Apologies for my tardiness. I had an early morning appointment that took up my normal news analysis time.
Quotes of the Day:
"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
– Jack London
"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
– Robert A. Heinlein
"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature."
– Marcus Aurelius
1. Biden Administration to Constrain Use of Sanctions in Foreign-Policy Shift
2. Is a sanctions rethink in the works?
3. Officials warn 5 key tech sectors will determine whether China overtakes U.S. as superpower
4. Evidence Mounts that Mass Suggestion Caused "Havana Syndrome"
5. Green Berets’ work to free Afghans comes with a personal cost
6. Biden says United States would come to Taiwan's defense
7. Remarks by President Biden in a CNN Town Hall with Anderson Cooper
8. White House officials clarify multiple Biden comments made during live town hall
9. 'Defend Taiwan' can hardly be seen as a slip of the tongue, but Biden has yet to say how or dare to 'stand against 1.4b Chinese' - Global Times
10. Biden won’t make good on ‘defend Taiwan’ claim
11. Expert: Beijing’s ‘Wolf War’ diplomacy is a way of covering up the truth
12. The Department of Defense’s Multidomain Operations Challenge - Global Security Review
13. How UAVs Could Spark a Military Conflict in the Taiwan Strait
14. A Counterfactual Look at the Afghan War: the “SOF-only” COA and its Implications for the Future
15. China Flaunts Its Offensive Cyber Power
16. Syria's challenge to Tony Blinken's conscience
17. PRC Info-Ops – in their own words
18. House lawmakers want military pay raise for enlisted troops
19. The Distracted Defense Department
1. Biden Administration to Constrain Use of Sanctions in Foreign-Policy Shift
Removing a key tool from the toolbox? I think we should keep in mind that sanctions already imposed by the UN and by the US Congress cannot be unilaterally lifted by the US administration (e.g., north Korea). Unfortunately in the future, the US can veto sanctions resolution in the UN Security Council or the President might veto a law passed by Congress. I think the focus should be on the strategy we are implementing to protect US national security issues rather than only on the ways. We need to think critically about the strategy and not the tools. And we should never tie our own hands especially when it comes to non-military options.
Biden Administration to Constrain Use of Sanctions in Foreign-Policy Shift
The change comes after successive administrations increasingly used the tool, alienating allies and raising questions of efficacy
The policy overhaul marks a potential turning point in U.S. foreign policy after successive administrations increasingly turned to sanctions to punish what they saw as misdeeds and push foreign governments to comply with American interests. The number of sanctions levied on governments, businesses, officials and others grew 10-fold over the past two decades—a trend that culminated in the Trump administration, which blacklisted adversaries more frequently than previous administrations.
Many foreign governments, including some allies, have often criticized their use as bad policy and long-arm justice. Sanctions advocates have also questioned their effectiveness and worried about undermining U.S. global power and spurring the creation of alternative financial systems and the use of cryptocurrencies beyond U.S. reach.
Some point to the failure of the Trump administration to prevent Iran from enriching nuclear materials, oust Venezuela’s longtime rulers, stop North Korea from testing ballistic missiles or deter Russia from interfering in U.S. elections.
Sanctions have at times proven effective in securing U.S. foreign policy goals, and defenders say they represent an alternative to force, especially as the Trump administration sought to reduce the U.S. military footprint abroad. Former Trump officials have also said that relying on international consensus and waiting for allies would have entailed compromises undermining U.S. national security.
Deputy Treasury Secretary Adewale Adeyemo, who led the Biden administration sanctions review, said the new approach is meant to “ensure that sanctions remain an effective national security tool.”
As part of the review, officials examined past actions and found that sanctions subjected to rigorous questioning before they are implemented led to a greater likelihood of success, the officials said.
Another critical plank of the Biden administration’s strategy is securing international collaboration for sanction regimes, instead of going it alone, to reduce the channels for evasion by sanctions targets, the officials said.
The new vetting process will scrutinize the potential impact of sanctions on financial markets, economies and vulnerable populations, the officials said. One Treasury official said the new vetting will be akin to the administrative procedures required to approve use of military force.
The Biden administration has already ratcheted back the use of sanctions since taking office in January. Around 450 people, companies and other entities have been blacklisted in that time period, less than half the number imposed during the Trump administration’s first year, according to Treasury data collated by the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic-leaning think tank in Washington.
Those numbers show the Biden administration is more hesitant to automatically respond to foreign policy challenges with sanctions, said CNAS researcher Jason Bartlett.
Sanctions “will continue to play an important role in leveraging U.S. power,” said Mr. Bartlett. “They will incorporate sanctions as a force multiplier in their foreign policy strategy instead of leading with them,” he said.
2. Is a sanctions rethink in the works?
Excerpts:
Here’s a final question to mull. Will diminished U.S. use of sanctions increasingly leave policymakers with the choice between: (1) a campaign to isolate a regime that might not care about its outlaw status, and (2) military action, alone or with others, that brings bloodshed and unintended consequences?
These are admittedly hard questions, with no easy answers in sight. The Biden administration, however, deserves credit for beginning to ask them.
Is a sanctions rethink in the works?
The Hill · by Lawrence J. Haas, opinion contributor · October 21, 2021
The Biden administration’s announcement that it will limit economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy could prove significant, since it follows two decades in which policymakers of both parties dramatically increased the use of sanctions against governments, individuals, and entities that they considered bad actors.
“After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” the Treasury Department wrote in a new report after a nine-month review, “economic and financial sanctions (‘sanctions’) became a tool of first resort to address a range of threats to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. This tool rests on the formidable strength of, and trust in, the U.S. financial system and currency.”
Looking forward, the Treasury wrote, “Economic and financial sanctions should be tied to clear, discrete objectives that are consistent with relevant presidential guidance — such as countering forces that fuel regional conflict, ending support to a specific violent organization or other malign and/or illicit activities, stopping the persecution of a minority group, curtailing nuclear proliferation activities, enhancing multilateral pressure, or ceasing specific instances of atrocities.”
Fine. But the notion of limiting the use of sanctions — e.g., trade embargoes, investment restrictions, asset freezes on governments or individuals — could prove a sea change for U.S. policymakers who, in recent years, have viewed sanctions as the go-to response to global bad behavior.
The figures are striking. Sanction designations imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Controls (commonly referred to as OFAC) and its 37 separate sanctions programs rose in number from 912 in 2000 to 9,421 in 2021 — or by 933 percent in just over two decades.
Nor does that include the separate sanctions imposed by other departments, such as State, Commerce, Homeland Security, and Justice. The State Department, for instance, can name a foreign organization as a terrorist entity or, as it does in its annual human rights reports, label a government as a state sponsor of terrorism. Such designations can set the stage for sanctions of different kinds.
Nor do these numbers include the multinational sanctions that Washington pushes, sometimes successfully, at the United Nations Security Council or the European Union, such as on North Korea and Iran over their nuclear programs.
Like U.S. sanctions, global and regional sanctions — whether promoted by Washington or otherwise — have grown in number and scope.
During the Cold War, the Security Council sanctioned just two nations (Southern Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977), due largely to U.S.-Soviet disagreements and other issues. Since 1990, however, the Council has sanctioned more than 20 other nations. That figure could have been higher, had China and Russia, for instance, not vetoed sanctions against Syria over its brutal civil war of recent years.
Similarly, while the European Union has imposed sanctions more than 30 times, it has expanded their range of late. And while traditionally focused on individuals and companies, the EU sanctioned Iran over its nuclear program (although it dropped those sanctions as part of the 2015 global nuclear agreement with Iran).
None of this is surprising, for sanctions provide a convenient in-between alternative to the polar options of diplomacy and war. They activate U.S., regional, or global pressure without the risk of bloodshed.
And, sometimes, they work well. U.S. designations of more than 1,600 entities and individuals over the last two decades have weakened them by, for instance, drying up their funding sources. U.S. and global sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program before the 2015 nuclear agreement (although the West is now split over how, and how quickly, to resurrect that deal).
The Treasury report offers only general guidelines for the future use of sanctions, so it’s not clear how influential they will be. The mere notion of limiting sanctions, however, raises vexing questions.
“Where possible,” the Treasury wrote, “sanctions should be coordinated with allies.” True, but should Washington eschew sanctions in the face of allied opposition — especially when the United States is a greater target of an outlaw regime, such as the one in Tehran, than are its allies in Europe or elsewhere?
“Treasury,” according to the report, “should seek to tailor sanctions in order to mitigate unintended economic and political impacts on domestic workers and businesses, allies, and non-targeted populations abroad.” Fair enough, but should it eschew sanctions even when the pain they impose on “non-targeted populations abroad” will help weaken the government in power? When Washington debated sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s, in-country activists argued that the long-term benefits of pressure on the government would outweigh the short-term pain on the people of their nation.
Here’s a final question to mull. Will diminished U.S. use of sanctions increasingly leave policymakers with the choice between: (1) a campaign to isolate a regime that might not care about its outlaw status, and (2) military action, alone or with others, that brings bloodshed and unintended consequences?
These are admittedly hard questions, with no easy answers in sight. The Biden administration, however, deserves credit for beginning to ask them.
The Hill · by Lawrence J. Haas, opinion contributor · October 21, 2021
3. Officials warn 5 key tech sectors will determine whether China overtakes U.S. as superpower
Officials warn 5 key tech sectors will determine whether China overtakes U.S. as superpower
U.S. intelligence officials responsible for protecting advanced technologies have narrowed their focus to five key sectors: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, semiconductors and autonomous systems.
Why it matters: China and Russia are employing a variety of legal and illegal methods to undermine and overtake U.S. dominance in these critical industries, officials warned in a new paper. Their success will determine "whether America remains the world’s leading superpower or is eclipsed by strategic competitors."
Driving the news: The National Counterintelligence and Security Center has launched a campaign to warn U.S. companies and researchers about foreign intelligence threats to these sectors, which the Chinese and Russian governments are targeting through international collaborations, talent recruitment and espionage:
- AI: Officials warn that current trends suggest China has "the might, talent, and ambition" to surpass the U.S. in AI in the next decade, which could significantly exacerbate threats posed by cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns.
- Quantum: Some foreign countries are spending substantially more on quantum development than the U.S., which puts them in a better position to recruit American talent. Whoever wins the race for quantum dominance could compromise other countries' economic and national security communications, the paper claims.
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Biotech: Competition in the global bioeconomy has intensified over the past decades, as foreign countries have stolen technology and intellectual property from the U.S. As one example, the paper highlights breakthrough technologies in genomics, which could be exploited for "surveillance and societal repression."
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Semiconductors: The global nature of the semiconductor supply chain — which is currently experiencing disruptions — creates economic chokepoints that can be exploited by adversaries. The U.S. is extremely dependent on one company in Taiwan for key chip components, for example.
- Autonomous systems: The expansion of these systems for both military and civilian purposes presents a "growing attack surface for malicious cyber actors," the paper warns.
The big picture: Acting NCSC director Michael Orlando told reporters that he was not advocating for "decoupling" the U.S. and Chinese economies, instead stressing: "If you are going to do business and collaborate, be smart about it."
4. Evidence Mounts that Mass Suggestion Caused "Havana Syndrome"
This will not go over well with the victims. And I fear this will contribute to the victims being left out in the cold by those who do not want to believe that Havana Syndrome is real. This will be another instance of blaming the victim. Of course if the theory below is true, statements and views along the lines I am presenting will hinder the ability to inoculate the potential victims in the future from the effects of this "syndrome." This is a terrible paradox - the victims obviously have symptoms that are very real and they must be properly cared for and not be blamed for succumbing to mass suggestion. But if it is mass suggestion we must prevent future victims by informing everyone this is a case of mass suggestion but we must do it without disrespecting the actual victims who exist today and not leaving them without all the treatment they need.
Conclusion:
One of the reasons for the spread of the belief that ‘Havana Syndrome’ is caused by a secret weapon is the continued reporting of misinformation. Perhaps the biggest myth is that many victims suffered brain damage. This was popularized after the publication of a 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study found brain anomalies in the patients. However, this is not the same as brain damage, but it was widely reported as such. In fact, the same study admitted that the anomalies were not so significant that they could not rule out the possibility they were caused by individual variation (Ragini et al., 2019). Furthermore, similar anomalies have been elicited from exposure to long-term stress, which is what embassy personnel were experiencing after rumors spread that they were being targeted for sonic attacks using a secret weapon. Also, 12 of the patients had histories of concussions, compared to zero in a healthy control group. This alone could explain the differences between the two groups (Baloh & Bartholomew 2020).
‘Havana Syndrome’ is the most recent in a long history of fears about new technologies prompting health complaints. It won't be the last.
Evidence Mounts that Mass Suggestion Caused "Havana Syndrome"
Studies suggest that a 'mystery illness' in Cuba was caused by social contagion.
Posted October 11, 2021 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
KEY POINTS
- Classified reports conclude that psychogenic illness played a major role in "Havana Syndrome."
- Recent actions by Defense Department are tantamount to a global experiment in mass suggestion.
- Myths about ‘Havana Syndrome’ continue to circulate
The contents of two U.S. government investigations into the origins of the 'Havana Syndrome' both found that mass psychogenic illness was likely a major driver of the outbreak. The condition was first reported in late 2017 by U.S. diplomats in Cuba and includes fatigue, memory problems, nausea, ear pain, dizziness, confusion, headaches, trouble sleeping, and sensations of pressure. While it is commonly reported that brain damage is part of the condition, such claims are not supported by the data. As R. Douglas Fields of the National Institutes of Health observes, "There is no evidence of any pathology…when you look at the data, there's no coherent syndrome, no pattern" (Hamilton 2019).
Source: DedMityay/Shutterstock
The first report, Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba was produced by a group of specialist scientists who issue advice on matters of national security. Their findings were publicly released in September 2021 under the Freedom of Information Act. The report deemed that claims of microwave radiation involving the ‘Frey Effect’ to be far-fetched. This effect involves the production of barely audible clicking sounds. However, the sounds heard by the diplomats in Cuba did not resemble the Frey Effect. Furthermore, over a dozen recordings were made during 'attacks.' Analysis revealed they were identified as the sounds of crickets and cicadas. One of the first scientists to identify how the Frey Effect works, bioengineering professor Ken Foster at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “the Frey Effect is real, but it has nothing to do with the Havana syndrome.” Foster says it is highly unlikely the effect could ever be weaponized (Foster 2021). The findings of a second report, produced by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, were recently leaked to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Adam Entous. It concluded that the victims were experiencing “mass psychogenic illness.”
A Global Experiment in Mass Psychology
In 2018, after ‘attacks’ were reported by several American diplomats stationed in China, the State Department cautioned that its foreign corps should be vigilant for attacks at other locations. To date, ‘attacks’ have been reported on U.S. officials in over a dozen countries including China, Australia, the United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Germany, Austria, Vietnam, and near the White House. The spread of 'Havana Syndrome' around the world is unsurprising given that the symptoms are so vague and common. By warning diplomats and intelligence officers to be on the lookout for "anomalous health incidents" that may or may not be accompanied by strange sounds, the U.S. government has created a global experiment in the nocebo effect whereby negative expectations produce negative symptoms. Think of it as the opposite of the placebo effect. To complicate matters, in September, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent letters to nearly 2.9 million military personnel, civilian officials, and contractors, warning them to be vigilant for any unusual health incidents. It stated, in part, “Over the course of the last several years, and predominantly overseas, some DOD (Department of Defense) personnel have reported a series of sudden and troubling sensory events such as sounds, pressure, or heat concurrently or immediately preceding the sudden onset of symptoms such as headaches, pain, nausea, or disequilibrium (unsteadiness or vertigo)." That nearly 3 million people have been told to be alert for anomalous health incidents is a recipe for a forthcoming cluster of anomalous health incidents as subjects redefine a plethora of conditions under a new label, ‘Havana Syndrome.’
The Myth of Brain Damage
One of the reasons for the spread of the belief that ‘Havana Syndrome’ is caused by a secret weapon is the continued reporting of misinformation. Perhaps the biggest myth is that many victims suffered brain damage. This was popularized after the publication of a 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study found brain anomalies in the patients. However, this is not the same as brain damage, but it was widely reported as such. In fact, the same study admitted that the anomalies were not so significant that they could not rule out the possibility they were caused by individual variation (Ragini et al., 2019). Furthermore, similar anomalies have been elicited from exposure to long-term stress, which is what embassy personnel were experiencing after rumors spread that they were being targeted for sonic attacks using a secret weapon. Also, 12 of the patients had histories of concussions, compared to zero in a healthy control group. This alone could explain the differences between the two groups (Baloh & Bartholomew 2020).
‘Havana Syndrome’ is the most recent in a long history of fears about new technologies prompting health complaints. It won't be the last.
References
Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba, November 2018. Declassified U.S. Government study.
Austin, Lloyd (2021). “Anomalous Health Incident.” Memorandum for All Department of Defense Employees, September 15.
Bartholomew, Robert, and Baloh, Robert (2019). “Challenging the diagnosis of ‘Havana Syndrome’ as a novel clinical entity.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 113(1):7-11.
Bartholomew, Robert, and Perez, Dionisio F. Zaldivar (2018). “Chasing ghosts in Cuba: Is mass psychogenic illness masquerading as an acoustical Aattack?” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 64(5):413-416.
Baloh, Robert, and Bartholomew, Robert (2020). Havana Syndrome. Cham, Switzerland: Copernicus Books.
Foster, Ken (2021). Personal communication, October 2.
Hamilton, Jon (2019). “Brain scans find differences but no injury in U.S. diplomats who fell ill in Cuba.” All Things Considered, National Public Radio (Washington DC), July 23.
Ragini V, Swanson, RL, Parker D, Ismail A, Shinohara RT, Alappatt JA, et al. (2019).“Neuroimaging findings in US government personnel with possible exposure to directional phenomena in Havana, Cuba.” JAMA 322(4):336-47 (July 23). https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2019.9269.
5. Green Berets’ work to free Afghans comes with a personal cost
A good story describing the various efforts and challenges by people who care and are trying to do something for others, and the suffering Afghans are experiencing and the challenges for those who are trying to help. "De oppresso liber" = "to free the oppressed" or as I like to describe the Special Forces' motto, "to help the oppressed free themselves."
Not named in this article is the organization founded and run by former Green Beret Jason Ghormley, Shona ba Shona (https://www.shonabashona.net/ ). One of the unique characteristics of this organization is that it is also focused on supporting a coalition of the willing and not just operating independently or for the sake of the organization but to help others and other organizations help the Afghans in need through the entire process of aiding, escaping, integrating, and providing support to women in peril. (note that I am on the board of directors, thus my bias).
Green Berets’ work to free Afghans comes with a personal cost
It didn’t take long for Carrie Elk to realize something was different with the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
A psychotherapist who specializes in war-related psychological trauma, Elk was at Bragg Sept. 12 to deliver PTSD resilience training to Green Berets preparing to transition out of the military.
She was invited by an NCO she had worked with for years to discuss caring for special forces soldiers who struggle to cope with the aftermath of exposure to brutal combat and the other miseries of protracted conflict.
“As I walked in, he felt different,” Elk said of the Green Beret NCO, who were both authorized to talk about the situation. The Green Beret NCO spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive nature of the Afghanistan rescue efforts. “His presence was very different than I’ve known. Something was off.”
Later, Elk noticed another sight that made her wonder.
“We walked by the offices, to the conference room, and I saw a couple of cots set up,” said Elk, founder and CEO of the Elk Institute for Psychological Health & Performance. “I thought that was awfully strange, and was wondering if that is how they do things at this unit or was something going on?”
There were cots. A whiteboard with maps and photographs of people.
Afghans on cell phones, having furious conversations in Dari with people back home.
A Green Beret was at his computer. His hands were on his forehead as he had a hushed conversation with the man next to him.
“What if I miss one?” she recalled him saying. “What if I miss the name? Dude, what if I miss a name?”
The Green Beret tried to reassure him.
“Dude, your job is to do the best you can to keep track of what you can and do as much as you can with what you’ve got. Their souls are not your responsibility.”
The souls, Elk learned, were U.S. citizens and Afghan allies trapped by rapid advance of the Taliban. Their lives hung in the balance and 7,000 miles away, there was nothing the Green Berets at Fort Bragg could do by way of direct action to help them.
But despite the admonishment, the men felt a responsibility.
So day after day, night after night, with the implicit approval of their command, the small group of five Green Berets at Fort Bragg spent their off hours working to find and guide American citizens and Afghans to safety. They took turns spending nights in the office transformed into a tactical operations center.
And for men used to responding, Elk could see that as the Taliban captured district after district, the pervasive feeling of helplessness and hopelessness was taking a mental and emotional toll, even as they managed to help hundreds escape.
Hundreds more are still on their waiting list, a small portion of the tens of thousands wanting to get out.
The command is aware of the toll the rescue effort has taken on the Green Berets.
“Some of our people experienced a range of powerful emotions over the last few months because Army Special Operations is more than a job, and our soldiers care deeply about the people they have worked closely with on deployments,” said Army Maj. Dan Lessard, a spokeman for the 1st Special Forces Command said in an email to Military Times. “We implement U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s Human Performance and Wellness program to provide our soldiers and families a holistic array of resources to build resilience, improve performance, and mitigate the acute effects of stress over their careers in Army Special Operations.”
Elk’s visit to Bragg, arranged long before the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, was part of that program.
“Their hands are tied everywhere they go,” Elk said of the Green Berets. “And then they’re still watching all these people dying, that saved them half of the time, looked out for them, gave them information they needed, some interpreters for them. And now they feel they’ve left these guys in harm’s way. And that’s opposite of their ethos and just soul crushing.”
Working on their own time, a small group of Green Berets at Fort Bragg helped U.S. citizens and Afghan allies navigate their way toward Hamid Karzai International Airport. (Photo courtesy of a Green Beret NCO).
Send us
A day before Kabul fell on Aug. 15, the small group at Fort Bragg appealed to the chain of command to head to Afghanistan.
“We made a promise to these people that we’d get them out, and we knew exactly what would happen to them if they were left there,” said the Green Beret NCO. “It is happening. And so that’s what killed us the most. Because we knew if we were on the ground, we could speed those processes up. We actually tried to go over there. We want to go over there.”
But leaders rejected the idea.
“It’s just like, ‘hey it’s never gonna happen,’” he said. “The Department of Defense doesn’t want any more people to be responsible for over there, you know? It’s a Department of State thing. They do immigration, not the military and so they didn’t want anyone getting in the way of that. Our command supported it, but it was just never going to happen, especially in such a short timeframe. By time we got there. It would have been over anyway. It was just so frustrating.”
Instead, the Green Berets began working in an unofficial capacity because what they were seeing was anathema to their motto, said the NCO.
“What we saw happening over there was the opposite of De Oppresso Liber,” he said, referring to the Green Beret’s Latin motto meaning “to free the opressed” in English. “I’ll say it over and over again, it was De Liber Oppresso. It was legitimately undoing everything we have done for 20 years. Just all of a sudden it was, we oppressed all the people that we’ve been trying to free from oppression. And it was like a light switch.
“It’s been mentally challenging for a lot of people because, you know, how many people we buried,” he said. “And because of that place, because of going to war for 20 years all the funerals we went to, all the family members we had to say sorry to and notify, just think about that. I’ve been going there since 2005, and I’ve been to memorials every single year.”
The Green Berets were operating with the knowledge of their command.
“1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) is aware of the informal efforts by soldiers within the command to assist former Afghan partners and their families with evacuation from Afghanistan,” Lessard said. “Our soldiers have built lasting relationships with partners during deployments over the last 20 years, and some soldiers have used their previous relationships and networks to provide unofficial assistance to those partners in their time of need.”
Working on their own time, a small group of Green Berets at Fort Bragg helped U.S. citizens and Afghan allies navigate their way toward Hamid Karzai International Airport. (Photo courtesy of a Green Beret NCO).
Taking action
“If you put a curtain over the window and not know where you were, you’d think you’re in Afghanistan running a mission,” said the Green Beret NCO.
The effort started with attempts to rescue family members of two Afghans. One of those Afghans is a Green Beret, the other a contractor who worked with the team. It became even more difficult after the Taliban takeover of Kabul on Aug. 15.
“That was one of the horrifying things,” said the Green Beret NCO. “One of the Afghans that’s working with us, his wife is stuck over there. He’s an American citizen. So imagine him helping us get all these people out and his wife can’t. Right? Because she has pending [special immigrant visa]. I have to look at his face every day. Not being able to go get her, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t walk away every day, and go home and sleep knowing that. It was crushing.”
So the Green Beret NCO reached out to a friend in Kabul.
“He was like, ‘hey man, this is, this is how it works. These units are controlling these access points.’ And he said, ‘you know, reach out to see who’s there, build contacts with them, and then see if they’ll vouch for your people and get them in and that’s what we did.”
Soon, the Green Berets were in contact with the family members, offering advice and helping guide them past Taliban checkpoints, toward contacts at Hamid Karzai International Airport who would let them in. They helped move people to safe houses and transport them when the time was right.
But it wasn’t easy and not every attempt to reach the airport worked. Eventually, though, the families of the Afghan team members made it out of the country.
News of the initial success quickly spread.
“Once we were successful getting those people out, it started,” said the Green Beret NCO of a torrent of requests for help. “Everyone else was like, hey, my friend’s family is there. Or, some general or colonel would be, okay my interpreter is stuck there. And they just kept asking me if you can get these people, and the other people, and it just became the larger operation overnight.”
It wasn’t easy at first “because they were overwhelmed,” said the Green Beret NCO. “Everybody was doing the same thing. So it just happened to be like, who could get there? How we can identify them? And who would vouch for him. And we did that.”
Zach Martin, a former Army officer and "Battle Captain" with "Team America" works on getting evacuees aboard Hamid Karzai International Airport. Photo by James R. Webb.
Helping hands
The Green Berets at Fort Bragg also worked with friends in several private organizations trying to rescue American citizens and Afghan allies.
RELATED
How a group of military veterans rescued a total stranger from Afghanistan.
The pleas have become increasingly desperate.
“Those people are stuck in a bad situation because they can’t do it the legitimate route through the Taliban or they’ll be hunted,” said the Green Beret NCO. “And they’re currently being hunted and killed.
“We’ve got videos of it, proof of like all the atrocities happening, these people being, you know, shot with their families in their homes or [the Taliban] going door to door looking for people,” he said. “It’s happening 24/7. What I had to look at for the last two weeks, you know, it was eating me alive.”
Carrie Elk, founder and CEO of the Elk Institute for Psychological Health and Performance, leads a PTSD resilience training session at Fort Bragg. (Photo courtesty of Carrie Elk).
Duty still calls
Even as all this was going on, the Green Berets had their day jobs.
For the NCO, it was running the transition workshop.
Elk was there to talk to the group about post-traumatic stress disorder and resilience, and then set up individual sessions for anyone wanting additional help. For the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, the timing could not have been better, and 17 Green Berets came forward.
“That’s unheard of to have that many people, during a couple-day period, reach out for help for behavioral health,” said the Green Beret NCO.
That response, he said, was the result of steadily building pressure on the force, exacerbated by the rescue effort.
“It was just like everything at once,” he said. “Transitioning our military is one of the most stressful points of your entire life. And then you had a pandemic and Afghanistan on top of it. So imagine that it’s just one relentless catastrophe after another, stacking up and all the other crap you’re already dealing with prior to it also. It definitely sent a lot of people over the edge.”
Elk treated those she could, but the slots quickly filled, which she said is typical for the SOF units she has been working with over the past decade.
“I am going to go back to help the others,” she said.
Smoke rises from a deadly explosion outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021. A suicide bomber targeted crowds massing near the Kabul airport, in the waning days of a massive airlift that has drawn thousands of people seeking to flee the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. The attack killed 13 U.S. troops and 169 Afghans. (AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon)
A very bad day
Meanwhile, there was more misery to come.
It was especially tense at Bragg, because there were families being rescued at the Abbey gate, the site of the bombing. And Marines who were working with the Green Berets. Two families at Abbey gate made it into the airport, but a Marine they were working with was killed.
“You feel helpless and hopeless that, you know, you can’t be there do something and like you know contribute and then you’re just sitting on the other side of the world, on a phone going out, you know, should have would have could have, so it was, it was horrible,” said the Green Beret NCO.
Working on their own time, a small group of Green Berets at Fort Bragg helped U.S. citizens and Afghan allies navigate their way toward Hamid Karzai International Airport. (Photo courtesy of a Green Beret NCO).
The mission continues
To date, the Green Berets at Fort Bragg helped rescue about 400 people, said the Green Beret NCO. But as the sleepless nights wear on, and the ability to effect change diminished with the withdrawal of U.S. troops on Aug. 31, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are hitting hard.
“I feel good getting the families we got out,” he said. “We did our part but now it’s like, there’s humanitarian crisis.”
There are still another 500 people on the Green Beret’s waiting list. But with no U.S. presence on the ground in Afghanistan, the messages are still coming, while the evacuation effort has wound down “to a slow trickle,” said the Green Beret NCO.
“It is finding any way necessary” to help them escape, he said. “Whether it was across land or by any type of aircraft that could fly out of Afghanistan, And we’ve only got probably about a dozen people out after that date, and then now it’s just like coming to a standstill.”
The challenge now is working under the legal framework for evacuation while still trying to help and not putting people at risk.
“You can’t support illegal immigration,” he said. “So, you have to do everything by the book. And we don’t want to be playing chess with other people’s lives over there. I mean it’s not a video game, it’s real life. So you’re not on the ground, you can’t see what’s happening so you have to trust what the people over there are telling you, and then give them the best advice possible but let them make the decision. We facilitate their decision making based on what we know and understand that come together with a unified decision of, are you willing to accept this risk but we’re not telling them what to do.”
The Green Berets have vowed to continue to help.
Elk says that’s one reason she is going to return to Bragg.
“Their values are ‘never leave a comrade behind,’ and ‘to free the oppressed’ but the situation created the opposite scenario,” she said. “It is easy to understand why things were different. Daily operations were being carried out at a high level of performance as always while in the background an existentially heavy 24-hour sustained mission weighed on the human hearts and minds.
“This incongruence, living against their ethos/motto, coupled with the understandable feelings of helplessness and hopelessness to directly act on or ‘right’ the situation, has potential to greatly impact their psychological and emotional health,” she said. “So it’s more important than ever to equip them with straightforward, operator-friendly resilience training to maintain their high level of performance.”
Howard Altman is an award-winning editor and reporter who was previously the military reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and before that the Tampa Tribune, where he covered USCENTCOM, USSOCOM and SOF writ large among many other topics.
6. Biden says United States would come to Taiwan's defense
A clear statement by the President, but...
Biden says United States would come to Taiwan's defense
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks briefly with reporters after participating in a ceremony for state and national Teachers of the Year at the White House in Washington, U.S. October 18, 2021. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
- Summary
- Biden says U.S. has "commitment" to defend Taiwan
- White House says no change in policy on Taiwan
- China expresses displeasure at Biden remarks
- Taiwan says it is determined to defend itself
- China claims Taiwan as its own territory
BALTIMORE, Oct 21 (Reuters) - The United States would come to Taiwan's defense and has a commitment to defend the island China claims as its own, U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday, though the White House said later there was no change in policy towards the island.
"Yes, we have a commitment to do that," Biden said at a CNN town hall when asked if the United States would come to the defense of Taiwan, which has complained of mounting military and political pressure from Beijing to accept Chinese sovereignty.
While Washington is required by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, it has long followed a policy of "strategic ambiguity" on whether it would intervene militarily to protect Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.
In August, a Biden administration official said U.S. policy on Taiwan had not changed after the president appeared then to suggest the United States would defend the island if it were attacked.
A White House spokesperson said Biden was not announcing any change in U.S. policy at the town hall and "there is no change in our policy", but declined further comment when asked if Biden misspoke.
"The U.S. defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act. We will uphold our commitment under the Act, we will continue to support Taiwan's self-defense, and we will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo," the spokesperson said.
China expressed its displeasure anyway, with a foreign ministry spokesman saying Beijing has no room for concessions on its core interests.
China urges the United States "not to send the wrong signals to the forces of Taiwan independence, to avoid seriously harming Sino-U.S. ties and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait," spokesman Wang Wenbin said.
Taiwan's presidential office said its position remained the same, which is that it will neither give in to pressure nor "rashly advance" when it gets support.
Taiwan will show a firm determination to defend itself, presidential office spokesperson Xavier Chang said in a statement, adding that the Biden administration's continued concrete actions show its "rock-solid" support for Taiwan.
Bonnie Glaser, a Taiwan expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, called Biden's remark a "gaffe" and said it was "patently not true" that Washington has a commitment to defend Taiwan.
"Some are suggesting a deliberate effort to send unclear signals, but in my view, that makes no sense. A confused U.S. policy weakens deterrence," she said, noting that Biden's Asia policy czar, Kurt Campbell, had rejected "strategic clarity" over Taiwan. read more
'MOST POWERFUL MILITARY'
Biden said people should not worry about Washington's military strength because "China, Russia and the rest of the world knows we're the most powerful military in the history of the world."
"What you do have to worry about is whether or not they're going to engage in activities that would put them in a position where they may make a serious mistake," he said.
"I don't want a cold war with China. I just want China to understand that we're not going to step back, that we're not going to change any of our views."
Military tensions between Taiwan and China are at their worst in more than 40 years, Taiwan's Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng said this month, adding that China will be capable of mounting a "full-scale" invasion by 2025. read more
China says Taiwan is the most sensitive and important issue in its ties with the United States and has denounced what it calls "collusion" between Washington and Taipei.
Earlier on Thursday, China's United Nations Ambassador Zhang Jun told reporters China was pursuing "peaceful reunification" with Taiwan and responding to "separatist attempts" by its ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
"We are not the troublemaker. On the contrary, some countries - the U.S. in particular - is taking dangerous actions, leading the situation in Taiwan Strait into a dangerous direction," he said.
"I think at this moment what we should call is that the United States to stop such practice. Dragging Taiwan into a war definitely is in nobody's interest. I don't see that the United States will gain anything from that."
Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in Washington, Michelle Nichols in New York, Gabriel Crossley in Beijing and Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Writing by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Stephen Coates, Edwina Gibbs and David Gregorio
7. Remarks by President Biden in a CNN Town Hall with Anderson Cooper
For those who missed it.
Excerpt:
MR. COOPER: Let me bring — let me bring in Glenn Niblo, a student at Loyola University, originally from Connecticut. He’s a Republican. Glenn, welcome. (Applause.)
Q Hi.
THE PRESIDENT: Where in Connecticut are you from?
Q Greenwich.
THE PRESIDENT: That’s great.
Q China just tested a hypersonic missile. What will you do to keep up with them militarily? And can you vow to protect Taiwan?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes and yes. We are — militarily, China, Russia, and the rest of the world knows we have the most powerful military in the history of the world. Don’t worry about whether we’re going to — they’re going to be more powerful. What you do have to worry about is whether or not they’re going to engage in activities that will put them in a position where there — they may make a serious mistake.
And so, I have had — I have spoken and spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader has. That’s why you have — you know, you hear people saying, “Biden wants to start a new Cold War with China.” I don’t want a Cold War with China. I just want to make China understand that we are not going to step back. We are not going to change any of our views.
MR. COOPER: So, are you saying that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if —
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
MR. COOPER: — China attacked?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, we have a commitment to do that.
Remarks by President Biden in a CNN Town Hall with Anderson Cooper
OCTOBER 22, 2021
•
Baltimore Center Stage
Baltimore, Maryland
(October 21, 2021)
8:00 P.M. EDT
MR. COOPER: With that, I want to welcome the 46th President of the United States, President Joe Biden. (Applause.)
So, there’s a lot to get to tonight, and we got a lot of great questions from our audience. We want to get into the details of what you’re calling the Build Back Better plan.
Before we get into that though, I just want to know — there’s been a lot of negotiating going on behind the scenes, as I’m sure you are very involved with. Are you close to a done deal?
THE PRESIDENT: No problems. It’s all done. (Laughter.)
No, look, Anderson, we’ve been — I’ve probably spent, well, well over 100 hours. This is a — this is a big deal. We’re both have — we have two plans: one is the infrastructure plan — roads, highways, bridges, buses, trains, et cetera — and the other one is what I call the “care economy”. It has a lot of money in there for environmental remediation as well as care economy. For example, you know, we want to get the economy moving, but millions of women can’t go to work because they don’t have any childcare. That kind of thing.
So, there’s a lot of pieces in there. There’s a lot that people don’t understand. And, by the way, all of it’s paid for — every single penny. It’s not going to raise one single cent (inaudible).
MR. COOPER: We’re going to get into a lot — a lot of those details. Just, though, are you close to a deal?
THE PRESIDENT: I think so. You know, look, I’ve been — I was a senator for 370 years. (Laughter.) And I was never — I was relatively good at putting together deals.
MR. COOPER: Is this the toughest deal you’ve worked on?
THE PRESIDENT: No. No. I think banning assault weapons was the toughest deal I worked on — and succeeded. (Applause.)
MR. COOPER: You’re flying — you’re flying to Europe, I think, in eight days.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
MR. COOPER: Do you think you’ll have a deal by the time you get on Air Force One in eight days?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, you know, it’s like my asking you, “Are you sure your next show is going to be a success?” Right? You know.
MR. COOPER: Yes. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Well, you’re more confident than I am. Look — hey, look, it’s all about compromise. You know, “compromise” has become a dirty word, but it’s — bipartisanship and compromise still has to be possible.
When I ran for the presidency, I said I’m running for three reasons: one, to restore the soul and decency in the country; two, to build the middle class and the working class so they were — we build from the middle out; and three, to actually unite the country. And everybody has been saying, “Well, that’s crazy. You can’t do it.” If we can’t eventually unite this country, we’re in deep trouble.
MR. COOPER: Bottom line: Do you think you will get a deal?
THE PRESIDENT: I do think I’ll get a deal.
MR. COOPER: All right, let’s get some — let’s go to the audience. This is Nicholas Vaught. He’s the coordinator at the Applied Liberal Studies Program at Morgan State University. He’s a Democrat.
Nicholas, your question.
THE PRESIDENT: Morgan State.
Q Morgan State.
THE PRESIDENT: All right, man. (Applause.) I’ve spoken there.
Q So, my wife and I have two young boys, Arthur and Teddy. However, the cost of childcare is nearly double our mortgage. We want to have more children, but even though we earn a good salary now, childcare is so expensive. So how will this new infrastructure plan help middle-class families pay for childcare?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me ask you: Do you have — how old are your kids?
Q Three and a half and six months old.
THE PRESIDENT: God love you. (Laughter.)
Well, look, there’s two pieces. There’s the childcare — having someone take care of your child while you are working, while you and your wife are working. Under this proposal I have, no one will have to pay — unless you’re making more than — individually, you’re each making — making over 300 grand –$150,000 apiece.
Q We’re educators.
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, God. (Laughter.) And, by the way, I’m married to one: Dr. Biden — right here. (Applause.)
So — so you will not have to pay more than 7 percent of your income for childcare — 7 percent. And the way we do that is we provide for the ability to have childcare centers funded. The money won’t even go — you don’t — the — figure your income; you get 7 percent with the total cost.
But there’s another piece here: You now are qualified to be able to have a Child Tax Credit. It used to be that when you — you know, when you — if you were — had enough money to pay significant taxes, you could write off 2,000 bucks for every child you had and reduce it from your taxes. But if you were making 60,000 bucks a year and you didn’t have that much to write off, you didn’t get anything.
Well, I call this a tax break for middle-class people. If you’re making in the $150,000 range right now, you’re in a situation where you can get, if you have a child under 7, $350; if you have a child over 7, between 7 and 17, you can get $300. And you get a direct payment. You — the IRS sends you money.
MR. COOPER: Joe Manchin wants a work requirement with your enhanced tax credit for kids. Is that something you would support?
THE PRESIDENT: No. Here’s the deal: All these people are working anyway. (Applause.)
And, by the way, you know, why should somebody who is not working and has — you know, makes — has a million-dollar trust fund, why should they get the benefit, and someone making 60 grand and not working, but staying home, why should they not get anything? I don’t get that.
MR. COOPER: You’re also proposing, for the first time ever, federal paid parental leave. And — (applause) —
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. That’s a different issue. Yeah.
MR. COOPER: Right. A different issue. Right. But this is — but this is in your proposal. How much time off would parents actually get under your proposal? Because at one point, you talked about 12 weeks. Now there’s reports it’s down to maybe four weeks.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, it is down to four weeks. And the reason it’s down to 4 weeks is I can’t get 12 weeks. (Laughter.)
And — but, look, here’s the deal, guys: How many people do you know — not a joke — or maybe yourself — have had a circumstance where you are working like the devil, you’re making 7 bucks an hour, 15 bucks an hour, or 20 bucks an hour, and you have a child that’s sick at home — or you have a mother or a father, husband and wife, son or daughter, and you need to stay home to help them?
We’re one of the few industrial countries in the world that doesn’t have paid leave — so that when you stay home to help that person, to take care of that person, you’re still getting your pay. And it does not hurt the business at all. The business isn’t paying for it; the federal government is paying for it. It’s a little bit like, as I said, a tax cut for people who are not able to otherwise take care of their families.
And, look, I’m looking out here, and a lot of you are part of that sandwich generation: You have young kids, and you have aging parents. And one of the things all the polling data shows, Anderson, is people are more concerned about taking care of the elderly, because they don’t know what to do, than they are even their children.
MR. COOPER: I want to talk about this. I want you to meet Vanessa Antrum from Bowie, Maryland. She’s retired. She’s a caregiver for her elderly parents.
THE PRESIDENT: God love you.
MR. COOPER: She’s a Democrat.
Vanessa, your question.
Q Yes. Mr. President, my parents have been married for 73 years and both are dealing — (applause) — yes. Both of them are dealing with dementia. My father, who was a veteran, is completely bedridden, and my mom is experiencing issues with walking.
I have found the process for me to provide care for them in my home very hard. They have worked all their life only for me to experience a lot of red tape to provide support —
THE PRESIDENT: Bingo.
Q — in a loving home environment. What is being done to support the elderly, especially for a middle-class family like mine?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all — (applause) — if my mom were here, she’d say you’re a good daughter, number one.
Q Yes. Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Number two, I was in a situation like you, where I was making more money — I was making $42,000 a year as a senator at the time, although I was listed the poorest man in the Senate for 36 years, but — (laughter) — I still made more money than most people because Senate salaries kept going up.
What happened was my — my dad got sick, and he was in hospice, so Jill and I took my dad home and we took care of him in our house. But we were lucky because we had the ability to have — I have a sister who is an angel and a brother who’s a wonderful guy, and we all took turns in our house taking care of them.
But here’s the deal: Right now, under Medicaid, there are 860,000 — I think it’s 860- — don’t hold me to the exact number, but it’s over 800,000 — who qualify for home healthcare aid for their parents, but there’s no money there. There’s no money there.
So what we do is we provide the funding for Medicaid to allow you to be able to keep — if your parents had their home — keeping them in their home if you wanted, or get help in your home with homecare from professionals providing — helping you take care of them — helping you take care of them.
And in many cases where you’re not taking care of them in your own home and they’re staying — and they’re staying in their home, you’re going to be able to have the ability to have someone come in and make their meals for them. They don’t have to be there 24/7.
So, there’s a lot of things we’re doing. In addition to the process, we’re going to be able to train up those homecare workers who are usually minority women, women of color, as well as immigrants. And they have the capacity to learn more as they go along, to move to the point where they can become practical nurses and things like that.
So, it makes a lot of sense, and it’s cheaper — cheaper than it is to not do it.
MR. COOPER: One of the other things that Democrats are looking to do is to expand Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing as well. Given all the negotiations that are going on, will all three of those still be covered?
THE PRESIDENT: That’s a reach. And the reason why it’s a reach — it’s not — I think it’s a good idea, and it’s not that costly in relative terms, especially if we allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
But here’s the thing: Mr. Manchin is — is opposed to that, as is — I think Senator Sinema is as well.
MR. COOPER: Opposed to all of them?
THE PRESIDENT: Opposed to all three. Because they don’t want — he says he doesn’t want to further burden Medicare so that — because it will run out of its ability to maintain itself in X number of years. There’s ways to fix that, but he’s not interested in that part either. (Laughter.)
But, look, Joe — Joe is not a bad guy. He’s a friend. And he’s always, at the end of the day, come around and voted for it.
But — but here’s the point: We’re in a situation now where if you are in a circumstance that you’re not able to provide — let me cut to the chase; I’m taking too long. (Laughter.)
One of the things we were able to do in the meantime is — the most expensive of these things would be dental. Okay? Now, we’re talking about — and I don’t have a deal on it yet — maybe getting an $800 voucher from Medicare for dental work that you may need.
And the hearing is a very important thing because — as Kyrsten Sinema, who supports this, points out — hearing is directly related to dementia. When you can’t hear, you have a problem, and it impacts on dementia.
So, we’re able to, I — and it’s cheaper to be able to take care of hearing. But I think I’ve been able to take care of that without changing Medicare, because what’s happening is now you have these hearing aid companies; you no longer are going to have to go to the doctor and spend five grand and get an app- — you can go buy at Walgreens, and buy over-the-counter hearing aids. (Applause.)
So — the harder one, though, is we — we haven’t gotten a consensus yet on how to deal with seeing, glasses. And — but that’s — so “it’s not done yet” is the answer.
MR. COOPER: All right. I want to get another question in. This is Ben Frederick. Ben is a realtor, a lifelong resident of Baltimore. He’s an independent. Serves on the Maryland Multi-Housing Association.
THE PRESIDENT: By the way, Ben, the Bidens all hail from Baltimore, beginning in 1850. (Laughter.) I don’t know how the hell they kicked me out, but I’m — (laughter).
MR COOPER: Ben, what’s your question?
Q IRS data shows that the top 5 percent of income earners pays 60 percent of the income taxes in this country. I hear you repeatedly say that the wealthy are not paying their fair share of income taxes. What is the percentage of income that you believe is fair?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think what’s fair is that — this present tax code, the highest tax rate is 35 percent, number one. Okay?
Number two, you’re in a circumstance where corporate America is not paying their fair share. And I come from the corporate state of the world: Delaware. More corporations in Delaware than every other state in the union combined. Okay?
Now, here’s the deal though: You have 55 corporations, for example, in the United States of America making over $40 billion, who don’t pay a cent. Not a single little red cent.
Now, I don’t care — I’m a capitalist. I hope you can be a millionaire or a billionaire. I — not a problem. But at least pay your fair share. Chip in a little bit.
And so —
MR. COOPER: Well, let me — let me follow up, because Kyrsten Sinema, who you mentioned — Senator Sinema is opposed to any tax rate hikes for corporations and for high earners. Speaker Pelosi suggested today she could accept that.
The question is: A, would you accept that — no rate hikes — tax rate hikes for corporations or high earners? And if so, how would you pay for this plan otherwise?
THE PRESIDENT: Because you don’t have — look, here’s the deal: The tax rate — the corporate tax rate was 35 points-some — 37 percent. Barack and I thought it should come down. We thought it should come down to 28 percent.
In the process, it came down to 21 percent under Trump, which even the corporate leaders — and you know if you’re in real estate — major real estate. Ask them. They know they should be paying a little more than 21 percent. Because the idea that if you’re a schoolteacher and a firefighter, you’re paying at a higher tax rate than they are, as a percentage of your taxes.
But here’s the deal: I believe that we can do the — we can pay for this whole thing — I have it written on a card here, but I won’t bore you with the detail. But, for example, if you in fact made sure that you paid a minimum 15 percent — minimum 15 percent — if you’re paying nothing — minimum 15 — that’s almost — that’s over almost $400 billion over 10 years.
MR. COOPER: So you would be willing to go along with what Senator Sinema and, it seems like, Speaker Pelosi is willing to consider: no tax hike for corporations or for high-earning individuals?
THE PRESIDENT: Here’s what I’m willing to do: I’m willing to make sure that we pay for everything without anyone making less than $400,000 paying a single cent more in taxes. That’s my objective.
And so, there’s ways to do that. For example — you covered it on your show — the minimum international tax at 15 percent.
MR. COOPER: But no rate — actual rate hikes?
THE PRESIDENT: No. No. I don’t think we’re going to be able to get to vote. Look — (laughs) — when you’re in the United States Senate and you’re President of the United States and you have 50 Democrats, every one is a President. (Laughter.) Every single one. So, you got to work things out.
But where I am is, I’m hearing now — I’ll turn on the news and I’ll hear that “Biden’s caved on such and…”
Look, Biden has a simple proposition. Biden is going to get — all the elements of these two bills have profound impact on economic growth; reduce, not increase, inflation; don’t add a penny to the debt; as well as grow the economy. According — I had 17 Nobel laureates in economics sent me a letter recently saying that my proposals would actually reduce inflation, diminish (inaudible).
But here’s the point. The point of it all is that I’m prepared — I can’t think of anything that was consequential and changing the circumstance for the middle class and working class in America that came as a consequence of a single piece of legislation.
I got a portrait of Roosevelt in my office. Okay? Social Security is not anything like it is today when he passed it. It evolved. It moved. It grew.
So I’m prepared to do the things that can get done now that can begin to change the lives of ordinary Americans to give them a fighting chance and come back and try to get others later.
MR. COOPER: Let’s talk about another one of those things. This is Sondra Guttman, an English professor at — (applause) — at Loyola University — also a Democrat.
Sondra, what’s your question?
THE PRESIDENT: And, by the way, you got another English professor who teaches writing here. (Laughter.)
Q Thank you for taking my question, Mr. President. We’ve heard in the news that the proposal for two years of free community college may be cut from your economic package. An educated citizenry is absolutely crucial to solving complex problems like climate change — (applause) — and the systematic inequities in this country. We hope that this is not cut from the package, but if it is, what can you do to ensure that all Americans can get the education that they need to face these issues?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, Professor, you made a very profound point, and I’m not — I’m not being sarcastic — and that is — and Jill uses a slightly different phrase: “Any country that out-educates us will out-compete us.” Any country that out educates will out- — out-educates will out-compete us.
You have the vast majority — of the 37 major cor- — countries in the world — economies — we rank 35 in our investment in education. We’re in a situation where if you — if you think about it, when we — what caused us to move ahead and dominate the 20th century: In the late 1900s — in the early 1900s, late 1890s, we came up — we said, 12 years of free education. That was revolutionary at the time. I mean, seriously.
Now, if we were sitting down today and saying, “Oh, we got to put together an education system,” raise your hand if anybody thinks 12 years is enough to compete in the 21st century?
So, that’s why what I propose is: free child — free school — free school for every three- and four-year-old in America, no matter what their background.
All the data shows that no matter what home they come from, they increase exponentially their prospects of succeeding all the way through 12 years of school. You know — you know all the statistics.
The statistics go that if you come from a home where there’s no books in the home and a single mom or a single dad, they don’t — they’re not well educated, they don’t talk a lot, the kid from the middle class — average middle-class home versus that home will go to school having heard 1 million more words spoken than the child who didn’t. A gigantic disadvantage.
MR. COOPER: Mr. President, the question was on the — the — on community colleges —
THE PRESIDENT: No, I know. I —
MR. COOPER: — which — which was a big campaign promise that you made. You talked about that a lot on —
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, I —
MR. COOPER: — the campaign trail.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, and I’m going to get it done. (Applause.) And if I don’t, I’ll be sleeping alone for a long time. (Laughter.)
But here’s the deal: So far, Mr. Manchin and one other person has indicated they will not support free community college. So, what I’ve — what I think we can get done is we can significantly increase the amount of money by 500 bucks a payment for Pell Grants. And Pell Grants are available, and they can apply for up to 30 percent of the cost of community college and/or — and/or college help tuition.
So, it’s not going to get us there. It’s not going to get us the whole thing, but it is a start.
I’m convinced — absolutely, positively convinced that we’re going to be able to — and, by the way, we have in the law — in the legislation, money for community colleges that deal with — dealing with apprenticeships, dealing with teaching people particular skills that are not getting — will not get you a two-year degree but will teach you the skill.
So, I think we can get all of that done this time out.
But I promise you — I guarantee you, we’re going to get free community college in the next several years and across the board. (Applause.)
MR. COOPER: What was that conversation when you realized you weren’t able — going to be able to get it in this bill at this time, and you had dinner with Dr. Biden that night, what was that conversation like? (Laughter.) How did you break that news?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, the White House has a lot of bedrooms. (Laughter.) And she went like this. (Points.) (Laughter.) “Down the hall.”
MR. COOPER: All right.
THE PRESIDENT: No, look, it really makes a gigantic difference. And think of this: You have more countries in the world with — having — providing college — I mean, providing professional education beyond 12 years. We rank like, I think it’s — don’t hold me to the number — I think it’s 16 or 17 in the world — the United States of America, for God’s sake.
MR. COOPER: I want —
THE PRESIDENT: This is about putting us in the game.
MR. COOPER: This is John Meche. He’s a doctoral candidate at Morgan State University and an independent. John, welcome. What’s your question? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Where — where are you?
MR. COOPER: Morgan State.
Q Morgan State.
THE PRESIDENT: I know all these Morgan men, man. (Applause.)
I’ve spoken there a couple times. And, by the way, the guy who runs my operation is a — anyway — (laughter) — I — I keep talking about Delaware State, but they keep saying about Morgan State, you know?
Q Morgan State.
President Biden, I had so much faith in your election win, but based on history, the bipartisan efforts of the Democratic Party are held hostage by rogue moderates and Republicans. Why not do like the Republicans and usher through the Democratic agenda? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Well, two reasons. If you notice, the Republicans haven’t passed a single, solitary thing. Zero. So, ushering through their agenda — their agenda right now is just “stop Biden.” Although, I shouldn’t make it so personal. “Stop my administration” — that’s what the agenda is. It’s much easier to stop something than to start something.
And look, what we did is, when I wrote — I’m going to back up just a second. I apologize. I wrote — I personally — during the campaign, before I got elected, I wrote the infrastructure bill relating to what we do to highways and all that kind of thing. Hard — hard data. And I wrote the — what they call — what’s now called the “care economy” piece and has a gigantic piece of environmental pieces in it too.
And I went before the joint session of Congress, and I laid out exactly what I was for. And so, I made it clear what I was for. Initially what happened was, I got no support for anything from our Republican friends. And then they said, “Maybe we can work out a bipartisan deal on infrastructure.” And we did. We worked on it. It didn’t give me everything I wanted. It didn’t have as much money in there for the environment, although it has tens of billions of dollars in there, but didn’t have what I wanted in it. But we made a bipartisan deal.
Now, what’s coming along is this reconciliation — they call it a fancy word — for the other pieces that have the childcare pieces, have the economy that relates to allowing people to — women to go back to work. It has about $450 billion for environmental remediation, and so on.
And that’s the one that is the issue.
MR. COOPER: Well, let me — let me ask you — just getting to — to his question: You — we’ve talked a lot about Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema. You seem relatively confident you can kind of get Senator Manchin on board.
There’s a lot of Democrats in the House and Senate who are confused about where Senator Sinema actually stands on things. (Applause.) And I know she’s been negotiating directly with you and the White House. What is your read on her?
And I — obviously, you need her to remain positive in your direction, so I don’t know what you’re going to say. (Laughter.) But what is your read on —
THE PRESIDENT: No —
MR. COOPER: Do you know where she stands?
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, she’s smart as the devil, number one. Number two, she’s very supportive of the environmental agenda in my legislation — very supportive.
She’s supportive of all — almost all the things I mentioned, relating to everything from family care to all — to all those issues.
Where she’s not supportive is she says she will not raise a single penny in taxes on the corporate side and/or on wealthy people. Period.
And so, that’s where it sort of breaks down, and there’s a few other issues it breaks down on. But what we’re trying to do is reach a point here where I’m able to present to the Senate — they’re able to vote on — and the House — a serious, serious piece of legislation that changes the dynamic for working-class folks in America and middle-class folks, and begins to have the very wealthy and corporations just begin to pay their fair share — not a lot.
How we get there — we’re down to four or five issues, which I’m not going to negotiate on national television, as you might guess.
MR. COOPER: We’d be interested —
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, no.
MR. COOPER: — in hearing them, if you want. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, no. I know. But, all kidding aside, I think we can get there.
MR. COOPER: You talked about the environmental piece. You said Senator Sinema is on board with that. Certainly, Senator Manchin is not. It gets to our next question.
This is from Kobi Khong. He’s originally from Anaheim, California. He’s a Sophomore Class President at Johns Hopkins University, a Democrat. (Applause.)
Kobi, what’s your question?
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. President.
Q One of the largest issues that people have trouble comprehending the severity of is climate change. Many legislators and politicians today are lenient, as they won’t have to live with the future effects. Without the legislative support for the climate aspects of your budget proposal and the earth rapidly approaching the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees limit, what other backup plans do you have to ensure a future for the next generations?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s — (applause). Mr. President, you got it right. The existential threat to humanity is climate change. And when President Trump pulled out of the Paris Accord — which, when I was with the Obama administration, we helped negotiate — the agreement was that we could not — if we reached beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in temperature, we’re gone. Not a joke. Not a joke.
And so, we decided that — he pulled out. First thing I committed to do is rejoin that accord, number one. (Applause.)
But number two — number two: What you have to do is you look at — there’s multiple ways in which we can deal with climate. I’m going off to COP26 in Scotland, and — in, I don’t know, I guess it’s two weeks or a week. I — I’m losing track of time.
And — and I’m presenting a commitment to the world that we will, in fact, get to net-zero emissions on electric power by 2035 and net-zero emissions across the board by 2050 or before. But we have to do so much between now and 2030 to demonstrate what we’re going to — that we’re going to do.
So, let me give you a couple examples.
MR. COOPER: Let me just follow up, though, very quickly on that, because the — the key climate provision that was in the Build Back Better plan, as you call it — the Clean Electricity Performance Program — that’s been dropped now from this spending bill. Reported —
THE PRESIDENT: No, it hasn’t.
MR. COOPER: It has not?
THE PRESIDENT: No, it ha- — look —
MR. COOPER: But Senator Manchin is opposed to that.
THE PRESIDENT: He’s opposed to it. But here’s the deal: That is only one of well over — well over a trillion dollars’ worth of expenditures for climate change. It’s $150 billion. It’s important.
And what it says is that if, in fact, the utility doesn’t pull back and continue to reduce the amount of carbon that they admit, that what will happen is they will end up paying a penalty. And so, there’s a penalty incurred.
Joe Manchin’s argument is: Look, we still have coal in my state. You’re going to eliminate it eventually. We know it’s going away. We know it’s going to be gone. But don’t rush it so fast that my people don’t have anything to do.
I think that’s not what we should be doing, but the fact of the matter is we can take that $150 billion, add it to the $320 billion that’s in the — in the law now that he’s prepared to support for tax incentives — tax incentives to have people act in a way that they’re going to be able to do the things that need to be do from —
For example, if you’re — if you — if you got windows that are the, you know, the wind is blowing through, you get an incentive to put new windows in your home. You get — you — help get it paid.
We’re going to significantly reduce the amount — the cost of solar panels on your roof. We’re going to continually — and, for example, there’s new battery technologies that are being — I went out in Silicon Valley; there’s a battery that’s about that wide and about that thick. If you have solar power, you put that in your basement and the sun doesn’t shine for seven days, you still have all the power you need.
MR. COOPER: But the concession has been agreed to for Senator Manchin —
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, no.
MR. COOPER: — about coal in his state —
THE PRESIDENT: No, no —
MR. COOPER: Is that true?
THE PRESIDENT: Nothing has been formally agreed to. The concession has been — the negotiation is: I’ve been saying to Joe, “Look, I’ll take — if we don’t do it in terms of the — the electric grid piece, what we’ll do is — give me that $150 billion. I’m going to add it to be able to do other things that allow me to do things that don’t directly affect the electric grid in the way that there’s a penalty, but allow me to spend the money to set new technologies in place.”
For example, we can save significant amounts of money and, as a consequence of that, significant amounts of energy, if, in fact, we are able to put the high-tension wires underground. It costs a hell of a lot more to do it. It creates real good jobs; it creates a hell of a lot more to do it. But, in fact, it would do a lot to keep things from happening that are dangerous. Half the forest fires out West are those towers coming down, setting fires, et cetera.
So, there’s a lot of things Joe is open to my convincing him that I can use it to increase environmental progress without it being that particular deal.
MR. COOPER: We’re going to take a quick break. When we get back, we got a lot more questions for President Biden. (Applause.)
(Commercial break.)
MR. COOPER: And welcome back. We are live at a CNN Town Hall event in Baltimore, Maryland, with President Joe Biden.
So, before we get to our next question, I want to just bring up the current labor market shortages. Millions of jobs are unfilled, businesses are struggling to meet demand. Is there anything you can do to either encourage people to go back to work or make jobs more attractive that they want to go back to work?
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, so, first —
MR. COOPER: Is there a role for the federal government?
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, we’ve created more jobs in the first eight months of my administration than any President in American history — total number of jobs created.
But the problem for the people not going back to work is twofold. Number one, they’re reluctant to go back to work because they’re afraid of COVID — many of them. So they don’t want to go back and they don’t want to be exposed to either the customers because they’re not required to wear masks or not required to have shots, or they don’t want to go back because they’re not sure of the people waiting on them and they — at the table, or the people coming up in the food market. So, a lot of it has to do with COVID. Number one.
Number two — and that’s why, you know, we were able to go from — when I first got elected — when I first was elected, there were only 2 million people who had COVID shots in the United States of America — had the vaccine. Now we got 190 million, because I went out and bought everything I could do — and buy in sight, and it worked. (Applause.)
But here’s the deal: The second thing — the second thing that has happened, Anderson, is that people are now using this as an opportunity to say, “Wait a minute, do I want to go back to that $7-an-hour job?”
I won’t name the particular restaurant chain, but they found out when they — they couldn’t hire anybody. When they found out, they started to pay 20 bucks an hour, everybody wanted to go back to work. Not a joke.
So what you see is wages are actually up for those who are working, because for the first time in a long time, employees are able to bargain. “You’re the boss? You want me to work for you? What are you going to pay me? How are you going to do it?” I’m not being facetious.
The third thing that’s out there is there’s a circumstance that exists where people are really worried about what they’re going to do — I mean, how — how can I say this?
How many people do you know — and maybe some in this audience — who, because of what you’ve been through — a loss of a husband, wife, brother, mother, father, son, whatever — or you’ve had something that’s really impacted you with COVID that you really find yourself just down? I mean just down. And so, there’s a lot of people who are just down. They’re not sure how to get back in the game. They’re not sure whether they want to get back in the game.
Think of this: If you’re graduating from Morgan State, okay? (Applause.) Right? Well, guess what? You didn’t have those great dances the last four years that you’d had before you went out at Morgan. No, I’m not joking. Graduated from high school, you don’t have your prom, you don’t have your graduation, you don’t have the thing — all the things that matter to people that go into things they look forward to. So, a lot of it has to do with us getting back on our feet and getting back on our feet in terms of our attitudes about what the future looks like for us.
MR. COOPER: What do you say to someone who’s down? Because —
THE PRESIDENT: What I say —
MR. COOPER: — there’s a lot of people watching tonight who are.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, there are. And I tell you what: There’s plenty of help. Look, being down, having some problem in terms of needing some — some advice — if you have a broken spirit, it’s no different than a broken arm. You shouldn’t be ashamed of it. You should seek the help. There’s a lot of people who can help. (Applause.)
And — but I really mean it.
MR. COOPER: Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: I — I don’t — I’m not saying that’s the whole problem, but I’m saying it is an element in terms of attitude about people — what they want.
Look, how often I get asked the question, “What’s Christmas going to be like? How about Thanksgiving? Is it going to be okay? I mean, what’s going to happen? I mean, how will I be able to buy gifts for my kids?” How — there’s a lot of anxiety people have.
MR. COOPER: Yeah. I want to ask a question along the lines of concern about Christmas and holidays and the supply chain.
Anna Hirsch is here, a student at Loyola University, who is originally from Connecticut. She’s a Democrat. Anna, what’s your question? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Anna.
Q President Biden, growing up in a small town, I’ve been surrounded by small-business owners, including my mom who owns her own interior design business. With the current supply chain crisis, small businesses are in jeopardy of not being able to get products that they need —
THE PRESIDENT: They are.
Q — because priority is given to large businesses. Does your administration have any policies or plans in place to aid the current supply chain problem and/or to help small businesses that are affected by this?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes on both. (Applause.) Here — but you — but you have it exactly right.
We have a significant supply chain problem. In the Obama-Biden administration, all of American business — and it made sense — it was just on time. You wanted to make sure that you didn’t waste any money and/or time between producing whatever you’re producing and having it done. You didn’t — so that’s how you saved money. You didn’t buy the material six months ahead of time and then keep it in your inventory and then move it. It was on time.
Now, that’s a big problem. You can’t — people can’t do it. They want to get out ahead. What I’ve recently done — and people said — doubted we could get it done. I was able to go to the private por- — 40 percent of all products coming into the United States of America on the West Coast go through Los Angeles and — and — oh, what am I doing here?
MR. COOPER: Is it Long Beach or —
THE PRESIDENT: Long Beach. Thank you.
And I know both the mayors. So I went to them and I said, “What can we do?” So I met with — and they’re privately owned, these ports — these two. So I met with the business people. I met with all their major customers — the Walmarts of the world and all the rest. There are like 70 ships waiting out there unable to get unloaded.
So, I — and because — not always — the longshoremen don’t always get along with the business folks in there. I got — I have a relationship with them. And I brought them together, and I said, “You got to be open 24/7.” No port there was open tw- — open five days a week, 40 hours a week. 24/7 — they’ve all agreed to it. They’ve agreed to it.
MR. COOPER: Would you consider the National Guard to help with the supply chain issue?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, absolutely, positively, I would do that. But in addition to that, what you got to do is you got to get these ships in and unloaded.
And one of the things in my — my infrastructure plan: There’s $16 billion for port expansion. We have to be able to move things along. Because what’s happening is, when we — a product your mother may need for interior design, in terms of drapery or colors or something, that is imported from somewhere else. Well, guess what? A lot of these places, particularly in South Asia, are closing down because of COVID. The businesses are just flat closing. They’re —
MR. COOPER: So, would you consider the National Guard for trucking? For — because there’s a lot of problems —
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
MR. COOPER: — with not enough truck drivers right now.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. But here’s — and that’s why what we’re doing now —
MR. COOPER: Do you have a timetable for that?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I had a timetable to — first of all, I want to get the ports up and running, and get the railroads and the rail heads and the trucks in port ready to move. Because I’ve gotten Walmart and others that say, “We’re going to move stuff off of the port, into our warehouses.” Which (inaudible).
MR. COOPER: So, are you — but you’re actually talking about having National Guardsmen and women —
THE PRESIDENT: The answer is —
MR. COOPER: — driving trucks?
THE PRESIDENT: The answer is: Yes, if we can’t move the — increase the number of truckers, which we’re in the process of doing.
MR. COOPER: Okay.
THE PRESIDENT: If we did at this moment, we’re not — but the whole point is: We’ve got to get the small business as well, because the big guys are in trouble. And a lot of the product that your mother makes, the product she — the things she does in her interior design building, the material she buys from the larger outfits. I assume; I don’t know that.
I — I — but my whole point is: Small businesses need the help badly. Small businesses make up 60 percent of all the revenue coming from business out there.
MR. COOPER: I want to bring in Linda Harris. She’s from Elkridge, Maryland. She’s a software project manager, Democrat. Linda, what’s your question?
Q Hey, President Biden.
THE PRESIDENT: Hey.
Q My middle-class family of four lives on a pretty tight budget. My husband and I both work full-time at well-paying jobs, but we still struggle some months to make the ends meet. With rising gas prices and utility prices and grocery prices, we’re feeling our discretionary income get squeezed and reduced. What plans does the administration have to help ease this kind of current crunch we’re feeling?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, there’s a number of things that have already been done. And it’s hard — and people don’t think about — the American Rescue Plan has provided for an awful lot — the $1.9 billion we passed right at — right after I got elected.
So, what you got is you got that — that $1,400 check in the mail, and you got a lot of things that help ameliorate some of the concerns and costs, because we knew what we were coming into. We knew we had inherited the wind, and things were going to get worse before they got better.
But in terms of being able to have what my dad used to say, “a little breathing room,” just a lit- — my — my dad busted his neck. He didn’t have a good-paying job. My dad was a well-read high-school-educated guy who thought his greatest sin in the world was he didn’t get to go to college.
And — but my dad was one of those guys that worked like hell, would come home for dinner, and then he’d go back and finish up work and close the shop. He — and — and the whole point of it was that all we want to give — all he’d talk about is “Joey, all I need is just a little breathing room, a little space — a little space.”
MR. COOPER: Let me — let me ask you about that, just in terms of inflation, because you had told us at a town hall, I think it was in July, that the — it was just near-term inflation. The Wall Street Journal recently talked to like 67 financial experts who said that they saw high inflation going all the way — or deep into 2022. Do you think it’s going to last for a while?
THE PRESIDENT: I — I don’t think so. I don’t think it will last if — depending what we do. If we stay exactly where we are, yes. If we don’t make these investments, yes.
MR. COOPER: What about gas prices? Because some states —
THE PRESIDENT: Gas pri- —
MR. COOPER: — are seeing —
THE PRESIDENT: Gas prices relate to a foreign policy initiative that is about something that goes beyond the cost of gas. And we’re about $3.30 a gallon most places now, when it’s up from — when it was down in the single digits. I mean — single di- — a dollar-plus. And — and that’s because of the supply being withheld by OPEC.
And so, there’s a lot of negotiation that is — there — there’s a lot of Middle Eastern folks who want to talk to me.
MR. COOPER: Mm-hmm.
THE PRESIDENT: I’m not sure I’m going to talk to them. But the point is, it’s about gas production. There is things we can do, in the meantime, though.
MR. COOPER: Do you think there’s a — I mean, do you see a — do you have a timeline for gas prices of when you think they may start coming down?
THE PRESIDNET: My guess is you’ll start to see gas prices come down as we get by — going into the winter — I mean, excuse me, into next year, in 2022. I don’t see anything that’s going to happen in the meantime that’s going to significantly reduce gas prices.
But, for example, for natural gas to heat your homes as winter is coming, there’s a lot — what people don’t realize: We put in billions of dollars in what they call “LIHEAP.” LIHEAP is the provision whereby you’re able to get funding from the federal government based upon your need to heat your home, and it is subsidized in a significant way. And there’s billions of dollars we have passed in the legislation I got passed in — in March of this year, because we anticipated that would be a problem, as well.
But the answer ultimately is — “ultimately” meaning the next three or four years — is investing in renewable energy. What I was able to do — (applause) — no, I — and, by the way, I really — I’m not — I’m not being — I mean, I’m being literal when I say this: What I was able to do when I ran — and you remember, Anderson, because I was on your show a couple times, and the issue was whether or not I could ever get the labor unions to support my environmental programs.
And I went out and I went to the IBEW and, as well, to the autoworkers, and I laid out my plan. They fully embraced it. Why? Because — and I spent time at General Motors and other companies, and I got General Mo- — I didn’t get them — General Motors decided, after a long time spent talking to me — they were suing California because they had a higher standard — mileage standard. They dropped the suit and agreed that they would be 50 percent electric vehicles by 2030 — by 2030. (Applause.) And now you have all three — all three major manufacturers saying the same thing.
So, what will ha- — what will happen is: You’re going to see a dramatic drop — a dramatic drop in what’s going to happen in terms of gas prices as we go into the next two or three years. Even if we’re not able to break the monopoly price — they’re keeping it up because — anyway.
So there’s — there — but I don’t — I must tell you, I don’t have a near-term answer. There’s two things I could do: I could go in the petroleum reserve and take out and probably reluce [sic] — reduce the price of gas maybe 18 cents or so a gallon. It’s still going to be above three bucks.
And one of the things that I refuse to have happen, because I didn’t want anybody — I made a commitment: If you pass the stuff I’m talking about, not — not one single penny in tax would go against anybody making less than 400 grand.
And so, if you notice, this is — these highway bills are not paid for by gas tax. They’re paid for by direct expenditures in other areas. So, the average person doesn’t have to pay more.
But it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be hard. There’s a possibility to be able to bring it down. Depends on — little bit on Saudi Arabia and a few other things that are in the offing.
MR. COOPER: Let me take a quick break. We’ll have more from President Joe Biden. (Applause.)
(Commercial break.)
MR. COOPER: And welcome back to our CNN Town Hall with President Joe Biden. (Applause.) Got a lot more questions to get to.
I want to introduce Neijma Donner, a professor and social worker at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. She’s an independent and mother of two young boys. We’re going to be talking about COVID.
Neijma, what’s your question?
Q Thank you for taking my question, President. When will the vaccines for young children be ready? And how accessible will they be once released?
THE PRESIDENT: I believe — and I want to make it clear: Unlike past administrations, science will dictate this. I’m not telling anyone at — (applause) — no, I really mean it. (Applause.)
But I do ask my COVID team what the expectations are. The expectations are it’ll be ready in the near term — meaning weeks, not — not months and months. Okay? That’s number one.
Number two, there are over 800,000 sites right now that exist in America where you can go get a vaccine. And you’re going to be able to do that with your children, particularly — we’re going to try to work it out to deal with childcare centers — make it available there — as well as your pediatricians and the — you know, and the docs — and finding places where you can do it. Some places are talking about doing at — you know, in churches on the weekend and that kind of thing.
So there’ll be plenty of places to — to be able to get the vaccine when — if and when it is approved.
And it’s likely to be approved. I spent a lot of time with the team on these things. And it’s likely to be approved and what — whether it’s Moderna or whether it’s Pfizer or whether it’s J&J, it’s going to be approved. And it will be a much smaller dose — basically the same dose, but a smaller dose. And they’re doing a lot of tests on it right now.
And — and those of you who have children or brothers or sisters who are between — you know, who are in that age category above 12, get — get the vaccine for them. Get the vaccine. (Applause.) Get it now.
MR. COOPER: Let me ask you — Mr. President — Mr. President —
THE PRESIDENT: By the way, there’s two famous guys in this audience here. I just noticed. (Laughter.) Ben Cardin — (applause) — and Chris Van Hollen. (Applause.) And the mayor! Holy mackerel.
MR. COOPER: Mr. —
THE PRESIDENT: This is a busman’s holiday for you guys, having to come here. (Laughter.) But thank you.
MR. COOPER: Mr. President, let me ask you a follow-up about that. As many as one in three emergency responders in some cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, right here in Baltimore, are refusing to comply with city vaccine mandates.
I’m wondering where you stand on that. Should police officers, emergency responders be mandated to get vaccines? And if not, should they be — stay at home or let go?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes and yes. (Applause.)
And, by the way — by the way, I waited until July to talk about mandating, because I tried everything else possible. The mandates are working. All the stuff about people leaving and people getting — you have — you have everyone from United Airlines to Spirit — all these airlines. They’re — we’re not going to get all — 96, 97 percent of the people have gotten the vaccine.
All the talk about all these folks who are going to leave the military if they were mandated — not true. You got about a 90-something percent vaccination rate.
I mean, so there’s a — the idea is that — look, the two things that concern me — one, are those who just tried to make this a political issue. “Freedom. I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID.” (Laughter.) No, I mean, come on. “Freedom.” (Laughter.) Number one.
Number two — the second one is that, you know, the gross misinformation that’s out there. Like what they’re saying about my buddy Colin Powell — (applause) — and he was my friend — who passed away. “Colin Powell was vaccinated, and he still died.” Well, he knew he had serious underlying conditions. And it would be difficult — he clearly would have been gone earlier had he not gotten the vaccine, had he not gotten the — the shots.
But my generic point is: There’s so much misinformation.
And you know what I find fascinating? I turn on Fox to find out how popular I am. (Laughter.) Well, I —
MR. COOPER: How are you doing there?
THE PRESIDENT: I’m doing very well. (Laughter.) I think I’m at 3 percent favorable. But — (laughter) —
But all kidding aside, one of the things I find: Do you realize they mandate vaccinations?
MR. COOPER: At Fox headquarters.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. (Applause.) I find that mildly fascinating.
MR. COOPER: You find that mildly fascinating?
THE PRESIDENT: Mildly fascinating.
MR. COOPER: I want to bring in — (laughter) — Thaddeus Price from — (applause). This is Thaddeus Price from Randallstown, Maryland. He’s a program coordinator at Morgan State University and a Democrat. (Applause.)
Thaddeus, welcome.
Q Good evening, Mr. President. You received overwhelming support from the Black community, and rightfully so. (Applause.) Rightfully so. But now many of us are disheartened —
THE PRESIDENT: Yep.
Q — as we watch a Congress fail to support police reform. We watch our voting rights vanish before our very eyes. (Applause.)
Mr. President, my question is: What will you do over the next three years to rectify these atrocities, secure our democracy, and ensure that freedoms and liberties that all Americans should be entitled to? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, you’ve stated the proposition accurately, in my view. I did get overwhelming support from the African American community. Only folks in Maryland understand Delaware is the eighth-largest Black population in America, as a percent of population. It’s been the source of my support. The only folks that helped me more than Black men are Black women. (Applause.)
And — and I tell you what my greatest regret is: My greatest regret is I have these — had these three major pieces of legislation that are going to change the circumstances for working-class folks and African Americans, as well, that I’ve been busting my neck trying to pass. But what it’s done is prevented me from getting deeply up to my ears — which I’m going to do once this is done — in dealing with police brutality, dealing with the whole notion of: What are we going to do about voting rights? It’s the greatest assault on voting rights in the history of the United States — for real — since the Civil War.
Q Yes. Yes, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: And, you know, for example: When I was in the Chair- — when I was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, I thought I had done something really important. And I was able to get passed and extended the Voting Rights Act for 25 years and get everyone on that committee, including the southern — the senator from South Carolina and others, to vote for it. I thought we had moved.
The point I’m making is this: We’re at a terrible place right now. And so, when this gets done — and in the meantime, here’s what I’ve done: I have the authority to deal with federal law enforcement.
So federal law enforcement, I’ve — we’ve issued mandates: no chokeholds, number one; make sure that we’re going to be able to do — have no no-knock warrants; in a position where we’re going to be able to see to it that we are able to go look at — and we’re doing it in four cities right now — patterns of abuse and patterns of misconduct of police departments; making sure that we have access to police records, in terms of what’s happening in —
So there’s a lot I’ve been able to do by executive order, in essence.
MR. COOPER: Let me ask you, on voting rights: If it is as important to you as you say, I think there’s a lot of Democrats who look at the filibuster and would like to see it changed, even if it was just on this one case. (Applause.) Why do you oppose that?
THE PRESIDENT: By the way, I think they make a very good point.
Here’s the deal: If, in fact, I get myself into, at this moment, the debate on the filibuster, I lose three — at least three votes right now to get what I have to get done on the economic side of the equation — the foreign policy side of the equation.
So, what I have said — you’re shaking your head no, but let me tell you something, Jack: It’s the truth. (Laughter.) Number one.
Number two. Number two, what I have proposed in the meantime is — it used to be the filibuster. The way it worked — and we have 10 times as many — more than that — times the filibuster has been used since 1978. It used to be you had to stand on the floor and exhaust everything you had, and you — when — and when you gave up the floor and someone else sought the floor, they had to talk until they finished. You’re only allowed to do it a second time. After that, it’s over; you vote — somebody moves for the vote. I propose we bring that back now, immediately. (Applause.)
But I also think we’re going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster. The idea that, for example, my Republican friends say that we’re going to default on the national debt because they’re going to filibuster that and we need 10 Republicans to support us is the most bizarre thing I ever heard.
I think you’re going to see an aw- — if they — gets pulled again, I think you’ll see an awful lot of Democrats being ready to say, “Not me. I’m not doing that again. We’re going to end the filibuster.”
But it still is difficult to end the filibuster, beyond that. That’s another issue. But —
MR. COOPER: But — but are you saying once you get this current agenda passed on spending and social programs that you would be open to fundamentally altering the filibuster or —
THE PRESIDENT: I am open to —
MR. COOPER: — doing away with it?
THE PRESIDENT: — fundamentally altering —
MR. COOPER: Or doing away with it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, that remains to be seen, exactly what that means, in terms of “fundamentally altering” it, whether or not we just end the filibuster straight up.
There are certain things that are just sacred rights. One’s a sacred obligation that we never are going to renege on a debt. We’re the only nation in the world — we have never, ever reneged on a single debt.
MR. COOPER: But when it comes to voting rights, do you —
THE PRESIDENT: Voting rights is equally as consequential.
MR. COOPER: When it comes to voting rights — just so I’m clear, though — you would entertain the notion of doing away with the filibuster on that one issue? Is that correct?
THE PRESIDENT: And maybe more.
MR. COOPER: And maybe other issues? (Applause.)
Okay, let’s — just a short time ago, the full House voted to hold — to hold former Trump ally, Steve Bannon — current Trump ally as well — (laughter) — in criminal contempt of Congress.
A week ago, you said the Department of Justice should prosecute those who defied subpoenas from the January 6th Committee. Was that appropriate for you to weigh in on?
THE PRESIDENT: No, the way I said it was not appropriate. I said — they asked me would I — do I think that he — they should be prosecuted for denying the — for not showing up at the committee. And I said, “Yes.”
Now that — when I’ve made a commitment — the plu- — the — one of the things I was committed to do when I ran was re-establish the reputation and integrity of the Justice Department. It has become the most — it was corrupted under the last administration.
I should have chosen my words more wisely. I did not, have not, and will not pick up the phone and call the Attorney General and tell him what he should or should not do in terms of who he should prosecute. (Applause.)
But, I answered the question honestly. And I think that a — anyone who does not respond to that kind of en- — question from the — from the — a legitimate committee in the House of Representatives or the United States Senate should be held accountable.
So that’s as much as I can say without coming and looking like I’m telling the — I have yet to talk to the Attorney General about anything (inaudible) —
MR. COOPER: The Attorney General put out a statement saying that they would make the decision on their own.
THE PRESIDENT: And they will.
MR. COOPER: Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: I guarantee that.
MR. COOPER: You’ve decided not to exert executive privilege to shield the former President in the House’s investigation into January 6th. Why? What were you —
THE PRESIDENT: Well, again, I’m leaving that to them to tell me what — and I didn’t — it’s not a blanket “I will not release the information.” It’s, I’m asking them to take a look at what is legitimate — what would legitimately fall in the position that future Presidents’ authority would be compromised by that, and what is. I don’t think there’s much legitimacy in the claim.
So that’s being looked at right now.
MR. COOPER: We’re going to take another quick break. We’ll have more with President Joe Biden. (Applause.)
(Commercial break.)
MR. COOPER: And welcome back to our CNN Town Hall with President Joe Biden. We’re taking questions from the audience on a range of topics.
I want to bring in Megan Crawford from Towson, Maryland. She’s a law student at the University of Baltimore and a Republican.
Megan, welcome. (Applause.)
Q Throughout your campaign, you’ve criticized former President Trump for his treatment of illegal immigrants and the southern border. Given that it’s nearly been a year into your campaign, why haven’t you been to the southern border of our country? And why did your stance on allowing immigrants suddenly revert to Trump-era policies?
THE PRESIDENT: Well — (applause) — they’re legitimate questions. Number one, the Remain in Mexico policy, which I oppose, the Court said I had to maintain it. So, we’re repealing it. That’s one of the reasons why we haven’t changed it.
We have made a gigantic change — there were over 5,000 children — children — in the — in the custody of the Border Patrol. There are now 504. We are making more progress than you think.
And we have a circumstance where one of the things that is going to bear fruit, I believe, is: I put together a program when I was a senator, and the Vice President is helping — helping initiate it now, where we provide for funding to change the circumstances on the ground in the countries in Central America.
For example, you’re in a circumstance where, you know, people don’t just sit around their — their hand-hewn table and say, “I got a great idea: Let’s sell everything we have, give it to coyote, let them take us across the border, drop us in a desert — a place they don’t want us. Won’t that be fun?”
People do it because they’re desperate. They’re desperate. And what I’ve been trying to do — and I’m trying to do in this legislation, as well — is get funding so we have funding for immigration officers to be able to hear cases immediately of whether or not they justify having asylum granted to them.
MR. COOPER: Mr. President —
THE PRESIDENT: We don’t have that.
MR. COOPER: You have kept in place, under a Public Health Authority known as Title 42 —
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
MR. COOPER: — which is a Trump-era policy, which allows immediate or very quick return to people who crossed over the border based on COVID protocols.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. And that is — we’ve maintained that because of the extent of the — of the — continued extent of COVID in those countries from which people are coming. It’s very, very high. And so, we’ve maintained the policy.
We are — we are not sending back children. We send back adults, and we send back fa- — large families. But we don’t send back children in that circumstance.
And so that’s why I have a proposal to provide for over a billion doses of COVID vaccine to the rest of the world, including a significant portion to Latin and Central America.
MR. COOPER: Do you have plans to visit the southern border?
THE PRESIDENT: I’ve been there before, and I haven’t — I mean, I know it well. I guess I should go down. But the — but the whole point of it is: I haven’t had a whole hell of lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by — by hurricanes and floods and — and weather, and traveling around the world.
But I plan on — now, my wife, Jill, has been down. She’s been on both sides of the river. She’s seen the circumstances there. She’s looked into those places. You notice you’re not seeing a lot of pictures of kids lying on top of one another with — you know, with — with bla- — with, you know, looks like tarps on top of them.
We’ve been able to deal that — we’ve been able to significantly increase funding through the HHS — Health and Human Services — to provide shelter for these kids and people. But there’s much more to be done.
And — and I realize — I — I think it is — it’s the thing that concerns me the most about being able to get control of it. Because I got to, number one, get enough funding to provide for immediate determination of whether or not someone that is, in fact, legitimately claiming a right to stay in the country because of legitimate fears. And it’s purely for economic reasons to get in line but not get in the country.
So, what we’re doing is bringing a lot of folks who are coming in and they’re doing ankle bracelets instead of people being sent back, depending on whether or not their claim appears to be legitimate.
MR. COOPER: Let me ask you about two other issues in the news. In less than two weeks, Minneapolis voters are going to decide whether or not to replace the police department in Minneapolis with what they would call a “Public Safety Department.” What do you think of that?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it depends what they mean by that. Look, I — I — I grew up in a neighborhood —
MR. COOPER: They said the Public Safety Department would be — have a more comprehensive public health approach to the delivery of functions of public safety and could include licensed peace officers — police officers.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, could. I think you need police officers. I think we need police officers to protect us. I think they have to be under certain changed circumstances. But I think we have to provide for them more opportu- — I call for more money for police to go to community policing, as well as dealing with additional help for psych- — psychologists and others working with police departments.
MR. COOPER: You’ve never been a fan of defunding police.
THE PRESIDENT: No, I haven’t. I’ve never supported. But I’ve been a fan — (applause) — of controlling police and making sure they’re held accountable. That’s a — they’re two different issues.
And one of the things — look, when we had community policing, initially in the late ‘90s, violent crime dropped significantly — significantly. And the reason it did is because we had significant number of police. What I did: I eliminated the LEAA funding — Law Enforcement Assistance Act — (applause) — and I put in place the proposal that required community policing.
What that meant was: If you were all — it’s going to take a second, but it’s important. (Laughter.) If your — what — what that meant, if your city had authorized a police force of 100 people, you could not take the money for community policing and fire 50 people and rehire 50 so now I just had the federal government paying for half and you didn’t increase the number of police.
You had to increase the number of police beyond your wh- — whatever. So, I remember my son Beau was the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Delaware as attorney general of the state of Delaware. And he used to do what I did.
He’d go down the east side where you can find the best basketball in the coun- — in — in the city. You know, every — every town has those — those places. And he’d sit there on the bench with my son — my grandson, Hunter, who’s now 16, who was then 5, sitting the bench and he’d get to know these guys.
And he’d walk over and he’d knock on the window of the police car that was sitting there — the cop not getting out of the car — and say, “Get the hell out of the car and meet these folks.” “No.”
I’ll give you one example: What we required initially was every police — every community policeman — there were two assigned — they were assigned in groups of two — they had to know the neighborhood.
I remember getting a call, as you — you’ve been to Delaware; you go down that road as you’re heading down to the (inaudible) station — Martin Luther King Boulevard. There was a woman who lived in one of those apartments in the second floor that sort of had an outcroppings — a Victorian kind of — it was a two-story place.
And what — but the cops made sure they had — she had their phone number. So, when a drug deal was going down, she’d pick up the phone on call and say to that police officer with a cellphone that the drug deal is going down, knowing that she would never be fingered, knowing that she would never be the one told it happened. And so, crime began to drop.
They had to know who owned the local liquor store. They had to know and walk in and shake hands with the local minister. They had to know — that’s community policing.
MR. COOPER: Let me try to get in a couple other questions —
THE PRESIDENT: I’m sorry.
MR. COOPER: — from our audience.
THE PRESIDENT: Ask easy ones.
MR. COOPER: But before we do, just another quick news question: New York City is removing a statue of Thomas Jefferson from its legislative chamber because of Jefferson’s history as a slave — slave holder. Do you support that decision?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that’s up to the locality to decide what they want to do on that. Look, there’s — there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of people who have no social redeeming value, historically. And there’s others who have made serious mistakes in they — in — in terms of what — what exists now in terms of what we should be talking about, but have done an awful lot.
And so, the very thing — for example, I just spoke at the Martin Luther King dedication. And I pointed out that we’re right across from the Lincoln Memorial. Well, you know, and — and you talked about — and — and then the Jefferson Memorial. And what — what are we doing? I talked about how they said, “We’re unique in all the world, as a nation. We’re the only nation founded on an idea. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal, endowed by…”
No nation has ever been founded on an idea. Have we ever lived up to it? No.
MR. COOPER: Let me br- —
THE PRESIDENT: But it’s a pretty big idea that somebody wrote that down and got the rest of the country to agree to it. So it depends. It depends. And it’s —
MR. COOPER: Let me bring — let me bring in Glenn Niblo, a student at Loyola University, originally from Connecticut. He’s a Republican. Glenn, welcome. (Applause.)
Q Hi.
THE PRESIDENT: Where in Connecticut are you from?
Q Greenwich.
THE PRESIDENT: That’s great.
Q China just tested a hypersonic missile. What will you do to keep up with them militarily? And can you vow to protect Taiwan?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes and yes. We are — militarily, China, Russia, and the rest of the world knows we have the most powerful military in the history of the world. Don’t worry about whether we’re going to — they’re going to be more powerful. What you do have to worry about is whether or not they’re going to engage in activities that will put them in a position where there — they may make a serious mistake.
And so, I have had — I have spoken and spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader has. That’s why you have — you know, you hear people saying, “Biden wants to start a new Cold War with China.” I don’t want a Cold War with China. I just want to make China understand that we are not going to step back. We are not going to change any of our views.
MR. COOPER: So, are you saying that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if —
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
MR. COOPER: — China attacked?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, we have a commitment to do that.
MR. COOPER: All right. We’re going to — we’re going to — we’re going to take another quick break. We got more questions from the audience. We’ll be right back. (Applause.)
(Commercial break.)
MR. COOPER: And welcome back. We are live with President Joe Biden, here in the city of Baltimore.
Just in the few minutes we have left: The country lost — and I know you lost somebody who you considered close friend, General Colin Powell. What’s something about him that people didn’t know?
THE PRESIDENT: He had enormous integrity; they knew that. But he’s one of the few serious, serious players I’ve dealt with over these years who, when he made a mistake, he acknowledges it. He said, “I ackno- — I was wrong about it.”
MR. COOPER: That’s rare these days. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: No, it’s rare. It’s been rare — it’s rare in human nature for someone in a powerful position to say they are wrong. They are wrong. “I made a mistake.” That’s a hard thing to do. And I’ve had to do it about a half a dozen times lately. (Laughter.) But — but all kidding aside —
And the second thing about him was he had a lot of serious — he had real compassion. You know, his — well, I’ll tell you afterwards, but — because we only have a few minutes.
He and I went out to the Secret Service racetrack. He had a brand-new Corvette his — his family bought — his kids bought him. And I have a ’67 327/350, and we raced. We raced. (Laughter and applause.)
And, you know — you know, the only reason — no, I’m serious. It was on “Jay Leno.” Check it out. “Jay Leno Live.” He’s — he’s a hell of a guy.
MR. COOPER: Who won?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I won only because he was worried I was going to crash into him. (Laughter.) Because I don’t have positraction, so I was burning rubber the whole way out there, and I could see him going, “Whoa.” (Laughter.)
MR. COOPER: All right. So just — my final question is: You famously — at the signing ceremony, I think it was, for Obamacare, you famously leaned in to the then-President, and — I’m not going to say a direct quote, but — (laughter) — off-mic, you said, “This is a big [effing] deal.” (Laughter.)
And I’m wondering: The Build Back Better plan — is it a bigger effing deal than that? (Laughter and applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Sixty seconds. We got in the car to go over to the — the Department of Education after we did that.
MR. COOPER: Oh, I thought you were talking about drag racing still.
THE PRESIDENT: No, no. He got in the car, and he was laughing like hell. I said, “What’s so damn funny?” And he told me.
I whispered in his ear — this way. I looked to see where it was. I said, “I’m going to — and this is a big deal.” And I didn’t realize the guy behind me was really lipreading. You can see it. (Laughter.) No, I’m serious.
The answer is: Yes, this is bigger. No, it is bigger because — not — not because what he did wasn’t enormous. He broke the ice. Enormous.
But part of what I have in here is we also increased access to the Affordable Care Act, and we reduced the price an average of 60 bucks a month for anyone who’s in the Affordable Care Act. Plus, on top of that, we have another 300 billion dollars’ worth of healthcare ever — in it.
So, it’s — I would say this is a bigger darn deal. (Applause.)
MR. COOPER: Mr. President, thank you very much. Appreciate your time.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much.
9:29 P.M. EDT
8. White House officials clarify multiple Biden comments made during live town hall
Compare this excerpt with the President's remarks.
Excerpts:
But a White House spokesperson on Friday told Fox News that the president "was not announcing any change in our policy."
"There is no change in our policy," the spokesperson told Fox News. "The U.S. defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act."
"We will uphold our commitment under the Act, we will continue to support Taiwan's self-defense, and we will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo," the spokesperson added.
The Taiwan Relations Act to which the United States is a party does not guarantee the U.S. will engage militarily if China attacks Taiwan, which it has claimed for decades is sovereign Chinese territory, but states that the United States "will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain self-sufficient defense capabilities."
U.S. presidents have pursued a policy of "strategic ambiguity" so that China would not know exactly what the U.S. response would be to an attack.
White House officials clarify multiple Biden comments made during live town hall
White House official told Fox News: 'We are not actively pursuing the use of the national guard on a federal level'
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.
The White House clarified a number of statements President Biden made during a live town hall Thursday night, walking back his vow to call in the National Guard to aid the congested supply chain and his suggestion that the United States would defend Taiwan from a potential attack from China.
The White House told Fox News on Friday that "requesting the use of the national guard at the state level is under the purview of Governors."
"We are not actively pursuing the use of the national guard on a federal level," a White House official told Fox News.
The clarification came after the president, during a CNN town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper Thursday night, was asked if he would consider having National Guardsmen drive trucks to make up for the lack of truck drivers amid the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
President Biden participates in a CNN town hall at the Baltimore Center Stage Pearlstone Theater, Thursday, Oct. 21, 2021, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Biden said he would, and that he had a timetable to solve the crisis.
"I had a timetable for, first of all, I want to get the ports up and running," the president said, noting the commitments he had from Walmart and other companies, like UPS and FedEx, to run 24/7 operations to help quell the congested supply chain.
When pressed further on whether he would want the National Guard to drive trucks, the president replied: "The answer is yes, if we can't move to increase the number of truckers, which we're in the process of doing."
Shifting to foreign policy, the president was asked by a member of the audience about China’s recent testing of a hypersonic missile and questioned him about whether the United States would defend Taiwan in the wake of an attack from Beijing.
"China, Russia, and the rest of the world knows we have the most powerful military in the history of the world. Don't worry about whether we're going to – they're going to be more powerful," Biden said in the CNN town hall. "What you do have to worry about is whether or not they're going to engage in activities that will put them in a position where they may make a serious mistake."
Biden added that he does "not want a Cold War with China."
"I just want to make China understand that we are not going to step back, we are not going to change any of our views," Biden said.
Cooper chimed in, pressing again on whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, to which Biden replied: "Yes, we have a commitment to do that."
By Friday morning, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson responded to the comment via the Chinese state-affiliated Global Times.
"No one should underestimate the strong resolve, determination and capability of the Chinese people to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity," the spokesperson said, according to the mouthpiece for the brutal communist regime. "China has no room for compromise."
The Global Times added that China's foreign ministry told the U.S. to "be cautious in words and deeds" and to "refrain from sending any wrong signal to secessionists."
But a White House spokesperson on Friday told Fox News that the president "was not announcing any change in our policy."
"There is no change in our policy," the spokesperson told Fox News. "The U.S. defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act."
"We will uphold our commitment under the Act, we will continue to support Taiwan's self-defense, and we will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo," the spokesperson added.
The Taiwan Relations Act to which the United States is a party does not guarantee the U.S. will engage militarily if China attacks Taiwan, which it has claimed for decades is sovereign Chinese territory, but states that the United States "will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain self-sufficient defense capabilities."
U.S. presidents have pursued a policy of "strategic ambiguity" so that China would not know exactly what the U.S. response would be to an attack.
Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway province and claims that it is part of its own territory. The two countries split in 1949, and China has been increasing pressure on the self-ruled nation while opposing its involvement in international organizations such as the United Nations. The U.S. does not formally recognize Taiwan but maintains an unofficial relationship and is supportive of its democratic government.
The Biden administration has aimed to compartmentalize its relationship with China – competing in some respects while seeking cooperation on other issues, like climate change. But it has made clear for months that the United States will defend Taiwan, which is a democratic island off the coast of China.
"We have an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. We consider this central to the security and stability of the broader Indo-Pacific region," a senior administration official told Fox News in August as China aimed to seize on the Afghanistan withdrawal to intimidate Taiwan.
"We will uphold our commitment under [Taiwan Relations Act], we will continue support Taiwan’s self-defense, and we will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo," the official said.
9. 'Defend Taiwan' can hardly be seen as a slip of the tongue, but Biden has yet to say how or dare to 'stand against 1.4b Chinese' - Global Times
The expected response to the President's remarks on Taiwan from the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece.
'Defend Taiwan' can hardly be seen as a slip of the tongue, but Biden has yet to say how or dare to 'stand against 1.4b Chinese' - Global Times
US President Joe Biden. Photo: AFP
The US would come to Taiwan's defense if the island faces a Chinese mainland "incursion," US President Joe Biden confirmed on Thursday. The strongest comments from the 78-year-old leader were believed as challenging Chinese mainland's redline and also deviating from Washington's "strategic ambiguity" on the Taiwan question.
Despite the White House attempting to clarify Biden's comments to calm the situation, saying the president was "not announcing any change in our policy and there is no change in our policy," China's Foreign Ministry on Friday warned the US that China has no room for compromise when it comes to safeguarding sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.
No one should underestimate the strong resolve, determination and capability of the Chinese people to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin, urging the US to not "stand against the 1.4 billion Chinese people."
We urge the US side to earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués, be cautious in words and deeds on the Taiwan question, and refrain from sending any wrong signals to secessionist, so as not to seriously damage China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits, Wang said.
When asked about whether the US would protect Taiwan if China attacked in a CNN town hall meeting on Thursday night, Biden said "Yes," and the US has "a commitment to do that," US media reported.
Biden's comments came amid rising tension in the Taiwan Straits, with EU Parliament lawmakers pushing forward a resolution to deepen so-called political and economic ties with the island of Taiwan and the Biden administration's pick for ambassador to China vowing to make the island "a tough nut to crack."
Observers said the overall US policy toward the Taiwan question is becoming clearer, and that China should not interpret some of the US moves seeking cooperation with China as signs of softening.
Moreover, the argument of "domestic hawkish pressure in the US" as a reason for being tough on China is hardly impressing Chinese experts.
Two Su-35 fighter jets and an H-6K bomber fly in formation on May 11, 2018. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) air force conducted patrol training over China's island of Taiwan. Photo: Xinhua
No more 'strategic ambiguity?'
Experts reached by the Global Times believe that Biden's remarks should not be seen as a slip of the tongue or an accident. China needs to intensify its communication with the US in diplomacy, and in military, China should be fully prepared for tactical interventions by the US.
In August this year, when Biden attempted to appease allies after the US pullout from Afghanistan, he said, "We made a sacred commitment to Article Five that if in fact anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with - Taiwan." Observers believe that his remarks seem to confuse the island with other allies that have formal security guarantees from the US. After the interview, a high-level official also told the press that US policy toward Taiwan island has not changed.
Analysts said that many hawks see the Taiwan Relations Act as an important justification for defending Taiwan. In April 2001, then US president George W. Bush said the US would do "whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself" in the event of an attack by the Chinese mainland, CNN reported. Bush is the only president who made such comments before Biden in the past two decades.
The US is in the process of constantly clarifying its one-China policy, including some so-called Taiwan-related legislation passed in the Trump era, Diao Daming, an associate professor at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, told the Global Times on Friday.
No matter what the White House says, Biden's remarks illustrate a US obsession with Taiwan on which his younger aides, including members of Congress, are not backing down, Diao said.
Experts said looking at the larger picture, the US' signals on the Taiwan question are still vague and complicated. Considering the need for cooperation with the Chinese mainland, some US politicians are considering whether to inherit such rhetoric popular during the Trump era.
On the CNN town hall meeting on Thursday, Biden also dismissed the idea of starting a cold war with China.
Regarding the recent remarks by the nominated US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns on the Taiwan question, calling the mainland government "aggressive" and emphasizing US commitment to the island, some experts said people should not be too optimistic about the recent detente between Chinese mainland and the US.
"In some areas the adjustment may be positive, in others, however, it may be more negative," Diao said.
"Biden is trying to convince himself of what to avoid, but at the same time he can't let go of this hyped-up obsession on certain issues," Diao said, noting if this contradiction remains for a long term, there can only be one explanation: Biden wants to see a clash happen in the Taiwan Straits but doesn't want to take responsibility if that happens, which is extremely dangerous.
Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times on Friday that compared with the US government's tendencies to remove strategic ambiguity, US strategic analysis on the Taiwan question has a clearer argument, but this clarity shows US efforts to "defend" Taiwan island would be very limited, and it is more about helping the island improve its self-defense capacity and making money by doing so.
The aim is to make the Chinese mainland pay more if it ever uses force to promote reunification, including military sacrifices, as well as to ensure the mainland is politically isolated after realizing reunification, the expert said.
"So far, not a single US government official has spelt what 'defending Taiwan' means if done by the US. Does it mean sending US troops to confront the PLA? No one has ever explained in detail," said Lü, noting ambiguity still exists, and no one dares to explain it clearly.
Even if China is not yet a lion, it is at least a strong bull today. The US said it would engage China from a position of strength. China can totally say exactly the same, said Lü.
During the National Day holidays, China sent more than 150 aircrafts to Taiwan island's self-proclaimed southwest air defense identification zone. "It is a warning to the US that if Washington takes risks, Beijing's countermeasures will shock it," the expert said.
Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, told the Global Times that to have meaningful military relations with Taiwan, the US would have to establish a major headquarters unit in Taiwan that would cost billions of dollars just to set up. In addition, the US doesn't have forces that are available to go to Taiwan. All our forces are dedicated to NATO, to the Middle East, he said.
"At the end of the day, it's gonna come down to money. How much money is the United States willing to put into the issue of Taiwan? We don't have any money available. That's the problem," Ritter said.
Domestic pressure?
Some say Biden is under pressure from domestic conservatives in the US, and experts reached by Global Times do not totally disagree with this perspective.
Biden has a strong sense of value and ideology within the Democratic Party, and his involvement in legislation related to arms sales to Taiwan was also evident during his time in the Senate.
If we compare the pressure Biden is facing domestically over the Taiwan question and the withdrawal decision from Afghanistan, it is hard to say which is larger. But in Afghanistan, Biden did what he wanted, Diao said.
"Domestic pressure" can be used as a bargaining chip for countries to gain leverage at the negotiating table, Diao said, suspecting that Biden's "defending-Taiwan" rhetoric may be driven more by his own will than by opposition pressure.
The role of the so-called opposition may be to show Beijing that there is a lot of pressure at home, so he has to say it strongly and Beijing has to accept this, Diao said.
Biden has not yet shown dominant strength in handling US domestic affairs. But he is tough on external affairs. He assumes that he has rich experience in this regard. If he has clear targets, he will not be constrained by so-called pressure, Diao said.
10. Biden won’t make good on ‘defend Taiwan’ claim
The Editorial response from the CCP to the President's remarks on Taiwan.
Biden won’t make good on ‘defend Taiwan’ claim: Global Times editorial - Global Times
Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
In an interview with CNN on Thursday, US President Joe Biden was asked whether the US would protect Taiwan island if the Chinese mainland attacked. "Yes, we have a commitment to do that," he answered. The interview quickly attracted eyeballs and interpretations.
As is known to all, the US has long held "strategic ambiguity" when it comes to the Taiwan question - not to make statements over whether to "defend" Taiwan island if the People's Liberation Army (PLA) makes military moves to reach reunification across the Straits. If Biden's answer implies that the US is giving up strategic ambiguity, and that US troops will fight the PLA if a war breaks out in the Straits, that would be a major shift in the cross-Straits situation and will be bound to trigger fierce confrontation.
In August this year, when Biden attempted to appease his allies after the US pullout from Afghanistan, he said, "We made a sacred commitment to Article Five that if in fact anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with - Taiwan." The rhetoric caused chaos at that time. The White House soon put out the fire, indicating that US policy on the Taiwan Straits has not changed. US academic circles and mainstream public opinion mostly believe that Biden' reply was "a slip of the tongue."
After Biden's interview with CNN on Thursday, a White House official clarified again the president's comments on the Taiwan question, saying there is no change in the US' Taiwan policy, stressing "the US defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act."
Biden's words are not backed by basic US policy or laws. Even the Taiwan Relations Act and Six Assurances do not include content on US commitment to send troops to defend the island. They only touch upon weapons sales to the Taiwan island, helping to enhance the island's defense capability. US diplomats could explain Biden's rhetoric as "a slip of the tongue." Since Biden often speaks incautiously, many people may also think that way.
Taking his answer literally, Biden's statement did break the previous US stance on Taiwan island. It created room for imagination that the Biden administration might be hatching a strategic change on the Taiwan question. Taiwan secessionist forces may be encouraged through his words and further stir up trouble by taking advantage of this statement, misleading the people on the island.
Whether it is a slip of the tongue, such a statement will not influence the Chinese mainland's determination and will over its stance on cross-Straits ties. US strategic ambiguity over the case may have been its tactic in the early years, but it is now becoming a forced choice to make without other alternatives in the face of reality.
The military strength between the two sides of the Straits used to be relatively balanced in the past. The US had advantages, and its strategic ambiguity was out of its diplomatic need toward China. But now, the PLA has an overwhelming advantage over the military on Taiwan island, with full capacity to cause unbearable results to US troops if they dare "defend" the island, and even to wipe them out. Only by sticking to the strategic ambiguity can the US maintain its position now, avoiding the scenario of either retreating or being involved in a war.
Over the past two years, some Americans wanted the US to abandon the strategic ambiguity policy and replace it with "strategic clarity." Their voices cannot be compared to those who clamor about human rights, which are far more violent and arrogant. In terms of the Taiwan question, US political circles and public opinion are generally cautious. They hold a negative and fearful attitude toward turning a fight with the PLA into a US obligation.
Biden does not have the political authority to announce that the US military will "defend Taiwan" when a war breaks out, nor does he have the confidence to have a strategic collision with the Chinese mainland in the Taiwan Straits to support Taiwan secessionists until a desperate fight erupts, and make the Americans bear the risk of a bottomless war for Taiwan island. So, even if he dared make a slip of the tongue, he would dare not really think so from the bottom of his heart.
Achieving peaceful reunification is a long-term policy of the Chinese mainland, but to deal with "Taiwan secessionists," we could resort to any means, including using force to punish them. Seeking "independence" and resisting reunification by military means is a dead end. And any move supporting "Taiwan secessionists" is a hostile act against China. Obviously, even for the US, it cannot make such an act recklessly.
11. Expert: Beijing’s ‘Wolf War’ diplomacy is a way of covering up the truth
Excerpts:
The two authors argue that the basic concept of “War Wolf” originates from Mao Zedong’s thought, which is at the core of CCP ideology.
Chinese media reported that then–CCP leader Mao Zedong told Beijing’s first diplomats, “Diplomacy is a political struggle. People do not fight with weapons. People fight with people’s pen and people’s words,” emphasizing the Party’s expansive doctrine of political warfare,
This strategy calls for using any and all tactics without the need for all-out military attacks to defeat the enemy.
Expert: Beijing’s ‘Wolf War’ diplomacy is a way of covering up the truth
Emma Wilson 10/21/21, 15:20
Chinese Foreign Affairs Spokesperson, Mr. Zhao Lijian on May 14, 2020. (WION/Screenshot by TheBL/YouTube)
Two very skilled and specialized writers on China-related matters, Frank Fang and Cathy He, have examined how China’s wolf diplomats fight the political war against China in The Western Hemisphere. Commentaries on the motivations for Beijing’s diplomacy are among them.
Chinese diplomats have repeatedly threatened and slandered countries such as France, Venezuela, and the United States in the opening months of this year.
The first face-to-face encounter between U.S. government officials and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) diplomats occurred in Alaska on March 18, 2021.
According to the two reporters, the CCP displayed a clear style of wolf diplomacy at this encounter.
Chinese diplomats have reacted angrily to U.S. criticism of the CCP’s powerful tactics at home and abroad.
Each side has two minutes to reach an agreement, according to the diplomatic convention. However, Mr. Yang Jiechi, a senior Chinese politician, and diplomat went over his allotted time by giving an introductory speech that lasted more than 15 minutes.
Mr. Yang chastised the United States for “struggling with democracy, a bad record on human rights, and unfair trade and foreign trade policies.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan reacted in defense of the United States.
Mr. Yang said he should have reminded the U.S. side to heed his tone in his respective starting remarks.
Diplomats from the CCP accused the United States of speaking “in a condescending tone” and violating diplomatic decorum. Mr. Yang Jiechi remarked that the United States is unqualified to converse with China.
At an ASEAN regional security meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, Mr. Yang Jiechi made a similar effort. Twelve countries expressed worry at the time about Beijing’s increasing aggression in the disputed South China Sea. “China is a giant country, and other countries are small ones, and that’s a truth,” Yang Jiechi raged.
Rise of the ‘War Wolf’
The CCP deployed war wolf diplomacy last year when Beijing fiercely resisted international criticism for its cover-up of the CCP virus outbreak.
Since then, CCP officials have frequently reacted angrily to international criticism of the CCP’s activities on Twitter and other platforms.
The CCP used the term “war wolf” after releasing a Rambo-style series of the same name in China. CCP diplomats become agitated, verbally aggressive, and unduly hostile and threatening due to the “war wolf” attitude.
To demonstrate, the authors provide several examples of War Wolf diplomacy.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhao Lijian accused the U.S. Army of delivering the virus to Wuhan in a tweet on March 12, 2020, saying the U.S. owes China an explanation.
2/2 CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation! pic.twitter.com/vYNZRFPWo3
— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) March 12, 2020
“The purpose of the allegation is to divert public attention from the investigation of the virus outbreak and the possibility that it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan,” said Frank Fang and Cathy He.
Also, in March, Venezuelan officials referred to the virus as the “Chinese” virus or the “Wuhan” virus. The Chinese embassy loudly demanded that Venezuelan officials “wear masks and shut up.”
In November 2020, Mr. Zhao Lijian posted a staged photo depicting a man dressed as an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife next to the neck of an Afghan child.
Mr. Zhao posted the image and commented that he was shocked by the Australian soldiers killing Afghan civilians and prisoners.
“We vehemently condemn such acts and call on them to be held accountable before the law,” Zhao said.
In response, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the tweet a “disgusting slanderous comment” against the Australian armed forces and demanded an apology from Beijing.
Where does “wolf war” diplomacy begin?
The two authors argue that the basic concept of “War Wolf” originates from Mao Zedong’s thought, which is at the core of CCP ideology.
Chinese media reported that then–CCP leader Mao Zedong told Beijing’s first diplomats, “Diplomacy is a political struggle. People do not fight with weapons. People fight with people’s pen and people’s words,” emphasizing the Party’s expansive doctrine of political warfare,
This strategy calls for using any and all tactics without the need for all-out military attacks to defeat the enemy.
Republishing a 2020 article from a local newspaper, the city authority of Nantong, a city in Jiangsu province, China, states that there is an equivalent “wolf nature” in the qualities of those who have absolute loyalty to the CCP.
A 2006 social science article analyzed how a “wolf culture” exists in Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and computer maker Lenovo. Former Huawei employees have previously said that the company has enthusiastically promoted “wolf culture,” a philosophy that founder Ren Zhengfei drew upon from his experience with the Chinese military.
Officially confirmed
CCP officials have openly endorsed this style. Last May, Liu Xiaoqing, then China’s ambassador to the U.K., told China state broadcaster CCTV that Chinese diplomats should act like “War Wolves.”
Months later, at a daily briefing in Dec. 2020, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she “doesn’t see any problem living with that “War Wolf.”
Beijing also claims it has the support of the people to engage in such diplomacy. In Dec. 2020, the Global Times reported that in a recent survey of 1,945 people in 16 Chinese cities, 71.2% said that Beijing should adopt a “war wolf” foreign policy.
According to Mr. Anders Corr, owner of the Journal of Political Risk and founder of Corr Analytics, the CCP’s methods ultimately backfired.
“Other countries quickly realized what it was. Its crudeness counters it. Countries respond through closer economic and military coordination and coalition building,” Corr said.
12. The Department of Defense’s Multidomain Operations Challenge - Global Security Review
Note the comments on phasing. Having a standard military template for phases prevents intellectual rigor and reduces campaigning to a checklist rather than the art and scones that it is. I was heartened with the new JP 5-0 removed the 6 phases template as a requirement.
As an aside, I think I recall the reason for the 6 phase standard template is a result of Secretary Rumsfled's demand following 9-11 when he had to review war plans and determine priority of resources. He asked how could he adequately assess war plans when they were all different and not aligned in a way that could be effectively analyzed. He wanted all plans to have the same format so that a phase by phase comparison could be made. And the phase 0 through Phase 5 construct was born and we now have "phase vocabulary" that calls for phase zero - operations left of "bang" or shaping operations and the dreaded phase four -post conflict or stability operations. Whenever anyone says Phase zero or Phase four everyone else knows what they mean.
I do fear the authors do not have a good understanding of irregular warfare. They seem to imply irregular warfare is simply doing Afghanistan and Iraq again. But irregualr warfare sis so much more than that.
Excerpts:
It Is More than Great-Power Competition
The United States’ first challenge is understanding that the country is already at war with Russia and China. Some within the military and foreign policy establishment attempt to coopt the joint-phasing construct, which includes six “phases” of conflict—laid out in Joint Publication 3-0 —as a way to easily distinguish between peace and war. However, this model was designed to arrange operations, not serve as a model for when war begins and ends.
Fig. 1. Joint Publication 3-0: Joint Operations (2010)
The Joint Staff has since reduced the focus on this phased approach to operational planning with its 2017 and 2020 revisions because too many planners and warfighters viewed the phases like a step-by-step process that, once completed, returns the United States to a state of peace. The perception that the military would seamlessly progress from Phase 0 to Phase V and back to Phase 0 was an easy mental model to follow but is contrary to the approaches of China and Russia.
Despite the Joint Staff’s effort to reshape thinking within the Department of Defense by recasting conflict as phase-less in recent revisions, this tidy conception of warfare persists. Jake Bebber is correct when he writes, “Yet it is here, in Phase 0, that adversaries are conducting military operations designed to deter and ultimately defeat the United States, whether in cyberspace or the broader ‘informationization’ of warfare. It is an era of persistent conflict.” Whether it is Russian hybrid warfare or Chinese informationized warfare, neither adversary sees a clear distinction between war and peace. We are already at war.
Contrary to the American view, the current era is not competition but war between the United States and China/Russia. This war is primarily in the information environment and cyber domain that it is all too frequently dismissed as competition when it is not.
Conclusion:
The move away from irregular warfare and toward large-scale conventional operations and multidomain operations is certainly the right move for the Department of Defense and the US Army. Field Manual 3-0, Operations, the Army’s new multidomain operations-focused doctrine, is a forward-looking attempt to meet the challenges of an operational environment that is at an inflection point. Developing a warfighting approach that gets inside China and Russia’s OODA loop is certainly understandable.
However, neither China nor Russia has the same conception of war and peace as the United States—leaving the Army, and the joint force, at a distinct disadvantage. Overcoming these shortcomings requires the following changes.
First, senior leaders must understand the United States is already at war with China and Russia in the cyber domain and information environment. Incorrectly describing war as “competition” leaves American forces to operate below the level of conflict, which signals a lack of resolve. Adversaries are specifically watching for the level of force employed in response to their attacks so they can evaluate the importance of interests at stake.
Second, the Army needs to shift from a focus on cyber security to a focus on mission assurance. Cyber security is neither necessary nor sufficient for the success of multidomain operations. Yet, as shown above, it serves as a pillar for success across a range of multidomain operations capabilities. This is a mistake that China and Russia are exploiting.
Third, the Army (and other services) must train soldiers in adversaries’ information operations methods and tactics to influence service members. With China and Russia developing more effective ways to use information against American service members, failure in the information environment is certain to have implications in the cognitive and physical domains.
For the United States to succeed in multidomain operations, merely developing and fielding new technologies is insufficient for American success. Fundamentally rethinking when and how war is fought is necessary. Anything less will leave the United States defeated before it ever recognizes war has begun.
The Department of Defense’s Multidomain Operations Challenge - Global Security Review
The Russians and the Chinese are developing capabilities to thwart American capabilities, complicating the success of multidomain operations.
In response to the shift towards Indo-Pacific regional concerns, the US Army and the Department of Defense began developing multidomain operations as a broad warfighting concept in 2016. Relying on a “third offset” that acknowledges the Army will “operate on congested, and potentially contaminated battlefields while under persistent surveillance, and will encounter advanced capabilities such as cyber, counter-space, electronic warfare, robotics, and artificial intelligence,” the goal is to develop information advantage that allows American forces to operate with greater speed and efficiency.
The problem with this information-dependent future is that adversaries are already working on asymmetric ways to disrupt and defeat this approach. Thus, we see five problems for the Army specifically, and also the overall joint force’s plans for a future where multidomain operations is the warfighting concept around which land forces and the joint force deter or defeat China and Russia: (1) understanding that the US is already at war with Russia and China; (2) multidomain operations rely on artificial intelligence; (3) the US is falling behind Russia and China in the development of robotic and autonomous systems; (4) China and Russia are leveraging Americans’ social media information presence to manipulate truth; and (5) adversaries are seeking to deny the US access to the electromagnetic spectrum.
The State of Play
Starting with background information is instructive. First, the shift to multidomain operations comes in response to the Asia-Pacific pivot, which the Obama administration and subsequent administrations began. To meet the needs of the pivot, the DoD authored the Air-Sea Battle concept (2013), which largely excluded the Army and incentivized the service to rethink its role in future conflicts.
The United States' first challenge is understanding that the country is already at war with Russia and China.
The US Army’s Field Manual 3-0, Operations (FM 3-0), currently in coordination, introduces multi-domain operations as the warfighting concept under which land forces will defeat Russia, China, or any adversary in large-scale conventional operations. The draft version describes multidomain operations as “how army forces enable and operate as part of the joint force against threats able to contest it in all domains” with a focus on creating and exploiting advantage across the continuum of conflict—integrating capabilities across multiple domains.1 This definition is similar to the Joint Staff’s definition of joint all domain command and control, which seeks to connect all military services’ sensors into a single network.
As Chris Dougherty has recently observed, the idea that all sensors can be connected to all shooters and that information advantage can be achieved once and for all are both unrealistic. Enough sensors connected to enough shooters during a period of enough advantage is the Army and the Department of Defense’s goal. Or, as General Glen Vanherck termed it, we need to focus on continually building the bike even as we ride it, and roads continue to change.
It Is More than Great-Power Competition
The United States’ first challenge is understanding that the country is already at war with Russia and China. Some within the military and foreign policy establishment attempt to coopt the joint-phasing construct, which includes six “phases” of conflict—laid out in Joint Publication 3-0 —as a way to easily distinguish between peace and war. However, this model was designed to arrange operations, not serve as a model for when war begins and ends.
Fig. 1. Joint Publication 3-0: Joint Operations (2010)
The Joint Staff has since reduced the focus on this phased approach to operational planning with its 2017 and 2020 revisions because too many planners and warfighters viewed the phases like a step-by-step process that, once completed, returns the United States to a state of peace. The perception that the military would seamlessly progress from Phase 0 to Phase V and back to Phase 0 was an easy mental model to follow but is contrary to the approaches of China and Russia.
Despite the Joint Staff’s effort to reshape thinking within the Department of Defense by recasting conflict as phase-less in recent revisions, this tidy conception of warfare persists. Jake Bebber is correct when he writes, “Yet it is here, in Phase 0, that adversaries are conducting military operations designed to deter and ultimately defeat the United States, whether in cyberspace or the broader ‘informationization’ of warfare. It is an era of persistent conflict.” Whether it is Russian hybrid warfare or Chinese informationized warfare, neither adversary sees a clear distinction between war and peace. We are already at war.
Contrary to the American view, the current era is not competition but war between the United States and China/Russia. This war is primarily in the information environment and cyber domain that it is all too frequently dismissed as competition when it is not.
Failing to Lead in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Second, multidomain operations rely on artificial intelligence as an enabling technology to speed the process of collection, sense-making, and sharing of information—transforming Army information processing. According to Nicholas Chaillan, the United States has already lost the race with Russia and China in artificial intelligence.
As Paul Scharre observes, technological advances often lead to economic and military advantages. Europe’s lead in the Industrial Revolution made it possible for European nations to control over 80 percent of the world’s landmass by 1914. If the United States falls further behind in the development of artificial intelligence, it may lose a military conflict with China.
The lack of moral and legal norms that challenge American efforts to weaponize artificial intelligence also creates an advantage for China and Russia that bleeds over into their ability to collect superior adversary data used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.
Another area where American perceptions differ greatly from those of the Chinese and Russians involves the “human in/on the loop” question. The hand-wringing Americans engage in over the need for human control of military artificial intelligence does not occur in China or Russia, where there is a greater willingness to rely on autonomous systems in virtual and physical environments.
When it comes to measuring the success of multidomain operations, improving the speed and accuracy of decision-making is critical. More than any other service, the Army needs its lower echelon forces to operate independently, especially when communications and connectivity are highly contested.
The Chinese and Russians are well aware of the Department of Defense’s information dependency with the development of multidomain operations and joint all domain command and control. As a result, peer adversaries prioritize their OODA loops and the prevention of American effects/influence on their decision-making.
Neither China nor Russia has the same conception of war and peace as the United States—leaving the Army, and the joint force, at a distinct disadvantage.
To deter or defeat American action, both adversaries actively develop artificial intelligence capabilities to penetrate our systems. For the offense, attacks must only work once, where the defense must work repeatedly. When the challenges discussed in this section are taken in aggregate, they present a serious challenge to American success in successfully incorporating artificial intelligence into the systems that will ensure multidomain operations are successful.
Robotic and Autonomous Systems
Third, the United States is falling behind China and Russia in the development of robotic and autonomous systems, which are also critical to the success of multidomain operations. Adversaries field systems range from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms to various types of battlefield drones.
For the United States, similar systems are not fully autonomous, requiring human control and data analysis. This limits the ability of such systems to serve as force multipliers. For adversaries, robotic and autonomous systems are indispensable as artificial intelligence develops to the point where turning over deadly force to robots is feasible. Whether the United States fields “killer robots” is yet to be seen.
The Army’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems Strategy (2017) outlines five major objectives: increase situational awareness, lighten soldiers’ physical and cognitive workloads, sustain the force with increased distribution throughput and efficiency, facilitate movement and maneuver, and protect the force. The service is developing systems that can support all of the five objectives as a single unit or well-coordinated group but not serve as autonomous killer robots.
Overcoming the moral/legal, data management, and cyber challenges will make or break the utility of robotic systems for the Army and the joint force—and it all occurs before the first shot is ever fired.
Collateral Data
Fourth, China and Russia are effectively using the openness of American social information systems to create expansive disinformation and misinformation capabilities that are specifically targeted at not only the American people but soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians. These capabilities enable adversaries to obfuscate, hide, and create information, making it difficult or impossible for Americans—and service members—to separate truth from fiction.
Admittedly, many soldiers do not realize how information operations are maturing in the era of ubiquitous information technologies. In short, information is always-on, ubiquitous, porous, and presents dangers for soldiers.
The Ether Is Everywhere
Fifth, the success of multidomain operations is also under threat because of American dependence on the electromagnetic spectrum, which adversaries are actively seeking to deny the United States. Whether it is situational awareness, deception, denial, or destruction, freedom of action in the spectrum is foundational.
American victory in future conflicts depends on information advantage by collecting and processing an overwhelming amount of data. Equipping every vehicle and soldier with sensors that can feed data into artificial intelligence-enabled networks that organize, filter, and share the “right” information with decision-makers is a central aspect of multidomain operations—with its dependence on fidelity electromagnetic spectrum sensors on platforms. This all occurs in an era where “every asset is a sensor” is central to our new warfighting concept.
As the network of sensors required for joint all domain command and control and multidomain operations is developed, the United States can use different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to see targets from different aspects and signatures. For example, a vehicle or artillery park may be camouflaged in one part of the spectrum (infrared), but radiofrequency or visual sensors may detect them. This ability to analyze a target in multiple parts of the spectrum reduces the effectiveness of deception.
Beyond preventing adversary electromagnetic spectrum jamming and spoofing, distilling, correlating, and presenting data in a useful format is the biggest challenge. Again, all of this depends on high-fidelity artificial intelligence to break down the data for decision-makers in a tactically relevant time. Failing to meet this time requirement surrenders the initiative to an adversary who can perform this feat.
Succeeding allows the United States military to think in terms of kill webs, which allows multiple sensors, shooters, and command and control nodes to prosecute an engagement. This capability creates resilience and allows commanders the flexibility to engage with various shooters, ensuring the most effective weapon system engages the target.
Fundamentally rethinking when and how war is fought is necessary. Anything less will leave the United States defeated before it ever recognizes war has begun.
Multidomain operations require sensor systems of the future with capabilities that include multi-spectral sensing on a single platform or as part of a system of systems. There is a need to pick out a signal of interest from the background clutter and identify the emitter. The Russians, masters of electronic warfare, and the Chinese are all developing capabilities to thwart American success in this area, which makes the success of multidomain operations challenging.
The challenge for the Army and the joint force is overcoming Russian and Chinese electromagnetic spectrum jamming and spoofing efforts. The Russian Army, for example, is the best in the world at both and will certainly further develop those capabilities as the Department of Defense fields capabilities designed to enable multidomain operations.
Recommendations
The move away from irregular warfare and toward large-scale conventional operations and multidomain operations is certainly the right move for the Department of Defense and the US Army. Field Manual 3-0, Operations, the Army’s new multidomain operations-focused doctrine, is a forward-looking attempt to meet the challenges of an operational environment that is at an inflection point. Developing a warfighting approach that gets inside China and Russia’s OODA loop is certainly understandable.
However, neither China nor Russia has the same conception of war and peace as the United States—leaving the Army, and the joint force, at a distinct disadvantage. Overcoming these shortcomings requires the following changes.
First, senior leaders must understand the United States is already at war with China and Russia in the cyber domain and information environment. Incorrectly describing war as “competition” leaves American forces to operate below the level of conflict, which signals a lack of resolve. Adversaries are specifically watching for the level of force employed in response to their attacks so they can evaluate the importance of interests at stake.
Second, the Army needs to shift from a focus on cyber security to a focus on mission assurance. Cyber security is neither necessary nor sufficient for the success of multidomain operations. Yet, as shown above, it serves as a pillar for success across a range of multidomain operations capabilities. This is a mistake that China and Russia are exploiting.
Third, the Army (and other services) must train soldiers in adversaries’ information operations methods and tactics to influence service members. With China and Russia developing more effective ways to use information against American service members, failure in the information environment is certain to have implications in the cognitive and physical domains.
For the United States to succeed in multidomain operations, merely developing and fielding new technologies is insufficient for American success. Fundamentally rethinking when and how war is fought is necessary. Anything less will leave the United States defeated before it ever recognizes war has begun.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ alone and do not represent the views or policies of the United States government, the United States Department of Defense, the United States military, the United States Department of the Army, or the United States Army.
1 FM 3-0, Operations is planned for public release in the summer of 2022. The document may change before release.
John Laudun, Tom Kroh, Mahbube Sidikki, Robert Arp, & Adam Lowther
Dr. John Laudan, Dr. Mahbube Siddiki, Dr. Rob Arp, Mr. Tom Kroh, and Dr. Adam Lowther are faculty in the Multidomain Operations Department at the Army Management Staff College. Their areas of expertise include social information systems, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, electromagnetic warfare, cyber security, and nuclear deterrence. The views expressed are theirs alone and do not represent the views or policies of the United States government, the United States Department of Defense, the United States military, the United States Department of the Army, the United States Army, or any other United States government agency.
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13. How UAVs Could Spark a Military Conflict in the Taiwan Strait
Excerpts:
The sum of these scenarios illustrates the diplomatic, military, and political problems that the ROC Air Force and government would face if or when China decides to include UAVs or UACVs into its ADIZ incursion missions. At the same time, as we have attempted to demonstrate, it is well within the realm of expectations that China could seek to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles into its operations, for operational, tactical, strategic, and geopolitical reasons. Therefore, it is essential that Taiwan, sooner rather than later, establish public policies about how it would engage with hostile unmanned systems.
Commentators have posited that direct conflict between China and Taiwan is unlikely; however, as Joseph Nye recently argued, while military conflict in East Asia is not imminent there is a risk that “we may get there by accident.” The use of UAVs over the Taiwan Strait increases the risk of such an “accident” significantly, and could lead to escalation spiraling that, for domestic and international reasons, would be difficult to control, temper, or reverse. In his comments, Nye highlights the “sleepwalker syndrome” as a pathway to possible conflict. Ironically, unmanned (particularly automated) aerial systems resemble many of the characteristics of sleepwalking: in both cases communication is not possible, unless by strong intervention. And such intervention could have dire consequences for Taiwan, and the region’s security situation overall.
How UAVs Could Spark a Military Conflict in the Taiwan Strait
It makes tactical, operational, and strategic sense for China to start using UAVs in its incursions into Taiwan’s ADIZ. Taiwan needs to decide now how it would respond.
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Much has been written, podcasted, and discussed about recent Chinese intrusions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zones (ADIZ). Among the more polemical analyses was a recent editorial by the Taipei Times advocating for the use and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The editorial argues that given the ever-increasing numbers of incursions and the wear it causes on Republic of China Air Force fighter jets and pilots, the Taiwanese armed forces should pursue further development and deployment of UAVs for monitoring incursions by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
The newspaper makes the case that using such systems would be a cost-effective and safer alternative to using manned jets. An added benefit, according to the Taipei Times, would be that the deployment of UAVs would increase the risks for the PLAAF: “if the PLA were to shoot down drones within Taiwan’s airspace, that would be perceived by the international community as a unilateral act of aggression – and possibly an act of war.”
The proposition by the newspaper is rationally driven. While the use of UAVs for monitoring purposes seems indeed worthwhile and potentially effective, it seems unlikely that the PLAAF would suddenly decide to shoot down any Taiwanese UAVs. While China has ramped it its pressure campaign, there are no indications that it seeks to escalate the conflict by committing any blatant acts of war. Rather, these operations appear to stem primarily from military training and political signaling purposes. The incursions correlate strongly to political events that China disapproves of, such as when Taiwan receives foreign delegations or, more recently, during national days of importance in China and Taiwan.
That said, the notion that UAVs could be used in these operations deserves further exploration. However, we should expect UAVs to be deployed not by Taiwan, but rather by China and the PLAAF – we consider it likely that in the near future, we can expect the introduction of Chinese UAVs in these missions. While to date, no UAV has been used in such missions, our impression is that we will likely see the deployment of such types of units in these missions with greater frequency as time carries on.
China has been actively developing, testing, and operating a new generation of UAVs and unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). At the recent Zhuhai airshow, China demonstrated the new CH-6 UCAV, which according to Song Zhongping, a Beijing-based military affairs analyst, is intended for operations in the Taiwan Strait. Other models on display included the WZ-7, WZ-8, and the GJ-11.
Franz-Stefan Gady illustrated the growing importance of UAV/UCAVs for Chinese operations in a previous analysis for The Diplomat. He proposed a fictional scenario in which Chinese UAVs and UACVs are used in a potential conflict with Taiwan and the United States in 2028. While his scenario highlights the use of such systems in a full-scale military conflict over Taiwan, an initial introduction of these systems in more minor full-scale operations, such as ADIZ incursion missions, is more probable.
We can expect that the PLAAF will seek to gain (additional) experience in using such systems in stand-alone operations and as part of joint operations, in which manned and unmanned systems collaborate. ADIZ incursions present themselves as ideal, if not perfect, opportunities for this. As Gady noted, such systems would be used in any conflict with Taiwan, meaning that it is likely that the PLAAF would seek to gain experience in peacetime operations. In a sense, these operations are taking place neither in times of peace nor times of war.
According to Dave Axe, the PLAAF has already used surveillance UAVs to track recent U.S., British, and Japanese naval exercises south of Japan. Clearly, China has the operational capabilities and rationale to use UAVs in their operations in the Taiwan Strait – chief among them, ADIZ intrusion missions and operations.
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Beyond the operational considerations, we need explore if the deployment of UAVs would be tactically and strategically plausible. As we have previously argued, China has long-employed various forms and methods of salami slicing. Furthermore, we have also illustrated how unmanned systems – in this case unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) – are well-suited to China’s use of grey-zone tactics, ideal operations between peace and war. In particular, the absence of established patterns and methods on how to deal with incursions has presented itself as a stubborn challenge. All of these considerations ring equally true in the Taiwan Strait. Therefore, we argue that within the ever-advancing framework of salami slicing, and China’s apt use of grey-zone tactics, the use of UAVs and potentially even UCAVs would be ideal for Beijing and is thus highly likely to materialize.
The integration of such systems into ADIZ missions could be considered a minor escalation in a longer ongoing process. Already, the intruding force has over time grown not only in quantity, but also in quality. Whereas earlier missions mainly used fighter jets, current missions include a wide array of different airframes, including nuclear capable bombers, early warning aircraft, and more recently, anti-submarine warfare airplanes. Nearly all are aircraft that could be engaged in offensive operations in a potential conflict with Taiwan. The use of UAVs and possibly subsequently even UCAVs, given that they have not been used in any operations over the Taiwan Strait, would then be a logical, and escalatory, step in this process of seeking to increase the quality of the intruding forces. This maturation process helps China as it seeks to legitimize and subsequently normalize incursions over the vital waterway and into sovereign airspace.
However, the potential use of UAVs should be understood from the grey-zone perspective. As we previously argued, “with no national markings, and devoid of personnel onboard, the possibilities for (direct) communication are almost nil. This ambiguity in communication could lead to a great deal of confusion and miscommunication.” The only viable communication alternative would be via military and diplomatic channels: Any communication would have to go from the intercepting Taiwanese fighter pilot to their home base, up the chain of command, and then to its Chinese counterpart down to the individual unit and operator of UAV(s). The time required for establishing this communication process would then present itself as valuable time for the PLAAF: While the process is playing out, China’s UAVs would intrude farther into Taiwan’s ADIZ (or potentially even Taiwanese airspace). This would fit with China’s desired messaging toward both domestic and Taiwanese audiences, illustrating Chinese technological capabilities and allowing the PLA to demonstrate how it can intrude deeper and deeper into Taiwanese airspace at will.
Such tactics would fit neatly into the framework of salami-slicing tactics. The use of UAVs would not necessarily constitute a dramatic escalation; nevertheless, it would clearly signal a form of escalation. Taiwan’s options in such a scenario are not optimistic. As we reasoned, “the apparent lack of diplomatic interaction compels opposing actors to settle on a limited framework of counter-options.” Most escalatory among them would be the decision to violently engage these unmanned intrusions by destroying the intruding airframe. While the Taiwanese government has not made any explicit statements that it would pursue such an option in the case of the Chinese missions into its ADIZ, Taipei has indicated that it would shoot down any Chinese UAVs intruding into its airspace over the South China Sea and held military drills to practice this. It remains to be seen if Taipei would extend this policy to unmanned Chinese ADIZ missions, but if so, it would mean a significant escalatory action.
Other, less violent, alternatives, are equally challenging. While mid-air collisions could be employed as a deliberate countering tactic, resulting in the invader’s destruction, this course of action carries with it the risk of escalation and even has the potential to establish a dangerous new precedent for countering Chinese threats. A less violent and dangerous alternative would be the disabling of UAVs by electronic jamming via, among other methods, jamming drones; however, whether Taiwan is technically capable of such moves is unclear. Even if Taiwan has the capacity to interdict Chinese drones in this way, the implication that Taiwan would have to engage directly with a foreign aircraft remains.
In each of these three scenarios the escalatory step of destruction or physical interference would be conducted by Taiwan, not China, making it possible for China to paint Taiwan as the aggressor. Under these circumstances it would be difficult for Taiwan to maintain any de-escalatory intentions or momentum.
The final alternative would be for the Taiwanese government to make the decision to abrogate its national security responsibilities and allow an incursion to take place. However, this ultimately involves the risk of losing in a larger political battle and demonstrating a lack of willingness to defend the state to other nations.
The sum of these scenarios illustrates the diplomatic, military, and political problems that the ROC Air Force and government would face if or when China decides to include UAVs or UACVs into its ADIZ incursion missions. At the same time, as we have attempted to demonstrate, it is well within the realm of expectations that China could seek to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles into its operations, for operational, tactical, strategic, and geopolitical reasons. Therefore, it is essential that Taiwan, sooner rather than later, establish public policies about how it would engage with hostile unmanned systems.
Commentators have posited that direct conflict between China and Taiwan is unlikely; however, as Joseph Nye recently argued, while military conflict in East Asia is not imminent there is a risk that “we may get there by accident.” The use of UAVs over the Taiwan Strait increases the risk of such an “accident” significantly, and could lead to escalation spiraling that, for domestic and international reasons, would be difficult to control, temper, or reverse. In his comments, Nye highlights the “sleepwalker syndrome” as a pathway to possible conflict. Ironically, unmanned (particularly automated) aerial systems resemble many of the characteristics of sleepwalking: in both cases communication is not possible, unless by strong intervention. And such intervention could have dire consequences for Taiwan, and the region’s security situation overall.
14. A Counterfactual Look at the Afghan War: the “SOF-only” COA and its Implications for the Future
This may devolve into a finger pointing exercise. Do not be put off by the SOF only in the title. There are almost no operations that are "SOF-only."
The author's point may be that perhaps if we kept to narrowly defined strategic objectives. However this should not be a SOF versus conventional forces argument but a critique of the strategy and within the strategy using the right forces for the right missions to accomplish US nationals security objectives..
As an aside, this article makes me want to add: assuming the acceptance of the counterfactual, did we have a SOF campaign headquarters to execute such a mission in 2001? Of course JSOC is a campaign capable HQ for a narrow specific national mission and one that has global responsibilities. I doubt we could have committed that HQ solely to Afghanistan (nor should we have). Today we have the 1st Special Forces Command - is that a capable SOF campaign headquarters? Or are the Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOC) sufficiently organized, trained, and equipped to plan, conduct, and orchestrate long term sustained SOF-led campaigns" The Philippines and Colombia are instructive here - e.g., SOCPAC and SOCSOUTH).
Excerpts:
This essay has argued the U.S.’ strategic objective to combat terrorism in Afghanistan could have been achieved using only U.S. SOF, air power, and a modestly sized force of indigenous ground troops. The justification of the actual COA employed of using a large deployment of conventional U.S. troops and a large ANSF was that by deploying the doctrinally recommended number of troops to achieve victory in a counterinsurgency, the U.S. would in turn be victorious in combatting terrorism. The SOF-only COA, on the other hand, maintains that effective CT can be performed in the midst of an insurgency. This is possible by establishing a strong base of support in Afghanistan from which long-range CT missions can be launched. The historical record of Task Force Dagger provides confidence that neither the Taliban nor any other insurgent group would be capable of toppling a regime backed by U.S. SOF, and successful long-range CT missions into hostile territory by the U.S. and Israel provide confidence the U.S. could make Afghanistan inhospitable for al-Qaeda without attaining complete control of Afghanistan. Further advantages of the SOF-only COA are that it’s economically feasible, and relies on building mutually beneficial relations with local militias.
A Counterfactual Look at the Afghan War: the “SOF-only” COA and its Implications for the Future
by Michael Perry
Introduction
The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan began as a war to combat transnational terrorism but quickly evolved into something deeper and more profound. To combat terror emanating from a foreign country the U.S. sought a cooperative Afghan government, and thus the war became an exercise in first toppling an uncooperative regime in the Taliban, and second establishing an effective government with a monopoly on force. The first step proved easy, while the second led to a revival of counterinsurgent theory and doctrine in the U.S. military, as the deposed Taliban fought to undermine the newly established government. With President Biden’s announcement all U.S. troops will be withdrawn after 20 years of engagement, it’s natural to take stock of what’s been achieved. Most now recognize the error in the strategy of deploying large numbers of U.S. and Coalition troops to augment the Afghan defense forces. Economically, through 2017 the combined efforts of the Afghan War had cost $877 billion, a price tag few would argue is justified by the realized returns.[i] Many have even argued the large deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan have been counterproductive. Micro-level studies of popular sentiment in Afghanistan have shown the Taliban is more popular in many regions than the Coalition,[ii] and macro-level studies have shown an approximate threefold increase in global terrorist manpower.[iii] Throughout the war an alternative course of action (COA) that was often floated, but never materialized, was a light-footprint approach made primarily of special operations forces (SOF), who would continue to train the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) that was created after the 2001 disposal of the Taliban regime, coordinate air support, and provide direct assistance on the ground when necessary. It’s unclear whether such a COA is presently feasible given the terms of U.S.-Taliban negotiations and uncertainty surrounding what level of support the global community will provide Afghanistan moving forward, but this essay asks not whether this SOF-only COA is feasible now, but whether it was feasible from the outset. In particular, I'll describe the initial stage of the Afghan War which was, in fact, prosecuted using only U.S. SOF and local Afghan militias, describe the state of Afghanistan immediately following the Taliban ouster, and argue that a continuation of the SOF-only COA could have achieved the U.S.' strategic objective in Afghanistan. Comments will be made on the relevance of this analysis to the future of Afghanistan as well as to future U.S. engagements in counterinsurgencies.
Methodology
The case for the SOF-only COA will be made almost exclusively using historical evidence predating the arrival of conventional U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The operations involving U.S. SOF teamed with Afghan militias in late 2001 will be used to illustrate the combat effectiveness of this combined force. A comprehensive review of insurgencies since World War II will be used to assess the risks of regime collapse during an insurgency. As the U.S.’ strategic objective in Afghanistan was to combat terrorism, irrespective of an ongoing insurgency, historical evidence of successful counterterror (CT) missions will be presented to assess whether CT can be performed in the midst of a chaotic insurgency. Regarding this last point, some evidence will be drawn from sources that postdate the arrival of conventional U.S. forces in Afghanistan, as CT missions conducted by SOF in this environment are a valuable source of information.
Findings and Analysis
Part of the appeal of a SOF-only COA for Afghanistan stems from the incredible success U.S. SOF had in the first three months following 11 September 2001. Due to a combination of senior officials’ reluctance to employ large amounts of U.S. troops and the logistical challenges of deploying a large force quickly,[iv] the first US soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan were a small contingent of U.S. Army SOF supported by conventional air power. Operating under the name Task Force Dagger, on 19 October 2001, two 12-man Operational Detachment Alphas (ODAs) linked up with militias from the Afghan Northern Alliance (the primary adversary of the Taliban in Afghanistan) and within a month a total of 10 ODAs were on the ground working with militias, including one led by eventual Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Collectively, this combination of ODAs, air power, and Afghan militias cut through the Taliban with incredible speed, culminating in the capture of Kandahar on 7 December 2001, and the disposal of the Taliban from power.[v] In total, the Taliban suffered approximately 3,500 casualties compared to 52 for the U.S./Afghan alliance.[vi]
What Dagger in essence showed was the new Afghan regime that was to be formed had a powerful army at its disposal: U.S. SOF working with local militias, a fraction of which could have been reconstituted into an army dedicated to defending the new regime. The militiamen involved in Dagger all had their own loyalties, but a good approximation of how many of these were dedicated to the defense of the new Afghan regime is 22,500.[vii] In contrast, the Taliban had approximately 40,000 personnel, composed of native Afghans, al-Qaeda fighters, and Pakistanis, but with the casualty rates cited above manpower comparisons are not germane. The combat effectiveness of Dagger made clear that if the Taliban were to fight back, they would either need to receive vastly enhanced conventional military support or fight as guerrillas. Even the Taliban’s main backer at the outset of the war, Pakistan, surely would not have provided such conventional support; this would have been easily traceable and invited international backlash given the circumstances following 9/11. Thus, the Taliban’s only option would be to launch a guerrilla campaign, which of course they did in the years following their ouster.
In evaluating the SOF-only COA, the question then begs as to how a regime with conventional military superiority can be defeated in an insurgency. A RAND Corporation study titled “Paths to Victory” analyzed all major insurgencies post-WWII and attempted to identify causal factors for victory and defeat.[viii],[ix] One factor included in their analysis was a binary indicator for the following statement: “COIN force of sufficient strength to force insurgents to fight as guerrillas (or to prevail in the preponderance of conventional engagements, should overmatched insurgents choose to give battle).” By analyzing the insurgencies RAND coded as a COIN loss, I looked for losses where this indicator was true and assessed whether the cause of defeat translates to a legitimate risk in the hypothetical Afghan War, where the new regime is supported only by U.S. SOF and air power. I also filtered COIN losses down to those that did not end due to the withdrawal of a foreign occupying force, on the conceit that U.S. presence is small in the SOF-only COA, sustainable, and that forces could even be redeployed quickly were the Afghan regime to experience trouble following a withdrawal of U.S. SOF. This left only eight COIN losses, for which I identified three general causes of defeat.
First, counterinsurgencies were observed to fail despite vast military superiority when the regime in power became so unpopular the military refused to follow the orders of their leader. For example, in Colombia (1948 – 1958) opposing liberal and conservative factions organized a political settlement that would unseat the current president, Rojas Pinilla, who then ordered the arrest of the organizers. Top military officials defected and deposed Pinilla.[x] Similar examples include Nicaragua (1981 – 1990), Nepal (1996 – 2006), and Papua New Guinea (1988 – 1998). In the context of the Afghan War, a similar situation could occur if powerful individuals capable of influencing the militiamen dedicated to defending the Karzai presidency (or any of his successors) called for his disposal. If this occurred because Karzai was widely unpopular it wouldn’t be an inherently bad thing, but the U.S. nonetheless wouldn’t want anyone to be capable of utilizing the Afghan defense force to advance their own self-interest. Mitigations for this risk will be discussed after reviewing other causes of COIN defeat.
A second cause of defeat occurred when a foreign power intervened in an ongoing insurgency. For example, in the brief counterinsurgent campaign Pakistan launched to try to prevent Bangladesh from becoming independent (1971), India intervened to stop the genocidal nature of the counterinsurgency.[xi] This scenario is unlikely in Afghanistan: the U.S. can use her influence to prevent any blatantly genocidal behavior from the Afghan regime, and no foreign power is likely to militarily challenge U.S. interests in any case.
The final cause of defeat found in the historical case studies occurred when a counterinsurgent with de jure governmental authority in a region tried to regain control from an insurgent with de facto control, such as Russia’s war with Chechnya from 1994 – 1996. Despite generally sound COIN practices, Russia failed to gain control of Chechnya, illustrating that counterinsurgencies are hard to win when the population you’re trying to gain control over doesn’t desire a change in de facto governance. Afghanistan is historically tribal in nature and resistant to any form of central governance,[xii] and post-9/11 history has shown that while neither the Taliban nor the U.S.-backed regime is welcome in many districts, the Taliban is often preferred.[xiii] In our counterfactual scenario (and in fact in any future counterinsurgencies, the U.S. must remain cognizant that no matter how well COIN tactics are applied they may fail in generating support in many parts of Afghanistan, and careful thought should be given to how much control is truly necessary to achieve the strategic objective.
Of the three causes of defeat identified above only two appear pertinent to the U.S.' situation following the fall of the Taliban regime: a disloyal military turning against the central government, and attempting to overextend the control of the central government. Given the SOF-only COA relies initially on militiamen hastily constituted into an army to defend the newly found regime, disloyalty is a major concern. Militias are loyal to individual leaders, not a conceptual elected office, and the initial militiamen who were tasked with the defense of Afghanistan in 2002 were largely loyal to the former Northern Alliance leaders rather than the elected President Karzai.[xiv] The long-term implication of this is that Afghanistan would need to transition towards a defense force designed to be unambiguously loyal to elected officials rather than specific individuals. Such a force would be composed of tribally diverse, highly-vetted individuals, roughly equal in size to the initial militiamen employed in 2002 (22,500). In addition, so that U.S. SOF wouldn’t need to support the Afghans in perpetuity, an indigenous group of elite special forces personnel must be trained and equipped with the advanced weapons systems that allowed Task Force Dagger to be so effective. Task Force Dagger was, to a good approximation, composed of one U.S. Army Special Forces Group (SFG) and accompanying personnel to provide additional air power;[xv] this force could be conservatively replaced with 3,000 additional highly trained personnel. While training both the regular and special Afghan forces would take time, the goal of training some 25,500 forces is very reasonable. The actual COA employed by the U.S. of training a large ANSF on the scale of 300,000 personnel has been fraught with issues, ranging from a lack of motivation to a lack of ability on the part of recruits,[xvi] but the U.S. has successfully trained an elite group of soldiers with proven combat effectiveness called the Afghan National Army Command Corps (ANACC) which was 21,000 strong in 2017, with plans of expansion.[xvii] The ANACC was only founded in 2007, and presumably the training timeline could have been sped up had the training of a small, elite force been the COA from day one. A force structure of 25,500 also would have been sustainable given the state of the Afghan economy in 2002, which could support an estimated 30,000 personnel.[xviii]
It’s worth saying a few words about why, in reality, the U.S. sought to develop a large ANSF that currently stands about 300,000 strong, even though this was never sustainable without the U.S.’ financial support.[xix],[xx],[xxi] This figure, coupled with U.S. and other foreign troop support, is most likely informed by COIN doctrine that recommends large amounts of troops for every 1,000 inhabitants of a region, and a hesitancy to rely on local, autonomous militias in the defense of Afghanistan. Most of the literature on the use of local militias in the Afghan War is negative or at best mildly supportive, but these critiques are almost always written within the framework of the large ANSF COA and view militias are a stop-gap solution while the ANSF is in development.[xxii],[xxiii],[xxiv] They cite legitimate issues such as the shifting loyalties of militias, human rights abuses, and fighting amongst militias, but they fail to acknowledge most of the benefits militias provide. Not only are militias a financially feasible solution for national defense, but Afghanistan has historically been resistant to centralized governance and thus a more realistic national defense strategy may involve influencing militias to act in the national interest.[xxv] In fact, before the group-think set in regarding the primacy of a large ANSF, a model for the ANSF was proposed by Anja Manuel and Peter Singer that called for a small, centralized force of 30,000 troops (similar to the SOF-only COA), while utilizing local militias in what was described as “a ‘national guard’ that incorporates tribal and warlord militias into formal units responsible to provincial governments.” [xxvi] While these militias would remain relatively autonomous, the central Afghan government could influence their behavior via economic agreements and by giving them a seat at the political decision-making table. What Manuel and Singer don’t mention, which creates further incentive for the militias to act favorably towards the government, is the extraordinary combat capability of a small ANSF modeled on Task Force Dagger; not only does this provide a “stick” with which to threaten militias hostile to the central government, but it’s also a “carrot” that can be offered to aid local militias under threat from a resurgent Taliban.
The second of the two concerns found through examining historic cases of COIN failure was that expanding territorial control of the central government is often difficult. Part of the logic behind the use of local militias in a national guard framework of defense is to create regions that are autonomous yet cooperative with the central government, thus avoiding the risk of defeat in insurgent warfare all together. Yet, the U.S. still would need to plan for the eventuality that many of these autonomous regions will be poorly governed and policed, and become subject to attack from a resurgent Taliban, a safe haven for terrorists, or both. Given the U.S.’ objective in Afghanistan was to combat terrorism, to evaluate the SOF-only COA it must be assessed whether effective CT can be performed within such an environment. Under the SOF-only COA, while the U.S. doesn’t seek to lock-down the entire country of Afghanistan with a conventional COIN campaign, it does gain a base of support from which it can launch CT missions; this is precisely what was lacking under the Taliban regime and necessitated Task Force Dagger. It should be noted that Dagger was launched out of the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in Uzbekistan, but diplomatic U.S.-Uzbek relations have since soured, highlighting the need to establish a solid base in Afghanistan.
One source of evidence for the U.S.’ ability to conduct CT in a hostile environment is the U.S.’ own experiences in Afghanistan thus far. While this is somewhat at odds with a counterfactual analysis of the SOF-only COA, the reality is that even under the current COA, the Afghan government only has uncontested control of approximately 53.8% of the country,[xxvii] and U.S. SOF have performed many CT missions within this environment. Navy SEALs famously raided Osama bin Laden’s compound near the Pakistani border and killed the al-Qaeda leader, but this is only one of many successful direct action (DA) missions by SOF. In 2010, for example, SOF conducted an average of five raids per day with about half capturing the intended target, and the remaining missions often generating valuable intelligence.[xxviii] In addition to DA, SOF have led hunter-killer teams through ungoverned territory in Afghanistan to capture al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in hiding and seize weapons caches. A successful example of this occurred in 2003 when teams discovered Taliban forces were coalescing in the mountains near Kandahar; SOF then led a team of indigenous forces and air power to attack the Taliban, destroying most and forcing the remainder to flee.[xxix]
The U.S.’ experiences in Afghanistan provide confidence CT missions can be equally successful under the SOF-only COA, but no discussion of CT in a hostile environment is complete without talking about Israel’s historical record on this issue. Israel has conducted successful CT missions throughout the Middle East and North Africa, all originating out of its home territory. Israel has conducted elaborate, long-range DA missions in areas as distant as Iraq and Tunisia;[xxx] emulating this capability would allow U.S. SOF to perform DA anywhere in Afghanistan, utilizing a solid base of support in Kabul. Israel has also performed larger scale CT operations in hostile territory. For example, during the Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 1990), Israel successfully expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon in 1982 by way of Operation Peace for Galilee, in which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) maneuvered from their occupied territory in southern Lebanon to Beirut to attack the PLO, causing them to relocate to Tunisia.[xxxi] The expulsion of the PLO by no means ended the Lebanese Civil War, which was a messy, multi-player war not unlike the current war in Afghanistan, but Israel’s CT objective was achieved. The lesson for the U.S. in Afghanistan is that under the SOF-only COA, al-Qaeda strongholds could have been pursued in attempts to eliminate Afghanistan as a terrorist safe haven. The U.S. needn’t have lost sight of the objective of combating terrorism by becoming too engaged in the civil war against the Taliban. Larger CT missions such as Operation Peace for Galilee would require Afghan troops to work with U.S. SOF. Assuming an ongoing insurgency, the Afghan regime’s focus would be on fighting the Taliban rather than al-Qaeda and other terrorists; a natural quid pro quo is that in exchange for U.S. assistance in defending the central regime around Kabul, the regime in turn assists the U.S. in combating terrorism.
To conclude the discussion on the risk of defeat in a counterinsurgency brought on by trying to overextend the control of the central government, I’ve argued that exerting influence on local militias lessons the need to extend government control and that effective CT can be performed as long as the U.S. has a solid base of support in country. Under the SOF-only COA, in addition to teaming with local Afghan forces to ensure the regime is protected, U.S. SOF would have performed both DA and more sustained CT missions to combat al-Qaeda. As the ANSF develops and U.S. forces departs, turning over the mission of protecting the regime to the ANSF wouldn’t cause an agency problem, but the CT mission may lag in quality. Maintaining basing rights to in Afghanistan is therefore important to deploy small numbers of SOF, such as a SEAL Team or an ODA, to execute high-priority CT missions based on actionable intelligence. In fact, being able to execute such small deployments anywhere in the world should be considered a core competency if the U.S. truly intends to fight terror on a “global” level.
Conclusion
This essay has argued the U.S.’ strategic objective to combat terrorism in Afghanistan could have been achieved using only U.S. SOF, air power, and a modestly sized force of indigenous ground troops. The justification of the actual COA employed of using a large deployment of conventional U.S. troops and a large ANSF was that by deploying the doctrinally recommended number of troops to achieve victory in a counterinsurgency, the U.S. would in turn be victorious in combatting terrorism. The SOF-only COA, on the other hand, maintains that effective CT can be performed in the midst of an insurgency. This is possible by establishing a strong base of support in Afghanistan from which long-range CT missions can be launched. The historical record of Task Force Dagger provides confidence that neither the Taliban nor any other insurgent group would be capable of toppling a regime backed by U.S. SOF, and successful long-range CT missions into hostile territory by the U.S. and Israel provide confidence the U.S. could make Afghanistan inhospitable for al-Qaeda without attaining complete control of Afghanistan. Further advantages of the SOF-only COA are that it’s economically feasible, and relies on building mutually beneficial relations with local militias.
While this essay was counterfactual and provides lessons for how the U.S. ought to think about future counterinsurgencies, the discussion can’t be complete without considering how the analysis presented here relates to the current situation in Afghanistan, where the government has collapsed with the removal of U.S. military support. Recall the three crucial factors identified for the SOF-only COA to succeed. Most fundamentally, the indigenous forces coupled with U.S. SOF and air power must be able to prevail in the preponderance of conventional battles. Second, the indigenous military must be willing to follow the orders of the regime in power. Third, it was observed that counterinsurgencies are hard to win where the counterinsurgent attempts to extend its influence into communities where lacks popularity relative to a local de facto government. While it’s premature to draw conclusions regarding the collapse of the Afghan government upon the U.S.’ withdrawal, all three factors could have raised concerns. The open-source reporting has not indicated U.S.-SOF were fighting alongside Afghan partners as they surrendered, and it’s been speculated air power wasn’t provided with the same regularity during the drawdown.[xxxii] A lack of U.S. involvement during the Taliban’s offensive would have put enormous pressure on the ANACC to act as a vanguard, and perhaps overwhelmed their capacity. The ANSF often surrendered without a fight; while this may indicate Afghan commanders believed they couldn’t win individual battles, it’s more likely an indication they weren’t willing to fight for the government. Corruption and competency within the Afghan central government have long been concerns, while the Taliban, on the other hand, are at least perceived as an organized movement. Commanders may have rationally been positioning themselves on the right side of history with their surrender. Regarding the third factor, polls indicated very low popular support for the U.S.-backed central government in many regions of Afghanistan.[xxxiii] While the central government wasn’t in direct conflict with local, de facto government bodies, they couldn’t marshal support from local militias to resist the Taliban’s offensive.[xxxiv] The U.S.-backed regime’s engagement with local leaders as part of their strategy for governing Afghanistan has experience fits and starts over the 20-year war, but has not been prioritized in recent years. A key program to empower local militias (the Afghan Local Police) was completely defunded during this critical time. In short, none of the prerequisites for the SOF-only COA appear to have been in place during the U.S. withdrawal, and the Afghan government’s collapse is in fact aligned with the historical record of counterinsurgency failures.
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Chan, Samuel. “Sentinels of Afghan Democracy: The Afghan National Army.” Military Review, February 2009, 25–40.
Cobban, Helena. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics. Cambridge Middle East Library. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Cooper, Helene. “Afghan Forces Are Praised, Despite Still Relying Heavily on U.S. Help.” New York Times, August 20, 2017.
Crawford, Neta. “United States Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2018: A Summary of the $5.6 Trillion in Costs for the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Post-‐‑9/11 Veterans Care and Homeland Security.” Brown University, Costs of War, 2017.
Feickert, Andrew. “U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF): Background and Issues for Congress.” Congressional Research Service, July 16, 2010.
Felbab-Brown, Vanda. “Hurray for Militias? Not so Fast: Lessons from the Afghan Local Police Experience.” Small Wars & Insurgencies 27, no. 2 (March 3, 2016): 258–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2015.1129169.
Gibbons-Neff, Thomas, Helene Cooper, and Eric Schmitt. “Departure of U.S. Contractors Poses Myriad Problems for Afghan Military.” New York Times, June 20, 2021.
Grenier, Robert. 88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary. First Simon&Schuster Paperbacks trade paperback edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2016.
Henriksen, Thomas H. The Israeli Approach to Irregular Warfare and Implications for the United States. Hurlburt Field, Fla.: JSOU Press, 2007.
Iqbal, Anwar. “Afghan Army to Collapse in Six Months without US Help: Ghani.” Dawn.Com, January 18, 2018.
“Joint Special Operations Task Force - North (JSOTF-N) (Afghanistan) ‘Task Force Dagger.’” GlobalSecurity.Org, n.d. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/jsotf-n-af.htm.
King, Marvin L., III. “Optimizing Counterinsurgency Operations.” Colorado School of Mines, 2014.
“Leave Them in No Peace: America’s Afghan Exit.” The Economist Radio, July 5, 2021.
Lefevre, Mathieu. “Local Defence in Afghanistan: A Review of Government-backed Initiatives.” Afghanistan Analysts Network, May 2010.
Livingston, Ian S., and Michael O’Hanlon. “Brookings: Afghanistan Index.” Brookings Institute, September 29, 2017.
Long, Austin G., ed. Locals Rule: Historical Lessons for Creating Local Defense Forces for Afghanistan and Beyond. Santa Monica, CA: RAND/National Defense Research Institute, 2012.
Lyall, Jason, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai. “Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan.” American Political Science Review 107, no. 04 (November 2013): 679–705. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055413000403.
Manuel, Anja, and P. W. Singer. “A New Model Afghan Army.” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (2002): 44. https://doi.org/10.2307/20033239.
Paul, Christopher, Colin P. Clarke, Beth Grill, and Molly Dunigan. Paths to Victory: Detailed Insurgency Case Studies. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2013.
———. Paths to Victory: Lessons from Modern Insurgencies. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2013.
Peltier, Isaac J. “Surrogate Warfare: The Role of U.S. Army Special Forces.” Fort Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, May 26, 2005. https://doi.org/10.21236/ADA436109.
Rempe, Dennis M. The Past as Prologue? A History of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in Colombia, 1958-66. Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2002. http://books.google.com/books?id=0ndsAAAAMAAJ.
Roggio, Bill. “Analysis: US Military Downplays District Control as Taliban Gains Ground in Afghanistan.” Long War Journal, January 31, 2019. https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2019/01/analysis-us-military-downplays-district-control-as-taliban-gains-ground-in-afghanistan.php.
“The Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan.” Middle East Focus. Middle East Institute, August 18, 2021.
Thrall, A. Trevor, and Erik Goepner. “Step Back: Lessons for U.S. Foreign Policy from the Failed War on Terror.” Policy Analysis, the Cato Institute, no. 814 (June 26, 2017): 26.
About the Author
Michael Perry is a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, currently serving in the Reserves. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2020 as the lead logistics advisor for the Special Mission Wing (SMW) Special Operations Advisory Group (SOAG). He holds a master’s in defense and strategic studies from the Naval War College with a specialization in irregular warfare, and currently works for George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Endnotes
[i] Neta Crawford, “United States Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2018: A Summary of the $5.6 Trillion in Costs for the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Post-‐‑9/11 Veterans Care and Homeland Security,” Brown University, Costs of War, 2017.
[ii] Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai, “Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 04 (November 2013): 679–705, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055413000403.
[iii] A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner, “Step Back: Lessons for U.S. Foreign Policy from the Failed War on Terror,” Policy Analysis, the Cato Institute, no. 814 (June 26, 2017): 26.
[iv] Robert Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary, First Simon&Schuster Paperbacks trade paperback edition (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2016).
[v] “Joint Special Operations Task Force - North (JSOTF-N) (Afghanistan) ‘Task Force Dagger,’” GlobalSecurity.Org, n.d., https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/jsotf-n-af.htm.
[vi] Marvin L. King III, “Optimizing Counterinsurgency Operations” (Colorado School of Mines, 2014).
[viii] Christopher Paul et al., Paths to Victory: Lessons from Modern Insurgencies (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2013).
[ix] Christopher Paul et al., Paths to Victory: Detailed Insurgency Case Studies (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2013).
[x] Dennis M Rempe, The Past as Prologue? A History of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in Colombia, 1958-66 (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2002), http://books.google.com/books?id=0ndsAAAAMAAJ.
[xi] Wardatul Akmam, “Atrocities against Humanity during the Liberation War in Bangladesh: A Case of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 4 (December 2002): 543–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/146235022000000463.
[xii] Anja Manuel and P. W. Singer, “A New Model Afghan Army,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (2002): 44, https://doi.org/10.2307/20033239.
[xiii] Lyall, Blair, and Imai, “Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime.”
[xiv] Manuel and Singer, “A New Model Afghan Army.”
[xv] Isaac J. Peltier, “Surrogate Warfare: The Role of U.S. Army Special Forces” (Fort Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, May 26, 2005), https://doi.org/10.21236/ADA436109.
[xvi] Samuel Chan, “Sentinels of Afghan Democracy: The Afghan National Army,” Military Review, February 2009, 25–40.
[xvii] Helene Cooper, “Afghan Forces Are Praised, Despite Still Relying Heavily on U.S. Help,” New York Times, August 20, 2017.
[xviii] Manuel and Singer, “A New Model Afghan Army.”
[xix] Ian S. Livingston and Michael O’Hanlon, “Brookings: Afghanistan Index” (Brookings Institute, September 29, 2017).
[xx] Anwar Iqbal, “Afghan Army to Collapse in Six Months without US Help: Ghani,” Dawn.Com, January 18, 2018.
[xxi] Chan, “Sentinels of Afghan Democracy: The Afghan National Army.”
[xxii] Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Hurray for Militias? Not so Fast: Lessons from the Afghan Local Police Experience,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 27, no. 2 (March 3, 2016): 258–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2015.1129169.
[xxiii] Austin G. Long, ed., Locals Rule: Historical Lessons for Creating Local Defense Forces for Afghanistan and Beyond (Santa Monica, CA: RAND/National Defense Research Institute, 2012).
[xxiv] Mathieu Lefevre, “Local Defence in Afghanistan: A Review of Government-backed Initiatives” (Afghanistan Analysts Network, May 2010).
[xxv] Manuel and Singer, “A New Model Afghan Army.”
[xxvii] Bill Roggio, “Analysis: US Military Downplays District Control as Taliban Gains Ground in Afghanistan,” Long War Journal, January 31, 2019, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2019/01/analysis-us-military-downplays-district-control-as-taliban-gains-ground-in-afghanistan.php.
[xxviii] Andrew Feickert, “U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF): Background and Issues for Congress” (Congressional Research Service, July 16, 2010).
[xxix] Joseph D Celeski, Hunter-Killer Teams: Attacking Enemy Safe Havens (Hurlburt Field, Fla.: Joint Special Operations University Press, 2010).
[xxx] Thomas H Henriksen, The Israeli Approach to Irregular Warfare and Implications for the United States (Hurlburt Field, Fla.: JSOU Press, 2007).
[xxxi] Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics, Cambridge Middle East Library (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
[xxxii] “The Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan,” Middle East Focus (Middle East Institute, August 18, 2021).
[xxxiii] Asia Foundation, “A Survey of the Afghan People,” n.d., http://asiafoundation.org/where-we-work/afghanistan/survey/resources/#archive.
[xxxiv] “Leave Them in No Peace: America’s Afghan Exit.”
About the Author(s)
Michael Perry is a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, currently serving in the Reserves. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2020 as the lead logistics advisor for the Special Mission Wing (SMW) Special Operations Advisory Group (SOAG). He holds a master’s in defense and strategic studies from the Naval War College with a specialization in irregular warfare, and currently works for George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
15. China Flaunts Its Offensive Cyber Power
Conclusion:
The assemblage of talent, and the directed focus of the competition, speaks to more than a near-peer challenge to U.S. cyber power. China brings together these hackers, many of whom who are apparently marginalized and overlooked within their system, largely for show. In so doing, they prove that they have effectively already eclipsed relative commitments by others to earlier Western competitive disclosure events. Yet the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force, Ministry of State Security, and Public Security Bureau’s development efforts remain out of public view. Increasingly, this points to future scenarios in which one cannot assure that the U.S. government and its Five Eyes allies will remain as the apex predators in the cyber realm.
Western policymakers face a very different prospective future than the one long assumed. This future is one in which the offensive cyber power available to the United States and its allies in crisis is not an overwhelming option available anytime it is needed, but whose employment should be considered only under the greatest restraint. Rather, it becomes one in which all-too-limited capabilities should be husbanded carefully, and where the United States cannot afford to sacrifice the few rare exploit options in its arsenal that were not already discovered by faster, more innovative offensive programs for mere demonstration or other signaling objectives. Should policymakers find that such scenarios impose prospective limitations on crisis management options that are uncomfortable or even unacceptable, then they may need to fundamentally rethink what they invest in and how they develop cyber capabilities. It is vital to ensure that these tools remain available as options to contest Chinese efforts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure systems and networks, blunt malicious disruption and destruction, and prevent Beijing from escalating cyber exchanges.
China Flaunts Its Offensive Cyber Power - War on the Rocks
States have long valued military parades. They allow countries to flaunt their most powerful tanks, aircraft, and missiles. However, what can a country do if it wants to showcase its considerable investments in offensive cyber capabilities? The typical “cyber weapon” entirely lacks the presence of a ballistic-missile launcher or impressively ranked armored vehicles. Even when a state might show off the more prominent footprint of their large-scale data centers, these lack obvious immediate offensive application — and you still can’t put a data center on parade. In addition, disclosing offensive cyber portfolios could allow adversaries to design defenses against them, or make it harder to carry out a cyber attack anonymously. This poses a dilemma for many states, China among them, that may wish to highlight their growing cyber arsenals — to signal readiness, relative advantage in correlation of forces, and commitment — without degrading the future effectiveness of these capabilities.
The Tianfu Cup competition in Chengdu increasingly appears to be the Chinese Communist Party’s way around this dilemma, a means of pursuing these objectives in a manner that has remained largely outside of strategic discourse in recent years. As a result, the remarkable display of capability in the event (which took place this month) deserves further scrutiny, as it conveys several key messages to an international audience. The Tianfu competition demonstrated the continued ability to hold key Western systems and networks at risk, highlighted the substantial depth of China’s offensive cyber inventories, and showed off a talent base of aggressive hackers undeterred by blowback from international exposure of its activities. Taken in total, this signaling also seems to suggest a trajectory towards a surprising future in which China’s offensive cyber power surpasses that of the West.
Reaching for the Cup
On the surface, the Tianfu Cup appears to be just another bug-bounty competition where hackers find new bugs in software code and submit them in return for cash awards. Vulnerability disclosure competitions like these arose in the mid-2000s as a means of disclosing device and software flaws despite the continuing indifference, or active hostility, of major technology firms. Competitions like Pwn2Own not only provided a venue for hackers to have their work acknowledged, but also a collective weight to withstand greater pressures from tech companies to keep vulnerabilities hidden than ordinary researchers working alone. The disclosed vulnerabilities would receive more attention and therefore would be patched more quickly. Over time, this shaped the dynamics of how researchers built their reputations and drove them to cultivate skillsets specific to new targets.
Researchers from China had been participating in these contests in increasing numbers through the late 2010s, seeking to prove their own talent and incentivized in many cases by the promise of matching compensation that would be paid by their employers for having won prizes in an international venue. But such participation faced increasing scrutiny from Chinese security services, and later direct discouragement. Eventually the Chinese government outright prohibited Chinese researchers from participating in international bug-bounty competitions, seeking to better understand and control the valuable exploits that Chinese hackers were finding and effectively giving away without consideration of their value to military and intelligence services. Chinese hackers were left with few options to demonstrate their skills and monetize their research.
The Tianfu Cup — started in 2017 — grew to fill this void. It has emerged as a socially responsible alternative backed by major Chinese technology firms including Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and Qihoo360, and taps into key talent networks of prominent hacker ventures such as NSFocus, VenusTech, and TopSec. In doing so, it has also evolved in very different ways than previous Western competitions. International hackers came to Western events often distinctly opposed to government involvement, and with strong suspicion of the vendors whose products they were there to break. Such suspicions were often well-founded, given the longstanding history of legal threats by Silicon Valley firms against researchers who dropped new zero-days — previously unknown and unpatched vulnerabilities — on stage. In contrast, Tianfu’s implied official sanction provided participants with reassurance that their work would be valued and protected from pressure from Western tech vendors — assurances that were reportedly communicated more explicitly in private.
In return, the Chinese government almost certainly receives early access to high-value exploit portfolios through the competition. One such remote code execution exploit chain, which provided attackers the ability to compromise Apple iPhones, was developed by a researcher for the 2018 Tianfu competition. This zero-day capability would be seen in near-immediate use thereafter against Uyghur minority targets, installing malware over the next two-month period, before Apple released a security update to patch the underlying vulnerabilities. These intrusions supported the Chinese government’s ongoing espionage against ethnic and religious minority populations, part of repressive campaigns that the U.S. government has determined are crimes against humanity.
New Exploitation Successes, Continuing Consistent Performance
Tianfu Cup 2021 competitors successfully exploited multiple targets, including immediate wins against Google’s Chrome browser, disclosing a high-value capability useful against global targets. Such a portfolio would otherwise trade at a substantial premium if offered for sale to international exploit brokers, as there is a robust market for previously unknown software vulnerabilities. Similar exploits were submitted in the 2019 and 2020 competitions, including multiple remote-code execution bugs across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge browsers. The operational value of these exploit portfolios may be compared to a similar set of capabilities identified in an intrusion campaign detected in the wild by Google’s Project Zero threat intelligence between February and October 2020, reportedly used in high-value counter-terrorism operations by a Western government. These exploits were detected only through substantial collection efforts by Mountain View engineers, and undoubtedly represented a significant investment of development effort, acquisition dollars, or both by the government involved. It therefore remains somewhat shocking to see equivalent capabilities casually displayed in the Tianfu demonstration.
Additional high-value findings surfaced in the 2021 competition included new exploits targeting current Apple iOS devices and various Android phone variants from multiple manufacturers. Similar capabilities have also been consistently delivered year on year. Likewise, this year’s target list featured a number of virtualization solutions in wide use (including VMWare, Parallels, and qemu), as well as routers and other network devices. Hacking groups linked to the Chinese government have compromised such devices to enable ongoing intrusions in the past — including the China nexus intrusion set detected during the summer of 2021, tracked by industry under the cryptonym APT31/ZIRCONIUM, which compromised home and office routers for use in the attack.
Tianfu researchers also found a new bug in Microsoft Exchange’s mail server on the first day of the 2021 competition. Although full details remain embargoed, this reportedly leveraged a similar attack surface as multiple other exploit portfolios targeting Exchange protocol handler services that have been made public in recent months. However, the new capability is allegedly technically distinct and able to defeat prior Microsoft fixes that had been rushed into production since the spring.
Participants at the Tianfu Cup are justifiably proud of their wins. They are also mindful of the potential military and intelligence utility of their work. One directly compared their research to the People’s Liberation Army’s new hypersonic weapons development efforts in a quickly deleted social media post. The competition’s sponsors, which include prominent firms within the country’s defense industrial base, may encourage such comparisons. Competitors may also be more directly aware of their potential contributions to state power, given rumors of relationships between the Ministry of State Security and a number of these firms’ high-profile employees — who themselves were previously “old school” mentors, highly active within early patriotic hacking movements. Chinese hackers have long sought to emulate both the technical successes and the professional behaviors of these mentors.
Implications
Interpreting Likely Signaling
Beyond the show of strength and brandishing China’s contemporary offensive cyber capabilities, the Tianfu Cup events may have sent more subtle signals. The exploitation of Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities in the competition comes mere months after the U.S. government sought to name and shame Chinese intrusion operators for involvement in widespread, unrestrained, and entirely irresponsible exploitation of an earlier Exchange bug starting in January 2021. This “land rush” delivered simple backdoors based on opportunistic mass scanning, leveraging a vulnerability believed to have been stolen from a Taiwanese researcher. The HAFNIUM intrusion set used it first, rapidly followed by multiple threat activity groups linked to China. These intruders made almost no efforts to secure compromised systems against further exploitation by any subsequent attacker that might abuse the easily hijacked backdoors installed by the Chinese teams. The brazenness, and unprofessionalism, of these intrusions sparked widespread denunciations in the Beltway and beyond. The prominence of new Exchange bugs on the Tianfu target list may thus be intended as a deliberate backhand in response to the U.S. establishment.
The message sent via the Exchange exploits may also be intended for another audience, beyond the U.S. government. New bugs also highlight Microsoft’s continuing failure to resolve weaknesses across the on-premises Exchange attack surface. It seems intended to play upon suspicions voiced by security industry professionals, who increasingly fear attempts by Microsoft to deprioritize support to legacy enterprise solutions, despite some customers’ continuing need for them, in order to incentivize customers to adopt cloud-first business models that provide more predictable recurring revenue. In addition to the intrinsic value of the exploit portfolio in future use against critical networks that remain reluctant to transition their mail servers to the cloud, disclosure in the competition once again highlights both Microsoft’s very public involvement in recent policy discussions around state-level intrusion behaviors, as well as the seeming disconnects with its security engineering posture.
Fragility Despite Appearances
As in any propaganda-driven event such as a parade, one must be wary of the gulf between the appearances of the exceptional and the realities of the mundane. History is replete with examples where public demonstrations have biased intelligence services towards over-estimating competitors’ offensive potential — from the bomber and missile gap debates to overly optimistic Western assessments of early Soviet computers. So too one sees in recent events indications of deeper systemic weaknesses.
Several prominent Western researchers have indicated that they were privately approached by Tianfu Cup competitors who, despite ranking well and demonstrating a high degree of talent, were not offered employment by increasingly ossified state-owned enterprises or in what are very political government positions. As a result, these hackers have sought options to emigrate to live and work in the West — even knowing the challenges of navigating bureaucracy and the risks involved after having come to the attention of the Chinese state security services.
Likewise, the concentration of winning teams supported by major Chinese technology firms (including multiple teams from giants such as Qihoo360) suggests that the support of these large ventures — and their associated internal bureaucratic politics — is a critical component of the success of the event. For these teams, competitors have also complained that prize monies must also reportedly be split not only among participating members, but also across the wider work unit and their bosses. This mutes some of the incentive to chase large award purses on difficult targets, especially where extended individual effort is required. The concentration of this much cyber talent at a few large firms also creates pockets of novel military capability that pose potential alternative power structures. This has proved to be a key area of concern for the Chinese Communist Party and has sparked multiple recent crackdowns intended to bring prominent firms to heel.
Outside of the large sponsored teams, much of the contributor talent base — including the highly ranked team Pangu — draws heavily upon the “jailbreaking” scene. This subculture is made up of hackers devoted to breaking mobile phones and associated devices free from the walled gardens of major U.S. app stores, to allow locally developed Chinese apps to be loaded outside of U.S. vendor restrictions. However, jailbreaks are a highly ephemeral area of focus, with advances frequently upended by manufacturer releases of new products or operating system versions. The scene is also reportedly heavily influenced by monetary rewards offered by competing app-store operators that seek market share for local solutions, driven by fragmented and often transient startups. The talent base that emerges from this environment is therefore less likely to provide the Chinese state with sustained advantage, despite its utility within the present ecosystem.
Outlook
Competing Against the Competitors
Other states are not limited to merely holding dueling parades or tests of their own as prospective reciprocal brandishing of their own arsenals — if they could even put together a Tianfu-style event. Indeed, in the West one would almost certainly not see anything like the enthusiasm, or talent, for participating in an officially encouraged competition. In these mature markets, offensively inclined researchers can get a better return on their time and effort by selling the vulnerabilities that they find.
Yet the world is not without options to respond to increasingly provocative Chinese displays. Technologist Dave Aitel, himself a veteran exploit developer, has previously proposed an assertive signal in reply that would further serve as counterweight to the propaganda benefits China currently receives from the event. He argues that U.S. intelligence and cyber defense efforts should focus on identifying and patching Tianfu bug targets immediately before they were disclosed in competition. Engineering deliberate “bug collisions” like this would require a nontrivial clandestine collection effort tracking researcher experimentation, coupled with aggressive defensive investment to harden identified attack surfaces and kill associated bug classes that give rise to the specific vulnerabilities (by rendering non-viable entire exploitation approaches through fundamental changes to the underlying software). Substantial public-private coordination would also be needed to make this happen across operationally relevant timelines. It also presumes that impacted vendors would actually deliver effective patches upon being warned by government agencies of potential exploitation. This seems an increasingly idealistic aspiration given the delays and ineffective mitigations that have been seen in some of the year’s highest profile vulnerabilities.
Aitel’s concept of operations would also potentially call for serious tradeoffs, where bugs of potential value within U.S. and Five-Eyes arsenals — vulnerabilities that the United States and its partners might like to use against adversaries and thus don’t want to see patched just yet —would be deliberately sacrificed to the possibility that these might be independently re-discovered in competition. This also functionally takes offline some percentage of the pool of U.S. and allied offensive capabilities talent as they work towards this objective — and the Tianfu Cup seeks to demonstrate that the West does indeed have a smaller and more limited pool of cyber talent than China. However, as Silicon Valley has long understood, measuring man hours alone does not adequately represent the ultimate productive value of a developer. It may be presumed that the West’s best offensive minds may equal or exceed the so-called “10x engineer” — making potential tradeoffs a more acceptable risk.
Future Evolution
Tianfu helps China to acquire cutting-edge cyber capabilities and spot talented hackers. Yet it is increasingly likely that the exploit options identified at such events are of less value in an landscape where offensive-capabilities developers pursue automated vulnerability discovery and exploit generation. Any zero-day exploits found through the competition may be used only within a limited time period before the vendor is able to patch the underlying vulnerability. This narrow window of early access is bought at what is likely an increasing probability of blowback as industry and global attention further focuses on this event. Against the backdrop of the supply-chain crisis and Chinese forces’ growing aggression against Taiwan and in the South China Sea, the problems highlighted by Tianfu may well be seen in a very different light. Apparent Chinese government signaling through this proxy channel becomes more prominent and, given the message conveyed, is likely to prompt a deliberate response.
Regardless of how the aftermath of this year’s Cup will play out, it is likely that Tianfu remains essentially a transient event. Burning valuable cyber capabilities through such conspicuous disclosure is an expensive demonstration, as unlike conventional weapons systems, these may not simply be parked after the event for future use, but instead are fundamentally degraded by public knowledge. The message of the Cup is not really about the problems of the present but, much like other parades in Tiananmen Square (or Red Square, or Kim Il-Sung Square, etc.), it is intended to convey the strength and depth of the arsenal that China’s leadership now commands.
The assemblage of talent, and the directed focus of the competition, speaks to more than a near-peer challenge to U.S. cyber power. China brings together these hackers, many of whom who are apparently marginalized and overlooked within their system, largely for show. In so doing, they prove that they have effectively already eclipsed relative commitments by others to earlier Western competitive disclosure events. Yet the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force, Ministry of State Security, and Public Security Bureau’s development efforts remain out of public view. Increasingly, this points to future scenarios in which one cannot assure that the U.S. government and its Five Eyes allies will remain as the apex predators in the cyber realm.
Western policymakers face a very different prospective future than the one long assumed. This future is one in which the offensive cyber power available to the United States and its allies in crisis is not an overwhelming option available anytime it is needed, but whose employment should be considered only under the greatest restraint. Rather, it becomes one in which all-too-limited capabilities should be husbanded carefully, and where the United States cannot afford to sacrifice the few rare exploit options in its arsenal that were not already discovered by faster, more innovative offensive programs for mere demonstration or other signaling objectives. Should policymakers find that such scenarios impose prospective limitations on crisis management options that are uncomfortable or even unacceptable, then they may need to fundamentally rethink what they invest in and how they develop cyber capabilities. It is vital to ensure that these tools remain available as options to contest Chinese efforts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure systems and networks, blunt malicious disruption and destruction, and prevent Beijing from escalating cyber exchanges.
J.D. Work is a former intelligence professional with over two decades of experience in cyber intelligence and operations roles supporting the U.S. government and private sector. He currently serves with the Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at the Marine Corps University, and holds additional affiliations with the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at Atlantic Council. He can be found on Twitter @HostileSpectrum.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the U.S. government or other organization.
16. Syria's challenge to Tony Blinken's conscience
Excerpts:
There is still time to reverse the gains Assad has made. Gas and power won’t begin to flow through Syria for roughly another three months, since repairs are under way to pipelines and other infrastructure damaged by the war. More importantly, the president has not officially waived Caesar Act sanctions nor has the administration formally circumvented them by other means. Clear messages from the secretary of state and the president could marginalize Assad once again, so that Moscow and Tehran remain the only capitals where he can expect a warm welcome.
The Syrian-American community and other advocates of human rights still hope that Blinken will serve as the conscience of this administration. During last year’s campaign, when asked to explain Biden’s view of Syria, Blinken spoke emotionally about how the Obama administration, in which he held senior positions, “failed to prevent a horrific loss of life” and massive displacement of refugees. “It’s something that I will take with me for the rest of my days,” he said. Now is the time to show it.
Syria's challenge to Tony Blinken's conscience
The Hill · by David Adesnik, opinion contributor · October 22, 2021
The Nazi massacre at Babyn Yar claimed the lives of 33,771 Ukrainian Jews in September 1941. To mark the 80th anniversary of the massacre, Secretary of State Antony Blinken meditated on the lessons of the past. We must, he said, “recommit ourselves to ensuring that their full history is told, and pledge to act, every day, so that history is not repeated.” That notion is unobjectionable, even banal. Nonetheless, it is absent from the Biden administration’s policy toward Syria. Unrepentant, Bashar al-Assad continues preside over prisons that churn out emaciated corpses in a manner reminiscent of the Third Reich. Yet according to Blinken, the United States will no longer stand in the way of those who seek Assad’s diplomatic rehabilitation.
The secretary of state is the stepson of an Auschwitz survivor, whose rescue by an African-American GI he recounted during the opening remarks at his confirmation hearing. On Holocaust remembrance day in April, Blinken honored the civil servants who appealed to President Roosevelt when the State Department placed one barrier after another in the way of European Jews seeking refuge in the United States. Their effort changed the president’s mind, enabling tens of thousands to enter the country.
During the first weeks of his tenure, Blinken made a commitment to “put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.” Initially, that extended to Syria. The administration pledged full implementation of the Caesar Act, the 2019 law that imposed expansive sanctions to isolate and hold accountable the Assad regime. “The world must renew its shared resolve to promote the dignity and human rights of all Syrians,” Blinken said in July, announcing sanctions on eight Syrian prisons and their overseers.
Weeks later, a quiet reversal began. In mid-August, the U.S. approved Syrian participation in a regional plan for trading natural gas and electric power. The U.S. ambassador in Beirut — there is none in Damascus — said that Washington’s sanctions on the Assad regime would not get in the way of the deal. “There is a will to get this this done,” she noted. Reportedly, the Biden administration even advised the four countries participating in the deal — Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan — how to structure their agreement in order to avoid sanctions.
Syria’s neighbors readily understood the signals from Washington, even though few inside the Beltway noticed. Neighbors that had once shunned Assad — whether out of principle or deference to Washington — suddenly raced to engage the regime. A delegation of Lebanese ministers visited Damascus in early September, the first such contact in a decade. Days later, the Jordanian minister of energy hosted his Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese counterparts in Amman to discuss their joint venture. The Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers then met with Assad’s top diplomat on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. In early October, King Abdullah of Jordan accepted a personal phone call from Bashar al-Assad, which he had not done since the war in Syria began.
This flurry of activity alerted journalists to the administration’s reversal; they began asking questions. The response was twofold. One the one hand, the State Department said U.S. policy toward Syria had not changed. Yet its spokespersons were careful not to reiterate the old calls for Assad’s isolation. Rather, they insisted the United States would not normalize relations with the Syrian regime, nor would it encourage others to do so. The Department seemed to hope that few would notice the difference between actively opposing normalization and simply not encouraging it.
Last week, Blinken finally faced a direct question from a reporter about Syria. Like his subordinates, the secretary sought to convey an impression of continuity while carefully selecting his words to avoid contradicting the new policy. He said, “What we have not done and what we do not intend to do is to express any support for efforts to normalize relations or rehabilitate Mr. Assad or lifted a single sanction on Syria or changed our position to oppose the reconstruction of Syria until there is irreversible progress toward a political solution.”
Blinken spoke those words only seven days after his commemoration of Babyn Yar. He should recall the civil servants who told FDR that his administration was complicit in the destruction of European Jewry. He should approach President Biden and the rest of the cabinet to explain why both our country’s principles and its national interest favor the isolation of a regime that continues to bomb hospitals, torture political prisoners en masse, and refuses to address evidence that it maintains an illegal chemical weapons program.
There is still time to reverse the gains Assad has made. Gas and power won’t begin to flow through Syria for roughly another three months, since repairs are under way to pipelines and other infrastructure damaged by the war. More importantly, the president has not officially waived Caesar Act sanctions nor has the administration formally circumvented them by other means. Clear messages from the secretary of state and the president could marginalize Assad once again, so that Moscow and Tehran remain the only capitals where he can expect a warm welcome.
The Syrian-American community and other advocates of human rights still hope that Blinken will serve as the conscience of this administration. During last year’s campaign, when asked to explain Biden’s view of Syria, Blinken spoke emotionally about how the Obama administration, in which he held senior positions, “failed to prevent a horrific loss of life” and massive displacement of refugees. “It’s something that I will take with me for the rest of my days,” he said. Now is the time to show it.
David Adesnik is a senior fellow and director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (@FDD), a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research institute focusing on foreign policy and national security. FDD does not accept donations from foreign governments.
The Hill · by David Adesnik, opinion contributor · October 22, 2021
17. PRC Info-Ops – in their own words
PRC Info-Ops – in their own words
Wow.
Written by the PRC’s National Defense University (NDU) faculty, with assistance from the General Staff Operations Department and the Academy of Military Sciences, this text contains instructional material for NDU Commander’s Course, Staff Officer, and PLA-wide Information Operations Advanced Studies Courses. Forward looking, and deliberately very comprehensive on concepts of information operations at the campaign level in the joint form, the 2009 edition contains extensive review/revisions from its previous publications.
In Their Own Words: Lectures on Joint Campaign Information Operations
What a great project. This stuff is out there and available. This is professional development. It’s not necessarily going to be a “fun” read or one that you need to do.
But if you’re a professional, it’s one that you absolutely should do.
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18. House lawmakers want military pay raise for enlisted troops
I fully support this. We must not neglect our enlisted force. We must care for it and never forget that it is the foundation upon which our military power rests. They should never go without a raise.
House lawmakers want military pay raise for enlisted troops
The Hill · by Ellen Mitchell · October 21, 2021
The top two lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee want to “significantly” increase service members’ pay and benefits as part of next year's defense spending bill.
Committee ranking member Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said proposals to boost compensation and benefits for troops will be a top priority as he and Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) put together the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in 2022.
“One of the things that Chairman Adam Smith and I have been talking about, and we intend to lean into in this next year, is significantly increasing compensation and benefits packages, particularly for enlisted personnel,” Rogers said at a think tank event Wednesday.
“We want to maintain a professional military and we need to compensate them as professionals. And we aren't doing that right now, particularly in the enlisted ranks,” he added. “So you're going to see us making some efforts to address some of those concerns.”
Rogers did not provide further details on such a plan.
Asked about Rogers’s comments, a spokesperson for Smith told The Hill that he will look “to ensure we have the right mix of pay and benefits.”
“Taking care of our service-members and their families is an integral component of the readiness and resiliency of the Joint Force,” spokesperson Monica Matoush said in a statement.
“We will be looking at next year’s defense budget to ensure we have the right mix of pay and benefits to attract, recruit and retain the most talented military in the world. We will also keep options open if we perceive there may be a shortfall that would negatively affect service-members and their families.”
House and Senate lawmakers are currently in the midst of finalizing this year’s NDAA, which includes a 2.7 percent pay raise for all troops beginning Jan. 1, as recommended by the White House.
The military has had pay raises that matched private sector increases every year for the past five years, but experts say service members are still behind their civilian counterparts due to smaller raises from 2014 to 2017.
Currently, the most junior enlisted troops earn well below $15 an hour, making only about $20,000 in base pay annually.
This year's NDAA includes language that would create a “Basic Needs Allowance” to help low-income troops boost their take-home dollar, particularly on food. But Rogers said Congress needs to make sure military staffing is maintained, particularly after the 20-year conflict in Afghanistan.
“People have to remember, we’ve been through two decades of war. We’ve worn everything we’ve got out, including manpower,” he said. “We need to make sure that we always have a professional military that’s vibrant and is capable.”
The Hill · by Ellen Mitchell · October 21, 2021
19. The Distracted Defense Department
Consider these four paragraphs (in addition to Dr, Schadlow's entire essay):
The essence of strategy is competition. Good strategy must respond to actors pursuing their objectives. The military strategist Carl von Clausewitz called this a “dialectic of wills,” whereby actors take actions and counteractions against each other. Similarly, modern strategist Edward Luttwak writes of “the paradoxical logic of strategy,” in which successful actions can’t be repeated because “the other party adapts.” That’s why fighting the last war is a formula for defeat: It would be unwise to repeat the same action against an adaptive adversary.
In contrast, successful approaches to complex problems should be repeatable. Lockdowns and mask mandates were deployed 100 years ago during the Spanish flu with some success. A well-designed vaccine works against its designated target.
Certainly the U.S. military can work to reduce its carbon footprint. But meaningful shifts away from fossil fuels are limited by the need to power ships and airplanes, maneuver to and across faraway theaters, and keep the lights on in its installations. All this is critical to deter adversaries. Until scalable and sustainable advances in power generation and energy storage arrive, decarbonizing the Pentagon would undermine deterrence.
Similarly, Covid-19 affects the readiness of U.S. forces. The Pentagon can contribute to solutions—through, for instance, its scientists sharing information and its logistics capabilities. But a pandemic is not a pacing threat.
Conclusion:
Militaries exist primarily to defeat strategic actors. As the Biden administration develops its National Security Strategy, it must distinguish between thinking, adaptive adversaries and the problems posed by Covid-19 and climate change. Improving the Pentagon’s ability to deter or win wars against pacing threats will keep it busy enough.
The Distracted Defense Department
The military should focus on strategic adversaries, not challenges like Covid and climate change.
Illustration: David Klein
The Defense Department is in trouble under the Biden administration. It surrendered to the Taliban and has been slow in responding to the challenge posed by China. Meanwhile, Pentagon leaders wasted time and resources developing a climate strategy, which they released this month.
At the root of these blunders is a failure to distinguish between strategic challenges posed by adversaries and problems such as climate change. Unless the military refocuses on deterring and winning wars, we will likely lose more conflicts.
China is an adaptive actor—an adversary who can think and shift course. Yet the Biden administration conflates such actors with challenges like Covid-19 and climate change, lumping them together as threats. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said few threats to national security “deserve to be [called] existential,” but that climate change qualified. He ordered the Pentagon to “prioritize climate change considerations.” President Biden’s interim national-security guidance reiterates this point. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said among the top challenges facing the U.S. Navy are China, climate change, and Covid.
This is misguided. The Chinese Communist Party, unlike climate change and Covid-19, is an opponent that makes choices to advance its goals. That is why defense experts consider China a “pacing threat.” China has modernized its armed forces to deny others access to the island chain running from Japan through Taiwan down to Singapore. This makes it more difficult for the U.S. military to project power in the area. In recent months, China has sent dozens of aircraft into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone. It has developed weapons systems, such as hypersonic missiles and cyber capabilities, and is expanding its nuclear arsenal.
Climate change and Covid-19 are complex challenges with many potential consequences, including mass migration and political instability. But actors with strategic intent don’t drive these outcomes—unless the administration is willing to deem the Covid-19 outbreak a deliberate act.
The essence of strategy is competition. Good strategy must respond to actors pursuing their objectives. The military strategist Carl von Clausewitz called this a “dialectic of wills,” whereby actors take actions and counteractions against each other. Similarly, modern strategist Edward Luttwak writes of “the paradoxical logic of strategy,” in which successful actions can’t be repeated because “the other party adapts.” That’s why fighting the last war is a formula for defeat: It would be unwise to repeat the same action against an adaptive adversary.
In contrast, successful approaches to complex problems should be repeatable. Lockdowns and mask mandates were deployed 100 years ago during the Spanish flu with some success. A well-designed vaccine works against its designated target.
Certainly the U.S. military can work to reduce its carbon footprint. But meaningful shifts away from fossil fuels are limited by the need to power ships and airplanes, maneuver to and across faraway theaters, and keep the lights on in its installations. All this is critical to deter adversaries. Until scalable and sustainable advances in power generation and energy storage arrive, decarbonizing the Pentagon would undermine deterrence.
Similarly, Covid-19 affects the readiness of U.S. forces. The Pentagon can contribute to solutions—through, for instance, its scientists sharing information and its logistics capabilities. But a pandemic is not a pacing threat.
Conflating threats posed by strategic actors and those posed by operational challenges has several debilitating effects. First, it shifts Defense Department attention and resources from pressing strategic challenges. This year, senior officers called into question America’s ability to deter and defeat a possible Chinese military action against Taiwan. What is the military’s operational concept to defend Taiwan? How does it plan to counter the growing Chinese nuclear capability? How does the U.S. intend to build up its naval forces, despite shrinking defense budgets? While Pentagon leaders focus on strategies for climate change, they don’t yet have answers to these problems.
Second, misplaced priorities can result in using the military to deal with problems best handled by others. The U.S. has several agencies dedicated to public health, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Public Health Service, and the Food and Drug Administration. States also have public-health capabilities. Environmental regulation and energy policy are the principal responsibilities of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department. Simply put, climate change and pandemic response are not the Pentagon’s problems to solve.
Third, such concerns take time and focus away from developing the skills needed to compete against adaptive actors like China. The toughest questions facing the Defense Department have little to do with Covid-19 or climate change. Pentagon planners need to speed up acquisition cycles to take advantage of new technologies. They need to manage the proliferation of artificial intelligence and harness emerging technologies such as hypersonic missiles and electronic warfare.
Militaries exist primarily to defeat strategic actors. As the Biden administration develops its National Security Strategy, it must distinguish between thinking, adaptive adversaries and the problems posed by Covid-19 and climate change. Improving the Pentagon’s ability to deter or win wars against pacing threats will keep it busy enough.
Ms. Schadlow is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Hudson Institute.
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
