Quotes of the Day:

“We do not describe the world we see. We see the world we can describe.” 

- Rene Descartes

“Men judge generally more by the eye, then by the hand, for everyone can see if you can feel. Everyone sees what you appear to be, if you really know what you are.” 

- Niccolo Machiavelli

Before you argue with someone, ask yourself, is that person, even mentally mature enough to grasp the concept of different perspective? Because if not, there's absolutely no point.” 

- Morgan Freeman

1.  Should I Stay or Should I Go? Stay-Behind Force Decision-Making

2. Austin Will Underscore U.S. Partnerships, Progress on Indo-Pacific Trip

3. Developing countries owe China at least $1.1 trillion – and the debts are due

4. American Geopolitical Strategy and the Israel-Hamas War

5. Gaza Hostage Crisis Led To "Unprecedented" Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 Deployment

6. Post retirement - Army (Soldier for Life)

7. Reoccupying Gaza ‘Not the Right Thing to Do,’ White House Tells Israel

8. China and Russia Claim Moral High Ground Over Palestinian Deaths

9. Biden’s AI Order Is Government’s Bid for Dominance

10. As war frustrations rise, stalemate tests Zelensky and top general Zaluzhny

11.  The Politics of Looking Strong

12. The Right Way to Deter China From Attacking Taiwan

13. Senior Leaders Must Own the Lack of Warfighting Focus

14. Five Eyes Warning is Clear: Government and Businesses Must Wake Up to China Threat

15. The Fourteen Facts about US Aid to Ukraine

16. Kishida Philippines trip's focus was Japan defense

17. A Knife Fight in a Phone Booth

18. Russia’s Second Front in Europe

19. Civilian deaths and proportionality in the Israel–Hamas war

20. Disinformation and the limits of yelling 'Liar' in a Crowded Theater

21. The New American Anarchists

22. AC-130J Ghostriders Could Lose Their Big 105mm Guns

23. ‘If Not Me, Who?’: As Ukraine Seeks Troops, Women Prepare for the Call

24. 'Influencers in uniform' are boosting recruiting, Pentagon says

25. Military Growing More Distant from Most Americans, Hicks Says

26. Opinion: I’m an expert in urban warfare. Israel is upholding the laws of war

27. There is strong public support for holding the Pentagon and its contractors accountable

28. Expanding multinational exercises key to countering China, says US Army Pacific commander

29. Peraton wins $2.8B Special Operations IT recompete

1. Should I Stay or Should I Go? Stay-Behind Force Decision-Making

​Brian Petit is a scholar practitioner who is one of our nation's foremost authorities on resistance. When he speaks I listen (or read his work).

Conclusion​:

Despite their name, stay-behind forces should always be prepared to flee an invading force. In the face of an invading enemy with the intent to occupy and control, staying behind might be a poor tactical choice at best and a suicidal act at worst. Stay-behind forces must survive to contribute. Unless a stay-behind force has a realistic environment in which to survive and operate, they should be prepared to flee and fight another day and in another way. Modern surveillance and detection technologies have made it difficult for stay-behind forces to hide, congregate, and operate. The digital signature is a tactical problem that plagues modern stay-behind concepts. This is one reason why investing in stay-behind forces is a gambit. Realistic employment options are somewhat unknowable prior to actual occupation.

The U.S. military has a strong interest in aiding allies and partners in building stay-behind forces. Friendly nations’ stay-behind forces, if capably conceived and legitimized by the state, are ideal partners for U.S. special operations forces. Unconventional warfare, a core mission of U.S. Special Operations Command, is conducted by partnering with local, irregular forces in contested or occupied areas. Such irregular forces, typically outgunned and outnumbered by the occupier, fight on borrowed time. These groups require external support to fight, survive, and win. In recent decades, the U.S. conducted successful unconventional warfare campaigns with Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance in 2001, with the Iraqi Kurds in 2003, and with Syrian Democratic Forces beginning in 2014. For countries facing Russian aggression or Chinese encroachment, the matching of stay-behind forces with U.S. special operations provides a clear asymmetric advantage. If done before a crisis, visibly and credibly, it also produces a deterrent effect.

Crafting a stay-behind force strategy should start by juxtaposing the utility of the stay-behind force against the expected (or actual) occupation environment. Decision-makers should understand the contextual environment before deciding on employment options. The four occupation environments described above can inform the decision-making of leaders and resistance units.

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Stay-Behind Force Decision-Making - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Brian Petit · November 8, 2023

The grinding Ukrainian military offensive during the summer of 2023 has been a frightful sight for undersized nations fashioning their own defensive strategies against Russia or China. Small nations invaded by numerically superior foes simply do not have the combat power to win a combined arms fight. To nullify this overmatch, out-gunned states require asymmetric options to deter and defend. If deterrence falters and the defense cracks, there are few options to prevent enemy consolidation of control. One irregular option, increasingly present in small-nation defense plans, is the so-called “stay-behind force.”

The purpose of a stay-behind force is plainly stated in the name: pre-designated operatives who plan to hide, survive, and eventually operate in the rear area of an advancing enemy. Stay-behind forces can slow advances, buy time, impose costs, create confusion, and psychologically demoralize an invading enemy. In military terms, this is a delaying action, not a defeat mechanism. Stay-behind forces are typically, but not always, a commando-type organization operating clandestinely.

Investing in stay-behind forces is on the rise but remains contentious. The very concept presumes failure. Building a stay-behind force implies that a state will not be able to stop an invader at its borders, and further acknowledges that counterattacks might not expel the occupier. Investing in stay-behind forces, however prudent, signals that occupation is possible or probable — a proposition that nations can be reluctant to admit. Even so, NATO countries in Eastern Europe such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as non-aligned countries such as Georgia and Taiwan, are formulating new national defense and whole-of-society resistance strategies. All face a vastly superior adversary. None can afford force parity. All are considering, or already have, a stay-behind force concept.

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This article provides a framework for stay-behind force decision-making, addressing the single decision that is seldom tested in wargames and is difficult to replicate in training scenarios: when a stay-behind force should remain and fight or flee and evade. After defining types of stay-behind forces, four “occupation” environments are described, differentiated by occupier methods. The four environments are: decapitation, pacification, subjugation, and liberation. This framework is designed to aid a resistance leader or stay-behind force advisor in making the decision: Should I stay, or should I go?

Types of Stay-Behind Forces

Stay-behind forces fall into two general categories. The first are specialized military units such as long-range reconnaissance teams that stay behind to provide intelligence and assist in target acquisition. These units are small, hit-and-run elements that free range in occupied areas and create havoc in the enemy’s rear area. The British Special Air Service operations in North Africa in 1942 against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps offer one famous example. In the Cold War, this category included deep-strike teams designed to service strategic targets inside enemy occupied area via raids, sabotage, or demolitions. Often, these were not intended to be unilateral operations. They were designed to aid or operate with indigenous, partisan units.

The military unit in which I spent a decade serving, the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), is one such unit. The 10th Group was assembled in 1952 and rushed to West Germany to serve in a stay-behind role. The special forces teams were to remain behind the lines after a Soviet Union invasion of central Europe. The mission was to organize and operate resistance networks of partisans that would impose costs on Soviet rear echelons. The classified plans, which were artifacts of the Cold War by the time I read them in 1997, were never activated. Were these 12-man special forces teams truly ready to execute this mission? We do not know. These ideas and organizations were untested.

The second organization — or collective of organizations — is the shadowy, pre-prepared clandestine network, run by intelligence organizations, that organizes citizen resistance. These networks furnish intelligence, circulate propaganda, or take part in direct actions such as subversion and sabotage. The World War II French resistance units typify this approach, with one fatal caveat: They were not pre-conceived. French resistance cells were scrambling start-ups that took shape after the capitulation of France on June 17, 1940. Despite their gutsy heroism, the French Resistance units only organized themselves well after the fall of France. Geographically distributed, ideologically distinct, and wholly uncoordinated, the French resistance groups never seriously challenged the occupying German forces. German consolidation was total and complete, six weeks after the invasion.

Four Occupation Environments

As a Joint Special Operations University adjunct who teaches these concepts and strategies, I have observed that investment in stay-behind forces is a gambit with decision-making peculiarities that lie outside of most doctrinal frameworks. In this context, classifying occupation environments into four categories can help inform the decision to “stay or go.”

No matter how a state builds its stay-behind forces or intends for them to be employed, it is the occupation environment that truly dictates decision-making. The stay-behind force is not designed to engage in a contest of wills or act in accordance with a doctrinal template. It is a counterpuncher and a shapeshifter, intended to attack a narrow range of vulnerabilities revealed by the occupying power. Thus, it is the occupation force’s behaviors more than the stay-behind force itself that dictates actions. The occupation environment includes the forces, methods, and repressive measures that an occupier uses to control territory, resources, infrastructure, and people.

Decapitation

The first scenario in which a stay-behind force can remain is when the invader pursues a decapitation strategy with a modest military occupation to follow. The invader presupposes that the existing security apparatus can be cowed, coerced, or rapidly refashioned into accepting a new regime with minimal upheaval. The invader assumes that current structures, behaviors, and organizations can remain in place, obviating the need for costly occupying forces. To be sure, portions of the population will be displaced, deported, or prosecuted, but the superstructure of security forces will not change drastically.

In this environment, potential stay-behind forces can monitor transitions like shifts and factionalism within security forces. Stay-behind forces can then make an analytic assessment of their political alignment and survivability. Borrowing from revolutionary insurgent groups, stay-behind operatives can judge if the moment is suited for low-signature acts such as organizing, planning, and posturing, or if the chaotic moment is more ideal for aggressive actions that can stymie consolidation of control.

Decapitation strategies are attractive to imperial states based on the promise of quick victory, limited casualties, and a low-cost war. The U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 sought to expel Panamanian leader Manual Noriega and “swap the leadership” while keeping the security apparatus largely intact. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was also a decapitation operation. The Soviet Union overthrew the Afghanistan government with a coup de main commando raid backed by a relatively light invading force of 30,000 troops. In these types of invasions (and occupations), disciplined stay-behind forces stand a reasonable chance of evading and operating. Unless they elevate themselves on the occupier’s target list by conducting splashy operations or media campaigns, stay-behind forces should remain behind as cohesive units of action.

Pacification

The second potential condition in which stay-behind groups can successfully remain is when the invading force intends to mollify or pacify the population — not dominate and terrorize. This type of occupier limits the violence that they will inflict, either by virtue of their ethics or the belief that excessive violence will be counterproductive.

This model approximates the U.S. military approach in Iraq in 2003, whereby the defeat of the Iraqi army was (falsely) expected to secure the compliance of the Iraqi population. When the Iraqi population began to self-organize against the U.S. occupying force, the United States limited its use of force while banking on new Iraqi governance as the antidote. Once the Iraqi population mapped the methods of the coalition occupation, select Iraqis judged that they could recruit, assemble, and fight the coalition and the embryonic Iraqi security forces. The Iraqi wait-and-see types soon formed into — or joined — resistance movements. By late 2004, the U.S.-led coalition (in which I served as a special forces officer), lost the initiative. Seven years later in 2011, U.S. forces departed Iraq, a superpower in retreat.

This type of occupation environment favors stay-behind forces in that they can rapidly identify the narrow range of behaviors (acts of terror, violence, subversion) that draw the attention of occupation forces. This operating space allows for the contemplation of a suitable stay-behind strategy, plan, and method.

Subjugation

The third occupation type is subjugation. This is a brutal scenario, but one where stay-behind forces can still successfully organize, despite violent and repressive measures.

In World War II Poland, the occupying Germans sought to impress large portions of the Polish population into a long-term work force. The Poles who were not killed or starved were enslaved as captured labor. Thus, the German regime sought to extract the fruits of Polish labor to bolster the German industrial war effort. This occupation method allowed room for the growth of the “Polish Underground State,” complete with a sophisticated, stay-behind, armed component.

The Polish Underground State organizational model informed the current U.S. Army Special Forces doctrine on resistance. This U.S. doctrine, in turn, informed the Resistance Operating Concept, the manual that has stimulated stay-behind force designs in Eastern Europe and around the Black Sea. In this model, a resistance has four components: an underground, the brain and nervous system of the resistance; an auxiliary of supporters and citizens who provide supporting functions; an armed element consisting of guerrilla forces; and a public component, the political face and voice of the movement.

In 2023, occupied portions of Ukraine resemble a subjugation occupation, even if the Russian Federation is not conducting (and cannot conduct) a wholesale impressment of Ukrainians in occupied territories like Germany did in Poland. At the tactical level, this helps the Russian occupiers. They do not need to provide for the welfare or sustain the productivity of captured citizens and there are few limits on the methods used to repress and control. The longer the war continues, the more the occupying force devolves into a criminalistic and sadistic enterprise. This creates grim conditions for operations behind enemy lines. In these situations, the best option for stay-behind forces is to flee and operate from a safe haven or shift operations to more permissive areas.

Liberation

The fourth condition favorable for a “stay” decision is where stay-behind forces have some expectation that a liberating force is coming and they can stay without being detained, deported, or killed. In occupied France in 1944, allied supporters such as the U.S. Jedburgh teams, paired with French resistance units, provided intelligence and created delaying actions to aid in Operation Overlord, the allied invasion of France. In this case, the “stay or go” decision was made on the perceived timing and presumed arrival of the liberating force.

Conclusion

Despite their name, stay-behind forces should always be prepared to flee an invading force. In the face of an invading enemy with the intent to occupy and control, staying behind might be a poor tactical choice at best and a suicidal act at worst. Stay-behind forces must survive to contribute. Unless a stay-behind force has a realistic environment in which to survive and operate, they should be prepared to flee and fight another day and in another way. Modern surveillance and detection technologies have made it difficult for stay-behind forces to hide, congregate, and operate. The digital signature is a tactical problem that plagues modern stay-behind concepts. This is one reason why investing in stay-behind forces is a gambit. Realistic employment options are somewhat unknowable prior to actual occupation.

The U.S. military has a strong interest in aiding allies and partners in building stay-behind forces. Friendly nations’ stay-behind forces, if capably conceived and legitimized by the state, are ideal partners for U.S. special operations forces. Unconventional warfare, a core mission of U.S. Special Operations Command, is conducted by partnering with local, irregular forces in contested or occupied areas. Such irregular forces, typically outgunned and outnumbered by the occupier, fight on borrowed time. These groups require external support to fight, survive, and win. In recent decades, the U.S. conducted successful unconventional warfare campaigns with Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance in 2001, with the Iraqi Kurds in 2003, and with Syrian Democratic Forces beginning in 2014. For countries facing Russian aggression or Chinese encroachment, the matching of stay-behind forces with U.S. special operations provides a clear asymmetric advantage. If done before a crisis, visibly and credibly, it also produces a deterrent effect.

Crafting a stay-behind force strategy should start by juxtaposing the utility of the stay-behind force against the expected (or actual) occupation environment. Decision-makers should understand the contextual environment before deciding on employment options. The four occupation environments described above can inform the decision-making of leaders and resistance units.

Become a Member

Brian Petit, a retired U.S. Army colonel, teaches and consults on strategy, planning, special operations, and resistance. He is an adjunct for the Joint Special Operations University and a 2023 non-resident fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a joint production of Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point.

Image: National Archives and Record Administration

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Brian Petit · November 8, 2023

2. Austin Will Underscore U.S. Partnerships, Progress on Indo-Pacific Trip

And will attend the 55th Security Consultation Meeting in Seoul. But here is the buried lede:

Following the security meeting, the U.S. and South Korea are expected to release a defense vision statement to further showcase the breadth of the alliance. 

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3581516/austin-will-underscore-us-partnerships-progress-on-indo-pacific-trip/#:~:text=Following%20the%20security%20meeting%2C%20the%20U.S.%20and%20South%20Korea%20are%20expected%20to%20release%20a%20defense%20vision%20statement%20to%20further%20showcase%20the%20breadth%20of%20the%20alliance.%20%C2%A0

What will be in this new vision? What I will be especially looking for and what I hope to see is that the ROK/US combined military will declare military support to the political endstae - of the acceptable durable political arrangement that will support, protect, and advance ROK/US alliance interests on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia. This is the support to the pursuit of a free and unified Korea.  Following war or regime collapse or some other contingency is this the end state that the military must support the political process of unification.? The military must conduct military operations in support of the political objective. A military operation is only victorious or successful if it accomplishes the political object. Or will the military fall back on the tired pablum of denuclearization and military defeat of the nKPA if Kim Jong Un attacks. 

To me this is the most important result to look for from the SCS. DOD and MND must acknowledge the key points of the Biden Yoon Summit in April and the Camp David Summit in August. We have definitive statements that their presidents (and prime minister in August) are calling for a free and unified Korea. As a military planner I take what the Commander in Chief says as an order. Will the SECDEF and MINDEF and the uniformed military accept the direction (or orders )from their Commanders in Chief and address how the military will support their nations’ political objectives which is what successful military operations do- they accomplish the political objective set by the commander in chief. 

These should be accepted as orders by the military. Failure to do so means the militaries are not completely doing their jobs. 

●“Buried Lede” – 26 Words

●"The two presidents are committed to build a better future for all Korean people and support a unified Korean Peninsula that is free and at peace." 

●https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/04/26/leaders-joint-statement-in-commemoration-of-the-70th-anniversary-of-the-alliance-between-the-united-states-of-america-and-the-republic-of-korea/

●Spirit of Camp David

●“We express support for the goal of the ROK’s Audacious Initiative and support a unified Korean Peninsula that is free and at peace.”

●https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/08/18/the-spirit-of-camp-david-joint-statement-of-japan-the-republic-of-korea-and-the-united-states/

●Camp David Principles:

●“We support a unified Korean Peninsula that is free and at peace.”

●https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/08/18/camp-david-principles/

Austin Will Underscore U.S. Partnerships, Progress on Indo-Pacific Trip

defense.gov · by Joseph Clark

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III will underscore the United States' deep commitment to its allies and partners throughout the Indo-Pacific as he embarks on his ninth official visit to the region later this week, senior defense officials said today.

The trip includes stops in India, South Korea and Indonesia, where the secretary will meet with his regional counterparts and attend a series of engagements showcasing the growing cooperation among the U.S. and its allies.

Pass and Review

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III is welcomed to the Philippine Department of National Defense in Manila, Philippines, Feb. 2, 2023. Austin is traveling to Asia to meet with senior government and military leaders in Korea and the Philippines to advance regional stability, further strengthen the defense partnerships and reaffirm the deep commitment of the United States to work in concert with allies and partners in support of the shared vision of preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific.

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"Every stop on this trip will highlight how the department continues to do more than ever alongside its allies and partners to deliver a shared regional vision of peace, stability and prosperity," an official said while previewing the trip from the Pentagon.

"Next week, you will see just how diverse the region's security architecture really is and the depth of our commitment across the board," the official said.

While in India, Austin will meet with Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh as the two countries progress on expanding their defense industrial cooperation and enhancing interoperability through the India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem, or INDUS-X.

Over the summer, the U.S. and India released their road map for the strategic partnership, which identified key areas for cooperation between the countries' defense industrial sectors. Those include cooperation on technology related to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, undersea domain awareness, air combat and support, munitions systems and mobility.

Austin and Singh will also discuss U.S. and Indian defense interoperability, including bilateral exercises focused on the Indian Ocean and multilateral engagements with other partners in the region.

The defense leaders will also participate in an expanded dialogue alongside Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar in New Delhi.

Austin Arrival

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III arrives at Yokota Air Base, Japan, May 31, 2023.

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Following their meeting, Austin and Blinken will meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

While in South Korea, Austin will meet with South Korean Defense Minister Shin Wonsik and other senior leaders as part of the 55th annual Security Consultative Meeting and the United Nations Command inaugural meeting of member states' defense ministers.

"While meeting with our South Korean allies, the secretary will reinforce the ironclad commitment to the security of the Republic of Korea, including through the full arsenal of our capabilities, including extended deterrence," a senior defense official said.

The visit will take place as U.S. and South Korea mark the 70th anniversary of their alliance this year. That alliance, the official said, remains an "important linchpin of peace and security in the Indo-Pacific."

Following the security meeting, the U.S. and South Korea are expected to release a defense vision statement to further showcase the breadth of the alliance.

"This is critical given the recent activities by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [North Korea], and Secretary Austin will state that the Department of Defense is fully committed to the denuclearization of the DPRK," the official said referring to North Korea by its formal name.

While in South Korea, Austin will honor U.S. and South Korean veterans in a ceremony marking Veterans Day.

Talisman Sabre

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who also serves as defense minister, visit U.S. and Australian service members participating in Exercise Talisman Sabre in Townsville, Australia, July 30, 2023.

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In Indonesia, Austin will attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Defense Ministerial Meeting-Plus, which includes representation from China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the 10 ASEAN member states and the U.S. Timor Leste will also attend this year's ADMM-Plus in observer capacity for the first time.

"In terms of the secretary's engagement with ASEAN and our Southeast Asian partners, a big focus of our discussion in the plenary will be the support for ASEAN capacity building and, specifically, how we are helping with our people-to-people ties," a defense official said.

Those areas include a new, emerging leaders defense program and a new gender adviser initiative that the U.S. will support alongside ASEAN partners.

During his engagements, Austin is also expected to address shared concerns around regional security.

Officials said Austin's trip throughout the region will further underscore how the U.S. and its regional allies are meeting what is a pivotal moment in the Indo-Pacific.

"Whether we're in New Delhi or Seoul [South Korea] or Jakarta [Indonesia] over the next week and a half, that's a major through line you will see," one official said. "We believe we are delivering results with our partners."

Spotlight: Focus on Indo-Pacific Spotlight: Focus on Indo-Pacific: https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/Focus-on-Indo-Pacific/

defense.gov · by Joseph Clark

3. Developing countries owe China at least $1.1 trillion – and the debts are due

Debt trap diplomacy is real.

Developing countries owe China at least $1.1 trillion – and the debts are due

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/07/business/china-bri-developing-countries-overdue-debt-intl-hnk/index.html?utm

By Simone McCarthy, CNN

 6 minute read 

Updated 4:59 AM EST, Tue November 7, 2023

A section of the China-backed Eastbay Expressway in Gwadar, Pakistan.

Jiang Chao/Xinhua/Getty Images

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world.

Hong KongCNN — 

Developing countries owe Chinese lenders at least $1.1 trillion, according to a new data analysis published Monday, which says more than half of the thousands of loans China has doled out over two decades are due as many borrowers struggle financially.

Overdue loan repayments to Chinese lenders are soaring, according to AidData, a university research lab at William & Mary in Virginia, which found that nearly 80% of China’s lending portfolio in the developing world is currently supporting countries in financial distress.

For years, Beijing marshalled its finances toward funding infrastructure across poorer countries – including under an effort that Chinese leader Xi Jinping branded as his flagship “Belt and Road Initiative,” which launched a decade ago this fall.

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That funding flowed liberally into roads, airports, railways and power plants from Latin America to Southeast Asia and helped power economic growth among borrowing countries. Along the way, it drew many governments closer to Beijing and made China the world’s largest creditor, while also sparking accusations of irresponsible lending.

Now, 55% of China’s official sector loans to developing countries have entered their repayment periods, according to the analysis of more than two decades of China’s overseas funding across 165 countries released by AidData.

Those debts are coming due during a new and challenging financial climate of high interest rates, struggling local currencies and slowing global growth.

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“A lot of these loans were issued during [the Belt and Road period starting in 2013] and they came with five- or six- or seven-year grace periods … and then [international debt suspension efforts during the pandemic] tacked on two additional years of grace where borrowers didn’t have to repay,” AidData executive director and report author Brad Parks told CNN.

“Now the story is changing … for the last decade or so China was the world’s largest official creditor, and now we’re at this pivot point where it’s really about (China) as the world’s largest official debt collector,” he said.

AidData’s figures are based on its database tracking what amounts to $1.34 trillion in loan and grant commitments from China’s government and state-owned creditors to public and private sector borrowers in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2021.

That dataset, built through collecting official and public source information about the individual loans and grants, provides one of the widest windows available into what are notoriously opaque Chinese funding activities.

The researchers also cited data reported by lenders to the Switzerland-headquartered Bank of International Settlements, which they said indicates developing country borrowers owe Chinese lenders at least $1.1 trillion and up to $1.5 trillion as of 2021.

The China-backed Karuma dam at the Karuma Hydropower Plant in Kiryandongo, Uganda.

Hajarah Nalwadda/Xinhua/Getty Images

‘International crisis manager’

AidData says Beijing never had to deal with more than 10 financially-distressed countries with unpaid debts until 2008. But, by 2021, there were at least 57 countries with outstanding debt to Chinese state-owned creditors that were in financial distress, its data shows.

This appears to be a factor changing how China is lending.

Funding for the big-ticket infrastructure projects that had earned Beijing goodwill across the developing world are in sharp retreat. Instead, China is providing substantial numbers of emergency rescue loans, according to AidData.

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Chinese lending isn’t bottoming out though. China remains the world’s single largest official source of development finance and continues to out-fund any single Group of Seven (G7) developed economy as well as multilateral lenders, the researchers say.

That’s even as the United States and its G7 partners have ramped up their rival efforts. Together, they outspent China by some $84 billion in 2021.

China has poured billions into Africa’s infrastructure. Is it now tightening the tap?

Overall funding commitments from China to the developing world declined at the start of the pandemic, according to AidData. They fell from a peak that was approaching $150 billion in 2016 and dipped below $100 billion in 2020 for the first time since 2014.

But financing is still in the tens of billions, according to the most recent data from AidData, which documented $79 billion in commitments for 2021, including grants and loans, up $5 billion from the previous year.

By comparison, financing commitments from the World Bank totaled around $53 million in 2021.

Chinese infrastructure project lending as a share of total commitments to low- and middle-income country borrowers, however, fell from 65% in 2014 to 50% in 2017, and again from 49% in 2018 to 31% in 2021.

That year, 58% of lending was emergency rescue loans, which help distressed countries stay afloat by shoring up foreign reserves and credit ratings or helping them make debt payments to other international lenders.

This means China is increasingly acting as an “international crisis manager,” according to AidData, which pointed out that which borrowers get bailed out depends on their risks to the Chinese banking sector.

“It’s very telling that not everybody who’s in debt distress gets an emergency rescue loan from China – what we find is that they really only channel these loans to the biggest Belt and Road borrowers where Chinese banks have the most balance sheet exposure,” Parks said.

“At a superficial level, China is bailing out the borrowers, but at a deeper level it’s bailing out its own banks.”

‘Muscling in’

The impact these troubled loans could have on China’s own banking sector, which is burdened by mounting issues with domestic debt, is not clear.

China has joined other lenders in joint negotiations on debt relief for troubled borrowers such as Zambia and Ghana, but AidData researchers suggest it may have also undermined efforts for coordinated relief by “muscling its way to the front of the repayment line by demanding that borrowers provide recourse to cash collateral that others lack.”

It has also been issuing stronger penalties for late repayments, they said.

China has consistently defended its debt relief record, saying it has played a “positive” and “constructive” role in multilateral efforts, noting last month that “debt sustainability has continued to improve” for the Belt and Road program.

Putin’s prominence and the shadow of conflict: Key takeaways from China’s Belt and Road Forum

Looking ahead, it has also moved toward syndicated loan arrangements, in which China works with Western commercial banks and multilateral institutions to vet projects and reduce future risk, according to AidData findings.

Half of China’s non-emergency lending portfolio to developing countries is now provided via syndicated loan arrangements, with more than 80% of these arrangements involving those Western or multilateral partners, they said.

In recent years China has also moved to recalibrate the Belt and Road Initiative with an eye to bolstering oversight and reducing risk, amid backlash over environmental, social and labor concerns about projects.

Chinese officials have defended the initiative’s impact. At a forum in Beijing last month focused on its Belt and Road drive, they hailed what they said was a new phase of the project focusing on “high-quality” development.

Meanwhile, for those countries already in debt and seeking to refinance with Beijing’s emergency rescue loans, the AidData researchers warned that they “must be mindful of the danger of swapping less expensive debt for more expensive debt.”

4. American Geopolitical Strategy and the Israel-Hamas War

Excerpts:

The United States must also maintain political leverage with Israeli leaders so that it can to curtail their worst excesses. Fortunately, America has considerable tools at its disposal for influencing Israeli decision-making. In addition to requiring defensive military technological assistance, Israel lacks strategic reserves of key weapons and depends on American resupply. It is important that the American government manage our own domestic politics in ways that make using such leverage credible.

Finally, the US must do everything it can to facilitate humanitarian aid reaching innocent Gazans in desperate need. This means more than just helping provide food and water. It requires ensuring Israel that a border that is porous to aid will not inevitably become a security risk. For example, America should offer technical support to screen goods going into Gaza more effectively for dual-use technology that might be repurposed by Hamas to generate mass fire.

The war between Israel and Hamas may appear a story of local counterterrorism or counterinsurgency of the sort that are no longer central to America’s national security strategy. But it is not. It is a war with profound implications for the emerging global order. It requires an American strategy that treats it as such.

American Geopolitical Strategy and the Israel-Hamas War - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Ethan Bueno de Mesquita · November 7, 2023

For understandable reasons, much of the analysis of the war between Israel and Hamas focuses on concerns that are internal to the conflict: Is Israel’s stated intention to destroy Hamas feasible; and if so, at what cost? How is it possible that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government allowed such profound degradation of Israeli state capacity and what will be the political consequences? Are these events the last nail in the coffin for the two-state solution, or might they be the crucible out of which renewed hope for peace emerges? Are there alternative entities that might be capable of governing Gaza in Hamas’s absence and to what extent are the Palestinian people interested in such alternatives? But, compelling as these questions are, from the perspective of the United States, much of this analysis misses the forest for the trees.

The war between Israel and Hamas has serious implications for the emerging geopolitical order with stakes far larger than these local concerns. America’s National Security Strategy sees “the most pressing strategic challenge” of the day as coming from countries like China, Russia, and Iran, “that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.” To meet that challenge, the National Security Strategy calls for building “the strongest possible coalition of nations.” The United States needs a strategy for managing the war that focuses first and foremost on these geopolitics. Focusing on the domestic politics of the past 15 years in Israel and the Palestinian territories, I argue there is no politically feasible alternative to a long-run Israeli strategy of containment and deterrence directed at a Hamas-controlled Gaza. Given Hamas’s increasing technological capacity, deterrence will come with heightened humanitarian suffering in Gaza, threatening détente with the Arab world and American’s case for the rules-based order more broadly. US strategy should use increased defensive military aid, political leverage, and a pragmatic approach to humanitarian assistance to manage these dynamics.

Friendly relations between Israel, Arab countries, and the West are an important component of building a coalition of nations to manage security and economic competition with the China-Russia-Iran axis. In the past several years, wary of Iran, important Arab-league countries including Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel, as they sought to improve their strategic relationship with the West. More recently, normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia has appeared within grasp. As this normalization process approaches critical moments, it is vulnerable to disruption by spoilers. And, indeed, President Biden recently argued that this was precisely Hamas’s goal in attacking Israel. Absent détente with Israel, reliable realignment of the various pro-Western Arab states with the United States will be difficult because American domestic politics will likely keep the United States tightly connected with Israel for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the rival axis is actively seeking its own openings in the region. Chinese firms in particular have been actively involved in networking critical Saudi infrastructure, perhaps creating backdoors that could be leveraged for cyber-based coercion. Moreover, the geopolitical risk extends beyond the region. Important partners in Asia—from Indonesia to Malaysia to Thailand—are watching. For them, Israel’s worst excesses in Gaza make American claims to stand on the side of a rules-based order that China eschews ring hollow, weakening our geopolitical case. Thus, it is important the United States has a clear-eyed understanding of what constitutes a realistic strategy for managing the geopolitical threat that this conflict poses. This requires an analysis of the constraints imposed by domestic politics, starting with Israel’s.

The Israeli politics of the current war have their origins in the Sharon government’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza. That policy—in which Israel dismantled settlements, displaced settlers, and withdrew the army from Gaza—along with the building of a security wall that reduced the threat of terrorism from the West Bank and the creation of the Iron Dome air defense system, created a new political reality. Israelis no longer bore the burden of sending their children to patrol Gaza. And, for the most part, they felt safe and secure. Consequently, they disengaged politically from the Palestinians, abandoned any serious talk of a peace process, and gradually drifted rightward. The implicit bargain of Israeli politics for the past fifteen years has been that the electorate votes for the right and conservative governments provide a level of security that allows Israelis to go about their lives, ignoring the Palestinians and the occupation.

Seen against this backdrop, the first and most obvious observation is that the almost incomprehensible success of Hamas’s attack on Israel is a political catastrophe for the Netanyahu government. In an important sense, they had only one job and they failed at it.

But there is a second, less obvious, and more important, implication. The political failing and potential consequences for some individual politicians notwithstanding, the Israeli electorate has available to it essentially no feasible alternative to the policy of disengagement. The Israeli left has been politically decimated. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt, degraded organization that can barely assert control over urban centers in the West Bank. It is not a realistic partner for the sort of land-for-peace deals that were under discussion a generation ago, even if Israelis had an appetite for such negotiations, which they don’t. And the religious-nationalist settler movement has leveraged its electoral and legislative alliance with the right, and the implicit threat of Kahanist terrorism, to expand its physical presence and intertwinement with the state’s security apparatus in ways that make alternative paths all but unimaginable. We are, therefore, almost certainly heading toward a medium-term future that looks much like a slightly modified version of the recent past: disengagement coupled with a reinvigorated Israeli focus on homeland security.

Considering these political realities, what should we expect that midterm future to look like?

First, for the same reason that motivated Sharon’s original withdrawal, there will not be a long-run reoccupation of Gaza: the right’s political case depends on Israelis not having to bear those costs.

Second, some Palestinian entity will remain in control in Gaza, and that entity will likely be Hamas or a carbon-copy organization. There simply is no viable alternative. The failing Palestinian Authority lacks the desire, the capacity, and the legitimacy to rule in Gaza. Israeli protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, this history of counterterrorism teaches us that destroying Hamas is not a realistic goal without a years-long campaign of destruction and death along the lines of the Sri Lankan fight to eradicate the Tamil Tigers. The Israelis will not go down that road. Dreams of the UN managing security in Gaza are a fantasy. Even if there were countries willing to send thousands of sufficiently well-trained soldiers to participate in a years-long operation involving urban peacekeeping in a conflict zone controlled by Hamas and contested by a variety of Islamic extremist groups, such a mission is not in the geopolitical interests of at least two permanent members of the security council, Russian and China. For all these reasons, Hamas, or its ilk, are with us to stay, and they are likely to be the only game in town.

Third, there will surely be a renewed Israeli commitment to security for the purpose of containment at the Gaza border. Some examples may include the elimination of work permits for Gazans to cross into Israel, the creation of a no man’s land, defense against remote Hamas attacks, and a substantially heightened military presence. Some analysts interpret the success of the Hamas attacks as clear evidence that the Israeli strategy of containment and deterrence were fundamentally flawed. This is a mistake. The problem was not the security concept, it was domestic politics. Insulated from serious electoral competition or accountability by the decline of the left, the Netanyahu government abandoned meritocracy in favor of patronage and loyalty. The failings in intelligence and response reflect profoundly degraded leadership at senior levels within the bureaucracy that must be fixed. Moreover, captured by an alliance with extremist settlers in the West Bank, the government took its eye off the ball in Gaza. Securing the Gaza border will require reversing what appears to have been a disastrous redeployment of the IDF away from Gaza to support and protect these West Bank settlers. The settlers remain politically powerful, and it will be hard for right-wing governments to resist gradually slipping back toward acceding to their ever-increasing demands. The scale and horror of the Hamas attacks, however, have also shaken the Israeli electorate from their lethargy. It is hard to imagine an Israeli government believing it can get away with such a dereliction of duty again.

Fourth, given that Hamas is likely to stay in charge, at least in a de facto sense, there will have to be an increased emphasis on deterrence. This will primarily mean imposing higher costs in response to attacks coming out of Gaza. And this is where the geopolitical challenges come to a head.

With the support of Iran, Hamas’s military capabilities have grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. Its ability to execute a coordinated attack on Israel from the ground, air, and sea makes this obvious. Beyond that, Hamas has increasingly sophisticated technological capabilities. It has shown the ability to employ off-the-shelf drones, and many expect the use of precision-guided munitions, submersible drones, armor piercing explosive devices, and much more in the coming days. Absent an intense electronic warfare effort at the Gaza border, uses of first-person view drone technology developed in Ukraine mean Hamas will soon have precision targeting capabilities anywhere within a few kilometers of the closest point to the border that Israel tolerates its activity. Especially coupled with extensive tunnel network that use unwitting civilians as human shields and allow Hamas forces to operate in a manner hard to detect without on-the-ground intelligence, that means that, even with the creation of a no man’s land, it will become increasingly difficult for Israel to provide its citizens the level of security they expect. Achieving an acceptable level of deterrence therefore may well require a substantial increase in Israel’s military engagement with Gaza, largely in the form of aerial bombardments. That heightened activity, coupled with economic isolation, will impose tremendous suffering on Gazan civilians. And that suffering will inflame public opinion around the globe, especially in the Arab world, substantially complicating the domestic politics of detente for the Saudis and other potential partners.

America’s strategy, thus, must focus on making the coming Israeli strategy of containment and deterrence as low-cost for Gazan civilians as possible. Our ability to do so would be substantially limited if the current war ignites a regional conflict. The primary risk here comes from Iran via Hezbollah. The United States must be prepared to act swiftly and decisively to deter any attempt at escalation. President Biden was right to deploy US military assets in ways that clearly signaled such intent. But beyond this immediate challenge, a realistic strategy for achieving Israeli security while limiting Gazan suffering rests on three pillars: defensive military aid, political leverage, and making humanitarian assistance feasible.

The United States must increase military aid to Israel, especially defensive technology that serves the mission of providing security while minimizing misery. Israel is going to need America’s help suppressing drone attacks along the Gaza border—for instance, by defending in the radio spectrum to jam GPS and drone control signals. The United States has already stepped in to help Israel maintain the protections afforded by Iron Dome, and it will have to do more. If Iron Dome becomes too expensive, or Israel’s overall security in the homeland is eroded by Hamas’s increasing technological sophistication, Israel may turn to a scorched-earth strategy that imposes horrifying, and geopolitically catastrophic, costs on innocent Gazans.

The United States must also maintain political leverage with Israeli leaders so that it can to curtail their worst excesses. Fortunately, America has considerable tools at its disposal for influencing Israeli decision-making. In addition to requiring defensive military technological assistance, Israel lacks strategic reserves of key weapons and depends on American resupply. It is important that the American government manage our own domestic politics in ways that make using such leverage credible.

Finally, the US must do everything it can to facilitate humanitarian aid reaching innocent Gazans in desperate need. This means more than just helping provide food and water. It requires ensuring Israel that a border that is porous to aid will not inevitably become a security risk. For example, America should offer technical support to screen goods going into Gaza more effectively for dual-use technology that might be repurposed by Hamas to generate mass fire.

The war between Israel and Hamas may appear a story of local counterterrorism or counterinsurgency of the sort that are no longer central to America’s national security strategy. But it is not. It is a war with profound implications for the emerging global order. It requires an American strategy that treats it as such.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita is the interim dean and Sydney Stein Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He has written and taught extensively on issues of terrorism, counterterrorism, rebellion, and national security strategy. The views expressed here are solely those of the author, not the Harris School or the University of Chicago.

Main Image: Commander of the U.S. European Command General Curtis M. Scaparrotti visits a captured Hamas tunnel, accompanied by Gaza Division Commander Brig. Gen Yehuda Fox, in 2017. (Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv)

5.Gaza Hostage Crisis Led To "Unprecedented" Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 Deployment

Who discusses this information with reporters? (assuming it is accurate but of which I have no knowledge).

Gaza Hostage Crisis Led To "Unprecedented" Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 Deployment

JSOC is preparing for a long campaign supporting the Israeli incursion into Gaza

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/gaza-hostage-crisis-led-to-unprecedented?utm

JACK MURPHY

NOV 7, 2023

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Image courtesy of the White House.

When Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer said Oct. 12 on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the Biden administration was “not contemplating” putting troops on the ground in Gaza to rescue the dozen or so American hostages captured during Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel, Joint Special Operations Command was already planning a rescue operation.

JSOC (pronounced “jay-sock”), which controls special mission units like the Army’s 1^st Special Forces Operational Detachment – Delta (commonly known as Delta Force) and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, and which conducts the United States’ most sensitive national-level special operations missions, had been informed by the Defense Department that the administration wanted to see “something” in terms of a plan of action to rescue the American citizens, a special operations official told The High Side.

In response, according to current and former U.S. government officials, JSOC conducted one of the biggest deployments in its history. But since those forces arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean, the command has seen its chances of launching a hostage rescue mission wax and wane, based on both the quality of the intelligence available and the shifting priorities of the Israeli and U.S. governments. In the meantime, no U.S. military personnel are known to have entered Gaza.

Living on “Caffeine and Hope”

Within days of the Hamas attack, JSOC operators and electronic warfare technicians had embedded with the Israeli Defense Forces, the United States was sharing technologies with the Israelis that are usually banned for export, and U.S. surveillance drones were flying over Gaza. Meanwhile, JSOC deployed a squadron each from SEAL Team 6 and Delta, plus a battalion from the 75^th Ranger Regiment, to a British Royal Air Force base in Cyprus to wait for the green light to conduct a seemingly impossible mission, three U.S. sources familiar with the operation told The High Side.

Planning for potential contingencies related to the Hamas attack and its aftermath was well underway at JSOC’s Fort Liberty, North Carolina, headquarters by Oct. 12, with various cells generating and discarding ideas and scenarios based on shifting operational realities on the ground, according to a former U.S. military official. Meanwhile, SEAL Team 6 and Delta were placed on alert, with operators returning to their commands from training exercises to prepare for deployment, the former military official said.

Tasked with locating and preparing to rescue about 12 U.S. citizens believed to be held in the Gaza Strip, which features an extensive underground tunnel network and a significant anti-aircraft threat to helicopters from shoulder-fired missiles, JSOC planners were living on “caffeine and hope,” a U.S. source familiar with JSOC operations told The High Side. Like other individuals interviewed for this article, the source spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive military topics.

Given an opportunity to provide comment for this article, U.S. Special Operations Command did not do so before The High Side’s deadline.

G Squadron, Black Squadron and Titan Zeus

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted the Israeli Defense Forces to invade Gaza as soon as possible, and the JSOC advisors embedded with the IDF told their headquarters that the Israelis were unlikely to wait beyond the weekend of Oct. 21-22. A major Israeli conventional invasion of Gaza would either change the dynamics of a hostage rescue mission or preclude its possibility entirely, according to a U.S. special operations official.

For that reason, within days of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, JSOC had begun to work with the IDF on a number of efforts, which included providing the Israelis with U.S. joint terminal attack controllers to support precision airstrikes, in an attempt to reduce unnecessary bombing, because too much rubble in the streets would hamper JSOC’s ability to maneuver in Gaza using ground convoys, according to a U.S. government official. The JTACs, who are military personnel trained to call in precision air strikes, were acting in an advisory capacity and did not enter Gaza.

Operators from Delta Force’s G Squadron and SEAL Team 6’s Black Squadron also deployed to both Israel and Lebanon, three U.S. sources familiar with the deployment told The High Side. Both squadrons feature operators who can travel incognito, under alias if need be, and conduct advance reconnaissance ahead of a planned assault. Once on the ground in the Levant, they conducted what is known as advance force operations or operational preparation of the environment in order to gather intelligence to support the potential hostage rescue mission. Additionally, the JSOC intelligence unit often called Task Force Orange, but today known by the code name Titan Zeus or simply TZ, was in the area, according to one current and one former U.S. government official.

(Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Christopher Maier told a conference in Washington, D.C., Oct. 31 that U.S. special operators were in Israel helping to locate hostages and speaking with the IDF about “what is going to be a very complex fight going forward” in Gaza.)

A “Stingray on Steroids” and Drones Diverted

The Pentagon’s support to Israel also included the transfer of some of the most cutting-edge technologies used by the U.S. special operations and intelligence communities: so-called “black box” devices that it had previously been illegal to share with American partners, no matter how close the relationships. The Israelis were allowed to use and carry these devices, but were not to be told how they worked and were required to return them after the mission.

One of these gadgets was described to the The High Side by an official briefed on the matter as a “Stingray on steroids,” a device that sucks voice signals from cell phone activity straight out of the air and processes them using artificial intelligence-enabled voice recognition technology. If the device finds a voice belonging to a known terrorist, the data is then forwarded to human technical experts for further analysis. Other U.S. technologies provided to Israel included advanced optics and thermal imaging technology, according to a U.S. individual briefed on the “black box” and familiar with the technology transfer.

The Pentagon also diverted unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft to Gaza from three combatant commands – European Command, Africa Command, and Central Command – according to a former U.S. military official familiar with the operation. The ISR drones immediately began searching for the American hostages, according to two U.S. government officials familiar with the drone activities.

(The Pentagon announced Nov. 3 that unarmed MQ-9 Reaper drones were flying ISR missions over Gaza, something that numerous flight tracker social media accounts had already publicized.)

Among the technologies on the drones was a type of radar that can penetrate concrete structures and detect heat signatures within, as well as see underground to a certain depth.

But despite these efforts, by the weekend of Oct. 14-15, JSOC still had no actionable intelligence on the hostages’ location – nothing that an assault force could launch on, according to a U.S. government official. One problem was that the drones’ capabilities were limited by Israeli restrictions on what parts of Gaza they could fly over, as well as by communications jamming equipment that the IDF was using, according to two U.S. government officials.

Delta and Team 6 Deploy to Cyprus

On Oct. 17, a Delta squadron and a SEAL Team 6 squadron landed at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus to stage for the operation. A package of helicopters from the Army’s 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and other enablers came with them.

The Israelis were to be fully briefed on any hostage rescue operation and a deconfliction process would take place to ensure the U.S. and Israeli militaries did not get in each other’s way, but JSOC was to conduct any mission to rescue U.S. hostages unilaterally, i.e. without Israeli support, according to a U.S. government official.

By Oct. 18, as the Ranger battalion arrived in Cyprus, JSOC had gained a little more fidelity on the locations of the American hostages, although the intelligence was not solid or detailed enough to be considered “actionable.” In addition, Hamas was not holding them all in the same place, vastly complicating the planning for any rescue mission. Intelligence estimates were that the 240 hostages, with the Americans mixed in, were spread around Gaza in groups of 15 to 20 with at least four armed Hamas fighters assigned to each group, a U.S. source familiar with the intelligence assessments told The High Side.

Also on Oct. 18, with the crisis in the Middle East threatening to spiral out of control, President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and met with Israeli leaders. JSOC was so busy that although an entire troop or even a squadron of operators would normally be assigned to support the Secret Service during such a high-risk presidential visit, only eight operators could be spared because the special mission units had their hands full preparing for the hostage rescue mission, according to a U.S. government official.

The White House published a photo of some JSOC operators working to augment Biden’s security detail, then deleted it, although it remains on the internet. Other JSOC operators supporting the Biden visit wore plain clothes and operated in a low-visibility capacity, said an official with knowledge of the deployment, adding that Delta Force’s commander was livid over the White House disclosure.

During his remarks in Tel Aviv, Biden hinted at the feverish activity occurring behind the scenes to secure the hostages’ release. “We’re working with partners throughout the region, pursuing every avenue to bring home those who are being held captive by Hamas,” he said. “I can’t speak publicly about all the details, but let me assure you: For me as the American president, there is no higher priority than the release and safe return of all these hostages.”

By then, JSOC’s concept of the hostage rescue operation included a helicopter assault force launching from one of the two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers on station in the Mediterranean. Infiltration and exfiltration also involved boats, ground convoys, and low-visibility vehicles that would blend in with what the locals drive. Two Air Force AC-130 gunships were also part of the fleet of aircraft that would support the operators, according to two U.S. government sources familiar with the mission planning. Virtually every asset JSOC has would be thrown at what was perhaps the most complicated operation the command had faced in its 43-year existence.

The faster JSOC could get the hostages out and the faster the Israelis finished their military operation against Hamas in Gaza, the better from the Pentagon’s perspective, according to a U.S. source familiar with briefings on the matter. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his team were worried that a larger regional conflagration in the Middle East would suck in Lebanese Hezbollah and their Iranian sponsors, with Russia potentially also helping Iran and its proxies kill Americans in Israel out of revenge for the United States’ support for Ukraine, according to the U.S. source.

However, the prospect of a complex hostage rescue in the dense urban jungle of Gaza City raised fears in the Pentagon of helicopters being shot out of the sky, according to a U.S. government official and the U.S. source familiar with briefings on the issue. Nonetheless, by the time Biden left Israel on Oct. 18, officials were “90% sure” that Biden would authorize the mission, most likely on the weekend of Oct. 21-22, a U.S. military official told The High Side.

But within 24 hours the situation had changed drastically. By Oct. 19, the Israelis were claiming the right of first refusal on any hostage rescue missions in Gaza. This meant that JSOC would only be able to embed a few operators in Israeli-led missions, or that JSOC might get the hand-me-down missions that the IDF didn’t want. Several U.S. sources briefed on or otherwise close to the mission planning described this situation as less than ideal, as they believed that Israeli targeting, intelligence, and military capabilities were not up to the task.

Thus, by Oct. 20, JSOC had gone from being in the driver’s seat to fighting for influence at the table with both the Israelis and the British. Now all the command could do was lobby for putting Americans back in the lead with a few Israeli operators embedded in their force instead of the other way around.

Meanwhile, a U.S. official told The High Side, the intelligence on the hostages’ locations remained spotty.

No Actionable Intelligence

As U.S. and Israeli officials debated what to do about the hostages, JSOC was also planning for the possible evacuation of other U.S. citizens from the region. Depending on how the IDF’s invasion unfolded, the Pentagon was preparing to evacuate between four and eight U.S. government facilities in Israel and Lebanon, according to two former U.S. military officials. These locations included embassies, consulates, and “annexes” (often used by the CIA), they said. The Pentagon calls this sort of mission a non-combatant evacuation operation. The JSOC version is called an enhanced military assisted departure.

(Maier, the assistant secretary of defense, said at the Oct. 31 conference that U.S. special operations forces in the Israel theater were ready “to help our own citizens get out of places and to help our embassies be secure.”)

On Oct. 20, secret negotiations between Hamas and the government of Qatar, acting as an intermediary between the militants and the U.S. government, paid dividends when Hamas released Judith and Natalie Raanan, two U.S. hostages who had been kidnapped from a kibbutz during the Oct. 7 attack. But the situation for the remaining hostages did not improve over the weekend of Oct. 21-22, nor did the expected IDF invasion materialize.

On Oct. 23 Hamas released two Israeli hostages. One, 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz, told the press that her captors had first put her into a group of 25, then into a group of four. They were imprisoned in a small part of a network of tunnels that she described to the press as resembling a vast spiderweb.

Shortly after Lifshitz’s release, Hamas personnel attacked the Red Crescent aid workers who had facilitated her transfer, according to a U.S. military official, who said the U.S. military assessment was that there was friction between Hamas and the Red Crescent in Gaza. As part of the deal to release the two Israelis, Hamas demanded that no American or Israeli drones monitor the transfer, according to a U.S. government official. It is unknown whether the United States and Israel stuck to this arrangement.

At the time of Lifshitz’s release, however, JSOC and the IDF still had no actionable intelligence regarding the other hostages, despite the U.S. government having provided the Israelis with some of the best technology available.

ISR platforms that can detect heat signatures through around ten feet of concrete failed to find any hostages, according to a U.S. government official. Sensor packages placed in Gaza disguised as rocks or rubble also failed to help geolocate any of the captives, the official went on to say, adding that sensors that can “smell” burning excrement or human corpses likewise detected nothing significant. (The use of these technologies did not involve any U.S. military personnel entering Gaza, according to U.S. officials.)

One slightly more promising development was that JSOC signals intelligence personnel were getting some hits that they believed, but could not confirm, were connected to the hostages, according to a second U.S. government official. In the absence of any solid intelligence, JSOC’s assessment was that the hostages were held deep underground in a tunnel system that connected two hospitals in Gaza, according to a U.S. government official.

A State of Limbo

As the odds of a hostage rescue mission dwindled, the operators and Rangers in Cyprus remained in a state of limbo, standing by for either a hostage rescue or an evacuation of U.S. civilians. At the same time, the news media began picking up on the large U.S. military deployment to Cyprus, which, according to a U.S. military official, had involved more than 50 Air Force C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft.

But a small turning point occurred on Oct. 24, when the IDF finally lifted the restrictions that governed what parts of Gaza JSOC’s drones could fly over. U.S. special operations planners finally got what they considered to be good quality full-motion video of Gaza City, according to a U.S. government official. In addition, the IDF reduced its electronic jamming, which allowed the JSOC ISR platforms over Gaza to pick up more signals intelligence, the official said.

Two days later, on Oct. 26, JSOC finally received actionable intelligence through Israeli technical means of the location of a group of hostages, according to the U.S. government official. However, whether that group included any U.S. citizens was unknown.

Biden authorized a team from the Rangers’ Regimental Reconnaissance Company (RRC) to conduct a scouting mission - which didn’t happen - and approved lethal force for a joint IDF/JSOC hostage rescue operation, according to a U.S. government official. Just like that, the big mission was back in play.

Also on Oct. 26, the U.S. military enabled an Israeli airstrike on Hamas’s deputy head of intelligence, a U.S. government official familiar with the operation told The High Side, adding that the drone was Israeli, but the United States had supplied the intelligence.

The next day, after cutting access to the local internet, electricity, and cell phone service, the IDF began its ground invasion of Gaza. JSOC advisers were embedded in IDF command posts as a form of forward reconnaissance, but did not enter Gaza, while the Rangers and other operators in Cyprus remained in a holding pattern with some ops approved but thus far unexecuted, according to three U.S. government officials. JSOC leaders intended to see how Iran and Hamas responded to the incursion before deciding on their next step, two U.S. government officials said.

With normal communications lines in Gaza severed, Hamas was forced to use hand-held radios to communicate. JSOC members embedded with the IDF identified these signals using a direction finding device called the “hydra,” which is used to pinpoint enemy locations, according to a former U.S. military official with knowledge of the operation.

A U.S. Special Operations soldier uses the Hydra in Afghanistan to help a sniper engage and kill an enemy combatant. (Courtesy photo, provided to The High Side)

By the first week of November, the pendulum had swung again. The IDF seemed increasingly focused on Hamas targets, rather than the hostages, according to a U.S. government official. (Netanyahu said on Nov. 3 that any ceasefire in Gaza must include the release of the hostages.)

With no clear end to the war in sight, JSOC planners concluded that they would be settling in for a long mission, one that might last years, supporting the IDF’s incursion into Gaza.

During a Nov. 6 press briefing, Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder laid out the Defense Department’s four “lines of effort” in the Middle East: protection of U.S. forces and civilians; supplying Israel in its fight with Hamas; coordinating with Israel to secure the release of the hostages; and strengthening the U.S. military presence in the region to prevent the conflict from spreading.

But in defense circles there is a growing recognition that the U.S. military’s goals are not perfectly aligned with those of the IDF. As the likelihood of a hostage rescue mission recedes again, JSOC’s priority, as spelled out to the command by the Pentagon, is to help “contain the conflict and isolate Iranian influence,” said a U.S. government official. Israel’s priority, the official added, “is to maximize Hamas casualties.”

6. Post retirement - Army (Soldier for Life)

​And now for something completely different. As a public service announcement for my fellow retirees (and more importantly for those who are planning retirement.). This handbook and website appear to be a very helpful and thorough .

Download the 74 Page US Army Retirement Handbook for 2024 at this link: https://soldierforlife.army.mil/Retirement/post-retirement

​The Retired Soldier Casualty Assistance Checklist is also very helpful and can be downloaded here: https://soldierforlife.army.mil/Documents/static/Post/Retired_Soldier_Casualty_Assistance_Checklist.pdf. Some of us who are feeling our mortality might want to use this to update their information to prepare for the inevitable future.

POST RETIREMENT

https://soldierforlife.army.mil/Retirement/post-retirement

Retired Soldiers have earned many benefits and entitlements through their years of faithful service. Over the years, like everything else in life, there have been changes and modifications. It is important that all Retired Soldiers maintain a working knowledge of their benefits and entitlements in order to take full advantage of them. In addition to the information presented here, Retired Soldiers should refer to Army Echoes which also outlines changes in benefits and entitlements. The current and previous editions of Army Echoes dating back to 1996 are available at the link provided above.

INFORMATION FOR RETIRED SOLDIERS AND FAMILY MEMBERS

7. Reoccupying Gaza ‘Not the Right Thing to Do,’ White House Tells Israel

Who in their right mind would want to occupy a hostile land where trying to pacify the population will only harden resistance?  Iraq? Afghanistan? The Philippines in 1900? The American colonies in the 1700s? Gaza in 2023?

Reoccupying Gaza ‘Not the Right Thing to Do,’ White House Tells Israel

The U.S. caution came after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu floated the idea that Israel might oversee security for the Gaza Strip indefinitely.

nytimes.com · by Lisa Friedman · November 7, 2023

Israeli tanks gathering north of the Gaza Strip last month.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

The White House cautioned Israel on Tuesday against reoccupying Gaza after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that his country could hold a security role there “for an indefinite period” once the war is over.

“We’re having active discussions with our Israeli counterparts about what post-conflict Gaza looks like,” John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, told reporters. “The president maintains his position that reoccupation by Israeli forces is not the right thing to do.”

The words of caution came after Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would need to oversee the security of the Gaza Strip once the fighting is over to prevent future attacks. Mr. Netanyahu, in an interview with ABC News, did not say who should govern the enclave after Hamas, which now controls it, is gone. But he said he thought Israel would “have the overall security responsibility” over the territory indefinitely.

President Biden previously said that it would be “a big mistake” for Israel to reoccupy Gaza, from which it withdrew in 2005.

The United States has offered staunch support for Israel since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas, which killed more than 1,400 people, according to Israeli authorities. A post-conflict Gaza, Mr. Biden has said, “can’t be Hamas,” an organization whose founding covenant embraces “killing the Jews” and wiping out Israel. The United States and the European Union have designated Hamas a terrorist group.

But as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepens, the United States increasingly is trying to balance its backing for Israel with calls for the protection of Palestinian noncombatants and for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting.

In just under a month, Israeli strikes have killed more than 10,000 people in Gaza and injured more than 25,000 others, the Gaza Health Ministry said on Monday. The figures from the ministry, which operates under the political arm of Hamas, could not be independently verified, but a Pentagon spokesman, Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, acknowledged that “we know the numbers are in the thousands.”

Mr. Biden spoke with Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday and discussed the need to accelerate and increase the humanitarian assistance going into the enclave, Mr. Kirby said. “He also talked about the importance of pauses in the fighting.”

Mr. Kirby also said the White House is “keeping in our thoughts and prayers the many, many thousands of innocent Palestinians who have been killed in the conflict since Oct. 7, and many more who are injured and wounded in the conduct of the operations.”

“We’re mindful of that suffering as well,” he said.

On Monday, the Israeli prime minister said he would consider “tactical little pauses” of about an hour to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid or allow the exit of hostages held by Hamas.

Asked if the White House considers those sufficient, Mr. Kirby said, “It’s in keeping with the conversations that we’ve been having.”

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

• The Civilian Toll: Facing global criticism over a bloody military campaign in Gaza that has killed thousands of civilians, Israeli officials say it is impossible to defeat Hamas without killing innocents, a lesson they argue Americans and their allies should understand.
• Waiting to Deploy: Facing a military campaign with no end in sight, 360,000 reservists who have been called up as Israel goes to war in Gaza find themselves in a holding pattern.
• Gaza’s Teetering Hospitals: Doctors and nurses in Gaza’s hospitals, which are nearing collapse without electricity and basic supplies after weeks of an Israeli siege, say they are facing hard choices about who lives and who dies.
• Blinken in the Middle East: During a quick trip to the region, Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeatedly warned Iran against using its proxies to widen the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
• Explosion in Al Maghazi: An explosion in the densely populated part of central Gaza destroyed several buildings and appeared to have killed and wounded many people, photos and videos from the scene showed. The Gazan Health Ministry blamed an Israeli airstrike.

The Conflict’s Global Reach

• U.S. Congress: Democrats in Congress, torn between their support for Israel and concern about civilian suffering in Gaza, are struggling with how far to go in calling for measures to mitigate civilian casualties as the left wing of the party escalates pressure for a cease-fire.
• President Biden: After weeks of terror and retaliation in Israel and Gaza, and 20 months of war in Ukraine, Biden is confronting the limits of his leverage in the two international conflicts defining his presidency.
• Social Media: Amid angry outpourings and even personal attacks, people are increasingly facing pressure to post about the Israel-Hamas war. The social networks, meanwhile, are being accused of spreading misinformation and hate speech.
• A Worldwide War of Words: Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China are using state and social media to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States.
• Dagestan Riot: An analysis of Telegram posts shows how a false rumor about the resettlement of Israelis in Dagestan that led to an antisemitic riot at an airport was shared online for longer and more widely than previously reported.

nytimes.com · by Lisa Friedman · November 7, 2023

8. China and Russia Claim Moral High Ground Over Palestinian Deaths

Excerpts:

The current crisis, and the support provided by the Biden administration so far, makes it evident that only a solid alliance with the U.S. can protect Israel, said Tuvia Gering, a China expert at the Institute for National Security Studies of Tel Aviv University.

“There is no alternative for Israel,” he said. “China is not neutral. It’s against Israel and is providing wind to the sails of those who wish to annihilate us. It’s been indifferent to our suffering and it is exploiting it for its own geopolitical gains.”

For Putin, who used to value Israel’s neutrality and refusal to join Western sanctions over Ukraine, the new frost with Israel can be explained in part by the change in Russia’s own demographics. Roughly one-quarter of Russia’s population is now estimated to be Muslim, a share that keeps rising because of higher birthrates in Muslim areas and mass migration from Central Asia.

The bloodshed in Gaza has already sparked unrest in several Muslim republics of the northern Caucasus. In late October, as rumors spread that the region’s Jews who had emigrated to Israel would be coming back as refugees, local vigilante groups raided hotels looking for Jewish guests and, on Oct. 29, stormed the international airport of Makhachkala after a scheduled flight from Tel Aviv landed there, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Allahu akbar.” Russian authorities have since made some 200 arrests. 

An even more important factor, however, is Putin’s drive to restore Soviet-era norms, an ideological campaign that also involves rewriting schoolbooks, erecting monuments to Stalin, and dismantling whatever remains of Russia’s democratic institutions. That has also meant a rapprochement with Soviet-era allies, such as North Korea.

 “It’s all part of Russia’s overall slide back to Soviet times, to Soviet thinking, to Soviet traditions,” said former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who now lives in the West. “This is in line with the overall neo-Soviet policy of confrontation with the West. And now, Israel’s turn has come.”

China and Russia Claim Moral High Ground Over Palestinian Deaths

The U.S. rivals are tapping outrage over Israel’s war in Gaza to gain support in the developing world

https://www.wsj.com/world/china-and-russia-claim-moral-high-ground-over-palestinian-deaths-4ee351a5

By Yaroslav TrofimovFollow

Updated Nov. 8, 2023 12:52 am ET

DUBAI—The bloody war in Gaza is providing America’s main geopolitical rivals China and Russia with a valuable opportunity to garner support around the world, enabling the two repressive autocracies to harness a wave of sympathy for the Palestinians and to position themselves as champions of humanitarian values and peace.

While both Moscow and Beijing maintained close relations with Israel for decades—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even used billboards of himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin during last year’s election—the two powers have pointedly declined to criticize Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war.

Distancing themselves from Israel, Russia and China have since focused on framing the war as part of a global power struggle against the U.S., with Israel reduced to little more than Washington’s regional pawn.

Putin, whose forces have flattened several Ukrainian cities, said in an address last week that his “fists clench and eyes tear up” as he watches the Israeli bombing of Gaza. Russian soldiers in Ukraine are fighting the same American “root of evil,” he said, and their battles “will decide the fate of Russia, and of the entire world, including the future of the Palestinian people.”

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After meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel wouldn’t consider any temporary cease-fire without the return of the hostages held by Hamas. WSJ’s Vivian Salama reported from Israel. Photo: Amos Ben Gershom/Israeli Press Office

China’s rhetoric has been more subdued, with Xi Jinping avoiding public comments on the Middle East since the conflict erupted. Chinese state media, however, has been filled with commentary blasting U.S. “hypocrisy” and “warmongering” in the Middle East, and contrasting it with Beijing’s demands for an immediate cease-fire and Palestinian statehood.

China has said that its position on the Palestinian issue is the same as Russia’s and the two nations voted together at the United Nations Security Council last month to veto a U.S.-sponsored resolution on the crisis.

“Countries should uphold the moral conscience, rather than clinging on to geopolitical calculations, let alone double standards,” China’s U.N. envoy Zhang Jun said in a veiled reference to the U.S. “China will continue to stand on the side of international fairness and justice, on the side of international law, and on the side of the legitimate aspirations of the Arab and Islamic world.”

Russia’s ambassador to the U.N., Vassily Nebenzia, last month voted against a U.S.-sponsored resolution on the Israel-Hamas conflict. PHOTO: JUSTIN LANE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Secretary of State Antony Blinken with China’s U.N. envoy Zhang Jun and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield before the start of the U.N. Security Council meeting called to address the conflict. PHOTO: EDUARDO MUNOZ/SHUTTERSTOCK

The predicament in the Middle East should lead Washington to abandon its longstanding hostile attitude to China, added Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization think tank in Beijing and a former government adviser.

 “They should really not treat China as a rival…They’re having a challenge with the Russian war in Ukraine, now they will have another challenge with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They should not have a challenge with China, too,” he said. “They should treat China as a partner, as a peacemaker, and should cooperate with China on these global issues.”

Hamas has been appreciative of such signaling. Khaled Meshaal, one of the group’s main leaders, said in a recent TV appearance that Hamas seeks “cooperation with great powers China and Russia.” He added that Russia has benefited from the Oct. 7 attack because it has diverted American attention from Ukraine and that China may be inspired by Hamas’s raid for its own plans to capture Taiwan. Unlike Russia and China, the U.S. and most other Western nations consider Hamas, whose members killed some 1,400 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage on Oct. 7, a terrorist organization.

Despite the rhetoric, neither Russia nor China has the capacity, or desire, to get actively involved in the Middle East at a time when the U.S. is returning in force to the region, deploying three aircraft carrier groups and significant aircraft and air defense assets to protect its partners and allies. But the diplomatic posturing alone is boosting their soft power across the developing world, where outrage over the thousands of civilian casualties caused by the Israeli bombing of Gaza has mounted for weeks. Countries that have recalled ambassadors from Israel in protest include faraway Colombia, Chile and South Africa. Bolivia has severed diplomatic ties with Israel altogether.

“For China, to be supportive of the Palestinian cause will serve the purpose of China uniting with the developing world at a global level,” said Chinese foreign policy expert Li Mingjiang at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. “Great-power politics is another factor. China senses a political opportunity to side with the majority of the countries of the world in opposition to the American position.”

Russian soldiers in Grozny. Putin began his presidency in 2000 by flattening the city during the war in Chechnya. PHOTO: ANTOINE GYORI/SYGMA/GETTY IMAGES

A Russian serviceman in Mariupol, Ukraine, last year. At least 25,000 civilians were killed during the monthslong siege, municipal officials said. PHOTO: SERGEI ILNITSKY/SHUTTERSTOCK

Russia, subjected to Western sanctions and global criticism for its invasion of Ukraine, is even more eager to change the narrative and pierce its own isolation.

“Choosing a policy that brings Russia closer to the Arab world is understandable. The Global South nowadays is important for Moscow because of the situation around Ukraine,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, a former Russian diplomat in Tehran who’s currently a professor at Qatar University. “Russia realizes that the events in Gaza are pushing the Global South away from the West, away from the United States and could make its attitudes more welcoming to Moscow.”

Russia’s record, in Ukraine and elsewhere, is littered with atrocities. Putin began his presidency in 2000 by flattening Grozny, the capital of the then-rebellious Muslim republic of Chechnya. In Syria, a Russian bombing campaign reduced to rubble much of the city of Aleppo in 2016. And in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which the Russian air force could bomb without fear of air defenses, at least 25,000 Ukrainian civilians were killed during the monthslong Russian siege last year, according to municipal officials. The true toll may never be known because the U.N. and other independent organizations were never given access to Mariupol and the victims were routinely bulldozed into the rubble or buried in mass graves.

China, meanwhile, incarcerated upward of a million Muslims from its western Xinjiang region—equivalent to the Gaza Strip’s entire adult population—in internment camps, according to American officials. China described these camps as providing vocational opportunities and most major Muslim nations have refrained from criticizing its repressive policies in Xinjiang.

“That particular issue doesn’t resonate in the ‘Muslim world’ the same way that the Palestinian issue does,” said Neysun Mahboubi, director of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. As the war in Ukraine damages Russia’s global appeal, and as America is criticized for its support of Israel, there “is an opportunity for China to shape an image of being a responsible world power, and more so than its competitors, including the United States,” he said.

A detention facility in China’s Xinjiang region. U.S. officials say Beijing has incarcerated upward of one million Muslims from the region. PHOTO: PEDRO PARDO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

For both Russia and China, involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a long history. The Soviet Union, which viewed Arab monarchies as proxies of Western imperialism, voted for the Jewish state’s creation at the U.N. General Assembly in 1947 and was the first nation to recognize Israel once it proclaimed independence the following year. It also helped ensure its survival by getting Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia to ship weapons. But Moscow severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 and quickly became a major military supporter of its Arab foes. Communist China had refused to recognize Israel altogether.

It was only after the end of the Cold War that Russia and China opened embassies in Tel Aviv. Relations quickly expanded as hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews settled in Israel and the country also became an important conduit of Western technologies to China. In 2018, Netanyahu wore the St. George’s ribbon, a symbol of Russian military glory that has also become a sign of support for Russian aggression in Ukraine, during a visit with Putin in Moscow. This summer, amid tensions with the Biden administration over planned judicial reforms, Netanyahu posted a photo of himself holding a book by Xi that had been gifted by the Chinese ambassador, a move that raised eyebrows in Washington.

President Biden’s administration has supported Israel’s right to defend itself following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. PHOTO: ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The current crisis, and the support provided by the Biden administration so far, makes it evident that only a solid alliance with the U.S. can protect Israel, said Tuvia Gering, a China expert at the Institute for National Security Studies of Tel Aviv University.

“There is no alternative for Israel,” he said. “China is not neutral. It’s against Israel and is providing wind to the sails of those who wish to annihilate us. It’s been indifferent to our suffering and it is exploiting it for its own geopolitical gains.”

For Putin, who used to value Israel’s neutrality and refusal to join Western sanctions over Ukraine, the new frost with Israel can be explained in part by the change in Russia’s own demographics. Roughly one-quarter of Russia’s population is now estimated to be Muslim, a share that keeps rising because of higher birthrates in Muslim areas and mass migration from Central Asia.

The bloodshed in Gaza has already sparked unrest in several Muslim republics of the northern Caucasus. In late October, as rumors spread that the region’s Jews who had emigrated to Israel would be coming back as refugees, local vigilante groups raided hotels looking for Jewish guests and, on Oct. 29, stormed the international airport of Makhachkala after a scheduled flight from Tel Aviv landed there, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Allahu akbar.” Russian authorities have since made some 200 arrests. 

An even more important factor, however, is Putin’s drive to restore Soviet-era norms, an ideological campaign that also involves rewriting schoolbooks, erecting monuments to Stalin, and dismantling whatever remains of Russia’s democratic institutions. That has also meant a rapprochement with Soviet-era allies, such as North Korea.

 “It’s all part of Russia’s overall slide back to Soviet times, to Soviet thinking, to Soviet traditions,” said former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who now lives in the West. “This is in line with the overall neo-Soviet policy of confrontation with the West. And now, Israel’s turn has come.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

9. Biden’s AI Order Is Government’s Bid for Dominance

Excerpts:

Big Tech and other large companies might be able to manage these new regulatory and legal headaches, which may be why many CEOs have invited regulation. But startups and smaller businesses will have an added burden in lawyers and monitors who report to government, resulting in less competition. If Mr. Biden’s order had been in force a decade ago, would OpenAI have progressed as fast?

Mr. Biden’s lawyers know he lacks the legal authority to do most of what he’s seeking to do, which is why he’s invoking expansive presidential powers to protect national defense under the 1950 Defense Production Act. Imagine if Bill Clinton as President had done the same to impose government control over the free-wheeling internet.

The Administration is touting an “AI safety pledge” signed by the U.S., U.K. and China last week. But Beijing is unlikely to honor such safeguards as it moves rapidly to surpass U.S. leadership in AI, including military uses. The best news about the order is that it will have to be implemented with regulation that can be challenged in court for its legal overreach.

Biden’s AI Order Is Government’s Bid for Dominance

His executive action will help the giants but slow down innovation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-ai-executive-order-china-artificial-intelligence-regulation-64024988?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

By The Editorial Board

Follow

Nov. 7, 2023 6:45 pm ET

President Joe Biden signs an executive order providing rules around generative AI at the White House, Oct. 30. PHOTO: CHRIS KLEPONIS/ZUMA PRESS

President Biden rightly says the U.S. is in a technological arms race with China. Then why is he ordering an across-the-board government intrusion into artificial intelligence (AI) that will slow American innovation?

“To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risks, we need to govern this technology, not—and there’s no other way around it, in my view. It must be governed,” Mr. Biden said last week in issuing a 63-page executive order. He called it “the most significant action any government anywhere in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security, and trust.” This isn’t reassuring.

***

AI covers a broad sweep of applications including chatbots, and deep-learning and large-language models that mimic human neural networks at exponentially higher power. Most large businesses already use AI in some form, and it has enormous potential to boost labor productivity, advance human knowledge and save lives. It also carries risks, especially if generative AI eventually resembles human cognition.

The President’s order includes a few useful ideas such as providing guidance on authenticating content and water-marking to clearly label AI-generated content so Americans can discern if, say, a political ad includes manipulated images or voices. The order also seeks to increase visas for foreign workers with AI skills.

Yet it isn’t clear that government has anything close to the expertise to understand AI, which is developing rapidly, much less the wisdom to know how to regulate its various applications. And the risk is that it will tie up in red tape American companies that are developing AI for beneficial uses.

Under the order, federal agencies will have to establish guidelines “for developing and deploying safe, secure, and trustworthy AI systems” within 270 days. Companies developing AI models that pose a “serious risk” to national security, economic security, or public health and safety will have to notify regulators when training their models and share the results of “red-team safety tests.”

These safety tests will have to probe AI systems for flaws, including discriminatory biases, limitations, errors and risks from misuse. Federal agencies don’t have the capacity to oversee hundreds of thousands of AI systems that could fall under their purview—from predictive crime models to factory robots—even if they were to raid OpenAI for engineers.

While engineers usually test their products for bugs before launching them, no system is perfect. Chatbots are known to “hallucinate”—i.e., fabricate information—on occasion. But each new version improves as bugs are discovered and fixed, and more data is fed into the models. That’s how iterative AI works.

Progressives warn that AI models can propagate racial and gender discrimination if biases are ingrained in data they are trained on. That’s true, but companies that use AI are still obligated to follow civil-rights laws, so they have every incentive to ensure that their models don’t discriminate.

The Biden Administration’s bigger concern seems to be that AI systems are highly adept at detecting subtle patterns and correlations that may cause a disparate impact on certain groups. Hence, Mr. Biden directs federal agencies to review business AI models such as those used in underwriting loans and hiring for disparities affecting “protected groups.”

AI large-language models could also discriminate based on political viewpoint and amplify progressive narratives if they are trained on news stories from a liberal press and academic studies. Yet that risk doesn’t seem to worry the Administration, though it ought to concern AI developers since it could cause half the country to turn against the technology.

AI has enormous potential to assist with drug development, predicting disease risk and selecting treatments. But the order will complicate such advances by micromanaging how healthcare providers and drug makers use AI, and setting up a central repository to track incidents that allegedly cause harm, including through bias. This will be a boon, perhaps intentional, for the tort bar.

Big Tech and other large companies might be able to manage these new regulatory and legal headaches, which may be why many CEOs have invited regulation. But startups and smaller businesses will have an added burden in lawyers and monitors who report to government, resulting in less competition. If Mr. Biden’s order had been in force a decade ago, would OpenAI have progressed as fast?

***

Mr. Biden’s lawyers know he lacks the legal authority to do most of what he’s seeking to do, which is why he’s invoking expansive presidential powers to protect national defense under the 1950 Defense Production Act. Imagine if Bill Clinton as President had done the same to impose government control over the free-wheeling internet.

The Administration is touting an “AI safety pledge” signed by the U.S., U.K. and China last week. But Beijing is unlikely to honor such safeguards as it moves rapidly to surpass U.S. leadership in AI, including military uses. The best news about the order is that it will have to be implemented with regulation that can be challenged in court for its legal overreach.

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Journal Editorial Report: The week’s best and worst from from Kyle Peterson, Mary O’Grady and Dan Henninger. Images: AP/Zuma Press/Reuters Composite: Mark Kelly

10. As war frustrations rise, stalemate tests Zelensky and top general Zaluzhny

Excerpts:

“We are near the moment in which everybody understands that we need a way out,” Meloni said. “The problem is to find a way out which can be acceptable for both, without destroying the international law.”

Ukraine’s counteroffensive, she continued, “is not going” as Kyiv had hoped, and seemed unlikely to change the “destiny of the conflict.” She warned the war could “last many years if we don’t try to find some solutions.”

Meloni’s office expressed “regret” for the embarrassing mishap, and her chief diplomatic adviser resigned. But she also appeared to be echoing a certain national sentiment.

In his Monday night address, Zelensky insisted that Ukraine could defeat the Russian invaders provided the country stays unified. “Our victory is achievable. We will get there if we all stay focused on this aim,” the president said. “Not on political or personal benefits. Not on the infighting that serves no use.”

As war frustrations rise, stalemate tests Zelensky and top general Zaluzhny

By Siobhán O'Grady

November 8, 2023 at 1:49 a.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Siobhán O'Grady · November 8, 2023

KYIV — After months of heavy losses in a largely stalled counteroffensive against Russia, tension among Ukraine’s senior leaders has spilled awkwardly into the open in recent days — prompting President Volodymyr Zelensky to call for a halt to political infighting.

“Everyone should be concentrating their efforts right now on defending the country,” Zelensky said Monday in his nightly address. “Put themselves together and do not rest; do not drown in infighting or other issues.” He warned that shattered unity could have drastic consequences: “The situation is now the same as it was before — if there is no victory, there will be no country.”

Zelensky’s plea to stop any infighting came after he engaged in his own a rare, public dispute with the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, over whether the war has reached a World War I-style “stalemate” — as Zaluzhny asserted in a recent interview with the Economist.

Zelensky then rebuffed those remarks at a news conference with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “Everyone is tired and there are different opinions,” Zelensky said when discussing Zaluzhny’s “stalemate” remark. He also told NBC News that he does “not think that this is a stalemate.” But one of the president’s aides went so far as to say on Ukrainian TV that comments like Zaluzhny’s to the media “eases the work” of Russia.

Zaluzhny, a career military officer, enjoys huge national popularity, and he is widely viewed as a potential threat to Zelensky should he ever jump into politics. So far, the general has given no indication that he plans such a move.

But after 20 months of all-out war, public fissures are starting to appear in Ukraine’s previously unshakable national unity. The issue of a stalemate is especially sensitive because Ukrainian officials fear a perceived deadlock could mean they will be pressured into negotiations with Russia that would force them to cede territory. An overwhelming majority of Ukrainians oppose territorial concessions.

The friction among leaders is on full display as Ukraine prepares for the possibility of another brutal winter with virtually no hope of any significant progress on the southern front. Even Zaluzhny has said: “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”

These open disagreements “serve as a distraction from winning the war and definitely play into [the] enemy’s hands,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, founder and director of the New Europe Center, a think tank in Kyiv. “[E]verything starts from … unity inside Ukraine,” Getmanchuk said.

The lack of good news is dampening civilian morale, as are growing fears Russia will soon renew its attacks on energy infrastructure that could make life miserable during the coldest months of the year.

The pressure is coming not only from the battlefield. International attention has largely diverted to the war in Israel and Gaza. And in Washington, there are disagreements among lawmakers over additional aid for Ukraine.

On Monday, Zelensky publicly dismissed the possibility of holding a presidential election in spring, as would normally occur on Ukraine’s political calendar. Some foreign officials had urged Zelensky to press on with elections, as a show of the country’s commitment to democracy.

Zelensky, however, declared that discussions of elections were “utterly irresponsible” during wartime. The country is under martial law, which prohibits holding elections. In addition to thousands of soldiers fighting on the front, millions of Ukrainians have been displaced by the war, which makes holding a fair election almost impossible.

Until now, Ukraine had shown solid national unity with political rivalries set aside as the country fought back against the Russian invasion. In recent days in Kyiv, however, some observers have expressed frustration over the sense that infighting has played a role in key decisions with potentially serious effect on the outcome of the war.

Last week, for example, Zelensky’s office removed Gen. Viktor Khorenko, who headed the country’s special forces.

Khorenko, who served under Zaluzhny, told Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda that he did not know the reason for his dismissal and that he “learned about it from the media.” Zaluzhny, he said, also appeared blindsided by the announcement and “could not explain this to me.”

Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, whose predecessor Oleksii Reznikov was ousted by Zelensky in September amid a corruption inquiry, said in a statement posted on Facebook that he could not publicly describe the reasons for Khorenko’s dismissal because such revelations could aid Russia.

In a top comment on Facebook, which was liked hundreds of times, former Vice Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko criticized Umerov’s handling of the issue. “You made a very big mistake when you made this submission behind Zaluzhny’s back,” Rozenko wrote. “And it is precisely such mistakes that weaken Ukraine in this war! … It is very unfortunate that political intrigues prevail in this situation!”

Many others chimed in to criticize the move. One speculated that Khorenko was dismissed because “it was not possible to dislodge Zaluzhny.”

The political fractures have further darkened a national mood that was already somber over a series of brutal missile strikes by Russia, and other military setbacks.

Over the weekend, at least 19 soldiers from Ukraine’s 128th Mountain Assault Brigade were killed when Russia fired a missile at a location near the front where they were gathered for a medal ceremony. The incident drew widespread outrage in Ukraine and is under investigation. The brigade commander was suspended and Zelensky demanded an investigation into what he described as “a tragedy that could have been avoided.”

Then, on Monday, a top aide to Zaluzhny was killed when a grenade he received as part of a birthday gift exploded at his home in what police said appeared to be an accident, according to a preliminary investigation.

Some analysts rejected the idea that there was any real division between Zelensky and Zaluzhny regarding the future of the war.

“[B]oth Zaluzhny and Zelensky are trying to send the same message to the Western governments — wake up to what is at stake in Ukraine,” said Hanna Hopko, a foreign policy analyst and former lawmaker. “I hope that instead of looking for some unimportant and populist reasons for limiting support for Ukraine, Western governments, politicians, and media will actually listen to what [they] are saying.”

Zelensky’s government, however, is finding it increasingly difficult to convince even close allies of just how much more weaponry, money and other resources they need to push Russian forces back.

Last weekend, before Zelensky’s announcement about the elections, von der Leyen, the European Commission president, visited Kyiv and praised Ukraine’s efforts in preparing for formal negotiations to join the bloc, saying the country had made “excellent progress.”

But some European partners have also started to rethink their national commitments.

Last month, the new Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, announced that Slovakia would no longer provide any weapons to Ukraine.

And recent comments by Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, suggest she, too, may be wary of long-term support. Meloni until now had backed Ukraine and condemned Moscow, bucking internal pressure, including from factions within her far-right coalition, which are seen as more sympathetic to Putin.

But last week, Russian comedians Vovan and Lexus — known for prank-calling prominent figures — released a 13-minute audio in which they duped Meloni into a candid assessment of the Ukraine war. “I see that there is a lot of fatigue. I have to say the truth, from all the sides,” Meloni said on the call, which took place in September. She apparently thought she was speaking to African diplomats.

“We are near the moment in which everybody understands that we need a way out,” Meloni said. “The problem is to find a way out which can be acceptable for both, without destroying the international law.”

Ukraine’s counteroffensive, she continued, “is not going” as Kyiv had hoped, and seemed unlikely to change the “destiny of the conflict.” She warned the war could “last many years if we don’t try to find some solutions.”

Meloni’s office expressed “regret” for the embarrassing mishap, and her chief diplomatic adviser resigned. But she also appeared to be echoing a certain national sentiment.

In his Monday night address, Zelensky insisted that Ukraine could defeat the Russian invaders provided the country stays unified. “Our victory is achievable. We will get there if we all stay focused on this aim,” the president said. “Not on political or personal benefits. Not on the infighting that serves no use.”

Anthony Faiola in Rome and Kamila Hrabchuk, Anastacia Galouchka, Serhiy Morgunov and David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Siobhán O'Grady · November 8, 2023

11. The Politics of Looking Strong

Excerpts:

Reconciling these impulses—Americans’ desire for a restrained foreign policy and their attraction to tough leaders—is not easy. In the past, political parties did so by nominating presidential candidates with extensive military experience who could rely on their records to convince voters that they were strong without having to adopt hawkish stances. Eisenhower’s military record was undoubtedly part of why he proved unusually successful at limiting defense spending and keeping the United States out of foreign wars. But few candidates in history have possessed Eisenhower’s credentials, and except for DeSantis, none of the leading 2024 candidates have any military experience at all. As a result, if they want to advocate for less hawkish positions without appearing weak, they must resort to other methods.

One approach, which is common today among the progressive left, is to cloak foreign policy restraint in confrontational language. Instead of railing against Washington’s adversaries, these politicians talk aggressively about standing up to the pernicious influence of the foreign policy establishment. For example, the 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren argued in Foreign Affairs that Americans need to “fight back” against misguided leadership in order to “adopt a foreign policy that works for all Americans, not just wealthy elites.” A different approach is to argue that strong leaders need to “keep their eye on the ball” of managing great-power competition rather than be distracted by unnecessary wars of choice or superfluous military programs. That was the heart of George W. Bush’s foreign policy message during the 2000 election, in which he argued that Clinton had dragged the U.S. military into humanitarian interventions and nation building on an ad hoc basis.

But progressive presidential candidates have struggled to win presidential primaries in recent decades, let alone general elections. And despite promising restraint, Bush became one of the most interventionist presidents in history. If Americans really want less hawkish behavior from their leaders, they will ultimately need to change how they evaluate them. Americans should realize that by demanding that presidential candidates publicly demonstrate their toughness, they force those candidates to make tradeoffs between satisfying voters’ policy preferences and crafting appealing personal images.

It may be hard for voters, collectively, to adjust long-standing views of what makes a good commander in chief. And U.S. citizens have the right to determine how much emphasis they want to place on electing strong leaders. But voters should also be aware of how candidates exploit their impulses in systematic—and frequently cynical—ways. Otherwise, Americans will continue to be frustrated by the cost and scope of their country’s global role.

The Politics of Looking Strong

Americans Like Tough Talk More Than Tough Action

By Jeffrey A. Friedman

November 8, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Jeffrey A. Friedman · November 8, 2023

The current slate of Republican presidential candidates disagree on many things, be it how much to restrict abortion or whether U.S. President Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 election. But when it comes to international affairs, almost all the contenders have taken aggressively hawkish policy positions. The top four front-runners for the GOP nomination—Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and former U.S. President Donald Trump—have endorsed attacking Mexico to combat that country’s drug cartels. Trump, for instance, said he would send to Mexico “all necessary military assets, including the U.S. Navy.” Most of the field has also called for escalating confrontation with Iran. And the candidates have, by and large, demanded more hostility toward China, often using dire terms in making their appeals. DeSantis, for example, declared that Washington must treat Beijing as it treated “the Soviets.” Haley asserted that China is leading a new global “axis of evil.” Ramaswamy labeled China “our top enemy.”

On the surface, these stances seem out of touch with Americans’ attitudes. A September 2023 Reuters poll found that just 29 percent of voters approve of attacking Mexico’s drug cartels without support from that country’s government (which would almost certainly not be forthcoming). A Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey conducted in January of this year found that only 22 percent of Americans consider China to be an adversary. And although national surveys do not necessarily reflect the views of primary voters, Donald Trump captured the Republican base in 2016 by renouncing military adventurism and promising to reduce Washington’s global commitments. Proposals to send U.S. soldiers to Mexico or to wage a cold war with China thus fly in the face of conventional wisdom, which is that Americans want presidents who will avoid costly overseas endeavors and will focus their attention at home.

But although Americans say they oppose individual interventions or acts of U.S. aggression, their behavior at the voting booth reveals they like tough, combative presidents. According to my research, voters are more than three times as likely to vote for a presidential candidate based on the voters’ beliefs about whether a politician is a strong leader as they are to vote based on the candidate’s foreign policy stances. When asked to say why they think one presidential candidate would do a better job of handling foreign policy than others, voters are more than twice as likely to cite the candidate’s personal attributes—such as strength and decisiveness—as they are to praise specific elements of that candidate’s foreign policy platforms. These patterns indicate that presidents and presidential candidates have incentives to take unpopular foreign policy positions if that helps them show they are tough enough to serve as the country’s commander in chief.

Politicians have noticed. Over the last half century, candidates from both parties have frequently used aggressive foreign policies to demonstrate that they are strong enough to lead the United States. This hawkishness can help win elections. But it also produces a suite of policies—rising defense budgets, open-ended wars of choice, unilateral diplomacy—that are at odds with public opinion.

Fixing this disconnect will not be easy given the cold electoral logic. But candidates can look strong without being hawkish if they redirect their aggression away from international adversaries and toward the domestic elites who promote belligerence. Politicians can also explain that strong leadership requires sticking to a set of core priorities, such as reinforcing the credibility of the United States’ alliances, instead of expanding Washington’s foreign policy commitments. Meanwhile, voters and pundits should be aware that a seemingly reasonable desire to elect a strong commander in chief can actually distort U.S. foreign policy, encouraging leaders to make decisions that are more hawkish than what Americans want.

HARD AS NAILS

When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he saw foreign policy as one of his principal political vulnerabilities. Kennedy had served with distinction in the navy during World War II, but he had little high-level experience handling international affairs. By contrast, the Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon, had gained fame leading anticommunist investigations in the U.S. Senate, confronted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a nationally televised debate, and spent eight years touring the world as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, the man who remained the country’s most trusted voice on global issues. John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard economist who was one of Kennedy’s foreign policy advisers, summarized this challenge in a campaign memo, arguing that “Nixon’s claim to vast experience in a period of trouble and peril is going to be one of our most difficult and perhaps our most difficult issue.”

Kennedy’s team believed the solution to this problem had little to do with proposing foreign policies that voters liked on the merits. As George Belknap, a political scientist who advised Kennedy on public opinion, wrote, “A large percent of people express a concern over ‘keeping the peace,’ but specific foreign affairs issues were not of great importance to them.” Instead, Belknap explained that most voters tended to turn foreign policy discussions into referendums on the candidates’ leadership strength. Ithiel de Sola Pool, an MIT political scientist who also advised Kennedy’s campaign, agreed. “Particular postures on issues will not directly affect many voters,” he wrote. “The primary objective for Kennedy in dealing with specific foreign affairs issues is to enhance his image by demonstrating his knowledge and competence.”

To do this, Kennedy oriented his foreign policy platform around increasing defense expenditures, particularly by expanding the country’s supply of nuclear missiles. In theory, this should not have been a winning bid. According to Gallup, just 22 percent of voters thought defense spending was too low, 19 percent thought it was too high, and 45 percent thought it was about right. Clearly, the most popular policy would be to hold military expenditures constant, which is what Nixon proposed doing. But as Walt Rostow, one of Kennedy’s foreign policy advisers, explained, taking a hawkish position on military spending would allow Kennedy to seem as though he would “seize the initiative” in international politics while making Nixon appear complacent in the face of the Soviet menace. “It represents Kennedy on the offensive and Nixon on the defensive,” said Louis Harris, Kennedy’s pollster. Kennedy therefore hammered his proposal home in campaign speeches, arguing that his aggressive stance on defense spending showed he would be “a vigorous proponent of the national interest” rather than “a bookkeeper who feels that his work is done when the numbers on the balance sheet come out even.” Surveys conducted by the Kennedy campaign showed him steadily gaining ground with voters who were concerned with issues of war and peace. Kennedy ultimately concluded that taking a hawkish position on defense spending was critical to his narrow win.

Candidates exploit voters’ impulses cynical ways.

Four years later, when President Lyndon Johnson entered the presidential race, he also saw foreign affairs as one of his main political weaknesses. Johnson’s Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, appeared to be gaining traction by arguing that Johnson was using timid half measures to contain the communist insurgency in Vietnam. Goldwater called for a more aggressive response and laced his stump speeches with claims about how Johnson had gotten the United States “bogged down in an aimless, leaderless war” and how Vietnam was “being sacrificed to this administration’s indecision.” Johnson’s private polling confirmed that Vietnam was his most unfavorable policy subject. “The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it, every one of them,” Johnson told Georgia Senator Richard Russell, his former mentor. Russell agreed. “It’s the only issue they’ve got,” he said.

Johnson’s polling data indicated that just 15 percent of Americans supported escalating U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. But Johnson’s advisers nevertheless believed that shifting Vietnam policy in a hawkish direction would help parry charges that Johnson was weak. Johnson aide Bill Moyers explained this logic in a memorandum, arguing that “it is difficult for a government official—and particularly for a candidate—to get much mileage out of being for peace” because this would require him to “make assurances that he is not soft.” The question, then, was how Johnson could take a hard stance on Vietnam without spooking Americans who were reluctant to go to war.

Johnson decided to thread this needle by asking Congress to grant him open-ended authorization to use force in Vietnam without committing to an invasion. His administration began preparing such a proposal in May 1964. When North Vietnam attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in August, Johnson introduced it. As Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy explained in a memorandum titled “The Case for a Congressional Resolution,” the measure allowed Johnson to provide “a continuing demonstration of U.S. firmness” without having to explain to the public exactly what he intended to do with his Vietnam policy.

Trump at a rally in Houston, Texas, November 2023

Callaghan O’Hare / Reuters

Despite its deftness, Johnson’s gambit still encountered opposition. At first, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, told Johnson that he opposed escalating U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. But Johnson persuaded Fulbright that the use-of-force resolution was simply a tool to rebut public concerns that he was soft on communism and promised that he would return to Congress to seek additional approval before sending ground troops to Vietnam. Fulbright then took the lead in shepherding the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through Congress with minimal debate. “You pass this thing and it gives Lyndon a tool in the campaign,” Fulbright privately assured skeptical Democrats.

And it did: although Johnson’s polling data showed that 58 percent of Americans opposed his handling of Vietnam before the Tonkin crisis, a whopping 72 percent supported Johnson’s handling of the war once the resolution passed. “In a single stroke,” wrote Harris, Johnson’s pollster, the president had “turned his greatest political vulnerability in foreign policy into one of his strongest assets.” But the Tonkin Resolution also gave Johnson the ability to launch a war that voters had not asked for. The next year, Johnson broke his promise to Fulbright, sending U.S. soldiers to Vietnam without additional congressional approval—and setting Washington on a course toward a costly and humiliating defeat.

Recent elections provide many similar examples of leaders using hawkish foreign policy positions to bolster their personal images. According to the political commentator George Stephanopoulos, Dick Morris, U.S. President Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign manager, encouraged Clinton to “bomb the shit out of Serbia to look strong,” even though a minority of voters supported military intervention in the Balkans. After Clinton agreed to bomb Serbian military positions (and to send U.S. forces to the region for peacekeeping), he realized that Morris had given him sound political advice. According to the journalist Bob Woodward, the president repeatedly “voiced fascination that while 60 percent of the public had opposed the deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia, public approval of his foreign policy went up, not down, after he ordered the deployment anyway.” Clinton, Woodward wrote, concluded “that toughness and decisiveness were appreciated even if people disagreed” with the policies he had chosen.

The politics of posturing have high stakes when it comes to U.S.-Chinese relations.

U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign exploited a similar logic. According to polling data gathered throughout the campaign by the National Annenberg Election Survey, just 43 percent of Americans supported Bush’s handling of the Iraq war. But rather than announcing a new course, Bush stridently promised to “stick to his guns” in Iraq despite the political pressure. Bush’s campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, explained in a post-election interview that he believed the substance of Bush’s Iraq war policies was less important than what those policies revealed about Bush’s personal qualities. “Staying the course” in Iraq might not have appealed to voters on the merits, but it helped depict Bush as a steady wartime president, a stance Mehlman saw as worth taking. “Issues are usually about attributes, not issues,” Mehlman said, and the attribute Bush had that was “most important and relevant to voters was the fact that he was a strong leader.”

To some extent, Trump broke this mold when running for president in 2016. He criticized his predecessors for waging wars of choice, and much of his international agenda—particularly his efforts to negotiate a withdrawal from Afghanistan (and the fact that he did not start any new wars of his own)—reflected voters’ demands to avoid costly military adventures. But Trump took aggressively hawkish stances in other areas of foreign policy, most notably through his harsh criticisms of the United States’ traditional allies and partners. For example, Trump called NATO “obsolete,” accused Mexico of “killing us economically,” and said that Americans were “tired of being ripped off by everybody in the world.” Trump promised that he would stand up to these countries—including, famously, by declaring that he would build a wall on the U.S. southern border and make “Mexico pay for it.”

In theory, such rhetoric should have been a political liability. Decades of survey data show that most Americans want their leaders to cooperate with other countries to solve global problems. Those attitudes persisted even after Trump took office; according to a May 2017 Quinnipiac poll, 88 percent of Americans thought it important for the president of the United States to be publicly supportive of allies. But Trump’s claim that he was a hard-nosed bargainer who would prevent other countries from taking advantage of the United States helped illustrate his resolve. It was, in the view of Trump’s campaign, crucial to his political success.

THE POWER OF POSTURE

Strength is not the only personal attribute that voters associate with a competent commander in chief. Voters also want presidents to possess good judgment—in other words, ones who avoid taking unnecessary risks. Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964 provides a case in point. By taking extreme foreign policy positions and expressing them through careless language—such as his stated interest in “lobbing” a nuclear weapon into the Kremlin’s men’s room—Goldwater came across as a fanatical anticommunist who could not be trusted with the nuclear codes. Johnson capitalized on this unease by releasing a now infamous attack ad in which a girl plucking daisies in a field is enveloped by a mushroom cloud. At the end of the ad, a narrator instructs viewers to vote for Johnson because “the stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

But most presidential candidates reap relatively little benefit from trying to convince voters that they possess good judgment in international affairs, if only because such wisdom is exceptionally difficult to signal. Good judgment depends on context: a foreign policy that is reasonable in one situation might be too risky or too cautious in another. Even with the benefit of hindsight, foreign policy experts frequently disagree about how to distinguish good judgment from good luck in international affairs. Lay people can rarely make such assessments with confidence. It is, by contrast, easy for presidential candidates to use hawkish foreign policies to project strength. By promising to confront adversaries, refusing to make diplomatic concessions, and promoting expanded military capabilities, candidates can make it seem like they will stand firm in protecting U.S. interests.

Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 provides a good example of how it is hard to evaluate a policy’s wisdom—but simple to spot resolve. After Trump ordered the strike, many observers accused him of recklessly risking war with Tehran. Others said that the United States should have targeted Soleimani long ago and that the strike would help deter Iran from challenging the United States in the future. Even in retrospect, it is difficult to determine whether Trump’s decision reflected good judgment. Iran’s retaliation for the Soleimani strike was less severe than many people predicted. It is thus possible that Trump carefully analyzed the situation and accurately understood that his choice to kill Soleimani was not as dangerous as critics claimed. But it is also possible that Trump had no idea how Tehran would react and nonetheless opted to roll the dice without good reason—and happily lucked out.

What Soleimani’s assassination did unambiguously show was Trump’s willingness to punish Iranian aggression in a manner that other leaders would not. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had declined to take direct action against Soleimani, and during the 2020 presidential election, Biden explicitly said that he would not have approved the strike. Trump leaned into this contrast by invoking the assassination throughout his 2020 reelection campaign and accusing Biden of being soft.

Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 provides a clear contrast to the Soleimani strike. Polling data at the time suggested that voters lacked firm views about whether it was a good idea to remove U.S. troops from Kabul. Many analysts believed that Biden’s choice to end a long and unpopular conflict would generate substantial popular support. But the sudden collapse of Afghanistan’s government and the chaotic pullout dealt a sharp blow to Biden’s reputation for being a competent commander in chief. His approval rating quickly dropped by six points, which he never recovered.

PLAYING WITH FIRE

It is easy to understand why voters place a high priority on whether candidates are fit to be commander in chief. Many of the events that shape presidents’ legacies relate to international affairs, such as Harry Truman’s conduct of the Korean War, Kennedy’s management of the Cuban missile crisis, and George W. Bush’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Each of these events was unexpected when those presidents ran for office. Since world politics are often dominated by surprise challenges, voters have good reason to care about whether their highest leaders are competent at handling foreign policy issues in general—not just whether they advance a set of specific foreign policies.

Yet the way candidates use foreign policy issues to shape their images can have important, tangible consequences. It is easy, for instance, to dismiss the Republican presidential candidates’ statements about attacking Mexico as bluster that would never shape their behavior in office. But presidents face pressure to honor their hawkish promises, and they often follow through. Kennedy increased defense spending in ways that most voters did not want. Johnson waged the war that Congress authorized him to fight. Bush stayed the course in Iraq for the remainder of his presidency. And Trump strained relations with allies throughout his four years in office.

Today, the politics of posturing have especially high stakes when it comes to U.S.-Chinese relations. It is extremely hard to know how the United States should respond to China’s rise; even experts and policy professionals disagree about which kinds of actions will be more likely to contain Chinese aggression. Voters certainly cannot be expected to have firm views about which policies are superior to others on their merits. But presidential candidates have clear incentives to use China as a way to demonstrate their commitment to winning a great-power competition, to show that they will not back down in the face of aggression, and to portray their rivals as complacent about threats to U.S. security. In doing so, candidates risk making U.S.-Chinese relations, which are already tense, far more confrontational than what Americans want.

Candidates can look strong without being hawkish.

Reconciling these impulses—Americans’ desire for a restrained foreign policy and their attraction to tough leaders—is not easy. In the past, political parties did so by nominating presidential candidates with extensive military experience who could rely on their records to convince voters that they were strong without having to adopt hawkish stances. Eisenhower’s military record was undoubtedly part of why he proved unusually successful at limiting defense spending and keeping the United States out of foreign wars. But few candidates in history have possessed Eisenhower’s credentials, and except for DeSantis, none of the leading 2024 candidates have any military experience at all. As a result, if they want to advocate for less hawkish positions without appearing weak, they must resort to other methods.

One approach, which is common today among the progressive left, is to cloak foreign policy restraint in confrontational language. Instead of railing against Washington’s adversaries, these politicians talk aggressively about standing up to the pernicious influence of the foreign policy establishment. For example, the 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren argued in Foreign Affairs that Americans need to “fight back” against misguided leadership in order to “adopt a foreign policy that works for all Americans, not just wealthy elites.” A different approach is to argue that strong leaders need to “keep their eye on the ball” of managing great-power competition rather than be distracted by unnecessary wars of choice or superfluous military programs. That was the heart of George W. Bush’s foreign policy message during the 2000 election, in which he argued that Clinton had dragged the U.S. military into humanitarian interventions and nation building on an ad hoc basis.

But progressive presidential candidates have struggled to win presidential primaries in recent decades, let alone general elections. And despite promising restraint, Bush became one of the most interventionist presidents in history. If Americans really want less hawkish behavior from their leaders, they will ultimately need to change how they evaluate them. Americans should realize that by demanding that presidential candidates publicly demonstrate their toughness, they force those candidates to make tradeoffs between satisfying voters’ policy preferences and crafting appealing personal images.

It may be hard for voters, collectively, to adjust long-standing views of what makes a good commander in chief. And U.S. citizens have the right to determine how much emphasis they want to place on electing strong leaders. But voters should also be aware of how candidates exploit their impulses in systematic—and frequently cynical—ways. Otherwise, Americans will continue to be frustrated by the cost and scope of their country’s global role.

• JEFFREY A. FRIEDMAN is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and the author of The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image-Making in U.S. Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 2023), from which this essay is adapted.

Foreign Affairs · by Jeffrey A. Friedman · November 8, 2023

12. The Right Way to Deter China From Attacking Taiwan

Excerpts:

The real debate is not whether to jettison a policy approach that has preserved peace and protected Taiwan for decades but, rather, how the United States should evolve its approach within the current “one China” policy framework. Although there is a seductive appeal to abandoning this policy, doing so would stress U.S. commitments to Taiwan and the region, and open up another fault line of risk in an already dangerous world. Unsatisfactory as it may be to many, the U.S. goal is to stretch time horizons, not collapse them.

The purpose of Washington’s strategy in the Taiwan Strait is to incentivize behavior that serves U.S. interests while disincentivizing actions that threaten them. Hard power is a critical element of the United States’ efforts to uphold peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. It is a variable in the equation, though, and not the solution. To protect its interests, U.S. leaders must become more adept at combining efforts to bolster military capabilities with clarity in their strategic objectives, strength in their coalitions, solid coordination with Taiwan, and a sharper comprehension of the psychology of decision-makers in Beijing. The United States has protected its interest in peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait for nearly 45 years. It has to up its game to continue doing so for the next 45.

The Right Way to Deter China From Attacking Taiwan

American Hard Power Is Not Enough

By Ryan Hass and Jude Blanchette

November 8, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Ryan Hass and Jude Blanchette · November 8, 2023

As debate over China policy rages in the United States, the discussion in Washington is increasingly focused on the question of how to deter Beijing from invading or blockading Taiwan. This is for good reason: like their predecessors, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his colleagues have signaled a determination to exercise control over Taiwan and will, if necessary, resort to force to do so. Responding to these threats, a growing number of U.S. military leaders—including former head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Phil Davidson and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday—have warned that China could attack Taiwan by 2027.

Under its “one China” policy, the United States maintains strong unofficial relations with Taiwan, as well as formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Washington’s policy has long been to encourage direct dialogue between leaders in Beijing and Taipei, insisting that disputes across the Taiwan Strait must be resolved peacefully. To underscore this position, the United States maintains a significant forward military presence in the Western Pacific. Yet with Chinese aggression in and around the Taiwan Strait growing, there are mounting concerns over whether the United States can preserve the peace moving forward.

Many analysts and policymakers argue that the best way for the United States to continue to deter China from attacking Taiwan is to place hard power in Beijing’s path. As U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin stated recently, “We need to be moving heaven and earth to arm Taiwan to the teeth to avoid a war.” This theory of deterrence places a premium on ensuring that the United States and Taiwan have sufficient military capabilities to frustrate an invasion and to threaten China with staggering retaliatory costs. To deter China, the theory’s advocates argue, Washington must dramatically increase its defense expenditures, rebuild the U.S. defense industrial base, and accelerate the speed with which Taiwan is being provided with weapons and other military assistance.

Taking these military steps is critical, but more needs to be done. This is because, properly understood, deterrence is an exercise in political-psychological persuasion, and it has never been solely a calculation of who possesses more military assets. Deterrence requires an extensive toolkit, including diplomatic patience, nuance, surprise, brinksmanship, and also reassurance and credibility. It is this holistic view of deterrence that is needed in Washington today. Key features of a more effective strategy include a measured U.S. approach to diplomacy that avoids provocative political stunts and a renewed effort to build a deeper, wider, and stronger coalition of countries to support Taiwan’s continued security and prosperity. To preserve the peace in Asia, Washington must adopt a more comprehensive vision of deterrence that not only prevents an outright invasion or blockade, but also ensures that Taiwan’s economy, democracy, and people can flourish.

DO NOT RISK IT

Although Washington’s current conception of deterrence relies on defense, its policy on using force in the Taiwan Strait has long been ambiguous. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which continues to guide U.S. policy, states that that the use of force or direct violence to “determine Taiwan’s future” would be seen as a threat to the “peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” This is not an explicit or unconditional guarantee of U.S. intervention, although it does strongly suggest that a Chinese invasion would provoke a direct U.S. response. But by themselves, words on a page will not give Beijing pause. Rather, successful deterrence depends upon Beijing’s belief that current and future U.S. administrations, irrespective of party affiliation, would risk the lives of U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China attacked. Should Beijing doubt this—or perceive that the United States’ commitment is unsteady or tied to superficial concerns, such as a wish to retain its access to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry—then its calculations may well shift.

But even assuming that the United States does maintain sufficient military capability and the credibility of its use, these efforts will go only so far to ensure Taiwan’s continued peace and prosperity. Beijing defines its claim to Taiwan as core to the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and critical to China’s own national security. Over more than 70 years, Chinese leaders have declared their intention to assert control over Taiwan, framing its ultimate “return” to the People’s Republic of China as a foundational goal of the CCP. It is hard to conceive of any scenario whereby the CCP leadership would entirely abandon its ambitions on Taiwan based on a calculation of military power. After all, Beijing’s appetite for absorbing Taiwan did not diminish during the second half of the twentieth century, even as the United States enjoyed absolute military superiority relative to China.

Indeed, Taiwan has long been the issue that threatened to bring the United States and China into open conflict. In 1958, U.S. military planners contemplated a nuclear strike on China after CCP Chairman Mao Zedong shelled Taiwan-controlled islands. In 1995, angered by Taiwan leader Lee Teng-hui’s visit to the United States, Chinese President Jiang Zemin ordered the launch of missiles into the waters off Taiwan’s coast. In response, U.S. President Bill Clinton sent a carrier strike group toward the Taiwan Strait. Back then, the United States could more freely undertake such responses, since it enjoyed comprehensive dominance over the Chinese military. Today, Washington faces a far more powerful Chinese military that, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, is on track to have 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030.

For now, Beijing likely appreciates that a direct assault on Taiwan would be prohibitively costly for China. But if Xi comes to believe that the political cost of inaction in the Taiwan Strait poses an existential threat to the CCP’s rule, he or his successors may well take enormous risks, including a dramatic military escalation. Xi would entertain such an approach only if all other avenues to unification were closed or if he calculated that restraint carried the highest political risk. There are several such scenarios that could prompt Xi to act. For example, were Taiwan to formally declare independence, Beijing might well resolve that a significant military escalation was its only politically acceptable choice. An appreciation of this risk explains why the vast majority of the Taiwanese people prefer the status quo.

NO MORE GIMMICKS

Deterrence, therefore, cannot be understood in exclusively military terms. Rather, a new and broader understanding of deterrence is needed to both prevent an invasion and ensure the security and prosperity of the Taiwanese people.

The first and most important element of a holistic approach to deterrence must be a clear and unwavering signal of U.S. support for Taiwan. Political stunts, undisciplined rhetoric, or indications that Washington is wavering in its resolve to uphold its security commitments are likely to lead to more anxiety, aggression, and unpredictability from Beijing. This was demonstrated last August, when the U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made a trip to Taiwan. Beijing responded by conducting a massive military exercise in the Taiwan Strait and, since then, has sought to normalize a persistent military presence close to Taiwan’s territorial waters. Of course, some might argue that U.S. President Joe Biden should have taken his own steps to counter this brazenness, but that misses the point. U.S. actions in the Taiwan Strait should be proactive and strategic, not reactive and undermined by political theater.

Coalitions are also critical to a holistic vision of deterrence. To preserve stability in the Taiwan Strait, it is essential for Washington to strengthen its partnerships with key allies, particularly in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. Symbolic virtue-signaling, untethered to any specific objectives, typified by Pelosi’s visit, only helps Beijing to paint Washington as the instigator of tensions and to drive wedges between the United States and other countries. Medium and small powers are unlikely to be decisive U.S. partners in the event of a conflict with China. But they can play critical, nonmilitary roles by internationalizing the Taiwan issue, and scrambling Beijing’s calculations of the costs it might incur by escalating. This is because, for all its formidable strengths, the Chinese economy remains highly dependent on access to international financial markets, as well as on imports of key technologies, technical know-how, oil, gas, and food. Chinese leaders recognize these vulnerabilities and are working to minimize them, but these cannot be solved immediately. The more united that Washington and its global partners are in their resolve to preserve peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, the greater the risk Beijing faces when considering military operations against Taiwan.

Deterrence is an exercise in political-psychological persuasion, never solely a calculation of military assets.

Some countries, including Japan, could play outsized roles in this strategy because of their military capabilities. Others, like Singapore and South Korea, may fill more niche roles by, for example, providing access to U.S. forces for refueling and repairs. The more partners Washington has, the more strategic options it will enjoy. The United States made progress in coalition building in February, when it signed an updated Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with the Philippines. This now gives the Pentagon access to nine military bases near Taiwan where it can train troops and station military equipment.

Yet as the conversation around Taiwan grows more dominated by the possibility of an invasion, many partners are becoming warier of going further in aligning with the United States and Taiwan on a range of economic and diplomatic initiatives. These countries are fearful that they will embroil themselves in a potentially open-ended and escalating confrontation with China. Such concerns also affect the decisions of global companies and investors, some of whom, including Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffet, perceive Taiwan as a risky destination for capital given the possibility of an imminent Chinese attack. The United States must show that its underlying goal is to cool tensions and preserve peace in Asia and that it has a coherent, holistic, and sustainable plan to do so. To the extent that there is instability, it is important that key global and regional actors recognize that Beijing, not Washington, is the one stirring the pot.

The stronger the coalition the United States builds, the more it will complicate Beijing’s risk-benefit calculus. A central U.S. objective must be to make Beijing perpetually unsure if it is adequately prepared to escalate its coercive or military efforts to seize Taiwan. Washington needs to make clear to China’s leaders that any battle over Taiwan would not simply be fought in the strait but would become a sprawling global effort to exploit each side’s vulnerabilities. U.S. leaders must work to privately impress upon their Chinese counterparts that the risks of expansion and escalation of a conflict could extend into space and cyberspace, and even become nuclear.

ACCIDENTS AND EMERGENCIES

At the same time, U.S. leaders must keep a path open for China and Taiwan to peacefully resolve their differences, even if such an outcome is unimaginable at present. The measure of success is not winning a war with China in the Taiwan Strait. Rather, success would be avoiding a war while allowing Taiwan to develop as a democracy. This will require persistent engagement with Chinese leaders, especially Xi, to clarify Washington’s intentions and explain its interests and concerns—and to request equal clarity from Beijing. U.S. officials must also maintain regular communication with Taiwan’s leaders, both to reassure them of the nature of their exchanges with their Chinese counterparts and, if necessary, to work to rein in any unnecessarily inflammatory actions by Taipei.

Washington and its partners must also disabuse Beijing of any suspicion that the U.S. commitment to Taiwan is weakening. The recent statement by former U.S. President Donald Trump that he would not comment on U.S. support for Taiwan in the event of an attack because “if I tell you an answer, it’s going to hurt me in negotiations” only increases the space for a miscalculation by Beijing. Chinese leaders must understand that maintaining the credibility of its security commitments is a vital interest to Washington; these commitments underpin the duties the United States has as a superpower. If key U.S. allies and partners are threatened, Beijing must know that Washington will not hesitate to act.

The United States must also provide China with incentives to moderate its aggression, not by developing new reassurances but by better acknowledging existing ones. For decades, Washington has declared that it would not support Taiwan independence and, equally, would accept any outcome negotiated between Taipei and Beijing so long as it was peaceful and enjoyed the Taiwanese people’s consent. The clarity and consistency of this long-standing commitment has wavered over the past several years, which has enflamed Beijing’s grievance that the United States is hollowing out its “one China” policy.

Any battle over Taiwan would not simply be fought in the strait but would become a sprawling global effort.

A peaceful and mutually agreed-upon resolution may appear far-fetched given Xi’s increasingly coercive approach. A growing number of voices, including President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass, state that Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” is outdated, while others argue that the “one China” policy is collapsing. But these critics consistently fail to articulate a better alternative that would simultaneously keep the peace and provide Taiwan with the security it needs to continue developing. It is incumbent on those calling for the United States to formally abandon key pillars of its “one China” policy, support Taiwan’s independence, and give Taipei an unconditional security guarantee to articulate what the likely implications would be for the region. They must answer whether such moves would help or hinder Taiwan’s security and prosperity, or create a more peaceful and predictable environment for key allies in the region, including Japan and the Philippines. Calling for a radical break—as former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has done—with traditional U.S. policy while waving away the consequences will not suffice.

At the same time, Washington’s support for the status quo must not become static. There are dramatically new dynamics at work in the Indo-Pacific that necessitate new ways of thinking and acting. U.S. policy on Taiwan has evolved and will evolve in tandem with developments around the Taiwan Strait, including Beijing’s growing truculence. The United States must remain committed to ensuring that China, as the stronger power, cannot unilaterally impose an intolerable political solution on Taiwan, the weaker one. A degree of flexibility is required to accomplish this. Washington’s policy has already proved itself capable of supporting a dynamic equilibrium by pushing back on unilateral attempts to alter the status quo, regardless of whether they emanated from Beijing or Taipei.

The real debate is not whether to jettison a policy approach that has preserved peace and protected Taiwan for decades but, rather, how the United States should evolve its approach within the current “one China” policy framework. Although there is a seductive appeal to abandoning this policy, doing so would stress U.S. commitments to Taiwan and the region, and open up another fault line of risk in an already dangerous world. Unsatisfactory as it may be to many, the U.S. goal is to stretch time horizons, not collapse them.

The purpose of Washington’s strategy in the Taiwan Strait is to incentivize behavior that serves U.S. interests while disincentivizing actions that threaten them. Hard power is a critical element of the United States’ efforts to uphold peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. It is a variable in the equation, though, and not the solution. To protect its interests, U.S. leaders must become more adept at combining efforts to bolster military capabilities with clarity in their strategic objectives, strength in their coalitions, solid coordination with Taiwan, and a sharper comprehension of the psychology of decision-makers in Beijing. The United States has protected its interest in peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait for nearly 45 years. It has to up its game to continue doing so for the next 45.

• RYAN HASS is a Senior Fellow, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center, and Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the U.S. National Security Council.
• JUDE BLANCHETTE is Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong.

Foreign Affairs · by Ryan Hass and Jude Blanchette · November 8, 2023

13. Senior Leaders Must Own the Lack of Warfighting Focus

Conclusion:

If senior Defense Department civilian and military leaders do not seriously convert organizational priorities toward warfighting, any lower-echelon attempt to refocus fighting forces on their core responsibility will achieve only marginal effect. Senior leaders must grasp how deckplate-level reality has become suffocated by miscellanea accumulating from decades of poorly prioritized requirements. Senior leaders must take decisive ownership of the problem and return enough time and focus to warfighters so they can truly put warfighting first.

FLOTILLA TACTICAL NOTES

SENIOR LEADERS MUST OWN THE LACK OF WARFIGHTING FOCUS

NOVEMBER 6, 2023 GUEST AUTHOR 2 COMMENTS

Flotilla Notes Series

By CDR Paul W. Viscovich, USN (ret.)

cimsec.org · by Guest Author

Vale la pena (“It is worth the effort”) was the motto of Naval Special Warfare Group EIGHT when it was stationed in Panama some 30 years ago. It was an appropriate philosophy for a tip-of-the-spear warfighting unit, and they lived up to it in operations throughout the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility. Can these SEALs teach us how to prioritize warfighting, and can their unit-level lessons be applied throughout the fleet?

In order to prioritize one thing – warfighting – it is necessary to diminish the importance of conflicting requirements. Due to the unique nature of their mission, and with the unyielding support of their NAVSPECWAR chain of command, the SEALs are largely insulated from the administrative distractions that bedevil the other warfighting communities. Their maintenance, training, and security programs are all consciously vectored toward supporting their one priority – providing warfighting capability.

Two things allow the SEALs to accomplish this. First, their entire community is culturally focused on warfighting. Second, their senior leadership is uncompromising in eliminating anything that distracts from this priority.

This leadership doctrine is at such variance from the rest of the Navy that any immediate attempt to apply this model on a fleet-wide scale will fail. The eight-decade absence of deadly conflict with an enemy of equal or superior capability has eroded the warrior ethos in generations of naval officers and senior enlisted leaders. Its absence has caused perverse incentives to metastasize, such as an administratively-obsessed culture that often defines excellence in terms of passing rote inspections, and scripted drills that mask warfighting deficits but make for positive reporting. Although individual commanding officers may strive mightily to create a warfighting focus within their units, the chain of command’s overriding insistence that they check all the superfluous administrative boxes will continue to doom their efforts and overwhelm the time of warfighters on the deckplate. At best, unit leaders can only put warfighting first on the margins of an already thinly-stretched crew and schedule. Whether aviators, submariners, or surface warfare officers, U.S. Navy flag officers are now largely trained, groomed, and selected to perpetuate this bureaucracy that is top-heavy with administration.

In this environment, almost any program to refocus the fleet on warfighting is likely to be little more than window dressing. An institutional initiative to put warfighting first could easily result in even more required record-keeping and reporting on top of what has been accumulating for decades. Today’s culture will self-perpetuate until some major calamity pushes the fleet into an existential fight, and finally forces the Navy to sharply consolidate its priorities toward warfighting.

The crucible of combat quickly shines a light on incompetence. It is common for warring great power militaries to fire and replace numerous commanding officers after poor combat performance, whether they be unit-level leaders, or senior flag and general officers. Those who more effectively put warfighting first in peacetime may be the Halseys that replace the Ghormleys. The Navy should take great care to learn the difference before its next war, and develop better warfighting-focused incentives and criteria for promotion and fitness reporting.

The front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 25th, 1942, with the headline “Ghormley Replaced in Solomons Shakeup.”

If senior Defense Department civilian and military leaders do not seriously convert organizational priorities toward warfighting, any lower-echelon attempt to refocus fighting forces on their core responsibility will achieve only marginal effect. Senior leaders must grasp how deckplate-level reality has become suffocated by miscellanea accumulating from decades of poorly prioritized requirements. Senior leaders must take decisive ownership of the problem and return enough time and focus to warfighters so they can truly put warfighting first.

Paul Viscovich is a retired Commander and Surface Warfare Officer with 20 years active service. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1975 and earned a Master of Sciences degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1987. From 2013-2021, he authored a monthly political column published in a south Florida magazine, currently writes a current events newsletter on Substack.com, and is working on an anthology of short stories, many with a nautical theme. He lives with his wife Christine in Weston, FL.

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Sept. 19, 2016) The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) fires a standard missile (SM 2) at a target drone as part of a surface-to-air-missile exercise (SAMEX) during Valiant Shield 2016. (U.S. Navy photo illustration by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Andrew Schneider/Released)

cimsec.org · by Guest Author

​14. Five Eyes Warning is Clear: Government and Businesses Must Wake Up to China Threat

Excerpt:

The threat manifested in the Five Eyes’ call to action is indeed real. The public recognition of that threat is a step in the right direction, but there is more that must be done. Congress needs to act, and Western tech companies that insist on continuing to invest in and develop technology in collaboration with China need to rethink their options. It’s time to recognize the challenge: Western innovation, economic advantage, and national security depend on it.

Five Eyes Warning is Clear: Government and Businesses Must Wake Up to China Threat

Published 11/07/23 06:00 AM ET|Updated 20 hr ago

Paul Rosenzweig

themessenger.com · November 7, 2023

Which presents the greater espionage threat to Western democracy: the Russia-Ukraine war or the Israel-Hamas conflict? Remarkably, if you ask the West’s five leading intelligence officials, the answer is “neither.”

Last month when the Five Eyes — an intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — came together for their first-ever public meeting and joint interview, they didn’t focus on Russian imperialism or a conflict that might engulf the Middle East. Instead, they focused on China’s access to and theft of Western intellectual property.

On close examination, it is easy to see why the intelligence leaders feel this way. The Five Eyes’ unprecedented joint call for action reflects warning signs that have been flashing “since China first opened its market.”

One can’t help but wonder who the audience was for the Five Eyes’ warning call? Congress? China? Or American businesses?

As for businesses, sometimes it seems as though Western tech companies are invested in helping the Chinese achieve their aim of leading the world in new AI developments by 2030. The Five Eyes’ meeting comes on the heels of a new report which catalogs the extent to which Western companies are voluntarily enabling the transfer of critical technology and intelligence to China. AI tools are flowing uninterrupted into China from major tech companies like Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, and Meta, bolstering the country’s state security, intelligence, and defense agencies — ultimately advancing China’s national security at the cost of our own.

Yet despite these warning signs, American tech executives seem oddly oblivious to the seemingly evident danger. Just last month, for example, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said China "needs to be at the table" to set global AI governance policies. As the report and Nadella’s comments make clear, these seemingly strange bedfellows know each other quite well. Microsoft was foundational in the development of China’s AI industry and has censored Bing on behalf of the CCP. Today, Microsoft is exporting cutting-edge AI to China.

As the intelligence leaders noted, one of the West’s greatest strengths is the vibrancy of its innovative economy and the ongoing cooperative relationship between democratically elected governments and the private sector. Given the urgency of the problem, it is time that the five governments use those relationships to ensure that their countries’ tech companies are putting national security before profits.

And as for Congress and the executive branch, the warning is even more salient. Since 2000, there have been 224 reported instances of Chinese espionage directed at the U.S. and over 1,200 intellectual property theft cases brought by U.S. companies against Chinese entities. It’s been five years since the White House issued a report on how China’s economic aggression threatened intellectual property globally and three years since FBI Director Christopher Wray called Chinese counterintelligence and economic espionage “the greatest long-term threat” to America’s technological advantage. Just this past summer, U.S. officials reported that Chinese state-linked hackers had breached Microsoft’s email platform and stolen tens of thousands of emails from U.S. State Department accounts.

Meanwhile, America’s allies also suffer from China’s efforts to steal their technology. A report released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2018 concluded that “China remains Australia’s primary cyber adversary and is making greater efforts to disguise and focus its commercial cyber espionage.” New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau in 2018 called out the “links between the Chinese Ministry of State Security and a global campaign of cyber-enabled commercial intellectual property theft.” In 2021, the UK government launched the Research Collaboration Advice Team to protect research assets from “hostile actors” in China. And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police made its first arrest related to trade secrets stolen for the benefit of China in 2022.

Today, the stakes are the highest they’ve ever been — the technology secrets that China steals or acquires represent innovation that is “about to change the world.” If public reports are to be believed, they’ve already stolen everything from metal detector designs, to F-22 Raptor technology, to the kiwifruit. That’s why the Director General of MI5, Ken McCallum, has warned that whichever country comes out on top in the battle for dominance in emerging technologies like AI “will wield the power to shape our collective future.”

The threat manifested in the Five Eyes’ call to action is indeed real. The public recognition of that threat is a step in the right direction, but there is more that must be done. Congress needs to act, and Western tech companies that insist on continuing to invest in and develop technology in collaboration with China need to rethink their options. It’s time to recognize the challenge: Western innovation, economic advantage, and national security depend on it.

Paul Rosenzweig is a lecturer at the George Washington University School of Law; he previously served as deputy assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security.

themessenger.com · November 7, 2023

15. The Fourteen Facts about US Aid to Ukraine

This can be accessed in PDF here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.hudson.org/110323_Fourteen_Facts_Ukraine_Memo.pdf

Nov 3, 2023

Hudson Institute

The Fourteen Facts about US Aid to Ukraine

Luke Coffey

hudson.org · 

Since Russia invaded Ukraine for the second time in eight years, Russian troops have ravaged Ukraine’s cities, raped its women, and stolen its children. Russian missiles and Iranian drones strike Ukrainian cities daily, often hitting civilian targets. Russia is the aggressor. Ukraine is the victim.

For Americans who believe in respect for national borders, the primacy of national sovereignty, and the right to self-defense, support for Ukraine is natural. Ukrainians are not asking for, nor do they want, US troops to help them fight Russia. All they ask for is the resources required to give them a fighting chance.

Meanwhile, Russia is among America’s top geopolitical adversaries. As former Secretary of State and Hudson Distinguished Fellow Mike Pompeo said last week, a Russian victory “would be felt well beyond Ukraine’s borders, including by strengthening a Russia-China-Iran alliance that aims to weaken the US and our allies across the globe.”

As Congress debates additional support for Ukraine, detractors will spread false and misleading information. It is important to understand the facts.

Fact: The US is not writing “blank checks” to Ukraine, and most of the money allocated to help Ukraine never leaves the US.

• Every dollar spent in support of Ukraine is authorized by Congress and used for a specific purpose. There has never been a “blank check” to Ukraine.
• Approximately $70 billion of the aid authorized for Ukraine will never leave the US. Instead, it supports our world-leading defense industry and creates well-paid jobs across 38 states.
• After witnessing the effectiveness of US military equipment in Ukraine, European countries alone have placed $90 billion in orders for American-made military hardware. This makes America safer and creates well paid jobs for Americans.

Fact: For a relatively modest amount of money, US aid helps Ukraine dismantle Russia’s armed forces without a single American firing a shot or being shot at.

• Russia is a top geopolitical adversary of the United States, and a close ally of China, Iran, and North Korea.
• Estimates vary, but up to 300,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine. The original Russian invasion force from February 2022 has effectively ceased to exist.
• Open source reporting has collected visual evidence that Russia has lost more than 12,900 major pieces of equipment in Ukraine by the time of this writing. Since this number is limited to visually confirmed losses, the actual number is likely far higher.
• These losses include: 2,439 main battle tanks, 1,026 armored fighting vehicles, 2,977 infantry fighting vehicles, 368 armored personnel carriers, 914 pieces of artillery, 201 multiple rocket launchers, 93 aircraft (including three strategic bombers), 132 helicopters, and likely thousands of other pieces of military hardware.
• Ukraine has destroyed or damaged 16 ships and submarines, including the guided missile cruiser Moskva (previously the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet) and the submarine Rostov-on-Don. Their destruction supports broader US security objectives outside the Black Sea. For example, Russia has used both vessels to support Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Fact: There has never been more accountability for US military assistance than what is available for Ukraine aid.

• Soon after Russia’s invasion, the US government established the Ukraine Oversight Interagency Working Group. More than 160 officials across 20 federal oversight agencies monitor US aid to Ukraine.
• To date, Congress has allocated $50 million for the inspectors general of the Department of Defense, Department of State, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to increase oversight through the working group.
• The groups have completed dozens of reports, with dozens more in the works. According to the working group, “Investigations related to the Ukraine response have not yet substantiated significant waste, fraud, or abuse.”
• The White House’s proposed Ukraine supplemental will add another $15 million to fund additional oversight activities. Among other things, this additional funding will allow the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General to “increase inspections and investigations beyond its 27 current and planned projects that span foreign assistance, management, and operational activities.”

Fact: Europe has spent more than the US on Ukraine aid.

• According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine aid tracker, total European commitments are now more than double those of the US after totaling all aid (military, economic, humanitarian, and refugee).
• Twenty European countries have given more to Ukraine than the US as a percentage of GDP.

Fact: A victorious Ukraine means a safer Taiwan.

• The choice between security in Europe or security in the Indo-Pacific is a false dichotomy. In terms of US national interests, the two regions are intimately linked.
• Russia is China’s junior partner. A weakened or defeated Russia means a weaker China. Beijing is watching how Western powers support Ukraine, so a strong and victorious Ukraine makes Taiwan stronger and deters Chinese aggression.
• It’s no coincidence that earlier this year, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited Ukraine while Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Russia. During this visit, Xi told Vladimir Putin, “Now there are changes that haven’t happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes.”
• In Kishida’s own words, “The security of the Indo-Pacific region cannot be separated from European security.”

Fact: European stability, which Russia is trying to undermine, affects the American worker.

• North America and Europe account for approximately 48 percent of the global economy.
• Europe is America’s largest source of foreign investment. In 2021, Europe accounted for $3.19 trillion out of a total of $4.98 trillion of foreign capital investment in the US, or about 64 percent.
• The US and Europe are each other’s largest export markets. In 2022, 45 out of 50 states—including the largest single-state economy, California—exported more goods to Europe than to China.
• Europe matters to the American heartland too. Arkansas, Kentucky, and Oklahoma each export five times more to Europe than China.
• When Americans build something to be exported, that protects American jobs. European stability brings untold benefits to the US economy and, by extension, to the American worker. Aiding Ukraine helps preserve that stability.

Fact: The lessons the US learns from Ukraine will make America stronger in the Indo-Pacific.

• Supporting Ukraine has exposed major shortcomings in the American defense industrial base, which the US is now addressing. Thankfully, these shortcomings were uncovered when America was not directly at war.
• Deployment in Ukraine has tested American-made military hardware in a way that is impossible in peacetime. The US is learning what works, what doesn’t work, and how to make improvements. This prepares America for future warfare to a degree that is unachievable through exercises alone.
• The US is replacing all the weapons it gives to Ukraine with newer, more effective systems.
• As Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a wake-up call to us all.” Because of their support for Ukraine, US allies and partners in East Asia are spending more on defense to better prepare for future threats.

Fact: The weapons the US is sending to Ukraine do not impact America’s ability to fight an Indo-Pacific conflict.

• Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rockets, older AGM-88 and AGM-88E air to surface anti-radiation missiles, and AIM-7 and AIM-9M interceptors, which the US is sending to Ukraine, are either irrelevant to an Indo-Pacific fight or are expiring anyway.
• The most effective way to use these weapons is to send them to Ukraine. The 10,000 Javelins or the 2,000 Stingers that the US has given to Ukraine will not be a determining factor in whether the US can deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. But they were the determining factor that allowed Ukraine to defend Kyiv in the beginning weeks of the war.
• America’s weapons of choice in a conflict against China will be torpedoes, the AGM-158 JASSM and AGM-158C LRASM strike missiles, naval mines, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. None of these have been provided to Ukraine.

Fact: Because of lessons the US learned by arming Ukraine, Taiwan is receiving weapons sooner.

• For the first time, the presidential drawdown authority (PDA), which has been used so effectively for Ukraine, is being used to arm Taiwan. Had the US not supported Ukraine, it is unlikely that Washington would have used the PDA to arm Taiwan.
• Congress has authorized up to $1 billion in weapons for Taiwan using PDA.
• In July 2023, the US announced a $345 million military aid package for Taiwan as part of the $1 billion in PDA approved by Congress.
• Even though the lethal High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) is in high demand from US allies and partners, Taiwan’s order for additional HIMARS will now arrive one year earlier than planned because the US reprioritized the sale.

Fact: Iran and North Korea enable Russia to attack Ukraine. Russia supports Hamas.

• Some of America’s top adversaries, and the enemies of America’s closest allies and partners, have aligned with Russia.
• By the end of 2022, Iran had provided more than 1,700 drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Earlier this year, Moscow and Tehran agreed to start producing around 6,000 Iranian-designed drones in Russia. Meanwhile, Iran and its proxies are using the same drones to threaten Israel and attack US troops in the Middle East.
• North Korea has reportedly delivered more than one million artillery rounds to Russia for use in Ukraine. There have also been reports that North Korea has provided ballistic missiles to Russia.
• Russia regularly votes in the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly to protect Hamas—even as Hamas commits atrocities against Israel. In October, only weeks after the group’s terrorist attack against innocent Israeli civilians, Russia received a Hamas delegation in Moscow.

Fact: Ukraine is not a new “forever war.”

• Not a single US service member is fighting against Russia in Ukraine.
• The US is not a belligerent in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
• Ukrainians are not asking for, nor do they want, US troops to help them fight Russia. All they ask for is resources, which the US is more than capable of providing.

Fact: The US is not engaged in a proxy war against Russia.

• The definition of a proxy war is a war “fought by states acting at the instigation or on behalf of other states.”
• The US has never instigated Ukrainians to fight. The US is not forcing the Ukrainians to fight on its behalf. The US is merely fulfilling Ukrainians’ requests for weapons and assistance as they fight a war of self-defense.
• Ukrainians are fighting a war of national survival. Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around. Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is the victim.
• If Russia stops fighting, the war will be over. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine as it is known today will be over.

Fact: The US needs to provide both military and nonmilitary aid to achieve the greatest effect.

• Some propose providing only one type of aid as a compromise with those who do not want to provide any aid to Ukraine. However, this proposal is a half measure and would yield disappointing results.
• The Ukrainian military is not the only actor defending against Russia. As shown by Russia’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians with ballistic missiles and Iranian drones, the whole of Ukrainian society is at war.
• The first year of Russia’s invasion eliminated almost 30 percent of Ukraine’s economy. Even so, Ukraine’s government and essential public services (law enforcement and first responders, diplomats, utility workers, etc.) need to function properly for the nation to remain on a total war footing.
• US support needs to be broad in scope. Those who call for the US to give only military support fail to see the bigger picture in Ukraine.

Fact: Claims that US aid to Ukraine has cost “$900 per American household” and that the newly proposed aid package will add “over $1,000” to the tax burden of “every family of four in America” are wildly misleading.

• These numbers are often used to mislead Americans into thinking that they are shouldering an unnecessary financial burden to help Ukraine amid economic difficulties and high inflation at home.
• These numbers are misleading because federal income tax is not levied evenly across households.
• In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, the top 1 percent of earners paid 42.3 percent of all federal income tax. The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (those making $42,184 or less) paid only 2.3 percent of all federal income tax.
• Approximately 60 million tax returns reported income of $30,000 or less. The effective average tax rate for this group was 1.5 percent before any tax credits were applied.

hudson.org ·

16. Kishida Philippines trip's focus was Japan defense

Excerpts;

Now it’s up to the Japanese (and the Americans) to demonstrate that they offer a much better alternative. And, unlike the Chinese, they are not seeking to dominate the Philippines and steal Philippine territory and resources.

The defense agreements Japan is signing with other nations are a positive thing. Japan is trying to defend itself, and the Philippines is a piece of the puzzle.

And Japan’s infrastructure development efforts directly relate to its national defense. They are a huge contribution to the efforts of the free world.

But looking outward and having friendly relations, including defense relations, with other nations is not a replacement for concrete, well-considered efforts by Japan to properly restructure its own defense.

And having a clear plan for defending Taiwan – along with the US force – is essential.

In fact, Japan should do for Taiwan what it’s doing for the Philippines. All their futures are tied together, and any weak link is a risk for the whole chain.

Kishida Philippines trip's focus was Japan defense

Japan and the Philippines are in the ‘First Island Chain’ that defends the small democratic bloc from China

asiatimes.com · by Grant Newsham · November 7, 2023

Japanese officers have been saying for years that “Taiwan‘s defense is Japan’s defense.” They’d also tell you, “The Philippines‘ defense is Japan’s defense.” And it’s true.

Island chain strategy. Map: ResearchGate

The Philippines is strategic terrain – part of the so-called “first island chain” running from Japan to Taiwan and onwards through the Philippines to Malaysia. This chain of islands hems in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, in the event of a war. And in peacetime as well.

The Philippines also plays an essential role in Taiwan’s defense, basically guarding Taiwan’s southern flank. If China moves on Taiwan it will have to deal with the Philippines.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida‘s recent visit to Manila ought to be viewed in the context of Japanese concerns over its own defense from an aggressive China.

Two countries working together

Kishida and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr agreed to start talks on a Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) such as Japan has with Australia and Great Britain. A pact of that sort makes military interactions between nations easier to conduct.

In fact, Japan and the Philippines already have a military-to-military relationship – although Japan doesn’t publicize it much and it is often overshadowed by the more comprehensive Philippine-United States defense activities.

The Akitsushima (PLH-32), a Japan Coast Guard ship, is pictured after it docked at Manila’s South Harbor, June 1, 2023. Photo: Jeoffrey Maitem / BenarNews

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) engagements with the Philippines have been going on for some time now – including exercises in the South China Sea where the Chinese have been bullying the Philippines.

The Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) has joined multilateral exercises and bilateral engagements in and with the Philippines. Japanese Air Self-Defense Force F-15 fighters put in a first-ever appearance in the Philippines in 2022.

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Additionally, Japan has provided aerial and naval patrol craft to the Philippines. Air-defense radar systems are also in the works.

What else Japan can do

Prime Minister Kishida is in fact bolstering the support Japan is already providing the Philippines – both defense-wise and economically. He is indicating, too, that more of such support is on the way.

There’s much more that Japan can do on the defense front. That includes regular joint patrols with Philippine and other navies to defend Philippine territory. Japan could also send more than token-sized units to participate in the US-Philippine-led multilateral exercises in the Philippines. And when the time comes to directly confront Chinese bullying, Japan needs to step up.

But for now, Japan is demonstrating its support for the Philippines. And it complements the far deeper US military involvement in the country post-Duterte.

One hopes the Americans and Japanese are coordinating their efforts.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks to the Philippine Congress as a guest on November 4, 2023, in Manila. Photo: Kyodo

Looking beyond the military

Where Japan can make a real difference is in an all-out push to further assist the Philippines on the infrastructure and economic development front. Japan has the money, the know-how and the experience. It has carried out such projects in several other-than-first-world countries.

Japan of course has development projects already ongoing in the Philippines. But especially now that the Philippines is disentangling itself from several Chinese Belt and Road projects that former President Roderigo Duterte agreed to, it’s essential that Japan steps in and shows itself to be a good alternative to Chinese investment – which it is.

It would be helpful if the Americans also joined in with the Japanese on this infrastructure development effort. But this is an area where Japan can and should be in the lead.

The economic is the political in this case. And when it comes to infrastructure such as ports and airfields and even roads, there is a clear military usefulness as well. That would be for the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the US military and potentially others, including the Japan Self Defense Forces.

Don’t overlook the Filipinos

One should consider that President Marcos and some other patriotic Filipinos have shifted the country away from the entanglement with the PRC that former President Duterte created. This is a bold move on Marcos’s part to shift the nation’s basic alignment back to the US and the free world. It needs support, and Marcos needs to show results domestically.

Japanese political support – not just military support – is immensely valuable. It’s psychologically important for Filipinos to see that two major countries are on their side. And one hopes that will continue for the foreseeable future.

Indeed, the Philippines are starting to be a stalwart of a “democratic” bloc of smaller nations in Asia. Manila has arguably more effectively challenged and exposed China’s gray-zone activities than has Washington. If this courage is supported, many across the region will take note and might be encouraged themselves to try to break free from Beijing’s increasingly tight grip.

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Thank you, Beijing

Tokyo and Washington can thank the Chinese for antagonizing and humiliating the Philippines. They’ve taken it to the point that there is a huge constituency in the Philippines that wants nothing to do with the PRC.

Now it’s up to the Japanese (and the Americans) to demonstrate that they offer a much better alternative. And, unlike the Chinese, they are not seeking to dominate the Philippines and steal Philippine territory and resources.

The defense agreements Japan is signing with other nations are a positive thing. Japan is trying to defend itself, and the Philippines is a piece of the puzzle.

And Japan’s infrastructure development efforts directly relate to its national defense. They are a huge contribution to the efforts of the free world.

But looking outward and having friendly relations, including defense relations, with other nations is not a replacement for concrete, well-considered efforts by Japan to properly restructure its own defense.

And having a clear plan for defending Taiwan – along with the US force – is essential.

In fact, Japan should do for Taiwan what it’s doing for the Philippines. All their futures are tied together, and any weak link is a risk for the whole chain.

Grant Newsham is a retired US Marine officer and former US diplomat. He is the author of the book When China Attacks: A Warning To America.

This article, originally publishsed by JAPAN Forward, is republished with permission.

asiatimes.com · by Grant Newsham · November 7, 2023

17. A Knife Fight in a Phone Booth

Excerpts:

Combat in a city is like a knife fight in a phone booth. The violence is fast and intimate. The images coming out of Gaza are beyond grim. They will worsen as Israeli troops push deeper into the city and enter the hell houses, to say nothing of miles of tunnels they’ll have to navigate as they seek to free hostages. In an urban battle—whether in Fallujah, Bakhmut, Hue City, or Stalingrad—the city is usually destroyed. It becomes the one hostage that can never be rescued. It’s difficult to see how Gaza City will avoid this outcome, or to understand how Hamas could deliver the citizens it purportedly represents to such a fate.

An army’s tactics tell you a lot about its strategic intentions. Hamas’s attacks on October 7 weren’t designed to bring victory to Palestine, or to ease the suffering of the Palestinian people. Before October 7, Saudi Arabia was poised to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. This would have been a historic breakthrough, decades in the making—a new promise of peace. Hamas shot that promise dead on the threshold. And they’ve dragged it, along with the hostages, into Gaza.

A Knife Fight in a Phone Booth

I learned the grim reality of urban combat in Fallujah.

By Elliot Ackerman

The Atlantic · by Elliot Ackerman · November 7, 2023

Twenty years ago, on what looked like a movie set built in the Quantico woods, I learned how to fight in a city. This faux city was called “MOUT Town.” MOUT—Military Operations in Urban Terrain—is U.S. military-speak for high-intensity urban combat, like what’s unfolding in Gaza. Tactically, MOUT was very different from the traditional combat we’d already studied in the Marine Corps. The urban battlefield was highly constricted; streets and buildings funneled us into close quarters with our enemy. Beyond every corner, window, or doorway lurked a potential ambush. Most notably, and adding a specific and complex layer to this type of warfare, civilians blended with adversaries, all played by instructors who ambushed us with paintball guns. Casualty rates in urban warfare far exceed those of other forms of combat, a fact reinforced by the dime-size paintball welts that covered my body by the end of MOUT week.

Less than a year later, in November 2004, I found myself leading a 46-man rifle platoon into Fallujah, in Iraq. This battle pitted 13,000 Marines and soldiers against a defending force of 4,000 al-Qaeda fighters. In staging areas outside the city, we drilled the urban tactics we’d learned in MOUT Town. Chief among those tactics was close-quarters battle, or CQB, a highly choreographed maneuver designed for hostage rescue in which a group of Marines enters a room and clears it of threats. These tactics look similar to what usually appears in movies featuring Navy SEALs or Delta Force operatives as they rescue hostages; it is a familiar, if violent, visual. The idea is to flood a room with so much speed and precision that you overwhelm a defending adversary; your enemy might be able to shoot the first man through the door, or even the second, but they’ll be killed by the third or fourth. In these situations, a room’s door isn’t even called a door; it’s called the “fatal funnel.” The first man knows he’s likely going to get shot—that’s his job.

From the July/August 2004 issue: Five days in Fallujah

Armed with these tactics, the second battle of Fallujah began for our platoon. It took only a few days for us to learn that CQB wasn’t appropriate for Fallujah. Unlike in Gaza, the majority of civilians had evacuated the city, and the intensity of fighting was such that it made no sense to send a Marine through the door of a building being defended by members of al-Qaeda who had chosen to remain in Fallujah with the sole purpose of exchanging their lives for ours. We quickly adjusted our approach. When ambushed on a street corner, we’d back off from the building where the threat was coming from. Instead of sending Marines in to clear the building, we’d surround it and radio up either an Abrams tank or a D9 armored bulldozer (loaned to us by the Israelis), and then collapse the building. If this sounds brutal, it was. Yet our calculus was simple: No building is worth a Marine’s life.

As we adjusted our tactics, our enemy adjusted its own. Within a few days, fighters learned that attacking us from a distance would result in being surrounded and killed, in many cases at minimal loss of American life. They needed to draw us in closer. And so, as we cleared the city, we encountered more of what came to be known as “hell houses.”

In these houses, insurgents would train a machine gun on the front door. On either side of that door, two more insurgents would take position. The insurgents wouldn’t shoot at us as we approached but rather would wait until the first Marine entered. The insurgent behind the machine gun would fire a burst into the Marine, causing him to fall forward through the door. The two insurgents by the door, operating as a snatch team, would drag that Marine into the house, away from his comrades, who wouldn’t know at that point whether he was alive or dead. The insurgents, knowing that we wouldn’t leave a fallen comrade behind, had effectively taken a hostage. This forced us to engage in the costly close-quarters battle that we had sought to avoid but that benefited our enemy, whose objective had never been to escape the house but rather to exchange their lives for as many American lives as possible.

Amid the horrors of war, it’s tempting to believe that the categorization of violence is a meaningless exercise. If someone is killed by a rifle shot at long range versus killed while fighting from room to room to rescue a hostage, does it matter? If civilians are killed accidentally in an air strike or are deliberately targeted, it’s all the same, isn’t it? Death is death. Violence is violence. Yet this view, which borders on nihilistic, creates false equivalencies. How we fight matters. Intention matters.

The members of al-Qaeda whom we fought in Fallujah had little to no intention of leaving that battle alive. They weren’t fighting to win. They were fighting to die. Theirs had become a death cult, fixated on martyrdom, paradise in the afterlife, and death to nonbeliever infidels, including many of their fellow Muslims. To maximize American losses, they were willing to take hostages. In the hell houses, those hostages were fallen Marines. But in a larger sense, they took the city itself hostage, displacing its citizens and turning Fallujah into a mousetrap to kill Americans.

Watching the battle unfolding in Gaza, I can see Fallujah’s hell houses. Hamas’s attack on October 7 was designed to elicit a specific, violent response from the Israelis. Hamas has turned the city of Gaza into a hell house. It has not only taken 242 hostages; it’s taken the entire city and population of Gaza hostage. Hamas’s goal isn’t the liberation of the Palestinian people. Like al-Qaeda in Iraq, Hamas is a death cult, whose charter quotes a hadith that states, “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

Hussein Ibish: Israel is walking into a trap

Combat in a city is like a knife fight in a phone booth. The violence is fast and intimate. The images coming out of Gaza are beyond grim. They will worsen as Israeli troops push deeper into the city and enter the hell houses, to say nothing of miles of tunnels they’ll have to navigate as they seek to free hostages. In an urban battle—whether in Fallujah, Bakhmut, Hue City, or Stalingrad—the city is usually destroyed. It becomes the one hostage that can never be rescued. It’s difficult to see how Gaza City will avoid this outcome, or to understand how Hamas could deliver the citizens it purportedly represents to such a fate.

An army’s tactics tell you a lot about its strategic intentions. Hamas’s attacks on October 7 weren’t designed to bring victory to Palestine, or to ease the suffering of the Palestinian people. Before October 7, Saudi Arabia was poised to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. This would have been a historic breakthrough, decades in the making—a new promise of peace. Hamas shot that promise dead on the threshold. And they’ve dragged it, along with the hostages, into Gaza.

The Atlantic · by Elliot Ackerman · November 7, 2023

18. Russia’s Second Front in Europe

Excerpts:

On the ground, NATO should deploy teams in Kosovo that counter Russia’s and Serbia’s propaganda machine. These teams should target far-right Serbian groups and remind them that Russian messaging about a “Slavic brotherhood”—to which Serbia ostensibly belongs—is a myth and that if conflict does erupt, Putin will not help them. To do so, all they need to do is speak the truth: Putin has his hands full fighting a losing war against Ukraine, and he will not provide resources to Serbia for an armed conflict with Kosovo. As evidence, these teams could point to the September war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia is a longtime ally of Armenia, and yet despite Armenia’s requests, Russia provided it with no military support in the recent conflict, which Armenia lost. The teams could also remind Serbian nationalists that Moscow did not help them during the wars in the 1990s.

NATO states may not want to take these measures. In fact, they probably want to ignore Vucic altogether. The alliance has been worn thin helping Ukraine, so expending time and resources on Kosovo and Serbia may feel like too much, especially when they can just buy off the latter country’s president.

But the West must realize that, if left to fester, tensions in these states could become far more difficult—and expensive—to address. What happens in Kosovo and Serbia rarely stays in those countries, and this crisis could easily spill over to other Balkan states. Nearby North Macedonia, which belongs to NATO, might get dragged in. Further escalations in Kosovo will also invite chaos in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik—who has close ties to Putin—has threatened to have Bosnia’s Serbian territories secede. In October, Dodik even emphasized that Serbs should “form a single state,” consisting of Serbia, Republika Srpska, and Montenegro.

A widening conflict would be an even bigger gift for Putin, who wants the West to train its attention away from Kyiv as he fights to seize more of that country. To protect Europe and stop the Kremlin, it is therefore essential that NATO fortify its Balkans flank right now, while the costs of doing so are still cheap.

Russia’s Second Front in Europe

The West Must Stop Putin From Provoking Conflict in the Balkans

By David Shedd and Ivana Stradner

November 7, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by David Shedd and Ivana Stradner · November 7, 2023

In late September, Serbia deployed advanced weapons to its border with Kosovo, in what amounted to one of the largest Serbian military buildups since the end of the Kosovo war nearly a quarter century ago. In the United States, a spokesman for the National Security Council called it “an unprecedented staging of advanced Serbian artillery, tanks, and mechanized infantry units.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic to demand an “immediate de-escalation.”

Although the buildup was largely overlooked by Western media at the time—and has since been forgotten amid the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas—it is part of an alarming development in the Balkans. The immediate pretext for the Serbian mobilization was months of unrest between Kosovo and Serbia, which have maintained a fragile peace ever since a NATO bombing campaign helped Kosovo win de facto independence from Belgrade in the 1998–99 war. In May, Serbia placed its troops on combat alert after ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo clashed with Kosovo police. And then in September, just before the recent mobilization at the border, 30 heavily armed ethnic Serbs attacked a police patrol in Kosovo, leaving four people dead.

But there are many indications that these incidents go beyond the familiar tensions that persisted in past years. These incidents also show the growing threat that Russia, Serbia’s partner, is posing to the region. In 2022, for example, Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said that Kosovo and Serbia were “on the brink of armed conflict.” And Moscow—which does not recognize Kosovo’s independence—fanned the flames, using information operations to fuel Kosovar-Serbian distrust and to spread hawkish messages that polarize the region along ethnic and religious lines. Russia has also armed Serbia while increasing Serbia’s energy dependence on its companies by providing gas and oil at a sharp discount. Moscow has promised Belgrade that it will block Kosovo from becoming a UN member state. “A big explosion is brewing in the center of Europe,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in May. It might have been a boast.

Part of why Russia is happy to stoke the historical conflict between Kosovo and Serbia is because doing so stresses NATO resources and undermines U.S. power in Europe. NATO forced Serbia to pull out of Kosovo in 1999, and the alliance has maintained a small peacekeeping force of NATO troops in the latter country ever since. As a result, rising tensions between Kosovo and Serbia test NATO’s staying power in the region. Backing Serbia also gives Russia a foothold in the Balkans. Serbian officials have thanked Russia for its “support for Serbia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty” and have stressed that Moscow’s support is the reason Serbia refuses to impose sanctions on Russia.

By putting pressure on Belgrade, the United States was able to calm the most recent bout of unrest, with Vucic declaring a few days later that he would draw down forces on the border and that Serbia had no intention of invading Kosovo. But tensions remain high. Kosovo has labeled the September attacks terrorism, while Vucic has charged Kosovo with perpetrating a “brutal ethnic cleansing” against ethnic Serbs in Kosovo with the help of “the international community.” And Vucic does not need to pursue a full-blown military campaign in Kosovo to further his project of destabilizing the country and humiliating NATO. Like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Vucic uses paramilitary groups to advance his aims. According to Kosovo’s government, Belgrade helped orchestrate the September attack. Vucic could use “little green men” to seize control of northern Kosovo while maintaining plausible deniability, just as Putin did in Crimea.

It is time, then, for NATO to decisively put an end to Vucic’s Kremlin-enabled sideshow. The United States and Europe must make it clear to Belgrade and Moscow that they will react strongly, and harshly, to future Balkan provocations. They must strengthen NATO’s presence in the region and establish credible redlines that Serbia cannot cross without provoking a military confrontation with NATO forces. And they must sanction Belgrade if Serbia’s leaders do not move away from Moscow and de-escalate tensions.

AXIS OF CONVENIENCE

Vucic’s emergence as a key instigator of tensions with Kosovo should not come as a surprise. As a young politician, Vucic was a hardcore Serbian nationalist. During the Balkan wars that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia—in which Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Croatians, and Serbs killed each other as they tried to control the region—Vucic encouraged the new Serbian state to crush its ethnic opponents. He felt particular vitriol for Kosovar Albanians, who are mostly Muslims and make up more than 90 percent of Kosovo’s population. “For every Serb killed, we will kill 100 Muslims,” Vucic declared in a 1995 address. In 1998, he became Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s minister of information. Milosevic’s regime, infamous for its particularly brutal killing of Albanians, fell apart after NATO’s intervention. Milosevic was arrested for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He died in prison before he could be convicted.

Today, Vucic is more of an opportunist than a nationalist, driven largely by his desire to remain in office and expand his power. But this new motivation has not made Serbia’s president particularly benevolent. Vucic benefits politically from chaos in the Balkans, which helps him justify his political relevance and maintain control. A crisis in Kosovo, for example, helps Vucic divert attention from his own domestic political issues and tamp down antigovernment protests. It has also improved his international hand. By escalating and de-escalating crises in Kosovo, Vucic has positioned himself as the determiner of the region’s stability, allowing him to negotiate and bargain with countries in the West, promising to ease tensions if they meet his demands for economic support.

Such bargaining is just one of the ways that Vucic has played the United States and Europe. He has also strung the EU along as part of Serbia’s membership bid. European leaders, including Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU commission, say they want Serbia in the organization, and Vucic has, theoretically, agreed to accession. But he does so simply because it brings in EU aid, and what he really wants is to keep Serbia on a long and unending admission path. He does not want to join an organization that would force him to fortify the rule of law.

Many Serbs believe Russian talking points about the war in Ukraine.

In fact, as soon as Vucic came to power, he undermined all pro-Western political opposition while strengthening far-right Serbian groups to improve his own political standing. To extend his power in the region, he is also trying to keep ethnic Serbs in Kosovo in Belgrade’s orbit. And Vucic still appears interested in forcibly taking parts of Kosovo. “All Serbs know they lost Kosovo,” he stated in 2018. “But I will try everything in my might to retrieve what I can, so in the end it is not a total defeat or total loss.” With the West busy supplying Ukraine, supporting Israel, and constraining China, Vucic believes his opportunity to conduct operations in Kosovo may come soon.

To succeed, however, Vucic needs Putin’s help. He wants, first and foremost, Russian energy: Moscow’s key tool of influence. But Russia and Serbia have also bolstered their military-technical cooperation (which Belgrade has then used as a bargaining chip with the West). Vucic has even called on Moscow for domestic help. In May, for example, Vucic warned about “attempts at color revolutions”—the series of protest movements that helped topple pro-Russian rulers in post-Soviet states—and in 2021, Serbia and Russia pledged to jointly combat them. The result could be Russian meddling in Serbia’s snap parliamentary elections on December 17, which Vucic called in October.

To win those elections, Vucic will likely lean heavily on the media. It is a domain that Vucic, as Serbia’s former information minister, knows well. Under Vucic’s watch, Belgrade has spread disinformation to prepare Serbs for escalations in Kosovo, including by accusing the United Kingdom of plotting Kosovo’s war for independence, alleging that Kosovo’s prime minister has conducted acts of “terror against the Serbs,” and blaming NATO for the country’s rise in cancer rates, which Belgrade claims came as a result of NATO using depleted uranium ammunition during its 1999 intervention. Serbia’s newspapers, which largely toe the government line, are filled with anti-Kosovo narratives, and Serbian radio stations have been blasting patriotic songs. Serbian streets have been flooded with graffiti that read “Kosovo is Serbia” and “When the army returns to Kosovo.” (The latter slogan, in effect, calls for Serbia to invade Kosovo).

Vucic and Putin in Sochi, Russia, November 2021

Mikhail Klimentye / Sputnik / Reuters

Russia has helped. It has put up billboards in its cities that proclaim, “We mourn together with Serbia / One color, one faith, one blood,” endorsing Serbia’s territorial claims. It has also echoed Serbian propaganda in its media outlets, which Vucic allows to freely operate in his state. These stations, such as RT and Sputnik, have used this freedom to spread pro-Russian messaging about Ukraine alongside pro-Serbian messaging—and with great success. Many Serbs believe Russian talking points about the war, and Serbia’s domestic media have adopted Kremlin narratives and spread Moscow’s propaganda. Serbian news sources, for example, frequently portray the Ukrainians as Nazis and declare, falsely, that Ukraine attacked Russia first.

For Putin, this opening has been a boon. Russia views the Balkans as Europe’s soft underbelly, and Moscow believes that Serbia is its most vulnerable spot. His goal is to turn Moscow into the Balkans’ only reliable conflict negotiator—giving the Kremlin leverage over Western powers. After all, if peace in the Balkans depends on Putin, NATO officials might have to make concessions to Moscow if they want to avoid war. By pushing the Balkans to the brink, he also hopes to show that NATO is a paper tiger and will not act if truly tested. Even if NATO does fight back against Serbia, Putin could still win. By opening another front, the West would have less capacity to help Ukraine.

The Kremlin has other reasons to support chaos in the Balkans. Putin uses the so-called Kosovo precedent to defend its illegal invasion of Ukraine, arguing that the annexation of Ukrainian territories is justified by Kosovo’s independence. According to this perverse logic, articulated by Russia’s permanent UN representative in a January speech, the illegal and wildly fraudulent annexation referendums held in occupied Ukrainian territories are akin to Kosovo’s fight for freedom from Serbia more than two decades ago. Kosovo, in other words, had the right to leave Serbia, and so the occupied Ukrainian territories have the right to join Russia. (The fact that Russia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence, or that Kosovo’s independence is, in fact, a precedent for Ukraine’s own fight for freedom, are ironies that Moscow has not addressed.)

The Kremlin’s support for Belgrade goes beyond narrow interests: Russia has a genuine ideological connection to Serbian nationalists. Putin has worked to position Russia as the leading defender of traditional cultural values—such as strict gender roles and conservative Christianity—against the liberal West. Many Serbians are natural partners. The Serbian media has accused the West of trying to destroy the Russian and Serbian Orthodox Churches, and it has railed against liberal policies, such as LGBTQ rights. Many in Serbia support the creation of the “Serbian world”—a Balkan equivalent to Putin’s “Russian world”—designed to unite all Serbs, including those in Kosovo, under a common Serbian cultural framework. Both states even have foundational myths that are rooted in the territories they would like to take. Many Russian nationalists, for their part, trace Russian civilization to a prince who governed from what is now Kyiv. Many Serbs believe their country should retake Kosovo because it is the home of many medieval Serbian Orthodox monasteries and was the site of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, when the creation myth of Serbian civilization was born.

GET TOUGH

Western leaders understand that Vucic is motivated at least in large measure by a desire to stay in power. As a result, they have been trying to appease Serbia’s president by giving Belgrade incentives, including economic initiatives and investments, designed to stop his escalations. In June, for example, a month after ethnic Serbs injured NATO peacekeepers, the EU gave Serbia a financial grant. The U.S. ambassador to Serbia has labeled Vucic “a constructive partner,” and when Serbian armed forces participated in a multinational military exercise with NATO in June, the U.S. embassy insisted that Belgrade had chosen the West over Russia. Vucic continues to walk a tight rope in his relationship with the West. According to a leaked document, Serbia has agreed to provide ammunition to Ukraine, and Vucic has not repudiated that claim. Last March, Serbia even voted in favor of the UN resolution condemning Russia’s aggression.

But these steps are just part of Vucic’s balancing act. The military exercise has been organized in Serbia since 2014, and it requires little of Belgrade. To Vucic, ammunition shipments to Ukraine are simply a business deal, and they have not dampened Russian-Serbian relations. And the UN resolution was purely symbolic—an opportunity to boost the country in the eyes of Western leaders without jeopardizing its relations with Moscow. In fact, the resolution’s real, coded meaning was that Serbia will not give up its claims to Kosovo. “For us, Crimea is Ukraine, Donbas is Ukraine, and it will remain so,” Vucic said in January 2023. But this is only because Belgrade believes that, as the Serbian graffiti proclaim, “Kosovo is Serbia.”

If the West continues to enable Vucic, it will simply embolden him. He will keep testing NATO and trying to prove that the alliance is toothless. The West has already given him encouraging signals: after more than 30 NATO peacekeepers were injured in the May clashes with Serbian protesters, the alliance did not detain the violent protesters out of fear that doing so would escalate the conflict. But such restraint is an invitation for further escalation by Vucic, as well as by the Kremlin. Russian officials are watching what happens in Kosovo and wondering whether they can get away with attacking NATO forces and installations.

Russia has a genuine ideological connection to Serbian nationalists.

Kosovo, for its part, has at times ignored the West’s goals. For example, NATO countries have been pushing Kosovo to establish an Association of Serbian Municipalities, which Kosovo has not done so far. The West has, relatedly, accused Kosovo of forcibly installing Albanian mayors in majority Serb towns and, in doing so, raising tensions with Serbia. In response, the United States imposed measures against Kosovo and canceled the country’s participation in the Washington-led Defender Europe 2023 military exercise. But none of Kosovo’s behavior justifies Serbia’s de facto campaign to undermine its independence.

To try to contain the conflict, a week after the May attack, NATO increased its presence in the region with a new legion of roughly 500 Turkish soldiers. NATO also deployed hundreds of British troops to the country in October. But these measures are insufficient. NATO must create a coalition of the willing, headed by the United States, that can send successfully pressure Belgrade and Moscow to stop promoting political instability. That means making it clear to Vucic that, if he continues to take escalatory measures, he will face an escalating series of tangible consequences—including, possibly, sanctions.

The West is well positioned to take such steps. In June 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order allowing Washington to impose sanctions against anyone who destabilizes the Western Balkans. Washington should not be shy about using them against individuals who (in the words of the order) “threaten the peace, security, stability, or territorial integrity” in the region. For American sanctions to have maximum effect, the United Kingdom and the EU should join Washington’s efforts. European leaders should, at a minimum, make future assistance to Serbia dependent on specific policy shifts in Belgrade. The EU, for example, could condition further aid on Vucic’s imposing sanctions on Russia, aligning its foreign policy with that of the bloc, tamping down on regional provocations, and fulfilling the EU’s reform agenda—especially when it comes to the rule of law and media freedom.

What happens in Kosovo and Serbia rarely stays in those countries.

On the ground, NATO should deploy teams in Kosovo that counter Russia’s and Serbia’s propaganda machine. These teams should target far-right Serbian groups and remind them that Russian messaging about a “Slavic brotherhood”—to which Serbia ostensibly belongs—is a myth and that if conflict does erupt, Putin will not help them. To do so, all they need to do is speak the truth: Putin has his hands full fighting a losing war against Ukraine, and he will not provide resources to Serbia for an armed conflict with Kosovo. As evidence, these teams could point to the September war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia is a longtime ally of Armenia, and yet despite Armenia’s requests, Russia provided it with no military support in the recent conflict, which Armenia lost. The teams could also remind Serbian nationalists that Moscow did not help them during the wars in the 1990s.

NATO states may not want to take these measures. In fact, they probably want to ignore Vucic altogether. The alliance has been worn thin helping Ukraine, so expending time and resources on Kosovo and Serbia may feel like too much, especially when they can just buy off the latter country’s president.

But the West must realize that, if left to fester, tensions in these states could become far more difficult—and expensive—to address. What happens in Kosovo and Serbia rarely stays in those countries, and this crisis could easily spill over to other Balkan states. Nearby North Macedonia, which belongs to NATO, might get dragged in. Further escalations in Kosovo will also invite chaos in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik—who has close ties to Putin—has threatened to have Bosnia’s Serbian territories secede. In October, Dodik even emphasized that Serbs should “form a single state,” consisting of Serbia, Republika Srpska, and Montenegro.

A widening conflict would be an even bigger gift for Putin, who wants the West to train its attention away from Kyiv as he fights to seize more of that country. To protect Europe and stop the Kremlin, it is therefore essential that NATO fortify its Balkans flank right now, while the costs of doing so are still cheap.

• DAVID R. SHEDD is former Acting Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
• IVANA STRADNER is a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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Foreign Affairs · by David Shedd and Ivana Stradner · November 7, 2023

19. Civilian deaths and proportionality in the Israel–Hamas war

Excerpts:

Assuming that both parties’ claims about casualties in Jabalia are true, Hamas clearly breached international law by deliberately building a militarily key target among the civilian population. The military necessity of the target—the headquarters of Hamas’s northern Gaza defence—is readily apparent. But was the loss of 50 Palestinian lives proportional to the military advantage Israel gained in conducting the strike? Were there other ways of disabling Biari’s ability to coordinate Hamas’s defence without killing him, other Hamas fighters and 50 Palestinians? Or was the opportunity to kill Biari a fleeting one, where firm intelligence placed him at that precise point but for only a limited time, precluding other methods of disabling his command? That is the type of information needed to make an informed judgement on the legality of strikes.

This may seem a sanitised way of looking at issues of proportionality when the pictures beamed nightly into people’s living rooms and uploaded every minute on various social media platforms show that there’s a real cost to the Gaza campaign and real children and civilians are being killed daily. Western governments have understood this and are beginning to change their tone on Israel by degrees. Unfortunately, the levels of the main players’ risk tolerances virtually guarantee more civilian casualties.

Seeking to make up for his government’s spectacular security failure on 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu willingly accepts civilian casualties among the Palestinian population as long as he destroys Hamas. Hamas invites civilian casualties by its positioning of military assets, and now that it knows that Israel’s risk tolerance is well beyond anything it has seen before, it likely sees outcries over more civilian casualties leading to a ceasefire as its only chance of survival. And Washington hopes that by supporting Netanyahu’s military campaign and calling for adherence to international norms it can buy Israel time to inflict grievous damage on Hamas before the White House will have to acquiesce to public opinion and back some kind of ceasefire. Israel, Hamas and Washington are all accepting of civilian casualties in Gaza—they only differ in how many and why.

Civilian deaths and proportionality in the Israel–Hamas war | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Rodger Shanahan · November 7, 2023

Since the Israeli response to the 7 October terrorist attack by Hamas began, the world’s focus has shifted onto Israel’s prosecution of its military campaign. But in an era where information (and misinformation) can be transmitted instantaneously, and when emotions are raw, context is largely absent or ignored. Terms such as ‘war crimes’ and ‘international law’ are thrown about by people who have little or no understanding what the terms actually mean. Accusations that a religious building, school, medical facility or ambulance has been bombed in most cases are made without knowledge of exactly what the building or vehicle was being used for. Protected civilian objects, for example, lose that protection when they are deemed to be legitimate military targets.

Hamas has spent years building tunnels underneath Gaza to house its weapons, supplies and command-and-control nodes. It is effectively using Gazans as human shields in contravention of international law. It wants to raise the risk threshold (that is, the civilian casualty count) that Israel faces in targeting its facilities. Israel, for its part, claims that it tried to separate combatants from non-combatants by dropping leaflets to people in north Gaza ordering them to head south. It was at best a perfunctory effort at minimising the number of civilians in the target area.

Exactly how many civilians and combatants in Gaza have been killed isn’t known. To date the Hamas-run Health Ministry has provided detailed figures of Palestinian civilians killed, yet there’s no mention of any Hamas deaths. The accuracy of the casualty figures have been called into question, and the Health Ministry was certainly caught out fabricating claims of an Israeli strike at al-Ahli Hospital, but without knowing how many Hamas militants were killed or injured in a strike, or the number of civilians, then determining whether the attacks, individually or collectively, breach international law is virtually impossible.

Given the increasingly strident calls for Israel to stop its aerial bombing campaign in Gaza and to reduce civilian casualties, it is perhaps worth examining the two main considerations that drive whether a military response, or aspects of a military response, can be considered to breach international law. I am not a lawyer, and nor are those that authorise the engagement of a target. Lawyers give advice, but it will be a uniformed non-lawyer military officer, or in some cases a senior politician, who will ultimately approve a strike.

The two guiding principles that inform a person’s decision boil down to ultimately subjective concepts: military necessity and proportionality. Both are concepts that can be argued ad infinitum, but the reality is that those charged with observing them often have to make such life-or-death decisions quickly and repeatedly.

Proportionality is perhaps the more contested of the two, and there are any number of well-informed backgrounders on social media explaining the formula that US forces came up with in trying to systematise the concept in the theatres they fought in over the past 20 years. It is an inexact science—indeed, it’s not a science at all, because the measure of proportionality relates not to the number of people being killed but to the military advantage being obtained.

The military effect is relatively easy to determine in a sparsely inhabited, billiard-table-type operating environment. The risk of civilian casualties is low and the nature of the military target is easy to discern. In dense urban terrain such as exists in parts of Gaza, and with an enemy that operates among, and underneath, the civilian population, the decision-making process is much harder and determining proportionality more difficult.

Risk tolerance is also a key practical factor in determining proportionality. In Israel’s case, it’s clear that the level of risk tolerance for civilian casualties and hence the calculation of proportionality are different to what would have been accepted before 7 October. But revenge is not sufficient a reason to make risk tolerance more elastic.

What is likely driving the increased risk tolerance for civilian casualties on the part of Israeli targeters, even more than simple revenge, is the mission. Politically it is to destroy Hamas; militarily it is to degrade the group sufficiently that it is unable to reconstitute for years, if ever. On this, the Israeli government has the backing of US President Joe Biden, who is acutely aware that more than 30 US citizens were killed in Hamas’s initial attack on 7 October and that nearly two dozen were taken as hostages.

The tempo of the operation, with Israel claiming that thousands of targets in Gaza have been hit, makes it difficult to accurately determine the likely impact on civilians of every strike. But before we can decide whether an airstrike was proportional or not, we would need much more information than we are actually privy to. To begin with, there’s the information on which the Israeli targeters who planned the strike based their decisions, relating to not only the risk of civilian casualties (which in many cases are more or less guaranteed) but also the steps they took to minimise them (such as selection of munitions type, attack timing and approach). The newly appointed UN special representative for human rights and counterterrorism, Australia’s own Ben Saul noted this challenge in categorising an airstrike as breaching international law in a recent interview.

The recent attacks on targets in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza provide a case in point. The first strike was alleged to have killed 50 Palestinians and wounded 150 more. The Israelis claim that the first strike killed Ibrahim Biari, a key planner of the 7 October attacks and allegedly commander of the northern Gaza sector, while the second strike killed the commander of Hamas’s anti-armoured forces. It also claimed that other Hamas fighters were killed in the strike because it destroyed a Hamas command post built underneath the refugee camp. This reflects the nature of decisions that need to be made in conflicts such as this.

Assuming that both parties’ claims about casualties in Jabalia are true, Hamas clearly breached international law by deliberately building a militarily key target among the civilian population. The military necessity of the target—the headquarters of Hamas’s northern Gaza defence—is readily apparent. But was the loss of 50 Palestinian lives proportional to the military advantage Israel gained in conducting the strike? Were there other ways of disabling Biari’s ability to coordinate Hamas’s defence without killing him, other Hamas fighters and 50 Palestinians? Or was the opportunity to kill Biari a fleeting one, where firm intelligence placed him at that precise point but for only a limited time, precluding other methods of disabling his command? That is the type of information needed to make an informed judgement on the legality of strikes.

This may seem a sanitised way of looking at issues of proportionality when the pictures beamed nightly into people’s living rooms and uploaded every minute on various social media platforms show that there’s a real cost to the Gaza campaign and real children and civilians are being killed daily. Western governments have understood this and are beginning to change their tone on Israel by degrees. Unfortunately, the levels of the main players’ risk tolerances virtually guarantee more civilian casualties.

Seeking to make up for his government’s spectacular security failure on 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu willingly accepts civilian casualties among the Palestinian population as long as he destroys Hamas. Hamas invites civilian casualties by its positioning of military assets, and now that it knows that Israel’s risk tolerance is well beyond anything it has seen before, it likely sees outcries over more civilian casualties leading to a ceasefire as its only chance of survival. And Washington hopes that by supporting Netanyahu’s military campaign and calling for adherence to international norms it can buy Israel time to inflict grievous damage on Hamas before the White House will have to acquiesce to public opinion and back some kind of ceasefire. Israel, Hamas and Washington are all accepting of civilian casualties in Gaza—they only differ in how many and why.

Rodger Shanahan is a former Australian Army officer and Middle East analyst. Image: AFP via Getty Images.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Rodger Shanahan · November 7, 2023

20. Disinformation and the limits of yelling 'Liar' in a Crowded Theater

Yes we need digital literacy. We need cyber civil defense (the entire society involved in cyber defense, protect yourself online and protect the network(s) to which you belong) and personal cyber hygiene - cleaning up your online presence.

Excerpts:

Kosseff’s final suggestion – echoed by many others including this reviewer – is to increase digital literacy and civic education. After all, when a majority of Americans can’t even name the three branches of government, it’s no wonder that many thought the Vice President had the power to change the electoral college vote in January 2021. But that’s a long-term and expensive proposition, and it too will merely blunt the effectiveness of disinformation, not cure the problem.

The unsatisfactory reality is that we don’t have a good answer to a problem we’ve created. Professor Kosseff warns us that the one solution we might naturally turn to – impinging on the historically understood scope of the First Amendment – is unwise and could lead to greater evil. So. in this regard, the book is a success – it’s a convincing case against tinkering with the First Amendment — and should be read for that purpose. But we are still left to sort through imperfect solutions to a dangerous problem.

Disinformation and the limits of yelling 'Liar' in a Crowded Theater

thecipherbrief.com

More Book Reviews

November 7th, 2023 by Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation, |

BOOK REVIEW: LIAR IN A CROWDED THEATER: FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN A WORLD OF MISINFORMATION

By Jeff Kosseff / Johns Hopkins University Press

Reviewed by: Glenn S. Gerstell

The Reviewer — Cipher Brief Expert Glenn S. Gerstell is a Principal with the Cyber Initiatives Group and Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. He served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020 and writes and speaks about the intersection of technology, national security and privacy.

REVIEW — When asked at a Cipher Brief conference several years ago, to name the most serious security threat facing the United States, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had a short and ready answer: disinformation.

General Clapper elaborated that cyber-propelled foreign and domestic disinformation could have the pernicious effect of corroding the legitimacy of our democratic institutions, leading to loss of trust in government and ultimately to autocratic reactions.

That deep concern over the threat posed by disinformation and other lies spread and turbocharged by social media is at the heart of Liar in a Crowded Theater, a new book by Jeff Kosseff, a Professor of Cybersecurity Law at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The author of The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet, a highly regarded explanation of the statute that insulates social media from liability for users’ wrongful content, Kosseff sets forth his goals clearly for his new work: “This book explains why courts have set such a high bar for protecting false speech, why we should not relax those standards in the face of serious threats, and how we can address those threats without defaulting to government censorship.”

The book’s title refers of course, to the commonly held notion that one cannot falsely yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater — stemming from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion in a 1919 Supreme Court case upholding some government restrictions on speech, notwithstanding the constitution’s First Amendment. Kosseff asserts that this notion is of little help in resolving the challenges of today’s disinformation: “[t]he real problem with the ‘fire in a crowded theater’ discourse is that it too often is used as a placeholder justification for regulating any speech that someone believes is harmful or objectionable.”

Get an up close briefing with Glenn Gerstell and other cyber experts at the Cyber Initiatives Group’s virtual Winter Summit, Wednesday, December 6 from 12p – 3p ET. Save my seat.

The first half of the book consists of a detailed analysis of mostly First Amendment cases, in which Kosseff demonstrates how the seemingly simple “fire in a crowded theater” concept is actually more complex and, as evolved, now requires that the speech cross the threshold of “imminent incitement” to violence or wrongful acts before it can be penalized. Explaining the principal judicial cases in the area, Kosseff reaffirms the concept underlying free speech in a democracy — that in a largely unfettered marketplace of ideas, with all participants in the marketplace having equal opportunity to participate, “the one truth will prevail on the open market.” Perhaps in theory, but not in practice, in part because participants are unequally positioned and, in many cases, there is no “one truth.”

Nonetheless, as Kosseff demonstrates in discussing other judicial cases, our legal system so values truth as a foundation stone of democracy, that even merely “substantial truth” is a defense to a defamation claim, and opinions, no matter how repulsive and perhaps otherwise defamatory, are shielded. Step-by-step, Kosseff reviews legal precedents to show how courts have placed only the lightest of restrictions on false or incorrect speech, whether commercial, defamatory, political or otherwise, and he concludes the first part of his book asserting that even if restrictions were to be imposed, they would rarely be effective in curbing misinformation.

Today’s constant barrage of information makes it easy for countries to wage disinformation campaigns and your emotions are the weapon of choice. Learn how disinformation works and how we can fight it in this short video. This is one link you can feel good about sharing.

At two-thirds of the way into the volume, the reader will have been inundated with judicial case after case calling into question the imposition of governmental restrictions or burdens on any free speech. This is, after all, a law professor’s book, very consciously aimed in part at lawyers and legislators. As a lawyer, this reviewer found the discussion illuminating and persuasive; but the lay reader might well instead wish for a simple chapter summarizing this conclusion, perhaps with a handful of examples.

In his robust defense of only limited governmental burdens on speech, Kosseff doesn’t give as much weight to the fact that in many areas we do allow restrictions. Most of that is in commercial speech – you can’t advertise liquor or cigarettes on TV for example – but there is also a wide array of restrictions in dealing with the government – you can’t lie to an FBI agent, for another example. And tort law could afford some protection against speech that causes emotional distress or that interferes with commercial contracts. Moreover, there are surely other areas remaining where Congress and state legislatures have room to legislate up to the edge of the First Amendment. As recently as 2018, the Supreme Court noted that it did not have any “doubt that the State may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures.”

The final part of the book addresses what the reader really wants – a fix for the problem. And ultimately that’s the most unsatisfying part since the strength of our desire for solutions isn’t matched by the tools available. To be fair, that’s not really the author’s fault. He summarizes his position:

— “I largely agree with the cautious skepticism of taking drastic actions. We should not discount the harms and challenges created by misinformation and disinformation, particularly as it can spread rapidly on social media. Nor do I rule out all liability for false speech; indeed, our legal system has always left the door open for defamation civil claims and criminal charges such as fraud and lying to government agents. But the bar for such liability has been and should be extraordinarily high. Rather than reflexively banning speech that we believe is false, we should look at other options to mitigate the underlying causes of false speech.” —

The problem, in essence, is that the most targeted “solutions” are precisely the ones that would encroach on the First Amendment, and Kosseff clearly doesn’t think that tradeoff is worth it. So, we are left with a handful of less effective options. He enumerates several that might help negate or curtail false speech, such “counter speech” — simply affirmatively creating and disseminating the truth, correction or the opposite opinion in the face of the false statements. But broadcasting the truth after the lie has already been told rarely convinces everyone, even assuming you could reach all who heard the lie in the first place.

Cipher Brief Subscriber+Members enjoy unlimited access to Cipher Brief content, including analysis with experts, private virtual briefings with experts, the M-F Open Source Report and the weekly Dead Drop – an insider look at the latest gossip in the national security space. It pays to be a Subscriber+Member.

More promising is the possibility that there may be some maneuvering room – but short of coercion — for government to set the record straight with social media platforms. Just how much room is newly to be decided within the year by the Supreme Court. Kosseff correctly observes:

— “[a]t the very least, the jawboning case law suggests that the government officials should avoid exerting pressure on platforms to remove constitutionally protected content, and focus instead on effectively responding to misinformation and building public trust …. And Congress should consider passing a law that clearly defines the sort of jawboning in which government officials are prohibited from engaging.

… How should the government go about responding to what it views as misinformation? This, too, is a tricky balancing act. Even if the government is not directly prohibiting speech, its declaration of the one absolute truth could raise similar distrust.

…[The government should correct misinformation] with candor, transparency, and humility…..The government also can build confidence in the information that it provides by earning the public’s trust.” —

In an area in which he is clearly an expert, Kosseff reviews possible changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act:

The current legal regime, in which the First Amendment and Section 230 give platforms substantial breathing room to take down or leave up user content, is far from perfect. Conservatives are understandably concerned about a few dominant platforms unfairly preventing them from speaking to the public, and liberals are understandably concerned about the widespread distribution of harmful but constitutionally protected user content.

He recognizes that social media platforms and other “[i]ntermediaries are key to reducing misinformation and other harmful content. They can do better, but they are only one part of an imperfect solution….[some] disclosure requirements [for social media platforms] might increase transparency and public trust. Of course, any such requirements would need to meaningfully address First Amendment concerns about chilling the platforms’ ability to moderate content. I question whether even the most transparent policies would ultimately lead to better content moderation, but they might build trust with users.”

Since the First Amendment limits directly blocking false speech in most cases, we are left with more diffuse tools. With the January 6th Capitol attack in mind, Kosseff cites a greater effort to “holding recipients accountable if they break the law, even if they say that they were motivated by lies that others had told.” Making clear that recipients of false information have some burden to vet the information on which they might otherwise react unquestionably makes sense but it’s hard to see how that’s truly going to change the disinformation landscape.

Kosseff’s final suggestion – echoed by many others including this reviewer – is to increase digital literacy and civic education. After all, when a majority of Americans can’t even name the three branches of government, it’s no wonder that many thought the Vice President had the power to change the electoral college vote in January 2021. But that’s a long-term and expensive proposition, and it too will merely blunt the effectiveness of disinformation, not cure the problem.

The unsatisfactory reality is that we don’t have a good answer to a problem we’ve created. Professor Kosseff warns us that the one solution we might naturally turn to – impinging on the historically understood scope of the First Amendment – is unwise and could lead to greater evil. So. in this regard, the book is a success – it’s a convincing case against tinkering with the First Amendment — and should be read for that purpose. But we are still left to sort through imperfect solutions to a dangerous problem.

Liar in a Crowded Theater earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats

21. The New American Anarchists

​But not your father's (or great great grandfather's) anarchist.

Excerpts:

In contrast, some of the old American students not only do not know what they want, but do not even know exactly who they hate. They lack any power of distinction, or sense of proportion, by which to draw a line between justified violence and inhumanity, not because their hatred of Jews is so intense, as it is for some Arab-American students, but because they cannot stop their own thoughts of hate. They cannot return to normal. In this respect, they are more like anarchists than socialists or anti-Zionists. If the Arab-American students who celebrated the killing of innocent civilians are like the happy person who laughs, then the old Americans who celebrated the event are like the hysterical person who cannot stop laughing.

The immorality of the old American students might be best understood in connection with two other anarchistic types now common in American life: the lone wolf killer and the radicalized knowledge worker. At first glance, the two types appear to have nothing in common. The former is often right-wing, while the latter is often left-wing. The former is often poorly educated; the latter is often over-educated. Nevertheless, the two types share a common experience. Spending hours online, and with little to no contact with the object world, they both believe strongly in illusions, which inspires them to lash out—the radicalized knowledge worker through illiberal, intolerant, and violent anti-democratic action; the lone wolf killer through mass murder.

​....

For the old American students who supported Hamas, passion for their cause was equally boundless. It did not occur to them to think how little place the cause occupied in their own lives. Like the man in love with his vision of the most perfect woman, they extracted from the Hamas cause something pleasurable precisely because the cause still carried mystery about it. It existed mostly within themselves, in their imaginations. Strip their cause of their passion and there would be nothing left.

Something similar is true for lone wolf killers and radicalized knowledge workers. They feel angry and put upon, for whatever reason. They find a cause with which to express their anger. In their anger, they feel low and beneath conventional morality. Yet they also feel themselves to be supremely educated about the world, because they know abstract words, and so they also feel high above it. In either case, they feel free, and that they have the burning moral duty to attack violently or adopt outrageous positions expressed in strange, imprecise words. Neither of the two types seems to be at a loss for an effective moral attitude. They do everything on principle.

As more Americans lose contact with the real, the rest of us are left trying to make sense of their cruel nonsense. But to do so, we sometimes privately wonder whether we are dreaming ourselves, or dreaming that we are dreaming, or dreaming that we are awake, so awful is the nightmare before us.

The New American Anarchists – Ronald W. Dworkin

lawliberty.org · by Ronald W. Dworkin · November 7, 2023

Many Americans were shocked to watch college campus groups defend Hamas’s killing of innocent Israeli civilians. What is life like for a person unable to say that beheading babies is evil, or who tries to qualify the event by “giving it context”? Most people can’t even imagine it. Such a person must have different feelings and different joys—his or her view of the world is not the same as ours and life doesn’t seem a very precious gift.

Yet pictures of the campus groups invariably reveal not one but several different populations of radicalized students, and the explanation for their immorality may not be the same for all.

One population includes students of Arab descent. Some of them were likely raised in the anti-Jewish culture well-documented in Middle Eastern life. Also, many of these students likely had friends or relatives directly affected by the Arab-Israeli dispute. Their immorality in condoning Hamas’s targeting of innocent civilians is horrible but comprehensible.

Another population of students is the bigger mystery. They look to be Americans of European descent, well-nourished, and upper-middle class. They were probably not exposed to anti-Semitism growing up; nor did they have a family member killed or land confiscated during the Arab-Israeli wars. Yet now they wear the Palestinian keffiyeh around their necks and celebrate Hamas. Their path from playdates to shopping malls to virulent anti-Semitism and celebrating the purposeful slaughter of innocent civilians is as puzzling as it is artificial.

It is not enough to call their behavior youthful rebelliousness, for rebellion aims at setting up a new rule in place of the old rule. The Arab-American students may be rebellious in their call to eliminate Israel—they have a definite aim—but for the other students (we’ll call them “old Americans”) their aim seems muddled, ranging from climate change to gay rights (which few Arab states recognize) to hatred for the police, while their enemies go beyond Israel to include the government, corporations, and anyone who voices an opinion that might cause a marginalized person pain.

Nor is theirs the ideology of socialism, which also has a definite aim. Socialists may see capitalism everywhere—because their minds are fixed on capitalism. But they do not see things to kill everywhere, because they have control over their minds. Something similar may be said of the Arab-American students who support the ideology of anti-Zionism. They see Zionism everywhere because their minds are fixed on Zionism. The most extreme among them want to kill Jewish civilians. But they do not see things to kill everywhere. Their hatred is focused like a laser beam.

In contrast, some of the old American students not only do not know what they want, but do not even know exactly who they hate. They lack any power of distinction, or sense of proportion, by which to draw a line between justified violence and inhumanity, not because their hatred of Jews is so intense, as it is for some Arab-American students, but because they cannot stop their own thoughts of hate. They cannot return to normal. In this respect, they are more like anarchists than socialists or anti-Zionists. If the Arab-American students who celebrated the killing of innocent civilians are like the happy person who laughs, then the old Americans who celebrated the event are like the hysterical person who cannot stop laughing.

The immorality of the old American students might be best understood in connection with two other anarchistic types now common in American life: the lone wolf killer and the radicalized knowledge worker. At first glance, the two types appear to have nothing in common. The former is often right-wing, while the latter is often left-wing. The former is often poorly educated; the latter is often over-educated. Nevertheless, the two types share a common experience. Spending hours online, and with little to no contact with the object world, they both believe strongly in illusions, which inspires them to lash out—the radicalized knowledge worker through illiberal, intolerant, and violent anti-democratic action; the lone wolf killer through mass murder.

Detached from Reality

On May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white man, traveled 200 miles to a supermarket in a black neighborhood, where he shot and killed ten people, yelling racial slurs the whole time.

Gendron was a lone wolf killer. He had no formal ties to any organization. Nor did he know his victims. All he had were his illusions, including the illusion of race. Many of his illusions came from abstract concepts he learned online, which Gendron later admitted.

Other lone wolf killers have also spent an inordinate amount of time online. They gain insight into the world not by learning about life and people first-hand, but through an online study of images and symbols—through language. In the U.S., over half of the deadliest mass shootings in the last 100 years have occurred since 2014, when social media took off. Gendron sprinkled his pre-murder manifesto with abstract words such as “fascism,” “capitalism,” “nihilism,” “hedonism,” and “individualism,” in an effort to explain his thinking. As a teenager, he said he was committed to “communism,” then to “authoritarianism,” and later to “populism.” Connor Sturgeon, another lone wolf killer (and knowledge worker) who shot and killed five people in 2023, filled his manifesto with vague and ill-defined words from popular psychology, including “self-esteem,” “negative self-image,” and “self-improvement.”

All these words can exist without being connected to anything that does exist. They have no well-defined cognitive content. They lend themselves to illusion because a person can project his or her own desires, hate, and fears onto them. They can mean whatever the person says they mean.

Even if we were to dream the same dream every night, which we do not, it would barely affect our minds because the people and objects we meet every day would drown out its effect. Because of this lack of continuity, we know the world of our dreams is not the real world. Our dream—our illusion—cannot survive our awakening. But for lone wolf killers, the illusions hold fast, for in some sense these people never awaken. Their waking world is a dream world, spent mostly among symbols, images, and abstract words, often online. With social science education geared toward abstract concepts, schooling in that field, even at the high school level, becomes almost an extension of that dream world.

As more Americans lose contact with the real, the rest of us are left trying to make sense of their cruel nonsense. But to do so, we sometimes privately wonder whether we are dreaming ourselves, so awful is the nightmare before us.

Radicalized knowledge workers reveal a similar trend, spending a large amount of time, both at work and at home, on social media. There are also the years spent in school training for knowledge work, where life is also strangely abstract.

Urooj Rahman was a radicalized knowledge worker in her thirties. She threw a flaming gasoline-filled beer bottle into a New York City police car during the 2020 George Floyd riots. Tending toward the anarchic despite being a lawyer, she shouted, “I hope they burn everything down. Need to burn all police stations down and probably the courts too.”

Rahman spent much of her life amid abstract concepts. She spoke “the language of abolitionist Twitter,” one writer observed. She was “steeped in the language of social justice and racial politics.” Ill-defined terms such as “race,” “gender,” “LGBTQI,” and “environmentalism” seem to have shaped her crude perception of reality. Life for her became a theater in which her own little plot, built upon abstract words, was always being played.

The old American students who celebrated the purposeful killing of innocent Israeli civilians revealed a similar obsession with abstract words, constantly referring to phrases such as “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “humanitarian,” and “identity.” The words reflect the same creepy simplicity of mind that chills the blood.

Abstract Words

How did abstract words so fully penetrate our lives? To some extent, the problem is cumulative, with illusions in general bombarding us from every corner of society. From politics comes the illusions of ideology. Art, by definition, is an illusion. Popular psychology promises illusions of personal perfection. Science pushes the illusion that the scientific method can be applied to human affairs. Technology cultivates a realm of illusion to help people escape reality—for example, online.

Abstract language began its most recent ascent in the 1980s, when elementary words such as “fat” and “dumb” lost favor in influential circles. Although bewildered by the reasons, many people stopped using these words; they hid their natural personalities behind a façade of decorum. Meanwhile, new words so broad and abstract as to be devoid of content crept into the nation’s vocabulary—words such as “triggering” and “inclusivity.” None of the new words were subject to precise definition. All of them had to be interpreted. Everyone who spoke the words played a game in their minds; they projected their own mindsets onto the words—that is, they created illusions—then, in any given situation, competed with others to see whose illusion would prevail.

A certain kind of intelligence expressed itself in the new words. It was the kind of intelligence that arrives at solutions to problems through abstract reasoning rather than through an instinct based on a profound knowledge of people and things. It is the difference between someone who believes in “capitalism” (or “socialism”) and tries to run a factory based on that belief, and an actual manufacturer who has grown with his plant, who knows every cog, and who has worked with his employees.

The new words ran counter to instinctual truths. The old words “dog” and “cat,” for instance, are clear of content and easy to define. When people see a dog or a cat they instinctively know what they are looking at; when thinking the words “dog” or “cat” they are at one with the object of their thought. The new abstract words, in contrast, are purposely vague—for example, “social change” or “oppressed person.” Many people came to believe it was wrong to dwell in the real, in simplicity, to know things through intuition and common sense, and to use simple, short, one-syllable words. They used the new abstract words, which must be carefully interpreted. And interpretation is the origin of illusions.

The new words have turned many of their users into euphemists, but for a peculiar purpose. For example, the Hamas-supporting old American students proclaimed something like the following: “The oppressive regime in Israel invited an attack upon civilians that merits balanced analysis and suggests the attack was neither disproportionate nor intolerable, including toward civilians of younger age.” The sentence soothed them. But if one had said, “Murder Jewish babies,” these students would have sat up quite suddenly. This, in fact, happened, as some students became embarrassed, even though the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same.

Yet what startled these students, it seems, was not just the crudity of the second phrase, or because their true intentions had been exposed, but because the more euphemistic phrase had allowed each of them to interpret the awful event in Israel as they saw fit, for their own purposes, and within the context of their greatest pet peeve. For example, some transgendered old Americans did, rather oddly, dive into anti-Semitism and support the Hamas murders, often linking the Hamas cause and the transgender cause with the abstract phrases “humanity” or “oppressed people.” These abstract words let them relate events in Israel with some deeper private resentment, as both experiences were made to fall under a more general desire, again expressed euphemistically, to “build a better world” or “enact meaningful change.” Getting rid of the euphemistic phrase and focusing specifically on the murder of innocent children robbed them of their chance to luxuriate in this private anger through the connection.

Our Nightmares

When lone wolf killers, radicalized knowledge workers, and old American students who acquiesce in killing innocent civilians voice outrageous beliefs, we often wonder what extraordinary encounter led them to be so committed to their cause. But that is not the way to think about it. These people are often not committed to their cause because of some encounter with the issue at hand. Many of the old American students, as noted above, have no connection with the Arab-Israeli dispute. Instead, the cause came into their lives at a time when they were committed, only they did not know yet to what cause.

Young people commit to causes for a variety of reasons. Some because they are idealistic. Some because they are bored. Some because they need a sense of purpose. But some because they are … very angry.

For many old American students who supported the butchering of innocent civilians, anger cast about for a cause on which it could settle. Eventually, it found one. They then gave that cause special features and provided it with all the substance they needed to grow passionate about it. Using abstract words to frame it made it especially easy for them to connect that cause with other causes, thereby creating an illusory world that they colored with their own passions. Through their support of Hamas, they brought their anger to the level of the real.

Their state of mind can be likened to how a man can quickly fall in love with a rare and fleeting vision of a pretty woman but just as quickly lose interest when he actually gets to know that woman. A whole anxiety process is set in motion and serves to fix his love on the woman who has become the object of his love, although she is barely known to him. The passion for his love is not in reality; it is in his imagination.

For the old American students who supported Hamas, passion for their cause was equally boundless. It did not occur to them to think how little place the cause occupied in their own lives. Like the man in love with his vision of the most perfect woman, they extracted from the Hamas cause something pleasurable precisely because the cause still carried mystery about it. It existed mostly within themselves, in their imaginations. Strip their cause of their passion and there would be nothing left.

Something similar is true for lone wolf killers and radicalized knowledge workers. They feel angry and put upon, for whatever reason. They find a cause with which to express their anger. In their anger, they feel low and beneath conventional morality. Yet they also feel themselves to be supremely educated about the world, because they know abstract words, and so they also feel high above it. In either case, they feel free, and that they have the burning moral duty to attack violently or adopt outrageous positions expressed in strange, imprecise words. Neither of the two types seems to be at a loss for an effective moral attitude. They do everything on principle.

As more Americans lose contact with the real, the rest of us are left trying to make sense of their cruel nonsense. But to do so, we sometimes privately wonder whether we are dreaming ourselves, or dreaming that we are dreaming, or dreaming that we are awake, so awful is the nightmare before us.

lawliberty.org · by Ronald W. Dworkin · November 7, 2023

22. AC-130J Ghostriders Could Lose Their Big 105mm Guns

INteresting developments.  Videos at the link: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ac-130j-ghostriders-could-lose-their-big-105mm-guns?mc_cid=972232de7f&mc_eid=70bf478f36

AC-130J Ghostriders Could Lose Their Big 105mm Guns

The future of the AC-130J’s big gun is once again uncertain as interest in giving the Ghostrider more stand-off strike capabilities grow.

BY

JOSEPH TREVITHICK

|

PUBLISHED NOV 7, 2023 5:30 PM EST

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · November 7, 2023

The Air Force's AC-130J Ghostrider gunships might lose their iconic 105mm howitzers, starting within the next two years or so. The deliberations center heavily on a desire for more stand-off strike capacity, especially ahead of any potential future high-conflict, such as one against China. The service has already been testing special operations C-130s, along with other cargo aircraft, as possible cruise missile carriers using palletized launch systems.

Stephen Losey from Defense News first reported that the future of the 105mm howitzer on the AC-130J, a key feature found on multiple AC-130 variants dating back to the Vietnam War, is in question earlier today. At present, the Air Force has 30 Ghostriders, the only version of the AC-130 now in service. Depending on what course of action the Air Force ultimately pursues, those aircraft could begin seeing their big guns removed in 2026.

The current fixed armament configuration of the AC-130J includes a 30mm GAU-23/A Bushmaster automatic cannon and a 105mm howitzer, both firing out the left side of the fuselage. There are no plans to remove the 30mm gun, per Defense News' reporting.

AFSOC has already been in the process of integrating improved 105mm guns onto its Ghostriders in place of the aging and increasingly unsupportable versions of the Cold War-era M102 howitzer, and 17 of the gunships have been retrofitted so far according to Defense News. Modified M102s were first added to certain AC-130 variants in the 1970s.

An AC-130J with the original modified M102 howitzer installed, seen sticking out of the rear left-hand side of the fuselage. USAF

An AC-130J with the improved 105mm howitzer fitted. USAF

As can be seen in the video below, the AC-130J can also employ a wide range of precision-guided bombs and missiles from pylons under their wings, as well as through launch ports built into their rear loading ramps. The latter launch system is designed to work specifically with munitions pre-loaded into standardized Common Launch Tubes (CLT).

"To field operational concepts and technologies relevant in the current and future strategic competition environments, AFSOC [Air Force Special Operations Command] is currently assessing the capabilities of the AC-130J Ghostrider," the command told Defense News. “The goal of this review is to enhance the lethality, versatility, and adaptability of the AC-130J in a wide range of operational scenarios while ensuring it remains a vital asset within AFSOC.”

The big question behind this review seems to be about what AC-130Js will be able to contribute in a future high-end conflict against an opponent like China with dense integrated air defense networks.

Traditionally, AC-130s have worked very close to their targets, often in direct support of special operations and conventional forces on the ground. In those scenarios, the breadth of armament options on the gunships, as well as their ability to loiter over areas of the battlefield for protracted amounts of time, have made these aircraft uniquely capable and flexible assets.

An AC-130 fires at targets down below. USAF

The 105mm howitzer, specifically, combined with the very stable firing platform the AC-130 provides, offers a very accurate weapon that can deliver a significant degree of destructive effect on a precise location, and then immediately be redirected to fire on another target. Multiple ammunition options mean that it can be loaded with a round that is most optimal for whatever it is firing at for each shot.

At the same time, the vulnerability of the core AC-130 platform was well established by the end of the Vietnam War. Even with successive survivability improvements over the years, the gunships almost exclusively operate today in permissive environments and at night.

“In a scenario where you’re not able to just have free rein and fly over a friendly location for three hours, how do we beat our adversaries at that game?” an anonymous Air Force official posed a rhetorical question to Defense News. “If they take away our ability to loiter for extended periods of time, what’s our counter-punch?”

It's worth noting that the Air Force originally envisioned the AC-130J as more of a precision-guided munitions truck and having a gun armament consisting of just the 30mm cannon. The decision to change course and integrate the old 105mm howitzers onto the Ghostriders (as well as the now-retired AC-130W Stinger IIs) only happened relatively recently.

What armament AFSOC would add to the AC-130J if it were to remove the 105mm howitzers is unclear and is the purpose of the review that is now ongoing. As noted, the 30mm cannon, which offers another, albeit less powerful tool for rapidly and flexibly engaging very specific points on the ground, would still be retained, as well. So the AC-130J would not lose its rapid direct fire capability.

The Air Force was planning to flight test a high-energy laser directed energy weapon on a Ghostrider this year, but it is unclear whether or not that has occurred or if that is still the goal. The future of that project looks increasingly uncertain as time goes on and The War Zone has reached out for more information about its status.

A rendering depicting an older AC-130U Spooky gunship, all of which have now been retired, firing a laser weapon in addition to its guns. USAF

"Our intent with [the airborne high-energy laser] right now is to continue and finish the demonstration for [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], and we will see if we are able to actually pick it up as a weapon system," a second anonymous Air Force official told Defense News. "Right now, it doesn’t look like we might. We just don’t know; the decision has not been made yet. But in short, the laser can’t go in where the 105[mm cannon] is."

Regardless, a high-energy laser wouldn't be the kind of stand-off strike weapon that AFSOC appears more interested in adding to the AC-130J's arsenal now.

AFSOC has expressed interest in arming the AC-130Js with small form-factor cruise missiles, possibly able to fit inside CLTs and be launched from the rear ramp, for an added stand-off punch. There have been demonstrations in the past showing that CLT launchers can be used to deploy small drones in mid-air.

The possibility of AC-130Js being used in the future as drone swarm motherships could open up interesting possibilities. The Ghostriders have an extremely capable self-defense and threat awareness suite, advanced communications, and are operate regularly at low altitudes. These traits could allow them to fly right to the edge of highly contested airspace and unleash a horde of drones that would fly forward into more dangerous areas.

USAF

This networked swarm could include various types of uncrewed aircraft, including loitering munitions, also known as kamikaze drones, and types configured in other ways, including as airborne sensor nodes or electronic warfare jammers. The entire group could then help search for targets for stand-off strikes, scramble enemy radars to protect friendly forces, and even directly launch kinetic attacks on any threats that might pop up, among other tasks.

The value of this kind of capability is something The War Zone has previously explored in detail in the context of potentially turning the P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol plane into a multi-role 'arsenal ship.' Separately, U.S. military wargames, as well as independent ones carried out under its auspices, routinely show the game-changing potential of swarms with hundreds or even thousands of individual drones, especially in the context of a potential clash with China over Taiwan.

Depending on what the rear cargo bay of the AC-130J looks like after the removal of the 105mm howitzer, there is a question about whether the Rapid Dragon palletized munitions system could be used with these aircraft. Rapid Dragon has been tested on AFSOC MC-130 and EC-130 aircraft already as a means to quickly turn those aircraft into launch platforms for AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) series cruise missiles and other munitions. Rapid Dragon has also been tested in combination with Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft.

Earlier this year, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) announced plans to test an AC-130J with a new active electronically-scanned array radar, which could increase the aircraft's organic ability to find and engage targets at stand-off distance. Ghostrider crews could also use targeting information provided by offboard sources.

"What does the future fight look like?" the first anonymous Air Force official Defense News spoke to said. "Do we need the 105[mm cannon]? … We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves in strictly special operations. That’s where our expertise lies, [but] we also want to expand capabilities and offer something up to the joint force as well."

USAF

At the same time, there can only be questions about whether the option of using the relatively small and niche fleet of AC-130Js for things like helping to launch mass cruise missile strikes makes sense. Even in a future large-scale high-end conflict, Ghostriders could still be called upon to perform their existing core missions in various contexts. Similar questions have arisen regarding the use of the Rapid Dragon palletized munitions system on existing airlifters, which would be heavily tasked to perform their primary mission sets in any fight against China or another major adversary.

In many ways, the debate that looks to be shaping up within the Air Force around the AC-130J's gun armament feels more about the future of the Ghostriders in general. There are regular reports, including from The War Zone, about the U.S. special operations forces community having to do significant soul-searching after two decades of near-constant counter-terrorism missions around the world with the focus having now shifted to preparing for potential future high-end fights.

In the end, whether or not the AC-130Js keep their 105mm howitzers remains to be seen. Whatever decision the Air Force makes could have broader ramifications for the future of the Ghostriders.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · November 7, 2023

23. ‘If Not Me, Who?’: As Ukraine Seeks Troops, Women Prepare for the Call

Excerpts:

“Nobody wants to fight in the trenches,” said Olha Bakhmatova, 46, a psychologist who attended the training. “It’s unnatural to want it.” But she felt it was “inevitable” that more women would wind up fighting, and she wanted to be prepared.

“Now, I understand: If not me, who?” she said.

After 20 months of full-scale war, the fighting in Ukraine has bogged down in vicious battles of attrition along a zigzag front line in the southeast. A steady supply of weapons and personnel are crucial, and while Ukraine has the benefit of Western-donated armaments, it relies on only its own population as a pool for replenishing forces — and Russia’s is about three times as large.

With so much hinging on refilling the ranks, efforts are underway to draw more Ukrainian women into the army. Volunteer groups offering all-female training, like the one near Kyiv, are supporting the effort.

‘If Not Me, Who?’: As Ukraine Seeks Troops, Women Prepare for the Call

With so much in the war against Russia hinging on refilling the ranks of soldiers, efforts are underway to draw more Ukrainian women into the army.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/europe/ukraine-war-army-women.html?utm

By Andrew E. Kramer and Maria Varenikova

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Nov. 8, 2023, 12:01 a.m. ET

Women participating in a course in firearms and urban combat in a forest near Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, last month.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

By Andrew E. Kramer and Maria Varenikova

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Nov. 8, 2023, 12:01 a.m. ET

Want the latest stories related to Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for the newsletter Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send them to your inbox.

Halyna Vynokur, a clerk in a hardware store in Kyiv, was shouldering a firearm for the first time. Iryna Sychova, a purchasing manager at a department store, disassembled and reassembled the jumble of rods and springs in a Kalashnikov rifle.

They were among two dozen women who turned out in a forest near Kyiv one recent weekend for a course in firearms and urban combat, training that included shooting rifles, finding booby traps and throwing hand grenades. They were spurred by a sense of duty, they said, realizing they might some day end up on the front lines.

“Nobody wants to fight in the trenches,” said Olha Bakhmatova, 46, a psychologist who attended the training. “It’s unnatural to want it.” But she felt it was “inevitable” that more women would wind up fighting, and she wanted to be prepared.

“Now, I understand: If not me, who?” she said.

After 20 months of full-scale war, the fighting in Ukraine has bogged down in vicious battles of attrition along a zigzag front line in the southeast. A steady supply of weapons and personnel are crucial, and while Ukraine has the benefit of Western-donated armaments, it relies on only its own population as a pool for replenishing forces — and Russia’s is about three times as large.

With so much hinging on refilling the ranks, efforts are underway to draw more Ukrainian women into the army. Volunteer groups offering all-female training, like the one near Kyiv, are supporting the effort.

Image

The all-female training sessions were aimed at providing a learning environment where the women would not feel less knowledgeable than men.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

About 43,000 women now serve in the Ukrainian military, according to the ministry of defense, an increase of about 40 percent since 2021, the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion. The proportional increase is less than the male fighting force, which has more than tripled over the same period.

Ukrainian women are fighting in combat in southeastern Ukraine now. In several steps since the invasion, the military abolished restrictions that kept women from roles such as machine gunner, tank commander and sniper, and lifted rules prohibiting women from driving trucks. It raised the age limit for female recruits, previously 40, to 60, the same as for men.

Earlier in the full-scale war, women had taken combat roles in paramilitary groups or by skirting rules. And they have been wounded, captured and killed, though the military does not release casualty figures for either men or women.

The State of the War

• Ukrainian Morale Is Tested: With the war deadlocked, the spirit that fueled Ukrainians early in the conflict against Russia is starting to fade, polling and interviews show.
• A Striking Rebuke: The office of President Volodymyr Zelensky chastised Ukraine’s top military commander for publicly declaring the war at a stalemate. The censure signaled an emerging rift between the Ukrainian military and civilian leadership.
• Strike on a Ceremony: Zelensky said that criminal proceedings had been initiated over an episode in which Russian missiles struck a medals ceremony, killing 19 Ukrainian soldiers.

The Ukrainian Army’s outreach to women is a step toward equality, to be sure, but one that also reflects the tremendous toll the war has exacted.

The hundreds of thousands of men who wanted to volunteer at the start of the war, many lining up on Day 1, have already joined; many are dead or wounded. Ukraine now needs to mobilize and train many more soldiers to sustain its resistance to the Russian invasion, even as men are increasingly dodging the draft.

The all-female training sessions are aimed at providing a learning environment where the women would not feel less knowledgeable than men, and where their efforts would not continually be compared with male physical strength.

“Women are able to fight on an equal footing with men and at the same time remain feminine,” said Darya Trebukh, the founder of the nongovernmental group, Ukrainian Valkiriya, that is leading the training sessions. “The gender of a warrior makes no difference.”

Image

Two participants in a training session practice loading bullets into a magazine.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Ms. Vynokur, 26, the hardware store clerk, turned out for the training with a friend after seeing an advertisement on Instagram. “What attracted me is this is only for women,” she said. “It’s more comfortable, especially for the first time” handling a weapon. “As women, we are all on the same level,” she said.

Of serving in the military, she said: “Everybody understands the war won’t be over in a month. I don’t want to, I never wanted to, but I understand I should be ready to.”

Ukraine’s military has focused primarily on ways to improve conditions for women already in the military, such as providing gender-specific clothing and body armor, and not on mobilization. It does not draft women, though recently it has required that women with medical training register for the draft. Women who want to serve must enlist.

At the recent session near Kyiv, beginners learned to adjust the sling on a Kalashnikov rifle: Too loose and it bounces, too tight and it cannot quickly swing into position to fire.

The male instructor, an active-duty paratrooper, demonstrated reloading a magazine, clearing a jammed cartridge and firing from a prone position.

Instances of friction have become more common. In July, the police arrested officials in military recruitment offices for taking bribes of $250 to $1,500 from men to avoid the draft and President Volodymyr Zelensky fired all regional heads of draft offices over bribery concerns.

Image

In addition to training on weapons, participants also learn how to apply tourniquets. Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

In August, the military cut back on deferments for chronic diseases. Now men with asymptomatic tuberculosis, hepatitis and H.I.V. are eligible for the draft. In June, the military tightened exemptions for men caring for disabled relatives or studying at graduate schools, where enrollment has ballooned since the invasion.

To accommodate women, the ministry of defense introduced a female-specific uniform over the summer and this month the Ukrainian Army issued female underwear.

The first indication of a possible draft for women came into effect on Oct. 1, with a law requiring women with medical training to register at recruitment offices. They are not being called up, but are required to undergo medical checkups and receive draft cards.

Women have been drawn in particular into piloting drones flown for surveillance or to drop explosives on the enemy.

“Women who can fly drones are people who could tomorrow, if needed, get a drone to target artillery fire,” said Valeriy Borovyk, a drone unit commander and founder of a group dedicated to training female pilots called Pilotesy.

Mr. Borovyk founded Pilotesy in Kyiv in the first month of the full-scale invasion while scrambling to find drone pilots. A fashion show organizer helped recruit, and some of the first students were models and actresses. About a third of these women have since joined the army, he said.

Image

Iryna Sychova, a purchasing manager at a department store, learning to aim a sniper rifle. Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Women study combat drone piloting for a range of reasons, he said. Some think they may be called up to fight and want a useful skill. Others are already in the military and want to move from supporting positions or medical jobs to combat roles.

“I can be called up to the army so I decided that I should have some skills for the front line,” said Alina Budnyova, 24, who graduated from the medical university last year and is now required to register for the draft. She said she was motivated to prepare because “I want to protect my country.”

Ms. Budnyova was starting with basics: left and right turns, hovering, keeping the drone in line of sight of satellites for navigation. She flew carefully, low to the ground, buzzing over dry, brown autumn grass and flowers in a training field.

“Women often feel themselves second class,” in the military, said one of the drone trainers, Diana, who asked that only her first name be used for security reasons. “They are physically weaker and there are things they cannot do.” But they are on equal footing in piloting drones. “I joined the army to fight, not shuffle papers,” she said.

The Valkiriya group has trained about 200 women in firearms and other combat skills. Women who complete the course and wish to join the army sign up at recruitment offices; about one in five of the students have done so, Ms. Trebukh said.

Image

One of the course’s instructors demonstrating the creation of a booby trap with a grenade and a trip wire.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Out in the forest, the all-female group trained for combat, some having an introductory lesson, others practicing advanced skills. The group makes a few nods to gender: Some of the targets were pink balloons, and a car was parked nearby as a private space for changing into camouflage.

A few hours into the training, a group of half a dozen women, including Ms. Sychova, the purchasing manager, practiced assaulting a building. They walked up stairwells, through corridors, around corners, covering one another, patting one another on the back, and keeping their weapons trained on possible threats. On an upper floor, a man playing an enemy waited.

When the lead group reached him, one woman yelled, “Contact!” The trainees pretended to shoot.

“Girls, that’s it,” Ms. Sychova yelled down a stairwell. “We killed him”

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.

Andrew E. Kramer is the Times bureau chief in Kyiv. He was part of a team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for a series on Russia’s covert projection of power. More about Andrew E. Kramer

24. 'Influencers in uniform' are boosting recruiting, Pentagon says

The way of the future? Will this really make a difference? (I hope so).

'Influencers in uniform' are boosting recruiting, Pentagon says

Troops' social-media posts are "wildly popular because I think youth are looking for authenticity,” says deputy defense secretary.

defenseone.com · by Edward Graham

The Pentagon’s efforts to recruit more young Americans into the armed forces are receiving a boost from service members with large online followings, the deputy secretary of defense said during an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security on Tuesday.

Kathleen Hicks said when it comes to the department’s Gen Z-focused military recruitment initiatives on social media, “where we've seen the most success is with—I feel so out of my lane here—with influencers.”

Hicks said digital content from “genuine service members on their own,” such as videos on YouTube, are resonating with younger viewers, particularly posts that are less overt in their recruitment tactics.

Service members "describing a day in their life talking about whatever—going out to get fast food but they're in uniform, whatever it is—those are wildly popular because I think youth are looking for authenticity,” Hicks said.

An August 2022 survey of 13- to 17-year-old Americans conducted by the Pew Research Center found that significant and growing numbers of teenagers reported using video- and photo-sharing platforms in 2022, including Youtube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.

DOD personnel and employees of other federal agencies, however, are prohibited from using or downloading TikTok on their official government devices due to national security concerns over the app’s ownership by a China-based company.

Service branches that are not the Marine Corps and Space Force have seen subpar recruiting in recent years. In April, leaders from the Army, Navy, and Air Force all told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee that they expected to miss their recruitment goals for fiscal year 2023 by thousands of enlistees.

Some branches are considering switching or relaxing their standards for enlistment to allow more Americans to meet the eligibility requirements for service.

Hicks admitted that “military recruitment has been a challenge” for DOD since the COVID-19 pandemic and that “we continue to look for creative solutions” in targeting and expanding the pool of eligible candidates for military service.

Part of the Pentagon’s effort includes increasing the visibility of service members. Less than 7% of U.S. adults in 2022 were veterans, which Hicks said “has reduced most Americans’ familiarity with the military.”

“Without those direct ties, it is harder to observe the military way of life up close,” she said. “We can improve societal connections by increasing the visibility of the military through community outreach, by sharing their stories of service so that youth especially can better understand who our service members are, what they do and what they're most proud of.”

Hicks said DOD reviews “how we advertise, where we advertise, to whom we advertise,” and is continuing to look at recruitment efforts geared toward the online and virtual spaces where younger Americans congregate.

“We can do a lot on advertising — we need to, we’re going to,” she added. “And that includes on social media, [it] includes in gaming platforms [and] other places, because what constitutes social media is itself shifting.”

But she added that “we can't lose sight of the fact that that authenticity really speaks, and that's where I think there's a lot of opportunity to grow.”

defenseone.com · by Edward Graham

25. Military Growing More Distant from Most Americans, Hicks Says

Excerpts:

On the bright side, Hicks said “we have been surpassing our retention goals, and we take that as a strong indicator that we’re meeting our value proposition, and that matters,” Hicks said.

A chronic recruiting problem is the dwindling number of Americans who have served in the military, Hicks said. Whereas in 1980, some 18 percent of Americans had served, today it is only seven percent. There is a growing deficit of veterans who can explain the benefits of military service to friends and family members, she said.

The U.S. military relies on “society’s familiarity with the military as a recruitment tool and to bridge the divide between civilians and service members and their families,” Hicks noted. Fewer and fewer eligible recruits have “direct ties” to someone who served.

That also makes it harder to maintain “healthy civil-military relations,” she said.

“We must ensure that as a society, we are familiar with the military, with military families, and what they do, and the sacrifices that they make for the nation,” Hicks asserted. While Americans’ trust in entities such as “Congress, the courts, our justice system, public schools, the press, businesses small and large, and so on has been on decline,” the military remains “one of our more trusted institutions,” she said, and both trust and recruiting is helped by ensuring “fairness, equality, and personal liberties” in the ranks.

Military Growing More Distant from Most Americans, Hicks Says

airandspaceforces.com · by John Tirpak · November 7, 2023

Nov. 7, 2023 | By John A. Tirpak

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After 50 years, the All-Volunteer Force still works and is the right model, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said Nov. 7. However, to fill the ranks in a hot labor market, the Pentagon needs to expand its eligibilities and make the benefits it offers more relevant and well know.

Congress also needs to stop using the military as a political pawn and predictably fund the defense budget, she asserted, calling out Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) ongoing hold on military promotions and noting that since 2010, the Defense Department has operated for a cumulative four years under continuing resolutions.

Speaking at the Center for a New American Security to talk about the All-Volunteer Force, which took effect in 1973, Hicks said the fact that “it has lasted for 50 years and that we have built the finest force in the world is a testament to its strength, and I believe that it remains the best model for the U.S. military,”

Its success can’t be taken for granted. She said the two goals facing the creators of the AVF—“healthy civil-military relations and recruiting and retaining the force we need”—require constant attention.

Recruiting for all the services has gotten tougher in the last few years, Hicks acknowledged, attributing a good portion of that challenge to the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed schools and halted face-to-face recruiting with teens and those in their early 20s.

Add to that “the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years,” and it should come as no surprise that recruitment is not hitting targets, Hicks said, and “we’ve been hard at work recovering.”

Among the approaches are “programs and policy changes that will increase the pool of eligible candidates, from raising the maximum ages of enlistment and launching new programs that help potential recruits meet eligibility requirements; to offering a variety of incentives, such as bonuses, to recruits and recruiters, and releasing targeted ad campaigns that amplify the benefits of military service. And we continue to look for creative solutions.”

The biggest draws to military service remain educational opportunities, training, the opportunity to lead, travel, to fulfill a willingness to serve, and be part of “something bigger than your self,” Hicks said.

But along with those broad benefits, the DOD is focusing on practical benefits, Hicks said. It’s making more commissaries available, and lowering their prices, and especially working toward making childcare more available. The Defense Department provides care for more than 360,000 children already, but Hicks acknowledged that there are “long waiting lists” and that this issue is getting top-level attention.

Hicks also said the Pentagon is setting new standards for pay and allowances to keep soldiers with families out of poverty, so that minimum compensation is “150 percent of the poverty level.”

On the bright side, Hicks said “we have been surpassing our retention goals, and we take that as a strong indicator that we’re meeting our value proposition, and that matters,” Hicks said.

A chronic recruiting problem is the dwindling number of Americans who have served in the military, Hicks said. Whereas in 1980, some 18 percent of Americans had served, today it is only seven percent. There is a growing deficit of veterans who can explain the benefits of military service to friends and family members, she said.

The U.S. military relies on “society’s familiarity with the military as a recruitment tool and to bridge the divide between civilians and service members and their families,” Hicks noted. Fewer and fewer eligible recruits have “direct ties” to someone who served.

That also makes it harder to maintain “healthy civil-military relations,” she said.

“We must ensure that as a society, we are familiar with the military, with military families, and what they do, and the sacrifices that they make for the nation,” Hicks asserted. While Americans’ trust in entities such as “Congress, the courts, our justice system, public schools, the press, businesses small and large, and so on has been on decline,” the military remains “one of our more trusted institutions,” she said, and both trust and recruiting is helped by ensuring “fairness, equality, and personal liberties” in the ranks.

“For our part, remaining an apolitical institution is critical to maintaining that trust and confidence, and especially in this moment in history,” Hicks insisted. It’s critical that the armed forces avoid “politicization and remain nonpartisan.” Servicemembers are “routinely trained and educated on this very issue,” she said.

Leaders should reinforce this norm and protect servicemembers “from being dragged into the political fray or being colored or affected by policy disagreements that they, by design, have no control over,” Hicks observed.

Passing the fiscal 2024 Defense Appropriations Act would go a long way toward reinforcing the idea of apolitical support of the military, she said, noting that “the clock is ticking” on the current continuing resolution, which expires Nov. 17.

“The now-routine failure to secure needed resources for defense and for the whole government erodes military trust in civilian leaders,” she said.

“We cannot afford any further delays. I can assure you that Russia and the [People’s Republic of China] are not going to slow down while we get our house in order.”

She criticized Tuberville’s months-long hold on general and flag officer promotions as “unnecessary, unprecedented, and unsafe. It’s bad for the military, it’s bad for military families, and it’s bad for America, and it needs to stop now.”

She offered appreciation for the confirmation of senior officers who have been cleared to their new jobs in recent weeks—including the Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. David W. Allvin—“but it is not enough. We need all these nominations to move forward now, and I hope that the Senate will recognize that and move swiftly to confirm the nearly 360 remaining men and women into their positions.”

Hicks said the Pentagon will continue to “amplify” the benefits of military service, promoting military-wide pay raises of more than 10 percent over two years, if the fiscal 2024 budget is approved. These raises are the highest military raises in 20 years, she said.

Hicks said the DOD is also looking at Space Force’s success in “career permeability,” which allows movement back and forth between full-time and part-time work, as a way to fill the ranks.

The Pentagon is working with the various states to ensure licensing reciprocity and similar spousal career protection so partners don’t have to abandon a career when a military family moves from one state to another. She’s also pushing for more “career intermissions,” where service members can take a leave to work with industry and return to service later; a program that only some 500 people have taken advantage of in the years it’s been available.

The Marine Corps “has not had a recruiting challenge,” Hicks noted, and the other services are looking at how that branch “selects its recruiters and rewards them” in an effort to “take what works for them out of that model.”

From the various panels commissioned to examine the recruiting issue, one recommendation was to establish a “chief talent management officer” for the DOD, “which is a best practice in other organizations and institutions. We’ve done that and he’s getting going, starting with some pilots in some key areas and trying to, again, build a community of practice both around function — what we call functional community managers.” Those communities include cyber experts and financial managers. “This is “really getting leadership focus,” she said.

The controversial policy compensating members for out-of-state travel “if they can’t get” needed healthcare reproductive nearby is one of the ways the administration is addressing that issue, Hicks said.

Hicks said there’s “really good news” in the fact that surveys show “strong evidence that [Generation] Z has a deep desire, like many generations before” for service and “to make sure they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves.” Gen Z is generally considered to be those born from the late 1990s to around 2010. She added, “We just have to make sure the military is a place both that really delivers on that and that they see us delivering on that, and that’s the job that’s left to us.”

Personnel

airandspaceforces.com · by John Tirpak · November 7, 2023

26. Opinion: I’m an expert in urban warfare. Israel is upholding the laws of war

Opinion: I’m an expert in urban warfare. Israel is upholding the laws of war

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/07/opinions/israel-hamas-gaza-not-war-crimes-spencer/index.html?utm

Opinion by John Spencer

 7 minute read 

Updated 6:37 AM EST, Tue November 7, 2023

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CNN embeds with Israeli forces inside Gaza

03:57 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project and host of the “Urban Warfare Project Podcast.” He served for 25 years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book “Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War” and co-author of “Understanding Urban Warfare.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN — 

All war is hell. All war is killing and destruction, and historically civilians are inordinately the innocent victims of wars. Urban warfare is a unique type of hell not just for soldiers, who face assaults from a million windows or deep tunnels below them, but especially for civilians. Noncombatants have accounted for 90% of casualties per international humanitarian experts in the modern wars that have occurred in populated urban areas such as Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa, even when a Western power like the United States is leading or supporting the campaign.

John Spencer

Courtesy of John Spencer

The destruction and suffering, as awful as they are, don’t automatically constitute war crimes – otherwise, nearly any military action in a populated area would violate the laws of armed conflict, rules distilled from a complicated patchwork of international treaties, court rulings and historic conventions. Scenes of devastation, like Israel’s strikes on the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza earlier this week, quickly spark accusations that Israel is engaging in war crimes, such as indiscriminately killing civilians and engaging in revenge attacks. But war crimes must be assessed on evidence and the standards of armed conflict, not a quick glimpse at the harrowing aftermath of an attack.

Hamas forces indisputably violated multiple laws of war on October 7 in taking Israelis hostage and raping, torturing and directly targeting civilians, as well continuing to attack Israeli population centers with rockets. Years of intelligence assessments and media reports have shown that Hamas also commits war crimes by using human shields for its weapons and command centers and by purposely putting military capabilities in protected sites like hospitals, mosques and schools.

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On the other hand, nothing I have seen shows that the Israel Defense Forces are not following the laws of wars in Gaza, particularly when the charges that the IDF is committing war crimes so often come too quickly for there to have been an examination of the factors that determine whether an attack, and the resulting civilian casualties, are lawful. The factors that need to be assessed are the major dimensions of the most commonly agreed to international humanitarian law principles: military necessity, proportionality, distinction, humanity and honor.  

Opinion: Biden needs to call for a ceasefire and restore respect for international law

President Joe Biden and multiple European countries, including the UK, Germany and France, are supporting Israel’s self-defense even as they express concerns over the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Though Gaza’s legal status is unresolved under international law, Israel needs no permission to enter the territory and resort to using force in order to wage defensive operations because Israel’s right to immediate and unilateral self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter is universally recognized.

Israel has pledged to obey international law, and one of its cornerstones is proportionality. The concept is often misunderstood to allow only for equal numbers of civilian casualties on both sides, with any lopsided numbers considered disproportionate. But proportionality is actually a requirement to take into account how much civilian harm is anticipated in comparison to the expected concrete and direct military advantage, according to UN protocols. In other words, a high civilian death count in Jabalya could potentially be considered legal under international law so long as the military objective is of high value. The Israel Defense Forces said the intended target in this case was the senior Hamas commander who oversaw all military operations in the northern Gaza; neutralizing him is an objective that most likely clears the proportional bar. Furthermore, Israel pointed out that the loss of life was compounded because Hamas had built tunnels that weakened the targeted structure that then collapsed in the strike.

The attack also passes muster on the level of “military necessity,” the principle that the action was necessary to pursue an allowed military goal (killing enemy troops), rather than an illegal goal (causing civilians to suffer). The IDF has said that its aim is to remove the rockets, ammunitions depot, power and transportation systems Hamas has embedded within their civilian population. So far, a number of military experts have assessed that Israel appears to be trying to follow the law of armed conflict in its Gaza campaign.

A woman carries a white flag as Palestinians flee from Gaza City to the south on November 7.

Mohammed Dahman/AP

In pictures: Israel at war with Hamas

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Of the remaining principles of the law of war – distinction, humanity (which, as the International Committee of the Red Cross phrases it, “forbids the infliction of all suffering, injury or destruction not necessary for achieving the legitimate purpose of a conflict”) and honor in conduct of waging war – the principle of distinction is the most complex. Distinction requires Israel to “distinguish between the civilian population and combatants” and between civilian facilities and military targets, while taking all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. So far I have seen the IDF implementing – and in some cases going beyond – many of the best practices developed to minimize the harm of civilians in similar large-scale urban battles.

These IDF practices include calling everyone in a building to alert them of a pending air strike and giving them time to evacuate – a tactic I’ve never seen elsewhere in my decades of experience, as it also notifies the enemy of the attack – and sometimes even dropping small munitions on top of a building to provide additional warning. They have been conducting multiple weeks of requests that civilians evacuate certain parts of Gaza using multi-media broadcasts, texts and flyer drops. They’ve also provided routes that will not be targeted so that civilians have paths to non-combat areas, though there have been some tragic reports that Palestinians from northern Gaza who have relocated to the south were subsequently killed as the war rages throughout the strip.

Gen. David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts: The huge challenge facing Israel

When Hamas uses a hospital, school or mosque for military purpose, it can lose its protected status and become a legal military target. Israel must still make all feasible attempts to get as many civilians out of the site as possible, but the sites don’t need to be clear of civilians before being attacked.

Unfortunately, it’s essentially impossible to empty a city of all civilians before conducting an urban battle. Some people always stay, and it can be impossible for the elderly, infirm, hospitalized and similar to evacuate. In the densely populated Gaza Strip, where most Palestinians have nowhere to fully escape the dangers of the war, the proportion of those who remain is likely to be higher, as border crossings remain closed to nearly all Gazans, many Palestinians object to leaving and Hamas has warned others not to go.

Still, even if Hamas has no interest in meeting its obligation to take all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians, Israel does and should. The IDF should take steps like constraining its forces to smaller portions of larger urban areas while continuing to provide safe areas and routes out of the combat areas. It should continue its calls for civilian evacuations. It should restrict the use of air strikes and artillery near certain safe areas or gatherings of civilians. It should continue to cooperate with the US in facilitating the entry of humanitarian supplies into Gaza (though it’s reasonable to block fuel, which Hamas can use in its attacks and which the group is also stockpiling while refusing to share it with its own people).

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There is no escaping that pursuing a terrorist organization touches off a nightmarish landscape of war. The visually repulsive imagery in Gaza essentially recreates the same scenes that unfolded under American and allied campaigns fighting Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terror groups, because that is what it looks like when you are forced to uproot a sadistic terror organization embedded in an urban area. Sadly, successful US-led or supported campaigns in places such as Mosul and Raqqa caused billions of dollars in damage and killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians; that is the hellish reality of defeating terrorism.

Like all similar conflicts in modern times, a battle in Gaza will look like the entire city was purposely razed to the ground or indiscriminately carpet bombed – but it wasn’t. Israel possesses the military capacity to do so, and the fact that it doesn’t employ such means is further evidence that it is respecting the rules of war. It is also a sign that this is not revenge – a gross mischaracterization of Israeli aims – but instead a careful defensive campaign to ensure Israel’s survival.

27. There is strong public support for holding the Pentagon and its contractors accountable

There is strong public support for holding the Pentagon and its contractors accountable

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/4298481-there-is-strong-public-support-for-holding-the-pentagon-and-its-contractors-accountable/?utm

BY WILLIAM D. HARTUNG, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 11/07/23 7:00 PM ET

The Pentagon and the arms industry are benefitting from a flood of new funding tied to fears of Russia and China and the Biden administration’s policies of sending tens of billions in U.S. military aid to Israel and Ukraine. 

The potential impact of current hot wars in Europe and the Middle East and the potential new Cold War with China on the arms sector goes far beyond the demands of the moment. The Pentagon and the arms industry have been attempting to exploit public and congressional concern about the war in Ukraine to press for a series of changes in how weapons are purchased that would benefit weapons contractors while reducing government scrutiny of their activities. Proposed changes include providing cushy multi-year contracts, pushing arms sales out the door more quickly, changing weapons buying practices in ways that will make it easier to overcharge the government and provide substandard systems, and supersizing the defense industrial base by building new factories. These special favors for the arms contractors have long been on the industry’s agenda, but the current political environment offers their best chance in years to bring them to fruition.

But according to a new poll by Data for Progress, the public is wary of providing a blank check to the Pentagon and its allies in industry. Over 80 percent of Americans believe that the Pentagon should not receive additional funds unless and until it can pass an audit, which it has yet to do despite being required to do so by law since 1990. And 83 percent of the public wants contractors to provide honest information about the true costs of the items they are selling to the Pentagon to avoid the kind of rampant price gouging that has been exposed by independent experts and the Pentagon’s own Inspector General.

The Pentagon has been routinely overcharged on basic items, including $71 for a pin that could have been purchased for four cents. Then there’s the case of Transdigm, a major supplier of spare parts to the U.S. military. In a review of a small portion of the items the company supplies to the military, The Pentagon’s inspector general estimated that TransDigm received $16.1 million in excess profits for 46 parts sold to the Defense Logistics Agency and the Army. In one instance, TransDigm overcharged the Department of Defense by as much 4,451 percent for one part.

No one knows for sure how much money the Pentagon loses due to contractor overcharges, but based on the few cases that have surfaced publicly it is likely to be billions of dollars, or possibly even tens of billions.

As the Pentagon budget soars towards $1 trillion, it is more important than ever that contractors be prevented from ripping off the government on a grand scale. Earlier this year, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) introduced the “Stop Price Gouging the Military Act,” which would, among other things, require contractors to supply truthful cost or pricing information on the pricing of items it is supplying to the Pentagon. Without this data government negotiators are at a severe disadvantage in seeking to establish fair prices for basic items.

There are larger issues behind all of this, including whether the Pentagon’s current, ambitious strategy serves our security interests and how much decisions on what weapons systems to buy are distorted by pork barrel politics. Pursuing the wrong strategy and buying the wrong weapons systems represents waste writ large. Congress needs to ask tough questions about these issues if we are ever going to align Pentagon spending with an effective defense strategy. Now is an ideal time to raise these issues, before the rush to fund the Department of Defense locks in dysfunctional practices that will cost untold billions while making America less safe.

William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

28. Expanding multinational exercises key to countering China, says US Army Pacific commander

Expanding multinational exercises key to countering China, says US Army Pacific commander

stripes.com · by Wyatt Olson · November 7, 2023

Expanding multinational exercises key to countering China, says US Army Pacific commander | Stars and Stripes

Asia-Pacific

By

Wyatt Olson

Wyatt Olson

Stars and Stripes • November 7, 2023

Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, speaks to reporters on a training field at Wheeler Army Airfield, Hawaii, Monday, Nov. 6, 2023. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

WHEELER ARMY AIRFIELD, Hawaii — U.S. Army Pacific’s commander offered bad and good news about China’s rising military might Monday as helicopters buzzed overhead and trucks rumbled by him at this base on Oahu.

“What I’m seeing in the region is the irresponsible and insidious behavior of the Chinese,” Gen. Charles Flynn told reporters during a break from the massive 10-day Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center exercise that concludes Friday.

“That’s the bad news,” he said. “The good news is that I’m also seeing an increase in multilateral and multinational exercises tenfold.”

That would first and foremost include this readiness exercise, which is taking place on Oahu, the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island of Hawaii and on Palau in Micronesia.

The training is focusing on the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade Infantry Combat Team, but the 5,100 personnel participating also include airmen, sailors and Marines.

Flynn ticked off a list of once low-key bilateral Army exercises with partner nations that are now huge in scope.

Talisman Sabre in Australia was once an army-to-army exercise between the U.S. and that close ally. “Now you have 15 nations, 30,000 people,” he said.

Garuda Shield in Indonesia was once a bilateral army-to-army affair, but earlier this fall it had 6,000 participants from 14 nations, Flynn said. The Yama Sakura drills in Japan now include soldiers from four nations, he added.

“What we’re doing here is integrating and binding together the joint and multinational forces in a way where our interoperability, our readiness, our confidence is enhanced,” Flynn said of the Hawaii exercise, which includes troops from Thailand, Indonesia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The growing participation and interest in joint multinational training “enables our partners and allies in the region to defend their territorial integrity, protect their national sovereignty, protect their people and protect their resources,” he said.

Interoperability for the military is the ability of a country’s armed forces to use another country’s training methods and military equipment.

China has created an arsenal that is primarily designed to defeat air and naval power through anti-access strategies, Flynn said.

It is not designed to “find, fix and finish” the kind of mobile and distributed land forces that U.S. Army Pacific would deploy in an archipelagic environment during a conflict in the region, he said.

“That has enormous deterrence effect,” he said.

A soldier shoulders a rifle at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, Nov. 2, 2023, during the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center exercise. (Tristan Moore/U.S. Army)

The Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, provides personnel and equipment that rival the kind of realistic combat training soldiers would get at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., or the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., but with less hassle.

Sending soldiers and equipment to those stateside sites has not been optimal, Flynn said.

“We would pack up an entire division’s worth of equipment and sail through the Panama Canal to Louisiana,” he said. Soldiers were separated from their equipment for months as it was sent to the training center and then sent back.

“And we just cannot afford to be going out of this region,” he said.

“For example, if something were to happen, I would cancel this in a second,” Flynn said, snapping his fingers toward the training surrounding him.

“If we’re in the Panama Canal and something happens, I just took options away from the National Command Authority and the combatant command,” he said.

“I don’t want to do that,” Flynn added. “I want to give them options.”

Wyatt Olson

Wyatt Olson

Wyatt Olson is based in the Honolulu bureau, where he has reported on military and security issues in the Indo-Pacific since 2014. He was Stars and Stripes’ roving Pacific reporter from 2011-2013 while based in Tokyo. He was a freelance writer and journalism teacher in China from 2006-2009.

stripes.com · by Wyatt Olson · November 7, 2023

29. Peraton wins $2.8B Special Operations IT recompete

Peraton wins $2.8B Special Operations IT recompete

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Gettyimages.com/ Jon Feingersh Photography Inc

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By Ross Wilkers,

Senior Staff Reporter

| November 6, 2023

This award is poised to continue a tradition of the customer going with someone else other than the incumbent.

Peraton has won the potential eight-year, $2.8 billion recompete of a task order contract that will see the company take over the operations and maintenance of Special Operations Command's enterprise IT environment.

The command received three bids in total for this third iteration of the Special Operations Forces IT Enterprise Contract and made the award on Tuesday, according to Federal Procurement Data System records.

SOCOM uses this contract to buy enterprise, network services, data center management, support for end-user devices, information assurance and service desk. The General Services Administration worked with SOCOM to award the contract as a task order through the Alliant 2 government-wide IT solutions contract vehicle.

Pending the debriefs and any potential protests, SOCOM's choice of Peraton would mean this is the third time that the command has not gone with the incumbent.

Jacobs secured the current SITEC II award in 2018 at a ceiling of $778.6 million, which has since been extended to approximately $1.2 billion and an expiration date of Jan. 12. SOCOM has obligated approximately 82% of that ceiling to-date, according to Deltek data.

SITEC II was a consolidation of several prior contracts into a more consolidated procurement. CACI International, General Dynamics and the former Hewlett-Packard were incumbents on SITEC I.

Jacobs was an incumbent as well on a functional area, but its booking of SITEC II brought in a significant volume of new work.

The company did lodge a protest over the summer after its elimination from the SITEC III recompete, but that challenge was dismissed after SOCOM agreed to hold discussions with all bidders including Jacobs.

Work under SITEC III will take place over a one-year initial base period and up to seven individual option years.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com