Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"We must believe that we are gifted for something and that is the thing, at whatever cost, must be attained."

– Marie Curie

"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to cinur my own abhorrence."

– Frederick Douglas

"The strongest people are not those who show strength in front of the world but those who fight and win battles that others do not know anything about."

– Jonathan Harnsich

1. Winning Modern Wars through Adaptation by Mick Ryan

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, October 30, 2024

3. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 30, 2024

4. Prosecutor tells jury of 9/11-style plot thwarted in the Philippines

5. Philly Shipyard’s Transformation: How Hanwha’s Investment Is Driving U.S. Navy Readiness

6. American Diplomacy for a New Era

7. How the U.S. military lost a $250 million war game in minutes

8. Men under "downward pressure" (Army SOF and Green Berets)

9. Russia asks at UN meeting: If the West aids Ukraine, why can’t North Korea help us?

10. The Rise of Soldier-Influencers: Army Eyes Policy for Troops with Millions of Online Followers

11. Lebanon’s Military Can Barely Fight—Even After $3 Billion From the U.S.

12. Study Estimates North Korea’s $5.5 Billion Military Supply Deal with Russia in Ukraine War

13. Can the United Kingdom and France Team Up in the Third Nuclear Age?

14. Why I Hate Sun Tzu

15. Penetrate, Disintegrate, and Exploit: The Israeli Counteroffensive at the Suez Canal, 1973

16. Global military threats to U.S. are increasingly linked, Adm. Sam Paparo says

1. Winning Modern Wars through Adaptation by Mick Ryan

I still think anticipation is the key. Eliot Cohen and John Gooch wrote in their seminal work on military failure (Military Misfortune) that all military failures are a result of the failure to learn, the failure to adapt, and the failure to anticipate.

Excerpts:

The environment for the adaptation battle is comprised of four key elements. These all interact. Given how each interacts in different ways, over different time spans and have many different outcomes, I have used the term Adaptation Mesh to describe the overall environment for adaptation. ‘Morass’ just didn’t have the same ring to it! The elements of this mesh are:

1. Multilevel adaptation within military organizations.

2. Adaptation within friendly non-military organisations that conduct research or undertake manufacturing of military materiel.

3. Adaptation in allies and security partners.

4. Adaptation in the adversary system.

...

This has been the experience of both sides in the war in Ukraine since February 2022. As I have examined in my book, The War for Ukraine, where either side has invested in the intellectual rigor to investigate and implement new methods and organizational constructs to better absorb new technologies, they have generally been more successful on the battlefield. This demonstrates, again, the importance of an adaptive stance within military institutions. Such a posture allows them to respond to surprise and engage in the learning and improvement activities—at all levels—that are essential to winning battles and wars.

Military organisations are never at a steady state. Internally, there are always intellectual battles that bring together advocates for the past, present and future possible states of the institution. Added to this is the contemporary rapid pace of change in technology and in the strategic environment. This means that military institutions need to be adapting at different levels concurrently and doing so continuously.

At the same time that this is occurring, military and other national security institutions must be continually seeking to interfere with the capacity of adversaries to do the same. This is an ongoing adaptation battle and one that is central to the success of military institutions, and the nations they serve, in 21st century war and strategic competition.

The Future of War

Winning Modern Wars through Adaptation

Adaptation is THE critical contemporary and future capability for nations and their military organisations to win in war.

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/winning-modern-wars-through-adaptation?utm

Mick Ryan

Oct 31, 2024

∙ Paid

Ukrainian M1 tank with multiple adaptations including new armour and EW systems. Source: Army Recognition.

The ultimate test of military preparation and effectiveness does not end once a war begins. On the contrary, history strongly reflects the enduring phenomena of learning and implementing change during war as well…The requirement that a force must adapt while it is in combat is built into the inherent nature of war. Frank Hoffman, Mars Adapting: Military Change During War.

Throughout the war in Ukraine, the most important capability that Ukraine and Russia have employed and honed has been their ability to learn and adapt. This is an interactive fight because each side is learning based on the reactions of their adversary, and then finding and implementing solutions to improve their effectiveness against that enemy.

This process, which I have described as The Adaptation Battle, occurs at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. At its best, learning and adaptation takes evidence-based observations from the battlefield, shares them with the right analytical agencies, ensures the resulting lessons are then integrated into evolved training, doctrine, organisations, infrastructure, logistics and leadership models.

In many cases, adaptation is local or shared within a small community. And, in some cases, learning and adaptation does not improve the overall effectiveness of a military institution because the context or the situation has changed. There have been examples of all three approaches, from both Ukraine and Russia, since the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But adaptation also occurs at multiple levels within military institutions, it occurs before and during wars, and it also takes place in corporate entites who have links to, or interests in, military organisations. Finally, adaptation takes place within enemy organisations as well as within allies.

The aim of this article to explore this environment, and propose key steps that Western military institutions should be taking now to ensure they have the appropriate ‘adaptive stance’ at all levels within their organisations and with their interactions with external entities.

Why is Adaptation so Crucial?

Systemic adaptation is the mechanism for learning and combining technology, people and ideas in many different and new combinations at different levels within a nations’ warfighting effort. This permits the development of theories of victory, and strategies, that pose multiple dilemmas for an adversary – or group of adversaries - at the political and strategic levels as well as on the battlefield.

Adaptation is the mechanism to build advantage in many areas continuously while constantly negating enemy advantage and interfering with their learning and adaptation systems.

Finally, understanding and having a systemic, strategic and well-led approach to adaptation is something that can give a nation, or alliance, greater power in both peace and war. At the same time it is something that can used against us to devastating effect if we don’t understand it or if we don’t make efforts to degrade our enemy’s ability to learn and adapt.

A few other aspects of adaptation should be emphasised.

First, adaptation is an essential foundation for battlefield learning and continuous generation of advantage. The old saying ‘adapt or die’ has firm historical foundations. But effective modern adaptation must occur, and be nurtured, at every level of a military enterprise and every level of war.

Second, it is key to learning about the enemy and improving the capacity of friendly forces to negate an adversary’s existing (and new) advantages in technology, tactics, people and generation of smart ideas and massed capability over time. This process occurs in war, but must begin in peacetime.

Therefore, the third point to be made is that adaptive processes must be in place when wars begin to minimise the strategic shock of the initial days and weeks. Both Russia and Ukraine underwent periods of military transformation in the years before the large-scale invasion in 2022. This provided a foundation for their subsequent ‘adaptive stance’ in war.

Fourth, adaptation theory can play a crucial role in learning about how societies evolve in the transition from peace to war in a more efficient fashion. The transition from the post-Cold War security order to what now exists in Europe has been traumatic for politicians and citizens, who assumed large scale war in Europe was simply impossible in the modern world. Some still don’t accept the new reality, and therefore there is uneven investment in defence capacity in Europe.

Fifth, understanding the different levels of adaptation is important for building the quickest and most effective transition from peace to war for military organisations. This subject was recently examined by Meir Finkel in his terrific book, On Agility. It provides recommendations on this strategic adaptation from peace to war which include: 1. Conceptual and doctrinal flexibility; 2. Organisational and technological versatility; 3. Flexibility in command and cognitive skills; and 4. The mechanism that nurtures fast learning and rapid circulation of lessons.

Sixth, adaptation is key to continuously improving productivity in defence industry before and during war. As I will explore shortly, adaptation is not purely a military endeavour. There must be close and continuous links with those who research, improve and produce all forms of military materiel from boots to precision munitions to drones.

Seventh, adaptation is important for the cognitive aspects of war. It underpins learning about enemy misinformation and the impact it is having on friendly populations and political systems. Adaptation is crucial to not just winning the war, it is central to winning the ‘story’ about the war.

Finally, adaptation is foundational to developing leaders at all levels who are fit to lead and evolve in a rapidly changing environment. As such, adaptation is a central concept for continuously improving training and education, and evolving ‘what right looks like’ in leaders at all levels as war progresses. And, it should go without saying, this adaptative training and education system should produce leaders who understand their function as adaptation leaders and nurturers.

Adaptation has a clear and central purpose in contemporary and future military institutions. But to build and enhance the capacity of military institutions to successfully engage in, and win, the adaptation battle, they must understand the environment in which adaptation takes place.

An Adaptation Mesh: The Environment for Adaptation

The environment for the adaptation battle is comprised of four key elements. These all interact. Given how each interacts in different ways, over different time spans and have many different outcomes, I have used the term Adaptation Mesh to describe the overall environment for adaptation. ‘Morass’ just didn’t have the same ring to it! The elements of this mesh are:

1. Multilevel adaptation within military organizations.

2. Adaptation within friendly non-military organisations that conduct research or undertake manufacturing of military materiel.

3. Adaptation in allies and security partners.

4. Adaptation in the adversary system.

Element 1: Multilevel Adaptation in military organizations. Within a military organization, adaptation takes place at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. Strategic adaptation is the learning and adaptation that has an impact on the making of national and military strategy and the direction of the war overall. In short, it is the learning that underpins winning wars. If strategic adaptation is to take place, some of the fundamental assumptions held by political leaders about the objectives and kind of war being fought must also adapt based on strateglc learning. This level of adaptation is predicated on understanding one’s adversary and continuing to build that knowledge as the war develops. The war in Ukraine has seen multiple examples of strategic adaptation.

The next level of adaptation is operational adaptation. Operational adaptation is the learning and change that takes place where military campaigns are planned, executed and won or lost. This is an adaptive process which occurs above the level of battles and tactical concerns, but beneath the layer where military strategies are produced and enacted. It is the ability to learn and then improve military effectiveness for the employment of major forces in the achievement of strategic aims in a theatre of war.

Source: Author

Finally, tactical adaptation is the sum of actions that underpin learning and improvement on the battlefield, the dissemination of those lessons to other battlefield elements, as well as the training that prepares reinforcements and new units. In essence, this is the learning and adaptation that helps win battles.

Element 2: Adaptation within friendly non-military organisations that conduct research or undertake manufacturing of military materiel. One of the defining elements of the Ukrainian war effort has been the massive surge in civil adaptation to assist the operations being conducted by military forces, the intelligence services and border security forces in Ukraine. From day one of the war, private citizens have assisted with provision of drones, supplies for soldiers and funding larger research efforts in private entities.

Large fundraising organisations have also become research organizations. For example, Come Back Alive underakes fundraising as well as research for evolved military capabilities such as countering Russian reconnaissance drones. The Brave1 cluster is a collaboration between different Ukrainian government departments to fund research into a range of capabilities related to military and national security requirements.

But beyond Ukrainian (and Russian) defence companies, European and American companies have been avid observers of the war and have been proposing solutions to western military institutions based on lessons from Ukraine. Examples of this include the Indo-Pacom Hellscape concept for defending the Taiwan Strait, and the plethora of counter-drone projects and experiments being undertaken in Western military institutions.

Element 3: Adaptation in allies and security partners. The Ukrainian war effort has been fundamentally underpinned by financial, intelligence, diplomatic, military and moral support from Europe, the United States as well as countries such as Australia, Japan and South Korea. As part of that support as well as their observations of Ukrainian and Russian operations, each of these countries as well as NATO have learned and adapted. Nearly every nation supporting Ukraine has evolved their approach to technologies such as drones and precision warfare. NATO fundamentally reshaped its strategic concept for the alliance, and republished this in 2022.

But Russia’s partners are also learning and adapting. Iran has clearly observed Russian drone and missile tactics against Ukraine, and has sought to use them (mostly without success) in its two massed drone and missile attacks on Israel this year.

The learning and adaptation undertaken by allies and security partners helps them to improve their own military effectiveness. But, it can also be an important feedback loop and provide additional insights back into the operations of those they are observing.

Element 4: Adaptation in the adversary system. Even the dumbest and most conservative military institutions demonstrate the ability to learn and adapt. Even if there are institutional obstacles to such behaviour, such as the centralised command models or extreme reluctance to report failure that have been demonstrated by the Russians in Ukraine, they still learn. Russia has proven this despite its multiple failures in strategy, tactics and ethical behaviour during the war.

In an article for Foreign Affairs at the start of 2024, I explored how Russia was improving its capacity to adapt. It was demonstrating a form of meta-cognition – the ability to learn how to learn better. And, the longer the war continues, the better they are getting at learning and adaption. As I wrote then:

The longer this war lasts, the better Russia will get at learning, adapting, and building a more effective, modern fighting force. Slowly but surely, Moscow will absorb new ideas from the battlefield and rearrange its tactics accordingly. Its strategic adaptation already helped it fend off Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and over the last few months it has helped Russian troops take more territory from Kyiv. Ultimately, if Russia’s edge in strategic adaptation persists without an appropriate Western response, the worst that can happen in this war is not stalemate. It is a Ukrainian defeat.

Michael Kofman has recently published a good examination of Russian adaptation in 2023. As he notes in his report:

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian military had made choices and trade-offs in its force design that positioned it poorly for the type of war it ended up fighting. These choices were compounded by the unworkable concept of operations being executed during the invasion and the political assumptions that drove it. For most of 2022, the Russian military struggled with the consequences of these decisions, its own shortcomings, and a structural manpower deficit. Initial adaptations yielded poor results in the prevailing operating environment. But, by late 2022, the Russian political leadership committed to a prolonged conventional war. The military began to demonstrate a capacity for learning and adaptation.

Source: Author

Regardless of how evil we might think our adversaries are, or whatever level of dehumanisation might be implemented against them, our enemies remain learning, adaptive entities. The entire history of human warfare proves ample evidence of this, as does the recent wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Consequently, the enemy’s capacity to learn and adapt is part of the adaptation environment and is something that friendly forces must understand, and if possible, interfere with and degrade. This interference with enemy adaptation, which I have previously described as counter-adaptation, is a topic I will return to shortly.

A Response by Western Military Institutions

How might Western military institutions respond to this adaptation mesh, and enhance their ability to learn and adapt in 21st century military operations? There multiple areas where they might improve their capacity to learn, adapt and succeed in the potential wars we face in the 21st century.

First, adaptive cultures and systems must be constructed long before wars begin. Tactical adaptation is important but strategic processes for adaptation are also crucial. In peace time, military institutions need to have the capacity to draw lessons from combat, analyze them, develop solutions to new problems, and then ensuring that solutions—doctrinal, training, technological, or otherwise—are rapidly spread throught the entire organisation. While it is possible such a system could emerge during a conflict, the existence of one beforehand, as part of an integral learning culture, is a superior and more efficient approach.

These learning cultures must also be rigorous enough to ensure that learning incorporates important contextual aspects of the conflict at hand. As Sir Michael Howard reminds us, we must study military history in depth, breadth, and context. He writes in The Use and Abuse of Military History that “the roots of victory and defeat often have to be sought far from the battlefield, in political, social, and economic factors which explain why armies are constituted as they are, and why their leaders conduct them in the way they do.”

It is possible to draw the wrong lessons from wars if we are not sufficiently rigorous in our analysis during peacetime. This can cripple adaptive processes during war. For example, many of the lessons learned during the two decades of counter insurgency operations in the wake of 9/11 may be irrelevant to our future operations.

Second, we need to ensure that our learning and adaptation informs change as well as our notions of military effectiveness. Military effectiveness is a topic that is at the heart of the design, functioning, and improvement of military organizations, the forces they deploy in combat, and the institutions that support them at different levels. Every good military institution, while absorbed with the day-to-day challenges of fighting in wartime or training in peacetime, also invests in improving its military effectiveness. Millett and Murray (2010) defined military effectiveness as “the process by which armed forces convert resources into fighting power.” Brooks and Stanley (2007) define military effectiveness as “the capacity to create military power from a state’s basic resources in wealth, technology, population, and human capital.”

Adaptation, regardless of its level, should be contributing to the maintenance and improvement of military effectiveness. And the aggregate effect of many adaptations at the tactical, operational and strategic levels should be helping the most senior military and political leaders to constantly redefine what an effective modern military looks like in peace and war.

Third, strategic leaders must take more risk with innovation in peace time to build the right culture for wartime learning. Not all innovation succeeds. Both sides in the war in Ukraine have undertaken innovations that either have not produced the desired results or that the enemy has been able to rapidly respond to, ensuring that those innovations do not provide a new source of advantage. This is totally normal, and even in failure, institutions can learn.

Unfortunately, the risk averse cultures that have developed in many Western military institutions does not nurture the capacity to try lots of things in the knowledge that some will succeed while many other will fail. Failure is a crucial element of learning and adaptation, and if there is minimal or no tolerance of failure during peacetime, it will only emerge slowly during wartime (except where people actually put their lives at risk - it will re-emerge rapidly there).

Western military institutions must shift their promotion and incentive structures to ensure there are more of what Andrew Gordon describes in The Rules of the Game as ‘ratcatchers’, and less managerial ‘regulators’. Effective adaptation, and the linking of tactical and strategic adaptation relies on risk, extensive military experience and good judgement, not sound but low-risk managerial approaches.

Fourth, adaptation is only partly about technology but must also include evolved ideas and organisations. None of the new technologies employed in Ukraine since February 2022 would have had the impact they have without a variety of human interventions. These interventions generally have fallen into one or more of three types: new ideas, new (and evolved) organizations, and new training. As I described in the War for Ukraine:

All of the technologies explored above were initially applied in traditional ways, and then, gradually, new forms of application arose due to battlefield or strategic imperatives. Whether it was the employment of Starlink satellite communications to replace battlefield radios to enhance soldier survivability, the addition of munitions to commercial drones, or new tactics in the application of drones, the adoption of new ideas and adaptation of older ideas generated by humans have been central to realizing the benefits pf new technologies. At the same time, new organizational constructs have been important in the adaptation of military capabilities during the war…The performance of newly formed Ukrainian brigades in mid-June 2023 is a demonstration that the best equipment does not guarantee effective military performance.

In 1993, the director of the U.S. Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall, wrote that “the most important competition is not the technological competition. The most important goal is to be the best in the intellectual task of finding the most appropriate innovations in the concepts of operation and making organizational changes to fully exploit the technologies already available.”

As amazing as some of the new and advanced technologies are, their successful absorption and employment by military institutions will always rely on new and evolved ideas and institutions. This approach must be baked into institutional approaches to adaptation and into leadership development models.

Fifth, new and more effective counter-adaptation methods need to be developed. The implementation of an adaptive approach in military institutions has another benefit. If organisations are disciplined enough to adapt at all levels in a cohesive and efficient way, they might also better understand how an adversary adapts. Using this knowledge, they may then be able to more precisely target those areas of enemy organisations central to learning and adaptation. In understanding adaptive mechanisms and complex systems, future military institutions might be able to shape and influence an adversary’s ability to adapt, and to minimise their chances of affecting the success of friendly forces. I describe this as counter-adaptation.

In my 2022 book, War Transformed, I conducted an extensive examination of counter-adaptation. I wrote that:

We should therefore focus as much on influencing enemy adaptive measures as we do on fostering our own. An approach to do so must be founded on a theoretical basis of adaptation and complex adaptive systems. In doing so, we should identify the level and timescale over which we seek influence. It is possible that countering the adaptation of an adversary may see us influencing them at many different levels concurrently, with objectives that have different timeframes.

There are many elements to this, which I describe in War Transformed. The core elements of this concept for counter-adaptation are shown in the table below.

Source: War Transformed, Mick Ryan, 2022.

Counter-adaptation seeks to deny an adversary the ability to effectively adapt to a friendly force’s strategy, presence and activities. This will reduce the enemy’s range of options against friendly forces, as well as degrade the enemy’s operational capabilities and their capacity to influence friendly operations. Finally, counter-adaptation operations should also decrease friendly predictability during the conduct of military operations.

This is a difficult but necessary undertaking by military institutions that seek to learn and improve in peace time and during war. By degrading an enemy’s capacity to learn and adapt, Western forces will be providing themselves with anther source of strategic advantage. We need every one of those that we can possibly generate.

Finally, adaptation must be led. While there are individual imperatives in some circumstances for rapid learning and adaptation, even the most immediate of learnings can and should be shared to enhance the overall survivability of teams and larger formations. Military leaders need to improve their capacity to nurture innovation as well ensure the functional linkages between battlefield learning and the institutional adoption of new ideas, technology and military structures.

Senior military commanders and leaders at subordinate levels must nurture people and formations that are actively learning and capable of changing where it is effective to do so. This senior advocacy is one of the essential elements of successful institutional learning and reform. For a useful case study involving the massive transformation of a military organisation, see that of the U.S. Army in the wake of the Vietnam War in Don Starry’s, To Change an Army.

Leading an adaptive culture starts with clear statements about the leadership environment, and its tolerance for risk and new ideas. What leaders can and should do at every level to observe, collect, record and share lessons about combat and non-combat aspects about military affairs must be well defined and disseminated widely. This must also be accompanied by definitions of acceptable failure for individuals and teams because failure is an integral part of learning. Different incentive frameworks are also needed to encourage risk taking to improve military effectiveness. This is about creating an institutional culture that Martin Dempsey has described in No Time for Spectators as “responsible rebellion”.

However, military organisations must also achieve a balance of rapid learning on one hand, and not rushing to failure on the other. Sometimes, initial lessons from the tactical level may not be indicative of wider changes in the character war. There is a need for analytical processes that can achieve getting the right lessons to the right people at the right time, and not leaping on every new observation as some profound shift in warfare. This requires good analytical processes but also good judgement in the most senior leaders of a military organisation.

Winning Wars in the Adaptation Mesh

In his 2006 book, War Made New, Max Boot portrayed adaptation in military institutions as “a sudden tempest which turns everything upside down.” This is sometimes the case, but the best practice is when institutions learn and adapt their military capacity through the melding of physical, moral, and intellectual capabilities on a continuous rather than periodic basis. The approaches to do so might vary from nation to nation, and between different services in a single country. And if one of these capabilities is left underdeveloped, it has an impact on the other two aspects of warfighting capability.

This has been the experience of both sides in the war in Ukraine since February 2022. As I have examined in my book, The War for Ukraine, where either side has invested in the intellectual rigor to investigate and implement new methods and organizational constructs to better absorb new technologies, they have generally been more successful on the battlefield. This demonstrates, again, the importance of an adaptive stance within military institutions. Such a posture allows them to respond to surprise and engage in the learning and improvement activities—at all levels—that are essential to winning battles and wars.

Military organisations are never at a steady state. Internally, there are always intellectual battles that bring together advocates for the past, present and future possible states of the institution. Added to this is the contemporary rapid pace of change in technology and in the strategic environment. This means that military institutions need to be adapting at different levels concurrently and doing so continuously.

At the same time that this is occurring, military and other national security institutions must be continually seeking to interfere with the capacity of adversaries to do the same. This is an ongoing adaptation battle and one that is central to the success of military institutions, and the nations they serve, in 21st century war and strategic competition.

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, October 30, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, October 30, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-30-2024

Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem reiterated normal Hezbollah themes and ideological points in his first speech as secretary general on October 30, suggesting his appointment will not spur drastic organizational change. Hezbollah’s Shura Council appointed Qassem on October 29 to replace Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel killed on September 27. Qassem’s speech echoed similar topics to his speeches delivered after Nasrallah’s death but before Qassem’s appointment.

Qassem continued to attempt to obfuscate the reality that Hezbollah’s military forces are failing in Lebanon. Qassem bragged about Hezbollah's capabilities and fighting prowess, stating his intent to continue to “implement the war plan” against Israel that Nasrallah created. Qassem called on Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon to “reduce [Israeli] losses” and threatened that Israel would soon pay an “unprecedented price.” Qassem continued to assert that Hezbollah fighters were successful on the battlefield and that “all the required capabilities are available to the resistance fighters on the front lines, and they are steadfast and capable.” He also noted that Hezbollah fighters continue to launch attacks into northern Israel despite the widespread airstrikes targeting launch sites. He emphasized that Hezbollah is “hurting” Israel, using the Binyamina base drone attack that killed four IDF personnel and injured 60 others as proof. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Northern Command said on October 21 that Hezbollah “fails to carry out effective reinforcements and does not fight as a system” in southern Lebanon border villages where the IDF is operating, however. It is also notable that though Hezbollah is firing between 100 and 200 rockets into Israel every day, pre-war estimates indicated Hezbollah would be able to fire well over 1,000 rockets into Israel every day. This indicates that Hezbollah is either unwilling or unable to launch rockets into Israel at a higher rate.

Key Takeaways:

Hezbollah: Qassem continued to attempt to obfuscate the reality that Hezbollah’s military forces are failing in Lebanon. Qassem alleged that Israel regularly violated UNSCR 1701, but Hezbollah has violated the resolution since the end of the 2006 war by building massive military sites south of the Litani River that Israeli forces are now operating inside of Lebanon to destroy.

Israeli Airstrikes Targeting Iran: Israel's retaliatory strikes on Iran on October 25 significantly degraded Iran's integrated air defense system and made subsequent Israeli strikes on Iran easier and less risky.

Ceasefire in Lebanon: The IDF is signaling that it is preparing to end its initial phase of ground operations in southern Lebanon. Israeli movement to secure a ceasefire suggests that the IDF believes it has achieved the military objectives dictated to it by Israeli political leadership, not that the ground operation has “failed.”

Israeli Ground Operations in Lebanon: The IDF continued to conduct clearing operations and seize terrain along the Lebanese border to disrupt Hezbollah artillery observers’ ability to support indirect rocket and mortar attacks into northern Israel.

3. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 30, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 30, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-30-2024

Western intelligence officials reportedly stated that North Korean troops are in an unspecified area in occupied Ukraine. CNN, citing two unspecified Western intelligence officials, reported on October 30 that a small number of North Korean personnel are in occupied Ukraine but did not specify their location — the first such confirmation from Western sources. The intelligence officials stated that they expect the number of North Korean personnel in Ukraine to grow as they complete training in Russia. Ukrainian and South Korean officials reported in early October 2024 the presence of a limited number of North Korean personnel in occupied Donetsk City, mainly engineering personnel, who were likely repairing or somehow improving the quality of a large amount of low-quality ammunition that North Korea provided to the Russian military. The reports from Western intelligence officials could refer to the same group of North Korean personnel or similar specialists conducting engineering work in occupied Ukraine. Financial Times reported on October 30 that senior unspecified Ukrainian intelligence officials have stated that Russian authorities transferred about 3,000 North Korean personnel to western Kursk Oblast from other areas in Russia in civilian vehicles and that the group consisted of a few hundred special forces servicemembers and regular troops. North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui visited Russia on October 29 but did not specify the purpose of the visit. AP, citing South Korean intelligence, reported on October 29 that Choe might have visited Russia to discuss the deployment of additional North Korean troops to Russia. Russian Foreign ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed that the arrival of the North Korean foreign minister was pre-planned, in line with Russia–North Korea cooperation.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky highlighted enhanced Ukraine–South Korea cooperation amid since-retracted reports that South Korea would consider providing direct military assistance to Ukraine. Zelensky reported on October 29 that he had discussed enhanced intelligence cooperation with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in order to develop an action plan and propose a set of countermeasures in response to Russian and North Korean escalation of the war. Zelensky announced that the two countries will soon exchange delegations to coordinate their actions and that they will involve common partners in their proposed intelligence cooperation. South Korean news outlet The Dong-A Ilbo reported on October 30 that the South Korean government was considering providing 155mm artillery shells directly to Ukraine, but the South Korean presidential office denied these reports, stating that Ukrainian officials have not requested such assistance.

Key Takeaways:

Western intelligence officials reportedly stated that North Korean troops are in an unspecified area in occupied Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky highlighted enhanced Ukraine-South Korea cooperation amid since-retracted reports that South Korea would consider providing direct military assistance to Ukraine.

The Kremlin is reportedly struggling to prepare for the September 2026 Russian State Duma elections campaign due to uncertainty about the course of the war in the Ukraine, suggesting that the Kremlin is not confident that Russia will be able to win the war over the next two years.

The Kremlin simultaneously continues to militarize various levels of Russian government, likely in preparation for long-term war efforts in Ukraine and confrontation against NATO despite the reported lack of preparation for the Duma elections.

The US Treasury and State departments sanctioned nearly 400 entities and individuals from over a dozen countries on October 30 in one of the largest concerted efforts to address Russian sanctions evasions via third parties to date.

Ukrainian forces recently regained positions near Pokrovsk.

Russian forces recently advanced in Kursk Oblast and near Kreminna, Chasiv Yar, Pokrovsk, and Kurakhove.

Russian occupation authorities continue to advertise Russian military service to civilians in occupied Ukraine.

4. Prosecutor tells jury of 9/11-style plot thwarted in the Philippines

We should not forget that the plans for 9-11 were discovered on a computer recovered after a raid on an Al Qaeda cell in a hotel in Manila in 1995. They were ignored because of the other plans that included proposed assassinations of the US president and the Pope as well as bringing down airliners using bombs (a failed attempt of a Northwest Airlines plane resulted in a hole in the fuselage and an emergency landing in Okinawa I believe).

What is old is new again.

Prosecutor tells jury of 9/11-style plot thwarted in the Philippines

October 29, 2024 9:43 PM

By Associated Press

voanews.com · October 29, 2024

NEW YORK —

A Kenyan man who plotted a 9/11-style attack on a U.S. building was training as a commercial pilot in the Philippines when his plans were interrupted, a federal prosecutor told a New York jury Tuesday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jon Bodansky told a federal jury in Manhattan that Cholo Abdi Abdullah plotted an attack for four years that he hoped to carry out on behalf of the terrorist organization al-Shabab.

He said Abdullah was almost finished with his two-year pilot training when he was arrested in July 2019 in the Philippines on local charges. He was transferred in December 2020 to U.S. law enforcement authorities, who charged him with terrorism-related crimes.

Abdullah underwent training in explosives and how to operate in secret and avoid detection before moving to the Philippines in 2017 to begin intensive training for a commercial pilot's license, the prosecutor said.

Abdullah posed as an aspiring commercial pilot even though his true intention was to locate a building in the United States where he could carry out a suicide attack from the cockpit by slamming his plane into a building, Bodansky told the jury.

He said Abdullah was "planning for four years a 9/11-style attack" only to have it thwarted with his arrest.

The defendant, operating from a Nairobi hotel, used the internet to research how to breach a cockpit door and looked up a 2019 terrorist attack that killed some 21 people, Bodansky said. Among those killed in that attack was an American businessman who survived the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Prosecutors have said Abdullah also researched information "about the tallest building in a major U.S. city" before he was caught.

Abdullah, who is representing himself and once pleaded not guilty, declined to give an opening statement and did not actively participate in questioning witnesses Tuesday.

In court papers filed before the trial, prosecutors told the judge that they understood "through standby counsel that the defendant maintains his position that he 'wants to merely sit passively during the trial, not oppose the prosecution and whatever the outcome, he would accept the outcome because he does not believe that this is a legitimate system.'"

The State Department in 2008 designated al-Shabab, which means "the youth" in Arabic, as a foreign terrorist organization. The militant group is an al-Qaida affiliate that has fought to establish an Islamic state in Somalia based on Shariah law.

If convicted, Abdullah faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison. His trial is expected to last three weeks.

voanews.com · October 29, 2024

5. Philly Shipyard's Transformation: How Hanwha’s Investment Is Driving U.S. Navy Readiness

Philly Shipyard's Transformation: How Hanwha’s Investment Is Driving U.S. Navy Readiness

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Wilson Beaver and Dominic Seibold · October 28, 2024

Military Hardware: Tanks, Bombers, Submarines and More

PACIFIC OCEAN (Oct. 1, 2024) The Independence-class littoral combat ship USS Mobile (LCS 26) comes alongside the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) for a fueling-at-sea, Oct. 1, 2024. Theodore Roosevelt, flagship of Carrier Strike Group 9, is underway conducting routine operations in the U.S. 3rd Fleet area of operations. An integral part of U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. 3rd Fleet operates naval forces in the Indo-Pacific and provides he realistic, relevant training necessary to execute the U.S. Navy’s role across the full spectrum of military operations – from combat operations to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. U.S. 3rd Fleet works together with our allies and partners to advance freedom of navigation, the rule of law, and other principles that underpin security for the Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Richard Tinker)

A $100 Million Investment in Philly Shipyard is Starting to Pay Dividends for Pennsylvanians and America’s Navy: Earlier this year, Hanwha Ocean Company bought Philly Shipyard for $100 million. Though it was met with little fanfare from the public at the time, the investment was a big deal in the Navy.

It came after requests from American defense experts and government officials for shipbuilders from allied countries to invest into the worn down, depleted, and inefficient mess that is the US shipbuilding industry. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro even called the deal, “a game-changing milestone” for America’s “Maritime Statecraft.”

Now, the new partnership is paying dividends, for Hanwha, Philadelphia, and the United States. In late August, Hanwha secured an annual Navy maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) contract. That contract and the new work at Philly Shipyard will go a long ways towards fixing the Navy’s current maintenance backlog, which is currently contributing to both shipbuilding delays and cost overruns.

According to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report, the Navy’s current maintenance backlog amounted to $1.8 billion. This inefficiency has a major impact on America’s combat readiness has contributed to the Navy’s decision to decommission 9 ships before their expected service life.

Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse under the Biden-Harris administration. Misguided spending priorities and a lack of urgency have set back America’s ability to keep up with and deter China, which is the world’s largest Navy numerically and whose fleet is still growing fast.

Hanwha could help turn the tide in that fight, though. With the purchase of the Philly Shipyard, it is now positioned to compete for contracts for building new ships, which could be an enormous windfall not only for Philadelphia workers, but also our naval power.

Specifically, the Philly Shipyard is well positioned to compete for contracts to construct Constellation-class frigates. Currently, these ships are only being built at Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, with the first ship set to set sail in 2029 following production delay. But Navy leadership has already called for an increase in the construction of new missile-guided frigates, and the Philly Shipyard is now well-positioned to compete for building these additional frigates.

The new investment in the Philly Shipyard is a refreshing step in the right direction. It is also a reminder that our efforts to reshore industry and rebuild our defense industrial base will benefit American workers first and foremost, like the new workers who will need to be hired as Philly Shipyards expands.

If we want to win, however, we need to build on this positive momentum. Policymakers should work to create maritime prosperity zones, implement programs to solve labor shortages, and cut down on overregulation in order continue to promote further investments in and expansion of our naval infrastructure, especially at Philly Shipyards.

As our Navy works to meet the challenges of tomorrow, Hanwha’s new investment means Philadelphia will be playing a leading role in the fight. By fixing the maintenance glut and building new ships, Philly Shipyard will be vital to preserving the security of the American people.

Why? Because the first battle of the next great power competition will not take place in the far-off seas of the Pacific; it will be fought in places like Philly Shipyard on the Delaware as we set out to defeat our own deficiencies. And this is a battle we can’t afford to lose.

About the Authors

Wilson Beaver is a Policy Advisor for defense budgeting at The Heritage Foundation. Dominic Seibold is a Fall 2024 Member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

NOTE: This piece has been updated since publication.

Written By Wilson Beaver and Dominic Seibold

Wilson Beaver is a Policy Advisor for defense budgeting at The Heritage Foundation. Dominic Seibold is a Fall 2024 Member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Wilson Beaver and Dominic Seibold · October 28, 2024

6. American Diplomacy for a New Era

A long address from SECSTATE.

Key except of the SECSTATE's "scorecard" for the department:

Now, before we could build for the future, we had to reinvest in some of the foundations of our diplomatic tradecraft: our people’s regional expertise, foreign language fluency, negotiation skills, an understanding of international politics and history.

We had to tend to some core management issues, too – ensuring that we could maintain and protect our embassies and consulates, safeguard our data and communications, take care of our people’s health and their welfare.

At the same time, in developing this modernization agenda, as you heard from Deputy Secretary Verma, we wanted to build on past efforts, past initiatives, not reinvent the wheel. Look at the incredible work that had been done by some of my predecessors, Democratic and Republican alike, to work to strengthen the department.

And as you heard, we’ve drawn on the visions, the voices, the expertise, the experience, of so many people across the department, allies and partners on Capitol Hill – and I’m gratified to see Representative Barbara Lee here with us today, a great champion of the department – so many others.

We were animated by the knowledge that we couldn’t finish this work overnight or even in a single term or administration. If it’s going to endure, this agenda had to be rooted in our national interest, and in the initiatives that any secretary of state, regardless of party, would be expected to carry forward on behalf of the American people.

I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made over the past few years.

Now, I want to talk about that today, and I also want to talk about some of the work that’s left to be done. But let me start with this: None of the modernization work would have been possible without strong bipartisan support from Congress, including Representative Lee. It’s taken exceptional efforts and people at every post, in every bureau of this department: members of our Civil Service and our Foreign Service, eligible family members, contractors, locally employed staff. And, of course, our senior leadership team: Deputy Secretary Campbell; Deputy Secretary Verma; his predecessor, Brian McKeon; John Bass, now the acting Under Secretary for Political Affairs; Alaina Teplitz, who’s taken on the duties of Under Secretary for Management; our Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Global Talent, Marcia Bernicat; the director of the Foreign Service Institute, Joan Polaschik; my Policy Planning Staff, led by Salman Ahmed; and so many others.

As I look out at all of you, at our remarkable chief of staff, Suzy George, and so many others, it’s like I’m looking at the 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers, which as a Yankee fan – (laughter) – is not the best sight.

So let me talk a little bit about what we’ve accomplished so far, and again, what remains to be done.

First, we’ve reorganized the department and invested in our ability to lead on the issues that are increasingly animating our diplomacy.

We established the Bureau of Cybersecurity and Digital Policy and the Office of the Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology. We brought in incredible talent in these areas to ensure that the United States and our partners retain our collective edge in the technologies that are shaping our future.

Across our diplomacy, we’ve prioritized leading on norms and standards, promoting digital freedom, protecting our most sensitive technology, making critical supply chains more resilient. We’re committed to building what we call digital solidarity – because we have a profound stake in working with and supporting partners that share our vision for a vibrant, open, and secure technological future.

We dedicated more resources to combatting the climate crisis, powering the clean energy transition, protecting the environment – across our department, through our special presidential envoy for climate – and I have to, again, thank with deep appreciation Secretary Kerry for taking on this work – and with the creation of a new dedicated Foreign Service Officer positions across the department.

In the wake of COVID, President Biden made it clear that we needed to prioritize health diplomacy, drawing on the decades of experience that this department has and USAID have with SARS, with Ebola, with HIV/AIDS. So, we created a Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy. By acting as a central hub for all of our public health efforts, this team works with our partners abroad to strengthen health systems, to fight deadly diseases, to prevent future pandemics.

The challenges posed by People’s Republic of China touch every aspect of our foreign policy and every region of the world. So we built what we call “China House” – an office that brings together experts from across the department and other agencies under one roof, where they can better coordinate and better manage this most complex and consequential relationship.

We invested in our economic statecraft – focusing more on improving development finance, strengthening supply chains, elevating our Office of Sanctions Coordination, establishing a coordinator on global anti-corruption, appointing a special representative for international labor affairs, setting up a task force to help countries become more resilient to economic coercion.

We stood up an office to advance our interests and values in an increasingly contested and crucial set of international organizations. That team is getting Americans elected to senior leadership positions, while building coalitions to drive reform and to safeguard the integrity of institutions like the United Nations.

And in a world where foreign and domestic policy are increasingly intertwined, we set up a Subnational Diplomacy Unit to build collaboration with – and between – mayors, governors, locally elected officials both here at home and around the world. And I’ve seen the power of this. These leaders, they’re the ones day in, day out – particularly at the local level – who are finding cutting-edge solutions for what are global challenges, from ransomware to public health crises. And it’s critical that they have the opportunities to share their ideas with other local officials and with national governments, so that we can all learn from each other and make our own policies better.

Now, with all of this focus on reorganization and making sure that the institutional building blocks of the department were fit for purpose, we also knew that to truly modernize our diplomacy, we had to embrace new tools and some new tactics. To become more innovative, more nimble, more effective.

So we transformed the way that we assess, accept, and deal with risk in an increasingly volatile world. And you heard this from Rich Verma.

American Diplomacy for a New Era

Speech

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State

Foreign Service Institute

Arlington, Virginia

October 30, 2024

https://www.state.gov/american-diplomacy-for-a-new-era/

DEPUTY SECRETARY VERMA: Well, good morning. Good morning, everybody.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

DEPUTY SECRETARY VERMA: Thank you – thank you for your patience. I asked who the opening act was, and they said there wasn’t one, I was the opening act, which is – (laughter) – which is really too bad, but – (laughter). Thank you, Joan, for hosting us at FSI, and for the amazing work that you and the faculty do each day in training our incredible workforce.

It was three years ago this month that Secretary Blinken set forth his vision for modernizing the State Department, for giving our people the tools to tackle the challenges and opportunities of today; to strengthen our institution to compete with adversaries, and also to deepen our key partnerships; to make the work experience at the State Department more fulfilling; and to sure we were all poised to lead in this century through what President Biden calls an inflection point, a point of great change, technological advancement, and, yes, new threats to our democratic order.

It’s in this complex environment that the work of the State Department and diplomacy, in particular, becomes even more critical today and in the months and years ahead. We have faced such challenges before, and this institution has shown it can deliver since the founding of our republic.

But with the rapidly changing landscape, we have to change and adapt too, if we want to continue to shape and lead on the global stage. That means building new capabilities around our critical missions, developing new skills, continuing to attract the most talented and diverse workforce, utilizing new technologies, and updating our approach to risk. Critical missions, workforce reforms, risk and innovation – these were the pillars of the effort. And I know the Secretary will give you a more detailed update on how we have fared and the work that yet remains.

Of course, there have been reform and modernization efforts in the past that have produced important results. We cannot forget Secretary Powell’s speech some 23 years ago when he called for a more modernized department, and even committed that every employee will have an internet connection at their desk. (Laughter.) Now, on some days many of us wish we didn’t have that particular – (laughter) – connection, given the avalanche of email. But his vision was important. He also called for a training float, which I’m happy to report has been a key part of this effort, and the successes would not have been possible without the hard work and creativity of the team right here at FSI.

Secretary Clinton, too, instituted the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, or QDDR – an effort to ensure we were right-sized with the proper resources and in the right places.

And we can go back through the history of the various reform efforts to see how the department has continued to adapt, and it is in this long arc of progress that brings us here today to discuss the Secretary’s agenda. But I would argue it has been distinctive in three main ways.

First, it’s been driven by all of you. It was informed and led by our workforce. The Secretary understood from the beginning that true reform cannot be top-down alone; it must engage the people who are at the heart of the institution – the Foreign Service Officers, our civil servants, locally employed staff, family members, and so many more who carry out our foreign policy every day. From listening tours across the globe to town hall meetings – and yes, to seemingly endless surveys – we have actively sought input from employees at every level, making sure their voices are heard in shaping the future of the department, a department that is agile, inclusive, expert, and more capable across multiple domains.

Second, we took in the advice and guidance of so many outside experts, think tanks, retired diplomats, congressional members and staff, universities, our Foreign Service Association to bring the best ideas forward, and many of you are in this room today. We are grateful for your continued leadership and for your vast experience and insights. A special word of thanks to Salman Ahmed and the team at Policy Planning, who weaved all of the internal and external ideas together, crafting a careful and studied plan under the Secretary’s direction. Salman, Suzy George, Marcia Bernicat, Kelly Fletcher, Matthew Graviss, Rena Bitter, John Bass, Alaina Teplitz, and so many more did so much to drive this effort forward.

Finally, I think what’s made this particular reform effort especially distinct and impactful has been the leader who launched it three years ago and the one who has led it at every turn. We could not be more fortunate to have Secretary Blinken as the architect and visionary leader to guide the department during these complex times. He understands, from his vast experience over decades, what this institution means and what it can do to bring greater peace and prosperity to so many. He’s had a bird’s-eye view and direct role from his experience on the National Security Council staff, to a young staffer here in the department, to his days on Capitol Hill, as national security advisor to the vice president, and as deputy secretary of state.

I had the privilege of working with then-staff director of the Foreign Relations Committee Blinken 22 years ago. And it was obvious then that this is someone who cared deeply about people, who was and remains the foremost expert on international affairs, and who understood deeply about the essential role that the U.S. plays in the world. And we see his experience and vision come to life in this modernization effort that has posted real results to make American diplomacy stronger, better, more inclusive, and more impactful.

Mr. Secretary, thank you for your outstanding service, your commitment to this incredible workforce, and for making such an important impact that will be felt for generations.

And so without further ado, it is my privilege and honor to present to you the 71st Secretary of State, Tony Blinken. (Applause.)

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Please, have a seat.

Rich, one of the great pleasures and privileges of my time in Washington has been working with you. And as I look out at so many people here, so many people who have come back to the department, so many people working today to strengthen the department, it’s also cause for reflection that the best part of my 32 years has been the people I’ve had the immense privilege to work with. And I see so many of them here today, and I’m grateful to each and every one of you.

So, I started at the department more than 32 years ago – my first job in Washington, coming here at the beginning of the Clinton administration. I was a special assistant in what was then the Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, for those with long memories. (Laughter.) I was in the front office, and I had my own office. Its previous occupant had been a very large safe. (Laughter.) I found, on the desk that barely fit into that office – and some of you will remember this – those very large Wang computers. (Laughter.) And that was the beginning of an experience that led me to where I am today. And a I like to say, over the course of 32 years, I moved up one flight from the sixth floor to the seventh floor and got some windows. (Laughter.) So not bad.

But it was the start of a deep attachment to this institution and to its people – and a conviction that those of us who are entrusted for a brief period of time with responsibility for leading this institution owe it to the institution, and owe it to the institution’s people, to try to leave it a little bit stronger, a little bit more effective, a little bit more fit for purpose than when we found it. And that’s what we’ve been working to do.

During my time as Secretary, we’ve traveled a million miles. I’ve met with leaders and citizens in some 86 countries, and more than a dozen cities and towns across the United States. We’ve seen remarkable things during that time.

But everywhere I’ve gone, my conversations have focused on issues that are increasingly shaping the lives of the people that we’re here to serve: Protecting workers and businesses from unfair trade practices that hurt their bottom lines, threaten their jobs, threaten their livelihoods. Securing supply chains for critical items – like semiconductors, medicines – that our people and our economy depend on. Safeguarding digital infrastructure to make sure that our privacy is protected, our data secure, our hospitals and electric grids are safe. Using emerging technologies like AI – using them for good, while working to prevent their misuse. Producing clean, affordable energy that people can count on to power their homes, businesses, while keeping this planet habitable for our children and grandchildren. Preventing another pandemic. Stopping the flow of synthetic drugs into our communities. Contending with historic migration across our hemisphere and around the globe.

At the same time, we face a small number of revisionist powers – principally Russia, with the partnership of Iran and North Korea, as well as China – that are aggressively challenging our interests and values, and are determined to alter the foundational principles at the heart of the international system. China alone has acquired the economic, the diplomatic, the technological, and military power to do so on a regional and a global scale.

As geopolitical competition is underway to shape a new era in international affairs, longstanding challenges remain – conflicts, terrorism, political instability. We see this around the world, from the Middle East, to Sudan, to Venezuela. So the world we face is more competitive, it’s more complex, it’s more combustible, than at any other point in my career.

Now, to address these challenges from a position of strength, we’ve made historic investments here at home in our competitiveness and we’ve worked to re-engage, to rejuvenate, to reimagine our alliances and our partnerships around the world. Across the State Department and the globe, my colleagues and I are hearing the same thing: The United States remains the partner of first choice. Not just our federal government – local government, private sector, universities, technologists, philanthropies. People continue to look to the United States.

Now, it’s also profoundly in our interest to team up with our counterparts abroad because we can accomplish so much more together than any one of us can do alone. And we know that the strength, the success, of our friends redounds directly to our own security and prosperity – more markets for our products, more partners to tackle global challenges, new allies to deter and defeat aggression. That’s at the heart of something that used to animate our approach to the world – enlightened self-interest – and I believe it needs to be at the heart of how we approach the world now.

To meet this moment, our diplomacy and this department have to be fit for purpose, organized, resourced, and with the talent to lead on the most pressing issues of our time.

So as Rich said, three years ago, right here at FSI, we launched a plan to strengthen and revitalize American diplomacy for this new age in international affairs.

I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made over the past few years.

So let me talk a little bit about what we’ve accomplished so far, and again, what remains to be done.

First, we’ve reorganized the department and invested in our ability to lead on the issues that are increasingly animating our diplomacy.

So we transformed the way that we assess, accept, and deal with risk in an increasingly volatile world. And you heard this from Rich Verma.

Now, we can’t and we shouldn’t set out to try to eliminate risk entirely. That’s an unrealistic standard. But what we are doing is working to manage risk responsibly – making it easier for diplomats to work in person, in the field, with fewer security constraints – and better realizing the full potential of our presence and our people.

That broader shift is helping us expand our diplomacy’s reach and get more out of our taxpayers’ dollars.

Now, previously, it could take up to 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a single U.S. embassy. So we teamed up with Congress to update the rules, the requirements around how we build our embassies. Now, we can be on the ground in more places, more quickly, without sacrificing security. That means America can advance our interests and values more effectively in this more competitive world.

Just in the last two years, we’ve established five new embassies in the Indo-Pacific – in the Maldives, Tonga, the Seychelles, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands. In some cases, we were able to open our doors in less than 12 months, with much smaller budgets. Now, some of these embassies have smaller staffs, others share a location with an ally, but they’re letting us deepen and strengthen our partnership with these nations.

Another way that we’re changing our diplomacy is by embracing different tools.

Three years ago, we released the department’s first-ever strategy to incorporate more data into our work, and we surged hiring of dedicated data officers to help us do the job. Now, whether we’re designing our foreign assistance programs, responding to crises around the world, we’re doing so in a way that’s using more timely, data-informed insights to guide the decisions that we make.

We’re harnessing the power of technology to improve our productivity in other areas.

Americans can now renew their passports online, without leaving their homes or putting anything in the mail. So far, more than 1 million people have successfully used online passport renewal. And just yesterday, I had an opportunity to be with our colleagues in Consular Affairs who have done such an extraordinary job in building back, stronger and better than ever before, our ability to deliver visas for people who want to come to the United States and deliver blue books to Americans who want to be able to travel the world. We’ve issued or renewed a record number of passports over the last year. And the result of this, as well as a record number of visas, means that more that more people are able to come to the United States than ever before; more Americans are able to travel the world than ever before.

We’ve also made the State Department a leader – a leader in our federal government when it comes to incorporating artificial intelligence into our work. The State Department is leading the pack.

A few months ago, we rolled out our own set of AI tools, including our own State Department chat bot. They saved our teams tens of thousands of hours, translating documents, fact-checking reports, tracking international news and social media posts, creating instantly accessible databases of diplomatic knowledge and diplomatic practice. Now, we’re just getting started using AI, but I can see a future that’s already with us to become not only more efficient, but more rigorous, more effective in our analysis, in our planning, and also freeing up all of our people to focus their time where they can have the most value added, the most impact, to do what’s really at the heart of their jobs.

Now, there’s one more tool that we’ve embraced: downgrading, declassifying, sharing intelligence with our foreign partners and with the public.

2022, working our remarkable Intelligence Community, we warned the world before Russia began its further invasion in Ukraine. Just last month, we used intelligence diplomacy to shed light on the link between the media company RT and Russia’s intelligence apparatus, including their efforts to manipulate Moldova’s upcoming election. In both cases, and in so many others, intelligence diplomacy helped us expose lies and disinformation, build trust with our partners, develop a stronger and collective response.

We’ve also worked to do something that I think is essential for the well-being, the strength, the resilience of this institution – and that’s working to renew a spirit of discourse and debate here at the department.

We have a workforce, represented by so many in this room, of exceptionally smart, exceptionally creative, exceptionally experienced people. But it’s a large bureaucracy, and too often our bureaucracy can stop good ideas from rising to the surface. We wanted to encourage people to share their perspectives, their advice, even – in fact, especially – when the subject is a hard one.

We launched the Policy Ideas Channel to create a platform for fresh thinking where people from every post and bureau can send forward suggestions, ideas.

We revitalized the Dissent Channel so that officers can express their concerns about our policies directly to senior leadership without fear of retribution. In the last few years, I personally read and responded to every dissent message we’ve received. Dissent makes our policy stronger, our diplomacy more resilient; it’s patriotic, and I will always protect it.

In addition, we revived the Open Forum, which hosts conversations between our workforce and leaders and critics from across and outside the department. I’ve seen the result of these panels. They’ve sparked incredibly constructive dialogues on a wide variety of topics, from trade strategy to our approaches to the PRC, to the Middle East.

Now, not every dissent nor every discussion is actually going to generate a change in policy. But each and every one causes us to at least pause for a moment, to step back, to maybe question our assumptions, to test alternative approaches. And in some cases we have implemented recommendations, shifted our thinking. So I strongly want to encourage this to continue.

One employee suggested that more American diplomats should do stints at multilateral organizations, something our competitors and many of our friends have done for a long, long time. So we thought that was a good idea – that it would offer hands-on experience for our workforce, let us deepen our cooperation with, and influence in, these institutions. Our first cohort will start their jobs next summer.

We also needed to improve our ability to anticipate and plan for developments that will challenge even the best strategy and even the best policy. That’s one of the key lessons we took away from the Afghanistan After Action Review.

So we launched the Policy Risk and Opportunity Planning Group to carry out this work – to do it in a rigorous and deliberative manner. Thanks to contributions from colleagues across the department, we’ve successfully anticipated a number of scenarios, from coups to conflicts and technological breakthroughs, to economic crises – and we’ve been better prepared when they happened.

Finally, new structures and innovations will only deliver if they’re matched by investments in our workforce – the remarkable people who bring diplomacy to life. And in many ways, that’s really at the heart of everything we’ve been trying to do for the last three and a half years.

And we’re doing that by recruiting and retaining the best talent that America has to offer, building a more robust and equitable pipeline for the next generation of diplomats.

We got direct hiring authority for critical positions – a status that lets us bring on qualified candidates through a faster, less bureaucratic process. And in a world that is changing as rapidly as this one is, the ability to do that – to make sure we can bring in the best talent in this country to address these emerging challenges – that is a critical asset to have.

We’re finding people with expertise in key fields, like STEM, through fellowships and tailored recruitment programs.

We’re making job opportunities more inclusive. We launched a paid internship program for the first time in the history of the department. It’s already brought on 1,700 interns, making entry-level roles more accessible for people from a broader range of socioeconomic backgrounds. We moved the Foreign Service application process online instead of requiring that many candidates pay to travel to D.C. for an interview.

Thanks in part to these efforts, and to some historic budget increases that we received from Congress, we have more people in the Foreign Service than we’ve ever had before. And since 2021, our Civil Service team has expanded 22 percent – the biggest hiring surge in 20 years. This year, eligible family member employment – the spouses, the adult children of our diplomats overseas – hit an all-time high.

But growth is not enough. We need to offer more support, more flexibility, more room for advancement to win today’s competition for talent. And make no mistake about it: We’re in a competition for talent. The people in this department could be doing so many other things, and indeed, many have come from doing other things. We have to be the best possible place to work, if we’re going to continue to recruit the best and continue to retain the best.

So that’s the goal of the first-ever retention plan that we rolled out last month, based on surveys and interviews we did to try to understand why some people choose to leave well short of the normal time they would spend at the department, why they might be giving up on the incredible investment that they made and that we made in them – and drawing on that, again, how to make this department the best possible place to work.

Now, this is going to be a long-term effort, but we’ve already taken steps to improve training for managers, to combat workplace bullying, and to lighten unnecessarily heavy workloads. We’re offering more room for career growth by adding senior positions and expanding overseas roles for Civil Service employees. We’re providing more chances and choices for professional development. We grew our training float, allowing more people to focus on learning new skills full time, without understaffing their teams or sacrificing our readiness.

And this is an initiative that I think is going to make a profound difference. It’s something we’ve been trying to do for years but that now we have at hand, and it really will free up people to engage in career-long learning, but to do it in a way, again, that doesn’t undermine the work of a particular office or bureau or our readiness for any challenge that we have.

And here at the Foreign Service Institute, we’re working together to strengthen that career-long learning, to create new and more advanced courses on critical topics – commercial tradecraft, emerging tech, global health diplomacy.

And here again, I can’t begin to emphasize the importance of this initiative and the work that Joan and her team have been doing at FSI. We know, you all know, that the rapidity of change, the profundity of change, is such that we have to have effective career-long learning if we’re going to keep up, never mind get ahead. And so having a Foreign Service Institute that is geared not only to the work that comes with bringing people in, but that is with them, that’s with you, every step of the way in your careers, I believe is mission critical. And I’m grateful for the work that we’ve been doing and the more that needs to get done.

We’re also taking steps to support our locally employed staff – you all know this, I know this – the lifeblood of our embassies in every country in the world. Locally engaged staff account for some two thirds of this department’s personnel. Their support, their success, is mission critical. We’re making their pay more predictable, competitive, more reflective of local conditions, so that we remain an employer of choice overseas. We’re improving their access to training and professional development so that our colleagues can strengthen their skills and stay at the forefront of emerging fields.

As Secretary, one of my top priorities has also been to make sure the department’s capitalizing on one of our nation’s greatest strengths: our diversity. It’s not just the right thing to do; it’s the smart and necessary thing to do. We’re operating in an incredibly diverse world. The greatest benefit we have in operating in that world is our own diversity, this diversity in experience, in skills, in knowledge, in backgrounds. It’s profoundly in our interest to make sure that we’re drawing on it in this department. If we don’t – if we don’t, we’re simply short-changing our diplomacy, short-changing our foreign policy, and short-changing our country. So this is an area of tremendous importance and one that we’ve really dug into. And we’ve done a number of things to make sure that we are building a strong department reflective of the country that we serve.

In 20011, I created the Office of Diversity Inclusion. It reports directly to the Secretary. Based our initial strategic plan, we’re conducting regular studies on our workplace environment, the demographics of our staff, to give us the information we need to make informed change. We made hiring and promotion processes for senior-level roles, like deputy assistant secretaries, more transparent. We’re continuing to make our embassies and ambassadors’ residences more accessible. We’ve expanded access to assistive technologies, from adaptive keyboards to magnification software, so that people with disabilities have the tools that they need to do their best work.

On top of these efforts, we’re taking steps to make people’s jobs – and their lives – a little bit easier. You all know this: Serving abroad involves unique challenges – often separation from loved ones, stress, danger. So we’ve improved our mental health programs, expanding counseling and other support for our colleagues and families overseas as well as right here at home.

We found ways to make it less difficult and less expensive to move with pets – (laughter) – one of the things that I heard again and again as I was traveling around. We expanded a program that lets more of our colleagues work remotely so they can join their family members who are serving overseas with State or the Department of Defense. Instead of our team members swapping official laptops and phones every time they transition from one post to another or one office to another – and losing access in between assignments – employees can now take their tech with them from day one.

Now, some of this may seem like a small step, but we know that even these small steps can have a powerful impact, a real effect, on people’s quality of life, and so we’ve also made them a priority.

In all of these different ways, we’ve made steady progress to implement the modernization agenda.

By creating offices that draw on expertise from across the department to address pressing new challenges, by embracing cutting-edge tools and letting our people get creative, by giving our workforce more chances to grow and to contribute, the State Department has become a more agile, a more effective institution. And as a result, we’re better able to strengthen our partnerships, compete with strategic rivals, deliver for our people during a moment of remarkable challenge.

And just to give you a few examples of how all of this is translated into real-world effect, when it comes to the PRC, we’ve achieved a level of strategic convergence with allies and partners across and between the Atlantic and Pacific that was unimaginable just a few years ago – looking at the problem and the challenges posed by the PRC in the same way, acting increasingly together to address those challenges. And even as we strengthen our hand in this competition, we’re maintaining communications channels, including between our militaries, and even growing cooperation on issues like the threat of synthetic opioids.

We’re not asking countries to choose between China and the United States, but we’re working hard to improve the value proposition that partnering with the United States brings to deliver on countries’ economic needs and aspirations.

We’ve expanded opportunities for countries to access development finance by reforming international financial institutions and establishing new lending policies. With the G7, we launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment to unlock some $600 billion for high-quality, environmentally sound infrastructure projects that will improve access to markets, support entrepreneurship, create jobs, empower communities.

Our diplomats are shaping the rules and norms for emerging tech50 like AI, enlisting our leading companies to make voluntary commitments on safety, security, trustworthiness; enshrining those pledges with the G7; and then winning the support of all United Nations member states – 193 countries – for the first-ever General Assembly resolution on artificial intelligence.

We’re extending digital access in the Pacific Islands, Africa, South America, and beyond. That means our partners don’t have to give up their security and privacy to gain high-speed, affordable internet connections. As part of the CHIPS Act, we’re investing $500 billion2 to build secure telecommunications networks and diversify semiconductor supply chains from the Caribbean to Europe to the Indo-Pacific.

We’re also building trusted tech ecosystems, including in emerging areas like quantum – a technology with capabilities that exceed even the most powerful supercomputers. Through the Quantum Development Group, we brought together eight European and Asian allies to strengthen supply chain resilience, deepen our research and commercial partnerships.

We’re expanding our collaboration with local officials across this country and around the world. Just in the last few years, we’ve engaged with over 5,000 mayors, governors, county supervisors, and other sub-national leaders. By bringing people together through events like the first-ever Cities Summit of the Americas in Denver, which included 250 mayors from all across our region, we sparked initiatives to promote clean energy, create good jobs, improve public health in cities and states around the world.

We’ve quadrupled financing to countries as they pursue their own climate goals. We launched the Mineral Security Partnership to accelerate the development of diverse and sustainable supply of critical energy minerals.

At the same time, we’re strengthening energy security by helping our partners in the European Union reduce their dependency on Russian gas. Back in 2021, 45 percent of their natural gas imports came from Russia. Today, it’s down to less than 15 percent. Now, the United States is the top LNG supplier to the EU, and we’ve been that for the last three years in a row.

We’re revitalizing U.S. leadership at the United Nations, rejoining organizations like the Human Rights Council and UNESCO. We’ve successfully elected American candidates to lead roles at six major institutions like the World Bank, the International Telecommunications Union. We’re driving reforms to make the international system more effective and more inclusive, from the UN Security Council to the G20.

We built coalitions to better strengthen public health threats from synthetic opioids to food insecurity. We helped launch a platform that’s focused on improving coordination between foreign ministries as we tackle infectious disease, providing direct support to, working with partners to slow the spread of Marburg virus; delivering vaccines to communities affected by mpox; providing HIV treatment to tens of millions of people around the world, continuing to build on the extraordinary achievements of PEPFAR.

These developments, and so many others, show the power and purpose of a revitalized American diplomacy.

But – and I’ll end with this – there’s more work to be done, more work that we can do, more work that we must do.

We need to continue investing in diplomatic tradecraft – if we let our core diplomatic skills and competencies atrophy, we’re not going to be able to deliver on emerging missions.

We need to do more to bridge the gap between the skills that we have and those we’ll need in the coming years.

We need faster, more efficient, more equitable hiring processes. We also have to continue prioritizing hiring in critical issue areas and filling the staffing shortages that still exist.

We need more flexible personnel structures to allow the department to take full advantage of the deep bench of talent that we already have.

We have to reward a broader range of experiences, expertise, and career paths for both the Civil and Foreign Service, including those staff that concentrate on priority areas.

That includes making it easier for our career professionals to gain experience in other parts of government – and outside government – and then rewarding them when they return. We need to find more ways for world-class experts to join the department for short stints and make their perspectives incorporated into our policies.

And it’s high time for us to update the way we evaluate performance and promote talent. Right now, performance evaluation takes an enormous amount of energy from our workforce, and, I have to say, with too little return on investment. I know this – too many people feel this process is insufficiently transparent, insufficiently objective. They feel that it doesn’t lead to enough improvement in performance and accountability.

So there is a lot left to be done. We’ll continue these efforts, and we’ll continue these efforts in part by working with the bipartisan Commission on Reform and Modernization of the Department of State, which Congress recently created, to share recommendations for how the department can further strengthen its operations, its organizational structure, its policies.

And of course, for our diplomacy to truly succeed, we’ll also need the continued partnership with Congress – and I hope not just a continued partnership, but a strengthened one.

Look, if we’re serious about U.S. leadership in the world, we can’t keep operating without knowing whether we’ll have a budget for the next fiscal year, forcing us to impose harmful cuts and hiring freezes.

We can’t reduce our investments in international financial institutions. We can’t fail to authorize historic bipartisan successes like PEPFAR, or new efforts to combat the threat of disinformation like the Global Engagement Center. We can’t fail to pay our dues at the UN and cede the space to our competitors.

And we can’t hold up the confirmation of highly skilled, capable, and patriotic Americans – sometimes for years at a time – when they should be leading our missions overseas. In 2001 – in 2001 – on average, nominees were confirmed 50 days after their nomination. Today, nominees, including our ambassadors, are waiting an average of 240 days. The system is broken. It’s damaging our diplomacy; it’s undermining our competitiveness; it’s disincentivizing public service.

And of course, this all feeds our competitors’ false narratives of our decline and division. It reinforces their conviction – their false conviction – that now is the time to challenge the United States and pursue their revisionist goals. It shakes the trust and confidence of our friends. So together, we have to find a way to fix this system. We have to do better by our people; we have to do better by our diplomacy; we have to do better by our foreign policy; we have to do better for our country.

When our diplomats have the resources they need, when they have the support they deserve, when they have the chance to contribute to their full potential, there’s nothing – nothing – they can’t do.

Two weeks ago, 235 of the newest members of our Foreign Service took their oath of office. That’s our largest single class ever.

These people – and the more than 2,000 others who joined the Foreign Service and the Civil Service this year alone – they represent the future of American diplomacy.

Former attorneys, engineers, teachers, veterans, financial experts – they’ve lived in every part of the world. They speak some of the most difficult and critical foreign languages.

They’re bringing a wealth of experience with them. The diversity is staggering. One person trained as a hostage negotiator. Another worked as the first carbon-negative farm in Costa Rica. Someone else created Nepal’s first digital library.

And like the people that I have the immense privilege of working with every day, I know – I know that they’re going to serve our country with incredible dedication, with character, with heart.

Ultimately, it’s them – and all the people of the State Department – that fill me with optimism and fill me with confidence about the future of this institution, the future of American diplomacy.

I thank each and every one of you who’ve participated in taking our country to the world, helping us to understand the world a little better, informing our diplomacy, informing our foreign policy, making America stronger at home and around the world. This is a collective enterprise. I’m gratified by the extraordinary talent we have at the department. I can see an incredibly powerful, productive, positive future for this institution, but we’ve all got to make it happen together, and I thank you for the work you’re doing to do just that.

Thank you, everyone. (Applause.)

2021 ↩︎
million ↩︎

7. How the U.S. military lost a $250 million war game in minutes

Old news perhaps, but this report is based on newly declassified information after the mandatory declassification review.. But I do not recall ever reading about this $250 million price tag.

Excerpts:

An after-action report of the exercise — which has remained secret for over 20 years — reveals that the surprise defeat triggered internal warnings that the U.S. military was vulnerable to low-tech warfare, foreshadowing the very challenges the United States would face in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and other conflicts since then. The Post recently obtained the report in response to a Mandatory Declassification Review request (MDR).

How the U.S. military lost a $250 million war game in minutes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/10/30/usa-war-military-money-report/

Secret for 20 years, a declassified report warned of military vulnerabilities to unconventional tactics that were later exploited by enemies in real conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An assortment of images and documents from Millennium Challenge 2002. (Video: (Marissa Vonesh/The Washington Post; Technical Sergeant Lisa M. Zunzanyika/U.S Air Force; PH2 Aaron Ansarov/U.S. Navy; Staff Sgt. Aaron D. Allmon II/U.S. Air Force; Chief Warrant Officer Tim Schauwecker/U.S. Army; documents obtained by The Washington Post)/The Washington Post, Photo: (Marissa Vonesh/The Washington Post; Technical Sergeant Lisa M. Zunzanyika/U.S Air Force; documents obtained by The Washington Post)/The Washington Post)

9 min

Analysis by Nate Jones

October 30, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

As a U.S. Navy carrier battle group entered the Persian Gulf, it came under surprise attack by adversaries launching missiles from commercial ships and radio-silent aircraft that quickly overwhelmed its missile defense systems. Nineteen U.S. ships, including the aircraft carrier, were destroyed and sunk within 10 minutes.

Fortunately for U.S. forces, this scenario was only a simulation in a massive, $250 million war game named Millennial Challenge 2002. After the unexpected and humbling “loss” in July 2002, military officials at Joint Forces Command in Norfolk paused the war game, “refloated” the ships and restarted the exercise. They also imposed limits on enemy tactics. After the restart, the U.S. forces defeated their adversaries in a more conventionally fought simulation.

An after-action report of the exercise — which has remained secret for over 20 years — reveals that the surprise defeat triggered internal warnings that the U.S. military was vulnerable to low-tech warfare, foreshadowing the very challenges the United States would face in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and other conflicts since then. The Post recently obtained the report in response to a Mandatory Declassification Review request (MDR).

The after-action report was written by retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who commanded the enemy forces during the war game.

Skip to end of carouselRevealing Records

An occasional series explaining public records and how they illuminate the innerworkings of government.

End of carousel

“We looked for their weakness and put our strength against it,” Van Riper told The Post.

I first learned of this classified document by reading a 2002 Army Times article in which Van Riper criticized Millennium Challenge 2002 as “rigged” and mentioned “a 20-page report” that he had submitted to his superiors.

With this information, I filed the declassification request to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2013. At the time, I was working for the National Security Archive, a nonprofit based at George Washington University that fights to make government records of historical significance public.

U.S. Marines run for cover during an exercise in Victorville, California, in 2002. Live-action maneuvers were part of the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)

Eleven years later, I got my answer — an email explaining that the record I had requested had been declassified in part. The released report demonstrates why it is important to push back against government secrecy: Unearthed records may reveal to the public critical information omitted from official government narratives.

Van Riper’s write-up contradicts portions of an official 752-page final report on Millennium Challenge 2002 released by the military more than a decade ago that called the war game a “major milestone” and described the loss of an entire carrier group as only “moderately unsuccessful.”

It also reveals the restrictions the U.S. military eventually imposed on the enemy and Van Riper’s conclusion that by limiting his tactics, the U.S. military ensured victory and de-emphasized the critical vulnerabilities he had identified.

Mandatory Declassification Review requests are similar to, but distinct from, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Unlike FOIA, which was a law passed by Congress, the Mandatory Declassification Review provision is governed by an executive order. The requirements for submitting a MDR request are defined by President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13526.

Because MDR requests are frequently reviewed by government declassification experts who hold high-level security clearances, requesters usually have a better shot at winning the release of classified records than with FOIA requests, which are often reviewed by officials lacking such expertise.

But like FOIA requests, MDR delays can be frustrating. This request was reviewed for release by five entities: Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Central Command, and the U.S. Army. And the released record is moderately redacted, which — of course — I have appealed.

The Defense Department press office did not respond to multiple Washington Post queries as to why it took more than 11 years to process the request.

Revealing Records: FOIA

PerspectiveWhen government officials withhold records, the public pays the price

PerspectiveI find documents officials want to keep hidden. Here’s how.

PerspectiveHow to FOIA: A visual guide for obtaining public records

New FOIA Column “Reveals” All in The Washington Post

Millennium Challenge 2002 was touted at the time by the Defense Department as “the largest-ever joint military experiment conducted by the United States.” It took two years to develop, involved more than 13,500 participants and unfolded over three weeks in July and August 2002.

Millennium Challenge 2002 resembled a much more complicated version of recreational, countertop war games: Participants simulated the conflict at 17 sites as wargamers conducted maneuvers against each other on a military computer network. Adjudicators used computer models to determine the outcome of their attacks and other operations.

The simulated conflict also was combined with live training of troops and equipment at nine locations in the United States. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) Commander Gen. Buck Kernan, who oversaw the war game, in public remarks at the time described the opposing forces as “very very, determined … this is free play. [Van Riper] has the opportunity to win here.”

In many ways, Millennium Challenge 2002 was a rehearsal for the 2003 Iraq War. After the game was conducted, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent a note to Kernan asking him to write a report explaining “what you think you learned from Millennium Challenge that we ought to apply to Iraq.”

Page 6. (The Washington Post)

Page 7. (The Washington Post)

Kernan did not respond to requests for comment. But the official report released in 2012 by Joint Forces Command about Millennium Challenge 2002 said that the exercise “provided an analogous complex situation” to the Iraq War.

In the exercise, Van Riper played the “Major General” of a country resembling Iraq or Iran that “possessed natural resources critical to the world community.”

His report notes that he used a strategy of ambiguity, asymmetry and denial of territory to have his forces, known as “Red,” defeat the superior U.S. military. He wrote that because the U.S. forces, designated “Blue,” appeared determined to go to war, he “saw no option except to strike Blue first.”

To plan his attack, Van Riper wrote that he “employed a command and control methodology specifically designed to thwart” American technological advantages, including the ability to intercept electronic and phone communications. He relied on couriers to relay sensitive messages and communicated to aircraft with lanterns to avoid radio chatter.

After his surprise attack simulated the destruction of the carrier group, the atmosphere at Norfolk command, where Van Riper led his team, was “shock,” he told The Post in an interview. “It was just quiet. It never happened in an exercise before. ... I don’t think [Joint Forces Command] knew what to do.”

Van Riper wanted to continue to attack U.S. forces, pressing forward with his asymmetric advantage, his report notes.

Instead, a war game adjudicator determined Van Riper’s successful attack “wouldn’t have happened” in real warfare and ruled that all but four of the virtual U.S. ships would be “refloated” and the war game would continue, according to his report.

In an interview, Micah Zenko, an expert on war games and author of the book “Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy,” said that Van Riper may not have taken into account the full picture in his desire to keep playing. He said that U.S. Joint Forces Command was charged with “scoping, designing, and running, an extremely complex and elaborate war game ... if ‘refloating’ the Blue’s maritime forces is required to do that, they will do so.”

Zenko noted that the war game also involved real activity. Of the forces participating, 20 percent were practicing live fire exercises on U.S. bases, including Nellis Air Force base, Nev., and Fort Irwin, Calif. If the U.S. carrier group was not refloated, these live exercises could not have been realistically conducted.

Still, Zenko praised Van Riper’s report for being “devastating in the specific critiques he witnessed.”

Van Riper, in his report, noted that the ultimate significance of the elimination of realistic war gaming in Millennium Challenge 2002 was that it created an exercise for which the “result was preordained.” As such, he believed the exercise was not a useful test of the U.S. military’s ability to invade a hostile nation.

After the U.S. carrier group was “refloated,” other restrictions were imposed on Van Riper, he noted in his report. His forces could not initiate combat, but U.S. forces could. Van Riper’s forces were also forbidden from using chemical weapons against the United States, which he considered his country’s “most significant” asymmetric military strength.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper during a hearing on Capitol Hill in 2007. In a 2002 interview, Van Riper criticized Millennium Challenge 2002 as “rigged.” (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Having lost the independence he believed was integral to the war game, Van Riper stepped down as commander of opposition forces but continued to monitor the war game as an adviser, he told The Post.

At the conclusion of the war game, he wrote that the results of Millennium Challenge 2002 “need to be considered in light of the fact that the [United States] commander did not operate against a ‘thinking and adaptive’ enemy who ‘could win’” after the American fleet was refloated. “Not having a ‘thinking and adaptive’ enemy operating against [United States forces] will have a very significant impact on the assessment” of U.S. warfighting concepts, he wrote.

Van Riper believes that the public should “absolutely” have been able to read this report decades ago. He says that with the report’s current redactions, “they could have declassified it the next day,” in 2002.

“The real sad thing,” he said, “is some of the things that we learned were never shared.”

Craig Whitlock, Dan Lamothe and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

Do you have a question, comment or FOIA idea? Leave a comment or email me at RevealingRecords@washpost.com.

8. Men under "downward pressure" (Army SOF and Green Berets)

Recruiting shortfalls are an existential threat. Challenges present opportunities. Carpe diem.

Excerpts:

THE HIGH SIDE: Those are all of my questions. Is there anything else either of you want to add?

SLIDER: No. I would just say that Lee and I and Chief [Warrant Officer 5 Gary] Ostrander [command chief warrant officer at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School], we’re excited about all of the opportunities that all of these challenges present. I think that this is really good work that we’ve set out ahead of us. You’ve listened to the Chief [of Staff of the Army, Gen. Randy George] and the Secretary [of the Army, Christine Wormuth] talk really candidly about the challenges in front of the Army. Those challenges exist at our level as well, so I’m excited about the opportunity.

Men under "downward pressure"

The leaders at the Army’s special operations schoolhouse explain how they are trying to fight through a tightening budget and a recruiting crisis to ensure the Green Berets are ready for the future.

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/men-under-downward-pressure?utm

Sean D. Naylor

Oct 31, 2024

∙ Paid

Maj. Gen. Jason Slider (left), commander of the JFK Special Warfare Center and School, and CSM Lionel “Lee” Strong, the center’s senior enlisted adviser. (U.S. Army photo)

What follows is a very lightly edited transcript of an exclusive interview with Maj. Gen. Jason Slider, head of the U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (or SWCS – pronounced “swick” – for short), and CSM Lionel “Lee” Strong, the center’s senior enlisted adviser. The High Side’s Sean D. Naylor conducted the interview on Oct. 15 in Washington, D.C., during the annual meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army. Earlier that day, Slider and Strong had each participated in a “State of the Regiment” panel discussion with Maj. Gen. Gil Ferguson, head of 1^st Special Forces Command (Airborne). The High Side attended the discussion, to which several of the questions and answers below refer. We also published the following article based on some of the major themes to emerge from the panel discussion and the interview: https://thehighside.substack.com/p/two-new-jobs-but-too-few-people-and

THE HIGH SIDE: You said that you viewed the recruiting crisis as “an existential threat” to 1^st SFC. Please elaborate on that. Where is the existential threat and on what timeline might that be realized?

SLIDER: So why do I think that?…

The Army has had a challenge with recruiting. Deputy Undersecretary of the Army Honorable Mario Diaz yesterday had made the comment that we’ve made a lot of improvements over the last couple of years. We’ve recognized this problem actually going back to 2018, and so the Army has been addressing the full length of the problem… There are policy challenges, there are manning challenges, there’s the inertia associated with a 10,000-man U.S. Army Recruiting Command, how do you turn that ship. There’s adapting to using 21^st Century tools so that we better understand the environment. There’s retraining our recruiters so that we as an Army better understand the young people of today, better understand the influencers of today. So all that matters. Now what’s also going on in the Army is the Army’s … putting its money where its mouth is. It is investing in our ability to go out and find the people that are interested and recruit them. That includes 18 X-Rays, that includes the off-the-street men and women that will come into Special Forces, Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations. Also, as I mentioned at USAREC, there’s the Special Operations Recruiting Battalion, and their focus really is kind of beating the bushes with our divisions, our brigades, and finding E-5s, E-6s and E-7s to come over.

So layered on top of that is the Army’s effort to refocus on large-scale combat operations. Between about … 2004 and 2014, the Army and the other services did a remarkable job of transforming the Army of the ‘90s that was finely tuned to large scale combat into the counterterrorism, industrial-level counterinsurgency stability force that it needed. And so within that effort, we know that there are force structure gaps that the Army’s trying to address, like, we need more air defense artillery, we need to build integrated fire protection centers, we need to fully build out our multidomain task forces. The Army has taken steps to improve our ability to fight with information, with the theater information advantage detachments. So there’s force structure that we know we have to build, that we’re not currently generating the forces to put into those formations. And then there’s other force structure that was really, really important between 2004 and 2014 that’s now less important. The Army will make decisions in its annual TAA [Total Army Analysis] process about whether or not that becomes the bill payer for these priorities or whether it moves into the National Guard or Reserves. Likewise, there are things probably in the National Guard or Reserves that might need to come back into the active-duty component, rebalancing those capabilities.

So, to your question: Why do I think it’s an existential threat?If we can’t fill the force structure we have, then it makes it really difficult for us to make the argument that we need to hold on to it while at the same time the Army is trying to find efficiencies in cutting where we no longer need capabilities and investing where we currently have capability gaps. Now I will extend that a little bit further. It’s not just about, hey, can we generate the forces that we need to actually fill the authorizations that we possess. It’s also about how does ARSOF fit in the large-scale combat operations. So, in this larger context of downward pressure on people, manpower, downward pressure on budget, we are working to better integrate how ARSOF fights with the Army. In the past we spent a lot of time focusing on irregular warfare, special operations in competition, working in direct support to combatant commanders. We are now very deliberately working with the Army to try to understand, okay, what are those documented gaps associated with large-scale combat operations. What are the gaps in terms of realizing the multi-domain operations concept, and then based on capabilities within ARSOF, in terms of how we fight, how do we marry those things up, work with the Army so that they can make optimal force structure decisions going forward.

THE HIGH SIDE: And this is the point you were making at the breakfast about how, when the doctrine was written ten years ago, it outlined how Army special operations forces fit into a joint construct, rather than into a big Army construct.

SLIDER: Right. So, we’re rewriting FM 305 [“Army Special Operations Forces”] right now. And we will absolutely address irregular warfare in the competition space. We are also very deliberately addressing ARSOF in LSCO. We’ve not done that before. We’ve not done that before. And we’re working hand in hand with [Maj.] Gen. Ferguson, everything that they’re learning in experimentation, the Special Forces groups that are participating in the Army’s training program, the Warfighters … Special Forces commanders working in direct support of a corps commander for a joint forced entry operation, and also our companies and our ODAs that are training in our combat training centers.

THE HIGH SIDE: There’s been a tension in Special Forces between the true believers in unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense, on one hand, and those that seemed more interested in direct action. As you try to blend SF into large-scale combat operations, a phrase that implies more kinetic action, how will it affect that dynamic? Will SF have to become more like the old OSS [Office of Strategic Services], with sabotage missions behind enemy lines?

SLIDER: So, it’s all of that. We’ve had a conversation inside our own chain of command, from SOCOM all the way down through USASOC, 1^st SFC, SWCS and part of that conversation is ‘back to our roots.’ … To your point, Army special operations did what the nation asked it to do between 2001 and ’14, ‘15 and ’16. Just like the Army. The Army did a remarkable job turning the Army of the ‘90s into this counterinsurgency stability force. We started to make the transition back to large-scale combat operations in … 2017 I think is when the Combined Arms Center initially did its large-scale combat operations gap study. In ’17. That work is still driving the force modernization priorities that the secretary and the chief talked about just yesterday morning [at AUSA]. So ARSOF also cannot just turn the corner. We have work to do. And the other thing I would say in that context is as we do that work we are also honoring the service, the sacrifice, the loss of life, of every ARSOF soldier, man or woman, over the past 20 years. People should not confuse our act of honoring those people with trying to hold on to what we were asked to do over the last 20 years.

So, back to our roots. So, when you go back to World War II, you just mentioned [the OSS]. So, we are the world’s best unconventional warfare force and we’re not going to let anybody else challenge us in that space, I don’t think. But when you go back to World War II … OSS in the 1960s and 1950s was popularized by movies and it was guys popping out of the ground in black turtlenecks behind enemy lines, or wearing a tan trench coat, masters of disguise. That was just a little itty bit of what OSS was doing, what special operations was doing in World War II. The Rangers at Pointe du Hoc – they needed a highly trained unit to do that mission, but their mission was rather conventional: It was silence the guns on Pointe du Hoc and allow – I forget the numbered division – allow them to land and break out onto the continent … In the China-India- Burma theater, you had the Merrill Marauders – long-range deep penetration. Why? To capture the airfield in northern Burma that the Japanese were using to have air superiority over that theater. Then Merrill Marauders re-task organized into the MARS Task Force. It included the integration of conventional capability. They recaptured and opened up the Burma road. Why was that important? So we could open back up the ground line of communication to continue to supply and arm the Chinese Nationalists in China that were holding down 38 Japanese divisions on the mainland. They were also protecting other airfields that we then began flying U.S. bombers out of to attrit the Japanese homeland and their ability to generate forces against our main effort in the island campaign.

So, when we talk about ARSOF and back to its roots, when we talk about ARSOF and LSCO today, it is back to its roots. It’s not just an OSS, an [SOE - British Special Operations Executive] and a French resistance, an FFI [French Forces of the Interior] officer behind enemy lines. It’s the Rangers, it’s the Marauders, it’s the MARS Task Force and it’s working with both conventional and joint commanders.

STRONG: I think something that hasn’t changed, whether you look at the OSS, World War II, Vietnam into the GWOT now transitioning into LSCO, what really hasn’t changed is our emphasis on by, with and through partners and allies. Yes, during the GWOT, we might have had special operations forces, and primarily ODAs, doing CT/COIN … kind of fights with high-end DA. That was the mechanism because that’s what the nation needed. But as we transition to LSCO, we’re still training by, with and through partners and allies, but maybe instead of doing direct action-focused missions, now we’re looking more at resistance and deep sensing and things like that. So I don’t think we’ve really gone too far away from our lineage and our traditions of partnering.

SLIDER: We haven’t gone away from it at all. I mean, we won’t talk about where we are around the world right now, but where we are around the world right now are in really critical places that conventional forces can’t operate, where we are training, equipping, deepening relationships in areas prioritized by combatant commanders, and I’ll just leave it there.

STRONG: The mechanism hasn’t changed. It’s still partnering, whether it’s direct action or unconventional warfare.

THE HIGH SIDE: You [Maj. Gen. Slider] and Maj. Gen. Ferguson this morning spoke about the potential of two new MOSs in Special Forces. One of them would be an 18-series JTAC-like position dedicated solely to fires. What was the other MOS you are envisioning?

SLIDER: So on your point about the first one, the JTAC-like capability, we don’t know what the MOS will be, but it’s basically improving the lethality of our SF teams, our operational detachment – alphas. That’s not a SOF-peculiar problem. If you listen to Gen. [James] Rainey [the head of Army Futures Command] talk, if you look at what Brig. Gen. Bryan Babich is doing with modernizing the command-and-control system, access to joint fires in large-scale combat operations is one of the very essential, minimum capabilities you need based on how ARSOF operates, bringing that capability into SF teams is critical.

Now, the other MOS. It’s not approved yet, but to answer your question, we think it might be something like a robotics technical warrant officer.

THE HIGH SIDE: Is the first one approved?

SLIDER: No, it’s not. This is something that [Maj.] Gen. Ferguson and I are just talking about and looking at the possibilities of integrating that into the schoolhouse.

THE HIGH SIDE: And what’s the timeline for both of those, upon approval?

SLIDER: We’re talking about that right now … One of the things that we can do, in partnership with the Army, because of some of the flexible funding that we have, is that we can incubate an idea – use that flexible funding to incubate it – produce something, experiment with it, and then if it is a viable capability that … helps the Army solve address a gap or solve a problem that they have, then we can work within the Army systems to help scale that capability.

So, as I said [at the Green Beret Foundation panel discussion], the team out at Fort Moore, Georgia, they’re working on human-machine integration. We’re working on robotics and autonomous system operations. We’re trying to be very aggressive in this space … We know that we’re going to get support from the SOCOM side here in the near future. We’re trying to figure out what the timeline looks like on the Army side.

Ukrainian troops work with first-person-view strike drones. Lessons from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are informing how Slider, Strong and other Army special operations leaders are trying to prepare the force for future conflicts. (Ukrainian military photo via Wikimedia Commons)

THE HIGH SIDE: But if what you’re considering comes to reality, would that mean two new positions on an A-team? And would those new positions be in addition to the current 12-man team, or would they replace positions on the team? In other words, might you lose one of the two 18 Charlies, for instance?

SLIDER: What is causing us to be deliberate here is that we’ve got downward pressure on money, we’ve got downward pressure on manpower, and so we have to be careful that, in our effort to solve a problem at our level, we don’t shift the resource bill to either SOCOM or the Army, because they’ve got downward pressure on people and money just like we do. So part of the deliberate work we have to do, thoughtful work we have to do, is how do we pay that bill internally. So, if we’re going to create that JTAC-like capability for an ODA, is that indeed another person? Or are we modifying the responsibilities of the commo sergeant, or the weapons sergeant? We don’t know the answer to that. And then there’s cognitive load that we have to consider … that Lee talked about earlier.

On the robotics side, we’re doing the same thing. We think that that is a capability that will reside no lower than battalion level. We think that we could initially provide the manning for that new MOS internally with our [180-Alphas, Special Forces warrant officers] but we have to be careful because we need to make sure we don’t take away from the [180-Alphas] that we need across the force while we try to build this new capability.

THE HIGH SIDE: So that robotics and automated systems soldier would be a battalion-level asset that would be pushed down to companies and A-teams as required?

SLIDER: I think it’s a capability at that [battalion] level that will then push capabilities closer to the forward edge. Whether that person’s going to the forward edge or not, I don’t know. But you heard Gil Ferguson say [at the Green Beret Foundation panel discussion], yeah, we think we need this person with this skillset, but we don’t know where we’re going to get all the attritable systems and the payloads that we also need so that he can do the job that we envision for him in the future.

STRONG: On the JTAC piece, I don’t know how familiar you are with how we currently run the SOTAC program. So right now, we currently have qualified SOTAC graduates that do terminal guidance on ODAs, and that’s an additional skill that you train somebody to. And we’ve kind of hit a point where we see the value of that, and there’s now maybe a gap that exceeds an additional skill, that maybe you need an MOS for. So that’s where you see maybe the demand for an MOS as opposed to training somebody in an additional task.

THE HIGH SIDE: So when you’re deploying A and B-teams now, where do the Air Force Special Operations special tactics personnel fit?

STRONG: We developed the SOTAC program to basically have additional capacity because there were not enough controllers in the Air Force to support everybody so we trained our 18-series personnel.

THE HIGH SIDE: So if you’re an A-team leader or B-team commander, if you’re deploying downrange you might be going with an Special Tactics airman or you might be deploying with an 18-series SOTAC graduate?

STRONG: Correct. We need more capacity, particularly in that capability. And then, similarly, just like we have 18-Foxes [Special Forces intelligence sergeants]. The evolution was SOF NCOs were trained at O and I, at PME and at the time it was ANCOC back then, now it’s the senior leaders course, but you got an O and I block, and at some point we had a demand to develop an MOS [that became the] 18 Fox. We grew that. Now, what we see with the 18 Fox program is we struggled to fill the 18 Foxes, now you want to add another MOS on top of this? So it’s a challenge… We’re learning as we go, and just like [Maj.] Gen. Slider said, we can’t rush to this and then pass off the bill.

SLIDER: To your point, though, the other thing we have to account for is AFSOC is also modernizing; AFSOC also has downward pressure on people and money and so AFSOC may not prioritize some of the skillsets at the same scale that we’ve relied on in the past … It’s a team effort and we have very strong partnerships across all the SOF components and with SOCOM and we just have to balance that effort as we move forward.

THE HIGH SIDE: There have been rumors of Special Forces going to a 16-man A-team. Are the potential new positions anything to do with that?

SLIDER: Probably where that comes from is from [U.S. Special Operations Command head] Gen. [Bryan] Fenton, from [Lt.] Gen. Braga all the way down, that conversation is just about challenging the status quo. Maybe the answer is 12’s right. Maybe it’s a different number. But there’s a lot of folks that only know 12. Well, if you look at the entire history of an SF ODA, it hasn’t always been 12. So, I think the conversation that’s being had is really about what capability do we need, and let’s not be constrained artificial notion that back in 1952 we figured out 12 was the right number because that wasn’t the number back then.

STRONG: I’ve now been in SWCS for a little over two years. But as I was leaving the operational force – I was the command sergeant major of 3^rd Special Forces Group – some of this innovation and experimentation was starting and one of the things that came up was we were basically layering too many tasks on an ODA and an AOB, and at almost every echelon. So, we started questioning, is our force structure appropriate for the capabilities we need to meet the demands. So, we looked at, if we grew the size of the ODA… If we were to build an ODA today, what capabilities would you need? Would it be a JTAC? Would it be space and cyber and all those things, and it made us question the 12-man ODA, so we did a little bit of, at the time, some experimentation of what does an ODA with those capabilities look like and the number of people. And really what we got to was form follows function. What are the things we need this formation to do at every echelon, and then what capabilities do you layer on to make that happen? We’re still iterating and evolving through this process two and a half years later and I don’t think we’ve landed on what the right answer is, and quite frankly I don’t think we will. I think what we’re going to constantly be doing is evolving to meet those demands and I think you’re going to see us maybe, some centralized capability that… we’re pulling levers and hitting buttons to move capabilities to a point of need at a specific time and purpose and then recentralize those at those battalion and brigade echelons. And maybe the core of the AOB and the ODA stays – I wouldn’t say the same as it is now, but very similar, and then commanders at the O-5, O-6 and above [paygrades] will be moving those capabilities to a time and place of need, if that makes sense.

THE HIGH SIDE: One challenge might be that you might conclude that you need a 15 or 16-person A-team, but if you’re unable to fill the current 12-soldier A-team, that becomes something of an academic discussion.

STRONG: Form is going to follow function and we’re going to task organize for purpose. Whatever that mission is, you’re going to task organize for that.

SLIDER: And we will have catastrophic success on the recruiting, preparation and production.

THE HIGH SIDE: We’ve also heard a rumor of a proposal to put a Space Force person on an ODA. Is that the “space and cyber guy” to whom you referred earlier?

SLIDER: I’m not sure there’s enough Space guys to go around.

STRONG: There’s not enough capability to put it on every ODA. You’re probably going to start with Space [Force] officers at the brigade headquarters to inform and educate the formation on the capabilities that reside in those functions.

THE HIGH SIDE: Of the SF candidates who don’t make it through the pipeline, are you losing most of them in SFAS?

SLIDER: I’m going to let Lee answer this question, but I’ll just start off with … just like with any course in the Army that has been around for a while, there’s ebbs and flows. It doesn’t matter what course you’re in in the Army, there’s always some part of it [that] is perfect and some part of it is still in development … and we’re learning and applying those lessons learned. There have been times where the production numbers were really low and discouraging. We’re past that time. There have been times where there were a lot of really good questions about standards. We’re past that time. And I’ll let Lee talk a little bit about why those things are true.

STRONG: Assessment and selection still serves as our primary filter. By the time somebody makes it to the Qualification Course, you’re seeing high-90 percents in the pass rates in the Qualification Course. That single digit percentage that makes it through Assessment and Selection and goes on to the Qualification Course and is unsuccessful, they maybe had some family circumstances that [prevented] them from finishing; they might have… After some investment from us of train, test and maybe retrain, if they have a series of… they’re just not grasping the content and they’ve failed multiple times, we have to drop them from the course. But it is single digits in the drop rate in the Qualification Course, high 90 percent pass rates. And we are investing as much as we can into them, because ultimately Assessment and Selection is screening your suitability to both pass the Qualification Course and further on your suitability to serve in the operational force. So you see our highest attrition at Assessment and Selection and once you’re beyond that hurdle, it is a train, lead, mentor and develop kind of model. Our cadre are the heartbeat of that. They are the ones that… They are truly taking on a leader development model and they want the students to be successful. Even at Assessment and Selection, we want everybody to be successful. Success for [Maj.] Gen. Slider and [me is] if we have a 200-person Selection class, that 200 people get selected. The cadre are there to monitor and run that course. The students select and non-select themselves.

A candidate going through the Special Forces Assessment and Selection course.

THE HIGH SIDE: You said during the panel discussion that in the resource-constrained environment you were placing the risk on 2^nd Special Warfare Training Group. Can you elaborate on that?

SLIDER: We’re still in the process of figuring that out. As I mentioned earlier, I’m in the job for 90 days, 100 days now. [Maj.] Gen. Ferguson and I have teamed up together. He is in the process of refining how ARSOF… not only how it will operate in the 21^st century in competition, given some of the tech that we’re developing, but also how ARSOF fights in LSCO. So it’s still too early to say ‘We’re not going to do this, we are going to do that.’ There’s also efficiencies that we can gain. So, for example, we may not have to hibernate a POI, because we can modify the frequency with which we conduct the course and the student load that we bring through the course. But there may be other POIs that have persisted that maybe are legacy now as we look at them through the lens of what we’re learning in global conflicts, how we’re going to fight as part of the Army … And then the other thing too is one of the conversations that we’re having with USASOC and SOCOM is where can the broader enterprise find efficiencies: Do we need multiple SERE courses? Can we find efficiencies with other skillsets like freefall? Things like that. Now, will we do those things? I don’t know. But I think just professionally in the resource environment that we’re in, it’s prudent to have those conversations.

THE HIGH SIDE: Do you mean efficiencies in terms of the training, or in terms of the force structure? In other words, are you asking whether you need as many freefall teams as you have at present?

SLIDER: It could be both. So, for example, we’re looking really hard at everybody that shows up to our military freefall course, at the numbers. Is each one of those, whether they’re Army, Air Force or Navy, aligned against a documented authorization that requires that skillset? Now, in some cases, we’re seeing that we’re actually training more people than is specifically required. There’s good reasons for that, but in resource=constrained environment, we may have to be more conservative in how we manage our student population.

STRONG: Another thing we’re doing too is we’ve kind of separated individual training from collective training. We make MOSs and we build additional skill identifiers that we then give to Gil Ferguson at 1^st Special Forces Command to train collective tasks and certify and validate… Freefall is a great example. SWCSproduces a basic military freefall parachutist. We’re teaching them to exit an aircraft safely, control the canopy and land. When it comes to jumping on a detachment at night under NODs, pushing a bundle and landing on an unmarked drop zone, that’s a collective task that an ODA would do at the unit. That is an easy area to separate what does 1 SFC do and what does SWCS do. We’re producing the initial entry capability and they’re learning how to operationally employ it, certify and validate it to do that mission. We were spending a lot of time and resources trying to do both.

THE HIGH SIDE: You [Maj. Gen. Slider] mentioned during the panel discussion regarding the recruiting crisis that “within the USASOC enterprise a two-star commander will own that problem, be made accountable to that problem and will fix that problem.”

SLIDER: I think we all are optimistic and we like to believe we’ll accomplish any task we put our mind to, but inside USASOC what we have decided to do is, instead of viewing recruiting as a separate problem from preparation as a separate problem from production, we’re putting that all underneath a single commander and that’s the CG at the Special Warfare Center and School.

THE HIGH SIDE: So that’s you.

SLIDER: Right.

THE HIGH SIDE: We’ve also heard reports that the military’s shift to the Genesis health system has added to the recruiting challenge by centralizing servicemembers’ health records in digital form, meaning that people with minor problems in their medical history that disqualify them from serving in Special Forces are now being filtered out, when previously they might have slipped through the cracks.

STRONG: Genesis is one of many challenges we’re facing [when it comes to] recruiting. You heard [Army Secretary Christine Wormuth] yesterday when she talked about recruiting in her opening comments for AUSA … I wrote down in my notebook she said 77 percent of Americans are ineligible for military service. So we’re trying to recruit from 23 percent of the population. The Army’s recruiting challenges are our recruiting challenges. So the Army’s trying to pull from 23 [percent of the population] that are eligible to serve – doesn’t mean they want to serve – and then when you bring that down further to ARSOF, we’re trying to recruit from that same population and then within the Army it narrows that down to I think 6,000 to 7,000 servicemembers in the active duty Army that we can recruit from that meet our basic qualifications, whether it’s GT scores, physical fitness. And Genesis is one layer of that barrier to entry that we have to solve. I think we’ve got to get way left of this problem, as we’re looking at just the health of our nation. Seventy percent of Americans are overweight, obese…

SLIDER: At the root of it, MHS Genesis is about taking care of people, and that process is being… It’s a DoD program, it’s a joint program, all the services are operating within and in support of that process. It’s about taking care of people.

STRONG: There’s a ton of value [to it]. We can go down to Genesis[-related] recruiting issues, but there’s [the] value of Genesis as a servicemember, as you transition from installation to installation, command to command, your records are there for everybody to see, versus the old-style way of passing on a yellow-jacket folder which gets lost. We went to it for a reason.

THE HIGH SIDE: You said toward the end of the panel discussion that there are “hard choices” ahead. What are your top two or three hard choices that you are going to have make?

SLIDER: We are talking about people. So I guess maybe the way I would answer that is I’d go back to your point about … that there are some out there that have a different view of what SOF is, what 18-series [soldiers] and ODAs do. And so, Lee and I, we joined the Army back in the 90s, so we have a perspective that the vast majority of the force does not have. The vast majority of the force joined the Army after 2001, came into SOF after 2001, and they only know what SOF has been doing during those years. And so, we have to bring the entire formation along as we adapt. And so for some folks, we can say, some of us that have a little bit of gray hair, we can say we’re getting back to our roots, we understand how we operated in the ‘90s, we understand the history of World War II, but not everybody has that same perspective. So, I think that makes it really hard when we’re talking to our leaders that are now field grade officers and mid-grade NCOs and having this conversation with them. So I think hard choices come when we look at, for example, the kinds of courses we’re teaching in the 2^nd Special Warfare Training Group. Some of those course have been around for a while, they are part of the DNA of USASOC and 1^st SFC and we’ve got to bring the entire formation along as we have discussions about, ‘Is this thing still more important than, for example, the robotics and unmanned systems integration course.’

THE HIGH SIDE: Can you give us any examples of the courses that might be on the chopping block?

SLIDER: I don’t know if I want to speculate at the moment about what we might… But I do think that, again, because of the downward pressure on people and money, I think there’ll be some hard choices.

THE HIGH SIDE: The other theme that emerged from the panel discussion was that there is a pace of adaptation that you at USASOC are observing in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that is some way beyond what ARSOF would be capable of at the moment.

SLIDER: I’ll comment on that. So, what I would say is let’s first identify what’s different: In Ukraine, it’s an existential threat. The entire country is united behind that threat. In Israel, they view it as an existential threat. The entire country is united behind what they’re doing. So, I think that one could say that the speed at which they are taking advantage of technological innovation is quicker than what we’re currently seeing with how we’re doing some of our transformation and modernization. But it’s a different environment. They’re adapting [to] and addressing an existential threat.

The other thing is … you look at how they’re fighting in Ukraine and I think you have to ask, would we fight that way. You look at how they’re fighting in the Middle East and you have to ask, well, would we fight that way. So, yes, there are lessons to be learned; yes, we should pay attention to their innovation, but we should be careful about drawing false conclusions because we may not fight that way. What is true, however, … and affecting us, is the pace of technological innovation has likely never been greater in human history. And what machine learning and artificial intelligence promise, in terms of steepening and accelerating that curve, I personally believe that … it will steepen and not flatten out while I’m still in the Army. And so how do we adapt to that reality?

THE HIGH SIDE: With regard to the Israelis’ fight, Maj. Gen. Ferguson said you were trying to learn the lessons as quickly as possible. What level of cooperation from the Israeli Defense Forces are you getting?

SLIDER: I think that what I would say is, not just for the conflict in the Middle East, but also in Europe, [is that] we have longstanding relationships and partnerships with both countries. The U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth is where the Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned resides. That center has been very active in Europe in cooperation with U.S. Army Europe and Africa, and as you may know the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command has maintained annual Army-IDF staff talks for decades now. So those lines of communications, those partnerships, are still being exercised today. The context of the conversations and how we’re having those conversations has just focused right on current events.

THE HIGH SIDE: But that’s big Army to big [IDF] army. Do you in Army special operations have similar discussions with your IDF counterparts?

SLIDER: We do.

THE HIGH SIDE: On the breakfast panel this morning you made the point that the cycle of adaptation is between 30 and 90 days, so how useful is an annual meeting?

SLIDER: It’s an annual meeting of senior leaders, but in reality, the way that process lays out, you get together once a year to lay out the next 12 months of work that occurs not only in the Special Operations Center of Excellence, but the Fires Center of Excellence, the Maneuver Center of Excellence, the Cyber Center of Excellence, so that work is ongoing. And yes, of course, we have specialized relationships with counterparts in Israel.

THE HIGH SIDE: So no matter what’s happening at the political level between the two countries, you’re not seeing a slowdown of information sharing at your level?

SLIDER: I’m not aware of it. I’m not aware of it.

The High Side: As you mentioned, Army special operations forces had built good relationships with Ukrainian SOF prior to the Russia’s invasion in January 2022. How are you managing that mentoring relationship now?

SLIDER: I don’t want to speak out of school. Lt. Gen. Curtis Buzzard is the commander of the SAG-U [Security Assistance Group – Ukraine] and I think that he’s probably the best guy to comment on those things.

THE HIGH SIDE: Those are all of my questions. Is there anything else either of you want to add?

SLIDER: No. I would just say that Lee and I and Chief [Warrant Officer 5 Gary] Ostrander [command chief warrant officer at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School], we’re excited about all of the opportunities that all of these challenges present. I think that this is really good work that we’ve set out ahead of us. You’ve listened to the Chief [of Staff of the Army, Gen. Randy George] and the Secretary [of the Army, Christine Wormuth] talk really candidly about the challenges in front of the Army. Those challenges exist at our level as well, so I’m excited about the opportunity.

9. Russia asks at UN meeting: If the West aids Ukraine, why can’t North Korea help us?

Ha ha ha!

The simple answer is that Ukraine with US, NATO and other's support is helping Ukraine defend itself from the illegal and brutal invasion by Russia. The attempt at "whataboutism" here is precious. Bless his heart.

Russia asks at UN meeting: If the West aids Ukraine, why can’t North Korea help us?

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/russia-asks-at-un-if-west-aids-ukraine-why-cant-north-korea-help-us?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/world

Mr Vassily Nebenzia said Russia's military interaction with North Korea does not violate international law. PHOTO: REUTERS

Updated Oct 31, 2024, 02:46 PM

Facebook

NEW YORK - Russia's envoy to the United Nations on Oct 30 questioned why its allies like North Korea could not help Moscow in its war against Ukraine, given Western countries claim the right to help Kyiv.

Mr Vassily Nebenzia faced a blunt argument at a Security Council meeting from the United States, Britain, South Korea, Ukraine and others, who all accused Russia of violating UN resolutions and the founding UN Charter with the deployment of troops from North Korea to help Moscow.

“Supporting an act of aggression, which completely violates the principles of the UN Charter, is illegal,” South Korea’s UN ambassador Joon-kook Hwang said.

“Any activities that are entailed with the DPRK’s dispatch of troops to Russia are clear violations of multiple UN Security Council Resolutions,” he added, referring to the North by its official name.

Some 10,000 North Korean troops were already in eastern Russia, and it appeared likely that they would be used to support combat operations in Russia's Kursk region, near the border with Ukraine, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Oct 30.

Mr Nebenzia said Russia's military interaction with North Korea does not violate international law.

Russia has not denied the involvement of North Korean troops in the war, which it has been waging in Ukraine since February 2022.

“Even if everything that’s being said about the cooperation between Russia and North Korea by our Western colleagues is true, why is it that the United States and allies are trying to impose on everyone the flawed logic that they have the right to help the Zelensky regime... and Russian allies have no right to do a similar thing,” Mr Nebenzia said.

Ukraine’s UN ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya responded: “None of the countries that provide assistance to Ukraine is under Security Council sanctions.”

“Receiving assistance from the fully sanctioned North Korea is a brazen violation of the UN Charter,” he added. “Sending the DPRK troops to support Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is a flagrant violation of international law.”

North Korea has been under UN Security Council sanctions since 2006, and the measures have been steadily strengthened over the years with the aim of halting Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

North Korea has not acknowledged the deployment of troops to Russia, but said any such move would be in compliance with international law.

“If Russia’s sovereignty and security interests are exposed to and threatened by continued dangerous attempts of the United States and the West, and if it is judged that we should respond to them with something, we will make a necessary decision,” North Korea’s UN ambassador Song Kim told the council.

“Pyongyang and Moscow maintain close contact with each other on mutual security and development of the situation,” he said.

However, deputy US ambassador Robert Woodward warned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: “Should DPRK’s troops enter Ukraine in support of Russia, they will surely return in body bags. So I would advise Chairman Kim to think twice about engaging in such reckless and dangerous behaviour.” REUTERS.

10. The Rise of Soldier-Influencers: Army Eyes Policy for Troops with Millions of Online Followers

Embrace current culture. We have no choice.

The Rise of Soldier-Influencers: Army Eyes Policy for Troops with Millions of Online Followers

military.com · by Steve Beynon · October 30, 2024

For Capt. Michael Villahermosa, the Army made him the man he is.

"I went from having no college education to being an officer," Villahermosa, a company commander at the service's bomb disposal school, told Military.com. "I have a wife, the kid, the two-car garage, picket fence. ... The Army gave me all of that."

Now, Villahermosa, an Afghanistan War veteran, wants to give back to the Army -- and he's using his online influence to do it.

Going by the moniker "EOD Happy Captain" on social media, he's been sharing tidbits for years about daily Army life, usually with a glass-half-full approach to service. He also has a podcast on which he has interviewed service members, journalists and other key stakeholders in the Army community.

"When all that's out there is the negative, you know, people start to believe that is the status quo, and that is the standard within an organization," he said. "But it's not the case."

The Army is now eyeing influencers like Villahermosa to help shape its digital presence, but it aims to do so with a notably hands-off approach. Service planners are working on a policy for influencers they aim to be as flexible as possible.

"The Army doesn't have a policy on social media engagement; it's sorta the wild west," Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said. "What I don't want to do is [for] it to become an Army reg that tightens things so much that it sucks the life out of their posts."

For now, the rules on social media use and what is considered appropriate remain largely subjective, and those decisions are left up to commanders. But Wormuth noted new efforts need to balance capitalizing on those online personalities and their messages about Army service while not burdening them with too many rules or too much oversight.

"The Army has not leveraged those folks in any kind of systemic way," Wormuth said.

Some soldiers in the force, including some junior enlisted troops, have millions of followers online. But a soldier having an online audience larger than the Army itself is not something the service has got its arms around yet, especially when it comes to how it governs its formations.

The Army's digital landscape is a battleground of sorts -- a mix of the military's signature gallows humor, meme accounts that lambaste service leadership, and a civilian press corps publishing stories that top brass might prefer are left unreported.

Against that backdrop, the service has long wrestled with how to cut through the noise and promote a more positive public narrative.

In the private sector, companies have increasingly turned to influencers to sidestep traditional advertising. Leveraging influencers -- often with massive followings across platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, brands are tapping into a more personalized approach to marketing to avoid a commercialized and inauthentic feel.

In some cases, it's as simple as companies giving major podcast personalities their products without any formal endorsement deal and banking on the hope the influencers will genuinely enjoy the product and mention it in passing during a show.

Service planners met with some Army influencers early this month for their feedback on how a policy should be developed. Wormuth did skits and interviews with some, but the aim wasn't landing any formal Army-endorsed influencer.

Instead, the upcoming policy could set basic guardrails and effectively tell commanders that soldiers have a greenlight to share their Army life online -- assuming it's in good taste. The service may also have those influencers at key Army events or share information with them to distribute to their followers if they choose to do so, as it does with the press.

Sgt. 1st Class Tyler Butterworth is a National Guard recruiter with more than 2 million followers on Instagram. Known for his signature mustache and family friendly skits, he's supercharged a recruiting platform with more reach than the Army's official recruiting presence. For comparison, the Army's recruiting page on Instagram has just under 73,000 followers.

"I realized that social media is a very effective tool to help with recruiting, and that's kind of why I started it in the beginning," Butterworth told Military.com. "I've had thousands of messages of people looking for military service, not just for the Army National Guard, but also active-duty Army, Army Reserve and other branches."

The Army’s interest in influencers and the new policy push come amid the service's persistent recruiting challenges. A key issue: The service's marketing still leans heavily on traditional cable TV-style ads, which have limited impact on younger audiences.

Complicating matters further is the federal prohibition on paid advertising on TikTok, the Chinese-owned platform where Gen Z spends much of its screen time, leaving the Army struggling to engage the demographic it needs most. But influencers can be on the platform.

The policy is also part of a broader effort to open up the historically cloistered Army. For example, Wormuth also called for service leaders to engage more with the press.

"We need to talk to the press about what we are trying to do and why it is important," she said in an address to the force at an Association of the United States Army, or AUSA, conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. "If we do that, real change is possible."

However, some of the particulars of working with and encouraging Army influencers, such as monetization, can quickly get tricky. Troops leveraging the uniform for personal gain can run afoul of Defense Department rules. Moreover, when troops venture into posting about non-military issues -- especially political topics -- the stakes grow. Such activities can test the boundaries of military guidelines.

The timeline for finalizing Army guidelines for soldiers with significant online followings remains uncertain, but some military officials are already working with troops who have large audiences.

Tim Kennedy, a Green Beret in the National Guard, spent much of the AUSA conference with Gen. Randy George, the top officer in the service, and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer, the service's top enlisted leader. Kennedy made several posts online commentating on the show and touting some of those officials' announcements.

Known for his outspoken political views, Kennedy is a firebrand within the gun culture community and an avid jiu-jitsu enthusiast. His unapologetic partisan commentary has garnered him a significant following, particularly through his guest appearances on Fox News and blockbuster podcasts big in the military community, including those hosted by Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink.

military.com · by Steve Beynon · October 30, 2024

11. Lebanon’s Military Can Barely Fight—Even After $3 Billion From the U.S.

Money, and even equipment, can't solve all problems.

Lebanon’s Military Can Barely Fight—Even After $3 Billion From the U.S.

The Lebanese military has for years fallen short of the West’s aspirations and is ill-equipped to stand up to Hezbollah

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/lebanons-military-can-barely-fighteven-after-3-billion-from-the-u-s-a1d24969?mod=latest_headlines

By Omar Abdel-BaquiFollow

and Adam Chamseddine

Updated Oct. 31, 2024 12:47 am ET

BEIRUT—At an international conference in Paris last week, European leaders singled out the Lebanese Armed Forces as key to stabilizing the country. Some $200 million in contributions were announced, including sums provided by the U.S., France and Germany.

“The Lebanese army has a decisive role to play, today more than ever,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.

The only problem: The Lebanese military has for years fallen short of the West’s aspirations, strangled by limited resources and the fragile political reality in Lebanon.

Despite $3 billion in U.S. funding since 2006, Lebanon’s armed forces are ill-equipped to secure the country’s borders and push aside Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that is now battling Israel.

Lebanon’s military is outmanned and outgunned. It has roughly 70,000 to 80,000 active-duty soldiers, compared with estimates of up to 100,000 for Hezbollah. It lacks advanced air-defense systems and possesses only around five operational jet fighters and limited missile capabilities, according to the Lebanese Armed Forces, while Hezbollah has tens of thousands of rockets, missiles and drones.

A Lebanese soldier on security duty outside a hospital in Beirut. Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ

Hezbollah militants at a funeral for a comrade killed by Israeli forces. Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ

“It is one of the weakest armies in the Middle East,” said Amal Saad, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University and an expert on Lebanese affairs. “That is part of the reason Hezbollah emerged in the 1980s—the Lebanese army wasn’t able to stand up to Israel,” Saad said, referring to an earlier Israeli invasion of Lebanon that helped trigger Hezbollah’s creation as an opposition force.

Lebanon’s military was supposed to have disarmed Hezbollah with the help of a United Nations peacekeeping force, part of a 2006 U.N. agreement that ended an earlier war between Israel and Hezbollah. Instead, Hezbollah imported more weapons through Syria in violation of the resolution.

The militant group also maintained a presence south of Lebanon’s Litani River, an area it was supposed to vacate.

Those conditions contributed to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. The invasion began in September, when Israel’s soldiers crossed the border as part of an offensive to stop Hezbollah from firing missiles into northern Israel, which it has done daily for the past year to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

Lebanon’s armed forces pulled back from the border, avoiding a confrontation that would pit it against a far better-equipped Israeli force, Lebanese military officials said, and could alienate it from the U.S., according to analysts.

Lebanese soldiers take part in a drill; a soldier eats a snake at the end of training.

Marwan Naamani/dpa/ZUMA Press

The Lebanese military says it has been executing its missions, which include coordinating with U.N. peacekeepers to implement the 2006 agreement and defending Lebanon’s national sovereignty, including from Israel.

Its defenders say there are a host of reasons the armed forces haven’t been able to fulfill the mandates.

For starters, it has had to straddle the country’s complex sectarian divides, including Christian, Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim and Druze communities.

The U.S. has also long been conflicted over how far to go in providing weapons and funding because the Lebanese military considers U.S. ally Israel an enemy. And Hezbollah’s continuing dominance over the country requires the Lebanese armed forces to coordinate with the group.

Still, if the U.S. and its allies want a stable Lebanon, they have little choice but to work with the country’s military, its defenders say.

“The Lebanese military is the only military alternative to Hezbollah,” said Samy Gemayel, the head of a historically Christian Lebanese party opposed to Hezbollah. “It should be strengthened. Without it, Hezbollah would be in control of the entire country.”

Since the end of the country’s brutal civil war in 1990, Lebanon’s armed forces have largely served as a unifying force. They helped to disarm various nonstate actors, confiscating their war equipment, and played intermediary between rival political factions.

Over the years, however, Hezbollah emerged as a more powerful player with Iran’s backing. It leveraged its success as a fighting force to take on a formal political role in Lebanon, with seats in the country’s parliament and a sizable social-welfare operation.

Protesters clashed with the Lebanese military in Beirut in April 2023. Photo: Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

The U.S. and Europe provide much of the Lebanese military’s funds and training. When a financial crisis gutted the armed forces’ budget, the Biden administration stepped in last year to help pay soldiers’ salaries. Wages are still so low that locals joke that their food deliveries are coming from the army, because so many soldiers have to take second jobs on delivery motorbikes.

Lebanon’s military spending last year was $241 million, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. U.S. funds accounted for more than half the spending from 2021 to 2023, with $150 million requested for next year.

Supporters of the funding say it has yielded benefits to Lebanon and U.S. interests in the region. The military has cracked down on drug smuggling and organized crime. At times working with Hezbollah, it defeated Islamic State militants.

Last year, before the latest war began, the army helped convince Hezbollah to take down tents its members had placed on disputed territory that Israel controls, preventing an armed clash, according to a former general.

All of that leaves U.S. and European officials with difficult decisions over the scale of their support for the Lebanese military.

At the conference last week, Western leaders said their latest round of funding was meant to buy fuel and arms and recruit 6,000 new soldiers.

A Lebanese soldier guards an observation tower in southern Lebanon overlooking the border with Israel. Photo: Anwar Amro/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein said last week that the Lebanese Armed Forces must be allowed to “actually be deployed in south Lebanon and to do its job, and for that it needs support from the international community.”

But U.S. officials have also argued about how much support to provide over the years, partly because of fears that U.S. assistance could fall into the hands of American adversaries. Israeli officials have in the past pushed for the U.S. to halt arms transfers to Lebanon, out of fear the weapons would be used against them, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2011.

A former Lebanese general told the Journal that when the military requested ships from the U.S. equipped with missile launchers in recent years, the request was denied.

“Instead, we were given just the boat, and were not permitted to attach missiles,” the former general said. “It would be useful—for fishing.”

Despite the military’s past failures, this time could be different, said Randa Slim, director of the Conflict Resolution and Track II Dialogues Program at the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

“Today, we have a weakened Hezbollah, with most of its leadership wiped out, a major part of its arsenal lost, its strongholds destroyed and 1.2 million of its constituents displaced” by Israeli bombing, she said.

“The LAF is also different,” she added. “It is more capable and better trained thanks to years of support by the U.S. and EU.”

Lebanese soldiers at the site of Israeli airstrikes in a southern suburb of Beirut in September. Photo: Ibrahim Amro/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Write to Omar Abdel-Baqui at omar.abdel-baqui@wsj.com

Appeared in the October 31, 2024, print edition as 'West’s Aid Fails to Bolster Lebanese Military'.

12. Study Estimates North Korea’s $5.5 Billion Military Supply Deal with Russia in Ukraine War

How much of the resources could have been used to take care of the Korean people in the north?

Study Estimates North Korea’s $5.5 Billion Military Supply Deal with Russia in Ukraine War

While the exact contents of the containers from North Korea are unclear, analysts estimate 80-95% are ammunition – mainly 152mm and 122mm artillery shells – with 5-20% being other weapons.

by Julia Struck | October 30, 2024, 8:23 am

kyivpost.com · by Julia Struck · October 30, 2024

While the exact contents of the containers from North Korea are unclear, analysts estimate 80-95% are ammunition – mainly 152mm and 122mm artillery shells – with 5-20% being other weapons.

by Julia Struck | October 30, 2024, 8:23 am

This handout from South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) released on October 18, 2024 shows an undated satellite image by Maxar Technologies of what NIS said is the Russian vessel Angara, loaded with North Korean weapons, departing from Rajin Port in the North Korean city of Rason. North Korea has decided to send a "large-scale" troop deployment to Russia to support their war in Ukraine, with 1,500 special forces already in country and training before, Seoul's spy agency said on October 18. (Photo by Handout / various sources / AFP)

North Korea’s arms deal with Russia could be worth up to $5.5 billion, providing a critical lifeline as Russia faces mounting ammunition shortages in its war against Ukraine, according to researcher Olena Guseinova from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

Reports suggest Moscow has turned to Pyongyang not only for weapons but potentially even personnel. Guseinova’s study outlines a deal with North Korea that could provide Russia with urgently needed military supplies.

JOIN US ON TELEGRAM

Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.

“Taking into account potential price variations, the total cost of the arms deal is estimated to range between $1.72 billion and $5.52 billion,” the study read. “Guseinova estimates the value of the arms deal between the two countries at up to $5.5 billion, viewing North Korea’s military support as a critical, timely resource for Moscow.”

Intelligence reports suggesting that North Korea might be supplying weapons to Russia first appeared in September 2022, around seven months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

While initially met with some skepticism due to limited evidence on the battlefield, these reports gained credibility as the intensity of Russian artillery fire gradually decreased. In the early stages, Russian forces fired approximately 70,000 to 80,000 rounds daily in March-April 2022, which fell to 60,000 by May. By January 2023, daily usage dropped to 20,000 rounds, then to 14,000 by April-May, 12,000 by July-August, and just 8,000 by November.

British Defence Intelligence Update Ukraine 30 October 2024

Latest from the British Defence Intelligence.

This steady decline likely stemmed from Russia’s miscalculation regarding the war’s duration, resulting in faster-than-anticipated depletion of its stockpiles. Even with efforts to ramp up domestic production, Russia’s current output of around 250,000 artillery shells monthly—totaling roughly 3 million annually—can only sustain a daily firing rate below 10,000 rounds. While this rate is adequate for low-intensity engagements, it is insufficient for the sustained, large-scale bombardments required for Russia’s war strategy.

To address this shortfall, Russia has had to look for external sources of ammunition, which appears to have led it to seek support from North Korea.

As per the report, convincing the Kim regime to assist took some time, as the first shipment of military equipment to Russia was not delivered until August 2023—nearly a year after intelligence initially reported on the potential arms deal between Pyongyang and Moscow. This delay suggests that negotiations were challenging and required significant bargaining efforts.

By October 2023, it was confirmed that North Korea had transferred over 1,000 containers of weaponry to Russia. This number surged to 6,700 containers by February 2024 and nearly doubled to either 13,000 (according to South Korean intelligence) or 16,500 (according to US intelligence) containers by August 2024. Ultimately, shipments are expected to reach 20,000 containers by October 2024.

While satellite imagery cannot pinpoint the exact distribution of the contents within these containers, most analysts estimate that approximately 80-95% of the shipments consist of ammunition—primarily 152mm and 122mm artillery shells. The remaining 5-20% includes various other weaponry, such as portable surface-to-air missiles, rifles, rocket launchers, and mortars.

Low-Range Estimate

$1.72 billion: Based on $300 per 152mm artillery shell, $150 per 122mm shell, $1.5 million per KN-23/24 tactical ballistic missile, and 1 Bulsae-4 anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) vehicle set.
$2.84 billion: Based on $500 per 152mm artillery shell, $300 per 122mm shell, $1.5 million per KN-23/24, and 2 Bulsae-4 ATGM sets.

High-Range Estimate

$4.63 billion: Based on $800 per 152mm shell, $500 per 122mm shell, $3 million per KN-23/24, and 2 Bulsae-4 ATGM sets.
$5.52 billion: Based on $1,000 per 152mm shell, $500 per 122mm shell, $3 million per KN-23/24, and 2 Bulsae-4 ATGM sets.

According to available data, commercial ties between Russia and North Korea have steadily increased from 2022 to 2024. In 2022, trade volume was $3.78 million, rising nine-fold to $34.4 million in 2023 and further increasing to $52.9 million from January to May 2024.

This upward trend suggests a potential return to pre-sanction levels when the average annual trade volume between the two countries hovered around $100 million, the study read. This marks a significant recovery, especially compared to the 2018-2020 period, when annual turnover was approximately $45 million.

Despite this growth, the $52.9 million figure in 2024 remains modest, particularly when compared to the much larger trade volumes between North Korea and China. In 2023, Russia accounted for just 2% of North Korea’s trade, while China dominated at 97%. This imbalance is unlikely to shift in Moscow’s favor soon due to the limited range of goods North Korea can offer.

Even if trade between Russia and North Korea exceeds $100 million in 2024, it is likely to reflect sanctions evasion rather than genuine expansion of their economic relationship. Notably, reported trade statistics do not account for the arms deal estimated between $1.72 billion and $5.52 billion, suggesting that weapon transactions may occur through a barter system or a mix of barter and cash.

The latter is more plausible, as North Korea likely sought a substantial inflow of hard currency to support its struggling economy. Experts note that food and oil are primary items in this barter system; in March 2024, the first direct oil shipments to North Korea occurred since UN sanctions were imposed in 2017.

The report also discusses potential troop deployments, concluding that up to 20,000 North Korean soldiers could be sent to Russia.

Beyond addressing its immediate military needs, Russia aims to leverage its relationship with North Korea and the transfer of military technology to challenge Western alliances, particularly in East Asia. This strategy seeks to create security and diplomatic issues for countries like South Korea and Japan, shifting the geopolitical landscape in Russia’s favor.

However, this approach has limitations, the research said. North Korea’s outdated and unreliable weaponry raises doubts about the sustainability of the arms deal, while Pyongyang's history of shifting alliances makes it an unpredictable partner. Furthermore, empowering a more aggressive North Korea could strain Russia’s relationship with China. Moscow's deepening ties with North Korea, especially in the transfer of sensitive technologies, may further isolate Russia internationally.

To suggest a correction or clarification, write to us here

You can also highlight the text and press Ctrl + Enter

Please leave your suggestions or corrections here

Julia Struck

Julia Struck is a news writer and Kyiv Post correspondent who has previously worked as a parliamentary editor, journalist, and news editor. She has specialized in covering the work of Ukrainian parliament, government, and law enforcement agencies.

13. Can the United Kingdom and France Team Up in the Third Nuclear Age?

Excerpts:

Britain’s Atlanticist and AUKUS orientation and France’s desire for E.U. leadership in defense are not incompatible. In fact, with the United Kingdom’s intent to reset security relations with Europe and recent momentum with France on broader defense bilateral cooperation, there is a unique opportunity to level up the U.K.-French strategic relationship.

Both countries have become important leaders of Europe’s conventional defense since the war in Ukraine and share growing relations with everyone — but each other. In the nuclear realm, both France and Britain’s arsenals are essential in deterring further Russian saber-rattling, filling the gaps of America’s own extended deterrence and satisfying Europeans in search for more reassurance. Strengthening cooperation will enable London and Paris to play this valuable role more effectively.

Can the United Kingdom and France Team Up in the Third Nuclear Age? - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Paul Cormarie · October 31, 2024

Europe’s only nuclear powers have a lot in common. France and the United Kingdom have both been contributors to NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture since the Ottawa Communique of 1974. Despite France not having joined the alliance’s Nuclear Planning Group, these two countries have grown to become key partners with important dialogues and technical consultations on nuclear issues. Indeed, bilateral Anglo-French nuclear cooperation has continued apace despite the political and diplomatic vicissitudes between them.

As we enter a new or “third” nuclear age, the United Kingdom and France are well positioned to improve and deepen nuclear cooperation even further. They can do so by expanding research in disruptive and emerging technologies, deterring new threats in the Indo-Pacific, and improving their interoperability. As the world’s nuclear powers move toward greater competition, Anglo-French cooperation is vital to maintain both countries’ strategic relevance and strengthen Europe’s presence on the global stage.

Become a Member

History of Cooperation

The United Kingdom and France have not always had a strong relationship in the nuclear sphere. Their nuclear paths started diverging in the late 1950s and 1960s. The United States and the United Kingdom grew closer while France, under President Charles de Gaulle, went its own way. London and Washington signed the Mutual Defence Agreement in 1958 and began sharing Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles. France, on the other hand, drew different conclusionsfrom the Suez and Sputnik crises and saw the development of European institutions as an alternative to Atlanticism. Despite this split, France and the United Kingdom did continue to collaborate on matters of defense and aviation. This included the famous Concorde supersonic aircraft, launched just three years after France left NATO’s integrated command.

Cooperation between Britain, France, and the United States regained momentum in the 1970s, especially as the Nixon administration adopted a more relaxed attitude to the proliferation of the bomb in France. Washington even providedsome technical assistance to the French ballistic missile program. London and Paris grew closer as well, and even began negotiations over common assets. But it was the 1990s when the U.K.-French relationship reached a level almost comparable to their respective bilateral relationships with the United States. The Joint Nuclear Commission, established in 1992, helped inform their respective nuclear policies and the 1995 Chequers Declaration publicly recognized the equivalence of their vital interests.

The Lancaster House Treaty of 2010 represented the most ambitious framework to date for U.K.-French cooperation across conventional and nuclear defenses. Boosted by a supplemental treaty just two years after, these landmark agreements helped both countries cooperate in preserving the long-term viability and safety of their nuclear stockpiles at a time of austerity. Since then, there have been some undeniable disappointments on the conventional side, particularly the failure to stand up a joint Future Combat Air System. Diverging political priorities, the United Kingdom’s trajectory after Brexit, the end of the “entente frugale,” and skepticism of Washington’s commitment to Europe have all hindered progress in the Anglo-French defense relationship.

But on the nuclear side, things have remained far healthier. Despite the sometimes-tense political rhetoric of the past decade, the Lancaster House Treaty is still enforced thanks in part to its mandatory measures. It should now serve as the basis for adapting to some new priorities in response to today’s changed strategic environment, shaped by new technologies, adversaries, and capabilities.

Revisiting Anglo-French Cooperation

Instead of overly ambitious plans, there are three broad ways the U.K.-French bilateral relationship could improve for the third nuclear age: research, regional direction, and security cooperation.

First, the Lancaster House Treaty’s TEUTATES agreement, which governs nuclear cooperation on research and development, is an ideal framework for further technical cooperation, especially by taking inspiration from its hydrodynamics and radiographic research. Its X-ray facility, Epure, is envisioned to become the most advanced in the world. Epure has nationally restricted areas for safety experiments on French nuclear warheads as France, unlike the United States and United Kingdom, does not share these results. According to some estimates, the TEUTATES projects have, all together, allowed important costs savings for both countries. Depending on national will, the facility also includes exchange of classified information on nuclear weapon safety and security.

Research cooperation should be extended on several fronts: artificial intelligence, cyber malign activities, quantum computing, and the possibility of unmanned weapons systems. Such emerging and disruptive technologies could deteriorate the robustness and survivability of countries’ nuclear deterrents. So far, the United Kingdom and France appear to be diverging research partners, with the E.U. AI Act and the growth of technology cooperation in Europe on the one hand, and the easing of technological restrictions and intensification of cooperation under AUKUS Pillar 2 in the other. One bright spot is that the United Kingdom fully rejoined the European Union’s Horizon Europe program and stepped up its relationship with France soon after, albeit with only modest funding for joint projects. But those lines alone are not strong enough to resist the winds of political change in London or Paris. Attaching them to a heavily invested TEUTATES-like agreement would make it stronger and bring in more actors beyond the Atomic Commissions of each country. It would also exclude the European Union. Since Brussels’ role is still sensitive in U.K. politics, this could help foster British confidence in the plan.

Second, the Indo-Pacific has emerged as a key region since 2010. The growth of China as a competitor and possible adversary, with its own nuclear arsenal, represents a growing area of concern. Both the United Kingdom and France have already increased their contributions to the region’s conventional deterrence with freedom-of-the-seas operations and possibly soon a permanent European carrier strike group. In contrast with their sometimes diverging interests in Europe, British and French interests converge in the Indo-Pacific, particularly as the Chinese nuclear arsenal continues to grow and might threaten European security over the long term. Both France and the United Kingdom have a marginal physical presence in the region and limited submarine capability. This means balancing between the Atlantic and the Pacific could challenge the “strict sufficiency/minimal deterrence” principle they share and overstretch their arsenals. Discussing and eventually coordinating a division of labor there would help achieve greater continuous at-sea nuclear deterrence — or French permanence — in the region.

More ambitiously, revitalizing the Combined Joint Expeditionary Force, which was established in the Lancaster House Treaty, could serve as an ideal way to coordinate U.K.-French delivery systems. Currently, the force is too small to make a difference in NATO’s multinational battlegroups against Russia, nor is it meant for air and maritime campaigning in the Indo-Pacific. In 2023 Paul O’Neill proposed repurposing the Combined Joint Expeditionary Force beyond land forces “as a Combined Joint Experimentation Force: a standing unit that seeks to experiment with new technologies, concepts and doctrine.” Refit for that purpose, an aerial Combined Joint Expeditionary Force would be useful for testing interoperability between their air forces, and ultimately improving the survivability and scale of the French aerial delivery system. Unlike France, the United Kingdom does not have an air leg of the nuclear triad, but by following the spirit of arms control it can seek to improve France’s. Tankers are already supporting French aerial operations and proposals to reform the Combined Joint Expeditionary Force already exist. Adding a new proposal to better test air interoperability and, one day, allow the Royal Air Force to support French “Poker” air nuclear exercises would help enhance French credibility and “flexibility” (or souplesse).

Challenges to Cooperation

Obstacles to further nuclear cooperation have historically been the respective British and French relationships with the United States. But these can be overcome if cooperation is seen as complementary to U.S. extended deterrence rather than a replacement for it.

In 2012, Matthew Harries wrote “there is no reason to believe that, all else being equal, the British nuclear establishment would pursue cooperation with France if it came at the expense of relations with the United States.” This is just as true now, if not more so. The creation of AUKUS and the new British government’s pivot to “NATO first” differ markedly from President Emmanuel Macron’s insistence on developing a European strategic dialogue. Diverging priorities, political tensions, and misperceptions between the “P3” have sometimes proven complex. As Jeffrey Lewis and Bruno Tertrais wrote in 2015, “for all of its hypothetical benefits, a badly managed trilateral relationship could have, so to speak, the unsatisfying complexity of a ménage à trois and end up hurting all three sides of the triangle.”

Since British nuclear forces are still reliant on the United States and France seeks to remain out of the Nuclear Planning Group, observers have sometimes suggested that a post-American NATO would push them to converge and defend Europe. But no matter what happens in Washington, both France and Britain will struggle to align as both capitals are doubling down on either defending their own vital interests in Europe or a continuous at-sea deterrent defending NATO partners. Unless a dramatic reversal in Washington forces them to reconsider — even assuming they pick each other and do not isolate themselves — the current poor prospect of adopting a joint direction only reflects wishful thinking.

Instead of a U.K.-French security umbrella over Europe, cooperative deterrence is both more realistic and more beneficial for the years to come. It helps decrease the costs of an already expensive program that could be used instead for conventional defense all the while helping London and Paris increase the credibility of their arsenals. Even if a political earthquake in Washington shakes its commitments to Europe, the results of cooperation will benefit both British and French nuclear doctrines, including the UK’s global aspirations and commitments, and France’s concern with the full sovereignty of its arsenal.

Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Each Other’s Bomb

Britain’s Atlanticist and AUKUS orientation and France’s desire for E.U. leadership in defense are not incompatible. In fact, with the United Kingdom’s intent to reset security relations with Europe and recent momentum with France on broader defense bilateral cooperation, there is a unique opportunity to level up the U.K.-French strategic relationship.

Both countries have become important leaders of Europe’s conventional defense since the war in Ukraine and share growing relations with everyone — but each other. In the nuclear realm, both France and Britain’s arsenals are essential in deterring further Russian saber-rattling, filling the gaps of America’s own extended deterrence and satisfying Europeans in search for more reassurance. Strengthening cooperation will enable London and Paris to play this valuable role more effectively.

Become a Member

Paul Cormarie is a policy analyst at the non-partisan, non-for-profit RAND. He is also a Center for Strategic and International Studies nuclear scholar and a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He writes on European defense and deterrence and is a former researcher at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

Image: Wikimedia

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Paul Cormarie · October 31, 2024

14. Why I Hate Sun Tzu

Not me! Provocative title that should get some clicks!

I think all complex political military problems can be solved by reading and studying Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Thucydides! They do not provide the answers but engaging with those texts will help you draw out the solutions from your own intellect.

Excerpts:

Sun Tzu should be studied and comprehended in the same way that Mao’s Little Red Book should be kept handy. No reasonable person could argue about Mao’s effectiveness as a leader; he achieved his political objectives and was one of the most consequential leaders of the 20th century. Yet, this came at the cost of ruthless purges, grinding campaigns, and mass starvation but on a scale that most Americans can barely comprehend. The current generation of the Chinese Communist Party helming China are the heirs of that tradition. Whether they appreciate it or not, Americans are crusaders. Brilliant crusaders. Whether crushing insurrections to end slavery or ending the terror of an authoritarian dictator; when Americans go to war with ideals and strategic alignment—they get the job done regardless of the cost and blood.

Sun Tzu is commonly referenced because it is easily referenced, pithy quotes that apply to everything. The Western classical tradition is more difficult to digest but offers a much richer understanding of humans in conflict. Thucydides is a grind, both textually and spiritually, and it should be—comprehending war should not be easy or convenient. The works of Homer and Thucydides are ostensibly sad, life is hard, and war is tragic but that is only because deep down they understand that it should not have to be this way. Understanding the rage of Achilles, the despair of Odysseus, or the whole tragedy of the Peloponnesian War offers a far more realistic view of humanity in conflict because of its longing for a better world that is denied to them. They can only see the silhouettes that are created by a luminous perfect form. They are focused on the light; Sun Tzu is focused on the shadows.

Sun Tzu’s current place in the Western strategic canon is poetic, his introduction is far more recent, yet he is the most recognizable and more often quoted. The West Point Civil War generals fought because of Jomini, the Prussian generals fought because of Clausewitz, and both of whom are footnotes when compared to the influence of Thucydides. Sun Tzu has truly won without fighting.

Why I Hate Sun Tzu

By: Maj James M. Stephens

Posted on October 24,2024

Article Date 22/10/2024

https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/why-i-hate-sun-tzu/

2024 Chase Prize Essay Contest Winner: Honorable Mention

Reevaluating a supposedly foundational text

I hate Sun Tzu. There, I said it. Go on, make your judgments, roll your eyes, and think: Here we go, this is the same guy who dismissed Plato in Philosophy 101 just to be a shocking contrarian. That is, admittedly, a perfectly reasonable reaction—but let me add some context now that I have your attention.

The Art of War does not offer bad advice, quite the opposite. It has had a profound effect on the 20th century through men like Mao Zedong and Vo Nguyen Giap; that is unquestioned. The Art of War is the definitive work on war in some parts of the world—but not here. The problem with Sun Tzu is two-fold. First, the influence of Sun Tzu is wildly overemphasized in Western military education since The Art of War is a relatively recent addition to the Western strategic canon. Second, his Confucian philosophy is antithetical to the philosophies that shaped the American way of war. Ultimately, Sun Tzu is an outsider whose work has limited applicability to the Marine Corps.

What value does Sun Zi add to the study of the Western way of war? (Photo provided by author.)

New Kid on the Block

Sun Tzu is typically covered first when studying the theory of war. This makes sense, as he is chronologically the earliest great theorist. Yet, when the historicity is considered, Sun Tzu is a relatively recent addition. French Jesuits brought the first translations of The Art of War to Europe in the late 18th century, but when The Art of War entered into the Western zeitgeist is up for debate. Just because translations were available did not mean they were utilized. B.H. Liddell-Hart, whose indirect approach bears some similarities to The Art of War, was already working on his ideas when he was introduced to Sun Tzu in 1927.1 It was Marine Gen Samuel B. Griffith’s translation and commentary alongside Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare in 1963 that finally brought the text to wider attention in the West. Griffith even observes in his translation’s appendix that, despite European theorists having access to the text, they either had little knowledge or regard for it.2 Sun Tzu did not even make the cut for the definitive Makers of Modern Strategy, first released in 1986, though he did make the cut in the 2023 edition.3

Mediocre translations were certainly a factor in the relative sluggishness of Sun Tzu’s acceptance in Europe; however, likely the most significant factor was the lack of foundational texts whose understanding was a requisite for comprehension. Even today, much of the nuance of The Art of War is lost on Westerners who are not familiar with Confucian philosophy and Chinese history.

Most Westerners are not familiar with their own foundational texts, much less the Chinese ones. However, this was not always the case. For centuries, education in Europe was based on the medieval model’s trivium and quadrivium—collectively referred to as the liberal arts.4 This model drew heavily from the Greco-Roman texts that formalized education and served as a means of leveling the upper class.5 Classical works were pervasive in the development of modern military theory, practitioner Wellington and theorist Clausewitz would have equally dreaded the sentence: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.6

Intellectually, the Greco-Roman and Medieval worlds were far more influential than Sun Tzu could ever hope to be. The overwhelming majority of theorists and practitioners who shaped our world had no idea who Sun Tzu was. If studying the evolution of Western strategic theory as it developed chronologically, Sun Tzu appears very late—certainly after Clausewitz and Jomini. The ancient classics with their medieval linkages are so vast that scholars frequently forget they are standing on them.

Why Sun Tzu Does Not Belong

The Art of War was a subversive text at the time of its collection. War in ancient China had become increasingly theatrical with battles serving as opportunities for the nobility to display their manliness. Sun Tzu brought pragmatism to war in China. That is precisely the problem, Sun Tzu is the ultimate pragmatist; winning without fighting is a pragmatic goal, not a moral ideal. Restraint and magnanimity in victory are only necessary when the benefits outweigh the cost. People are disposable if it means winning; he lets others do the fighting and suffering provided it leads to victory. Everything is available to Sun Tzu—how you win is of no importance so long as you do. Mao and Giap won their wars in no small part because they were willing to inflict truly staggering degrees of suffering not just on their soldiers but on their own people; safe in the knowledge, it was for their own good. Effectively employing The Art of War requires the kind of hubris that Icarus would briefly appreciate.

This is where Sun Tzu fails to meaningfully contribute to the American way of war or Marine Corps warfighting. His commonsense advice is just that—common. Sun Tzu is certainly not unique, Homer compares conflict to flowing water as well.7 Readers can already learn the value of deception from wily Odysseus, sound campaign preparations from Julius Caesar, and strategic foolishness from Thucydides. Sun Tzu just reads better on a PowerPoint.

What is distinct to Sun Tzu is his cynical philosophical underpinnings that are best suited to equally cynical autocrats seeking to create a world more advantageous for themselves. The difference becomes more apparent when it is compared directly to the Western intellectual tradition that would create the concepts of chivalry and just war. The Art of War stresses the importance of the general as the “bulwark of the state” and “arbiter of fate” which has been an antithetical concept in American history since George Washington.8

Like Liddle-Harts’s indirect approach, Sun Tzu requires a healthy degree of sophistry to intellectually sustain. If you properly observe the techniques, then success is all but guaranteed; failure is the result of not following the proscribed techniques. By this logic, one could argue that Alexander applied the indirect approach when he slashed open the Gordian knot. Just consider the translation convention of terms like Moral Law and virtue, Sun Tzu and Thomas Aquinas are talking about very different things.9 Where Sun Tzu advocates morally relative pragmatism, Thomas Aquinas acknowledges moral paradox. War can be both awful and just. Violent men are expected to control themselves with courtly manners. This is not hypocrisy but the inability to live up to transcendent ideals, much like Clausewitz’s acknowledgment that theoretical total war is impossible. This is why Europe has King Arthur and China has Confucius.

Know Your Self, Know Your Adversary

Science is the handmaiden of philosophy. Therefore, cynical pragmatic philosophy will produce cynical pragmatic means of making war. Sun Tzu would be baffled by Western readers’ negative perception of the Melian Dialogue as an increasingly imperious Athens threatens the small neutral island of Melos into submission; obviously, the weak endure what they must, that is the entire point of being strong! For the most hardened student of realpolitik, it is hard to make a case that Americans are particularly talented at the strategy advocated by Sun Tzu. It has been attempted but rarely with lasting success and never with moral justification. When Americans are at peace, Sun Tzu has minimal applicability to U.S. foreign policy because pragmatism does not win friends.

Two states that actively espouse Sun Tzu will never truly be at peace. Sun Tzu emphasizes attacking an opponent’s strategy. In peacetime, this means undermining the enemy society since the best way to win without fighting is to endlessly prepare for war while undermining your adversary. A state that ascribes to this sort of mentality can have a public policy of no preemptive strikes yet still launch a surprise attack in the name of defense.

Sun Tzu emphasizes a mental model of war versus a physical one; this becomes truly terrifying when it hybridizes with postmodern materialistic philosophy. The pursuit of gaining and maintaining political power becomes its principal goal and is endlessly pursued. Sun Tzu is far more applicable to the challenges of international order, unsurprisingly, the People’s Republic of China. China has recognized that attacking an opponent’s strategy means corrupting their society, which they do through disinformation campaigns on social media, complicity in illicit synthetic opioid exports, and eroding trust in global institutions, such as the World Health Organization. A state that emphasizes undermining its perceived adversary’s societal fabric through deception will have to pay a moral cost as words will cease to mean things and trust corrodes.

What Should the Marine Corps Do About It?

Thucydides should be acknowledged as the intellectual godfather of the Marine Corps; the History of the Peloponnesian War puts tragic the human cost of war on full display. When war is perceived as easy and convenient, reality quickly dispels this notion at a terrible cost. Society breaks down when pragmatism is ahead of ideals. The fact humans are unable to achieve permanent peace does not make the ideal less worthwhile. Wars should be fought with the intent to create a better state of peace, wars of pragmatism rarely accomplish this. Thucydides paints an imperfect world that is worth living and fighting for, the world of Sun Tzu knows no leisure.

Sun Tzu should be studied and comprehended in the same way that Mao’s Little Red Book should be kept handy. No reasonable person could argue about Mao’s effectiveness as a leader; he achieved his political objectives and was one of the most consequential leaders of the 20th century. Yet, this came at the cost of ruthless purges, grinding campaigns, and mass starvation but on a scale that most Americans can barely comprehend. The current generation of the Chinese Communist Party helming China are the heirs of that tradition. Whether they appreciate it or not, Americans are crusaders. Brilliant crusaders. Whether crushing insurrections to end slavery or ending the terror of an authoritarian dictator; when Americans go to war with ideals and strategic alignment—they get the job done regardless of the cost and blood.

Sun Tzu is commonly referenced because it is easily referenced, pithy quotes that apply to everything. The Western classical tradition is more difficult to digest but offers a much richer understanding of humans in conflict. Thucydides is a grind, both textually and spiritually, and it should be—comprehending war should not be easy or convenient. The works of Homer and Thucydides are ostensibly sad, life is hard, and war is tragic but that is only because deep down they understand that it should not have to be this way. Understanding the rage of Achilles, the despair of Odysseus, or the whole tragedy of the Peloponnesian War offers a far more realistic view of humanity in conflict because of its longing for a better world that is denied to them. They can only see the silhouettes that are created by a luminous perfect form. They are focused on the light; Sun Tzu is focused on the shadows.

Sun Tzu’s current place in the Western strategic canon is poetic, his introduction is far more recent, yet he is the most recognizable and more often quoted. The West Point Civil War generals fought because of Jomini, the Prussian generals fought because of Clausewitz, and both of whom are footnotes when compared to the influence of Thucydides. Sun Tzu has truly won without fighting.

>Maj Stephens is the Course Chief for the Logistics Intelligence Planners Course at the Marine Corps Operational Logistics Group in Twentynine Palms, CA.

Notes

1. Sun Tzu, Art of War, translated by Samuel Griffith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

2. Ibid.

3. Gordon Gecko cites the text in 1987’s Wall Street if that is any indication of public awareness.

4. For a concise description of the medieval liberal arts, see the Dorthy L. Sayers essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.”

5. Thomas Ricks, First Principles (New York: Harper, 2020).

6. “All of Gaul is divided into three parts,” The (in)famous opening line of Julius Caesar’s campaign in Gaul.

7. Homer, The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

15. Penetrate, Disintegrate, and Exploit: The Israeli Counteroffensive at the Suez Canal, 1973

A key influence in the development of AirLand Battle.

The 27 page report can be downloaded here: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Penetrate-Disintegrate-and-Exploit.pdf

Penetrate, Disintegrate, and Exploit: The Israeli Counteroffensive at the Suez Canal, 1973 - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Nathan Jennings · October 31, 2024

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

With the adoption of multidomain operations (MDO) as its central operational concept, the US Army is modernizing its approach to more effectively compete against a variety of state and nonstate adversaries. This development offers a pathway forward for the service to, as argued by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown, Jr., “keep focus on what is essential in Jointness—working seamlessly across domains, Services, and the Total Force.” Seeking to compel decision on increasingly lethal battlefields that challenge operational maneuver and formation endurance, the MDO concept—now codified in the Army’s capstone doctrine with corresponding changes in force structure—calls for novel interplay across the land, air, maritime, space, and cyber domains in order, as argued by the chairman, “to fight today’s battles but also to prepare for tomorrow’s wars.”

While the Army must implement MDO and prepare to fight across the spectrum of conflict, conventional and large-scale combat operations pose a particularly important set of challenges. The rise of peer threats around the world and their involvement in such conflicts raise the possibility that the United States may, if deterrence fails, need to fight a war of expanded scale and intensity. At the same time, there is gradually diminishing institutional memory or experience the United States military can draw on to know what to expect during large-scale combat operations. Thus, it is important to balance the requirement to retain hard-won counterinsurgency competencies learned in Iraq and Afghanistan with emerging imperatives to prepare for expeditionary campaigns against peer adversaries.

Trends in recent large-scale combat such as the Battle of Mosul, the Nagorno-Karabakh War, and the Russia-Ukraine War suggest that the dominant character of modern warfare remains positional and attritional; the prospect of employing dynamic power projection to achieve decisive outcomes through offensive fire and maneuver will remain a potentially necessary, if high risk, option. As explained in the Army’s original MDO concept that emphasized “convergence” across joint, interagency, and multinational teams, this may require expeditionary ground forces, through integration of both traditional practices and emerging technologies, to “penetrate, dis-integrate, and exploit” increasingly sophisticated adversary defenses in places such as Eastern Europe and the South China Sea. Given the rising lethality of regional powers’ antiaccess and area-denial capabilities, the prospect of executing maneuver into fiercely contested spaces should be considered with caution and humility lest the venture devolve into catastrophe. Nonetheless, it is important to study successful large-scale maneuver operations to maximize readiness if contributing to one ever becomes necessary.

History is replete with examples of armies that executed this kind of offensive action with decisive effect. Among these are Napoleon Bonaparte’s masterpiece at Austerlitz in 1805 and the German invasion of France in 1940, yet it is the Israeli counteroffensive in the second week of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, also called the Yom Kippur War, that represents a particularly relevant case study that featured mechanized penetration, contested river crossings, disintegration of air defense networks, reduction of antiarmor systems, and deep exploitation in rear areas. This costly campaign, which deeply informed the US Army’s Active Defense and AirLand Battle reforms in the late Cold War, provided a bloody proving ground for new technologies and creative tactics as both Arab and Israeli forces adapted to the reality of a more destructive environment that demanded multidomain solutions to intractable problems.

The 1973 conflict, with its cross-domain innovations, contested maneuver, and devastating losses, thus invites reconsideration by the US Army. Analyzing this war through the lens of the modern operational environment will yield important insights for dealing with new capabilities like precision strike, unmanned platforms, electronic warfare, and informational innovations, alongside age-old challenges posed by massed artillery, constrained logistics, and restrictive terrain. Even as recent conflicts have shown the high cost of modern maneuver, the US Army may nevertheless be required to unleash high-tempo offensives while avoiding attrition and culmination. This kind of campaign, demanding the highest operational art in expeditionary settings, will likely require unprecedented cooperation across arms, services, and agencies in order to mitigate risk and, despite countervailing trends in modern warfare, achieve decisive outcomes under challenging circumstances.

Read the full report here.

Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings is an Army strategist and associate professor in the Department of Joint, Interagency, and Multinational Operations at the US Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. With a background as a 19D cavalry scout and armor officer, he served as a platoon leader and troop commander in Operation Iraqi Freedom and as a strategic planner the Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan. Jennings previously taught history at the US Military Academy at West Point and in the Department of Military History at CGSC. He is a graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies (Advanced Military Studies Program) and earned a PhD in history from the University of Kent.

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: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Nathan Jennings · October 31, 2024

16. Global military threats to U.S. are increasingly linked, Adm. Sam Paparo says

I concur. But if they are increasingly linked does that mean that geographic combatant commands are an anachronism? Should we evolve to another construct?

Global military threats to U.S. are increasingly linked, Adm. Sam Paparo says

Indo-Pacom chief warns of growing China, Russia, Iran and North Korea ties

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

By - The Washington Times - Tuesday, October 29, 2024

China poses the major security threat to the United States and the danger is compounded by Beijing’s growing links with Russia, North Korea and Iran, according to the admiral in charge of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

“The security environment that we’re living in right now is incredibly challenging, but you should be confident that we’re going to prevail,” Adm. Sam Paparo said in a speech last week in Honolulu.

The global security environment has grown increasingly disordered and chaotic. Wars are raging in Europe and the Middle East and the danger of future conflict with China is growing, he said in an address to a conference on information operations.

Israel’s war against Hamas following the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in Gaza has evolved into “multi-party proxy war” with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen, he said. North Korea continues large-scale ballistic missile testing and is enhancing its nuclear arms development, even as it forces close military, economic and diplomatic links with Russia.

In China, the People’s Liberation Army is engaged in the world’s largest military expansion since World War II, Adm. Paparo said.

“The PRC’s coercive campaign of pressure against Taiwan continues, and the PRC’s revanchist, revisionist and expansionist claims in the South China Sea could very well be the next flash point,” he said, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

Adm. Paparo said none of the threats are contained to “a stovepipe” — disconnected from other geopolitical crises.

“They’re increasingly linked, and our would-be adversaries in cases have formed transactional and symbiotic, ’no-limits’ relationships,” he said.

Adm. Paparo singled out North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for supplying ballistic missiles, artillery and now troops in the Ukraine war. Iran also is providing weaponized drones and recently delivered several hundred close-range ballistic missiles to Russia for the conflict in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian recently announced closer ties after an October meeting. After the meeting, Mr. Putin said the two nations would seek to overhaul the U.S.-led international order.

Iranian ties with China also helped Tehran undercut U.S. sanctions against Iran and helped boost Iranian influence throughout the Middle East, Adm. Paparo said.

“So, you see the PRC, Russia, Iran and North Korea are collaborating and cooperating together to oppose the United States, our allies and our partners, like-minded democracies, every single day,” he said.

Command structure

The admiral noted that the world is not divided in ways that conform to the American military’s current unified command plan — the network of global combatant commands covering regions such as Africa, the Middle East or Latin America.

“The world is increasingly connected. Our economies are increasingly connected, and conflict is increasingly connected,” the four-star admiral said.

In addition to the new axis of adversaries, advanced technology is adding a new layer of threats, Adm. Paparo said, including major shifts in the use of autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, hypersonic missiles, nanotechnology, directed energy, large data computation and, in the future, quantum technology.

All are combining with and contributing to global conflict and disorder.

“Threats are increasingly connected. The technology is demonstrating greater speed and greater effects,” Adm. Paparo said. “Given the security mission, the security environment, the PRC’s increasingly aggressive behavior, more than any other time in recent history our ability to deter the PRC may have never been more urgent, nor more critical.”

Deterrence of a U.S. war with China contains three elements, the admiral said.

First is having powerful military capabilities and second is the willingness to use those capabilities.

“That last thing is your would-be adversary’s awareness of it. Without that, all the capability and all the will in the world is the tree that falls in the forest. Does it make a sound? Who knows, if there’s no one there to hear it?” Adm. Paparo said.

To support the deterrence mission, the Indo-Pacific Command is boosting its information capabilities. The goal is to let China and other adversaries know that the risk of military defeat, economic loss, diplomatic isolation or a combination of those factors will outweigh any expected gains.

“Only by being ready can we deter, and by that I mean there’s no bluffing this,” he said.

Robust information operations must be backed by credible combat power and a clear realization among potential enemies that U.S. and allied forces are ready to fight and win, he said.

To support that, the command’s “No. 1 line of effort” is launching campaigns of integrated and impactful information operations, he said.

Propaganda disadvantage

The U.S. and its allies, however, are at a disadvantage in the information wars: Chinese and other authoritarian regimes that tightly control all news and propaganda “in ways that we cannot, and we will not,” he said.

The U.S. government is constrained to using truth and a free press for its information operations, he said.

“That is not the case for our would-be adversaries, who are absolutely free to lie and have a constrained press,” he said.

Authoritarian regimes “lie at will” and exploit the open information environment in doing so, he noted.

For the West, the long-range advantages of living in a world with highly accountable governments and a free press ultimately will provide greater advantages.

To overcome the challenge posed by adversaries’ unconstrained use of propaganda, U.S. government information operations must be clear in telling “our strategic story,” Adm. Paparo said.

“Our story — it’s not a fake, it’s not a narrative, it’s not an info op. It’s real. It is underpinned by combat, credible operations. It’s underpinned by values. It’s underpinned by the values that bind us all,” he said.

To better conduct information operations, the Pacific Fleet set up the Information Warfare Command Pacific in 2022. The unit centralized several disparate information operations units spread throughout the military. A two-star general, Air Force Maj. Gen. Neil Richardson, was named the command’s senior leader for information operations.

The command also is working closely with allies and partner governments and militaries to better synchronize information operations, including programs currently underway with Japan, Australia, Philippines, Singapore and South Korea.

“Our network of alliances and partnerships is a strategic and asymmetric advantage,” Adm. Paparo said.

The key to success is belief in America’s founding principles, including accountable government, freedom of speech and a free press.

“Have faith that we’re going to prevail. I do,” the admiral said.

• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.

Click to Read More and View Comments

Click to Hide

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

17.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website

Winning Modern Wars through Adaptation

Adaptation is THE critical contemporary and future capability for nations and their military organisations to win in war.

Why is Adaptation so Crucial?

An Adaptation Mesh: The Environment for Adaptation

A Response by Western Military Institutions

Winning Wars in the Adaptation Mesh

Prosecutor tells jury of 9/11-style plot thwarted in the Philippines

Philly Shipyard's Transformation: How Hanwha’s Investment Is Driving U.S. Navy Readiness

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Wilson Beaver and Dominic Seibold · October 28, 2024

Military Hardware: Tanks, Bombers, Submarines and More

According to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report, the Navy’s current maintenance backlog amounted to $1.8 billion. This inefficiency has a major impact on America’s combat readiness has contributed to the Navy’s decision to decommission 9 ships before their expected service life.

Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse under the Biden-Harris administration. Misguided spending priorities and a lack of urgency have set back America’s ability to keep up with and deter China, which is the world’s largest Navy numerically and whose fleet is still growing fast.

Hanwha could help turn the tide in that fight, though. With the purchase of the Philly Shipyard, it is now positioned to compete for contracts for building new ships, which could be an enormous windfall not only for Philadelphia workers, but also our naval power.

As our Navy works to meet the challenges of tomorrow, Hanwha’s new investment means Philadelphia will be playing a leading role in the fight. By fixing the maintenance glut and building new ships, Philly Shipyard will be vital to preserving the security of the American people.

Why? Because the first battle of the next great power competition will not take place in the far-off seas of the Pacific; it will be fought in places like Philly Shipyard on the Delaware as we set out to defeat our own deficiencies. And this is a battle we can’t afford to lose.

About the Authors

Wilson Beaver is a Policy Advisor for defense budgeting at The Heritage Foundation. Dominic Seibold is a Fall 2024 Member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

NOTE: This piece has been updated since publication.

In this article:

Written By Wilson Beaver and Dominic Seibold

Wilson Beaver is a Policy Advisor for defense budgeting at The Heritage Foundation. Dominic Seibold is a Fall 2024 Member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Wilson Beaver and Dominic Seibold · October 28, 2024

American Diplomacy for a New Era

How the U.S. military lost a $250 million war game in minutes

Secret for 20 years, a declassified report warned of military vulnerabilities to unconventional tactics that were later exploited by enemies in real conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Men under "downward pressure"

The leaders at the Army’s special operations schoolhouse explain how they are trying to fight through a tightening budget and a recruiting crisis to ensure the Green Berets are ready for the future.

Russia asks at UN meeting: If the West aids Ukraine, why can’t North Korea help us?

The Rise of Soldier-Influencers: Army Eyes Policy for Troops with Millions of Online Followers

Lebanon’s Military Can Barely Fight—Even After $3 Billion From the U.S.

The Lebanese military has for years fallen short of the West’s aspirations and is ill-equipped to stand up to Hezbollah

Study Estimates North Korea’s $5.5 Billion Military Supply Deal with Russia in Ukraine War

JOIN US ON TELEGRAM

British Defence Intelligence Update Ukraine 30 October 2024

Can the United Kingdom and France Team Up in the Third Nuclear Age? - War on the Rocks

Why I Hate Sun Tzu

Penetrate, Disintegrate, and Exploit: The Israeli Counteroffensive at the Suez Canal, 1973 - Modern War Institute

Global military threats to U.S. are increasingly linked, Adm. Sam Paparo says