The tech giant helps governments and law enforcement decipher vast amounts of data - to mysterious and, some say, dangerous ends.
By Michael Steinberger
On a bright Tuesday afternoon in Paris last fall, Alex Karp was doing tai chi in the Luxembourg Gardens. He wore blue Nike sweatpants, a blue polo shirt, orange socks, charcoal-gray sneakers and white-framed sunglasses with red accents that inevitably drew attention to his most distinctive feature, a tangle of salt-and-pepper hair rising skyward from his head.
Under a canopy of chestnut trees, Karp executed a series of elegant tai chi and qigong moves, shifting the pebbles and dirt gently under his feet as he twisted and turned. A group of teenagers watched in amusement. After 10 minutes or so, Karp walked to a nearby bench, where one of his bodyguards had placed a cooler and what looked like an instrument case. The cooler held several bottles of the nonalcoholic German beer that Karp drinks (he would crack one open on the way out of the park). The case contained a wooden sword, which he needed for the next part of his routine. "I brought a real sword the last time I was here, but the police stopped me," he said matter of factly as he began slashing the air with the sword.
Those gendarmes evidently didn't know that Karp, far from being a public menace, was the chief executive of an American company whose software has been deployed on behalf of public safety in France. The company, Palantir Technologies, is named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." Its two primary software programs, Gotham and Foundry, gather and process vast quantities of data in order to identify connections, patterns and trends that might elude human analysts. The stated goal of all this "data integration" is to help organizations make better decisions, and many of Palantir's customers consider its technology to be transformative. Karp claims a loftier ambition, however. "We built our company to support the West," he says. To that end, Palantir says it does not do business in countries that it considers adversarial to the U.S. and its allies, namely China and Russia. In the company's early days, Palantir employees, invoking Tolkien, described their mission as "saving the shire."
The brainchild of Karp's friend and law-school classmate Peter Thiel, Palantir was founded in 2003. It was seeded in part by In-Q-Tel, the C.I.A.'s venture-capital arm, and the C.I.A. remains a client. Palantir's technology is rumored to have been used to track down Osama bin Laden - a claim that has never been verified but one that has conferred an enduring mystique on the company. These days, Palantir is used for counterterrorism by a number of Western governments. French intelligence turned to Palantir following the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris. Karp claims that Palantir has helped thwart several attacks, including one or two that he says could have had seismic political consequences. "I believe that Western civilization has rested on our somewhat small shoulders a couple of times in the last 15 years," he told me in Paris, where he was hosting a conference for Palantir's corporate clients.
A few months later, the world was being menaced by a novel coronavirus, and Palantir quickly joined that battle against Covid-19: By April, according to the company, approximately a dozen countries were using its technology to track and contain the virus. The speed with which Palantir transitioned to pandemic response ostensibly underscores the flexibility of its software, which can be put to any number of tasks. The U.S. Army uses it for logistics, among other things. The investment bank Credit Suisse uses it to guard against money laundering. The pharmaceutical company Merck, in Germany, uses it to expedite the development of new drugs. Ferrari Scuderia uses it to try to make its Formula 1 cars faster. To Palantirians, as some call themselves, these myriad applications are just further proof that many problems are data-integration problems.
Yet Palantir's work on the coronavirus has also highlighted the mistrust that trails the company. In Europe, it is viewed with suspicion because of the C.I.A. connection. But the main source of apprehension is simply the nature of Palantir's work. Although Palantir claims it does not store or sell client data and has incorporated into its software what it insists are robust privacy controls, those who worry about the sanctity of personal information see Palantir as a particularly malignant avatar of the Big Data revolution. Karp himself doesn't deny the risk. "Every technology is dangerous," he says, "including ours." The fact that the health records of millions of people are now being funneled through Palantir's software has only added to the unease.
That's especially true in the United States, where the Department of Health and Human Services is using Palantir's software to analyze virus-related data. Palantir's work with H.H.S. has become bound up in the biggest controversy that the company has faced, over its relationship with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Progressive activists and members of Congress have expressed fear that the information collected by H.H.S. could be used by the Trump administration to expand its immigration crackdown, in which Palantir's technology has played a part. And the fact that Palantir was awarded a pair of no-bid contracts valued at nearly $25 million by H.H.S. has amplified concerns that it has benefited from Thiel's support of President Trump. Thiel was one of his most prominent backers in 2016, even speaking at the Republican National Convention.
Palantir's perceived links to the president have made it an object of suspicion among liberals, which frustrates Karp. In contrast to Thiel, the 53-year-old Karp is a self-described "progressive warrior" who says he voted for Hillary Clinton and who has expressed antipathy for Trump. His greatest fear, he says, is the rise of fascism. Although Karp's political views are widely shared in Silicon Valley, he is one of the tech industry's unlikeliest chief executives. He co-founded Palantir with no background in computer science or business. Instead, he holds a law degree from Stanford University and a doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt, where for a time his thesis adviser was Jürgen Habermas, possibly Europe's most celebrated living social philosopher. On the corporate scene, Karp is a sui generis figure, a fact vividly on display that autumn afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Until recently, it could be argued that his intellectual pedigree and political leanings were a kind of shield for Palantir, deflecting criticism of its work - or at least keeping critics off balance. But fairly or not, Palantir has come to be regarded as an enabler and prime beneficiary of Trump's presidency, which has rendered the company toxic in the eyes of many progressives. In response to the criticism of Palantir's relationship with ICE, Karp has attacked the tech industry over what he sees as its insufficient patriotism. Palantir recently relocated its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver, a move that seemed partly rooted in the contempt that Karp and Thiel have for Silicon Valley. The company, which has yet to turn a profit, went public last month amid concerns that its prospects in Washington could be diminished under a Biden administration. Palantir says that its software solves "the world's hardest problems." Removing the stain of Trumpism may prove to be an especially hard one.
Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir.Antoine d'Agata/Magnum Photos for The New York Times
Speaking at a tech conference in 2010, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive at the time, made a startling observation. "There were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003. Now that same amount of information is created every two days," he said. (An exabyte is equivalent to one billion gigabytes.) It was perhaps a slightly exaggerated claim in the service of an indisputable fact: Humanity is now awash in data. The premise of Big Data is that all of this information can yield powerful insights. But the difficulty is harnessing the data, which is where Palantir comes in. Although Palantir has glamorous clients and offices in upscale locales (the Marais in Paris, Soho Square in London, the Georgetown section of Washington), in tech circles, data integration is not considered particularly sexy. "It's plumbing work, basically," Louis Mosley, who runs Palantir's London office, told me with a smile.
He was being modest. What Palantir does is a little more complex than unclogging a toilet. Essentially, Palantir's software synthesizes the data that an organization collects. It could be five or six types of data; it could be hundreds. The challenge is that each type of information - phone numbers, trading records, tax returns, photos, text messages - is often formatted differently from the others and siloed in separate databases. Building virtual pipelines, Palantir engineers merge all the information into a single platform. They work quickly. According to Jose Arrieta, who was H.H.S.'s chief information officer until two months ago, Palantir merged around two billion data elements related to the Covid-19 outbreak in less than three weeks. Once the data has been integrated, it can be presented in the form of tables, graphs, timelines, heat maps, artificial-intelligence models, histograms, spider diagrams and geospatial analysis. It is a digital panopticon, and having sat through several Palantir demos, I can report that the interface is impressive - the search results are strikingly elegant and easy to understand.
Those appealing visuals were conceived in order to hunt and kill terrorists. In 1998, Thiel co-founded PayPal, then served as its chief executive from 2000 until it was acquired by eBay in 2002. Not long after 9/11 - Thiel can't recall exactly when - it occurred to him that PayPal's anti-fraud algorithms could possibly help the U.S. government combat terrorism. In 2003, Thiel asked a trio of software engineers, including two from PayPal, to create a prototype. His intuition plus their coding gave rise to Palantir. While Thiel provided most of the early money, the start-up secured an estimated $2 million from In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital firm that finances the development of technologies that can help the C.I.A.
Karp says the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it gave Palantir access to the C.I.A. analysts who were its intended clients. According to Palantir, every two weeks, Aki Jain, one of the first engineers hired by Thiel, and Stephen Cohen, an engineer who had worked at Thiel's hedge fund, Clarion Capital Partners, traveled from Palo Alto to Langley with an updated version of the software program. (Cohen recalls the C.I.A. guys' referring to him as "Two Weeks.") The C.I.A. analysts would test it out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and Jain would fly back to California to tweak it. Jain estimates that from 2005 to 2009, he and Cohen made around 200 trips to Virginia. The iterative approach became standard practice for Palantir - even now, it embeds what it calls "forward-deployed engineers" with clients to customize the software to their needs, which has led some observers to conclude that Palantir is as much a consultancy as it is a software maker.
Although Palantir is often depicted as a kind of omnipotent force, it is actually quite small, with around 2,400 employees. By contrast, Facebook, which seems to vie with Palantir for the worst headlines these days, has more than 50,000. (Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook and remains a member of its board.) And while Palantir's reach feels tentacular, the prospectus that it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission before going public revealed that it has just 125 customers, a number that surprised some observers and raised questions about the company's growth prospects. In mid-October, Palantir stock was trading around $10 per share, and its market capitalization was nearly $16 billion.
Palantir is pricey - customers pay $10 million to $100 million annually - and not everyone is enamored of the product. Home Depot, Hershey, Coca-Cola and American Express all dropped Palantir after using it. Even within the intelligence community, there seem to be mixed opinions. Three years ago, BuzzFeed obtained a leaked video in which Karp told Palantir employees that the company's relationship with the National Security Agency had ended. Several former C.I.A. analysts told me that they and their colleagues were underwhelmed by Palantir. But the C.I.A. is a big place, and others who worked there extolled it.
Some clients seem to believe Palantir's software is essential. One is the aerospace manufacturer Airbus, which hired Palantir in 2016 when it was ramping up production of its new A350 jet. Marc Fontaine, who until recently was Airbus's digital-transformation officer, told me that when you go from a single plane on the assembly line to 10, "the complexity increases exponentially, and it kills you." Missing parts, faulty parts, production mistakes, communications glitches - those and other problems inevitably slow down the assembly process and cause millions of dollars in cost overruns. They can also result in penalties and damages that have to be paid to airlines awaiting delivery.
In 2016, five Palantir engineers embedded in the Airbus factory in Toulouse, France. Using Foundry, Palantir's commercial application - Gotham, its other flagship software program, is for national security and defense - they merged 25 data silos related to production of the A350 and integrated more than 400 sets of data. Palantir produced results immediately. Before it came on board, Fontaine says, it took an average of 24 days to fix production mistakes; Palantir helped cut that to 17. Airbus realized several hundred million dollars in cost savings.
These days, around 15,000 Airbus employees use Palantir, and its software has essentially wired the entire Airbus ecosystem through a venture called Skywise, which collects and analyzes data from around 130 airlines worldwide. The information is used for everything from improving on-time performance to preventive maintenance. Fontaine says that Airbus was always open to using other data-analytics tools, but "we didn't find anything equivalent at the time to Palantir." Its software, he says, "has unique capability." His former boss, Tom Enders, who was Airbus's chief executive from 2012 to 2019, echoes that praise. He calls bringing in Palantir "one of the best decisions of my career."
Karp, standing, with Palantir employees: Dave Glazer, Sara Peletz and Mayer Schein. The portrait on the wall is Michel Foucault, the French philosopher.Antoine d'Agata/Magnum Photos for The New York Times
''I still can't believe I haven't been shot and pushed out the window," Karp told me. We were in Palantir's New York office, located in the Meatpacking district. He wasn't being literal, despite the office's bulletproof windows and the bodyguards hovering nearby. Rather, he meant the feeling of inevitable doom that has plagued him since childhood. Karp grew up in the Philadelphia area. His parents are Dr. Robert Karp, a clinical pediatrician, and Leah Jaynes Karp, an artist. His father is Jewish; his mother is African-American. (Karp has a brother and two stepsiblings.) He told me that his parents were "hippies" and that he spent a lot of time as a kid at political protests. He intuited from a young age that his background made him vulnerable, he said. "You're a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who's also dyslexic - would you not come up with the idea that you're [expletive]?" Although he was now the head of a major corporation, neither time nor success had diminished the anxiety. If the far right came to power, he said, he would certainly be among its victims. "Who's the first person who is going to get hung? You make a list, and I will show you who they get first. It's me. There's not a box I don't check." His fear, he said, "propels a lot of the decisions for this company."
Given the political milieu in which he was raised, Haverford College, a school with Quaker roots near Philadelphia with a robust tradition of dissent (it was a hive of antiwar activity in the 1960s and 1970s), was a natural fit for Karp. We happened to be classmates there, but despite the college's small size (currently around 1,200 students), he and I somehow never exchanged a word in four years. Karp was, by his own admission, somewhat introverted and also very studious. The library didn't see much of me, which may go some way to explaining why he ended up a billionaire and I did not. Over conversations in New York, Washington, Paris and Vermont, we found that we had a lot to talk about, although I can't say it is regrettable that we never connected at Haverford; I am not sure that 20-year-old me would have fully appreciated his bracing intelligence, and I suspect that my talent for procuring beer and organizing Roman-themed parties would have been of little use to him.
After graduating, Karp went to Stanford Law School, which he hated - "the worst three years of my adult life." He says he knew within a week of enrolling that he had made a mistake. In his view, Stanford was just a glorified trade school; his classmates were mainly animated by a desire to land prestigious jobs, and the intellectual discourse was "highly performative," as he puts it. What made Stanford bearable was his unlikely friendship with Thiel, a classmate. They bonded over their shared disdain for law school and a love of political debate. Thiel had already achieved some prominence for his libertarian views - as a Stanford undergraduate, he had helped found the right-leaning Stanford Review - and he and Karp spent much of their free time interrogating each other's positions. "We argued like feral animals," Karp recalled. According to Thiel, their conversations generally took place late at night in the law-school dorm. "It sounds too self-aggrandizing, but I think we were both genuinely interested in ideas," he says. "He was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist. He was always talking about Marxist theories of alienated labor and how this was true of all the people around us."
Karp didn't even stick around for his Stanford graduation: As soon as classes ended, he left for Frankfurt to begin studying German. His aim was to earn a doctorate in Germany, an ambition kindled mainly by the fact that most of the writers and thinkers he was drawn to were German. After six months, he had mastered enough of the language - despite his dyslexia - to gain admission to Goethe University in Frankfurt. Having Jürgen Habermas as his Ph.D. thesis adviser was a big deal. Habermas was affiliated with the university's Institute for Social Research, which had given rise to the so-called Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist movement renowned for its critique of capitalism and culture. In Karp's words, "If you can get Habermas to work with you for even two minutes, you can be a tenured professor at Columbia."
But Karp says he had a falling out with Habermas over his dissertation topic and ended up switching advisers. When I first asked him to describe his thesis, which he wrote in German, he said that it "rebuilt the Parsonian framework to account for the somewhat irrational philosophy of Adorno, basically." When I later asked for an explanation that I could perhaps understand, he told me that it was about the German writer Martin Walser's controversial 1998 speech on the limits of wartime guilt and "a parochial form of fascism that occurs by purposely saying things that are incorrect in speech." ("Parsonian" is a reference to the American sociologist Talcott Parsons; Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher and sociologist.) Karp said that although his collaboration with Habermas ended prematurely, it was clarifying. He realized that, however gifted a scholar he might have been, he could never attain the stature of Habermas. "Working with Habermas showed me that I couldn't be him and didn't want to be him," he says.
While his second advanced degree also failed to yield a career path, it had an unexpected dividend: He developed a deep affinity for Germany. "I went for intellectual reasons," he says. "The reason I stayed was emotional." He found that he was good at what he calls "German conceptual thinking" but also felt a sense of belonging in Germany - that he fit in even as he recognized that his Jewishness would always set him apart. He still feels that way. "I have a second home, and it's called Germany and the German-speaking world," he told me. "I'm more naturally accepted there than anywhere else in the world." The years that he spent in Germany are the touchstone of his life. "I only made two good decisions as an adult: going to Germany and starting Palantir," he said. "Everything else was, I wouldn't call it a mistake, but it was either preparation for these two decisions or a mistake."
After finishing his dissertation, Karp founded a money-management firm. His goal was to accumulate a $250,000 nest egg and to settle in Berlin, where he planned to live as a highbrow dilettante, combining intellectual pursuits with various "forms of debauchery." But then Thiel reached out to him. Thiel thought that Palantir might be a tough sell to potential clients, at least initially - there would be skepticism about the software, as well as bureaucratic resistance - and that the fledgling company needed a persuasive frontman with a sophisticated mind. "I am not sure that Alex was the perfect person for it, but he was by far the best person I knew," Thiel told me. "You needed someone who was smart, scrappy, who - I think he has a terrific sense for people. I think he's incredibly tenacious."
Still, Karp was not an obvious choice to run a tech firm or any company, for that matter. Even though he has now been Palantir's chief executive for 17 years and is a celebrity at Davos and other elite gatherings, in some ways he still seems ill suited to the task, a point he readily concedes. He is a lifelong bachelor who is drawn to solitary pursuits - his chief pastime is cross-country skiing (he will do 40 to 60 kilometers a day when time and weather permit). He doesn't like to give speeches or do interviews, and you will never see him prowling a stage in the way that, say, Steve Jobs once did. Backslapping and small talk are not his thing, either. "Most businesspeople have a slight politician inside them," Karp said. "I don't have that inside me."
He said it would be helpful to Palantir if he were more "norm-conforming." I asked what norm-conforming looked like. "The way I see your life," he said. (I had filled him in on the details during a previous conversation.) I was a little disappointed to learn that my conventionality - wife, kids, dog - was so obvious, but I kept that to myself and asked if he thought he could eventually marry. Karp shook his head. "I fantasized about being norm-conforming, but I don't know how to do that," he said. "I just don't know how to do that, I don't know how it works, I wouldn't know how to be not transgressive. I try. I try really hard, really I do ... but it's not working out." (He did tell me later that he had a girlfriend in Germany.) I suggested that his idiosyncratic personality didn't seem to be hurting Palantir. He disagreed. "We are an enterprise company with enterprise clients," he said. "You think it is helpful having a fluorescent praying mantis coming into their office, telling them about German philosophy? Do you think that's helpful? I can tell you, it's not helpful."
On the other hand, Karp had no doubt that he was the right person to lead Palantir internally. "Once I stumbled on it," he said, "it turned out that I was built for certain things that are really valuable, like managing very complex, sometimes difficult - highly in many cases - technical software engineers. There are just very few people in the world built for that." Among Palantirians, "Dr. Karp," as he is known, commands something approaching reverence. He appears to be a loyal and generous boss. I also had the impression that his employees serve a loco familia function for him, which may go some way to explaining why, before the pandemic, he spent roughly 300 days a year on the road, circulating among Palantir's 22 offices. And if, as he insists, his distinctive manner is off-putting to clients, Karp believes it is crucial to his ability to lead Palantir. "I manage the most eclectic, creative group of 2,400 people perhaps in the world," he told me. "You need a way you can bond, and my eccentric, nonstandard character is the bonding mechanism."
Karp taking a break out of his temporary offices. He does at least one hour of hiking in the morning.Antoine d'Agata/Magnum Photos for The New York Times
Karp and Thiel say they had two overarching ambitions for Palantir early on. The first was to make software that could help keep the country safe from terrorism. The second was to prove that there was a technological solution to the challenge of balancing public safety and civil liberties - a "Hegelian" aspiration, as Karp puts it. Although political opposites, they both feared that personal privacy would be a casualty of the war on terrorism. When I met with Thiel at his Los Angeles office, in a conference room with a commanding view of the Hollywood Hills, he used a whiteboard to illustrate those concerns. With a black marker, he drew a graph. At the end of one axis he wrote "Dick Cheney" and at the other end he wrote "A.C.L.U." Cheney, he explained, represented "lots of security and no privacy" while the A.C.L.U. was "lots of privacy but little security." Post 9/11, Thiel said, it seemed inevitable that the Cheney view would prevail. He then drew another axis, this one with "low-tech" at one end and "high-tech" at the other. "Low-tech" was a catchall for crude, highly intrusive technology. "High-tech," he said, was more effective but also less invasive. Thiel's fear was that we would end up with a combination of low-tech and Cheney, in which case civil liberties would likely be crushed. He said that he and Karp wanted to make software that could help save lives but also preserve privacy. "Maybe there were still trade-offs, but they were at a very different level," he said.
To that end, Palantir's software was created with two primary security features: Users are able to access only information they are authorized to view, and the software generates an audit trail that, among other things, indicates if someone has tried to obtain material off-limits to them. But the data, which is stored in various cloud services or on clients' premises, is controlled by the customer, and Palantir says it does not police the use of its products. Nor are the privacy controls foolproof; it is up to the customers to decide who gets to see what and how vigilant they wish to be. The potential for abuse seems vast, especially in the United States, where digital-privacy laws are not nearly as stringent as in Europe. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek broke the story of a rogue JP Morgan Chase employee who had used Palantir's software to spy on colleagues, reading their emails and tracking their movements. Even some of the bank's senior executives were unknowingly surveilled.
Over the years, Palantir has been embroiled in several controversies that have raised doubts about its own trustworthiness. In 2011, the hacker collective Anonymous released emails it had taken from a third party showing that Palantir employees were involved in a proposed misinformation campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and to smear some of its supporters, notably Glenn Greenwald. Though no one was fired, Karp personally apologized to Greenwald. (When I asked Karp about the episode, he chalked it up to "growing pains.") Palantir was also implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Christopher Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica employee-turned-whistle-blower, claimed that Palantir helped the firm harvest Facebook data that was then used on behalf of the Trump campaign. Palantir, which has a policy of not working on elections, said the matter involved just one employee in its London office and that the person was fired.
For those made nervous by Palantir, the company's work with police departments has been a source of particular worry. Of all the ways that Big Data can be used, perhaps none generates greater attention than predictive policing, in which quantitative analyses are used to identify places that seem especially prone to crime and individuals who are likely to commit or fall victim to a crime. To critics, data-driven policing encourages overly aggressive tactics and reinforces racial biases that have long plagued the criminal-justice system. Palantir's effort to market its software to police departments can also be regarded as an example of how weapons originally meant for the war on terrorism are now being deployed on American streets. "This is a tool designed to enhance government surveillance now being redirected on the domestic population," says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor of law at American University who has written extensively about policing and technology.
That said, Palantir has struggled to drum up business from police departments. The New York Police Department stopped using Palantir a few years ago, as did the New Orleans Police Department. Not long before, concerns had been raised about how the N.O.P.D. was using the data. These days, the only major metropolitan force using Palantir is the Los Angeles Police Department. Before traveling to Los Angeles last December, I reached out to the L.A.P.D., asking to interview officials about Palantir. My request was turned down. But Sarah Brayne, now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, had better luck.
In 2013, when Brayne was a doctoral candidate at Princeton researching the use of data in policing, members of the L.A.P.D. allowed her to study their deployment of new technologies. Over the next two years, she enjoyed considerable access to the department, interviewing dozens of officers and going on ride-alongs in patrol cars. It became apparent to her that Palantir's software was having a significant impact. For instance, Palantir's network analysis - its ability to identify a person's friends, relatives, colleagues and other relations - was pulling people into the L.A.P.D.'s surveillance system who otherwise wouldn't have been.
Brayne's findings will be included in a book coming out next month called "Predict and Surveil." In it, she quotes one L.A.P.D. captain who inadvertently confirmed the worst suspicions about the use of data analytics in policing. "Let's say I have something going on with the medical-marijuana clinics where they're getting robbed," he told Brayne. "I can put in an alert to Palantir that says anything that has to do with medical marijuana plus robbery, plus male, Black, six foot. I like throwing the net out there, you know?" Racial profiling was just one obvious risk. Among the many data streams available to the L.A.P.D. via Palantir were automatic license-plate readers, and it was easy enough to conjure nightmare scenarios. A detective could conceivably use that information to squeeze a reluctant witness - say, by finding out he was having an affair. Someone in the L.A.P.D. could possibly keep tabs on his ex-wife's comings and goings. Brayne told me that what most troubled her about the L.A.P.D.'s use of data was its opaqueness. "Digital surveillance is invisible," she said. "How are you supposed to hold an institution accountable when you don't know what they are doing?"
A great deal of the controversy that dogs Palantir can also be attributed to Thiel, whose activities have raised some doubt about his commitment to democratic society and fair play. In the past, Thiel has argued that democracy and economic freedom are incompatible and suggested that giving women the vote had undermined the latter. After Gawker reported that he was gay, he secretly financed the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that bankrupted the website. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Thiel had been urging Mark Zuckerberg not to censor political ads on Facebook. Thiel's comments and activities occasionally get in the way of Palantir's messaging. Karp gave a talk in Washington in September last year in which he said that the only justifiable use of facial-recognition technology by law enforcement was to exonerate people. A few months later, The Times reported that Thiel had helped finance a start-up called Clearview AI, whose facial-recognition app was being used by police departments around the country to charge individuals with crimes. Thiel's investment in Clearview seemed to contradict Karp's position and also raised questions about the sincerity of the views he had expressed regarding civil liberties and privacy.
When I asked Thiel about the risk of abuse with Palantir, he answered by referring to the company's literary roots. "The Palantir device in the Tolkien books was a very ambiguous device in some ways," he said. "There were a lot of people who looked into it and saw more than they should see, and things went badly wrong when they did." But that didn't mean the Palantir itself was flawed. "The Tolkien point I always make is that at the end of the day, it was actually a good device that was critical to the plot of the whole story. The way it worked was that Aragorn looked into the Palantir, and he showed Sauron the sword with which the One Ring had been cut off Sauron's fingers at the end of the Second Age. This convinced Sauron that Aragorn had the One Ring and caused Sauron to launch a premature attack that emptied out Mordor and enabled the hobbits to sneak in to destroy the One Ring." He continued: "The plot action was driven by the Palantir being used for good, not for evil. This reflected Tolkien's cosmology that something that was made by the good elves would ultimately be used for good."
A moment later, he added: "That's roughly how I see it, that it is ultimately good and still very dangerous. In some ways, I think that was reflected in the choice of the name."
In the lateaughts, Palantir began pitching its technology to the U.S. military. The Army had equipped its troops with a battlefield-intelligence platform that was doing a poor job of protecting them, but it had sunk billions of dollars into the system and was unreceptive to Palantir. So Palantir started offering its software directly to individual battalions in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of 2011, about three dozen units across the military were using Palantir, and some were raving about its ability to steer them clear of ambushes and roadside bombs. According to Fortune magazine, a few senior military figures had become fans, too, among them Gen. James Mattis, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
In 2012, the Army commissioned an assessment of Palantir. According to a draft of the report that Palantir produced during litigation, 96 percent of military personnel surveyed deemed Palantir's software to be effective. But rather than embracing Palantir, officials appeared to ignore the report. Two years later, the Army finally conceded that the intelligence system it was providing to troops was inoperable and began soliciting bids to develop a replacement. It refused, however, to allow Palantir to take part because its software was an off-the-shelf product, and the Army was only willing to entertain proposals for building a new system from scratch. In June 2016, Palantir sued the Army, and three months later, a federal court ruled in its favor. The judge said the Army had acted in "an arbitrary and capricious manner" and ordered it to open up the competition to Palantir.
The protracted battle with the Army is now corporate lore at Palantir, a story that encapsulates how the company sees itself - the scrappy outsider, dedicated to ensuring that good software triumphs over bad. In truth, the saga was slightly more complicated than that. For one thing, Palantir hired lawyers and lobbyists to plead its case and cultivated some prominent allies, such as Senator John McCain. Jonathan Wong, a former Marine and now a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, says that the Army wasn't necessarily acting out of malice toward Palantir. It wanted a more comprehensive battlefield-intelligence system than Palantir was offering at the time, one that could be used against "what we are fighting today and what we will be facing tomorrow," as he puts it. But Wong, whose dissertation at RAND focused in part on the early relationship between Palantir and the Pentagon, says that Palantir's software was better for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism challenges that the military was facing at the time.
The federal court's decision was handed down eight days before Trump was elected president. Depending on how you see it, the timing was either merely coincidental or portentous. With Trump's victory, Palantir was suddenly among the best-connected companies in Washington. Thiel had been one of Trump's most prominent supporters, and Mattis, McMaster and Flynn all ended up with senior positions in the new administration. The Trump years have been a bonanza for Palantir. Since Trump took office, it has won military contracts worth billions, including an $800 million contract to build the replacement battlefield-intelligence system. Palantir also has contracts with a number of civilian departments and agencies, among them the I.R.S., the S.E.C. and the C.D.C. The U.S. government now accounts for around half its business.
There appear to have been no allegations of impropriety around the military contracts that Palantir has won under Trump. But the military procurement process has not been immune to the ethical concerns that have swirled around his presidency. Last year, Amazon filed a lawsuit claiming that it had been passed over for a $10 billion defense contract because the Pentagon had yielded to pressure from Trump, who had repeatedly attacked the company's founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, and who had also publicly stated that he did not want Amazon to get the deal.
Karp told me the idea that Palantir had benefited from Thiel's support of Trump was "completely ludicrous," and he bemoaned "the unfairness it creates toward us." Whatever good will Thiel enjoyed with Trump, he said, was offset by his own opposition. "I think they already know my views at the White House," he said. "It's true Peter is chairman, [but] I'm running the company, I don't have close ties with the Trump administration." Still, he acknowledged that he was worried about "the guilt by association thing" - the possibility that Palantir could be tarnished by its perceived links to Trump. Even so, he refused to back away from the most damaging connection, Palantir's work with ICE.
Palantir's client relationships are sometimes born in moments of crisis. That was true with French intelligence, and it was also the case with ICE, which sought Palantir's assistance after one of its agents was assassinated by a Mexican drug cartel. According to the company, it took Palantir's engineers 11 hours to merge all of the relevant data, and within two weeks the killers were identified and arrested. ICE subsequently awarded Palantir a contract to help manage the data of Homeland Security Investigations, or H.S.I., the ICE subdivision that handles drug smuggling, human trafficking, financial crimes and cybercrimes. Palantir's relationship with ICE attracted little notice before Trump's presidency. But it became deeply controversial as Trump made good on his campaign pledge to curb illegal immigration.
Initially, Palantir tried to deflect criticism by pointing out that its contracts were with H.S.I., not Enforcement and Removal Operations, or E.R.O., the subdivision that was spearheading Trump's policy. "We do not work for E.R.O," the company said in a statement to The Times in 2018. That may have been technically true, but it wrongly implied that Palantir was playing no part in the crackdown. In the years before, H.S.I. had supported E.R.O. in a continuing operation to arrest and possibly deport family members of undocumented children who were caught trying to cross the border. And last year, H.S.I. led a raid on food-processing plants in Mississippi in which nearly 700 people were arrested. Interviewed by CNBC at Davos in January, Karp appeared to concede that Palantir's previous disavowals were no longer operative. "It's a de minimis part of our work, finding people in our country who are undocumented," he said.
But Jacinta González of the advocacy group Mijente contends that even that comment was "totally false" and that Palantir's software has played an integral role. She notes that ICE itself describes Palantir's software as "mission critical," underscoring its importance to the government agency. She claims that in recent years, ICE raids on undocumented individuals became much more targeted - agents seem to know exactly whom they are looking for and where to find them, which had not always been the case. González says it was clear to her and her colleagues that ICE had somehow obtained access to a wealth of personal information about those individuals and had also acquired data-analytics capabilities that allowed it to operate with greater precision. With the help of a research firm that examined government documents, Mijente concluded that Palantir's software was helping to power ICE's crackdown. "[Palantir] created something tailor-made for ICE to be able to run the kind of raids it wants," González says. "To say that they are not included in enforcement is kind of laughable."
Last year, Mijente and other groups held protests outside Palantir's offices in New York and Palo Alto, as well as outside Karp's Palo Alto home (Mijente also organized demonstrations in the lead-up to Palantir's recent public listing). Student organizations at colleges and universities across the country also spoke out against Palantir. For years, the company had sponsored a conference on privacy law held at the University of California, Berkeley. But the organizers dropped Palantir after participants pressured them to cut ties to the firm. There was also dissent within Palantir: More than 200 employees sent a letter to Karp expressing their concern over ICE. Thiel's political activities weren't helping. On one of the days that I was with Karp in Paris, Thiel co-hosted a fund-raiser for a former Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his hard-line anti-immigration position.
"Every technology is dangerous," Karp says, "including ours."Antoine d'Agata/Magnum Photos for The New York Times
A few weeks after I saw Karp in Paris, I visited him at a home that he owns in Vermont. When I drove up the dirt road leading to the cabin-style house, a couple of bodyguards greeted me. Karp's personal assistant then came out and took me into the house, where Karp was waiting at the dining-room table. Suitcases were lined up against a wall. Karp had spent the morning roller skiing. He arrived the night before, and I assumed he was staying for the weekend. But he was going to Boston later that afternoon for a meeting and then heading to Europe. After lunch, we spent a couple of hours hiking. Two of Karp's bodyguards trailed us by a few feet while two others waited in the parking lot. We talked at length about ICE. He noted that other tech companies had contracts with ICE, yet activists seemed to be directing most of their ire at Palantir, which he took as a backhanded compliment. "People understand we have these powerful platforms and that the platforms actually work," he said, adding that maybe the protesters were ignoring the other companies because their technology was "not as effectual."
Karp made clear that he was opposed to Trump's immigration policies: "There are lots of reasons I don't support the president; this is actually also one of them." He told me that he was "personally very OK with changing the demographics of our country" but that a secure border was something that progressives should embrace. "I've been a progressive my whole life," he said. "My family's progressive, and we were never in favor of open borders." He said borders "ensure that wages increase. It's a progressive position." When the left refuses to seriously address border security and immigration, he said, the right inevitably wins. To the extent that Palantir was helping to preserve public order, it was "empirically keeping the West more center-left."
But he claimed that if ICE had sought Palantir's services after Trump took office, he probably would have balked. "I'm not sure I would feel strongly about doing it," he said. "We probably wouldn't do the contract. But that's different than pulling the plug." Karp said that Palantir couldn't break with ICE because doing so would mark it as an unreliable partner in the eyes of the military. If Palantir walked away from ICE, he said, it would send a horrible message to soldiers who depend on Palantir's software. "Why would a war fighter believe you aren't going to do the same thing to them when they're in the middle of a battle?" he asked.
He told me that Palantir has rejected some potential clients because it was worried about how they might use its software. It had spurned a lucrative offer from the Saudi government because of Riyadh's human rights record, he said, and had likewise turned down a major tobacco company. Karp said that he found it hard personally to see Palantir accused of facilitating racism. But he told me that he had been reluctant to talk about his mother because "I don't want to instrumentalize her" and also because "I don't think the emotional argument is as persuasive as people think."
Instead, Karp was trying to initiate a broader debate about Silicon Valley and U.S. national security. He had a convenient cudgel at his disposal: In 2018, Google withdrew from Project Maven, the Pentagon's artificial-intelligence program, after facing resistance from some employees, who didn't think the company should be involved in the development of potentially lethal weapons. Karp had elsewhere criticized Google's decision as "borderline craven" and had sarcastically called the Google employees "super-woke engineers." In his view, Project Maven was nothing less than the Manhattan Project of the 21st century, and, as with the atomic bomb, the country that gained a military edge with artificial intelligence would "determine the world order tomorrow." What he didn't say publicly was that Palantir had replaced Google on parts of the project. (Karp couldn't confirm that, but I confirmed it, and it has been reported elsewhere.)
Karp insisted that Palantir was more in step with public opinion in the United States than Google and other Silicon Valley giants were. "We're making Western institutions strong and, in some cases, dominant," he said. "That's our narrative. Now, that's probably not a popular narrative in the Valley. It's a very popular narrative in the rest of America. What's Google's narrative? 'We destroy the media, we divide the country, we take away your job, we get rich, and by the way, when the country needs you, we're nowhere to be found.'" He added that if the "Google standard takes hold, the single biggest strategic asset America has, which is our ability to produce software platforms, will be taken out of the hands of our war fighters. And that de facto means our adversaries are in a much stronger position."
But if Karp's broadsides against Google were meant to ease public pressure on Palantir, it didn't seem to work. When it was announced in April that Palantir had been awarded the H.H.S. contracts, a backlash ensued. Progressive groups, human rights organizations and members of Congress criticized the deals. The main concern was that the Trump administration might use information collected by H.H.S. to target immigrants. In a six-page letter sent in July to the H.H.S. secretary, Alex Azar, Senator Elizabeth Warren and 15 other congressional Democrats cited the immigration issue and said that their reservations about the deal were "compounded by the fact that Palantir has a history of contracting with ICE." (An H.H.S. spokesperson says that the data it collects as part of its Covid response does not include personally identifiable information and is not being shared with ICE.) Last month, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jesús García, pointing to Palantir's contracts with H.H.S. and other aspects of its business, asked the S.E.C. to investigate the company before allowing it to go public. Their request evidently had no effect, but it was an indication of how Palantir has come to be viewed in progressive circles.
Palantir is not without Democratic allies. James Carville is an informal adviser to the company, and Palantir's technology was used extensively by the Obama administration. When Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, was California's attorney general, her office turned to Palantir for help creating a statewide law-enforcement database. But living down the controversy over ICE may not be easy. Perhaps an interesting analogue, raised in a column last year by the Times writer Kevin Roose, is Dow Chemical, which produced the napalm that the U.S. military used in Vietnam - a fact that would gut its reputation for decades to come. Even if Palantir's business ultimately doesn't suffer, its image has unquestionably been harmed.
In June, Palantir filed to go public, and its stock debuted on Sept. 30. The company eschewed an initial public offering in favor of a direct listing, in which no new shares were created or issued. In the prospectus that it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Palantir announced that it had moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver, formalizing its break from Silicon Valley. Karp used his introductory letter to drive home the point. He slammed what he called "the engineering elite of Silicon Valley," said that Palantir had found itself increasingly alienated from the values of the tech industry and reaffirmed the company's commitment to working with the U.S. military and to defending the West. "We have chosen sides," Karp wrote, a comment that seemed to imply that Silicon Valley had chosen the opposite side.
The decision to go public represented an about-face for a company that had resisted doing so even as it was being hyped as a next-generation Silicon Valley unicorn. Just before I saw Karp in Paris, he had announced to employees that the company would be remaining private for awhile longer. Karp told me that Palantir had never had trouble raising money and that he worried about the effect a public listing might have on its culture. Thiel just didn't think that the time was right. He said that "it still feels to me like we're nowhere near the point where this is the kind of ubiquitous platform" that would, in his view, have justified taking Palantir public.
A few days after Palantir's stock debuted, I spoke to Karp via video link. He was in Switzerland. He had spent the first few months of the pandemic at a house he owns in New Hampshire, not far from his place in Vermont, before leaving for Europe in July. He was in good spirits, as you would expect of someone who had officially just become a billionaire (he owns at least 6 percent of Palantir). He said that, as an introvert, the lockdown had been no great burden for him. He missed, however, seeing his parents (both reside in the Philadelphia area) and his colleagues.
Some observers had suggested that Palantir's decision to go public had been driven in part by the prospect of a Trump loss; it was cashing in while its government business was still flourishing. But Karp insisted the election had nothing to do with it - federal contracts, he said, were largely apolitical, and a change in the White House was unlikely to affect Palantir. He also noted that he was supporting Biden and was about to make a donation to his campaign. He told me that Palantir had gone public because its business had matured to the point that it now made sense. Despite the pandemic, he said, the company's revenue had been up 49 percent during the first six months of the year. More important, he added, Palantir had tweaked its Foundry software so that it could now be installed and updated remotely, which would make it easier to win new business. "Out of nowhere," he said, "the company was in a technical and financial position" to go public.
Investors weren't so sure. In its prospectus, Palantir reported that it was still losing hundreds of millions of dollars: $580 million in 2019, following a similar loss the year before. It also disclosed that just three customers accounted for roughly 30 percent of its revenue. (Palantir's governance structure was another concern: Karp, Thiel and Stephen Cohen will retain just under 50 percent of the voting power, as long as their holdings of securities meet a certain minimum.) For years, Palantir had often been portrayed as a colossus. But its financials appeared to tell a different story, and some critics went so far as to suggest that Palantir was barely a viable business. The day before the company's stock started trading, CNBC interviewed Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, who was caustic. Palantir, he said, was "crap being flung at tourists to the unicorn zoo."
To Galloway, Palantir is just more Silicon Valley smoke and mirrors (even if it is no longer based in the valley). To Karp, Palantir is nothing less than a bulwark of liberal democracy - and maybe all that stands between him and the realization of his worst fear, a world succumbing to fascism. To Ben Wizner, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology project, Palantir's business model is predicated on an assumption that its clients should have "legitimate access to every detail of our lives," and the company's software is a mechanism by which the government can keep an ever closer watch on us. To Airbus, Palantir is a tool that enhances efficiency and profitability. To Mijente, Palantir is an accessory to human rights violations. To the United Nations World Food Program, which earlier this month was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on Covid-19 relief, Palantir's technology has played a key role in its effort to get food and supplies distributed amid the pandemic.
What Palantir does is complicated and mysterious. As with the magical stones for which it is named, people seem to see in it what they want to see. I thought Karp put it pretty nicely. "Palantir," he said, "is the convergence of software and difficult positions."
Michael Steinberger is a regular contributor to the magazine. His last feature was about the resiliency of the stock market despite the global pandemic.
Type animation by Nikita Iziev.
2. Top US general in Afghanistan says he's holding back to give Taliban peace deal a chance
U.S. forces in Afghanistan are doing their best to keep to an agreement to reduce violence, their commander told the BBC in a segment that aired Wednesday, including opting not to go on the offensive in some cases.
"We've shown a great deal of restraint because we're trying to make this peace process work," Miller said. "At the same time, we'll defend our forces."
What goes on between the Taliban and Afghan security forces is another matter, and critics have pointed out that as the U.S. reduces its troop presence in the country - and the president proclaims that everyone could be home by Christmas - Afghanistan remains as unstable as ever.
"The violence is too high," Miller said. "What we've said all along is that all sides need to bring it down."
There have been some positive sides this year, including a week-long ceasefire in late February and around the Eid holidays later in the year.
"But when we get most of it down, all of the sudden you have some flexibility to get some things done in the peace process," Miller said.
Pentagon and State officials fear that putting a definitive date on troop withdrawal could undercut negotiations to finalize a peace deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
Lolita Baldor and Kathy Gannon, The Associated Press
Last year, the Trump administration set about 8,000 troops as its benchmark to remain in Afghanistan after a peace deal, but that number wound down to about 4,000 this year.
"We're down to 4,000 troops in Afghanistan," President Donald Trump said Oct. 8 in an interview with Fox Business Channel. "I'll have them home by the end of the year. They're coming home, you know, as we speak. Nineteen years is enough. They're acting as policemen, OK? They're not acting as troops."
A best-case scenario timeline, per the peace talks in Qatar, would have had troops out of the country later in spring 2021.
"If the violence goes up, it's going to make it very, very difficult to come to any solution in Doha, which is exactly what this country needs," Miller said.
Asked whether he believes the Afghan national army and national police are ready to keep the peace on their own after a U.S. withdrawal, Miller deflected.
"The Afghan forces have to be ready. So it's not a question of if they're ready - they have to be ready," he said. "The commitment I see from them is they understand that they are the security forces that must secure the Afghan people."
3. The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion
More on the targeting of our intelligence officers.
The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion | GQ
He was a senior CIA official tasked with getting tough on Russia. Then, one night in Moscow, Marc Polymeropoulos's life changed forever. He says he was hit with a mysterious weapon, joining dozens of American diplomats and spies who believe they've been targeted with this secret device all over the world-and even at home, on U.S. soil. Now, as a CIA investigation points the blame at Russia, the victims are left wondering why so little is being done by the Trump administration
Marc Polymeropoulos awoke with a start. The feeling of nausea was overwhelming. Food poisoning, he thought, and decided to head for the bathroom. But when he tried to get out of bed, he fell over. He tried to stand up and fell again. It was the early morning hours of December 5, 2017, and his Moscow hotel room was spinning around him. His ears were ringing. He felt, he recalled, "like I was going to both throw up and pass out at the same time."
Polymeropoulos was a covert CIA operative, a jovial, burly man who likes to refer to himself as "grizzled." Moscow was not the first time he had been on enemy territory. He had spent most of his career in the Middle East, fighting America's long war on terrorism. He had hunted terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. He did the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been shot at, ducked under rocket fire, and had shrapnel whiz by uncomfortably close to his head. But that night, paralyzed with seasickness in the landlocked Russian capital, Polymeropoulos felt terrified and utterly helpless for the first time.
Struggling to regain control over his body, Polymeropoulos couldn't have imagined that this incident would upend his life. It would end a promising career that had just catapulted him into the ranks of senior CIA leadership, and threw him into the middle of a growing international mystery that has puzzled diplomats and scientists, and raised concerns on Capitol Hill. In the months ahead, he would come to realize that it wasn't a spoiled sandwich that had mowed him down. Rather, it was his macabre initiation into a growing club of dozens of American diplomats, spies, and government employees posted abroad who were suffering in much the same way he was-targets of what some experts and doctors now believe were attacks perpetrated by unknown assailants wielding novel directed energy weapons. Though many of these apparent attacks have been publicized, including those that took place in Cuba and China, others have not been revealed until now, including at least three incidents that officials from the CIA and Capitol Hill say targeted American citizens on American soil.
Former CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos visiting Moscow in late 2017, where he says he was attacked by a microwave weapon.
Courtesy of Marc Polymeropoulos
A loyal soldier of the CIA even after his untimely retirement, Polymeropoulos has never detailed publicly what he calls his "silent wounds." But in the year since he left, he has become increasingly frustrated by the Agency's reluctance to give him and the other CIA officers affected with the medical care they need. "It's incumbent on them to provide the medical help we require, which does not include telling us that we're all making it up," he told me. "I want the Agency to treat this as a combat injury." He has also grown alarmed that the Agency and this administration are neither investigating nor pushing back against the apparent perpetrators who are targeting his old comrades-and other Americans-in increasingly brazen ways. (In a statement to GQ, CIA representatives said that "the Agency's top priority is the health and well-being of our officers followed very closely by collecting on hard targets, including Russia, and providing that intelligence to policymakers. Suggestions otherwise in your story are simply not true.")
"There is a lot of incredible unease and disgust with the Agency leadership and the Office of Medical Services on this issue," Polymeropoulos told me. That leadership, he says, "has not done right by us." "There's a lot of people who are very upset. And how can I say this? The Agency is going to have to answer for this."
Polymeropoulos arrived in Moscow at the end of Donald Trump's first, chaotic year in the White House. Shortly before Trump was inaugurated, the intelligence community released its conclusions that the Russian government had successfully meddled in the 2016 presidential election. It was the kind of high-confidence, public assessment that rarely came out of the fractious world of U.S. intelligence. Yet the new president dismissed their findings and denigrated intelligence officers as the "deep state" who wanted nothing more than to thwart his agenda. He also seemed determined to make nice with the Kremlin, even going so far as inviting the Russian foreign minister into the Oval Office in May 2017, and using the occasion to mock ousted FBI director James Comey and to share highly classified Israeli intelligence with the Russians-without Jerusalem's sign-off. "I remember thinking this is like George W. Bush inviting bin Laden after 9/11 and saying, 'Eh, we're good,' " Polymeropoulos told me. "Stuff like that that really alarmed us considerably." Some of it, he added, made his "head explode."
Not only were the president's overtures to Vladimir Putin concerning, they were also in direct contradiction to the work Polymeropoulos was doing at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In late January 2017, Polymeropoulos had been transferred from the CIA's counterterrorism division and promoted to a new role: deputy chief of operations for the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, the EEMC. The CIA's leadership, along with then director Mike Pompeo, decided that it was time to start pushing back on Russian active-measures campaigns more aggressively and that the best way to show the Kremlin that the Americans were serious was to bring in the tough guys who had spent the past 15 years in the Middle East. These people, like Polymeropoulos, didn't know much about Russia, its history, or its culture. "We knew nothing on Russia," Polymeropoulos admits. But, like his Russian counterparts, he and his counterterrorism comrades were fluent in the language of force.
Polymeropoulos's new job was to run clandestine operations across the Center's approximately 50 stations, which dotted the landscape from Ireland to Azerbaijan. As far as the Agency and Polymeropoulos saw it, the area in between-Europe, Ukraine, Turkey, the Caucasus-was now a battleground between the United States and Russia. Polymeropoulos issued what he refers to as "a call to arms." "Every station was directed to refocus its efforts on Russia," he explained. "It goes back to the old days where, in every station around the world, there was a Soviet branch. We wanted to reconstitute that because Russia can't be ignored anymore." Though Polymeropoulos and the other counterterrorism officers brought in for this new mission were mostly skilled at tracking suspected terrorists, they had to rely on a different skill set in dealing with the Russians. "The best way you do covert influence traditionally is with the truth," Polymeropoulos told me. "And Russian operations and covert influence is so easy because we never have to say, like, you know, Putin likes little boys in the back of his car. You don't make stuff up to embarrass him. You just say what they do." This involved exposing Russian operations across the continent-like the efforts to stop Macedonia from changing its name and to sponsor a coup in Montenegro-by working with local intelligence services to make sure that the European public knew that the Kremlin was trying to manipulate them. (The Russian government has denied its involvement in these events.)
To this day, Polymeropoulos doesn't know how much President Trump knew of the work he was doing at the EEMC. "Did he go down and brief the president?" Polymeropoulos said of Pompeo. "I don't know, and it doesn't even matter because we were given kind of the green light to go ahead and do it... It was simply a matter of us deciding internally in the CIA, this is what we're going to do. We don't need any kind of approval on that. It's not like we were killing Russians." (That would require high-level permission because physically targeting the officers of a sovereign country creates a different level of political risk. Polymeropoulos, along with other sources familiar with the CIA's counterintelligence efforts, insists that at no point did these efforts involve physically harming Russian operatives.)
In the fall of 2017, Polymeropoulos and an Agency colleague decided they wanted to go to Russia. Polymeropoulos had never been before, and he and his colleague thought a trip might be useful. They could meet with the American ambassador and embassy staff, and perhaps open a more direct and fruitful line of communication with their counterparts in Russian intelligence. They told the Russians they wanted to meet with American embassy staff in Moscow-and to talk with the Russian government about counterterrorism cooperation, which is one of the few areas where the United States and Russia still work together, at least formally. This was despite the feeling-widely held at the agency-that the efforts have yielded little in recent years and have become, according to Polymeropoulos, a "staggering waste of time."
Moscow granted Polymeropoulos and his colleague visas, but the Russian embassy in Washington told Polymeropoulos directly that they did not want him to make the trip. According to Polymeropoulos, they said they did not buy the Americans' excuse of wanting to further counterterrorism cooperation and feared they were actually coming to Russia to run covert operations, an allegation Polymeropoulos denies. It is just not how espionage works, Polymeropoulos explained. At the time, he was the equivalent of a four-star general, and no one of his high rank, on either the American or the Russian side, would ever go and run operations on the ground in person. Moreover, Polymeropoulos explained, it was normal for the top officials in the clandestine services to meet and talk. "We have liaison with them," he told me, using Agency-speak for having a channel of communication. "And that's not a bad thing at all. We have to meet them. Even in the worst times, during [the existence of] the Soviet Union, there was always liaison between the Agency and the KGB. There's got to be a channel. And there's been trips all the time."
Despite the Russians' warnings, Polymeropoulos and his colleague set off for Moscow in December 2017. The trip started off well. He and his colleague, who declined to be interviewed for this article, checked into the Marriott near the U.S. embassy. They met with then ambassador Jon Huntsman and other embassy staffers. They were ostentatiously followed everywhere by half a dozen FSB tails, but it didn't stop Polymeropoulos and his colleague from seeing the sights-a local McDonald's, the fabled Moscow Metro, and dive bars where Russian patrons earnestly asked them why Americans hate Russians so much.
The official part of the visit was less fun. The meeting with the FSB was numbingly boring and the meeting with the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, quickly devolved into bitter recriminations. SVR officers told Polymeropoulos and his colleague bluntly that they had not wanted them to come and could not understand why they had shown up in Moscow anyway. "You are not welcome here," Polymeropoulos remembers them telling him. Then the Russians launched into a long lecture on America's systemic racism and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Polymeropoulos turned to one of his colleagues and asked, "Is this guy fucking kidding? Like, are you serious?" The colleague assured Polymeropoulos that this was a standard Russian practice going back more than half a century. Polymeropoulos countered by warning the Russians to stop meddling in American elections. The Russians denied they would ever do such a thing. It was the way most Russian officials behave in such meetings at all levels of government-a lecture about American racism, theatrical incredulity and hurt feelings that the Americans would think the Russians had meddled in American politics. Still, Polymeropoulos was stunned by how unabashedly combative his Russian counterparts were. He had spent his career in a region where people were exceedingly polite, rolling out banquets and plying him with tea, even as he knew they were plotting to kill him. He knew the Russians didn't like him, but "I would have expected them to be a little more polite," Polymeropoulos told me.
Nonetheless, he figured that this was little more than bluster. He knew he had to be careful in Russia and to be wary of Russian agents trying to entrap him in compromising situations-for example, the beautiful young women at the rooftop bar of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton who seemed determined to chat up him and his colleague. But Polymeropoulos figured he had no reason to fear for his physical safety. Even after that awful night in the Marriott, Polymeropoulos did not immediately suspect anything malicious. By morning, the worst of the symptoms had passed and he seemed to be doing better, confirming his suspicion that it had just been something he'd eaten. Just a few hours after he'd been incapacitated, he managed to get on a train to St. Petersburg, where he felt well enough to walk for miles, duck into more dive bars, and even glimpse the famous troll factory. He even did some Christmas shopping for his wife and kids. That miserable, terrifying night in his Moscow hotel room receded in his memory.
Two days before the end of his trip, Polymeropoulos and his colleagues were eating dinner at Pushkin, a posh Moscow restaurant, when he suddenly felt the room begin to spin again, just as it had in the hotel room that night. A wave of nausea hit, and he was suddenly drenched in sweat. He barely made it back to his hotel room, where, having canceled all his meetings, he stayed for the rest of his trip, unable to move. His body was in revolt, and he had no idea why. "I made it back on the airplane somehow," Polymeropoulos said.
It wasn't until Polymeropoulos got home to the Virginia suburbs that it occurred to him that what had happened in Moscow was possibly the result of something far more sinister that what he'd originally suspected. In February, after a few weeks of relative normalcy, he started feeling an intense and painful pressure that started in the back of his head and radiated forward into his face. He went to an ear, nose, and throat specialist, who, Polymeropoulos says, thought it might be a sinus infection. But Polymeropoulos's scans were clear, and a course of antibiotics did not alleviate the pain. If anything, it was growing steadily worse. The vertigo and nausea came roaring back. His ears started ringing again. His brain was swathed in a dense fog. By March, his long-distance vision started going and he could no longer drive. Repeated MRI and CAT scans showed nothing suspicious, but Polymeropoulos was now feeling so ill that he started calling out sick.
There was no way this was all the result of food poisoning two months prior, Polymeropoulos realized. But what could it have been? He told me his colleagues at the CIA believed he could have been the target of some kind of technical attack in Moscow. But what kind? Polymeropoulos wondered if the Russians had inadvertently injured him while trying to collect the data in his phone remotely. It was the kind of thing all intelligence services did, the Americans included. Polymeropoulos figured the Russians had just "turned up the juice too much."
But as his symptoms grew worse, Polymeropoulos and his Agency colleagues noticed that his symptoms lined up with those of American diplomats who had apparently been attacked in Havana.
In late 2016, some two dozen Americans stationed in the revived embassy in Cuba began reporting strange new phenomena. Some heard a strange noise-sometimes high-pitched, sometimes low-and felt a sudden pressure in the skull. Others heard nothing at all, but many of them developed vertigo and nausea, and had trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, persistent headaches, and changes in vision and hearing. Like Polymeropoulos's constellation of symptoms, some of these effects waxed and waned at seemingly random intervals, while others seemed impossible to cure-all to maddening effect.
As word of what was happening in Havana seeped out into the press, everyone seemed to have an opinion on the events, but no one, not even the CIA, knew for certain who was responsible-or even what had happened. Some speculated that it had been an acoustic attack. Some believed the culprits were hardliners in the Cuban security services who had been determined to sabotage Havana's new détente with Washington. Still others believed it was all made up, the product of paranoid imaginations or collective anxiety.
Some of the two dozen Americans affected in Havana had been CIA officers under diplomatic cover. Though these apparent attacks baffled officials at the Agency, there was growing suspicion inside CIA headquarters, according to two sources familiar with the discussions, that these attacks had been the work of Russian security services. It was not a wild stretch, and many in Washington's foreign policy and national security universe were thinking along the same lines. Since 2014, the Russians had become increasingly brazen in going after the U.S. and its allies, and they had every reason to peel their old Cuban allies away from the Americans' embrace. "These guys have been told they can take the gloves off and do whatever they want to hurt Americans," says a former national security official. "They're trying to weaken us generally, and they've obviously taken the gloves off quite some time ago."
By the spring of 2018, Polymeropoulos was convinced he was a new addition to the Havana victims' ranks. What's more, he told me, the Agency colleague who had accompanied him to Moscow was now also sick and had lost hearing in one of his ears. But, according to Polymeropoulos, the leadership of the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS) told him they didn't agree. They put Polymeropoulos through a series of tests they had developed in an attempt to see if he had, in fact, suffered the same brain injuries as the CIA officers in Havana. They asked him to walk in a straight line and to perform simple cognitive tasks. But by this time, Polymeropoulos's vertigo had disappeared. Despite the pain and debilitating fatigue, he could now walk just fine, even if he hadn't been able to stand up without falling over that night in Moscow. It didn't seem to matter. The OMS doctors declared that he had passed the test: no Havana Syndrome. Polymeropoulos told me that his colleague was also cleared. (In a statement to GQ, Keith Bass, the director of the Office of Medical Services, said, "CIA's Office of Medical Services would, of course, never comment on anyone's physical or mental health, but I will reiterate that our top priority is taking care of Agency personnel.")
Still, the intense pressure and pain in Polymeropoulos's head would not abate. He started seeing doctors on his own-neurologists, infectious-disease specialists, allergists, dentists, eye doctors, sleep specialists, pain experts, neck and spine doctors. Countless tests, scans, injections, rounds of steroids, and antibiotics did nothing to diagnose or alleviate the now round-the-clock migraine he had developed. He was in constant pain, which was exacerbated by his staring at a computer for long periods of time. Sitting still for more than an hour or two would sap his energy completely. But the demands of Polymeropoulos's job didn't let up. Running the CIA's clandestine operations across Europe and Eurasia and managing thousands of agents required 12-hour days, packed with long meetings and hours spent in front of computer screens. Before long, he had taken a total of four months off of work, maxing out his sick leave.
Meanwhile, the roster of victims was growing ever longer. In June 2018, the U.S. State Department evacuated nearly a dozen people from Guangzhou, China, where American diplomats and trade representatives reported feeling symptoms eerily similar to those their colleagues had experienced in Cuba. One victim, Catherine Werner, said that her symptoms began in late 2017, just as Polymeropoulos's had: a splitting headache, nausea, loss of balance. When her mother went to Guangzhou to help her, she, too, fell ill. Even Werner's dogs were affected, her mother told NBC News. They began vomiting blood and avoiding the room where Werner and her mother heard the sounds and felt the symptoms start.
Yet Polymeropoulos was still having trouble getting the CIA's medical bureaucracy to take his condition seriously. As far as they were concerned, he says, he had passed the test they had administered, even though they could not explain his persistent migraine. Frustrated by their inability to help him, Polymeropoulos asked OMS to refer him to the Center for Brain Injury and Repair, at the University of Pennsylvania, where some of the Havana victims had gone for treatment. The team had published a study in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association about what had come to be widely known as the Havana Syndrome. They evaluated 21 of the Havana victims and found the kind of damage to cognitive, balance, motor, and sensory functions associated with a severe concussion. Unlike with most concussions, however, these symptoms did not quickly dissipate. Instead, they lasted for months, waxing and waning over time.
The neurologists at the University of Pennsylvania found that some explanations for the Havana Syndrome, including mass hysteria and group psychosis, were highly unlikely. Many of the patients didn't know each other, their performance on these tests could not have been faked, and they did not wallow in their pain. In fact, according to the study, they were desperately trying to get better and "were largely determined to continue to work or return to full duty, even when encouraged by health care professionals to take sick leave." The study also concluded that these injuries were likely not caused by exposure to chemicals, since no organs other than the brain were involved. Nor were they likely to have been the product of a viral infection, the doctors said, because these patients did not display associated symptoms, like a spiking fever. Still, the University of Pennsylvania researchers couldn't explain what actually had happened to these patients. Their brain scans were basically normal, and the doctors could not fathom what could have caused this kind of brain injury, one that refused to heal. "These individuals appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma," the study's authors concluded. Doctors and patients began referring to it as the "immaculate concussion."
In the spring of 2018, a private neurologist gave Polymeropoulos a diagnosis: occipital neuralgia, a condition resulting from damage to the two nerves that run from the base of the skull, curving toward the front of the head. Despite the private diagnosis, Polymeropoulos says the Agency kept refusing to refer him to the University of Pennsylvania, telling him it wasn't necessary.
As he grasped for an explanation, Polymeropoulos was paying careful attention to what was being discovered about the incidents in Cuba and China. By the summer of 2018, scientists, intelligence officials, and journalists were zeroing in on a potential culprit: microwave weapons.
The notion of weaponizing microwaves dates back to the Cold War, when, in 1961, an American biologist named Allan Frey discovered that irradiating a human head with microwaves could produce the sensation of sound-even in deaf ears, even from thousands of feet away. Playing with the frequency and intensity of the microwave beam could produce a range of different sensations in a person. In 2018, Frey told the New York Times that the Soviets took immediate notice of his work and flew him to Moscow, where they squired him around secret military facilities and asked him to give lectures about the effects of microwaves on the brain.
As the Cold War progressed, both the United States and the Soviet Union raced to find military uses for what came to be called directed energy weapons. American researchers had studied things like beaming words into subjects' heads-great for psychological warfare-while also researching the thermal aspects of microwaves. Packaged in the right way, researchers theorized, a microwave weapon could be mounted on a truck, where it could cast a beam outward to create an invisible barrier anywhere, anytime, capable of immobilizing any person who got within its range. This research ultimately culminated in the development of a weapon the Pentagon calls an Active Denial System, or ADS. In a video touting its capabilities, the U.S. military boasts that this highly portable weapon can be attached to a military vehicle and used to direct precise beams of electromagnetic radiation at, say, an armed militant in a crowd or a suspicious person approaching a military checkpoint. The beam would instantaneously produce a sensation of heat on the skin, which would trigger a person's reflex to flee. (This summer, a military official inquired about deploying the technology against American protesters who flooded into the streets of Washington, D.C., to protest police brutality.)
On the other side of the world, the Soviets focused on the non-thermal applications of microwave radiation. A 1976 report compiled by the Pentagon's intelligence branch, the Defense Intelligence Agency, reviewed Soviet research on the topic. The report detailed Moscow's investigation of the effects of microwaves on the nervous system. Soviet, and later Russian, scientists found that exposing an animal's brain to microwaves changed the frequency at which neurons fired. Neurons also became suddenly out of sync with one another. Some brain cells in mice were found to have withered. Nerves became damaged. The radiation also showed the potential to disturb the sacrosanct blood-brain barrier and, according to the DIA, resulted in "the alterations of brain function." The most common symptoms reported in humans who had been exposed to microwaves for long periods of time sounded familiar: headache, fatigue, perspiration, dizziness, insomnia, depression, anxiety, forgetfulness, and lack of concentration.
Like Frey, Soviet researchers found that turning the intensity of the beam up or down could produce differing effects in its target. A target's unique physiology-a slightly different curvature of the skull, for example-also determined how this directed energy would affect them. A weapon that created an ever-changing kaleidoscope of neurological symptoms would have a powerful psychological dimension. If everyone's symptoms are all slightly different, victims might question whether they'd all been exposed to the same thing-or if they'd been hit at all.
In September 2018, a California physician and scientist named Beatrice Golomb published a paper that tried to link the suffering of American diplomats to directed microwaves. She connected what came to be known as the Frey effect-using microwaves to create the false sensation of sound-with the fact that some, but not all, of the diplomats in Havana reported hearing the kinds of noise described by Allan Frey. This would suggest that these symptoms were not the result of sonic attacks, as some had speculated. She also offered an insight that could explain Polymeropoulos's persistent migraines. "Brain injury may be a predisposing factor for...[microwave] injury," she wrote. That is, people like Polymeropoulos, who was frequently around explosions in his time in Middle Eastern war zones, may be especially vulnerable to brain injury from directed microwave weapons.
Not all scientists agree with Golomb's conclusions, and some challenge her methodology. Andrei Pakhomov, a scientist who studied microwaves both in Russia and in the United States and wrote a comprehensive review of Soviet research on the subject, told me he is still not convinced that microwaves could do this kind of damage. Douglas Smith, a neurosurgeon who heads the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Brain Injury and Repair and was the principal investigator on the JAMA study, says he doesn't understand how microwaves could target an organ so precisely, damaging the brain but not any peripheral nerves. Still, the fact that the Havana victims felt the buzzing and tingling on one side of their face, or that the sensation stopped when they moved to another room, indicated to Smith that these injuries were caused by some kind of directed energy weapon. "We believe there was something directed, but we don't know what it was," he told me. "It is quite a mystery. There's no question that something happened, but there's not a fingerprint for this kind of injury."
If the incidents were connected to directed energy weapons, the question remained: Who was deploying them against U.S. personnel? Russia certainly had the technology, but several other countries had also developed or purchased these capabilities. A Ukrainian researcher had reportedly sold the technology to the Saudi government. The Chinese and possibly the Iranian governments are also said to possess these capabilities. The Cuban government adamantly denied hitting American diplomats, but their security services were notoriously close to Moscow's. Surely, the Russians could have shared the technology with their old anti-American allies?
Sitting in his office in Langley, Polymeropoulos was convinced he knew who was behind these apparent attacks: Moscow. He had been charged with pushing back against the Russians, and now, he figured, the Russians were retaliating, including against him personally. Without conclusive intelligence linking the attacks to the Kremlin, however, there was little he could do. As the 2018 holiday season-and the one-year anniversary of that night in the Marriott-rolled around, Polymeropoulos had an idea. It was customary for the heads of the Russian and American clandestine services to exchange holiday cards. By now he understood the Russians well enough to know that the ritual of these kinds of holiday swaps was extremely important in Russian culture, especially in the world of Russian bureaucracy. It was a sign of respect and an acknowledgment of status. Before the cards went out, Polymeropoulos wrote to the new CIA director, his old comrade Gina Haspel, and asked her not to send holiday cards to the Russians that year. According to sources familiar with the incident, Polymeropoulos had hit his mark: The Russians were furious.
In April 2019, after 26 years at the agency, Polymeropoulos decided to retire from the CIA. He was a decorated senior intelligence officer serving in a top post, and he was still relatively young-there had been talk of promotions, an even bigger future. But whatever happened in the Moscow Marriott had changed all that. "I had a lot more to offer," Polymeropoulos told me. "I was 50, but I had to retire because these goddamn headaches don't go away." In July of that year, he walked out of Langley for the last time.
Gradually, Polymeropoulos settled into his post-CIA life. He got a contract to write a book about leadership. A speaking agent promised him a few lucrative turns on the lecture circuit before the pandemic put an end to all that. But he was still struggling with constant migraines, fatigue, and an inability to concentrate. He had heard that some people suffering from the Havana Syndrome were getting effective treatment at Walter Reed, the nation's top military hospital, but he would need a referral from CIA doctors to go there. Even after his injury had forced his retirement, he says, the leadership at the OMS refused to help.
Polymeropoulos was still in touch with his friends and colleagues at Langley, and what they told him alarmed him. Apparent attacks were continuing around the world. Two sources with knowledge of the situation-and who asked for anonymity to discuss matters that they did not have authorization to disclose to the press-told me about the ongoing attacks. In the fall of 2019, two top CIA officials, both in the clandestine service, traveled to Australia to meet with officials in that country's spy agency. (Australia is part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance with the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and New Zealand.) While in their hotel rooms in Australia, both of the Americans felt it: the strange sound, the pressure in their heads, the ringing in their ears. According to these sources, they became nauseous and dizzy. They then traveled on to Taiwan to meet with intelligence officials there. They felt it again while in their hotel rooms on the island.
By now, this was no longer a novel occurrence, and CIA people had come to call it "getting hit." One senior intelligence officer in EEMC, the Center Polymeropoulos used to run, had gotten hit twice while traveling under cover, first in Poland in the spring of 2019, then again in Tbilisi, Georgia, that fall. He, too, was diagnosed with occipital neuralgia and experienced symptoms similar to Polymeropoulos's. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)
According to these sources, the attacks were becoming increasingly daring: One of the CIA officials hit in Australia and Taiwan was among the agency's five highest-ranking officials.
Whoever was behind the attacks also began going after Americans on American soil. An American diplomat and his spouse, who had been hit when they were stationed in China, traveled to Philadelphia to get specialized treatment at the University of Pennsylvania. One night in June 2018, according to three government sources, the couple was startled awake by a sound and pressure in their heads similar to what they had felt back in China. On the advice of FBI agents, the family moved to a hotel, but on their second night there, they were again awoken in the early morning hours. Terrified, the parents ran into the room where their children were sleeping to find them moving in their sleep, bizarrely and in unison. In the weeks afterward, the children developed vision and balance difficulties. The family members, whose identities GQ is not revealing for privacy reasons, declined to be interviewed for this story. "I can't say anything about that," says attorney Janine Brookner, who represents the family.
Then, shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face.
According to the source, this had happened to the staffer before. In August 2019, she had accompanied John Bolton, who was then the national security adviser, on a trip to London. The staffer, whom GQ is not identifying out of concerns for her privacy, did not respond to requests for comment. According to the government source, she was in her hotel room when she suddenly felt a tingling in the side of her head that was facing the window. The intense pressure in her head was accompanied by a tinning in her ears. When she left the room, the symptoms stopped. She reported the incident to the Secret Service because it was uncannily similar to the symptoms described by American diplomats who had served in Cuba and China.
While the CIA is not typically involved in investigations of domestic incidents, two sources familiar with the attack on the White House staffer told me that the Agency began looking into the matter and, last December, briefed the National Security Council's unit on biodefense. But by the end of the month, the unit had become completely consumed with a brand new threat coming from overseas: COVID-19. (The White House did not respond to GQ's request for comment.)
In the meantime, a team was assembled at Langley to investigate the incidents overseas. Investigators came to believe that the injuries to victims' brains were caused by a microwave weapon, which could be beamed at its target through walls and windows, and could even be effective from a couple miles away. Given the work Polymeropoulos and his team had been doing to thwart the Russians since 2017, and the fact that much of the scientific literature on the biological effects of microwaves had been published in the Soviet Union and Russia, it seemed plausible to the investigators that the Russians could be behind this.
The most compelling evidence, however, came from publicly available data. As has been widely reported, mobile phones track people's movements, and location-data companies accumulate this information and sell it. Using this sort of data, CIA investigators were able to deduce the whereabouts of Russian agents, and place them in close physical proximity to the CIA officers at the time they had been attacked when they were in Poland, Georgia, Australia, and Taiwan. In each case, individuals believed to be FSB agents were within range of the CIA officers who had been hit in 2019. In two of the incidents, location data apparently showed FSB agents in the same hotel at the same time their targets experienced the onset of symptoms.
When I asked Polymeropoulos about the CIA investigation, he said that it was conducted after he retired and that, because he did not have direct knowledge of it, he could not comment on it. He did say, however, that it would not be difficult to use the same techniques, analyzing publicly available data, that had been used by organizations like Bellingcat, which have employed similar methods to expose Russian operations in Europe. "Anyone can buy the cell-phone data on the open market, and you can see where people went," Polymeropoulos explained. "And perhaps the reason why it seems to have worked is because, just like you saw with all of the GRUactivities, they're sloppy." GRU machinations were discovered because officers had made several embarrassing missteps, like leaving behind taxi receipts that showed their starting address as GRU headquarters. In the case of the microwave attacks, it seemed FSB operatives had brought their phones with them while carrying out their missions-typically a no-no in the world of covert operations. "There's ways intelligence officers cover their tracks," Polymeropoulos marveled. "If I'm going off to do something like that, I'm not taking my phone. It's insane. It's so sloppy."
(Asked for comment about the CIA investigation linking Russian security services to the attacks on CIA officers, Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said, "I will not try to confirm whether they are the victims of 'an acoustic attack,' paranoia, or Russophobia. That's a question for the doctors.")
According to people familiar with the investigation, the geolocation data did not provide a slam dunk, but made a good circumstantial case that could link the Russian government to the apparent attacks on CIA officers. It was a starting point, a lead that some people aware of the investigation hoped Agency leaders would pick up on and continue to probe. They would soon be deeply disappointed.
The attacks on CIA officers infuriated people in the Agency. "There's a gentlemen's agreement not to do these things," Polymeropoulos explained. "There's never any physical stuff." (When I asked him if the CIA had ever physically hurt Russians when he was running EEMC, Polymeropoulos was adamant, saying, "We never harm other officials like that. It's counterproductive.") But the Russian government was clearly feeling more emboldened. "They know that our president is at war with our intelligence community, so kick them when they're down, get back at them for everything they've done before," the former national security official told me. "It's a kick in the balls, isn't it?" Whatever punishment Washington had meted out for, say, meddling in the 2016 election was clearly not deterring the Russians. "The Russians have factored all this in," the former national security official said. "They don't care about sanctions." As a result, the Russians seemed to be going further than ever. In 2019, according to two sources, Russian operatives even slipped date-rape drugs into the drinks of an undercover CIA officer at a diplomatic reception.
On December 23, 2019, the CIA team investigating the attacks brought its findings to CIA director Gina Haspel. According to two sources, after listening to the investigators lay out their evidence that suggested the Russian security services were behind the hits on Agency personnel, Haspel challenged them. They say she accused the investigators of both hiding information from her and lying to her about what their inquiry uncovered. The sources say that the director questioned the motives of those looking into the mysterious attacks. "This is why we need to clean out Russia House," she said, referring to the CIA's operations unit focused on Russia, according to two sources. "You're just trying to stir up trouble on Russia." A third source confirmed that "the meeting did not go well."
One possible explanation for such a reaction from Haspel is that she did not find the intelligence convincing. In a statement to GQ, Brittany Bramell, the director of public affairs at the Agency, said, "If there was credible intelligence that showed an adversary purposefully harmed a CIA officer, you can bet Director Haspel would act swiftly and decisively."
But the other explanation for dismissing the conclusions of the investigative team is more troubling. According to reporting in Politico, Haspel has seemed to be reluctant with what information on Russia she brings to the White House, given President Trump's obstinate lack of willingness to condemn Vladimir Putin or Russian attacks in any way. "No one's going to brief anything on Russia to the president," Polymeropoulos told me. "They're terrified of doing that. I know that from the briefers. Because he'll explode and the whole thing will get derailed, because he has this weird affinity for Putin." Asked why Putin remains such an untouchable subject for the American president, the former national security official said, "He doesn't want to be embarrassed in front of Putin, that's part of the dilemma. He wants Putin to like him. Just look at how he behaves with the Queen. That's how he behaves with everyone who has any glamour and cachet." Moreover, the former official added, "Putin has everything he doesn't have."
There are some at Langley who regard Haspel's motives as noble, if shortsighted. In their view, she may be engaged in an effort to protect the agency, even at the cost of not protecting individual CIA employees. According to two sources, Haspel was worried that, if she upset Trump too often by boxing him in with more news of alleged Russian malfeasance that he'd be asked to condemn publicly, he would gut the CIA-which he already distrusts-just like he did with the State Department. And though Polymeropoulos told me that Haspel "hates the Russians," she is hamstrung by the fact that Russia has become such an explosive issue in American domestic politics. One former CIA official quipped that "a good day for Gina is when we don't talk about Russia." Haspel apparently sees herself as someone who can steer the CIA ship through the stormy waters of the Trump era, at least until a new administration can calm the waters. She is, after all, very much a creature of the Agency; she started her career as a clandestine operative and even headed Russia House for a time. Sources familiar with her thinking say she warns that if the CIA pushes Trump too hard on Russia, he will replace her with someone like Senator Tom Cotton, a Trump loyalist-and an outsider.
Whatever her logic, according to two sources familiar with the situation, Haspel has yet to take the evidence of Russian involvement in the attacks to President Trump.
Nearly three years after that terrifying night in the Moscow Marriott, Polymeropoulos's constant migraines have still not abated. Botox, plasma, steroid injections, visits to a chiropractor-nothing has helped, and painkillers don't seem to touch it. He is enrolled in an NIH study for which, once a year, he is hooked up to an elaborate machine that spins him around to test his balance. It takes him days to recover from the nausea and dizziness it triggers.
He's not alone. Smith, of the University of Pennsylvania, told me that "the good news is that everyone improved and many people's symptoms resolved." Yet many of the State Department staffers affected in Cuba and China are still disabled. Some are wheelchair-bound; others have to wear weighted vests for the rest of their lives to correct their balance. Many have had to retire prematurely.
Polymeropoulos says the CIA still refuses to send him to Walter Reed for medical treatment, but according to a source on the Hill working with affected diplomats, the State Department and Department of Commerce have treated their employees far worse than the Agency has. "These employees were struggling not only with their injuries, but they were ostracized and some were even reprimanded for saying they were sick," says New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen. In 2018, she was approached by a constituent who had been hit in China. Since then, Shaheen and her staff have become unofficial case workers for dozens of diplomats and trade officers affected by the Havana Syndrome in Cuba and China. "There has been very little progress, from what I've seen," Shaheen says. "Sadly, it sometimes seems like those tasked with unearthing the truth of the matter are more concerned with limiting the patients' understanding of their own ailments and burying the issue." Shaheen is also aware of similar attacks on Americans on American soil, but says she doesn't know of anything that's being done to counter that threat.
In the meantime, according to several sources on Capitol Hill and at the CIA, the National Academy of Sciences has completed a report, commissioned by the State Department, assessing the potential causes of the Havana Syndrome. The report, now under review at State, apparently reached many of the same conclusions that Smith and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania did. David Relman, a Stanford immunologist and microbiologist who chaired the Academy's committee on investigating the Havana Syndrome, told me that he is deeply frustrated that their report still has not been made public. He says it "describes distinct clinical findings and plausible mechanisms" responsible for the injuries, and that the "American people, and their elected representatives, deserve to read what we have found."
Smith's ongoing research has offered new insights into the Havana Syndrome-if little encouraging news for those suffering from it. In 2019, Smith and his team published a follow-up study that used advanced neuroimaging and brain-connectivity studies to look at the brains of diplomats hit in Havana. This technique showed what less sophisticated imaging had missed. The patients' brain connectivity was severely affected, especially in the cerebellum and brain networks that control auditory and visuospatial functions. Their volumes of white matter-the inner, deeper part of the brain-were significantly reduced. White matter is made up of axons, the delicate wiring of the central nervous system. According to Smith, it was the axons and their carefully arranged structure that were damaged in people suffering from the syndrome. "If the axons break, that's it," he told me. "They won't reconnect. And you're not going to grow new axons. You only have the ones you're born with." The brain can learn to make up for and work around some of the damage, Smith says, but that takes time and the compensatory mechanisms are often far from perfect.
Is it so farfetched to imagine that the Russian government is inflicting potentially permanent brain damage on U.S. government personnel? "In general, the Russians have no compunction about doing this kind of thing," says John Sipher, who was a clandestine CIA officer in Russia and was deputy director of Russia House during George W. Bush's presidency. "They don't give a shit," he says, about physically harming American officers. He and other CIA veterans pointed to reports of the KGB bathing the American embassy in Moscow in microwaves for decades during the Cold War, as well as other intelligence tricks that potentially compromised the health of American diplomats and spies. He says he remembers the Russian security services zapping him and his colleagues in Moscow with radiation to see if they were carrying electronic equipment. The CIA officers all joked about their testicles and the potential health consequences, but as far as Sipher could tell, none of it was done to deliberately cause injury. Whatever health effects occurred seemed like unintentional collateral damage. If the Russians were now targeting U.S. personnel to knowingly cause brain damage, "this is definitely an escalation," Sipher says. "It's the asymmetrical way of doing things. You push until you get pushback."
This is a fairly accurate assessment of how the Russian government operates abroad, especially under Vladimir Putin's leadership. Historically, he has kept pushing the boundaries until he's met resistance, though in recent years, he has become far more brazen. Neither sanctions nor the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the United States and other Western countries for deploying the nerve agent Novichok against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal on British soil seems to have made much of a difference. Last summer, a man was assassinated in a Berlin park in broad daylight, an attack the German government blamed on Moscow. In August, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok in Siberia. And there is no sense that the Russians are letting up: This year, the American intelligence community announced that Russia was again interfering in the presidential election with the aim of helping reelect Donald Trump.
American foreign policy specialists who want to reinvent the U.S.-Russia relationship can't quite understand why the Russian security services are still doing this-other than because they can, and because, with Trump in office, they will most certainly get away with it. "They create the reason to keep fighting with them," says the former national security official about the Russian government. "We don't even know why they're doing this. We don't even want anything from each other anymore, other than an arms-control agreement. We have to kind of push back, we have to do that, but we also have to find a way of living together too." Yet the Russians, the former official explains, "can't get used to the fact that we've moved on. They want to pull us back into the fight again-the question is for what? This is what we kept telling [Russian officials], that if you want to have a relationship of equals and get stuff done, knock this other crap off."
Until recently, the details of the CIA investigation that links Russian intelligence services to the attacks have been tightly held at Langley. Earlier this month, according to three sources, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence asked for and received a briefing on the matter from the CIA. "The Committee has long-standing concern related to whether foreign adversaries might be seeking to do harm to Americans abroad, particularly the men and women of the intelligence community who often toil in shadows with no public recognition of their many sacrifices," said Chairman Adam Schiff in a statement to GQ. "We have conducted, and will continue to conduct, rigorous oversight to ensure the health and safety of all intelligence community personnel." But Schiff and his staff declined to comment on whether a briefing had even happened, let alone on its substance. It is not clear if information from the December 2019 briefing to the NSC ever made it to the president, and the White House has not been briefed since.
The secrecy ensures that Russia suffers no consequences for its actions, and the impunity may motivate Russian security services to carry out more attacks. This has caused growing anger at the CIA, that neither their director nor the commander in chief seems willing to protect them or American civilians. This is why intelligence officials leaked the information about Russian bounties on American troops in Afghanistan to the press, and it was the stated motivation of my sources in revealing the highly sensitive information they possessed on the microwave attacks. They felt they had no other recourse. It was also another way to continue the work Polymeropoulos did at the EEMC: expose what he thinks are Russian covert operations with the aim of thwarting them.
The fact that the Agency has not aggressively pursued the investigation or gone after the people involved infuriates Polymeropoulos too. "If there was an al-Qaeda threat against our officers, we would do everything possible to shut it down, but also to catch the people involved," Polymeropoulos told me. "I don't see any of that happening here. What I would have expected would be this full court press that, you know, if we have senior people traveling and you think the Russians are going to hit him, have teams ready to try to capture" the people carrying out the attacks. As far as Polymeropoulos knew, the Agency wasn't doing this-or even sending a private, high-level message to their Russian counterparts warning them to stop. The fact that the CIA still wasn't doing any of this was damning, in Polymeropoulos's eyes.
But Polymeropoulos is largely reluctant to criticize the agency he still loves. He is clearly nostalgic for his time there, and when we met this summer, we escaped the heat into the carpeted cool of his suburban basement, where he proudly showed me his medals, souvenirs, and photographs from his many exploits in the Middle East. He is careful to separate the Agency from the Office of Medical Services, and even then he makes a point of defending the younger doctors, who, he says, were very kind and empathetic. When I pressed him on whether he was angry at the Agency, he grew philosophical. "Look, it's incredible I was never killed in Afghanistan or Iraq," Polymeropoulos told me. "I'm not mad at the Russians. At the end of the day, we have a lot of adversaries, and you kind of chalk it up to that. I am more looking for what doctor's going to help me stop having these goddamn headaches."
Julia Ioffeis a GQ correspondent.
4. Pentagon's New Plan to Fight China and Russia in the Gray Zone
This is the key point. "Yet the rivalries with Russia and China involve far more than the possibility of large-scale war. They also involve struggling in the shadows - shifting the status quo without resorting to open violence, or seeking to undermine rivals through subtle, ambiguous strategies." This is why we need an American Way of Political Warfare. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE300/PE304/RAND_PE304.pdf
Pentagon's New Plan to Fight China and Russia in the Gray Zone
The U.S. military has to walk a tricky line: preparing for war with other great powers while making peacetime efforts to ensure that war never happens.
When it comes to relations among the great powers, conflict and competition are not the same thing. Conflict is what happens when states use violence to achieve political goals - in other words, war. Competition is the jostling and coercion that occur short of armed conflict - the art of maneuvering for geopolitical advantage amid a tense peace.
Not since the end of the Cold War has that distinction been as salient for the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Pentagon has no more important task than preparing to win a sharp, intense conflict with Russia or China. Yet it has also been seeking to make itself relevant to subtler, long-term competitions for influence. That necessitates a delicate balancing act, given that the requirements of preparing for war and those of competing in peace can pull America's military in different directions.
The most recent example of this tension was a short document released this month called the Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy. The National Defense Strategy itself, published in 2018, focused heavily on reorienting the Pentagon toward threats from China and Russia after a long period when counterterrorism dominated U.S. policy.
Since then, the department has emphasized building the capabilities and warfighting concepts necessary to deter and, if need be, defeat Russian or Chinese aggression in danger zones such as the Baltic region or the Taiwan Strait.
Yet the rivalries with Russia and China involve far more than the possibility of large-scale war. They also involve struggling in the shadows - shifting the status quo without resorting to open violence, or seeking to undermine rivals through subtle, ambiguous strategies.
Thus the importance of irregular warfare. That concept, the Pentagon writes, "favors indirect and asymmetric approaches," such as attacking the legitimacy of a hostile government, strengthening allies and partners against coercion, or otherwise resisting assertive authoritarian powers without crossing the line into outright conflict.
Russia is deploying mercenaries and other proxies to strengthen its hand from Ukraine to Africa; it is using disinformation and political meddling to weaken Western political systems. China's incremental expansion in the South China Sea relies on provocations that never quite amount to a flagrant casus belli. The U.S. must use its own irregular approaches, the department contends, to stymie these advances and turn the tables on America's competitors.
In one sense, the Irregular Warfare Annex is simply an effort to prevent the U.S. from squandering experience it purchased during the Global War on Terrorism. After Vietnam, the U.S. Army discarded much of what it had learned about counterinsurgency, a lapse of institutional memory that exacted a high cost in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today, the Pentagon understands that the experience of working with irregular proxy forces, such as the Syrian Democratic Forces, may come in handy in competing for influence with the Russians in the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa.
More broadly, the Pentagon is wrestling with the central paradox of great-power rivalry.
Preparing for a high-end fight against Russia or China is essential to maintaining deterrence, and thus peace. Yet because great-power war would be so devastating, U.S. rivals have strong incentives to test Washington and its allies through information warfare, economic coercion, paramilitary actions and other "measures short of war." So the Pentagon is seeking to bring its capabilities to bear in these less-violent, more protracted struggles.
The National Defense Strategy introduced the concept of "expanding the competitive space" - the idea that most geopolitical action occurs between the extremes of war and peace. The support office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff has pushed military personnel to think in terms of "campaigning" rather than "campaigns" - to consider rivalries as ongoing affairs rather than discrete clashes with a clear beginning and end. To be relevant in a great-power rivalry, Pentagon officials argue, the department cannot merely focus on a high-end war that may never occur.
So what does this mean in the real world?
There are certainly areas where the Pentagon can play a useful role in day-to-day competition. Presence missions - the deployment of military assets, whether a few special operators or a vast carrier strike group, as symbols of American commitment - can reinforce perceptions of U.S. power in contested areas such as East Asia and the Western Pacific.
Training missions and efforts to strengthen vulnerable allies and partners, such as the Philippines or Ukraine, can reduce the impact of authoritarian coercion. The Pentagon's world-class intelligence and cyber capabilities are well-suited to identifying, and punishing, malign behavior in the "gray zone" where competition occurs.
Yet this is where things get tricky. For starters, the Pentagon will not typically be the lead department when it comes to peacetime competition. The era of great-power rivalry will not be like the Global War on Terrorism, where military action was the leading edge of American strategy.
Rather, those rivalries will occur principally in the realms of economic statecraft, diplomatic influence and intelligence activity. American military might looms imposingly in the background of any situation in which the use of force is possible. But other entities - the State Department, the intelligence community, the Treasury Department - should generally take the lead.
A second problem is that focusing too heavily on competition can be damaging if it weakens the Pentagon's ability to prepare for conflict. Presence missions are useful in showing the flag, but they also disrupt training and degrade readiness.
"The consequences of losing a great power war is more serious than losing a gray zone dispute," write defense analysts Jim Mitre and Andre Gellerman. The Pentagon, they contend, can best shape day-to-day diplomatic interactions by showing that it can win when the shooting starts.
Succeeding in great-power rivalry, then, will require the Pentagon to contribute to long, indecisive struggles for position. Yet it will also require preparing for the intense, climactic fights that could occur if competition gives way to conflict. The task for Pentagon strategists, and for America's civilian leadership, will be to determine how much of the former the department can do without eroding its ability for the latter.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
5. James Stavridis on global order amid potential election chaos
An important message. Do not attempt to explicit US domestic challenges. Conclusion: "The message to any would-be geopolitical destabiliser is that America will respond vigorously. Do not mistake domestic squabbling for an unwillingness to stand firm internationally, from anywhere to anywhere. As the great pageantry of clash and cacophony that typifies American democracy takes place again this year, no one should underestimate the country's preparedness and resolve. As American citizens focus on the election, American institutions remain focused on maintaining global order."
James Stavridis on global order amid potential election chaos
America's adversaries would be foolish to take advantage of the moment-and would suffer if they did
This guest commentary is part of a series on American election integrity.
AS AMERICA ENTERS the final stage of a highly contested election, some global leaders must be relishing the moment: the country looks utterly distracted, inwardly focused and politically divided. With the prospect of a chaotic post-election period, there may be voices in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang and Caracas wondering: "Could there possibly be a better moment to take advantage of the situation and grab a quick victory before a fractured America has time to marshal a response?"
It is often said that crime is where motive and means meets opportunity. And a few rather unneighbourly countries might be tempted. One can imagine plenty of scenarios.
Perhaps China wants to increase repressive measures in Hong Kong, make a military move on Taiwan or threaten countries in the South China Sea. Russia could try to use this moment to consolidate control over another part of Ukraine, perhaps creating a "land bridge" from Russia to Crimea along the coast of the Black Sea. In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro could decide this is the moment to arrest the opposition leader Juan Guaidó. And that perpetual nuisance of the international system, North Korea, might strike merchant shipping or lash out at South Korea.
But I would advise extreme caution. Put simply: Don't try it. You may be surprised by just how prepared America is to safeguard its interests in global security.
Although our domestic politics may be roiled and confusing, our military remains deployed and ready to respond anywhere in the world. Our intelligence network, from constellations of satellites in the skies above to nuclear submarines in the seas below, are always listening and watching closely. With a defence budget of over $700bn, America has much more military capability than China and Russia combined. We aim for peace and stability, but train to "fight tonight" if need be.
Our global network of allies and friends, though tested during the Trump administration, remains solid. The president may have hectored Europeans as "free-loaders" but European Union and NATO defence spending is greater than China's and Russia's together. When the resources of American allies like Japan, South Korea, Australia and Saudi Arabia are included, it amounts to a formidable global capacity for reach and response. Even smaller allies-from Singapore to New Zealand to Colombia-bring substantial support. It is a strong, solid network.
America's opponents might think that the issue is not military capacity but political will: American forces can't and won't act without presidential authorisation, and if politicians in Washington are distracted, opponents can claim a geopolitical win. But this dangerously misunderstands the reality. In the waning days of a presidential election, or a tense period after the ballots are in but the outcome uncertain, no president, especially one who claims to know more than his generals, would wish to appear weak in response to international provocation.
America and its partners together have powerful economic and diplomatic leverage too. NATO is an alliance of 30 countries but represents roughly 50% of the global economy. Despite the Trump administration's misgivings about the international system-be it the United Nations, NATO, the EU or the Organisation of American States-the collective strength exists to apply diplomatic and economic sanctions against those who threaten international stability. Sanctions have placed heavy burdens on Russia, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea over the past decade. Although skirted at times, they can have real bite when the need arises.
The idea of deterrence is correctly categorised as capability plus credibility. "Capability" means that an opponent should believe that a deterring actor is capable of applying real damage diplomatically, economically and militarily. "Credibility" is the assessment of whether or not the deterring actor is willing and able to muster the political will to use its force. By this formulation, all institutions of American power stand ready to defend the country's interests amid a period of election uncertainty, just as they are at other times.
There are examples of past presidents acting militarily at the end of an administration or during times of domestic distraction. For example, in 1992 in his last weeks in office, President George H. W. Bush sent American troops to Somalia to protect UN aid workers. And in August 1998, even as he was being impeached in the midst of a scandal, President Bill Clinton authorised "Operation Infinite Reach", a set of cruise-missile strikes on al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and a factory in Sudan in response to attacks on two American embassies in Africa.
When I served as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in 2009-13, I was often asked if the United States "would really come to the aid of Estonia?" More recently, the question is framed as "are Americans willing to see their soldiers die to defend tiny Montenegro?" naming a recent member of the alliance.
The answer has always been "yes". A peaceful and prosperous global order depends on it. History shows that America intervenes on the side of freedom and its national interests-not always perfectly and at times with tactical missteps. But preserving democracy is in our lifeblood as a nation.
America's enemies in the past, from those who attacked Pearl Harbour to the perpetrators of 9/11, have made the mistake of underestimating our resolve. And that resolve extends far beyond direct attacks on the American homeland. No one should assume that just because we are attentively watching a contentious election, we won't come together and respond if someone were so foolish as to provoke us.
The message to any would-be geopolitical destabiliser is that America will respond vigorously. Do not mistake domestic squabbling for an unwillingness to stand firm internationally, from anywhere to anywhere. As the great pageantry of clash and cacophony that typifies American democracy takes place again this year, no one should underestimate the country's preparedness and resolve. As American citizens focus on the election, American institutions remain focused on maintaining global order. ______________
Retired Admiral James Stavridis was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO from 2009 to 2013, and later dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. An independent, he was vetted as a potential vice-presidential running mate by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 and as a possible Secretary of State by President-elect Trump.
6. Defense Policy Board and China
Bill Gertz assesses the members of the Defense Policy Board.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is the architect of conciliatory U.S. policies toward China. (Associated Press/File) more >
The Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, an influential advisory panel of former officials, is dominated by experts who do not reflect the hard-line policies toward China put into place under President Trump, according to analysts.
Chief among those on the board with views that clash with Mr. Trump is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, architect of the conciliatory U.S. policies that argued in favor of unfettered economic and diplomatic engagement with the communist regime.
The Kissinger policy has been rejected by the Trump administration, which regards China as the United States' chief strategic competitor and rival.
Mr. Kissinger, 97, did not take part in two recent meetings of the policy board, but his influence is said to remain strong among Pentagon leaders and others in the Trump administration.
William C. Triplett II, former chief Republican counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at least two-thirds of the board's members should support the vision of the administration in power, with one-third reflecting from previous administrations.
"But the one-third should be distinguished persons who are not known for high and active partisanship," Mr. Triplett said.
"The present composition of the board does not appear to meet that standard," he said. "For example, certainly Dr. Kissinger is entitled to his opinions on China, but they are the antithesis of the Trump administration, and former Secretary of State [Madeleine] Albright is an active Democratic partisan."
The board was briefed recently on China by David Helvey, principal deputy assistant defense secretary for Indo-Pacific security affairs. Mr. Helvey is viewed by critics as favoring past polices of engagement with China, especially military-to-military exchanges that were curbed by Congress over concerns that Beijing was gaining valuable war-fighting data from the exchanges.
One policy board member is David McCormick, CEO of Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund with extensive ties to China. Bridgewater China Investment Management is a unit of the hedge fund based in Shanghai.
Mrs. Albright is a partisan Democrat who during the Clinton administration helped push through Chinese entry into the World Trade Organization, based on promises of reforms in Beijing that critic say never took place.
Another Democrat on the board is Jamie Gorelick, a liberal deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration who was responsible for erecting the disastrous bureaucratic "wall" between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Critics say the wall hindered federal agencies from sharing information that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Ms. Gorelick recently circulated a legal analysis for the board on the idea of "decoupling" the United States from the close economic integration with China. No details of the paper could be learned.
Clinton administration Deputy Defense Secretary Rudy deLeon is also on the board. Mr. deLeon is currently an Asia analyst with the liberal Center for American Progress.
Former Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, also is on the policy board. Ms. Harman was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and was widely expected to be given a senior post had Mrs. Clinton won.
Former Adm. Gary Roughead, who also is on the board, was in China for a military exchange program with the People's Liberation Army in 2006 when The Washington Times reported how a Chinese submarine was able to surface undetected within torpedo range of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk.
The incident was widely seen as an embarrassment to the Navy and a sign of hostility from the PLA.
As reported earlier in this space, Adm. Roughead, Mrs. Albright, Ms. Gorelick and Ms. Harman were added to the policy board in 2011 during the Obama administration as part of an effort to slant it in a Democratic direction.
Conservatives currently on the board include J.D. Crouch, a Pentagon and White House official in the George W. Bush administration; Reagan and Bush administration official Paula Dobriansky; and Robert Joseph, a State Department official in the Bush administration.
Moderate Republicans on the board include former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and former Sen. Jim Talent of Missouri.
"While the current membership of the Defense Policy Board is comprised of very well-known names, the board's current overall membership, save for a few exceptions, fundamentally represents the 'engagement' policy' that is largely responsible for ignoring, even abetting, the People's Republic of China's militaristic and aggressive expansion in Asia over the past decade," said retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell, a former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief.
"It seems clear the membership of the board does represent the U.S. government's policy towards the PRC as espoused in the 2017 National Security Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Strategy."
A spokesman for Defense Secretary Mark Esper had no immediate comment.
NSA WARNS ON CHINESE CYBERATTACKS
The National Security Agency this week issued a warning about Chinese state-run cyberattacks against defense networks.
"One of the greatest threats to U.S. national security systems, the U.S. defense industrial base, and Department of Defense information networks is Chinese state-sponsored malicious cyber activity," NSA said in a technical notice to network administrators.
"These networks often undergo a full array of tactics and techniques used by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors to exploit computer networks of interest that hold sensitive intellectual property, economic, political and military information."
The Chinese hacking targets known vulnerabilities in software. The NSA has warned computer operators to take steps to apply security patches and other mitigation efforts.
Chinese hackers follow well-known attack procedures used by other sophisticated cyberoperatives.
"They often first identify a target, gather technical information on the target, identify any vulnerabilities associated with the target, develop or re-use an exploit for those vulnerabilities, and then launch their exploitation operation," the NSA said.
The advisory did not identify the Chinese state-run actors involved in the cyberattacks. China's main cyberunits include hacking units of the Ministry of State Security, the civilian spy service and the PLA military cyberunits.
The agency said computer systems should be updated as soon as possible after patches are released. But the NSA also noted that after a system has been hacked, a patch will not protect compromised systems.
"Expect that data stolen or modified (including credentials, accounts and software) before the device was patched will not be alleviated by patching, making password changes and reviews of accounts a good practice," the advisory said.
Chinese hackers have used at least 26 vulnerabilities to penetrate defense networks.
"NSA is aware that national security systems, defense industrial bases, and Department of Defense networks are consistently scanned, targeted and exploited by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors," the advisory said.
"NSA recommends that critical system owners consider these actions a priority, in order to mitigate the loss of sensitive information that could impact U.S. policies, strategies, plans and competitive advantage."
CHINA DEPLOYS HYPERSONIC MISSILES
China has deployed a new hypersonic missile that state media reports say would be used against the United States in a future conflict over Taiwan.
The Communist Party newspaper Global Times reported Monday that the DF-17 hypersonic missile would be used against "foreign military intervention" in a battle for the island state 100 miles off the southern Chinese coast.
The South China Morning Post, owned by Chinese interests, reported that DF-17s were deployed to the southeast coast for use in a possible invasion of Taiwan.
The Global Times quoted Chinese military experts as correcting the Morning Post report, noting that the ultra-high-speed maneuvering missile will not be used against targets in Taiwan because of the proximity to the mainland.
"The military targets on Taiwan are totally within the reach of the PLA's rocket launchers and air-launched missiles carried by military aircraft, so using advanced missiles to strike against Taiwan would be a waste," a Beijing-based military academy official told the Global Times.
"If the PLA deploys missile like the DF-17, that would be a weapon for striking foreign military force's military bases or fleets in the West Pacific region if those 'foreign forces' dare to intervene in the PLA operation to reunify the island."
Tensions have been raised over Taiwan in recent weeks as Chinese warplanes have stepped up flights near the island.
The Navy sent the guided-missile destroyer USS Barry through the Taiwan Strait on Oct. 14, said Cmdr. J. Myers Vasquez, a Pacific Fleet spokesman.
"The ship's transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific," he said. "The U.S. Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows."
* Contact Bill Gertz on Twitter at @BillGertz.
7. China's influence operations offer glimpse into information warfare's future
We need to pay attention. This is the competition: Closed societies versus open societies. Authoritarian regimes versus democratic nations. Those who want to control their people and others, execute rule by law, deny human rights, and ensure the economy and industry supports the politics of the leaders to ensure the party remains in power versus those who value freedom and individual liberty, liberal democracy, free market economy, rule of law, and human rights.
China's influence operations offer glimpse into information warfare's future
Intelligence experts are monitoring the "competition between democratic systems and autocratic systems of government."
NBC News · by Olivia Solon and Ken Dilanian · October 21, 2020
While U.S. intelligence experts generally agree that Russia is better than any other country at spreading disinformation to undermine voter confidence leading up to the election, security experts have been preoccupied with a longer-term threat. They fear that the Chinese government's disinformation operations pose a far more insidious menace to democracy that will continue well past Election Day.
Scholars studying the efforts say the Chinese are growing bolder and more brazen, often taking pages from what used to be seen as Russia's playbook in discrediting the United States. It's a pattern so troubling to global intelligence officials that last week, Ken McCallum, the incoming intelligence chief of the British domestic security service, MI5, said that if Russia's influence operations are like bad weather, China's growing operations are like climate change - far more destructive.
"We are in a competition between democratic systems and autocratic systems of government," said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, part of the nonprofit German Marshall Fund of the United States, who follows the changing dynamics. "China has grown in its geopolitical and economic clout and is trying to portray itself as a system that is equally legitimate to democratic governance. That is fundamentally in opposition to U.S. interests."
While Chinese government officials vigorously deny that they are interfering in the presidential election, they also stress that they plan to preserve their reputation on the global stage.
"We are not interested and have never interfered in the U.S. presidential election," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a news briefing Sept. 23. "On the contrary - the world sees clearly who has been wantonly meddling in other countries' domestic affairs."
Russia has used disinformation methods to covertly sow division and conspiracy theories in the U.S. for decades, experts said. In the internet age, that has translated into paying operatives to manipulate public opinion through social media.
It also includes a large English-language propaganda network, which includes Russian television and related websites. Those websites seek to promote stories that both aggravate political tensions in the U.S. and cast the country in an especially bad light to the rest of the world by highlighting its violent protests, its racial strife and what the sites portray as its governmental incompetence.
China's information operations historically have focused more on elevating China's global standing than on attacking the U.S. and the West. As trade relationships increase around the globe, China does not want to appear as a rogue operator, experts said. It wants to make sure its global counterparts recognize its geopolitical strength.
"Basically, the only business we do with Russia is arms control and purchases of Stolichnaya vodka," said a senior congressional official briefed on intelligence matters who was not authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified. "The Russians want to take us down with them. The Chinese can't afford to see us in chaos, because we are their biggest market. They are trying to accelerate the relative decline of the United States and their ascension to primacy."
To do that, the Chinese Communist Party has been building what it calls "discourse power" by shaping a narrative that its model of government is superior to democratic government structures. The goal, experts said, is to develop more influence overseas, particularly among America's political and military allies in Southeast Asia, who have been alienated by President Donald Trump, and to ultimately replace the U.S. as the dominant world power.
"The infrastructure and bureaucracy from China is more designed to present their point of view and persuade potentially sympathetic audiences around the world, especially in diaspora communities," said Graham Bookie, the acting director and managing editor of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, a nonprofit international affairs think tank.
Over the last 18 months, however, the Chinese have started to take pages from Russia's playbook. Bookie said they have been using both covert and overt tactics to manipulate public opinion, including outright disinformation.
"We have seen more of a willingness to engage in more aggressive influence operations, including some of the stuff we would associate with Russia," Bookie said.
For example, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Chinese agents created fake social media accounts to push out false messages on Twitter and in texts that the Trump administration was planning to lock down the country. In mid-March, the National Security Council countered the rumors, saying on Twitter that they were fake.
"Ultimately, China doesn't hesitate to use smoke, mirrors and misdirection to influence Americans," FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a speech in July to the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank.
China has extended the new tactics to other countries. In a report titled "Operation Naval Gazing," the social media research company Graphika identified Facebook posts praising China's generosity in offering coronavirus vaccines to the Philippines and commending its president, Rodrigo Duterte, after he said China was "in possession" of the South China Sea.
China's disinformation campaigns still clearly need refining. In August 2019, Twitter took down 936 troll accounts that it linked to Chinese state actors. The accounts, some of which claimed to be from U.S. cities, pushed conspiracy theories about pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
Little effort was put into making the accounts seem like plausible human personas, according to an analysis by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. Many of the accounts had previously been used to push spamlike promotional links for companies, and they would tweet in a wide range of languages, including Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic, English and Spanish.
Researchers at Graphika identified an inauthentic pro-Chinese network called "Spamouflage Dragon," which over the summer posted clumsily made English-language videos attacking U.S. policy and the Trump administration on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The videos, which had robotic voice-overs in English, criticized the U.S. over issues like how police were treating anti-racism protesters.
But the videos failed to attract any viewers.
"I've not yet found a Spamouflage video where I could reliably demonstrate that a real person engaged with it. All the engagement was from other members of the operation," said Graphika's director of investigations, Ben Nimmo.
China's direct efforts to influence the presidential election have been limited. In its "Naval Gazing" research, Graphika analyzed a cluster of fake Facebook and Instagram groups, pages and profiles attributed to individuals in China that posted about many issues, including the U.S. election. However, the accounts focused far more on topics like maritime security in the South China Sea.
Only three groups actually directly discussed the U.S. election, including one created in April 2019 called "Go for Pete Buttigieg 2020," which had only two members by last month. In mid-2020, the operation created a group called Trump KAG 2020, which posted pro-Trump messaging, and another called Biden Harris 2020. When Facebook took the pages down early last month, the Biden Harris page had 1,400 members, and the Trump group had three.
"I would question whether the goal was election interference," Nimmo said. "You're not going to make a dent on the American internet with three groups with a combined membership of less than 1,500 people."
Some experts suggest thinking of the election as a testing ground for Chinese information operations. "It's been a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' approach," said Chloe Colliver, head of digital policy and strategy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism policy institute in London.
Briefing the congressional intelligence committees last month, National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe said dozens of lawmakers had been more broadly targeted by Chinese influence campaigns, a fact first reported by The Hill newspaper.
An intelligence official who was not authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified said the intelligence community "has become aware of Chinese influence operations targeting members of Congress at a rate of approximately six times that of Russia and 12 times that of Iran."
Still, the senior congressional official who was briefed on intelligence matters said, China's efforts to influence lawmakers are intended not to influence the election of one candidate over another but to broadly expose flaws in the U.S. The approach will only grow, national security officials said, and it will go beyond propaganda and social media.
"China is engaged in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign, and its methods include bribery, blackmail and covert deals," Wray, the FBI director, said in July. "Chinese diplomats also use both open, naked economic pressure and seemingly independent middlemen to push China's preferences on American officials."
8. New American military base in Pacific would show how US-China cold war is heating up fast
From Russia's RT news service.
New American military base in Pacific would show how US-China cold war is heating up fast
Few people in the west are likely to have heard of a nation called Palau, an archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean. Located close to Papua New Guinea and the Philippines, it boasts a population of only 17,000 people, less than the average small town.
Do not let its size obscure its significance, though. For all these islands may seem irrelevant in the world of contemporary politics, they are in fact situated right at the heart of one of the world's emerging geopolitical struggles, the cold war between the United States and China.
In the midst of growing tensions between Washington and Beijing, Palau could not be a more strategically important location. The Pacific Ocean at large has already become the stage for a military chess game between the two countries, as the US seeks to encircle China's periphery and Beijing aims for military parity in its own backyard.
Yet Palau has already chosen a side as a loyal diplomatic partner of Taiwan, an island whose support in this region has otherwise been dwindling. And now, it is looking to invite Washington to create a military base within its territory.
Since the end of World War II, large swathes of the Pacific Ocean have been an area of indisputable American dominance. Its entry into the region commenced in the 19th century, and over the years Washington has annexed many parts of the area outright, such as Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, the Philippines, the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands.
With the outbreak of World War II and conflict with Japan, the US' 'island hopping' strategy saw this region transformed into a vast strategic military footprint which consolidated its grip as a global power.
However, the balance of power is shifting. China's rise as a global power and naval modernization, plus its growing clout in the South China Sea, have allowed Beijing to exert greater influence in the Pacific. Its goal, however, is not to battle for hegemony with the US, but to achieve security by checking what it sees as an obvious attempt by the Americans to encircle it.
Although the US labels Beijing 'the threat', the reality is that it's China which has a string of American naval bases and allies surrounding it. As part of its 'free and open Indo-Pacific' strategy, Washington has subsequently sought to intensify its naval power within the region.
So where does Palau come into it? As a set of Pacific islands, it is ultimately part of the chessboard. But it has already picked its side; as one of the few remaining allies of Taiwan, it does not have formal diplomatic relations with China.
This has traditionally been the case for many island nations in the Pacific, because of their alliance with the Americans. However, as China's economic power has grown, this has shifted in recent years. Beijing has been increasingly successful in getting pro-Taiwan Pacific nations to switch allegiance by making pledges of investment that Taipei could not match. Last year, it got Kiribati and the Solomon Islands to accept the 'One China' policy and thus choose Beijing.
The US and its allies have feared Palau could do the same, especially as its size means it has few resources of its own to develop its economy. It has, however, been loyal to Taipei and has persistently voted in favour of anti-China resolutions at the United Nations over the likes of Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Now it is aiming to anchor its significance by inviting the US military in, a move which will give it increased influence and diplomatic support. There is no logical reason why the US would turn down such an offer when it is intensively focused on militarizing the region.
Of course, this does not mean China is out of the game; other Pacific islands such as Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu are all part of Beijing's Belt and Road initiative, and there has been speculation that China may be considering building a base in the region itself.
Just because Palau is opposed to China does not mean that the other island nations of the Pacific are inclined to be so, and they seem happy to leverage Beijing against what has been 70 years of American and Australian dominance.
In essence, the great game across the Pacific is heating up, and both powers will continue to squabble for the allegiance of these tiny countries as they seek to play out their grand strategies. In this, Palau sees an opportunity, and others will surely follow.
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9. Canada's Parliament Labels China's Abuses in Xinjiang 'Genocide,' Urges Government Action
Canada's parliament on Wednesday labeled China's actions targeting Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) "genocide," calling on Ottawa to adopt the designation and sanction Chinese government officials responsible for rights violations in the western region.
The resolution marked the strongest move to date by lawmakers from a foreign nation seeking to hold China accountable for abuses in the XUAR, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a vast network of internment camps since early 2017.
The House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development said in a statement on Wednesday that after convening urgent meetings with experts in July to build upon the testimony of witnesses about developments in the region, its members were "profoundly disturbed" and "convinced of the need for a strong response."
"The Subcommittee heard that the Government of China has been employing various strategies to persecute Muslim groups living in Xinjiang, including mass detentions, forced labour, pervasive state surveillance and population control," the statement said.
"Witnesses were clear that the Government of China's actions are a clear attempt to eradicate Uyghur culture and religion."
The subcommittee said that some witnesses stated that China's actions meet the definition of genocide as set out in Article II of the United Nations' 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
"The Subcommittee unequivocally condemns the persecution of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang by the Government of China," the statement said.
"Based on the evidence put forward during the Subcommittee hearings, both in 2018 and 2020, the Subcommittee is persuaded that the actions of the Chinese Communist Party constitute genocide as laid out in the Genocide Convention."
The subcommittee urged the Canadian government to officially condemn China's actions in the XUAR, work with allies and organizations to help international observers gain unfettered access to the region, and provide support to civil society groups raising awareness about the Uyghurs-especially in countries beholden to China because of their geopolitical importance to Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The U.S. $1.3 trillion BRI is Chinese President Xi Jinping's signature geopolitical policy, which features major investments to build infrastructure supporting trade between China and countries across Asia, Europe and Africa. It has been dogged by controversy after countries in Asia and Africa piled up unsustainable debts.
The subcommittee also called on Canada's government to recognize that the acts being committed in the XUAR against Uyghurs constitutes genocide and impose sanctions under the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act on all Chinese officials responsible for the perpetration of rights abuses in the region.
"Canada has a responsibility to protect Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims under the international norm that it helped to establish, the Responsibility to Protect, of which the objective is to ensure the international community prevents mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity," the statement said.
"The Subcommittee shares concerns raised by witnesses and agrees that the Government of Canada needs to take immediate action and live up to the values it espouses at home and abroad. Canada must act now to address China's aggression against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims."
The subcommittee said it will be tabling a report shortly with recommendations for the government.
Growing global criticism
The designation by Canadian lawmakers comes less than a week after China's Ambassador to Canada Cong Peiwu warned of a "strong reaction" if the country's parliament were to condemn Beijing's policies in the XUAR as part of a campaign of genocide.
It also follows a June report about a dramatic increase in recent years in the number of forced sterilizations and abortions targeting Uyghurs. Author Adrian Zenz believes the campaign may amount to government-led genocide under United Nations definitions.
At the end of July, the Trump administration leveled sanctions against the quasi-military Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC) and two of its current and former officials over rights violations in the XUAR, as well as several top Chinese officials, including regional party secretary Chen Quanguo-marking the first time Washington targeted a member of China's powerful Politburo.
U.S. officials, including Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, have also publicly discussed whether the situation in the XUAR merits being labeled genocide.
Last week, China narrowly won a seat on the United Nations' Human Rights Council, prompting a rights group to call the vote "embarrassing" for a country that has worked overtime to whitewash its image and used its growing power to stifle criticism of its persecution of ethnic Uyghurs and Tibetans.
Earlier this month, the U.K. and Germany led a group of 39 member states at the U.N. General Assembly in condemning China's policies in the XUAR, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, and several members of the European Union.
The condemnation marked a significant increase in the number of countries willing to stand up to China's threats of cutting off trade with nations that support such statements. A similar resolution last year received only 23 backers.
Designation welcomed
Responding to lawmakers' designation Wednesday, the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) called the move "an important step to acknowledge the severity and urgency of the Uyghur crisis."
"We thank the Canadian Subcommittee recognizing that the atrocities against Uyghurs constitute genocide and for proposing concrete and meaningful action for Canada to take to address this crisis," said WUC President Dolkun Isa.
"We urge R.Hon. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Canadian government to adopt and implement the conclusions of the committee and to demonstrate that Canada will not sit idly by while a genocide takes place."
Washington-based Campaign For Uyghurs (CFU) also welcomed Wednesday's decision.
"It is grimly satisfying to see these crimes against humanity labeled for what they are specific to the suffering Uyghurs: genocide," CFU Executive Director Rushan Abbas said in a statement.
"This label must carry forth to result in consequences for those responsible."
CFU urged Ottawa to swiftly enact the subcommittee's recommendations and called on other global government bodies to follow the lead of Canadian lawmakers.
10. Cheap drones versus expensive tanks: a battlefield game-changer?
Everyone must be studying the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh in great detail and with great concern.
Cheap drones versus expensive tanks: a battlefield game-changer? | The Strategist
The distant conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has already provided a sharp lesson on how future battles might be fought.
The war has been most visibly characterised by 'kill cam' footage of drones attacking armoured fighting vehicles, including main battle tanks, as well as unprotected infantry, with devastating effect.
It's not widely understood in the West, but this conflict has the potential to escalate into a wider regional war, dragging Turkey and potentially Russia more overtly into the fighting.
The use of armed drones isn't new, of course. Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) armed with Hellfire missiles were used extensively in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Australia is acquiring the armed MQ-9B Sky Guardian.
What's different in the current conflict in the Caucasus is the use of low-cost 'loitering munition'systems bought from allies. Each drone costs far less than a crewed platform or a fully reusable UAV. In the future, rapid manufacturing technologies will allow them to be acquired at low cost and used in large swarms. That's a potential game-changer for land warfare.
This has generated debate on whether expensive and technologically sophisticated armored vehicles can survive in future battles against masses of cheap 'suicide drones'. Is the tank, which first emerged on the battlefields of the Western Front in 1917, now approaching the twilight years of its military utility?
With Australia's purchase of new armoured vehicles under the LAND 400 program underway, the likelihood of large numbers of low-cost drones operating over the future battlespace should be a concern for defence planners.
In Phase 2 of LAND 400, the Defence Department is acquiring 211 Boxer combat reconnaissance vehicles to replace the army's light armoured vehicles (the ASLAVs). In Phase 3, it will buy 450 infantry fighting vehicles and up to 17 manoeuvre support vehicles to replace the obsolete M113 armoured personnel carriers.
South Korea's Hanwha Defense Australia's AS-21 'Redback' and Rheinmetall Defence Australia's 'Lynx' are competing in Phase 3. A decision is due by 2022. The budget range is now $18.1 billion to $27.1 billion for 450 vehicles, or about $50 million each.
These big contracts are important for the future capability of the Australian Defence Force, and it would be premature to write off these vehicles. But the drones can't be ignored either. Decisions need to ensure capability is effective even in the face of rapid technological shifts.
The suicide drone isn't going to disappear from the battlespace and, given the sophistication of the systems now being used by both sides in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, it's prudent to consider the capabilities that might be employed by a major power in the Indo-Pacific region. An assessment of whether our future combat systems can survive is vital to the capability development process. The ADF cannot assume that it will operate only against an opponent that doesn't have a credible anti-armour capability.
The first step in responding to this challenge must be to pursue a fast, resilient and survivable very low altitude air-defence capability that is highly mobile. It needs to be able to directly support vehicles carrying infantry and protect systems such as self-propelled artillery, while defending itself. The evidence from Nagorno-Karabakh suggests that drones attack battlefield air defence first to gain and maintain control of the low-altitude airspace before attacking ground combat systems.
The Australian government's 2020 force structure plan suggests that development of directed-energy weapons will go ahead. EOS Australia is developing this technology. Defence's LAND 19 Phase 7B project is intended to deliver a national advanced surface-to-air missile system (NASAMS) within the AIR 6500 joint battle management system, a partnership between Raytheon Australia and Kongsberg.
NASAMS is a next step beyond the RBS-70 man-portable surface-to-air missile and will be based on the AIM-120 AMRAAM-ER (advanced medium-range air-to-air missile-extended range). It will enhance the army's ability to counter crewed aircraft and some high-altitude drones.
Relying on traditional ground-based systems such as NASAMS to counter large numbers of small, cheap lethal drones will quickly exhaust these expensive missiles-and there will always be more drones on the way. With cheaper drones likely to cost around $100,000 each versus a $50 million armoured vehicle, the drone wins the value-for-money test.
The force structure plan has the right answer with directed-energy weapons and greater investment in counter-drone systems using electronic warfare technology, and ultimately compact solid-state laser weapons. These initiatives must be fast-tracked.
The roles of these weapons and systems should be expanded beyond defence of individual vehicles. Speed and sustained effect are crucial against large swarms of cheap, lethal UAVs. It doesn't make sense to try to hit a $100,000 drone with a million-dollar missile.
It's also important to recognize that, unlike Australia and other liberal democracies, our adversaries may have no ethical or legal concerns about using autonomous weapons. They will use these new technologies without constraint on and over the battlespace.
If we have to fight a major power, we will need to be able to attack with our own swarms-or we'll go into battle with one hand tied behind our back.
11. The Next Ninety days and China's Coming Invasion of Taiwan: 3 November 2020 as possible D-Day
The Next Ninety days and China's Coming Invasion of Taiwan: 3 November 2020 as possible D-Day | Small Wars Journal
The Next Ninety days and China's Coming Invasion of Taiwan: 3 November 2020 as possible D-Day
William M. Darley, Colonel (ret.), U.S. Army
Source: File art
The next ninety days, from today through the end of 2020, constitute the most dangerous period that the United States has ever faced in its history. Not only does the United States face numerous menacing foreign adversaries with sophisticated weaponry, but it at the same time faces disruptive domestic enemies as the continuing chaos in our urban centers attests together with an already compromised process for selecting its political leadership in the 3 November elections that will likely be widely and passionately disputed over a prolonged period of time perhaps extending into 2021. These events coincide with a long-festering lack of moral cohesion within the nation as it relates to popular identification with the traditional mores associated with the value of upholding the rule of law and sustaining the U.S. Constitution as the law of the land. These mores appear badly eroded in many key geographic areas of the country as well as among the occupants of many principal nodes of power and influence within the United States' most basic institutions.
The moral erosion is especially evident at present in our major urban centers, which have dominant economic as well as cultural control over the country. It is ominously on display among many of the nations' local leaders who clearly lack commitment to containing civil unrest, and frankly barbarism, and in some cases appear to actually support destructive instability for their own political and partisan purposes. This situation should be viewed as something more than a temporary passing phase in the evolution of our society but instead as a cause for genuine and profound alarm among the balance of the U.S. population on par with the kinds of fears, concerns, suspicion, and confusion that citizens of the United States no doubt widely felt in the years just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In the same way as the run up to that war, the severe fissures in the foundations of our society pose the threat of uncontrolled fracturing and institutional collapse if brought under the extreme test of some series of highly stressful events either domestic or foreign.
As a consequence, until the persons who will assume the U.S. presidency and the elected offices in Congress are finally decided upon after the 3 November 2020 national elections, the United States will be in the most vulnerable position it has ever been in internationally and domestically because it will be virtually leaderless for months in terms of dealing decisively with the various dimensions of challenges that are all converging at one time in the face of real and present threats.
Such a situation is not lost on the enemies of the United States, such as Iran, Russia, Venezuela, North Korea, China, or non-state players such as al-Qaida and ISIS. No doubt, among the most important observations by such enemies over the last nine months from the COVID-19 pandemic is that the United States was brought to its economic knees, self-confidence in its political processes severely undermined, and domestic stability disrupted not by conventional weapons of war but by the introduction of a virus. They are asking themselves, 'if our nemesis's socio-political and economic systems are so demonstrably fragile, what other means might be consciously and systematically employed in concert at some future time to achieve the same kinds of political objectives of a war against the United States, perhaps without firing a shot in conventional war?'
Therefore, as one considers the disruptions and distractions caused by an eroded state of U.S. societal and political affairs limiting the ability of the United States to respond in a decisive way, there is a strong likelihood that U.S. enemies have concluded that any sudden act against a nation in which the United States claims it has national interests during the next ninety days would be met with a minimal if not stultified U.S. response. Further, such enemies may have concluded that there exists as well a credible possibility that a tepid U.S. response to foreign aggression that undermined in a stunning way U.S. national interests overseas could cascade into a complete economic collapse of the United States together with a degeneration into socio-political chaos on a massive scale well beyond that which we have observed since January of 2020.
One might immediately dismiss observations as mere sensational hyperbole, arguing that many other previous eras in U.S. history posed a much greater "existential threat" (to borrow an already hackneyed bromide in vogue) to the American nation as, for example, the mortal threat posed by armies of the British Crown against the rebelling colonies, the U.S. Civil War that temporarily tore the country into fragments, the Great Depression that brought into question the very concept and workability of democracy and capitalism, or World War II and the Cold War that pitted the U.S. Judeo-Christian civilization against an aggressive set of fascist ideologies that had as their actual stated goal eradicating Western civilization in general, along with that of the United States.
However, in each of the events noted above, there were wide oceans with which enemies had to cope that limited the likelihood of intervention from Europe and Asia, and a spacious wilderness into which refugees could find sanctuary if foreign elements could actually negotiate the problems of crossing the oceans in sufficient force to be a credible existential threat. In contrast, the threats posed in those eras of U.S. history did not occur at a time when multiple nations had nuclear weapons and capable delivery systems that could reach the United States in an effective way; and, in a time when our vulnerabilities were so open to attack as, for example, our national power grid, upon which the economic and social wellbeing of the country has come to rely, which could be feasibly decimated by well-placed detonations of electro-magnetic pulse weapons over the United States that not only severely disrupted it but the internal workings of every machine in the United States that depends on a computer chip.
But, most importantly, those events did not occur when the relative social cultural adhesion of the country was so much in doubt in terms of identifying with a common national identity. In former eras of existential threats, the nation was stabilized by a widely shared cultural narrative of unity that stemmed from a more or less common set of values derived from Judeo-Christian influence coalescing around a general notion of common nationality rooted in confidence in basic natural human rights. That sense of a common national identity, which gave it domestic resilience and was a bulwark against previous catastrophes the country faced demonstrably no longer exists among significant swaths of the U.S. population and among some highly powerful cultural, economic, and political elites that heavily influence public attitudes and the direction of political decision making in the United States as related to its security.
In sum, those previous conflicts or events that threatened the existence of the United States as a nation at its various stages of development did not occur in a time of hyper globalization, a global rising tide of ethnic and racial tribalism both domestically and abroad, the ability to cross national borders with impunity due to modern technological means of moving large numbers of migrants, and massive information transfer with the potential to balkanize, organize, and agitate populations for different political purposes at a speed never before experienced in human history.
And, to the specific point of this article, they did not occur in a time with so great uncertainty as to who the political leadership of the country would be and what the condition of the U.S. domestic socio-political environment would be when the persons assuming the presidency and the seats in Congress were finally decided upon pursuant to an election that is likely to be litigated.
The United States has never faced such conditions converging all at once; extreme political uncertainty regarding the legitimacy of its leaders at the same time it is suffering from a startling internal erosion of shared national values and the legitimacy of a national identity as it simultaneously faces determined foreign enemies armed with sophisticated technological means having global reach and almost unimaginable destructive potential.
In other words, from 3 November to the end of the year, there is a window of opportunity for aggressive and committed enemies of the United States to take advantage of the political as well as moral vacuum of authority that will exist starting on the U.S. Election Day. And the most likely enemy that has the economic power as well as the diplomatic, military, informational means, and will to maximize exploitation of U.S. weakness during such a period of political uncertainty is China. And China's number one current national priority is the conquest and annexation of Taiwan.
A harbinger of what will happen during the authority vacuum that will occur while the United States sorts out its political leadership at the end of 2020 was on display with the aggressive international actions that China has already taken this year on the calculated risk that the international community would do little or nothing to effectively oppose it including mass enslavement of its Uighur Muslim minority, the closure and burning of Christian churches within its borders, encroachment on disputed territory with India, the total subjugation of Hong Kong (including disestablishment of its democracy), and, of course, its failure to acknowledge or take accountability for its role in a global pandemic that has literally killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Most of China's actions were met with nothing like international solidarity against its actions but rather by piecemeal and milk toast diplomatic protests and the sanctioning of a few individuals followed by business as usual. Consequently, when forecasting what is next for China, the answer is Taiwan.
Communist China has made no secret for decades that it intends to annex Taiwan by force if other means failed, and so far, all other means have failed. In response, the hardline leaders of the Communist Chinese military have been calling for several years for a confrontation with the United States over U.S. insistence on freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, U.S. opposition to China's militarization of the South China Sea islands-at least one general calling for the sinking of a U.S. aircraft carrier as a warning to the United States--and its increasing effort to fortify Taiwan militarily against Communist Chinese aggression.
Many pundits in the news and "China experts" have, until recently, routinely downplayed such threats from China against Taiwan, asserting it has too much to risk internationally in undertaking an invasion of Taiwan that would offend the world and unduly risk its global economic relationships. It is well to bear in mind these are largely the same experts that asserted Hong Kong was immune to Chinese aggression and Pakistan did not have a nuclear weapon.
The fact is that many Western pundits down playing Chinese strategic objectives view the annexation of Taiwan through the prism of capitalistic Western eyes that calculates the value of policy objectives based on cost-benefit analysis. This is wrong headed with regard to assessing China's motivations and objectives. The annexation of Taiwan is much more than a cost-risk economic venture for the Chinese Communists. It is an immoral imperative; an essential ideological, nationalistic and cultural objective that must be accomplished. The fact that a free and open democracy practicing capitalism has existed on the borders of China allowing its citizens personal rights and economic freedom is something the Communist government cannot continue to countenance. As long as Taiwan exists, it is a dire moral threat to Communist China because it puts on display an alternative way of governance and life for ethnically Chinese people that challenges the communist system of dogmatism and state terrorism used to govern China. China's continuing efforts to stamp out any vestige of freedom of expression or personal liberty is both totalitarian and global in scope, and thus Taiwan must be stamped out because it is the mirror it does not want mainland Chinese people to continue to view as juxtaposed against the characteristics of communist state subjugation. Consequently, Western-style cost-benefit analysis is both irrelevant and dangerous. The only variable important to the Communist Chinese despite whatever costs is calculating the actual probability of success. When success seems probable, China will act to destroy Taiwan whatever it takes; and no better foreseeable opportunity will present itself than over the next ninety days.
The current U.S. administration has been hard on Communist China. Its actions have weakened the Chinese economy and therefore slowed the investments China has been able to make in its military as well as other means for exercising totalitarian control over its people, and has also slowed investments in its Belt and Road or "New Silk Road" initiative that aims to expand China's socio-economic, political, and military influence globally. Recent U.S. actions have reversed decades of Chinese expansion and sent it in to modest decline. Additionally, the United States has been aggressively selling upgraded military equipment to Taiwan, including more than two-hundred M1 Abrams tanks and other advanced systems that will make Taiwan more difficult to conquer militarily if fully delivered and deployed before the PRC is able to act.
Setting their public faces to righteous indignation and protest against all of these actions, upgrading Taiwan's military has been particular irksome. Chinese leaders are seething against both the perceived humiliation they are receiving from the Trump administration with regard to Taiwan and the obstacles the U.S. administration is now placing in Communist China's preparations for military conquest of Taiwan and the South China Sea in a manner not seen since the 1970s. This ire together with zealous commitment to consolidate control over Asian island chains and finally annex Taiwan to stamp out any vestige of democracy in their near abroad is increasingly on display in their numerous recent exercises and elevating instances of provocations of Taiwan. Thus faced with the beginnings of a slow economic decline that threatens to sap its strength, there will be no better window of opportunity to achieve the objective of annexing Taiwan than the next ninety days while the U.S. is distracted with internal political uncertainty immediately following its elections complicated by U.S. domestic social unrest that is expected to continue, and while the rest of the world's nations who might otherwise oppose China's attack on Taiwan are fixated on the international economic instability that the turmoil in the United States will be causing, which conceivably will drag them into a global depression.
This polemic is intended to stimulate awareness of a plausible scenario that has a very real chance of occurring in the very short term that poses essential questions regarding a clear, present, and immediate danger to the United States, its interests in Asia, and to the U.S. military in the Pacific. Unfortunately, the situation between China and Taiwan and the ramifications that the annexation of Taiwan would have for the United States and the world have often been overlooked or underrated at the policy level due to preoccupation with Russia and its possible military actions in Europe and Eurasia. However, in light of the above circumstances, what realistically is the more likely scenario? A Russian invasion of Central Europe? Or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?
The People's Republic of China has long sponsored propaganda that promotes support and enthusiasm among the Chinese people for invading Taiwan. One recent manifestation of efforts to stoke popular support among certain segments of society for an invasion is a widely disseminated series of art works created by students at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute depicting the People's Liberation Army attacking various targets inside Taiwan during such an invasion. An example from this series is provided above. Copyright waived by owners: weibo.com/5745531486/J30
Setting aside those questions, China's plans for invasion could be stopped if the United States assumes the alert level appropriate to dealing with a range of current indicators that China is preparing for a move against Taiwan during probable political turmoil inside the United States from Election Day forward. In anticipation of a PRC attempt to exploit this situation to annex Taiwan, the United States should move sufficient forces to the area in anticipation of countering aggressive actions during the expected period of its own internal political uncertainty. Additionally, in anticipation of dealing with a sudden aggressive move against Taiwan, U.S. Pacific Command and other affected organizations should receive immediately specific operational orders approved in legislative language by a specific bi-partisan Congressional mandate regarding how it is to respond to such aggression irrespective of whatever domestic political confusion there might be until whomever the president-elect is decided upon.
Among the obvious questions that anticipating the need for such preparations are the following:
Who in the U.S. government would authoritatively answer Taiwan's pleas for help if China undertook an invasion under the conditions that will prevail from November through the end of 2020 during a period of political uncertainty at the seat of U.S. government?
After nineteen years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, which bi-partisan representatives in the United States Congress are going to step forward to champion another foreign military intervention, or even strong diplomatic actions, when China attacks Taiwan in the face of popular national exhaustion with war?
If instances of actual armed conflict occur between U.S. and Communist Chinese forces on or about Election Day in the vicinity of Taiwan, or over freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, what potential is there for escalation if the U.S. Navy and Chinese Communist begin sinking each other's ships?
If it went badly for the United States, say the sinking of several U.S. carriers and their related ships, what then? How far is the United States willing to go? In light of a situation where there are casualties and equipment losses, the resulting extreme elevation of tensions will produce a high degree of uncertainty. Such situations greatly increase the risk of decisions being made on hunches driven by fear and panic rather than actual knowledge of intent. What, therefore, is the potential for catastrophic miscalculations being made in decisions that involve nuclear armed foes that have engaged in instances of conventional combat over the defense of Taiwan, and what can be done to mitigate such miscalculations in advance?
Would the continental United States feasibly become a target if it started sinking Chinese ships? If so, what weapons would the two sides elevate to in "proportional response"?
And what would the limit of such escalation be?
In the event of an outbreak of hostilities over Taiwan, who else would likely get involved that has a bone to pick with China or that would become a de facto target (e.g., Japan, Korea, India, Vietnam, Australia, etc.)
Conclusion.
The U.S. military has focused a great deal on the supposed conventional Russian threat over the past several years. However, when considering the capabilities of Russia, it is well to bear in mind that Russia has an economy about the size of Italy's and no expressed ambitions for global domination though their "near abroad" preoccupies their military focus in open source literature.
In contrast, China has expressed as an objective de facto global domination through a range of initiatives, both military and non-military. To that end, China's economy may have already surpassed that of the United States, which makes it fully capable of conducting a sustained war. And, it has a large, well-equipped, and fairly sophisticated army supported by a sophisticated air force and the largest military naval fleet of combat ships in the world together with hundreds of other ships associated with international shipping and fishing easily capable of providing transport for an invasion force from China's multiple naval bases already in close proximity to Taiwan. It is there. It is hungry. And it is angry.
William M. Darley, Colonel (ret.) U.S. Army, served thirty-one years on active duty in the U.S. Army, primarily as a public affairs officer. After retirement, he served as a social anthropology team leader for the Human Terrain System in Ramadi, Iraq and editor for the Army University Press at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is a 1977 graduate of Brigham Young University and its ROTC program.
12. Despite Military Improvements, Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Still 'Highly Risky' Says Former Pentagon Official
Key points from Randall Shriver:
While "the PLA [People's Liberation Army] is getting better" at amphibious warfare, moving "tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands" of troops "across 80 nautical miles of water" and then successfully fighting an active resistance in mountainous terrain is not likely, Schriver said.
China "prefers to win without fighting," he added. That does not mean Xi is backing down on eventual reunification, a goal he wants to reach by the centennial of the founding of the Chinese communist party in 2021.
Despite Military Improvements, Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Still 'Highly Risky' Says Former Pentagon Official - USNI News
Soldiers of the 74th Army Group of the People's Liberation Army take part in a battle drill in a coastal area of Guangdong province on June 1, 2020. Xinhua Photo
Xi Jinping's go hard approach to bringing Taiwan to heel isn't about to let up, but "it would be highly risky" for China to believe the United States would not intervene if it launched an all-out cross-straits invasion, a former senior Trump administration Pentagon official said.
Speaking Monday at an Atlantic Council online forum, Randall Schriver, now chairman of Project 2049, compared the island to the Fulda Gap, a pivotal point in the defense of Western Europe during the Cold War.
While "the PLA [People's Liberation Army] is getting better" at amphibious warfare, moving "tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands" of troops "across 80 nautical miles of water" and then successfully fighting an active resistance in mountainous terrain is not likely, Schriver said.
China "prefers to win without fighting," he added. That does not mean Xi is backing down on eventual reunification, a goal he wants to reach by the centennial of the founding of the Chinese communist party in 2021.
Neither Schriver nor the other two security and economic experts on the panel expect a major shift in American policy toward Taiwan - economically and militarily - even if former Vice President Joseph Biden is elected.
"We're seeing an entirely different level" of pressure put on Taiwan by the mainland than it has employed against Australia, the Philippines and Mongolia, or nations that still maintain diplomatic relations with Taipei, said the Atlantic Council's Dexter Tiff Roberts.
To the other nations, as their largest trading partner, China is most often applying economic pressure, usually without the threat of military force.
The difference comes in the saber-rattling against the government of President Tsai Ing-wen that includes deploying new amphibious vessels, coastal military build-up, constant testing of air defenses and responses and recent large-scale amphibious assault exercises.
Michael Mazza, of the American Enterprise Institute, said the Taiwanese are "seeking to diversify their economic partners" to ensure their survival. Among the steps they have taken is lifting restrictions on beef and pork coming from the United States as a means to negotiate a free trade agreement and tighten ties with Washington.
So far, there has been no indication that the United States is moving toward such an agreement with Taiwan.
"Taiwan's most important relationships are with the United States, Japan and the E.U.," Schriver said, referring to Taiwan's ability to grow economically in the future.
The complicating factor in that comes in the intertwined manufacturing and trade arrangements that Taiwan maintains with China and the United States, Roberts said. Using Foxconn, a large Taiwanese-based electronics manufacturer, as an example of a corporation that has top customers in both countries, Roberts said "there is pressure on them to take sides" in the competition between the two powers.
At the same time, more residents - younger ones who often support Tsai's party, which leans toward independence - identify themselves as Taiwanese and many view the island as the Republic of China, an entity different from the mainland. "It's a framework that the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] doesn't like," despite Tsai's "creative way" of downplaying talk of an independent Taiwan, Roberts said.
"Taiwan is [America's] ninth largest trading partner" and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic matters when considering reliable partners, Schriver said. He also cited its position as an upholder of democratic values in the Indo-Pacific as another factor in its favor.
He noted that the Trump administration "sees Taiwan as a true partner" that "punches above its weight as a good citizen."
Taiwan "is the key to security" beyond Japan and the South China Sea. Schriver said.
Related
13. Department of Defense Releases 2020 Military Intelligence Program Budget
Spoiler alert: $23.1 billion. But of course no further details, just the top line.
Department of Defense Releases 2020 Military Intelligence Program Budget
The Department of Defense released today the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) appropriated top line budget for FY 2020. The total MIP budget, which included both the base budget and Overseas Contingency Operations appropriations, was $23.1 billion and is aligned to support the National Defense Strategy.
The department has determined that releasing this top line figure does not jeopardize any classified activities within the MIP. No other MIP budget figures or program details will be released, as they remain classified for national security reasons.
The 2016 election was hardly the first time that the U.S. political system alarmed many of the United States' partners broad. After the election of 1832, the British complained that the United States was governed by "demagogues and non-entities," and versions of that grievance have been repeated regularly by allied leaders since. Yet this time is different. During the presidency of Donald Trump, the United States' friends have, for the first time, begun to hedge their bets in clear and consequential ways. A second term for Trump would accelerate such moves, with the result of transforming the international order for good.
Even before the start of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year, support for the United States had plummeted to historic lows. Over the past six months, Washington has shown both indifference to the magnitude of suffering among its own citizens and sharp-elbowed selfishness in its approach to global cooperation on vaccines, medical supplies, and more-decimating support for both U.S. leadership of a mutually beneficial international order and global aspiration to the American way of life.
If Trump is reelected, his "America first" foreign policy will have been validated, and the result will be an America snarling into decline. The admiration for the United States that reduces the cost of everything it tries to achieve in the world will evaporate, and other countries will move on, shaping a new order to protect themselves from a self-seeking, often hostile United States. Washington will find that it has squandered an international order that was built to enhance its security and sustain its prosperity and instead faces a world without the institutions, alliances, and goodwill that have long bolstered U.S. interests. The president and the Republican leaders who support him will have to take responsibility for what they have wrought: a new order that excludes the United States.
A NEW ORDER
Projecting forward from the Trump foreign policy decisions of the last four years makes clear the damage that could be done in a second term-and what that damage will mean for U.S. leadership. Convincing countries to align their policies with those of the United States will become more difficult because the United States will no longer represent common ideals. Allies will not want to station U.S. military forces in their countries or join coalition operations with the United States. Pardoning war criminals and vituperating against the International Criminal Court-as Trump has done over his first term and will likely continue doing over a second term-will make it less likely that other powers see the U.S. military as a force that uses violence lawfully.
The Trump administration's self-seeking approach to foreign policy, if repeated, will push other powers to forge new alliances that keep the United States out. Under a second Trump administration, the United States will likely withdraw troops from Europe. It will continue demanding extortionate payments from South Korea and Japan for stationing U.S. troops and, since neither will concede, withdraw troops from both countries, embrittling security commitments. Meanwhile, North Korea will continue to stockpile nuclear weapons, and South Korea will inch toward conciliation with the North. Japan will become a major military power and pull the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam into closer cooperation. These new security alliances may not embrace U.S. interests, thus shaping a new order.
The United States will go from leading an international order to being unmoored from it.
In the Middle East, Washington will write off the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and leave Syria to President Bashar al-Assad's brutality. Perhaps Russia and Iran would dispute each other's influence in the region. But it is more likely that the vacuum the United States leaves behind will have room for the ambitions of both. Meanwhile, no U.S. allies will trust Washington's security guarantees, instead hedging against the United States' abandonment or conceding to intimidation. Middle-power cooperation, once a promising means to strengthen the rules-based international order, will prove inadequate without the underwriting of U.S. support.
The fundamental miscalculation by the Trump administration is to assume the United States is so powerful that it doesn't need to compromise. Under a second Trump administration, Washington would withdraw from international organizations, vacate alliances, fail to negotiate treaties limiting threats, and accelerate its use of punitive sanctions. Extending sanctions to France, Germany, and the United Kingdom and intending to snap back penalties on Iran for an international agreement the United States withdrew from will exhaust European patience. As economic ties fray, the EU will work with China and Russia to create alternative payment structures to the dollar and increase efforts to set regulatory standards affecting U.S. companies. These changes will put more sand in the gears of U.S. investment, manufacturing, and trade, isolating the United States from sources of prosperity. Excluded from these new economic structures, the United States will go from leading an international order to being unmoored from it.
This post-American order is not hypothetical. Leading indicators have already come into view, and the United States' adversaries and closest allies are acting to diminish its hegemony and create a new order at its expense. China created a "petro yuan" to price oil in a currency other than dollars. Meanwhile, India and Russia have developed a payment method to skirt the dollar zone, as have the United States' European allies. When the United States balked at joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Australia, Canada, and Japan brought the agreement into force without it.
CHANGING COURSE
Republicans backing Trump will have to reckon with a new post-American international order that shuts out the United States-the direct consequence of continuing policies already enacted or implementing policies likely to be enacted if the Trump administration's approach to foreign policy is validated by Trump's reelection. But if Republicans decline to support the president in numbers sufficient for his reelection, Republican politicians and foreign-policy makers will have the opportunity to push for an alternate approach-one that acknowledges the Trump administration's successes while shearing away its self-defeating tendencies.
That would mean strengthening U.S. alliances that have deteriorated under the Trump administration. To forestall the trend toward creating institutions that work against U.S. interests, the United States needs to start doing things with allies, not to them. Barring the current leader of the Republican Party, both Republicans and Democrats broadly agree on the value of U.S. alliances. Republicans in Congress have legislated against troop withdrawals from allied countries, supported NATO against presidential threats, and funded cooperative defense initiatives. Going forward, Republicans should push to strengthen the United States' alliances, especially with its North American partners. The United States is missing many opportunities to consolidate North American cooperation in energy development and distribution, workforce management, and the creation of supply chains independent from China.
A new approach will require rethinking relationships not only with allies but also with adversaries such as China. The Trump administration was right to continue the shift acknowledging China's refusal to become a responsible stakeholder. That shift, however, began in the administration, when the Pentagon determined it needed 50 percent of naval forces in the Pacific, and continued with the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia." Republicans should smooth out the erratic veers of Trump administration policy regarding China and push for a cooperative strategy that builds a common front with allies, achieving the economy of scale needed to push China to play by the rules.
Republicans backing Trump will have to reckon with a new post-American international order.
To protect the U.S.-led order, policymakers should also reconsider the current approach to so-called forever wars. The basic strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq over the last three U.S. administrations has been to develop the ability of the Afghani and Iraqi governments to manage threats. These wars are creating the stability that will diminish the prospect of future wars in the region. Most Republicans understand the need to sustain these commitments and reject the appeal to abandon the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. Though policymakers have not been expending the political capital to sustain public support for these relatively low-cost ways of achieving U.S. objectives, they must do so going forward to regain public support.
In the Middle East, the Trump administration was right that moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem would not ignite blowback. It rightly assessed that Arab states were less committed to Palestinian concerns than they professed to be. Whether or not the Trump administration anticipated it, shared concern among Gulf Arab states and Israel about Iran and about U.S. retrenchment from the Middle East fostered the thaw of icy relations in the region. Furthering that cooperation into greater support for Jordan, which is buckling under the weight of Syrian refugees and stateless Palestinians, and a common approach to Syria would diminish the need for U.S. military involvement.
Preventing a post-American international order will also require a new trade policy. Tariff wars are costing U.S. producers their markets and consumers higher prices. Americans appreciate that trade is generally advantageous; the problem is that trade creates markets and benefits consumers broadly, but the costs of expanded trade fall on specific sectors. To rebuild support for trade, Republicans need to develop trade-adjustment policies that maintain open markets while buffering transitions for American workers.
Opportunities abound for constructing a Republican foreign policy that restores the luster of the United States' example and the strength that comes from cooperation. But it will require Republicans repudiating Trump at the ballot box to avert the dark and dangerous course his policies are following. If Republicans do not wrench foreign policy out of the "America first" course Trump and his supporters have put the United States on, this country will find itself not just alone but facing an international order buffering itself from U.S. influence and indifferent to U.S. interests.
15. How two ex-Green Berets were lured into a disastrous failed coup in Venezuela
In May, President Nicolás Maduro announced that Venezuelan security forces thwarted an attempted coup led by two former US Green Berets, releasing video footage that showed a ragtag group of men rounded up in a coastal village.
However, the U.S. State Department described the event as "propaganda." In a statement to Business Insider, a US State Department spokesperson said the event was "staged by the illegitimate Maduro regime."
The two captured Americans were reportedly hired for the mission by Jordan Goudreau, also a former Green Beret and founder of the contracting company Silvercorp USA.
A combination of red flags seen in the footage released by Venezuela and reports that the government knew about the mission weeks before the capture suggests that the mission was infiltrated by Maduro loyalists.
In May, reports surfaced of a supposed failed coup against the Venezuelan government. Headlines called the event "Bay of Piglets," or "Keystone Coup," and footage released by the Venezuelan government seemed to back up the nicknames.
The footage showed a ragtag group of men who appear to be under-prepared; a few of the men were shirtless and had their passports on them. According to President Nicolás Maduro, eight people were killed and dozens more were captured. Among the captured men were two American former Green Berets.
But the footage, as well as circumstances leading up to the event, created a few red flags.
Business Insider spoke with the brother of captured American Luke Denman, the U.S. State Department, and Juan José Rendón, a former advisor to Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaidó, to understand what aspects of this complex story are rooted in fact, and what aspects may have been constructed by the Venezuelan government.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Narrator: In May, this Venezuela State TV footage made headlines around the world. Venezuelan security rounding up a ragtag group of men in a village on the country's northern coast. Some of the captured men were wearing no shoes or shirts at all.
Interrogator: What's your name? Luke Denman: Luke Alexander Denman.
Narrator: Two of the men captured were Americans, ex-US Army Green Berets. And Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro said dozens more were captured and eight men killed.
Nicolás Maduro: They have been detained, surrendered, and submitted by the law of Venezuela.
Narrator: Maduro said the men planned to enter Venezuela on its northern coast and make their way to Caracas, where they would attempt to kidnap him. Many reports about the footage characterized it as the aftermath of an attempted but failed coup against the current Venezuelan government. But the US State Department called this footage "propaganda." In a statement to Business Insider, a spokesperson called it "scripted, coordinated, and staged by the illegitimate Maduro regime."
Mark Denman: Something had gone terribly wrong.
Narrator: Business Insider spoke to Luke Denman's brother, Mark, along with the US State Department and other key figures to try and understand what happened in May and what happens next.
Jordan Goudreau: At 1700 hours, a daring amphibious raid was launched from the border of Colombia deep into the heart of Caracas.
Narrator: This is the man behind the mission. Jordan Goudreau, also a former US Green Beret and founder of a private-security firm called Silvercorp USA. Goudreau reportedly planned the mission, known as Operation Gideon, that led to the two Americans being captured. But his whereabouts are currently unknown.
Goudreau: We manage risk. Anywhere, anytime, any situation.
Narrator: In this promotional video from Silvercorp's Instagram, Goudreau is presented as an athletic, adventurous, very patriotic soldier for hire. Born in Canada, Goudreau eventually became a US citizen and joined the Army Special Forces. He served for about 15 years, and during that time, he met Luke Denman and Airan Berry.
Denman: He was their, from what I understand, their superior officer, and heavily respected guy that had a lot more time in than they did.
Narrator: After his service, Goudreau founded Silvercorp USA in 2018. In February 2019, Goudreau was reportedly hired to work security at a concert event on the border of Venezuela and Colombia. He posted this video to Silvercorp's Instagram account with the caption: "Venezuela Aid Live. Controlling chaos on the Venezuela border where a dictator looks on with apprehension." The dictator in question seems to be Maduro.
Mike Pompeo: We're here to urge all nations to support the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people as they try to free themselves from former President Maduro's illegitimate mafia state.
Narrator: Opposition parties in Venezuela have long claimed that Maduro's 2018 presidential election did not meet international democratic standards. Which is where Juan Guaidó's name comes in.
Pompeo: The time is now to support the Venezuelan people, to recognize the new democratic government led by interim president Guaidó, and end this nightmare.
Narrator: Guaidó, the president of the National Assembly, claimed the title of interim leader in January 2019. And political bodies including the European Union, the Lima Group, and the US government recognize the 37-year-old opposition leader as the legitimate president of Venezuela. And Guaidó's team was looking for ways to get Maduro out.
Juan Rendón: So, President Guaidó said, "OK, everything's over the table. And under the table, too."
Narrator: Juan José Rendón, otherwise known as JJ Rendón, worked as an advisor to Juan Guaidó.
Rendón: So when they say that, and they say, "OK, explore everything," we explore different scenarios of use of force.
Narrator: Jordan Goudreau was working on one such scenario of his own. A few months after posting this video, Goudreau traveled to Bogotá, where he met Clíver Alcalá, a former Venezuelan Army general.
Juan Cruz: This is a person who was one of the generals close to Chávez when Chávez was president.
Narrator: This is Juan Cruz, a former member of the National Security Council who served as a special assistant to President Trump.
Cruz: When Maduro comes on the scene, there's a falling-out. That wasn't uncommon. He was one of the individuals that was too often associated with saying out loud that he wanted to displace or overthrow Maduro.
Narrator: The Associated Press reported that Alcalá said he had a training camp with a few dozen men in Colombia. And Goudreau said Silvercorp could train them. So he sought the backing of Guaidó's government, which led him to JJ Rendón.
Rendón: With Jordan, he asked to have a moment to pitch his company. He said that he was in contact with the Venezuelans in Colombia. And they were in touch, and they were planning something.
Narrator: Rendón said Goudreau told him the cost of the mission itself would be covered by a secret group of backers and that upon completion, he wanted a payment of $212 million.
Rendón: He said that he has this plan and that he has his people and that he has backers. Interesting.
"Who are they?"
"Oh, I cannot reveal to you."
OK. But if you have big backers with a big army ready to go, we wanna know about it. And we want that to be aligned, or at least under the supervision of our government.
Narrator: That's when Rendón began to grow suspicious.
Rendón: Those were enough red flags to back off. So we sit and say, "Look, my friend, we are not moving with that."
Narrator: Rendón said he and Guaidó's government cut all ties with Goudreau, paying him only $50,000 for any expenses and to wash their hands clean.
Rendón: It was like, let's get out of this.
"Oh, my expenses."
"OK, there you go. How much you spent?"
"$43,500."
"OK. In case you've missed something, I will give you $50,000."
Narrator: But preparations at the camp in Colombia continued with the help of the two former Green Berets. Here's Luke Denman's older brother, Mark.
Denman: Luke's saying this is a US-government-backed operation, back in February the 2nd.
Narrator: We interviewed Mark via Skype on June 15.
Denman: What he told me, he was training Venezuelans in Colombia and had no intention of going to Venezuela at all.
Narrator: But obviously that's not what happened.
Goudreau: At 1700 hours, a daring amphibious raid was launched.
Narrator: The same day Goudreau posted this video announcing the mission had launched, the Venezuelan government released its footage of an operation that had seemingly been thwarted by Maduro's security team.
Officer:: In the group are two Americans, two gringos? Man: They are detained.
Officer: Where do they work? What do they do? Man: They are intermediaries. They are from the security chiefs of the president of the United States.
Venezuelan officer: From Trump!
Man: Yes.
Narrator: The global media covered the story like something out of a Hollywood movie. Headlines like "Bay of Piglets" and "Keystone Coup" portrayed the captured Americans as wannabe heroes who led a botched operation that one writer described as something out of "a bad Rambo movie." But according to Luke Denman's brother, Mark, what you can see in the footage raised red flags.
Denman: I mean, the guy was arrested in shorts and a T-shirt with his passport and driver's license on him. And I know that people like to have a lot of fun with that, but if you can kinda look at this realistically, all of these guys are guys that have gone on many combat missions with combat loads and combat gear. I don't think that he suddenly thought that going into combat in shorts, T-shirt, no shoes, with his passport on him and no weapon was a good idea. It doesn't really add up.
Guaidó: We will not need foreign mercenaries.
Narrator: In a statement, Guaidó denied any involvement and said the operation was "infiltrated and financed" by the Maduro administration. And a key event that occurred over a month before supports the idea that Operation Gideon was in fact infiltrated.
Guaidó: No one believes your lies.
William Tarek Saab: A criminal investigation has been opened by the Public Ministry against Guaidó, Alcalá, and others involved in this attempted coup.
Narrator: On March 23, more than a month before the capture, Venezuela's government announced that $500,000 worth of weapons were seized en route to a training camp in Riohacha, Colombia. During this press conference, the minister of communication and information also identified the three Americans involved in the camp. This means the Venezuelan government was not only aware of a plot to oust Maduro, but it also knew exactly who was involved. US prosecutors then indicted Clíver Alcalá on drug-trafficking charges, and he turned himself in to US authorities.
Cruz: Things started to collapse a little. When he's removed from the scene, you and I probably would have taken a step back and reevaluated what we had and planned for another, for plan B or plan C. In this case, it appears that Goudreau and others that were still associated with it decided that they were gonna move forward.
Narrator: One reason the operation continued to move forward may have been the $15 million reward offered by the US government for information leading to Maduro's arrest. And so, without Guaidó's support, without Alcalá, and with the Maduro administration well aware of the plan, Goudreau's team continued forward. Only to be captured.
Cruz: There are probably three possibilities, and I would say probably all three come into play. One is bad operational security, known as OPSEC. People probably writing emails and having phone conversations and calling back home. Second is deliberate infiltrations or penetrations, where you, ahead of time, move somebody to appear to be part of the group who in reality was sent there by the bad guys to keep a finger on the pulse. Lastly, there are those that might be victimized in this. You can certainly imagine where there would be one of these guys, and somebody on the other end in Venezuela sends him a picture of his grandmother with a 9-millimeter in her mouth. And these guys say, "Hey, you either tell us what you're up to, or else."
Narrator: It's unclear when and where these men were intercepted by Venezuelan security forces and at what stage of planning they were at.
Cruz: Clearly, the point is that what these guys were doing was known to elements of the regime.
Narrator: One thing that's certain: Goudreau was not with Berry and Denman when they were captured. And meanwhile, Venezuelan State TV released footage of the two Americans...
Interrogator: What were the objectives of the mission?
Narrator: Giving what the government called confessions.
Denman: The only instructions that I received from Jordan was to ensure that we took control of an airport for a safe passage for Maduro.
Mark Denman: What we're calling a confession video, I mean, we're acting like this is somebody that was read their Miranda rights. I don't think those confession videos are their own words. They're kind of being prompted, they're heavily edited. Being held in some unknown environment and reading off a script essentially on what it is they're confessing to.
Luke Denman: My responsibilities to Silvercorp are written in a contract.
Narrator: The so-called confession videos released by Maduro's government also feature a document with Guaidó's name on it.
Berry: Signed by Juan Guaidó, Jordan Goudreau, and Juan Rendón.
Narrator: But Rendón maintains that he only signed an exploratory agreement and questions the validity of Guaidó's signature on the document shown.
Interrogator: Who commands Jordan?
Denman: President Donald Trump.
Mark Denman: From what he understood, this was a US-government-backed operation. His very trusted friend brought him in on it. It was for a cause he believed in.
Narrator: Although Luke Denman may have believed the mission had the support of the US government, the State Department flatly denies it.
Pompeo: There was no US government direct involvement in this operation. If we'd have been involved, it would've gone differently.
Narrator: Trump also disavowed any US involvement in the plot.
Trump: We just heard about it. But whatever it is, we'll let you know. But it has nothing to do with our government.
Narrator: Amid all of this, Mark Denman says it has become almost impossible to hire legal support for his brother since the United States doesn't recognize Maduro's government as legitimate.
Denman: I'm supposed to work through the legal process. However, because of the situation in Venezuela, there is no legal process to work through. So that's the catch-22 of it. That process doesn't exist, and how are they lawfully detained by a government you don't recognize?
Interrogator: Why did you train irregular groups as special forces to invade Venezuela?
Denman: I believed that it was helping their cause.
Mark Denman: Luke is a strong guy. He's mentally strong; he's physically strong. He's been through training for exactly this kind of thing. And we're confident that he can handle what he's going through, and we're doing everything we can to get him back.
Narrator: This interview was recorded on June 15. On August 8, his brother Luke and Airan Berry were sentenced to 20 years in prison. In a statement to Business Insider, the US State Department said: In the meantime, Alcalá remains in US custody and is reportedly cooperating with authorities. A federal investigation is looking into Goudreau on suspicion of arms trafficking, and Goudreau is also wanted in Colombia. He did not respond to Business Insider's requests for comment. [men shouting] And on September 3, Colombian authorities announced the arrest of four Venezuelan nationals on allegations they conspired to plan the operation, with President Iván Duque noting the allegations that Maduro financed it. If that's true, these events in May on the Venezuelan coast could have been orchestrated by Maduro's regime, building a narrative that tightens his grip on Venezuela. And Denman and Berry may have just been pawns in all of it.
16. Is Lockheed Building the Air Force's Secret Fighter?
It is a good thing we still have the Skunk Works.
Is Lockheed Building the Air Force's Secret Fighter?
Is Lockheed Martin building a secret new fighter jet that U.S. Air Force officials revealed last month?
Company executives dropped some not-so-subtle hints about the company's growing backlog of classified military work, including one project that requires erecting a new building at its secretive Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. They also pointed to revenue growth within the company's Aeronautics division, which includes the Advanced Development Programs shop that created the fabled U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and F-117 stealth attack jet.
"We do anticipate seeing strong double-digit growth at our Skunk Works - our classified Advanced Development Programs," Lockheed CFO Ken Possenriede said during the company's quarterly earnings call with Wall Street analysts. "We continue to execute on...recent awards."
Last month, Air Force leaders revealed they had built and flown a prototype for the Next Generation Air Dominance program - an effort to develop a new generation of warplanes. Service officials said the project relied heavily on digital engineering, but declined to reveal much else, including what company or companies were working on the new aircraft. The classified aircraft project is believed to have started near the end of the Obama administration.
During an interview after the call, Possenriede mentioned a classified project that was the Aeronautics division's top priority when he worked there between 2016 and 2019.
"It was bid aggressively [and] we happen to have won that one," he said. "And we're very happy with the results [and] the outcome right now."
On the earnings call, Possenriede said that "in the classified area of Aeronautics, there are a multitude of opportunities out there."
He said the company needs to build a building for a classified project in Palmdale, adding that "There are other customers that have a keen interest in that program."
In 2019, Lockheed's Aeronautics division booked $19.6 billion in sales over the first nine months of 2020, that's up nearly 13 percent higher than what the sector booked over the same period in 2019. Overall, the company will spend about $1.7 billion in capital expenditures, like new facilities, in 2020 and 2021, Possenriede said. As a while, the company will spend about $1.7 billion in capital expenditures, like new facilities, in 2020 and 2021, Possenriede said.
"We're going to keep investing in organic capital expenditures to build capacity to deliver on our core business," Lockheed CEO Jim Taiclet said on the call. "Much of what we spent this year is on classified programs in both aeronautics and space, that are growing relatively rapidly. And so we're going to continue to do those organic investments every time we can."
Aeronautics is not the only division seeing a bump in classified contracts. Lockheed's Space and Missile and Fire Control divisions are also seeing an uptick in secret work.
The missiles division, which is working on hypersonic weapons projects with the Aeronautics and Space divisions, won what Possenriede called a "large classified program" that is still in development.
"We will start to see - in the next four to five years - that go into limited-rate production, and then ultimately into production," he said.
17. Why Social Media Is So Good at Polarizing Us
It sure is. I see this every day on the social media pages of the interwebs. But here is the author's solution (can we break our addiction?): "Based on my own reporting, I'd call that a ringing endorsement for avoiding social media as much as possible - especially just before and after an election."
Why Social Media Is So Good at Polarizing Us
Mathematicians are teaming up with political scientists to create models of how social media divides us, and results suggest at least one popular solution might actually make the problem worse
Americans are more polarized than ever-at least by some measures.
A growing body of research suggests that social media is accelerating the trend, and many political scientists worry it's tearing our country apart. It isn't clear how to solve the problem. And new research suggests that one often-proposed solution-exposing users on the platforms to more content from the other side-might actually be making things worse, because of how social media amplifies extreme opinions.
With an election looming, Congressional investigations highlighting the far-reaching power of Facebook and Google over what we see and hear, and long-term trends in polarization pointing toward an ever-more-fractured America, the question of what role social-media giants play in dividing or uniting us has taken on new urgency, says Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology at Duke University who studies the impact of social media on polarization.
If social media seems particularly infuriating lately, it's possible that it's as much about the way it shapes our perception of what's going on as it is about the reality of the viewpoints and behavior of our fellow Americans.
It's also possible that highly partisan media-something that was common at the birth of our nation but which the U.S. had a relative respite from during the age of broadcast media-is an unavoidable consequence of America's foundational right to free expression. Technology only magnifies this natural effect of democracy.
One of the challenges of studying polarization is defining polarization.
There are different kinds. One, known as affective polarization, measures how much people of one party dislike members of the opposite party. Various measures of affective polarization have shown that over the past 60 years, it's gotten much worse. Another kind, known as ideological polarization, measures how far apart members of each party are on all issues, such as abortion and gun control. This kind of polarization has, contrary to what you might think, remained relatively stable over time.
In other words, many Americans hate each other more than ever, but they don't disagree with each other any more than they used to.
Taken as a whole, the literature on whether social media polarizes us is inconclusive, says Dr. Bail, a fact that Facebook itself has highlighted in its past responses to The Wall Street Journal coverage of the tech giant's role in dividing America. Part of the reason it's so difficult to isolate any one influence on the polarization of Americans, he adds, is that there are so many-from geographic self-sorting to long-term changes in the way political parties organize themselves.
It's also impossible to do the kind of experiments needed for measuring the contribution of any one thing, he says: Imagine switching off Facebook for a whole country, just to see if that reduced political polarization.
To try to sort out what's going on, researchers are instead creating mathematical models in which such experiments can be conducted. Like all simulations, these models are limited by the assumptions they make about the real world, yet they are giving rise to a new wave of intuitions and testable hypotheses about how social media affects us.
One such model, just published by researchers at Northwestern University, incorporates recent, and in some ways counterintuitive, findings by political scientists. One, from a 2018 study by Dr. Bail, is that when you repeatedly expose people on social media to viewpoints different than their own, it just makes them dig in their heels and reinforces their own viewpoint, rather than swaying them to the other side. (Dr. Bail's study was conducted on U.S. users of Twitter, but other studies have begun to replicate it, he adds.)
In the past, social-media giants have been accused of only showing us content that agrees with our preconceptions, creating echo chambers or "filter bubbles." The proposed solution, trumpeted by pundits of every stripe, was to change the social-media algorithms so that they would show us more content from people who disagree with us.
According to David Sabin-Miller and Daniel Abrams, creators of this latest model, exposing us to viewpoints different from our own, in whatever medium we encounter them, might actually be part of the problem. The reason is probably intuitive for anyone who has the misfortune to spend an unhealthy amount of time on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or even cable news. (During the pandemic, that's more of us than ever.) Because social media and Balkanized TV networks tend to highlight content with the biggest emotional punch-that is, they operate on the principle that if it's outrageous, it's contagious-when we're exposed to a differing view, it often takes an extreme form, one that seems personally noxious.
Mr. Sabin-Miller and Dr. Abrams, both mathematicians, call this effect "repulsion." In addition to the "pull" of repeatedly seeing viewpoints that reinforce our own, inside of our online echo chambers, repulsion provides a "push" away from opposing viewpoints, they argue. Importantly, this repulsion appears to be a more powerful force, psychologically, than attraction to our own side of a debate.
Bad actors on social media-such as Russian agents who have been active in advance of the 2020 election, attempting to divide Americans further-already appear to recognize repulsion as a tool, says Mr. Sabin-Miller. These trolls will assume roles on both sides of an ideological divide, and play dumb to make one side of the debate look foolish, while playing down the extremity of views on the other side.
"A reason we have some confidence in our model is the people who are trying to polarize us are already doing what they should be, by our model, to be optimally effective," he adds.
Another model by Vicky Chuqiao Yang, an applied mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute, explored a phenomenon political scientists have previously described: the way political parties have themselves become more polarized over time. Her model buttresses past work that suggested that political parties play to their more extreme constituents because it's more strategically advantageous than trying to go for ideological moderates, who often swing to one party or the other.
What models like these-and an assortment of other research by other sociologists, political scientists and technologists-suggest is that while social media might not be a direct driver of political polarization in the U.S., the way it interacts with many other phenomena could mean it has outsize power to drive us apart, says Dr. Yang.
These potential feedback loops are worthy of further study, says Dr. Bail, who cautions that they are still hypothetical. One such feedback loop, the way that social media drives the choice of stories and their framing on cable news, could explain the way that social media indirectly polarizes even those who don't rely on the internet as a primary source of news, such as Americans age 65 and older.
Cable news began the fragmentation of broadcast media into ideological filter bubbles long before social media arose, says Lisa Napoli, author of the book "Up All Night," about the birth of CNN. Ms. Napoli also notes that extreme partisanship was a feature of America's earliest newspapers, which often relied on the patronage of the politicians they praised, while lambasting their opponents.
As long as Americans have the freedom to choose outlets that support their own views while exposing them to alternative viewpoints in ways that primarily lead to repulsion, the result will be the polarization we see today, says Mr. Sabin-Miller-at least according to his model.
Unfortunately, understanding how social and other media divide us doesn't immediately suggest any solutions for the companies that run social-media platforms, says Dr. Abrams.
For each of us as an individual news consumer, the story is slightly more hopeful. "Just this idea that things close to you are attractive and things far away are repulsive can give you a framework," says Mr. Sabin-Miller. "If I'm only seeing things that are good for my own side and really crazy from the other, maybe I should look for something slightly toward the center," he adds.
18. Iran trying to meddle in U.S. election, Russia has obtained American voter info, national security officials say
KEY POINTS Iran and Russia have both obtained information about American voters' registrations and are trying to influence the public about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, national security officials said.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said that Iran has been sending "spoofed emails designed to intimidate voters, incite unrest and damage President" Donald Trump.
Trump is battling for a second term against former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.
CNBC · by Dan Mangan,Kevin Breuninger · October 21, 2020
FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks during a press conference to announce that two alleged Islamic State militants known as the 'Beatles' will arrive in the United States to face trial on U.S. charges for their alleged involvement in beheadings of Western hostages, at the Justice Department in Washington, U.S., October 7, 2020.
Jim Watson | Reuters
The FBI on Wednesday night abruptly scheduled a press conference for what it called a major election security issue.
The briefing, set for 7:30 p.m. ET, comes less than two weeks before Election Day, and was scheduled less than an hour before then.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Christopher Wray and John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, as well as Christopher Krebs, from the Homeland Security Department's Cyber Security and Infrastructure division, are due to attend.
The FBI did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for more information.
Before the press conference, the leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a joint statement about "threats from adversaries to U.S. election systems and infrastructure."
Acting committee Chairman Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and the Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said they "urge every American - including members of the media - to be cautious about believing or spreading unverified, sensational claims related to votes and voting."
This is breaking news. Check back for updates.
19. Strategic Assessment 2020: Into a New Era of Great Power Competition
13. Competing Visions and Actions by China, Russia, and the United States in
Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Arctic ........................271
Bryce Loidolt, David Auerswald, Douglas Farah, Shannon Smith, and Caitlyn Yates
Part IV. Preparing to Compete
14. U.S. Strategies for Competing Against China 289
Frank G. Hoffman
15. Conclusion: Realities, Imperatives, and Principles in a
New Era of Great Power Competition ..................................309
Thomas F. Lynch III
Appendix A. Selected Bibliography ...................................335
Appendix B. Contemporary Great Power Competition Dynamics Matrix (online only) 349
List of Contributors ........................................... .351
Index ...........................................
20. Is China Preparing for War in the Taiwan Strait?
But it is uncertainty that should be worrying us.
Is China Preparing for War in the Taiwan Strait?
Although Beijing is undoubtedly committed to further widening the military imbalance in the Taiwan Strait and to deploying assets that can delay or even prevent a U.S. intervention, China's ability to prosecute a quick invasion of Taiwan at acceptable cost remains, by most yardsticks, too much of an uncertainty.
Since the beginning of 2020, China's signaling of its purported intentions toward Taiwan has taken an unmistakable turn for the belligerent, with editorials clamoring for military action and a substantial increase in People's Liberation Army (PLA) activity around the democratic island-nation. Recently, PLA aircraft have frequently cut into Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) and crossed a median line in the Taiwan Strait that, although unofficial, had nevertheless served to reduce the risks of collision and miscalculation over the years. With Xi Jinping's adjuring the PLA to "prepare for war," commentaries in state-run media putting Taipei on notice, and the deployment of new DF-17 missile units and advanced stealth aircraft near Taiwan, it appears that war in the Taiwan Strait is just around the corner. Global media have weighed in on the issue, with several alarmist articles appearing in recent weeks.
Martial signaling notwithstanding, the likelihood that Beijing is about to embark on a major military endeavor in the Taiwan Strait remains fairly low. Most assessments indicate that despite quantitative and qualitative improvements in recent years, the PLA still does not have sufficient amphibious capabilities to launch an assault against Taiwan. Other variables complicate Beijing's calculations, including uncertainty, despite ongoing advances in the PLA's anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, over a potential involvement by the U.S. in a Taiwan contingency, as well as the potentially high losses involved in amphibious operations in the Taiwan Strait, for which eventuality the Taiwanese military has been preparing for decades.
Although Beijing is undoubtedly committed to further widening the military imbalance in the Taiwan Strait and to deploying assets that can delay or even prevent a U.S. intervention, China's ability to prosecute a quick invasion of Taiwan at acceptable cost remains, by most yardsticks, too much of an uncertainty. In fact, no such thing may even be possible. As the Department of Defense's 2020 report to Congress indicates, China's Joint Island Landing Campaign (登岛战役)-the most prominent of PLA plans for a major military campaign against Taiwan-"envisions a complex operation relying on coordinated, interlocking campaigns for logistics, air, and naval support, and EW [electronic warfare]. The objective would be to break through or circumvent shore defenses, establish and build a beachhead, transport personnel and materiel to designated landing sites in the north or south of Taiwan's western coastline, and launch attacks to seize and occupy key targets or the entire island."
It continues:
Large-scale amphibious invasion is one of the most complicated and difficult military operations. Success depends upon air and maritime superiority, the rapid buildup and sustainment of supplies onshore, and uninterrupted support. An attempt to invade Taiwan would likely strain China's armed forces and invite international intervention. These stresses, combined with China's combat force attrition and the complexity of urban warfare and counterinsurgency, even assuming a successful landing and breakout, make an amphibious invasion of Taiwan a significant political and military risk.
Warnings by Xi, bellicose editorials by retired PLA officers, and military exercises ostensibly aimed at Taiwan, therefore, need to be assessed for their more immediate value to the CCP. And those lie in the realm of propaganda, aimed chiefly at the Chinese public. The shift to a more confrontational strategy vis-à-vis Taiwan reflects a deep frustration in Beijing over Taiwan since 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen of the Taiwan-centric Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected. Beijing's hopes for "peaceful unification" with Taiwan, which seemed within reach during the eight-year rule (2008-2016) under the Beijing-friendly Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT), culminating in a historic, albeit purely symbolic, summit in Singapore in 2015, have completely collapsed. Efforts to "buy" the Taiwanese through various economic incentives and elite capture, accompanied by sustained efforts to isolate Taiwan internationally, have only succeeded in delivering a Taiwanese public that is increasingly committed to its democracy and way of life. The recent crisis in Hong Kong has only served to deepen that sentiment for independence and completely negated the appeal, such as it was, of the "one country, two systems" formula, which remains the only offer on the table. The re-election of President Tsai in the January 2020 election with a record number of votes, followed by Taiwan's successful handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and bourgeoning ties with the international community, have driven home for Beijing the hard reality that its longstanding strategy has failed.
Thus, as delegations of senior U.S. officials, former Japanese prime ministers and Czech representatives defy Beijing's warnings and interact with Taiwan, and with a series of U.S. arms sales announcements in the past year, Beijing has been compelled to react. Threats of military action, underscored by intense PLA activity, have been used to signal Beijing's displeasure, with the hope, perhaps, that such behavior would have a psychological effect on the Taiwanese public (the effect has been the exact opposite, however). A secondary consideration has been the necessity of responding to a more visible presence by the U.S. military in the area, which has reacted to ramped up PLA activity with passages of its own, creating an escalatory cycle of action and counteraction.
A more important consideration for the CCP is the need to demonstrate that it and it alone has the ability to dictate the outcome of the dispute in the Taiwan Strait. Undoubtedly cognizant of the fact that its Taiwan strategy has failed, for ideological reasons the CCP cannot admit to the Chinese public that it is so. Xi's style simply cannot countenance such an admission. The strategy, therefore, is to continue to insist, against all the evidence to the contrary, the a small clique of Taiwan "separatists" and their foreign allies are responsible for the standoff, and to demonstrate that Beijing can, if it so chooses, resolve the matter once and for all. The propaganda maintains that China is acting defensively-due to unreasonable forces that continue defy historical trends, the CCP is compelled to threaten force to defend reason and the country's honor. In this context, an increasingly active military around Taiwan, and the accompanying signaling in state-controlled media, are arguably more part of psychological warfare and propaganda effort than preparations for imminent all-out war against a stubborn neighbor.
All of this comes with a major caveat, however, as it is predicated on rational decision making in Beijing (Allison and Zelikow's classic Essence of Decision remains an indispensable guide on this issue). In other words, it assumes that the CCP calculates and weighs the costs and benefits of its actions in a way that militates against reckless behavior. But what if that isn't the case? Given the closed political system in China, tight controls on the media and heavy censorship, it is difficult to assess the current levels of instability in China that may exist in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic which, if serious enough, could encourage an insecure CCP to seek external distractions-along the border with India, in the South China Sea or, as the mother of all rallying points for Chinese nationalists, the unfinished business of Taiwan.
For this reason, Taiwan and its allies must nevertheless prepare against the possibility, however slim for the foreseeable future, that China is indeed preparing to launch an invasion of Taiwan (likelier scenarios include a limited amphibious assault against Taiwan's outlying islands or assets in the South China Sea). However unlikely an attempt to seize Taiwan may be at the moment, Taiwan cannot afford to be sleeping at the wheel, as the cost of unpreparedness would have catastrophic repercussions for the island-nation and its people. A CCP which feels that its legitimacy may be compromised by an underperforming economy, or an embattled Xi who needs to counter a factional challenge stemming from an increasingly unfavorable international environment which some have blamed on his hubris, could conceivably seek to inflame nationalistic sentiment as a way to redirect discontent and sideline internal adversaries. In such a scenario, a regime could be tempted to embark on behavior that, to outsiders, seems irrational and bound to be counterproductive.
There is, however, historical precedent for this, chiefly the case of Japan on the eve of World War II, which, while well aware that it could not possibly win a protracted war against the U.S., nevertheless launched attacks against Pearl Harbor, hoping against hope for a resounding knock-out that would encourage Washington to seek negotiations on Japanese terms. U.S. failure to conceive of such an attack, let alone to prepare against it, stemmed from an inability to understand the psychological pressures, fear and honor, that underpinned decision making in Tokyo. North Korea provides another example of a regime that, when the status quo has become untenable, has shown a proclivity to engage in what may appear like irrational and highly risky behavior.
Under certain conditions, Xi and the CCP could also feel that their honor is being unacceptably undermined by a succession of developments favoring Taiwan. Having sold the Chinese people a series of lies as to their ability to control the situation, and fearing a nationalistic backlash agains them should they "lose" Taiwan, the leadership could conclude that action is necessary before it is too late. It is quite possible that in such a scenario, an unusually risk-prone regime in Beijing could seek a similar bolt from the blue against Taiwan as Japan did against U.S. naval forces in 1941, especially if it convinces itself that the U.S. is unwilling to risk hostilities with China over Taiwan or is too distracted, perhaps due to a constitutional crisis over the outcome of the November elections, to orchestrate a coherent response.
Although Beijing is undoubtedly committed to further widening the military imbalance in the Taiwan Strait and to deploying assets that can delay or even prevent a U.S. intervention, China's ability to prosecute a quick invasion of Taiwan at acceptable cost remains, by most yardsticks, too much of an uncertainty.
by While a PLA assault arguably remains a less likely scenario than continued coercion, Taiwan and its partners must, as discussed earlier, prepare against such an eventuality. More importantly, every effort should be made to reduce the risk that China will resort to force. This can only be accomplished through greater investment in Taiwan's military deterrence through the acquisition and development of a layered defence, a counterforce capability, training, and mobilization, and an active campaign to raise public awareness and boost morale within the military. Additionally, a unified position by the international community that makes it clear to Beijing that an attack against Taiwan would result in retaliatory action-a combination of cyber attacks, sanctions, and an economic embargo that would cripple the Chinese economy, must be elaborated. A concerted warning of this sort, however, can only occur if the international community recognizes the highly destabilizing effects that an invasion of Taiwan would have on the region, and agrees that Taiwan, rather than being an internal matter for China, is in fact a frontline in an emerging clash of ideologies with global implications.
J. Michael Cole is a Taipei-based senior fellow with the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, D.C., the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, Canada, and the Taiwan Studies Programme at the University of Nottingham, U.K. He is a former analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Ottawa. His latest book, Insidious Power: How China Undermines Global Democracy, co-edited with Dr. Hsu Szu-chien, was published in July.
Image Credit: Military vehicles carrying DF-26 ballistic missiles travel past Tiananmen Gate during a military parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Beijing Thursday Sept. 3, 2015. REUTERS/Andy Wong/Pool.
The National Interest · by J. Michael Cole · October 21, 2020
image captionTaiwan spends billions on weapons and defence every year
The US has approved arms sales to Taiwan worth around $1.8bn (£1.4bn), in a move that is likely to increase tensions with China.
The Pentagon said the deal comprised three weapons systems, including rocket launchers, sensors and artillery.
Taiwan, which considers itself a country, is seen as a renegade province by China.
Tensions have increased in recent years and Beijing has not ruled out the use of force to take the island back.
Last week, US national security adviser Robert O'Brien said that while he did not believe China was ready to invade Taiwan, the island needed to "fortify itself" for the future.
Taiwan's defence ministry said the weapons would help it "build credible combat capabilities and strengthen the development of asymmetric warfare".
The deal includes 135 precision-guided cruise missiles, as well as mobile light rocket launchers and air reconnaissance pods that can be attached to fighter jets.
The BBC's Taiwan correspondent Cindy Sui says that under President Donald Trump, the US has sold significantly more weapons to Taiwan than before.
The island has also been seeking backing from the current administration, which, unlike its predecessors, seems willing to challenge the delicate balance Washington has maintained for decades with China and Taiwan, says our correspondent.
China's Foreign Ministry says the arms deal would likely have a major impact on its relationship with the US and that it would respond as necessary, according to Reuters news agency.
image copyrightAFP
image captionTaiwan relies heavily on US support for its military
Beijing strongly criticised the meeting, warning the US "not to send any wrong signals to 'Taiwan independence' elements to avoid severe damage to China-US relations".
China has also stepped up military drills that it presents domestically as rehearsals for a future invasion of Taiwan, though experts say a conflict is not imminent.
While the US does sell Taiwan arms, and has an implicit security guarantee, it does not have a formal defence treaty with Taiwan as it does with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
China and Taiwan were divided during a civil war in the 1940s but Beijing insists the island will be reclaimed at some point, by force if necessary.
Tensions have risen in recent years with the election of Ms Tsai as Taiwan's president, seen as an opponent of Beijing.
22. 'Maximum Pressure Brought Down the Soviet Union' and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves
Conclusion: "The Cold War analogy with the Soviet Union does, of course, demonstrate how a dangerous adversary can be contained, and it provides hope that in the long run, even hostile regimes can evolve in a relatively positive direction. But the Soviet Union's positive evolution, whose timing could not be controlled nor predicted, took place not as a result of a U.S. policy of total confrontation, let alone military intervention, but at the end of a long, patient, process of deterrence, diplomacy, arms control, soft power, and alliances. As they formulate policy today, current leaders would do well to keep this actual history in mind - rather than the dangerous caricature embraced by Trump and his supporters."
'Maximum Pressure Brought Down the Soviet Union' and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves - War on the Rocks
As the Donald Trump administration prosecutes its "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, proponents of that policy regularly invoke the Cold War as a model for how the policy is supposed to work. In this version of history, President Ronald Reagan allegedly "shifted away" from containment in the early 1980s and brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union through a policy of massive defense spending, economic warfare, support for proxies, and an ideological offensive. Curiously - and problematically - one of the key sources for this line of thinking appears to be a 26-year-old book by the conservative activist Peter Schweizer on what he calls Reagan's "secret strategy" that is newly popular among administration officials and their supporters.
The obvious implication of the Cold War analogy is that a similar approach is what is required to bring down the Iranian regime, as well as the hostile regimes in Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and potentially even China. It was not a coincidence that shortly after the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 - Pompeo chose the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, as the venue for a speech to the Iranian diaspora. If the United States just keeps up the pressure, the logic goes, these regimes will end up, like the communists in Moscow, on the ash heap of history.
In fact, although ideological confrontation, sanctions, and a military buildup obviously played a role in the containment and ultimate disappearance of the Soviet Union, this simplified take on the past overlooks the reality that regime change was never the near-term goal of U.S. strategy toward Moscow. What U.S. leaders actually did for more than four decades after World War II was grudgingly accept that they had to coexist with the Soviet Union, contain it by maintaining significant military power and strong alliances in Europe and Asia, demonstrate the superiority of capitalism and freedom, and patiently wait until the Soviet leadership realized that its system was failing and had to change. It finally did so in 1985, nominating the young Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party, and the result was the largely peaceful end of the Cold War, the liberation of numerous "captive nations," and ultimately the decline of the Soviet Union itself - all without extensive civil conflict among Soviets or direct military conflict with the West. But this outcome was not the result of a U.S. policy of regime change. If U.S. policy in the Cold War is going to inform policy choices today, it is important to understand what that policy actually was.
Containment Yes, Rollback No
In the early post-World War II period, there were, of course, proponents of regime change through "maximum pressure" - or even preventive war - in Russia, but they lost the debate. As Richard Haass, a veteran of several Republican administrations, has written, "seeking regime change, or rollback, was deemed too risky, even reckless, given what could result if a desperate Soviet leadership lashed out with all the force at its disposal." Rollback and regime change were even rejected even by Cold War hawks like Paul Nitze and John Foster Dulles, who focused instead on competing with the Soviets for influence in what was then called the third world and accepted the reality that political change in Moscow was not in America's power to achieve at acceptable cost. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all stood up firmly against the Soviet Union and waged the Cold War militarily and ideologically. But none thought there was any realistic prospect of ending the Soviet regime during their administrations.
In the wake of Nixon's pursuit of détente in the early to mid-1970s, a new generation of cold warriors - including members of the anti-Soviet Committee on the Present Danger - complained about containment. They renewed the calls for more offensive measures to weaken the Soviet Union internally, but they, too, failed to win over the actual decision-makers. While Reagan boldly criticized the "evil empire" and denounced accommodation of Moscow, his policies also reflected the need to manage the problem for the foreseeable future. His vision for destroying communism was only "a plan and a hope for the long term," as he put it to the British Parliament in 1982. Reagan himself later admitted that when he declared, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" during a speech in Berlin in June 1987, he "never dreamed that in less than three years the wall would come down." Secretary of State George Shultz has said that Reagan did not have a strategy "to spend the Soviets into the ground" through an arms race, and U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock wrote that there was no strategy "to bring the Soviet Union down." As the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis put it, "At no point did ... the Reagan administration give anything like serious attention to how they might actually overthrow the Soviet regime, or to what they would do in the unlikely event that such a thing should come about." Reagan was obviously no dove. But while the United States under his leadership worked assertively to contain Moscow's influence, Gaddis writes, "it did not seek nor was it prepared for any effort to remove the Soviet government from its position of authority."
Also relevant in today's context is that Reagan's approach to the Soviet Union - building on that of all his postwar predecessors - included extensive diplomatic engagement and the pursuit of arms control, even while the Soviet regime was mistreating its citizens at home and expanding its influence abroad. In the caricatured version of the end of the Cold War, U.S. isolation of the Soviet Union and refusal to deal with its leaders accelerated the fall of the regime. In fact, however, as historian Melvyn Leffler has pointed out, Reagan "fiercely wanted to talk to Soviet leaders from his first days in office." Gaddis has also noted that Reagan began looking to improve relations with the Soviet Union from the moment he entered the White House and "began shifting American policy in that direction as early as the first months of 1983, almost two years before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power." Reagan's approach did not change even after the Soviets shot down a South Korean civilian airliner in September 1983, killing 269 passengers, or when the hard-line apparatchik Konstantin Chernenko took over the Soviet leadership in February 1984.
Indeed, only a few days after Chernenko took office - in the first of a series of letters not unlike those Obama would write to Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, almost 30 years later - Reagan wrote the Soviet leader to say, "The US firmly intends to defend our interests and those of our allies, but we do not seek to challenge the security of the Soviet Union and its people." "I want you to know," he emphasized in a private, handwritten note the following month, "that neither I nor the American people hold any offensive intentions towards you or the Soviet people. Our constant and urgent purpose must be ... a lasting reduction of tensions between us. I pledge to you my profound commitment towards that end."
Reagan's message in his first meeting with the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, in September 1984 was also that the Soviet Union had "nothing to fear from us" and that the United States wanted "nothing less than a realistic, constructive, long-term relationship with the Soviet Union." This was not the approach of someone bent on achieving regime change in Moscow anytime soon, or who thought that refusing to talk was the best way to achieve it. In his study of the neoconservative movement, historian Justin Vaïsse concluded that "over the years Reagan moved steadily away from the neoconservatives, in the end adopting policies in defiance of their wishes that probably contributed just as much to 'winning the Cold War' as anything they proposed." Ultimately, Leffler notes, Reagan would engage Gorbachev with "conviction, empathy, and geniality."
Containment Is Not Appeasement
Containment, it should be noted, was not then and should not today imply inaction or indifference. The menu of policy options for dealing with adversarial regimes includes the maintenance of strong alliances and forward-deployed U.S. forces; measures such as no-fly zones and selective air strikes; incentives for governments to respect human rights and develop democratic institutions; investment in economic development, education, and exchanges; targeted economic sanctions; and a better resourced and revitalized diplomatic corps. Such tools can be used judiciously to advance U.S. interests while acknowledging the limits of what can reasonably be accomplished.
Nor does containment require giving up hope for future progress or rule out working for eventual political change. As the diplomat George F. Kennan wrote in his famous 1947 "X" article:
[T]he possibilities for American policy are by no means limited to ... hoping for the best. ... [T]he United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate ... and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.
Ultimately, of course, the Soviet regime did disappear, but it is worth noting that change came about only after decades of containment and generational change, that the United States had no control over its timing, and that it was neither outside intervention nor bottom-up revolution but the regime itself - through Gorbachev's promotion - that ultimately recognized the need to try to reform and salvage a crumbling system.
While it is widely taken as a given that U.S. support for the anti-Soviet Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan played a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is worth pointing out that the Politburo turned to Gorbachev more than a year before the United States tipped the military balance in Afghanistan by providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan rebels. The war in Afghanistan may have accelerated the Soviet collapse, but it did not cause it.
Is Change Possible?
It is true that the prospects for political change in countries where regime change might be contemplated today do not seem propitious. But then again, they did not seem very propitious in Moscow, either, and there are both empirical and theoretical reasons for believing that engagement, diplomacy, and economic development actually provide greater prospects for stability, peaceful relations, and long-term democratization than outside-imposed regime change. In countries as diverse as Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines, Serbia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, industrialization and economic growth - even in military autocracies - contributed to the expansion of the middle class, rising educational levels, demands for greater individual freedom, the rule of law, and increased international engagement.
There is obviously nothing automatic about this process - 30 years of rapid development in China have not made it more cooperative or democratic. But it is equally true that the prospects for positive change are even worse if the country in question is politically and economically isolated or facing a foreign-sponsored insurgency. The precedent of Iraq under Saddam Hussein and the situations in North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela today hardly suggest that sanctions and isolation are the best ways to encourage democracy, human rights, and regional cooperation. In the case of North Korea, such policies have also failed to prevent nuclear and ballistic missile proliferation.
Economic and political engagement with distasteful regimes obviously comes at a cost - more revenues for nefarious activities and the structures of repression - but the reality is that even when resources are scarce, the dictators and their cronies are the last to suffer. And the painful truth is that economic sanctions and isolation have a terrible track record of producing revolutions and never induce leaders to give up power voluntarily. This is because - as former Treasury and CIA official David S. Cohen and scholar Zoe A.Y. Weinberg have written - "the costs of relinquishing power will always exceed the benefit of sanctions relief." To believe that continuing to squeeze U.S. adversaries with sanctions will bring about regime change anytime soon would be to base policy on hope rather than experience.
The Cold War analogy with the Soviet Union does, of course, demonstrate how a dangerous adversary can be contained, and it provides hope that in the long run, even hostile regimes can evolve in a relatively positive direction. But the Soviet Union's positive evolution, whose timing could not be controlled nor predicted, took place not as a result of a U.S. policy of total confrontation, let alone military intervention, but at the end of a long, patient, process of deterrence, diplomacy, arms control, soft power, and alliances. As they formulate policy today, current leaders would do well to keep this actual history in mind - rather than the dangerous caricature embraced by Trump and his supporters.
Philip H. Gordon is the Mary and David Boies Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior State Department and White House official in the Obama administration.
23. Strategic Upheaval, Overhyped, or Something in Between? Forecasting the Relative Impacts of Cyber and Space Technologies
Strategic Upheaval, Overhyped, or Something in Between? Forecasting the Relative Impacts of Cyber and Space Technologies - Modern War Institute
mwi.usma.edu · by Marina Favaro · October 21, 2020
Recent commentary has sounded the alarm on the ability of so-called "emerging" technologies to tilt the balance of terror and complicate strategic stability calculations. Indeed, from the longbow and gunpowder to the tank and nuclear weapons, technological innovation has revolutionized and redrawn the borders of the battlefield. The same will be true of the range of new capabilities on the horizon, not least those in the space and cyber domains. But how are these new technologies distinguishable from that which came before them-in qualitative and quantitative terms? And how can we measure the impact of these technologies in a way that is not alarmist, but rather, allows us to systematically evaluate them on their potential for disruption?
Comparing the impacts of heterogenous technologies side by side (especially across two domains) can be challenging; it is the policy equivalent of comparing apples with oranges. This becomes especially apparent when we consider the numerous and wide-ranging ways in which emerging technologies have the potential to complicate strategic stability. They could, for example, provide new ways to use or stop the use of nuclear weapons (e.g., AI for missile defense could significantly change the deterrence calculation). They might blur the boundary between nuclear and non-nuclear infrastructure (e.g., the dual-use nature of satellites might increase the potential for misidentification or unintended escalation). They could create new vulnerabilities within existing systems (e.g., new technologies might enable cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure). And more fundamentally, they might even change the game (i.e., the technology, and its proliferation to new actors, could make attribution more difficult).
However, it is crucial to note that we have always had to contend with new technologies, and it is too easy to forget what was considered "emerging" and when. As a result, it is important to frame a discussion about the impacts of emerging technologies upon strategic stability as exhibiting elements of both continuity and change. Continuity does not mean that nothing changes, but rather, it helps to sober overblown claims that every emerging technology seemingly represents a revolution in military affairs.
With that in mind, perhaps it is possible to develop a measured and systematic means of forecasting the actual impact of individual technological capabilities.
STREAM
The Systematic Technology Reconnaissance, Evaluation, and Adoption Methodology (STREAM), developed by RAND, facilitates an assessment of the potential relative impacts of new technologies. The STREAM approach was designed to assess current and future technologies according to a range of impact and implementation criteria. STREAM culminates in a scoring exercise, wherein subject-matter experts score technologies in the cyber and space domains on the impact that they might have on strategic stability, as well as any barriers to their implementation, out to a ten-year horizon.
The findings presented in the following section are based on research that focused on the UK and its allies. They operate on the assumption that there are five major factors that dictate whether a given technology will impact strategic stability within the next ten years:
Current technological maturity
Rate of development
Capability increase
Ease of countering
Crisis instability
While this is by no means a definitive list, together these metrics produce a model that is not too heavily reliant on any single definition of strategic stability and that is modular (i.e., it can be arranged in different ways to reflect different definitions for strategic stability).
Research Findings
The STREAM scoring exercise generated a substantial amount of qualitative and quantitative data. In the interest of brevity, I will focus here on the most high-level findings.
Figure 1 combines the current technological maturity with the rate of development, which facilitates a better understanding of where the technologies are right now and how quickly they might reach maturity (if they are not already at a high level of maturity). The rate of development for each technology is deduced from the extent to which barriers to implementation differ for the UK and its allies versus for the UK's adversaries. A higher degree of dissimilarity would translate into a higher likelihood of asymmetric capabilities in the medium to long term.
The technologies highlighted in red in Figure 1 are at a moderate maturity level, with lower ethical barriers for the UK's adversaries-relative to the UK and its allies-and have around the same practical barriers for both parties. These include rendezvous and proximity operations; AI-trained offensive cyberattacks; AI for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; and direct ascent anti-satellite weapons.
The technologies highlighted in amber in Figure 1, meanwhile, paint two distinct pictures. On the one hand, cyberattacks on biotechnology is technologically immature, but it has the greatest disparity in ethical barriers between the UK and its allies versus the UK's adversaries, meaning that its development could happen quite quickly. For this reason, it is potentially destabilizing. On the other hand, unmanned aerial vehicles are very mature technologically, but the lower ethical barriers for the UK's adversaries relative to the UK and its allies might mean that the UK's adversaries are less constrained in their deployment of this technology. Thus, in combining technological maturity and rate of development, we can see that these technologies constitute different kinds of threats to strategic stability.
Figure 1: Prioritizing technologies using technological maturity and rate of development metrics
Figure 2 combines capability increase, ease of countering, and crisis instability. Combining capability increase and ease of countering illustrates how technologies that could significantly increase capabilities (defined as the single largest increase in offensive capability, defensive capability, or ability to reduce or enhance the reliable functioning of C4I-command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence) and are also difficult to counter could pose a significant threat to strategic stability. Furthermore, the addition of the crisis stability variable indicates which technologies have the highest potential to trigger an escalatory response, possibly even one that results in a nuclear first strike.
The technologies highlighted in red in Figure 2 (hypersonic missiles and AI-trained offensive cyberattacks) have the potential to significantly increase capabilities, are difficult to counter, and are highly likely to accelerate crisis instability. On the other hand, the technologies highlighted in amber (quantum computing, quantum cryptography, AI-powered autonomous response to cybersecurity threats, AI for missile defense, and direct ascent anti-satellite weapons) will have a similar impact on capabilities and are similarly difficult to counter, but they are slightly less likely to accelerate crisis instability.
Figure 2: Prioritizing technologies using increase in capability, difficulty in countering, and acceleration of crisis instability metrics
This study used a simple addition method in order to pull all the quantitative results together. A more advanced model (such as one that uses machine learning to cluster technologies) could capture these results in a more nuanced way and include more factors (such as the likelihood of the technology being produced in the private sector, for example, or the ability to attribute the use of this technology to a specific actor). Notwithstanding the various ways that this study could be further developed, this independent study was intended to be a proof of concept that would form the foundation for future research.
Figure 3 shows how the addition method identified the five technologies with the highest potential to disrupt strategic stability. These are: AI-trained offensive cyberattacks, hypersonic missiles, rendezvous and proximity operations, direct ascent anti-satellite weapons, and satellite jamming systems. The caveat for these findings is that the five aforementioned metrics (current technological maturity, rate of development, capability increase, ease of countering, and crisis instability) combine to produce a specific model of strategic stability that is not universal. Using the same data set, but different metrics for determining whether a given technology will impact strategic stability within the next ten years, could yield a different ranking altogether. This should not be seen as a shortcoming of the research, but rather, as an intentional characteristic.
In using these five metrics, the research is not too heavily reliant on any single definition of strategic stability, which is a contested concept-Russia and China have their own definitions, for example, which differ from ours-and one that is used without clear meaning. As a result, the data set generated by this research can be arranged in different ways to reflect different definitions for strategic stability. The intent here is establishing a model within which the appropriate metrics can be identified and weighted with greater precision and awareness of the context.
Figure 3: Ranking the technologies
Controlling for Bias
Another important caveat of this research is that just because a method is systematic does not mean that it is necessarily free of bias. For example, research participants of a specific background might respond differently to the STREAM scoring exercise. However, measures were taken to minimize bias to the greatest extent possible. When shortlisting technologies, I used a literature review and key informant interviews with a different group of experts from those who responded to the STREAM scoring exercise. In the scoring exercise, experts were asked about their certainty levels and to provide sources to justify their responses.
In spite of this, one of the major qualitative findings was that even experts are susceptible to hype in their assessments. This is evident when examining the scores for hypersonic missiles. Experts were given the opportunity to abstain from scoring any technology if they were not familiar with it. However, all experts (n=10) felt that they were in a position to assess hypersonic missiles-thereby indicating some literacy with it-which might stem from the fact that hypersonic missiles are arguably the most widely covered and publicized technology included in this study. It is possible that a cohort of missile technologists might be more skeptical of whether hypersonic missiles really are a game-changing technology (i.e., how different they are from ICBMs).
One of the ways that this research can be improved in future iterations is conducting this study with a larger expert group and including significance testing and other measures of uncertainty.
Although there are some limitations that will be addressed in future iterations of this project, it accomplished its objectives as a proof-of-concept study. Presenting this research at the UK Project on Nuclear Issues conference, hosted by the Royal United Services Institute, and at the NATO Early-Career Nuclear Strategists Workshop sparked interest in a novel method and enthusiasm for a new way of approaching a contemporary issue in the nuclear weapons policy community. Furthermore, STREAM is representative of a wider genre of foresight methods, which are as much about the process as they are about the outcome. Foresight methods are stakeholder driven and both the quantitative scoring exercise and the qualitative exercise debrief present opportunities for research participants to think critically and in a structured manner about these emerging technologies.
Full conference papers are forthcoming, and the next phase of this work will be undertaken by the author under the auspices of the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King's College London. Ultimately, if the model can offer a means of measuring the impacts of distinct technologies across two domains-of comparing apples and oranges-then policymakers can be equipped to make wiser strategic decisions.
Marina Favaro is a policy analyst at the British American Security information Council, where she manages the "Emerging Technology" research program, and consultant at King's College London's Centre for Science and Security Studies. Her areas of focus include the future of warfare and the impact of new technologies on arms control. Previously, Marina worked as an analyst at RAND Europe, where her research focused on space governance, cybersecurity, defence innovation, and the impact of emerging technologies on society. Marina conducts both qualitative and quantitative research through a variety of methods, including futures and foresight methods (e.g. horizon scanning, STREAM and scenario building). Marina holds a first-class master's degree in international relations and politics from the University of Cambridge. She sits on the British Pugwash Executive Committee, which contributes to scientific, evidence-based policymaking and promotes international dialogue across divides.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: Artist's rendition of one of two variants of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept. DARPA and the US Air Force recently successfully completed captive carry tests of both variants. (Credit: DARPA)
24. Resistance and Resilience in Asia - Political Warfare of Revisionist and Rogue Powers
My thoughts.
Resistance and Resilience in Asia - Political Warfare of Revisionist and Rogue Powers | Small Wars Journal
Before I begin let me say many speakers at these types of conferences will offer the caveat that they are not speaking for their organizations and are only speaking in their personal capacities. Now that I am retired as US Special Forces officer, I too speak in a personal capacity in that I am not longer constrained by doctrine, by funding, or by a chain of command so I can tell you how I really feel. However, I do work for a foundation that seeks to defend democracies and democratic institutions. We were founded just after 9-11 by the late Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick, the late Senator Jack Kemp, and our current president Cliff May to defend against terrorism and the threat it posed to the US. However, Ambassador Kirkpatrick conceived of our organization well before 9-11 because she recognized that we were not at the end of history and liberal democracy had not achieved total victory.
We are a Washington-based nonpartisan research institutecommitted to supporting US national security and foreign policy and provide support to our like-minded friends, partners, and allies. Our unofficial mission is to do what we can to hinder and interrupt the activities of our adversaries.
I think my organization, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has a lot in common with our Special Forces motto: to free the oppressed. Though if I were king for a day, I would say it is to help the oppressed free themselves.
We have all kinds of terms to describe the global security environment in the 21st Century from the gray zone, to hybrid conflict and irregular warfare, to great power competition and major state on state war. What is common to all these forms of war, to include major state on state warfare, is that political warfare is a critical component. A key component of political warfare is resistance, including political defiance, political resistance, and political violence.
I am heartened to see SOCPAC take the lead in this effort. While I do not consider this a SOF problem, or more specifically a SOF-only or SOF-unique problem, I think the collective SOF community, US and its allies, brings together experience and expertise, intellectual grounding, and a passion for these types of problems that can make important contributions to US national security as well as the national security of our friends, partners, and allies.
I am going to frame my remarks in three parts: Appreciate the Context, Identify the Problem, and Develop an Approach. Hopefully some of you are familiar with this.
1. Let me begin with an appreciation of the context
Special Operations Forces (SOF) must continue to focus on high end counterterrorism (CT) operations which have been raised to a high art form. However, SOF must also focus on the modern SOF trinity of irregular warfare (IW), unconventional warfare (UW), and support to political warfare. Advanced CT and other high end SOF capabilities combined with the new SOF trinity is where SOF must invest in organization, manning, equipping, training, and education. Not only must we outfight our enemies we have to outthink them. As T.E. Lawrence said, "irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge."
All great concepts come in threes: Fear, honor, and interest; Passion, reason, and chance, (or people, government, and the military); life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; federal democratic republic; the legislative, executive, and judicial; federal, state, and local; presence, patience, persistence; political defiance, political resistance, and political violence; ends, ways, and means; strategic, operational and tactical, and many more. It is time for SOF to have its own "trinities." As previously stated, the first is an overall SOF construct: irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare. The second is the comparative of advantage of SOF: governance, influence, and support to indigenous forces and populations. Political resistance is at the heart of both of these SOF trinities.
When we describe resistance we generally think in terms of political resistance in which a segment of a population is aggrieved, believes it has been wronged, is disenfranchised, or is oppressed by the ruling regime. It may try to engage in the lawful political process but when it does not achieve political satisfaction it may resort to illegal political means to attain its objectives. It may organize itself into political parties and action arms, usually an underground and auxiliary, as in the latent or incipient stage and later it might organize guerrilla forces to conduct indirect insurgent operations against the government, which results in a stalemate. If it gains strength, possibly with external support, it may develop conventional military forces to conduct direct operations against the government's army. This is Mao's classic protracted warfare and while still applicable today as a form of political warfare it is not what I am going to talk about today. I am going to talk about a modern form of political warfare that is focused on resisting revisionist powers who seek to undermine democratic nations around the world though their own political warfare strategies. Like minded nations need a superior political warfare strategy though I acknowledge this is difficult for democratic nations to execute. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes seem to always have an advantage in this area. But I would argue it does not have to be the case.
The US national security and national defense strategies sum it up quite well. We face an era of a return to great power competition. There are two revisionist powers (PRC and Russia), two rogue powers (Iran and north Korea) and violent extremist organizations. There are some common traits within these threats. And yes, I call them threats. Among them is they seek to undermine the international system that the US and the west championed following World War II. They did not have a role in establishing it and now they want to redefine the international system in terms favorable to them. In particular they seek to unhinge the US alliance system and separate the US from its friends, partners, and allies.
The focus on great power competition and conflict has been interpreted by many as justification to return to organizing, equipping, and training the U.S. military for major combat operations and theater level war against peer or near peer competitors. There is no doubt that war with the revisionist powers is the most dangerous threat to the U.S. and may even be considered existential. Therefore, it is logical and justified to invest in the military capabilities to defeat these threats. However, we should also consider that the PRC wants us to focus and invest in the high tech and expensive equipment to counter these threats while it may have no intention of every fighting us directly in state on state warfare.
However, the reverse is also true. Such wars will be existential threats to the revisionist and rogue powers. While this may temper their desire for large scale conflict, these powers have the common objectives to weaken the U.S., reduce the U.S. spheres of influence, alter or destroy international institutions, force the U.S to withdraw from contested locations, undermine the U.S. economy, separate the U.S. from its allies, and when possible inflict casualties to affect domestic support for overseas presence and operations. They may use our military desire for planning for great power state on state war to distract us from what is really a political warfare strategy. At the most basic level U.S. adversaries turn the historical Clausewitzian theory on its head. Most national security practitioners will tout that "war is a continuation of politics and policy by other means." However, for U.S. adversaries it is "politics is war by other means."
This is more than semantics or a change to the order of words. It is the essence of Sun Tzu in three ways: (1)"all warfare is based on deception;" (2) "it is the acme of skill to win without fighting;" and (3) "what is of supreme importance is to attack the enemy's strategy." U.S. adversaries have different views of warfare. For them the psychological or influence operations take precedence over the kinetic and influence may or may not be supported by kinetic operations. The U.S. places priority on kinetic operations. It has a strong aversion to leading with "influence." Nowhere is this more evident than in what some PSYOP officers lamented to me when I was last at Fort Leavenworth. It is easier to get permission to put a hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than it is to get permission to put an idea between his ears. U.S. adversaries have no qualms about maximizing their ability to operate in the human and information domains.
Military professionals and national security practitioners should know better. Napoleon said in war "the moral is to the physical as three is to one." In the 21st Century, "the psychological is to the kinetic as ten is to one." Unfortunately, there is no constituency in Congress for influence operations and there is no huge budget line that translates to congressional districts for influence operations. There are only critics and naysayers who view influence mistakes as somehow more damaging than kinetic ones. Getting a message wrong may be embarrassing but we can recover from it. Getting a kinetic strike wrong is unrecoverable for those on the receiving end.
Assuming U.S. adversaries seek to win without fighting (or with fighting that will be below the threshold of war) and achieve objectives through influence how should this be characterized? First, the U.S. absolutely must recognize that this form of "warfare" is dangerous and prone to miscalculation by any party involved which could result in major combat operations. Therefore, the U.S. cannot sacrifice high-end military readiness.
The U.S. must maintain a force that is capable of fighting and winning high intensity conflict at the theater and global level. Yet it must also maintain the ability to compete with and counter the revisionist and rogue powers below the threshold of major combat where they prefer to operate. They seek to maintain competition and conflict in the so- called gray zone. The want to achieve influence and dominance and accomplish their objectives below the threshold of conflict to prevent a kinetic response. The U.S. and its friends, partners, and allies must be able to strategically operate in this area known as political warfare. And just as important as conducting a superior form of political warfare, the US must help its friends, partners, and allies resist our common adversaries' political warfare by developing resiliency among political institutions and the population. It takes resiliency to conduct resistance.
The U.S. also cannot be afraid to call this warfare. It is fashionable for some national security practitioners to say the military wants to make every competition and conflict a war. Some say Foreign Service Officers do not like the use of war and warfare to characterize the national security environment. It should not be forgotten that it was a diplomat who emphasized the requirement to conduct political warfare during the Cold War, George Kennan. However, it is not the U.S. who is using politics as a continuation of warfare by other means. U.S. adversaries believe this and operate this way and policy makers and strategists ignore this to the peril of the U.S. We have to see the world as it really is and not as we would wish it to be. The fact is U.S. adversaries are doing everything they can to undermine the American and western way of life and the international system which has maintained relative and sufficient order since WWII. They seek to harm the U.S., and its friends, partners, and allies and it would be the height of irresponsibility for the U.S. to not have the capabilities to defend America in this realm and counter and defeat adversaries.
SOF has its comparative advantage in a number of areas. As illustrated over the past two decades there is no force with a greater capability to capture and kill high value targets than U.S. SOF. But it is not just kicking down doors that makes SOF world class. It is the creative employment of high- and low-tech equipment, from UAVs to cyber to electronic warfare to immediate sensitive site exploitation and much more. These capabilities continue to evolve as units develop new concepts and SOF R&D develops new equipment. And most important is the SOF operator on the ground who can establish requirements and solve problems. The essence of all SOF operations is simply the ability to solve problems. Sometimes it is a targeting problem. Sometimes it is an intelligence problem. Sometimes it is an infiltration problem. Sometimes it is a breach problem. And sometimes it is about solving or contributing to solvingcomplex political military problems.
Setting aside the major theater combat operations against near and peer competitors, or in reality America's enemies, the following concepts and ideas will have application before, during, and after major combat operations. SOF's greatest contributions will come both before and after peer and near-peer conflict (as well as in the gray zone) though it will make significant contributions during major combat operations as well.
However, in addition to capturing and killing high value targets and all the complex operations surrounding that mission SOF has a comparative advantage in three areas: governance, influence, and support to indigenous forces and populations. These areas are represented by civil affairs, psychological operations, and selected SOF from all the services which are optimized to conduct unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, and counterinsurgency.
It is governance, influence, and support to indigenous forces and populations that play the greatest role in modern irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare. SOF may be best described today along this spectrum of capabilities. First and foremost, SOF is designed to solve problems in the human domain which no other branch or service of the U.S. military can solve. These are complex political- military problems that are strategic in nature. Second, SOF conducts operations to prosecute strategic targets. Third, SOF conducts irregular warfare, advises and assists or defends against resistance movements or insurgencies, and provides support to the U.S. government's political warfare strategies.
What is irregular warfare? The 2007 DOD definition is lacking: "violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations." It said that IW consisted of UW, foreign internal defense (FID), CT, counterinsurgency, and stability operations (SO). This was a compromise definition because at the time there was such controversy about the use of warfare within the interagency.
Congress suggested a better definition of irregular warfare in the 2018 NDAA. I think this describes much better what we need to do in terms of support to resistance and resiliency. US military forces along with other elements of the interagency conduct operations "in support of predetermined United States policy and military objectives conducted by, with, and through regular forces, irregular forces, groups, and individuals participating in competition between state and non-state actors short of traditional armed conflict." This is describing operations in the so-called gray zone below the threshold of major conflict and combat operations and is designed to support specific US strategic objectives. This is where the competition with the revisionist and rogue powers is taking place. And this is the fertile ground for violent extremist organizations. This is where we should focus our efforts on developing resistance and resilience.
Let me just touch on the joint definition of Unconventional Warfare. It is characterized by activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary or guerrilla force in a denied area.
The essence of UW is found in revolution, resistance, and insurgency and may manifest itself eventually in civil war. It is about seeking political change. It is about Robert Helvey's political defiance, it is about political resistance, and it is about political violence. In From Dictatorship to DemocracyGene Sharp described Helvey's political defiance. He writes, "'Political defiance' is nonviolent struggle (protest, noncooperation, and intervention) applied defiantly and actively for political purposes. "The term is used," Sharp continues, "principally to describe action by populations to regain from dictatorships control over governmental institutions by relentlessly attacking their sources of power and deliberately using strategic planning and operations to do so." An example of one the techniques employed is the call for massive withdrawal of funds from Hong Kong banks to target the economic instruments of Chinese power.
As an aside, what is another term for political violence? Terrorism.
Bruce Hoffman defines terrorism as the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change. All terrorist acts involve violence or the threat of violence. Terrorism is specifically designed to have far-reaching psychological effects beyond the immediate victim(s) or object of the terrorist attack. It is meant to instill fear within, and thereby intimidate, a wider `target audience' that might include a rival ethnic or religious group, an entire country, a national government or political party, or public opinion in general. Terrorism is designed to create power where there is none or to consolidate power where there is very little. Through the publicity generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence and power they otherwise lack to effect political change on either a local or an international scale. Terrorism is not something separate to be treated outside of irregular warfare. It is an integral part of it.
What is the fundamental aspect of UW? It is political resistance by disaffected groups who are seeking a change in governance, usually from an oppressive government or a government that does not meet the terms of the social contract. It is all about governance. Yes, it is a fight for legitimacy and a huge component of that fight is influence. The revisionist and rogue powers are exploiting the conditions of political defiance, political resistance, and political violence to create conditions that support their strategic objectives to create instability, weaken US influence, and tear down international institutions. For the US we either support those resistance movements or insurgencies that align with our interests or we advise and assist our friends, partners, and allies to defend against them. But with revisionist and rogue powers exploiting these conditions they are conducting their own forms of unconventional warfare. The Russians are conducting New Generation or non-linear warfare. We are well aware of the Iran Action Network and the UW conducted by the IRGC/Quds force. The Chinese conduct unrestricted warfare and its "three warfares:" psychological warfare, media warfare, and legal warfare or lawfare. And of course, my favorite is the subversion, coercion, and extortion conducted by the Guerrilla Dynasty and Gulag State of north Korea. This is why in the 2016 NDAA Congress included Section 1097 directing DOD to develop a strategy to counter UW. Counter-unconventional warfare.
This is the way I would describe what is taking place in the 21st Century. From the Gray Zone to Great Power struggle is a spectrum of cooperation, competition, and conflict in that space between peace and war. We seek and desire cooperation, we have to be able to compete, and while we want to avoid conflict, we must prepare for it. One of the important forms of conflict can be described by revolution, resistance, insurgency, terrorism, and civil war (RRIT & CW)) with our adversaries from AQ to ISIS to the Russian Little Green Men to the Iran Action Network or PRC's PLA and the Guerrilla Dynasty and Gulag State of north Korea all executing strategies of modern unconventional warfare and more specifically political warfare, with their own unique characteristics to include application of conventional force, to exploit the conditions of political resistance to achieve their strategic political objectives. The US must wage irregular warfare in this environment against these threats.
Here is one way to characterize US SOF in this environment: We face competition, not only among state actors and state and non-state actors but also in two competing ideas - one is the national interest to maintain a stable international nation-state system based on respect for and protection of sovereignty. This idea can be supported in part through the application of one of the major special operations activities: foreign internal defense in which SOF and other US government agencies seek to assist friends, partners and allies in their own defense and development programs so that they can defend themselves against lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, and terrorism that would threaten their sovereignty. The other idea is a fundamental human right which is the right of a people to seek self-determination of government and this can be supported by the one of the core special operations activities: the application of unconventional warfare. These two competing ideas must be reconciled throughthe correct application of national statecraft (i.e., political warfare), supported by SOF in the gray zone.
But the bottom-line problem is this: We face threats from political warfare strategies supported by hybrid military approaches that exploit the political resistance found in the human domain.
This brings us to the third leg of the trinity: political warfare.
In 1948 George F. Kennan defined political warfare as "the logical application of Clausewitz's doctrine in time of peace." While stopping short of the direct kinetic confrontation between two countries' armed forces, "political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command... to achieve its national objectives." A country embracing Political Warfare conducts "both overt and covert" operations in the absence of declared war or overt force-on-force hostilities. Efforts "range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures..., and 'white' propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of 'friendly' foreign elements, 'black' psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states."
I am partial to Paul Smith's definition. In 1989 he defined political warfare as the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations.
Political warfare is not a SOF mission. It is a national mission. It is statecraft. SOF provides support to political warfare. It applies its comparative advantages to support national objectives: contribute to solving complex political military problems, applying influence, supporting governance, and advising and assisting indigenous forces and populations.
In addition to SOF and selected DOD organizations conducting irregular warfare a 2018 RAND study on political warfare identified two other elements of an American Political Warfare capability:
First is expeditionary diplomacy: DoS and USAID would become the proponents for expeditionary diplomacy, which would entail diplomats working in "fluid situations without a strong central host government or U.S. embassy infrastructure to promote the local government's rule of law, reconstruction and economic development, and delivery of services." This would include support to military forces during military operations and as part of a whole-of-government approach in pre-conflict or post conflict settings, functioning as a "form of asymmetric warfare in crisis countries, particularly those with crumbling regimes or new unstable governments."
Second is covert political action: The Intelligence Community remains the proponent for covert political action, which would cause "economic dislocation, distortion of political processes or manipulation of information." In addition, the Intelligence Community would continue to provide intelligence to support operations in situations short of armed conflict; however, this intelligence collection and analysis may become increasingly focused on understanding how civilian populations and partner forces may be influenced using nonlethal means.
In 2015 USASOC published a white paper on SOF support to Political Warfare and described and SOF and DOD's role in this way:
A whole-of-government endeavor, Political Warfare is best led by agencies beyond DoD and can only succeed if it is conducted in a way to "elevate civilian power alongside military power as equal pillars of U.S. foreign policy."
SOF is well suited to lead DOD's contribution to Political Warfare's activities, because they are relatively knowledgeableexperts in this form of warfare.
The overall Political Warfare effort relies on persuasive and coercive diplomacy,economic coercion and engagement, Security Sector Assistance (SSA),Unconventional Warfare (UW), and Information and Influence Activities (IIA).
Everything outlined in the discussion already exists within the SOF community. SOF needs to employ its comparative advantages in support of the National Security and Defense Strategies. SOF leaders and operators must continue to innovate. The 21st century security environment is complex and dangerous. SOF has all the tools and capabilities and most important the trained and educated force to operate in this environment. My recommendation is to consider using the "trinities" as organizing principles both to frame special operations and communicate how the force supports the national strategy. Governance, influence, and support to indigenous forces are the comparative advantage that provide the foundation for the trinity of irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare. This is all in the DNA of SOF.
2. Understand the Problem.
Now that we have examined the big picture in context, we should assess what is the fundamental problem in Asia. I think it is Peoples Republic of China (PRC). More specifically it is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that is a threat. I am not afraid to say it. The CCP seeks to undermine US and western influence and the influence of individual freedom and liberty, liberal democracy, free market economy, and human rights and human dignity of all. These are the common values the and like-minded countries share.
We should all take some time and reread Unrestricted Warfare which was written by two Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) colonels in 1999 as an academic exercise on how to counter a superpower. It was based on their assessment of the US military in the post- Cold War World and in particular the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs which we were chasing in the 1990's. I think this was a very prescient book using all means available in an unrestricted manner. When I received my letter from OPM after the Chinese hacked all our security clearance forms, I returned to Unrestricted Warfare and I was amazed at how many references there were to hacking and obtaining data for later exploitation. Again, this was written in 1999.
In 2004 when I was at the National War College the Chinese Minister of Defense addressed the students. I asked only one question at these distinguished leader presentations all year long. I asked the Defense Minister that since Unrestricted Warfare has proved so prescient is the PLA using it to inform its doctrinal development and strategic and operational concepts? He walked off the stage and conferred with his handlers and returned to tell me the book has been debunked and I should not believe everything I read. My inside voice said: "He doth protest too much."
Let me present a long passage here from Unrestricted Warfare to illustrate why it was so prescient and is so important for us to understand. The first part is discussing the economic instrument of national power exercised by seemingly philanthropic "foundations." The second part discusses the "new terror war."
Thus, we can get at least an inkling of the magnitude of financial war's destructive power. Today, when nuclear weapons have already become frightening mantlepiece decorations that are losing their real operational value with each passing day, financial war has become a "hyperstrategic" weapon that is attracting the attention of the world. This is because financial war is easily manipulated and allows for concealed actions, and is also highly destructive. By analyzing the chaos in Albania not long ago, we can clearly see the role played by various types of foundations that were set up by transnational groups and millionaires with riches rivaling the wealth of nation states. These foundations control the media, control subsidies to political organizations, and limit any resistance from the authorities, resulting in a collapse of national order and the downfall of the legally authorized government. Perhaps we could dub this type of war "foundation-style" financial war. The greater and greater frequency and intensity of this type of war, and the fact that more and more countries and non- state organizations are deliberately using it, are causes for concern and are facts that we must face squarely.
New Terror War in Contrast to Traditional Terror War: Due to the limited scale of a traditional terror war, its casualties might well be fewer than the casualties resulting from a conventional war or campaign. Nevertheless, a traditional terror war carries a stronger flavor of violence. Moreover, in terms of its operations, a traditional terror war is never bound by any of the traditional rules of the society at large. From a military standpoint, then, the traditional terror war ischaracterized by the use of limited resources to fight an unlimited war.This characteristic invariably puts national forces in an extremely unfavorable position even before war breaks out, since national forces must always conduct themselves according to certain rules and therefore are only able to use their unlimited resources to fight a limited war. This explains how a terrorist organization made up of just a few inexperienced members who are still wet behind the ears can nevertheless give a mighty country like the U.S. headaches, and also why "using a sledgehammer to kill an ant" often proves ineffective. The most recent proof is the case of the two explosions that occurred simultaneously at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The advent of bin Ladin- style terrorism has deepened the impression that a national force, no matter how powerful, will find it difficult to gain the upper hand in a game that has no rules.
Even if a country turns itself into a terrorist element, as the Americans are now in the process of doing, it will not necessarily be able to achieve success.
Again, keep in mind this was written in 1999 so it was before 9-11. It is part strategic and operational concept, part threat analysis and part anti-American propaganda.
We should know the Chinese Communist Party's "Three Warfares" just as our brethren from Europe know Russian's next generation or non-linear warfare and its little green men.
Psychological Warfareseeks to disrupt an opponent's decision-making capacity; create doubts, foment anti-leadership sentiments, deceive and diminish the will to fight among opponents.
Legal Warfare ("lawfare")can involve enacting domestic law as the basis for making claims in international law and employing "bogus" maps to justify PRC's actions.
Media Warfareis the key to gaining dominance over the venue for implementing psychological and legal warfare.
And more importantly we need resistance and resilience to counter them.
We should know One Belt and One Road (OBOR) and the economic strategy behind it that causes debt traps for vulnerable countries. Just ask Sri Lanka how PRC gained controlling interest of its major port. And this is happening not just in Asia but in Latin America and Africa as well.
We should understand CCP investment strategies and the industries in which it invests. Sure, economically it makes sense for PRC to invest in energy and other resources and we know it is a very "extractive" investor - takes all the benefits and provides very little in return. But in places such as Republic of China (ROC) or Taiwan it has made major investments to achieve controlling ownership of media companies. We should ask is this purely for profit or does this provide the Chinese Communist Party with important capabilities.
We need to be aware of Chinese espionage operations and its attempt to recruit pies in our countries. The thousand talents and the thousand grains of sand concepts are designed to gather information and knowledge for the PRC. The Confucius Institutes provide money to cities, towns, and school districts in return for providing education in Chinese language, culture, and history. Local governments become "addicted" to these funds which in turn allows the PRC to conduct aggressive influence operations at the grass roots level. The PRC has a vast intelligence network. They have infiltrated governments, militaries, businesses, the media, non-governmental organizations and much more. It is very difficult to keep information from the Chinese Communist Party since they seem to have eyes almost everywhere. However, this can have a positive benefit because the development of resistance capabilities and resilience in society will show the CCP their strategy is not working, and it may give them pause from pursuing it further or even shifting to more violent operations and actions.
We should think about our political processes. While we know what Russia has done and is doing to undermine the democratic processes in the US and European countries, we should be observing Chinese actions. Although I do not have specific data and evidence, I think it is something that we must defend against especially because I think the Chinese will be more subtle and sophisticated than the Russians.
One of the reasons we should consider is the long term "shaping operation" the Chinese are conducting in the world of entertainment, not only movies, but also gaming. We have seen the CCP censorship of Hollywood movies such as Red Dawn where the enemy had to be changed from PRC to north Korea. But one of the most insidious influence operations ever conducted is the Chinese takeover of the gaming industry.
There are perhaps only a few people in this room who partake in massive multi-player online gaming. Yet for some of the championship games the amount of the amount of people watching is many times greater than the super bowl audience. But what is really important about these games is the CCP are shaping the narrative story lines creating Chinese character heroes and favorable descriptions of PRC versus negative portrayal of the US and the west. This is shaping a whole next generation of youth who see PRC in a very favorably light based on false information and propaganda. The questions is how do we resist this and how to develop the resiliency necessary to counter act this?
I would offer an excerpt from our 2017 National Security Strategy that I think applies now only to the US but also to our friends, partners, and allies.
"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."
This is one of the forms of resistance and resilience that needs to be developed in our countries among all our people to defend what is the most fundamental attack by PRC: attacks on sovereignty.
Lastly, I would make one point to provide a different view to my previous remarks. It is important to see how the coronavirus changes PRC's strategy. We do not know for sure what happened. I do not want to be a conspiracy theorist and say PRC was developing a bioweapon though we understand there was bio lab 30 miles from Wuhan. In fact, bio experts have told me that it makes no sense to use this type of virus as a bioweapon.
However, it may not have been deliberate, perhaps there was an accident at the lab. Or perhaps it was some kind of test that went wrong. Or maybe it was a deliberate test to see the response and reaction or perhaps to deplete resources on a global scale. If it was a deliberate act PRC appears to already be suffering blowback. When the stock market reopened it lost billions of dollars in value. The question is if this was deliberate what do we do about it? In addition, although I am loath to exploit tragedy, it is obvious even if it was not deliberate, the Chinese reaction to the problem illustrates the vulnerability of authoritarian regimes. The lack of transparency allowed the virus to spread. The Chinese system is not one designed to take care of the people. It is a system designed to protect and keep in power the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of its people. That should be a key theme and message in any information and influence activities campaign.
3. Develop an Approach.
Lastly, we must consider new approaches (as well as recall old approaches that are still likely to be relevant and effective). I hope to just give a few ideas that might lead to further development in the working groups and breakout sessions. This is by no means a thorough approach.
First there are really only three options for a country facing PRC's political warfare strategy.
1. Accept and acquiesce. Accept that PRC can't be stopped, accept their investment and influence which will undermine the government's legitimacy and lead to PRC's objective of creating instability and insecurity among US friends, partners, and allies.
2. Create a civil-military resistance capability to defend your country.
3. Develop a civil military resistance and conduct a counter subversion campaign and actively subvert the hostile power.
I would posit that there are three elements to resistance and resiliency we need to focus on. Resiliency of governments and institutions to withstand attacks on their legitimacy. Resiliency of the people to maintain their values and belief in their nation and form of government (as imperfect as all our governments are), and third, a civil-military resistance capability to resist both Chinese political warfare while contributing to their own country's superior form of political warfare and ultimately having a developed resistance that will deter military adventurism and if deterrence fails it will contribute to the defeat of an attack. Nations and their people must undertake these tasks themselves. No one can do it for them. However, since we are like minded countries that share values, share interests, and share strategies the US can provide advice, assistance, and support in some areas to help countries protect their sovereignty.
The first thing we need to do is change our mindset. We need to take a campaign approach rather than a preparation approach. It is good that our strategic planning process has eliminated the standard phasing template that begin with Phase 0 and preparation. What we have to shift to is to be able to conduct a campaign within that time and space we once called Phase 0. We need to conduct a political warfare campaign that has as part of its foundation developing resilience in government and society and developing a civil-military resistance capability.
The second thing is we need to attack the Chinese strategy. The first step in that is to expose its strategy. We need to bring sunshine on the strategy. By doing so we can inform, educate, and influence the population - we can in fact inoculate the population against the Chinese strategy because if they know it, they can recognize it and take measures not to succumb to it.
We have to develop aggressive, comprehensive, and sophisticated information and influence activities campaigns to counter Chinese propaganda. One thing I understand that Taiwan is doing is fact checking Chinese content but using humor. This apparently is an attention getter and is useful for exposing propaganda. And it apparently upsets the Chinese so we know it must be working.
Countries must strengthen their human rights to serve as an example for those in authoritarian countries. This will allow them to have the moral high ground when they contribute to international efforts that focus on Chinese human rights with the Uighurs, other ethnic minorities, and Hong Kong. There should be no hesitation among free nations of the world to call out the Chinese Communist Party's terrible human rights record. It is one of the most subversive acts we can conduct.
We have to be aggressive in cyber space, not only in defense but offense as well. We should consider combined cyber task forces to counter PRC cyber enabled economic warfare, its online espionage efforts, its infrastructure attack capabilities and its influence operations. We need to take back the on-line gaming and entertainment industries to shut off a key propaganda line of effort. Simultaneously we need to inoculate our youth against CCP propaganda in on-line gaming because they will continue gaming operations.
We need to develop civil-military resistance capabilities along some similar lines. This is especially true for Taiwan. As I see the terrain of Taiwan, I get the sense that if Taiwan were ever to be invaded it would be a black hole, meaning what goes in will never come out. Taiwanese conventional military capabilities are insufficient to defend against a PLA attack. However, a civil military resistance could create devastating conditions for the PLA. Taiwan SOF could move away from direct action commando type operations to a more UW focused posture. It could lead an effort to organize, train, and equip local civil defense forces. It could learn from the Poles and the Swiss and the development of their civil defense and stay behind forces. US SOF could advise Taiwan SOF in this work. The number one purpose is for local civil defense. But such a plan would also contribute to governance and most importantly influence. The civil military linkage would reinforce government legitimacy. From an influence perspective due to the large number of Chinese spies this could not be done in secret. However, it will be good for the PRC to observe this effort as it could deter Kim from attacking and if he does attack this capability can mean the end to many Chinese bloodlines as the one child policy will result in the massive loss of families' only sons. A Taiwanese "Tom Clancy" could write a fictional account of the invasion of Taiwan and illustrate it as a "black hole" and it could tell the stories of the demise of Chinese soldiers who are the end of their parents' bloodline. I used Taiwan as an example, but it could be applied to Thailand and Mongolia and other countries. If we show the PRC the populations of Asian countries cannot be pacified during a PLA occupation the PRC might come to the conclusion that the price tag for its political warfare strategy is simply too high. This is what Robert Jones at USSOCOM J5 has called Unconventional Deterrence.
Since the PRC has infiltrated so many government and military organizations a counter- intelligence program could be devised that would cause the PRC to lose trust in all its recruited spies. A very simple program could be to establish a policy that says if you are recruited to become a PRC agent what you must do it report it to the proper authorities. If you report a legitimate foreign intelligence operative, you will be allowed to keep his payment and you will receive a matching stipend from the government. You will also be required to provided approved information from your government. Since some countries are so infiltrated by PRC spies this program will be immediately compromised and will be very difficult for the PRC to thoroughly vet ever person they recruit. It will not put an end to PRC espionage, but it will reduce the number of recruits the PRC can recruit, train, and deploy.
These are just a few ideas that hopefully will stimulate discussion. The bottom line is the US and its friends, partners, and allies face an aggressive and hostile PRC that is operating well below the threshold of conflict operating in the so-called gray zone. It is conducting a form of political warfare that seeks to undermine the international nation- state system and attack many of the international institutions for which the US had a large role in developing. The SOF "trinities" of irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare along with governance, influence, and support to indigenous forces and populations can play a role in helping to advise an assist in these areas. Most important is we need to adopt a new campaign approach and learn to lead with influence so that we can execute a superior political warfare strategy built on the foundation of resistance and resilience to protect the sovereignty of democratic countries in Asia and around the world,
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
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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