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Quotes of the Day:
"Today the man who is the real risk-taker is anonymous and nonheroic. He is the one trying to make institutions work."
– John William Ward
"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on."
– Walter Lippmann
"Think for yourselves, and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."
– Voltaire
1. Israeli Strikes on Iran Expose Gap in Prowess Between Two Arch Foes
2. The Middle East Drug Fueling War, Crime and All-Night Parties
3. Bullied by China at Sea, With the Broken Bones to Prove It (Vietnam)
4. As ties with the U.S. worsen, China asks: Who’s the new Kissinger?
5. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, October 27, 2024
6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 27, 2024
7. Special Report: Possible Russian Gains in Georgia and Moldova
8. The trajectory of Ukraine's fight against Russia hangs on the outcome of the US election
9. Resistance forces push military regime close to brink in Myanmar
10. US voters concerned about post-election violence and efforts to overturn the results: AP-NORC poll
11. US military scales back missile defense plans for Guam
12. 'Not Enough': US Coast Guard's new ops posture statement raises alarm on need for more money
13. The new front against Iran and its proxies: Underwater
14. America’s Overlooked Armed Force: Why the Coast Guard Deserves Better Oversight and Support
15. Japan’s Voters Punish Leadership of U.S. Security Ally
16. Opinion Israel is trying to uproot Iran’s influence. Iraq shows how hard that is.
17. Ill-advised retorts: The danger of defending one’s honor often outweighs the benefit
18. The Kims Are Coming – OpEd
19. Israel’s espionage machine – cyber intelligence, moles and money
20. Advisers Propose That Trump Give Security Clearances Without F.B.I. Vetting
21. Persuade, Change, and Influence with AI: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in the Information Environment
22. Proof that immigrants fuel U.S. economy can be seen in the billions they send back home
23. The Emerging Age of AI Diplomacy
24. How to End the Democratic Recession
25. These days, we’re mostly Confederates: Antebellum strategy/policy ethos in 21st century America
1. Israeli Strikes on Iran Expose Gap in Prowess Between Two Arch Foes
Excerpts:
“Iran’s relationship with Russia and China is compartmentalized and follows each country’s interests,” said Dina Esfandiary, senior adviser for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. “It means there are times where Russia and China don’t see helping Iran out as in their interest.’”
U.S. officials question how quickly Russia will be able to provide Iran with new missile defenses when its resources are stretched by the Ukraine war. Some U.S. officials believe delays could strain Russian-Iranian relations, which historically have been characterized by mistrust.
In the aftermath of the attack, Iranian officials appeared to play down the Israeli attack, suggesting that Tehran isn’t planning an immediate forceful response against Israel directly. Iran said Israel had fired missiles from Iraqi airspace, and accused the U.S. of complicity in the attack for providing Israel with advanced weaponry.
Khamenei on Sunday stressed that military pressure should not dissuade the Islamic Republic from pursuing advanced weapons, such as high-range missiles.
Israeli Strikes on Iran Expose Gap in Prowess Between Two Arch Foes
Recent conflict pits Iran and Israel in a direct, long-distance war—and Israel has the upper hand
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-strikes-on-iran-expose-gap-in-prowess-between-two-arch-foes-aded7cf8?st=HqNeiB&utm
By Sune Engel Rasmussen
Follow, Laurence Norman
Follow and Anat Peled
Follow
Oct. 27, 2024 3:53 pm ET
A Russian-made S-300 air-defense system was displayed in Tehran during a recent military parade. Photo: Vahid Salemi/Associated Press
BEIRUT—The Israeli strikes on Iran hit several of Tehran’s most advanced air defenses, exposing Iran’s vulnerability to future attacks as the two enemies engage in a new era of direct confrontation.
During the hourslong attack early Saturday, Israeli warplanes struck Iranian military assets in three provinces, including three Russian-supplied aerial defense systems known as S-300, according to U.S. and Israeli officials. A fourth aerial defense system was also hit. An Israeli official added that all the air-defense systems were rendered unusable.
The Israeli attack came after significant U.S. pressure to avoid hitting Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, with the U.S. saying Iran should now stand down from further escalations.
In a speech on Sunday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Israel had inflicted damage on Iran, though he didn’t specify what, and said that while Israel was exaggerating the impact, it would also be wrong to play down the attack or dismiss it as unimportant. Khamenei, who has led Iran since 1989, refrained from promising harsh retaliation, as he has done after other attacks in the past.
Confirmed Israel strikes around Tehran
Provinces struck by Israel
Tehran
Iran
Ilam
TEHRAN
Sorkheh Hesar
National Park
Khuzestan
Khojir Military Complex
Mehrabad Intl. Airport
Golestan Palace
Khojir National Park
Hazrat Amir Brigade
Air Defense Site
Parchin Military Complex
5 miles
Sources: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project (strike locations); Google Earth (satellite image)
Successfully defanging Iran’s self-defense capabilities marks a new chapter in Israel’s confrontation with the Islamic Republic. It created a vulnerability in Iran’s air defenses that highlighted the significant gaps between the two sides’ military capabilities. Israel claims it now has the ability to fly over Iranian airspace.
“Iran will have to do a lot of soul-searching and spend a lot of money on air-defense systems that are capable of intercepting these kinds of new threats,” said Farzin Nadimi, senior fellow and expert on Iran’s military with the Washington Institute, a think tank. “Iran is a military-industrial nation. There are so many targets in the country, so they really need all the air defenses they can get their hands on.”
For decades, Iran and Israel have fought each other indirectly. Iran has armed and trained militias to harass and threaten its enemies, including Israel, as a way to keep conflict away from its own borders. Israel has pressured Iran through sabotage and assassinations targeting Iran’s nuclear program, and by hitting Iranian forces abroad, including in Syria.
The recent war has pitted the two enemies in a different kind of battle: a direct, long-distance war. And they are performing very differently.
Iran has twice, in April and October, been able to sporadically penetrate Israel’s air defenses but only by firing hundreds of missiles at a time.
Israel has twice shown its ability to strike sensitive Iranian targets, with few if any of its weapons being intercepted. A previous Israeli attack hit an aerial defense radar in April. Saturday’s assault involved Israel’s most-advanced aerial weapon, F-35 jet fighters, which are adept at evading radar, people familiar with the mission said.
Israel hailed the weekend attack as a major victory.
“Now, the state of Israel has wider freedom of action in the air over Iran as well,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a televised briefing Saturday.
The S-300 is a family of surface-to-air missile systems designed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, and now used to defend against planes, drones and, to some extent, cruise and ballistic missiles. Russia supplied Iran S-300 systems in 2016, after nine years of delay due to nuclear negotiations and international sanctions.
Israel hit Tehran Province with airstrikes on Saturday. Photo: Yao Bing/Zuma Press
Although details about the systems aren’t publicly known, experts believe Iran received between 40 and 60 launchers as part of the total order, each of which is capable of carrying up to four missiles.
The S-300 systems are used to protect high-value targets such as nuclear sites and the domestic Mehrabad airport used for official flights. One battery is kept mobile and travels with Khamenei when he visits his home city of Mashhad in the country’s east, according to Nadimi, whose research is based on sources inside Iran and satellite imagery.
Iran has a domestically produced long-range, road-mobile air-defense system called Bavar-373, which it says can compete with the more advanced S-400 system. It also has a range of less advanced domestically produced aerial defense systems, which it can redeploy to replace the damaged batteries, Nadimi said.
Iran has long sought the more advanced S-400 systems from Russia, but Western officials say there is no evidence so far Tehran has received any.
Israel struck one of the S-300 defense batteries positioned near the Natanz nuclear facility in April when it attacked Iran in retaliation for a 300-missile and drone barrage. Saturday’s attack is believed to have hit most if not all of the remaining S-300s. Experts say that, even as the damage from the attack is still being assessed, the fact that Israel was able to hit Iran’s most advanced aerial defenses and some of its most sensitive military sites is significant.
“Iran’s anti-air defenses are vulnerable to superior strike technology. They’re insufficient to protect Iran’s airspace from better-equipped adversaries, Israel in particular,” said Afshon Ostovar, an expert on Iran’s military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “Those systems aren’t easily replaced. Iran probably has some redundancies, but even so, Israel might have paved the way for future attacks to be easier and less restricted.”
While Israel owes much of its military prowess to U.S. assistance, Iran has relied mostly on domestic technological development and support from Russia and China. The recent exposure of its vulnerabilities raises questions about the limits and benefits of its alliance with Moscow and Beijing.
Iran has sought Russia’s more advanced S-400 aerial defense systems, displayed here in Moscow recently. Photo: Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Tehran and Moscow have strengthened their military ties, with Iran supplying drones and ballistic missiles to Moscow, Western officials say. China in 2020 signed a long-term partnership deal with Iran, which included some cooperation on military research and weapons development. Russia and Iran are due to complete their own long-term strategic partnership, Russian President Vladimir Putin said after meeting his Iranian counterpart last week.
Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said in July 2023 that there were signs of Russian technicians working on Iran’s space launch vehicle program “and other aspects of their missile programs.” Iran’s space launch program is believed to be part of efforts to develop intercontinental missiles.
Those relationships come with caveats, however. Russia and China both have strategic ties with some of Iran’s regional rivals, including Saudi Arabia. Russia shares some interests with Israel in Syria. China, which imports half of its energy from the Middle East and prefers to keep conflict in the Middle East subdued, has always been reluctant to provide military assistance to Iran, said Raz Zimmt, senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, even as Beijing has worked to help Iran get around U.S. sanctions.
“Iran’s relationship with Russia and China is compartmentalized and follows each country’s interests,” said Dina Esfandiary, senior adviser for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. “It means there are times where Russia and China don’t see helping Iran out as in their interest.’”
U.S. officials question how quickly Russia will be able to provide Iran with new missile defenses when its resources are stretched by the Ukraine war. Some U.S. officials believe delays could strain Russian-Iranian relations, which historically have been characterized by mistrust.
In the aftermath of the attack, Iranian officials appeared to play down the Israeli attack, suggesting that Tehran isn’t planning an immediate forceful response against Israel directly. Iran said Israel had fired missiles from Iraqi airspace, and accused the U.S. of complicity in the attack for providing Israel with advanced weaponry.
Khamenei on Sunday stressed that military pressure should not dissuade the Islamic Republic from pursuing advanced weapons, such as high-range missiles.
“Of course, our officials should be the ones to assess and precisely apprehend what needs to be done and do whatever is in the best interests of this country and nation,” Khamenei said. “They still haven’t been able to correctly understand the power, capability, ingenuity, and determination of the Iranian people. We need to make them understand these things.”
Iran’s quest for military technology could complicate the conflicts in the Middle East and beyond, Ostovar said.
“For example, were Russia to supply Iran with S-400 anti-air batteries and send Russian troops to man those systems, it’d add another layer of geopolitical risk for Israel,” he said.
Aresu Eqbali contributed to this article.
2. The Middle East Drug Fueling War, Crime and All-Night Parties
Drugs can fuel chaos, conflict, and war in addition to societal decay (or subversion when employed with deliberate intent).
Excerpts:
U.S. officials are increasingly worried that the captagon trade is undermining decades of relative stability in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, crucial American allies. Jordan has deployed about a third of its army to help curb the flow of drugs across its border with Syria, as well as weapons trafficked by the same networks, a senior Jordanian security official said.
Much of the production takes place in Syria, officials and researchers say, with some in Lebanon. Smugglers might move the drugs from Syria through the official crossing to Jordan by stashing them in trucks, or by hiring women and children to stuff the pills in their tops or their shoes. In the desert, smugglers use catapults to throw the drug over border walls or drones. Or they simply go by foot, particularly in winter when fog and dust reduce visibility at night to about a yard.
The Middle East Drug Fueling War, Crime and All-Night Parties
Captagon is bringing big profits to Syria’s Assad regime and Hezbollah—and it’s triggering a health crisis
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/captagon-drug-syria-assad-hezbollah-f1588132?mod=latest_headlines
By Sune Engel RasmussenFollow
and Suha Ma’ayeh
Oct. 27, 2024 9:00 pm ET
AMMAN, Jordan—Another urgent conflict in the Middle East is playing out on the border between Syria and Jordan: a war against captagon, an amphetamine-like drug that’s taken off across the region.
The drug cuts across social class and borders. It’s used by taxi drivers handling late-night shifts, militia fighters looking to induce courage, students studying for exams, and high-powered executives wanting to work, or party, long hours.
It’s all added up to a multibillion-dollar drug trade that is fueling more conflict in the region. Money from drug smuggling has lined the pockets of Iran-backed militias, including Hezbollah, which has spent vast amounts of its proceeds on weapons to fight Israel. The drug props up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has become one of the world’s biggest drug syndicates, helping it offset years of punishing Western economic sanctions.
Syria has denied any involvement in the drug trade.
U.S. officials are increasingly worried that the captagon trade is undermining decades of relative stability in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, crucial American allies. Jordan has deployed about a third of its army to help curb the flow of drugs across its border with Syria, as well as weapons trafficked by the same networks, a senior Jordanian security official said.
Much of the production takes place in Syria, officials and researchers say, with some in Lebanon. Smugglers might move the drugs from Syria through the official crossing to Jordan by stashing them in trucks, or by hiring women and children to stuff the pills in their tops or their shoes. In the desert, smugglers use catapults to throw the drug over border walls or drones. Or they simply go by foot, particularly in winter when fog and dust reduce visibility at night to about a yard.
Fighters affiliated with a Syrian rebel group showed drugs seized at a checkpoint under its control in April 2022. Seized captagon and other items in Marea, Syria, in May 2022.
OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (TOP), AFP/GETTY IMAGES (BOTTOM)
The New Lines Institute, a Washington think tank, estimates that the global captagon market is worth about $5.7 billion, more than half as much as the cocaine market in Europe. Of that, the Assad regime fetched an annual average of about $2.4 billion between 2020 to 2022—roughly one-fourth of Syria’s GDP—according to the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks, a Syrian and Arab research organization that tracks the captagon trade.
In mid-October, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned three people it said were involved in the illegal production and trafficking of captagon to the benefit of the Assad regime and Hezbollah. One was the owner of a factory in Syria that the Treasury said has served as a front company, sending pills worth over $1.5 billion to Europe concealed in industrial paper rolls. Europe has become a key transshipment hub for captagon destined for the Arabian Peninsula, according to drug-trafficking agencies.
Since Israel launched its war on Gaza, the number of captagon seizures on the Jordanian-Syrian border have increased fourfold, often accompanied by illicit arms shipments, according to the New Lines Institute. U.S. officials say they worry that drug smuggling will lead to increased Iranian weapons smuggling to Palestinian factions in the West Bank.
GOLAN
HEIGHTS
SYRIA
Daraa
Jaber Border
Crossing
Irbid
Orman
JORDAN
LEBanon
SYRIA
Amman
Area of
detail
JORDAN
In what appears to be one of the deadliest incidents in the war against the drug so far, in January, two explosions destroyed a home in the tiny village of Orman, a Syrian desert outpost about 15 miles north of the Jordanian border. Ten people were killed, including five women and two children.
Syria blamed the blast on Jordanian airstrikes—a rare Jordanian military action on foreign soil. Jordan is suspected of carrying out at least four other attacks in southern Syria. Jordan declined to comment on the airstrikes, but in a statement after the January strike said it would continue to confront dangers from drug and weapons smugglers.
“The Syrian regime is creating an example for states that are weathered and under sanctions and are looking to make a buck, a very good buck,” said Caroline Rose, an expert on the captagon trade at the New Lines Institute.
The drug’s origins
Amphetamines historically have been the drug of choice in the Gulf, partly due to the scarcity of most of the drugs that are prevalent in the West, said Oscar D’Agnone, medical director of the OAD Clinic in London, which treats people from the Middle East for drug addiction.
“Captagon is their cocaine,” D’Agnone said.
Captagon was the brand name of a drug originally manufactured in Germany in the 1960s to treat narcolepsy, depression and attention-deficit disorder, then was banned in most countries in 1986. Bulgarian criminal groups moved production into Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a stronghold of Hezbollah, in the 1990s.
The Syrian war in 2011, paired with a collapse of the political and economic order in Lebanon, allowed the captagon trade to grow across embattled borders and ungoverned spaces into Mediterranean ports and international shipping lanes.
As the Assad regime reimposed its grip on the country, it seized facilities and industrialized the drug’s production. It has ramped up production over the past decade, desperate for cash amid a civil war and international sanctions.
In one video from a Syrian production facility, shared with The Wall Street Journal by the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a Washington-based Syrian antiregime advocacy group, several machines spat hundreds of beige-colored pills from metal spouts into plastic baskets. Another showed bags of captagon pills in piles, emblazoned with the logo of the Lexus luxury-car manufacturer, commonly used for higher-quality captagon.
Captagon’s main ingredient is pseudoephedrine, commonly found in cold and flu medication. According to the United Nations, Syria in 2020 reported anticipated imports of 110,000 pounds of pseudoephedrine, more than the U.K. and nearly half the amount reported by global pharma hub Switzerland. Syria, which has seen the collapse of its health sector and pharmaceutical industry after a decade of war, didn’t explain why it needed such large quantities.
Syria’s elite military Fourth Armored Division, commanded by the president’s brother Maher al-Assad, oversees most of the captagon production and distribution, said U.S., European and Arab officials. The Treasury’s recent sanctions also targeted a man it said was involved in trafficking, and had sold weapons to the Fourth Armored Division and donated more than $1 million to Hezbollah.
“The regime continues to fully rely on captagon,” said Col. Farid al-Qassem, a Syrian defector who fought in the civil war against Assad and now works with U.S. troops based in eastern Syria. “They can’t operate without these drugs.”
Shoot to kill
Traffickers carry other types of drugs through Syria, too, in particular crystal meth. The Jordanian security official estimated that drugs worth $8 billion to $10 billion cross the border from Syria each year, ferried by impoverished Syrians who make up to $10,000 a run. Hezbollah assists the Syrian regime in facilitating trafficking in areas under their control, and secures houses of drug dealers in southern Syria, the official said.
Clashes with armed infiltrators have turned so violent that Jordanian soldiers have adopted a shoot-to-kill policy.
At an army base, Jordanian intelligence agents showed the Journal grainy surveillance footage of three people inside a Syrian regime military base launching a drone that the officials believed to be carrying drugs toward the Jordanian border.
In another surveillance video, children walked with pack donkeys at night to drop drugs at the side of the Yarmouk River separating the two countries for pick up later. In a third video, a row of presumed smugglers carrying backpacks walked past a Syrian army outpost, with no interference from the soldiers a stone’s throw away.
Videos supplied separately by SETF showed what the activists said was a drone carrying presumed drugs from southern Syria toward the Jordanian border, and smugglers hauling sacks of captagon on their backs, escorted by men in fatigues, presumably Syrian regime soldiers.
Smugglers even use homing pigeons that have been trained to carry up to 2½ ounces of crystal meth. The Jordanian intelligence agents showed the Journal photos of a captured bird, caught on its way from Syria to Jordan with a small bag of white powder tied behind each of its legs.
A pigeon caught at a Jordanian army base had drugs attached to its legs. Video recovered from a smuggler shows a drone carrying drugs from Syria toward the Jordanian border.
Jordanian Armed Forces, SETF
Washington’s worry
In December 2022, President Biden signed the Captagon Act, requiring the U.S. to develop a strategy to disrupt captagon smuggling networks and build law-enforcement partnerships in the Middle East. A bipartisan bill passed the House in April requiring new sanctions against manufacturers and traffickers of captagon.
The U.S. hasn’t deployed troops to assist the Jordanians in the fight against captagon, but it does supply Jordan with satellite-guided bombs that Human Rights Watch has identified as being used to target alleged drug kingpins on Syrian soil. The U.S. also advises Jordanian security forces on how to use airborne surveillance sensors, drones and intercept communications, U.S. officials said.
Despite U.S. opposition, Jordan alongside Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other Arab nations normalized relations with the Syrian government last year in return for Assad pledging to crack down on captagon.
At first, the bargain appeared to work. In May 2023, Syria was readmitted into the Arab League after 12 years of exclusion. The next day, a presumed Jordanian airstrike killed Merhi al-Ramthan, a well-known cartel boss in southern Syria, with his wife and six children. Hours later, Jordan said it had formed a joint security force with Syria to combat drug trafficking, and Syrian state media said security forces had seized a million captagon pills. By the end of the month, Assad received red-carpet treatment at the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad arrived in Jeddah for the Arab League summit in 2023. Photo: SANA/REUTERS
Since then, the captagon trade has continued unabated. Jordanian officials said Syria’s initial cooperation was mostly for show. Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister Ayman Safadi met with Assad earlier this month to discuss the threat of drug smuggling, according to Jordan’s foreign ministry.
Jordan’s antidrug department last year arrested about 35,000 people on drug charges, a 24% increase from the year before. In June, Jordanian authorities foiled two smuggling operations involving nearly 10 million illicit pills, worth up to $200 million, destined for Saudi Arabia.
‘Unfulfilled life’
The torrent of drugs amounts to a societal crisis in the Arab world.
Syrian-produced captagon is often mixed with unknown quantities of substances such as caffeine, various anesthetics and sedatives, and even toxic levels of zinc and nickel. Pills destined for Saudi Arabia often contain Viagra. Users often pair captagon with other drugs that in recent years have become more available in the region, such as crystal meth and ketamine.
“As far as I can tell, the use of captagon has doubled in recent years,” said Abdullah Boulad, chief executive and founder of The Balance healthcare group, which runs luxury drug rehab clinics in Europe.
A Saudi customs officer opened imported pomegranates filled with captagon in 2021. Photo: SAUDI PRESS AGENCY/AP
He said many of his patients are affluent Gulf Arabs who, after returning from study or work in the West, struggle to adjust to their home countries’ more restrictive social and legal environment. “It creates this unfulfilled life, and this is where captagon comes in,” Boulad said.
In Saudi Arabia, authorities have erected checkpoints in cities to catch captagon smugglers and users. This month, Saudi authorities confiscated 1.3 million captagon pills hidden inside a shipment of marble mixing material near the border with Jordan, and dismantled a drug trafficking ring in Riyadh that included more than a dozen government employees. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad al-Sudani has warned about the link between drug trafficking and terrorism financing, and this month security forces confiscated one million captagon pills from a drug network in western Iraq.
Captagon’s reach is widening. Ports in Italy and Greece have made large seizures, and Dutch and German authorities have busted captagon labs in their own countries. A German court in August began the trial against four men arrested after a record bust in the country of hundreds of kilos of captagon tablets worth an estimated $60 million.
“It’s becoming extremely clear that these illicit networks are trying to create a foothold in Europe,” said Rose, of the New Lines Institute. “Captagon is likely going to trickle into Europe and potentially also American markets. This is something that I would not have said about a year or two ago.”
Italian police seized 84 million captagon pills in 2020. Photo: Napoli/ROPI/Zuma Press
Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com
3. Bullied by China at Sea, With the Broken Bones to Prove It
Bullied by China at Sea, With the Broken Bones to Prove It
A violent attack on a Vietnamese fishing boat tests Hanoi’s muted but resolute approach to China’s aggression in the South China Sea.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/world/asia/vietnam-south-china-sea.html
By Damien CavePhotographs and Video by Linh Pham
Damien Cave, who recently established The Times’s first bureau in Vietnam since the Vietnam War, reported this article from the south-central part of the country.
- Oct. 28, 2024
- Updated 2:55 a.m. ET
Nguyen Thanh Bien winced as he rubbed his side, turning toward a portrait of Ho Chi Minh in a living room filled with conch shells. He said he was still dealing with internal injuries two weeks after the Chinese authorities boarded his fishing boat and bashed him with iron pipes in a patch of the South China Sea claimed by both China and Vietnam.
“I got hit first in the head from behind — I was running to the front of the boat,” he said, sitting beside his father, who taught him to fish near their home on Vietnam’s south-central coast. “With the second blow, I lost consciousness.”
When he awoke, his catch, worth nearly $8,000, was gone. His ribs were broken. And three other crew members were injured.
China’s aggressive policing of disputed territory has produced the latest clash in a long, complex relationship. China ruled Vietnam for a millennium, leaving an indelible cultural mark, but Vietnam’s national identity and fierce independence spring from its resistance to Chinese empire-building, as its school students learn from a young age.
And the South China Sea is where Vietnam’s defiance is being tested — on its own and alongside other countries, including the Philippines and Indonesia, which are also struggling to hold on to parts of the sea that China seeks to control.
Image
Nguyen Thanh Bien getting a massage with medicated oil from his father this month to help with injuries from being beaten by the Chinese authorities while fishing in the South China Sea.
Image
Fishermen this month at the port of Sa Ky, south of Danang in central Vietnam. Vietnam has been offering loans, fuel and military training to fishermen to counter pressure tactics by China’s maritime militia.
If Beijing succeeds and bullies the region into submission, China would effectively own one of the most important waterways for global trade, giving it the power to disrupt supply chains and punish countries that do not fall in line with its demands, and also mine for resources below the ocean floor.
Breaking the bones of foreigners is visceral geopolitics, and the latest dark omen.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry denied that its law enforcement officers had hurt anyone while stopping a boat that it said was fishing illegally near the Paracel Islands on Sept. 30. But the violence, described in interviews, insurance claims and letters to the Vietnamese government, fit a pattern: China has already used water cannons, boat-ramming, ship-sinking and lasers in its effort to assert dominance over the South China Sea. Last week, it held a bombing exercise in the Gulf of Tonkin, issuing an “entering prohibited” warning for waters 75 miles from Vietnam’s coast.
The beatings and military operations, which closely followed more extensive drills around Taiwan, occurred less than a month after Vietnam’s new leader, To Lam, met with President Biden in New York. He had gone first to Beijing, and some analysts suggested that China was expanding its intimidation tactics to scare Hanoi — and others — away from Washington and alliances with neighbors.
More on China
-
Panda Factories: In the 1990s, China began sending pandas to foreign zoos to be bred, in the hope that future generations could be released into nature. It hasn’t gone as planned.
-
Killing of Japanese Boy: A 10-year-old Japanese student was fatally stabbed on his way to school in China. Some Chinese people believe the boy was a victim of the country’s state-led xenophobia.
-
War Games Encircling Taiwan: China held large-scale military drills surrounding Taiwan, a show of force that signaled the growing threat of Beijing’s ability to choke the self-governing island that China claims as its own.
“It shows that China may be harder on the new Vietnamese leadership going forward in the South China Sea,” said Alexander Vuving, a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “It also shows that the new Vietnamese leadership does not have much space to further accommodate China.”
Video
In a good month, a fishing crew in Vietnam can make more than three times what the average worker makes in a year.CreditCredit...
Beijing’s tight squeeze may change Hanoi’s calculus. Ever since China and Vietnam traded angry accusations over the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing vessel near a Chinese oil rig in 2014, Hanoi has preferred to say very little while bolstering its defenses with a not-quite-military strategy similar to China’s.
When the oil rig issue faded — China pulled out its equipment ahead of schedule — Vietnam gave preferential loans to fishermen. Seeing China’s maritime militia, Vietnam formed a smaller version of its own, giving some fishermen steel boats stronger than Mr. Bien’s wooden one and offering military training. The government also pays fishermen for four fuel loads a year to keep them on the water. It is quietly dredging and expanding small islands it occupies near China’s built-up outposts.
When incidents occur, and they frequently do — some fishermen keep folders of citations from the Chinese authorities going back to 2009 — Vietnamese officials have preferred to work behind the scenes, in part because Chinese aggression is such a combustible domestic topic. For Vietnamese leaders, intense pressure can come from both Beijing and from the public’s anti-China rage.
So while the Philippines, facing its own conflicts with China, has begun to document and publicize almost every perceived act of Chinese bullying in disputed waters, Vietnam has been more selective. In June, a fishing boat and its crew from Mr. Bien’s village, Chau Thuan Bien, about 80 miles south of Danang, disappeared after reporting by radio an encounter with the Chinese authorities.
Image
Fish and other seafood on display at a market near the port of Sa Ky, Vietnam.
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The house of the captain of a boat that disappeared in June after reporting by radio an encounter with the Chinese authorities. Relatives say they have heard from the men just once.
Vietnamese officials kept quiet. Relatives say they have still not heard anything from the men since one called to say they were being held on China’s Hainan Island. The Foreign Ministry in Hanoi did not respond to questions about the case, which has not previously been reported.
The assault on Mr. Bien, however, appears to have crossed a line, prompting a response on Oct. 2 that was far stronger than usual.
“Vietnam is extremely concerned, indignant and resolutely opposes the brutal behavior of Chinese law enforcement forces against Vietnamese fishermen and fishing vessels operating in the Paracel archipelago of Vietnam,” said the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Pham Thu Hang.
The attack has also shaken Mr. Bien’s coastal hamlet of 300 families, many of whom have been fishing for generations. Vietnam’s war with the United States exacted a heavy toll across the area, but in communities where nets sparkle at dusk and round basket boats brighten the beaches, China and the sea are timeless, elemental threats.
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This area of Vietnam is dotted with fishing communities, where the sea is a timeless, elemental threat.CreditCredit...
At a sun-yellow shrine with smoke dancing above incense, people pray for safety from the dangers that have wounded and killed loved ones for generations, from storms and wars to the risky local method of diving deep to spearfish.
At the port, where Mr. Bien’s boat engine was being repaired, a few dozen wooden haulers were crammed together, as if pushed in by a typhoon. Several captains said not a single vessel had left for the daylong journey to the usual fishing area since the news of the beating.
About a dozen boats that had already been out remained at sea, their crews hesitant to cut short what is usually a monthlong trip. At least one captain reported by text that his ship was being chased from fish-rich reefs by Chinese law enforcement.
“Many people are afraid,” said Nguyen Tan Van, one of the captains sitting in the shade at the port. “It will take time for the fear to die down before we go back out.”
The people of Vietnam have been drawing sustenance and wealth from what they call the East Sea for centuries. For a fishing crew, one good month there can yield a profit of $12,000, more than three times what the average worker makes in a year. And with Beijing also claiming an ancient right to the area, fishing has taken on near-military significance.
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Repairing broken glass this month on Mr. Bien’s fishing boat.
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Documents relating to when Mr. Bien’s boat was held by the Chinese in 2009. China has used increasingly aggressive tactics to assert dominance over the South China Sea.
Mr. Bien’s uncle and father, elder statesmen of the community, said fishermen saw themselves as Vietnam’s information gatherers. Asked if they and their sons might be the last of a particular breed, they said the local fishing fleet had actually grown in recent years despite the challenges, as more fishermen sought to become boat captains for wealth and patriotism.
They stressed that as China’s forces grow bigger and bolder, Vietnam should do more: build up its own maritime defenses, speak up more forcefully and compensate fishermen who lose their catch. Mr. Bien, 41, said his insurance company categorized what had happened on Sept. 30 as “an act of war” and was still rejecting his claim.
“It’s very stressful,” said his wife, Nguyen Thi Dung, who did not know if he was alive until a full day after she heard about his emergency call.
But for their family and others, worry at sea is the way it was, is and must be.
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A local shrine where people pray for good luck before going offshore fishing.
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Nguyen Thanh Nam, Mr. Bien’s uncle, helping run a radio system that lets fishermen stay in contact with land and track Chinese activities.
“Why should we stop? It’s our waters, our territory,” said Nguyen Thanh Nam, Mr. Bien’s uncle, who helps run a radio system that lets fishermen stay in contact with land and track Chinese activities. Many Vietnamese, he said, raising his voice, see the Chinese as “terrorists.”
Mr. Bien heard the comment and did not react. He smoked a slim cigarette a few steps from where his father taught him to dive. Along with seashells, his home décor included spent artillery shells collected from the South China Sea.
“I know the reefs and currents like the back of my hand,” he said. “As long as my father and I are healthy, we’ll keep going.”
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With China also claiming an ancient right to the area, fishing in Vietnam has taken on near-military significance.
Vivian Wang contributed reporting from Beijing.
Damien Cave leads The Times’s new bureau in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, covering shifts in power across Asia and the wider world. More about Damien Cave
4. As ties with the U.S. worsen, China asks: Who’s the new Kissinger?
"Smaller" Kissingers or useful idiots? And who is the "Chinese Kissinger?" Why doesn't China have its own Kissinger?
Excerpts:
Da acknowledged that no one person could replace Kissinger, but there could instead be “smaller Kissingers” — several people with connections to the leadership and policy circles that can help stabilize relations, he said.
Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for more engagement with Beijing, agreed that China’s search reflects concern that “government-to-government channels are no longer working out.”
“Whether it will be Harris or whether it’s Trump, they are going to need nongovernment channels to communicate the way Henry did for decades and decades,” Orlins said.
But Isaac Stone Fish, founder of Strategy Risks, a consulting firm that analyzes companies’ exposure to China, described Beijing’s search for a new Kissinger as one for a “new top useful idiot.”
Chinese leaders “seem to understand how advantageous it is for them to have this be something that only happens on the American side,” Stone Fish said, arguing that it makes the United States more responsible for improving the diplomatic relationship.
“Where’s the Chinese Kissinger?” he asked.
As ties with the U.S. worsen, China asks: Who’s the new Kissinger?
Influential voices in China are openly discussing who could act as a trusted bridge between Beijing and Washington, regardless of who wins the presidency.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/28/china-united-states-relations-kissinger/
Chinese leader Mao Zedong, left, meets with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Beijing in 1973. (Bettmann/Bettmann Archive)
By Christian Shepherd and Katrina Northrop
October 28, 2024 at 1:00 a.m. EDT
As the U.S. election approaches, China is on the hunt for the “new Henry Kissinger” — someone who is a friend of Beijing but has the ear of the incoming president. Someone who Chinese officials hope can cut through the bipartisan hostility toward China and encourage Washington to engage — as Kissinger did for five decades.
In Beijing’s foreign policy circles, the race for the White House is often cast as lose-lose, with former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris both signaling they will take a tough line on China, despite differing on policy details.
Chinese experts fear Trump’s return would mean a full-blown trade war with blanket tariffs on Chinese goods.
Harris, meanwhile, would probably continue the Biden administration’s fragile stabilization of ties — but also the efforts to counter China’s technological and military rise, an approach Chinese leader Xi Jinping has labeled “containment.”
That’s why a new Kissinger is needed, Chinese experts say, following Xi’s calls for Americans “of foresight” to step forward and improve ties. (There is no suggestion from the Trump or Harris campaigns that they are looking for a Kissinger-style envoy.)
China's Xi Jinping shakes hands with Kissinger in Beijing in 2015. (Feng Li/Getty Images)
Influential voices in China are openly discussing who could match Kissinger’s gravitas as a statesman, his unwavering advocacy for engagement, and his ability to act as a back channel in times of crisis — regardless of who wins the presidency.
The Paper, a state-run media outlet, recently ran an eight-part series called “Looking for Kissinger,” identifying American business leaders, academics and former officials who could help keep relations stable.
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The list included Stephen A. Schwarzman, the CEO of private equity firm Blackstone who launched an elite graduate program at Beijing’s Tsinghua University; John F. Kerry, the former U.S. special climate envoy who has advocated for close cooperation with Beijing to stem global warming; retired American diplomat Susan Thornton, who openly criticized the confrontational China policy adopted by Trump; and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), whose visit to Beijing last year fueled Chinese efforts to court local American politicians.
None of the four responded to requests for comment on their inclusion in the list.
Shipping vessels in Hong Kong this month. (Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)
Wang Huiyao, a prominent Chinese foreign policy thinker, says Graham Allison, an assistant defense secretary in the Clinton administration and esteemed political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, would be a good Kissinger-style bridge.
“We hope that you will carry on Kissinger’s spirit and be a great supporter and promoter, and of course, great contributor to the America-China relations,” Wang told Allison earlier this year.
Allison’s warnings about a “Thucydides trap” — a theory that rising powers almost always end up at war with incumbent great powers — have been adopted by Xi to urge Western powers to accept China’s rise.
Allison, who met with Xi in Beijing in March, said the Chinese leader was eager to continue discussions he had with Kissinger about lessons from the Cold War.
Allison is a strong advocate for engagement, which he says is in America’s best interest and needed to avert conflict. “China hysteria infects too many Americans,” he said in an interview.
President Joe Biden and Xi on a giant screen in Beijing during a virtual summit in 2021. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
On Chinese social media, people have suggested that Elon Musk could be another candidate, considering the Tesla CEO’s close business ties with China and Chinese officials, as well as his growing alliance with Trump. Musk often makes arguments favored by Beijing: Last year, for example, he called Taiwan an “integral part of China.”
Almost everyone, whether in the United States or China, agrees that Kissinger’s role in the relationship was unique. But many in Beijing advocate for preserving and, to whatever extent possible, replicating his legacy to avoid competition veering into conflict.
“The search for a new Kissinger is not just about locating Kissinger number two. It’s about Chinese passion and Chinese enthusiasm to search for reasonable, forward-looking views on relations,” said Zhu Feng, dean of international studies at Nanjing University.
But it’s also a prescription for how to manage a hostile White House. “Even when Kissinger was getting older, and China grew bigger and stronger, Kissinger’s mentality remained quite accommodating,” Zhu said.
There is great nostalgia in Beijing for the Kissinger years. Leading scholars write op-eds lamenting the difficulties of reestablishing “Kissinger-style engagement” and blaming American politicians for “spoiling the atmosphere” by attacking China for political gain. They still invoke Kissinger as an example of best diplomatic practices.
Kissinger’s reputation as a visionary diplomat began with his clandestine trip to Beijing in 1971 as national security adviser to Republican President Richard M. Nixon, a trip that paved the way for the establishment of diplomatic ties in 1979.
He continued traveling to Beijing through July last year, soon after his 100th birthday, when Kissinger sealed his legacy as a tireless advocate for improved ties. “We never forget our old friends,” Xi told him in the same building where Kissinger met Premier Zhou Enlai 52 years earlier.
In Chinese state media, that visit was heralded as a turning point in a tentative warming of ties that would lead to Xi meeting with President Joe Biden in San Francisco in November, even as the State Department said Kissinger was traveling as a private citizen and not acting on behalf of the United States.
Kissinger’s death in November led to an outpouring of condolences from Chinese officials as well as a flurry of speeches and essays lamenting the Kissinger-size hole in bilateral diplomacy.
The 10-year anniversary edition of Kissinger’s book “On China,” released in April last year, has over 1.45 million reviews on Chinese online book seller Dangdang.com. Only 338 of those are negative.
Beijing prefers to deal directly with the executive branch, but tensions have made that channel more difficult, creating a need for someone like Kissinger who can act as a “direct channel to the captain of the ship,” said Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University. “Captains sometimes cannot talk to each other with trust, so you need to find someone in between that both sides can trust.”
Da acknowledged that no one person could replace Kissinger, but there could instead be “smaller Kissingers” — several people with connections to the leadership and policy circles that can help stabilize relations, he said.
Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for more engagement with Beijing, agreed that China’s search reflects concern that “government-to-government channels are no longer working out.”
“Whether it will be Harris or whether it’s Trump, they are going to need nongovernment channels to communicate the way Henry did for decades and decades,” Orlins said.
But Isaac Stone Fish, founder of Strategy Risks, a consulting firm that analyzes companies’ exposure to China, described Beijing’s search for a new Kissinger as one for a “new top useful idiot.”
Chinese leaders “seem to understand how advantageous it is for them to have this be something that only happens on the American side,” Stone Fish said, arguing that it makes the United States more responsible for improving the diplomatic relationship.
“Where’s the Chinese Kissinger?” he asked.
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By Christian Shepherd
Christian Shepherd is China correspondent for The Washington Post. He previously covered the country for the Financial Times and Reuters from Beijing.follow on X @cdcshepherd
By Katrina Northrop
Katrina Northrop is a China correspondent for The Washington Post. Previously, she covered China's global impact on business and technology for The Wire China. Her work has also been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Providence Journal. follow on X @NorthropKatrina
5. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, October 27, 2024
Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, October 27, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-27-2024-0
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) inflicted serious damage to the Iranian integrated air defense network during its strikes on Iran on October 25. The IDF struck and disabled air defense command-and-control sites and radars, including at some S-300 sites. The S-300 is Russian-made and the most advanced air defense system that Iran operates. The IDF struck three or four S-300 sites, including one at the Imam Khomeini International Airport near Tehran. Three unspecified Iranian officials told the New York Times that the IDF strikes have caused major alarm among Iranian leaders.
Some of the air defense sites that the IDF struck were protecting critical energy infrastructure in western and southwestern Iran. Western media confirmed that IDF struck air defense sites around the Abadan oil refinery, Bandar Imam Khomeini energy complex and port, and the Tang-eh Bijar gas field. Degrading the air defenses around these sites could leave them more vulnerable to future strikes.
CTP-ISW previously reported on how the IDF strikes could also disrupt the Iranian ability to build missiles and transfer them to partners abroad, such as Russia, Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Houthis. The IDF strikes—in addition to targeting air defense sites—hit drone and missile production facilities across Iran. Commercially available satellite imagery revealed significant damage at the Parchin military complex, for example. The Parchin complex is one the most expansive and secretive Iranian missile production facilities. Some of the targets that the IDF targeted at the missile facilities were sophisticated mixing machines used to make solid fuel for advanced ballistic missiles, such as those that Tehran has used to attack Israel directly. Iran will likely need months or possible a year or more to acquire new mixing equipment
Key Takeaways:
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Iran: The IDF inflicted serious damage to the Iranian integrated air defense network in its strikes on October 25. This is in addition to the disruption that the IDF may have imposed on the Iranian ability to build missiles.
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Gaza Strip: Hamas rejected a deal with Israel that would grant Hamas leaders safe passage from the Gaza Strip in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages. Hamas’ rejection indicates that the group has not accepted defeat and calculates that it can survive and recover from the war.
6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 27, 2024
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 27, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-27-2024
Russia's economy and war effort is coming under increasing strain, which will pose increasingly acute challenges to Russian President Vladimir Putin's ability to sustain the war over the long term. The Washington Post reported on October 27 that the Russian economy is "in danger of overheating," noting that Russia's excessively high military spending has fueled economic growth in a way that has forced Russian companies to artificially raise their salaries in order to fulfill labor demands by remaining competitive with Russia’s high military salaries. The Washington Post quoted Russian Central Bank Head Elvira Nabiullina, who warned in July 2024 that Russia's labor force and production capacity are "almost exhausted." The Washington Post noted that private Russian companies are struggling to keep up with Russian military salaries and are increasingly having to offer wages several times higher than the typical industry averages. ISW has recently reported that Russian regional authorities are significantly increasing the one-time signing bonuses for Russian contract servicemembers in order to sustain Russia’s rate of force generation (roughly 30,000 troops per month), which underscores the fact that Russia does not have an indefinite pool of manpower and must financially and socially reckon with the ever-growing costs of replenishing its frontline losses via various force-generation avenues. The Washington Post also noted that Russia's stringent migration policies, particularly after the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack, have further depleted Russia's labor pool and amplified economic frictions. This has particularly become the case as migrant workers are increasingly identifying Russia as a hostile and unattractive place to relocate for work. ISW has reported at length on the balance that Putin is trying to strike between catering to his pro-war ultranationalist constituency, which espouses extreme anti-migrant sentiments, and his practical need to leverage migrant labor both economically and militarily.
Putin very likely assesses that calling another partial mobilization wave, or introducing general mobilization, will be too costly to his regime, and has therefore resorted to crypto-mobilization efforts that appear to be placing greater and greater strains on the Russian wartime economy. The recent appearance of North Korean troops in Russia, and their reported deployment to the combat zone in Kursk Oblast, further suggests that Putin's entire force-generation system is very tenuous. The costs of fueling the war will increase as Russia continues to burn through manpower and materiel on the frontline. Russian resources are finite, and Putin cannot reckon with these costs indefinitely. Russia's economy will reach a burnout point. That burnout point will inflict great costs on Russian society, which may force Putin to make major decisions about how to resource Russia’s war or change Russia’s mode of warfighting to preserve his regime’s stability.
Key Takeaways:
- Russia's economy and war effort is coming under increasing strain, which will pose increasingly acute challenges to Russian President Vladimir Putin's ability to sustain the war over the long term.
- Ukrainian and Russian forces both advanced within the main Ukrainian salient in Kursk Oblast.
- Russian forces advanced in and near Selydove and northwest of Vuhledar.
- Russian authorities are using Cossack organizations to militarize Russian children and build out Russia's force generation reserve in the long term.
7. Special Report: Possible Russian Gains in Georgia and Moldova
Special Report: Possible Russian Gains in Georgia and Moldova
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/possible-russian-gains-georgia-and-moldova
The Kremlin continues to pursue its longstanding hybrid warfare efforts to regain effective control of the territories of the former Soviet Union even as it seeks to gain control of Ukraine through military force. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine is, in fact, supporting Russian hybrid warfare efforts in former Soviet states, particularly Moldova and Georgia, as pro-Russian local political leaders and influencers benefit from the implicit threat of Russian aggression against their own states. Moscow seeks to regain momentum in its efforts to reconsolidate control over the post-Soviet space through the ongoing elections in Moldova and Georgia and will seek to capitalize on successes in those elections to advance its objectives in Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.
Russia has implemented various methods from its hybrid warfare playbook to influence the recent Georgian elections and directly interfere in the recent Moldovan election. The Kremlin relied on information operations in both Georgia and Moldova and is tailoring its methods to the distinctive characteristics of Moldova's and Georgia's histories, governments, geopolitics, and societies. ISW offers the following updates on the October 26 parliamentary elections in Georgia and the October 20 first-round presidential election and EU referendum in Moldova. ISW will continue to analyze Moscow's attempts to influence and interfere in these elections and forecast how the Kremlin can exploit the results of these elections in future reports.
Key Takeaways:
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Georgia: Preliminary results show that the ruling Georgian Dream party has won the 2024 Georgian parliamentary elections, sparking widespread allegations of voter irregularities and setting the stage for protests, further complications in Georgia-West relations, and enhanced Kremlin influence in Georgia and the South Caucasus.
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Moldova: The presidential election will move into a second round on November 3, but it is not yet clear if the Moldovan Constitutional Court will finalize the results of the October 20 referendum amid allegations of serious irregularities.
8. The trajectory of Ukraine's fight against Russia hangs on the outcome of the US election
The irony is that the focus of the US election is (as always) domestic (economy, abortion, and immigration) yet its effects will be global.
The trajectory of Ukraine's fight against Russia hangs on the outcome of the US election
AP · October 28, 2024
The trajectory of Ukraine’s fight against Russia hangs on the outcome of the US election
1 of 8 |FILE - Vice President Kamala Harris, right, and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, shake hands during their meeting on Sept. 26, 2024, in the vice president’s ceremonial office inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — There is no doubt that the U.S. election will determine the trajectory of the war in Ukraine.
The status of military aid from Kyiv’s chief international backer is dependent on who becomes president, as is any prospect for a cease-fire that could benefit Ukraine.
Some in Kyiv say the country’s very existence hinges on who wins the White House.
As Americans vote, exhausted and outmanned Ukrainian soldiers are holding defensive lines under constant Russian fire, knowing the results will dictate their future.
The war in Ukraine is one of the most divisive issues of the Nov. 5 election: Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, advocate very different views on how much support the U.S. should continue to give Ukraine.
After a whirlwind Western tour, Kyiv’s leaders have tried to promote their version of what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls his “victory plan.” They hope key decisions will be made — including Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership — by the new administration.
For now, they have no choice but to wait.
More election coverage
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Harris rallies Philadelphia voters at church, barbershop, bookstore, restaurant and basketball court
“We believe that regardless of the last name of the future president of the U.S., the country of the United States will not give up global dominance, global leadership as such. And this is possible only through the support of Ukraine and through the defeat of the Russian Federation,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy.
Harris would likely continue Biden’s policies
Harris, who has decried President Vladimir Putin’s “brutality,” would likely carry on President Joe Biden’s policy of support, albeit within the strict limits on Ukraine’s ability to strike deep inside Russian territory that have frustrated Kyiv’s leaders.
“President Biden has made it clear from the beginning of this conflict that his top priority has been to avoid an all-out war with Russia. I think that remains the top American priority,” said Malcom Chalmers, deputy director general at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
The U.S. has provided Ukraine more than $59.5 billion in military weapons and assistance since Russia invaded in February 2022. But throughout, Kyiv has been captive to fraught American politics that often undermined its battlefield potential.
Ukraine lost territory and manpower as weapons stocks dwindled during the six months it took the U.S. Congress to pass an aid package. Even promised military assistance has failed to arrive on time or in sufficient quantities.
Ukraine is still hoping for Western approval of strikes inside Russian territory with longer-range weapons supplied by its allies. It also holds hundreds of square kilometers (square miles) in Russia’s Kursk region after an incursion in August.
Still, Biden’s commitment to support Ukraine has never wavered. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced a $400 million package during his recent visit. Zelenskyy said he expects another worth $800 million, the first tranche for Ukraine’s production of long-range capabilities. Still another $8 billion is expected by the end of the year.
But for some, all that is too late.
“If the amount of aid that was promised but not delivered had been fulfilled, we could have entered negotiations in a stronger position with Russia,” said Gen. Lt. Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the General Staff.
What to know about the 2024 Election
Trump’s vague vows and praise for Putin
Trump has repeatedly taken issue with U.S. aid to Ukraine, made vague vows to end the war and has praised Putin.
He also is considered highly unpredictable.
Some Ukrainian officials even privately welcome this quality, saying it could bring about results quicker. But so much is unknown about what decisions Trump would make.
“He has emphasized that he has a very different approach to Ukraine than Kamala Harris. And if what he’s saying now is translated into action, then it’s going to be a very rocky period for Ukraine,” Chalmers said.
“Donald Trump is raising the very distinct probability that the United States will cut off most if not all military aid to Ukraine, which given that the situation on the ground, although deadlocked, is one which Russia currently has the advantage, could tip the balance in Russia’s favor,” he added.
Podolyak said Trump “understands the logic” of Zelenskyy’s plans after meeting with him. “Mr. Trump realized that there is no way to agree on something in this war, because it is necessary to ensure Russia’s compulsion to understand what a war is, what consequences Russia will have in this war. That is, Russia can be forced to do something, but not asked.”
Faced with Trump’s harsh rhetoric, some Ukrainian officials say that despite his stated views, his actions as president at times benefited Ukraine. Some of the toughest sanctions fell on Russia’s elite during his administration. Trump also approved the sale of lethal weapons to Ukraine, something President Barack Obama fell short of doing.
Most Ukrainians fear Trump will halt all military aid to Kyiv, and no other country can match the U.S. support. Ukrainian soldiers remain defiant, saying they’ll continue to hold the line, no matter what.
But the practical implications would be dire, and Kyiv may be forced to accept devastating cease-fire terms, with a fifth of its territory under Russian control.
“If the aid is stopped, the situation will become more complicated,” Romanenko said. “In this case, the seizure of Ukrainian land will continue, but we do not know how fast, because their offensive potential is not unlimited.”
Zelenskyy’s plans hang in the balance
Zelenskyy has presented his vision for ending the war to both Trump and Harris, arguing for its necessity. He said Ukraine hopes for a post-election response from Washington, particularly on the question of NATO membership, insisting that such an invitation be irreversible.
Both Ukraine and Russia are feeling considerable economic and societal strain to maintain the war effort. For the first time, Zelenskyy has openly discussed the potential for a partial cease-fire. But important questions remain about the fate of Russian-occupied territories.
Russia has allocated a large part of its government budget to defense spending and continues to lose thousands of men. The potential introduction of what Zelenskyy has put at 10,000 North Korean troops signals that Moscow is having issues with mobilizing new conscripts.
Ukraine’s battered energy infrastructure and struggling mobilization drive is under far more pressure than Russia, however. Kyiv must find a way to de-escalate the intensity of the war and attacks on shipping and energy assets.
“In the end, it’s only going to happen if both sides calculate that they will get a net benefit from doing so,” Chalmers said.
“My concern would be in the uncertainty of the coming months when the Russians may believe that one last push and they can really get much larger concessions from the Ukrainians,” he added.
Zelenskyy’s plans were developed with this reality in mind. It’s why his team insists Russia must be forced to talk rather than convinced to do so. Without nuclear weapons to serve as a deterrent, NATO is the only logical alternative.
“I said, ‘We don’t have nuclear weapons, and we are not in NATO, and we will not be in NATO during the war. That’s why I need this package. And you cannot be against it,’” Zelenskyy said, describing his argument to reporters.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/ukraine#
SAMYA KULLAB
Kullab is an Associated Press reporter covering Ukraine since June 2023. Before that, she covered Iraq and the wider Middle East from her base in Baghdad since joining the AP in 2019.
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AP · October 28, 2024
9. Resistance forces push military regime close to brink in Myanmar
This conflict flies under the radar of most Ameircans, to include policy makers and strategists. There are a handful of Americans supporting the resistance.
But this conflict is important to China and we need to understand how complicated it is for Xi.
Excerpts:
Complicating the political picture is the influence of neighboring China, which is believed to have tacitly supported the 1027 offensive in what turned out to be a successful bid to largely shut down organized crime activities that had been flourishing along its border.
In January, Beijing used its close ties with both the Tatmadaw and the Three Brotherhood groups to negotiate a ceasefire in northern Shan, which lasted for five months until the ethnic alliance opened phase two of the 1027 offensive in June, accusing the military of violating the ceasefire.
China has been displeased with the development, shutting down border crossings, cutting electricity to Myanmar towns and taking other measures in a thus-far unsuccessful attempt to end the fighting.
Its support for the regime also seems to be growing, with China’s envoy to Myanmar urging the powerful United Wa State Army, which wasn’t involved in the 1027 offensive or related fighting, to actively pressure the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army and Ta’ang National Liberation Army to halt the renewed offensive, according to leaked details of an August meeting widely reported by local media.
There is no evidence that the UWSA has done that, however.
Resistance forces push military regime close to brink in Myanmar
AP · October 28, 2024
World News
DAVID RISING
Rising covers regional Asia-Pacific stories for The Associated Press. He has worked around the world, including covering the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, and was based for nearly 20 years in Berlin before moving to Bangkok.
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AP · October 28, 2024
10. US voters concerned about post-election violence and efforts to overturn the results: AP-NORC poll
A pretty simple litmus test: You either support and defend the Constitution or you do not. You either support a peaceful transfer of power or you don't. You do not quibble about what the "other side" might or might not do or what the other side has done or not done in the path. All Americans should ask themselves: do they support and defend the Constitution and a peaceful transfer of power or not?
US voters concerned about post-election violence and efforts to overturn the results: AP-NORC poll
AP · by ALI SWENSON · October 28, 2024
1 of 3 |FILE - Rioters loyal to President Donald Trump storm the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
GARY FIELDS
ALI SWENSON
Swenson reports on election-related misinformation, disinformation and extremism for The Associated Press.
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LINLEY SANDERS
Sanders is a polls and surveys reporter for The Associated Press. She develops and writes about polls conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, and works on AP VoteCast.
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AP · by ALI SWENSON · October 28, 2024
11.US military scales back missile defense plans for Guam
Budget? Force Structure? Or reassessment of requirements and capabilities?
Or environmental impact? Is environmental impact going to take precedence over defense of US territory and strategic locations? Can we achieve the same defense effects from 16 locations versus 22?
US military scales back missile defense plans for Guam
The U.S. military is reducing the number of missile defense sites it intends to put on Guam, cutting the previous proposal of 22 down to 16 locations.
Nicholas Slayton
Posted on Oct 27, 2024 5:51 PM EDT
taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton
The U.S. military is reducing the number of missile defense sites it intends to put on Guam, cutting the previous proposal of 22 down to 16 locations. The revised plan calls for splitting the various systems across three bases on the island,with the goal of 360-degree defense from aerial munitions.
The scaled-back plans come from a draft environmental impact report released by the Missile Defense Agency on Friday, Oct. 25. As recently as this spring, the military intended to build up radar and interceptor systems across 21 locations owned by the Department of Defense, plus one privately owned site. That was revised following a summer feedback period by the public, but the new environmental impact statement doesn’t explicitly say why six locations were cut. Now the plan, first reported on by Reuters, outlines a plan to use the 16 locations to track and take out missile and air threats.
The island, given its location in the Pacific close to China, has become a central part of U.S. military strategy in the region. The U.S. is working to revive several installations used in past conflicts, including World War II airfields, but Guam remains important, given its status as a home for American submarines and bomber planes. Meanwhile China’s DF-26 Intermediate-Range Ballistic missiles have a range that can strike the island.
The now-16 planned missile defense sites would be set up on the three military installations already on Guam. Eight would be located on Naval Base Guam, six would be at Andersen Air Force Base and the last two would be set up at Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz. The MDA described the system as a combination of “missile defense radars, sensors, missile launchers and missile interceptors, and command and control systems.”
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“Current U.S. forces are capable of defending Guam against regional ballistic missile threats,” the Missile Defense Agency noted in its filing. “However, regional missile threats continue to increase and advance technologically. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command identified a requirement for a 360-degree [Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense]capability on Guam as soon as possible to address the rapid evolution of adversary missile threats.”
The need for rapid air defense has become a major part of U.S. strategy. The defense plans for Guam have been in the work for years, including the interceptor systems, but ongoing conflicts in the Red Sea and Ukraine have highlighted the dangers posed by conventional missiles and asymmetric drone attacks. The U.S. military has spent much of the last year responding to the threat of ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones, committing extensive resources to provide anti-air defenses to allies and commercial ships in the region.
As a draft environmental impact report, the plan still facing public feedback; the comment period runs through Jan. 8, 2025.
The latest on Task & Purpose
taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton
12. 'Not Enough': US Coast Guard's new ops posture statement raises alarm on need for more money
Access the 11 page posture statement here: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Oct/24/2003570849/-1/-1/0/2024%20US%20COAST%20GUARD%20OPERATIONAL%20POSTURE%20STATEMENT_508%20COMPLIANT%2010242024.PDF
It is a good primer about Coast Guard missions and operations. I found it useful.
Strategy is about prioritization and in particular prioritization of resources. . But we cannot neglect our Coast Guard as it is a key element of national security and as well as for public safety.
'Not Enough': US Coast Guard's new ops posture statement raises alarm on need for more money - Breaking Defense
breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · October 25, 2024
The Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea works the ice channel near McMurdo, Antarctica. (USCG photo by Rob Rothway)
WASHINGTON — Faced with an increasing number of missions, personnel and materiel readiness shortfalls, and “finite resources,” the US Coast Guard today published its first “Operational Posture” document [PDF], which a senior officer said is intended to convey to lawmakers and the public how stretched his service has become.
“What we’re finding is, as we are operating our current fleet to accomplish missions [and] … recapitalizing to make sure that we have readiness in the future to do our missions, we quite simply do not have enough funding to do all of that at the same time,” Vice Adm. Peter Gautier, the service’s deputy commandant for operations, told an audience today during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The new 11-page document largely serves as a list of the various missions the service is tasked with — ranging from marine safety to cybersecurity — and the regions around the world the service operates in.
Although Gautier explicitly said the statement is not “a pitch for money,” he also made it clear the USCG cannot continue on its current trajectory indefinitely without a budgetary boost — ideally to the tune of $6 billion annually.
“We only have funding to do maintenance on roughly half of what we need to do on the maintenance inventory to keep our cutters functional,” he said. “We have small boats that are aging out and … our aircraft fleet is getting old. Spare parts are no longer manufactured for some of these types [of aircraft].”
“We really, really do struggle, and our path is going to be really challenged unless we get the kind of budget support that we need to keep ourselves on a sustainable track,” he continued.
Earlier this year, the Coast Guard’s ship maintenance woes caught up with the service at an inconvenient and coincidental time. As Breaking Defense reported, while the leaders of the United States, Canada and Finland were preparing to meet in Washington, DC, to sign the new ICE Pact agreement, the USCG’s icebreakers were both sidelined from heading north to patrol Arctic waters — one of the service’s key missions.
When asked about the message the Coast Guard wants lawmakers to take away from the new operational statement, Gautier emphasized that the maritime environment is “changing rapidly.”
“That’s just increasing the demand for Coast Guard services exponentially. We have the right people and the right workforce and the right missions and authorities to do wonderful things, but we need the support of our stakeholders in Congress in order to overcome the challenges that we have in sustaining readiness of our current capabilities, while we build the readiness of the future,” he said.
13. The new front against Iran and its proxies: Underwater
An Israeli perspective.
Excerpts:
Although drones currently pose a significant threat to Israel's home front, Iran is undoubtedly a power in the naval front. The development of autonomous waterborne threats is not an unrealistic scenario, and we must prepare for it. Unlike the trend in the air, Israel might need to consider adopting a different approach at sea. Until now, Israel has invested heavily in developing precise and expensive systems to counter the Iranian threat, but from a budgetary standpoint, this is an unfair competition. The drones launched by Iran and its proxies are cheap, while Israel's missiles and defense systems cost exponentially more. This cannot continue for long, and Israel eagerly awaits the completion of laser-based interception systems to change the situation fundamentally.
In the naval front, which is not necessarily Israel's strongest area, we might need to consider a different approach. Perhaps we should initially focus on cheaper, less advanced, and less precise solutions that can be deployed on a larger scale. This would allow us to produce large quantities of low-cost defense systems and position them to counter any attempt to attack our strategic assets.
At the same time, Israel can and should cooperate with countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia to develop, based on their shared experiences, the most suitable tools to combat these threats. The future of the maritime front is already here, and artificial intelligence will only exacerbate the dangers it poses to us. We must not neglect addressing the underwater front.
The new front against Iran and its proxies: Underwater
https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/10/26/the-new-front-against-iran-and-its-proxies-underwater/
Damage to strategic assets, laying mines, cutting communication cables, and attacks on ships: autonomous underwater vehicles allow a wide range of possibilities and threats, and Israel needs to prepare for this new front.
Unmanned underwater vehicle
Israel and Iran have been clashing directly and through the Islamic republic's proxies over the past year. These confrontations occur in the air, on land, at sea, and even in the cyber front, often unnoticed by those not directly involved.
One surprising, not very central, front operates far from daylight: underwater. This new front offers with many opportunities and risks, mostly far from Israel's limited coastlines. Nevertheless, we are also involved, and our adversaries are not ashamed to extend their reach beneath the waves. For Israel, the main importance of this front lies in safeguarding strategic assets such as gas rigs in the Mediterranean Sea — Israel cannot afford to neglect this area.
The focus on the underwater front in the region began mainly after the Houthis' attacks on shipping routes leading from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea. This was driven by two primary threats posed by the Yemeni rebels — attacks on ships using underwater means, and damage to the underwater communication cables that run from the Persian Gulf through the Red Sea, from Asia to Europe.
In March, three of the 14 underwater communication cables in the Red Sea were cut, reportedly affecting 25 percent of the region's internet traffic at the time. As a result, companies started exploring alternatives to bypass the Red Sea, considering re-routing network traffic through other regions.
Unmanned underwater vehicle
One of the mysteries surrounding this event was how the Houthis allegedly managed to damage the cables, which lay on the seabed. It requires the ability to dive to depths of hundreds of meters, and even today, it's unclear if the Houthis possess the means for such a task. Of course, they denied having targeted the cables. One possible explanation raised at the time was the deliberate dropping and dragging of anchors along the seabed until they hit the cables. It's also possible that the cables were cut by the anchors of ships attacked by the Houthis.
At the time the cables were damaged, six additional cables were planned for installation in the region, where 90 percent of internet traffic between Asia and Europe is concentrated. It's possible the conflict will now change the plans of some companies. However, since this is a vast network of cables, most of which do not pass through the Red Sea, there is no danger that intercontinental internet traffic will stop completely.
Even though it seems unlikely that the Houthis have the ability to dive hundreds of meters, they certainly possess the ability to operate below the surface. Evidence of this came a month earlier, when the Americans encountered an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) operated by the Yemeni rebels and destroyed it. According to them, this vessel, along with three anti-ship cruise missiles—whether the vessel launched them or they were part of another incident remains unclear—was intercepted "due to the threat they posed to merchant vessels and US Navy ships in the area."
That small Houthi submarine is what's known as an "unmanned underwater vessel" (UUV) or "unmanned underwater vehicle" (UUV). While not much is known about the Houthis' particular vessel, it's believed to be a relatively unsophisticated autonomous vehicle. Nevertheless, even such a simple device can pose a significant threat to ships in the area and is a greater challenge than conventional threats like drones or surface vessels.
Such vessels can release mines, launch torpedoes, or carry explosives for "kamikaze" attacks on targets. Even if their range is only tens of kilometers, these submarines could still threaten ships entering the Red Sea. While they likely aren't equipped with advanced guidance systems, they are extremely hard to detect. Most current defense systems in the region are simply not designed to deal with such threats, and sonar systems and other underwater tracking tools will be needed to combat them.
Where do the Houthis, operating in one of the world's poorest countries, get such capabilities? As usual, the answer is, of course, Iran. In February, US Central Command intercepted a shipment of weapons from Iran to the Houthis, which included components for surface and underwater unmanned vehicles. According to images published by the Americans, the shipments contained propellers typically used for UUVs, which Tehran is known to have in its military.
Iranian UUVs, according to reports, resemble torpedoes in appearance but are slower. They are particularly effective against stationary or slow-moving ships. It's believed they can be equipped with vision systems for target observation, and they may have been used in attacks on targets off the coast of the UAE.
Threats from the north and south
Iran's military is no novice when it comes to underwater capabilities. Its first submarine series dates back to the 1990s, including three Russian-made "Kilo" class submarines. These are relatively old, but Iran has been working to refurbish them as of last year. Another series, Iran's domestically produced "Ghadir" class midget submarines, is believed to include at least ten active vessels. These submarines, weighing 125 tons, are equipped with diesel engines, anti-ship cruise missiles, and torpedoes. These replaced Iran's only other submarine from the "Nahang" class, a 115-ton midget submarine.
Iran's most advanced submarine is the "Fateh" class, weighing around 600 tons, equipped with advanced sonar systems and four 533-mm torpedo tubes. It can also carry mines and anti-ship cruise missiles. According to local reports, this submarine can dive to a depth of 200 meters and remain at sea for up to five weeks without refueling. Currently, Iran is believed to be building three more of these submarines, but only one has been operational since 2019.
Aside from submarines, Iran also operates UUVs. These vehicles can reportedly dive to depths of 200 meters and stay underwater for up to 24 hours. They are capable of carrying mines and deploying them in deep waters to target enemy ships.
Unmanned underwater vehicle
Tehran is also investing in underwater defense measures. Near strategic facilities, Iran maintains an underwater sensor network, sonar systems, advanced helicopters equipped with underwater tracking systems, torpedoes, and mines. All of these are in addition to air defense systems designed to protect these facilities from drone or cruise missile attacks.
Iran is not keeping these advanced capabilities only for its favored rebels in Yemen. Hamas, for example, has also begun building such underwater capabilities in recent years. In 2021, the IDF thwarted an attack by Hamas using such a vessel "launched toward Israel's maritime territory." The intended target was not specified, but in addition to Navy ships, it could have been aimed at Israel's gas rigs, located dozens of kilometers from its coast.
In general, Hamas developed its underwater capabilities before the "Operation Guardian of the Walls" war. In addition to autonomous vessels, it trained divers and naval commando units, developed explosive boats, and more. During ground operations in Gaza, the IDF also discovered—sometimes within tunnels—workshops for producing additional such underwater vehicles. These are not advanced systems, and at this stage, they are likely torpedo-like missiles guided by GPS, packed with dozens of kilograms of explosives. Still, they pose a serious threat to both the Israeli Navy and Israel's gas rigs.
The maritime threat is also present in the northern Israeli front. Hezbollah, as is well known, possesses anti-ship missiles, which it used with deadly effect against the Israeli Navy's INS Hanit during the Second Lebanon War. It has naval commando units, and according to expert assessments, it may also possess versions of Iran's Ghadir submarines and attack or "suicide" UUVs, which were smuggled into Hezbollah's hands from Iran.
A different approach to armament
The underwater threat from Iran's axis has not gone unnoticed by Western powers or even by countries friendly to the Islamic Republic. In recent years, Persian Gulf states have begun arming themselves with underwater capabilities in an effort to protect their coastlines against such threats.
The UAE, for example, began this year building and testing "Cronus" class midget submarines, which feature advanced mobility capabilities, diesel-electric engines, and torpedoes. These submarines can dive to depths of 100 meters and accommodate around ten crew members.
At the start of the year, Saudi Arabia signed a contract with the Thales company for the purchase of towed sonar systems, which can be connected to new patrol ships that the Saudis bought from Spain. Riyadh sees the Houthi underwater threat as a serious danger, requiring preparation in case the Yemen conflict erupts again. The Saudis are also negotiating with a Chinese company to purchase UUVs and are exploring possible avenues for acquiring light submarines for anti-ship operations and underwater surveillance.
Unmanned underwater vehicle
Another country making moves in this field is Qatar. The Qataris purchased two small submarines from Italy, at a value of over $200 million, which will allow them to carry out covert missions on the seabed and even lay mines.
In addition to these countries, the anti-Houthi coalition, led by the United Kingdom and the United States—two traditional maritime powers—also operates in the region. The US, of course, has advanced underwater capabilities, but in recent years it has found itself lagging behind another naval power: China. The US has been responding to developments related to warfare in the Red Sea and monitoring events in Ukraine, where Kyiv and Moscow have been battling each other in the Black Sea.
At the same time, the US has been investing relatively little of its resources in the field of unmanned underwater vehicles. The budget for medium and small UUVs in the US this year stands at $172 million, and next year it will drop to just over $100 million. By comparison, the White House's proposed budget for the entire US Navy next year amounts to $63 billion. It appears the US prefers to invest in building giant ships, even though market trends are moving towards autonomous vehicles.
What about Israel?
There's no need to go into detail about Shayetet 13's capabilities or the IDF's submarine fleet, which includes five diesel-powered "Dolphin" class submarines. Additionally, Israel has developed a UUV called the "Blue Whale," designed for intelligence gathering, submarine detection, and reconnaissance. This UUV is intended to be part of Israel's defensive efforts against Iran's increasing naval capabilities.
Meanwhile, Israel's Navy must continue working hard to deal with the wide range of threats facing the IDF. For example, it's unclear whether we have enough tools for prolonged and broad combat at sea. Experts estimate that the IDF needs to make adjustments to its naval defense systems, including for detecting and neutralizing UUVs, developing a coherent naval combat doctrine, and cooperating with other countries to share knowledge and experience for protecting strategic assets at sea.
Although drones currently pose a significant threat to Israel's home front, Iran is undoubtedly a power in the naval front. The development of autonomous waterborne threats is not an unrealistic scenario, and we must prepare for it. Unlike the trend in the air, Israel might need to consider adopting a different approach at sea. Until now, Israel has invested heavily in developing precise and expensive systems to counter the Iranian threat, but from a budgetary standpoint, this is an unfair competition. The drones launched by Iran and its proxies are cheap, while Israel's missiles and defense systems cost exponentially more. This cannot continue for long, and Israel eagerly awaits the completion of laser-based interception systems to change the situation fundamentally.
In the naval front, which is not necessarily Israel's strongest area, we might need to consider a different approach. Perhaps we should initially focus on cheaper, less advanced, and less precise solutions that can be deployed on a larger scale. This would allow us to produce large quantities of low-cost defense systems and position them to counter any attempt to attack our strategic assets.
At the same time, Israel can and should cooperate with countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia to develop, based on their shared experiences, the most suitable tools to combat these threats. The future of the maritime front is already here, and artificial intelligence will only exacerbate the dangers it poses to us. We must not neglect addressing the underwater front.
Elie Klutstein is a researcher at the Misgav Institute for National Security.
14. America’s Overlooked Armed Force: Why the Coast Guard Deserves Better Oversight and Support
Excerpts:
Today, the Homeland Security Secretary serves as the direct civilian overseer of the Coast Guard and is also responsible for eight other agencies, including the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. These agencies engage in complex, real-time operations, often responding to crises or high-stakes situations. While the Homeland Security Secretary oversees all these entities, the effectiveness of managing each one is constrained by their broad responsibilities. Given the Coast Guard’s unique missions, it requires dedicated attention that is diluted due to the Secretary’s extensive oversight of multiple heavily taxed agencies.
This has perpetuated a culture where the Coast Guard engages on its own with Congress on political issues better suited for a Service Secretary. Instead, Coast Guard senior leaders are forced into precarious political discourse that often yields outcomes contrary to strategic plans. For example, the Coast Guard has tried to close redundant shore stations, but congressional intervention has blocked these efforts despite independent studies supporting the closures.
Congress should establish a Service Secretary for the Coast Guard to provide persistent oversight and advocacy for resources, and alignment with national interests and strategic policies.
Although the service bears some responsibility for missteps, faults in Congressional and Departmental oversight have exacerbated nearly every issue the Service faces. Congress and the Department of Homeland Security have both stated their support for the service, but the question remains whether they will make meaningful reforms or continue down the path of allowing increasing threats to undermine U.S. national security.
America’s Overlooked Armed Force
By Justin Matejka
October 26, 2024
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/10/26/americas_overlooked_armed_force_1067847.html?mc_cid=5be5b73280
America’s Overlooked Armed Force: Why the Coast Guard Deserves Better Oversight and Support
For over 234 years, the United States Coast Guard has been always ready, serving as a federal law enforcement agency, regulatory body, first responder, and one of the six armed forces. The Coast Guard has participated in every war and conflict, fighting alongside their Navy, Marine, Army and Air Force comrades, from the Quasi War to the D-Day landings at Normandy to fighting the war against terrorism in the Middle East.
In an average year, the Coast Guard responds to 16,000 search and rescue cases, issues 50,000 merchant mariner credentials, inspects 18,000 commercial vessels and conducts 5,000 maritime facility inspections. It is responsible for securing a $5.4 trillion U.S. maritime transportation system that directly impacts our critical supply chains. Its personnel and ships deploy globally in support of Defense, State and Homeland Security missions, from the Arctic to Antarctica, and across regions including the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, Europe, South America, and Africa. However, its ability to accomplish missions is being undercut by mismanagement and underfunding.
Fragmented Congressional oversight, and lack of a Service Secretary within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have hindered the Coast Guard’s ability to modernize and respond effectively to today’s threats.
The bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy recommended a review of “the military’s reliance on U.S. private critical infrastructure for warfighting and the resilience of critical infrastructure.” From peace time trade to mobilizing for conflict, critical infrastructure, including shipping ports, are vulnerable to disruption or destruction by adversaries such as China and Russia. The Coast Guard is at the forefront of protecting the nation’s vessels, ports, facilities, and waterways.
Like its fellow armed services, multi-year recruitment shortfalls have left a 10 percent workforce shortage, or more than 4,000 unfilled positions out of its target size of 44,500.
“The Coast Guard cannot maintain the same level of operations with our current shortfall – we cannot do the same with less,” Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan told lawmakers in March 2024 on Capitol Hill during the annual State of the Coast Guard address. “The service cannot maintain the same level of operations with this gap.”
In response, the Coast Guard has limited or paused operations at shore stations responsible for everyday patrols of its waterways and reduced the number of operating ships through early retirement of its 210-foot cutters — well ahead of new replacements coming online.
Major ship acquisitions such as the Polar Security Cutter, and Offshore Patrol Cutter have suffered from cost overruns, contract challenges, and a struggling defense industrial base. Coast Guard aircraft failed to meet its own target aircraft availability percentage for response to urgent search and rescue due to maintenance issues associated with airframes nearing the end of life, including the grounding of a number of its 45 MH-60 Jayhawk helicopters.
The Coast Guard’s shore infrastructure construction and maintenance program, vital to supporting its people and operations, has a backlog of more than $2.6 billion. Even with this reality, Congress and the Department of Homeland Security enable pervasive issues to persist. Significant changes by Congress and Homeland Security are imperative to safeguarding the long-term success of the Coast Guard and security of U.S. critical ports and waterways.
Congressional jurisdiction of the Coast Guard is fragmented, with at least 12 House and Senate committees claiming some level of oversight. When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, it failed to adjust its internal oversight organization or rules, leading to inefficiencies in jurisdiction and management.
Despite the Coast Guard falling under DHS, the House and Senate committees on homeland security lack primary jurisdiction over the Coast Guard. It is the only armed force and DHS component under the jurisdiction of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committees.
As an armed force, the Coast Guard sees intermittent support from the Armed Services Committees and is often left off critical legislation. During the 2019 government shutdown, Coast Guard members went 34 days without pay, as the Homeland Security budget was not passed, while other military branches continued receiving funds through the appropriated Defense budget.
Congressional leaders and committees in both chambers should work together to reform jurisdictional rules over the Coast Guard to streamline oversight, align strategic priorities, and reduce bureaucratic burden.
Today, the Homeland Security Secretary serves as the direct civilian overseer of the Coast Guard and is also responsible for eight other agencies, including the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. These agencies engage in complex, real-time operations, often responding to crises or high-stakes situations. While the Homeland Security Secretary oversees all these entities, the effectiveness of managing each one is constrained by their broad responsibilities. Given the Coast Guard’s unique missions, it requires dedicated attention that is diluted due to the Secretary’s extensive oversight of multiple heavily taxed agencies.
This has perpetuated a culture where the Coast Guard engages on its own with Congress on political issues better suited for a Service Secretary. Instead, Coast Guard senior leaders are forced into precarious political discourse that often yields outcomes contrary to strategic plans. For example, the Coast Guard has tried to close redundant shore stations, but congressional intervention has blocked these efforts despite independent studies supporting the closures.
Congress should establish a Service Secretary for the Coast Guard to provide persistent oversight and advocacy for resources, and alignment with national interests and strategic policies.
Although the service bears some responsibility for missteps, faults in Congressional and Departmental oversight have exacerbated nearly every issue the Service faces. Congress and the Department of Homeland Security have both stated their support for the service, but the question remains whether they will make meaningful reforms or continue down the path of allowing increasing threats to undermine U.S. national security.
Commander Justin Matejka, national security affairs fellow for the 2024–25 academic year at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security, or the U.S. Government.
15. Japan’s Voters Punish Leadership of U.S. Security Ally
Japan’s Voters Punish Leadership of U.S. Security Ally
Election weakens longstanding ruling party, which now needs new coalition partners to stay in power
https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/japans-voters-punish-leadership-of-u-s-security-ally-58c6ce42?mod=googlenewsfeed&utm_medium=social
By Miho Inada
Follow
Updated Oct. 27, 2024 10:58 pm ET
Ballot boxes were opened in Tokyo on Sunday to count votes in Japan’s election. Photo: Richard A. Brooks/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
TOKYO—Japanese voters deprived the ruling Liberal Democratic Party of the absolute majority it has held for over a decade in Japan’s lower house, with an election Sunday that prolongs a period of uncertainty over the leadership of an important U.S. ally.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba now faces a political battle to keep his job and continue on the path set by his predecessor, Fumio Kishida, who sought to strengthen U.S. security ties to counter China, boost the Japanese military and steer the economy toward a complete exit from deflation.
Ishiba, who took office on Oct. 1, said before the election that he would consider it a victory if the ruling two-party coalition held on to a majority.
“We’re being judged harshly,” he said Sunday night as exit polls indicated that the LDP would fail to carry the coalition over that relatively low bar. “We must accept it with humility and solemnity.”
Ishiba, a 67-year-old inveterate agitator within the LDP, was billed as an agent of change when he was selected as party leader last month, with a mission of helping reverse a decline in the party’s popularity. He quickly set the date for Sunday’s election as an opportunity to secure a mandate for the LDP.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, right, and Yoshihide Suga, vice president of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, at LDP headquarters in Tokyo on Sunday. Photo: Takashi Aoyama/Press Pool
But after he made a series of policy reversals, Ishiba’s approval ratings fell and voters began to see him as a continuation of the status quo under his predecessor, who stepped down from office in response to public anger over a funding scandal involving senior party members.
The LDP secured 191 seats in voting Sunday for the 465-seat House of Representatives, down from its 247-seat majority, according to results reported by public broadcaster NHK. Its junior coalition partner, the Komeito party, won 24 seats, down from 32.
To hold on to power, the LDP and Komeito will need to bring in new partners to attain the 233 seats needed for a majority.
Some members of the LDP are likely to call on Ishiba to take responsibility for the poor election result, possibly costing him his job, said political scientist Lully Miura.
Sunday’s election was the first in three years for Japan’s lower house, which is the more powerful of the parliament’s two chambers, with the power to select the prime minister and pass the budget on its own.
Asuka Eitoku, a 28-year-old occasional supporter of the LDP in Tokyo, said she didn’t vote for the party this time in protest over the funding scandal, which involved a failure to report fundraising revenue.
“I’m concerned about one-party monopoly politics,” Eitoku said.
The LDP’s domination of the government has been nearly unbroken since the party’s founding in 1955, in part because of the fragmentation of the opposition.
Tokyo voter Toshimitsu Miyajima, 85 years old, said the LDP had become complacent. “Politics must change. Change is important,” he said. Miyajima said that he had voted for the largest opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.
The CDPJ ended up with 148 seats after voting Sunday, a leap from its pre-election count of 98, NHK reported.
Among Kishida’s priorities was a goal of nearly doubling Japan’s military spending by the fiscal year that begins in 2027, a shift from conventional postwar policy. Ishiba, a former defense minister, supported that shift.
Before Ishiba was selected to be prime minister, he also called for revising what he described as an unequal security alliance with the U.S. and floated the idea of forming an Asian version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
But after taking office, Ishiba backpedaled. There was no mention of either of those ideas in the LDP’s campaign platform published ahead of Sunday’s election. Instead, it reprises a message from previous platforms: “Make the Japan-U.S. alliance the cornerstone” of partnerships “to further promote a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said after the vote that the relationship remains strong. “It’s clear that there is a consensus in Japanese politics that the ever-deepening cooperation between our two nations is critical to the security and collective deterrence of the Indo-Pacific region and beyond,” Emanuel said.
The LDP’s platform also called for a significant strengthening of Japan’s defense capabilities to address security challenges such as missile tests by North Korea and more frequent Russian and Chinese military operations in the air and sea near Japan.
“I would support the LDP if the focus were on security issues,” said Atsushi Okano, a 47-year-old salesperson at a publishing company, before voting in Tokyo on Sunday.
But Okano said he was considering voting for the small Democratic Party for the People, which promised during the campaign to raise the take-home pay of salaried workers, an attractive pledge for voters frustrated with wage increases that have failed to keep up with rising prices.
Ishiba also pledged wage increases, after decades of deflation in which salaries didn’t rise. “We’re getting out of that kind of economy,” he said.
In August, wages were up 3% from a year earlier, but down 0.6% when adjusted for inflation. Some businesses that raised prices have started cutting them again to win back customers, renewing concerns about a return to deflation.
Ishiba has called for a new economic package intended to ease the burden of rising prices, including a payout to low-income households.
If his party remains in power, its weakened standing will make it more difficult for Ishiba to secure the spending package he seeks, said Toru Hirosue, an economist at Daiwa Securities, ahead of Sunday’s vote. A limited economic package would leave the impression that Japan’s economy will stagnate, with a negative impact on the market, he said.
Since taking office, Ishiba has embraced his predecessor’s goal of ensuring that Japan manages to fully exit deflation—ditching his endorsement of tighter fiscal and monetary policies. Ishiba has since said that he wants the Bank of Japan to maintain accommodative monetary conditions to support the government’s efforts.
In another policy shift, Ishiba initially called for curbs in nuclear power in Japan but has since taken on his predecessor’s push to restart dormant plants and build new ones. Japan is working to restart nuclear power plants that have been offline since shortly after the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident, in an effort to meet decarbonization goals and the rising energy demands of powering artificial intelligence.
Chieko Tsuneoka contributed to this article.
Write to Miho Inada at miho.inada@wsj.com
Appeared in the October 28, 2024, print edition as 'Japanese Vote Costs Ruling LDP Absolute Majority in Lower House'.
16. Opinion Israel is trying to uproot Iran’s influence. Iraq shows how hard that is.
Excerpts:
“There are parts of Iraq that the Iranians don’t control, but their political influence is predominant,” Robert S. Ford, a former U.S. diplomat who was ambassador to Syria and Algeria and served many years in Iraq, told me. “I wouldn’t call Iraq a province of Iran, but they certainly have heavy influence there.”
In short, the Iraq War is over and Iran won.
That experience should cause Israeli leaders (who were always, to be sure, skeptical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq) to exercise a bit of humility and self-restraint, even at a moment when they have inflicted heavy military blows on Iran and its “axis of resistance.” Unfortunately, the Iranian influence network is so deeply entrenched across the region — particularly, but not exclusively, among Shiite populations — that it cannot be excised by military force alone. Iranian-backed groups not only project military power, they have also usurped state functions, especially in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Iraq, to provide social services to the population.
That will require a political strategy to replace Iranian influence with something else — but what? The dismal reality remains that, as long as Iran has a malignant, extremist regime bent on regional domination and funded by lucrative oil exports (which go mainly to China), it will continue to exercise considerable sway over its neighbors. Israel’s tactical, military success against Iranian proxy organizations, welcome as it is, should not blind us to this larger strategic reality
Opinion Israel is trying to uproot Iran’s influence. Iraq shows how hard that is.
It’s a cautionary tale for any thoughts of remaking the Middle East.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/iran-influence-iraq-israel/?utm
Supporters of the Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces take part in a demonstration in Baghdad on Oct. 11. (Ahmed Jalil/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
By Max Boot
October 28, 2024 at 7:15 a.m. EDT
Having killed two of its leading enemies — Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hasan Nasrallah — Israel is expanding its military ambitions in the multifront struggle against Iranian proxies. Israel is not only trying to stop Hezbollah from rocketing northern Israel, it is also bombing the group’s financial institutions all over Lebanon to undermine the terrorist organization’s grip on the Lebanese state. Hope is growing, at least in some quarters, that Israel can ultimately defeat Iran and, as a former Mossad chief recently said, “reshape the Middle East.”
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For a reality check — and a reminder of how difficult it is to reshape the region or uproot Iranian influence — shift your focus away from Israel’s immediate vicinity. Look, instead, at Iraq, which in 2003 was supposed to be a showcase of U.S. hopes of transforming the Middle East in a more democratic and moderate direction. I once shared that vision, promulgated by the George W. Bush administration. In hindsight, I can’t believe how naive I was — and I hope Israel doesn’t fall prey to the same hubris that led U.S. troops into the Iraqi quagmire.
Turns out the opponents of the Iraq invasion who warned that, by toppling the Saddam Hussein regime, it would advance Iran’s hopes of regional domination were absolutely right. “The Iraq war destabilized the region by removing the Arab bulwark that kept the Islamic Republic in check, enabling Iran’s resurgence and projection of power,” Emma Sky, a former political adviser to U.S. military commanders in Iraq, told me recently. “We are living with the consequences of the war today as conflict in the Middle East escalates and expands — and the U.S. proves unable to contain and broker an end to the violence.”
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I still recall dreams among some supporters of the 2003 invasion that Iraq could be transformed from a foe into an ally not only of the United States but also of Israel. How delusional that turned out to be. Far from recognizing Israel, Iraq has become a staging ground for missile and drone attacks against Israel undertaken by Iranian-backed militias.
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Just as Iran exerts influence over Lebanon via Hezbollah and over Yemen via the Houthis, so Tehran holds sway over Iraq by backing a host of extremist militias. The most prominent are the Badr Organization, Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. Though rivals, they also work together under the rubric of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — a state-funded security service that effectively answers to Iranian, not Iraqi, leaders. In 2023, the PMF had an estimated 200,000 fighters and a budget of $2.6 billion.
The PMF is too powerful for Iraq’s own security services to challenge, and it can tap directly into state oil revenue. The PMF has even created a conglomerate, modeled on the holding company of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to finance its operations with commercial activities such as agriculture, vehicle imports, textile manufacturing and animal slaughterhouses.
“The kleptocratic militia run system in Iraq is glutting itself on the biggest trough of oil money that the axis of resistance has ever encountered outside Iran,” Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told me. Knights went on to note that there is plenty of “infighting” among different Shiite militias over the oil windfall. Iraq, he pointed out, has “a lot of little Hezbollahs instead of one big one,” and that makes it harder for the Iranians to “snuff out resistance entirely” to Iranian dominance over the country, which is unpopular even with many Iraqi Shiites.
Yet, whenever Iraq faces a major foreign or domestic issue, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani flies off to Tehran for guidance — or hosts a visit from a senior Iranian leader. Iran doesn’t try to micromanage every decision of the Iraqi state, but on the big issues it largely gets its way. As a Brookings Institution analysis earlier this year noted, “The Popular Mobilization Force is turning Iraq into an Iranian client state.”
One of the PMF’s prime objectives has been to drive out the 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq; Iran’s proxies don’t like living side by side with the soldiers of the Great Satan. The Iranian-backed militias have been staging attacks against U.S. bases and pressuring Sudani’s compliant government to end the U.S. military presence. Sure enough, in September, the Biden administration and the Sudani government announced an agreement that would have most U.S. troops leave Iraq proper by 2026 and relocate to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north. That small force might be sufficient to support anti-Islamic State efforts in both Iraq and Syria, but Iran will be left in de facto control of most of Iraq.
Iraq allows Iran to evade international sanctions by buying at least $10 billion of Iranian goods last year. Many Iraqis, even Shiites, are not happy about the level of Iranian influence and the corruption and cronyism that comes with it. There were massive anti-Iran protests across the country from 2019 to 2022. But little seems to have changed.
“There are parts of Iraq that the Iranians don’t control, but their political influence is predominant,” Robert S. Ford, a former U.S. diplomat who was ambassador to Syria and Algeria and served many years in Iraq, told me. “I wouldn’t call Iraq a province of Iran, but they certainly have heavy influence there.”
In short, the Iraq War is over and Iran won.
That experience should cause Israeli leaders (who were always, to be sure, skeptical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq) to exercise a bit of humility and self-restraint, even at a moment when they have inflicted heavy military blows on Iran and its “axis of resistance.” Unfortunately, the Iranian influence network is so deeply entrenched across the region — particularly, but not exclusively, among Shiite populations — that it cannot be excised by military force alone. Iranian-backed groups not only project military power, they have also usurped state functions, especially in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Iraq, to provide social services to the population.
That will require a political strategy to replace Iranian influence with something else — but what? The dismal reality remains that, as long as Iran has a malignant, extremist regime bent on regional domination and funded by lucrative oil exports (which go mainly to China), it will continue to exercise considerable sway over its neighbors. Israel’s tactical, military success against Iranian proxy organizations, welcome as it is, should not blind us to this larger strategic reality.
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Opinion by Max Boot
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend.”follow on X MaxBoot
17. Ill-advised retorts: The danger of defending one’s honor often outweighs the benefit
Important perspective from one of my mentors. I am guilty of this over the past few days in some of my exchanges.
My pride goeth before the fall.
Excerpt:
I genuinely, passionately, utterly believe we need measured, civil exchanges which is what I most seek. I don’t want to be intellectually lazy, either, so I want to hear from others. I did read the initial post that got me into this pickle but didn’t think much evidence supported the argument but that was me. Dialogue is the most foundational of needs in a society with 340+ million people, much less an even grander world.
Ill-advised retorts
The danger of defending one’s honor often outweighs the benefit
https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/ill-advised-retorts?r=7i07&utm
Cynthia Watson
Oct 27, 2024
My column is a personal reminder that actions create consequences, intended or not. I responded to someone in a chat group yesterday who posted about an author whose work I have not found compelling over a quarter century. I dismissed his argument, adding that I wondered whether people listened perhaps only because of his ethnic origin. I did not malign him or his ethnicity but I certainly made clear I did not think his prediction had much validity, based on what I have read over the years.
I got a response this morning calling me uncivil, if not racist and intellectually lazy. To say that stung, with the effort to write this column to explore various ideas and views, is definitely true. I acknowledge that as a professor, I often pushed people out of their comfort by stressing hypotheticals they likely would never have considered. I also acknowledge that I can definitely be tart with my words but I genuinely saw my initial response as neither racist of intent nor uncivil. I did not think I was lazy as I read the article but did not see evidence supporting it.
My second retort, unfortunately made in the wee hours out west before coffee, was definitely ill-advised as I should have let the matter go. But none of us like our reputations questioned by someone we think misinterprets our motivation. We tend—at least too many of us—to see our honor besmirched as if it were something cataclysmic rather than an exchange among a group discussing national security. My second response, thus, was surrendered the power to ignore something that I did not find compelling but that should have been my exit point. I was wrong determined to be right.
I now realize anew how harshly everyone on any political side is assessing others’s motivations, concerns about race, and every other attribute. That makes the need for listening, thinking, rethinking, THEN responding if you think it will advance the conversation rather than always having the last word. Pause is our superpower right now yet we often discard it.
Put another way, as the one and only Susan the Dog Whisperer Extraordinaire teaches us all, positive reinforcement means responding to something. By doing so leads to a greater probability of an action being repeated rather than deterring the behavior. We tend to focus on deterrence as a concept but what does a sharp retort really advance? I forgot that long-known lesson so I failed on that score this morning.
I genuinely, passionately, utterly believe we need measured, civil exchanges which is what I most seek. I don’t want to be intellectually lazy, either, so I want to hear from others. I did read the initial post that got me into this pickle but didn’t think much evidence supported the argument but that was me. Dialogue is the most foundational of needs in a society with 340+ million people, much less an even grander world.
So, I welcome your thoughts, criticisms, and extended questions on any topic we discuss. I thank you for your time on this Sunday in late October. Thank you to those who read and subscribe. Without you, I would shut this down for lack of meeting its purpose.
Be well, vote, and be safe. FIN
18. The Kims Are Coming – OpEd
I am not a fan of the Ron Paul institute. But this offers an important perspective of how some in the world (and those who align with Ron Paul Institute) view US hypocrisy.
The Kims Are Coming – OpEd
eurasiareview.com · October 27, 2024
After a few cat and mouse days of Defense Secretary Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin’s denials, the Pentagon finally yesterday affirmed that there was evidence of a North Korean military presence in Russia. Asked what they were doing in Russia, Austin replied, “What exactly they are doing? Left to be seen. These are things that we need to sort out.”
For days, South Korea (no conflict of interest there) and Ukraine (nor there) had been claiming that thousands of North Korean soldiers had swooped in to rescue a beaten and bloodied Russian army from certain defeat at the hands of Ukraine (which has lost nearly a million men at arms in the nearly three year war). As the Russian army accelerates its pace, burning through the last fortified towns in eastern Ukraine, the mainstream media continues – with a few reluctant but panicked exceptions – to push the “Russia is losing” narrative.
The added twist of thousands of “evil communists” from North Korea screaming across the Russian tundra (on horseback, no doubt) promises to add new plot lines to the drama concocted by the mainstream media and most of Washington, and indeed the usual suspects are biting furiously at the bait.
Take US House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael Turner. He is so outraged that there might be members of the North Korean military in Russia that he actually sent a letter to President Biden calling for war. “If North Korean military forces join Russia’s war against Ukraine,” Fox News reported him to say, “the US should consider the possibility of direct military action.”
Against whom? We are already involved in a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine. We are already directly involved in Israel’s seven-front war against its neighbors and Iran. Who does Chairman Turner think we should attack if North Korean troops are present in Russia? Russia? North Korea? China? All of them?
North Korea and Russia have just signed a treaty whereby their two militaries will more closely collaborate and even come to each other’s aid if one is threatened. While such an agreement may give Turner and the other neocons the vapors, it is nothing different than the mutual defense treaty the US has with its NATO partners and with many others on a bipartisan basis.
Treaties for me but not for thee? Is that the name of the “rules-based international order” game?
The hypocrisy runs even deeper. It is well-known and widely reported that NATO countries are training Ukrainian troops not only in NATO countries but inside Ukraine itself. So it’s absolutely fine for the US and its NATO partners to insert troops inside Ukraine to train its military to kill more Russians and to even operate sophisticated weapons systems inside Ukraine that the Ukrainian military could never operate on its own, but if Russia strikes up a deal with North Korea where the two armies can train together inside Russia, it’s a “red line” (as Chairman Turner wrote) that demands that we start WWIII.
It seems we are not sending our best and brightest to Congress.
What we are witnessing is the birth of a new narrative after some 500 Ukraine narratives have already collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Remember the two years of “Russia is losing” narrative? Well just this week NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Christopher Cavoli, said in an interview with the German Spiegel magazine that Russia would emerge from this conflict actually STRONGER than when it entered!
But of course they are losing…
So what to do? Just as the Hollywood writers do once a sit-com has run too many seasons and is playing itself out, plot-wise, insert a new character. Insert a new twist, to bamboozle the viewers and give them a new reason to keep watching the program. It’s funny but not funny, because the future of the world hangs in the balance. Just like the film “Idiocracy” has become a documentary in our absurd times, so has “Wag the Dog.” The military industrial complex with its Hollywood-like allies producing endless narratives to keep the gravy train rolling…
P.S. if anyone believes this whole insane and hysterical anti-North Korea narrative is not political…well I have a bridge in Brazoria, TX, to sell you…
eurasiareview.com · October 27, 2024
19. Israel’s espionage machine – cyber intelligence, moles and money
Israel’s espionage machine – cyber intelligence, moles and money
dailymirror.lk
28 Oct 2024 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Hassan Nasrallah (File Photo)
Ismail Haniyeh (File Photo)
Israel pays its spies very well, dishing out $50,000 to $100,000 each time, plus bonuses and gifts Israel has a formidable espionage machine. Mossad is its best known component, and has an annual budget of US$2 billion
Israel pulled off two stunning espionage coups in recent months – the killing of Hamas’s top political leader Ismail Haniye in the Iranian capital Tehran, followed by the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah militant organisation in Lebanon.
This was followed by the killing of Nasrallah’s successor when his house was destroyed in an aerial attack in Beirut, the Lebanese capital.
Israel has a formidable espionage machine. Mossad is its best known component, and has an annual budget of US$2 billion. But this highly efficient network consists of several other bodies, all working seamlessly to destroy Israel’s enemies.
Unit 8200 is a vital part of this espionage network, specialising in cyber espionage, collecting signal intelligence and code decryption, cyberwarfare and surveillance. Unit 8200 is also known as the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps. Its operatives are mostly very young, usually from 18 to 21, and they are skilled in hacking.
Hacking into phones and planting explosives in them has paid off handsomely in this clandestine war which Israel has waged for years.
In 1996, Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’ chief bomb-maker known as “the engineer,” responsible for killing dozens of Israelis, was killed in Gaza after his cell phone, packed with 50 grams of explosives, blew up as he answered a call.
After Israeli successes with this tactic, Hezbollah began using pagers. Anticipating this move, Israeli intelligence services created a pager company, resulting in explosive laden pagers which killed a number of Hezbollah operatives.
Apart from hacking and cyber espionage, Israel uses traditional methods such as moles, double agents and honeytraps. It looks likely now that the killings of Haniyeh and Nasrallah were carried out with the help of a mole.
There was a sensational development last week when rumours that Esmail Qaani, chief of Iran’s top unconventional warfare unit, known as Quds, has been arrested as an Israeli spy after he suddenly disappeared from public view.
Quds is part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (RGC), but specialises in unconventional warfare and military intelligence.
After weeks of speculation, it emerged that he had indeed been arrested and was being interrogated. Then came the news that he had suffered a heart attack during interrogation.
His present condition and whereabouts are unknown.
Some Iranian politicians, including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been saying for some time now that Israel has a mole at the highest levels of Iranian counter-espionage. Apparently, Qaani came under suspicion after the killing of Yaniyeh in a guesthouse in the outskirts of Tehran.
He was killed by a bomb planted under his bed. Security of the guesthouse and the surrounding area was Qaani’s responsibility.
He was also in Beirut and met Nasrallah the day the latter was killed.
Bizarre development
In another bizarre development, Israeli police and the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency say they have arrested a network of Israeli citizens spying for Iran who allegedly provided information on military bases and conducted surveillance of individuals.
The investigators claimed the network had been active for about two years. According to reports in the Israeli press, the suspects are accused of photographing and collecting information about Israeli bases and facilities, including the defence headquarters in Tel Aviv, known as the Kirya, and the Nevatim and Ramat David airbases.
The Nevatim base was targeted by Iran’s two missile attacks this year, and Ramat David has been targeted by Hezbollah. Investigators call this a serious security breach, and say the group had carried out 600 spying missions for Iran over two years.
An Israeli businessman accused of spying for Iran was arrested in September. According to investigators’ allegations he had travelled twice to Iran to discuss the possibility of assassinating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, and others key figures.
This shows that Israel is not having its way all the time, though it seems to be on the top of this espionage game right now.
It pays its spies very well, dishing out $50,000 to $100,000 each time, plus bonuses and gifts. Its spies from the Arab world and other third world countries are officials, civilian or military, earning meagre salaries; hence, the kind of money Israel can pay is very lucrative.
In the 1960s, Israel’s star spy was Eli Cohen, an Egyptian-born Jew who posed as a Syrian businessman and passed on vital information to Israel. He was discovered by the Syrians in 1965 and executed.
Cohen was Jewish, but Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian who tipped off Israel about the 1973 Yom Kippur War, wasn’t. Neither is Ismail Qaani.
Money can be a greater motivator than race or religion.
Israel’s way
But things haven’t always gone Israel’s way. Mossad killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in 2010 in a Dubai hotel room, but the operation was an international embarrassment to Tel Aviv because Israeli agents tracking Al-Mabhouh used fake passports.
Al-Mabhouh was wanted for killing two Israeli soldiers. He was also a key Hamas figure and procured arms from Iran.
His assassination attracted international attention in part due to allegations that it was ordered by the Israeli government and carried out by Mossad agents holding fake or fraudulently obtained passports from France, Germany and Australia. Dubai police, working with Interpol, established that many belonged to people holding dual citizenship who had no idea that their passports were being used for an assassination.
Mossad tried many times to assassinate Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat, and failed. They even sent a hypnotized Palestinian into Jordan to kill him. But this is a story for my next column.
20. Advisers Propose That Trump Give Security Clearances Without F.B.I. Vetting
I am curious if anyone thinks this is a wise idea.
But I suppose some would argue that the current system could be broken given who has received security clearances with alleged ties to Iran.
But is this the solution to that problem?
Advisers Propose That Trump Give Security Clearances Without F.B.I. Vetting
A memo circulating in Donald Trump’s orbit says that if elected he should use private firms to check appointees’ backgrounds and give them immediate access to classified secrets after taking office.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/trump-security-clearances-fbi.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm
A number of former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers — and Mr. Trump himself — have long viewed background checks for security clearances with deep suspicion.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
By Maggie HabermanJonathan Swan and Charlie Savage
Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage have written a series exploring the policy stakes of a second Trump administration.
Oct. 27, 2024
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A memo circulating among at least half a dozen advisers to former President Donald J. Trump recommends that if he is elected, he bypass traditional background checks by law enforcement officials and immediately grant security clearances to a large number of his appointees after being sworn in, according to three people briefed on the matter.
The proposal is being promoted by a small group including Boris Epshteyn, a top legal adviser to Mr. Trump who was influential in its development, according to the three people.
It is not clear whether Mr. Trump has seen the proposal or whether he is inclined to adopt it if he takes office.
But it would allow him to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks, potentially increasing the risks of people with problematic histories or ties to other nations being given influential White House roles. Such checks hung up clearances for a number of aides during Mr. Trump’s presidency, including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Epshteyn himself.
The proposal suggests using private-sector investigators and researchers to perform background checks on Mr. Trump’s intended appointees during the transition, cutting out the role traditionally played by F.B.I. agents, the three people said. Once Mr. Trump took the oath, he would then summarily approve a large group for access to classified secrets, they said.
Asked about the proposal, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, responded with an attack on Vice President Kamala Harris, saying she and Democrats “have weaponized the Department of Justice to attack President Trump and his supporters” and that Mr. Trump would use “the full powers of the presidency” to build his administration starting on Inauguration Day.
A number of Mr. Trump’s advisers — and the former president himself — have long viewed background checks for security clearances with deep suspicion.
They believe that the process is designed to make challenges to outcomes difficult, and that personal pieces of information submitted during the vetting can be disseminated later for damaging results. Mr. Trump has long railed about the F.B.I. being part of a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine him.
But a change that would allow a president with a record of flouting norms and rules for the handling of classified material to further sidestep existing guardrails would raise new questions about the adequacy of the system protecting national security secrets.
It is not clear what positions the altered system would cover, but the people familiar with the proposal said it appeared to apply to a large number of potential Trump appointees in a second administration.
Mr. Epshteyn, who was indicted earlier this year in Arizona in connection with a so-called fake electors scheme to upend Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss and has two prior arrests in that state, speaks with Mr. Trump multiple times a day and is one of his most influential aides. He is a lawyer and consultant who has helped recruit and manage the legal team that has been defending Mr. Trump in the four criminal cases filed against him since he left office. (Mr. Epshteyn reached a plea deal after a 2014 arrest, and in the other case, in 2021, three charges were dismissed and he pleaded guilty to one charge. Both convictions were later set aside.)
It is not clear whether Mr. Epshteyn would like to go into government, but his name is on at least one list compiled outside the official transition process as a possible White House counsel, along with other potential choices listed for the role, according to two people briefed on the matter. That list was prepared with Mr. Epshteyn’s input, according to a third person briefed on the matter.
Image
Boris Epshteyn, who was indicted earlier this year in Arizona, speaks with Mr. Trump multiple times a day and is one of his most influential aides. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Traditional federal background investigations for security clearances carry risks for potential appointees.
Lying on official application materials could lead to a criminal charge for making a false statement. Seeking a clearance also invites scrutiny that could turn up some other cause to open a criminal investigation. Potential Trump appointees would reduce or avoid those risks under the proposal, in which the privately assembled dossiers would apparently be seen only by the White House.
Security clearances have been a critical part of the government’s system for protecting national security secrets, which dates back to World War II and the early Cold War. Background investigations for clearances are intended to turn up hidden foreign conflicts or personal problems that could reveal that applicants are a security risk because they could be susceptible to blackmail by foreign spies or are otherwise untrustworthy.
The process is grounded in executive orders and memorandums — not federal statutes enacted by Congress — and the Supreme Court has said that presidents have ultimate authority over decisions about sharing and restricting national security information as part of their constitutional role as commander in chief of the armed forces.
Updated
Oct. 27, 2024, 11:20 p.m. ETOct. 27, 2024
Under the traditional system, when officials or contractors need access to classified information to do their jobs, they are considered for security clearances that would entrust them with access to secrets of various levels of sensitivity, from confidential to top secret. The rigor of the scrutiny increases based on how high the clearance’s level would be.
Many agencies investigate their own nominees, and sometimes basic vetting, including for employees of contractors, has been outsourced to private firms which then provide dossiers to the sponsoring agencies. But under a memorandum of understanding between the White House and the F.B.I., the bureau conducts background investigations for people named to the White House staff.
Starting with information provided by applicants in their clearance application forms, agents check law enforcement databases and interview people who know them in search of red flags. They look at any criminal conduct; psychological conditions and personal behavior; alcohol or substance abuse; foreign contacts; personal finances and similar matters.
If initial checks uncover no problems, people can be granted interim clearances to begin working with classified information while the investigation continues, though they can face greater restrictions on access to more sensitive data — especially more restricted forms of top secret information — until they receive permanent clearances.
Across the government, the findings of background checks are shared with the sponsoring agency, which makes the final decision. And when a background check uncovers evidence of a potential crime, it can lead to a criminal referral for further investigation.
But presidents subjecting their appointees to the FB.I. vetting process is a norm, not a legal requirement. As a matter of constitutional law, there is nothing to stop a president from cutting out the F.B.I. and granting a clearance to access classified information to anyone, based on his or her own discretion.
Like many other aspects of Mr. Trump’s first term and plans for a second term, the proposed move to do so for his appointees would exploit the gap between legal limits and traditional norms of presidential self-restraint.
A number of Mr. Trump’s appointees faced delays and roadblocks in getting clearances in his administration.
In addition to Mr. Epshteyn, who failed to get a clearance during a brief White House stint in 2017 before leaving the post, many aides worked with temporary security clearances for more than a year because they could not get permanent clearances approved. Others eventually left the government, too. (The Trump campaign said earlier this year that Mr. Epshteyn’s clearance issue, which was never clarified, was “resolved,” but provided no further details).
Image
Under a memorandum of understanding with the White House, the F.B.I. has been responsible for conducting background investigations for people named to the White House staff.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
Mr. Kushner, who played a variety of roles including as an envoy to the Middle East brokering deals to get Arab states to recognize Israel, went through months of questions over his background check for reasons that were never publicly disclosed. Finally, in 2018, Mr. Trump overrode the normal process and ordered the government to grant him a clearance.
In 2019, a manager in the White House’s Personnel Security Office told a House committee that senior Trump administration officials granted security clearances to at least 25 officials and contractors whose applications had been denied by career employees for “disqualifying issues” that could put national security at risk. One of them appeared to be Mr. Kushner.
Mr. Kushner’s allies have claimed that the process was an attempt to damage Mr. Trump by extension.
There are other aides who have been investigated along with Mr. Trump over the past four years who might struggle under the current process if Mr. Trump wants to bring them into the government.
Among them are Walt Nauta, Mr. Trump’s personal aide, who was his co-defendant in the since-dismissed classified documents case, and Peter Navarro, who was Mr. Trump’s trade adviser and recently finished a federal prison sentence stemming from obstructing a congressional subpoena.
Another former White House adviser who is close to Mr. Trump, Stephen K. Bannon, is set to be released from prison in the coming days. He was also imprisoned after being convicted of contempt of Congress.
Mr. Kushner has said he does not plan to return to government. But if he changes his mind, the career officials handling security clearances inside the U.S. intelligence community under the current system would have to contend with the implications of the nearly $3 billion he raised for his investment firm from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Other supporters of Mr. Trump have proposed overhauling the system for vetting security clearances.
One came from the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” a policy program developed by a consortium of conservative think tanks to offer Mr. Trump ideas should he win the presidency.
The project proposed that the White House’s National Security Council — run by the president’s national security adviser — should be authorized to adjudicate internally whether its own staff receive security clearances, with investigators who “work directly for the N.S.C. and whose sole task is to clear N.S.C. officials.” (The Trump campaign has disavowed Project 2025, and a top Trump transition official said that its authors would not be involved in any transition.)
In December, the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank run by Mr. Trump’s former head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, published a policy paper calling for giving the president and his top appointees direct control over granting security clearances.
The paper said that it must be made “crystal clear that agency heads may grant, suspend or revoke security clearances — notwithstanding the recommendations of subordinates.”
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 28, 2024, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Some Trump Advisers Are Seeking End To F.B.I.’s Security Checks on Appointees. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, U.S. Politics, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Council, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner
21. Persuade, Change, and Influence with AI: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in the Information Environment
PSYOP becomes more and more sophisticated with the use of AI and we continue to fall behind because of our fears and ignorance of PSYOP and all things related to "influence" in the military and national security ecosystem.
Excerpts:
The risks of ignoring the AI-driven psychological warfare tactics employed by Russia and China are not just theoretical—they are already unfolding. As the operational environment continues to evolve, adversaries will continue to exploit AI to destabilize democratic systems, manipulate public opinion, and undermine US influence on the global stage. The cost of inaction is severe, as AI accelerates the scale and sophistication of disinformation campaigns in ways we are only beginning to grasp. Failure to address these tactics could lead to a strategic imbalance that weakens the United States, leaving us vulnerable to further erosion of trust in our institutions and a diminished ability to project influence and reinforce stability across the globe.
The US military cannot afford to lag behind in this critical dimension of the information environment. To preserve our national security, we must adapt now. This requires not just policy updates, but a comprehensive approach that includes advanced training, strategic AI integration, and rapid deployment of AI-enhanced operations. By embracing AI as an active component of our psychological warfare capabilities, we can outpace our adversaries, address the capacity and bandwidth issues psychological operations forces face across the globe, and be better prepared to safeguard the information environment from adversarial malign influence. This is not a future challenge—it is a present-day battle, and the stakes could not be higher.
Persuade, Change, and Influence with AI: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in the Information Environment - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Austin Coombs · October 25, 2024
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US adversaries are weaponizing artificial intelligence to unleash a new wave of psychological warfare. Russia, through its troll factories and bot farms, has adopted a new AI-driven asymmetric warfare strategy, using generative models to amplify disinformation efforts on an unprecedented scale. A striking example was the AI-generated image of a false Pentagon explosion, which caused a rapid and dramatic (albeit temporary) drop in the US stock market. This incident highlights the catastrophic potential of AI-driven propaganda to destabilize critical systems, making it imperative for the United States to adapt. While the Department of Defense’s AI Adoption Strategy is a step forward, gaps remain in training US forces to fully harness AI for information warfare and to counter these evolving threats, particularly those from Russia and China.
Russia is using AI to enhance its disinformation campaigns, particularly through the evolution of bot accounts that now produce more human-like and persuasive content. Ahead of the coming November US presidential election, Russian actors have sought to leverage AI to enhance the scope and scalability of their influence operation efforts, some of which specifically aim to shape public opinion toward candidates, sway US electoral outcomes, undermine public confidence, and sow discord both within the United States and globally. The integration of AI has allowed Russia to monitor the information environment in real time, enabling rapid adaptation of disinformation tactics.
China’s use of AI in psychological warfare has become a key element of its strategy to shape regional and global narratives, amplifying its influence across the world. By leveraging AI to create deepfakes, automate social media bots, and tailor disinformation to specific audiences, China has enhanced its capacity to manipulate public discourse. This strategy extends beyond mere online influence; China’s AI capabilities enable large-scale cyber-enabled operations, as seen in coordinated disinformation campaigns targeting Western audiences. China’s “cognitive domain operations” merge AI with psychological and cyber warfare, aiming to deter US intervention in future conflicts or polarize American society, presenting an ever-growing challenge to global stability.
The Dangers of Doing Nothing
Failing to act against adversarial AI-enhanced information warfare poses significant risks. Russia’s and China’s ability to leverage AI to amplify their propaganda and disinformation campaigns threaten to undermine US and allied efforts across the globe. If unchallenged, this technological edge could enhance adversarial aims to destabilize regions, influence elections, and manipulate public opinion with unprecedented effectiveness. The cost of inaction is high, potentially leading to a strategic imbalance favoring adversaries that are adept at exploiting AI for malign purposes. Imagine a scenario where Russian and Chinese AI-driven disinformation campaigns go unchecked. The flood of false narratives could have devastating effects by eroding public trust in democratic institutions, creating confusion and division. In such an environment, the United States’ ability to project influence and reinforce stability in regions across the globe could be severely diminished. The stakes are high, and the need for a proactive response is urgent.
Enhancing Training: Adapting to AI Integration
The training focus for US military personnel, particularly psychological operations soldiers, needs to adapt to the evolving technological landscape. Soldiers must be educated on the current AI tools available and understand how these tools can then assist in analyzing the operational environment, speeding up analysis, generating content, and addressing risk concerns for commanders. Increasing AI literacy is the first step. Soldiers should understand the basics of AI, its capabilities, and limitations. This foundational knowledge is crucial for effectively integrating AI tools into operations. Training programs should include hands-on experience with AI tools, allowing soldiers to practice using these technologies in realistic scenarios. Education on the ethical implications of AI use in military operations is also essential to ensure compliance with legal and moral standards. Given the rapid pace of AI development, training programs must emphasize continuous learning and adaptation to keep pace with new advancements.
AI-Enhanced Psychological Operations
Integrating AI tools into military operations, particularly in the realm of information warfare, offers several key advantages that can enhance US military capabilities and enable psychological operations soldiers to counteract adversarial information campaigns. These advantages include enhanced analysis, speed and efficiency, scalability, and risk mitigation. AI can analyze vast amounts of data from various sources to identify trends, sentiment, and potential threats. This capability allows psychological operations detachments and teams to gain a deeper understanding of the operational environment and develop more precision-based messaging efforts. Additionally, AI can generate content quickly and efficiently, which is vital in today’s increasingly fast-paced information environment.
Moreover, a major issue that psychological operations teams face is the expansion of their efforts across the entirety of their deployed areas of responsibilities. Army psychological operations capabilities are already in high demand by geographic combatant commands, theater special operations commands, and Department of State embassy country teams. Given the high demand from multiple organizations, detachments are required to break into smaller subunits to cover extensive geographic areas and critical missions, leading to substantial challenges in managing bandwidth and scalability. AI can help overcome these bandwidth and scalability issues by streamlining content production and distribution, allowing smaller teams to support wider mission objectives, cover more ground, and engage with multiple audiences without sacrificing speed or quality. This scalability is essential for countering widespread disinformation campaigns effectively when timing is usually a crucial factor in messaging effectiveness.
Risk management is also significantly enhanced by AI. AI can assess the potential impact of different messaging strategies, helping commanders to understand the risks and benefits associated with various courses of action. By simulating potential outcomes, AI can provide a clearer picture of the operational environment and the likely responses from adversaries and other audiences. Moreover, AI’s risk mitigation capabilities enable teams to derive actionable insights and recommendations, streamlining planning processes to better support their commands. This is predicated on the AI implementors being able to communicate the integration process to their commanders and policymakers.
Content generation is another critical area where AI can be beneficial, as it can be used to efficiently create authentic and realistic material rapidly enough to maximize impact. AI can generate high-quality content at scale, which is crucial for countering adversarial narratives and disseminating US messaging, enabling rapid responses to adversarial propaganda. Tools like natural language processing can create persuasive and contextually relevant content that resonates with target audiences. The speed at which it can do so is crucial in the fast-paced information environment, where timely interventions can make a significant difference.
Audience response testing is another area where AI can be invaluable, primarily due to its speed and efficiency. Instead of relying solely on traditional methods, AI can simulate expected audience reactions and engagement metrics based on preloaded audience characteristics, allowing teams to refine messaging strategies before wider dissemination. While this approach may not replace the nuanced, experience-based insights of a psychological operations detachment, it significantly accelerates the process, enabling multiple iterations of a message to be tested and optimized more quickly than manual methods allow, thus improving the likelihood of effective engagement.
Training Proposal: Developing a Period of Instruction
To effectively integrate AI tools into military operations, a comprehensive training program is essential. This program should include essential instruction blocks covering the fundamentals of AI, basic knowledge of AI literacy, how AI and large language models works, various capabilities AI can provide, and, crucially, its limitations and concerns about its use. This foundational knowledge is critical for understanding how AI can be applied in military contexts. Hands-on training should be a significant component of the program. Practical exercises that allow soldiers to use AI tools in simulated scenarios will help them become familiar with the technology and understand how it can be applied in real-world operations. This hands-on approach ensures that soldiers are not just theoretically knowledgeable but practically skilled in using AI tools. Ethical and legal considerations should also be a key part of the training; soldiers must be aware of the potential risks and ensure that their use of AI complies with any strategy documents or policy updates that dictate ethical standards of AI usage.
Continuous learning is essential given the rapid pace of AI development. Ongoing education and training are crucial to ensure that soldiers remain proficient in using AI. This could include regular updates on new AI tools and technologies, as well as refresher courses to keep soldiers informed about the latest developments in AI. Specialized training for psychological operations personnel is also necessary, given their role in challenging adversarial narratives in the information environment. Focused training on how AI can enhance previously discussed specific tasks—information analysis, content generation, and audience engagement—will equip psychological operations teams with the skills they need to effectively integrate AI into their operations. The quality of this specialized training will be greatly enhanced if it can include real-world examples and case studies to illustrate the successful practical application of AI, as well as lessons learned from implementation and experimentation struggles.
Policy Updates for End-User Implementation
One of the critical solutions to countering adversarial AI advantage is updating US military policies to provide clear boundaries for the use of AI tools. Training on AI is fundamental, but its impact will only be maximized if the right policy framework is in place. Current policies often lack the specificity needed to guide military personnel in the ethical and effective use of AI technologies. By establishing comprehensive guidelines, the US military can empower its members to utilize AI in ways that support US goals and objectives while maintaining adherence to ethical standards. These policy updates should focus on defining acceptable uses of AI in various military operations, establishing protocols for the deployment and oversight of AI tools, and providing a framework for continuous evaluation and adaptation of AI policies as the technology evolves. Clear guidelines will not only enhance operational effectiveness but also ensure that AI use is responsible and ethical.
The risks of ignoring the AI-driven psychological warfare tactics employed by Russia and China are not just theoretical—they are already unfolding. As the operational environment continues to evolve, adversaries will continue to exploit AI to destabilize democratic systems, manipulate public opinion, and undermine US influence on the global stage. The cost of inaction is severe, as AI accelerates the scale and sophistication of disinformation campaigns in ways we are only beginning to grasp. Failure to address these tactics could lead to a strategic imbalance that weakens the United States, leaving us vulnerable to further erosion of trust in our institutions and a diminished ability to project influence and reinforce stability across the globe.
The US military cannot afford to lag behind in this critical dimension of the information environment. To preserve our national security, we must adapt now. This requires not just policy updates, but a comprehensive approach that includes advanced training, strategic AI integration, and rapid deployment of AI-enhanced operations. By embracing AI as an active component of our psychological warfare capabilities, we can outpace our adversaries, address the capacity and bandwidth issues psychological operations forces face across the globe, and be better prepared to safeguard the information environment from adversarial malign influence. This is not a future challenge—it is a present-day battle, and the stakes could not be higher.
Major Austin Coombs has fifteen years of experience in the United States Army, five of which have been as a psychological operations officer in the European theater. He is currently tasked with completing a study sponsored by the Army’s 5th Battalion, Special Warfare Training Group on how to use generative artificial intelligence to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of information operation professionals, staffs, and allied and partner forces. His next assignment will be as a company commander within 6th Psychological Operations Battalion.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Esercito Italiano, via Wikimedia Commons
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Austin Coombs · October 25, 2024
22. Proof that immigrants fuel U.S. economy can be seen in the billions they send back home
Graphics at the link.
Proof that immigrants fuel U.S. economy can be seen in the billions they send back home
https://www.upi.com/Voices/2024/10/25/immigrants-fuel-us-economy-billions-sent-home/9351729860299/
By Ernesto Castañeda, American University
Social scientists and analysts tend to concur that immigration -- both documented and undocumented -- spurs economic growth. Photo by Pixabay/Pexels
Donald Trump has vowed to deport millions of immigrants if he is elected to a second term, claiming that, among other things, foreign-born workers take jobs from others. His running mate JD Vance has echoed those anti-immigrant views.
Researchers, however, generally agree that massive deportations would hurt the U.S. economy, perhaps even triggering a recession.
Social scientists and analysts tend to concur that immigration -- both documented and undocumented -- spurs economic growth. But it is almost impossible to calculate directly how much immigrants contribute to the economy. That's because we don't know the earnings of every immigrant worker in the United States.
We do, however, have a good idea of how much they send back to their home countries -- more than $81 billion in 2022, according to the World Bank. And we can use this figure to indirectly calculate the total economic value of immigrant labor in the United States.
Economic contributions are likely underestimated
I conducted a study with researchers at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab at American University to quantify how much immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy based on their remittances, or money sent back home.
Several studies indicate that remittances constitute 17.5% of immigrants' income.
Given that, we estimate that the immigrants who remitted in 2022 had take-home wages of over $466 billion. Assuming their take-home wages are around 21% of the economic value of what they produce for the businesses they work for -- like workers in similar entry-level jobs in restaurants and construction -- then immigrants added a total of $2.2 trillion to the U.S. economy yearly.
That is about 8% of the gross domestic product of the United States and close to the entire GDP of Canada in 2022 -- the world's ninth-largest economy.
Immigration strengthens the United States
Beyond its sheer value, this figure tells us something important about immigrant labor: The main beneficiaries of immigrant labor are the U.S. economy and society.
The $81 billion that immigrants sent home in 2022 is a tiny fraction of their total economic value of $2.2 trillion. The vast majority of immigrant wages and productivity -- 96% -- stayed in the United States.
Remittances from the United States represent a substantial income source for the people who receive them. But they do not represent a siphoning of U.S. dollars, as Trump has implied when he called remittances "welfare" for people in other countries and suggested taxing them to pay for the construction of a border wall.
The economic contributions of U.S. immigrants are likely to be even more substantial than what we calculate.
For one thing, the World Bank's estimate of immigrant remittances is probably an undercount, since many immigrants send money abroad with people traveling to their home countries.
In prior research, my colleagues and I have also found that some groups of immigrants are less likely to remit than others.
One is white-collar professionals -- immigrants with careers in banking, science, technology and education, for example. Unlike many undocumented immigrants, white-collar professionals typically have visas that allow them to bring their families with them, so they do not need to send money abroad to cover their household expenses back home.
Immigrants who have been working in the country for decades and have more family in the country also tend to send remittances less often.
Both of these groups have higher earnings, and their specialized contributions are not included in our $2.2 trillion estimate.
Additionally, our estimates do not account for the economic growth stimulated by immigrants when they spend money in the United States, creating demand, generating jobs and starting businesses that hire immigrants and locals.
For example, we calculate the contributions of Salvadoran immigrants and their children alone added roughly $223 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023. That's about 1% of the country's entire GDP.
Considering that the U.S. economy grew by about 2% in 2022 and 2023, that's a substantial sum.
These figures are a reminder that the financial success of the United States relies on immigrants and their labor.
Ernesto Castañeda is a professor at American University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
23. The Emerging Age of AI Diplomacy
Excerpts:
Even in the face of such hedging, the United States should not impose a blanket ban on all sales of advanced AI chips to the Gulf. Many, if not most, emerging powers believe that they can successfully balance relationships with both the United States and China, and U.S. policymakers should generally restrain themselves from pressuring regional powers into making zero-sum choices. At times, U.S. policymakers will have to become comfortable operating in regions and sectors in which U.S. and Chinese influence overlap. And it would not serve U.S. interests if Washington were to drive billions of dollars of Gulf funds toward projects that accelerate China’s technological progress.
U.S. policymakers should thus move forward with their negotiations with the Gulf states over chip exports. But they should do so without any illusions about the regimes they are working with, the risks involved, or the chances that such collaboration will help reshape the political order of the Middle East. The Gulf states will not cut off ties with China except in narrowly scoped areas, and even then such decisions will always be open to renegotiation. Without serious efforts at mitigation in the form of sustained investments in both physical and cybersecurity, building massive data centers in non-allied countries increases the risks of intellectual property theft and misuse, especially if those centers host the weights of frontier models (the parameters that encode the core intelligence of an AI system). The United States will need to devote resources to monitor—and enforce—compliance for any deals it reaches. In the absence of independent verification, the United States should treat Emirati and Saudi assurances about their stewardship of U.S. technology with skepticism. And U.S. policymakers should strongly encourage American tech companies to build their largest and most advanced facilities in the United States.
In this emerging era of AI diplomacy, Washington will face similar challenges in one setting after another: it will have to control the proliferation of technologies that might have critical national security implications without kneecapping American corporations or driving potential partners into the arms of China. In their negotiations with the Gulf, U.S. policymakers should make sure that they set the right precedents.
The Emerging Age of AI Diplomacy
To Compete With China, the United States Must Walk a Tightrope in the Gulf
October 28, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Sam Winter-Levy · October 28, 2024
In a vast conference room, below chandeliers and flashing lights, dozens of dancers waved fluorescent bars in an intricately choreographed routine. Green Matrix code rained down in the background on a screen that displayed skyscrapers soaring from a desert landscape. The world was witnessing the emergence of “a sublime and transcendent entity,” a narrator declared: artificial intelligence. As if to highlight AI’s transformative potential, a digital avatar—Artificial Superintelligence One—approached a young boy and together they began to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The audience applauded enthusiastically. With that, the final day dawned on what one government minister in attendance described as the “world’s largest AI thought leadership event.”
This surreal display took place not in Palo Alto or Menlo Park but in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the third edition of the city’s Global AI Summit, in September of this year. In a cavernous exhibition center next to the Ritz Carlton, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman imprisoned hundreds of wealthy Saudis on charges of corruption in 2017, robots poured tea and mixed drinks. Officials in ankle-length white robes hailed Saudi Arabia’s progress on AI. American and Chinese technology companies pitched their products and announced memorandums of understanding with the government. Attendants distributed stickers that declared, “Data is the new oil.”
For Saudi Arabia and its neighbor, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), AI plays an increasingly central role in their attempts to transform their oil wealth into new economic models before the world transitions away from fossil fuels. For American AI companies, hungry for capital and energy, the two Gulf states and their sovereign wealth funds are tantalizing partners. And some policymakers in Washington see a once-in-a-generation opportunity to promise access to American computing power in a bid to lure the Gulf states away from China and deepen an anti-Iranian coalition in the Middle East.
They should temper their expectations. Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s economic and political relationships with China are more robust than ever, and that is unlikely to change. Although the Gulf states are eager for advanced AI chips that for now only the United States can provide, they also have strong and enduring incentives to hedge their bets, playing the major powers off against each other to extract concessions. When appropriate, the United States and its tech companies should cooperate with the Gulf states on AI. But they should do so within limits and with safeguards—and without deluding themselves that doing so will bring a lasting strategic realignment in the Gulf.
BRIDGING THE GULF
The two Gulf states’ interest in AI is not new, but it has intensified in recent months. Saudi Arabia plans to create a $40 billion fund to invest in AI and has set up Silicon Valley–inspired startup accelerators to entice coders to Riyadh. In 2019, the UAE launched the world’s first university dedicated to AI, and since 2021, the number of AI workers in the country has quadrupled, according to government figures. The UAE has also released a series of open-source large language models that it claims rival those of Google and Meta, and earlier this year it launched an investment firm focused on AI and semiconductors that could surpass $100 billion in assets under management.
U.S. technology companies have eagerly reciprocated this interest. The infrastructure required to train the latest generation of AI models uses vast amounts of energy, capital, and land—three things the Gulf states have in abundance. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has talked with investors in the UAE about multitrillion-dollar investments in chips and data centers, and state-backed Emirati firms participated in OpenAI’s recent round of fundraising. Top executives at the semiconductor giants Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung have floated the idea of building factories in the UAE. Amazon announced a $5.3 billion investment for data centers in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, and the AI startup Groq has partnered with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Aramco to build a huge AI data center in the country. Microsoft, meanwhile, has invested $1.5 billion in the UAE’s leading tech company, G42, in a deal that will help Microsoft expand its business in emerging economies and give G42 access to Microsoft computing power.
Where American AI companies see a commercial opportunity, some policymakers in Washington see a strategic one: access to U.S. computing power could be an important carrot to draw countries away from a rapidly expanding Chinese technological ecosystem. The United States wants to shore up its relationship with the world’s largest oil exporters and deepen an anti-Iranian coalition in the Middle East. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are increasingly influential in the region and beyond—in 2023, for example, the UAE announced $45 billion in investments in Africa, far surpassing Chinese expenditures there that year. It is in Washington’s interests that Gulf actors invest their vast sums of capital in U.S. technology companies rather than Chinese ones.
Washington has a good deal of leverage over these technological partnerships because exporting the advanced chips used in AI data centers requires licenses from the U.S. government, which has been slow-walking approvals for large-scale sales for months while it debates what conditions to attach. If the U.S. government doesn’t greenlight these licenses, some fear, China might soon offer an alternative. At the AI summit in Riyadh, the subject of U.S. export controls was a regular conversation starter. Google and Microsoft had the most prominent booths by the entrance, but the Chinese firms Alibaba and Huawei were not far away, their booths stationed in an adjoining room around the corner—a tangible reminder of the Chinese options that may be available to the Gulf states if Washington adopts a more restrictive approach.
HEDGING THEIR BETS
Even though the United States has an economic and geopolitical opportunity in the Gulf, there are also significant risks to offshoring major clusters of advanced AI chips to authoritarian regimes with elaborate surveillance systems, an appetite for military adventurism, and expanding ties to China. Lawmakers and Pentagon officials have expressed concern that Chinese companies linked to the People’s Liberation Army could access those chips through data centers in the Middle East as a means of skirting U.S. export controls that have sought to restrict China’s access to cutting-edge AI technology.
More broadly, if AI systems soon gain the potential to drive explosions in economic growth, design new synthetic bioweapons, or develop impressive new cyber-capabilities, they may disrupt the global balance of power. If that proves to be the case, then the infrastructure that underpins frontier AI systems—in particular, the massive data centers where these models will be trained and hosted—should not be offshored lightly. As the former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner put it in a widely circulated memo: “Do we really want the infrastructure for the [next] Manhattan Project to be controlled by some capricious Middle Eastern dictatorship?”
The UAE in particular appears to have made serious efforts to assuage these concerns, going out of its way to portray itself as a responsible steward of American AI technology. According to public reporting, the UAE has pledged that it will lock down its data centers, stripping them of Chinese hardware that might have backdoors, screening customers and workers, and monitoring how buyers use their chips. Under U.S. pressure, G42, which is chaired by the Emirati national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, divested from Chinese firms and stripped out its Huawei technology as part of its deal with Microsoft. Last month, partly in response to these efforts, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a rule that could ease the shipment of AI chips to the Middle East.
The UAE has declared that it seeks a “marriage” with the United States founded on AI. But U.S. policymakers should understand that any such marriage is unlikely to be monogamous. Saudi Arabia and the UAE both have powerful incentives to hedge their bets, given American domestic political instability and the enduring, if eternally frustrated, U.S. desire to “pivot” to Asia. China is Saudi Arabia’s largest oil customer and trading partner and the UAE’s top non-oil trading partner. It does not hector either state about its human rights abuses or regional activities. Chinese-made drones are among the UAE’s tools of choice for its covert campaigns in Sudan, and earlier this year the Chinese and Emirati air forces held joint exercises in Xinjiang, of all places. And even though G42 may have divested from Chinese firms, a new Abu Dhabi investment vehicle has taken over the management of G42’s Chinese-focused fund, and, like G42, the new vehicle is overseen by the Emirati national security adviser. At another conference in Abu Dhabi last month, Chinese and Emirati officials alike described the last few years as the “golden era” of Chinese-Emirati cooperation.
MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE
Even in the face of such hedging, the United States should not impose a blanket ban on all sales of advanced AI chips to the Gulf. Many, if not most, emerging powers believe that they can successfully balance relationships with both the United States and China, and U.S. policymakers should generally restrain themselves from pressuring regional powers into making zero-sum choices. At times, U.S. policymakers will have to become comfortable operating in regions and sectors in which U.S. and Chinese influence overlap. And it would not serve U.S. interests if Washington were to drive billions of dollars of Gulf funds toward projects that accelerate China’s technological progress.
U.S. policymakers should thus move forward with their negotiations with the Gulf states over chip exports. But they should do so without any illusions about the regimes they are working with, the risks involved, or the chances that such collaboration will help reshape the political order of the Middle East. The Gulf states will not cut off ties with China except in narrowly scoped areas, and even then such decisions will always be open to renegotiation. Without serious efforts at mitigation in the form of sustained investments in both physical and cybersecurity, building massive data centers in non-allied countries increases the risks of intellectual property theft and misuse, especially if those centers host the weights of frontier models (the parameters that encode the core intelligence of an AI system). The United States will need to devote resources to monitor—and enforce—compliance for any deals it reaches. In the absence of independent verification, the United States should treat Emirati and Saudi assurances about their stewardship of U.S. technology with skepticism. And U.S. policymakers should strongly encourage American tech companies to build their largest and most advanced facilities in the United States.
In this emerging era of AI diplomacy, Washington will face similar challenges in one setting after another: it will have to control the proliferation of technologies that might have critical national security implications without kneecapping American corporations or driving potential partners into the arms of China. In their negotiations with the Gulf, U.S. policymakers should make sure that they set the right precedents.
- Sam Winter-Levy is a Fellow in Technology and International Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Foreign Affairs · by Sam Winter-Levy · October 28, 2024
24. How to End the Democratic Recession
A long read. Graphics at the link.
The last two sentences are the money quote:
Scholars and policymakers understand what the political scientist Terry Karl once called “the fallacy of electoralism.” A democratic election is only a beginning. Without honest and effective governance, a capable state, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and a vigilant civil society, democracy will not deliver the economic growth, physical infrastructure, social services, public health, human rights, and safety and security that its voters expect. Helping democratically elected governments gain access to the financing, investment, training, and direct assistance they need to serve their people effectively remains a vital task of official aid agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, and of private foundations.
After a two-decade democratic retreat, the tide must now turn. Competitive elections are not the end of the story, but they provide the most promising and abundant opportunities to move in a positive direction politically. A concerted strategy of international engagement to support free elections could blunt the march of illiberal populism, strengthen civil societies, help restore democratic vitality in pivotal countries, and yield the largest harvest of democratic transitions since the global democratic recession began. Once democracy regains its momentum, even entrenched dictatorships will be under pressure. The alternative is a continued authoritarian drift toward a world of increasing polarization, repression, conflict, and violence. A world dominated by China, Russia, Iran, and lesser autocracies unburdened by concerns for human rights and the rule of law. A world hostile to the interests and values not just of the United States but of freedom-loving people everywhere.
Elections are opportunities to defend and renew democracy. They must not be squandered.
How to End the Democratic Recession
The Fight Against Autocracy Needs a New Playbook
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/how-end-democratic-recession-autocracy-larry-diamond
November/December 2024
Published on October 22, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Larry Diamond · October 22, 2024
On August 5, following weeks of mass student protests, a dictator fell in the world’s eighth most populous country. Amid wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the escalating danger of a wider conflict in the Middle East, and the twists and turns of the U.S. presidential race, the sudden resignation and flight into exile of Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, drew slight global attention. But the significance of her ouster could prove substantial. Hasina, the daughter of the independence leader and first president of Bangladesh, first served as prime minister from 1996 to 2001 and was elected to the office again in 2008. In three successive terms over the next 15 years, she ruled with mounting ruthlessness and resolution. She asserted personal control over the courts, prosecutors, government agencies, and the police, using them to silence the media, persecute her opponents, cow private business, and subvert the institutions and traditions that previously allowed for reasonably free and fair elections. By the time Bangladeshis voted again, in 2014, Hasina had so trampled on constitutional norms that most opposition parties chose to boycott the election, accelerating the country’s descent into autocracy and misrule.
Yet Bangladesh’s civil society refused to remain silent in the face of a rising tide of arrests and disappearances. In January 2024, as Hasina prepared to glide into a fourth consecutive term in another unfair election (which also was boycotted by the opposition), popular protest intensified. In June, the dam burst.The trigger was a seemingly modest issue: the reinstatement of a quota system for government jobs that was seen to favor Hasina’s political base. Bangladeshi university students took to the streets, angered by the prospect of a spoils system. Hasina responded with repression: her party’s shock troops joined the fray, and she sent in the police and the military. Over the next two months, hundreds of civilians were killed, more than 20,000 injured, and more than 10,000 arrested. The government’s brutality turned a limited protest movement into a nationwide civil disobedience campaign against tyranny and corruption. In the end, after losing the support of the military, Hasina fled to India.
One could argue that bringing down a dictator was an easier job in Bangladesh than it would be elsewhere. No Bangladeshi party or movement had institutionalized ideological and political control over the state, security apparatus, and economy the way revolutionary communist parties had in China, Cuba, and Vietnam, the ayatollahs had in Iran, or, to a lesser extent, Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian socialist” movement had in TVenezuela. But many of the autocratic regimes that have emerged in the past decade have followed a path similar to Bangladesh’s. Corrupt leaders have hollowed out democratic institutions and established authoritarian rule behind the façade of multiparty elections. Following a common playbook, they wholly dismantled democracy in El Salvador, Hungary, Nicaragua, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Elsewhere, similar tools have been used to degrade democracy, although whether those countries crossed the line into autocracy is debatable: recent examples include Georgia, Honduras, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Illiberal practices have also eroded the quality of democracy and the public’s support for it in Botswana and Mauritius, Africa’s oldest multiparty systems. Corrupt and domineering ruling parties in Mongolia and South Africa have overseen democratic declines, although recent elections dealt severe setbacks to both. In Mexico, by contrast, a move by Andrés Manuel López Obrador as outgoing president could further erode the country’s precarious rule of law. A new constitutional amendment requires all judges to be popularly elected, undermining the independence of the judiciary and putting the future of the country’s democracy at risk.
Most of these countries are not full-blown dictatorships. Rather, they have joined (or gravitated toward) the ranks of what the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way term “competitive authoritarian” regimes. The description encompasses a core contradiction. The ruling elites will not commit to the constitutional norms that allow for free elections and government accountability, but the people will not tolerate the complete elimination of individual freedoms, civic pluralism, multiparty elections, and at least the possibility of parties’ alternating in power. Many countries, such as Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania, have lingered in this halfway house for some time. Others, such as Pakistan and Thailand, do so with the added complication of militaries that hold political veto power.
The global outlook for democracy is clouded, if not downright disheartening. Political extremism, polarization, and distrust have been on the rise even in long-established liberal democracies, and doubt about the democratic commitment of one of the two major-party candidates is a major issue in the U.S. presidential race this year. But there are glimpses of sun behind the clouds. Bangladesh is not the only example. The struggle for freedom escalated in Venezuela after a stolen election in July, with the opposition presenting overwhelming evidence of its landslide victory. Thailand’s military-backed regime has faced a deepening crisis of legitimacy since courts blocked the winner of the May 2023 parliamentary elections from taking power. Turkey’s electoral autocracy looks increasingly worn and fragile, with the country’s long-ruling strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barely eking out a victory over a colorless opponent in the May 2023 presidential vote. Last year as well, stunning opposition victories in national elections brought a restoration of democratic practices in Poland and a historic extopportunity in Guatemala to move past the country’s troubled history of autocracy and corruption. And the past two election cycles in Malaysia suggest a shift toward democracy after six decades of what seemed a stable competitive authoritarian regime: a makeshift coalition ended the six-decade rule of the Barisan Nasional coalition in 2018, and voters then made the principal opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, prime minister in 2022.
In other words, today’s autocrats are not invincible. Many rely on elections, albeit deeply flawed ones, to maintain an air of legitimacy. But this means they can be defeated. Determined domestic opposition fronts, backed by the larger community of liberal democracies, can reverse the trend of global democratic backsliding. To be successful, they will need to grapple with the drivers of the antidemocratic trend, weaken the pillars that prop up the fake democracy of authoritarian populism, and apply the lessons of previous successful campaigns against authoritarian rulers. Just as autocrats employ a common set of tools to acquire and maintain power, their opponents must start following the playbook for democratic change.
DEMOCRACY IN RETREAT
Democracy’s global momentum peaked soon after the end of the Cold War. For the first time in history, systems in which people could choose and replace their leaders in free and fair elections became the predominant form of government. By 2006, about three-fifths of all countries met this standard. Since then, democracy and freedom have been in steady retreat. For 18 consecutive years, the nonprofit group Freedom House—which tracks changes in political rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law and assigns countries and territories an annual “freedom score” on a scale of zero to 100—has counted more countries losing freedom than gaining it. Often, the difference is a two-to-one ratio or worse. The Swedish-based project V-Dem has identified a similar but somewhat more recent unfavorable trend.
The decline has been global. Average levels of democracy, as measured by Freedom House, V-Dem, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, have dropped in every region of the world since 2006.The changes have not always been disastrous, but they have been remarkably broad and persistent. Of the 22 sub-Saharan countries that shifted significantly on democracy scales during this period, 18 underwent declines, and of the four that improved, three—Angola, Gambia, and Zimbabwe—simply became less abusive autocracies. Globally, those three are outliers; most autocracies, including Cambodia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Myanmar, and Russia, have become significantly more repressive.
The euphoria that attended the heady expansion of democracy from the mid-1970s to the first few years of the twenty-first century—the “third wave” of democratization—now seems a distant memory. A few places, such as Armenia, Bhutan, Colombia, Malaysia, Moldova, and Taiwan, have seen notable gains in recent years, but genuine democratic breakthroughs have been few and far between. Iran’s government crushed one popular rising, the Green Movement, in 2009 and another, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, in 2022. All the Arab Spring uprisings were ultimately suppressed save for the one in Tunisia, where a fledgling democracy stumbled on until the president moved to dismiss parliament and the prime minister in 2021. The same year, Myanmar’s military ended an experiment in semi-democracy when it overturned the results of the country’s 2020 elections, closed parliament, and arrested senior civilian officials, plunging Myanmar into a bloody conflict.
AUTOCRATIC ENABLERS
What sent the world spinning toward autocracy? The answer varies from country to country, but certain factors stand out. To some extent, a course correction may have been inevitable as democracy spread to many countries that lacked the economic base and rule-of-law institutions to control corruption and deliver sustained progress. Yet this does not explain every case of backsliding; some very poor countries, such as Liberia and Malawi, have largely managed to keep their democratic gains.
Another driver is the series of reputational blows that liberal democracy suffered in the first decade of the twenty-first century. First, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq tarnished the idea of promoting democracy by linking it to the use of military power to force regime change—to disastrous effect. Then, only a few years later, a global financial crisis destabilized many governments, including democratic ones. It had originated in the United States, a supposed model democracy, when the country’s mortgage industry came crashing down after a decade of government failure to rein in predatory practices.
It was not just democracies that sullied their own image; illiberal actors helped them along. China used its growing wealth, propaganda, technology, and mechanisms of covert influence to promote its authoritarian governance model and dim the attractions of open societies. The Russian government worked in similar ways to denigrate democracy and destabilize democratic institutions, such as by intervening in elections. After taking office in 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban crafted a deeply illiberal pseudo-democracy that appealed to far-right anti-immigrant and nationalistic forces around the world.
Today’s autocrats are not invincible.
At first, social media enabled citizens to circumvent autocratic states’ control of information and organize for democratic change. Although online platforms are still used for these purposes, their positive role has been overshadowed by the advance of authoritarian means of digital surveillance and repression and by the polarizing effects of social media algorithms, which autocracies can exploit to divide and demoralize democratic societies. Artificial intelligence is now beginning to supercharge these efforts.
The digital technology boom joined a snowballing set of global trends that undermined popular support for democracy and created fertile ground for the rise of illiberal populist parties. Dramatic increases in income inequality in both advanced and emerging economies meant soaring wealth for a small fraction of top income earners and economic stress for much of the middle and lower classes, which became pessimistic about the future and cynical about the parties and politicians who had failed them. Inequality then fed into political polarization, which was further intensified by the accelerating movement of diverse people, ideas, and cultures across borders and by campaigns for gender and racial equality that upset long-settled hierarchies of social status. To exploit the public backlash, politicians in many advanced democracies, particularly in Europe and the United States, framed large waves of immigration as a threat to economic health, social stability, and national character. Their rhetoric severely distorted reality, but it played to people’s fears.
These trends coincided with a historic shift in global power. From 1960 to 1990, the U.S. share of global economic output declined from two-fifths to around one-quarter, where it remains, and Europe’s share has shrunk since 1960 by roughly half. At its peak in the early 1990s, Japan accounted for nearly one-fifth of global GDP; now its share is just three percent. Meanwhile, China has risen to become the world’s second-largest economy, ranking behind only the United States, and India’s economy is now closing in on Germany’s and Japan’s. China and Russia have used corruption, coercion, and propaganda to sway and subvert open societies, and their militaries have cast long, alarming shadows in their respective neighborhoods. In sum, while Beijing and Moscow (and Tehran) bully their way into reshaping world politics, the advanced democracies, with their diminished economic and geopolitical standing, have a weakened hand and are playing it cautiously. The “unipolar moment” immediately after the Cold War, when autocrats made political decisions under the shadow of American power, is long past.
At a rally in Dhaka, Bangladesh, September 2024
Mohammad Ponir Hossain / Reuters
Then there is the human factor. Restraint in the exercise of power is not a natural tendency. This is why the framers of the first constitutional democracy, the United States, understood the need to check and balance power, following the Madisonian principle that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” “If you want to test a man’s character,” goes one aphorism, “give him power.” Unencumbered by strong constitutional guardrails, most men—and, like Sheikh Hasina and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi before her, some women—who get the opportunity fail the test.
Over the past two decades, critical constraints on human behavior have lifted. Ambitious politicians have observed the rhetoric and methods their peers abroad have used to dismantle democracy, piece by piece. These aspiring autocrats have learned from examples of success and acted on those lessons, emboldened by the inability of domestic and international actors to restrain them. Once, the diffusion of political ideas helped foster democratic transitions. Today, it facilitates democratic backsliding.
Furthermore, constitutions restrain rulers only if they are enforced. When these documents are embedded in norms, incentives, and expectations, violations are rare and tend to fail because powerful actors rise to reaffirm the constitutional order out of both conviction and self-interest in sustaining the rules of the game. But when severe political polarization generates a sense of existential risk—a fear that losing an election could mean the permanent loss of political power and even one’s livelihood and freedom—these dynamics change. A politician with sufficient skill and will to override constitutional norms can embark on the road to autocracy.
EXPOSING THE FRAUD
Today’s autocrats mainly come to power at the ballot box, and they remain in power while maintaining a façade of competitive elections. Of the roughly 30 countries that have lost their democracies since 2006, all but three (the Sahelian coup countries—Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) have followed this pattern. Holding votes gives autocrats a claim to legitimacy, but it also makes them vulnerable. The elections they stage may be deeply unfair, but the incumbent autocrat can still lose and be compelled to leave office. To restore democracy through elections, however, domestic defenders of democracy and their supporters abroad must be able to identify authoritarian populism and understand how it works.
First, authoritarian populists purport to defend “the people”—the true, virtuous majority—against a corrupt establishment that has hijacked power and exploited them. In this narrative, there are not just good and bad policies; there are good and evil people. The ruling elites and their allies are morally bankrupt and must be vanquished, even as some of those allies, especially in the business community, opportunistically throw in their lot with the populists. Drawing so stark a divide enables the populist contender to claim a mandate to persecute opponents and purge the civil service on coming to power. Resorting to that tactic explains another key feature: populists are anti-institutional. They disparage the existing economic and political institutions, even the constitution itself, as the rotten structures of a rotten elite. Then they dismantle institutional safeguards and weaponize state power.
Authoritarian populism is not a defense of the people but a fraud upon the people.
On a societal level, populists reject pluralism. They see no need to make space for multiple ways of thinking and believing. The country has one identity, and people who are different—by faith or ideology or national origin or sexual identity—are deviant and dangerous. They must be watched, controlled, or removed. Finally, populism is personalistic and hegemonic. Since leaders are the saviors of their countries against evil forces, they must be granted extraordinary unfettered power. Elections are no longer instruments of political accountability and constraint but rather plebiscites to revalidate leaders and their political monopolies.
Inevitably, an authoritarian populist regime becomes intolerant, xenophobic, and corrupt. More than its bigotry—perhaps even more than its violation of democratic norms—this corruption, drawn from a sense of moral entitlement to gorge on public resources, is its Achilles’ heel.
The key to defeating authoritarian populism is to expose its vanity, duplicity, and venality, to show it to be not a defense of the people but a fraud upon the people. This requires independent reporting to reveal corruption. It requires using, whenever possible, countervailing institutions—regulatory bodies, auditing agencies, the judiciary, the police, the civil service, and, if there is a significant opposition presence, the legislature—to disclose and curtail abuses of the public trust. Elements of civil society, such as bar associations, trade unions, student groups, and other professional and civic organizations, can be important allies in this cause. Resistance is more effective when mobilized early; the longer populist authoritarians hold on to power, the more they chip away at institutional constraints. One reason illiberal parties did not fully subvert democracy in Poland or, at first, in Mexico, unlike in Hungary, Turkey, or Venezuela, is that they did not win sufficient majorities in parliament or through a direct vote to amend the constitution. Enough judicial and other institutional independence remained to limit the authoritarian slide. That constraint was lifted in Mexico with the June election, when López Obrador’s party won enough seats in Congress to push through constitutional change.
HTURNING THE TIDE
Once the authoritarian project conquers the country’s institutions, resistance from within the state is no longer possible. Mass mobilization is required to defeat it. Success is much more likely if the democratic movement is peaceful and operates within legitimate institutional boundaries. Demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of nonviolent civil resistance may slow or halt the descent into authoritarianism—or even force an autocrat to flee, as seen in Bangladesh this year and in Ukraine after the Euromaidan protests of 2014. But the most promising route is still through the ballot box. Repeatedly over the past decade, in countries as diverse as Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Poland, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Zambia, and—yes—the United States, democratic elections and the enforcement of term limits have curtailed an authoritarian drift. In India in May, they eroded the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s iron grip on the parliament, which might diminish the party’s readiness to abuse power to stifle dissent. In Belarus, Hungary, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, opposition campaigns fell short, unable to overcome the obstacles posed by entrenched authoritarian regimes to free and fair elections. But the progress they made is notable. In Belarus’s case, the opposition candidate for president likely won the 2020 election, but the dictator Alexander Lukashenko declared patently false results.
Opposition mobilization has worked in earlier eras, too. Globally, the third wave of democratization was driven in part by opposition movements that overcame repression and fraud by documenting their electoral victories through independent vote tabulation at polling stations and by rallying mass protests. The first successful “color revolution” to bring about a democratic transition after a disputed election unfolded in the Philippines in 1986, followed by Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004–5, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005. In a few other cases, ruling autocrats were stunned by their electoral defeats but accepted the outcome and ceded power without the need for mass protests.
Both the earlier and more recent electoral victories for democracy share other important features. Opposition forces united behind a single electoral platform or, as in Poland last year, coordinated their parliamentary campaigns to avoid dividing the vote. In each case, the authoritarian ruling party was deeply unpopular, internally divided, or both. In some cases, external pressure from liberal democracies raised the costs of repression and encouraged defections by the elite. And the incumbents’ ability to cling to power by using blatant falsehoods and blunt force was constrained by independent media, divisions within the security forces, or the latter’s unwillingness to fire on their own people.
Voting in Diyarbakir, Turkey, March 2024
Sertac Kayar / Reuters
Successful campaigns against authoritarian populists have shared some basic messaging strategies. They craft broad political appeals to mobilize the largest possible electoral base, even courting voters who supported the autocrat in the past. They seek to unify the country, not divide it. Authoritarian populists thrive on and excel at polarization; their democratic opponents must undercut that cynical strategy. They must show empathy and humility, welcoming culturally, ethnically, and ideologically diverse segments of society to join the democratic cause. In Turkey, for example, the opposition’s astonishingly successful municipal election campaigns in 2019 and 2024 pursued a strategy of “radical love”—an explicit rejection of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s rhetoric of hate and division. Democratic aspirants, moreover, must call out the incumbent’s failures and must foreground issues that matter to ordinary voters, such as improving the country’s economic performance, ending corruption, and delivering services that will improve people’s lives. Their campaigns should recapture patriotism, emphasizing pride in the nation as a democracy. They should not be dour but rather present a confident vision of a better future. They should not be boring, either. A successful campaign is one infused with creativity, energy, passion, and even joy. Finally, as the political scientist Steven Fish has urged, those seeking to unseat an autocrat cannot be weak. They must project conviction, with forceful appeals to voters’ interests and values. They must show that strongman rule is not the only form of strong leadership.
External support is also critical. Lately, however, liberal democracies have been sitting on the sidelines as China and Russia stand behind autocrats who rig and terrorize their way to electoral victory, such as Lukashenko in Belarus in 2020, Emmerson Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe last year, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in July, or, in the case of Pakistan, as the military barred former Prime Minister Imran Khan from running for parliament in the February election. Amid heightened strategic competition with an emerging axis of autocracies that includes China, Russia, and Iran, powerful democracies, particularly the United States and major European countries, are hesitant to use all the diplomatic, informational, and economic tools at their disposal to support democratic change.
To reverse the global democratic slide, the liberal democracies must get back in the game. A test of their resolve is already underway in Venezuela, where the opposition has compiled official tallies from over 80 percent of polling stations to demonstrate that its candidate, Edmundo González, defeated Maduro in a landslide in the July presidential election. With the backing of China, erRussia, and Cuba, as well as the loyalty of the country’s military and security establishment, Maduro has brutally repressed protests demanding that he acknowledge the results and peacefully transfer power. Ending Venezuela’s authoritarian nightmare, which has already prompted more than a fifth of the population, some eight million people, to flee the country over the past decade, now requires an intense diplomatic effort. Brazil, the United States, and democracies in Latin America and Europe need to coordinate their efforts to persuade Maduro and his allies to accept the opposition’s offer of immunity from prosecution in exchange for a transfer of power. Negotiations require carrots and sticks. An international coalition must not only prepare to make painful concessions on amnesty (including shielding members of the Venezuelan regime from prosecution in the United States and assuring them safe passage abroad) but also threaten the elite with punishing sanctions on their foreign assets and with blocking family visas if they continue to resist the will of the Venezuelan people.
It is rare to encounter such a glaring and well-documented example of an autocrat facing electoral defeat and a broad, passionate societal aspiration for change. Venezuela is ripe for a democratic transition, and the world’s liberal democracies must do all they can to help it along.
FREEDOM REBORN
The challenges confronting democracy today are formidable. Authoritarian regimes have gone on the offensive to discredit and destabilize free societies. That they do so out of fear and concern for their own legitimacy does not make their actions any less dangerous. Making matters worse, hostile autocracies are increasingly acting in concert in a malevolent axis that features China, Russia, and Iran at the center, joined by Cuba, North Korea, and others. Protecting democracy against such forces will take strength, agility, and tenacity. The world’s liberal democracies must enhance their external defenses and cooperate more closely to maintain an economic, military, and technological edge that denies antidemocratic adversaries the power to dominate global politics and undercut their rivals.
At the same time, as underscored by the recent electoral gains of extremist populist forces on both the right and the left in France and Germany, democratic leaders cannot neglect their internal defenses. Emerging and mature democracies alike need strategies to counter the siren song of illiberal populism. Even a long-standing liberal democracy can turn toward autocracy if its government does not deliver effective policies to combat crime and terrorism, manage national borders, soothe societal divisions, and ensure broad access to economic opportunity and security.
In their global outreach, liberal democracies must push back against authoritarian campaigns of disinformation and covert influence. They must make bigger and better coordinated investments in development assistance to foster the economic growth and rule of law that make countries partners for democracy rather than captives of autocracy or failed states. And to win the war of ideas, they need to disseminate democratic values, lessons of success and failure, and sources of true information.
Once democracy regains its momentum, even entrenched dictatorships will be under pressure.
The possibility of a democratic transition cannot be written off in any country. Autocracies live in fear that what happened to seemingly impregnable one-party communist regimes in the late twentieth century will happen to them. At any time, a leader’s death or a sudden crisis can open an opportunity to sweep away an entrenched autocracy. But proponents of democracy can do more than simply wait. Competitive elections, even when they are not free and fair, are mobilizing events charged with opportunity for change. When those moments come, they must be seized not only by voters but also by other democratic countries.
Ahead of an election, democracies can provide opposition groups with the funding and training they need to conduct parallel vote tabulations. They can help political parties mount more substantive and effective campaigns. They can provide technical and financial assistance to election management bodies. They can help civil society organizations identify and counter disinformation and foreign interference on social media. They can send in independent observers during the campaign, the vote, and the vote count to fortify domestic monitoring efforts. If the opposition wins and the incumbent is reluctant to step down, democracies may need to offer concessions to the defeated autocrat in exchange for accepting the results—and potentially bring withering pressure down on the regime if it refuses.
When promising opportunities for democratization arise, as witnessed this summer in Bangladesh and Venezuela, they should command focused international attention. But the agencies and networks that support democratic transitions should also keep an eye trained on elections in the years ahead. In many countries that have edged away from democracy or have not yet fully secured it, voters will continue to face critical choices at the ballot box. Elections will provide opportunities to advance democratic progress in countries such as Armenia and Malaysia; to reverse democratic backsliding in Botswana, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Mauritius, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Serbia; to achieve meaningful democracy in Gambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Thailand; to dislodge autocracy in countries where the possibility is often dismissed, such as Zimbabwe; and to someday put countries torn apart by conflict, such as Ethiopia and Sudan, on a path to peace and political accountability.
Scholars and policymakers understand what the political scientist Terry Karl once called “the fallacy of electoralism.” A democratic election is only a beginning. Without honest and effective governance, a capable state, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and a vigilant civil society, democracy will not deliver the economic growth, physical infrastructure, social services, public health, human rights, and safety and security that its voters expect. Helping democratically elected governments gain access to the financing, investment, training, and direct assistance they need to serve their people effectively remains a vital task of official aid agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, and of private foundations.
After a two-decade democratic retreat, the tide must now turn. Competitive elections are not the end of the story, but they provide the most promising and abundant opportunities to move in a positive direction politically. A concerted strategy of international engagement to support free elections could blunt the march of illiberal populism, strengthen civil societies, help restore democratic vitality in pivotal countries, and yield the largest harvest of democratic transitions since the global democratic recession began. Once democracy regains its momentum, even entrenched dictatorships will be under pressure. The alternative is a continued authoritarian drift toward a world of increasing polarization, repression, conflict, and violence. A world dominated by China, Russia, Iran, and lesser autocracies unburdened by concerns for human rights and the rule of law. A world hostile to the interests and values not just of the United States but of freedom-loving people everywhere.
Elections are opportunities to defend and renew democracy. They must not be squandered.
- LARRY DIAMOND is William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
Foreign Affairs · by Larry Diamond · October 22, 2024
25. These days, we’re mostly Confederates: Antebellum strategy/policy ethos in 21st century America
Sun, 10/27/2024 - 10:16pm
These days, we’re mostly Confederates
Antebellum strategy/policy ethos in 21st century America
by
Martin N. Stanton COL, USA (Ret)
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/these-days-were-mostly-confederates-antebellum-strategypolicy-ethos-21st-century-america
Introduction:
Despite the recent Orwellian attempts to “unperson” him, Robert E. Lee remains an iconic figure in American military history. He was a great field commander who probably got more out of his outnumbered and ill-supplied tatterdemalion army than any other general of his time could have by sheer professional acumen and force of personality. However, with him (and every other senior Southern commander) that’s as far as it goes. He failed utterly in his responsibility to convince his political superiors of their folly in the strategic prosecution of the war. He also dissipated combat power he could not afford to lose in two futile invasions of the North. Worst of all, he allowed Jefferson Davis to tie the Army of Northern Virginia to the defense of Richmond and Petersburg like a staked goat for the implacable Grant to ultimately devour. By June 1864 he could see the writing on the wall. If he stayed in Grant’s gory embrace the Army of Northern Virginia would perish and with it the Confederacy. But he could not bring himself to forcefully challenge his civilian leadership who were willfully blind to the facts – or walk away from them. Instead, he soldiered on as nemesis approached.
The fact of the matter is that the South had terrible national level leadership and a national military strategy that was ill suited to achieve its policy goals. Worse, Southern military leadership was unquestioning in their acquiescence to the elite and insular civilian authority that was driving their cause to ruin.
You can see many similarities between the national level leadership of the Confederates and the civilian and military leaders in Washington today.
In my kinder moments, I compare most of the senior military leaders at the national level over the past two (+) decades to Robert E. Lee. Semi-tragic figures - honorable dignified individuals and competent practitioners of their craft, driven by duty to make the best of bad circumstances. But this is mitigation, not praise. Like Lee, they too have allowed their nation to be tied to losing strategies developed by obtuse elitist dilettantes with little protest.
Our Strategy and Policy community has lost a lot of ground
When we look at the military giants of the last century, G.C. Marshall, Eisenhower, King, Bradley etc. we see men of immense talent and leadership ability. However, if you’re going to compare them to the leaders of today you must first consider the overall milieu of strategy/policy decision making they operated in back then. A good deal of the reason they were successful is that they had educated, responsible and thoughtful civilian leadership with whom they could interact. To put it succinctly, General Marshall could be the Marshall he was because he had a Roosevelt, a Hull and a Stimson to work with.
This isn’t the case today. Today’s media, civilian administrative and political class, comes increasingly from an increasing insular elite that has little training in strategic affairs, is not inclined to learn and is becoming alarmingly divorced from reality in its outlook. The elites of Washington today resemble nothing so much as the Southern planter aristocracy in the lead up to the civil war. Those guys lived in a self-affirming bubble too; were focused on their own narrow interests and had a short strategic horizon. The impact of our 21st century political elite (planter) class on America’s national defense and security policy has been almost as ruinous.
Of Generals and Reindeer
It’s interesting to look at the criteria our WA DC political elite uses to choose our military senior leaders. In many ways their thought processes are like those of the Saami people of Lapland in choosing reindeer. They breed their reindeer for docility and strength. Any reindeer that looks too independent gets culled out. The Saami look for obedient, powerful sled pullers. Over time, our senior generals have become like reindeer, selected by the political elites for their professional competence but also for their ideological conformity and accommodating nature. George C. Marshall would unsettle today’s political elites and never be chosen for CJCS. A Robert E. Lee would probably be acceptable to them (although they’d snigger amongst themselves behind his back at his obsession with morally upright personal behavior). But mainly they’re looking for people who will do what they are told and who don’t ask many questions.
Or to use a phrase from Josiah Bunting’s insightful novel of the Army in the Vietnam War, The Lionheads, they are looking for “Cocker Spaniels that wouldn’t soil the rug”.
In turn, prolonged exposure to the political elite of this nation, their ethics, thought processes and priorities has had a corrosive impact on Senior Military leaders who serve in DC. Our political class and senior civilian policy makers all have largely the same resume of schools and rotational jobs within the beltway. Their view of the world comes from the faculty lounge and the bureaucracy. Their strategic horizons are limited to the 4-year US presidential election cycle. They’re also increasingly amoral and largely focused on their own interests. Washington and its politics have always had an unsavory side. But corrupt actors used to be the exception rather than the rule. It’s no accident that scandals like Fat Leonard and Army Generals trying to improperly influence promotion boards happen now. It also explains why we seem to be constantly beset by incoherent strategic / policy direction and scandal in the military’s senior leadership. Work with the DC Swamp for too long and you start to think like them.
One wonders what the ghost of General Marshall would say.
The Strategic Orkin Men
We’ve recently marked the third anniversary of the fall of Kabul and the collapse of the Afghan government. Lost in the grand guignol of recrimination, finger pointing and self-flagellation over why the campaign failed and whose fault it was, I never saw anyone ask the big question:
Was it a good idea to begin with?
I suspect if someone had gone to General Marshall and briefed him that the only way to keep the US safe from terrorist attack was to conduct a counter terrorism campaign on the other side of the world in perpetuity – necessitating the presence of a CT platform in one of the most remote nations on earth with tenuous lines of communication - he’d probably have taken the briefing stone faced. Afterwards he’d have made a note to himself that the originators of the briefing weren’t a good fit for the Strategic Plans division and would have them moved to another job.
September 11, 2001, was a dreadful day in American history and it damaged our psyche. Perhaps the worst outcome of it though was our resultant fixation with counterterrorism operations. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) occasioned a complete loss of strategic perspective on the part of Senior Leadership. September 11th was an outlier, and the USG did a pretty good job in closing the gaps in our intelligence and law enforcement cooperation that made the attack possible. The chances of another 9-11 happening quickly became remote.
At the national strategic level (where four stars reside), terrorists are like roaches, they’re a quality-of-life issue, not a strategic threat that imperils the larger well-being of the household (nation). Day-to-day you take reasonable precautions against roaches and periodically you have the exterminator come in and spray. Anything more is wasting assets on an issue that – in the big scheme of things – is not of strategic importance. Seeing the occasional roach on the floor is no reason to incur the cost and disruption of tent fumigating the house.
The single most inexcusable failure of strategic leadership in the first two decades of this century is that the senior military leaders of this nation passively allowed the post 9-11 political objective of “No-new-terrorist-attacks-on –the-US-homeland” to become a national strategic objective.
Think about that for a second.
Each of the two main political parties in the US is eager to blame the other for any new terrorist attack in the US. It’s the ultimate political “Gotcha!” As a result, regardless of who is in office the military is given the do-not-drop-glass-ball strategic objective of no new terrorist attacks on the US homeland. This has been going on since 2001. A whole generation of officers grew-up and made flag rank under this cannot-fail requirement.
No one challenged it.
Not a single four star said. You know, keeping tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan for a generation, spending trillions of dollars there and losing hundreds of people killed and wounded every year - all to keep a car bomb from going off occasionally somewhere in the USA is strategically unconscionable. Doing this cost us assets and opportunity. Our resources are finite and best used elsewhere or husbanded for likely future contingencies.
None of them pointed out the obvious to their political leaders; that terrorism is a tactic and cannot be defeated in the conventional sense. That is: A war on terror cannot be won, it’s a mitigation exercise. No one general in almost 20 years has gone to the president and told him that at a strategic level terrorism is not an existential threat to the United States and treating it like one wastes resources, tires the nation psychologically and prevents us from addressing other threats in a timely manner.
Our four stars – the best people our military produces, the guys responsible for sound military strategic advice to presidents and their administrations - allowed our planter elite political class to make counter terrorism a strategic imperative and prioritize it over the real strategic threats metastasizing before our very eyes. The GWOT became a 21st century version of the Petersburg lines, that the US was pinned to by the unsound priorities of its political (planter) class. A Marshall would have stood against this strategic malpractice. But his successors in the 21st century were not up to the task.
You want to see an effective national strategy being executed? I’m afraid you’ll have to go look at the Chinese. Since 9-11 the US has outsourced strategy to the Orkin man.
Stockholm Syndrome
In 2017 we had a change of national leadership. Our generals were ill-prepared for Trump. For sixteen years they had successfully managed conflicts for the Bush and Obama administrations. They had gotten comfortable with this. Victory was a chimera, but defeat didn’t seem possible so…just keep-on-keeping-on was what passed for strategic thought. Now suddenly here was this obnoxious Yankee reality TV host who wasn’t from the genteel administrative/political elite planter class they were used to and who was asking them all sorts of uncomfortable questions.
Trump questioned the whole strategic worth of the Afghan campaign. For the first time since 9-11 the generals had a president who was prepared to give them his political top cover to withdrawal from Afghanistan and reshape our counterterrorism strategy into something that was sustainable over the long term.
And in 2017, they talked him out of it. The generals pushed back. They could see that we had reached diminishing returns in Afghanistan but could not bring themselves to leave because of the artificial strategic imperative of “no-attacks-on-the –homeland” counter-terrorism that had been imposed upon them after 9-11 by the political class. It was a true Stockholm syndrome moment. Trump was telling them they could leave the bank vault (or the Petersburg lines – depending on which analogy you prefer) and they implored him to remain hostages.
This is where our 21st century military leaders differ from Robert E. Lee (and not in a good way). Lee inwardly despaired at Petersburg. He knew he was executing a ruinous strategy but couldn’t find a way out. Conversely, most of our 21st century senior military leaders in DC were fully on board with the GWOT program. In this, they resemble the perennial “Yes” men of the Wehrmacht, Generals Keitel and Jodl more than the tragic Lee. No strategy or policy was too bizarre or transparently unworkable for those guys either. It’s one thing to serve political masters who are strategic incompetents and do your best to make it work - trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit as it were. It’s quite another to convince yourself that chicken shit …tastes good!
Of course, things that can’t last, don’t. We were eventually forced to leave Afghanistan - just like the Confederates had to abandon Richmond and Petersburg. For Lee, it was a simple equation of military force. For our 21st century leaders it was a confluence of factors, but the end was the same.
We emerged from Afghanistan to find that while we spent decades chasing the skewed priorities of our elite planter class, our nations enemies have been running the tables on us. China has expanded its power and influence massively worldwide while we have been distracted, Iran as well, both in terms of their own combat power and that of their proxies. (Quick question – who would have had the Houthis interdicting maritime traffic on the Bab al Mandeb for a year in the face of the US Navy on their bingo cards four years ago?) The Russians made their move on Ukraine and all three are working together along with the North Koreans. The groundwork for all this was laid by 21st century political leadership with venal, parochial, self-interested 19 century mindsets, their fixation with the GWOT and senior military leader’s acquiescence to it over the past twenty plus years.
The statues of the Confederates may be gone, but in AD 2024 the Confederacy’s strategic heirs dominate Washington DC. Hooray for life’s little ironies.
About the Author(s)
Martin Stanton
Martin Stanton is a retired Army officer currently residing in Florida. The opinions expressed are his own and do not reflect any official DOD or USG position.
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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