Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

– George Orwell

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

– Thomas Jefferson

"I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it."

– Harry Emerson Fosdick

1. US B-2 bombers strike Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen

2. Statement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III on U.S. Airstrikes in Houthi-Controlled Areas of Yemen

3. U.S. Strikes Target Houthi Weapons Stores in Yemen

4. U.S. Shifts Ukraine’s F-16 Training to Focus on Younger Pilots

5. 5. How Hezbollah was fooled into purchasing explosive pagers

6. With Jets and Ships, China Is Honing Its Ability to Choke Taiwan

7. Iran Should Stay on the Global Terror Finance and Money Laundering Blacklist.

8. Europe-based units are learning from Ukraine, officers say

9. China’s coast guard joins military drills, raising risk of escalation

10. Bell presses on with FLRAA as Army cools on large programs

11. Fighting ‘dirty’ — The Army’s plan to survive, and win, a doomsday war

12. How Iran’s Ghost Fleet Sidesteps U.S. Sanctions

13. We Are in Need of Renaissance People

14. Iran warns Israel against retaliation for missile attack

15. From Chaos to Influence: The Implications of Natural Disasters on America’s Foreign Policy

16. Regional war in Asia would be a 'global problem' for the US, Pacific Army chief warns

17. China on ‘insidious’ path, says US Army Pacific commander after Taiwan exercise

18. How the Pentagon’s financial audit will help win wars

19. Chaos Engineering for National Defense: Embracing Infrastructure Complexity for Mission Assurance

20. Air Force Ospreys complete first flights to Okinawa since fatal crash

21. The Real Purpose of a U.S.-Saudi Security Agreement

22. Why Washington Has Failed to Solve the Border Crisis

23. Military Newspapers Told Stories No One Else Did. It Was Our Job to Care.

24. Ukraine’s pioneering virtual reality PTSD therapy

1. US B-2 bombers strike Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen

I can hear the troops saying: "It is about damn time." (especially the sailors in the Red Sea who have been dealing with the Houthi attacks).

US B-2 bombers strike Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen | CNN Politics

CNN · by Oren Liebermann, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky · October 17, 2024

CNN

CNN —

The US carried out a round of strikes in Yemen against the Iran-backed Houthis on Wednesday evening, according to three US defense officials, targeting weapons storage facilities, including underground facilities.

The facilities housed advanced conventional weapons used to target military and civilian vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the officials said.

The strikes were carried out by B-2 Spirit bombers, according to one of the officials, marking the first time the US has used the strategic stealth bomber to attack the Houthis in Yemen since the beginning of the US campaign. The B-2 is a much larger platform than the fighter jets that have been used so far to target Houthi facilities and weapons, capable of carrying a far heavier load of bombs.

The attack on the Iranian-backed proxy group comes at a time of huge tension in the region. Israel is expected to retaliate for Iran’s recent missile barrage before the November 5 US election, and its conflicts with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza are ongoing.

Wednesday’s strike — early Thursday morning, local time — is the latest in a saga of back-and-forth attacks by the Houthis and the US, as the Houthis have been carrying out constant attacks on commercial shipping and Navy assets in the region for months.

It also comes as US service members have begun arriving in Israel after the US announced the deployment of an advanced anti-missile system to help protect Israel following Iran’s missile barrage.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

CNN · by Oren Liebermann, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky · October 17, 2024

2. Statement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III on U.S. Airstrikes in Houthi-Controlled Areas of Yemen

Release

Immediate Release

Statement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III on U.S. Airstrikes in Houthi-Controlled Areas of Yemen

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3937640/statement-by-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii-on-us-airstrikes-in-houthi/

Oct. 16, 2024 |

Today, U.S. military forces, including U.S. Air Force B-2 bombers, conducted precision strikes against five hardened underground weapons storage locations in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. U.S. forces targeted several of the Houthis' underground facilities housing various weapons components of types that the Houthis have used to target civilian and military vessels throughout the region. This was a unique demonstration of the United States' ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified. The employment of U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bombers demonstrate U.S. global strike capabilities to take action against these targets when necessary, anytime, anywhere.

For over a year, the Iran-backed Houthis, Specially Designated Global Terrorists, have recklessly and unlawfully attacked U.S. and international vessels transiting the Red Sea, the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait, and the Gulf of Aden. The Houthis' illegal attacks continue to disrupt the free flow of international commerce, threaten environmental catastrophe, and put innocent civilian lives and U.S. and partner forces' lives at risk. At the direction of President Biden, I authorized these targeted strikes to further degrade the Houthis' capability to continue their destabilizing behavior and to protect and defend U.S. forces and personnel in one of the world's most critical waterways.

Again, the United States will not hesitate to take action to defend American lives and assets; to deter attacks against civilians and our regional partners; and to protect freedom of navigation and increase the safety and security in these waterways for U.S., coalition, and merchant vessels. We will continue to make clear to the Houthis that there will be consequences for their illegal and reckless attacks. I am grateful for the professionalism and skill of the brave American troops who took part in today's actions and who continue to stand guard in defense of our Nation.

3. U.S. Strikes Target Houthi Weapons Stores in Yemen

Excerpts:

The B-2 Spirit is considered a stealth aircraft designed to penetrate air defenses and has a range of approximately 6,000 nautical miles.

“This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement.

Arab states, under the threat of assault from Iran, have told the Biden administration that they don’t want their military infrastructure or airspace to be used by the U.S. or Israel for any offensive operations against the Iranian regime.

The Houthis didn’t immediately issue a response to the U.S. attacks.

U.S. Strikes Target Houthi Weapons Stores in Yemen

Bombing is aimed at stopping Iran-backed group from attacking vessels in Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, Pentagon says

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-strikes-target-houthi-weapons-stores-in-yemen-c3bcceaa?mod=latest_headlines

By Rory Jones

and Nancy A. Youssef

Oct. 17, 2024 2:30 am ET

A B-2 bomber in California in 2014. The aircraft is designed to penetrate air defenses. Photo: frederic j. brown/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The U.S. said Thursday it hit Houthi targets in Yemen with long-range bombers, the latest in a series of strikes aimed at stopping the Iran-backed group from attacking commercial and military vessels in the Middle East.

U.S. Air Force and Navy assets, including B-2 Spirit bombers, targeted underground weapons stores that help the Houthis launch attacks on ships traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the Pentagon said, adding that it was assessing the damage from the strikes on the Houthis.

The U.S. has conducted scores of strikes against the Houthis since late last year, when the Iranian ally began firing at ships in support of Hamas, the militant group that sparked a war with Israel in Gaza that has since morphed into a multifront conflict in the Middle East.

The strikes against the Houthis come as Israel is expected to attack Iran in retaliation for an Iranian ballistic-missile assault earlier this month.

The U.S. has in recent months usually deployed jet fighters rather than bombers in strikes against the Houthis. It wasn’t immediately clear why the U.S. opted to use a B-2 Spirit bomber during the attack, which hit multiple sites in Houthi-controlled Yemen. Some of the facilities were underground, and a bomber can carry the kinds of ordnance that could reach such sites.

A satellite picture from Planet Labs PBC shows a Greek-flagged oil tanker in the Red Sea after being attacked by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in September. Photo: Associated Press

The B-2 Spirit is considered a stealth aircraft designed to penetrate air defenses and has a range of approximately 6,000 nautical miles.

“This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement.

Arab states, under the threat of assault from Iran, have told the Biden administration that they don’t want their military infrastructure or airspace to be used by the U.S. or Israel for any offensive operations against the Iranian regime.

The Houthis didn’t immediately issue a response to the U.S. attacks.

The Houthis began targeting Israel and commercial and military ships shortly after the war in Gaza began in October 2023, sinking at least one vessel and killing mariners. The militant group’s attacks have severely disrupted one of the world’s busiest commercial shipping routes through the Red Sea.

Israel has largely intercepted Houthi missiles fired at its territory, but some have slipped through the country’s aerial defense systems.

In July, Israeli jet fighters bombed the Houthi-controlled Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, destroying fuel tanks and damaging a power plant, in retaliation for the killing of an Israeli civilian by a Houthi drone strike in Tel Aviv.

Over the summer, U.S. intelligence agencies began warning that Russia might arm Houthi militants in Yemen with advanced antiship missiles in retaliation for the Biden administration’s support with U.S. weapons for Ukraine’s war against Russia.

U.S. Shifts Ukraine’s F-16 Training to Focus on Younger Pilots

Decision could extend timeline for Kyiv to have full squadron ready for the battlefield

https://www.wsj.com/world/u-s-shifts-ukraines-f-16-training-to-focus-on-younger-pilots-f8b97cfd?mod=latest_headlines

By Lara SeligmanFollow

and Brett ForrestFollow

Updated Oct. 17, 2024 12:01 am ET

WASHINGTON—The U.S. is refocusing its training of Ukrainian F-16 pilots on younger cadets rather than experienced air force members, a decision that could extend by many months the timeline for when Kyiv will have a full squadron of the Western-built aircraft ready for the battlefield.

The new direction is the result of the lack of experienced Ukrainian pilots with requisite English-language abilities who can be spared from the battlefield, U.S. officials said. Some officials also said that the U.S. believes younger cadets would be more open to Western-style instruction.

The training course has been a subject of debate recently, particularly after an August crash that killed one of Ukraine’s top fighter pilots, a former MiG-29 squadron commander who had recently graduated from the program, and destroyed one of Ukraine’s few F-16s.

Ukraine is desperate for additional F-16s and pilots to bolster its air defenses, which are being overwhelmed by Russian aerial attacks. The bombardments are devastating Ukraine’s military as well as damaging critical civilian infrastructure like the power grid, a growing vulnerability as the weather turns colder.

A Ukrainian trainee in a flight simulator at a French air base earlier this year. Photo: Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

For the past year, the U.S. and international partners have been training small numbers of Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 jet fighters at three separate locations: Morris Air National Guard Base in Arizona, the Danish military air base in Skrydstrup—which shuttered recently as the Royal Danish Air Force transitions to the new F-35—and the recently opened Fetești Training Center in Romania. A dozen pilots have passed through the courses so far, and 11 of those are now flying in Ukraine.

Even before the decision, Ukraine likely wouldn’t have a full squadron of F-16s—20 planes and 40 pilots to operate them—until spring or summer next year at the earliest, according to a person with knowledge of the program.

While the initial cadre of Ukrainian pilots learning to fly F-16s all had many years of flying Soviet jet fighters under their belts, the coalition has recently added more cadets to the mix. While the experienced pilots could skip basic flight training, the rookies must spend a year learning to fly at facilities in the U.K. and France before moving to the F-16 course in Arizona and Romania.

“It is a mix,” a senior Pentagon official said. “Some have been experienced pilots, and we still are receiving more experienced pilots. But there’s also those that do not have that kind of pilot training and experience.”

The Ukrainian Air Force didn’t respond to a request for comment about the F-16 training.

The training course has been a focus of attention since the deadly August crash, on the first day Ukraine used F-16s in combat, during a major Russian drone and missile barrage.

A photo of a Ukrainian pilot who was killed in an F-16 crash in August. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The crash raised questions about whether the pilots were rushed through the course and into battle without adequate preparation. It can take years to train a Western air force cadet to fly F-16s from scratch.

For U.S. Air Force pilots, the training lasts about two years from start to finish, said retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. Nine months to a year is required to complete basic flight training, followed by four to six months flying a chosen aircraft and an additional four to six months to learn the procedures of a first operational unit.

“To get an experienced pilot, you need an experienced pilot. That’s just a fact of life,” Deptula said. “You don’t come out of elementary school and become an Olympic athlete in a couple of months.”

Even after training, Western pilots typically fly for months in exercises and with their units before executing live missions. Ukraine’s new F-16 pilots, by contrast, have been transferring from training directly to the battlefield, without the time and experience generally required to operate the advanced airplane optimally.

The U.S. accelerated the training course for Ukraine’s veteran pilots to six to nine months, depending on experience, by focusing on the specific missions they would face in the war against Russia, primarily air defense.

An F-16 in Norway earlier this year. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Ukrainian officials have argued for months that accelerated training is necessary because of the existential threat their country is facing. They say they need pilots trained as quickly as possible and have pushed for the U.S. to open additional spots in the program.

U.S. officials say that Ukrainian trainees have struggled with aspects of the curriculum as well as competency in English, which is required to complete the course. American instructors also found that some Ukrainian pilots in the initial batches of students—who were experienced in flying Soviet-designed MiG jet fighters and fresh from serving in an active war zone—were resistant to American training methods, according to two people familiar with the matter.

This dynamic reflects a frequent tension on weapons training between NATO instructors, who have a set way of doing things, and Ukrainians, who are faced with immediate needs in the war against Russia and often have more battlefield experience than their Western trainers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Many of the Ukrainian pilots also struggled to decipher English-language F-16 training manuals. Some pilots who began the course in Denmark failed the program, a Western official said.

Eight cadets who spent the past year learning basic flying skills on Alpha Jets, a jet trainer aircraft, in France, started training last month on the F-16 in Romania, according to a person familiar with the program. Another eight, all experienced fighter pilots, are wrapping up F-16 training in Arizona now and will arrive in Ukraine early next year.

Additional cadets are undergoing basic pilot training in France and the U.K.

At Ukraine’s urging, President Biden announced last month that the U.S. would expand the number of positions in the program from 12 to 18 total in Arizona and Romania. This expansion will take place next year, according to a Pentagon spokesman.

Write to Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com and Brett Forrest at brett.forrest@wsj.com

5. How Hezbollah was fooled into purchasing explosive pagers

With this exposure in the Israeli press I guess this was a one time action. The enemy "won't get fooled again" using this technique.

But this was a brilliant operation. I am sure Israeli intelligence will conceive something innovative for future employment.

Graphics at the link: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-hezbollah-was-fooled-into-purchasing-explosive-pagers/

How Hezbollah was fooled into purchasing explosive pagers

Invisible detonators and wafer-thin plastic explosives turned batteries into bombs after a fake, but convincing, online history was created for bulky new product used by thousands

By Maya Gebeily, James Pearson and David Gauthier-Villars

16 October 2024, 11:31 pm

timesofisrael.com · by Maya Gebeily, James Pearson and David Gauthier-Villars Today, 11:31 pm Edit

A photo taken on September 18, 2024, in Beirut's southern suburbs shows the remains of exploded pagers on display at an undisclosed location. The pagers were used by Hezbollah and the attack has been blamed on Israel. (AFP)

BEIRUT (Reuters) — The batteries inside the weaponized pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an alleged Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles’ heel.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness – the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product – they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation that has struck unprecedented blows against Israel’s Iran-backed Lebanese foe.

A thin, square sheet with six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was squeezed between two rectangular battery cells, according to the Lebanese source and photos.

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The remaining space between the battery cells could not be seen in the photos but was occupied by a strip of highly flammable material that acted as the detonator, the source said.

This three-layer sandwich was inserted in a black plastic sleeve, and encapsulated in a metal casing roughly the size of a matchbox, the photos showed.

The assembly was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniaturized detonator, typically a metallic cylinder, the source and two bomb experts said. All three spoke on conditions of anonymity.

Without any metal components, the material used to trigger detonation had an edge: like the plastic explosives, it was not detected by X-ray.

Upon receiving the pagers in February, Hezbollah looked for the presence of explosives, two people familiar with the matter said, putting them through airport security scanners to see if they triggered alarms. Nothing suspicious was reported.

The devices were likely set up to generate a spark within the battery pack, enough to light the detonating material and trigger the sheet of PETN to explode, said the two bomb experts, to whom Reuters showed the pager-bomb design.

Since explosives and wrapping took about a third of the volume, the battery pack carried a fraction of the power consistent with its 35-gram weight, two battery experts said.

“There is a significant amount of unaccounted-for mass,” said Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium batteries at Britain’s Newcastle University.

At some point, Hezbollah noticed the battery was draining faster than expected, the Lebanese source said. However, the issue did not appear to raise major security concerns – the group was still handing its members the pagers hours before the attack.

On September 17, thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded in the southern suburbs of Beirut and other Hezbollah strongholds, in most cases after the devices beeped, indicating an incoming message.

Among the victims rushed to hospital, many had eye injuries, missing fingers or gaping holes in their abdomens, indicating their proximity to the devices at the time of detonation, Reuters witnesses saw. In total, the pager attack, and a second on the following day that activated weaponized walkie-talkies, killed 39 people and wounded more than 3,400.

Two Western security sources said Israeli intelligence agency Mossad spearheaded the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.

Reuters could not establish where the devices were manufactured. The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has authority over Mossad, did not respond to a request for comment.

A man, who was wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah detonated on Tuesday across Lebanon, receives treatment at Sidon Governmental Hospital, in Sidon, Lebanon September 20, 2024. (REUTERS/Ali Hankir)

Lebanon’s Information Ministry and a spokesperson for Hezbollah declined to comment for this article.

Israel has neither denied nor confirmed a role. The day after the attacks Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised Mossad’s “very impressive” results in comments that were widely interpreted in Israel as a tacit acknowledgment of the agency’s participation.

US officials have said they were not informed of the operation in advance.

An undated file catalog image of an Apollo pager, similar to the ones that exploded on September 17, 2024, in various cities of Lebanon and Syria, in an unprecedented attack on Hezbollah personnel. (Balkis Press / ABACAPRESS.COM / Reuters)

The weak link

From the outside, the pager’s power source looked like a standard lithium-ion battery pack used in thousands of consumer electronics goods.

And yet, the battery, labeled LI-BT783, had a problem: Like the pager, it did not exist on the market.

So Israel’s agents created a backstory from scratch.

Hezbollah has serious procurement procedures to check what they buy, a former Israeli intelligence officer, who was not involved in the pager operation, told Reuters.

“You want to make sure that if they look, they find something,” the former spy said, requesting not to be named. “Not finding anything is not good.”

Creating backstories, or “legends,” for undercover agents has long been a core skill of spy agencies. What made the pager plot unusual is that those skills appear to have been applied to ubiquitous consumer electronics products.

For the pagers, the agents deceived Hezbollah by selling the custom-created model, AR-924, under an existing, renowned Taiwanese brand, Gold Apollo.

People gather outside a hospital in Beirut as Hezbollah members are brought for treatment after pager devices exploded across Lebanon on September 17, 2024. (REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir)

Gold Apollo’s chairman, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters a day after the pager attack that he was approached about three years ago by a former employee, Teresa Wu, and her “big boss, called Tom” to discuss a license agreement.

Hsu said he had scant information about Wu’s superior, but he granted them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely distributed Gold Apollo brand.

Reuters could not establish the identity of the manager, nor whether the person or Wu knowingly worked with Israeli intelligence.

The chairman said he was not impressed by the AR-924 when he saw it, but still added photos and a description of the product to his company’s website, helping give it both visibility and credibility. There was no way to directly buy the AR-924 from his website.

Hsu said he knew nothing about the pagers’ lethal capabilities or the broader operation to attack Hezbollah. He described his company as a victim of the plot.

Gold Apollo declined to provide further comment. Calls and messages sent to Wu went unanswered. She has not given a statement to the media since the attacks.

This picture shows Lebanese army forces preparing to destroy in a controlled explosion a communication device found on the ground in southern Lebanon, between the villages of Burj al Muluk and Klayaa, on September 19, 2024. Thousands of Hezbollah devices exploded in attacks blamed on Israel. (Photo by Rabih DAHER / AFP)

‘I know this product’

In September 2023, webpages and images featuring the AR-924 and its battery were added to apollosystemshk.com, a website that said it had a license to distribute Gold Apollo products, as well as the rugged pager and its bulky power source, according to a Reuters review of internet records and metadata.

The website gave an address in Hong Kong for a company called Apollo Systems HK. No company by that name exists at the address or in Hong Kong Corporate records.

However, the website was listed by Wu, the Taiwanese businesswoman, on her Facebook page as well as in public incorporation records when she registered a company called Apollo Systems in Taipei earlier this year.

A section of the apollosystemshk.com site devoted to the LI-BT783 put emphasis on the battery’s outstanding performance. Unlike the disposable batteries that powered older generation pagers, it boasted 85 days of autonomy and could be recharged via a USB cable, according to the website and a 90-second promotional video on YouTube.

In late 2023, two battery stores came online with the LI-BT783 listed in their catalogs, Reuters found. And in two online forums devoted to batteries, participants discussed the power source, despite its lack of commercial availability: “I know this product,” a user with the handle Mikevog wrote in April 2023. “It’s got a great datasheet and a great performance.”

This video grab, shows a walkie-talkie that was detonated inside a house in an attack on Hezbollah members widely blamed on Israel, in Baalbek, east Lebanon, September 18, 2024. (AP Photo)

Reuters could not establish the identity of Mikevog.

The website, the online stores, and the forum discussions bear the hallmark of a deception effort, the former Israeli intelligence officer and two Western security officers told Reuters. The websites have been scrubbed from the web since the pager bombs wreaked havoc in Lebanon, but archived and cached copies are still viewable.

Ruing the day they bought the pagers, Hezbollah leaders said they had launched internal investigations to understand how the security breach could happen and identify possible moles.

The group had shifted to pagers at the start of the year after realizing that cellphone communications were compromised by Israeli eavesdropping, Reuters previously reported.

Hezbollah’s investigations have helped uncover how Israeli agents used an aggressive sales tactic to make sure Hezbollah’s procurement manager chose the AR-924, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

The salesperson who conveyed the offer made a very inexpensive proposition for the pagers “and kept bringing the price down until he was pulled in,” the person said.

People watch as a blaze rages amid the smoldering rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike targeting Hezbollah’s main headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 27, 2024. (Fadel Itani/AFP)

Lebanese authorities have condemned the attacks as a serious violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty. On September 19, in his last public speech before he was killed by Israel, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the device blasts could amount to a “declaration of war” and vowed to punish Israel.

Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging fire since October 8, 2023, when the terror group began launching daily attacks at northern Israeli towns, claiming solidarity with Palestinian ally Hamas amid the war in Gaza, which was sparked by the latter terror group’s October 7 onslaught in Israel in which some 1,200 were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

In the wake of the device attacks, Israel has launched a full-on war on Hezbollah, including a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and airstrikes in Beirut that have killed most of its top leadership.

Hezbollah’s internal investigation into the pager attack, still underway, suffered a setback on September 28: Eleven days after the devices exploded, the senior Hezbollah official tasked with leading the procurement probe, Nabil Kaouk, was himself killed by an Israeli airstrike.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

timesofisrael.com · by Maya Gebeily, James Pearson and David Gauthier-Villars Today, 11:31 pm Edit

6. With Jets and Ships, China Is Honing Its Ability to Choke Taiwan

Excerpts:

“Beijing is normalizing the use of these large-scale military and coast guard activities under the Lai administration,” said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They have made it clear that if they see things that they perceive as provocative from Taiwan that they will respond this way.”

Some analysts saw China’s drills as aimed in part as a response to military exercises by the United States and its allies in the region. On Wednesday, the United States and the Philippines began their annual war games. Troops from Japan, South Korea, Australia, Britain and France are also participating. U.S. exercises with Japan are planned for later this month.

China kept up the drumbeat of pressure on Taipei on Wednesday with a tour by President Xi Jinping of Dongshan County, a coastal community in eastern Fujian Province that is close to Taiwan. On the same day, Chen Binhua, a spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, reiterated that Beijing would not renounce the use of force to take Taiwan, if necessary.

Should they become more frequent, China’s large-scale drills increase the risks in what was already one of the most contested areas in the world. An accident between Chinese and Taiwanese forces could plunge the two sides into a political crisis and an “escalation spiral” in which neither Beijing nor Taipei can pull out of, risking war, Mr. Hart said.

With Jets and Ships, China Is Honing Its Ability to Choke Taiwan

China’s large-scale military exercises are encircling Taiwan and testing the island’s defenses. They also raise the risk of conflict, accidental or otherwise.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/world/asia/china-taiwan-blockade-drills.html

Scores of Chinese aircraft and dozens of ships surrounded Taiwan, after President Lai Ching-te rejected Beijing’s claim over the island.Credit...Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By David Pierson and Amy Chang Chien

David Pierson reported from Hong Kong, and Amy Chang Chien from Taipei, Taiwan.

Oct. 16, 2024

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

The Chinese warplanes, deployed in record numbers, crossed an informal boundary between China and Taiwan. Chinese Coast Guard boats joined naval ships in encircling Taiwan. Fighter jets took off from an aircraft carrier parked off the island’s east coast.

The large-scale military drills China held this week were aimed at demonstrating its potential to choke Taiwan’s access to food and fuel and block the skies and waters from which the United States and its allies would presumably approach in coming to the island’s defense.

The exercises showed how China was improving its coordination of complex operations involving a range of military, coast guard and rocket forces. They also raise the risk of a confrontation or accident that could draw in the United States and its Asian allies.

China’s tightening military squeeze on Taiwan is imposing a new normal — creating daily pressure that exhausts the island’s defense forces and increases the incentive for Taiwan to capitulate without a fight.

It was the second time in less than five months that China has conducted similar exercises in response to what it regarded as pro-separatist remarks by the island’s president, Lai Ching-te. By comparison, China held two such drills during the eight years Mr. Lai’s predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, was in office.

“Beijing is normalizing the use of these large-scale military and coast guard activities under the Lai administration,” said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They have made it clear that if they see things that they perceive as provocative from Taiwan that they will respond this way.”

Image

President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan made a speech on National Day last week that China regarded as a message promoting independence.Credit...Annabelle Chih/Getty Images

Some analysts saw China’s drills as aimed in part as a response to military exercises by the United States and its allies in the region. On Wednesday, the United States and the Philippines began their annual war games. Troops from Japan, South Korea, Australia, Britain and France are also participating. U.S. exercises with Japan are planned for later this month.

China kept up the drumbeat of pressure on Taipei on Wednesday with a tour by President Xi Jinping of Dongshan County, a coastal community in eastern Fujian Province that is close to Taiwan. On the same day, Chen Binhua, a spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, reiterated that Beijing would not renounce the use of force to take Taiwan, if necessary.

Should they become more frequent, China’s large-scale drills increase the risks in what was already one of the most contested areas in the world. An accident between Chinese and Taiwanese forces could plunge the two sides into a political crisis and an “escalation spiral” in which neither Beijing nor Taipei can pull out of, risking war, Mr. Hart said.

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In any such conflict between China and Taiwan, the United States might come to Taiwan’s defense. That American support for Taipei remains one of the biggest drivers of tension with China. Beijing accuses Washington of promoting Taiwanese independence, and Washington accuses Beijing of sowing instability with provocative military drills.

The pressure campaign includes challenging Taiwan’s limits in the skies and the waters. Among the record 153 planes China flew toward the island, 111 crossed the so-called median line in the Taiwan Strait. Until several years ago, it was an informal boundary that they had rarely crossed. The coast guard also sent four boats into restricted waters near Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, close to mainland China.

China is still trying to teach its army, navy, air force and other military branches to coordinate better. That is a skill militaries like that of the United States have honed over decades of continuous war, whereas the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has not fought a battle since its brief conflict with Vietnam 45 years ago.

“China continues to press up against the contiguous zone so these activities are coming closer and closer to Taiwan shores,” said David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We see them flying further from China’s coast. We see them operating on the east side of Taiwan as well, so you know we see the sophistication increasing.”

China is also not nearly as experienced as the United States in wielding aircraft carriers. The inclusion of the Liaoning, China’s first carrier, allowed the ship to practice projecting its strength toward the Pacific Ocean, where it is presumed U.S. and other forces, potentially from bases in Japan and Guam, would come from should the two sides go to war. China released video of fighter jets launching from its decks.

Image

A still image taken from a video released by China’s military showed a fighter jet taking off from the Liaoning, an aircraft carrier, during Monday’s drills near Taiwan.Credit...China's People's Liberation Army Eastern Theatre Command, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“It is equivalent to having an airport on the Pacific side,” said Lin Ying-yu, an assistant professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan who specializes in the People’s Liberation Army, of the Liaoning. “If the People’s Liberation Army today has the ability to attack from the east side, Taiwan’s strategy of using the east as a reserve base will need to be adjusted.”

Still, the most significant aspect of this week’s drills may be the inclusion of 18 coast guard vessels, the most in any such exercise. That indicated that China would lean heavily on maritime law enforcement to impose a quarantine around Taiwan, analysts said, leaving the military to focus on fighting.

A bigger role for the coast guard reinforces Beijing’s assertion that Taiwanese waters are actually Chinese, making any blockade or quarantine a domestic issue. And during a war, it is generally assumed an opposing navy would avoid firing on coast guard ships because it could play into a Chinese narrative that it is other militaries escalating tensions.

Image

A still image taken from a video released by the Taiwan Coast Guard showed one of its members monitoring a Chinese Coast Guard boat on Monday as it passed near the coast of Taiwan’s Matsu islands.Credit...Taiwan Coast Guard, via Associated Press

Beijing’s continued bid to intimidate Taiwan with its military has potential consequences for its other interests. The specter of Chinese forces surrounding Taiwan could scare off foreign investors at a time when China is trying to woo them back to help stabilize its economy, which has been badly weakened by a property crisis.

The drills also risk making China a greater focus of the American presidential campaigns — something analysts said Beijing had been trying to avoid so that the next administration might not feel as much pressure to confront China.

“While China is thought to be cautious during this period, the drills send the message that Taiwan remains so sensitive, so important and crucial for the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a Washington policy research group.

Indeed, a crucial audience for China’s drills is the one at home. In propaganda messages, the Chinese Coast Guard sought to cast its exercises as a paternalistic gesture of love toward its Taiwanese compatriots, captured in a graphic depicting Taiwan surrounded by a line of red arrows in the shape of a heart.

The gesture fell flat in Taiwan, where on social media and political talk shows, commentators poked fun at the illustration, which was accompanied by the message “The patrol is in the shape of loving you.”

Image

A beach on Pingtan Island, the closest point in China to Taiwan’s main island.Credit...Adek Berry/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Many in Taiwan responded with a collective “ick.” Some compared the illustration to the mind-set of an abusive partner. Others said the graphic was “too disgusting” and called it “sexual harassment.”

Chris Buckley contributed reporting.

David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about David Pierson

Amy Chang Chien is a reporter and researcher for The Times in Taipei, covering Taiwan and China. More about Amy Chang Chien

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 17, 2024, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: With Jets and Ships, China Hones Its Ability to Choke Taiwan. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Communist Party of China, People's Liberation Army (China), Lai Ching-te, Tsai Ing-wen, Xi Jinping

7. Iran Should Stay on the Global Terror Finance and Money Laundering Blacklist.

I cannot imagine a logical argument for removing Iran from the list given the overwhelming evidence of Iran''s activities.

Iran Should Stay on the Global Terror Finance and Money Laundering Blacklist.

By Toby Dershowitz and Saeed Ghasseminejad

https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2024/10/15/iran_should_stay_on_the_global_terror_finance_and_money_laundering_blacklist_1065428.html

On October 21, the plenary of the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, will convene in Paris. Should the organization that sets global standards for countering money laundering and terror finance consider removing the Islamic Republic of Iran from its blacklist, as Tehran hopes, the answer should be a resounding and unequivocal “no.”

FATF has previously told Tehran it needs to address technical issues like weak customer due diligence mechanisms; processes for identifying and sanctioning unlicensed money transfer service providers; and ensuring that financial institutions verify originator and beneficiary information. But Iran has yet to comply with the full action plan FATF has identified. FATF should not remove the Islamic Republic from the blacklist until it ceases the actions that have made Tehran the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and terrorism finance.

One of the bloodiest terrorist attacks associated with the regime occurred on October 7, 2023, when Iran-backed Hamas massacred or kidnapped nearly 1,500 people from southern Israel, including Israeli civilians, at least 40 Americans, and citizens of 45 countries. The terrorist group recently executed six of the hostages in cold blood, including an American citizen.

But Iran’s malign role in the Middle East hardly started there.

In the last 12 months, Iran has provided funds and weapons to the Houthis, a Yemen-based terrorist organization. The Houthis, a proxy and willing partner of Tehran, have launched scores of deadly missiles and drones targeting international tankers and ships. This has disrupted billions of dollars in global trade in the Red Sea, including food, oil and gas, and consumer goods, impacting all FATF member countries.

In the last 12 months, Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 missiles and rockets into Israel’s population centers, killing at least 41 Israelis, including 12 Druze kids playing soccer. Iran provides weapons and hundreds of millions of dollars annually that Hezbollah uses for terrorism. October 2024 will mark 41 years since Hezbollah killed 241 U.S. servicemembers and 58 French paratroopers sent to Beirut to keep the peace.

In the last 12 months, al Qaeda, designated by the United Nations as a terrorist entity, has called on foreigners to join the organization and receive training for terrorist activity in Afghanistan. Iran is providing safe haven to Sayf al-Adl, believed to be al Qaeda’s head emir.

FATF placed Iran on its blacklist in 2007. The events of the past year are reminders of why it should remain there. The blacklist sends a message to the market that it’s just not safe to do business with Iran.

Masoud Pezeshkian, the new president of the Islamic Republic, has made Iran’s removal from the FATF blacklist a priority because he knows it’s a prerequisite for reintegrating the country into the global financial network and bolstering its economy.

However, an editorial in Kayhan, a publication regarded as the supreme leader’s mouthpiece, reminded him and the public, days before his September 24 address to the UN General Assembly, that “matters of state like FATF compliance are not for lower levels of the political hierarchy to decide.” The piece emphasized that such critical issues remain firmly in the hands of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

There has long been a debate in Iran about complying with FATF’s requirements. If Tehran complies with and really enforces FATF’s action plan, it would be more difficult for the Islamic Republic to evade sanctions, launder money, and finance terrorism. Consequently, the hardliners are against compliance with FATF’s requirements.

The pragmatists argue that the cost of being on FATF’s blacklist is too high a price for Iran’s economy and advocate carving out exceptions in how its laws define terrorism. They want it both ways. They argue that Iran can keep secret what information its authorities reveal about their illicit financing.

Included in FATF’s requirements is that the Islamic Republic enact legislation that would compel the country to become a party to two UN conventions: the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. The Iranian parliament introduced the bills in 2018.

Tehran drafted the bills to define terrorism in a way that excludes organizations it says “struggle against colonial dominance and foreign occupation." In so doing, the Islamic Republic seeks its removal from the blacklist while simultaneously continuing to finance its “axis of resistance,” including the Houthis, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and Hamas. FATF, however, does not permit such deceptive carve outs.

In 2018, Iran's parliament approved the FATF-related bills, but its Guardian Council, a 12-member body that screens all legislation to ensure it conforms with the regime’s Islamist ideology, chose not to ratify them. Six years later, the decision remains pending before the Expediency Discernment Council, which intervenes in cases of disagreement between the parliament and the Guardian Council.

Earlier this month, Pezeshkian told the media, “I will certainly write a letter to the Expediency Council to reactivate the FATF discussions so that we can find a solution” to Iran’s economic troubles. Even if the council ultimately passes the legislation, FATF should not remove Tehran from its blacklist. Iran’s leaders have made clear they do not intend to stop financing terrorism, laundering money, or evading international sanctions. Pezeshkian’s post-election dialogue with and expressions of support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis reflect this policy.

To protect the global financial system, FATF should keep the Islamic Republic of Iran right where it belongs.

Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Toby Dershowitz is managing director at FDD Action. Follow them on Twitter @tobydersh and @SGhasseminejad.

8. Europe-based units are learning from Ukraine, officers say

Excerpts:

“He's able to get insights on the environment in terms of the number of drones that they're flying,” Williams said. “Learning is taking place as we speak, at the tactical level, the operational level, to inform the strategic level.”

The team that rotates through Ukraine is limited to working inside the U.S. embassy and does not provide advice to the Ukrainian government, a U.S. Army Europe spokesperson said.

The U.S. has also adapted its own training facilities at Grafenwöhr, Germany, to better mimic the tactical environment for the Ukrainian units who come there for training, Williams said.

Europe-based units are learning from Ukraine, officers say

A small group of soldiers regularly travels to Kyiv to collect observations, said one general.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

Army units stationed in Europe, from platoons to headquarters, are learning from Ukraine’s battlefield as the service embarks on the second phase of an equipping effort, officials said Wednesday.

A “small element” of soldiers rotates in and out of the war-torn country to collect lessons, said Gen. Darryl Williams, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, speaking at a media roundtable at the Association of the United States Army’s annual Washington meeting.

Those soldiers fall under Lt. Gen. Curtis Buzzard, who in August was appointed head of the allied effort that coordinates aid to Ukraine. He previously served as the commander of a major U.S. Army doctrine center, the Maneuver Center of Excellence.

“He's able to get insights on the environment in terms of the number of drones that they're flying,” Williams said. “Learning is taking place as we speak, at the tactical level, the operational level, to inform the strategic level.”

The team that rotates through Ukraine is limited to working inside the U.S. embassy and does not provide advice to the Ukrainian government, a U.S. Army Europe spokesperson said.

The U.S. has also adapted its own training facilities at Grafenwöhr, Germany, to better mimic the tactical environment for the Ukrainian units who come there for training, Williams said.

“It looks like the conditions in Ukraine,” he said.

The lessons brought back by that team are shaping how the Army approaches its “Transformation-in-Contact” equipping strategy. Under the 8-month-old effort, the Army is flooding certain units with new drones, counter-drone tech, and communications gear that is not necessarily part of any program of record—the service’s typical method of buying new equipment.

One light infantry unit that’s part of the initial Transformation in Contact cohort, the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade, is drawing directly from Ukraine for its new “Strike” Company, said Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, commander of Army V Corps.

That unit, which links drone operators to mortars, artillery, and loitering munitions, is “coming straight out of watching what's going on in Ukraine,” he said.

Williams said the Europe-based 2nd Cavalry Regiment, and U.S.-based 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division are among the four brigades slated for “Transformation-in-Contact 2.0,” an expansion announced by George on Tuesday.

Command Sgt. Maj. Dennis Doyle of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment said that unit is already adopting lessons from Ukraine.

“Over the last few years, based off of the fight that's in the Ukraine, and just with us being right there with the enemy at the doorstep…we've been able to extract a lot of lessons learned that's kind of drove us to kind of think about how we do agile and adaptive command and control,” Doyle said.

Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian troops have underscored the need to make command posts harder for enemy forces to find.

Even before being designated for the TiC effort, the 2nd Cavalry Regiment was working to slim down its command posts, as well as experimenting with translation software for communicating with allies.

The unit started receiving some equipment under the TiC 2.0 fielding strategy this month, Doyle said.

Not all lessons are about new tech, though, said Maj. Gen. Ron Ragin, commander of the unit responsible for helping manage aid transfers to Ukraine, the 21st Theater Sustainment Command.

Ragin said he recently asked several senior Ukrainian officers what they would have done differently before the war.

He said the Ukrainians recommended investing in ammunition production and stockpiles and in creating multiple locations for maintaining equipment. They also recommended creating hardened storage and command-and-control infrastructure.

“I'm using those lessons from our Ukrainian partners that are currently under strain and in contact to inform how I approach the priorities that Gen. Williams has given us,” Ragin said.

“So I'm working with not only the acquisition community but also with the joint material enterprise to make sure that we're taking the lessons learned from Ukraine and applying it to how we move forward in the future,” he said.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

9. China’s coast guard joins military drills, raising risk of escalation

China’s coast guard joins military drills, raising risk of escalation

The world’s largest maritime law enforcement agency played an unprecedented role in Chinese military drills around Taiwan, simulating a blockade of the island.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/17/taiwan-chinese-military-drills-coastguard/

A China Coast Guard vessel conducts patrol operations in Hainan Province, China on Monday. (Wang Jian/VCG/Getty Images)

By Katrina Northrop and Vic Chiang

October 17, 2024 at 4:54 a.m. EDT

TAIPEI, Taiwan — China’s coast guard, the world’s largest maritime law enforcement agency, played an unprecedented role in this week’s military drills around Taiwan, participating in a simulated blockade of the island and raising the chance of escalation as Beijing muddies the waters with “gray zone” tactics.

The drills, which came just days after Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te rebuked Beijing’s claims of sovereignty over Taiwan, included a record-breaking 153 jets buzzing around the island from Monday to Tuesday morning, according to the Defense Ministry in Taipei.

Also for the first time, China’s coast guard fully encircled Taiwan, with the ministry counting 17 of the service’s ships around Taiwan and its outlying islands during the same period. The Chinese coast guard also deployed a new type of huge vessel not previously used in drills around Taiwan and navigated to waters surrounding Taiwan’s Matsu islands where it had not ventured in the past.

While coast guards are widely seen as law enforcement agencies, not as arms of the military, the drills illustrate the Chinese coast guard’s unusually aggressive behavior. They also reveal its increasing role in Beijing’s attempts to assert control over waters like the South China Sea and those around Taiwan.

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“The amount of coast guard integration into this exercise is remarkable because it’s something we haven’t seen to this level before,” said Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project at Stanford University. “China’s coast guard has become central to China’s strategy of asserting its sovereignty in the places that it wants the other countries to know that it is sovereign.”

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry expressed “strong condemnation” of the drills, which are now common around sensitive political events in the island democracy of 23 million people.

Taiwan is not the only area where China’s coast guard has flexed its power this week. On Thursday, the agency announced it drove away a Japanese fishing boat that “illegally entered” waters near the tiny but disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, which both Beijing and Tokyo claim.

Tokyo, which rejects Beijing’s claim over the islands, did not comment on the incident Thursday.

Chinese coast guard’s unprecedented involvement

After encircling Taiwan and mimicking a blockade that could cut off the island from the outside world, China’s coast guard published a map on social media of its boats around Taiwan in the shape of a heart, likening the surrounding vessels to an illustration of China’s love for its neighbor.

This week also marked the first time Chinese coast guard ships entered the prohibited waters around Matsu, an archipelago of outlying Taiwanese islands, in a military drill, according to a Taiwanese coast guard official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive cross-strait topics.

The Chinese coast guard sent its largest ship, called the 2901, during drills around Taiwan, the official said. The 2901 weighs 10,000 tons and can sail as fast as 25 knots, according to Chinese state media.

The Taiwanese coast guard ships are much smaller and “cannot compare to the big monster,” said Lin Ying-yu, an expert on the Chinese military at Taiwan’s Tamkang University.

Why is this concerning?

China’s use of the coast guard around Taiwan fits into a broader category of “gray zone” tactics, meant to menace while stopping short of provoking an outright conflict.

“The coast guard essentially gives China a degree of ambiguity as it uses military coercion against Taiwan in what’s known as the gray zone, below the threshold of the use of force,” said Drew Thompson, an expert on the Chinese military at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and a former Pentagon official.

It also muddies the response because China can categorize coast guard activities as law enforcement, rather than military action. In fact, a spokesperson for China’s coast guard described its activities this week as “law enforcement inspections,” according to a statement.

If Taiwan responds to aggression from the Chinese coast guard with its navy, according to Thompson, China has the pretext to bring in its own naval forces while accusing Taiwan of escalating the situation.

Taiwanese Navy vessels off Keelung City on the island's north on Monday. (Ritchie B Tongo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

“It’s a way of complicating not just Taiwan’s response but the international community’s response,” Thompson said. “By characterizing these vessels as law enforcement vessels rather than navy vessels, it’s essentially claiming that this is a civil, nonmilitary action, and that makes it difficult to respond with military force.”

Other examples of gray-zone tactics China could employ include the use of cyberattacks against Taiwanese critical infrastructure as well as economic punishments like banning certain Taiwanese imports.

Lai, in a speech last month, specifically decried this strategy. “Through its use of gray-zone tactics such as economic coercion and cognitive warfare, China poses serious threats to global peace and stability,” Lai said. “China doesn’t just want to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. It intends to change the rules-based international order and achieve international hegemony.”

The rapid expansion of the Chinese coast guard

China’s coast guard has expanded and militarized over the past decade.

It was established in 2013 under the State Oceanic Administration, the government authority previously responsible for regulating China’s coastal areas. Five years later, it was moved under the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary organization overseen by the most powerful military body in China, the Central Military Commission.

Today, the Chinese coast guard has 150 large vessels — including 20 transferred from China’s navy — some of which are equipped with helicopter facilities, water cannons and guns, according to a 2023 Pentagon report. In addition, it is estimated to have more than 50 medium and 300 small ships.

The coast guard’s legal powers are also growing. In 2021, Beijing passed the Coast Guard Law, which expanded the maritime force’s ability to respond, including with weapons, to foreign ships in areas China deems to be under its jurisdiction. This spring, additional regulations were passed to allow the coast guard to board and detain ships it determines have illegally entered Chinese waters.

If the coast guard boards a Taiwanese ship as the regulations allow, said Bonnie Glaser, an expert on Taiwan at the German Marshall Fund in D.C., “it could result in a confrontation and possibly exchange of fire that would significantly escalate cross-strait tensions.”

Chinese coast guard activity beyond Taiwan

A Chinese coast guard ship seen from a Philippine coast guard vessel near the disputed Sabina Shoal on Aug. 26. (Jam Sta Rosa/AFP/Getty Images)

The South China Sea and East China Sea have become flash points for clashes between the Chinese coast guard and countries like the Philippines.

In June, the Chinese coast guard forcibly boarded Philippine navy ships in the most serious, recent confrontation in the South China Sea, while the Japanese government complained to Beijing after four Chinese coast guard vessels entered territory that Japan considers its own. In August, coast guard ships from China and the Philippines collided near the Sabina Shoal, a disputed area in the Spratly Islands.

China’s coast guard has also started venturing further afield. It recently entered Arctic waters for the first time in a joint exercise with Russia, according to a post on the Chinese agency’s official social media account early this month.

What is the response to the coast guard’s aggression?

Taiwan is attempting to modernize its own coast guard, but experts say more resources and attention are needed.

With a budget of nearly $800 million in 2024 — down 3 percent from 2023 — Taiwan’s coast guard has 164 vessels as of August last year. But many of those ships have been in commission for two or three decades and need upgrades, according to data from Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council.

Tamkang University’s Lin said a bigger coast guard budget is necessary, as well as more cooperation with maritime forces from other countries, like the United States and Japan. In 2021, Washington and Taiwan agreed to establish a coast guard working group to improve communication between the countries’ maritime agencies. This summer, Taiwan and Japan held joint coast guard drills off Japan’s eastern coast.

The most important preparation for engagement with the Chinese coast guard, however, may be a mental one.

“It’s important for other countries not to delude themselves that the Chinese coast guard is anything other than a branch of the PLA,” Thompson said, referring to China’s People’s Liberation Army. “The most important thing is recognizing them for what they are.”

Comments

By Katrina Northrop

Katrina Northrop is a China correspondent for The Washington Post. Previously, she covered China's global impact on business and technology for The Wire China. Her work has also been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Providence Journal. follow on X @NorthropKatrina

By Vic Chiang

Vic Chiang joined The Washington Post’s China Bureau in 2022. He was previously a reporter at Deutsche Welle in Taipei, where he covered news of China and Taiwan with a focus on politics and human rights.

10. Bell presses on with FLRAA as Army cools on large programs

Bell presses on with FLRAA as Army cools on large programs

Service officials are banking on the future rotorcraft for a new air assault concept.

By Audrey Decker

Staff Writer

October 16, 2024 05:56 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

Just months after the Army canceled one planned helicopter, and just a day after its top officer hinted at other large-program cuts, Bell Textron execs said they’re simply focusing on starting deliveries of their V-280 tiltrotor by decade’s end.

“There are things we can't control. The things we can control: execution, schedule, staying within the cost objectives of the Army,” said Frank Lazzara, who leads the company’s sales and strategy efforts for the service’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA, program.

At the Army’s mainstay conference, Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said the service won’t hesitate to cut programs that don’t support its modernization goals—and will no longer buy programs “for ten years at a time.” The service has canceled programs it invested billions in, like the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program, or FARA—an effort once hailed as the service’s No. 1 aviation priority. And FARA’s end might not be the final dramatic program move the Army makes, service officials have warned.

"Even if it was a requirement in the past. Even if it was a program of record, we may have to stop buying it," George said on Tuesday at the AUSA conference.

Asked about George’s speech, Lazarra said that in the government, someone’s always coming after someone else’s money, and the Army has a lot of programs it needs to pay for.

“But if we stay on track with what their objectives are, those are the things we can control, and I think those are the things that keep a program viable and safe and protect the budget for the program,” he said.

The FLRAA program, which will partially replace the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, could be worth up to $70 billion for Bell—depending on how many aircraft the company sells to the Army and foreign militaries.

The total FLRAA buy hinges on budgetary constraints, and what the Army learns once it gets the aircraft to its test unit, said Maj. Gen. Clair Gill, commanding general of the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence and Fort Novosel.

But Gill emphasized that the Army is “all in” on FLRAA, and called it one of the service’s major modernization programs.

“I'm not worried, but if it doesn't perform, then it becomes a risky program, and then potentially does get cut. I think, between us setting requirements, the research and development, the science and technology, all those things coming together, and then the manufacturer delivering on that—if it's on schedule, if it performs the way that I feel like [it will], then it's a safe program. I mean, we need the capability. It is a next-generation transformational capability. If those things don't happen, then I don't disagree with the chief. Then you have to look at it and say, ‘Is this what the Army needs to pay for? And I think the chief and secretary do that with every single program’,” Gill told reporters Wednesday.

Part of the Army’s plan to keep costs low on FLRAA is to build the aircraft with a modular, open-systems architecture, so upgrades are easy and cheaper, and the service isn’t locked into one subcontractor’s component for the aircraft’s entire lifespan.

“What the Army wants is to be able to control their own destiny. So the open systems approach will create more competition. It'll probably help with some level of cost control. They're not beholden to a sub[contractor] or a contract or anything,” Lazarra said. And this new approach to acquisition will be a “litmus test” for industry to see if they can adapt and do business another way, he said.

Fuselage twist

Company execs at AUSA also confirmed a major switch-up to FLRAA production plans: Bell will now build the tiltrotor’s fuselage in-house, pulling the work away from Spirit AeroSystems in the wake of Boeing’s proposal to reacquire the company. The move was first reported in July by Aviation Week.

“We want to control the quality and the timeline and the schedule and the things we can control, and we don't want anything else to put that in jeopardy,” Lazzara said.

The company is “fully prepared” to start building the fuselages in-house, he said, and has been building the team for a while since this is “something we’ve seen coming.”

Lazzara said he doesn’t anticipate the move affecting the program’s schedule.

“Any time we can take in the work for a part of the aircraft, and we can control just quality, timeline, cost, all those other things, we're excited to do it and anytime we can bring more work into Bell that helps across the board with other things that have cost involved,” he said.

Army’s already practicing

As the Army awaits the arrival of its high-speed, high-capacity tiltrotors in 2030, it is already practicing the new operating concept that they will enable. The idea behind “large-scale, long-range air assault,” or L2A2, is to “deliver one brigade combat team in one period of darkness, over 500 miles, arriving behind enemy lines, and able to conduct sustained combat operations,” said Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, who leads the 101st Airborne Division. And the service can’t do this with the platforms it has today, he said.

Sylvia’s team has started working on the new tactics, techniques, and procedures and has practiced the concept four times in live demos over the last year, and multiple times in simulation. In the simulation, replacing UH-60s with FLRAA gave the combat aviation brigade “four times the amount of heavy-lift aircraft than what I have today,” Sylvia said.

In the most recent test, the unit used its existing helicopters to move a brigade combat team about 570 miles, from Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border to Fort Johnson in Louisiana. The movement required three nights, two mission support sites, and six forward arming-and-refueling points. But in a simulation that used FLRAAs, the same mission required half the sustainment and security footprint--and just one night, Sylvia said.

“We are building, over the course of the next few years, this air assault combat aviation brigade. We are doing the things in order to be able to build the foundation so that all we have to do is just receive the aircraft and we'll be ready to execute,” he said.

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

11. Fighting ‘dirty’ — The Army’s plan to survive, and win, a doomsday war

I recall spending a lot of time in MOPP suits in Germany in the 1980s but this is not Col War 2.0.

Excerpts:

But experts in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) defense, must also fight complacency that’s existed for generations and bureaucratic red tape.

“There’s this assumption that this threat will never come, that we will never have to fight in this type of environment,” said Col. Tina Schoenberger, director of the Army’s Nuclear and Countering WMD Agency.

And Schoenberger and her colleagues don’t want the first time a commander is thinking about such dangers to be in battle.

The Army recently finished a proof of concept that tests how brigades will fare against a foe willing to bring weapons of mass destruction to bear on the battlefield.

A follow-on, pilot program that is part of a seven-year effort to ready operational units for such an event, will see 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division face a live, simulated nuclear event in their culminating training event in October at the Joint Pacific Multinational Training Center in Hawaii.

...

As the Army focused on terrorists for the past two decades, the service saw its CBRN skills atrophy.

Robert Peters, a nuclear deterrence expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, painted a picture of how priorities changed post-Cold War and what it means to rebuild CBRN expertise across the force.

At that time, large combatant commands such as in Europe, might have had 50 planners dedicated solely to anticipating the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities, and any potential chemical or biological scenarios, and prepping commanders for war in the shadows of mushroom clouds or fighting through gas attacks.

Once the Soviet Union fell, nuclear experts in those commands were slowly replaced by terrorism experts, causing a “brain drain” among planners and commanders, Peters said.

Fighting ‘dirty’ — The Army’s plan to survive, and win, a doomsday war

Defense News · by Todd South · October 16, 2024

Daring moves by U.S. adversaries foreshadow the return of sinister nuclear, chemical or biological weapons as technological advances promise to bring new tools of destruction to strike soldiers on future battlefields.

A soldier’s new best friend may not be a rifle, or altogether new weapons, but instead a gas mask, gloves and a protective suit.

In May, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to rehearse deploying tactical nuclear weapons in response to what he alleges are “threats” from the West in response to the war in Ukraine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has pursued a nuclear buildup to accumulate 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, up from about 200 in 2019, according to Pentagon estimates.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s military has stockpiled between 2,500 and 5,000 tons of chemical weapons and an undetermined number of biological weapons, according to 2022 assessment by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, as the nation continues its nuclear weapons programs and provocative long-range missile tests in the region.

As the Army pivots to battle peers, chemical, biological threats loom

The CBRN community is seeing renewed attention in the shadow of potential adversary threats.

As these developments have emerged, the Pentagon, and specifically the Army is reimagining how units may have to fight large-scale combat in deadly, contaminated environments.

But experts in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) defense, must also fight complacency that’s existed for generations and bureaucratic red tape.

“There’s this assumption that this threat will never come, that we will never have to fight in this type of environment,” said Col. Tina Schoenberger, director of the Army’s Nuclear and Countering WMD Agency.

And Schoenberger and her colleagues don’t want the first time a commander is thinking about such dangers to be in battle.

The Army recently finished a proof of concept that tests how brigades will fare against a foe willing to bring weapons of mass destruction to bear on the battlefield.

A follow-on, pilot program that is part of a seven-year effort to ready operational units for such an event, will see 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division face a live, simulated nuclear event in their culminating training event in October at the Joint Pacific Multinational Training Center in Hawaii.

The challenges range from enemy rockets or landmines filled with toxic chemicals that blister or suffocate their victims to contagious, debilitating and lethal smallpox, anthrax and newly developed superbugs. Other hurdles include rolling into a recently radiated area following a strike on a nuclear facility or a purposeful nuclear weapons attack.

All impede operations, terrorize and complicate the already fear-inducing prospect of large-scale combat.

Not Cold War 2.0

As the Army focused on terrorists for the past two decades, the service saw its CBRN skills atrophy.

Robert Peters, a nuclear deterrence expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, painted a picture of how priorities changed post-Cold War and what it means to rebuild CBRN expertise across the force.

At that time, large combatant commands such as in Europe, might have had 50 planners dedicated solely to anticipating the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities, and any potential chemical or biological scenarios, and prepping commanders for war in the shadows of mushroom clouds or fighting through gas attacks.

Once the Soviet Union fell, nuclear experts in those commands were slowly replaced by terrorism experts, causing a “brain drain” among planners and commanders, Peters said.

Soldiers practice CBRN drills at Schofield Baracks, Hawaii. (Sgt. Sarah D. Williams/U.S. Army)

Leading up to the 1990 Persian Gulf War, planners suspected that Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein might use stockpiles of chemical weapons as he had in the Iran-Iraq War.

The Pentagon deployed more than 4,000 CBRN specialists to the region. While coalition troops did not face such attacks, post-conflict reports showed a severe lack of training, equipping and preparation that was only resolved by the six-month buildup before combat.

In 1993, Congress created a defense-wide chemical and biological defense program. A decade later, when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, troops again prepared hastily for a potential chemical attack as the stated objective of the operation was to remove alleged weapons of mass destruction from Iraq’s arsenal.

Many were ordered to take the Anthrax vaccine before deployment and frontline units carried protective gear and experienced multiple false alarms for chemical attacks in the early weeks of the war. Again, U.S. troops did not face such attacks and inspectors did not find the alleged WMDs.

But, in the coming years, technological advances have brought about more ways to use nukes, such as low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons. Such devices can devastate a small area without the larger fallout of multi-kiloton warheads.

Yet, they still carry the terrible aspects of nuclear attack and contaminate locations, causing devastating consequences locally.

That means planners must account for these threats and train troops accordingly, Peters said.

“Maybe what you need to do is button down your Stryker and roll through this area,” Peters said. “And you’re airtight in there for X number of hours. At the end of that you put on your [protective gear] and you need to [decontaminate] your Stryker because you need to get to the front within 36 hours.”

Those are the scenarios that service leaders must now consider.

Fighting ‘dirty’

In recent years, the Army has been rebuilding and reprioritizing CBRN units and training as leaders eye the growing threat.

Advances in technology have cut costs for developing new biological and chemical agents that militaries can’t counter. The internet has opened previously hard-to-acquire information for rogue states and terror groups who want to build and use such weapons.

At the same time, new sensors, materials, computing and automation are bringing tools to bear that will detect threats, model and simulate their effects and give commanders options without endangering troops.

But all those advances will take time. And the arms race that defined the nuclear age continues as those tech advances help weapons developers find gaps and outmaneuver protective measures.

All this has led to a new way of thinking about contamination threats.

Previously commanders thought that any level of contamination meant the gear, personnel or an area was “dirty,” and must be completely cleansed.

That’s not feasible and with new equipment, it’s also not effective.

“We are reframing the way we look at risk for CBRN writ large,” said Lt. Col. Dan Meany, director of full dimensional protection for the Army’s programming office. “We are trying to move away from thinking about CBRN as a binary threat, a binary hazard: ‘I am 100% clean. I am 100% dirty.’”

Speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association annual CBRN conference in June, Meany said the new approach is to get commanders to accept risk and then have CBRN soldiers determine how much they can reduce risk for operations.

That will mean using more uncrewed systems and relying on single pieces of equipment that can detect more contaminants, and finding ways to automate decontamination, especially of combat vehicles.

Army Futures Command has developed concepts for how to run automated decon sites, though there is not yet a program for it, he said.

Steady shifts mean big changes

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has updated its strategy to counter WMDs to incorporate new threats and the office has renewed its nuclear posture review and, in 2023, completed a first-of-its-kind biological defense posture review.

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Victoria RamageGarcia took over as the 20th CBRNE Command chief warrant officer in July and has spent the past 20 years in this work. Early in her career, units focused mostly on evacuating contaminated casualties and working with other agencies for homeland defense.

There wasn’t much integration with operational units. But in the past decade and even more over the past five years, she’s seen CBRN experts brought into all aspects of unit planning.

“I am only as great of an asset to you as you allow me to be,” RamageGarcia said.

Working through potential CBRN attacks can’t be an afterthought. Without preparation, such an attack can devastate a unit and render it inoperable, stalling the larger fight.

If experts such as RamageGarcia understand the commander’s mission and goals, they can keep the unit fighting, regardless of what it encounters.

Soldiers prepare for role-players to come through a Mass Casualty Decontamination line. (2nd Lt. Corey Maisch/U.S. Army)

In 2019 the Joint Chiefs of Staff published an updated nuclear operations manual, which lays out how unit commanders will fight through nuclear attacks.

The manual also details how U.S. commanders might use their own tactical nukes offensively. The document calls for combatant commanders to create priority target lists for nuclear strikes in their regions.

“Commanders should know how nuclear weapon effects can affect personnel, equipment, and the dynamics of combat power. They should train for and implement survivability measures and techniques,” according to the doctrine.

Also in 2019, the 1st Armored Division conducted a Warfighter Exercise, which focused on command post operations, almost entirely in CBRN protective gear.

Post-training observations published by the Combined Arms Center identified shortcomings.

“Units have not prepared adequately at home station to conduct [protective gear] exchange within six hours of being contaminated,” according to the report.

The units also tended to “stumble” on selective unmasking required after conditions began to clear. And they were not proficient with their decontamination system.

By early 2020, soldiers with the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, were establishing a standard certification process for CBRN recon platoons.

Early the next year, the Army updated technical guidance to its CBRN platoons and a few months later soldiers with the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division were part of the largest CBRN-focused rotation at the National Training Center since 1985.

The unit faced an “unprecedented amount” of CBRN munition attacks during their training cycle, Maj. Chris Chavis, the 2nd Chemical Battalion operations officer, said at the time.

The Army 2030 campaign plan updated its CBRN approach across the force, which includes a seven-year effort to prove new concepts for maneuver units operating in CBRN during large-scale combat.

The first major step happened last year, at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, when the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division served as a “proof of concept” team for CBRN.

Using information from that rotation, Lt. Col. Sean Carmody, countering WMD readiness integrator at Army headquarters told Army Times, they began a pilot program this year with 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, which will culminate in the brigade facing a simulated nuclear attack during their October rotation at the Joint Pacific Multinational Training Center, Hawaii.

If successful, the CBRN plan will integrate new methods across operational units by 2030.

Officials have also designed a new heavy decontamination reconnaissance company, to bring large units into areas to clean themselves and their equipment or prepare to head into danger areas, said Brig. Gen. W Bochat, former commandant of the Army’s CBRN School who took over 20th CBRN Command in August.

At the same time, leaders have added education at nearly all levels for individual soldiers and commanders, said Col. Schoenberger, Countering WMD Agency director.

Since 2022, Army recruits now face CBRN scenarios at boot camp and combat training. Enlisted and officers must pass CBRN requirements in their professional courses. The CBRN School teamed up with their engineer and military police counterparts and CBRN officers now run a tabletop exercise with senior advisors during their captain’s course.

Diverse threats call for new gear

These new threats have led to renewed efforts to counter them, and their effects.

Decades-old equipment won’t work in today’s CBRN landscape, experts said.

In 2022, Deborah Rosenblum, the assistant secretary of defense over CBRN Defense called for a “radical transformation” in equipping the services for combatting the “vastly more difficult” and “rapidly changing” threats.

At the time, the Pentagon had just increased its annual spending on CBRN by $300 million and sought an additional $1.2 billion over the next five years.

In the most recent budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, the Pentagon seeks $1.7 billion for CBRN research and development.

The funding aims to improve soldier protection, detection and threat reporting and add remote-controlled or autonomous methods to do the most dangerous work.

Soldiers from the 59th CBRN Company "Mountain Dragons" are bolster the Republic of Korea-U.S. Alliance combined defense posture during a rotational deployment near the Korean Demilitarized Zone. (U.S. Army)

Robots are more than a safety concern because there are not enough CBRN professionals to go around. As of 2021, the Army, the largest service with the most CBRN troops, had nearly 6,000 enlisted specialists and slightly more than 300 officers.

By comparison, there were more than 52,000 infantry soldiers and 7,300 officers.

And many of those CBRN capabilities rest with the Guard and Reserve components whose missions vary from the active-duty.

The Reserve has two brigades dedicated to CBRN.

The Guard has its own, focused primarily on homeland defense.

The active Army has only one brigade to cover ongoing training and global operations.

In the coming years, the Army is scheduled to bring new decontamination systems, collective protection gear, individual masks and suits into operation, according to Army auisition data.

The service is replacing its legacy biological equipment with the joint biological tactical detection system, which will give biodefense platoons near real-time detection of airborne biological agents, Bochat said.

Perhaps the centerpiece of equipment efforts is the Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Reconnaissance Vehicle Sensor Suite Upgrade, which offers crews protection and sensors for their immediate area and the ability to launch drones from their vehicles so they can gauge the dangers outside.

To give soldiers less exposure, the service issued a new man-transportable robot, to CBRN and explosives disposal teams that can be outfitted with sensors.

Autonomous efforts are taking longer.

An autonomous decon system, a key development that could save manpower and reduce exposure remains in early testing until at least fiscal year 2027. Additionally, a wearable compact detector has been in development since 2014 and has yet to reach later testing stages.

An autonomous vapor chemical detector is expected to see initial operational capability in fiscal year 2027 but won’t be fully operational until fiscal year 2032.

As changes in doctrine, training and equipment converge in the coming years, soldiers across the force in operational and support units will see more time spent donning gas masks, stocking up on protective gear, planning for the nefarious “what ifs” of a chemical, biological or nuclear attack.

“I think things are better, but they’ve frankly got about three decades worth of lost knowledge that they’re trying to rebuild in real time,” said Peters, the Heritage Foundation nuclear expert. “[Ground commanders] are not really thinking about, oh God, if Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong Un makes a decision to employ these things, there could actually be a number of these things that we have to fight our way through.”

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

Defense News · by Todd South · October 16, 2024

12. How Iran’s Ghost Fleet Sidesteps U.S. Sanctions

Excerpts:

Despite the West’s efforts, Iran has managed to sidestep sanctions with a scheme that sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. “Iran’s ghost fleet, as well as a whole host of black market forces, are what allows the Islamic Republic to earn revenues from two critical sources even while being subject to sanctions—and those sources are crude oil sales and petrochemical sales,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told TMD.

How does a ghost fleet work? The normal process for transporting oil by cargo freight is fairly straightforward. All cargo ships are registered—or “flagged”—under a specific nation, whose regulations they are subject to. This isn’t necessarily the same nation as that of the company that owns the vessels. For example, an American company might flag one of its vessels under the Marshall Islands, which has more lenient regulations. The ship would be registered in the Marshall Islands, pay taxes there, and be subject to the legal code of the Marshall Islands—even if it never visits there. Then, governed by its “legal nationality” alongside the International Law of the Sea, the vessel is free to ply its trade.

Iran’s dark fleet takes advantage of this legal system. Vessels will “flag-hop,” or switch a given ship’s flag multiple times—a task often accomplished with shell companies, ownership changes, and physical modifications to the vessel. Operated by front companies linked to the Iranian government, these ghost ships take advantage of the fact that some countries have extremely limited capacity to keep track of ships registered under their flags and to conduct inspections, enabling the vessels to move oil around the world undetected.

How Iran’s Ghost Fleet Sidesteps U.S. Sanctions

‘The money is only coming from China.’

By Mary Trimble, Grayson Logue, James P. Sutton, and Peter Gattuso

Published October 17, 2024

thedispatch.com · by Mary Trimble

Happy Wednesday! Remember, if you like what we’re doing here and want to give your friends and family a taste of what we’re up to, we’re giving each member five guest passes in honor of The Dispatch’s fifth birthday! With less than three weeks to the election—shudder—gift your loved ones some news they can trust.

Going After Iran’s Ghost Fleet

Last week, the U.S. Treasury and State Departments announced new sanctions that represent the latest salvo in their fight against so-called “ghost fleets.” And that’s not a reference to Davy Jones or the Flying Dutchman.

Rather, the Biden administration slapped penalties on vessels and companies associated with the Iranian government that have enabled an illicit and far-reaching trade in oil to help fund the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and proxy military forces throughout the Middle East.

The “ghost fleet” phenomenon—and the black market it enables—points to the larger success of Iran, Russia, China, and other Western adversaries in working together to evade economic sanctions. Their increased collaboration in this effort is an enduring foreign policy challenge for the U.S.—and indeed for the next president.

The U.S. and its allies have tried to choke off Iran’s oil exports, which provide revenue to fuel the regime’s activity at home and across the region. U.S., European Union, and United Nations sanctions target Iran’s oil and gas exports and its petrochemical industry and also cut Tehran off from the global banking system—largely excluding it from making international money transfers or accessing foreign reserves. The Trump administration imposed most of these sanctions in 2018 after the U.S. withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an Obama-era agreement lifting sanctions on Iran in return for limiting its nuclear program.

The Biden administration has, for the most part, continued with these unilateral penalties, although critics accuse President Joe Biden of lax enforcement. Early in Biden’s presidency, the administration seemed to be inching toward renewing a nuclear deal with Iran—with sensitive negotiations perhaps putting a damper on aggressive sanctions enforcement. Later, others suggested the administration was avoiding fully enforcing the existing sanctions for fear such moves would raise commodity prices during a period of high inflation.

The Iranian regime is almost entirely dependent on its oil production: Up to 70 percent of the government’s revenue comes from oil exports—and those numbers have been rising, perhaps in part because the regime is figuring out how to avoid getting caught in the sanctions web. In 2019, oil production sat at less than 2 million barrels of oil a day, but by 2023, that figure had gone up to 3.5 million, representing an increase of roughly $40 billion in total revenue and record levels of total production.

Despite the West’s efforts, Iran has managed to sidestep sanctions with a scheme that sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. “Iran’s ghost fleet, as well as a whole host of black market forces, are what allows the Islamic Republic to earn revenues from two critical sources even while being subject to sanctions—and those sources are crude oil sales and petrochemical sales,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told TMD.

How does a ghost fleet work? The normal process for transporting oil by cargo freight is fairly straightforward. All cargo ships are registered—or “flagged”—under a specific nation, whose regulations they are subject to. This isn’t necessarily the same nation as that of the company that owns the vessels. For example, an American company might flag one of its vessels under the Marshall Islands, which has more lenient regulations. The ship would be registered in the Marshall Islands, pay taxes there, and be subject to the legal code of the Marshall Islands—even if it never visits there. Then, governed by its “legal nationality” alongside the International Law of the Sea, the vessel is free to ply its trade.

Iran’s dark fleet takes advantage of this legal system. Vessels will “flag-hop,” or switch a given ship’s flag multiple times—a task often accomplished with shell companies, ownership changes, and physical modifications to the vessel. Operated by front companies linked to the Iranian government, these ghost ships take advantage of the fact that some countries have extremely limited capacity to keep track of ships registered under their flags and to conduct inspections, enabling the vessels to move oil around the world undetected.

United Against Nuclear Iran, a New York-based, nonprofit advocacy group, is one of the main sources of information on suspected ghost ships registered in countries like the Cook Islands. The chaotic and decentralized nature of ghost fleets make it extremely difficult for countries to determine who, exactly, is transporting oil.

In 2021, two ships whose flags were registered to the Cook Islands were removed from the country’s flag registry after it was revealed they had been illicitly transporting Iranian oil. One of the ships had allegedly been flying the flag of the Comoro Islands through most of 2020 and switched its flag to the Cook Islands once it came under suspicion of picking up crude oil from an Iranian island. It subsequently hopped to the flag of the Federated States of Micronesia and then to a Samoan flag, making it difficult for these small countries to track their movements.

On Friday, the Treasury and the State Departments issued new sanctions—as part of the U.S. response to Iran’s October 1 ballistic missile attack on Israel—that target some of these ships. The new designations target 16 entities and 23 vessels, dubbing them “blocked property” for their role in enabling illicit Iranian oil sales, funding weapons programs, and underwriting Iranian proxies like Hezbollah. The sanctions can also result in penalties on those who do business with any of the designated ships or entities.

But who are Iran’s customers? There’s essentially only one: China. Beijing purchases approximately 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, while the other 10 percent is sent to Iranian allies like Venezuela and Cuba, either in barter or as economic aid.

China is far from dependent on Iran: While China imports almost three-quarters of the oil it consumes, Iran-sourced oil represents only around 15 percent of China’s total imports. Russia—another country facing myriad Western sanctions—is the largest source of oil for China, supplemented by a variety of Middle Eastern and African sources.

The appeal of Iranian oil lies not in its abundance but rather in its price. The sanctions are a black mark on Iranian exports, depressing demand and, therefore, the price. Iran also discounts the commodity even further as a way to compensate for the complex workarounds needed to purchase the oil. The payoff for China is clear: In 2023, it was estimated that it saved $10 billion by buying oil at record rates from Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—all at a steep discount.

But even if Iran is taking a proverbial bath on the oil that it sells, it is still able to use the limited profits to fund the regime’s projects—but not before cleaning up its cash with sophisticated international money laundering schemes. In 2023, the Financial Times reported that Lloyds and Santander UK, two of the largest banks in the United Kingdom, had provided accounts to British front companies that were in actuality owned by the Petrochemical Commercial Company, which is controlled by the Iranian state. Funds were transferred from Iranian entities in China to U.K.-based accounts to avoid sanctions and allow the money to be moved. The cash was then used to fund the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and proxy militias in the Middle East.

Hong Kong—previously a bastion of well-regulated financial institutions fully integrated into the Western monetary system—also has become a hub of sanctions evasion, Iranian and otherwise. Access to its financial institutions has become a key part of “sanctions busting,” or evading international sanctions. As China has steadily eroded the enclave’s semi-sovereign status since 2019, the financial center has become less of a safe entry for Western companies into China and more of a conduit for Chinese infiltration of Western institutions. “The West has to look very differently at Hong Kong post-2019, both as a sanctions-busting jurisdiction as well as a potential forward deployment in the international financial system,” said Taleblu.

“Third countries”—neither Iran, the seller, nor China, the buyer—have become a key part of Iranian sanctions evasion. Both Singapore and Malaysia have played host to companies enabling the shipment of Iranian oil and the movement of ill-gotten funds—and Malaysian companies have faced U.S. sanctions.

Just as China is giving Iran a hand in avoiding the Western dragnet, Tehran—in addition to providing Russia with lethal aid—also has helped Moscow avoid the worst of the theoretically crippling sanctions the West applied in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “Russia quickly becomes even more sanctioned than Iran” in 2022 after the invasion, Iulia Joja, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and director of its Black Sea Program, told TMD. “And then they have the choice: Are they doing this alone, or are they cooperating?” Iran was more than happy to oblige, Joja said, giving Russia technical advice to set up its own ghost fleet and even potentially lending it ships during those initial months.

So do these new sanctions represent a step forward in combating Iranian oil exports? “I would classify what [the Biden administration has] done now as necessary but not sufficient,” Taleblu said. “The fact that designations are important does not necessarily mean they are impactful. Because there’s no doubt about the U.S. capability. There’s a doubt about the will to continue to play this shell game over time.”

But even if sanctions are tightened on Iran and Russia, that’s only half the job: Their biggest customer, China, would also have to be integrated into the strategic vision of the United States and its allies to make Iran and Russia feel the bite. “The main enabler is China; neither Iran nor Russia would be able to do so well and to survive so well or maintain their war efforts—whether we’re talking about the Middle East or about Ukraine—if they wouldn’t have China’s help,” said Joja. The Biden administration has sanctioned some Chinese firms, but the effort has been relatively piecemeal.

Taleblu thinks that the next administration, whether Republican or Democrat, will be better positioned than many previous presidencies to begin implementing a more comprehensive strategy. “This will be a test for the next U.S. president,” he told TMD. “How can you take advantage of this bipartisan or even, dare I say, nonpartisan policy consensus on getting tough on China? To thread that needle through the Iran oil sanctions enforcement, what Chinese financial institutions do you have to go after?”

But all sanctions on the Middle Kingdom risk incurring Chinese retaliation and carry costs—administrative, financial, and logistical—of their own. When the winner of next month’s election is inaugurated in January, he or she will have to decide whether and how to confront cooperation among Iran and the U.S.’s other chief rivals.

“What Iran and Russia are trying to do, the havoc that they’re wreaking in their respective regions and areas of concentration, they do that with very, very little money,” said Joja. “The money is only coming from China.”

thedispatch.com · by Mary Trimble

13. We Are in Need of Renaissance People

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Probably one of the best lines of Stoic philosophy and it was written by Kris Kirstofferson.

Is overspecialization harming us?

Excerpts:

Overspecialization has helped make vulnerable and sometimes doomed complex top-down societies from the Mycenaeans to the Aztecs to the Soviets. A tiny, credentialed, and often incestuous elite manages the lives of a vast underclass whose daily lives are scripted by top-down master planners—as an autonomous and skeptical middle class disappears.

America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.

The overclass cult lacks sufficient common sense and pragmatic expertise outside their narrow areas of specialization to direct society, and the masses are often without the education, money, and power to challenge them or the esoteric complexity of their modern society. And the result is often disastrous, as we see everywhere, from the trivial to the existential—from our currently paralyzed state space station program and inability to build a floating pier in Gaza, to ineffectual and insensitive state responses to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene and an increasingly dangerously incompetent Secret Service.

Renaissance people provide a link to the proverbial people, as they master almost anything they attempt while keeping themselves attuned to the practical effect of their achievement among the people.

The Renaissance physicist Richard Feynman once explained to the entire nation why the space shuttle Challenger catastrophically imploded shortly after launch in 1986. A polymath, Albert Einstein explained to America why it had to begin the Manhattan Project and beat Nazi Germany to the acquisition of an atomic bomb. Theodore Roosevelt used his expertise as a politician, conservationist, outdoorsman, explorer, and writer to help establish and preserve 230 million acres of public lands.

So, we should occasionally pause and reflect on the Kristoffersons and Musks in our midst. They play a vital role in enriching culture and civilization for the many without becoming part of the narrow few. And we owe these people, who belong to a rare and hallowed caste of the ages, for making our lives richer, more enjoyable, easier, and safer.

We need more Kris Kristoffersons, et el.

We Are in Need of Renaissance People

We have created a society of professionals who are experts within their narrow specialties. Those are not the people who get great things done.

https://www.thefp.com/p/renaissance-people-ben-franklin-elon-musk

By Victor Davis Hanson

October 14, 2024

The songwriter, actor, country-western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes Scholar, Pomona College- and University of Oxford-degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate Kris Kristofferson died last month at 88.

Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star acting roles in A Star Is Born (1976) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), his numerous solo albums, especially with then-spouse and singer Rita Coolidge, and the country group super-quartet The Highwaymen he formed with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.

In other words, Kristofferson was a rare Renaissance man who could do it all in an age of increasingly narrow specialization and expertise.

At certain times throughout history at particular locales, we have seen such singular people from all walks of life.

Classical Athens produced polymaths like Aristotle—tutor to Alexander the Great, logician, student of music, art, and literature, educator, think-tank founder, biologist, philosopher, and scientist. Later Greeks like Archimedes and Ptolemy, as men of action, mastered six or seven disciplines and applied their abstract knowledge in ways that made life easier for those around them.

The late Roman Republic was another cauldron of multitalented geniuses. It produced the brilliant stylist, historian, politician, and consummate general Julius Caesar as well as his republican archrival Cicero—politician, philosopher, orator, master stylist, lawyer, and provincial governor.

Turn-of-the-century Victorian Great Britain produced giants like Winston Churchill—prime minister, statesman, essayist, historian, orator, strategist, and wartime veteran. As Britain’s war leader, between May 10, 1940, and June 22, 1941, he, almost alone, resisted the Axis powers and prevented Adolf Hitler from winning World War II.

But we associate the idea of a Renaissance man mostly with Florence, Italy, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In that brief 100 years, the Florentine Republic hosted multitalented geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci—master painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, and inventor—best known for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

The multifaceted talents of his younger contemporary Michelangelo were as astounding, whether defined by his iconic sculptures David and Pietà, his stunning painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or as the master architect of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.

The American Revolution was a similar cradle of Renaissance men. Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most famous example of unchecked abstract and pragmatic genius displayed in almost every facet of late eighteenth– and early nineteenth-century life—main author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. president, founder of the University of Virginia, inventor, agronomist, architect, and diplomat.

But Benjamin Franklin may best approximate the model of the Florentine Renaissance holistic brilliance—journalist, publisher, printer, author, politician, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and philosopher.

Franklin’s life was one of perpetual motion and achievement. In one lifetime, he helped to draft the Constitution, invented the lightning rod and bifocals, founded the American postal service, and successfully won over European countries to the nascent American cause. Theodore Roosevelt—president, historian, essayist, conservationist, naturalist, combat veteran, battle leader, explorer, and cowboy—exemplified the idea of an American president as the master at almost everything else.

The history of our own contemporary Renaissance people often suggests that they are not fully appreciated until after their deaths—especially in the post–World War II era.

Why?

We have created a sophisticated modern society that is so compartmentalized by “professionals” and the credentialed that those who excel simultaneously in several disciplines are often castigated for “amateurism,” “spreading themselves too thinly,” “not staying in their lanes,” or not being degreed with the proper prerequisite letters—BA, BS, MA, PhD, MD, JD, or MBA—in the various fields that they master.

But specialization is the enemy of genius, as is the tyranny of credentialism.

Because the Renaissance figure is not perfect in every discipline he masters, we damn him for too much breadth and not enough depth—a dabbler rather than an expert—failing to realize that his successes in most genres he masters and redefines is precisely because he brings a vast corpus of unique insights and experience to his work that narrower specialists lack. The Greek poet Archilochus first delineated the contrast between the fox who “knows many things” and the hedgehog who “knows one—one big thing.” We have become a nation of elite hedgehogs, whose narrow expertise is not enriched by awareness of or interest in the wider human experience.

Renaissance people often live controversial lives and receive 360-degree incoming criticism, not surprising given the many fields in which they upstage specialists and question experts—and the sometimes overweening nature of their personalities that feel no reason to place boundaries and lanes on their geniuses and behavior or to temper their exuberances.

The best American example of the current age is the controversial Elon Musk, a truly Renaissance figure who has revolutionized at least half a dozen entire fields.

No one prior had broken the Big Three auto monopoly of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler.

Musk did just that. He exploded all three companies’ dominance with his successful creation of the first viable electric vehicle, Tesla, whose comfort, drivability, reliability, safety, and power rivaled or exceeded the models of all his competitors.

His spin-off battery storage and solar panel companies allowed thousands of families to go off the grid and stay self-sufficient in power usage.

Musk’s revolutionary Starlink internet system—a mere five years old—provides global online service to over 100 countries. Through its some-7,000 satellites, Starlink brings internet service to remote residents far more effectively and cheaply than do their own governments. When natural disasters overwhelm utilities or war disrupts the normality of peace, all look to Musk to restore online connections to the outside world.

Musk, almost single-handedly, transformed the U.S. space program from a NASA 60-year-old government monopoly to an arena of fervent private-public competition. His Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) created a rocket and spacecraft program that has kept the U.S. preeminent in space exploration and reliable satellite launches. When NASA and old aerospace companies falter, the government looks to Musk to bail them out.

Musk, at great personal cost, radically transformed the old Twitter—poorly managed, censorious of ideas and expressions not deemed progressive, and mired in scandal for partnering with the FBI to silence news deemed possibly injurious to Democratic candidates and left-wing campaigns.

His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearinghouse, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X.

Musk’s newest companies have now entered the convoluted, little-understood, radically competitive, and dangerous field of artificial intelligence (xAI) and the emerging discipline of bonding the natural brain to the electronic online world (Neuralink). To the degree Musk is successful, America will lead these areas of intense international rivalry that involve the gravest issues of national security and survival.

Overspecialization has helped make vulnerable and sometimes doomed complex top-down societies from the Mycenaeans to the Aztecs to the Soviets. A tiny, credentialed, and often incestuous elite manages the lives of a vast underclass whose daily lives are scripted by top-down master planners—as an autonomous and skeptical middle class disappears.

America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.

The overclass cult lacks sufficient common sense and pragmatic expertise outside their narrow areas of specialization to direct society, and the masses are often without the education, money, and power to challenge them or the esoteric complexity of their modern society. And the result is often disastrous, as we see everywhere, from the trivial to the existential—from our currently paralyzed state space station program and inability to build a floating pier in Gaza, to ineffectual and insensitive state responses to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene and an increasingly dangerously incompetent Secret Service.

Renaissance people provide a link to the proverbial people, as they master almost anything they attempt while keeping themselves attuned to the practical effect of their achievement among the people.

The Renaissance physicist Richard Feynman once explained to the entire nation why the space shuttle Challenger catastrophically imploded shortly after launch in 1986. A polymath, Albert Einstein explained to America why it had to begin the Manhattan Project and beat Nazi Germany to the acquisition of an atomic bomb. Theodore Roosevelt used his expertise as a politician, conservationist, outdoorsman, explorer, and writer to help establish and preserve 230 million acres of public lands.

So, we should occasionally pause and reflect on the Kristoffersons and Musks in our midst. They play a vital role in enriching culture and civilization for the many without becoming part of the narrow few. And we owe these people, who belong to a rare and hallowed caste of the ages, for making our lives richer, more enjoyable, easier, and safer.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished visiting fellow at Hillsdale College and a classicist and historian as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. This article is reprinted from his Substack “The Blade of Perseus.”

14. Iran warns Israel against retaliation for missile attack

Iran warns Israel against retaliation for missile attack

By Elwely Elwelly, Maya Gebeily and Abdelhadi Ramahi

October 17, 20246:12 AM EDTUpdated 37 min ago

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/16-dead-israeli-strike-lebanese-municipality-building-2024-10-16/?utm

Item 1 of 8 Smoke billows over Arnoun, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Marjayoun, near the Lebanese border with Israel, October 17, 2024. REUTERS/Karamallah Daher

[1/8]Smoke billows over Arnoun, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Marjayoun, near the Lebanese border with Israel, October 17, 2024. REUTERS/Karamallah Daher Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Summary

LATEST DEVELOPMENTSEgypt's Sisi meets Iranian foreign minister to discuss regional crisisIsrael issues new evacuation orders in Lebanon

DUBAI/BEIRUT, Oct 17 (Reuters) - The commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards warned Israel on Thursday against attacking the Islamic Republic in retaliation for a missile barrage as the Israeli military stepped up its offensive in Lebanon against Tehran-backed Hezbollah.

Fears of a wider Middle East conflict have grown as Israel plans its response to the Oct. 1 missile attack carried out by Iran after Israeli airstrikes on Iranian-allied militants.

"We tell you (Israel) that if you commit any aggression against any point we will painfully attack the same point of yours," Hossein Salami said in a televised speech, adding that Iran can penetrate Israel's defences.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday about Israel's operations in Lebanon and Gaza, aiming to avert a regional war.

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, on a Middle East tour, met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo, with Sisi reiterating Egypt's call to avoid an expansion of the conflict, the Egyptian presidency said.

However Israel shows no signs of easing its military campaigns against Hezbollah in Lebanon after assassinating several of its leaders, and Hamas in Gaza and it has vowed to punish Iran for its Oct. 1 attack.

Israel struck Syria's port city of Latakia early on Thursday, Syrian state media reported, and the United States said it carried out strikes on Wednesday in areas of Yemen controlled by Iran-aligned Houthis.

Qatar, which has mediated in numerous failed ceasefire talks, said there had been no engagement with any parties for the last three to four weeks on the Gaza war.

Israeli airstrikes killed 11 Palestinians in Gaza City on Thursday, medics said, while Israeli forces sent tanks into Jabalia in the north, where Palestinians and United Nations officials expressed alarm over shortages of food and medicine.

On its northern front in Lebanon, Israel has said it will not stop fighting a now weakened Hezbollah before it can safely return its citizens to their homes near the Lebanese border and said any ceasefire negotiations will be held "under fire".

EVACUATION ORDERS

The Israeli military said on Thursday that over the past 24 hours it had killed 45 Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, including a battalion commander, and seized many weapons.

Israeli operations in Lebanon have killed at least 2,350 people over the last year, according to the health ministry, and more than 1.2 million people have been displaced. The death toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but includes hundreds of women and children.

Around 50 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in the same period, according to Israel.

The Israeli military on Thursday issued evacuation warnings for residents of the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon focusing on three buildings in Tamnine town, and Saraain El Tahta and Sefri villages where it said Hezbollah maintained facilities.

"For your safety and the safety of your family, you must evacuate this building and the surrounding buildings immediately and stay at least 500 meters away from them," military spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted on X.

The mayor of a major town in south Lebanon was among 16 people killed on Wednesday when an Israeli airstrike destroyed its municipal headquarters in the biggest attack on an official Lebanese state building since the Israeli air campaign began.

Lebanese officials denounced the incident, which also wounded more than 50 people in Nabatieh, a provincial capital, saying it was proof that Israel's campaign against the Hezbollah armed group was now shifting to target the Lebanese state.

Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting since the militant group began firing missiles at its arch-foe a year ago in support of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza and the conflict has sharply escalated in recent weeks.

Abdelnaser, a man displaced from Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold which Israel has repeatedly bombed, was on the waterfront early on Thursday morning. He recalled Lebanon's long list of tragedies over the years.

"War has become normal for us. We know that every 10 years Lebanon gets built, and every 10 years it gets destroyed again," he said.

Get the latest news and expert analysis about the state of the global economy with the Reuters Econ World newsletter. Sign up here.

Reporting by Laila Bassam and Timour Azhar in Beirut, Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo, Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Stephen Coates, Philippa Fletcher and Ros Russell

15. From Chaos to Influence: The Implications of Natural Disasters on America’s Foreign Policy

Excerpts:

Conclusion: Turning Crisis into Opportunity Through Strategic Diplomacy

Natural disasters are more than humanitarian challenges—they are geopolitical events that shape the global landscape and influence U.S. foreign policy. For the United States, disaster diplomacy offers a unique opportunity to project soft power, build alliances, and promote stability in key regions.

As disasters continue to disrupt fragile states and global supply chains, the U.S. must adopt a proactive approach that integrates humanitarian aid with long-term recovery efforts. Strategic investments in resilient infrastructure and transparent development programs will not only mitigate future crises but also enhance America’s influence in the global arena.

By aligning disaster response with national interests, the U.S. can turn crises into opportunities, ensuring that its foreign policy promotes stability, security, and prosperity in a rapidly changing world.

From Chaos to Influence: The Implications of Natural Disasters on America’s Foreign Policy

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/from-chaos-to-influence-the-implications-of-natural-disasters-on-america-s-foreign-policy?postId=

The recent events in Florida highlight just how impactful natural disasters can be domestically. Expanding on this issue, natural disasters are not just humanitarian crises—they are geopolitical events that shape global power dynamics, disrupt economies, and challenge national security frameworks globally. For United States foreign policy, these events present both risks and opportunities. Hurricanes in the Caribbean, earthquakes in Asia, and floods in Africa can destabilize fragile states, disrupt migration flows, and threaten trade routes. At the same time, disaster diplomacy offers the U.S. opportunities to project soft power, strengthen alliances, and counter the influence of strategic rivals.

American foreign policymakers must navigate the complex intersection of disaster response, humanitarian aid, and geopolitical competition. Effective engagement requires balancing immediate relief with long-term recovery efforts, building resilience, and ensuring that U.S. efforts promote stability while advancing strategic interests.

Challenges of Natural Disasters: Strategic Risks and Security Threats

Natural disasters frequently trigger large-scale humanitarian emergencies, overwhelming governments and creating conditions that destabilize entire regions. In fragile states, disasters can exacerbate existing challenges such as poverty, corruption, and weak governance. When local governments fail to respond effectively, it opens the door to social unrest, political instability, and displacement.

The United States has a history of deploying humanitarian aid in disaster-affected regions, with agencies like USAID and the Department of Defense providing rapid relief. However, these crises often have lasting consequences, including mass migration. For example, disasters in Central America, such as hurricanes, have contributed to migration flows toward the U.S. southern border, creating diplomatic and political challenges. Managing these migration pressures requires not only immediate aid but also long-term engagement to address the underlying drivers of instability.

Natural disasters can significantly disrupt global supply chains, particularly in regions critical to U.S. trade and investment. Earthquakes, floods, and typhoons in Asia can interrupt manufacturing hubs, while hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico can impact energy markets. These disruptions have downstream effects on U.S. industries that rely on imports and affect the broader global economy.

Recovery in disaster-hit areas can also become a strategic competition. Countries seeking aid for rebuilding may turn to geopolitical rivals, such as China, for infrastructure financing through initiatives like the Belt and Road. To protect its interests and prevent rivals from gaining influence, the U.S. must position itself as a preferred partner in rebuilding efforts, offering transparent aid and sustainable development alternatives.

Opportunities for U.S. Leadership Through Disaster Diplomacy

While natural disasters create challenges, they also present opportunities for the U.S. to advance its diplomatic agenda, strengthen alliances, and promote stability through well-coordinated disaster diplomacy. For the U.S. military, disaster response operations—such as airlifting supplies or restoring critical infrastructure—are often essential in stabilizing regions. These efforts not only save lives but also demonstrate U.S. commitment to regional security, reinforcing alliances and deterring adversaries.

Humanitarian aid allows the U.S. to showcase its values, demonstrating leadership and compassion on the world stage. Quick and decisive responses to disasters build goodwill with foreign populations and strengthen relationships with governments. For example, the U.S. response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami not only provided life-saving aid but also improved diplomatic relations with Indonesia and India. This act of disaster diplomacy highlighted the power of humanitarian assistance as a tool for advancing U.S. influence in critical regions.

Soft power plays a crucial role in shaping how the U.S. is perceived internationally, particularly in regions where rivals are also competing for influence. Effective disaster response reinforces America’s reputation as a reliable partner, providing an alternative to transactional aid programs from other powers, such as China and Russia.

Disaster response also presents opportunities to deepen collaboration with international partners and multilateral institutions. The U.S. actively works with the United Nations, NATO, and regional organizations to promote disaster preparedness, share resources, and enhance global coordination. Joint exercises, cross-border disaster drills, and resource-sharing agreements help build trust among allies and improve collective response capabilities.

By leading multilateral initiatives, the U.S. reinforces global norms that align with its strategic interests. Strengthening international frameworks for disaster response ensures that countries work together efficiently during crises and builds long-term partnerships that promote regional stability.

The aftermath of disasters provides opportunities for the U.S. to promote development strategies that align with its foreign policy goals. Investments in disaster-resistant infrastructure, communications systems, and early warning technologies help countries recover more quickly and reduce future vulnerabilities. These investments also foster economic growth, making regions more stable and less susceptible to future crises.

Resilient development is particularly important in areas vulnerable to recurrent disasters, such as the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. By offering sustainable alternatives to Chinese-backed infrastructure projects, the U.S. can help these regions recover while promoting transparency and good governance. This approach not only strengthens bilateral ties but also ensures that recovery efforts do not undermine U.S. influence.

Conclusion: Turning Crisis into Opportunity Through Strategic Diplomacy

Natural disasters are more than humanitarian challenges—they are geopolitical events that shape the global landscape and influence U.S. foreign policy. For the United States, disaster diplomacy offers a unique opportunity to project soft power, build alliances, and promote stability in key regions.

As disasters continue to disrupt fragile states and global supply chains, the U.S. must adopt a proactive approach that integrates humanitarian aid with long-term recovery efforts. Strategic investments in resilient infrastructure and transparent development programs will not only mitigate future crises but also enhance America’s influence in the global arena.

By aligning disaster response with national interests, the U.S. can turn crises into opportunities, ensuring that its foreign policy promotes stability, security, and prosperity in a rapidly changing world.

16. Regional war in Asia would be a 'global problem' for the US, Pacific Army chief warns

Excerpts:

Those elements of Chinese military power, rocket forces and anti-access/area denial capabilities—known as A2AD—create huge potential problems for the Navy and Air Force. Ships, which are observable from Chinese satellites, would be vulnerable to missile attack, while the Air Force relies heavily on visible runways that would also be open to attack in the event of a conflict. The U.S. Army can provide “an asymmetric counterweight that's unmatchable,” Flynn says.

It’s a big part of the reason Flynn has worked to make the U.S. Army in the Pacific relevant in multiple domains, to develop a force that can protect air and maritime assets and work across air, sea, and space.

China has “the primary means of their attack approach, with their A2AD arsenal, against the strength of the United States, that strength is in the air and in the maritime domains,” as well as space and cyberspace, Flynn said. However, that Chinese arsenal was “not designed to find, fix, and finish land-based forces that are distributed, dispersed, mobile, reloadable network.”

Regional war in Asia would be a 'global problem' for the US, Pacific Army chief warns

The Army’s transformation in the Pacific is the “game changer” against China, says Gen. Charles Flynn.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

The top U.S. Army commander in the Pacific region is sounding alarms about China’s “dangerous trajectory” and the rising threat of a war in Asia.

Gen. Charles Flynn, the outgoing commander of U.S. Army Pacific, said increased coordination and technology exchange between autocratic states such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is a “very dangerous combination that we all should pay very, very close attention to”—in no small part because that coordination is putting greater pressure on the United States everywhere the military is conducting operations.

“There's a limited regional war going on in Europe. There's a limited regional war going on in the Middle East. We can ill afford another limited regional war in Asia. Why? Because it will be a global problem for all of us,” Flynn said at the AUSA conference, one of several D.C.-area venues he addressed this week.

In a farewell tour of sorts before he leaves his command in November, Flynn hit the capital city to address the AUSA conference, speak to reporters, and also appear at the Center for a New American Security to address policy wonks. For many outside of Washington, the name Flynn conjures recollections of his brother Mike, Donald Trump’s disgraced national security advisor and conspiracy pusher. (It’s an open secret that the brothers are not on good terms.) But the military and national security community knows Charles Flynn as a transformative figure in the U.S. Army and consummate champion for the importance of the U.S. Army in the Pacific in a fight against China.

“I would argue that this century is going to be defined by the relationship between the United States and China in Asia,” he said this week.

Flynn also argued that the Army would be critical in a fight with China. It’s not the obvious position in a region known less for its land masses than its oceans and vast distances. But he said the Army has undergone a profound transformation to make it not only relevant but essential.

“I often remind people that you're not going to invade Taiwan with the Navy and Air Force. You need to generate an invasion force to invade Taiwan. Well, that invasion force exists in the [Chinese] eastern theater command and it is three army groups, and it's north of 55,000 Chinese soldiers in those combat brigades,” he said.

But China, beginning with its 2015 reorganization and modernization push, has become a much more capable military. It’s a transformation that Flynn says in many ways mirrors how the United States military develops forces, with a large emphasis on the development of training centers, “taking pages right out of our book and putting them in place to build a force.”

Additionally, China has developed a massive rocket force and anti-access area denial capabilities. “It is historical in the scale of what they have…They have three things that we lack. They're operating on interior lines that are right there. They have mass, and then they have magazine depth. These three things are what we have to counter,” he said.

Those elements of Chinese military power, rocket forces and anti-access/area denial capabilities—known as A2AD—create huge potential problems for the Navy and Air Force. Ships, which are observable from Chinese satellites, would be vulnerable to missile attack, while the Air Force relies heavily on visible runways that would also be open to attack in the event of a conflict. The U.S. Army can provide “an asymmetric counterweight that's unmatchable,” Flynn says.

It’s a big part of the reason Flynn has worked to make the U.S. Army in the Pacific relevant in multiple domains, to develop a force that can protect air and maritime assets and work across air, sea, and space.

China has “the primary means of their attack approach, with their A2AD arsenal, against the strength of the United States, that strength is in the air and in the maritime domains,” as well as space and cyberspace, Flynn said. However, that Chinese arsenal was “not designed to find, fix, and finish land-based forces that are distributed, dispersed, mobile, reloadable network.”

Flynn lacks his brother’s appetite for political statements, but he’s not afraid to call out the military for what he sees as strategic errors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he believes those errors stem from a systematic and decades-long underestimation of the importance of the U.S. Army to match China.

“I would argue that for many, many years, we've over invested in the aerial layer and over invested in the space layer. In the Indo-Pacific, we have to have a terrestrial collection layer, and that is a series of sensors that could both collect in all domains, to include open source, and share that with our partners,” he said.

Changing the game

To correct those perceived oversights, the U.S. Army has built new capabilities to attack China in new ways, even across long distances. One significant example: Multi-domain Task Force, or MDTF, teams.

“A few short years ago, this was merely a concept,” Flynn explained. “Now, it's an organization that’s got four battalions, got a sustainment battalion, it's got an integrated air-and-missile-defense battalion. It's got a long-range precision-fires battalion, and then it's got a multi-domain effects battalion and a task force headquarters.”

Those MDTF teams play a critical role in helping the Air Force and Navy be more effective in the Pacific, he said, by gathering information and intelligence the Chinese can’t easily counter, and providing options for hitting China from locations that aren’t so easy for enemy forces to find and hit.

“To me, that is game changing when it comes to being able to do missile defense and then being able to do counter-strike with long-range fires,” he said. “We have a theater information directorate. We have a theater strike effects group. This is space. This is information. This is lethal and non-lethal targeting all brought together at the operational level, at the theater army, so that the multi-domain task forces can take the long-range precision fires, from hypersonics to mid-range capability to (precision strike missiles), integrated air and missile defense… etc, to include future vertical lift sustainment capabilities, distributed forces, network forces, meshed forces, cellular forces—all in support of the joint force.”

The Army has worked hard to develop air and drone defenses, and is planning a composite air defense battalion to be based of Guam starting in 2027. But the service is putting new air defense capabilities into place now at multiple levels to counter the threat of China’s enormous stockpile of rockets, missiles, and drones.

“I think the advance of these advanced composite air defense battalions, where we bring together the integrated fire protection platform, the LTM sensor, IBCS RIG-360 and ALPS towers…that with what we're doing with THAAD and Patriot and the [integrated air and missile defense] and, the software integration of those… This ability to be able to have what was originally designed to be a defensive capability, to sense and do an intercept and then to cross cue an offensive platform, to do counter strike,” is a huge improvement over a traditional, simple air defense capability.

The other key new advantage the Army now offers is the many allies and partners across the region that it has built close relationships with through joint exercises. By contrast, China is “doing it in a way that is, in many ways, is helping us, because it's turning the allies and partners away from them,” he said.

INDOPACOM officials routinely point out the importance of more partners in the region—including governments and militaries that have difficult histories with each other—now not only participating in exercises together but actually asking to do so. Aside from seeing China as a threat, the other common feature among those militaries is actually the outsized role of their various armies. “The region is defined by armies… In the Philippines’ army, they have 12 divisions. They have more divisions than we have in the U.S.,” Flynn said.

The Taiwan question

If there is one area where Flynn is a bit more reticent, it’s the potential of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Military officials in in 2021 said that invasion could occur by 2027, making that assessment based in no small part on the words of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the rapid modernization of Chinese forces.

“I take him for his word, because if I did otherwise, and I think if any military leader did otherwise, that would be irresponsible,” Flynn said.

But when Defense One asked him specifically if he believed that moving U.S. forces, such as an MDTF team or Marine Littoral Regiment, to Taiwan might deter such an attack, he answered simply: “That is absolutely a policy question. I'm not going to render my opinion on it…We have a long standing relationship with Taiwan.”

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

17. China on ‘insidious’ path, says US Army Pacific commander after Taiwan exercise

Is China making us focus exactly on what China wants us to focus on? What are we missing?

China on ‘insidious’ path, says US Army Pacific commander after Taiwan exercise

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · October 16, 2024

Chinese fighters fly within view of Taiwan's Central Mountain Range, Oct. 14, 2024, in this screenshot of a video released by China's Eastern Theater Command. (China's Eastern Theater Command)

U.S. Army Pacific’s commander took the measure of China’s military during a virtual fireside chat on Tuesday, a day after Chinese ships and aircraft swarmed around Taiwan for a daylong military exercise.

China on Monday sent 153 warplanes, a one-day record, across the Taiwan Strait median, the unofficial dividing line between the island and mainland China, during exercise Joint Sword 2024B. The aircraft carrier Liaoning and another two dozen ships joined the drills, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense wrote on social platform X on Monday and Tuesday.

The training happened four days after Taiwan marked National Day, its founding holiday, and a speech by Taiwan President Lai Ching-te. China launched a similar, two-day exercise, Joint Sword 2024A, in May after Lai’s inauguration.

These exercises result from Beijing’s decadelong effort to modernize and reorganize its military, which bodes ill for the Indo-Pacific, according to Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific.

“The incremental path that they’ve been on, the insidious nature of that path, in other words, the lawfare, corruption, the behavior and some of the ways forces are operating out there - that is concerning,” he said during a talk for the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, speaks at the AUSA Contemporary Military Forum in Washington, D.C. Oct. 14, 2024. (Leroy Council/U.S. Army)

On Wednesday, a spokesman for China’s Office of Taiwan Affairs reiterated that force remains an option for bringing Taiwan into a union with the mainland. It regards Taiwan as a breakaway province that must be returned to the fold.

“We are willing to strive for the prospect of peaceful reunification with the utmost sincerity and endeavor,” spokesman Chen Binhua said at a press briefing Wednesday, Reuters reported that day. “But we will never commit ourselves to renouncing the use of force.”

Monday’s exercise was punishment for Taiwan because Lai had colluded with foreign powers, damaged Taiwan-China relations, threatened stability in the region and “stubbornly adhered to the position of Taiwan independence,” China’s Taiwan affairs office said in a statement.

Lai’s statements on Taiwan sovereignty since his inauguration, however, differ little from those of his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, according to Norah Huang, director for international relations at the Prospect Foundation, a security and foreign affairs think tank in Taipei.

China’s reunification goals are less about nationalism and more about “expansionist imperialism,” she told Stars and Stripes by email Wednesday.

“As [Beijing] continues rolling out military modernization and reforms, China is definitely more confident in leveraging its military to amplify intimidation against Taiwan,” Huang said.

As it strengthens, China has also taken increasingly aggressive actions against neighboring countries, including territorial disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea and frequent drills around Taiwan.

Broadening his remarks, Flynn said Chinese intimidation “in many ways is helping us” as the U.S. builds a “security architecture” in the region.

“I do think that U.S. leadership in that area carries a great weight,” he said. “There is a — in the neighborhood there — an economic relationship of necessity that goes on with China. It’s undeniable.”

But the U.S. is the “security partner of choice” among those same countries, Flynn said. “We need to continue to invest and work on that every single day because it’s vitally important to the region.”

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · October 16, 2024

18. How the Pentagon’s financial audit will help win wars

Excerpts:

One key to finishing the transformation is making sure the audit is viewed not as simply a financial matter but as commanders’ business. By emphasizing the warfighting value, the DoD can ensure that audit remediations contribute not only to closing financial documentation gaps but also to closing kill chains with the speed and exactness required in today’s complex battlespace.

We’ve spent great treasure to gain extensive knowledge about our adversaries—even though they are never 100 percent knowable—but we have much to gain by improving knowledge about ourselves in a way that provides operational relevance, an effort that is completely within our control. In many ways, no matter if DoD ever “passes” a full financial statement audit, if remediation is done right, it is a step toward remedying this imbalance, creating the visibility we need to know ourselves better and improving our ability to fight and win.

How the Pentagon’s financial audit will help win wars

The cultural and technological drive toward transparency will ultimately make U.S. forces more effective.

By Elaine McCusker, Mark Easton and Greg Little

October 16, 2024 02:36 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Elaine McCusker

In about four weeks, despite all the progress being made, we will likely hear that the Pentagon has again failed its annual financial audit. But the headlines will also likely miss the most important point: the warfighting benefits that are accumulating now as a result of the audit. Far from a mere compliance exercise, the cultural and technological changes required to pass an audit are the same ones necessary to keep U.S. forces dominant.

For the Defense Department to pass its audit, it must account for more than dollars. It must track the vast array of things the military uses: munitions, spare parts, fuel, real estate. Moreover, it must track the condition of these things: In the shop? Ready for use? In the field? And it must do so accurately and in real time. All this requires comprehensive changes. Cyber security must be improved, systems integrated, processes and automation deployed to ensure the accuracy of data, and more.

Undaunted, DOD has attacked these problems with resolve and money. Over the past five years, the department has spent more than $4 billion to improve visibility and transparency. Efforts to pass the audit have helped integrate data from finance, logistics, and readiness systems, breaking down longstanding silos and making it possible to see across the entire defense enterprise. What was once a cumbersome and time-consuming process—yielding outputs that were neither timely nor reliable—has become more streamlined.

These changes are already yielding benefits. By improving visibility into resources, the DoD has made strides in ensuring that the right resources are available at the right time and that limited dollars are not put toward duplicative capabilities.

But the benefits go far beyond the record-keeping necessary for a clean financial bill of health. By improving the flow of data, the audit effort is helping to ensure U.S. military dominance into the future.

Tomorrow’s victories will increasingly depend on decision advantage: the ability to make faster and better decisions than adversaries by harnessing accurate, reliable, and timely data. This is why the Pentagon is working to link all warfare domains through its CJADC2 efforts, enabling data to flow seamlessly between platforms.

Imagine a scenario in the Indo-Pacific where tensions between the U.S. and a near-peer adversary, such as China, have escalated, making the ability to close the kill chain quickly and effectively paramount. U.S. forces use intelligence assets—ranging from satellites and UAVs to cyber intelligence—to rapidly identify and track enemy movements. This sensor data is then transmitted to a CJADC2 command center, where it is fused into a single operational picture. Commanders then use this data for targeting, which also shows what strike assets—fighter jets, ships, or missile systems—are ready for deployment. As U.S. forces use precision-guided munitions to strike the enemy fleet, cyber capabilities are also deployed to protect U.S. systems and disable enemy communications. Finally, UAVs conduct a battle damage assessment, providing commanders with immediate feedback on the success of the mission.

The data integration promoted by the audit promises to enable commanders—from small units up to unified commands—to access information about the availability and the condition of munitions, vehicles, equipment, parts, and supplies. As the above example illustrates, this visibility is essential for warfighting, as it allows commanders to allocate resources effectively. A unified, enterprise-wide view will enable them to move with speed and surety, whether responding to emerging threats or executing long-term strategic operations. Accurate, real-time data on asset quantities, condition, and location will enable the use of automation, data analytics, and AI in decision-making and execution.

There remains much work to be done before this vision comes to pass. The improvements to date will only yield full operational benefits if they are integrated into real-time decision-making processes that can adjust to the demands of fast-moving, contested environments.

This requires cultural change. The entire defense enterprise must shift from a compliance-driven, labor-intensive audit remediation mindset to one focused on mission outcomes. But this is already taking place. Historically, data transparency and integration across the defense enterprise were counter-cultural. The audit has pushed the DoD toward greater transparency, data integration, and enterprise-wide standards.

One key to finishing the transformation is making sure the audit is viewed not as simply a financial matter but as commanders’ business. By emphasizing the warfighting value, the DoD can ensure that audit remediations contribute not only to closing financial documentation gaps but also to closing kill chains with the speed and exactness required in today’s complex battlespace.

We’ve spent great treasure to gain extensive knowledge about our adversaries—even though they are never 100 percent knowable—but we have much to gain by improving knowledge about ourselves in a way that provides operational relevance, an effort that is completely within our control. In many ways, no matter if DoD ever “passes” a full financial statement audit, if remediation is done right, it is a step toward remedying this imbalance, creating the visibility we need to know ourselves better and improving our ability to fight and win.

Elaine McCusker is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She previously served as acting undersecretary of defense (comptroller) for the U.S. Defense Department, where Mark Easton had served as deputy chief financial officer. Greg Little is a senior counselor for Palantir

defenseone.com · by Elaine McCusker

19. Chaos Engineering for National Defense: Embracing Infrastructure Complexity for Mission Assurance

Excerpt:

Conclusion

Current approaches to mission assurance are ill-equipped to address surprise during degraded operations and contingency scenarios. Chaos engineering for national defense provides an alternative vision and a way to understand and manage the inherent complexity of infrastructure under stress. To prepare for when operational capability is most essential — when “the balloon goes up” — the Department of Defense can minimize the risk of fundamental surprise through deliberate experimentation. In preparing for future conflicts, complexity cannot be eliminated — so it must be embraced.

Chaos Engineering for National Defense: Embracing Infrastructure Complexity for Mission Assurance - War on the Rocks

Nicholas Judson and Craig Poulin

warontherocks.com · by Nicholas Judson · October 17, 2024

Infrastructure failure is inevitable. National defense missions rely upon infrastructure — such as water, electricity, communications, and logistics — and those systems are guaranteed to fail under sufficient stress. Hazards range from weather, cyber attack, equipment faults, assault, disinformation, and curious animals. When infrastructure fails, mission systems and personnel will scramble to adapt — especially during critical activities, such as a mobility surge. At the same time, infrastructure operators will rush to recover their systems. These periods of disruption are characterized by surprise — surprise in the disruption itself, surprise in second- and third-order effects, surprise in emergent requirements, and surprise in the level of confusion or lack of control. For national defense missions, this chaos introduces risk when capabilities are most essential.

Eliminating failures is an impossible goal — threats are too numerous, interdependencies are too vast, and systems are too complex. More importantly, in national defense missions, the enemy gets a vote. Checklists and compliance standards may catch human errors but are ill-equipped to prevent all surprise or mitigate its effects. Limited in scope and imagination, existing Department of Defense mission assurance programs leave national defense missions vulnerable to the uncertainty and unavoidable surprise following infrastructure failures.

How can this be addressed? Chaos engineering for national defense embraces the inevitability of infrastructure failure and ensuing chaos. Chaos engineering itself is not novel — it is a mature concept within software development. In software, developers use chaos engineering to explore and understand system behavior under stress. But national defense infrastructure cannot directly implement practices from software engineering. Physical systems provide unique challenges, defense objectives may not have clear metrics, and, critically, people don’t die when Netflix fails.

But the Department of Defense can adapt software practices and their underlying philosophy. Chaos engineering for national defense prompts mission owners and infrastructure operators to pursue knowledge of how systems and people behave under stress. Better informed organizations can then calibrate their confidence and mitigate revealed vulnerabilities. The Department of Defense — and related organizations — should develop new structures, competencies, and techniques to implement chaos engineering in pursuit of mission assurance during inevitable infrastructure disruptions.

Become a Member

Complexity in Infrastructure

In the broadest sense, infrastructure describes systems that support other activities. It includes physical systems (e.g., energy, water, communications) and non-physical “soft infrastructure” (e.g., business rules, contracting and acquisition, healthcare). An expansive definition is important: Following a disruption, system behavior is determined by both interdependent physical components and human behavior from accrued experience, training, and management.

Infrastructure and mission systems provide a complicated web of interdependencies. Consider ballistic missile defense: Geographically separated subsystems each depend on local infrastructure, and those systems, in turn, support other local missions. Within this web, disruptions often propagate outside their originating systems. This is clear after seven years of energy resilience readiness exercises. Although constructed around power outages, these events consistently extend beyond the electrical system itself, providing critical recommendations to mission owners and their systems. In modern conflict, adversaries can — and likely will — target critical national infrastructure systems. The Department of Defense should evolve mission assurance to holistically encompass infrastructure dynamics and disruptions that affect multiple systems and locations simultaneously.

Relationships between missions and infrastructure are complicated and their dynamics are complex, especially when disrupted. Disruption of complex systems introduces distinct characteristics, which can challenge intuition and traditional practices. Among these characteristics are nonlinearity, limited control, and unanticipated behavior. Small errors can have huge effects. For example, the 2003 Northeast blackout was due to failures in the alarm system, but obvious fixes may not work as operators can misinterpret alarms. Disruptions can also propagate in unexpected ways. During Hurricane Sandy, rising floodwaters led to internet disruptions despite functional backup generators. Framing infrastructure as complex is not new — Charles Perrow described “interactive complexity” in 1984. What has changed is the acceleration of forces contributing to complexity. Interdependencies continue to multiply, people cannot track the status of those interdependencies, mission requirements change faster than infrastructure can adapt, and threats to infrastructure have expanded.

In practice, how does this complexity affect personnel and organizations? When something goes wrong, complexity translates into surprise. Surprise can emerge from many directions, including the environment (e.g., weather extremes), system behavior (e.g., network traffic limitations), or mission requirements (e.g., COVID-19 support). While surprise is inevitable within new situations, there is an important distinction between situational and fundamental surprise. Situational surprise describes unlikely, but foreseeable, events — “it was bound to happen eventually” — while fundamental surprise contradicts one’s mental model — “I didn’t know this was a possibility.” If an organization doesn’t have resources or the ability to adapt, fundamental surprise can be crippling. Furthermore, installations should expect adversaries to create fundamental, not situational, surprise. Yet traditional mission assurance processes are focused on managing situational surprise, leaving systems vulnerable to fundamental surprise.

How do organizations prepare for fundamental surprise? Threat-based analyses are insufficient, precisely because fundamental surprise results from an event that was not imagined. Comprehensive hazard enumeration is impossible, and complexity prevents discovery of all potential system behavior. Fortunately, this challenge provides an opportunity. For example: The water supply can fail for many reasons — burst pipes, contamination, cyber attack, or something unanticipated. So how will organizations adapt, regardless of the underlying cause of failure? Approaching resilience and mission assurance this way is liberating — it expands analyses beyond probabilities to possibilities. Chaos engineering was specifically designed to investigate system behavior under such possibilities.

What is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos engineering was developed at Netflix to improve the reliability of its cloud services and enable its mission to continue when software services failed. Distributed computing is inherently complex. Systems rely on the interaction between many services on many servers in many geographic locations. Each constituent piece of software code is tested in its development, but engineers cannot anticipate how software will interact once deployed. Despite its best efforts in software design, Netflix’s mission was at risk from local failures, such as power loss at a single server.

In its earliest form, an automated tool — Chaos Monkey — disabled a random Netflix service within their distributed architecture. Disruptions were introduced to systems “in production,” meaning while actively used by a small subset of customers. This allowed engineers to observe real-world system behavior and discover unknown interdependencies and failure mechanisms. In other words, they exposed themselves to fundamental surprise. Armed with new knowledge, engineers update their mental map of interdependencies and update their code to mitigate system-wide impacts. Netflix has since refined its approach, and chaos engineering has been adopted throughout the online systems industry.

Chaos engineering embraces complexity and explores it proactively. Casey Rosenthal, John Allspaw, and Nora Jones, early pioneers of the concept, describe chaos engineering as “the facilitation of experiments to uncover systemic weakness.” As experiments, each event tests a specific hypothesis on disrupted system behavior, and the hypothesis is evaluated through a defined performance metric (Netflix uses stream starts per second). Each experiment examines disrupted system behavior and software engineers’ mental models and allows learning about the system capabilities.

The concept of chaos engineering — stress testing through experimentation to allow understanding and resilience improvements — can be extended to other complex systems. Such efforts are still relatively new and limited, with cyber security being the most significant. Moreover, extending chaos engineering to new domains presents clear challenges. Unlike distributed computing, infrastructure cannot take advantage of A/B testing — experimenting on a subset of users — or system rollback —quickly undoing a change. And many missions cannot be described with aggregated metrics, unlike how “stream starts per second” summarizes millions of Netflix users. Finally, distributed computing often focuses on maintaining day-to-day performance, whereas national defense missions are generally focused on readiness for the surge of activity if conflict arises. These challenges are not insurmountable, but they prevent wholesale adoption of commercial chaos engineering practices. Instead, the Department of Defense should develop new structures, competencies, and methods of evaluation to establish chaos engineering for national defense.

Chaos Engineering for National Defense

Like software, there is an inherent complexity to infrastructure and, like software, chaos engineering seeks to discover knowledge of how the system works under unexpected stresses. To be clear: The purpose of chaos engineering is, in the words of Rosenthal and Jones, “to uncover the chaos inherent in complex systems, not to cause it.” As in the software world, chaos engineering for national defense needs to be organized around deliberate, structured experimentation. Rephrased and reframed for infrastructure, the four experimental steps are: scope the experiment, generate a hypothesis, execute the experiment, and translate the results.

The first step, scope the experiment, determines the systems of interest, identifies the stakeholders, and defines the perturbations that will take place. Of particular interest are the connections (and gaps) between systems and organizations. Systems outside one’s span of control are likely to be opaque, and mistaken expectations can trigger cascading impacts — for example, assuming connection to backup power. Disruptions should extend to recovery activities and include the consideration of possible failure mechanisms. The process of scoping experiments, in itself, has value: What are stakeholders’ concerns and are they well understood? Experiments should also vary in size and level of effort. For example, a small-scale experiment could focus on a communication node, its backup generator, and the response process.

In contrast to traditional mission assurance processes, experiments extend beyond past performance and threat intelligence. Experiments should also incorporate randomness — as with Chaos Monkey — and corner case extremes where expected operational limits are met. This provides a broad mandate, resolved only through continuous experimentation across a variety of scopes and scenarios.

The second step, generate a hypothesis, distinguishes chaos engineering from traditional mission assurance approaches. Those most familiar with the system must attempt to predict the system’s behavior. Hypotheses should specify the operating environment, mission requirements, performance measures, and criteria for confirmation or rejection. Omitting technical criteria here for brevity, a hypothesis might be stated as: Given steady-state communications load in the middle of the night, when power is lost and the backup generator fails to start, any throughput degradation will be identified and resolved before network traffic is throttled.

Like scoping, the process of hypothesizing provides value in and of itself. Stakeholders may confront otherwise implicit assumptions about the operating environment or mission requirements. Hypotheses, when written out, might be immediately dismissed as wishful thinking. The process itself promotes curiosity and provides insights in the pursuit of mission assurance.

The third step, execute the experiment, tests the hypothesis. Just as software is tested in production, events should seek maximum realism. This specifically includes no-notice experiments. The disruption events are investigation, not practice, and an experiment is concluded when the hypothesis is confirmed or rejected. To prevent impacts from propagating, an experiment should end if rejection is imminent or if the event escalates beyond its anticipated scope. If there are failures, adopting the software approach of learning from incidents will allow changing actions from specific fixes to broader gap mitigation that enhances mission assurance. In sum: Experiments are executed to gain specific knowledge, not for training value or evaluation.

Unlike compliance-based mission assurance, a rejected hypothesis is not a failure or a discrepancy. Surprise allows a better understanding system behavior, “revealing the way the world actually exists and how it differs from how we expect it to exist.” Every experiment provides knowledge or confidence; every experiment is a success.

In the final step, translate the results, chaos engineers review the event and establish next steps. If the hypothesis is confirmed, stakeholders have justified confidence in their system and can focus attention on other concerns. If the hypothesis is rejected, stakeholders have better information on vulnerabilities or flaws within their mental models. Results can be useful beyond the event’s participants.

With a better understanding of disrupted system behavior, the risk of fundamental surprise is reduced. While experiments themselves require time, effort, and resources, the end result “swaps uncontrolled risk for controlled risk.” Experiments can highlight immediate and inexpensive improvements to mission assurance, as well as more extensive capability gaps that must be weighed against mission risk and cost.

Establishing and Empowering Chaos Engineers

The cloud computing industry provides an example, but not a blueprint. So what’s next? Like chaos engineering itself, implementing chaos engineering for national defense would involve experimentation. If adopted, the concept will evolve over time, but there are three immediate actions to quickly improve mission assurance.

Action One: Introduce a new culture for mission assurance. With the right mindset and authority, anyone can be a chaos engineer. The foundational concept — experimentation — is so flexible that it can be applied without formal training or organizational structure. At the local level, stakeholders should seek opportunities to learn about their systems under stress. A commander could ask for an upcoming maintenance-driven power outage to be kept secret from their unit, with the hypothesis that an unexpected outage will not prevent us from executing the day’s mission. In general, leaders should explore “latent uncertainty in the thing you believe to be absolutely true.” Even without a formal structure, grassroots experimentation will improve local mission assurance.

Action Two: Establish and empower installation-level organizations. To fully establish chaos engineering for national defense, new skillsets are needed within empowered organizations. Within the Department of Defense, each service has its own approach to managing infrastructure and running installations, and installation-level organizations are evolving for future conflict (for example, the Air Force’s new distinction between combat wings and air base wings). Each installation already has requirements for readiness, plans, and mission assurance, all with associated offices and responsibilities. At the installation level, an office of chaos engineering would augment those efforts with its core philosophy: Experiment to learn about system behavior under stress.

At a minimum, an installation-level office of chaos engineering should span a variety of installation support activities (e.g., electrical systems, communications, logistics). Organizational seams and functional stovepipes create blind spots, so an office of chaos engineering must be deliberately cross-functional (e.g., avoid chaos engineering for public works). As a cross-functional team, the office would scope experiments, support local execution, and communicate results. For example, repeating the same experiment has diminishing value, so the office would analyze and recommend high-impact events to installation leaders.

With the goal of building new knowledge, an installation-level office of chaos engineering should have a cooperative — not adversarial — relationship with local missions and organizations. To be useful, experimental results should inform performance standards for policy, training, and evaluation. For example, building codes require generators to be periodically tested. Should technician response times be similarly evaluated? What about response times at night? What about response times for backup battery systems on critical communication nodes? An office of chaos engineering establishes local-level knowledge of system behavior and vulnerabilities, and that information informs local decisions. If technician response times are unacceptable, rewrite standby procedures. If backup battery systems — generally not managed as real property — are underperforming, invest in maintenance or practice mission transfer procedures.

Action Three: Synchronize installation efforts through higher-level staffs. With the right mindset, anyone can be a chaos engineer. But higher-level staffs are needed to guide local efforts, collect best practices, and synthesize results. Within a single installation, infrastructure is dynamic and interdependent; at the national level, installations are dynamic and interdependent. A staff-level office of chaos engineering focuses on intra-installation complexity and seeks knowledge of system behavior beyond that of local leaders.

A staff-level office would also provide the center of gravity for building the skills of nascent chaos engineers. Candidates should have broad knowledge of infrastructure but, more importantly, the ability to effectively communicate with stakeholders, even when identifying uncomfortable truths. Adopting a philosophy from safety systems, an ideal chaos engineer is a concerned outsider who knows the inside. Chaos engineers should develop skills in selecting scenarios. As with distributed computing, it is impossible to test all potential disruptions, and expertise is needed to decide which experiments not to run. Personnel serving as educators, evaluators, and emergency managers can leverage their experience to build offices of chaos engineering.

Finally, chaos engineers will develop insights into how systems behave — and fail — during contingencies. Rosenthal and Jones described how the Netflix chaos engineering team developed a unique set of skills: “You naturally start to develop a specific expertise in how it’s all wired together, without having ‘deep’ expertise in any particular area of the system.” There is tremendous value in the ability to uncover, explore, and communicate modes of system failure. This expertise is a final benefit of adopting chaos engineering for national defense: a cadre of curious and empowered thinkers, all dedicated to understanding infrastructure contingencies and how to enable mission success.

Conclusion

Current approaches to mission assurance are ill-equipped to address surprise during degraded operations and contingency scenarios. Chaos engineering for national defense provides an alternative vision and a way to understand and manage the inherent complexity of infrastructure under stress. To prepare for when operational capability is most essential — when “the balloon goes up” — the Department of Defense can minimize the risk of fundamental surprise through deliberate experimentation. In preparing for future conflicts, complexity cannot be eliminated — so it must be embraced.

Become a Member

Nicholas Judson, Ph.D., is the associate group leader of the energy systems group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he has pioneered the initiation and evolution of Department of Defense energy resilience readiness exercises.

Lt. Col. Craig Poulin, Ph.D., P.E., is an Air Force civil engineer officer. He holds a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary engineering from Northeastern University, where he researched infrastructure resilience modeling and served as a military fellow with MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Formerly the commander, 801st RED HORSE Training Squadron, he is currently the director, Department of Engineering Management at the Civil Engineer School, Air Force Institute of Technology.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Image: Staff Sgt. George Davis

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Nicholas Judson · October 17, 2024

20. Air Force Ospreys complete first flights to Okinawa since fatal crash

Air Force Ospreys complete first flights to Okinawa since fatal crash

Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson and Keishi Koja · October 16, 2024

An Air Force crew chief assigned to the 21st Special Operations Aircraft Maintenance Squadron marshals a CV-22B Osprey at Yokota Air Base, Japan, July 2, 2024. (Samantha White/U.S. Air Force)

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — A pair of CV-22 Ospreys from this airlift hub in western Tokyo flew to Okinawa for the first time since a deadly accident grounded the military’s entire fleet of hybrid tiltrotors in November.

The aircraft landed at Kadena Air Base on Tuesday afternoon, a spokeswoman for the Okinawa prefecture’s Military Base Affairs Division told Stars and Stripes by phone the next day. The Okinawa Defense Bureau, an arm of Japan’s Ministry of Defense, notified the prefecture of the flight, she said.

Some Japanese government officials may speak to the press only on condition of anonymity.

A spokesman for Kadena’s 353rd Special Operations Wing, Capt. Richard Caesar, acknowledged but did not immediately respond to questions about the flight on Wednesday.

An Air Force Osprey with the Yokota-based 21st Special Operations Squadron crashed Nov. 29 off Japan’s southern coast while en route to Kadena. All eight airmen aboard were killed.

As a result, the U.S. military grounded its fleet of about 400 Ospreys between Dec. 6 and March 8 while a team investigated the accident’s cause.

U.S. Marine Corps and Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Ospreys resumed flights soon after the flight ban was lifted; the Navy followed suit shortly thereafter.

The Air Force waited until July 2 to fly its Ospreys again in Japan, 216 days after the November crash.

The U.S. fleet is not permitted to fly its full range of missions until mid-2025, Vice Adm. Carl Chebi, who leads U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, told House lawmakers in June.

The Osprey can hover like a helicopter also fly as a fixed-wing aircraft by tilting its wings forward.

U.S. and Japanese Ospreys are expected to fly for the first time to Yonaguni Island, the Japanese territory closest to Taiwan, as part of the upcoming Keen Sword exercise, a spokesman for Japan’s Joint Staff told Stars and Stripes last month.

The tiltrotor flights are scheduled as part of civilian evacuation drills during the annual training, which is scheduled Oct. 23 to Nov. 1 across Japan, according to the spokesman.

Okinawa prefecture has asked the defense bureau whether the Ospreys will participate in the Keen Sword drills but haven’t heard back yet, the local official said.

Seth Robson

Seth Robson is a Tokyo-based reporter who has been with Stars and Stripes since 2003. He has been stationed in Japan, South Korea and Germany, with frequent assignments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Australia and the Philippines.

Keishi Koja

Keishi Koja is an Okinawa-based reporter/translator who joined Stars and Stripes in August 2022. He studied International Communication at the University of Okinawa and previously worked in education.

Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson and Keishi Koja · October 16, 2024

21. The Real Purpose of a U.S.-Saudi Security Agreement

Excerpts:

There is no imminent great-power shift in the Middle East. Yet competition between the United States and China there, as elsewhere, is indeed growing, and it is regarded by U.S. partners as a serious risk. Many have responded by choosing “omni-alignment,” that is, participating in both U.S.-led multilateral institutions and newer Chinese-led alternatives, to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits they can accrue from contention between the two powers. Even countries that understand China’s limits as a partner worry that the United States has become increasingly unpredictable and transactional as its attention shifts between short-term crises in places such as the Middle East and long-term priorities, notably in the Indo-Pacific.

A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty could help to ameliorate this dynamic in the Middle East, both by tightening the bonds between Washington and one of its most important partners in the region and by putting those partners in a better position to address crises on their own. Some may worry that the treaty would trap the United States in the Middle East. In reality, a closer bilateral partnership on defense could over time limit Chinese inroads in the region, bolster Riyadh’s and other partners’ capacities to act without U.S. intervention, and even bring Saudi Arabia deeper into common efforts to tackle global challenges. Along with the increasing activism by countries such as India and Japan, the expansion of these efforts could help arrest the global order’s decline into a stalemate between two great powers. Rather than worry about the emergence of a new cold war, Washington should work to build a new global diplomatic-security concert, toward which a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty can be an important step.

The Real Purpose of a U.S.-Saudi Security Agreement

A Deal Could Reduce Direct American Intervention in the Middle East

By Michael Singh

October 17, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Michael Singh · October 17, 2024

Earlier this year, the United States and Saudi Arabia were close to sealing a bilateral defense treaty. The agreement’s terms are largely agreed upon, but its formal signing was postponed amid the present conflict in the Middle East. Analysts have frequently viewed this deal as but a piece of a larger puzzle. As conflict has racked the Middle East since Hamas’s heinous October 7 terrorist attack, the potential treaty tends to be characterized as one element of a “megadeal” aimed at pacifying the region: a cease-fire in Gaza would set the stage for the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel in return for a U.S. security guarantee and strengthened American and Israeli commitments to Palestinian statehood.

But that is the wrong way to look at a U.S.-Saudi treaty. In reality, the impetus for such a treaty preceded the conflict in Gaza. If signed, the agreement will not merely be another transaction in which the United States pays for an Arab state to normalize ties with Israel. The strategic context for it is global, not regional: If successful, a U.S.-Saudi treaty will pave the way for better security integration of U.S. partners in the Middle East and less direct American intervention there. In the long run, it will not tie the United States down in the region but help free Washington to act with greater latitude elsewhere. And the deal will draw Washington’s most capable friends in the Middle East deeper into efforts to address global challenges, including that posed by the rise of China.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

Few in Washington question the current wisdom that the United States must increase its focus on the Indo-Pacific or that doing so will require a decreased focus on the Middle East, a region that continues to drain U.S. resources. Yet this trade-off holds only if one considers the Middle East of middling importance in the United States’ competition with China or conceives of U.S. national security strategy as akin to a zero-sum game where policymakers merely push their pieces from one region to another.

In reality, the Middle East remains vitally important to both U.S. and Chinese interests. The past year’s turmoil demonstrates not that U.S. attention to the region has been futile but that the United States cannot ignore the region, however much it may wish to do so, and that it urgently needs a new, more sustainable strategy for securing its interests there. A bilateral defense treaty with Saudi Arabia may seem an unusual response, as it might appear only to promise deeper U.S. involvement in the Middle East. But if successful, a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty would in fact shift more of the burden of addressing the region’s troubles onto U.S. partners, limit Chinese influence, and even draw partners closer in U.S.-led efforts to address global challenges and entrench Washington’s preferred norms.

Such a treaty would bring three potential strategic benefits. First, it would more closely bind Saudi Arabia and the United States, solidifying one of Washington’s most important partnerships in the Middle East. A mutual defense guarantee would be the centerpiece of any U.S.-Saudi treaty, but any such treaty would also facilitate cooperation between the two countries in sensitive high-tech areas such as artificial intelligence and related supply chains as well as Saudi access to U.S. defense technology. Such cooperation on technology would also limit China’s opportunities in these areas and circumvent controversies that often arise in the transactional, issue-by-issue negotiations that typically characterize U.S. partnerships in the region. More frequent and routine collaboration in technology could also help to entrench Washington’s preferred norms and practices for data privacy and the regulation and transfer of technology, potentially enabling their spread throughout the Middle East, given Saudi Arabia’s economic and financial weight there.

Second, the treaty would help Saudi Arabia—and by extension, the region—manage and resolve crises without extensive U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia is already one of the world’s top buyers of American and other Western arms. But this reliance is becoming more of a strategic liability for Washington. With needy partners in Europe and Asia, it is difficult to justify putting Saudi Arabia first in line for U.S. arms sales, even if Riyadh pays up front and without assistance, unless it plans to use those systems to advance mutual interests with the United States. Selling one more shell or jet to Taiwan or Ukraine, for example, accomplishes far more for U.S. interests than sending those tools to a partner that will not or cannot use them. In a world of rekindled contention between great powers, this strategic math is just as important as the financial calculus of arms sales, if not more so.

If successful, a U.S.-Saudi treaty will pave the way for better security integration of U.S. partners in the Middle East.

A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty would presumably bring more frequent military exchanges and exercises, enabling the United States to better shape critical Saudi reforms that aim to turn its military into a modern fighting force. These improved capabilities must of course be accompanied by a willingness to act. Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has demonstrated greater will than in the past to project its power and influence—for example, in its military campaign in Yemen—but its capabilities and strategic planning have not matched its ambition. As a result, some in the West have distanced themselves from Saudi Arabia; a more effective approach would forge a closer working partnership that can channel Saudi ambitions toward shared ends.

The United States doubtless hopes that a formal defense partnership with the Saudis would serve as the foundation for deeper multilateral coordination of U.S. defense relationships in the Middle East than the pacts it has signed so far with smaller (yet still critical) regional partners. This process began with the Abraham Accords and has already yielded collaboration, such as military exercises sponsored by the U.S. Central Command that have brought together Israeli and Arab officers. It has also led to the impressive effort by the United States, Israel, and an array of regional partners in mid-April to intercept the approximately 300 missiles and drones that Iran launched against Israel. But while this showed the potential for regional defense cooperation, it also demonstrated the region’s continued dependency on the United States. Washington would like to continue bolstering the former while reducing the region’s requirement for the latter. Perhaps counterintuitively, this would be best accomplished not by stepping away from the region but by even more intensive training of regional forces through mechanisms that a bilateral treaty would likely produce. By strengthening U.S. partners, such a treaty would free up American forces and allow Washington to attend to priorities in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere without abandoning its interests in the Middle East. The accord would also underline a competitive advantage that the United States has over China: the United States can act as both a security integrator bringing parties across the region together and as a security guarantor providing new military technology, neither of which China can offer at this stage.

Finally, a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty could bring the Saudis and perhaps others in the region further into efforts to tackle global challenges. Riyadh has already demonstrated interest in exercising its global influence beyond adjusting its oil supply to world markets. In August 2023, Saudi Arabia hosted an international summit on the war in Ukraine. It has also sought a more prominent role in meetings of multilateral groupings such as the G-20. Washington, for its part, has increasingly recognized Saudi Arabia’s potential, as well as that of the United Arab Emirates and other wealthy Gulf states to leverage wealth and diplomatic influence in addressing transnational issues such as climate change and critical minerals processing. After decades of viewing Middle Eastern states as objects of U.S. foreign policy, Washington increasingly sees them as partners in it. A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty can further aid in drawing these partners out of their regional bubble by increasing their natural links and commonalities with U.S. allies in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

UNDERSTANDING THE RISKS

A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty will not be without its risks, but the real risks are often misidentified. There is little reason to believe a treaty would increase the chances of a war between the United States and Iran. Even though the United States declined to respond militarily to Iran’s attack on Saudi oil facilities in 2019, any future U.S. president, treaty or not, will likely feel motivated to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense—or to that of another Gulf partner or strategic shipping route—in the event of a major Iranian attack. By formalizing what is already close to a de facto commitment, the United States can better deter Iran by eliminating any doubt that an attack on Saudi Arabia would prompt a strong U.S. response. And a treaty would not necessarily tie U.S. forces down in the region more than they already are. Evidence from the Middle East and elsewhere suggests that the involvement of U.S. forces in a given region is connected to threat levels and other factors, not the existence of a treaty. American forces have surged into the region recently in response to Iranian threats, for example, even though the United States has no formal treaty allies there.

The real risks are twofold. The first is of misaligned expectations. Policymakers in Washington will likely expect that by signing a bilateral defense treaty, Saudi Arabia will be committing to refrain from any actions that jeopardize U.S. security and to contribute more constructively to stability in the Middle East. Increasingly, policymakers expect allies to refrain from cooperating with U.S. adversaries not only in traditional military and defense matters but also through indirect actions that will enhance U.S. rivals’ broader military-industrial complexes. Such actions could simply involve providing adversaries with access to certain technologies or even, in the case of Russia especially, cooperating to protect their revenues through mechanisms such as OPEC Plus, which includes 22 of the world’s major oil exporters. Washington will be looking for Saudi Arabia not only to show preference for the United States at the margins, but to also make a firm commitment to the U.S.-led alliance system that it would join after inking a treaty. Saudi normalization with Israel would be vital to securing ratification of the accord by the U.S. Senate and to realizing the full benefits of multilateral security cooperation in the region. It would also serve as a strong signal from Riyadh that Saudi Arabia is making a strategic and not merely a tactical shift in its foreign policy.

The second risk involves the fickleness of U.S. foreign policy, of which Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have found themselves disproportionately on the receiving end. Twenty-plus years of quixotic nation-building efforts should have taught U.S. policymakers that the United States can hold fast to its own values without imposing them on others. Washington can harbor strong and valid concerns about the human rights or political practices of partners such as the Saudis while still working practically to promote reform—or better yet, supporting partners’ own programs of reform, such as Riyadh’s Vision 2030—rather than recklessly threatening to break relations after every new unsavory revelation. Riyadh sees the treaty ratification process, which requires approval by a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate, as a way of ensuring that Washington sticks to its commitments, just as the United States sees Saudi normalization with Israel as a signal of Riyadh’s long-term commitment.

THE MIDDLE EAST GOES GLOBAL

There is no imminent great-power shift in the Middle East. Yet competition between the United States and China there, as elsewhere, is indeed growing, and it is regarded by U.S. partners as a serious risk. Many have responded by choosing “omni-alignment,” that is, participating in both U.S.-led multilateral institutions and newer Chinese-led alternatives, to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits they can accrue from contention between the two powers. Even countries that understand China’s limits as a partner worry that the United States has become increasingly unpredictable and transactional as its attention shifts between short-term crises in places such as the Middle East and long-term priorities, notably in the Indo-Pacific.

A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty could help to ameliorate this dynamic in the Middle East, both by tightening the bonds between Washington and one of its most important partners in the region and by putting those partners in a better position to address crises on their own. Some may worry that the treaty would trap the United States in the Middle East. In reality, a closer bilateral partnership on defense could over time limit Chinese inroads in the region, bolster Riyadh’s and other partners’ capacities to act without U.S. intervention, and even bring Saudi Arabia deeper into common efforts to tackle global challenges. Along with the increasing activism by countries such as India and Japan, the expansion of these efforts could help arrest the global order’s decline into a stalemate between two great powers. Rather than worry about the emergence of a new cold war, Washington should work to build a new global diplomatic-security concert, toward which a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty can be an important step.

MICHAEL SINGH is Managing Director and Lane-Swig Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He served as Senior Director for the Middle East at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration.

Foreign Affairs · by Michael Singh · October 17, 2024

22. Why Washington Has Failed to Solve the Border Crisis

Better pathways to legal imagination is one way to reduce illegal immigration.

Excerpts:

To prevent future waves of irregular migration from destabilizing U.S. politics, the United States also needs a federal coordination system that can match new arrivals, specifically those who arrive without sponsors or family ties, with communities that have the capacity to host them. Historically, many migrants—including my family, which entered the United States in the 1920s along with other Mexican immigrants responding to the need for laborers in Arizona—benefited from the existence of diaspora communities that ensured that migrants had housing and a social network upon arrival. In addition to increasing sponsorship opportunities for individuals—and even state governments who want to recruit immigrants—the federal government must take greater responsibility for managing the integration of the asylum seekers it admits at the border through federal relocation programs that place migrants in communities with both available housing and jobs that cannot be filled by U.S. workers.

Finally, the United States cannot secure the border if it lacks the infrastructure to safely and quickly process migrants, no matter where they arrive. Relying solely on existing infrastructure diverts resources from other pressing security needs. Building new ports of entry and modern asylum processing centers would help to both ensure the country’s security and guarantee the safe screening of people seeking access to the U.S. immigration system.

Regardless of who takes office in January, Washington must craft a fresh strategy for the modern era of global migration. As U.S. policymakers imagine a future response to the border, they can opt to replicate the current failed framework or embrace a new one, scaling up policies that have proved more effective at preventing irregular migration than stopgap asylum restrictions. Doing so would allow the United States to harness the benefits of migration, control its borders, uphold its values as a country of refuge, and create better outcomes for Americans and immigrants alike.

Why Washington Has Failed to Solve the Border Crisis

Fixing Asylum Matters—but Not as Much as Creating New Pathways for Legal Immigration

By Andrea R. Flores

October 17, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Andrea R. Flores · October 17, 2024

On the cusp of the 2024 presidential election, immigration and U.S. border security are among the top issues of concern for American voters. Former President Donald Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, are worlds apart on whether immigration is good or bad for the United States, but they do agree on one thing: the southern border has been in crisis, and the broken U.S. asylum system is to blame. In 2022, the number of unauthorized border crossings reached a peak of 2.2 million, overwhelming not only border communities from Texas to California but also major cities such as New York, which received tens of thousands of new migrants with only limited support from the federal government. Images of disorder in border towns and of families being held in horrific conditions, as well as the increased presence of new arrivals lacking housing or work permits in U.S. cities, escalated public concern about the visible disarray of the U.S. immigration system. Even though the numbers of unauthorized crossings at the southern border are down in 2024, the sense of crisis has persisted across the country.

Although the challenges have become more acute since the COVID-19 pandemic, the border has been in a state of crisis for most of the last decade. When confronted with increases in unauthorized migration, the federal government has often failed to manage the safe and orderly arrival of unauthorized migrants at the U.S.-Mexican border, leading to major operational challenges and political discord. With the vulnerabilities of the country’s outdated immigration system on full display, much of the American public, as well as U.S. allies and adversaries, question the United States’ ability to manage its borders.

The last time the U.S. Congress weighed in on the question of whom the country should welcome was in 1990, when it passed legislation to increase the number of people who could immigrate to the United States. In the 34 years since then, advances in technology, an evolving labor market, the aging of the U.S. population, climate change, and political and humanitarian crises in the Western Hemisphere have driven more people to leave their homes, despite the fact that there are few safe legal pathways for those with a humanitarian or other urgent need to come to the United States. Today, the United States is relying on an immigration system designed for a different country at a different time.

In the absence of reforms that would have allowed the United States to adjust to the profound changes that have taken place since 1990 by making it easier to legally immigrate, migrants have increasingly resorted to utilizing smuggling networks and claiming asylum at the U.S.-Mexican border in order to enter the country. The U.S. asylum system was crafted to offer a limited form of protection for people fleeing persecution. But with almost no other legal avenues by which to enter the United States, it has become the only option for migrants who have been displaced for a broad array of reasons.

Without Congressional action to address the true source of the resulting border crises—the United States’ outdated asylum and immigration laws—administrations from both parties have addressed the problem unilaterally, carving out exceptions to current asylum law to turn people away without screening them for protection claims. Republicans promise to seal the border by blocking all asylum seekers with no exceptions, whereas Democrats want to limit asylum to people who seek advance permission to enter at a port of entry, forcing people to wait in Mexico regardless of the threats they may be facing.

But the focus on blocking migrants from filing asylum claims distorts the debate over immigration and limits the universe of policy solutions; the overwhelmed asylum system is not the cause of the border crisis but rather a consequence of the United States’ failure to develop a coherent response to global shifts in irregular migration. Since 2010, mounting instability in the Western Hemisphere has displaced up to 25 million people, including eight million from Venezuela alone. The United States has responded by rolling back its commitment to territorial asylum and outsourcing more of its immigration responsibilities to other countries. But these efforts have done little to stop the unauthorized movement of people to the United States or to restore the public’s trust in Washington’s ability to control the border.

The asylum system is collapsing under its own weight.

Moreover, years of chaos at the border have amplified xenophobia at a time when the U.S. economy needs immigrants more than ever. Around 55 percent of Americans now support curbing immigration to the United States—the highest proportion since the months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, the United States is showing the first signs of population decline, and demographers have determined that without additional immigration, the country’s working-age population will continue to shrink, as will the U.S. economy. But to advance the immigration reforms that are critical for economic growth, such as updating family and employment-based visa systems and creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, American policymakers must properly address the public’s concerns about the border and the failures of the current U.S. immigration regime.

To bring the border crisis narrative under control, U.S. policymakers must first acknowledge that immigration policy is both a foreign and domestic issue and that policies that stabilize people in transit are as important as the policies that govern borders. Washington must also acknowledge that sustainably reducing unauthorized migration at the southern border cannot be achieved solely by tightening asylum rules, because every asylum restriction put in place in the last ten years has given way to higher unauthorized border crossings over time. The U.S. needs a new legal regime that does not merely react once people have reached the border, but one that holistically addresses the incentives and lack of alternative safe routes that draw people to the border in the first place.

With both the demand for and the number of immigrants set to remain extraordinarily high, the only way to reduce unauthorized migration is to expand protections and regional employment opportunities for displaced people in the Western Hemisphere, make legal immigration easier by increasing pathways for entry into the United States, modernizing infrastructure at the border, and better integrating immigrants once they have arrived. Only this kind of multi-pronged immigration strategy will help the country move away from the failed approach of the past decade.

ASYLUM IS NOT ALL-OR-NOTHING

Up to now, the United States has leaned on an outdated asylum system to manage irregular migration. But the system is collapsing under its own weight. Under current law, when migrants make unauthorized border crossings into the United States, they can claim that they have a fear of facing persecution if they return to their country of origin and file an asylum claim as a defense in their removal proceedings in immigration court. This process, known as defensive asylum, can take years to resolve: the backlog has grown from 100,000 cases in 2014 to one million cases in 2024 as more people have claimed asylum without a corresponding increase in resources or personnel to efficiently adjudicate these cases. After years waiting in legal limbo, the majority of migrants, many of whom represent themselves in highly complicated legal proceedings without a lawyer, have their claims denied or dismissed. This protracted process hurts the people most in need of humanitarian protection, making it more and more difficult to preserve evidence of their persecution or to respond to shifts in asylum eligibility rules across administrations.

The absence of alternative avenues, however, has pushed many migrants to attempt to enter the United States via the asylum system, even if it entails a dangerous journey with an uncertain outcome and even if they do not meet the criteria for asylum as traditionally understood. For the millions of displaced people who may not meet the high legal threshold for protection and lack other accessible legal paths, seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexican border could be the only way to enter the United States to find work or to reunite with family.

The U.S. asylum system was not designed to handle this influx of hemispheric migration or to adjudicate hundreds of thousands of claims every month—it was designed to be an emergency protection option for people fleeing persecution. As a result, U.S. facilities, personnel, and procedures at the border are primarily equipped to quickly turn back migrants from a contiguous country that will accept their returned citizens, not to screen people from noncontiguous countries for potential asylum claims. Without the proper infrastructure to process non-Mexican nationals, immigrants have been released from custody into the United States with almost no coordination between the federal government and the communities receiving them, and a limited system in place to manage the timely and fair removal of people who are not eligible for humanitarian protection.

For now, the United States has mostly given up on trying to make asylum work at one of the largest land borders in the world. A bipartisan Senate proposal drafted earlier this year aimed to speed up the process, but still failed to address the underlying problem, by preserving asylum as the only legal option for most immigrants. (The agreement was ultimately shelved after Trump put pressure on Republicans to block the bill.) The jockeying has obscured a basic truth: U.S. policymakers don’t need to either expand or abandon the country’s commitment to defensive asylum—they just need to stop thinking of it as the primary avenue for processing would-be migrants to the United States.

FROM CRISIS TO CRISIS

Efforts by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations to address the border crisis have inadequately addressed the drivers of migration, as well as inherent flaws in the U.S. asylum system and the country’s outdated border infrastructure. When faced with a border emergency, Washington has generally responded by combining asylum restrictions with temporary diplomatic agreements with other countries to arrest, detain, and deport migrants before they reach the United States. This approach has not only had serious human rights consequences for migrants—exposing them to kidnapping, sexual assault, and death—but has also failed to stop the decades-long upward trend in arrivals, achieving short-term reductions at best.

The first of these modern border crises occurred in 2014. At the time, I was serving as a policy adviser in the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Families and unaccompanied children from Central America, displaced after years of criminal violence, political turmoil, and natural disasters, arrived at the southern border and claimed asylum in record numbers. Seeking to deter further migration, President Barack Obama expanded family detention, requiring parents and their children, often infants or toddlers, to remain in detention for weeks, during their initial asylum screenings. On the diplomatic front, the administration also worked with Mexico to increase its deportation efforts, leading to a decrease in the number of migrants encountered at the border. But even though this combined domestic and foreign policy response appeared to have some initial success, irregular migration was once again on the rise by 2016.

American politics and society are uniquely vulnerable to weaponized migration.

As president, Trump pursued an extreme approach to irregular migration. His administration’s signature asylum restrictions relied on penalizing migrants for failing to seek humanitarian protection in other countries that in fact did not have functioning asylum systems. One policy required asylum seekers to live in Mexico until their hearing dates, trapping over 60,000 people in some of the most dangerous cities in the world. Trump also pursued the most extreme act of deterrence: intentionally separating children from their parents with no effort to ever reunite them. Additionally, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Trump invoked Title 42, a public health law, to allow DHS to expel migrants back to Mexico or their countries of origin without screening them for humanitarian protection.

But even such restrictive measures as the use of Title 42, which President Joe Biden kept in place for the first two years of his presidency, failed to achieve a reduction in irregular migration. The U.S. government expelled 2.8 million migrants under Title 42; once the policy was lifted in May 2023, Biden attempted to replicate Trump’s ban on asylum seekers who failed to seek protection along the migratory route. Still, this policy failed as a deterrent, and by December 2023, unauthorized encounters at the border peaked at 300,000 people in one month—the highest number recorded since U.S. Customs and Border Protection started tracking this data in 2000.

Under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans, Biden enacted further restrictions on asylum access this year, limiting defensive asylum to a lottery system operated through the phone app CBP One. This policy has the same fatal flaw as every previous asylum restriction: it is entirely reliant on Mexico’s ability to arrest and detain migrants before they reach U.S. borders. In the first six months of 2024 alone, Mexico apprehended over 700,000 migrants, three times the number from the year before, but it lacks the capacity to deport them. Reports from Mexico show that this enforcement push has had severe human consequences, with migrants subjected to criminal violence as they are transported from northern to southern Mexico to prevent them from reaching the U.S. border. The current reduction in unauthorized migration continues to hinge on another country’s ability—and willingness—to hold hundreds of thousands of people back by any means necessary.

THE MIGRATION CARD

Past administrations have largely treated border management as a domestic political issue, but the border crisis undermines the United States’ national sovereignty, safety, and standing in the world. Authoritarian governments routinely weaponize migration for political ends, with autocrats transporting large groups of migrants to another nation’s border or to specific communities to sow disarray and fuel right-wing sentiment—a tactic that has also been adopted by some Republican governors in the United States.

Given the United States’ inability to manage the processing of migrants at its borders or to manage their orderly resettlement in the country, American politics and society are uniquely vulnerable to weaponized migration. The images of chaos at the southern border communicate to U.S. adversaries that irregular migrants can trigger a widespread and enduring domestic crisis and exacerbate ethnic and racial tensions. Authoritarian leaders have taken notice: President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, for instance, has said that he wants to provoke the United States by allowing migrants from Africa and Asia to fly into his country and then make their way toward the U.S. border, creating new migration trends that could be used as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from Washington.

Outsourcing the U.S. immigration system to states such as Mexico likewise creates vulnerabilities for national security and gives other countries additional leverage over the United States. Although passing the buck on enforcement may be a tempting political fix at a time when American voters want less chaos at the border and lawmakers are unlikely to pass legislation, it is not a viable long-term solution to what is fundamentally a U.S. problem. Regional cooperation is necessary to manage our border, but relying on countries such as Mexico to manage the flow of migrants without creating adequate channels and infrastructure in the United States empowers other governments to set off the next U.S. border crisis.

Moreover, countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean have failed to adjust to these irregular migration trends, with many allowing large numbers of migrants to pass through on their way to the United States without building out their own legal avenues, asylum systems, and immigration enforcement systems in response. Some countries have even benefited financially from the growth of smuggling networks, which reduces their incentive to control their borders. The United States can only expect to be able to persuade other countries of the benefits of modernizing their immigration systems once it has reclaimed the power to manage its own land borders.

HELPING MIGRANTS TO HELP OURSELVES

Policy innovations under the Biden administration suggest a potential path forward. Under Biden, the United States has put in place new legal avenues for migrants from countries including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela that require a potential migrant to find a U.S.-based sponsor. After vetting, the migrant is allowed to purchase a ticket to fly into a designated U.S. airport and legally work and live in the United States for two years. Per DHS’s own data, this model has reduced unauthorized border crossings of migrants from these countries by 99 percent—a stunning result. U.S. policymakers should build on the success of this approach by creating other new avenues for entry that meet the country’s labor needs, help people reunite with family members, and protect migrants who may not legally qualify as refugees but are still unable to return home.

U.S. authorities could also make the asylum system more orderly by reforming CBP One, the mobile app that allows migrants to enter a lottery in order to receive an appointment to enter the United States at an official port of entry, rather than make an unauthorized crossing. Right now, CBP One operates as a decompression mechanism, doling out daily appointments, enrolling people in removal proceedings once they enter the country, and adding them to the back of the immigration court backlog. If use of the app led to a timely screening by an asylum officer, rather than a months-long wait in Mexico, it could help prioritize access to the U.S. land border to people with humanitarian protection claims and, over time, discourage the widespread perception among potential migrants that traveling to Mexico and waiting for an appointment will guarantee entry into the United States. This can be done by increasing the availability of daily appointments and assigning asylum officers to assess the merits of asylum claims raised at ports of entry.

Beyond improving border procedures, Washington’s response to increased migration must aim to incentivize regional governments, the private sector, and civil society groups to expand both legal status and employment opportunities for people who are internally displaced or already on the move, rather than relying solely on foreign aid to address the root causes of migration before people decide to leave. Studies have found that rather than deterring irregular migration, U.S. efforts to increase economic stability for would-be migrants have given them the resources to depart, especially in cases where political conditions in their countries make it impossible for them to stay. Moreover, the United States must use targeted financial investments to help governments throughout the region to build their own strong asylum systems and immigration systems to manage their borders.

Washington must craft a fresh strategy for the modern era of global migration.

The United States should also prioritize the expansion of legal alternatives that make traveling to the U.S.-Mexican border an option of last resort. The Biden administration has taken a step in this direction by creating Safe Mobility Offices in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala. These offices seek to redirect potential migrants toward legal pathways, both in the United States and other receiving countries. SMOs are a blueprint of what a modernized system could look like, but they will only work if additional legal routes to entry are made available; otherwise, people will continue to turn to smuggling networks to make their way to the southern border.

To prevent future waves of irregular migration from destabilizing U.S. politics, the United States also needs a federal coordination system that can match new arrivals, specifically those who arrive without sponsors or family ties, with communities that have the capacity to host them. Historically, many migrants—including my family, which entered the United States in the 1920s along with other Mexican immigrants responding to the need for laborers in Arizona—benefited from the existence of diaspora communities that ensured that migrants had housing and a social network upon arrival. In addition to increasing sponsorship opportunities for individuals—and even state governments who want to recruit immigrants—the federal government must take greater responsibility for managing the integration of the asylum seekers it admits at the border through federal relocation programs that place migrants in communities with both available housing and jobs that cannot be filled by U.S. workers.

Finally, the United States cannot secure the border if it lacks the infrastructure to safely and quickly process migrants, no matter where they arrive. Relying solely on existing infrastructure diverts resources from other pressing security needs. Building new ports of entry and modern asylum processing centers would help to both ensure the country’s security and guarantee the safe screening of people seeking access to the U.S. immigration system.

Regardless of who takes office in January, Washington must craft a fresh strategy for the modern era of global migration. As U.S. policymakers imagine a future response to the border, they can opt to replicate the current failed framework or embrace a new one, scaling up policies that have proved more effective at preventing irregular migration than stopgap asylum restrictions. Doing so would allow the United States to harness the benefits of migration, control its borders, uphold its values as a country of refuge, and create better outcomes for Americans and immigrants alike.

ANDREA R. FLORES is Vice President of Immigration Policy and Campaigns at FWD.us. She served as an immigration policy adviser in the Obama and Biden administrations and for the U.S. Senate.

Foreign Affairs · by Andrea R. Flores · October 17, 2024

23. Military Newspapers Told Stories No One Else Did. It Was Our Job to Care.

Military Newspapers Told Stories No One Else Did. It Was Our Job to Care.

thewarhorse.org · by Nathan Webster · October 16, 2024

Newspapers—the old-fashioned, printed, published kind—are meant to be replaced. A day or week of stories and photos, then a new edition. They are like soldiers, giving way to who’s next, like how my responsibilities, across five years and six duty stations, became someone else’s job after I had moved on. Same destiny, no matter how big a day’s headline, or how high a rank.

As the soldier-editor of Fort Belvoir’s Castle newspaper, I used that idea as the June 28, 1991, headline for post commander Brig. Gen. Arvid West’s retirement ceremony—“West Moves On,” above the image of his final salute after 35 years. Commanders are like royalty, a lineage of predecessors and successors. An average soldier needs to trust the Army’s memory that their little effort might be remembered.

The Castle once did its part to be that memory. Each week, headlines, pictures, and stories cataloged Belvoir’s history. Production finished at Comprint Military Publications in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where I pasted down blocks of text and pictures. Comprint took advertising revenue and published the Castle for free, distributing it to racks at the PX or commissary.

In 1991, Army Sgt. Nathan Webster in the Castle’s office at Fort Belvoir’s Flagler Hall. (Photo courtesy of the author)

Originally named for Belvoir’s then-departed Engineer presence, the Castle modernized its logo that summer of 1991, adding a bald eagle to better connect with the post’s Accotink Bay Wildlife Refuge.

The changes coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Castle’s uninterrupted printed publication. The June 7, 1991, edition used the original Castle logo from June 4, 1941.

Using that old logo was probably my idea. Even if each newspaper was discardable, it made history feel permanent, part of a lineage—that for 50 years, other soldiers had told Belvoir’s story under their era’s Castle logo, same as me.

I had arrived at Belvoir from South Korea in mid-1990, was a Castle journalist, made sergeant, deployed to Desert Storm, and had returned to fill the Castle editor’s role for a couple months before an upcoming reassignment to then-Fort Bragg.

That summer of 1991, I leaned into being in charge. I was a puffed-up popinjay, both insecure and full of himself, high on postwar emotion. I was brusque, I was blunt, and I didn’t care about feelings.

Or I was a young sergeant and had seen other sergeants showing up first and leaving last and who expected everyone’s equal effort. I did what I thought I was supposed to do, and copied what they had shown me.

A new private got too familiar, tried copying the grizzled specialist who I let use my first name. He needed to at least make PFC before earning that privilege.

“I don’t know any ‘Nate.’ My name is Sgt. Webster,” I told him, and I wasn’t joking. I felt obligated to pull rank—isn’t that what rank sometimes requires?

His Torch Beckoned Like a Searchlight

A civilian staff writer enjoyed writing about arts and theater. He reviewed Thelma and Louise and wanted hijrah in the headline—something like “Thelma and Louise: A duo’s epic hijrah.”

It was Arabic for “journey,” and it fit the review, but I said no way that overblown word would appear in a newspaper directed toward average soldiers and their families. If I don’t know a word, nobody knows the word. Get a grasp; this isn’t college.

He wasn’t happy. He changed my mind some of the time. Not that time.

He cared, though. And if I wasn’t nice, I just expected everyone to care. It’s not hard.

Caring was the Castle’s job. The finance clerk, Judge Advocate General’s noncommissioned officer, or civilian data analyst, they just wanted information about why the fire department cordoned off the shoppette—“oh, a propane leak.” Why a bunch of kids were filling the athletic fields—“oh, it’s summer Bible camp.” We quoted their humility when they won Civilian of the Year; maybe they saved the article.

They didn’t care about the rest. It wasn’t their job to care. It was our job.

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The Castle cataloged events small and sometimes dramatic: “Storm Batters Davison,” a headline proclaimed over a front-page picture of a huge hanger roof torn off by a microburst. I sent the private out to do the story. They took him up in a helicopter to get an aerial shot; I assume I was jealous, but it was his turn to do that sort of thing.

No both-sides, no debates, little controversy. If our stories made anyone cynical, that was their fault—we didn’t give anybody anything to be cynical about.

I can read my old stories and say I did OK. I was organized and on point. If my leads were derivative and obvious, that’s the nature of learning how to write.

I’m a better writer now, though it only shows up as an older man’s hobby of now and then.

I have learned how West maybe felt at the end of his career, when one more job, one more rank, could have validated it all.

The June 28, 1991, edition of the Castle commemorates the retirement of Brig. Gen. Arvid West.

West died in 2018. I’m sure by 1991 he understood the leveling. The compromises, disappointments, sacrifices, the running out of steam, and disappearance, after handshakes and a fare-thee-well.

I left the Castle that autumn, left Flagler Hall’s corner office, and my evening runs down to the Potomac, and solo drinking and sundown brooding. I headed south to Fort Bragg, where I never drank alone.

Fort Bragg’s gone—renamed Fort Liberty last year—good riddance to Braxton Bragg. Belvoir could have used a refresh—named for a slaveholding plantation.

But Belvoir’s still here—the Castle’s not, became the Eagle in 1992, foreshadowed by our logo change. Then in 2021, the Eagle flew away, part of the purge of printed base newspapers when the advertising math stopped working. Now, news and events appear on a digital Belvoir Eagle or the Fort Belvoir Facebook page, the command’s information alongside social media’s screeds and nonsense.

In this era of misinformation, that’s not enough separation. The Castle was simple, and simple’s needed, then and now. What happened and why.

In 1991, I believed the printed Castle was irreplaceable—not each week’s edition, but its creation of a lineage. Back then, I read old issues, bound in thick volumes chronicling past decades. I assumed future young soldiers would someday do the same and see their contributions within that shared lineage.

It feels wrong to have surrendered that physical record.

This past summer, I had dug out my small Castle archive for research to argue against the mistake of closing these military newspapers, which told stories no one else did. I would deploy my skills at melodrama and overstatement, and use this War Horse Reflection to make that case.

The more the 30-year-old newsprint stained my fingers, the less that fight stayed in me.

I read the stories from 1991—a school principal’s retirement, an Agent Orange action group, a recycling campaign, the criteria for the Southwest Asia Campaign Ribbon.

These days, stories in the digital Belvoir Eagle still do that job—yearly awards, features on soldiers or civilians doing good work, changes to post policy, visits by retired officers.

Marking its 50th year of publishing, the June 7, 1991, edition of the Castle used the original logo from June 4, 1941.

Printed newspapers didn’t do it differently or better.

On Facebook in April 2024, the Fort Belvoir page posted daily updates about a fuel leak on Davison Airfield, explaining steps to prevent contamination within the wildlife refuge. In 1991, we couldn’t have done that—at best, one story one week, and a follow-up the next.

Websites and Facebook are more convenient, that’s for certain.

Still, convenience is not the same as presence.

Physical newspapers had a presence. A consistent appearance each week, in the barracks and the break rooms. A presence, same as the flag in front of the headquarters. Like the flag, permanence.

In West’s retirement photo, he stands before the Army flag bedecked with campaign streamers—the lineage and honors.

Today’s online era lumps that lineage into a maze of random links. There is no searchable database for the Castle or Eagle. Nor for the Paraglide, Signal, Southern Star, or anywhere I once wrote for the Army. Without a permanent record, history becomes just one more assumption.

Does it matter? Reading about Army life in 1991 is equivalent to myself in 1991, listening to some old-timer drone on about 1958. Maybe it’s silly to care at all.

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It’s silly if campaign streamers are silly—if it’s silly to remember the lineage of Fort Belvoir, and history growing around soldiers who ground through ever-distant days.

In this digital, ephemeral age of 2024, history is a casualty, collateral damage to convenience and efficiency. It’s true that newspapers were made to be discarded each week, but they cataloged history for years into decades. Printed newspapers aren’t coming back, but it should be easier to remember the job they did.

On Fort Belvoir’s 2024 webpage is digital art of almost the same bald eagle I pasted down for its first front-page appearance in June 1991. The eagle is the lineage of replaceable men and women who come and go.

Irreplaceable history. Like I said, it was my job to care.

This War Horse Reflection essay was written by Nathan Webster, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Abbie Bennett wrote the headlines.

thewarhorse.org · by Nathan Webster · October 16, 2024

24. Ukraine’s pioneering virtual reality PTSD therapy

Ukraine has so much to teach us. It is a laboratory in so many ways.

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/ukraines-pioneering-virtual-reality?utm

Ukraine’s pioneering virtual reality PTSD therapy

Necessity breeds invention. And as difficult as the war is, new tools to help mental distress are being innovated due to the trauma of war.

Anastasiia Kryvoruchenko

Oct 17, 2024

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Last year, Mykola Horishnyi was declared clinically dead – twice. The Ukrainian soldier suffered severe blood loss caused by an explosion, likely a Russian mine.

“Tomorrow will mark exactly one year since I was wounded. At 4:45 pm. I still can't fully grasp that this all happened to me, and that I am no longer in the trenches,” Mykola told The Counteroffensive.

Mykola (right) has lunch with a fellow veteran (far left) at the Borodyanka Center for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation in the Kyiv region

Mykola suffers from PTSD, making it difficult for him to discuss the traumatic events he endured. He recently began psychotherapy at a rehabilitation center in the Kyiv suburb of Borodyanka, which is pioneering unique virtual reality therapy.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Health reported that the number of people struggling with mental health has doubled since 2023. Market research data shows that sales of antidepressants have grown by more than 50 percent compared to the pre-war year of 2021, reported the BBC.

Typically, around 15% of people develop PTSD after experiencing traumatic events of violent conflict or war. Most of those can overcome its effects with the right professional help, though traditional therapy doesn't always succeed.

The increase in mental health problems suggests that there will be a major social crisis after the war, as hundreds of thousands of soldiers try to reintegrate back into peacetime civilian life. To tackle these problems, technological innovators are trying to make that transition easier with new experiments in virtual reality therapy.

“If it wasn't for our doctors, we wouldn't be talking now,” Mykola said.

VR-set used in Borodyanka social rehabilitation center

For Mykola, it all started after he volunteered to join the army in February 2023.

“I wanted to be deployed to the frontlines in the East, to get to Crimea, take our Crimea back, and that’s it, but of course, it didn't work out as expected,” Mykola said.

A year has passed since Mykola was injured, but he is still haunted by the images.

“I still can’t fully comprehend that this is my reality now, that I’m no longer in the trenches, running around, storming positions. When I close my eyes or sit alone, I feel like I’m still there. I see the trenches in my sleep — these nightmares never leave me,” Mykola told The Counteroffensive.

Currently, Mykola is receiving therapy and retreat services at the Borodyanka Center for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation. The center is one of a few places in Ukraine that is actively developing VR therapy.

Exposure therapy with the help of VR has been shown to have promising therapeutic qualities.

“It’s hard to think of many mental health conditions that it couldn’t benefit. We are working on treatments for a large number of conditions,” said professor Daniel Freeman told the BBC.

A video game - ‘Horizon: Call Of The Mountain’ – shows what people can see while using the same VR set used at the Borodyanka center:

A specialist is always present to provide support, but the main goal is to recreate traumatic memories to help the patient overcome stress and fear.

“Our brains are built in a way that they don’t really tell the difference between virtual and physical reality. Virtual reality is used to help bring a person back to normal memories and feelings by immersing them in a virtual environment,” said Yevhen Kotukh, a VR specialist who is actively helping develop this technology.

Yevhen and his team are working on the development of a new technology for rapid diagnosis of PTSD.

They plan to use virtual reality to evoke emotional impulses in a veteran by showing a two minute simulation of combat operations. Signals from the brain can then be used to help determine whether the person has PTSD.

Currently, the VR technology at the center is at a very early stage of development, but the team is actively working with donors and partners to improve it.

It is expected that normal treatment will require up to ten sessions of 50 minutes each, which will take place weekly. When the course is finished, the sensitivity to stress experienced by the person should decrease to a controlled level. Ultimately, VR therapy can help more than two-thirds of people with PTSD when used in conjunction with a psychologist.

Traditional ‘exposure’ therapy – where the therapist creates a safe environment and exposes you to your fears to overcome them – may not be suitable for everyone and has its limitations.

First, it takes time to engage the soldier and begin addressing traumatic events.

Second, the veteran’s memory and imagination might not be sufficient, making it difficult to process the trauma.

Plus, it can be hard for individuals to open up and speak freely about painful memories.

Currently, active cooperation with foreign partners is underway to create a specialized room with sensors in which people can move freely. This will make the experience of using VR even more realistic.

In addition to psychological assistance, VR helps with phantom pain for people who have lost limbs but can still feel pain in their place. Mykyta Makazan is one of the veterans who had his leg amputated and faced the problem of phantom pain. He says that sometimes it hurt so much that it was difficult to get out of bed.

Mykola Makazan having VR-session, photo by Vilne Radio

With sensors attached to the muscles on his lost limb and virtual reality that shows you a game aimed at developing motor skills, you can rewire your brain to believe that the limb that you move in the game is your own limb. It helps to move the muscles and stretch them, then phantom pain goes away. That's how Mykyta Makazan explained it in an interview with Ukrainian media.

The point of virtual reality therapy is to relieve the pain we feel in actual reality.

In the rehabilitation center, as Mykola was telling me about nightmares that still haunt him, he lost his smile.

I could tell that in his head he was partially reliving war scenes that happened to him.

So I switched the topic. To the question about things that distract him, he smiled.

“Family. Home, routine, communication, when my wife comes home from work and we talk, when we go for a walk, this center in Borodyanka,” Mykola said.

This man’s eyes were full of love for his family.

All the veterans should experience such support and help on their extremely hard path towards physical and psychological rehabilitation.

At the time of my conversation with Mykola he had just a couple previous visits at the Borodyanka center.

When I tried to reach out to him to talk about his VR experience and his impression, I was informed that he is in the hospital. I was really shocked to hear that.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t talk to me or share anything further.

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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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