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Quotes of the Day:
“We must find the time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.”
- John F. Kennedy
"What I love about Thanksgiving is that it's purely about getting together with friends or family and enjoying food. It's really for everybody, and it doesn't matter where you're from."
- Daniel Humm
“Thanksgiving Day is a jewel, to set in the hearts of honest men; but be careful that you do not take the day, and leave out the gratitude.”
- E.P. Powell
1. With job cuts and drug tests, the Pentagon hopes to prepare its special-ops forces for a new era of warfare
2. Meet the Iranian-born Biden military aide reportedly under investigation for major influence campaign: ‘Clear and present danger’
3. War and Thanksgiving - War on the Rocks
4. Uncovering the Hidden Logic of War: Data and the Meso-Level of Armed Conflict
5. US Navy: ‘Non-kinetic effects’ will likely decide the next war
6. There’s only one way forward in Gaza by Carl Bildt
7. AI For Five Eyes? New bill pushes AI collaboration with UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand
8. “Changes Unseen in a Century”: Seeking American Partnership in US Decline
9. China Tried Using Economic Ties to Bring Taiwan Closer. It Isn’t Working.
10. The Hostage Deal Means Israel Is Fighting the Clock
11. What we know about the hostages set for release in the Israel-Hamas deal
12. Fiery car wreck at U.S.-Canada border prompts massive response
13. Fox News Forced to Walk Back ‘Terrorist Attack’ Claim at Rainbow Bridge
14. The Chinese Communist Party's Theory of Hybrid Warfare
15. America and China Are Not Yet in a Cold War
16. An Asia hand's argument for putting Ukraine first
17. There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid By Eliot A. Cohen
18. Preparing for a Russia-Ukraine stalemate
19. Is Myanmar’s embattled regime using chemical weapons?
20. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 22, 2023
21. Iran Update, November 22, 2023
1. With job cuts and drug tests, the Pentagon hopes to prepare its special-ops forces for a new era of warfare
So much wrong here. But let me focus on this:
The reduction of troop numbers and requirement for drug testing reflect the Pentagon’s focus on building a special-operations force suited for a new era in which special-ops leaders expect their units to focus more on supporting the operations of their parent branches.
What this statement implies at the extreme is disbanding USSOCOM and reverting SOF to its parent services to be used for conventional missions. It was the misuse of SOF (and lack of support for unconventional warfare and psychological operations and other special operations) that drove Congress to enact the Nunn-Cohen Amendment to the Goldwater NIchols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 and establish a unified Special Operations Command (USSOCOM).
SOF will play a critical supporting role to the GCCs and conventional forces in large scale combat operations but it plays as important if perhaps even more important role in the gray zone of strategic competition in support of political warfare through irregular warfare, and more specifically special warfare in support of irregular warfare. SOF is a force that makes arguably the largest contribution in support of the Joint Concept for Competing. Part of the problem is that we have never been able to quantify SOF contributions and merely provide anecdotes about the value and contributions of SOF. Relationships, rapport, tactical to strategic assessments, understanding the political environment, solving or contributing to solving complex political military problems, working "through, with, and by," facilitating interagency operations, respect for sovereignty and self determination (manifested in the Irregular warfare missions of foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare respectively) unconventional deterrence, developing resistance and resilience among indigenous forces and populations, sustained engagement, influence, governance, advising without being in charge, irregular warfare campaigning, and support to political warfare are all concepts that do not lend themselves to easy measurements of effectiveness. Time is also a problem, because current investments may take months or even years to pay off. The tough question is can SOF quantify what many of us think is unquantifiable. I know experts are trying and we need to fully support their efforts. More specifically, do the models that are used by CAPE and the Services adequately represent and take into account these difficult to quantify SOF contributions. And to the point, given even the anecdotal evidence, does our national value and need the contributions to national security provided by SOF?
I also worry how Congress may "help" in this situation. If the Army and USSOCOM cannot come to an agreement on force structure Congress may step in and prevent any cuts. We may then cut off our nose to spite our face. We may lose in the long term to all the services' superior "bureaucratic unconventional warfare." Ironically the services are better at this bureaucratic unconventional warfare than USSOCOM.
We need the Army and USSOCOM to come to an agreement on what needs to be done. The Army is being driven by the very difficult issue of force structure for the entire Army and has to make some cuts. USSOCOM is obviously resistant to cuts and many supporters and opponents (who are outside of the SOF enterprise) believe cuts must be recited at all costs and may be willing to burn bridges and throw the services under the bus with Congress. This will likely have long term blowback for the SOF enterprise. SOF looks at any cut to SOF as a threat to its existence in addition to an impact on its ability to conduct all the missions it is being tasked to conduct by the COCOMs. But instead of defending against cuts (circling the wagons and building support in Congress to prevent any cuts) maybe we need to approach this from the question of what kind of SFO do we need and how many operational elements do we need and what kind and amount of enabling support do we need organically and on call from the services? Rather than a "defend what we've got approach" we should consider conducting analysis on "what do we need now" and in 20 years. Again the first thing we need to come to grips with is the time component - SOF does not always achieve immediate effects (especially when considering influence, governance, and support to indigenous forces and populations) though most visualize of the effects of SOF in removing terrorists from the battlefield by the exquisite counterterrorism operations to capture or kill high value targets. This is a very important part of SOF but actually only one small part of the SOF enterprise.
As an aside I do believe the Army believes that cuts to SOF enabling forces (logistics, communication, and intelligence) can be mitigated by the Army providing support on a case by case and mission by mission basis. Of course SOF argues (correctly in most cases) that it requires habitual sustained relationships for most effective enabling support and that logistics, communications, and intelligence support are integral to successful special operations. Of course the 5th SOF truth says that most special operations require non-SOF support. The question is does that mean it needs organic and assigned SOF support or does that mean support provided on an as needed basis? Obviously the correct answer is somewhere in between - the right balance must be acheived. In terms of enabling support the question is what level of enabling support needs to be organic and what kind of support can be provided on an as needed basis? Perhaps the Army and USSOCOM should conduct an experiment. The Ranger Regiment can be considered an enabler to the National Mission Force. The Rangers were re-established in the 1970s with the Abrams Charter which was to meet an Army requirement to raise the level of infantry capabilities by establishing the best light infantry unit in the world that would cross pollinate its officers and NCOs with the rest of the Army. Maybe the Ranger Regiment should be returned to the Army and then Ranger support can be provided from the Army on a case by case and mission by mission basis. Sacrilege I know (and I will keep my head down from the incoming fire) but I am just extending the enabling argument to another level here.
Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for our nation's Special Operations Forces and all our Services. Hopefully we will all give away together on these critical issues.
With job cuts and drug tests, the Pentagon hopes to prepare its special-ops forces for a new era of warfare
Business Insider
A West Coast member of Naval Special Warfare Command during a water-climb training event in 2014.
Naval Special Warfare Group One
- The US military is reorienting to great-power competition after 20 years of counterterrorism.
- This shift means a change in how US special-operations forces are used.
- To make that change, Pentagon leaders say, those forces need to shape up and slim down
After more than two decades of combat against terrorist and insurgent groups in the Middle East, the US military is reorienting for a different kind of fight.
As the US military has waged those campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, strategic challenges have only become bigger and more complicated.
While the Russian military is suffering heavy losses in Ukraine, US officials continue to see it as a credible and unpredictable near-peer threat that poses an “acute” challenge. China’s military is also growing more capable and more confident as Beijing pursues supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region.
Special-operations forces are still the tip of the US military spear, but Pentagon leaders say that to be competitive in an era of intense competition with Russia and China, those forces need to shape up and slim down.
Drug tests and force reductions
SEAL Qualification Training Class 336 at their graduation ceremony in Coronado, California, in April 2020.
US Navy/MCS 1st Class Anthony W. Walker
Naval Special Warfare Command announced in September that it would start testing its personnel, including Navy SEALs and Naval Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen, for performance-enhancing drugs.
The initiative comes after several drug-related incidents in the Naval Special Warfare community and is designed to protect the force’s health and readiness.
“My intent is to ensure every NSW teammate operates at their innate best while preserving the distinguished standards of excellence that define NSW,” said Rear Adm. Keith Davids, the commanding officer of the Naval Special Warfare Command.
To become a Navy SEAL, a sailor must first complete Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, or BUD/S. One of the toughest special-operations selections in the world, BUD/S is exceptionally hard on the mind and body.
To help get through it, some students have used drugs to minimize pain and reduce the time needed to recover from injuries. The Navy is now looking to eliminate that practice, limit the use of steroids in the SEAL and Special Boat Teams, and bolster discipline in the force.
Special Forces Assessment and Selection candidates carrying a telephone pole during a ruck march at Camp Mackall in North Carolina in March 2020.
US Army/K. Kassens
US Army Special Operations Command is also set to start testing operators and recruits for performance-enhancing drugs, but that’s only one of the changes facing the Army special-operations community. The service is also set to roll out a program that will reduce the size of its special-operations force by about 10%, or some 3,000 soldiers.
Most of those cuts are expected to affect support troops. These enablers perform a variety of roles — at the higher end are explosive-ordnance-disposal specialists and cyber and electronic-warfare operators, while less complex roles include mess specialists and mechanics.
Regardless of the complexity of their job, those enablers are critical to the success of special-operations missions, and lawmakers have pushed back on the Army’s plan to cut their numbers.
Reducing force size is a natural direction for an Army that is moving away from two decades of high-tempo operations. Beginning in the early 2000s, the US special-operations community expanded rapidly in response to the demands of the war on terror. The community ultimately doubled in size.
Over the years, each of the Army’s Special Forces groups added a fourth battalion, and the service’s 75th Ranger Regiment added a fourth rifle company and a support company to each of its battalions. The Navy Special Warfare Community has swelled to about 4,000 SEALS — 10 times as many as at the height of the Cold War. The tier-one units of Joint Special Operations Command also expanded.
A US soldier assigned to 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) free falls after jumping out of a C-130 Hercules over a drop zone in Germany in March 2015.
US Army/VIS Jason Johnston
Despite some difficulties, that growth was relatively smooth, though there have been persistent concerns about what it means for the community, as one of the core “special-operations truths” is that its operators can’t be mass-produced.
The reduction of troop numbers and requirement for drug testing reflect the Pentagon’s focus on building a special-operations force suited for a new era in which special-ops leaders expect their units to focus more on supporting the operations of their parent branches.
Limiting drug use and other moves to improve discipline will surely be beneficial, but critics of the reduction plans say trimming support troops may hinder future operations by limiting the number of special-ops units available and shrinking the range of missions they can do.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations and a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ). He has a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. in strategy, cybersecurity, and intelligence from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and is pursuing a Juris Doctor degree from Boston College Law School.
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2. Meet the Iranian-born Biden military aide reportedly under investigation for major influence campaign: ‘Clear and present danger’
I worked with Dr. Ariane Tabatabai when we were both at Georgetown in the Security Studies Program. She was a very popular professor and I never saw any indications of the allegations in this piece and we had many national security discussions and she never gave any indication of conflicting loyalties.
Regarding the Naval Reserve intelligence Unit a lot of highly regarded political appointees have been members of that unit. Someone must be looking out for her.
Excerpts:
Not only is Tabatabai the chief- of-staff to the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier, but, according to Navy sources, she recently became a US reserve naval intelligence officer.
Tabatabai has completed her five-month training at the Center for Information Dominance in Dam Neck, Va., according to a fellow officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and expressed concern that Tabatabai retains her security clearance, despite the counterintelligence investigation.
The officer says Tabatabai would receive access in her reservist intelligence role to such sensitive information as staff rosters and movements of US ships and submarines in the Persian Gulf, all of which is clearly of interest to Iran amid the current Gaza conflict.
“The Navy has been actively training her to be an intelligence officer and giving her access to, not just what she has in her civilian job, but access to all the need-to-know information that a reserve unit has,” says the officer.
Meet the Iranian-born Biden military aide reportedly under investigation for major influence campaign: ‘Clear and present danger’
New York Post · by Social Links for Miranda Devine View Author Archive Get author RSS feed · November 23, 2023
In the wake of terrorist fears over the car explosion at a US-Canada border control checkpoint Wednesday, the Biden administration’s inexplicable complacency about national security threats must end.
While Gov. Hochul now says the FBI has ruled out a terrorist attack, there were initial concerns “at a time of heightened alert” that the car was packed with explosives and may even have been heading to New York City.
Hochul announced new counterterrorism efforts last week and already had beefed up security for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On Tuesday, CBS reported a threat assessment from the New York State Intelligence Center warning that the war in Gaza is “driving chatter about targets in New York.”
The threats make it all the more reprehensible that hundreds of known and suspected terrorists have been caught crossing our porous southern border — and God knows how many have evaded detection.
But equally worrying is the administration’s apparent harboring and coddling of agents of Iran, even after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It sponsors Hamas.
And, yet, sitting in the Pentagon with a high-level security clearance is Ariane Tabatabai, the Iranian-born Biden military aide who reportedly is under investigation over an Iranian influence operation whose tentacles reach deep into Washington’s military and diplomatic establishment — and nobody in the government will explain why.
Eyes on Tehran
Not only is Tabatabai the chief- of-staff to the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier, but, according to Navy sources, she recently became a US reserve naval intelligence officer.
Tabatabai has completed her five-month training at the Center for Information Dominance in Dam Neck, Va., according to a fellow officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and expressed concern that Tabatabai retains her security clearance, despite the counterintelligence investigation.
The officer says Tabatabai would receive access in her reservist intelligence role to such sensitive information as staff rosters and movements of US ships and submarines in the Persian Gulf, all of which is clearly of interest to Iran amid the current Gaza conflict.
“The Navy has been actively training her to be an intelligence officer and giving her access to, not just what she has in her civilian job, but access to all the need-to-know information that a reserve unit has,” says the officer.
“This naval reserve [role] gives her more clearance and access. Everyone she has contact with in the Navy intelligence realm is now potentially outed.”
The officer says Tabatabai’s security access has been a source of ongoing concern among colleagues, especially as “the investigation has been going on for so long.”
“It’s a clear and present danger in that even if [the investigation] affords her the right to due process, her clearance still should be on hold, and she should not have any access to go into the Pentagon or any other military installation.”
The FBI reportedly has been shut out of the Tabatabai probe, and it is not known which agency is in charge.
The FBI did not respond to The Post’s questions Wednesday.
The Pentagon acknowledged receipt of The Post’s questions about Tabatabai Wednesday, but said “we will not meet your deadline.”
Sources say it highly unusual that the probe has dragged on so long while Tabatabai remains free to access computer systems and enter the Pentagon, despite leaked emails reported by Semafor two months ago showing she was in regular communication with senior Iranian officials and was a protege of suspended Iran special envoy Robert Malley.
Malley, her former State Department colleague, was placed on unpaid leave in June, two months after his security clearance was suspended, pending an FBI investigation into alleged mishandling of classified information, which is in at least its seventh month, with no explanation from the administration, “due to privacy considerations.”
The architect of the Obama administration’s disastrous Iran nuclear deal that was scuttled by Donald Trump, Malley was brought back by Joe Biden to reanimate the deal, despite strenuous objections from Israel that it would empower Iran and fuel terrorism.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and 30 other Senate Republicans sent a letter to the Pentagon in September demanding Tabatabai’s security clearance be revoked but have had no response.
“Hamas’ barbaric attack on Oct. 7 tragically demonstrated the folly of this administration’s coddling of the Iranian regime,” Johnson told The Post.
“Maybe now they will take our concerns with Ms. Tabatabai’s connections to the Iranian government seriously, but I’m not holding my breath.”
A report handed to Congress and the White House this month claims Tabatabai and other members of the Tehran-backed influence network, the Iran Experts Initiative, have infiltrated the US government to spread disinformation about the Iranian regime’s intentions and to undermine the leading anti-Iranian dissident group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq(MEK).
“No individual or organization who aligns themselves with a hostile state or who serves as a foreign agent should wield influence over US policy or have access to sensitive national-security information,” the report’s author, professor Ivan Sascha Sheehan of the University of Baltimore, told The Post on Wednesday.
Keep up with today's most important news
Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update.
White House silent
“I did not receive a response from the White House following the release of my report. Neither am I aware of any changes to Dr. Tabatabai’s security clearance.”
Among the aid and comfort the Biden administration has provided to the Iranian regime was its blessing to attack the Mojahedin-e Khalq(MEK) in Albania, where the dissidents had been guaranteed safe haven under the Trump administration.
Last November, the State Department disavowed MEKthe group in a statement, saying: “the United States does not see the MEK as a viable democratic opposition movement that is representative of the Iranian people.”
That appeared to be the green light for the Albanian government to raid MEK headquarters in June, killing one and seizing computers that turned up in Tehran.
In September, in response to questions about Tabatabai’s security clearance, a Pentagon spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon: “We are honored to have her serve, prompting Iran’s intelligence ministry to thank Albania and start arresting MEK operatives.”
Malley was accused by a bipartisan group of former lawmakers, including former AG Michael Mukasey and former Sen. Joe Lieberman, of being behind the State Department’s “flagrant betrayal” of the Iranian dissidents.
How much damage was done to Israel and US intelligence-gathering capabilities in Iran by the destruction of MEK’s covert network there, less than four months before Hamas’ attack on Israel?
Albanian sources say MEK members now are attempting to move to Canada.
The State Department and the Pentagon have shown a cavalier disregard of media interest in the Iranian spy scandal.
In October, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller dismissed questions with a breezy: “I do not have any reason to believe an Iranian influence operation infiltrated the United States government.”
Hannity’s ‘Jingle’ is family fun
We’re in that delightful time of year when families can spend downtime together watching hokey wholesome holiday movies.
Since woke Hollywood has lost its mind, it’s usually safer to stick with the heartwarming old classics like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Home Alone” or any Christmassy movie starring Chevy Chase — my favorite rib-tickler is “Funny Farm.”
But Sean Hannity has come to the rescue this year.
The popular Fox News host has co-produced a family-friendly Christmas comedy called “Jingle Smells” that launches in a pay-per-view format on Rumble Thursday.
Hannity even has a cameo role, along with Fox regular and former Gov. Mike Huckabee, among actors John Schneider, Eric Roberts and Ben Davies.
Hannity promises that his Robin Hood-themed film is free of the “crazy agendas being presented by those other entertainment platforms. ‘Jingle Smells’ is a movie that your entire family can enjoy together.”
That’s worth a plug, in my view.
Happy Thanksgiving!
New York Post · by Social Links for Miranda Devine View Author Archive Get author RSS feed · November 23, 2023
3. War and Thanksgiving - War on the Rocks
With reprising ten years later and considering Lincold's words.
War and Thanksgiving - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by John Amble · November 23, 2023
Editor’s Note: This is our annual Thanksgiving article, originally published in 2013.
Happy Thanksgiving from War on the Rocks! Today is all about tradition: turkey and stuffing; family, friends, and football. From early childhood, we all learn the origin story of Thanksgiving that is so mythically central to its celebration. Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony marked a successful harvest with a feast to which they invited Native Americans who had lent much-needed assistance after the previous hard winter. Records of earlier harvest celebrations and debates (google “thanksgiving origins” if you’re interested and have hours to kill) about the actual provenance of what would become our Thanksgiving aside, it is no surprise that the centuries-long history would make it the holiday most steeped in uniform tradition across America.
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But how did thanksgiving become Thanksgiving? The first recognition of a single, nationally celebrated holiday of Thanksgiving came in a proclamation by the Second Continental Congress in 1777, a year after it signed the Declaration of Independence. It came as our young country’s future was far from certain, and was indeed issued from a temporary meeting site because the national capital of Philadelphia itself was then occupied by British forces. The language was marked by its central theme of gratitude for American forces’ successes, thanking God,
particularly in that he hath been pleased, in so great a Measure, to prosper the Means used for the Support of our Troops, and to crown our Arms with most signal success.
The document also issued prayers for further good fortune on the battlefield:
To inspire our Commanders, both by Land and Sea, and all under them, with that Wisdom and Fortitude which may render them fit Instruments, under the Providence of Almighty God, to secure for these United States, the greatest of all human Blessings, Independence and Peace.
Similar proclamations followed intermittently for a few years, but disappeared for a period until James Madison brought back the tradition in 1814 to issue thanks for America’s fortunes in yet another “time of public calamity and war,” this time the War of 1812 (so serious that the immediate prior proclamation called for citizens to defend against the British invasion of Washington). Like the Continental Congress’s proclamation of four decades prior, Madison’s also gave thanks for
the distinguished favors conferred on the American people … in the victories which have so powerfully contributed to the defense and protection of our country,
and asked for
wisdom to [the nation’s] measures and success to its arms in maintaining its rights and in overcoming all hostile designs and attempts against it.
But Thanksgiving Day did not become an annually observed national celebration until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued his own proclamation. Like its predecessors, this too was written in the contemporary context of a conflict that threatened the very viability of the United States as a sovereign, unified nation, “in the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity.”
So today, while we enjoy our Thanksgiving traditions, we should take note of the ways in which the wars that we have fought have shaped our nation not only politically, but culturally and as a society, as well. We do not celebrate thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving. We celebrate it annually, as a nation, a unifying tradition that would not exist in such a form were it not for our collectively shared experiences of the conflicts that define our history. As such, there is perhaps no better day on which to reflect on the enormously important impact of our nation’s wars — past, present, and future.
The full text of Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation is included below.
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation
The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans. mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.
In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October, A. D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
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John Amble is the editorial director of the Modern War Institute.
Photo credit: Matthew Brady
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by John Amble · November 23, 2023
4. Uncovering the Hidden Logic of War: Data and the Meso-Level of Armed Conflict
Graphics at the link: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/uncovering-the-hidden-logic-of-war-data-and-the-meso-level-of-armed-conflict/
For all my data scientist friends out there (but I think I only know one!)
Uncovering the Hidden Logic of War: Data and the Meso-Level of Armed Conflict - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Kerry Chávez, J Andrés Gannon · November 22, 2023
When wars occur, the side that boasts comparatively greater military power is at an advantage but does not always emerge victorious. Why? Several theories offer ostensible answers—war weariness, risk aversion, military myopia, problems with civil-military relations, miscalculations. We suspected that if we knew how states (and nonstate combatants) fight, we could better answer this consequential question. Aphorisms about winning the battle but losing the war highlight a problem with current approaches. There is a missing middle, an underappreciated meso-level of conflict: operations. Alas, there were little to no organized data at this level.
Several important and interesting questions can be and have been answered by case studies at the operational level. There is a whole host of questions, however, that require a broader scope. There are systematic patterns and lessons on how the US military fights, whether it wins or loses battles and wars, that only quantitative data can resolve. To date, this has only been available at the war level or piecemeal, leaving much to be desired where the actual warfighting occurs.
Most existing datasets dwell at the strategic level, collapsing all information on military interventions into one aggregated line item. For instance, three seminal data sources—the Military Intervention by Powerful States project, the International Crisis Behavior project, and the Militarized Interstate Disputes data set—have a single observation for the two-decade Afghanistan War. This drastically masks the prosecution of war, precluding analyses of how states fight, obscuring ebbs and flows over the course of the war, and limiting our ability to pinpoint and parse wars’ causes and effects.
Some studies address this by analyzing specific technologies and innovations, and we have certainly gained much from focused analyses of particular military means like nuclear weapons, naval power projection, aerial bombing, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or drones. But this work involves several limitations. First, it tends to focus on the possession of these platforms rather than their use, offering insight only on the latent potential for force. Second, most focus narrowly on a single platform. This overlooks that leaders craft the use of military force in packages and from a menu of substitutable (or complementary) options. Furthermore, while tracing more precise stages of wars it primarily details those where a platform of interest is in play. Like visual closure, this forces scholars to assume or imagine the complete picture of a war with incomplete information.
Finally, the datasets capturing cases within wars do not record the relations between them. Returning to the Afghanistan War, RAND improves on sources listing one line item by including more detailed information on more specific subcomponents like Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Swift Freedom, the International Security Assistance Force, Resolute Support, and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. However, not only does this blur levels of aggregation—since some of these are campaigns, some are subcampaigns, and some are operations—but it also fails to depict that lower-order cases are nested within broader ones. Figure 1 illustrates the unstructured list alongside the structured reality. Rather than independent observations arising in isolation, Operation Swift Freedom was part of Operation Enduring Freedom–Afghanistan, Operation Freedom’s Sentinel was the US component of NATO’s Resolute Support mission, and of course all of these occurred under the umbrella of the Afghanistan War.
Figure 1. Empirical reality versus existing dataset structures. (Sources: ICB, IMI, MIDS, MIPS, PRIO, RAND)
Overall, existing resources are either highly generalized on one side or highly specific and siloed on the other and none address how observations relate to one another.
MONSTr in the Middle
We created Military Operations with Novel Strategic Technologies in r (MONSTr), an open-source and publicly available dataset and website that features:
- measures of the means of military force (the how) across
- a comprehensive and disaggregated list of US military operations from 1989 to January 2021 (neither generalized nor siloed) that
- captures dependence between observations.
Interested in what happens in military interventions at the operational level, we followed the path cleared by the Military Intervention by Powerful States and International Military Intervention datasets to identify interventions and the Department of Defense Dictionary and Joint Publication 3-0 to scope to the operational level within them. For the dataset, we defined a military operation as:
a series of tactical actions (battles, engagements, strikes) conducted by combat forces in an operational theater to achieve strategic or campaign objectives in the context of a political issue or dispute through action against a foreign adversary.
Data collection is a titanic, labor-intensive, meticulous task. The only way we were able to accomplish what past efforts could not was to embrace state-of-the-art automated data retrieval techniques from a taboo source: Wikipedia. We scraped the structured knowledge graphs of this familiar, yet underutilized source using SPARQL, a customizable database query language. For any sticklers, techies, or skeptics, we discuss our definition work, Wikipedia’s anatomy, details of the extraction process, audits, and validation exercises in our recently published debut article.
Features and Uses
MONSTr’s unit of analysis is more granular, its depth more detailed, and its structure more realistic and scalable than existing data sources. First, by disaggregating the unit of analysis from wars to individual operations, we provide information on 313 observations representing the sixty-five post-1989 US interventions covered in all existing datasets combined. We include variables identifying the strategic events in which our cases are nested so that scholars can isolate them, cross-reference with other sources, and scale up and down at will.
Second, we extracted several covariates characterizing military operations. For instance, we indicate the means of force employed in each event. Other datasets either code domains (i.e., air, land, or sea) or exclusively list a sole type of force. We identify seven types: ground troops, paramilitary (special operations), close air support, air-to-air combat, aerial bombing, cruise missiles, and drones. The categories were informed by several things. First, this is largely how scholars have broken out the means of force in studies examining them in isolation. Second, the military and government generally think about force employment this way—cruise missiles were selected as the means of achieving the intended objectives in Operation Infinite Reach, for example, while the use of drones and numbers of ground troops provided frames of reference in Afghanistan. Third, it coincides with the way that Wikipedia distinguishes actions, differentiating between drones and piloted aircraft but seldom between tanks and transport vehicles.
Each military approach has its pros, cons, and fitness for a given operational environment. Additionally, each sends a different signal of risk tolerance or resolve. Of course, force planning and employment also depend on the technologies available. Figure 2 shows a cumulative count of each type of force we track. We began with 1989, marking the advent of consistent US cruise missile use in conflict, yet this platform has not been used in public view as extensively as some predicted. On the other hand, the use of special operations forces intuitively increased to intermix advanced combat technology and population trust in the counterinsurgency campaigns in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
Figure 2. Cumulative count of US operations by types of force.
Our dataset also enables analyses of combined force employment showing which means were used in conjunction. As modern warfare becomes more complex and multidomain, this information is critical to empirically examine how the US military employs jointness in action.
MONSTr provides a replete list of combatants on both sides (allies and adversaries) for every operation. The identity, traits, and dynamics of conflict actors strongly influence how they fight. Many data sources, however, generalize this aspect by looking at the primary intervener and target. This neglects vital and nuanced variation in war participation, especially ones occurring over years or even decades. The rosters comprising the coalition and the targets throughout the Afghanistan War, for instance, shifted as it unfolded.
Simply look at the top right panel of Figure 3, plotting only US allies, to get a sense of this diversity and dynamism. Compared to partners in the 1991 Gulf War (all of which were states) and the later Syria War (most of which were nonstate combatants), we see temporal trends and idiosyncrasies ripe for exploration. Especially as conflicts increasingly feature nonstate actors, we must unpack how the United States fights alongside or against them given asymmetry in strength and unconventional strategies. The dataset supports unprecedented assessments of longevity, loyalty, alliances of convenience, side switching, and more.
Figure 3. Selected network plots of US operational partners. The thickness of each connection corresponds to the number of operations performed with that actor.
MONSTr explodes the number and direction of avenues for future research on the geography and temporality of war. Nearly all operations are geocoded with GPS coordinates or the name of a local municipality. Spatial analysts can investigate how borders, terrain, degree of urbanization, resource access, strategic sites, infrastructure, and many more variables affect the application of military force.
Perhaps more pioneering, the dataset’s nested structure identifying operations within broader interventions will equip researchers to study time and context in war with greater rigor. For example, we code how many days into the parent war (or campaign) each operation occurred. This spotlights several questions. For instance, how do wars change across their life cycles, in real time, in response to withdrawals and insertions, operational failures and successes, casualties (deeply studied yet still disputed and conditional), public opinion shifts, elections and other domestic political developments, leader turnover, and even seasons? This also enables researchers to reverse the causal arrow to explore a new set of questions where the tides of war are the cause rather than the outcome.
Our data also enable more expansive inquiries of legacy theories. By controlling for the strategic context in which operations occur, it is possible that researchers have over- or underestimated the impact of certain determinants on force employment, especially structural factors. As an example, Figure 4 shows the means of force used in operations within the three primary campaigns of the Gulf War: the Iraqi no-fly zones, the air campaign, and the liberation of Kuwait. It is no surprise that the air campaign featured aerial sorties and bombing while the liberation campaign primarily comprised ground troops with close air support. By accounting for the strategic objective defining a cluster of operations, scholars can more accurately model the causes of force employment choices and the effects of their performances.
Figure 4. Nested structure of the Gulf War.
MONSTr exists here as both a static dataset and interactive website. We hope it grows. More can, should, and will be done to identify and explain military operations across more expansive time periods, more states, and more detail. We invite practitioners, students, and quantitative scholars of war to browse and use it.
Kerry Chávez, PhD, is an instructor in the Political Science Department and project administrator at the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Laboratory at Texas Tech University. She is also a nonresident research fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point. Her research focusing on the politics, strategies, and technologies of conflict and security has been published in several venues including the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Policy Analysis, War on the Rocks, and others. With practitioner and law enforcement experience as well as working group collaborations, she produces rigorous, engaged scholarship.
J. Andrés Gannon, PhD, is an assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and a faculty affiliate at the Data Science Institute. Previously, he was a Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonresident fellow at the Eurasia Group Foundation, an International Security Program postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Hans J. Morgenthau research fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center, and a PhD Eisenhower defense fellow at the NATO Defense College.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Alex Ramos, US Army
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Kerry Chávez, J Andrés Gannon · November 22, 2023
5. US Navy: ‘Non-kinetic effects’ will likely decide the next war
How do we measure these non-kinetic effects?
True believer? In the Eric Hoffer sense?
Excerpt:
For whoever comes in, you know, behind this behind me…you gotta be a true believer. Because there's still some questioning on its relevancy and its capabilities and its credibility within the space. But the more true believers there are that understand that the very nature of warfare is changing and you know, the non-kinetic side of this is more and more important moving forward. You really need somebody to kind of go to the mat to advocate a champion for these things. And that's what I'm hoping for the person that comes in behind me.
US Navy: ‘Non-kinetic effects’ will likely decide the next war
The service’s new cyber strategy lays out lines of effort for a new era of warfare.
BY LAUREN C. WILLIAMS
SENIOR EDITOR
NOVEMBER 22, 2023 02:21 PM ET
defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams
What is seapower’s decisive weapon? Not missiles or torpedoes, declares the U.S. Navy’s new cyber strategy.
“The next fight against our major adversary will be like no other,” the 14-page document begins. “The use of non-kinetic effects and defense against those effects prior to and during kinetic exchanges will likely be the deciding factor in who prevails.”
It’s a bold statement, and meant to be, says the Navy’s first, and now former, principal cyber advisor. Chris Cleary, who stepped down on Tuesday, said it’s imperative that the Navy see cyber warfare as far more than networks and cybersecurity.
“It's a warfighting discipline that we should consider a core competency, and, more importantly, professionalize around,” Cleary said in an interview on his last day at the Pentagon.
Tuesday’s release of the Navy’s first cyber strategy is the capstone of Cleary’s three-year effort to unite the service’s cyber efforts—and get the rest of the service to understand their key role in modern warfare. He had been hinting at the document for months, saying that the service had put itself in “a respectful holding pattern” to make way for and align with the National Defense Strategy and other cyber strategies from the White House and, more recently, the Pentagon.
The document details seven lines of effort to help the Navy improve its cyber workforce and readiness, defend enterprise IT, data, and networks, protect critical infrastructure and weapon systems, conduct cyber operations, secure the defense industrial base, and enhance cooperation.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How is this strategy different from earlier network-related documents?
I can't overemphasize that this is not a cybersecurity strategy. This is a cyber strategy. This is a strategy that, when you look at the different lines of effort within it, goes well beyond the blocking and tackling of what the [chief information officer] is responsible for.
And let me pause there just for a moment. The CIO was equally as engaged in writing the strategy. Some of the lines of effort were really their responsibilities…like “shift to cyber readiness” and defend the IT enterprises—those are very, very heavily weighted CIO sort of functions.
Then you get into the next two: the infrastructure, the weapons systems, the warfighting. These are kind of new things that I've never seen, we've never seen, how these lines of effort have been incorporated into a larger document that get beyond just cybersecurity and this is just “warfighting.”
And then this idea of conducting and facilitating cyber operations. That's a new one. We are a warfighting organization. It's not a secret that we will professionalize and develop capabilities and are obligated to present forces to the joint force and then sort of work through the ways that we're going to do what we would affectionately refer to as service-retained cyber operations—cyber you're gonna see from the fleet or cyber you're gonna see through a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Those are things that we never really talked about before.
So when you take the whole thing of cyber—again, it covers that spectrum of “everything you need to fix my computer” to “deliver effects when directed in a time of place of our choosing to degrade adversaries’ freedom of maneuver.” And then it gives the folks in the department the ability to point back at something and say, “The secretary signed this out.” Some of these things we were struggling with, but now we have something to map back to. So this is not just good ideas anymore. It's based all the way up to the present United States direction through the National Security Strategy, mapping all the way down to how we're going to try and do it as a department.
How does this relate to last year’s Cyber Ready guidance?
Directly. The Line of Effort No. 2 is completely mapping to cyber readiness—that is, the Cyber Ready initiative…overseeing the implementation of that throughout the department, and now it's incorporated into a larger strategy.
Are there goals and milestones to make sure the Navy gets there?
All of these strategies are as good as the implementation plans that come after them. The Department of Defense just released their cyber strategy not too long ago, and we are in the process now of working through the implementation plan at the OSD level to get after that strategy. Now, the good news is: lots of things of that strategy are sort of backed up by what we're doing. So it's not at all redundant; it's very cooperative.
That said, one of the things I was stressing with the secretary on my way out is, you know, cyber, up until recently…it hasn't been solidified as a core competency of the Department of the Navy. That's not to say there are not things that we are aggressively getting after through Fleet Cyber and Naval Information Forces and contributing components to the cyber mission force. Zero trust, identity management Cyber Ready…artificial intelligence, machine learning, our own data initiatives. Those are all now being brought into one thing, but it's still a little messy right now.
Once we embrace cyber as a core competency alongside surface warfare, subsurface warfare, Marine expeditionary warfare, Navy Special Warfare—once cyber is seen in that lens as equal to the rest of these, things will then naturally begin to fall into place. All indications are we're moving in that direction.
How has the principal cyber advisor, or PCA, job changed in the past three years?
In the Navy specifically, we very quickly came to an agreement. You can't do anything in the Navy without a truly empowered CIO. That is table stakes now. Where the PCA really came in, we focused on the operational significance of that, the warfighting side. Bringing attention to things that we haven't traditionally focused on: defense critical infrastructure, the cyber survivability and resiliency of weapons systems, the readiness of the mission force, the advocacy for resourcing for things like offensive cyber capabilities because we're a warfighting function—that's what the Navy does.
Mission force readiness…in years one and two was a big topic of conversation at the time, and how the Navy was going to improve its readiness standards. And now we've moved beyond that with the creation of the cyber warfare engineer and the maritime cyber warfare officer, and Vice Adm. [Kelly] Aeschbach being completely empowered as the sole provider of the manning and force presentation back to the joint force. So we worked a lot of things out in the beginning, but it was not an easy thing to do, you know, in the first 18 months, because you're trying to deal with some really challenging issues at the same time you're trying to build an office.
The Navy built a lot of networked weapons before much consideration was given to hacking.
Once we came to the realization that these things all do have vulnerabilities, there were efforts put in place to sort of get after the remediation of those. There's two programs of note: the SABER program, which is this initiative to get after the cyber survivability and resiliency of things at sea, and the MOSAICS effort, which sits ashore. Some things are so old…you have to come up with new capabilities to secure them. Other things that are brand new should be built with cyber survivability and resiliency as a key performance parameter right out of the gate.
The Constellation-class frigate is a perfect example of this. That is a brand-new ship and cyber survivability is something that is being designed right as we lay the keel down. They understand that it has to be watertight, it has to float, and it has to be cyber-secure right out of the gate. It doesn't mean the adversary is not going to figure out ways to do that and get around it. It doesn't mean that you don't need to build boundary defense around these things, but they're going to be built better than they were built 20 or 30 years ago.
Working with the [Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment organization] through the cyber strategic cybersecurity program is one of the ways we get after that. As that program got online, the PCAs were sort of seen as the cheerleaders within the departments to help A&S do what they needed to go to. Because the weapons systems they were looking at covered all the services. Everybody had some weapon system that was designated as a strategic weapon system. Because ultimately, it's the joint force that requires these things to be delivered and delivered securely. The services required to man, train, and equip these things.
The PCA was really in the middle of making a lot of that happen across all the services: Wanda Jones-Heath for the Department of the Air Force, Michael Sulmeyer and before him Terry Mitchell, for the Department of the Army. We've all really always gotten along very, very well. We all contribute to these programs. We all think these things are important. And I think that was one of the good stories about the PCA organization. Because we started kind of as a joint community and ensured that we maintain those relationships the whole time.
What are you most proud of and what advice do you have for your successor?
The creation of the cyberspace superiority vision followed by the cyberspace strategy. Some of these things have never existed and it was really taking this discussion well beyond cybersecurity and really making it cyber—warfighting, resiliency. In doing that, we were able to elevate things like weapons systems and defense critical infrastructure security. Because those things have always been done, but they've sort of never bubbled to a level where it got the attention of the Secretary of the Navy. These have the Secretary of the Navy's attention now and I think the PCA helped connect those. We didn't do the work; there's offices within NAVSEA, NAVAIR, and NAVFAC that are doing the work. We just helped connect the efforts of these organizations to the real decision-makers…and champion their causes.
For whoever comes in, you know, behind this behind me…you gotta be a true believer. Because there's still some questioning on its relevancy and its capabilities and its credibility within the space. But the more true believers there are that understand that the very nature of warfare is changing and you know, the non-kinetic side of this is more and more important moving forward. You really need somebody to kind of go to the mat to advocate a champion for these things. And that's what I'm hoping for the person that comes in behind me.
defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams
6. There’s only one way forward in Gaza by Carl Bildt
Excerpts:
The key, then, is to use the renewed prospect of a two-state solution to galvanise moderate forces on both sides—and to do so fast, before more people succumb to fatalism or despair. Such a reopening won’t happen without strong, sustained international engagement by the US, the EU and the other Arab states. With Russia having ostracised itself with its war of aggression against Ukraine, the international community will need a new format to replace the previous Middle East Quartet (the EU, the US, the United Nations and Russia).
Though upcoming elections in the US and elsewhere may divert attention next year, the issue should be made a top priority thereafter. We must never give up on diplomacy. We have now been reminded of what the alternative looks like.
There’s only one way forward in Gaza | The Strategist
aspistrategist.org.au · by Carl Bildt · November 21, 2023
Is there any possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or must we simply get used to periodic wars that deny both sides the tranquillity and stability they seek?
It’s easy to be pessimistic. The history of the region is littered with failed peace plans, collapsed diplomatic conferences and thoroughly disillusioned mediators. Everything seems to have been tried, and nothing seems to have worked. Everyone is left assigning blame to anyone but themselves.
Yet to give up on diplomacy is to accept the unacceptable: eternal war. That’s why, even amid the horrors of the latest Gaza war, talk of an eventual two-state solution remains alive and has actually grown louder.
At his 3 November press conference in Tel Aviv, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken went further in describing a lasting solution than any US official has in a long time—if ever. A two-state solution, he averred, is ‘the only guarantor of a secure, Jewish and democratic Israel; the only guarantor of Palestinians realising their legitimate right to live in a state of their own, enjoying equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity and dignity; the only way to end a cycle of violence once and for all’.
Blinken is right. Ensuring an ‘equal measure of security, freedom, opportunity and dignity’ for everyone between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is the only ultimate solution. European leaders acknowledged this reality back in 1980 with the Venice Declaration. The nine members of the European Community proclaimed: ‘The Palestinian people, which is conscious of existing as such, must be placed in a position, by an appropriate process defined within the framework of the comprehensive peace settlement, to exercise fully its right to self-determination.’
By that time, Arab governments had given up on trying to erase the state of Israel. Following their failure in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, they finally agreed to make peace. But as the Venice Declaration recognised, true regional peace wouldn’t be possible until the Palestinian issue was settled.
In the optimistic early 1990s, the Oslo Accords showed what was possible. Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat (an ex-terrorist) and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (an ex-general) shook hands on the White House lawn. The path to a two-state solution had been established, even if crucial details remained to be settled.
But the Oslo process eventually failed, owing to opposition boiling up among Israelis and Palestinians alike. The earlier optimism gave way to Palestinian terrorism and illegal Israeli settlements, and it has been downhill ever since. While successive US administrations have made repeated attempts to revive the peace process, none has made it a top priority. Until 7 October, Joe Biden’s administration had left the issue on a back burner, hoping that the region would remain calm while it concentrated on other matters.
For its part, the European Union long maintained a forward-looking commitment to the Middle East peace process. In December 2009, it issued a detailed pronouncement calling for ‘a two-state solution with the State of Israel and an independent, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.’ But Europe’s interest in the issue also waned over time. Though there were various reasons for that, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s consistent efforts to make serious peace talks impossible surely played a significant role.
Moreover, politicians in America, Europe and Israel began to convince themselves that the Palestinian issue could simply be forgotten, since more Arab countries had begun to establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel. ‘If the Arab world no longer cares about the Palestinians,’ they thought, ‘why should we?’
Now that the political quagmire and humanitarian disaster in Gaza has returned the issue to the fore, it’s clear that there can be no resolution without some decisive steps towards a two-state solution.
But we shouldn’t harbor any illusions. The obstacles are huge. Among the most worrying is the apparent increase in support for violence among Palestinians who have grown frustrated to the point of despair. Hamas isn’t the only organisation that sees terror as the best way forward. In the West Bank, too, the Palestinian Authority has lost control of some areas where it is supposed to provide security and order.
Another major obstacle is the inclusion of fundamentalist Jewish settlers in the current Israeli government. There are now an estimated 700,000 people living in illegal settlements scattered across territory that is supposed to belong to a future Palestinian state. Many of these settlers are armed, and since 7 October have been violently forcing hundreds of Palestinians from their homes. Some even dream openly of demolishing the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, so that they can rebuild the biblical Temple in Jerusalem (which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC, and again by the Romans in 70 AD).
Extremists on both sides want to control all of the land between the river and the sea by whatever means necessary. If either is allowed to gain further ground, this war will become even deadlier than it already is.
The key, then, is to use the renewed prospect of a two-state solution to galvanise moderate forces on both sides—and to do so fast, before more people succumb to fatalism or despair. Such a reopening won’t happen without strong, sustained international engagement by the US, the EU and the other Arab states. With Russia having ostracised itself with its war of aggression against Ukraine, the international community will need a new format to replace the previous Middle East Quartet (the EU, the US, the United Nations and Russia).
Though upcoming elections in the US and elsewhere may divert attention next year, the issue should be made a top priority thereafter. We must never give up on diplomacy. We have now been reminded of what the alternative looks like.
aspistrategist.org.au · by Carl Bildt · November 21, 2023
7. AI For Five Eyes? New bill pushes AI collaboration with UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand
Any memes for "AI for five Eyes?" As Sgt Provo said it kind of sings.
And on a serious note:
Keeping up — or catching up — with the People’s Republic of China is crucial, agreed Arthur Herman, who heads Hudson’s quantum technology initiative.
“We are far behind China in thinking and planning strategically about AI, particularly in integrating commercial apps and IP systematically into national security-related uses,” Herman told Breaking Defense in an email. “Having a Five Eyes AI Working Group alone won’t catch us up, but having a working group that is also working to integrate quantum technology into AI planning and research and development — since all five countries have strong and well-developed QIS [Quantum Information Science] sectors — would allow us to steal a march on the Chinese in this regard.” (While the bill doesn’t specifically call out quantum technology, it’s closely intertwined with AI).
Groen agreed that the allies can do better against China together — if they can step up their coordination game.
“When you think about like China, [as] an authoritarian government … they have an integrated system of artificial intelligence for warfighting from end to end, because they own all the pieces” under a policy known as “civil-military fusion,” he said. “We can give the Chinese a run for their money, we have all kinds of innovation and great capabilities — we just deploy them in disparate ways and not through an integrated system.”
AI For Five Eyes? New bill pushes AI collaboration with UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand - Breaking Defense
“If we want to fight as a system... you have to start sharing technology now,” the former head of the Pentagon’s Joint AI Center told Breaking Defense. “We can’t build the system on the eve of battle.”
breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · November 22, 2023
The flags of the Five Eyes countries, but cyber-style. (Graphic by Breaking Defense, images via Pexels and ODNI)
WASHINGTON — Two key House lawmakers have introduced a bill [PDF] requiring the Pentagon to collaborate more closely with America’s closest allies on artificial intelligence.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on cybersecurity and information technology, and the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced the bill on Tuesday. It would direct the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Security to jointly form an interagency working group “to develop and coordinate an artificial intelligence initiative among the Five Eyes countries” — Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.
Formed by the five allies in 1946, the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing apparatus also coordinates on sensitive technical matters ranging from space policy to spectrum management. Meanwhile, in 2021, the three biggest members of the Five Eyes, Australia, the UK and US, signed an even more intimate AUKUS agreement focused on nuclear submarines but with “Track 2” provisions to jointly explore “advanced technology” such as AI.
The proposed bill mandates no further action beyond a report to Congress and provides no new funding. It also explicitly states that “any knowledge or technical data produced by a Five Eyes country under any cooperative project … shall be controlled by that country under the export control laws and regulations of that country.” Export controls — especially the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which can apply even to software — have been the bane of inter-allied technical cooperation for decades.
Those self-imposed limitations are likely to ease the bill’s progress through a divided and dysfunctional Congress, where it may well end up wrapped into the must-pass policy bill, the annual National Defense Authorization Act.
“The goal was to make this operational and not set it up for immediate failure,” an aide to Gallagher told Breaking Defense, adding that the congressman’s staff had consulted with both the Pentagon and potential co-sponsors in the Senate. “This bill is a stepping stone for more extensive reforms.”
While this initial “stepping stone” would just create a working group, it expects that group to think big on topics like reforming export controls and advancing AI ethics and innovation.
In particular, the working group must “identify (including by experimenting, testing, and evaluating) potential solutions to advance and accelerate the interoperability of artificial intelligence systems used for intelligence sharing, battlespace awareness, and other covered operational uses.” In other words, the objective is not just to talk about sharing the latest technology, but to work towards sharing data across the allies’ increasingly computerized command-and-control systems — what the Pentagon refers to as “Combined Joint All-Domain Command & Control.”
But the Five Eyes already collaborate closely, so what would the Gallagher-Khanna bill add? One expert who spoke to Breaking Defense was deeply skeptical.
“I’m not sure if the bill moves the ball forward as much as sideways,” said James Lewis, a former diplomat and information security expert at CSIS. “Here are already [Five] Eyes working groups on emerging technology, so this seems like Congressional micromanagement. With no new money or authorities? Nice idea, needs work.”
But other experts, including the former head of the Pentagon’s Joint AI Center, were far more enthusiastic.
“On its own, it doesn’t really drive a lot of activity,” acknowledged retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen Mike Groen. “However, I think it does really start to open windows for Five Eyes cooperation in AI.
“That’s exciting,” Groen told Breaking Defense. “There’s a lot of stuff this bill could enable: mechanisms for interoperability, mechanisms for sharing of data … [from] a warfighting perspective, this becomes really critical.”
The working group, if created, “could be a really good opportunity to make these things real, so we don’t fight as five separate allies, [but] as an integrated system of capabilities,” he said.
“If we want to fight as a system… you have to start sharing technology now,” he told Breaking Defense. “We can’t build the system on the eve of battle.”
Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and Pentagon strategist at the Hudson Institute, agreed that if the Five Eyes are expected to fight together, they “need to ensure their AI-enabled systems are compatible, if not interoperable with one another.”
If allied countries are running incompatible algorithms or built divergent assumptions into models for such areas as electronic warfare, for example, their AI-assisted operations could end up going in different, mutually unhelpful directions or even directly interfering with each other.
“The bill does a good job setting up the construct for considering how AI will be employed militarily by the Five Eyes countries [and] highlighting some of the challenges,” Clark told Breaking Defense in an email. The bill’s repeated references to “testing and evaluation” are particularly important in this context, because machine learning algorithms are notoriously opaque, even unpredictable — witness ChatGPT’s tendency to “hallucinate” wrong answers for no obvious reason — so the allies need a common, robust approach to ensuring they actually work and that each others’ AIs can be trusted.
Clark said he does have concerns about cooperation and the bill itself, however. It’s important for the Five Eyes team to all pull together — but without yoking the fastest members to the slowest. Rapid US progress “could leave behind Five Eyes countries that are not as far along in implementing AI-enabled systems,” he said. “The bill would help to level the field between allies, but could slow US AI advancement compared to the PRC.”
Keeping up — or catching up — with the People’s Republic of China is crucial, agreed Arthur Herman, who heads Hudson’s quantum technology initiative.
“We are far behind China in thinking and planning strategically about AI, particularly in integrating commercial apps and IP systematically into national security-related uses,” Herman told Breaking Defense in an email. “Having a Five Eyes AI Working Group alone won’t catch us up, but having a working group that is also working to integrate quantum technology into AI planning and research and development — since all five countries have strong and well-developed QIS [Quantum Information Science] sectors — would allow us to steal a march on the Chinese in this regard.” (While the bill doesn’t specifically call out quantum technology, it’s closely intertwined with AI).
Groen agreed that the allies can do better against China together — if they can step up their coordination game.
“When you think about like China, [as] an authoritarian government … they have an integrated system of artificial intelligence for warfighting from end to end, because they own all the pieces” under a policy known as “civil-military fusion,” he said. “We can give the Chinese a run for their money, we have all kinds of innovation and great capabilities — we just deploy them in disparate ways and not through an integrated system.”
breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · November 22, 2023
8. “Changes Unseen in a Century”: Seeking American Partnership in US Decline
Excerpts:
In sum, when Xi addressed American business leaders in a speech last week, he was presenting them with a choice: the United States can choose to be an adversary or a partner. He stated “China is ready to be a partner and friend of the United States” as long as Washington accepts the changes underway (Xinhua, November 16). Xi highlighted the Belt and Road Initiative alongside the Global Security Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative as inclusive programs in which the United States could participate. The partnership offer, however, is an offer for the United States to partner in its own decline and the promotion of a Sinocentric international order. These initiatives are almost explicitly about redesigning global governance to reflect Beijing’s preferences and to work through international institutions that privilege the Party’s priorities (FMPRC, October 31). Xi has explicitly linked at least the Global Development Initiative to “changes unseen in a century (FMPRC, July 10).
The limits of the partnership CCP General Secretary Xi was offering in San Francisco become clearer when compared to his exchange in March with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Xi told Putin “Now there are changes that have not happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes” (Reuters, March 22). If the China-Russia partnership is a force for the change Beijing wants to see in the world, then Xi’s offer to Biden is an invitation for US acquiescence rather than positive change or stability.
“Changes Unseen in a Century”: Seeking American Partnership in US Decline
https://jamestown.org/program/changes-unseen-in-a-century-seeking-american-partnership-in-us-decline/
Publication: China Brief Volume: 23 Issue: 21
November 21, 2023 12:59 AM Age: 2 days
The flags of the United States and the People’s Republic of China in Washington, D.C. (Source: People’s Daily)
In his opening remarks this week to US President Joe Biden, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping said “The China-US relationship, which is the most important bilateral relationship in the world, should be perceived and envisioned in a broad context of the accelerating global transformations unseen in a century” (Youtube.com, November 15). Xi’s remarks highlighted an important Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assessment—often translated as “changes unseen in a century” (百年未有之大变局)—that is an invitation to President Biden participate in shepherding the United States in its decline. [1] By setting the US-China relationship in these terms, Xi is saying that the relationship can be stabilized and deliverables like those finalized at the summit can come, but only if the United States accepts the inevitability of its decline and Beijing’s reshaping the global order. Only by accepting what the Party means by “changes unseen in a century” do the CCP’s intentions for the US-China relationship become clear.
The assessment of “changes unseen in a century” incorporates opportunities and risks in what Beijing sees as the way in which the international system is changing. The opportunity is that the balance of power or center of gravity in global affairs is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific as the world becomes more multipolar (Xinhua, December 28, 2017). In Xi’s report to the 20th Party Congress, he said that scientific, technological, and industrial transformations were underway and that these already had shifted the international balance of power (FMPRC, October 25, 2022). Alongside multipolarity, economic globalization continues to be a powerful—or, in Xi’s words, “irreversible”—trend that shapes international relations (Xinhua, April 26, 2019). For over a decade, Beijing has consistently identified emerging multipolarity and the democratization of international relations as emerging features of the global order. Concepts like “New Type of International Relations (新型国际关系)” and “Community of Common Destiny for Humanity (人类命运共同体)” are built around remaking international politics in the CCP’s domestic image (China Brief, June 7, 2013; State Council Information Office, June 2021).
The countervailing risks of “changes unseen in a century” include the rise of anti-globalization sentiment as well as increasing external hostility toward China specifically (Peoples’ Net, May 25, 2021). In Xi’s 20th Party Congress speech, he explicitly talked about foreign “attempts to blackmail, contain, blockade, and exert maximum pressure on China” in response to the “drastic changes in the international landscape” (FMPRC, October 25, 2022). But these are long-standing themes in the context of “changes unseen in a century.” For example, at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2018, Xi warned that “hegemony and power politics persist; protectionism and unilateralism are mounting,” pushing back against these global transformations (Xinhua, September 3, 2018).
In the Party’s thinking, these two factors combine to create favorable conditions for Beijing’s diplomacy and to push new initiatives reshape global governance. Beijing’s depiction of the counter-forces positions China as the champion of regional cooperation and positive globalization in venues like FOCAC (China Brief, December 3, 2021). In a speech in St. Petersburg in 2019, Xi pointed out that the global governance system was incompatible with the current international situation (Xinhua, June 8, 2019). The global COVID-19 pandemic did little to change official concerns about the unsuitability of global governance institutions, as officials and commentators continued to echo this assessment (FMPRC, September 13; Guangming Daily, December 3, 2022; People’s Daily, March 1, 2021).
Related to the changes unseen is the CCP assessment that “Major-country competition runs counter to the trend of our times (大国竞争不符合当今时代潮流)” (FMPRC, November 13). Some in the United States and elsewhere apparently read this as more of a statement of intention and preference, i.e. that the Party seeks to avoid strategic competition. However, this statement admonishes the United States that it is fighting against the historical currents outlined above. If one accepts that China’s rise under the CCP is legitimate, and the notion of “changes unseen,” then one should accept China’s place at the center of the global stage.
In sum, when Xi addressed American business leaders in a speech last week, he was presenting them with a choice: the United States can choose to be an adversary or a partner. He stated “China is ready to be a partner and friend of the United States” as long as Washington accepts the changes underway (Xinhua, November 16). Xi highlighted the Belt and Road Initiative alongside the Global Security Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative as inclusive programs in which the United States could participate. The partnership offer, however, is an offer for the United States to partner in its own decline and the promotion of a Sinocentric international order. These initiatives are almost explicitly about redesigning global governance to reflect Beijing’s preferences and to work through international institutions that privilege the Party’s priorities (FMPRC, October 31). Xi has explicitly linked at least the Global Development Initiative to “changes unseen in a century (FMPRC, July 10).
The limits of the partnership CCP General Secretary Xi was offering in San Francisco become clearer when compared to his exchange in March with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Xi told Putin “Now there are changes that have not happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes” (Reuters, March 22). If the China-Russia partnership is a force for the change Beijing wants to see in the world, then Xi’s offer to Biden is an invitation for US acquiescence rather than positive change or stability.
Notes
[1] The “changes” in “changes unseen in a century” could also be translated in ways that suggest more fundamental change, for instance, “transformation,” “a turbulent situation,” or “instability.”
CB-V-23-Issue-21-November-21.pdf
PLA-Cadet-Recruitment-Appendices-PDF-1.pdf
9. China Tried Using Economic Ties to Bring Taiwan Closer. It Isn’t Working.
Does "it's the economy, stuoid" apply here? I think not.
China Tried Using Economic Ties to Bring Taiwan Closer. It Isn’t Working.
As geopolitical tensions rise, Taiwan is shifting its economy to rely more on the U.S. and other countries but at a cost
https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/china-tried-using-economic-ties-to-bring-taiwan-closer-it-isnt-working-8a7d63dc?mod=hp_lead_pos6
By Joyu WangFollow
and Nathaniel TaplinFollow
Nov. 23, 2023 9:24 am ET
TAIPEI—For years, Beijing hoped to win control of Taiwan by convincing its people their economic futures were inextricably tied to China.
Instead, more Taiwanese businesses are pivoting to the U.S. and other markets, reducing the island democracy’s dependence on China and angering Beijing as it sees its economic leverage over Taiwan ebb.
In one sign of the shift, the U.S. replaced mainland China as the top buyer of Taiwanese agricultural products for the first time last year.
Electronics firms such as chip maker
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. are also selling more goods to American and other non-Chinese buyers, thanks in part to Washington’s chip restrictions and Apple’s bets on Taiwanese chips.Overall, Taiwanese exports to the U.S. in the first 10 months of 2023 were more than 80% higher than in the same period of 2018, Taiwanese government data shows. Taiwanese exports to the mainland were 1% lower—a major change from a decade or so ago when China’s and Taiwan’s economies were rapidly integrating.
Taiwan’s outbound investment has also shifted. After flowing mostly to mainland China in the early 2000s, it has now moved decisively toward other destinations, including Southeast Asia, India and the U.S.
Taiwanese electronics giant
Foxconn, which assembles iPhones in mainland China, is expanding in India and Vietnam after Apple began pushing its suppliers to diversify.Chinese state media recently reported that China had opened tax and land-use probes into Foxconn. Though Taiwanese officials and analysts interpreted the probes as a sign that China wants Foxconn founder Terry Gou to drop plans to run in Taiwan’s presidential election in January, some have said Beijing may also be trying to pressure Foxconn into resisting decoupling with China.
“Any attempt to ‘talk down’ the mainland’s economy or to seek ‘decoupling’ is driven by ulterior motives and will be futile,” said a spokeswoman for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office in September. “The mainland is always the best choice for Taiwanese compatriots and businesses.”
Fully decoupling from mainland China’s economy likely isn’t possible, and would be disastrous for Taiwan, not to mention China, even if it were.
An election campaign billboard featuring Foxconn founder Terry Gou in Taipei. PHOTO: LAM YIK FEI/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Foxconn and other major Taiwanese companies depend heavily on China for parts, testing and buyers. Some 25% of Taiwan’s electronic parts imports still come from the mainland.
If China’s weakened economy returns to strong growth, it could shift the calculus back in favor of the mainland, where the Communist Party claims Taiwan despite never having ruled it. About 21% of Taiwan’s total goods trade this year has been with mainland China, versus 14% for the U.S., though the U.S. share has risen from 11% in 2018.
“My hunch is that the large manufacturing sectors will try to stay in the Chinese market, even with harsh conditions,” said Alexander Huang, director of the international affairs department of the opposition Kuomintang Party, whose supporters include business people with mainland ties. “If you talk to those business owners, they say, ‘Nah, no way will I give it to my competitors.’”
Even so, many forces are pushing Taiwan to rewire its economic relationship with China.
Trump-era tariffs and Biden administration export controls have raised the cost of sourcing from China, and in some cases prohibited it. U.S. firms are pushing their Taiwanese suppliers to diversify sourcing, and rising wages in China have made it less attractive than before.
Long-running shifts in Taiwanese sentiment toward China—and China’s own efforts to punish the island using its economic leverage—are also factors. China has banned Taiwanese agricultural products such as pineapple and, in 2022, grouper fish, and restricted outbound tourism to Taiwan.
Those restrictions to some degree have backfired, pushing Taiwanese businesses to look elsewhere.
Casting for new markets
Chang Chia-sheng, who runs a fish farming operation in Taiwan, said his main export target a decade ago was mainland China. But as geopolitical tensions climbed, he looked elsewhere. Sales to Americans have jumped fivefold since 2018, he said. “In the U.S., things just seem to work out more easily,” Chang said.
The U.S. and Taiwan reached an agreement in May on a number of trade and investment measures to deepen ties, though the deal stopped short of reducing tariffs.
In the June quarter of 2023, 63% of revenues at TSMC, which makes most of the world’s most cutting-edge logic chips, came from the U.S., up from 54% in the same period in 2018, according to S&P Global data. Just 12% of TSMC’s revenue now comes from Chinese buyers, down from 22% in the second quarter of 2018.
Taiwan’s government is also encouraging closer economic links with Southeast Asia, South Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Its “New Southbound Policy,” rolled out in 2016, has been the subject of fierce debate in Taiwan, with the Kuomintang Party saying steps to boost relations—like handing out scholarships—aren’t worth the cost.
Fishermen harvest and prepare fish at a farm and food processing factory in southern Taiwan.
CHANG CHIA-SHENG
Exports to “New Southbound” partners have risen, however, to $66 billion in the first nine months of 2023, about 50% higher than the same period in 2016.
“Frankly speaking, we’re responding reactively” to the need for more diverse trading partners, Taiwan’s Economic Minister Wang Mei-hua said in an interview. “Taiwan needs to manage the risks on its own, but we also need our allies to join us more in mitigating these risks.”
Together, the U.S. and the six largest Southeast Asian economies accounted for 36% of Taiwanese exports in the third quarter of 2023, according to data from CEIC, surpassing the percentage sent to mainland China and Hong Kong on a quarterly basis for the first time since 2002.
In September, Taiwan sent less than 21% of its exports to the mainland, the lowest percentage since the global financial crisis.
Taiwanese foreign investment into mainland China, steady at around $10 billion a year for most of the early 2010s, plummeted in late 2018 and has since been running at about half that level, according to Taiwanese government data. In 2023 so far, just 13% of Taiwan’s investment went to mainland China; 25% went to other Asian locations, and nearly half went to the U.S.
A survey of Taiwanese businesses conducted last year on behalf of The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, found that nearly 60% had moved or were considering moving some production or sourcing out of China—a significantly higher rate than European or American firms.
Jay Yen, chief executive of Yen and Brothers, a Taiwanese frozen-food processing company, said his firm received a government subsidy of around $75,000 to market his products to American consumers. China now only accounts for about 3% of its revenue, he said.
That said, “if you really have to consider the risks of a war between the U.S. and China and its potential impact on Taiwan, you might want to place your bets on a third country—neither China nor the U.S.,” Yen added.
A chef prepares products from Taiwanese company Yen and Brothers at a grocery store in California. PHOTO: YEN AND BROTHERS
Reversing the tide
After China began to open up its economy in the late 1970s, Taiwanese businesses were among the first investors.
By the 2000s, China seemed to be succeeding in its strategy of integrating the two economies, with more than 28% of Taiwan’s exports going to the mainland in 2010, from less than 4% a decade earlier.
Direct flights between the two sides were normalized for the first time in decades. Mainland tourists were allowed to visit Taiwan on their own.
By 2014, the tides were turning as more Taiwanese grew worried about overdependence on China. Student demonstrators protested against a trade pact, later abandoned, which would have deepened ties with China. President Tsai Ing-wen, who took office in 2016, has pushed to diversify Taiwan’s economy.
China has responded by moving trade issues more into the spotlight.
In April, it opened an investigation into Taiwanese trade restrictions which it says limit exports of more than 2,400 items from the mainland to the island in violation of World Trade Organization rules. In October, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced the probe would be extended until Jan. 12—the day before Taiwan’s coming election.
Taiwan’s government has called the probe politically motivated.
Chinese officials have implied that Beijing could suspend preferential tariff rates for some Taiwanese goods in China under a 2010 deal signed when Kuomintang’s Ma Ying-jeou was president. Beijing has also reacted angrily to Taiwan’s recent trade agreement with the U.S.
An overview of Chang Chia-sheng’s fish farm in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. PHOTO: CHANG CHIA-SHENG
For Taiwanese companies, building and operating new factories in places other than China isn’t cheap or easy. Protests have at times disrupted operations at Indian plants operated by Foxconn and
Wistron, another Apple supplier. In September, a fire halted production at a Taiwanese facility in Tamil Nadu.Still, some Taiwanese businesspeople have clearly soured on China.
“The electronics industry has already become a Chinese empire, not a Taiwanese one,” says Leo Chiu, who worked in mainland China in quality control for an electronics manufacturer for 14 years before concluding he couldn’t move up further there and returning to Taiwan in 2019. Many of his old colleagues have left, he said.
“If Xi Jinping steps down, there’s still a chance it could change,” says Chiu. “But I think it’s very hard.”
Write to Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com and Nathaniel Taplin at nathaniel.taplin@wsj.com
10. The Hostage Deal Means Israel Is Fighting the Clock
In regards to time: Does Israel have to winn and Hamas just has to not lose? If so then is time on Hamas's ide?
The Hostage Deal Means Israel Is Fighting the Clock
With a short cease-fire reportedly going into effect Friday, Hamas has seized control of the war’s timetable.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/now-israel-is-fighting-the-clock-ceasefire-war-gaza-5b7d51eb?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
By Dominic Green
Nov. 22, 2023 6:22 pm ET
An Israeli soldier patrols near a protective fence demarcating the Gaza strip in Netiv HaAsara, Nov. 17. PHOTO: KOBI WOLF/BLOOMBERG NEWS
With a four-day cease-fire reportedly going into effect Friday, time isn’t on Israel’s side in its war with Hamas in Gaza. Israel already faces challenges unprecedented in the history of war. A terrorist enemy dedicated to its destruction holds hundreds of hostages in a complex tunnel network and uses civilians as human shields. Israeli society, already riven by political infighting, is traumatized by Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault and divided over how to handle the hostage crisis. Further cease-fires mean the recovery of more hostages, but this will slow and eventually halt Israel’s effort to break Hamas’s control over Gaza. That would be a strategic defeat for both Israel and the U.S.
Israel needs time to root out Hamas. But the longer the war goes on, the likelier it is to spiral into a regional conflict drawing in the U.S. Since Oct. 17, Iranian-supplied militias have hit U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria with more than 60 rocket attacks. If a rocket or drone kills American troops, the Biden administration will face a crisis of its own. It could either retaliate against Iran and risk unpredictable military, economic and electoral consequences, or retreat from the Mideast, abandoning Israel and ceding a crucial region in the U.S.’s great-power struggle with China.
Few observers are better placed to understand these dilemmas than Michael Oren. An Israeli-American historian of the U.S.’s relationship with the Middle East, Mr. Oren served in Gaza with the Israel Defense Forces, then advised on several rounds of peace negotiations with the Palestinians. He was Israel’s ambassador to Washington during the Obama years. He held the Gaza brief as Benjamin Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister.
Mr. Oren praises President Biden’s forthright support of Israel. He agrees with the president’s statement that “a ceasefire is not peace” as long as Hamas “clings to its ideology of destruction.” It is war by other means, allowing the terrorists to “rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again.” Mr. Oren expects U.S. and international pressure for cease-fires to grow “exponentially” in the coming weeks.
A cease-fire deprives Israel of military momentum and transfers the initiative to Hamas. Now that Israel has agreed to a short cease-fire, the Biden administration and its Qatari interlocutors will expect longer cease-fires. Hamas will remain armed and dangerous in Gaza, despite Israel’s war aims and the U.S.’s stated goals, and will use this cease-fire to regroup. The cease-fire’s terms allow Hamas to extend the truce by releasing 10 hostages a day. As the possibility of a permanent truce nears, and as Hamas starts to trade adult, male and military hostages, the group’s demands will rise. The U.S. will pressure Israel to release hundreds of Palestinian terrorists.
The partial hostage release also increases pressure inside Israel for further cease-fires. Israeli society, and Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, are already split by a real-life “Sophie’s choice”: Who is returned home, and who is left behind? The Israeli government insists its Gaza campaign will resume once the cease-fire lapses, but a combination of domestic and international pressures may prevent Israel from regaining military momentum. The State Department is already refusing to endorse an Israeli move into southern Gaza, citing humanitarian concerns.
A temporary cease-fire that becomes permanent is incompatible with the Biden administration’s commitment to Israel’s security. More than 200,000 Israelis are internally displaced from the southern regions adjoining Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon. This cease-fire with Hamas won’t return those Israelis home. It will, however, embolden Iran and its proxies, none of whom are parties to the cease-fire deal. Hezbollah’s attacks across Israel’s northern border have intensified in recent weeks, as has the pace of rocket attacks by Iranian-sponsored militias on American bases in Iraq and Syria. The Houthis of Yemen, removed from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list when the Biden administration came into office, have hijacked a cargo ship in the Red Sea and launched ballistic missiles at Israel.
“What’s going to happen when the message gets out that we can be hit more or less with impunity, and when we try to defend ourselves, someone’s going to slap a cease-fire on us?” Mr. Oren asks.
Restoring Israel’s deterrence is a matter of survival for the Jewish state. It’s also an asset that the U.S. is defending by resupplying Israel and sending out two carrier strike groups to the region. Israelis now appreciate the indispensability of American support more than at any time since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It’s vital the Biden administration uses its leverage wisely.
Mr. Oren endorses reports that after Oct. 7 Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant advised launching a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah before addressing Hamas’s smaller rocket arsenal in Gaza. Mr. Gallant was overruled in the cabinet partly, Mr. Oren believes, because of “tremendous pressure” from the Biden administration. The president’s one-word warning to Iran and its assets—“Don’t”—also applies to Israel.
Mr. Oren hears several clocks ticking at once. A short cease-fire won’t slow any of them, and it will exacerbate some of their pressures. There is the “ammo clock”: The IDF needs to be resupplied consistently with U.S.-made advanced munitions. There is the “reservist clock”: Israel has mobilized an army equivalent to those of Britain and France combined; its young men and women, he says, form “the backbone of our high-tech economy.” There is the “economic clock”: Foreign investment and tourism have collapsed, and Israel is burning money on the war. There is the “humanitarian clock”: Footage continues to show civilian casualties and more than a million displaced Gazans.
Israel needs to stop these clocks to survive. The Biden administration should create time and diplomatic space for Israel’s forces to break Hamas. That means preventing the terrorists from setting the timetable in the Gaza war, letting Israel strike Hezbollah as necessary, and re-establishing American deterrence against Iranian-sponsored rocket attacks. It also means rethinking America’s Iran strategy.
Israel’s leaders, Mr. Oren among them, made the mistake of believing Hamas could be bought off with Qatari cash and work permits. The Obama administration, he says, “made the same mistake” about Iran. The Biden administration, which transferred $6 billion to Iran to secure the release of five American hostages in September and allowed sanctions on Iran’s missile technology to lapse, is under the same delusion. The Democrats’ long campaign to escape the Mideast by placating Iran has “completely boomeranged” in “abject failure,” Mr. Oren says. The U.S. has been dragged back into the region by Iranian-sponsored aggression.
Two other clocks are ticking: the countdown to Iran’s nuclear breakout and the countdown to what Mr. Oren calls the “crunch” moment when an Iranian missile takes American lives or hits a U.S. Navy vessel. That would also be a direct hit on “the contradictions of American policy.” Time is tight for Israel, but the U.S. is approaching a fateful moment too.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
11. What we know about the hostages set for release in the Israel-Hamas deal
What we know about the hostages set for release in the Israel-Hamas deal
By Niha Masih and Frances Vinall
November 23, 2023 at 2:53 a.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Niha Masih · November 23, 2023
A hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas will involve the return of 50 hostages, who are among the estimated 240 held captive by Hamas and possibly other groups in Gaza, in exchange for the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, plus a four-day pause in fighting.
The agreement, announced Wednesday, was the result of weeks of tense negotiations that involved mediation by Qatar. President Biden said in a statement welcoming the deal that he would continue to push for the release of all hostages.
Israeli National Security Council Director Tzachi Hanegbi said talks were continuing and that the release would not begin before Friday.
Here’s what we know about the release of hostages from Gaza.
The facts
- At least 50 hostages — women and children — will be released during a four-day pause in fighting, the Israeli government said Wednesday.
- In turn, Israel will release 150 Palestinian prisoners — women and teenagers, three for each hostage. The pause in fighting could be extended by a day for every additional 10 hostages released by Hamas from Gaza after the first group of 50.
- Three Americans — two women and a girl — are expected to be released under the present agreement, a senior Biden administration official told The Washington Post.
- The hostages are likely to be transferred to the International Committee of the Red Cross in small numbers in Gaza who will escort them to Israeli border crossings.
- In Israel, six hospitals have been readied to receive the hostages with a special pediatrics unit and mental health counselors. The hostages and their families will be housed in dedicated facilities, and the hospitals would be barred from releasing information or photographs to the public, the Israeli Ministry of Health said.
Who are the hostages being released?
The names of the 50 hostages expected to be released have not been shared.
The estimated 240 people held in Gaza are from a plurality of countries, many also with Israeli citizenship. About 20 Thai workers were among those taken, the Thai Foreign Ministry said. They are hoped to be among the first released, it said Nov. 2, after talks with Iran, Egypt and Qatar before the hostage release deal. Not all hostages are believed to be held by Hamas; smaller militant groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad are potentially in control of some.
After the initial captives exchange is completed, there will still be about 190 remaining hostages in Gaza, though the deal leaves open the possibility of further exchanges. Israeli and U.S. officials believe there are at least another 25, and perhaps another 50 or more, women and children among the hostages, with the remaining including male civilians, female Israeli soldiers, and up to several dozen male members of the Israel Defense Forces, The Post reported Wednesday. Hamas has claimed that some hostages were killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza, but verifying that information has not been possible.
Were other hostages released earlier?
Four hostages have been released by Hamas since the beginning of the war, in two batches of two about a month ago.
On Oct. 20, Americans Judith Raanan, 59, and her daughter Natalie, 17, were released. Hamas said that this was due to “humanitarian reasons,” without elaborating further. They had been staying with relatives at the Nahal Oz, a kibbutz near the border with Gaza, when they were taken captive during Hamas’s unprecedented attack Oct. 7 that killed at least 1,200 in Israel. More than 11,100 have since been killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which stopped releasing a count from Nov. 10 on, citing the intensity of the fighting.
On Oct. 23, Yocheved Lifshitz and Nurit Cooper, Israeli women in their 70s and 80s, were released, for “crushing humanitarian reasons,” Hamas said. Their husbands remain in captivity.
How many American hostages are there?
At least nine Americans and one legal permanent resident are believed to be among those held in Gaza, The Post reported previously. One is a 3-year-old child whose parents were killed in the Oct. 7 attack.
Biden said that Americans would be among those freed under the newly announced deal. “Today’s deal should bring home additional American hostages, and I will not stop until they are all released,” he said in his statement Wednesday.
Steve Hendrix contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Niha Masih · November 23, 2023
12. Fiery car wreck at U.S.-Canada border prompts massive response
Curiouser and curiouser. How did the vehicle explode? I thought modern cars' gas tanks were built not to explode on impact tand that only happened on TV and the movies.
Fiery car wreck at U.S.-Canada border prompts massive response
By Devlin Barrett, Anthony J. Rivera, Justine McDaniel and Maria Sacchetti
Updated November 22, 2023 at 10:58 p.m. EST|Published November 22, 2023 at 6:25 p.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Devlin Barrett · November 22, 2023
A speeding car that veered off the road, flew over a fence and crashed in a burning fireball at a security station on the U.S.-Canada border sent FBI agents scrambling Wednesday to determine the cause, but officials said there were no signs the fatal wreck was an act of terrorism.
Two people in the car died in the crash, which happened around midday at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Coming on America’s busiest travel day of the year, and at a time when security officials are increasingly worried about the possibility of a terror attack inspired by the conflict in the Middle East, the incident prompted a massive federal response.
In the immediate aftermath, four border crossings in the area were closed. Tougher security measures were implemented at the Buffalo airport, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said authorities were considering additional measures at all U.S.-Canada crossings.
Within a few hours, however, officials began lifting the restrictions, reassured that investigators had a clearer sense that while the vehicle careened out of control — flying over an eight foot fence — there was no indication yet to suggest terrorism as a possible motive for the driver, believed to be a local man who may have been at a casino earlier.
Officials said a Customs and Border Protection officer suffered minor injuries.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said that the preliminary investigation showed “no sign of terrorist involvement.” Federal officials from the Justice Department, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security echoed that assessment, and said they would continue to investigate.
One eyewitness told local television station WGRZ that the car was speeding and swerving as it approached the border from the U.S. side. Shortly after it passed another car, it abruptly careened toward the U.S. security checkpoint.
“We could hardly see it, it was going that quick,” said Mike Guenther. “He was flying ... There was a car in front of him, he swerved out, went in front of the car, hit the fence, and went flying up in the air.”
Guenther said there was “a ball of fire, like 30, 40 feet high. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was really incredible.”
Canada’s Minister of Public Safety, Dominic LeBlanc, said the country’s security agencies “are doing absolutely everything that Canadians would expect at this moment to ensure that the border crossings can operate safely.”
In recent weeks, FBI officials have said they have seen a significant increase in threat reporting, much of it in reaction to the violence in the Middle East, particularly the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and Israel’s extensive military strikes in Gaza.
From his restaurant Niagara Tandoori Hut, just a couple of blocks from toll gate for the Rainbow Bridge, Raghu Bhattarai said he heard a loud boom around the time of explosion. He described it as a “big sound.”
When he looked out the window, he saw smoke rising from the direction of the bridge.
Shortly after, police began arriving.
The Rainbow Bridge carried about 5,700 vehicles per day in October. But the explosion prompted officials to also close other, busier bridges into Canada for several hours Wednesday afternoon.
New York State Department of Transportation traffic cameras showed long lines of vehicles backed up on the approaches to the bridges. The other crossings reopened after 5 p.m.
Buffalo Niagara International Airport was closed to international flights, according to a Federal Aviation Administration bulletin, but the airport handles only limited traffic to Canada. In a statement, the airport said it had increased security but was “open and fully operational.”
The Transportation Security Administration said that going into the busy Thanksgiving travel period it had already been operating under a heightened level of security “as a result of world events and the current threat environment.”
Late Wednesday, Canadian student Harvis Zheng, 23, stood shivering outside the police checkpoint on the U.S. side of the border, staring at the blinking lights, unsure of when he’d be able to get back to school.
After a quick day trip to buy cheaper American gas, Zheng found his route home barricaded by a huge police presence.
As he waited, Zheng worried he might have to spend the night in a hotel or sleep in his car. "I have class tomorrow,” he said.
Rivera reported from Niagara Falls, N.Y. Ian Duncan contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Devlin Barrett · November 22, 2023
13.Fox News Forced to Walk Back ‘Terrorist Attack’ Claim at Rainbow Bridge
Fox news compromised. They demonstrate their true agenda.
They thought they had the perfect storm, blame illegal immigrants of a certain religion and thwith fault lying at the feet of the current administration.
The sad irony is that despite their walk back there are those in the Fox News target audience who will still believe the initial reporting from Fox and they will somehow rationalize the walk back
Fox News Forced to Walk Back ‘Terrorist Attack’ Claim at Rainbow Bridge
MY BAD
The right-wing network went all-in on suggesting the fiery crash may have been part of a jihadist plot by radicalized immigrants, only to quiet down as the situation developed.
Justin Baragona
Senior Media Reporter
Updated Nov. 22, 2023 6:07PM EST / Published Nov. 22, 2023 6:02PM EST
The Daily Beast · November 22, 2023
Mert Alper Dervis/Anadolu via Getty Images
After diving headfirst into speculation that a Wednesday afternoon explosion at the New York-Canada border was an “attempted terrorist attack,” Fox News reversed course with correspondent Alexis McAdams having to walk back her reporting based on “high-level police sources.”
A deadly vehicle crash at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls led to immediate closures of all four bridges between Canada and the United States on the busiest travel day of the year. Traveling at a high rate of speed, a vehicle reportedly entering the bridge on the U.S. side became airborne after hitting a curb, exploding when it impacted a checkpoint structure, law enforcement officials said.
While authorities investigated whether the crash was deliberate, and the incident initially created a heightened state of alert, officials noted there were no secondary incendiary or explosive devices found among the vehicle’s remains.
And in a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stated that there was “no indication” the crash was an act of terrorism. Reuters reported that the explosion was “likely caused by a reckless driver” based on early assessments of the scene.
But in the immediate aftermath of the incident, Fox News went all-in on depicting the fiery crash as a likely terror attack—even going so far as to openly speculate whether the explosion was part of a coordinated series of attacks related to either the war in Gaza or illegal immigration.
It would appear the conservative cable giant felt confident to go down this path due to McAdams’ reporting on the incident. “High level police sources tell me this is an attempted terrorist attack,” she tweeted early Wednesday afternoon. “Sources say the car was full of explosives. Both men inside dead.”
McAdams also claimed on-air, citing these sources, that the vehicle had been stopped at an initial checkpoint at the bridge and told to move to a secondary security area, which is where the explosion occurred. Furthermore, she said, her sources claimed officials were looking for a second vehicle that may have also been involved.
Following McAdams’ report, Fox News anchor John Roberts brought up the incident while interviewing GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, wondering without any evidence whether immigrants may have been responsible for the supposed attack.
“We don’t know how long the people who perpetrated this attack have been in this country,” Roberts declared. “Did they recently come across? Did they come into the country legally? Did they come across illegally and claim asylum? Were they some of the nearly one million got-aways who’ve come into this country? Were they radicalized in this country? Were they radicalized at all? Did they come into the country that way? There’s so many questions yet to be answered.”
A short time later, Roberts and co-anchor Gillian Turner welcomed former Trump administration official Morgan Ortagus, who linked the incident to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and invoked the jihadist group ISIS.
“That may be what happens today,” Ortagus asserted. “We were talking about the social media aspect of this and what terror groups are able to do. Remember during the second term of the Obama administration, when ISIS had a physical caliphate in Iraq and Syria, and ISIS was very sophisticated at that point, recruiting young people from around the world to come to the physical caliphate to fight with them. They put out slick videos.”
The following hour, the Fox News speculation went into overdrive.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki, for instance, expressed concern that there could soon be similar “attacks” across the country, noting how there was more than one target in the 9/11 terror attacks. Israeli special ops veteran Aaron Cohen suggested the crash was part of a “systematic global jihad with everybody who stands with Hamas’ ideology.”
Eventually, with other media outlets reporting that there were no explosives in the vehicle and that the crash was the result of reckless driving, McAdams began walking back her story, saying “minute-by-minute” things were changing and it was unknown whether the car was actually packed with explosives.
“High-level police sources say bomb techs on the scene immediately alerted all authorities that this was an attempted terror attack because they had never seen a car explosion with a debris field like that before and believed there were several explosives in the car,” McAdams later tweeted. “All government buildings were evacuated, the bridge was closed, and the airport had heightened security. Also, authorities checked all cars near the airport. Looking in the trunk and back seats. A police source says those are all steps that follow what they believed to be a terror attack.”
She finally acknowledged on-air during the 4 p.m. hour that law enforcement officials didn’t believe that the incident was terrorism.
“I’m told this was a stolen vehicle, two men now dead that tried to avoid border patrol at the crash and causing a massive explosion,” she said, adding: “That’s what happens with breaking news. As of now, they walked back it was a possible terrorist attack but have never seen a car explode in that way.”
In the end, after the right-wing network spent two hours running on-air graphics about an “attempted terror attack” at the border, Fox News quietly switched the chyron to read: “Motive Unclear in Incident at NY-Canada Border.”
The Daily Beast · November 22, 2023
14. The Chinese Communist Party's Theory of Hybrid Warfare
Citations at the link: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/chinese-communist-partys-theory-hybrid-warfare
Key Takeaways
- Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military theorists frame hybrid warfare as how countries deploy all aspects of physical and non-physical state power, including civil society, to confront an adversary indirectly. They also view it as a means of confronting great powers within an interconnected and globalized world.
- The available CCP publications indicate that hybrid warfare accepts the premise of systems confrontation that warfare is a contest of comprehensive national strength. The publications suggest that hybrid warfare departs from systems confrontation in that it does not definitionally accept the emphasis on nested systems as the way to view warfare, however.
- The PRC is fighting a hybrid war for Taiwan by nesting it within a hybrid war against the United States. The hybrid war against the United States also targets US regional allies, such as Japan and the Philippines, to degrade the image of the US-led security architecture as providing regional stability.
CCP Hybrid Warfare Theory
Intersection of Hybrid Warfare and Systems Confrontation in CCP Strategic Thought
Implications for the United States and Taiwan
THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY'S THEORY OF HYBRID WARFARE
Nov 21, 2023 - ISW Press
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The Chinese Communist Party's Theory of Hybrid Warfare
Nils Peterson
November 21, 2023
Key Takeaways
- Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military theorists frame hybrid warfare as how countries deploy all aspects of physical and non-physical state power, including civil society, to confront an adversary indirectly. They also view it as a means of confronting great powers within an interconnected and globalized world.
- The available CCP publications indicate that hybrid warfare accepts the premise of systems confrontation that warfare is a contest of comprehensive national strength. The publications suggest that hybrid warfare departs from systems confrontation in that it does not definitionally accept the emphasis on nested systems as the way to view warfare, however.
- The PRC is fighting a hybrid war for Taiwan by nesting it within a hybrid war against the United States. The hybrid war against the United States also targets US regional allies, such as Japan and the Philippines, to degrade the image of the US-led security architecture as providing regional stability.
Introduction
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military theorists frame hybrid warfare as how countries deploy all aspects of physical and non-physical state power, including civil society, to confront an adversary indirectly. They also view it as a means of confronting great powers within an interconnected and globalized world. Their framing presents hybrid warfare as a competition of holistic, comprehensive strength. The theorists use the concept to challenge the primacy of systems confrontation thought, which was the dominant CCP framework throughout the 2000s and early 2010s.
This framework incorporates what US policymakers refer to as hybrid warfare and “gray zone” activities, such as public opinion manipulation or the deployment of irregular forces.[1] The CCP military theorists place the concepts in a broader strategic framework that emphasizes coordination across domains and government organizations to wage war. This differs from the US conceptions that focus on tactical actions short of war.
US policies based on collaborating with, competing with, and confronting the PRC where necessary must contend with the CCP’s view that competition in countries around the PRC is a form of hybrid warfare confrontation rather than competition.[2] US explanations that the CCP is operating in a “gray zone” or using “hybrid threats” do not account for this. They fail to nest the party’s actions into a larger conceptualization of how the party employs coercion to achieve its political objectives. Understanding hybrid warfare on the party theorists’ terms will inform decision-makers about how to holistically counter the CCP’s coercive aims without needing to respond to each of the party’s coercive actions.
CCP Hybrid Warfare Theory
The predominant view among CCP military theorists is that hybrid warfare is how countries deploy all aspects of physical and non-physical state power, including civil society, to indirectly confront an adversary.[3] The military theorist Gao Wei captured the breadth of this concept when he provided the CCP’s first precise definition of hybrid warfare in a state-sanctioned Ministry of National Defense–affiliated press outlet in 2020.
“[Hybrid warfare is] a unified and coordinated act of war that is conducted at the strategic level, employing political (public opinion, diplomacy, law, etc.), economic (trade war, energy war, etc.), military (intelligence warfare, electronic warfare, special operations), and other such means.”[4]
Gao’s use of the term ‘strategic’ is in the context of a discussion around Russia’s military interventions in Syria and Ukraine in the 2010s, which aimed to achieve Russian political objectives. This context indicates that Gao’s understanding of the term roughly corresponds to the strategic level of war, which regards the use of all forces available in a given theater to achieve all of the goals within that theater. No CCP theorist explicitly uses the levels-of-war framework when discussing hybrid warfare, however.
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The US military defines the strategic level of war as the level that includes national policy and theater strategy. “At the strategic level, a nation often determines the national guidance that addresses strategic objectives in support of strategic end states and uses national resources to achieve them.”[5]
That at least some CCP organizations, such as the Chinese Electronics Chamber of Commerce, have repeated this definition in their work indicates a degree of consensus within party bureaucracy around Gao’s conceptualization.[6] A recent statement from a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) commander reinforces this point. PLA Western Theater Commander Wang Haijiang, who has commanded in various capacities in western China since the mid-2010s, published an article in May 2023 that echoed Gao’s definition of hybrid war.[7]
Other CCP military theorists provide insight into how the party views the concept of hybrid warfare by elaborating on how to implement the concept. The perspectives that the theorists publish indicate that the party views vying for influence with the United States in geographically or politically important third-party countries on the PRC’s periphery as hybrid warfare. The theorists are representative of party thinking insofar as they either teach the elite party cadre or publish in widely distributed military-affiliated publications.
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Han Aiyong, a researcher at the Central Party School’s International Strategy Research Institute, one of the organizations that train the party elite on international relations, views the goal of hybrid warfare as destabilizing great powers along their peripheries without directly targeting the great powers.[8] A hybrid war does not have to conquer territory but wins over the populace, slowly degrading the surrounding security environment of a great power.[9]
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PLA-affiliated Liberation Army News theory department editor Xu Sanfei stated the common argument among CCP theorists that the interconnected nature of globalization opens a path for indirect means of confrontation between major powers.[10] Interconnectedness enables weak and strong countries alike to compete via hybrid warfare through all means available to the state.[11] He also noted that hybrid warfare emerged because major powers with nuclear weapons and large armies make substantial direct conflict between such powers’ conventional military forces a lesser possibility.[12]
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The official PLA website published an article stating that traditional military force forms the backbone of hybrid warfare even though large-scale battles are not the main avenue of competition.[13] Irregular units and fifth-column subversion of an enemy society mutually reinforce non-kinetic means to wage war.[14] The military section of the CCP media outlet People’s Daily also wrote how non-kinetic means such as economic, diplomatic, cognitive, legal, cyber, and public opinion intertwine with kinetic activity to wage hybrid war.[15] These articles demonstrate that the CCP’s much-publicized “three warfares” (public opinion, psychological, and legal warfare) are means to conduct hybrid warfare.[16]
The CCP theorists elaborate on the use of hybrid warfare with reference to how they argue the United States and Russia have used it. This includes the importance of a veneer of legal justification in hybrid warfare. The legal justification can range from claims to uphold principles of international law to explicit requests for intervention from a host government. The theorists also explain that a country can use hybrid warfare for offensive or defensive purposes but do not articulate differences between the uses in terms of implementation or efficacy. Labeling a hybrid war offensive or defensive is therefore a normative statement by the CCP rather than an articulation of different categories of warfare. Notably, there have been few public-facing articles on hybrid warfare since the start of Russia’s ongoing full-scale conventional invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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Gao Wei emphasized how Russia justified its military interventions in Syria and Ukraine by claiming to legally intervene at the request of the host country throughout the 2010s. He also cited the example of Russia holding a referendum after occupying Crimea to formally incorporate it into Russia.[17] An official PLA website also stressed the importance of legal justifications, such as freedom of navigation operations, for underpinning the alleged United States hybrid war against China in the South China Sea.[18]
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The theorists Li Xiangying, Wang Jianing, and Xia Zhenning wrote in a Ministry of National Defense–affiliated press outlet that the United States wages offensive hybrid war while the Russians do so defensively.[19] They explain that the United States acted offensively in supporting the eastward expansion of NATO since the 1990s, which made Ukraine a buffer zone through which the United States and Russia compete. They argue that the United States pushed Ukraine further away from Russia via the hybrid warfare tactics of inciting the Ukrainian populace against their pro-Russian government. The latter point is presumably a reference to the 2014 Revolution of Dignity that forced the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from office.[20]
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The CCP military theorists broadly see Russia as the most useful case study for implementing hybrid warfare because of the frequency it has used hybrid warfare across Africa, Syria, and Ukraine.[21] There is consensus among CCP theorists that Russia initially lagged behind the United States in implementing hybrid warfare but has caught up since 2013.[22]
Intersection of Hybrid Warfare and Systems Confrontation in CCP Strategic Thought
CCP military theorists give little explicit attention in public-facing party publications to the interaction between hybrid warfare and systems confrontation, which refers to the view of warfare as a competition between opposing systems of systems.[23] The available CCP publications indicate that hybrid warfare accepts the premise of systems confrontation that warfare is a contest of comprehensive national strength. The publications suggest that hybrid warfare departs from systems confrontation in that it does not definitionally accept the emphasis on nested systems as the way to view warfare, however.
- The CCP’s thinking on systems confrontation emerged before hybrid warfare and lays out the conceptions with which the latter interacts. This nascent interaction is relevant to the body of strategic thought that the PLA general officer corps draws upon.
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The rapid US-led coalition victory in the First Gulf War served as the impetus for the CCP to begin framing modern conflicts as confrontations between systems. Within this framework of systems confrontation, the CCP emphasizes establishing information and decision-making dominance.[24]
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Systems confrontation theory and hybrid warfare theory both look to the period of globalization and technological modernization starting after the First Gulf War as conceptual starting points. Systems confrontation thought emerged throughout the 2000s and early 2010s.[25] Hybrid warfare initially entered the party lexicon in the late 2010s.[26]
Some articles about hybrid warfare and systems confrontation from CCP military theorists, such as Guo Ruobing, suggest that the intersection between the two concepts is an ongoing topic of research for party theorists.[27] Guo used systems confrontation as a starting point to describe hybrid warfare in a 2022 article by viewing the latter as a “systematic confrontation based on the comprehensive strength of a country.”[28] Guo embraces the view of hybrid warfare that merges kinetic and non-kinetic means in an ongoing struggle.[29] This indicates the importance of hybrid warfare to executing the party’s political objectives within, even when two states have not declared war upon each other.
Implications for the United States and Taiwan
The coercive actions that the CCP is taking to control Taiwan fall within the military theorists’ framework of hybrid warfare. The CCP's attempts to infiltrate all of Taiwanese society through political, economic, and military means fit the core components of Gao Wei’s definition of hybrid warfare. The CCP also claims to act in concert with Taiwanese organizations representing ROC nationals to grant the party’s actions a veneer of legitimacy under the hybrid warfare framework.
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PRC Taiwan Affairs Director Song Tao met with a Taiwanese Mazu Friendship Association delegation in February. Mazu is a sea goddess worshiped in the ROC and PRC. Song framed the Mazu Friendship Association as a way to strengthen Chinese culture and “maintain the national feelings on both sides of the strait.”[30] Using such religious organizations likely enables the CCP to spread pro-CCP narratives surrounding Chinese identity in the ROC. The Taiwanese Mainland Affairs Council warned of CCP efforts to use religious temples in this manner in October.[31]
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The PRC Ministry of Commerce began an ongoing investigation in mid-April after ROC President Tsai Ing-wen met with then–US Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy in early April. The Ministry of Commerce reserves the right to extend the investigation to January 12, the day before the ROC presidential election.[32] This demonstrates that the CCP leverages economic investigations to influence political elections within the ROC through hybrid warfare.
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The PLA Air Force has increased the number of aircraft committing daily violations of Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone over the past three years.[33] This demonstrates the most salient military dimension of the CCP’s hybrid warfare efforts targeting Taiwan.
The CCP perceives its hybrid war against Taiwan as defensive, which is similar to Russia’s experience with NATO expansion. This perception arises because the CCP falsely views the sovereignty of the Republic of China (Taiwan) as illegitimate due to the party’s incorrect view that Taiwan is a province of the PRC. The CCP views itself as engaging in a hybrid war to force Taiwan away from its relationship with the United States, much like it perceives the Kremlin as engaging in a defensive war against the United States in Ukraine before 2022.
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The CCP-controlled media frames Taiwan as a US pawn that the United States manipulates and will abandon in the event of a crisis.[34] From the CCP’s perspective, it needs to remove the chess player’s (United States) ability to communicate with and move the pawn (Taiwan) to accomplish the party’s goal of “unifying” with Taiwan. The party aims to degrade US political, economic, and military influence with Taiwan, the core components of Gao Wei’s definition of hybrid warfare, to achieve this goal.
The PRC nests the hybrid war against Taiwan within a hybrid war against the United States. The pursuit of a hybrid war targeting Taiwan also involves a hybrid war with the United States because the party perceives any US relationship with the Republic of China (Taiwan) as destabilizing the PRC. The CCP holds this view because it considers the ROC (Taiwan) as an illegitimate state whose annexation by the PRC is the only way to stabilize the immediate security environment. The CCP targets US regional allies, such as Japan and the Philippines, to carry out the hybrid war and degrade the image of the US-led security architecture as providing regional stability.
CCP propaganda in August falsely alleging that Japan had discharged dangerous amounts of radioactive wastewater from Fukushima is a recent example of the PRC’s nested hybrid war effort. This propaganda is also part of the hybrid war against the United States because of the close US–Japan political, economic, and military collaboration in the region. The CCP framing Japan as irresponsible also serves to counter the positive role that the United States plays in the region. That image of irresponsibility enables the CCP to claim that the US-led security architecture produces chaos rather than stabilizing the region.
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The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs and state-run media accused Japan of “misrepresenting” the safety of the discharge. They also implied that Japan worked in concert with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to conceal the true danger that the wastewater presented on multiple occasions.[35] The messaging conflicts with statements from the IAEA, which deemed the discharge from the Fukushima nuclear power plant safe.[36]
The CCP military coercion of the Philippines, such as on the Second Thomas Shoal, also enables the party to violate the territorial sovereignty of a United States treaty ally, undermining the US-led security architecture as part of a hybrid war. The PRC Coast Guard and maritime militia rammed Philippine ships on a resupply mission to the Second Thomas Shoal on October 22.[37] The PRC Coast Guard continues ongoing harassment of Philippine ships on resupply missions in November.[38] The aggression aims to legitimize PRC territorial claims to the Second Thomas Shoal, which the Philippines has occupied since 1999.
Endnotes
15. America and China Are Not Yet in a Cold War
A view from China.
Excerpts:
There are five things, however, that could stabilize the relationship and avoid catastrophe. First, the two economies must remain intensively intertwined. Business groups, technology companies, and scholarly organizations should join hands to resist unreasonable and counterproductive policies and measures that confine their collaboration.
...
Second, Beijing and Washington should defuse tensions over Taiwan. China’s Anti-Secession Law stipulates that “to reunify the country through peaceful means best serves the fundamental interests of the compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. The state shall do its utmost with maximum sincerity to achieve a peaceful reunification.” Beijing remains committed to peaceful unification. The United States and Taiwanese authorities should do everything they can to encourage that commitment and not persuade China that it must employ nonpeaceful means.
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Third, to dispel the specter of a new Cold War, Beijing and Washington should learn from arguably the best agreement Washington and Moscow reached during the Cold War, which established crisis-prevention and crisis-management mechanisms between their two militaries and top leaders
...
Fourth, the two countries should also strengthen cooperation on issues concerning the health and well-being of their citizens. The agreement Biden and Xi reached last week to reduce the flow of fentanyl components from China into the United States was a good start. But there are other ways that Washington and Beijing could work together on projects relating to global health.
...
Finally, in an era characterized by global ecological crises, it is also imperative that the two largest economies and largest emitters achieve tangible results in their climate change coordination. In early November, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua reached an agreement to revive a bilateral working group on environmental issues including advancing renewable sources of energy and reducing methane emissions.
The Biden-Xi meeting has put the two countries on a less threatening trajectory in the short term. But one meeting alone cannot halt the long-term momentum in the direction of conflict. Influential citizens in both countries must mobilize to find ways beyond official engagement to promote the common good. Whatever new paradigm leaders in Beijing and Washington choose must do more than just avoid a new cold war; it must prevent a hot one, as well.
America and China Are Not Yet in a Cold War
But They Must Not Wind Up in Something Even Worse
November 23, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Wang Jisi · November 23, 2023
The original Cold War ended in December 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But the idea that the world is witnessing the early phases of a new cold war—this time, a strategic competition between China and the United States —has taken hold in many quarters, especially in Washington. There is no question that as China’s power has surged since the early 2010s, the Chinese-U.S. relationship has become increasingly contentious. And in recent years, it has fallen to its lowest ebb since 1972, when Chinese leader Mao Zedong greeted U.S. President Richard Nixon in Beijing and the process of normalization began. But it is up to the two countries to decide whether to engage in a cold war; their perceptions and assumptions will, in turn, shape the reality of the relationship. Handled properly, the relationship might foster global stability. Handled poorly, it might plunge the world into something much worse than the Cold War.
The current situation does resemble the Cold War in a number of ways. The United States and China are the only countries that can be considered superpowers, as were the United States and the Soviet Union for most of the second half of the twentieth century. As in the Cold War, there is an ideological dimension to the competition, with China’s embrace of communism and the unchallenged rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) contrasting with the U.S. system of democratic capitalism. And today, Beijing and Washington compete for support and influence in what is referred to as “the global South,” just as the Soviet Union and the United States did in the so-called Third World during the Cold War.
But those similarities are offset by important differences. The relationship between the closely linked U.S. and Chinese economies bears little resemblance to that between the U.S. and Soviet ones, which operated almost independently of one another. Despite the ideological differences between Beijing and Washington, China does not seek to export its version of Marxism in the way that the Soviet Union did. Although hardly noticed in the West, it is significant that the CCP now rarely extols Leninism separately and more commonly refers to its leading ideology as Marxism. Thus, although the U.S.-Chinese competition involves rival models, it is not the kind of global ideological contest that Washington and Moscow fought.
Those factors make the current situation less dire than the Cold War. Other differences, however, push in the opposite direction. For one thing, the Cold War played out in the context of a globalizing world; the Chinese-U.S. competition, on the other hand, is taking place in a world that is de-globalizing and fragmenting. And in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Washington and Moscow maintained mechanisms for preventing crises, and managing them if they did occur. The contemporary Chinese-U.S. relationship lacks such coordination.
Last week’s meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden in San Francisco has rekindled hopes that the two countries will find a stable trajectory and avoid a catastrophic conflict. Both leaders have declared many times that they do not seek a new cold war. The key will be for their governments to better understand how the U.S.-Chinese competition differs from that historical precedent: acknowledging the similarities, embracing the differences that make things less dangerous today than during the Cold War, and working to minimize the effect of the differences that could make it even more dangerous.
A WORLD DIVIDED
The Chinese-U.S. strategic rivalry most resembles the phase of the Cold War that began in the early 1970s and ended in the early 1980s, when Soviet economic and military capacities were regarded as having reached a rough parity with those of the United States. No third power could match the capacities of either superpower in those years. Similarly, in today’s world, the comprehensive strengths of the United States and China far exceed those of any other single country.
As during the Cold War, Washington today sees its rival as an ideological foe. The CCP holds high the banner of Marxism. The party dominates China’s politics, economy, and society and does not allow any deviation that might challenge its authority. This reminds Americans of the Soviet communism they loathed. For their part, Chinese elites view the United States as a sinister challenge to China’s internal political security and to the CCP’s authority. As they see it, Washington has more tools to influence China than it had to influence the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the Cold War, Washington and Moscow regarded one another as their gravest security threats and strategic rivals. The same is true today of the United States and China; the latter has achieved a rough military balance of power with Washington thanks to the growing Chinese nuclear arsenal, even though overall U.S. military capabilities still exceed those of China.
The United States and the Soviet Union actively divided the world into two parts. Moscow referred to them as “the socialist camp” and the “imperialist/capitalist camp,” whereas Washington spoke of “the communist world” and “the free world.” Then there was the Third World, which belonged to neither side—and to which China claimed to belong after it broke with the Soviet bloc. Beijing and Washington nowadays also look at the world as bifurcated (although not yet bipolar). From Beijing’s perspective, China inhabits “the developing world” or “the global South,” which is gaining more power and influence, whereas the U.S.-led “Western world” or “developed world” is declining. In American conventional wisdom, by contrast, the world is split between democracies, on the one hand, and nondemocracies and dictatorships, on the other—and the democracies should lead the way.
A DIFFERENT ERA
For all those similarities, there are some salient differences between the two eras. For one thing, unlike the Soviet Union, China today has little interest in converting other countries to its version of Marxism. Indeed, it strongly opposes “color revolutions” and movements such as the Arab Spring that have disrupted the internal order of other countries, and it does not seek to inspire or cultivate such changes. Although the CCP would be happy to see its practices in remolding China shared by other countries, the party’s recent promotion of a “Chinese path to modernization” and a “fine traditional Chinese culture” is defensive in nature; it reflects a desire to resist further westernization at home.
Another difference is that China’s economy, compared with that of the Soviet Union, is far more integrated into the global economy and intertwined with the U.S. economy. Through the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and the Soviet Union, trade with the other superpower averaged about one percent of the global total. In contrast, in 2022, China was the largest trading partner of over 140 countries in the world, and trade with China accounted for about ten percent of total U.S. foreign trade.
And unlike the Soviet Union, which hung the Iron Curtain around itself and its client states, China’s economic openness since the late 1970s has permeated every aspect of the country’s society and has been coupled with international technological cooperation, humanitarian exchanges, energetic tourism, and high levels of immigration to the United States. Over three million of the five million people of Chinese origin now living in the United States were born in China. Between 2001 and 2020, nearly 90,000 Chinese students (including ones from Hong Kong) earned doctorates from U.S. universities—by far the largest group of foreign doctoral students, and more than double the equivalent number of Indian students, who made up the second-largest group.
U.S. and Soviet societies were virtually closed to each other, and U.S.-Soviet cultural, educational, and people-to-people exchanges hardly existed. Consequently, Soviets and Americans were largely ignorant of the internal features of each other’s country. and unable to exert much political influence on one another. Even in years when U.S.-Soviet contact intensified, U.S. officials could talk to only high-level Soviet officials and leaders and were barred from reaching out to ordinary citizens.
China does not seek to export its version of Marxism in the way that the Soviet Union did.
Today, in contrast, China and the United States are both capable of using their societal connections and economic ties to exert political influence on the other side, which has a dramatic impact on their respective domestic politics as well as on bilateral relations. On the one hand, Chinese and American individuals and groups who have benefited from interdependence deplore the corrosion of bilateral ties and call for stability. In China, they are known as “soft-liners” and may be criticized for being enticed by American ideas and interests; in the United States, they are derided as “soft on China.” On the other hand, those with political weight who have gained little from U.S.-Chinese cooperation see national security as a reason to prevent deepening ties. In this sense, the Chinese-U.S. strategic competition is multilayered, reflecting interactions between different domestic priorities and interests. It is not simply an interstate affair. Instead, it is an intricate set of intrastate political and economic games. If geopolitical and national security concerns override economic considerations and nationalist populism swells in both China and the United States, conciliatory voices are likely to be drowned out.
Another dissimilarity between the historical Cold War and today’s competition is the global context. During the Cold War, especially in its later stages, globalization and regional integration gradually melted great power tensions. The Berlin Wall was brought down by East Germans’ aspiration to have what they saw in Western countries. Extensive communication and trade between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan eased their hostility. But in the post–Cold War era, a tide of antiglobalization has surfaced, caused by a combination of economic protectionism, political populism, and ethnic nationalism, and exacerbated by numerous global problems such as climate change and pandemics. This makes for a more challenging environment for superpower competition.
After the Cuban missile crisis, Washington and Moscow developed techniques to avoid disasters, culminating in the creation of the Moscow-Washington hotline, which allowed for direct communication between the countries’ leaders. Partly as a result, no direct military conflict ever took place between U.S. and Soviet armed forces. Regrettably, today, even as U.S. and Chinese warships and aircraft risk clashes in the western Pacific, in particular near the Taiwan Strait, and as U.S. and Chinese strategic nuclear missiles target population centers, the two countries lack robust crisis prevention and management mechanisms. The resumption of military-to-military communications announced last week represents a step in the right direction.
WORSE THAN A COLD WAR?
Unfortunately, the two powers seem to be moving into an intensifying strategic competition that carries some features of the Cold War but may be even more damaging if the downward spiral of their relationship is not arrested in time. Part of the problem is that both countries have questionable assumptions that are deeply rooted in their political and cultural traditions. As the American statesman Henry Kissinger puts it in his book On China, some U.S. activists “would argue that democratic institutions are the prerequisite to relations of trust and confidence. Nondemocratic societies, in this view, are inherently precarious and prone to the exercise of force.” In this view, as long as China maintains communist ideals and the CCP dominates Chinese politics and society, Washington must contain China’s technologic advancement and global influence under the pretense of protecting U.S. security. This view is reflected in the “small yard with high fences” that the Biden administration is attempting to build around Western technologies—in order to keep China out.
Kissinger also points out that some Chinese triumphalists, similar to some U.S. strategists, “interpret international affairs as an unavoidable struggle for strategic preeminence” and as essentially zero-sum. Indeed, in China, elites and ordinary people alike generally view politics as a struggle for power and material interests. The most common Chinese understanding about U.S. strategy toward China is that unless and until China’s national power exceeds that of the United States, there will be no way to modify Washington’s arrogant, aggressive approach.
Both sets of assumptions are unrealistic and fatalistic: the CCP and its basic policies will remain firmly in place, and the comprehensive strength of the United States will remain greater than that of China for the next decade or beyond. Still, these assumptions are not likely to fade away.
There are five things, however, that could stabilize the relationship and avoid catastrophe. First, the two economies must remain intensively intertwined. Business groups, technology companies, and scholarly organizations should join hands to resist unreasonable and counterproductive policies and measures that confine their collaboration.
In China, people generally view politics as a struggle for power and material interests.
Second, Beijing and Washington should defuse tensions over Taiwan. China’s Anti-Secession Law stipulates that “to reunify the country through peaceful means best serves the fundamental interests of the compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. The state shall do its utmost with maximum sincerity to achieve a peaceful reunification.” Beijing remains committed to peaceful unification. The United States and Taiwanese authorities should do everything they can to encourage that commitment and not persuade China that it must employ nonpeaceful means. Whoever wins the election next year in Taiwan should act in a prudent manner with the goal of resuming cross-strait contacts, an approach to which Beijing might respond in kind.
Third, to dispel the specter of a new Cold War, Beijing and Washington should learn from arguably the best agreement Washington and Moscow reached during the Cold War, which established crisis-prevention and crisis-management mechanisms between their two militaries and top leaders. The two sides should think of setting up a hotline between their operational military headquarters. In particular, they should also hold discussions about reducing the potential risks posed by artificial intelligence.
Fourth, the two countries should also strengthen cooperation on issues concerning the health and well-being of their citizens. The agreement Biden and Xi reached last week to reduce the flow of fentanyl components from China into the United States was a good start. But there are other ways that Washington and Beijing could work together on projects relating to global health. The United States should allow and encourage China to take part in Project Orbis, a cross-border collaboration run by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that seeks to accelerate regulatory approval of new cancer drugs. China should also participate in the Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot project, which aims to cut the cancer death rate by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years.
Finally, in an era characterized by global ecological crises, it is also imperative that the two largest economies and largest emitters achieve tangible results in their climate change coordination. In early November, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua reached an agreement to revive a bilateral working group on environmental issues including advancing renewable sources of energy and reducing methane emissions.
The Biden-Xi meeting has put the two countries on a less threatening trajectory in the short term. But one meeting alone cannot halt the long-term momentum in the direction of conflict. Influential citizens in both countries must mobilize to find ways beyond official engagement to promote the common good. Whatever new paradigm leaders in Beijing and Washington choose must do more than just avoid a new cold war; it must prevent a hot one, as well.
- WANG JISI is Founding President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.
Foreign Affairs · by Wang Jisi · November 23, 2023
16. An Asia hand's argument for putting Ukraine first
We have to be able to walk and chew gum.
Am I an "Asia-Firster?" Of course I focus on Asia professionally, but I think we must all focus on US national security and understand our broad interests. We cannot be narrowly focused on one region. I recognize the threat from Russia and the importance of Europe. What I am encouraged by are the increased security connections between Asia and Europe.
Excerpts:
Asia-firsters might accept all this and still insist that the Europeans themselves provide for European security. But that insistence ignores European history and current politics. The so-called continent – more accurately, a peninsula projecting from the vast landmass of Asia – remains small and crowded, with differences in security outlooks among capitals. Although European military and economic assistance to Ukraine is now equal to what the US is providing, the war has once again made clear that US engagement and leadership are necessary to get Europeans pushing in the same direction.
This is partly due to American wealth and power. But it is also because no other country has the international standing or institutional heft—or the geographic and metaphorical distance from internal European politics—to effectively fill that leadership role. Few if any in Europe are prepared to submit to French or German leadership, nor is European security by committee likely to be effective. America remains the essential nation when it comes to European security, and European security remains essential to America.
What would be the result if America sacrifices Ukraine on the altar of Taiwan’s security? An insecure Europe vulnerable to Russian aggression, requiring even greater American attention and resources than at present. Any gains in the Indo-Pacific would be fleeting as the unchecked Russian threat required ever more attention and resources to contain. Conversely, Ukrainian victory and the chastening of Russia could finally pave the way for the US to make a real pivot to Asia.
That is well worth another $61 billion in security assistance for Kyiv. Keep the aid flowing.
An Asia hand's argument for putting Ukraine first - Breaking Defense
Europe is too important, and Russia too great a threat in the Far East, to put Ukraine on the backburner in favor of Taiwan, argues AEI Asia expert Michael Mazza.
breakingdefense.com · by Michael Mazza · November 21, 2023
A man walks with a Ukranian flag while people attend the pro-Ukraine rally marking the one year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war at the Liberty Square in Taipei, Taiwan, February 25, 2023. (Photo by Walid Berrazeg/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
As President Joe Biden and a deeply divided Congress juggle aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, AEI Asia expert Michael Mazza argues that putting “Asia First” at the expense of European security would sabotage US strategy in both theaters.
At first glance, it seems like a contradiction. In President Biden’s $105 billion request to Congress, only $7.4 billion is earmarked for all of Asia, compared to $61.4 billion for Ukraine. Yet according to the administration’s own National Defense Strategy, China presents “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security.” The threat to Taiwan grows increasingly dire, with the cross-Strait and trans-Pacific military balances tipping in China’s favor, even as Xi Jinping hints at growing impatience for unification. So it only makes sense that Washington should prioritize the Indo-Pacific and the defense of Taiwan over the war in Ukraine, right?
Wrong.
The two theaters are inextricably linked – although that linkage is not a simple as some pundits and politicians preach. No, Russian victory in Ukraine will not give China a blank check in the Pacific, nor will Russian defeat alone scare China out of an impending turn to aggression. And yet, Ukrainian success will ultimately pave the way for more effective American deterrence in Asia.
RELATED: ‘No easy answers’: Biden admin juggling pathways to send Taiwan weapons, but no line skipping
Why is this true? A common – and flawed – argument is that the United States must support Ukraine to deter China. As Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, has said, “There can be no backing off of helping Ukraine, because if we fail here, there goes Taiwan.” Or as Graham’s Democratic colleague Chris Murphy argued recently: “If we abandon Ukraine and Kiev becomes a Russian city, NATO is next, and the invasion of Taiwan not far behind.”
But this is oversimplified. American actions in Europe undoubtedly do shape Chinese assessments of American will and intentions, but those actions amount to just one factor in China’s complex considerations about its own domestic politics, the balance of power and the potential use of force.
While China may be a greater threat long-term, Russia is the more pressing threat right now – and while Asia may be more important than Europe for the global economy, Europe in many ways remains more important for the US. Concerns about a potential war in the Taiwan Strait are real, but there is an actual war on in Europe now—one with grave implications for both the United States and for Asia.
“Asia-first” approaches to American foreign policy tend to elide the continuing centrality of Europe to US interests. The bilateral US-European Union economic relationship, when factoring in investment and trade in goods and services, is the world’s largest. The United Kingdom is consistently a top-ten destination for American goods exports. In terms of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the United States is more deeply invested in Europe than in the Indo-Pacific, and the reverse is true as well. Indeed, the difference between American FDI in Europe and Asia has been growing, not shrinking over the past two decades. And although the total value of US trade with major Asian economies ($2.13 trillion in 2022) now outstrips that with major European economies ($1.81 trillion), the United States still exports more goods and services to Europe than to Asia, while maintaining a far more balanced trans-Atlantic trade relationship (see figure). A downturn in that trade would be widely felt in the United States, despite America’s more sizeable trans-Pacific trade.
“Major European economies” comprises EU plus Switzerland. “Major Asian economies” comprises Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam. (Chart by Michael Mazza)
These trade and financial links are essential to America’s economic strength, which, in turn, underlies its ability to resource its military. Stability, security, and prosperity in Europe go hand-in-hand with America’s economic capacity to meet the challenge in Asia. And given Vladimir Putin’s near-decade-long war on Ukraine, and the economic havoc it has wrought in global markets for everything from oil to wheat, taking that stability, security, and prosperity for granted is no longer a safe assumption.
Conversely, instability in Europe and the resulting economic downturn would not only impact Americans’ well-being, but that of Asians as well. The European Union is the third largest overall trade partner for Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, and the combined markets of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. It is a major source of foreign direct investment for all of those markets and for Taiwan, for which the EU is the fourth largest overall trade partner.
A victorious Russia, moreover, will have both the confidence and the resources—financial, diplomatic, and military—to make trouble for the United States and its allies in Asia, including by directly or indirectly supporting Chinese aggression. Put simply, Europe and Asia are not two strategically distinct theaters.
This is why America’s Asian allies are committed to Ukrainian victory—not for purely symbolic reasons and not primarily, despite the rhetoric of some, because they see it as part of a global competition between autocracy and democracy. Rather, it is because Asian democracies understand a key historical truth. From the age of exploration to the colonial era, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the Treaty of Versailles, and from Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland to the outbreak of Cold War in the late 1940s, history teaches that what happens in Europe does not stay in Europe.
Asia-firsters might accept all this and still insist that the Europeans themselves provide for European security. But that insistence ignores European history and current politics. The so-called continent – more accurately, a peninsula projecting from the vast landmass of Asia – remains small and crowded, with differences in security outlooks among capitals. Although European military and economic assistance to Ukraine is now equal to what the US is providing, the war has once again made clear that US engagement and leadership are necessary to get Europeans pushing in the same direction.
This is partly due to American wealth and power. But it is also because no other country has the international standing or institutional heft—or the geographic and metaphorical distance from internal European politics—to effectively fill that leadership role. Few if any in Europe are prepared to submit to French or German leadership, nor is European security by committee likely to be effective. America remains the essential nation when it comes to European security, and European security remains essential to America.
What would be the result if America sacrifices Ukraine on the altar of Taiwan’s security? An insecure Europe vulnerable to Russian aggression, requiring even greater American attention and resources than at present. Any gains in the Indo-Pacific would be fleeting as the unchecked Russian threat required ever more attention and resources to contain. Conversely, Ukrainian victory and the chastening of Russia could finally pave the way for the US to make a real pivot to Asia.
That is well worth another $61 billion in security assistance for Kyiv. Keep the aid flowing.
Michael Mazza is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.
breakingdefense.com · by Michael Mazza · November 21, 2023
17. There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid By Eliot A. Cohen
We must all heed George Washington's words.
Excerpt:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid
The ideals I’m celebrating this Thanksgiving
By Eliot A. Cohen
The Atlantic · by Eliot A. Cohen · November 23, 2023
This Thanksgiving, three generations of my family will drink a champagne toast, eat the hors d’oeuvres that my mother used to make and my grandchildren now help produce, tackle the turkey that will succumb to my inexpert slicing, and then move on to the pecan and pumpkin pies.
But first, as we have for decades now, we will read George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. The letter includes his declaration that the U.S. government offers “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” It is often quoted, most recently by Deborah Lipstadt, the government’s special envoy to monitor and counter anti-Semitism, at the large pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C., on November 14.
We also read the initial letter of greeting to Washington from Moses Seixas, the warden of Newport’s Touro Synagogue (which we attended when I taught at the Naval War College). The occasion was the first president’s stately tour of the new country in the summer of 1790, when local dignitaries like Seixas would extend salutations and he would graciously reply.
Yair Rosenberg: When anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic
Each time we read the letters, several qualities of this exchange stand out.
For one thing, it was Seixas who first used the famous phrase. It bears repeating in full:
Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People—a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.
“To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” in other words, reflected the Jews of Newport’s delight in a new reality, not an announcement of a new or original policy by the president. They recognized that the bedrock of the new country lay in a fundamental equality of citizenship under liberty.
Washington liked the phrase so much, however, that he repeated it back in his response:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
That is the point: not religious toleration, but natural right. Eight years earlier, the enlightened Emperor Joseph II of Austria had issued his deservedly applauded Toleranzpatent, later expanded by a Toleranzedikt, that gave Jews all kinds of rights they had heretofore lacked. But the word was tolerance, and it was a gift from the government.
If one wishes to understand the fierce patriotism that has so often animated American Jews, look to this point of origin. In this nation, we did not have to earn our rights, or meekly receive them; they are, and always have been, ours by right. Jews have known, as Washington said, that rights imply obligations as citizens, which perhaps helps explain their pervasive and long-standing engagement in public affairs.
As long as the United States remains the United States, so it will be. It is unlike our history in any other state. Look closely and you will find in the Jewish history of other countries words like toleration and emancipation, permission and encouragement, not inherent natural rights. It is the big thing for which my family, at least, is profoundly thankful during this season.
But Washington’s warm response to Seixas contains another sentiment that will be more troubling this year.
May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.
That quote, from the prophet Micah 4:4, rings hollow this year. The FBI director recently declared that fully 60 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes are directed at Jews, who number barely 2 percent of the population. On university campuses, Jewish students have been harassed, humiliated, and assaulted. And in response, too many university leaders have simpered and mumbled, or taken refuge in denouncing the anti-Semitism of a century gone by rather than accept accountability for assaults that were carried out on their watch today.
These events have sometimes occurred under the excusing banner of anti-Zionism. In some cases, the mask slips, and the deeper hatred shows itself. But even those who sincerely insist that they are merely “anti-Zionist” must note that the Zionist project was the creation of a Jewish state. To be anti-Zionist is presumably to believe that the project should be undone. In that case, you should know how such a dissolution would happen and what it would entail. Look at the videos and pictures from the pogrom of October 7, and note that the epithet that was shouted exultantly by the murderers was not “Israeli,” but “Jew.” And this is also why today, American Jews know fear.
Worse than the fact that my synagogue has to have an armed police officer on guard during services, worse even than the hate spewed on the extremes of right and left—including by swaggering billionaires and prominent politicians—is the silence from those of whom many Jews expected better. It is the silence of feminists about the rape of women; it is the silence of civil-rights activists about the murder of babies; it is the silence of human-rights advocates about torture and burning people alive.
Tom Nichols: The juvenile viciousness of campus anti-Semitism
And so, that hope—not a promise, to be sure—offered by George Washington seems far from reality. That is what we will have to work through this Thanksgiving.
The way to do so begins with the words of a contemporary of Seixas and Washington, from a world away. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was a Hasidic master, a mystic, a troubled and tormented soul, who died of tuberculosis while yet a young man in Uman, Ukraine, where tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews still make a pilgrimage to his grave every year. One of his sayings, abbreviated and edited into a popular religious song, is relevant: “Know that Man has to cross a very, very narrow bridge, and that the guiding principle and the essential thing is not to make oneself afraid.”
It is a subtle point: Fear is natural and will come, but that does not mean we have to yield to it. Jewish history and Jewish thriving are about crossing that narrow bridge, often to the amazement of friends as well as foes. Indeed, often to our own astonishment.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Newport in 1852 and brooded about the Jewish cemetery there. He saw a synagogue that was closed and, admiring though he was of Jewish civilization, saw in those graves a finality about their meaning:
But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.
But one such nation did rise again. It survived far more terrible things than the poet could ever have imagined. Moses Seixas’s Touro Synagogue—the oldest in the United States, predating the American founding by more than a century—continues to conduct services to this day. When we named our youngest daughter there, the sanctuary was full. For the resilience and courage that history and that knowledge gives on this Thanksgiving, we should be, and we will be, deeply grateful.
The Atlantic · by Eliot A. Cohen · November 23, 2023
18. Preparing for a Russia-Ukraine stalemate
Excerpts:
Making the current stalemate sustainable would imply thinking about the situation on the ground – not so much in terms of temporary stalemate to be overcome through military escalation, but more in terms of an acceptable, if imperfect, status quo that is worth preserving.
In practical terms, this would imply no significant fighting and no further mobilizations. As such, it would also likely have an immediate and tangible effect on the lives of people on both sides of the lines of contact.
Progress in this direction will not be linear, especially given upcoming presidential elections in Russia, the US, and – possibly – Ukraine. As the election campaigns get underway, there will be periods of escalation not only along the frontline but also in rhetoric. Neither side is likely to commit in public to a ceasefire. And neither side will disown their articulated maximum demands.
Yet, beyond this, there appears to be a realization now on all sides that a stable status quo is in everybody’s interest. Moscow, Kiev and the West are likely to work towards such stabilization, pursue humanitarian issues and possibly begin negotiations on a ceasefire.
None of this is equivalent to the just and lasting peace that Ukraine and Ukrainians deserve. But it does embody the hope of ultimately achieving such a peace at the negotiation table and not on the battlefield.
Preparing for a Russia-Ukraine stalemate
Neither side will disown their maximum demands but a realization is settling that a stable status quo is in everybody’s interest
By STEFAN WOLFF And TETYANA MALYARENKO
NOVEMBER 23, 2023
asiatimes.com · by Stefan Wolff
US President Joe Biden took to the pages of the Washington Post last week to assure the American people that continuing economic and military support to Ukraine is an investment in US security.
On October 20, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Kiev to give the Ukrainian leadership a similar assurance together with the promise of an additional US$100 million in military aid.
A day later, his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, announced a new 1.3 billion euro ($1.4 billion) support package, focused on defensive equipment including four more IRIS-T SLM air defense systems and anti-tank mines.
This is an indication of a growing realization that Western emphasis is shifting to sustaining Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression – contrary to the insistence by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his closest political allies that victory on the battlefield is not just possible but probable. This view is now even contested in Kiev.
In an interview with The Economist, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said: “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.” The US defense secretary echoed this view in Kiev, emphasizing that Ukraine needs to “make the right adjustments” to its strategy.
Similar doubts have been voiced in Western capitals for months. In July 2023, the then-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, warned that Ukraine’s counteroffensive, then in its fourth week, would be “very long” and “very, very bloody.”
Less than two weeks later, a NATO communique after its summit in Vilnius failed to provide more than the vague promise of future membership. The next day, the G7 leaders’ joint declaration of support for Ukraine noted that G7 members were launching negotiations on “bilateral, long-term security commitments and arrangements” to support Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t getting everything he wants from the West. Photo: NDTV / Screengrab
There are further sobering signs of a significant reset of Western strategy on Ukraine. An article in Time magazine painted a bleak picture of deliberations in Zelensky’s inner circle over how difficult the war will be to win.
Meanwhile, an NBC story revealed mounting Western pressure on Ukraine to consider a peace deal with Russia that would involve at least some territorial concessions.
No appetite for endless conflict
The underlying premise of this reset in Western attitudes is that the outcome of this war will ultimately not be decided for a long time.
Bilateral security guarantees – especially from the US, UK, Germany and France – would go some way in assuring Ukraine that the West would continue to have its back while kicking the thorny issue of NATO membership into the long grass.
The West could also remain rhetorically committed to Zelensky’s peace formula. And support for EU membership – likely to be a long and slow process – could also continue and assist Ukraine with both reforms and recovery.
Such an approach would anchor Ukraine more clearly in the West in ways that might be less unacceptable to Russia than NATO membership.
All of this, however, is predicated on the assumption of a stalemate on the ground, which Moscow and Kiev would need to accept. It also assumes that neither side can see a clear opportunity to either escalate militarily to victory or do enough to have the advantage should the two sides end up at the negotiation table.
Both sides would also need to have grounds to believe that they have the political will and material resources to at least sustain the status quo. They must also be able to credibly signal this to the other side.
For Ukraine, the recent G7 statement, Biden’s article in the Washington Post and Austin’s comments in Kiev all contribute to this message without contradicting Zelensky’s stance of no surrender, which still has clear majority support in Ukraine.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine 20 months ago. It has been a year since any significant movements on the battlefield. No major third-party peace initiatives are on the horizon that could change the calculations of the belligerents. Taken together, a status quo is emerging on the ground.
For this to become a preference for both Moscow and Kiev over futile and costly attempts of escalation, several conditions need to be met.
For Ukraine, the kind of credible bilateral security guarantees embodied in the G7 Leaders’ joint declaration of support are required. For Russia, it would mean no Ukrainian NATO membership and no significant escalation of Western support that could give Kiev the technological edge it might need to defeat Moscow on the battlefield.
Making the current stalemate sustainable would imply thinking about the situation on the ground – not so much in terms of temporary stalemate to be overcome through military escalation, but more in terms of an acceptable, if imperfect, status quo that is worth preserving.
In practical terms, this would imply no significant fighting and no further mobilizations. As such, it would also likely have an immediate and tangible effect on the lives of people on both sides of the lines of contact.
Russia’s relentless bombardment of the city of Kharkiv continues. Photo: EPA-EFE via The Conversation / Sergey Kozlov
Progress in this direction will not be linear, especially given upcoming presidential elections in Russia, the US, and – possibly – Ukraine. As the election campaigns get underway, there will be periods of escalation not only along the frontline but also in rhetoric. Neither side is likely to commit in public to a ceasefire. And neither side will disown their articulated maximum demands.
Yet, beyond this, there appears to be a realization now on all sides that a stable status quo is in everybody’s interest. Moscow, Kiev and the West are likely to work towards such stabilization, pursue humanitarian issues and possibly begin negotiations on a ceasefire.
None of this is equivalent to the just and lasting peace that Ukraine and Ukrainians deserve. But it does embody the hope of ultimately achieving such a peace at the negotiation table and not on the battlefield.
Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham and Tetyana Malyarenko, Professor of International Relations, Jean Monnet Professor of European Security, National University Odesa Law Academy
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
asiatimes.com · by Stefan Wolff
19. Is Myanmar’s embattled regime using chemical weapons?
Is Myanmar’s embattled regime using chemical weapons?
TNLA insurgent group claims military dropped chemical agent on its fighters, an allegation the UN should probe and if true punish
By DAVID SCOTT MATHIESON
NOVEMBER 21, 2023
asiatimes.com · by David Scott Mathieson · November 21, 2023
Myanmar’s military is still reeling from the surprise Operation 1027 insurgent attacks in northern Shan state that overran over 140 bases, captured large caches of weapons and raised potent new questions about the State Administration Council (SAC) coup regime’s survival.
But is the SAC’s extraordinary setback driving it to use banned chemical weapons against the three main insurgent groups, known collectively as The Brotherhood, which spearheaded the lightning attacks and the military claims threaten to break up the nation?
On November 19, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army insurgent group released a public statement alleging that following its takeover of the Myanmar army’s Sakham Thit base in Namkham township, “junta forces dropped a poisonous chemical bomb on the TNLA soldiers.”
The TNLA’s statement further alleges that the SAC “committed a similar attack on November 4 by dropping a poisonous bomb upon Mong Kyat camp in Lashio township.”
According to the armed group statement, “although there were no any (sic) cuts or wounds on the victims’ bodies, some of the TNLA soldiers suffered from (1) dizziness, (2) breathlessness, (3) nausea, (4) extreme agitation and fatigue, (5) low blood oxygen levels etc. The (TNLA) health department…is providing necessary medical treatments to those comrades.”
No deaths have been reported in the alleged chemical attacks, and to date there has been no independent substantiation of the group’s claims.
The Myanmar Now independent news outlet interviewed one Ta’ang soldier who claimed, “(t)he bomb went off with a hiss and released a gas. I fainted after inhaling the gas. I can’t even remember who carried me from the frontline to the hospital. I still feel light-headed when I move too much.”
These are serious allegations and the TNLA’s claims must be addressed by the international community. SAC spokesperson Major-General Zaw Min Tun characteristically dismissed the claims, but he hasn’t uttered an honest syllable since the coup and would hardly admit to a potential war crime now.
Major General Zaw Min Tun has denied the TNLA’s chemical weapon claim. Image: CNN Screengrab
However, there have been multiple allegations of the Myanmar military using chemical weapons against ethnic insurgents in the past. In the 1980s there were claims that Myanmar crop-dusting aircraft were spraying ethnic Shan villagers with 2,4-D defoliant, half the compound of the deadly Agent Orange that was supplied to then-Burma through a US counter-narcotics program.
A General Accounting Office (GAO) report in 1989 “could not accurately assess the program’s safety”, but research by American human rights activists and writer Edith Mirante and her Project Maje convincingly documented misuse of the chemical.
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During the fall of the insurgent Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) base at Kawmura along the Thailand-Myanmar border in late 1994, convincing allegations of chemical weapons use were made but not substantiated, with a likelihood that white phosphorous was used along with high explosive (HE) rounds.
In alleged chemical weapons attacks against ethnic Karen positions in February 1995, the authoritative Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) concluded from multiple interviews with soldiers, none of whom died, that “(i)t still appears likely that the ‘liquid’ shells and the white phosphorus shells were one and the same, because although white phosphorus is a solid, several sources confirm that it can appear like a liquid after the shell has exploded and is burning.”
Other possibilities, such as the use of smoke rounds or misuse of potassium cyanide, which the then-State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) military regime used to poison ethnic Karen water supplies or a potentially toxic snake curry the soldiers had consumed that day, were dismissed.
White phosphorous, which burns when exposed to air and is often used to range targets, is not explicitly banned under international law but its use is highly restricted and there have been calls for its use to be totally banned.
In 2005, a Myanmar army attack against Karenni Army/Karenni National Progressive Party (KA/KNPP) insurgents close to the Thai border with Mae Hong Son allegedly used some form of chemical agent. Several KA soldiers were taken ill with respiratory illness and treated in Thai hospitals, though none died.
While it seems likely that some unusual artillery rounds were used, despite a number of investigations, it was never confirmed. The original source for the allegations, London-based conservative Christian activist Benedict Rogers for Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), strains credibility.
One explanation is possibly that a mixture of factors, of soldiers hiding in bunkers and breathing in dust, cordite from weapons fire, smoke rounds to mask Myanmar army movements and possible white phosphorous use could produce the combination for respiratory conditions, but not always the blistering that comes with chemical weapons use.
During the renewed conflict in Kachin state from 2011, multiple reports of chemical weapons were raised in 2012 and early 2013 of troops firing hand-held weapons armed with some form of chemical weapons, which came from the reliable Free Burma Rangers (FBR) group, and aircraft dropping chemical munitions confirmed by multiple local aid groups.
However, a mysterious yellow powder that appeared in multiple locations tested inconclusively by human rights groups.
And, of course, there was the use of munitions against protestors at the Letpadan copper mine in central Monywa in late November 2012, in which dozens of protestors, including Buddhist monks, were horrifically burned as police violently dispersed the protest camp.
One independent report claimed that white phosphorous was used. But a government investigation, led by now imprisoned National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, claimed only smoke grenades that may have contained “phosphorous” were used and controversially recommended the mine project continue.
The first priority for the current chemical weapon allegations is to establish without doubt that the TNLA’s claims are true. That obviously requires testing by a credible, independent third party in a laboratory. Those tests should ideally include the involvement of credible and trustworthy actors, possibly the United Nations.
The TNLA insurgent group is part of The Brotherhood Alliance that delivered a crushing blow to Myanmar military morale. Image: Asia Times Files / AFP / Ye Aung Thu
Any investigation should be cognizant of past mistakes and treat chemical weapons claims with caution. Myanmar expert and scholar Andrew Selth has analyzed multiple claims of chemical and biological weapons manufacture and use by the Myanmar military over the years and so far found little hard evidence to substantiate the allegations.
Secondly, as the conflict looks set to continue for the foreseeable future, international donors to Myanmar should consider the creation of an acoustic sound ranging system in war zones that is able to determine the use of artillery and potentially airpower strikes, especially on civilian sites protected under international humanitarian law (IHL).
There is currently an inchoate ecosystem of human rights reporting and evidence preservation and much confusion over what constitutes necessary real-time reporting and advocacy and longer-term investigations to collect evidence.
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There is usually a time lag where international groups take several days, at times weeks, to determine if incidents of abuse that have already been well established soon after they took place did indeed actually happen.
The Myanmar Witness rights group “examines photos” and through geotagging determines ten days later if alleged incidents happened at the exact map reference that local Myanmar media outlets had reported on the day of the incident.
Previous reports of chemical weapons use have often been counter-productive: all the accusations drowned the actual determination of possible use.
Thirdly, observers must resist the temptation to see the use of chemical weapons, if proven, as a sign of the SAC’s desperation. A regime that uses medieval arson techniques against civilian housing, burns down the town of Thantlang multiple times and drops fuel-air explosives on children at an office opening in Sagaing is undoubtedly capable of using chemical weapons. Its brutality is fueled by sadism, not desperation.
The more salient compulsion of the SAC in the coming weeks is less desperation than a thirst for retribution, punishing civilians in northern Shan state as it attempts to retake lost territory and further blocking badly needed humanitarian assistance to over 50,000 people displaced following Operation 1027.
Finally, the TNLA’s chemical weapon allegations should be used as an opportunity to urge all anti-SAC military and political forces to make a public commitment to avoid the use of banned weapons themselves.
That should include a commitment by the ethnic armed organizations’ political wings and the anti-coup National Unity Government to adhere to the Convention on Chemical Weapons (CCW), which Myanmar signed in 1993 and finally ratified in 2015.
If the SAC did use chemical weapons to bomb the TNLA, it must be proven beyond a doubt and tallied as yet another serious crime of savagery by a failing regime that will ultimately be punished after the war.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar
asiatimes.com · by David Scott Mathieson · November 21, 2023
20. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 22, 2023
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-22-2023
Key Takeaways:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin reframed the Kremlin’s stance on the Israeli-Hamas war to a much more anti-Israel position in an attempt to demonstrate the supposed hypocrisy of Western condemnations of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
- Putin also reiterated boilerplate rhetoric falsely portraying Russia as willing to engage in meaningful negotiations, likely to pressure the West into prematurely pushing Ukraine to negotiate with Russia.
- US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby reported on November 21 that Iran is supplying Russia with glide bombs and that Iran may be preparing to transfer short-range ballistic missiles to Russia.
- The Kremlin appears to be inexplicably concerned about the outcome of the upcoming March 2024 Russian presidential elections, despite apparent widespread Russian approval of Putin.
- Russian Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin called for Russia to codify an unspecified state ideology in the Russian constitution, suggesting that some Russian officials may want to explicitly end nominal constitutional protections for civil rights, democratic pluralism, and ethnic equality.
- Bastrykin has yet to detail what a potential Russian state ideology should be, although the Kremlin’s support for Russian ultranationalism would likely heavily influence any potential Russian state ideology.
- Bloomberg reported on November 21 that the European Union (EU) proposed a plan to strengthen security commitments from EU member states to Ukraine.
- Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on the night of November 21 to 22.
- Russian milbloggers appear to be focusing renewed complaints against the Russian military command for what milbloggers perceive as poor choices that contribute to Russian casualties.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, northwest of Horlivka, near Avdiivka, west and southwest of Donetsk City, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and advanced east of Synkivka.
- The Russian Federation Council approved the Russian 2024-2026 federal budget on November 22, and Russian officials continue to emphasize social spending over defense expenditures.
- The Russian government and occupation authorities continue to forcibly deport children in occupied Ukraine to Russia under medical treatment schemes.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 22, 2023
Nov 22, 2023 - ISW Press
Download the PDF
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 22, 2023
Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Angelica Evans, and Frederick W. Kagan
November 22, 2023, 7:30pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Click here to see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.
Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.
Note: ISW and CTP will not publish a campaign assessment (or maps) tomorrow, November 23, in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. Coverage will resume Friday, November 24.
Note: The data cut-off for this product was 12:30pm ET on November 22. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the November 24 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reframed the Kremlin’s stance on the Israeli-Hamas war to a much more anti-Israel position in an attempt to demonstrate the supposed hypocrisy of Western condemnations of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin stated that attendees of the G20 summit who expressed shock at the continued Russian war in Ukraine should instead be “shocked” by the “bloody” 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine and the subsequent war that the “Kyiv regime waged against its own people” in Donbas and by the “extermination of the civilian population in Palestine, in the Gaza sector.”[1] Putin’s November 22 statement on the Israel-Hamas war referring to the “extermination of the civilian population of Palestine” was a departure from previous Kremlin framing that largely focused on calling for peace and claiming that the Israel-Hamas war will distract from the provision of Western military aid to Ukraine.[2] Putin’s November 22 framing of the Israeli-Hamas war continues to exploit that war to undermine Western support for Ukraine, as ISW has previously assessed, and also signals potentially increasing support for Iranian interests in the region and an increased willingness to antagonize Israel.[3]
Putin also reiterated boilerplate rhetoric falsely portraying Russia as willing to engage in meaningful negotiations, likely to pressure the West into prematurely pushing Ukraine to negotiate with Russia. Putin stated that the world must “think about how to stop this tragedy [the Russian-initiated war in Ukraine],” falsely signaling a willingness to engage in meaningful peace negotiations in Ukraine.[4] Putin and other Russian officials have routinely falsely claimed that the Kremlin is ready to negotiate to end the war while signaling that the Kremlin maintains its maximalist objectives, including territorial claims and regime change.[5] Kremlin officials have pushed this narrative while claiming that Ukraine is unwilling to negotiate with Russia, likely to coerce Western officials into prematurely offering concessions favorable to Russia rather than engage in meaningful, good faith negotiations.[6] Ukrainian officials have routinely expressed their willingness to negotiate with Russia as soon as Russia removes its forces from Ukraine’s internationally-recognized territory, including Donbas and Crimea.[7] ISW has observed no indications that Putin does not retain his maximalist objectives and continues to assess that a premature cessation of hostilities in Ukraine greatly increases the likelihood of renewed Russian aggression on terms far more favorable to the Kremlin in the near future.[8]
US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby reported on November 21 that Iran is supplying Russia with glide bombs and that Iran may be preparing to transfer short-range ballistic missiles to Russia.[9] ISW has observed Russian forces increasingly using glide bombs, particularly modified FAB-500, KAB-500, and RPK-500 aerial bombs equipped with glide bomb structures, in the Lyman and Kherson directions.[10] It is unclear whether Kirby meant that Iran is supplying Russia with glide bomb components or with fully constructed glide bombs. The Critical Threats Project (CTP)-ISW’s Iran Update reported on August 14 that Iran produces a variety of glide bombs domestically, such as the Ghaem glide bombs, Yasin long-range glide bombs, Sadid glide bombs, and Balaban glide bombs.[11] Iran commonly uses these bombs with its various drone platforms, likely including the Shahed-131/136 drones that Iran supplies to Russia. A Russian milblogger previously amplified claims that Russian Su-25 aircraft may be compatible with Iranian glide bombs.[12] Iran presented several glide bomb variants at the Russian Army-2023 Forum in Moscow in August 2023 and possibly during Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s visit to Tehran in September 2023.[13] Kirby added that Iran also continues to supply Russia with drones and artillery ammunition.[14] Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Deputy Chief Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated on November 6 that Iran may continue to send small batches of Shahed-131/136 drones to Russia despite increased Russian efforts to produce Shahed drones domestically and Iran’s fulfillment of its first Shahed supply contracts with Russia.[15] CTP-ISW previously assessed that Iran and Russia may conclude a drone and missile sale agreement following the expiration of UN missile restrictions against Iranian missile and missile-related technology exports on October 18, 2023.[16]
The Kremlin appears to be inexplicably concerned about the outcome of the upcoming March 2024 Russian presidential elections, despite apparent widespread Russian approval of Putin. Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) Chairperson Ella Pamfilova stated on November 21 that some Russian citizens who left Russia and others still in Russia have already begun efforts to discredit the upcoming Russian presidential elections.[17] Pamfilova’s statement suggests that the Russian government will continue to intensify censorship efforts under the guise of fighting attempted internal election meddling ahead of the presidential elections. Putin also stated on November 15 that the Russian government will suppress any foreign or domestic election interference at a meeting with Russian election commission representatives.[18] Two unnamed sources from Russian federal and regional authorities told Russian opposition outlet Verstka in an article published on November 22 that the Kremlin instructed Russian regional authorities to stop relatives of mobilized personnel from protesting by paying them.[19] The sources added that the Kremlin advised Russian regional governments to “make every effort” to ensure that the governments issue payments to the relatives of mobilized personnel and address other complaints about poor treatment of mobilized personnel in response to rising dissatisfaction among the relatives.[20] The sources also told Verstka that the Kremlin considers the relatives of mobilized personnel a social group that may pose one of the greatest threats to the beginning of Putin’s still unannounced presidential campaign.[21]
The Kremlin may also be concerned about a perceived lack of support for Putin from the Russian veteran community.[22] This veteran community is a subsection of the Russian ultranationalist community and has routinely argued in favor of full mobilization and continued Russian offensive operations in Ukraine, as opposed to freezing the current frontlines.[23] The Kremlin’s apparent concern about Putin’s support is odd given that the Levada Center - an independent Russian polling organization - found that 82 percent of Russians approve of Putin's performance as of October 2023.[24] The Kremlin may also want Putin to receive an even higher percentage of the vote and may be attempting to placate specific groups that vocally express dissatisfaction with Putin’s decisions.
Russian Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin called for Russia to codify an unspecified state ideology in the Russian constitution, suggesting that some Russian officials may want to explicitly end nominal constitutional protections for civil rights, democratic pluralism, and ethnic equality. Bastrykin made the call on November 22 during a conference about the Russian constitution at the Russian Ministry of Justice in Moscow and argued that dismissing his call would not work.[25] Bastrykin previously called on Russian Constitutional Court Chairperson Valery Zorkin to look into ways of establishing an unspecified state ideology in May 2023, although Zorkin rebuffed Bastrykin by noting that the current constitution contains a set of values that protect civil society.[26] The Russian constitution declares that Russia is a democratic state in which Russia’s multinational people should exercise power directly and that the “supreme direct expression” of that power are referendums and free elections.[27] The constitution establishes that the Russian state’s obligation is to recognize, observe, and protect human and civil rights.[28] Article 13 of the Russian constitution notably forbids Russia from proclaiming a state ideology and commits the Russian state to recognize ideological diversity, political diversity, and a multi-party system.[29] Bastrykin's calls would require Russian officials to amend or even repeal Article 13 of the Russian constitution, and possibly would require more extensive amendments depending on the potential new state ideology. Russia adopted its current constitution in 1993 and laid out codified state protections for multiethnic democratic pluralism and human and civil rights to mark a definitive break with the Soviet system of autocratic one-party ideological rule. Bastrykin, who has previously advocated for Stalinist-era domestic policies, may hope that a new ideology enshrined in the Russian constitution would further weaken or outright cancel Russia’s existing constitutional commitment to democratic pluralism and human and civil rights.[30] Bastrykin may be voicing this position on behalf of a wider group of Russian officials wishing to end these nominal constitutional projections, but the Kremlin has shown no indication that it wishes to do away with the veneer of legitimacy that these nominal constitutional protections offer.[31]
Bastrykin has yet to detail what a potential Russian state ideology should be, although the Kremlin’s support for Russian ultranationalism would likely heavily influence any potential Russian state ideology. The Kremlin has heavily courted the Russian ultranationalist community against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, a community that supports Russian imperial goals, efforts to Russify and ethnically cleanse occupied territories, and nationalist demands to protect ethnic Russian communities.[32] The focus on protecting and enforcing the Russian ethnic identity would likely be a key component of any state ideology should the Kremlin entertain Bastrykin’s calls. Bastrykin himself may have had this Russian ultranationalism in mind when he called for a state ideology given that he has heavily sought to capitalize on heightened ethnic tensions in Russia and is increasingly casting himself as a prominent anti-migration figure.[33] Bastrykin and the Russian Investigative Committee have reportedly directly engaged in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and the forced placement of Ukrainian children into Russian military training programs — parts of a campaign to destroy Ukrainian ethnic identity and Russify Ukraine.[34] The Kremlin’s support for Russian ultranationalism is also heavily focused on promoting Russian Orthodoxy and appeals to “traditional” social values. Putin most recently signed a decree on November 22 declaring 2024 the “Year of the Family” to focus on preserving traditional family values.[35] ISW has previously assessed that the war in Ukraine is likely exacerbating an emerging identity crisis within Russian society resulting from tensions between Russian identity and Russian nationalism.[36] This crisis as well as pronounced ethnoreligious tensions will likely worsen if the ultranationalist Kremlin decides to pursue codifying a state ideology. Putin and elements of the Kremlin, highly aware of the potential for these ethnic, religious, and national tensions to prompt instability and discontent, are unlikely to support Bastrykin’s calls to codify an explicit state ideology in the short term.
Bloomberg reported on November 21 that the European Union (EU) proposed a plan to strengthen security commitments from EU member states to Ukraine.[37] Bloomberg reported, citing a draft proposal, that the EU’s proposal would build on existing bilateral agreements established within the framework of the Group of Seven’s (G7) declaration on security guarantees for Ukraine. The proposal reportedly includes mechanisms for: long-term military aid; training of Ukrainian forces; cooperation with Ukraine’s domestic defense industrial base (DIB); strengthening Ukraine’s ability to counter cyber and hybrid threats; demining assistance; support for Ukraine’s reform agenda as part of the EU accession process; assistance for Ukraine’s energy transition and nuclear safety efforts; and the sharing of intelligence and satellite imagery. EU Foreign Affairs Representative Josep Borrell stated on November 13 that Ukraine is the EU’s top priority and that the EU’s commitment to Ukraine will not waiver.[38] Bloomberg reported that EU member states are expected to consider the EU’s draft proposal in December 2023.
Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on the night of November 21 to 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces shot down all 14 Shahed-131/136 drones that Russia launched at Ukraine.[39] Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces also launched two missiles, of which one Kh-22 cruise missile fell in an unpopulated area in Zaporizhia Oblast.[40] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat stated on November 21 that Russian forces have paused their use of cruise and ballistic missiles and began using KAB glide bombs and Kh-59 and Kh-31 missiles to conduct strikes against Ukraine.[41]
Russian milbloggers appear to be focusing renewed complaints against the Russian military command for what milbloggers perceive as poor choices that contribute to Russian casualties. Russian milbloggers expressed anger on November 21 and 22 after a Ukrainian HIMARS strike on Kumachove, Donetsk Oblast (37km southeast of Donetsk City and 61km from the frontline) allegedly killed over 25 and injured over 100 personnel of the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet) who were attending a concert for a Russian military holiday on November 19.[42] The milbloggers largely focused on poor security measures, criticizing the Russian command for allowing a large gathering of people within HIMARS range of the frontline in violation of operational security principles.[43] The milbloggers largely called for the Russian military to ban such events and expressed frustration that the Russian military command has not learned this lesson despite nearly two years of war and multiple instances in which publicly available information facilitated Ukrainian strikes.[44]
Though this strike does not affect the battlefield situation in Ukraine, the Russian milbloggers’ reaction to this strike reflects the Russian ultranationalist community’s continued frustration with the Russian military command’s management of the war. Russian milbloggers have recently begun to complain about the Russian military command following a period of self-censorship likely prompted by the death of Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and the arrests of highly critical Russian ultranationalist milbloggers in summer 2023.[45] The milbloggers’ complaints have largely focused on how the Russian military command’s poor conduct of the war and poor discipline have led to poor treatment of Russian military personnel and casualties instead of focusing on the success or failure of Russian military operations. Russian milbloggers have routinely complained that the Russian military command’s orders to use "meat assaults” to push Ukrainian forces from positions on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast have led to extensive Russian casualties, for example.[46]
Key Takeaways:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin reframed the Kremlin’s stance on the Israeli-Hamas war to a much more anti-Israel position in an attempt to demonstrate the supposed hypocrisy of Western condemnations of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
- Putin also reiterated boilerplate rhetoric falsely portraying Russia as willing to engage in meaningful negotiations, likely to pressure the West into prematurely pushing Ukraine to negotiate with Russia.
- US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby reported on November 21 that Iran is supplying Russia with glide bombs and that Iran may be preparing to transfer short-range ballistic missiles to Russia.
- The Kremlin appears to be inexplicably concerned about the outcome of the upcoming March 2024 Russian presidential elections, despite apparent widespread Russian approval of Putin.
- Russian Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin called for Russia to codify an unspecified state ideology in the Russian constitution, suggesting that some Russian officials may want to explicitly end nominal constitutional protections for civil rights, democratic pluralism, and ethnic equality.
- Bastrykin has yet to detail what a potential Russian state ideology should be, although the Kremlin’s support for Russian ultranationalism would likely heavily influence any potential Russian state ideology.
- Bloomberg reported on November 21 that the European Union (EU) proposed a plan to strengthen security commitments from EU member states to Ukraine.
- Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on the night of November 21 to 22.
- Russian milbloggers appear to be focusing renewed complaints against the Russian military command for what milbloggers perceive as poor choices that contribute to Russian casualties.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, northwest of Horlivka, near Avdiivka, west and southwest of Donetsk City, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and advanced east of Synkivka.
- The Russian Federation Council approved the Russian 2024-2026 federal budget on November 22, and Russian officials continue to emphasize social spending over defense expenditures.
- The Russian government and occupation authorities continue to forcibly deport children in occupied Ukraine to Russia under medical treatment schemes.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Russian Technological Adaptations
- Activities in Russian-occupied areas
- Russian Information Operations and Narratives
Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)
Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on November 22 and made a confirmed advance. Geolocated footage published on November 22 indicates that Russian forces made a limited advance east of Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk).[47] A Russian milbloger claimed that Russian forces slightly advanced in the Serebryanske forest area (10km southwest of Kreminna), although ISW has not observed visual evidence of this claim.[48] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Synkivka and Ivanivka (20km southeast of Kupyansk), northeast and east of Petropavlivka (7km east of Kupyansk), and in the direction of Siversk (19km south of Kreminna).[49] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets assessed that Russian forces in the Kupyansk direction are completing a force regrouping and may soon increase the pace of offensive operations in the area.[50]
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Kupyansk and south of Kreminna on November 22. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Synkivka and Dibrova (7km southwest of Kreminna).[51] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near the Serebryanske forest area and Torske (14km west of Kreminna).[52]
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued assaults south of Bakhmut on November 22, although Ukrainian forces did not make any confirmed or claimed gains.[53]
Russian forces continued ground attacks near Bakhmut on November 22 but did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[54] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces successfully established a foothold on the northern outskirts of Klishchiivka, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[55] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are assaulting Ukrainian positions on tactical heights near Klishchiivka and near Khromove (immediately west of Bakhmut), and Bohdanivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[56] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted footage purporting to show elements of the Russian 98th Guards Airborne (VDV) Division operating near Bakhmut.[57] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the 119th and 137th VDV Regiments (both of the 106th VDV Division) are also operating in the Bakhmut direction.[58]
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks northwest of Horlivka on November 22. The Russian MoD claimed that elements of the Russian Southern Grouping of Forces repelled a Ukrainian assault near Pivdenne (immediately northwest of Horlivka).[59] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian light infantry assaults near waste heaps northwest of Horlivka.[60] A Russian milblogger claimed that artillery elements of the Russian 132nd Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People's Republic [DNR] Army Corps) repelled Ukrainian attacks northwest of Horlivka.[61]
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian counterattacks northwest of Horlivka near Pivdenne on November 22.[62]
Russian forces intensified offensive operations near Avdiivka and reportedly advanced on Avdiivka’s southeastern outskirts on November 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted more than 22 unsuccessful assaults east of Novobakhmutivka (12km northwest of Avdiivka); north of Lastochkyne (5km west of Avdiivka); and near Avdiivka, Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), and Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka).[63] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Oleksandr Shtupun stated that Russian forces significantly intensified assault operations near Avdiivka and that Ukrainian forces in the area have noted a 25 to 30 percent increase in Russian assaults over the past day.[64] Shtupun stated that Russian forces conducted mechanized assaults with around a dozen armored vehicles in the Avdiivka direction and that Ukrainian forces repelled the assaults, destroying two tanks and seven armored fighting vehicles.[65] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted a successful surprise attack and quickly occupied five buildings in the industrial zone on Avdiivka’s southeastern outskirts.[66] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also captured Ukrainian defensive fortifications southwest of the industrial zone.[67] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces made unspecified gains near Stepove (3km north of Avdiivka) and that the settlement remains a contested “gray zone.”[68] Shtupun noted that Russian aviation has also intensified operations near Avdiivka, and Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces intensified artillery and air strikes on Ukrainian positions on Avdiivka’s northern and southern flanks.[69] Shtupun stated that weather conditions are not currently impacting the tempo of hostilities in the Avdiivka direction and that reduced foliage in the area due to cold weather is improving Ukrainian visibility against Russian infantry assaults.[70] Ukrainian military observer Konstyantyn Mashovets stated that the Russian command committed elements of the 255th Motorized Rifle Regiment (20th Motorized Rifle Division, 8th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) to battles in the Avdiivka direction.[71]
A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces counterattacked north of Avdiivka near Stepove on November 22 but did not specify an outcome.[72]
Russian forces continued offensive operations west and southwest of Donetsk City on November 22 but did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled more than 18 Russian assaults near Marinka (immediately southwest of Donetsk City) and Novomykhailivka (11km southwest of Donetsk City).[73] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced near Marinka and Novomykhailivka, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[74] Yaroslav Chepurnyi, a spokesperson for a Ukrainian brigade operating in the Marinka direction, stated that Russian forces have stormed Ukrainian positions in the Marinka direction over 150 times and have launched over 300 strike drones in the past week.[75]
Ukrainian forces did not conduct any claimed or confirmed counterattacks west and southwest of Donetsk City on November 22.
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on November 22. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that elements of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces repelled a Ukrainian attack near Pryyutne (14km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[76] The Russian “Vostok” Battalion claimed that there is increased activity in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.[77]
Russian forces continued ground attacks in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on November 22 but did not make any confirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks west of Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[78] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are also attempting to advance near Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[79] A Russian news aggregator claimed on November 21 that Russian forces counterattacked in the direction of Pryyutne, Staromayorske, and Urozhaine.[80] Another Russian milblogger published footage on November 22 claiming to show elements of the Russian 5th Guards Tank Brigade (36th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) striking Ukrainian positions west of Novodonetske (12km southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[81]
Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on November 22 but did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) direction.[82] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled three Ukrainian attacks north of Novoprokopivka (2km south of Robotyne) and west of Verbove (9km east of Robotyne).[83] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces continued attacks along the Robotyne-Verbove line.[84] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian armored assault near Robotyne.[85] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces also unsuccessfully attacked near Novofedorivka (15km northeast of Robotyne).[86]
Russian forces continued unsuccessful attacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on November 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful assaults near Robotyne and Kamianske (30km southwest of Orikhiv).[87] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that elements of the Russian 56th Air Assault (VDV) Regiment (7th VDV Division) are defending north of Verbove.[88]
Ukrainian forces maintain positions in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and reportedly attacked in the area on November 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces maintain positions in left bank Kherson Oblast.[89] Russian milbloggers widely acknowledged the continued Ukrainian presence in Krynky (30km northeast of Kherson City and 2km from the Dnipro River).[90] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces also maintain positions and attacked near Poyma (12km east of Kherson City and 4km from the Dnipro River), Pishchanivka (13km east of Kherson City and 3km from the Dnipro River), Pidstepne (17km east of Kherson City and 4km from the Dnipro River), and the Antonivsky Roadway and Railway Bridges.[91] Mashovets stated that there is also unspecified activity west of Oleshky (7km south of Kherson City and 4km from the Dnipro River).[92]
Russian forces continued assaults in left bank Kherson Oblast on November 22 but did not make confirmed advances. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are advancing into Krynky from the east.[93] Mashovets stated that Russian forces have narrowed the Ukrainian bridgehead near Krynky in the past few days.[94] Mashovets stated that elements of the Russian 328th VDV Regiment (104th VDV Division) are attacking Krynky from Korsunka (45km northeast of Kherson City and 1km from the Dnipro River) and added that Russian forces are constantly attacking along the Oleshky-Nova Kakhovka coastal road (7km south to 53km northeast of Kherson City).[95]
The Russian MoD claimed on November 22 that Russian forces destroyed four Ukrainian naval drones and three aerial drones targeting Crimea.[96] A Kremlin-affiliated Russian milblogger suggested that Ukraine was targeting a Black Sea Fleet (BSF) base near Yevpatoria (64km north of Sevastopol).[97]
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
The Russian Federation Council approved the Russian 2024-2026 federal budget on November 22, and Russian officials continue to emphasize social spending over defense expenditures.[98] Prior versions of the federal budget that the Russian State Duma previously approved focused on Russian defense expenses, though the allocation of funds between defense, social, and other spheres in the November 22 budget is currently unclear.[99] Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov noted that Russia’s main budgetary focuses for the next three years are defense and security needs, so-called “special military operations,” and the state’s social obligations to Russian citizens.[100] Federation Council Budget Committee Chairperson Anatoly Artamonov highlighted the social and cultural spending allocated in the budget and emphasized that Russia’s “priority areas of spending remain in the social sphere.”[101]
Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine)
Nothing significant to report
Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
The Russian government and occupation authorities continue to forcibly deport children in occupied Ukraine to Russia under medical treatment schemes. The Kherson Oblast occupation administration announced on November 22 that the Kherson Oblast occupation Ministry of Labor and Social Protection and the office of Kremlin-appointed Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova transported Ukrainian teenagers with disabilities from occupied Kherson Oblast to a rehabilitation center in Penza Oblast.[102] The Kherson Oblast occupation Social Fund of Russia announced on November 20 that it will launch a program on January 1, 2024 wherein residents of occupied Kherson Oblast from unspecified “preferential categories” can apply for fully funded travel to and treatment at sanitorium-resorts.[103]
Russian Information Operations and Narratives
Russia continues to posture itself as an effective partner to China. Russian State Duma Chairperson Vyacheslav Volodin and a Duma delegation arrived in Nanjing as part of a state visit to China from November 21 to 23.[104] Volodin met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Chinese National People’s Congress Standing Committee Chairperson Zhao Leji, and Jiangsu province regional officials on interregional technological cooperation and strengthening Russian-Chinese economic ties.[105]
Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) held a joint meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, the Council of Defense Ministers, and the Committee of Secretaries of the CSTO’s member states’ Security Councils on November 22 in Minsk.[106] The CSTO reported that representatives from Armenia did not attend this meeting.[107]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
21. Iran Update, November 22, 2023
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-november-22-2023
Key Takeaways:
- Israel and Hamas have agreed to a four-day humanitarian pause in fighting. Hamas is the only militant group explicitly mentioned in the humanitarian pause agreement.
- The entire Axis of Resistance has been involved in the escalation against the United States and Israel since October 7 and it is unclear how its non-Hamas members will react to the pause. Senior Iranian, Hamas, Lebanese, LH, and PIJ officials met in Beirut on November 22 to discuss the four-day humanitarian pause between Israel and Hamas.
- Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)—an umbrella security organization that ostensibly reports to the Iraqi Prime Minister—held a funeral for five Kataib Hezbollah members who were killed in two US drone strikes on KH facilities on November 22. Iranian-backed militias attempted to portray the US airstrike as having targeted a state-affiliated security organization and not members of the US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, Kataib Hezbollah.
- The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed two drone attacks on al Harir Airbase in retaliation for Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip. The IDF intercepted a Houthi cruise missile that targeted Eilat, Israel on November 22.
- Israel published more evidence for how Hamas uses al Shifa Hospital as a command node.
IRAN UPDATE, NOVEMBER 22, 2023
Nov 22, 2023 - ISW Press
Download the PDF
Iran Update, November 22, 2023
Andie Parry, Ashka Jhaveri, Johanna Moore, Peter Mills, and Annika Ganzeveld
Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm EST
The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. For more on developments in Iran and the region, see our interactive map of Iran and the Middle East.
Note: CTP and ISW have refocused the update to cover the Israel-Hamas war. The new sections address developments in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as noteworthy activity from Iran’s Axis of Resistance. We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
CTP-ISW will not publish an update on Thursday, November 23, for the Thanksgiving holiday. CTP-ISW will resume publishing daily updates on Friday, November 24.
Key Takeaways:
- Israel and Hamas have agreed to a four-day humanitarian pause in fighting. Hamas is the only militant group explicitly mentioned in the humanitarian pause agreement.
- The entire Axis of Resistance has been involved in the escalation against the United States and Israel since October 7 and it is unclear how its non-Hamas members will react to the pause. Senior Iranian, Hamas, Lebanese, LH, and PIJ officials met in Beirut on November 22 to discuss the four-day humanitarian pause between Israel and Hamas.
- Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)—an umbrella security organization that ostensibly reports to the Iraqi Prime Minister—held a funeral for five Kataib Hezbollah members who were killed in two US drone strikes on KH facilities on November 22. Iranian-backed militias attempted to portray the US airstrike as having targeted a state-affiliated security organization and not members of the US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, Kataib Hezbollah.
- The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed two drone attacks on al Harir Airbase in retaliation for Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip. The IDF intercepted a Houthi cruise missile that targeted Eilat, Israel on November 22.
- Israel published more evidence for how Hamas uses al Shifa Hospital as a command node.
Gaza Strip
Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:
- Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to launch and sustain a major ground operation into the Gaza Strip
- Degrade IDF material and morale around the Gaza Strip
Israel and Hamas have agreed to a four-day humanitarian pause in fighting. Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk said the pause will begin at 0300 EST on Thursday, November 23. [1] The Israeli National Security Director said that hostages will not be released before Friday, however.[2] It is therefore unclear when the pause will begin. Statements from Israel and Hamas acknowledged a prisoner/hostage swap in return for a four-day pause in the fighting in the Gaza Strip with different levels of detail.[3] The Israeli government’s official statement said that 50 women and children would be released by Hamas over four days at a rate of at least 10 per day.[4] Hamas’ political wing issued a more detailed statement and said that it would release 50 Israeli women and children under the age of 19 in exchange for Israel releasing 150 Palestinian women and children under the age of 19. Israel’s statement presents the opportunity for the extension of the pause, stipulating that for each additional 10 hostages Hamas released, a day would be added to the pause. Hamas’ statement did not mention this aspect of the agreement.
Hamas’s statement also included details about a no-fly zone in the southern Gaza Strip, a partial no-fly zone in the northern Gaza Strip, and humanitarian, fuel, and medical aid deliveries. The official statement from Israel did not include details about these features of the deal. An anonymous senior Israeli security official speaking to the press said that Israel has alternatives to gathering intelligence via drone and that stormy days in the forecast would limit Israeli aerial intelligence gathering anyway.[5] This statement indicates that the no-fly zone is part of Israel’s understanding of the deal. Hamas also said that the parties agreed to “a ceasefire. . . and a cessation of all military actions by Israel in all areas of the Gaza Strip.” The Israeli statement did not specify where the fighting would stop or use the term “ceasefire.” The official Israeli statement mentioned only a “pause in the fighting.”
Hamas and Israel negotiated the pause with the mediation of Qatar, which released a separate statement affirming the agreement.[6] The Qatari statement included details about the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and humanitarian convoys carrying fuel entering the Gaza Strip.
Hamas said that it remains committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital despite the truce and will remain the protective shield and defender of the Palestinian people until Israel is defeated. The Israeli government’s statement included the declaration that it will continue the war to eliminate Hamas.[7] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset as it voted on the deal that Israeli security agencies assess that the war effort will not be harmed and that the deal will enable the IDF to prepare for the continuation of fighting.[8]
Hamas is the only militant group explicitly mentioned in the humanitarian pause agreement. Hamas is also the only Palestinian militant group that has acknowledged the pause agreement, despite the fact that Hamas is only one of several groups fighting Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) has unofficially indicated that it would adhere to a pause in fighting if Israel did, according to an unspecified LH official speaking to al Jazeera.[9] There are no indications that other Palestinian or Axis of Resistance groups regard themselves as bound by the Israel-Hamas agreement. Other Palestinian militant groups are actively fighting Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and conducting indirect fire attacks into Israel. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) attacked Israeli forces and launched rockets at Israel at least 15 times on November 21.[10] The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade—a self-affiliated militant wing of Fatah—has conducted attacks on Israeli ground forces in the Gaza Strip and fired rockets into Israel.[11] The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s militant wing in the Gaza Strip—the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades—has conducted at least 14 indirect fire attacks into Israel since the start of the war. The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s militant wing has also conducted attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel.[12]
PIJ’s and Hamas’ militant wings have acknowledged that they coordinate ground operations targeting Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip over the past several weeks of fighting.[13] PIJ and Hamas have also coordinated operations with other smaller militias in the Gaza Strip such as the al Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades—the militant wing of Popular Resistance Committees.[14] Israel has repeatedly held Hamas responsible for all anti-Israel militant activity emanating from the Gaza Strip even as Hamas claims that it has no control over other militias operating in Gaza.[15] PIJ and possibly other militant groups are holding Israeli hostages, complicating hostage exchange according to Hamas, which has claimed that it does not control hostages held by other militias even though Hamas fighters were the ones who seized the hostages on October 7.[16] PIJ’s spokesperson Abu Hamza announced the death of one of its hostages, Hanna Katzir, on November 21.[17] These factors increase the risk that a non-Hamas militia that has nevertheless been coordinating military operations with Hamas could attack Israeli forces drawing an Israeli response that Hamas would attempt to frame as an Israeli violation of the agreement.
The entire Axis of Resistance has been involved in the escalation against the United States and Israel since October 7, and it is unclear how its non-Hamas members will react to the pause. Axis of Resistance groups, including the Houthis and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, have continued to attack Israel while Israel and Hamas discuss the terms of the pause agreement. Houthi fighters hijacked an Israeli-owned, Japanese-operated freighter transiting the Red Sea on November 19 and launched a cruise missile at Eilat on November 22.[18] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq also began using close-range ballistic missiles against US forces in November, including on November 21.[19] It is unclear how this pattern will progress during the pause, as Hamas and Israel are the only combatant parties explicitly bound by the agreement.
Israel destroyed the headquarters of Hamas’ Northern Brigade in the Sheikh Zayed neighborhood during clearing operations. Israeli media reported that the IDF is expected to intensify combat operations in the Gaza Strip with a focus on clearing militant strongholds in the eastern Gaza Strip before there is a pause in fighting.[20] The IDF said on November 18 that it is expanding offensive operations toward Jabalia city in the northern Gaza Strip.[21] Israeli forces conducted targeted raids northwest of Jabalia in the Sheikh Zayed neighborhood on November 22, where Israel says several senior members of Hamas live.[22] The force located large tunnel shafts and large complexes and destroyed the headquarters of Hamas’ Northern Brigade.[23] The IDF said in a publication on November 13 that Hamas maintains five regional brigades, two of which operate in the northern Gaza Strip.[24] Israeli forces also discovered a model of an IDF vehicle.[25] Palestinian militias have made several claims to destroy Israeli vehicles and frequently target them with rocket-propelled grenades (RPG).
Israel said its forces are on the offensive in the Tal al Hawa neighborhood in southern Gaza city.[26] The IDF said its forces raided the Hamas Gaza City Brigades outpost and a military intelligence office where they discovered unspecified information about the underground infrastructure Hamas uses across the Gaza Strip.[27] Israeli forces also located a workshop for manufacturing drones and a laboratory for one-way attack drones, IEDs, mortars, and other weapons.[28]
The al Quds Brigades—the militant wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—said that its forces targeted Israeli forces against Israeli lines of advance. The al Quds Brigades claimed to attack Israeli forces advancing south of Gaza city and in neighborhoods surrounding Jabalia city with various munitions including RPGs, tandem-charge anti-tank weapons, small arms, and mortars.[29] The IDF has targeted PIJ operational headquarters since the Israel-Hamas war began.[30]
Israel published more evidence for how Hamas uses al Shifa Hospital as a command node. Israel posted footage of Hamas’ “underground city” and tunnel network underneath al Shifa Hospital on November 22.[31] Israeli forces discovered military equipment during clearing operations in the al Shifa Hospital area including various weapons and electronic devices, as well as patches of the al Quds Brigades.[32] CTP-ISW has reported that the IDF faces a loose coalition of Palestinian militant groups in the Gaza Strip—rather than just Hamas.
Palestinian militia fighters continued attacks targeting Israeli forces behind the Israeli forward line of advance, which is consistent with the nature of clearing operations. The al Qassem Brigades—the militant wing of Hamas—published several video compilations of various attacks it has conducted on Israeli forces across the northern Gaza Strip using RPGs, small arms, and IEDs.[33] The al Quds Brigades claimed to attack Israeli infantry forces in Beit Hanoun.[34]
Sources[35]
Recorded reports of rocket attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.
The al Quds Brigades conducted one indirect fire attack into Israel on November 22. The al Quds Brigades fired rockets at the Third Eye military site in southern Israel.[36] The al Qassem Brigades did not claim indirect fire attacks into Israel on November 22.
Recorded reports of rocket attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.
West Bank
Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:
- Draw IDF assets and resources toward the West Bank and fix them there
Palestinian militia fighters conducted 18 attacks on Israeli forces, primarily in Tulkarm, in the West Bank on November 22. Unspecified Palestinian militia fighters fired small arms at Israeli forces and detonated at least five IEDs targeting them on November 22 in response to an Israeli raid in Tulkarm.[37] The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade’ Tulkarm Rapid Response Battalion acknowledged six of its fighters, including four commanders, died during the Israeli operation in Tulkarm.[38] The al Quds Brigades stated that it participated in the fighting against Israeli forces in Tulkarm, but did not acknowledge any casualties.[39] Unspecified fighters engaged in five small arms clashes and detonated at least two IEDs targeting Israeli forces across the West Bank on November 22.[40] The IDF reported Israel arrested 29 people, of whom 3 were associated with Hamas, across the West Bank.[41]
CTP-ISW recorded two demonstrations in Ramallah in the West Bank on November 22.[42] One of the demonstrations took place outside the German consulate to protest Germany’s support for Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip.[43]
This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and demonstrations in the West Bank.
Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights
Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:
- Draw IDF assets and resources toward northern Israel and fix them there
- Set conditions for successive campaigns into northern Israel
Iranian-backed fighters, including LH, conducted 20 attacks on November 22 into Israeli territory from Lebanon. LH specifically claimed 16 attacks on Israeli border positions.[44] Unspecified fighters separately launched three rocket salvoes and sent one unspecified drone into northern Israel.[45] The IDF conducted multiple airstrikes targeting LH units conducting cross-border attacks and LH military infrastructure in southern Lebanon.[46]
Unspecified fighters in Syria fired rockets toward the Golan Heights on November 22 after the IDF carried out an airstrike targeting possible Iranian-backed fighters in Sayyida Zainab, Damascus.[47] Iranian-backed militia groups have long maintained bases in Sayyida Zainab and used it to facilitate Iranian lines of effort elsewhere in Syria.[48]
Iran and Axis of Resistance
Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:
- Demonstrate the capability and willingness of Iran and the Axis of Resistance to escalate against the United States and Israel on multiple fronts
- Set conditions to fight a regional war on multiple fronts
Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)—an umbrella security organization that ostensibly reports to the Iraqi prime minister—held a funeral for five Kataib Hezbollah (KH) members, who were killed in two US drone strikes on KH facilities on November 22.[49] Iranian-backed militias Ashab al Kahf and Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba offered condolences and congratulations to KH for the death and martyrdom of their militants.[50] The PMF-sponsored funeral, however, highlighted the militants’ affiliation with the PMF and referred to them as martyrs of the PMF.[51] The PMF funeral procession showed portraits of the killed KH militants alongside PMF insignia.[52] In doing so, Iranian-backed militias attempted to portray the US airstrike as having targeted a state-affiliated security organization and not members of the US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), KH.
Two unidentified defense officials reported that US fighter jets struck a KH operations center and KH command and control center in Jurf al Saqr, Babil Province, Iraq, on November 22 and confirmed that KH personnel were located at both facilities.[53] KH has retained control of Jurf al Saqr since 2021 following their forces' relocation of local Sunnis from the area from late 2020 to early 2021.[54] Iranian-backed militias expanded their presence within the Baghdad Belts in 2020 under the pretext of counter-ISIS operations following the US force drawdown.[55] However, during that time, ISIS was conducting targeted attacks in Jurf al Saqr to stoke ethnic conflict. Iranian-backed militias, namely KH, fed into the ISIS objective by forcibly displacing Sunnis from the area.[56] KH has prevented Sunnis from returning and has effectively blocked Iraqi security forces from operating in the area to mask their activities from the Iraqi government as ISW previously reported.[57]
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed two drone attacks on al Harir Airbase in retaliation for Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip.[58] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed 11 attacks on US forces stationed at al Harir Airbase since October 18.[59]
The IDF intercepted a Houthi cruise missile that targeted Eilat, Israel on November 22.[60] The IDF reported that one of its F-35 fighter jets intercepted a cruise missile over the Red Sea.[61] The Houthi Movement claimed the attack on Eilat in support of Palestinian militias fighting in the Gaza Strip.[62] The Houthis have claimed five drone and surface-to-surface missile attacks targeting Eilat since October 18.[63] The Houthi movement threatened on October 31 to ”continue its strikes with rockets and drones until the Israeli aggression [in the Gaza Strip] stops.”[64]
Senior Iranian, Hamas, Lebanese, LH, and PIJ officials met in Beirut on November 22 to discuss the four-day humanitarian pause between Israel and Hamas. Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian met with the Deputy Chairman of Hamas’ Political Bureau in the Gaza Strip, Khalil al Haya, PIJ Secretary General Ziyad al Nakhalah, and Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri.[65] Abdollahian discussed the four-day humanitarian pause in his meetings with these officials and Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanani told Iranian state media on November 22 that Abdollahian had traveled to Beirut to “help stabilize the ceasefire.”[66] LH-affiliated media reported that Abdollahian will also meet with LH Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.[67] Abdollahian’s visit to Beirut notably coincides with Nasrallah’s meeting with Haya and Hamas senior representative to Lebanon Osama Hamdan on November 22.[68] Abdollahian’s November 22 visit to Beirut marks his second trip to Lebanon since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7. Abdollahian last traveled to Beirut on October 12 as part of his regional diplomatic tour to Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Qatar, as CTP-ISW previously reported.[69]
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei discussed the Israel-Hamas war with a group of Iranian athletes in Tehran on November 22.[70] Khamenei warned that Israel’s “atrocities” will not go “unanswered” and that Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip will “shorten [Israel’s] lifespan.” Khamenei has used similarly threatening language in his speeches since October 7. He warned on October 17, for example, that the continuation of Israeli “crimes” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip will make resistance groups “impatient” and that “no one will be able to stop [these groups].”[71]
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi conducted an interview with five Axis of Resistance media outlets on November 22.[72] Raisi’s interview is noteworthy given that Iranian officials typically do not conduct interviews with numerous outlets simultaneously. Raisi conducted the interview with LH-affiliated al Manar, Kataib Hezbollah-operated al Etejah, PIJ-affiliated Filastin al Yawm, Hamas-controlled Al Aqsa TV, and Houthi-controlled al Masirah. Raisi claimed that Israel’s “insults” to the Al Aqsa Mosque and “killing” of Palestinians before October 7 precipitated the Al Aqsa Flood Operation. Raisi further claimed that the IDF has thus far failed to eliminate Hamas in the Gaza Strip and that the United States opposes a ceasefire because it fears a ceasefire “will make Israel’s defeat certain”[73]
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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