Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. . . . A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive--and nowhere else!--and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . . . .
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“War has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end”
― George F. Kennan





1. World Powers Lead Massive Show of Might in the Philippine Sea
2. Can the U.S. and Chinese Militaries Get Back on Speaking Terms?
3. CENTCOM disputes Air Force account of attempted hijacking at Kabul airport during Afghanistan evacuation
4. Robert Gates: Afghanistan withdrawal 'probably did not need to have turned out that way'
5. The active-duty Army is facing a record suicide rate. Leaders have no idea how to fix it
6. U.S. Aims to Resume Regular Evacuation Flights From Afghanistan
7. ‘I Never Believed That Would Happen’: After 20 Years of War, an Abrupt End
8. What Should A $100 Billion Japanese Military Look Like?
9. Can't Sail Away from Cyber Attacks: 'Sea-Hacking' from Land
10. Why Do Armed Robot Dogs Make Us Uncomfortable?
11. Have South Korean Conservatives Made a Full Comeback?
12. FDD | Blinken Affirms Softening of U.S. Policy Toward Assad Regime
13. FDD | Western Governmental Funds Divest From West Bank While Investing in China
14. Book Review: Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the US Army’s Elite, 1956–1990
15. Thermal Camouflage Sheet Technology Make Soldiers Nearly Undetectable
16. Exclusive--O'Donnell: How 25 Americans Stopped an Army
17. Navy announces discharge details for coronavirus vaccine refusers
18. Less ‘prestigious’ journals can contain more diverse research, by citing them we can shape a more just politics of citation.
19. “Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself
20. The Wagner Group Has Its Eyes on Mali: A New Front in Russia’s Irregular Strategy


1. World Powers Lead Massive Show of Might in the Philippine Sea
I don't usually turn to Esquire for national security reporting but the photos here are an impressive display of alliance capabilities.


World Powers Lead Massive Show of Might in the Philippine Sea
esquiremag.ph · by [email protected]
Four aircraft carriers and over a dozen warships from the U.S. Navy, the U.K.’s Royal Navy, and Japan’s Self Defense Forces have converged in the Philippine Sea in what is now the largest naval exercise in the world.
After their exercises in the Philippine Sea, the tripartite naval powers will move to the South China Sea where they will continue the military drills and conduct freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS).
Photo by Royal Navy Carrier Strike Group 21.
Combat Exercises in the Philippine Sea
Four aircraft carriers—namely the U.K.’s HMS Queen Elizabeth, American carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Ronald Reagan, and Japan’s JS Ise—were joined by at leat 14 warships from Canada, New Zealand, Japan, U.S., U.K., and the Netherlands in combat exercises in the Philippine Sea.
Photo by Royal Navy Carrier Strike Group 21.
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Although Japan’s JS Ise is officially classified as a helicopter destroyer, it also serves as a de facto aircraft carrier. The Japanese Self-Defense Force cannot possess “attack aircraft carriers” because its anti-war constitution prevents this. It can only acquire or build military equipment for defense.
The exercises aim to smoothen interoperability between the participating countries’ warships in case war or disaster breaks out.
The massive exercises within the Philippine Sea and the South China Sea are also meant to send a message to China: Any attempt by China to expand its military bases any further in the region will be met with a strong response.
Photo by Royal Navy Carrier Strike Group 21.
Western powers, including the European Union, the U.S., the U.K., and NATO have all criticized China’s military expansion in the West Philippine Sea and called for sobriety and observance of international law, particularly of UNCLOS and the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling against China in favor of the Philippines.
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China is locked in a tense dispute over the South China Sea and the West Philippine Sea with claimants to the waters which include Vietnam and the Philippines.
Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei’s maritime zones are also within China’s Nine-Dash Line claim, but the countries have not acknowledged the existence of a maritime or territorial dispute with China.
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Discover the best of culture, business, and style from Esquire Philippines. Visit Quento for more stories and subscribe to our YouTube channel for new videos.
esquiremag.ph · by [email protected]

2. Can the U.S. and Chinese Militaries Get Back on Speaking Terms?
Excerpts:
Perhaps most important, there are signs that Xi holds great personal interest in improving military engagement, as demonstrated by his remarks during an unusual private meeting with Dunford in August 2017, in which he expressed hope that military-to-military relations could serve as a stabilizing force in the overall bilateral relationship. Reinvigorating military-to-military dialogue would be entirely consistent with long-standing U.S. policy, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The Trump administration’s 2018 report on China’s military lauded Department of Defense engagement with China as supporting an “overall U.S. policy and strategy toward China” and the military-to-military relationship as a “stabilizing element to the overall bilateral relationship.” And in July, Secretary Austin declared his staunch commitment to “stronger crisis communications” with the PLA.
To call for dialogue and communication with China’s military leadership is not to condone its aggression or Beijing’s repression at home. Even at the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, while denouncing the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” hosted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for arms control negotiations. More recently, during the war in Syria, the Trump administration pursued high-level military contact through a private channel between Dunford and Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. In addition to a hotline between U.S. military officers at the operations center in Qatar and Russian counterparts in Syria, a dialogue between the two countries’ armed forces at the three-star level helped to ensure that military activities did not create dangers with the rival country that could quickly spiral out of control.
The United States and China are on a dangerous path in the Indo-Pacific. Both sides must seize the opportunity to prevent a wider conflict before it is too late.

Can the U.S. and Chinese Militaries Get Back on Speaking Terms?
Indo-Pacific Security Depends on Reviving Bilateral Defense Dialogue
Foreign Affairs · by Chris Li and Eric Rosenbach · October 15, 2021
Nearly nine months into the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, Washington’s relationship with Beijing has sunk to a historic low. After a high-level diplomatic meeting in March that devolved into an ugly exchange of insults, fruitless visits to China by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, and virtual climate talks that failed to produce clear deliverables, the world’s two great powers have reached a dangerous impasse.
By forming a new trilateral security pact with the United Kingdom and Australia, the United States has made it clear that it is serious about defending its allies in Asia and countering China’s territorial claims. But while the move has been hailed by some Western commentators as a stroke of strategic brilliance, it has also sharply increased military tensions in the Indo-Pacific.
During a phone call last month, Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed the “responsibility of both countries to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.” History suggests that open communication is the best way for the two great powers to uphold that responsibility, but Xi and Biden’s recent call was their first conversation in seven months. More alarming, neither U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin nor Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks has yet met with his or her Chinese counterpart. Although the Pentagon’s first reported contact since Biden’s inauguration took place on August 27 and was followed by video conferences at the deputy assistant secretary level in September, no communication has occurred at the senior-most levels of military leadership.
As Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan have argued in these pages, the U.S.-Chinese rivalry is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed. If the Biden administration hopes to manage the competition and prevent it from turning into catastrophe, it must take urgent action to establish and maintain open channels of communication between the Pentagon and China’s armed forces.
In the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, General Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew so concerned that China’s leaders were mistakenly predicting an imminent U.S. attack that he preemptively assured his Chinese counterpart that the U.S. government was “stable.” Milley’s decision may well have forestalled military conflict: historically, accidents and misunderstandings have too often led to war.

In an era of renewed competition, the risks of inadvertent escalation—leading even to a nuclear showdown—are higher than ever. As U.S. and Chinese forces in the Indo-Pacific operate in ever-closer proximity, military leaders from both countries must commit to working together to develop a flexible framework for substantive, real-time communication in order to mitigate the risk of miscalculation, effectively manage the professional and safe conduct of forces, and promote deconfliction mechanisms in the event of a crisis. Though restarting strategic communication with China will be challenging, and will not always produce tangible results, the Biden administration must make it a priority.
MUTUAL PROVOCATIONS
The danger of a miscalculation is especially acute around Taiwan. Beijing’s military posturing over the Taiwan Strait has turned increasingly aggressive, with almost daily incursions into the island’s air defense identification zone, coupled with “combat drills” targeting U.S. warships. When a U.S. Senate delegation visited Taipei in April, the People’s Liberation Army sent its carrier strike group, the Liaoning, to conduct “training exercises” off Taiwan’s coast. Beginning on Friday, October 1, as the People’s Republic celebrated its National Day, and continuing through the holiday weekend, the PLA dispatched nearly 100 sorties of aircraft, including nuclear-capable bombers and fighters, in a menacing show of force. Meanwhile, U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft have flown over Taiwan, while guided missile destroyers have routinely transited the Taiwan Strait, in what the Pentagon has affirmed are demonstrations of American commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific in accordance with international law.
Those familiar with the military planning process recognize how easily an accidental collision could ignite a conflict. The Pentagon’s war-gaming and simulation exercises demonstrate that once the military machines are in motion, escalation and entanglement are hard to avoid.
Once the military machines are in motion, escalation is hard to avoid.
Alarming scenarios are not entirely hypothetical. In 2001, when a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane collided with a PLA F-8 fighter over the South China Sea, leading to the death of a Chinese pilot and forcing the American plane to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island, an 11-day military and diplomatic showdown ensued. The U.S. ambassador to China at the time, retired Admiral Joseph Prueher, later recalled that he was unable to reach any senior Chinese military officials during the initial hours of the crisis. The dispute ended only after seasoned diplomats defused the incident with a carefully worded letter, and the U.S. crew was released from Chinese custody.
Today, an accidental collision in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea—or even on the Korean Peninsula—compounded by cyberattacks and hardening nationalistic pressures at home, could set both countries on a path to all-out war neither wants. And if American and Chinese leaders fail to establish meaningful military-to-military dialogue, the question won’t be if such an accident will occur, but when.
COMPETITION WITHIN BOUNDARIES
Both governments must commit to restarting high-level bilateral talks between both military and civilian officials and expanding checks and safeguards to limit competition and prepare for crises before they occur. To start, both countries should take immediate action to arrange meetings between senior leaders of their respective armed forces.

Neither side should allow organizational differences between the two militaries to get in the way of meaningful exchange. Recently, controversy ensued when Secretary Austin’s requests to speak with General Xu Qiliang, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and China’s top-ranking military officer, were rebuffed. Meanwhile, China’s state-run media have accused the Pentagon of flouting diplomatic protocol by refusing to speak, instead, to the more junior defense minister. While the U.S. secretary of defense’s titular counterpart, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe, may not hold equivalent functional status, Pentagon chiefs of previous administrations have consistently met with China’s defense ministers. The Chinese military structure divides authority differently than the Pentagon, and while the external-facing defense minister is subordinate to the vice chairman, both are part of the Central Military Commission’s senior leadership, which exercises command and control over the PLA.
Organizational differences between the two militaries must not get in the way of meaningful exchange.
Austin should begin dialogue with any senior Chinese leader in the Central Military Commission. Productive engagements often occur between different levels of leadership, and in the past, Chinese leaders have often offered meetings with progressively more senior officials in order to demonstrate progress over time.
The United States and China should also commit to reestablishing a formal structure for communication between the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Chinese Joint Staff Department, one that has not existed since former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joe Dunford visited Beijing in 2017. Most important, senior Pentagon officials must fundamentally rethink the nature of crisis management mechanisms and make use of communications between retired military officers and officials in so-called Track 1.5 and Track II backchannel dialogues.
Both militaries must also prioritize sustained face-to-face engagement, with initial senior-level meetings serving as a launching pad for recurring functional engagement focused on practical cooperation to promote deconfliction and operational trust. The focus should be on space and cyber domains, as well as on safe conduct of maritime forces at sea. The joint staff dialogue mechanism, which was initiated under the administration of President Donald Trump in 2017 and enabled bilateral communication at the three-star level, could serve as a model.
OVERCOMING CHINESE RETICENCE
The lack of success in prior efforts at establishing guardrails and risk mitigation is in large part due to the Chinese government’s consistent refusal to engage. In December 2020, for example, representatives from China’s navy failed to appear for scheduled meetings with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command as part of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement. Much of this stems from China’s political culture, in which the degree of communication is a product of the health of the overall relationship, and defense officials are wary of military engagement on the grounds that it legitimizes U.S. presence in the region. And because of political pressures on the chain of command and rigid hierarchies within the PLA, top Chinese officers are especially reluctant to engage. After the United States and China established a secure bilateral "Defense Telephone Link” as a crisis notification mechanism in 2008, the line was rarely used. The Biden administration’s top Indo-Pacific official, Kurt Campbell, recently noted that on past occasions when U.S. military officials tried to reach their Chinese counterparts using the hotline, it “just rung in an empty room for hours upon hours.”
Yet there is reason for cautious optimism that such reticence can be overcome. While in the past, Chinese military leaders have hesitated to engage out of fear that they could reveal operational vulnerabilities, such concerns are abating as the PLA modernizes and gains recognition as a peer competitor. U.S. and Chinese forces operate in closer proximity today in greater numbers of domains (space and cyber), making risk mitigation an interest for both countries. Xi has consolidated sufficient formal and informal influence over the military, making foreign outreach less of a political risk. And as National Security Council China Director Rush Doshi has argued, Beijing’s concern that military-to-military mechanisms would evoke Cold War comparisons are moot given Washington’s new bipartisan consensus that China is a strategic competitor. What’s more, the announcement that the United States will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, despite a predictably hostile response from China, may in fact make PLA leaders more receptive to reviving military-to-military dialogue: China’s leaders understand that since, like it or not, American security commitments and alliances in the region will only grow stronger, it is in their own interests to engage militarily.
Since American ties in the region will only grow stronger, it is in China's interests to communicate with the U.S. military.
Perhaps most important, there are signs that Xi holds great personal interest in improving military engagement, as demonstrated by his remarks during an unusual private meeting with Dunford in August 2017, in which he expressed hope that military-to-military relations could serve as a stabilizing force in the overall bilateral relationship. Reinvigorating military-to-military dialogue would be entirely consistent with long-standing U.S. policy, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The Trump administration’s 2018 report on China’s military lauded Department of Defense engagement with China as supporting an “overall U.S. policy and strategy toward China” and the military-to-military relationship as a “stabilizing element to the overall bilateral relationship.” And in July, Secretary Austin declared his staunch commitment to “stronger crisis communications” with the PLA.

To call for dialogue and communication with China’s military leadership is not to condone its aggression or Beijing’s repression at home. Even at the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, while denouncing the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” hosted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for arms control negotiations. More recently, during the war in Syria, the Trump administration pursued high-level military contact through a private channel between Dunford and Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. In addition to a hotline between U.S. military officers at the operations center in Qatar and Russian counterparts in Syria, a dialogue between the two countries’ armed forces at the three-star level helped to ensure that military activities did not create dangers with the rival country that could quickly spiral out of control.
The United States and China are on a dangerous path in the Indo-Pacific. Both sides must seize the opportunity to prevent a wider conflict before it is too late.

Foreign Affairs · by Chris Li and Eric Rosenbach · October 15, 2021

3. CENTCOM disputes Air Force account of attempted hijacking at Kabul airport during Afghanistan evacuation

Hmmm... what is the ground truth?

CENTCOM disputes Air Force account of attempted hijacking at Kabul airport during Afghanistan evacuation
CNN · by Oren Liebermann, CNN
Washington (CNN)US Central Command, which oversaw the US evacuation from Afghanistan, disputed an Air Force account of an attempted hijacking of a commercial flight from Kabul international airport during the final weeks of the evacuation from the country.
In a statement to CNN on Thursday afternoon, a spokeswoman for Central Command said they are "unaware" of an attempted hijacking.
"I am unaware of any attempt to hijack a plane at Hamid Karzai International airport," said US Central Command spokeswoman LT Josie Lynne Lenny in a statement Thursday afternoon.
"During the Afghanistan evacuation mission, an intel tip indicated the possibility of a plot to highjack a particular flight that was preparing to depart the airfield. Ground traffic controllers diverted the plane to a safe location on the airfield where security forces boarded the plane and determined that there was no active attempt to hijack the aircraft."
The Air Force account which detailed an attempted hijacking of a commercial airliner was published Tuesday on the Air Force's website and was written by Lt. Col. Kristen Duncan, a public affairs officer for the 23rd Wing, which deployed to Afghanistan this summer. During the evacuation operation, as US Air Force C-17s began steadily arriving at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Duncan wrote that airmen from the personnel recovery task force began tracking passengers departing the airport.
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"On one occasion after they received an intel tip, five people onboard one of the commercial flights intended to hijack the aircraft," Duncan wrote.
"'Our team worked to get them clear of the NATO ramp, relocated to the north side away from friendly forces, then ultimately onto the south side where the situation was handled,'" she wrote, quoting Lt. Col. Brian Desautels, the commander of the 71st Rescue Squadron and the leader of the airmen at Kabul.

While Duncan's published account offers few details on the attempted hijacking, it provides fresh insight into the US' frantic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, when American military personnel rushed to evacuate themselves, as well as other Americans and Afghan allies, from the country after it fell to the Taliban.
Duncan does not specify which carrier or on what day the flight left, and there is also no information provided about the five people removed from the flight and whether they were detained or released.
Duncan's account includes a note that it had been "thoroughly reviewed" and approved by Central Command on October 6 for operational security reasons. The statement from CENTCOM made no mention of the review.
As of late Thursday afternoon, there has been no change or update to the posted account from Duncan.
In describing the frenetic scene at the airport, Duncan writes that, moments after a C-17 cargo aircraft took off with Afghans clinging to its side, two of the Wing's HC-130J combat rescue aircraft took off with barely any runway to spare, skimming 10 feet above the heads of the crowd that had swarmed the airport during the evacuation efforts.
Duncan said that Desautels had reached out to the Combined Forces Air Component Commander, who said aircraft could take off from a taxiway if needed.
"'The strategic message: we would have a runway,'" Desautels said, according to Duncan's account.
Duncan also described another scene at Kabul's airport in which an officer came under "effective sniper fire" as expeditionary rescue squadrons helped secure a part of the airport for medical treatment.
"To stay open, the senior enlisted leader of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan Forward said he needed people to cover security," Duncan wrote. "Personnel Recovery Task Force (PRTF) Pilots, maintainers and support personnel donned their vests, helmets and M-4 rifles and manned defensive fighting positions."
"'One of our captains was on the rooftop taking effective sniper fire,'" Duncan quoted Desautels as saying. "Every enemy combatant was taking every opportunity to incite more chaos in what was already a chaotic event."
The statement from Central Command does not mention sniper fire.
Though the US fully withdrew all military personnel from Afghanistan in late August, marking the end of America's longest war, some US citizens were left in the country and later evacuated.
The withdrawal, which began earlier in the summer and picked up speed as an August 31 deadline approached, also turned deadly after a terrorist attack at Kabul's airport killed 13 US service members.
This story has been updated with a statement from US Central Command disputing the Air Force account of an attempted hijacking.
CNN's Alex Marquardt and Devan Cole contributed to this report.
CNN · by Oren Liebermann, CNN

4. Robert Gates: Afghanistan withdrawal 'probably did not need to have turned out that way'

Excerpts:
Gates — during an interview with “60 Minutes” that is set to air on Sunday — said watching the U.S. pull troops from Kabul sickened him.
“It was really tough… I actually wasn't feeling very well… And I was just so low about the way it had ended,” Gates told Anderson Cooper.
“The other feeling that I had was that it probably did not need to have turned out that way,” he added.
Robert Gates: Afghanistan withdrawal 'probably did not need to have turned out that way'
The Hill · by Mychael Schnell · October 14, 2021

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan “probably did not need to have turned out that way,” pinning blame on both former President Trump and President Biden.
Gates — during an interview with “60 Minutes” that is set to air on Sunday — said watching the U.S. pull troops from Kabul sickened him.
“It was really tough… I actually wasn't feeling very well… And I was just so low about the way it had ended,” Gates told Anderson Cooper.
“The other feeling that I had was that it probably did not need to have turned out that way,” he added.
Sunday on 60 Minutes: Robert Gates says watching the Afghanistan withdrawal sickened him. The former defense secretary and CIA head also says China is the United States' top military and economic rival now. https://t.co/O0WYyP5f85 pic.twitter.com/aPiBwZPWyX
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 14, 2021
Gates served as Defense secretary from 2006 until 2011, overseeing the war in Afghanistan under former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama. He also served as the director of the CIA between 1991 and 1993.
The former Pentagon chief pinned the blame for the messy withdrawal — which ended with the death of 13 U.S. service members by a suicide bomber — on both Trump and Biden.
He pointed to the ample time Trump had to plan the pullout, and Biden’s failure to start the evacuation in April, when he announced the U.S. would withdraw by Sept. 11.
“Certainly the military considers withdrawal the most dangerous part of an operation. But they really had a lot of time to plan, beginning with the deal that President Trump cut-- with the Taliban… So that was in February of 2020,” Gates said, referring to the agreement Trump brokered with the insurgent group in February 2020.
Many critics have condemned Trump for the deal, arguing that it emboldened the Taliban.
“If you start with the notion that we're pulling out entirely, I think you'd have to be pretty naïve not to assume things were going to go downhill once that withdrawal was complete,” the former Pentagon chief said.
Both Biden and Trump were the target of criticism following the U.S.’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, which brought an end to America’s longest war after 20 years of military involvement.
The Hill · by Mychael Schnell · October 14, 2021

5. The active-duty Army is facing a record suicide rate. Leaders have no idea how to fix it

Excerpts:
Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston said this week that he and senior enlisted leaders across the Army meet monthly to discuss ideas on how to tackle big issues in the force, including suicide. They share ideas, brainstorming to find different solutions that could work in both preventing and responding to suicide.
But the biggest message the Army is pushing remains the same as what soldiers have heard now for over a year: build “cohesive teams.”
“How do we build cohesive teams where everybody’s looking out for each other, everybody has each other’s back, and everybody’s going to act in each other’s best interest?” Helis said. “Even if that means having that uncomfortable conversation about, ‘I’ve noticed this, I’ve noticed that you’re drinking a lot, I’ve noticed that you’re becoming withdrawn, I’ve noticed that you’re not hanging out with us anymore,’ to identify those changes, have the conversation to find out what’s troubling the soldier, so you can get them reconnected and get them the assistance or support they need.”
The active-duty Army is facing a record suicide rate. Leaders have no idea how to fix it
taskandpurpose.com · by Haley Britzky · October 14, 2021
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Army leaders continue to struggle to find a way to address suicide in the ranks as the problem worsens, with 2020 marking the highest rate of suicides among active-duty soldiers in years.
Army leaders say they are looking to try just about anything to better respond to and prevent suicides. In the Army Reserve, that includes giving commanders the ability to put a soldier on paid, active duty status to respond to a teammate in crisis.
“[I]f one of our junior noncommissioned officers or officers become aware that somebody’s reaching out for help, our commanders have the ability to say ‘You’re on active duty right now, if you’re within a reasonable commuting distance go escort that soldier to get some help at a community care center,’” Army Reserve Command Sgt. Maj. Andrew Lombardo said on Tuesday at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference.
The policy Lombardo was referencing was made official in November 2020, though it has received little public attention since it was enacted. The policy directs leaders and soldiers to take “rapid action to ensure care of soldiers who express suicidal ideations.” It’s one of many tools Army leaders are hoping will reverse a devastating trend of suicides in the service. And as the numbers continue to rise, the Army is focused on getting ahead of the problem and ahead of the crisis, in the hopes that policies like the one Lombardo referenced would never need to be used in the first place.
Command Sgt. Maj. Andrew Lombardo, command sergeant major of the U.S. Army Reserve, hosts a breakout session Oct. 11 to discuss recruiting and retention during the Association of the United States Army 2021 Annual Meeting & Exposition at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C. (U.S. Army photo by Mr. Shawn Morris, 99th Readiness Division Public Affairs)
In 2020, the Army saw its highest rate of suicides among soldiers, from active duty to Army Reserves and the National Guard, in years — 32 suicides per every 100,000 soldiers, according to data released in September. Among soldiers on active duty, the rate of suicide was 36.5 suicides for every 100,000 soldiers — the highest rate of suicide among active-duty soldiers in the last decade. The rate of 36.5 suicides among active-duty soldiers is nearly an 18% increase from 2019’s rate of 31 suicides, according to data provided by the Army.
It wasn’t just the Army; the rate of suicide increased “across all services” between 2015 and 2020, according to the data released last month. As Defense One reported, 2020’s suicide rate among all active-duty troops was the highest recorded since the military began digitally tracking the issue in 2008.
The new data “showed quite clearly that we were going in the wrong direction in 2020,” Dr. James Helis, the director of the Army Resiliency Directorate, said this week at AUSA.
Helis told reporters on Tuesday that the Army knows the “who” of the suicide problem: typically male soldiers in their twenties, ranked private first class to staff sergeant, who has a privately-owned weapon. But what the Army can’t figure out is the “why.” They’re hoping to get answers from an outside study which the Army commissioned to get “some new eyes” on the issue — though there has been no shortage of studies already done on the topic.
An infantryman with the Oregon National Guard’s 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry Regiment, enters a wall of blast smoke to check on his battle buddies after a simulated attack on an entry check point at the Mobilization Support Site on North Fort Hood, July 17, 2014. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Ken Scar, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)
“Is there something we’re missing?” Helis said. “Is there a factor we’re not seeing, or is there some connection we’re not seeing that can help us to focus our prevention efforts?”
That frustration was echoed by leaders throughout the AUSA conference, including Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville.
“I haven’t been able to figure out how to cure suicides,” he told Task & Purpose, explaining that the Army is focused on getting to soldiers before they’re in crisis.
“We just haven’t been able to change the trajectory … We’re doing everything we can, I think as an organization to try to build cohesive teams, the fact that young men and women are connected,” McConville said. “We think there’s something there. We know what makes people more high-risk. Got a bad relationship, but a lot of people had bad relationships. Or people have trouble with financial matters, but a lot of people have trouble. Or people that are going through some type of administrative or UCMJ process may be at higher risk, but a lot of people are. So how do we identify those folks? How do we get them the right care, and then how do we let them go on with their lives?”
Helis said the Army is trying to get ahead of suicides by targeting those key problems McConville mentioned — financial or relationship challenges and disciplinary issues. They’re looking to see what impact classes on things like financial literacy, healthy relationships, or parenting skills might have.
U.S. Army Gen. James C. McConville, Chief of Staff of the Army, listens to a question on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Sept. 1, 2021. The purpose of the visit was to brief senior leaders across Fort Bragg and to meet with spouses of Paratroopers. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Jacob Moir)
Helis also spoke about some of the biggest misconceptions he sees soldiers have about suicide. Some soldiers believe asking their buddy if they’re having suicidal thoughts could push them into acting on those thoughts, for example.
That’s not the case, Helis said.
“It is absolutely appropriate to ask somebody the question, ‘Are you thinking about hurting yourself?’ And you just ask them that candidly, and that bluntly,” he said. “Asking the question and pressing the issue is not going to drive the person to attempt to take their own life … You need to be comfortable having that uncomfortable conversation and asking those difficult questions.”
Helis also mentioned safe weapons storage and “means transference” — soldiers offering to take in someone’s privately owned firearms for a few days if they’re having thoughts of hurting themselves. It essentially boils down to putting as much time as possible between the thought of suicide and the action.
Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston said this week that he and senior enlisted leaders across the Army meet monthly to discuss ideas on how to tackle big issues in the force, including suicide. They share ideas, brainstorming to find different solutions that could work in both preventing and responding to suicide.
But the biggest message the Army is pushing remains the same as what soldiers have heard now for over a year: build “cohesive teams.”
“How do we build cohesive teams where everybody’s looking out for each other, everybody has each other’s back, and everybody’s going to act in each other’s best interest?” Helis said. “Even if that means having that uncomfortable conversation about, ‘I’ve noticed this, I’ve noticed that you’re drinking a lot, I’ve noticed that you’re becoming withdrawn, I’ve noticed that you’re not hanging out with us anymore,’ to identify those changes, have the conversation to find out what’s troubling the soldier, so you can get them reconnected and get them the assistance or support they need.”
If you’re thinking about suicide, are worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, the Lifeline network is available 24/7 across the United States. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (800-273-8255) to reach a trained counselor. Use that same number and press “1” to reach the Veterans Crisis Line.
More great stories on Task & Purpose
Want to write for Task & Purpose? Learn more here and be sure to check out more great stories on our homepage.

Haley Britzky is the Army reporter for Task & Purpose, covering the daily happenings in the Army and how they impact soldiers and their families, as well as broader national security issues. Originally from Texas, Haley previously worked at Axios before joining Task & Purpose in January 2019. Contact the author here.

taskandpurpose.com · by Haley Britzky · October 14, 2021

6. U.S. Aims to Resume Regular Evacuation Flights From Afghanistan

Excerpts:
A senior regional official said that Qatar Airways would operate the flights for the State Department, and that Washington had hoped to get operations up and running this week.
U.S. troops disabled and destroyed some of the airport’s flight-control equipment as they departed in August. Qatari forces guarded the tarmac and ran terminal security for flights in early September, and the Gulf state’s technicians also spent several days making the airport operational for daytime flights.
Other bureaucratic and operational issues have held up the process of arranging the regular U.S. evacuation flights.
“Until the airport is reopened, I think all we have to deal with really is charter flights, because regular airlines are going to find it very difficult to pay the insurance premiums that are required or be willing to fly into Afghanistan,” the first senior State Department official said.
The Biden administration has been under pressure from lawmakers, veterans and other advocates to do more to help Afghans left behind. The U.S. and its allies airlifted almost 100,000 Afghans out of the country during a two-week operation in August after the Taliban seized power, according to the Centre For Immigration Studies, a nonprofit. State Department officials have said most Special Immigrant Visa applicants were left behind.
U.S. Aims to Resume Regular Evacuation Flights From Afghanistan
U.S. citizens, residents and some Afghan visa applicants would qualify to fly
WSJ · by Jessica Donati
The small number of U.S. citizens and thousands of Afghans left behind after the chaotic evacuation effort in the final weeks of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan could be eligible for seats on the U.S.-sponsored flights.
The last U.S. troops departed on Aug. 31, bringing the 20-year conflict to an end. Since then, a small number of flights have carried Americans, Afghans and other foreign passport holders out of Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, and some people have left over land, through border crossings to Central Asian countries and Pakistan.

The State Department has yet to schedule a date to resume evacuation flights because it is still working through arrangements with neighboring countries, the State Department official said. Among the issues being worked out are documentation for travelers, permission to fly over other countries and procedures with the Taliban and foreign governments.
“As soon as we have the right combination of documentation and logistics, we will get going again,” the senior State Department official said in an interview.
Qatar requires all passengers to have valid travel documents. Other issues have arisen over the presence on the planes of stowaways, and the prevalence of fraudulent documents. The U.S. is unable to deport Afghans without valid travel documents and Qatar won’t take them in.
“We haven’t been able to get a flight out in a couple of weeks,” the official said.
A second senior State Department official said the U.S. has worked to step up charter flights and has previously said this was its goal. Since the U.S. ended its presence in Afghanistan on Aug. 31, more than 200 U.S. citizens and residents have departed on such flights.
“Our goal is to accelerate the pace of these ongoing charter flights, and we are working closely with our partners to do that,” the official said.
The Taliban didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Taliban are requiring most Afghan travelers to have passports, a problem for some Afghans who fear they are at risk of retaliation after working for the U.S. war and reconstruction effort over the past two decades.
Some have destroyed their documents or no longer have access to them. The Taliban have reopened the passport office and have started issuing documentation, but some Afghans fear that applying to leave the country would put them on the Taliban’s radar.
The State Department aims eventually to run several flights a week, the official said. The U.S. plans to centralize its evacuation efforts through Qatar, where the evacuees will be processed at the Al Udeid air base, the State Department official said. Previously, Afghans were evacuated to a number of countries in the Middle East and Europe for processing.
Priority for seats on the evacuation flights will be given to the U.S. citizens still in the country, U.S. legal permanent residents and their immediate family members. Eligible for those flights will be remaining U.S. Embassy staff, and applicants under the Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghans who worked for the U.S. and who have cleared most security vetting.
The State Department estimated in September that fewer than 200 Americans who wanted to leave were left behind; some of those have since departed the country and others have emerged and requested help leaving Afghanistan. Nongovernmental organizations say the number is higher.
“I think we’re prepared to do this for the foreseeable future, that is certainly the reason for reorganizing the overall effort,” the first official said.
Applicants to the Special Immigrant Visa program for former U.S. military and government workers will be eligible for seats as well. But they will have had to have completed most of the vetting steps required in the process. The State Department is continuing to process visa applications, and more people will become eligible for the flights as the department works through the backlog, the official said.
Other Afghans at risk, such as female judges or government workers, won’t qualify for evacuation flights under the current plan. For them, the only option remains to escape Afghanistan by their own means and apply for asylum in a third country, a remote prospect for most who lack the resources to undertake risky escapes and potentially wait for years for their paperwork to be processed.
A senior regional official said that Qatar Airways would operate the flights for the State Department, and that Washington had hoped to get operations up and running this week.
U.S. troops disabled and destroyed some of the airport’s flight-control equipment as they departed in August. Qatari forces guarded the tarmac and ran terminal security for flights in early September, and the Gulf state’s technicians also spent several days making the airport operational for daytime flights.
Other bureaucratic and operational issues have held up the process of arranging the regular U.S. evacuation flights.
“Until the airport is reopened, I think all we have to deal with really is charter flights, because regular airlines are going to find it very difficult to pay the insurance premiums that are required or be willing to fly into Afghanistan,” the first senior State Department official said.
The Biden administration has been under pressure from lawmakers, veterans and other advocates to do more to help Afghans left behind. The U.S. and its allies airlifted almost 100,000 Afghans out of the country during a two-week operation in August after the Taliban seized power, according to the Centre For Immigration Studies, a nonprofit. State Department officials have said most Special Immigrant Visa applicants were left behind.
Write to Jessica Donati at jessica.donati@wsj.com
WSJ · by Jessica Donati

7. ‘I Never Believed That Would Happen’: After 20 Years of War, an Abrupt End


‘I Never Believed That Would Happen’: After 20 Years of War, an Abrupt End
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Victor J. Blue, Jim Huylebroek and Christina Goldbaum
Published Oct. 9, 2021
Updated Oct. 11, 2021
The New York Times · by Christina Goldbaum · October 9, 2021
Amid the uncertainty that lies ahead under a Taliban-controlled government, Afghans reflect on the final months of fighting.

Credit...Clockwise from top left: Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times (2); Victor J. Blue for The New York Times (2); Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
By Victor J. Blue, Jim Huylebroek and
Oct. 9, 2021, 12:12 p.m. ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — By the time Ghulam Maroof Rashid’s 50th birthday passed, he had spent more than one-third of his life fighting for the Taliban on one battlefield or another in Afghanistan. He believed they would eventually win the war but had no idea that this year would finally be its end.
“We once thought that maybe the day would come when we would not hear the sound of an airplane,” he said this month while sitting on the dusty red carpet of a governor’s compound in Wardak Province. “We’ve been very tired for the last 20 years.”
In the last year of the war, the Taliban’s lightning military offensivethe collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and the withdrawal of the last American troops, have brought about an upheaval as profound as the U.S. invasion in 2001 — two decades ago this month.
Now, former fighters like Mr. Rashid are grappling with governance. A generation of women are struggling to keep a sliver of space in public life. And Afghans across the country are wondering what comes next.
Mr. Rashid’s story is only one in the kaleidoscope of experiences Afghans have shared over the years of the American war that officially began on Oct. 7, 2001, when the dark silhouette of U.S. bombers clouded the Afghan skies.
Since then, a generation of Afghans in urban areas grew up spirited by an influx of international aid. But for more than 70 percent of the population living in rural areas, the way of life remained largely unchanged — except for those caught under the violent umbrella of the Western war effort that displaced, wounded and killed thousands.
The New York Times spoke to five Afghans about the sudden end of the American war in Afghanistan, and the uncertainty that lies ahead.
Ghulam Maroof Rashid, a Taliban commander in Wardak Province. A young intelligence officer with the Taliban in the 1990s, he remembers the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The Insurgent
A young intelligence officer with the Taliban in the 1990s, Mr. Rashid remembers the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: “I started farming at first but then became a teacher in the village school,” he said about his life after the Taliban’s collapse. “Then, we started our jihad.”
Soon, they were planting Russian-made mines and homemade explosive devices on the roads, one of the deadliest tactics of the war. Mr. Rashid said he mainly fought in Chak, his home district. That district fell to the Taliban about four months ago.
“I remember because we paid the army soldiers some money so they could travel to their homes,” he said. “I didn’t expect that two months later all Americans would have left and we would be visiting our friends in Kabul.”
Mr. Rashid has found himself once more in the Taliban government. He goes to work at the Wardak governor’s office every day, sleeps with his family every night and no longer shudders at the metallic whir of aircraft overhead.
Khatera, a humanitarian worker in Kabul. “I knew what life would look like,” she recalled as the insurgents were seizing province after province. “Female season was over.”Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The NGO Worker
When the Taliban began its brutal advance across the country this year, Khatera, 34, thought about her daughter, just 14 years old — the same age Khatera was when she learned of her impromptu engagement during the first Taliban regime to stave off the possibility of being forced to wed a Talib.
“I knew what life would look like,” she recalled as the insurgents returned in what seemed like an unstoppable force. “Female season was over.”
She reflected on the career she built — from a broadcaster at a radio station to the project manager for an international aid organization — over the past two decades. “I had the pleasure of independence and economic freedom,” she said. “When I was getting into those doors, I saw what life could be.”
In the first few weeks since the Taliban took over, much of that freedom is gone. Khatera is afraid to send her children to school. She is afraid to go to her office and knows that even if she is able to, she could not return to her old job. The international aid organization she works for put a man in her position to communicate with the Taliban.
“This is the worst feeling as a woman, I feel helpless,” she said.
Shir Agha Safi, left, with Afghan security forces during the battle for Lashkar Gah in May. Until Aug. 15, he had been an intelligence officer in the Afghan Army.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The Soldier
On a recent day in September, Shir Agha Safi, 29, stood in front of two Marine military police officers outside the tent city on the base in Quantico, Va., that was now his temporary home. He had been evacuated from Afghanistan this summer, along with thousands of others.
“I never believed that would happen, that all of Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban,” Mr. Safi said, even though he had spent the last year on one of the most volatile front lines in Afghanistan.
Until Aug. 15, he had been an intelligence officer in the Afghan Army, after joining the U.S.-backed military force more than a decade earlier.
Both of the Marines, when asked, had never heard of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand Province, where Mr. Safi had spent months locked in a bloody urban battle with the Taliban. A cascade of suicide bombings and airstrikes, both Afghan and American, destroyed much of the city, leaving hundreds of combatants and civilians dead and wounded.
“At that time we still had hope,” Mr. Safi said of the battle for Lashkar Gah, which dragged through the summer as surrounding districts collapsed. “We never thought to surrender.”
Where Mr. Safi will end up after he leaves Quantico is anything but clear, though he understands he might be placed in a home elsewhere in the United States.
“Do you know about Iowa?” he asked.
Abdul Basir Fisrat in his truck in Kabul. He lives in Kandahar with his family, but he makes the 1,000-mile drive along the Herat-Kandahar-Kabul route whenever there is work.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
The Civilian
Abdul Basir Fisrat, 48, has driven trucks along the Herat-Kandahar-Kabul route for 35 years, but during the twilight months of the American war, that path traced the collapse of much of the country as the Taliban swept toward the capital.
The first district that he saw fall was Nawrak, in Ghazni Province, about five months ago. He was relieved to see it go: A security checkpoint staffed by soldiers from the previous government used to fire on his truck, demanding money to pass. After it was seized, he said, “we thanked God that we were saved from the oppression of the government soldiers.”
Mr. Fisrat lives in Kandahar with his family, but he makes the 1,000-mile trip whenever there is work. He has made due without an education and driven under five different Afghan governments since the 1980s, two of them ruled by the Taliban.
Now Mr. Fisrat, who owns three trucks, has the potential to pocket what he was paying in thousands of dollars in bribes to the Afghan government. Under the Taliban, he pays none. It would be a significant windfall, if it was not for the worsening economy that has made trips fewer and far between. But the lack of fighting means he can go where he wants when he wants: “If I want to, I will leave in the middle of the night,” he said.
Samira Khairkhwa, 25, faces an uncertain future under the Taliban. “We didn’t believe that America would leave Afghanistan in this situation,” she said. “But once it happened we were shocked.”Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
The Civil Servant
The life of Samira Khairkhwa, 25, encapsulates the gains made for Afghan women during the war years, and the ambition those advances spurred in many of them.
After finishing college in the north, she found her way to Kabul, the capital, through a program for youth leadership funded by U.S.A.I.D., and by 2018, she landed a job working on the re-election campaign for Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani. From there, she became the spokeswoman for the state-run electric company in Kabul. She had dreams of eventually running for president herself.
But as the Taliban pressed their relentless advance over the summer, Ms. Khairkhwa began to have nightmares. “I dreamed that the Taliban came to our office and our house,” she said. She kept those visions to herself, worried that telling anyone might make them a reality.
On Aug. 15, Ms. Khairkhwa was headed to the office when she got caught in the snarl of panicked traffic in Kabul. She stopped in a restaurant, uploaded a clip of the chaos that ended up on the news, and made her way home.
“We didn’t believe that America would leave Afghanistan in this situation,” she said. “That the Taliban would return or that Ghani would surrender. But once it happened we were shocked.”
Safiullah Padshah and Yaqoob Akbary contributed reporting.
The New York Times · by Christina Goldbaum · October 9, 2021

8. What Should A $100 Billion Japanese Military Look Like?

Professor Holmes provides four ideas.

Conclusion:
So Japan’s defense buildup need not exude glamour. An airfield or building may prove as important to Japanese success as an Aegis destroyer or aircraft carrier. Tokyo must refuse to succumb to the allure of prestige platforms.
Controlling access to the first island chain will safeguard Japanese territory while helping deter or, if necessary, defeat China. Tokyo should make access its north star when charting budgets and force acquisitions.

What Should A $100 Billion Japanese Military Look Like?
19fortyfive.com · by ByJames Holmes · October 14, 2021
Over at Reuters, Tim Kelly and Ju-min Park tender the feel-good story for the week: Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) intends to double defense spending from 1 to 2 percent of GDP, which would equate to roughly $100 billion. Since World War II the island state has maintained an informal cap on defense budgets to soothe worries among neighbors fearful that Tokyo might again march Asia over the precipice into regional or world war.
The cap made sense during the immediate postwar decades. Memories run long, and so do fears. By now, though, Japan has recouped its good name many times over. It menaces no one. Plus, the rise of an increasingly domineering China that covets neighbors’ territory and natural resources, seeks to subvert if not overthrow the regional order, and routinely threatens to use force to take what it wants makes misgivings about Japanese militarism feel quaint.
Now, it’s one thing for party chieftains to make a bold pledge, quite another to coax a people with a strong pacifist streak into supporting it. We will learn something about the character of the Japanese government and society—and thus Japan’s fitness for great sea power—as the LDP tries to put promises into action. One wishes the party well as it strives to rally popular backing for a more muscular Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF).
After all, a more balanced partnership with the United States within the longstanding security alliance would be a healthy development for the allies and the region. So would a more even balance of power between Japan and China.
What Should a $100 Billion Japanese Military Look Like?
How should Tokyo spend its new largesse if the LDP defense program does come to pass? The natural tendency would be to just throw money at the existing force, increasing purchases of what the JSDF is already procuring—especially marquee platforms such as stealth fighters and major surface warships. Given my druthers, I would like to see Tokyo take a more strategically minded approach. Political leaders should ask big questions about what Japan wants to accomplish in the region and the world and design a force able to help accomplish it.
That force might look quite different from a supersized version of the current JSDF. It should be a force built around the principle of access, meaning the ability to preserve or deny access to landmasses, waters, and skies important to Japanese and allied strategy. How could a redesigned JSDF pull this off? By embracing a few principles.
A $100 Billion Japanese Military: Four Ideas
First, Japanese forces need to be mobile, adept at vaulting from island to island to hold embattled ground such as the Senkaku Islands and the Ryukyus chain. Manpower and platforms that let JSDF defenders reach contested islands first and hold them against a Chinese onslaught—light amphibious transports, for instance—are imperative. According to the greats of martial affairs, after all, tactical defense is the strongest form of warfare.
Japanese strategic directives talk about recovering islands lost to an aggressor. Enough with the defeatism. Rather than surrender its geographic advantages, Japanese officialdom must field a force that preserves and widens them.
Second, a bulked-up JSDF needs to be what U.S. Navy wonks call a “distributed” armed force. A multitude of platforms scattered about on the map constitutes a distributed force. The logic behind distributed operations is straightforward. Chinese air and missile forces can reach out from the mainland and strike at allied forces along the first island chain. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will have some success. Allied forces made up of a few capable but pricey platforms—ships, warplanes, and so forth—concentrate a hefty percentage of their combat power in each platform. Losing one of those assets to an aerial assault deducts that share of a fighting force’s overall strength.
But if force designers and constructors decompose the force into plentiful smaller, cheaper platforms, they reduce the percentage of battle power concentrated in each one. A ship or plane can be incapacitated; the force as a whole fights on. Which is the point of operations and strategy.
Think small, cheap, and versatile, Japan.
Third, Japanese strategists should base their deliberations on regulating access to the waters and skies around the islands as well as the islands themselves. The JSDF can help contain the PLA, bottling up Chinese aggressors within the first island chain and simplifying a host of operational problems for the allies. Weaponry that can assail shipping and aircraft in tight nautical passages will be at a premium. The good news is that distributed forces excel at island-chain defense. Manned and unmanned submarines, aircraft, and surface patrol craft can work with the combined fleet while marines on the islands loft missiles the PLA’s way. In so doing the force can stymie access to the Western Pacific and Japanese soil to boot.
Again: think small.
And fourth, a more lavishly funded JSDF needs to be resilient. Distributed operations help out in this regard. So does improving base infrastructure up and down the island chain. In all likelihood PLA rocketeers and airmen will bombard major allied bases such as Yokosuka, Sasebo, and Kadena at the outset of a shooting war. The allies need to harden and disperse their basing posture, including through passive measures such as emplacing materiel underground and active measures such as installing anti-air and anti-missile defenses. Tokyo should also invest in secondary bases, as well as equipment and procedures for creating temporary bases in times of extreme need.
So Japan’s defense buildup need not exude glamour. An airfield or building may prove as important to Japanese success as an Aegis destroyer or aircraft carrier. Tokyo must refuse to succumb to the allure of prestige platforms.
Controlling access to the first island chain will safeguard Japanese territory while helping deter or, if necessary, defeat China. Tokyo should make access its north star when charting budgets and force acquisitions.
Haste.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfighting, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
19fortyfive.com · by ByJames Holmes · October 14, 2021

9. Can't Sail Away from Cyber Attacks: 'Sea-Hacking' from Land
Conclusion:
National security strategic actions should include a dramatic change in commercial shipping’s incentives that ensure — not merely indemnify — cyber defense of the vessels. The threat to maritime traffic can’t be ignored. The threat is real, bigger than merely assuring ports and hulls for the U.S. Navy. Serious national security responses should include both a carrot and stick. We suggest requiring proof of cyber security for container and other commercial ships that enter U.S. waters, and vastly increased federal financial support for cyber security for the ports, shipping, and shipbuilders that serve the needs of the U.S. maritime industry.
In effect, the U.S. maritime industry should extend the 2020 National Maritime Cybersecurity Plan and the proposed bills in the current negotiations behind the SHIPYARD Act beyond ports alone to include container ships as an urgent first step. New policies need to require proof of and enable funding for cyber security upgrades in all container ships delivering cargo to U.S. ports. This is a strategic and national response that ought to be in concert with and cooperatively implemented with the other established seafaring nations. United with democratic allies, the U.S. government can strongly influence what is considered normal but is grossly inadequate in the construction, operations, and insurance of the worldwide maritime fleet. The United States and its allies are major stakeholders in the global maritime socio-technical-economic system. It is the same system that America’s major adversary, China, intends to dominate with ships, ports, export volumes, political and personal coercion, military saber-rattling, and technological command. Cyber vulnerabilities feed their lead in all these areas throughout the globe. Either the United States directly addresses the problem with commercial and government stakeholders, or it will spend much more in blood and treasure when adversaries attack at the time and place of their choosing. As the DefCon exercise demonstrated, even hacker curiosity could make a ship into a weapon.

Can't Sail Away from Cyber Attacks: 'Sea-Hacking' from Land - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Chris C. Demchak and Chris C. Demchak,· October 15, 2021
The warnings had been issued for years. The techniques were simple enough — penetrate the platform through the onboard navigation system and then go horizontally across the onboard networks to gain control of key systems such as steering and the throttle. The hackers did exactly this — surprisingly without foreknowledge of the specific systems they were to hack prior to beginning the penetration. They were in and through the navigation interface in a remarkably short time and had control of both the steering systems and the throttle in quick succession. From this effort came a coveted “Black Badge” from the Maritime Hacking village of the annual cyber security conference DefCon, held in August 2021 in Las Vegas.
The conference’s Hack the Sea Village “SeaTF” hacking challenge allowed teams of three to five individuals to gain hands-on experience hacking real maritime hardware in a controlled environment using Fathom5’s “Grace” maritime cyber security testbed. The simulated maritime bridge setup is meant to be an accurate facsimile of equipment typically in use onboard ocean-going vessels, allowing hacking teams to attack the afloat environment. Using realistic components and protocols, hackers were able to penetrate different maritime subsystems including navigation, firefighting, and steering systems. While this year’s challenge required hackers to tap into propulsion, steering, and navigation systems through a wired connection to their laptops, next year the hope is to provide a wireless environment.
Importantly, the 2021 competition once more demonstrated that hacking skills from land-based systems and environments are easily transposable to a maritime environment. The winning team had neither experience in the simulated environment or in maritime hacking in general. A skilled hacking team typically takes at most 14 hours to penetrate the system safeguards and remotely take control of both steering and throttle controls. While the simulation used at DefCon did require “plugging into” the equipment, remote-access hacking is possible as demonstrated in February 2017, when hackers took control of a German-owned container vessel traveling from Cyprus to Djibouti. The hackers compromised both steering and maneuver controls. It was only when an information technology team came aboard to remediate that the ship’s crew regained control of the steering. Segregation of a ship’s internet protocol and serial networks can prevent this.
Maritime Chokepoints Make Attractive Targets
The vast bulk of the world’s critical economic and military traffic passes through a handful of narrow strategic waterways known as “maritime chokepoints.” While these waterways have always been prey to pirates, weather, and maritime accidents, these perils are now joined by maritime cyber attacks — whether conducted for ransom, malicious disruption, piracy, or as part of larger geopolitical conflicts. When a commercial vessel or warship is strategically delayed via sea-hacking, critical shipments are delayed by days or weeks. The massive size of modern container ships such as the Ever Given makes hacking their steering systems or forward speed a means of weaponizing the vessel. It is worth a bad actor’s effort to experiment with grounding a major new container ship remotely from land-based cells.
The Suez Canal could be one of the more lucrative cyber disruption targets due to the amount and expected speed of traffic flow through its two-lane and one-lane sections. 30 percent of the world’s shipping container volume carrying 12 percent of global trade passes through the canal. Ships, including the very largest container vessels, can cut an average 12 days off a three-week trip from India to Italy by transiting the canal. The 205-meter-wide canal is known to be challenging even at modest speeds for ships the size of the Ever Given. Its 120-mile-long narrow transit offers the opportunity for cyber-induced disruption, particularly if one wanted to stall oil and gas deliveries to the Mediterranean and Europe. If the canal is blocked companies must take the alternative route — around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 10 to 12 days transit time, fuel costs, and security costs. Comparatively, according to a 2006 RAND study, the closing of the Malacca Strait would increase transit time by only an additional three days.
With the grounding of the enormous container ship — the Ever Given — on March 23, 2021, the world was reintroduced to the issue of “maritime choke points”. The giant ship blocked the Suez Canal for six days. The Ever Given was not a cyber target this time but its grounding demonstrated the potential impact on global trade when a ship blocks a chokepoint. For example, the BBC reported that fears that the blockage would tie up shipments of crude oil resulted in crude prices rising by 4 percent on international markets. The Ever Given was launched in 2018, and is one of the largest ships in the world. It was built and is owned by a Japanese firm, leased and operated by a Taiwanese company, and sailing under a Panamanian flag. Similar-sized ships carry an increasing percentage of global trade, and the relatively recent 2015 addition of a second channel to the Suez Canal was undertaken in part to accommodate them.
The canal is wide enough to accommodate such large vessels but physical clearance on either side of both channels is currently still limited. Mistakes in speed or understanding of wind effects on huge vessels can (and did in this case) come from human error. But they can also be stimulated by difficult-to-detect cyber intrusions into the navigation and steering systems of these ships, especially in newer vessels. The internet protocol networks used for steering and navigation are often not segregated effectively for cyber security. They are connected to the serial bus networks that make up the supervisory control and data acquisition systems critical to ship operations. The blockage caused by the grounding of the Ever Given demonstrates to cyber-competent terrorists or adversaries the potential for disruption if they are able to manipulate or disrupt transit mechanisms from the ships themselves, their containers’ content, and pilotage management systems. Even basic electricity supplies for locks such as those in the Panama Canal offer disruption options to a world of bad actors who have already demonstrated a willingness to attack critical infrastructure. The 900-kilometer-long Malacca Strait carries 40 percent of the world’s maritime trade, including a quarter of the globe’s seaborne oil supplies and 80 percent of the Middle East’s oil and gas supplies to China. Traffic congestion is its major challenge, particularly where the strait narrows to just 2.7 kilometers wide near Singapore. In addition to posing a lucrative target, these chokepoints also afford the opportunity, both from shore and through remote means, for potential bad actors to track particular ships, owners’ fleets, crew, content, origin, destination nationalities, or missions in order to select targets.
These risks are aggravated as ships and systems rely increasingly on automation. Fully autonomous ships are a stated goal of the industry and the U.S. Navy. Such systems should include proper cyber security.
Ships and Cyber Security Still Strangers
In 2018, security researchers at Pen Test Partners found vulnerabilities in electronic chart display and information systems commonly used on cargo and container ships. These chart systems are often linked to GPS-guided autopilots, which when exploited give hackers the ability to access the operational technology of the ship: If networks are not segregated, hackers can remotely manipulate the ship’s steering, ballast pumps, and navigation. The electronic charting system is often slaved directly to the autopilot on many ships, causing the ship to automatically follow the charted course. Hackers can redirect the ship’s course by planting false information messages via satellite communications in order to mislead navigational decisions. Many satellite communications terminals on ships are available on the public internet with default credentials and can be hacked remotely. Numerous other paths can also prove useful vectors in the cyber attack of a vessel. For example, the 2018 research also showed that the electronic charting systems on some ships were still using relic operating systems with many known major vulnerabilities, such as Windows NT, often because these are expensive to upgrade. Even when malicious control is discovered, as the cliché goes, it can be very difficult to regain control in a timely manner.
Commercial ship networks tend to have flat network architectures that are originally unsegmented networks without firewalls or other cyber security measures as part of their architecture. Once inside such networks, it is not difficult to travel around across the systems of the entire ship. Internal systems often use manufacturer default passwords, not just on firewalls but also on the critical programmable logic controllers running systems, as well as satellite communication equipment.
Researchers have identified other vulnerabilities in computer-security forums, such as using the ship’s satellite terminal as a point of penetration. The terminal opens the system itself to attackers replacing the poorly secured firmware or simply reverting to an even less secure previous version, and then altering the applications running the terminal. Similar research results have produced similar concerns. Access in — whether through the electronic charting system, the satellite communications terminal, or any other outward-facing communications — means the ability to control critical ship systems covertly and use the massive bulk for any reason the attacker desires.
At the outset some experts suggested that the Ever Given grounding was a cyber incident. When the voyage data recorder was examined, this speculation was shown to be wrong in this case. However, as long-time cyber control systems expert Joe Weiss noted, the potential for cyber disruption still exists. Despite the ship’s relative youth, the latest marine electronics likely installed for control and navigations do not resolve the vulnerabilities discussed earlier. The recent DefCon exercise is not a one-off example of success in simulated seahacking. Concurrent with the actual grounding of the Ever Given, a team of doctoral students competed in a NavalX “Hack the Machine” exercise — using the same “Grace” maritime system as DefCon — in order to determine if “hackers” could successfully attack maritime systems remotely through a cloud network. The team succeeded, “hacking and crashing the [fictional ship’s] cyber security monitoring system.”
These oversights are major safety and security issues currently left unaddressed. One reason is a gap in crew skills and the costs of maintaining cyber secure systems while underway. Leaving poor default administrative passwords on essential systems means that attackers can take control of those systems.
Shipping as a Cyber Campaign Weapon
Attackers will not ignore the opportunities presented by poor maritime cyber security. A cyber campaign can provide a good enough return on investment in either economic or political benefits to make it attractive, and possibly even lucrative. American adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran learn from these exploits and integrate them in larger cyber-enabled campaigns. Russia, for example, has spoofed a ship’s GPS at least 7,910 times between 2016 and 2019, affecting about 1300 commercial ships. In 2017, North Korean navigation jamming was said to be behind the forced return of hundreds of South Korean fishing vessels, and its cyber attacks led to the devastating NotPetya attacks that crippled the large Maersk shipping line the same year. In July 2021, Sky News reported the acquisition of documents said to originate from an Iranian offensive cyber unit called Shahid Kaveh, which is part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps cyber command. They present research on how to sink a cargo ship using cyber techniques and include details on the satellite communications systems used in the global shipping industry.
The routine hacking of ships from space is coming. Currently the Global Navigation Satellite System constellation includes the American-run GPS, the Russian GLONASS, the European Union’s GALILEO, Japan’s QZSS, China’s BeiDou, and the Indian system known as NAVIC. Each nation’s ships tend to use their own national system. No nation’s commercial ships are as secure as necessary today, and they lag in securing the shipboard systems in the near and medium term. There is some talk of using older but functional radio wave technology as a more secure alternative to satellite-based systems, but the discussions are only just beginning. It is questionable how rapidly or widely alternatives such as eLORAN will spread. It will take investment and a sense of urgency on cyber security from major shipbuilding firms and shipping lines to accomplish this. As one researcher states, “[Electronic charting] systems pretty much never have anti-virus.” The anti-virus industry that protects land-based personal computers in the United States and Europe started over 30 years ago, but a multitude of huge ships launched during that time with complex computer architectures contain only basic cyber protection.
U.S. and allied warships — as well as most of the world’s exporting economies — plan on free transit through the Suez Canal and other chokepoints. Iranian intelligence services have collected maps, means, and incentive to use maritime cyber weaknesses for Iranian campaigns. In the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group experimented with a variety of attempted attacks using public transit, notably in Paris. Six years later al-Qaeda used commercial airliners against the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept. 11. The maritime cyber environment is abysmally insecure. The technical means to exploit these ships is well distributed across land-based hackers with no prior maritime systems experience. It doesn’t take much to mess with a passing ship. The opportunities are well-known, from the chokepoints and the ship dependence on external networks, clouds, and satellite navigation communications. The motivation is as varied as the adversary, ranging from the ransomware criminal, to the “just because they can” opportunist, to the state adversary and its proxies.
The gauntlet is on the deck for the westernized democracies to pick up or ignore. Positive discussions of increasing national support for U.S. shipping — dangerously dependent on Chinese or other foreign shippers — don’t address the lagging cyber security and global disruption potential from hacking huge container ships. 90 percent of the world’s trade travels by sea and 40 million U.S. jobs depend on trade. In classic military strategic thought, the triad of means, opportunity, and motivation lacks only the final “when.”
National security strategic actions should include a dramatic change in commercial shipping’s incentives that ensure — not merely indemnify — cyber defense of the vessels. The threat to maritime traffic can’t be ignored. The threat is real, bigger than merely assuring ports and hulls for the U.S. Navy. Serious national security responses should include both a carrot and stick. We suggest requiring proof of cyber security for container and other commercial ships that enter U.S. waters, and vastly increased federal financial support for cyber security for the ports, shipping, and shipbuilders that serve the needs of the U.S. maritime industry.
In effect, the U.S. maritime industry should extend the 2020 National Maritime Cybersecurity Plan and the proposed bills in the current negotiations behind the SHIPYARD Act beyond ports alone to include container ships as an urgent first step. New policies need to require proof of and enable funding for cyber security upgrades in all container ships delivering cargo to U.S. ports. This is a strategic and national response that ought to be in concert with and cooperatively implemented with the other established seafaring nations. United with democratic allies, the U.S. government can strongly influence what is considered normal but is grossly inadequate in the construction, operations, and insurance of the worldwide maritime fleet. The United States and its allies are major stakeholders in the global maritime socio-technical-economic system. It is the same system that America’s major adversary, China, intends to dominate with ships, ports, export volumes, political and personal coercion, military saber-rattling, and technological command. Cyber vulnerabilities feed their lead in all these areas throughout the globe. Either the United States directly addresses the problem with commercial and government stakeholders, or it will spend much more in blood and treasure when adversaries attack at the time and place of their choosing. As the DefCon exercise demonstrated, even hacker curiosity could make a ship into a weapon.
Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael L. Thomas, Ph.D., is currently assigned to Maxwell Air Force Base as a professor of cyberwarfare studies at the U.S. Air Force Cyber College. He is a graduate of both the Air Command and Staff College and the Air War College.
Chris C. Demchak, Ph.D., is Grace Hopper Chair of Cyber Security and Senior Cyber Scholar, Cyber Innovation Policy Institute, U.S. Naval War College. Her manuscripts in progress are “Cyber Westphalia: States, Great Systems Conflict, and Collective Resilience” and “Cyber Commands: Organizing for Cybered Great Systems Conflict.”
Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Air University, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government agency.
warontherocks.com · by Chris C. Demchak · October 15, 2021

10. Why Do Armed Robot Dogs Make Us Uncomfortable?

Conclusion:

So while it is easy to dismiss discomfort with armed robot dogs as a relic of deeply ingrained cultural imagery of a putative robotic apocalypse, there are sound reasons to be worried about how, in this case, form might well drive function – right past the point of our own discomfort.
Why Do Armed Robot Dogs Make Us Uncomfortable?
Is it the function of an armed robot dog that raises eyebrows, or its form?
thediplomat.com · by Jacob Parakilas · October 15, 2021
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The Association of the United States Army annual conference is a place where defense contractors and technology firms show off novel technology for ground warfare. This year, arguably the most notable item on display is a joint product of Ghost Robotics and SWORD International, called the Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle, or SPUR.
In clearer terms, SPUR is a robot dog with an assault rifle backpack: very literally the subject of a particularly creepy episode of Black Mirror.
To be clear, putting guns on small robotic ground vehicles is hardly new. More than a decade ago, the U.S. Army acquired three small, tracked TALON robots upgraded to carry a range of standard infantry weapons (confusingly, the armed version was dubbed SWORDS, though without relation to SWORD International). However, they were apparently never used in combat. A number of other similar programs – in the U.S. and elsewhere – have come and gone in the intervening years without yet producing a meaningful combat capability. On that basis, it is entirely possible that SPUR will remain a trade-show oddity and never transform the battlefield of the future.
Nevertheless, there are two issues here worth unpacking: one of form and one of autonomy.
A few years ago, the webcomic XKCD addressed the form question brilliantly. The fevered science-fictional imagination of 1984’s “Terminator” – a nigh-indestructible robot assassin in the shape of a human (or at least an Arnold Schwarzenegger), hunting its target without pity or fear or remorse – has given way to a reality in which robotic assassins look like windowless airplanes.
But, at least for those of us lucky enough to live outside the drone hunting grounds, the advent of flying robotic killers has not led to a sea change in our view of the use of armed force. After all, even Bernie Sanders In short, they have become rapidly normalized.
Perhaps, though, there is something different about the idea of an armed robot that at least superficially resembles a living creature rather than a tooled-up golf cart. Every new Boston Dynamics video of their robots demonstrating newly acquired, humanlike skills is met with protest and warning; by contrast, new capabilities demonstrated by conventional-looking uncrewed aircraft are largely met with silence and indifference.
The other fundamental issue is autonomy. The Army’s abortive SWORDS robots and their like were “remotely operated” rather than meaningfully autonomous. The human being controlling them had direct control over the unit’s functions: push the stick forward and it would move forward; push the fire button and the weapon would discharge. (The nature of remote control does mean that it would be possible to jam or hack the controls, but that is a separate problem.)
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Something like SPUR, however – despite its name suggesting that it will serve merely as a distant appendage to a human infantry soldier – requires a great deal more autonomy to function.
Wheeled or tracked vehicles are limited in their capabilities – taking the stairs, for example, is difficult for them – but they do not require much additional processing than the operator provides in order to navigate. A legged platform, on the other hand, can theoretically navigate far more challenging terrain, but it requires a huge amount of hardware capability and on-the-fly data processing to avoid simply collapsing into an expensive heap. (This, incidentally, explains why legged robots have up until now largely remained the preserve of science fiction rather than reality.) Give a robot the ability to walk and, by definition, you are imbuing it with a level of autonomy an order of magnitude greater than a tracked or wheeled gun platform, even if a human still retains the final authority over firing its weapon.
Autonomy tends to be self-reinforcing. A system with the ability to navigate by itself, outside the reach of a human operator’s control unit, will quickly be deemed capable of more ambitious missions. Once it has demonstrated the ability to navigate autonomously, the ability to carry out mission directives and respond to changing circumstances will seem a small additional step. Every military still professes fealty to the idea of “meaningful human control” over the use of lethal force, but what that term means in practice is disputed – especially if more sophisticated electronic jamming and cyber capabilities make remote operation unreliable in time of need.
So while it is easy to dismiss discomfort with armed robot dogs as a relic of deeply ingrained cultural imagery of a putative robotic apocalypse, there are sound reasons to be worried about how, in this case, form might well drive function – right past the point of our own discomfort.
thediplomat.com · by Jacob Parakilas · October 15, 2021

11. Have South Korean Conservatives Made a Full Comeback?

Interesting political analysis.

Excerpts:

Representing the interests of the sharply right-leaning Gen Z men has become politically important for the PPP, and conservative leaders have attempted to do so by justifying anti-feminism. For example, the young leader Lee Jun-seok has criticized the Democratic Party for being too women-friendly and advocated removing female quotas in politics and other fields like STEM education, claiming that structural gender inequality is nonexistent. Conservative presidential candidates have also made questionable statements on gender equality, such as claiming that South Korea needs “humanism, not feminism,” vowing to dismantle the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and arguing that feminism causes low birth rates as it hinders young men and women from having proper relationships.

The anti-feminist approach, however, has been largely counterproductive. It has attracted Gen Z men but not as many Millennial men, and the vast majority of Gen Z and Millennial women lean progressive as a result. Without depoliticizing gender equality and demonstrating some care for women’s empowerment, the People Power Party will have difficulty attracting female voters.

With the 2022 election just a few months away and the conservative presidential primary kicking off now, the PPP is entering a critical juncture. It should be presenting the most appealing version of itself to the public: a reliable and capable moderate-right coalition. Developing a more tolerant and inclusive agenda and abandoning radical right-wing populist rhetoric could effectively do the job. And the final conservative candidate should ideally be one that best represents the party’s transition to the center-right.

Even though more South Koreans feel skeptical about another progressive rule, their concern has yet to fully translate into support for conservatives. Despite various struggles, Moon Jae-in’s approval rating is continually hovering around 40 percent, making him the most popular lame duck president in South Korean political history. The Democratic Party and its progressive presidential candidate, Lee Jae-myung, remain highly competitive, with a strong core support base. South Korean conservatives have brought themselves back into the game, but without promising philosophies and policies, they could be playing a tough match in next year’s big race.

Have South Korean Conservatives Made a Full Comeback?
The People Power Party’s makeover has come a long way, but there are still some hurdles to overcome to compete with the progressives.
thediplomat.com · by James Park · October 14, 2021
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In recent years, South Korea’s conservative party has gone through devastating political turmoil. Following the political scandal that led to the impeachment of former president Park Geun-hye, the conservatives lost public trust and have been defeated in every election since. But in recent months, the party – now rebranded as the People Power Party (PPP) – has regained momentum. The PPP claimed its first electoral win in the April by-elections for the Seoul and Busan mayoral posts, and has caught up with President Moon Jae-in’s progressive Democratic Party in approval rating.
Broadly, the conservative party’s resurgence can be attributed to expanded support from moderate swing voters. According to a Seoul National University study, South Korea’s ideological landscape displays a 5:3:2 ratio between moderates, progressives, and conservatives. Reflecting that number, the Democratic Party’s approval rating has rarely dipped under 30 percent, even in their downtimes, and the People Power Party’s rating mostly hung around the low 20s until recent months. Therefore, there is largely one explanation as to how the PPP bounced back: more support from the moderate base.
What could this mean for the upcoming 2022 presidential election?
The Conservative Resurgence and the 2022 Presidential Election
Moderate voters are leaning toward the right for several reasons, including dissatisfaction with the current progressive government’s perceived underperformance, as well as the conservative party’s reform and rebranding. In recent years, public frustration with the Moon administration and the Democratic Party’s failure to address skyrocketing housing prices has cost the current government support. This year’s land speculation scandal involving officials at state housing developer Korea Land and Housing Corporation further damaged the Moon administration. After evidence surfaced that government officials were taking advantage of inflated real estate prices while failing to resolve the problem, the PPP’s approval rating jumped significantly while the Democratic Party’s reputation fell.
Additionally, though the Moon administration’s initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic garnered strong public support, relative struggles in responding to emerging variants have been a challenge lately. Public approval of the Moon administration’s pandemic management, once as high as 85 percent in 2020, has dropped to 54 percent. Continued underperformance in this regard could harm the reputation of Moon and his party going into the 2022 election.
While the Democratic Party has been losing face in the public eye, the PPP has been working simultaneously to neutralize its far-right image and rebrand itself as a more inclusive, approachable party. The party’s far-right politics dissuaded many moderate voters from supporting the PPP even when they were unhappy with the progressive government. Only after a defeat in the 2020 National Assembly election did the conservatives realize the need for rebranding. They publicly apologized for the wrongdoings of imprisoned presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, tried to downgrade their longstanding regional prejudice against the traditionally progressive Jeolla province by adopting a more inclusive candidate selection policy, and (most notably) have empowered younger politicians.
Empowering young politicians, especially appointing 36-year-old Lee Jun-seok as the party chairperson, was a strategic move to impress the public, as polling showed 90 percent of South Koreans want greater generational diversity in politics. Aside from his youth, the party capitalized on Lee’s relatively moderate political stance. At the start of the Park Geun-hye scandal, Lee was among the few conservative politicians that strongly refuted Park and left the party in an attempt to establish a more moderate right-wing coalition. Although the attempt failed and they eventually returned to the People Power Party, Lee and the rest of the minority faction managed to attain a less extreme image. After returning to the main conservative party, Lee stayed away from far-right politics and even fought against it, recently rebuking a conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 National Assembly election.
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But despite the progressive government’s underperformance, whether the conservative party’s efforts to rebrand and reform will be enough to attract moderate voters in the 2022 election remains to be seen.
Challenges Ahead: Developing a Moderate-Conservative Agenda and Abandoning Radical Populism
Despite some positive developments, the PPP is still just halfway through its rebranding process. Efforts to erase their outdated, far-right image have left a good impression on voters, but without enacting more tolerant philosophies and policies, the conservatives may lose the support of moderates. Some conservative politicians recognize that their party can no longer neglect important national issues such as preventing social discrimination, raising the minimum wage, and fighting climate change simply because these issues tend to be viewed as progressive in nature. Trying to impress only the right-wing audience would likely lead to electoral failure given that the combined moderate and progressive support bases greatly outsize that of the conservatives. A nuanced and depoliticized conservative agenda may be key to electoral success going forward.
In addition, the People Power Party may have a better chance of keeping moderate voters on its side if it stays away from radical populist politics, such as overexaggerating the “China threat“ or justifying anti-feminism. In recent years, South Korean conservatives branded themselves as China hawks to exploit their country’s strong Sinophobia and garner support for the party. But this strategy gives voice to racism and discrimination within the party. For example, conservative politicians have made derogatory statements related to Joseon-jok (Korean Chinese) migrants, such as falsely blaming Joseon-jok’s pro-progressive voting behavior for an election defeat, or condemning a governmental proposal to ease naturalization requirements for children of long-term foreign residents because it would bring in more Joseon-jok and “Sinicize“ South Korea. One conservative politician even tweeted that he doesn’t want to live with Chinese people in the same country. This inflammatory rhetoric could drive moderates away from the PPP.
When it comes to South Korea’s China policy, there is a clear difference between hawkishness and boldness. South Koreans wouldn’t want their government to look vulnerable facing Beijing’s assertiveness, and advocating for a bolder approach in this regard could appeal to the public. But excessive hawkishness would not help the PPP in the 2022 election. Despite their Sinophobia, numerous South Koreans find bilateral strategic cooperation with China on issues related to the economy and North Korea important. Regardless of how they perceive China’s rise, South Koreans generally believe that their government should take a careful approach to the intensifying China-U.S. strategic rivalry. On the issue of China, voters in the 2022 election are more likely to be attracted to a candidate who appears as a rational decision-maker that acts according to national interests, not one that reacts to over-inflated threat perception.
The People Power Party has also made a questionable decision to embrace young misogynists’ demonization of feminism to gain their political support. South Korean “yi-dae-nam” (Gen Z men) are particularly hostile toward their country’s growing women’s rights activism, with 76 percent opposing feminism. The resistance to feminism largely stems from the notion of reverse sexism, which gives rise to the idea that South Korea’s overwhelming gender disparity and glass ceiling phenomena no longer exist and that men are victims of women-friendly government policies. Unsurprisingly, South Korean Gen Z men have become the staunchest opponents of the feminism-friendly progressive party; about 73 percent of Gen Z men voted conservative in this year’s Seoul mayoral election.
Representing the interests of the sharply right-leaning Gen Z men has become politically important for the PPP, and conservative leaders have attempted to do so by justifying anti-feminism. For example, the young leader Lee Jun-seok has criticized the Democratic Party for being too women-friendly and advocated removing female quotas in politics and other fields like STEM educationclaiming that structural gender inequality is nonexistent. Conservative presidential candidates have also made questionable statements on gender equality, such as claiming that South Korea needs “humanism, not feminism,” vowing to dismantle the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and arguing that feminism causes low birth rates as it hinders young men and women from having proper relationships.
The anti-feminist approach, however, has been largely counterproductive. It has attracted Gen Z men but not as many Millennial men, and the vast majority of Gen Z and Millennial women lean progressive as a result. Without depoliticizing gender equality and demonstrating some care for women’s empowerment, the People Power Party will have difficulty attracting female voters.
With the 2022 election just a few months away and the conservative presidential primary kicking off now, the PPP is entering a critical juncture. It should be presenting the most appealing version of itself to the public: a reliable and capable moderate-right coalition. Developing a more tolerant and inclusive agenda and abandoning radical right-wing populist rhetoric could effectively do the job. And the final conservative candidate should ideally be one that best represents the party’s transition to the center-right.
Even though more South Koreans feel skeptical about another progressive rule, their concern has yet to fully translate into support for conservatives. Despite various struggles, Moon Jae-in’s approval rating is continually hovering around 40 percent, making him the most popular lame duck president in South Korean political history. The Democratic Party and its progressive presidential candidate, Lee Jae-myung, remain highly competitive, with a strong core support base. South Korean conservatives have brought themselves back into the game, but without promising philosophies and policies, they could be playing a tough match in next year’s big race.
thediplomat.com · by James Park · October 14, 2021

12. FDD | Blinken Affirms Softening of U.S. Policy Toward Assad Regime
Conclusion:

The proper response to Assad’s unceasing atrocities and destabilization of the Levant is a policy of relentless pressure.

FDD | Blinken Affirms Softening of U.S. Policy Toward Assad Regime
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · October 14, 2021
Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday became the first Cabinet-level official to confirm that the United States will no longer stand in the way of Arab states pursuing the diplomatic rehabilitation of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. This reversal marks an important gain for Assad and for his sponsors in Moscow and Tehran, who have struggled to restore the regime’s legitimacy despite overcoming all military threats to Assad’s hold on power.
Blinken sought to leave an impression of continuity in U.S. policy by insisting Washington will not encourage the Assad regime’s return from isolation. “What we have not done and what we do not intend to do is to express any support for efforts to normalize relations or rehabilitate Mr. Assad,” the secretary stated. This framing obscures the critical point that the United States had, until this summer, actively — and effectively — sought to deter Assad’s rehabilitation by employing a combination of diplomatic pressure and sanctions.
The first clear sign of a change in U.S. policy was the Biden administration’s mid-August decision to approve Syrian participation in a four-country energy deal also involving Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Crucially, the U.S. ambassador in Beirut provided explicit assurances that the White House would not let U.S. sanctions derail the project. According to The Washington Post, the Biden administration even advised the deal’s participants on how to structure their agreement to avoid such consequences.
Arab governments quickly grasped that they now had a green light to engage with Assad. After a decade of avoiding high-level contacts, Syria’s neighbors began to arrange ministerial-level meetings. King Abdullah of Jordan, who is spearheading the effort, even accepted a personal phone call from Assad.
In the years before President Joe Biden took office, the Arab Gulf monarchies periodically sought to test Washington’s commitment to isolating Assad. Encountering resistance, they mostly retreated. Most importantly, overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress passed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act in 2019, which mandated sanctions on foreign nationals who do business with the Assad regime. These so-called “secondary sanctions” put in jeopardy any Gulf investors in the Syrian market.
While the prior administration implemented sanctions aggressively, designating 113 targets between June and December of last year, the Biden administration has designated just a handful of targets with no economic significance. Nonetheless, until mid-summer, the administration insisted on its commitment to the Caesar Act. In late June, the State Department’s assistant secretary for Middle Eastern affairs specifically warned those planning to engage the Assad regime that “governments and businesses need to be careful that their proposed or envisioned transactions don’t expose them to potential sanctions from the United States under [the Caesar] act.”
The reversal of U.S. policy toward Syria is especially striking in light of Blinken’s pledge, shortly after taking office, that the Biden administration would “put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.” Moreover, as the stepson of an Auschwitz survivor, Blinken has frequently asserted the importance of learning from past atrocities to prevent their recurrence. Last week, on the 80th anniversary of the Nazi massacre at Babyn Yar, he said, “[We must] recommit ourselves to ensuring that their full history is told, and pledge to act, every day, so that history is not repeated.”
The reversal of U.S. policy — with no apparent concessions from Assad or from his patrons in Moscow and Tehran — also sacrifices an important source of leverage that could facilitate the pursuit of other U.S. objectives, such as expanding humanitarian access. In July, the administration persuaded Russia not to veto a UN Security Council resolution that reauthorized a major component of the UN aid program for Syria, yet Moscow is likely to threaten another veto next July, so diplomatic leverage remains indispensable.
The proper response to Assad’s unceasing atrocities and destabilization of the Levant is a policy of relentless pressure.
David Adesnik is research director and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from David and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow David on Twitter @adesnik. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · October 14, 2021

13. FDD | Western Governmental Funds Divest From West Bank While Investing in China

Excerpts:
A September 2021 report by the UK-based nongovernmental organization Hong Kong Watch highlighted the New Zealand fund’s investments in China. A spokesperson for the body that sets the fund’s policies responded, “If we exited every company facing conduct concerns, all we’d achieve is to sell our stock to someone who cares less about these issues and is more willing to turn a blind eye.” The fund has not applied this standard to Israel.
The recent divestments based on Israeli settlement ties provide a troubling precedent for other fund managers who might be tempted to participate in Palestinian efforts to boycott Israeli firms as well. In addition, so long as these funds continue to divest from West Bank-related firms while investing in other conflict zones, the funds will rightfully be exposed to accusations of having a double standard.
FDD | Western Governmental Funds Divest From West Bank While Investing in China
fdd.org · by Orde Kittrie Senior Fellow and David May Senior Research Analyst· October 14, 2021
In September, Norway’s Government Pension Fund became the third major Western governmental investment fund since March to divest from companies doing business in West Bank settlements. Participating in Palestinian efforts to boycott Israeli firms has exposed these funds to accusations of hypocrisy for continuing to invest in other conflict zones.
The Norwegian Government Pension Fund, a $1.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund that owns 1.5 percent of all publicly traded shares worldwide, said in a statement that it divested from the Israeli firms “due to unacceptable risk that the companies contribute to systematic violations of individuals’ rights in situations of war or conflict.” The fund divested from two other Israeli companies four months earlier, citing similar reasons.
The fund’s rationale for divesting from these companies references international law. But international law does not prohibit business in disputed territories. Nor is doing such business inconsistent with the non-binding principles of corporate social responsibility. That is the official view of the United Nations, expressed in its Global Compact document titled “Guidance on Responsible Business in Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas: A Resource for Companies and Investors.”
These divestments are also inconsistent with U.S. law and policy. U.S. law states that Congress “opposes politically motivated actions that penalize or otherwise limit commercial relations specifically with Israel, such as boycotts of, divestment from, or sanctions against Israel.” The law defines “boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions against Israel” to include such politically motivated actions against “persons doing business in Israel or in any territory controlled by Israel.”
Meanwhile, the Norwegian fund continues to invest in other countries responsible for grave human rights violations. Five percent of the fund’s investments are in Chinese companies. China has detained up to 1 million Uyghurs, suppressed democracy in Hong Kong, and continues to occupy Tibet.
Separately, KLP, which is partially owned by various Norwegian municipalities, for which it manages some $95 billion in pension funds, announced in July its divestment from 16 companies due to their operations in Israeli West Bank communities. This appears to be the first time a major Western public-sector financial institution has based a divestment decision squarely on the controversial UN blacklist of businesses operating in West Bank settlements. Yet even a February 2020 report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights explicitly states that the blacklist “does not purport” to characterize as illegal the listed companies’ settlement-related activities.
In 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute listed 82 global companies with supply chains that reportedly use forced labor by China’s Uyghur population. As of the date KLP published its 2020 annual report, it had over $435 million invested in 28 of those companies. A U.S. government commission has published a similar list. Yet KLP has apparently never divested from any company for its use of forced Uyghur labor.
In March, New Zealand’s sovereign wealth fund divested from five Israeli banks because of their West Bank operations. Meanwhile, the fund holds nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of investments in 625 Chinese companies, including two blacklisted by the United States for direct involvement in “human rights violations.”
A September 2021 report by the UK-based nongovernmental organization Hong Kong Watch highlighted the New Zealand fund’s investments in China. A spokesperson for the body that sets the fund’s policies responded, “If we exited every company facing conduct concerns, all we’d achieve is to sell our stock to someone who cares less about these issues and is more willing to turn a blind eye.” The fund has not applied this standard to Israel.
The recent divestments based on Israeli settlement ties provide a troubling precedent for other fund managers who might be tempted to participate in Palestinian efforts to boycott Israeli firms as well. In addition, so long as these funds continue to divest from West Bank-related firms while investing in other conflict zones, the funds will rightfully be exposed to accusations of having a double standard.
Orde Kittrie is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where David May is a senior research analyst. They both contribute to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP) and Israel Program. For more analysis from the authors, CEFP, and the Israel Program, please subscribe HERE. Follow the authors on Twitter @ordefk and @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Orde Kittrie Senior Fellow · October 14, 2021
14. Book Review: Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the US Army’s Elite, 1956–1990

A very important book. We could learn a lot from DET-A for operations in the gray zone of political warfare in strategic competition.


Book Review: Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the US Army’s Elite, 1956–1990
linkedin.com · by James Stejskal
The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, Number 3 Volume 51, Number 3 (2021)
Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the US Army’s Elite, 1956–1990 By James Stejskal
Reviewed by Dr. David P. Oakley, assistant professor and scholar, National Defense University
Special operations forces (SOF) have been at the forefront of global counterterrorism efforts and an integral part of America’s military approach since 2001. The military’s reliance on special operations has led to closer cooperation between SOF and conventional forces, while also resulting in a twofold increase in SOF over the past two decades (CSIS 2019). Despite greater operational familiarity and the increased regularity of irregular warfare in conventional military lexicon, much remains unknown about the Cold War history of SOF and how it shaped today’s special operators. This lack of information is unfortunate because current security professionals can learn much from previous irregular warfare experiences as the United States competes with Russia and China. Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the US Army’s Elite, 1956–1990 is a valuable unit history that reduces this gap.
James Stejskal, a former SOF and CIA officer, tells the story of the 39th Special Forces Detachment/Detachment A and its successor Physical Security Support Element-Berlin during their three-decade existence. Originally established in 1956 to provide small unit direct action and unconventional warfare capabilities during a Soviet invasion, Detachment A adopted a counterterrorism role in the 1970s as the threat of terrorism increased. In the early 1980s, Army officials closed Detachment A and replaced it with Physical Security Support Element-Berlin over fear the unit and its personnel were too well known to Warsaw Pact countries.Despite a name swap and a new cover story,the unit’s mission remained unchanged. Toward the end of the Cold War, the Army disbanded Physical Security Support Element- Berlin and assigned its members to other Special Forces units. The unit’s unconventional warfare and counterterrorism expertise, coupled with its clandestine collection capability, made it a valuable asset for the US Army, its German allies, and its partners beyond Berlin’s borders. Even though a Soviet invasion never occurred, the unit remained active during the Cold War and helped shape contemporary SOF.
The book’s eight chapters follow a chronological time line of the unit’s evolution from its founding in 1956 through its transition in 1984 to its closure in 1990. Although Stejskal focuses on Special Forces in Berlin, he also nicely nests the unit’s history within a larger historical context, allowing readers to appreciate how the environment shaped the unit and how the unit and its members influenced others. For example, a discussion in the first chapter on the early years of SOF and its relationship with the CIA regarding unconventional warfare is particularly useful. The chapter also provides an excellent example of early Department of Defense/CIA relations. It describes bureaucratic struggles so readers can understand the roles and responsibilities of each in a dynamic and uncertain environment. These debates will resonate with practitioners trying to appreciate shifting roles and responsibilities within the current security environment.
Practitioners will also find the discussion on the evolving unit mission and the risks involved with shifting operational focus informative.Although a direct action counterterrorism capability in Europe was needed during the 1970s and 1980s, Stejskal points out how preparing for counterterrorism missions distracted the unit from “the more esoteric tradecraft required for the wartime [unconventional warfare] UW mission” (272). Contemporary security practitioners should appreciate this type of trade-off. Stejskal also shows how organizations created for one purpose often evolve in directions that were unforeseen at their establishment. Although practitioners might not discover solutions in the book, they should find solace in knowing that previous generations grappled with similar dilemmas.
Having served in the unit during the 1970s and 1980s, Stejskal has personal knowledge and access that most authors do not, and his storytelling approach results in interesting personal stories and detailed descriptions of unit members and their experiences. He brings the personalities to life and engages readers, making for a memorable and entertaining book. Stejskal’s descriptive telling of unit members’ involvement in preparation for the attempted Iran hostage rescue is one example.This story is fascinating and reveals the unique combined capabilities the unit provided the United States.
Overall, readers will benefit from Stejskal’s insights and experiences; however, there are times when his passion results in too much detail for general readers. For example, some readers may find the in-depth discussion of underwater operations and SCUBA gear in chapter 3 interesting, but it distracts from the more fascinating elements of the story. With that said, the book is largely free of minutiae, and the presence of such details highlights Stejskal’s passion and familiarity with the topic.
As Stejskal makes clear, this book was a labor of love. In addition to his reflections, he interviewed more than 50 former unit members and senior leaders. His intimate knowledge of special operations in Berlin, personal experiences, and passion shine through in his writing, resulting in an enjoyable and engaging book that places readers in the visual environment he creates. While Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the US Army’s Elite, 1956–1990 is aimed at a more general audience, scholars will find value in accessing experiences and details previously locked in a classified vault or unit members’ heads.
linkedin.com · by James Stejskal


15. Thermal Camouflage Sheet Technology Make Soldiers Nearly Undetectable

Make this into a poncho liner and it will be the most used and most effective piece of military gear ever developed!

Thermal Camouflage Sheet Technology Make Soldiers Nearly Undetectable
thebrighterside.news · October 14, 2021
[Oct 14, 2021: The Brighter Side of News]

Thermal visual concealment (TVC) material that makes soldiers nearly undetectable. (CREDIT: Maya Margit)
Israel-based Polaris Solutions in collaboration with the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MoD) unveils The Kit 300, camouflage technology that consists of a sheet made from thermal visual concealment (TVC) material that makes soldiers nearly undetectable. It uses a combination of microfibers, metals and polymers to make soldiers not only harder to see with the human eye, but thermal imaging cameras as well.
In the battlefield, soldiers can use one side in dense vegetation, while the other is more suited for desert areas. If these scenarios do not suit your use case, the company can fully customize the patterns and colors as needed. Plus, it’s waterproof and can double as shelter to the military when used as a small tent. Despite being lightweight, the material is strong enough to be molded into three-dimensional shapes, thus enabling one to transform it into a stretcher.
"Someone looking at them from a distance through binoculars will not see soldiers. Camouflage nets haven’t changed too much over the past 50 years. We wanted to bring a new type of material. So TVC was born,” said Gal Harari, head of the detectors and imaging technology branch of the Defense Ministry’s research and development unit.
Thermal imaging technology creates a visual representation of an object via the invisible infrared (“heat radiation”) the object emits. If that object radiates heat, a thermal imager will show an image of it, with different colors representing relative levels of heat.
A warm-blooded human being, for example, will show up as a human-shaped blob, with the level of fine detail depending on the acuity of the sensor. A tank will appear as a tank-shaped object, and if the tank’s engine is running, the engine will look like a “hot” spot.

A U.S. soldier dismounting a tank and visible through the thermal imager of another tank. The soldier’s body heat is readily apparent. Credit: Scott Nelson - Getty Images
Thermal imagers are used to power modern night-vision devices. Unlike older night-vision technology, which required some source of light (even infrared light), thermal imagers don’t require any ambient light at all. They simply require a detectable level of heat to function.
This means thermal imagers can detect people, armored vehicles, and even flying aircraft on moonless nights, without infrared searchlights, and through smoke screens. The latter makes thermal imagers useful even during daylight conditions, and during the Cold War, American tanks would have easily detected and engaged enemy tanks moving through smoke screens, as though they weren’t there at all.
But the technology isn’t perfect. Objects that don’t radiate heat don’t show up at all in thermal imagers. The Kit 300 system, then, is designed to eliminate a soldier’s thermal presence, thus making the soldier “invisible”—to thermal imagers, anyway.
The materials in the Kit 300 system likely act as insulators, preventing a soldier’s heat from leaking out from behind the sheet.
The Kit 300 doesn’t stop there. A soldier could stand in the middle of a barren field invisible to thermal imagers, but still be plainly obvious to the naked eye. The system makes soldiers more difficult to spot in the visual light band by using old-fashioned colors and camouflage techniques designed to allow the wearer to blend in with surrounding terrain.
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thebrighterside.news · October 14, 2021


16. Exclusive--O'Donnell: How 25 Americans Stopped an Army

Some great history.

I am reminded of this quote:

“When the hour of crisis comes, remember that 40 selected men can shake the world” Yasotay (Mongol Warlord)


Exclusive--O'Donnell: How 25 Americans Stopped an Army
Breitbart · by Patrick K. O'Donnell · October 12, 2021
Two hundred and forty-five years ago, in a forgotten battle that saved Washington’s Army, a handful of American soldiers accomplished a feat exceptionally rare in history. They successfully prevented an amphibious landing by thousands of British soldiers.
On October 12, 1776, while crouching behind a woodpile, Colonel Edward Hand gazed in astonishment at the sea of Redcoats in front of him. Married to an American, the Irish immigrant doctor had resigned his position as a surgeon’s mate in the British Army immediately before the Revolution began in 1774 and thrown his support to the Patriot cause. Although he and his twenty-five expert marksmen faced more than four thousand British Redcoats intent on landing, Colonel Hand maintained his composure.
Under cover of the morning fog, Lord William Howe had transported his troops by sea up the Long Island Sound to Throgs Point in the Bronx in hopes of trapping the Continental Army in Manhattan after the Battle of Harlem Heights. Fortunately for the Americans, high tide made the peninsula more of an island. To step foot on the mainland, the troops had to cross either a single bridge or a narrow strip of land wide enough for only one or two men at a time.
As soon as the Continentals realized British intentions, they quickly tore up the wooden planks on the bridge, leaving only the causeway to connect the point to the Bronx. A woodpile near the far end of the causeway provided cover, and Hand and his men took full advantage of it. The marksmen picked off the British soldiers one by one as they attempted to cross. Officers, in particular, remained in the riflemen’s sights.
Methodically, the men went through the tedious process of loading and firing their rifles, timing their shots so that someone was always ready to fire on the British troops as they attempted to cross the narrow causeway spanning the marsh in front of them. Small puffs of smoke rose in the air, and the acrid smell of gunpowder infiltrated his nostrils while rifles cracked on either side of him. Taking a scrap of parchment from his pocket, Hand dashed off a note requesting reinforcements and tasked a messenger with delivering it to Washington. He then picked up his weapon and joined his men in their ceaseless efforts to fend off the enemy.
After scrambling out of their eighteenth-century versions of landing craft, the British moved inland. A British officer recorded in his diary that they marched forward until they came a bridge and dam where a small party of Rebels opposed them.
Colonel Hand and his small detachment of Pennsylvania riflemen had been stationed there to guard against such an attempt. Still, they never imagined that the two dozen of them would need to hold off an army. Miraculously, Hand and his crack riflemen managed to check Henry Clinton’s forces long enough for reinforcements. Later that day, 1,800 Massachusetts and New York Continentals arrived, bringing with them two cannon. Those additional Americans included the Marbleheaders.
The full story now told in the new bestselling book, The Indispensables: Marblehead’s Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware. The book is a Band of Brothers-style treatment of the regiment and the leading revolutionary citizens from Marblehead, a unique largely unknown group of Americans who changed the course of history.
Over the next six days, Clinton made several attempts to traverse the bottleneck; however, the Patriots stymied him every time. On October 12, another American brigade arrived, and Howe decided to try a different tack. Despite his failure at Throgs Neck, he did not give up on his plan. Howe loaded his men back onto their vessels and headed roughly five miles up Long Island Sound to Pell’s Point, from where he could travel down the Eastchester Road to King’s Bridge and trap Washington’s army. Yet, once again, they would encounter the Marblehead brigade which would change the course of history.
Patrick K. O’Donnell is a bestselling, critically acclaimed military historian and an expert on elite units. He is the author of twelve books, including The Indispensables, which is featured nationally at Barnes & Noble, Washington’s Immortals, and The Unknowns. O’Donnell served as a combat historian in a Marine rifle platoon during the Battle of Fallujah and often speaks on espionage, special operations, and counterinsurgency. He has provided historical consulting for DreamWorks’ award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers and documentaries produced by the BBC, the History Channel, and Discovery. PatrickODonnell.com @combathistorian
Breitbart · by Patrick K. O'Donnell · October 12, 2021


17. Navy announces discharge details for coronavirus vaccine refusers

Excerpts:
Commands must then report the sailor refusing the vaccine to Navy Personnel Command, which oversees the coronavirus disposition authority, according to the statement.
There is still time to apply for a vaccine exemption for religious or medical reasons. Additionally, sailors who start terminal leave on or before the vaccine deadlines “are administratively exempted from vaccine requirements,” according to the statement.
Since the start of the pandemic, 164 sailors, Navy personnel and other “members of the Navy family” have died from the coronavirus — “far exceeding the combined total of all other health or mishap related injuries and deaths over the same time period,” according to the statement. All but 20 were unvaccinated.
Navy announces discharge details for coronavirus vaccine refusers
Stars and Stripes · by Caitlin Doornbos · October 14, 2021
A sailor receives his first dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine early this year at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. (Quinton Lee/U.S. Navy)

WASHINGTON — The Navy has established a special command to process separations for sailors who refuse the coronavirus vaccine after the upcoming deadline for inoculations, the service said in a statement Thursday.
Active-duty sailors who are not fully vaccinated against the coronavirus after Nov. 28 without a pending or approved exemption request will be forced out of the Navy for failing to obey a lawful order, according to the statement. For Navy Reserve sailors, the deadline is Dec. 28.
The Pentagon does not consider a person fully vaccinated until two weeks after the last shot in the series, meaning the final day to meet the deadline is Nov. 14. Two available vaccines — by Moderna and Pfizer — require two shots. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is administered in a single dose.
Sailors who continue refusing the shot after the deadline will have their case sent to the Navy’s newly established COVID Consolidate Disposition Authority, which Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. John B. Nowell Jr. established to “ensure a fair and consistent process for separation determinations,” according to the Navy.
COVID-19 is the name of the disease the coronavirus causes.
“Those separated only for vaccine refusal will receive no lower than a general discharge under honorable conditions,” the service said in its statement. “This type of discharge could result in the loss of some veterans’ benefits.”
About 94% of active-duty sailors have been fully immunized and 99% have received at least one dose, according to the Navy’s weekly coronavirus update on Wednesday.
The service said the vaccine helps sailors “execute their mission at all times, in places throughout the world, including where vaccination rates are low and disease transmission is high.”
“Immunizations are of paramount importance to protecting the health of the force and the warfighting readiness of the fleet,” the Navy said in the statement.
The CCDA has the authority to remove a refusing sailor’s warfare qualifications, additional qualification designations and Navy enlisted classifications or sub-specialties, according to the statement.
“The CCDA may also seek recoupment of applicable bonuses, special and incentive pays, and the cost of training and education for service members refusing the vaccine,” the service said in the statement.
In August the Pentagon mandated the vaccine for all troops. The service branches were each given authority to establish their own deadlines and processes for removal, and the Navy is the first of the five to release its detailed separation process.
The Navy’s separation process will not wait for the vaccination deadline. Administrative actions may begin as soon as a sailor meets the service’s definition of “refusing the vaccine,” which is one who “received a lawful order to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, is not or will not be fully vaccinated on the date required by the order and does not have a pending or approved exemption request,” according to the Navy.
“Effective immediately … commands shall not allow sailors refusing the vaccine to promote or advance, reenlist or execute orders, with the exception of separation orders, until the CCDA has completed disposition of their case,” the Navy said in the statement. “Transfer orders may be cancelled by Navy Personnel Command.”
Further, beginning Thursday, officers and enlisted sailors in senior leadership who refuse the vaccine will be “notified immediately in writing that they have five days to either begin a vaccination series or request an exemption before being relieved and have detachment for cause initiated,” according to the Navy.
Senior leadership roles are those that are “members of command triads and those key staff positions, including any flag officer or flag officer select,” according to the statement.
Additionally, commanding officers and officers in charge are now allowed to temporarily reassign sailors who refuse the vaccine, “regardless of exemption status, based on operational readiness or mission requirements.
However, sailors who refuse must first receive counseling on the vaccine to ensure they know the facts about its safety, efficacy and need. Should they still refuse, the service member’s supervisor must submit a “special evaluation or fitness report” and document their failure to comply with the order to receive the shot, the Navy said.
Commands must then report the sailor refusing the vaccine to Navy Personnel Command, which oversees the coronavirus disposition authority, according to the statement.
There is still time to apply for a vaccine exemption for religious or medical reasons. Additionally, sailors who start terminal leave on or before the vaccine deadlines “are administratively exempted from vaccine requirements,” according to the statement.
Since the start of the pandemic, 164 sailors, Navy personnel and other “members of the Navy family” have died from the coronavirus — “far exceeding the combined total of all other health or mishap related injuries and deaths over the same time period,” according to the statement. All but 20 were unvaccinated.
Caitlin Doornbos

Stars and Stripes · by Caitlin Doornbos · October 14, 2021


18.  Less ‘prestigious’ journals can contain more diverse research, by citing them we can shape a more just politics of citation.


Less ‘prestigious’ journals can contain more diverse research, by citing them we can shape a more just politics of citation.
blogs.lse.ac.uk · by simon batterbury · October 11, 2021
Drawing on their recent analysis of journals in the field of Higher Education Studies, which shows that journals with lower impact rankings are more likely to feature research from diverse geographic and linguistic contexts, Shannon Mason and Margaret K. Merga argue that researchers should adopt more careful citation practices, as a means to broaden and contextualise what counts as ‘prestigious’ research and create a more equitable publishing environment for research outside of core anglophone countries.
The ‘top’ journals in any discipline are those that command the most prestige, and that position is largely determined by the number of citations their published articles garner. Despite being highly problematic, citation-based metrics remain ubiquitous, influencing researchers’ review, promotion and tenure outcomes. Bibliometric studies in various fields have shown that the ‘top’ journals are heavily dominated by research produced in and about a small number of ‘core’ countries, mostly the USA and the UK, and thus reproduce existing global power imbalances within and beyond academia.
In our own field of higher education, studies over many years have revealed persistent western hegemony in published scholarship. However, we observed that most studies tend to focus their analysis on the ‘top’ journals, and (by default) on those that publish exclusively in English. We wondered if publication patterns were similar in other journals. So, we set out to compare (among other things) the author affiliations and study contexts of articles published in journals in the top quartile of impact (Q1), with those in the bottom quartile of impact (Q4).
In our own field of higher education, studies over many years have revealed persistent western hegemony in published scholarship
Unsurprisingly, we found that overall, there was strong representation of research in and about the USA, the UK, and Australia. However, we also found that Q4 journals are statistically more likely to include research and researchers from outside of the core anglophone countries. In doing so, Q4 journals make an important contribution to scholarship through the inclusion of research from and about regions that are otherwise under-represented. Further, it was only in Q4 journals in which articles written in languages other than English were considered.
Journal impact is based on citations, and whilst flawed, citation is an area in which researchers can exercise agency, and an opportunity to reflect on our own sometimes constrained practice. Following, we provide suggestions for relatively simple actions that researchers could take from today in order to draw on the rich research and experiences from a wider pool of nations and scholars and thus promote the diversity of views and voices heard within academia.

Cite articles beyond those in the ‘top’ journals.
Lower impact does not necessarily mean lower quality. In fact, one Q4 journal that we analysed was also ranked Q1 within another subject category, being somehow both the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ with the same content. Impact is not static, and journals may experience dramatic losses and gains in impact over the years. We suggest looking at a range of journals and determining the relevance and rigour of articles through other considerations, such as their peer-review protocols and the expertise and internationality of their editorial boards. If you work in a field where the ‘top’ journals are primarily publishing the works of scholars from core anglophone contexts, the only way to escape this may be to intentionally seek out literature beyond those journals, thereby including diverse perspectives that may only be found in ‘less prestigious’ journals.
Cite articles from diverse contexts.
Citing articles from contexts beyond that which is the most immediately apparent can also help expand research beyond the norms of our current “national containers”. Regardless of the discipline, our understanding of a phenomenon can only be deepened and challenged by looking at it from various viewpoints. Looking beyond the handful of leading journals within a field can help scholars develop and contribute to ideas outside of the dominant perspectives. This is particularly important for researchers seeking to claim that their work may be responsive to or reflective of global issues and populations. In stepping out of our national containers, we can not only expand our knowledge of a field, but also develop our awareness of various theoretical and methodological perspectives and possibilities that may be reflected in diverse contexts.
Citing articles from contexts beyond that which is the most immediately apparent can also help expand research beyond the norms of our current “national containers”
Unfortunately context is often a factor in determining publication, and we have experienced rejection in peer review due in part to the context in which a study was conducted. This highlights a broader point, that it is not only in our roles as authors that we need to be aware of the implications of citation practices, but that it should also inform our decisions as editorial board members and peer reviewers.
Cite works that are in languages other than English.
Even if you are reading this as a monolingual English speaker, having command of just one language no longer has to exclude you from citing works in languages other than English. While online translation tools such as Google Translate are not perfect, we can use these tools judiciously in order to include research works published in languages that we are not proficient in. For example, in her forthcoming book Merga expanded the pool of diverse literature drawn upon after noting her own dependence on exclusively English academic literature, the result was a book with broader international relevance. Indeed, the inclusion of non-English articles in our paper was a methodological choice rarely applied in similar studies, which required more effort and some creativity, when the skills of our multilingual research team reached its limits.
Provide clear details about the context of your own research.
A failure to contextually position a study within the broader discourse compromises generalisability, although it would be a rare study to have universal applicability. To make it easier for those outside of your context to find compelling commonalities or differences, we suggest that you illustrate how your work may relate to other and broader contexts. Consider, while scholars are commonly expected to make the relevance of their work for a US audience explicit, the expectation that USA-based scholars highlight the utility of their work for audiences beyond the USA is rare. In our study we found many cases of articles, ultimately found or presumed to be from the USA, that did not give any details of the context, which would be required for readers to fully understand and interpret their findings.
If scholars increasingly cite beyond ‘top’ journals, cite work in languages other than English, and connect their own work with broader contexts, this could help to promote a more equitable publishing environment. We suggest that when developing our own academic papers, and when critiquing the work of others, it is important to increasingly adopt and encourage these simple practices. Of course, there are broader structural issues and systemic forces at play and individual efforts can only go so far. Real change requires reflection, awareness and effort from all gatekeepers in the publishing process, but also material changes, to ensure that quality is ultimately not conflated with context.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Impact Blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below
Image Credit: Patrick Fore via Unsplash.
About the author
Shannon Mason
Dr Shannon Mason is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Nagasaki University in Japan. As a higher education researcher, she has been involved in a range of projects that investigate the experiences of doctoral and early career researchers. Specific areas of focus include scholarly publishing, peer review, and research dissemination.
Margaret Merga
Dr Margaret Merga is a former academic and Honorary Adjunct at the University of Newcastle in Australia. She has conducted extensive research in higher education, research communication, literacy and librarianship. She has published books on literacy, librarianship and research methods, and is a strong advocate of communicating research findings beyond academia.
Posted In: Academic publishing | Academic writing
blogs.lse.ac.uk · by simon batterbury · October 11, 2021

19.  “Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself
An amazing story (if not fake news). Perhaps the CIA should hire this guy for black propaganda operations. The process outlined below should now be able to be defended against.

“Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself
Ars Technica · by Ax Sharma · October 14, 2021
Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
This is the story of the mastermind behind one of the largest "fake news" operations in the US.
For two years, he ran websites and Facebook groups that spread bogus stories, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. Under him was a dedicated team of writers and editors paid to produce deceptive content—from outright hoaxes to political propaganda—with the supreme goal of tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
Through extensive efforts, he built a secret network of self-reinforcing sites from the ground up. He devised a strategy that got prominent personalities—including Trump—to retweet misleading claims to their followers. And he fooled unwary American citizens, including the hacker's own father, into regarding fake news sources more highly than the mainstream media.
Pundits and governments just might have given Russia too much credit, he says, when a whole system of manipulating people's perception and psychology was engineered and operated from within the US.
"Russia played such a minor role that they weren't even a blip on the radar," the hacker told me recently. "This was normal for politicians, though… if you say a lie enough times, everyone will believe it."
Previously dubbed "Hacker X," he's now ready to reveal who he is—and how he did it.
A note on sourcing: In a rigorous effort to fact-check the claims made here, Ars has seen written correspondence between the hacker and notable entities involved in producing fake news; emails sent to him by prominent personalities publicly known to own (or be associated with) fake news sites; tax forms showing income received by him from fake-news generation companies; receipts for IT asset purchases, such as domain names; emails from him to staff explaining strategy and assigning them tasks on a regular basis; and archived copies of webpages, forums, and tweets produced as a part of this large operation. We have also communicated with sources, both named and unnamed, some of whom are "writers" who worked at the same company and have corroborated the hacker's claims.
Because he requests that the company he worked for not be explicitly named, Ars has referred to the fake news company with… a fake name, Koala Media.
The samurai
The fake new impresario who has now decided to break his silence is "ethical hacker" Robert Willis.
Some in the information security community might know "Rob" today as an active member who speaks at conferences and works with the Sakura Samurai ethical hacking group. (The Sakura Samurai have, on many occasions, responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in the computer systems of government and private entities. I have previously interacted with Rob on about two occasions, minimally, when I had questions regarding Sakura Samurai's vulnerability writeups.)
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But back in 2015, Willis was just another hacker looking for an IT job. He had already received one job offer—but still had an interview scheduled at one final company.
"I was thinking of not showing up to the interview," he told me. "I had, after all, just committed to another company."
That final company was opaque—it would not reveal either its name or the actual job duties until Willis showed up in person. But the opacity was itself intriguing. Willis decided to do the interview.
Willis in 2017 when writing for the now-shuttered Conservative Country website.
Robert Willis
"I showed up at the location, which was a large corporate building. I was given directions to wait downstairs until I was collected. The secretiveness was intriguing. It may have turned some people off, but I love an adventure. I had not been given any information on the job other than that they were very excited, because to find someone like me was very rare—I had tons of random, overlapping, highly technical skills from years of wearing multiple hats at smaller private companies."
Even before his ethical hacking days at Sakura Samurai, Willis had gained an extensive technical skill set in networking, web applications, hacking, security, search engine optimization (SEO), graphic design, entrepreneurship, and management. He knew how to take advantage of search engine algorithms, once, he said, getting a random phrase to the No. 1 spot on one engine within 24 hours. "Many will say this is/was impossible, but I have the receipts," he said, "and so do other credible people."
At the interview site, a man came down to get him, and they rode the elevator to a floor with a nearly empty office. Inside waited a woman beside three chairs. They all sat. His hosts finally revealed the name of their company: Koala Media. The moment felt like an orchestrated Big Reveal.
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"I wasn't scared but excited at how crazy this was already turning out [to be]," Willis told me. "I listened. I was told that there were big plans for the office I was sitting in and that they had already hired the initial writers and editor for the new operation."
The interviewers at the company told Willis that "everything was to be built with security in mind—at extreme levels."
Should he get the job, his primary role would be to rapidly expand a single, popular website already owned by Koala Media. For this, they needed someone with Willis' diverse skill set.
Then the interview took a political turn. "They told me that they were against big companies and big government because they are basically the same thing," Willis said. They said they had readers on the right and the left. They said they were about "freedom." That sounded OK to Willis, who describes himself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative—"very punk rock, borderline anarchist."
Then the interviewers told him, "If you work for us, you can help stop Hillary Clinton."
"I hated the establishment, Republicans, and Democrats, and Hillary was the target because she was as establishment as it got and was the only candidate that was all but guaranteed to be running on the main ticket in the future 2016 cycle," said Willis. "If I were to choose a lesser evil at the time, it would have, without a doubt, been the Republican Party, since I had moved to the new city due to the Democrats literally destroying my previous home state. It felt like good revenge."
Willis says he had no indication that the company that was about to recruit him was extreme or would become so in the future. In his perception, the company was just "investigative" with regard to its journalism.
When Koala offered him the job, he took it.
Enlarge / What does a content farm look like? It's not glamorous. This is the Koala office.
Robert Willis
Enlarge / The lobby of Koala's building.
Robert Willis
Cancer-curing lemons
The owners of Koala Media reeled in good money at the time. Koala's main site covered "health" topics and hawked supplements and alternative cures. A tiny front-page ad would bring in $30,000 a month, Willis tells me, with mailing lists enriching the Koala Media empire further.
"Getting highly targeted individuals to sign up was huge for financial gain," he said. "[Koala] would advertise products directly to individuals and sell thousands of them at a time."
Emails were sent out twice a week, one promoting a sale and the other some new product. Additionally, affiliate links and virtual event promotions garnered further income in the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" range for a single opportunity.
But as Willis came on board, Koala's stories got more controversial.
A former Koala Media writer who has worked with Willis told Ars, "In the beginning, the job was fine, writing regular AP-style news articles. Then, it went toward goofy stuff, like 'lemon curing cancer.' And eventually, it went to super-inaccurate stuff." That is when the writer knew it was time to call it quits. But Willis stayed on, even as one of the site owners personally contributed content that made him uncomfortable.
"That was the problem," Willis told me. "We were trying to build a more legitimate network and were reaching more and more millions weekly, but then the owner—who contributed a story once a day, during the best time for reach—would write crazy stuff.
"What saved me was a couple [of Koala Media] employees," he added. "One came into my office and closed the door and looked at me and said, 'You don't actually believe this stuff, do you?' and I let out a sigh of relief when I said, 'God, no'—and laughed. It became an ongoing joke."
Enlarge / Rob Willis.
Robert Willis
From that moment onward, the hacker and office staff would joke about the stuff they were being assigned to write—like a conspiracy-laden writeup on "chemtrails" or a piece on "lemons curing cancer"—thinking that only a small "ultracrazy" percentage of readers actually believed what was being written.
The ring
Toward the end of 2015, more and more pro-Trump stories started emerging on Koala. But after Trump won the Republican primary in 2016, the focus shifted heavily toward anti-Clinton stories. During this time, Koala's already-loose editorial standards relaxed even further. Stories became increasingly bizarre or opinionated. Citations that did exist were often placed in a misleading manner, misconstruing the linked stories or pointing to existing stories in the Koala webring, making it hard for readers to fact-check the material. The "search bar" on these news sites even took users to a search engine created by Koala; it showed stories from "independent media," i.e., sites from the webring. Pieces that ran during this crucial period claimed, among other things, that Clinton had plans to "criminalize" gun owners, to kill the free press, to forcefully "drug" conservatives, to vaccinate people against their wills, to euthanize some adults, and to ban the US flag.
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Yet Facebook, which directed plenty of traffic to Koala, never cut the site off. In the two years of the operation that Willis oversaw, Facebook banned only one of Koala's posts, Willis said.
Through it all, Willis did what he was hired to do: he put his technical skills in the service of boosting Koala's reach—by any means possible.
The basic approach involved the creation of a massive syndication network of hundreds of specialty "news" websites, where articles from the main Koala website could be linked to or syndicated. But these additional websites were engineered so that they looked independent of each other. They were "a web ring where the websites didn't look like they had any real associations with each other from a technical standpoint and couldn't be traced," said Willis.
Each fake news website was on a separate server and had a unique IP address. Each day's stories were syndicated out to the fake news sites through a multistep sync operation involving "multiple VPNs" with "multiple layers of security." Eventually, each public-facing fake news site received its daily content payload, and the stories would go live at scheduled times. In addition to Americans, Willis' team also comprised outsourced web developers working from Mexico, Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Taiwan.
"I oversaw everything and even had stacks of SIM cards purchased with cash to activate different sites on Facebook since it was needed at that point in time," admitted Willis. "Every website had a fake identity I made up. I had them in a sheet where I put the name, address, and the SIM card phone number. When I accessed their account I created on Facebook, I would VPN into the city I put them in as living in. Everything attached to a website followed these procedures because you needed to have a 'real' person to create a Facebook page for the websites. We wanted no attachment, no trace of the original source. If anyone were to investigate who owned a page, they would be investigating a fake person."
Eventually, carriers started asking for Social Security numbers (SSNs) prior to issuing and activating SIM cards. But "they took anything resembling an SSN, even ones generated from dead people," Willis said. As a test, Willis once provided Elvis Presley's SSN, which he had found on Google Images. The number worked.
Independent studies, seen by Ars, have confirmed that in 2015, shortly after Willis had started at Koala, hundreds of fake news domains sprang up. A British think tank has also linked this network of hundreds of domains to Koala Media.
Enlarge / Just another day at the office... brainstorming Facebook group names.
Robert Willis
The schedule
After carefully studying the Facebook pages maintained by Koala staff, which were reaching about 3 million people weekly, Willis began using information-warfare tactics, some inspired by young Macedonians. Willis studied the connection between Koala headlines and the emotions they triggered among readers. The next time Koala Media's owners came into the office, Willis showed them a carefully outlined posting schedule.
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"I surprised them by holding up a large poster board with what became the schedule and deep explanations from a psychological standpoint on what articles to put at what times," he said. "Early morning was positive articles—people will interact with positive things when they first wake up, they had the big story of the day at 11 am already, which they previously noticed was the most powerful slot of the day, afternoon prior to 2 pm was articles to really push hard, late night (11 pm to the early morning) was fringe content."
These claims have been corroborated to Ars by former Koala Media staff who prefer to remain anonymous.
The new publishing strategy, along with the additional fake news sites, caused a rapid spike in traffic. As Willis puts it, this all felt "like playing a video game and getting new high scores to me. I did not think of the readers as people but more like background characters in a video game. I am neurodiverse and have major issues with understanding empathy due to my condition. Crunching numbers is something I love to do; these were numbers I wanted to go up, and I would do it with no emotional attachment to the material or people."
Soon enough, Koala's published "news" pieces reached over 30 million people a week.
"I was completely caught off guard while pushing nonstop Trump news through the election cycle," said Willis. "One of our websites was the No. 1 Google search result for the term 'Trump News'!"
At one point, then-candidate Trump himself retweeted a shout-out from the Twitter account "@debateless." The account was set up by Willis for his personal BloodyRubbish.com blog, as confirmed by Ars.
Enlarge / Trump retweeting "debateless" account managed by Willis.
Enlarge / Rob Willis also managed BloodyRubbish.com.
The results of the 2016 election left Willis and his team in shock.
“The shock was around the power of the machine”
Willis and his army of fake news editors knew that millions of Americans targeted by their pro-Trump and anti-Clinton propaganda were real people who actually showed up to vote. "There were other pro-Trump news organizations," Willis told me, "but nothing was built [as] extreme as ours. We had without a doubt contributed to Donald Trump winning the presidency."
Countless studies, including one from Stanford, attempted to pin the election outcome on fake news. Ars has seen the news articles produced by Willis' operation but cannot disclose these, as doing so would divulge the Koala website.
By the end, Willis was hoping that he and his team would be caught, that someone would be able to connect the dots. But it didn't quite happen.
By 2017, after being with the fake news farm for nearly two years, Willis couldn't take it anymore. "I had a soul-searching moment and money in the bank and decided what I liked doing most was hacking, and I wanted to get back to it. So I decided to get a job in the security industry as a hacker," he said.
He knew he should talk about the system he had helped to build. "I helped contribute to the monster of fake news," he said. "I knew I had a responsibility to be a whistleblower on what exactly went down—even though the network I helped build looks like a shell of its former self, especially after they've been banned from basically every platform, along with other 'alternative' news outlets."
But back then, Willis wasn't yet ready to be named. He confessed to a trusted friend, podcast producer Matt Stephenson, what he had done.
In a Zoom call, Stephenson told me that, as a podcast producer, he is constantly looking for ways to expand his network and frequently travels to attend social events like conferences. It was at the interactive media and film festival South by Southwest (SXSW) in March 2018 that Stephenson first met Willis. Over a period of time, the two became well acquainted. When Willis confessed to Stephenson the details of the operation and stressed that he needed the truth to come out, Stephenson agreed to act as his "handler."
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Enlarge / Stephenson and Willis at a marketing event in San Francisco, April 2018.
Robert Willis
Around that time, former White House chief information officer and renowned cybersecurity expert Theresa Payton was working on her book Manipulated. She was seeking sources who were either the victims of misinformation campaigns or "manipulators" involved in fake news production. Payton was already one of Stephenson's connections, and Stephenson put Payton and Willis in touch.
But Payton did not know Willis' real name—referring to him only as "Hacker X" in her book. In the beginning, Payton and "Hacker X" would communicate over Zoom calls with the latter's video turned off. In June 2019, though, the trio met in Austin, Texas. Even then, on meeting "Hacker X" and Stephenson in person, Payton did not know Willis' real name—although Willis did reveal his face. The detailed account of the rendezvous is shared in Payton's book.
One interesting detail that caught my eye in the book was that Payton had no trouble guessing how "Hacker X" might look months before they had even met:
Without ever laying eyes on him—as his video was turned off during our first interview—I ask if he would let me guess what he looks like. He laughs heartily, thinking I'll never guess correctly. Based on our two hours speaking and my profiling skills, I hazard a guess. "You're a five-ten to six-foot twentysomething male. Earnest-looking face, perhaps—someone who could be in a J. Crew or Brooks Brothers ad or lacrosse-team picture of an Ivy League school."
I wait.
"Wow!" his handler says. "That description was stunningly accurate."
In the same book, "Benefactors" is a catch-all phrase used by Payton to describe Koala Media owners. The chapter titled "Anatomy of a Manipulation Campaign" goes over the Benefactors' intentions:
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Hacker X tells me that the Benefactors wanted to initiate a massive manipulation campaign with three goals: "run an online news campaign that would net them a lot of money, make sure they did not get caught, and not let the deep state get Hillary elected." The Benefactors had admired the Obama campaign and its ability to mobilize and energize voters through social media to gather, donate, and get the word out. They told him they had heard Hacker X was the best at building algorithms that could target the right message to the right people—and at hiding his tracks; they wanted to keep this operation and his existence covert. They wanted him to build this operation from the ground up, with security and privacy in mind. "I'm sitting at a table with them, and they say to me, 'Don't you want to be part of something big? You can help us make sure the country picks the right person for the next president. Are you up for the challenge?' And I said, 'Heck, yeah—I'm ready!" Hacker X quietly adds, "I gave up almost two years of my life serving the cause." Not once does he mention anything about "moral values." I have no idea if Hacker X is religious; he never says anything racial, bigoted, anti-immigrant, or antigay.
He does demonstrate a deep dislike for the "elites" and for Hillary Clinton, repeatedly using the phrase "destroy Hillary"; otherwise, he seems to generally love his fellow Americans and all walks of life.
Payton's book was published in the spring of 2020, a time when humanity's focus was on fighting the coronavirus pandemic. With so much devastation all around, unmasking "Hacker X" wasn't on anyone's radar.
But Willis is now ready to be named.
Enlarge / Willis giving a speech.
Robert Willis
The motive
Despite all the evidence presented by Willis, and despite the multiple sources who helped me corroborate the story, the skeptic in me couldn't help but wonder: what were Willis' true motives while all this was happening? What were they now? And what would "whistleblowing" achieve years after the 2016 election—and without naming the news empire he ran?
To ditch a job offer Willis had already accepted, diving instead into the murky waters of an elusive antiestablishment "media company," raised questions. Was it just the thrill of exploring the unknown and having found a place where his hacker mindset could be applied to its fullest potential? Or did Willis see some higher purpose in denouncing the political "establishment"?
Willis admits the decision to join Koala Media was at least partially motivated by political revenge, but based on my understanding from people who have known Willis, he isn't actually "right wing." Willis isn't a Democrat or even a proper Republican, his handler Stephenson tells me. He's just antiestablishment. Willis' self-proclaimed title—"original punk rock right-wing millennial"—aptly describes his ideology.
Sources also told Ars that Koala Media owners realized the massive potential for financial gain in pushing out the pro-Trump and anti-Clinton rhetoric after analyzing Trump's voter base and their emotional reactions to the fake news articles all adding to traffic. Had Clinton's voter base earned them more money, the pro-Clinton narrative might have been their focus, claim the sources.
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Was Willis the same way? Did he do it for the money?
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, Willis was raised by his mother and her family, who had immigrated to the United States from Italy. "My father was around, but I didn't know his family," Willis told Ars.
The hacker says that he comes from a place of poverty, though as a child he was never aware of it. "I had a unique upbringing; I was poor but didn't know it when I was young," he said. "I remember that I wasn't allowed to cross the street since my neighbors were crackheads. I grew up around the gay community from a young age with gay relatives. My schoolmates and friends were very diverse since I was just outside New York City. I was always very open-minded and accepting of everyone. I was the only white kid on my bus. I grew up as diverse as one could imagine."
In a conversation with Ars, the hacker recounted an episode from his childhood where his younger brother got attacked over food stamps on their school bus, and he described a nomadic life deprived of the basics.
"I built my first computer using parts from computers found at the city dump," he said. But it was getting involved with technology that helped Willis out of a life of poverty.
"By the time I was in my 20s I had moved over 30 times—very much a nomad, always used to moving but within the same general areas. I put myself through school with the help of government aid, taking many years, struggled very hard, because of no support system. Once government aid ran out, I paid upfront for classes before taking loans for my bachelor's degree."
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But poverty isn't what fueled his journey into the secretive Koala empire. Rather, what seemed like a "fun-sounding job" came his way years after he had already left Connecticut and a life of poverty behind.
As for naming himself, if he didn't do it in Payton's book, why come out now? After having interviewed Willis several times, Payton believes the hacker just wants to do the right thing. According to her, Willis is an "idealist" and wants people to know the truth. Recounting her meeting with Willis and Stephenson, she tells me, "I saw that in front of my own eyes... He is superimpressed with himself that he got away with it. But he felt disgusted that he got away with it."
"He has remorse for what he did. I feel protective about him," stressed Payton. "Not that he needs protecting… but he wants to right the wrongs that he believes he was a part of."
Willis' decision to reveal his identity now, he told me, is fueled by the continuing damage that he sees from fake news stories about COVID, especially those spreading anti-vaccination propaganda.
"The new war is to wake up those who have been manipulated, while actively taking out the fake news campaigns," writes Willis in a blog post. "COVID has shown me the deadly side of fake news and anti-vaccination people. After multiple conversations with my father, who refuses to wear a mask or get vaccinated, I was getting very concerned. I asked him what sites he would read the conspiracy-based things on, and he mentioned the website that ran the network I had built the machine on."
Prior to approaching me, Willis had disclosed his history with fake news farms to his family, hoping to undo the brainwashing done by these websites. Unfortunately, it was too late. To this day, Willis' father does not believe the hacker's story, Willis said, adding, "He has been too manipulated."
Ars Technica · by Ax Sharma · October 14, 2021

20. The Wagner Group Has Its Eyes on Mali: A New Front in Russia’s Irregular Strategy
Excerpts:
The United States needs to respond. It should begin by raising awareness of PMCs among the Malian public, highlighting in particular their ineffectiveness and human rights violations. It’s not clear that a large, genuine pro-Wagner constituency exists in Mali, and members of the military have reportedly attempted to manufacture the appearance of pro-Russia sentiment. This offers partner governments the opportunity to proactively publicize the malign activities of Russian PMCs. United States Africa Command has undertaken similar name-and-shame efforts in response to the Wagner Group’s activities in Libya—a blueprint that could be deployed to head off Wagner’s overtures elsewhere. An effort to publicize Wagner’s abuses could raise the domestic costs of this partnership for the Malian junta and call into question the benefits of working with the group.
More broadly, the United States should develop a comprehensive strategy to disincentivize African countries from entertaining partnerships with PMCs like the Wagner Group. Russia’s efforts in this space have been likened to “throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks”—a series of experimental and adaptive ventures. Yet the United States cannot be effective if it is simply playing an ad hoc game of defense in response to new Russian forays. Strengthening civil society can create strong safeguards against official corruption, reducing the revenue-generating capabilities of Russian PMCs. The United States should seek to vigorously support efforts, like transparency in the extractive industries sector and robust civil society watchdogs, that can help frustrate attempts by PMC-linked companies to surreptitiously win resource concessions.
The Wagner Group’s influence is growing in Africa; it’s now up to the United States to respond.
The Wagner Group Has Its Eyes on Mali: A New Front in Russia’s Irregular Strategy - Modern War Institute
mwi.usma.edu · by Jared Thompson · October 14, 2021
Russian private military companies (PMCs) are on the march. In 2012, Russian PMCs were present in only two countries. Today, that number has risen to twenty-seven. Russia’s most infamous “corporate soldiers,” the Wagner Group, are now seeking to enter a new market, Mali, at a time when the country’s fragile democracy is backsliding and counterterrorism challenges are worsening. Wagner’s potential deployment to Mali stands to further erode democracy by entrenching an illiberal government and exacerbating longstanding counterterrorism challenges in the Sahel.
The potential deployment of the Wagner Group to Mali echoes other PMC efforts in Africa. Since 2018, Russian PMCs have been active in the Central African Republic, seizing control of mineral resources while committing brutal human rights abuses. PMCs have similarly deployed to countries like SudanLibya, and Mozambique, providing further evidence of a Russian irregular effort on the continent with PMCs at its forefront.
The Wagner Group is less a single entity than a network of businesses and mercenary groups, linked through their connections to associates of President Vladimir Putin, most notably Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. While ostensibly a private security contractor, Wagner has been characterized as a “creature of the Russian state” with close ties to its military intelligence services and a directive to pursue the economic interests of Russian elites. The Wagner Group has undertaken a variety of security tasks, including training local forces and VIP protection, which now form the basis of a potential contract in Mali.
Not What a Troubled State Needs
Mali is navigating overlapping political and security crises, making the prospect of a Wagner deployment particularly fraught. As Islamist militants expand their influence, Mali has experienced two coups d’état since August 2020 and is currently governed by a military junta. Against this backdrop, the prospect of Wagner’s deployment has both alarmed France and complicated the relationship between Mali and its primary security partner.
On September 13, Reuters reported that an agreement between Mali and the Wagner Group was imminent. The deal would reportedly see one thousand mercenaries deploy to the country to train Malian security forces and protect senior political leaders for a monthly price tag of $10.8 million. Wagner would also gain access to three mining deposits as further compensation for its services. The news followed renewed bilateral engagement between Mali and Russia, including a recent visit by the Malian defense minister to Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov subsequently confirmed that the Malian government had approached Russian PMCs but maintained that Moscow was not involved in these talks.
The prospect of an agreement between the Malian government and Wagner set off a flurry of diplomatic activity from France, which has been spearheading counterterrorism efforts in Mali since 2013. France’s chief Africa diplomat, Christophe Bigot, traveled to Moscow on September 8 for meetings with the Russian foreign ministry. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called a potential Wagner presence in Mali “incompatible” with France’s military footprint in the country. French Defense Minister Florence Parly subsequently traveled to Mali to emphasize “the heavy consequences” of an agreement with the Wagner Group. Malian domestic actors reacted similarly. The Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), a coalition of Tuareg and Arab nationalist groups active in Mali’s north, released a statement opposing Wagner and noting its history of human rights violations.
The broader Wagner apparatus has undertaken public relations efforts designed, at least in part, to support its deployment to Mali. The Foundation for National Values Protection (FZNC), an entity sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for disseminating disinformation, released a public opinion poll in September purporting to show 87 percent support among Malians for the government’s outreach to Wagner. The FZNC is headed by Maxim Shugaley, who works “under the direct supervision” of Prigozhin, and previously conducted similar polls in the Central African Republic (CAR). Alexandre Ivanov, a Prigozhin associate who has advocated on behalf of PMC personnel in CAR, recently gave an interview to Malian media promoting the potential benefits of a PMC deployment to Mali.
Convergent political and security crises in Mali make the prospect of a Wagner contract particularly concerning. Mali is governed by a military junta, led by Colonel Assimi Goïta, that has launched two coups d’état since August 2020. While the junta has nominally agreed to transfer power to a civilian government following elections in February 2022, there are increasing signs that the military government will disregard this deadline and retain power well into next year. France, meanwhile, maintains a counterterrorism mission in Mali, Operation Barkhane, which aims to defeat Islamist insurgent groups like Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS). While France has announced an ostensible end to Barkhane, the French military will likely remain engaged, albeit with a smaller footprint, over the short term. Other multilateral efforts are also underway to counter the insurgent threat in Mali. A United Nations peacekeeping mission has had a broad civilian protection mandate since 2013, and a European Union training mission currently provides assistance to the Malian security sector.
Russia’s PMC activities potentially afford Mali’s junta some degree of leverage with respect to its traditional security partners. Ultimately, a deal between the Malian government and the Wagner Group may not come to pass. The prospect of such a deal, however, has allowed the junta to apply pressure to the international community and attempt to weather criticism that the junta is planning to cling to power. During the 2021 UN General Assembly, Malian Prime Minister Choguel Maiga lambasted France’s alleged abandonment of Mali and argued that it justified Mali’s discussions with actors like Wagner. France and the United States now face a new risk calculus thanks to the emergence of Russian security patronage: Criticism of the junta may push it to ally with other illiberal partners, limiting the international community’s ability to facilitate a democratic transition or protect Malian civilians. At a time when the United States and France appear poised to deepen counterterrorism cooperation in the Sahel, Wagner’s deployment could derail these efforts.
Russia’s Irregular Strategy in Africa
Wagner’s reported missions in Mali—training for the Malian military and protection for government officials—may appear benign. But the effects of a Wagner Group deployment in Mali will likely be similar to those seen in other African states: exacerbated conflict and entrenched illiberal governance as a way to facilitate Russian political and economic interests in the country.
Russia and the Wagner Group are also active in CAR, a country mired in civil conflict. In CAR, Wagner nominally trains the Central African military and provides protection to senior government officials like President Faustin-Archange Touadéra. Yet the Wagner Group has also facilitated the diplomatic and economic activities of companies and individuals linked to Putin’s associate, Prigozhin. One of these entities, Lobaye Invest, secured mining concessions as a result of the agreement that brought PMCs to CAR, and continues to operate gold and diamond mines with the assistance of PMC personnel. A Russian national with ties to military intelligence services, Valery Zakharov, currently serves as a national security advisor to Touadéra and also has financial links to Prigozhin-controlled companies.
More concerning, however, is the extent of PMC combat activities against rebel groups in CAR, often with disastrous humanitarian results. The United Nations has documented PMC participation in “indiscriminate killings,” looting, and forced disappearances. Russian PMCs also operate clandestine prisons that detain civilians before forcing families to pay ransoms to release detainees. The intermingling of PMC personnel with UN peacekeepers in CAR, meanwhile, threatens to undermine the credibility of multilateral interventions to stem the country’s conflict. Russian PMCs have scored tactical victories against the country’s rebels but have further entrenched the brutal character of CAR’s conflict by committing human rights violations and generating revenue in the process. An entrance into Mali by Wagner would likely yield similar effects.
In other African theaters, PMCs have provided Russian actors with leverage to make economic and diplomatic inroads, but their combat record is mixed and has perpetuated conflict. In Mozambique, where Wagner mercenaries deployed to Cabo Delgado to fight an Islamist insurgency in 2019, PMC operatives failed to make gains against the insurgents and displayed poor interoperability with local security forces. Mozambique subsequently replaced Wagner with other PMCs, like South Africa’s Dyck Advisory Group. In Libya, Wagner forces were unable to propel Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s forces to victory in the country’s civil war, leaving Russia to salvage diplomatic relations with Libya’s internationally recognized government. Should PMCs conduct combat missions in Mali, their performance risks being similarly poor.
France has been engaged militarily in Mali since 2013, and while its counterterrorism efforts have notched numerous tactical successes, violence has continued to metastasize. Instability in the Sahel is a political problem, and not one that PMCs have the capacity to address. Moreover, a certain level of instability is desirable for Wagner, permitting it to justify its involvement in a country while obfuscating its malign activities. In short, Wagner simply may not be interested in solving insecurity, even if it could. Rather than stabilize the Malian government, Wagner is more likely to “coup-proof” it while insulating it from international scrutiny in exchange for influence and access to natural resources.

Russia’s overtures to Mali stand to undermine the political and security priorities of the United States and its partners, including their counterterrorism and pro-democracy efforts. Increased Russian influence in Mali will reduce the United States’ and France’s ability to pressure the military government to democratize—a key element of a counterterrorism strategy in the Sahel. Unstable and authoritarian politics could also accelerate the expansion of jihadist groups like JNIM and ISGS to the West African littoral states, a process that is already well underway. Moreover, Wagner combat activity in Mali would almost certainly exacerbate the conflict’s extrajudicial brutality, as PMC actions in CAR demonstrate. More drastic consequences, such as a full withdrawal of French forces from the country in response to a Wagner deployment, could increase violence as armed actors compete in a newly created security vacuum.
The United States needs to respond. It should begin by raising awareness of PMCs among the Malian public, highlighting in particular their ineffectiveness and human rights violations. It’s not clear that a large, genuine pro-Wagner constituency exists in Mali, and members of the military have reportedly attempted to manufacture the appearance of pro-Russia sentiment. This offers partner governments the opportunity to proactively publicize the malign activities of Russian PMCs. United States Africa Command has undertaken similar name-and-shame efforts in response to the Wagner Group’s activities in Libya—a blueprint that could be deployed to head off Wagner’s overtures elsewhere. An effort to publicize Wagner’s abuses could raise the domestic costs of this partnership for the Malian junta and call into question the benefits of working with the group.
More broadly, the United States should develop a comprehensive strategy to disincentivize African countries from entertaining partnerships with PMCs like the Wagner Group. Russia’s efforts in this space have been likened to “throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks”—a series of experimental and adaptive ventures. Yet the United States cannot be effective if it is simply playing an ad hoc game of defense in response to new Russian forays. Strengthening civil society can create strong safeguards against official corruption, reducing the revenue-generating capabilities of Russian PMCs. The United States should seek to vigorously support efforts, like transparency in the extractive industries sector and robust civil society watchdogs, that can help frustrate attempts by PMC-linked companies to surreptitiously win resource concessions.
The Wagner Group’s influence is growing in Africa; it’s now up to the United States to respond.
Jared Thompson (@JaredA_Thompson) is a research associate with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
mwi.usma.edu · by Jared Thompson · October 14, 2021







V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
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FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
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If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

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