Quotes of the Day:

“Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” 

- Ernest Hemingway.

“Only the guy who isn't rowing has the time to rock the boat.” 

- John Paul Sartre

“To do the usual thing, to say, the craziest thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” 

- Thomas S. Eliot

1. Top 4 things to know about special operation forces right now

2. The Hamas-CNN axis is from China’s ‘Go to War’ playbook

3. Opinion | How feminists have failed Israeli victims of sexual violence

4. How the West lost the artillery shell race and what it means for Ukraine

5. Honoring Mike Spann: New book shines a light on a CIA officer’s heroism

6. The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook — Special Tactics

7. Journal to look at the complexities of psychological warfare

8. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 25, 2023

9. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 25, 2023

10. Pentagon's AI initiatives accelerate hard decisions on lethal autonomous weapons

11. Opinion: Holodomor in Perspective 90 Years On

12. Russia held these Ukrainian teens captive. Their testimonies could be used against Putin.

13. Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records

14. The tunnels: How Hamas buried Gaza's future

15. Can Taiwan Continue to Fight Off Chinese Disinformation?

16. Taiwan Draws Clear US-Versus-China Battle Lines in Key Election

17.  China, US exchange accusations over US vessel in South China Sea

18. Does the US actually want Ukraine to defeat Russia?

19. Queens high school students storm halls after learning teacher attended pro-Israel protest

20. Is Hamas buying time with hostage releases?

21. Meet the Israeli officer in charge of identifying victims of Hamas

22. Five wounded in Kyiv by largest drone attack yet on Ukraine

23. Russia says it downed dozens of Ukrainian drones headed for Moscow, following a mass strike on Kyiv

24. The Song and Dance of American Secrecy

25. A soldier in Vietnam and a girl wrote letters. Decades later, they finally met.

1. Top 4 things to know about special operation forces right now

The four:

Discussions focused on technology, modernization of the force and current conflicts, and possible cuts to special operation forces.  

No decision on cuts - likely unfilled billets. It will be important to understand the risk mitigation approach as mentioned by the ASD SO/LIC.

Sounds like the general no longer thinks UW is relevant, that it is an anachronism. I hope he is not implying that because he could not be more wrong. The OSS also provides a useful model for the future in so many ways, but he is giving the tired old line of all the OSS did was operate behind the in WWII. I think we need to keep in mind it was a complete special operations and intelligence organization. We need to learn from the past and not toss it away to chase some shiny new thing. But perhaps his comments were taken out of context or my interpretation is wrong so I will give him the benefit of the doubt.

Roberson said special operation forces are good at counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare but those forces were born out of a great power competition, starting with the Office of Strategic Services, where service members went behind enemy lines during World War II and into occupied China. 

He said leaders are now focusing on what’s next and modernization, but taking care of “people first” is the No. 1 priority as well.

Top 4 things to know about special operation forces right now

Rachael Riley

Fayetteville Observer

AD

0:06

The future of Army special operation forces was a topic of discussion for panelists, keynote speakers and military leaders during the Global SOF Foundation’s modern warfare symposium held last week at Fort Liberty. 

Speakers included Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, and Maj. Gen. Patrick Roberson, deputy commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command at Fort Liberty. 

Discussions focused on technology, modernization of the force and current conflicts, and possible cuts to special operation forces. 

Here’s a look at some of the highlights. 

Cuts to special operation forces 

During remarks Wednesday morning, Maier said the Army is at a point of transition and under pressure from recruiting shortfalls. 

“And the Army is going to look to USASOC enterprise to help pay down some of those bills and mitigate some of that risk, so we're looking towards some cuts in Army (special operation forces),” Maier said. 

Maier said leaders are taking a “risk mitigation approach” by looking at unfilled billets when considering cuts. 

At the same time, he said, officials want to “protect” high-end capabilities to preserve counterterrorism crisis response, while looking toward the future of fighting, whether that’s against counties like China, or supporting allies and partners.  

Maier said his office is working with USASOC’s higher command, the U.S. Special Operations Command, to build capabilities and “articulate” reasons for needing additional resources. 

Later Wednesday afternoon, Roberson declined to say which specific units could get cut. 

“We haven’t decided quite yet … That's ongoing ... sensitive information,” Roberson said.  

Roberson said leaders are evaluating how to adjust to what’s important and asking what is needed for the future. 

However, he said he thinks information operations are important in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s capabilities. 

Is Army, Department of Defense considering cuts to special operation forces?

Future warfare

 Maier said the core mission of counterterrorism and “creating dilemmas for adversaries and options for senior leaders” remain for special operations forces. 

Meanwhile, he said, special operation forces are positioned to be a leader in areas like cyberspace and electronic warfare.  

“I think the model that we continue to advocate for is one where SOF is really able to shape the potential conflict before it even occurs,” Maier said. 

Roberson said special operation forces are good at counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare but those forces were born out of a great power competition, starting with the Office of Strategic Services, where service members went behind enemy lines during World War II and into occupied China. 

He said leaders are now focusing on what’s next and modernization, but taking care of “people first” is the No. 1 priority as well.

Technology

Roberson said people also need the right technology to operate. 

“We're also looking at how do we change our information because of this technology,” Roberson said. 

Technology is evolving to include robotic dogs for surveillance and use of unmanned aerial systems, he said.  

Roberson said that because operational detachment teams often operate miles from a commander or team leader, communication is also a priority. 

“How do we communicate in an encrypted way? How do we communicate with partners? How do you do that without being detected?” he said. 

Areas of operations

Roberson said that after 20 years of fighting in the Middle East, special operation forces are also focusing on other areas like the Indo-Pacific region. 

Forces remain in the U.S. Central Command area, the U.S. Africa Command and Southern Command areas, he said. 

Roberson said that from 2001 to 2019, special operation forces weren’t just in the U.S. Central Command area in the Middle East, and that half their deployments were in other areas of the world like Ukraine. 

Roberson said that after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, American forces worked with Ukrainians to train their forces and rebuild Ukraine’s special operation forces.  

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.

2. The Hamas-CNN axis is from China’s ‘Go to War’ playbook

Kerry Gershaneck is providing an important service here.  

I have written the following before.

I have a simple recommended concept to consider: Recognize, Understand, EXPOSE, Attack.

First we must recognize the adversary's strategy - its overall strategy to include its information and influence strategy,

We must gain a sufficient (but hopefully) deep understanding of the strategies as this will help us to develop concepts to counter them as well as develop a superior influence strategy.

We must EXPOSE the adversaries strategy. We must tell the multiple target audiences (e.g., US public, Ukraine Public, Russian, PRC, Iran (and now Palestinian), and north Korean publics, International community) what the adversary's strategy is, how it is executing it and what the adversary is trying to achieve. The intent of exposure is to "inoculate" the "friendly" target audiences. If they understand the strategy and what it is trying to accomplish, how it is trying to influence them, then they are less likely to be influenced by it. We are helping to develop sufficient critical thinking among the populations by providing knowledge and understanding. Knowledge and understanding is like a vaccine against the virus of propaganda.

Lastly we have to attack the enemy's strategy with a superior information strategy. (e.g., political warfare)

A superior influence strategy should be based on four concepts: Large amounts of Information, Practical information, the Truth, and Understanding.

Target audiences need large amounts of information to inform them - from news to entertainment - e.g., stories that describe what is happening and why, either directly or indirectly through fiction (but not lies).

Target audiences need practical information - what actions can they take to defend themselves from propaganda and from the overall adversary strategy - and some target audiences like the Ukraine public (and Russian, PRC, Iranian, and north Korean) need practical information on how to resist as well as how to survive. For example, useful information from the Ukraine government and the international community can help sustain the people's lives and sustain support for the resistance and for the defense of Ukraine.

Target audiences need the truth - but they need the truth before the propaganda lies from the adversary - "a lie goes around the world before the truth can put its pants on." The target audiences must be saturated with the truth - good AND bad information - this is why there needs to be massive amounts of information and this is how you help inculate the people from propaganda. 

Lastly, the target audiences need to understand the threat, the adversaries' strategies, the effects on them, and their human rights, 

And I cannot emphasize this enough (from the 2017 NSS):

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

Access 2017 NSS HERE

:

The Hamas-CNN axis is from China’s ‘Go to War’ playbook

washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

China’s ‘Go to War’ news media playbook illustration by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times China’s ‘Go to War’ news media … more >

By Kerry K. Gershaneck - - Saturday, November 25, 2023

OPINION:

Early on the morning of Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists savagely massacred roughly 1,400 Israelis and took hostage about 400 more, the press was in place, ready — and seemingly eager — to record the action. News media collaboration with Hamas is not unprecedented, but this time, America must pay attention. In the not-too-distant future, we will see such media collaboration with China’s forces attacking American troops and installations as part of its much broader political warfare playbook. We are not prepared.

According to Reporters Without Borders, photojournalists affiliated with CNN, Associated Press, The New York Times, and Reuters knew where to be when the Hamas butchery began. Some were apparently embedded with the terrorists as they infiltrated Israel on their mission of sadistic mass murder and abduction. International news organizations published the reporters’ images and reports, in effect assisting Hamas’ psychological warfare and propaganda campaign.

Like these news organizations, China is also supporting Hamas’ psychological warfare and propaganda. While news media collaboration with Hamas is not without precedent, Beijing’s increasingly sophisticated political warfare support for Hamas is unprecedented. Beijing has not condemned Hamas’ mass murder and hostage-taking, and its propaganda platforms block all reports about Hamas’s savage attack while sensationalizing Israel’s military response. Further, anti-Israeli propaganda on Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-affiliated TikTok is having a global impact. Finally, China is coordinating its propaganda campaign with Russia and Iran, complicating efforts to detect and defeat it.

In fact, Hamas’ co-option of the news media is straight out of China’s political warfare playbook. George Kennan defined political warfare as all means a nation uses to achieve its strategic objectives short of kinetic war. China‘s political warfare includes media warfare, legal warfare, psychological warfare, United Front operations, active measures like assassination, and a seemingly endless array of unrestricted warfare. As China’s playbook unfolds in the Hamas-Israel conflict, we see what will unfold when Beijing initiates kinetic war. Like Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, that war may come faster than expected.

True, it seems fashionable lately for some U.S. officials and celebrity China hands to proclaim that “Everyone knows China prefers to win without fighting, so Xi Jinping is not going to attack (fill in the blank).” The first clause is true: who wouldn’t want to win a war without fighting? But the second clause reflects dangerously wishful thinking.

China has indeed achieved notable strategic victories without fighting. Declaring sovereignty over the South China Sea and militarizing manmade islands, there is one such victory achieved after years of preparation that ensured a feckless global response. However, if Beijing perceives that political warfare alone will not deliver what it wants, it will start a war. Take Mr. Xi’s word on that: The CCP’s top theoretical journal, Qiushi, reports that Xi’s recent speeches strongly emphasize preparation for war, a war he expects to initiate and win.

Chinese doctrine is to strike first, so China will conduct a deliberate surprise attack. But China could also inadvertently ignite a war as a result of the over-zealous People’s Liberation Army (PLA) or maritime armed forces attacking South China Sea claimants or its dangerous air intercepts of U.S. and other nations’ military aircraft. Regardless of what sparks the war, China’s fight for public opinion will be its second battlefield.

Before firing the first missile, China’s highest-level officials will closely plan and direct political warfare operations. The goal is to generate public support worldwide, weaken the U.S. and allies’ will to fight, and hyper-nationalize Chinese and the global Chinese diaspora. Its wide-ranging political warfare apparatus will be primed and ready, with propaganda, disinformation, and deception products prepared well in advance.

China will strike first, and it will be the first to broadcast. Its narrative will dominate the airwaves, frame the narrative and subsequent debate, and define the subsequent coverage. It will closely coordinate with co-opted foreign news media to supplement its already formidable global propaganda platforms such as Xinhua and China Global Television Network.

Through such means as purchasing news media outlets and coercion, China has co-opted most Chinese-language news media globally. Further, it controls many news media organizations across the Global South, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas. Beijing will exploit this co-opted media to distract, deceive, and demoralize America and coalition partners and sway public opinion to China’s side.

As part of its media warfare, China will embed its own propagandists and selected foreign journalists into its attacking force. Once combat begins, the embedded journalists and propagandists will be expected to do the PLA’s bidding. For example, they will be required to celebrate PLA victories, highlight coalition setbacks and defeats and report falsified allegations of U.S. and coalition war crimes, civilian casualties caused by coalition forces, and the surrender of coalition forces. Meanwhile, the PLA’s Strategic Support Force, roughly 300,000 strong, will conduct media warfare and psychological warfare against U.S. and coalition forces. In a form of civil-military fusion, it will conduct cyberattacks that reinforce social media warfare by China’s so-called netizens and 50-Cent Army.

There are many other ways that China will wage political warfare during combat operations. The Oct. 7 Hamas attack provides forewarning. For example, like Hamas, China routinely takes hostages, so in wartime, it will take hostage Americans living there and in territory it occupies to wring concessions from the United States. Like Hamas, Beijing will also instigate mass protests and rallies in cities globally to divide its opponents, as well as at ports and other transport facilities to disrupt the coalition war effort. And like Hamas, China will use legal warfare and its supporters in international organizations to try to paralyze coalition operations.

Hamas may have surprised some with its media co-option on Oct. 7, but China’s political warfare during a war against America is clearly foreseeable. This threat deserves far greater attention than the executive branch has afforded it, so it must begin intelligently planning for it, along with friends and allies. Failure to do so will likely result in America’s failure to achieve our wartime objectives, regardless of the outcome on the kinetic battlefield.

• Kerry K. Gershaneck is a specialist on hybrid threats and fellow at the NATO Allied Command Operations Office of Legal Affairs. He is the author of the book Political Warfare: Strategies for Combatting China’s Plan to ‘Win Without Fighting.’

Copyright © 2023 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Click to Read More and View Comments

Click to Hide

washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

3. Opinion | How feminists have failed Israeli victims of sexual violence

This is terrible. If we cannot condemn these acts then we have lost all our humanity.

Excerpts:

In stark contrast, former Facebook Chief Operating Officer and feminist writer Sheryl Sandberg issued a plea this week that is both obvious and urgent: Regardless of our politics, we must all unconditionally denounce rape. It is telling that it took six weeks for an unsparing condemnation of this act of mass sexual violence from a prominent feminist to surface and that it came from Sandberg, whose “lean-in feminism” is commonly (and I think sometimes fairly) criticized by progressives as individualistic and corporatist. Unfettered by the ideological commitments of the left at this moment, however, she articulated a truth too few have dared to express. Sandberg joins a small and hopefully growing number of less well-known voices raising similar alarms.

The most vocal American advocates for taking the rapes of Israeli women seriously, however, have been from the political right. Even a glancing assessment of their record on reproductive rights, rape legislation or essentially any “women’s issue” suggests this advocacy is as much about instrumentalizing this gender-based violence to advance Israeli military interests as it is about sincere concern.

Along with fighting to free Palestinians from Hamas, feminists should be the loudest in decrying this mass sexual violence perpetrated during the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Fortunately, feminism has always been a work in progress, and this is not the first time the movement must break free of obsolete, obstructionist ideology to more equitably advance the interests of all women. As a historian of gender, a feminist, a woman and a Jew, I hope we move forward by returning to the movement’s most important principle: the essential worth and bodily integrity of all women.

Opinion | How feminists have failed Israeli victims of sexual violence

The skepticism that met Israeli women’s claims perpetuates traditions of dehumanizing Jews.

Nov. 25, 2023, 8:49 AM EST

By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, historian and author of "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession"

msnbc.com

Anyone who watched the first, horrifying videos of Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 could reasonably assume that sexual violence was at least part of this terror campaign. Bystanders recounted the rapes of friends at the Supernova music festival. Further reporting has supplied more details of the extraordinarily brutal picture of sexual assaults that took place. And while sexual trauma is often hard to document because of shame, bias and a lack of witnesses, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the director of the Israeli Commission on Hamas’ October 7 Crimes Against Women, argues for more resources to document this evidence but unsparingly relays that the problem here is simpler: Many of these victims cannot speak up because they are dead (some of them, forensic evidence suggests, were posthumously violated again).

In times of war and peace, rape is always a crime. Sexual violence on the battlefield, perpetrated against women, children and men, remains perhaps the ultimate, most intrusive way of asserting dominance, and international law in the last three decades has criminalized this behavior more strongly. Here in the U.S., breaches of sexual consent in civilian life (intimate partner violence, street harassment, workplace propositions, etc.) have increasingly come to be understood as existing on a continuum with stranger rape, all of which merit redress. Feminist activists can largely take credit for this formidable progress on all fronts.

So why, then, in a moment when statements of solidarity fly fast and furious, have feminists and their progressive allies not been more outspoken about the grotesque sexual violence visited upon Israeli women on Oct. 7?

Many feminist organizations rushed to express support for the Palestinian cause while eliding the plight of Israeli victims. The organization UN Women issued a four-page report last month exclusively addressing the impact of the war on women and girls in Gaza but made only a brief condemnation of the Oct. 7 attack that made no mention of the sexual violence that had been reported. A group of prominent scholars circulated a letter under the title “Feminists for a Free Palestine,” without explicitly condemning the sexual violence against Israeli women.

College campus groups have furnished other examples, such as the women’s students’ groups at Harvard that signed on to a letter holding Israel entirely responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks or the (now-former) director of the University of Alberta’s Sexual Assault Center’s signing on to a letter doubting the veracity of accounts of Israeli rape survivors. Even the office on my own campus that is devoted to helping students “lead social-justice centered lives” issued thousands of words in solidarity with the Palestinians and did not once acknowledge the sexual violence (or murder or abduction) perpetrated by Hamas. And then there are the familiar conversations like those that Miriam Schler, the executive director of a Tel Aviv crisis center, reports having with friends who style themselves “champions of human rights, feminism, and social justice” but who “have been bending over backwards to justify atrocities and rationalize rape.”

The site of a music festival near the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on Oct. 12.Ohad Zwigenberg / AP file

This tragic minimization — or justification, in some cases — of violence against Israeli women appears to be the result of an ideological turn among some feminists and progressives that elevates an “antiracist” agenda above the core feminist commitment to defend the universal right to bodily autonomy for all women. This argument contends that because Israel is a colonial power oppressing the Palestinians, any resistance is a justified dimension of decolonization. The “settler colonialism” concept that undergirds this position, however, is insufficient to characterize a complex conflict between two majority nonwhite peoples who both have long-standing claims to the contested land. When such a theory serves to excuse rape, it is simply indefensible.

This impulse, importantly, comes from an inspired place: the effort by Western feminists to depart from the movement’s long history of racial exclusivity. At the movement’s inception in the 19th century, white women fought for their own suffrage at the expense of Black enfranchisement and for decades often uncritically sought personal advancement within political and labor systems that excluded women of color.

Rape was an arena in which this racial disparity was most acutely felt — and where multiracial feminist coalitions have formed most powerfully, especially since the 1970s. Nonwhite and working-class women had long been largely disbelieved when they accused men of rape — Black women were considered “inviolable,” because they were either categorized as property during slavery or, after emancipation, deemed lacking in virtue. The anti-rape movement combated these glaring biases in the legal system and the culture. Rejecting the idea that some women were inherently more credible or “legitimate” victims of sexual violence than others based on their race or class background became one of the movement’s organizing objectives and animated some of its most important contributions.

Has the feminist movement become so hidebound by a reductive conception of liberation that it has abandoned its essential purpose to defend the bodily autonomy of all women, regardless of their identities or political contexts? For all the talk of antiracism, the skepticism that has met Israeli women’s claims is perpetuating a centuries-long antisemitic tradition of dehumanizing Jews.

Has the feminist movement become so hidebound by a reductive conception of liberation that it has abandoned its essential purpose to defend the bodily autonomy of all women?

In stark contrast, former Facebook Chief Operating Officer and feminist writer Sheryl Sandberg issued a plea this week that is both obvious and urgent: Regardless of our politics, we must all unconditionally denounce rape. It is telling that it took six weeks for an unsparing condemnation of this act of mass sexual violence from a prominent feminist to surface and that it came from Sandberg, whose “lean-in feminism” is commonly (and I think sometimes fairly) criticized by progressives as individualistic and corporatist. Unfettered by the ideological commitments of the left at this moment, however, she articulated a truth too few have dared to express. Sandberg joins a small and hopefully growing number of less well-known voices raising similar alarms.

The most vocal American advocates for taking the rapes of Israeli women seriously, however, have been from the political right. Even a glancing assessment of their record on reproductive rights, rape legislation or essentially any “women’s issue” suggests this advocacy is as much about instrumentalizing this gender-based violence to advance Israeli military interests as it is about sincere concern.

Along with fighting to free Palestinians from Hamas, feminists should be the loudest in decrying this mass sexual violence perpetrated during the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Fortunately, feminism has always been a work in progress, and this is not the first time the movement must break free of obsolete, obstructionist ideology to more equitably advance the interests of all women. As a historian of gender, a feminist, a woman and a Jew, I hope we move forward by returning to the movement’s most important principle: the essential worth and bodily integrity of all women.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is associate professor of history at The New School in New York City. She is the author of two books, most recently "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession," and the host of the "Past Present" podcast. 

msnbc.com

4. How the West lost the artillery shell race and what it means for Ukraine

The three victories again.

Excerpts:

“We need three victories. The first one is the victory with [the] US Congress. It’s a challenge, it’s not easy, but Ukraine is doing everything,” Mr Zelensky told a news conference in Kyiv.

President Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve many billions of dollars in assistance for Ukraine, but Kyiv’s funding was omitted from a stop-gap spending bill passed last week, raising concerns it may not get through in the face of stiff opposition from a vocal bloc of Republicans.

Mr Zelensky also zeroed in on a €50 billion package from the EU that was announced earlier for Ukraine, but has not yet been approved and is so far opposed by Hungary.

“The second [victory] is we need the help from the EU on the €50 billion package,” the Ukrainian leader said. “And the third is to open a dialogue about our future membership.”

Kyiv hopes the European Union’s members will agree at a summit on Dec 14-15 to formally launch the long process of talks for Kyiv to join the bloc, a move that Mr Zelensky said would improve Ukrainian morale.

How the West lost the artillery shell race and what it means for Ukraine

While President Zelensky warns his munition stockpiles are waning, Moscow receives one million shells from North Korea

By

Joe Barnes,

 BRUSSELS CORRESPONDENT

25 November 2023 • 2:08pm

The Telegraph · by Joe Barnes,

As the weather worsens and front lines are frozen in place, Ukraine is struggling to secure enough artillery shells to change the equation.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned key shipments of 155mm munitions have dropped off after fighting erupted between Israel and Hamas last month.

Both Ukraine and Russia have struggled to maintain stockpiles of shells after nearly two years of long-range duels across vast battlefields.

But recently Moscow has received one million shells from its ally North Korea in 10 separate shipments since August, according to South Korea’s intelligence service.

This has helped sustain Russian forces in a renewed attempt to capture Avdiivka, pummelling the Donetsk region town relentlessly with artillery fire.

At the same time, the European Union has conceded its one-year target to deliver a million shells to Kyiv by next March will not be reached.

The bloc has delivered around 300,000 shells, mainly from national stockpiles, since the programme started on Feb 9.

Diplomats and ministers moved to blame Europe’s production capabilities and a failure to significantly ramp up manufacturing, for the lacklustre performance.

Ukraine was estimated to be firing around 6,000 155mm rounds a day, according to Western intelligence figures, whereas Russia was firing 20,000 a day – the same amount produced by European manufacturers each month.

Rates of fire often varied depending on intensity of fighting and external supplies.

The release of dual-purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM) clusters by the United States eased some of the problems because there were significant stockpiles of those shells.

“This has helped mitigate fears of artillery ammunition shortage, especially in light of commitments in Israel,” Justin Crump, CEO of strategic intelligence company Sibylline, said.

Artillery ammunition is one of the main demands from Ukraine when it holds talks with its Western allies about support for its war effort.

Kyiv recently received a promise for more 155mm shells from Germany as part of a €1.4 billion military aid package.

Meanwhile, the US is rushing to ramp up shell production to replenish reserves of munitions now being drained by both Ukraine and Israel.

Earlier this month, the US Army urged Congress to approve $3.1 billion in funding to buy 155mm artillery rounds and expand production.

Of the $3.1 billion specific to 155mm artillery, about half would go to boosting industrial capacity with the remainder going to buying rounds, said Doug Bush, the chief weapons buyer for the US Army.

A Ukrainian soldier fires artillery as the war continues in the direction of Bakhmut Credit: Diego Herrera Carcedo/Getty

The US plans to increase its production rate for 155mm artillery shells to 100,000 a month. But it is not expected to hit that target until 2025.

The slow pace with which allies are boosting artillery production means Ukraine is unlikely to be able to tip the balance on the battlefield.

Experts say it will likely be able to cling on, however.

“[Ukraine] could certainly use more, but for now both sides have sufficient supplies to maintain the fight, albeit rarely to move the front line under current conditions,” said Mr Crump.

In response to the repeated requests from Kyiv, Western governments have argued they are aiming to equip Ukraine’s forces with higher-quality long-range weapon systems.

The introduction of the air-launched Storm Shadow cruise missile, donated by Britain and France, and the US Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), have significantly helped overcome Russia’s advantage in numbers.

The Kremlin’s artillery advantage has been gradually eroded in almost 20 months of fighting, with Russian forces losing around 600 guns and launchers.

Moscow is believed to be losing four times more artillery systems than Kyiv on the main axes of the southern counter-offensive.

But still without shells, Ukraine will not be able to hold back Russian advances, nor attempt to advance in the future.

The situation is a growing concern, Mr Crump said, as a Cold War-era surplus of artillery munitions meant factories were shut down.

“With stockpiles of all sorts drawing down, and long lead times to replace, this does create a point of Western vulnerability that should cause policymakers concern,” he added.

‘We need three victories’

Mr Zelensky on Friday outlined three key “victories” that his country had to secure on the international front – two of which were centred on arms deliveries.

“We need three victories. The first one is the victory with [the] US Congress. It’s a challenge, it’s not easy, but Ukraine is doing everything,” Mr Zelensky told a news conference in Kyiv.

President Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve many billions of dollars in assistance for Ukraine, but Kyiv’s funding was omitted from a stop-gap spending bill passed last week, raising concerns it may not get through in the face of stiff opposition from a vocal bloc of Republicans.

Mr Zelensky also zeroed in on a €50 billion package from the EU that was announced earlier for Ukraine, but has not yet been approved and is so far opposed by Hungary.

“The second [victory] is we need the help from the EU on the €50 billion package,” the Ukrainian leader said. “And the third is to open a dialogue about our future membership.”

Kyiv hopes the European Union’s members will agree at a summit on Dec 14-15 to formally launch the long process of talks for Kyiv to join the bloc, a move that Mr Zelensky said would improve Ukrainian morale.

The Telegraph · by Joe Barnes,

5. Honoring Mike Spann: New book shines a light on a CIA officer’s heroism

Another great American serving with other great Aemericans.

Excerpts:

Mr. Spann and Mr. Tyson were part of the eight-man “Team Alpha,” the first Americans to fight behind Taliban enemy lines after the September 11 terrorist attacks. J.R. Seeger led Team Alpha with his deputy Alex Hernandez. Members of the team included CIA Officer Scott Spellmeyer, who had fought as a US Army officer in the Battle of Mogadishu; CIA Medic Mark Rausenberger; Green Beret Capt. Justin Sapp; and “Andy,” whose last name is still classified because he is still actively serving in the CIA.

The heart-stopping, inspiring account of Mr. Spann, Mr. Tyson and their fellow American heroes is poignantly recounted in Toby Harnden’s new “First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA mission to Avenge 9/11.”

...

As one of my mentors used to say, “The secret of our success at CIA is the secret of our success.” CIA officers most often serve their country anonymously, in the shadows, doing work that can never be talked about but which is crucial to keeping our nation safe.

Mr. Harnden deserves kudos for lifting the veil on this amazing mission and shining the spotlight with grace and historical accuracy on Mike Spann, Dave Tyson and their fellow courageous Alpha Team members, who infiltrated Afghanistan to take the fight to the enemy 36 days after 9/11 and will forever inspire those who follow in their footsteps.

Honoring Mike Spann: New book shines a light on a CIA officer’s heroism

An ethos to collect intelligence to protect our country even while putting oneself in harm's way

washingtontimes.com · by Daniel N. Hoffman

Honoring Mike Spann Illustration by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times Honoring Mike Spann Illustration by Alexander … more >

By - - Thursday, November 18, 2021

OPINION:

When I served in the CIA, I became accustomed to looking over at the stars on the memorial wall commemorating our fallen heroes each time I entered and departed CIA Headquarters.

Although I was personally acquainted with very few of those brave patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our grateful nation, their legacies shaped and defined my career and the careers of so many of my colleagues throughout the intelligence community.

I never met Marine Corps officer and CIA paramilitary Case Officer Mike Spann, the first American killed in combat in Afghanistan in the U.S. launched Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 against the Taliban and al Qaeda. But I was deeply knowledgeable of Mr. Spann’s sacred mission, especially through my friendship with now-retired CIA officer Dave Tyson.

Mr. Spann and Mr. Tyson were part of the eight-man “Team Alpha,” the first Americans to fight behind Taliban enemy lines after the September 11 terrorist attacks. J.R. Seeger led Team Alpha with his deputy Alex Hernandez. Members of the team included CIA Officer Scott Spellmeyer, who had fought as a US Army officer in the Battle of Mogadishu; CIA Medic Mark Rausenberger; Green Beret Capt. Justin Sapp; and “Andy,” whose last name is still classified because he is still actively serving in the CIA.

The heart-stopping, inspiring account of Mr. Spann, Mr. Tyson and their fellow American heroes is poignantly recounted in Toby Harnden’s new “First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA mission to Avenge 9/11.”

CIA officers learn during their basic training that they control very little beyond their own preparation. In contrast to the U.S. military, whose primary mission often entails shaping or controlling the battlespace, CIA case officers are trained to recruit spies and steal secrets by immersing themselves in overseas environments and exploiting their adversaries’ blind spots.

With near-native Uzbek language skills as well as fluent Russian, Turkish, and Turkmen, Mr. Tyson established deep rapport and trust with Afghanistan‘s Northern Alliance leaders, including Abdul Rashid Dostum.

On November 25, 2001, Mike Spann and Dave Tyson were collecting intelligence on terrorist threats from the roughly 400 al Qaead detainees at Qala-i-Jangi, a historic fort in Mazar-i-Sharif. Back home, the Bush administration was searching for the perpetrator of anthrax attacks, which began a week after 9/11, and wading through a dizzying array of intelligence on emerging al Qaeda terrorist threats.

On that day there was arguably no more important mission for the CIA than Mr. Spann and Mr. Tyson’s interrogation of hardened al Qaeda fighters, some of whom had received training in toxins and chemical weapons in the terror groups Afghanistan-based training camps.

Mr. Spann spotted one particular high-value detainee, John Walker Lindh, the American who moved to Afghanistan and trained at al Qaeda’s infamous al Farouq training camp, which at least seven of the 9/11 hijackers had also attended. Weeks before the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Lindh had reportedly met with Osama bin Laden and learned of the planned attacks on the U.S. homeland.

Mr. Harnden makes a significant contribution to our understanding of CIA’s impact on the war and on the events of that fateful November day, when al Qaeda detainees attacked and killed Spann. Based on interviews with those present at the fort, including two doctors who witnessed Mr. Spann’s final moments, the author recounts how Mr. Spann heroically defended himself against impossible odds and Mr. Tyson fought his way to safety after first trying unsuccessfully to save his colleague’s life.

It was a tragic loss for our country, but, as Mr. Spann’s wife Shannon has emphasized, we should admire Mr. Spann most of all for how he lived. He embodied the best of what CIA officers strive for — an ethos to collect intelligence to protect our country even while putting oneself in harm’s way. Mr. Spann was a role model for me during the three years I spent serving alone in war zones in the Middle East and South Asia. The lessons he taught me: Remember we are deployed to preempt threats before they are visited on our shores. Take care of our people. Respect their sacrifices and those of their families.

As one of my mentors used to say, “The secret of our success at CIA is the secret of our success.” CIA officers most often serve their country anonymously, in the shadows, doing work that can never be talked about but which is crucial to keeping our nation safe.

Mr. Harnden deserves kudos for lifting the veil on this amazing mission and shining the spotlight with grace and historical accuracy on Mike Spann, Dave Tyson and their fellow courageous Alpha Team members, who infiltrated Afghanistan to take the fight to the enemy 36 days after 9/11 and will forever inspire those who follow in their footsteps.

• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.

Copyright © 2023 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Click to Read More and View Comments

Click to Hide

washingtontimes.com · by Daniel N. Hoffman

6. The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook — Special Tactics

I remember buying Lind's first Maneuver Warfare handbook in paperback in the 1980s for about $35 because I thought I needed it for professional development.

And I will buy this one because one of my mentors', LTG Jim Dubik, is telling me to do so! I am going to have to go through the boxes of books I still have in theb basement and dig up the original.

Excerpts:

In the coming weeks we will be publishing new articles and resources relating to The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook and maneuver warfare in general. We are excited to be publishing and have contributed to what we believe will be a military classic, just like the original. In his foreword to the new book, Lieutenant-General James Dubik writes…

My advice? Read [both Maneuver Warfare Handbooks] thoroughly, discuss them widely, then implement them in your unit’s training and professional development programs. You’ll be glad to you did. So will your unit and your subordinates. In the end, your books will be as worn as mine.

That is truly high praise coming from a combat commander of LTG Dubik’s calibre and experience. The new book is now available for purchase in electronic form on Amazon Kindle and the hard copy is available for pre-order at a 20-percent off discount. The print book will be ready to ship on 14 December 2023.

The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook — Special Tactics

specialtactics.me · November 22, 2023

PRE-ORDER THE HARD COPY

BUY THE KINDLE E-BOOK

Special Tactics is proud to have collaborated with William S. Lind, LTG(ret) James Dubik and Don Vandergriff in creating The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook. Since the original Maneuver Warfare Handbook was published in 1985, understanding of maneuver warfare has broadened and deepened. Here, the author of the original book, William S. Lind, shares that new knowledge with readers. The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook offers novel insights in military theory while remaining focused on the people who do the fighting, Marines and soldiers from Battalion level on down through staff NCOs and NCOs. The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook is not a replacement or “new edition” of the original, but rather augments the original book in ways useful to commanders at every tactical level.

The original book included an appendix by Marine Colonel Mike Wiley’s called “An Introduction to Tactics.” In the new book, the Special Tactics Staff has written a new version of this appendix and we have done our best to carry on the high-standards set by Colonel Wiley in the original. The new version differs from the original in that it places an increased emphasis on small-unit tactics in an effort to better relate to and capture the attention of junior officers and NCOs who lead and command at the small unit level. Some believe that maneuver warfare theory only starts to apply at the company or battalion level. They argue that squads and platoons are not really capable of independent initiative and thus must base their actions on more rigid drills. We disagree strongly with this perspective and believe that small unit excellence and initiative, down to the squad or even fire team level, is critical for success in maneuver warfare.

The book contains two additional appendices not included in the original version. The appendix on “Outcomes Based Learning” is written by Donald E. Vandergriff with contributions and input from the inter-service subject matter experts of the Special Tactics Staff. It is adapted from Special Tactics’ Outcomes Based Learning Professional Handbook (also written by Donald Vandergriff) and various articles and books Vandergriff has written over the years.

The final appendix on “Training for Mission Command” is comprised of four articles written by LTG(ret) James Dubik. The articles cover a wide range of key topics for understanding how to conduct maneuver warfare. A common theme of these chapters is the often-neglected point that success in maneuver warfare is not just about empowering subordinates, but also setting the conditions so that subordinates will succeed once empowered.

In the coming weeks we will be publishing new articles and resources relating to The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook and maneuver warfare in general. We are excited to be publishing and have contributed to what we believe will be a military classic, just like the original. In his foreword to the new book, Lieutenant-General James Dubik writes…

My advice? Read [both Maneuver Warfare Handbooks] thoroughly, discuss them widely, then implement them in your unit’s training and professional development programs. You’ll be glad to you did. So will your unit and your subordinates. In the end, your books will be as worn as mine.

That is truly high praise coming from a combat commander of LTG Dubik’s calibre and experience. The new book is now available for purchase in electronic form on Amazon Kindle and the hard copy is available for pre-order at a 20-percent off discount. The print book will be ready to ship on 14 December 2023.

PRE-ORDER THE HARD COPY

BUY THE KINDLE E-BOOK

specialtactics.me · November 22, 2023

7. Journal to look at the complexities of psychological warfare

I am honored to be on the editorial board of this new (or reborn) publication.

Ryan Shaw and Arizona State University are doing a lot of innovative work with competitive statecreat, political warfare, and irregular warfare.

Journal to look at the complexities of psychological warfare

news.asu.edu · by Marshall Terrill · November 22, 2023

November 22, 2023

ASU's Competitive Statecraft Initiative will produce Inter Populum, a new academic journal dedicated to issues surrounding irregular warfare

Arizona State University has long had the reputation and designation as a military-friendly school. From the celebrated McCain Institute to the Pat Tillman Veterans Center to the Global Security Initiative, the university’s connection to the United States military runs deep.

Ryan Shaw, who served as an officer in the U.S. Army and earned his commission at West Point, is working to add more components to ASU’s mission. In addition to his direction and leadership over ASU’s Competitive Statecraft Initiative, he recently helped launch Inter Populum: The Journal of Irregular Warfare and Special Operations, a new peer-reviewed academic journal that will be published twice a year.

According to Shaw, a professor of practice in history and strategy, managing director of strategic initiatives and senior advisor to ASU President Michael Crow, Inter Populum will explore everything from lessons learned through historical case studies to current best practices to the nature of future conflict.

Shaw spoke to ASU News about the academic journal, irregular warfare and what it means for the world going forward.

Editor's note: Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Ryan Shaw

Question: Most people’s first question would be a pretty simple one: What is irregular warfare?

Answer: Actually, that’s not a simple question at all. The U.S. military just approved a new doctrinal definition for irregular warfare (IW).

To my mind, there are three important factors that any good definition should account for. First is the “who” — if it's only professional soldiers wearing uniforms with flags on their soldiers, it’s probably not IW. IW usually involves insurgents, criminal gangs, proxies or others that can be called “non-state actors.”

Second is the “what” — if it’s force-on-force battles like what you think of with the two world wars, that’s conventional warfare. IW involves less direct forms of combat, like guerilla tactics, terrorism, subversion, sabotage and resistance.

But the third factor is, I think, the most important one for defining irregular warfare: the “why.” Conventional war is usually a fight to destroy another military or to seize a piece of terrain. But the “target” of irregular warfare is the people themselves — more specifically, their loyalty and their perceptions of the legitimacy of their government.

Of course, it’s much harder to measure success when the target is psychological rather than physical. That’s why IW is more complex than conventional war — not harder, necessarily, but definitely more complex. And that’s why the journal is named “Inter Populum.” That’s Latin for “among the people.” IW is sometimes referred to as war among the people — it’s the human domain that matters most.

Q: Are there elements of irregular warfare going on right now with Ukraine-Russia, China-Taiwan and Hamas?

A: For sure. Hamas is a terrorist organization employing irregular tactics. And they, like Hezbollah, are Iranian proxies, so from an IW perspective, that conflict is much bigger than just Gaza. Many elements of the war in Ukraine are conventional, but the Wagner Group is a private company that has been stirring up trouble in Ukraine on behalf of the Russian state for a decade now. And both sides there are working to build resistance movements in the territory they consider their own. Taiwan is doing the same as they feel increasingly threatened by the Peoples Republic of China. And while China knows it would be folly to provoke a conventional war with the U.S., either directly or by bullying our allies, they consistently use irregular means to chip away at our influence and advantages without sparking a major war. Irregular warfare is alive and well.

Q: Why did you take on this additional role?

A: Because the world needs this journal, and because ASU is the ideal home for it. That sounds grandiose, but I believe it’s true. There is a real need for more rigorous scholarship around these issues.

The U.S. spent two decades tangled up in counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives — many of them people I knew and served with. That was IW — and to say the least, it didn’t work out like we’d hoped. Now, all the attention is on preparing for a big, conventional war with China or Russia and everybody thinks that means we can forget about IW. But IW is never going away. As long as we can deter our adversaries from taking us on in conventional or nuclear war, they will try to chip away at our strategic advantages through IW. And the terrorism problem isn’t going anywhere, either. Getting these things right doesn’t cost big money like battleships and fighter jets — the real investment required is intellectual. That’s why a journal like this is important.

And I do think ASU is the right home. We’re already offering graduate programs specifically in IW — few universities do that. We’re ranked No. 1 in the U.S. for transdisciplinary research, and IW is inherently transdisciplinary. We’ve got excellent faculty with the right expertise and vast experience, and we have deep connections into the military and special ops communities. Besides that, our publishing team is exceptional, and they’ve been very supportive.

Q: Who is Inter Populum’s intended audience?

A: We aim to make it useful to both scholars and practitioners. That is, people who study these things in universities and at think tanks, and also those who are “doing” irregular warfare, whether in the military, defense civilians in the intelligence community and law enforcement, and even policymakers who write the laws and provide the funding to make IW work.

And not just in the U.S. One of ASU’s great assets in this space is Security & Defense PLuS, our partnership with King’s College London and the University of New South Wales in Australia. ... Those two universities have excellent programs and deep ties to their defense ministries. The U.S. doesn’t go to war without allies, and ASU doesn’t start a venture like this without our partners.

Q: What do you hope to achieve with this journal?

A: T.E. Lawrence wrote that “guerrilla war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.” That was his pithy way of saying what I said before, that IW is just tremendously complex. So it requires rigorous thought and open debate. But while there are great professional journals for nearly every branch and function of the military, there has not been one dedicated specifically to the study of irregular war — until now. ... Scholarly journals are vital for getting new and diverse ideas out into the wild. That’s our ambition for Inter Populum — to be the central medium for discussion, debate and the exchange of ideas among scholars and practitioners. And ultimately, of course, all this will result in better approaches to security and defense, and a freer, more peaceful world.

Top photo courtesy Pixabay

Global Engagement Tempe campus Office of University Affairs Expert Q-and-A Military National security Community Faculty Staff Policymakers

Reporter , ASU News

480-727-5176 marshall.terrill@asu.edu

news.asu.edu · by Marshall Terrill · November 22, 2023

8. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 25, 2023

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-25-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces launched the largest drone strike against Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion overnight on November 24 to 25 using a new modification of the Iranian Shahed 131/136 drones.
• Ukrainian and Russian forces continue to grapple with the challenges electronic warfare (EW) systems pose on the front.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on November 25 that Ukraine’s Western partners agreed to transfer warships to Ukraine to protect Ukraine’s grain corridor in the Black Sea.
• Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that Russia has not fulfilled arms export deals to Armenia and offered an alternative arrangement that would allow Russia to keep the weapons against the backdrop of recent deteriorating Russian-Armenian relations.
• Infighting among Russian ultranationalist milbloggers, likely exacerbated by ethnic tensions, has compelled a prominent milblogger to close his Telegram channel.
• Other milbloggers attributed increased infighting among ultranationalist voices about the war in Ukraine to Russian politics and the coming 2024 Russian presidential elections.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, near Avdiivka, west and southwest of Donetsk City, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on November 25 and advanced in some areas.
• Russian military commanders are reportedly ignoring frontline units’ requests for drones.
• Ukraine’s Ministry of Reintegration reported on November 24 that over 13,500 Ukrainians returned to Ukraine from Russia via a humanitarian corridor in Sumy Oblast since its establishment in July 2023.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Nov 25, 2023 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 25, 2023

Angelica Evans, Christina Harward, Grace Mappes, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Frederick W. Kagan

November 25, 2023, 6:45pm 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: The data cut-off for this product was 2:45pm ET on November 25. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the November 26 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian forces launched the largest drone strike against Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion overnight on November 24 to 25 using a new modification of the Iranian Shahed 131/136 drones.[1] Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces launched 75 Shahed drones that mainly targeted Kyiv City from the southeast (Primorsko-Akhtarsk) and northeast (Kursk Oblast) and that Ukrainian forces shot down 74 drones.[2] Ukrainian military officials also reported that Ukrainian forces shot down a Russian Kh-59 cruise missile over Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and that air defenses activated in at least six regions, including Kyiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, and Kirovohrad oblasts.[3] Ukrainian Air Force officials stated that mobile fire groups enabled Ukrainian forces to shoot down a significant number of drones.[4] Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky observed that Russian forces launched the drone attack on the Ukrainian remembrance day of the 1932-1933 Holodomor man-made famine.[5]

Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat reported that Russian forces attacked Kyiv with a new modification of Shahed drones and noted that these drones were black in color and contained a material that absorbs radar signals, making them more difficult to detect.[6] Russian milbloggers similarly claimed that Russian forces used “black Geran” or “Feran” (the Russian name for Shaheds) drones for the first time and claimed that these drones are more challenging to detect in the night sky.[7] Iranian media published footage on November 19 showing the Iranian Ashura Aerospace University of Science and Technology presenting the new Shahed-238 jet-powered modification of the Shahed-136 drone.[8] The presented Shahed-238 appeared to be black in color, but it is unknown if Russian forces used the Shahed-238 modification during the November 25 strike.

Ukrainian and Russian forces continue to grapple with the challenges electronic warfare (EW) systems pose on the front. The Economist reported on November 23 that superior Russian EW systems are impeding Ukrainian reconnaissance, communication, and strike capabilities.[9] The Economist, citing Western experts, stated that Russia has placed a “huge focus” on producing and developing superior EW capabilities and that Ukraine is struggling to produce equivalent EW systems and EW-resistant weapons domestically. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi assessed in his essay “Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win It” that Ukrainian forces need to introduce necessary command and control (C2) processes for EW complexes, increase EW production capabilities, streamline engagements with volunteer organizations that provide smaller EW complexes to Ukrainian forces, improve Ukraine’s counter-EW measures, and develop new drones with EW in mind.[10] The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported on November 25 that it is working to develop drone variants more resistant to Russian EW systems and produce successful variants at scale.[11] Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) Deputy Director of Analysis Margarita Konaev and CSET Fellow Owen Daniels reported on September 6, 2023, that Russian adaptations to the deployment of EW systems continue to present challenges for Ukrainian drones transmitting targeting information and securing Ukrainian signals.[12] Russian sources previously credited superior Russian EW capabilities for aiding Russian forces’ defense against Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in southern Ukraine in June 2023.[13]

Russian sources have also repeatedly expressed concerns and complaints about perceived inadequacies in Russian EW systems, however.[14] Russian sources credited superior Ukrainian EW and aerial reconnaissance systems for Ukrainian advances south of Bakhmut in September 2023 and claimed that Ukrainian EW systems were significantly disrupting Russian communications in western Zaporizhia Oblast in August 2023.[15] ISW reported on November 25 that the effectiveness of Russian EW systems is inconsistent across the front, allowing the Ukrainians to continue to use drone-based reconnaissance-strike complexes to disrupt Russian offensive operations.[16] Russian milbloggers have been inconsistent in their assessments of which side has “superior” EW systems, indicating that neither Russia nor Ukraine currently has a decisive advantage over the other.[17] Western aid in support of Ukrainian efforts to destroy, disrupt, or bypass Russian EW systems would increase Ukraine’s ability to strike targets near the front precisely, disrupting Russian advances, and setting conditions for further Ukrainian offensive operations.[18]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on November 25 that Ukraine’s Western partners agreed to transfer warships to Ukraine to protect Ukraine’s grain corridor in the Black Sea.[19] Zelensky stated during a speech at the “Grain from Ukraine” conference in Kyiv that Ukraine and unspecified international partners reached an agreement to enable Ukraine to provide sea escorts for merchant ships transporting grain from Ukrainian ports in the near future. Zelensky added that Ukraine’s partners also agreed to provide “very powerful” air defense systems to defend Odesa Oblast. Zelensky noted that the “Grain from Ukraine” initiative has delivered more than 170,000 tons of grain to Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Yemen in the past year.[20] Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics, Swiss President Alain Berset, and Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte also attended the conference and expressed their support for the initiative.[21]

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that Russia has not fulfilled arms export deals to Armenia and offered an alternative arrangement that would allow Russia to keep the weapons against the backdrop of recent deteriorating Russian-Armenian relations. Pashinyan stated on November 24 that Armenia has paid Russia for arms shipments but that Russia has not delivered the weapons or returned the money to Armenia.[22] Pashinyan offered the reduction of Armenia’s outstanding debt to Russia in the amount of the arms purchase as a solution, possibly as a means to decrease Armenia‘s economic ties to Russia. The Defense Ministry of India similarly reported a delay in Russia’s delivery of an S-400 missile system due to the war in Ukraine in 2022.[23] The head of the Russian Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, Dmitry Shugaev, stated on August 14 that Russia will deliver the S-400 system to India on time by the end of 2024, however.[24] 

Infighting among Russian ultranationalist milbloggers, likely exacerbated by ethnic tensions, has compelled a prominent milblogger to close his Telegram channel. The milblogger announced on November 25 that he is temporarily closing his Telegram channel on November 25, and another milblogger claimed that supporters of Chechen “Akhmat” Spetsnaz forces subordinate to Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov threatened the first milblogger’s parents and admonished the “full-time military bloggers and journalists” for making the threats.[25] The second milblogger later claimed that readers began threatening him to avoid repeating the “fate” of the first milblogger and that he will apologize “sooner or later,” and the milblogger also claimed that he is confident that Akhmat commanders are not behind the attacks but mid-level “sheep.”[26] A third milblogger responded in support of the other two milbloggers, claiming that another user offered him money to take down his post in support of the first milblogger but to “think hard” because he is a “good person.” The milblogger disdained the request as “dishonorable.”[27] The first milblogger first drew the wrath of the “public relations people of Akhmat and Kadyrov” in early November when he criticized rumors that Wagner Group personnel were transferring to Akhmat units, drawing some support from other milbloggers when the Akhmat-affiliates targeted this milblogger in a defamation campaign.[28] These attacks allegedly from supporters of Kadyrov come during a period of especially high ethnoreligious tensions in Russia and as Kadyrov is increasingly attempting to curry and display Russian Vladimir Putin’s favor.[29]

Other milbloggers attributed increased infighting among ultranationalist voices about the war in Ukraine to Russian politics and the coming 2024 Russian presidential elections. One milblogger claimed that the “war” on Telegram and in the Russian media will temporarily end as Russian political “towers” - or political officials financing Telegram channels to advance their political goals - temporarily stop feuding until after the Russian presidential elections in March 2024.[30] The milblogger claimed that the “towers” may sacrifice some overzealous “pawns” as bargaining chips and noted that milbloggers and other prominent voices will either need to stop fighting or move to the sidelines.[31] Another milblogger claimed that this infighting is the result of Russian leadership playing politics and that Russia is fighting an enemy that wants to win the war at any cost.[32]

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces launched the largest drone strike against Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion overnight on November 24 to 25 using a new modification of the Iranian Shahed 131/136 drones.
• Ukrainian and Russian forces continue to grapple with the challenges electronic warfare (EW) systems pose on the front.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on November 25 that Ukraine’s Western partners agreed to transfer warships to Ukraine to protect Ukraine’s grain corridor in the Black Sea.
• Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that Russia has not fulfilled arms export deals to Armenia and offered an alternative arrangement that would allow Russia to keep the weapons against the backdrop of recent deteriorating Russian-Armenian relations.
• Infighting among Russian ultranationalist milbloggers, likely exacerbated by ethnic tensions, has compelled a prominent milblogger to close his Telegram channel.
• Other milbloggers attributed increased infighting among ultranationalist voices about the war in Ukraine to Russian politics and the coming 2024 Russian presidential elections.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, near Avdiivka, west and southwest of Donetsk City, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on November 25 and advanced in some areas.
• Russian military commanders are reportedly ignoring frontline units’ requests for drones.
• Ukraine’s Ministry of Reintegration reported on November 24 that over 13,500 Ukrainians returned to Ukraine from Russia via a humanitarian corridor in Sumy Oblast since its establishment in July 2023.

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 offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on November 25 but did not make confirmed advances. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced near Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk).[33] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Synkivka, Petropavlivka (7km east of Kupyansk), and Ivanivka (20km southeast of Kupyansk) in the Kupyansk direction; near Stelmakhivka (16km northwest of Svatove) in the Svatove direction; and near the Serebryanske forest area in the Kreminna direction.[34] A Russian milblogger claimed that fighting is ongoing near Torske (14km west of Kreminna).[35] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Artem Lysohor stated that Russian forces are increasingly complaining about personnel losses in the Kupyansk direction and are expressing hesitancy to participate in future assaults due to unsuccessful offensive operations.[36] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that the “Aida” group of the Chechen ”Akhmat” Spetsnaz forces is operating in the Kreminna direction.[37]

Russian sources claimed on November 25 that Ukrainian forces advanced southeast of Kupyansk and attacked along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces liberated previously lost positions near Yahidne (22km southeast of Kupyansk).[38] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Zahoryukivka (a settlement 16km east of Kupyansk that was disincorporated in the 1980s), Pershotravneve (24km east of Kupyansk), and Ivanivka in the Kupyansk direction; and near Hryhorivka (10km south of Kreminna) in the Lyman direction.[39]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut on November 25 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued assault actions south of Bakhmut.[40] Russian Southern Grouping of Forces Spokesperson Vadim Astafyev claimed that Russian forces repelled 10 Ukrainian attacks near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[41]

Russian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut and reportedly made marginal, unconfirmed gains on November 25. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced near the railway northeast of Klishchiivka and near Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut), though ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[42] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks near Bohdanivka (5km northwest of Bakhmut), Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut), Klishchiivka, and Andriivka.[43] Footage posted on November 25 shows that the Russian 58th Spetsnaz Battalion (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] Army Corps) and elements of the 106th Airborne (VDV) Division operate in the Bakhmut area.[44]

Russian forces continued offensive operations near Avdiivka on November 25 and made a confirmed advance. Geolocated footage posted on November 24 indicates that Russian forces advanced north of Krasnohorivka (7km northwest of Avdiivka).[45] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces advanced in the industrial area and near the Yasynuvata-2 train station (both southeast of Avdiivka), from Kamianka (5km northeast of Avdiivka), and near the Avdiivka Coke Plant.[46] Several Russian milbloggers amplified footage purportedly showing some Ukrainian forces withdrawing from positions in the industrial zone on Avdiivka’s southern flank, but another milblogger claimed that Russian forces have not yet completely captured the industrial zone.[47] Russian sources also claimed that Russian forces advanced near Stepove (4km northwest of Avdiivka) and Novokalynove (11km northwest of Avdiivka).[48] ISW is unable to confirm any of these claims. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks east and south of Novokalynove and near Novobakhmutivka (13km northeast of Avdiivka), Stepove, Avdiivka, Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), and Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka).[49] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Oleksandr Shtupun stated that Russian forces have decreased the intensity of airstrikes and reduced the number of armored vehicles operating in the Avdiivka direction but that Russian forces are still conducting infantry attacks.[50]

Russian forces continued offensive operations west and southwest of Donetsk City and reportedly marginally advanced on November 25. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces achieved an unspecified tactical success near Novomykhailivka (25km southwest of Donetsk City).[51] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground assaults near Marinka (immediately west of Donetsk City) and Novomykhailivka.[52]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed on November 25 that elements of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces repelled a Ukrainian attack in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area near Pryyutne (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[53]

Russian forces continued attacks in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on November 25 but did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked south of Zolota Nyva (11km southeast of Velyka Novosilka) and east of Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[54] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces attacked northwest of Staromayorske on November 24 and 25.[55] The Russian “Vostok” Battalion claimed that the ground in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area began to thaw following the initial frost, making the ground muddy again.[56]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on November 25 but did not make any claimed or confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) direction.[57] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled two Ukrainian attacks north of Novoprokopivka (just south of Robotyne).[58] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted mechanized assaults near Robotyne and Verbove (9km east of Robotyne).[59] Another Russian milblogger claimed that poor weather is inhibiting Russian and Ukrainian forces’ ability to conduct ground attacks and use military equipment north of Verbove.[60]

Russian forces continued ground attacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on November 25 but did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Robotyne and Novopokrovka (9km northeast of Robotyne).[61] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces counterattacked and captured unspecified positions in a forest area near Verbove.[62] Another Russian milblogger published photos purporting to show elements of the Russian 503rd Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment (19th Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District [SMD]) operating a newly modernized T-62M tank along the Robotyne-Verbove line.[63]

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on November 25 that Ukrainian forces continue to hold positions in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.[64]

Russian sources claimed on November 25 that Russian forces shelled and attacked Ukrainian positions in left bank Kherson Oblast. Russian milbloggers acknowledged that Ukrainian forces maintain positions in Krynky (30km northeast of Kherson City and 3km from the Dnipro River) but claimed that Russian forces shelled and attacked Ukrainian positions near and in the settlement.[65] Several Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces recaptured unspecified positions near Krynky and advanced into the western part of the settlement.[66] Other Russian milbloggers claimed that it is too early to discuss successes around Krynky, however.[67] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces struck Ukrainian positions near the Antonivsky road and railway bridges, and in the direction of Poyma (10km southeast of Kherson City and 4km from the Dnipro River), Pishchanivka (13km east of Kherson City and 3km from the Dnipro River), and Pidstepne (17km east of Kherson City and 4km from the Dnipro River) with FAB-1500 modified glide bombs.[68]

Ukrainian Crimea-based partisan group “Atesh” stated on November 24 that Atesh members were involved in a large-scale Ukrainian drone strike against targets in occupied Crimea on the night of November 23 to 24.[69] Atesh stated that Ukrainian strikes destroyed Russian radar and air defense systems and personnel. Russian sources claimed that Russian air defenses and Black Sea Fleet naval aviation downed 25 drones.[70]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian brigade or division-level military commanders are reportedly ignoring frontline units’ requests for drones. A Russian milblogger stated that some Russian units on the front are receiving drones thanks to a procurement procedure developed a year ago and advertised by the Russian milblogger community, which allows units to request drones from the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD). The milblogger stated that there are cases in which brigade and division-level commanders slow down or halt the process, however.[71] The milblogger stated that commanders offer various reasons for the delays, such as telling units that they do not need the drones or that the drones are useless and low-quality. The milblogger stated that brigade and division-level commanders do not pass along units’ requests for drones to higher-ups, so the Russian military leadership is unaware of the problem.

The Russian Cabinet of Ministers signed a resolution on November 24 that conforms the Russian military registration system with the previously adopted federal law that raised the upper limit of the conscription age to 30 years old starting January 1, 2024.[72]

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine)

Russia has reportedly domestically produced a jet engine that will likely bolster Russian passenger and military aircraft domestic production in the face of Western sanctions. The Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade previously claimed that the “import substitute” version of the Sukhoi Superjet (SJ-100) successfully completed tests on August 29.[73] Russian state newswire TASS stated that the August test included a plane with a French-Russian SaM146 engine, but the chief designer of the Sukhoi Superjet announced on October 12 that the PD-8 engine was tested for the first time in the aircraft.[74] Russian United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) Head Yuri Slyusar stated on November 13 that the Sukhoi Superjet was slated to be certified by the end of 2023 but that the PD-8 testing program caused delays. Slyusar stated that the aircraft will be certified in 2024 and that the UAC will produce 22 aircraft next year.[75] Slyusar also stated that the PD-8 engine is undergoing testing on an Il-76 aircraft. Russian Transport Minister Vitaliy Savelyev stated on November 25 that Russia lost 76 passenger aircraft due to Western sanctions, and a Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that this situation will allow Russia to focus on modernizing passenger airlines by converting Sukhoi Superjets to use entirely domestic components.[76]

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)

Ukraine’s Ministry of Reintegration reported on November 24 that over 13,500 Ukrainians returned to Ukraine from Russia via the humanitarian corridor in Sumy Oblast since its establishment in July 2023.[77] The Ministry of Reintegration specified that of the total number of returned Ukrainians, 1,653 are children and 131 are individuals with limited mobility.

Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin and Kremlin-appointed Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova met with Ukrainian children from occupied Donetsk Oblast as part of Belova’s “A Country for Children” program.[78]

Kherson Oblast occupation officials claimed that they have approved 15,500 state housing certificates since October 2022 amid milbloggers’ recent complaints about tensions over housing among local occupation officials and Russian servicemen fighting in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.[79] Russian milbloggers claimed that Kherson Oblast occupation officials allocate “Kherson certificates” for housing to people who are “scamming” the Russian government instead of providing vacant apartments to Russian servicemen.[80]

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian state media and milbloggers misrepresented statements by a Ukrainian official about Ukrainian-Russian peace talks after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in order to promote long-standing Kremlin allegations about Western control over Ukraine. Head of the Ukrainian Servant of the People party Davyd Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation during peace talks with Russia in Belarus and Turkey in 2022 after the start of the full-scale invasion, stated on November 24 that the Russian delegation promised to end the war if Ukraine committed not to join NATO.[81] Arakhamia stated that the Ukrainian delegation did not trust the Russian delegation and that it would have been impossible for the Ukrainian delegation to agree to this peace deal even if it had wanted to as it would have required changes to the Ukrainian constitution, which states that NATO membership is a goal of the Ukrainian government. Arakhamia added that then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated that Ukraine should not sign any agreements with Russia and should fight, and that other Western advisors expressed similar sentiments. Russian state media largely fixated on Arakhamia’s statements about Johnson and falsely claimed that Western pressure dictated Ukrainian decisions and led to the “breakdown” of negotiations.[82] Russian milbloggers similarly claimed that Johnson and the West were controlling Ukraine’s decision-making and are responsible for the war in Ukraine.[83]

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)

Nothing significant to report.

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.

9. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 25, 2023

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-november-25-2023

Key Takeaways:

1. Hamas released a second round of hostages after Hamas accused Israel of violating the humanitarian pause agreement and threatened to delay the hostages’ release.
2. CTP-ISW did not record verifiable reports of kinetic activity inside the Gaza Strip or reports of attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
3. CTP-ISW recorded nine small arms clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters in the West Bank.
4. Palestinian militias are trying to exert greater control over the Palestinian population in the West Bank to facilitate further militia operations against Israeli targets.
5. Israeli and Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) media suggested that LH conducted 2-3 attacks into northern Israel.
6. Iranian-backed Iraqi factions are trying to exploit the Israel-Hamas war to erode US military and political influence in Iraq.
7. Iran and its Axis of Resistance appear to be continuing to threaten Israeli-affiliated commercial shipping.
8. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—did not claim any attacks against US forces in Iraq or Syria.

IRAN UPDATE, NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Nov 25, 2023 - ISW Press

Iran Update, November 25, 2023

Andie Parry, Johanna Moore, Annika Ganzeveld, and Nicholas Carl

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.

Key Takeaways:

1. Hamas released a second round of hostages after Hamas accused Israel of violating the humanitarian pause agreement and threatened to delay the hostages’ release.
2. CTP-ISW did not record verifiable reports of kinetic activity inside the Gaza Strip or reports of attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
3. CTP-ISW recorded nine small arms clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters in the West Bank.
4. Palestinian militias are trying to exert greater control over the Palestinian population in the West Bank to facilitate further militia operations against Israeli targets.
5. Israeli and Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) media suggested that LH conducted 2-3 attacks into northern Israel.
6. Iranian-backed Iraqi factions are trying to exploit the Israel-Hamas war to erode US military and political influence in Iraq.
7. Iran and its Axis of Resistance appear to be continuing to threaten Israeli-affiliated commercial shipping.
8. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—did not claim any attacks against US forces in Iraq or Syria.

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

NOTE: The IDF has said that its forces are stationed along ceasefire lines across the Gaza Strip during the pause in fighting. CTP-ISW's map of Israeli clearing operations shows reported Israeli clearing operations and the claimed furthest Israeli advances. CTP-ISW will not be mapping the shift in Israeli operating areas during the humanitarian pause.

Hamas released a second round of hostages on November 25 after Hamas accused Israel of violating the humanitarian pause agreement and threatened to delay the hostages’ release. Hamas and the IDF confirmed that 13 Israeli hostages and four foreign nationals left the Gaza Strip at around 1600 EST on November 25.[1] Their releases come after Hamas media adviser Taher al Nunu accused Israel of violating the pause agreement by failing to supply sufficient aid to the northern Gaza Strip, operating surveillance drones in the closed airspace above the Gaza Strip, shooting and killing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and releasing Palestinian prisoners in the wrong order from Israeli prisons.[2] Osama Hamdan—Hamas’ senior representative to Lebanon—echoed al Nunu’s complaints of alleged Israeli violations during a press conference in Beirut.[3] Nunu and Hamdan did not threaten to withdraw from the pause agreement, however. The al Qassem Brigades—the militant wing of Hamas—announced earlier in the day that it would delay the release of the second batch of hostages until Israel adhered to the terms of the deal.[4] Iranian state media separately claimed that the IDF violated the agreement by “attacking” Gazan civilians on November 24.[5] Israeli officials have not responded to these allegations, nor have they accused Hamas of violating the deal at the time of this writing.

Hamas remains the only party that has publicly released what it claims are the details of its agreement with Israel.[6] Israel and Qatar both reported that they reached an agreement with Hamas but did not provide the same level of detail on the terms. CTP-ISW cannot therefore assess whether the parties involved have properly executed the terms of the agreement or whether any changes were made to the agreement during engagements with US, Egyptian, and Qatari mediators on November 25.[7] The official spokesperson for the Qatari Foreign Affairs Ministry stated that 39 Palestinian prisoners, 13 Israeli hostages, and seven other unspecified foreign nationals would be exchanged in accordance with the agreement on the evening of November 25 after talks with both parties.[8] The al Qassem Brigades similarly said that it released seven foreign nationals but later revised its statement to say that it only released four.[9]

Hamas claimed that the agreement stipulates that 200 aid trucks will enter all areas of the Gaza Strip daily.[10] The IDF Arabic-language spokesperson detailed the quantity, destination, and contents of aid trucks that entered the Gaza Strip from Egypt on November 24 and 25.[11] He stated that 50 of the 200 trucks transported food, water, humanitarian shelter supplies, and medical equipment aid to the northern Gaza Strip on November 25.[12] The IDF said another 200 trucks arrived at unspecified locations in the Gaza Strip on November 24.[13] The Palestinian Red Cresent contrastingly said that it only received 196 trucks and transported 61 to the northern Gaza Strip on November 24.[14] The northern Gaza Strip is the focus of Israeli clearing operations against Hamas at this time. The US Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues said on November 4 that between 350,000 to 400,000 people remained in the northern Gaza Strip.[15]

CTP-ISW did not record verifiable reports of kinetic activity inside the Gaza Strip or reports of attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel on November 25.

West Bank

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Draw IDF assets and resources toward the West Bank and fix them there

CTP-ISW recorded nine small arms clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters in the West Bank on November 25. Palestinian media reported that Israeli forces conducted several raids across the West Bank. The Jenin Battalion of the al Quds Brigade claimed an attack on Israeli forces conducting a raid on the outskirts of the Jenin refugee camp.[16] The group claimed that its fighters fired on the Israeli forces and threw IEDs at them.[17] Local West Bank media warned locals prior to the raid of an imminent Israeli operation and instructed civilians to avoid cellphone use and open areas.[18] Unspecified Palestinian fighters separately shot down an Israeli drone over Qabatiya during clashes with Israeli forces.[19] Palestinian fighters in Qabatiya fired on and threw IEDs at Israeli forces.[20] Israel did not report on any Israeli raids in the West Bank on November 25, which is contrary to its normal practice.

Palestinian militias are trying to exert greater control over the Palestinian population in the West Bank to facilitate further militia operations against Israeli targets. The Hornets’ Nest—a subordinate unit of the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades—issued a statement on November 25 warning West Bank residents that Israel is trying to recruit local informants.[21] The statement added that Israel offered money to locals for information on the militia.[22] The al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades also released videos purportedly showing two men confessing to providing Israel with information in exchange for money.[23] Both men were publicly executed in Tulkarm on November 24.[24] The fact that the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades felt that it needed to release these statements and videos suggests that the group is concerned about the extent to which it controls the population.

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

Israeli and Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) media suggested that LH conducted 2-3 attacks into northern Israel on November 25. LH media, citing Israeli reports, claimed that LH fired anti-armor guided missiles and drones at unspecified locations in northern Israel. The IDF separately intercepted a drone and surface-to-air missile entering Israeli territory from Lebanon.[25]  The IDF reported that it intercepted the missile over the Galilee panhandle, as the missile targeted an Israeli drone.[26] The IDF conducted an airstrike on LH infrastructure in southern Lebanon in retaliation for the attempted attack on the Israeli drone.[27] No group has claimed responsibility for any of the attacks into Israeli territory on November 25 at the time of publication. The al Qassem Brigades announced on November 23 that LH would observe the pause in fighting brokered between Israel and Hamas.[28] The likely LH attacks into northern Israel on November 25 suggest that the al Qassem Brigades either intentionally or unintentionally did not accurately portray LH‘s position or LH changed its calculus regarding the pause.

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

Iranian-backed Iraqi factions are trying to exploit the Israel-Hamas war to erode US military and political influence in Iraq. Iranian leaders routinely assert that one of their greatest strategic objectives is expelling the United States and its influence from the Middle East. Iranian leaders appear to assign particular priority to removing the United States from Iraq given how important they consider Iraq to the security of the Iranian regime.

• Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba Secretary General Akram al Kaabi released a statement on November 23 calling for a “declaration of war” against the United States and its expulsion from Iraq.[29] Kaabi released the statement in response to US fighter jets striking KH sites in Jurf al Saqr, Babil Province, Iraq, on November 22. The United States conducted these strikes in response to repeated KH attacks against US servicemembers in recent weeks. Kaabi described the presence of US combat forces, advisers, and technicians in Iraq as “hostile.”
• Asaib Ahl al Haq Secretary General Qais al Khazali separately stated that US forces have no intention of leaving Iraq and are justifying their presence under the pretext of fighting ISIS during an interview with LH-controlled outlet al Ahed on November 24.[30] Khazali stated that US attacks on Iraqi security forces and especially the Popular Mobilization Forces are “unacceptable.” Iranian-backed militias have tried to highlight KH’s membership in the PMF in recent days to portray the US airstrikes on KH positions as attacks against a state-affiliated security organization rather than members of the US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization that is KH. Khazali also emphasized Iraqi resistance groups’ support for Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war.
• Iraqi parliamentarian Alaa al Rikabi claimed on November 25 that former Parliament Speaker Mohammed Halbousi blocked an extraordinary parliamentary session to expel US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski before he was dismissed on November 14.[31] The Iraqi Federal Supreme Court issued a ruling to remove Halbousi from parliament on November 14.[32] Halbousi, an important Sunni politician and the leader of the Taqqadum Movement, claimed that the Federal Supreme Court’s ruling was unconstitutional and was a move by unspecified parties to create political divisions within society.[33] Rikabi’s November 25 claim supports CTP-ISW's hypothesis that Halbousi was removed from his post as part of political efforts to reduce the US presence in Iraq.

Iran and its Axis of Resistance appear to be continuing to threaten Israeli-affiliated commercial shipping.

• Likely Houthi fighters seized an Israeli-owned, Malta-flagged freighter transiting the Red Sea on November 25. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations reported that “Yemeni authorities” forced a ship near al Hudaydah, Yemen, to “alter course” on November 25.[34] The ship is believed to be the Israeli-owned, Malta-flagged Zim Luanda. The Houthi movement has not officially claimed responsibility for the attack. Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree wrote “ZIM” in a one-word post on X (Twitter) on November 25, however.[35] Houthi members have used one-word posts to indicate their responsibility for attacks on Israeli targets in recent weeks, however. Houthi Political Bureau member Hizam al Asad previously wrote the Israeli city “Eilat” in a post on X on October 27—the same day that the Houthi movement conducted a drone attack targeting southern Israel.[36] At least two unspecified drones originating from the “Red Sea area” struck Egyptian territory near Taba, a resort town adjacent to Eilat, on October 27.[37] The November 25 seizure follows the Houthi’s November 23 warning that it will continue attacks against Israeli ships and interests until Israel’s “aggression against Gaza stops.”[38] The seizure also follows Emirati reporting on November 23 that Tehran ordered its proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen to abide by the temporary pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas.[39] Houthi Naval Forces Chief of Staff Mansur al Saadi has received extensive training from Iran, and the US Treasury Department sanctioned him in March 2021 for planning attacks against international shipping in the Red Sea.[40]
• The IRGC may have conducted a one-way drone attack on an Israeli-owned, Malta-flagged freighter in the Persian Gulf on November 24. A suspected Iranian Shahed-136 one-way attack drone struck the CMA CGM Symi.[41] The Associated Press reported on November 25 that US officials suspect the IRGC of conducting the attack. LH-affiliated al Mayadeen, citing informed sources, reported the attack on November 25.[42] Iranian state media recirculated al Mayadeen’s reporting of the attack.[43] Iranian officials and media have not denied Iranian involvement in the attack at the time of writing.
• Houthi fighters recently hijacked an Israeli-owned, Japanese-operated freighter transiting the Red Sea on November 19.[44] Houthi fighters fast-roped onto the deck of the Galaxy Leader from a helicopter and took 25 crew members hostage.[45] The Israeli government said that the Houthis hijacked the ship under Iranian "guidance.”[46]

Iranian Deputy Parliament Speaker Mojtaba Zonnour warned on November 25 that Iran can inspect and stop ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz if they jeopardize Iranian national security.[47] It is unclear whether Zonnour made this warning in response to the suspected IRGC attack on the Israeli-owned freighter in the Persian Gulf on November 24. Zonnour previously served as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s deputy representative to the IRGC between 2008-2011.[48]

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—did not claim any attacks against US forces in Iraq or Syria on November 25. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has not claimed any attacks since the Israel-Hamas pause in fighting went into effect. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq and its affiliated groups claimed 74 attacks against US forces in the Middle East between October 18 and November 23.[49]

Iranian Tourism and Cultural Heritage Minister and former IRGC official Ezzatollah Zarghami stated that he previously visited Hamas tunnels in the Gaza Strip and taught Hamas fighters how to use the Iranian-made Fajr-3 rocket during an interview with Iranian state television on November 20.[50] Zarghami stated that he traveled to the Gaza Strip as a “production manager” of the Fajr-3 rocket. Zarghami was a member of the IRGC in the 1980s and served as the IRGC Radio Program head between 1982 and 1986.[51] He served as the president of the state-controlled outlet IRIB between 2004 and 2014 and has served as Iran’s tourism minister since August 2021.[52]

10. Pentagon's AI initiatives accelerate hard decisions on lethal autonomous weapons

Excerpts:

As to when AI will be reliable enough for lethal autonomy, Martell said it makes no sense to generalize. For example, Martell trusts his car’s adaptive cruise control but not the tech that’s supposed to keep it from changing lanes. “As the responsible agent, I would not deploy that except in very constrained situations,” he said. “Now extrapolate that to the military.”

Martell’s office is evaluating potential generative AI use cases – it has a special task force for that – but focuses more on testing and evaluating AI in development.

One urgent challenge, says Jane Pinelis, chief AI engineer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab and former chief of AI assurance in Martell’s office, is recruiting and retaining the talent needed to test AI tech. The Pentagon can’t compete on salaries. Computer science PhDs with AI-related skills can earn more than the military’s top-ranking generals and admirals.

Testing and evaluation standards are also immature, a recent National Academy of Sciences report on Air Force AI highlighted.

Might that mean the U.S. one day fielding under duress autonomous weapons that don’t fully pass muster?

“We are still operating under the assumption that we have time to do this as rigorously and as diligently as possible,” said Pinelis. “I think if we’re less than ready and it’s time to take action, somebody is going to be forced to make a decision.”

Pentagon's AI initiatives accelerate hard decisions on lethal autonomous weapons

BY FRANK BAJAK

Updated 11:49 AM EST, November 25, 2023

AP · November 25, 2023

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. (AP) — Artificial intelligence employed by the U.S. military has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces’ missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia. It tracks soldiers’ fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space.

Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to “galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August.

While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy - including on weaponized systems.

There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the U.S. will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles.

That’s especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a U.S.-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.

The Longshot, an air-launched unmanned aircraft that General Atomics is developing with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency for use in tandem with piloted Air Force jets, is displayed at the Air & Space Forces Association Air, Space & Cyber Conference, Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023 in Oxon Hill, Md. Pentagon planners envision using such drones in “human-machine teaming” to overwhelm an adversary. But to be fielded, developers will need to prove the AI tech is reliable and trustworthy enough. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

It’s unclear if the Pentagon is currently formally assessing any fully autonomous lethal weapons system for deployment, as required by a 2012 directive. A Pentagon spokeswoman would not say.

Paradigm shifts

Replicator highlights immense technological and personnel challenges for Pentagon procurement and development as the AI revolution promises to transform how wars are fought.

“The Department of Defense is struggling to adopt the AI developments from the last machine-learning breakthrough,” said Gregory Allen, a former top Pentagon AI official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

The Pentagon’s portfolio boasts more than 800 AI-related unclassified projects, much still in testing. Typically, machine-learning and neural networks are helping humans gain insights and create efficiencies.

“The AI that we’ve got in the Department of Defense right now is heavily leveraged and augments people,” said Missy Cummings, director of George Mason University’s robotics center and a former Navy fighter pilot.” “There’s no AI running around on its own. People are using it to try to understand the fog of war better.”

Space, war’s new frontier

One domain where AI-assisted tools are tracking potential threats is space, the latest frontier in military competition.

China envisions using AI, including on satellites, to “make decisions on who is and isn’t an adversary,” U.S. Space Force chief technology and innovation officer Lisa Costa, told an online conference this month.

The U.S. aims to keep pace.

An operational prototype called Machina used by Space Force keeps tabs autonomously on more than 40,000 objects in space, orchestrating thousands of data collections nightly with a global telescope network.

Machina’s algorithms marshal telescope sensors. Computer vision and large language models tell them what objects to track. And AI choreographs drawing instantly on astrodynamics and physics datasets, Col. Wallace ‘Rhet’ Turnbull of Space Systems Command told a conference in August.

Another AI project at Space Force analyzes radar data to detect imminent adversary missile launches, he said.

Maintaining planes and soldiers

Elsewhere, AI’s predictive powers help the Air Force keep its fleet aloft, anticipating the maintenance needs of more than 2,600 aircraft including B-1 bombers and Blackhawk helicopters.

Machine-learning models identify possible failures dozens of hours before they happen, said Tom Siebel, CEO of Silicon Valley-based C3 AI, which has the contract. C3’s tech also models the trajectories of missiles for the the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and identifies insider threats in the federal workforce for the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

Among health-related efforts is a pilot project tracking the fitness of the Army’s entire Third Infantry Division — more than 13,000 soldiers. Predictive modeling and AI help reduce injuries and increase performance, said Maj. Matt Visser.

Aiding Ukraine

In Ukraine, AI provided by the Pentagon and its NATO allies helps thwart Russian aggression.

NATO allies share intelligence from data gathered by satellites, drones and humans, some aggregated with software from U.S. contractor Palantir. Some data comes from Maven, the Pentagon’s pathfinding AI project now mostly managed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, say officials including retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan, the inaugural Pentagon AI director,

Maven began in 2017 as an effort to process video from drones in the Middle East – spurred by U.S. Special Operations forces fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda — and now aggregates and analyzes a wide array of sensor- and human-derived data.

AI has also helped the U.S.-created Security Assistance Group-Ukraine help organize logistics for military assistance from a coalition of 40 countries, Pentagon officials say.

All-Domain Command and Control

To survive on the battlefield these days, military units must be small, mostly invisible and move quickly because exponentially growing networks of sensors let anyone “see anywhere on the globe at any moment,” then-Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley observed in a June speech. “And what you can see, you can shoot.”

To more quickly connect combatants, the Pentagon has prioritized the development of intertwined battle networks — called Joint All-Domain Command and Control — to automate the processing of optical, infrared, radar and other data across the armed services. But the challenge is huge and fraught with bureaucracy.

Christian Brose, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director now at the defense tech firm Anduril, is among military reform advocates who nevertheless believe they “may be winning here to a certain extent.”

“The argument may be less about whether this is the right thing to do, and increasingly more about how do we actually do it -- and on the rapid timelines required,” he said. Brose’s 2020 book, “The Kill Chain,” argues for urgent retooling to match China in the race to develop smarter and cheaper networked weapons systems.

To that end, the U.S. military is hard at work on “human-machine teaming.” Dozens of uncrewed air and sea vehicles currently keep tabs on Iranian activity. U.S. Marines and Special Forces also use Anduril’s autonomous Ghost mini-copter, sensor towers and counter-drone tech to protect American forces.

Industry advances in computer vision have been essential. Shield AI lets drones operate without GPS, communications or even remote pilots. It’s the key to its Nova, a quadcopter, which U.S. special operations units have used in conflict areas to scout buildings.

On the horizon: The Air Force’s “loyal wingman” program intends to pair piloted aircraft with autonomous ones. An F-16 pilot might, for instance, send out drones to scout, draw enemy fire or attack targets. Air Force leaders are aiming for a debut later this decade.

The race to full autonomy

The “loyal wingman” timeline doesn’t quite mesh with Replicator’s, which many consider overly ambitious. The Pentagon’s vagueness on Replicator, meantime, may partly intend to keep rivals guessing, though planners may also still be feeling their way on feature and mission goals, said Paul Scharre, a military AI expert and author of “Four Battlegrounds.”

Anduril and Shield AI, each backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital funding, are among companies vying for contracts.

Nathan Michael, chief technology officer at Shield AI, estimates they will have an autonomous swarm of at least three uncrewed aircraft ready in a year using its V-BAT aerial drone. The U.S. military currently uses the V-BAT -- without an AI mind -- on Navy ships, on counter-drug missions and in support of Marine Expeditionary Units, the company says.

It will take some time before larger swarms can be reliably fielded, Michael said. “Everything is crawl, walk, run -- unless you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

The only weapons systems that Shanahan, the inaugural Pentagon AI chief, currently trusts to operate autonomously are wholly defensive, like Phalanx anti-missile systems on ships. He worries less about autonomous weapons making decisions on their own than about systems that don’t work as advertised or kill noncombatants or friendly forces.

The department’s current chief digital and AI officer Craig Martell is determined not to let that happen.

“Regardless of the autonomy of the system, there will always be a responsible agent that understands the limitations of the system, has trained well with the system, has justified confidence of when and where it’s deployable -- and will always take the responsibility,” said Martell, who previously headed machine-learning at LinkedIn and Lyft. “That will never not be the case.”

As to when AI will be reliable enough for lethal autonomy, Martell said it makes no sense to generalize. For example, Martell trusts his car’s adaptive cruise control but not the tech that’s supposed to keep it from changing lanes. “As the responsible agent, I would not deploy that except in very constrained situations,” he said. “Now extrapolate that to the military.”

Martell’s office is evaluating potential generative AI use cases – it has a special task force for that – but focuses more on testing and evaluating AI in development.

One urgent challenge, says Jane Pinelis, chief AI engineer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab and former chief of AI assurance in Martell’s office, is recruiting and retaining the talent needed to test AI tech. The Pentagon can’t compete on salaries. Computer science PhDs with AI-related skills can earn more than the military’s top-ranking generals and admirals.

Testing and evaluation standards are also immature, a recent National Academy of Sciences report on Air Force AI highlighted.

Might that mean the U.S. one day fielding under duress autonomous weapons that don’t fully pass muster?

“We are still operating under the assumption that we have time to do this as rigorously and as diligently as possible,” said Pinelis. “I think if we’re less than ready and it’s time to take action, somebody is going to be forced to make a decision.”

AP · November 25, 2023

11. Opinion: Holodomor in Perspective 90 Years On

Opinion: Holodomor in Perspective 90 Years On

The Holodomor is finally recognized for the genocidal crime that it was, but lessons still need to be drawn from what was involved to get to this stage and what still needs to be done.

By Bohdan Nahaylo

November 25, 2023, 3:16 pm | Comments (26)

kyivpost.com · by Bohdan Nahaylo

In 1932-33, according to the latest most conservative estimates, at least four million people were deliberately starved to death in Soviet-ruled Ukraine. This was due to Moscow’s imposition of excessive grain quotas and the forcible requisitioning of food from the villagers, accompanied by draconian repressive measures. Ninety years later, and after almost two years since Russia launched a new genocidal war against Ukraine, the scale and significance of this unpunished crime is rightfully commanding more attention than ever.

Let’s briefly recall what occurred.

In 1932-33 the most fertile regions of the USSR were ravaged by the largest man-made famine in history. As part of his collectivization drive, Stalin unleashed mass terror against the peasantry and literally starved them into submission. Ukraine bore the brunt of the assault and the Ukrainian nation and has suffered from the effects ever since. The traumatizing blow accompanied a purge of its national intelligentsia, and the intensification of Russification affected its demography and social composition, undermined its national assertiveness severely stunting its national development.

Stalin had strongly advocated dispensing with the legal fiction of independence for the non-Russian republics in a nominally federated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics but was overruled by Lenin. After Lenin’s death, he declared in 1925: “The peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement.” The following year, 1926 Stalin intervened against what he described as “a struggle for the alienation of Ukrainian cultural and social life from the Soviet cultural life, of a struggle against Moscow and Russians in general, against Russian culture.”

More on this topic

Address of the President of Ukraine on the Occasion of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomors

Ukrainian President said it was "impossible" to forgive the crimes of genocide during a famine that took place under the rule of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

In 1928 Stalin launched his drive to collectivize agriculture which invariably primarily targeted the most productive agricultural areas in Ukraine and the Norh Caucasus.

In fact, his industrialization program was based on the forcible extraction of sufficient marketable grain from the peasants. Agricultural surpluses were to be exported in exchange for imported machinery.

The campaign was conducted in a ruthless manner with total disregard for the suffering and human cost involved. Wealthier peasants, dubbed “kulaks,” their families were rounded up and deported in their tens of thousands to remote regions.

Peasant resistance was stiff particularly in Ukraine and among the nomadic herdsmen of Kazakhstan.

By 1932 with the collectivization drive virtually completed and the war to subdue the peasantry effectively won, yet the assault on Ukraine continued.

By 1932 with the collectivization drive virtually completed and the war to subdue the peasantry effectively won, yet the assault on Ukraine continued. For here, because of the national question, it assumed an additional dimension.

Stalin, who viewed the nationalities question as being inherently linked with the peasantry, had made no secret of his disapproval of the national assertiveness of the Ukrainians. As the threat of famine loomed, pleas from Ukrainian Party officials to stop the continued grain seizures were received with irritation in Moscow and more and more functionaries dispatched from Moscow to Ukraine to ensure that Stalin’s policy was implemented.

Stalin wrote on Aug. 11 to his chief henchman in Ukraine, Lazar Kaganovich: "If we don't make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine…. Keep in mind that the Ukrainian Communist party includes not a few (yes, not a few!) rotten elements, conscious and non-conscious” nationalist and Polish agents. “I repeat - we can lose Ukraine."

From November 1932 Ukrainian villages were economically blockaded if they failed to meet their quota. By the end of the year special “tow brigades” had seized all the available food and seed. Widespread hunger in one of Europe’s most productive agricultural regions began to turn into a famine of massive proportions. The parallel campaign against Ukrainian nationalism and “national deviationism” among Ukrainian Communists was intensified and linked even more directly with the struggle for grain.

Stalin again urged that Ukrainian nationalism be eradicated by intensified repression. As millions of Ukraine’s inhabitants starved to death, the Soviet Union nevertheless continued exporting grain. The artificial terror famine raged in Soviet Ukraine and the North Caucasus, which was heavily populated by Ukrainians and where Ukrainian national schools and cultural facilities had been established. It did not spread to neighboring Belarus, or other parts of Russia.

The Soviet authorities did their best to conceal the facts and ensured that there were few foreign witnesses.

The Soviet authorities did their best to conceal the facts and ensured that there were few foreign witnesses. Illustrious apologists for Soviet Communism, such as George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs and the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, insisted reports of starvation were false or exaggerated.

In 1941, the Nazi invasion of the USSR turned Stalin, Hitler’s accomplice by virtue of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact involving a mutual non-aggression pact and the division of eastern Europe, into an ally of the West; therefore concern about the means that “Uncle Joe” had used until then to consolidate his totalitarian rule was deferred or forgotten. Later, when his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, he avoided discussing the period of forced collectivization and what followed it and the archives remained off limits.

In the West, Ukrainian émigrés who continued to attempt to draw attention to what had occurred in their homeland under Soviet rule were all too often dismissed as fanatical anti-Communists with an axe to grind. It was not until around the 50th anniversary of the famine, after intensified efforts to publicize the atrocity by Ukrainian scholars in North America and Western scholars like Robert Conquest and James Mace had delved more deeply into the subject, that broader attention began to be given to it.

The Soviet authorities sought to undermine the validity of the research and publications that ensued by branding them as “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Almost right up to the very end of the Soviet era, they denied that the man-made famine in Ukraine had occurred and that millions had perished.

Yet, when glasnost finally began to make itself felt in Ukraine in the wake of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, one of the first “blank spots” which the Ukrainian cultural intelligentsia began to demand be removed concerned this tragedy in the nations’ history. They were further encouraged when, in 1988, a Committee of the US Congress acknowledged the famine in Ukraine as an act of genocide.

Finally, in February 1990 the Communist Party of Ukraine reluctantly acknowledged in the face of mounting public pressure that the famine had taken place and was the result “of the criminal course pursued by Stalin and his closest entourage toward the peasantry.”

Only after Ukraine achieved its independence, could historians begin to discover what was left in the hitherto secret state archives and to publish their findings.

Only after Ukraine achieved its independence, could historians begin to discover what was left in the hitherto secret state archives and to publish their findings. Consequently, during the 1990s much valuable material appeared confirming both the scale of the atrocity, but also, the way in which was organized.

As a result, the details of the man-made famine or Holodomor, as it has become known in Ukrainian (literally meaning, killing by starvation), have become better and more firmly established as a defining experience in Ukrainian national consciousness. Their appearance also led Western scholars and public figures to examine what happened.

Ukrainian scholarly and official efforts to have the Holodomor recognized as genocide achieved an important breakthrough in 2003, on the 70th anniversary of the Holodomor. The Ukrainian parliament, or Verkhovna Rada, recognized it as an act of genocide.

In October of that year, the first European scholarly forum on this topic was held in Vincenza under the auspices of the President of Italy and the Ukrainian Embassy in Rome and the participants included specialists from western Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Canada. A leading contemporary Ukrainian scholar on the famine, Stanislav Kulchitsky, told the Ukrainian press that at the Vincenza symposium “The issue of the Holodomor as an act of genocide dominated the reports…”

A month later, at the 58th General Assembly of the United Nations, Ukraine’s efforts to obtain international recognition of the Holodomor as genocide achieved a preliminary partial success. Delegations from 20 countries, including Italy signing on behalf of the European Union and associated members, agreed to recognize it as a tragedy caused by the actions of a totalitarian regime.

During 2003, resolutions, or declarations, concerning the Holodomor were adopted by the US Congress, the Australian and Argentinian Senates and the Canadian and Hungarian parliaments.

After the Orange democratic revolution in Ukraine at the end of 2004 and beginning of 2005, the new president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, stepped up efforts to get the UN to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide. He referred to it as such in his speech before the UN General Assembly on Sep. 15, 2005, and designated the fourth Saturday of November as an annual day of remembrance of the victims of the Holodomor and political repression.

After their analogous democratic revolutions brought their countries politically closer, Georgia extended support to Ukraine in this regard: at the beginning of 2006, the Georgian parliament formally acknowledged the Ukrainian famine as an act of genocide.

In Russia, not only its political leadership but also and many historians, political scientists and legal specialists opposed viewing the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainians.

But in Russia, not only its political leadership but also and many historians, political scientists and legal specialists opposed viewing the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainians.

To this day no precise figures about the numbers of those who perished as a result of the Soviet collectivization drive and the Holodomor are available. Various Western scholars in the 1980s concluded that around five million died as a result of the general Soviet collectivization drive between 1929 and 1932. But this still leaves the question of how many victims the Holodomor claimed.

In an exclusive interview given to Kyiv Post this week, Director of the National Museum of the Holodomor, Lesya Hasydzhak, acknowledged that it remains impossible to give a precise total of the Ukrainians killed during the Holodomor, but it is certainly no less that four million and probably much higher.

As of today, according to a survey conducted by the Sociological Rating Group in Ukraine, 92% of those polled agreed with the statement that “the Holodomor of 1932-1933 was a genocide of the Ukrainian people,” representing an increase of one and a half times compared to 2010. Twenty-eight countries have recognized the Holodomor as a genocide, and this month the Ukraine-initiated Declaration commemorating the 90th anniversary of Holodomor at the UN was signed by 55 UN Member States and the EU delegation.

Finally, 90 years later, the Holodomor has been acknowledged as the genocide it was. Today, the challenge is to get the world to recognize that Russia’s war against Ukraine is genocide once again being conducted by an imperialist aggressor in a cynical and barbaric manner.

kyivpost.com · by Bohdan Nahaylo

12. Russia held these Ukrainian teens captive. Their testimonies could be used against Putin.

Russia held these Ukrainian teens captive. Their testimonies could be used against Putin.

By Siobhán O'Grady and Anastacia Galouchka

November 25, 2023 at 3:41 p.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Siobhán O'Grady · November 25, 2023

November 25, 2023 at 3:41 p.m. EST

Rostyslav Lavrov shows the selfie he and his friend, Denys Berezhnyi, took after arriving in Kyiv. (Alice Martins for The Washington Post)

KYIV — The Russian missing child poster went up in Crimea soon after Rostyslav Lavrov escaped last month.

“HELP FIND,” it read. “17 years old, born 2006 … Height 160 cm, thin build, dark hair, blue eyes.”

“Anyone who knows anything about the whereabouts of the teenager is asked to report this.”

The attached photo — which Lavrov said was taken several months ago when Russian authorities holding him against his will tried to issue him a Russian ID card — showed the Ukrainian teen sullen in a white shirt and tie.

He is one of three Ukrainian teenagers who fled Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea this summer and shared their experiences with The Washington Post in lengthy interviews in Kyiv and Kherson. They each described systematic efforts by Russian officials to keep them in Russian-controlled territory.

Ukraine says there are thousands of Ukrainian children like Lavrov who were forced to move to Russia or Russian-occupied territory, including Crimea, since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. What makes Lavrov exceptional is that he got out, carrying with him memories of his experience that could one day be used in court to prove Russia committed war crimes by relocating children.

On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, which accused them of war crimes for unlawfully deporting and transferring Ukrainian children. Lvova-Belova herself adopted a Ukrainian teen from the occupied city of Mariupol. The Kremlin has denounced the warrants and said they have no legal validity in Russia.

Some of the Ukrainian children in Russia are too young to know their own names or citizenship. Others may be too scared to speak up. Some have already been adopted into Russian families — including by Russian government officials — or issued Russian identity documents.

But accounts from teenagers, who are capable of describing their forced removal and detention by Russian authorities, contradict the Russian narrative that Ukrainian children are finding safety and happiness in Russia. They also pose an immense legal and political threat to Putin, Lvova-Belova and other Russian officials.

Ukraine intends to use their testimony as evidence that Russia is systematically removing Ukrainian children from their homes and culture, erasing their identities to reshape them as loyal Russian citizens.

Escaping Russia

Lavrov saw the missing poster online from 1,000 miles away in Kyiv, where his phone kept ringing. First the calls were from the director of the school where Russian officials forced him to study in Crimea, then from the Russian police.

“Where are you?” they wanted to know. “I’m in Ukraine,” he replied. His name was not registered crossing any border, they told him. People he knew were going to get in trouble for this, the director warned, and a teacher who accidentally marked him present in class the day he left could even go to prison.

Lavrov — who is originally from a village in Ukraine’s Kherson region that was occupied by Russian forces last year — apologized but refused to answer their questions. He didn’t tell them how he fled his dorm room or share details about his travels by car and train through Russia and Belarus before he crossed into Ukraine on foot, clutching his birth certificate as proof of his Ukrainian citizenship.

Instead, the boy sent a Russian police officer contemptuous evidence he was finally in his home country: a time-stamped selfie from Maidan — the central square in Kyiv where Ukrainians famously gathered in protest a decade ago. It is a symbol of Ukraine’s desire to break free from Russian influence and join the European Union.

The Washington Post is not disclosing the full account of Lavrov’s narrow escape from Russia due to ongoing security concerns.

Facing immense pressure over the issue of missing children — the arrest warrant has prevented Putin from traveling to meetings with other world leaders — Russia recently has relented in several cases, allowing a few children to return to Ukraine after mediation by Qatar.

Among them was 17-year-old Bohdan Ermokhin, a Ukrainian orphan from Mariupol who was relocated to Russia and then issued a Russian passport, which Russia said he voluntarily accepted. His Ukrainian lawyer said that while living in Russia he then received summonses to register with a Russian military office, a request Russia described as standard for all boys with Russian citizenship who turn 18 in the country.

Russia insists that it is protecting children, adhering to the law, and helping families reunite when possible.

In Ermokhin’s case, Lvova-Belova said in a statement that Russian troops found him “neglected” in Mariupol in 2022 and placed him in the care of a Russian family.

His departure took “into account the unambiguous position of Russia on the issue of reunification of children with relatives separated during the period of the special military operation,” she said.

Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets — whose office is responsible for negotiating children’s returns to Ukraine — said Ukraine did not recognize Ermokhin’s Russian passport as legitimate and that accepting Russian identification was often “a mechanism of survival” for people living in temporarily occupied territory or moved to Russia. The Washington Post could not reach Ermokhin directly for comment on his case.

After intense diplomatic negotiations, Ermokhin returned to Ukraine via Belarus on his 18th birthday last week, escaping the prospect of one day being conscripted to fight against his own country. That same fate was among Lavrov’s fears while stuck in Crimea with his own 18th birthday quickly approaching.

Securing Ermokhin’s release “was one of the hardest cases” of the war so far, Lubinets said, adding that Ermokhin’s willingness to tell Russian officials he wanted to go home despite the risks made him “a hero.”

The ombudsman said he hopes publicity around Ermokhin’s case could encourage other Ukrainian children in Russia to also speak up and find their way back to Ukraine.

Each child Lubinets’s office has gotten out of Russia required its own “operation,” he said. Hundreds of other children have found their way home through other, more discreet efforts, including missions supported by Save Ukraine, a Kyiv-based organization, which has helped parents and guardians travel to Russia to retrieve their children.

One such Save Ukraine mission helped Lavrov’s close friend, Denys Berezhnyi, who is from Kherson city, get out of Crimea several months ago.

Forced away from home

Berezhnyi was studying to become a locksmith when Russia occupied his hometown last year. Then, in October 2022, his school director, who supported Russia’s occupying authorities, told him and other students that they would be required to attend “camp” in Crimea. Berezhnyi, who was then 17, tried to refuse but school officials said they had legal documents certifying his parents’ permission for him to travel. His parents told him they never signed any document and were unaware of the plan, he said.

Fearing repercussions, Berezhnyi agreed to go — traveling by boat and bus with other children from Russian-occupied Kherson into Crimea. Some 600 other kids, including some as young as seven years old, were also enrolled at the camp and Lavrov was among them, the two teenagers said.

Months earlier, Lavrov’s grandmother had died and his mother was hospitalized for severe mental illness. He never knew his dad. At 16, he was living alone in his family house, surviving off his vegetable garden, when a local collaborator working with Russia and three armed Russian soldiers came to his door and told him he needed to move to Kherson city to enroll in school, he said.

Soon after, the school where they sent him forced him to the Crimean camp.

The boys were among masses of Ukrainian children moved out of the Kherson region in autumn 2022 as Ukrainian troops were poised to retake it from Russian control.

So was Diana, who is now 16, and is being identified only by her first name because of security concerns. She was in eighth grade and living with her grandparents when Russian troops seized Kherson.

For seven months, she found her own ways to rebel against Russian occupation. When schools reopened and she had to take Russian history class, she drowned out the teacher’s lessons with music, hiding her headphones with her hair. When Russian soldiers bothered her on the street, she occasionally talked back. So when her school director pressured her and her two best friends, Sonya and Masha, to attend camp in Russia for 10 days last October, she initially refused.

The demands became more persistent. The school director insisted it was for their own safety and pressured the three girls to sign permission slips meant for their guardians, Diana said. The falsified documents allowed them to travel to the camp near the Russian city of Krasnodar. After they signed, Diana recalled, “He was like, ‘Good enough! Give it here!’”

On Oct. 14, 2022, the three girls boarded a train with hundreds of other children, roughly 6 to 18 years old, thinking they would be gone for 10 days, Diana said. Others on board said they heard it would be three weeks.

“We’re sitting on the train, and … Sonya goes ‘I think something is wrong,’” Diana later recalled. She tried to reassure her. But weeks passed and the girls were still stranded at the camp, glued to their phones to follow reports that Ukrainian troops were advancing on their hometown.

Similar scenes unfolded at the camp where Berezhnyi and Lavrov were stuck in Crimea. Lavrov spent around nine days total in solitary confinement as punishment, including for not singing the Russian national anthem, he said. Berezhnyi, who is diabetic, said he ran out of insulin and was hospitalized for weeks against his will.

The kids were all scared of what might happen to their families in the fight for Kherson. When one girl learned her village had been shelled, “she was shaking completely and the entire camp was calming her down,” Diana recalled.

Diana, typically outspoken, asked the Russian staff what would happen if Ukraine liberated Kherson city. “‘My brother is sitting in the trenches. It’s 100 percent sure that [Ukrainian forces] will not enter the city,’” she recalled one Russian camp official telling her. The official also admonished her not to use the word “liberate.”

Days later, Ukraine made a surprise advance on the city, and Russian troops retreated across the Dnieper River. In Krasnodar, the girls scrolled through footage of people cheering in the streets, draped in Ukrainian flags and realized they — and hundreds of other kids — were now stuck.

Diana said she went back to the same camp official. “Listen, moron,” she recalled telling him. “You promised us that we will be home … How are we going to return?”

But there was no plan. Ukrainian children could not safely cross battle lines back to Ukrainian controlled territory on their own and were also banned from crossing borders from Russia into Belarus or Europe without an accompanying guardian.

No easy way out

As autumn 2022 gave way to winter, some children from areas of Ukraine still occupied by Russia were sent home. But children from liberated areas of Kherson and the northeast Kharkiv region were moved to a smaller campsite in Russia.

Eventually, kids from Kharkiv were sent to the Russian city of Yeysk, Diana said, while those from Kherson were put in a hotel in the city of Anapa. Diana watched some Ukrainian mothers risk their own safety to come collect their stranded kids.

The Russian adults in charge of kids at the hotel in Anapa told those who remained that anyone not picked up by New Year’s would be put in the custody of the Russian police and sent to boarding school, Diana recalled.

She knew no one would come for her.

The teenager has no relationship with her mother and was raised by her grandparents, who could not afford to travel. Her father, who has another family, was not allowed to exit Ukraine due to martial law banning military-aged men from leaving.

Sonya’s mother came to get her. Masha’s grandmother came for her next. “I was left alone and then it was really hard,” Diana said.

Desperate, Diana contacted her godmother, who was living in Russia. On Jan. 9, she picked her up from the hotel. For the next six months, Diana stayed with her in the city of Vityazevo. It was a dark time, she said, in which she would stare at her house keys from Kherson and search online for ways to return home.

In Crimea, Berezhnyi and Lavrov were searching for their own ways out.

By early this year, they were still stuck at camp when Russian officials sent them to the Crimean city of Kerch and enrolled them to study at a technological institute, the teens said. Russian authorities moved Lavrov’s mother to a hospital in Crimea and told him they issued her a Russian passport. They said he should accept one too. He refused.

Then, in early summer, a fellow Ukrainian student’s mother came to escort him out. With help from Save Ukraine, Berezhnyi’s parents signed power of attorney documents to let her take him. But documents the organization provided for Lavrov were refused due to complications over his mother’s guardianship, despite her hospitalization. His classmate’s mother took the issue to a Russian-controlled court in Crimea and was rejected.

They had to leave without him.

Diana, meanwhile, knew her friend Sonya had gotten home in part with the help of volunteers from Save Ukraine. She contacted the organization and they said they might be able to help her too. Another mother from the Kherson region was planning to go to Russia to retrieve her kids, they told her, and with a power of attorney document signed by Diana’s father, she could travel with them.

Her dad agreed and on July 27 — eight months after she first entered Russia — she boarded a bus with the woman and her two children, strangers who held the ticket to her escape. They traveled for a week straight and she reached Kherson on Aug. 4, her grandmother’s birthday. She surprised her at home with a cake.

“There were tears in her eyes,” Diana said in Kherson this summer. “We hadn’t seen each other for almost a year … I was scared that she’d have a heart attack.”

Lavrov was still stuck — and the months after his friends got out were a blur of misery.

When the dorms in Kerch closed for the summer, school officials sent him to a camp for troubled children elsewhere in Crimea. He began plotting again how to get out. When he returned to school this fall, officials again tried to push Russian documents on him, he said, including a Russian version of his birth certificate, which he burned. He fled soon after.

When he finally reached the border last month and saw the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag, he practically ran toward it, he said. Save Ukraine volunteers he told about his successful escape were waiting for him on the other side.

They drove him to a shelter in Kyiv. When Lavrov stepped out of the car, Berezhnyi was there, waiting for him. They would be roommates and the teens, who had survived Russian captivity, were together again.

This time, in the capital of Ukraine.

The Washington Post · by Siobhán O'Grady · November 25, 2023

13. Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records

Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records

A WIRED analysis of leaked police documents verifies that a secretive government program is allowing federal, state, and local law enforcement to access phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

Wired · by Condé Nast · November 20, 2023

A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter obtained by WIRED, sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality.

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services, or DAS, has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people unsuspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact with as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records reviewed by WIRED show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by the US government, meaning that, while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator’s letter.

AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson declined WIRED’s request to comment on the DAS program, saying only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena.

There is no law requiring AT&T to store decades’ worth of Americans’ call records for law enforcement purposes. Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T’s voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance.

In 2020, the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets published hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement data stolen from agencies around the US. A WIRED review of the files unearths extraordinary detail regarding the processes and justifications that agencies use to monitor the call records of not only criminal suspects, but of their spouses, children, parents, and friends. While DAS is intended to exclusively target drug-related crimes, a leaked file from the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) shows that local police agencies, such as those in Daly City and Oakland, requested DAS data for unsolved cases seemingly unrelated to drugs.

In one instance, an officer with the Oakland Police Department asked for a “Hemisphere analysis” to identify the phone number of a suspect by analyzing the calls of the suspect’s close friends. In another, a San Jose law enforcement officer asked his regional HIDTA to identify a victim and material witness in an unspecified case. One officer, soliciting information from AT&T under the program, wrote: “We obtained six months of call data for [suspect]'s phone, as well as several close associations (his girlfriend, father, sister, mother).” The records do not indicate how AT&T responded to every request.

Leaked law enforcement files further show that a range of officials—from a US Postal Service inspector to a New York Department of Corrections parole officer—participated in DAS training sessions. Other participants include port authorities and members of US Immigration & Customs Enforcement, National Guard, and California Highway Patrol, alongside scores of smaller agencies.

First disclosed by the New York Times in September 2013 as Hemisphere, the DAS program—renamed in 2013—has since largely flown under the radar. Internal records obtained by the newspaper at the time concerning the program’s secrecy show that law enforcement had long been instructed to never “refer to Hemisphere in any official document.”

Following the Times’ story, former US president Barack Obama reportedly suspended funding for the Hemisphere program in 2013. And while discretionary funding was withheld over the following three years, a White House memo obtained by WIRED shows that individual law enforcement organizations across the US were permitted to continue contracting with AT&T directly in order to maintain access to its data-mining service. Funding resumed under former president Donald Trump but was halted again in 2021, according to the White House memo. Last year, under president Joe Biden, the funding resumed once more, the memo says.

The White House acknowledged an inquiry from WIRED, but has yet to provide a comment.

The DAS program is maintained under an affiliated program called HIDTA, funded by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). HIDTA, or “high-intensity drug trafficking area,” is a designation assigned to 33 different regions of the US, according to the White House. The first five regions, mapped out in 1990, included areas around Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, New York, and the entire US-Mexico border, some of the nation’s most active drug trafficking areas.

The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a variety of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient’s names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time. Documents released under public records laws show the DAS program has been used to produce location information on criminal suspects and their known associates, a practice deemed unconstitutional without a warrant in 2018.

“Requests concerning location information require the highest level of legal demand, which is a court-issued warrant, except in emergency situations,” AT&T’s Hart Jonson says.

Orders targeting a nexus of individuals are sometimes called “community of interest” subpoenas, a phrase among privacy advocates synonymous with dragnet surveillance.

“The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope,” Wyden’s letter to Garland says.

The White House has provided at least $6.1 million in discretionary funding to the DAS program since 2013, according to a two-page memo authored last year by White House officials. An internal HIDTA “participant guide” reviewed by WIRED shows that HIDTA funding exceeded $280 million in 2020 alone. It remains unclear how much HIDTA funding is spent to support AT&T's vast collection of American call records.

It is not currently known how far back the call records accessible under DAS go. A slide deck, released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014, states that up to 10 years’ worth of records can be queried under the program, a statistic that contrasts with other internal documents that claimed AT&T could reach decades into the past. AT&T’s competitors, meanwhile, typically retain call records for no more than two years. (The necessity for phone companies to track call records for extended periods of time has gradually decreased with the disappearance of long-distance charges.)

The DAS program echoes multiple dragnet surveillance programs dating back decades, including a Drug Enforcement Agency program launched in 1992 that forced phone companies to surrender records of virtually all call going to and from over 100 other countries; the National Security Agency's bulk metadata collection program, which the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals deemed illegal in 2014; and the Call Details Records (CDR) program, which suffered from "technical irregularities" leading the NSA to collect millions of calls it was “not authorized to receive.”

Unlike these past programs, which were subject to congressional oversight, DAS is not. A senior Wyden aide tells WIRED the program takes advantage of numerous “loopholes” in federal privacy law. The fact that it’s effectively run out of the White House, for example, means it is exempt from rules requiring assessments of its privacy impacts. The White House is also exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, reducing the public’s overall ability to shed light on the program.

Because AT&T’s call record collection occurs along a telecommunications “backbone,” protections enshrined under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act may not apply to the program.

Earlier this month, Wyden and other lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced comprehensive privacy legislation known as the Government Surveillance Reform Act. The bill contains numerous provisions that, if enacted, would patch most if not all of these loopholes, effectively rendering the DAS program, in its current form, explicitly illegal.

Read Wyden's full letter to the US Department of Justice below:

The Honorable Merrick B. Garland

Attorney General

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Garland:

I write to request that you clear for public release additional information about the Hemisphere Project. This is a long-running dragnet surveillance program in which the White House pays AT&T to provide all federal, state, local, and Tribal law enforcement agencies the ability to request often-warrantless searches of trillions of domestic phone records.

In 2013, the New York Times revealed the existence of a surveillance program in which the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) pays AT&T to mine its customers’ records for the benefit of federal, state, local, and Tribal law enforcement agencies. According to an ONDCP slide deck, AT&T has kept and queries as part of the Hemisphere Project call records going back to 1987, with 4 billion new records being added every day. That slide deck was apparently disclosed by a local law enforcement agency in response to a public information request and was published by the New York Times in 2013.

The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope. One law enforcement official described the Hemisphere Project as “AT&T's Super Search Engine” and ... "Google on Steroids,” according to emails released by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) under the Freedom of Information Act. The ONDCP slide deck and an email released by the DEA also reveal that AT&T searches records kept by its wholesale division, which carries communications on behalf of other communications companies and their customers. Another slide deck released by ONDCP and published by the press in 2014 describes the specific capabilities of Hemisphere, including that it can be used to identify alternate numbers used by a target, obtain location data and “two levels of call detail records for one target number” (meaning the phone records of everyone who communicated with the target).

The Hemisphere Project has been supported by regular funding from the White House ONDCP since 2009, according to the attached undated white paper that ONDCP provided to my office on October 27, 2022 (Appendix A). That same document reveals that White House funding for this program was suspended by the Obama Administration in 2013, the same year the program was exposed by the press, but continued with other federal funding under a new generic sounding program name, “Data Analytical Services.” ONDCP funding for this surveillance program was quietly resumed by the Trump Administration in 2017, paused again in 2021, the first year of the Biden Administration, and then quietly restarted again in 2022.

Although the Hemisphere Project is paid for with federal funds, they are delivered to AT&T through an obscure grant program, enabling the program to skip an otherwise mandatory federal privacy review. If the funds came directly from a federal agency, such as the DEA, Hemisphere would have been subjected to a mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties, the findings of which would be made public. Instead, ONDCP provides funding for the program through the Houston High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), one of 33 regional funding organizations as a part of a grant program created by Congress and administered by ONDCP. The HIDTAs distribute federal anti-drug law enforcement grants to state and local agencies, and are governed by a board made up entirely of federal, state and local law enforcement officials.

ONDCP provided my staff with an undated white paper describing the program and its historical funding levels, but ONDCP directed all questions about Hemisphere to the Houston HIDTA. Officials at the Houston HIDTA provided my office with a briefing on November 7, 2022, and spoke again with my staff again by phone on December 1, 2022. The Houston HIDTA officials told my staff that all Hemisphere requests are sent to a single AT&T analyst located in Atlanta, Georgia, and that any law enforcement officer working for one of the federal, state, local and Tribal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. can contact the AT&T Hemisphere analyst directly to request they run a query, with varying authorization requirements. The Houston HIDTA officials confirmed that Federal and state law enforcement agencies can request a Hemisphere search with a subpoena, which is a directive that many law enforcement agencies can issue themselves (except in California and Texas, where a court order is required by state law). They also explained that Hemisphere searches are not required to be in support of drug-related investigations.

For the past year, I have urged the DOJ to release dozens of pages of material related to the Hemisphere Project, which it first provided to my office in 2019. This information has been designated “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” which is meant to restrict its public release. I have serious concerns about the legality of this surveillance program, and the materials provided by the DOJ contain troubling information that would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress. While I have long defended the government’s need to protect classified sources and methods, this surveillance program is not classified and its existence has already been acknowledged by the DOJ in federal court. The public interest in an informed debate about government surveillance far outweighs the need to keep this information secret. To that end, I urge you to promptly clear for public release the material described in Appendix B.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Sincerely,

Ron Wyden

United States Senator

Wired · by Condé Nast · November 20, 2023

14. The tunnels: How Hamas buried Gaza's future

​Excerpt:

Israel has been battling Hamas, an Islamic offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, since it took over Gaza in 2007, and even well before. In between wars, Thomas Friedman notes, “Israel built an impressive society and economy…. Hamas took nearly all of its resources and built attack tunnels.”

The tunnels: How Hamas buried Gaza's future

​The web of tunnels beneath Gaza was made not to facilitate life but to bring death. And it is at long last seen by Israel as an existential strategic threat that must be destroyed.

By SHLOMO MAITAL

NOVEMBER 25, 2023 19:16

Jerusalem Post

Consider the New York City subway system. Launched in 1904, it carried 1.8 billion passengers last year, over 248 route miles beneath the sprawling city, covering Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Amazing. It is hard to imagine life in the city without its metro.

There is another “metro.” It is the web of tunnels beneath Gaza. Its goal is not to facilitate life but to bring death. And it is at long last seen by Israel as an existential strategic threat that must be destroyed. To do so will take creative thinking and a massive ground invasion, facing huge difficulties.

How large is the Gaza ‘metro’?

Truly staggering. The tunnels stretch for miles beneath the length and breadth of Gaza. An IDF website notes that since January 2014, some 4,680 trucks carrying 181,000 tons of gravel, iron, cement, wood, and other materials passed through the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza – from Israel. Yes, we Israelis were fully complicit in this.

Read More...

Bar-Ilan University geology professor Joel Roskin has published books and articles on tunnels and used his expertise in his IDF service. He told Jerusalem Post reporter Judy Siegel-Itzkovich that Hamas tunnels have been a project under construction for many years. “It began with the smuggling of goods [mainly to and from Egypt], progressed to the smuggling of weapons, and later evolved into attack tunnels,” he said.

Siegel-Itzkovich observes that “in recent years, Hamas integrated the underground system in many ways into its defensive and offensive system, built by cruelly combining military warfare, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism.”

TUNNELS FROM Gaza are a threat but the government’s tunnel vision also needs to be corrected (credit: REUTERS)

All this, right under our noses.

How costly is the Gaza metro?

According to Prof. Roskin, tunnels may be as deep as 60 meters (180 feet, the height of a 15-story building). Roskin notes that the deeper the tunnel, the denser and harder are the clay sediments, owing to overburden (pressure of the soil above the tunnel), enabling a more sturdy tunnel. Hamas, of course, has taken into account IDF threats from the air in planning tunnel depths.

Roskin, who in the past has advised IDF on geological aspects of the tunnels, observed that IDF estimates state that each stretch of tunnel costs $3 million, using prefabricated concrete and iron. And there are many dozens of them. They have spacious rooms for command and control, hospitals, and even places where Hamas terrorists host their families. They are well ventilated and well lit, with power from generators that use diesel fuel.

Incidentally, Hezbollah has also built attack tunnels, from Lebanon into northern Israel. Before Israel found and destroyed one, it was shown to the world. An American four-star general, Joseph Votel, said he was “taken aback at the level of effort involved in creating those things.” Effort, resources – in a poor nation, Lebanon, struggling to feed its people.

Can the tunnels be destroyed by aerial bombardment?

Only in theory. The US has some fearful weapons, including a 15-ton bomb, the GBU-57. But they haven’t offered them to Israel. And in a tiny area three times more densely populated than Los Angeles, only 25 miles long and six miles wide, the civilian toll would be immense and unacceptable. Aerial bombs alone cannot do the trick.

How did Egypt try to destroy the smuggling tunnels leading into Sinai?

A vast system of tunnels was built from Gaza, leading south into Egypt’s Sinai, for purposes of smuggling weapons and people. According to Roskin, the tunnel exits in Sinai were built under houses and other structures order to hide them. Egypt at one point pumped sewage and seawater into these tunnels, igniting a huge Palestinian protest.

So, how can the IDF effectively neutralize the tunnels?

Writing in the daily USA Today, Rick Jarvis describes in detail IDF anti-tunnel efforts. An IDF unit called Samur (“weasel” in Hebrew) is trained to squeeze through narrow tunnels, find lodging and headquarters, and stores of weapons, knowing booby-traps are everywhere. They are also trained to find hostages – some 240 of them remain after the October 7 attack.

Great expense has been incurred in preparing technologies and methods to destroy the tunnels. Jarvis notes that the US Congress has allocated $320m. since 2016 to assist in this. The IDF has invested much more.

Can Gazan civilians shelter in the tunnels?

Hamas does not allow it. Not only does Hamas build command bunkers in tunnels under schools and hospitals, but it bans civilians from using them for shelter. Let’s run some numbers. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who spent years in Israeli prison and was released in a hostage exchange, bragged in 2021 that there are 300 miles of tunnels under Gaza – fully the length of the New York City subway system. This is an exaggeration. But suppose there are, say, 100 miles of tunnels. I estimate that a mile of tunnel, 5,280 feet, could shelter 2,600 people, giving each two feet of space to sit or stand. One hundred miles of tunnel, notwithstanding the huge halls built for hostages and command centers, could shelter 260,000 Gazans – enough to house, say, over half of Gazan children 12 and under. Gaza has a million children and youths 18 and under.

Hamas murdered many of our Israeli children and hold others hostage. They are also directly culpable for many of the collateral deaths of their own. But none of their supporters seem willing to recognize this.

Are the hostages being held in the tunnels?

On Monday, October 23, hostage Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, from Kibbutz Nir Oz, was freed. She was taken by motorbike to Gaza by Hamas terrorists. She said she was beaten initially, though later given medicine and fed by her captors. She reported that the hostages are held in a “spider’s web” of tunnels that stretch far beneath Gaza and was forced to walk for miles through them.

How does Hamas provide power for the tunnels?

Tunnels have to be well ventilated, lit, and equipped for communications. This is done through generators powered by diesel fuel. That is why Hamas is so desperate to obtain fuel, thus far disallowed by Israel in the humanitarian aid trucks.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari estimates that Hamas has at least half a million liters of fuel underground. “Hamas is stealing from Gazan civilians to fuel its attacks,” he noted. The UN aid agency UNRWA has confirmed theft of diesel fuel by Hamas from hospitals.

A 100-kilowatt generator uses 7.4 gallons of diesel (28 liters) per hour, or 672 liters per 24 hours, 4,700 liters per week. This suggests that Hamas has enough diesel fuel to power 100 generators for a week.

IN HIS 2017 book Not in God’s Name, the late UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asserted that when individuals are motivated by what he calls “altruistic evil” in the name of their God, terrible violence ensues.

A quarter of the world’s eight billion people are Muslims. Based on global pro-Hamas demonstrations, it appears that many or most have embraced a religious war against Israel.

There are 16 million Jews in the world, nearly half of whom live in Israel. A very large majority rejects the notion of a religious war.

Israel has been battling Hamas, an Islamic offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, since it took over Gaza in 2007, and even well before. In between wars, Thomas Friedman notes, “Israel built an impressive society and economy…. Hamas took nearly all of its resources and built attack tunnels.”

We will destroy the tunnels that threaten us, though it will be hard and costly.

And one day, sanity will return and peace among peoples will prevail. ■

The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion and blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.

Jerusalem Post

​15. Can Taiwan Continue to Fight Off Chinese Disinformation?

Countries need cyber civil defense. All citizens have to defend against disinformation.

Excerpts:

Fact checkers and watchdog groups said public apathy was a concern — research suggests that Taiwanese people make limited use of fact-checking resources in past elections — as was the risk of being spread too thin.

“There’s mountains of disinformation,” said Eve Chiu, the chief executive of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which has around 10 fact checkers working each day. “We can’t do it all.”

Attempts to increase interest in media literacy have included a nationwide campaign, “humor over rumor,” which leveraged jokey meme culture and a cute dog character to debunk false narratives. In September, the Taiwan FactCheck Center also held a national virtual competition for youths that drew students like Lee Tzu-ying, Cheng Hsu-yu and Lu Hong-yu.

The three civics classmates, who finished in third place, acknowledged that Taiwan’s raucous politics allowed disinformation to breed confusion and chaos. Their Taiwanese peers, however, have learned caution.

“If you see something new, but don’t know if it is true or false, you need to verify it,” Ms. Lee, 16, said. “I just want to know the truth — that’s very important to me.”

Can Taiwan Continue to Fight Off Chinese Disinformation?

By Tiffany Hsu, Amy Chang Chien and Steven Lee Myers

Nov. 26, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by Steven Lee Myers · November 26, 2023

Ahead of a presidential election in January, Taiwanese fact checkers and watchdogs say they are ready for Beijing. But they are still worried.

An advertisement in Taipei, Taiwan, for Lai Ching-te, whose presidential campaign was the target of an audio deepfake.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times

Nov. 26, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

Suspicious videos that began circulating in Taiwan this month seemed to show the country’s leader advertising cryptocurrency investments.

President Tsai Ing-wen, who has repeatedly risked Beijing’s ire by asserting her island’s autonomy, appeared to claim in the clips that the government helped develop investment software for digital currencies, using a term that is common in China but rarely used in Taiwan. Her mouth appeared blurry and her voice unfamiliar, leading Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau to deem the video to be almost certainly a deepfake — an artificially generated spoof — and potentially one created by Chinese agents.

For years, China has pummeled the Taiwanese information ecosystem with inaccurate narratives and conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine its democracy and divide its people in an effort to assert control over its neighbor. Now, as fears over Beijing’s growing aggression mount, a new wave of disinformation is heading across the strait separating Taiwan from the mainland before the pivotal election in January.

Perhaps as much as any other place, however, the tiny island is ready for the disinformation onslaught.

Taiwan has built a resilience to foreign meddling that could serve as a model to the dozens of other democracies holding votes in 2024. Its defenses include one of the world’s most mature communities of fact checkers, government investments, international media literacy partnerships and, after years of warnings about Chinese intrusion, a public sense of skepticism.

The challenge now is sustaining the effort.

“That is the main battlefield: The fear, uncertainty, doubt is designed to keep us up at night so we don’t respond to novel threats with novel defenses,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s inaugural digital minister, who works on strengthening cybersecurity defenses against threats like disinformation. “The main idea here is just to stay agile.”

Taiwan, a highly online society, has repeatedly been found to be the top target in the world for disinformation from foreign governments, according to the Digital Society Project, a research initiative exploring the internet and politics. China was accused of spreading rumors during the pandemic about the Taiwanese government’s handling of Covid-19, researchers said. Representative Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island as speaker of the House last year set off a series of high-profile cyberattacks, as well as a surge of debunked online messages and images that fact checkers linked to China.

For all of Beijing’s efforts, however, it has struggled to sway public opinion.

In recent years, Taiwan’s voters have chosen a president, Ms. Tsai, from the Democratic Progressive Party, which the Communist Party views as an obstacle to its goal of unification. Experts and local fact checkers said Chinese disinformation campaigns were a major concern in local elections in 2018; the efforts seemed less effective in 2020, when Ms. Tsai recaptured the presidency in a landslide. Her vice president, Lai Ching-te, has maintained a polling lead in the race to succeed her.

China has denied interloping, instead saying it is the “top victim of disinformation.”

News about the presidential race on a television in a Taipei noodle restaurant. Many Taiwanese have internal “warning bells” for disinformation, a founder of a group called Fake News Cleaner said.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times

Ms. Tsai has repeatedly addressed her government’s push to combat Beijing’s disinformation campaign, as well as criticism that her strategy aims to stifle speech from political opponents. At a defense conference this month, she said: “We let the public have knowledge and tools that refute and report false or misleading information, and maintain a cautious balance between maintaining information freely and refusing information manipulation.”

Many Taiwanese have developed internal “warning bells” for suspicious narratives, said Melody Hsieh, who co-founded Fake News Cleaner, a group focused on information literacy education. Her group has 22 lecturers and 160 volunteers teaching anti-disinformation tactics at universities, temples, fishing villages and elsewhere in Taiwan, sometimes using gifts like handmade soap to motivate participants.

The group is part of a robust collective of similar Taiwanese operations. There is Cofacts, whose fact-checking service is integrated into a popular social media app called Line. Doublethink Lab was directed until this month by Puma Shen, a professor who testified this year before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the U.S. government. MyGoPen is named after a homophone in the Taiwanese dialect for “don’t fool me again.”

Taiwan’s anti-disinformation groups include Doublethink Lab, formerly led by Puma Shen.Credit...Chiangying-Ying/Associated Press

Mascots at the entrance of the Taiwan Fact Check Center in Taipei.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times

Citizens have sought out fact-checking help, such as when a recent uproar over imported eggs raised questions about videos showing black and green yolks, Ms. Hsieh said. Such demand would have been unthinkable in 2018, when the heated emotions and damaging rumors around a contentious referendum inspired the founders of Fake News Cleaner.

“Now, everyone will stop and think: ‘This seems odd. Can you help me check this? We suspect something,’” Ms. Hsieh said. “This, I think, is an improvement.”

Still, fact-checking in Taiwan remains complicated. False claims swirled recently around Mr. Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing, and his visit to Paraguay this summer. Fact checkers found that a memo at the center of one claim had been manipulated, with changed dates and dollar figures. Another claim originated on an English-language forum before a new X account quoted it in Mandarin in a post that was shared by a news website in Hong Kong and boosted on Facebook by a Taiwanese politician.

China’s disinformation work has had “measurable effects,” including “worsening Taiwanese political and social polarization and widening perceived generational divides,” according to research from the RAND Corporation. Concerns about election-related fake news drove the Taiwanese government last month to set up a dedicated task force.

A banner in Taipei depicts Sun Yat Sen, the first president of the Republic of China, and Taiwan’s flag.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times

Taiwan “has historically been Beijing’s testing ground for information warfare,” with China using social media to interfere in Taiwanese politics since at least 2016, according to RAND. In August, Meta took down a Chinese influence campaign that it described as the largest such operation to date, with 7,704 Facebook accounts and hundreds of others across other social media platforms targeting Taiwan and other regions.

Beijing’s disinformation strategy continues to shift. Fact checkers noted that Chinese agents were no longer distracted by pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, as they were during the last presidential election in Taiwan. Now, they have access to artificial intelligence that can generate images, audio and video — “potentially a dream come true for Chinese propagandists,” said Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a RAND researcher.

A few months ago, an audio file that seemed to feature a rival politician criticizing Mr. Lai circulated in Taiwan. The clip was almost certainly a deepfake, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice and the A.I.-detection company Reality Defender.

Chinese disinformation posts appear increasingly subtle and organic, rather than flooding the zone with obvious pro-Beijing messages, researchers said. Some false narratives are created by Chinese-controlled content farms, then spread by agents, bots or unwitting social media users, researchers say. China has also tried to buy established Taiwanese social media accounts and may have paid Taiwanese influencers to promote pro-Beijing narratives, according to RAND.

Disinformation that directly addressed relations between China and Taiwan grew rarer from 2020 to 2022, the Taiwan Fact Check Center said last month. Instead, Chinese agents seemed to focus more on stoking social division within Taiwan by spreading lies about local services and health issues. Sometimes, other experts said, questionable posts about medical remedies and celebrity gossip guided viewers to conspiracy theories about Taiwanese politics.

The ever-present menace, which the Taiwanese government calls “cognitive warfare,” has led to several aggressive attempts at a crackdown. One unsuccessful proposal last year, modeled after regulations in Europe, would have imposed labeling and transparency requirements on social media platforms and forced them to comply with court-ordered content removal requests.

Critics denounced the government’s anti-disinformation campaign as a political witch hunt, raising the specter of the island’s not-so-distant authoritarian past. Some have pointed out that Taiwan’s media ecosystem, with its diverse political leanings, often produces pro-Beijing content that can be misattributed to Chinese manipulation.

At an event in June, President Tsai stressed that “well-funded, large-scale disinformation campaigns” were “one of the most difficult challenges,” pitting Taiwanese citizens against one another and corroding trust in democratic institutions. Disinformation defense, she said, must be “a whole-of-society effort.”

Fact checkers and watchdog groups said public apathy was a concern — research suggests that Taiwanese people make limited use of fact-checking resources in past elections — as was the risk of being spread too thin.

“There’s mountains of disinformation,” said Eve Chiu, the chief executive of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which has around 10 fact checkers working each day. “We can’t do it all.”

From left, Lu Hong-yu, Lee Tzu-ying and Cheng Hsu-yu placed third as a team in a Taiwan fact-checking competition.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times

Attempts to increase interest in media literacy have included a nationwide campaign, “humor over rumor,” which leveraged jokey meme culture and a cute dog character to debunk false narratives. In September, the Taiwan FactCheck Center also held a national virtual competition for youths that drew students like Lee Tzu-ying, Cheng Hsu-yu and Lu Hong-yu.

The three civics classmates, who finished in third place, acknowledged that Taiwan’s raucous politics allowed disinformation to breed confusion and chaos. Their Taiwanese peers, however, have learned caution.

“If you see something new, but don’t know if it is true or false, you need to verify it,” Ms. Lee, 16, said. “I just want to know the truth — that’s very important to me.”

Tiffany Hsu reports on misinformation and disinformation and its origins, movement and consequences. She has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Tiffany Hsu

Amy Chang Chien covers news in mainland China and Taiwan. She is based in Taipei. More about Amy Chang Chien

Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation for The Times. He has worked in Washington, Moscow, Baghdad and Beijing, where he contributed to the articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2021. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.” More about Steven Lee Myers

The New York Times · by Steven Lee Myers · November 26, 2023

16. Taiwan Draws Clear US-Versus-China Battle Lines in Key Election

Excerpts:

The collapse of the opposition alliance makes Chinese President Xi Jinping’s stated goal of voluntary unification with Taiwan more remote, with pro-Beijing votes scattered among the challengers to the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party. That would benefit the ruling party’s candidate, Vice President Lai Ching-te, who wants to further strengthen Taiwan’s ties with Washington.

...

Standing in Lai’s way are the Kuomintang’s Hou Yu-ih and the Taiwan People’s Party’s Ko Wen-je, both of whom have said they plan to restart direct talks with Beijing. Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou withdrew from the presidential race just hours before Friday’s registration deadline, saying he did so for the “greater good” to give the two remaining opposition candidates a better chance of unseating the DPP.

Taiwan Draws Clear US-Versus-China Battle Lines in Key Election

• China-friendly parties fail to form alliance to challenge DPP
• Ruling party candidate Lai sees long-held lead in polls shrink
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-26/taiwan-draws-clear-us-versus-china-battle-lines-in-key-election?sref=hhjZtX76

By Jennifer Creery

November 26, 2023 at 5:02 AM EST

Taiwan’s voters in January will have the chance to reset the island’s fraught relationship with China, and cool down one of the world’s key geopolitical flashpoints.

With less than seven weeks to go until polling day, that prospect now hangs in the balance after opposition parties that seek better relations with Beijing failed to unite behind a single candidate, despite weeks of chaotic and often acrimonious negotiations that played out in public.

The collapse of the opposition alliance makes Chinese President Xi Jinping’s stated goal of voluntary unification with Taiwan more remote, with pro-Beijing votes scattered among the challengers to the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party. That would benefit the ruling party’s candidate, Vice President Lai Ching-te, who wants to further strengthen Taiwan’s ties with Washington.

Standing in Lai’s way are the Kuomintang’s Hou Yu-ih and the Taiwan People’s Party’s Ko Wen-je, both of whom have said they plan to restart direct talks with Beijing. Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou withdrew from the presidential race just hours before Friday’s registration deadline, saying he did so for the “greater good” to give the two remaining opposition candidates a better chance of unseating the DPP.

Taiwan Presidential Preference

Polls numbers in percent

Source: My Formosa

Despite the fractured opposition, an unprecedented third straight term in power for the DPP is by no means a foregone conclusion. After almost eight years in power, there’s growing unhappiness with the party and a desire for change, especially among younger voters. Support for Lai dipped to 31.4%, leaving him just a fraction ahead of the KMT’s Hou on 31.1%, according to a survey by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation released Friday. Ko trails in third place on 25.2%.

“There are a substantial amount of voters who want a change,” said Wei-Ting Yen, assistant professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. “So there is a higher chance for the DPP to lose the majority in the legislature.”

• Read more on Taiwan’s election:Dramatic Week in Taiwan Leaves Pro-US Candidate as Frontrunner
• Socially Awkward Outsider Is Surprise Contender to Lead Taiwan
• War With China Is the Threat That Defines Taiwan’s Next Election
• Why Taiwan’s 2024 Election Matters From China to US: QuickTake

Friday’s registration deadline for the election confirmed the final roster of candidates contesting the Jan. 13 vote. Their choices of vice presidential running mates also provided strong indications of where their priorities lie.

Lai’s vice presidential pick, Hsiao Bi-khim — Taiwan’s former de facto ambassador to the US — points to his party’s efforts to build upon its success in strengthening unofficial ties overseas, especially with Washington.

“We’ve been put in a situation where geostrategic challenges are formidable and the rock-solid partnership with the US is critically important,” Hsiao said at a press conference Thursday.

While the US doesn’t formally recognize Taiwan as a nation, it has vowed to help the island defend itself against what American officials say is an increasingly aggressive China. Beijing views Taiwan as a part of Chinese territory.

Both Lai and Hsiao assert Taiwan is already a de facto sovereign country in need of greater international recognition. China has labeled Lai a “troublemaker,” and has put Hsiao on its sanctions list of “die-hard” Taiwan independence supporters.

Kuomintang presidential candidate Hou Yu-ih, left, and his running mate Jaw Shaw-kong.Photographer: I-Hwa Cheng/Bloomberg

Hou selected television presenter and media owner Jaw Shaw-kong as his running mate. A former KMT legislator in the 1980s, Jaw split from the party in the early 1990s to co-found a hardline unification political party, only to rejoin the KMT in 2021.

Hou’s choice of a China-leading vice president “sends a clear signal that they aim to consolidate the blue voters,” Franklin & Marshall College’s Yen said, referring to that part of the electorate that favors Taiwan’s eventual unification with China. “If the KMT is successful in the strategic voting campaign, we can expect the poll number to go up for the KMT candidate, and it will be a much closer race,” she said.

17. China, US exchange accusations over US vessel in South China Sea

Excerpts:

According to a post on the official WeChat social media account of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Southern Theatre Command on Saturday, the Chinese military deployed its naval and air forces to "track, monitor and warn away" the U.S. destroyer.

The U.S. Navy said on Sunday that the Hopper had "asserted navigational rights in the South China Sea near the Paracel Islands, consistent with international law".

China, US exchange accusations over US vessel in South China Sea

Reuters

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Nov 26 (Reuters) - China and the United States exchanged accusations at the weekend over the disputed South China Sea, after China's military said it had driven away a U.S. warship that the U.S. Navy said was on a routine freedom of navigation operation.

According to a post on the official WeChat social media account of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Southern Theatre Command on Saturday, the Chinese military deployed its naval and air forces to "track, monitor and warn away" the U.S. destroyer.

The U.S. Navy said on Sunday that the Hopper had "asserted navigational rights in the South China Sea near the Paracel Islands, consistent with international law".

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, a conduit for more than $3 trillion of annual ship-borne commerce, including parts claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 said China's claims had no legal basis.

The Philippines and Australia began their first joint sea and air patrols in the sea on Saturday, days after Beijing accused Manila of enlisting foreign forces to patrol the South China Sea, referring to joint patrols by the Philippine and U.S. militaries.

This weekend's incident, China said, "proves that the United States is an out-and-out 'security risk creator' in the South China Sea".

Lieutenant Kristina Weidemann, deputy spokesperson for the U.S. 7th Fleet, said in an emailed statement: "The United States challenges excessive maritime claims around the world regardless of the identity of the claimant.

"Unlawful and sweeping maritime claims in the South China Sea pose a serious threat to the freedom of the seas."

Earlier this month, the United States and China held talks on maritime issues, including the contested South China Sea, where the U.S. underscored concerns about what it called "dangerous and unlawful" Chinese actions, the U.S. State Department said.

Reporting by Casey Hall in Shanghai, Laurie Chen in Beijing and Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Mark Potter and Edmund Klamann

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Acquire Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Reuters

18. Does the US actually want Ukraine to defeat Russia?

We should consider both the national security and moral issue of a strategy where we are only willing to ensure Ukraine does not lose. Or, as Kupchan suggests, is out waiting Putin a viable strategy - can Ukraine win a war of exhaustion? Or are we just fighting to the last Ukrainian? 

Excerpts:

A common refrain since February 2022 is that the U.S. is giving Ukraine enough military aid to survive, but not enough to win. In this telling, Washington, D.C. fears that a strategic Kremlin defeat in Ukraine could prompt chaos within Russian borders, perhaps the unseating of President Vladimir Putin, and a vicious regional struggle to fill a power vacuum littered with weapons of mass destruction. With the China challenge looming, Eurasian anarchy would pose many new problems for the White House.

...

American and allied Western officials have been privately critical of Ukraine's offensive approach. reported in August that U.S. planners felt Kyiv's attacking forces were too spread out along the 600-mile front, failing to concentrate enough firepower in one spot to punch through.

But for many Ukrainians, the U.S. bears some responsibility for the as-yet underwhelming counteroffensive. "I'm grateful to the U.S. as the leaders of our support," Zelensky told CNN in July. "I told them as well as the European leaders that we would like to start our counteroffensive earlier, and we need all the weapons and materiel for that. Why? Simply because if we start later, it will go slower."

Vajdich said this sentiment is still strong in Kyiv. "It is an empirical fact that a lot of the assistance has not gotten to the Ukrainians as quickly it as it could have," he said. "There are supply chain issues, there's no doubt about that. But there's also a portion of this assistance, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that could have gotten to the Ukrainians a lot earlier.

...

Ukraine is fighting a war of national survival. Biden and other Western leaders, though, have been clear that the Western coalition is charged with global survival. "We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis," Biden said in October 2022.The White House has favored a graduated approach to military aid for Kyiv. Too much too soon, officials have warned, could prompt dangerous escalation from the Russian side. Western partners have also cited the need for strategic ambiguity and the element of surprise. Actual strikes on Russian positions have often been the first sign that Ukraine has received certain NATO weapon systems.But step-by-step Western aid has sown frustration nonetheless. Steven Moore—once a chief of staff for former chief deputy GOP whip Rep. Pete Roskam (R-IL), and now running Ukraine Freedom Project in Kyiv—told Newsweek: "Ukrainians view themselves as our partners in taking out a long-held American adversary in Russia."

...

Kupchan said Ukraine and the West should, like Putin, consider "the long game."

"You get the fighting to end, you get Ukraine back on the path of prosperity, and then you wait Putin out, and you hope for a day when at the negotiating table Russia gives Ukraine back its territory.

"Is that outcome in sight? No. But how many people in 1985 believed that Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia would be independent democracies and members of NATO? Nobody.

"Everyone talks about Putin waiting out Ukraine and the West. I think we turn the tables. We out-wait him."

Does the US actually want Ukraine to defeat Russia?

Newsweek · by David Brennan · November 26, 2023

Ukraine's 2023 fighting season is drawing to a close under a cloud of unmet expectations. Its soldiers and citizens, who are steeling themselves for a Russian winter blitz, will not be warmed by the memories of summer success, Kyiv's long-awaited counteroffensive operation having failed to achieve the breakthrough needed to collapse Moscow's occupation of the south of the country.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and top commander General Valerii Zaluzhnyi have admitted Ukraine's shortcomings. "There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough," Zaluzhnyi said in an interview with The Economist earlier this month. Zelensky, meanwhile, told citizens that "all attention should be focused on defense."

As Kyiv works to maintain its Western coalition, stress fractures are forming. In Europe, a wave of right-wing populism threatens to derail the continent's political establishment, while in the U.S. President Joe Biden is heading into a fierce re-election contest with a Republican Party cowed by former President Donald Trump and shifting into open Ukraine-skepticism.

A common refrain since February 2022 is that the U.S. is giving Ukraine enough military aid to survive, but not enough to win. In this telling, Washington, D.C. fears that a strategic Kremlin defeat in Ukraine could prompt chaos within Russian borders, perhaps the unseating of President Vladimir Putin, and a vicious regional struggle to fill a power vacuum littered with weapons of mass destruction. With the China challenge looming, Eurasian anarchy would pose many new problems for the White House.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and U.S. President Joe Biden walk to the Oval Office of the White House September 21, 2023. Biden has tied his presidency closely to Ukrainian victory. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Zelensky appears to be feeling the pinch. "The Ukrainians do see continued hesitancy and this mindset of worrying about escalation, not provoking the Russians in some sort of way," Daniel Vajdich—president of Yorktown Solutions and one of Ukraine's most prominent lobbyists in Washington, D.C.—told Newsweek.

"On the implementation side, there's a whole lot of continued caution that raises real questions in Kyiv about whether there is a desire for the Ukrainians to truly defeat the Russians. And the conclusion is 'no'.

"The Ukrainians believe that despite all the assistance, despite the fact that the administration is doing so much, there is still so much caution because there is not a desire for the Ukrainians to decisively defeat the Russians, thinking that this would really lead to internal turmoil and collapse in Russia."

Newsweek has contacted Zelensky's office and the White House by email to request comment.

'Failure Is an Orphan'

American and allied Western officials have been privately critical of Ukraine's offensive approach. reported in August that U.S. planners felt Kyiv's attacking forces were too spread out along the 600-mile front, failing to concentrate enough firepower in one spot to punch through.

But for many Ukrainians, the U.S. bears some responsibility for the as-yet underwhelming counteroffensive. "I'm grateful to the U.S. as the leaders of our support," Zelensky told CNN in July. "I told them as well as the European leaders that we would like to start our counteroffensive earlier, and we need all the weapons and materiel for that. Why? Simply because if we start later, it will go slower."

Vajdich said this sentiment is still strong in Kyiv. "It is an empirical fact that a lot of the assistance has not gotten to the Ukrainians as quickly it as it could have," he said. "There are supply chain issues, there's no doubt about that. But there's also a portion of this assistance, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that could have gotten to the Ukrainians a lot earlier.

"It had a decisive impact in terms of the situation on the ground...the spring offensive this year would have been a spring offensive and not a July offensive, which made all the difference. It allowed the Russians to literally entrench themselves and fortify their defenses."

Kyiv has had to fight hard for every new NATO weapons system. The first American-made main battle tanks had arrived in Ukraine as of October, more than 18 months since Russian armored columns rolled across Ukrainian frontiers. Kyiv is still pushing for the longest-range version of the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System—known as the ATACMS, and U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets will not expected to arrive until early 2024.

Flags on Independence Square, each honouring a soldier lost in the war, after fresh snowfall in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 22, 2023. Ukraine is thought to have suffered more than 100,000 casualties in its war with Russia. Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images

Ukraine is fighting a war of national survival. Biden and other Western leaders, though, have been clear that the Western coalition is charged with global survival. "We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis," Biden said in October 2022.

The White House has favored a graduated approach to military aid for Kyiv. Too much too soon, officials have warned, could prompt dangerous escalation from the Russian side. Western partners have also cited the need for strategic ambiguity and the element of surprise. Actual strikes on Russian positions have often been the first sign that Ukraine has received certain NATO weapon systems.

But step-by-step Western aid has sown frustration nonetheless. Steven Moore—once a chief of staff for former chief deputy GOP whip Rep. Pete Roskam (R-IL), and now running Ukraine Freedom Project in Kyiv—told Newsweek: "Ukrainians view themselves as our partners in taking out a long-held American adversary in Russia."

"We supply the weapons, they supply the lives of their very best people," Moore said. "The Ukrainians aren't getting the weapons that we promised nor are they getting the weapons that they need."

America's Inflection Point

Some hope the onset of winter and the relatively static front may facilitate fresh peace negotiations. Putin has repeatedly said he is open to revived talks, though only on the condition that Ukraine accepts the "new territorial realities" of Moscow's occupation of around 20 percent of Kyiv's territory.

Zelensky has refused talks on Russian terms, and disputed suggestions that the war has become a stalemate. "A few military tricks, and you remember, the Kharkiv region was liberated," he said this month, referring to the surprise counteroffensive success in northeastern Ukraine in fall 2022.

"We have no right to give up. What's the alternative? What, we need to give away a third of our state? This will only be the beginning. We know what a frozen conflict is, we have already drawn conclusions for ourselves. We need to work more with air defense partners, unblock the sky, give our fighters the opportunity to carry out offensive actions."

Zelensky denied any pressure from Western partners to go back to the negotiating table. Vajdich said he too sees no coercion. "But if it did exist, or if this is what some Western leaders are thinking without acting on it, what they need to do is not convince President Zelensky, they need to convince the Ukrainian people," he said, noting sustained public support for full liberation of the country.

An unpopular peace proposal may spell the end of Zelensky's stint in office, "with an election or without an election," Vajdich added.

Ukraine cannot continue its war without Western—and especially U.S.—support. Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that the looming winter and disappointing Ukrainian summer push "necessitate a comprehensive reappraisal of the current strategy that Ukraine and its partners are pursuing."

Both told Newsweek that neither the U.S. nor Ukraine has yet reached that point. "That broader public debate is overdue and is necessary," Kupchan said. "We've been in a political environment in which having this kind of conversation has been almost taboo."

"It's a dangerous situation to be in," he added. "That's how wars go on endlessly. Good strategy is about not just what's desirable, but also what's possible."

Haass proposed "an interim definition of success," one that pauses rather than abandons the goal of full territorial liberation. "It might have to wait years or even decades to accomplish the larger definition of success," he explained. "That would probably have to wait on the emergence of a post-Putin leadership, or a post-post-Putin leadership."

Full liberation is "unlikely to be achievable given the military balance," Haass said. "We've now had two fighting seasons. I don't see a basis for saying if you had a third, or a fourth, or fifth Ukraine would be able to realize that goal."

"I think it is essential for Ukraine survive that Russia be frustrated. And the current situation I would describe as a strategic victory for Ukraine and the West. It's not everything, but it's a lot. And it doesn't rule out more down the road."

The Biden administration shows no sign of breaking with Kyiv, despite the difficult environment almost two years after Russia's full-scale invasion. "The Biden administration finds itself in something of a dilemma," Haass said.

There are some "who are sympathetic to what I've just articulated, but don't want the Biden administration to be seen to be at cross purposes with Ukraine," he added.

Two Ukrainian soldiers in Maidan Square, Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 22, 2023. The country is bracing for a tough winter after a summer-fall of underwhelming battlefield progress. Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images

"It's always an awkward topic when you disagree with an ally with about policy aims," Haass said, warning that the broader geopolitical trends are not necessarily in Ukraine's favor. "I would argue we should do this now from a position of strength, and I would argue Ukraine should do it now from a position of strength."

The sense in D.C., Kupchan said, is that "Zelensky is not ready to begin to pivot to a strategy aimed at ending the war. If the Ukrainians are not ready for this conversation, then the West is not going to foist it upon them."

"My guess is that behind closed doors there is a conversation about how to end the war, and about a set of feasible war aims, and about the role of diplomacy," he added. "But I don't think you're going to see that conversation go public until the there is a sense that the Ukrainians themselves are ready to have that conversation."

"It's inevitable that Ukrainians themselves begin to address the question of 'what do we do now?'" Kupchan said. "Perhaps, at some point, it makes more sense for Ukraine to invest the resources that it's getting from the West into the defense and reconstruction of the 82 percent of Ukraine under Kyiv's control."

Post-Putin Planning

Ukrainians will not look kindly on Western partners urging what amounts to surrender, even if only in the short term. Kyiv is believed to have sustained more than 100,000 casualties in nearly two years of fighting, and tens of thousands more in the lower intensity war with Moscow and its separatist puppets since 2014.

Ukrainians are scarred by the collective Western failure to hold Putin to account in 2014, or to deliver on the security assurances given to Ukraine in the 1997 Budapest Memorandum, under which Kyiv surrendered its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. Few Ukrainians want to allow the Russian dictator to keep the spoils of another round of aggression.

Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia, on November 24, 2023. The Russian president appears to be waiting out Ukraine and its Western partners. Contributor/Getty Images

Growing Western discomfort is clear to Ukrainians. "Maybe it's a sign for us, for Ukrainians that we have to discuss a few more options of how to stop this war, not only to reach our borders of 1991—now, it's very difficult to achieve it," Ivan Stupak—a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine and now an adviser to the Ukrainian parliament's national security, defense and intelligence committee—told Newsweek. "Maybe [there is] a middle point."

But the lack of trust between the two sides remains a serious problem. "Russians never kept their promises," Stupak said. "How do we force the Russian Federation to keep their word?"

Kupchan acknowledged that the "downside" of his proposed approach "is that you let, at least for now, Russia get away with a blatant act of aggression and territorial conquest. And that sends a terrible message to the world about the rule of law and the sanctity of sovereignty."

Still, he added, not all is well for the Kremlin. "Russia has already been dealt a profound strategic defeat," Kupchan said. "Putin has lost Ukraine. We know that. And now the question is whether he going to get a consolation prize by holding on to some percentage of Ukrainian territory."

Both Haass and Kupchan were part of a group that reportedly took part in back-channel talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier this year. "I think, at the moment, the Russian conversation is based on the assumption that things are going their way politically," Haass said.

"They see the populist trends, they see the polls in the United States. I think Putin strategy boils down to, 'Let's see where things stand in a year,'" he added. "I assume he's lighting candles for a Trump victory."

Kupchan said Ukraine and the West should, like Putin, consider "the long game."

"You get the fighting to end, you get Ukraine back on the path of prosperity, and then you wait Putin out, and you hope for a day when at the negotiating table Russia gives Ukraine back its territory.

"Is that outcome in sight? No. But how many people in 1985 believed that Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia would be independent democracies and members of NATO? Nobody.

"Everyone talks about Putin waiting out Ukraine and the West. I think we turn the tables. We out-wait him."

Ukrainian soldiers operate a Flakpanzer Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft gun near Kyiv on November 23, 2023. The country is approaching the two-year mark of war following Russia's full-scale invasion, with no end in sight. Kostya Liberov/ Libkos/Getty Images

Uncommon Knowledge

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

Newsweek · by David Brennan · November 26, 2023

19. Queens high school students storm halls after learning teacher attended pro-Israel protest

Until our children can understand and respect this ideal we are going to struggle. This is the complete opposite of cancel culture. This is what it means to every American soldier, sailor, airmen, and Marine who takes the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. When our youth can understand and respect this ideal we will be on the right path (and our recruiting failures will end).

“I wholly disapprove of what you say - and will defend to the death your right to say it.”

• Voltaire

Queens high school students storm halls after learning teacher attended pro-Israel protest

BY TARA SUTER - 11/25/23 5:57 PM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4327269-queens-high-school-students-storm-halls-teacher-pro-israel-protest/

Students at a high school in Queens, N.Y., reportedly stormed the hallways after learning a teacher attended a pro-Israel protest Monday.

According to the New York Police Department (NYPD), school safety agents at Hillcrest High School “requested the response of the school sergeant in regard to a disorderly group of students inside of the location.” When the sergeant responded, the students reportedly “dispersed.”

The New York Post reported Saturday that the disturbance began over what students referred to as a protest that was already planned due to a teacher’s Facebook profile photo that showed her at a pro-Israel rally last month holding a poster that said “I stand with Israel.”

“The teacher was seen holding a sign of Israel, like supporting it,” a senior reportedly told The New York Post.

“A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot,” the senior continued.

Alleged video of the incident appeared to show students running through and jumping in hallways. 

The students tried to get into the teacher’s classroom, according to The New York Post. The teacher hid in a locked office due to the alleged riot.

“I have been a teacher for 23 years in the New York City public school system — for the last seven at Hillcrest High School. I have worked hard to be supportive of our entire student body and an advocate for our community, and was shaken to my core by the calls to violence against me that occurred online and outside my classroom last week,” the teacher said in a statement to The New York Post.

“No one should ever feel unsafe at school — students and teachers alike,” she continued.

The Hill has reached out to New York City Public Schools.

20. Is Hamas buying time with hostage releases?

Who gets to adopt the Rolling Stones' "Time is on my side?"

Is Hamas buying time with hostage releases?

BY NICK ROBERTSON - 11/25/23 5:30 PM ET

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4327097-hamas-buying-time-hostage-releases/

The hostage deal reached late Wednesday in the Israel-Hamas war is set to halt fighting in the conflict for at least four days, but its open-ended nature raises concerns about whether the pause may assist Hamas strategically, as the U.S. and Israel both hope to wipe out the terrorist organization.

The Israel-Hamas war began early last month when Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis in a brutal surprise attack on border settlements and took about another 250 people hostage.

The deal reached this week is set to free 50 Israeli hostages in exchange for a temporary cessation of hostilities and the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners to the West Bank.

But critics of the agreement note that any pause in fighting may only play into Hamas’ hands and allow the group to extend its fight against Israel.

That criticism marks a division within Israel and among its allies, University of New Haven national security senior lecturer Ken Gray told The Hill.

“For the IDF, this pause causes problems because it gets time for Hamas to realign their forces, to try to shore up some areas that they may not have had people in at that time,” Gray said. “It gives [Hamas] a chance to retrench themselves.”

“In many ways, there is a conflict as to what the primary mission is,” he continued. “The IDF’s primary mission is to be able to remove Hamas as a threat, while others in Israel want to try to resolve this peacefully and as quickly as possible in order to get the hostages back.”

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton has been one of the loudest critics of the agreement, calling it “bad for Israel,” despite the concerns for hostages. He previously served as national security adviser to former President Trump.

“Hamas is playing a game of psychological warfare against the people of Israel, and the people of the United States as well,” he said in a CNN interview Thursday.

“They’re trying to distract Israel from its strategic mission of eliminating Hamas, and trying to focus on the question of the hostages [and] the question of the condition of civilians in Gaza,” he continued.

A focus in the deal is a clause that allows Hamas to extend the cease-fire by a day for every additional 10 hostages released. That could allow Hamas to extend the pause for over two weeks until they return every hostage.

Gray said he expects Hamas to drag out the cease-fire deal. The group already delayed the second wave of hostage releases on Saturday, citing a shortfall in humanitarian aid, though the problem was quickly resolved.

“Hamas is trying to buy time in hopes that it becomes a regional conflict. And the way that they do that is to start not fulfilling the hostage exchanges,” he said. “Early on, have a hostage exchange and then start having problems and not delivering the hostages, and then it turns into the same situation as [Gilad Shalit].”

IDF soldier Gilad Shalit was taken hostage by Hamas in 2006, and released in 2011 after five years of tense negotiations in exchange for about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. 

However, Gray said attempts to create larger regional conflict — a major concern of the Biden administration — are unlikely to be successful. The risk of the conflict growing to include Hezbollah militants in Lebanon and Iran is smaller now than at the outbreak of the war, he said.

“If it were possible, it would have already happened,” he said. “Hamas overplayed their hand.”

While Hezbollah has continued limited skirmishes with Israeli troops on the Israel-Lebanon border, there has been no large-scale escalation in fighting.

Middle Eastern governments at large appear to be refusing to back Hamas, and the Biden administration has stressed the importance of an independent Palestinian government in post-war Gaza, a key issue among Arab leaders. 

“As we look to the future, we have to end the cycle of violence in the Middle East,” Biden said Friday. “We need to renew our resolve to pursue this two-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians can one day live side-by-side in a two-state solution with equal measures of freedom and dignity.”

Backers of the hostage deal also highlight that it allows significant amounts of humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza, which has run low on food, medical supplies and fuel reserves for weeks.

Assisting civilians in Gaza has been a focus of U.S. pressure on the Israeli government and increasing domestic pressure within Israel, as the civilian death toll climbs. 

Over 12,000 Palestinians, including at least 4,600 children, have died in Israeli air strikes and the ground invasion of Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Keeping that figure as low as possible and assisting civilians in Gaza also keeps Middle Eastern governments, and skeptics in Israel and the U.S., on board with the war effort, Gray said.

“At some point, the number of Palestinian casualties will get so great that Israel will have no choice but be forced to stop,” Gray said. “The question is, how many is too much? Is 11,000 too much? Is 12,000 too much? 15,000?”

Despite that the pause could bring military advantage to Hamas, proponents of the deal argue that releasing the first 50 Israeli hostages can set the stage for further hostage releases in addition to advancing humanitarian interests.

Biden said Friday that it is his “goal” for the cease-fire agreement to be extended beyond four days, and for all hostages to be returned.

“The moment Hamas kidnapped these people, I along with my team, have worked around the clock to secure their release,” he said. “All of these hostages have been through a terrible ordeal, and this is the beginning of a long journey of healing for them.”

21. Meet the Israeli officer in charge of identifying victims of Hamas

The brutality, the tragedy, and the sadness. And the resilience of the people of Israel.

Excerpts:

Emma described what she saw at the base during those two weeks as a horrific tragedy that she will always remember.

"Burnt children, dismembered young people, these are things I will never forget," she recalled.

However, Emma remains optimistic, "from here I will grow, learn about myself, and hope that there will be better days in our beautiful country. We have no other country," Emma concluded.

Meet the Israeli officer in charge of identifying victims of Hamas

Jerusalem Post

Following the October 7 massacre, Cpt, (res.) Emma, an operations officer in the IDF, ran the operation at the Shura military base to identify the bodies of Hamas's victims.

Emma immigrated from Paris a decade ago, and in her civilian life, she is a lawyer for a large firm in Israel.

After the massacre, she would help the families of victims in identifying their loved ones who were murdered.

Identifying the victims

During the first 14 days of Israel's war against Hamas, the Shura military base, located south of Ramle, was used to bring the bodies of over 1,300 people, and among them, 311 soldiers, who were killed during the massacre, according to Ynet.

Over the course of two weeks, constant efforts were made to identify hundreds of bodies that were sent to the military base.

Israeli soldier around the destruction caused by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, near the Israeli-Gaza border, in southern Israel, October 30, 2023 (credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Throughout the duration of days, the family members of missing civilians and soldiers arrived at the scene attempting to identify their loved ones.

Recalling the tragedy

Members of the military rabbinate who worked on the scene testified that the sights at the base were "shocking and resembled a horror scene reminiscent of hell."

Advertisement

When the October 7 massacre occurred Emma was in Paris, but when she was called for her reserve service, she returned home to Israel immediately.

"I woke up in Paris due to calls from my best friend, who lives in the south of the country. A few hours later I received an order from my commander to go to reserve service, I didn't hesitate for a moment, I packed a suitcase, left my family, and boarded a flight from Paris to Israel."

"I arrived in Israel at night, and an hour after landing I was in uniform ready to fight. After a few hours, I was sent to the Shura military base that was set up that day to collect and identify civilian bodies."

"At the Shura base, the police officers alongside soldiers identified hundreds of bodies that I saw arrive every hour," Emma said.

Emma's role at the Shura base was to accompany the families of the victims following their arrival at the base. She organized cooperation between the families, social workers, and people in charge of explaining the death of the victim's death to the families.

Additionally, Emma delivered the belongings of the victims to the families. She provided them with support and helped the families who came to the base to receive answers about their missing relatives.

Emma described what she saw at the base during those two weeks as a horrific tragedy that she will always remember.

"Burnt children, dismembered young people, these are things I will never forget," she recalled.

However, Emma remains optimistic, "from here I will grow, learn about myself, and hope that there will be better days in our beautiful country. We have no other country," Emma concluded.

Jerusalem Post

22. Five wounded in Kyiv by largest drone attack yet on Ukraine

Five wounded in Kyiv by largest drone attack yet on Ukraine

Reuters · by Max Hunder

• Summary
• Russia launched 75 drones at Ukraine - air force
• Zelenskiy condemns attack on day marking Ukraine's worst tragedy

KYIV, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Ukraine's capital suffered what officials said was Russia's largest drone attack of the war on Saturday, leaving five people wounded as the rumble of air defences and explosions woke residents at sunrise after a week of intensifying attacks.

Saturday's six-hour air raid, on the day Ukraine commemorates the 1932-33 Holodomor famine that killed several million people, began hitting different districts of Kyiv in the early hours, with more waves coming as the sun rose.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that over the course of the week, Russia had carried out 911 attacks across the country, killing 19 Ukrainians and wounding 84.

"The enemy is intensifying its attacks, trying to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians," he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. It was doing so deliberately, "just like 90 years ago, when Russia killed millions of our ancestors," he said.

Ukraine's air force initially said 71 of the 75 drones had been shot down, but subsequently revised the number of downed craft to 74. Its spokesperson said on television that 66 of those had been downed over Kyiv and the surrounding region.

Air force chief Mykola Oleschuk praised the effectiveness of 'mobile fire' units - usually fast pickup trucks with a machine gun or flak cannon mounted on their flatbed. According to him, these downed nearly 40% of the drones.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko, writing on the Telegram app, said the attack had injured five people, including an 11-year-old girl, and damaged buildings in districts all across the city.

[1/12]Employees carry items inside a building of a kindergarten damaged during Russian drone strikes, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine November 25, 2023. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko Acquire Licensing Rights

Fragments from a downed drone had started a fire in a children's nursery, he said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy also pointed out that the attack had come in the early hours of commemorations of the famine, which is recognized by Ukraine and over 30 other countries as a genocide by the Soviet Union, which ruled Ukraine at the time and sought to crush its desire for independence.

"Wilful terror .... The Russian leadership is proud of the fact that it can kill," he wrote on Telegram.

Moscow denies the famine deaths were caused by a deliberate genocidal policy and says that Russians and other ethnic groups also suffered.

The target of Saturday's attack was not immediately clear, but Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Russia will once again wage an aerial campaign to destroy Ukraine's energy system, as it sought to do last winter.

Ukraine's energy ministry said nearly 200 buildings in the capital, including 77 residential ones, had been left without power as a result of the attack.

"It looks like tonight we heard the overture. The prelude to the winter season," Serhiy Fursa, a prominent Ukrainian economist, wrote on Facebook.

Reporting by Max Hunder and Nick Starkov in Kyiv; Additional reporting by Ron Popeski and Elaine Monaghan; Editing by Jacqueline Wong, Alexandra Hudson, Mark Potter and Diane Craft

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Acquire Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Reuters · by Max Hunder

23. Russia says it downed dozens of Ukrainian drones headed for Moscow, following a mass strike on Kyiv

Russia says it downed dozens of Ukrainian drones headed for Moscow, following a mass strike on Kyiv

CNBC · November 26, 2023

An explosion of a drone is seen in the sky over the city during a Russian drone strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 25, 2023.

Gleb Garanich | Reuters

Russian authorities on Sunday claimed that Ukraine tried to attack Moscow with dozens of drones overnight, just a day after Russia launched its most intense drone attack on Kyiv since the beginning of its full-scale war in 2022, according to Ukrainian officials.

Russian air defenses brought down at least 24 drones over the Moscow region — which surrounds but does not include the capital — and four other provinces to the south and west, the Russian Defense Ministry and Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported in a series of Telegram updates. Neither referenced any casualties.

Andrei Vorobyev, governor of the Moscow region, wrote on Telegram that the drone strikes damaged three unspecified buildings there, adding that no one was hurt.

Russian Telegram channels reported that one drone crashed into a 12-story apartment block in the western Russian city of Tula, about 180 kilometers (113 miles) south of Moscow, injuring one resident and frightening others.

Moscow's Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports also briefly shut down because of the drone attack, according to Russia's state-run news agency Tass. Both appeared to have resumed normal operation by 6 a.m. local time, according to data from international flight tracking portals.

Russian Telegram channels speculated that Ukrainian forces had deployed a previously unseen type of drone in the purported strike, pointing out some similarities to the Iranian-made weapons Moscow routinely employs in its attacks on Ukraine.

The Russian capital has come under attack from drones regularly since May, with Russian officials blaming Ukraine. Military analysts commented at the time that the early attacks deployed Ukrainian locally-made drones which could not carry as heavy a payload as the Iranian-made Shaheds.

As of late morning Sunday, Ukrainian officials did not acknowledge or comment on the strikes, which came a day after Russia targeted the Ukrainian capital with over 60 Iranian-made Shahed drones. At least five civilians were wounded in the hourslong assault, which saw several buildings damaged by falling debris from downed drones, including a kindergarten. The wounded included an 11-year-old child, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko.

The attack was "the most massive air attack by drones on Kyiv" in the war so far, Serhii Popko, head of the Kyiv city administration, said on Saturday. Ukrainian air force spokesman, Yurii Ihnat, confirmed later that same day that air defenses shot down 66 air targets over the Ukrainian capital and surrounding region throughout the morning.

The attack on Kyiv was carried out on the morning of Holodomor Memorial Day, which commemorates the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions of Ukrainians from 1932 to 1933. It is marked on the fourth Saturday in November.

The Ukrainian air force early on Sunday said it had brought down eight of nine Iranian-made Shahed drones fired overnight by Russian forces.

Also on Sunday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that two Soviet-made S-200 rockets fired by Kyiv were shot down over the sea of Azov, which stretches between Crimea and Ukraine's Russian-occupied southeastern coast.

According to local news sources, air raid sirens sounded shortly earlier in Russian-annexed Crimea, which on Friday came under what Russian officials called one of the biggest drone attacks since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. There were no reports of casualties and no comment from officials in Kyiv.

Elsewhere, parts of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine were left without power following a nighttime Ukrainian strike on a thermal power plant in the Donetsk region, a Moscow-installed local official reported on Telegram Sunday. According to Denis Pushilin, who heads the province Russia illegally annexed last year, the attack on the Starobesheve plant took out the electricity in parts of the occupied cities of Donetsk and Mariupol, along with other nearby areas.

On the outskirts of Donetsk, Russian troops have continued their attempts to advance near Avdiivka, the eastern town that has been a Ukrainian stronghold and fighting hotspot since the early days of the war, according to reports by the Ukrainian General Staff and analysis by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

The Ukrainian General Staff on Sunday morning said Kyiv's forces over the previous 24 hours beat back Russian assaults to the northeast, west and southwest of Avdiivka, as Moscow's troops strain to encircle the city.

Several Russian bloggers also made unconfirmed claims that Ukrainian forces had begun withdrawing from the industrial zone on Avdiivka's southern flank, although others said that Russian troops lacked complete control of the area. These claims could not be independently verified.

CNBC · November 26, 2023

24. The Song and Dance of American Secrecy

​Excerpts:

Legal scholar Yochai Benkler has outlined one model for such a public-interest defense that is both sensible and workable. It would require the leaker to prove three things: (1) that they had a reasonable belief that their leak discloses a substantial violation of law or a substantial systemic error; (2) that they took efforts to avoid causing imminent, specific harms from disclosure that outweigh the benefits of the disclosure; and (3) that they communicated their disclosures to a channel likely to result in actual exposure to the public—that they went to a journalist, say, rather than tipped off an acquaintance.

Beyond the public-interest defense, it would also help to vary the penalties for leaking depending on the severity of the disclosure. One of the quirks of the current secrecy laws is that the level of classification is irrelevant. A lot of bureaucratic effort is put into distinguishing these levels and working out who can access information that will “harm” or “gravely harm” the United States. It is absurd that the same penalties apply to leaking both. A more nuanced and precise criminal law would provide an important safety valve and check on abuse while also allowing for more fine-grained prosecutions of genuine leaks.

Obviously, these two sets of reforms would not resolve, once and for all, the democratic dilemmas posed by secrecy. But much of the current tension is caused by the swollen bloat of the classification system and the imprecise criminal laws used to enforce it. Creating mechanisms to ensure that improperly or unnecessarily classified information cannot be kept secret will make it much easier to enforce prohibitions against disclosing a much smaller class of properly classified information—and thus begin to repair the country’s deeply flawed secrecy regime.

From the book State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime by Sam Lebovic

The Song and Dance of American Secrecy

Espionage law hasn’t changed much since William Howard Taft—yet recent presidents have wielded it as a cudgel more than ever before.

NOVEMBER 26, 2023, 7:00 AM

By Sam Lebovic, a professor of history at George Mason University.

Foreign Policy · by Sam Lebovic · November 27, 2023

The U.S. government has a secrecy problem. Recent scandals about improperly stored secrets—Mar-a-Lago, Hillary Clinton’s rogue server, U.S. President Joe Biden’s garage—are just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a vast state whose operations are shielded from public view. This poses an obvious challenge to democratic norms. Yet when government employees seek to inform the public about abuses happening in secret, they find themselves prosecuted under a century-old law originally designed to protect the nation from foreign spies: the Espionage Act.

In its eight years in power, the Obama administration brought espionage charges against eight people for disclosing information to the media—most famously, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. The Trump administration brought six such charges in four years. That may not seem like much. But between 1917, when the Espionage Act was passed, and 2008, a grand total of five such cases had been brought against leakers.

The book cover for Sam Lebovic's State of Silence.

This article is adapted from State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime (Basic Books, 464 pp., $32.50, November 2023)

Simply counting up the charges radically understates the power of the law. The Espionage Act serves as the final backstop to the nation’s bloated secrecy regime. No one knows exactly how much information is kept secret by the government. But by any reckoning, it is a staggering amount. One 2001 estimate suggests that there are 7.5 billion pages of classified information cloistered in the U.S. government—as many pages of secrets as there are pages in all the books in the Library of Congress. By the 2010s, between 50 million and 90 million documents were newly stamped as “secret” every year. Managing them is an expensive business. In 2017, the last year in which this figure was made public, maintaining its secrets cost the United States more than $18 billion.

The secrecy laws are supposed to keep the United States safe. Yet runaway secrecy has been producing real harms for decades. There are all the familiar harms: torture and corruption and death and waste. And there are the costs to democracy itself. The cynicism about and mistrust of U.S. politics today have been bred, in no small part, by the cult of secrecy that the Espionage Act helped to construct.

It is time to acknowledge that secrecy has not, in fact, made Americans secure. People have lost their lives as a result of abuses and incompetence made possible by secrecy. The nation has started wars on the basis of policies begun in secret. Secretive politics have led, often many years later, to blowback. The 9/11 attacks, for instance, can be seen as a consequence of secrecy—the clandestine funding of Afghan mujahideen forces in the 1980s; the failure to share intelligence on the threat posed by al Qaeda—as much as a cause of it.

Ironically, the current secrecy regime, while very effective in blunting democratic oversight, has not been all that effective at securing secrets. If Washington wants to restore Americans’ faith in their government—and actually protect its secrets—it needs to make the national security state less secretive.

Chelsea Manning, wearing glass, and a dark button-up shirt, is seen in front of the U.S. District Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. A statue of justice and U.S. flag is seen behind her. A news microphone if held by a hand at right.

Chelsea Manning leaves the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, on March 5, 2019. Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The mega-leaks of Snowden and Manning proved that it was actually pretty easy for a low-level employee to exfiltrate huge quantities of data from the supposedly impregnable bowels of the security state. Manning needed just a couple of blank CDs with a Lady Gaga label. It is only because of good fortune that U.S. leakers have, thus far, been motivated by the desire to inform the public about wrongdoing rather than by more sinister goals.

It would have been just as easy to sell those secrets to a rival power. From 2011 to 2013, a petty officer in the supply corps of a U.S. Navy base in Japan was walking into a secure room on the USS Blue Ridge, printing out the schedules of upcoming ship movements, and walking off the boat to give them to a Singapore-based firm that supplied navy ships in the Indian and Pacific oceans. The movement of vessels is the kind of operational detail that could pose a grave risk to national security. Thankfully, this was a low-level case of political corruption. Detailed knowledge about shipping schedules, and what the U.S. was paying its rivals, helped the firm win millions of extra dollars from the U.S. taxpayer. But all the firm had to do to get the secrets was give the officer about $1,000 per month, some free nights in luxury hotels, and a handful of consumer electronics (an iPad, a Wii, a digital camera).

The more secrets a state tries to keep, the harder it is to actually secure them. The sheer size of the secretive state means that more than 4 million Americans need security clearances to do their work. In the 1990s, the job of managing those clearances was privatized, and the firms that are responsible are inevitably cutting corners to try to get through the backlog and meet their required quotas. This is security theater, producing profit for the contractors more than any genuine peace of mind.

Meanwhile, efforts to compensate for increasingly frequent leakages are causing problems within the security branches. From 2013 to 2016, the head of naval intelligence was not able to read, see, or hear any classified information. His clearance had been suspended when his name surfaced during a corruption investigation, and although he was ultimately never charged, the case remained open for years, and he remained in his position throughout. Every time he entered the room of a colleague, they had to secure all classified material.

The whole song and dance about secrecy is an expensive production, costly both in simple budgetary terms and in its broader political consequences. Too much information is being kept secret, including information that should, by rights, be public. It leaks all the time, mostly to serve the needs of those in power; the textbook case is the disclosure of classified information about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Yet rare acts of disclosure that are intended to inform the public are prosecuted harshly, and the Espionage Act provides a powerful cudgel to shape the flow of information in the polity.

It is past time to reform the system. But the secrecy regime is such a complex tangle of laws and orders and bureaucratic practices that it is hard to know where to begin.

A World War II American propaganda poster shows a woman on the phone with the words "Keep Mum" acorss her face. Type in the center of the image says: "The World Has Ears" and a globe with a face holds a hand to its ear with an expression of shock.

A World War II American propaganda poster promotes the importance of secrecy to the war effort. Edward T. Grigware art/Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

For more than a century, lawyers have complained that the Espionage Act is a poorly drafted, deeply confusing law. At the heart of the act are two sections of the U.S. criminal code, sections 793 and 794. Section 794 criminalizes what we might think of as traditional espionage—it makes it illegal to collect information for a foreign government. Section 793, the section used to prosecute leakers today, is murkier. It contains six complicated clauses intended to protect secrets by making it illegal to gather or transfer information without authorization. But exactly what they mean, and how they are supposed to work, is very unclear.

Since the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917, the system has grown like weeds, guided by no overall vision but a century-long process of improvisation and adjustment. The risk of tinkering with one part of the regime is that it will create new problems somewhere else as the delicate ecology of the bureaucracy evolves to deal with changes. So the ideal solution would be to begin again, to think about the system as a whole and to draw up laws that try to accommodate the competing interests in a more rational way.

Thankfully, people have been calling for reforms to the espionage laws for nearly a century. In a 2006 decision in an Espionage Act case that inaugurated the new era of aggressive leak prosecutions under President George W. Bush, Judge T. S. Ellis III observed that it was remarkable that the “basic terms and structure of [the act] have remained largely unchanged since the administration of William Howard Taft.” A lot had changed in U.S. law and politics and foreign policy since then. “These changes,” Ellis said, “should suggest to even the most casual observer that the time is ripe for Congress to engage in a thorough review and revision of these provisions.”

That hasn’t happened. But the past 90 years of complaints about secrecy have provided a well-stocked pantry of reform ideas. Putting them together, we can begin to imagine what a new secrecy regime might look like.

The most basic starting point is an omnibus information bill that will consolidate and coordinate the various moving pieces of the law. At present, the structure of the laws is shaped by history. The Espionage Act, in all of its vagueness, came first. Then came patches to deal with what were seen as the act’s inadequacies: the classification system (a series of executive orders that established rules for stamping information as secret); prepublication review (a wide-ranging system in which both current and former national security and intelligence employees need pre-approval before publishing material related to their work); and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (a 1982 law that makes it illegal to reveal the identities of covert agents).

Then came reform measures intending to make that secretive state more transparent: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and whistle-blowing laws, which, respectively, provided citizens a right to petition for government information and protected some government employees’ rights to share knowledge of misconduct and abuse within the state.

Because the secrecy laws came first, the reform measures have largely deferred to them. The whistle-blowing laws and the FOIA exempt classified information. At present, the right of the public to know what its government is doing is not actually being balanced against the need for the state to keep some things secret. It is being sacrificed to the presumption of secrecy.

Read More

Illustration by Delcan & Company for Foreign Policy

Illustration by Delcan & Company for Foreign Policy

The Spycraft Revolution

Changes in technology, politics, and business are all transforming espionage. Intelligence agencies must adapt—or risk irrelevance.

china-spying-illustration-foreign-policy-hp

china-spying-illustration-foreign-policy-hp

China Has Been Waging a Decades-Long, All-Out Spy War

While the West was distracted, the Chinese government began an intelligence assault that never stopped.

Two white balloons float near a Chinese flag during a demonstration outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

Two white balloons float near a Chinese flag during a demonstration outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

Let’s Stop Pretending Spying Is a Big Deal

In great-power competition there is no such thing as minding one’s own business.

An omnibus public-information law could consider all of these things at once, building in checks and balances that would better protect the public’s interest. The precise form of the law would be a matter for democratic debate. But history suggests that any effective law would need to do two things.

First, it would need to prevent the routine over-classification of information. The obvious solution is to reform the executive orders guiding the classification regime. The current system asks classifiers to stamp as secret any potential risks to national security. A new statute should require a clearer articulation of the need for classification stamps in any given case and require classifiers to weigh that need for secrecy against the harms posed by a lack of transparency.

However nicely drawn the standards, the only way to ensure that they will be effective is to enforce them. In 1951, Sen. William Benton and the American Civil Liberties Union proposed creating a “people’s advocate” or “anti-censor” who could audit and police classification decisions. It is still a good idea and should be enacted. The Information Security Oversight Office, established in the 1970s to oversee the classification system, should be transformed into an Office of Public Knowledge, with powers to audit classification decisions and impose sanctions. Individuals who repeatedly classify incorrectly would see that reflected in evaluations of their work performance. Agency-wide failures could be punished by extracting the costs incurred by over-classification from the agency’s budget. Reform could be incentivized by allowing agencies to redirect money saved on classification to other needs.

The second area for reform is the Espionage Act itself. Its murky, confusing provisions should be revised to clearly distinguish between the crime of espionage and the crime of improperly disclosing classified information. While the press and public should be exempt from the latter, government employees and contractors should be liable for both negligent and willful disclosures of secrets. If over-classification is kept in check, the government needs to be able to protect the small class of properly secret information. But there should be an important exception: If the leaker discloses information that informs the public about a matter of importance, they should not be found guilty of violating the public-information law.

Legal scholar Yochai Benkler has outlined one model for such a public-interest defense that is both sensible and workable. It would require the leaker to prove three things: (1) that they had a reasonable belief that their leak discloses a substantial violation of law or a substantial systemic error; (2) that they took efforts to avoid causing imminent, specific harms from disclosure that outweigh the benefits of the disclosure; and (3) that they communicated their disclosures to a channel likely to result in actual exposure to the public—that they went to a journalist, say, rather than tipped off an acquaintance.

Beyond the public-interest defense, it would also help to vary the penalties for leaking depending on the severity of the disclosure. One of the quirks of the current secrecy laws is that the level of classification is irrelevant. A lot of bureaucratic effort is put into distinguishing these levels and working out who can access information that will “harm” or “gravely harm” the United States. It is absurd that the same penalties apply to leaking both. A more nuanced and precise criminal law would provide an important safety valve and check on abuse while also allowing for more fine-grained prosecutions of genuine leaks.

Obviously, these two sets of reforms would not resolve, once and for all, the democratic dilemmas posed by secrecy. But much of the current tension is caused by the swollen bloat of the classification system and the imprecise criminal laws used to enforce it. Creating mechanisms to ensure that improperly or unnecessarily classified information cannot be kept secret will make it much easier to enforce prohibitions against disclosing a much smaller class of properly classified information—and thus begin to repair the country’s deeply flawed secrecy regime.

From the book State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime by Sam Lebovic Copyright © 2023 by Sam Lebovic. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Foreign Policy · by Sam Lebovic · November 27, 2023

25.

Apartheid? This is what our youth are told. And unfortunately they believe it.

Excerpts:

Aside from the moral and legal implications of this are the practical ones. It is difficult to envision any Palestinian leader or governing structure that will take over responsibility for the Gaza Strip after Israel destroys it, as they will be seen as having been ushered there on the backs of Israeli tanks. Such leaders will have even less legitimacy than the PA has in the West Bank today, which is hard to imagine.

Such an approach might buy some time. It might produce the semblance of a status quo and a degree of stabilization. But if any lesson must be garnered from Oct. 7, it is that this will not be lasting or sustainable. Any chosen governing entity will not be able to guarantee security for any Israeli as long as apartheid exists and any Palestinian government installed in Gaza will rightly be seen as illegitimate and collaborationist.

However the “day after” is packaged, it will fail unless it comes with holding Israel accountable and dismantling its regime of apartheid, and it will be clear to all Palestinians that it is just another Bantustan solution, cloaked either as humanitarianism or a renewed commitment to a two-state solution.

In this sense, Hamas has indeed dealt a fatal blow to Israel’s fantasy that it could continue its occupation and blockade indefinitely. It is yet unclear, however, if Israeli political leaders—beyond their vengeful violence—have managed to heed this lesson. But grassroots organizers, Hamas’s allies, and other political and military formations have.

Whatever comes next, and however Hamas’s legacy will be written, it’s clear that it is the movement that burst the delusion that Israel and its allies have held on to for far too long.

What Was Hamas Thinking?

The Oct. 7 attack was the culmination of a strategic shift to challenge the movement’s containment.

By Tareq Baconi, the president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network and the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.

Foreign Policy · by Tareq Baconi · November 27, 2023

Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel has initiated an unpredictable chain of events, and it is too early to determine how the attack might shape the future course of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. The vast destruction of the Gaza Strip and the horrifying loss of civilian life are a painful blow to Palestinians, reminiscent of the Nakba of 1948. Yet, simultaneously, the illusion that the Palestinian question can be swept aside while Israeli apartheid persists has been shattered, and Palestine is back at the top of the global agenda—with growing recognition that it must be addressed, even if the brutal massacres of Oct. 7 have polarized the debate around it.

Since 2007, Hamas’s presence in the occupied territories has been restricted to the Gaza Strip, where the movement has been effectively contained through the use of a hermetic blockade that collectively imprisoned Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians. In its containment, Hamas was stuck in what I have termed a “violent equilibrium,” whereby military force emerged as a means for negotiating concessions between Hamas and Israel. The former uses missiles and other tactics to compel Israel to ease restrictions on the blockade, while the latter responds with overwhelming force to build deterrence and secure “calm” in the areas around the Gaza Strip. Through this violence, both entities operated within a framework whereby Hamas could maintain its role as a governing authority in Gaza even under a blockade that enacts daily structural violence against Palestinians.

Beginning in 2018, Hamas began experimenting with different means of changing this equilibrium. One was through its decision to allow for popular protests against Israel’s domination to take place. The Great March of Return in 2018 was one of the most extensive examples of Palestinian popular mobilization. The protest emerged as a civil society-led effort that was given permission, supported, and ultimately managed by a committee comprising the various political parties in Gaza, including Hamas. As a governing authority, Hamas provided much of the infrastructure necessary for the mobilization, such as buses to transport activists. This was a stark departure from the means with which Hamas traditionally challenged the blockade.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh smiles amid a large crowd as he greets protesters at the border fence with Israel in Gaza City.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh greets protesters at the border fence with Israel in Gaza City on May 15, 2018. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Another shift in the equilibrium came a few years later, in 2021, when Hamas leveraged its military arsenal to retaliate against Israeli aggression in Jerusalem. In the lead-up to Hamas’s rocket fire, Israel had been actively working to expel families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood from their homes to make room for Jewish settlers. This initiated widespread mobilization of Palestinians across the land of historic Palestine. The Israeli state responded with force and mass arrests against protests that were peaceful and included prayers around Al-Aqsa Mosque. Israel’s efforts to disrupt the protests and push forward with its colonization of East Jerusalem triggered Hamas to respond with rocket fire.

These examples demonstrate efforts by Hamas to go on the offensive and expand its resistance to encompass demands that extend beyond the lifting of the blockade. Such positioning implies an objective to act as a military power that comes to the defense of Palestinians against Israeli colonial violence beyond the Gaza Strip. Underpinning these tactics was a clear strategic shift by the movement to transition away from acquiescence to its containment to a more explicit challenge of Israeli domination—and thereby overturn the equilibrium that had become entrenched over the course of 16 years.

This shift is in keeping with Hamas’s historical evolution as a movement that has relied on both armed and unarmed resistance, in ebbs and flows, to challenge Israel’s occupation and to push for core demands of the Palestinian struggle, including the right of return, which was central in the 2018 protests. (Hamas’s history is replete with examples in which it read the political context around it and, on the level of the movement’s leadership, altered the strategic direction of the organization, with clear instructions for the military wing to either escalate or de-escalate.)

The recent shift to all-out violence is also in keeping with the movement’s understanding of the role of armed resistance as a negotiating tactic—one that the movement has historically relied on to force concessions from Israel.

Palestinian demonstrators gather near and climb the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel Flags are caught in the barbed wire of the fenc.e

Palestinian demonstrators gather near the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel during a demonstration on Aug. 21.

The Oct. 7 attack can be seen as the next logical step for a movement chafing against its containment. Some analysts have described Hamas’s move as suicidal, given Israel’s reaction, or irresponsible, given the death toll it has led to among Palestinians. Whether or not either of these characterizations is accurate depends on an analysis of what options Hamas had and on how the dust settles. There is no doubt, however, that the attack itself was a decisive rupture—one that is, in retrospect, clearly the culmination of all the changes that the movement had been experimenting with.

The strategic shift entailed moving from the limited use of rocket fire to negotiate with Israel into a full-throttled military offensive aimed at disrupting its containment, specifically, and the Israeli assumption that it could maintain an apartheid system with impunity.

There is little doubt that the bloody Oct. 7 attack exceeded Hamas’s expectations and that the scale of the massacres in Israel has galvanized Israeli and international opinion in ways that Hamas may not have entirely anticipated. Any significant military operation that Hamas conducted with any degree of success—targeting military bases near the Gaza-Israel fence area and securing a significant number of Israeli combatants—would have similarly shattered the paradigm of the blockade and elicited a devastating Israeli response.

Yet the killing of civilians on this scale—whether or not Hamas’s leadership had actively pushed and prepared for this level of bloodshed—has galvanized a ferocious Israeli response in Gaza, enabled by the carte blanche granted to the Israeli government by most Western leaders. Some scholars of genocide have argued that the Israeli campaign amounts to ethnic cleansing and intent to commit genocide.

It is counterfactual to argue whether or not these responses would have taken place had no civilians been killed or kidnapped. Either way, Hamas’s military offensive and the mass violence that followed have irreversibly shaped the nature of the response against Palestinians in Gaza.

From a strictly military-strategic perspective, prior to the attack the only option other than the use of force available to Hamas was to remain constricted within the framework of the blockade, while Israeli settlers expanded their rampaging violence in the West Bank, Israeli politicians disrupted the status quo around Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount complex, and Israel got rewarded with U.S. visa waiver programs and regional normalization agreements.

Within this climate, the options Hamas had were to acquiesce to the continued assumption that Palestinians had been effectively defeated and to remain confined and strangulated within their various Bantustans—parcels of discontiguous land resembling the apartheid-era South African “homelands” of the same name, where many disenfranchised urban Black people were relocated and governed by supposedly independent local puppet regimes while a white supremacist government continued to exert military control.

The choice, as Hamas saw it, was between dying a slow death—as many in Gaza say—and fundamentally disrupting the entire equation.

It is certainly the case that cornering Hamas—and Palestinians more broadly—into a situation whereby only a powerful military attack of this form emerges as the preferred option for the movement could have been avoided. Even prior to Hamas’s containment, and specifically since the Second Intifada, there were many opportunities for diplomatic and political engagement with it.

A crowd of Palestinian supporters of Hamas wave green Islamic flags following Friday noon prayers at The Dome of the Rock in the al-Aqsa mosque compound in 2006.

Palestinian supporters of Hamas wave green following Friday noon prayers at The Dome of the Rock in the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City on Jan. 27, 2006, after Hamas’s general election victory.Awad Awad/AFP via Getty Images

Hamas had de facto acquiesced between 2005 and 2007 to a political program that may, if leveraged correctly, have led to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and the dismantling of the occupation. This was a position that the movement put forward as part of its election victory in 2006 and subsequent entry into the Palestinian Authority. Later, this position was formalized in 2017 in the movement’s amended charter, which called for the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 line, without offering formal recognition to the state of Israel.

The Israeli and American refusal to engage with any of the movement’s political concessions since then, while Israel was consistently given a free pass to maintain its violent occupation and ongoing colonization of Palestinian land, undermined any faith Hamas may have harbored regarding the international community’s interest in holding Israel to account or enabling Palestinians to establish a state on a portion of historic Palestine.

Much has been written on the lost opportunities of dealing with Hamas diplomatically. The events that followed the movement’s democratic election in 2006 were premised on a refusal to engage with Hamas’s political platform, with Israel and the U.S. government preferring to pursue regime change and to deal with Hamas militarily, choosing to limit their engagement on the Palestinian file with the PA.

Prime minister designate Ismail Haniyeh (center), sits at a table with two other men in a large formal room as they attend the first session of the Hamas-led Palestinian legislative council meeting in Gaza City in 2006.

Prime minister designate Ismail Haniyeh (center), attends the first session of the Hamas-led Palestinian legislative council meeting in Gaza City on March 6, 2006. Abid Katib/Getty Images

Since then, Israel has supported and enabled Hamas to exist as a governing authority while simultaneously demonizing the movement as a terrorist organization, a paradox that enabled the state to justify the collective punishment inherent in the blockade of the Gaza Strip. This was explicitly the chosen strategy of successive governments under Benjamin Netanyahu, who openly spoke about the benefits to Israel of pursuing a “separation policy” between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a means of undermining prospects for Palestinian statehood.

In the absence of any real diplomatic prospects for Hamas, its choices were either slow strangulation as the governing authority of the Gaza Strip, while Israel became ingratiated with Arab regimes that had all but abandoned the Palestinian cause, or a decisive blow that could fundamentally disrupt the assumption that Palestinians were defeated and subservient and that Israel could maintain its apartheid regime cost-free.

That Hamas opted for the latter suggests that it is behaving strategically and remains committed to the belief that it is playing a long game. By this logic, even if Hamas’s military wing were entirely destroyed or expelled, the movement has already secured a victory in revealing the weakness and fragility of Israel’s military, which can be exploited in the future through a reconstituted Hamas or through another future military formation equally committed to armed resistance as a means of liberation. In other words, the disruption itself becomes a space for alternative possibilities to emerge, whereas, prior to that, there was only the calcified certainty of continued Palestinian oppression.

Emotionally driven reactions from Washington won’t prevent future violence. Dismantling the Gaza prison could.

This belief in a long game means that regardless of what happens in the short- to medium-term future, even with the horrifying loss of civilian life in Gaza, Hamas has disrupted not only the structure of its containment but the entire notion that Palestinians can be siloed into Bantustans and forgotten without Israelis incurring any cost. That disruption is existential for Israel, and, supported by Western allies, the state believes that the only way to survive this blow is through decimating Hamas.

Israel will fail—and is already failing—in attaining that objective. Regardless of how the battles against Hamas in Gaza unfold now, the movement can already claim to have emerged victorious in the long term because it irreversibly shattered the false sense of security Israelis had cloaked themselves in, despite all attempts to present Israel as invincible and impenetrable.

But even in the immediate battle taking place in Gaza now, prospects for an Israeli victory are slim. As in any asymmetric struggle, the guerrilla fighters merely have to not lose to emerge victorious, whereas the powerful state will lose if it does not achieve its overarching goals. And the goal of decimating Hamas as a movement is as vague as it is unachievable. For one thing, the movement is much bigger than its military wing. It is a movement with a vast social infrastructure, connected to many Palestinians who are unaffiliated with either the movement’s political or military platforms.

A man carries a child injured in an Israeli strike to the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. A gurney is pushed behind the running man. At left is another man carrying a dust-covered injured child.

Children injured in an Israeli strike are rushed to the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 15. Dawood Nemer/AFP via Getty Images

At its core, Hamas is an Islamist movement that has its roots in the regional branches of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is connected to health care infrastructure and educational facilities and charities. If, by decimating Hamas, Western and Israeli leaders are calling for the killing of any Palestinian who espouses any form of Islamist ideology, then that is nothing less than a genocidal call against the Palestinian people, and it should be understood as such.

If, however, the goal is to destroy the movement’s military infrastructure, then this goal is likely to fail in one key way. The breaking apart of Hamas’s military wing will set the stage for the emergence of other forms of organized resistance—whether within Hamas’s ideological garb or otherwise—that are similarly committed to the use of armed force against Israel.

History has already taught us this much. Hamas emerged in 1987 from the embers of the PLO’s historic concession, whereby throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s the PLO shifted toward conceding on the partition of Palestine by recognizing the state of Israel and renouncing the use of armed resistance in pursuit of a Palestinian state. Coinciding with that transition was the establishment of Hamas as a party that held on to the same principles the PLO had before it, couched in an Islamist ideology instead of the secular nationalist one that dominated the 1960s and 1970s.

There is a continuum of Palestinian political demands that stretch back to 1948 and before. Whether or not Hamas survives in its current incarnation is a red herring: Palestinian resistance against Israeli apartheid, armed and otherwise, will persist as long as the regime of domination continues.

At its core, this is a regime that provides more rights for Jews than Palestinians throughout the land of historic Palestine, stratifying Palestinians into different legal categories and fragmenting them geographically in order to sustain an overarching regime of domination. All the while, it prevents the internationally recognized right of allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

Israel’s model of apartheid is committed to Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea—a recently maligned phrase that has long been used unapologetically by the Israeli right—while Palestinians remain as a dominated people living within the confines of that state and governed in the occupied territories through illegitimate authorities that are collaborationist in nature with the Israeli state.

To overturn this dynamic, and to undo Israel’s conviction that Hamas—through its containment—could be pacified as the PA had been in the West Bank, the movement took a calculated risk with its operation, given that it realistically expected its military infrastructure would be severely weakened in the anticipated retaliation. But in the absence of any willingness by the international community to engage with Palestinians outside of such armed tactics, and given Israel’s ongoing and increasingly violent colonialism, this shift toward an expansive military operation on Hamas’s part was ultimately inevitable.

A boy peeks over the top of a tattered window covering during a funeral in the southern Gaza strip.

A boy watches the funeral of a Palestinian man killed amid clashes following anti-Israel protests by the Gaza Strip’s eastern border fence in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Sept. 20. Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images

Palestinian boys hold a gun as they crowd around a masked member of the al-Qassam Brigades. The soldier wears camouflage fatigues.

Palestinian boys hold a gun belonging to a member of the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas movement, in Gaza City on June 14, 2021.Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images

There is another reason underpinning Hamas’s calculus, and that is its ambivalence toward governance. Hamas was shackled by its role as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip. When the party ran for elections in 2006, it was with no small degree of organizational conflict about taking on a governing role or even participating in the PA.

Hamas leaders articulated that rather than accepting the limitations of governance under occupation, as Fatah had done through the Oslo Accords, the movement was intent on using its election victory to revolutionize the Palestinian political establishment. It asserted its capacity to do that by noting that, through its response to the Second Intifada, Israel had decimated the Palestinian body politic and rendered both the PA and the Oslo Accords obsolete.

Hamas spoke about the need to build a society of resistance, an economy of resistance, an ideology of resistance, through the very body of the PA—and to use this body as a stepping stone into the PLO, from where it could lead alongside other political factions on setting a vision for the liberation of Palestine, and for representing Palestinians in their entirety, beyond those in the occupied territories.

Its election victory, as I argue in my book, Hamas Contained, was meant to be revolutionary toward, rather than accepting of, the status quo. With no real prospects for statehood, Hamas understood that focus on governance and administration meant beautifying a Bantustan within Israel’s apartheid system, that there would be no real prospect for liberation or sovereignty, and that the only path forward was enhancing quality of life while remaining subservient to the occupation. That is indeed the PA’s model in the West Bank, and it would have been a more extreme version of that in the Gaza Strip.

With the successful Western-backed coup against Hamas—which began shortly after Hamas’s election victory and culminated in a civil war between Hamas and Fatah in 2007—for some time it looked as if the movement’s governance in Gaza had pacified it to the extent that its revolutionary ideals had been lost. The lengthy period of containment suggested that the movement may have become entrapped in its own electoral success and shackled by its governance responsibilities—or, in other words, pacified. The violent attack on Oct. 7 has clearly shown that the movement, rather, had been using this time precisely to revolutionize the political body, as it had always intended to do.

A large crowd of Palestinian families, including a woman carrying a child on her shoulders in focus at center, walk along a road as they flee Gaza City and other parts of northern Gaza.

Palestinian families fleeing Gaza City and other parts of northern Gaza walk along a road on Nov. 10. Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images

All this still does not mean that Hamas’s strategic shift will be deemed successful in the long run. Hamas’s violent disruption of the status quo might well have provided Israel with an opportunity to carry out another Nakba. This might result in a regional conflagration or deal Palestinians a blow that could take a generation to recover from.

What is certain, however, is that there is no return to what existed before. Yet this is precisely what Israeli, U.S., and other Western leaders and diplomats are preparing for. Already, the discussion has turned to the day after, even in the absence of a cease-fire having been formalized.

All indications point to a U.S.-Israeli decision to try to replicate in the Gaza Strip the successful model—in their view—of Palestinian collaborationist rule that exists in the West Bank. Rather than engaging in a process whereby Palestinians have the opportunity to choose representative leaders who could govern them, Israel and the United States are replaying an age-old approach of choosing compliant leaders who can do their bidding and subdue the Palestinians under Israeli hegemony.

This is being done under the banner of supposedly unifying the Palestinian territories, with both parties conveniently erasing their own complicity in facilitating this disunity until now. The goal for both is not reunification but the pursuit of acquiescent rule: the creation of a governing structure in which a pliant leadership governs civil needs under an overarching structure of Israeli military domination.

Such a goal has to contend with Gaza’s historic reality as a hotbed of resistance to Israeli apartheid, given that the majority of Gaza’s inhabitants are refugees seeking the return to their homes in what is now Israel. To facilitate the installation of an authority chosen by Israel and the United States requires nothing less than razing Gaza and killing its inhabitants—the policy that is now unfolding.

A man wears a scarf around his head and flace and a Palestinian flag around his shoulders during a protest in the West Bank with black smoke and fire in the distance.

A man dons a Palestinian flag while protesting Israeli occupation in the West Bank, as protesters are met with tear gas, flashbangs, and live fire from Israeli forces, in Beit El area of Ramallah, Israel, on Oct. 13.Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty

Aside from the moral and legal implications of this are the practical ones. It is difficult to envision any Palestinian leader or governing structure that will take over responsibility for the Gaza Strip after Israel destroys it, as they will be seen as having been ushered there on the backs of Israeli tanks. Such leaders will have even less legitimacy than the PA has in the West Bank today, which is hard to imagine.

Such an approach might buy some time. It might produce the semblance of a status quo and a degree of stabilization. But if any lesson must be garnered from Oct. 7, it is that this will not be lasting or sustainable. Any chosen governing entity will not be able to guarantee security for any Israeli as long as apartheid exists and any Palestinian government installed in Gaza will rightly be seen as illegitimate and collaborationist.

However the “day after” is packaged, it will fail unless it comes with holding Israel accountable and dismantling its regime of apartheid, and it will be clear to all Palestinians that it is just another Bantustan solution, cloaked either as humanitarianism or a renewed commitment to a two-state solution.

In this sense, Hamas has indeed dealt a fatal blow to Israel’s fantasy that it could continue its occupation and blockade indefinitely. It is yet unclear, however, if Israeli political leaders—beyond their vengeful violence—have managed to heed this lesson. But grassroots organizers, Hamas’s allies, and other political and military formations have.

Whatever comes next, and however Hamas’s legacy will be written, it’s clear that it is the movement that burst the delusion that Israel and its allies have held on to for far too long.

Foreign Policy · by Tareq Baconi · November 27, 2023

26. A soldier in Vietnam and a girl wrote letters. Decades later, they finally met.

Ending today's news and commentary on a positive note.

Video and photos at the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/11/25/vietnam-war-soldier-care-package-letters/?fbclid=IwAR18s5PFs6yXDq0mtlUNNe--sCzq3bUcxcm_vxJ05UTFeWfWT4c-lXPB-e0

A soldier in Vietnam and a girl wrote letters. Decades later, they finally met.

A Camp Fire group sent a care package, launching an unlikely lifelong friendship

By Susan Svrluga

November 25, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Susan Svrluga · November 25, 2023

Col. Ned Edward Felder was serving in Vietnam when he was surprised by a care package from a stranger. It wasn’t the contents that touched him; it was the idea that someone had taken the trouble to send it. Alone in the midst of a war thousands of miles from his own home and family, the kindness felt enormous.

Kristina Olson, a shy 12-year-old girl who had knocked on neighbors’ doors in Michigan to ask for donations to send to soldiers as part of a Camp Fire group, was just as surprised, and delighted, when she saw that a stranger had taken the time to write a thank-you note for the gift.

So, she wrote back.

And thus began an unlikely friendship, an exchange of letters that began in 1967 and spanned years, continents, and deep cultural divides. Felder was 30 years old, a Black man raised in poverty in South Carolina who had lifted himself through college and law school and had become a captain in the U.S. Army. Olson, who is White, wrote to him about her school, which was in an apple orchard. About Camp Fire Girls, practicing piano and learning to play the French horn.

His letters, arriving with exotic stamps, were written like novels, she said. She worked hard on her replies, awed by the standard he had set with his writing.

“I couldn’t just jot a note back to him,” she said. “I had to compose a good letter.” Her life was sheltered, and she was grateful for the glimpse at a larger world, as well as his kindness. “He made me want to be a better person,” said Olson, now 68.

He sent her a book about Vietnam, a doll in a silk tunic, and a Christmas card with a soldier silhouetted against the night sky, looking up at a bright star overhead.

“For someone who did not know anyone over there to be so kind, to a stranger — that’s heartwarming,” Felder, now 86, said this week. “That means a lot. That’s what life is all about.”

After a decade, the letters petered off. He was back home with his wife and children, now in Virginia serving as an associate judge on what was then known as the U.S. Army Court of Military Review. She had finished college and moved to New York City to launch her career as a buyer and product developer in the Garment District.

But more than 50 years after their first letters, she surprised him again. After a series of painful losses and a rare chance to reflect, she felt an urgent need to thank him. So, she wrote him a letter.

This fall, they finally met.

A soldier’s story

Col. Ned Felder was born in 1937 in Charleston. His mother was 16 when she had him, so young that he thought his grandparents were his mother and father until he was about 5. His mom married his stepfather, and moved with him and his brother into a single room they rented in an alley just off King Street. They had no running water, cooked on a gas-powered hot plate, and heated the room with a tin stove that got bright red when it was hot, burning his brother’s leg one day when he got too close.

It gave Felder a lifelong conviction that poverty is the best incentive to achieve success.

He says he was shaped by his Gullah Geechee ancestors and his church. When children would walk to school, the pastor of one of the two Black churches they passed on the way would play a game with them. They would try to tap him, and the pastor, fast as a cobra, would snatch at their hands. If he caught one, he would hold it, and the child would have to kneel and say the Lord’s Prayer. The pastor and the children all enjoyed it — and prayed a lot.

In high school, Felder learned a trade, spending half the day in classes and half the day working for a tailor. He planned to join the military and had no thought of college. There was no way to pay for it. But a teacher urged him to apply for scholarships.

He was accepted at South Carolina State University and, with the help of two scholarships and $27.90 a month through the ROTC program, was able to afford it. It was the first time he was able to sleep in his own bed and take a shower. He made friends for life. And he had changed his trajectory.

He went to law school, also at S.C. State, a school created when South Carolina’s leaders refused to integrate the law school at the flagship university. There were seven students, five professors, one secretary, and one janitor — very different from the school where White people studied. But he appreciated the demands: With only two other classmates in his year, they were all constantly questioned by professors. There was nowhere to hide if one hadn’t done the work.

In 1961 he joined the Army. He went to Vietnam in 1966, leaving his wife and young children for the year. There he was assigned duties he considered too menial — a perennial issue in his career. One was urging soldiers to vote. That was when he learned that those who weren’t U.S. citizens couldn’t vote, even though they might well die for their country. He wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson, extended his tour another year and was pleased when the law was amended.

It was a hallmark of his life, to turn a frustrating assignment into something important and lasting. The teacher who urged him to go to college had taught him that intelligence is measured by how well one adjusts to one’s situation. He was promoted to major.

That extra year, from 1967 to 1968, also brought him something else: A pen pal. He was delighted every time he got a letter from Kris Olson.

She told him about her grades (all As) and playing the bugle. He told her about his family, and about Vietnam. He didn’t write about the horrors of war, or things tearing their own country apart, such as the three Black students fatally shot by police and the more than 20 others who were wounded on the S.C. State campus in 1968 during a protest over segregation.

Sometimes he gave her advice: Study hard. Be safe. In Michigan, she felt the thrill of opening the mailbox and finding a letter and running inside to open it. She saved the envelopes, marked with their long journeys.

A pen pal’s story

Kris Olson was born in 1954 in East Grand Rapids, the daughter of an engineer for a furniture company and a homemaker. She was shy, an eager student, musical. She made clothes for her dolls, and joined the school band.

She wanted to learn more about the world, feeling confined by the suburbs of Grand Rapids. She knew about the war — everyone was talking about it, and admired the soldiers fighting overseas. As she got older and her friends in high school began getting drafted, she realized it was complicated.

Olson loved to sew, and majored in textiles at Michigan State. She graduated early and moved to New York.

For many years, she was busy with her career, enjoying the city and traveling often. She got married and took her husband’s name, Feeney. She had a son and a daughter. Her husband was a carpenter, and she switched her career to real estate.

Then life got harder. Her mother died. Her father developed Parkinson’s disease and moved in with them for almost a decade. Her husband had a series of medical crises and was critically ill for several years. They couldn’t possibly pay all the medical bills. The recession hit, and they moved to Texas to save money. She worked two jobs.

Her father died. Her husband died. Last year, she lost her 27-year-old son to fentanyl poisoning.

Suddenly, it seemed important to find Col. Ned Felder again. She had known him, she realized, longer than almost anyone in her life.

“He was such an important part of my life,” she said, “and I never got a chance to tell him that.”

She had thought of him often over the years, showing friends the letters he had sent, looking him up sometimes to admire his latest accomplishments. “It always meant something to me,” she said, that someone had taken this trouble to write to her.

“It was just a kindness — just generosity. At many times in my life when I had a lot of difficult things to get through myself, it was just good to reflect on a person like that, who cared enough to do things like that,” Feeney said.

“He sets a pretty good example of how to live a good life. Be respected and be respectful. Appreciate things.

“I look for all the good I can find now.”

A reunion

When he received her letter at his home in Burke, Va., Felder said, “I was so happy! So happy. This one is more meaningful than any of the others,” he had received from her.

Over the years, he had often thought about the little girl who wrote to him in Vietnam and wondered where she was.

In her letter, she thanked him. And she told him she had moved to South Carolina and would love to see him if he was visiting family in Charleston or college friends in Orangeburg.

Felder, who had recently organized a gathering for his high school class — for both the graduates of the Black high school he attended and two White high schools — invited her to S.C. State on Veterans Day. “If I had not been in the military, I would not have met Kris,” he said.

Everything was choreographed to make her feel special, Feeney said. A car whisked her to campus, where they watched the football game from the president’s box. He brought his oldest son. He was going to wear his dress uniform, he told her, and joked that she should wear her Camp Fire uniform.

When she saw him, she gasped and covered her face.

“It was surreal, like the space-time continuum shifted,” she said. “Someone that was 10,000 miles away and then all of a sudden in the same room, physically right there.”

They immediately hugged. And hugged again.

He was telling himself, “‘You’re a colonel. You don’t cry. You’re a tough guy, don’t let them see you cry.’”

Looking back on it from his neat-as-a-pin home, he was amazed that two people of such different ages and backgrounds could be so happy to see each other for the first time, and be so comfortable together.

“It’s divine intervention,” he said.

And also, an example: “If we can do it, everyone can do it.”

They plan to get together again soon. He’s eager to meet her daughter, and introduce her to his other children. She has a lot of questions she wishes she had asked. She appreciates his soft laugh and his capacity for joy. There’s so much they haven’t told each other.

“She’ll become a family member,” he said.

In the meantime, she’s choosing a card. A good one, to write him a thank-you note.

“There’s nothing like mail,” she said.

Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Susan Svrluga · November 25, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com