Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"To be defeated and not submit, is victory;

to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat."

- Jozef Pilsudski

"The true measure of all our actions is how long the good in them lasts... everything we do, we do for the young."

- Elizabeth II

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

- George Bernard Shaw

1. China vows crackdown on 'hostile forces' as public tests Xi

2. Former President Jiang Zemin, who guided China’s rise, dies

3. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 29 (Putin's War)

4. Ukraine - Russia Conflict Update - Nov 2022 | SOF News

5. Defense Intelligence Agency forms ‘China mission group’ to track rival

6. No, a former Marine general is not working for an infamous Russian mercenary group

7. 7. Prevent the mistakes of history by passing the fiscal 2023 NDAA

8. Ukraine needs tanks, and the west should supply them. They could finish off Putin and Russia

9. The Pentagon’s Lead Intelligence Agency Has an HR Problem

10. How Ukraine is innovating Soviet-era weapons for a 21st century battleground

11. Indecent exposure in critical supply chains

12. Pentagon warns of China’s plans for dominance in Taiwan and beyond

13. What the Ukraine War Teaches About Modern Ground Wars

14. 'America First' is the default US strategy, rather than a mere Trump-era slogan

15. Who said it, when, and why? Part II (of II)

16. Xi Jinping in His Own Words

17. Bipartisan consensus in US on foreign policy

18. 2022 Report on Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China

19. The Hard Truth About Long Wars

20. Why The Next Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Should Be From The Air Force

1. China vows crackdown on 'hostile forces' as public tests Xi

How long will this go on and how brutal will the crackdown(s) have to be to put a halt to these protests?

China vows crackdown on 'hostile forces' as public tests Xi

AP · November 30, 2022

BEIJING (AP) — China’s ruling Communist Party has vowed to “resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces,” following the largest street demonstrations in decades staged by citizens fed up with strict anti-virus restrictions.

The statement from the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission released late Tuesday comes amid a massive show of force by security services to deter a recurrence of the protests that broke out over the weekend in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and several other cities.

While it did not directly address the protests, the statement serves as a reminder of the party’s determination to enforce its rule.

Hundreds of SUVs, vans and armored vehicles with flashing lights were parked along city streets Wednesday while police and paramilitary forces conducted random ID checks and searched people’s mobile phones for photos, banned apps or other potential evidence that they had taken part in the demonstrations.

The number of people who have been detained at the demonstrations and in follow-up police actions is not known.

The commission’s statement, issued after an expanded session Monday presided over by its head Chen Wenqing, a member of the party’s 24-member Politburo, said the meeting aimed to review the outcomes of October’s 20th party congress.

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At that event, Xi granted himself a third five-year term as secretary general, potentially making him China’s leader for life, while stacking key bodies with loyalists and eliminating opposing voices.

“The meeting emphasized that political and legal organs must take effective measures to … resolutely safeguard national security and social stability,” the statement said.

“We must resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces in accordance with the law, resolutely crack down on illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order and effectively maintain overall social stability,” it said.

Yet, less than a month after seemingly ensuring his political future and unrivaled dominance, Xi, who has signaled he favors regime stability above all, is facing his biggest public challenge yet.

He and the party have yet to directly address the unrest, which spread to college campuses and the semi-autonomous southern city of Hong Kong, as well as sparking sympathy protests abroad.

Most protesters focused their ire on the “zero-COVID” policy that has placed millions under lockdown and quarantine, limiting their access to food and medicine while ravaging the economy and severely restricting travel. Many mocked the government’s ever-changing line of reasoning, as well as claims that “hostile outside foreign forces” were stirring the wave of anger.

Yet bolder voices called for greater freedom and democracy and for Xi, China’s most powerful leader in decades, as well as the party he leads, to step down — speech considered subversive and punishable with lengthy prison terms. Some held up blank pieces of white paper to demonstrate their lack of free speech rights.

The weekend protests were sparked by anger over the deaths of at least 10 people in a fire on Nov. 24 in China’s far west that prompted angry questions online about whether firefighters or victims trying to escape were blocked by anti-virus controls.

Authorities eased some controls and announced a new push to vaccinate vulnerable groups after the demonstrations, but maintained they would stick to the “zero-COVID” strategy.

The party had already promised last month to reduce disruptions, but a spike in infections swiftly prompted party cadres under intense pressure to tighten controls in an effort to prevent outbreaks. The National Health Commission on Wednesday reported 37,612 cases detected over the previous 24 hours, while the death toll remained unchanged at 5,233.

Beijing’s Tsinghua University, where students protested over the weekend, and other schools in the capital and the southern province of Guangdong sent students home in an apparent attempt to defuse tensions. Chinese leaders are wary of universities, which have been hotbeds of activism including the Tiananmen protests.

Police appeared to be trying to keep their crackdown out of sight, possibly to avoid encouraging others by drawing attention to the scale of the protests. Videos and posts on Chinese social media about protests were deleted by the party’s vast online censorship apparatus.

“Zero COVID” has helped keep case numbers lower than those of the United States and other major countries, but global health experts including the head of the World Health Organization increasingly say it is unsustainable. China dismissed the remarks as irresponsible.

Beijing needs to make its approach “very targeted” to reduce economic disruption, the head of the International Monetary Fund told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday.

Economists and health experts, however, warn that Beijing can’t relax controls that keep most travelers out of China until tens of millions of older people are vaccinated. They say that means “zero COVID” might not end for as much as another year.

On Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said restrictions were, among other things, making it impossible for U.S. diplomats to meet with American prisoners being held in China, as is mandated by international treaty. Because of a lack of commercial airline routes into the country, the embassy has to use monthly charter flights to move its personnel in and out.

“COVID is really dominating every aspect of life” in China, he said in an online discussion with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

On the protests, Burns said the embassy was observing their progress and the government’s response, but said, “We believe the Chinese people have a right to protest peacefully.”

“They have a right to make their views known. They have a right to be heard. That’s a fundamental right around the world. It should be. And that right should not be hindered with, and it shouldn’t be interfered with,” he said.

Burns also referenced instances of Chinese police harassing and detaining foreign reporters covering the protests.

“We support freedom of the press as well as freedom of speech,” he said.

Asked about foreign expressions of support for the protesters, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian defended China’s approach to handling COVID-19 and said other nations should mind their own business.

“We hope they will first heed their own peoples’ voices and interests instead of pointing fingers at others,” Zhao told reporters at a daily briefing.

AP · November 30, 2022

2. Former President Jiang Zemin, who guided China’s rise, dies

This will be interesting. Will there be a state funeral? If so, what foreign dignitaries will attend? What countries will send official representation?

Former President Jiang Zemin, who guided China’s rise, dies

AP · by JOE McDONALD · November 30, 2022

BEIJING (AP) — Former President Jiang Zemin, who led China out of isolation after the army crushed the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989 and supported economic reforms that led to a decade of explosive growth, died Wednesday. He was 96.

Jiang died of leukemia and multiple organ failure in Shanghai, where he was a former mayor and Communist Party secretary, state TV and the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

A surprise choice to lead a divided Communist Party after the 1989 turmoil, Jiang saw China through history-making changes including a revival of market-oriented reforms, the return of Hong Kong from British rule in 1997 and Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Even as China opened to the outside, Jiang’s government stamped out dissent. It jailed human rights, labor and pro-democracy activists and banned the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which the ruling party saw as a threat to its monopoly on power.

Jiang gave up his last official title in 2004 but remained a force behind the scenes in the wrangling that led to the rise of current President Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012.

Xi has tightened political control, crushed China’s little remaining dissent and reasserted the dominance of state industry.

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Rumors that Jiang might be in declining health spread after he missed a ruling party congress in October at which Xi, China’s most powerful figure since at least the 1980s, broke with tradition and awarded himself a third five-year term as leader.

Jiang was on the verge of retirement as Shanghai party leader in 1989 when he was drafted by then-paramount leader leader Deng Xiaoping to pull together the party and nation. He succeeded Zhao Ziyang, who was dismissed by Deng due to his sympathy for the student-led Tiananmen Square protesters and was held under house arrest until his 2005 death.

In 13 years as party general secretary, China’s most powerful post, Jiang guided the country’s rise to economic power by welcoming capitalists into the ruling party and pulling in foreign investment after China joined the WTO. China passed Germany and then Japan to become the second-largest economy after the United States.

Jiang captured a political prize when Beijing was picked as the site of the 2008 Summer Olympics after failing in an earlier bid.

A former soap factory manager, Jiang capped his career with the communist era’s first orderly succession, handing over his post as party leader in 2002 to Hu Jintao, who also took the ceremonial title of president the following year.

Jiang tried to hold onto influence by staying on as chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the party’s military wing, the 2 million-member People’s Liberation Army. He gave up that post in 2004 following complaints he might divide the government.

Even after he left office, Jiang had influence over promotions through his network of proteges.

He was said to be frustrated that Deng had picked Hu as the next leader, blocking Jiang from installing his own successor. But Jiang was considered successful in elevating allies to the party’s seven-member Standing Committee, China’s inner circle of power, when Xi became leader in 2012.

Portly and owlish in oversize glasses, Jiang was an ebullient figure who played the piano and enjoyed singing, in contrast to his more reserved successors, Hu and Xi.

He spoke enthusiastic if halting English and would recite the Gettysburg Address for foreign visitors. On a visit to Britain, he tried to coax Queen Elizabeth II into singing karaoke.

Jiang had faded from public sight and last appeared publicly alongside current and former leaders atop Beijing’s Tiananmen Gate at a 2019 military parade celebrating the party’s 70th anniversary in power.

Jiang was born Aug. 17, 1926, in the affluent eastern city of Yangzhou. Official biographies downplay his family’s middle-class background, emphasizing instead his uncle and adoptive father, Jiang Shangqing, an early revolutionary who was killed in battle in 1939.

After graduating from the electrical machinery department of Jiaotong University in Shanghai in 1947, Jiang advanced through the ranks of state-controlled industries, working in a food factory, then soap-making and China’s biggest automobile plant.

Like many technocratic officials, Jiang spent part of the ultra-radical 1966-76 Cultural Revolution as a farm laborer. His career rise resumed, and in 1983 he was named minister of the electronics industry, then a key but backward sector the government hoped to revive by inviting foreign investment.

As mayor of Shanghai in 1985-89, Jiang impressed foreign visitors as a representative of a new breed of outward-looking Chinese leaders.

A tough political fighter, Jiang defied predictions that his stint as leader would be short. He consolidated power by promoting members of his “Shanghai faction” and giving the military double-digit annual percentage increases in spending.

Foreign leaders and CEOs who shunned Beijing after the crackdown were persuaded to return.

When Deng emerged from retirement in 1992 to push for reviving market-style reform in the face of conservative opposition after the Tiananmen crackdown, Jiang followed.

He supported Premier Zhu Rongji, the party’s No. 3 leader, who forced through painful changes that slashed as many as 40 million jobs from state industry in the late 1990s.

Zhu launched the privatization of urban housing, igniting a building boom that transformed Chinese cities into forests of high-rises and propelled economic growth.

After 12 years of negotiations and a flight by Zhu to Washington to lobby the Clinton administration for support, China joined the WTO in 2001, cementing its position as a magnet for foreign investment.

Despite a genial public image, Jiang dealt severely with challenges to ruling party power.

His highest-profile target was Falun Gong, a meditation group founded in the early ’90s. Chinese leaders were spooked by its ability to attract tens of thousands of followers, including military officers.

Activists who tried to form an opposition China Democracy Party, a move permitted by Chinese law, were sentenced to up to 12 years in prison on subversion charges.

“Stability above all else,” Jiang ordered, in a phrase his successors have used to justify intensive social controls.

It fell to Jiang, standing beside Britain’s Prince Charles, to preside over the return of Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, symbolizing the end of 150 years of European colonialism. The nearby Portuguese territory of Macao was returned to China in 1999.

Hong Kong was promised autonomy and became a springboard for mainland companies to go abroad. Meanwhile, Jiang turned to coercion with Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing says is part of its territory.

During Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996, Jiang’s government tried to intimidate voters by firing missiles into nearby shipping lanes. The United States responded by sending warships to the area in a show of support.

At the same time, trade between the mainland and Taiwan grew to billions of dollars a year.

China’s economic boom split society into winners and losers as waves of rural residents migrated to factory jobs in cities, the economy grew sevenfold and urban incomes by nearly as much.

Protests, once rare, spread as millions lost state jobs and farmers complained about rising taxes and fees. Divorce rates climbed. Corruption flourished.

One of Jiang’s sons, Jiang Mianheng, courted controversy in the late 1990s as a telecommunications dealmaker and later the chairman of phone company China Netcom Co.

Critics accused him of misusing his father’s status to promote his career, a common complaint against the children of party leaders.

Jiang Mianheng, who has a Ph.D. from Drexel University, went on to hold prominent academic positions, including president of ShanghaiTech University in his father’s old power base.

Jiang is survived by his two sons and his wife, Wang Yeping, who worked in government bureaucracies in charge of state industries.

AP · by JOE McDONALD · November 30, 2022

3. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 29 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics:

Key Takeaways

Russian forces made marginal gains around Bakhmut on November 29, but Russian forces remain unlikely to have advanced at the tempo that Russian sources claimed.
The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that Russian forces have likely stopped deploying battalion tactical groups (BTGs) in the past three months, supporting ISW’s prior assessments.
Russian forces continued to defend against Ukrainian counteroffensive operations around Svatove as Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations around Svatove and Kreminna.
Russian forces continued limited ground attacks west of Kreminna to regain lost positions.
Russian forces conducted ground attacks near Siversk and Avdiivka, and in western Donetsk Oblast.
Russian forces continued strengthening defensive positions in eastern Kherson Oblast as Ukrainian forces continued striking Russian force concentrations in southern Ukraine.
Russian forces continued to struggle with outdated equipment and domestic personnel shortages amid official actions indicative of a probable second wave of mobilization.
An independent investigation found that Russia may have transported thousands of Ukrainian prisoners from penal colonies in occupied Ukraine to Russia following the withdrawal from the west bank of Kherson Oblast.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 29

Nov 29, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Grace Mappes, Madison Williams, Yekaterina Klepanchuk, Angela Howard, Karolina Hird, and Frederick W. Kagan

November 29, 6:30 pm 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.

Russian forces made marginal gains around Bakhmut on November 29, but Russian forces remain unlikely to have advanced at the tempo that Russian sources claimed. Geolocated footage shows that Russian forces made marginal advances southeast of Bakhmut but ISW remains unable to confirm most other claimed gains around Bakhmut made since November 27.[1] Some Russian milbloggers made unsubstantiated claims that Russian forces broke through the Ukrainian defensive line south of Bakhmut along the T0513 highway to advance towards Chasiv Yar, which would cut one of two remaining main Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Bakhmut, but such claims are likely part of a continuing Russian information operation and are premature, as ISW has previously assessed.[2] ISW continues to assess that the degraded Russian forces around Bakhmut are unlikely to place Bakhmut under threat of imminent encirclement rapidly.[3]

The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported on November 29 that Russian forces have likely stopped deploying battalion tactical groups (BTGs) in the past three months.[4] The UK MoD stated that the BTGs‘ relatively low allocation of infantry, decentralized distribution of artillery, and the limited independence of BTG decision-making hindered their success in Ukraine.[5] ISW assessed starting in April that Russian BTGs were degraded in various failed or culminated Russian offensives, including the attacks on Kyiv, Mariupol, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk, and later efforts to reconstitute these BTGs to restore their combat power have failed.[6] Russian forces have likely since thrown their remaining combat power and new personnel, including mobilized personnel, into poorly trained, equipped, and organized ad hoc structures with low morale and discipline.[7] The structure of BTGs and the way the Russian military formed them by breaking up doctrinal battalions, regiments, and brigades likely deprived the Russians of the ability to revert to doctrinal organizations, as ISW has previously assessed, so that the Russians must now rely on ad-hoc structures with mobilized personnel.[8]

Key Takeaways

Russian forces made marginal gains around Bakhmut on November 29, but Russian forces remain unlikely to have advanced at the tempo that Russian sources claimed.
The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that Russian forces have likely stopped deploying battalion tactical groups (BTGs) in the past three months, supporting ISW’s prior assessments.
Russian forces continued to defend against Ukrainian counteroffensive operations around Svatove as Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations around Svatove and Kreminna.
Russian forces continued limited ground attacks west of Kreminna to regain lost positions.
Russian forces conducted ground attacks near Siversk and Avdiivka, and in western Donetsk Oblast.
Russian forces continued strengthening defensive positions in eastern Kherson Oblast as Ukrainian forces continued striking Russian force concentrations in southern Ukraine.
Russian forces continued to struggle with outdated equipment and domestic personnel shortages amid official actions indicative of a probable second wave of mobilization.
An independent investigation found that Russia may have transported thousands of Ukrainian prisoners from penal colonies in occupied Ukraine to Russia following the withdrawal from the west bank of Kherson Oblast.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those 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 population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian forces continued efforts to defend against Ukrainian counteroffensive operations northwest of Svatove on November 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued standard defensive operations in the Kupyansk, Kharkiv Oblast, direction.[9] Kharkiv Oblast Head Oleh Synehybov amplified reports that Russian forces are conducting constant artillery attacks on Ukrainian positions in Kupyansk but stated that Ukrainian forces are holding the line and repelling Russian forces.[10] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian attack in Ivanivka (22km southeast of Kupyansk) and that Russian forces struck Ukrainian control points in Petropavlivka (7km east of Kupyansk) and Berestove (26km southeast of Kupyansk).[11]

Ukraine continued counteroffensive operations in the direction of Svatove and Kreminna on November 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian concentration area in Svatove, Luhansk Oblast, which Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai claimed was a deployment point and ammunition depot.[12] Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Ambassador to Russia Rodion Miroshnik claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted a massive shelling of Svatove and unsuccessfully attempted to break through Russian defensive lines to the Svatove-Kreminna highway.[13] Miroshnik additionally claimed that Ukrainian forces attempted to probe Russian defenses in Kuzemivka, 13km northwest of Svatove.[14] Russian sources continued to claim that Russian forces are repelling Ukrainian attacks in this area.[15] A Russian source claimed that Ukraine is accumulating forces in Kharkiv Oblast to possibly resume an offensive against Svatove and Starobilsk.[16] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Novoselivske (14km northwest of Svatove), while Russian sources claimed that Russian forces seized Novoselivske.[17] A Russian source stated that Russian forces began offensive operations on the Svatove-Kreminna line and conjectured that operations will intensify in the coming days as the weather improves.[18] Ukrainian troops additionally continue to target Russian rear areas in Luhansk Oblast along critical ground lines of communication (GLOCs) and hit a concentration area in Luhutyne, just southwest of Luhansk City along the H21.[19]

Russian forces continued limited ground attacks west of Kreminna to regain lost positions on November 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued standard offensive operations in the Lyman direction, and the Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces thwarted a Ukrainian attack towards Chervonopopivka (6km northwest of Kreminna).[20] The Ukrainian General Staff also noted that Russian troops continued efforts to attack Bilohorivka, 10km south of Kreminna.[21]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces continued to make limited gains around Bakhmut amid reports of heavy fighting in the area on November 29. Geolocated footage posted on November 29 shows that Russian forces advanced on the southeastern outskirts of Bakhmut.[22] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled attacks northeast of Bakhmut near Bakhmutske along the T1302 highway and near Soledar.[23] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) officials claimed that Russian forces captured Ozarianivka (15km southwest of Bakhmut) and Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut) on November 29.[24] Russian milbloggers reiterated claims that Russian forces advanced southwest of Bakhmut, taking Andriivka, Ozarianivka, and Zelenopillia (13km south of Bakhmut), and that Wagner forces captured Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[25] Various Russian sources also claimed that Russian forces established control over the Siverskyi-Donets-Donbas canal (13km southwest of Bakhmut), which directly impacts the water supply to Horlivka and Yasynuvata, on November 29.[26] Russian milbloggers also circulated unverified claims that Russian forces broke through the Ukrainian line at the T0513 highway to Chasiv Yar—part of the Ukrainian GLOC—which ISW assesses is unlikely.[27] A Russian milblogger also claimed that Russian forces made progress in Opytne (4km south of Bakhmut) and began a ground attack on Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) on November 29.[28] Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast Head Pavlo Kyrylenko reported that Russian forces struck near Chasiv Yar, Paraskoviivka, Yakovlivka, and the Maiorska station of the Svitlodarsk hromada through the night of November 28 and 29.[29] Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian advances south of Bakhmut moved Russian forces closer to operationally encircling Bakhmut and a further offensive in the direction of Toretsk.[30] A Russian milblogger prematurely called this operational offensive around Bakhmut the first victory since the capture of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk; however, there is no evidence that Russian forces currently threaten key Ukrainian logistics lines into Bakhmut and ISW continues to assess that Bakhmut is currently not under threat of Russian encirclement.[31]

Russian forces increased offensive operations northeast of Bakhmut around Siversk and Soledar on November 29, likely trying to capitalize on increased morale from claimed Russian successes around Bakhmut. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled attacks near Serebrianka, Verkhnokamianske, Berestove, Bilohorivka, and Yakolivka, all within 35km northeast of Bakhmut.[32] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces are conducting offensive operations against fierce opposition along the T1302 near Bilohorivka and Yakolivka.[33] Some Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces suffered heavy losses and that Russian forces took Spirne and advanced through Verkhnokamiankse toward Siversk, but Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin refuted this claim and stated that fighting is ongoing in Spirne.[34] Prominent Russian milbloggers claimed that there are no significant changes in control of terrain near Soledar.[35]

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces experienced successes around Avdiivka on November 29. Russian sources boasted of heavy Ukrainian causalities and minor operational successes around Avdiivka and Marinka on November 29.[36] One prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces control more than two-thirds of Marinka and boasted that Russian forces are succeeding in this area for the first time in eight years.[37] Another Russian milblogger, however, admitted that the pace of Russian advance in this area is slow.[38] Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks near Pervomaiske, Nevelske, and Krasnohorivka.[39] Russian forces continued routine strikes along the line of contact in Eastern Ukraine on November 29.[40]

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

Note: ISW will report on activities in Kherson Oblast as part of the Southern Axis in this and subsequent updates. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in right-bank Kherson Oblast has accomplished its stated objectives, so ISW will not present a Southern Ukraine counteroffensive section until Ukrainian forces resume counteroffensives in southern Ukraine.

Russian forces continued strengthening their defensive positions in eastern Kherson Oblast and conducted routine shelling on the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River on November 29. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces increased their administrative law enforcement presence in occupied Kherson Oblast and plan to deploy Rosgvardia (Russian national guard) elements to the area.[41] As ISW has previously reported, the use of Rosgvardia elements to police rear areas means these elements are unavailable to conduct combat operations at the front or to strengthen existing defenses.[42] Such Rosgvardia elements may eventually strengthen Russian defensive capabilities throughout occupied Kherson Oblast, supporting ISW’s recent assessment that Russian forces take the threat of a possible future Ukrainian counteroffensive seriously.[43] Geolocated satellite imagery shows that Russian forces built out existing defensive fortifications along and perpendicular to the E58/M14 Kherson City-Melitopol highway near Fedorivka, Volynske, and Stepne, Kherson Oblast, between November 15 and November 28.[44] Russian forces continued to shell areas along the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River, including Kherson City, Chornobaivka, Antonivka, and Beryslav.[45]

Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian force concentrations and military assets in southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported Ukrainian strikes on November 27 against four areas of Russian force concentrations, including Polohy, Tokmak, and Basan, Zaporizhia Oblast (all along the T0401 highway), inflicting losses of 470 personnel, 50 pieces of military equipment, and unspecified amounts of ammunition.[46] Ukrainian sources reported explosions in Skadovsk, Henichesk, and Novooleksiivka, Kherson Oblast on November 29, possibly from Ukrainian strikes.[47] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian air defenses intercepted two Ukrainian Uragan MLRS rockets near Nova Kakhovka.[48]

Russian forces continued routine shelling west of Hulyaipole and in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on November 29.[49] Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Dnipro City and Synelnukove (40m southeast of Dnipro City) overnight.[50] Russian forces shelled Nikopol and Marhanets, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[51] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces struck a Ukrainian ammunition depot near Bilohirya, Zaporizhia Oblast, 14km southeast of Orikhiv.[52]

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

A prominent Russian milblogger contended that Russian forces should make use of World War II-era artillery and cheap, inferior-quality military equipment to address challenges in providing for Russian soldiers.[53] ISW has extensively reported on Russian difficulties in providing for the mobilized as well as on Russian equipment shortages.[54] The milblogger alleged that both Russia and NATO states are experiencing weapons shortages and presented cheap, simple, and old equipment of perceived lower quality as a way to “quickly and cheaply saturate the troops.”[55]

Reports from Russian sources indicate that Russia may attempt to use prison labor, overtime, and child labor to resuscitate the Russian military-industrial complex and fill general labor shortages. Russian opposition media source Meduza reported on November 29 that 250 convicts from Sverdlovsk Oblast will serve forced-labor sentences at a Russian tank and armored vehicle construction plant.[56] Meduza separately reported that employees at the plant have been working four additional hours on weekdays and extra shifts on weekends.[57] Zaporizhia Occupation Administration Council Member Vladimir Rogov on November 29 cited a speech by Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova that the Russian State Duma will consider a bill amending the Russian labor code to simplify the employment procedure for those under 18.[58] Russian deputies may hope such actions will reduce the severe Russian labor shortage exacerbated by mobilization, on which ISW has previously reported.[59]

Russian news sources continue to report official actions indicative of a probable second wave of mobilization for which the Russian military system is highly unprepared. A Russian source stated on November 27 that a military registration and enlistment office for Kirov City, Kirov Oblast, issued subpoenas for employees of an unspecified local business to “clarify military credentials” before the start of 2023.[60] Another Russian source claimed on November 28 that Russian military registration and enlistment offices have begun prohibiting men they have subpoenaed for data clarification from leaving the country.[61] An open-source intelligence aggregator on Twitter posted an alleged Russian report indicating a shortage of platoon and company-level officers in the 3rd Army Corps on November 28.[62] Russian force generation structures have not recovered from the last mobilization and the Russian military-industrial complex remains stretched, so Russian force generation infrastructure is unlikely to be able to accommodate another mobilization wave this rapidly.

The Russian state continues to struggle to compensate mobilized soldiers and their families to a level residents consider adequate. A Russian news source stated on November 28 that the Regional Government of Novosibirsk Oblast received over 100 complaints from the families of mobilized soldiers.[63] Fifty-two of the complaints centered on Russian authorities’ inadequate compensation for the purchase of coal and firewood and the allocation of vouchers for sanatorium treatment for children.[64]

Certain Russian social actors are challenging pervasive Russian institutional failures to address military and logistical failures. A prominent Russian milblogger amplified independent, nationalist Russian politician Roman Yuneman’s scathing condemnation of Russian military leadership and framing of the war in Ukraine.[65] Yuneman claimed that hundreds of thousands of mobilized soldiers with smartphones have directly undermined state narratives that the reports of organizational and planning issues are slander or falsified claims.[66] Yuneman argued that the “organizational catastrophe” and “complete impotence of military leadership” will prevent Russia from achieving its goals in Ukraine.[67] Yuneman stated that it is impossible to reform the Russian military apparatus because true reform requires steps antithetical to the current vertical power structure: objective information and feedback, an end to corruption, and decentralization.[68] This view represents one side of the Russian debate over whether to stifle reports of systemic Russian military failures or address the challenges in hopes of resolving them, on which ISW has previously reported.[69]

Vocal complaints of mobilized personnel from Serpukhov, Moscow Oblast on November 23 fueled contention over Russian military logistics and the Kremlin's handling of the information space.[70] An independent Russian news outlet reported on November 29 that relatives of the mobilized soldiers have not received any sort of communication from the Serpukhov soldiers in an unspecified number of days, a divergence from their habitual patterns of communication.[71] The outlet listed the front lines in Baranykivka, Luhansk Oblast as the last confirmed location of the mobilized soldiers.[72]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

An independent investigation conducted by Alexei Navalny’s “Sirena” team found that Russia may have transported thousands of Ukrainian prisoners from penal colonies in occupied Ukraine to Russia following the withdrawal from the west bank of Kherson Oblast. The investigation draws from data from the “Russia behind bars” legal advocacy organization, human-rights organization “Gulag.net,” and interviews of families of Ukrainian prisoners and notes that Russian forces began moving prisoners from Kherson and Mykolaiv Oblasts to penal colony IK-7 in Stara Zburivka (just south of Kherson City) in May.[73] According to the investigation, Russian officials began transferring up to 2,500 prisoners to penal colonies in Krasnodar Krai and Volgograd Oblast two weeks before the Russian withdrawal from west bank Kherson Oblast. Other independent investigations noted that Russian officials have been moving Ukrainian prisoners to Russian regions on a large scale since early November.[74] Russian officials are likely taking measures to move prisoners to free up prison infrastructure in occupied areas, either to use prisoner assets as military bases for personnel and equipment storage or to free up space to detain Ukrainian citizens as law enforcement crackdowns continue throughout occupied areas.

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.

https://twitter.com/PauliusZaleckas/status/1597588245235499009

https://twitter.com/bradyafr/status/1597390124681424898

[56] https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1597594996102041601?s=20&t=aPLBGvLLOo... io/en/news/2022/11/29/250-convicts-will-serve-forced-labor-sentences-at-nizhny-tagil-tank-and-armored-vehicle-construction-plant

[57] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/11/29/v-nizhnem-tagile-prigovorennyh-k-prinuditelnym-rabotam-otpravyat-na-uralvagonzavod-tam-proizvodyat-tanki-i-druguyu-bronetehniku

[73] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/11/29/sirena-ukrainskih-zaklyuchennyh-vyvezli-v-desyat-koloniy-v-rossii-rech-mozhet-idti-o-tysyachah-lyudey

understandingwar.org

4. Ukraine - Russia Conflict Update - Nov 2022 | SOF News

Ukraine - Russia Conflict Update - Nov 2022 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · November 30, 2022

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, Ukrainian defense, and NATO. This report is currently posted every 30 days, providing curated news for the month.

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

Big Picture of the Conflict

Russians Lose More Territory. Russia is continuing to suffer defeats on the ground in Ukraine. The recent retreat of over 30,000 Russian troops from the regional capital of Kherson in mid-November is its’ third major retreat since the Ukraine war began. The first was from the Kyiv region and the second from the Kharkiv region. The Russians retreated from Kherson to the east bank of the Dnieper River – a much more defensible position for the coming winter months. About 70% of the Kherson region remains under Russian control. The Russian withdrawal from the city follows a months-long offensive by Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine.

Winter Campaign. The onset of winter in Ukraine will likely slow down the pace of battlefield operations. Both countries will use the rest from fierce fighting to fortify positions, train up reinforcements, and set the environment for further offensive action. Snow and mud will degrade the fighting ability of the individual soldier, impede some vehicle traffic, and slow the pace of logistical resupply operations.

Fight in the Skies

Missile Strikes on Civilian Infrastructure. Russian missile attacks continued to strike Ukrainian civilian infrastructure throughout the month of November. This included strikes on water supply facilities, electric power systems, and more. Scheduled and emergency blackouts have become routine over many parts of Ukraine. Western officials had predicted over the past few months that the Russian ability to launch massive missile strikes had diminished as the stockpiles had been used up in the previous months. However, the huge number of missile attacks over the past month have discounted that theory. On Tuesday (Nov 15th) over 96 missiles hit various targets in Ukraine. Its electrical infrastructure has suffered immense damage leaving millions without power – with some estimates saying that half of the energy system was out of order for an extended period of time. The United States and other nations are stepping up to provide millions of dollars to support the acquisition of critical electricity grid equipment.

“Russian Missile Strikes Plunge Ukraine into Darkness”, by Nolan Peterson, Coffee or Die Magazine, November 23, 2022.
“How Was Russia Able to Launch Its Biggest Aerial Attack on Ukraine?”, The New York Times, November 18, 2022. (subscription).
“U.S., Allies Work to Supply Ukraine Air Defense Needs”, DoD News, November 29, 2022.

Iran Helps Russia with Drones. An agreement between Russia and Iran will result in Iran transferring designs and key components for armed drones for use by Russia in the Ukraine war. (The Kyiv Independent, Nov 19, 20220).

Air Defense and NASAMS. The United States has provided Ukraine with National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems. Two have been delivered and six more are on order. While Russia’s manned aircraft are having a difficult time in Ukraine’s airspace, the Russian drones and cruise missiles are having more success. The NASAMS should be helpful in countering the drones and cruise missiles.

“NASAMS Arrive in Ukraine in US Bid to Bolster Air Defense”, Air and Space Forces, November 7, 2022.
“As Russia Ups Air Attacks, US-built NASAMS Air Defense Missiles Arrive in Ukraine”, Coffee or Die Magazine, November 7, 2022.

Maritime Activities

Black Sea Fleet. The loss of captured territory in Ukraine is a devastating blow to the Russian military; yet, it is not without strategic options. Utilizing its Black Sea Fleet, it can still launch missile attacks against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure – crippling its economy. And it can continue to blockade Ukraine’s ports – hurting its ability to export grain and industrial goods. Russia retains the capability to conduct an amphibious landing using several ships positioned in the Black Sea – putting a substantial element of Russian naval infantry on land to threaten vital Ukrainian targets. Read more in “Relative Dominance: Russian Naval Power in the Black Sea”, War on the Rocks, November 9, 2022.

Ukraine’s Drone Boats. One way of countering Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is the employment of unmanned tactical surface vessels. They have the capability of striking targets as far away as 500 miles. The Ukraine government is hoping to ‘crowdsource’ the funding of 100 of these drone boats. They are about 18 feet long, travel about 50 mph, and can carry a payload of up to 400 pounds. Read more in “Ukraine’s Shadowy Kamikaze Drone Boats Officially Break Cover”, The WarZone, November 11, 2022.

Ukraine to Get Riverine Patrol Boats. The United States has announced it is sending 40 armored riverine boats to Ukraine as part of a $400 million assistance package announced in November. 18 riverine boats were sent in June 2022. “Pentagon Adds 40 Armored Patrol Boats to Latest Ukraine Military Aid Package”, USNI.org, November 7, 2022.

Ukraine SOF – Walking on a River Bottom. A different type of story is told in this article about Ukrainian and International Legion divers who crossed the Dnieper River to liberate a Kherson Oblast village. The divers came from the International Legion and the Ukrainian 73rd Marine Special Operations Center. Euromaiden Press, November 19, 2022.

Tactical Ground Situation

Russian Advances – Minimal Gains. A lot of effort and Russian lives are being spent to gain very little territory along the front lines in eastern Ukraine. Untrained ad-hoc Russian units are being pressed into service to gain minimal amounts of territory.

Artillery – Older Models Employed by Ukrainians. The 105-millimeter M101 was a standard light howitzer for the United States during World War II. The Ukrainians have acquired more than 50 of these artillery pieces twenty years ago and they are still being used on the frontlines very effectively. “Ukraine’s World War II- vintage Howitzers Still Work Just Fine”, Forbes.com, November 28, 2022.

Situation Maps. War in Ukraine by Scribble Maps. View more Ukraine SITMAPs that provide updates on the disposition of Russian forces.

Interactive Map – Institute for the Study of War (ISW)

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641cf64bd375

General Information

Negotiations. The prospect for a negotiated settlement is slim. Russia in no longer able to negotiate from a position of strength and President Putin is very unlikely to admit defeat. He is willing to expend more Russian lives in attempt to keep the territory his military forces have gained – most importantly, a land corridor from the Russian border, along the west coastline of the Sea of Azov, going to Crimea. The Ukrainians won’t stop fighting until most of that territory is regained.

Refugees, IDPs, and Humanitarian Crisis. View the UNHCR Operational Data Portal – Ukraine Refugee Situation (Updated daily), https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine.

The Cost of the War. The long-running ‘three day special military operation’ is having a tremendous cost for Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world. For Ukraine especially, its economy has been severely impacted, the standard of living has dropped, and thousands and thousands of Ukrainians have been injured, wounded, or killed. For Russia, the economic cost has been high – although not as much as Ukraine’s. The human cost for Russia – wounded and killed – has been equal, if not more, to the human cost for Ukraine. “The ballooning costs of the Ukraine War”, The Strategist, by David Uren, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), November 24, 2022.

NAFO and Meme Warfare. The information space is a battleground for the Ukraine Russian conflict. There are many aspects to the IO fight; one of the is the use of memes. “The Fellas” (NAFO) is one group that specializes in the use of memes. “Seizing the memes of advantage in the Ukraine war and beyond”, by Callum Harvey, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, November 15, 2022.

World Response and Military Aid

U.S. Military Equipment – Another $400 Million. In mid-November the United States announced it was providing another $400 million in arms, munitions, and equipment. This material will be drawn down from U.S. Department of Defense inventories. This latest supply will bring the total of military aid to over $19 billion since the beginning of the Biden administration. The latest aid package contains missiles for the HAWK air defense system, ammunition for the HIMARS, artillery rounds, mortar rounds, HMMWVs, grenade launchers, and more. “$400 Million in Additional Assistance for Ukraine”, DoD News, November 10, 2022.

Iran – Providing Weapons to Russia. A Congressional Research Service ‘fact sheet’ describes some of the weapons deliveries to Russia made by Iran. The Shahed-131 and 136 drones have ranges of over 900 kilometers and can carry munitions. The Iranians may also be contemplating the transfer of short-range ballistic missiles to Russia as well. “Iran’s Transfer of Weaponry to Russia for Use in Ukraine”, CRS, November 4, 2022, PDF, 4 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12042

SF Veterans Help in Ukraine. Two former Green Berets traveled to Ukraine to teach medical classes to the Ukrainian military. Read about it in “Why a Cumberland County Special Forces veteran went to Ukraine”, The Fayetteville Observer, November 9, 2022.

Canadian Engineers to Poland. More than forty combat engineers from Canada will be supporting Polish efforts to train Ukrainian military forces. The training provided will be on the topics of engineer reconnaissance, explosives, mining, and de-mining. Canadian forces have been assisting in supporting refugee reception centers and helping British-based training programs. “Canada to send 40 combat engineers to Poland to train Ukraine soldiers”, CBC.CA News, October 11, 2022.

Commentary

Surrender? Not Likely. Yurij Holowinsky tells us why the Ukrainians are unlikely to negotiate and even less likely to surrender. “Why Ukraine Won’t Quit”, Small Wars Journal, November 26, 2022.

“Dad, what does it mean to ‘surrender’?” “I don’t know my son. We are Ukrainians!”

Lessons Learned. The Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine was supposed to last three days and result in the capture of Kyiv, toppling of the Ukraine government, and installation of a ‘puppet’ regime. Instead, Russia finds itself in a long, attritional battle. For national security observers, the conflict has provided updated ‘lessons learned’ about modern conflict. Over twenty lessons learned are described in this article. Among them are 1) Ukrainians can be trusted, 2) Russians cannot be trusted, 3) equipment doesn’t win wars, people do, 4) sanctions work but are messy, 5) influence operations are important, and more. “What the world has learned from Russia’s war in Ukraine“, Atlantic Council, November 2022.

Maps and Other Resources

Maps of Ukraine

https://www.national-security.info/ukraine/maps.html

Ukraine Conflict Info. The Ukrainians have launched a new website that will provide information about the war. It is entitled Russia Invaded Ukraine and can be found at https://war.ukraine.ua/.

Ukrainian Think Tanks – Brussels. Consolidated information on how to help Ukraine from abroad and stay up to date on events.

Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Podcast – American Legionaire. Veteran’s Day sees the ‘G Base’ host an American veteran, Jack Herra, who volunteered to serve in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion and shares his story and unique perspective with listeners. Pinelander Podcast, November 11, 2022, one hour.

https://pinelander.podbean.com/e/episode-049-american-legionaire-november-11-2022/

Podcast – Surviving a Winter War. As Ukraine gears up for a winter conflict with Russia it might look back into history to a time when Finland fended of the larger Soviet Union army for many months during its ‘winter war’. The Finnish soldiers, using snow caves and skis to push back against Stalin’s forces. “What it Takes to Survive a Winter War”, Outside Podcast, November 16, 2022.

https://www.outsideonline.com/podcast/survival-winter-war-russia-finland/

sof.news · by SOF News · November 30, 2022

5. Defense Intelligence Agency forms ‘China mission group’ to track rival

Excerpts:

John Kirchhofer, the DIA’s chief of staff, on Nov. 29 said his agency, which produces, analyzes and disseminates military intelligence, established a “China mission group” that will reach full operational capacity early next year.

“It’s as simple as this: We created a box and we called it China,” he said during a livestreamed Intelligence and National Security Alliance event. “If you are in DIA and you are working China, you’re in that box.”

Defense Intelligence Agency forms ‘China mission group’ to track rival

c4isrnet.com · by Colin Demarest · November 29, 2022

WASHINGTON — The Defense Intelligence Agency is pulling together a group of analysts and experts to monitor competition with China, a world power Pentagon officials consider the leading threat to U.S. national security.

John Kirchhofer, the DIA’s chief of staff, on Nov. 29 said his agency, which produces, analyzes and disseminates military intelligence, established a “China mission group” that will reach full operational capacity early next year.

“It’s as simple as this: We created a box and we called it China,” he said during a livestreamed Intelligence and National Security Alliance event. “If you are in DIA and you are working China, you’re in that box.”

Whereas the CIA is focused on providing intelligence of all kinds to the president, the DIA is the principal source of foreign intel for combat endeavors. The new mission group will become the agency’s repository for China knowledge and knowhow, meaning insiders including Director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier as well as outsiders will know where to turn “for whatever deep expertise” is needed, according to Kirchhofer, the third-ranking officer.

“This is us integrating to the maximum extent possible on an existential threat to the long-term success of the United States,” he said.

After decades of fighting in the Middle East and investment in counterterrorism and technologies related to smaller-scale conflict, the U.S. is now focusing on China and the Indo-Pacific, a region home to some of the world’s largest militaries, ports and populations.

Advance work in Ukraine blunted Russian cyber advantage, US says

The Pentagon sought $11.2 billion for cyber in fiscal 2023. That's $800 million, or nearly 8%, over the Biden administration’s previous ask.

Defense officials in Washington are warning about the dangers posed by Beijing, and have rallied allies and partners to counteract its global ambitions. The annual China Military Power Report sent to Congress this week notes that China is the only country with the will and military capacity to eventually challenge what it called the U.S.-led “world order,” Defense News reported.

While much of the intelligence community “has been heavily focused in Europe, and that goes back decades,” Kirchhofer said, “that’s not necessarily where this long-term threat is coming from, even with Russia being as belligerent as they are today.”

DIA plans to move more resources — including people, communications and information technology — to the Pacific. Talks to extend the military intelligence agency’s footprint are already underway with friendly nations. The Army, Navy and Air Force are taking a similar tack.

The shift will help “with resiliency in the event of a crisis and some needed redundancy in the event of worst-case scenarios,” according Kirchhofer.

“It’s very exciting, and I think that is putting our money where our mouth is,” he said. “It really shows our long-term commitment to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the potential fight against China.”

About Colin Demarest

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

6. No, a former Marine general is not working for an infamous Russian mercenary group

Thanks to Jeff Schogol for running this down.

No, a former Marine general is not working for an infamous Russian mercenary group

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · November 29, 2022

The Defense Department’s top spokesman has called bullshit on a recent claim by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Russia’s Wagner Group, that a former Marine Corps general officer works for the private mercenary company.

Prigozhin made his dubious claim on Nov. 25 to the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, when he said that about 20 Finnish citizens are fighting with Wagner in Ukraine.

“I have a very good opinion about the Finns on the battlefield,” the French wire service Agence France-Presse quoted Prigozhin as saying. “They are fighting in a British battalion (as part of Wagner PMC), which is commanded by a US citizen, a former general of the Marine Corps.”

Notably, Prigozhin did not identify this alleged Marine officer whom he claimed to have on the payroll. It was also far from clear why a former Marine general officer would opt to work for Wagner instead of embracing the bosom of America’s defense industrial base (F-35s, after all, cannot sell themselves).

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On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder dismissed Prigozhin’s comments as Russian disinformation.

“We have seen those press reports; we’ve seen no names associated with those press reports; we’re not aware of any names associated with those,” Ryder said at a Pentagon news briefing. “And so, I think, again, very likely that this is – not surprisingly – propaganda. I would refer you to the Marine Corps, but I don’t know how much credibility I would put into the Wagner Group.”

The Marine Corps had nothing to add beyond Ryder’s comments on Tuesday. Task & Purpose also asked two retired Marine general officers if they had heard of any of their colleagues joining Wagner, and the answer was a resounding nyet.

Russian billionaire and businessman, Concord catering company owner Yevgeny Prigozhin attends a meeting with foreign investors at Konstantin Palace June 16, 2016 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

To most Americans, it is not surprising to hear that the head of the Wagner Group, which has been accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere, is not the most trustworthy source of information. In fact, Prigozhin has about as much credibility as a James Bond villain.

A video posted in September shows a man who looks a lot like Prigozhin recruiting Russian prisoners to fight in Ukraine. The man in the video says that while Wagner is careful about accepting prisoners convicted of sex crimes into its ranks, the company also understands that “mistakes happen.”

If Wagner actually employed a former Marine general officer, the Russians would have certainly published this person’s picture, military records, and other personal information to humiliate the U.S. military, said Olga Lautman, an expert on Russia and Ukraine at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, DC.

Lautman noted that in June, Russian television showed two American military veterans who had been captured in Ukraine. Alex Drueke and Andy Huynh were eventually released after 104 days in Russian captivity thanks to a chance call to the VA’s crisis hotline.

A man wearing military camouflage stands at the entrance of the ‘PMC Wagner Centre’, associated with the founder of the Wagner private military group (PMC) Yevgeny Prigozhin, during the official opening of the office block on the National Unity Day, in Saint Petersburg, on November 4, 2022. (Olga MALTSEVA /AFP via Getty Images)

Prigozhin’s claim about having a Marine general officer on his company’s payroll was likely intended for a Russian audience, Lautman told Task & Purpose on Tuesday.

“I think it’s more for internal purposes, domestic propaganda, to show: Look, we can buy former U.S. military members, to show the weakness of the U.S. military; and also to pollute social media, like western audiences, with more garbage,” Lautman said.

Prigozhin’s dubious claim about having a Marine general officer leading a Wagner battalion is emblematic of how the Russians approach propaganda campaigns, said Marek Posard, an expert on disinformation with the RAND Corporation.

“Typically, the Russians will try to cook up falsehoods that are ripped from recent headlines,” Posard told Task & Purpose. “Earlier this month, there were reports of former allied personnel aiding foreign adversaries. I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia is trying to piggyback on this story to undermine the perceived legitimacy of the U.S. military.”

So, remember: Whenever Russian President Vladimir Putin or one of his allies or subordinates make outlandish claims about American military personnel, you can always smell a big, fat, commie rat.

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Want to write for Task & Purpose? Click here. Or check out the latest stories on our homepage.

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · November 29, 2022

7. Prevent the mistakes of history by passing the fiscal 2023 NDAA

Excepts:

Our country has an enormous responsibility — whether we like it or not — as the leader of the free world. To avoid another global conflict, we must have the capacity to inflict unacceptable costs on any potential adversary and the will to impose those costs if necessary; simply put, our potential adversaries must fear the consequences of their actions. This concept of deterrence has been the heart of our defense strategy for over 70 years and is the guiding principle of the bill currently before us.

...

We are living in a historic moment. As we have seen in our collective global history, had Hitler been confronted earlier — before he completely rebuilt the Nazi war machine — World War II might well have been avoided.

Less than 15% of our federal budget to fight off a brutal autocracy, prevent another war across Europe and save thousands if not millions of lives? To me, that’s one of the most important investments we could possibly make because the cost of war would far exceed these investments.

There’s no more solemn responsibility we have than to provide for the common defense. It’s part of the very preamble to the Constitution. So let’s learn from the mistakes of history, meet our global responsibility and pass this critical bill.

Prevent the mistakes of history by passing the fiscal 2023 NDAA

Defense News · by Sen. Angus King · November 29, 2022

I sometimes get asked: “Why is America spending so much to help Ukraine?” My response is to Google “Rhineland, 1936″ or “Sudetenland, 1938.” Those were places where Adolph Hitler started his war across Europe, and where any level of resistance could have stopped his bloody march — and might well have saved the over 50 million lives lost in World War II.

Along with our European allies, America failed to see the threat and stem the tide of the Third Reich. Today, as Russian President Vladimir Putin continues his illegal, unprovoked attacks against Ukraine, with his sights set on the rest of Eastern Europe, history must not be allowed to repeat itself.

From the 1930s onward, it’s become ever clearer that a strong national defense is essential to protect the cause of freedom and save lives. That’s why the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act makes historic and necessary investments in the defense of America and the free world. Among other important provisions, such as raises for the troops, rebuilding a modern navy and upgrading our nuclear capability, the legislation includes the critical weapons and logistics support Ukraine needs — because if Putin is not stopped now, our allies in the Baltics, Poland and large swaths of Europe will be next.

Providing these tools to Ukraine is at the very crux of what it means to be a global leader. We must exercise this leadership to avoid mistakes of the past — and prevent a larger war in the future.

Our country has an enormous responsibility — whether we like it or not — as the leader of the free world. To avoid another global conflict, we must have the capacity to inflict unacceptable costs on any potential adversary and the will to impose those costs if necessary; simply put, our potential adversaries must fear the consequences of their actions. This concept of deterrence has been the heart of our defense strategy for over 70 years and is the guiding principle of the bill currently before us.

Included in the bill are initiatives to deter the global ambitions of dictators and autocrats by modernizing America’s nuclear defenses. It’s become clear to me while chairing the Senate Subcommittee on Strategic Forces — which oversees our nuclear triad — that the United States has failed to pace the threat. We must pass the NDAA to overhaul these essential deterrents and meet the growing threats of new weapons like hypersonic missiles and increased competition from Russia and China — not to prepare for nuclear war, but to prevent one.

These commitments do not come without cost, and while it is true that the United States spends more on defense than any other nation, no other country in the world has our global responsibility.

So, yes, our global leadership role means we spend more than other countries, but this needs a bit more context. In 1952, during the Korean War, about 70% of the federal budget went toward defense (it was even higher during World War II). And according to Congressional Research Service data, it has steadily trended downward over the decades. By 1987, it was about 28% of the federal budget. Today, our defense spending is only about 13% of our total federal spending. This is among the lowest levels in the last 70 years.

Similarly, defense spending relative to our total gross domestic product has been trending downward. Again, going back to 1952, defense spending as a percentage of GDP was around 13%, and in 1987, nearly 6% of our economy was committed to defense.

Today, only about 3% of our total economy is committed to defense spending, which few can argue is unreasonable given our uniquely global responsibilities and the magnitude of the threats we face.

We are living in a historic moment. As we have seen in our collective global history, had Hitler been confronted earlier — before he completely rebuilt the Nazi war machine — World War II might well have been avoided.

Less than 15% of our federal budget to fight off a brutal autocracy, prevent another war across Europe and save thousands if not millions of lives? To me, that’s one of the most important investments we could possibly make because the cost of war would far exceed these investments.

There’s no more solemn responsibility we have than to provide for the common defense. It’s part of the very preamble to the Constitution. So let’s learn from the mistakes of history, meet our global responsibility and pass this critical bill.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, chairs the Subcommittee on Strategic Force and serves on the Seapower and Airland subcommittees.

8. Ukraine needs tanks, and the west should supply them. They could finish off Putin and Russia

Ukraine needs tanks, and the west should supply them. They could finish off Putin and Russia | Frank Ledwidge

In 1941, Churchill said to the US: ‘give us the tools and we will finish the job’. Zelenskiy is saying the same to us – and we should listen

The Guardian · by Frank Ledwidge · November 29, 2022

In a 1941 speech on a Royal Navy ship, Winston Churchill directed his final comments to the US: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” After a significant victory in Kherson, and standing at the gates of Crimea facing a Russian army desperately trying to shore up its ramshackle defences, Ukraine has the troops and morale to defend what it has. However, despite some western assistance, the Ukrainians lack the tools – tanks, missiles and aircraft – to retake their land and impose strategic defeat on the Russians. If the west, and especially the US, is serious about helping to protect Ukraine, decisions on stepping up military assistance need to be made now. If Ukraine is to be able to secure its future after victory – assuming that is what the west truly wants – its forces need to begin to transition to Nato-standard equipment.

The US has not yet declared a political or military objective. However, in April the US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, said he wanted “to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine”. Is it the intention of the United States genuinely to support military efforts to return Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders? Or does it instead suit US and western decision-makers to support a long war with Ukrainian forces used as proxies to bleed out Russia’s armed forces? Obviously, these are not at all the same thing. Decisions need to be made very soon about increasing military support, and those decisions will tell us which objective is being pursued.

Barring a collapse of Russian forces (which is possible), without a step-change in weapons supplies, it is unlikely that the Ukrainians will be able to defeat Russia. Certainly, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the US chiefs of staff, thinks there will be no victory any time soon, and fears a first world war-type stalemate. With the force levels and weapons they now have, he may be right. While the administration has worked to “clean up” these remarks, they almost certainly reflect the perspective of the US armed forces.

In September, his Ukrainian counterpart, General Valerii Zaluzhny, set out how he intends to achieve victory, starting by raising between 10 and 20 brigades (that is, up to 100,000 troops). These troops will be able to hold the land they have now, but unless they are properly trained and equipped, they are unlikely to be capable of sustained offensive action to complete the liberation of their country. Three additional forms of weapon systems, most of them American, are vital: heavy armour, long-range missiles and air defence.

First, heavy armoured vehicles, especially tanks. As matters stand, the Ukrainian armed forces remain largely equipped with Russian or ex-Soviet equipment. Despite assistance from Nato countries, largely in the form of unwanted ex-Soviet stock from former Warsaw Pact countries, more than half of Ukraine’s’s tank fleet comprises captured Russian vehicles. Ukraine has repeatedly asked for more and better armour to support its campaigns to retake occupied territory. The US M1 Abrams tank is battle-tested and a generation ahead of anything remaining in Russia’s arsenal. Of the 3,000 or so the US has in reserve storage, the Ukrainians would need far fewer than 1,000 to equip their new brigades. The same considerations apply to the release of up to 2,000 equally battle-proven Bradley armoured personnel carriers to protect Ukrainian infantry. Europe can supply excellent Nato-standard equipment, including tanks, but it won’t. This might be a blessing, as a single large fleet of tanks and armoured vehicles – which the US can supply without seriously affecting its military readiness – makes far better sense than multiple fleets, each with its own maintenance and logistical tail. Supply of American tanks has been “on the table” for several months. They need to go from the table and on to the ships and trains.

Second, one of the keynotes of Ukraine’s success has been Himars, the US-made rocket artillery launcher system which has devastated Russia’s ammunition stocks, and played a major role in offsetting Russia’s artillery advantage. Russia has no answer to it. However, the range of the rocket ammunition they currently have allows them only to attack targets up to 50km or so behind enemy lines. The Ukrainians have repeatedly requested ATACMS (or Army Tactical Missile System) missiles, with ranges up to 300km, for the Himars launchers. These would put at risk Russia’s military bases in Russian-occupied Crimea, or far behind the lines elsewhere. Targets might include the Black Sea Fleet in Sebastopol, or the Russian and Iranian drone-launchers currently immiserating Ukraine’s civilians.

Finally, Ukraine needs a vastly increased air defence capability. Ukrainian combat aircraft, astonishingly, are still operating. Over the next year or two it will need to be re-armed with western aircraft. The aircraft most often touted is the American F-16 fighter, the mainstay of many Nato and other air forces. There are plenty of these available. However, they are maintenance-intensive and possibly not suited to Ukraine’s airfields. And there are other options, such as the Swedish Saab Gripen.

More urgently, dozens of the latest anti-aircraft and anti-missile launchers are required to provide a systematic, effective and sustainable defence of Ukraine and its beleaguered people. The Ukrainians have requested top-of-the-range US Patriot and Italian-French SAMP/T launchers to shoot down ballistic missiles. The western systems already delivered, one German IRIS-T and two Norwegian-US NASAMS are a small fraction of what is needed.

The best way to ensure that Russia is, in Lloyd Austin’s words, “weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine” is to arm our allies properly to defeat them now and deter Russia in the future. Whether it is ever permitted to join Nato, a Ukraine armed with a relatively modern Nato-standard arsenal of heavy weaponry would become – like formerly neutral Sweden or Finland – capable of operating with western allies to secure its borders and those of Nato.

There is no time for delay: it will take many months to supply this essential equipment and to train troops to use and maintain it. Stepping up weapons supply would indicate that the US has opened the arsenal of democracy with clear intent for victory.

Most important, it would avoid an long drawn-out, bloody conflict with absolutely no guarantee of Ukrainian success. Getting this right will shorten the war and save thousands of Ukrainian – and incidentally Russian – lives.

Frank Ledwidge is a barrister and former military officer who has served in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan

The Guardian · by Frank Ledwidge · November 29, 2022

9. The Pentagon’s Lead Intelligence Agency Has an HR Problem

The Pentagon’s Lead Intelligence Agency Has an HR Problem

Too few human-resources staffers means a constant struggle to keep up with basic personnel record-keeping and more.

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

The Defense Intelligence Agency has a longstanding HR problem: too few human-resources workers to help the rest of its growing workforce. Now the agency is aiming to boost recruiting and retention of HR staff by updating its record-keeping and telework systems.

The DIA has “chronically under-invested in our human resources capabilities” since 2008, when it absorbed intelligence personnel from military departments in combatant commands, agency chief of staff John Kirchhofer said Tuesday.

“We never grew our HR capacity to support that. And that was part of the logic at the time: ‘we can do this cheaply,’” Kirchhofer said Tuesday. “But when you're faced with a crisis, you realize that doing it cheaply is not serving the workforce well.”

For example, he said, “We struggle on some of the basics like making sure that awards are done in a timely fashion, that pay and compensation is taken care of, and personnel actions are up to date.”

So DIA has been working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the defense undersecretary for intelligence and security to boost its HR to a healthy level that can support DIA’s 16,500 employees in more than 100 countries. Kirchhofer also said the agency plans to hire 1,000 employees a year.

The effort includes updating the cumbersome systems used to keep track of the agency’s people.

“We are still largely analog, paper-based. And that's a lost opportunity,” Kirchhofer said. “The reality is: We can't take advantage of anything that big data brings to the fight—machine learning, how we might use those types of tools—to tell us more about where we have gaps in talent in our workforce” until the system is digitized.

Meanwhile, DIA, like the rest of the U.S. military, has been working to increase its presence in the Indo-Pacific region.

“We are looking to move more personnel forward around the Pacific Rim,” Kirchhofer said. “This will help us with resiliency” and advantage during a crisis.

DIA has started to shift people and gear to the region, while working with partners.

“I think that is putting our money where our mouth is. And it really shows our long-term commitment to U.S. INDOPACOM,” he said.

Yet amid that shift is a bubbling personnel crisis: a potential exodus of talent in key support areas like human resources, IT, and contracting over lack of telework options, Kirchhofer said.

“If you are operating in the mission space in DIA, you're gonna have to be in a [sensitive compartmented information facility, or] SCIF, and I don't see us putting SCIFs at home for the vast majority of our workforce. So the reality is that at least some of the time, if not the vast majority of the time, our folks are going to have to come in,” Kirchhofer said.

That will have to change for DIA to be a competitive employer, particularly for jobs that are often completely remote in other parts of government and the private sector. Kirchhofer said business systems, like for HR or finance, are on the “high side” and can’t be accessed remotely from personal devices, but some capabilities can likely be “pushed down” to lower classification levels.

“I think we're probably going to have to do some level of that to compete for personnel in that space. So if you take a contracting officer or human resources specialist, they can go anywhere in the federal government, and most of our non-[intelligence community] partners are allowing those folks to work from home full time,” he said.

DIA is “seeing increased attrition” in those areas, he said, and to keep it from worsening, the agency will need to adopt more work-from-home solutions.

“Otherwise, I just don't think we can compete for talent and our retention will struggle.”

Kirchhofer said he really wants to push for secure telework capabilities, like letting people work from SCIFs anywhere the DIA has connectivity. It’s “eminently doable” and can allow personnel to move around as their life requires.

“I can take care of an eldercare situation that I have while still performing my job completely because I have full access to the communication suite. So I would like to see us embrace that as one of the ways to mitigate what's potentially going to be a flight of personnel,” he said.

“If we learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that we can do amazing things through this type of medium…We can have amazingly effective meetings and get the job done.”

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

10. How Ukraine is innovating Soviet-era weapons for a 21st century battleground

Necessity is the mother of ... We will be studying the Ukrainians and learning from their actions.

How Ukraine is innovating Soviet-era weapons for a 21st century battleground | CNN

CNN · by Mick Krever,Matthew Chance,Kosta Gak,Luis Graham-Yooll · November 30, 2022

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In a basement in eastern Ukraine, young men sit at a long table strewn with laptops, their eyes glued to a television screen an arm’s length away.

They watch black figures on a bleak winter hilltop, which appear to panic, then run across the frame. It’s a live video feed from a small Ukrainian drone several miles away – a spotter for artillery teams trying to kill Russian soldiers in their trenches.

Plumes of smoke rise from the near misses of Ukrainian salvos.

All along the eastern frontlines, in basement command centers hidden behind unmarked metal doors, bookish Ukrainian soldiers direct artillery fire in a desperate attempt to hold off a Russian advance.

This is a real-life testing ground for shoestring, innovative 21st century warfare. The men use cheap, commercially available drones and consumer chat programs to identify and communicate targeting for weaponry that in many cases is multiple decades old.

Their fiercest fight is taking place for the city of Bakhmut, besieged for months by Russian forces.

The ferocity of that battle is apparent from the first moments of approaching the city, where black smoke billows from apartment blocks.

As a CNN team drove in on the heavily trafficked main road, a Russian artillery shell landed on a building just a few dozen yards away. Moments later, another shell slammed into the building again, prompting our military escort to urge the team to leave. Much of this war is fought avoiding the incessant Russian artillery threat.

Ukrainian soldiers watch a real-time feed from a drone as they target artillery strikes on Russian positions.

Mick Krever/CNN

The Kremlin has concentrated large numbers of forces to this assault on Bakhmut and Ukraine’s troops are struggling, says Petro, the National Guard commander who runs this unit.

“It feels like one constant, non-stop assault,” he says. “The only window to rest is when they run out of people and wait for reinforcements.”

Like others in the Ukrainian military, Petro uses only his first name, to protect his identity.

He describes a battle into which Russia has sent wave after wave of forces, seemingly caring little if they were mowed down.

“Their tactic is sending these poor people forward who we need to eliminate,” Petro explains. “They cannot take Bakhmut with a direct attack, so they went around it. We had to move from the urban areas to the fields where we are very exposed to artillery.”

Petro’s description echoes that of Serhiy Hayday, the Ukrainian head of the neighboring Luhansk region, who said last month that near Bakhmut, the Russians “die in bulk – the mobilized simply go forward to identify our positions.”

Some Russian soldiers have described significant casualties, though the Russian Defense Ministry earlier this month claimed that losses did “not exceed 1% of the combat strength and 7% of the wounded.”

Ukrainian forces fire an artillery piece at Russian positions at the frontline near Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine.

Mick Krever/CNN

Every nook of the subterranean command center is occupied – by whiteboards tallying kills, sleeping cots, boxes of drones waiting to be configured.

“The roads are muddy,” Petro says. “We can’t evacuate the wounded fast enough, and deliver ammunition.”

Ukrainian commanders also complain about lack of communication between units, and that they lack enough lower-level officers to keep soldiers motivated and in the fight after months of grueling warfare.

Further toward the front, in a treeline bordering farmland, is the Ukrainian artillery unit on the other end of the phones with the basement.

Pavlo, a Ukrainian commander, in his basement post.

Mick Krever/CNN

Tuman, the commander of a Ukrainian artillery battalion, on the frontlines.

Mick Krever/CNN

Tuman, the commander of the battery, receives coordinates on a mobile phone in one hand, and writes them down in a notebook he holds in the other.

He shouts them out and a soldier yells them back before peering through a scope to aim the Soviet-era artillery piece they now load with Polish-made shells. With the pull of a cord, the autumn leaves are shaken from the nearly frozen ground, and an artillery shell whistles toward the horizon.

“Our general staff tries to supply as many rounds as possible,” Tuman says in the relative safety of a nearby trench. “But we understand that we are low on our caliber. But you get what you get.”

KYIV, UKRAINE -- NOVEMBER 24: General view of a blackout on November 24, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. On November 23, the Russian Armed Forces launched a massive missile attack on Ukraine. Explosions rang out in many large cities of Ukraine, damaging, among other things, energy infrastructure facilities and blacking out the entire country. The Government of Ukraine is doing everything possible to stabilize the situation as quickly as possible. (Photo by Zinchenko/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

Zinchenko/Global Images Ukraine/Getty Images

Kyiv says it 'won't let Putin steal Christmas' as Russian attacks threaten bleak winter in Ukraine

He claims the accuracy of Russia’s artillery has deteriorated over the course of the year, as Ukrainian forces damaged their enemy’s ability to conduct air reconnaissance.

“Their precision went down,” he says. “But their rounds are flying over us all the time.”

In another basement command center, further south in the Donetsk region, another set of soldiers stare at their own set of screens.

Their commander, Pavlo, tells us they count daily casualties in the dozens.

“Vehicles and ammunition are expandable,” he says. “We try not to count them, and use as much as we need to stop the enemy from advancing. The only thing we cannot recover is human lives.”

He is sanguine about that cost.

“There is no war without casualties,” he says. “If we resist, and don’t want to let Russians capture our territory, we need to fight. If we fight, we take casualties. These casualties are justified, and inevitable.”

CNN · by Mick Krever,Matthew Chance,Kosta Gak,Luis Graham-Yooll · November 30, 2022

11. Indecent exposure in critical supply chains

(or let's make logistics sexy!). (apologies, I could not resist trying to be sarcastic)

Indecent exposure in critical supply chains

BY NATHAN PICARSIC AND EMILY DE LA BRUYERE, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 11/29/22 2:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3750245-indecent-exposure-in-critical-supply-chains/

In 2016, China’s Hefei Province launched a high-profile but cryptic and closely guarded industrial project: The “506 Project.” It leveraged some 54 billion RMB of provincial funds, backed by the Chinese central government’s integrated circuit investment fund, and the expertise of leadership from SMIC, one of China’s top state-owned semiconductor companies, which was placed on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List in 2020. The 506 Project’s goal was simple: To develop a Chinese domestic state champion in DRAM, or dynamic random access memory — part of a larger effort to shore up indigenous capacity across the semiconductor value chain.

In 2018, the 506 Project became ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), a part of the “Made in China 2025” national strategy and China’s Science and Technology National Key Projects. In 2019, CXMT started mass production. Today, the company is closely integrated into China’s military and surveillance systems; supplies and partners with a “Who’s Who” of Chinese military and government players including DJI, Hikvision, China Telecom, and Huawei; and co-invests with Chinese government and military players. “CXMT has fired a resounding shot,” reported Chinese media in 2022, “in the chokehold counterattack.”

CXMT is an arm of China’s government and that government’s industrial offensive. It is military-tied and strategically motivated. It is, one would assume, the kind of company that the U.S. would be wary of incorporating into defense and other crucial or sensitive value chains — or, really, any value chains at all. That assumption would be wrong.

Congress is negotiating a final defense authorization bill. A provision in the Senate version of the bill would ban government procurement of chips made by high-risk Chinese companies — namely CXMT, as well as YMTC and SMIC — and encourage federal contractors to do the same. This would be the most basic of defensive responses to China’s industrial chokehold offensive.

But that provision faces an uphill battle. A campaign is being waged on Capitol Hill to neuter it by delaying implementation, building in loopholes, or removing it altogether. And this campaign cannot be attributed to China. It is spearheaded by U.S. industry and the U.S. defense industry, intent on preserving today’s frictionless, profitable (in the short term) status quo at the expense of U.S. economic and national security.

Beijing sees today’s geopolitical competition as an industrial one determined by critical supply chains. Leverage in these grants influence and even control. If the U.S. military and U.S. industry rely on Chinese inputs, how much can the country actually compete with China? Plus, those inputs risk granting Beijing access to U.S. technologies, and perhaps even control over them. Accordingly, the Chinese Communist Party has spent the past decades building up domestic industrial self-sufficiency while undermining that of the U.S.: This is what the Made in China 2025 national strategy is about, and also the Belt and Road Initiative and Beijing’s larger architecture of subsidies and other non-market practices.

The U.S. is not playing defense, let alone competing. Rather, the U.S. government risks caving to a U.S. industry so focused on today’s quarterly returns that it has lost sight of what tomorrow’s will look like if Beijing’s industrial offensive goes unaddressed.

The problem extends well beyond the semiconductor value chain. It’s pervasive across the U.S. industrial and defense industrial bases. Take rare earths, for example: The engines of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jets require Chinese rare earth alloys. This reality runs afoul of U.S. procurement laws — and of U.S. security interests. But rather than resolve it, Lockheed has secured a waiver from the Department of Defense. As China’s state-owned Global Times put it in October: “U.S. waiver for Chinese alloy in F-35 jets exposes dependence on rare-earth production from China.”

The Chinese Communist Party can, and will, exploit this dependence. That much has been clear for over a decade: In 2010, to force Tokyo’s hand during a territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands, Beijing cut off exports of rare earths to Japan. The October Global Times piece calls on China to apply the same approach to the U.S. today.

Beijing is competing over and through international supply chains. That makes them a matter of national security. It makes their vulnerabilities threats to national security. As long as industry fails to address those vulnerabilities, industry is sabotaging American security.

Nathan Picarsic and Emily de La Bruyère are senior fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) with a focus on China policy, and the co-founders of Horizon Advisory, a consulting firm focused on the implications of China’s competitive approach to geopolitics.

12. Pentagon warns of China’s plans for dominance in Taiwan and beyond

Excerpts:

Further threatening the global balance, the Pentagon says, are the relationships China is pursuing outside its direct geographic sphere of influence to expand a more conventional military footprint. The report notes how China and Russia, for example, continue to hold joint exercises. Such cooperation — even if China has not given Russia military supplies for its Ukraine war effort — demonstrates that Beijing “still seems to see a lot of value in their partnership,” according to the defense official.

The report provides a list of countries in which the Pentagon believes China has “likely considered” establishing military logistics facilities “to support naval, air and ground forces projection,” in a style similar to the Chinese military’s support base in Djibouti, which sits just a few miles away from a U.S. base, Camp Lemonnier.

Those countries include: Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Seychelles, Tanzania, Angola, and Tajikistan, the report says. But the senior defense official cautioned that the list should be read as an indication of the areas in which China was “trying to make progress,” and not a warning that a second base like the one in Djibouti was imminent.

Pentagon warns of China’s plans for dominance in Taiwan and beyond

As part of its buildup, China’s military conducted more ballistic missile tests last year than the rest of the world combined, U.S. says

By Karoun Demirjian

Updated November 29, 2022 at 6:16 p.m. EST|Published November 29, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Karoun Demirjian · November 29, 2022

China conducted more ballistic missile tests last year than the rest of the world combined and is on course to possess 1,500 nuclear weapons within the next decade, the Pentagon warns in a new assessment of Beijing’s rapidly expanding military posture.

The findings are detailed in a report for Congress released publicly in unclassified format Tuesday. It outlines China’s broad desires to pursue global dominance but comes as the Chinese Communist Party faces perhaps the most serious internal challenge to its authority in decades, with audacious demonstrations against President Xi Jinping’s harsh covid lockdowns having included, in some cities, demands for his ouster.

Pentagon officials, in detailing the report, were careful not to draw any links between the protests — which overnight brought a crackdown from police — and China’s military planning. But at the very least, the uprising represents a complication for Xi as he attempts to exert authority over other unwilling subjects in the region, including in Taiwan, where U.S. officials remain doubtful he can achieve his goal of uncontested dominance.

Many have pointed to 2027 — the 100-year anniversary of China’s People’s Liberation Army and a target date Xi has set for modernizing its military capabilities — as the point when Taiwan needs to worry about being attacked. That date, however, “is not a timeline for action,” said a senior U.S. defense official, who described the benchmarks China had set for itself to achieve by then as “ambitious.”

“We know what they want to accomplish, which is really to have more credible military capabilities for a Taiwan scenario,” this official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the new report before its release. “In terms of what they’ll actually be able to accomplish by 2027, I think that remains to be seen.”

Instead, the Pentagon believes that China has been trying to establish a “new normal” when it comes to Taiwan, with more missile launches, more naval activity, and more “centerline crossings” over the Taiwan Strait by Chinese military aircraft. Those activities intensified dramatically after of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit to Taiwan earlier this year and have “not gone down to the level that we were accustomed to,” the official said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said he is committed to maintaining the “status quo” surrounding Taiwan’s status, warning his Chinese counterpart last week against taking “destabilizing” actions. The United States has taken umbrage at China’s pattern of menacing U.S. vessels and those of U.S. allies navigating the South China Sea, calling the close encounters “unsafe and unprofessional,” and warning they could lead to catastrophic accidents. Austin and others have told their Chinese counterparts that if the measures are designed to prevent Western powers from exercising their rights to freedom of navigation, they won’t work.

An executive summary of the Pentagon’s report, shared with reporters ahead of the full document’s release, emphasizes Washington’s alarm over Beijing’s missile tests and the geopolitical implications of its nuclear ambitions. China has more than 400 nuclear weapons, it notes, and the 135 ballistic missile tests it conducted in 2021 “was more than the rest of the world combined.” Those numbers sharpen what’s known publicly about its nuclear development program, long a subject of close scrutiny as other research has detailed the country’s construction of missile silos and other infrastructure to support its expansion.

China’s nuclear arsenal is still far smaller than that of the United States, which has about 5,500 warheads, or Russia, which has almost 6,000, according to the Federation of American Scientists. But China’s advancements — and its plans to increase production — puts the communist regime on a footing where the Pentagon believes its leaders need to come to the arms-control negotiating table. Its reluctance to do so, the report states, is “negatively impacting global strategic stability — an area of increasing global concern.”

“I don’t see any clear indication that they’re looking for a first strike kind of capability here, but certainly they’re developing a set of capabilities that would give them a range of options for sort of deterrence signaling,” the senior defense official said. That capability, the official added, “does raise some questions about what their intent will be in the longer term.”

Further threatening the global balance, the Pentagon says, are the relationships China is pursuing outside its direct geographic sphere of influence to expand a more conventional military footprint. The report notes how China and Russia, for example, continue to hold joint exercises. Such cooperation — even if China has not given Russia military supplies for its Ukraine war effort — demonstrates that Beijing “still seems to see a lot of value in their partnership,” according to the defense official.

The report provides a list of countries in which the Pentagon believes China has “likely considered” establishing military logistics facilities “to support naval, air and ground forces projection,” in a style similar to the Chinese military’s support base in Djibouti, which sits just a few miles away from a U.S. base, Camp Lemonnier.

Those countries include: Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Seychelles, Tanzania, Angola, and Tajikistan, the report says. But the senior defense official cautioned that the list should be read as an indication of the areas in which China was “trying to make progress,” and not a warning that a second base like the one in Djibouti was imminent.

The Washington Post · by Karoun Demirjian · November 29, 2022

13. What the Ukraine War Teaches About Modern Ground Wars

Excerpts:

Ukraine War: A Return to World War I?

Altogether, the war thus far shows that we still follow the fundamentals of war established in World War I. Technologies from ballistic to electronic have yet to undo the infantry-armor-artillery triad, though they might shift the balance in one direction or another. There is no question that the armies fighting today in Ukraine are more technologically advanced than the armies that fought on the Western Front in 1917.

At the same time, there is little that an infantry or artillery captain from 1917 would find unintelligible about the fighting in the Donbas.

What the Ukraine War Teaches About Modern Ground Wars

19fortyfive.com · by Robert Farley · November 30, 2022

It is difficult to learn the right lessons from the wars of the past. It is harder still to operationalize those takeaways in any kind of useful way. It is certainly risky, then, to look for lessons about war from a conflict that is still ongoing, but we are going to try.

In this three-part series, we will endeavor to distill some lessons from the conduct of the Russia-Ukraine War to this point.

In this first part of a three-part series, we will discuss the ground war in Ukraine.

Ukraine: Offensive Maneuver Hasn’t Gone Away

The war began with a spectacular Russian maneuver designed to seize Kyiv and force the Ukrainian government to capitulate. That maneuver, which also included an airborne assault, failed dramatically and led to a disordered retreat in the ensuing weeks. Over the course of that retreat, Ukrainian infantry, artillery, and aircraft picked off Russian armored vehicles seemingly at will. The advent of “Saint Javelin” opened up questions about whether the time-honored infantry-armor team could survive in a context defined by longer-ranged, more lethal infantry weapons. This evolved into discussions about whether the main battle tank, the venerable armor leader on the battlefield, has finally become obsolete.

The Ukrainian offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv, along with incessant requests from Ukraine for more and more modern tanks, should put these arguments to rest. While Ukrainian success has hinged on factors idiosyncratic to each front, both of its major advances made use of the traditional armor-infantry-artillery triad. It remains possible for a carefully structured offensive to seize territory, at least when all of the pieces work together as they should.

Artillery Is Still God

The fast-paced military campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s seemed to devalue the contribution of artillery. Although mobile artillery systems complemented maneuver-centric operations, airpower and standoff munitions seemed to replace what came to be regarded as the slow, plodding artillery arm.

Masses of enemy troops need not be destroyed when they can be paralyzed or encircled. Airpower, it was thought, could do the job that was once left to clumsy artillery tubes.

No more. Ukrainian and Russian artillery tubes have had a devastating effect on exposed enemy forces, and artillery has re-established its primacy of place. Grinding barrages have had an attritional impact on infantry in fortified positions, with battles in the Donbas often devolving into artillery duels. Miserable, dug-in infantry are suffering levels of devastation that would have been well understood in 1916. Mass, it seems, still has a quality all its own.

Logistics and Supply

As Lawrence Freedman has pointed out, nearly every long war begins with ambitions to wage a short war. The failure of Russia’s initial offensive to seize Kyiv meant that a war nearly everyone expected to be short now has no clear endpoint. This has meant delving into stockpiles of equipment and munitions that neither side expected to use. Both Ukraine and Russia have, at times, used ammunition at an unsustainable rate.

The pace of combat has forced Russia to seek supply from Belarus, North Korea, and Iran. For its part, Ukraine has been forced to beg for equipment and ammunition from the West, much of which has already been so heavily used that it is breaking down from wear and tear rather than from direct enemy action.

Unfortunately, NATO militaries have discovered their stockpiles short on the ammunition needed to fight a high-intensity war, and they are now struggling to keep up with Ukraine’s needs.

Long story short, every country needs to prepare for the fact that its pleasantly short war might run long.

Communications

One of the most important contrasts between the conduct of today’s war and the conduct of past wars involves the extensive and overlapping networks of information management on both sides. Elon Musk’s network of Starlink satellites has helped keep the Ukrainian military connected and aware of its surroundings, making it possible not only to build intricate, self-supporting defenses, but also to conduct mobile offensive operations.

For their part, the Russians suffered bitterly in the early days of the war from an incomplete communications network, with various legacy systems unable to communicate with one another, and with use of commercial technology (cellphones) often enabling successful Ukrainian artillery strikes.

Technology, of course, is not determinative. The information economy of Russian forces is much different than that of the Ukrainians. On the Russian side, the availability of drones and real-time communications has resulted in an even more hierarchical system of command and control. Remote commanders are relying on video to monitor the compliance of their own troops with orders, changing the nature of the longstanding principal-agent problem.

On the Ukrainian side, the availability of information has made possible a diffuse system of command and control that has played well against Russian weaknesses.

Ukraine War: A Return to World War I?

Altogether, the war thus far shows that we still follow the fundamentals of war established in World War I. Technologies from ballistic to electronic have yet to undo the infantry-armor-artillery triad, though they might shift the balance in one direction or another. There is no question that the armies fighting today in Ukraine are more technologically advanced than the armies that fought on the Western Front in 1917.

At the same time, there is little that an infantry or artillery captain from 1917 would find unintelligible about the fighting in the Donbas.

US Military M777 Artillery. Ukraine Now Has a Similar System.

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.

19fortyfive.com · by Robert Farley · November 30, 2022

14. 'America First' is the default US strategy, rather than a mere Trump-era slogan

But doesn't every country put its interests first? I actually think the US might be an anomaly in that it works hard to defend the rules based international order, something beyond America first. I think the US takes global responsibility more seriously than other potential superpowers.

'America First' is the default US strategy, rather than a mere Trump-era slogan

Le Monde

A few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron used a metaphor to describe the strategic confrontation between China and the United States: "We are in a jungle with two big elephants that are getting more and more nervous. If they [...] go to war with each other, it will be a big problem for the rest of the jungle." He went on to call for "the cooperation of other animals: tigers, monkeys..."

The "problem" is already here: The American pachyderm is now advancing without many precautions with regard to the European monkey or the Korean or Japanese tigers. The Inflation Reduction Act unveiled by President Joe Biden's administration over the summer poses a serious threat to the economies of America's key allies. Once again, the European Union (EU) may have no choice other than to quietly accept being stomped on, or protest with little chance of being heard.

The gigantic $369-billion plan (€356 billion) is very good news for the fight against climate change but very bad news for European industry. Two-thirds of it is a huge package of subsidies and tax credits to attract investment in wind turbines, electric batteries, green hydrogen and solar energy.

Marginalization of European industry

It is commendable that the second largest emitter of CO2 is finally committing the money needed to fight climate change, but the particulars of the plan are not so praiseworthy. The US government will allocate these public subsidies on the basis of locally manufactured goods, while the European market remains wide open to American exports.

In the fierce competition to attract the investments required for decarbonization, the EU could become the butt of the joke. Added to this are a competitive energy gap and high interest rates driving up the dollar and attracting capital from around the world. The marginalization of European industry is underway.

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Such discriminatory public assistance mechanisms are prohibited by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The US is knowingly dealing a new blow to the multilateralism promoted by an already weakened institution. With the Inflation Reduction Act, the Europeans have received confirmation that "America First" was not just a Trump-era slogan but a default strategy regardless of the administration in power. When it comes to free trade, Mr. Biden is like Mr. Trump minus the insults.

But Europe can hardly muster a response. Firstly, it is difficult to criticize the US when it is finally giving itself the means to achieve its climate objectives. Second, the war in Ukraine has only underlined our military and energy dependence on Washington. To paraphrase French director Michel Audiard, when a country with a GDP of $23,000 billion says certain things, those 10 times less wealthy listen, especially when they are in a position of dependency.

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Le Monde

15. Who said it, when, and why? Part II (of II)

More brilliant quotes with illuminating background and context for each from Matt Armstrong.

Who said it, when, and why? Part II (of II)

mountainrunner.substack.com · by Matt Armstrong

Happy Monday. I hope you enjoyed last week’s quiz. More important, however, is that you learned something from the answers provided in the post on Friday, “Who said it, when, and why? Part I.” The time spent sharing these quotes, and their context, seems justified when I receive feedback on the posts. One from a retired Foreign Service Officer included this observation: “Every organizational, conceptual, and doctrinal U.S. deficit in the information space was anticipated in the first postwar decade, it seems, and every time the insights were ignored.” Today is not like yesterday in many respects, but the most important difference is not the technology, despite the conventional wisdom, but the breadth and depth of discussions around the issues. The lack of commitment, leadership, depth of analysis, and consistency shown by both the legislative and executive branches is stunning compared to the depth, frequency, attention, and profile of the executive discussions, planning, and legislative actions in 1945-1952, for example.

Moving on, first here’s a picture from my trail run yesterday with my dog (8.6 miles with about 1100’ of ascent) on a false flat section. It was a beautiful day, naturally. Ok, now let’s get into the answers and context for questions 7-10.

Q7:

The United States Information Service is truly the voice of America and the means of clarifying the opinion of the world concerning us. Its objective is fivefold. To be effective it must (1) explain United States motives; (2) bolster morale and extend hope; (3) give a true picture of American life, methods, and ideals; (4) combat misrepresentation and distortion, and (5) be a ready instrument of psychological warfare when required.

When: 1947, selected by 42% of the respondents (1953 selected by 17%, 1959 enjoyed 42%).

Source: “Preliminary Staff Report of the Smith-Mundt Congressional Committees During September and October 1947 of Conditions in Europe, with Particular Emphasis on the United States Information Service,” November 1947.

This report opened with the lines, “Europe today has again become a vast battlefield of ideologies in which words have replaced armaments as the active elements of attack and defense... The lines in this conflict are becoming so clearly drawn that positive American leadership must be promptly exerted to combat the encroachments of totalitarian power politics and to counteract the insidious undermining of free forces resisting communism.” A joint Senate and House committee, under the co-chairmanship of Senator H. Alexander Smith (R-NJ) and Representative Karl E. Mundt (R-SD), visited 22 European countries in September and October of 1947. Their purpose was “to study the political and economic conditions in each [country], as well as our present informational and cultural services” to make the programs more effective to “fully implement United States foreign policy.”

The quote above is important for point 5: to be a ready instrument of psychological warfare when required. In the final version of the report, released by the Senate and the House in January 1948, a week after the Smith-Mundt Act was signed into law by Truman, had six points. A new point was inserted at the front, to “tell the truth”, while the “ready instrument” was reworded to “aggressively interpret and support our foreign policy.” The latter is an understandable change considering the State Department’s then (and continuing) aversion to the words “psychological” and “warfare.”

The conclusion of the 19-page preliminary analysis, which covered political and economic conditions, budget issues, and organizational and leadership issues, includes this line: “We should stand on our own feet and stop thinking that a piccolo can drown out a Soviet brass band.” I have a political cartoon somewhere that reflects this, perhaps it is this, but I thought I had one that referred to a piccolo:

This preliminary report, though not released to the public, was the basis of an article published in the New York Times Magazine attributed to Karl Mundt entitled, “We are Losing the War of Words in Europe.” (Nerd alert: Do you know you can buy reprints of NYT articles? Well, I bought this one and it’s framed and on my wall.) The article's purpose wasn’t to build public support but to get the Senate to move as they were effectively debating the perfect, an admission made by Sen Smith and others in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee executive session a few weeks later. The nudge worked, and they passed the bill, which previously passed the House in June, 292-97 (most of the nays came from the “geography of the hard core of isolationism” of both parties). Not coincidentally, Mundt’s article followed one by the head of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Program on the need to meet worldwide food shortages, particularly in Europe, devastated by drought, a severe winter, and war. Besides the humanitarian aspect, the potential repercussions were clear: “Widespread and continuing hunger, with the resulting social and political unrest, will undermine the foundation of governments.” Mundt echoed this point in his article with this paragraph, one of my favorites about aid:

Up to now, we Americans have largely contented ourselves with efforts toward feeding the stomachs of Europe while the Russians have concentrated on feeding its minds. If this formula is continued, it is easy to envisage the result at the end of the trail. We may help avert starvation in Europe and aid in producing a generation of healthy, physically fit individuals whose bodies, are strong but whose minds are poisoned against America and whose loyalties are attached to the red star of Russia. If we permit this to eventuate it will be clear that the generosity of America is excelled only by our own stupidity.⁠

It’s important to recall that the Marshall Plan was announced a few months earlier in a speech that included this statement:

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

By the way, the special joint Smith-Mundt committee provided ten suggested areas of inquiry to the Members who participated on the trip. One of ten these seems relevant today:

What and how much propaganda is Russia carrying on? What is the number of persons doing this work? What kind of activity is being carried on, and what is its estimated cost? Is this directed against the United States in the countries you visit? Do the people listen to Russian broadcasts? What are the local information facilities of the Communist party newspapers, radio stations, libraries, etc.? Are they subjected to a large amount of Russian material in the press, movies, libraries, schools, etc.? How large is the Russian program for exchange of students and specialists in their area, and is the Russian propaganda effective?

The other nine are generally much shorter, though they are not softballs. Area of inquiry number six included exploring whether the “present personnel [are] competent?”

Q7:

I am convinced an information program can contribute to our security just as can an army, a navy, and an air force; and that it can make its contribution in a manner that is vastly preferable to the threat or the use of force, and at infinitely less expense.

When: 1946, selected by 47% of the respondents (1941 selected by 9%, 1953 enjoyed 64%).

Source: Testimony of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes before the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, April 1946.

Byrnes was requesting Congress support the International Information Programs then operating without explicit legislative authority pending the passage of the then-named Bloom bill, originally introduced by Mundt in January 1945 (see The Incompleteness of the Fulbright Paradox). Preceding his comment above, Byrnes said, “There never was a time, even in the midst of war, when it was so necessary to replace prejudice with truth, distortion with balance, and suspicion with understanding.”

In his November 1947 article mentioned above, Mundt used a common comparison at the time: the price of a battleship. He asked for spending of “just about one-third the cost of constructing a modern battleship under prevailing building rates.” He continued that spending an amount of “just two battleships spread across the next half-dozen years in Europe…[is] an insurance to make our economic aid [the Marshall Plan] program an effective instrument for peace.” In other words, an information program was needed to support our policies.

These programs are inexpensive relative to the deployment and use of destructive force. This statement by Byrnes was echoed repeatedly over the years. The same sentiment is seen in George Gallup’s statement following the demise of the Freedom Academy proposal that I’ve written about (and here) and which

Asha Rangappa

uses to frame The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa writing: “If a country is lost to communism through propaganda and subversion it is lost to our side as irretrievably as if we had lost it in actual warfare.”

Q8:

I am sure if you get away from telling the truth, then there is no place where you stop.

When: 1947, selected by none of the respondents (1917 chosen by 50%, 1960 also got 50% of the vote).

Source: Testimony of Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, May 1947.

Acheson was testifying in support of the pending Smith-Mundt bill, commonly referred to then as the Mundt bill. This statement spoke to the reality of the information program, and one that law review articles and academic writings on the Smith-Mundt Act ignore, something I wrote about here in the first of two “unintended and unintentionally long rebuke of two law review articles on Smith-Mundt.” This was followed up by eloquently named: “Follow up to ‘You’ve told us why the Voice, but you haven’t told us what it is.’”

Dean Acheson believed in the information program, a comprehensive program that was far more than the radio operation that gained all of the attention.

So long as we remain amateurs in the critical field of political warfare, the billions of dollars we annually spend on defense and foreign aid will provide us with a diminishing measure of protection.

When: 1961, selected by 45% of the survey respondents (1953 chosen by 9%, 1972 got 45% of the vote).

Source: Senator Thomas J. Dodd, speaking in support of the Freedom Academy bill in February 1961.

The whole statement is:

We have lost and lost and lost in the cold war for one primary reason: we have been amateurs fighting against professionals. So long as we remain amateurs in the critical field of political warfare, the billions of dollars we annually spend on defense and foreign aid will provide us with a diminishing measure of protection.

Keep in mind, as I wrote elsewhere (and in greater detail in the book chapter, The Politics of Information Warfare in the US” in Hybrid Conflicts and Information Warfare: New Labels, Old Politics… let me know if you want a PDF of my chapter), the US Information Agency wasn’t even a part of these discussions as it was not charged with or funded to fulfil what the Freedom Academy proposed. It should be noted that at this time, and after, a new report on the deficiency of USIA came out almost annually (this situation was one of the reasons the term “public diplomacy” was adopted in a public relations campaign to defend USIA’s independence, see my Operationalizing Public Diplomacy chapter). One of the three reports completed in 1961 on fixing USIA and its relationship with foreign policy, including its roles and responsibilities and integration with policymaking, was led by the number two at USIA, who urged the agency to “undertake to persuade, not just to inform.” Put another way, the FA proposal would have helped train USIA personnel.

Mundt, now a Senator, was a major proponent of the Freedom Academy. The below statement is part of a long argument on November 8, 1963, in support of the Freedom Academy bill, then a confirmed death at the hands of Senator Fulbright who used parliamentary tactics to pull the bill into his committee and suffocate it. The “they” Mundt refers to below are the many Senators who supported the bill.

But they agree on one thing, namely, that we cannot win a war against professionals if we are relying on amateurs. This does not mean that the amateurs are evil. This does not mean that the amateurs are bad. It merely means that golf tournaments are not won, either, when amateurs are playing against pro- fessionals. It means that football games are not won when amateurs are playing again.st professionals. It means that baseball world champion.ships are ,not won by amateurs playing against professionals. And wars are not won that way. They are not won by arraying amateurs against professionals when the wars are hot. They are not won that way either when the wars are cold. …

The world and the American taxpayer both deserve a program which is effective, which is implemented by personnel who are trained and competent. They need a program which planned and implemented by professionals, and not merely proposed and promoted by enthusiastic, well-intentioned but inadequately trained amateurs.

Q10:

The truth is that a fact — an incontrovertible fact — is often the most powerful propaganda⁠

When: 1946, selected by 8% of the survey respondents (1953 chosen by 67%, 1961 got 25% of the vote).

Source: Elmer Davis, formerly the Office of War Information chief, speaking to the Chicago Rotary Club in February 1946.

I’ll admit that I put in 1953 in the hopes of tricking people into thinking this statement related to the establishment of USIA. I also selected 1961 for a similar reason: thinking some might think Edward R. Murrow said it. Murrow did say something similar, but I think Davis’s comment has more impact, considering the date.

Davis was responding to the aggressive stance by the Associated Press, supported by the United Press (the Hearst news service, International News Services, would not merge with UP to make UPI for some years; and INS did not go along with the AP here), in arguing against a government information program. That broad statement is how you’ll read about the AP’s arguments in academic and law review literature, but the AP was focused on the radio operation and not on the more extensive non-radio information programs to be authorized by the pending Bloom bill, formerly the Mundt bill as mentioned earlier. The radio program provided “spot news” (think today’s headline news), which competed with the AP, in addition to unfiltered and unedited US government speeches and statements. Davis was referring to the plain facts that were and were to be sent, in contrast to the characterization by the AP, namely by its executive director, Kent Cooper.

Anyway, that story gets quite long, including a long effort to remove the radio operation from the State Department and to put it into a non-profit managed by and funded by the government (with a board of bipartisan trustees appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, plus a full-time CEO running day to day operations). I delve into the details of this in my (pending) book. So that is it for now.

Thanks for reading.

mountainrunner.substack.com · by Matt Armstrong

16. Xi Jinping in His Own Words

Conclusion:

The contest between democracies and China will increasingly turn on the balance of dependence; whichever side depends least on the other will have the advantage. Reducing Washington’s dependence, and increasing Beijing’s, can help constrain Xi’s appetite for risk. When coupled with U.S. cooperation with Australia, Japan, and Taiwan to field an unmistakably superior and well-coordinated military presence in the western Pacific, constrainment offers the best way to prevent the “stormy seas of a major test” that Xi seems tempted to undertake as he begins his second decade as China’s dictator.

Xi Jinping in His Own Words

What China’s Leader Wants—and How to Stop Him From Getting It

By Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith

November 30, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith · November 30, 2022

In October, at 20th National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), General Secretary Xi Jinping set himself up for another decade as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, replaced his most economically literate Politburo colleagues with a phalanx of loyalists, and enshrined the Stalinist-Maoist concept of “struggle” as a guiding principle in the Party Charter. The effect was to turn the page on “reform and opening,” the term the CCP uses to describe the economic liberalization that began in the late 1970s and led to the explosive growth of the Chinese economy in the past four decades.

At the party congress, Xi was granted a third term as the CCP’s top leader—an unprecedented development in the contemporary era and a crucial step in his effort to centralize authority. But perhaps even more significant was the way the congress served to codify a worldview that Xi has been developing over the past decade in carefully crafted official party communications: Chinese-language speeches, documentaries, and textbooks, many of which Beijing deliberately mistranslates for foreign audiences, when it translates them at all. These texts dispel much of the ambiguity that camouflages the regime’s aims and methods and offer a window into Xi’s ideology and motivations: a deep fear of subversion, hostility toward the United States, sympathy with Russia, a desire to unify mainland China and Taiwan, and, above all, confidence in the ultimate victory of communism over the capitalist West. The end state he is pursuing requires the remaking of global governance. His explicit objective is to replace the modern nation-state system with a new order featuring Beijing at its pinnacle.

Granted, Beijing’s aspirations, like Moscow’s, may be greater than what it can realistically accomplish. But Xi, like the man he has described as his “best, most intimate friend,” Russian President Vladimir Putin, does not seem to believe that his reach exceeds his grasp. Policymakers around the world should take note.

It would be better to constrain and temper Xi’s aspirations now—through coordinated military deterrence and through strict limits on China’s access to technology, capital, and data controlled by the United States and its allies—rather than wait until he has taken fateful and irrevocable steps, such as attacking Taiwan, that would lead to a superpower conflict. The war in Ukraine offers constant reminders that deterrence is far preferable to “rollback.”

The Biden administration’s recent steps to constrain Xi’s quest to make China the world’s dominant semiconductor manufacturer—a status that Beijing has already achieved in telecommunications equipment, solar panels, advanced batteries, and other key sectors—mark an important evolution in U.S. strategy. If Congress, the White House, and U.S. allies move quickly to enact similar measures that sustain Chinese dependence on the rest of the industrialized world, it could blunt Xi’s growing appetite for risk.

There is a moral imperative for concerted action, too, highlighted by the street protests that have erupted in several Chinese cities in recent days as people have grown exasperated with draconian anti-COVID measures bearing Xi’s signature. If the demonstrations gain momentum, Xi’s response could be severe, judging from some of his more ominous statements. In any case, democracies should do more to side with the Chinese people by facilitating safer means for them to communicate with one another both inside and outside China.

MOUTHFULS OF SAWDUST

Reading CCP documents can be a brutal exercise. The late Simon Leys, one of the most insightful China watchers in the West, compared it to “swallowing sawdust by the bucketful.” Wading through the texts of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” as the leader’s ideology is officially known, is no exception. Much of Beijing’s rhetoric, particularly when it is directed at foreign audiences, is confusing and ambiguous. But Xi’s most revealing statements are not the ones he makes at Davos or while standing next to the U.S. president in the Rose Garden. Rather, he is at his most trenchant when delivering speeches to top CCP leaders. Such speeches, which serve as guidance to the party faithful, are sometimes kept secret for months or years before appearing in Chinese-language publications. But as Leys understood, they contain slivers of insight if one is patient and diligent enough to search for them.

Xi’s texts reflect his inheritance, as the latest in a long line of communist theorists and leaders steeped in similar doctrines, traditions, and desired end states. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao can all be seen in Xi Jinping Thought, in letter and in spirit. And Xi does not represent as radical a departure from his more immediate predecessors as some analysts believe; his ambitions and those of the party that elevated him are broadly in sync.

None of this is to say, however, that CCP bosses are interchangeable. Leadership matters in Leninist systems as much as in any other system. And Xi’s personal imprint is all over Beijing’s current approach, even if his desired end states are consistent with those of his predecessors. Chinese critics mock him as “The Great Accelerator,” alleging that he is speeding the eventual demise of the party’s monopoly on power. His champions would probably agree that he is an accelerator—but in their eyes, he is speeding up the process of achieving the party’s long-standing goals. Either way, there is no denying that Xi is the most important person to watch and read if one is to understand where China is headed and why.

Xi does not seem to believe that his reach exceeds his grasp.

One key to understanding Xi is to look at his interpretations of history. It is well known that Putin once declared the Soviet Union’s collapse to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Less well understood is the extent to which the Soviet collapse also haunts Xi and how it functions as a fundamental guide to the Chinese leader’s actions.

In December 2012, just after becoming general secretary, Xi gave a closed-door speech to cadres in Guangdong Province, excerpts of which were leaked and published by a Chinese journalist in early 2013. Xi’s speech, framed as a cautionary tale, provided an early window into his worldview:

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken. . . . It’s a profound lesson for us! To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organizations on all levels.

Xi’s mention of “historic nihilism” may have been an implicit criticism of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had faulted the record of his predecessors. But the explicit villain in Xi’s speech was Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (opening) reforms set the stage for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “A few people tried to save the Soviet Union,” Xi said. “They seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again, because they didn’t have the tools of dictatorship. Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” The phrase “the tools of dictatorship”—the idea that it is essential for the party and especially its top leader to control the military, the security apparatus, propaganda, government data, ideology, and the economy—would recur again and again in Xi’s speeches and official guidance over the next decade.

A door with a poster about the 20th National Congress in Beijing, October 2022

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

A month later, in January 2013, Xi gave another speech, effectively an inaugural address, to new members and alternate members of the CCP’s Central Committee, which is composed of China’s top few hundred highest-ranking officials. This speech, kept secret for six years, shows Xi directing the party-state in terms borrowed right from the Cold War:

Some people think that communism can be aspired to but never reached, or even think that it cannot be hoped for, cannot be envisioned, and is a complete illusion. . . . Facts have repeatedly told us that Marx and Engels’s analysis of the basic contradiction of capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph outdated. This is the irreversible overall trend of social and historical development, but the road is winding. The ultimate demise of capitalism, and ultimate triumph of socialism, will inevitably be a long historical process.

Three months after that, in April 2013, the Central Committee issued Document No. 9, an internal directive to party cadres that has proved to be a foundational text of the Xi era—systematic and strategic in its vision, hugely influential on the course of Chinese governance, and deeply hostile toward the West and Western ideas. Kept secret until it was leaked to overseas Chinese-language media in the summer of 2013, Document No. 9 was formally titled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere.” It told an unambiguous story: Western countries conspire to infiltrate, subvert, and overthrow the CCP, so the party must stamp out Western “false ideological trends” including constitutional democracy, the notion that Western values are universal, the concept of civil society, economic neoliberalism, journalistic independence, challenges to the party’s version of history, and competing interpretations of the party’s “reform and opening” agenda. “In the face of these threats,” exhorted Document No. 9, “we must not let down our guard or decrease our vigilance.”

The Soviet collapse haunts Xi and functions as a fundamental guide to his actions.

Document No. 9 also warned of “color revolution.” This term originated in the first decade of this century, when a series of antiauthoritarian popular uprisings in former Soviet states became known by colorful names, including Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004), and Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution (2005). Beijing began using the phrase to evoke the ever-present specter of Western-instigated subversion. As Document No. 9 put it, “Western anti-China forces” will always “point the spearhead of Westernization, division, and ‘color revolution’ at our country.”

In late 2013, Xi required party leaders at all levels to watch a six-part documentary titled “A 20-Year Memorial for the Soviet Loss of Party and Country.” This “internal educational reference film” attributed the Soviet collapse to deep problems within the Soviet Communist Party, including its inability to manage political and economic infiltration and corruption that it blamed on the United States. The film was jointly produced by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s internal loyalty enforcer.

The same year, Beijing’s National Defense University produced a separate documentary, Silent Contest, that was distributed by several party and state organs. The film similarly used the Soviet collapse to rail against the “world strategy” of the United States. This was the opening line of Silent Contest: “The process of China’s realization of the great undertaking of national rejuvenation must ultimately follow from testing and struggle against the system of American hegemony.” Later, the film shows a clip of Putin delivering his now famous remark that the Soviet collapse was a geopolitical catastrophe.

WHEN WATER BECOMES ICE

Xi’s decision-making can be understood only with reference to Marxist-Leninist theory. In Marxist dialectics, history moves inexorably toward its utopian destination “step by step,” accumulating “quantitative increases that culminate in a qualitative leap,” as Xi explained, paraphrasing Mao, in a speech delivered to high-ranking cadres in January 2021 and published in April 2021.

Mao, in turn, was paraphrasing Joseph Stalin’s rendering of Friedrich Engels’s theories about the application of the laws of physics to the processes of societal development. According to Engels, as quoted in Stalin’s 1938 Short Course on the History of the Bolsheviks, this process of change is akin to water heating or freezing:

The temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state; but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, a moment arrives when this state of cohesion changes and the water is converted in one case into steam and in the other into ice.

In the Short Course—the most widely published book in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule and, as the China expert John Garnaut has pointed out, the closest thing to a religious text in 1950s China—Stalin and his co-authors explain that this “science of history” helps the enlightened to see patterns and great trends where others might see only “a jumble of accidents and . . . absurd mistakes.”

Xi believes that we are today witnessing a “qualitative leap” in world affairs, where China has moved to center stage and the U.S.-anchored Western order is breaking down. As Xi said in his speech published in April 2021:

The world today is undergoing a great change in situation unseen in a century. Since the most recent period, the most important characteristic of the world is, in a word, “chaos,” and this trend appears likely to continue.

New Politburo Standing Committee members Xi Jinping, Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, and Li Xi in Beijing, October 2022

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

Xi depicts the current historical period as one of great risk and opportunity. It is his “historical mission” to exploit the inflection point and push history along its inexorable course through a process of “struggle,” which includes identifying internal and external enemies, isolating them, and mobilizing the party and its acolytes against them.

Xi expanded on these ideas in an impassioned address to the Sixth Plenum meeting of Communist Party leaders in November 2021, lauding Mao’s 1950 decision to send “volunteers” across the Yalu River into Korea to fight the U.S. and UN forces commanded by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur.

Comrade Mao Zedong, with the . . . strategic foresight of “by starting with one punch, one hundred punches will be avoided,” and the determination and bravery of “do not hesitate to ruin the country internally in order to build it anew,” made the historical policy decision to resist America and aid Korea and protect the nation, avoid the dangerous situation of invaders camping at the gates, and defend the security of New China.

Xi’s speech made an equally strong endorsement of the CCP’s “decisive measures” to crush the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and withstand “the pressure of Western countries’ so-called sanctions” that followed. This saved the party, in Xi’s telling, and today “the CCP, the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese nation have the most reason to be self-confident” of any “political party, country, or nation” in the world. The statements leave little doubt that Xi would be willing to adopt “decisive measures” again today if less violent means to disperse demonstrations failed.

Like many of Xi’s most aggressive and important statements, his Sixth Plenum speech was initially kept secret. It was delivered behind closed doors and published in Qiushi magazine nearly two months later. The CCP does not appear to have published an official English translation of it, and the speech was all but ignored by Western news outlets.

But just over a year later, its implications have become clear: regardless of near-term economic considerations for China, Xi is being guided by ideology and his firmly held diagnosis that the West is declining and that Beijing, led forcefully by Xi himself, must take risks and act decisively to assert new spheres of influence and build a world conducive to Marxist autocracy.

MARXIST MEANS AND ENDS

Xi Jinping Thought makes clear that Marxism is not just the means to achieving global supremacy but also the goal of that supremacy. “Karl Marx dedicated his entire life to overthrowing the old world and establishing a new world,” Xi said in 2018 while presiding over Marx’s 200th birthday celebration in Beijing—an event surrounded by weeks of propaganda and publications timed to establish Xi as the designated heir to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Xi called the German theorist “the greatest thinker in human history,” and decreed that “Marxism is not to be kept hidden in books. It was created in order to change the destiny of human history.”

This phrasing evoked a major foreign policy initiative that Xi has embraced called “A Community of Common Destiny for Mankind,” which aims to shape the global environment in ways favorable to Beijing’s authoritarian model. (The ominous-sounding term “common destiny” is often misleadingly translated by the CCP into the more anodyne English phrase “shared future.”) Xi’s 2018 speech made clear that the initiative and Marx’s vision of a stateless, collectivized world are linked.

“Just like Marx, we must struggle for communism our entire lives,” Xi said. “A collectivized world is just there, over [the horizon]. Whoever rejects that world will be rejected by the world.”

Ian Easton, an American researcher, discovered a recent set of People’s Liberation Army textbooks focused on Xi’s ideology that elaborate further on the link between Xi’s foreign policy and global communism. These books, edited by top educators and administrators at National Defense University and labeled as “internal teaching materials” for senior military officers, can be taken as authoritative. In China, the military is subordinate to the party, not to the state, and ideological training figures heavily in the education of officers. Xi has described the National Defense University as “an important base” for training China’s officer corps.

Xi called Karl Marx “the greatest thinker in human history.”

Passages from the textbooks, cited in Easton’s 2022 book, The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy, underscore the idea that overturning U.S. leadership around the globe is only one phase of Xi’s plan. Xi also seeks to upend the concept of equal and sovereign states that emerged from Europe four centuries ago and is the cornerstone of international relations, according to the texts. As one of them, Strategic Support for Achieving the Great Chinese Rejuvenation, explains:

The Westphalian System was founded on the notion of a balance of power. But it has proven unable to achieve a stable world order. All mankind needs a new order that surpasses and supplants the balance of power. Today, the age in which a few strong Western powers could work together to decide world affairs is already gone and will not come back. A new world order is now under construction that will surpass and supplant the Westphalian System.

This and the other textbooks leave no doubt that the system that replaces the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia must be the socialist model made in China. “As we push for the fusion of the world’s civilizations on the basis of developing our nation’s unique civilization, there are several things that must be done,” reads one passage. “[We] must insist on taking the road of development with Chinese cultural characteristics. . . . And we must insist on our principles and our bottom line as we actively engage with others.”

Another passage states: “The Community of Common Destiny for Mankind will mold the interests of the Chinese people and those of the world’s people together.” At another point, that same text makes clear who has decreed this approach: “Xi Jinping has emphasized that our state’s ideology and social system are fundamentally incompatible with the West. Xi has said ‘This determines that our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable, so it will inevitably be long, complicated, and sometimes even very sharp.’” The textbook’s authors evidently took the term “very sharp” to mean violent. As the book continues: “To use war to protect our national interests is not in contradiction with peaceful development. Actually, such is a manifestation of Marxist strategy.”

In the meantime, the book advocates weaponizing economic dependence and greed: “We must gain a grip on foreign government leaders and their business elites by encouraging our companies to invest in their local economies.”

STRUGGLE SESSION

Xi further codified this view of China’s mission at the party congress in October, as he adjusted official language to match his vision and made personnel changes to reflect his control of the CCP and the preeminence of his thinking. One way in which this was achieved was through an act of editing: Xi led the congress in unanimously voting to insert the word “struggle” into the Party Charter in several more places. These changes were missed by some foreign observers, perhaps because the CCP’s English-language propaganda selectively mistranslated the word “struggle,” using euphemisms such as “persistent hard work.” But the term now rivals references to “reform and opening” in the charter, signaling that Beijing’s focus will now be even more on confronting perceived enemies at home and abroad and less on growing the economy.

The personnel changes at the top of the party suggest much the same. In a difficult-to-parse sequence of events during the proceedings, Xi’s elderly predecessor Hu Jintao was removed, seemingly against his will, from his seat next to Xi on a dais in the Great Hall of the People. That might have been passed off as clumsy choreography or perhaps as a response to some medical issue. But soon afterward, Xi dumped all three of Hu’s allies from the Politburo, replaced them with personal loyalists, and elevated military industrialists and security-apparatus officials in place of officials with national-level economic experience. These changes made Hu’s removal appear more like a public humiliation.

Xi’s picks to lead the military—the two vice chairs of the Central Military Commission, of which Xi himself is chair—further signal his disruptive geopolitical ambitions. Xi reappointed Zhang Youxia as first vice chair, despite Zhang’s advanced age (72), which put him well past typical retirement age. (Zhang’s father fought side by side with Xi’s in China’s civil war.)

For the second vice-chair seat, Xi selected He Weidong, a 65-year-old with a focus on joint operations and experience on China’s contested frontiers. He commanded ground forces in China’s west during a period of high tension (and some bloodshed) with India, then led the Taiwan-focused eastern theater, where he oversaw a dress rehearsal for war following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in August. But to become vice chair, he required a double promotion.

In short, Xi’s new leadership team appears tailormade for “the spirit of struggle” and for the “high winds and waves” and “stormy seas of a major test” that he referred to in his work report to the Party Congress. One wonders whether he had Taiwan in mind when he chose those particular words.

WARMING UP TO “CONSTRAINMENT”

In May, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a major address laying out the Biden administration’s China policy. “We are not looking for conflict or a new cold war,” Blinken asserted in his speech. “To the contrary, we’re determined to avoid both.”

The Biden administration avoids using the Cold War term “containment” to describe its approach to China, and Blinken did not use that term in his speech. But what he described echoes the successful approach Washington adopted in its contest with the Soviet Union. As one senior American official explained in a briefing to preview Blinken’s speech, U.S. policy is focused on “constraining Beijing’s ability to engage in coercive practices.” Washington seeks to work with allies to “leverage our collective strength” and “close off vulnerabilities that China is able to exploit.” Blinken summed it up in these terms in his address: “We cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory. So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system.”

This is not quite containment, but it bears a family resemblance. “Constrainment” is the term that one of us (Pottinger) has used to describe it. A policy of constrainment, unlike containment, accounts for the current realities of economic interdependence and seeks to tilt them to Washington’s advantage. Constrainment should seek to puncture Beijing’s confidence that it can achieve its aims through war and sap Beijing’s optimism that it can decisively accumulate coercive economic leverage over the United States and other democracies.

The Biden administration avoids using the term “containment” to describe its approach to China.

Putin’s belief that western Europe had become too dependent on Russian energy to meaningfully oppose his armored assault on Kyiv appears to have been a significant factor in his decision to re-invade Ukraine. Xi is working to acquire similar coercive leverage—what he calls the “powerful countermeasure” of “international production chains’ dependence on China”—in semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech inputs to the global economy. An allied constrainment policy would avoid falling into this trap, as well as extricate the United States where it has already stumbled into one. Washington and its allies must adopt, in essence, the opposite of Germany’s corporatist, antistrategic foreign policy that tethered European prosperity to the whims of adversarial “Führer states,” to borrow Wolfgang Ischinger and Sebastian Turner’s apt phrase.

Rules regarding semiconductors that the Biden administration issued in October take an important step in the right direction. Beijing currently must import hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of chips annually—a dependence that Washington should work to sustain. The most important elements of the new rules are limits on the export of chip-making equipment and U.S. skilled labor to China. If enforced diligently, the rules will foil Xi’s ambition to make China the world’s largest chipmaker and erode its goal of commanding the high-tech supply chains of its trade partners.

That dynamic is the essence of constrainment, which should strive to maintain a favorable balance of dependence in a wide range of areas. A policy of constrainment should, for example, strengthen the dominance of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve and trading currency, extending Washington’s ability to monitor and punish money laundering, weapons proliferation, bribery, and other dangerous actions by Beijing. Constrainment should remind Beijing of its dependence on foreign sources of food and energy while reversing the United States’ growing reliance on Chinese batteries, solar panels, and other “green” technology.

TikTok represents a potentially powerful instrument for censorship and mass manipulation.

Constrainment would also rectify the lead Beijing has, incredibly, opened over the United States in global Internet governance and control of information and data flows. The fact that ByteDance, a Chinese company, controls TikTok—the fastest growing news and video content outlet in the United States—represents a potentially grave failure by Washington to protect democracy and free speech. TikTok’s algorithms, whose source code Beijing has restricted from being transferred out of China, could be modified to suppress or amplify content according to the CCP’s preferences, which would give China the ability to influence the views of tens of millions of Americans. Zhang Fuping, who serves as editor-in-chief of ByteDance, is also the secretary of the company’s Communist Party Committee, tasked with ensuring the company’s alignment with the CCP’s interests. According to a report in Sina Finance, at a meeting in 2018, Zhang declared that the company should “‘take the lead’ across ‘all product lines and business lines’ to ensure that the algorithm is informed by the ‘correct political direction’ and ‘values.’” And according to a report in Taiwan News, in 2019, ByteDance signed an agreement with the Ministry of Public Security’s Press and Publicity Bureau pledging to boost “network influence and online discourse power” and enhance “public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility.”

TikTok and other content apps based in China or owned by Chinese firms represent potentially powerful instruments for censorship and mass manipulation; Washington should ban their use, just as India’s government has wisely done. If the CCP wants to influence international audiences, it should have to depend on digital platforms domiciled in, regulated by, and accountable to democracies.

The contest between democracies and China will increasingly turn on the balance of dependence; whichever side depends least on the other will have the advantage. Reducing Washington’s dependence, and increasing Beijing’s, can help constrain Xi’s appetite for risk. When coupled with U.S. cooperation with Australia, Japan, and Taiwan to field an unmistakably superior and well-coordinated military presence in the western Pacific, constrainment offers the best way to prevent the “stormy seas of a major test” that Xi seems tempted to undertake as he begins his second decade as China’s dictator.

MATT POTTINGER is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021.
MATTHEW JOHNSON is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
DAVID FEITH is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. From 2017 to 2021, he served on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia.

Foreign Affairs · by Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith · November 30, 2022

17. Bipartisan consensus in US on foreign policy

Excerpt:

Is it too soon to declare the death of globalization or is the world already too fragmented and filled up with antagonism for us to continue pretending we are still in the 00s?

A high degree of globalization is here to stay. Technologies once developed will be rapidly spread internationally. Think, for example, of artificial intelligence devices for greater driver safety and technologies for electric vehicles, for which there is a global market and global industry. We will see fragmentation alongside globalization.

Bipartisan consensus in US on foreign policy | eKathimerini.com

Tufts Professor says the heroic defense efforts of Ukraine resonate in the United States

ekathimerini.com · by Pavlos Papadopoulos · November 29, 2022

While world affairs become more complicated by the day, leaving an impact that influences each and every country, pressing questions are popping up. One of the eminent academics in the field of strategic studies in the United States, Robert Pfaltzgraff, has taught at Tufts for 50 years and is the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies Emeritus. He was also made an honorary professor at Panteion University’s School of International Studies on November 3.

Today he talks to Kathimerini about the changing dynamics of the world that seems to be sinking deeper into crisis due to strategic conflicts while financial and economic problems accumulate.

In the US midterm elections, the so called “red wave” hasn’t materialized. But the country continues to be sharply divided while the economy stumbles. Can a superpower marred in internal conflict continue to guarantee the security of the Western Alliance or could the allies be forgiven for assuming that another Trump surprise victory that would create much uncertainty is around the corner again?

To be sure, the United States has deep domestic political divisions and a polarized electorate, as we saw in the midterm election results. Nevertheless, on key foreign policy issues there is bipartisan consensus, especially concerning support for Ukraine and Taiwan, but of course not all issues, such as Iran policy. But Democrats and Republicans agree that China and Russia, in that order, loom as 21st century security challenges and threats. Agreement across political party lines about foreign policy priorities is often obscured by the domestic conflicts of the day. There also is widespread bipartisan agreement that the United States should rely on allies to do more for their own and the common NATO defense. For this reason, the heroic defense efforts of Ukraine resonate in the United States. As for former president Trump, he is capable of surprises, as you suggest, but he reiterated a longstanding US concern about the need for greater defense burden sharing by allies. He also warned NATO members such as Germany that they should reduce their energy independence on Russia several years before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

‘We are in a high-tech race with China for artificial intelligence dominance, with both civilian and military applications in this and other technology sectors’

There’s little doubt that the war in Ukraine is in fact a proxy war between Russia and NATO led by the US. Do you share this conclusion? Is there a way out or is Russia a grave threat to Europe which should be defeated, as Poland and other former Eastern countries believe? Is there a compromise accepted by all sides or, as Russia probably cannot accept a total defeat in a land considered historically as vital for its security, is the possibility of a nuclear escalation increasing by the day?

The war in Ukraine has provided tragic evidence that Great Power conflict is still possible in Europe. However, Putin grossly miscalculated the determination of the Ukrainian people to resist Russian aggression as well as the will of NATO and the United States to support Ukraine after the collapse of US policy and the disorderly retreat from Afghanistan. Ukraine is a disaster for Putin. He has propelled Finland and Sweden into NATO and demonstrated Russia’s military weaknesses with repeated defeats in Ukraine. Russian regimes, including Tzarist Russia and the Soviet Union, collapsed in the face of international failures. It remains to be seen what will happen to Putin’s Russia of course. Putin’s ultimate instrument is nuclear weapons, but such escalation may yield greater risks and dangers for Russia faced with an unyielding Ukrainian resistance and a vast array of escalatory and retaliatory options available to NATO and the international community.

The consequences of war are being felt across the globe in terms of heightened inflation, the cost-of-living crisis, recession and projected unemployment increases as well as heightened financial instability in economies overburdened with debt (as the UK showed recently). Not to mention the rise of the far right across Europe and the US. Is there any hope of a better, more peaceful future when all the signs are pointing toward more disruption rather than less?

The war in Ukraine accelerated economic forces already at work around the world, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the United States, for example, Covid-19 had devastating effects on productivity, with much of the economy forced to shut down. This was accompanied by vast infusions of liquidity into the financial system, sparking growing inflation. The delayed effects of this injection of money will be felt for some time. Furthermore, the rise in energy prices is the result not only of supply restrictions from the Ukraine war, but also from conscious policy choices in the United States to restrict and discourage drilling and refinery construction and new pipelines. Petroleum products remain important in fertilizers for farming and fuel for supply chains, to mention only the most obvious examples of the inflationary effects of rising fossil fuel prices. The negative trends that you mention will recede, if and when the factors contributing to them subside.

For the past 30 years the West has outsourced labor-intensive production to China but it has ended up not only with increased social instability and squeezed low and lower middle classes – a phenomenon that helped produce the Trump movement – but also with an emboldened China all but ready to strengthen control of Hong King, challenge the US over Taiwan and even on the verge of outperforming the US in key technologies. Should we anticipate the re-industrialization of the West?

The bipartisan foreign policy consensus that I referred to above focuses heavily on China. There is widespread concern that China is on a path to surpass the United States both militarily and economically. You have described accurately the perceived costs incurred in outsourcing labor-intensive manufacturing to China and its political and social effects on the United States. The result of this backlash is growing impetus toward “reshoring” or bringing manufacturing back to the United States to reduce dependence on China across a spectrum of industries from pharmaceutical products to rare earth minerals used in high-tech. We are in a high-tech race with China for artificial intelligence dominance, with both civilian and military applications in this and other technology sectors. This points toward “deglobalization.”

Is it too soon to declare the death of globalization or is the world already too fragmented and filled up with antagonism for us to continue pretending we are still in the 00s?

A high degree of globalization is here to stay. Technologies once developed will be rapidly spread internationally. Think, for example, of artificial intelligence devices for greater driver safety and technologies for electric vehicles, for which there is a global market and global industry. We will see fragmentation alongside globalization.

US US Elections Ukraine War Russia

ekathimerini.com · by Pavlos Papadopoulos · November 29, 2022

18. 2022 Report on Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China

The 196 page report can be accessed here: https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF

2022 Report on Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China

defense.gov

Release

Immediate Release

Nov. 29, 2022 |×

Today the DOD released its annual report on "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China," commonly known as the China Military Power Report. This Congressionally mandated report serves as an authoritative assessment of the Department's pacing challenge and charts the current course of the PRC's military and security strategy. You can read the full report at Defense.gov/CMPR.

defense.gov

19. The Hard Truth About Long Wars

Excerpts:

Make no mistake, there is a strategic case for the Ukrainians to fight on and for the West to support them. Still, resistance to Russia—and rejection of the kinds of distasteful compromises that might bring the war to a swift end—should also be understood as evidence of the abiding power of ideals and principles in geopolitics.

Such values and ideas will continue to play a leading role in the wars waged by democracies in the future. The West has grown steadily more rights-based over time: it has become obligatory in many countries to abide by and defend certain liberal principles, whatever the consequences. The philosopher Michael Ignatieff calls this shift the Rights Revolution. These ideals should be celebrated, and Western governments should continue to try living up to them (even if they often fail). But if this tendency makes the West less inclined toward realpolitik—trading rights and principles for peace, or cutting deals with unpalatable autocrats—wars such as the one in Ukraine may become more frequent and more difficult to end.

The Hard Truth About Long Wars

Why the Conflict in Ukraine Won’t End Anytime Soon

By Christopher Blattman

November 29, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by @cblatts · November 29, 2022

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, few observers imagined that the war would still be raging today. Russian planners did not account for the stern resistance of Ukrainian forces, the enthusiastic support Ukraine would receive from Europe and North America, or the various shortcomings of their own military. Both sides are now dug in, and the fighting could carry on for months, if not years.

Why is this war dragging on? Most conflicts are brief. Over the last two centuries, the average war has lasted just three to four months. That brevity owes much to the fact that war is the worst way to settle political differences. As the costs of fighting become apparent, adversaries usually look for a settlement.

Many wars, of course, do last longer. Compromise fails to materialize for three main strategic reasons: when leaders think defeat threatens their very survival, when leaders do not have a clear sense of their strength and that of their enemy, and when leaders fear that their adversary will grow stronger in the future. In Ukraine, all of these dynamics keep the war raging.

But these three tell only part of the story. Fundamentally, this war is also rooted in ideology. Russian President Vladimir Putin denies the validity of Ukrainian identity and statehood. Insiders speak of a government warped by its own disinformation, fanatical in its commitment to seize territory. Ukraine, for its part, has held unflinchingly to its ideals. The country’s leaders and people have shown themselves unwilling to sacrifice liberty or sovereignty to Russian aggression, no matter the price. Those who sympathize with such fervent convictions describe them as steadfast values. Skeptics criticize them as intransigence or dogma. Whatever the term, the implication is often the same: each side rejects realpolitik and fights on principle.

Russia and Ukraine are not unique in this regard, for ideological belief explains many long wars. Americans in particular should recognize their own revolutionary past in the clash of convictions that perpetuates the war in Ukraine. More and more democracies also look like Ukraine—where popular ideals make certain compromises abhorrent—and this intransigence lies behind many of the West’s twenty-first-century wars, including the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is seldom acknowledged, but closely held principles and values often make peace elusive. The war in Ukraine is just the most recent example of a fight that grinds on not because of strategic dilemmas alone, but because both sides find the idea of settlement repugnant.

WHY SOME WARS DON’T END

Wars begin and persist when leaders think they can secure a better outcome by fighting rather than through normal politics. Countries fight long wars for at least three calculated reasons. First, rulers who fear for their survival stay on the battlefield. If Putin believes defeat could end his regime, he has an incentive to keep fighting, whatever the consequences for Russians.

Second, wars persist in conditions of uncertainty—for instance, when both sides have only a fuzzy sense of their relative strength or when they underestimate the damaging consequences of the conflict. In many cases, a few months of battle dispel this fog. Fighting reveals each side’s might and resolve and clears up misperceptions. Rivals find a way to end the war by reaching an agreement that reflects the now visible balance of power. Most wars, as a result, are short.

But in some cases, the fog of war lifts slowly. Take the current situation in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have exceeded everyone’s expectations, but it remains unclear whether they can drive Russian troops out of the country. A cold winter could erode Europe’s willingness to keep delivering funds and weapons to Ukraine. And the battlefield effects of Russia’s partial mobilization in September will only be apparent months from now. Amid such persistent uncertainties, rivals can find it harder to strike a peace deal.

Finally, some political scientists and historians argue that every long war has at its heart a “commitment problem”—that is, the inability on the part of one side or both to credibly commit to a peace deal because of anticipated shifts in the balance of power. Some call this the Thucydides Trap or a “preventive war”: one side launches an attack to lock in the current balance of power before it is lost. From Germany’s effort to prevent the rise of Russia in 1914 to the United States’ desire to stop Iraq from becoming a nuclear power in 2003, commitment problems drive many major wars. In those circumstances, bargains can unravel before they are even made.

The principles and obsessions of Ukrainian and Russian leaders fuel the conflict.

At first glance, the war in Ukraine looks to be full of commitment problems. Whenever a European leader or a U.S. general suggests it is time to settle with Russia, Ukrainians, and their allies retort that it is Putin who cannot credibly commit to a deal. The Kremlin is hellbent on gaining territory, they say, and its leader is politically and ideologically locked into his war aims. Settle now, Ukrainians warn, and Russia will simply regroup and attack again. Ukrainians, moreover, are in no mood to compromise with their oppressor. Even if Moscow could get a Ukrainian negotiator to agree to a cease-fire, the chances of the Ukrainian public or the Ukrainian parliament’s accepting even the tiniest loss of people or territory are slim. A popular backlash would scupper any negotiated deal.

Neither Russia’s resolve nor Ukraine’s, however, are traditional commitment problems stemming from strategic calculations and perceptions of shifts in power. Rather, immaterial forces make an accord difficult. The principles and obsessions of Ukrainian and Russian leaders fuel the conflict. There is no imminent deal because both sides prefer fighting to conceding.

ZEAL AND PURPOSE

Ukraine’s strident resistance to any suggestion of compromise is not unusual. The same intransigence recurs throughout history whenever colonized and oppressed peoples have decided to fight for their freedom against all odds. They reject subjugation for many reasons, including a mix of outrage and principle. Concessions—to imperialism, to domination—are simply abhorrent, even for the weak. As the anticolonial political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote in his 1961 classic, The Wretched of the Earth, “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

The parallels between Ukrainian resistance and the United States’ own revolution are especially striking. Then, as now, a superpower hoped to strengthen its grip over a weaker entity. In the 1760s and 1770s, Great Britain tried again and again to restrain the autonomy of the 13 colonies. British forces were militarily superior, and the colonists had no formal allies. Arguably, partial sovereignty and increased taxes were the best possible deal the colonists could demand from the hegemon. Still, many Americans rejected this bargain. Why? In a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, John Adams wrote that the true revolution occurred in the “Minds of the People.” This was effected, he wrote, “in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” It came about, he observed a few years later, through a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections” of the colonists. To many, compromising on these principles by conceding to a British king was out of the question. In Ukraine, its autonomy assailed for nearly a decade by Putin, a similar resolve has emerged. Many Ukrainians refuse as a matter of principle to accept Russian claims to their land or to bend in the face of Russian aggression—especially when it means leaving countrymen and women on the other side.

There are also parallels to an old, now neglected idea in the study of war: “indivisibility,” or an object, place, or set of principles that people convince themselves cannot be divided or compromised in any way. Some scholars used the concept to explain why holy sites and ethnic homelands can prompt long and divisive wars. Others dismissed it as a boutique explanation for a narrow class of conflicts, and indivisibilities drifted from academic attention. The concept is powerful, however, and applicable to a wide range of conflicts. When the brave fighters in Ukraine or anti-imperial revolutionaries in colonial America and in European colonies in Africa refused to concede liberties, it was because they considered the tradeoffs too costly. A radical change in principles and popular sentiment made surrendering land and freedom politically infeasible.

The parallels between Ukrainian resistance and the U.S. revolution are striking.

This phenomenon is far from rare, and it seems particularly prevalent in democracies. Arguably, principles and unacceptable compromises are one of the main reasons democratic countries end up waging long wars. Take the United States’ two-decade campaign in Afghanistan. Repeatedly, from 2002 through at least 2004, Taliban officials sought political deals with Hamid Karzai, who was then the Afghan president. But according to insiders interviewed by the historian Carter Malkasian, the George W. Bush administration’s view was that “all Taliban were bad.” Looking at the same period, the journalist Steve Coll noted how U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that negotiation was “unacceptable to the United States” and that the U.S. policy toward the Taliban was “to bring justice to them or them to justice.” In both Malkasian’s and Coll’s accounts, the Bush administration steadfastly forbade Karzai from pursuing any settled peace.

Of course, the U.S. government had strategic reasons to doubt the Taliban’s sincerity. And in seeking the total military defeat of the Taliban, administration officials wanted to establish a reputation of strength and send a signal to other adversaries not to attack the United States. But it would be foolish to ignore the fact that, for almost two decades, U.S. leaders rejected the idea of negotiating with the Taliban as a matter of principle, not just one of calculated strategy.

The United States is not alone in its refusal to deal. Again and again, in confronting insurgents and terrorists in Iraq, Northern Ireland, the Palestinian territories, or a dozen other places, democratic governments have refused for years to even consider dialogue. Jonathan Powell, the British government’s chief negotiator in Northern Ireland from 1997 to 1999, lamented this situation in his 2015 book Terrorists at the Table. He argued that demonizing the enemy and refusing all dialogue was shortsighted and invariably the cause of needless deaths. In Northern Ireland, the British government eventually realized that it needed to pursue a political process. Peace is impossible, Powell contends, if ideological barriers prevent leaders from negotiating.

THE PERIL OF PRINCIPLE

Yet events in Ukraine have not reached a point where Ukrainians can countenance compromise. Recently, realists such as Henry Kissinger and Stephen Walt have urged Ukraine to overcome its ideological barriers and trade some degree of sovereignty for peace. The difference between such realists and the idealists who want Ukraine to keep fighting is simple: they disagree on the cost of the concessions Ukraine might have to make to produce a deal and on the level of Russia’s ideological commitment to the conquest of its neighbor.

Make no mistake, there is a strategic case for the Ukrainians to fight on and for the West to support them. Still, resistance to Russia—and rejection of the kinds of distasteful compromises that might bring the war to a swift end—should also be understood as evidence of the abiding power of ideals and principles in geopolitics.

Such values and ideas will continue to play a leading role in the wars waged by democracies in the future. The West has grown steadily more rights-based over time: it has become obligatory in many countries to abide by and defend certain liberal principles, whatever the consequences. The philosopher Michael Ignatieff calls this shift the Rights Revolution. These ideals should be celebrated, and Western governments should continue to try living up to them (even if they often fail). But if this tendency makes the West less inclined toward realpolitik—trading rights and principles for peace, or cutting deals with unpalatable autocrats—wars such as the one in Ukraine may become more frequent and more difficult to end.

CHRISTOPHER BLATTMAN is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Columbia University. Follow him on Twitter @cblatts.

Foreign Affairs · by @cblatts · November 29, 2022

20. Why The Next Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Should Be From The Air Force

Some interesting arguments

Why The Next Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Should Be From The Air Force

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2022/11/28/why-the-next-chairman-of-the-joint-chiefs-should-be-from-the-air-force/?utm_source=pocket_saves&sh=4456595120c3

Loren ThompsonSenior Contributor

I write about national security, especially its business dimensions.

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will retire next year. The nation’s top military officer by law can only serve a single, non-renewable term of four years, and thus a successor will need to be nominated by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Secretary Austin should nominate an Air Force officer, current Chief of Staff General Charles Brown, to lead the Joint Chiefs. If he does, media coverage will undoubtedly focus on the fact that Brown is the first African American to lead a branch of the armed forces.

However, that is not the reason why Brown should be the next Joint Chiefs Chairman. The logic of his appointment resides in other institutional, strategic and operational considerations. The fact that he is temperamentally and experientially suited to the job is icing on the cake.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is, by law, the principal military advisor to the President and the Secretary of Defense. He is also a statutory member of the National Security Council—the only military officer enjoying that status. As the nation’s most senior military officer, he (or she) plays a pivotal role in deliberations concerning war and peace.

But why is General Brown in particular the best choice to succeed General Milley? The case for Brown comes down to four concerns: institutional equity, strategic timeliness, operational relevance, and temperamental suitability.

Institutional equity. Equity in this context means, to quote the Oxford Dictionaries, “the quality of being fair and impartial.” When the Chairman’s job was first being filled during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the practice was to rotate the position between the senior military officers of the three military departments—the Army, Navy and Air Force. That pattern was abandoned during the 1960s, with three chairmen in a row coming from the Army.

Ever since, the Army has tended to have the advantage in filling the nation’s top military position. With General Milley’s confirmation by the Senate in 2019, ten of the 20 Joint Chiefs Chairmen have been from the Department of the Army, six from the Department of the Navy, and only four from the Department of the Air Force. In fact, in the 40 years since President Reagan endured his first midterm election, only one Air Force officer has been chairman—General Richard Myers, who served from October of 2001 to September of 2005.

If the military services are actually co-equal, then it is time for the Air Force to get the top job. In fact, it is past time.

Strategic timeliness. The preference for Army officers during the 1960s was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that U.S. military forces were engaged in a major ground war in Asia. The value of specific military capabilities and training varies depending on the nation’s strategic priorities. At the moment, U.S. national defense strategy is focused mainly on the return of great-power rivalry, with particular emphasis on the Western Pacific where China poses a challenge to U.S. economic and military dominance.

U.S. air power has more relevance to great-power rivalry than land or sea power. In the Pacific, vast distances dictate the use of long-range aircraft in responding quickly to aggression, while the growing firepower of China limits the utility of potentially vulnerable warships. Ground forces are of secondary importance—at least, away from the Korean Peninsula. Orbital assets, which reside largely within the Department of the Air Force, are critical for sustaining joint communications and reconnaissance in the Chinese littoral.

In Europe, the other main arena of great-power rivalry, the sea services are limited in their applicability by geographic factors. The Army plays a leading role in deterring aggression on the ground, but without the top cover provided by air and space power, the Army’s ability to prevail against Russian forces would be doubtful. Air Force leadership is thus uniquely relevant in the current strategic moment, just as Army leadership was during the war in Indochina.

Operational utility. The mix of capabilities and competencies sustained by the Air Force is especially useful during a period of technological ferment. To a greater degree than the other military departments, the Air Force and Space Force provide a technological foundation for security in the 21st century. For instance:

The Department of the Air Force operates two-thirds of the nuclear triad and three-quarters of the command and communications infrastructure supporting the U.S. nuclear posture.
The Space Force operates the vast majority of national-security space systems and manages all military launches.
The Air and Space Force are principal providers of global surveillance and reconnaissance to the joint force.
The Air Force is the principal provider of tactical air power to the joint force, planning to operate three-quarters of all fifth-generation fighters in the force.
The Air Force is the principal provider of airlift and aerial refueling for the joint force.

These capabilities will support U.S. global military dominance through mid-century. To a greater degree than the other military services, the Air Force and the Space Force are investing in the warfighting technologies of the future such as unmanned vehicles, artificial intelligence and networked warfare. Moreover, the Air Force is pioneering the way in which warfighting systems are designed, developed and produced through innovations such as digital engineering and rapid software development.

Temperamental suitability. Air Force Chief of Staff Brown has proven to be a sober and thoughtful leader of his service, exhibiting the appropriate gravitas for a person who might one day represent the entire joint force. He has nearly 3,000 hours of flight experience, mainly in combat aircraft, and has devoted much of his recent career to Pacific operations. He has avoided any hint of partisan politics while demonstrating unusual empathy for his airmen and women.

That doesn’t mean that General Brown is temperamentally superior to the chiefs of the other services, but what it does show is that he is an exemplar of the military profession, and well suited to serve a nation of diverse interests. What makes Brown different is that his background is perfectly matched to the strategic moment, and it his service’s turn to lead.

Check out my website.

Loren Thompson

I focus on the strategic, economic and business implications of defense spending as the Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates. Prior to holding my present positions, I was Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at Georgetown. I have also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. I hold doctoral and masters degrees in government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of science degree in political science from Northeastern University. Disclosure: The Lexington Institute receives funding from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, including Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies.

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