Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Most people don't want to be part of the process, they just want to be part of the outcome. The process is where you figure out who's worth being part of the outcome."

– Alex Morton

"The simple step of the courageous individual is not to take part in the lie."

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't know that it doesn't know."

– Noam Chomsky

1. Trump Draft Executive Order Would Create Board to Purge Generals

2. The Marshall Reorganization and the plucking board or committee

3. Trump Names Fox News Host Pete Hegseth to Head Pentagon, John Ratcliffe to Lead CIA

4. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to lead Trump's Department of Government Efficiency

5. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 12, 2024

6. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 12, 2024

7. Loyalty Is Common Thread as Trump Fills Foreign Policy, Immigration Jobs

8. Here are the people Trump has picked for key positions so far

9. Trump Is Recruiting a Team of China Hawks. So Why Is Beijing Relieved?

10. Let’s Make a Deep State Peace Deal

11. Lawmakers want VA to better secure records after campaign violations

12. Jury Awards Abu Ghraib Detainees $42 Million, Holds Contractor Responsible

13. Who Is Michael Waltz, Trump’s Pick to Be National Security Adviser?

14. Pacific partnerships are key to preventing war, Army leaders say

15. Japanese Minesweeper Sinks in Port, Sailor Missing; Advanced Russian Attack Sub Spotted Near Japan

16. New Philippine Laws Define Maritime Zones in the South China Sea

17. Chronic Brain Trauma Is Extensive in Navy’s Elite Speedboat Crews

18. Philippine Defense Secretary Doesn't Expect Trump Will Demand Payment for Protection

19. Trump Had It Easy the First Time

20. I Blame the Navy’s Strategic Woes on the Chiefs of Naval Operations

21. Man Charged in Leak of Classified Documents About Israeli Military Plans

22. The Axis of Resilience: Israel Is Underestimating Iran and Its Allies

23. Trump Must Not Betray "America First"

24. Discovery of over 2,000,000,000 tons of rare Earth mineral found in US could make country the new 'world leader'

25. Why We Need to Talk about WMD

26. Trump Might Not Lead a U.S. Retreat from the World Stage After All

1. Trump Draft Executive Order Would Create Board to Purge Generals

Trump Draft Executive Order Would Create Board to Purge Generals

Panel could upend military review process and raise concerns about politicization of military

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trump-draft-executive-order-would-create-board-to-purge-generals-7ebaa606?st=SHi5FJ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Vivian Salama

Follow, Nancy A. Youssef

Follow and Lara Seligman

Nov. 12, 2024 3:33 pm ET

One feared potential target of Donald Trump’s threatened purge could be Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma Press

WASHINGTON—The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.

If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.

As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to purge a number of generals and admirals.

The draft order says it aims to establish a review that focuses “on leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence.” The draft doesn’t specify what officers need to do or present to show if they meet those standards. The draft order originated with one of several outside policy groups collaborating with the transition team, and is one of numerous executive orders under review by Trump’s team, a transition official said.

The warrior board would be made up of retired generals and noncommissioned officers, who would send their recommendations to the president. Those identified for removal would be retired at their current rank within 30 days.

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump-Vance Transition spokeswoman, declined to comment on this draft executive order, but said “the American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”

The establishment of the board would be in line with Trump’s calls for purging what he views as failed generals, including those involved in the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to people familiar with the policy discussions. Trump has said he would ask all generals involved in the withdrawal to resign by “noon on Inauguration Day.”

The president-elect previewed the move during a campaign event in October, telling an audience that he would create a task force to monitor the “woke generals” and get rid of diversity training in the military.

“They’re gone,” Trump said of those generals, without naming specific officers.

One feared potential target of Trump’s threatened purge could be Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to two defense officials. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, Brown spoke about the impact that movement had on him and what it was like to rise through the military ranks as a Black fighter pilot.

The executive order, which has been reviewed by the president-elect’s transition team, may be presented to Trump when he takes office, and its implementation depends on whether he chooses to sign it in its current form, according to a person familiar with its drafting.

Hundreds of people gathered near a U.S. Air Force transport plane in Kabul in August 2021. Photo: Shekib Rahmani/AP

Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, which is pending, would be key in implementing the findings of the warrior board’s review. It isn’t clear who is on the shortlist to be Pentagon chief, after the top three contenders—Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.)—either dropped out, were ruled out or were given another job in the administration.

The Trump team wants to do major reforms at the Defense Department, particularly around the size of the joint staff, according to a person with knowledge of the transition.

“It’s gotten way too big,” this person said. “Trump also expects that many of the generals, the three- and four-star generals that have been underperforming will basically be retired.”

The draft executive order cites as precedent for the move Gen. George C. Marshall’s creation of a “plucking board” in 1940, led by retired general officers, to review the files of senior serving military officers and “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” The goal of Marshall’s board was to make room to promote promising junior officers.

But some former officials believe the incoming Trump administration is looking to politicize the military.

“Do they start wearing MAGA hats in formation to signal who’s where?” asked one former senior Pentagon official. “The potential for this to go wrong is infinite.”

The president has the power to fire generals but rarely does so for political reasons. President Harry Truman fired Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur for publicly challenging the administration’s Asia security strategy. President Barack Obama fired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal as his Afghanistan commander after the military leader’s subordinates were quoted as criticizing the administration in a magazine article.

U.S. troops take an oath of office to the Constitution and vow to not follow any illegal order, and Congress must approve the promotion of general officers.

But establishing a board separate from the current process, which uses serving officers, could undermine the idea that generals refrain from sharing their political views within the Pentagon. It could also potentially prompt officers not to speak out against orders they believe are illegal, says Eric Carpenter, professor of military law at Florida International University College of Law.

“This looks like an administration getting ready to purge anyone who will not be a yes man,” said Carpenter, a former Army lawyer. “If you are looking to fire officers who might say no because of the law or their ethics, you set up a system with completely arbitrary standards, so you can fire anyone you want.”

In the early days of his presidency, Trump openly expressed admiration for military generals and promoted a number of them to his administration. Ret. Marine Gen. Jim Mattis served as his first defense secretary. Ret. Marine Gen. John Kelly was his chief of staff and Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster served as national security adviser.

But relations between Trump and the generals quickly soured. By the end of his term, all three of those officers publicly criticized him and described him as a threat to national security.

The president-elect also had a particularly fraught relationship with Ret. Army Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump nominated to serve as his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the final two years of his first administration. Milley told journalist Bob Woodward in his latest book that Trump is “a total fascist.”

Trump has called Milley a “loser.”

Write to Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com, Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com

2. The Marshall Reorganization and the plucking board or committee

A friend flagged this for me from US Army History.

Given the draft executive order to purge general officers this history may be instructive, and in particular this excerpt.

Excerpt:

The success of any large organization depends upon the ability of its leaders to select competent subordinates, not merely yes-men. In large-scale organizations governed by formal promotion systems, this approach is not always possible, and the War Department contained its share of bureaucratic incompetents. Assistant Secretary Lovett recalled there was so much "deadwood" in the department that it was "a positive fire hazard." In reorganizing the department General Marshall could select the men he wanted as his assistants, as had Secretary Stimson earlier. General McNarney became the sole Deputy Chief of Staff and acted as Marshall's general manager in running the department until McNarney went overseas in October 1944. McNarney, McNair, Arnold, Somervell, and the principal staff officers of WPD-OPD were Marshall's men, and upon them he relied heavily in the development and co-ordination of military strategy. His reputation as the Army's greatest Chief of Staff depended in no small measure upon his exceptional judgment of men.37

In summary the main purpose of the Marshall reorganization was to provide effective executive control over the War Department and the Army. The rationalization of the department's structure in substituting the vertical pattern of military command for the traditional horizontal pattern of co-ordination paralleled similar developments among leading industrial organizations. However disgruntled those personalities and agencies displaced by the new dispensation, the officials most. directly responsible for the management of the Army as a whole testified to its effectiveness. The complaints came mostly from those responsible for only one aspect of the war and who resented the restrictions placed on their traditional freedom of action and autonomy. 38

The history does not mention the plucking board specifically so here is an excerpt from another article that describes it.

Gen. George C. Marshall Eliminates the “Dead Wood”

The Army Chief of Staff and His “Plucking Committee”

When President Franklin Roosevelt chose Marshall as Army Chief of Staff, he bypassed thirty-three more senior generals. Most importantly, he had rejected Marshall’s major competition for the post, Maj. Gen. Hugh Drum, who had reached that rank in 1930, held almost every top position in the Army below Chief of Staff, and in fact had been regularly recommended for that position since 1930. To those officers content with the existing system, there was no clearer signal that times had changed.

A legend arose during World War II that Marshall kept a “little black book” that had the names of junior officers he had encountered over the years who had impressed him. While it’s been argued that the physical black book itself didn’t exist, what is inarguable is the fact that Marshall did keep tabs on promising junior officers. Many of those, such as Eisenhower, Bradley, Ridgeway, and others, went on to become successful commanders during the war. Marshall’s opportunity to act decisively on the dead wood officer problem occurred when the Second Supplemental Appropriation Act of 1940 was passed. Included in its provisions was the elimination of the seniority-only criteria for promotions. Now vested with the authority to promote deserving junior officers, Marshall acted swiftly to clear the logjam.

He established what was called the “plucking board” or “plucking committee.” It was composed of six retired officers headed by his immediate predecessor and former boss, Gen. Malin Craig. Its task was to review the efficiency ratings of the older officers – particularly colonels in their sixties and near retirement who could not withstand the rigors of combat command – and weed out the worst to make room for younger, more fit officers. In his instructions to the review board he told them to ignore past, peacetime records, as they were irrelevant when it came to the demands of leadership in combat. “Critical times are upon us,” he warned. Only “today’s performance” mattered. In the first six months of its existence the panel removed 195 captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. Ultimately 500 colonels were forced into retirement. One who was not was Col. George Patton. Even though his age, 54, placed him in the at-risk for retirement category, Patton had the energy and drive of a much younger man – he survived the plucking committee’s review.

On April 22, 1941, Marshall testified about the progress of his rapid mobilization program of the Army before the Truman Committee, a senate committee responsible for oversight of military expenditures. He made a point of highlighting the success of the new policy of selective promotion based on merit. Marshall said, “If leadership depends purely on seniority you are defeated before you start. You give a good leader very little and he will succeed; you give mediocrity a great deal and they will fail. This is illustrated everywhere I turn. These rapid tours I make around the country disclose that as the most impressive thing. You see the effect of leadership in handling the flu, in the construction of a cantonment, in doing anything.”

https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/gen-george-c-marshall-eliminates-dead-wood/

Chapter II:

The Marshall Reorganization

https://www.history.army.mil/books/root/chapter2.htm

When General George C. Marshall became Chief of Staff in 1939, he inherited not only the staff structure sketched in the previous chapter, but also a set of planning assumptions on the nature of the next war laid down in the Harbord Board report. The basic assumption was that any new war would be similar to World War I and would require similar command and management methods. In fact the circumstances of World War II would differ radically from those of World War I, and this difference made the Harbord Board doctrine and the planning based upon it almost irrelevant from the start. In the prewar period, 1939-41, the War Department struggled along trying to adapt the Harbord concepts to the new situation, revising them piecemeal in response to the immediate needs of the moment. When war came General Marshall determined to sweep the entire structure aside and develop a new and radically changed organization adapted to the circumstances of World War II.

The Harbord Board had assumed that the next war would involve a single theater of operations, that the Chief of Staff would take the field as commanding general with the nucleus of his GHQ taken from the War Plans Division, and that military planning in GHQ would be primarily on tactics for a one-front war. It took into consideration neither the new importance of air power and armor, nor the necessity for genuinely joint operations with the Navy or combined operations with the Allies. The board also assumed there would be a single M-day (mobilization day) on which the United States would change overnight from peace to war as in April 1917, a concept which dominated mobilization planning between the two wars. Instead the nation gradually drifted from neutrality to active belligerency between September 1939 and December

[57]

1941, and the war developed as a global affair on many fronts involving combined ground, air, and naval forces. A complicated series of combined arrangements with the British evolved, and the Army found itself, from 1939 onward, caught up in vital questions of global political and military strategy for which it was not thoroughly prepared.1

Probably the most important assumption of the Harbord Board was one never stated, but clearly implied: that the President and Secretary of War would follow the practice of Woodrow Wilson and Newton D. Baker in delegating broad authority for the conduct of the war to professional military officers. This was a questionable assumption since President Wilson was the only President in American history who did not play an active role as Commander in Chief in wartime. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to exercise an independent role in determining political and military strategy was more consistent with the traditional concept of the President as Commander in Chief developed by George Washington, James Madison, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley. Even if Roosevelt had not deliberately chosen to play an active role, the vital political issues raised by World War II would have forced him to do so. Every major decision on military strategy was almost always a political decision as well and vice versa. There was, consequently, no clear distinction between political and military considerations during World War II, although many, including the President himself at times, imagined there was one.

The chapter continues at this link:https://www.history.army.mil/books/root/chapter2.htm

3.Trump Names Fox News Host Pete Hegseth to Head Pentagon, John Ratcliffe to Lead CIA

STATEMENT FROM PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

I am honored to announce that I have nominated Pete Hegseth to serve in my Cabinet as The Secretary of Defense. Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country. Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First. With Pete at the helm, America's enemies are on notice - Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down. Pete is a graduate of Princeton University, and has a Graduate Degree from Harvard University. He is an Army Combat Veteran who did tours in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For his actions on the battlefield, he was decorated with two Bronze Stars, as well as a Combat Infantryman's Badge. Pete has been a host at FOX News for eight years, where he used that platform to fight for our Military and Veterans. Pete's recent book, "The War on Warriors," spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list, including two weeks at NUMBER ONE. The book reveals the leftwing betrayal of our Warriors, and how we must return our Military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence. Pete has also led two Veterans Advocacy organizations, leading the fight for our Warriors, and our great Veterans. Nobody fights harder for the Troops, and Pete will be a courageous and patriotic champion of our "Peace through Strength" policy.

Trump Names Fox News Host Pete Hegseth to Head Pentagon, John Ratcliffe to Lead CIA

The unconventional choices places loyalists in top national security positions

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-names-fox-news-host-pete-hegseth-to-head-pentagon-john-ratcliffe-to-lead-cia-f5711d3e?mod=latest_headlines

By Alexander Ward

Follow and Vivian Salama

Nov. 12, 2024 8:12 pm ET

John Ratcliffe at a White House ceremony in 2020. Photo: Doug Mills/Bloomberg News

President-elect Donald Trump has named Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran and Fox News host, as his choice for secretary of defense and John Ratcliffe, a hawkish former House lawmaker, to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, continuing his trend of placing loyalists in key positions.

The selection of defense secretary also continues Trump’s practice of turning away from civilians with high level national security experience to run the Pentagon or to retired officers, which he tried early in his first term when he chose retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis to run the department.

“Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country. Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said in a statement confirming his selection. In a separate statement, Trump called Ratcliffe a “warrior for Truth and Honesty” and credited him for exposing what Trump called “fake Russian collusion” accusations against his 2016 campaign.

Pete Hegseth Photo: Michael Brochstein/Zuma Press

If confirmed by the Senate, Hegseth would take over the federal government’s biggest department with a budget that last year reached $850 billion, overseeing a workforce of nearly 3 million civilian workers and military service members, many deployed around the world. He has never held a senior government post, an issue likely to be raised at least by Democrats ahead of a vote on his nomination.

Hegseth, 44, is a National Guard veteran from Minnesota who has been a commentator on Fox News for the last decade. He once led an advocacy group that sought to privatize healthcare provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs, leading Trump to consider him as VA secretary during his first term.

Nancy A. Youssef and Lara Seligman contributed to this article.

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com and Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com

4. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to lead Trump's Department of Government Efficiency

Another bureaucracy to manage or dismantle the bureaucracy? (apologies for the sarcasm)

Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to lead Trump's Department of Government Efficiency

foxnews.com · by Sarah Rumpf-Whitten Fox News

Video

Trump names Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary

Fox News host Laura Ingraham has the latest on the administration news on 'The Ingraham Angle.

President-elect Trump announced that billionaire Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump said that the pair will work together to "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies."

Republican presidential candidate businessman Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at a caucus site at Horizon Events Center, in Clive, Iowa, Jan. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Elon Musk attends The 2022 Met Gala Celebrating "In America: An Anthology of Fashion" in New York City. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)

"It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time," the announcement on Tuesday evening said. "Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time."

The president-elect said that Musk and Ramaswamy will provide "advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before."

Sarah Rumpf-Whitten is a breaking news writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business.

Story tips and ideas can be sent to sarah.rumpf@fox.com and on X: @s_rumpfwhitten.

foxnews.com · by Sarah Rumpf-Whitten Fox News

5. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 12, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 12, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-12-2024

Russian forces recently advanced during two company-sized mechanized assaults within and south of Kurakhove in western Donetsk Oblast. Geolocated footage published on November 12 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced along Zaporizkyi Street in northeastern Kurakhove during a company-sized mechanized assault. The Ukrainian brigade that defended against the mechanized assault reported that Russian forces attacked with 12 armored vehicles and that Ukrainian artillery and drones destroyed three tanks and six infantry fighting vehicles. The Ukrainian brigade reported that three groups of Russian infantry also unsuccessfully attempted to cross the Vovcha River north of Kurakhove at the same time as the mechanized assault. Additional geolocated footage published on November 11 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced in northern Dalne (south of Kurakhove) during a reduced company-sized mechanized assault consisting of at least nine armored vehicles, and Russian forces' recent advances northeast of Dalne and in the fields east and southeast of the settlement are likely a result of the same reduced company-sized mechanized assault. The Ukrainian brigade that repelled the Dalne mechanized assault reported that Ukrainian artillery and tanks destroyed two Russian tanks and six armored vehicles. Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated on November 12 that forward units of the Russian 20th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) participated in the Russian advance into Dalne. The spokesperson of another Ukrainian brigade operating in the Kurakhove direction reported on November 12 that Russian forces are conducting mechanized assaults of an unspecified echelon near Katerynivka and Antonivka (both northeast of Vuhledar and south of Kurakhove along the C051104 highway) in order to level the frontline in western Donetsk Oblast. Russian advances near Dalne are likely aimed at bypassing the string of settlements north of Vuhledar along the C05114 highway that could have posed a notable challenge to advancing Russian forces. ISW continues to assess that further Russian advances into Dalne and west of the settlement could force Ukrainian forces to withdraw from positions in the pocket north and northeast of Vuhledar, allowing Russian forces to advance along the C051104 highway relatively uncontested and further pressure Ukrainian positions in Kurakhove from the south.

Key Takeaways:

Russian forces recently advanced during two company-sized mechanized assaults within and south of Kurakhove in western Donetsk Oblast.

Geolocated footage confirms reports that an explosion damaged the Ternivska Dam at the Kurakhivske Reservoir on November 11.

Recent Western and Ukrainian estimates about the size of the Russian force grouping in Kursk Oblast do not represent a significant inflection, as Russian forces have spent several months gathering forces for a future counteroffensive effort to expel Ukrainian forces from Russian territory.

Ukrainian military officials warned that Russian forces may intensify assaults in Zaporizhia Oblast in the near future.

Select Russian defense officials appear to be contradicting Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent assertion that Russia is not interested in forming a unified security bloc against the West.

Russian forces recently advanced near Toretsk and Kurakhove and in Kursk Oblast.

The Russian military reportedly continues to coerce conscripts into signing Russian military service contracts, likely as part of ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts.

6. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 12, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 12, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-november-12-2024

Newly-appointed Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reaffirmed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will continue its operation in Lebanon until it accomplishes its mission. Katz made these comments during a meeting with the IDF General Staff. Katz replaced Yoav Gallant as defense minister on November 8 and was formerly foreign minister. Katz affirmed that Israel would “continue to hit Hezbollah with full force” to capitalize on past successes like the killing of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and “realize the fruits of victory.” He stressed that Israel would not agree to any ceasefire agreement that does not “guarantee Israel’s right to enforce and prevent terrorism on its own,” in addition to other war aims of disarming Hezbollah, forcing a Hezbollah withdrawal north of the Litani River, and returning northern Israeli residents safely home. Katz’s vision is largely consistent with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said that Israel needs to push Hezbollah north of the Litani River “with or without an agreement” and that any agreement must include measures to prevent Hezbollah’s reorganization and rearmament.

Two US officials reported on November 12 that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States would not alter its assistance to Israel after Israel took “important steps” to address the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. This decision follows Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Loyd Austin warning senior Israeli officials on October 13 that the US would withhold military assistance to Israel, among additional unspecified steps, if aid was not delivered to non-combatants in the Gaza Strip. Blinken met with Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer on November 11 to discuss the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli security cabinet approved a series of humanitarian measures for the Gaza Strip on November 11, including increasing the number of aid trucks entering Gaza. The IDF re-opened the Kissufim border crossing near Khan Younis for aid delivery on November 12.

US President-elect Donald Trump selected former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as the new US Ambassador to Israel. Trump said that Huckabee will work to “bring about peace in the Middle East.” Western media has noted Huckabee’s long-standing support for Israel, including for Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

A likely Hezbollah drone struck a kindergarten in the Haifa suburb of Nesher on November 12. The drone struck outside the kindergarten while the children were in a bomb shelter and did not cause casualties. Israeli journalists reported that the IDF alert system did not sound in Nesher but did activate in neighboring areas. Hezbollah did not claim a drone attack at the same time or area as the strike, nor did it explicitly acknowledge the strike. Hezbollah similarly did not claim its rocket attack that struck a soccer field of Druze children in Majdal al Shams on July 27. It is more likely that Hezbollah’s Majdal al Shams strike was unintentional and caused by technical failures inherent to rockets. One-way-attack drones, however, are much more accurate than rockets. Drones can still suffer failures and miss their intended targets as a result of electronic warfare or a partial interception. Hezbollah’s decision in early 2024 to transition from less-sophisticated rocket and anti-tank guided missile systems to more advanced and deadly rockets, one-way attack drones, and anti-tank guided missile systems increased the risk that a Hezbollah attack would cause significant Israeli casualties, either intentionally or due to a miscalculation.

Key Takeaways:

Israeli War Aims in Lebanon: Newly-appointed Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reaffirmed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will continue its operation in Lebanon until it accomplishes its mission. Katz said that Israel would not agree to any ceasefire agreement that does not “guarantee Israel’s right to enforce and prevent terrorism on its own.” Israel’s currently limited operation in frontline border towns of southern Lebanon will not alone accomplish Katz’s vision.

Iran-Russia Relations: Iran and Russia have taken the first steps to create a banking network that circumvents international sanctions. The creation of this network and its emphasis on reducing dependence on the US dollar is part of a broader Iranian effort to mitigate sanctions and bolster the Iranian economy by building relations with regional and international states.

Iran and Russia in the Caucasus: Growing Russo-Iranian tensions in the Caucasus represent fissures in the bilateral relationship, but both states will likely attempt to prevent the Caucasus issue from derailing wider Iranian or Russian policy objectives. The disagreements between the two countries over the Caucasus is unlikely to derail broader Iranian and Russian efforts to deepen bilateral ties. Iran would certainly prioritize sanctions mitigation through a stronger Russo-Iranian relationship over secondary policy objectives like the Zangezur Corridor. Iran views sanctions mitigation as a way to enhance regime security by improving its economy.

Hezbollah Attack Campaign in Israel: A likely Hezbollah drone struck a kindergarten in the Haifa suburb of Nesher on November 12. The drone struck outside the kindergarten while the children were in a bomb shelter and did not cause casualties. One-way-attack drones are much more accurate than rockets. Drones can still suffer failures and miss their intended targets as a result of electronic warfare or a partial interception.

7. Loyalty Is Common Thread as Trump Fills Foreign Policy, Immigration Jobs

Are we making too much of the "loyalty" thing? it is only logical that he will select those who agree with his worldview and policy direction. I do not think anyone else other than Lincoln constructed a "team of rivals."

And as I have said, if you accept your oath to support and defend the Constitution, by definition you will obey all lawful orders of the Commander in Chief. What other loyalty test can there be other than being loyal to our Constitution? Show me I am wrong.

Loyalty Is Common Thread as Trump Fills Foreign Policy, Immigration Jobs

Trump settles on GOP lawmakers for key posts in a bid to avoid infighting that frustrated him in his first term

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/donald-trump-cabinet-picks-14ad0489?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1 By

Alexander Ward

Updated Nov. 12, 2024 8:15 pm ET

Immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller is named Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy. Photo: brian snyder/Reuters

WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump is stocking his cabinet and White House staff with loyalists with deep congressional experience who back his agenda on immigration and foreign policy—mostly shunning establishment Republicans whom he blames for thwarting his first-term goals.

In the clearest example yet, Trump on Tuesday named Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), a former Army Green Beret who shares the former president’s views on illegal immigration and skepticism of America’s support for Ukraine, to be his national-security adviser, according to people familiar with the discussion. The job, which Trump has elevated to cabinet rank, doesn’t require Senate confirmation.

The president-elect is also expected to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio, (R., Fla.) to be secretary of state, according to people familiar with his thinking. Rubio has differed with Trump over the importance of alliances and favors confronting China and Iran but, like Trump, has called for ending the war in Ukraine.

Trump on Tuesday said he would nominate Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth to serve as Secretary of Defense. He also said that he would nominate John Ratcliffe to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Ratcliffe, a Republican from Texas, served as Director of National Intelligence in the first Trump administration. Additionally, the president-elect picked billionaire Elon Musk and biotech company founder Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate, to lead an effort to cut spending, eliminate regulations and restructure federal agencies.

John Ratcliffe served as Director of National Intelligence in the first Trump administration. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News

Trump hasn’t signaled whom he will pick as Treasury secretary. Among the candidates for Treasury is hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent, who publicly backed Trump during the campaign. Another Trump supporter, billionaire investor John Paulson, removed himself from contention on Tuesday.

Some of Trump’s closest advisers are seeking to block candidates deemed insufficiently loyal for other top administration posts, fearing they could derail or slow roll his priorities.

It won’t be easy to achieve the unanimity that Trump and some advisers want. To ensure Senate confirmation he might be forced to turn to some candidates who are at odds with him in important respects. Disagreements between agencies and members of his team were rife in his first term and are likely to reappear, current and former officials said.

Trump has also said he would nominate Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), the first lawmaker to endorse his re-election bid, as ambassador to the United Nations and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel. He has named immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy. Tom Homan, a champion of family separation, will be the new “border czar.” Former Republican lawmaker Lee Zeldin was nominated to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump said Monday.

Trump has also chosen South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter. Noem, a longtime Trump ally previously considered to be his running mate, will play a crucial role implementing his border policies, alongside Homan and Miller.

His choice as White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is known for delivering candid advice but isn’t confrontational and doesn’t seek the spotlight—traits that have gotten other Trump insiders in trouble. The discipline she brought to the campaign earned her credit with Trump, say people close to the incoming president, who wanted to send a message about the disciplined operation he plans to lead this time.

“What Trump will look for in senior nominees in a second term is fealty. He wants ‘yes men’ and ‘yes women,’” said John Bolton, who was national-security adviser during Trump’s first term but is now one his most outspoken critics.

Former Republican lawmaker Lee Zeldin is nominated to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Photo: Reuters

Trump has rejected Mike Pompeo, who served as the CIA chief and secretary of state in the first term but has been a strong supporter of U.S. assistance to Ukraine, and Nikki Haley, Trump’s top presidential rival and former envoy to the U.N. who broke with him over support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country,” Trump said Saturday in a social-media post, referring to Pompeo and Haley. Responding the following day, Donald Trump Jr. said in a social-media post he was working on keeping other job seekers who didn’t share his father’s agenda out of the administration.

Former top aides such as Robert O’Brien, Trump’s fourth and last national-security adviser, are open to serving again but aren’t sure they will be asked to join the administration.

“The president has a great group of people to select his cabinet from. I’m enthusiastic about the prospects for the country,” O’Brien said. “If I remain in the private sector, which is likely, I will be cheering on the president and his team for huge successes.”

With more like-minded advisers, the hope is Trump can pursue his “America First” agenda with fewer restraints, people who served on the Trump campaign said. But a team that shuns dissenting views also brings risks, according to former officials and analysts.

Donald Trump’s choice for White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is known for delivering candid advice but doesn’t seek the spotlight. Photo: carlos barria/Reuters

“Trump looks set on bringing in a team that prizes loyalty, which could instill some message discipline but also risks group think,” said Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security, a centrist Washington think tank.

Trump doesn’t make decisions in an orderly process, often announcing them without consulting advisers or via social media. Staffers during the first term often tried to walk back some of those decisions. Loyalists are more likely to carry out them without providing alternative ideas or debating the pitfalls, analysts said.

The president-elect has long said he would end American involvement in overseas wars, erect new trade barriers and force allies in Europe and Asia to share more in defense costs. During his first term, his advisers often pushed back against his more-ambitious policies, occasionally convincing him to back off and other times slow-rolling his orders.

Several generals he placed in top jobs at the Pentagon and White House because he saw them as able to get results often proved to be obstacles to some of his most far-reaching national security plans.

Trump wanted U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, but it wasn’t until February 2020 that the administration struck a deal with the Taliban to withdraw several thousand remaining troops——but only after President Biden took office.

After Trump lost the 2020 election but before leaving office, he signed a directive pushed by loyalists and not seen by senior Pentagon leaders to remove all troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Germany and across Africa. Trump eventually canceled the order but only after a conversation with O’Brien, then his national-security adviser, who said it hadn’t gone through proper channels.

Journalist Bob Woodward reported in his book “Fear” that Gary Cohn, the chief economic adviser in the White House, stole a 2017 letter off the Resolute Desk that, if signed by Trump, could have ended a key free-trade deal with South Korea, a staunch ally. Trump denied that any aides took letters or other documents off his desk, even though Woodward reproduced the letter in his book.

Mike Pompeo served as secretary of state in Donald Trump’s first term. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

As he constructs his second-term cabinet, Trump has turned to rivals who once derided his antiestablishment message but whose views have moved closer to his own. When Rubio ran for president in 2016, he taunted Trump at campaign stops and during debates, questioning his wealth, his temperament and even the size of his hands. Trump countered the attacks by referring to Rubio as “Little Marco” and calling him “a lightweight.”

But in a video statement posted on social media earlier this month, Rubio echoed Trump’s criticism of the Ukraine war, saying the Biden administration’s military aid to Kyiv was “funding a stalemate” that “needs to be brought to a conclusion.”

Unlike Trump, who has called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “genius” and “savvy” for the Ukraine invasion, Rubio said seeking to end the war “doesn’t mean we celebrate what Vladimir Putin did or are excited about it. But there needs to be some common sense.”

Alex Leary and Brian Schwartz contributed to this article.

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com

8. Here are the people Trump has picked for key positions so far

The scorecard to keep track so far.

Here are the people Trump has picked for key positions so far

By THOMAS BEAUMONT

Updated 7:58 PM EST, November 12, 2024

AP · November 11, 2024

THOMAS BEAUMONT

Beaumont covers national politics for The Associated Press. He is based in Des Moines, Iowa.

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AP · November 11, 2024

9. Trump Is Recruiting a Team of China Hawks. So Why Is Beijing Relieved?

Do tariffs deter war?

"....Trump suggested a transactional approach to the self-governed island, indicating he might use tariffs as a tool to deter China from trying to take control of Taiwan by force."

Excerpts:

People who consult with senior Chinese officials say that for now at least, Beijing is relieved that several Republicans considered particular threats by the Communist Party, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, aren’t in the mix.

“The cabinet choices are viewed as bad by China,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. “But for now, there appears to be still room for dialogue.” Sun said that if Trump had picked people seen as directly threatening the Communist Party’s core interests and its hold on power, “then that room for dialogue would be completely gone, from China’s point of view.”

...

Rubio was among a handful of U.S. officials China sanctioned twice in 2020 as both countries were feuding over issues including allegations of genocide in China’s Xinjiang region and Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong. Rubio sponsored a bill intended to prevent the import of goods made in Xinjiang, and President Biden later signed it into law.

Wang Yiwei, a professor of international studies at Renmin University in Beijing, said China would find a way to work around the sanctions on Rubio, noting that while the restrictions could apply to Rubio as an individual, they might not apply to the office of secretary of state.

“This is something they can discuss,” Wang said.

Pompeo was also sanctioned by China in early 2021, but only as he was leaving office.

Waltz, a former Army Green Beret and combat veteran of Afghanistan, is one of Congress’s most hawkish members regarding China. He said in 2021, “We are in a Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party.”

In contrast with Trump’s stance on trade, his perspective on whether the U.S. should come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese invasion has been more ambiguous. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board last month, Trump suggested a transactional approach to the self-governed island, indicating he might use tariffs as a tool to deter China from trying to take control of Taiwan by force.

Trump Is Recruiting a Team of China Hawks. So Why Is Beijing Relieved?

Absent from the expected cabinet lineup are China’s most-feared adversaries, including Mike Pompeo and Robert O’Brien

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-is-recruiting-a-team-of-china-hawks-so-why-is-beijing-relieved-bb1a4001?mod=hp_lead_pos2

By Lingling Wei

Updated Nov. 13, 2024 12:03 am ET

Marco Rubio is expected to be nominated by Trump to be secretary of state. Photo: patrick t. fallon/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

With the expected appointments of Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Mike Waltz to cabinet positions, President-elect Donald Trump is putting together what some China hawks call a tough-on-China “dream team.”

Both lawmakers are harsh China critics. If confirmed, Rubio would be the first sitting secretary of state under Beijing sanctions and banned from traveling to China. Waltz, asked to be Trump’s national security adviser, is one of the most vocal China critics in Congress. Both men are likely to be central to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s fears of a rise in tensions under Trump.

Still, from Beijing’s perspective, it could have been worse.

People who consult with senior Chinese officials say that for now at least, Beijing is relieved that several Republicans considered particular threats by the Communist Party, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, aren’t in the mix.

“The cabinet choices are viewed as bad by China,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. “But for now, there appears to be still room for dialogue.” Sun said that if Trump had picked people seen as directly threatening the Communist Party’s core interests and its hold on power, “then that room for dialogue would be completely gone, from China’s point of view.”

In a speech in the summer of 2020, Pompeo called on the Chinese people to work with the U.S. to change the party’s behavior. Later, one passage from Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” in which he called on the U.S. to grant full diplomatic recognition to Taiwan, enraged Xi as the book made the rounds in Beijing in early 2023, people familiar with the matter have said. China has repeatedly warned the U.S. not to meddle over Taiwan, which it considers its own territory.

Mike Waltz is expected to be Trump’s national security adviser. Photo: Rod Lamkey/Associated Press

Another Republican China is especially wary of is Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser. O’Brien has indicated that the U.S. should try to bring Russia’s war in Ukraine to an end and then attempt to peel Moscow away from Beijing.

At a press briefing Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said he had no comment about the expected appointments.

Political strategists in Washington say the two cabinet-level choices could make it harder for Beijing to try to take advantage of Trump’s penchant for deals, potentially empowering those who want to accelerate the effort to decouple the U.S. economy from that of China.

One of them is Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative during Trump’s first term. The president-elect has told allies that he wants Lighthizer, who has openly advocated for cutting off nearly all of China’s access to America’s markets, technology and capital, as the administration’s trade czar. That role would likely give Lighthizer oversight on trade policy across the administration, including at the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Xi and his aides have worked for months to prepare for heightened economic tensions with Washington. China is increasing efforts to court U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, doubling down on central control to fortify the Chinese economy, and readying a tool kit to hit back at any U.S. moves to shut Chinese products out of its market.

Meanwhile, senior Chinese officials also are planning to step up courtship of American business leaders to try to counterbalance the China hard-liners on Trump’s foreign-policy team, according to the people who consult with Beijing. Chief among their targets, they say, is Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive officer of Tesla, which makes half its electric vehicles in China.

Late last week, Tesla became one of the first automakers in China to earn a certification that indicates all vehicles produced at Tesla’s gigafactory in Shanghai comply with China’s standards for automotive data security. The so-called “vehicle privacy protection” certification could encourage more purchases of Tesla EVs in China by individuals, businesses and even government agencies.

Let’s Make a Deep State Peace Deal

U.S. intelligence won’t be able to fight Trump and Russia at the same time.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/lets-make-a-deep-state-peace-deal-us-intelligence-agencies-cant-fight-trump-and-russia-at-same-time-9884f0d9?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Nov. 12, 2024 5:17 pm ET

The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. Photo: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

Another big loser in last week’s election, besides Democrats and the media, was the intelligence community. And yes, this subject is still important.

Donald Trump during the campaign gave himself unmistakable marching orders to resolve the Ukraine war. It won’t be easy and it will be less easy if U.S. intelligence veterans and cable TV anchors are shouting that he’s a Kremlin agent.

I don’t say it’s impossible. He got this far despite their opposition. But he’s good at politics, and not so good at governing. This time, too, his voters have made it clear that after the Biden chaos, they want stabilization, not disruption.

In one of America’s more disgraceful episodes, the U.S. intelligence community decided to greet Mr. Trump’s 2016 election by punishing Americans for how they voted. A transcript has surfaced of President Obama, in his final days in office, stirring up progressive journalists about Mr. Trump’s alleged Russia ties. You only have to turn on MSNBC to see the agenda being resurrected. Or read the dominant press about a “flood,” a “torrent,” a “deluge” of pro-Trump Russian propaganda efforts late in the election.

These are words by people who fail at journalism, the basic job of which is to describe reality accurately.

The only flood is the billions of click-hithers Russians have to compete with to get their driblets noticed. That’s why 100% of Russia’s purpose isn’t the hopeless one of secretly swaying U.S. voters. In one of its noisy indictments timed for the election, the Biden administration cites a Russian $10 million fake-news budget. Notice that this figure is a third the reported salary of a single U.S. journalist, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, whose 11-minute on-air rant about “Russian influence” is perhaps a thousand times as valuable to Russia on a per viewer basis as any of its own homemade videos.

Not all the signs are unpropitious for Ukraine. Its cheerleaders and supporters have gotten more realistic about Mr. Trump. The Biden administration was offering only drift toward disaster; Mr. Trump is at least speaking of an endgame.

Mr. Putin, meanwhile, is spending troops like there’s no tomorrow, which suggests he’s positioning himself for a negotiation.

Very bad scenarios are also lurking. Our moment recalls 1950, when China, Russia and North Korea put aside their rivalries to challenge the postwar order of the U.S. and its allies. This would be a lot for any president to figure out, and Mr. Trump has been freer than most in expressing his conflicting impulses, especially where allies are concerned. In two years, he could be an 80-year-old LBJ or Truman, in a shooting war he wanted to avoid. This outcome, don’t kid yourself, MSNBC-style hysteria isn’t helping to prevent. Unfortunately, MSNBC doesn’t pay Ms. Maddow $30 million to develop a deeper understanding of events than the one that keeps her target audience coming back.

To get the active support from U.S. intelligence agencies necessary for a successful Ukraine negotiation, somehow relations will need to be repaired. Strangely, the best of the Biden cases against Mr. Trump, on intelligence handling, would also have been a chance for Mr. Trump to argue, with good evidence, that U.S. intelligence agencies misused their authority to sabotage his presidency, a story that otherwise will never be aired for the U.S. media-consuming public.

It helps also that Mr. Trump has been right about one thing, or at least verging on right. The emphasis on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Article 5, those magical words, is a lot less important today than the syllables “rearmament.”

That’s true for Ukraine, which needs to be able to repel and deter Russian forces regardless of any formal guarantees it receives in a cease-fire deal.

It’s true of NATO itself. Its guiding ethos needs to become rearmament, with European countries relying less on U.S. nuclear threats than on their own military capacity to fight Russia, as Ukraine has done for the past two years.

The election may have been a repudiation of inflation, but America was going to get a new Ukraine policy no matter who won. My reading of the exit polls is that almost any other Republican, such as Nikki Haley, would likely have gotten the same voting result only bigger.

Mr. Trump shouldn’t overinterpret his mandate; his opponents should refrain from resurrecting their disingenuous and reckless rhetoric about Mr. Trump and the Kremlin. During the eight years they practiced such rhetoric, they might notice, it only strengthened Mr. Trump with the U.S. electorate and discredited themselves.

Now he’s back at a pivotal moment in history and they get a second chance to do what they should have done after his first election: help him use his undeniable political talents to get important things done.

Lawmakers want VA to better secure records after campaign violations

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · November 12, 2024

Even though the election is over, Republican lawmakers still want answers from Department of Veterans Affairs officials on how they plan to better secure candidates’ veterans medical and benefits records ahead of future campaigns.

Earlier this fall, VA officials confirmed that the Department of Justice is investigating several federal staffers for improperly accessing the veterans records of vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance amid the contentious summer campaign.

In a statement Friday, VA press secretary Terrence Hayes said that department leaders are continuing to work with investigators on the matter and “will take swift and appropriate action to discipline any VA employees who sought to improperly access veteran records.”

VA employees improperly viewed health records of both VP candidates

Department of Justice officials are looking into whether the actions by VA staff warrant criminal charges.

But in a letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough earlier this month, a group of eight Republican senators led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz expressed concern that the matter remains unsettled, even after votes were counted in the presidential contest.

“The repeated, unauthorized access of veterans’ medical records by VA employees is a serious breach of trust that demands swift and decisive action,” the group wrote. “We urge you to act immediately to safeguard the medical privacy of every veteran in the VA system and to prevent such activity in the future.”

The senators asked for more information on safeguards and policy changes put in place following the security breach, to ensure similar intrusions don’t occur again.

Hayes said that following notification of the allegations of improper accessing of the records, VA leaders limited access to all records regarding Walz’ and Vance’s use of department services. They also stepped up monitoring on those files and distributed a staff-wide message warning about improper viewing of veterans’ private information.

“Every VA employee is required to take extensive yearly training on when and how they are allowed to access veteran medical records, if at all,” Hayes said. “These trainings also make clear the stark consequences of failure to properly use these records, including discipline that could include firing and reporting to law enforcement authorities.”

Vance, now the vice president-elect, spoke on the campaign trail about using VA health care after leaving the active-duty ranks. He served in the Marine Corps for four years. Walz, the current governor of Minnesota, served for 24 years in the Army National Guard.

Federal officials did not say how many employees accessed the vice presidential candidates’ records. The senators in their letter suggested as many as a dozen VA employees may have viewed them without proper justification.

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

12. Jury Awards Abu Ghraib Detainees $42 Million, Holds Contractor Responsible

I had a curious thought: Can POTUS use his pardon power to pardon a corporate entity in a civil case? (I am assuming this was a civil trial in a federal court).

Excerpts:

CACI, as one of its defenses, argued it shouldn’t be liable for any misdeeds by its employees if they were under the control and direction of the Army. under a legal principle known as the “borrowed servants” doctrine.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that CACI was responsible for its own employees' misdeeds. They said provisions in CACI’s contract with the Army, as well as the Army Field Manual, make clear that CACI is responsible for overseeing its own workers.

The lawsuit was first filed in 2008 but was delayed by 15 years of legal wrangling and multiple attempts by CACI to have the case dismissed.

Lawyers for the three plaintiffs argued that CACI was liable for their mistreatment even if they couldn’t prove that CACI’s interrogators were the ones who directly inflicted the abuse.

The evidence included reports from two retired Army generals, who documented the abuse and concluded that multiple CACI interrogators were complicit in the abuse.

Those reports concluded that one of the interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, lied to investigators about his conduct and that he likely instructed soldiers to mistreat detainees and used dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations.

Stefanowicz testified for CACI at trial through a recorded video deposition and denied mistreating detainees.

Jury Awards Abu Ghraib Detainees $42 Million, Holds Contractor Responsible

military.com · by Associated Press | By Matthew Barakat Published November 12, 2024 at 1:00pm ET · November 12, 2024

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A U.S. jury on Tuesday awarded $42 million to three former detainees of Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, holding a Virginia-based military contractor responsible for contributing to their torture and mistreatment two decades ago.

The decision from the eight-person jury came after a different jury earlier this year couldn't agree on whether Reston, Virginia-based CACI should be held liable for the work of its civilian interrogators who worked alongside the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004.

The jury awarded plaintiffs Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and Asa’ad Al-Zubae $3 million each in compensatory damages and $11 million each in punitive damages.

The three testified that they were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, forced nudity and other cruel treatment at the prison.

They did not allege that CACI's interrogators explicitly inflicted the abuse themselves, but argued CACI was complicit because its interrogators conspired with military police to “soften up” detainees for questioning with harsh treatment.

CACI's lawyer, John O'Connor, did not comment after Tuesday's verdict on whether the company would appeal.

Baher Azmy, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the lawsuit on the plaintiffs' behalf, called the verdict “an important measure of Justice and accountability” and praised the three plaintiffs for their resilience, “especially in the face of all the obstacles CACI threw their way.”

The $42 million fully matches the amount sought by the plaintiffs, Azmy said.

“Today is a big day for me and for justice,” said Al-Ejaili, a journalist, in a written statement. “I’ve waited a long time for this day. This victory isn’t only for the three plaintiffs in this case against a corporation. This victory is a shining light for everyone who has been oppressed and a strong warning to any company or contractor practicing different forms of torture and abuse.”

Al-Ejaili traveled to the U.S. for both trials to testify in person. The other two plaintiffs testified by video from Iraq.

The trial and subsequent retrial were the first time a U.S. jury heard claims brought by Abu Ghraib survivors in the 20 years since photos of detainee mistreatment — accompanied by smiling U.S. soldiers inflicting the abuse — shocked the world during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

None of the three plaintiffs were in any of the notorious photos shown in news reports around the world, but they described treatment very similar to what was depicted.

Al Shimari described sexual assaults and beatings during his two months at the prison. He also said he was electrically shocked and dragged around the prison by a rope tied around his neck. Al-Ejaili said he was subjected to stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid. He was also deprived of sleep, forced to wear women’s underwear and threatened with dogs.

CACI had argued it wasn’t complicit in the detainees’ abuse. It said its employees had minimal interaction with the three plaintiffs in the case, and CACI questioned parts of the plaintiffs' stories, saying that military records contradict some of their claims and suggesting they shaded their stories to support a case against the contractor. Fundamentally, though, CACI argued that any liability for their mistreatment belonged to the government.

As in the first trial, the jury struggled to decide whether CACI or the Army should be held responsible for any misconduct by CACI interrogators. The jury asked questions in its deliberations about whether the contractor or the Army bore liability.

CACI, as one of its defenses, argued it shouldn’t be liable for any misdeeds by its employees if they were under the control and direction of the Army. under a legal principle known as the “borrowed servants” doctrine.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that CACI was responsible for its own employees' misdeeds. They said provisions in CACI’s contract with the Army, as well as the Army Field Manual, make clear that CACI is responsible for overseeing its own workers.

The lawsuit was first filed in 2008 but was delayed by 15 years of legal wrangling and multiple attempts by CACI to have the case dismissed.

Lawyers for the three plaintiffs argued that CACI was liable for their mistreatment even if they couldn’t prove that CACI’s interrogators were the ones who directly inflicted the abuse.

The evidence included reports from two retired Army generals, who documented the abuse and concluded that multiple CACI interrogators were complicit in the abuse.

Those reports concluded that one of the interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, lied to investigators about his conduct and that he likely instructed soldiers to mistreat detainees and used dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations.

Stefanowicz testified for CACI at trial through a recorded video deposition and denied mistreating detainees.

military.com · by Associated Press | By Matthew Barakat Published November 12, 2024 at 1:00pm ET · November 12, 2024

13. Who Is Michael Waltz, Trump’s Pick to Be National Security Adviser?

I first met Mike when he was working on the Obama NSC in 2009 or 2010.

An interesting fact from his wikipedia bio:

In 2010, Waltz helped found the analytics and training company Metis Solutions. It was bought in November 2020 by Pacific Architects and Engineers for $92 million.^[12]

Not only does he have national security chops but he also an entrepreneur and successful businessman as well.

Who Is Michael Waltz, Trump’s Pick to Be National Security Adviser?

The former Green Beret and three-term congressman from Florida has established himself as a hawkish Republican voice on matters of national security.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/us/politics/who-is-michael-waltz-trump.html?utm

Share full article

Representative Michael Waltz at the Republican National Convention in July.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

By Catie Edmondson

Nov. 12, 2024

Representative Michael Waltz of Florida, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen to be his national security adviser, is a former Green Beret and three-term congressman who established himself early on Capitol Hill as a key hawkish voice on matters of national security.

Mr. Waltz, who received four Bronze Stars after multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and Africa, has the pedigree of the type of conservative who once espoused the G.O.P. orthodoxy on foreign policy. At the Pentagon, he worked as a defense adviser to defense secretaries Donald H. Rumsfeld and Robert M. Gates. He advised then-Vice President Dick Cheney on counterterrorism.

But during his time in Congress, Mr. Waltz has espoused a national security doctrine that has increasingly jelled with Mr. Trump’s worldview. A member of the Armed Services, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees, he has chastised NATO allies for not meeting their military spending commitments and taken a hard line on China and Iran.

He has deep connections to the Trump administration.

Even during his first term in Congress, Mr. Waltz caught the eye of the Trump White House with his national security credentials. In 2020, in the days after Mr. Trump authorized the drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran, Mr. Waltz was included in a small group of Republicans invited to the White House who received a briefing on the strike. He frequently appears on Fox News as an expert on matters of national security.

His wife, Julia Nesheiwat, was homeland security adviser in the first Trump administration.

His hawkish worldview extends from Mexico to Iran to Afghanistan.

Since he was elected to Congress in 2019 to represent a district in eastern Florida, Mr. Waltz has displayed a hawkish outlook on Iran and China, but also on Mexico and Afghanistan.

He was a vociferous critic of President Biden’s precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“What no one can ever do for me, including this administration right now, is articulate a counterterrorism plan that’s realistic without us there,” Mr. Waltz said in an interview in the days after the withdrawal.

Mr. Waltz had also opposed withdrawing large numbers of troops from Afghanistan during the Trump administration without stringent conditions, and he introduced legislation to prevent a significant troop drawdown from Afghanistan unless the director of national intelligence could certify that the Taliban would not associate with Al Qaeda.

In 2023, Mr. Waltz led legislation that would authorize the president to use military force against Mexican drug cartels based on their fentanyl trafficking, production and distribution. The bill mirrored the war powers Congress gave former President George W. Bush before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times. More about Catie Edmondson

14. Pacific partnerships are key to preventing war, Army leaders say

I do hope the Trump administration will continue to allow the military and diplomatic to sustain and further develop these partnerships and alliances.

Now more than ever the silk web of US alliances and partnerships is key to winning across the spectrum of conflict, from strategic competition and political warfare in the gray to deterrence, to winning large scale combat operations/major theater war.

I hope the President-elect's advisors will be able to prove the case for the importance of allies. As a way of uniting, the President-elect could give credit to the Biden administration and the current military leaders, diplomats, intelligence officers, and national security professionals who have helped to improve the relationships with US fiends, partners, and allies to support US national security which also bleeds over to support national prosperity as well. Allies should be a US super power especially when compared to the transactional relationships among the "Dark Quad." Mutual trust, shared values, and shared burdens for national security would be how the US and allies describe their relationship which is far more powerful than and far superior to the Dark Quad.

Pacific partnerships are key to preventing war, Army leaders say

defenseone.com · by Jennifer Hlad

FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii—The personal relationships soldiers are building in dozens of training exercises each year with partners throughout the Indo-Pacific are the true strength of U.S. Army Pacific, the command’s new leader said Friday, pledging to continue the initiatives championed by outgoing commander Gen. Charles Flynn.

“It’s those relationships, built on a bedrock of trust, that really give our adversaries pause. They can plan for, or resource against, technical or procedural advantage that we may have, but they can’t undo relationships,” said Gen. Ronald Clark, adding that Flynn “has made the region safer and our Army stronger.”

Clark has served here multiple times before. He is returning to Hawaii after two years as the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin—a role that prompted Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., to hold up Clark’s promotion for weeks.

He took command from Flynn on Friday in a rainy ceremony attended by senior military leaders from across the region.

Flynn used his last speech in uniform to discuss key events and themes that made a difference in his life, to recognize family and friends, and to thank U.S. partners in the region for underscoring what he calls “the strategic land power network…a great counterweight to all the things that are happening out here every day that are dangerous and aggressive.”

The way to “maintain peace and stability, protect everyone’s freedoms and prosperity, and ultimately…our highest duty, as [INDOPACOM’s Adm.] Sam Paparo says, is to deter and prevent a way from going on. So the goal here is to have no war.”

Flynn has been a passionate champion of the Army’s role in the Pacific—which he calls “vital and central to success”—and regularly highlights the importance of Operation Pathways, a series of more than 40 joint and partner exercises across the region.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said at the ceremony that Army’s Pacific forces have during Flynn’s tenure “planned, coordinated, and executed more than 200 bilateral military exercises in more than 90 countries,” as they “built a formation that is lethal and cohesive.”

U.S. Army Pacific “is gritty, determined, smart, creative, and a spirited team, because they have taken on the traits of their commander,” George said. “Your genuine and sincere appreciation for our partners and allies has laid the foundation of trust and respect we enjoy today and must have to win tomorrow.”

There is no mission more important for the Army, George said, directing his comments to Clark. “Today, our adversaries are working together to challenge us in every theater. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea represent an axis of upheaval that is increasingly collaborating to threaten the free world.”

Paparo, leader of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, noted that “the security environment has worsened” since Clark was last stationed in the theater, in 2021.

“Given this dangerous security environment, the connected, transactional symbiosis of our would-be adversaries, the [People’s Republic of China’s] increasingly aggressive behavior, the increasing connections between Russia and North Korea, we need to the team to be ready. You are precisely the right leader for this assignment,” Paparo said.

Still, Clark told reporters he is not overly concerned by news that North Korean troops are fighting alongside Russians in Ukraine.

“It really doesn’t give me pause… because on, as you know, on the Korean peninsula, we’re ready to fight tonight,” he said. “The proliferation of combat capabilities across the world is something that happens at breathtaking speed now, given automation, the internet, AI, machine learning. So our expectation is… that our adversaries are going to learn quickly. We also have to learn quickly, and quicker, from ongoing conflicts. And… the thing that they can’t break are those relationships” with allies and partners.

defenseone.com · by Jennifer Hlad

15. Japanese Minesweeper Sinks in Port, Sailor Missing; Advanced Russian Attack Sub Spotted Near Japan

Is there a "rest of the story" here? Or are the two events unrelated? The locations are quite distant so likely unrelated. But the headline was clickbait for me. it caught my attention.

Japanese Minesweeper Sinks in Port, Sailor Missing; Advanced Russian Attack Sub Spotted Near Japan - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · November 11, 2024

JS Ukushima (MSC-686) in flames. Image from NHK

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force minesweeper JS Ukushima (MSC-686) capsized on Monday following an engine room fire on Sunday with one crewmember missing from the incident. Meanwhile Japan’s Joint Staff Office (JSO) on Monday issued a release stating that a Russian Navy Yasen-class nuclear powered cruise missile submarine (SSGN) had been sighted operating near Japan’s waters for the first time.

Japanese media reports stated that Ukushima on Sunday at 9.40 a.m. reported to the Japan Coast Guard’s (JCG) 7th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters that the ship had a fire in the engine room. Ukushima was sailing in the East China Sea in an area 1.5 miles off Oshima Island off the coast of Fukuoka Prefecture on the main island of Kyushu.

Japan’s Kyodo News reported that minesweeper JS Toyoshima (MSC-685), which joined the coast guard in the fire-fighting and rescue operation, reported around 2 p.m. that the fire on the Ukushima was contained, but flared out of control later. The crew of Ukushima were taken off by Toyoshima by 3:45 p.m., but it was found that petty officer 3rd class Tatsunori Koga, who worked in the engine room, was missing.

Japanese media NHK’s Fukuoka’s branch posted on its X social media account a video showing the minesweeper ablaze at 7 p.m on Sunday night with a later video showing the ship’s capsized bow barely above water. The fire was only put out when the ship capsized a few minutes after midnight on Monday. Divers from the JCG are now searching the wreck for the missing crew member.

Ukushima was carrying out training in preparation before a large-scale JMSDF – U.S. Navy joint mine warfare exercise that begins on Saturday and concludes on Nov. 26. A JMSDF release on Nov. 5 stated that the exercise would involve a frigate, both Uraga class mine countermeasures vessels, two Awaji class minesweepers and 14 other minesweepers from the JMSDF and two U.S. Navy mine countermeasures vessels.

Russian Yassen class-submarine. JMSDF Photo

As per standard procedure, a JMSDF board of inquiry has been set up to look into the incident which is the second incident this year involving the JMSDF that resulted in a loss of life, in April, two JMSDF SH-60K helicopters collided in mid-air while conducting anti-submarine warfare training with all eight crew members killed in the incident.

On Monday the JSO issued a release stating that at 8 a.m. that day, Russian Navy destroyer RFS Marshal Shaposhnikov (543), missile range instrumentation ship RFS Marshal Krylov (331), a rescue tug and a Yasen class submarine were sighted sailing west in an area 49 miles northeast of Cape Soya on the main island of Hokkaido. The release added that subsequently the Russian ships sailed west through La Perouse Strait, which separates Hokkaido from the Russian island of Sakhalin.

A JMSDF P-3C Orion Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) from Fleet Air Wing 2 based at JMSDF Hachinohe Air Base on the main island of Honshu shadowed the Russian ships, according to the release which noted that this was the first time the JMSDF sighted a Yasen class submarine. The Russian Navy Pacific Fleet has two Yasen class SSGNs, RFS Novosibirsk (K-573) and RFS Krasnoyarsk (K-571) assigned to it.

Meanwhile in Indonesia on Sunday, Russian Navy submarine RFS Ufa (B-588) together with rescue tug Alatau left Surabaya, Java after arriving on Thursday last week for a port visit. Ufa is heading towards the Russian Navy Pacific Fleet’s submarine base at Kamchatka Naval Base, having been assigned to join the fleet, and is now likely transiting through the South China Sea. Meanwhile the Russian Navy Pacific Fleet’s surface action group comprising of corvettes RFS Gromkiy (335), RFS Hero of the Russian Federation Aldar Tsydenzhapov (339) and RFS Rezkiy (343) and fleet oiler Pechenga wrapped up drills in the Java Sea with the Indonesian Navy and is likely now operating in the South China Sea.

news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · November 11, 2024

16. New Philippine Laws Define Maritime Zones in the South China Sea

West Philippine Sea.

New Philippine Laws Define Maritime Zones in the South China Sea

https://news.usni.org/2024/11/12/new-philippine-laws-define-maritime-zones-in-the-south-china-sea?utm

Aaron-Matthew Lariosa

November 12, 2024 3:11 PM

Philippine Navy personnel aboard the Rigid-Hull Inflatable Boat (RHIB) demonstrate a boat transfer exercise from the BRP Ramon Alcaraz (PS-16) during the simulated island seizure exercise at Kota Island in the West Philippine Sea on Nov. 6, 2024. Armed Forces of the Philippines Photo

Philippine President Marcos passed two maritime laws last week in a move that Manila says will strengthen its sovereignty over waters within the country’s archipelago and the South China Sea.

Using standards set forth by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Philippine Maritime Zones Act and Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act identify the country’s internal waters, archipelagic waters, territorial sea, contiguous zone, exclusive economic zone, continental shelf and sea lanes. Manila wants these acts to solidify its rights and sovereignty within the Philippines’ maritime zones.

“With these pieces of legislation, we align our domestic laws with international law, specifically the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS, improve our capacity for governance and reinforce our maritime policies for economic development and for national security,” Marcos said during the signing ceremony.

Following the seizure of Scarborough Shoal in 2012 by Chinese forces, Manila turned to international courts to delegitimize Beijing’s claims in the region, culminating in the 2013 arbitration case and the 2016 South China Sea Arbitration. Despite the outcome of the arbitration, which discredited Beijing’s nine-dash-line claim over the majority of the region via UNCLOS, the Philippines had yet to adopt the international laws to delineate its waters. Through these laws, the National Maritime Council noted that the Philippines can “respond to regional maritime disputes with a clear, unified voice.” Loren Legarda, a senator who worked on both laws, also highlighted that they provide a “robust legal foundation for the Philippines to assert its jurisdiction and sovereign rights over its vast marine resources and surrounding seas.”

While the Philippine Maritime Zones Act clarifies Philippine waters both internally and into the exclusive economic zone, the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act targets a long-standing issue that the country has faced with foreign vessels transiting its waters. Composed of an archipelago of 7,641 islands, the country is frequently used by Chinese forces transiting between the first and second island chains without informing the Philippines beforehand.

In 2022, Philippine Navy frigate BRP Antonio Luna (FF-151) tracked a People’s Liberation Army Navy surveillance ship transiting the Sulu Sea, which at the time was the training area for a bilateral U.S.-Philippine military exercise. Manila protested the transit, claiming that the vessel was not practicing innocent passage. Since then, more substantial Chinese maritime movement has occurred in the country’s southern waters around Basilan and Tawi-Tawi, including the transit of multiple People’s Liberation Army Navy surface action groups and even a carrier strike group. A preliminary map released by the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority identified routes to be used by foreign vessels and aircraft within the Sulu Sea and Luzon Strait.

China condemned the new laws, claiming that they destabilize the region and reiterated its claims by posting a list of coordinates detailing maritime features, including Sabina and Second Thomas Shoals, and their Chinese names.

“This is an important element in what must be a comprehensive national strategy for the Philippines to combat what has grown to become a maritime occupation of the West Philippine Sea by a hostile imperial power,” Ray Powell, director of the SeaLight Project at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, told USNI News regarding the new laws.

Powell highlighted how the Philippines is the only country bordering the South China Sea to have foreign military bases, noting the air and naval base at Mischief Reef, and restricted access to maritime features within its exclusive economic zone. “This includes Scarborough, Second Thomas and Sabina Shoals, access to all of which are now actively and often aggressively controlled by Beijing,” he said.

To counter what he describes as an “occupation force,” Powell stressed that the Philippines “will need to adopt a strategy of resistance, of which lawfare is one necessary element.” Manila’s current strategy has consisted of publicizing incidents and monitoring Chinese forces. “Imperialists don’t simply pack up and leave because they are in the wrong. Rather, they withdraw when the accumulated costs of occupation over time outweigh the perceived benefits.”

17. Chronic Brain Trauma Is Extensive in Navy’s Elite Speedboat Crews

Military operations are inherently dangerous in peace and war. And some sustained military operations have severe effects over time.

From my few experiences in the MK V I can see how the pounding at high speed over the waves can affect the brain. They are probably similar to the effects from constant breaching and shooting in the shoothouse over time.

These "speedboats" are not pleasure craft.

Excerpts:

The widespread reports of injuries point to a problem with implications that go beyond one small, specialized Navy unit: In its push for ever more powerful equipment, the military may have exceeded what many human brains can handle.

The Pentagon has started to acknowledge that repeatedly firing weapons like howitzers and rocket launchers may cause serious injuries to troops’ brains. But the experience of the Special Boat Teams suggests that the problem may extend beyond blast exposure to include getting jolted and knocked about in high-performance vehicles.

Chronic Brain Trauma Is Extensive in Navy’s Elite Speedboat Crews

The pounding that sailors’ brains take from years of high-speed wave-slamming in the Special Boat Teams can cause symptoms that wreck their careers — and their lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/us/brain-trauma-cte-navy-speedboat.html?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm

By Dave Philipps

Reporting from San Diego

Nov. 12, 2024

In the year before Troy Norrell died, he grew convinced that the government had somehow infiltrated his brain. And in a way, he was right.

The 44-year-old was a rising star in the Navy’s Special Boat Teams — an elite group of stealth speedboat crews who can race over rough seas at 60 miles an hour to deliver Navy SEALs to their targets. But after years of pounding across the waves, he was barely able to function. He grew forgetful and confused. He struggled with insomnia, alcohol abuse and rage. On a training trip, he smashed a rearview mirror and started cutting his chest with the glass.

He was forced to medically retire in 2017 after 12 years in uniform.

As a civilian, he grew delusional and paranoid, and started to believe that the government had bugged his phone, then his kitchen walls and finally his own skull.

“There’s only a little piece of me left,” he told a neighbor in 2021, tapping his head. “They got the rest.”

Image

Troy Norrell during his time in the Navy.

Credit...via Sue Norrell

A few days later, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a field near his home in the San Diego suburbs.

An autopsy revealed that his brain was riddled with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a progressive disease often associated with football players who suffer repeated blows to the head.

A Defense Department neurologist who analyzed samples of Mr. Norrell’s brain wrote that his C.T.E. probably came from years of impacts with waves. The neurologist alerted the Navy that other sailors in the Special Boat Teams might face the same risk.

As if to underline the point, six weeks after Mr. Norrell’s death, another boat team member in the grip of paranoid delusions, Travis Carter, 33, died by suicide a few miles away.

Seeking an edge in combat, the Navy has created boats so powerful that riding in them can destroy sailors’ brains, several former senior members of the Special Boat Teams said.

In interviews, 12 former boat team leaders — nearly all chiefs or senior chiefs — said the damage piles up almost unnoticed for years, and then cascades, often around the time sailors move into leadership roles. Rock-solid sailors like Mr. Norrell become erratic, impulsive and violent. Many develop alcohol problems, get arrested for bar fights or domestic violence, or become suicidal. One was charged with threatening to kill President Barack Obama.

“Over and over and over, high-performing guys spiral down and fall apart,” said Robert Fredrich, 44, a retired senior chief who served in the teams from 2001 to 2023. “It happened to me, it happened to most of my friends. When it does, they kick us out or force us to retire, but never address the real issue.”

Every boat crew veteran interviewed by The New York Times recalled seeing the pattern play out repeatedly.

It is unclear how many sailors have been injured. There is no public data from the Navy, and even if there were, no blood test or brain scan exists that can definitively detect in a living sailor the type of damage that an autopsy found in Mr. Norrell.

In a questionnaire sent to boat team veterans by one retired chief, nearly all who replied — about 300 — said they had experienced concussion symptoms from riding on the boats, and most were still experiencing symptoms years later. Nearly a quarter said they had been suicidal.

The widespread reports of injuries point to a problem with implications that go beyond one small, specialized Navy unit: In its push for ever more powerful equipment, the military may have exceeded what many human brains can handle.

The Pentagon has started to acknowledge that repeatedly firing weapons like howitzers and rocket launchers may cause serious injuries to troops’ brains. But the experience of the Special Boat Teams suggests that the problem may extend beyond blast exposure to include getting jolted and knocked about in high-performance vehicles.

Image

A Combatant Craft Medium maneuvering in the waters off Guam.Credit...Shaina O’Neal/U.S. Navy, via Department of Defense

In other parts of the military, post-traumatic stress disorder from combat is often seen as a driving factor when top performers fall apart. In the boat teams, though, few sailors ever see combat. Not knowing what else could be behind the epidemic of behavioral issues, veterans said, leaders have repeatedly blamed the sailors themselves.

In interviews, a number of former senior chiefs said that at the point when they were promoted to positions overseeing critical missions, they were already stumbling over words, losing their trains of thought, and getting distracted by family lives that were falling apart.

“The problem is, we have dudes with brain injuries leading dudes with brain injuries, and they are unable to fully comprehend what is going on,” Mr. Fredrich said.

Image

“Over and over and over, high-performing guys spiral down and fall apart,” said Robert Fredrich, a boat crew veteran.Credit...Hailey Sadler for The New York Times

The Navy and the Defense Department have been tight-lipped about what they know. The Defense Department brain lab that found C.T.E. in Mr. Norrell refused to say how many boat team members’ brains it has examined, or what it has found in them. More than 70 current and former boat crew members have participated in a brain injury study at Tulane University, but the Navy and Tulane each declined to describe the findings.

A spokeswoman for Naval Special Warfare, which oversees the boat teams, said in a written response to questions that the risks to the boat crews “are well recognized,” but would not address whether those risks include brain damage.

The spokeswoman disputed that leaders may be particularly affected, noting that they undergo extensive testing and are chosen for their “sustained superior performance.”

Image

Photos from Mr. Fredrich’s time on the Navy’s Special Boat Teams.Credit...Hailey Sadler for The New York Times

In 2021, medical staff members at Naval Special Warfare started slipping a memorandum into crewmen’s files, warning future medical providers that the crews were “subject to large shock and vibration forces,” and that their heads experienced sudden jerks of up to 64 Gs (64 times the force of gravity). Fighter pilots typically experience a maximum of about nine Gs.

The medical memorandum suggests that some in the Navy are concerned about the risk of brain damage. The Navy has made changes in recent years to improve detection and treatment of brain injuries.

But veterans say operations have continued unchanged, and any lessons from the suicide deaths seem to have been missed.

“No one was asking, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” said Mr. Fredrich, who was still in the teams when Mr. Norrell and Mr. Carter died. “It was just, ‘Well, what a tragedy. Now get back in the boats.’”

The Special Boat Teams were established in the late 1980s to speed Navy SEALs to their targets. The Navy had been using small patrol boats since World War II, but those boats topped out at about 30 miles an hour, and the crews serving on them usually stayed only a few years before moving to other assignments. The new teams acquired high-powered racing boats and trained a new class of career operators known as Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen, or SWCCs, who stayed for their entire careers.

Several former crewmen said skipping over big waves and hitting the faces of the next ones was like being in repeated car crashes.

“The first hit weakens you, and you are still trying to recover when the next one hits,” said Steve Chance, who served in the first generation of boats in the 1990s. “You do that for hours, and it feels like someone worked you over with a pool cue. Sometimes you’d slam so hard you’d have a headache for a week.”

Almost immediately, crews started reporting high injury rates. In 1994, a Navy study put sensors on boats and found that crews experienced more than 120 whiplash events per hour. The force of the hits, the study said, was “a challenge to human tolerances.”

The Navy added better shock absorbers to the seats of some boats in the 2000s, but former sailors said the boats hit the waves with such force that those seats often broke.

Image

“The first hit weakens you, and you are still trying to recover when the next one hits” said Steve Chance, who served in the Navy in the 1990s.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times

“It was so violent,” said Anthony Smith, who joined the boat teams in 1996 and rose to the rank of chief. “You couldn’t think straight, your back hurt, your neck hurt, and all the guys would have blood in their urine.”

Repeated jolts to the head can fray neurons over time, leading to impulsive decisions, violent reactions, depression and psychosis. Sailors often saw the battering as part of the job and endured it without complaint, unaware of the long-term consequences.

After eight years on boats, Mr. Smith developed an overwhelming sensation that he was existing outside his own body. He had crippling depression and panic attacks. In 2004, he had a seizure with convulsions so strong that his shoulder dislocated. Like many others, he was quietly retired from the Navy on medical grounds.

“No one in the Navy ever said the words ‘brain injury,’” he said. “The psychologist told me I was depressed because I didn’t want to leave the Navy.”

Determined to learn whether others were having similar troubles, Mr. Smith recently started sending questionnaires and found nearly all were reporting issues.

The Navy introduced a new generation of boats about a decade ago, in part to try to smooth the ride, but sailors say the improved technology just allowed crews to go faster, and the slamming continued.

Image

Navy Special Boat Teams operated with the Mark V Special Operations Craft from the 1990s until 2013.Credit...Anthony Smith

Image

They now use faster boats, including the Combatant Craft Medium, seen here.Credit...Adam Brock/U.S. Navy, via Department of Defense

One new model was the 2,500-horsepower, $11 million Combatant Craft Medium, and one of the first sailors to man it was Travis Carter, who died by suicide in 2021. Sailors said the boat performed well, but the pounding across the waves continued at faster speeds.

“We all got destroyed,” said Mr. Fredrich, the retired senior chief, who worked with Mr. Carter.

Mr. Carter’s memory started to crumble and his moods swung so violently that his wife thought he was bipolar. He was racked by delusions and would boil with rage, smash things in his house and then act as if nothing had happened.

“He was two completely different people, and he was getting violent to the point where it was scary,” his widow, Nichole Carter, said in an interview.

The boat teams pulled Mr. Carter from a leadership position in 2021 because of his strange behavior. Though the military has a world-class brain injury clinic only a few miles from his base near San Diego, the boat teams didn’t send him there because he was about to deploy for a fourth time. He died five days before he was due to leave.

“He knew there was something really, really wrong, but the Navy said they were going to deal with it when he got back,” Ms. Carter said.

The medical examiner in San Diego sent Mr. Carter’s brain to the Defense Department brain lab in 2021. This October, his family finally got a letter about the results. The letter was clear on what the lab had not found — no C.T.E., it said — but it was vague about whether the lab had found other damage.

Image

Travis Carter and his wife, Nichole.

Credit...Nichole Carter

All the boat crew veterans interviewed by The Times said they repeatedly saw squared-away sailors like Mr. Carter unravel as they climbed in rank. Chiefs who once seemed flawless went blank during briefings, wrecked boats or landed in jail.

“It is far too common to be a coincidence,” said Kyle Zellhoefer, who served for 20 years in the Navy. “I’ve seen it happen over and over. It happened to me.”

By the time Mr. Zellhoefer reached the rank of chief in 2017, he was having headaches so debilitating that his vision would blur and he was screaming at people, just as he had seen chiefs before him do. A shoving match with a master chief in 2019 led to formal punishment and stalled his career. He transferred out of the boat teams, and then retired from the Navy over the summer.

“It probably saved my life to get pushed out when I did,” he said. “I’ve seen how others have ended up.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.

Dave Philipps writes about war, the military and veterans and covers The Pentagon. More about Dave Philipps

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 13, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Toll on Brain For Veterans Of Fast Boats. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

18. Philippine Defense Secretary Doesn't Expect Trump Will Demand Payment for Protection

Let's put the "mutual" in mutual defense. We are not running a protection racket. We have mutual defense treaties because they are in the national security interests of the US first and foremost.

Philippine Defense Secretary Doesn't Expect Trump Will Demand Payment for Protection

military.com · by Associated Press | By Rod McGuirk Published November 12, 2024 at 10:35 am · November 12, 2024

MELBOURNE, Australia — Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said Tuesday that he didn't expect President-elect Donald Trump’s next administration would demand that the Philippines pay more for military protection because both allies faced the shared threat of China.

Teodoro was speaking at a news conference with Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles following an inaugural bilateral annual meeting aimed at improving security ties.

Asked if Trump would expect the Philippines, like Taiwan, to pay for U.S. protection, Teodoro replied: “I really don’t expect some sort of a statement from Mr. Trump, hopefully not.”

“I really don’t have any preconditions or any assumptions as to what will be the outcome of this administration, except on what we are working on — on institutional ties,” he said.

“We have an interest, both the United States and the Philippines, in ensuring that our partnership continues because — not totally, but principally — ... of shared threats. And that is undoubtedly the overreach and the aggressive and illegal activities of China,” he added.

Marles said that Australia had been confident that regardless of the U.S. presidential election outcome, Australia’s alliance with Washington would remain in “good shape.”

“What we see in the election of President Trump and in the formation of his administration, is an administration which will maintain America’s role of leadership in the world, which is really important in terms of maintaining the global rules-based order, which is very much in Australia’s national interest,” Marles said.

Last week, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed two laws reaffirming the extent of his country’s maritime territories and right to resources, including in the South China Sea, angering China, which claims the hotly disputed waterway almost in its entirety.

China’s Foreign Ministry said it summoned the Philippine ambassador to China to lodge a “stern protest.” The ministry condemned the move as an attempt to “solidify the illegal ruling of the South China Sea arbitration case through domestic legislation.”

Confrontations between Chinese and Philippine coast guard and naval forces in the disputed sea passage have spiked alarmingly since last year. That has sparked fears that the United States — Manila’s longtime treaty ally — may get drawn in a major conflict.

The laws, called the Philippine Maritime Zones Act and the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act, were signed by Marcos in a nationally televised ceremony attended by top military and national security officials. They further cement Manila’s rejection of China’s claims to virtually the entire sea passage, and stipulate jail terms and stiff fines for violators.

military.com · by Associated Press | By Rod McGuirk Published November 12, 2024 at 10:35 am · November 12, 2024

19. Trump Had It Easy the First Time

Excerpts:

To put it another way: If you think the only border that will preoccupy Trump when he takes office on Jan. 20 is America’s southern border, you’re not paying attention.

When Trump left office in 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah, one could argue that we were still in the “post-Cold War” era, dominated by increasing economic integration and Great Power peace. Russia had taken a bite out of Ukraine, but never attempted to devour the whole thing. Iran and Israel were hostile, but never directly attacked each other.

Israel occupied the West Bank, but never had a government whose official coalition agreement included formal annexation of the whole West Bank and now has members advocating the same for Gaza. America did not care for the Houthis in Yemen, but we had never sent B-2 stealth bombers to drop some of the largest payloads in our arsenal on them.

In short, a lot of bright red lines have been crossed since Trump occupied the big White House. And restoring them, and “making America great again,” will almost certainly require more subtle and sophisticated uses of force and coercive diplomacy than the isolationist Trump ever contemplated in his first administration or suggested in his campaigns.

...

A Trump administration could cause a new and very different set of red lines to be crossed if it pulls back from NATO or expresses any diminished willingness to protect longtime allies.

Japan, Poland, South Korea and Taiwan have hostile nuclear-armed neighbors and the technology and resources to build nuclear weapons themselves. “They haven’t done it because they thought they didn’t need to — because they believed that the United States had their back, even in the ultimate nightmare of a nuclear war,” said Gautam Mukunda, the noted strategy expert and Yale lecturer. “Think about that for a second: They had such total faith in the U.S. as an ally that for decades they have, literally, bet the existence of their country on America’s word.” He added, “Given what Trump has said about alliances, could any responsible foreign leader keep making that wager?”

Trump Had It Easy the First Time

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/opinion/trump-had-it-easy-the-first-time.html?utm

Nov. 12, 2024

Credit...Daniel Ribar for The New York Times

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By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist, writing from Tel Aviv

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

I don’t know why people say that President-elect Donald Trump is going to face difficult challenges in foreign policy.

All he needs to do is get Vladimir Putin to compromise on Russia’s western border. Get Volodymyr Zelensky to compromise on Ukraine’s eastern border. Get Benjamin Netanyahu to define Israel’s western and southern borders. Get Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to define his country’s western border — that is, stop trying to control Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Get China to define its eastern border as short of Taiwan. And get the Houthis in Yemen to define their coastal border as limited to just a few miles off shore — without the right to stop all shipping into the Red Sea.

To put it another way: If you think the only border that will preoccupy Trump when he takes office on Jan. 20 is America’s southern border, you’re not paying attention.

When Trump left office in 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah, one could argue that we were still in the “post-Cold War” era, dominated by increasing economic integration and Great Power peace. Russia had taken a bite out of Ukraine, but never attempted to devour the whole thing. Iran and Israel were hostile, but never directly attacked each other.

Israel occupied the West Bank, but never had a government whose official coalition agreement included formal annexation of the whole West Bank and now has members advocating the same for Gaza. America did not care for the Houthis in Yemen, but we had never sent B-2 stealth bombers to drop some of the largest payloads in our arsenal on them.

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In short, a lot of bright red lines have been crossed since Trump occupied the big White House. And restoring them, and “making America great again,” will almost certainly require more subtle and sophisticated uses of force and coercive diplomacy than the isolationist Trump ever contemplated in his first administration or suggested in his campaigns.

In Israel, where I am right now, one of the farthest right members of Israel’s far-right government, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has not wasted any time, declaring on Monday that Trump’s new presidency presents an “important opportunity” to “apply Israeli sovereignty to the settlements in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical names for areas of the West Bank. He added, “The year 2025 will, with God’s help, be the year of sovereignty” in these occupied territories.

But Trump may be much more of a wild card for Israel today than Smotrich expects. He is the first U.S. president who overtly appealed to and benefited from votes from Arab and Muslim Americans who were unhappy with unconditional U.S. support for Israel in Gaza. He also comes in with as strong an isolationist mandate as any president since the end of the Cold War. On top of that, when Trump was president before, he put out a peace plan for a two-state solution in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, albeit one that strongly favored Israel.

I was at a dinner in Haifa on Tuesday with Israeli Jews and Arabs together. The guests told me that many Jewish Israelis think that because one of Trump’s sons-in-law is Jewish he is ready to be tough with Palestinians, while many Israeli Arabs think Trump will benefit them because he is the only one tough enough to stand up to Netanyahu and because his other son-in-law has a Lebanese American father. Somebody is going to be disappointed!

As for Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy, getting Putin to agree to some kind of cease-fire/peace agreement restoring a Russian border with Ukraine may be the biggest challenge of all, the Russia expert Leon Aron from the American Enterprise Institute told me, because “Trump wants peace in Ukraine and Putin wants victory.”

Putin, Aron added, cannot afford to come back to the Russian people after some 600,000 of their compatriots have been killed and wounded in Ukraine, and say, “Oops, sorry, we are not going to control Ukraine after all.” Putin cannot let this war end in defeat. But Trump cannot accept a peace that looks like a defeat for the West. Then he would look like a loser.

If there is any chance of a mutually acceptable deal on Ukraine — a long-term cease-fire roughly on existing battle lines in return for some lifting of sanctions on Russia and accelerated membership for Ukraine in the European Union along with security guarantees but not formal NATO membership — it will most likely happen only after Putin suffers more defeats there and Trump makes clear that he would arm Ukraine even more heavily if Putin would not relent.

The fact that Putin had to effectively hire 10,000 North Korean forces to help fight his reckless war in Ukraine shows two things: how afraid he is to stop without a visible victory “and how afraid he is of a societal backlash if he is forced to send into the trenches raw 18-year-old ethnic-Russian conscripts, especially from Moscow and St. Petersburg where the Russian elite lives,” said Aron, author of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War.”

“Putin is not in a position to have a forever war,” concluded Aron. “He is running out of people.” All of which is to say that if Trump is capable of sustaining Ukraine in its current battlefield position for 12 more months, he might get the deal to end the Ukraine war in a year that he promised in the campaign to deliver in a day.

A Trump administration could cause a new and very different set of red lines to be crossed if it pulls back from NATO or expresses any diminished willingness to protect longtime allies.

Japan, Poland, South Korea and Taiwan have hostile nuclear-armed neighbors and the technology and resources to build nuclear weapons themselves. “They haven’t done it because they thought they didn’t need to — because they believed that the United States had their back, even in the ultimate nightmare of a nuclear war,” said Gautam Mukunda, the noted strategy expert and Yale lecturer. “Think about that for a second: They had such total faith in the U.S. as an ally that for decades they have, literally, bet the existence of their country on America’s word.” He added, “Given what Trump has said about alliances, could any responsible foreign leader keep making that wager?”

They have seen what happened to Ukraine after it gave the nuclear weapons stationed there back to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. If these countries lose faith in America’s promise — or that promise is withdrawn — and they develop their own nuclear weapons, that would be the end of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that has limited the spread of nuclear weapons since World War II. That would erase the mother of all red lines.

In this same vein, two of Trump’s possible top foreign policy choices, Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Representative Michael Waltz for national security adviser, are outspoken hard-liners on China and will probably be looking to amplify Trump’s plans to double down on trade tariffs on Beijing — another sound bite that plays great on the campaign trail. But China did not take this lying down before from Trump, and won’t again. I highly recommend they both read the July 29 piece in The Wall Street Journal about the Chinese telecom giant Huawei. It begins like this:

“Five years ago, Washington sanctioned Huawei, cutting off the Chinese company’s access to advanced U.S. technologies because it feared the telecommunications giant would spy on Americans and their allies.” It continues: “Huawei struggled at first — but now it’s come roaring back. Bolstered by billions of dollars in state support, Huawei has expanded into new businesses, boosted its profitability and found fresh ways to curb its dependence on U.S. suppliers. It has held on to its leading position in the global telecom-equipment market.” And now, it adds, Huawei is “making a big comeback in high-end smartphones, using sophisticated new chips developed in-house to take buyers from Apple.”

That’s the thing about the world — it is always so much more complicated than it sounds on the campaign trail, and today more than ever. Or as the boxer Mike Tyson is said to have observed: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

I Blame the Navy’s Strategic Woes on the Chiefs of Naval Operations - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Bruce Stubbs · November 13, 2024

There is no shortage of problems confronting the U.S. Navy, as salvo after salvo of embarrassing stories attest. The range of problems is spectacularly depressing, addressing almost every facet of the Navy — from the design, production, maintenance, and crewing of its warships to the lack of commercial shipyard capacity, civilian shipbuilders, government drydocks, force structure, recruits, civilian mariners, and an adequate budget.

How the Navy got into this predicament is complex. The lack of consistent strategic guidance between the chiefs of naval operations, however, is a major cause. The chiefs of naval operations’ pursuit of individualistic and inconsistent strategic guidance for the Navy’s forward progress is one of the principal reason for the Navy’s seabag of problems. The Navy cannot get its act together, because each service chief has a different act for the Navy, beginning every four years. Too often chiefs of naval operations have produced strategic documents littered with generalities, aspirational desires, and insubstantial arguments to express their rationale for the Navy’s national defense contribution. Moreover, this parade of different guidance documents from chiefs of naval operations sends a misleading message to Congress and the public that the departing chief of naval operations got it wrong, and now the incoming chief of naval operations will make it right with a new plan. The cumulative result is the Navy acts without strategic intent, neglects strategic planning, focuses on short-term issues, and makes incremental decisions. I blame the chiefs of naval operations.

Over the last 30 years, I have had substantive involvement in the production of national and service-level strategies. From 2011 to 2022, as a member of the senior executive service, I supported successive chiefs of naval operations, serving on their strategy and concepts staff. This experience has taught me the timeless truth, in the words of Hal Brands, that strategic guidance “allows us to act with purpose in a disordered world; it is vital to out-thinking and out-playing our foes.” Indeed, when Adm. James D. Watkins was the chief of naval operations, he had a similar opinion, declaring the famous 1980s Maritime Strategy as the Navy’s “bedrock of planning, programming, and operations throughout today’s Navy.”

During my assignments on the Navy staff, I had no role in producing the strategic guidance I critique below. I wrote this article, however, because the personal strategic guidance produced by the service chiefs no longer adequately serves the purpose cited by Brands and Watkins. I also wrote this for another reason: As the final 2024 report by the Commission on the National Defense Strategy ominously warns, “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.” America needs to face unprecedented threats with urgency. And that starts with strategy.

Become a Member

Why the Need for Strategic Consistency Between Chiefs of Naval Operations

Consistency between chiefs of naval operations is a prerequisite to maintain and transform the Navy’s force structure, not in response to, but in anticipation of, technological advancements and changing threats. The Navy’s force mix in terms of capabilities and numbers cannot be changed in less than a decade. Continuity of the Navy’s strategic approach is required. Since the Navy’s forward progress does not occur in a four-year increment reflecting a service chief’s tenure in office, there must be a high degree of consistency across them. Furthermore, the long lead times required to accomplish many forward progress objectives (i.e., building ships, aircraft, and weapon systems) demand a high level of consistency.

The Navy needs each service chief to build upon what has happened before so that it can benefit from continuous unity of effort. The service requires a consistent planning process, not an entirely new version, to accompany the incoming service leader’s new strategy. The challenge is to sustain consensus in a planning and acquisition process that runs a decade or more and is instigated by a chief of naval operations who serves four years. The 1980s Maritime Strategy linked Admirals Thomas B. Hayward, James D. Watkins, and Carlisle A.H. Trost and gave them continuity to their work with a shared understanding and commitment, no matter their personal feelings.

In addition, only the chiefs of naval operations can ensure the Navy staff maintains a strategic focus. They alone can direct the staff to keep its focus on the Navy’s strategic direction, ensuring it drives force planning and the resource allocation process.

The Identity Politics of Being Chief of Naval Operations

Chiefs of naval operations seem to believe that they must differentiate themselves from their predecessors and mimic American presidents with their naval versions of presidential campaign platforms. Using snappy nautical titles, pedestrian alliterative bullets, and lots of the possessive “my,” but falling short on the specifics of “how,” each service chief personally authors a strategic document to describe the actions they want to move the Navy forward during their four-year tenure. Recent examples include: Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert‘s Sailing Directions (2011) with annual Navigation Plans updates, Adm. John M. Richardson’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority 1.0 (2016) and 2.0 (2018), Adm. Michael M. Gilday’s Navigation Plans (2021 and 2022), and Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy (2024).

Individually authored, these documents addressing the Navy’s forward progress are the Navy’s capstone true strategic guidance to define priorities for allocating its resources. They are the strategic documents that matter the most to the chiefs of naval operations. These documents convey to internal and external Navy audiences their most important set of policies for implementation above all other guidance documents, to include the tri-service strategies, such as A Cooperative Strategy for 21st-Century Seapower (2007 and 2015 editions) and the 2020 Advantage at Sea.

These tri-service strategies address the national defense role of an integrated Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard and ostensibly represent the Navy’s apotheosis for strategic guidance. Most chiefs of naval operations, however, do not consider the tri-service strategies as higher-level guidance to methodically follow, beyond offering a complimentary shout-out in their own guidance documents. The tri-service documents have little value for shaping Navy guidance for force planning and conducting resource allocation.

Plans, Not Strategies

The unclassified guidance documents authored by the chiefs of naval operations are aspirational strategic plans, usually containing numerous lists of objectives, priorities, and principles, and not conventional Clausewitzian strategies with clear ends, ways, and means. Their planning guidance frequently lacks comprehensive prioritization, explicit assumptions, risk assessments, clear time schedules, assignment of responsibilities, and metrics of success. Furthermore, their plans lack clear roots to the strategies that they are supposed to implement. Most importantly, these plans lack any effort to describe the necessary level of resources and budgets required, as well as detailed explanations of how they intend to achieve the stated objectives. For example, in her Navigation Plan, Franchetti sets a major goal to “get platforms in and out of maintenance on time … embrace novel approaches to training, manning, modernization, and sustainment,” with no substantive discussion of how to achieve these goals.

The chiefs of naval operations’ planning guidance commonly falls into four overarching priority bins of naval issues — personnel, current readiness, future readiness, and temporal or other. The first three priority bins are timeless, and most issues and goals addressed in their guidance plans fall within these three bins. So, to be fair, there is some consistency. However, the devil is in the details. Each service chief , nevertheless, feels compelled to rename these three enduring bins of priority issues, add more layers of bins called tenets or principles, pioneer novel frameworks for crafting their guidance, introduce new terms, and relabel their predecessor’s nomenclature to reflect his or her personal preferences. They use the fourth “temporal or other” bin for their individual, high-interest issues, such as Richardson’s quest for the Navy to embrace his short-lived high-velocity learning initiative.

Additionally, most chiefs of naval operations give curt treatment to the enduring bin of future readiness, also called the future fleet or force design bin. With one exception, the strategic guidance for designing the future Navy consists mostly of sweeping, unhelpful generalizations such as this from Greenert’s 2011 Sailing Directions that “new and updated weapons, unmanned systems, sensors, and increased power” will make future ships and aircraft more effective. Richardson, in both his 2016 and 2018 guidance documents, omits any force design guidance. Instead, in May 2017 he offered his nine-page guidance, The Future Fleet, which, despite its length, has little substantive utility. Gilday provides the exception with his second Navigation Plan in 2022, which has four pages describing specific numbers and types of ships and aircraft and their six force attributes. In her 2024 Navigation Plan, Franchetti offers no future Navy guidance, makes no reference to any previous guidance, and mentions her commitment to leaving her successor “a thoughtful blueprint for the future Navy.” Table #1 displays the variations and inconsistencies of the chiefs of naval operations’ frameworks and lexicons in their strategic guidance from 2011 to 2024.

Table #1: Chiefs of Naval Operations’ Inconsistent Approaches for Strategic Guidance from 2011 to 2024

Regarding the incorporation of higher-level national guidance — the national security, defense, and military strategies along with the Defense Department’s policies for “jointness” — the chiefs of naval operations, with one notable exception, respond in an uneven manner. Greenert never mentions any national strategy and mechanically cites the term “joint” three times in his 2011 Sailing Directions, and once with a warning that the Navy must “operate independently when necessary.” Likewise, in his 2016 Design, Richardson never names any national strategies and uses the term “joint” only once. Richardson explains the release of his 2018 Design version to ensure the Navy’s “plans were aligned with updated strategic guidance” outlined in the national strategies, and uses the term “joint” in 11 instances.

In his 2021 guidance, Gilday does not refer to any national strategy and mentions “joint” nine times. Gilday, however, attributes the advent of the classified Joint Warfighting Concept and the 2022 National Defense Strategy emphasizing “long-term competition with China and sustain military advantage against Russia” as two of his three major reasons for publishing the 2022 edition of his guidance. Franchetti is the exception. Her 2024 guidance differs drastically with its full-throated embrace of jointness, using the term “joint” 36 times. To achieve her two strategic ends, she defines two strategic ways, one of which is “Expanding the Navy’s contribution to the Joint warfighting ecosystem.” Franchetti devotes cumulatively almost three pages to expressing her commitment to jointness but does not quote by name any national strategy.

The widespread differences in the chiefs of naval operations’ strategic guidance are not an existential threat to the Navy. These variations, however, undermine the requirements for unity of effort and continuity amongst the chiefs in appearance and fact. Furthermore, inadequately written guidance documents lead to ineffective planning and occasionally uneven results. These differences between chiefs of naval operations weaken these prerequisites. To paraphrase Field Marshal Sir William Slim, the only test for chief of naval operations leadership is success, and in one vital matter — growing the Navy — the service’s leaders have little success. In 2002, the Navy had 292 battle force ships, and in 2024, the number was 296 ships with an official requirement for 381 crewed ships. There are numerous factors, many beyond the chiefs of naval operations’ control, for this outcome; nonetheless, inadequate strategic planning undoubtedly plays a role.

Lastly, some information omitted from the chiefs of naval operations’ strategic guidance results in an insidious consequence. By avoiding the hard up-front thinking to provide guidance on strategic assumptions, risk, the “how,”, and requisite resources, the chief of naval operations defer their determination to deliberations in the Navy’s four-phased annual Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, which has become the Navy’s principal tool for setting priorities and allocating resources. The result is that budgeteers and programmers, who oversee and manage this resource allocation process, simultaneously develop the Navy’s strategic guidance during their platform and capabilities trade-off negotiations, and not the Navy’s strategists. The effect is incremental decision-making and incremental acquisition of ships, aircraft, and weapon systems, not the production of an integrated, connected warfighting machine of ships, aircraft, and weapon systems crewed by well-trained sailors to deliver unmatched air, surface, and sub-surface lethality now and in the future.

An Illusion of Strategic Consistency

Franchetti became the chief of naval operations on Nov. 2, 2023. She released her 2024 Navigation Plan on Sept. 18, 2024. In the intervening 10 months, she conducted Project 33, named after herself as the 33rd chief of naval operations, to assess the Navy’s near-term readiness for a possible war with China in 2027.

Franchetti’s 2024 plan makes wholesale changes to Gilday’s 2022 Navigation Plan with his 18 “coordinating objectives” distributed into his four overarching priority bins. She eliminates two of Gilday’s bins (Capabilities and Capacity) and retitles his other two: Sailors become Warfighters, and Readiness becomes Warfighting. She also adds a new priority bin titled Foundation, an indecipherable title for catch-all objectives. Franchetti subsumes five of Gilday’s 18 objectives into five of her seven “targets” from Project 33. Next, she either renames or eliminates Gilday’s objectives, or adds new objectives for a revised total of 20 versus Gilday’s original 18.

She also stops using Gilday’s adjective-laden substitute term for sea power — Integrated All Domain Naval Power, which Gilday identifies as the Navy’s ultimate objective to deliver. Franchetti reverts to the plain vanilla term “naval power” as the ultimate objective to deliver and introduces a new trendy term, “Joint warfighting ecosystem,” to describe the joint force as “a system in which the layered capabilities of each … military Service[s] enable and are enabled by each other.” Her use of the term “naval power” contradicts the authoritative guidance in the capstone 2020 Naval Doctrine Publication 1, Naval Warfare, to use the traditional term of “sea power.” Table #2 displays her wholesale changes to Gilday’s plan. Note that the seven highlighted objectives depicted on table #2 are Franchetti’s seven “Targets” from her Project 33.

Table #2: Franchetti’s Reconfiguration of Gilday’s Four Overarching Priority Bins and 18 Objectives

Franchetti shares with Gilday an item of strategic consistency regarding the Navy’s enduring bins of priorities but with a confusing twist. Gilday’s 2021 Navigation Plan states his four priorities as “readiness, capabilities, capacity, and our Sailors.” In his Jan. 12, 2021, media availability to discuss this strategic guidance, Gilday states that readiness “continues to be my number one priority” followed by capabilities and capacity. In her January 2024 two-page white paper, America’s Warfighting Navy, Franchetti announces her new priorities as “Warfighting, Warfighters, and the Foundation that supports them.” In an October 2024 forum at the Atlantic Council, however, Franchetti states that her “big picture” priorities are “first Columbia, our number one acquisition priority” and “after that, readiness, capability, and then capacity.” She concludes, “I’m really focused on readiness.”

In her statement, Franchetti uses Gilday’s construct for the Navy priorities — readiness, capabilities, and capacity — and not her construct of warfighting, warfighters, and foundation. Why? Gilday’s priorities do not require interpretation and are easily understandable, especially to non-military persons, and apparently even to Franchetti. This is what happens when chiefs of naval operations want to needlessly differentiate themselves from their predecessors. Congress and the American public can readily comprehend terms like readiness, capabilities, and capacity, whereas Franchetti’s “warfighting” as a substitute term for both readiness and capabilities obscures the Navy’s message. Moreover, her “Foundation” priority term is too abstract to comprehend. This is not a trivial, inconsequential subject to highlight. Her Navigation Plan should provide the common thread that integrates and synchronizes the planning activities and operations of the Navy as a whole and serves as the basis for the Navy’s strategic communications to express its arguments for funding.

In a positive action, Franchetti expresses in the clearest terms a strategic end for her 2024 guidance. The previous guidance by her predecessors uses multiple high-level, generalized terms for strategic ends. Paraphrased examples of these lofty ends are to strengthen the Navy’s warfighting advantage or deliver a Navy for sea control. Franchetti instead writes a very arresting strategic end: “readiness for the possibility of war with the People’s Republic of China by 2027.”

Such clarity to express a key strategic objective is a welcomed change from the previous documents, and reminiscent of the lucidity in the Navy’s famous 1980s Maritime Strategy. Unfortunately, the continuity between these two documents stops there. The 1980s Maritime Strategy provides a vivid, detailed description of a naval war with the Soviet Union. Franchetti’s “How We Fight” section in her guidance has no detailed description of a war with China and how the Navy prevails over the Chinese navy, despite declaring a possible 2027 war with as a strategic end. With no useful explanation of “how,” she simply states, “We establish deterrence and prevail in war when we work as part of a Joint and Combined force” and “The Navy fights in a warfighting ecosystem.” Her anodyne description of naval warfare is simplistic, abstract, and broad, and lacks any real intellectual substance or planning value.

In summary, Franchetti continues this malpractice to incorporate little to no strategic consistency. With her 2024 document, the strategic continuity between chiefs of naval operations remains tenuous.

Not an Empty-Headed Plea

This call for chiefs of naval operations’ strategic guidance consistency is not a mindless requirement for an unbroken set of unchanging goals and priorities from one chief of naval operations to the next. Given the dynamic nature of security threats and technological, political, and fiscal environments, all strategic guidance documents require semi-continuous adjustment to remain relevant and valid. What the Navy does not need, however, is wholesale change every four years for the sake of change. The issue for the Navy is to maintain unremitting momentum of strategic intent, conduct consistent strategic messaging, focus on a continuous set of those Navy issues that extend beyond the tenure of a single individual, and reduce the staff churn from sweeping changes to guidance. As Franchetti stated in her 2024 Navigation Plan, “Right sizing the fleet will be a generational project for the Navy, Congress, and industry.” Generational projects require a high degree of consistency for success as well as necessary adjustments as environmental factors change, but not across-the-board changes every four years, which is what the Navy presently gets. In short, this is a plea for the Navy to have a dedicated process and means to develop its capstone strategic guidance versus its current ad hoc and inconsistent practices. The bottom line is the Navy needs corporate strategic guidance, not an individualistic strategic guidance.

The Benefits of Consistency

Without a doubt, the benefits of strategic consistency between chiefs of naval operations would be enormous. There would be assured continuity of strategic direction over the fielding of major platforms and weapon systems and no requirement for an incoming chief of naval operations to craft from whole cloth a “new” Navy strategic direction. In addition, the chiefs of naval operations would have increased unity of effort on the Navy’s way ahead, as well as the basis for a consistent Navy message for strategic communications. Finally, there would be a welcomed reduction in false starts and nonproductive efforts.

The first benefit has significant consequences for the Navy in terms of its credibility with Congress and the Defense Department. From February 2008 to June 2023, the Navy could not consistently state how many crewed ships it required; the range of numbers went from a low of 313 to a high of 450, and back to today’s 381. Strategic consistency between chiefs of naval operations would have reduced this litany of constantly changing crewed ship numbers. (Obviously, the Navy must adjust the size and composition of its fleet to reflect major changes in threats, operations, and budgets.)

The final benefit also has notable repercussions. The vast expenditure of man-hours pursuing ill-thought initiatives is a colossal waste of resources and talent, not to mention its soul-draining effect on the Navy staff. Service chiefs do themselves and the Navy no favors, causing incredible political and staff churn that no one wants to report to the chiefs of naval operations, when each has a “new” vision, plan, or strategy or some management fad to push. Examples abound, such as the infamous 1980s Total Quality Leadership initiative or the extraordinary implementation effort, and eventual quiet death, of the “Line of Effort Purple: Expand and Strengthen Our Network of Partners” in both versions of Richardson’s A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority.

A collateral benefit derives from conducting the hard up-front thinking to provide guidance on strategic assumptions, risk, how, and requisite resources in lieu of the present practice to defer their determination to Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution deliberations. Up-front development of comprehensive guidance would ensure the resource allocation process serves the strategic guidance, not vice versa. All strategic guidance is shaped and informed by available resources. That, however, is not the Navy’s norm. The Navy needs to avoid the development of strategic guidance by its programming and budgeting process.

How to Achieve Consistency

To achieve strategic consistency between incumbents, the chiefs of naval operations need to carry out the three painless steps listed below. The resources are readily available; it is simply a matter of resetting priorities for what is more important. And what could be more important than Franchetti’s statement about the possibility of the U.S. Navy fighting a global war with China in 2027? Her statement should concentrate the minds of all Navy leaders as if they were facing an imminent hanging, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson. If Navy leaders sincerely subscribe to her strategic end, then they and the entire Navy should start thinking and acting like the Navy did in the 1930s when it prepared to defeat the Imperial Japanese Navy.

A Dedicated Strategic Planning Staff

Franchetti should stop the ad hoc production of Navy capstone strategic guidance by one-off project groups such as her honorific Project 33, kitchen cabinets, or transition teams. She should do what most chief executive officers in the corporate world do: stand up a dedicated strategic planning staff to produce, implement, monitor, measure, and update — on a continuous basis — Navy capstone strategic guidance, reporting directly to the chief of naval operations. The key is to centralize the production, implementation, and monitoring of all Navy capstone documents addressing the overarching direction for the Navy to plan, program, and budget the readiness of current and future forces to support national strategy.

Franchetti has a readily available source for establishing a strategic planning staff. She needs to repurpose her existing commander’s action group and place it under the leadership of a post-command carrier strike group rear admiral with a civilian senior executive service member as the deputy along with a much-increased staff. By reducing the large number of commander’s action groups scattered across the offices of Navy three-star admirals, Franchetti has a large pool of talented officers for the increased manpower that the new strategic planning staff requires. These three-star commander’s actions groups act are not nearly as important to the Navy’s future as the strategic planning staff.

The Process

Franchetti should establish a deliberate strategic planning process to generate strategic consistency between the service chiefs. There are numerous models from the military, industry, and academia to draw upon. It is critical that this process include periodic “big tent” three-star review of strategic planning activities and products, as well as the solicitation of input by deputy chiefs of naval operations, fleet commanders, and force and systems commanders, and something similar for periodic “small tent” review at the four-star level. One of the participants at these two events will surely be the next chief of naval operations. And it would be prudent for that individual to be prepared to hit the ground running with an update plan in hand on the first day as chief of operations and not wait for 10 months to do so, as experienced by Franchetti.

She also should eliminate the practice of the three-star type commanders publishing their own visions for the Navy’s aircraft, ships, and submarines — Navy Aviation Vision 2030–2035 for aircraft, Surface Warfare: The Competitive Edge for surface ships, and Commander’s Intent 4.0 for submarines. There should only be one vision for the Navy’s forces, and that is the vision approved by the chief of naval operations in a single document drafted by the new strategic planning staff.

Lastly, Franchetti should invite the secretary of the Navy jointly sign all chief of naval operations–originated strategic guidance documents to foster a comprehensive whole-of-Navy approach to force planning between the Navy staff and the Secretariat. Admiral Hayward and Watkins could not, on their own, employ this whole-of-Navy approach on the naval acquisition system, especially to the Naval Systems Commands, as they did not have the authority to do so. The prevalent Navy staff attitude that the responsibilities for acquisition and requirements are clearly divided between the secretary and the chief of naval operations is incorrect and artificial. The secretary can legally be involved in strategy development and force planning. Furthermore, Navy uniformed leaders should not forget that while the chief of naval operations owns the development of the Navy’s budget, it is the secretary of the Navy who owns the budget’s execution and approves any budget reprogramming requested by the chief of naval operations. A stronger relationship between the secretary and the chief of naval operations would promote a whole-of-Navy approach to force planning by using one common set of strategic guidance documents for unity of effort from the fleet to the naval systems commands, and not the current bifurcated approach with Franchetti’s Navigation Plan and the Secretary’s separate plan.

Leadership

Franchetti and all subsequent chiefs of naval operations should keep the strategic planning staff in place. They need to make it work as envisioned. If a chief of naval operations is unhappy with its products, then she or he should bring a different person to run the show, but the organization itself needs to retain its role rather than being shoved aside and replaced with a new, favorite staff group. The key is for the service chiefs to select their director and have confidence in their staff. The chiefs of naval operations ought to keep the staff focused on its overarching mission. No matter how tempting, the chiefs of naval operations should not employ this staff as “firefighters” to extinguish the daily “helmet fires” and corrupt its purpose. The chiefs of naval operations should not convert the strategic planning staff into their special projects office. Moreover, the chiefs of naval operations cannot control this staff so tightly that it becomes identified exclusively and personally with him or her because the principal’s eventual departure may terminate the staff’s usefulness and influence to the incoming chief of naval operations. The strategic planning staff requires continuity and longevity for mission success, avoiding the “cult of four-star personality.” On a more minor note, if the moniker “Navigation Plan” sticks for all subsequent chiefs of naval operations after Franchetti, they should stop calling it the Chief of Naval Operations’ Navigation Plan. It’s not. It is the Navy’s Navigation Plan. And in the same vein, the chiefs of naval operations should stop using the possessive “my” and use “our” instead.

Conclusion

In 1988, respected Congressional Research Service defense analyst Ronald O’Rourke wrote a compelling essay in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine for the Navy to maintain strategic consistency between chiefs of naval operations. As the Cold War’s end approached, he recommended that the Navy not arbitrarily discard its powerful and successful organizing concept — the 1980s Maritime Strategy. He suggested, instead, that the Navy build upon its 1980s achievements by identifying “the key organizing concepts and arguments behind those achievements” and examining whether they could be refined and applied for the 1990s. He did not propose the Navy rest on its laurels, as circumstances always change. O’Rourke, however, noted that the Navy “cannot afford to discard powerful concepts arbitrarily, simply because they are not new, particularly if they might be applicable, with refinements, to emerging circumstances.” His 1988 advice for strategic consistency still rings true for the Navy in 2024. I continue to blame the chiefs.

Become a Member

Bruce Stubbs had assignments on the staffs of the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations from 2009 to 2022 as a member of the U.S. senior executive service. He was a former director of Strategy and Strategic Concepts in the N3N5 and N7 directorates. As a career U.S. Coast Guard officer, he had a posting as the Assistant Commandant for Capability (current title) in Headquarters, served on the staff of the National Security Council, taught at the Naval War College, commanded a major cutter, and served a combat tour with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam during the 1972 Easter Offensive. The author drew upon his forthcoming publication, Cold Iron: The Demise of Navy Strategy Development and Force Planning, to compose portions of this commentary.

Image: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Bruce Stubbs · November 13, 2024

21. Man Charged in Leak of Classified Documents About Israeli Military Plans

DOD employees were wrongly accused.

Man Charged in Leak of Classified Documents About Israeli Military Plans

The man, who worked overseas for the C.I.A., was arrested on Tuesday by the F.B.I. and faces two counts of violating the Espionage Act.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/us/politics/israel-iran-leak.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

Israeli tanks near the border with Gaza last month. The information in the leaked documents is highly classified and shed light on a possible strike by Israel on Iran.Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters

By Adam Goldman and Seamus Hughes

Reporting from Washington

Nov. 13, 2024

Updated 8:35 a.m. ET

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A C.I.A. official has been charged with disclosing classified documents that appeared to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this year, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.

The official, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He was arrested by the F.B.I. on Tuesday in Cambodia and brought to federal court in Guam to face charges.

The documents were prepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and information collected by U.S. spy satellites. It conducts work in support of clandestine and military operations.

Mr. Rahman, who worked abroad for the C.I.A., was set to appear in Guam on Thursday.

The information in the documents is highly classified and details interpretations of satellite imagery that shed light on a possible strike by Israel on Iran. They began circulating last month on the Telegram app. U.S. officials have previously said that they did not know from where the documents had been taken, and that they were looking for the original source of the leak.

Court documents said Mr. Rahman held a top secret security clearance with access to sensitive compartmentalized information, which is typical for many C.I.A. employees who handle classified materials.

The C.I.A. declined to comment.

The F.B.I. acknowledged last month that it was investigating the leak, saying that it was “working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and intelligence community.”

The bureau is responsible for investigating violations of the Espionage Act, which outlaws the unauthorized retention of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.

Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Adam Goldman

22. The Axis of Resilience: Israel Is Underestimating Iran and Its Allies

Excerpts:

History suggests that Israel’s military actions are unlikely to succeed without a comprehensive political solution, especially when those actions are conducted outside its own territory. Instead, the Israeli campaign will probably result in an even more unstable Middle East, one in which genuine peace is only a distant possibility. Israeli massacres of civilians, which have been condemned by the United Nations and by human rights organizations, have proved devastating for civil society and are being used by axis groups to foster their ideology of resistance. Somewhat counterintuitively, the populations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria will now find it even more challenging to insist on accountability from the axis groups that govern their everyday lives, much less to demand reforms. These civilians, and not the members of the axis, will be the greater long-term casualties of Israel’s total war.

Rather than enabling Israel’s ruthless strategy, therefore, international actors need to find a political settlement that begins with a cease-fire to the bloody wars in Gaza and Lebanon. The next step should be to bring in the governments linked to the axis to negotiate a broader settlement that takes into account the true nature of the power dynamics in the region. Without such an inclusive approach, regional conflict in the Middle East is destined to persist, to the detriment of future generations.

The Axis of Resilience

Israel Is Underestimating Iran and Its Allies

By Renad Mansour

November 13, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Renad Mansour · November 13, 2024

In response to Hamas’s October 7 attack last year, the Israeli government launched a regional war meant to reshape the Middle East. Israel specifically targeted the so-called axis of resistance, a network of groups allied with Iran that includes Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, and parts of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq. Working on a scale that dwarfs previous efforts against the axis, Israel has spent the past year trying to destroy the network’s political, economic, military, logistical, and communications infrastructure. It has also undertaken an unprecedented campaign against the axis’s leadership, killing the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah and several senior commanders in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The ferocity of the Israeli offensive, which has been bolstered by advanced technologies and a strategy of total war that flattens and depopulates neighborhoods and cities, will significantly alter the balance of power in the Middle East. Yet for all its undeniable military superiority, not to mention its support from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, Israel is unlikely to eradicate the organizations and regimes that belong to the axis in the way it hopes. Time and again the axis has demonstrated an adaptability and a resilience that attest to the deep connections its member groups maintain within their own states and societies. What’s more, the transnational relationships that compose the axis mean that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the other member organizations are best understood not merely as discrete nonstate actors or insurgent armed groups but as interlinking nodes of durable political, economic, military, and ideological networks.

These networks, which are regional and sometimes even global, have allowed the members of the axis to accommodate various shocks, including military setbacks, such as the assassination by the United States of its de facto leader, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, in January 2020; economic collapses, such as the crippling sanctions from U.S. President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign and the Lebanese banking crash of 2019, which dissolved the financial accounts of many member groups; and popular uprisings, such as the protests that at various times contested the authority of the axis in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. Despite these challenges, axis members—and the axis as a whole—have drawn on support from their local states and communities and from one another to survive.

The historical resilience of the axis of resistance suggests that Israel will find it difficult to eliminate groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. In all likelihood, the Israeli strategy of total war will continue to yield short-term tactical victories that degrade the capabilities of militant groups and states, forcing them into a kind of survival mode for a time. But without a political solution that comes to terms with the social embeddedness of the groups, the axis will likely draw again on local sources of influence, along with its transnational connections, to reconfigure itself at the local and regional levels. Since October 7, in fact, smaller groups within the axis have seized the moment to strengthen their alliances. While Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC endure the brunt of the Israeli offensives, groups such as Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen have capitalized on the turmoil to emerge as formidable regional players.

RESILIENCE THROUGH ADAPTATION

The axis of resistance as it exists today differs significantly from the network that was initially established in the 1980s. Back then, the nascent Islamic Republic of Iran founded and fostered Hezbollah in Lebanon as a means of projecting power. Its aim was to “export the revolution” and employ “forward defense” through asymmetric deterrence against perceived threats, namely Israel. Iran strategically replicated this model across various countries. Around the same time that it founded Hezbollah, for instance, Iran established Iraqi Shiite groups such as the Badr Corps, which played a role in toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime and seizing power in post-2003 Iraq. In the 1990s, Iran bolstered Palestinian factions such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas, thereby helping enhance their influence. And in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings, Iran extended its support to Assad in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, further solidifying its regional network.

What fundamentally sustained these groups was a deep reliance on their local governing regimes and social bases. They embedded themselves within the fabric of their respective states to such an extent that the formal heads of government in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Gaza are all either members of groups that belong to the axis or were chosen with those groups’ support. Furthermore, transnational ties among the groups have served as a crucial insurance policy during periods of shock.

An early test of the axis came in 1992, when Israel assassinated Abbas al-Musawi, who was the secretary-general of Hezbollah. At the time, a major Israeli newspaper proclaimed that “the era of conflict with Hezbollah in its comfortable playground has ended.” Despite the attack, however, Hezbollah was able to reconstitute itself. The party leveraged local support by rallying the Lebanese Shiite community and securing backing from Iran, which provided financial aid, military training, and strategic guidance. This robust support network enabled Hezbollah to not only recover but also expand its influence. Under the guidance of its Shura Council and Hassan Nasrallah, Musawi’s successor, Hezbollah eventually became strong enough that it was able to force Israel from Lebanese territory in 2000. This triumph, coupled with the 2006 war in which Hezbollah fought Israel to a standstill—an unprecedented feat for Arab militias—greatly enhanced its reputation. It also ushered in a formidable new incarnation of the axis of resistance.

Another challenge to the axis came in 2011, when the Assad regime in Syria faced an existential threat in the form of a civil war. Protests against the regime, which initially sought reforms, were followed by an armed uprising fought by groups—with backing from Turkey and the Gulf states—demanding regime change. Once again, however, the axis was able to adapt in ways that allowed it to overcome this crisis. Assad was aided in part by important connections that the axis made with states outside the region: most significantly, Russia came to Assad’s rescue and became an influential global partner for the network. But Assad’s regime also benefited from the assistance of other axis members. Under the strategic direction of Soleimani, the IRGC’s Quds Force, along with Iraqi Shiite armed groups, began constructing a vital land bridge to transport supplies, weapons, and personnel from Iran and Iraq into Syria. Hezbollah fighters were eventually deployed to the frontlines of the civil war, where they played a crucial role in quelling the armed uprising. (Although initially reluctant to enter the Syrian conflict because of opposition from its local supporters, Hezbollah was compelled by Iran to intervene.) As Assad’s government teetered on the brink of collapse, Hezbollah stepped in decisively to safeguard the regime and prevent the emergence of a new regime in Damascus that would be hostile to the axis.

The axis of resistance as it exists today differs significantly from the network that was established in the 1980s.

The 2011 uprisings also led to the Houthis’ formal integration into the axis of resistance. Following the overthrow of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Iranian support became instrumental in transforming the Houthis from a local armed group into a formidable military force. By providing financial aid, advanced weaponry, and military training, Iran enabled the Houthis to enhance their operational capabilities. This assistance, coupled with local support bases, allowed the Houthis to seize control of Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in 2014 and to maintain their dominance against a Saudi-led coalition.

In addition to military attacks, the axis of resistance has also faced economic assaults in the form of sanctions. During the early years of this century, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its growing influence prompted an international coalition led by the United States to levy new sanctions against Iran and its allies within the axis. The sanctions increased dramatically in 2018, when Trump reneged on the Iran nuclear deal and launched his maximum pressure campaign. This campaign was intended in part to reduce Iranian oil exports to zero, thereby stripping the regime of a crucial revenue source. The sanctions devastated Iran’s economy, but they did not halt the regime’s oil trade. Instead, Tehran found ways to sell its oil through informal markets. With the help of its allies in the axis of resistance, Iran used these markets to trade energy resources, fund military operations, and gain access to U.S. dollars. In Iraq, for example, Iran worked with the rest of the axis to combine Iranian and non-Iranian fuel before selling it to countries in Asia. The revenues from this trade allowed Iran to purchase weapons components and ship them to its allies throughout the region. It also gave the axis additional global connections in the form of Chinese oil buyers.

The last major challenge that the axis of resistance faced before Israel’s post–October 7 offensive against Hamas and Hezbollah was the assassination of Soleimani by the United States in January 2020. Soleimani had helped found the axis, and his role as its de facto leader, as well as his top-down command style, meant that his death was a major setback for Iran and its allies. Yet even though the attack sent shock waves through the network—axis member groups in Iraq went underground—in the end, it demonstrated the adaptability of the axis to deal with serious threats.

After Soleimani’s death, the axis transitioned from a top-down Iranian-driven network into a more horizontally integrated alliance. Iran retained a pivotal role in setting the axis’s strategic direction. But the new structure allowed the other members greater autonomy and more independent interactions with both Tehran and one another. In the reformed axis, Hezbollah’s Nasrallah became an important broker: he provided regular strategic guidance to Esmail Qaani, Soleimani’s successor. Qaani aimed to transform the axis into a more formal and coherent institution, empowering its members to take greater control and operate as equals. (This goal was helped, somewhat inadvertently, by the fact that Qaani had neither Soleimani’s deep-rooted personal connections nor his proficiency in Arabic, which made Nasrallah’s guidance even more crucial.)

In Iraq, for instance, Nasrallah and his representative, Mohammad al-Kawtharani, emerged as key advisers to the Baghdad government. They helped quell the Tishreen (October) Uprising that had erupted a few months before Soleimani’s assassination, in which protesters demanded an end to the Iran-allied post-2003 governing regime. Nasrallah and Kawtharani helped to fortify the regime against popular protest. During this period, Kawtharani also significantly expanded Hezbollah’s economic interests across Iraq, thereby filling the void left by Soleimani’s death. These changes, although driven by a negative shock, reshaped the axis once again.

RESPONDING TO ISRAEL'S TOTAL WAR

The previous threats to the axis of resistance pale in comparison to the total war that Israel launched in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack. As before, however, the axis was forced to adapt for its own survival. In particular, it has continued to transition to a more horizontal command structure and has further tightened its transnational connections.

To a much greater degree than in previous conflicts, Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah has drawn a strong response from other allies within the axis, such as the Houthis and Kataib Hezbollah, which has its roots in the Badr Corps of the 1980s and is currently linked to the PMF in Iraq. Previously, these groups were peripheral to the broader dynamics in Middle Eastern conflicts. Over the past year, however, they have deepened both their autonomy and their regional influence.

The Houthis, for instance, began for the first time to use antiship ballistic missiles to disrupt commercial shipping routes. They attacked ships traveling through the Red Sea, forcing freight companies to reroute around Africa, which led to increased costs and delays in the delivery of energy, food, and consumer goods around the world.

Transnational ties among the axis have served as a crucial insurance policy during periods of shock.

Kataib Hezbollah has also sought more involvement and influence in the transnational arena as Hamas and Hezbollah came under attack. In a move that challenged popular conceptions of its role as an Iranian proxy, the group killed three U.S. service members in January 2024 along the Jordanian-Syrian border in an attack on a U.S. military outpost known as Tower 22. This action was undertaken against the wishes of the IRGC, which subsequently pleaded with Kataib Hezbollah to call a cease-fire. The attack nevertheless revealed a new configuration of the axis that involved more proactive and autonomous decision-making from its members.

The post–October 7 reorientation has also fostered closer ties among some of the members of the axis of resistance. For several years, the Houthis maintained only a nominal presence in Iraq, with a single representative in Baghdad. That envoy’s work seemed more symbolic than substantive. In response to Israeli offensives against Hamas and Hezbollah, however, the Houthis deepened their collaboration with the PMF. This intensified cooperation saw an increase in weapons sharing and joint operations and showcased an enhanced capability to attack Israel.

Members of the axis also worked together across borders more concertedly following the assassination of Nasrallah in September. In the aftermath of his death, dozens of Hezbollah’s economic elites and their families relocated to southern Iraq, traveling by land through Syria with Assad’s assistance. They quickly found places to resettle, as Hezbollah had increased its business activities in Iraq after Soleimani’s death, including making investments in infrastructure, land, and residential complexes. These economic links allowed Hezbollah’s elites to move out of the direct line of fire in Lebanon while continuing to generate revenue. Once more, the axis’s transnational connections provided a crucial lifeline for its members during a period of profound difficulty.

THE NEED FOR ACCOUNTABILITY

Israel, of course, understands the transnational nature of the axis of resistance. It is precisely because of this understanding that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government embarked on its total war strategy in response to October 7, a strategy that involved offensives of varying intensity not only against Hamas but also against Hezbollah, Iran, the Assad regime, and other axis members.

Yet its actions over the past year suggest that Israel has strategically underestimated the resiliency of the network and the extent to which a military solution, even one not constrained by international law, can bring about societal change in other countries. The past year has proved that the network is, to a meaningful extent, still able to adapt to military and economic challenges. While many of its member groups will remain underground or close to home during this period of intense conflict, they will nonetheless continue to draw on domestic support, on other members of the network across the region, and on global allies such as Russia and China. To eradicate the network fully is an impossible task and would likely require, at a minimum, demolishing, occupying, and reestablishing new states wherever the groups are embedded. For a country such as Israel, which has been accused of war crimes at the International Criminal Court and the UN, that sort of effort would prompt blowback from key allies and the international community.

History suggests that Israel’s military actions are unlikely to succeed without a comprehensive political solution, especially when those actions are conducted outside its own territory. Instead, the Israeli campaign will probably result in an even more unstable Middle East, one in which genuine peace is only a distant possibility. Israeli massacres of civilians, which have been condemned by the United Nations and by human rights organizations, have proved devastating for civil society and are being used by axis groups to foster their ideology of resistance. Somewhat counterintuitively, the populations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria will now find it even more challenging to insist on accountability from the axis groups that govern their everyday lives, much less to demand reforms. These civilians, and not the members of the axis, will be the greater long-term casualties of Israel’s total war.

Rather than enabling Israel’s ruthless strategy, therefore, international actors need to find a political settlement that begins with a cease-fire to the bloody wars in Gaza and Lebanon. The next step should be to bring in the governments linked to the axis to negotiate a broader settlement that takes into account the true nature of the power dynamics in the region. Without such an inclusive approach, regional conflict in the Middle East is destined to persist, to the detriment of future generations.

RENAD MANSOUR is a Senior Research Fellow and Project Director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House.

Foreign Affairs · by Renad Mansour · November 13, 2024

23. Trump Must Not Betray "America First"

Excerpts:

Republicans in leadership positions on Capitol Hill, however, as well some influential conservative think tanks and prominent right-of-center media figures, still largely hew to the pre-2016 Republican orthodoxy. This group includes some likely nominees to key positions within the second Trump administration. But the ground may be shifting beneath their feet. Consider the case of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose name has been floated as a candidate for Secretary of State. When he campaigned for president in 2016, Rubio ran on a “New American Century” platform that harkened back to the now-defunct neoconservative “Project for a New American Century” think tank founded in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Rubio’s worldview, however, has seemingly evolved toward an emphasis on “American renewal,” which, as he has articulated it, suggests he could shift the collective security burden to U.S. allies and trim aid to Ukraine. This trendline may well accelerate over the next four years.

As those who favor American restraint continue to fill the ranks of the conservative movement, however, the behavior of many elected officials and conservatives who prioritize career progression over ideology will have to change. The Republican Party’s remaining neoconservatives may simply return to the Democratic Party, from which they sprang. This will create a clear opportunity for the Republicans to seize even more advantageous ground on foreign policy, especially if the Democrats maintain an embrace of liberal interventionism that fails to resonate with the electorate.

In the long run, a more decisive Republican shift on foreign policy might drive the Democrats to acknowledge the need for more restraint. Conservative and liberal proponents of restraint will not always see eye to eye—their ideological differences render disputes inevitable. But if the U.S. policymaking class could more broadly agree that the United States has overreached in its foreign policy and must course-correct, that would help ensure that the country does not repeat the deadly mistakes of the last 20 years. The most recent election strongly suggests that this course correction is what American voters want.

Trump Must Not Betray "America First"

The Case for a Foreign Policy That Eschews Primacy and Embraces Restraint

By Dan Caldwell and Reid Smith

November 13, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Public Policy Advisor at Defense Priorities · November 13, 2024

Donald Trump has achieved a political comeback with no parallel since the Gilded Age, when Grover Cleveland won reelection to the presidency in nonconsecutive terms. On his way to this latest victory, Trump provoked a popular backlash against both major political parties’ establishments. This realignment underscores a shift in the GOP’s constituent demographics and illuminates a broader transformation within the electorate itself.

To understand why this seismic shift occurred, it is necessary to examine more fully one of the aspects of Trump’s appeal: his heterodox approach to foreign policy. Trump’s vision of the U.S. role in the world stood in sharp contrast with President Joe Biden’s dogged commitment to the post-Cold War consensus that the United States should remain stalwart in its pursuit of liberal hegemony through global primacy—a doctrine that Vice President Kamala Harris and her surrogates enthusiastically embraced while on the campaign trail. Although voters reported that domestic issues such as immigration and inflation were their main concerns, these priorities reflect—and were driven by—their shifting attitudes toward American foreign policy. Indeed, foreign policy proved a decisive issue for key communities in crucial swing states.

In the aftermath of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy disasters, an increasing number of Americans oppose their country relying heavily on the use of military force to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Instead, they want policy makers to focus on challenges at home and be more cautious when they send America’s service members into combat. Trump’s victory signals that breaking with the post-Cold War orthodoxy on foreign policy is both sound policy and smart politics. Many Republicans in Washington, however, still believe that the United States should pursue an interventionist foreign policy; as of this writing, Trump’s national security team is still taking shape. But regardless of his personnel decisions, U.S. foreign policy must take cues from the election and re-orient around the risk of strategic insolvency, the reality that the U.S. defense industrial base is overworked, and the relative flexibility afforded by a second-term executive relieved of the pressure of reelection. Instead of doubling down on American primacy, the GOP should more fully embrace a foreign policy of realism and restraint that prioritizes American interests over maintaining the hegemony of liberal values worldwide.

BATTLE FATIGUE

Throughout the past two decades, the U.S. government has been mired in conflicts, whether by direct engagement, as in Iraq and Syria, or by extending substantial assistance to one side, as it has done for Ukraine. These prolonged engagements—and the tarnished legacy of the so-called global war on terror—have fueled the American public’s wariness of military entanglements. Many Americans are increasingly skeptical of military interventions that seem to yield limited benefits and impose heavy costs on the United States. In recent elections, this fatigue may well have translated into a preference for candidates who have embraced a more realist approach to foreign affairs.

For example, after the 2016 presidential election, the political scientist Douglas Kriner and the psychologist Francis Shen showed that voters in states with higher rates of recent battlefield casualties had been more likely to choose Trump. They argued that if three key swing states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—had not had higher-than-average battlefield casualty rates, Hillary Clinton, a prominent supporter of America’s post-9/11 wars, might have won there. Similarly, in 2024, the dissatisfaction that Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan—a critical swing state—felt toward Biden’s approach to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East likely contributed to them flipping to Trump.

Harris’s campaign may have exacerbated this dynamic. Compared with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Biden himself, as vice president, Harris was nearly invisible on foreign policy matters. When she hit the campaign trail, however, she and her fellow Democrats embraced a more muscular foreign policy. The Democratic National Committee’s 2024 platform attacked Trump for negotiating with North Korea when he was president and for advocating a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine. It even criticized him for displaying “fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency,” a complete reversal from the party’s stance just four years earlier. In 2020, Harris, then a senator from California, sponsored failed legislation to try to stop the Trump administration from directing the U.S. military to engage in “hostilities” against Iran without congressional authorization, and that year’s DNC platform criticized Trump’s supposed “race to war with Iran.”

Most notably, in her campaign for president, Harris elevated Liz Cheney—a former Republican representative and one of the most prominent neoconservatives in the country—as a chief surrogate and campaigned with her in key swing states. In their joint appearances, they framed Trump’s candidacy as not just a threat to American democracy but to the United States’ primacy in the world. Harris and her campaign surrogates also touted an endorsement from Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, a leading architect of the United States’ disastrous post-9/11 foreign policy.

END RUN

That Democrats would take such a pugnacious stance was perhaps unsurprising in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The premise that Putin’s hostility to liberal democratic values posed a direct threat to the United States resonated with American liberals concerned about the health of democracy at home. Meanwhile, Russia’s partnerships with Iran and North Korea drove Democrats to develop a more hawkish posture toward what Blinken, in these pages, called the “the revisionist powers.” Finally, Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on Israel prompted the Biden administration to take a more interventionist approach to the Middle East, boxing in a Harris campaign that refused to distance itself from the president.

But Harris’s attempt to out-hawk Trump on foreign policy did not deliver her an electoral boost. It now appears more likely that her association with the Cheneys and her tacit approval of Biden’s generous material support to Israel alienated more key voters than it reassured. Her embrace of a more muscular and militaristic foreign policy than Trump espoused may even have hurt her in swing states such as Michigan, dampening the enthusiasm of minority communities—in particular, Black and Arab Americans—who routinely express more opposition to military entanglements compared with the general population.

Harris’s strategy enabled Trump to seize open political terrain and position himself as the putative peace candidate. For starters, he selected Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate. After Vance, a veteran of the Iraq War, joined the Senate in 2023, he rapidly emerged as one of its most vocal skeptics of Biden’s assistance to Ukraine and a prominent critic of America’s recent nation-building wars in the Middle East. Trump chose him over intense opposition from many in the Republican foreign-policy establishment.

Despite the Republican Party’s longstanding tension with the Iranian regime, during his campaign, Trump explicitly said he would not seek regime change in Iran, as did Vance. Certainly, both continue to vocally oppose Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but they made it clear that they do not support a direct conflict with the Islamic Republic. Trump also called for a swift diplomatic resolution to the conflict in Ukraine, conveyed his opposition to fighting a war on Ukraine’s behalf, and mulled freezing or blocking a bid by Ukraine to enter NATO. His campaign’s foreign policy approach was summed up in his victory speech: “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”

HOMEWARD BOUND

For years, Washington’s foreign-policy establishment—often derisively portrayed as “the Blob”—has championed a bipartisan, interventionist strategy aimed at maintaining U.S. primacy abroad. When it emerged from the Cold War as the world’s lone superpower, the United States adopted a foreign policy premised on using its influence to promote American values worldwide. Since 9/11, however, this approach has imposed enormous costs on the United States without making the country dramatically safer or more prosperous. The United States sacrificed thousands of American lives and $8 trillion for wars in the greater Middle East that were largely unrelated to its own safety and core national interests. The expansion of the United States' alliance commitments in Europe, meanwhile, encouraged its wealthy NATO allies to rely more heavily on its support and exacerbated tensions with Russia. As the United States plowed resources into other regions, China emerged as a serious economic and military competitor.

Trump’s stance resonates with a broad spectrum of voters—including moderates and independents—who simply perceive that a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget has not stopped the world from catching fire. After 20 years of failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and places in between, American voters are keen to focus on the home front. For months leading up to the 2024 election, polling demonstrated that Americans were sharply divided on the United States’ responsibility to support Ukraine. These polls hinted that many voters did not see who controls eastern Ukraine or the fate of the so-called rules-based international order as primary concerns. Instead, they had legitimate reason to prioritize issues such inflation, which did enormous damage to the economic well-being of many Americans, and the southern border, where in 2023 a record number of migrants crossed into the United States without prior authorization.

These shifts in voters’ priorities are not new. It has been clear for some time that Americans are becoming more focused on domestic concerns than on bulwarking their country’s global primacy through costly permanent deployments to distant theaters. After Clinton lost the presidential race in 2016, for example, members of the Democratic foreign-policy elite—including Sullivan, the current national security advisor—attempted to address this shift by reframing their foreign policy as one designed “for the middle class.” Although both Biden and Harris largely abandoned this rhetoric, many of their key advisers knew eight years ago what has once again been demonstrated in 2024: that a foreign policy more narrowly focused on U.S. interests increasingly appeals to voters.

To be clear, the direction of U.S. foreign policy remains a secondary issue for the majority of voters, even if it motivated certain constituencies’ choices in crucial swing states. That means, however, that a more prudent engagement with the world is more broadly popular and politically safe, given foreign policy’s lower salience to most voters. Foreign policy may not have decisively cost Harris this election, but it likely contributed to her defeat.

LIMIT SWITCH

Future American candidates should take note lest they suffer a similar fate—not only Democrats but Republicans, too. Trump’s victory will no doubt accelerate a debate that was already roiling the Republican Party between conventional hawks and proponents of a more restrained, “America First” foreign policy. The preferences that voters expressed on November 5 suggest that the Republicans under Trump and Vance should further emphasize a commitment to realism and restraint—and institute policies that uphold such a vision.

First, it is essential to recognize that the United States operates in a world of constraints. The national debt now exceeds $35 trillion; interest payments on that debt surpass defense spending. In the post-pandemic era, the U.S. economy has struggled with inflation, undermining voters’ willingness to subsidize wealthy allies and fund foreign wars in perpetuity. More urgently, the U.S. military continues to face recruiting challenges, and much of its essential equipment is worn down after nearly 25 years of high-intensity operations. It has nearly exhausted its stockpiles of critical munitions and weapons in its support of Ukraine and partners in the Middle East. The United States’ limited industrial capacity makes these stockpiles difficult to replenish.

The Biden administration acted as if these constraints did not exist. The introduction to the 2022 National Security Strategy pronounced that “there is nothing beyond our capacity.” After Hamas’s October 7 attack, the journalist Scott Pelley pressed Biden on “60 Minutes” about whether the United States could afford to assist allies fighting in both Ukraine and Gaza. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense,” Biden replied. Days after the interview, however, his administration was forced to re-direct a shipment of artillery shells from Ukraine to Israel, underscoring the reality that U.S. resources are limited.

Republicans must be honest about the limits of American power. They may find that the public is more comfortable facing this reality than the policymaking class is. Acknowledging the limits on American power does not mean lowering expectations for the United States’ future or accepting its decline. But denying constraints risks strategic insolvency: if the United States becomes unable to meet its expanding global commitments, that will significantly increase the risk of a major economic collapse or security failure.

Trump’s victory will accelerate a debate already roiling the Republican Party.

A foreign policy that prioritizes making Americans safe and prosperous while acknowledging the country’s constraints would improve the United States’ fiscal policies and work to rebuild its industrial base. But these measures alone will not be sufficient: the United States should militarily retrench from regions in which American interests are less pronounced, such as Europe and the Middle East, especially when the United States’ current responsibilities can be outsourced to relatively wealthy and capable allies in those regions who have more at stake. Balancing against Iran, for instance, can be achieved largely by Israel and by the Gulf Arab nations; the United States should not have to substantially backstop or bribe them to pursue their own interests. The United States should ask allies in East Asia to shoulder similarly heightened levels of responsibility in order to manage competition with China through strategic balancing rather than a security spiral that could easily end in a full-on war.

But simply redirecting and focusing the resources the United States has positioned abroad from a variety of theaters toward the Indo-Pacific will not be enough, either. The Republican Party should embrace Trump’s “art of the deal” foreign policy approach. Trump has articulated a desire to negotiate with U.S. adversaries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia to de-escalate tensions and avoid fresh conflicts. This approach is not new; it could also be called tough-minded diplomacy. It is how Republican presidents conducted foreign policy throughout most of the Cold War. President Richard Nixon, for instance, restored relations with China and achieved détente with the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan brokered agreements with Moscow to slow the arms race. His successor, President George H.W. Bush, managed the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Warsaw Pact with deft diplomacy. Only after the Cold War ended did a neoconservative foreign policy consensus come to dominate the American right—and diplomacy became a dirty word for Republicans. If Trump does prioritize diplomatic dealmaking, other Republican officials—particularly those in Congress and the national-security bureaucracy—should support his efforts instead of impeding them, as happened during his first term.

Republicans in leadership positions on Capitol Hill, however, as well some influential conservative think tanks and prominent right-of-center media figures, still largely hew to the pre-2016 Republican orthodoxy. This group includes some likely nominees to key positions within the second Trump administration. But the ground may be shifting beneath their feet. Consider the case of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose name has been floated as a candidate for Secretary of State. When he campaigned for president in 2016, Rubio ran on a “New American Century” platform that harkened back to the now-defunct neoconservative “Project for a New American Century” think tank founded in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Rubio’s worldview, however, has seemingly evolved toward an emphasis on “American renewal,” which, as he has articulated it, suggests he could shift the collective security burden to U.S. allies and trim aid to Ukraine. This trendline may well accelerate over the next four years.

As those who favor American restraint continue to fill the ranks of the conservative movement, however, the behavior of many elected officials and conservatives who prioritize career progression over ideology will have to change. The Republican Party’s remaining neoconservatives may simply return to the Democratic Party, from which they sprang. This will create a clear opportunity for the Republicans to seize even more advantageous ground on foreign policy, especially if the Democrats maintain an embrace of liberal interventionism that fails to resonate with the electorate.

In the long run, a more decisive Republican shift on foreign policy might drive the Democrats to acknowledge the need for more restraint. Conservative and liberal proponents of restraint will not always see eye to eye—their ideological differences render disputes inevitable. But if the U.S. policymaking class could more broadly agree that the United States has overreached in its foreign policy and must course-correct, that would help ensure that the country does not repeat the deadly mistakes of the last 20 years. The most recent election strongly suggests that this course correction is what American voters want.

DAN CALDWELL is a Public Policy Adviser at Defense Priorities and former Vice President of Foreign Policy at Stand Together.

REID SMITH is Vice President of Foreign Policy at Stand Together.

Foreign Affairs · by Public Policy Advisor at Defense Priorities · November 13, 2024

24. Discovery of over 2,000,000,000 tons of rare Earth mineral found in US could make country the new 'world leader'

Seems like an incredible number. Too good to be true?

Discovery of over 2,000,000,000 tons of rare Earth mineral found in US could make country the new 'world leader'

search.app2 min

November 12, 2024

Updated 12:05 13 Nov 2024 GMTPublished 19:00 12 Nov 2024 GMT

https://www.uniladtech.com/news/discovery-2-trillion-tonnes-rare-earth-mineral-us-112183-20241112

Rebekah Jordan

It could change the future of US manufacturing

View Original

Following the election, billionaire Elon Musk has been warning that the US economy is looming towards bankruptcy and urging President Donald Trump to consider Bitcoin as a solution to the country’s ever-increasing debt.

However, America might have just found a new path to financial strength after a discovery of incredibly rare materials was made in the country.

Right now, China leads the world in manufacturing, producing 95% of all rare earth minerals and holding over 31% of global manufacturing.

Meanwhile, the US relies on importing about 74% of its minerals and holds only a 15% share in global manufacturing.

But this gap could start to close thanks to a lucky find by American Rare Earths in Wyoming that hit the jackpot with the land they drilled earlier this year.

The team uncovered a treasure trove of rare minerals, including neodymium, praseodymium, samarium, dysprosium, and terbium.

So far, American Rare Earths have only drilled 25% of land in their project so there could be much more to discover.

MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMES/Getty

The kinds of minerals found are widely used in technology such as smartphones, hybrid cars and aircrafts, as well as light bulbs and lamps.

Following a ban on extraction in December 2023, American Rare Earths has been working to break China's record.

The company first started drilling in March 2023 and estimated 1.2 million metric tons of minerals in Wyoming.

In fact, American Rare Earths have actually increased its yield by over two thirds.

According to CEO Don Schwartz: “These results are illustrative of the enormous potential of the project when the resource increased by 64 percent during a developmental drilling campaign, which increased measured/indicated resources by 128 percent.

“Typically, you’ll see the resource decrease as infill drilling takes place – instead, we’re seeing the opposite, with only 25% of the project being drilled to this point."

But American Rare Earths aren't the only ones making discoveries in rare materials after Ramaco Resources came across a deposit of such near Sheridan in Wyoming, valued at around $37 billion.

American Rare Earths

Speaking to Cowboy State Daily, Ramaco Resources CEO, Randall Atkins, said: “We only tested it for 100, 200 feet, which is about the maximum you’d ever want to do a conventional coal mine.

“Much deeper than that, and the cost would be prohibitive to mine for $15-a-ton coal. But there are seams that go down almost to 1,000 feet. So, we’re drilling down into the deeper levels to see what’s down there.”

Despite this, American Rare Earths has dismissed the estimate.

“Our resources is on an order of magnitude larger than the Ramaco Resources number,” said Schwartz.

“If you did the same thing for it, you’d come up with a lot bigger number, but that doesn’t take into account whether you can [mine and process] more economically, or even do it.”

If these discoveries pan out, they could give a huge boost to the US industry, and ultimately help America solidify its position on the world stage.

25. Why We Need to Talk about WMD

Why We Need to Talk about WMD

First we have to convince Congress to wake up

https://almauroni.substack.com/p/why-we-need-to-talk-about-wmd?utm

Al Mauroni

Nov 12, 2024

[Preface] I was done with this post, but I saw this article on the Atlantic Council website and thought it was the perfect intro to illustrating how poorly the national security community talks about countering WMD. MG (ret) Bradley Gericke, a former armor officer, and Donna Wilt, formerly posted at USANCA, are concerned about adversarial nations using nuclear weapons on the battlefield and believe that the Army’s “generation of neglect toward its readiness to counter such weapons of mass destruction” is why we’re not ready to fight and win on a nuclear battlefield.

Now I agree that the Army’s attitude toward countering WMD has significantly degraded, and I also agree that the U.S. military is ill-prepared to fight a nuclear conflict that escalates from a conventional military crisis. But I would never suggest that the concept to counter weapons of mass destruction was the same thing as nuclear deterrence and nuclear weapons operations. They are and should be considered as distinct but complementary operations. This article continues a bad practice by many national security professionals who say “WMD” when they only mean “nuclear.” It’s bad form. [end preface]1

One of the most difficult parts of federal policy work (and by difficult, I mean hard to institutionalize as good practice) is where the federal government evaluates its efforts to achieve its policy objectives and make appropriate changes as needed to correct its course as necessary. If the elements by which people conduct program assessments are eliminated, then you see an inertia take place a where the federal programs just go on forever just because they’ve always been there. That’s not a good deal for the public. But after the U.S. government failed to find a active WMD program in Iraq (circa 2005), interest in assessing this national security topic began to wane.

In 2007, the DoD Inspector General examined the department’s implementation of its combating WMD programs and found them wanting. Specifically, DoD needed to:

coordinate the work of the 40 offices involved in combating WMD
clearly identify the use of $917 million budgeted in FY 2004 for programs aimed at combating WMD
consistently report on whether it accomplished the goals for combating WMD and
propose legislation that provided for interagency coordination on combating WMD issues

There was some positive change. The DoD did update its DoD directive on responsibilities to combat WMD, included significant notes about WMD in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (and we never saw as much emphasis in later QDRs), approved a “National Military Strategy to Combat WMD” (which was in the works anyway), approved USSTRATCOM to be the lead for integrating and synchronizing DoD combating WMD efforts (which USSTRATCOM immediately handed off to DTRA), and standardized the definition of WMD (notably, high-yield explosives are not WMD). Since then, things have not been so positive.

In 2008, when Congress decided to terminate the requirement for a “Report on Activities and Programs for Countering Proliferation and NBC Terrorism” effective 2013, I did not speak out - although I was a mid-level counterproliferation analyst, I was never a fan of the report’s “Areas for Capability Enhancement” list.2

In 2013, when Congress eliminated the Section 721 requirement for an “Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions,” I did not speak out because I was not an arms control wonk.3

In 2016, when Congress eliminated the requirement for a “DoD Chemical and Biological Defense Annual Report to Congress” effective 2021, I did not speak out because I was no longer working as a Beltway chem-bio defense analyst.4

In 2019, when the Department of Defense terminated the DTRA Threat Reduction Advisory Committee, there was no one left to speak for me as a counter-WMD analyst.

In 2022, DoD did address WMD in its National Defense Strategy. “Terrorists remain interested in using WMD in attacks against U.S. interests and possibly the U.S. homeland. Dual-use knowledge, goods, and technology applicable to WMD continue to proliferate.” Also, “It is critically important that the Joint Force can fight and win in a chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN)-contaminated environment.” Just don’t look for evidence of the U.S. government’s progress toward those goals.

In 2020, DoD created a “Countering WMD Unity of Effort Council” so that the OSD civilians across the department would talk with the military leadership on WMD issues, notably concerned about the military’s readiness in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility. They met occasionally to talk - and talk - and talk some more - but I’m not sure they really did anything other than applaud the work on a Biodefense Posture Review (which was a horrible product) and create a new DoD strategy for countering WMD that was passable (even if the armed services ignored it). Meantime, the DoD CB Defense Program is working hard to develop countermeasures to fentanyl poisoning and to fund pandemic preparedness efforts.

The General Accountability Office is one of Congress’s arms to report on how the U.S. government is doing on particular issues. The last GAO report of interest related to DoD counter-WMD efforts was written in 2010, when it recommended actions needed to track budget execution for counterproliferation programs and to better align resources with combating WMD strategy. The GAO thought that the Counterproliferation Program Review Committee (CPRC) should do more to highlight appropriations and expenditures as well as prioritize shortfalls. Oh, did I forget to mention, the CPRC is the agency responsible for that “Report on Activities and Programs for Countering Proliferation and NBC Terrorism” that Congress highlighted in 2008 to cease its efforts in 2013? So there is no tracking budget execution for counterproliferation or counter-WMD programs.

The Congressional Research Service has been a little busier, maybe because they proactively investigate issues of congressional interest while the GAO goes where they are directed to investigate. Most of its WMD coverage relating to DoD interests focus on adversarial nations’ nuclear weapons programs or arms control and nonproliferation activities. The exceptions are a study on chemical weapons related to the Syrian use of sarin in 2013 and the Russian use of Novichok agents in 2018 and 2020. I use this CRS report dated 2008 - “Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons and Missiles: Status and Trends” - as a reference for teaching. It’s a really good assessment as an open-source reference and I wish the CRS would update it today.

Congress used to have an Office of Technology Assessment when they understood that they might have difficulty understanding technologies of military concern such as weapons of mass destruction. Before Newt Gingrich killed the office in 1996, they wrote this very nice report on “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks” and “Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Nothing like it today to guide congressional discussions on this topic, which is reflected in the lack of any serious congressional discussion on this topic, even in the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

So other than listing to this old man yell at the sky, why should we talk about WMD? A colleague referred this article to me in which the author makes the argument that large drone swarms should be categorized as weapons of mass destruction. While I was initially skeptical, I grew increasingly convinced, at the least, that they should be examined under the law of armed conflict as unconventional weapons with mass casualty capabilities. The author notes:

It is an established principle of customary international law that weapons which are incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets are prohibited and that their use would amount to an indiscriminate attack, banned under customary law and under article 51(4)(a) of Additional Protocol I (API) of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

On the other hand, the principle of proportionality (article 51(5)(b)) refers to the proscription to cause excessive incidental or involuntary harm to the civilian population in relation to the military advantage anticipated. Notably, a direct attack on civilians, in violation of the principle of distinction (API article 48, 51(2), 52(2)), may be inferred from the indiscriminate character of the weapon used, particularly if the “incidental” harm is excessive.

The scalability of drone swarms, that is, their possibility to vary in size, ranging from just a few units to thousands, is what increases their potential for harm. Thus, a drone swarm becomes a WMD when it is large enough to meet the same threshold as other CBRN armaments in terms of destructive capabilities, regardless of the munition used.

On this note, the author argues that large drone swarms will be inherently indiscriminate and disproportionate. Once the swarms scale in the thousands, its operator’s cognitive capacity would simply fail to meaningfully control the sheer number of drones. This loss of control makes the drones intrinsically unpredictable, causing failures to be infinitely possible and, in some instances, even inevitable.

My concerns about opening up the term “WMD” or unconventional weapons to weapons other than nuclear, biological, and chemical, has largely been one about 1) scale of the attack being significantly high enough to warrant an arms control focus, and 2) official (legal) designation by the United Nations as being an unconventional weapon. But here we have a strong argument that references international law. And to the author’s credit, she notes this exact problem that we have no quantitative measure for what constitutes “mass destruction” or “mass casualties.”

Although currently there is no specific threshold on the required level of destruction for any weapon to be considered a WMD, the scalability of drone swarms could easily meet any of the generally accepted criteria in this regard. Granted, a small cluster of drones may not be considered as WMD, unless they are equipped with CBRN. Actually, in said scenario those drones would only be vehicles, not WMD themselves.

It’s a very solid and smart argument, and it’s a short paper so I encourage you to take a look at it. The only challenge is that it will never gain traction in the United States because the White House, DoD, and Congress are increasingly eschewing the modern threat of WMD and how the U.S. military should address them.5 The term “WMD” has lost a lot of its cache but I will say that the arms control community is about the only group who could still use the term correctly. Maybe it’s a topic worth discussing.

I really want to emphasize that the very large U.S. nuclear enterprise does not give two shits about countering WMD operations and its very small technical community. The nuclear operators understand that nuclear weapons are the most significant existential threat to the nation, and they don’t care about CBRN defense readiness, supporting arms control and nonproliferation activities, or incident response. Countering WMD has always been about the threat of small nations with CB weapons and/or a very small nuclear arsenal. The nuke guys know it and they don’t talk counter-WMD, they talk nuclear options.

Public Law 110-181, National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2008, section 1256, extended the termination of the Counterproliferation Program Review Committee from 2008 to 2013. The addendum to its 2011 report is their last report of record.

Public Law 112-277, Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2013, section 310, repealed the requirement for the report because the intel community said the topic would be covered in two or three sentences within its unclassified annual threat assessment reports. Also in 2013, all kinds of excitement about Syria’s chemical weapons program, evidently did not move Congress to reconsider killing these two reports.

Public Law 114-328, section 1061, National Defense Authorization Act for 2017, with no clear rationale other than Congress was getting too many DoD reports and wanted to cut back on what they thought was too much information. Popular saying in the military, “An organization does well only the things the boss checks.” Now no one checks what we do in CBRN defense.

I will note for the record that the GAO and CRS has provided Congress with a lot of reports on WMD with regard to DHS’s efforts, but that’s because some congressional representatives like to knock DHS about how it spends its money. It’s not as if Congress has adequately evaluated DHS’s counter-WMD efforts and resourced it to be successful. But at least DHS is getting attention, which is more than what DoD’s counter-WMD issues get.

26. Trump Might Not Lead a U.S. Retreat from the World Stage After All

Trump Might Not Lead a U.S. Retreat from the World Stage After All

Former president Donald Trump and Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) react during a campaign event in Raleigh, N.C., November 4, 2024.(Jonathan Drake/Reuters)

By Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/trump-might-not-lead-a-u-s-retreat-from-the-world-stage-after-all/?utm

November 12, 2024 2:35 PM

His early personnel choices indicate his incoming administration would be willing to use sticks as well as carrots to deal with Russia.

It’s axiomatic that personnel is policy. That can be overstated, but Donald Trump’s cabinet picks do provide us with some clues about how his next administration will govern.

What is the through line that connects Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, Elise Stefanik and Kristi Noem, Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller? It’s not their many shared ideological tendencies — certainly not when it comes to foreign affairs (which is the portfolio many of these nominees will manage). It’s not their complementary managerial styles or their personal demeanor. It’s loyalty. That’s what they can lay a convincing claim to, and that’s what was lacking in Republicans, such as Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, who’ve been shown the door.

If loyalty matters more than the contours of any one particular policy item, we can assume that Trump’s second term will look a lot like the first. Beyond trade and immigration — areas where his passions lie — Trump’s appointees will probably have latitude to set U.S. policy. That’s making some of Trump’s true believers nervous. They thought they were electing the architect of America’s grand retreat from the world stage. But Trump’s cabinet picks suggest that something else is in the offing.

There is no question that Rubio, Waltz, and Stefanik are Israel supporters. As such, they are also hostile toward Iran and the terrorist networks it commands. Likewise, all are more inclined to take a confrontational approach toward China, with the aim of rolling back its malign influence inside the West and deterring it from engaging in expansionist aggression in its neighborhood. It’s a safe bet that the Trump administration will take a proactive approach to securing U.S. interests in the Middle East and in East Asia, not just because his staff are so inclined but because the Republican Party’s voters support those projects.

But what about Europe? What will become of Ukraine’s fortunes and the NATO alliance that has sought to safeguard Kyiv’s sovereignty against absorption into the Russian Federation? That’s a trickier question.

Like so many of their colleagues, these lawmakers have spent the past eight years trying to thread a needle. Their goal was to avoid betraying as much as possible their empirical conception of Russia as hostile to U.S. interests and their understanding that its violent expansion undermines America’s position and that of its allies. They reached the vague conclusion that the GOP’s activist class now regards containing the Kremlin as a fool’s errand.

At the outset of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, Rubio cast himself as a stalwart supporter of Kyiv’s righteous cause. But his outlook shifted as the war dragged on. “At the end of the day, what we are funding here is a stalemate war,” he told an NBC reporter in September following his vote against another tranche of U.S. military aid for Ukraine. He advocated a “negotiated settlement” to the war that “ends hostilities” in a way that “is favorable to Ukraine.”

Waltz’s political evolution followed a similar trajectory. U.S. commitments to Europe’s deteriorating security are delaying America’s forever-stalled pivot to Asia, he told an audience last month. “Is it in America’s interest? Waltz asked. “Are we going to put in the time, the treasure, the resources that we need in the Pacific right now badly?”

So how, exactly, does the U.S. engineer that happy outcome? In remarks to NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Waltz outlined the Trump team’s strategy to achieve the president-elect’s goal of putting an end to the Ukraine conflict on or about Inauguration Day.

Step 1 involves enforcing energy sanctions against Russia and secondary sanctions against the entities that do business with Moscow. Step 2 entails unleashing American energy and ramping up U.S. exports of liquid natural gas to drain the Kremlin’s coffers and to liberate America’s partners who depend on Russian energy exports. Step 3 culminates in a standoff. “We have leverage, like taking the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine as well,” he said. “And then, of course, I think we have plenty of leverage with Zelenskyy to get them to the table.”

Steps 1 and 2 are desirable on their own merits, but they are unlikely to force Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. The Biden White House balked at a robust secondary sanctions regime against Russian oil importers like China and India because it would be difficult to enforce, complicate bilateral relations, and put upward pressure on global energy supplies. It takes time and money to introduce enough U.S.-produced fossil fuels into the market to offset the associated costs, so these are not quick fixes.

The same cannot be said for step 3. Threatening Vladimir Putin with the prospect of increased U.S. support for Ukraine’s defense beyond the point at which Russia can easily absorb the risk doesn’t just speak Putin’s language — it is the essence of deterrence. Waltz’s comments also dovetail with Trump’s pledge to provide Ukraine with “more than they ever got” if Putin proves a recalcitrant negotiating partner.

Now in its third year, Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine looks very little like the one that erupted in February 2022. Kyiv’s forces are under increasing strain amid a Russian advance, which is now augmented by North Korean combat troops. As a reward for its assistance, Russia will reportedly provide North Korea with access to sophisticated nuclear technology and weapons platforms. Ukraine has decimated Russia’s naval presence in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, limiting Moscow’s freedom of action on the high seas and truncating its access to its Middle Eastern allies like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. And Kyiv’s troops still occupy portions of Russian sovereign territory, an offensive push that was likely designed to complicate any effort to freeze the current lines of contact separating Russia and Ukrainian forces in place. Rolling all this back at the negotiating table would be quite a feat.

The status quo on the battlefield is too fluid and the conditions that pertain today too undesirable for both parties to this conflict to envision either of them willingly slouching their way toward peace talks. There will have to be inducements. It’s easy to see how the Trump administration can twist Volodymir Zelensky’s arm, but not Putin’s. Carrots won’t be enough. The Trump team will have to produce sticks, too. And Trump’s personnel preferences suggest he’s open to that prospect.

All this is nerve-wracking to those who believed they were getting in Trump a capitulatory advocate for global retrenchment. Elon Musk, who has not left Trump’s side since Election Day, is firing off posts credulously indulging the revisionist fantasy that Russia was forced into a ruthless campaign of mass murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing by the heedless Americans. His fellow entrepreneur and GOP convention speaker, David Sachs, appears equally unnerved. “The simplest path to peace in Ukraine is to go back to the draft deal signed in Istanbul at the beginning of the war but with realities on the ground (Russia has annexed the 4 oblasts),” he wrote. “Everything else is a non-starter. Further delay only loses more lives & territory.” The plan, put simply, consists of surrender on Ukraine’s behalf. And if the Ukrainians balk at being condemned to unimaginably brutal foreign subjugation, they’ll just have to be made to comply.

That all sounds perfectly feasible when you’re surrounded with like minds in a cloistered environment like social media. But the real world rarely comports with fashionable theories about how it should operate, and the geopolitical landscape always looks far more dangerous from the perspective of the Resolute Desk. These are still early days, and Trump’s own posture could shift toward something less ambiguous tomorrow. But for now, it seems like those who convinced themselves they were electing a president who would wash his hands of American global hegemony were misled.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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END RUN

HOMEWARD BOUND

LIMIT SWITCH

Discovery of over 2,000,000,000 tons of rare Earth mineral found in US could make country the new 'world leader'

It could change the future of US manufacturing

Why We Need to Talk about WMD

First we have to convince Congress to wake up