s participation in these talks is contingent upon war tribunals, a requirement unlikely to achieve any resolution or negotiated settlement.

Moreover, Mr. Zelenskyy has signed into law that Ukraine-Russia negotiations will not include Russian President Vladimir Putin, and senior Ukrainian officials have stated that negotiations with Russia are a “deal with the devil.” These sentiments offer no clarity on steps toward a negotiated settlement to secure Ukrainian sovereignty, merely a prolonged conflict.

Absent negotiations, Ukraine is on a pathway of continued military engagement with Russia. Sending the Patriot system means that this will likely not be the last military equipment that Mr. Biden provides Ukraine, opening the door to long-range weapon shipments.

The provision of long-range weapons would enable Ukraine to achieve ancillary objectives that may not be tied to reaching an end-state, including Ukraine’s desire to commence a campaign to retake Crimea, thereby opening a new front to the war.

Therefore, the decision to arm Ukraine with Patriots without establishing strides toward negotiations risks prolonging the conflict in Ukraine and losing sight of both American and Ukrainian interests. Mr. Biden’s commitment to arm Ukraine “as long as it takes” without stating how it plans to translate the military assistance to Ukraine, however necessary it is, into an overall end to the conflict is a path devoid of strategic thinking.

After his tenure as secretary of defense, Robert McNamara published “In Retrospect,” detailing the flawed thinking of U.S. decision-makers during the Vietnam War that led to the prolongation and, ultimately, the defeat of the United States. His argument can be summarized as we knew our strategy was failing, but we escalated America’s involvement in the war anyway. In this case, the Biden administration has not even established an end-game strategy for Ukraine. If it determines the need to escalate militarily, it is time for the administration to share its vision for how the war ends.

• Gloria McDonald serves as senior policy analyst at the America First Policy Institute in the Center for American Security.

washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

12. Q&A: China's Vast Influence Campaign in Canada

Excerpts:

People in Canadian police and intelligence, and in other countries, those communities are starting to share information because they see that I’ve got it right, because they see that it’s making a difference in areas where it needs to make a difference.

And even more importantly, my sourcing comes from the communities that are most directly impacted by these networks: Chinese-Canadian, Hong Kong-Canadian, Taiwanese, Uighur communities. And certainly not to suggest that they’re victims without agency. They have great agency, they are some of the best sources to police and intelligence themselves.

And I would add that people inside United Front criminal networks are some of my best sources. And how could that be? Well, China rules by fear, and also inducements and greed. And there are people that could fall out of favor, and people that have consciences, and yet maybe we could say they’re trapped within those networks, that are very eager to share information. They don’t want to see criminal thugs holding a lot of power in the broad community or just in the Asian community in Canada.

Q&A: China's Vast Influence Campaign in Canada

In an interview with ProPublica, investigative reporter Sam Cooper describes how he unearthed scandals that have shaken the Canadian political system.

defenseone.com · by Sebastian Rotella

An exclusive news report dominated the headlines in Canada in recent weeks: Canadian intelligence had warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about a vast campaign of political interference by China. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service had learned that Chinese consulate officials in Toronto had covertly funded a network of at least 11 political candidates in federal elections in 2019, the report said. The Chinese operation had also targeted Canadian political figures and immigrant leaders seen as opponents of the regime in Beijing, subjecting them to surveillance, harassment and attacks in the media, the report said. Trudeau responded with promises of action, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they were investigating the alleged foreign interference. The Chinese foreign ministry denied the allegations.

Not surprisingly, the report’s author was Sam Cooper. An investigative journalist for Global News, a private Canadian media organization, the 48-year-old Cooper has done hard-hitting work about a surprisingly active criminal underworld rooted in a large diaspora from Hong Kong, a bastion of the mafias known as triads. His best-selling 2021 book, “Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West,” examines violent international gangs involved in drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and, most alarmingly, Chinese espionage and influence activity in Canada.

Cooper and other experts (including U.S. national security officials interviewed by ProPublica) say Canadian political leaders have ignored or minimized the extent of the threat from China. Cooper has received criticism from pro-Beijing figures in the Chinese-Canadian community and is fighting two defamation lawsuits from subjects of his coverage. But his reporting has drawn praise from national security officials, dissidents of Chinese origin and academics in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. It helped spur a governmental inquiry known as the Cullen Commission, which recently concluded that organized crime had laundered billions of dollars in the province of British Columbia. And the latest revelations of Chinese interference are having a potentially dramatic impact on the political debate in Canada.

ProPublica’s conversation with Cooper has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: I wanted to ask you first, in terms of your background, how you got involved in this topic.

Cooper: I went to University of Toronto. I ended up traveling to Japan for some post-university work and culture. And so I really became enamored and fascinated with East Asian culture.

As a young reporter in Vancouver, and also a young family guy, there were things that I noticed. I started to break ground on how influential money from Hong Kong and mainland China was in Vancouver real estate, how it appeared to be driving prices incredibly high in comparison to local incomes. And that led to finally understanding or digging into the underground casino and underground banking nodes and networks that have been feeding Vancouver.

I recognized pretty early there was a huge, high-level pushback on the reporting to dig into the roots of what I eventually found were extremely high-level tycoons from Hong Kong with triad connections [who] had been developing big portions of Vancouver since the 1980s. And this led to a lot of discoveries.

Q: What's remarkable about the history of this issue in Canada in the past decades is that there’s this prophecy that is rejected or ignored. What was your assessment of Project Sidewinder [a Canadian intelligence report leaked in 1999 that warned of the threat from China-connected tycoons, gangsters and spies] when you were looking at this stuff?

Cooper: Sidewinder, for let’s just call it the Western or Canadian mind, it was too much too early to understand what they were alleging and pointing to. It just was hard to believe. And so…I took the report with a grain of salt. I didn’t swallow it as truth. And there had been a huge pushback on that report from Ottawa, so I was cautious. But you’re absolutely right. This was basically raw intelligence, it was leaked. So people were able to point to a few flaws, or maybe even the odd overreach. But it is absolutely confirmed and true based on my current work, and my book, that the basic elements of what's alleged — that is, that Chinese intelligence and foreign influence operations use high-level gang bosses to both send money abroad and to corrupt Western societies — is absolutely true and confirmed.

Q: In U.S. press and politics, there’s this ongoing focus on Mexico: drugs in Mexico, corruption in Mexico. There’s very little attention paid to national security issues related to Canada. If you read your book, one has to wonder why there hasn’t been more focus on Canada and the extent to which there is a crisis in Canada that just doesn’t get the attention it should in the United States.

Cooper: Yeah, that’s right. In some ways, Canada makes the perfect host for very sophisticated, powerful, transnational organized crime that doesn’t typically hang bodies from overpasses. The level of sophistication of Asian organized crime is that people that would appear to be gentleman bankers or stockbrokers can be the leaders of transnational drug trafficking gangs. And further than that, people that are respected officials in the Chinese Communist Party at the end of the day are the handlers and bosses of these elite, transnational Asian gangs. Canada as a G-7 nation, as a banking economy that is tied in at the highest levels of respect with the other leading industrial nations, makes a perfect disguise and host for very sophisticated transnational crime.

Q: There is concern in the U.S. government about some of these structural weaknesses in Canadian legislation and the Canadian law enforcement and judicial culture. You give the example that it takes seven months to get a warrant for a wiretap on Sinaloa cartel guys that would take a couple of days in the U.S. or Australia.

Cooper: I, like many Canadians, you know, just have the innate sense that Canada’s such a stable, well-ordered, law-abiding society. And often that’s true. But what is missed by so many people is that the laws that…prevent overreach into the lives of law-abiding citizens have been exploited, really, by transnational gangs that have so much cover in Canada.

The perfect example of this is Tse Chi Lop, the Canadian citizen who I and others have reported was at the top of this network of networks of the highest triad bosses, The Company. I reported that there clearly are interconnections with Chinese state police and intelligence agencies. This man, this Canadian, was about to fly from Asia to Toronto. And I understand there was some sort of international police operation to divert his flight away from Canada because Australian and United States police did not have the trust that if Mr. Tse landed in Toronto he would be able to be prosecuted and extradited. The concerns there are that Canada’s legal system is just full of holes. It is much too difficult to prosecute powerful criminals. One of the other issues is the lack of an anti-racketeering law to deal with real organized crime. [ProPublica note: During an extradition hearing in the Netherlands last year, Tse told a judge he was innocent of drug trafficking charges.]

But another huge one…is a growing sense that elite capture, and even corruption, within [the] Canadian government, could be an inhibition to tackling people like Mr. Tse. The questions are: Do Mr. Tse and his network, in a roundabout or even a direct way, have hooks into people like Cameron Ortis, the former Canadian RCMP intelligence boss, who fell in a massive corruption case that I wrote about? Beyond Mr. Ortis, could powerful politicians be linked to powerful triad members or triad leaders in Canada? [ProPublica note: Ortis is awaiting trial and has not yet entered a plea, according to press reports. His attorney did not return a request for comment.]

Q: Your book really lays out your focus on organized crime and the casinos. And that underworld then takes you into the question of political influence and how aggressive the People’s Republic of China has been in political influence operations in Canada, with organized crime as a weapon in that. Why do you think that the PRC has been able to do that?

Cooper: Australia has been…pretty much a perfect analogue of the PRC methods of infiltration and corruption. Australia and Canada [are] very similar societies. Australia and Canada were in the same dire straits in 2015 when, as we know, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping elevated his United Front [the Communist Party’s overseas influence arm] interference networks. But the response since 2015 has been very different. Australia rightly responded with foreign interference laws around 2017, 2018. And we’ve seen some very, very powerful people now implicated in investigations.

In contrast, in Canada, nothing has been done for the similar threat. We have a bipartisan Parliament group of senior officials with access to intelligence reports, sensitive reports, they make recommendations to government. For several years now, they’ve been asking the Liberal government to follow Australia’s example. And there has really been no change.

Q: And what justification do opponents of something as basic as a foreign agent registration act give for opposing it?

Cooper: I can't find a good justification. Unfortunately, I think we can look at news circumstances such as when Canadian parliamentarians were debating whether to declare China’s actions in Xinxiang a genocide in 2021. Some Canadian senators…went on the record saying that these kinds of discussions would fan anti-Asian racism.

I probed very deeply [former Canadian legislator] Kenny Chiu’s case. The evidence at the time came from what he told me himself, what I had heard about Canadian intelligence’s deep concerns with what happened to Kenny Chiu and others in the 2021 federal election. And also open source reports at the time that said that clearly Mandarin-language media, which is influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and WeChat networks, attacked Kenny first and foremost ahead of the 2021 election, smearing him as an anti-Asian racist. Again, this is a Hong Kong-born Canadian. They call him a racist because he suggested a foreign influence registry. He did not even name China in the bill. He lost his seat.

So that’s what I call a two-pronged attack on Canadian democracy. Beijing is seeking, I have reported, based on Canadian intelligence, to in corrupt ways fund and advance its interests in candidates. And it is seeking to attack Canadian members of Parliament that it would see as threats to Chinese Communist Party objectives.

Q: The response to your latest reports about a Chinese political influence campaign in Canadian politics seems to be unprecedented.

Cooper: We can see there’s a very robust debate now about what is lacking in Canada’s foreign interference laws. How deep could this corruption go? How aggressive are China’s actions? Could they turn elections in their favor? These questions are now being debated almost every day in Canada’s Parliament. And I can say we’ve never seen that level of attention before.

Q: And in your case, personally, there must be some sense of vindication.

Cooper: Now I have access to the intelligence that can’t be refuted that exactly what I was reporting was happening. And not only do I believe, I’ve been told my reporting has been [the] subject of counternarratives from Chinese espionage and intelligence networks who are very uncomfortable and angry about my reporting. So I don’t know that vindication is the word more than I just, I deeply believe, and I’m told by a lot of people, that really this could be precedent-setting historic work for helping us support Canada's democracy.

People in Canadian police and intelligence, and in other countries, those communities are starting to share information because they see that I’ve got it right, because they see that it’s making a difference in areas where it needs to make a difference.

And even more importantly, my sourcing comes from the communities that are most directly impacted by these networks: Chinese-Canadian, Hong Kong-Canadian, Taiwanese, Uighur communities. And certainly not to suggest that they’re victims without agency. They have great agency, they are some of the best sources to police and intelligence themselves.

And I would add that people inside United Front criminal networks are some of my best sources. And how could that be? Well, China rules by fear, and also inducements and greed. And there are people that could fall out of favor, and people that have consciences, and yet maybe we could say they’re trapped within those networks, that are very eager to share information. They don’t want to see criminal thugs holding a lot of power in the broad community or just in the Asian community in Canada.

Sebastian Rotella is a reporter at ProPublica. An award-winning foreign correspondent and investigative reporter, Sebastian's coverage includes terrorism, intelligence and organized crime.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

defenseone.com · by Sebastian Rotella

13. A looming threat, and a hollow force

Quite an indictment.

Excerpts:

Most distressing, however, is the navy’s total inability to articulate its strategic mission and ensure congressional support in the face of an unsupportive executive. Exercises at sea, training, logistics and planning all suggest an admiralty that is insufficiently bold in the face of a gathering storm. The pace of shipbuilding and virtually every other category of naval preparedness demonstrate that the most critical service in a West Pacific conflict does not believe that war is possible within the next decade.

Consistent with this, the current administration’s Defense Department actively seeks to ransack the military budget to pay for domestic priorities. The navy is first in the firing line for bureaucratic reasons. The defense secretary and chief of naval operations have been unable to withstand the political/bureaucratic winds.

A looming threat, and a hollow force

The US Navy is not ready to fight

asiatimes.com · by More by Seth Cropsey · January 6, 2023

The year 2022 was an underreported but brutal one for the US Navy. The service is in crisis. Retention issues, an aging fleet, the revelation of several command failures, and a blunt inability to articulate its strategic mission in an increasingly hostile bureaucratic environment bode ill for the navy’s ability to meet American strategic needs.

As the US faces a potential Indo-Pacific war that could spiral into a Eurasian conflagration, revitalizing the navy’s command culture and strategic thought is vital to American interests.

The roots of American naval atrophy run deep, far deeper than even the Cold War’s conclusion. American political culture ironically militates against naval power. In the context of Eurasia, the US is a maritime nation.

The nation’s founders understood this, and thereby authorized within the constitution the maintenance of a navy without restriction, as opposed to the stringent limitations placed on peacetime ground forces. However, strategic conditions did not bring naval power to the fore until the early 20th century.

The US Navy played a vital role in preserving American access to Eurasian markets, from policing the Barbary Coast to securing Anglo-American trade routes alongside the Royal Navy in the Indo-Pacific. But until 1898, America’s wars were land wars, either of continental expansion or civil pacification.

The Civil War

During the American Civil War, the Federal and Confederate Armies engaged in land battles that resembled European warfare in scale. Nearly 200,000 men fought at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, making each engagement similar in size to Waterloo or Austerlitz.

But there was no great sea fight, no fleet action akin to Horatio Nelson’s victories at the Nile or Trafalgar. Rather, the naval war was attritional and logistical, with Confederate commerce raiders and blockade runners pressing the Federal Navy’s blockade, while Union ships supported amphibious assaults along the Confederate coastline.

The navy played a crucial role in the Union’s victory. Without it, the Confederacy would have received far greater supply from the European powers, seeing no risk in opposing a United States incapable of policing the North Atlantic. Yet after 1865, the US reoriented toward continental expansion once again, de-emphasizing naval power.

Even the American relationship to significant naval power is unique. The US has maintained a world-class navy since the late 19th century, and since 1945 has maintained the world’s most powerful combat fleet. This navy defeated Spain in a major fleet action, imposed its will on the German U-Boat threat twice, facilitated an amphibious invasion of Europe, and defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Nevertheless, the United States is an industrial-agrarian power, a unique hybrid of continental traditions. The American founders understood the role of maritime power in the national interest largely because they were northeastern Anglophiles, not southern agrarians.

The Cold War

With the death of the Federalist Party and the rise of northern industry, the US discounted the role of naval power beyond immediate wartime needs. Thus the US maintained a large ground army in Europe throughout the Cold War: American strategic thought is comfortable with massed military engagements despite the American political tradition’s skepticism of permanent military deployments abroad.

The United States’ ability to maintain a globally dominant navy from 1945 to 1990 is the remarkable result of committed political leadership by naval officers and their congressional allies.

So it is unsurprising that the 1991 “Peace Dividend” fell hardest upon the navy. This is not simply a case of numerical decline – US Navy and Army personnel numbers fell by roughly similar proportions between 1990 and 2000, but the navy was nearly half of its Cold War size in 2000 as platforms were phased out rapidly.

The fundamental issue, however, was strategic. The US Army and Air Force had a purpose. In 1991 they fought a decisive combined-arms ground war against a predatory Iraq. Then the USAF, alongside army special operations forces (SOF), fought another messy but low-casualty war in the Balkans. After 2001, US SOF and air power dismantled the Taliban. In 2003, another air-ground invasion dismantled the Iraqi military.

Never mind that in each case the navy played a crucial supporting role. The troops needed to man the barricades were the army and marines, alongside precision-strike airmen. The future, insofar as it seemed in the 2000s, was asymmetric, unconventional, and littoral. It was also joint and transformational – the navy would need to leverage new technologies and re-conceptualize its strategic role.

In decline

Hence the first of the navy’s misfortunes, which still bedevil the service today. The F-35 program has finally delivered airframes, and the first Ford-class aircraft carrier has finally reached the fleet, both around a decade later than expected, notwithstanding their cost overruns.

The littoral combat ship debacle is equally embarrassing. The navy designed a small modular warship for various “green water” operations against a poorly defined threat. The resulting ship lacked the defensive capabilities to counter modern anti-ship missiles and the offensive capabilities to pose a threat to targets in the late-2010s.

The same force-development issues persist today. If all goes according to plans, the navy will deliver two Constellation-class frigates a year from 2026. But it took the service well over two years to authorize construction once an initial contract was awarded because the navy, predictably, pushed the Constellation class into the same bureaucratic processes and capability reviews as every other ship.

With the first ship only beginning construction in late 2022, the navy will be fortunate if it receives its 20 new ships by 2040. Meanwhile, the navy receives on average two new Virginia-class submarines a year, while it retires two Los Angeles-class boats. The submarine fleet, then, is static year-on-year, while various maintenance and overhaul delays disrupt deployment schedules even further.

And under the options articulated in its NavPlan – which overlooks how to implement it – the navy will shed large surface combatants, replacing them with still-notional unmanned ships. All this points to a shrinking fleet at least through the early 2030s.

The US Navy is nevertheless asked to do more with less. Operational tempo has increased since the Cold War. At any given time, around 30% of US Navy ships are deployed. Yet the US Navy has far fewer ships, and it will have even fewer in the coming decade.

Sailors are overworked without nearly enough rotation and training time. The results have not been good. Basic seamanship standards slipped throughout the 2010s, leading most notably to the two Indo-Pacific destroyer collisions. Navy ships routinely return to port shedding rust.

These difficulties are translating into wholesale command failures. The USS Bonhomme Richard disaster demonstrates the situation’s severity. The Bonnie Dick, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship – the backbone of American amphibious capabilities and the most flexible ship in the fleet – burned nearly to the waterline in July 2020. The navy formally accused a single sailor of arson and punished 20 others. Yet when the case went to trial, the accused was acquitted in just two weeks.

The command investigation had found that the Bonnie Dick’s damage-control facilities were non-functional: The ship’s automatic fire responses and firehoses were almost all in disrepair, and the Bonnie Dick’s hatches held open to enable shoddy power lines to snake throughout the ship. The navy sought, and failed, to concentrate its harshest punishment on a single sailor for a colossal command failure.

The Bonnie Dick and the attack submarine USS Miami, its predecessor in a fiery peacetime demise by eight years, were both scrapped. The two ships’ fate is a cautionary tale: The US faces its first naval peer competitor since World War II. The US lacks the secure repair facilities to receive and repair battle-damaged ships. If the navy could not repair Miami and later Bonnie Dick, what will happen if many more ships are damaged at once, or within weeks of each other, in a West Pacific war?

Just as the navy’s training standards fall and its deployment tempo remains the same, it also faces a recruiting dilemma. This is true throughout the military – the navy barely met its 2022 recruiting targets, while the US Army missed its objectives – but the navy has taken several radical steps to remedy its woes.

Most notably, it will increase the number of sailors it recruits from low-aptitude score brackets on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. This, combined with larger bonuses and a modified career progression scheme for senior sailors, may keep force numbers above their targets. But the quality of the individual sailor likely will decline, as will discipline, seamanship, and long-term military capacity.

Most distressing, however, is the navy’s total inability to articulate its strategic mission and ensure congressional support in the face of an unsupportive executive. Exercises at sea, training, logistics and planning all suggest an admiralty that is insufficiently bold in the face of a gathering storm. The pace of shipbuilding and virtually every other category of naval preparedness demonstrate that the most critical service in a West Pacific conflict does not believe that war is possible within the next decade.

Consistent with this, the current administration’s Defense Department actively seeks to ransack the military budget to pay for domestic priorities. The navy is first in the firing line for bureaucratic reasons. The defense secretary and chief of naval operations have been unable to withstand the political/bureaucratic winds.

Congressional intervention saved 12 ships and authorized additional funding for the US Navy and Marine Corps. But this was despite acrimonious exchanges with Congress throughout the year when the navy could not or would not produce a coherent long-term strategic vision.

The issue here is bureaucratic, strategic, and political. As it successfully did in the Cold War, the navy must articulate a strategic vision that it can take to Congress, one that includes a structured fleet plan capable of meeting the country’s defense needs. This, in turn, requires far greater funding, both for ships and personnel to attract and maintain real talent.

The US spends on defense a proportion of GDP similar to that of the late 1990s, a completely unacceptable state of affairs given the accelerating threat from China. A clear strategic vision will allow the navy’s allies in Congress to push back against President Joe Biden’s administration and allocate for it the funding it needs to grow the force.

asiatimes.com · by More by Seth Cropsey · January 6, 2023

14. Taiwan Must Heed the Wake-Up Call From Ukraine

Taiwan Must Heed the Wake-Up Call From Ukraine

Extending compulsory military service only begins to address shortcomings in Taipei’s efforts to prepare for — and deter — conflict with China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-05/taiwan-must-heed-the-wake-up-call-from-ukraine-to-deter-china?sref=hhjZtX76

ByClara Ferreira Marques

January 5, 2023 at 5:00 PM EST

Taiwan’s decision to shake up compulsory military service — extending it to one year, among other measures — has prompted generous commentators to argue that Taipei is finally getting serious about self-defense and deterrence, seizing the window of opportunity provided by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to make a necessary but politically difficult move. The less magnanimous pointed out that the change has been a long time coming, and behind-the-scenes US arm-twisting may have focused minds.

Either way, in the face of an increasingly assertive China, this is at best a first step. From genuinely overhauling conscript and reservist training to adjusting military procurement and addressing critical vulnerabilities like energy supply, Taiwan has far more to do if it is to adequately prepare for catastrophic conflict with its giant neighbor. And, ideally, avert it.

What We Know About U.S.-Backed Zero Units in Afghanistan

Deadly night raids. Faulty U.S. intelligence. A “classified” war loophole. Reporter Lynzy Billing’s investigation offers an unprecedented insight into the civilian casualties of Afghanistan’s Zero Units.

ProPublica · by Lynzy Billing

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the CIA-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.

So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four year period. The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:

At least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is almost certainly an undercount. While some raids did result in the capture or death of known militants, others killed bystanders or appeared to target people for no clear reason.
A troubling number of raids appear to have relied on faulty intelligence by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence-gathering services. Two Afghan Zero Unit soldiers described raids they were sent on in which they said their targets were chosen by the United States.
The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency acknowledged that the units were getting it wrong at times and killing civilians. He oversaw the Zero Units during a crucial period and agreed that no one paid a consequence for those botched raids. He went on to describe an operation that went wrong: “I went to the family myself and said: ‘We are sorry. ... We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban.”
The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the CIA often joined them. The Afghan soldiers Billing spoke to said they were typically accompanied on raids by at least 10 U.S. special operations forces soldiers. “These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids,” one of the Afghans said, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.”
Military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry, according to one U.S. Army Ranger Billing spoke to. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he said, yet no one seemed to really care. He told Billing that night raids were a better option than airstrikes but acknowledged that the raids risked creating new insurgent recruits. “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”
Because the Zero Units operated under a CIA program, their actions were part of a “classified” war, with the lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer for operations that went wrong. And U.S. responsibility for the raids was quietly muddied by a legal loophole that allows the CIA — and any U.S. soldiers lent to the agency for their operations — to act without the same level of oversight as the American military.
Congressional aides and former intelligence committee staffers said they don’t believe Congress was getting a complete picture of the CIA’s overseas operations. Lawyers representing whistleblowers said there is ample motivation to downplay to Congress the number of civilians killed or injured in such operations. By the time reports get to congressional oversight committees, one lawyer said, they’re “undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy.”
U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long relied on night raids by forces like the 02 unit to fight insurgencies around the globe. The strategy has, again and again, drawn outrage for its reliance on sometimes flawed intelligence and civilian death count. In 1967, the CIA’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3% of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.
Eyewitnesses, survivors and family members described how Zero Unit soldiers had stormed into their homes at night, killing loved ones** at more than 30 raid sites Billing visited. No Afghan or U.S officials returned to investigate. In one instance, a 22-year-old named Batour witnessed a raid that killed his two brothers. One was a teacher and the other a university student. He told Billing the Zero Unit strategy had actually made enemies of families like his. He and his brothers, he said, had supported the government and vowed never to join the Taliban. Now, he said, he’s not so sure.
Little in the way of explanation was ever provided to the relatives of the dead — or to their neighbors and friends — as to why these particular individuals were targeted and what crimes they were accused of. Families who sought answers from provincial officials about the raids were told nothing could be done because they were Zero Unit operations. “They have their own intelligence and they do their own operation,” one grieving family member remembered being told after his three grandchildren were killed in an airstrike and night raid. “The provincial governor gave us a parcel of rice, a can of oil and some sugar” as compensation for the killings. At medical facilities, doctors told Billing they’d never been contacted by Afghan or U.S. investigators or human rights groups about the fate of those injured in the raids. Some of the injured later died, quietly boosting the casualty count.

In a statement, CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp said, “As a rule, the U.S. takes extraordinary measures — beyond those mandated by law — to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict, and treats any claim of human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness.” She said any allegations of human rights abuses by a “foreign partner” are reviewed and, if valid, the CIA and “other elements of the U.S. government take concrete steps, including providing training on applicable law and best practices, or if necessary terminating assistance or the relationship.” Thorp said the Zero Units had been the target of a systematic propaganda campaign designed to discredit them because “of the threat they posed to Taliban rule.”

The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about Zero Unit operations.

With a forensic pathologist, Billing drove hundreds of miles across some of the country’s most volatile areas — visiting the sites of more than 30 raids, interviewing witnesses, survivors, family members, doctors and village elders. To understand the program, she met secretly with two Zero Unit soldiers over the course of years, wrangled with Afghanistan’s former spy master in his heavily fortified home and traveled to a diner in the middle of America to meet with an Army Ranger who’d joined the units on operations.

She also conducted more than 350 interviews with current and former Afghan and American government officials, Afghan commanders, U.S military officials, American defense and security officials and former CIA intelligence officers, as well as U.S. lawmakers and former oversight committee members, counterterrorism and policy officers, civilian-casualty assessment experts, military lawyers, intelligence analysts, representatives of human rights organizations, doctors, hospital directors, coroners, forensic examiners, eyewitnesses and family members — some of whom are not named in the story for their safety.

While America’s war in Afghanistan may be over, there are lessons to be learned from what it left behind. Billing writes:

“The American government has scant basis for believing it has a full picture of the Zero Units’ performance. Again and again, I spoke with Afghans who had never shared their stories with anyone. Congressional officials concerned about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan said they were startled by the civilian death toll I documented.

As my notebooks filled, I came to realize that I was compiling an eyewitness account of a particularly ignominious chapter in the United States’ fraught record of overseas interventions.

Without a true reckoning of what happened in Afghanistan, it became clear the U.S. could easily deploy the same failed tactics in some new country against some new threat.”

Read her full report here.

ProPublica · by Lynzy Billing

16. Viasat to Continue Network, Communication Support for SOCOM

Viasat to Continue Network, Communication Support for SOCOM

thedefensepost.com · by Rojoef Manuel · January 5, 2023

California-based Viasat has received a $325-million contract to support the US Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) networking and communication capabilities.

The five-year agreement builds on a $350-million contract signed in 2017.

Under the deal, Viasat will continue to provide SOCOM with mission equipment and related services supporting information, cybersecurity, tactical satellite communications, terrestrial networking, and associated management architectures.

“This contract award reaffirms Viasat’s deep commitment and partnership with the SOCOM community to understand and address the capability needs of forces for the most complex missions,” Viasat Government Systems President Craig Miller said.

“Networking and communications needs across the modern battlespace are continually evolving and we’re excited to help SOCOM maintain the advantage with solutions that deliver the performance, flexibility and resilience Special Operations Forces require to successfully operate independently and interoperate effectively with joint forces.”

Sustaining Improvements in SOCOM

According to Viasat, the contract enables new concepts of operation and adoption of the latest capabilities.

SOCOM will maintain its tactical technologies and dynamic mission requirements through the program.

“While we are fully committed to winning the current fight, we are simultaneously working to prepare for the conflicts of tomorrow. We are always searching for improvements and relentlessly pursuing our next advantage,” SOCOM Commander Gen. Raymond Thomas III stated about the first contract award.

thedefensepost.com · by Rojoef Manuel · January 5, 2023

17. Ukrainian citizen uprising is the war Russia didn’t see coming

Resistance.

Authoritarian regimes need to understand that attacking a free people will meet with ion willed resistance among those who want to remain free.

And of course it is wise to understand the history and culture of those you are trying to invade, occupy, and oppress.

Ukrainian citizen uprising is the war Russia didn’t see coming

BY TOM MOCKAITIS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 01/05/23 12:30 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3800333-ukrainian-citizen-uprising-is-the-war-russia-didnt-see-coming/?utm_source=pocket_saves

While the media focuses on conventional operations and high-tech weapons, Ukraine has employed an ancient tactic against the Russian invaders: partisan guerrilla warfare.

The Ukrainians have taken a page from the old Red Army playbook. As the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union drove them back to the gates of Moscow, Soviet forces left behind groups of partisans to harass the invaders.

Bands of refugees and soldiers separated from their units joined these formal groups or set up their own bands. For example, the Bielski brothers, Jewish refugees from the Nowogrodek ghetto, created a particularly effective partisan force in the Belarusian forests.

Operating on their own, guerrillas rarely amount to more than a nuisance for regular armies. In cooperation with conventional forces, however, they can be quite effective. By the summer of 1942, Soviet partisans numbered approximately 125,000. They derailed 800 trains in Belarus alone between June and November of that year.

The impact of Soviet partisans on the war in Eastern Europe has been the subject of debate. They did not disrupt major German operations, but they forced the Wehrmacht to divert troops to guarding supply lines.

In the summer of 1943, the guerrillas posed a serious enough threat to require a major military operation against them. As losses mounted, the Germans had to divert troops to secure rear areas where attacks occurred. Partisans did not affect the outcome of the war on the eastern front, but they may have hastened its conclusion.

Unconventional forces have played a key role in other conflicts, notably the American Revolution. Partisans bands, ranger units and state militias operated in support of the Continental Army. They scouted, sprung ambushes and attacked British supply lines. They harassed loyalists and made it difficult for British forces to control the areas they captured.

The U.S. military has not enjoyed much success against guerrillas. It lost a hybrid war in Southeast Asia (1961-73), where it battled North Vietnamese regulars supported by Viet Cong insurgents. Thirty years later, U.S. forces faced intractable insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ukraine provides an ideal environment for partisan warfare. Russia’s naked aggression and the brutality of its occupation have united Ukrainians behind the war effort. Spontaneous acts of resistance occurred in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

Farmers dug up roads and towed away abandoned Russian vehicles, workers welded makeshift tank barricades known as hedgehogs, and a brewery converted production from beer to Molotov cocktails.

This spontaneous resistance supports a coordinated partisan campaign waged by the Ukrainian military. In 2015, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Ukraine’s subsequent abortive guerrilla campaign in the Donbas region, the Ukrainian military created a Special Operations Forces (SOF) unit to train and equip volunteers and professionals for partisan warfare.

As Russia massed troops on the Ukrainian border in preparation for the invasion in February, SOF stepped up its training of guerrilla fighters. It has even created a National Resistance website to coordinate partisan operations.

Given the disparity in size and resources between Russia and Ukraine, many analysts and the Ukrainian military itself believed Russia would occupy the country in a matter of weeks. In that case, a partisan war would have been Kyiv’s only option.

To the surprise of most observers, the Ukrainians not only halted the invaders but drove them back. Instead of being the only form of resistance left, partisan warfare became a “force multiplier” augmenting conventional operations.

The Ukrainian high command remains understandably tight-lipped about the precise nature and extent of partisan activities. However, in August, they made several SOF members available to be interviewed by the New York Times.

“The goal is to show the occupiers that they are not at home, that they should not settle in, that they should not sleep comfortably,” one interviewee stated.

Russian forces are particularly vulnerable to partisan warfare. Poorly trained and ill-equipped conscripts suffer from low morale. Fear of guerrilla attack by irregular fighters intimately acquainted with the terrain and enjoying popular support exacerbates that problem.

Poor logistics have plagued the Russian Army since the beginning of the war. Ukrainian SOF forces exploit this weakness. In August, an elite Ukrainian unit blew up an ammunition dump behind enemy lines in Crimea. That same month, partisans carried out a successful attack on a Russian airbase in Crimea.

Partisans have set booby traps, sabotaged rail lines and assassinated Ukrainians collaborating with the Russians. They have also provided Ukrainian forces with valuable targeting intelligence.

As Ukrainian forces advanced to liberate Kherson, resistance fighters carried out attacks and provided reconnaissance for the liberators. One group posted photos of Russian soldiers on its Telegram channel with the tagline “we’re watching you.” The group also hung a banner that boldly declared, “If the HIMARS [U.S. rockets] can’t reach you, a partisan will.”

Effective though it may be, partisan warfare comes with significant risks. Unable to come to grips with elusive guerrillas, the Russian military will take its frustration out on the local population accused (rightly or wrongly) of aiding the insurgents. Atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere may have been a deliberate strategy to cow civilians into submission.

The Russians are also conducting a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in occupied areas. At least 900,000 Ukrainians have been forcibly relocated, including 200,000 children.

The Russian military has a well-deserved reputation for brutality. Putin crushed the Chechen insurgency using extreme violence that included torture and murdering civilians. A United Nations report found that Russians bombed civilians during the Syrian civil war.

Russia has adopted the same tactic in Ukraine. With the frontlines frozen, it has been targeting civilian infrastructure, especially the electrical grid. By denying them heat, electricity and water, Putin hopes to break the will of the Ukrainian people and compel them to sue for peace.

The tactic is not working. Ukrainian morale is high and will remain so if the West continues to supply the country with weapons. Popular resistance to occupation will continue.

Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Conventional and Unconventional War: A History of Conflict in the Modern World.”

18. US cybersecurity director: The tech ecosystem has ‘become really unsafe’

Excerpts:

Hackers are able to break into systems by exploiting weaknesses, or errors, in the code that make up the operating systems and software that power computers and servers across the world. Since people write that code, and people are flawed, they inevitably introduce potential vectors through which hackers can launch their attacks.

Easterly said tech companies that power the world’s computers, like Microsoft (MSFT), need to be held to a higher standard to ensure that the software is as free of flaws as possible.

To do that, the director said companies need to create products that are secure by design, ensure that their software has security settings turned on by default, and that CEOs need to embrace good corporate cyber responsibilities.

“Cyber is a social good,” Easterly said. “It's about societal resilience. And my last message is that we need to fundamentally change the relationship between government and industry.”

US cybersecurity director: The tech ecosystem has ‘become really unsafe’

finance.yahoo.com

The head of the nation’s top cybersecurity agency is warning that the current technology ecosystem, which underpins much of our lives, is at risk of being hacked by malicious actors.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance at CES 2023 in Las Vegas, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly explained that the tech industry, consumers, and government need to come together to help improve cyber safety in the U.S.

“We live in a world…of massive connections where that critical infrastructure that we rely upon is all underpinned by a technology ecosystem that unfortunately has become really unsafe,” said Easterly, who was previously head of Firm Resilience at Morgan Stanley.

She added: “We cannot have the same sort of attacks on hospitals and school districts that we've been seeing for years. We have to create a sustainable approach to cyber safety, and that's the message that I'm bringing to CES.”

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly testifies before a House Homeland Security Subcommittee, at the Rayburn House Office Building on April 28, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Easterly, who was confirmed as director of CISA in 2021— and helped create and design the United States Cyber Command—explained that tech companies need to ensure that the software they put out into the world has fewer flaws that hackers can exploit.

“We've essentially accepted as normal that technology is released to market with dozens or hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities and defects and flaws,” Easterly said. “We've accepted the fact that cyber safety is my job and your job and the job of my mom and my kid, but we've put the burden on consumers, not on the companies who are best equipped to be able to do something about it.”

Over the last several years hackers and nation state actors have taken aim at everything from critical U.S. infrastructure to the IT systems that help small towns provide services to their residents. For example: In 2021, hackers attacked JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier, demanding an $11 million ransom. That same year, attackers broke into Colonial Pipeline’s systems, triggering fears of fuel shortages on the East Coast. And throughout the pandemic, hackers launched ransomware attacks against hospitals and hospital systems, forcing facilities to delay patient care.

Hackers are able to break into systems by exploiting weaknesses, or errors, in the code that make up the operating systems and software that power computers and servers across the world. Since people write that code, and people are flawed, they inevitably introduce potential vectors through which hackers can launch their attacks.

Easterly said tech companies that power the world’s computers, like Microsoft (MSFT), need to be held to a higher standard to ensure that the software is as free of flaws as possible.

To do that, the director said companies need to create products that are secure by design, ensure that their software has security settings turned on by default, and that CEOs need to embrace good corporate cyber responsibilities.

“Cyber is a social good,” Easterly said. “It's about societal resilience. And my last message is that we need to fundamentally change the relationship between government and industry.”

19. The Greatest Threat America Faces Is China

The Greatest Threat America Faces Is China

19fortyfive.com · by Sean Durns · January 6, 2023

“One of the most dangerous forms of human error,” the late American strategist Paul Nitze observed, “is forgetting what one is trying to achieve.” For several years now, the United States has rightfully considered China to be its sole peer strategic competitor. Yet, the U.S. is failing to heed Nitze’s warning.

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In 2018, the Trump administration issued a landmark document, the U.S. National Defense Strategy, which warned that America was returning to an era of great power competition, with both Russia and China as key threats. The 2022 National Defense Strategy built on this theme and correctly singled out Beijing as the chief threat, noting that China is the “only competitor out there with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the power to do so.”

The U.S. has, if belatedly, awoken to the threat posed by China. But it has yet to fully imbibe it.

The United States is right to note that China alone is the long-term “pacing challenge”—a view that likely incorporates Beijing’s economic and military might and Russia’s lackluster battlefield performance in Ukraine. But Washington and its allies need to turn this notion into something more: an animating idea.

To deter a belligerent Beijing, the United States must prioritize the Indo-Pacific—and this needs to be a perspective that is shared across the board, by all relevant agencies and actors.

U.S. policymakers must focus on the Indo-Pacific and subordinate other objectives accordingly. Those responsible for protecting and advancing American interests in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere should look at their respective regions with the China threat foremost in mind. This might sound extreme, but history tells us that its essential.

After all, the U.S. won both World War II and the Cold War by correctly prioritizing Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively. American defense planners and diplomats, industry, and civil society demonstrated a keen, if at times imperfect, ability to focus on the preeminent threat.

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration pursued a “Europe First” strategy, which prioritized the threat posed by Nazi Germany over that presented by Imperial Japan. Berlin was, among other things, more industrially powerful and presented a greater danger to the most economically developed parts of the world, with capabilities and reach that greatly exceeded its east Asian ally.

Similarly, during the Cold War there was a bipartisan decision to prioritize certain areas of the globe over others. As importantly, American actions in other theaters were usually conducted with the understanding that the Soviet Union alone constituted the chief threat. This isn’t to say that other regions and arenas ceased to matter or even that they mattered less. Rather, U.S. strategy and policy were formulated with the Soviet menace chiefly in mind. Collective security agreements and bilateral alliances were built and maintained accordingly.

U.S. policymakers constructed policies in the so-called “Third World” and elsewhere with the view that the Soviet Union was America’s primary opponent and everything else proceeded from that starting point. A similar level of focus is needed now.

In 1900, a U.S. Senator named Albert Beveridge claimed, “the power that rules Asia rules the world.” His proclamation, however, was premature; Europe, not Asia, remained the industrially developed powerhouse for most of the next century. Yet, that is not the case today—or for the foreseeable future.

The emerging bipartisan consensus that China alone is a strategic peer competitor is correct. As the strategist Elbridge Colby, among others, have pointed out, Asia will soon account for more than 50 percent of global GDP. The power that dominates the Indo-Pacific will control the majority of the world’s GDP and will possess the ability to shape and influence events far beyond that part of the world.

Indeed, China is a formidable opponent. Beijing is vastly more economically integrated into the global economy than either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. This provides the Middle Kingdom with tremendous leverage and makes it more immune to the sanctions regimes that the U.S. has adopted towards other opponents, from Damascus to Moscow. China has a veritable chokehold on key sectors of the U.S. economy, possessing the ability to cut off key materials from rare earth metals that are essential to our infrastructure to everyday medicines.

As the historian Cathal J. Nolan has convincingly argued, wars, both hot and cold, are largely won by industrial power, among other factors. On that front, China presents a threat that the U.S. hasn’t ever encountered.

China is the largest police state in world history, with surveillance powers that Stalin or Hitler would envy. To be sure, free societies innovate; the very repression that Communist China relies on hinders the technological innovation that remains the strength of the West. But China has shown itself to be a first-class thief; what it can’t create it is happy to pirate and steal.

Beijing has another advantage: a head start. China has been steadily seeking to upend the U.S.-led international order. Its rapidly expanding military might showcase a China that seeks to project power far beyond its shores. By contrast, the U.S. and its allies have been subsisting off a steady diet of delusions, insisting—despite growing evidence—that China would somehow politically liberalize and become a “responsible stakeholder.” The days of believing in such fantasies need to end. We can no longer afford them.

There are significant implications to prioritizing China. The defense industrial base in the U.S. is, at present, ill-equipped for this reality. Accordingly, it will need to be both expanded in scope and strengthened. China’s industrial and manufacturing power need to be accounted for.

History also tells us that in the Indo-Pacific both warfare and a credible deterrence are highly taxing on logistics. It also reveals how essential naval and air power can be—factors which should be reflected in defense funding. In 1961, a retired Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously told then-President John F. Kennedy that “anyone wanting to commit ground troops to Asia needs his head examined.” As the historian Mark Perry has documented, in a follow up meeting three months later, MacArthur added that America’s greatest strength was its economy—and that naval power was its greatest military asset. These are good adages to keep in mind today, both in wartime and to maintaining peace.

Going forward, deterring and confronting China’s aggression needs to be the chief animating idea for American foreign policy. And there isn’t a second to lose. As Napoleon used to tell his generals, “I can give you anything but time.”

The writer is a Washington D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.

19fortyfive.com · by Sean Durns · January 6, 2023

20. Cold War II

Excerpts:

Great powers, then, must not only have substantial populations and resources, but must also use them to support a world-class national industrial base in a prolonged and sustainable way. Neither state socialist crash programs that peter out over time nor bubbles and booms inflated by central banks in liberal market economies are adequate. To date in the industrial era, developmental states, both authoritarian like present-day China and democratic like the midcentury United States, have been more successful than communist regimes and free market liberal regimes. China has risen to the status of a second superpower on the basis of internal development and external trade, without waging the wars of choice on which the U.S. has squandered blood and treasure for a generation. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a reminder of the costs of wars of foreign conquest. So is the costly and humiliating failure of America’s two-decade misadventure in Afghanistan.

If the history of the world wars of the industrial era holds any lessons, this is one: For the small number of populous nations that can aspire to great power status in the 21st century, the ability to bomb and invade weak, backward countries will be far less consequential than government competence and superior manufacturing capability.

Cold War II

The U.S. is losing its economic advantage in a new era of global conflict

Tablet · by Michael Lind · January 4, 2023

Can a second cold war be avoided? The brutal proxy war in Ukraine between Russia and the U.S. and its allies, combined with deepening trade and military rivalries between the U.S. and its allies and China, has made the question anachronistic. We are in Cold War II now.

A cold war is a conflict among rival powers that is waged by means short of direct combat between their forces and direct attacks on their homelands. A quick survey of the methods and means that characterize such a conflict shows they are already in effect. Proxy war? Check. Arms races? Check. Trade embargoes and financial sanctions? Check. Sabotage? Somebody blew up Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Seas. Propaganda wars? Check.

Russia, China, and Iran claim they stand for a multipolar world no longer oppressed by U.S. imperial hegemony. Liberal internationalists in America and Europe claim that we are in a Manichean struggle between freedom and democracy on the one hand and reactionary autocracy, symbolized by the otherwise quite different Russian, Chinese, and Iranian regimes. In both camps, critics of regime policy are smeared as apologists for the enemy, regardless of whether that enemy is NATO or Putin’s Russia.

But while high-flown ideological battles between Putinism and Western liberalism have often taken center stage, the outcome of the new global conflict rests largely on economic competition. In the last cold war, the American economic system proved stronger and more robust than the Soviet-style command economy. Yet, in a strange turn, since the end of the last cold war America has rapidly pivoted away from the industrial model that proved so successful in the 20th century. The U.S. elite have wagered on transforming the country into an information and services-based economy. China, meanwhile, has adopted the older U.S. model of state-private sector cooperation, in the process becoming the world’s manufacturing base.

One side of the new cold war is led by countries like China and Russia, whose economic power rests on their control of physical goods. On the other side, the Western alliance dominates the financial and information sectors of the virtual economy. Neither side is completely independent of the other, but the division between them is unequal. Despite protests over Ukraine, Western Europe still needs to buy Russian gas to avoid freezing in the winter. The U.S. assails the Chinese government, but remains utterly reliant on China to supply Americans with critical goods like antibiotics.

As in Cold War I, the current conflict has produced a miscellaneous group of “nonaligned” nations that seek to keep their distance from both camps. Two of the world’s most populous democracies, India and Brazil, along with a majority of non-Western countries, pointedly refused to join North America and Western Europe in denouncing and sanctioning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. And many nations, including Israel, prefer to be on good terms with both the U.S. and China.

Scholars still debate when the first Cold War started. Was it the Greek Civil War that began in 1946? The Berlin airlift in 1948? The Korean War that began in 1950? Or did the first Cold War begin even earlier, during World War II? In the same way, tomorrow’s historians can argue about when Cold War II started. The date that I nominate is 2008—when Vladimir Putin responded to the possibility of Georgian membership in NATO by invading Georgia, and when China demonstrated its anti-satellite capability to the U.S. by shooting down one of its own satellites—a metaphorical “shot across the bow.” Whatever its origins, in Cold War II the Ukraine war represents as dramatic an escalation of hostilities as the Korean War did in Cold War I. Whether the second cold war lasts nearly half a century, as the first did, remains to be seen.

Can a second cold war be avoided? The question is anachronistic. We are in Cold War II now.

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In modern world wars and cold wars, manufacturing capacity both defines the great powers and shapes the outcomes of conflicts among them. In the pre-industrial era, except for a few trading posts that levied tolls on long-distance trade, the major power resources were populations of slave or serf or peasant farmers. Tribal warriors could gallop into a country, bully large numbers of farmers into paying them tribute, and replace the former landlords.

In the industrial era, however, no country can be a great military power without the ability to make most, if not necessarily all, of its own armaments and rely chiefly on its own population for soldiers and spies. The manufacturing industries on which modern military power depends are industries characterized by increasing returns to scale, from steel-making to automobile manufacturing to aerospace and computer production. Increasing-returns industries benefit from large markets, preferably large internal markets in populous countries. It is no coincidence that even in the alleged borderless global economy of today the global market share in these strategic industries tends to be dominated by firms based in the most populous developed nations—the U.S., Japan, Germany and—increasingly—China.

To be a great power or a superpower in the industrial age, then, it is necessary but not sufficient to have a large domestic population of consumers and workers, preferably sharing a common language and a sense of national identity; secure access to agriculture and mineral resources; and, if possible, the strategic depth enabled by a continental or subcontinental territory. That these are not enough in themselves is proven by the case of present-day India or Brazil which, according to an old joke, is the superpower of the future and always will be.

Given the importance of large home markets for the industries that are the basis of national military power, the scramble for empire among the industrializing nations of Europe as well as Japan in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th made strategic sense, even if it was immoral according to various perspectives. There were two ways to create a sufficiently large domestic consumer market and workforce capable of supporting the major industries needed for great-power status. One was to create a giant nation-state, with a single internal market and a culturally homogeneous, if not ethnically homogeneous, majority. This is what the U.S. did. The other strategy was to try to cobble together a multinational empire, as Japan did, or to try to hold together a multinational empire and modernize it, as the Soviet Union attempted.

One of the pleasures of watching James Bond movies from the 1960s is the premise that even then a tripolar world still existed, with suave and cunning Brits sharing global hegemony with uncouth Americans and boorish Russians. But after 1945, to the surprise of American and Soviet policymakers, Britain’s economic troubles, more than the loss of its colonial empire, led the U.K. to tumble down the great-power stairwell and become like France: a power of the second rank.

British thinkers had long speculated that the U.S., once it industrialized, would dwarf Britain, as Britain had earlier dwarfed the Netherlands. Proponents of “imperial federation” like Sir John Seeley argued for a customs union of Britain and its “white dominions” of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. A common external tariff, of the kind championed by the turn-of-the-century British liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain, could have created a home market for this Greater Britain capable of rivaling those of the United States and Imperial Germany.

The idea was not crazy. In 2022 if the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand formed a single trading bloc, it would have a population of 138 million, comparable to Russia’s 146 million. Calculated according to purchasing power parity (PPP), Greater Britain would have a GDP of more than $7 trillion, greater than the roughly $5 trillion GDP of the Russian Federation, whether based on PPP or market exchange rate. To be sure, as the French economist Jacques Sapir has argued, GDP measurements probably exaggerate the financialized British economy and underestimate the Russian economy, with its real-world strengths in energy, minerals, and manufacturing.

But Greater Britain was not to be. In the late 19th century, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand insisted on protecting their own industries with their own national tariffs. And British financial interests, based in the City of London, defeated the British manufacturing interest and equated free trade with virtue and protectionism with sin—a process that was repeated later in the U.S. in the 1990s and 2000s, with similar disastrous results for U.S. industrial and military power. The result was that in spite of Britain’s success at innovation in industries ranging from television to atomic power to pharmaceuticals, the production and scaling-up happened elsewhere, in the U.S. or Europe or Asia. Britain became a military dependency of the U.S.—“Airstrip One,” as it is known in George Orwell’s 1984.

Two other great powers that suffered defeats in the world wars or the cold war of the 20th century were Japan and Russia. It is easy to forget that Japan is almost as populous as Russia (125 million people compared to 143 million people), although the Japanese population is crammed into a few islands instead of spread across 11 Eurasian time zones. Japan’s Self-Defense forces are one of the world’s largest militaries. But the militarists who led Japan miscalculated in believing they could conquer Asia in the face of American, British, and Soviet opposition. A dependency of the U.S. during Cold War I, Japan has emerged as an important ally of the U.S. against China in today’s Cold War II.

Russia’s power in the 20th century was weakened by its communist regime. An older generation of communist fellow travelers in the West used to claim that at least Stalin had to be given credit for his program of crash industrialization that helped the USSR survive the Nazi onslaught. Writing in 1931, Stalin was right about Russia’s relative backwardness:

One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her—for her backwardness: for military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity ... We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.

But Russia was rapidly industrializing under the late czarist regime. The communist revolution in 1917, followed by the Civil War, the exodus or imprisonment and execution of many talented Russians, the confiscation of all farmland and industry, the state-engineered Ukrainian famine, and the military and political purges of the 1930s, were all economic as well as social and moral disasters, undermining Soviet military strength.

That the problem with the Soviet economy was communism itself, not Russian culture or some other local factor, is clear from the history of Marxism-Leninist state socialism elsewhere. The Cold War provided unique experiments in the form of divided countries: Germany, Korea, and China. In each case, the noncommunist section quickly surpassed the communist-controlled territory in prosperity. Add to this the poverty and stagnation of Castro’s Cuba and the rapid growth of the Chinese economy after Mao’s successors abandoned Marxism-Leninism for Market Leninism, and similar growth in modern Vietnam, and the case against communist-style state socialism is closed.

The Cold War was viewed by many on both sides at the time as a contest between two ways to organize a modern industrial economy, “capitalism” and “communism” or “socialism.” Looking back, it is clear that instead Cold War I was a three-way contest between communism and two kinds of capitalism—liberal or free market capitalism, and developmentalism, characterized by a mixed economy and state-directed industrial policy in support of targeted strategic industries.

Examples of the developmental state are familiar in East Asia: Japan and the four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore), plus post-Mao China. But the East Asians borrowed the developmentalist model from Germany and the United States, which in their successful attempts to catch up with industrial Britain in the 19th century had used their own variants of the tradition, associated with Friedrich List in Germany and Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay in the U.S. The roots of developmentalist economics can be traced back to mercantilism and cameralism in early modern Europe and even further back to Renaissance Italy. (There was no “fascist model” of economics. Mussolini’s regime might be classified as an authoritarian developmentalist state, but the short-lived Nazi economy was based first on preparation for war and then on plunder and slavery.)

Ironically, during the Cold War, when the U.S. supposedly illustrated the virtues of free enterprise, the U.S. had its own successful developmental-state industrial policy, orchestrated by the Defense Department through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other agencies. In the 1990s, libertarians and neoliberals claimed that the information technology revolution proved the superiority of the free market to government when it comes to innovation. But the major tools of the computer age, from digitization to the global internet to the computer mouse were developed by government contractors reliant on U.S. taxpayer money.

It is no coincidence that U.S. productivity and innovation sputtered in this century, when neoliberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans decided to let the free market develop the next wave of technologies. It turns out that venture capitalists and advertisers are more interested in addictive online sites like Facebook and Twitter than in robots and cures for cancer. Without exception the major advances in basic technology during the post-1980s era of free market utopianism have been largely funded by the federal government. Think of the sequencing of the human genome, the vaccines to combat COVID, electric cars like Tesla, and the rockets of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Neoliberal America, symbolized by Silicon Valley, is living on the technological capital inherited from developmentalist America, symbolized by the Pentagon.

This is critically important because world wars, hot and cold, are ultimately wars of industrial attrition. The three world wars that preceded today’s second cold war—World Wars I and II and Cold War I—demonstrate the importance of industrial power for victory. Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany and its allies were doomed once the U.S. mobilized its industrial might and entered the wars against them. When the Soviet Union under Gorbachev asked for a truce, the USSR was out-matched by the combined resources of the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, and its former ally communist China. In World War II, the U.S. and its allies directly bombed the factories and arsenals of their enemies. In World War I and Cold War I, the economies and morale of Imperial Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively, were strained to the breaking point without any foreign troops on the soil of the defeated power’s homeland.

Great powers, then, must not only have substantial populations and resources, but must also use them to support a world-class national industrial base in a prolonged and sustainable way. Neither state socialist crash programs that peter out over time nor bubbles and booms inflated by central banks in liberal market economies are adequate. To date in the industrial era, developmental states, both authoritarian like present-day China and democratic like the midcentury United States, have been more successful than communist regimes and free market liberal regimes. China has risen to the status of a second superpower on the basis of internal development and external trade, without waging the wars of choice on which the U.S. has squandered blood and treasure for a generation. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a reminder of the costs of wars of foreign conquest. So is the costly and humiliating failure of America’s two-decade misadventure in Afghanistan.

If the history of the world wars of the industrial era holds any lessons, this is one: For the small number of populous nations that can aspire to great power status in the 21st century, the ability to bomb and invade weak, backward countries will be far less consequential than government competence and superior manufacturing capability.

Tablet · by Michael Lind · January 4, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

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Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

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

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RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 6, 2023

Jan 6, 2023 - Press ISW

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