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Quotes of the Day:
“Only the American melting pot could mobilize such a body of experts in the knowledge of other countries, and we did it to the great advantage of our war effort.”
– WIlliam J. Donovan, Director of the OSS
"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."
– Harriet Tubman
“It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. . . . Children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving. . . . The Indians in their simplicity literally give away all that they have—to relatives, to guests of other tribes or clans, but above all to the poor and the aged, from whom they can hope for no return.”
– Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa)
1. FBI Confirms Investigation Into Leak of Top-Secret Documents About Israeli Strike Plans
2. Pentagon denies employee of Iranian origin leaked Israel's strike intel
3. Grayzone Warfare Intensifies as the West Dithers
4. Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics: PRC Consulate Gray Zone ‘Pop-up’ Events in New York and Beyond
5. A global leadership void and ongoing wars
6. A Soldier's General - 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) Honors Legacy of Retired U.S. Army Gen. Gary Edward Luck
7. Our First Look At Land-Based Aegis Missile Defense System In Guam
8. Russian Propaganda Unit Appears to Be Behind Spread of False Tim Walz Sexual Abuse Claims
9. We need a a whole-of-society approach to intelligence
10. The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Rush to Get Money Out of China
11. As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator
12. Russia and Iran may fuel violent post-election protests in the US, intelligence officials warn
13. How a conspiracy-fueled group got a foothold in this hurricane-battered town
14. U.S. Agrees to Give Ukraine Millions to Build More Long-Range Drones
15. Proliferated LEO, hybrid cloud capabilities enable U.S. forces to operate more disconnected
16. Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough for the Pentagon?
17. The New Battle for the Middle East
18. Battles of Precise Mass: Technology Is Remaking War—and America Must Adapt
19. How Trade Can Serve the American Worker
20. Losing Georgia to Putin
21. BLM Collected Over $90 Million in Donations. Where Did It Go?
22. Commentary: China’s rare ICBM test was a show of force, but a missed opportunity for diplomacy
23. Xi tells Putin the world is in chaos but friendship with Russia will endure
24. The William J. Donovan Award (OSS Society) to LTG Patrick Hughes
1. FBI Confirms Investigation Into Leak of Top-Secret Documents About Israeli Strike Plans
Of course the FBI must investigate.
Example:
“This isn’t supposed to happen, and it’s unacceptable when it does,” Kirby said.
There is no apparent connection between the leak and foreign efforts to influence the U.S. elections next month, a U.S. intelligence official said Tuesday in a news briefing. “At this time, there’s no indication that the two are connected in any way,” the official said.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the U.S. intelligence community, referred questions about the disclosures to the FBI.
This isn’t the first significant leak of sensitive intelligence during the Biden administration. Last year, in a case officials said was a major security breach, a tranche of classified U.S. assessments of the war in Ukraine and other foreign-policy matters appeared on the online community platform Discord.
The leak was traced to Jack Teixeira, an enlisted airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, who was quickly arrested. He pleaded guilty in March to a range of related charges.
The FBI is also investigating the Biden administration’s special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, over allegations that he improperly handled secret information, potentially moving classified materials to a personal email account. Malley is on unpaid leave from the government. His access to classified information was suspended last year.
FBI Confirms Investigation Into Leak of Top-Secret Documents About Israeli Strike Plans
The reports began circulating online last week, raising concerns the leaker came from within U.S. government
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/fbi-confirms-investigation-into-leak-of-top-secret-documents-about-israeli-strike-plans-308f3cb6?mod=latest_headlines
By Sadie Gurman
Follow and Dustin Volz
Follow
Updated Oct. 22, 2024 7:16 pm ET
The FBI said it was ‘working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.’ Photo: Valerie Plesch/Zuma Press
WASHINGTON—The FBI is investigating a leak of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents that show Israeli military preparations for an expected strike on Iran, the agency confirmed on Tuesday.
The two leaked reports were prepared last week and included classified information from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes satellite imagery, and the National Security Agency, which conducts communications intercepts.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement that it was “working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.” The agency investigates violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it illegal to retain or disclose national-defense information that could hurt the U.S. or help its enemies.
The reports describe Israel’s planning for a possible Iran attack, including the types of aircraft and munitions its military could use in an attack, which the documents say could come without additional warning.
The documents describe Israeli air-force exercises involving air-to-surface missiles, believed to be in preparation for aerial strike inside Iran. One of the reports says the U.S. hasn’t seen any sign an attack would involve nuclear weapons, a capability Israel is known to possess but doesn’t publicly confirm it has.
Screenshots of the documents began circulating Friday on the Telegram messaging app. Neither document indicates the potential targets of the planned Iran strike, which Israel says will be a response to an Iranian attack earlier this month.
Former intelligence officials said it appeared the documents were most likely a leak from someone with access to the files, rather than from a hack into U.S. government classified servers. While the material is designated as top secret, officials across several agencies likely would have had access to it, they said.
“The investigation is in its first few days, so it’s important to let that investigation run its course,” Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Tuesday. The safeguarding of sensitive information “is, of course, something we take incredibly seriously here at the Department of Defense.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has discussed the leak with Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, Ryder said.
Middle East Spectator, a site that describes itself as an “open-source news aggregator,” posted the documents on Telegram and X. The site said it received them from an anonymous source, detailing the steps “the Zionist regime” is taking to prepare for an attack on Iran.
Middle East Spectator said it first became aware of the files when they were shared in a Telegram channel with 7,000 members, where it believed the source was likely a participant. It added: “We have no connection to the original source, which we assume to be a whistleblower within the U.S. Department of Defense.”
Several U.S. officials said the leak, while damaging, wasn’t a devastating public revelation of U.S. intelligence methods and capabilities.
Executive-branch officials have briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees on the leak, congressional officials said. The House is scheduled to get another briefing Tuesday, though most lawmakers are out of Washington on pre-election recess.
“Based upon the briefing that I have received, the FBI’s investigation is imperative of what clearly would constitute a criminal act of espionage,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner of Ohio said in a written statement. “Leaking highly classified and damaging information of the United States not only affects an important ally but risks the safety of our men and women in uniform serving in the Middle East.”
John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, said Monday the administration wasn’t exactly sure of the source of the leak. There were no signs that more documents beyond the original two that appeared online had been compromised, the White House said.
“This isn’t supposed to happen, and it’s unacceptable when it does,” Kirby said.
There is no apparent connection between the leak and foreign efforts to influence the U.S. elections next month, a U.S. intelligence official said Tuesday in a news briefing. “At this time, there’s no indication that the two are connected in any way,” the official said.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the U.S. intelligence community, referred questions about the disclosures to the FBI.
This isn’t the first significant leak of sensitive intelligence during the Biden administration. Last year, in a case officials said was a major security breach, a tranche of classified U.S. assessments of the war in Ukraine and other foreign-policy matters appeared on the online community platform Discord.
The leak was traced to Jack Teixeira, an enlisted airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, who was quickly arrested. He pleaded guilty in March to a range of related charges.
The FBI is also investigating the Biden administration’s special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, over allegations that he improperly handled secret information, potentially moving classified materials to a personal email account. Malley is on unpaid leave from the government. His access to classified information was suspended last year.
Brett Forrest and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.c
2. Pentagon denies employee of Iranian origin leaked Israel's strike intel
This is a hit job. Dr. Tabatabai has been under such scrutiny from past accusations that if she was working for a hostile intelligence service I would think she would be much more careful than this. Also she has been the chief of staff at ASD SO/LIC for some time so she must have been well vetted.
Pentagon denies employee of Iranian origin leaked Israel's strike intel
Last week, two US intelligence documents reportedly disclosing Israel's plan for a potential retaliatory attack on Iran were leaked.
By HANNAH SARISOHNOCTOBER 22, 2024 16:21Updated: OCTOBER 22, 2024 22:37
Jerusalem Post
The Pentagon denied that Ariane Tabatabai, Chief of Staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, is a subject of interest in the investigation for the alleged leak of classified documents pertaining to Israel's plans for a retaliatory attack against Iran.
"To my knowledge, this official is not a subject of interest," said Press Secretary of the Air Force, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.
Earlier Tuesday, Sky News Arabia cited a senior Pentagon official who reportedly named Tabatabai as the main suspect in the FBI's investigation into the leaks.
According to Sky News, Tabatabai came under fire in 2023 after members of Congress wrote to Defense Secretary Austin asking for Tabatabai to be removed from her position due to security concerns over her alleged communication with the IRGC.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has spoken with his Israeli counterpart Defense Minister Yoav Gallant regarding the leaks, Ryder said.
"The FBI is investigating the alleged leak of classified documents and working closely with the Department of Defense and the intelligence community on this," Ryder said Tuesday.
"Anytime there's an allegation of potential unauthorized disclosures, the Pentagon is going to take it seriously," he said.
The FBI is leading the investigation, limiting what Ryder was able to say from the Pentagon's podium. He declined to answer why the Pentagon is not conducting its own investigation into how the documents leaked.
Last week, two US intelligence documents reportedly disclosing Israel's plan for a potential retaliatory attack on Iran were leaked and disseminated on a Telegram channel.
The channel claimed it had received the documents via a source within the US intelligence community.
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US investigating incident
Following the leak, the US said it was investigating the incident, which House Speaker Mike Johnson characterized as "very concerning."
Israel said it would respond to Iran's October 1 attack, which saw the Islamic Republic launch some 180 ballistic missiles at Israel.
Tovah Lazaroff, Walla, Reuters, and Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.
Jerusalem Post
3. Grayzone Warfare Intensifies as the West Dithers
We must not dither any longer.
Excerpts:
As early as 2018, when I launched RUSI’s Modern Deterrence initiative to focus on deterrence of grayzone attacks, it was clear that authoritarian states had (rightly) concluded that using aggression below the threshold of armed military violence was a cheap and effective way of hurting Western societies.
China was harming Western countries through systematic theft of intellectual property, which had helped the country advance to Western rivals’ innovation standards — and thus economic power — in record time. Russia was engaging in gradual border alternations. Iran was attacking and sometimes assassinating diaspora members living in Western societies. North Korea was subverting the global maritime system by using shadow vessels for deliveries of sanctioned goods.
These and other gray zone activities, though, were relatively limited and could have been contained if Western countries had taken them seriously – and if they had seriously tried to build appropriate defenses and deterrence.
Granted, deterring malign activities that can appear anywhere, anytime, and in any guise is extremely difficult, and deterring them without resorting to illegal means or escalating the situation is even harder. A Western country can’t threaten to take a sliver of Russian territory in response to prospective gradual border alterations by the Kremlin. Deterring gray zone aggression is, in fact, so difficult that I called my book about the subject The Defender’s Dilemma.
Grayzone Warfare Intensifies as the West Dithers
The warnings have been ignored for years, Now, authoritarian states routinely attack the West because there’s no price to be paid.
By Elisabeth Braw
October 21, 2024
cepa.org · by Elisabeth Braw · October 21, 2024
There was a time, not so long ago when many viewed gray zone aggression as a marginal concern. Even those who paid attention to it mostly focused on cyber aggression and disinformation campaigns.
Now, it has become much more serious because we haven’t managed to deter it. Examples of hostile activity by the authoritarian axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are proliferating.
The UK faces “state-backed sabotage and assassination plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war,” MI5’s Director-General, Ken McCallum, warned on October 8. The same is true for every Western country. Defending free societies against it remains extremely difficult. But Western countries are not defenseless — or rather, they don’t have to be.
As early as 2018, when I launched RUSI’s Modern Deterrence initiative to focus on deterrence of grayzone attacks, it was clear that authoritarian states had (rightly) concluded that using aggression below the threshold of armed military violence was a cheap and effective way of hurting Western societies.
China was harming Western countries through systematic theft of intellectual property, which had helped the country advance to Western rivals’ innovation standards — and thus economic power — in record time. Russia was engaging in gradual border alternations. Iran was attacking and sometimes assassinating diaspora members living in Western societies. North Korea was subverting the global maritime system by using shadow vessels for deliveries of sanctioned goods.
These and other gray zone activities, though, were relatively limited and could have been contained if Western countries had taken them seriously – and if they had seriously tried to build appropriate defenses and deterrence.
Granted, deterring malign activities that can appear anywhere, anytime, and in any guise is extremely difficult, and deterring them without resorting to illegal means or escalating the situation is even harder. A Western country can’t threaten to take a sliver of Russian territory in response to prospective gradual border alterations by the Kremlin. Deterring gray zone aggression is, in fact, so difficult that I called my book about the subject The Defender’s Dilemma.
In his October 8 speech, McCallum observed that even though terrorism remains a significant threat to the UK and other Western countries, state-sponsored malign activity is growing fast. Hostile state “targets include sensitive government information, our technology, our democracy, journalists and defenders of human rights,” he said, and added that, “in just the last year the number of state threat investigations we’re running has shot up by 48%”
Over the past three years, Belarus’s weaponization of migration along its borders with Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania has caused such harm that earlier this month, Poland won EU approval for its plan to suspend asylum for anyone crossing its borders from Belarus. China, Russia, and Iran have intensified their hostage diplomacy, which is why the Merchant of Death, Viktor Bout, is once again a free man and appears to have returned to arms trading. Iran has increased its attacks on members of the diaspora living in the West and is increasingly subcontracting to criminal gangs in Western countries. This summer, Finland saw a string of break-in attempts at water plants, and earlier this month, a Swedish water plant was broken into.
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It doesn’t stop there. As I have noted in previous articles for CEPA, in recent weeks, a string of packages containing incendiary devices have been dispatched to German logistics firms. Had everything gone according to the perpetrators’ plans, the packages would have exploded mid-air. This summer, a similar package caught fire at a DHL warehouse in the UK.
Someone, who seems to be operating from Russian-occupied Ukraine, has been sending bomb threats to enormous numbers of Czech schools. There has been an assassination plot against a German defense company CEO, and Swedish defense firms report a rise in sabotage.
China continues its maritime harassment of Philippine vessels in the South China Sea. Chinese vessels have cut the two communications cables connecting the Matsu Islands with Taiwan proper, and another Chinese-owned vessel has damaged a pipeline and two undersea cables in the Baltic Sea. (China says the latter was an accident.) A slew of other activities have also been credibly linked to hostile governments.
Grayzone activities are intensifying because the perpetrators know they can get away with them. Because we are open societies, we’re vulnerable to all manner of interference, and because we still haven’t managed to stand up an effective defense against gray zone aggression, let alone deterrence of it, the cost of using it remains ridiculously low. For that reason, the list of states engaging in gray zone aggression is likely to grow.
So is the harm such countries cause our societies. Credit to Ken McCallum for being transparent with the British public about the “state-backed sabotage and assassination plots” facing the country. Credit, too, to the Swedish Security Police for telling the public about the Russian sabotage and malign-influence efforts taking place. And credit to the heads of Germany’s three intelligence agencies, who, in a news conference earlier in October, told the public about Russian espionage and sabotage that have increased “both quantitatively and qualitatively” and reached a “previously unknown” level.
Educating the public about the astonishing extent of gray zone aggression against our countries is, in fact, crucial if we are to blunt the harm of this aggression because an informed public can help spot things that don’t look right. And for that to happen, citizens need to know roughly what to look for.
The decisive change to hostile states’ harmful activities, though, will come when we punish them for it. That extremely hard part is at the core of the defender’s dilemma.
But let’s begin right away, with the somewhat easier task of shoring up societal resilience. Every bit helps in the fight against the torrent of gray zone aggression.
Elisabeth Braw is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
cepa.org · by Elisabeth Braw · October 21, 2024
4. Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics: PRC Consulate Gray Zone ‘Pop-up’ Events in New York and Beyond
The 19 page report can be downloaded at this link. https://jamestown.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Sze-Fung-Lee-Diplomacy-with-Chinese-Characteristics-PRC-Consulate-Gray-Zone-‘Pop-up-Events-in-New-York-1.pdf
The EXSUM and conclusion are below.
Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics: PRC Consulate Gray Zone ‘Pop-up’ Events in New York and Beyond
https://jamestown.org/program/diplomacy-with-chinese-characteristics-prc-consulate-gray-zone-pop-up-events-in-new-york-and-beyond-2/
October 21, 2024 02:33 PM Age: 1 day
PRC Consul General in New York Huang Ping (seated, left) and Deputy Consul General Wu Xiaoming (standing, left), conducting a consular service event at an adult day care center in Flushing, New York, on March 12, 2024. (Source: Consulate General of the PRC in New York, March 12)
Executive Summary
- The Consulates General of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago have been conducting gray zone “pop-up” consular service events across the United States under the initiative “Bringing Consular Services into the Community,” often at non-diplomatic facilities. These events provide consular services such as passport renewals and document processing, but their legality remains questionable due to possible violations of international law.
- These events likely serve as platforms for the PRC’s broader political influence operations, potentially gathering intelligence on Chinese diaspora communities and mobilizing them for future operations, including political activities. The events have been co-hosted by community organizations with links to the CCP’s united front system, raising concerns about data handling and surveillance.
- The events may also align with the PRC’s broader strategy of influence and electoral interference in the United States, targeting districts with substantial Chinese American populations and potentially mobilizing community support for specific candidates and political agendas.
- Online propaganda campaigns, coordinated across Chinese and Western social media platforms, accompany the events as part of a gray zone approach to cognitive warfare.
Conclusion
The PRC’s consulates general in the United States have, for at least eight years, run pop-up events across the country that appear to contravene either international law, US domestic law, or both. It is unclear whether the consulates have received approval from the US Department of State to run these events. Even if they have done so, any authorization would strictly be limited to the provision of consular services. It appears, however, that the pop-up events, which tend to be co-hosted with organizations with links to the CCP and its united front system, have also served political purposes.
These “Bringing Consular Service into Community” pop-up events are likely a worldwide operation. Similar events appear to have been conducted by local PRC consulates under the same initiative in Canada, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Tanzania, Jamaica, and elsewhere. None of these seem to be on the same scale as in the United States, however. While consulates’ gray zone activities in different countries may differ, they all carry similar implications that constitute a far more problematic issue than their nominal function of providing innocuous “consular services.”
These gray zone operations set a precedent for the PRC’s growing, pervasive efforts to extend its outreach and exert control over the Chinese diaspora in external jurisdictions. Reinforced by Beijing’s influence operations on social media, the pop-ups serve as a basis for broader ideological campaigns. The aim, as articulated by Xi Jinping, is not only to influence public perceptions of the PRC but also to generate a “patriotic united front” for his dream of “national rejuvenation.” Through these pop-up events, PRC diplomats are leveraging an asymmetric advantage, exploiting open societies and vulnerabilities inherent in liberal democratic systems. Such tactics lie at the heart of the PRC’s hybrid warfare strategy. Beijing’s gray zone operations challenge existing international norms and rules-based order, yet under the threshold of a major diplomatic scandal.
Irregular activities of this nature may serve as peacetime united front operations to advance overseas political mobilization capabilities. While the effectiveness of the events as opportunities for intelligence gathering is unclear, these pop-up events enable the PRC to strengthen ties with overseas Chinese communities. In doing so, they can explore approaches to better coordinate and mobilize for future operations—including kinetic operations—all in the name of “diplomacy for the people.”
5. A global leadership void and ongoing wars
Excerpts:
Now, to be clear, both the United States and China say all the right things. In Beijing, I was hearing from the leaders that they're friends with the Ukrainians and they maintain stable relations, and of course they want the war over, and they respect Ukrainian territorial integrity. And of course, the Americans support a two-state solution for the Palestinians and want to ensure that they get humanitarian aid and want to see a ceasefire happen, but I mean, the revealed preferences of both of these countries is their willingness to do anything about it is virtually zero. The Chinese don't care about the Ukrainians ultimately. That's what we're learning over the last few years. The Americans don't care about the Palestinians ultimately. That's what we've learned over the last year.
Absent leadership from the two most powerful countries in the world, where do you think we're going to get geopolitically? The answer is, to a much more dangerous place. That's the concern. I don't see that changing, particularly whether we have a Harris or a Trump presidency. I don't see that changing whether we have a Xi or a Xi presidency in China. It's not like they're making any real choices going forward. But look, maybe I'll be surprised. And certainly, it would be nice if no matter who wins, this was a topic of conversation between the Americans and the Chinese. That, "Hey, China. If you'd be willing to do a little bit more with Russia, we'd be willing to do a little bit more with Israel." I mean, frankly, at the end of the day, that's the kind of horse-trading I think we could really use diplomatically. Right now, that's a conversation that hasn't happened yet, but maybe it will.
That's it for me, and I'll talk to y'all real soon.
A global leadership void and ongoing wars
gzeromedia.com · by Ian Bremmer · October 21, 2024
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October 21, 2024
- YouTube
youtu.be
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody, Ian Bremmer here, and a Quick Take to kick off your week. I am here in Tokyo, Japan. Just got back from Beijing. Being in this part of the world has me thinking a little bit about the state of our world and leadership, or should I say, the lack thereof. Those of you following me know I talk about a G-zero world, not a G-7, not a G-20, a place where we lack global leadership, and that has been so clear, thinking about the wars that continue, between Israel and Palestine, and now Lebanon, and more broadly in the Middle East, and between Russia and Ukraine, and increasingly NATO in Europe.
I think about the fact that all over the world, everyone wants these wars to be over. They're causing enormous amounts of suffering, displacement of human beings, massive war crimes, but they persist. It's worth thinking about what that means in terms of leadership because when we talk about the Middle East, and Israel-Palestine in particular, the United States is the most powerful ally of Israel, overwhelmingly in terms of its political and diplomatic support, its economic support, technological support, its military aid and training and intelligence. And yet, over the last year, the United States has had virtually no influence in the ability to contain, constrain, or end this war, irrespective of all the suffering.
You can complain about the United States on that with good reason, but then you look at Russia-Ukraine, and you see that over the last three years, China's been, by far, the most powerful friend and supporter of Russia, massive amounts of trade only expanding and dual-use technologies and diplomatic support. Yet, despite that, China has been unwilling to use any influence on Russia to try to bring the war to the end.
Now, to be clear, both the United States and China say all the right things. In Beijing, I was hearing from the leaders that they're friends with the Ukrainians and they maintain stable relations, and of course they want the war over, and they respect Ukrainian territorial integrity. And of course, the Americans support a two-state solution for the Palestinians and want to ensure that they get humanitarian aid and want to see a ceasefire happen, but I mean, the revealed preferences of both of these countries is their willingness to do anything about it is virtually zero. The Chinese don't care about the Ukrainians ultimately. That's what we're learning over the last few years. The Americans don't care about the Palestinians ultimately. That's what we've learned over the last year.
Absent leadership from the two most powerful countries in the world, where do you think we're going to get geopolitically? The answer is, to a much more dangerous place. That's the concern. I don't see that changing, particularly whether we have a Harris or a Trump presidency. I don't see that changing whether we have a Xi or a Xi presidency in China. It's not like they're making any real choices going forward. But look, maybe I'll be surprised. And certainly, it would be nice if no matter who wins, this was a topic of conversation between the Americans and the Chinese. That, "Hey, China. If you'd be willing to do a little bit more with Russia, we'd be willing to do a little bit more with Israel." I mean, frankly, at the end of the day, that's the kind of horse-trading I think we could really use diplomatically. Right now, that's a conversation that hasn't happened yet, but maybe it will.
That's it for me, and I'll talk to y'all real soon.
europemiddle eastisraelpalestinelebanonrussia ukraine warian bremmerquick takenatoglobal leadershipus foreign policyus-china relationsg-zero
gzeromedia.com · by Ian Bremmer · October 21, 2024
6. A Soldier's General - 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) Honors Legacy of Retired U.S. Army Gen. Gary Edward Luck
A Soldier's General - 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) Honors Legacy of Retired U.S. Army Gen. Gary Edward Luck
https://www.dvidshub.net/news/482959/soldiers-general-7th-special-forces-group-airborne-honors-legacy-retired-us-army-gen-gary-edward-luck?utm
Photo By Staff Sgt. Christopher Stevenson | UH-60 Black Hawks organize a flyover during a private interment for retired U.S. Army... read more
UNITED STATES
10.10.2024
CAMP "BULL" SIMONS, Fla. – Soldiers and leaders of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) gathered on Sept. 19, 2024, to honor the life and legacy of retired U.S. Army Gen. Gary Edward Luck, who passed away on Aug. 14, 2024. The memorial service occurred at Liberty Chapel on Camp "Bull" Simons, where family and friends reflected on the distinguished 36-year career of a leader who left a profound mark on the U.S. military.
After the memorial, Gen. Luck's family, friends, and comrades gathered at Red Empire Restaurant for a reception, where they shared stories of his leadership, mentorship, and impact on the Army. Gen. Luck's influence extended beyond the battlefield, as he was a critical figure in shaping the future of military leadership for decades to come.
"His legacy, other than being really really smart, is that he genuinely loved people, especially soldiers, he loved his family. He was humble and communicated his faith through action. I thank God above for him. We look forward to the day we will see him again, in the place Christ Jesus has prepared for us," said Retired Col. Gary Luck jr, son of Gen. Gary Luck.
Gen. Luck served in the U.S. Army for 36 years, leading troops in combat during some of the most significant conflicts of the 20th century, including the Vietnam War, Operations Desert Storm, and Desert Shield. He also commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), where his leadership and tactical expertise were vital in strengthening joint military operations across all services.
After retirement in 1996, Gen. Luck served as Chief of the Senior Mentor Program and Senior Fellow for the Department of Defense. His work led to the development of pivotal military leadership courses such as CAPSTONE, PINNACLE, and KEYSTONE, shaping the careers of thousands of senior officers and enlisted leaders. Even after his second retirement in 2017, Gen. Luck was recognized for his contributions to military education and mentorship, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff awarded him the Distinguished Public Service Award.
"Gen. Luck has done so much for the United States Army no one can name all the stuff, that would take too much time and we all truly would miss him. Gen. Luck is what I would call a Soldier's General…sir I salute you, Airborne, all the way," said Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Andrew McFowler.
On Sept. 20, 2024, a private interment was held at Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida. As the solemn ceremony ended, the 18th Airborne Corps performed a flyover in honor of Gen. Luck's service and dedication to the nation. This poignant tribute marked the final farewell to a man who served his country for over five decades and was instrumental in shaping the future of U.S. military leadership.
Gen. Luck is survived by his wife Leah, his son Skip, daughter Kim, and grandchildren. His legacy lives on through the thousands of military leaders he mentored, as well as through his contributions to the programs that continue to guide our armed forces today.
7. Our First Look At Land-Based Aegis Missile Defense System In Guam
Our First Look At Land-Based Aegis Missile Defense System In Guam
Elements of the land-based version of the Aegis system are now in Guam, but they are just part of a very ambitious air defense upgrade for the island.
Thomas Newdick, Tyler Rogoway
Posted on Oct 21, 2024 3:23 PM EDT
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twz.com · by Thomas Newdick, Tyler Rogoway
We have gotten what appears to be our first view of a Mk 41 vertical launch system (VLS) for the Aegis Ashore air defense system that has been installed on the highly strategic American island of Guam in the Pacific. The land-based Mk 41 launchers are one step toward addressing the vulnerabilities of the U.S. military bases on the island to attack — something that China, in particular, has directly referenced in the context of a full-scale conflict in the region. Ultimately, Aegis Ashore on Guam will be just one element in plans to make the island’s airspace the most heavily defended anywhere on Earth.
A photo showing the VLS array installed in an above-ground structure was published by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) on October 17. The image was part of a series from Joint Task Force Micronesia showing a visit to the island by Acting Under Secretary of the Navy Tom Mancinelli.
Acting Under Secretary of the Navy Tom Mancinelli is greeted by Navy Cmdr. Mark Klein, commanding officer of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 25, during a tour of Guam, Oct. 17. U.S. Navy photo by William J. Busby III William Busby
According to information provided by DVIDS, Mancinelli received briefings from military leaders on “critical defense infrastructure, force readiness, and emerging threats in the Indo-Pacific region.”
Mancinelli was also shown flying over the island in a U.S. Navy MH-60 Seahawk helicopter, all part of his gaining a “comprehensive understanding of key strategic locations across the island, highlighting Guam’s essential role in U.S. military operations and regional security.”
Acting Under Secretary of the Navy Tom Mancinelli tours Guam by helicopter with Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 25 on Oct. 16, 2024. U.S. Navy photo by William J. Busby III William Busby
Most intriguing, however, is the photo showing the Mk 41 VLS array, the caption of which actually describes Mancinelli’s tour of a different air defense system — the U.S. Army Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery on the island.
As TWZ has discussed before, THAAD has been deployed continuously to the island for many years now. It was sent there particularly to counter the possibility of a North Korean strike, as well as any other potential contingencies, but the growing threat from China far eclipses that of North Korea.
As part of the efforts to drastically upgrade Guam’s defenses, the U.S. Navy is installing a version of the Aegis Ashore system on Guam, in addition to similar facilities in Poland and Romania, plus a dedicated test site in Hawaii.
The U.S. Aegis Ashore site in Romania. USN
Typically, Aegis Ashore facilities comprise a main ‘deckhouse’ and associated support building, as well as the VLS arrays seen in the photo at the top of this article.
The deckhouse accommodates the Aegis Combat System and AN/SPY-1 radar, among other things, and mimics portions of Flight IIA Arleigh Burke class destroyers. This reflects the Aegis Ashore’s heritage in the sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, which you can read about in more detail here.
Aegis Ashore is primarily designed to engage ballistic threats during the midcourse portion of their flight outside the Earth’s atmophere using SM-3 interceptors. However, the Mk 41 is a modular launcher, meaning that additional anti-missile interceptors, such as the terminal-stage intercept and anti-air SM-6 and the forthcoming Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI), which could also be added. With its ability to take down certain incoming hypersonic threats, as well as other weapons, the GPI could be especially relevant for the defense of Guam. With additional launchers, even dispersed around the island, shorter-ranged missiles, such as the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) Block II and even the latest SM-2s, could feasibly provide protection against air breathing threats, such as cruise missiles and drones. Patriot interceptors are now also now a possibility.
While its capabilities are much in demand, there are various issues that make the installation of the traditional Aegis Ashore more complicated in Guam.
Not only does the island have limited space for such a facility with the right lines of sight for its radar and radio systems, but the terrain is mountainous. In its basic configuration, Aegis Ashore needs a relatively large amount of flat open space and it has to be positioned to maximize radar coverage relative to potential threats. The difficulty in installing Aegis Ashore in an environment like this contributed to Japan’s decision to abandon its own plans for the system.
An MDA briefing slide showing a notional layout of the Aegis Ashore site in Poland, as of 2013, given a sense of the physical space requirements. MDA
As TWZ wrote in the past, “placing portions of a future Aegis Ashore system on Guam in facilities underneath mountains or on mobile platforms on land, or even just off the coast, could certainly help with figuring out exactly how to make it work, from a basic design perspective, within the physical limitations that the island imposes.”
The U.S. military previously said they planned to have the site operational by 2026. We have approached the Navy for comment on the current status of Aegis Ashore on Guam.
Ultimately, Aegis Ashore should be much better adapted to Guam’s specific requirements, forming part of the planned Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense (EIAMD) system.
Last year, the U.S. military revealed that a total of 20 separate sites were currently under consideration to host surface-to-air interceptors, radars, and more, under EIAMD.
A map showing the 20 sites on Guam under consideration to host elements of the Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense system. MDA
Using a distributed and tiered ‘system of systems’ approach, EIAMD is planned to provide 360-degree air and missile defense for Guam, with capabilities to deal with a wide spectrum of aerial threats.
While the VLS array photographed last week may look familiar, overall, Aegis Ashore in Guam will probably look very different from the sites in Eastern Europe.
As well as the potential to integrate additional missiles into the versatile Mk 41 VLS, Guam’s Aegis Ashore could have its various elements distributed to a much more significant degree than its predecessors, improving survivability and making better use of the island’s challenging geography.
In the past, there was talk of the possibility that portions of Guam’s Aegis Ashore site could go into bunkers underground or onto mobile platforms or even vessels. Based on this one photo, the site uses the standard above-ground structure for its VLS — at least for now.
A satellite image of Guam. Google Earth
“I can see Aegis being underground or mobile,” the Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) director, U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Jon Hill, said, back in 2021. “It’s not new science separating radars from weapons.”
That might still be an option in the future, especially as the Pentagon is well aware of the potential vulnerabilities of a fixed above-ground facility, especially in a major conflict with a near-peer adversary, like China.
EIAMD will also include at least four AN/TPY-6 radars, which were formerly known as the Homeland Defense Radar-Guam. This radar makes use of technology developed for the Lockheed Martin Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) used in Alaska.
The Long Range Discrimination Radar at Clear Space Force Station, Alaska. MDA
MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY
As we have discussed previously, regardless of any vulnerabilities that might be inherent in the static and above-ground nature of the basic system, Aegis Ashore is intended to primarily provide an additional line of defense against limited ballistic missile strikes launched by smaller ‘rogue’ actors, such as Iran. It is not seen as a broader strategic deterrent or a more robust missile defense capability for an all-out war with a peer competitor.
Taken by itself, Aegis Ashore would be vulnerable to attack by China, which would use saturation strikes by its growing ballistic missile arsenal to overwhelm it, as it targeted the various U.S. military bases across the island.
However, in Guam, Aegis Ashore by itself would be more about providing complementary coverage to other anti-missile defenses, including the aforementioned THAAD. That system has its own limitations, only being capable of intercepting ballistic missiles in the terminal stages of their flight. At the same time, its AN/TYP-2 radar is unidirectional, so it cannot provide 360-degree coverage against incoming threats. But as the island’s defenses rapidly evolve, Aegis ashore will be a core component of the sprawling Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense system. Patriot, directed energy systems, and the Army’s new Enduring Shield lower-tier air defense system, among others. are all likely to play a part. Taken together, this highly diverse and distributed system, which will also be able to link with warships, aircraft, and especially space-based surveillance systems, will make Guam arguably the most highly defended piece of land on the planet.
A transporter-erector-launcher for interceptors associated with the THAAD system. DOD
At the same time, even with the best air defenses available, wider concerns about survivability are driving the U.S. military to work on expanding its available basing options across the Pacific, to provide alternatives to well-established bases like those in Guam. This includes alternate operating locations on nearby islands in the Marianas archipelago.
Even though questions remain about how Aegis Ashore in Guam will eventually look and what kinds of more survivable and other elements will be included in the overall air defense architecture, the photo of the new VLS underscores the fact that the Pentagon is now on its way to drastically upgrading the island’s defenses. Hopefully the move to finally do so isn’t too little, too late.
Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com
Staff Writer
Thomas is a defense writer and editor with over 20 years of experience covering military aerospace topics and conflicts. He’s written a number of books, edited many more, and has contributed to many of the world’s leading aviation publications. Before joining The War Zone in 2020, he was the editor of AirForces Monthly.
twz.com · by Thomas Newdick, Tyler Rogoway
8. Russian Propaganda Unit Appears to Be Behind Spread of False Tim Walz Sexual Abuse Claims
Excerpts:
When Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president in July, Russian-aligned propaganda networks struggled to mount effective disinformation campaigns targeting the vice president and her team.
But as Microsoft reported in the summer, those campaigns have started to find their footing. "The shift to focusing on the Harris-Walz campaign reflects a strategic move by Russian actors aimed at exploiting any perceived vulnerabilities in the new candidates," Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, wrote in August.
Russian Propaganda Unit Appears to Be Behind Spread of False Tim Walz Sexual Abuse Claims
The Russian-aligned network Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos—including deepfakes—to push Kremlin talking points.
Wired · by David Gilbert · October 21, 2024
A Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote wild and baseless claims that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sexually assaulted one of his former students, according to several specialists tracking the disinformation campaign.
Experts believe that the campaign is tied to a network called Storm-1516, which has been linked to, among other things, a previous effort that falsely claimed vice president Kamala Harris perpetrated a hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011. Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, and often deepfake videos, to push Kremlin talking points to the West.
The propaganda unit’s work has successfully reached the highest levels of the Republican party, with vice presidential candidate JD Vance repeating at least one of their narratives. NBC reported this week that the group has pushed at least 50 false narratives in this manner since last fall, which comes amid a broader Russian government effort to disrupt next month’s election with the aim of helping former president Donald Trump return to the White House.
Numerous figures in MAGA world boosted the Tim Walz assault claims, including Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate promoter who is now a member of Trump’s campaign team, and Candace Owens, the popular right-wing podcaster. The claims went viral on X last week, when an anonymous account called Black Insurrectionist posted screenshots of emails from a purported victim. Other X users quickly debunked the claims, citing formatting errors in the images that suggested the emails were fake, but days later another conspiracist posted a video on X claiming he had spoken to one of Walz's supposed victims on the phone—without providing any proof. The video racked up millions of hits.
Then, on Wednesday, a video claiming to show a former student of Walz describing abuse by the former football coach spread widely on X. According to a WIRED analysis using several deepfake detector tools, the video was created using AI. The video, shared by a prominent anonymous QAnon-promoting account, garnered over 4.3 million views before it was deleted.
The campaign to attack Walz predates the video; it traces back to John Dougan, a former Florida cop who now lives in Moscow and runs a network of pro-Kremlin websites. Dougan appeared on Zak Paine’s QAnon show RedPill78 on October 5 with an anonymous man named “Rick,” who said he was a foreign exchange student at Mankato West High School in 2004 when Walz was a teacher there. “Rick” then claimed Walz assaulted him. Dougan did not respond to a request for comment.
The claims, however, didn’t go viral until last week and the release of the deepfake video.
Darren Linvill, codirector at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, tells WIRED that he immediately recognized this tactic as part of Russia’s well-established disinformation playbook.
“There is little doubt this is Storm-1516,” says Linvill, whose team uncovered the network last fall.
Linvill says the account that first shared the AI-altered video bears all the hallmarks of previous Storm-1516 campaigns. “It is standard for them to create an X or YouTube account for initial placement of stories,” says Linvill.
The campaign orchestrated by Storm-1516 often begins with the posting of a fake story and video from a whistleblower or citizen journalist, the US mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe outlined in July. Disinformation is “amplified by other seemingly unaffiliated online networks,” the US mission stated. The claims then take on a life of their own, shared and reposted by unwitting social media users who likely have no idea of where the videos originated.
The fake stories can also be picked up by other media outlets that cover viral social media stories. In the case of the Walz claims, they ended up on MSN, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft.
In the past, Storm-1516 has relied on a network of fake news websites run by Dougan to push its narratives. On Saturday, a story that referenced the RedPill78 interview, the Black Insurrectionist posts, and the deepfake video was published on over 100 of Dougan’s websites simultaneously.
This was first discovered by Alex Liberty, a researcher who tracks the activity of Russia’s propaganda networks and who agrees with Linvill’s assertion that the deepfake video bears all the hallmarks of a Storm-1516 campaign.
“We believe that it might be a coordinated campaign in [an] attempt to bring numerous false accusations of the same nature against Tim Walz through different channels and in different formats in order to bring an image of legitimacy to the narrative,” Liberty tells WIRED.
McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, agrees.
“The false narrative appears to be part of a wider campaign pushed by pro-Kremlin media and QAnon influencers ahead of the November 5, 2024, US elections aimed at portraying Walz, whose political appeal is as an everyman schoolteacher and coach, as a pedophile who had inappropriate relationships with minors,” Sadeghi wrote in an analysis of the deepfake video.
From the very beginning, the allegations against Walz were easily debunked. In his interview on the RedPill78 QAnon show, Dougan’s source claimed he was in the US thanks to the State Department–funded Future Leaders Exchange program, which allows students from countries formerly under the control of the Soviet Union the chance to study in the US for a year.
However, a spokesperson for the US State Department, told NewsGuard that it has no record of any Future Leaders Exchange student from Kazakhstan in Mankato area schools from 2000 through 2020. Mankato Area Public Schools communications director Mel Helling told NewsGuard the allegations were “outlandish.”
The baseless claims were shared by some far-right accounts in the days after the episode was published, but they didn’t really take hold until a week later, when the X account known as Black Insurrectionist posted a clip from Dougan’s RedPill78 episode. The clip was viewed over 800,000 times.
Google search trends data shows a huge spike in people searching for “Tim Walz pedophile” and “Tim Walz abuse” on October 13, the day the Black Insurrectionist account began posting their claims.
The Black Insurrectionist account is anonymous and launched a year ago; its followers include Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump adviser Roger Stone. The account’s bio reads: “I am MAGA.” It rose to prominence weeks before the Walz post, when it claimed to have been in contact with a whistleblower at ABC who said Harris had been provided with the questions ahead of her September debate with former president Donald Trump. Those claims were widely debunked by multiple major fact-checking and media organizations.
Last week, the Black Insurrectionist account shared screenshots of email correspondence the account had with an alleged victim on X. Almost immediately, the evidence was questioned when X users spotted a text cursor in one of the screenshots, suggesting that Black Insurrectionist was editing the document. Others pointed out that the date and time format shown in some of the screenshots was inconsistent with how they are displayed on real emails.
Black Insurrectionist initially defended itself before going silent. The account was deleted on Thursday.
The two dozen posts from Black Insurrectionist laying out their alleged evidence have been viewed over 33 million times, according to X’s own metrics, and have been shared on numerous other platforms, including Truth Social, Instagram, Telegram, and TikTok.
Among those sharing Black Insurrectiont’s claims was Paine, who hosted Dougan on his QAnon show. “I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this story,” Paine wrote on X.
The posts have also caught the attention of the wider MAGA universe in a way that Dougan’s initial claims didn’t. Prominent right-wing figures like Owens and Posobiec both flagged the “allegations” as something worth looking into.
Owens discussed the conspiracy on her top-rated podcast, with the episode racking up over 630,000 views on YouTube since it was posted on Wednesday.
Posobiec wrote on X that there were “lots of allegations going around regarding Tim Walz sexually abusing young student(s).” While he added that he didn’t “know about any of the recent allegations being made,” he did share a link to Dougan’s claims from earlier in the month.
When Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president in July, Russian-aligned propaganda networks struggled to mount effective disinformation campaigns targeting the vice president and her team.
But as Microsoft reported in the summer, those campaigns have started to find their footing. "The shift to focusing on the Harris-Walz campaign reflects a strategic move by Russian actors aimed at exploiting any perceived vulnerabilities in the new candidates," Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, wrote in August.
Wired · by David Gilbert · October 21, 2024
9. We need a a whole-of-society approach to intelligence
Excerpts:
Some of this data comes from open sources, some from satellites and other technical means, and some from human sources. All of it is collected legally, and it all helps shipowners decide where to send their ships. “Intelligence providers are often seen as the bringer of bad news,” Furulund observed. “We inform our clients about how dangerous situations are in the days to come, but we also tell them about opportunities,” which can include things like minor changes to a ship’s route or placing armed guards on board.
Staffed by ex-military and intelligence professionals, the Intelligence and Operations Center has been operating since 2016, but intensifying political tensions over the past couple years have made it positively indispensable for both DNK and its clients. “Historically, the war risks insurance market argued that war risks would strike the insureds at random — which meant that loss-prevention activities, such as analysis of threat actors’ intentions and capabilities, weren’t pursued,” explained Svein Ringbakken, DNK’s managing director. But that’s changed dramatically.’
...
As many Western companies operate in places Western governments don’t, they should then share their insights with their home governments and other friendly states. And governments should return the favor.
We may not be able to clearly predict the acts of hostile states and groups with complete certainty, but making qualified assessments is far superior to sailing into uncharted waters. And that’s why we need a whole-of-society approach to intelligence too.
We need a a whole-of-society approach to intelligence
Politico · by Elisabeth Braw · October 22, 2024
If Western countries are to withstand the aggression waged by various rivals and their proxies, sharing insights from the front line is the only way forward — and today, that includes businesses.
The Houthis recently resumed their campaign against Western shipping in the Red Sea after a couple weeks’ silence. | Mohammed Huwais/Getty Images
Beyond the Bubble
October 22, 2024 4:00 am CET
By
Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO.
A nondescript suite of rooms in an office building in central Oslo hosts activity of the kind one would normally associate with a military headquarters or the CIA. In the central situation room, a monitor displays activity across the world’s oceans, while analysts at neighboring desks update this information around the clock. But this is not an intelligence agency — it’s DNK, a Norwegian insurer of maritime war risk.
Today, intelligence is no longer just the domain of government agencies — or, rather, it shouldn’t be. Companies are now far more likely to be harmed by geopolitically linked events than ever before outside of full-scale wars. Thus, they need to keep a constant eye on the world. And if they do, they’re likely to see things that would be equally useful for their governments to know.
DNK (a partner of the Atlantic Council’s Maritime Threats initiative, which I lead) has long insured merchant vessels against serious risks, and in today’s geopolitical climate, such risks are growing — fast. That means the company needs to know precisely what’s taking place in every corner of the maritime world, at all times.
“Intelligence are knowledge-based forecasts derived from verified data tailored to support decision-making. That’s different from what you get in the news,” said Freddy Furulund, who directs the Intelligence and Operations Center.
“To be able to provide such forecasts, you need to not only describe precisely what has happened, but you also need to contextualize it and describe its consequences for future voyages for the shipowner. We get data pointing in different directions, verify it, contextualize it and, most importantly, assess where it points to.”
Some of this data comes from open sources, some from satellites and other technical means, and some from human sources. All of it is collected legally, and it all helps shipowners decide where to send their ships. “Intelligence providers are often seen as the bringer of bad news,” Furulund observed. “We inform our clients about how dangerous situations are in the days to come, but we also tell them about opportunities,” which can include things like minor changes to a ship’s route or placing armed guards on board.
Staffed by ex-military and intelligence professionals, the Intelligence and Operations Center has been operating since 2016, but intensifying political tensions over the past couple years have made it positively indispensable for both DNK and its clients. “Historically, the war risks insurance market argued that war risks would strike the insureds at random — which meant that loss-prevention activities, such as analysis of threat actors’ intentions and capabilities, weren’t pursued,” explained Svein Ringbakken, DNK’s managing director. But that’s changed dramatically.’
Companies are now far more likely to be harmed by geopolitically linked events than ever before outside of full-scale wars. | Mohammed Huwais/Getty Images
It’s not just that the Houthis are systematically targeting ships linked to Western countries; they also have far better weaponry than pirates ever did — and similar militias could start attacking merchant vessels elsewhere too. Indeed, some countries around the world appear to have decided to disregard global maritime rules altogether. And that makes it imperative for shipowners and insurers — not to mention crews — to understand where misfortune may strike from.
Meanwhile, foreign government officials visiting Norway often schedule a stop at DNK to see the center at work, and Furulund’s team regularly shares information with Western governments. “When we see something that poses an imminent threat to someone, we share that with not only the shipowner but also with the government — if it’s the government of Norway or a friendly country — or with whoever needs to be alerted,” he said. “It’s the ethical thing to do.”
Essentially, if Western countries are to withstand the aggression waged by various rivals and their proxies, sharing insights from the front line is the only way forward. And for Western countries today, it’s businesses rather than soldiers that are on the daily front line. (Should a war break out that would clearly change — but businesses will still face massive geopolitical risks.)
Not every company can operate its own intelligence center, of course, but more and more companies are now discovering they ought to collect threat information more systematically. Businesses simply need to do their best to discern what geopolitically linked risks may face them, not just in the Red Sea but in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea, along the Cape of Good Hope route and other waters too — not to mention on land.
The Houthis recently resumed their campaign against Western shipping in the Red Sea after a couple weeks’ silence. Meanwhile, China’s maritime harassment of civilian vessels in the South China Sea continues. Is Beijing likely to expand its punishment of Western companies as proxies for their home countries? Will nations increasingly close to Russia and China try to harm Western companies operating in their countries? Western companies and governments need to know the answers to these questions — or at least gather enough information to make qualified assessments.
As many Western companies operate in places Western governments don’t, they should then share their insights with their home governments and other friendly states. And governments should return the favor.
We may not be able to clearly predict the acts of hostile states and groups with complete certainty, but making qualified assessments is far superior to sailing into uncharted waters. And that’s why we need a whole-of-society approach to intelligence too.
Politico · by Elisabeth Braw · October 22, 2024
10. The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Rush to Get Money Out of China
The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Rush to Get Money Out of China
Chinese residents, worried about growth, have been using everything from crypto to fine art to move their money overseas
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-capital-flight-2ba6391b?mod=latest_headlines
By Jason Douglas
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and Rebecca Feng
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Updated Oct. 23, 2024 12:03 am ET
Chinese residents have been illicitly moving billions of dollars out of the country under authorities’ noses as a cratering property market and economic uncertainties push people to find safer places to park their wealth overseas.
Moving fortunes out of China is hard: The country imposes strict capital controls that cap individual purchases of foreign exchange at $50,000 a year. Violators can receive big fines, or even prison sentences, if they break the law.
Nevertheless, the stampede for the exit in the past few years appears to dwarf the outflows that occurred in 2015 and 2016, when an earlier property downturn propelled what at the time was the biggest episode of capital flight from China, in dollar terms, according to economists and a Wall Street Journal data analysis.
The Journal’s tally suggests as much as $254 billion might have left China illicitly in the four quarters through the end of June. That is a larger sum than fled the country almost a decade ago, when outflows raised fears of a possible financial crisis. However, estimates of such outflows are inherently imprecise and overall capital flight appears to be smaller today as a share of China’s overall economy, which is now much larger.
Some of the missing money likely includes export earnings stashed overseas instead of being brought back to China in order to take advantage of higher deposit rates and investment opportunities abroad.
Even so, the trend is worrisome for Chinese policymakers. It adds to pressure on the currency at a time when officials are focused on tightly managing it, though recent attempts to jolt the economy with stimulus are buoying the yuan and Chinese stock markets, which might persuade people to keep more money in China for now.
It also underscores waning confidence in China’s economic path among those with the resources and wherewithal to get their money out.
Unhappy investors
People use a variety of tried-and-tested, but risky, methods to get around the government’s restrictions, such as shipping valuables overseas or overpaying for imports. Others are using newer methods such as ferrying computer hard drives loaded with cryptocurrencies to other jurisdictions to convert into hard cash.
Behind the exodus lies the Covid-19 pandemic, government crackdowns on the private sector and widespread fears that China’s go-go days are behind it.
Economic growth is expected to slow to around 3% by the end of the decade, according to the International Monetary Fund, from 5% now and closer to 7% before 2020. China’s epic property meltdown has incinerated an estimated $18 trillion in household wealth since 2021, according to Barclays.
Although Beijing’s latest stimulus measures, which include pledges of new fiscal spending, are likely to boost growth somewhat this year, it is too early to say if they will spark a durable economic turnaround.
Longer-term, the nation faces a fearsome challenge from an aging and shrinking workforce and is enmeshed in conflict with the U.S.-led West over issues ranging from trade to security and technology.
Government officials are trying to make examples of the people they catch violating the rules. In a case reported by state television broadcaster CCTV in September, Beijing police busted a group that helped move 800 million yuan, equivalent to $112 million, overseas by trading in cryptocurrencies.
An earlier case in May involved a person who ostensibly worked at a travel agency but operated an illegal foreign-currency exchange business from Beijing, Xinhua state media reported.
The Covid-19 pandemic led to people using risky methods to get around government investment restrictions. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange publishes records of people it has punished for violating capital controls. A man surnamed Liu, from Zhejiang, made 48 illegal foreign-exchange transactions totaling more than $3 million between January 2022 and March last year, according to SAFE’s website, one of 10 similar examples they published in April.
Punishments include fines totaling more than half of the money involved, and could lead to criminal charges.
That capital flight is nonetheless occurring shows how far people will go to get better returns given scant investment opportunities in China, said Martin Lynge Rasmussen, a senior strategist at research firm Exante Data who has studied the phenomenon.
“Five or 10 years ago if you were a Chinese person you could put your money in real estate and have a way of growing your wealth,” he said. “That is not by any means attractive anymore,” though recent stimulus efforts might make domestic stocks more attractive as an alternative and help reduce capital flight, he added.
Paintings and crypto
China began tightening its grip on capital flowing across its borders in 2016. At the time, a real-estate slump, a weakening economy and downward pressure on China’s currency spurred many Chinese to send money overseas. That heaped pressure on the yuan and raised fears about the potential for a wider financial crisis if investor sentiment turned decisively against emerging markets and banks holding Chinese assets suffered heavy losses.
Getting money out of China has become a lot harder, even for rich people with overseas connections in wealthy cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai, according to private bankers and family office employees in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Nowadays, banks in Hong Kong have strict limits for new cash deposits designed to weed out potential capital-control violations. Any customers who deposit more than $10,000 in a week must provide documentation showing the source of funds, said private bankers in the city.
To get around the rules, some business owners set up shell companies overseas in their family members’ names, which are then used to acquire a stake in the China-based enterprise, according to people at family offices that manage Chinese money.
That way, the China-based firm can be redesignated as a Sino-foreign joint venture, which isn’t subject to the government’s caps for individuals, allowing its China-based owners to transfer money to the offshore entity in the form of dividends and other payments. But moving money that way is slow, the people said.
China’s already struggling economy faces a further challenge from an aging and shrinking workforce. Photo: Cfoto/NurPhoto/ZUMA PRESS
Art offers another route. One person at a major auction house said most transactions nowadays are done by people who want to move money out of China.
The method is simple: A painting or other valuable piece of art is shipped to Hong Kong and sold at auction. But rather than repatriate the proceeds to mainland China, the funds are kept offshore in Hong Kong, in U.S. dollars or another foreign currency. From Hong Kong, which doesn’t have capital controls, the seller can transfer the money elsewhere.
Cryptocurrencies offer new possibilities for capital flight. Though Beijing banned crypto trading in 2021, setting up a crypto wallet isn’t illegal. People in China can use Chinese currency to buy crypto assets with the help of a facilitator. Once they have cryptocurrency in their digital wallet, they can convert those assets into dollars overseas.
Data debate
Estimating capital flight from China used to be straightforward.
Like other places, China reports balance-of-payments data that record how much money enters and exits the country. Ordinarily, international receipts and payments in the data should add up to zero over a given time, with only small discrepancies that disappear quickly.
In China’s case, not only did the sums not add up, but the gaps also persisted—a sign that some money was leaking out illicitly, without being declared.
These sums rose dramatically in 2015 and 2016 and peaked in the 12 months through June 2017 at around $228 billion. The government responded by tightening capital controls and the size of the gaps collapsed.
When the pandemic began in 2020, they started creeping up again and shot up in 2021 and 2022 as people sought ways to get their money—and themselves—out of China and away from its severe Covid-19 policies.
More recently, the gaps have shrunk so dramatically that they pointed to a small inflow into China in the second quarter. But economists say that doesn’t square with generally negative views about China’s economy. It also doesn’t square with large legitimate outflows recorded elsewhere in China’s accounts, which suggest businesses and investors are seeking better returns abroad.
Economists including Rasmussen at Exante Data and Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the incongruity is explained by a change China made in 2022 to the way it calculates its balance of payments data. The change replaced customs data with surveys, which some economists say has the effect of reducing China’s enormous trade surplus and obscures outflows.
In a statement, SAFE said the change was made to “more comprehensively and accurately” measure the country’s balance of payments as trading patterns evolve and that experts outside of the country have said its methodology is “in line with the principles of international balance of payments data.”
Adjusting the data so that it is closer to the way it was calculated before, economists say the evidence of illicit capital flight reappears. Using that measure, the gap in payments data for the 12 months through September 2022 was more than $370 billion, coinciding with Covid-19 lockdowns in major Chinese cities.
Capital flight measured this way has diminished since then, but was running at well above $200 billion in the four quarters through June.
China’s SAFE said statistical gaps in the balance of payments aren’t unusual for large, trading economies and aren’t evidence of capital flight.
A woman speaks with a worker at a cryptocurrency exchange in Hong Kong. Photo: dale de la rey/AFP/Getty Images
—Clarence Leong in Singapore in contributed to this article.
Write to Jason Douglas at jason.douglas@wsj.com and Rebecca Feng at rebecca.feng@wsj.com
11. As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator
Partisan politics aside, this raises serious civil-military relations issues perhaps like no others given his positions in the previous administration. This is of course much different than 700 national security professionals including retired GOFOs signing a letter of support or opposition to a candidate.
What are a former general's responsibilities in the political process? Should he remain silent and separate from the political process to protect civil-military relations and the reputation of general officers? Or since he served in the administrations does he have a responsibility to publicly express his views and insert himself into the political process based on his knowledge and fears?
I suspect this will be studied in PME leadership classes for years to come.
And the political question is will this have any effect on the outcome of the election or is the political division of our country too hardened?
Excerpts:
With Election Day looming, Mr. Kelly — deeply bothered by Mr. Trump’s recent comments about employing the military against his domestic opponents — agreed to three on-the-record, recorded discussions with a reporter for The New York Times about the former president, providing some of his most wide-ranging comments yet about Mr. Trump’s fitness and character.
In the interviews, Mr. Kelly expanded on his previously expressed concerns and stressed that voters, in his view, should consider fitness and character when selecting a president, even more than a candidate’s stances on the issues.
“In many cases, I would agree with some of his policies,” he said, stressing that as a former military officer he was not endorsing any candidate. “But again, it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.”
As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator
John Kelly, the Trump White House’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that he believed that Donald Trump met the definition of a fascist.
John F. Kelly, who was chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump, during a cabinet meeting in 2018.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
By Michael S. Schmidt
Oct. 22, 2024
Few top officials spent more time behind closed doors in the White House with President Donald J. Trump than John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff.
With Election Day looming, Mr. Kelly — deeply bothered by Mr. Trump’s recent comments about employing the military against his domestic opponents — agreed to three on-the-record, recorded discussions with a reporter for The New York Times about the former president, providing some of his most wide-ranging comments yet about Mr. Trump’s fitness and character.
Mr. Kelly was homeland security secretary under Mr. Trump before moving to the White House in July 2017. He worked to carry out Mr. Trump’s agenda for nearly a year and a half. It was a tumultuous period in which he drew internal criticism over his own performance and grew disenchanted and distressed by conduct on the part of the president that he considered at times to be inappropriate and reflecting no understanding of the Constitution.
In the interviews, Mr. Kelly expanded on his previously expressed concerns and stressed that voters, in his view, should consider fitness and character when selecting a president, even more than a candidate’s stances on the issues.
“In many cases, I would agree with some of his policies,” he said, stressing that as a former military officer he was not endorsing any candidate. “But again, it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.”
Image
Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
He said that, in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.
He discussed and confirmed previous reports that Mr. Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers” — comments first reported in 2020 by The Atlantic.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, assailed Mr. Kelly in a statement, calling Mr. Kelly’s accounts of his time in the White House “debunked stories” and saying Mr. Kelly had “beclowned” himself.
Here are excerpts from, and audio of, Mr. Kelly’s comments.
Kelly said that based on his experience, Trump met the definition of a “fascist.”
In response to a question about whether he thought Mr. Trump was a fascist, Mr. Kelly first read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online.
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.
Kelly on Trump and Fascism
Listen · 1:44 min
Mr. Kelly said that definition accurately described Mr. Trump.
“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Mr. Kelly said.
He added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly said Trump chafed at limitations on his power.
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Mr. Kelly said.
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Would Trump Like to Govern Like a Dictator?
Listen · 26 sec
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Mr. Kelly with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in 2018. He said the former president’s recent comments about using the military against what he called the “enemy within” were so dangerous that he felt he had to speak out.Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times
“I think he’d love to be just like he was in business — he could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot,” he said.
He said he was deeply troubled by Trump’s recent comments about using the military against domestic opponents.
When Mr. Kelly left the White House in 2019, he decided he would speak out on the record only if Mr. Trump said something that he found deeply troubling or involved him and was wildly inaccurate.
Mr. Trump’s recent comments about using the military against what he called the “enemy within” were so dangerous, he said, that he felt he had to speak out.
Using the Military Inside the U.S.
Listen · 2:29 min
“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so. Mr. Trump nevertheless continued while in office to push the issue and claim that he did have the authority to take such actions, Mr. Kelly said.
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Police officers and members of the military faced protesters near the White House before a photo opportunity for Mr. Trump outside St. John’s Church in 2020.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
“Originally, conversation would be: Mr. President, that’s outside your authority, or you know that’s a routine use, you really don’t want to do that inside the United States,” he said. “But now that he’s talking about it as ‘I’m gonna do it’ is, again, it’s disturbing.”
He said he believed Trump stood alone in his lack of understanding of history and the Constitution.
Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump lacked a fundamental understanding of basic American values and what being president is about.
“He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that,” Mr. Kelly said.
Updated
Oct. 22, 2024, 11:47 p.m. ETOct. 22, 2024
Kelly Says Trump Does Not Understand American Values
Listen · 37 sec
“He just doesn’t understand the values — he pretends, he talks, he knows more about America than anybody, but he doesn’t.”
He said Trump wanted personal loyalty to outweigh loyalty to the Constitution.
Mr. Kelly said that in the first few days of working for Mr. Trump as his chief of staff in the summer of 2017, he had to explain to the president that top government officials like himself had taken an oath to the Constitution and would place that oath over personal loyalty.
Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump pressed him about that pledge and seemed to have no appreciation that top aides were supposed to put their pledge to the Constitution — and, by extension, the rule of law — above all else.
Kelly Sees Trump Putting Personal Loyalty Above the Constitution
Listen · 2:23 min
“He and I talked about it — it was a new concept for him, I guess is the best way to put it, and I don’t think it’s one he ever totally accepted.”
Mr. Kelly said that personal loyalty “is virtually everything to him.”
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Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump wrongly believed that the uniformed and retired senior generals he brought in to work for him would be loyal to him above all else.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
As soon as someone in his orbit loses that loyalty, Mr. Kelly said, that person is then out of favor with Mr. Trump and “your time is short.”
Mr. Trump, Mr. Kelly said, wrongly believed that the uniformed and retired senior generals he brought in to work for him would be loyal to him above all else.
“Certainly, a big surprise for him, again, was if you remember at the beginning of the administration, he would talk about ‘his generals,’” Mr. Kelly said. “I don’t know why he thought that — but then a very big surprise for him was that we were — those of us who were former generals and certainly people still on active duty — that the commitment, the loyalty was to the Constitution, without question, without second thought.”
Mr. Kelly added: “That was a big surprise to him that the generals were not loyal to the boss, in this case him.”
Trump told him that “Hitler did some good things.”
Mr. Kelly confirmed previous reports that on more than one occasion Mr. Trump spoke positively of Hitler.
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump told him.
Comments About Hitler
Listen · 1:4 min
Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump had little appreciation for history — “I think he’s lacking in that,” he said — but said that he would still try to explain to Mr. Trump why those comments about Hitler were problematic.
Image
Mr. Kelly in the Oval Office in 2017. He said Mr. Trump had little appreciation for history.Credit...Tom Brenner/The New York Times
“First of all, you should never say that,” Mr. Kelly said that he told Mr. Trump. “But if you knew what Hitler was all about from the beginning to the end, everything he did was in support of his racist, fascist life, you know, the, you know, philosophy, so that nothing he did, you could argue, was good — it was certainly not done for the right reason.”
Mr. Kelly said that would usually end the conversation. But Mr. Trump would occasionally bring it up again.
Kelly said Trump looked down on those who were disabled on the battlefield.
In response to a question about previous stories about Mr. Trump having disdain for disabled veterans, Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump did not want to be seen in public with those who had lost limbs on the battlefield.
“Certainly his not wanting to be seen with amputees — amputees that lost their limbs in defense of this country fighting for every American, him included, to protect them, but didn’t want to be seen with them. That’s an interesting perspective for the commander in chief to have.”
“An Interesting Perspective for the Commander in Chief’
Listen · 42 sec
“He would just say: ‘Look, it just doesn’t look good for me.’”
He said Trump called service members who were injured or killed “losers and suckers,” despite denials from Trump and some aides.
Confirming a statement he gave to CNN last year, Mr. Kelly said that on multiple occasions Mr. Trump told him that those Americans wounded, captured or killed in action were “losers and suckers.”
“The time in Paris was not the only time that he ever said it,” Mr. Kelly said, referring to reports that Mr. Trump told him that he did not want to visit a cemetery where American service members killed during World War I were buried.
“Whenever John McCain’s name came up, he’d go through this rant about him being a loser, and all those people were suckers, and why do you people think that people getting killed are heroes? And he’d go through this rant.”
“To me, I could never understand why he was that way — he may be the only American citizen that feels that way about those who gave their lives or served their country,” Mr. Kelly said.
A Lack of Understanding of Selflessness and Sacrifice
Listen · 52 sec
Mr. Kelly said that on top of saying “losers” and “suckers,” Mr. Trump often questioned the decisions by Americans to sacrifice for their country.
Image
Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania, visiting a cemetery for American soldiers in Normandy, France, in 2019.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
At Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017, Mr. Trump toured the section where recently killed service members are buried, including Mr. Kelly’s son Robert, a Marine who was killed in 2010 while fighting in Afghanistan.
While walking through the cemetery, Mr. Kelly recounted, Mr. Trump asked what had been in it for those who had given their lives.
“And I thought he was asking one of these rhetorical kind of, you know, questions,” Mr. Kelly said. “But I didn’t realize he was serious — he just didn’t see what the point was. As I got to know him, again, this selflessness is something he just didn’t understand. What’s in it for them?”
Mr. Kelly had nothing good to say about Mr. Trump
Mr. Kelly was asked whether Mr. Trump had any empathy.
“No,” Mr. Kelly said.
Kelly on the Importance of Character Over Policy
Listen · 1:40 min
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations. More about Michael S. Schmidt
12. Russia and Iran may fuel violent post-election protests in the US, intelligence officials warn
Recognize our enemies' strategies. Understand them. EXPOSE them, and attack them with a superior political warfare strategy.
Anyone who considers employing political violence based on the outcome of an election should ask themselves if they are willing to support Russia and Iran (and China and north Korea).
Again, I must must provide this from the 2017 NSS (President Trump's NSS):
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
Access NSS HERE
Russia and Iran may fuel violent post-election protests in the US, intelligence officials warn
AP · October 22, 2024
FILE - Police block pro-Palestinian demonstrators from entering a building on the UCLA campus, May 23, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ryan Sun, File)
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia and Iran may try to encourage violent protests in the U.S. after next month’s election, senior intelligence officials warned Tuesday in a declassified memo, citing two recent examples of foreign intelligence agencies seeking to sow discord ahead of the vote.
The memo, released Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said both countries could support violent protests either by covertly organizing events themselves or by encouraging participation in those planned by domestic groups. The aim, the officials wrote, would be to increase division, cast doubt on election results and complicate the transfer of presidential power.
In January, Russian military intelligence tried to recruit an American to organize protests in the U.S., according to a declassified national intelligence memo released publicly Tuesday. The American was “probably unwitting” and did not know he was in contact with Russian agents, the memo said.
The U.S. first accused the Iranian government of covertly supporting protests against American support for Israel during the war in Gaza. Individuals linked to Iran offered to cover the cost of travel to protests this year in Washington, the memo said.
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In battleground Georgia, some poor people see no reason to vote. That decision could sway election
The risk that one of America’s adversaries could encourage political violence after the election is greater this year, officials said, because officials in both nations now have a better understanding of the complicated process the U.S. uses to certify the vote. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters also highlighted just how easily false and misleading claims about election results can trigger deadly real-world action.
The period between Election Day and the inauguration of the new president poses special risks as foreign adversaries and domestic extremists could seek to disrupt election certification by exploiting misleading claims or innocent irregularities. Concerns about safety already have prompted election workers in some communities to install bulletproof glass and panic buttons because of the risk of election-related incidents.
Fears of political violence have grown amid concerns about widening polarization and growing distrust, a trend America’s adversaries have tried to accelerate by using online disinformation and propaganda. Besides hoping to shape the outcome of the election, officials say Russia and Iran — as well as China — want to undermine American unity by spreading false and misleading claims about elections, voting and hot-button issues like immigration, the economy or the federal response to recent hurricanes.
For Russia, which aims to erode support for Ukraine, that means favoring former President Donald Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and criticized the NATO alliance. Iran, meanwhile, has sought to hurt Trump’s campaign through disinformation and by hacking into its campaign emails.
Trump’s administration ended a nuclear deal with Iran, reimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, an act that prompted Iran’s leaders to vow revenge.
Russia will likely try to foment protests in the U.S. regardless of who wins the White House, according to an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who briefed reporters Tuesday on the condition of anonymity under rules set out by the office of the director. Officials said they expect Russia’s response will be more aggressive, however, if Harris defeats Trump.
What to know about the 2024 Election
China also has spread disinformation seemingly designed to mislead and confuse Americans, but intelligence officials say they have no indication that Beijing will seek to encourage violent protests. While China has sought to meddle in down-ballot races for Congress or state and local office, U.S. intelligence officials and private analysts agree that Beijing has expressed no meaningful preference in the presidential race.
Groups looking to meddle in the election also could use the threat of violence at polling places to keep certain groups of voters from casting a ballot, officials have warned. Something similar happened in 2020, when Iranian hackers allegedly posed as members of the far-right Proud Boys organization and sent threatening emails to Democratic voters as a vote suppression tactic.
Voting advocacy organizations and civil rights groups have responded to concerns of election violence with public outreach initiatives aimed at increasing resilience to disinformation and at reminding them that Americans agree on more than the current political climate suggests.
“In 2024, voters must know that they will decide the outcome of the election — not a political party, extremist groups or purveyors of disinformation,” said Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, which has launched its own efforts to fight election misinformation and the political violence it could spur. “Democracy requires passionate persistence.”
Russia, China and Iran have all rejected claims that they seek to meddle with the U.S. election. On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Iran’s U.N. mission pointed to past statements denying an intention to interfere in American politics. A spokesperson for China’s Embassy in Washington told The Associated Press that U.S. officials’ claims about Chinese disinformation are “full of malicious speculations against China.”
A message left with Russia’s embassy was not immediately returned Tuesday.
AP · October 22, 2024
13. How a conspiracy-fueled group got a foothold in this hurricane-battered town
On the one hand I find it hard to believe that this could happen in America and that real Americans could act like this. But on the other hand I recognize that this may now be all too common given today's politics.
Surely these types of groups are being targeting by Ruaaian and Iranian active measures groups for future influence exploitation.
How a conspiracy-fueled group got a foothold in this hurricane-battered town
Over the course of 11 days, a supermarket parking lot became a snapshot of the chaos that can unfold in some corners of post disaster-America.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/10/23/how-conspiracy-fueled-militia-got-foothold-this-hurricane-battered-town/
A search-and-rescue team hikes along North Carolina Route 9 on Oct. 1 near a Lake Lure police vehicle in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
By Brianna Sacks, Scott Dance, Will Oremus, Samuel Oakford and Jeremy B. Merrill
October 23, 2024 at 5:30 a.m. EDT
LAKE LURE, N.C. — It started with hot coffee.
Hurricane Helene had just cut off this already-isolated foothill town from everything: power, water, information. Paralyzed, the only thing that residents Carin Harris and Hilary Yoxall could think to do was post up outside their Ingles supermarket and hand out something warm. Soon, donations began to pour in, and a makeshift supplies distribution center emerged from a parking lot off the main two-lane road.
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Then everything got more complicated.
A group called Veterans on Patrol showed up in Rutherford County late on the night of Oct. 11, just four people with no supplies. But their leader, Lewis Arthur, came with a lot of promises and a big vision, which he said was sent from God: a three-year plan to help this lakeside community and others around here bounce back, according to Yoxall and Arthur.
At first, it did seem like a Godsend, Yoxall, Harris and other residents said. They started organizing the piles of diapers, boxes of canned food and mounds of winter clothes. But as soon as Yoxall, a retired Army nurse, and Arthur got to talking, and he started telling her about his work fighting cartels at the border, about his need for armed security, she got a bad feeling.
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“There’s something wrong here,” she told another longtime resident and fellow organizer.
Hilary Yoxall speaks with volunteers including Lewis Arthur. (Brianna Sacks for The Washington Post)
What she and others didn’t know yet was that Veterans on Patrol is an anti-government group steeped in conspiracy theories and that its leader has a well-documented history of embedding in communities to launch missions related to migrants or purported child trafficking, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Western States Center, two watchdog groups.
And that the group was motivated to come to this small town because they believed that the government was using the hurricane to move people here off lithium-rich land and stop them from getting it back, according to the group’s posts on Telegram, the messaging service.
“Hurricane Helene was an act of war perpetuated by the United States Military”; a “land grab” responsible for “murdering hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans,” the group said on Oct. 3. That same day, it launched its disaster deployment operation, stating they were “coming to the aid of those who will not sell, have stolen, or be restricted their property” and to replace the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Over the course of 11 days, this makeshift hurricane supplies depot in a supermarket parking lot became a snapshot of the chaos that can unfold in some corners of post-disaster America: Residents came together to help their community because local officials were unable to.
People came searching for critical supplies because the federal government does not give those out as part of its disaster response. An extremist group motivated by anti-government beliefs and conspiracy theories was able to show up, wield influence and become a source of help for some and fear for others.
And in the mix of all that, an armed man from a town over, also fueled by viral, anti-government misinformation, joined the fray. He showed up right when Veterans on Patrol did, Yoxall and two other volunteers said, joining their Sunday prayer circle. Then he talked about “hunting FEMA,” she said. Police eventually arrested and charged him with “going armed to the terror of the public.”
“What is happening in my backyard?” Yoxall said last week. “I don’t know these people, and if they are trying to get a foothold here in my community, they are getting a good start.”
The remnants of a home in Lake Lure on Oct. 2. (Allison Joyce/AFP/Getty Images)
Helene was historic for many reasons. It was a hurricane in the mountains that spurred massive floods and landslides, destroying thousands of homes and killing more than 200 people. Researchers also said it led to an unprecedented amount of misinformation directed at FEMA and its workers, often amplified by figures such as former president Donald Trump.
In addition to Veterans on Patrol, members of more than a dozen other extremist, white-nationalist and militia organizations also came to some hard-hit western North Carolina towns for disaster response, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which studies extremism and disinformation, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Misinformation has always been the bane of disaster response,” said Andy Carvin, managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, but with Helene “we’re seeing this additional layer of craven politicization about the federal disaster response itself.”
And it’s had consequences. Armed threats at the Ingles parking lot and elsewhere caused snags in FEMA’s work and that of other federal agencies on the ground, according to federal officials. For at least 48 hours, workers and contractors doing an array of jobs such as clearing trees and inspecting homes stopped working. FEMA adjusted its security practices, for example, not going door-to-door in certain locations. The agency, already stretched thin, has had to divert time and resources away from helping people to combating misinformation, according to a FEMA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely on the situation.
“We are used to dealing with threats, but the unprecedented piece we have is it’s part of the political climate we are in,” the official said. The worst part, though, is that “this rhetoric may be discouraging people from applying for assistance.”
In Lake Lure, Veterans on Patrol showed up to take over logistics, the head of the group, whose full name is Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, told The Post in one of several interviews. They put up a big, colorful circus tent. They hung an American flag and shirts on hangers that declared “Try this in a small town” and “Let’s go Brandon,” the epithet targeting President Joe Biden. They brought in big trucks full of water and generators and promised they had a lot more coming.
Arthur, who says he is guided by his Christian faith, said he diverted from a mission in Chicago hunting Salvadoran cartels and an “Iranian cell” after seeing reports that authorities threatened to arrest a volunteer pilot trying to rescue people in the Lake Lure area. Journalists verified much of the story, which became fodder for the right wing: evidence that the government was not helping but hindering private citizens’ relief efforts.
Arthur said he was acting without political motive. Disasters like this, he added, are “our only opportunity to get everyone to put aside the politics and BS and come together.”
That was a far different tone than his online posts. Beneath photos of donated aid on Telegram, the group said that “People are very angry at FEMA” and that it had intel on “FEMA pulling a dirty trick on good people.”
Arthur made similar comments to locals, Yoxall said. Yet, she added shortly after they arrived, she could not deny that his group was helping.
“It’s complicated because a lot of people still don’t trust him, and I am in that group, but the man is doing good work,” she said.
She wouldn’t always feel that way.
Heavy machinery clears a road Sept. 28 as the Rocky Broad River flows into Lake Lure, carrying debris from Chimney Rock. (Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
How one tweet can mobilize
In the immediate aftermath of Helene’s devastation, residents in hard-hit towns began sharing shocking images and videos of what they were having to do to survive. The federal government wasn’t there, people said. In many places, they were right. North Carolina received its federal disaster declaration on Sept. 29, but the mechanisms needed to trigger those massive response operations were just getting started.
Chimney Rock, N.C., Sept. 27 (Banff Luther via Storyful) (Video: Banff Luther via Storyful)
Their shock, anger and pleas for help caught fire, though, especially with big right-wing voices. On platforms like X, algorithms wove real stories alongside full-blown conspiracies.
On Sept. 29, an X user suggested that the supposed presence of lithium provided a motive for someone to “modify” the storm, to steal access to the mineral. Prominent voices amplified the theory to millions of people.
Groups such as Veterans on Patrol soon picked it up. “Isn’t it ironic how much lithium is available in the areas targeted by Helene?” the group asked in a Sept. 30 Telegram post.
(There is, in fact, a lithium mine in the North Carolina foothills about a 60-mile drive from Lake Lure. But that area wasn’t as affected, and the government cannot control a hurricane’s path. In an interview, Arthur said he did not want to talk about conspiracy theories, just his mission.)
The theory deepened. Chris Martenson, a right-leaning, conspiracy-minded author and influencer with more than 200,000 followers, published on his verified X account that he had heard that residents in nearby Chimney Rock were told that their town “was being bulldozed, bodies and all and the land was being seized by the federal government,” possibly to mine lithium. (Martenson didn’t respond to requests seeking comment.)
This rumor exploded online thanks to a spate of X accounts known for promoting conspiracy theories, according to Connexions Global Matrix, a nonprofit that works on disinformation and media literacy, and NewsGuard, which monitors media credibility and misinformation.
Social media messages like these help conspiracy-driven groups establish their authority, said Cody Zoschak, senior analyst at the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“A tweet like that creates an atmosphere where they can mobilize, as we saw them do in North Carolina, and to find and identify people who might be sympathetic to their cause,” said Zoschak. “Then the militia can step in and say, ‘We’re the solution.’”
Amid this swirl of suspicion, Trump also started casting doubts on FEMA. On the morning of Oct. 3, he took to Truth Social and shared that “FEMA is largely MIA because it has diverted resources for immigration resettlement.”
That same day, Veterans on Patrol decided to head straight toward Chimney Rock with a disaster response mission titled “OPERATION STEER IT BACK.” They did a callout, writing “if you are willing to mobilize with North Carolina families and remove FEMA from North Carolina.”
While it wasn’t Veterans on Patrol’s first disaster mission, Helene was a pivot from its usual focus. Arthur started the group in 2015 with the stated goal of helping homeless vets. Based in Arizona, extremist researchers say they quickly became vigilantes, feeding off Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies to pursue child and sex traffickers along the border. He developed a criminal record and was convicted in Arizona of assault, records show.
This past February to August, Veterans on Patrol embedded in the small town Washtucana, Wash., because Arthur believed the town was the center of a child trafficking operation.
In the early days of the Helene disaster, Veterans on Patrol doubled down on anti-government sentiments. It said FEMA “has billions in untapped resources designated for the 6+ million more Migrants, terrorists, and criminals being brought up RIGHT NOW.”
“FEMA IS THE PROBLEM, NOT THE ANSWER!”
In some hard-hit mountain communities of North Carolina, some people didn’t know what to believe. Residents here “don’t trust and have felt abandoned by the government,” said Chris Malcolm, a disaster response volunteer who also lives in Rutherford County.
In four local Facebook groups spanning three rural counties, as well in massive Helene-focused ones with 30,000 members, posts echoing misinformation became sandwiched between requests for helping stray dogs, finding generators for one needy family or another, and updates on power being restored.
Four locals said they’ve had to persuade friends and neighbors to sign up for FEMA assistance, combating falsehoods that the agency is trying to steal their homes and personal information.
Still, Malcolm said, some people have told the agency, “we don’t want you here.” He can sympathize, since trusting them has been hard for him, too. “We don’t know if FEMA will help,” he said. “We are hopeful that they will.”
‘The standoff in Lake Lure’
On a recent sunny, crisp afternoon, about a dozen people, some wearing fatigue-style pants and others in camouflage hats, buzzed around Veterans on Patrol’s distribution site. It had been about a week since they arrived. Members of the group unloaded garbage bags and boxes filled with supplies from the packed bed of a pickup truck into the circus tent.
Nearby, a FEMA motor home was set up where agency officials were helping residents fill out paperwork and answer questions.
Derrik Staley, a manager at the Ingles supermarket, said that he was happy to host Veterans on Patrol’s relief efforts, noting “how they’ve gotten bigger and bigger.”
“We appreciate them being here in peoples’ times of need,” he said.
Allen Hardin, a recently retired lieutenant with the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office, sat in a patrol car. He said that since the threat against FEMA, the sheriff would probably keep an officer posted in the parking lot as long as the Veterans on Patrol operation remained. But there have been no issues for officers to get involved in.
“They’ll talk your head off,” Hardin noted of the group, “but that’s it.”
By this point, Yoxall had read a lot about Arthur and his group online and said she was “afraid for her community.” She didn’t understand why they had picked her tiny town or why they wanted to stay here for three years, which Arthur never explained.
“I’m not sleeping,” she said Friday night. “It’s getting scary.”
She and five other volunteers also began to doubt Arthur’s glowing social media posts about his group’s assistance, which he used to call for more donations. They said they grew suspicious that supplies might not be reaching the churches that were supposed to receive them; one person surreptitiously filmed a truck on its supply journey.
Harris and Yoxall decided to confront Arthur directly. “We appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but you’re not part of this community, you can back off the supplies,” Yoxall said she told him.
And that’s when he snapped, they said.
“He was threatening me,” Harris said Saturday morning. “Then it turned into people calling me last night, like, be careful. Be careful. Really, he’s talking a lot about you.”
After that, they decided to walk away.
On Monday morning, they went back, again telling Arthur to pack it up, showing the encounter on a video call with a reporter. The Ingles supermarket chain had also gotten involved, the women said. And the people who lent him the giant circus tent and massive trailers no longer wanted to be a part of this.
Police confront Arthur
0:30
Police spoke to Lewis Arthur in Lake Lure on Oct. 21 after Ingles supermarket owners asked him to leave, despite Arthur's insistence they said he could stay. (Video: Mary Borek)
At one point, Arthur started running, blocking some people from picking up goods.
“Those are for the people,” Yoxall and Harris yelled. “Those are donations for people, for our community. Hey, that’s donations you cant touch that!”
“This is nuts,” Yoxall, stepping off to the side, exclaimed into her phone. “You can call this the standoff in Lake Lure.”
Soon enough, Veterans on Patrol started packing up, and Arthur disappeared for most of the day. Lake Lure police officers at the scene said that they were not filing charges and that the group was leaving on its own volition.
Amid the chaos Monday, people were still coming to the big striped tent for supplies, a new routine that for some residents had become like therapy. Yet there was tension all around.
Volunteers sort through donations left behind after Veterans on Patrol gave up control of the donation site. (Scott Dance/FTWP)
Eunice Gonzalez, who came to the depot before to get clothes, wipes and water, had been looking for blankets when, she said, suddenly someone accused her of stealing supplies meant for struggling mountain communities. They pointed at her and said they had seen her there the night before, asking if she was part of the group sending supplies elsewhere. She knew nothing about it.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I don’t want to know, either.”
Arthur said that he is the victim, making a range of accusations against the women who had confronted him. As of Tuesday, he said he was posted up next to dumpsters at a nature park across the street. He said his group would next find private land, he said, and continue their “humanitarian work” but would have license plate readers so he “can see everyone who is stealing.”
Yoxall, Harris and the other women who originally started the operation with some hot coffee said they sent the remaining clothes, bottled water and other supplies to another hard-hit town in Virginia.
They don’t know if they’ll continue to help with the recovery.
“That’s a hard question,” Yoxall said. “My heart says yes, God to me says yes, but the human part of me? I don’t know how it exploded like this. I really don’t.”
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By Brianna Sacks, Scott Dance, Will Oremus, Samuel Oakford and Jeremy Merrill
14. U.S. Agrees to Give Ukraine Millions to Build More Long-Range Drones
U.S. Agrees to Give Ukraine Millions to Build More Long-Range Drones
The move, confirmed by a Pentagon official, is in line with a U.S. policy change aimed at shoring up Ukraine’s ability to fight the war against Russia with its own weapons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/world/europe/us-ukraine-aid-long-range-drones.html?utm
Servicemen of the 5th Separate Kyiv Assault Brigade load drones onto a truck in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday.Credit...Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Kim BarkerMaria Varenikova and Eric Schmitt
Kim Barker, Maria Varenikova and Eric Schmitt, who is traveling with the U.S. secretary of defense, reported from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Oct. 22, 2024
The United States has agreed to give Ukraine $800 million in military aid that will go toward manufacturing long-range drones to use against Russian troops, Ukraine’s leader said on Monday, fulfilling a longtime Ukrainian goal of getting Washington to buy weapons from manufacturers in Ukraine instead of primarily in America.
A Pentagon official, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed the move, which comes as the United States shifts its policy and moves toward shoring up Ukraine’s ability to fight the war with its own weapons and on its own terms.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a briefing with journalists Monday that the money was just the first U.S. disbursement for Kyiv’s weapons production and long-range capabilities.
The decision to support long-range drone production in Ukraine may be a kind of consolation prize for Mr. Zelensky, who — despite repeated pleas — has so far failed to persuade Western partners to lift restrictions on using their long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia.
The decision also shows a change in tactics for the West.
The United States has given more than $61 billion in security aid to Ukraine since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022. But it has long resisted giving money directly to Ukraine for weapons, instead portraying its support for Kyiv in the war as a way to support American companies and minimize the potential for corruption. U.S. military aid packages to Ukraine have shrunk recently, partly because of concerns about dwindling Pentagon stockpiles.
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In April, Denmark became the first country to join a Ukrainian campaign called Manufacturing Freedom, which aims to raise $10 billion for the production of Ukrainian weapons. The Danish government agreed to give about $28.5 million to buy weapons from Ukrainian manufacturers. Canada and the Netherlands later signed on.
More than two and a half years into the war, Mr. Zelensky is trying to reinvigorate Western support in whatever way he can. Russia continues to advance in the east of Ukraine and now occupies about 20 percent of the country despite record Russian troop casualties in September, more than 1,200 a day.
For weeks, Mr. Zelensky has been promoting what he calls a “victory plan,” visiting the United States and Europe to try to persuade Western leaders to send more weapons and to give Ukraine more of a chance to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength.
But, so far, no one has signed on to that plan, which relies largely on increased Western support, and Mr. Zelensky’s visits were overshadowed by the war in the Middle East, Hurricane Milton and the looming U.S. election.
Mr. Zelensky told journalists on Monday that U.S. officials were evaluating his plan, but said he did not expect any decision until after the Nov. 5 election. He also said the majority of Ukraine’s NATO allies wanted to invite Ukraine formally to join the military alliance, but a few, including the United States and Germany, were more cautious. Russia has pushed strongly against NATO membership for Ukraine.
Drones have been crucial for Ukraine’s long-range capabilities, especially while the country has been waiting for the West to sign off on long-range missiles.
Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, said on Monday that Ukraine had invested more than $4 billion in its defense industry. Appearing alongside the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, in Kyiv, he said that long-range drones could hit targets more than 1,000 miles away and that they had already destroyed more than 200 military facilities in Russia.
“Our drones have become a real threat to the enemy,” said Mr. Umerov. But he said his country still needed investment from international allies.
Western officials recently praised Ukrainian drone attacks against ammunition depots near Toropets, a town in western Russia, in late September. The officials said it was one of the best examples of Ukraine’s successfully attacking Russian ammunition dumps, fuel bunkers, command posts and Moscow’s overall ability to supply its forces.
The officials said the Ukrainian one-way attack drones had hit a series of depots storing Russian ammunition, bombs and missiles, as well as ammunition purchased from North Korea. The first strike, on Sept. 18, was so large it caused an explosion that registered 2.7 on the Richter scale and ignited fires covering an area almost four miles wide.
Overall, the strikes over several days destroyed an estimated 100,000 tons of ammunition — the largest loss of Russian and North Korean-supplied ammunition since the war started, the officials said.
On Friday in Brussels, Mr. Austin said that the Ukrainians had used Ukrainian long-range drones to take out “a number of strategic-level ammunition supply points, which has had an impact on the battlefield.” He also said Ukraine could produce those drones in great numbers at a small fraction of the cost of a precision-guided missile and that they “have proven to be very effective and accurate.”
Lara Jakes, Anastasia Kuznietsova and Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting.
Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about national issues. More about Kim Barker
Maria Varenikova covers Ukraine and its war with Russia. More about Maria Varenikova
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times, focusing on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism issues overseas, topics he has reported on for more than three decades. More about Eric Schmitt
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 23, 2024, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Agrees to Give Ukraine $800 Million to Build More Long-Range Drones. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
15. Proliferated LEO, hybrid cloud capabilities enable U.S. forces to operate more disconnected
Proliferated LEO, hybrid cloud capabilities enable U.S. forces to operate more disconnected
With connectivity expected to be limited in future conflicts, U.S. troops must learn to operate without persistent communications and data.
By
Mark Pomerleau
October 22, 2024
defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · October 22, 2024
Emerging capabilities such as proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite communications and hybrid cloud capabilities will allow U.S. military forces to operate effectively without having to be constantly connected on the battlefield in the future, according to a Marine commander.
Unlike the conflicts in the Middle East of the last 20 years against a technologically inferior enemy, Pentagon officials anticipate contested and congested digital environments where maintaining connectivity will be difficult — a concept known as DDIL, or denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited, in Defense Department parlance.
“Because the bandwidth that’s available in these pLEO satellite connections to our ground control stations is so big, we’re talking hundreds of megabytes of bandwidth with negligible latency, it makes things possible that you couldn’t do anymore. You don’t need to be persistently connected anymore,” Col. Jason Quinter, commander of Marine Air Control Group 38, said during a webcast Monday hosted by C4ISRNET, adding that this also includes the cloud.
In the past, U.S. troops were used to constant connectivity to higher headquarters or to pass data back and forth. Now, they will have to operate somewhat disconnected at times, but these new technologies are providing more bandwidth in those scenarios.
“pLEO is a game changer … That high amount of bandwidth and that low latency really changes what’s possible on modern networks,” Quinter told DefenseScoop in an Oct. 7 interview. “Because the satellites are in low-Earth orbit, you have significantly less latency than you typically would. What that means is it makes certain things possible that wouldn’t [otherwise] be possible.”
These constellations provide orders of magnitude more bandwidth than traditional program-of-record SATCOM capabilities, where forces would have to aggregate connections together to achieve 12 megabytes. Now, troops can have up to 200 megabytes or more depending on how much officials are willing to spend, allowing unprecedented connectivity and data.
Those constellations are also more resilient given there are more smaller satellites in orbit as opposed to a lower number of exquisite, geosynchronous orbit satellite communications architectures.
“Some of our senior leaders used to refer to those [military satellite constellations] as big, juicy targets for anti-satellite ballistic missiles. With the proliferation of these smaller, flat sats in lower orbit, orders of magnitude — four, five, six — and there’s plans for there to be 10-12,000 of these satellites in lower orbit, there’s inherent survivability in that constellation, just from the sheer numbers,” Quinter said in the webcast.
Those connections, however, are easier to jam, and officials have always been careful to warn that their access must factor into what the military describes as a PACE plan — or primary, alternate, contingency and emergency — depending on the operation.
But the enhanced connectivity those constellations provide will allow forces to operate more dispersed and disconnected on the battlefield, a key tenet as observations from current conflicts indicate static units will be much more vulnerable.
“Once you have that kind of bandwidth, you don’t need to be persistently connected. You could establish a hybrid cloud network,” Quinter said.
Quinter served on the Joint Staff’s J6 team when it was developing the overarching concept for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix. He noted that during that process, officials used to say the critical requirement to enable that concept is cloud.
Key to realizing that goal is the DOD’s enterprise cloud contract vehicle, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the Pentagon’s highly anticipated $9 billion effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders. Officials in the past have indicated how important this vehicle is to the CJADC2 concept and enabling connectivity and interoperability of forces across the globe.
“We are working with companies … through their cloud environment and trying to establish that hybrid cloud architecture at the edge of the network, which could persist without a connection over pLEO. You could turn that satellite connection on and off as necessary to be more survivable,” Quinter said.
He noted that as long as units have enough processing power and storage at the edge, they don’t need to be constantly connected. They just need to be able to process the information in the field.
“I say ‘hybrid cloud’ because it needs to be both private and public, like we need to be taking advantage of the prime contractors that are on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract,” he said. “Those will enable us to leverage [a] big data center when we are connected to the enterprise. But we also need to have the hardware at the edge of our network that can handle cloud, hybrid cloud at the edge.”
Quinter noted that the entire DOD is looking at how to get forces to operate more persistently disconnected. He likened a future scenario to submarines that are usually disconnected, but they surface when they need to, download the necessary data and dive back down to resume their patrols.
“We learned that as communicators, that we need to have a PACE plan. You hear other folks from other communities talking a lot more about that now, but I would say that with the technology that’s available right now, you could essentially operate in a no probability to detect, no probability of intercept environment, because hybrid cloud will enable you to do many, many things on the edge of a network that you typically, at least historically, have not been able to do,” Quinter said.
This notion will require a paradigm shift and change in thinking for many service members that have been used to being constantly connected.
“One thing that I have noticed over the last two years in particular, [is] that we have a lot of teaching and educating that we need to do across the force when it comes to cloud,” he said. “I think there’s not enough people that understand how that technology works in particular, which puts us at a disadvantage, because as we’re designing these circuits to install, operate, maintain them in the network in a combat environment, we need to know what’s in the realm possible. I think cloud is not something with that we’re teaching in the schoolhouse yet, but we’re getting there.”
There is a bit of a misconception among many, Quinter added, given cloud is associated with large data centers.
“When people think about cloud, they think about data centers, like back in [the continental U.S.]. In their mind, I think it’s a natural default for most people to think, ‘Well, if I’m not connected to the data center, then how am I using the cloud?’” he said. “That’s what I meant by the level of education that’s required, even across the comm community, for people to understand what is and is not possible when it comes to cloud.”
Written by Mark Pomerleau
Mark Pomerleau is a senior reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · October 22, 2024
16. Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough for the Pentagon?
Excerpts:
...the “Defense Death Spiral,” a phenomenon first warned of by a courageous group of defense reformers during the Reagan buildup of the 1980s.
There is a reckoning on the horizon regarding the goals and costs of the U.S. military apparatus. Unfortunately, the leaders of both parties remained mired in the past, like the proverbial generals fighting the last war. But this is no longer a theoretical debate. The lives and safety of millions of people here and around the world are at stake. We need to force Washington to catch up with reality, and soon, or we will all pay a horrific price in blood and treasure.
Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough for the Pentagon?
Forbes · by William Hartung · October 22, 2024
... [+]Getty Images
Writing at Responsible Statecraft, the online magazine of my organization, the Quincy Institute, my colleague Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center summarizes the dangers of the “Defense Death Spiral,” a phenomenon first warned of by a courageous group of defense reformers during the Reagan buildup of the 1980s.
The thesis is fairly simple – as each generation of weapons purchased by the Pentagon becomes more expensive and more complex, the U.S. armed forces shrink accordingly. As Grazier points out, the U.S. armed forces have half as many combat aircraft as they did in the mid-1970s, and fewer than half as many combat ships – all on a budget that is 60% higher than it was back then, adjusted for inflation. And contrary to the official story, it’s not clear that the quality of the new generation of weaponry has made up for the reduction in quantity, as evidenced by the subpar performances of major systems like the Littoral Combat Ship and the F-35.
The Pentagon’s attempt to supply weapons to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza while acquiring equipment relevant to a possible conflict with China has laid bare the flaws of the Pentagon’s current system of developing and purchasing new weapons.
For years basic items like artillery shells have been purchased in reduced quantities in favor of spending on more expensive – and more lucrative – big ticket items. But ramping up production, or replacing munitions expended during the wars in Ukraine and Middle East conflicts, is extremely difficult to do in short order because U.S. weapons are more costly and more complex than those produced by U.S. adversaries like Russia. Even the missile wars against the Houthi rebels in Yemen put the U.S. military-industrial complex at a disadvantage, as the U.S. shoots down cheap Houthi missiles with expensive U.S. interceptors.
There are two potential solutions to the death spiral. First, build simpler weapons that are good enough for the tasks at hand, but are also cheaper, more reliable, and easier to maintain and produce. This would run contrary to decades of Pentagon practice, where more technological “sophistication” is always viewed as a positive. It should be noted that the Pentagon’s “Replicator Initiative,” which is aimed at producing large numbers of cheap, capable systems in short order, is an attempt to address the death spiral issue, but the jury is out on whether this approach will succeed. And so far these new weapons – like swarms of mini-drones – are to be produced in addition to costly current generation systems, which is good news for arms makers but terrible news for taxpayers at a time when interest on the debt is now higher than the entire, enormous, Pentagon budget. We need to spend our money more wisely across the board, and the Pentagon is a good place to start.
Read More: The Human Costs of the Gaza War Are Even Greater Than You Think
The second way to address the death spiral is to rein in America’s runaway military strategy, which seeks the ability to fight and win wars virtually anywhere on earth while maintaining a huge global military footprint, as well as to arm multiple allies in shooting wars. We need a more hardheaded, restrained approach to when it is in the U.S. interest to use force, or to send weapons into battle zones. For example, arming Ukraine to defend itself against a Russian invasion makes sense, but since neither side is going to win total victory on the battlefield it is also urgently important to explore diplomatic options to end the conflict. In the Middle East, on the other hand, enabling Israel’s crimes in Gaza and its escalation to Lebanon and Iran is in no one’s interest, yet U.S. weapons keep flowing uninterrupted. That has to change.
There is a reckoning on the horizon regarding the goals and costs of the U.S. military apparatus. Unfortunately, the leaders of both parties remained mired in the past, like the proverbial generals fighting the last war. But this is no longer a theoretical debate. The lives and safety of millions of people here and around the world are at stake. We need to force Washington to catch up with reality, and soon, or we will all pay a horrific price in blood and treasure.
Forbes · by William Hartung · October 22, 2024
17. The New Battle for the Middle East
Excerpts:
The success or failure of these competing visions will have broad global ramifications. A world in which Vision 2030 fails dramatically, leaving the vast energy resources of both Saudi Arabia and Iran under the control of Sunni and Shiite extremists, would make the Middle East and the global economy less prosperous and stable. Conversely, if Iran’s post-Khamenei leadership prioritizes the economic welfare and security of its people, Iran has the potential to one day become a G-20 nation and a pillar of global stability.
The failed American experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with the failures of the Arab Spring, have largely dispelled illusions among U.S. officials that Washington has the capacity to meaningfully shape, at least in a positive way, the politics of the Middle East. It will be local actors who determine which visions prevail. But given that Vision 2030 seeks to uphold the U.S.-led liberal world order and Vision 1979 seeks to defeat it, the United States has a vested interest in the success of the former and the failure of the latter. It is also in the global economic interest to see stable, prosperous governments in Saudi Arabia and Iran that are at peace with one another and themselves. This means the world should help the people of Iran move beyond an oppressive ideological regime that has caused internal stagnation and regional unrest, and help Saudi Arabia navigate political reforms that will help sustain its social and economic transformation.
The best outcome for the United States, the Middle East, and the world is two sustainable, representative, forward-looking visions in both countries. The worst outcome is two backward-looking regimes clinging to past grievances. The former may be difficult to achieve. But the consequences of the latter would be nothing short of catastrophic.
The New Battle for the Middle East
Saudi Arabia and Iran’s Clash of Visions
November/December 2024
Published on October 22, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Karim Sadjadpour · October 22, 2024
There are many Middle Eastern conflicts that could reshape the global political order. But the one most likely to do so is the battle between the region’s two dominant powers: the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Although this rivalry was once primarily viewed as an ethnic and sectarian conflict between the predominantly Sunni Arab Saudis and the Shiite Persian Iranians, the key dividing line today is ideological. The clash centers on their respective strategic visions—Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and Iran’s Vision 1979. Each vision dictates the internal policies of its respective country, as well as how it deals with others.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are both autocratic energy titans, collectively controlling nearly a third of the world’s oil reserves and a fifth of its natural gas. Yet they are led by starkly different men with profoundly different plans. The de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, 39-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, wants to rapidly modernize a state long steeped in Islamist orthodoxy and move it away from its dependence on fossil fuel production. He created Vision 2030 to achieve those ends. The longtime leader of Iran, 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, remains dedicated to the ideological principles of Iran’s Islamist revolution. Khamenei does not call his plan Vision 1979. But the name can still aptly be applied, since his vision is all about preserving the Iranian Revolution’s ruthless commitment to theocracy.
These two countries are historic rivals with irreconcilable goals. Vision 2030 appeals to national aspirations, whereas Vision 1979 taps into national grievances. Vision 2030 seeks a security alliance with the United States and normalization with Israel; Vision 1979 is premised on resisting the former and eradicating the latter. Vision 2030 is propelled by social liberalization; Vision 1979 is anchored in social repression.
Although they harbor enormous mutual mistrust, Iran and Saudi Arabia are unlikely to fight each other directly. Tehran and Riyadh struck a 2023 agreement to normalize relations, lowering bilateral tensions. Their greatest challenge thus lies not in confronting each other but in addressing their internal struggles. And here, both have plenty to grapple with.
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s problems are obvious. The country resembles the late-stage Soviet Union, economically and ideologically bankrupt and reliant on brutality for its survival. Beyond its borders, however, Tehran is more powerful than ever before in its modern history. Iranian-backed proxies and militias dominate four failing Arab states—Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen—as well as Gaza. Tehran also has an outsize effect on numerous global security issues, including nuclear proliferation, Russia’s war in Ukraine, cybersecurity, disinformation campaigns, and the weaponization of energy resources.
Saudi Arabia’s struggles are not as immediately apparent. Right now, MBS appears to enjoy widespread support for having lifted social restrictions and for his country’s strong economy. Yet the success of Vision 2030 will invariably depend on the economic viability of its gigantic projects, and it will be challenged by lofty public expectations, oil price volatility, corruption, and repression. It will also be tested by disgruntled reactionary forces. The country still has a large population of deeply conservative Islamists who are unhappy with MBS’s choices, and they could create major problems for his government. Vision 2030, then, is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor.
Whether either state will succeed in sustaining its vision is not clear. What is clear is that the fate of the two visions—one driven by change, the other defined by resistance—will have consequences that extend far beyond either country. These visions will shape not only whether the Middle East becomes more prosperous and stable but whether the whole world does, as well.
THE LEGACY OF 1979
Saudi officials like to tell a story about their country and Iran. In the late 1960s, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s modernizing ruler, wrote to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Faisal, the shah wrote, had to liberalize Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, he might be overthrown.
The king strenuously disagreed. In his response, Faisal suggested that it was Pahlavi—with his secular, more European vision for society—who was actually at risk of being deposed. “Your majesty, may I remind you, you are not the shah of France,” he wrote back, adding: “Your population is 90 percent Muslim. Please don’t forget that.’’
The king proved to be right. In Iran’s 1979 revolution, protesters deposed Pahlavi and transformed the country from a U.S.-allied monarchy into an anti-American theocracy. Although a diverse coalition of forces opposed the shah, the man who emerged as the leader of the revolution, the 76-year-old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, believed that Western political and cultural influence posed an existential threat to Iran and Islamic civilization. “All the things they used to pervert our youth were gifts from the West,” the cleric said. “Their plan was to devise the means to pervert both our men and our women, to corrupt them and thus prevent them from their human development.” Khomeini died a decade later, but his successor, Khamenei, has kept his vision alive.
As it happened, 1979 was also a pivotal year for Saudi Arabia. Islamist radicals, believing the Saudi royal family had strayed from the path of true Islam, seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, helping to plunge the monarchy into an existential crisis. Fearing that they would suffer the same fate as the shah, the Saudi government abandoned modernization efforts and redirected vast resources to reactionary forces at home and abroad. The country empowered fundamentalist clerics to exercise control over education and the judiciary, expanded the morality police, shut down movie theaters, and enforced strict gender segregation in schools and public spaces. In exporting these policies, in part with U.S. encouragement to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia spent tens of billions of dollars to fund thousands of mosques as well as jihadi groups that became the antecedents of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are led by starkly different men with profoundly different plans.
These policies endured for 20 years. But the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001—15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals—and the deadly al Qaeda bombings in Riyadh in 2003 forced a course correction. Both attacks exposed a harsh reality: Islamic fundamentalism, once perceived as an asset, had evolved into a profound threat to the kingdom’s stability. The Saudi government thus attempted to turn off its financial support for external radicalism as well as embark on a costly domestic counter-radicalization campaign. “We try to transform each detainee from a young man who wants to die into a young man who wants to live,” said Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, then one of the key architects of the Saudi counterterrorism strategy, in 2007.
But it was not until more than a decade later, when MBS began his ascent to power, that Saudi Arabia commenced its broader, international transformation. One of more than a dozen children born to King Salman, MBS saw an aging Saudi leadership that was overly reliant on oil and disconnected from its young society. He worried his country was falling behind Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which were working to become transportation and trade hubs with outsize influence in business, entertainment, sports, and media. In response, MBS had the kingdom launch its own agenda, Vision 2030, aimed at opening the country economically, jettisoning Islamist restrictions, diversifying away from oil, and building a national identity.
The vision’s foundational document is centered on three themes—“a vibrant society, a thriving economy, and an ambitious nation”—and has led to real policy shifts. Beginning in 2018, Saudi women gained the right to drive and travel without a male guardian’s permission. Their presence in the country’s labor force increased significantly, including in senior government positions. The government began investing tens of billions of dollars in plans for data centers and in artificial intelligence and other types of technology. It dramatically boosted youth entertainment—nearly two-thirds of Saudis are under 30—with Formula 1 races, wrestling tournaments, and the recruitment of soccer stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo. New tourist rules were introduced to encourage foreign visitors to explore the country and bring in revenue.
So far, these efforts have had mixed results. Saudi Arabia has been among the world’s fastest-growing major economies in the last several years, with significant growth in non-oil sectors. Yet growth figures are still often tied to the price of oil. Similarly, the Saudi Ministry of Investment has estimated that foreign direct investment increased by over 150 percent from 2017 to 2023. One Saudi businessman, however, told me that “non-oil FDI has gone nowhere.”
TWO MEN, TWO VISIONS
Vision 1979 and Vision 2030 reflect the personalities of Khamenei and MBS. The two men are arguably the most powerful individuals in today’s Middle East, but they have vastly different visions and leadership styles—the former’s based on historic grievances, and the latter’s on modern ambitions. These differences are clear in their animosity toward each other. MBS has called Khamenei the “new Hitler of the Middle East,” and Khamenei has derided MBS as a “criminal” whose “inexperience” will lead to Saudi Arabia’s downfall.
Both have unique backstories. Khamenei was born into a clerical family of modest means, was educated in a Shiite seminary, and spent his formative years as a revolutionary agitator (including several as a political prisoner). Had the Iranian Revolution never happened, he would have been destined for the life of a humble cleric. Instead, he was catapulted to power, becoming Iran’s president in 1981 and supreme leader in 1989. His hypervigilance, born of profound insecurity, has been one of the keys to his longevity. Despite widespread popular discontent and a state of near-permanent external crisis, Khamenei has not deviated from the revolutionary ideals of his mentor, Khomeini. The ideological pillars of Iran’s Vision 1979 remain as they were then: “Death to America, Death to Israel,” as Khamenei’s supporters often chant, and the mandatory veiling of women, which Khomeini once referred to as “the flag of the Islamic Revolution.”
In stark contrast, MBS was born into immense wealth as a son of one of the world’s richest men, King Salman bin Abdulaziz. Although MBS was born after 1979, he said that the radicalism spawned that year “hijacked” Islam as a religion. He aspires for his people to achieve modernity rather than martyrdom. “We will not waste 30 years of our lives dealing with extremist ideas,” he once declared. “We will destroy them today.’’ This decisiveness has sometimes led to grave misjudgments, including the brutal 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the devasting war in Yemen. Yet the crown prince has retained the confidence of much of young Saudi society and the momentum of Vision 2030.
One of the most important differences between the Saudi vision and the Iranian one relates to social freedoms. Iranians had long looked down on their Gulf Arab neighbors. Khomeini once referred to the House of Saud as “the followers of the camel grazers of Riyadh and the barbarians of Najd, the most infamous and the wildest members of the human family,” and he denounced them in his last will and testament. No matter how reactionary their regime was, Iranians may have taken some comfort in having more social freedoms than Saudis. But this is no longer the case. The world’s most famous musicians regularly perform in Saudi Arabia, including top Iranian singers whose music is banned in their homeland. Tens of millions of Iranians get their news from Iran International, a Saudi-backed Persian-language satellite news channel. After a 35-year ban, Saudi Arabia reopened movie theaters in 2018. Social media apps are widely available. The country has welcomed more tourists than ever before, while Iran has doubled down on the practice of taking foreigners (often Iranian dual nationals) as hostages.
The difference between the two plans is particularly stark when it comes to the treatment of women. Although Saudi women, once hidden from public life, continue to lag on indices of equality, the advances they have made under MBS are real and significant. Iranian women are better educated than their male counterparts and have often risen to the top of their professions. Yet they are among the few in the world who face more restrictions today than their grandmothers did five decades ago, before the Islamic Revolution. This imbalance erupted during Iran’s 2022 to 2023 “Women, Life, Freedom” protests, which were triggered by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman. She had been arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly.
CRUDE POWER
The most dramatic difference in outcomes between Vision 2030 and Vision 1979, however, is in the effect on each state’s economy. Saudi Arabia has used its energy production to fuel its strategic vision. As a result, the Saudis are far richer than their Iranian counterparts by virtually every metric. Saudi Arabia has more than twice the GDP of Iran despite having less than half its population. Iran’s annual inflation rate is consistently among the world’s highest, and Saudi Arabia’s is around two percent. Riyadh has over $450 billion in foreign currency reserves, around 20 times what Tehran possesses.
There are many reasons for Iran’s terrible economic performance. But they all relate to Vision 1979. Thanks to its hostility toward the West, Iran has come under heavy sanctions that have crippled its foreign currency holdings and made it hard to sell its main two commodities, oil and gas. In 1978, the year before the revolution, Iran was producing almost six million barrels of oil per day, roughly five million of which were exported. Since the revolution, Iranian production and exports have averaged less than half these amounts. Although Iran has the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas, after Russia, it does not rank among the world’s top 15 exporters. And Tehran has sought to use the energy resources it does have as a weapon. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Iranian officials repeatedly reminded an energy-strapped Europe that “winter is coming’’ to try to threaten the continent’s leaders into acceding to Tehran’s nuclear demands.
Yet the greatest tragedy of Vision 1979 for Iran has been the waste not of its natural resources but of its human resources. In 2014, Iran’s minister of science and technology claimed that the country’s annual brain drain—estimated at 150,000 people leaving annually—cost the economy a staggering $150 billion every year, more than four times its oil revenue from 2023. In contrast, most of the estimated 70,000 Saudi students studying abroad return home when their studies are finished. Vision 1979 often sees its country’s educated minds as a threat, but Vision 2030 treats them as an asset.
Saudi Arabia has spent heavily on ambitious plans to modernize its economy, such as on the introduction of smart cities. That includes its Neom project, focused on creating a large urban area in the desert that could transform the kingdom into a global technology hub and drive economic diversification. Although both governments have built strong surveillance states, Tehran’s technology innovations and investments have been employed mostly to repress its people, arm its proxies, and attack its enemies.
ORDER VS. DISORDER
Saudi Vision 2030 has clearly outperformed Iran’s Vision 1979 in advancing the economic well-being and satisfaction of citizens. But when it comes to international influence, the story is very different. The Middle East’s regional power vacuums and chronic instability are threats to Vision 2030, yet they have been boons to Vision 1979.
This difference makes sense. Vision 2030 is contingent on building, whereas Vision 1979 is content with destroying. The power vacuums and instability caused by the Lebanese civil war, the Iraq war, and the 2011 Arab Spring have thus all furthered Iranian ambitions, and Iranian influence has in turn deepened the disorder and chaos across the Arab world. Although opinion polls have suggested that Saudi Arabia enjoys significantly more popular support than Iran in the Arab world, including in countries where Iran wields the most influence, Riyadh’s efforts to counter Tehran’s ambitions—using hard power, soft power, or financial co-optation—have largely failed.
Over the last two decades, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been on opposing sides of the deadliest conflicts in the Middle East. The two have backed rival groups in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as well as in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. In each of these arenas, Iranian-backed hard power prevailed. Saudi Arabia has largely opted out or been defeated. The most humiliating of these defeats was in Yemen. Between 2015 and 2019, Riyadh spent over $200 billion on a military intervention to counter the power grab of the Iranian-backed Houthis. That intervention contributed to tens of thousands of civilian deaths. Yet it failed to weaken the group. Today, the Houthis, whose slogans wish death to America and Israel, not only remain entrenched in power but have also bottlenecked the global economy, diverting an estimated $200 billion in trade by harassing ships in the Red Sea (ostensibly to protest Israel’s war in Gaza).
As the Middle East’s lone theocracy, Iran uses Islamist radicalism as an asset. Virtually all Shiite radicals, from Lebanon to Pakistan, are willing to fight for Iran. Meanwhile, most Sunni radicals, including al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS, seek to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia despite its Sunni lineage. In fact, Tehran has proved willing and able to work with Sunni radical groups that share its opposition to Israel and the United States. The current head of al Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, has resided mostly in Iran for two decades.
Israel is one of the biggest international points of contention between the two countries. Vision 2030 is open to normalization with Israel, whereas Vision 1979 is opposed to Israel’s very existence. Iran was the lone country in the world that explicitly praised Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. Although it remains unclear to what extent Tehran was involved in the planning of the operation, Iran funds most of Hamas’s military budget, so U.S. officials have said Tehran is “broadly complicit.” The attack succeeded in delaying, and perhaps sabotaging, a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement.
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
The outside countries that will likely play the greatest role in determining the fate of these two visions are the United States and China. Vision 2030 needs Washington as an ally, but Vision 1979 wants it as an adversary. Vision 2030 is contingent on U.S. security support, while Vision 1979 cannot survive without Chinese economic support. An estimated 90 percent of Iranian oil exports are bound for China.
Given Iran’s economic and strategic dependence on China, any U.S. strategy to counter Tehran’s nuclear and regional ambitions will probably require some collaboration with Beijing. There is reason to believe that such cooperation is possible despite Beijing and Washington’s global competition. China and the United States ultimately have common interests in the region: namely, political stability and the free flow of trade and energy. (Russia, by contrast, benefits from regional instability and tumult in the oil markets.)
Yet the United States ultimately has even more in common with Saudi Arabia. American liberals may historically be deeply ambivalent about the country, but the United States’ great-power competition with China and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine changed Washington’s perceptions. Once seen as a problematic partner, Saudi Arabia is now viewed as a coveted ally. The possibility of a historic Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement under the umbrella of a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty ratified by the Senate will likely remain a signature aspiration of any future American administration, Democratic or Republican.
In the current environment, however, the domestic political costs to Saudi Arabia of a normalization deal with Israel could outweigh the benefits of a U.S. security umbrella. A public opinion poll conducted in November and December 2023 showed that 95 percent of Saudis believed that Hamas did not kill Israeli civilians on October 7; 96 percent of Saudis agreed that “Arab countries should immediately break all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel.” These sentiments have forced MBS to increase his negotiating demands. He recently declared that Riyadh would not establish diplomatic relations with Israel before the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” MBS may be an autocrat, but he cannot afford to be insensitive to public opinion. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, after all, was an autocrat. That did not prevent him from being assassinated after normalizing relations with Israel.
Still, there is reason to think that the Saudis will eventually strike a bargain with the Americans and the Israelis. Despite Saudi Arabia’s vast commercial ties to China and its friendship with Russia, it can count only on the United States to protect it from external adversaries, and it needs such protection. The September 2019 Iranian attacks on Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, exposed just how vulnerable the country and its vision are. In the absence of U.S. security guarantees, Saudi Arabia could spend half a trillion dollars over a decade to build Neom, intended to be 33 times the size of New York City, and Iran and its proxies could destroy it in days with cheap missiles and drones.
THE DANGER OF EXPECTATIONS
Numerous civil unrest indices have ranked Iran among the least stable governments in the world. In the past 15 years alone, Iran has experienced three major national uprisings—in 2009, 2019, and 2022—that brought millions of citizens into the streets. Yet Khamenei is one of the world’s longest-serving autocrats, having ruled since 1989, and the regime has consistently defied predictions of its imminent demise. History suggests, perhaps counterintuitively, that revolutionary dictatorships are often more enduring than rapidly modernizing monarchies. As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have written, revolutionary regimes born from “sustained, ideological, and violent struggle” tend to endure because they destroy independent power centers, produce cohesive ruling parties, and establish tight control over formidable security forces. In Iran, all these factors apply, helping to shield the Islamic Republic from elite defections and from military coups. Up to now, the regime has consistently crushed mass protests.
The past also suggests that successful popular uprisings tend to happen not in states suffering from constant deprivation, as Iran is, but in countries where improved living standards create elevated expectations. As the social theorist Eric Hoffer has written, “It is not actual suffering, but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.” Political reforms can also open the door to sudden change, something Iran has studiously avoided. Machiavelli observed that there is nothing “more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” For this reason, Khamenei, a student of the fall of the Soviet Union, has been firmly committed to the ideological principles of the 1979 revolution, believing that diluting them would precipitate the Islamic Republic’s downfall.
For MBS, meanwhile, the most applicable cautionary tale from history may be the experience of the shah of Iran, a fellow modernizing leader who alienated key constituencies, including the clergy, the bazaar, and intellectuals, that would conspire to unseat him. Yet the lessons learned from the shah’s downfall are mixed. As the historian Abbas Milani argued in his biography of the shah, Pahlavi was too authoritarian when he didn’t need to be and not authoritarian enough when he needed to be.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, MBS, and Bahraini King Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa in Sakhir, Bahrain, May 2024
Bahrain News Agency / Reuters
For many Saudi elites, the greatest fear is not a mass popular uprising like Iran’s 1979 revolution, but a targeted internal plot against the crown prince—a scenario with historical precedent in the kingdom. In March 1975, King Faisal, another modernizing monarch, was shot and killed by his nephew. This act of revenge was motivated by the death of the assassin’s brother, an Islamist who had been killed roughly a decade earlier while protesting Faisal’s introduction of television in Saudi Arabia.
MBS has put his stamp on the country’s leadership. He has faced down Saudi political and business elites more than any leader in his country’s history. He downsized the royal family, and his 2017 detention of hundreds of prominent Saudi businessmen at the Ritz-Carlton hotel—called a “sheikhdown” in Western tabloids—reportedly yielded over $100 billion in recovered assets.
But MBS may be unaware of the hazards awaiting him. To avoid internal challenges, autocrats often prioritize loyalty over competence when appointing advisers, creating an echo chamber that results in dangerous blind spots. The shah, for example, was bewildered by the anger against him and later lamented that he had been misled by sycophantic aides who shielded him from the truth. MBS may already be falling into this trap. One consigliere to the crown prince—a former European head of state—privately told me that the longer MBS rules, the more confident he becomes in his own judgment and the less need he feels to heed constructive criticism.
MBS faces other risks, as well. Ongoing judicial reforms in Saudi Arabia still lag behind economic and social reforms (and international standards). Training a new generation of secular Saudi lawyers and judges is a much more laborious process than hiring foreign consultants to transform the economy and build cities of the future. Many Saudi men feel resentment about losing power over women. This uneven progress—rapid economic and social reform without concurrent political reform—can also be a source of unrest. As Samuel Huntington warned in his book Political Order in Changing Societies, political instability is commonly triggered by “rapid social change and the rapid mobilization of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions.”
The Saudi crown prince may be unaware of the hazards awaiting him.
For now, MBS is strong and seemingly popular. Although credible public opinion polling in Saudi Arabia is rare, one November 2023 survey suggested that a solid majority of Saudis have trust in their government. In contrast, a recent government poll in Iran reported that more than 90 percent of the country’s citizens feel dissatisfied or hopeless. Targeting prominent Saudi businessmen for corruption, shrinking the entitlements of the royal family, imprisoning fundamentalist clerics, and diminishing the religious police have all earned the crown prince some support. Yet MBS has also cracked down on members of what should be his natural constituency: Saudi liberals, including Khashoggi and the women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul. This could backfire. “A social and economic reformation on overdrive is at too high a risk of failure without the parallel legal and procedural transformation occurring at the same pace and intensity,” warned Mohammed al-Yahya, a senior Saudi Foreign Ministry official and friend of Khashoggi, after Khashoggi’s killing.
The murder of the journalist no longer looms large inside Saudi Arabia. But it continues to taint MBS’s reputation in the West. Externally, his most vociferous critics, much like those of the shah, are Western liberals, many of whom liken him to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In 2020, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent, even said that Saudi Arabia’s leaders were “murderous thugs” and that the regime was “one of the very most dangerous countries on the face of this earth.” Inside Saudi Arabia, however, the group more likely to eventually challenge MBS’s authority is not liberals who believe he is undemocratic, but Islamists who believe he is far too liberal. As the author David Rundell wrote, “If a successor government came to power by the ballot, it would almost certainly be an Islamist populist regime. . . . If a new government came to power through violence, it would most likely be a jihadist organization such as ISIS or al-Qaeda.”
Although the crown prince is trying to turn the page on Islamic fundamentalism, he has not been able to eliminate it wholesale. MBS “put the Wahhabis in a cage,” said the Saudi author Ali Shihabi, referring to the country’s ultra-orthodox school of Islam. Yet just as the Taliban bided their time for two decades in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia’s Islamists are dormant but not dead. In an interview with The Economist, one Saudi religious commentator likened Islamist opponents of MBS to ants building an underground kingdom. “The prince has closed their mouths,” he said, “but he hasn’t ended their kingdom.”
WHITE ELEPHANTS AND BLACK SWANS
Over the last half century, the Middle East has consistently defied the predictions of forecasters. The whims of individual autocrats and the volatile mix of oil wealth, religion, and great-power politics have made the region uniquely vulnerable to black swan events with global ramifications. Those events include Iran’s 1979 revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the Arab Spring, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the October 7 attacks in Israel.
In this context, the future of both Vision 2030 and Vision 1979 will hinge on the fate of Saudi Arabia’s and Iran’s leaders and the global energy demands that sustain their ambitions. Should MBS’s grand projects become white elephants—costly, unproductive endeavors—or should oil prices experience a prolonged decline, rising public dissatisfaction may compel the Saudi crown prince to prioritize regime stability over transformational reforms. Although MBS is young, he is acutely aware of the occupational hazards that come with absolute rule, including the unforeseen pressures that have brought down autocrats in the past. The shah’s political downfall stemmed from myriad forces, but also partly from a terminal cancer diagnosis that he concealed even from his family, which undoubtedly impaired his decision-making during crises.
In Iran, meanwhile, the future of the Islamic Republic and Vision 1979 remains uncertain beyond the lifespan of the 85-year-old Khamenei. Although there is a possibility that power may transfer smoothly to loyal clerics and military leaders committed to revolutionary ideals, there is also a chance of a shift toward a leadership that prioritizes Iran’s national and economic interests over its revolutionary doctrine. Efforts by some supporters of Mojtaba Khamenei, Khamenei’s 55-year-old son and potential successor, to compare him to Iran’s MBS are risible. But they suggest that even Tehran’s younger-generation revolutionaries recognize that a forward-looking vision is more appealing than a backward-looking one.
An Iranian missile next to a poster of Khamenei, Tehran, October 2024
Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters
The success or failure of these competing visions will have broad global ramifications. A world in which Vision 2030 fails dramatically, leaving the vast energy resources of both Saudi Arabia and Iran under the control of Sunni and Shiite extremists, would make the Middle East and the global economy less prosperous and stable. Conversely, if Iran’s post-Khamenei leadership prioritizes the economic welfare and security of its people, Iran has the potential to one day become a G-20 nation and a pillar of global stability.
The failed American experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with the failures of the Arab Spring, have largely dispelled illusions among U.S. officials that Washington has the capacity to meaningfully shape, at least in a positive way, the politics of the Middle East. It will be local actors who determine which visions prevail. But given that Vision 2030 seeks to uphold the U.S.-led liberal world order and Vision 1979 seeks to defeat it, the United States has a vested interest in the success of the former and the failure of the latter. It is also in the global economic interest to see stable, prosperous governments in Saudi Arabia and Iran that are at peace with one another and themselves. This means the world should help the people of Iran move beyond an oppressive ideological regime that has caused internal stagnation and regional unrest, and help Saudi Arabia navigate political reforms that will help sustain its social and economic transformation.
The best outcome for the United States, the Middle East, and the world is two sustainable, representative, forward-looking visions in both countries. The worst outcome is two backward-looking regimes clinging to past grievances. The former may be difficult to achieve. But the consequences of the latter would be nothing short of catastrophic.
- KARIM SADJADPOUR is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Foreign Affairs · by Karim Sadjadpour · October 22, 2024
18. Battles of Precise Mass: Technology Is Remaking War—and America Must Adapt
Conclusion:
The U.S. military must stride forward faster; today’s innovations and prototypes must become tomorrow’s everyday military force if the United States is to preserve global leadership. The growing evidence of the effectiveness of precise mass systems should trigger not just conversations about future changes but also real changes in investments today—outlays that will influence a wide array of decisions, from the ships the navy builds to the missiles purchased by the army to the artificial intelligence infrastructure that every military service will need to use. Since the core underlying technologies driving these advances in precise mass come from the commercial sector, strategists will need to think through the consequences of the large-scale proliferation of such capabilities. The relative accessibility of precise mass systems will shape the way every country, not just the United States and China, prepares for the future.
Battles of Precise Mass
Technology Is Remaking War—and America Must Adapt
November/December 2024
Published on October 22, 2024
Foreign Affairs · October 22, 2024
At the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian forces deployed a handful of Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 uncrewed aerial vehicles to hit Russian targets. Those precise drone strikes were a sign of things to come. More than two years into the war, the TB2 is still a fixture of Ukraine’s arsenal, but it has been joined by a plethora of other uncrewed systems. Similar technology features in the current conflicts in the Middle East. Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen launch one-way attack systems (drones armed with explosives that slam into their targets) and missiles at Israel, commercial shipping, and the U.S. Navy. For its part, Israel is using a range of unmanned vehicles in its war in Gaza. China is exploring ways to use uncrewed systems to blockade Taiwan and prevent outside powers from helping the island in the event of a Chinese attack. And the United States has launched several initiatives to help it rapidly field affordable uncrewed systems at greater scale. In all these cases, advances in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, combined with a new generation of commercially available technologies and reduced manufacturing costs, are allowing militaries and militant groups to bring “mass” back to the battlefield.
For millennia, commanders considered mass—that is, having numerically superior forces and more materiel than the other side—critical to victory in battle. An army stood a greater chance of vanquishing its foes if it could deploy a greater number of troops, whether armed with spears, bows, and rifles or sitting in tanks. This principle dictated how militaries, especially those of great powers, pursued and achieved victory, from Roman legions in Gaul to the Soviet army on the eastern front of World War II. Having the biggest navy allowed the British empire to rule the seas, and having more planes empowered the Allies to bomb the Axis powers to smithereens. Mass has never been everything—better prepared, smaller militaries can thwart bigger and ostensibly more powerful ones—but it has traditionally established the odds in wars.
The last 50 years, however, saw a turn away from mass toward precision, a trend accelerated by the end of the Cold War. Militaries such as that of the United States discovered greater efficiency and effectiveness in the use of expensive advanced weapons that could accurately strike targets all over the world. Leaders chose to scale down the size of their forces and focus instead on honing their technological advantages.
Today’s wars and the assiduous investments made by the United States and China show that mass is making a comeback, but not at the expense of precision. Indeed, the current age of warfare is collapsing the binary between mass and precision, scale and sophistication. Call it the age of “precise mass.” Militaries find themselves in a new era in which more and more actors can muster uncrewed systems and missiles and gain access to inexpensive satellites and cutting-edge commercially available technology. With these tools, they can more easily conduct surveillance and stage accurate and devastating attacks. Its imperatives already shape warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East, influence dynamics in the Taiwan Strait, and inform planning and procurement in the Pentagon.
In the era of precise mass, war will be defined in large part by the deployment of huge numbers of uncrewed systems, whether fully autonomous and powered by artificial intelligence or remote-controlled, from outer space to under the sea. The U.S. military has positioned itself to lead in adapting to these changes in the character of warfare, but it must be ready to adopt innovations quickly and at scale. The pioneering breakthroughs evident in today’s conflicts merely foreshadow how wars will be waged in the years and decades to come as militaries grapple with the imperatives of both mass and precision.
THE QUEST FOR PRECISION
Countries long believed that they could achieve success on the battlefield by having more troops, equipment, and provisions than their opponents. The weight of numbers would deliver victory, the thinking went. But in the late 1960s, that theory started to change. The U.S. military began seeing virtue in precision over sheer quantity. U.S. forces sought to identify, track, and hit targets with ever-greater accuracy. That emphasis reduced the number of platforms and weapons necessary for military operations while also helping the United States comply with international humanitarian law by limiting the likely collateral damage of strikes.
In the 1970s, the United States and its European allies faced numerically superior Soviet forces. They could not match the Soviets tank for tank. Top U.S. military analysts feared that Moscow would win a war in Europe because of its quantitative advantage. To address these concerns, the United States introduced a program called Assault Breaker to integrate then-emerging technologies into military planning, with the intention of using precision missiles and bombs to devastate Soviet forces. Even if the Soviets achieved an initial breakthrough in an attack on central Europe, they would be unable to punch deep holes in Western lines. With sensors, early forms of guidance systems, and long-range weapons, the United States built the capability to destroy the second, third, and succeeding waves of Soviet forces in Europe.
The Cold War never turned hot in Europe, but precision strike capabilities would make their public debut in the first Gulf War in 1991. People around the world tuned into footage of laser-guided bombs slamming into Iraqi tanks. The decline of great-power competition—with the world focused on smaller conflicts such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo, and then counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq—placed an enormous premium on accuracy, as most military operations happened between smaller forces in populated areas.
Throughout the first part of the twenty-first century, the United States maintained a generational lead in precision strike capabilities. At a time when the Pentagon faced skyrocketing costs for ground vehicles, aircraft, submarines, ships, and weapons, that advantage convinced the U.S. military that it could triumph by slimming down and prioritizing efficiency and accuracy over sheer numbers. The United States consciously chose to reduce the scale of its military and rely on precision. The overall inventory of the air force and the fleet size of the navy are about a third of the size they were in 1965, but the striking power of each aircraft and each ship or submarine is much larger.
A FALSE BINARY
The wheel has turned once again. The United States no longer enjoys the vast lead in precision strike capabilities that it once did. The technology underlying those capacities—conventional munitions, sensors, and guidance systems—has become cheaper over time and accessible to many countries and militant groups beyond the United States. From Azerbaijan to North Korea, other forces can strike some targets with the precision, power, and range that were once the preserve of the U.S. military. They have benefited from advances made in the private sector in artificial intelligence and the widening availability of sensing and communications platforms, such as global positioning systems. With this proliferation of know-how, technology, and weaponry, warfare is changing. Crucially, advances in manufacturing and software have lowered the price of key equipment. A cheap commercial drone equipped with weapons, guided by another cheap drone packed with sensors, can hit specific faraway targets or conduct surveillance operations. And because they are relatively inexpensive, such aircraft can be deployed at scale. Militaries are beginning to realize that they don’t have to choose between precision and mass; they can have both.
Systems of this kind are, in military parlance, “attritable”—that is, their relatively low cost makes the loss of any one system relatively insignificant. They are inferior in comparison with the most advanced weapons deployed by the U.S. or Chinese militaries—an F-35 stealth fighter, for example, or a Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile—but these systems can be deployed at a much greater scale than their more expensive counterparts. Their unit costs are low enough that their aggregate capabilities are more affordable.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at a drone production facility in St. Petersburg, September 2024
Grigory Sysoyev / Kremlin / Sputnik / Reuters
To be sure, these cheap and precise systems are not making tanks, artillery, and other elements of modern warfare obsolete. They complement what came before, just as past innovations have; the advent of air warfare, for instance, did not spell the end of the use of infantry in battle. Future battlefields will be characterized by a mix of high-end systems deployed in smaller numbers, with these attritable systems deployed in far greater numbers.
These new trends and technologies have turned the war in Ukraine into a “battle lab,” as British Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace put it in 2023. Both sides have used flocks of relatively cheap drones to surveil and strike the other. In the sea, Ukraine’s robotic boats have delivered devastating blows to the Russian navy as part of a campaign that has damaged or destroyed a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, according to Ukrainian estimates. Russia is now trying to eliminate these Ukrainian uncrewed vessels with remotely controlled drones guided by first-person-view piloting and targeting.
What’s different today, as opposed to in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, is the scale at which these capabilities are employed—their undeniable mass. Both Ukraine and Russia use, and sometimes lose, thousands of drones per week for tasks including surveillance and combat. Some of these drones are recoverable, whereas others are designed for one-way missions traveling hundreds of miles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in December 2023 that his country would produce over one million drones in 2024 and has created a separate branch of the military focused on uncrewed forces, informally known as Ukraine’s “army of drones.”
MASSIVE ATTACK
This shift in the character of war is occurring because of its potential advantages on the battlefield, not just because of its technical feasibility. Every actor, not just smaller states or nonstate actors, can generate immense striking power by deploying cheaper systems at great scale. For example, Ukraine can spend anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a tactical drone to help a small unit conduct surveillance to up to $30,000 for longer-range strike systems that can hit targets over 500 miles away. Russia employs a great number of Iranian-made Shahed-136 one-way attack systems, which have a range of roughly 1,500 miles and cost between $10,000 and $50,000. With weapons like these, it might take an army several shots to knock out a given target, but the aggregate cost for eliminating each target will be lower than it would be with more expensive weapons systems. For the sake of contrast, consider the sophisticated and very capable U.S. Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile Extended Range. It will do the job, but public estimates place the cost of each missile at between $1 million and $2 million.
It is also much more expensive at present to defend against such attacks than it is to launch them. In April, Iran flung more than 300 weapons, including one-way attack drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, at Israel. With support from the United States and a handful of Middle Eastern countries, Israel repulsed almost all of the weapons. But at what cost? One report suggests the strike cost about $80 million to launch but $1 billion to defend against. A wealthy country and its allies could afford that sort of expense a few times—but maybe not 20 times, 30 times, or 100 times. Fending off this form of attack is not only expensive but also difficult. An assailant can strike at an adversary with a variety of systems; that adversary may be able to repel one specific system but struggle to deal with others. Commanders and analysts are only beginning to figure out how to counter precise mass at scale.
The United States no longer enjoys a vast lead in precision strike capabilities.
From the vantage point of the attacker, militaries can no longer assume that small numbers of high-end weapons will deliver victory. For example, some of Ukraine’s most advanced weapons, including U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and GPS-guided artillery shells, have faced challenges on the battlefield because Russia has developed the ability to jam their targeting and navigation systems. That is why Ukraine also needs the scale afforded by cheaper weapons systems to overwhelm Russian defenses.
The use of a great quantity of cheaper weapons systems can help make expensive, higher-end weapons more effective. A precise mass strike can exhaust an adversary’s air defenses, allowing more sophisticated but less numerous systems a better chance of hitting their targets. Russia, for instance, has mixed firing low-cost weapons with more expensive cruise missiles, including hypersonic missiles, against Ukraine.
The war that has now raged for more than two years in Ukraine shows that conflicts between states may remain nasty and brutish, but they are not always short. Countries stand a better chance of enduring such a protracted war with deep reserves of cheaper weapons systems, given that trying to maintain sufficient stocks of more expensive systems will be much more difficult. Focusing on precise mass allows militaries to prepare for the possibility that a war will not finish quickly and that years of combat lie ahead.
SHARPENING THE CUTTING EDGE
The Pentagon is often accused of being slow to innovate and adopt innovations, a struggle acknowledged by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Several recent initiatives and programs, however, demonstrate growing Defense Department interest in precise mass and the adoption of these evolving technologies. The air force, for instance, is seeking to acquire lower-cost uncrewed combat aircraft that can fly alongside platforms such as F-35 fighters. It plans to procure these uncrewed aircraft by the end of the decade and deploy thousands of them. The secretary of the air force, Frank Kendall, even rode in an F-16 guided by artificial intelligence to highlight his branch’s embrace of new technologies. The air force is also working with the private sector to produce cruise missiles that could cost as little as $150,000 each, a fraction of the current cost of $1 million to $3 million. For its part, the navy has begun hiring specialists in robotic warfare, created a new squadron focused on uncrewed surface vessels, and experimented with large numbers of uncrewed platforms in the Middle East.
The most prominent U.S. military investment in precise mass is the Replicator initiative, which is focused on accelerating the adoption of innovations that the U.S. military needs now, not in five or ten years. The program’s first area of emphasis is in scaling “all-domain attritable autonomous” systems—the affordable platforms that define the new era of warfare—that can function everywhere from the air to underwater, with the goal of deploying many thousands of these systems by August 2025. The Pentagon has announced that the first Replicator investments include Switchblade 600, a one-way attack drone, along with uncrewed surface vessels and systems that can fend off aerial drones. Through Replicator, the Defense Department has made progress in developing capability in less than a year that would generally take multiple years to complete—leading Hicks to announce that the Defense Department is on track to achieve Replicator’s 2025 goals for attritable autonomous systems.
A Ukrainian soldier launching a combat drone near Pokrovsk, Ukraine, August 2024
Serhii Nuzhnenk / Radio Free Europe / Reuters
In addition to specific investments in precise mass, the U.S. military is making organizational adjustments to help the armed forces adapt to and adopt new technologies, refining how U.S. forces are organized, trained, equipped, and deployed. Marine units are experimenting with AI-enabled sensors that help soldiers understand the surrounding environment and monitor adversaries’ vessels. The army has created task forces working across multiple domains to test emerging capabilities in air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace and see how they can be effectively employed on the battlefield. The elevation of the Defense Innovation Unit—an organization within the Defense Department tasked with accelerating the development and deployment of commercially available technology—to report directly to the secretary of defense, and the dramatic budget increase it received from Congress in 2024, prove that both the Pentagon and Capitol Hill are taking these changes in warfare seriously.
Finally, the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve funds experimentation with capabilities that the U.S. military views as the most important for addressing challenges in the Indo-Pacific and other theaters. Already, three projects that came through the reserve’s initial set of activities are moving into the U.S. military, including the acceleration by five years of improvements to the Marine Corps’ ability to perform strike operations in the Indo-Pacific. Although there is more to be done, these advances demonstrate that the United States has laid the groundwork not only to take advantage of precise mass but also whatever comes next.
THE FOG OF THE FUTURE
The signs of major change in how wars are waged are unmistakable. The small, inexpensive drones deployed en masse in Ukraine over the last two years provide only a glimpse of what such wars could look like in the future. Militaries will have to figure out ways to defeat a precise mass strategy, and that effort will lead to further change. For instance, directed-energy weapons—arms that use highly focused energy, such as lasers or particle beams, instead of a solid projectile—could lower the cost per shot of defending against swarms of drones. American and British militaries have recently tested and deployed directed-energy systems designed to defend against aerial drones, including in the Middle East. To be sure, directed energy has been imagined as the technology of the future for at least four decades. But such weapons could indeed find a place in the wars to come.
What is certain is that standing still means falling behind. China, Russia, Iran and its proxies, and a range of other actors are not holding back in pursuing precise mass and its tangible benefits on the battlefield. Policymakers in Washington should be alarmed in particular by China’s rapid advances in everything from ships to hypersonic missiles to antiship missiles, combined with its enormous investments in artificial intelligence, interest in precise mass concepts, and ability to produce systems far more rapidly than the United States can today.
The U.S. military must stride forward faster; today’s innovations and prototypes must become tomorrow’s everyday military force if the United States is to preserve global leadership. The growing evidence of the effectiveness of precise mass systems should trigger not just conversations about future changes but also real changes in investments today—outlays that will influence a wide array of decisions, from the ships the navy builds to the missiles purchased by the army to the artificial intelligence infrastructure that every military service will need to use. Since the core underlying technologies driving these advances in precise mass come from the commercial sector, strategists will need to think through the consequences of the large-scale proliferation of such capabilities. The relative accessibility of precise mass systems will shape the way every country, not just the United States and China, prepares for the future.
Foreign Affairs · October 22, 2024
19. How Trade Can Serve the American Worker
Excerpts:
In recent years, the United States has sought closer trade relationships with a number of partners, such as the United Kingdom, but has made little progress. Long-standing U.S.-British ties and the two countries’ similarly high standards on labor and environmental protection could make London an ideal candidate for a future agreement. Progress here could even lead to renewed interest in negotiations with the European Union; although the United States and the EU have the largest overall bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world, there is no underlying economic agreement between them. Kenya and Taiwan may also offer promising opportunities for broader trade discussions. Even if broad, high-standard trade agreements with these partners end up not being feasible, Washington could still explore deals targeting specific sectors, such as green steel, critical minerals, and semiconductors, or advancing specific goals, such as supply chain resilience.
Of course, the U.S. trade agenda can do only so much to address serious problems that affect the U.S. economy, such as rising income inequality, persistent poverty, and a tax system that favors the wealthy. The Biden administration has made significant strides to address these concerns, and it has made investments across the country in infrastructure, manufacturing, and twenty-first-century technologies. But the next administration can do more to support American workers. It should renew and expand trade adjustment assistance—the federal program that provides benefits to workers who lose their jobs because of international trade—to widen the categories of eligible workers. It should also improve the quality of and access to K–12 education, and develop post–high school apprenticeship programs to rival those available in other countries. And it must support training to give American workers the opportunity to hone the skills they will need to succeed in the industries of the future.
No matter who wins the election next month, the next steps for U.S. trade policy are clear. Trade negotiations are opportunities to ensure that markets operate on a level playing field as the United States and its partners develop new ways to tackle problems that harm workers at home and abroad. The USMCA’s labor rights enforcement mechanism sets a benchmark for future progress by providing a model that can be adapted to address other challenges and modified to work with other trading partners. Combined with broader efforts to boost U.S. competitiveness, trade policy can help build a stronger and more resilient U.S. economy—one that works better for all.
How Trade Can Serve the American Worker
Even Without New Deals, Biden Made Progress That His Successor Can Build On
October 23, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Judge Knot: Politics and Development in International Investment Law · October 23, 2024
Trade has gotten a bad name in the United States. In the past few decades, as the shine of globalization wore off, international trade became associated more with job losses, environmental degradation, and poor labor standards than with economic prosperity. It is a sentiment that tanked major U.S. trade initiatives, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Talk of trade opportunities gave way to fears of trade wars as Washington ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese goods under President Donald Trump and continued most of them under President Joe Biden.
On the presidential campaign trail, Trump has proposed the idea of a punitive universal tariff of—depending on the day—ten to 20 percent or higher on all imports from all countries, as well as a 60 percent tariff on goods from China. But as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has pointed out, the cost of such tariffs would be borne not by foreign competitors but by U.S. importers and, ultimately, American consumers, who would end up spending much more on groceries, gas, and other goods from abroad. Such a step would also induce other countries to impose retaliatory tariffs, sparking a trade war that would shrink demand for U.S. exports.
Elements of a more positive trade agenda, however, have started to develop in recent years, almost under the radar. Rather than focusing purely on punitive, unilateral action, an emerging bipartisan consensus emphasizes the importance of improving U.S. trade partners’ labor practices to start to level the playing field. Stronger labor standards abroad and increased investment in critical sectors at home can help protect American workers from unfair competition while enabling the United States to maintain its technological edge and expand its export base.
This approach to trade is more than rhetoric: it is being put into practice in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The USMCA was negotiated during the Trump administration, but the Biden administration, in particular, has used the deal’s novel enforcement mechanism to fight for labor law reforms to the benefit of workers in both Mexico and the United States. In doing so, the administration has demonstrated that trade obligations can advance critical policy goals. Biden’s successor will have plenty of trade leverage—the incentive of continued access to the $3.8 trillion U.S. import market, the largest in the world—to push for higher standards in policy areas beyond labor and with trading partners beyond Canada and Mexico. By working with U.S. partners in this way, the next president can not only secure stronger protections for American workers but also drive economic growth and keep the United States—rather than China—at the helm of global economic leadership.
FRAYING CONSENSUS
For much of the twentieth century, labor and trade were seen as complementary. Workers’ rights provisions were steadily integrated into U.S. trade policy. The Tariff Act of 1930, for example, prohibited the import of goods produced by forced labor. From the 1930s to the 1980s, the United States typically had trade surpluses, and American labor unions generally supported major trade bills because they saw a direct link between U.S. exports and good jobs. In 1974, Congress passed its first Trade Promotion Authority law, which fast-tracked trade negotiations by enabling the executive branch to present trade deals to Congress for expedited review. Industry-specific labor advisory groups worked alongside private-sector advisory groups to provide guidance before and during negotiations. When the TPA was renewed in 1988, Congress made promoting workers’ rights a principal objective for U.S. trade negotiators, and the bill passed with an overwhelming 376–45 vote.
In the early 1990s, however, the pro-trade consensus started to fray. In 1993, Congress approved NAFTA over the opposition of labor unions and a majority of House Democrats. President Bill Clinton, who had inherited the pending NAFTA deal from President George H. W. Bush, sought to secure enough votes for passage by negotiating side agreements with Canada and Mexico to address Democrats’ concerns about Mexican labor and environmental practices. But neither additional agreement included serious enforcement provisions. Mexico thus had little incentive to improve its labor laws, and wages there remained low, encouraging U.S. companies to shift production across the border. As a result, most American labor unions opposed most subsequent U.S. trade agreements.
It is possible to craft a trade deal that both champions high labor standards and establishes a means to enforce them.
Fortunately, unions did not disengage from the trade policymaking process, and their continued advocacy eventually led to improvements. When the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative enters a trade negotiation, it typically uses the most recently completed agreement as a baseline and updates labor and other obligations from there. This practice meant that language on labor rights gradually moved from the sidelines of NAFTA into the main text of bilateral agreements with Jordan, Peru, Colombia, and other countries. The language slowly became stronger and, in some respects, more enforceable. Trade agreements with Peru and Colombia, for example, mandated that the parties adopt and maintain the core labor principles of the 1998 International Labor Organization Declaration, which was a step beyond the commitment made in earlier agreements merely to “not fail to effectively enforce” local labor laws.
Despite this progress on paper, it proved frustratingly difficult to successfully litigate a labor case against a foreign government. The United States used consultative mechanisms and other provisions in its trade agreements to address concerns and secure improvements over the years, but the limits of this approach were laid bare in a case in which Washington asked an arbitration panel to compel Guatemala to enforce its labor laws. Based on a complaint from the AFL-CIO and local labor unions about inadequate enforcement, the United States requested consultations with Guatemala in 2010 under the terms of CAFTA-DR, a trade agreement between the United States, the Dominican Republic, and several Central American countries. The whole process took nearly a decade from start to finish, and the result was disappointing. The panel ruled that although the United States had established Guatemala’s enforcement failure, the nature of the lapses did not amount to behavior that had affected trade with the United States. The gap between the U.S. government’s ability to enforce domestic labor laws and its ability to enforce the labor-related commitments of its trading partners was growing too wide to ignore.
ENTER THE DISRUPTERS
Concern that U.S. trade policy was harming American workers featured prominently in the 2016 presidential campaign. Voter dissatisfaction ultimately helped the Republican Party punch through the “blue wall” that the Democratic Party had relied on for electoral victory. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a combined 77,764 votes—a much smaller number than the nearly 400,000 union manufacturing jobs lost in those states in the previous 15 years.
Trump often claimed to be a master negotiator, but as president he more often broke deals than made them, withdrawing the United States from both the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Iranian nuclear deal. An exception to this pattern was his administration’s effort to renegotiate NAFTA. Rechristened as the USMCA, the deal updated provisions on labor and conservation issues, created stronger local content rules to boost domestic and regional manufacturing, and embraced digital trade commitments to support innovation.
But the most important strides for labor came at the insistence of Democrats in the House of Representatives. The administration needed their support to pass the USMCA, which gave them leverage to demand ambitious provisions. Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and key staffers, House Democrats proposed a new model that would clearly tie Mexico’s reform and effective implementation of its labor laws to the ability of companies operating there to enjoy continued access to the U.S. market. Rather than simply making marginal improvements to the language in the USMCA, this change would give the U.S. government the tools to take concrete action when it received or initiated a complaint.
The central provision of this new model was a Rapid Response Labor Mechanism, or RRM, which enabled the United States to penalize private companies operating in Mexico that were denying their workers fundamental labor rights, such as freedom of association or collective bargaining. If the companies did not resolve the problem, the United States could bar their products from entering its market. This mechanism is unique in international trade law: as the scholars Kathleen Claussen and Chad Bown have explained, the difference between the RRM and mechanisms in other binding trade agreements is that “the RRM targets companies for their social harms rather than countries for their regulatory failures.” The spirit of the mechanism is reflected in the text of the USMCA, where the signatories “recognize the goal of trading only in goods produced in compliance with” the agreement’s labor provisions.
The next administration can do more to support American workers.
The USMCA entered into force on July 1, 2020, but the Trump administration never used the RRM. Since Biden took office in 2021, however, the United States has brought nearly 30 complaints alleging that factories in Mexico denied labor rights to workers. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai—who had helped lead development of the RRM when she worked on the House Ways and Means Committee—and her team initiated the first complaint in May 2021. It was directed at General Motors de México, the largest automobile manufacturer in Mexico and a subsidiary of its American namesake, GM. Most cases that followed were similarly brought against subsidiaries of U.S. and multinational companies operating in Mexico. Use of the RRM, however, was far from an imperialist imposition of U.S. values on a trading partner: the petitions were often filed at the behest of Mexican workers, and the Mexican government saw the tool as a way to advance its own domestic labor reform agenda.
The RRM has so far worked more effectively than earlier mechanisms to address labor violations. Unlike the case involving Guatemala, which took years to unfold and did not yield meaningful changes to labor practices, RRM cases are usually resolved in a matter of months and involve remediation plans that can have immediate benefits for workers. With the GM complaint, for example, the company agreed to a 17-point remediation plan that included rerunning a rigged union election, giving workers time off to vote, and hosting observers from the International Labor Organization. As AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler has described it, these cases often result in “concrete wins for Mexican workers in the form of authentic union representation with higher wages, benefits, and the reinstatement of illegally fired union supporters.” And critically important, such enforcement helps American workers by undermining the rationale for outsourcing jobs to Mexico.
The USMCA raised the bar in other ways, too. All three signatories, for example, banned the import of goods made with forced labor. The U.S. law implementing the agreement also created an interagency task force to ensure that long-standing restrictions on all imports made with forced labor, not only those from North America, are adequately enforced.
A more complete assessment of the effectiveness of the RRM must await a joint review of the entire USMCA, which is mandated to begin in 2026. But already the United States and its two largest bilateral trading partners have crossed an important threshold. The USMCA showed it is possible to craft a trade agreement that both champions high labor standards and establishes a viable mechanism for enforcing them. If labor rights can remain at the center of its trade policy, the United States can start to rebalance a playing field that has too often been tilted against American workers.
THE NEXT CHAPTER
The next administration will have the opportunity to review the USMCA, finding ways to improve its existing mechanisms and identifying new opportunities to use trade policy to fight illegal practices and boost U.S. competitiveness. Indeed, Harris has already signaled that, if elected, she would use the USMCA review period to explore additional steps to protect American jobs from unfair competition.
The USMCA review should pay particular attention to climate issues, considering how to spur closer cooperation on environmental standards, ensure greater accountability, and reward efforts toward decarbonization. According to a recent survey by scholars at Yale University, more than a third of registered voters in the United States both consider climate an extremely important factor in their voting decisions and prefer candidates who support measures to address global warming. It is clear that one candidate is listening: Harris has called climate change an existential threat and expressed her belief that the United States needs to do more to address the problem. When she voted against the USMCA as a senator, she cited its insufficient environmental provisions. Trump, for his part, has called climate change a hoax. But if he is half as worried as he claims to be about China outcompeting the United States, then perhaps he may be persuaded to use trade obligations to bolster American leadership on clean energy.
The RRM can serve as a model for assessing and enforcing strong environmental policies. But setting penalties for violations may not be the only way USMCA countries can develop a more climate-friendly agenda. A new North American strategy, for instance, could create continent-wide incentives for firms that expand clean energy capacity and add high-quality jobs in this sector.
Another important issue during the USMCA review will be China’s growing economic ties to the region. The parties will need to consider how to address rising Chinese investment in Mexico, particularly in strategic sectors—such as electric vehicles, telecommunications, mining, and ports—where Beijing’s role could undermine U.S. (and Mexican) interests. They will also need to ensure that investments in Mexico’s auto industry and other sectors do not circumvent restrictions on China’s direct exports to the U.S. market, which Washington put in place to safeguard investments under the Inflation Reduction Act that support the United States’ decarbonization efforts.
Trade negotiations are opportunities to ensure that markets operate on a level playing field.
The next U.S. administration can also apply the lessons of the USMCA to strengthen U.S. trade partnerships beyond North America in ways that embrace high standards and strong enforcement. It is helpful to recognize that trade deals—like other kinds of agreements—are neither inherently good nor bad. Rather, their value depends on both the strength of the language and the agreed enforcement mechanism. Washington has shown that it can negotiate a trade deal that puts American workers first, and it need not be shy about doing so again, provided that it continues to fight unfair competition and reduce incentives for companies to offshore jobs.
In recent years, the United States has sought closer trade relationships with a number of partners, such as the United Kingdom, but has made little progress. Long-standing U.S.-British ties and the two countries’ similarly high standards on labor and environmental protection could make London an ideal candidate for a future agreement. Progress here could even lead to renewed interest in negotiations with the European Union; although the United States and the EU have the largest overall bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world, there is no underlying economic agreement between them. Kenya and Taiwan may also offer promising opportunities for broader trade discussions. Even if broad, high-standard trade agreements with these partners end up not being feasible, Washington could still explore deals targeting specific sectors, such as green steel, critical minerals, and semiconductors, or advancing specific goals, such as supply chain resilience.
Of course, the U.S. trade agenda can do only so much to address serious problems that affect the U.S. economy, such as rising income inequality, persistent poverty, and a tax system that favors the wealthy. The Biden administration has made significant strides to address these concerns, and it has made investments across the country in infrastructure, manufacturing, and twenty-first-century technologies. But the next administration can do more to support American workers. It should renew and expand trade adjustment assistance—the federal program that provides benefits to workers who lose their jobs because of international trade—to widen the categories of eligible workers. It should also improve the quality of and access to K–12 education, and develop post–high school apprenticeship programs to rival those available in other countries. And it must support training to give American workers the opportunity to hone the skills they will need to succeed in the industries of the future.
No matter who wins the election next month, the next steps for U.S. trade policy are clear. Trade negotiations are opportunities to ensure that markets operate on a level playing field as the United States and its partners develop new ways to tackle problems that harm workers at home and abroad. The USMCA’s labor rights enforcement mechanism sets a benchmark for future progress by providing a model that can be adapted to address other challenges and modified to work with other trading partners. Combined with broader efforts to boost U.S. competitiveness, trade policy can help build a stronger and more resilient U.S. economy—one that works better for all.
Foreign Affairs · by Judge Knot: Politics and Development in International Investment Law · October 23, 2024
20. Losing Georgia to Putin
Republic of .... rather than state of....
Losing Georgia to Putin
The West sits idly by as the ruling party pushes the republic closer to Russia and Vladimir Putin.
thedispatch.com · by Gary Schmitt and Reuel Marc Gerecht · October 23, 2024
Georgian Dream, the ruling party of the Republic of Georgia, is trying, unashamedly, to turn the country into a one-party state. With national elections on October 26, the party, which is controlled and financed by the pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, is trying to drive underground, out of business, or into exile the civic, academic, watchdog, and election-monitoring groups that support closer ties to the West and are fighting Georgia’s capture by Russia.
The democratic opposition has been begging the U.S. and the EU to use their bully pulpits and sanctions to undermine the effort. In an act of foreign policy malpractice, their response has been tepid and belated.
In late August, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that the government would, if Georgian Dream retained a working majority within parliament, begin banning pro-Western opposition parties. Because there are serious doubts that a fair election will even be held (with the party firmly in control of the Central Election Commission), Georgia could well be headed toward becoming a second Belarus.
This would be a serious and needless loss to the West. The overwhelming majority of Georgians sees themselves as Europeans whose home is within the European Union, while two-thirds fully support joining NATO. They are a threat to Vladimir Putin’s dream of reestablishing Russian domination of the former Soviet Union. Like the Baltic republics, a democratic Georgia that freely rejects Moscow’s dominion serves as an icon for how a formerly Soviet people can become more humane and prosperous. Stunningly beautiful and wine-rich, stubbornly Christian but religiously tolerant, and sandwiched between Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and the Black Sea, Georgia has historically had an outsized influence on the region.
Ivanishvili, founder of Georgia Dream, its de facto leader, and a former prime minister, clearly sees the stakes. For years, Georgian Dream has been pushing Georgia toward Russia. In June 2019, the government allowed a visiting member of the Russian Duma who had supported the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 to address the parliament from the speakers’ podium. Rather than see the Kremlin as the aggressor here, Ivanishvili and his minions have increasingly shown sympathy to a war that became a blatant Russian land grab along the Black Sea. In 2021, for example, the Georgian Dream-led government allowed the U.S. training program for Georgia’s military to die. And instead of helping to isolate Russia in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, Georgia’s government has thrown open its doors to Russian money and increased sanctions-busting, cross-border trade, while at the same time killing infrastructure projects that would have lessened Russian control over regional trade between Central Asia and Europe. A senior U.S. official recently told Voice of America’s Georgian service that Ivanishvili has undertaken “some actions at the direction of the Russian intelligence services.”
Responding to the Georgian population’s hopes, Ivanishvili and his party had at least in the past “professed” a desire to see the country join the EU. However, in December 2023, once Brussels gave Georgia “candidate status”—conditioning acceptance on the government allowing an independent media and cleaning up the corruption and abuses that had become endemic under Georgian Dream—the faux rhetoric ended and the gloves came off. It’s also probable that Putin saw Georgia’s actual candidate status as simply unacceptable and ordered Ivanishvili to put an end to the charade. Ivanishvili, who made his billions while living in Russia and who still probably makes vast sums from laundering Russian money through Georgian banks, hasn’t as yet been sanctioned by either Washington or Brussels despite the democratic opposition begging for such action.
Concerned Georgians are trying to stop the country’s authoritarian drift. Tens upon tens of thousands of them repeatedly hit the streets of Tbilisi this past spring to protest Georgia Dream’s effort to enact a foreign-agent law—the first big step toward dictatorship. The party rammed the legislation past a presidential veto. The law requires non-governmental organizations that receive 20 percent or more of their funding from outside Georgia to register with the government as “pursuing the interest of a foreign power.” Copied from a Russian law instituted in 2012, its goal is to force Western-assisted, civic organizations to declare themselves as foreign agents.
These organizations overwhelmingly promote liberal and democratic norms. They are working on behalf of Georgian citizens, not foreign governments. The law has exactly the opposite purpose of, say, the U.S.’s Foreign Agent Registration Act. Since most NGOs will not register as “foreign agents,” and few have the resources to pay the fines, it’s likely they will cease operating.
“A democratic Georgia that freely rejects Moscow’s dominion serves as an icon for how a formerly Soviet people can become more humane and prosperous.”
It’s regrettable that some American conservatives have tried to depict Georgian Dream and the foreign-agents law as a reasonable response to supposed American meddling in Georgia’s domestic affairs. Elements within Georgian Dream, likely following Putin’s and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’s efforts to depict themselves as avatars of traditional values, have tried to depict Ivanishvili’s naked power grab as a populist upwelling against imported indecency.
Anyone who has actually visited the targeted NGOs or met the principal players in the Georgian opposition knows, however, that they aren’t trying to turn the country into a LGBT haven; they are just trying to ensure the country maintains basic civil liberties and a free press and that the government isn’t captured by a pro-Russian mafia.
The writing has been on the wall for the last several years when it comes to the direction Ivanishvili and his minions wanted to take Georgia in. But neither Washington nor Brussels developed policies to challenge that effort. Instead, both opted for continued engagement, hoping the worst would not occur.
Over the past two years, up to today, Georgians have taken to the streets in massive numbers to protest the government’s turn from the West and toward Moscow. Yet the EU is still largely sitting on its hands, freezing some aid but not all and suggesting, but with no guarantee, that there might be sanctions on the Georgian Dream’s leaders following this month’s elections. Congress, meanwhile, has yet to move legislation adopted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee to a vote that would offer a comprehensive carrot-and-sticks approach to Georgia. And only within recent weeks has the Biden administration suspended $95 million in aid and let it be known that it had prepared a package of sanctions against Ivanishvili for undermining Georgia’s democracy and acting to the benefit of the Kremlin—steps the democratic opposition welcomes but wanted to see being put forward months earlier when the foreign-agent law was being passed, when civil society leaders were being threatened, and when police and pro-government thugs were beating up individuals peacefully protesting in the streets.
Putin, of course, has had his eye on Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, for years now. Calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, he kept troops in Georgia after the republic declared independence. And when, at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, the alliance declared that Georgia would not be offered a roadmap to join the alliance, but would at some point in the very distant future possibly be offered membership, he invaded just four months later. Now, with Ivanishvili controlling all the levers of power in Georgia, Putin doesn’t have to invade to capture Georgia.
The vast majority of Georgians are pro-Western democrats. It’s a tragedy that the West has not done better by them.
thedispatch.com · by Gary Schmitt and Reuel Marc Gerecht · October 23, 2024
21. BLM Collected Over $90 Million in Donations. Where Did It Go?
Just another organization of grifters?
BLM Collected Over $90 Million in Donations. Where Did It Go?
As its leaders spent the money on tailored suits, birthday parties, and ‘big ass’ mansions, almost none of it went to the cause.
https://www.thefp.com/p/blm-grift-patrisse-cullors-george-floyd-six-million-dollar-mansion
By Sean Patrick Cooper
October 22, 2024
Can you name the scrappy start-up that struck gold in 2020, earning its three female founders worldwide fame and $90 million in company revenue? Multimillion-dollar homes and a production deal with Warner Bros. soon followed, while friends and family were showered in consultant gigs worth millions of dollars.
Capitalizing on the lucrative opportunities afforded to them as high-profile progressives, the three celebrity founders moved on, leaving the operation to wither in the hands of deputies who, sadly, turned on each other. A remarkable spate of legal trouble, brushes with law enforcement, and tangles with the Internal Revenue Service have all but spelled the death of the enterprise that you probably know best as Black Lives Matter.
The spectacular rise and fall of BLM has surprisingly little in common with earlier civil rights campaigns, other than, perhaps, good intentions. How BLM’s leaders exploited George Floyd’s murder to raise millions that they then put into their own pockets more closely resembles the stories of famous grifters like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or Sam Bankman-Fried’s foray into “effective altruism.”
Think back for a minute to 2020, when George Floyd was killed by police, and the tens of thousands of people on the left who protested despite Covid-19, wrote “Black Lives Matter” in the middle of roads, and took over a handful of downtowns in places like Minneapolis and Seattle. Think back to the panicked response by corporations that vowed to do better by black America, revved up their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and threw millions of dollars at BLM. Think back to the presidential race, where defunding the police was a top issue.
Here we are now, with DEI programs in retreat, corporations no longer willing to make political statements, and the left more obsessed with Israel than police reform. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris compete to be the law-and-order candidate. And BLM four years later? It looks like little more than a hustle.
The latest proof point came earlier this month when Tyree Conyers-Page—a.k.a. Sir Maejor Page, the 35-year-old former leader of the BLM chapter of Greater Atlanta—was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison for money laundering and wire fraud. Pocketing the $450,000 raised from 18,000 donors to “fight for George Floyd” and the “movement,” Page spent lavishly on himself, splurging on tailored suits, nightclub bar tabs, an evening with a prostitute, and, as he texted to a friend, “a big-ass cribo” that he bought in Ohio after he “won the lottery.”
The mansion that BLM Global bought in 2020 for $6 million. (Jae C. Hong via AP Photos)
For years, local chapters have fought national parent BLM organizations in disputes over who actually represents the movement and are thus the rightful heirs to tens of millions of dollars in donations. You’ll note that I mentioned parent organizations. There are actually two of them: BLM Global Network Foundation and BLM Grassroots. The latter was formed in 2019 as an umbrella organization of local chapters of the group and is co-directed by Melina Abdullah. Since then, media reports have accused Abdullah and other chapter leaders of using Grassroots’ coffers to pay for vacations to Jamaica and her own personal expenses. (She hasn’t been charged with a crime.)
Abdullah has denied the allegations, but at least $8.7 million in donations is unaccounted for. The answer to where the money went may come soon. California attorney general Rob Bonta has demanded that Grassroots turn over delinquent tax filings and late fees before Sunday, October 27. If it doesn’t, the organization’s tax-exempt status will be revoked.
Like trying to count the falling bricks of a building as it crumbles, charting the entire implosion of BLM is a confusing, chaotic endeavor. Three years after BLM Grassroots split from BLM Global, it sued BLM Global, alleging financial mismanagement and claiming that $10 million in BLM Global donations actually belong to BLM Grassroots. The court threw the case out in June 2023 and, pouring salt in the wound, the judge ordered BLM Grassroots to pay $700,000 in legal fees.
Not that BLM Global has been a paragon of virtue. It was founded in July 2013 by activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi as an online platform in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Its stated goal was inspiring but vague: The founders described it as “a platform and organizing tool” that “other groups, organizations, and individuals used to amplify anti-Black racism across the country.” By the mid-2010s, its founders were well-known enough that two of the three—Tometi in 2015; Garza in 2017—left to launch their own celebrity brands. The apotheotic moment, though, came with the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, by which time Cullors was running BLM Global herself. After Floyd was filmed dying at the hands of the police, the movement galvanized tens of millions of people, raising some $90 million in the subsequent 12 months.
(From left) Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah host a roundtable at BLM Global’s $6 million house. (via YouTube)
As the national face of BLM, Cullors was suddenly in great demand. She inked a deal with Warner Bros. to create animated kids’ programming, documentaries, dramas, and comedies about structural racism and inequality—none of which were ever made. She and the foundation also spent a big chunk of those donations on an enviable real estate portfolio. They acquired a $6 million Los Angeles mansion, which Cullors used in early 2021 for a Biden inauguration party as well as her son’s birthday party. She and BLM Global paid $6.3 million for a mansion in Canada, which they named “the Wildseed Centre for Arts and Activism” (“a transfeminist, queer affirming space politically aligned with supporting Black liberation work across Canada”). They also dropped $3.2 million on four luxury properties, including a 3.2-acre estate in Georgia that boasted a runway for private aircraft. And BLM Global handed out money to a coterie of Cullors’ friends and relatives, including $778,000 for “services” to an arts group run by Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ son, and $1.6 million to a security firm owned by her brother Paul. The foundation also cut checks totaling $205,000 to a company run by Cullors and her spouse as well as a $211,000 payout to Asha Bandele, the friend who helped Cullors write her memoir.
But lately, donations to BLM Global have gone from a torrent to a trickle. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2023, BLM Global collected $4.6 million while spending $10.8 million, according to its federal filings. And while it still has $25 million in assets, its cash is dwindling. Unless something changes dramatically, the end is likely nigh.
In May 2021, about one month after it was revealed that she owned four homes, Cullors stepped down from BLM Global. In a statement BLM Global gave to the New York Post, which broke the story about the mansions, it described the outlet’s stories about Cullors as continuing “a tradition of terror by white supremacists against Black activists,” and putting her family “in harm’s way.”
On the one hand, Cullors is an easy target to blame for raiding the movement’s piggy bank while undermining the BLM’s potential social progress. On the other hand, you have to applaud the entrepreneurial spirit of Cullors and her co-founders. To build something from the ground up using the tools of social media while harnessing a grassroots movement against police violence requires ingenuity, luck, and good timing. These women seized on an anxious moment when corporations and major financial institutions were unsure of how to manage an ascendant left-wing populism that started with Occupy Wall Street protesters agitating over the 1 percent. What that 1 percent did was give money to BLM.
Maybe, if the founders had been as committed to social justice as to enriching themselves, BLM could have enjoyed a long life as a progressive institution. But it wasn’t to be. In just one year, the Pew Research Center noted in a 2023 survey, BLM saw a 16 percent drop in supporters, with more than 60 percent of Americans saying the movement has been ineffective at improving race relations. The furor over BLM’s financial improprieties hasn’t helped, but a bigger factor, in all likelihood, is BLM’s push to “defund the police.”
Tyree Conyers-Page aka Sir Maejor Page addresses protesters in Columbus, Ohio, on December 28, 2020. (Stephen Zenner via Getty Images)
After a disastrous experiment with minimizing policing, cities are becoming safer by ignoring BLM’s central call for reduced policing. For instance, in Philadelphia, which has turned away from a defund policy and instead added patrol officers and new recruits beginning in 2023, the homicide rate has fallen by 50 percent compared to the historically high span between 2020 and 2022, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. The city is now on track for the lowest number of killings in nearly a decade.
And yet, a husk of BLM still exists, and is focused on what might be the organization’s final cause: anti-Zionism. You can practically pick a local BLM chapter at random and find activists like Zellie Thomas, the leader of New Jersey’s BLM chapter in Paterson. A fourth-grade math teacher in Paterson’s public schools, Thomas has explained that his adolescent students are taught the rules of math “with a racial and social justice lens.” A month after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel last October, Thomas expanded that lens to urge West Orange High School students to walk out of class and chant “from the river to the sea.” In social media posts, he wrote “We CANNOT allow our kids to be alone in their pursuit of justice.” Thomas wouldn’t be alone either, rallying a crowd of at least a 1,000 people on the streets of Paterson on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack. “We’re rising up,” Thomas told them. “We’re joining forces, and we ain’t going nowhere.”
Sean Patrick Cooper is the author of The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided. He’s contributed narrative features and essays to The New York Times, Tablet, and others.
The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.
22. Commentary: China’s rare ICBM test was a show of force, but a missed opportunity for diplomacy
Commentary: China’s rare ICBM test was a show of force, but a missed opportunity for diplomacy
China should be more upfront about its strategic intentions when doing so does not compromise its national security. Failing to do so undermines its ability to persuade the world that its desire to be viewed as a benign hegemon is a genuine aspiration, says Dr James Char, a Chinese military expert at NTU’s RSIS.
James Char
23 Oct 2024 06:00AM
(Updated: 23 Oct 2024 08:25AM)
channelnewsasia.com
SINGAPORE: China's rare intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test last month in the South Pacific - its first in 44 years - has raised questions over Beijing’s strategic ambitions.
The sudden announcement on Sep 25 by China’s defence ministry came less than two hours after the launch of the ICBM at 8.44am from Hainan. It was reported by Chinese state media as having met the objective when the missile “fell into expected sea areas”.
Although not indicated explicitly, media reports in French Polynesia indicated the projectile landed near the territory’s economic zone.
Having travelled more than 11,000km from its launch site - double the 5,500km range of the most basic ICBMs - the offending object, likely the Dong Feng-31AG (DF-31AG), was loaded with a dummy warhead rather than the 1-megaton fissile material this type of missile is designed to carry.
If the ICBM in question was indeed a variant of the DF-31 - which first entered service almost two decades ago - as opposed to the newer, more advanced DF-41, the decision to fire the older (meaning it is more stable), but nevertheless potent, weapon can perhaps be interpreted as Beijing prioritising a more reliable means to signal its martial prowess to the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific.
As well as claiming the test was “routine” and not directed at any country, Beijing was lauded by some US officials for giving the Pentagon advance notice to avert misperception and miscalculation.
France, Australia and New Zealand have also said that they were given advance notification of the test. Accordingly, the information would have been conveyed by some of them to their counterparts in the region as well as relevant authorities operating in those waters and airspace. At the same time, Japan and the Philippines were alerted a few days prior to the launch of possible "space debris" landing at sea, although it is unclear if they were directly informed about the ICBM test.
Still, not everyone who believe they had a right to know was impressed. For one, the president of Kiribati criticised the Chinese government for neglecting to inform the Pacific Island state, and further alluded to the test as a threat to “world peace and stability”. In response, China’s embassy there stated “there was no need to alert Kiribati” since the test targeted no one in that part of the world.
The relative dearth of advance strategic messaging in this episode is in stark contrast to the previous time the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fired an ICBM into the Pacific Ocean.
In order to grasp the circumstances behind the latter, one needs to go back to a time when China had just emerged from the excesses of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution as his successors sought to reintegrate the country with the global economy.
CHINA’S 1980 INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC MISSILE TEST
The genesis of the decision by China to develop its own ballistic missile programme began in March 1965, which it named the Dong Feng (or East Wind) project.
Under the auspices of the then Seventh Ministry of Machinery Industry directed by the regime’s top military leadership, it was recommended that four different types of surface-to-surface missiles were to be developed from 1965 to 1972: The DF-2, DF-3, DF-4 and DF-5.
However, this so-called “Eight Years, Four Bombs” proposal was ultimately set back by the Cultural Revolution, and it would take an additional eight years until May 1980 before the final test of the last missile, the DF-5 - China’s first ICBM - was completed.
To be sure, the decision to conduct the test was made in September 1977, but it required a few more years for China’s National Defence Science and Technology Commission to formulate and coordinate the work plans necessary to effect a successful test.
Those due processes included: Determining the test ranges, finalising the engineering and land mapping, securing sea lines of communications, meteorological and hydrological analyses, aviation security as well as constructing a base for its 18-strong naval taskforce of Yuanwang survey ships and other escort vessels.
After having decided the Jiuquan Test Centre as the launch site and identifying “the high seas of the Pacific Ocean” as the endpoint of the DF-5, Xinhua News Agency went as far as announcing the coordinates (7°00’ South, 171°33’ East) on May 9, 1980, adding that the event was to take place sometime between May 12 and Jun 10.
In line with the information, the DF-5 was launched at 10am on May 18 and dropped within a 70-nautical mile radius in the waters surrounded by the Pacific Island nations of Nauru, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
CHINA IN 2024 - DRAWING GREATER GLOBAL ATTENTION THAN EVER BEFORE
Not unlike the world’s other superpowers, China has the legitimate right to develop its military capabilities as its national power increases. As it is, the PLA has conducted more ICBM tests in China’s inland areas. Nevertheless, the recent test in the South Pacific allows it to measure the performance of its equipment along a more realistic trajectory, although it does so at some reputational cost since it may play into the hands of what the ruling Chinese Communist Party sometimes labels “external forces” - including those entities that purportedly play up the China threat.
Whether it was a careless slip by Chinese defence planners, or genuine disregard for the sensitivities of its lesser international counterparts on Beijing’s part that resulted in the non-disclosure of the ICBM test to some regional countries prior to launch, China’s current status in the world order means that its leaders cannot expect their words and deeds to go unnoticed.
Whereas its ICBM test in 1980 generated little attention given how China then was still actively reaching out to the world’s developed economies for foreign investment and know-how to kickstart its reform and opening-up policy, China in the 21st century contributes substantially to the global gross domestic product (GDP). Militarily and technologically, it is also regarded by Washington as the only other superpower capable of mounting a systemic challenge to the US’ number one position.
As it is, the lack of strategic messaging by Beijing in 2024 to caution all concerned parties at the receiving end of its missile launch represents a missed opportunity.
As much as China the superpower has steadfastly sought to project an image of a benign hegemon, whether its interlocutors buy into it is another matter. Obviously, only Beijing can speak for itself as to why it failed to disclose its strategic objective this time when there seemed little national security risk at stake.
Further neglect in China’s strategic messaging leaves open the possibility for others to fill in the gaps - or worse, mischaracterise its actual intent.
James Char is Assistant Professor with the China Programme and Deputy Coordinator of the Master of Science (Asian Studies) programme at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Source: CNA/aj
23. Xi tells Putin the world is in chaos but friendship with Russia will endure
Xi tells Putin the world is in chaos but friendship with Russia will endure
23 Oct 2024 03:38AM
channelnewsasia.com
KAZAN, Russia: Chinese President Xi Jinping told Russia's Vladimir Putin that the international situation was gripped by chaos but that Beijing's strategic partnership with Moscow was a force for stability amid the most significant changes seen in a century.
Xi and Putin in May pledged a "new era" of partnership between the two most powerful rivals of the United States, which they cast as an aggressive Cold War hegemon sowing chaos across the world.
"At present, the world is going through changes unseen in a hundred years, the international situation is intertwined with chaos," Xi told Putin in the Russian city of Kazan at the opening of the BRICS summit.
"But I firmly believe that the friendship between China and Russia will continue for generations, and great countries’ responsibility to their people will not change."
Russia, waging war against NATO-supplied Ukrainian forces, and China, under pressure from a concerted US effort to counter its growing military and economic strength, increasingly have found common geopolitical cause.
Russia and China, pushing back against the perceived humiliations of the 1991 Soviet collapse and centuries of European colonial dominance of China, have sought to portray the West as decadent and in decline.
The United States casts China as its biggest competitor and Russia as its biggest nation-state threat, and President Joe Biden has said the democracies face a challenge from autocracies such as China and Russia.
Biden has referred to Xi as a "dictator" and has said Putin is a "killer" and even a "crazy SOB". Beijing and Moscow have scolded Biden for the comments.
Putin called Xi "dear friend" and said the partnership with China was a force for stability in the world.
"Russian-Chinese cooperation in world affairs is one of the main stabilising factors on the world stage," Putin said.
"We intend to further enhance coordination on all multilateral platforms in order to ensure global security and a just world order."
Xi said cooperation in the BRICS group was "the most important platform for solidarity and cooperation between emerging market countries and developing countries in the world today."
He said it was "a mainstay force in promoting the realization of equal and orderly global multipolarity, as well as inclusive and tolerant economic globalisation".
Source: Reuters/fs
24. The William J. Donovan Award (OSS Society) to LTG Patrick Hughes
Here is the video of the acceptance of the Donovan Award on behalf of the late LTG (RET) Patrick Hughes by LTG (RET) Donald L. Kerrick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrIGnp0IOHs
Here is my toast to General Donovan: "Be Like Donovan."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI9YlVoQ_z8
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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