Quotes of the Day:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead
“When the hour of crisis comes, remember that 40 selected men can shake the world”
- Yasotay (Mongol Warlord)
"There are always thugs, villians, rogues, and fools out there, as well as some in here, who mean us harm."
-Colin Gray
1. Could the U.S. Lose a War with China Over Taiwan?
2. Taiwan: Will We or Won’t We?
3. What Role Could Civilians Play in Taiwan’s Defense?
4. COVID-19's global death toll tops 5 million in under 2 years
5. In Afghan hospital, unpaid doctors and rigid Taliban clash
6. Left Behind After U.S. Withdrawal, Some Former Afghan Spies and Soldiers Turn to Islamic State
7. Taiwan Special Forces Have Been Working With US Troops, but Who Are They?
8. The Taliban Haven’t Changed, But U.S. Policy Must
9. Op-Ed: We Can Still Help the Women of Afghanistan
10. U.S. Military Jury Condemns Terrorist’s Torture and Urges Clemency
11. Pentagon rattled by Chinese military push on multiple fronts
12. Australian warship stops at Navy base in Japan to replace helicopter lost at sea
13. Pentagon may not immediately fire vaccine resisters
14. Air Force is first to face troops’ rejection of vaccine mandate as thousands avoid shots
15. Blinken says US will 'make sure Taiwan has the means to defend itself'
16. Defense Companies Brace For Workforce Loss Due To Vaccine Mandate
17. Appeal for CIA, DoD Clandestine Ops to Rescue Afghan Allies
18. Biden tells Macron US ‘clumsy’ in Australian submarine deal
19. The unintended consequences of the AUKUS deal
20. Re-shaping Forces for the High-End Fight: The Challenge of Overcoming the Legacy of the Land Wars
21. Journalist shot dead in Philippines, 21st killed since Duterte took office
22. Your Laptop Does More Than PowerPoint: Computational Thinking and Changing the Military’s Mindset
23. Is U.S. Foreign Policy Too Hostile to China? Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts
24. FDD | Russian Hackers Continue Targeting the Software Supply Chain
1. Could the U.S. Lose a War with China Over Taiwan?
"Imaginative diplomacy."
Conclusion:
Finally, the biggest takeaway from the recent history of Taiwan is that imaginative diplomacy offers a much better way for parties to both secure their interests and avoid war. When the United States and China established formal relations under Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, statesmen recognized that the issue of Taiwan was irresolvable—but not unmanageable. The diplomatic framework they created wrapped irreconcilable differences in strategic ambiguity that has given all parties five decades of peace in which individuals on both sides of the strait have seen greater increases in their well-being than in any equivalent period in their history. Much has changed over these decades in China, in Taiwan, and in the United States. In this grave new world, the most urgent and consequential international challenge for President Biden and his team is to craft a twenty-first-century analog that will extend this peace for another half-century.
Could the U.S. Lose a War with China Over Taiwan?
The era of U.S. military primacy is over.
During a town hall last week, when asked whether America would defend Taiwan against a Chinese assault, President Joe Biden answered: “yes.” In response, China’s foreign ministry stated unambiguously that, to prevent the loss of Taiwan, Beijing is prepared to go to war. If China were to attack Taiwan, and the United States sent military forces to Taiwan’s defense, could the United States lose a war with China?
When current Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks and her fellow members of the National Defense Strategy Review Commission examined this question in 2018, they concluded: maybe. In their words, America “might struggle to win, or perhaps lose a war against China.” As they explained, if in response to a provocative move by Taiwan, China were to launch an attack to take control of that island that is as close to its mainland as Cuba is to the United States, it might succeed before the U.S. military could move enough assets into the region to matter. As former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral James Winnefeld and former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell wrote last year, China has the capability to deliver a fait accompli to Taiwan before Washington would be able to decide how to respond.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, who served under three Secretaries before retiring in 2017, has been even more explicit. As he has stated publicly, in the most realistic war games the Pentagon has been able to design simulating war over Taiwan, the score is eighteen to zero. And the eighteen is not Team USA.
This scorecard might shock Americans who remember the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-1996 when China conducted what it called “missile tests” bracketing Taiwan. In a show of superiority, America deployed two aircraft carriers to Taiwan’s adjacent waters, forcing China to back down. Today, that option is not even on the menu of responses that Chairman Mark Milley would present to the President.
How did so much change so quickly? A forthcoming report from Harvard’s China Working Group on the Great Military Rivalry documents what has happened in the military race between China and the United States in the past decades, and summarizes our best judgments about where the rivals now stand.
First, the era of U.S. military primacy is over. As Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it starkly in his 2018 National Defense Strategy, “For decades the U.S. has enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted.” But that was then. “Today,” Mattis warned, “every domain is contested—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.”
Second, in 2000, A2/AD—anti-access/area denial systems by which China could prevent U.S. military forces from operating at will—was just a People's Liberation Army (PLA) acronym on a briefing chart. Today, China’s A2/AD operational reach encompasses the First Island Chain, including Taiwan and Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. As a result, as President Barack Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy put it, in this area, “the United States can no longer expect to quickly achieve air, space, or maritime superiority.”
In the current climate where American political dynamics are fueling increasing hostility to China, insistence on recognizing the military realities may seem unhelpful. But as former Deputy Secretary Work has noted, the Chinese leadership is more aware of everything he has made public than are most members of the American political class and policy community who have been expressing views about these issues.
The reason for confronting ugly realities is not to counsel defeatism. On the contrary, it is meant as a call to act now to change these facts. There are many things Taiwan could do to make itself a much harder target, including deploying a protective barrier of smart mines. There are many asymmetric systems the U.S. military could deploy that would raise the costs and risks for China of a military assault on Taiwan. There is an even longer and likely more impactful agenda of initiatives the United States could undertake with the other instruments of American power in the DIME—diplomacy, informational, military, economic—arsenal that would make China’s leaders worry that the costs and risks of an attack on Taiwan would exceed the benefits.
Unfortunately, a clear-eyed observer would remind us that Taiwan and the United States had similar opportunities a decade ago. Nonetheless, previous failures need not be a predictor of future performance. The question now is: will they?
In the meantime, clear-eyed recognition that the current military balance over Taiwan has shifted dramatically in China’s favor does not mean that the United States would not come to Taiwan’s defense. Chinese strategists remember 1950 when the Truman Administration declared unambiguously that Korea was beyond the U.S. defense perimeter. Despite those declarations, when Communist China’s ally in North Korea launched an assault on South Korea, the U.S. did come to South Korea’s defense. China and the United States soon found themselves at war. While the United States had taken no position on Taiwan prior to the Korean War, during the war, the 7th Fleet positioned itself in the strait between China and Taiwan, effectively creating a de facto American security umbrella. For the Chinese, this was the beginning of the enduring narrative that they lost Taiwan for a generation.
Finally, the biggest takeaway from the recent history of Taiwan is that imaginative diplomacy offers a much better way for parties to both secure their interests and avoid war. When the United States and China established formal relations under Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, statesmen recognized that the issue of Taiwan was irresolvable—but not unmanageable. The diplomatic framework they created wrapped irreconcilable differences in strategic ambiguity that has given all parties five decades of peace in which individuals on both sides of the strait have seen greater increases in their well-being than in any equivalent period in their history. Much has changed over these decades in China, in Taiwan, and in the United States. In this grave new world, the most urgent and consequential international challenge for President Biden and his team is to craft a twenty-first-century analog that will extend this peace for another half-century.
Image: Reuters
2. Taiwan: Will We or Won’t We?
Interesting discussion of the Taiwan Relations Act.
Excerpt:
The elected head of the executive branch in a democratic republic working together with the elected legislative body to determine a national response to a crisis? Hey, that’s what the Act says…
Taiwan: Will We or Won’t We?
Much ink has been spilt about President Biden’s recent statement about a U.S. commitment to defending Taiwan if attacked by China, as well as the clarification issued by the White House afterward:
The U.S. defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act. We will uphold our commitment under the Act, we will continue to support Taiwan's self-defense, and we will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo.
Which is exactly right. Unlike NATO and the countries that the President referred to, the United States does not have a security treaty with Taiwan. What the U.S. has is the Taiwan Relations Act, so let's see what the Act commits the U.S. to regarding the defense of Taiwan…
The relevant sections of the Act are 2.b.4 and 3.c. Section 2.b.4 states:
to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States;
So what does “grave concern” mean? The U.S. does not have some checklist or dictionary that defines what a "grave concern" might be, but it is clear that in this globalized world, any hard-power threat to Taiwan, be it military or economic in nature, would have a profound effect on both the U.S. and world economies.
Section 3.c states the following:
The President is directed to inform Congress promptly of any threat to the security or the social or economic system of the people on Taiwan and any danger to the interests of the United States arising therefrom. The President and Congress shall determine appropriate action by the United States in response to any such danger in accordance with constitutional processes.
Similar to the text of mutual defense treaties the U.S. has with other nations, there is no “automatic” response should China threaten Taiwan in some way. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume the nature of the threat is an armed attack by China on Taiwan. In this case, what are the “constitutional processes” mentioned in the Act? Following a strict interpretation of the Constitution, Congress could decide to declare war on China and direct the President, as Commander in Chief, to take military action to defend Taiwan.
But Congress hasn’t declared war on another country since 1941, and even then, it was asked to recognize that "a state of war exists between the U.S. and the Empire of Japan." That hasn't stopped the U.S. from using military force, however. Virtually every President has claimed that their powers as Commander in Chief of the armed forces give them the executive authority to use military power, not just to defend the U.S. against attack, but to defend U.S. interests, however broadly defined. Therefore, in response to a military attack against Taiwan, a president might decide unilaterally to take military action to defend Taiwan. At some point, Congress would have to get involved, either to belatedly authorize the money necessary to continue military action or to attempt to use the War Powers Act to restrict the President's ability to continue that action.
Another possibility is that a president decides that an armed attack against Taiwan should not be responded to with military force. After all, there is nothing in either the Taiwan Relations Act or the Constitution that requires the President to take unilateral military action to defend Taiwan. It is rare in the discourse to hear this option discussed, but it is certainly possible.
There is yet another possible response, which the Act clearly prescribes: 1) the president, who controls the intelligence resources necessary to make such a determination, is directed to inform Congress of any threat to Taiwan, and 2) working together, the executive and legislative branches are to determine the appropriate national response, given the broad range of instruments of national power, for the existing situation.
The elected head of the executive branch in a democratic republic working together with the elected legislative body to determine a national response to a crisis? Hey, that’s what the Act says…
Notes:
Take, for example, the text of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between Japan and the United States of America:
“Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.” Or from the North Atlantic Treaty Article V: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all, and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
“DIME”: Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic; or the longer “DIME-FIL”, which adds Financial, Intelligence, and Legal.
3. What Role Could Civilians Play in Taiwan’s Defense?
But any article that can tout the OSS Simple Sabotage Manual gets an "A" grade in my book!
Excerpts:
Rather, the purpose should be to prepare a civilian population to make themselves as inconvenient as possible to potential occupiers. This is not a novel idea; the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, produced a “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” in 1944, which gave simple, easy-to-understand instructions for how ordinary workers could introduce friction and difficulty into the lives of occupying military forces. Much of the content within it is badly outdated (though office workers will perhaps recognize many of the bureaucratic tactics it suggests from their own lives). A modernized attempt to pre-organize sabotage, friction, and non-violent resistance in potentially vulnerable states could – if judiciously publicized – contribute to strategic risk calculations amongst potential aggressors. It should be noted, though, that this depends on how much economic value is part of those calculations – if the aggressor views a potential campaign of conquest through a primarily nationalistic lens, the prospect of industrial and commercial sabotage might not have much impact.
Of course, the world of 2021 is not the world of 1944. From the perspective of countries that are relatively safe from invasion but wracked with sociocultural polarization, it might seem unwise to intentionally introduce the prospect of sabotage as a deterrent. But as one mechanism amongst many, it is at least worth considering how the population of a smaller, vulnerable state can threaten to create enough friction to be worth taking seriously.
What Role Could Civilians Play in Taiwan’s Defense?
Advertisement
There is little doubt that the People’s Liberation Army is conventionally superior to Taiwan’s military. It could hardly be otherwise, given the vast disparity in population size and GDP, not to mention Beijing’s pressure campaign to limit Taipei’s access to international arms markets. The open question is whether Taiwan’s forces could inflict enough harm on the People’s Liberation Army to make it politically or strategically unfeasible for an invasion to succeed.
It is an open question in part because, since their last clash in the late 1950s, the two militaries have not fought each other – indeed, neither military has much of a contemporary combat record at all to draw inferences from. But more broadly, there are relatively few examples of how modern militaries fare under sustained assault from a numerically and technologically superior opponent. The Georgian military, in 2008’s summer war with Russia, managed to inflict significant casualties and destroy some high-status hardware, but failed to stop Russia from achieving its objectives in relatively short order. (Moreover, the Russian military of 2008 was far less modernized and sophisticated than it is today, in part because the war with Georgia exposed many of its shortcomings.)
Other recent engagements give at least some hints as to what vulnerabilities may exist. Armed drones have been notably successful against conventional military targets in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Syria – though it is worth pointing out that in almost all of those instances, they were being used against targets defended by point rather than integrated air defense networks. Ballistic missiles remain capable of doing real harm to facilities and other immobile targets, even those protected by state-of-the-art defense systems. And the fact that even limited numbers of anti-ship missiles have proved capable of wreaking havoc on warships suggests that major surface combatants are at severe risk from the large missile arsenals of heavily industrialized state adversaries.
Those vulnerabilities go both ways, of course – the airfields and warships of larger powers have the same inherent vulnerabilities as those of smaller states. But where there is a major imbalance of forces – as exists across the Taiwan Strait – a smaller power’s military can give as good as it gets and still lose the war.
Strengthening conventional forces to address imbalances is the obvious solution, but it has significant limitations. Most democratic nations have moved away from conscription, and peacetime professional militaries often struggle to fill their existing ranks, let alone expand (Taiwan is no exception, as John Oliver recently observed). That problem extends beyond simply filling the ranks of infantry units; a military that can’t draw on a deep reserve of different kinds of talents will find it more difficult to maintain and effectively operate its most sophisticated and effective weapons systems. That in turn means that simply spending more money and buying state-of-the-art combat systems is not in and of itself a solution either.
This is not to suggest that conventional armaments and military formations are pointless in the face of larger adversaries. But they should not be considered as the only aspect of national defense and deterrence. Technology might have reshaped battlefield capabilities, but to conquer and hold territory still requires a large force of military personnel to undertake the tasks of occupation with a coherent and achievable political objective. That creates its own vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by a sufficiently prepared civilian population.
To be clear, this is not a suggestion to create hidden paramilitary forces ready for activation in the small democracies of the world. As NATO discovered with Operation Gladio, attempting to do so is inherently antidemocratic and creates enormous blowback, serious unintended consequences, and – given the necessary secrecy – provides very limited deterrent effect.
Advertisement
Rather, the purpose should be to prepare a civilian population to make themselves as inconvenient as possible to potential occupiers. This is not a novel idea; the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, produced a “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” in 1944, which gave simple, easy-to-understand instructions for how ordinary workers could introduce friction and difficulty into the lives of occupying military forces. Much of the content within it is badly outdated (though office workers will perhaps recognize many of the bureaucratic tactics it suggests from their own lives). A modernized attempt to pre-organize sabotage, friction, and non-violent resistance in potentially vulnerable states could – if judiciously publicized – contribute to strategic risk calculations amongst potential aggressors. It should be noted, though, that this depends on how much economic value is part of those calculations – if the aggressor views a potential campaign of conquest through a primarily nationalistic lens, the prospect of industrial and commercial sabotage might not have much impact.
Of course, the world of 2021 is not the world of 1944. From the perspective of countries that are relatively safe from invasion but wracked with sociocultural polarization, it might seem unwise to intentionally introduce the prospect of sabotage as a deterrent. But as one mechanism amongst many, it is at least worth considering how the population of a smaller, vulnerable state can threaten to create enough friction to be worth taking seriously.
4. COVID-19's global death toll tops 5 million in under 2 years
Sobering statistics.
COVID-19's global death toll tops 5 million in under 2 years
AP · by CARLA K. JOHNSON · November 1, 2021
The global death toll from COVID-19 topped 5 million on Monday, less than two years into a crisis that has not only devastated poor countries but also humbled wealthy ones with first-rate health care systems.
Together, the United States, the European Union, Britain and Brazil — all upper-middle- or high-income countries — account for one-eighth of the world’s population but nearly half of all reported deaths. The U.S. alone has recorded over 740,000 lives lost, more than any other nation.
“This is a defining moment in our lifetime,” said Dr. Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health. “What do we have to do to protect ourselves so we don’t get to another 5 million?”
The death toll, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. It rivals the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Globally, COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and stroke.
ADVERTISEMENT
The staggering figure is almost certainly an undercount because of limited testing and people dying at home without medical attention, especially in poor parts of the world, such as India.
Hot spots have shifted over the 22 months since the outbreak began, turning different places on the world map red. Now, the virus is pummeling Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, especially where rumors, misinformation and distrust in government have hobbled vaccination efforts. In Ukraine, only 17% of the adult population is fully vaccinated; in Armenia, only 7%.
“What’s uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, director of ICAP, a global health center at Columbia University. “That’s the irony of COVID-19.”
Wealthier nations with longer life expectancies have larger proportions of older people, cancer survivors and nursing home residents, all of whom are especially vulnerable to COVID-19, El-Sadr noted. Poorer countries tend to have larger shares of children, teens and young adults, who are less likely to fall seriously ill from the coronavirus.
India, despite its terrifying delta surge that peaked in early May, now has a much lower reported daily death rate than wealthier Russia, the U.S. or Britain, though there is uncertainty around its figures.
ADVERTISEMENT
The seeming disconnect between wealth and health is a paradox that disease experts will be pondering for years. But the pattern that is seen on the grand scale, when nations are compared, is different when examined at closer range. Within each wealthy country, when deaths and infections are mapped, poorer neighborhoods are hit hardest.
In the U.S., for example, COVID-19 has taken an outsize toll on Black and Hispanic people, who are more likely than white people to live in poverty and have less access to health care.
“When we get out our microscopes, we see that within countries, the most vulnerable have suffered most,” Ko said.
Wealth has also played a role in the global vaccination drive, with rich countries accused of locking up supplies. The U.S. and others are already dispensing booster shots at a time when millions across Africa haven’t received a single dose, though the rich countries are also shipping hundreds of millions of shots to the rest of the world.
Africa remains the world’s least vaccinated region, with just 5% of the population of 1.3 billion people fully covered.
“This devastating milestone reminds us that we are failing much of the world,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a written statement. “This is a global shame.”
In Kampala, Uganda, Cissy Kagaba lost her 62-year-old mother on Christmas Day and her 76-year-old father days later.
“Christmas will never be the same for me,” said Kagaba, an anti-corruption activist in the East African country that has been through multiple lockdowns against the virus and where a curfew remains in place.
The pandemic has united the globe in grief and pushed survivors to the breaking point.
“Who else is there now? The responsibility is on me. COVID has changed my life,” said 32-year-old Reena Kesarwani, a mother of two boys, who was left to manage her late husband’s modest hardware store in a village in India.
Her husband, Anand Babu Kesarwani, died at 38 during India’s crushing coronavirus surge earlier this year. It overwhelmed one of the most chronically underfunded public health systems in the world and killed tens of thousands as hospitals ran out of oxygen and medicine.
In Bergamo, Italy, once the site of the West’s first deadly wave, 51-year-old Fabrizio Fidanza was deprived of a final farewell as his 86-year-old father lay dying in the hospital. He is still trying to come to terms with the loss more than a year later.
“For the last month, I never saw him,” Fidanza said during a visit to his father’s grave. “It was the worst moment. But coming here every week, helps me.”
Today, 92% of Bergamo’s eligible population have had at least one shot, the highest vaccination rate in Italy. The chief of medicine at Pope John XXIII Hospital, Dr. Stefano Fagiuoli, said he believes that’s a clear result of the city’s collective trauma, when the wail of ambulances was constant.
In Lake City, Florida, LaTasha Graham, 38, still gets mail almost daily for her 17-year-old daughter, Jo’Keria, who died of COVID-19 in August, days before starting her senior year of high school. The teen, who was buried in her cap and gown, wanted to be a trauma surgeon.
“I know that she would have made it. I know that she would have been where she wanted to go,” her mother said.
In Rio de Janeiro, Erika Machado scanned the list of names engraved on a long, undulating sculpture of oxidized steel that stands in Penitencia cemetery as an homage to some of Brazil’s COVID-19 victims. Then she found him: Wagner Machado, her father.
“My dad was the love of my life, my best friend,” said Machado, 40, a saleswoman who traveled from Sao Paulo to see her father’s name. “He was everything to me.”
___
AP journalists Rajesh Kumar Singh in Chhitpalgarh, India; Cara Anna in Nairobi, Kenya; Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda; Kelli Kennedy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Colleen Barry in Bergamo, Italy; and Diane Jeantet in Rio de Janeiro contributed.
AP · by CARLA K. JOHNSON · November 1, 2021
5. In Afghan hospital, unpaid doctors and rigid Taliban clash
Can the Taliban "government" effectively govern? Are there any competent government officials? WIll significant resistance develop? Could resistance cause the government to collapse eventually? And how much suffering will the Afghan people have to endure?
In Afghan hospital, unpaid doctors and rigid Taliban clash
AP · by SAMYA KULLAB and BRAM JANSSEN · November 1, 2021
November 1, 2021 GMT
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban-appointed supervisor of a small district hospital outside the Afghan capital has big plans for the place — to the dismay of the doctors who work there.
Mohammed Javid Ahmadi, 22, was asked by his superiors, fresh off the fields of battle from a war that has spanned most of his life, what kind of jobs he could do. On offer were positions in an array of ministries and institutions now under the Taliban’s power following their August takeover and the collapse of the former government.
It was Ahmadi’s dream to be a doctor; poverty had kept him from gaining admission to medical school, he said. He chose the health sector. Soon after, the Mirbacha Kot district hospital just outside of Kabul became his responsibility.
“If someone with more experience can take this position it would be better, but unfortunately if someone (like that) gets this position, after some time you’ll see that he might be a thief or corrupt,” he said, highlighting a perennial problem of the former government.
It’s a job Ahmadi takes very seriously, but he and the other health workers in the 20-bed hospital rarely see eye-to-eye. Doctors are demanding overdue salary payments amid critical shortages of medicine, fuel and food. Ahmadi’s first priority is to build a mosque inside the hospital quarters, segregate staff by gender and encourage them to pray. The rest will follow according to the will of God, he tells them.
The drama in Mirbacha Kot is playing out across Afghanistan’s health sector since the Taliban takeover. With power changing hands overnight, health workers have had to contend with a difficult adjustment. The host of problems that preceded the Taliban’s rise were exacerbated.
The U.S. froze Afghan assets in American accounts shortly after the takeover, in line with international sanctions, crippling Afghanistan’s banking sector. International monetary organizations that once funded 75% of state expenditures paused disbursements, precipitating an economic crisis in the aid-dependent nation.
Health is acutely affected. World Bank allocations funded 2,330 out of Afghanistan’s 3,800 medical facilities, including the salaries of health workers, said the Taliban’s Deputy Health Minister Abdulbari Umer.
Wages had been unpaid for months before the government collapsed.
“This is the biggest challenge for us. When we came here there was no money left,” said Umer. “There is no salary for staff, no food, no fuel for ambulances and other machines. There is no medicine for hospitals; we tried to find some from Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, but it’s not enough.”
ADVERTISEMENT
In Mirbacha Kot, doctors have not been paid in five months.
Disheartened staff continue to attend to up to 400 patients a day, who come from the neighboring six districts. Some have general complaints or a heart condition. Others bring sick babies.
’What can we do? If we don’t want to come here there’s no other job for us. If there was another job, nobody can pay us. It’s better to stay here,” said Dr. Gul Nazar.
Every morning, Ahmadi makes his rounds. His small frame, topped by a black turban, is a sharp contrast to the sea of white coats that routinely rush in and out of the facility to tend to patients.
The first order of the day is the registration book. Ahmadi wants every doctor to sign in and out. It’s a formality most health workers are too busy to remember, but neglecting it is enough to inspire Ahmadi’s ire.
Second, the mosque.
Workers come to the hospital to take measurements for the project and Ahmadi gives them orders.
“We are Muslims, and we have 32 staff members, and for them, we need a mosque,” he said.
There are many benefits, he added. Relatives can stay with sick patients overnight, sleeping in the mosque, as the hospital lacks extra beds especially during the winter months. “And this is what is needed the most,” he said.
Dr. Najla Quami looked on, bewildered.
She, too, has not been paid in months and routinely complains of medicine shortages in the maternity ward. They have no pain medication for expectant mothers. The pharmacy is stocked only with analgesic and some antibiotics. Is this the time for a mosque, she asked.
But Ahmadi said it was the responsibility of non-governmental organizations to resume their aid programs to finance these shortages. The money for the mosque will come from local donations.
His arrival ushered in other sweeping changes.
Men and women were told to stay in separate wards. Female doctors are forbidden to go to the emergency room. Ahmadi ordered them to wear a head covering and focus on female patients.
“We can’t go to the other side of the hospital,” said Dr. Elaha Ibrahimi, 27. “Woman is woman, man is man, he told us.”
Due to shortages, doctors advise patients to find medications elsewhere and return. Ibrahimi said Ahmadi often scrutinizes her prescriptions.
“He isn’t a doctor, we don’t know why he is here, we ask ourselves this all the time,” he said.
But Ahmadi is quick to allege deeply entrenched corruption in the hospital under the former hospital administrator, his predecessor from the former government.
He said he was aghast to uncover an entire warehouse full of medical equipment, furniture and other stolen goods to be sold in the market for personal profit. He could not offer proof that this was the intention of the previous administrator.
He sees his job to meticulously ensure that never happens again, echoing the Taliban’s broader aims for the nation.
Doctors are routinely lambasted by angry patients, most of whom can’t afford to pay for the life-saving medicines. “All of them fight with us,” Ibrahimi said.
(AP Video/Bram Janssen)
Staff working the night shift say there is no food. The power shuts off for hours in the day with generator fuel quickly running out.
Quami holds a mobile phone for light as she makes her way to check on malnourished babies.
“Every doctor here is in a deep depression,” she said.
Ahmadi, by contrast, said his dreams were finally coming true.
Working in the hospital has afforded something life growing up poor never could: A medical education.
He claims that in the past two months he has learned how to administer injections and prescribe basic pharmaceuticals. He said that’s part of the reason why he scrutinizes Ibrahimi’s prescriptions.
“I know the names of the medicines needed for different conditions,” he said proudly. Recently, after a car accident, he was on the scene to provide an injection of painkillers, he added.
Ahmadi still dreams of being a doctor, and, like the health workers he supervises, hopes the money comes through somehow.
ADVERTISEMENT
AP · by SAMYA KULLAB and BRAM JANSSEN · November 1, 2021
6. Left Behind After U.S. Withdrawal, Some Former Afghan Spies and Soldiers Turn to Islamic State
If we do not want them joining ISIS-K then we have to consider supporting an alternative indigenous resistance organization. Are we willing to do that? Are we capable of doing that? (given there is only one military force and one gov’t agency that is optimized for that mission).
So we need to determine what is the resistance potential within Afghanistan and if it is supportable. But there is no silver bullet.
Left Behind After U.S. Withdrawal, Some Former Afghan Spies and Soldiers Turn to Islamic State
Hunted by the Taliban and lacking income, members of disbanded security forces provide recruits for extremist group
WSJ · by Yaroslav Trofimov
An Afghan national army officer who commanded the military’s weapons and ammunition depot in Gardez, the capital of southeastern Paktia province, joined the extremist group’s regional affiliate, Islamic State-Khorasan Province, and was killed a week ago in a clash with Taliban fighters, according to a former Afghan official who knew him.
The former official said several other men he knew, all members of the former Afghan republic’s intelligence and military, also joined Islamic State after the Taliban searched their homes and demanded that they present themselves to the country’s new authorities.
A resident of Qarabagh district just north of Kabul said his cousin, a former senior member of Afghanistan’s special forces, disappeared in September and was now part of an Islamic State cell. Four other members of the Afghan national army that the man knew have enlisted in the group, also known as ISIS-K, in recent weeks, he said.
“In some areas, ISIS has become very attractive” to former members of Afghan security and defense forces “who have been left behind,” said Rahmatullah Nabil, a former head of Afghanistan’s spy agency, the National Directorate of Security, who left the country shortly before the Taliban takeover. “If there were a resistance, they would have joined the resistance.” But, he said: “For the time being, ISIS is the only other armed group.”
Taliban forces in early September stamped out a nascent resistance movement in the Panjshir valley led by Ahmad Massoud, a son of anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by al Qaeda in 2001. Resistance leaders then fled abroad.
The Taliban have long alleged that Islamic State-Khorasan Province was a creation of Afghanistan’s intelligence service and the U.S. that aimed to sow division within the Islamist insurgency, a claim denied by Washington and by Kabul’s former government.
Hundreds of thousands of former Afghan republic intelligence officers, soldiers and police personnel are unemployed and afraid for their lives despite pledges of amnesty from the Taliban. Only a fraction of them, mostly in the National Directorate of Security, have returned to work under Taliban supervision. Like nearly all other Afghan government employees, they haven’t been paid for months.
“It’s exactly how it started in Iraq—with disenchanted Saddam Hussein generals,” a senior Western official warned. “You have to be careful.” The U.S. disbanded Iraq’s security forces after the 2003 invasion of the country. Often with weapons stashed at home and with years of combat expertise, they provided a ready pool of recruits for militant groups, including al Qaeda and the precursor of Islamic State.
In addition to protection from the Taliban, Islamic State is offering significant amounts of cash to its new members in Afghanistan, security officials say. In recent Senate testimony, Colin Kahl, U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, warned that Islamic State in Afghanistan could generate the capacity to attack the West and allies within six to 12 months.
While the Taliban are highly motivated to go after Islamic State, he added, “Their ability to do so, I think, is to be determined.”
A suspected Islamic State member was detained by the Taliban in Kabul in September.
Photo: wana news agency/Reuters
Though the Taliban and Islamic State both say they want to impose a strict Islamic order in Afghanistan, the two groups have deep religious, ideological and political differences. The Taliban mostly follow the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, believe in an Afghan nation-state and say they seek good relations with all countries, including the U.S. They view the country’s Shiite Hazara minority as fellow Muslims.
Islamic State follows the more rigid Salafi Islamic tradition, considers Shiites to be apostates who should be physically exterminated, and seeks to establish a world-wide Islamic caliphate through military conquest.
While influenced by Islamic State’s original leaders in Syria and Iraq, Islamic State-Khorasan Province was established in 2014 by Afghan and Pakistani Taliban militants who felt the Taliban leadership, by then seeking peace talks with the U.S., wasn’t radical enough. The group controlled several districts of eastern Afghanistan until a Taliban offensive in 2015 dramatically weakened the group.
Islamic State-Khorasan Province, however, has rebounded this year, taking advantage of the collapse of the Afghan republic and the withdrawal of the U.S. counterterrorism presence.
While the U.S. has begun providing some intelligence on Islamic State to the Taliban, Taliban officials are loath to admit that cooperation and generally dismiss the severity of Islamic State’s challenge.
“We are not faced with a threat nor are we worried about them,” said Mawlawi Zubair, a senior Taliban commander whose 750 men oversee southwestern Kabul and who operates out of the capital’s third police district headquarters. “There is no need, not even a tiny need, for us to seek assistance from anyone against ISIS.”
The area under his supervision includes the Kabul zoo, where a man believed to be an Islamic State militant recently threw a hand grenade into a crowd of Taliban foot soldiers. Former members of the Afghan security forces are “100%” involved in such Islamic State attacks, Mr. Zubair said.
He said Islamic State is also feeding on growing resentment over the country’s economic meltdown that followed the Taliban’s Aug. 15 takeover.
“In the current situation, we are not dealing with a few difficulties, we are facing many,” Mr. Zubair said. “If we get rid of all our economic and administrative problems, ISIS will disappear in 15 days in all of Afghanistan.”
—Zamir Saar and Ghousudin Frotan contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Yaroslav Trofimov
7. Taiwan Special Forces Have Been Working With US Troops, but Who Are They?
Taiwan Special Forces Have Been Working With US Troops, but Who Are They? | SOFREP
Recently, U.S. foreign policy has placed increased attention on the decades-long Nationalist-Communist Chinese conflict. To the wider world, it may look like an international conflict between two sovereign nations. Yet, in reality, the civil war between Nationalist and Communist forces was only ever put on pause in 1949. To this day, both Taipei and Beijing maintain conflicting claims of legitimacy.
The Taiwanese government has stated that it could not last more than a month against a Communist assault. This forecast emphasizes the importance of international assistance in the event the mainland government makes a move.
Additionally, the R.O.C. armed forces which were once composed mainly of conscripts, are now moving towards an all-volunteer force. Some training remains obligatory in Taiwan, but with a military budget almost one-tenth of the mainland’s, the island is in a precarious position.
The Nationalist Party in Taiwan, descendants of the Kuomintang that led the fight against Japan in WWII, are realists. The Taiwanese government hasn’t seriously considered invading the mainland since the 1970s. Today, the emphasis is on deterring and surviving a potential invasion by the Communists.
But who are the R.O.C. forces who would stand in defense of the virtual fortress country of Taiwan? Who are the special operation counterparts that U.S. Special Forces have been training with, and what are they capable of?
Taiwanese Special Forces of all Shapes and Sizes
For a westerner to understand the R.O.C. Special Forces, first there has to be some understanding of the R.O.C. military.
One significant difference is the R.O.C. Military Police branch. That’s right, I said branch. Like the U.S. and most other countries, Taiwan has an army, air force, and navy.
Yet, the country also has a separate branch for military police, and that branch has its own special forces operators. In fact, even the R.O.C. Coast Guard has special operators.
In total, the island nation has at least five known special operations forces, each with its own unique backstory, history, and mission.
And that doesn’t even count the local police forces with their own SWAT-like units patterned after the National Police Agency’s (NPA) special forces.
Additionally, any defense of Taiwan would involve a “total war” footing. If the Communists were to invade, everyone from local police to construction workers would be pressed into service for defense.
Earliest Taiwan Special Forces
A recent graduate of the R.O.C. Army’s 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion’s 15-week training course has the Sea Dragon Badge shoved into his chest by his instructor. (Republic of China Ministry of National Defense)
The 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion is the oldest of the R.O.C. Special Forces units. Stood up in 1949 after the Nationalists retreated from mainland China, the 101st was founded with U.S. assistance. They are also the R.O.C. unit shown in the Facebook video posted by the U.S. Army 1st Special Forces Group.
While they belong to the R.O.C. Army, the 101st is operationally similar to the U.S. Navy SEALS. In a callback to the WWII predecessors of the SEALS, they are also known as “Sea Dragon Frogmen.” Their original role was amphibious reconnaissance and stealth missions on the mainland coast, though now they focus on a defensive role.
The members of the 101st qualify through the 15-week “iron-man road” training course. This has an 80 percent failure rate. Training covers such areas as scuba, underwater explosives, survival in the wild, and hand-to-hand combat. The R.O.C. frogmen also specialize in mountain, airborne and amphibious operations.
The Taiwanese government recently invested approximately $13 million on equipment and facility upgrades for the frogmen. New forward operating bases on Penghu and Kinmen islands are meant to bolster rapid response capabilities in the Taiwanese Strait.
Response to Terrorism From Taiwan Special Forces
Founded around 1980, the R.O.C. Army has another special forces unit tasked primarily with counterterrorism. The Airborne Special Service Company (ASSC) has a comparable mission to Delta Force.
While little is publicly disclosed about the ASSC, they were recently the alleged target of Communist espionage. Prosecutors in the case alleged that the ASSC is trained both for counterterrorism and defensive counterstrikes against Communist military leaders.
The unit is also known as the Liang Shan Special Operations Company. It is allegedly based out of Pingtung County.
A 2017 report from the R.O.C. Ministry of National Defense discusses ongoing training for defensive operations involving the ASSC. Along with other special forces units, they are part of the Joint Airborne Task Force. The task force is tasked with both homeland defense and airborne infiltration.
Both the ASSC and the 101st were put under the R.O.C. Army’s Aviation and Special Forces Command (ASFC) around 2007. As of 2010, the total troop strength of the ASFC was 9,500, including 300 women. The ASFC also includes the 601st and 602nd Aviation Brigades, the 603rd Aviation Training Command, and the Air Transport Battalion. The elite ASSC is reported to have approximately 150 personnel.
The ROC Marine Corps’ Role in Taiwan Special Forces
Members of the Airborne Special Service Company conduct close-quarters training. (Office of the President, Republic of China)
The R.O.C. Army has the first amphibious special forces set up by the Nationalist Chinese. Yet, they aren’t the only amphibious Taiwan special forces unit. Founded in 1950, the R.O.C. Marine Corps Amphibious Reconnaissance and Patrol Unit (ARP) is almost as old.
According to the official ARP Facebook page, the brigade falls under the Special Operations Command of the Republic of China (Taiwan).
In recent years, the R.O.C. Ministry of National Defense has also invested in new training facilities for special operations. Approximately $36 million was earmarked in 2018 for the new training facilities, with the majority going to naval installations. A portion will also go toward a joint training facility for use with the R.O.C. Military Police’s special operators — but more on this unit later.
The new training facilities are expected to be operational in 2022, providing both live-fire and computer-simulated training scenarios. They will focus on amphibious and conventional operations, as well as individual combat skills. Training will include airborne and amphibious insertion, as well as hostage-rescue drills covering air, land, and sea scenarios.
The joint training base will have urban environments, with plans for both R.O.C. Military Police and regular police to train in them.
‘Night Hawks’ in the Taiwan Special Forces
R.O.C. Marine Corps Amphibious Reconnaissance and Patrol Unit members participate in a parade in Taipei. (Office of the President, Republic of China)
As mentioned above, the R.O.C. Military Police (ROCMP) are their own branch. The military police traces its history to the elite imperial guards of the Chou dynasty. The current branch was founded in 1914 by Sun Yat-sen.
Rather than guarding the emperor, Sun Yat-sen’s military police were tasked with maintaining military discipline. In 1925, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek increased their numbers and used them in purging Communists from the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang is the Nationalist Party of China that originated with Sun Yat-sen and still dominates politics in Taiwan.
During WWII, the military police even served in conventional combat against the Japanese. With the 1946 outbreak of civil war, the military police served a primarily defensive role, guarding government facilities and officials.
In the 1970s, the Nationalists formed a special operations unit within the R.O.C. Military Police in response to global terrorism. The R.O.C. Military Police Special Services Company, also known as the Night Hawks, were established in 1978.
Their mission is primarily counterterrorism and “anti-atrocity,” though they engage in other traditional special operations missions as well. They also train special-service teams for the nation’s police departments.
During times of civil unrest, the Night Hawks have also performed operations related to maintaining public order, according to the ROCMP website. They continue to operate as a protective force for government officials and conduct counter-smuggling operations related to arms and drugs.
The Night Hawks have teams that specialize in attack, sniper operations, and explosives. ROCMP members who wish to join the Night Hawks must complete a nine-month training course.
In 2020, the Ministry of National Defense confirmed that the Night Hawks regularly train with Green Berets on U.S. soil. Additionally, the unit has been tasked with training the special forces of other countries.
Taiwan Special Forces of all Stripes
Members of the ROC Military Police Special Services Company with an explosive ordnance disposal robot. (Wikimedia Commons)
The special operators of the R.O.C. Army, Marines, and Military Police branches are the most readily recognized and discussed. Yet, they are not the only special operators in the country. Both the ROC Coast Guard Administration and the National Police Agency of Taiwan have their own special forces units.
Hardcore Coasties
The R.O.C. Coast Guard Administration’s (CGA) Special Task Unit (STU) is the youngest of the nation’s special forces. The unit marked its 10th anniversary in 2010, and at the time had 52 members. While they are stationed at airports around Taiwan, their training includes scuba and underwater skills.
Like the nation’s other special operators, members of the STU train in multiple martial arts. Their initial training includes a three-month course with the ARP and a two-month course with the Night Hawks.
While efforts to form the unit began in 2000, the CGA website states the STU was fully formed in July 2005. The official mission of the STU is counterterrorism in maritime zones.
However, the STU has also participated in drills with other special forces units to counter attacks on the presidential office. The joint training also covered incursions in coastal zones and waterways. One of the primary defensive concerns for Taiwan is a “decapitation” strike by Communist forces. Such a strike would seek to disable the country by taking out senior leaders ahead of an invasion. This has led to increased emphasis on joint operations and training.
SWAT With Benefits
Members of the R.O.C. Coast Guard Administration Special Task Unit participate in martial arts drills. (Office of the President, Republic of China)
Last, but certainly not least, there’s the R.O.C.’s National Police Agency Special Operations Group (NPASOG), commonly referred to as the Thunder Squad. The unit participates in training with other Taiwan special operations units; this includes anti-decapitation joint training.
Such joint training exercises include both live-fire and simulated exercises intended to secure the nation against a Communist invasion.
The NPA’s special forces are also known as the Wei’an, or Special Security Service Forces. Their missions include counterterrorism, as well as protecting senior leaders and critical infrastructure. That includes protecting nuclear power facilities and border control.
National Police Agency Special Operations Group members participate in an exercise in 2019. (Office of the President, Republic of China)
If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting our Veteran Editorial by becoming a SOFREP subscriber. Click here to get 3 months of full ad-free access for only $1 $29.97.
8. The Taliban Haven’t Changed, But U.S. Policy Must
Excerpts:
Moving beyond these immediate needs, the United States needs a congressionally mandated, comprehensive accounting of its engagement in Afghanistan. At its core should be the voices of Afghans, veterans, diplomats and others who spent the past two decades on the frontlines of American involvement in Afghanistan. A similar commission has been proposed in an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022; this is promising, but the commission’s declared scope must be broader. How Americans form national narratives and a national memory of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan must be built on the voices of Afghans as well as Americans.
In any accounting for the failures of the U.S. withdrawal, the bipartisan efforts to normalize the Taliban, from the beginning of U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations to the U.S. and allied withdrawal and beyond, should also be a subject of scrutiny. Whitewashing the Taliban reveals far more about the proponents of these claims than it does about the jihadists it tries to excuse. Many of its proponents have insisted that the West cannot fight for democracy, human rights and women’s equality everywhere. Yet, in doing so, they merely highlight a growing willingness by established democracies to accept despotism in places where Western governments are (at least partially) responsible for the malaise. Normalizing the takeover of Afghanistan by a tyrannical, jihadist regime is symptomatic of not only a growing abandonment of democratic values but also the hypocrisies of democracy’s supposed defenders.
The Taliban Haven’t Changed, But U.S. Policy Must
Editor’s Note: With the United States defeated in Afghanistan and the Taliban in power, it is tempting to minimize the impact of the disaster by contending that, this time around, the Taliban will no longer be the terrorist-supporting, human rights-abusing nightmare that they were before 9/11. Haroro J. Ingram, Andrew Mines and Omar Mohammed of George Washington University's Program on Extremism argue that such assumptions are fundamentally at odds with the Taliban's goals and the realities of Afghanistan today. The authors call for keeping the Taliban regime at a distance while trying to address the humanitarian disaster facing Afghanistan.
Daniel Byman
***
The people of Afghanistan are once again trapped under the Taliban’s tyrannical rule, but rather than facing condemnation and ostracism, much of the world seems ready to embrace the new regime. Indeed, the Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan has been largely met with not just acquiescence justified in the name of counterterrorism but concerted efforts to whitewash the jihadists, often with counterfactual claims.
This practice is a product of more than just the wishful thinking of its proponents. It too-often reflects an enthusiasm to continue a dangerous shift in U.S. foreign policy toward a posture that is more insular (despite the rhetoric), less predictable for allies and more willing to abandon democratic values for the sake of expediency. The governments of the United States and other countries must accept that the Taliban are tyrannical jihadists and decide how to engage with them to ensure the provision of aid to the Afghan people. To prevent a humanitarian catastrophe for Afghans this winter, what matters most is getting U.S. and international aid to Afghans immediately, free of diplomatic grandstanding or conditions that would further legitimate the Taliban. Even as it provides aid, the United States should lead its allies in rebuking recognition of the Taliban regime as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and holding it accountable for human rights violations. And as the United States creates a policy to move forward, it needs to reflect on its actions with a comprehensive, accurate accounting of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan over the past 20 years—including the most recent period of Taliban whitewashing.
Whitewashing the Taliban
Whether promoted by politicians, academics or the Taliban themselves, efforts to whitewash the group have been characterized by claims that, to varying degrees, the Taliban have moderated their stance on women and minorities, adopted a more inclusive approach to governance, will prevent al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base for external operations against the United States and its allies, and will be a viable counterterrorism force against the Islamic State in Khorasan province (IS-K). According to this perspective, the new Taliban 2.0, unlike previous iterations of the group, can be pressured to commit to developmental goals and support counterterrorism efforts. Leaders from both the former and current U.S. administrations have attempted to present the Taliban as a responsible diplomatic party, as evidenced by the proposal to invite Taliban leaders to Camp David and optimistic (if highly caveated) claims that the Taliban are keeping their word. After all, the latest round of U.S.-Taliban peace efforts were initiated in February 2019, resulting in an agreement signed a year later by the Trump administration and then fulfilled by the Biden administration. It was in U.S. and allied interests to suggest the Taliban had changed.
These talking points about a new, reformed Taliban have featured in media reporting and been promoted by the Taliban themselves in the pages of major U.S. news publications. For example, the New York Times published an op-ed in 2020 by Sirajuddin Haqqani—the wanted terrorist, and now Afghan minister of the interior—showcasing the full suite of whitewashing claims. More recently, in the aftermath of the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, the Times published a video that looks like a Taliban propaganda film, in which militants lament the corruption of Afghan officials while touring warlord Abdul Dostum’s abandoned mansion.
Whether motivated by political expediency or naïveté, the claims that underpin the Taliban 2.0 myth are wrong. The Taliban see their extraordinary success as the result of their religious fervor and ruthless insurgency campaign. Earlier this year, the Taliban engaged in a vicious campaign of threats, intimidation and violence against female journalists across the country. It was hardly surprising given the Taliban’s history of terrorizing Afghans, including massacres of Hazara men, sexual violence against women, and the execution and mutilation of surrendered Afghan security personnel—a history that has continued as the group has seized power this past year.
Since taking Kabul in August, the Taliban have appointed a cabinet filled with wanted terrorists and hardened battlefield commanders, restored the feared Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, resumed public executions, and carved away girls’ access to education. In mere weeks of having power, the Taliban have demonstrated that they will proudly desecrate women’s rights, not simply ignore minorities but actively persecute them, and implement their barbaric system of criminal justice. The Taliban’s new interim government is an all-male, mostly Pashtun assortment of veterans from the brutal years of Taliban governance in the 1990s and leaders in the war against the U.S.-led coalition. This all bodes badly for the plight of ordinary Afghans once global attention shifts.
Then there is the myth that the Taliban will be a viable counterterrorism force against the two jihadist organizations that pose the greatest regional and international threats—al-Qaeda and IS-K. The Taliban’s deep historical ties and strategic alliance with the former makes it unlikely they will meaningfully challenge or constrain the group. In the short term, even if al-Qaeda refrains from attacking the United States and its allies, it will almost certainly consolidate and expand the resources necessary to train, coordinate and direct its various regional operations and affiliates. Over time, al-Qaeda has the capacity and strategic vision to then pose a renewed threat directly to the United States and allied homelands, and in the event of an attack, the Taliban would likely deflect and deny that it originated from Afghanistan.
When it comes to IS-K, the notion that the Taliban will be able to provide anything more than short-term, tactical gains against the group is optimistic. Although the Taliban may succeed in rooting out some IS-K cells in the next few months, the history and current trajectory of the Islamic State-Taliban rivalry suggests that a much longer, protracted war between the two organizations is likely if the Taliban are left alone to manage IS-K. Civilians will bear the brunt of the costs. Boosted by thousands of jailbroke fighters, new leadership, and a revamped messaging campaign that paints the Taliban as illegitimate puppets of the United States and the international community, IS-K recently embarked on a lethal campaign of attacks in its former stronghold of Nangarhar province to challenge Taliban rule. With likely support from Salafist sympathizers, veteran jihadists, younger Afghans and others, IS-K has already begun to implement the same method of insurgency as its namesake in Iraq and Syria, including the assassination of prominent members of the “moderate middle” in IS-K’s target recruiting pool in order to weaken its opponents.
The Taliban have obvious incentives to target and eliminate their main jihadist rival, and past Taliban efforts have demonstrated some efficacy in limiting IS-K expansion efforts. However, the Taliban also benefited tremendously from coalition operations targeting IS-K, which successfully captured or killed hundreds of IS-K leaders and thousands of the group’s fighters. While the Taliban may be able to prevent IS-K from holding territory for now, territorial control is not currently a priority for IS-K and there’s no guarantee that it will be in the future. Regardless of its efficacy, a Taliban campaign to deny IS-K a haven would result in significant levels of death, destruction and displacement afflicting tens of thousands of Afghans, further exacerbating the existing economic, humanitarian and other crises the Taliban are ill prepared to address. History matters, and accepting Taliban claims that they can tackle IS-K independently would ignore just how much the Taliban benefited from U.S. and Afghan efforts to combat the group these past several years.
The Taliban’s limited ability to take on IS-K prompts questions about what role the United States should play. But even narrow, case-by-case tactical cooperation with the United States is likely to stoke internal Taliban divisions, delegitimize the Taliban’s claims to sovereignty and legitimacy, and push Taliban hardliners into IS-K’s ranks. And from a U.S. perspective, American over-the-horizon counterterrorism capacities are markedly limited. In fact, one expert put U.S. intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance counterterrorism capabilities at just one-fourth of last year’s levels, which were already in sharp decline from previous years.
Compounding Sense of Betrayal
Afghans now living under Taliban rule are distrustful of the new leadership and worry that the United States and other Western governments are continuing to undermine them even after the withdrawal. We interviewed Afghans for a forthcoming special episode of the “Mosul and the Islamic State” podcast. Our interviewees were from a range of different backgrounds, but none was supportive of the Taliban. They lamented how efforts to normalize the Taliban had intensified their feeling of betrayal and revealed the duplicity of the two decades of promises made by Western governments. As Omar Mohammed, who remains in Kabul, told us, “The international community should be cautious of, first of all, [giving] recognition to the Taliban because that will provide them [with] legitimacy. What we observed in three weeks is that their words do not match their behavior.” This raises complex issues related to recognition and its implications for the Taliban’s legitimacy, as well as to the delivery of aid. Most Afghans we interviewed conceded that while all efforts should be made by states not to legitimize the Taliban through formal recognition, conditional economic and humanitarian aid will be essential for the well-being of Afghan civilians living under Taliban rule.
Afghanistan’s women invested and risked the most in the promises of democracy. For example, a recent UNESCO report highlights the extraordinary advancements in female education in Afghanistan, with girls constituting four in 10 primary school students and about 90,000 enrolling in higher education before the Taliban takeover. Female literacy has nearly doubled in less than a decade, and improvements in girls’ education had led to greater female participation in Afghanistan’s economy and society. These achievements were reached from a baseline of basically zero women’s education and economic participation under previous Taliban rule and, almost overnight, have now been reversed.
Many Afghan women have courageously protested for their rights, directly confronting the Taliban to demand equality. The Afghan women we spoke to said that Taliban whitewashing, especially from Western government officials, had been particularly demoralizing because they had seen firsthand that the Taliban had not reformed.
As Farkhondeh Akbari told us, “[The United States and Western allies] needed to whitewash the Taliban to make it more digestible …. But on the other hand, the Taliban themselves did not change an inch from who they are …. For them to change means to lose their identity, their fighters, their rank-and-file, so they could not really change themselves to fit with the narrative.” She went on to say, “This is the Taliban who fought us, they committed suicide bombings, they killed civilians, including civilian employees of the international community, and now they’re being painted as people that want peace.”
Averting More Catastrophes
The task of securing and delivering humanitarian aid to struggling Afghans should now be the top priority of the United States and its allies. This can and should be done without formally recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan or as a U.N. member state. The Taliban organization remains a violent, totalitarian jihadist group with designated terrorists among its cohort. Humanitarian aid should be delivered independently of political objectives and without conceding to Taliban demands for recognition and legitimacy. This appears to be the initial U.S. stance based on recent discussions with the Taliban, in which the United States stated that it will give humanitarian assistance directly to Afghans and provide facilities for humanitarian organizations to deliver aid without recognizing the Taliban. After all the damage that has been done so far, saving Afghan lives and averting a human catastrophe must be the short-term priority.
Moving beyond these immediate needs, the United States needs a congressionally mandated, comprehensive accounting of its engagement in Afghanistan. At its core should be the voices of Afghans, veterans, diplomats and others who spent the past two decades on the frontlines of American involvement in Afghanistan. A similar commission has been proposed in an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022; this is promising, but the commission’s declared scope must be broader. How Americans form national narratives and a national memory of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan must be built on the voices of Afghans as well as Americans.
In any accounting for the failures of the U.S. withdrawal, the bipartisan efforts to normalize the Taliban, from the beginning of U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations to the U.S. and allied withdrawal and beyond, should also be a subject of scrutiny. Whitewashing the Taliban reveals far more about the proponents of these claims than it does about the jihadists it tries to excuse. Many of its proponents have insisted that the West cannot fight for democracy, human rights and women’s equality everywhere. Yet, in doing so, they merely highlight a growing willingness by established democracies to accept despotism in places where Western governments are (at least partially) responsible for the malaise. Normalizing the takeover of Afghanistan by a tyrannical, jihadist regime is symptomatic of not only a growing abandonment of democratic values but also the hypocrisies of democracy’s supposed defenders.
9. Op-Ed: We Can Still Help the Women of Afghanistan
Excerpts:
Helping women around the world has proven remarkable results and Afghanistan is no exception. Societies, where women are educated and contribute to the workforce and economy, are more stable than those countries that do not provide the same opportunities. Improving literacy can have a remarkable effect on women’s earnings. As reported in the 2013/14 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, in Pakistan working women with high levels of literacy skills earned 95% more than women with weak or no literacy skills. The differential was only 33% amongst men . Educated women are empowered to take a greater economic role in their families and communities, and they tend to reinvest most of what they earn back into their families. They also improve the education of their children as literate mothers produce literate and healthier children. According to UNICEF, the power of education on economic growth is significant, as a one percentage point increase in female education raises the average gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.3 percentage points and raises annual GDP growth rates by 0.2 percentage points . The Brookings Institute reported that since 2004 the number of girls attending school increased from 10 to 33 percent and at the same time the life expectancy for women grew from 56 to 66 years .
Afghanistan has a long way to go to rebuild and become a stable society, but the process starts with recognizing women and their rights and what they can bring to their country. Oppressing and beating down over 50 percent of a country’s population can only bring one outcome – that of a disordered and unstable nation. Time is running out to help the women of Afghanistan, but we can change the current trajectory of Taliban policies if we make this push for this change now and build a coalition to support it.
Op-Ed: We Can Still Help the Women of Afghanistan | The Pardee Atlas Journal of Global Affairs
By: Iris Sobchak
Iris Sobchak is a student in the MAIR program and a retired Army officer. Her interests are in security studies, women’s issues, and Latin America.
The future of women in Afghanistan is not necessarily preordained with the Taliban takeover of the country in August. While there is every reason to take Taliban threats towards women seriously, the United States and other world organizations have valuable leverage that can be used to influence the Taliban. When the Taliban seized Kabul in August, President Biden announced that the US would freeze nearly $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank and would stop shipments of cash to the nation . The Taliban is currently cash strapped and it has been reported that their banking system is teetering on collapse. The United Nations has recommended that this money be released to prevent the collapse of the Afghan economy but there is no reason to believe that the Taliban would use this money to help their people. The United States and world organizations have a good amount of leverage with this money, and they can influence the Taliban by portioning it out slowly. The payments would be made only if the Taliban complies with specific requirements and oversight provided by NGOs and media on the ground. These would include allowing women in the public sphere. Women would not be barred from serving in government, media, businesses, academia, and other economic activities. Wearing the burqa or hijab would not be mandated and public beatings of women by the “morality police’ would end. Afghan women and girls could attend schools and universities. Child marriage under the age of 15 would be banned and women would be allowed to participate in sports.
In order to achieve these ends, the United States needs to create a diplomatic coalition of states and non-government organizations. Many NGOs will rush into Afghanistan or continue to support the country despite the Taliban, but this is a mistake. Continual support provided to Afghanistan under the Taliban only lengthens the suffering of women and children. The United States cannot do it alone and building a coalition will be difficult, but it can be done. It is in the interests of the world that the Taliban does not slide back into old patterns and addressing the rights of women is the first step. It is also in the interests of the Taliban to promote basic rights for women. The Taliban is headed towards another failed state and falling back into civil war, but such a risk can be arrested by committing to women’s rights. If Afghanistan can educate girls and improve women’s access to credit, land, jobs, and training then the Afghan economy can transform and be stabilized more quickly. While it is important to manage expectations about what we can achieve by pressuring the Taliban with funds, this topic is far too important for the world to give up on it.
Helping women around the world has proven remarkable results and Afghanistan is no exception. Societies, where women are educated and contribute to the workforce and economy, are more stable than those countries that do not provide the same opportunities. Improving literacy can have a remarkable effect on women’s earnings. As reported in the 2013/14 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, in Pakistan working women with high levels of literacy skills earned 95% more than women with weak or no literacy skills. The differential was only 33% amongst men . Educated women are empowered to take a greater economic role in their families and communities, and they tend to reinvest most of what they earn back into their families. They also improve the education of their children as literate mothers produce literate and healthier children. According to UNICEF, the power of education on economic growth is significant, as a one percentage point increase in female education raises the average gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.3 percentage points and raises annual GDP growth rates by 0.2 percentage points . The Brookings Institute reported that since 2004 the number of girls attending school increased from 10 to 33 percent and at the same time the life expectancy for women grew from 56 to 66 years .
Afghanistan has a long way to go to rebuild and become a stable society, but the process starts with recognizing women and their rights and what they can bring to their country. Oppressing and beating down over 50 percent of a country’s population can only bring one outcome – that of a disordered and unstable nation. Time is running out to help the women of Afghanistan, but we can change the current trajectory of Taliban policies if we make this push for this change now and build a coalition to support it.
Jeff Stein,” Biden administration freezes billions of dollars in Afghan reserves, depriving Taliban of cash.” The Washington Post, 17 August 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/08/17/treasury-taliban-money-afghanistan/.
“Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All.” UNESCO Education For All World Monitoring Report, 2013/14, http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/teaching-and-learning-achieving-quality-for-all-gmr-2013-2014-en.pdf.
Jo Bourne, “Why Educating Girls Makes Economic Sense.” Global Partnership for Education, 2014, https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/why-educating-girls-makes-economic-sense.
“Expanding and Improving the quality of Girl’s Education in Afghanistan.” Brookings Institute Blog, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2015/08/19/expanding-and-improving-the-quality-of-girls-education-in-afghanistan/.
10. U.S. Military Jury Condemns Terrorist’s Torture and Urges Clemency
U.S. Military Jury Condemns Terrorist’s Torture and Urges Clemency
Seven senior officers rebuked the government’s treatment of an admitted terrorist in a handwritten letter from the jury room at Guantánamo Bay.
Camp Justice, at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, houses the court for detainees charged with war crimes.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
By
Oct. 31, 2021
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In a stark rebuke of the torture carried out by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks, seven senior military officers who heard graphic descriptions last week of the brutal treatment of a terrorist while in the agency’s custody wrote a letter calling it “a stain on the moral fiber of America.”
The officers, all but one member of an eight-member jury, condemned the U.S. government’s conduct in a clemency letter on behalf of Majid Khan, a suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Qaeda courier.
They had been brought to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay to sentence Mr. Khan, who had earlier pleaded guilty to terrorism charges. They issued a sentence of 26 years, about the lowest term possible according to the instructions of the court.
At the behest of Mr. Khan’s lawyer, they then took the prerogative available in military justice of writing a letter to a senior official who will review the case, urging clemency.
Before sentencing, Mr. Khan spent two hours describing in grisly detail the violence that C.I.A. agents and operatives inflicted on him in dungeonlike conditions in prisons in Pakistan, Afghanistan and a third country, including sexual abuse and mind-numbing isolation, often in the dark while he was nude and shackled.
“Mr. Khan was subjected to physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques, instead being closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history,” according to the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.
The panel also responded to Mr. Khan’s claim that after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, he told interrogators everything, but “the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” and so he subsequently made up lies to try to mollify his captors.
“This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests,” the letter said. “Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.”
Majid Khan in 2018.Credit...Center for Constitutional Rights
In his testimony on Thursday night, Mr. Khan became the first former prisoner of the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites to publicly describe in detail the violence and cruelty that U.S. agents used to extract information and to discipline suspected terrorists in the clandestine overseas prison program that was set up after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
In doing so, Mr. Khan also provided a preview of the kind of information that might emerge in the death penalty trial of the five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, a process that has been bogged down in pretrial hearings for nearly a decade partly because of secrecy surrounding their torture by the C.I.A.
The agency declined to comment on the substance of Mr. Khan’s descriptions of the black sites, which prosecutors did not seek to rebut. It said only that its detention and interrogation program, which ran the black sites, ended in 2009.
More than 100 suspected terrorists disappeared into the C.I.A.’s clandestine overseas prison network after Sept. 11, 2001. The agency used “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and violence to try to have prisoners divulge Al Qaeda’s plans and the whereabouts of leaders and sleeper cells, but with no immediate plans to put its captives on trial.
President George W. Bush disclosed the existence of the C.I.A. program in September 2006, with the transfer of Mr. Khan and 13 other so-called high-value detainees to Guantánamo. President Barack Obama ordered the program shut down entirely after taking office in 2009.
Mr. Khan, 41, was held without access to either the International Red Cross, the authority entrusted under the Geneva Conventions to visit war prisoners, or to a lawyer until after he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay. He pleaded guilty in February 2012 to terrorism crimes, including delivering $50,000 from Al Qaeda to an allied extremist group in Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah, that was used to fund a deadly bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, five months after his capture. Eleven people were killed, and dozens more were injured.
The clock on his prison sentence began ticking with his guilty plea in 2012, meaning the panel’s 26-year sentence would end in 2038.
But Mr. Khan, who has cooperated with the U.S. government, helping federal and military prosecutors build cases, has a deal that was kept secret from the jury that could end his sentence in February or in 2025 at the latest.
Under the military commission system that was set up after Sept. 11, even defendants who plead guilty and make a deal with the government must have a jury sentencing hearing. This was the case for Mr. Khan, whose sentencing was delayed by nearly a decade to give him time to work with government investigators and win favor in the form of early release from a jury sentence.
The clemency letter also condemned the legal framework that held Mr. Khan without charge for nine years and denied him access to a lawyer for the first four and half as “complete disregard for the foundational concepts upon which the Constitution was founded” and “an affront to American values and concept of justice.”
This letter was drafted in the deliberation room recommending clemency for Majid Khan. Seven members of Mr. Khan’s eight-officer jury signed it, using their panel numbers. The jury was drawn from a pool of 20 active-duty officers who were brought to Guantánamo Bay on Oct. 27.
Although it is rarely done, a military defense lawyer can ask a panel for letters endorsing mercy, such as a reduction of a sentence, for a service member who is convicted at a court-martial.
But this was the first time the request was made of a sentencing jury at Guantánamo, where accused terrorists are being tried by military commission. A clemency recommendation is not binding, but it could send a powerful message to the convening authority of military commissions, the senior Pentagon official overseeing the war court, whose role is to review a completed case and an accompanying clemency petition from defense lawyers to decide whether to shorten a sentence. An Army colonel, Jeffrey D. Wood of the Arkansas National Guard, currently fills that role as a civilian.
In closing arguments, Mr. Khan’s military lawyer, Maj. Michael J. Lyness of the Army, asked the panel for a minimum sentence and then to consider drafting a letter recommending clemency.
The lead prosecutor, Col. Walter H. Foster IV of the Army, asked the panel to issue a harsh sentence. He conceded that Mr. Khan received “extremely rough treatment” in C.I.A. custody but said he was “still alive,” which was “a luxury” that the victims of Qaeda attacks did not have.
The jury foreman, a Navy captain, said in court that he took up the defense request and drafted the clemency letter by hand, and all but one officer on the sentencing jury signed it, using their panel member numbers because jurors are granted anonymity at the national security court at Guantánamo.
Ian C. Moss, a former Marine who is a civilian lawyer on Mr. Khan’s defense team, called the letter “an extraordinary rebuke.”
“Part of what makes the clemency letter so powerful is that, given the jury members’ seniority, it stands to reason that their military careers have been impacted in direct and likely personal ways by the past two decades of war,” he said.
At no point did the jurors suggest that any of Mr. Khan’s treatment was illegal. Their letter noted that Mr. Khan, who never attained U.S. citizenship, was held as an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” a status that made him eligible for trial by military commission and “not technically afforded the rights of U.S. citizens.”
But, the officers noted, Mr. Khan pleaded guilty, owned his actions and “expressed remorse for the impact of the victims and their families. Clemency is recommended.”
Sentencing was delayed for nearly a decade after his guilty plea to give Mr. Khan time and opportunity to cooperate with federal and military prosecutors, so far behind the scenes, in federal and military terrorism cases. In the intervening years, prosecutors and defense lawyers clashed in court filings over who would be called to testify about Mr. Khan’s abuse in C.I.A. custody, and how.
In exchange for the reduced sentence, Mr. Khan and his legal team agreed to drop their effort to call witnesses to testify about his torture, much of it most likely classified, as long as he could tell his story to the jury.
The jurors were also sympathetic to Mr. Khan’s account of being drawn to radical Islam in 2001 at age 21, after the death of his mother, and being recruited to Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks. “A vulnerable target for extremist recruiting, he fell to influences furthering Islamic radical philosophies, just as many others have in recent years,” the letter said. “Now at the age of 41 with a daughter he has never seen, he is remorseful and not a threat for future extremism.”
The panel was provided with nine letters of support for Mr. Khan from family members, including his father and several siblings — American citizens who live in the United States — as well as his wife, Rabia, and daughter, Manaal, who were born in Pakistan and live there.
11. Pentagon rattled by Chinese military push on multiple fronts
Pentagon "rattled?" Really?
Pentagon rattled by Chinese military push on multiple fronts
WASHINGTON (AP) — China’s growing military muscle and its drive to end America predominance in the Asia-Pacific is rattling the U.S. defense establishment. American officials see trouble quickly accumulating on multiple fronts — Beijing’s expanding nuclear arsenal, its advances in space, cyber and missile technologies, and threats to Taiwan.
“The pace at which China is moving is stunning,” says Gen. John Hyten, the No. 2-ranking U.S. military officer, who previously commanded U.S. nuclear forces and oversaw Air Force space operations.
At stake is a potential shift in the global balance of power that has favored the United States for decades. A realignment more favorable to China does not pose a direct threat to the United States but could complicate U.S. alliances in Asia. New signs of how the Pentagon intends to deal with the China challenge may emerge in coming weeks from Biden administration policy reviews on nuclear weapons, global troop basing and overall defense strategy.
For now, officials marvel at how Beijing is marshaling the resources, technology and political will to make rapid gains — so rapid that the Biden administration is attempting to reorient all aspects of U.S. foreign and defense policy.
The latest example of surprising speed was China’s test of a hypersonic weapon capable of partially orbiting Earth before reentering the atmosphere and gliding on a maneuverable path to its target. The weapon system’s design is meant to evade U.S. missile defenses, and although Beijing insisted it was testing a reusable space vehicle, not a missile, the test appeared to have startled U.S. officials.
RELATED
A host of scenarios could push China and the United States into some kind of conflict.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the test was “very close” to being a Sputnik moment, akin to the 1957 launching by the Soviet Union of the world’s first space satellite, which caught the world by surprise and fed fears the United States had fallen behind technologically. What followed was a nuclear arms and space race that ultimately bankrupted the Soviet Union.
Milley and other U.S. officials have declined to discuss details of the Chinese test, saying they are secret. He called it “very concerning” for the United States but added that problems posed by China’s military modernization run far deeper.
“That’s just one weapon system,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “The Chinese military capabilities are much greater than that. They’re expanding rapidly in space, in cyber and then in the traditional domains of land, sea and air.”
On the nuclear front, private satellite imagery in recent months has revealed large additions of launch silos that suggest the possibility that China plans to increase its fleet of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs.
Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists, says China appears to have about 250 ICBM silos under construction, which he says is more than 10 times the number in operation today. The U.S. military, by comparison, has 400 active ICBM silos and 50 in reserve.
Pentagon officials and defense hawks on Capitol Hill point to China’s modernization as a key justification for rebuilding the U.S. nuclear arsenal, a project expected to cost more than $1 billion over 30 years, including sustainment costs.
Fiona Cunningham, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a specialist in Chinese military strategy, says a key driver of Beijing’s nuclear push is its concerns about U.S. intentions.
“I don’t think China’s nuclear modernization is giving it a capability to pre-emptively strike the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and that was a really important generator of competition during the Cold War,” Cunningham said in an online forum sponsored by Georgetown University. “But what it does do is to limit the effectiveness of U.S. attempts to pre-emptively strike the Chinese arsenal.”
Some analysts fear Washington will worry its way into an arms race with Beijing, frustrated at being unable to draw the Chinese into security talks. Congress also is increasingly focused on China and supports a spending boost for space and cyber operations and hypersonic technologies. There is a push, for example, to put money in the next defense budget to arm guided-missile submarines with hypersonic weapons, a plan initiated by the Trump administration.
For decades, the United States tracked China’s increased defense investment and worried that Beijing was aiming to become a global power. But for at least the last 20 years, Washington was focused more on countering al-Qaida and other terrorist threats in Iraq and Afghanistan. That began to change during the Trump administration, which in 2018 formally elevated China to the top of the list of defense priorities, along with Russia, replacing terrorism as the No. 1 threat.
RELATED
On its current trajectory, U.S. planners should expect greater military cooperation on a global level between Beijing and Moscow.
For now, Russia remains a bigger strategic threat to the United States because its nuclear arsenal far outnumbers China’s. But Milley and others say Beijing is a bigger long-term worry because its economic strength far exceeds that of Russia, and it is rapidly pouring resources into military modernization.
At the current pace of China’s military investment and achievement, Beijing “will surpass Russia and the United States” in overall military power in coming years “if we don’t do something to change it,” said Hyten, who is retiring in November after two years as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “It will happen.”
The Biden administration says it is determined to compete effectively with China, banking on a network of allies in Asia and beyond that are a potential source of strength that Beijing cannot match. That was central to the reasoning behind a Biden decision to share highly sensitive nuclear propulsion technologies with Australia, enabling it to acquire a fleet of conventionally armed submarines to counter China. Although this was a boost for Australia, it was a devastating blow to Washington’s oldest ally, France, which saw its $66 billion submarine sale to Australia scuttled in the process.
Taiwan is another big worry. Senior U.S. military officers have been warning this year that China is probably accelerating its timetable for capturing control of Taiwan, the island democracy widely seen as the most likely trigger for a potentially catastrophic U.S.-China war.
The United States has long pledged to help Taiwan defend itself, but it has deliberately left unclear how far it would go in response to a Chinese attack. President Joe Biden appeared to abandon that ambiguity when he said Oct. 21 that America would come to Taiwan’s defense if it were attacked by China.
“We have a commitment to do that,” Biden said. The White House later said he was not changing U.S. policy, which does not support Taiwanese independence but is committed to providing defensive arms.
Associated Press writer Nomaan Merchant in Washington contributed to this report.
12. Australian warship stops at Navy base in Japan to replace helicopter lost at sea
Quad collaboration.
Japan: America's 12th aircraft carrier.
Australian warship stops at Navy base in Japan to replace helicopter lost at sea
The Royal Australian Navy destroyer HMAS Brisbane is moored at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan, Monday, Nov. 1, 2021. (Daniel Betancourt/Stars and Stripes)
YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — The crew members of an Australian warship have been enjoying U.S. Navy amenities as they await delivery of a new helicopter.
The guided-missile destroyer HMAS Brisbane steamed into the homeport of the U.S. 7th Fleet for the first time on Friday. On Thursday, the crew expects delivery of an MH-60R Seahawk helicopter to replace one lost at sea last month.
The aircraft is being prepped for the trip at Yokota Air Base, the U.S. airlift hub in western Tokyo, where it arrived Saturday from Naval Air Station Nowra aboard an Australian C-17 Globemaster III.
A Seahawk aboard the Brisbane was ditched in the Philippine Sea during a military exercise Oct. 13, the Australian Department of Defence announced the next day. All three crewmembers were rescued within 20 minutes and treated for minor injuries.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, Brisbane’s skipper, Cmdr. Aaron Cox, told Stars and Stripes on Monday. He said a team of investigators recently came aboard the ship to collect evidence gathered by his crew.
“And they’ve returned to Australia this morning to continue their investigations,” he said.
The Royal Australian Navy destroyer HMAS Brisbane is moored at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan, Monday, Nov. 1, 2021. (Daniel Betancourt/Stars and Stripes)
The Australian government agreed to a $985 million deal to purchase another 12 Seahawks from the U.S. on Oct. 8, according to a same day announcement from the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency. Australia currently has 24 Seahawks, which it purchased for approximately $2.2 billion, according to the Australian Navy website.
The Brisbane’s crew members have several more days before they get underway again, Cox said, but they’re keeping themselves busy.
The ship shares many features with the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and Cox described the Brisbane as a “mini Arleigh Burke.” The most obvious similarity is that both carry the Aegis Combat System, which can detect, track and target with missiles more than 100 targets simultaneously, according to Navy.mil.
“Being able to come to a port like this, where all the expertise resides for those systems, it’s a fantastic opportunity halfway through our deployment,” Cox said.
Despite their short stay in Japan, the crew has found time for recreational activities. They can’t leave base due to COVID-19 restrictions, but they could shop the Navy Exchange and frequent other facilities at Yokosuka, Cox said.
“We were fortunate enough to have been provided some limited opportunities ashore on the base to visit the NEX and some of the eateries in a COVID-safe manner,” he said.
Cox said the Brisbane is on “its first major deployment.”
The ship left Sydney, Australia, on Sept. 22, for three to five months. So far, Brisbane has visited ports in Malaysia and South Korea. It’s expected to call at Sasebo Naval Base, and South Korea for a second time, before returning home.
Alex Wilson
13. Pentagon may not immediately fire vaccine resisters
Pentagon may not immediately fire vaccine resisters
Army Cpl. Jonathan Leon Camacho injects an Army Reserve Soldier from the 447th Military Police Company with the COVID-19 vaccination, Aug 21, 2021, at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center (CSJFTC), Miss. (Brian Barbour/Arizona Army National Guard)
WASHINGTON (Tribune News Service) — Facing criticism that mandates for coronavirus vaccinations could force the Defense Department to fire thousands of civilians, contractors and troops, the Biden administration is signaling that vaccine resisters may get more time to comply.
President Joe Biden and administration officials have previously said Pentagon employees and contractors have to be vaccinated or face termination on a series of upcoming deadlines. This has led to fears that thousands of people responsible for national defense may soon be forced out of their jobs. Virtually every day, Republican lawmakers decry what they describe as a national security crisis in the offing.
The deadlines for vaccination vary, depending on the type of employee. And they have not changed. The first of them arrives next week, on Nov. 2, for active-duty Air Force personnel, and official service figures show that some 4% of the active-duty Air Force is still not fully vaccinated.
Three administration officials in the last couple of days have described the deadlines not as the dates when an ax will fall but rather as the start of an education process designed to convince those who are resisting vaccination to reverse course.
Administration officials seem to be straddling a line — sending a strict signal that the U.S. government will vaccinate its people on the one hand, while reassuring Americans that enforcement will not come so hard and fast as to harm U.S. military readiness or the broader economy.
“U.S. military leaders are sending a tough message to the troops to get it done,” said Mike Hanzel, a civilian attorney who specializes in military law. “However, my sense is that their goal here is not to punish or separate large numbers of servicemembers, which could be counterproductive to overall readiness, but rather to encourage compliance. In practice, while anyone who failed to get their vaccine is at risk once the deadline passes, I believe most will still have an opportunity to get the vaccine and avoid involuntary separation.”
Soft sell
Under a variety of directives, federal government civilians, contractors and U.S. military personnel must all be vaccinated as a condition of employment or of receiving contracts, except for those exempted for religious or medical reasons.
The deadlines for people whose work connects them to the Pentagon to get fully vaccinated generally fall in November and December, though Army reservists have until June of next year to get their shots.
While it is clear that termination of employment is a possible consequence for those who do not comply on schedule, how and when the policy would be enforced is not yet clear.
On Thursday, Stephen Morani, the Pentagon’s acting assistant secretary for sustainment, addressing the Nov. 22 deadline for Defense Department civilians to be fully vaccinated, described the enforcement process as more pedagogical than punitive.
“There will be escalation in disciplinary actions that will go through a process,” Morani said at a House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee hearing. “Nobody is going to be fired on the 22nd. Education is critical in this space — to educate people about the safety of it and the risk of not having it.”
Likewise, Ashish Vazirani, the president’s nominee to be the Pentagon’s deputy under secretary for personnel and readiness, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday he supports the mandate but believes it will be sensitively enforced.
“It’s my understanding that there is an administrative process that allows for exemptions, whether they’re medically necessary or due to religious belief, and then progressing administrative actions to address a servicemember who may decline a vaccine,” Vazirani said, addressing the committee’s top Republican, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma. “So, senator, if I’m confirmed, I would certainly look towards making sure that those processes are administered with care and compassion, so that we understand the specific needs of each servicemember.”
Inhofe, for his part, said: “I can’t think of anything that would be worse than if we were to find ourselves in a situation where we’re letting people go, we’re firing people.”
The administration’s soft sell of the mandate was also in evidence the day before when Jeff Zients, Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters that most of the deadlines are still a few weeks off and, even then, a process will only have begun.
“But even once we hit those deadlines, we expect federal agencies and contractors will follow their standard HR processes and that, for any of the probably relatively small percent of employees that are not in compliance, they’ll go through education, counseling, accommodations, and then enforcement,” Zients said. “So, these processes play out across weeks, not days. And so, to be clear, we’re creating flexibility within the system. We’re offering people multiple opportunities to get vaccinated. There is not a cliff here.”
A Senate GOP aide said Zients’s comments “increase confusion for business owners who will ultimately bear the ramifications of accidental noncompliance. Doublespeak isn’t good enough: The White House needs to be clear if they’re moving the deadline or not.”
A White House official declined to clarify or elaborate on Zients’s remarks.
‘Phased approach’ to enforcement?
The military services have all said that uniformed personnel who are documented as having refused to be vaccinated by the deadline may face what is known as separation — or what civilians call firing.
But the services have sent different and sometimes unclear signals on whether less strict punishments might be tried before separation and whether those who miss the deadline but comply later will still be punished.
The Navy and Marine Corps stand out as being clear that processing for separation will occur whenever a sailor refuses to be vaccinated on schedule without an allowable exemption. Other punishments may occur, officers say, but not in lieu of separation, which servicemembers can appeal.
The Army, Air Force and Space Force meanwhile, have been less precise on how enforcement will play out.
Those services “direct the use of a phased approach to enforcing the vaccination mandate with education and counseling of noncompliant servicemembers prior to initiating actions to separate an individual from military service,” said Bryce Mendez, a defense health care policy analyst with the Congressional Research Service. “Other services take a more direct approach by initiating separation actions immediately.”
To be sure, even after all the educating, counseling and cajoling, some troops and Defense Department employees and contractors — perhaps thousands — may decide not to be vaccinated and accept the consequences.
The National Defense Industrial Association, representing some 70,000 contract workers, takes no position on the vaccine mandate, but its executives say they are gravely concerned about the potential loss of skilled workers as a result.
Greg Hayes, Raytheon Technologies chief executive, said this week he expects his company alone to have to replace thousands of workers.
Protests against the vaccine mandate for federal contractors, with its Dec. 8 deadline, occurred in recent weeks at major Navy shipyards in Virginia, Maine and Mississippi.
Still, it is likely that some troops, contractors and civilians who are reluctant to get vaccinated may change their minds, once the consequences of not getting jabbed become apparent. Then, the administration hopes, only a small minority would have to be let go.
“Some may find that when it comes to putting their job at risk or taking the vaccine, they’ll take the vaccine,” said the Pentagon’s Morani.
Mark Satter contributed to this report.
©2021 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
Visit cqrollcall.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
14. Air Force is first to face troops’ rejection of vaccine mandate as thousands avoid shots
Why is USSOCOM at 98% compliance and so many in the Air Force are resisting vaccination?
Air Force is first to face troops’ rejection of vaccine mandate as thousands avoid shots
Up to 12,000 Air Force personnel have rejected federal orders to get fully vaccinated against the coronavirus despite the Pentagon mandate, and officials say it is too late for them to do so by the Tuesday deadline, posing the first major test for military leaders whose August directive has been met with defiance among a segment of the force.
The vast majority of active-duty airmen, more than 96 percent, are at least partially vaccinated, according to data from the Air Force. But officials have warned that, barring an approved medical or religious exemption, those who defy lawful orders to be fully immunized are subject to punishment, including possible dismissal from the service, or they could face possible charges from within the military justice system.
The challenge now facing Air Force leaders — how to address potential major dissent in the face of a top health priority which has been deeply politicized — is a bellwether for the dilemma in store across other service branches, which all have compliance deadlines ranging from the end of November to the middle of next summer and, in some cases, have seen far greater resistance to President Biden’s mandate.
A wave of dismissals could jolt the Air Force personnel system and cause significant challenges within units that must be ready to respond to crises at a moment’s notice, especially if some vital jobs — like pilots or aircraft maintainers — are overrepresented among those who could face expulsion, said Katherine Kuzminski, a military policy expert with the Washington think tank Center for a New American Security. “The fact that it’s a choice leading to potential loss to readiness is striking,” she said.
The Air Force is the third-largest military service, just behind the Navy, with 324,000 active-duty airmen, making even 3 percent of its ranks a substantial figure. For comparison, the personnel assigned to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, one of the service’s most-populated installations in the United States, numbered slightly over 10,000 in 2019.
The Air Force declined to say how many airmen appear to be outright refusing vaccination versus how many are seeking exemptions or have opted out since they are close to their scheduled exits from the military. The Air Force will release some of the details after next week’s deadline passes, said Ann Stefanek, a spokesperson for the service.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby has said that, generally, the number of religious exemptions for any vaccine is “very small.” The Army, the largest military service, has granted just one permanent medical exemption and no religious exemptions for the coronavirus vaccine, officials said. The Navy hasn’t granted any religious exemptions for any medical vaccine — for the coronavirus or otherwise — in the past seven years.
The religious objections have centered on the fetal cell lines used in some aspects of vaccine development, essentially reproductions of cells out of abortions performed in the 1970s and 1980s. The shots themselves don’t contain the actual cells. A regimen of numerous vaccines is required upon joining the military and even more if troops are deployed overseas. Some of those required vaccines, including those against Rubella, chickenpox and hepatitis A, also were developed using similar cells.
Vaccination rates within the Air Force have slowed in recent weeks, and it is too late to now begin a regimen and be in by compliance by the Tuesday deadline, indicating that the Air Force has mostly immunized all service members who want to get the vaccine, officials said.
Airmen receive counseling from leaders and medical providers when filing a medical exemption from the vaccine mandate. For a religious exemption request, service members must meet with a chaplain to determine if their request was generated by a “sincerely held belief,” Stefanek said.
Information about their request is forwarded to a senior commander for consideration, she said, typically a three-star or four-star general who must weigh an individual’s request against the unit’s mission needs.
Even if the commander believes an airman has made a sincere request, it may be denied if it is believed the unvaccinated airman could harm unit cohesion or make it too difficult to work close together, she said.
Historically, most administrative exceptions have been made for service members who are near a previously planned departure, she said. Airmen who secured approved retirement or separation by Nov. 1, with an exit by April 1, will not be subject to the vaccine mandate, Stefanek said.
Overall, the military vaccination rate has increased since August, when Defense Department leaders informed the 2.1 million service members of the United States that immunization would become mandatory.
Nearly 87 percent of active duty troops are fully vaccinated, Kirby said, though hesitancy among military reservists and National Guard members drives down the rate for the entire force to 68 percent. The numbers vary widely between service branches, fueled in part by the differing deadlines and cultural reasons, The Washington Post found.
As vaccination rates rose, so did military deaths attributed to the more infectious delta variant, with 71 coronavirus-related fatalities in the ranks to date. In September, more military personnel died from coronavirus infections than in all of 2020. None who died had been fully vaccinated, according to Pentagon spokesman Charlie Dietz.
Service members who decline to get vaccinated face an array of potential discipline. The Air Force has said airmen who refuse can change their mind after speaking with their commanders or if their request is denied, though further noncompliance faces an escalating set of punishments, including involuntary separation or court-martial charges.
Similar violations could be handled differently in the other services, which Rachel Van Landingham, a former Air Force lawyer and president of the National Institute of Military Justice, deemed unfair.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin can and should impose one standard of accountability, removing the commanders from the process and limiting punishment to administrative discharges, rather than sending decisions to military courts, she said. Austin will likely not do that, she said, since the services “are parochial and don’t want to give up power.”
Nearly 40 recruits in the Air Force training pipeline were recently forced out of the service for declining to get vaccinated, officials said. They were sent home using a discharge method to easily banish recruits who fail to meet standards before officially entering the military.
Airmen who decide to leave the military over the vaccine mandate may face similar retention problems if they want to transition to federal government employment or jobs with government contractors, which are popular draws for veterans but now mandate the immunization as well.
Michelle Boorstein contributed to this report.
15. Blinken says US will 'make sure Taiwan has the means to defend itself'
Excerpts:
Earlier on Sunday, Blinken raised concerns during a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the G-20 summit about China's actions that "undermine the international rules-based order and that run counter to our values and interests and those of our allies and partners" including Taiwan.
Last week, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen confirmed U.S. troops were on the island.
"We have a wide range of cooperation with the U.S. aiming at increasing our defense capability," she said of the troops.
The U.S. has long operated under a policy of “strategic ambiguity” in dealings related to Taiwan. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act calls for the U.S to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.”
Blinken says US will 'make sure Taiwan has the means to defend itself'
The Hill · by Monique Beals · October 31, 2021
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the U.S. would ensure Taiwan had the ability to defend itself if attacked.
"There is no change in our policy," Blinken said on CNN's "State of the Union" before referring to "a long standing commitment pursuant to the Taiwan Relations Act to make sure that Taiwan has the means to defend itself."
"We stand by that," the secretary of state added. "We want to make sure that no one takes any unilateral action that would disrupt the status quo with regard to Taiwan. That hasn't changed."
At the time, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the president “wasn’t announcing a change in policy nor have we changed our policy.”
"Are you now saying that the United States would not come to Taiwan's defense if attacked? Can you be specific, yes or no?" Bash asked.
"What I can tell you is that we remain committed, resolutely committed, to our responsibilities under the Taiwan Relations Act, including making sure that Taiwan has the ability to defend itself from any aggression," Blinken replied.
"The president said specifically that the U.S. would, that's not what you're saying, correct?" Bash asked again.
Blinken then reiterated that Biden had "made clear that we will do everything necessary to make sure that Taiwan has the means to defend itself."
"We have a wide range of cooperation with the U.S. aiming at increasing our defense capability," she said of the troops.
The U.S. has long operated under a policy of “strategic ambiguity” in dealings related to Taiwan. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act calls for the U.S to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.”
The Hill · by Monique Beals · October 31, 2021
16. Defense Companies Brace For Workforce Loss Due To Vaccine Mandate
Defense Companies Brace For Workforce Loss Due To Vaccine Mandate - Breaking Defense
President Joe Biden’s vaccination mandate could cause workers to leave their jobs. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON: With little more than a month left to meet the Biden administration’s Dec. 8 coronavirus vaccination mandate, defense contractors are bracing for the loss of a portion of its workforce.
“We are proactively increasing our hiring now, in anticipation that we may have some loss of workers,” Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden told investors during an Oct. 28 earnings call. “And we are ensuring that we have training and skill building programs in place, so as we bring those new employees into the workplace, they can get productive and efficient as quickly as possible.”
Raytheon Technologies is also hiring additional workers, hoping to mitigate the expected loss of “several thousand” of its 125,000 employees, its CEO Greg Hayes told CNBC on Tuesday.
Warden said that the “vast majority” of Northrop employees are vaccinated or are in the process of getting vaccinated. However, the company won’t know the ultimate fallout of the mandate on its business until it understands with more certainty how many workers will be terminated — and what expertise could be leaving the defense sector forever.
Warden echoed concerns from other CEOs this week that workers may choose to exit the industry rather than get vaccinated, taking with them decades of experience in areas like engineering or machining. And while a mass walkout of workers would obviously have an impact on defense programs, it’s too early to know which weapon systems could face increases in cost or schedule delays.
So far, 83% of Raytheon employees have been vaccinated, with 6% currently going through the vaccination process and 3% planning to seek a religious or health accommodation, Hayes said, according to Reuters.
However, another 3% of workers have stated that they do not plan on getting vaccinated, Hayes added.
CACI International, one of the government’s biggest IT providers, is trending toward a 90 percent vaccination rate, said its president and CEO John Mengucci on Thursday.
But while that’s a “positive” sign, Mengucci expressed some exasperation with the implementation of the mandate, saying that his company has had to work through “hourly changes” to the policy as interpreted by various federal agencies.
“Different customers are reacting differently to this mandate that working with them to address safety first, access to government facilities, and ensure continuity of operations,” Mengucci said in an earnings call. Still, “we don’t think the intention of that executive order is to disrupt mission critical activities, or displace skilled and cleared workers in an extremely tight labor market.”
When asked by an investor how much of Booz Allen Hamilton’s workforce still needed to get the vaccine, CEO Horacio Rozanski did not provide figures, but stated that the company’s goal was to get 100 percent of its workforce vaccinated.
“This has been a subject of rich internal conversation,” he said in an earnings call today. “I personally held a couple of town halls, the last one had several thousand people attending, where we talked about and took questions, and had a very open and frank discussion, which was challenging at times.”
‘Noise Up Front and Compliance in the Back’
When President Joe Biden signed the Sept. 9 executive order that put in place a Dec. 8 deadline for federal contractors to get vaccinated, defense and aerospace industry associations went to work. Their goal: to decode guidance from disparate federal agencies, answer questions about implementation and convey overarching concerns about the ripple effects to the supply chain.
But one thing that looks clear, sources said, is that the mandate is not going away.
Arnold Punaro, who chairs the National Defense Industrial Association board, told members in an Oct. 15 message that the the Biden administration has signaled its willing to risk defense companies losing unvaccinated employees.
“They believe from their data that there will be ‘noise up front and compliance in the back’ as this directive is implemented,” he said.
NDIA has not come forward either for or against the vaccine mandate, said Wes Hallman, the organization’s senior vice president for strategy and policy. Rather, the group is trying to make the case for greater flexibility in implementing the policy and has requested guidance on equitable adjustments for any cost increases or schedule delays to contracts as a result of employee losses.
That impact could be especially sizable for small defense businesses.
“These companies don’t have a lot of wiggle room or maneuver space in their employee pool,” Hallman told Breaking Defense in an interview today. “They have specific employees that have specific skillsets and specific security clearances to perform on contract. So even if they lose onesies and twosies, that’s gonna have a real impact on their ability to deliver on contracts and in some cases, may prevent them from delivering on contracts.
The Aerospace Industries Association — which represents both the commercial and defense aviation industries — released an Oct. 11 statement confirming that its member companies planned to conform to the mandate.
“America’s aerospace and defense industry stands together as we prepare to implement the new federal vaccine requirement, while working with our government partners as they develop detailed guidance,” it stated.
While defense executives and industry associations have been careful not to anger the administration by laying out any direct opposition to the mandate, Republicans on Capitol Hill have come out in force against it.
A group of 11 GOP House members — including Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee — urged the administration to reconsider implementing the vaccine mandate in an Oct. 22 letter.
“We will lose critical experience in skilled labor,” they wrote. “We will lose opportunities for mentorship and on-the-job training from veteran craftsmen. In the long-term, we will miss quality control standards. We will face endemic cost overruns and rework as decades of lessons are not passed to the next generation.”
The lawmakers added a foreboding warning that, if weapons programs exceed cost and schedule estimates when seasoned workers leave defense companies, Congress will hold the Pentagon responsible.
“If a contractor loses key members of its workforce due to a post-negotiation customer demand, the customer is to blame,” they wrote. “The Department of Defense is the customer and will ultimately be at fault when the industrial base falters at a crucial turning point in our deterrence of China.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, (R-Ala.), has requested that the Senate Armed Services Committee hold a hearing on the vaccine mandate’s impact on national security, citing potential impacts to small companies.
“Small business remains the backbone of American enterprise and the ingenuity machine in our competition with China,” he wrote in an Oct. 27 letter to SASC chairman Sen. Jack Reed, (D-N.H.). “We cannot afford to slow them down.”
Jeffrey Zients, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, suggested that there may be a grace period for federal contractors who choose not to get vaccinated by the Dec. 8 deadline.
“Those deadlines are not cliffs,” he said during a Oct. 27 briefing. “Once we hit those deadlines, we expect federal agencies and contractors will follow their standard HR processes and that, for any of the probably relatively small percent of employees that are not in compliance, they’ll go through education, counseling, accommodations, and then enforcement.
17. Appeal for CIA, DoD Clandestine Ops to Rescue Afghan Allies
As his contract promised.....?
Excerpt:
An Afghan who worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development recently filed suit against the U.S. government for not getting his two sons, all that remains of his family, out of the country, as his contract had promised him.
Appeal for CIA, DoD Clandestine Ops to Rescue Afghan Allies
Retired Green Beret Lt. Col. Scott Mann says President Biden should authorize the CIA and Pentagon to rescue “tens of thousands” of former Afghan special operation troops who are being hunted down by Taliban hit teams armed with payroll records and biometric data left behind during the chaotic U.S. evacuation last August.
Scott Mann
Mann, who runs Spirit of America, one of a number of veterans groups trying to help their former allies, also says Congress needs to pass legislation bestowing Special Immigration Visas on the troops and their families, who are moving from house to house to evade the Taliban. With winter closing in, their situation is increasingly “dire,” Mann tells SpyTalk.
Contrary to reports, “they fought to the last bullet,” Mann said in an interview. “They gave everything, they've risked probably more than anybody in terms of...commitment to the nation. And they are not even categorically eligible for the SIV. And I think we need Congress to take legislative action to expand that and direct the State Department to adhere to it.”
Spokespersons for relevant congressional offices and the White House could not be immediately reached for comment Sunday afternoon. Former CIA officers have told SpyTalk since the collapse of the Kabul regime that the agency has maintained contact as best as possible with their former allies. A number have urged the Biden administraton to support resistance efforts, but there appears to be little effort for that since the last holdouts were routed in September and October.
In late August, Mann led a private, clandestine mission, dubbed the Pineapple Express, to shepherd several hundred Afghan “special operators, assets and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to the protective custody of the U.S. military,” according to the report by ABC News.
Rescue and support efforts by Afghanistan war veterans in the U.S. have continued, taking a harsh emotional toll on them, according to a recent report in the Military Times.
“We’ve got videos of ...all the atrocities happening, these people being, you know, shot with their families in their homes or [the Taliban] going door to door looking for people,” a Green Beret trooper at Ft. Bragg, N.C. told reporter Howard Altman. “It’s happening 24/7. What I had to look at for the last two weeks, you know, it was eating me alive.”
Mann said that “most of [the Afghans] have had to take their belongings, leave their homes, and they're on the run, and that's what makes it even tougher as winter approaches.”
He called the personal and private rescue efforts “very heartbreaking, and very, very damaging to our veterans.”
“What a lot of people are not understanding right now is that the bulk of the people who are working these issues are not in the government, right?” he added. “This is not the VA. This is not DHS. These are mostly veterans from the special operations community who have multiple tours in combat and have been severely traumatized already, and have essentially been re-traumatized by answering the phone when nobody else would.”
The State Department, which is in charge of the overall effort, is focusing on U.S. citizens, Green Card holders and their families stuck in the country.
American veterans don’t have the resources to get significant numbers of their former allies out, Mann said, especially if they don’t have SIVs. False papers aren’t likely to fool Taliban checkers at the airports. If they make it overland to, say, Tajikistan, they have find find safe places to hide—not easy in the Russia friendly nation. Pakistan has ling been a Taliban ally.
“The best you can do is try to reassure them that you're going to do everything you can,” said Mann, a 23-year Army Special Forces veteran who did tours in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan. “You have to remind them that the onus is on them to stay alive, that they have to keep themselves composed, that they have to keep themselves in the present and do whatever they have to do to stay alive. But no matter what happens, you know, our ability to get them on airplanes, to get them a visa, is excruciatingly limited. And, and right now, the best we can do in many cases is to try to get them in a safe house to try to get them out.”
An Afghan who worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development recently filed suit against the U.S. government for not getting his two sons, all that remains of his family, out of the country, as his contract had promised him.
18. Biden tells Macron US ‘clumsy’ in Australian submarine deal
The US national security team thrown under the bus.
Biden tells Macron US ‘clumsy’ in Australian submarine deal
Defense News · by Sylvie Corbet, The Associated Press · October 29, 2021
ROME — Working to patch things up with an old ally, President Joe Biden told French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday that the U.S. had been “clumsy” in its handling of a secret U.S.-British submarine deal with Australia, an arrangement that left France in the lurch and rattled Europe’s faith in American loyalty.
Biden and Macron greeted each other with handshakes and shoulder grabs before their first face-to-face meeting since the deal was publicly announced in September, marking the latest American effort to try to smooth hurt French sensibilities. Biden didn’t formally apologize to Macron, but conceded the U.S. should not have caught its oldest ally by surprise.
“I think what happened was — to use an English phrase — what we did was clumsy,” Biden said, adding the submarine deal “was not done with a lot of grace.”
“I was under the impression that France had been informed long before,” he added.
The U.S.-led submarine contract supplanted a prior French deal to supply Australia with its own diesel-powered submarines. The U.S. argued that the move, which will arm the Pacific ally with higher-quality nuclear-powered boats, will better enable Australia to contain Chinese encroachment in the region.
Macron said the two allies would develop “stronger cooperation” to prevent a similar misunderstanding from happening again.
“We clarified together what we had to clarify,” he added, when asked if U.S.-France relations had been repaired. “What really matters now is what we will do together in the coming weeks, the coming months, the coming years,” he said.
To that end, Macron’s goal for the meeting was securing greater U.S. intelligence and military cooperation supporting French anti-terrorist operations in the Sahel region of Africa.
Macron praised Biden’s “very operational, very concrete decisions” in recent weeks that helped the French military fighting Islamic extremists in the Sahel.
Biden and Macron also discussed new ways to cooperate in the Indo-Pacific, a move meant to soothe French tempers over being excised from the U.S.-U.K.-Australia partnership that accompanied the submarine deal. Other topics on the agenda include China, Afghanistan and Iran, as well as climate change, before next week’s UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
The French, who lost out on more than $60 billion from the submarine deal, have argued that the Biden administration at the highest levels misled them about the talks with Australia and even levied criticism that Biden was adopting the tactics of his bombastic predecessor, Donald Trump. France is especially angry over being kept in the dark about a major geopolitical shift, and having its interests in the Indo-Pacific — where France has territories with 2 million people and 7,000 troops — ignored.
The row challenged Biden’s carefully honed image of working to stabilize and strengthen the trans-Atlantic alliance after Trump’s presidency, as France for the first time in some 250 years of diplomatic relations pulled its ambassador to the U.S. in protest.
U.S. officials, from Biden on down, have worked for weeks to try to soothe tensions, though not so much for Biden to visit France himself to try to reset relations with Paris. Instead, he’s dispatched Vice President Kamala Harris for a visit in early Novembe r.
In a concession by the White House, the Biden-Macron meeting in Rome was organized and hosted by France at Villa Bonaparte, the French embassy to the Holy See, which Macron’s office called “politically important.” Meanwhile, first lady Jill Biden was to host Brigitte Macron for a “bilateral engagement’ Friday afternoon.
Biden also praised France as an “extremely valued partner” and a “power in and of itself.”
“There is too much that we have done together, suffered together, celebrated together and valued together for anything to ... break this up,” Biden said.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the two leaders would “literally cover the waterfront of issues facing the U.S.-France alliance,” including counterterrorism in the Middle East, China and trade and economic issues.
“We feel very good about the intensive engagement that we’ve had with France over the course of the past few weeks,” he added.
Following their meeting, Biden and Macron were expected to issue a joint statement outlining areas of mutual cooperation, including the Indo-Pacific and economic and technological cooperation.
While the U.S. focuses on Asia, Macron is seeking to bolster Europe’s independent defense capabilities, with more military equipment and military operations abroad.
France is also determined to put “muscle” into Europe’s geopolitical strategy toward an increasingly assertive China, France’s ambassador to Australia, Jean-Pierre Thebault, told The Associated Press earlier this month.
France wants Western allies to “divide up roles” instead of competing against one another, and for the Americans to be “allies as loyal and as available for their European partners as always,” according to the top French official.
19. The unintended consequences of the AUKUS deal
It is not a silver bullet.
Excerpts:
There are many reasons to be skeptical AUKUS is a “silver bullet” when it comes to the Chinese maritime challenge. The PLA Navy has spent the last two decades trying to close the gap on anti-submarine warfare and progress is evident, whether in the buildup of light frigates or maritime patrol aircraft. Moreover, nuclear submarines may not be optimal for the shallow and often confined waters of the East Asian littoral. Modern diesel submarines are arguably both quieter and much cheaper.
Some strategists have argued the U.S. submarine force should cease its exclusive focus on nuclear propulsion for submarines. But the stark reality is that submarines are unlikely to make a major difference in a Taiwan scenario since their magazines are simply too small and they will confront difficult obstacles, such as mine fields. They would be powerless to stop the legions of Chinese troops, hopping over to the island via helicopters and parachute drops, or even by small boats.
Even so, the biggest problems with AUKUS are not confined to its feasibility, time horizon and relevance to various scenarios. Rather, there is the major danger that this submarine partnership will cause China and Russia to double down on their own naval partnership. It is within the realm of possibility the Russian Navy will operate decades in the future with Chinese-made aircraft carriers, even as the Chinese Navy navigates all the world’s oceans in the most cutting-edge Russian-made nuclear submarines, while they collaborate to build lethal drones and vertical-launch fighters.
A semi-permanent marriage between Russia’s military design genius and China’s industrial production acumen on large projects may be the most concerning legacy of the AUKUS deal.
The unintended consequences of the AUKUS deal
Washington and other allied capitals have been abuzz with talk of nuclear submarines since the surprise announcement of the new trilateral pact known as AUKUS in September. Aside from the frictions with France, the new agreement has been met with nearly universal adulation from the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
Some have raised legitimate concerns about the impact of the deal on nuclear non-proliferation. How to prevent myriad other countries from leaping into the domain of nuclear power for military applications when this is exactly how the leading powers are proceeding with selected “special friends”?
The most devastating critique of AUKUS, however, was delivered by someone well acquainted with the relevant facts: former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. He asked incredulously how a country with no civil nuclear program whatsoever was going to put together a near-term program for nuclear submarine fabrication and operations?
Turnbull concludes: “There is no design, no costing, no contract. The only certainty is that we won’t have new submarines for 20 years, and their cost will be a lot more than the French subs.”
Yet, there is a related issue that may raise even more fundamental questions for U.S. national security. This concerns whether the AUKUS deal might accelerate an undersea arms race that is already underway, and could paradoxically tip the balance against America and its allies. True, China is making steady upgrades to its own nuclear submarine fleet and has recently significantly enlarged its own nuclear submarine building capacity.
A new article appearing in Global Times on Oct. 14 in Mandarin, but not in English reveals another side to this arms race: “Faced with increasing pressure from the maritime sector, China and Russia should vigorously strengthen cooperation in the maritime dimension.”
“As land-sea hybrid countries, they are facing the imperative to optimize and integrate land and sea resources,” the author continues. “The comprehensive strategic cooperation between the two countries in the maritime dimension can give play to their respective comparative advantages … so as to rationally coordinate their land and sea resources.”
Notably, the article proposes that Russia-China maritime cooperation go beyond the Pacific to extend into the Atlantic and the Arctic.
Beijing and Moscow have been coordinating maritime strategy for some time already. Indeed, many of China’s aircraft, submarines, and missiles have Russian origins. The Chinese fleet has already made some limited appearances in both the Baltic and Black seas.
Yet, recent developments may portend a significantly tighter alignment. In August 2020, it was reported that China and Russia will cooperate in building a conventional submarine — a first. More recently, Beijing appears to have made a very large order of Russian naval attack helicopters. Now, the Chinese fleet has been exercising with the Russian Pacific Fleet off of Vladivostok in the Sea of Japan.
Notably, the Chinese have brought along their top-of-the-line new surface combatant, the Type 055 cruiser. According to PLA Daily, the exercises demonstrate the great value of continuous and “back to back” naval exercises between the two navies.
There are many reasons to be skeptical AUKUS is a “silver bullet” when it comes to the Chinese maritime challenge. The PLA Navy has spent the last two decades trying to close the gap on anti-submarine warfare and progress is evident, whether in the buildup of light frigates or maritime patrol aircraft. Moreover, nuclear submarines may not be optimal for the shallow and often confined waters of the East Asian littoral. Modern diesel submarines are arguably both quieter and much cheaper.
Some strategists have argued the U.S. submarine force should cease its exclusive focus on nuclear propulsion for submarines. But the stark reality is that submarines are unlikely to make a major difference in a Taiwan scenario since their magazines are simply too small and they will confront difficult obstacles, such as mine fields. They would be powerless to stop the legions of Chinese troops, hopping over to the island via helicopters and parachute drops, or even by small boats.
Even so, the biggest problems with AUKUS are not confined to its feasibility, time horizon and relevance to various scenarios. Rather, there is the major danger that this submarine partnership will cause China and Russia to double down on their own naval partnership. It is within the realm of possibility the Russian Navy will operate decades in the future with Chinese-made aircraft carriers, even as the Chinese Navy navigates all the world’s oceans in the most cutting-edge Russian-made nuclear submarines, while they collaborate to build lethal drones and vertical-launch fighters.
A semi-permanent marriage between Russia’s military design genius and China’s industrial production acumen on large projects may be the most concerning legacy of the AUKUS deal.
Lyle J. Goldstein is director of Asia engagement at think tank Defense Priorities.
20. Re-shaping Forces for the High-End Fight: The Challenge of Overcoming the Legacy of the Land Wars
Excerpts:
A key way to do so is to ramp up efforts to integrate distributed forces packages which are more survivable but also integratability across the services with the C2/ISR capabilities built into those force packages to deliver an aggregated effect. To be blunt, this is not about working the entire gamut of U.S. forces as an integrated force, for frankly, this is not within the ken of the current force and might never be.
But by focusing on force distribution, integrated modular task forces can be in the very short term.
But this requires focusing on the kind of C2 and ISR available within a modular task force tailored to combat wherever that task force is operating. By working integrated distributed force packages and operating as kill webs to train and fight in terms of joint or coalition aggregated effect, the adversaries face a force which is more survivable and more lethal across the spectrum of warfare. And you weed out of the equation those forces that simply not cannot operate this way.
Doing a self-blitzkrieg defeat is not a path to victory; getting on in the short term with more integrated USAF-US Navy-USMC and where appropriate U.S. Army force packages is.
And as the forces learn to do so, a path is opened to a broader strategy of force integratability.
The future is now; we don’t have time to what till the results are in for force structure redesign 2030, 2040 or 2050.
Re-shaping Forces for the High-End Fight: The Challenge of Overcoming the Legacy of the Land Wars - Second Line of Defense
By Robbin Laird
With the return of the high-end fight, and the challenge of delivering tailored military capabilities to ensure escalation dominance in the maritime domain, a broadened focus on maneuver warfare in the maritime space has emerged. Distributed operations within a wider capability to integrate the force is a key focus of shaping a way ahead for the high-end fight and crisis management.
For North Atlantic defense, Second and Sixth fleets are working with the joint force and allies to shape distributed forces which can integrate to deal with various Russian threats, from the hybrid to the gray zone to high-end warfare. For the Pacific, the defense of the outer islands of Japan through to Guam to Australian defense provides the core defense zone from which power is projected into the areas where the Chinese are pushing out for greater influence and combat effects.
But for effective capability to leverage distributed operations to deliver an integrated effect is a work in progress. It is an art form which requires significant training as well as capabilities to deliver C2 at the tactical edge.
Connectivity among the pieces on the chessboard is required to provide for the kind of escalation dominance crisis to engage effectively in full spectrum crisis management. With the development of flexible multi-mission platforms, there is an ability to flex between offensive and defensive operations within the distributed battlespace. It is clearly challenging to operate such a force, delegate decision making at the tactical edge, but still be able to ensure strategic and area wide tactical decision-making.
The strategic thrust of integrating modern systems is to create a grid that can operate in an area as a seamless whole, able to strike or defend simultaneously. This is enabled by the evolution of C2 and ISR systems. By shaping an evolving ISR enabled C2 systems inextricably intertwined with platforms and assets, which provide for kill web integratable forces, an attack and defense enterprise can operate to deter aggressors and adversaries or to conduct successful military operations.
With the Biden Administration’s Blitzkrieg withdrawal strategy, the curtain was drawn on the core commitment of the U.S. military to stability operations and counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan. With this comes a significant historical shock – the U.S. military has been focused by its political masters on fighting a non-peer competitor and has built a force structure optimized for such operations.
But the Chinese and the Russians as peer competitors have not been focusing on Afghanistan or fighting what the U.S. military has been optimized for. This is a significant strategic disconnect which the U.S. military is working to correct.
This is a short- and long-term challenge. The world is not going to wait while the U.S. military goes into a long-term retooling. As Secretary Wynne noted when discussing a military force twenty years out: “you already have 80% of that force today.”
But what if you have stockpiled equipment for stability operations and counter-insurgency and your Commander and Chief simply decides to end this effort, but now faces direct threats from China and Russia?
What do you do then? What are core war winning capabilities?
You have a military which has not really thought about nuclear weapons. They have not really focused on a major theater war. They have not really integrated their forces for a high-end fight, During the land wars what passed for joint operations was what the services provided the U.S. Army leadership who dominated the definition and execution of joint operations. Now the maritime and air arms of the U.S. military clearly recognize the need to work force integration, but how they have done so for twenty years is not the same as fighting peer competitors.
“This is the first large-scale exercise held in decades and I am excited about the high-end integration of the carrier, and all that it brings, at sea,” said Capt. P. Scott Miller, Vinson’s commanding officer. “Carl Vinson and our embarked air wing are trained and ready to participate in the first Naval and amphibious large-scale exercise conducted since the Ocean Venture NATO exercises of the Cold War.”
To say that there is a disconnect between the force you have inherited and what you need to do today is certainly where one has to start. The United States has significant combat capability for the high-end fight, but unfortunately it resides in services that largely do Piaget’s notion of young children doing parallel play, rather than working together to achieve a combined result.
Force integration can be a key advantage for the United States if it can achieve it. The problem is that there is too much long-range “planning” for force integration for the future force. We will not get to that future unless we deliver enhanced capability in the short term.
A key way to do so is to ramp up efforts to integrate distributed forces packages which are more survivable but also integratability across the services with the C2/ISR capabilities built into those force packages to deliver an aggregated effect. To be blunt, this is not about working the entire gamut of U.S. forces as an integrated force, for frankly, this is not within the ken of the current force and might never be.
But by focusing on force distribution, integrated modular task forces can be in the very short term.
But this requires focusing on the kind of C2 and ISR available within a modular task force tailored to combat wherever that task force is operating. By working integrated distributed force packages and operating as kill webs to train and fight in terms of joint or coalition aggregated effect, the adversaries face a force which is more survivable and more lethal across the spectrum of warfare. And you weed out of the equation those forces that simply not cannot operate this way.
Doing a self-blitzkrieg defeat is not a path to victory; getting on in the short term with more integrated USAF-US Navy-USMC and where appropriate U.S. Army force packages is.
And as the forces learn to do so, a path is opened to a broader strategy of force integratability.
The future is now; we don’t have time to what till the results are in for force structure redesign 2030, 2040 or 2050.
Post Views: 386
21. Journalist shot dead in Philippines, 21st killed since Duterte took office
An amazingly dangerous country for journalists.
Journalist shot dead in Philippines, 21st killed since Duterte took office
- Orlando Dinoy, a reporter for Newsline Philippines and anchor for Energy FM, was shot six times by a gunman who barged into his home on Mindanao island
- The Philippines is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, and most of their killers go unpunished
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE South China Morning Post1 min
Police officers are seen on patrol in the Philippines, which is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. Photo: EPA-EFE
A Philippine news reporter has died after being shot multiple times in his home, police said on Sunday, becoming the latest in a long line of journalists murdered in the country.
The archipelago nation is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, and most of their killers go unpunished.
Orlando Dinoy, a reporter for online outfit Newsline Philippines and anchor for Energy FM, was shot six times by a gunman who barged into his flat in Bansalan town, Mindanao island, local police chief Major Peter Glenn Ipong said.
Dinoy died immediately.
Officers were still investigating possible motives, the police force added.
“One of the angles we are looking at is his work as a media man … but no one can give us a concrete lead so far,” said Ipong.
Dinoy was the 21st journalist killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took power in 2016, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said.
National police chief General Guillermo Eleazar ordered a thorough investigation into the case, and vowed to protect the media from attacks.
In a report this month, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists listed the Philippines at seventh place in its Global Impunity Index, with 13 murders of journalists still unsolved.
The nation has been a mainstay in the annual index since it started in 2008.
22. Your Laptop Does More Than PowerPoint: Computational Thinking and Changing the Military’s Mindset
Excerpts:
Data-informed decision-making, or the ability to use data to generate insights, then act on those insights. This is as opposed to purely intuitive or experience-based reasoning.
Computers already help military personnel perform their jobs more effectively. Digital technology is becoming ever more powerful, and has the potential to change the way the military does its normal business, plans, and conducts operations, especially as the DoD integrates AI. But most servicemembers have only begun to scratch the surface of what the average laptop can do for them. Without better training, servicemembers will be left relying on the analog tools and processes they used in the 1980s while the rest of the world, including potential adversaries, continues to move into the machine age. No matter how powerful technology becomes, we cannot just build systems and applications and expect our warfighters to use them to their full potential. For that, they need to learn to think differently.
Your Laptop Does More Than PowerPoint: Computational Thinking and Changing the Military’s Mindset - Modern War Institute
Our nation has given soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines access to computers that can perform millions of operations per second and store more information than a human can read in a lifetime. Most use it to create PowerPoint presentations and send emails. The obvious mismatch between capability and application screams that something has gone wrong. Integrating advanced digital technology into warfare should be about more than designing and delivering new applications and hardware. While technology changes can drive changes in warfare, we cannot expect warfighters to change the way they fight without also changing the way they think. The cliché nature of this statement is belied by military planning and decision-making processes that have changed little in decades, do not take advantage of the power of the information processing capabilities available, and instead look like PowerPoint replications of pen and paper processes.
Computational thinking “is the thought processes involved in formulating problems and their solutions so that the solutions are represented in a form that can be effectively carried out by an information-processing agent.” Phrased differently, computational thinking involves breaking problems into their component pieces and identifying which can be optimized, automated, or scaled by a computer. If the military does not improve how it teaches computational thinking, warfighters will not be able to capitalize on the many advantages of machine speed and scale, or be able to build, interact with, and responsibly delegate authority and decision-making to digital systems. Using the lessons learned process as an example, here is the impact computational thinking can have on military operations, even without the addition of new technology.
The Traditional Approach: Lessons Learned Documents
Our fictitious unit is conducting a training event centered around how likely an electronic warfare (EW) system is to work in different circumstances. Because these training events take place infrequently, most of the personnel who participate will no longer be in the unit during the next iteration. Good units try to ensure they share the benefits of their training with those who follow them.
One way to share knowledge gained through training is to draft lessons learned documents. Well-disciplined military units collect and record lessons learned after training exercises and operations. Typically, units capture lessons during after action reviews and record them in slide decks and memos. Those documents are then shared internally, with neighboring units, or more broadly through institutions like the Center for Army Lessons Learned and databases like the Joint Lessons Learned Information System. Particularly key lessons are integrated into the unit’s standard operating procedure (SOP).
This collection and dissemination process is the approach most good units take, but it has to overcome several challenges to maximize effectiveness. Often, servicemembers are hard-pressed to find time to review lessons learned documents. Units preparing for a major training event typically have many administrative and staff requirements competing for limited time and personnel. Unfortunately, in the rush to complete these tasks, reviewing lessons learned documents often falls by the wayside. Even when lessons learned have been incorporated into SOPs, they are often removed when new chains of command review and update those instructions. Thus, lessons learned are easily forgotten. Finally, even when service members read and sufficiently understand lessons learned, they can easily consciously or unconsciously default back to their own experiences and biases.
Building Models
Organizations that prioritize computational thinking have alternative approaches that avoid many of the above challenges and tap into the advantages of machine speed and scale. Rather than drafting a lessons learned document, units could create models. The most basic version would be a series of If-Then statements in a program like Microsoft Excel. To determine the likelihood the EW system will work, service members would determine the variables that influence the EW system, their possible values, and their effects in order to create the If-Then statements.
As an example, the EW system may have four influential variables, each with three possible values, for a total of eighty-one different scenarios that must be analyzed. After establishing the variables, the soldiers would set an outcome for each of the scenarios in probabilistic terms. If filling in eighty-one scenarios seems excessive, keep in mind that this is the exact same volume of information that a thorough lessons learned document would need to address to maximize its effectiveness.
Once the model is complete, users would simply select values for each of the four variables, and the model would provide the probability that the EW system would produce the desired effect. It would be relatively simple to combine models for multiple systems to understand which would have the highest probability of producing a desired outcome in a given scenario.
Alternatively, units could also build much more powerful Bayesian models, still just using a spreadsheet. Bayesian models leverage prior knowledge and assumptions, then incorporate updates based on a stream of data points. In this case, the prior knowledge and assumptions would be experience-based knowledge about the probability of EW system effectiveness in various scenarios, much like the If-Then statements. The stream of data points would come from evaluations of the EW system’s effects after additional uses. This would enable the model to improve over time, becoming more effective as long as the effects of the scenario’s influential variables remain consistent.
Creating a model can be a much more effective way to share lessons learned than creating a memorandum or slide deck. While lessons learned documents take time to review and may not be understood even when read, servicemembers could use the model with very little time and effort by inputting key variables and reading the model’s output. This would also shorten decision-making timelines, especially in environments when commanders and staffs are suffering from information overload and fatigue. While servicemembers would still need to understand how the EW system works, a model would also reduce the amount of knowledge and experience needed to employ the EW system.
Data-informed models also benefit from a strong empirical basis. In the military, lessons learned documents tend to rely on intuitively derived lessons and are intended to help shape a reader’s intuition. While that works adequately in many cases, and is often the only way to function in an ambiguous and uncertain environment, it is incredibly susceptible to bias, including unconscious bias. While models will never fully escape their developers’ biases, a firm empirical grounding will improve the model’s accuracy as long as the servicemembers who develop and maintain the model are adequately trained.
A Bayesian model’s greatest advantage over a lessons learned document is that it can learn at machine speed and scale. Computers can perform millions of calculations per second and digest vast amounts of information. Limits arise from processing power, bandwidth, and access to data but not from the number of people involved. Organizations that identify choke points in their workflow and use machines to do that work can deliver value faster and at a much greater scale than those that remain bound by human limitations. Humans continue to contribute by guiding the machines and by performing the tasks machines cannot.
When units use lessons learned documents alone, the rate that units can learn is limited by human learning speed. First, the initial author must learn the right lessons from their experiences, incorporate that information into a lessons learned document, and share the document. A second human then needs to find, read, understand and apply those lessons for them to be truly learned. As a result, the entire organization can only learn at the speed that individuals can learn and share lessons, no matter how many people are involved.
In contrast, a Bayesian model can learn and improve its outputs as quickly as new data is added, slowed only by processor speed and bandwidth. Updates can come from an entire network. In this case, every service member using the EW system could use and update the same model, capturing the lessons of dozens or hundreds of users rather than just a handful in just one unit or formation. The more users in the model, the more and faster lessons are learned. As long as the model is regularly validated to prove accuracy and avoid optimizing to an implicit bias, the model will improve even faster when data collection and integration are automated.
Skills Needed
Switching from capturing lessons learned in PowerPoints to building models seems like a sharp departure from military’s way of doing business, but it is much more feasible than it might appear. Revising our way of processing information can be done by the current force with just a few additional skills. First, servicemembers need to understand the actual problem they are trying to build a model to address. It would be very easy to assume in the above scenario that the challenge is to write a better lessons learned document. That is ancillary to the real problem. In reality, the challenge is to share the benefits of a specific experience without requiring the experience and its associated cost in time and money.
Second, they would need enough of a basic understanding of models to know that a Bayesian model might solve their challenge more effectively than a lessons learned document. They would also need the ability to create such a model. This would not require a mastery of Bayesian inference or statistics—just fundamental skills in Microsoft Excel and access to tutorials on YouTube. They would also need to understand how to collect and enter data to update the model, how to interpret outputs stated in probabilistic terms, and when to trust their model. Models are not well-suited for every type of problem. Even when they are well-suited, servicemembers still need to think critically about the model’s output and to become comfortable with trusting the model.
It is worth noting that all of this can be done without any knowledge of computer languages or coding. Servicemembers still need to understand their EW system. Models can be helpful, and would somewhat deskill the decision-making process, but they are not a substitute for understanding how a system functions, its likely faults and failures, how it interacts with other weapon systems, and where its use fits into the larger operational plan. Using computational thinking, though, rapidly expands that knowledge base.
Moving Forward
Everything described up to this point is possible using simple, unsophisticated tools. Computational thinking will take on an entirely new level of importance as the military begins to integrate artificial intelligence into everyday operations. Unfortunately, leaders cannot just wish to improve their servicemembers’ computational thinking and make it so. To turn this aspiration into a reality, the military services need discrete topics they can train and teach.
-
Problem curation, or discovering the causal mechanisms that lead to problems and associated issues. Problem curation is important for understanding the root cause of an issue, and determining if a computer can help solve the problem.
-
The AI lifecycle, which is a framework that simplifies the complex process of developing and deploying an AI-enabled application. A better understanding of the AI lifecycle will encourage leaders to invest in the important but deeply unsexy work that must take place before applications are developed, and prevent leaders from trying to ‘sprinkle on some AI’ after a system is mature.
-
Data collection and management. The military’s data sets are often terrible, hamstringing efforts to develop AI-enabled systems. This is a problem everyone in the military contributes to and everyone will need to contribute to the solution. Much like equipment maintenance, marksmanship, and first aid, data collection and management need to become skills for every servicemember.
-
Probabilistic reasoning and data visualization. Many AI applications and models present their outputs in probabilistic terms. Servicemembers need to understand enough about probabilistic reasoning to understand their system’s output in a given situation. They also need to understand the limits of probabilistic reasoning as part of problem curation.
Data-informed decision-making, or the ability to use data to generate insights, then act on those insights. This is as opposed to purely intuitive or experience-based reasoning.
Computers already help military personnel perform their jobs more effectively. Digital technology is becoming ever more powerful, and has the potential to change the way the military does its normal business, plans, and conducts operations, especially as the DoD integrates AI. But most servicemembers have only begun to scratch the surface of what the average laptop can do for them. Without better training, servicemembers will be left relying on the analog tools and processes they used in the 1980s while the rest of the world, including potential adversaries, continues to move into the machine age. No matter how powerful technology becomes, we cannot just build systems and applications and expect our warfighters to use them to their full potential. For that, they need to learn to think differently.
Justin Lynch served as an Army officer and at the House Armed Service Committee, National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is a Nonresident Fellow at the Modern War Institute and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The views expressed in this article are his own and not necessarily those of his employer.
Alexander Mann is a graduate student at the University of Maryland and contributed to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s recommendations. Previously, Alex co-authored papers on defense industrial mobilization, AI chips, and the semiconductor supply chain. Prior to entering national security policy, Alex worked in consulting as an industrial engineer.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Sergeant First Class Brent Powell, US Army
23. Is U.S. Foreign Policy Too Hostile to China? Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts
A long list of China scholars and experts weigh in with many divergent opinions. Please go to the link to access each article and see the graphic distribution of opinions.
I would like to see an assessment of the opposite question: Is Chinese foreign policy too hostile to the US?
Is U.S. Foreign Policy Too Hostile to China?
Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts
October 19, 2021
Chinese President Xi Jinping in Athens, Greece, November 2019
Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters
We at Foreign Affairs have recently published a number of pieces on U.S. foreign policy toward China and whether it has become too hostile. To complement these articles, we decided to ask a broad pool of experts for their take. As with previous surveys, we approached dozens of authorities with specialized expertise relevant to the question at hand, together with leading generalists in the field. Participants were asked to state whether they agreed or disagreed with a proposition and to rate their confidence level in their opinion. Their answers are below.
- Aaron L. Friedberg
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Professor at Princeton University
- Albeit belatedly, in the last several years the United States has begun to respond more vigorously to China’s increasingly aggressive...
- Read More
- Alice Lyman Miller
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
- Washington should both compete and cooperate with China. To do that, it must first and foremost get its own house...
- Read More
- Andrea Kendall-Taylor
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security
- The concern is not that U.S. policy toward China has become too hostile but that Washington is overly focused on...
- Read More
- Andrew Nathan
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University
- The Biden administration’s China policy does not seek to stop the rise of China or overthrow the Chinese Communist Party...
- Read More
- Anne-Marie Brady
- STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Professor at the University of Canterbury
- The government of Xi Jinping changed Chinese-U.S. relations, not the U.S. government. The U.S. government, along with other governments, needs...
- Read More
- Audrye Wong
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California
- Avery Goldstein
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Professor at the University of Pennsylvania
- Now that both China and the United States are focused on the challenges they present to one another, posturing is...
- Read More
- Aynne Kokas
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Faculty Senior Fellow at the Miller Center and Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia
- U.S. foreign policy with regard to China needs greater nuance in areas of potential engagement. China is a strategic competitor,...
- Read More
- Bilahari Kausikan
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Chair of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore
- Bonnie Glaser
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund
- Protecting U.S. national interests requires a tougher set of policies toward China, but these need to be integrated into a...
- Read More
- Bonny Lin
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
- There are significant differences between the United States and China, but these differences should not overshadow and eliminate the potential...
- Read More
- Cecilia Han Springer
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Senior Researcher with the Global China Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center
- Given the global climate challenge, there is simply no time for increased hostility between the United States and China. Both...
- Read More
- Champa Patel
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Director of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House
- Cheng Li
- STRONGLY AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Director and Senior Fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution
- Beijing believes that the United States ended the war in Afghanistan in order to prepare for war with China, along...
- Read More
- Dan Nexon
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
- Professor in the School of Foreign Service and Department of Government at Georgetown University
- U.S. rhetoric toward China is probably unnecessarily hostile. It doesn’t advance any concrete foreign policy goals, and the xenophobia apparent...
- Read More
- Dan Wang
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Technology Analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics
- The “whole-of-government” approach taken by the Trump administration demanded every department to identify ways to challenge China. Resulting efforts such...
- Read More
- Dexter Tiff Roberts
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Asia Security Initiative
- The United States has belatedly come to recognize China’s deep and disruptive ambitions in geopolitics, the military, and the economy...
- Read More
- Diana Fu
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
- 19. Diana Fu Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution
- U.S. foreign policy aggression has been matched by Beijing aggression. Both sides have become too aggressive toward one another, and...
- Read More
- Emma Ashford
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
- Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council
- Over the last few years, U.S. foreign policy toward China has become reflexively hostile in a number of areas, from...
- Read More
- Eric Heginbotham
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies
- Although the U.S.-Chinese relationship has inherently competitive elements, there are also areas where the two countries can and should cooperate....
- Read More
- Evan Medeiros
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Professor at Georgetown University
- China is a powerful, indignant, and insular rising power that requires the deft use of competitive strategies by the United...
- Read More
- Ho-fung Hung
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University
- The United States’ increasingly assertive posture toward China, from Obama’s pivot to Asia to Trump’s trade war and so on,...
- Read More
- J. Stapleton Roy
- STRONGLY AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center
- China is throwing its weight around in ways that require an appropriate U.S. response. This increases the desire of Asian...
- Read More
- Jeffrey Bader
- STRONGLY AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
- China is difficult, evolving negatively in some respects, but treating it as an all-purpose adversary is profoundly contrary to U.S....
- Read More
- Joseph Nye
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School
- About right....
- John Mearsheimer
- STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Professor at the University of Chicago
- China is bent on establishing hegemony in Asia, which makes eminently good sense from Beijing’s perspective. In effect, China is...
- Read More
- Jude Blanchette
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
- Hostility is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But I see no action that the Biden administration has...
- Read More
- Kelly Hammond
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas
- Kharis Templeman
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution
- U.S. policy toward China is belatedly catching up to the significant changes WITHIN China over the last decade. It is...
- Read More
- Kiron Skinner
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
- Kurt Tong
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Partner at the Asia Group
- The United States needs to do a better job collectively, both the executive branch and Congress, at prioritizing objectives and...
- Read More
- Manjari Chatterjee-Miller
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
- Since the deterioration of the U.S.-Chinese relationship, the United States and China have been strategizing past each other. The United...
- Read More
- Mary Gallagher
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Professor at the University of Michigan
- Under the last administration, U.S. policy toward China was badly mismanaged, but the overall direction of a more “hostile” policy...
- Read More
- Matt Duss
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Foreign Policy Adviser for Senator Bernie Sanders
- Matt Pottinger
- STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Chair of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
- See “Beijing’s American Hustle” (September/October 2021).
- ...
- Melissa M. Lee
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University
- China has risen. Full stop. U.S. foreign policy must accept that reality. Chinese-U.S. cooperation will be essential for tackling global...
- Read More
- Michael Beckley
- STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
- The United States will eventually need to reengage with China. But right now the priority is to blunt a surge...
- Read More
- Michael D. Swaine
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
- The United States conflates its moral opprobrium toward Beijing’s repressive domestic policies with the pragmatic calculation of its national interest....
- Read More
- Michael Fullilove
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Executive Director of the Lowy Institute
- The main reason that U.S. policy toward China has changed is that China has changed. Beijing has become more aggressive...
- Read More
- Michael Singh
- STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Managing Director of the Washington Institute
- U.S. foreign policy is not hostile to China; rather, the United States is (belatedly, some would argue) taking seriously China’s...
- Read More
- Michelle Murray
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Associate Professor of Politics and Faculty Director of the MA Program in Global Studies at Bard College
- The brewing antagonism between the United States and China is not an inevitability. Rather, it is the product of decades...
- Read More
- Mike Mazarr
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation
- The issue here is what “foreign policy” we’re talking about. To begin with, it is mostly China that is fueling...
- Read More
- Minxin Pei
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Professor at Claremont McKenna College
- Nora Bensahel
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Visiting Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
- Oriana Skylar Mastro
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Center Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
- While it is true that the United States has decided to push back against some nefarious Chinese activities, the U.S....
- Read More
- Orville Schell
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 2
- Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society
- We need to stand up to China in a bipartisan way while keeping the door open to work on areas...
- Read More
- Patricia M. Kim
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution
- The Biden administration has framed the right approach toward China—declaring that Washington will seek to simultaneously compete and cooperate with...
- Read More
- Paula Dobriansky
- STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Senior Fellow at Harvard University
- We are in a geopolitical environment of expanding competition among great powers. China poses significant challenges to the United States....
- Read More
- Richard Fontaine
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- CEO of the Center for a New American Security
- Beijing has earned its reputation as the United States’ foremost foreign policy challenge, and a firm set of responses is...
- Read More
- Richard McGregor
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute
- The United States needed to strengthen its policy—in a sense, to overcorrect—to get seriously back in the game of strategic...
- Read More
- Robert C. O’Brien
- STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Chair of American Global Strategies
- Returning reciprocity to the U.S.-Chinese relationship must be a priority. Ending China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property and technology must...
- Read More
- Robert Jervis
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University
- We are exaggerating both China’s strength and its ambitions—as least for the near future....
- Robert Keohane
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 3
- Professor Emeritus at Princeton University
- Xi’s policies require pushback, so current policy is appropriate. But we should keep the rhetoric down. Our interests require that...
- Read More
- Ryan Hass
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
- Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
- The crux of strategy is to advance interests, uphold values, and strengthen cohesion with allies and partners. One hopes that...
- Read More
- Scott Kennedy
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Senior Adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
- The limited communication with China, exacerbated by the obstacles to travel for government officials, business leaders, and others, has pushed...
- Read More
- Shelley Rigger
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Professor of Political Science at Davidson College
- Shivshankar Menon
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Chair of the Centre for China Studies at Ashoka University
- Finding the “Goldilocks zone” for U.S. China policy will always be complicated by the fact that China, too, has a...
- Read More
- Stacie Goddard
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College
- I do not think that the United States’ “policy” has become too hostile. AUKUS, the Australia-United Kingdom-United States defense agreement,...
- Read More
- Stephen Orlins
- STRONGLY AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- President of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations
- Great that you are asking this question to see where senior people are on this issue. Even more than usual...
- Read More
- Stephen Walt
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8
- Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School
- Although U.S. policy toward China has toughened in recent years, it is a sensible response given China’s growing power and...
- Read More
- Stephen Wertheim
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 6
- Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- U.S. policy has needed to adjust to China’s coercive actions and rising power, but in recent years, American leaders have...
- Read More
- Sulmaan Khan
- STRONGLY AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Denison Chair in International History at the Fletcher School at Tufts University
- To be clear, I do think that Chinese policy is needlessly hostile, too—not just toward the United States but toward...
- Read More
- Tanisha M. Fazal
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 7
- Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota
- On democracy and human rights, the United States and China have a lot to disagree about. But they also need...
- Read More
- Victoria Hui
- STRONGLY DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame
- Vijay Gokhale
- DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Nonresident Senior Fellow at Carnegie India
- For at least the past 15 years, the Chinese have worked in the Indo-Pacific to diminish the United States’ role...
- Read More
- Wang Jisi
- NEUTRAL, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 5
- President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University
- Given the increased incompatibility of interests and values of the United States and China, a more hostile U.S. policy toward...
- Read More
- Yanzhong Huang
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9
- Professor at the Seton Hall University School of Diplomacy and International Relations
- President Joe Biden’s China policy is fundamentally no different from President Donald Trump’s. Although China’s internal repression and external aggression...
- Read More
- Yuen Yuen Ang
- AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 10
- Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan
- The issue is less about hostility than about whether U.S. foreign policy is based on a balanced, grounded understanding of...
- Read More
24. FDD | Russian Hackers Continue Targeting the Software Supply Chain
Excerpts:
Changes to public and private cybersecurity policies could help make IT networks harder targets. Congress should establish a cloud security certification, which would institute cybersecurity standards for MSPs that provide cloud-based services to other companies. A certification process requiring even basic cyber hygiene best practices likely would have thwarted Nobelium’s password spraying and phishing attempts.
Nobelium’s continued targeting of MSPs should be a wakeup call to Washington and to MSP operators. The public and private sectors must do everything in their power to ensure that these high-value targets are secure.
FDD | Russian Hackers Continue Targeting the Software Supply Chain
fdd.org · by Trevor Logan Research Analyst · October 29, 2021
The Russian state-sponsored hacker group responsible for last year’s massive SolarWinds breach has continued targeting managed service providers (MSPs) in an effort to piggyback into other victim networks, according to a new threat report from Microsoft published on Sunday. The report indicates that Russia’s cyber operators remain undeterred and that cybersecurity at some MSPs is woefully inadequate.
Microsoft’s report details how a hacker group it calls “Nobelium,” which the U.S. government has linked to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, has been targeting companies “integral to the global IT supply chain.” Moscow is “trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling – now or in the future – targets of interest to the Russian government,” Microsoft concluded.
Since May, Microsoft has notified over 140 MSPs that they have been targeted by Nobelium, which Microsoft believes has managed to penetrate as many as 14 MSPs to date. MSPs provide cloud and other IT services to companies and often have ongoing access to client networks. MSPs are therefore high-value targets, as breaching one MSP can provide access to hundreds if not thousands of other networks. When Nobelium breached the software company SolarWinds, for example, the hackers leveraged that access to compromise as many as 18,000 companies and at least nine U.S. government agencies.
After the SolarWinds breach, the Biden administration’s federal budget proposal included $750 million to “respond to lessons learned from the SolarWinds incident.” The administration also tightened U.S. sanctions against Russian sovereign debt and designated six Russian technology companies for supporting “the Russian Intelligence Services’ cyber program.” President Joe Biden has repeatedly warned his Russian counterpart that the United States will respond “firmly” to defend its national interests in cyberspace.
As Nobelium’s latest hack demonstrates, however, Moscow appears to have concluded that penetrating the technology supply chain is too lucrative to stop, barring a much more significant response from the Biden administration. While the Biden team should explore additional cost-imposition tools to punish Moscow, deterrence through denial is more likely to stem Russia’s cyber-espionage efforts. This requires hardening U.S. networks against infiltration.
Therefore, it is most troubling that some MSPs instead appear to be giving the Russians an easy target. In its latest campaign, Nobelium reportedly used relatively unsophisticated techniques, such as password spraying and phishing, to access MSP networks. Those techniques echo last year’s SolarWinds hack, in which Nobelium used an easy-to-guess password (“solarwinds123”) to gain initial access to the software company’s network, then used SolarWinds’ own software patches to push malware to its clients.
MSPs are guardians of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their clients’ data. The fact that some MSPs apparently do not employ complex passwords and multi-factor authentication, which are basic cyber hygiene practices, is inexcusable.
Changes to public and private cybersecurity policies could help make IT networks harder targets. Congress should establish a cloud security certification, which would institute cybersecurity standards for MSPs that provide cloud-based services to other companies. A certification process requiring even basic cyber hygiene best practices likely would have thwarted Nobelium’s password spraying and phishing attempts.
Nobelium’s continued targeting of MSPs should be a wakeup call to Washington and to MSP operators. The public and private sectors must do everything in their power to ensure that these high-value targets are secure.
Trevor Logan is a cyber research analyst at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Trevor and CCTI, please subscribe HERE. Follow Trevor on Twitter @TrevorLoganFDD. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Trevor Logan Research Analyst · October 29, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
