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Quotes of the Day:
“Society needs more individuals who understand their duty to act, rather than merely asserting their freedom to act. True progress arises from a profound sense of responsibility."
- Seneca, the Younger.
“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”
- African proverb
“A seed grows with no sound but a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is quiet. This is the power of silence… Grow silently.”
- Confucius.
1. Qatar announces Israel-Hamas truce-for-hostages deal that would pause Gaza fighting, bring more aid
2. Pentagon seeks to rapidly build up information-warfare force
3. Israel and Hamas agree to breakthrough deal on hostage release and four-day truce
4. A growing global footprint for China’s space program worries Pentagon
5. Taiwan ruling party powers ahead as chaos engulfs opposition campaign
6. Opinion | Xi Jinping is sending ominous signals on Taiwan
7. (Taiwan) MOFA thanks Japan, South Korea leaders for supporting cross-strait peace
8. The Scandal of Robert Malley
9. White House declassifies intel suggesting Wagner Group is preparing to provide air defense capability to Hezbollah or Iran
10. Kim Jong Un viewed photos of US bases taken from new satellite, state media says
11. US retaliates with airstrikes after militants fire missile at Iraq air base used by American troops
12. Navy's new cyber strategy aims to place a premium on non-kinetic capabilities' role in conflict
13. Nearly half of Americans think the US is spending too much on Ukraine aid, an AP-NORC poll says
14. ‘I’ll bounce back,’ top Marine vows in 1st video since cardiac arrest
15. End of an era: The last class of Marine Scout Snipers graduates on Dec. 15
16. Gaza Is Gen Z’s First Real War
17. Al-Qaeda: A Defeated Threat? Think Again.
18. House Republicans push to boost funding for security initiatives across Indo-Pacific
19. My School Doesn’t Tolerate Anti-Semitism
20. The True Military Assistance Tradeoff Is Between Israel and Taiwan
21. An Alternative Way of Dealing with Human Shields
22.. Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is Stalled, but Not at Sea
24. Hamas’s Asymmetric Advantage
1. Qatar announces Israel-Hamas truce-for-hostages deal that would pause Gaza fighting, bring more aid
I hope all these reports and announcements do not jinx the release of the hostages by the Hamas terrorists.
Qatar announces Israel-Hamas truce-for-hostages deal that would pause Gaza fighting, bring more aid
AP · November 21, 2023
JERUSALEM (AP) — Qatar on Wednesday announced a truce-for-hostages deal between Israel and Hamas that would bring a four-day halt in fighting in a devastating six-week war, win freedom for dozens of hostages held in the Gaza Strip, and also lead to the release of dozens of Palestinian prisoners.
Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said it would announce within a day when the clock will start ticking on the truce, during which 50 hostages will be released in stages in exchange for what Hamas said would be 150 Palestinians prisoners held by Israel. Those freed by both sides will be women and children.
Humanitarian aid to besieged Gaza would also increase.
The announcement came hours after Israel’s Cabinet approved the deal. It capped weeks of indirect Qatari-led negotiations between Israel and Hamas, an Islamic militant group that has ruled Gaza for 16 years. The United States and Egypt were also involved in stop-and-go talks to free some of the roughly 240 hostages held by Hamas and other militants in Gaza.
Hostage releases will begin roughly 24 hours after the deal is approved by all parties, said a senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office made no mention of the release of Palestinian prisoners or increased humanitarian aid when it confirmed the Cabinet had approved the deal.
“The government of Israel is committed to bringing all of the hostages home. Tonight, the government approved the outline for the first stage of achieving this goal,” the office said in a statement.
Ahead of the Cabinet vote, which came after a six-hour meeting stretching into the early morning, Netanyahu said the war against Hamas would resume after the truce expires.
“We are at war, and we will continue the war,” he said. “We will continue until we achieve all our goals.”
Palestinians gather in front of a building hit by an Israeli on the Gaza Strip in Nusseirat refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
A girl weeps as she holds a placard during a protest against Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip, in front of the headquarters of U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) in Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023. An Israeli strike on southern Lebanon killed Tuesday two journalists reporting for the Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV on the violence along the border with Israel, according to the Lebanese information minister and their TV station. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
In welcoming the deal, President Joe Biden emphasized that Netanyahu has committed to supporting an “extended pause” to make sure not only all hostages are released but that humanitarian assistance can be sent to Palestinians in Gaza.
Biden, who is in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for the Thanksgiving holiday, said the agreement should release some American hostages, and added: “I will not stop until they are all released.”
The Israeli government statement said that the truce would be extended an extra day for every additional 10 hostages released by Hamas.
A longer-term lull could lead to pressure, both international and domestic, for Israel to end its war without achieving its goal of destroying Hamas’ military capabilities.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it is standing by to assist any swap in the Israel-Hamas war. Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric met with Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar, as well as Qatari political leaders, earlier this week.
The war erupted on Oct. 7 when several thousand Hamas militants burst across the border into Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage. Most of the dead were civilians, while the hostages include small children, women and older people.
Israel responded with weeks of devastating airstrikes on Gaza, followed by a ground invasion that began over three weeks ago.
More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed during the Israeli offensive, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. It does not differentiate between civilians and militants, though some two-thirds of the dead have been identified as women and minors. Israel says thousands of Hamas militants have been killed.
The invasion has caused vast destruction in northern Gaza, including Gaza City, displaced an estimated 1.7 million people and caused a humanitarian crisis with shortages of food, medicines, fuel and other key supplies throughout the territory.
Israel has rejected growing international criticism and vowed to press ahead until it destroys Hamas’ military and governing capabilities and all hostages are freed. Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, has ruled Gaza since ousting the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority in 2007.
The return of any of the hostages could lift spirits in Israel, where the plight of the captives has gripped the country’s attention. Airwaves are filled with interviews with families of the hostages, who include babies and toddlers, women and children and people in their 80s with health issues.
Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
The families have become a powerful force in Israel, staging mass demonstrations and marches pressuring the government to bring home their loved ones. They have made a central Tel Aviv square their headquarters, where evocative displays like a long white table with seats for all 240 hostages are meant to keep their plight in the public eye.
But the structure of the deal could weaken Israel from various directions.
Any pause would give Hamas and its shadowy leader, Yehya Sinwar, a chance to regroup after suffering heavy losses during the fighting, especially if Hamas drags things out with additional hostage releases.
Israel claims to have killed thousands of Hamas fighters, though it has not presented evidence, and destroyed parts of the group’s underground tunnel system. But Israeli officials acknowledge much of the group’s infrastructure remains intact.
A cease-fire could also add to the already growing international pressure on Israel to halt its offensive as the full extent of damage in Gaza becomes apparent. Even the U.S., Israel’s chief backer, has expressed concerns about the heavy toll on Gaza’s civilian population.
Some three-quarters of Gaza’s population has been uprooted from their homes and are staying in overcrowded and unsanitary shelters.
Many, if not most, will be unable to return home because of the vast damage in the north and the continued presence of Israeli troops there. That could lead to an even worse humanitarian disaster as people remain in shelters or are forced to live in tents through the cold, rainy winter.
And in Israel, the staggered releases of hostages risks triggering divisions between families of those who are freed and those who remain in captivity. Soldiers, for instance, are likely to be among the last to be freed. Families of the soldiers, who include young women who served as spotters along the border, are likely to press the government not to resume the offensive until their loved ones return home as well.
“There are many families and many opinions,” Hadas Kalderon, whose two young children were abducted with their father, told Israel’s Channel 12 TV.
A lengthy truce could also affect Israel’s battle readiness. While Israeli troops are expected to remain in place and the Israeli military said its battle plans remain intact, it will be difficult and risky for the army to leave its forces stationary behind enemy lines.
Asked about a cease-fire, the army’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said: “The army will know how to maintain its operational achievements.”
Hamas may try to declare a victory, but Sinwar will have little to celebrate. Even if he survives and Hamas maintains power, he will emerge to vast destruction that will take years, if not decades, to repair.
In the meantime, fighting continued on Tuesday, with the front line of the war shifting to the Jabaliya refugee camp, a dense warren of concrete buildings near Gaza City that houses families displaced in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.
Israel has bombarded the area for weeks, and the military said Hamas fighters have regrouped there and in other eastern districts after being pushed out of much of Gaza City.
Families of hostages captured by Hamas militants during the Oct. 7 attack have met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet. (Nov. 21) (AP Video/Ami Bentov)
In southern Lebanon, an Israeli strike killed two journalists with Al-Mayadeen TV, according to the Hezbollah-allied Pan-Arab network and Lebanese officials. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. A separate Israeli drone strike in Lebanon killed four Hamas members, a Palestinian official and a Lebanon security official said.
An Israeli officer fires tear gas at Palestinians during a military operation in the Balata refugee camp, West Bank, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)
The Israeli military has been trading fire almost daily across the border with Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and Palestinian militants since the outbreak of the war.
On Tuesday, Gaza’s Health Ministry said that as of Nov. 11 it had lost the ability to count the dead because of the collapse of large parts of the health system.
It believes the actual death toll has risen sharply above the official number of 11,000. Some 2,700 people are missing and believed to be buried under rubble, and hospitals have continued to report deaths from daily strikes, often dozens at a time.
The Israeli military says 68 soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive.
___
Jeffery reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Wafaa Shurafa in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip; Samy Magdy in Cairo; Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem and Colleen Long in Washington contributed.
___
Full AP coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.
AP · November 21, 2023
2. Pentagon seeks to rapidly build up information-warfare force
My question is are we fully and effectively employing the full range of psychological operations capabilities and all our psychological operations forces?
My sense is we are not but I would be happy to learn otherwise.
Of course this is probably a problem with terms and definitions. I think most think of information warfare like this General - it is an enabler to provide information dominance and decision advantage and not about influencing foreign target audiences. Information warfare is such a broad term and has been the catchall (or dumping ground) for every related to information from electronic warfare to computer network attack to data mining and oh yes, way at the bottom of the barrel is PSYOP, the capability borne out of psychological warfare.
Excerpts:
Air Force Lt. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, the commander of the information warfare-focused 16th Air Force, at an event earlier this month said the discipline dominates international competition and shapes the fighting that can follow.
“It’s the essential enabler, as we’re looking to gain information and decision advantage,” Kennedy said at a Mitchell Institute event last week. “We’re employing forces across domains to make sure that we’re ready to seize the initiative in the information domain, and, through our information warfare capabilities, to prevail in conflict and set the conditions for peace, after the conflict, as we’re moving forward.”
Pentagon seeks to rapidly build up information-warfare force
Defense News · by Colin Demarest · November 21, 2023
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military lacks the ability to quickly deploy personnel that can fend off malevolent actors trying to shape public opinion and must act now to build up such “information forces,” according to a newly revealed Pentagon strategy.
Conquering the information ecosystem from social-media chatter to government propaganda is increasingly important as mis- and disinformation proliferate and world powers including China and Russia try to influence foreign affairs from afar.
The Defense Department must “build a process to rapidly deploy teams of information forces, including the reserve force,” and foster a related workforce comprising military and civilian experts, according to the 2023 Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment. Improved recruiting, training and career paths are needed for the effort.
The congressionally mandated document was made public Nov. 17, months after internal publication. Information warfare represents a persuasive brew of public outreach, offensive and defensive electronic capabilities, and cyber operations; it combines data awareness and manipulation to gain an advantage before, during and after major events.
“As this strategy makes clear, our ability to gain and sustain information advantages at the times and places of our choosing are critical to successful operations in the information space,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in the introduction. “Make no mistake: America’s competitors and enemies are moving quickly in the information environment, hoping to offset our enduring strategic advantages elsewhere.”
RELATED
China, Russia propaganda wither as cameras multiply, US admiral says
Among recent examples, he said, was the Russian harassment of a U.S. Air Force drone, which splashed into the Black Sea after a collision in March.
Emerging technologies play a critical role in both waging and foiling influence campaigns, according to the strategy.
Generative artificial intelligence, capable of imitating human interaction, can fuel spam, phishing attempts and impersonation, while automation can flood Facebook or X, formerly Twitter, with misleading and provoking posts. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned of the former. The latter has been seen in the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, the commander of the information warfare-focused 16th Air Force, at an event earlier this month said the discipline dominates international competition and shapes the fighting that can follow.
“It’s the essential enabler, as we’re looking to gain information and decision advantage,” Kennedy said at a Mitchell Institute event last week. “We’re employing forces across domains to make sure that we’re ready to seize the initiative in the information domain, and, through our information warfare capabilities, to prevail in conflict and set the conditions for peace, after the conflict, as we’re moving forward.”
About Colin Demarest
Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.
3. Israel and Hamas agree to breakthrough deal on hostage release and four-day truce
Israel and Hamas agree to breakthrough deal on hostage release and four-day truce
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/22/middleeast/israel-approves-hamas-hostage-deal-intl/index.html
By Simone McCarthy, Rob Picheta, David Shortell, Anna Chernova, Niamh Kennedy and Caroline Faraj, CNN
7 minute read
Updated 6:32 AM EST, Wed November 22, 2023
Families and friends of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza hold signs calling for their release during a demonstration in Tel Aviv, Israel on Tuesday.
Ariel Schalit/AP
CNN —
Israel and Hamas have reached a deal for a four-day pause in fighting and the release of at least 50 women and children held hostage in Gaza, marking a major diplomatic breakthrough nearly seven weeks after the start of a conflict that has spiraled into a grave humanitarian crisis in the enclave.
The deal, as laid out by key negotiator Qatar in a statement, would see hostages held captive by Hamas released in exchange for a number of Palestinian women and children in Israeli jails. The truce, meanwhile, would also allow the entry of “a larger number of humanitarian convoys and relief aid,” the statement said.
The starting time of the pause in fighting would be announced within the next 24 hours, the statement added.
Qatar’s lead negotiator Minister of State Mohammed Al-Khulaifi said the agreement should prompt the international community to “seize this brief window of opportunity to generate further momentum for the diplomatic track.”
The announcement has been greeted with relief and heightened anticipation from the families of those taken hostage, who now await further news about their loved ones.
It has also been met with positive reaction on the international stage. Egyptian President Abdelfattah El-Sisi reiterated Egypt’s commitment to finding a “sustainable” solution for the Palestinian people, while Qatar’s prime minister said his country hopes the development will establish “a comprehensive and sustainable agreement that will put an end to the war and the bloodshed.”
Jordan’s foreign ministry said it hopes the foreign-mediated deal will be a “step” that leads to a “complete cessation of the war” in Gaza. In Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov welcomed the deal, saying that Moscow views it “positively” and describing it as “the first good news from Gaza in a very long time.”
Hamas is holding 239 hostages captive in Gaza, including foreign nationals from 26 countries, according to figures from the Israeli military. The mass abductions at gunpoint took place during October 7, when Hamas militants struck across the border in a coordinated and bloody surprise attack killing around 1,200 people – the largest such attack on Israel since the country’s founding in 1948.
Prior to the deal, only a handful of hostages had been released.
Israel responded to the attack by declaring war against Hamas and imposing a blockade on Gaza that cut off supplies of food, water, medicines and fuel, while launching a relentless air and ground assault. Some 12,700 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to data from the Palestinian health ministry in the West Bank, which draws on information from Hamas-run health authorities.
The newly announced deal followed weeks of negotiations that included the United States and Egypt, and was approved by Israel’s cabinet in the early hours of Wednesday morning following a six-hour meeting an Israeli official described as “tense and emotional.”
Israel held out the potential for the truce to extend beyond the original four-day period, saying in a statement that an extra day would be added for each 10 additional hostages available for release. Some 150 Palestinian prisoners would be released over four days during the initial hostage release if terms are met, the government said.
The Israeli Cabinet Secretariat said that in the first phase, 150 security prisoners would be released in four stages over four days, with Palestinians being released subject to at least 10 Israeli abductees being handed over to Israeli security forces each day. Israel said there would be a lull in the fighting during those four days.
But it also made clear that Israel plans to resume its air and ground campaign “to complete the eradication of Hamas” once this round of hostage releases concludes.
The exact start time of the pause and details of where and how the hostages will be released remain unclear, with Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus telling CNN Wednesday morning that the military was still working out the exact timing for the pause.
“Until we are told to do so by the Israeli government, we will continue fighting Hamas and when such a deal will come into effect, we will respect that. But we will be very vigilant on the ground,” Conricus said.
The deal followed mounting pressure on the Israeli government from the families of the hostages, who have demanded answers and action from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It also comes amid growing international pressure for more humanitarian support for the people of Gaza.
Hostages’ families anxiously await the release
Even as the details of the release remained unclear, some family members of the hostages held by Hamas expressed relief – and anticipation as they waited to learn whether their loved ones would be included in the negotiated release.
Anat Moshe Shoshany, whose grandmother was kidnapped from kibbutz Nir Oz on the back of a moped, said hearing of the hostage deal gave her “so much hope.”
“I really do hope to see someone walking out of there alive,” Shoshany said. “We want a chance to see our loved ones back. This is all we want and I really hope this is just the first step in this mess.”
Liz Hirsh Naftali, the great-aunt of Abigail Edan, a 3-year-old US citizen being held hostage by Hamas, told CNN that the situation has been “excruciating.”
“We have spent the last seven weeks, seven weeks, worrying, wondering, praying, hoping,” she said.
Inside the painstaking negotiations between Israel, Hamas, the US and Qatar to free 50 hostages
The family hopes Abigail, who is the youngest American hostage held by Hamas, can come home by Friday, her fourth birthday.
“We need to see Abigail come out and then we will be able to believe it,” Naftali added.
US President Joe Biden welcomed the deal in a statement Tuesday night in Washington, saying it “should bring home additional American hostages.” He pledge he “will not stop until they are all released.”
Three Americans could be among the 50 women and children freed as part of the deal, senior US officials said. Ten Americans remain unaccounted for, including two women and a 3-year-old girl, according to a senior administration official. The official didn’t name the girl.
A US official also said there are “various locations where the hostages will be brought out,” but declined to provide further detail.
The IDF spokesperson Conricus said the list of hostages to be released in the deal are all Israelis - some with dual nationalities. He added that the Palestinian prisoners set to be released are “not serious offenders.”
Israel on Wednesday released a list of 300 prisoners that could be released, leaving open the possibility of a second phase of exchanges of prisoners for hostages after the initial four-day period.
The publication of the list starts a 24-hour period during which legal petitions against the release of Palestinian prisoners can be filed to Israel’s Supreme Court, after which point the process is expected to begin.
The total number of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails is approximately 8,300, according to Qadura Fares, the head of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, a non-governmental organization.
Of those 8,300, more than 3,000 are being held in what Israel calls “administrative detention,” which Amnesty International says can be extended indefinitely.
‘Potential’ for longer pause
The arrangement for a second phase of exchange built into the deal has the potential to create a longer humanitarian pause than just the four days originally stipulated, officials and statements from the US, Israel and Qatar have suggested.
“The hostages deal, as it is structured, includes a pause, a humanitarian pause over a number of days, four to five days at least. And there’s the potential with additional releases for that to be for that to be extended, but that will also be dependent upon Hamas releasing additional hostages,” according to a senior US official, who added this “incentivizes the release” of all hostages.
The pause will also allow for additional, much-needed humanitarian convoys and relief aid to enter the enclave.
Hostage families welcome first, precarious hopes after Israel-Hamas deal
Those would include fuel “designated for humanitarian needs,” according to Qatar, which did not provide further details on the volume of aid expected.
In its statement Wednesday, Hamas said the deal “involves the entry of hundreds of trucks carrying aid relief, medical supplies and fuel to all parts of Gaza.”
Israel has been highly reluctant to allow fuel into Gaza since October 7, citing concerns Hamas will use it to power its operations, and only last week agreed to allow minimal deliveries to power sewage facilities and water supply systems.
Humanitarian groups have for weeks called for fuel to be allowed into Gaza, arguing it is critical for cooking food and maintaining operations at hospitals, which have struggled to keep patients, including neonatal babies alive, amid power outages, supply shortages and bombardment.
Governments across the world and international organizations have also been ramping up pressure for increased aid deliveries to the struggling enclave.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
CNN’s Becky Anderson in Doha, Jeremy Diamond and Mike Schwartz in Sderot, Kareem El Damanhoury, Pamela Brown, Betsy Klein, Lauren Iszo, Amir Tal and Manveena Suri contributed to this report.
4. A growing global footprint for China’s space program worries Pentagon
Maps,graphics, and photos at the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/china-space-program-south-america-defense/
A growing global footprint for China’s space program worries Pentagon
As its satellites crowd the skies, China has built ground stations in more than a dozen countries, with two more underway in Antarctica
The Washington Post · by Cate Cadell · November 21, 2023
EL ALTO, Bolivia — On a plateau 13,000 feet above sea level in the Bolivian Andes, llama herders and Indigenous farmers share the sparse landscape with an unusual neighbor: a towering cluster of Chinese-built satellite dishes.
The Amachuma Ground Station exchanges data 24 hours a day with Bolivia’s only state-owned satellite, Tupac Katari I, which orbits some 22,300 miles above Latin America. The remote ground station has another, largely invisible, use: It allows Beijing to surveil skies 10,000 miles from China, according to officials from the Bolivian space agency and Chinese scientists and company officials familiar with the program.
China’s Global Leap
At every point of the compass, China is quietly laying the foundations of its new international order.
The Pentagon is increasingly concerned that China’s growing network of facilities in Latin America and Antarctica for its civilian space and satellite programs has defense capabilities. U.S. officials say the ground stations — which allow countries to maintain uninterrupted communication with satellites and other space vehicles — have the potential to expand Beijing’s global military surveillance network in the southern hemisphere and areas close to the United States.
China already has over 700 satellites in orbit, with plans to expand that number exponentially in the coming years — a project that requires a global constellation of terrestrial facilities to track and communicate with them as they pass over different parts of the planet.
Apart from two ground stations in Bolivia, opened in 2013, China built space facilities in Venezuela in 2008, Peru in 2015, Argentina in 2016 and has at least two stations under construction in Antarctica. It has additional access to facilities in Brazil and Chile through research partnerships. This infrastructure fills a key geographical gap for Beijing’s space program, allowing China to track and communicate with its growing fleet of satellites and space vehicles while also potentially surveilling other state’s assets as they pass over the southern hemisphere.
Ground stations are a critical piece of terrestrial space infrastructure, performing what is called telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) functions, meaning they are able to track or communicate with the vast web of satellites and space vehicles that fill the sky. They are key to delivering commercial services, including internet connectivity, Earth imaging and the monitoring of civilian space research vehicles.
Students check out a model of a Venezuelan communication satellite during a trip to the Bolivian Space Agency, the country's national space agency, in La Paz Department, Bolivia.
Ground stations can also play an important role in national security. They facilitate military communications, track missile launches, surveil the space assets of other countries and can play a role in jamming, interfering with or potentially destroying enemy satellites. The importance of satellite networks in war has been underscored since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where communication satellites and terminals made by Starlink, the satellite internet company operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, have become a lifeline for Ukrainian forces.
China’s international space facilities are still far outnumbered by U.S. stations, but the Latin American and Antarctic sites are just one segment in a growing Chinese global space infrastructure, forged mostly in countries with close diplomatic ties to Beijing.
The Chinese state firm behind Bolivia’s ground stations has, since 2008, built similar projects in Laos, Pakistan, Nigeria and Belarus, while other space-tracking facilities linked to the People’s Liberation Army include sites in Namibia and Kenya. China also maintains a fleet of mobile space support ships that, according to the Pentagon, are used to track satellite and ICBM launches.
This summer, Chinese state media said national records were broken when 67 satellites were launched within just nine days in June. Earlier this year, Chinese military researchers said work has begun on launching a mega-constellation of almost 13,000 low-earth orbit satellites, designed to compete with Starlink, which has its own global constellation of ground stations.
“Their on-orbit armada of satellites can track us, can sense us, can see us … and can now hold U.S. forces at risk in a way we have never understood or had to face to date,” said Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon, deputy chief of space operations for intelligence at the U.S. Space Force, speaking at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare symposium in March.
Gagnon said that around half of China’s 700 satellites are used for remote sensing and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance purposes, meaning they are equipped to gather sensitive security data.
At the time of its launch in 2013, the Tupac Katari I satellite — named after a famed Bolivian revolutionary and funded by a $250 million China Development Bank loan — represented something unthinkable to many Bolivians: the prestige of a national space program, connectivity for the country’s remote rural communities and a specialized military communications bandwidth.
But almost 10 years later, the promise of Bolivia’s revolutionary leap into space has faded. While Tupac Katari I has driven more connectivity in remote areas, plans to use the project as a launchpad for the country’s own space industry have been scuttled by economic woes. Much of the Chinese loan remains outstanding, with Tupac Katari I set to be retired into a deep space graveyard within five years.
The ground stations have proved useful as one of several Latin American facilities accessible to China.
Satellite monitoring screens are displayed at the Bolivian Space Agency.
“We have rented it to the Chinese to control the launch of [their] other satellites,” said Iván Zambrana, director general of Agencia Boliviana Espacial, the Bolivian space agency, speaking from the expansive glass-fronted building that overlooks the dishes — a glitzy perk of the Chinese loan package.
Zambrana said that under the contracts, Chinese technicians travel to Bolivia about once a year to access the base, usually via a secondary ground station that communicates with Amachuma from the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. From there, they are able to install technology and track other assets in space. One Chinese technician said Beijing is able to remotely access a number of the overseas stations, including those in Bolivia and Venezuela. “Those agreements were done with the permission of partner governments,” said the technician who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Beijing is not alone in building space TT&C facilities abroad, most of which have legitimate civilian uses, and the country maintains its ground stations in Latin America and Antarctica are used exclusively for peaceful purposes. What sets China’s international commercial space program apart is its close links to the military. The contractors behind China’s space technology — including most of the Latin American and Antarctic facilities — are also the leading state-owned powerhouses behind the missile development, cyberwarfare and counter space defense programs of the People’s Liberation Army.
Iván Zambrana, director general of Agencia Boliviana Espacial, the Bolivian space agency.
“The way to think about it is, if these sites are or could collect data that is beneficial to the PLA, and the PLA wants it, it’s going to get it.”— Matthew Funaiole, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies
“All of the [Chinese] agencies that are involved in the information and the data collection at these places are tied back in one way or the other to the Chinese government or to the Chinese military,” said Matthew Funaiole, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has studied the expansion of Chinese ground stations in Latin America and Antarctica.
“The way to think about it is, if these sites are or could collect data that is beneficial to the PLA, and the PLA wants it, it’s going to get it,” he said.
Beijing has set a goal to become a world-leading space power by 2045 — a program that lays out ambitious targets in national security as well as civilian projects, including a plan to send crewed spacecraft to the moon by 2030 and develop nuclear-powered space shuttles by 2040. Spearheading Beijing’s race toward space supremacy are a cluster of state-owned firms that are either direct units of the PLA or military contractors. Others are private or state enterprises that are part of Beijing’s military-civil fusion program, a national strategic policy drive by the Chinese Communist Party to enrich the military with civilian-developed technologies.
Why we’re tracking China’s global influence
The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to forge new economic and diplomatic alliances, including through its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, are now well known. Also, at every point of the compass, Beijing is laying the foundations of its new international order and shaping places and institutions outside its borders in its image.
Where we went and why
We looked for places where China’s efforts had gone relatively unnoticed. We sought to show the breadth of China’s ambitions — from collecting DNA information to policing to media representation.
Our team fanned out across the world, reporting from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Central America and Europe.
How we reported this series
Shibani Mahtani reported on Chinese influence in Singaporean media and vocational education in Indonesia and Lao indebtedness to China.
Michael Miller traveled to Fiji, detailing the fallout from China’s policing agreement.
Joby Warrick and Cate Brown reported on China leading the arms race of mass-collecting DNA data.
How we reported this series
Karen DeYoung traveled to Tegucigalpa to report on the Honduran government’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with China, breaking its ties with Taiwan.
Lily Kuo traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, to examine how China is positioning itself to dominate the deep-sea mining industry that will be crucial to developing next-generation technology with military and civilian applications.
How we reported this series
Liz Sly and Júlia Ledur reported on China’s growing network of ports that lie at the heart of global supply chains.
We are continuing to document Beijing’s reach.
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The technology behind China’s space program — including the facilities in Latin America and Antarctica — is dominated by two state-owned enterprises: the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC). Both firms originated in the PLA, before being spun off into major state-owned enterprises, and remain top suppliers to the country’s military. CASC, according to company documents, is the country’s sole manufacturer of intercontinental nuclear missiles, as well as a top contractor of military space technology, drones and launch systems.
CASIC describes itself as the “backbone” of China’s aerospace industry, overseeing the development of cruise and ballistic missiles among a vast range of other projects. “CASIC takes ‘empowering the military’ as its first duty and ‘building China into a space power’ as its own responsibility,” according to a description on its website.
A woman walks by a store in El Alto selling Tup4K antennas. With the Tup4K satellite kit, it is possible to receive digital radio and TV signals broadcast from the Tupac Katari satellite.
Towering over a remote plain in Patagonia, Argentina, is the largest Chinese-made space facility in Latin America. A 35-meter-wide satellite dish at the Espacio Lejano Ground Station is operated by the PLA’s Strategic Support Force (SSF), according to a 2023 Pentagon report and two people who work for a Chinese-state space group and are familiar with the project’s operation. The SSF is the military unit that oversees the PLA’s space, cyber and electronic warfare programs.
Under a contract signed between the two countries, Argentina’s government agreed not to “interfere or interrupt” China’s activities at the ground-station facility.
In Venezuela, a Chinese state-owned company launched a satellite and built two ground stations — the largest of which is located inside Venezuela’s Capitán Manuel Ríos Airbase, a military airport in the country’s central north. The company, China Great Wall Industry Corp. (CGWIC), is the sole entity authorized to provide commercial satellite technology to international partners and is a wholly owned subsidiary of CASC.
The CGWIC also built the ground station in Bolivia and is the group that liaises with Bolivia’s space agency to conduct projects from its Andean base station.
Aymara woman Lucia Aruquipa walks toward her house, equipped with a Tup4K antenna, in Patamanta, a small, rural community in Bolivia.
Almost 6,200 miles south, a ground station antenna under construction at China’s Zhongshan base in Antarctica is being built by CASIC, according to Chinese state media. Another Chinese ground station under construction on the remote Antarctic outcrop of Inexpressible Island has drawn concerns from the Pentagon that it could “provide the PLA with better surveillance capabilities … well positioned to collect signals intelligence over Australia and New Zealand,” according to the Defense Department report released last month on military threats posed by China.
Map showing locations of Inexpressible Island and Zhongshan base
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The Chinese technician who previously worked as a contractor on overseas projects for the CGWIC told The Washington Post that the lines between civilian and military are fluid in the state-owned firm and in China’s broader international space partnerships.
“They are the same, the same staff … military and civilian, you know in China there is no difference, this is the condition of our country’s space industry,” said the person. “The United States, Western countries, also do this type of work in secret conditions. Why not China?”
The CGWIC did not respond to a request for comment. CASC and CASIC did not respond to emails and calls to their Beijing headquarters.
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told The Post that he could not comment on specific country partnerships, but said Beijing is “for peaceful use of outer space.”
Spokesman Liu Pengyu said China is against the “weaponization” of space technology and does not support an “arms race” in outer space. “We promote an outer space community with shared future for mankind,” he said. Liu pointed to China’s cooperation with Brazil, using satellites to surveil earth resources, weather and other civilian applications as evidence of China’s successful role in the region’s space industry.
“We promote an outer space community with shared future for mankind.”— Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington
The Chinese Embassy in Bolivia did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked about the potential for China to use the CGWIC base for military purposes, Zambrana, director of the Bolivian space agency, dismissed the idea. “Go look for yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the nearby Amachuma Ground Station. “You won’t see any military.”
Rogelio Mayta, who spoke to The Post while serving as foreign minister in October, a role he stepped down from last week, said that Bolivia is alert to the potential of satellite technology being militarized, but feels it is unavoidable, and that the benefits to Bolivians outweigh those concerns. “We have to live with that potential reality and the aerospace capabilities of the great powers,” he said. “We know that it can imply a security risk.”
Beijing’s expanding space presence in Latin America has been carved along diplomatic lines, finding success in countries where relations with the United States and its allies have faltered.
As discussions on the formation of Bolivia’s space agency were underway in 2009, the country’s relations with the United States were at a crisis point.
President Evo Morales leveled sweeping accusations that the CIA was plotting against his government. Months earlier, he had expelled the U.S. ambassador and officials from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, accusing them of conspiracy, charges the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia called “absurd.”
At the time, Beijing was not deeply engaged in the country, which was emerging from an economically turbulent decade, but over the next 12 years it would become the country’s top international financier and infrastructure collaborator. In 2017, Bolivia’s vice president said the country would receive a $7 billion credit line from Beijing for infrastructure projects, double the country’s external debt at the time. This year, amid a severe shortage of U.S. dollars, Bolivia began trading in China’s currency, the yuan.
With the loans came expanded access for Chinese companies to the country’s vast natural resources, including lithium, and Bolivia obtained other advanced technology. In 2019, for instance, Bolivia launched the Bol-110 project, equipping police and emergency-response services in the country’s cities with Chinese-made surveillance systems.
When Beijing floated the $250 million loan for the Tupac Katari I satellite project, Bolivian space agency officials said the Chinese proposal was not only more comprehensive than alternative bids, but also represented a welcome alternative from what they perceived to be patronizing treatment from American and European space suppliers who were in contact with Bolivia at the time.
“There was an air of superiority in Americans and Europeans when dealing with Bolivia,” said Zambrana, who has headed the space agency since its inception in 2010, only stepping away from the role when an interim government took power for a year following a political crisis in 2019.
Police in La Paz monitor the public with Chinese-built cameras in a video surveillance room.
Within 10 months of the founding of the Bolivian space agency, the government signed a contract with the CGWIC for a package that included two ground stations and the Tupac Katari I satellite. As part of the agreement, Bolivia sent 64 scientists to study satellite technology at Beihang University, China’s top civilian and military aerospace university. They then continued their training alongside Chinese engineers at the newly constructed ground stations back in Bolivia.
“In general, there’s been a recognition over the last 10 years that the U.S. needed to up its soft power game to counter some of this,” said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for Secure World Foundation and an expert in space security. “What China was doing was filling in the gaps where the U.S. was not focused.”
“We don’t want to be told that we are with God or with the devil.”— Rogelio Mayta, former Bolivian foreign minister
Bolivian officials maintain they aren’t wedded to China as their sole space contractor and are actively considering other countries for future projects. They do, however, resent the idea that they would be forced to choose between the West and China.
“We don’t want to be told that we are with God or with the devil,” said Mayta, the former foreign minister. “That is, we believe that we can have a position open to everyone,” he said.
In Bolivia, while relations remain strong with China, much of the hype around the original space collaboration has faded. Plans for a second, Chinese funded, Earth-imaging satellite announced by the Morales government in 2017 and lauded for its potential to capture detailed data on the country’s land use, have been shelved indefinitely — deemed too costly.
Elsewhere in Latin America, other countries have continued to buy into a more ambitious vision of a China-led future in space. Venezuela — since its initial pact with the CGWIC in 2008 — has moved ahead with two further Chinese satellites. In September, it became the first Latin American country to formally join the China-led International Lunar Research Station project.
Despite the country’s cratering economy, President Nicolás Maduro vowed during a September state visit to Beijing that he would send “the first Venezuelan man or woman to the moon” with the help of China.
Among Pentagon documents leaked on the Discord chat platform in the spring was one that contained a stark assessment of China’s satellite capabilities in the southern hemisphere. It said the satellites were sophisticated beyond previous estimates, and Beijing already holds the ability to track, jam or destroy U.S. and allied satellites that would collect critical intelligence in the Indo-Pacific in the event of war in Taiwan.
“The PRC’s overall military strategy to establish and maintain information dominance in a conflict drives Beijing’s development of space,” it said.
About this story
Story by Cate Cadell. Photos by Marcelo Perez del Carpio. Story editing by Peter Finn. Project editing by Courtney Kan. Photo editing by Jennifer Samuel. Design and development by Kat Rudell-Brooks and Yutao Chen. Maps by Cate Brown and Laris Karklis. Design editing by Joe Moore. Copy editing by Susan Doyle.
The Washington Post · by Cate Cadell · November 21, 2023
5. Taiwan ruling party powers ahead as chaos engulfs opposition campaign
Taiwan ruling party powers ahead as chaos engulfs opposition campaign
Reuters
TAIPEI, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Taiwan cannot afford chaos or "experiments" when it comes to being president, the front-runner to be the island's next leader said on Wednesday as the opposition remained mired in a bitter dispute on mounting a joint presidential challenge.
The Jan. 13 election will shape Chinese-claimed Taiwan's relations with Beijing at a time China has stepped up military pressure to assert its sovereignty claims.
Vice President Lai Ching-te of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who China views as a separatist, leads opinion polls to be Taiwan's next president. Talks between the two main opposition parties to team up and take him on have floundered and are in deadlock.
Lai and his running mate, Taiwan's former U.S. envoy Hsiao Bi-khim, formally registered with the election commission on Tuesday to run in the election, but it remains unclear what the opposition will do. The deadline to register is Friday afternoon.
Lai told reporters he and Hsiao were "confident and determined to lead Taiwan steadily in the chaotic situation".
"Taiwan cannot afford chaos and experimentation at this moment," he said.
Only candidates with experience and ideas can successfully lead Taiwan to continue its steady progress, Lai said, standing with the DPP's lawmaker candidates for Taipei city.
Taiwan's main opposition party the Kuomintang (KMT), which traditional favours close ties with Beijing, had agreed with the much smaller Taiwan People's Party (TPP) last week to offer a joint ticket to take on Lai.
But neither party can agree how to interpret opinion polls on which of their candidates, the KMT's Hou Yu-ih and TPP's Ko Wen-je, should stand for president and which for vice president.
Hou on Tuesday called for re-opening talks on the opinion polls and said he had never insisted he had to be the presidential candidate.
The KMT's interpretation of the polls was that Hou being presidential candidate put him best placed to win over Lai and Hsiao, which the TPP has rejected as unscientific and not in line with its statistical analysis.
On Wednesday, Ko's campaign director Huang Shan-shan gave no sign of backing down and criticised what she said were attacks on her, the TPP and Ko by the KMT.
"Our enemy is Lai Ching-te. This turmoil has let Lai lie around at home. He's very happy," Huang said.
Ko, asked at a separate event what was going to happen, said: "There are still two days, don't be nervous".
Another presidential candidate is Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of major Apple supplier Foxconn (2317.TW) who is standing as an independent but has also yet to formally register and has trailed in the polls.
His running mate, the actress Tammy Lai, briefly visited the election commission on Wednesday to pick up registration documents, but declined to say whether she and Gou, who did not accompany her, would actually register.
Bombarded by questions from reporters, Gou's campaign spokesman Huang Shih-hsiu would only say that "anything can happen" before the Friday deadline.
Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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6. Opinion | Xi Jinping is sending ominous signals on Taiwan
Conclusion:
Leaders in Washington and Taipei can’t allow optimism about the U. S-China relationship to obscure the fact that Xi is rapidly altering the status quo around Taiwan and interfering in Taiwanese politics more than ever before. Xi has revealed his true intentions. Ignoring his ominous words and actions would be the most dangerous policy of all.
Opinion | Xi Jinping is sending ominous signals on Taiwan
The Washington Post · by Josh Rogin · November 21, 2023
Many in Washington are pointing to last week’s meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping as a sign that the two great powers are growing closer. But on the most important issue in the relationship — Taiwan — Washington and Beijing are moving further apart. Xi’s rhetoric indicates he’s getting impatient with the status quo — and his actions are even more worrisome.
During the two leaders’ private meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area, Xi struck some ominous notes on Taiwan. Regarding Beijing’s long-standing desire to bring the island under its control, Xi said his “preference was for peaceful reunification,” a senior U.S. official told reporters — but then Xi outlined several scenarios under which he might use force. Biden reiterated to Xi that the United States supports the status quo and is determined to maintain peace.
But Xi’s reaction to Biden’s simple restatement of existing U.S. policy was to tell the U.S. president that China would not be satisfied with the status quo forever.
“Xi responded, ‘Look, peace is all well and good, but at some point we need to move toward resolution more generally,’” according to the official.
Some current and former officials highlighted this quote as evidence Xi is getting increasingly impatient, suggesting that he intends to ramp up efforts to coerce Taiwan into unifying with the People’s Republic. Matthew Pottinger, deputy national security adviser to President Donald Trump, noted that the Chinese foreign ministry’s readout of the meeting said Xi told Biden that the United States should actually “support China’s peaceful reunification” — a particularly bad sign, Pottinger said.
“This is a significant moving of the goal posts, because [Beijing] is now saying that the relationship with China is predicated on the U.S. supporting the Chinese takeover of Taiwan,” said Pottinger. “Xi is saying, ‘I’m not going to stand for the Taiwan status quo much longer, and you, America, are in our way.’”
Not everybody agrees on how to read the tea leaves. Two other senior administration officials I spoke with after the summit said they saw Xi’s comments on reunification as consistent with past statements from Beijing. But they did believe Xi had become more assertive on two other aspects of the Taiwan issue. Xi aggressively warned Biden against arming Taiwan and also urged him not to support Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te in his presidential bid ahead of elections in January, they said.
Beijing sees Lai and his Democratic Progressive Party as “pro-independence.” Lai and President Tsai Ing-wen have repeatedly explained that they do not seek formal independence for Taiwan, but they’re under attack by Beijing nonetheless. Tsai has refused to affirm what’s called the “1992 Consensus,” which essentially asserts that Taiwan is a part of China. And Beijing sees the opposition Nationalist Party as more friendly.
In his post-summit news conference, Biden said he had explicitly warned Xi against interfering in Taiwan’s upcoming presidential election. Of course, Beijing is already working to undermine Lai’s candidacy in a number of ways, using military intimidation, economic coercion and information warfare.
“Right now, we are seeing a very sophisticated campaign focused on three major tenets: disinformation, disinformation and disinformation,” Vincent Chao, spokesman for the DPP, told me during a panel at this weekend’s Halifax International Security Forum.
To drive home the threat that the DPP will lead Taiwan into war, the Chinese military has menaced the island with record numbers of warplanes and naval vessels in recent months. China sent 21 military aircraft and seven ships into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone just days after the Biden-Xi meeting.
The limited achievements of the Biden-Xi meetings, such as restoring U.S.-China military communications (which Beijing cut off last year to protest then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit), are positive. Yet these hopeful developments mask a grim reality: Xi is telling the world through both words and actions that he intends to take over Taiwan one way or another — and everyone else should either actively help or just accept it.
Chao said the key to dealing with Xi is to make sure “the risk and cost of Xi Jinping taking action must never be lower than the risk and cost of him not taking action.” That means bolstering deterrence by increasing the flow of arms to Taiwan. It also requires helping Taiwan protect its democratic institutions and its information environment, without taking sides in its politics.
Leaders in Washington and Taipei can’t allow optimism about the U. S-China relationship to obscure the fact that Xi is rapidly altering the status quo around Taiwan and interfering in Taiwanese politics more than ever before. Xi has revealed his true intentions. Ignoring his ominous words and actions would be the most dangerous policy of all.
The Washington Post · by Josh Rogin · November 21, 2023
7. MOFA thanks Japan, South Korea leaders for supporting cross-strait peace
MOFA thanks Japan, South Korea leaders for supporting cross-strait peace - The Press United
thepressunited.com · by Updates · November 22, 2023
Remarks from Japan and South Korea leaders reaffirming the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait were sincerely welcomed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Nov. 21.
In the article “World is facing ‘polycrisis’ warns South Korean president ahead of UK state visit” published Nov. 20 by the U.K.-based The Daily Telegraph newspaper, South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol stressed the necessity of maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Striat and building a rules-based maritime order in the South China Sea. Other global issues discussed in his interview included the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas conflict, North Korea-Russia military cooperation, the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.
According to the MOFA, since he took office in May 2022, Yoon has reiterated an emphasis on security across the Taiwan Strait through joint statements following summits with the US, European and Japanese leaders as well as through interviews with media outlets. Taiwan will continue to work with like-minded partners to jointly promote prosperity and stability across the strait, on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, the ministry said.
A similar sentiment was expressed by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during a bilateral meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping Nov. 17 in San Francisco, the MOFA said. Kishida reiterated that cross-strait peace and stability are extremely important to Japan and the international community, the ministry added.
China’s authoritarian expansion has seriously affected regional security and raised global concerns, the MOFA said, adding that safeguarding the cross-strait status quo now has consensus from countries worldwide, evidenced by joint statements following meetings including the US-Japan, US-Japan-South Korea, and G7 summits held earlier this year. (YCH-E)
Write to Taiwan Today at ttonline@mofa.gov.tw
from Taiwan Today – Top News
thepressunited.com · by Updates · November 22, 2023
8. The Scandal of Robert Malley
Excerpts:
If this were a spy novel, all of this would be grist for a plot of intrigue and betrayal. Here we have a foreign-policy insider comfortable with presidents and all those at the highest levels of his government—but, raised by radicals, he is later caught spilling secrets and hiring agents of influence for Iran.
But on closer inspection, there’s no skullduggery here, not really. Robert Malley was always open about his many meetings with terrorist leaders over the years. And he did not undermine the Biden administration by appeasing Iran; he was implementing its preferred policy.
“The positions that Rob has taken are positions that the president, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan would have taken if he was not there,” says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a harsh critic of the Iran nuclear deal that Malley has sought to revive.
In this respect, Malley is a classic product of the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy establishment. But this was not always the case. We do not here have a cautionary tale of a talented diplomat and scholar infiltrating Washington. No, this is a story about how America’s foreign-policy establishment came to adopt an approach of appeasement toward what was once a leftist fringe in the United States.
....
A better way to understand the scandal around Malley is to look at the people he himself hired and mentored in recent years. These include Ali Vaez, who is currently an analyst at the International Crisis Group. The emails disclosed in the Iran International and Semafor investigations show Vaez seeking approval from his contact at Iran’s foreign ministry for op-eds he would later publish in Western outlets. In an October 2, 2014, missive to Iran’s foreign minister, Vaez wrote, “As an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty, I have not hesitated to help you in any way.”
Malley tried to bring Vaez into the Biden administration, but Vaez could not get a security clearance. Malley did hire Ariane Tabatabai as an adviser. According to Semafor and Iran International, Tabatabai actually asked for guidance from her Iranian foreign-ministry contact on whether she should visit Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Tabatabai is now chief of staff to Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Last month, Maier testified before the Senate that the Pentagon is investigating “whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top-secret special compartmented information.” In October, the Pentagon announced that Tabatabai would keep her security clearance after the investigation.
Says Gerecht, “If you’ve known Malley’s position on Iran, it makes perfect sense he would hire these people. The fact that these individuals were apparently acting somewhat obsequiously toward Iranian officials is a separate issue.”
The Scandal of Robert Malley
It’s not that he’s a spy. It’s that his once-noxious views have become mainstream.
The Scandal of Robert Malley
commentary.org · by Eli Lake ·
When he was a much younger man, Robert Malley worked in the administration of Bill Clinton in the 1990s as an adviser on the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In those hopeful days, Rob was always greeted by the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, with a memory and a kind word about his father, Simon Malley.
Each time Arafat would meet with Clinton and Malley, he would share a different and inaccurate story about Simon. Arafat claimed that the elder Malley was a founder of the Egyptian Communist Party (not true) and once a prisoner in an Egyptian jail (partially true). As the younger Malley shared in a 2008 lecture for Oxford University, Arafat once told Clinton that Simon had been a “world renowned Torah expert who could vouch for the fact that the Jewish Temple never had been built in Jerusalem.”
That last Arafat memory was a whopper. Simon Malley was Jewish, but he never had much patience for the actual religion. Instead, Simon found his calling in the Arab struggle against Western imperialism. He devoted his life as an editor and journalist to this cause. And in that pursuit, Simon Malley became a comrade and friend of Yasser Arafat.
Malley later claimed he would often quarrel about Arafat with his father, who would not hear a bad word about the Palestinian leader. But when Rob matriculated at Yale University in 1980, he was still very much his father’s son. He wrote a fiery op-ed for the college newspaper that compared resistance to the Nazis in Europe to the Palestinian struggle against the world’s only Jewish state.
Since then, Malley’s politics have evolved. He does not engage in the noxious rhetoric of his undergraduate days. But he is still a moral, political, and foreign-policy relativist. He will condemn the actions of those who seek the slaughter of innocents in the name of liberation, but he has never been able to see his interlocutors for the dark beings they really are.
All of this is important in light of a recent scandal that has upended the Biden administration’s Iran policy. In 2021, the president named Malley to be his point man on reviving the dormant 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, or JCPOA, which Donald Trump had scrubbed in 2018. Today, a humbled Malley finds himself under investigation by the FBI and the State Department’s diplomatic security office for mishandling classified information. Two government officials tell me that Malley was picked up on an intercept revealing something he was not supposed to reveal in a private conversation with a foreign official.
Malley is also connected to another scandal exposed in September on the news website Semafor and the Persian-language television channel Iran International—an Iranian foreign-ministry scheme to cultivate a network of analysts to influence U.S. foreign policy that was known as the Iran Experts Initiative. Malley hired two of those analysts at the International Crisis Group, the think tank he helmed before joining the Biden administration. He then hired a third member of the Experts Initiative, Ariane Tabatabai, as an adviser when he became Biden’s Iran envoy.
If this were a spy novel, all of this would be grist for a plot of intrigue and betrayal. Here we have a foreign-policy insider comfortable with presidents and all those at the highest levels of his government—but, raised by radicals, he is later caught spilling secrets and hiring agents of influence for Iran.
But on closer inspection, there’s no skullduggery here, not really. Robert Malley was always open about his many meetings with terrorist leaders over the years. And he did not undermine the Biden administration by appeasing Iran; he was implementing its preferred policy.
“The positions that Rob has taken are positions that the president, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan would have taken if he was not there,” says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a harsh critic of the Iran nuclear deal that Malley has sought to revive.
In this respect, Malley is a classic product of the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy establishment. But this was not always the case. We do not here have a cautionary tale of a talented diplomat and scholar infiltrating Washington. No, this is a story about how America’s foreign-policy establishment came to adopt an approach of appeasement toward what was once a leftist fringe in the United States.
_____________
The story begins in the aftermath of the failed Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, in the wake of the Clinton administration’s end and at the beginning of the second intifada terror war led by Yasser Arafat against Israel. In August 2001, after his stint on Clinton’s national-security council, Malley co-authored an essay for the New York Review of Books dissenting from the Washington consensus that Arafat had stubbornly rejected the offers from Israel and Washington for a final deal to create a Palestinian state.
The piece was a veiled criticism of his former boss, because Clinton had blamed Arafat for the collapse of the peace process. “I am a failure, and you made me one,” Clinton famously told the Palestinian leader. This view of Camp David was “remarkably shallow,” Malley wrote (without naming Clinton). “It acts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenient culprit—Arafat—rather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis.”
That essay did not go over well in the Democratic Party in the years after the Clinton presidency. By 2001, Arafat was no longer fêted by presidents and prime ministers. He had reverted to the radicalism of his earlier years, those wondrous days when Malley’s father adored the Palestinian leader for the same reason that decent countries abhorred him: his commitment to armed struggle through terror.
The other reason Malley’s essay was politically toxic was that it was published a month before 9/11. The terrorist attack changed U.S. foreign policy in an instant. No longer was America willing to try terrorists patiently in courts of law. Now it would scour the earth to hunt them down. In those initial years after the twin towers fell, Robert Malley was in the political wilderness.
He eventually found a home at the International Crisis Group, a think tank that promoted scholarship on conflicts all around the world. As head of its Middle East program in this period, Malley met with groups shunned by most in the Washington policy community. Chief among them was Hamas, the terror movement responsible for the October 7 atrocities in Israel.
In a 2010 documentary called Cultures of Resistance, Malley sounds a call for nuance similar to the one he had made years before. Of Hamas and Hezbollah, the Lebanese terror group that currently has at least 100,000 missiles pointed at Israel’s northern border, he says: “None of them are crazies. They may do things that we consider belong to a different realm of rationality, but within their own system, it’s often very logical.” In the film, Malley goes on to make the case that Israel should recognize the group’s social-welfare programs and allow Hamas “to govern” Gaza, the territory Hamas seized in 2007.
He became an informal adviser in 2008 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign—a good fit for a candidate who argued during the Democratic primaries that he would never fear negotiations with rogue states. But Malley’s role in Obamaland did not last long. On May 9, the Times of London published a piece that said Malley had been ousted as a Middle East adviser with the Obama campaign after it had emerged that he had held meetings with members of Hamas. In a letter published in the New York Times, Malley bristled at the suggestion that he had misled anyone; he never hid his engagement with Hamas, he said. Nonetheless, he wrote that he would be stepping away from the campaign “to avoid any misperception—misrepresentation being the more accurate word—about the candidate’s position regarding the Islamist movement.”
Matt Duss, the vice president at the Center for International Policy who worked closely with Malley on Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016, told me that he thought Malley had been pushed aside because of his 2001 essay on the peace process. “I remember when that happened to Rob,” he said. “I knew his work. He wrote an important piece with Hussein Agha complicating what happened at Camp David. That made him persona non grata with other Democrats who very much preferred the older narrative.”
Obama never did engage Hamas during his presidency. But he did bring Malley back into the fold five years later to engage with the organization’s principal international patron, Iran. By Obama’s second term, the foreign policy of the Democratic Party had changed. No more were Democrats seeking to prove how tough they were against America’s enemies. Instead, they wanted to kill Iran’s hardliners by showing kindness to its moderates.
The policy alteration that led to the 2015 Iran deal has a lot to do with Obama himself. But he received an assist on his signature foreign policy from key organizations that comprised what his deputy national-security adviser, Ben Rhodes, would later call an “echo chamber” inside Washington.
The initial efforts to shift U.S. policy on Iran began with the Rockefeller Fund, which, after 9/11, gathered national-security experts to discuss outreach to the Islamic Republic. Between 2001 and 2015, the philanthropic foundation gave nearly $5 million to groups to pursue engagement with Tehran. By 2002, the Rockefeller initiative called itself the Iran Project. It reached out to Javad Zarif, who was then Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. It began hosting meetings with the Institute for International and Political Studies, an Iranian-funded think tank.
In those early years, their efforts were kept quiet. At the same time, participants briefed high-level officials in the George W. Bush administration, including Bush’s second-term national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, and Condoleezza Rice, who was then secretary of state. In a 2015 article in Businessweek, R. Nicholas Burns, who had served as an undersecretary of state in the Bush years, said the insights shared were valuable because the U.S. government had virtually no contacts at all with Iran’s regime.
There was also an initiative from the Ploughshares Fund, a well-funded nonprofit that makes grants to arms-control groups. In 2011, the fund formed a loose coalition of organizations to help mold public opinion to favor a nuclear bargain with Iran. According to emails from a private Ploughshares listserv, the first meeting of the group counseled affiliated nonprofits to attack opponents of Iran diplomacy as “pro-war.”
Another organization, the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, also played a role in advocating engagement with Iran. As I reported in 2009, NIAC helped to organize an effort to prevent Obama from appointing veteran diplomat Dennis Ross to oversee his Iran policy, on the grounds that Ross was too close to Israel. That effort failed, but the council nonetheless made alliances inside the Obama administration and the Democratic Party and became a key node in the White House echo chamber.
All of this is to say that while Malley may have been toxic in the Bush years in his own camp, by 2013 he was firmly ensconced within the mainstream of the Democratic Party. When the Obama administration finally did reach a deal with Iran in 2015, Malley was part of what Obama considered his administration’s greatest foreign-policy achievement. Malley’s “nuanced” approach had won the day. With enough patience, money, and resolve, America and its negotiating partners were able to tame the regime that took the U.S. Embassy hostage when it came to power in 1979.
But the nuclear agreement was deeply flawed. After negotiations finished, Iran’s General Qassem Suleimani flew to Moscow to forge an alliance to assist the Syrian regime’s war on its own people. Key limitations in the JCPOA on the number and quality of Iran’s centrifuges expired over time. And a majority of Congress voted against it in 2015. In 2018, then president Donald Trump withdrew America from Obama’s agreement.
After Biden won the 2020 election, Malley was perfectly positioned to guide U.S. policy toward Iran. He was close friends with Antony Blinken, who would become Biden’s secretary of state. Malley and Blinken attended the same high school in Paris and worked on the yearbook together. In Washington, they played on a recreational soccer team. To some, this might suggest that the current investigation into Malley is so serious that even his old and powerful friend could not save him from it.
That said, it’s too early to know the nature of the probe into Malley’s mishandling of state secrets. There has always been a tension between the State Department and the FBI when it comes to rogue regimes. The job of a diplomat is to engage with foreign officials. One hazard of this work is that sometimes a piece of classified information may slip into a conversation. For example, Henry Kissinger, in a meeting with his Soviet counterpart, famously shared the fact that America was reading Egyptian cable traffic. Or consider the case of Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. His clearance was suspended in 2000 after it was learned he had been sending classified emails from the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. No evidence ever emerged that Indyk or Kissinger was a spy.
A better way to understand the scandal around Malley is to look at the people he himself hired and mentored in recent years. These include Ali Vaez, who is currently an analyst at the International Crisis Group. The emails disclosed in the Iran International and Semafor investigations show Vaez seeking approval from his contact at Iran’s foreign ministry for op-eds he would later publish in Western outlets. In an October 2, 2014, missive to Iran’s foreign minister, Vaez wrote, “As an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty, I have not hesitated to help you in any way.”
Malley tried to bring Vaez into the Biden administration, but Vaez could not get a security clearance. Malley did hire Ariane Tabatabai as an adviser. According to Semafor and Iran International, Tabatabai actually asked for guidance from her Iranian foreign-ministry contact on whether she should visit Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Tabatabai is now chief of staff to Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Last month, Maier testified before the Senate that the Pentagon is investigating “whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top-secret special compartmented information.” In October, the Pentagon announced that Tabatabai would keep her security clearance after the investigation.
Says Gerecht, “If you’ve known Malley’s position on Iran, it makes perfect sense he would hire these people. The fact that these individuals were apparently acting somewhat obsequiously toward Iranian officials is a separate issue.”
This cuts to the heart of the Rob Malley scandal. He is not an interloper and neither are his protégés. They are instead implementers of a worldview that pretends fanatics and terrorists can be tamed through negotiations and that acts of savagery can be explained away by root causes. And we have just seen and are now living through the response to the greatest challenge in our time to the idea that such people can somehow be treated as anything but the monsters they are.
In his 2008 lecture, Rob Malley acknowledged the tragedy and failure of the secular radicalism his father embraced. “And how ingloriously it all ended,” he wrote. “No last brave stand for fight to the finish. Instead a muted, slow, nondescript decline. As early as the 1980s, the illusions had all but expired.”
But Malley never learned the lessons of his father’s expired illusions—the bizarre fantasy that revolutionary violence would liberate the Third World. He has instead himself succumbed to the dangerous fantasy that engaging violent revolutionaries will persuade them to renounce their illusions. His security clearance may yet be restored and his name cleared, but Robert Malley should not be allowed inside the corridors of power ever again.
Photo: AP Photo/Riccardo De Luca
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commentary.org · by Eli Lake ·
9. White House declassifies intel suggesting Wagner Group is preparing to provide air defense capability to Hezbollah or Iran
I think the administration should get credit for trying to effectively use intelligence. I am sure it is likely over the objections of some who think all intelligence should always remain classified. But I think it is important to inform the public and generate support for US foreign policy by accurately describing the threats. It takes intelligence to help do that.
The way to attack the enemy's strategy must include exposing that strategy to weaken it or cause it to fail when it is exposed.
White House declassifies intel suggesting Wagner Group is preparing to provide air defense capability to Hezbollah or Iran
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/21/politics/white-house-wagner-group-intelligence/index.html
By Natasha Bertrand, CNN
3 minute read
Published 1:36 PM EST, Tue November 21, 2023
The headquarters of Wagner Group on June 27, 2023 in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
VCG/Getty Images
CNN —
The White House released recently declassified intelligence on Tuesday confirming that the Russian mercenary organization Wagner group has been preparing to provide an air defense capability “to either Hezbollah or Iran,” according to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.
Wagner was preparing to provide the capability at the direction of the Russian government, Kirby said.
The newly downgraded intelligence did not specify where the missile system would be coming from. But CNN previously reported that the Wagner Group had been tasked with carrying out the delivery of a surface-to-air SA-22 missile system from Syria to the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad agreed to provide Hezbollah with the Russian-made missile defense system, known as a Pantsir, two people familiar with the intelligence told CNN last month.
“We will closely monitor for whether Wagner provides military equipment to Hezbollah or Iran,” Kirby said. “We are prepared to use our counterterrorism sanctions authorities against Russian individuals or entities making these destabilizing transfers.”
Russia’s role in directing the transfer of an air defense system to Hezbollah reflects Moscow’s ongoing arms relationship with Iran and its proxies, which has only strengthened since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The US is also concerned that Iran is preparing to provide Russia with ballistic missiles, which Iran showcased to Russian Defense Minister Shoigu during the latter’s visit to Tehran in September, Kirby said on Tuesday.
Wagner and Hezbollah fighters have also both operated in Syria for years, where they have been working alongside Russian and Syrian armed forces to bolster the Assad regime against the Syrian opposition. Hezbollah began to pull its fighters out in recent years, but the group is also backed by Iran, which is a close Assad ally. A source familiar with western intelligence told CNN previously that there has been evidence of increasing collaboration between Hezbollah and Wagner in Syria.
The possibility that Hezbollah could soon have a new air defense system comes amid concerns that the militants are considering opening a new front in Israel’s war on Hamas, on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. The US has repeatedly warned Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups to stay out of the conflict and has positioned aircraft carriers and troops in the region to try to deter against a potential escalation.
Still, Iran-backed militia groups have launched over 60 attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria since October 17, prompting the US to respond with strikes on the militants.
The US intelligence community has assessed that Iran has been calibrating its response to Israel’s military intervention in Gaza to avoid direct conflict with Israel or the US, while still exacting costs on its adversaries via its proxy groups, CNN has reported.
But Iran does not maintain perfect control of its umbrella of these proxy groups, officials say—in particular over Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an ally of Hamas, the group that attacked Israel on October 7, and has long positioned itself as fighting against Israel.
Hezbollah and Israel have engaged in cross-border strikes on each other in northern Israel and southern Lebanon over the last month, but US officials believe Hezbollah is for now not planning on entering the war in force.
10. Kim Jong Un viewed photos of US bases taken from new satellite, state media says
They are getting satellite data back pretty quickly. Are their systems really operational? Or are they just downloading imagery from Google Earth?
Kim Jong Un viewed photos of US bases taken from new satellite, state media says
https://www.nknews.org/2023/11/kim-jong-un-viewed-photos-of-us-bases-taken-from-new-satellite-state-media-says/
North Korea says spy satellite will begin operations in 7-10 days, with plans to launch another in 2024
Chad O'Carroll | Shreyas Reddy November 22, 2023
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North Korean leader visits the Pyongyang General Control Center of the National Aerospace Technology Administration (NATA) on Nov. 22, 2023, after the DPRK claimed it successfully launched a military spy satellite into orbit the previous day. | Image: KCNA
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un viewed images of U.S. military bases in the Pacific captured by the country’s new spy satellite on Wednesday, while visiting a space center shortly after the DPRK put the satellite into orbit, state media has reported.
During the visit to the Pyongyang General Control Center of the National Aerospace Technology Administration (NATA), Kim hailed the launch of the military reconnaissance satellite on Tuesday night as “a great event in developing the armed forces of the Republic” amid a changing security situation in the region, according to Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
He reportedly observed photos of Anderson Air Force Base, Apra Harbor and other U.S. bases on the island territory of Guam taken by the satellite and received early Wednesday.
The leader also called for further efforts to track U.S. and South Korean military movements in real time by deploying a network of satellites operating on different orbits, stating that the next satellite launch will take place next year.
“Noting that the armed forces of the DPRK have taken in their hands both ‘eyes’ overlooking a very long distance and a strong ‘fist’ beating a very long distance, he stressed once again that it is necessary to operate many more reconnaissance satellites in the aspect of increasing the effectiveness of the powerful military strike means of the DPRK as well as for self-defense,” KCNA reported.
Pyongyang claimed earlier Wednesday that it “successfully” placed the Malligyong-1 in orbit, and NATA officials reportedly told Kim that the new satellite will officially start reconnaissance operations from Dec. 1 “after finishing 7 to 10 days’ fine-tuning process.”
The ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a press release on Wednesday that it estimates that the satellite entered orbit as North Korea reported. But it added the U.S. and South Korea will continue to investigate whether the satellite is functioning normally.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visits the Pyongyang General Control Center of the National Aerospace Technology Administration (NATA) on Nov. 22, 2023, after the DPRK claimed it successfully launched a military spy satellite into orbit the previous day. | Image: KCNA
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North Korean media did not release the satellite images that Kim reportedly viewed, but it could do so in the coming days or weeks. North Korea’s official newspaper previously published photos of Seoul that it said were taken during a test for the spy satellite last year.
The release of such images could reveal more information about the satellite, but showing its hand could be to Pyongyang’s disadvantage.
“Showing and disclosing your capabilities is the last thing you want to do,” retired ROK Lt. Gen. Chun In-bum told NK News.
Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based lecturer in international relations at Troy University, said South Korea would respond to the DPRK publicizing images of sensitive locations by acquiring more counter-space capabilities and strengthening cooperation with its allies.
Experts told NK News earlier on Wednesday that questions remain about North Korea’s ability to establish “reliable communications” and demonstrate credible space-based surveillance capabilities.
During the visit to the NATA center, Kim again cited U.S. military activities to justify North Korea’s development of the satellite and other military capabilities.
The leader specifically referenced the arrival of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and nuclear-powered submarine Santa Fe in South Korea on Tuesday, emphasizing the need “to closely monitor and grasp the nature of such maneuvers of the U.S. imperialists and their vassal armies” with a network of satellites.
Pinkston told NK News that Pyongyang’s ambitions could accelerate the “militarization of space” and trilateral cyber and space cooperation between Seoul, Washington and Tokyo.
“Paradoxically, in the long run, this competition, and North Korea’s WMD programs, will lead to the Kim regime’s demise,” he said.
Building on the claimed success of its first military reconnaissance satellite, Kim said an upcoming ruling party meeting will discuss plans for the launch of its next satellite in 2024 as part of efforts to secure “the aerospace reconnaissance capability for monitoring south Korea and the Pacific and their vicinity.”
Edited by Bryan Betts
Updated at 6:40 p.m. KST on Nov. 22 with expert comments, ROK assessment of satellite.
11. US retaliates with airstrikes after militants fire missile at Iraq air base used by American troops
US retaliates with airstrikes after militants fire missile at Iraq air base used by American troops
Stars and Stripes · by Matthew Adams · November 21, 2023
An MC-130 Combat Talon II, assigned to Hurlburt Field, Fla., has its engines tested at Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait, March 14, 2020. A U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship fired on a vehicle Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023, carrying Iran-backed militants who had launched a missile at American troops in western Iraq, causing “several enemy casualties,” U.S. officials said. (Kevin Tanenbaum/U.S. Air Force)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. struck back with an AC-130 gunship and airstrikes after Iran-backed militants fired a missile Tuesday at American and coalition forces at an air base in western Iraq, U.S. officials said.
The attacks began when a close-range ballistic missile was fired Tuesday at al-Asad Air Base west of Baghdad, resulting in “several non-serious injuries and some minor damage to infrastructure, “ Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters at the Pentagon.
Singh said the AC-130 was airborne at the time of the attack and fired on a vehicle carrying the assailants.
The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said on X, formerly Twitter, that the AC-130 “maintained visual confirmation from the time of the [missile] launch to the time of engagement.”
“This strike resulted in several enemy casualties,” CENTCOM added.
Later Tuesday, CENTCOM reported it carried out “discrete, precision strikes” against two undisclosed facilities in Iraq. The statement linked the attacks to the missile strike at al-Asad but did not elaborate.
U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked at least 66 times by militant groups since Hamas extremists breached Israeli defenses around Gaza, slaughtered about 1,200 men, women and children and took about 240 people hostage. Israel has responded with airstrikes and a ground invasion of Gaza, killing more than 11,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The U.S. still maintains forces in Iraq and Syria as part of operations against the Islamic State group and its allies, which U.S. officials say receive money, weapons and other support from Iran.
The U.S. has pledged support for Israel and has deployed more than 1,200 troops to the Middle East to deter other countries or militant groups from escalating the conflict.
Matthew Adams
Matthew Adams
Matthew Adams covers the Defense Department at the Pentagon. His past reporting experience includes covering politics for The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle and The News and Observer. He is based in Washington, D.C.
Stars and Stripes · by Matthew Adams · November 21, 2023
12. Navy's new cyber strategy aims to place a premium on non-kinetic capabilities' role in conflict
Excerpts:
Overall, the Navy’s cyber strategy has seven lines of effort:
1) Improve and support the cyber workforce
2) Shift from compliance to cyber readiness
3) Defend enterprise IT, data, and networks
4) Secure defense critical infrastructure and weapon systems
5) Conduct and facilitate cyber operations
6) Partner to secure the defense industrial base
7) Foster cooperation and collaboration
Navy's new cyber strategy aims to place a premium on non-kinetic capabilities' role in conflict
"We really need to talk about this a bit more openly," Chris Cleary, the Department of the Navy's principal cyber advisor, told DefenseScoop.
BY
MARK POMERLEAU
NOVEMBER 21, 2023
defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · November 21, 2023
The Department of the Navy’s new cyber strategy, released Tuesday, places an emphasis on cyber as a warfighting domain in an attempt to change the culture of the sea services and elevate this mission area as a core competency.
The guidance, which applies to both the Navy and Marine Corps, was about three years in the making. Officials involved in the effort sought to make the distinction from past strategies and documents, which were heavily focused on cybersecurity and defense, to one that recognizes cyber is part of warfighting.
“The [chief information office] really [focuses on] modernize, innovate, defend. They’re going to do a lot of that zero trust, identity management, [risk management framework] reform. What the [principal cyber adviser] really tried to bring to this was, … ‘Hey, this is a warfighting domain and we need to figure out how to talk about this a little more openly,’” Chris Cleary, the Department of the Navy’s principal cyber advisor, told DefenseScoop regarding the strategy that his office helped craft.
“When we released the cyberspace superiority vision a year ago, it was really to focus on that. This is not just a cybersecurity exercise, this is not just a zero-trust problem. This is a warfighting domain, this is a warfighting domain to be professionalized in, and this is a warfighting domain that the Navy and the Marine Corps need to adopt as a core competency in and amongst the services. Once you’ve come to those three conclusions, then the presentation of forces, the development of capabilities, the use of those capabilities just get more and more ingrained into the service moving forward,” he said. “It is no surprise that our adversaries are continuing to advance and professionalize in this space. We need to as well.”
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The strategy warns that the next fight will be like no other prior conflict and the use of non-kinetic capabilities will likely be the deciding factor. Militaries that effectively synchronize non-kinetic effects, like cyber, will have a decisive advantage.
“We need to begin to have similar conversations about sort of the non-kinetic side of what we’re expected to do in the Navy,” said Cleary, whose last day in the department is Tuesday.
The risk of not talking about these things openly, he added, is there could be capabilities that key Defense Department components never become aware of because some organizations could be excluded if conversations are reserved purely for classified environments.
“As a warfighting organization, we need to be able to speak more openly about how we would expect to leverage certain kinds of capabilities in this domain without talking about those capabilities, specifically. The ones and zeros, the kinds of things that we’re going to be going after, the kinds of aim points we have to look at — those things are all very, very good reasons, classified conversations that we won’t have publicly … [but] we really need to talk about this a bit more openly, just like we do with any other weapons system we have in the Navy or the Marine Corps, [such as] the joint strike fighter, the Ford-class aircraft carrier, the Columbia-class submarine,” he said.
The Department of the Navy has begun thinking about how it provides certain non-kinetic effects and teams to achieve the services’ goals. The Navy and Marine Corps already provide cyber forces to U.S. Cyber Command, but they don’t exert any operational control over those cyber capabilities as that authority belongs to Cybercom.
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Cleary said the Marines have really led the way in developing concepts, doctrine and forces in the non-kinetic realm for what’s known as service-retained capability, primarily through the Marine Expeditionary Force Information Groups, or MIGs.
Cleary explained there will be times when true remote cyber capabilities won’t be effective against certain targets given they may be disconnected from traditional networks or access might be difficult. As such, close and proximal forces might be needed to gain access and provide non-kinetic effects.
“Sometimes on net, or traditionally wired sort of cyber capabilities may not be available to us for a variety of reasons. And the ability to gain access to targets using off-net capabilities might be the way that you have to go about doing this. And who’s better to perform that than the Navy and the Marine Corps based on their presence?” he said, acknowledging that they’re in the process of figuring out what those capabilities and forces will look like.
Over the past year, Navy officials have described the notion of fleet non-kinetic effects teams that will augment afloat forces with critical information warfare capabilities.
A Navy spokesperson told DefenseScoop that a Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) study is still ongoing to analyze operational requirements, capabilities and potential options for the teams’ construct. That effort is expected to conclude in late 2024.
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Changing the culture
The new strategy recognizes a need to drive culture change throughout the Department of the Navy.
Despite being a common refrain in strategic guidance, Cleary said this is a generational issue.
“We’re in the middle of one of these sort of cultural revolutions right now, which is the idea of kinetic warfare versus non-kinetic warfare. To be honest with you, there’s still folks in the Navy that are not completely convinced that the non-kinetic warfare delivers the kinds of things that we’re promising that it can,” he said. “That is a cultural transition. Again, you could argue, there were many people that didn’t believe in the airplane in the 1940s, or the submarine in the 1940s.”
Ultimately, the strategy must be viewed by the entire force, not just those in the cyber community. Cleary explained that cyber must not be an afterthought, but integrated equally with the services’ other warfighting capabilities.
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“This is the cyber strategy for the entire Navy to read and to begin to fully embrace this as a warfighting function that is integrated across all things we do in the Department of the Navy and the Navy and the Marine Corps, because all future fights are going to begin and potentially end here,” he said.
“Cyber can’t be seen as a bolt-on to what we do. It can’t be seen as something that sits next to airplanes or sits next to submarines or next to Navy Special Warfare. It has to be fully integrated into the department for it to be successful … This has to be integrated into the department, resourced appropriately, manned appropriately, prioritized appropriately. And we’re hoping that this cyber strategy begins to elevate this mission space within the department writ large,” he added.
Some culture change has already made its way into the force. Cleary noted that the Marines have included cyber when listing the service selection of midshipmen out of the Naval Academy. A few years ago, there were only two classifications: marine air or marine ground.
“About three years ago, the Marines added marine cyber to the conversation. That culturally is an amazing shift that cyber was enough of a differentiator that it would break out from marine air and marine ground and be its own thing that the Marines called out specifically, when they commissioned midshipmen out of the Naval Academy,” Cleary said. “Culturally, they’re embracing it and they’re showing that embracing through making it very prominent in the way they talk about their force: marine air, marine ground, marine cyber. That’s amazing.”
Overall, the Navy’s cyber strategy has seven lines of effort:
1) Improve and support the cyber workforce
2) Shift from compliance to cyber readiness
3) Defend enterprise IT, data, and networks
4) Secure defense critical infrastructure and weapon systems
5) Conduct and facilitate cyber operations
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6) Partner to secure the defense industrial base
7) Foster cooperation and collaboration
In This Story
defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · November 21, 2023
13. Nearly half of Americans think the US is spending too much on Ukraine aid, an AP-NORC poll says
Americans: Israel, yes. Ukraine, no?
Troubling.
Nearly half of Americans think the US is spending too much on Ukraine aid, an AP-NORC poll says
AP · by SEUNG MIN KIM · November 22, 2023
WASHINGTON (AP) — As lawmakers in Washington weigh sending billions more in federal support to Kyiv to help fight off Russian aggression, close to half of the U.S. public thinks the country is spending too much on aid to Ukraine, according to polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Those sentiments, driven primarily by Republicans, help explain the hardening opposition among conservative GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are rebuffing efforts from President Joe Biden to approve a new tranche of Ukraine aid, arguing that the money would be better spent for domestic priorities.
Yet opposition to aid is down slightly from where it was a month ago in another AP-NORC poll. Now, 45% say the U.S. government is spending too much on aid to Ukraine in the war against Russia, compared with 52% in October. That shift appears to come mostly from Republicans: 59% now say too much is spent on Ukraine aid, but that’s down from 69% in October.
Nonetheless, the Republican resistance to continued Ukraine aid remains strong.
“I understand the citizens need help, but I feel like we’re spending way too much money on Ukraine when we have our issues here, on our own soil, that we need to deal with,” said Eric Mondello, 40, from Fountain, Colorado. Pointing to needs such as health care for veterans and homelessness in communities, Mondello added: “I understand the U.S. has been an ally to others, but I feel like, let’s take care of our people first.”
More than one-third (38%) of U.S. adults say that current spending is “about the right amount,” which is up slightly from last month (31%). Among Republicans, nearly 3 in 10 (29%) say the current spending is about right, up from 20% last month.
Paula Graves, 69, is among those who says the amount of spending for Ukraine is the right amount.
“Putin, he’s straight up evil. I don’t think there should be any question in anyone’s mind,” said Graves, of Clovis, California. “He’s a dictator. He’s infringed on human rights, he’s a very scary person and if Ukraine falls to him, who’s next? What country’s next?”
Graves, who says she is not affiliated with a political party but leans more conservative, said she believes the U.S. has a leadership role on the global stage and added: “I think we definitely need to put America first, but I don’t think that needs to be first and only.”
The White House has been repeatedly pressing lawmakers to pass Biden’s nearly $106 billion emergency spending package that he proposed in October, which includes more than $61 billion specifically for the war in Ukraine. The rest of Biden’s request has aid for Israel as it battles Hamas, money for various priorities in the Indo-Pacific region and additional resources to help manage migration at the southern border.
On Ukraine, the Biden administration is increasingly warning that the well of aid is running dry. In an unannounced visit to Kyiv on Monday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Ukraine’s effort to defeat Russian forces “matters to the rest of the world” and pledged that U.S. support would continue “for the long haul.”
That message was reinforced at the White House.
“As President Biden has said, when aggressors don’t pay a price for their aggression, they’ll cause more chaos and death and destruction,” John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, told the White House press briefing Monday. “They just keep on going, and the cost and the threats to America and to the world will keep rising.”
But Congress has rebuffed the White House efforts at bolstering Ukraine support at least twice in recent months. First, it ignored a roughly $40 billion supplemental request before a Sept. 30 funding deadline. Then last week, it passed a stopgap funding measure that keeps the government operating through early next year, but with no additional Ukraine aid.
In the Senate, a small bipartisan group is working on legislation that would combine fresh Ukraine assistance with stricter border measures to address concerns from Republicans that the U.S. was focused on needs abroad at the expense of issues closer to home. A broad majority of senators remains supportive of Ukraine aid, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., being one of the most stalwart supporters despite the isolationist strain in his party.
South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said lawmakers will continue to work on the Ukraine-border package over the Thanksgiving break and won’t wait until mid-January — when Congress faces another government funding deadline — to act on Ukraine.
The big question mark is in the House, where still-new Speaker Mike Johnson — who had voted against Ukraine aid as a rank-and-file conservative — has spoken broadly of the need to counter Russian aggression yet faces unruly GOP lawmakers who have shown more hostility to continued support for Kyiv.
Johnson, too, is insisting that additional Ukraine aid be paired with tougher border measures, although it is far from certain that any immigration agreement that clears the Democratic-led Senate could pass the GOP-controlled House.
Half of U.S. adults are extremely or very concerned that Russia’s influence poses a direct threat to the United States. Democrats (53%) and Republicans (51%) are similarly concerned about Russian power – but Democrats are more likely than Republicans to see Ukraine as a nation of shared values to the U.S. and to support more aid for Ukraine.
About half of the public (48%) endorses providing weapons to Ukraine (57% among Democrats, 42% among Republicans). About 4 in 10 favor sending government funds directly to Ukraine (54% for Democrats, 24% for Republicans).
Americans have grown slightly more likely to say the U.S. should take “a less active role” in solving the world’s problems, compared with a September poll from AP-NORC and Pearson. Slightly fewer than half (45%) now say the U.S. should be less involved, up from 33% in September. Just 16% of Democrats now say the U.S. should take a more active role, down from 29% in September.
Peter Einsig, a Republican from Tulsa, Oklahoma, said he still believes the U.S. has a role to play abroad, but that he remains concerned about excessive government spending and federal debt.
Yet Einsig said he would be more inclined to support aid to Ukraine if there were more oversight into how the money was being used abroad, as well as a timeline of how much longer the U.S. would be providing support.
“We don’t have transparency on where the money is really, really going,” said Einsig, 40. “It’s a big lump sum.”
Four in 10 U.S. adults say Ukraine is an ally that shares U.S. interests and values. That view is most common among Democrats (53%), who are much more likely than independents (28%), Republicans (29%) and Americans overall to see Ukraine as a nation with similar values and needs. About half of Republicans say Ukraine is a partner that the U.S. should cooperate with, but say it is not a nation that shares U.S. values.
___
The poll of 1,239 adults was conducted Nov. 2-6, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, designed to represent the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
AP · by SEUNG MIN KIM · November 22, 2023
14. ‘I’ll bounce back,’ top Marine vows in 1st video since cardiac arrest
The short video is here. https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cz7FZG9ve-D/
I am confident this will end up strengthening him for his tenure as Commandant. As Nietzche said...
But we should all be concerned with the health of our own tickers...
‘I’ll bounce back,’ top Marine vows in 1st video since cardiac arrest
marinecorpstimes.com · by Irene Loewenson · November 21, 2023
The No. 1 Marine general appeared in a brief video Tuesday in an effort to reassure Marines he was recovering from the cardiac arrest that had left him hospitalized for weeks.
It was the first known public-facing appearance that Commandant Gen. Eric Smith made since going into cardiac arrest more than three weeks ago.
“I’m still in the fight — I need you to be in the fight,” Smith said. “It’s not the first time I’ve been knocked down. When I was shot in 2004, I bounced back from that. I’ll bounce back from this.”
In April 2004, Smith was shot in the left leg but remained in Iraq, becoming the second-in-command of a Marine infantry regiment there, The Washington Post reported.
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Biden’s pick to lead the Marine Corps helped design its new vision
President Joe Biden nominated Gen. Eric Smith Tuesday to serve as the next commandant of the Marine Corps.
Before Tuesday, Smith had issued statements about his medical condition, but only in the form of written news releases issued by Marine Corps headquarters’ communications team.
Clad in the camouflage combat utility uniform and standing upright without support, he thanked Marines for their support and wished them a happy Thanksgiving.
Smith, who reportedly runs his own Instagram account, also posted a long caption to the video with reflections on the upcoming holiday.
“The world is uncertain, and I’ve been reminded recently that we can’t take anything for granted, but as Marines, we must be certain of one thing — that we’ll always have each other,” Smith wrote. “Thanksgiving is a great time to reaffirm our commitment to our fellow Marines and the core values that bind us together.”
“I’m thankful for each one of you, who had the courage to walk past the other service’s recruiting offices that offered you tangible rewards and probably an easier life, to join the one branch you knew was going to be the most challenging,” he said.
Smith went into cardiac arrest Oct. 29, and the Marine Corps announced him to be in stable condition three days later. He has been released from the hospital, the Corps said Thursday, and is preparing for a procedure to fix his bicuspid aortic valve ― a congenital heart abnormality that doctors said contributed to his cardiac arrest.
Meanwhile, the hospitalization of Smith and the lack of a Senate-confirmed assistant commandant left Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the general in charge of force modernization, performing the duties of commandant. Gen. Christopher Mahoney took over Nov. 3 following his confirmation as assistant commandant.
On Tuesday evening, Mahoney issued his own Thanksgiving message to the force, urging Marines to “plan for mission success by managing the risks” of holiday travel.
“[A]ssess road terrain and weather conditions, get sleep, and allow adequate time for traffic,” Mahoney wrote. “If conditions change, change your plan for the well-being of your family, friends, unit, and yourself.”
“Remember this Marines, you are the most important thing to me,” Mahoney continued. “Take good care of yourselves and each other.”
Smith is not yet back to full duty status, Marine spokesman Maj. Josh Larson said Tuesday in an email to reporters.
But Smith repeatedly has indicated his intention of getting back to work once he can.
“I’ll be back in the fight soon enough, and I can’t wait to see you all again,” Smith wrote Tuesday.
About Irene Loewenson
Irene Loewenson is a staff reporter for Marine Corps Times. She joined Military Times as an editorial fellow in August 2022. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.
15. End of an era: The last class of Marine Scout Snipers graduates on Dec. 15
I am sure there are many Marines who do ont agree with this decision.
End of an era: The last class of Marine Scout Snipers graduates on Dec. 15
The last HOGs night will take place the night before, aboard Camp Geiger in North Carolina.
BY JOSHUA SKOVLUND | PUBLISHED NOV 21, 2023 4:44 PM EST
taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · November 21, 2023
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The last class of Marine Scout Snipers is scheduled to graduate on Dec. 15, marking the end of the 0317 MOS and a long tradition of producing some of the deadliest snipers on the battlefield.
The last HOGs night will take place the night before, aboard Camp Geiger in North Carolina.
Marine scout sniper candidates are initially called Professionally Instructed Gunmen, or PIGs, but once they graduate from the course, they are called Hunters of Gunmen, or HOGs.
The HOGs night, a tradition for all scout sniper graduates including legends like Carlos Hathcock and Charles “Chuck” Mawhinney, is where scout snipers gather around a bonfire to receive their HOGs tooth, a 7.62 bullet on a 550 chord necklace. The right of passage is traditionally attended by Scout Snipers past and present.
Jonathan Taylor is the executive vice president and COO of the USMC Scout Sniper Association. He served as a Scout Sniper from 2006 to 2013, deploying three times to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. He’s helped put together the HOGs night for years, helping to attract celebrity guest speakers and getting invites out to as many scout snipers as possible.
“It’s usually just a smaller group with the graduates and then a few, you know, a few stragglers here or there. This one is scheduled to be big,” Taylor said. “We’re already getting emails from people. I think they are planning for 50 at the HOGs night, but that’s just off the top of the head of the staff NCOIC. I would say it’s closer to 60 to 70.”
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The night will include a pig roast and goodbyes — for now — to the Scout Sniper course and MOS. Celebrity guest speakers like Naked and Afraid star Justin Governale and Cody Alford, former Scout Sniper and Marine Raider, will attend the last HOGs night and graduation the following day.
“It’s definitely a bittersweet event,” Taylor said. “But, you know, the Scout Sniper program is going away. We don’t know how long it’s going to be gone for, but this will be the last one for the time being.”
Logan Stark, a former Marine Scout Sniper who deployed to Okinawa, Japan; and Sangin, Afghanistan, acknowledged that though there are mixed emotions, he’s confident that with the current state of the world, this won’t be the last we’ve seen of the Scout Snipers. He pointed out that the Marine Scout Sniper course has come and gone multiple times since the first course took place in 1918.
“I think that there’s very much a break in case of emergency mentality for Scout Snipers right now,” Stark said. “I think that if all of a sudden the warfare landscape switched dramatically overnight, I think we would see the program brought back immediately. But, who knows.”
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Joshua Skovlund
Joshua Skovlund is a staff writer for Task & Purpose and a former U.S. Army forward observer. He has been covering the military, veterans, and first responders for over three years, reporting on assignment from Ukraine during the opening salvo of the Russian invasion, multinational military exercises in Germany, and during the 2020 civil unrest in Minneapolis. His previous bylines include Coffee or Die Magazine and Outdoor Life. Contact the author here.
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taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · November 21, 2023
16. Gaza Is Gen Z’s First Real War
Peace? When has there been peace? Especially when our adversaries believe that politics is war by other means. Maybe this will be a wake up call for our youth.
Gaza Is Gen Z’s First Real War
Many young people grew up believing war was passé and peace was normal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gaza-is-gen-zs-first-real-war-hamas-israel-social-media-world-war-ii-3111692f?st=he91ca8h0dodgtu&utm_source=pocket_saves
By Walter Russell Mead
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Nov. 20, 2023 6:10 pm ET
Students demonstrate at Columbia University in New York, Nov. 15. PHOTO: SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
Is Israel’s war with Hamas a war crime? At a recent (entirely civil and non-confrontational) event at Bard College, a student suggested that this was the case. After all, there have been at least 11,000 casualties since the Oct. 7 terror attack that launched the war, and the majority dead have been civilians. Thousands were children. How, the Bard students and many of their peers around the country and the world ask, could all this not be a war crime? And even if Hamas’s initial attack was itself a war crime and not a “legitimate act of resistance against an occupying power,” isn’t the larger loss of civilian life in Israel’s subsequent attacks just as bad?
I could have turned the session into a debate about the underlying merits of the Palestinian and Israeli causes or a technical discussion of the laws of war. Instead, being a professor, I turned the discussion to the history of war. One night in March 1945, U.S. planes dropped incendiary bombs over Tokyo killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. Incomplete estimates from Japan put the total death toll from allied bombing raids as high as 500,000. All told, there were an estimated 38 million civilian deaths in World War II, more than twice the approximately 15 million deaths of soldiers in combat.
As for the treatment of enemy civilians, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference the U.S. agreed to the forcible removal of about 12 million Germans, again largely civilian and many children and elderly, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. Many of the expulsions took place in winter amid terrible scenes of hunger and deprivation, all while mass rapes of German women slowly subsided across the Soviet zone of Germany.
Lawyers and legislators can debate whether these actions constitute war crimes, but as Cicero put it more than two thousand years ago, “inter arma enim silent leges.” Roughly, that translates as the “laws go silent when armies clash.” Or as William Tecumseh Sherman put it more succinctly, “War is hell.”
One reason the news from Gaza has so massively affected the younger generation is that they have grown up considering peace to be normal and natural. The war in Gaza hasn’t merely introduced young Americans to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also has shown them the face of war.
After the horrors of World War II, Americans did everything to build a stable and at least relatively peaceful world order. This order was far from perfect. It tolerated and, in some cases, protected gross economic, social, racial and national injustices. And some of the little wars Americans fought to defend it, as policy makers at the time believed, were as brutal as the world wars of the 20th century.
But the world order prevented the eruption of global conflicts on the scale of the great wars with casualties reckoned by the tens of millions. It also permitted generations of Americans to grow up in a bubble. For younger generations, war was passé. Foreign policy henceforth would involve promoting equitable development in poor countries, extending the definition of human rights, promoting global public health, fighting climate change and perfecting the body of international law.
War has other ideas. The American-led world order is under attack abroad, even as Americans have increasingly abandoned their commitment to preserving it. The result, inevitably, is a gradual and perhaps sudden return to the lawlessness and violence that marks a world at war.
Israelis and Palestinians don’t live in the post-historical bubble. More than 300,000 Syrian civilians are believed to have been killed during a decade of civil war, and millions more have been driven from their homes. Elsewhere, an estimated 100,000 Armenians fled their homes in terror this year. Roughly six million Sudanese have done so in the current civil war. Industrial-scale slaughters of the innocent, and the flight of millions of refugees are the new normal in their neighborhood. Jihadi bands and Wagner mercenaries are sowing chaos and death across the Sahel. About 370,000 have died in the Yemen war.
Gaza introduced Gen Z to the true horror of war. In the short run, Hamas’s propaganda machine is enlisting images of suffering Palestinians to foil Israeli efforts to break its power in Gaza.
The real question, though, for the future of America and the world isn’t whether hot-headed college students will march for Hamas. It’s whether as they mature, they come to understand how fragile and important peace is and take up the task of defending it. If not, war won’t be something they see on cellphones and spout slogans about. It will be the force that shapes and determines their lives.WSJ Opinion: The First Humanitarian-Crisis War
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Wonder Land: Hamas knew that after Oct. 7 the narrative would shift to the isolation of Israel. Images: Zuma Press/AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the November 21, 2023, print edition as 'Gaza Is Gen Z’s First Real War'.
17. Al-Qaeda: A Defeated Threat? Think Again.
Violent extremist organizations (VEOs) remain the 5th threat along with the four revisionist and rogue powers. We cannot neglect the terrorist threat.
Conclusion:
Decades of conflict have left the West weary and dismissive, but underestimating al-Qaeda’s resolve is a critical error. Wishful thinking won’t eradicate terrorism, and complacency invites it home. History’s lessons are clear: the Taliban’s rise foretold 9/11, the Islamic State’s growth unleashed international terror, and vacuums in Iraq and Afghanistan nurtured extremism. The resurgence of Hamas is a reminder that terrorism’s embers still burn, unseen but ever-present. In our battle against terror, miscalculating al-Qaeda’s threat could be our gravest oversight — for what is unseen often poses the greatest danger.
Al-Qaeda: A Defeated Threat? Think Again. - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Sara Harmouch · November 22, 2023
U.S. President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan marked the closure of America’s longest war against the very adversary that started it. “Remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said al-Qaeda would not be there. I said it wouldn’t be there,” declared Biden, resonating with a nation eager to turn a new page. However, reality clashed with this confidence on Aug. 15 when a 17-year-old tied to al-Qaeda was arrested in Philadelphia on charges related to weapons of mass destruction. Americans must now confront a question many thought the nation had left behind: Is al-Qaeda really defeated or has the threat merely evolved?
President Biden may have announced the end of the Afghan war, but al-Qaeda has not. As of June 2023, U.N. reports indicate that the group’s activities are intensifying not just in Afghanistan, but globally as well. The group’s sustained ties with the Taliban and their leaders’ strategic return to Afghanistan are an advancement — not a decline. While top al-Qaeda figures are also calling for renewed jihad in Sudan, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is simultaneously targeting nations like Morocco with new propaganda campaigns. Additionally, al-Qaeda’s threats against Sweden and Denmark aren’t mere talk. In the wake of Quran burnings, the group has declared, “[w]e’re still here and open for business.” The escalating Israel-Hamas conflict further fuels al-Qaeda’s resurgence, leveraging the Palestinian cause to rally support, reinvigorating its base, and staging a comeback. These developments not only reaffirm al-Qaeda’s adaptability and determination but clearly underscore that any claims of al-Qaeda’s defeat are, at this point, premature.
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The Contagion
Contradicting Biden’s assessment, the Taliban’s 2021 ascension reinvigorated al-Qaeda’s Afghan operations. Al-Qaeda commanders are back in Afghanistan, swiftly reactivating the group’s presence. Training camps are now operational in five provinces, including Zabul and Nuristan, areas that Osama bin Laden once earmarked as crucial for al-Qaeda. In Nuristan, these camps are actively training suicide bombers, signaling a revival of al-Qaeda’s past strategies, evocative of their roles in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and the 9/11 attacks — all executed under the Taliban’s shield.
However, al-Qaeda’s resurgence is no longer confined to Afghanistan. In 2023 alone, al-Qaeda’s affiliates orchestrated 1,305 attacks globally. Al-Shabaab, leading with 1,057 attacks in Somalia and Kenya, continues to be a major threat with its developing transnational capabilities. Concurrently, Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin in the Sahel and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen conducted 184 and 64 attacks, respectively. In West Africa, frequent coups and military withdrawals have emboldened al-Qaeda affiliates to proliferate in countries like Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. The global scope of these attacks highlights al-Qaeda’s penchant for capitalizing on regional instabilities. This pattern becomes clearer when we observe the unfolding situation in Sudan.
Al-Qaeda is exploiting Sudan’s civil strife to establish a new stronghold. Abu Hudhaifa al Sudani, a prominent figure within the organization and a former bin Laden associate, intends to “sow the seeds of jihad” amidst the chaos. Al Sudani’s militant rhetoric, backed by his history in Afghanistan and Iraq, adds weight to his call to arms and lends credence to this threat. His al-Qaeda-aligned Rapid Support Forces have weakened Sudan’s armed forces, creating openings for extremist activities. Sudan, with its strategic location, resource wealth, and Islamic heritage, has been a prime target for al-Qaeda since the 1990s. Under Omar al Bashir, Sudan harbored bin Laden and formed the notorious Janjaweed militia (now the Rapid Support Forces). Al Sudani’s 2022 manifesto, “Now the fighting has come: War messages to the Mujahideen in Sudan,” and recent strategies by Ibrahim al Qussi, outline ambitions to turn Sudan into an “Afghanistan 2.0” — a central hub to orchestrate attacks exceeding the scale of 9/11.
Misguided Optimism
Despite Biden’s reassurances, al-Qaeda’s domestic threat looms large. In May 2022, former al-Qaeda fighter Shihab Ahmed Shihab plotted to assassinate President George W. Bush in Ohio and smuggled four Iraqi operatives into the United States through the southern border. Remarkably, Shihab had entered the United States undetected by intelligence agencies despite his history of killing U.S. soldiers in the Iraq War. These incidents display al-Qaeda’s ability to exploit national security gaps. The FBI thwarted this plot, yet it, along with the 2019 Naval Air Station Pensacola attack, reminds observers that al-Qaeda is neither distant nor defeated. FBI Director Christopher Wray’s warning of an anticipated rise in terrorist activities, including increased risk of al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. soil, further corroborates this unsettling trend.
Between 2021 and 2023, al-Qaeda ramped up its publications, reiterating its longstanding strategy of targeting the far enemy – the United States. On the eve of the 9/11 attacks’ 22nd anniversary, al-Sahab, their media wing, divulged plans for new attacks involving skilled militants, some being 9/11 veterans. The burgeoning reach of their media outlets, primarily through the magazine “Mujahideen in the West,” heralds a transition toward a more ideologically driven warfare. This platform not only incites lone-wolf attacks but also pioneers innovative methods. In “Road to Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam,” al-Qaeda explicitly labeled attacks on American economic assets and citizens as “simple and easy,” recommending low-effort tactics like arson. Al-Qaeda’s communiqués forewarn of an imminent “Islamic strike,” limited in resources yet potentially devastating in impact.
Contrary to Christy Abizaid’s assertion of a minimal al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, the group’s operational success does not solely depend on numbers. Al-Qaeda is renowned for favoring strategic ingenuity over sheer numbers. The 9/11 attacks, executed by just 50 members, are a testament to their efficiency. Despite a modest Afghan footprint, by 2020, al-Qaeda boasted 20,000 fighters in Syria, at least 2,000 in the Sahel, 6,000 in Yemen, and 7,000 in Somalia. Their modus operandi, adhering to a low-tech, high-impact ethos, enables them to transcend geographical and numerical constraints.
Al-Qaeda’s strategic flexibility is also evidenced in its response to regional tensions, such as the Israel-Hamas conflict. The group’s leadership celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 strike as a historic triumph for global jihad, exposing Western and Israeli vulnerabilities. This stance is reinforced by endorsements from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, and al-Shabaab, who not only elevate the conflict’s international profile but also weave local issues into their broader jihadist agenda. Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent’s calls for attacks on Western targets and al-Shabaab’s potential “solidarity” attacks exemplify this expansive approach. The narrative culminates with al-Qaeda’s Syria branch, Hurras al-Din, urging Muslims to join jihad, a move that exacerbates old animosities and galvanizes a new generation of militants. This concerted effort positions al-Qaeda to reclaim its role as the vanguard of the global jihad.
The group’s capacity to leverage geopolitical upheavals is a recurrent theme. A prime example was during the Arab Spring of 2011. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, seizing the moment, integrated seamlessly into Yemen’s local power structures, simultaneously pursuing their global jihad agenda. This dual strategy was apparent in their 2012 attempt to down a U.S. airliner. The group’s ability to turn regional conflicts into opportunities for broader aggression poses a significant threat to international security. This pattern, reflected in the spate of attacks across the United States and Europe, particularly between 2004 and 2006 and again from 2015 to 2018, persists in today’s Middle Eastern conflicts.
A New Rallying Point
Al-Qaeda’s adaptive strategy amid the Israel-Hamas conflict marks a new phase in its operations. The group is now actively seeking an alliance with the Islamic State, aiming to create a unified jihadist front against shared adversaries. This shift, highlighted in the 4th issue of “Mujahideen in the West,” signifies a blend of operational dexterity and ideological fervor, challenging perceptions of its waning influence. This evolution is not new: In West Africa, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have previously collaborated, coordinating attacks and establishing joint influence zones to subvert both Western and local authorities. Such adaptability continuously positions al-Qaeda as a formidable threat.
Following the death of former leader Ayman al Zawahiri, al-Qaeda demonstrated its resilience by strategically concealing its leadership transition. This tactical opacity, designed to protect its key figures, is evident in revelations from al-Qaeda’s publication “The Road to Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam” and the bin Laden documents. These insights reveal a pragmatic leadership approach fixated on enduring and evading targeted strikes, validating the effectiveness of their post-9/11 decentralized model. Similarly, al-Qaeda has honed its operational process, providing overarching attack plans and granting ground operatives full autonomy for execution. This improves their agility as an organization. In another striking disclosure, al-Qaeda’s publications also show how counterterrorism actions have unexpectedly eased their financial logistics. Together, these factors depict an entity that, despite setbacks, remains undeterred.
Saif al Adl, al-Qaeda’s presumed de facto leader, is crucial in this transformation. In his groundbreaking book, “Free Reading in the Book 33 Strategies,” inspired by Robert Green’s “33 Strategies for War,” al Adl advocates for a departure from conventional methods, emphasizing creativity and agility. He promotes unpredictability and advises “striking where the enemy least expects,” incorporating urban guerrilla warfare and potent propaganda to instill fear. Focused on the psychological ramifications, he suggests a series of consecutive strikes to amplify their effect. Interestingly, while endorsing “soft targets,” al Adl diverges from targeting civilians, “whether on our lands or enemy lands,” indicating a strategic recalibration in al-Qaeda that melds militancy with a form of outreach. This evolution within al-Qaeda’s ranks is a microcosm of the group’s upward trajectory as al Adl reshapes its approach.
Conclusion
Dispelling myths of decline, al-Qaeda remains a resilient and evolving force, continually refining its methods. Cunning and resourceful, this group stands as a sophisticated global menace, deftly navigating geopolitical dynamics and circumventing counterterrorism measures. Despite these realities, some argue that al-Qaeda is yesterday’s news. Experts like Daniel Byman paint al-Qaeda as an afterthought — overshadowed by today’s latest flavor of emerging terror factions. Byman’s assessment side-steps bin Laden’s time-tested, strategic direction for the group: A “war of attrition against tyrannical superpowers.” The Mujahideen won against the Soviets, and the rise to power of an al-Qaeda friendly Taliban regime following the U.S. withdrawal only affirms bin Laden’s situational understanding. For al-Qaeda: It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Decades of conflict have left the West weary and dismissive, but underestimating al-Qaeda’s resolve is a critical error. Wishful thinking won’t eradicate terrorism, and complacency invites it home. History’s lessons are clear: the Taliban’s rise foretold 9/11, the Islamic State’s growth unleashed international terror, and vacuums in Iraq and Afghanistan nurtured extremism. The resurgence of Hamas is a reminder that terrorism’s embers still burn, unseen but ever-present. In our battle against terror, miscalculating al-Qaeda’s threat could be our gravest oversight — for what is unseen often poses the greatest danger.
Become a Member
Sara Harmouch, a Lebanese national and doctoral candidate at American University’s School of Public Affairs, specializes in counterterrorism. She has firsthand experience with the impacts of terrorism through her upbringing and extensive fieldwork conducted across the Middle East and North Africa region. Harmouch consults for the U.S. government and the private sector, and has recently briefed NATO on religious terrorist groups. Her research focuses on asymmetric warfare, political violence, and threats to democracies. Follow her on Twitter: @sara_harmouch
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Sara Harmouch · November 22, 2023
18. House Republicans push to boost funding for security initiatives across Indo-Pacific
Weapons and equipment. We are preparing for war which of course is the number one priority for effective deterrence. As President Washington said, "if you want peace, prepare for war." This is absolutely necessary.
But there is also strategic competition. Are we adequately resourced for that "fight?" We do need to be concerned with what it says in the Joint Concept for Competing - what if we "lose without fighting?" See Ryan Shaw's article here: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/whistling-dark-why-pentagons-joint-concept-competing-not-enough
Are we sufficiently resourcing those forces engaging in competing throughout the One Belt One Road initiative countries? Are we developing an unconventional deterrence capability - that is population, resistance, and resilience based? Are we adequately resourcing our information and influence capabilities? We have to effectively operate in the human domain. The irony is this is not that expensive and resource intensive - which of course is always a problem. If it does not reach a certain funding threshold it is often allowed to fall by the wayside. But I would urge Congress to focus on strategic competition- the political warfare in the gray zone where we really are fighting a "new kind of war, ancient in its origins..." as JFK once said.
The fundamental question for Congress is are we adequately resourcing the concepts and organizations in the Joint Concept for Competing?
House Republicans push to boost funding for security initiatives across Indo-Pacific
BY BRAD DRESS - 11/21/23 10:46 AM ET
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4320533-republicans-funding-security-initiatives-indo-pacific/?utm
Top House Republicans on the select China committee are pushing to secure billions more dollars for security initiatives and U.S. posture across the Indo-Pacific to counter the growing ambitions of Beijing.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the China select committee, led his GOP colleagues in a Sunday letter to House and Senate leadership asking to boost the funding levels laid out in the Biden administration’s supplemental request for the Indo-Pacific by $12 billion.
The Republicans argued the funds would better counter the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the region, citing Chinese aggression against the Philippines and other nations in the South China Sea, war drills over Taiwan and a massive military buildup.
“If we fail to provide the resources necessary to deter CCP aggression tomorrow, history will not forgive our inaction nor will it spare us the consequences,” lawmakers wrote. “Future generations of Americans that live in a world that is less secure, less prosperous, and less free will look back at this moment and ask why we failed to act with urgency when Xi Jinping’s hostile intent and robust military capabilities were so clear.”
In October, President Biden requested that Congress fund a $106 billion supplemental request to support the border, Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific to protect U.S. interests across the globe.
While there is no immediate threat in the Indo-Pacific, unlike Ukraine and the Middle East, Washington has increasingly warned of a conflict between American and Chinese forces over the self-governing island nation Taiwan in the near future as Beijing has expressed a desire to reunify with Taipei.
Biden’s supplemental request included $5.4 billion for the Indo-Pacific between submarine building and foreign military financing for the region, which includes grants and loans to allied nations.
The president’s proposal drew scrutiny when it was unveiled because Republicans said it did not include enough for the Indo-Pacific, especially compared to the about $60 billion for Ukraine and the roughly $14 billion for Israel.
The China select committee said an extra $2 billion is needed to backfill U.S. equipment that could be sent to Taiwan to more urgently address the island nation’s needs. Lawmakers have long raised concerns about a backlog in weapons for Taipei.
They are also requesting an additional $10 billion for the Indo-Pacific to promote the defense industrial base and accelerate munitions production for the region.
It’s unclear where congressional leadership stands on the request, but funding the Indo-Pacific and deterring China is one of the few areas where lawmakers have agreed.
Still, Congress has struggled to agree on key bills to fund Israel and Ukraine, and Biden’s supplemental request has not seen much unified movement in Congress since its introduction more than a month ago.
In the letter, lawmakers argued that despite the pressing conflicts in Ukraine and Israel, the Indo-Pacific “must not be an afterthought.”
“In order to safeguard peace in Asia and deter conflict on a scale we have not seen in generations, we must act before it is too late,” they wrote. “For while deterrence may be hard, war is hell.”
19. My School Doesn’t Tolerate Anti-Semitism
IWP is an excellent school. More institutions should emulate it.
My School Doesn’t Tolerate Anti-Semitism
And we are happy to work with donors who are tired of giving to colleges that do.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-school-doesnt-tolerate-anti-semitism-hamas-ivy-league-jewish-students-protest-1a5b4d97?st=5cue0tciaj7yg5w&utm_source=pocket_saves
By James S. Robbins
Nov. 20, 2023 5:20 pm ET
Protesters rally outside Columbia University in New York, Nov. 15. PHOTO: EDNA LESHOWITZ/ZUMA PRESS
America’s elite colleges and universities are soft on terrorism and strong on anti-Semitism. Who knew?
Weak-kneed responses by academic leaders to Hamas’s attack on Israel, coupled with soaring anti-Semitism on campuses, have created a crisis. Jewish students are increasingly unsafe, while major donors are alarmed by the harmful ideas promoted by the institutions they support.
The implicit bargain in higher education is that donors support schools as an expression of good citizenship, and it’s up to the schools to produce good citizens. This bargain has frayed in recent years as schools aren’t holding up their end of the deal.
Many campuses have become echo chambers that lack intellectual diversity and promote a climate of intolerance. To avoid being “canceled” by progressives, moderate and conservative students and faculty practice self-censorship rather than discuss controversial ideas.
The response to the Oct. 7 attack exposed how schools have become incubators of radicalism. Protests, vandalism, intimidation, and assaults—mostly targeting Jewish students—are the fruits of the critical-theory educational model that stigmatizes Jews as “white oppressors” and Israelis as “Zionist colonizers.” In response to anti-Semitism, university administrators have either done nothing or issued anodyne statements deploring violence in general terms, until some were badgered into reacting more explicitly.
Many donors saw the jarring response from the academy as a betrayal of their generosity and deeply held values. Now they are voting with their feet and wallets: withdrawing or canceling donations, resigning from boards, and encouraging alumni to boycott their alma maters.
Some schools set a higher standard. As the academic dean at the Institute of World Politics—a private graduate school in Washington—I have had no problem calling out Hamas for its genocidal actions. My academic and professional background is in counterterrorism, and I served for a decade in the Defense Department’s professional military education programs. Other scholar-practitioners at IWP have analyzed or operated against adversaries in Russia, Iran, Latin America, East Asia and elsewhere. We bring our real-world experience to the classroom, and we encourage intellectual inquiry, debate, and diversity.
Donors frustrated with schools in thrall to progressivism but who still want to support education should shop around for a better fit. IWP is one of many smaller, private schools where uncensored debate, critical thinking, and respect for Western civilization still thrive. Schools with values-based undergraduate programs such as High Point University, Belmont Abbey College, Grove City College, Elon University, Hillsdale College and Liberty University don’t tolerate the outrageous behavior we have seen at establishment schools.
Donors who reject Western civilization and would like to see Israel erased, by contrast, can always give to the Ivy League.
Mr. Robbins is dean of academics at the Institute of World Politics.
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the November 21, 2023, print edition as 'My School Doesn’t Tolerate Anti-Semitism'.
20. The True Military Assistance Tradeoff Is Between Israel and Taiwan
Is this the fundamental strategic problem? Can we effectively prioritize and still ensure all our interests are protected? Can we prioritize and still ensure success in Ukraine, Israel against Hamas, and Taiwan? Or where can or should we accept risk (and that measn the risk of loss or failure)?
Excerpt:
To avoid putting Indo-Pacific allies in this position, Washington should confront the resource constraints and necessary tradeoffs it faces on military aid. The Indo-Pacific is America’s top defense priority, according to Biden’s National Defense Strategy, and Washington faces greater medium to long-term escalation risks there if it cannot effectively deter China. Moreover, the military threat posed by China is substantially greater than that of Hizballah or Iran. What’s more, Taiwan’s current military capabilities fall well below Israel’s.
Excerpts:
Finally, U.S. policymakers should begin planning their off-ramps for reducing emergency aid — that is, aid above the annual military assistance Israel normally receives from the United States. Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Iraq show the difficulty of reducing military assistance once it is in place. To prevent a repeat, U.S. policymakers should define indicators relating to Israel’s progress toward its military goals and defense industrial base development that would trigger a gradual reduction in emergency aid and return to the usual status quo. Policymakers could also consider using the Israel aid package now before Congress to further signal boundaries on emergency military aid. Given that Israel has most of what it needs to prosecute its campaign in Gaza and a robust defense sector, a smaller aid package could still signal U.S. political support for Israel’s highest-priority near-term needs, but with a clearer end point and less risk of pressure on the priority systems needed in the Indo-Pacific.
Some observers, seeing the United States unable to provide unlimited arms to an array of partners while also filling its own stocks to abundance, argue that the best solution is for the United States to massively ramp up investment to put its defense industrial base on wartime footing. This approach cannot meet near-term demands or address the root causes of delays and bottlenecks in U.S. weapons production. Furthermore, it is likely that demand will rise with increased supply, leaving the United States no better off.
The United States cannot escape the need to make tough choices when it comes to allocating scarce military aid. It should define narrow goals and carefully prioritize its means. The alternative is the real risk that the United States will be outmatched by a peer competitor in the Indo-Pacific because it let itself become overextended elsewhere.
The True Military Assistance Tradeoff Is Between Israel and Taiwan - War on the Rocks
JENNIFER KAVANAGH AND JORDAN COHEN
warontherocks.com · by Jennifer Kavanagh · November 21, 2023
Calling the United States “the indispensable nation,” President Joe Biden used his second Oval Office address to argue that America has the resources and the responsibility to arm Ukraine and Israel “for as long as it takes.” Absent from the speech was Taiwan — the other U.S. partner in desperate need of U.S. weapons — along with any mention of the tradeoffs that will be required to balance Washington’s competing demands.
As our analysis shows, the most significant potential tradeoff isn’t between Ukraine and Israel, which have different armament needs, or between Ukraine and Taiwan, which have more overlap but still have different priorities. Rather, the tradeoff that Washington should be focused on is between Israel and Taiwan. In the best-case scenario, if the Israel-Hamas conflict remains limited, Washington may face no tradeoff at all. But if fighting expands to include Hizballah or direct conflict with Iran, the United States will be unable to avoid making hard choices about how to allocate arms transfers and military aid between Ukraine, Israel, and allies in the Indo-Pacific.
While there are important areas of overlap between the military needs of Taiwan and Ukraine — especially when it comes to air defense and uncrewed aerial systems — their many differences made resourcing both marginally sustainable. Ukraine’s highest-priority needs include heavy artillery, ammunition, tanks, short-range missiles, and mobile air defense, while Taiwan has much more need for anti-ship missiles, naval mines, long-range missiles, and more advanced, longer-range air defense systems. Adding aid to Israel changes this calculus. Israel’s needs overlap somewhat with Ukraine’s but more extensively with Taiwan’s and those of other Indo-Pacific allies. This means that a commitment to fully aiding Israel could leave Taiwan and other U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific facing longer delays for systems they require and could leave U.S. forces ill-equipped to counter China.
To avoid putting Indo-Pacific allies in this position, Washington should confront the resource constraints and necessary tradeoffs it faces on military aid. The Indo-Pacific is America’s top defense priority, according to Biden’s National Defense Strategy, and Washington faces greater medium to long-term escalation risks there if it cannot effectively deter China. Moreover, the military threat posed by China is substantially greater than that of Hizballah or Iran. What’s more, Taiwan’s current military capabilities fall well below Israel’s.
As a result, Washington should place clear boundaries on its aid to Israel to preserve capabilities that are essential to deterring China in the Indo-Pacific. First, the United States should take off the table key systems needed by Taiwan, other Asian allies and partners, and U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific. These include long-range precision and anti-ship missiles, air defense systems like Stingers, Patriots, and terminal high-altitude area defense, and a substantial percentage of uncrewed aerial and naval systems. Second, the United States should be explicit with Israel in private about the hard limits of U.S. materiel support, including capabilities, amounts, and duration, thereby allowing Israel to develop sustainable defense plans. Finally, policymakers should define an exit strategy for eventually winding down the additional emergency aid provided to support Israel in this crisis period.
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Scenario 1: A Limited Gaza Incursion
If Israel’s campaign in Gaza remains limited to a multi-month offensive targeting Hamas, the United States will have little trouble supporting it without compromising aid to Ukraine or Taiwan.
With few exceptions, the capabilities in demand in Ukraine are not needed by Israel for operations in Gaza, and the overlaps that do exist are probably manageable. Israel has so far relied most heavily on its Iron Dome air defense system with Tamir interceptor missiles and air-launched precision-guided munitions including small diameter bombs and gravity bombs equipped with joint direct attack munition kits to conduct thousands of airstrikes on targets in the Gaza Strip. The United States has provided additional quantities of these weapons to Israel in recent weeks, but they have not come at the cost of Ukraine or other U.S. foreign policy priorities.
Israel is the only country operating the Iron Dome system, and Ukraine does not have the F-15 aircraft required for air-launched small diameter bombs. The United States has promised a ground-launched version of the small diameter bomb to Ukraine (and Taiwan), but these are a new capability and have not arrived. Ukraine uses joint direct attack munitions, which turn unguided weapons into guided ones, but they are relatively cheap and easy to produce in large quantities. As it continues its airstrikes, Israel might use other air-launched precision-guided munitions, such as the Hellfire missile – which the United States has also reportedly provided in recent aid shipments – but with excess capacity and the proven ability to surge production, it should not be difficult to meet Israel’s needs for this weapon.
For a conflict confined to the Gaza Strip, Israel should have little need for most capabilities in shortest supply and highest demand in Ukraine. For example, advanced air defense systems like the Patriot have missiles that are too expensive to expend on Hamas’ less sophisticated rockets. Ground-launched precision-guided weapons, such as Army Tactical Missile Systems, have a range longer than what is needed for strikes in Gaza. Israel could make use of Stinger missiles, which have been in high demand in Ukraine, but these are in such short supply in U.S. stocks that the United States is unlikely to be able to provide them to any partner in the near term. On the other hand, requests for additional tanks, artillery, armed drones, or aircraft are unlikely. Even if the Hamas-Israel conflict expands to include ground incursions, the Israel Defense Forces likely have sufficient systems of their own.
A more extensive ground operation into the Gaza Strip will create additional defense needs. This includes increased demand for the 155mm shells that Ukraine burns through at a rate of 6,000 per day — far above U.S. production capacity of 28,000 per month. Compared to Ukraine, however, Israel’s 155mm ammunition requirements are likely to be limited. For example, in the 51-day Israeli operation in Gaza in 2014, the Israel Defense Forces reported using about 35,000 artillery shells. This is comparable to rates of fire for U.S. forces operating in urban environments against the Islamic State.
Washington has already provided Israel with of tens of thousands of these shells, though the Pentagon pushed back onclaims these were rerouted from Ukraine to Israel. Combined with a sizeable ammunition order Israel placed earlier this year and access to what remains in the U.S. stockpile prepositioned on Israeli territory, this may be enough to meet Israel’s needs in Gaza. Meeting Israel’s ammunition needs may come at some marginal cost to Ukraine’s operations, but given that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is largely stalled, these effects should be small and temporary.
Scenario 2: An Expanded War with Hizballah
An expanded conflict that includes Hizballah, however, would dramatically increase Israel’s military requirements and potential requests for assistance from the United States. This would put real but not unmanageable strain on aid to Ukraine. However, in this scenario, the impact on military assistance and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific should be the primary concern.
Hizballah is thought to have somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 fighters and a stockpile of around 150,000 missiles, including relatively advanced precision-guided and short-range ballistic and anti-ship missiles and drones that could overwhelm Israeli air defenses and devastate critical infrastructure. In its 2006 war against Hizballah in southern Lebanon, Israel relied primarily on long-range fires — hitting as many as 7,000 targets using 19,000 bombs and 2,000 missiles — supplemented by a more limited ground campaign and naval blockade with sea-based strikes. Facing a stronger and better armed Hizballah today, the Israel Defense Forces would almost certainly respond with increased airstrikes and artillery fire, creating additional demands for precision-guided munitions and ammunition. Israel has also surged tank units to its northern border, suggesting a ground operation might be possible as well.
The United States could probably supply Israel with the short-range weapons it would need to take on Hizballah. But a longer or more intense campaign than in 2006 — a likely reality, given that Hizballah is stronger than in 2006 — could strain existing stocks, especially for systems like the Hellfire that have relevance in both Ukraine and Taiwan. Tradeoffs would become more difficult if Israel requests longer-range air-launched systems such as the joint air-to-surface standoff missile or the joint standoff weapon to strike Hizballah targets in Syria, where more modernized air defenses are capable of intercepting Israel’s fighter jets and air-launched munitions. Israel might not need many of these longer-range missiles. But they would be central to any Indo-Pacific campaign, and U.S. stockpiles are quite limited — by some estimates already below what would be needed for a Taiwan contingency — so even a minor diversion could detract from both deterrence and warfighting capability in the Indo-Pacific theater.
Meeting additional demand for 155mm ammunition would be harder. Over the course of the 34-day 2006 war with Hizballah, Israeli forces fired nearly 150,000 artillery rounds, including 155mm and other variants. With Hizballah stronger now, the Israel Defense Forces might need to increase their rate of artillery fire. At the very least, a ground operation that takes several months could increase Israel’s 155mm ammunition needs by over 100,000 rounds, which would undoubtedly force tradeoffs with supplies sent to Ukraine. Once again, the stalemate in Ukraine and Israel’s smaller needs should be factors in allocating resources across the two countries.
Israel’s need for air defense is also likely to increase if the war expanded to include operations against Hizballah. To protect against Hizballah’s larger and more advanced arsenal of missiles, Israel relies on layered air defenses that include the David’s Sling and the Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile. But even these advanced systems might be overwhelmed by Hizballah’s likely high rate of fire and cruise missiles. Both systems are produced in Israel, so the United States would not be able to backfill these systems directly. To fill any gap, however, Israel might request U.S. Patriot air defense systems — which are already in short supply. Not only are they needed in Ukraine, but they are also high on the list of capabilities required in the Indo-Pacific, whether for Taiwan’s asymmetric defense or for U.S. installations in the region. Sending them to Israel instead would leave both vulnerable.
Finally, as it did in 2006, Israel also might try to blockade Lebanese ports to limit the flow of weapons into Lebanon. Israel has a supply of domestically produced anti-ship missiles it could use to support this operation, but depending on the scope, it might request more, like the Harpoon missiles that Israel previously purchased from the United States. With Taiwan waiting for 800 Harpoon missiles and other allies in the Indo-Pacific region interested in this capability, meeting an Israeli request for this or similar systems would create difficult tradeoffs.
Scenario 3: A Direct Conflict with Iran
Iran has traditionally relied on proxies like Hizballah, but as Israel’s operations against Hamas intensify, there is a risk the Israeli-Iranian “shadow war” may become more open. If this occurs, additional Israeli military needs — for example long-range strike and air defense capabilities — would impact some U.S. military assistance to Ukraine but could have devastating implications for Washington’s Indo-Pacific allies and partners.
Iran arguably has the most versatile and largest arsenal of rockets and missiles in the Middle East. This is comprised of cruise and ballistic missiles, long-range missiles that can reach Tel Aviv, a large land- and sea-based paramilitary force, and possibly advanced air defense systems acquired from Russia.
To overcome Iran’s advanced air defenses, Israel could request additional long-range precision-guided munitions (most likely air- and sea-launched) from the United States, including the joint air-to-surface standoff missile, Tomahawk, or Standard Missile-6, among others, along with advanced uncrewed aerial systems with strike capabilities. To counter any threats from Iran’s sea-based paramilitary forces, Israel might need additional uncrewed surface and underwater vessels and a sizable stock of anti-ship missiles, including possibly the long-range anti-ship missile and Harpoon missiles. Finally, a direct conflict with Iran would pose further air defense challenges. Since Israel would require time to build up its stockpiles of Arrow 3 missiles, it might request U.S. Patriot systems or even temporary use of a U.S. terminal high-altitude area defense system to protect against Iran’s arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles.
Except for the Patriot air defense system, these capabilities are not in high demand in Ukraine, but they are essential for the Indo-Pacific theater and in short supply there. For example, U.S. forces and allies and partners would rely heavily on long-range strike assets to target Chinese air, naval, and potentially mainland assets. The Pentagon has prioritized increasing its production of these weapons, in particular the joint air-to-surface standoff missile and long-range anti-ship missile, but these efforts would be undone by a diversion of substantial quantities of either to the Middle East. Uncrewed air and naval systems will also be valuable for U.S. forces to counter a Chinese invasion fleet in the Taiwan Strait or Chinese forces in the South China Sea. The same systems will be central to Taiwan’s asymmetric defense. Finally, given China’s large stockpile of advanced weapons, air defense of all kinds will be at a premium in the Indo-Pacific, and the loss of even moderate numbers of these systems to the Middle East will have a negative impact on the U.S. posture in Asia.
The Rationale for Prioritizing Taiwan
There are two main reasons why military assistance to Taiwan should be prioritized over aid to Israel. The most important is that the U.S. interests at stake in the Indo-Pacific are much greater than those in Middle East. The Biden administration has repeatedly identified China as the most significant U.S. competitor and prioritized the goal of deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific as the focus of U.S. defense policy. The United States has significant economic interests in the region and a strategic interest in deterring China from seizing Taiwan, which could shift the balance of power in Asia and put pressure on U.S. alliances in the region. In contrast, U.S. economic and strategic interests in the Middle East are considerably narrower, especially given greater U.S. energy independence. A deterrence failure in the Indo-Pacific will have more severe consequences for the United States and should be more strenuously avoided.
In addition, U.S. assistance is both more needed in the Indo-Pacific and likely to have a greater impact on regional deterrence and escalation risks than it would in the Middle East. The military challenge China poses to Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific allies is substantially greater than the threat presented to Israel by Hizballah or Iran — especially since neither has shown much interest in escalation with Israel to this point. This is true not only because China’s military capabilities greatly exceed those of Iran and its proxies but also because Israel has an advanced and well-stocked arsenalof its own supplemented yearly by nearly $4 billion in U.S. military assistance while Taiwan’s military capabilities are substantially weaker and in need of much investment before they will be sufficient to defend against Chinese attack. In this context, it makes sense to prioritize scarce resources toward the greater threat and need.
A Sustainable Path Forward
Instead of open-ended military assistance, Washington should provide narrowly tailored aid to help Israel increase its capacity for self-defense and reduce the most pressing threats presented by Hamas. Policymakers should make clear to Israel that capabilities defined as central to Indo-Pacific deterrence will not be provided. This would include all long-range strike systems, anti-ship missiles, air defense systems including Stingers, Patriot, and terminal high-altitude area defense, and a large portion of uncrewed air and naval platforms.
To keep these systems “off limits,” the United States will need to communicate the boundaries of its support privately to Israel’s war cabinet, specifying capabilities that it will not transfer and, for those that it can provide, the quantities that are available and on what timelines. U.S. leaders should make clear that the limits of U.S. support would grow tighter as the conflict expands, incentivizing Israel to avoid escalation, realistically plan its own operations given available weapons supplies, and make choices about how to invest in its own long-term security. Being clear about limits to military assistance upfront may also help reduce political pressures down the line, as the conflict evolves.
Finally, U.S. policymakers should begin planning their off-ramps for reducing emergency aid — that is, aid above the annual military assistance Israel normally receives from the United States. Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Iraq show the difficulty of reducing military assistance once it is in place. To prevent a repeat, U.S. policymakers should define indicators relating to Israel’s progress toward its military goals and defense industrial base development that would trigger a gradual reduction in emergency aid and return to the usual status quo. Policymakers could also consider using the Israel aid package now before Congress to further signal boundaries on emergency military aid. Given that Israel has most of what it needs to prosecute its campaign in Gaza and a robust defense sector, a smaller aid package could still signal U.S. political support for Israel’s highest-priority near-term needs, but with a clearer end point and less risk of pressure on the priority systems needed in the Indo-Pacific.
Some observers, seeing the United States unable to provide unlimited arms to an array of partners while also filling its own stocks to abundance, argue that the best solution is for the United States to massively ramp up investment to put its defense industrial base on wartime footing. This approach cannot meet near-term demands or address the root causes of delays and bottlenecks in U.S. weapons production. Furthermore, it is likely that demand will rise with increased supply, leaving the United States no better off.
The United States cannot escape the need to make tough choices when it comes to allocating scarce military aid. It should define narrow goals and carefully prioritize its means. The alternative is the real risk that the United States will be outmatched by a peer competitor in the Indo-Pacific because it let itself become overextended elsewhere.
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Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Jordan Cohen is a policy analyst in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Jennifer Kavanagh · November 21, 2023
21. An Alternative Way of Dealing with Human Shields
Non-lethal weapons.
Excerpts:
First, no weapon is guaranteed to be nonlethal. Some very old, very young or other at-risk people might perish, despite efforts to mitigate the effects. That point needs to be made to the media and the public in general.
Second, NLW must be used in a combined arms approach. NLW should always be covered by lethal means. A medical infrastructure needs to be standing by to help those innocents caught in the fighting, and a public affairs plan should be on hand to help the domestic and international audience understand what is being attempted and to do damage control if some fatalities occur among noncombatants or hostages. We also need to realize that the opposition is not above cleaning out morgues and planting corpses at the scene, even if no one is killed in such an operation.
Finally, there should never be a policy that NLW be attempted before lethal force is employed. Police departments that have adopted this rule have come to regret it.
We should pursue advanced directed-energy NLW not as a substitute for lethal force in urban combat or hostage rescue situations, but as another tool in the kit. If properly used, such a system would act as a deterrent to the cynical terrorists who would subject other humans to being used as shields.
An Alternative Way of Dealing with Human Shields
military.com · by 21 Nov 2023 Military.com | By Gary Anderson · November 22, 2023
The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.
Those of us who fought in Somalia in 1993 were the first Americans to experience firsthand the barbaric tactic of using civilians as human shields in combat. We came away shaken, but we also realized that the tactic worked.
The cynical Somali leaders who used women and children as pawns in the Battle of Mogadishu ("Black Hawk Down") caused the American people to recoil in horror as noncombatants -- willing or unwilling -- were gunned down by coalition soldiers who had no other option than to fire into teaming crowds or be overwhelmed.
The asymmetric Somali tactic worked. The Clinton administration decided that the nation-building effort in Somalia was not worth the cost of seeing American soldiers being portrayed as indiscriminate killers of women and children. U.S. forces left Somalia in 1994.
That is what is being played out in Gaza today as Hamas uses housing areas, hospitals and refugee camps from which to launch missiles and rockets.
There is another way to deal with such tactics, but neither Israel nor its western allies have adopted it. The potential antidote is the selective use of directed energy (NLW).
Led by now retired Marine Gen. Tony Zinni, many of us Somalia veterans lobbied Congress to fund exploring such NLW systems, and the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was established in the mid-1990s. By the end of the decade, the United States had a directed energy weapon able to keep crowds that might contain armed elements at bay by making them feel like they were burning up should they cross a clearly defined line. The weapon excites the outer layer of skin and causes targeted individuals to feel like they are on fire. However, the sensation goes away immediately when the beam is taken off the targets and leaves no ill effects.
I led the red teaming of the operational field tests. Consequently, I am one of the people most exposed to the system and have not suffered any long-term medical effects after nearly two decades.
That said, we red teamers quickly realized that, although the system is very capable, it would be possible for the opposition to portray it as a death ray or instrument of torture if U.S. forces do not use it in a well-thought-out manner.
Unfortunately, the Russians gave NLW a bad name when in 2002 they used a supposedly incapacitating gas to attempt to save hostages in an opera house that had been seized by Chechen terrorists in Moscow. The Russians flooded the theater with a nonlethal gas that knocked out almost everyone inside -- including the hostages -- long enough to deal with the equally incapacitated terrorists. The gas was apparently fentanyl-based, and immediate treatment would have been needed by the hostages. The Russians either did not know this or did not plan for it. One hundred and seventy hostages died because competent medical help in adequate numbers was not on the scene.
A domestic example of a botched use of NLW was the FBI attempt to smoke out the occupants of the Waco, Texas, compound of David Koresh in 1993. A smoke grenade delivered by a modified tank set fire to the compound, incinerating most of its inhabitants. As a result of such incidents, policymakers have been reluctant to use existing systems due to fear of unintended consequences.
I mention all this because the next generation of directed energy weapons could potentially solve the problem that the Israelis face by incapacitating everyone in a building -- innocents and terrorists alike -- by giving them a temporary case of heat prostration. Then, the noncombatants and bad guys could be separated without mass casualties occurring. If our country or Israel decides to develop such a weapon, no technology is foolproof, as we found out in red teaming the original weapon. Most will eventually be countered, but the deterrent effect of negating the human shield factor would be worth the effort. There are several things to be considered before employing another such an NLW technology.
First, no weapon is guaranteed to be nonlethal. Some very old, very young or other at-risk people might perish, despite efforts to mitigate the effects. That point needs to be made to the media and the public in general.
Second, NLW must be used in a combined arms approach. NLW should always be covered by lethal means. A medical infrastructure needs to be standing by to help those innocents caught in the fighting, and a public affairs plan should be on hand to help the domestic and international audience understand what is being attempted and to do damage control if some fatalities occur among noncombatants or hostages. We also need to realize that the opposition is not above cleaning out morgues and planting corpses at the scene, even if no one is killed in such an operation.
Finally, there should never be a policy that NLW be attempted before lethal force is employed. Police departments that have adopted this rule have come to regret it.
We should pursue advanced directed-energy NLW not as a substitute for lethal force in urban combat or hostage rescue situations, but as another tool in the kit. If properly used, such a system would act as a deterrent to the cynical terrorists who would subject other humans to being used as shields.
-- Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel who served as the military adviser to the U.S. Liaison Office in Somalia and has written extensively on nonlethal weapons.
military.com · by 21 Nov 2023 Military.com | By Gary Anderson · November 22, 2023
22. Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is Stalled, but Not at Sea
Go plucky Ukraine Navy - beat evil Russian Army.
Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is Stalled, but Not at Sea
Kyiv’s plucky navy uses missiles and drones to break the Black Sea blockade and force a Russian retreat.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-racks-up-victories-at-sea-in-counteroffensive-black-sea-navy-grain-6425494a?utm
By Jillian Kay Melchior
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Nov. 21, 2023 12:46 pm ET
Stamps depicting a Ukrainian border guard gesturing at the Russian ship Moskva, at the Kyiv Post Office, April 2022. PHOTO: MIGUEL GUTIéRREZ/ZUMA PRESS
Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive has disappointed many in the West who were hoping for breakthroughs like last year’s liberation of Kharkiv and Kherson. But critics are looking by land when they should also be looking by sea. Ukraine’s maritime wins, which include piercing Russia’s Black Sea blockade and forcing the Russian navy into retreat, are a lesson in restoring deterrence.
Since August, more than 130 vessels have sailed from Ukrainian ports and exported more than five million tons of goods, Ukraine’s Ministry of Infrastructure told me this week. They sail in defiance of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to hold the global food supply hostage. In July Russia walked away from the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Yet Ukraine broke the blockade and re-established a grain corridor without a naval escort from the United Nations or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
In addition, the Ukrainian government and more than a dozen British insurers are working to ensure exporters’ losses are covered in case of an attack. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal recently said Kyiv and London reached an agreement for a “special mechanism” that “will allow for a discount on the cost of war insurance for exporters of all products from Ukraine.”
Resuming grain shipments is a major advance in a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has Russia’s Black Sea fleet scrambling. For the war’s first year and a half, the Russians believed they could “dominate” the Black Sea, “dictate the rules there,” and that their “Black Sea fleet is completely safe and secure,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, told me in September. The main goal now is “to eliminate Russia’s domination of the sea,” Mr. Podolyak said.
Mr. Zelensky cited the progress in a speech last month: “The Russian military fleet is no longer able to operate in the western part of the Black Sea and is gradually retreating from Crimea. This is a historic achievement.”
Ukraine’s Black Sea gains are notable given the differences between the two countries’ navies. Russia is one of the world’s great naval powers. In Ukraine, by contrast, “we literally have almost no navy,” said former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk, so recent gains prove “the asymmetric approach and the new-technology approach can take away old doctrines and old ways of warfare.”
Throughout the 2023 counteroffensive, Ukraine has used missiles and drones to drive back Russia’s navy. Small groups of Ukrainians, some working out of garages, are developing kamikaze sea drones that have repeatedly inflicted damage on the Russian fleet.
The Resilient Africa vessel at the entrance to the port of Haifa in northern Israel as it awaits to be unloaded, Sept. 28. PHOTO: JACK GUEZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Ukrainian sea-drone attacks in August damaged a Russian landing ship and struck a Russian oil tanker near the Kerch Strait Bridge linking Russia and Crimea. In September Ukraine seized control of oil and gas platforms in the Black Sea that Russia had been using as a helipad and to conduct reconnaissance. A few days later a Ukrainian missile attack on a Russian port in Sevastopol in occupied Crimea destroyed a landing ship and submarine and damaged one of the Black Sea fleet’s main repair facilities. Within days, Ukrainian drones and cruise missiles struck the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol.
These blows led Russia to pull back. Ukraine’s naval spokesman said last month that the Black Sea fleet was moving some vessels from Sevastopol to Feodosia and Kerch, further east in Crimea, and to the Russian city of Novorossiysk. On Nov. 4, Ukraine struck and damaged the Zalyv shipyard in Kerch—“the largest shipyard in Eastern Europe” and “likely the main repair facility” for Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Crimea after the September strike in the Sevastopol repair complex, according to the Institute for the Study of War. Ukrainian officials said the attack also damaged a small Russian missile ship. And on Nov. 10, Ukrainian military intelligence said sea drones had sunk two small Russian landing ships near Chornomorsk, Crimea, adding that one of them had been laden with armored vehicles.
To date Ukraine has destroyed 15 Russian vessels and damaged an additional 12 in the Black Sea, Ukraine’s naval spokesman said Friday. Ukraine hasn’t overwhelmed Russia’s navy. But “we have chipped away at their dominance,” Serhii Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a Kyiv think tank, told me this fall.
The counteroffensive hasn’t deprived Russia of long-range missiles that could strike anywhere in the Black Sea. The Kremlin has repeatedly hit grain storage and export facilities in southwestern Ukraine. A missile strike on the port of Odessa this month hit a Liberian-flagged vessel at the port, killing one person and injuring four, including three Filipino crew members.
But Ukraine’s attacks have denied Russia the ability to operate in the Black Sea with impunity. Russian ships can no longer safely sail near the grain corridor and interfere with shipping by colliding with freighters, firing warning shots or similar interdictory measures.
Mr. Putin must choose between sinking civilian ships owned by non-Ukrainians or allowing Ukraine’s grain corridor to operate—even though Russia warned it would no longer guarantee the safety of commercial vessels transiting these waters, says Fred Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. So far, Mr. Putin has chosen not to escalate.
Ms. Melchior is a London-based member of the Journal editorial board.WSJ Opinion: Hits and Misses of the Week
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Appeared in the November 22, 2023, print edition as 'Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is Stalled, but Not at Sea'.
23. Hamas’s Asymmetric Advantage
Excerpts:
Israel can make some gains against Hamas with better surveillance, stronger defenses, and increased use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence-assisted targeting, counterdrone capabilities, and Iron Dome interceptors. Hamas no longer enjoys the element of surprise. Unless it is joined by Hezbollah, its ability to project force has peaked. Tunnel warfare will be slow, costly, and extremely difficult for Israel—but Hamas cannot win by indefinitely hiding in the dark. Hamas’s ability to integrate operations has been damaged by the shutdown of Internet, cellular, and landline telephone capabilities in Gaza. Israel is preventing Hamas’s forces from easily coordinating with one another, gathering intelligence, and reaching political leaders in Lebanon. It should continue to isolate Hamas in this way.
But more important, Israel needs to counter Hamas’s political mobilization—that is, cut off its ability to attract attention, recruits, and allies. Doing so would involve using force discriminately and reclaiming the moral high ground it had in the immediate aftermath of the attack but quickly forfeited with a reckless bombing campaign that killed “far too many” Palestinian civilians, in the words of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Israel should, for example, clearly articulate that its enemies are Hamas fighters, not Palestinian civilians. Hurting the latter is morally wrong and often illegal—and strategically counterproductive. (To adapt a line often attributed to Talleyrand, Napoleon’s minister of foreign affairs, killing civilians in a fight against terrorists is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.) After weeks of pressure from the Biden administration, Israel agreed on November 4 to what it calls a “humanitarian corridor” that opens for four hours each day so that civilians can escape from the war zone to the south in Gaza, and international actors can supply food, water, and medicine to those who are trapped. Hamas, PIJ, and other hostage-holding gangs apparently do not care about starving Palestinian civilians; but Israel must.
In addition, Israel must not drive the Palestinian Authority toward supporting Hamas. As the terrorism expert Daniel Byman wrote in Foreign Affairs, Israel needs to avoid inciting anger in the West Bank, preventing settlers from attacking Palestinians and punishing those who do. Israel should also keep tax and customs revenue flowing to the Palestinian Authority, which has suppressed riots by Hamas sympathizers in the West Bank.
Israel has few ways to eliminate Hamas’s asymmetric advantages. The country cannot reverse technological change or completely shut down pro-Hamas messaging on social media. But Israel does have the power to react to Hamas’s terror attack strategically, and with restraint. Doing so can sap Hamas of much of its power. Given that Hamas designed its attack to stoke an overreaction from Israel, the best thing Israel can do now is to refuse to play into Hamas’s hands.
Hamas’s Asymmetric Advantage
What Does It Mean to Defeat a Terrorist Group?
November 22, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. · November 22, 2023
Israel responded to Hamas’s horrific attack on October 7 with overwhelming force. In the wake of the bloody terrorist raid, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.” The Israeli military called up over 350,000 reservists and launched attacks on the Gaza Strip with the aim of eliminating the political and military wings of Hamas. Since then, Israeli forces have killed thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children, piling agony on top of agony.
That Israel met Hamas’s violence with violence is not remotely surprising, given the Israeli military’s incomparable conventional military superiority to Hamas. Israel has long responded to Palestinian terrorism with inordinate force. The Israeli military is stronger, larger, and better resourced than Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, and Israeli planners know that their foes cannot go toe to toe with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Yet Israel’s military advantages are growing slimmer. Hamas has proved difficult, if not impossible, to vanquish with military force. Technology has shrunk the gap between states and terrorists, allowing nonstate groups to behave in ways that mimic the operations of countries; Hamas can launch sophisticated attacks and spread propaganda much as Israel can. Ancient tactics, too, such as the construction of a warren of tunnels beneath Gaza, have helped Hamas fend off a more powerful adversary. And Hamas gained leverage by capturing some 240 hostages. States have always struggled to defeat terrorist groups, but the Israel-Hamas war shows why it has gotten even harder to do so.
For Israel, perhaps the most galling outcome of this asymmetry is that its armed forces may have played squarely into Hamas’s hands by striking Gaza with tremendous force. Hamas was founded with the goal of eradicating Israel, but the group is not capable of doing that, so it wields terrorism to gain attention and allies. The bloodshed on October 7 was intended to provoke the Israeli military into an overreaction that would undermine international sympathy for Israel, stoke an uprising in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and rally support for Hamas, notably from Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Hamas has used the deaths of both Israelis and Palestinian civilians to promote its political agenda. In many ways, the group has succeeded. The best way for Israel to defeat Hamas, therefore, is to regain the moral high ground by moderating its use of force and offering more protection to Palestinian civilians. It will be difficult for Israeli leaders to show restraint because their constituents are furious. But doing so is the only way Israel can cut off Hamas’s ability to draw support and incite further violence.
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
States no longer have a monopoly on the resources needed to project power and promote narratives. Many advances in technology have disproportionately benefited terrorist groups. In fact, modern terrorism can be chalked up to the invention of dynamite in 1867. Previous gunpowder projectiles—such as seventeenth-century grenades or Orsini bombs, the spiky explosives used by anarchists in the nineteenth century—were finicky and heavy. But dynamite is easily concealed under clothing and can be swiftly lit and tossed at a target. The result was terrorism carried out by small groups and individuals, such as the 1881 assassination by dynamite of the Russian Tsar Alexander II.
The Kalashnikov assault rifle, also known as the AK-47, was the next major technological boon to terrorists. Firearms had been around for centuries but were expensive, difficult to maintain, and more effective in the hands of trained professionals. Early machine guns, including Gatling and Maxim guns, were used by European colonial powers to wreak devastation, as when British soldiers killed hundreds of Zulu warriors in 1879 in the Battle of Ulundi in what is today South Africa. The same gun models were used by private security forces, federal and state troops, and police departments to put down labor strikes; in 1892, the Pennsylvania National Guard used Gatling guns to end a strike at the Carnegie Steel Company.
The AK-47, invented in 1947 in the Soviet Union, changed the equation in favor of nonstate actors. It was easy to carry and use, weighing around ten pounds. Today it is thought to be the most widely used firearm in history, earning its reputation as a symbol for terrorists around the world. The al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden often had a later-model Kalashnikov propped up behind him in his video addresses. Hezbollah’s flag bears an assault rifle similar to the AK-47. The statistics are telling: between 1775 and 1945, insurgents won against state armies about 25 percent of the time. Since 1945, that figure has jumped to around 40 percent. Much of that change can be attributed to the introduction and global spread of the AK-47.
Modern terrorism can be chalked up to the invention of dynamite in 1867.
On October 7, Hamas militants appear to have used old Chinese and Soviet AK-47s to storm Israeli military outposts, kill civilians, and take hostages. But they also used some relatively new tactics and technologies. The group began its assault by firing thousands of rockets to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terrorist group based in Gaza, have smuggled rockets from Iran and can make some explosives and missiles themselves from commercial parts. Earlier Qassam missiles built by Hamas around 2005 had a range of about ten miles. The missiles they used on October 7 can travel 150 miles. Like the Ukrainians, who have successfully used commercial drones to attack tanks and troops, Hamas and PIJ have been innovative in building their own weapons systems. To avoid Israeli air defenses, Hamas launched dozens of Zouari suicide drones, fixed-wing weapons that Hamas made with materials that are available in Gaza. Hamas also used small commercial-grade drones to drop grenades on Israeli observation towers and on remotely operated machine guns. Such drones can be purchased online and can evade Israel’s radar systems by flying slowly and close to the ground. Hamas’s attack was successful because it inundated Israeli defenses with cheap, accessible weapons.
A revolution in information technology has also benefited terrorists, allowing them to magnify the impact of their violence. The invention of satellite television facilitated an uptick in global terrorism in the 1970s: over the last 50 years, the Global Terrorism Database notes, the highest number of terrorist attacks in the combined regions of North America and western Europe was recorded in 1979. Satellite television enabled terrorists to publicize their cause, drawing support and recruits. Black September, a terrorist group connected to the Palestine Liberation Organization, took advantage of satellite television when it kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich in front of 800 million television viewers, reaching roughly one in five people on the planet. The massacre raised the profile of Palestinian nationalism and sparked copycat attacks, even though Israel obliterated Black September after the Munich killings.
Social media has had a comparable effect on terrorism. Hamas is now on a similar footing with Israel in its ability to project its own narrative about the war. Hamas uses the messaging app Telegram to recruit new members and spread misinformation. Even after Israel cut off electricity and shut down the Internet in Gaza, Hamas was able to proliferate disinformation on messaging apps and social media by relying on a global army of sympathizers. Such blackouts may have mostly hurt Israel, as they made it more difficult for trusted media organizations to verify facts on the ground. A great deal of the online information about the Israel-Hamas war is challenging to collect and verify. Many observers unintentionally promote falsehoods, including well-meaning nongovernmental organizations, media outlets, and open-source intelligence groups that make every effort to cross-reference videos and photographs of the war through the use of satellite imagery, maps, geolocation tools, and reverse image searches. In late October, for example, The New York Times acknowledged that its initial reporting on an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City a few days earlier had “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas government officials” that “an Israeli airstrike was the cause.” The U.S., Canadian, and French governments said later that evidence suggested that the explosion was caused by an errant missile fired from within Gaza.
TUNNEL VISION
Tunnels provide Hamas with another asymmetric advantage. In 2021, the group claimed to have built over 300 miles of tunnels—a strategy that has been used for thousands of years by groups facing more powerful or entrenched adversaries: Jews against Romans in Judea in the first century, Union troops against Confederates in the siege of Petersburg in 1864, Japanese soldiers against the U.S. Marines in Peleliu in 1944, the Vietcong against American troops in the Vietnam War, and more recently, al Qaeda and the Islamic State against American forces and Hezbollah against the IDF. Tunnels can be used to smuggle goods, to launch operations, and to store food, weapons, and militants. A single fighter who knows a tunnel’s layout can hold off dozens of enemy soldiers groping in the dark.
Tunnels allow Hamas fighters to move through the city even when Israeli forces have taken the streets above, making it easy to ambush them. Firing a weapon in a tunnel can injure the shooter more than the target because bullets may ricochet or produce sound and shock waves that can cause concussions. Night-vision goggles work poorly in tunnels because there is no ambient light, and soldiers cannot rely on hand or arm signals in the pitch dark. It is also difficult for commanders to communicate with soldiers in tunnels because of weak signals for communication devices.
Well-equipped armies can try to use robotic tools to fight against groups that dig tunnels. Aerial drones can map out tunnels by using high-resolution cameras and sensors, and unmanned ground-based robots can scout, test air quality, record distances, move supplies, carry weapons, and shield soldiers. But they can go only so far. Uneven ground, wet surfaces, and unexpected obstacles such as tripwires or even rocks can topple robots. In narrow spaces, disabled robots become obstacles themselves.
Drones flying in Gaza City, December 2022
Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto / Getty Images
Israel could use massive bombs to destroy tunnels, but doing so would kill thousands more civilians in the process—winning the country only more international opprobrium and promoting Hamas’s narrative that the IDF deliberately slaughters innocent people. Even if the military operation were successful, the political cost would further isolate Israel and spur more people to take up arms against it.
Hamas’s most important asymmetric advantage has been strategic: its exploitation of Israel’s response to its assault. Because the goal of Hamas’s attack was to provoke Israel into a counterproductive overreaction, the IDF’s bludgeoning response has inflamed public opinion in the region against Israel exactly as Hamas wanted. In recent years, Israel had succeeded in convincing several Arab governments to put concerns about Palestinians aside and normalize bilateral relations. Hamas wanted to halt or reverse that trend—and for the time being, it has.
Put simply, Israel took the bait by responding to Hamas’s attack with violent repression, a popular but rarely successful method of counterterrorism that works best when members of terrorist groups can be distinguished and separated from the civilian population—an impossible task in Gaza. According to Hamas, Israel killed over 11,000 people in the territory within a handful of weeks after the October 7 attack. With every civilian death, Israel invites a global backlash that makes it harder to defeat Hamas and protect Israeli citizens.
MOVING FORWARD, HOLDING BACK
Israel can make some gains against Hamas with better surveillance, stronger defenses, and increased use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence-assisted targeting, counterdrone capabilities, and Iron Dome interceptors. Hamas no longer enjoys the element of surprise. Unless it is joined by Hezbollah, its ability to project force has peaked. Tunnel warfare will be slow, costly, and extremely difficult for Israel—but Hamas cannot win by indefinitely hiding in the dark. Hamas’s ability to integrate operations has been damaged by the shutdown of Internet, cellular, and landline telephone capabilities in Gaza. Israel is preventing Hamas’s forces from easily coordinating with one another, gathering intelligence, and reaching political leaders in Lebanon. It should continue to isolate Hamas in this way.
But more important, Israel needs to counter Hamas’s political mobilization—that is, cut off its ability to attract attention, recruits, and allies. Doing so would involve using force discriminately and reclaiming the moral high ground it had in the immediate aftermath of the attack but quickly forfeited with a reckless bombing campaign that killed “far too many” Palestinian civilians, in the words of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Israel should, for example, clearly articulate that its enemies are Hamas fighters, not Palestinian civilians. Hurting the latter is morally wrong and often illegal—and strategically counterproductive. (To adapt a line often attributed to Talleyrand, Napoleon’s minister of foreign affairs, killing civilians in a fight against terrorists is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.) After weeks of pressure from the Biden administration, Israel agreed on November 4 to what it calls a “humanitarian corridor” that opens for four hours each day so that civilians can escape from the war zone to the south in Gaza, and international actors can supply food, water, and medicine to those who are trapped. Hamas, PIJ, and other hostage-holding gangs apparently do not care about starving Palestinian civilians; but Israel must.
In addition, Israel must not drive the Palestinian Authority toward supporting Hamas. As the terrorism expert Daniel Byman wrote in Foreign Affairs, Israel needs to avoid inciting anger in the West Bank, preventing settlers from attacking Palestinians and punishing those who do. Israel should also keep tax and customs revenue flowing to the Palestinian Authority, which has suppressed riots by Hamas sympathizers in the West Bank.
Israel has few ways to eliminate Hamas’s asymmetric advantages. The country cannot reverse technological change or completely shut down pro-Hamas messaging on social media. But Israel does have the power to react to Hamas’s terror attack strategically, and with restraint. Doing so can sap Hamas of much of its power. Given that Hamas designed its attack to stoke an overreaction from Israel, the best thing Israel can do now is to refuse to play into Hamas’s hands.
Foreign Affairs · by How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. · November 22, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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