Quotes of the Day:
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
- Marie Curie
“there are only two sources of human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity and intelligence.”
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
"Deep listening is miraculous for both the listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judgmental, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand.”
- Sue Patton Soele
1. Why Afghanistan Fell: An Insider’s Account of What Went Wrong
2. Everything you think you know about the CIA is wrong
3. Why Climate Policy Has Failed
4. Harvard moves Chinese language programme to Taiwan
5. China needs a stronger message to 'tamp down' aggression against Taiwan
6. Chinese 'shock' troops storm beach near Taiwan in training exercise
7. Retired Marine colonel says US should weigh nuclear war with China over Taiwan
8. Taiwan not concerned about war with China, despite sky-high tensions
9. Paratroopers sent to Kabul this summer had a 3-D simulation of the airport
10. Lawmakers Press to Rescue Afghan Relatives of U.S. Service Members
11. Taliban Takeover Of Afghanistan Is Inspiring Americans Online, FBI Says
12. ‘A triumph of truth over lies’: joy in the Philippines over Maria Ressa’s Nobel prize win
13. ‘No way around it’: Facing budget cuts, Army braces to fight for modernization
14. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: Getting Force Design Right in the Next National Defense Strategy
15. Analysis | Americans aren’t that tired of war, it seems
16. A Harvard study is going viral among anti-vaxxers. The author says they are all wrong.
1. Why Afghanistan Fell: An Insider’s Account of What Went Wrong
Excerpts;
None of these factors alone was responsible for the collapse of the Afghan state. But they interacted and reinforced one another in ultimately fatal ways. Leadership failures in the Afghan security sector, for example, were exacerbated by Biden’s decision to rapidly withdraw not only all remaining international forces but also all associated contractors. Only three years earlier, the United States had stopped buying Russian-produced Mi-17 helicopters for the Afghan military and switched to U.S.-made UH-60 Black Hawks. But there was no time to train enough Afghan pilots and maintenance crews required to operate the new fleet of U.S. helicopters, which were more advanced and complex machines. With the withdrawal of international troops and contractors, the ability of the Afghan military to project power through its air force significantly declined.
The fallout and sense of betrayal from the Doha agreement deepened the bickering between Ghani, Abdullah, and Karzai, further weakening any sense of a strong, central government. Karzai and Abdullah continued to push for an interim government, which Ghani opposed. Given the Taliban opposition to Ghani during the peace negotiations, Khalilzad then reportedly encouraged Karzai and others to consider themselves candidates for a negotiated interim president position. In the end, it didn’t matter. The Taliban surrounded Kabul, and Ghani fled.
We will undoubtedly debate the reasons for the Afghan state’s quick collapse and cast blame for a long time to come. Understanding what led to its rapid downfall will, eventually, allow others to learn from our experience and formulate appropriate policy responses. In the meantime, the consequences will be borne—yet again—by Afghan citizens who had no say in any of these matters.
Why Afghanistan Fell
An Insider’s Account of What Went Wrong
October 11, 2021
“The current conditions in Afghanistan do not lend themselves well to the consolidation of democracy.” That’s what I wrote in 2007, when I was a young student at the Harvard Kennedy School. Even then, it was clear that the forces threatening to undermine the new democratic Afghan state would likely prove too powerful for it to withstand. Despite my analysis, I returned home and attempted to help build the new government, first as senior economic adviser to President Ashraf Ghani, then as minister of industry and commerce, and, most recently, as central bank governor. In the end, 14 years after I wrote those words, the Taliban retook Afghanistan and democracy died overnight.
From my vantage point working for the government in Kabul until August 15, when I scrambled to board a C-17 to escape the country, I had a front-row seat to what went wrong. For years, the Afghan government was plagued by political infighting, corruption, and national security and law enforcement leaders who abused their positions of power or had little to no experience. Thus, when the United States brokered the Doha peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, it dealt an already weak Afghan government a devastating blow. As the United States and the international community started heading for the exits, other regional players, especially Pakistan, took additional steps to further shift the balance of power to the Taliban. As these external drivers shaped the country’s future, Afghan political actors did not adjust accordingly. When the United States decided to fully withdraw its troops, these same leaders continued to compete for power rather than plan for the worst-case scenario.
I typically did not discuss security issues with the president, but in early August, after he asked me to become finance minister when Khalid Payenda resigned and fled the country, I expressed concerns about the deteriorating situation. At this point, most rural districts and many provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan had already fallen to the Taliban. Ghani replied that the security forces required six months to reconfigure and realign themselves. The comment seemed out of touch with the rapidly advancing Taliban. I wanted instead to hear the one-week plan. Ghani then stated that he was in talks to bring in other external security contractors and also expressed frustration that U.S. General Austin Miller, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan until he left on July 12, never discussed the drawdown in detail with him. Less than a week after my conversation with Ghani, Kabul fell to the Taliban.
This combination of U.S. betrayal and disbelief on the part of Afghan leaders set the stage for the government’s swift collapse. Any accounting of what went so horribly wrong needs to acknowledge this confluence of external and internal factors, which worked to reinforce each other as the state hurtled toward its downfall.
Pulling the Rug From Under
In February 2020, in the final year of the administration of President Donald Trump, the United States signed the Doha agreement with the Taliban. The negotiations, led by U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad, and the resulting deal legitimized the Taliban while undermining the Afghan government: the United States was negotiating with a terrorist organization while excluding a country with which Washington had a bilateral security agreement. As part of its deal with the Taliban, the United States agreed to withdraw its troops and, in return, the Taliban committed to not attack U.S. troops as they left. The arrangement also required the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, which it did reluctantly. At the time, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even criticized the Afghan government for not releasing them quickly enough. Now, some of those same men make up key parts of the Taliban leadership.
By shifting the balance of power toward the Taliban, the Doha agreement helped create the conditions for the state’s collapse. Although Khalilzad is a seasoned diplomat, he was perhaps too close to the issue. He and Ghani were in the same international student exchange program in the United States decades ago, and there is well-known animosity between the two men. This meant that in addition to being about the future of two countries, the Doha deal was about two individuals. With Ghani and the Afghan government left on the sidelines, the deal contributed to the worst-possible outcome. It would have been far better if the U.S. military simply left Afghanistan, rather than signing a deal with the Taliban on the way out.
The Doha agreement helped create the conditions for the Afghanistan's collapse.
U.S. President Joe Biden reinforced the problem by announcing within a few months of his arrival in the White House that he would comply with the commitments made by the Trump administration to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, even if on a delayed timeline. This decision ran contrary to the advice of both the Afghanistan Study Group, a bipartisan task force created by the U.S. Congress, and U.S. military leadership. In recent U.S. Senate testimony, General Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, clearly stated that he had recommended maintaining 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan and warned that removal of such troops would lead to the collapse of the government. But Biden had long been skeptical of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. In 2008, as a senator, he traveled to Kabul and had dinner with Hamid Karzai, then president of Afghanistan. Frustrated with Karzai’s denials about corruption, Biden reportedly threw down his napkin and stormed out. As vice president, he opposed the 2009 troop surge. In an August 19 interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Biden said that he would have found a way to withdraw U.S. troops even without Trump’s Doha deal. Given the Afghan National Security Forces’ dependence on logistical and air support from international forces, the decision to withdraw troops and all its associated contractors in such a short period of time significantly weakened ANSF capabilities.
The Taliban, in contrast, enjoyed consistent external support, above all from Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the former president of Pakistan, was famously quoted as saying that Pakistan always sought to keep the temperature boiling in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s most important contribution was providing sanctuary to the Taliban. “Make no mistake: The Taliban operated from Pakistan consistently,” former U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said at an event last week at Harvard University. "It's no accident that [Osama] Bin Laden was in Abbottabad. It's no accident that [Sirajuddin] Haqqani's running the place now. Where did Haqqani spend the last couple of decades? In Western The previous ISI director, Faiz Hameed, even visited Kabul on September 4, looking quite relaxed as he met with Taliban leaders. Two days later, an interim Taliban government was announced and it included key posts for leaders of the Haqqani network, a militant group with links to al Qaeda that received refuge in Pakistan and is viewed as an ally of the ISI.
Other regional actors also played a role. China approved of Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, with the aim of countering perceived Indian interests in Afghanistan and to help make the United States seem like an unreliable partner. Iran was unhappy when, under pressure from the United States, the Afghan Central Bank sanctioned Aryan Bank, an Afghan subsidiary of an Iranian bank, in 2018. It also complained about the construction of dams along Afghan rivers that flowed into Iran. Russia supported and legitimized the Taliban through the Moscow process, negotiations that took place between the Taliban and the Afghan government and were hosted by Russia, in order to undermine the Afghan government.
The Center Cannot Hold
Thanks to its own weakness, the Afghan government was unable to withstand these external forces. Part of the problem was Ghani’s approach to governance. He was more interested in long-term state development than in appeasing domestic political actors. This made enemies of local power brokers who had, for better or worse, maintained strong regional security networks—including former Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum in Jowzjan, Atta Nur in Balkh, and Ismail Khan in Herat. This left Ghani with too few allies as he centralized decision-making, relying instead on best-practice institutional structures—a single treasury account, a single procurement authority, and a single chain of command for the military. If Ghani had had more time in office and more external support, his state-centric approach might have been the correct one for the country. But he miscalculated when it came to the opposition of both domestic and international political actors to his policies. He should have known better – Amanullah Khan, the Afghan king who led the country to independence from Britain in 1919, was overthrown almost 100 years earlier for trying to make reforms too rapidly. Ghani refused to adjust to changing circumstances, and his governing strategy failed.
But Ghani wasn’t alone in this. As the United States negotiated with the Taliban and later, as the Taliban advanced across the country toward Kabul, other Afghan politicians did little to strengthen the Afghan government and instead focused on their own political futures. Ghani’s rival Abdullah Abdullah contested the presidential election results in 2020—and, in March of that year, even held a parallel inauguration. It was the third time he had run for president and lost. Karzai also wanted to return to the political stage and was reputed to be angling to become president again in an interim arrangement with the Taliban. Since he left the government in 2018, former Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal thought he could convince the Taliban that he could help them become legitimate in the eyes of the international community. Other domestic politicians, including Mir Rahman Rahmani, Ahmad Zia Massoud, and Mohammad Younus Qanooni, flew to Islamabad on the day Kabul fell to seek some sort of political influence with the Taliban via the Pakistani government. These politicians thought they could obtain better political outcomes in a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban, but they lost on both ends of the bargain: they weakened the country and have obtained no position in the new Taliban government.
Corruption was ensconced in the Afghan state.
This all took place against a backdrop of corruption—another key domestic driver of state weakness. I would be the last to argue that there was no corruption in Afghanistan. There clearly was. But Afghanistan had been making slow incremental progress on this front. Afghanistan’s score in the annual Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index improved from 11 out of 100 in 2015 to 19 in 2020; its Parliament passed significant new legislation that improved transparency in the natural resources sector; and the government created an independent anticorruption council. As head of the central bank, I ensured that central bank accounts were connected electronically to all commercial banks in the country, in order to make government salary payments fully electronic, which over time could have significantly reduced the presence of “ghost workers” and ensured transparency in the payment of salaries to soldiers and police. But these actions were clearly too little, too late. Corruption was ensconced in the Afghan state.
Finally, there were consequential leadership failures among security officials. The ANSF fought bravely over the last two decades. But National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib, one of Ghani’s close associates, had no military or intelligence background and made sure that all military appointments had to be approved by him. In October 2020, Mohib appointed new provincial district governors and district police chiefs throughout Afghanistan, most of whom had no connection to the local communities they were overseeing.
What’s more, frequent senior-level changes to military leaders led to confusion and continual shifts in strategy. During a critical period throughout much of 2020 and 2021, acting Minister of Defense Asadullah Khalid was sick and out of the country for many months. It was never clear why Khalid was left in his position during this time, although Ghani mentioned to me that the U.S. military wanted him to remain there. Then, in June 2021, as the military situation worsened, Ghani replaced both the defense and interior ministers, as well as the army chief of staff. At no point did the military seem to be planning a high-level strategy for the protection of major cities. And, in the end, it was a surprise to me to see Minister of Defense Bismillah Khan departing the country, seated comfortably, on the same flight I scrambled to board.
Interconnected Failures
None of these factors alone was responsible for the collapse of the Afghan state. But they interacted and reinforced one another in ultimately fatal ways. Leadership failures in the Afghan security sector, for example, were exacerbated by Biden’s decision to rapidly withdraw not only all remaining international forces but also all associated contractors. Only three years earlier, the United States had stopped buying Russian-produced Mi-17 helicopters for the Afghan military and switched to U.S.-made UH-60 Black Hawks. But there was no time to train enough Afghan pilots and maintenance crews required to operate the new fleet of U.S. helicopters, which were more advanced and complex machines. With the withdrawal of international troops and contractors, the ability of the Afghan military to project power through its air force significantly declined.
The fallout and sense of betrayal from the Doha agreement deepened the bickering between Ghani, Abdullah, and Karzai, further weakening any sense of a strong, central government. Karzai and Abdullah continued to push for an interim government, which Ghani opposed. Given the Taliban opposition to Ghani during the peace negotiations, Khalilzad then reportedly encouraged Karzai and others to consider themselves candidates for a negotiated interim president position. In the end, it didn’t matter. The Taliban surrounded Kabul, and Ghani fled.
We will undoubtedly debate the reasons for the Afghan state’s quick collapse and cast blame for a long time to come. Understanding what led to its rapid downfall will, eventually, allow others to learn from our experience and formulate appropriate policy responses. In the meantime, the consequences will be borne—yet again—by Afghan citizens who had no say in any of these matters.
2. Everything you think you know about the CIA is wrong
Excerpts:
Analysts pride themselves on "speaking truth to power," and are encouraged from their first days on the job to be wary of anyone attempting to distort reality. Newly appointed CIA directors, most of whom arrive from outside Langley, are often shocked to observe young analysts correct their superiors or even the director in briefings.
CIA case officers -- charged with spotting, developing, and recruiting human agents -- are often portrayed in the media as professional liars. But the nature of their work demands precisely the opposite. They must be able to work independently. Langley must trust them. And it is honesty that delivers this trust.
The dynamic with agents is similar. Though the case officer is living under cover and the foreign agent is committing treason, productive, long-term relationships are best formed on a foundation of truth-telling. Case officers are taught early on that lying to Langley is the greatest of all the sins. The CIA might tolerate all manner of screw-ups and mistakes, but it will not tolerate deception.
So, the next time you flip on "Jack Ryan," remember that on the other side of the Hollywood looking glass, CIA officers are both struggling with the mundane and playing a serious, high-stakes game to accomplish their mission: uncovering and speaking the truth.
Everything you think you know about the CIA is wrong
CNN · by Opinion by David McCloskey
David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst and former consultant at McKinsey & Company, is the author of a new spy novel, "Damascus Station." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
(CNN)We are awash in spy stories. "No Time to Die," the latest James Bond film, landed last week as the 25th installment in the franchise -- one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.
David McCloskey
Two long-running spy thriller series, Brad Thor's Scot Harvath and Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon, topped the New York Times Bestseller list during back-to-back weeks in August. The second season of the "Jack Ryan" series, tracking the adventures of the eponymous CIA analyst, was reportedly one of Amazon's most popular shows ever.
I am an avid consumer of these stories. I have even written a spy novel. I am also a former CIA analyst. And if Hollywood or spy thrillers are your primary source on the agency's Langley headquarters, then chances are that everything you think you know about the CIA is wrong.
In most Hollywood treatments, the CIA's superhero spies kill a lot of people, blow things up, and often operate without official sanction, perhaps on American soil. A random sample of spy thrillers on Amazon reveals CIA protagonists with job descriptions that would puzzle the Langley Human Resource mavens: "black ops officer," "assassin" and "covert operative" are all common. In other depictions, the CIA is morally bankrupt and ineffectual, its officers cynical liars and bunglers.
There is nothing wrong with the Hollywood fare, and in any case most offerings are not striving for authenticity. Much of it is loads of fun. Some of it may even tap into a vein of truth. But none of it sheds light on what it is really like to work inside the CIA.
Read More
To understand the agency, instead think of it as a uniquely bipolar organization. The daily work of the CIA is as mundane (and far quirkier) than that of nearly any business; it is also far more high-stakes and exceptional.
On the mundane side: the agency is a large bureaucracy beset by many of the same issues as Fortune 500 companies. Much of a chief of station's job involves exchanging cable traffic with Langley, a fancy way of saying that, like many middle- to upper-level managers, they send a lot of emails. Officers in the field call headquarters "The 10,000 Mile Screwdriver" for its ability to turn the crank on stations halfway across the globe.
There are byzantine processes for submitting expenses and booking travel. For example, flights must exceed 13 hours in duration (excluding layovers) to qualify for business class fares. That is, unless you are granted a height waiver from the agency doctors, based on a formula that includes not just height but also the distance from the hip to the knee and the knee to the ankle. Take those measurements, perhaps swirl them with the entrails of a goat, and out pops a score. I am 6'4" with long legs. Much to my colleagues' dismay, I received the waiver.
There are plenty of other quirks. Some of Langley's temporary offices are infested with rats. And officers compete savagely for parking passes to shorten the trudge through Langley's Disneyland-style parking lot.
The CIA throws an annual "Family Day," on which employees may bring a carload of relatives onto the compound. Agency offices and components set up booths and organize events. At the booth run by the Office of Security, my teenage sister spectacularly failed her first and only polygraph.
There is a gift shop that sells agency-branded swag, including mugs, golf balls, barbecue sauce, and -- my favorite -- luggage bearing a CIA monogram, which agency officers for obvious reasons cannot buy (in fact, any CIA officer under cover cannot use the gift shop at all).
There is also a hot dog machine in the Langley basement, loaded with Hormel products in the manner of a belt-fed machine gun. I visited it on many late nights.
The fact that the agency is not just a large organization, but a highly secretive, government organization, means that CIA officers are subjected to additional wrinkles of inanity. Bringing alcohol into the building requires a waiver (confiscations are not uncommon). Because taxpayer dollars cannot be used to fund celebrations, CIA holiday parties resemble the homespun ambience of a church potluck, with volunteers making or buying the food.
Inside headquarters, maintenance workers are minded by contractors whose uniform includes a green suit jacket. I have visited bathrooms in which, to the untrained eye, it would appear as though a PGA Master's champion was keenly observing a plumber unclogging a toilet.
But if the bureaucracy is mundane and the quirks far quirkier, the stakes of the CIA's mission are also much, much higher. Hollywood's superhero spies do not exist, but the CIA does deal in the exceptional -- and deadly serious -- business of convincing agents to betray their countries, disrupting terrorist networks, and providing assessments to US policymakers that shape American foreign policy.
I know of technical and human operations that infiltrated terrorist cells in the Middle East, preventing attacks. I have watched drone footage of some of our adversaries' most prized -- and secretive -- facilities from windowless Langley rooms. I know of operations in which CIA officers ventured into hard target, denied countries, under elaborate cover, to scout potential locations for agents to drop sensitive documents.
I know of bags of cash passed to agents after their release from prison with the message that the CIA keeps its promises. I know of agents arrested and killed after their governments discovered they had provided secrets to the CIA.
I know of officers asked to deploy to Afghanistan and other hotspots for yearlong tours on a week's notice, putting incredible stress and strain on their marriages and families. I say all of this not to paper over the CIA's real warts and shortcomings, but to offer a few examples to demonstrate that while most corporate jobs have analogues elsewhere, the CIA does not. The exceptional nature of what CIA officers simply call "the Mission" is the reason they tolerate the bureaucracy and the quirks of life in the secret world.
The strange reality is that, for a secretive organization dealing in deception, the moral code developed to achieve this mission is all about telling the truth. This does not mean that the CIA always lives up to this code -- the agency's history has its share of both intelligence and moral failures -- but truth is the standard. The search for it is the soul of the place.
Analysts pride themselves on "speaking truth to power," and are encouraged from their first days on the job to be wary of anyone attempting to distort reality. Newly appointed CIA directors, most of whom arrive from outside Langley, are often shocked to observe young analysts correct their superiors or even the director in briefings.
CIA case officers -- charged with spotting, developing, and recruiting human agents -- are often portrayed in the media as professional liars. But the nature of their work demands precisely the opposite. They must be able to work independently. Langley must trust them. And it is honesty that delivers this trust.
The dynamic with agents is similar. Though the case officer is living under cover and the foreign agent is committing treason, productive, long-term relationships are best formed on a foundation of truth-telling. Case officers are taught early on that lying to Langley is the greatest of all the sins. The CIA might tolerate all manner of screw-ups and mistakes, but it will not tolerate deception.
So, the next time you flip on "Jack Ryan," remember that on the other side of the Hollywood looking glass, CIA officers are both struggling with the mundane and playing a serious, high-stakes game to accomplish their mission: uncovering and speaking the truth.
CNN · by Opinion by David McCloskey
3. Why Climate Policy Has Failed
Excerpts:
The world has made little progress in slowing global warming. Even with all the policies implemented over the last three decades, the rate of global decarbonization is unchanged. If we hope to meet our climate objectives, we must enact a swift and sharp downturn in emissions.
An effective policy must introduce high carbon prices, harmonized across countries and across sectors. Actual carbon prices are virtually zero today; they should immediately increase to around $50 per ton of carbon dioxide and rise steeply after that. High emission prices will help remedy the problem of underinvestment in low-carbon technologies, but governments must provide additional support. Right now, countries severely neglect the fundamental energy research and development that will make possible a low- or zero-carbon economy. Finally, coordinating effective international policies will require some kind of club structure—an agreement that uses both carrots and sticks to induce countries to implement critical reforms.
High carbon prices combined with investment in low-carbon technologies and international participation in a climate club—this is the mix of policies we need to meet our ambitious objectives.
Why Climate Policy Has Failed
And How Governments Can Do Better
Editor’s Note: This essay draws on a keynote address, offering an economic perspective on current climate trends and policy recommendations, delivered to G-20 foreign ministers and central bank governors gathered in Venice in July 2021.
The world is witnessing an alarming outbreak of weather disasters—giant wildfires, deadly heat waves, powerful hurricanes, and 1,000-year floods. There can be little doubt that this is only the beginning of the grim toll that climate change will take in the years ahead. Today, the central question is whether our political systems can catch up with the geophysical realities that threaten our lives and livelihoods. As world leaders struggle to design and adopt policies that can slow the pace of warming and mitigate its consequences, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, this November will be an important test.
How do we evaluate the success of past climate policies? The best indicator is carbon intensity, which is a measure of carbon dioxide emissions divided by global real GDP. Figure 1 displays the levels of carbon intensity between 1990 and 2019. There are small fluctuations in the annual changes, but the trend is basically a straight line showing a decline of 1.8 percent per year.
Why is this important? The central goal of climate policies is to bend the emission curve downward. Yet even with all of the international agreements of the last three decades—the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, the Copenhagen accord of 2009, and the Paris climate accord of 2015, along with 25 conferences of the parties—over the same period the rate of decarbonization has remained unchanged.
Figure 1. Trend in decarbonization, 1990–2019
Why has there been so little progress? To begin with, the price of carbon dioxide emissions across the world is essentially zero, so there is no real market incentive to decarbonize. Second, our economies suffer from inadequate investment in low-carbon technologies because of misaligned innovation incentives. Finally, the entire structure of international policy is hampered by the syndrome of free-riding. Countries rely on others to act, a tendency that undermines the strength of climate agreements. Given these three problems, it cannot be a surprise that the world has made so little headway in slowing climate change.
Climate policy today must address all of these failures. A successful strategy must include three mutually reinforcing components: universal carbon pricing, robust government support for low-carbon technologies, and a new architecture for international climate agreements. Every pillar is necessary if the world is to stand a chance of meeting its climate objectives.
THE PATH TO TWO DEGREES
The internationally agreed climate target is to limit the global temperature increase to two degrees Celsius. Looking forward, what is necessary to attain that objective? Consider three scenarios. The top line in Figure 2 assumes no change to climate policy. With the current (minimal) policies in place at both the national and international levels, emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent (carbon dioxide plus other gases that produce warming effects) are projected to increase roughly one percent per year over the next five decades—trending up, not down.
The next scenario, shown at the bottom of Figure 2, is one in which the world meets the two-degree target. To stay on this path, emissions must decline sharply and immediately. Whereas current policies will result in a rise in emissions of almost 25 percent between 2015 and 2030, the two-degree path requires a decline of 30 percent by 2030 and reaches zero emissions shortly after midcentury.
Figure 2. Three emission scenarios
Finally, consider the path of emissions under the Paris accord, shown in the middle line in Figure 2. Emission estimates through 2030 reflect actual national commitments, while those after 2030 are projections assuming countries continue to deepen their commitments at the same pace as during the period between 2015 and 2030. The emission trajectory under the Paris accord is virtually flat, rising three percent from 2015 to 2030 and then declining slightly after that. Of course, these projections assume that the Paris commitments are actually fulfilled.
The main takeaway is that meeting the two-degree target cannot happen without an immediate and steep drop in emissions. Even if all countries meet their Paris objectives, that will reduce emissions only a fraction of the necessary amount.
We should recognize that some countries have moved beyond Paris in their domestic commitments. Many are aiming for zero net emissions by midcentury or shortly thereafter. These are soft commitments, however, lacking a binding international agreement and the actual policy mechanisms that will be necessary for implementation. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, for example, has promised deep emission reductions but has not put policies in place to meet those promises—no carbon pricing, no major increase in energy research, and no proposals to retool international agreements.
There is a vast chasm between aspirations and policies. Economic studies indicate that there are three steps countries can take to bridge the gap: price carbon emissions, promote low-carbon technologies, and improve the architecture of international climate accords.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CARBON PRICING
The single most important step to achieve climate objectives is to put a market price on the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, such as methane. For succinctness, this is commonly referred to as a price on carbon. The fundamental economic logic is that raising the price of a good reduces consumption—whether that good is cigarettes, gasoline, alcohol, or emissions. A high carbon price is necessary if we are to change the behavior of thousands of local and national governments, millions of companies, and billions of consumers.
The power of carbon prices can be explained with the example of using coal for electricity generation. When burned, one ton of coal emits close to three tons of carbon dioxide. If the government levies $50 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, this will add approximately $140 per ton to the price of coal. This will more than double the cost of coal-fired electricity. Producers would have a strong incentive to transition away from coal in favor of low-carbon fuels (such as natural gas) or renewable technologies (such as wind, solar, and nuclear power).
Other sectors will feel a smaller impact. A $50 carbon price would add $230 per year to the cost of driving a gasoline-powered car but only $1 to the average household’s annual cost of banking services. Across the economy, carbon prices tilt the playing field against emissions. The higher the price, the steeper the tilt.
A second point, which is less obvious, is that the carbon price needs to be equal across countries and sectors. It won’t do for some sectors, such as motor fuels, to have astronomical carbon prices while other sectors, such as electricity or aluminum production, have low ones. Harmonizing prices allows the world to attain its climate objectives at minimum cost. Calculations suggest that placing the burden of reductions on only half of all countries or half of all sectors will at least double that cost.
Meeting the two-degree target cannot happen without an immediate and steep drop in emissions.
How high a carbon price is necessary? Estimates of the “social cost of carbon”—which calculates global economic damage per ton of emissions—would suggest a price of around $50 per ton in 2021, rising to $85 per ton in 2050.
This price is unlikely to attain the two-degree objective or the target of zero net emissions by 2050, however. Doing either would require much higher prices. I estimate that these ambitious targets would require carbon prices of $300 to $500 per ton in 2030, rising as high as $1,000 per ton by 2050. But the estimates from different models vary widely because the technologies needed to reach zero emissions are still speculative.
In reality, carbon emission prices and the regimes under which they operate are completely inadequate. According to World Bank calculations, in 2019 the average global price was about $2 per ton of carbon dioxide. This is not even in the same universe as what is necessary. Low carbon prices are one reason why climate policies have been so ineffective.
There are dozens of carbon pricing plans in place in different regions of the world, each setting its own price and varying in terms of the share of the region’s emissions that are covered by the regime. The largest is the European Union Emissions Trading System (ETS), which operates as a multinational carbon trading scheme. Even the ETS, as impressive as it is, has two flaws. One problem is that the price is so volatile: it has varied from $4 to $75 per ton of carbon dioxide over the last decade. More important, the ETS covers only a fraction of the European Union’s economy—slightly less than half. Other regional carbon pricing regimes, such as the California cap and trade system, have a very high coverage rate but a very low tax. Still other systems, such as those of Sweden and Switzerland, have very high prices but very low coverage.
The policy necessary to meet international climate objectives looks very different from any regime currently in operation. It needs to have the price adopted by Sweden or Switzerland and the coverage rate of California—something like a price of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide and close to 100 percent coverage. High and harmonized carbon prices are key to climate change policy, but those that exist today tend to be low and fragmented.
GREEN R & D
Governments must also increase their support for low-carbon technologies. Just as countries used extraordinary incentives to develop COVID-19 vaccines in record time, we need to use all our ingenuity to accelerate the development of low-carbon technologies.
The reason for the urgency is that moving to a low- or zero-carbon global economy will require replacing large parts of our energy infrastructure and/or developing brand-new carbon-removal technologies. Fossil fuels accounted for 84 percent of the world’s primary energy consumption in 2019. By a rough estimate, it will take on the order of $100 trillion to $300 trillion in new capital to reach zero net emissions over the next four decades. And much of that new capital must come in the form of technologies that are largely unproven or immature today. Research and development is urgently needed to make this possible.
Why is government support necessary? From an economic point of view, R & D suffers from a severe externality in the same way that climate change does. The public returns on green innovation are much larger than the private returns. Indeed, there is a double externality for low-carbon R & D. Green inventors get only a small fraction of the returns on their innovations to begin with, and then the low prices of emissions exacerbate the problem.
Carbon capture and sequestration provides a good example of this double externality. Economic returns on the research and commercialization of CCS spill over to other firms and future consumers. But the captured carbon is worthless in most countries because carbon emissions are drastically underpriced, which makes investments in CCS commercially nonviable—and therefore out of the question in corporate boardrooms.
The same logic holds for advanced nuclear power, fusion power, and the burgeoning hydrogen economy: none of them have any advantage over fossil fuels as long as carbon prices remain low. Hydrogen will never be the energy carrier of the future when carbon prices are $2 per ton.
It should be emphasized that the primary requirement is support for research and development, not production. Developing new low-carbon technologies and energy sources is much more important than subsidizing the current generation of low-carbon equipment in cars, houses, and industry.
The U.S. government’s research budget today reveals misplaced national priorities. In 2019, federal R & D spending on military systems—such as aircraft, drones, artificial intelligence, robots, and nuclear weapons—totaled $60 billion. By contrast, advanced energy and renewables received only $2 billion in government R & D funding. While there may be political logic to this disparity, there is no societal logic to the imbalance given the climate threats the world faces in the coming years.
THE CLIMATE CLUB
Why have landmark international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris accord failed to make a dent in emission trends? The reason is free-riding—countries neglect to do their part, putting their national interests over global interests. A country displaying this syndrome might say not just “America first” but “America only.” Nationalist policies that maximize one state’s interests at the expense of others—beggar-thy-neighbor policies—are a poor way to resolve global problems. Noncooperative approaches to issues as diverse as tariffs, ocean fisheries, war, outer space, and climate change lead to outcomes that leave most or all nations worse off. The result of pervasive free-riding is that international climate policy has reached a dead end.
The fatal flaw in the 25 UN conferences leading up to Glasgow is that they are essentially voluntary. Countries may agree to take action, but there are no repercussions if they withdraw from the accords or fail to keep their commitments. When the United States dropped out of the Kyoto Protocol, there were no penalties. In every climate agreement to date, there have been no penalties for nonparticipation or for breaking promises. Voluntary climate change treaties produce very limited emission reductions—this is the lesson of both history and economic theory, and it is validated by the three-decade decarbonization trend shown in Figure 1.
Current carbon emission prices are completely inadequate.
One proposal to combat free-riding in climate treaties is what I have called a “climate club.” Scholars who study effective international agreements find they include sticks as well as carrots—that is, they set penalties for nonparticipants and rule breakers. Trade treaties and the World Trade Organization system epitomize such an approach. They require countries to make costly commitments that serve the collective interest, but they also penalize countries that do not keep their commitments.
This could be a template for an effective climate agreement. Take an example that we have modeled at Yale and that has been studied at other universities. Suppose a climate club agrees to establish a minimum target carbon price. Under club rules, countries would be required to impose a minimum domestic carbon price, say, $50 per ton of carbon dioxide, that rises over time. The implementation mechanism may vary by country—a government could decide to use a cap and trade or a carbon tax, for instance—and each country would keep its own revenues.
The new feature—and the key difference from existing climate agreements—is a penalty for nonparticipants and countries that fail to meet their obligations. In our analysis, this takes the form of a uniform tariff increase. Such a penalty is simple to administer and serves as a powerful incentive. Our modeling suggests that a carbon price of $50 per ton plus a uniform tariff penalty of three to five percent would be sufficient to induce strong participation in a climate club. Other projections have also found that the club can succeed in bringing most countries onboard if its initial members include key players, specifically China, the United States, and the European Union.
THE RIGHT POLICY MIX
The world has made little progress in slowing global warming. Even with all the policies implemented over the last three decades, the rate of global decarbonization is unchanged. If we hope to meet our climate objectives, we must enact a swift and sharp downturn in emissions.
An effective policy must introduce high carbon prices, harmonized across countries and across sectors. Actual carbon prices are virtually zero today; they should immediately increase to around $50 per ton of carbon dioxide and rise steeply after that. High emission prices will help remedy the problem of underinvestment in low-carbon technologies, but governments must provide additional support. Right now, countries severely neglect the fundamental energy research and development that will make possible a low- or zero-carbon economy. Finally, coordinating effective international policies will require some kind of club structure—an agreement that uses both carrots and sticks to induce countries to implement critical reforms.
High carbon prices combined with investment in low-carbon technologies and international participation in a climate club—this is the mix of policies we need to meet our ambitious objectives.
4. Harvard moves Chinese language programme to Taiwan
Harvard moves Chinese language programme to Taiwan
Harvard University is to move its intensive Chinese-language programme to Taiwan due to alleged difficulties operating in mainland China.
From 2022, what was formerly the Harvard Beijing Academy, taught at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), will continue in partnership with the prestigious National Taiwan University under the name Harvard Taipei Academy.
Jennifer Liu, the programme’s director and head of Chinese languages at Harvard, told the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, that the move reflected what she felt was a less friendly environment for US institutions in China in recent years.
For instance, she said that in 2019, the programme’s host institution BLCU said that the academy’s students could not hold a holiday party – a small affair that involved eating pizza and singing the US national anthem – to commemorate US Independence Day on 4 July.
She also listed quality concerns, including access to classrooms and dormitories, telling the Crimson that BLCU was unable to house the programme’s students – who numbered roughly 80, according to an alumnus – together.
“Given the condition they provided, we really couldn’t run the programme with the quality that we are hoping to deliver to our students,” said Professor Liu.
Times Higher Education has contacted BLCU for comment.
Professor Liu sought to allay concerns that the change in location would disadvantage its participants. “No matter where the programme is located, we are very confident that they will get the most out of it,” she said.
According to Harvard Summer School, the programme has the “same rigorous language curriculum while also affording [students] the opportunity to immerse yourself in the dynamic and diverse society and culture of Taiwan”.
Like its mainland predecessor, the Harvard Taipei Academy will offer students a chance to complete a year’s worth of Chinese language study over a summer term. Set to open on 24 June, it includes five hours of Chinese-language tuition on weekdays.
It also promises students accommodation in “comfortable rooms with private bathrooms in a modern student residence building adjacent to the NTU campus”.
5. China needs a stronger message to 'tamp down' aggression against Taiwan
Excerpts:
While the administration talks of “tamping down” a China-Taiwan conflict, Robert Thomas, the former Indo-Pacific commander, said Beijing “won’t allow … the U.S. Seventh Fleet [just to] show up and say, ‘Everybody calm down.’”
The real test of America’s “rock-solid” commitment will come after any initial suppression of China’s opening thrust by air or sea. Washington needs to make clear its strategy against Chinese escalation based on these strategic rules of engagement:
In accordance with the international law of collective self-defense, it will assist Taiwan in blunting any Chinese aggression by resisting and defeating the attacking forces. The initial response will be measured and proportional, intended only to halt the aggression at its impact point, not at its source, risking only the forces on each side actually engaged in direct combat operations.
If, however, China expands its targeting to ships or bases from which U.S. defensive actions originate, or to other U.S. or allied assets or territory, Washington will consider such actions a major escalation tantamount to a declaration of war against the United States and will respond accordingly. Hopefully, Beijing will decide that tamping down rather than ramping up is the prudent way to close the matter.
China needs a stronger message to 'tamp down' aggression against Taiwan
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · October 12, 2021
Last week, China dramatically escalated its naked military threats against Taiwan, flying almost 150 warplanes through Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated: “We are very concerned. …[T]he PRC’s provocative military activity near Taiwan … is destabilizing, … risks miscalculation, and … has the potential to undermine regional peace and stability.”
His formulaic message is not commensurate with China’s increasingly aggressive actions. Beijing has heard it all before, for decades. What it has never heard — except transiently from George W. Bush and only implicitly from Donald Trump — is that America will defend Taiwan.
Instead, Washington muddles along with its policy of strategic ambiguity, unchanged since the Clinton administration told the Chinese military what America would do if it attacks Taiwan: “We don’t know; it would depend on the circumstances.”
Far from dissuading Beijing from planning to use force against Taiwan, the vagueness has encouraged its preparations, building attack submarines and anti-ship ballistic missiles. China believes it has created severe enough “circumstances” — such as the prospect of sinking a U.S. aircraft carrier or two and killing 5,000 to 10,000 sailors, as a Chinese admiral has threatened — to deter Washington from intervening in any cross-Strait conflict.
Responding to questions about the growing prospect of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “[W]e have a significant amount of capability forward in the [Indo-Pacific] region to tamp down any such potential.” But America’s military capability to counter China’s aggression against Taiwan is not in doubt.
What is questioned, by many on both sides of the Pacific, is whether America has the requisite will to undertake military conflict with China, especially after the humiliating Afghanistan debacle and its devastating impact on U.S. credibility.
To its credit, the Biden administration has been building on the Trump team’s transformative Taiwan policies by deepening and broadening U.S. relations with its fellow democracy and “security partner” — through arms sales and high-level visits.
So far, however, it has failed to fulfill its tentative intention to invite Taiwan to Biden’s upcoming Summit for Democracy, or to change the name of the Taipei Economic, Cultural and Representative Office to the simpler, more accurate Taiwan Representative Office. The administration fears offending Beijing, which objects even to those symbolic steps to enhance Taiwan’s international standing.
Doing these things in the face of China’s opposition will be further indications that America’s moral commitment to Taiwan is as firm as Blinken and other administration officials say it is. But they still fall far short of the strategic clarity needed to persuade Chinese leader Xi Jinping that attacking Taiwan would be self-destructive in the extreme for China.
Beijing will need serious convincing of American resolve after the lessons it took from the Obama administration’s obliterated “red lines” in Syria, Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds there, and Biden’s catastrophic abandonment of U.S. interests and values in Afghanistan.
The administration has ample opportunity — and urgent need — to send a stronger deterrent message to China. It was revealed this past week that for at least a year, American military personnel have been in Taiwan, supporting and training their counterparts to meet the rising danger from China.
Beijing may well have known of this U.S. stationing and tolerated it because the numbers were small and it had larger issues on its negotiating agenda with Washington. But now that it has become public knowledge, China is registering its expected complaint. Zhao Lijian, spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, stated, “In his phone call with President Xi Jinping, President Biden emphasized that it has no intention to change the One China principle … the political foundation of China and U.S. relations.”
The Chinese statement distorts the historical record in important ways. America’s “One China policy” is not the same as China’s “One China Principle,” much as Beijing constantly conflates them. The latter claims Taiwan is part of China, period. The former says Taiwan’s international status is yet to be determined. Most critically, as the Taiwan Relations Act recounts, the entire basis for U.S.recognition of Communist China “rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.”
It is not evident that Biden reminded Xi of that during their 90-minute phone call, only that, “We agree, we will abide by the Taiwan agreement.” Xi did repeat this week that China will pursue “unification through peaceful means,” though he did not remove the threat to use force if “persuasion” fails, Beijing’s traditional default position. Xi’s use of “unification” instead of the usual “reunification” might suggest a slight concession that Taiwan has never been ruled by China’s communist government. But it is a thin reed since he also referred to “Chinese people, including Taiwan compatriots.”
If the story about U.S. forces in Taiwan was leaked to convey determination, the administration can reinforce that message by stating its intention to retain or even expand the complement in parallel with China’s threatening actions. If, instead, someone in the administration intended to remove an irritant to U.S.-China relations by ending the quasi-deployment, Biden must know he cannot afford another capitulation to America’s adversaries. He should also invite Taiwan to participate in the multinational RIMPAC naval exercise.
While the administration talks of “tamping down” a China-Taiwan conflict, Robert Thomas, the former Indo-Pacific commander, said Beijing “won’t allow … the U.S. Seventh Fleet [just to] show up and say, ‘Everybody calm down.’”
The real test of America’s “rock-solid” commitment will come after any initial suppression of China’s opening thrust by air or sea. Washington needs to make clear its strategy against Chinese escalation based on these strategic rules of engagement:
In accordance with the international law of collective self-defense, it will assist Taiwan in blunting any Chinese aggression by resisting and defeating the attacking forces. The initial response will be measured and proportional, intended only to halt the aggression at its impact point, not at its source, risking only the forces on each side actually engaged in direct combat operations.
If, however, China expands its targeting to ships or bases from which U.S. defensive actions originate, or to other U.S. or allied assets or territory, Washington will consider such actions a major escalation tantamount to a declaration of war against the United States and will respond accordingly. Hopefully, Beijing will decide that tamping down rather than ramping up is the prudent way to close the matter.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · October 12, 2021
6. Chinese 'shock' troops storm beach near Taiwan in training exercise
A demonstration. I would be interested in reading the intelligence analysis of their capabilities based on our observations of the exercise. I am sure our ISR capabilities were focused in on this exercise.
Chinese 'shock' troops storm beach near Taiwan in training exercise
China's military has revealed it carried out beach-landing and assault drills "in recent days" directly across the sea from Taiwan.
The Chinese military did not explicitly link the drills to those tensions, but the official People's Liberation Army Daily newspaper said the exercise had involved "shock" troops, sappers and boat specialists.
In a short post on its Weibo microblogging site, it said the troops were "divided into multiple waves to grab the beach and perform combat tasks at different stages."
A video showed soldiers in small boats storming a beach, throwing smoke grenades, breaking through barbed wire defences and digging trenches in the sand, Reuters reported.
The exact timing of the drill has not been revealed, but the announcement comes on the back of a record-breaking upsurge of Chinese military aircraft, including nuclear-capable bombers and fighter jets, flying into Taiwan's air defence zone – the buffer area close to its sovereign airspace.
Beaches on Taiwan's Kinmen islands are fitted with anti-landing spikes. The islands are just two miles from the mainland China coast, which can be seen in the background Credit: SAM YEH /AFP
The Chinese Communist Party claims the island democracy of 23.5 million as its own territory, even though it has never ruled there and Taiwan operates as an independent country with its own government, foreign policy and military.
Fujian province, where the drills took place, would be a key launching site for any Chinese invasion of Taiwan due to its geographical proximity.
Over the weekend, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, and Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan's leader, went head-to-head in speeches outlining their opposing views on cross-Strait relations.
Over the weekend, a row also broke out between Tony Abbott, the former Australian prime minister, and the Chinese government after he criticised China's human rights record under the "cult of the red emperor".
The Chinese embassy in Canberra hit back, calling Mr Abbott a "failed and pitiful politician" and accusing him of a "despicable and insane performance in Taiwan".
On Monday, Zhao Lijian, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Beijing had made "formal complaints" to Canberra.
7. Retired Marine colonel says US should weigh nuclear war with China over Taiwan
Make it clear that the PRC will lose everything and the mainland will become West Taiwan. :-)
Excerpts:
“Make it clear to the Chinese leaders that they will lose everything if they start a war over Taiwan,” retired U.S. Marine Col. Grant Newsham, a senior researcher with the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies in Tokyo, wrote in an email to Stars and Stripes. “The U.S. also needs to take the lead and help Taiwan break out of 40 years of military and diplomatic isolation.”
Newsham’s comments followed video shown by Japanese TV on Tuesday of Chinese troops conducting exercises that suggest preparations for invading Taiwan, an island 100 miles off the mainland coast.
The video, obtained from Chinese state television, shows troops storming a beach and overcoming coastal defenses with the help of a drone – the sort of skills they’d need to invade of Taiwan.
Retired Marine colonel says US should weigh nuclear war with China over Taiwan
A Taiwanese flag flies over Taipei in this undated photo. (Adam Jones/Wikicommons)
The U.S. government needs to make clear that Americans will fight and risk nuclear war on Taiwan’s behalf, a former Marine and consultant on Asian defense matters said Tuesday.
“Make it clear to the Chinese leaders that they will lose everything if they start a war over Taiwan,” retired U.S. Marine Col. Grant Newsham, a senior researcher with the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies in Tokyo, wrote in an email to Stars and Stripes. “The U.S. also needs to take the lead and help Taiwan break out of 40 years of military and diplomatic isolation.”
Newsham’s comments followed video shown by Japanese TV on Tuesday of Chinese troops conducting exercises that suggest preparations for invading Taiwan, an island 100 miles off the mainland coast.
The video, obtained from Chinese state television, shows troops storming a beach and overcoming coastal defenses with the help of a drone – the sort of skills they’d need to invade of Taiwan.
Japanese public broadcaster NHK replayed the footage that includes soldiers landing on a beach in small boats and being supplied by a hovering drone before blowing up an obstacle and firing their weapons as they maneuver inland.
The exercise follows incursions by nearly 150 Chinese warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone over a four-day period this month.
On Saturday, during an event to commemorate the overthrow of China’s last imperial dynasty in 1911, Chinese President Xi Jinping said peaceful reunification was in the interest of the entire nation, including the Taiwanese people.
However, Xi has previously vowed to “smash” attempts at Taiwan independence and said the issue cannot be passed from generation to generation forever.
China regards the democracy of some 24 million people as a rebellious province, but Taiwan has maintained that it will defend its independence.
The invasion threat is “dead serious,” Newsham said in his email.
In recent years the Chinese military has built sufficient capability to believe an invasion of Taiwan might succeed, he said.
“The [Chinse military] has developed a good enough amphibious capability - to include marines and amphibious-trained army soldiers - and they have been training for years,” he said. “They understand the importance of combined arms and joint operations and are working on this to combine air, sea, and ground forces.”
An assault on Taiwan would probably include full use of China’s rocket force, electronic and cyber warfare and special operations and spies already on Taiwan, Newsham said.
It’s likely that a force from the mainland could ferry several thousand troops across the Taiwan Strait, he said.
China has at least 55 amphibious ships, hundreds of civilian vessels and thousands of barges that could participate, he said.
The U.S. military, including much of the Marine Corps, has tended to dismiss Chinese capabilities, Newsham said.
“This is dangerous and condescending, in my opinion,” he said. “I'd say the Chinese probably were capable of assaulting Taiwan at least seven or eight years ago, though with no guarantee of success. They have improved capabilities since then and keep improving.”
U.S. and Taiwanese forces should train together, and the U.S. should also provide political and diplomatic support for Taiwan, he said.
Japan, Australia, India, the United Kingdom and other countries in Europe should also be part of the defense of the island, Newsham said.
“There is no deal to be cut with [China] over Taiwan,” he said. “Taiwan is this era's version of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s when the Germans were demanding it be handed over. The stakes are that high for our generation.”
Robert Dujarric, co-director of Temple University’s Institute for Contemporary Asian Studies in Tokyo, said the U.S. likely wouldn’t get involved militarily if Chinese action on Taiwan was limited to something like economic sanctions.
“The D-Day scenario where the Chinese army lands on the western coast of Taiwan … I think would lead to an American military response,” he told Stars and Stripes by telephone Tuesday. “If that would lead to nuclear war, I don’t know.”
Seth Robson
8. Taiwan not concerned about war with China, despite sky-high tensions
In this way Taipei and Seoul have something in common.
Taiwan not concerned about war with China, despite sky-high tensions
Newsweek · by John Feng · October 12, 2021
Tensions across the Taiwan Strait are said to be approaching boiling point, but recent polls show the Taiwanese population remains sanguine, not expecting a war with China and feeling confident that American assistance would come if needed.
In its first public opinion survey, released on September 29, Taiwan's opposition-run Intelligentsia Taipei found that 50.2 percent of respondents weren't concerned about the possibility of war, compared to 42.5 percent who said they were. A majority 58.8 percent thought conflict with China was unlikely to happen in the next 10 years, but 17.6 percent said it was probable. Only 2.2 percent of those polled were certain of war this decade.
The think tank, which collected 1,074 telephone surveys from Taipei City residents above the age of 20 between September 15 and 17, asked respondents what they would do if war were to break out across the Taiwan Strait. Some 40.2 percent of those polled said they would resist and cooperate with the government—the most popular answer—while 36 percent said they wouldn't resist a Chinese attack.
The same poll reflected a 46.3 percent expectation of unspecified assistance from the United States, while 34.1 percent—the second the most popular answer—said the U.S. wouldn't come to Taiwan's aid.
This optimism about U.S. backing was shown even more clearly in an August 10 survey released by the pro-independence Taiwan New Constitution Foundation (TNC), which polled 1,071 people above the age of 18 across Taiwan by telephone between August 3 and 6.
TNC's survey reflected overwhelmingly positive views of the U.S. and Japan—at 75.6 percent and 83.9 percent, respectively—as well as equally negative views of China at 70.2 percent, aligning closely with the findings of a Pew Research Center study released on June 30.
Exactly 70 percent of respondents felt that the U.S. was likely to assist Taiwan if China launched an attack, while 64.1 percent said Japan would probably help, and 64.3 percent of the those polled said they themselves would take up arms—36 percent answered with certainty.
Beijing's expectation that democratic Taiwan will be brought under its control was emphasized by Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Saturday, when he said "unification" by peaceful means—under China's "one country, two systems" formula—was preferred.
Taiwan's main political parties have rejected the governing formula also used in Hong Kong, and the population's preference for unification remains at an all-time low, according to biannual survey results released by National Chengchi University's Election Study Center in Taipei.
Keeping the Status Quo
Only 1.5 percent of respondents wanted unification as soon as possible, while just 5.6 percent said they wanted independence as soon as possible, the index pollster's July 20 findings show. A combined majority of 87.2 percent opted for some form of the "status quo," reflecting a preference for Taiwan's current functionally independent status under the formal name the Republic of China.
NCCU's Election Study Center conducts monthly telephone polling of citizens above the age of 20 across Taiwan proper, with 4,717 samples collected between this January and June.
Taiwan's defense minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, told lawmakers last week that cross-strait tensions were the highest he had seen in his 40-year military career. The Chinese military would possess the capability to attack Taiwan while incurring minimal losses in just four years, he said.
A day after Xi's speech, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said in a National Day address that Taiwan was facing greater pressure from China because of its achievements. Taiwan's citizens don't have the privilege of letting their guard down, she warned.
Citizens Remaining Positive
Despite the stark choice of words and continuing efforts by the Tsai administration to mobilize the population, the overall sense of alarm remains low—a situation observers can't quite seem to fathom, given China's refusal to renounce the use of force against Taiwan and its rapidly expanding military capabilities.
Taiwanese citizens remain positive about their country's future prospects even as politicians in Washington, Tokyo and Canberra are seeing cause for concern. In August, a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found for the first time that just over half of Americans—52 percent—were in favor of using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan against an attack by China.
During an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations last Thursday, Taiwan's former chief of the general staff, Lee Hsi-min, called the lack of urgency "quite natural."
"It's kind of human nature," Lee said. "Over time, people can easily be numbed, so people need to be warned, to be encouraged, and to be guided to have this kind of sense of urgency."
Jet trainers assigned to the Thunder Tiger Aerobatics Team of Taiwan's air force fly over the Presidential Office in Taipei during the Republic of China National Day celebrations on October 10, 2021. Office of the President, Taiwan
Newsweek · by John Feng · October 12, 2021
9. Paratroopers sent to Kabul this summer had a 3-D simulation of the airport
My guess is this capability was developed by one of the national mission units.
I recall many years ago one of the visions of the SOF mission planning and rehearsal system was to have a capability such as this.
Paratroopers sent to Kabul this summer had a 3-D simulation of the airport
WASHINGTON – The Army’s plans for simulation training are not confined to the lab — or even to training.
One World Terrain can build virtual maps of territory all over the globe. When soldiers know they’re going to a particular hotspot, the idea is that One World Terrain can simulate the area.
The One World Terrain team delivered to the 82nd Airborne Division a 3-D representation of Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The capability allowed analysts and commanders to gain a more accurate and detailed perspective into the area in and around the airport, including areas of concern where crowds were massing, and vulnerabilities associated with airfield operations.
RELATED
One World Terrain, which uses real-world data, is rolling out this month.
One World Terrain capture kits, which include drones, controllers, tablets and cloud-supported software, have been provided to more than a dozen units and supporting organizations over the past two years, including the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the 25th Infantry Division in the Indo-Pacific region.
The effort has amounted to more than 3.5 million square kilometers of 3-D terrain shared to units.
“[One World Terrain] has produced the largest and most extensive corpus of 3D terrain data across the DoD,” Glaser said in an email. “The program continues to churn out data quarterly in support of training, simulation, rehearsal, intelligence, operations and post-mission assessment.”
One World Terrain teams have also been working closely with the Joint Staff to advance 3-D geographic intelligence across the Defense Department, according to Glaser.
The work includes joint fires, Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance at the operational and strategic levels in events such as Project Convergence, down to the organic collection and production of rapid, high-resolution geographic intelligence alongside Naval Special Warfare units and Marine Expeditionary Units, Glaser said.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
10. Lawmakers Press to Rescue Afghan Relatives of U.S. Service Members
Note the paradox: it is hard to process applications when you do not have an embassy in country. Also, the most committed and best trained soldiers never thought to apply for VISAs because they did not expect the government and military to collapse and are now the most vulnerable
Excerpts:
Lawmakers have also taken note of another vulnerable group that is ineligible for the special visa program: the elite commandos who served in the Afghan Special Forces, who were trained and equipped by U.S. forces and often worked alongside them.
Mr. McCaul said he raised the issue on a call on Wednesday with Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, who assured him the State Department was working on it.
But, Mr. McCaul added, “it’s hard to process” any applications “when you don’t have an embassy in country.”
Heather Nauert, a former State Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration who has been deeply involved with advocating for the evacuation of Afghans and American service members’ families, said that the commandos she has spoken to have reported an increase in violence targeting them and their families.
“Every day, they are getting images and stories from their former comrades stuck in Afghanistan,” Ms. Nauert said. “Some of them have had family members who have been hunted captured, tortured and murdered.
“These are men who were trained by America’s special operators,” she added. “They never applied for visas, because they never thought they would have to.”
Lawmakers Press to Rescue Afghan Relatives of U.S. Service Members
After a frenzied effort to evacuate Afghans who had worked with the U.S., members of Congress are now focusing on the stranded relatives of American troops.
Representative Michael McCaul of Texas is working to evacuate at-risk allies from Afghanistan, including the relatives of service members.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
By
Oct. 11, 2021
WASHINGTON — More than a month after a frenzied U.S. effort to evacuate thousands facing retribution from the Taliban in Afghanistan, members of Congress are still quietly pushing the government to help extract a small group of stranded Afghans who are direct relatives of American military service members.
The service members, some of whom have traveled to Washington to plead with lawmakers and the Biden administration for help, largely share the same story. Many of them once worked as interpreters or fixers for the U.S. military in Afghanistan but moved to the United States years ago, obtaining visas and then green cards to become permanent residents, and then enlisting in the armed forces they had once served as civilians.
They were evacuated from Afghanistan as part of the U.S. withdrawal weeks ago. But now, with the Taliban seeking to punish anyone with ties to the Americans, their parents and siblings are in danger, and lawmakers and U.S. officials are puzzling over how to help them.
“It was bad enough that American citizens were left behind, and our Afghan partners were left behind,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a recent interview. “But when I found out that we have active service members whose families are stuck in Afghanistan, and the State Department can’t get them out? It was like the worst of the worst cases.”
The cluster of service members’ relatives, estimated in the low hundreds, is one of several groups of at-risk people whom lawmakers are still working behind the scenes to help, underscoring the danger many Afghans still face in their home country.
The State Department in recent weeks created a team across agencies, including the Defense Department, to help facilitate the evacuation of service members’ families and other vulnerable Afghans, according to a spokesman. But officials have provided little information about how that will be accomplished and who will be eligible.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban in August, congressional offices were flooded with messages asking for help and staff sprang into action, morphing the offices into informal operations centers focused on assisting Americans and Afghans to escape as the last U.S. troops prepared to withdraw. Two months later, lawmakers are still agonizing over the steady stream of requests they continue to receive.
“We need to get them out because the Taliban is actively hunting,” said Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat of Colorado and a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan. “They are systematically working through their lists. Time is of the essence here.”
Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who directed Afghan strategy at the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and is now retired, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week that he was aware of at least 35 service members who were still trying to evacuate their family members from Afghanistan. Lawmakers tracking the issue have similar estimates.
Lawmakers first learned of the relatives’ plight in August, during a news conference held by Mr. McCaul outside the Capitol. As he was delivering remarks on the situation of stranded Afghan interpreters, he noticed a group of men in Army uniforms holding placards.
“Our families should not get slaughtered as a result of our service in the U.S. military,” one sign read.
Their precarious situation reflects the limitations of a special visa program that was already badly backlogged and never meant to facilitate a mass evacuation. The Special Immigrant Visa program was intended to help people facing threats because of their work for the United States government — a definition that excludes many of those whom the Taliban is now targeting.
“The S.I.V. program has been so fundamentally broken for so long, there are so many aspects that need to be fixed,” Mr. Crow said.
Last week, he said he and his family had welcomed an Afghan family that his office had helped to evacuate in August.
“They had been waiting on S.I.V. approval since 2005 and they probably would still be waiting,” he said.
Over the summer, Congress passed legislation to increase the cap on the special visas by 8,000 and to remove application requirements that slowed down the process. President Biden signed that bill into law, but the program’s limitations remain, and now Mr. Crow and Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, are proposing a measure to raise the cap by 10,000 more and expand eligibility.
But lawmakers also have complained that the visa program’s bureaucratic issues have only been compounded by the way in which a strained State Department has handled their requests.
State Department officials have designated only American citizens and their immediate family members as the top priority for evacuation, according to congressional offices.
Commandos in the Afghan Special Forces are ineligible for the visa that would allow them to be evacuated to the United States.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Mr. Crow said his office was looking for better guidance from the administration “on how folks can be evacuated and who is eligible for various programs.” Mr. McCaul said that Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, had never responded to a letter he had sent inquiring how many service members had family currently trapped in Afghanistan and what the agency was doing to secure their evacuation.
“If you’re a U.S. citizen with your blue passport, I think there’s hope for you,” Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, said in an interview. “But we are seeing a marked difference across all the groups we’re dealing with, which is really disturbing.”
Mr. Waltz said he understood the State Department’s dilemma.
“Where do you draw that line: nuclear family, brothers, cousins, parents?” he said. “But the point is, I think we should have had as much latitude as possible.”
The State Department spokesman said efforts were underway to try to help the service members whose Afghan family members were in need. But he conceded that the department would always have a “special responsibility” to Americans seeking evacuation.
Amplifying the sense of urgency, lawmakers and veterans’ groups working on evacuation efforts said, is an uptick in retributive attacks by the Taliban. Mr. Waltz said that his office had recently received video of a woman who had served in the Afghan National Army who had been nearly beaten to death, her arms and ribs broken.
After American military forces left Kabul in August, Daniel Elkins, the executive director of the Special Operations Association of America, a veterans’ organization that has helped organize evacuation efforts, said he saw a downturn in Afghans contacting him for help.
“Recently there’s been a steady increase in number of people reaching out again,” Mr. Elkins said. “That communicates that the threat picture has been rising.”
Lawmakers have also taken note of another vulnerable group that is ineligible for the special visa program: the elite commandos who served in the Afghan Special Forces, who were trained and equipped by U.S. forces and often worked alongside them.
Mr. McCaul said he raised the issue on a call on Wednesday with Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, who assured him the State Department was working on it.
But, Mr. McCaul added, “it’s hard to process” any applications “when you don’t have an embassy in country.”
Lawmakers have also taken note of another vulnerable group that is ineligible for the special visa program: the elite commandos who served in the Afghan Special Forces, who were trained and equipped by U.S. forces and often worked alongside them.
Mr. McCaul said he raised the issue on a call on Wednesday with Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, who assured him the State Department was working on it.
But, Mr. McCaul added, “it’s hard to process” any applications “when you don’t have an embassy in country.”
Heather Nauert, a former State Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration who has been deeply involved with advocating for the evacuation of Afghans and American service members’ families, said that the commandos she has spoken to have reported an increase in violence targeting them and their families.
“Every day, they are getting images and stories from their former comrades stuck in Afghanistan,” Ms. Nauert said. “Some of them have had family members who have been hunted captured, tortured and murdered.
“These are men who were trained by America’s special operators,” she added. “They never applied for visas, because they never thought they would have to.”
11. Taliban Takeover Of Afghanistan Is Inspiring Americans Online, FBI Says
Excerpts:
Spencer said Al Qaeda, which organized the Sept. 11 attacks and has maintained a close relationship with the Taliban, is not prepared today to launch large-scale attacks like that against the mainland United States. But it will likely be able to target American personnel or facilities in the region around Afghanistan soon, he predicted.
“It’s much easier to execute than it would be going across the Atlantic...but I definitely think that within a short period of time—a year or less, maybe years—they could easily probably project that kind of attack,” he said.
If the Taliban acts responsibly to stop this terrorist threat from growing in their country in a bid to be recognized on the world stage, as America has called on them to do, that could end up benefiting the Islamic State, said Edmund Fitton-Brown, the coordinator for the United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban.
“If they try to arrest people, stop people from organized crime...that’s the risk of ISIL attracting people away, both disillusioned Taliban and hardline foreign extremist elements,” Fitton-Brown said at the forum, using another acronym for the Islamic State. “ISIL has unmistakably positioned itself as the uncompromising rejectionist force in Afghanistan and has the potential to recruit quite a lot of people on that basis.”
The Islamic State also benefited in August when thousands of its prisoners were released from a prison in Afghanistan after the country fell into Taliban control.
“You may see ISIS grow significantly in Afghanistan” because of that, Spencer said.
Taliban Takeover Of Afghanistan Is Inspiring Americans Online, FBI Says
“That’s where they see this rallying cry and their opportunity. Now it’s ‘time to buy a gun, run people over with a car,’ do whatever they’re going to do,” an FBI official said Tuesday.
The FBI is seeing evidence of Americans being inspired to potential violence by the Taliban’s recent victory, an agency official said Tuesday.
Charles Spencer, the assistant director of the FBI’s international operations division, said he is seeing more chatter online and on social media from Americans who have not traveled to the Middle East, yet are influenced by the rapid seizure of Afghanistan over the summer.
“There’s a lot of talk about it, and I think that’s the first thing you see. Where there’s talk, there’s more interest,” Spencer said at the Soufan Center’s Global Security Forum in Doha. “That’s where people who are people on the fringes. [who are] potentially not mentally stable, [and] not even affiliated with them, I think that’s where they see this rallying cry and their opportunity. Now ‘it’s time to buy a gun, run people over with a car,’ do whatever they’re going to do.”
The past decade has already seen deadly attacks in the United States by Americans who had never been to the Middle East or had direct contact with terrorist groups. A husband and wife who carried out a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, were identified as “supporters” of the Islamic State terrorist group. The following year, another American man killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando after pledging allegiance to ISIS.
With the Taliban now in control of Afghanistan, officials are waiting to see whether the country will once again become a safe haven for terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda to organize, launch attacks, and spread their messages of violence through the internet.
Spencer said Al Qaeda, which organized the Sept. 11 attacks and has maintained a close relationship with the Taliban, is not prepared today to launch large-scale attacks like that against the mainland United States. But it will likely be able to target American personnel or facilities in the region around Afghanistan soon, he predicted.
“It’s much easier to execute than it would be going across the Atlantic...but I definitely think that within a short period of time—a year or less, maybe years—they could easily probably project that kind of attack,” he said.
If the Taliban acts responsibly to stop this terrorist threat from growing in their country in a bid to be recognized on the world stage, as America has called on them to do, that could end up benefiting the Islamic State, said Edmund Fitton-Brown, the coordinator for the United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban.
“If they try to arrest people, stop people from organized crime...that’s the risk of ISIL attracting people away, both disillusioned Taliban and hardline foreign extremist elements,” Fitton-Brown said at the forum, using another acronym for the Islamic State. “ISIL has unmistakably positioned itself as the uncompromising rejectionist force in Afghanistan and has the potential to recruit quite a lot of people on that basis.”
The Islamic State also benefited in August when thousands of its prisoners were released from a prison in Afghanistan after the country fell into Taliban control.
“You may see ISIS grow significantly in Afghanistan” because of that, Spencer said.
Meanwhile, the Islamic State is also rapidly growing its presence in Africa, where the terrorist group seized the port city of Palma, Mozambique in March.
“The rapid expansion and the success they’ve had and the capability they’ve shown has probably been the most surprising thing I’ve seen in the last couple years,” Spencer said.
12. ‘A triumph of truth over lies’: joy in the Philippines over Maria Ressa’s Nobel prize win
Quite a congratulatory note from the Duterte Administration. Actually I am surprised Duterte has not tried to take some credit because it is his actions that contributed to her receiving this great honor.
It took three days for the Duterte administration itself to issue a lukewarm congratulation to Ressa.
“It’s a victory for a Filipina and we are very happy for that,” presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said. “But of course, it is true that there are individuals who feel that Maria Ressa still has to clear her name before our courts.”
“In fact, she’s a convicted felon for cyber libel in the Philippines and she faces other cases in the Philippines,” he said.
‘A triumph of truth over lies’: joy in the Philippines over Maria Ressa’s Nobel prize win
The award has put a spotlight on the struggle of journalists and activists fighting President Rodrigo Duterte’s attacks on press freedom
The news that journalist Maria Ressa has been awarded the Nobel peace prize has been greeted with joy by defenders of human rights in the Philippines.
Ressa last week became the first Filipino journalist to be awarded the prestigious prize, which she shared with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov.
For the past five years, Ressa and her news website Rappler did not waver in reporting on alleged abuses and corruption in the Duterte administration.
The award was announced on 8 October, as Ressa and Rappler were busy reporting on the last day of registration for candidates in next year’s national and local elections.
Six top politicians were among nearly 100 people who have registered to run to succeed Duterte in the May 2022 elections, but the final list will only be out later in the year.
Duterte critic Senator Leila De Lima, who has been detained since 2017 over drug charges that have drawn accusations of being politically motivated, said the timing of the prize award was perfect.
“This is truly a triumph of truth over lies, and the award has not come at a more opportune time than during our struggle to regain our lost freedoms under Duterte,” said De Lima, who is running for re-election while in detention.
Ressa and Muratov were honoured “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said the award was “not only a recognition of their work but of the importance of freedom of the press and of expression in their countries and throughout the world.”
“We hope this award will shine more light on those who put the spotlight on the truth at a time when basic freedoms and democracy are under attack,” the group said in a statement.
But the celebrations were not universal. Duterte supporters questioned Ressa’s credibility and claimed the Nobel was being used by the west as a political tool. Prominent Filipino writer Francisco Sionil Jose said the Nobel judges had been “taken for a ride by western media hype”.
It took three days for the Duterte administration itself to issue a lukewarm congratulation to Ressa.
“It’s a victory for a Filipina and we are very happy for that,” presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said. “But of course, it is true that there are individuals who feel that Maria Ressa still has to clear her name before our courts.”
“In fact, she’s a convicted felon for cyber libel in the Philippines and she faces other cases in the Philippines,” he said.
Ressa has appealed against her conviction last June, which stemmed from an article she did not write and was published four months before the law on cyber libel was enacted in 2012, sparking criticism that the case was filed to intimidate her and Rappler.
She is also fighting five tax evasion cases and a closure order on Rappler for allegedly violating a constitutional ban on foreign investments in media companies.
Roque said “no one has ever been censored in the Philippines” under the Duterte administration, and that “press freedom is alive [in the country] and the proof is even the Nobel prize award given to Maria Ressa”.
It took three days for the administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to issue a lukewarm congratulation to Ressa. Photograph: Eloisa Lopez/Reuters
Aside from Rappler, the Duterte administration has also targeted the largest broadcast network, ABS-CBN, which was shut down last year after Congress did not renew its franchise. His political critics, like De Lima, have been slapped with criminal charges.
Ressa said she hoped that the award would re-energise the fight for facts and democracy.
“I hope it gives adrenaline and energy to Filipino journalists that we are not alone, that the world is watching and that this is hopefully a turn for the better,” she said on Monday.
Human rights activist Cristina Palabay, whose group Karapatan has been vilified by Duterte and his security forces, said the prize was also a “strong message of support by the international community for advocates of press freedom and freedom of expression in the Philippines who are bearing the brunt of the attacks by the current administration.
“We stand with her and all journalists in the battle for truth and democracy in the Philippines,” she added.
Leaders of the influential Roman Catholic church said Ressa’s win was a reminder of the importance of the truth and the difficult environment journalists are facing amid fake news and disinformation.
“This important recognition – the first for a Filipino – would hopefully strengthen our people’s conviction to build a nation where journalism is free, at the service of truth, goodness and justice,” said Archbishop Romulo Valles, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines.
13. ‘No way around it’: Facing budget cuts, Army braces to fight for modernization
But will we build more ships?
‘No way around it’: Facing budget cuts, Army braces to fight for modernization
But the budget proposed cuts to existing procurement programs “down into the bone,” as the Army official overseeing the service’s equipping peg at the time, Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, told Defense News ahead of the release.
If budgets continue to decline, he warned, the Army will have to slice into the muscle of untouchable modernization programs.
As budget experts caution the Army will see reduced or — at best — flat budgets in the coming years, service officials are readying for a more difficult look at how to cut costs to preserve modernization momentum. This could mean making harder decisions about the future of its inventory or making cuts to reduce readiness or end strength.
There aren’t many palatable choices left on the menu.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, in an exclusive interview with Defense News ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, said the budget plan for FY23 isn’t as grim as some experts imagined, but acknowledged the difficult path ahead.
“I feel comfortable that we have protected our modernization and been able to take care of our people and maintain readiness,” Wormuth said. “It’s really, as I looked ahead, more to the latter years of the [Future Years Defense Program] where I think that becomes more challenging because of downward pressures … and because, frankly, there’s nothing but minnows left in the pond.”
Service leaders are “really going to have to look across the whole enterprise and look at the levers to see what makes the most sense for the Army and the most sense for us as contributors to the joint war fight,” she said. “In my view, it’s inevitable that we will have to continue to really ask hard questions across the portfolio.”
Unexpected challenges
The service is expecting additional financial burdens from some of its new strategic initiatives, such as the Arctic strategy and a soon-to-be released climate strategy.
Though they are expected to produce efficiencies, “there may be some costs associated with our climate initiatives,” Wormuth said.
The Army is also coping with unanticipated costs related to Operation Allies Welcome, which helps bring Afghans that helped American personnel during the war there to the United States.
But the service has experience managing unexpected costs: In 2020 and 2021, it faced operations on Capitol Hill related to the insurrection; at the southwest border; combatting and coping with the coronavirus pandemic; and evacuating Americans and Afghans from Afghanistan, said Lt. Gen. Paul Chamberlain, military director of the Army budget, who spoke to Defense News in an Oct. 1 interview.
For example, he said, while the Army recouped $1.3 billion through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act in FY20 for costs related to the pandemic, it incurred another $250 million in expenses in FY21.
“In some instances, when we have efficiencies or savings, that then allows us to fund such unexpected expenses,” Chamberlain said. “However, when you have three or four or five unexpected, unprogrammed events, it’s just all consumed on you.”
Personnel costs have long put pressure on the Army’s ability to pay for other priorities, and these costs could rise significantly in the near term. Military basic pay is typically set to the employment cost index; pay in the private sector is rising, which means military pay is likely to increase as well. Already, about 40 percent of the Army’s budget goes to military pay.
“To the extent that elements of our budget like military pay are increasing at a rate faster than inflation, or faster than our top line — if the top line stays fixed, it’s a concern,” Caral Spangler, the Army’s comptroller, said in the same interview with Chamberlain.
If personnel funding makes up a higher percentage of the overall budget than it already does, Chamberlain added, “there’s less money that goes to other operational requirements or readiness, and that will end up having to be something that we have to balance.”
Nothing is ‘untouchable’
The Army began a budget review process ahead of its FY20 funding request meant to be an all-encompassing deep dive to ensure the service would properly allocate money to cover its ambitious modernization efforts. The process was coined “night court” after the 1980s television show about an eccentric New York judge.
The service continues to use this approach each year as part of budget deliberations, and as it seeks to adjust programs and keep modernization priorities on track. But the results are changing, as officials are finding less funding they can ransack for modernization efforts.
In the Army’s first round of night court, the service moved more than $33 billion from programs across the FY20 through FY24 five-year plan. The second round found another $13.5 billion. By the third round, the Army shifted $9.1 billion and identified just seven programs to cancel after shuttering 93 programs in FY20 and 41 in FY21.
Through the annual process, which has been used four times, “we’ve gone through the tough choices. We may be faced with the excruciating choices,” Lt. Gen. Erik Peterson, the Army’s new G-8 chief, said in an interview with Defense News last month.
“Those include the modernization portfolio, not necessarily just the [35 signature systems] but the other portions of that portfolio, as well as just the Army’s top line overall,” he explained.
Army leaders from the G-8 to the budget office to Army Futures Command are readying for Wormuth, the new Army secretary, to take a fresh look across every priority and program to ensure plans align with the new administration’s objectives and policies.
Wormuth has held leadership roles at both the Pentagon and in D.C.-based think tanks. She’s experienced in national security policy and previously worked with both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
During her previous stint at the Pentagon, Wormuth led the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review process and pushed for realism about how to manage the budget. That year, she said if Congress wouldn’t allow either a base realignment and closure effort or major internal reforms, the department would have to find internal cuts.
The administration has not yet released a new National Defense Strategy or a new global force posture review, both of which could generate shifts in Army priorities.
“I wouldn’t consider anything untouchable, period,” Peterson said. “I think our senior leadership will consider all options with balanced risk, threat informed; and none of their decisions, from my perspective, are static.”
‘Gives and takes’
Many of the service’s modernization programs are racing toward ambitious fielding timelines. Some major capabilities, like long-range precision fires and hypersonic weapons, could be fielded to units as soon as FY23.
Others, like a new optionally manned fighting vehicle and two new future vertical lift aircraft, are slated for fielding later on and are undergoing design, development and prototyping.
The Army is also working to field its new Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, or AMPV, albeit slower than anticipated, and a series of major upgrades to its Stryker combat vehicles, such as a new 30mm cannon, will be delivered soon.
“There is clearly momentum associated with programs that are in production” Peterson said. However, he added, that doesn’t mean they’re safe from the cutting block. For example, the Army deliberately delayed the AMPV effort.
To make funding adjustments, Peterson said, the Army could alter a system’s program timeline as well as its quantities or rates.
“There are gives and takes with all of those decisions that we engage in from the beginning,” he said, such as “balancing requirements against resources potentially available, [or] understanding and measuring the operational and strategic value of those capabilities to the joint force as well as the constraints to our top line. And we do that iteratively.”
The Army also wants to find ways to maintain capability and readiness while saving money, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Joseph Martin told Defense News in a recent interview.
“A great example of what I’m talking about is this joint Pacific multinational range capability that we’ve got where we are going to — instead of taking brigades from Hawaii and Alaska, and putting them on ships and putting them on planes, and bring them to one of our combat training centers — we’re going to train them in the environment that they exist in,” he said.
This means bringing observers, coaches and trainers to those environments, he added. As a result, “they’re not spending all this time and resources to the tune of tens of millions of dollars on shipped transportation and air transportation.”
But painful choices are inevitable, says Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“For the Army, I think it’s a more acute situation because more than half of their budget goes to personnel costs. And for the Army, it is very directly a trade-off between end strength and modernization,” he told Defense News. “There’s really no way around it.
“The sooner they start making those choices — particularly the sooner they start scaling back end strength — the better situation they’ll be in and the less end strength they’ll have to end up cutting down the road.”
Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville previously said the service won’t reduce its force strength any lower than it already has in its FY22 budget.
But the chief added in an interview with Defense News last month that the Army is committed to modernization efforts that ensure the force can meet its operational requirements and defeat adversaries.
“As we look at ‘23, that’s just one year to get these systems, which are starting to come to fruition, much closer to get into the hands of soldiers,” he said. “We are committed to making that happen.”
Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defense News. She has covered defense in the Washington area for 10 years. She was previously a reporter at Politico and Inside Defense. She won the National Press Club's best analytical reporting award in 2014 and was named the Defense Media Awards' best young defense journalist in 2018.
14. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: Getting Force Design Right in the Next National Defense Strategy
Excerpts:
This approach is not without risk. Such a strategy risks overoptimizing for a single threat that might not materialize, resulting in a force that is underprepared for other contingencies and that may be incapable of responding to simultaneous threats. Reduced military capacity also may increase the risk that adversaries challenge the United States and may make American leaders less willing to defend threatened allies and partners. It similarly places large bets on future technologies, which may not mature as expected or on the needed timelines. Even if the Defense Department successfully develops and begins to field new military capabilities, there is a risk that this could encourage adversaries to use force before the window of opportunity closes. But without risk comes no reward. With this adage in mind, the department should accept some near-term risk in competition, against other threats, and in secondary regions to meet the most challenging and consequential threat.
For more than a decade, analysts have been warning the Defense Department that the U.S. military could lose a war against a great-power adversary and that significant changes to U.S. force structure, operational concepts, and acquisition processes are needed. This is not a resource problem. The problem is the department’s inability to make hard choices, prioritize, and then follow through by planning and programming against the priorities. This is not necessarily about how big the force is, but rather getting force design right: having the right force structure, in the right locations, with the right training and preparation to execute new warfighting concepts that enable victory against a great power. The greatest risk is further deferring conventional and nuclear modernization and finding that America has fallen so far behind that it cannot defend itself or its allies, partners, and interests.
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: Getting Force Design Right in the Next National Defense Strategy - War on the Rocks
The narrow window to keep pace with China is closing, and there are signs that the Defense Department is in danger of making a strategic misstep as it develops the next National Defense Strategy. The cornerstone of the forthcoming 2022 strategy is the all-encompassing idea of integrated deterrence. This expansive and ill-defined concept does not promote confidence that the Department of Defense is likely to set clear priorities in its strategy that would enable the force redesign needed to deter and, if necessary, fight and win a war with China or Russia.
The Biden administration should narrowly focus the Defense Department on high-end deterrence against China and Russia instead of strategic competition or managing an expanded array of lesser threats. This strategy would enable the dual nuclear and conventional modernization that is desperately needed to strengthen deterrence, both now and in the future, at current levels of defense spending. Additional resources would not translate to doing more, particularly not when more takes the department’s eye off the ball and encourages a lack of strategic discipline. Rather, any additional resources should translate to doing a narrower range of critical high-end missions more effectively. Urgent change at a significant scale is required to secure the nation today and tomorrow, but this will not occur if the next National Defense Strategy promotes too much of the same.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The 2018 National Defense Strategy heralded a new era of American defense planning focused on deterring and defeating large-scale conventional aggression by a great power. This strategy was praised for abandoning the post-Cold War two-war force planning construct, which had led to a prioritization of military capacity over capability. It had produced a force that was simultaneously larger than was needed for any one conflict, yet less capable of defeating peer adversaries and more vulnerable to long-range adversary attacks.
The 2018 strategic guidance may have focused the Department of Defense on the most consequential and difficult military challenges that the United States faces, but the implementation of this strategy faltered. Presidential budget request after budget request made limited headway and underinvested in key capabilities needed to meet the demands laid out in the strategy. This was due in part to the fact that while the 2018 strategy prioritized high-end deterrence, it also stressed the “reemergence of long-term strategic competition” with China and Russia. Great-power competition became the loophole that allowed the services to push their preferred programs and to protect force structure that might not be needed or relevant in a great-power conflict.
Now there are calls for the 2022 National Defense Strategy to further widen its aperture so that it not only identifies strategic competition and warfighting as core missions, but also elevates a growing list of persistent threats. Upgrading these threats or adding a requirement to be able to win simultaneous wars will produce a more modern force but one that otherwise maintains the basic size and shape of today’s force. This is a losing strategy. Even a larger defense budget would not enable the Department of Defense to successfully manage all of these threats, just as past strategies have failed to do. Congress, for example, has provided an additional $24 billion increase to the Fiscal Year 2022 defense budget to buy more aircraft, ships, and weapons that might not be needed or even wanted.
It is an open question whether the Biden administration takes the good from the 2018 National Defense Strategy — the hard choices made to explicitly prioritize preparing for war against China — and improves on it, or whether the Department of Defense returns to strategy-making as a device to achieve consensus, which results in a growing list of undifferentiated threats and a mismatch between the strategy and resources, similar to the 2006, 2010, and 2014 Quadrennial Defense Reviews. Our analysis of the FY2022 budget request offers more concrete insight into what we might expect from the next National Defense Strategy, to include a force-planning construct. But the strategic direction suggested from this analysis is not promising, as the revealed strategy in the budget suggests that the Biden administration is headed toward building a future force incapable of fulfilling one of the top missions of the U.S. military: deterring and defeating great-power adversaries. This should prompt a rethink in the Defense Department about the priorities of the next National Defense Strategy, and its implications for force design.
What the FY2022 Budget Reveals About the Next National Defense Strategy
The FY2022 budget request provides a few glimpses about the likely direction of the next strategy. It will be built around the concept of integrated deterrence, which seeks to link together all types of national power across all domains to deter gray-zone tactics as well as conventional and nuclear attacks. Diplomacy — not hard power — is at the forefront of this concept. In the revealed strategy, the Defense Department focuses on defending the homeland — arguably the top objective of every defense strategy — and making investments to deter conventional military aggression. This approach seeks to maintain a credible deterrent vis-à-vis China, the department’s “pacing challenge,” with the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and by making investments in critical capabilities such as long-range fires, a resilient space architecture, and nuclear modernization. It also aims to enhance the research and development of new technologies and long-term modernization to maintain the U.S. military technological edge. But the budget also invests in countering an expanded array of near-term threats, such as COVID-19, and long-term challenges, like climate change, while seeking to hedge against a wide range of lesser threats such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors.
At some points, the FY2022 budget appears to prioritize preparing for future high-end conflict, while at others, it seems to champion the building blocks of a near-term competition strategy. The budget largely protects the current force size, and invests in readiness. This suggests an emphasis on great-power competition (vice conflict) and the need for an expanded global presence as a means to compete against China and Russia. Trying to straddle all of these competing demands would likely result in a force-planning construct that aims to compete day-to-day while simultaneously building readiness and capability to deter China and Russia, with an emphasis on China. It would also seek to retain the capacity to punish opportunistic aggression and respond to other emergent threats.
Integrated Deterrence or Merely Deterring Everything?
Such a strategy seeks to do it all — hedge against multiple threats while competing today and deterring the wars of tomorrow. It raises the level of ambition for and demands on the U.S. military because of the multiple threats that they will need to both compete against and deter. The issue with such a middle-of-the-road, Goldilocks-style approach is that in choosing to do everything, nothing is being prioritized. Inevitably, this will result in more of the same — a failing approach against the most difficult and consequential threats. In trying to do too much, the Defense Department risks not doing any of it particularly well.
Although this approach sounds like a prudent way of hedging against future uncertainty, it will result in a force that cannot defend the homeland or American allies against a Chinese or Russian attack. Historically the need to build and maintain a large force ready to fight has displaced modernization. The Defense Department clearly needs sufficient capability and capacity, but there inevitably is a tradeoff among these two if there are limited resources. Today this tension is even greater as the military personnel and operations and maintenance accounts are eating up an even larger share of the defense budget, leaving a smaller slice for modernization.
Additional resources are not going to resolve this dilemma. If extra funding is used to buy more capabilities that are not relevant to high-end deterrence, they may exacerbate this problem over time and further entrench constituencies opposed to the changes needed. Additional capacity also increases the likelihood that defense leaders take their eye off the Indo-Pacific and employ military forces in other regions for missions that can be fulfilled by other parts of the government. Time and time again we have seen the Department of Defense struggle to multi-task. It has taken a herculean effort by multiple administrations to shift the defense bureaucracy’s focus to China, which is required given the magnitude of the challenge and the time already wasted ignoring the problem. The department needs to make sure that the demands of today do not supersede the needs of tomorrow. Without doing so, the end result will be the U.S. military finding itself technologically outmatched in the future.
Indeed, when we tested whether the force created by a what appears to be the administration’s strategy based on analysis of the FY2022 budget request could meet the demands of defeating a fait accompli by a great-power adversary or roll back sub-conventional aggression in the Indo-Pacific and Europe in a series of table-top exercises, the results were sub-optimal. The force associated with this strategy could contest, but not halt, an invasion of Taiwan or the Baltics, and it could not overturn a sub-conventional land grab in either region. While the strategy fared fine at competition, it failed at two critical missions that arguably only the U.S. military can fulfill and was seemingly unable to defend vital U.S. interests. Moreover, this had the unintended effect of limiting options to counter adversary aggression, forcing policymakers to adopt a warfighting approach of rollback or punishment. Yet even this larger force lacked the capacity and capability, especially after essentially losing the first phase of the war, to effectively implement either alternative warfighting strategy.
An approach similar to the revealed strategy found in the FY2022 budget request runs the risk of producing a force that is too big, less ready for the future fights it is likely to face, and incapable of addressing the most concerning forms of aggression. It also risks missing the small window remaining to modernize the force to maintain a technological advantage over other great powers. If this doesn’t keep the Defense Department up at night, it should.
Integrate Deterrence by Focusing on the High End
There is a better approach. The department’s senior leaders should embrace some near-term risk and make the hard choices needed to set the future force in the right direction. This means sacrificing capacity and the ability to fight simultaneous wars to maintain enough forces with enhanced capabilities to win one large fight against the most consequential threat, China or Russia. In our series of tabletop exercises, we tested a strategy focused on high-end deterrence that could produce a force capable of defeating China or Russia and rolling back sub-conventional land grabs. Even without additional money provided by Congress, this strategy could simultaneously fund nuclear and conventional modernization and enable a deterrence-by-denial strategy against China and Russia.
The strategy narrowly defines the military’s role to warfighting and eschews the concept of competition, which primarily occurs in the non-military realm and is the responsibility of other parts of the government. It also explicitly prioritizes the threats posed by great-power challengers and takes an economy of force perspective to persistent lesser threats. As such, the force planning construct for this strategy is to prioritize China, sustain focus on Russia, and accept risk against other adversaries and threats. This one great-power war force-planning construct only maintains enough capacity to win one large war at a time, but it mitigates the risk of opportunistic aggression by improving the survivability and lethality of U.S. forces in both the Indo-Pacific and European theaters.
Because it enhances deterrence, this strategy can reduce the risk of a conflict with China and Russia in the near term and over the long run. It makes key investments in existing capabilities, mainly advanced long-range munitions and enablers, and improvements in posture to strengthen deterrence now. These improvements would put the right forces in the right places today, shore up American military power, and reduce the prospect of a war in the near term, allowing enough time for modernization efforts to come to fruition. At the same time, it focuses investments on new conventional capabilities that enhance denial strategies and advance the U.S. military technological edge, while funding the modernization of U.S. strategic forces. It would also create a division of labor within the joint force, in that the Army would prioritize Europe, where heavy ground forces are essential to deterrence, and the Air Force and Navy would focus on the Indo-Pacific. It reduces the size of the overall force (in particular the Army), relies on allies and partners to be the front line for daily competition, and divests of capabilities that are not survivable in a high-end conflict to free up resources to invest in game-changing future technology.
This approach is not without risk. Such a strategy risks overoptimizing for a single threat that might not materialize, resulting in a force that is underprepared for other contingencies and that may be incapable of responding to simultaneous threats. Reduced military capacity also may increase the risk that adversaries challenge the United States and may make American leaders less willing to defend threatened allies and partners. It similarly places large bets on future technologies, which may not mature as expected or on the needed timelines. Even if the Defense Department successfully develops and begins to field new military capabilities, there is a risk that this could encourage adversaries to use force before the window of opportunity closes. But without risk comes no reward. With this adage in mind, the department should accept some near-term risk in competition, against other threats, and in secondary regions to meet the most challenging and consequential threat.
For more than a decade, analysts have been warning the Defense Department that the U.S. military could lose a war against a great-power adversary and that significant changes to U.S. force structure, operational concepts, and acquisition processes are needed. This is not a resource problem. The problem is the department’s inability to make hard choices, prioritize, and then follow through by planning and programming against the priorities. This is not necessarily about how big the force is, but rather getting force design right: having the right force structure, in the right locations, with the right training and preparation to execute new warfighting concepts that enable victory against a great power. The greatest risk is further deferring conventional and nuclear modernization and finding that America has fallen so far behind that it cannot defend itself or its allies, partners, and interests.
15. Analysis | Americans aren’t that tired of war, it seems
Perhaps it is not a desire for war but a recognition by the people that we must defend our interests around the world.
Excerpts:
Perhaps it’s less that people are tired of war, writ large, and more that they were tired of those wars. But even that doesn’t really account for the increasing appetite to defend allies from the likes of Russia, China and North Korea.
Analysis | Americans aren’t that tired of war, it seems
If there’s one article of faith on American foreign policy these days, it might be that our electorate has become significantly more isolationist — or at least noninterventionist.
But a new poll suggests this isn’t necessarily a complete philosophical shift as much as an issue-specific one.
The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor on Monday spotlighted a recent poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that found that, despite what you might think, Americans are actually more in favor of intervention if China invades Taiwan than in the nearly four decades the institution had polled this question.
That caught my attention. Perhaps this might be a symptom of our increasing and unusually bipartisan focus on combating China, I thought. But then I looked a little more closely.
In fact, this increasing desire to use the U.S. military to defend allies from incursion by adversaries spans multiple key regions — every one the Chicago Council surveyed. And it increased even as the country as a whole turned more and more against our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Defending Taiwan from a Chinese invasion? It was supported by 28 percent in 2015, before Donald Trump supposedly made noninterventionism a GOP value, too. But today it’s at 52 percent — nearly double.
Defending South Korea from an invasion by North Korea? It went from 47 percent in 2015 to 63 percent today.
Defending Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia if Russia invaded? From 44 percent in 2014 to 59 percent today.
On defending Israel from a neighbor in the Middle East, the uptick is less pronounced, but it, too, has climbed from the mid-to-high-40s to 53 percent.
In each case, a majority of Americans — though not always a big one — say they support using U.S. troops to defend an ally from an invasion, including in three cases by a major or nuclear-armed world power.
But even then, the same polling showed relatively strong and increasing support for defending U.S. allies abroad. It showed majority support in 1972 for defending European allies from the Soviet Union. Then, support dropped, but it later recovered to 56 percent vs. 27 percent opposition. Defending South Korea from either the Soviets or China had less support, but it was also a plurality position.
In those cases, it seems logical that this owed to concerns about communist influence during the Cold War — even as the effort to combat it hadn’t exactly gone according to plan in Vietnam.
Today, though, the desire to defend allies against such big-name adversaries as China and Russia is even higher — and is growing — despite the misadventures of the past 20 years and despite the lack of such an all-consuming foreign policy initiative (you don’t hear many talking about the “war on terror” today).
Perhaps it’s less that people are tired of war, writ large, and more that they were tired of those wars. But even that doesn’t really account for the increasing appetite to defend allies from the likes of Russia, China and North Korea.
Perhaps people are just a little more willing to accept a war in which the purpose is actually clear.
16. A Harvard study is going viral among anti-vaxxers. The author says they are all wrong.
I guess you have to read more than just the headlines and subtitles. I bet the disinformation workers in China and Russia are having a field day with this.
A Harvard study is going viral among anti-vaxxers. The author says they are all wrong.
A medical worker prepares a shot of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Belgrade, Serbia.AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic
Anti-vaxxers say that they’ve found a smoking gun: a new blue-chip paper that proves COVID vaccines are ineffective.
The vaccine “doesn’t stop you from getting [COVID] at all,” claimed Daniel Horowitz, a senior editor at the Blaze, in in a tweet promoting a column he wrote trumpeting the research. The headline: “Harvard researcher finds absolutely no correlation between vax rates and COVID cases globally.” Supporters of Horowitz’s perspective tweeted the piece and posted it on Facebook, where it received over 4,000 interactions, including 2,600 shares, according to data from Crowdtangle, the Facebook-owned analytics company.
“That conclusion is misleading…This paper supports vaccination.”
Alas, there’s just one problem for Horowitz and company: S.V. Subramanian, the Harvard professor of population health and geography behind the paper, says the vaccine doubters are completely wrong.
“That conclusion is misleading and inaccurate,” Subramanian told me of Horowitz’s Blaze column over email. “This paper supports vaccination as an important strategy for reducing infection and transmission, along with hand-washing, mask-wearing, and physical distancing.”
At first glance, the title of Subramanian’s paper, “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States,” looks like it could be arguing against vaccine effectiveness. Indeed, the paper initially came onto my radar from a concerned tipster who worried an unscrupulous Harvard researcher was working to leverage the university’s name in the service of right-wing political aims.
But on closer inspection, Subramanian’s paper, which was published in the peer-reviewed European Journal of Epidemiology, simply examines the lack of correlation between broad geographies’ vaccination rates and their rates of new COVID cases. For example, Subramanian points to countries like Israel, which have high rates of both vaccination and new infections. But instead of concluding that such data means vaccines are useless, Subramanian says his findings suggest that it is unwise to ignore other treatments and precautionary steps—say, masks or lockdowns. In other words, he writes, the “sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined… other pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions may need to be put in place alongside increasing vaccination.”
Over email, Subramanian insisted that the positive effects of vaccines are not in any doubt: “Other research has clearly and definitively established that the vaccines significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization and mortality.”
Despite the misinterpretation, anti-vaxxers and vaccine skeptics like Horowitz have held up and shared Subramanian’s paper as vindication on an array of platforms that have struggled to fight false anti-vaccine information. Horowitz’s own column has been tweeted out to at least half-a million users. Posts bringing attention to the paper have done well on anti-vax and right-wing Reddit groups; a summary was posted to over a dozen subreddit communities with over 34 million followers.
On Facebook, posts sharing a link to the paper’s abstract has also gone viral thanks to similar pages. Bernhard Zimniok, a member of European Parliament representing Germany’s far-right AfD party, shared it to his 24,000 Facebook followers, netting over 1,000 likes, shares, and comments. Slobodny Vysielac, a xenophobic, nativist Slovakian publication which has been likened to Infowars, also shared a link to the study to its 85,000 followers. Across the platform, Crowdtangle analytics show it was shared by pages with over a collective 2 million followers and was interacted with 7,000 times.
While Subramanian’s paper has its skeptics, it is not considered particularly controversial. Nor does he use his findings to advance polemic political claims. But that hasn’t stopped his research from being shared and contorted by people who are trying to spread vaccine disinformation. In many cases, they share news of the paper with little to no comment at all, a nothing-to-say tactic that may help them avoid scrutiny or moderation for spreading disinformation. Even so, given their track record of spreading vaccine falsehoods, the subtext of what they are communicating is perfectly clear.
17.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
