Quotes of the Day:

It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error.” 

- Thomas Paine

"The mark of a great chiphanlder is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling." 

- Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King

"Warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right. to take another life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who cannot provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity. - Sitting Bull, (c. 1831-1890) Hunkpapa Sioux

1. Defense Department needs to capitalize on historic opportunity

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 5 (Putin's War)

3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (05.11.22) CDS comments on key events

4. West Sees Little Choice but to Keep Backing Ukraine

5. Singapore’s new cyberdefence force: a reflection of modern warfare in the digital age

6. Misinformation is bad, but ‘solutions’ to stop it are even worse

7. Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday’s Midterms

8. Special operation forces induct notable veterans at Fort Bragg

9. What a hybrid war is and how it applies to the UK, Russia and Ukraine

10. 10th Group enhances SFAB’s advisory roles

11. Philippine military chief: Communist guerrillas down to 24 fronts nationwide

12. Send Ukraine C-RAMs and VAMPIREs to help defeat Iranian drones

13.  Iran’s Hard-Liners Are Starting to Crack

14. Chinese Election Meddling Hits the Midterms

15. Sayyaf men with IS links yield in Basilan

16. Spate of global assassination attempts hints at a violent new era

17. Islamic Jihad Militant with Links to the Lions’ Den Killed in West Bank

18. An International Post-War Security Force is Needed in Ukraine

19. Chinese top brass say PLA must be on ‘full-time standby’ for war in Taiwan Strait

20. Black Hawk helicopter flies autonomous "rescue" mission without crew

21. LORD ASHCROFT: Sheer courage of unsung British Intelligence Corps

22. Spirit of America: Democracy's Civilian Force

23. Inside the political fundraising machine that is flooding your inbox

1. Defense Department needs to capitalize on historic opportunity

Our latest commentary on Irregular Warfare.

Remember that Irregular Warfare is an intellectual orphan in DOD (though perhaps not in the Army in the new FM 3-0 as the Army has introduced not only a new definition but also a description of IW as well as conventional warfare).

And in terms of partnering with universities perhaps the Space Force's recent partnership with Johns Hoplkins provides a model for the IW Center.

Defense Department needs to capitalize on historic opportunity

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3721929-defense-department-needs-to-capitalize-on-historic-opportunity/

BY CHARLES T. CLEVELAND, DANIEL EGEL, RUSSELL HOWARD, DAVID MAXWELL, HY ROTHSTEIN, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 11/06/22 9:30 AM ET

The Department of Defense (DOD) may be facing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix a critical gap in its national security arsenal. Congress has authorized the creation of an institution dedicated to the study and research of irregular warfare (IW), and the education of officers and civilian professionals charged with defending against non-standard threats and executing competent IW campaigns and strategies. 

Unfortunately, initial indications are that this opportunity created by Congress — which comes at precisely the right moment to prepare the nation for competition in the 21^st century, in which IW may play an oversized role — might not be realized.

Congress authorized the creation of the Irregular Warfare Functional Center (IWFC) with the Mac Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act of 2021. According to the legislation, such a center could “enhance and sustain focus on, and advance knowledge and understanding of, matters of irregular warfare.” It could improve the U.S. military’s understanding of IW and professionalize the next generation of U.S. leaders and staff officers, leveraging expertise both within the DOD and from America’s world-class universities to do so. 

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin ordered (in an unpublished but circulated memorandum) the establishment of the IWFC on July 28; in doing so, he highlighted the potential of this organization in declaring that it shall become the “central mechanism for developing the department’s irregular warfare knowledge and advancing the department’ s understanding of irregular warfare concepts and doctrine in collaboration with key partners and allies.”

However, the approach that is being followed to realize Congress’s vision and Austin’s guidance is concerning and could be flawed. In the current approach, the IWFC is being patterned after the Marshall Center and other regional centers supporting the Geographic Combatant Commands, which are focused on security cooperation with U.S. allies rather than on improving U.S. capabilities and understanding.

Assuming the center can focus on the need, it should have three primary functions.

The first is research. Irregular warfare represents the norm; throughout history adversaries have most often resorted to irregular warfare before turning to engage in riskier and more costly traditional war. Yet IW has no dedicated home for study, unlike traditional war which is the object of every service’s professional military education curriculum. Analyses of U.S. successes and failures outside the “big fights” of Afghanistan and Iraq — such as in Ukraine, the Baltics, Colombia, Philippines, Pakistan, Niger — could be a priority. Rigorous and ongoing research could lead to an American IW operating concept that could result in better doctrine, purpose-built organizations, and appropriate IW education — essential components to a contemporary world class military. The ability to engage in large-scale combat operations (LSCO) and IW simultaneously is both powerful and complementary, but they are distinct modes of warfare. More importantly, IW can occur independent of LSCO and could be of greater strategic utility when it does.

Research is best when it supports education. It is in the classroom where professionals can discuss the writings of the greatest thinkers of irregular warfare — including Sun Tzu, T.E. Lawrence, Hannah Arendt, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Min, David Galula, Sam Sarkesian, John McCuen, Frank Kitson, and Saint Marc — and IW-focused papers written by these professionals can add to the body of knowledge. No compulsory IW-specific professional military education exists today, which leaves to chance the availability of critical and informed IW input for future policy makers. The IWFC could fill this gap by providing a dedicated and professional IW structure.

Lastly, the center could become a resource for national security policy makers across government. If IW is to be the prevalent military activity — as it has historically been and as many believe it will be — it would stand to reason that the DOD, the executive branch, and Congress may need readily available IW expertise throughout their ranks. Developing the depth of needed IW expertise could take time. In the meantime, the IWFC could be a source of credible and vetted experts.

Organizationally, the IWFC should be sponsored by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict — the proponent for IW within the Office of the Secretary of Defense — and U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) should be its executive agent.

Currently, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) is the de facto executive agent of the IWFC because of DSCA’s role as executive agent for the Regional Centers. This may be inappropriate, given Congress and the Secretary of Defense’s vision for the IWFC, which is very different from the mandate for the regional centers.

Austin’s guidance for the IWFC was clear: it must engage with a broad range of U.S. government departments and agencies and leverage a multitude of academic institutions to do so. DSCA may not be well positioned to do this, but USSOCOM is and has a proven track record of working across the U.S. government and bringing in top quality expertise from across U.S. universities.

It is also imperative that the DOD identify the right university (or universities) as a partner for these efforts. While this could be critical to meeting near-term curriculum and research requirements, it could also create new opportunities for private-public cooperation in preparing the nation for 21^st century IW. A privately funded component could study and propose how best to achieve whole-of-America effects in securing U.S. interests and achieving its strategic objectives. IW could be DOD’s contribution to Kennan’s political warfare or today’s squishier, strategic competition, and the IWFC could look to improve DOD’s contribution. However, IW may be most effective when nested within coordinated interagency efforts and most powerful when used in conjunction with other elements of national power. That broader effort may also require scholarship. A privately funded component could allow it to independently critique government policies and strategies. 

The future will require fresh thinking on how to build world class capabilities across the full spectrum of traditional and irregular war. The IWFC, properly focused on filling the U.S. gap in dedicated IW scholarship, could be a rare chance to make a new and important contribution to U.S. national security. 

Lt. Gen. Charles T. Cleveland (Ret.) is an adjunct researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and a senior mentor to the Army War College.

Daniel Egel is a senior economist at RAND. 

Brig. Gen. Russell Howard (Ret.) is a distinguished senior fellow at the Joint Special Operations University and an adjunct faculty member at the Institute for Security Governance.

Col. David Maxwell (Ret. is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Global Peace Foundation and a senior advisor to the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy. 

Col. Hy Rothstein (Ret.) is a recently retired faculty member of the Naval Postgraduate School.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the official policy or positions of the DOD or U.S. government.

TAGS DEFENSE DEPARTMENT DOD IRREGULAR WARFARE IRREGULAR WARFARE FUNCTIONAL CENTER LLOYD AUSTIN NATIONAL SECURITY NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 5 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-5

Key Takeaways

• Wagner Group financier Yevheniy Prigozhin seeks to obfuscate his efforts to strengthen his independent power base with an appeal to the concept of Russia’s historic unity.
• Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian confirmed that Iran began providing Russia drones before February 24, but strangely denied that Russian forces have used them in combat.
• DNR military commander Aleksandr Khodakovsky claimed that Russian friendly fire may have caused up to 60% of total Russian losses since mid-May.
• Ukrainian troops reportedly continued counteroffensives along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian forces continued to set up defensive positions along the Dnipro River.
• Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian logistics and transportation in Kherson Oblast.
• Russian forces continued to attack around Bakhmut and claimed unspecified advances.
• Russian forces continued unsuccessful offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area and in western Donetsk.
• Continued poor conditions for mobilized soldiers catalyzed a large-scale protest in Kazan.
• Unknown actors reportedly attempted to assassinate high-profile Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Supreme Court Judge Aleksandr Nikulin.
• Russia continues to deploy personnel to staff administrative positions in occupied areas.
• Russian forces continued forced evacuations in Kherson Oblast. Over 80% of Kherson residents reportedly have evacuated.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, NOVEMBER 5

Nov 5, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Angela Howard, and Mason Clark

November 5, 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.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin seeks to obfuscate his efforts to strengthen his independent power base with an appeal to the concept of Russia’s historic unity. Prigozhin provided a vague response to a media inquiry regarding his recent visit to Kursk Oblast on Russia’s Unity Day (November 4), during which he had indirectly implied that Wagner forces are involved in upholding Russia’s unity.[1] Prigozhin stated that Russian people, businesses, government, and army need to come together to fight for Russia’s sovereignty and its great future while deflecting from the journalist’s question regarding Prigozhin’s reported meeting with Kursk businessmen about the organization of an unspecified people’s militia – outside of formal Russian military command structures. Prigozhin also noted that Russia has all the ingredients to achieve its goals including a strong president, cohesive army, and great nationhood, which he concluded with an out-of-place greeting from Wagner fighters. Prigozhin later claimed in a follow up media response that his “independence” does not contradict Russian President Vladimir Putin’s politics as some audiences have interpreted.[2]

Prigozhin’s rather sarcastic statements have several underlying implications for his perception of his power within Russia. ISW previously reported that Kursk Oblast officials announced the construction of second and third lines of defenses in the region, and if Prigozhin’s meeting with local businessmen took place, may indicate that he is attempting to expand his influence in the region.[3] Prigozhin’s comment on Russia’s “cohesive army” next to Putin was likely thinly-veiled sarcasm, given that Prigozhin has repeatedly criticized the Russian Armed Forces on numerous occasions.[4] Prigozhin also directly recognized that he is an independent entity, which as ISW previously assessed, relieves him of some obligations to the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD).[5] Putin’s dependency on Prigozhin’s forces around Bakhmut also allows Prigozhin privileges such as voicing his criticisms of the Kremlin or the Russian Armed Forces without significant ramifications. Prigozhin has also coincidentally opened his Wagner Center in St. Petersburg on Russia’s Unity Day.[6] However, Prigozhin is notably shielding his efforts to build an independent power base and shape the conduct of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with language focused on Russian Unity – likely both to appeal to Russian nationalists and civilians and to deflect criticism of his fairly overt efforts to build an independent power base.

Prigozhin continues to rely on ineffective convicts to staff his forces. Prigozhin declined to comment on a reporter’s question regarding ongoing recruitment drives at Krasnoyarsk Krai penal colonies, despite previously openly discussing prisoner participation in the war with Russian outlets like RiaFan.[7] Russian opposition outlet The Insider, however, found that over 500 prisoners recruited into Wagner units have died in the past two months.[8] The publication added that Wagner lost between 800 and 1,000 mercenaries in Ukraine, indicating convicts comprise a large proportion of Wagner’s forces in Ukraine. Ukrainian intelligence officials also previously reported that many prisoners suffering from infectious diseases infected Wagner troops, to which Prigozhin responded that he does not discriminate on the basis of illness.[9]

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian confirmed that Iran sent Russia combat drones. Amir-Abdollahian stated on November 5 that Iran “gave a limited number of drones to Russia months before” the war in Ukraine.[10] Amir-Abdollahian also claimed that if Ukrainian officials could prove that the Russian military has used Iranian-made drones in Ukraine then Iranian officials would “not be indifferent” to the concern - falsely and ridiculously implying that Russia has not used the drones that he admitted Iran has provided.[11] Iran’s confirmation of the drone shipments further supports ISW’s previous assessments that Russia is sourcing Iranian-made weapons systems to address the depletion of its high-precision munitions arsenal.[12] ISW previously assessed that Iran is likely already exploiting Russian reliance on these Iranian-made weapons systems to request Russian assistance with its nuclear program.[13] The nuclear assistance requests and the recognition of the drone shipments are both indicators that Iranian officials may intend to more clearly establish an explicit bilateral security relationship with Russia in which they are more equal partners.

Former Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Security Minister and current DNR military commander Aleksandr Khodakovsky claimed on November 5 that Russian friendly fire may have caused up to 60% of total Russian losses since the end of Russian offensive operations in Mariupol in mid-May.[14] Even if this statistic is exaggerated, the fact that a Russian commander is publicly speculating on such a damning indicator of Russian and proxy competency indicates the deep challenges Russian forces face. Friendly fire typically does account for a limited number of losses in war but ordinarily nowhere near 60% of total casualties, which demonstrates a lack of communication and command and control coordination between Russian forces. Russian and Ukrainian sources also reported that a Russian rotation returning to its base near Pavlivka, Donetsk Oblast on November 5 drove into a ditch constructed by army subcontractors without prior discussion or warning, further demonstrating a widespread lack of cross-training and coordination between Russian troops.[15] The frequent replacement of Russian military leaders, promotion of inexperienced soldiers, and cobbled-together Russian force composition including Russian contract soldiers, Russian mobilized soldiers, DNR and Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) forces, and Wagner Group forces exacerbate the fragmented nature of the Russian chain of command and ineffectiveness of Russian forces and likely contributes to frequent friendly fire incidents.

Key Takeaways

• Wagner Group financier Yevheniy Prigozhin seeks to obfuscate his efforts to strengthen his independent power base with an appeal to the concept of Russia’s historic unity.
• Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian confirmed that Iran began providing Russia drones before February 24, but strangely denied that Russian forces have used them in combat.
• DNR military commander Aleksandr Khodakovsky claimed that Russian friendly fire may have caused up to 60% of total Russian losses since mid-May.
• Ukrainian troops reportedly continued counteroffensives along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian forces continued to set up defensive positions along the Dnipro River.
• Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian logistics and transportation in Kherson Oblast.
• Russian forces continued to attack around Bakhmut and claimed unspecified advances.
• Russian forces continued unsuccessful offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area and in western Donetsk.
• Continued poor conditions for mobilized soldiers catalyzed a large-scale protest in Kazan.
• Unknown actors reportedly attempted to assassinate high-profile Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Supreme Court Judge Aleksandr Nikulin.
• Russia continues to deploy personnel to staff administrative positions in occupied areas.
• Russian forces continued forced evacuations in Kherson Oblast. Over 80% of Kherson residents reportedly have evacuated.

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—Southern and Eastern Ukraine
• Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
• 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 sources claimed that Ukrainian troops continued counteroffensive actions along the Svatove-Kreminna line on November 5. Russian sources, including the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), reported that Ukrainian troops conducted an assault in the direction of Kuzemivka, 13km northwest of Svatove.[16] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian troops crossed the Zherebets River west of Svatove and are probing Russian positions along the Kuzemivka-Kolomyichykha line.[17] Geolocated footage shows Ukrainian troops conducting strikes on Russian armored vehicles about 30km northwest of Svatove, indicating that Russian troops maintain positions in the Yahidne-Orlianka area.[18] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces re regrouping in this area after a failed assault on Yahidne.[19] A Russian milblogger reported that Ukrainian troops continued attempted attacks towards Kreminna.[20] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled a Russian attack on Bilohorivka, 10km south of Kreminna.[21] Russian sources also claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted a HIMARS strike on Russian positions in Svatove and Kreminna and shelled Russian positions along the Svatove-Kreminna line.[22]

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Russian forces continued to set up defensive positions along the Dnipro River on November 5. Spokesperson for the Ukrainian Southern Forces, Nataliya Humenyuk, stated that Russian forces are building strong defensive positions on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnipro River with firing positions that they will use to target Ukrainian forces on the right (western) bank.[23] Humenyuk added that Russian forces are still operating on the right bank. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command noted that Russian forces are still conducting maneuvers and setting up defensive lines on the right bank, while simultaneously mining the left bank and evacuating civilians at least 15km away from the coast.[24] The Ukrainian Resistance Center specified that Russian forces are preparing Nova Kakhovka (on the left bank) for battle by mining underground communications lines such as sewers.[25] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command also reiterated that Russian forces are continuing to destroy civilian watercraft and have already destroyed over 50 vessels.[26] ISW has previously assessed that Russian forces are likely attempting to prevent Ukrainian forces from chasing them to the left bank following a fighting withdrawal.[27]

Ukrainian and Russian sources did not report significant changes in the situation on the frontlines on November 5. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued to shell Ukrainian positions northwest of Kherson City, in southeastern Mykolaiv Oblast, and near the Inhulets River.[28] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command added that Russian forces used S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to target ground targets in Beryslav Raion.[29] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks in the directions of Sablukivka and Sukhanove, about 40km and 34km northeast of Beryslav.[30] Russian milbloggers and a Kherson City occupation deputy noted the lack of Ukrainian or Russian ground maneuvers.[31] A Russian milblogger added that Russian forces are shelling Ukrainian forces along the E58 highway northwest of Kherson City, likely to disrupt Ukrainian attacks.[32]

Ukrainian forces continued their interdiction campaign on November 5, targeting Russian logistics and transportation routes in Kherson Oblast. Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian river crossing near Antonivsky Bridge, destroying a tugboat and damaging two other vessels.[33] Ukrainian forces also reportedly struck a Russian military convoy awaiting to cross the Dnipro River in Olhivka, about 13km northwest of Nova Kakhovka.[34] Ukrainian military officials added that Ukrainian forces shot down two Russian attack helicopters in Beryslav Raion, damaged Russian area of manpower accumulation in Radensk, and destroyed three ammunition depots in Beryslav and Kherson raions.[35] Local Ukrainian sources reported witnessing explosions in Kherson City, and Russian sources accused Ukrainian forces of targeting evacuees.[36] Local residents also reported a Ukrainian strike on Nibulon factory in Hola Prystan, about 14km southwest of Kherson City.[37]

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 offensive operations around Bakhmut on November 5. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled assaults near Bakhmut; within a 30km radius northeast of Bakhmut near Spirne and Bakhmutske; and within a 20km radius south of Bakhmut near Ivanhrad, Klishchiivka, Ozarianivka, and Mayorsk.[38] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) head Denis Pushilin stated on November 4 that Russian forces made advances near Mayorsk and expressed hope that Russian forces would soon capture the settlement.[39] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also conducted an assault northeast of Bakhmut near Verkhnokamianske.[40] Another Russian milblogger claimed on November 5 that Ukrainian forces must constantly rotate units south of Bakhmut in the direction of Ivanhrad and Vesela Dolnya to respond to Wagner PMC units conducting offensives in the direction of Opytne.[41] A separate Russian milblogger claimed on November 5 that Russian forces conducted an assault on Opytne with the aim of cutting off a section of the E50 highway.[42] A different Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian counterattacks south of Bakhmut near Opytne and Kurdiumivka.[43] The milblogger also claimed that Ukrainian forces are continuing to constrain the actions of Russian forces south of Bakhmut near Ivanhrad, Odradivka, Vesela Dolyna, and Zaitseve, and are preparing for urban battles in Bakhmut itself.[44]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on November 5. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground assaults near Kamianka and within a 35km radius southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske, Nevelske, Marinka, and Novomykhailivka.[45] A Russian milblogger claimed on November 5 that Russian forces also attempted to advance southwest of Avdiivka to Kostantinivka.[46] Geolocated footage posted on November 5 shows that Russian forces are likely operating southwest of Avdiivka near Krasnohorivka.[47] A BARS-13 (combat army reserve) source claimed that Russian and Ukrainian positions near Avdiivka are only 30 to 40 meters apart.[48]

Russia forces continued offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast on November 5. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault on Pavlivka (52km southwest of Donetsk City).[49] Geolocated footage shows Ukrainian forces still control Pavlivka as of November 4.[50] A Russian milblogger claimed that Pavlivka is of great tactical importance because there is a road interchange in the settlement and the surrounding rear areas are rocky terrain that makes vehicle maneuvers more difficult.[51] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on November 5 that Russian forces continued routine indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk Oblast.[52]

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

Russian forces continued routine air, missile, and artillery strikes west of Hulyaipole, and in Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv oblasts on November 5.[53] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Vilniansk, Zaporizhia Oblast.[54] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces conducted drone attacks in Mykolaiv and Vinnytsia oblasts.[55] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian air defenses shot down six Shahed-136 drones in Mykolaiv Oblast and two in Vinnytsia Oblast.[56]

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

Continued poor conditions for mobilized soldiers are catalyzing general unrest and a large-scale protest at a mobilization collection point in Kazan on November 4. One social media user posted that almost 2,000 soldiers participated in the protest, though ISW cannot independently confirm the size of the crowd.[57] Video posted by news agencies and to social media shows mobilized forces threatening violence and chanting slurs at a reported colonel after demanding that he explain the lack of provision of basic necessities including food, water, and heat.[58] A Tatarstan government news agency published an article on November 5 claiming authorities had resolved the relevant issues.[59] However, Russian authorities are highly unlikely to be able to fix such issues and halt the resulting protests in the near future. Russian and Ukrainian sources provided continued reports of a lack of medical care, shelter, heating, and equipment for mobilized soldiers on November 4 and 5.[60] ISW has reported on a series of protests due to under-provisioning for Russian mobilized soldiers.[61]

Russian forces face additional challenges generating combat power due to pervasive official ineptitude and possible domestic sabotage efforts. One Russian milblogger accused inert mid- and high-level government officials, military leaders, and ministerial deputies of criminal sabotage of mobilization efforts due to incompetence on November 5.[62] Video posted to Twitter on November 4 shows Russian anarchists intentionally sabotaging Russian logistics efforts by burning Russian Railways switchboards and electrical substations.[63]

Social tensions caused by a lack of material support for, or financial commitment to, mobilized soldiers are likely pressuring Russian regional heads to increase payments to mobilized recruits and their families. Oryol Oblast Governor Andrey Klychkov and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast Governor Gleb Nikitkin announced on November 3 and November 4 that mobilized residents and their families will receive additional payments of 50,000 rubles on top of mandated federal payments.[64] These actions align with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s November 4 promise of a one-time payment of 195,000 rubles (about $3,150) to mobilized men and new contract soldiers.[65] New payments will also increase the already heavy burden of mobilization on regional budgets.

Russian authorities continue to explore options for dealing with mobilization evaders. One Russian news source claimed on November 3 that Russian authorities, including FSB border agents, may investigate mobilization evaders returning from abroad for “cooperation with foreigners.”[66] The ongoing war, probable covert mobilization, and potential for a second official wave of mobilization decrease the likelihood that many Russian men who fled mobilization will choose to return, however.

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)

Unknown actors reportedly conducted an assassination attempt against Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Supreme Court Judge Aleksandr Nikulin on November 4. The DNR Ministry of Internal Affairs stated that they are working to identify suspects who attacked Nikulin in Vuhlehirsk, Russian-occupied Donetsk Oblast.[67] Nikulin notably sentenced UK citizens Aiden Aislin and Sean Pinner and Moroccan citizen Brahim Saadoun to death in June on charges of mercenarism after the Russian capture of the Azovstal Steel Plant.[68] It is still unclear if the attack was partisan in nature or the result of in-fighting between internal DNR factions.

Russian occupation officials continue to drive the “evacuation” and forced relocation of residents of Kherson Oblast. Head of the Ukrainian “Kherson Hub” headquarters Roman Golovnya stated on November 5 that since the beginning of the war, over 80% of Kherson City’s residents have left the city.[69] Russian sources continue to perpetuate information operations regarding Ukrainian strikes on civilian infrastructure in Kherson Oblast to continue to manipulate evacuation efforts.[70] Russian officials also continue efforts to deport Ukrainian children under the guise of ”vacation” schemes, and Russian media reported that children from Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast, are remaining at vacation camps in Yevpatoria, Russian-occupied Crimea.[71]

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.

[3] https://www.interfax dot ru/world/845597

[4] https://t.me/andriyshTime/4165; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/11/05/novym-gaulyajterom-mariupolya-stav-kolyshnij-mer-yakutska-j-irkutska-berdnykov/; https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/16250653

[5] https://t.me/andriyshTime/4165; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/11/05/novym-gaulyajterom-mariupolya-stav-kolyshnij-mer-yakutska-j-irkutska-berdnykov/

[6] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/11/05/rosiyany-prodovzhuyut-zvozyty-na-tot-svoyih-likariv/; https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/821

[7] https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/1969; https://republic dot ru/posts/105647; https://riafan dot ru/23715694-_obladayut_zheleznimi_yaitsami_prigozhin_ob_uchastii_zaklyuchennih_v_svo

[8] https://theins dot ru/news/256690

[23] https://armyinform dot com dot ua/2022/11/05/vorog-vede-vogon-u-napryamku-energodara-shhob-sprovokuvaty-vogon-u-vidpovid/

[25] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov dot ua/2022/11/05/okupanty-grabuyut-herson/

[29] https://www.facebook.com/okPivden/videos/3273161569583408; https://army... dot com dot ua/2022/11/05/vorog-vede-vogon-u-napryamku-energodara-shhob-sprovokuvaty-vogon-u-vidpovid/

[36] https://t.me/hueviyherson/28382; https://t.me/hueviyherson/28381; http... dot media/310320-nova-vijskova-dopomoga-vid-ssa-zaava-g7-pro-brudnu-bombu-255-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://t.me/readovkanews/46260

[58] https://twitter.com/bad_moskal/status/1588820974530891777; https://meduza dot io/video/2022/11/05/ty-polkovnik-che-ty-mozhesh-mne-s-bratvoy-ob-yasnit-v-kazani-mobilizovannye-ustroili-perepalku-s-ofitserom-iz-za-otsutstviya-ekipirovki-vody-i-drov; https://www.svoboda.org/a/mobilizovannye-v-kazani-vyshli-na-protest-iz-z...

[59] https://www.tatar-inform dot ru/news/v-kazanskom-tankovom-ucilishhe-resili-voprosy-kotorye-voznikli-u-mobilizovannyx-5885566

[60]https://gur dot gov dot ua/content/ym-pokh-iu-na-etu-zymu-u-nykh-y-tepliaky-y-nochnyky-nakh-i-a-u-nas-nykh-ia.html; https://t.me/chtddd/57001; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-nov-3-...

[67] https://t.me/news_mvddnr/4630; https://myrotvorets dot center/criminal/nikulin-aleksandr-anatolevich/; https://t.me/news_mvddnr/4630; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/15... https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/11/05/v-tymchasovo-okupovanomu-vuglegirs dot u-nevidomi-skoyily-zamah-na-suddyu-kolaboranta/

[69] https://suspilne dot media/310564-timcasovo-okupovanij-herson-pokinuli-majze-80-vidsotkiv-ziteliv/; https://t.me/hueviyherson/28385

understandingwar.org

3. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (05.11.22) CDS comments on key events

Note:

Dear subscribers,

Please note that because of power outages in Kyiv (due to Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure), our briefs might be delayed or missing some parts you get used to.

Please find attached the CDS Daily Brief on Russia's war against Ukraine. 

Kind regards, 

CDS Team

CDS Daily brief (05.11.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

Schedules of emergency power outages were introduced today in 7 Oblasts, namely Kyiv, Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Kharkiv and Poltava as well as in the city of Kyiv.

Three civilians were killed and eight were wounded in Ukraine during the day of November 4 as a result of Russian aggression, Deputy Head of the Office of the President Kyrylo Tymoshenko said.

As of 9 a.m. this morning, Oblast Military Administrations reported that the Russian army struck nine regions of Ukraine over one day.

-              Vinnytsia Oblast was attacked by kamikaze drones at night. Air defense forces were working.

-              In Zaporizhzhia Oblast, after midnight today, the Russian military attacked one of the villages in Vilnyanskiy district with S-300 missiles. The buildings of three enterprises and cars were damaged.

-              In Sumy Oblast bordering on the Russian Federation, the Russian military shelled a village in the Krasnopillya community at night. There was no information about victims or the destruction of infrastructure facilities. During the previous day, the Russian forces fired 70 shells and mines at 5 communities in Sumy Oblast.

-              In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Russian troops again attacked the Nikopol district at night, shelling Marhanetska, Chervonohryhoryvska, and Nikopol communities. 14 high-rise and private buildings were damaged in Nikopol, as well as other civilian infrastructure facilities.

-              In Kharkiv Oblast, the enemy shelled Kupyansk, Kharkiv, Chuhuyiv and Bogodukhiv districts located near the border with the Russian Federation and the contact line.

-              In Donetsk Oblast, late yesterday evening, the Russian forces shelled Pokrovsk and Kurakhivka village of the Kurakhiv community. Private houses were destroyed and damaged. At night, Russians hit Druzhkivka with rockets. Throughout the night, the enemy shelled the communities of Vuhledar, Toretsk, Avdiivka, and Ocheretynska. Three people died and eight were injured in Donetsk Oblast during the day.

-              In Mykolayiv Oblast, a settlement in Shirokivska community was shelled this morning, three houses and the administrative building of an agricultural enterprise were damaged.

Around 2 p.m., on November 5 the Russian forces opened fire with mortars on the Seredyna- Buda community in Sumy Oblast. 9 mines exploded near civilian houses. There is considerable destruction: demolished walls and roofs. According to preliminary information, 4 houses and farm buildings were damaged, the head of the Sumy Regional Military Administration, Dmytro Zhivytskyi said.

As a result of the POW exchanges that have taken place since the beginning of the Russian large- scale aggression against Ukraine, a total of 268 National Guard servicemen were released, including 24 women, the National Guard reported.

Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian railways have evacuated over 4 million people, a million children, 120 thousand animals, and transported more than 200 diplomatic delegations and 300 thousand humanitarian shipments, Oleksandr Kamyshin, chairman of the board of JSC "Ukrzaliznytsia" said.

Occupied territories:

Financial Times reported that the Russian occupying forces publicly executed a 56-year-old local resident, nurse Tetyana Mudrenko, for shouting "Skadovsk is Ukraine!" in the occupied Skadovsk of Kherson Oblast

Russian occupying authorities deported 12 children from the Oleshky boarding school in the captured territory of Kherson Oblast to the temporarily occupied Crimea. Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said.

About 700 people were forcefully moved from Kakhovka in Kherson Oblast. The number was reported by the occupying authorties.

Russian citizen Dmitriy Berdnikov, former mayor of Yakutsk and Irkutsk, became the new de facto mayor of Mariupol. He was transferred from the position of the first deputy head of the government of the Republic of Yakutia in the Russian far east. As an advisor to the legally elected Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol Petro Andryushchenko noted, the reason for the "change of leader" is an internal political struggle. The real reason voiced directly to the Russia-appointed temporary head of the occupation "administration" of Mariupol Konstantin Ivashchenko is a complete failure of preparations for the winter period and embezzlement of funds on too large a scale.

Operational situation

(please note that this section of the Brief is mainly on the previous day's (November 4) developments).

It is the 254th day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation – "operation to defend Donbas"). The enemy tries to maintain control over the temporarily captured territories, concentrates its efforts on restraining the actions of the Defense Forces, and conducts offensive operations in the Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Novopavlivka directions.

Over the past day, units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled Russian attacks in the areas around Bilohorivka in Luhansk Oblast and Spirne, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Ivanhrad, Klishchiivka,

Ozaryanivka, Mayorsk, Kamianka, Pervomaiske, Nevelske, Maryinka, Novomykhailivka and Pavlivka in Donetsk Oblast.

The Russian military continues to shell the Ukrainian troops along the contact line, fortifies frontiers in certain directions and conducts aerial reconnaissance. In violation of the norms of international humanitarian law, the laws and customs of war, it continues to strike critical infrastructure. Over the past day, the Russian forces have launched 6 missile strikes and 21 air strikes and fired over 60 MLRS rounds. The Russian fire hit areas around more than 20 Ukrainian towns and villages in Lviv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts. Near the state border, the Russin military shelled Hrynivka, Liskivshchyna, Karpovychi, Tymonovychy, Leonivka in Chernihiv Oblast; Katerynivka, Novomykolaivka and Zapsilya in Sumy Oblast; Zolochiv, Hlyboke, Starytsia and Ohirtseve in Kharkiv Oblast.

The threat of missile strikes and the use of attack UAVs persists, specifically from the territory of the Republic of Belarus. The Republic of Belarus continues to support the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. It receives and accommodates Russian servicemen and provides training grounds. It is also known that the units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are being replenished on the territory of the Republic of Belarus with the mobilized persons arriving from the territory of Russia. Combat training and coordination of these units will last for about two to three weeks.

Over the past day, the Ukrainian Defense Forces aircraft made 11 strikes against the enemy. 4 areas of weapons and military equipment concentration and 7 anti-aircraft missile systems positions were hit. Over the past day, the Ukrainian air defense units shot down one Russian "Orlan-10" UAV, 11 "Shakhed-136" assault UAVs and 2 "Kalibr" cruise missiles.

Ukraine's missile and artillery forces hit 2 Russian command posts, 7 weapons and military equipment concentration areas, 1 ammunition depot, and 4 other important Russian military targets.

The morale and psychological state of the personnel of the invasion forces remain low. Kharkiv direction

• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the

RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;

• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd, and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments, 11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.

The Russian military fired at the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas of Dvorichna, Kyselivka, Tabaivka, Krokhmalne, Berestove, Vyshneve, Novoyehorivka, Makiivka and Nevske.

The Russian military command is trying to improve the situation in the Svatove area and reverse the negative trend. In addition to counterattacks to the west and north-west of Kreminna, the Russian forces conducted a series of attacks in the directions of Ploshanka - Makiivk and Ploshanka - Nevske over the past two days.

The Russian military concentrated up to three BTGs from the composition of the 3rd motorized rifle division of the 20th Army and reinforced them with formations akin to infantry companies - battalions of the mobilization reserve of the so-called LPR, assault detachments of the "Wagner" PMC and the remnants of the BARS detachments. It then tried to attack the left flank of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the forests west of Zhytlivka and Chervonopopivka, but failed to break through to Makiivka and Nevske.

Kramatorsk direction

● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;

●  252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th, and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.

Over the last few days, the Russian command tried to push the units of the Defense Forces in the Bilohorivka area back as much as possible towards Verkhnokamyanske and to the west near the village of Spirne. The Russin military employed the BTGs from the 55th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 41st Army, four BARS detachments (in general - up to the battalion), units of the 4th separate motorized rifle brigade and the 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps. As a result, it was able to advance along Siversky Donets and occupy the northeastern part of the Bilohorivka and get a foothold there. Periodically, to strengthen the attacks, platoon units, staffed by mobilized and recruited from among convicts, were used.

Donetsk direction

● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th, and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet," 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th

separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian military shelled the areas of Spirne, Bilohorivka, Yakovlivka, Soledar, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Ivanhrad, Opytne, Klishchiivka, Andriivka, Zelenopillia, Ozaryanivka, Avdiivka, Vodyane, Pervomaiske, Nevelske, Krasnohorivka, Maryinka, Paraskoviivka and Novomykhailivka with tanks and artillery.

To the north of the Soledar-Bakhmutske area, a Russian tactical grouping formed mainly from units of the 2nd Army Corps' mobilization reserve and reinforced by assault platoons of the "Wagner" PMC reached the gypsum quarry and the "Knauf" plant. Still, it was forced to stop and retreat in some places.

On the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut (in the direction of Pokrovske - Patris Lumumba St.), the Russian forces failed to advance beyond the intersection of M-03 - H-32 roads. However, separate Russian units advanced to the Bakhmut city landfill and Maksimenko Street. Separate units the size of a detachment infiltrated the private sector in the southeastern part of the city. The presence of "Wagner" PMC is manned both with prison inmates and professional mercenaries with extensive combat experience in different countries. In some areas, they are reinforced by tanks and other armored vehicles from the composition of the "Diesel" tank battalion of the 1st Army Corps and two combined battalions from the composition of the 2nd separate motorized rifle brigade of the 2nd Army Corps and the 31st separate airborne assault brigade of the Russian Armed Forces. Losses are promptly replenished by newly mobilized through the distribution battalion of the mobilization reserve of the 2nd Army Corps.

To the south of Bakhmut, the Russian command deployed the "League" and "Redut" PMC units, a large part of the joint BTG from the 336th separate marines brigade, the remnants of two mobilization reserve battalions of the 2nd Army Corps with the task of breaking through to the Klishchiivka - Andriivka frontier and further on to Ivanivske. The goal is to further block Bakhmut from the south, making its defense extremely difficult. At the same time, it was planned to break through Ivanhrad and Opytne into the city itself from the south. However, in a series of counterattacks, units of the Ukrainian Joint Forces pushed the enemy back to the T-0513 road in the direction of Zaitseve in the section between Opytne and Odradiivka, making it possible that the Ukrainian troops could move further to the rear of this tactical grouping.

Zaporizhzhia direction

●  Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the

42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian military shelled positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the areas of Vodyane, Bohoyavlenka, Vuhledar, Pavlivka, Novoukrainka, Prechystivka, Zolota Nyva, Vremivka, Velyka Novosilka, Novosilka, Olhivske, Hulyaipole, Shcherbaky and Mali Shcherbaky.

On November 3, about 80 wounded Russian occupiers arrived in the city of Melitopol. Russian medical units lack qualified personnel, in particular surgeons. Moreover, the medical staff they have is not able to provide quality medical care.

Tavriysk direction

-    Vasylivka – Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line – 296 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 39, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 7,5 km;

-   Deployed BTGs of: the 8th and 49th Combined Arms Armies; 11th, 103rd, 109th, and 127th rifle regiments of the mobilization reserve of the 1st Army Corps of the Southern Military District; 35th and 36th Combined Arms Armies of the Eastern Military District; 3rd Army Corps of the Western Military District; 90th tank division of the Central Military District; the 22nd Army Corps of the Coastal Forces; the 810th separate marines brigade of the Black Sea Fleet; the 7th and 76th Air assault divisions, the 98th airborne division, and the 11th separate airborne assault brigade of the Airborne Forces.

The Russian fire hit areas of more than 20 towns and villages along the contact line. Tryfonivka of Kherson Oblast and Nikopol of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast were directly affected by the Russian rocket and barrel artillery fire.

The Russian military continues to suffer losses. According to updated information, a tugboat was destroyed as a result of fire damage to an enemy crossing near Antonivka, Kherson Oblast, on November 3. Two other vessels were damaged and require repair. It was also confirmed that the Russian convoy that was waiting for the crossing in the area of Olhivka was damaged.

In addition, on November 4, 6 enemy refueling stations were destroyed in the area of Novovasylivka, Mykolaiv Oblast.

In Kherson, the Russian occupiers try to identify local residents who refused to evacuate to the territory temporarily controlled by the Russian invaders. The city is looted; the infrastructure is being destroyed.

Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:

The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the Black Sea and to maintain control over the captured territories.

The Russian fleet has 7 ships and boats at sea. They are located along the southwestern coast of Crimea. There is not a single Kalibr cruise missile carrier among them. Nevertheless, a rapid build- up of surface and underwater Kalibr missile carriers in the sea launch areas is possible.

In the Sea of Azov waters, 6 patrol ships and boats are located on the approaches to the Mariupol and Berdyansk seaports to block the Azov coast.

Russian aviation continues to fly from the Crimean airfields of Belbek and Hvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 14 combat aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.

The Russian military continues to fire kamikaze drones at the seaports of Ukraine. Over the last day, 6 Shahed-136 drones were destroyed in the area of Mykolaiv.

According to satellite images, three out of four submarines of project 636.3 returned to the Sevastopol base from Novorossiysk.

At the Avlita grain terminal (Northern side of Sevastopol), the ship Fedir (IMO: 9431977) was spotted with open hatches in the process of loading grain. Fedir transports grain between Sevastopol and Bandirma (Turkey). The grain was most likely stolen from Ukraine. This vessel normally sails with the AIS transponder switched off, which violates SOLAS requirements. The ship "Fedir" departed from Sevastopol after loading on November 3.

The "Admiral Makarov" frigate of project 11356 is moored on the starboard side to the berth in Holland Bay in Sevastopol. A floating crane works next to it. This position of the ship confirms the statement that "Admiral Makarov" could have sustained damage to the starboard side on October 29. The frigate was in such a position for at least 4 days.

Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Marat Husnullin reported to Putin on the Kerch Strait bridge repair progress. The occupiers plan to restore the connection by the end of 2022. The restoration of engineering highways is scheduled by the middle of 2023. About 500 repairmen and two floating cranes were involved in the Kerch Strait bridge repair.

"The Grain initiative": Risks of new "grain corridor" disruptions still exist while the war continues. Ukrainian grain should flow unimpeded to the countries of the world, and the war should be stopped, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview with the Turkish TV channel NTV. As noted, the Secretary General of the Alliance answered the question about the possible risks of repeat traffic interruption through the "grain corridor".

The agreement on the export of Ukrainian grain across the Black Sea was concluded between Ukraine, Turkey and the UN, as well as between Russia, Turkey and the UN on July 22 for a period of 180 days. The agreement can be extended by the agreement of the parties. The Russian Federation has not yet announced its decision. Most likely, the fate of the agreement will be clear after the meeting of the G20 heads, which will take place on November 15-16 in Indonesia on the island of Bali.

Russian operational losses from 24.02 to 05.11

Personnel - almost 75,440 people (+600);

Tanks - 2,758 (+8)

Armored combat vehicles – 5,601 (+21);

Artillery systems – 1,776 (+4);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 391 (0); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 202 (+1); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 4,184 (+10); Aircraft - 277 (0);

Helicopters – 260 (+2);

UAV operational and tactical level – 1,462 (+12); Intercepted cruise missiles - 399 (+2);

Boats / ships - 16 (0).

Ukraine, general news

President Volodymyr Zelensky held a three-hour meeting of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, at which the situation along the entire front line was discussed. In his televised address afterwards, Zelensky announced "good news" regarding air and missile defense in several weeks. Zelensky also announced his intention to create a fleet of sea drones.

International diplomatic aspect

The Elders, a group of former politicians and diplomats, called on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to consider a diplomatic way out of the conflict. "We need to encourage more thinking about how it will end in order to get the idea that this needs to end, as opposed to increasing the military arsenal on both sides and the devastation to the population in Ukraine," said a former Irish president Mary Robinson, who also served as UN high commissioner for human rights.

The Elders also condemned the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian Oblasts and defended Ukraine's right to defend its territory and sovereignty. Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, a previous UN human rights commissioner, underlined that the way out doesn't mean ceding Ukraine's sovereignty, while former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo accused Russia of committing crimes and said that the ICC should try it for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

However, the Elders didn't elaborate on what diplomatic way out is possible, given Russia's unwillingness to stop its war of aggression, let alone freeing the illegally annexed and occupied territories, denying any crimes committed by its troops.

"I am annoyed that the Ukrainian government put me on the list of terrorists on the grounds that I am working on a ceasefire or on the possibility of further diplomatic steps through local ceasefires," said Rolf Mützenich, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) faction in the German Bundestag. "My position has not changed. Most wars do not end on the battlefield," Mützenich said.

However, Rolf Mützenich was included not in the terrorists' list but the one made of "Speakers who promote narratives consonant with Russian propaganda," compiled by the Center for countering disinformation at the NSDC. He is in the company of nine more spekers who insist on various Kremlin narratives like Ukraine is to blame for the war; this war is between NATO and Russia; the US sponsors war bio laboratories in Ukraine; the West has provoked Putin; there's need to freeze the conflict; supplying arms to Ukraine will lead to escalation; the West has been humiliating Putin for decades; Russia has freedom of speech, contrary to the US and the West as a whole.

On January 8 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired a missile that shot down a Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 (Boeing 737-800), instantly killing all 176 passengers and the crew. Initially, Iranian authorities denied its responsibility for the crime, but the international pressure backed by evidence provided by western intelligence and Iranian public activists made Tehran admit that the IRGC "mistakenly" targeted a civilian plane "thinking" it was an American cruise missile. Now, after a month of denying that Iran provided Russia with kamikaze drones, Teheran admitted sending "a limited number of drones to Russia months before the Ukraine war."

"If (Ukraine) has any documents in their possession that Russia used Iranian drones in Ukraine, they should provide them to us," he said. "If it is proven to us that Russia used Iranian drones in the war against Ukraine, we will not be indifferent to this issue," the Iranian Foreign Minister said, not dwelling on what indifference he had meant. However, he denied allegations about the missiles. "This fuss made by some Western countries that Iran has provided missiles and drones to Russia to help the war in Ukraine - the missile part is completely wrong," he said.

"Tehran should realize that the consequences of complicity in the crimes of aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine will be much larger than the benefit from Russia's support," Ukrainian Foreign Ministry's spokesperson warned.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said after his visit to Beijing that Xi Jinping opposes nuclear escalation in the military conflict in Ukraine. Addressing his colleagues in the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Mr. Scholz reported on the convergence of views between Berlin and Beijing regarding nuclear weapons.

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4. West Sees Little Choice but to Keep Backing Ukraine

Little choice? Do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

Excerpts:

Mr. Putin says he is open to talks as soon as the U.S. directs Kyiv to negotiate. But given the Russian president’s escalation of the war, his proclaimed annexations of Ukrainian territory and his mobilization of more troops for the front, Western governments are making no attempt to force Mr. Zelensky into peace talks.

“There is no very clear vision of what a final peace settlement could look like” in Western capitals, said Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Warsaw office. “I don’t think either Berlin or Paris or Washington would push Kyiv now to accept something that Zelensky believes is not in the interests of Ukraine.”

Officials say there is the potential for divisions among Western governments, for example if Ukrainian forces further challenge Mr. Putin by seeking to take territory in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. But they say leaders are shelving those questions for now.

West Sees Little Choice but to Keep Backing Ukraine

Putin’s escalation has convinced most Western capitals there is no prospect of peace talks soon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/west-sees-little-choice-but-to-keep-backing-ukraine-11667732754?utm_source=pocket_mylist

By Laurence NormanFollow

Nov. 6, 2022 6:05 am ET

Washington and its allies see little prospect of a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine soon given the high stakes for Moscow and Kyiv, and the fact that both sides believe they can win, Western diplomats say.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its members say they are determined to keep supplying economic and military assistance to Ukraine as it fights to roll back gains made by Russian forces, and to punish Moscow with sanctions for its attack on its smaller neighbor.

Some U.S. lawmakers, worried about the costs of the war and the possibility of escalation, have pushed for peace talks. Republican legislators have questioned continued funding, and a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that support for Ukraine was waning among Republican voters.

But the U.S. and European governments say the Kremlin is escalating the war, rather than creating any opening for genuine negotiations.

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“We welcome President Zelenskyy’s readiness for a just peace based on respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty, and its legitimate right to defend itself from aggression,” foreign ministers from the Group of Seven, a club of large advanced democracies said in a statement on Friday. “Russia’s calls for negotiations are not credible when it continues to escalate the war and issue new threats and disinformation.”

With Ukraine taking back Russian-occupied territory and its citizens facing power and water cuts caused by Russian attacks on civilian targets, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says now isn’t the time to pull back and that no durable peace can be made with Mr. Putin.

Mr. Putin says he is open to talks as soon as the U.S. directs Kyiv to negotiate. But given the Russian president’s escalation of the war, his proclaimed annexations of Ukrainian territory and his mobilization of more troops for the front, Western governments are making no attempt to force Mr. Zelensky into peace talks.

“There is no very clear vision of what a final peace settlement could look like” in Western capitals, said Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Warsaw office. “I don’t think either Berlin or Paris or Washington would push Kyiv now to accept something that Zelensky believes is not in the interests of Ukraine.”

Officials say there is the potential for divisions among Western governments, for example if Ukrainian forces further challenge Mr. Putin by seeking to take territory in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. But they say leaders are shelving those questions for now.

A Ukrainian soldier near the borders with Belarus and Russia.

PHOTO: ED RAM/GETTY IMAGES

Ukrainian soldiers on captured Russian tanks hold military training near Chernihiv, Ukraine.

PHOTO: ALEKSANDR SHULMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In Europe, French President Emmanuel Macron talked recently of Mr. Zelensky eventually having to negotiate peace with Mr. Putin but has insisted that the timing and terms of such a negotiation are for Ukraine to decide.

In Washington, a group of Democratic lawmakers called on the White House to engage in peace talks with the Kremlin over Ukraine before withdrawing their statement. On the other side of the aisle, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy warned on Oct. 18 that there would be no “blank check” for Mr. Zelensky’s government if Republicans retake the House in this week’s midterm elections.

Yet, skeptics of the current course have failed to set out realistic pathways to a durable peace, calling on Western governments to either slash support for Ukraine or push for a swift cease-fire that could allow Moscow to rearm and relaunch the war in a few months from a position of greater strength.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Do you expect Western nations to remain united in their support for Ukraine? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.

Olivier Schmitt, a former French official who is now a professor at the Center for War Studies in Denmark, said that so long as both Ukraine and Russia see a plausible path for victory—Ukraine because of its battlefield gains and Russia by hoping that Western publics will turn against the war—there is little prospect of serious negotiations.

In a speech in Moscow last week, Mr. Putin said it was in Washington’s power to end the war. “They only need to send a signal to Kyiv to change the attitude and strive for peace talks,” he said.

But Mr. Zelensky’s interest in negotiations, which took place for a few weeks in the spring, has waned. Addressing leaders of the Group of Seven economies in a call on Oct. 11, Mr. Zelensky said, “There can be no dialogue with this leader of Russia,” whom he called “an international criminal.”

Officials say to the extent Western governments have shifted rhetoric, it is to persuade domestic audiences that leaders are focused on the goal of a just peace. Diplomats also hope this focus will help keep international diplomatic pressure on Russia at the United Nations and elsewhere.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a call with President Biden last month.

PHOTO: UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT'S OFFICE/ZUMA PRESS

Yet the fundamental goal remains to keep Ukraine strong enough to make further gains on the battlefield and force the Kremlin into eventual talks on its terms.

Mr. Putin “doesn’t share the narrative that he is losing the war,” said François Heisbourg, senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There is absolutely nothing in what he says which opens the space for any sort of substantive discussion.”

That makes unachievable what Western governments say are the basic building blocks of a tenable peace. These, the G-7 leaders said on Oct. 11, include respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, safeguarding its ability to defend itself in future, ensuring its reconstruction and finding a way to pursue accountability for what they called Russian war crimes.

While diplomats say there are private exchanges between Western capitals about possible peace terms, publicly almost all leaders and senior officials have avoided remarks that could box Ukraine in.

In European capitals, there is also nervousness about anything that looks like freelance diplomacy with Russia, diplomats say, after Paris and Berlin caused fractures in Europe by floating possible peace arrangements before the war and engaging regularly with the Kremlin in the first weeks of the conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin chaired a meeting via a video link in Sochi, Russia, earlier this month.

PHOTO: ALEXEI BABUSHKIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Differences could emerge later, officials say.

The thorniest issue, Mr. Schmitt said, will be whether Ukraine should boycott peace talks until it wins back all its lost territory, including Crimea—or if there are talks while Russia continues to occupy parts of Ukraine, how hard Kyiv should press to regain all its territory.

“At some point you will have some countries trying to rein Ukraine in and others saying they are totally within their rights to try and maximize their demands,” he said.

Mr. Buras said another division in Western capitals is over whether any durable peace is possible without Mr. Putin’s ouster.

Yet for now, even politicians who were once leading proponents of closer ties with Russia say the West must stay the course. In a major foreign-policy speech last week, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who in 2015 as foreign minister helped forge the Minsk agreements aimed at bringing peace to Ukraine after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, said Mr. Putin’s war of occupation in Ukraine currently offers no opportunity for compromise.

“I know that many people in our country long for peace. Some believe that there is a lack of serious efforts on our part,” he said. “I can assure you that nobody in their right mind lacks the will. But the truth is that, in the face of evil, good will is not enough.”

People visit graves of Ukrainian soldiers at a military cemetery in Uzhgorod, western Ukraine.

PHOTO: JANOS NEMES/SHUTTERSTOCK

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

5.  Singapore’s new cyberdefence force: a reflection of modern warfare in the digital age

Excerpts:

Cyberattacks have become increasingly commonplace, providing aggressors with a deniable yet effective way of striking an adversary in times of both peace and war, as seen this year in Ukraine, where government and financial institutions, satellite communications systems, and other critical infrastructure have been the repeated target of cyberattacks.

“There is a growing recognition that countries must address the reality that cyber elements are becoming more prevalent in modern warfare,” said Eleanor Shiori Hughes, defence analyst at The Asia Group, a strategic consulting firm in Washington.

Both state and non-state actors have grown increasingly sophisticated in how they carry out cyberattacks, she said, and this has spurred regional countries to devote more resources towards boosting their electronic defence capabilities and safeguarding their digital infrastructure.

Japan launched a newly reorganised cyberdefence unit in May and last Monday said it would boost its personnel numbers fivefold, to 5,000, by 2027 in response to heightened threats. China, meanwhile, launched the space, cyber and electronic warfare branch of its military, called the Strategic Support Force, in 2015. Its personnel numbers are not made public.

Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen highlighted cyber threats and the growing use of disinformation in warfare when he spoke in March of the need for the city state to have a dedicated service tasked with defending its digital borders.

Singapore’s new cyberdefence force: a reflection of modern warfare in the digital age

By Maria Siow South China Morning Post5 min

View Original

• The launch of Singapore’s Digital and Intelligence Service comes as the Ukraine conflict has thrown cyberwarfare and defence into sharper focus
• Analysts said the move ‘may raise eyebrows at first’, but it’s also ‘proactive and forward-looking’ – and part of a wider regional strategy

Maria Siow

+ FOLLOW

Published: 7:30am, 6 Nov, 2022

Defence strategies in the digital age have been forced to adapt to the constantly evolving demands of modern warfare, as the war in Ukraine has shown. Photo: dpa

Singapore late last month joined the growing ranks of Asian nations seeking to defend their digital borders with the formation of its military’s Digital and Intelligence Service (DIS).

Tasked with providing timely intelligence and safeguarding the island state against cyber threats, the Singapore Armed Forces’ fourth branch sits alongside its three traditional ones – the army, navy and air force – and will also work to protect electronic networks and act as an early warning system.

Defence strategies in the digital age have been forced to adapt to the constantly evolving demands of modern warfare, which is now fought almost as extensively in the virtual domain as it is by land, air or sea.

Cyberattacks have become increasingly commonplace, providing aggressors with a deniable yet effective way of striking an adversary in times of both peace and war, as seen this year in Ukraine, where government and financial institutions, satellite communications systems, and other critical infrastructure have been the repeated target of cyberattacks.

“There is a growing recognition that countries must address the reality that cyber elements are becoming more prevalent in modern warfare,” said Eleanor Shiori Hughes, defence analyst at The Asia Group, a strategic consulting firm in Washington.

Both state and non-state actors have grown increasingly sophisticated in how they carry out cyberattacks, she said, and this has spurred regional countries to devote more resources towards boosting their electronic defence capabilities and safeguarding their digital infrastructure.

Japan launched a newly reorganised cyberdefence unit in May and last Monday said it would boost its personnel numbers fivefold, to 5,000, by 2027 in response to heightened threats. China, meanwhile, launched the space, cyber and electronic warfare branch of its military, called the Strategic Support Force, in 2015. Its personnel numbers are not made public.

Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen highlighted cyber threats and the growing use of disinformation in warfare when he spoke in March of the need for the city state to have a dedicated service tasked with defending its digital borders.

Creating defence capabilities to meet the increasingly complex demands of modern warfare “requires not only upgrading military technologies and hardware, there must be organisational agility as well,” said Michael Raska, coordinator of the military transformations programme at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS).

The formation of DIS signals that Singapore recognises the importance of cyberdefence in a world where electronic warfare is no longer “considered abstract and somewhat elusive” but instead “viewed as concrete and real”, said Paul J. Smith, a professor at the US Naval War College who spoke to This Week In Asia in a personal capacity.

“Modern warfare will inevitably feature conflict in this domain,” he said, adding that Singapore had been careful to present the creation of its new military branch “as a capabilities-based decision, as opposed to a threat-based decision” without explicitly naming “where the threat is coming from”.

“This is important because the issue is not where the threat is coming from per se,” Smith said. “Rather, what matters is that Singapore has the capability to counter it regardless of its origin.”

Before this year, Singapore’s first line of defence against electronic threats was the Defence Cyber Organisation, an arm of the defence ministry founded in 2017 as the growing need to counter cyberattacks and other forms of digital warfare became increasingly clear.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only threw this requirement into sharper focus, according to Muhammad Faizal Bin Abdul Rahman, a research fellow at the RSIS’ Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies regional security architecture programme, who compared the rise of cyberwarfare and defence to the birth of national air forces in the 20th century after the then-new technology of flight had begun to turn the tide of battles.

“The Russia-Ukraine war is demonstrating how cyber and digital warfare is an essential element of multi-domain operations,” Muhammad Faizal said, further noting that a number of major powers had made cybersecurity more integral to their defence strategies in recent decades – such as the US Cyber Command, founded in 2010 – though their scale, missions and command structures differ.

Beginning as early as the second half of last year – months before Russia invaded on February 24 – Ukraine was hit with a string of concerted cyberattacks targeting its critical infrastructure and sensitive digital networks.

Russian-backed intelligence and military agencies have been attributed with carrying out the ongoing operations, which have targeted Ukrainian government and financial websites, satellite communications networks and other key systems.

Their next focus, it’s feared, could be Ukraine’s power grids – and any heating infrastructure not already damaged by physical bombardment – as the cold of winter closes in.

Singapore’s move to make cybersecurity more central to its national defence strategy can be viewed as complementing its existing efforts to promote better regional cooperation among Asean militaries through the new ADMM Cybersecurity and Information Centre of Excellence (ACICE) that’s hosted by the island state, Muhammad Faizal said.

Approved at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’s defence ministers last year, the ACICE was set up to share information and build regional cyberdefence capacity.

It’s is also in Singapore’s best interest, as a country with a highly digitised economy and society, to be “proactive and forward-looking” when it comes to cybersecurity, Muhammad Faizal said.

While the move to establish DIS “may raise eyebrows and perhaps interest from neighbouring countries”, Smith from the Naval War College said it’s unlikely to be perceived as threatening.

“Singapore’s military posture is defensive. Its military simply wants to protect the country, not invade or encroach on the interests of others,” he said.

“Singapore is an agile and innovative country that punches above its weight. Many countries envy Singapore’s ability to make bureaucratic changes in a matter of weeks or months that might take other countries years to achieve. I see this latest change as being consistent with this larger pattern.”

Maria Siow

Maria Siow is a long-time China-based correspondent and analyst with keen interest in East Asia. Maria has a masters degree in international relations.

5. Misinformation is bad, but ‘solutions’ to stop it are even worse

Again, I will reprise the 2017 NSS written by Nadia Schadlow and HR McMaster below this excerpt because it is what we all must do:

The solution to misinformation rests not in government or big corporations, but with individual citizens.

People need to fend for themselves and do the hard work to sort out reality from nonsense. If misinformation is a threat to democracy, it is only because citizens collectively failed to demand and identify reasoned arguments. A culture that becomes so gullible and easily duped is the threat to democracy, not any particular batch of misinformation.

The nation must have confidence that truth can prevail and that fellow citizens can figure it out, even if some crazy stuff floats into the national dialogue. The 20^th Century philosopher, G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.”

Fearing misinformation is a danger in itself.

From the 2017 NSS:. This is our responsibility.

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

Access NSS HERE

Misinformation is bad, but ‘solutions’ to stop it are even worse

BY JEFFREY M. MCCALL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 11/05/22 5:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721478-misinformation-is-bad-but-solutions-to-stop-it-are-even-worse/

Americans can agree that misinformation is bad. Stopping it, however, is not so easily accomplished. There are no simple fixes to the spread of misinformation in a free society in which expression is constitutionally protected.

Further, reckless or ill-advised efforts to bring a stop to misinformation could be more harmful to American democracy than the misinformation itself.

An Associated Press/NORC poll released this fall indicates that nine in ten respondents say misinformation is a serious problem in American society. Three-quarters of Americans say misinformation leads to more extreme political views and polarization. Interestingly, however, only 28 percent report they regularly fact-check the news they consume.

Thus, it appears Americans aren’t all that worried about the information they absorb for themselves. They are mostly worried about misinformation in the minds of fellow citizens.

The effort to control misinformation is rather futile, an effort to manage the unmanageable. Misinformation gets spread routinely in the establishment media, in the social media, by governments both foreign and domestic, by big corporations and kooks on YouTube. Presidents, too, have been famously fact-challenged. Topics of misinformation include the economy, elections, COVID, and civil disturbances from the summer of 2020 and Jan. 6.

For many people, misinformation is just somebody else’s information that they don’t like. Yelling about misinformation stirs up the public sphere and provides a rhetorical club to discredit and even shut down sociopolitical opponents. This “hair on fire” approach to misinformation doesn’t lead to reasoned debate and correction of error, but instead to fear, confusion and anger.

Misinformation is now a supposed threat to democracy itself, in the eyes of some alarmists, and therefore must be eliminated by any means. Of course, if misinformation were a threat to democracy, America would have disintegrated long ago.

While Americans agree that misinformation if harmful to the political culture, nobody has a great idea for how to stop it. Social media companies are surely not up to the task, either logistically or ideologically. Big tech’s efforts to manage misinformation have been unevenly applied and shrouded in the mystery of the basements in Silicon Valley. Establishment media, likewise, have so little credibility these days that news consumers have no confidence in big media as information referees.

The government can’t possibly be in charge of managing the broader information landscape because it is self-interested. Governments that control the flow of information aren’t doing journalism or providing education. They are, by definition, disseminating spin, at best — propaganda at worst.

The nation of Turkey has recently imposed its “solution” to misinformation. Like other authoritarian nations, Turkey has adopted a law to simply imprison anybody who disseminates “false or misleading information.” Of course, there is no clear definition of what constitutes misinformation, leaving enforcement decisions to President Erdogan and his police force. Essentially, political opponents who express disagreement with administration positions are now subject to being jailed.

The United States isn’t yet in Turkey territory, but it is clear that big government wants to intervene in the information marketplace. The Department of Homeland Security announced a Disinformation Governance Board earlier this year. The plan was eventually scrapped because of confusion over its mission and concerns about the board’s reach. Still, based on recent reports, it appears DHS hasn’t abandoned its overall goal of trying to control information on a range of matters, including COVID, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, racial justice, and the war in Ukraine.

A bill just proposed in Congress would create an ombudsman in the Department of Health and Human Services whose job it would be to root out “reproductive and sexual health misinformation.” The application of this bill, if it were to become law, would be quite different depending on the party of the HHS Secretary appointing the ombudsman.

The solution to misinformation rests not in government or big corporations, but with individual citizens.

People need to fend for themselves and do the hard work to sort out reality from nonsense. If misinformation is a threat to democracy, it is only because citizens collectively failed to demand and identify reasoned arguments. A culture that becomes so gullible and easily duped is the threat to democracy, not any particular batch of misinformation.

It can happen here — It is happening here

Local newscasts having devastating impact on Democrats. Here’s why.

The nation must have confidence that truth can prevail and that fellow citizens can figure it out, even if some crazy stuff floats into the national dialogue. The 20^th Century philosopher, G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.”

Fearing misinformation is a danger in itself.

Jeffrey M. McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant. Follow him on Twitter @Prof_McCall.

TAGS DISINFORMATION FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION FREEDOM OF SPEECH MISINFORMATION

7. Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday’s Midterms

Say it isn't so.

Excerpts:

As before, it may be hard to measure the exact impact of these accounts on voters come Tuesday. At a minimum, they contribute to what Edward P. Perez, a board member with the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan election security organization, called “manufactured chaos” in the country’s body politic.

While Russians in the past sought to build large followings for their inauthentic accounts on the major platforms, today’s campaigns could be smaller and yet still achieve a desired effect — in part because the divisions in American society are already such fertile soil for disinformation, he said.

“Since 2016, it appears that foreign states can afford to take some of the foot off the gas,” Mr. Perez, who previously worked at Twitter, said, “because they have already created such sufficient division that there are many domestic actors to carry the water of disinformation for them.”

Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday’s Midterms

nytimes.com · by Steven Lee Myers · November 6, 2022

The St. Petersburg building that is said to be the site of the Russian Internet Research Agency. Cybersecurity researchers have tied the agency to a new Russian misinformation effort.Credit...Mstyslav Chernov/Associated Press

The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol.

The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine’s president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda.

The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence.

The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future.

It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, though more narrowly targeted, Russian effort ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.

“It’s clear they are trying to get them to cut off aid and money to Ukraine,” said Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations official now with Providence Consulting Group, a business technology company.

The campaign — using accounts that pose as enraged Americans like Nora Berka — have added fuel to the most divisive political and cultural issues in the country today.

It has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most contested races, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could help the Russian war effort.

The campaigns show not only how vulnerable the American political system remains to foreign manipulation but also how purveyors of disinformation have evolved and adapted to efforts by the major social media platforms to remove or play down false or deceptive content.

Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert warning of the threat of disinformation spread by “dark web media channels, online journals, messaging applications, spoofed websites, emails, text messages and fake online personas.” The disinformation could include claims that voting data or results had been hacked or compromised.

The agencies urged people not to like, discuss or share posts online from unknown or distrustful sources. They did not identify specific efforts, but social media platforms and researchers who track disinformation have recently uncovered a variety of campaigns by Russia, China and Iran.

• Grain Deal: Russia rejoined an agreement allowing the shipment of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, one of the few areas of cooperation amid the war, easing uncertainty over the fate of a deal seen as crucial to preventing famine in other parts of the world.
• On the Diplomatic Front: The Group of 7 nations announced that they would work together to rebuild critical infrastructure in Ukraine that has been destroyed by Russia’s military and to defend such sites from further attacks.
• Turning the Tables: With powerful Western weapons and deadly homemade drones, Ukraine now has an artillery advantage in the south, where a battle for the city of Kherson appears to be imminent. The work of reconnaissance teams penetrating enemy lines has also proven key in breaking Russia’s hold in the territory.
• Refugees: The war has sent the numbers of Ukrainians seeking shelter in Europe soaring, pushing asylum seekers from other conflicts to the end of the line.

Recorded Future and two other social media research companies, Graphika and Mandiant, found a number of Russian campaigns that have turned to Gab, Parler, Getter and other newer platforms that pride themselves on creating unmoderated spaces in the name of free speech.

These are much smaller campaigns than those in the 2016 election, where inauthentic accounts reached millions of voters across the political spectrum on Facebook and other major platforms. The efforts are no less pernicious, though, in reaching impressionable users who can help accomplish Russian objectives, researchers said.

“The audiences are much, much smaller than on your other traditional social media networks,” said Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future who identified the Nora Berka account. “But you can engage the audiences in much more targeted influence ops because those who are on these platforms are generally U.S. conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims.”

Many of the accounts the researchers identified were previously used by a news outlet calling itself the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has previously linked the news outlet to the Russian information campaigns centered around the Internet Research Agency.

The network appears to have since disbanded, and many of the social media accounts associated with it went dormant after being publicly identified around the 2020 election. The accounts started becoming active again in August and September, called to action like sleeper cells.

Nora Berka’s account on Gab has many of the characteristics of an inauthentic user, Mr. Liston said. There is no profile picture or identifying biographical details. No one responded to a message sent to the account through Gab.

The account, with more than 8,000 followers, posts exclusively on political issues — not in just one state but across the country — and often spreads false or misleading posts. Most have little engagement but a recent post about the F.B.I. received 43 responses and 11 replies, and was reposted 64 times.

Since September the account has repeatedly shared links to a previously unknown website — electiontruth.net — that Recorded Future said was almost certainly linked to the Russian campaign.

Electiontruth.net’s earliest posts date only from Sept. 5; since then, it has posted articles almost daily ridiculing President Biden and prominent Democratic candidates, while criticizing policies regarding race, crime and gender that it said were destroying the United States. “America under Communism” was one typical headline.

The articles all have pseudonyms as bylines, like Andrew J, Truth4Ever and Laura. According to Mr. Liston, the website domain was registered using Bitcoin accounts.

For its contact information, electiontruth.net lists a cafe inside a converted gas station in Cotter, Ark., a town of 900 people on a bend in the White River. The cafe has closed, however, and been replaced by Cotter Bridge Market, a produce shop and deli whose owners said they knew nothing about the website. No one at Election Truth responded to a request for comment submitted through the site.

Mr. Liston said that links to electiontruth.net appeared to be closely coordinated with the accounts on Gab linked to the Russians.

In another campaign, Graphika identified a recent series of cartoons that appeared on Gab, Gettr, Parler and the discussion forum patriots.win. The cartoons, by an artist named “Schmitz,” disparaged Democrats in the tightest Senate and governor races.

One targeting Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is Black, employed racist motifs. Another falsely claimed that Representative Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, would release “all Fentanyl distributors and drug traffickers” from prison.

The cartoons received little engagement and did not spread virally to other platforms, according to Graphika.

A recurring theme of the new Russian efforts is an argument that the United States under President Biden is wasting money by supporting Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion that began in February.

Nora Berka, for example, posted a doctored photograph in September that showed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as a bikini-wearing poll dancer being showered with dollar bills by Mr. Biden.

“As working class Americans struggle to afford food, gas, and find baby formula, Joe Biden wants to spend $13.7 billion more in aid to Ukraine,” the account posted. Not incidentally, that post echoed a theme that has gained some traction among Republican lawmakers and voters who have questioned the delivery of weapons and other military assistance.

“It’s no secret that Republicans — that a large portion of Republicans — have questioned whether we should be supporting what has been referred to as foreign adventures or somebody else’s conflict,” said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Digital Forensics Lab at the Atlantic Council, which has also been tracking foreign influence operations.

The F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency did not respond to requests for comment about the Russian efforts. Mr. Brookie called the revived accounts “recidivist behavior.” Gab did not respond to a request for comment.

As before, it may be hard to measure the exact impact of these accounts on voters come Tuesday. At a minimum, they contribute to what Edward P. Perez, a board member with the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan election security organization, called “manufactured chaos” in the country’s body politic.

While Russians in the past sought to build large followings for their inauthentic accounts on the major platforms, today’s campaigns could be smaller and yet still achieve a desired effect — in part because the divisions in American society are already such fertile soil for disinformation, he said.

“Since 2016, it appears that foreign states can afford to take some of the foot off the gas,” Mr. Perez, who previously worked at Twitter, said, “because they have already created such sufficient division that there are many domestic actors to carry the water of disinformation for them.”

nytimes.com · by Steven Lee Myers · November 6, 2022

8.  Special operation forces induct notable veterans at Fort Bragg

Excerpts:

Special Forces Regiment Distinguished members 

∎ Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee

∎ Retired Maj. Gen. Salvatore “Sal” Cambria 

∎ Retired Col. Jerry Sage

∎ Retired Chief Warrant Officer 5 Douglas D. Frank 

∎ Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Richard C. Lamb  (the article failed to note his award of the Silver Star for his actions against the north Korean attack at the Joint Security Area,Panmunjom in 1984)

Psychological Operations 

∎ Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Robert S. Groover

∎ Retired Col. Norvell B. DeAtkine

∎ The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops' tactical-deception group, “Ghost Army,” was named as an honorary member of the Psychological Operations Regiment

Civil Affairs 

∎ Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Tony A. Sandoval 

Special operation forces induct notable veterans at Fort Bragg

https://www.fayobserver.com/story/news/military/2022/11/04/special-forces-psychological-operations-and-civil-affairs-honors/69601087007/

Rachael Riley

The Fayetteville Observer

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FORT BRAGG — The Special Forces, Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs community named eight new soldiers and veterans and one Army unit as distinguished and honorary members during induction ceremonies Thursday. 

Known as distinguished or honorary members of regiments, the inductions are a link between veterans and current soldiers, said Maj. Gen. Patrick Roberson, deputy commander of the U.S Special Operations Command.  

“We need to recognize the architects of our past success ... We can learn a lot from these guys,” Roberson said. 

Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Richard Lamb, who comes from a military family, donned a World War II uniform as he was inducted into the regiment during Thursday’s ceremony. 

“It’s humbling,” Lamb said afterward. “We didn't do it ourselves. We stood on the shoulders of giants who acted as surrogate fathers and best friends or kept me out of trouble.” 

Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Tony Sandoval also used the word humbling to describe what it means to be inducted along with a Medal of Honor recipient and former prisoner of war. 

“Sometimes you feel like you don’t belong in that group,” Sandoval said. “You don’t join the Army for these kinds of accolades. You just kind of do your job and other people will decide if you’re worth it or not, but it’s very humbling to be mentioned with some of (the fellow inductees) and to be in the same room as them.” 

More:'Willingness to take risks': Former Special Forces Delta commander inducted into regiment

Special Forces Regiment Distinguished members 

∎ Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee, a Clinton, Oklahoma, native, was awarded the Medal of Honor on Dec. 16. 

Plumlee earned the Medal of Honor for his actions in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, while serving as a weapons sergeant with Charlie Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group. 

According to the MOH citation, Aug. 28, 2013, Plumlee responded to an explosion when Forward Operating Base Ghani was attacked and 10 insurgents wearing Afghan national army uniforms and suicide vests poured through a breach in the base’s perimeter wall. 

Plumlee rushed toward the detonation site along with five other special operations soldiers in two mounted vehicles. 

Plumlee’s driver maneuvered his vehicle around enemy fire to shield three dismounted teammates, but two were injured. 

Plumlee used his body to shield the driver from enemy fire and exited the vehicle to engage insurgents 15 meters away. 

“Without cover and with complete disregard for his safety, he advanced toward the enemy force, engaging multiple insurgents with only his pistol,” Plumlee’s citation states. “Upon reaching cover, he killed two insurgents. Plumlee left cover and continued to advance alone.” 

Plumlee temporarily withdrew to take cover and join another soldier but soon re-engaged the enemy disregarding his own injuries. 

Joining a small group of American and coalition soldiers, Plumlee advanced to engage insurgents and ran to a wounded soldier to carry him to safety and render first aid. 

He organized three coalition members in a defensive stance, as he scanned the area for any remaining threats. 

“Throughout the entire engagement, Plumlee repeatedly placed himself in extreme danger to protect his team and the base, and to defeat the enemy,” his citation states. 

∎ Retired Maj. Gen. Salvatore “Sal” Cambria served in the Army for 36 years. 

After graduating as an honor graduate from the Special Forces Qualification Course, Cambria served as commander for Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alpha in the 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group in Bad Tolz, Germany. 

His other assignments included as operations officer and chief of current operations for the 1^st Special Operations Command; operations officer in a special mission unit; commander of the Support Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Training Group; and commander of the 7th Special Forces Group. 

Cambria was the first Special Forces officer selected to command two theater special operations commands — Special Operations Command South in Florida, and Special Operations Command Pacific in Hawaii. 

Cambria employed special operations troops in support of Plan Colombia, a diplomatic initiative conceived in 1999 by Colombian President Andrés Pastrana and U.S. President Bill Clinton to combat Colombian drug cartels and left-wing insurgent groups in Colombia. 

He also was involved in Operation Secure Tomorrow in Haiti, which was designed to protect U.S. interests and implement U.S. foreign policy. 

As commander of the Special Operations Command Pacific, he planned and coordinated employment of special operations troops in support of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s objectives to enhance stability in the Indo-Pacific region. 

Cambria was responsible for employment of a Special Operations Joint Task Force in support of Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines, which was part of the Global War on Terror and targeted various Jihadist terror groups operating in the country. 

Cambria culminated his military career as the director of operations and logistics for the U.S. Africa Command, where he planned, organized and synchronized joint military combat operations in support of Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya. 

He also oversaw the planning and directed the execution of a hostage rescue mission in Somalia, and coordinated planning for training and security assistance activities across 54 African nations. 

∎ Retired Col. Jerry Sage joined the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps in 1938 at the State College of Washington and joined the Army on Dec. 9, 1941, as an infantry officer. 

During his career, he earned a few nicknames including “Dagger,” while showing knife fighting skills when training with the British Special Operations Executive and “Cooler King,” during World War II when he was captured numerous times in prison camps and had more than 15 escape attempts that inspired the Steve McQueen character in “The Great Escape”. 

 Post-war, Sage coordinated the repatriation of displaced people based on his language skills developed during captivity. 

 At the height of the Cold War, his leadership and infantry command experience in Korea with the 5th Regimental Combat Team earned his selection to command the 10th Special Forces Group in Bad Tolz, Germany, from August 1963 to September 1965. 

The final test for the Special Forces Qualifications Course, Robin Sage, bares Col. Sage's name combined with the name of the town of Robbins where the first exercise was held in 1952.

In the later part of his career, Sage served in the Pentagon in two Special Forces-related assignments: first on the Army Staff developing the unconventional warfare training requirements for Special Forces, and then within the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff developing strategic plans for the employment of special operations. 

After retiring from the military in 1982, Sage became an educator and mentor at the collegiate and high school levels, developing a civics course for the University of South Carolina and being named High School Teacher of the Year for the state of South Carolina in 1978. 

Col. Sage died in 1993 at the age of 75.

∎ Retired Chief Warrant Officer 5 Douglas D. Frank joined the Minnesota Army National Guard in 1976 as an infantryman before becoming a military policeman for the Army two years later. 

 In 1985, he graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course and was assigned to the 7th Special Forces Group, where he spent the next five years. 

In 1990, Frank was appointed as a Special Forces warrant officer, serving as assistant detachment commander and detachment commander for the 7th Special Forces Group. 

Frank is credited with influencing the Special Forces Warrant Officer Program and was the first Special Forces-qualified Training, Advising, and Counseling officer at the Warrant Officer Candidate School at Fort Rucker, Alabama. 

He helped form the Special Forces Warrant Officer Institute, which led to the U.S. John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School becoming one of only two organizations authorized to appoint and commission Army warrant officers. 

After more than 38 years of military service, Frank served as an honorary warrant officer of the regiment for four years and as the operations director for the Special Forces Charitable Trust. 

He continues to be an active member of the Special Forces Association and is a co-founder and executive director of Warrior Sportsmen Inc., a nonprofit organization that supports Green Berets. 

∎ Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Richard C. Lamb enlisted in the Army in 1978 and participated in Operation Eagle Claw as an infantryman with the 1st Battalion, 75th Rangers. 

After completing the Special Forces Qualification Course in 1986, Lamb was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group in Panama, where he participated in Operation Just Cause. 

He served as a platoon sergeant and operations sergeant with the 75^th Ranger Regiment during Operation Gothic Serpent, where he became a Purple Heart recipient. 

Lamb served as a weapons sergeant, intelligence sergeant and operations sergeant for the 3^rd and 7^th Special Forces Groups, before becoming a company sergeant major for the 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group in Stuttgart, Germany, where he participated in Operation Joint Forge in Bosnia. 

His command sergeant major assignments included the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa in Djibouti during Operation Enduring Freedom and the 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group during Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

After retirement in 2003, Lamb served under the U.S. Special Operations Command's Special Operations Forces for Life program. 

He cross-trained as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, focusing on the Global War on Terror, and helped establish an interagency task force and integrated 24 allied partners into a first-ever, Multinational Directorate for the U.S. Southern Command. 

From 2015 to 2017, Lamb served as a Global Force Management technician with the Special Operations Command Korea. 

He currently serves as a military liaison for the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation and the Round Canopy Parachuting Team, organizations that honor, advocate for and assist airborne and special operations veterans. 

Psychological Operations 

∎ Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Robert S. Groover, a native of Orlando, Florida, joined the Army in 1994 and was first assigned to the 20^th Engineers at Fort Bragg. 

He reclassified as a psychological operations specialist in 2003 after being assigned as an intelligence analyst to the 1^st Psychological Operations Battalion in 2000. 

In 2004, his first assignment was as a detachment sergeant and he lead his detachment during the surge in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

After several team members died during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Groover became passionate about advocacy and support for the Psychological Operations Regiment to include outreach to Gold Star families; the Institutionalized Professional Development School Award Memorialization; establishing a regimental hallway that honors fallen soldiers and creating a local chapter of the Psychological Operations Regimental Association. 

Groover served with the 1st Psychological Operations Battalion during the height of the Counterdrug Operations in 2006 and was responsible for teams across Central and South America that had a role in the fall of the Marxist-Leninist Guerrilla Group known as “The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.” 

“The effects of interagency cooperation reduced illicit drug trafficking and drugs from entering the United States,” Groover’s biography states. 

During his military career, Groover served as the first sergeant for Delta Company, 9th Psychological Operations Battalion in support of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian Peninsula and supported the Naval Special Warfare teams to counter ISIS in the East, North and West. 

As a sergeant major, Groover increased the impact of the only Psychological Operations Tactical Battalion across combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

He is credited with redesigning his battalion into a task-organized force to meet the Central Command and Special Operations Command central mission requirements and optimizing the Army Force Generation Training Cycle to synchronize a reduced training window with other special operation forces organizations. 

∎ Retired Col. Norvell B. DeAtkine commissioned into the Army as a field artillery officer after graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point. 

 As an artilleryman, he served in positions of increasing responsibility, including a tour in Vietnam, before being chosen foreign area officer for the Middle East. 

DeAtkine earned his master’s in Arab studies from the American University Beirut, Lebanon while serving as the senior defense attache at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. 

He is credited with helping modernize the Jordanian army. He culminated his military career with an assignment as the chief of the Land Forces Section, Office of Military Program, which was responsible for modernizing Egyptian ground forces from Soviet to U.S. armament. 

DeAtkine has also served as director of Middle East Studies and a regional studies academic coordinator for the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School and helped develop a regional studies course for psychological operations and civil affairs officers. 

For more than 18 years, DeAtkine served as a Middle East seminar leader training psychological operations officers who developed psychological operations after 9/11 during the early years of the Global War on Terror in the Middle East.

∎ The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops' tactical-deception group, “Ghost Army,” was named as an honorary member of the Psychological Operations Regiment. 

Many of the tactics, techniques and procedures pioneered by the Ghost Army are used today by psychological operations regiments. 

The Ghost Army officially activated Jan. 20, 1944, at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, as a mobile multimedia unit that was “designed, manned, trained, equipped and dedicated solely to conduct and execute military deception.” 

The “Ghost Army” was comprised of existing units to establish one new company of about 1,100 soldiers and included the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion Special; the Signal Company Special; the 3132 Signal Service Company Special; and the 406th Engineer Combat Company Special along with a headquarters company. 

The unit was under Gen. Omar Bradley’s 12th U.S. Army Group and executed secret operations plans. 

The unit is credited with saving about 15,000 to 30,000 allied lives while rarely engaging in direct combat. 

Out of the 1,100-man unit, the only surviving members are John Christman of Leesburg, New Jersey; George Dramis, of Raleigh; Manny Frockt of West Palm Beach Florida; Mark Mallardi of Edgewater Florida; Bill Nall of Dunnellon, Florida; and Seymour Nussenbum of Monroe Township, New Jersey. 

More:Fort Bragg's Special Forces, Psychological Operations, Civil Affairs induct honorary members

Civil Affairs 

∎ Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Tony A. Sandoval is a Nevada native who joined the Army on Nov. 15, 1989, as an infantryman. 

After serving in various infantry positions and assignments from 1990 to 2003, he graduated from the civil affairs course in 2003. 

Sandoval said he had no intention of staying with civil affairs, but stuck with it after his son was born with medical complications in 2004. 

“I got to work in very small teams and go into places I would have never got go to in regular infantry units, and it kind of drew me to it,” he said. “It’s one of those jobs in (special operations forces) that you either love it or you hate it. There's no in-between. You got to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.” 

Sandoval served as an operational civil affairs first sergeant from 2006 to 2010, directing multiple civil affairs operations in five countries in West and North Africa to support Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans Sahara. 

He said working with different cultures in South America, the Middle East and Europe, makes him appreciative of the U.S. 

“You don’t want to force stuff on them,” he said. “You want to let them see how we operate …. and people are very appreciative of anything we do for them.” 

As a 95^th Civil Affairs Brigade operations sergeant from 2010 to 2012, Sandoval helped supervise the first two iterations of the brigade’s Special Operations Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection Program and created the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade Company Command and first sergeant Pre-Command courses. 

From 2012 to 2017, Sandoval served as the senior advisor to the commander in support of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Southern Command, providing leadership, guidance and input to all operational deployments in support of special operations and conventional forces. 

After retiring in 2018, Sandoval continued to be involved in supporting civil affairs soldiers through his involvment in the Friends of the Civil Affairs organization, which has raised money for Family Readiness Groups, scholarships, family assistance and a 95th Civil Affairs Brigade memorial stone at the Airborne and Special Operations Museum and the U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s Memorial Plaza. 

Sandoval currently lives in Fayetteville with his wife and two sons. 

Outgoing and incoming honorary regiment leaders 

Also recognized Thursday were retired Brig. Gen. Ferdinand Irizarry, outgoing honorary colonel of the regiment; retired Col. James Wolff, incoming honorary colonel of the regiment; retired Command Sgt. Maj. Timothy Kohring, outgoing honorary command sergeant major of the regiment; and Sandoval, incoming honorary command sergeant major of the regiment.  

9. What a hybrid war is and how it applies to the UK, Russia and Ukraine

Definition and terminology paralysis. What do we want to call it?

I have been carrying this list around since I saw the slide at CGSC in Leavenworth in 1994.

•Little Wars

•Small Wars

•Guerrillas

•Guerrilla warfare

•Partisan warfare

•Asymmetric warfare

•Low Intensity Conflict

•Low Intensity Opns

•Insurgency

•Counterinsurgency

•COIN

•Terrorism

•Counter-terrorism

•Anti-terrorism

•Imperial Policing

•Nation Building

•Intervention

•Irregular Warfare

•Wars amongst peoples

•Operations Other Than War

•Military Operations Other Than War

•OOTW

•MOOTW

•Gray Area Phenomena

•Revolutionary War

•Insurrection

•Counter-narcotics opns

•Counter Drug opns

•Punitive opns

•Peace opns

•Small scale contingencies

•Stability opns

•SASO

•Nation Assistance

•Occupation

•Uncomfortable Wars

•4GW

•5GW

•Civil wars

What a hybrid war is and how it applies to the UK, Russia and Ukraine

Experts have suggested the UK and Russia are involved in a ‘hybrid war’ – a modern type of warfare that involves more unconventional methods of fighting, such as propaganda, deception, sabotage and other non-military tactics

inews.co.uk · by Alex Finnis · November 2, 2022

The UK is not at war with Russia in a traditional sense. While Britain backs Ukraine and has been providing it with support since Russia’s invasion back in February, British troops have not been sent to fight and are not engaging Russia directly.

However, experts have suggested the UK and Russia are involved in a “hybrid war” – a more modern type of warfare that does not necessarily involve gunfire.

Casey Fleming, CEO of business warfare and counterintelligence company BlackOps Partners, told Epoch TV: “You’re in World War III today. It’s called hybrid warfare. We’re not aware of it, we don’t understand it… But hybrid warfare, you’re in it, you’ve been in it, and it’s peaking, and it’s maturing at this point.”

But what exactly is hybrid warfare, and how does it apply to the UK and Russia? Here’s everything you need to know.

What is hybrid warfare?

Hybrid warfare is a theory of military strategy that involves more unconventional methods of fighting, such as propaganda, deception, sabotage and other non-military tactics.

Nato says: “Hybrid threats combine military and non-military as well as covert and overt means, including disinformation, cyber attacks, economic pressure, deployment of irregular armed groups and use of regular forces.

“Hybrid methods are used to blur the lines between war and peace, and attempt to sow doubt in the minds of target populations. They aim to destabilise and undermine societies.

“The speed, scale and intensity of hybrid threats have increased in recent years. Being prepared to prevent, counter and respond to hybrid attacks, whether by state or non-state actors, is a top priority for Nato.”

How are the UK and Russia in a hybrid war?

Earlier this year, Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused the West of launching a “total hybrid war” against Russia.

He said: “The collective West has declared total hybrid war on us and it is hard to predict how long all this will last but it is clear the consequences will be felt by everyone, without exception.

“We are no strangers to sanctions: they were almost always there in one form or another.”

However, there is far more evidence of Russia engaging in hybrid tactics against the UK.

Last month, it emerged a phone belonging to Liz Truss was allegedly hacked while she was foreign secretary by agents suspected to be working for Vladimir Putin.

This reportedly allowed them to gain access to details of negotiations with key international allies.

The Government has not confirmed these reports. Cabinet minister, Michael Gove, told Sky News on Sunday: “I don’t know the full details of what security breach, if any, took place.

“What I do know is that the Government has very robust protocols in place in order to make sure that individuals are protected, but also that Government security and national security are protected as well.

“I think all of us have to be sensitive, particularly those of us in Government, to the fact that the more we talk in detail about these things, the more that we risk giving information to people who wish this country and its citizens harm.”

Chair of the Defence Select Committee, Tobias Ellwood, said: “This is a constant threat from Russia, they are getting better and better at these cyber attacks and hacking. We take the most stringent measures to make sure it doesn’t happen.

“It is something for the intelligence and security committee to investigate further.”

Russia’s reduction of gas flow to Europe via the Nord Stream could also be described as hybrid warfare, and is partly responsible for soaring energy prices.

There have also been reports of fibre-optic cables being cut, allegedly by Russian vessels, both in the Mediterranean and around the UK, disrupting broadband.

inews.co.uk · by Alex Finnis · November 2, 2022

10. 10th Group enhances SFAB’s advisory roles

The SFAB is not a challenge to Special Forces missions. A proficient SFAB is good for our national security.

10th Group enhances SFAB’s advisory roles

Public Affairs OfficeNov 3, 20220

https://www.fortcarsonmountaineer.com/2022/11/10th-group-enhances-sfabs-advisory-roles/

FORT CARSON, Colo. — A 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) Operator demonstrated the importance of terrain models to Soldiers assigned to 1st Battalion, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade in Fort Carson Sept. 29, 2022. Green Berets assisted, advised, and assessed 1st Battalion, 4th SFAB to enhance their capabilities and form an everlasting partnership. (Photo by Sgt. Isaih Vega)

By Sgt. Isaih Vega

10th Special Forces Group (Airborne)

FORT CARSON, Colo. — 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) hosted a combined training exercise with the 1st Battalion, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB), to enhance their advisory capabilities at Fort Carson Sept. 26, 2022 to Oct. 5, 2022.

FORT CARSON, Colo. — A 1st Battalion, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade Soldier rehearse reconnaissance movement and camouflage procedures prior to the main exercise in Fort Carson Sept. 29, 2022. Green Berets assisted, advised, and assessed 1st Battalion, 4th SFAB to enhance their capabilities and form an everlasting partnership. (Photo by Sgt. Isaih Vega)

SFABs are specialized units with the core mission to conduct training, advise, assist, enable and accompany allied and partner nations. Special Forces goals align with SFAB and it creates a combined partnership that allows both parties to be more effective and efficient in accomplishing their missions.

“We need to be able to look at how to export any of our capabilities into an advisory role working by, with and through people,” said a team sergeant with 10th SFG (A).

During the first five days of training, the 10th SFG (A) operators advised and assisted the SFAB to improve their proficiency in terrain modeling, day and night tactical movement, movement under fire and communication. The key importance of this training is to enhance the capacity in advising roles with partner allies.

“Because of the wide array of support military occupational specialties (MOS) and experiences we have, we are able to create lesson plans that teach them the same capability and be able to employ it,” said a team sergeant with 10th SFG (A).

Members of 10th SFG (A) and the SFAB cooperated in a culminating exercise that showcased the potency of their partnership. At the beginning of the operation, 10th SFG (A) and the SFAB reconnaissance team members performed a night infiltration operation and spent the first two days observing the targeted location and reporting activities of the opposing force.

FORT CARSON, Colo. — A 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) operator conducts site reconnaissance with a 1st Battalion, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade, Soldier at Fort Carson Oct. 4, 2022. Green Berets assisted, advised and assessed 1st Battalion, 4th SFAB, to enhance their capabilities and form an everlasting partnership. (Photo by Sgt. Isaih Vega)

On the final day of the exercise, the main body of 10th SFG (A) and the SFAB infiltrated the location and performed a close quarter battle. After the raid, both groups completed an exfiltration via UH-60 Black Hawk to a different site where 10th SFG (A) and the SFAB medics performed aid to a simulated wounded Soldier.

Throughout the exercise Green Berets assessed the SFAB to enhance their capabilities and form an everlasting partnership. This allowed the SFAB Soldiers to amplify their standard operating procedures for any future deployments.

“The training provided my advisory team with a brilliant look at tactics, techniques and procedures that have been used by the Special Forces groups,” said an SFAB team leader. “The training event was mirrored after a European theater situation that put both of our teams in a partnership role, one advising the other.”

11. Philippine military chief: Communist guerrillas down to 24 fronts nationwide

The communist threat remains and it is an existential threat to the Philippines as unlike the insurgencies in the Southern Philippines it seeks the overthrow of the Republic of the Philippines.

Philippine military chief: Communist guerrillas down to 24 fronts nationwide

benarnews.org

Battlefield victories in a counter-insurgency campaign have slashed the strength of communist rebels in the Philippines by nearly 75 percent to two dozen “guerrilla fronts,” the country’s military chief said Thursday.

The number of guerrillas in the communist New People’s Army (NPA) has also fallen since the campaign began in 2018, said Lt. Gen. Bartolome Bacarro, the armed forces’ chief of staff.

“We are happy to report that right now, out of the 89, we’re confronting just 24 guerrilla fronts,” Bacarro told reporters in an online news conference after a high-level meeting of the national anti-communist task force (NTF-ELCAC).

“In terms of their manpower, we have reduced them to 2,112 [fighters].”

Established under then-President Rodrigo Duterte, the task force is responsible for executing the government’s strategy to end the communist insurgency that began in 1969, and is the longest-running one in Asia. The NPA is the military wing of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines.

The strategy has focused on sustained military operations against guerrilla units coupled with local government programs to entice rebels to defect, including amnesty and economic aid packages.

Duterte created the task force shortly after he terminated peace talks with the communists in 2017, when he accused them of treachery by carrying out attacks while they engaged Manila in peace negotiations.

Human rights groups, meanwhile, have warned against the task force’s overarching powers, including its propensity to accuse political opponents of being communists or communist supporters despite a lack of evidence. They accused Duterte of using the task force to silence critics.

‘The challenge we have right now’

Bacarro said 19 of the 24 “guerrilla fronts” had been significantly weakened and would be declared dismantled soon.

The military has been going after five active guerrilla fronts in the central province of Samar and in South Cotabato, a province in the main southern island of Mindanao. These rebel units’ operations encompass more than 150 villages.

“We are focusing on those active guerilla fronts. That is the challenge that we have right now,” Bacarro said.

The NPA’s overall armory is down to an estimated 1,800 firearms, according to Bacarro who did not say how authorities got this information.

Previously, military leaders estimated the NPA had about 5,000 fighters nationwide scattered across remote areas, down from at least 20,000 at its peak in the 1980s.

The military recently declared Duterte’s southern home town, Davao city, as free of communist insurgency. It is the third area after Ilocos and Zamboanga to receive such a declaration.

Bacarro admitted that the military failed to crush the NPA forces by the time Duterte ended his six-year term on June 30.

“The conditions then were not favorable, we had COVID-19. So that is our priority now,” he said of efforts to dismantle all the NPA guerrilla fronts.

National Security Adviser Clarita Carlos, the task force vice chairman, convened a top-level meeting on Thursday to review the government’s anti-insurgency goals.

“What we have done in this four-hour long meeting of the NTF-ELCAC would really be to reiterate the philosophical and operational basis of the NTF-ELCAC which is the whole of nation and a whole of government work,” Carlos said.

“Which means everybody has to row together in the same direction to obliterate all the obstacles to our national development. This would be in the case of the enemies of the state to make sure that all our 42,000 barangays would really have a chance to be part of our economic growth,” he said.

benarnews.org

12. Send Ukraine C-RAMs and VAMPIREs to help defeat Iranian drones

Excerpts:

As Washington reduced force structure in the Middle East, a decision was made to halt C-RAM production. The Army, however, can provide 3 or 4 of its current C-RAM systems to Ukraine immediately to help Kyiv address the drone threat until the VAMPIRE systems arrive. The Army will need to procure more anti-drone systems to replace the ones sent to Ukraine and strengthen existing American vulnerabilities, with the goal of ensuring that U.S. Central Command has sufficient systems to protect U.S. troops when the next escalation comes from Tehran and its terror proxies.

As the Kremlin escalates its cruise missile and Iranian-drone attacks against the people of Ukraine, Americans can do more than just condemn the attacks. In addition to ensuring Ukraine receives the full allotment of NASAMS as quickly as possible, the United States should also send C-RAMS and VAMPIRE systems without delay. Together, they can save Ukrainian lives and ultimately help defeat the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion.

Send Ukraine C-RAMs and VAMPIREs to help defeat Iranian drones

By Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery (ret.) and Bradley Bowman

 Nov 4, 04:19 PM

c4isrnet.com · by Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery (ret.) · November 4, 2022

A group of Iranian-provided Shahed-136 drones struck Kyiv on October 17, reportedly killing at least four people, including a woman who was in a residential building and six months pregnant. About a week earlier, a barrage of Russian cruise missiles destroyed at least five residential buildings, reportedly killing at least 13 people and injuring more than 87 others, including 10 children.

Moscow is using its remaining cruise missiles and recently-procured Iranian drones to destroy infrastructure such as electrical substations, increase political pressure on Kyiv, and break the will of the Ukrainian population to resist the unprovoked Russian invasion.

The United States is sending the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) to help Ukraine deal with the cruise missile threat, but these systems are not ideally suited to deal with Russian attacks using Iranian-provided drones. To deal with the drone threat and to protect the NASAMS once they arrive, Washington should expedite the delivery of Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) systems and send Counter – Rocket, Artillery and Mortar (C-RAM) systems as an interim solution.

NASAMS, jointly developed by Raytheon and Norway’s Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace, consist of an AN/MPQ-64 Sentinel Radar, AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM), a command center, and launcher. The first two NASAMS are now in the U.S. government’s hands, and Ukrainian troops are being trained on how to employ the system. Both firing units are expected to arrive in Ukraine in the next few weeks. Six more units are projected to arrive in Ukraine next year (probably much later next year).

NASAMS provides a robust cruise missile defense capability (it helps protect Washington, D.C. against cruise missiles), but the system may struggle to counter Iranian Shahed-136 drones. That’s because of the Iranian drones’ challenging combination of slow speed, low flight profile, limited radar cross-section, and ability to attack in swarms from multiple directions. Those capabilities could enable a group of Shaheds to overwhelm a single NASAMS. Even if NASAMS were more effective against the Iranian drones, it is worth noting the cost per AMRAAM that NASAMS fires dramatically exceeds the cost of a Shahed-136 drone (upwards of 30 to 1).

The Ukrainians, therefore, need a low-cost counter-drone capability – and fast. Such a system could better protect key infrastructure and the NASAMS themselves. In fact, Ukrainian planners should plan to put counter drone systems in the vicinity of NASAMS firing units to avoid the disaster of an inexpensive Shahed drone destroying a newly-arrived NASAMS due to insufficient protection. That’s a technique that the United States has employed in the Middle East to protect its Patriot Air and Missile Defense Systems there.

The over 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft systems the U.S. has already provided can help, but we should expect to see more Iranian drones used in Ukraine. For that reason, Washington should be looking to send additional counter-drone capability to Kyiv.

The U.S. has two effective candidates, one in development and one already fielded. Washington should send both to Ukraine as soon as possible.

The VAMPIRE system is composed of an electro-optical and infrared sensor ball (to detect the drone), a laser designator (to track the drone), and a four-round launcher of 70mm short range rockets (to engage the drone) – all loaded on the back of a pickup truck. It is low cost at roughly $27,000 a round.

The problem with the VAMPIRE system is that a contract has not been awarded yet and is unlikely to arrive in Ukraine before May 2023, according to Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder. Meanwhile, Shahed-136 attacks continue, and Ukraine needs additional help countering Iranian drones immediately.

Congress would be wise to ask about delays in finalizing the contract and what can be done to expedite the VAMPIRE’s delivery. In the next breath, Congress should confirm that maximum possible quantities are being produced and sent.

In the meantime, the U.S. Army’s C-RAM system can help. It is a derivative of the U.S. Navy’s Phalanx Close-In Weapons System which is used to protect U.S. Navy ships against cruise missiles and other threats. Over the last forty years, the Navy has purchased and employed many of these systems. The Army purchased a total of 53 C-RAM systems by April 2022, primarily to protect U.S. bases in the Middle East.

The system consists of a 20mm gatling gun, integrated infrared and radar search and tracking systems, and power generators, all mounted on a trailer. Similar to VAMPIRE, its cost per engagement is a fraction of NASAMS’. U.S. Army C-RAM systems have engaged and destroyed hundreds of enemy rockets and mortars in Iraq and Afghanistan and apparently shot down two incoming drones in Baghdad in January of this year.

As Washington reduced force structure in the Middle East, a decision was made to halt C-RAM production. The Army, however, can provide 3 or 4 of its current C-RAM systems to Ukraine immediately to help Kyiv address the drone threat until the VAMPIRE systems arrive. The Army will need to procure more anti-drone systems to replace the ones sent to Ukraine and strengthen existing American vulnerabilities, with the goal of ensuring that U.S. Central Command has sufficient systems to protect U.S. troops when the next escalation comes from Tehran and its terror proxies.

As the Kremlin escalates its cruise missile and Iranian-drone attacks against the people of Ukraine, Americans can do more than just condemn the attacks. In addition to ensuring Ukraine receives the full allotment of NASAMS as quickly as possible, the United States should also send C-RAMS and VAMPIRE systems without delay. Together, they can save Ukrainian lives and ultimately help defeat the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion.

Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery is the senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation. Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at FDD.

Ryan Brobst, a research analyst at FDD, contributed to this article.

Have an Opinion?

This article is an Op-Ed and the opinions expressed are those of the authors. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please email C4ISRNET Senior Managing Editor Cary O’Reilly.

13. Iran’s Hard-Liners Are Starting to Crack

As the Beatles sang, "you say you want a revolution..."

Iran’s Hard-Liners Are Starting to Crack

Even regime stalwarts are criticizing Khamenei, which hasn’t happened during previous revolts.

By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

Nov. 2, 2022 5:59 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-hardliners-khomeini-supreme-leader-protests-larijani-rouhani-morality-police-newspaper-chief-justice-criticism-regime-change-1979-11667410559?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

This time is different. The Iranian people have been protesting in the streets for more than a month since the morality police beat a young woman to death for reportedly failing to wear a headscarf. Now even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s allies are distancing themselves from the government. It’s too soon to say the elite is fracturing, but it’s clear that these divisions will widen, putting unprecedented stress on the regime.

For four decades, regime loyalists have united in times of crisis. When reformers threatened the system in the late 1990s, moderates and hard-liners worked together to crush the threat. It’s telling that today many influential conservatives display little compunction about criticizing Mr. Khamenei and his henchmen.

Take Ali Larijani, who was the longest serving speaker of Parliament and is still one Mr. Khamenei’s advisers. He’s never been known to care about women’s rights. He’s been an ardent defender of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and sycophantic toward Mr. Khamenei. But in a recent interview with the Iranian paper Ettela’at, he decried the rigid imposition of the hijab and insisted, “Dialogue is necessary, and it has to be substantive. We must provide the public venues for protest and a means of conducting a dialogue.”

Jumhuriya Islami, a conservative newspaper whose first managing director was Mr. Khamenei, has also criticized the regime. A stern editorial rejected the government’s official explanation for the protests—that they are a product of foreign interference—and stressed the seriousness of demonstrators’ grievances: “The problems of inflation, unemployment, drought, and destruction of the environment have caused people, ranging from retirees, educators and students, to protest.” The newspaper offered a 14-point plan to defuse tensions. Point 11: “Don’t lie about what is happening.”

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Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eja’i has long cultivated an image of a ruthless enforcer. And yet he is now imploring that “we must increase dialogue in the country and ensure that diverse opinions are presented in the public culture.” This is hardly what Mr. Khamenei wants to hear from the judiciary, the linchpin of his regime’s frequent inquisitions.

Former President Hassan Rouhani, who has often kept quiet about repression if not loudly backed it, has strongly dissented from the supreme leader’s methods: “National security isn’t achieved only by recourse to military and law-enforcement means. . . . Security must come through the protection of life and the securing of one’s livelihood, personal freedoms, and the basic rights of the people.”

Autocracies rely on terror, and it’s clear that fewer Iranians fear Tehran today. This is particularly true of young women, but Iranians from all walks of life have joined the protests. The unrest has produced strikes in critical industries, and the security services have been hesitant to use lethal force. That conservatives are now critiquing Mr. Khamenei shows that the regime is losing its core strength. They seem to realize that Tehran can’t kill its way to success. These men either don’t have the stomach to murder thousands of women, or they believe—rightly—that doing so would only lead to mass confrontation with hundreds of thousands of angry, relentless men.

Those inside the regime who are critical of Mr. Khamenei find themselves in a difficult position. The demonstrators aren’t interested in compromise. Dialogue was the objective of protesters in 1997, when Mohammad Khatami, a clerical reformer, became president; even as late as 2009, when the pro-democracy Green Movement brought millions into Tehran’s streets, a compromise with the regime might have been possible. The theocracy’s brutal reactions then, and to later efforts at reform, have ended the possibility of dialogue. Conservatives now face a choice between joining the protest or being left behind.

The scenes in Iran today are reminiscent of 1979. The monarchy’s prospects dimmed when those who benefited most from its largess hedged and then fled. Today an important segment of the Islamist elite is displaying a similar hesitancy to back the regime. Over time it could become a majority.

The Islamic revolutionaries running Iran are made of stern stuff: They believe they’re defending God from political, if not spiritual, defenestration. But the Islamic Republic’s rulers, like the shahs before them, know that their regime ultimately rests on haybat—the awe of unchallengeable power. That neither teenage girls throughout Iran nor foundational figures of the theocracy see this majesty any longer suggests that Mr. Khamenei’s time is running out.

Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

14. Chinese Election Meddling Hits the Midterms

Chinese, Russians, who else is meddling? And what are we going to do about this meddling?

Chinese Election Meddling Hits the Midterms

Foreign Policy · by Craig Singleton · November 4, 2022

Analysis

Beijing is shifting its global influence campaigns from propaganda to blatant election interference.

By Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

A woman walks past election signs ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Oct. 28.

A woman walks past election signs ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Oct. 28. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Having consolidated his hold on power at the Chinese Communist Party’s recently concluded 20th National Congress, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has now set his sights on influencing the U.S. midterm elections. China’s latest efforts to sow doubt about U.S. election integrity are consistent with Xi’s stated goal of championing China’s autocratic model as a “new choice for humanity.” The threat of Chinese interference in democratic elections demands immediate action by policymakers in Washington and other Western capitals.

As early voting across the United States kicked into high gear this fall, so, too, did the activities of Chinese government-affiliated cyberactors seeking to discourage Americans from voting, discredit the election process, and sow further divisions among voters.

In one social media campaign uncovered by U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant, a Chinese hacker group with the code name Dragonbridge posted English-language videos across social media, blogs, and other platforms questioning the efficacy of voting and highlighting “civil war” as a possible way to “root out” the United States’ “ineffective and incapacitated” system. These posts also suggested attacks against law enforcement and other forms of political violence. Separately, Twitter announced in late October that it had disrupted several China-based operations on its platform. Those campaigns involved 2,000 user accounts and more than 250,000 tweets containing false election-rigging claims about the 2020 U.S. presidential election and hate speech against the transgender community.

Similarly, cybersecurity company Recorded Future identified another Chinese state-sponsored social media campaign aimed at dividing U.S. voters, this time by manipulating voter sentiments around divisive themes like racial injustice, police brutality, and U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. Likewise, in September, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta uncovered fake accounts originating in China that targeted voters on both sides of the political aisle. While some of these fake accounts portrayed U.S. President Joe Biden as corrupt, others castigated the Republican Party and, in particular, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio for their stances on abortion access and gun rights.

For its part, the FBI warned that Chinese government hackers were actively scanning the two parties’ various internet domains, looking for vulnerable systems as a potential precursor to hacking operations. Such probing is broadly consistent with the intelligence community’s 2020 assessment about China’s interest in acquiring information on “US voters and public opinion; political parties, candidates and their staffs; and senior government officials.”

Above all, policymakers must make clear to Beijing that election meddling will not go unpunished.

These and other election-shaping operations are not occurring in a vacuum, nor are they amateurish one-offs that can be ignored. Indeed, they reflect Xi’s growing emphasis on what the Chinese call “discourse power”: Beijing’s drive to alter global narratives about Chinese autocracy and Western democracy by comparing, contrasting, and consistently misrepresenting the two competing visions in ways that are advantageous to China.

In its most extreme form, which China’s People’s Liberation Army calls “cognitive domain operations,” discourse power seeks to influence individual and group behaviors to favor China’s tactical or strategic objectives. China’s ultimate goal: to undermine an adversary nation’s collective will to resist Beijing’s intentions. This can be done by sowing social division, undermining faith in public institutions, introducing conflicting social narratives, and even radicalizing specific groups within a population. All these themes featured prominently in China’s recent cyberoperations.

To achieve discourse victory, China has restructured its party-state to support the integrated employment, across peace and wartime, of public opinion, legal, and psychological warfare. Beyond simply aiding in the formulation and execution of China’s political warfare strategy, China’s decision to centralize command and control enables the party to more effectively direct the nearly $10 billion it spends annually on foreign interference. Central to the strategy, according to Lu Wei, the former head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, is to “occupy emerging public opinion spaces,” especially social media and other internet platforms, to propagate messaging about democracy’s failings and autocracy’s ostensible benefits.

If the principal target of these political warfare operations is the United States, Washington is hardly alone. Hours after former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announced her surprise resignation, the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times claimed Britain’s political upheaval demonstrated that Western democracy “cannot solve new problems.” This specious framing mirrors Beijing’s portrayal of the West’s pandemic response as “chaotic,” whereas China claimed its superior governance model, consisting of mass surveillance and lockdowns, achieved a “strategic victory” over COVID-19. These themes were later broadcast on Chinese and foreign platforms around the world, leading to a marked increase in favorable views—most notably in the global south—about China’s global stewardship.

As for the U.S. midterms, Beijing’s meddling is unlikely to cease on Election Day. In fact, just the opposite. After polls close, malicious cyberactors and Chinese state-backed media will almost certainly amplify claims about voting irregularities and contested election outcomes. These operations will not be limited to any one political party or geography. Their goals will be the same: to undermine democracy’s credibility and exploit cultural cleavages inherent in all pluralistic, nontotalitarian societies.

Identifying these social media campaigns may very well be straightforward, in large part due to contributions by technology firms headquartered in the free world. But undoing the long-term damage to U.S. institutions will be much harder. Even worse, China will almost certainly seek to employ this same playbook in other countries in the coming years.

That’s why policymakers in Washington and other democratic capitals must prioritize whole-society counteroffensives to respond to and ultimately neutralize China’s political warfare operations. That will require hardening democratic institutions, including modernizing campaign finance, strengthening counterinterference, and tightening espionage laws to increase transparency and disclosure requirements for individuals and entities that may be acting on China’s behalf, as well as toughening enforcement and sanctions to deter potential violators. Additional work must also be done to equip government officials, journalists, political parties, companies, civil organizations, and the general public with the information needed to reduce their exposure to China’s malign discourse. And that’s just for starters.

Above all, policymakers must make clear to Beijing that election meddling will not go unpunished. Upcoming meetings between democratic leaders and Xi at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, are as good a place to deliver that message as any.

Craig Singleton is a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. diplomat. Twitter: @CraigMSingleton

Foreign Policy · by Craig Singleton · November 4, 2022

15. Sayyaf men with IS links yield in Basilan

Sayyaf men with IS links yield in Basilan

manilatimes.net · by Al Jacinto · November 6, 2022

ZAMBOANGA CITY: Three Abu Sayyaf fighters with links to foreign terrorists surrendered to the Philippine Navy in the southern province of Basilan.

The Navy said the trio, known only by their aliases Abu Bero, Abu Paruk and Ganih, were supporters of the Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and fought with soldiers in the towns of Sumisip, Tipo-Tipo and Al Barka. Their surrender was facilitated by the Naval Task Force 61, including members of the elite Navy Seals and intelligence operatives, and the Philippine Army's Joint Task Force-Basilan and the 101st Infantry Brigade.

The terrorists also surrendered two M16 automatic rifles, ammunition magazines and several rounds of ammunition. They were presented to Rear Adm. Toribio Adaci Jr., commander of the Naval Forces Western Mindanao.

"Accordingly, Abu Bero, Abu Paruk and Ganih were involved in several hostilities against government troops in Basilan province, particularly in the municipalities of Sumisip, Tipo-Tipo and Al Barka. They were also involved in kidnapping cases since the time of Commander Abugao Bayali and Juhaiver Alamsirul, alias Abu Kik. The trio was also believed to have been conniving with foreign terrorists who are knowledgeable in manufacturing improvised explosive devices. They allegedly supported the establishment of ISIS caliphate in the Southern Philippines," the Navy said.

Despite their notoriety and crimes, the Navy said the trio is likely to be included in government programs for Abu Sayyaf surrenderers.

"The three ASG members underwent medical checkup at the Camp Navarro General Hospital prior to their proper turnover to the Joint Task Force-Basilan and 101st Brigade for processing and possible inclusion in [local government unit] programs for ASG surrenderers," it said.

manilatimes.net · by Al Jacinto · November 6, 2022

16. Spate of global assassination attempts hints at a violent new era

Spate of global assassination attempts hints at a violent new era

The Washington Post · by Adam Taylor · November 4, 2022

The attempted assassination this week of former Pakistani leader Imran Khan came just days after an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in what prosecutors say was a failed bid to harm or kidnap her. Weeks before that, a man approached former Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Buenos Aires and tried to shoot her in the face at close range.

That attack followed the July assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe by a man wielding a homemade gun in Nara city. And Abe was slain almost exactly a year after gunmen killed Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in a raid on his home in Port-au-Prince.

Together, these high-profile acts of violence potentially point to a new, volatile era in global politics, experts say. After years in which terrorist bombings dominated the headlines, this new spate of attacks is reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s, when major U.S. figures such as President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were killed in pivotal moments.

“There’s never going to be an end to individuals who want to assassinate public individuals,” said Colin P. Clarke, director of research and policy at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consultancy. But Clarke also said there were several factors that could lead to a rise in assassinations, including the “decline, at least in some parts of the world, of jihadi organizations” that favored different tactics.

In their place, “you’ve got the rise of far-right extremists who are far more decentralized,” he said. “And then you’ve got what people are calling ‘salad bar terrorism,’ which is when they kind of pick and choose different aspects of what motivates them to engage in these types of acts.”

Data from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which includes figures up to 2020, shows a sharp increase in assassination attempts on government figures around the world starting in 2014. The number of assassinations has stayed consistently high since then — even as the number of terrorist attacks has fallen.

It’s a trend that may have been overlooked in recent years. Erin Miller, program manager at GTD, noted that most of the attacks targeted low- to mid-level officials — and not prominent political leaders such as Khan or Pelosi. The most recent statistics, she said, were dominated by insurgent-led attacks in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover in 2021.

GTD’s data suggests that the late 1980s was another period when assassinations spiked. Miller said terrorist attacks such as suicide bombings that often kill indiscriminately were used much less then.

“Targeting political leadership was a tactic used to get attention for a cause with less risk of alienating the civilian population,” Miller said. “In more recent years, assailants adopt both targeted assassinations and mass-casualty strategies.”

Part of the shift may be structural. As groups like the Islamic State lost their territory, Clarke said, there was a rise in violence committed by people working alone, some of whom had been radicalized online to hate or target specific individuals.

To some extent, there may also be a tactical logic to the shift. Assassination attempts on individuals can often prompt significant political changes. Some attacks have changed the course of history, though not always in precisely the way their perpetrators intended: The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Austria-Hungary in 1914, for example, is considered the spark for World War I.

Views of assassinations can also change over time. In India, the assassin who killed beloved independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi has retroactively been branded a “patriot” by some supporters of the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Some historians consider the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a far-right extremist in 1995 a disastrous moment for the Middle East peace process. But almost three decades later, the far right has emerged as kingmaker in the country’s most recent election.

Even in Japan, the shocking assassination of Abe in July sparked a surprising turn: The country took the alleged assassin’s motives seriously.

The alleged killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, told police he wanted to carry out the assassination because his mother had made large donations to the Unification Church, a religious group with which Abe apparently had close ties. After the killing, Abe’s former party pledged to end its relationship with the church, though it later backtracked.

Japan, while generally nonviolent, has a significant history of political assassinations. But some countries that had long avoided attacks on senior officials have seen assassinations in recent years: Two British lawmakers have been killed in separate politically motivated attacks since 2016.

In Brazil, where there has long been political violence around election periods, the number of violent incidents involving political party representatives and supporters in the lead-up to the 2022 vote “eclipsed” that in the election four years before, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

At least some of the apparent rise in assassinations may be due to technological changes. Abe was shot with a “craft-made” gun created with readily available materials. Designs for similar weapons, which can be bought without a background trace and sometimes produced in a way that avoids metal detectors, can be found easily online.

There have been reported assassinations attempts via drone in recent years, such as the 2018 attack on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during an event in Caracas. Maduro survived the alleged attempt, a low-tech echo of U.S. drone attacks like the one that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

“Cruder technology lowers the barriers to entry for attackers, allowing even untrained or unprepared extremists ... to attempt serious plots,” Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, two experts in counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote for the War on the Rocks website.

Experts have also noted an increase in assassinations committed with state backing, including the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the killing of Kim Jong Nam by North Korean agents, and numerous deaths linked back to the Russian state.

But the ever-widening political polarization around the world, aided by online echo chambers that can radicalize potential perpetrators and demonize potential victims, has only added to the risk of assassination — as in the attack at Pelosi’s home that left her husband, Paul, wounded.

Clarke noted that figures on both the left and the right in the United States have been targeted in politically motivated attacks. In some ways, the spate of attempted killings felt worse than what came before.

“We’ve been here before. We’ve survived it,” Clarke said of U.S. political violence. “But there are people I speak to who say this feels fundamentally different. It feels like nothing’s beyond the pale, at least in terms of the rhetoric.”

The Washington Post · by Adam Taylor · November 4, 2022

17. Islamic Jihad Militant with Links to the Lions’ Den Killed in West Bank

Islamic Jihad Militant with Links to the Lions’ Den Killed in West Bank

fdd.org · November 4, 2022

Latest Developments

Islamic Jihad militant Farouk Salameh — wanted by Israel for his involvement in the shooting death of an Israeli police commando officer earlier this year — was killed Thursday during an Israeli raid in Jenin in the northern West Bank. Salameh also had ties to the Lions’ Den terrorist group and was suspected by Israel of planning additional attacks against Israelis. FDD’s Long War Journal reported that Israeli officials also suspected that Salameh conspired to secure funding for the Lions’ Den.

Expert Analysis

“There is growing consensus in the Israeli security establishment that Iran-backed terror groups in the West Bank like Islamic Jihad and Hamas are supporting the Lions’ Den’s activities. The IDF is compelled to act to prevent this axis of terror from targeting Israelis and continuing to sow chaos in the West Bank.” – Enia Krivine, Senior Director of FDD’s Israel Program and Senior Director of FDD’s National Security Network

The Lions’ Den Receives Support from Hamas

While the Lions’ Den denies coordinating with Iran-backed groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Israeli media have reported that Hamas, via operatives in Turkey, provides support and funding for the new terrorist group. Israeli and U.S. officials have confirmed to FDD experts that they believe these reports to be true.

Israel Successfully Targeted the Lions’ Den Leadership in October

In October, Lions’ Den senior leader Tamer al-Kilani was killed in Nablus by an improvised explosive device that detonated when al-Kilani walked by. Although the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not take responsibility for the strike, the Lions’ Den blamed Israel.

Three days later, a founder of the Lions’ Den, Wadee al-Houh, was killed in an IDF raid in Nablus that left five Palestinian gunmen dead and over 20 injured, according to Palestinian health officials. Among the injured was a senior member of the Lions’ Den, Mahmoud al-Bana, who subsequently surrendered to Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces along with other members of the terrorist group.

Future of the Lions’ Den Uncertain

Since the October IDF operations, six members of the Lions’ Den turned themselves in to the custody of the PA and 15 more were reportedly in talks with the PA to follow suit. This could be the beginning of the disarmament of the group, as the PA negotiates with the militants to lay down their weapons in return for their recruitment to the PA security forces.

Related Analysis

“Israel is Fighting to Prevent a Third Intifada,” By Enia Krivine

fdd.org · November 4, 2022

18. An International Post-War Security Force is Needed in Ukraine

An International Post-War Security Force is Needed in Ukraine

By Daniel Rice

 https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/international-post-war-security-force-needed-ukraine

The war in Ukraine will end at some point. When, and under what terms, is unknown and still to be determined.  But when it does end, there needs to be an international security force in Ukraine to ensure Russia never invades again.  

In hindsight, after Russia invaded and illegally annexed the Donbas and Crimea in 2014, an international security force should have been installed in Ukraine.  Had the international community done so, we would not likely be in this massive war.

Of course, Putin will protest and claim ‘escalation’. He has lost his seat at the table to make international decisions due to his aggressor actions and his army’s institutional-level war crimes against humanity.  And his armed forces have been degraded significantly, so a protesting Putin has less to threaten the stronger west. Russia has always been a threat and has been an aggressor nation for the past century. Even after this loss, it will re-arm. The 141 million inhabitants and large energy revenues will allow Russia to do so. 

This joint force should likely not include the United States to show that this is not a “U.S. versus Russia” issue. This is a “civilized world versus Russia” issue. 

One of the reasons NATO has been successful is because of standardization of equipment, but it goes far beyond just equipment. NATO has been successful mostly because of shared values, shared standards, shared training, equipping, strategy, tactics, and in particular shared understanding and communication. This does not come easily.  

Ukraine was a Soviet satellite and was led by Russian puppet kleptocratic leaders from 1991-2014. That is why the people rose up in the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, which deposed then-President Yanukovich, who fled to Russia after being deposed.  And the Ukrainian people have been fighting for their freedom and to reject that corrupt Russian kleptocratic culture. So it has not been 31 years since Ukraine gained full freedom from the Soviet Union, it is more likely 8 years since deposing the Russian puppet government, and all of the corruption that came with it. 

De-Soviet-ization needs to be deliberate and across the entire Ukrainian culture. The Ukrainian Armed Forces started this process in 2015 in coordination with the U.S. Army 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne).  26,000 Ukrainian soldiers went through training.  But the Ukrainian Armed Forces and security forces have swelled to nearly 1 million since February 24th.  All of those soldiers need to continuously be trained using NATO standards, tactics, techniques, and procedures. The other European nations need to embrace Ukraine.

Joining NATO is certainly a goal of Ukraine, and it has applied for membership in the past. Whether it is admitted or not, is a political issue. Ukraine alone has stood up to the enemy for which NATO was formed: Russia. So Ukraine should not be admitted to NATO- it should be the other way around, NATO should be trying to join Ukraine. If two members of NATO vote to not allow Ukraine to join, that would be a tragedy, and most likely a self-serving vote by those members.  They would rather sacrifice Ukraine than let them join the defensive pact of NATO.

A security agreement such as this is not a one-way street just to support Ukraine. Not many have traveled into the war zone and spent time with the war fighters. This Ukrainian Army is the most battle-hardened in all of Europe. They have been fighting the Russians for eight years. They are winning the war all alone – no one else has combat troops here – on their own. NATO has 30 current members and 2 potential new members, who all have a defensive pact to defend each other (Article V of NATO) in case Russia attacks.  Any security agreement should come with Ukrainian soldiers working with the partner countries to transfer lessons learned from the most kinetic war in Europe since World War II. The western countries are weaker and exposed if they do not learn these hard fought lessons from the soldiers who beat the Russian Army. 

Ukraine should not have been left alone to fight Russia after the 2014 invasion that lost the Donbas and Crimea. If there had been an international force of Polish, Romanian, Estonian, Latvia, Turkish, and Czech ground, air and naval forces in Ukraine, we would not likely be in this massive war. Ukraine’s neighbors should start discussing and planning the post-war security force to be stationed in Ukraine to prevent any further Russian aggression.

 A security force in Ukraine is in each country’s individual and collective interests. 

About the Author(s)

Daniel Rice

Dan is the President of Thayer Leadership and a 1988 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He served his commitment as an Airborne-Ranger qualified Field Artillery officer. In 2004, he voluntarily re-commissioned in the Infantry to serve in Iraq for 13 months. He has been awarded the Purple Heart, Ranger Tab, Airborne Badge and cited for ‘courage on the field of battle” by his Brigade Commander. 

SCHOLARLY WORK/PUBLICATIONS/AWARDS

Dan has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Small Wars Journal, and Chief Executive magazine. In 2013, he published and co-authored his first book, West Point Leadership: Profiles of Courage, which features 200 of West Point graduates who have helped shape our nation, including the authorized biographies of over 100 living graduates.. The book received 3 literary awards from the Independent Book Publishers Association plus an award from the Military Society Writers of America (MSWA). Dan has appeared frequently on various news networks including CNN, FOX News, FOX & Friends, Bloomberg TV, NBC, MSNBC, and The Today Show.

EDUCATION

Ed.D., ABD, Leadership, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education (graduation expected 2023)

MS.Ed., Leadership & Learning, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, 2020

M.S., Integrated Marketing Communications, Medill Graduate School, Northwestern University, 2018

M.B.A., Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, 2000

B.S., National Security, United States Military Academy, 1988

Full bio here: https://www.thayerleadership.com/about/founders/daniel-rice

19. Chinese top brass say PLA must be on ‘full-time standby’ for war in Taiwan Strait

The Party's army.

Chinese top brass say PLA must be on ‘full-time standby’ for war in Taiwan Strait

• At Communist Party congress, President Xi Jinping called on PLA to ‘fully enhance training and preparation for war’
• General Xu Qiliang says strengthening strategic capabilities could effectively deter an enemy

Liu Zhen in Beijing

+ FOLLOW

Published: 8:00pm, 5 Nov, 2022

By Liu Zhen South China Morning Post3 min

View Original

Members of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force march during the parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in October 2019. Photo: AP

The People’s Liberation Army must be “on full-time standby” for a war in the Taiwan Strait, senior officers said recently.

After President Xi Jinping called on the PLA to “fully enhance training and preparation for war” in the report he delivered at last month’s Communist Party congress, military leaders provided some interpretation in a book published this week.

“We must be fully prepared to respond to external interference and major incidents relating to Taiwan independence through non-peaceful means and other necessary measures, always maintain a high state of readiness, and be ready for war at all times,” the head of the Central Military Commission’s research bureau, Major General Liu Yantong, wrote in the book of official commentaries on the party congress report.

In another commentary in the book, General Xu Qiliang, formerly the party CMC’s top-ranked vice-chairman, urged the PLA to be “resolute” in crushing attempts at Taiwanese independence and foreign interference and prepare for a rapid transformation from peace to wartime.

“Always maintain a high-readiness posture, like arrows on a pulled string ready to go, to ensure that the troops are prepared to fight at all times,” he wrote.

Xu also said China must make good use of the fundamental “ballast” in great power competition – the strategic deterrence provided by its nuclear weapons.

In his party congress report, Xi set a goal for the PLA to “build a strong strategic deterrent system”.

Xu said the PLA should carry on with its “asymmetric countermeasures” approach, and “stick to the tactic of focusing on developing whatever the adversary fears the most”.

He said China’s national security faces growing instability, uncertainty and great challenges in a turbulent and changing world, and strengthening its strategic capabilities could effectively deter an enemy.

China has long pledged “no first use” of its nuclear weapons and its “minimum nuclear deterrence” strategy means it only possesses an asymmetric counterstrike capability. The US Department of Defence estimated in 2020 that China had an operational nuclear warhead stockpile in the “low-200s”, in contrast to the thousands held by Russia and the United States.

But in the past few years Beijing has reportedly been building up its nuclear arsenal. In its latest Nuclear Posture Review, issued last week, the Pentagon questioned the scope and pace, and lack of transparency, of Chinese nuclear expansion, as it said it would design a “tailored nuclear deterrence strategy” against it. China criticised the move as “stimulating a nuclear arms race”.

The report delivered by Xi at the party congress also called for an increase in the proportion of “combat forces of new domains and forms” in the PLA and the acceleration of the development of unmanned and intelligent combat forces.

In his commentary, Xu wrote that the use of new technologies in recent wars around the world had shown they had become the key variable in changing the rules of the game, and that meant the PLA needed to plan systematically and speed up the development of technologies that are “strategic, cutting-edge and revolutionary”.

Liu Zhen

Liu Zhen joined the Post in 2015 as a reporter on the China desk. She previously worked with Reuters in Beijing.

20. Black Hawk helicopter flies autonomous "rescue" mission without crew

Would you get on a pilotless Blackhawk? I suppose if I were wounded I would have no problem. But I trust a pilot in the cockpit more than I trust a pilot behind the keyboard. no offense to those who fly pilotless aircraft.

Black Hawk helicopter flies autonomous "rescue" mission without crew

New Atlas · November 5, 2022

The line between crewed and uncrewed aircraft has blurred even more after a Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter carried out a demonstration cargo mission as well as a medical "emergency rescue" entirely on its own without anyone aboard or human guidance.

The recent series of autonomous flight tests were conducted on October 12, 14, and 18 at the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona as part of the Army's Project Convergence 2022 (PC22) experiment in which US, British, and Australian service personnel evaluated 300 technologies, including long-range weapons, unmanned aerial systems, autonomous fighting vehicles, and next-generation sensors.

The general purpose of the exercise was to evaluate potential future military technologies. It also emphasizes the Army's insistence that any future combat helicopters like the Black Hawk must be pilot-optional or it's not interested. This isn't surprising, given that autonomous aircraft provide many advantages while maintaining the capabilities of a crewed helicopter. Not only can they be used for missions that would be too dangerous for a human crew, but they can also free up pilots from routine supply missions and they can self-deploy as needed.

Ted Carlson / Sikorsky AircraftF

The recent demonstration used a standard UH-60A Black Hawk that was retrofitted by Sikorsky and DARPA with DARPA's Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) incorporating Sikorsky's MATRIX autonomy technology. These turned the Black Hawk into a completely automated aircraft that can take over key pre-flight procedures, including power, secondary control, wind checks, as well as the ability to control elements of adaptive flying like take off and landing. In addition, the helicopter can respond appropriately to emergency situations without human supervision.

During the demonstrations, the Black Hawk was loaded with a cargo of 400 units of real and simulated human blood weighing 500 lb (228 kg). Two pilots flew the Black Hawk to the starting point, landed, switched on the MATRIX system, and exited. MATRIX then took complete control of the helicopter and flew 83 miles (136 km) at 100 kn (115 mph, 185 km/h) while hugging the valley terrain at an altitude of 200 ft (60 m) to avoid detection.

The Black Hawk was then fitted with a 40-ft (12 m) sling holding an external load of 2,600 lb (1,179 kg) and took off. About 30 minutes into the flight, the helicopter was ordered to divert to a new location by a ground operator using a secure radio and tablet. Once there, it was commanded to release its load, land and wait while a casualty in the form of a mannequin was loaded aboard on a litter.

The Black Hawk "rescued" a simulated casualty

Ted Carlson/Sikorsky Aircraft

After taking to the air again, the Black Hawk flew to a medical station while a BATDOK health monitoring device integrated with the helicopter's communications system monitored the simulated casualty's condition and relayed the vital readings in real time to the medical team.

"We believe Matrix technology is ready now for transition to the Army as they look to modernize the enduring helicopter fleet, and acquire Future Vertical Lift aircraft," said Igor Cherepinsky, director of Sikorsky Innovations. "In addition to increasing flight safety and reliability, Matrix technology enables survivability in high tempo, high threat 21st Century Security environments where Black Hawk helicopters operate today, and Defiant X and Raider X helicopters could operate in the future. Uncrewed or reduced crewed helicopters could safely perform critical and lifesaving missions day or night in complex terrain and in contested battle space."

The video below recaps the autonomous Black Hawk mission.

Black Hawk Medical

Source: Lockheed Martin

New Atlas · November 5, 2022

21. LORD ASHCROFT: Sheer courage of unsung British Intelligence Corps

Another piece of history that would be too unbelievable for a novel.

LORD ASHCROFT: Sheer courage of unsung British Intelligence Corps

The note left for Nazi high command that epitomises the sheer audacity of Britain's unsung Intelligence Corps: In an abridged extract from In The Shadows, author and historian LORD ASHCROFT chronicles the British Army's most secretive section

By LORD ASHCROFT FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

PUBLISHED: 18:30 EST, 5 November 2022 | UPDATED: 22:21 EST, 5 November 2022

Daily Mail · by Lord Ashcroft For The Mail On Sunday · November 5, 2022

They operate in the shadows, the men and women of the British Army's most secretive section, the Intelligence Corps.

For more than a century, they have brought their very distinctive type of courage, judgment, skill and resourcefulness to pull off exceptional feats all over the world on their country's behalf – yet, because of the clandestine nature of their work, doing so often without the recognition they deserve.

It attracts – and values – mavericks, which is why Paddy Leigh Fermor was a natural recruit to its ranks. A rebellious, free-spirited sort, he was described by a teacher at his school as 'a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness'. Not surprisingly, he was expelled.

Still a teenager, he set off to walk across Europe, from the Channel to Istanbul (or Constantinople, as he preferred to call it), carrying a rucksack containing a few spare clothes and a volume of Horace's Odes. For the next six years, he was on the road, sleeping in farmyards, inns, monasteries and grand houses, mixing with vagabonds, gypsies and aristocrats.

He returned only when war broke out in 1939 and joined the Army, and, once his adventuring in Europe and the facility with languages he had developed abroad came to light, was invited to transfer from the Guards to the Intelligence Corps.

LORD ASHCROFT: They operate in the shadows, the men and women of the British Army's most secretive section, the Intelligence Corps. Pictured: Patrick Leigh Fermor and William Stanley Moss (top row, second and third from left) and other members of the group that abducted the German general Heinrich Kreipe in 1944

Two years later, he was living in Nazi-occupied Crete. Disguised as a shepherd by the name of Michaelis, he was hiding out in mountain caves and gathering intelligence on German positions and troop movements, as well as training and organising the local resistance fighters and arranging parachute drops of munitions and supplies.

And then, as if that wasn't dangerous enough, he volunteered for an even more ambitious plan: to kidnap a German general and dispatch him to British Army headquarters in Cairo for interrogation.

From a hillside, he and fellow officer Bill Moss staked out the villa of the local commander, General Heinrich Kreipe, just outside the town of Heraklion, establishing his daily routine for the drive to and from his military headquarters.

A suitable ambush point was identified, and one evening in April they dressed as German military police corporals and lay in wait. It was getting dark when the car came into sight and they waved it down with a red torch.

The general opened his window. Leigh Fermor saluted and said: 'Papiere, bitte schön' ('Papers, please'). Then, as Kreipe reached to his breast pocket, Leigh Fermor wrenched open the door shouting: 'Hände hoch!' ('Hands up!').

He pressed a gun against Kreipe's chest and pulled him from the vehicle. At the same time, Moss knocked out the driver with a cosh and deposited his body at the side of the road.

Three Cretan resistance fighters, who had been hiding, sprang out, clapped handcuffs on Kreipe and, at knifepoint, pushed him into the back of the car. Moss took the wheel and Leigh Fermor sat beside him wearing Kreipe's hat, hoping to pass himself off as the general if they were stopped.

They bluffed their way through Heraklion and then passed through a further 22 German checkpoints unchallenged before abandoning the car and heading off on foot into the hills with their captive.

They left a note on the dashboard. It read: 'Gentlemen, Your Divisional Commander, General Kreipe, was captured a short time ago by a British raiding force. By the time you read this, both he and we will be on our way to Cairo. He is an honourable prisoner of war and will be treated with all the consideration owing his rank.

'We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of Cretans. Any reprisals against the local population will thus be wholly unwarranted and unjust.'

They signed their names, offering a cheery (and cheeky) 'Auf baldiges Wiedersehen!' ('See you soon!') and added a PS: 'We are very sorry to have to leave this beautiful motor car behind.'

The kidnappers and their captive trekked cross-country for three weeks, sleeping in caves, sheepfolds and cattle pens, all the time hunted by German land and air patrols.

They were fed and supplied by inhabitants of the many villages they walked through, despite these locals knowing they would be killed should the Germans ever discover that they had aided the general's abductors.

Leigh Fermor was plagued with severe joint pains but they made it the 100 miles to the coast, from where a motor boat took the general to Egypt. He was held there for the rest of the war before being released in 1947.

For his 'courage and audacity' in planning and executing the high-stakes mission, Leigh Fermor was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Moss, whose book about the kidnap, Ill Met By Moonlight, was made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde and Marius Goring, received the Military Cross.

Leigh Fermor (who died aged 96 in 2011) fulfilled in spades the Intelligence Corps' remit to 'exploit all sources and agencies' and leave no stone unturned in order to fulfil their mission.

He was one of its first recruits in the Second World War, joining a month after it was reconstituted in July 1940 after the near-disaster of the Dunkirk evacuations.

The Intelligence Corps had operated as an ad hoc unit in the First World War – more of which later –but had then been disbanded. Now it was not only back in business but established with the specific consent of the King.

It should be said that in those early days, regular Army officers were not always its admirers, dismissing too many of its recruits as 'gifted amateurs' – 'schoolmasters, journalists, encyclopaedia salesmen, unfrocked clergymen and other displaced New Statesman readers', as one such recruit, the writer Malcolm Muggeridge, put it. But, amateurs or not, the Corps gelled and did its job.

Leigh Fermor was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Moss, whose book about the kidnap, Ill Met By Moonlight (pictured), was made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde and Marius Goring, received the Military Cross

And it still does. Today, it remains one of the smallest elements of the British Army, with just 1,850 serving officers and soldiers, but its many achievements cannot be overstated. It is unique in that its officers and soldiers have regular access to highly classified material during their daily duties. It also has ties to the civilian security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6.

During the Second World War, Intelligence Corps members were also attached to the Political Warfare Executive, responsible for propaganda, and the Special Operations Executive, which carried out sabotage operations in Europe.

Corps signals intelligence experts worked closely with codebreakers at Bletchley Park and then, post-war, with GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters.

David Cornwell (alias John le Carré) was a member of the Intelligence Corps before working for MI5 and MI6 and turning his hand to spy novels. An equally renowned spy writer, John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, was a second lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps during the First World War.

Members of the Corps are trained soldiers, capable of physical confrontation with the enemy if called on. Their main role, however, has always been to advise the Army's commanders of an enemy's capabilities and intentions while also protecting their forces from espionage, sabotage and subversion.

They gather intelligence for both strategic and tactical reasons. It can originate from a technical asset, a well-placed source or simply a casual conversation with a member of a local community.

They have to be versatile. They might find themselves on an overseas stake-out or briefing a commanding officer in Britain about an attempt by hackers to destroy a computer network. They might be interrogating a prisoner-of-war or debriefing a defector, tapping a telephone or following a suspect on foot.

Or analysing imagery from aerial photographs. Back in 1944, this allowed accurate maps to be made of the beaches at Normandy for the D-Day landings. Today, this is even more sophisticated with satellites and drones to detect and monitor hostile movements.

Today, too, no commander will deploy on operations without the Intelligence Corps providing knowledge and understanding. Which is why, whereas other parts of the Army have shrunk over the past few decades, the Intelligence Corps has grown.

And they showed their worth with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, a sharp reminder that good intelligence is vital. The Kremlin proved to have a poor understanding of the armed forces of the country it chose to attack. It underestimated its enemy, one of the worst mistakes any military commander can make.

By contrast, the early warning the Intelligence Corps gave the West of Russia's intentions was of immense importance. Admittedly, it did not stop Russian tanks from crossing the border, but it did allow nations and organisations to prepare.

Frequently in its history, it is ordinary people who joined the Corps who have ended up achieving extraordinary things. People such as Roger West, one of the original 50 recruits when the Corps first formed after the outbreak of war in 1914.

A fluent speaker of German and French, he graduated from Cambridge with a degree in mechanical sciences and took a job with a firm making hydraulic cylinders and rams. He joined up the moment Britain declared war on Germany in 1914 and was quickly snatched up by the Intelligence Corps because of his languages.

So keen that he bought himself a second-hand uniform for 30 shillings from the military department of Moss Bros in Covent Garden, he caught a train to Southampton, where he was issued with a motorbike, field dressings and field glasses and dispatched to France.

As the British Expeditionary Force advanced to meet the Kaiser's forces, his job was to go ahead on his motorbike, collect what information he could about the enemy and race back to battalion headquarters with it. For days he criss-crossed the battlefield, constantly on the move – before the German First Army got the upper hand and forced the British forces to retreat, blowing up bridges over canals and rivers behind them as they went.

West was in the British rearguard, with the Germans in close pursuit, when he realised he had left his maps in his last billet in the town of Pontoise. He turned his motorbike around and hurried back there, but couldn't find them.

What he did see, however, was that the suspension bridge across the River Oise – the only remaining bridge in the area – was still standing. Charges had been laid and exploded but it was intact.

For the advancing Germans, the way ahead was clear to the outskirts of Paris, just 20 miles away. West reported the situation to his brigade commander and told him that, though his knowledge of demolitions was 'rusty', his intention was to go back and blow it up. He was told not to be so foolish, that he would be committing suicide, but West insisted.

He armed himself with a 14 lb tin of guncotton (a mild explosive), plus primers, fuses and detonators, and, aided by a Lieutenant Pennycuick from the Royal Engineers, headed back to the bridge.

On West's motorbike, the pair weaved through retreating troops and past horses as fast as they could into what they knew might already be enemy territory.

Arriving at Pontoise at about 7am, they were relieved to find no signs of the Germans, but they knew the clock was ticking. They unloaded the demolition kit and turned the motorbike in the direction of 'home' for a quick getaway, then stepped onto the empty bridge.

They climbed one of the towers and West fixed the slabs of guncotton, while Pennycuick attached the fuses and detonators. They climbed down, West lit the fuse and they ran towards a house for cover, whereupon they heard only a feeble bang. The charges had failed to go off.

So it was back on to the bridge and up the tower again with a new detonator and a new fuse, all the while anxiously aware of how close the Germans must be getting but determined to get the job done. As they were finishing off, there was a burst of rifle fire from across the river. The Germans had arrived.

The two Britons sprinted into a nearby building, then heard a tremendous explosion as the tower collapsed, and with it fell the suspension straps supporting the roadway, which plummeted 40ft into the river below. The bridge had been blown.

The Germans were stopped in their tracks and never reached the French capital.

His derring-do saw Roger West hailed as 'the man who saved Paris'. His courage and quick thinking were deemed by his senior officers to have played a significant part in frustrating the Schlieffen Plan, the blueprint for Germany's invasion of France and Belgium.

He was awarded a DSO, the first decoration earned by the Intelligence Corps during the First World War. The most modest of men, he simply noted in his diary that he was 'quite pleased with our morning's work'.

With the end of the First World War, the Intelligence Corps went into hibernation, only to be pulled out of retirement in 1940 to take the fight to a new German enemy, Hitler's Nazis.

This time irregular warfare played an even larger part in Britain's war effort, encouraged by Winston Churchill, who set up the Special Operations Executive – also dubbed the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – with instructions to 'set Europe ablaze'.

Several Intelligence Corps operators were among its 400 or so agents active in France, among them Manchester-born teacher Harry Rée, who turned out to be among its very best practitioners of the black arts of sabotage.

The note left for Nazi high command that epitomises the sheer audacity of Britain's unsung Intelligence Corps

This was surprising given that at Cambridge, he signed the Peace Pledge and in 1939 registered as a conscientious objector. But the knowledge that so many other young men were going into uniform when he was not made him ill at ease, and after the fall of France in June 1940, he joined up.

A year later he transferred from the Royal Artillery to the Intelligence Corps, having calculated that he would rather die as a result of making his own mistake than by following orders 'from some stupid colonel or general back at base'.

After training, he was dropped into Vichy France and, under the field name 'Caesar', toured the Resistance camps, organising supply drops and distributing arms and explosives to the underground movement, the Maquis.

Above all, he displayed the kind of counter-intuitive thought that was second nature to those working in intelligence after a failed RAF bombing run on a Peugeot factory producing turrets for German tanks. The town had been badly hit but the factory remained intact.

Another bombing raid was on the cards, but the inventive Rée had a different plan. He used his charm to arrange a meeting with the factory director, Rodolphe Peugeot, and 'persuaded' him to turn a blind eye to an act of sabotage. Rée then planned and led an attack on the factory, crawling along ducts to place explosive charges on transformers and turbo-compressors and putting it out of action for six months. This was a triumph for him, but all the time he had to stay one step ahead of the Germans. His life depended on it.

One day he went to the home of a Resistance leader and knocked on the door. What he didn't know was that the Frenchman had just been arrested by the Germans after they found sub-machine guns, revolvers and hand grenades there.

The door was opened by a German military policeman, a pistol in his hand. A brief interrogation followed in which Rée – in faltering French – tried to explain his presence but when the chance arose, he grabbed a wine bottle and smashed it over the German's head.

'I lunged at him,' he recalled, 'and brought him down. I remembered King Lear and tried to get one of his eyeballs out by pressing with my thumb. It didn't work, so I bit his nose and then put a finger in his mouth and tried to rip his cheek. I landed a couple of punches in his face and smashed his head against the wall.'

The German had had enough, and Rée was able to escape but, during the tussle, the German fired his pistol six times – and six times, Rée had been hit. In the heat of the moment he hadn't noticed, but as he ran for his life and disappeared into the countryside, he realised blood was seeping from his arm and chest. Though weak and in great pain, he swam across a river and made his way to a safe house, where a doctor found one bullet in his chest and another in his shoulder. The other four had grazed him. He was badly wounded.

He was spirited out of France into Switzerland to recover, and from there he continued to direct his Resistance group's sabotage activities. Eventually he made it back to London, where his reward was an OBE and a DSO. The citation read: 'His prestige and authority were enormous, and his activities have become legendary.'

It is fitting that at last the achievements of Harry Rée and his fellow Corps members, although carried out in the shadows, should be acknowledged.

© Michael Ashcroft, 2022

Abridged extract from In The Shadows, by Michael Ashcroft, published on November 8 by Biteback at £25. To order a copy for £22.50, with free UK delivery, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937 before November 19. Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For information on his work, visit lordashcroft.com. Follow him on Twitter and/or Facebook @LordAshcroft.

Daily Mail · by Lord Ashcroft For The Mail On Sunday · November 5, 2022

22. Spirit of America: Democracy's Civilian Force

I am proud to know Jim Hake and serve on his board of advisors. We should all be inspired by his unique service to our military and diplomats and to our nation.

Spirit of America: Democracy's Civilian Force

kiplinger.com · by Emma Patch · November 4, 2022

Jim Hake

(Image credit: John Boal)

By

published 4 November 2022

Who: Jim Hake, age 65

What: CEO and Founder, Spirit of America

Where: Arlington, Va.

What is the mission of Spirit of America? To engage citizens in preserving the promise of a free and better life. And we do that by working alongside U.S. troops and diplomats all over the world to help them save and improve lives and promote values that are shared by Americans and our allies. In the larger scheme, it is to demonstrate that the U.S. is a friend of those who seek a better life.

How did it start? I was motivated by the attacks of 9/11 to do something to stand up for what America stands for. I was a businessperson, without any government or military experience. But I have always felt that what America stands for really matters: the promise of a free and better life. What gave me the idea for the organization was a National Geographic show about U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan doing things to help the local population in very remote villages with help from friends and family back home. I contacted people who had connections with soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How many people work for you? There are 35 members of our team full-time. We’ve almost doubled in size in the past 12 months, and we’re significantly growing the organization.

A Doctor Invests in His Community

What kind of work have you done in Afghanistan? We provided assistance in Afghanistan for more than 15 years, mostly at the village level in support of U.S. military and civilian personnel. And when the evacuation crisis began in August 2021, our team was very involved, some directly coordinating evacuations, getting at-risk Afghans out to safety. More recently, we have been supporting a school for Afghans in Tajikistan of about 500 boys and girls that had been funded by the Afghan government. But with the Taliban taking control of the country, that funding stopped.

At what point did you begin focusing on Ukraine? Spirit of America has been involved in Ukraine since 2014, when Russia took control of Crimea and the Donbas. We helped launch Ukraine’s first armed forces media entity, an FM radio station called Army FM, to meet the needs of Ukrainian soldiers.

What aid have you been delivering since the war began in 2022? Our main focus has been providing protective aid, such as ballistic helmets, bulletproof vests, vehicles and first-aid kits, as well as food and clothing. Our support has been focused on protective aid for Ukrainian soldiers and civilian volunteers on the front lines.

Has it been difficult to deliver aid? Thanks to the relationships we have, our logistics are extremely fast and effective. For example, we have had assistance delivered into Poland on cargo planes with protective aid and assistance for the Ukrainian troops and the aid has been in their hands within 36 hours.

Where does funding come from? We’re an entirely privately funded 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. And the response of Americans who want to help has been very, very encouraging. For people who donate, we have what we call our 100% promise that if people choose to support a project in Ukraine or in any other part of the world, 100% of their funds will be used to pay for the expenses of that project. People can donate to specific projects through our website or by making a note on a check.

Emma Patch

Staff Writer, Kiplinger's Personal Finance

Emma Patch joined Kiplinger in 2020. She previously interned for Kiplinger's Retirement Report and before that, for a boutique investment firm in New York City. She served as editor-at-large and features editor for Middlebury College's student newspaper, The Campus. She specializes in travel, student debt and a number of other personal finance topics. Born in London, Emma grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Washington, D.C.

kiplinger.com · by Emma Patch · November 4, 2022

​23. Inside the political fundraising machine that is flooding your inbox

So we (my fellow boomers) are the problem!

Inside the political fundraising machine that is flooding your inbox

Boomers have fueled the explosion in digital solicitations.

Benjamin Powers

Technology Reporter

November 4, 2022

grid.news · by Benjamin Powers

If you feel like more and weirder political fundraising emails are clogging your inbox, you’re right.

Hear more about this story from Benjamin Powers:

Campaigns at all levels of government have been feverishly pumping out these messages. With less than a week to go before the midterm elections, it’s reached a fever pitch, digital strategists and marketers who have worked with campaigns told Grid. The subject lines plead, cajole or even try to scare recipients into donating: “I’M REALLY INTO THIS GUY” and “Stabbed to death with scissors …” are among the political email headers that flooded into a Grid test mailbox recently.

Don’t expect it to change any time soon.

Experts say a combination of factors is driving this email arms race. Baby Boomers, the most generous pool of political donors, are particularly willing to hand over cash in response to email come-ons. And Facebook and Twitter’s strict limits on political ads have weakened social media’s fundraising power. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee — which successfully pushed Google to loosen Gmail’s spam filter to allow more political emails through — is now suing the company in federal court seeking further concessions.

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At the same time, the total raised per individual email seems to be going down, creating a vicious cycle where campaigns must send more messages to rake in the same amount of cash. With a few exceptions, an email that would raise $25,000 a few campaign cycles ago now brings in just a few thousand dollars, a senior adviser to several national-level Democratic campaigns and organizations told Grid. This means campaigns need to send more messages just to hit the same goals.

Jared Leopold, who has worked on dozens of Democratic campaigns at all levels, said that former president Barack Obama’s record-setting 2008 fundraising campaign — which raised more than $1 billion while relying heavily on email come-ons — created a whole new world of fundraising online “that is oftentimes the wild, wild West.” Several other experts echoed that sentiment in interviews with Grid.

“You have legitimate candidates pushing urgency, you have legitimate candidates pushing bizarre match deals, and then you also have a bunch of scam artists out there who give maybe 5 cents on the dollar to the actual candidates and take the rest for themselves,” said Leopold, now the co-founder of climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. “It is a real uncharted territory, and everyone’s in it because it’s a cash cow.”

The dark art of email subject lines

Campaigns rely on a mix of fundraising tools — from social media to dinners for big donors — but email has proved a particularly intimate, and profitable, avenue. “It’s great for driving traffic, driving attention, reader engagement, it’s amazing for monetization,” said Dan Oshinsky, who runs the email consultancy Inbox Collective.

As part of reporting this story, Grid set up a fresh email account on Oct. 5 and subscribed only to updates from the two main candidates running for the Senate from Pennsylvania — Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz.

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The account received more than 90 campaign emails over the next 28 days. The subject lines included a Fetterman message from “John’s iPhone” with the subject line “hope I make u proud [<3]” and an Oz email with the header “Like a slap in the face — he is relentless.”

Grid also asked several people who regularly receive large numbers of political fundraising emails to share the worst and most misleading subject lines they’d seen. Among them: Emails referencing “Your at-home COVID-19 test” or a past-due bill, even though their purpose was to solicit political donations. These misleading subject lines can boost email open rates — getting campaigns past the first hurdle, making sure someone sees their message.

Businesses can’t use these kinds of grabby but misleading email subject lines, which are prohibited by the federal CAN-SPAM Act. But political campaigns and partisan groups fall into a legal gray area. Email strategies that would in theory subject a company to regulatory scrutiny, or perhaps fines or penalties, are permissible when employed by a campaign or political group because their emails are not considered commercial under the federal spam law.

“You certainly see senders on the political side abuse that freedom to send, taking actions and things that I personally wouldn’t recommend to folks,” said Oshinsky.

That behavior isn’t limited to one party. But Jake Sticka, vice president of client strategy at the digital marketing agency Rising Tide Interactive, said that he sees greater use of these tactics on the Republican side and quickly ticked off several examples.

One email from Donald Trump’s Save America PAC asked voters to split a donation between him and Republican Blake Masters, who’s running for the Senate in Arizona. Clicking through to the actual donation page reveals that roughly 99 percent of any donations would go to Trump’s group, with 1 percent going to Masters.

Then there’s J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, whose campaign has been sending emails telling people that they can get a 15-times match on their donations, meaning that if someone donates $1, other donors will donate up to $15 to match it.

“That’s pretty difficult to do as a Senate committee within [federal election] law,” said Sticka. “I would be very surprised if a 15-times match is true.”

His third example came from Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, who’s running for reelection. Johnson’s campaign sent an email that said he hadn’t received any donations yet that day and the recipient could become his first grassroots donor of the day by giving money, Sticka recounted.

Representatives for Trump, Masters, Vance and Johnson have not yet responded to Grid’s requests for comment.

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“I just see lots of these pretty verifiable lies going out on the Republican side that I don’t on the Democratic side,” said Sticka. “There are times where the language is tactical, but I find the Republican side is using far more misleading tactics on the whole.”

Other sources Grid spoke to echoed these concerns.

Wheeling and dealing subscriber lists

Signing up for one candidate’s emails can also result in an email address being shared with other candidates and companies in ways users don’t expect. There is an array of digital-strategy firms on both the Democratic and Republican sides that work with campaigns, and some sell email lists to other entities or use them for other clients.

That’s driven in part by Google, Twitter and Facebook’s decisions to tamp down on political ads on their platforms. Campaigns from both parties pivoted to the old-fashioned strategy of buying, selling and trading email lists. Many even spun up whole subsidiaries dedicated to list-brokering.

But that can involve selling the email addresses of people who either didn’t consent to have their information sold or shared or didn’t realize that such consent was buried in the fine print when they signed up for a candidate’s list. “I have heard of [campaign-consulting] firms who have in their contracts [that] in the event that you lose your race, the firm has the ability to share the emails that you’ve acquired with their other clients,” said Sticka.

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Both Republicans and Democrats do this, but Leopold, a Democrat, said that Republicans have pushed even further into the realm of total monetization. “There is a nexus between Republicans’ email lists and health supplements and doomsday prep, that kind of for-profit stuff,” he said. “And part of the reason I think that Republicans even had more trouble with getting their emails through on Gmail is because they’ve fully bought into this kind of profitization of political email lists.”

Take the 99-1 donation split Sticka mentioned between Trump and Masters. While Trump gets most of the money raised under the arrangement, Masters gets access to information about members of Trump’s mailing list — who he can then hit up later for more money.

Grid’s inbox, signed up for Fetterman’s and Oz’s emails, received messages soliciting donations for candidates such as Val Demings, a Democrat running for the Senate in Florida, and Adam Laxalt, a Republican running for the Senate in Nevada — sent from generic Fetterman and Oz email accounts, respectively.

But experts told Grid that list-sharing often begins in earnest after a candidate loses, rather than during a campaign cycle.

Outwitting spam filters

While there are specific laws governing commercial emails, which aim to get you to purchase something or engage in a commercial transaction, political speech is protected by the First Amendment. And federal laws on spam are aimed at commercial email, rather than the bucket that political emails fall into: noncommercial.

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But some political emails do qualify as spam by common definitions, if not government regulations.

“The definition of spam is unsolicited emails,” said Yanna-Torry Aspraki, an email and deliverability specialist at EmailConsul, a deliverability monitoring tool. “I might have given you my email. I’m might even have given you consent to send me emails — but I’ve given you consent to send me one email a week or whatever I was expecting, not sending me 30,000 emails a day or emails that I’m not expecting. That’s considered spam, even if I’ve given you consent.”

That can sometimes backfire, with greater volumes or unexpected senders making it more likely that messages will get caught in spam filters.

In general, Oshinsky said, email spam filters are looking at how recipients engage with emails to help determine what is spam. “They’re looking at positive signals like when someone opens, someone clicks, replies to an email, stars an email or moves it to a folder — basically anything that says like, ‘Oh, this email was valuable because someone took an action as a direct result of this email being sent and showing up in their inbox,’” he explained.

Conversely, negative signs such as someone ignoring an email, deleting it or moving it to the spam folder signal to the filter that a message is unwanted. Volume is also a factor. If a spam filter detects a massive increase in the number of emails being sent by a single sender, or a large increase in the number of people on a particular mailing list, it’s more likely to consider those messages spam. That can be tricky for campaigns, which often dramatically increase the number of emails they send out in the final days and weeks before an election, and trade lists to increase their reach.

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To address such issues, many email providers use sophisticated tools to help reputable groups with large email lists make sure their messages reach the intended recipients.

But that doesn’t necessarily satisfy large list-owners — like the RNC, which sued Google last month over its pilot program to help political emails bypass its spam filter. The RNC, which has not signed up for the service, is basing its case in part on a recent study that found Gmail sent Republican emails to spam more often than other emails. (The study’s authors say their findings have been misconstrued by Republicans and that there is no evidence that Gmail was purposely targeting Republican emails.)

In the meantime, the reality is that email fundraising works, and its pace and tone are unlikely to change any time soon.

“My personal view was that a lot of these senders have been in the spam folder because they have not been following the best practices, because they’re using shady subject lines, or they’re buying email lists, or they’re not setting up authentication,” said Oshinsky. “If that’s the case, that doesn’t really have anything to do with Gmail, or Yahoo, or Outlook, or any of these other email inboxes banishing messages to the spam folder. That’s a direct result of the senders themselves not following the best practices that the rest of us are.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

grid.news · by Benjamin Powers

​

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com