Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

Rule of Law defined: "Rule of law is the most fundamental constraint on power; the rejection of arbitrary rule in favor of codified limits and procedures knowable in advance and applying equally to everyone."

Civil Society defined: "Civil society is the central importance of freely formed institutions and social norms outside of state control, providing a crucial counterbalance to the concentration of power."

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill

1. Israel Strikes Suspected Syrian Chemical Weapons Sites

2. Corruption as an Enabler in the Hybrid Influence Toolbox

3. Tehran May Tempt Trump With Talks

4. Biden Takes an Undeserved Syria Victory Lap

5. Assad’s Fall Has Humiliated Washington

6. After Ousting Assad, Syrian Rebels Rush to Impose Order in Damascus

7. Empowering the Combatant Commands Is Critical for the Future Fight

8. Zelenskiy seeks diplomatic end to Russia's war, floats role for foreign troops

9. In a Test of Adult Know-How, America Comes Up Short

10. China Stages Largest Show of Force in Decades After U.S. Visit by Taiwan’s Lai

11. If Hephaestus Doesn’t Answer: Supply Chains and Modern War

12. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 9, 2024

13. Iran Update, December 9, 2024

14. South Korea's democracy held after a 6-hour power play. What does it say for democracies elsewhere?

15. MDA conducts first-ever ballistic missile intercept test from Guam

16. The shallow Baltic Sea holds deep secrets about a hybrid war on NATO

17. Will senior enlisted troops see a targeted pay boost in 2026?

18. The Middle East’s Dangerous New Normal

19. Trump's new world order

20. Meet Trump's new National Security Council

21. Assad’s Fall Shows Russia, Iran, and Hamas Made a Bad Bet

22. Adversarial Convergence Raises Alarm, Warns Socom General at Reagan Defense Forum

23. ‘Shock the system’: Startups and DOGE take over Reagan forum

24. Republicans pick Mast to lead House Foreign Affairs panel

25. Polarization: Merriam-Webster’s word of year is 2024 in a nutshell

1. Israel Strikes Suspected Syrian Chemical Weapons Sites

This is very important. If these weapons fall into the nads of violent extremist organizations or a successor hostile government it will be bad for the region.

What Dr. Bruce Becehotl reminded me that no one is reporting is that the Syria chemical weapons capabilities were developed through its relationship with north Korea. north Korea provided chemical weapons, precursors, and built production facilities. For years Syrian and north Korean military forces conducted chemical weapons training including the use of live agents. This is in addition to the SCUD C's and SCUD D's that north Korea provided (some 100 SCUD C's) and helped to develop prediction facilities in Syria. Again as Dr. Bechtol reminded me this was documented by the UN Panel of Experts in their reports about north Korean proliferation.

But the bottom line is Israel is doing the international community a favor by destroying these sites and capabilities that were developed with north Korea help (much like it destroyed the Syrian nuclear facility in 2007 that was being developed with extensive north Korea assistance). And north Korea is connected to all the bad actors around the world.

Israel Strikes Suspected Syrian Chemical Weapons Sites

https://www.newsweek.com/israel-strikes-suspected-syrian-chemical-weapons-sites-1997472

Published

Dec 09, 2024 at 3:08 AM ESTUpdated

Dec 09, 2024 at 9:57 AM EST

00:32

Israel Strikes Suspected Syrian Chemical Weapons Sites

By Michael D. Carroll

Breaking News Editor

147

Israel's foreign minister says it has struck suspected chemical weapons sites and long-range rockets in Syria in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of hostile actors.

"The only interest we have is the security of Israel and its citizens," said Israel's foreign minister Gideon Saar on Monday.

"That's why we attacked strategic weapons systems, like, for example, remaining chemical weapons, or long-range missiles and rockets, in order that they will not fall in the hands of extremists."

Smoke billows as people arrive to celebrate the fall of the Syrian government, in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024. Israel's foreign minister says it has struck suspected chemical weapons sites and long-range rockets in... More Ugur Yildirim/Dia Photo/AP

He spoke after Syrian rebels entered Damascus, leading to the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad's government after nearly 14 years of civil war. This development has raised hopes for a more peaceful future but also concerns about a potential security vacuum in the country, which remains divided among various armed groups.

People shoot in the air as they celebrate the fall of the Syrian government in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024. The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad's government occurred after nearly 14 years of civil... More Ugur Yildirim/Dia/AP

Were There Any Reported Airstrikes Near Damascus?

Airstrikes have been reported in the area of the Mezzeh military airport, southwest of the capital, on Sunday. The airport has previously been targeted in Israeli airstrikes, but it was not immediately clear who launched the latest strike.

Sa'ar did not provide details about when or where the strikes took place.

An Israeli army tank maneuvers near the so-called Alpha Line that separates the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights from Syria, in the town of Majdal Shams, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024. Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes in... More Matias Delacroix/AP

Does the Fall of Assad's in Syria Regime Help Israel?

Refugee Claims Halted Amid Islamic State Fears

Moscow Confirms Syria's Assad Has Been Granted Political Asylum

How Russia, Iran, China and Israel Responded to Assad's Ouster in Syria

Syrian Rebels Seize Control of Deir Ezzor as Assad Troops Withdraw

Israelis have expressed cautious optimism following the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, a key ally of Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group. While welcoming the potential for reduced hostile influence near their borders, there is concern about the ensuing power vacuum and the rise of various armed factions within Syria.

Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria over recent years, primarily targeting sites it identifies as linked to Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, both of which were key allies of President Bashar al-Assad. While these strikes aim to disrupt the military capabilities of hostile forces, Israeli officials seldom comment on specific operations, maintaining a policy of ambiguity regarding their actions.

In 2013, Syria agreed to surrender its chemical weapons stockpile following international outrage over a chemical attack near Damascus that killed hundreds of people. However, it is widely believed that the Syrian government retained portions of its chemical arsenal and faced accusations of deploying such weapons in subsequent years, further intensifying concerns over their use in the protracted civil war.

Is the US Conducting Airstrikes in Syria?

The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that it launched dozens of airstrikes on Islamic State (ISIS) camps and operatives in central Syria. The strikes, conducted on Sunday, aimed to "disrupt, degrade, and defeat ISIS," preventing the group from taking advantage of the current situation to reorganize or conduct external operations.

Using B-52 bombers, F-15s, and A-10 aircraft, the strikes targeted over 75 locations linked to ISIS activities. CENTCOM reported no civilian casualties and stated that damage assessments are underway.

U.S. leaders, including President Biden, have confirmed the United States is collaborating with Middle Eastern nations to prevent chemical weapons, previously controlled by the Assad regime, from falling into the hands of hostile entities.

"We will support Syria's neighbors—Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Israel—from any threat that could arise from Syria," Biden said in a speech on Sunday.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken said in a statement Sunday "We will support international efforts to hold the Assad regime and its backers accountable for atrocities and abuses perpetrated against the Syrian people, including the use of chemical weapons."

Vehicles leave Damascus following the fall of the Syrian government on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024. Airstrikes have been reported in the area of the Mezzeh military airport, southwest of the... More Ugur Yildirim/Dia Photo/AP

Has Turkey Taken Action Since Assad's Regime Collapsed?

The Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) launched an offensive against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northern city of Manbij on Dec. 6, following a similar operation that expelled SDF fighters from Tal Rifaat. Turkish security officials have stated that "control of Manbij has been secured," though further details were not provided. These officials spoke anonymously, adhering to Turkish regulations.

Turkey considers the SDF, primarily composed of the Syrian Kurdish militia YPG, as an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey. Despite this, the SDF has been a crucial ally of the United States in combating the Islamic State group.

The recent military actions by Turkish-backed forces have intensified tensions in northern Syria, complicating the region's security dynamics and impacting international efforts to maintain stability.

Previously it was reported that Iran-backed militias had also joined the fighting in Syria, although in the past week Hezbollah and other groups sponsored by Iran are believed to have been largely withdrawn from the country.

This article includes reporting from The Associated Press

2. Corruption as an Enabler in the Hybrid Influence Toolbox

Excerpts:

Inter-penetration of government institutions and corporate entities with organized crime actors solidifies corrupt influence. This corruption is enabled by both transnational criminal organizations, gangs, Colombia guerrillas (including the FARC and ELN, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and National Liberation Army, respectively), far-left militias known as colectivos, Hezbollah, and state actors including Russia, Cuba, Iran, and China all interact with the Venezuelan state and its Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise (as do Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Suriname, and El Salvador. Gangs—characterized as Third Generation Gangs—are the engine extending this corrupt influence. Money laundering is its lubricant with illicit flows of at least $10 Billion and up to $43 Billion diverted or laundered over the past decade. The money laundering includes trade-based transactions, falsified oil sales, and real estate purchases. Russia supports the regime militarily and economically while exploiting the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise to facilitate global illicit flows and augment its own network of oligarchs. Hezbollah uses the corrupt proceeds of this network to augment its own illegal financing activities and fund its operations.

This networked arrangement utilizes hybrid influence to sustain the Venezuelan state, its nation-state sponsors and allies, as well as its non-state criminal partners. Each of the participants gains its own profit and power while leveraging the influence of its partners. Countering this endeavor requires global cooperation, including criminal enforcement and prosecution, financial intelligence, and diplomatic action. Economic sanctions and the development of new multilateral enforcement structures—including transnational and international anti-corruption legal regimes and courts and joint investigations—are needed to counter this type of global hybrid network.

Corruption as an Enabler in the Hybrid Influence Toolbox

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2024/12/10/corruption-as-an-enabler-in-the-hybrid-influence-toolbox/

by John P. Sullivan

12.10.2024 at 06:00am

Hybrid threats and hybrid warfare are firmly embedded in the contemporary threat environment. They involve the complex blend of both state and non-state actors in an ongoing continuum of competition that blurs the boundaries between peace and war. They also embrace several approaches to conflict: conventional warfare, irregular warfare, and terrorism. As a consequence, they erode the distinctions between crime and war. Hybrid threats also leverage network forms of organization to extend influence and shape the operational environment.

Hybrid involves both the actors and the means they employ. That is, a range of actors (including criminal gangs, organized crime, and more traditional state actors) using a range of means—some traditional and some novel—ranging in sophistication from simple, low-tech violence through complex high-tech means using cyber and modern lethal systems (including anti-satellite weapons, and drones), as well as information warfare and traditional military operations. Hybrid operations often synchronize a variety of means to disrupt, degrade, or destabilize adversaries. This often involves leveraging cognitive warfare to gain advantage. As a result, influence operations are integrated with all other means.

Corruption can be used in hybrid warfare to enable other actions in the hybrid armamentarium, such as funding other activities or allowing access for exploitation; amplifying political sentiments (such as discontent) in order to extend outrage (and sow division); disrupting (undermining bureaucratic institutions, governance, and the rule of law); and finally to distract (the populace and political actors) to take the focus off other conventional or hybrid activities in order to prevent an adversary from diverting resources from countering those threats. This article will discuss the corruption-hybrid threat nexus and present a case study of corruption in Venezuela to illustrate its global complexities. Policy recommendations will be provided to address the role of corruption in hybrid threats and warfare.

Hybrid Influence

Hybrid influence involves the full scope of propaganda and influence activities (disinformation, the use of proxies, etc.) that shape the operational environment. It can be used before the outbreak of war, within armed conflicts (both of international and non-international scope), and during “cold wars” or periods of intense competition below the threshold of armed conflict. The hybrid influence toolset includes:

economic influence, e.g., by ownership in key sectors of the economy, the banking system, sectors of the critical infrastructure and the media, leverage on the politics and state institutions, nurturing patronage networks, corruption, propaganda, disinformation, and, possibly, the threat of using military force (but not the actual use of force).

Hybrid influence campaigns can range from short-term activities with a specific target (tactical) to longer-term actions (e.g., propaganda, covert action) within a specific theater of operations (operational) to a concerted, long-term action against a range of targets (strategic). These can occur simultaneously and can be coordinated efforts directed or guided by state actors (or other hybrid actors). Hybrid influence can leverage diaspora communities, networks of reserve and retired military personnel, paramilitary organizations (such as extremist militias and criminal armed groups [CAGs]), social media platforms, and conspiracy theories (such as QAnon).

Non-state actors, ranging from individuals to criminal organizations and armed groups, are key players in the hybrid threat landscape. These non-state actors can wield both hard and soft power in several ways. Hard forms of power include cyber, privatized, people’s, and terrorist; while soft forms include real economic, financial, diplomatic, civil, scientific and technological, and media. These actors exploit ambiguity to manipulate the political situation at strategic, operational, and tactical levels of influence and maneuver. Jurisdictional boundaries and bureaucratic seams are exploited to shield the actors waging hybrid influence campaigns. Non-state actors can be allies, non-aligned, or rivals to state actors and can serve as auxiliaries, surrogates, affiliates, or proxies for state actors for transient (temporary), short-, or long-term durations.

Maskirova and Kompromat (Disguise and Compromise)

Russia uses a full range of hybrid influence activities to shape its operational environment. These measures include exploiting social media to gain influence, spread disinformation, and sow dissension. According to the Mueller investigation, Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Elections included employing the Internet Research Agency to disseminate propaganda, hacking by Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, and infiltrating the Trump campaign. Russian electoral interference included undermining trust in established political institutions and processes, destabilizing democracy by amplifying political discord, hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign to obtain specific information to be used to achieve Russian strategic objectives, and infiltrating the Trump campaign and others to establish “back channels” to US politicians in order to obtain information and subtly exert policy influence on American policy.

Fake news, including deepfakes enabled by algorithms, along with traditional means of influence, such as the use of corruption, compromising political actors through blackmail and kompromat, and inserting corrupt actors and agents into agenda-setting institutions, were used in this Russian attempt to compromise American internal politics to weaken the US on the global stage. The insertion of Maria Butina, an unregistered foreign agent, into US politics (including the Republican Party, the Trump Campaign, and the National Rifle Association) led to her prosecution and conviction for felony charges of conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent. Disruption and deception (maskirovka or disguise) integrated into cyber operations (both attacks and information operations) were tightly integrated into the Crimea and east Ukraine operations and are core to current Russian operations in the Ukraine war. Irregularities in defense procurement, including restricting competition, manipulating the bidding process, preferring certain bidders, are exemplary of the corrupt practices in Ukraine that degrade military and capability and combat readiness. The influence of Russian or pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine epitomizes the use of corruption as a political tool.

Corruption

Corruption can serve as an adjunct to these hybrid influence activities. Corruption can occur in all spheres of activity, at all levels of governance, and within public and private entities. Corruption can alter the nature and projection of real economic power and financial power. Inserting corrupt agents of influence within the organizations that hold real economic and financial power is one means of exerting influence. Stock manipulation and similar trading irregularities, such as manipulating sovereign wealth funds are another. Financial power (or financial instruments and infrastructure) can be disrupted by using a combination of means that leverage corrupt access. These combined means are a hallmark of all hybrid operations but are particularly effective in the financial realms since they can leverage interactions between financial, media, and cyber domains in real-time to destabilize financial markets and, ultimately, economies. Hackers and social media campaigns can amplify these effects.

Corruption comes in many guises; it can be configured as “influence market corruption,” where informal business and political actors and networks collude or use bribery to gain influence, political access, and specific economic benefits. Corruption can also be expressed as “elite cartel corruption,” where political and economic elites are interconnected and exclude competitors through manipulating trade, lobbying, and access. Another expression is “oligarch and clan corruption,” where a diffuse set of oligarchs and/or clans plunder both private and public institutions for their own gain while using violence to further their goals. Finally, it can be expressed as “official moguls corruption,” where power and the economy are monopolized by a single entity (a dictator, family, or junta). In the last case, patronage, power, and corruption (as well as violence and intimidation) are mobilized in support of the actor in charge. This is a defining characteristic of a kleptocracy. When official roles are less important than informal positions—kleptocracy prevails. At the extreme end of corruption, kleptocracy enables authoritarian and criminal regimes to extend their influence when they forge de facto alliances with banks and other global financial institutions. Kleptocrats and oligarchs are able to link with transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), corrupt officials, and institutions to extract wealth and launder money. Corrupt financial institutions process the laundered funds, which then allows the kleptocrats to freely use the illicit funds to increase their financial and real estate holdings and power while extending (purchasing) influence globally.

Strategic Corruption: Weaponizing Kleptocracy

Putin has effectively weaponized kleptocracy and corruption on a global scale. When assessing the threat of weaponized corruption, it is valuable to note that “[t]he term ‘weaponization’ implies that corruption is being used purposefully as a tool of statecraft to interfere with, co-opt, weaken, and destabilize democratic institutions and processes.” Russia, under Putin, has created or co-opted numerous entities (both state and non-state), such as hacker groups, cyber influencers or troll farms sowing discord, and private military companies, to project its influence worldwide. These cyber influence operations have extended to US elections. The activities conducted by these entities include funding political action through loans and direct contributions and have the support of a network of pro-Russian oligarchs that, in turn, support right-wing political parties and extremist groups. This, in addition to the aforementioned interference in US politics, has included support of the German anti-immigrant, right-wing Alternative für Deutsch (by selling gold at discounted prices), and providing favorable loans and political exposure to France’s National Front, now known as the National Rally (Rassemblement National) under Marine Le Pen. Essentially, weaponized kleptocracy employs strategic corruption as a means of extending influence.

Strategic corruption and its partner strategic crime leverage illicit economic gain and criminal activity to open channels for influence that compromise the stability and defense capabilities of rival nations. The mechanisms of strategic corruption include reliance on the revolving door between government officials and corporate roles (where individuals move between government and corporate jobs, enhancing their influence and ability to profit). Former government officials can then lobby their former agencies on behalf of private interests (including those with direct foreign connections), as seen in the case of the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who worked for Gazprom on its Nord Stream board; he now faces criminal charges. The role of manipulating gas supplies and prices naturally weakened Germany’s energy independence in favor of Russian aims. Strategic corruption also relies upon illicit political finance and money laundering (as discussed above). Finally, it can enable judicial corruption, as seen in Ukraine. Russian influence weakened Ukraine’s anti-corruption mechanisms through the apparent influence of multiple judges with connections to Russia. As Philip Zelikow et al. observes:

In bureaucratic and grand corruption, the payer and the payee are mainly just trying to get rich. In strategic corruption, by contrast, the greed is still there, for at least some of the players, but the corrupt inducements are wielded against a target country by foreigners as a part of their own country’s national strategy. Sometimes, but not always, these schemes entail violations of the law, including by citizens of the target country. In other cases, the conduct may be technically legal but still involves “the perversion or destruction of integrity in the discharge of public duties,” as the venerable Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “corruption” puts it.

Zelikow et al. describe the imbroglio leading to then-President Trump’s 2019 impeachment as the most prominent case of strategic corruption in recent years. In short, Trump allegedly:

sought to condition his and his administration’s future relations with Ukraine on Kyiv’s willingness to help him dig up dirt on his political opponent Joe Biden, blame former Ukrainian government officials (and not the Kremlin) for hacking the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and cast doubt on evidence that U.S. prosecutors had used to put one of Trump’s 2016 campaign managers, Paul Manafort, in prison.

The alleged sequence had foreign roots and involved a complex set of interactions with pro-Putin Oligarchs. These included smear attacks on Marie Yovanovitch, the now-former US Ambassador to Ukraine, and other acts in furtherance of Kremlin priorities.

Zelikow et al. also document Chinese influence operations in support of its energy conglomerate and the Belt and Road Initiative, including bribery and money laundering in Africa and efforts to wield strategic corruption in Australia, where the Chinese Communist Party has funded political organizations and election campaigns, conducted influence operations in the media, and contributed funds to pliant politicians.

Turkey has also corruptly influenced US politics, with several Trump associates, such as Rudy Giuliani and former attorney general Michael Mukasey, still awaiting judicial accountability for alleged acts ranging from interference in criminal investigations against a Turkish official and a Turkish bank (Halkbank) for evading US sanctions on shipping gold to Iran in return for favorable treatment in private business affairs including Trump’s real estate interests in Turkey. These private interests were allegedly pursued at the expense of state policy (i.e., helping Iran evade sanctions). As Zelikow et al. conclude, “That goes well beyond pay-to-play. It is pay-for-policy; it is strategic corruption.”

Russian corruption exploits global financial flows and leverages illicit finance to weaken the rule of law abroad, sustain its own kleptocracy, and buy influence on a global scale. The tools of these influence operations include “Russian Dark Money” and illicit wealth funds, lawyers, bankers, lobbyists, and accountants, as well as real estate agents in global cities such as New York, Miami, and London (colloquially known as “Londongrad”), as well as off-shore tax havens.

In these schemes, state actors (Russia, China, and Turkey, for example) have individually leveraged state action and illicit financial flows to penetrate and subvert rival governments and institutions, ranging from banks, real estate companies, and lobbying and public relations firms to social media enterprises, to serve their interests and the interests of their allied oligarchs and proxies. Strategic crime augments these de-stabilization efforts by bolstering criminal enterprises, sowing insecurity and disorder, and ultimately eroding confidence and perceptions of legitimacy among rivals. Of course, the criminal enterprises benefit from this empowerment and leverage the corrosive effects of corruption for sustaining and expanding their own power.

Countering Corruption and Hybrid Influence

Countering corruption and kleptocracy requires transparency. That means the secrecy and occult nature of corruption need to be exposed. Excessive privacy in banking laws, lack of press freedom, and weak access to public information empower oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters, and corrupt officials. Active efforts by investigative journalists and civil society can counter the effects of strategic corruption and crime. Investigative reporting efforts like the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, leaked documents detailing offshore corruption, and the Brazilian “Lava Jato” public corruption investigation help expose the reach and damage caused by hybrid influence activities conducted by transnational corruption networks.

Transparency International recommends the following steps to counter kleptocracy and corruption:

Identifying and freezing the assets of corrupt officials
End anonymous companies
Increase transparency of trusts
Open the black box of hedge funds, private equity and other investment funds
Increase transparency in luxury goods
Ban golden passports and regulate golden visas [that give oligarchs unfettered global access]
Hold professional enablers to account [banks, corporate service providers, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents]
Strengthen mechanisms for seizing, confiscating, and – eventually returning – assets
Support civil society organizations, independent journalists, activists, and whistleblowers.

The Global Observatory of Transnational Criminal Networks views these transnational corruption networks as macro-networks of corruption. Confronting macro-corruption and macro-networks of corruption requires understanding and confronting these decentralized and transnational networks. It also requires confronting corruption-related money laundering through real-time data analysis and social network analysis of illicit financial flows. To achieve these objectives, it is necessary to enhance the state of practice for financial intelligence by developing protocols, methodologies, and analytical tools that help enforcement agencies understand and confront massive, transnational, and decentralized structures of corruption. In addition, it is necessary to develop controls on electoral funding and criminal and administrative controls on public contracts. This must include preventive measures against macro-networks of corruption and training the judiciary (and criminal justice staff) to possess and implement the prosecution and trial of illicit networks and corruption networks.

These strategies to counter strategic corruption and kleptocracy must be informed by political analysis responsive to politics, coordinated across borders, and integrated across sectors (health, infrastructure, energy, climate, and security (including military). All of these approaches require enhancing multilateral cooperation and coordination, building robust law enforcement and judicial capacity, developing sound and actionable intelligence, transparency, and the involvement of civil society, the military and defense sector, security services, the press and news media, and the public at large. Finally, they demand multilateral, transnational, and international action.

Case Study: Criminal Threats and Corruption in Venezuela

Venezuela is a kleptocracy or criminalized state. Forged from the legacy of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution, its current leader, Nicolás Maduro, continues using transnational organized crime as an instrument of state power. Indeed, the use of corruption as a source of power has led the regime’s global criminal network to be characterized as the “Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise.” The activities waged by this consortium of actors include money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and resource extraction (including illegal mining and petroleum theft). These global activities are tied together and operationalized by corruption.

Venezuela ranks 177 out of 180 counties (and had a score of 14/100, with 0 being very corrupt and 100 being very clean) in Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, with 50 % of its public service users paying a bribe in the last 12 months and 87% of its population perceiving an increase in corruption during the same time frame according to the Global Corruption Barometer. Venezuela’s petroleum reserves potentially offer great economic opportunity, but its state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) is riddled with corruption. The corrupt acts include graft, bribery, diversion of public funds, money laundering, and bid rigging by public officials. This corruption is a political tool for the regime and its Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise. The PDVSA is tightly integrated with the regime with key leadership positions held by its members; for example, in 2017, Manuel Quevedo, a Major General in Venezuela’s National Guard, was installed as head of the PDVSA and as the nation’s oil minister despite having no experience in the energy sector.

Inter-penetration of government institutions and corporate entities with organized crime actors solidifies corrupt influence. This corruption is enabled by both transnational criminal organizations, gangs, Colombia guerrillas (including the FARC and ELN, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and National Liberation Army, respectively), far-left militias known as colectivos, Hezbollah, and state actors including Russia, Cuba, Iran, and China all interact with the Venezuelan state and its Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise (as do Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Suriname, and El Salvador. Gangs—characterized as Third Generation Gangs—are the engine extending this corrupt influence. Money laundering is its lubricant with illicit flows of at least $10 Billion and up to $43 Billion diverted or laundered over the past decade. The money laundering includes trade-based transactions, falsified oil sales, and real estate purchases. Russia supports the regime militarily and economically while exploiting the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise to facilitate global illicit flows and augment its own network of oligarchs. Hezbollah uses the corrupt proceeds of this network to augment its own illegal financing activities and fund its operations.

This networked arrangement utilizes hybrid influence to sustain the Venezuelan state, its nation-state sponsors and allies, as well as its non-state criminal partners. Each of the participants gains its own profit and power while leveraging the influence of its partners. Countering this endeavor requires global cooperation, including criminal enforcement and prosecution, financial intelligence, and diplomatic action. Economic sanctions and the development of new multilateral enforcement structures—including transnational and international anti-corruption legal regimes and courts and joint investigations—are needed to counter this type of global hybrid network.

Tags: Corruption, Hybrid Crime, Hybrid Threats, Hybrid Warfare, influence operations, Russia, Venezuela

About The Author

John P. Sullivan
John P. Sullivan was a career police officer. He is an honorably retired lieutenant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, specializing in emergency operations, transit policing, counterterrorism, and intelligence. He is currently an Instructor in the Safe Communities Institute (SCI) at the Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California. Sullivan received a lifetime achievement award from the National Fusion Center Association in November 2018 for his contributions to the national network of intelligence fusion centers. He completed the CREATE Executive Program in Counter-Terrorism at the University of Southern California and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Government from the College of William and Mary, a Master of Arts in Urban Affairs and Policy Analysis from the New School for Social Research, and a PhD from the Open University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). His doctoral thesis was “Mexico’s Drug War: Cartels, Gangs, Sovereignty and the Network State.” He can be reached at jpsullivan@smallwarsjournal.com.

3. Tehran May Tempt Trump With Talks

If the assessment that Iran is on the ropes is accurate, the basic questions are what effect can we achieve from this condition and how do we acheive that effect?

Do we focus myopically on the nuclear program (like we do with north Korea) or do we have a broader view and desired outcome that goes beyond denuclearization (and that will by definition solve the nuclear threat)?

Tehran May Tempt Trump With Talks

The Islamic Republic is on the ropes, but it could still exploit the threat of rapid nuclear breakout.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tehran-may-tempt-trump-with-talks-iran-nuclear-threat-mideast-12bc5e20?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

Dec. 9, 2024 5:23 pm ET

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during his meeting with the paramilitary Basij force members in Tehran, Nov. 25. Photo: Iranian Supreme Leader'S Office/Zuma Press

One of the first things the Syrian rebels did on entering Damascus was to ransack the Iranian Embassy. The Assad dynasty was a pillar of the Islamic Republic’s regional power. In 1980 Hafez al-Assad was the only Arab leader to back Iran in its war with Iraq; his son Bashar later offered Tehran a pathway for dominating the Levant.

Throughout the Middle East, the Islamic Republic is now seen as a serial loser. It has had an annus horribilis. Israel’s demolition of Hamas and Hezbollah—and with them the “axis of resistance” against the Jewish state—surprised Tehran. Israel’s unstoppable air raids and covert operations inside Iran also caught the regime off guard. So, too, did Donald Trump’s comeback. With the downfall of its Syrian ally, Iran’s ruling elite no longer even pretends that the clerical regime is winning in the region.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 85, should never be counted out, however. He has mastered the art of checking enemies at home and abroad during his 35 years in power. His tried and true way of dealing with fearful foreign unknowns is to dangle engagement. He appears to be exploring the possibility of new nuclear talks with Mr. Trump in hopes of neutralizing the U.S.

Given the substantial growth in Iran’s uranium enrichment and foreign machinations over the past four years, Mr. Khamenei has had little fear of Joe Biden. Soon he’ll be confronting Mr. Trump, who despite his oft-stated distaste for “forever wars,” killed the dark lord Qasem Soleimani, Mr. Khamenei’s beloved protégé in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mr. Trump’s unpredictability worries the clerical regime, as does the possibility that Mr. Trump will toughen sanctions, attack Iranian nuclear sites, or, unlike the Biden administration, encourage ambitious Israeli operations. If the Iranians can’t build a bomb before Jan. 20, Tehran’s fear of Mr. Trump will probably be enough to convince Mr. Khamenei to pause his nuclear program—at least until Mr. Trump scares him less.

Testing Mr. Trump through diplomacy offers Tehran time to recover from its current calamities. Compared with the negotiations over Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2012-15, we don’t yet see much hard-line opposition in the Iranian press to the idea that the Islamic Republic would benefit from engaging the Americans. For Tehran, direct contact with the new administration would be distasteful, but new negotiations aren’t out of the question. “Whether we like it or not, we will inevitably face the U.S. in regional and international issues. We should manage this situation ourselves,” President Masoud Pezeshkian has said. Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Ravanchi was more specific: “The JCPOA can still be the basis of negotiations and reflect new realities by updating it.”

Every Iranian olive branch comes with a threat. Ali Larijani, a veteran politician whose cunning and experience Mr. Khamenei values, is back in the supreme leader’s inner circle. Mr. Larijani, who once headed Iran’s nuclear diplomatic team and may return to that job, issued this warning to Washington: “We will not move toward the bomb, and you must accept our conditions. Make a new agreement.” His brother Mohammad-Javad Larijani also advises Mr. Khamanei on foreign affairs and recently said that Iran was potentially no more than 24 hours away from developing a military nuclear capability. That is surely bloviation, but it does reflect a new openness to building a bomb—and probably some regret at not having done so already. An Islamic Republic without nukes is now wide open to Israeli attacks.

No U.S. president can simply reject an offer of talks with Tehran. The question wouldn’t be whether to negotiate but how to do so given all the unavoidable pitfalls and traps. It’s entirely possible that President Trump, the deal maker, could soon find himself facing a question similar to the one Mr. Obama was forced to answer: If Mr. Khamenei refuses to dismantle his nuclear and ballistic-missile programs and abandon his proxy-war strategy and penchant for terrorism, what, exactly, is the U.S. willing to do about it?

Mr. Obama wasn’t willing to walk away from negotiations, and he certainly didn’t want to use the American military to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. Instead he launched the U.S. down the slippery slope of nuclear concessions. Washington tied itself to the JCPOA, providing Tehran an opening to behave badly throughout the region. The perverse absurdity of this should have become unbearable after Oct. 7. Has it?

Iran’s theocracy will soon find out.

Mr. Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Biden Takes an Undeserved Syria Victory Lap

Assad’s fall and Hezbollah’s weakness were no thanks to him.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/joe-biden-syria-bashar-al-assad-white-house-israel-jake-sullivan-40f7db71?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

By The Editorial Board

Dec. 9, 2024 5:42 pm ET

President Joe Biden speaks on the latest developments in Syria at the White House on Dec. 8. Photo: Ron Sachs/Bloomberg News

The main reasons for the Assad regime’s weekend fall in Syria happened in defiance of President Biden’s policy. Naturally, he is rushing to take credit.

“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” Mr. Biden said Sunday. “Through this combination of support for our partners, sanctions, and diplomacy and targeted military force when necessary, we now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region.”

Just like they drew it up. Never mind that the Biden team had given up on the Syrian opposition and tacitly acceded to dictator Bashar al-Assad’s return to the region’s good graces. The White House slow-rolled sanctions and blocked the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act in the Senate after it passed the House 389–32. When Mr. Assad rejoined the Arab League in 2023, Mr. Biden looked the other way.

“For the first time ever,” the President said Sunday, “neither Russia nor Iran nor Hezbollah could defend this abhorrent regime in Syria. This is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine and Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense with unflagging support of the U.S.”

How unflagging? National security adviser Jake Sullivan explained on Sunday, “We chose a course of making sure Israel had what it needed to beat its enemies, backed up by American power.” This is revisionist history. Pressed on his weak Iran policy, Mr. Sullivan pointed to the scoreboard: “Iran’s major proxy in the region, Hezbollah, is absolutely weakened, shattered.”

That’s true—precisely because Israel ignored the counsel of Mr. Sullivan’s boss. Mr. Biden worked hard, even blocking weapons, to stop Israel from taking the fight to Hezbollah. Even after 11 months of Hezbollah attacks, Mr. Biden argued that Israeli self-defense would risk escalating into a regional war. He pushed a cease-fire that would have left Hezbollah at the height of its powers.

Biden officials were furious when Israel instead blew up Hezbollah’s pagers and took out its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. But now they congratulate themselves for a policy that, in Mr. Biden’s words, “made it impossible for Iran and Hezbollah to continue to prop up the Assad regime.” Israel made that impossible, against Mr. Biden’s wishes.

The last time the Administration took a victory lap like this was right before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Mr. Sullivan wrote, “The region is quieter than it has been for decades,” thanks to Biden policy that “de-escalated crises in Gaza” and deterred Iranian aggression.

Like Donald Trump, humility isn’t their strong suit. But on foreign policy the Biden team has much more to be humble about.

After Ousting Assad, Syrian Rebels Rush to Impose Order in Damascus

Leader Jawlani moves to form a transitional government, get the buses running and turn the power back on

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/after-ousting-assad-syrian-rebels-rush-to-impose-order-in-damascus-1c4f5fab?mod=latest_headlines

By Stephen Kalin

Follow and Saleh al-Batati

Dec. 10, 2024 7:11 am ET

Rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani speaks at a mosque in Damascus. Photo: Omar Albam/Associated Press

When the regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed over the weekend without a fight, Damascus slipped into a power vacuum that saw the pillaging of the deposed president’s ornate palace, some government buildings and the homes of high-ranking officials.

But hours after Assad fled Syria, organized rebel forces entered the capital and began attempting to restore order. Gunmen from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, one of the largest groups from the north, curbed looting and set up checkpoints to confiscate stolen goods, including furniture, electronics and home appliances, residents said.

On Monday, HTS said it had nearly completed the task of securing the capital and tapped Mohammed al-Bashir, the head of a de facto government the group backed for years in Syria’s rebel-held northwest, to form a transitional government for the entire country.

Bashir met Monday with HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani as well as the prime minister of the ousted regime, who for now is working with the group on a transition.

The rebel group of just 25,000 fighters shocked the world with a lightning assault that in just over a week toppled the Assad regime, which had ruled Syria for more than half a century. The country, made up of diverse ethnic and religious communities, has become an unwieldy patchwork of armed groups that could potentially turn on each other now that the central authority is gone.

While Jawlani has become the most visible face of the new power in Damascus, Syrian analysts say HTS is joining forces with local entities and expect it will be a few weeks before the transition process becomes clearer.

People in Damascus celebrate after rebels seized the Syrian capital. Photo: bakr alkasem/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Jawlani fought the U.S. occupation in Iraq, where he ended up in an American-run prison. He later joined Islamic State and then al Qaeda but broke with both groups and steered HTS away from the global jihadist movement waging war on the West. Since 2017, HTS has administered a statelet in northwest Syria with a population of some four million people.

HTS is classified by many foreign governments, including the U.S., as a terrorist organization over links to al Qaeda, which it disavowed years ago. Its dominant role in Syria’s transition now presents a conundrum for those governments. A U.K. minister said the British government would consider delisting the group depending on its behavior in the coming period.

The incoming Trump administration might not be as flexible. Joel Rayburn, a former senior director for Syria on the National Security Council who is working on the president-elect’s national security transition team, said Jawlani and HTS are “delusional” if they think the world would support a transitional government that he said circumvents the United Nations.

The extent of HTS control varies across the country. In northwestern areas around Idlib, where it was holed up for years under bombardment from the regime and its Russian ally, it established a government that focused on delivering needed services and showed some tolerance for Christians and women, drawing criticism from hard-liners.

When it took Aleppo late last month, it quickly imposed itself. But in Damascus, it was less disciplined rebel groups from the suburbs and southern areas like Deraa that first entered the city.

Moataz Houssein, a Damascus resident, described a capital city haunted by decades of suffering and the rapid developments of recent days, with most shops still closed and many people staying home out of fear. He said he encountered gunmen firing celebratory gunshots and recently released prisoners wandering the streets as Israeli airstrikes echoed in the distance.

“It all feels like a nightmare, yet you remind yourself it is also a dream—now that Assad is gone,” he said.

Several officials in Damascus have been focused on finding fuel for buses to get employees to work, fixing power outages and hiring workers to clean neighborhoods. In some parts of the country, schools that closed last week partially reopened on Tuesday. Most stores and restaurants in the capital remain closed due to a lack of supplies, and the price of basic goods has soared.

Haid Haid, a fellow at Chatham House who is from Syria, said HTS has historically been successful by pursuing a gradual approach to governance that mixes coercion with patience and persuasion, which allows it to implement its objectives slowly and avoid backlash by adapting to public reactions.

“Its mixed strategy helps mitigate negative consequences and avoid alienating local communities, whose support is vital for its survival and influence,” he wrote on X. But with the regime’s collapse and the rebels’ rapid territorial gains, it may have to pursue meaningful reforms or risk losing favor among many Syrians.

Empowering the Combatant Commands Is Critical for the Future Fight - War on the Rocks

Maj. Gen. Peter Andrysiak and Bryan Quinn

warontherocks.com · by Maj. Gen. Peter Andrysiak · December 10, 2024

If U.S. European Command — where I am the chief of staff — had to fight today, we would risk failing to support our commander in making decisions at the speed and quality necessary to succeed in modern conflict.

In the days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States assembled a coalition to provide urgently needed support to Ukraine. Our planners soon found themselves working around a table with multinational partners looking over each other’s shoulders to synchronize military assistance in the form of equipment and supplies. It quickly became evident that an unclassified but secure communications platform was essential to share information across an impromptu group of 26 partners. Despite the U.S. Air Force leading the development of a network capable of such a requirement since 2018, it could not deliver on the promise of a combined communications environment. In response, the combatant command fielded an expedient solution to perform this critical communication function in crisis.

Though less stark than past failures like Operations Desert One or Urgent Fury, this shortfall highlights a modern failure in the field. When multiplied across the numerous, interdependent, and complex command-and-control systems that connect a commander’s decisions to actions on the ground, this simple example underscores the disconnect between the needs of the field commander and solutions provided by the armed services, undermining combatant command readiness for crisis and conflict.

To compete with and win wars against modern adversaries, combatant commands need to understand the battlefield — our own forces, allies, the enemy, and terrain — and be able to act faster than the adversary across air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace. This military action is managed through command and control, the system through which commanders plan, direct, and coordinate people and things towards the accomplishment of the mission. However, decades of underinvestment in command headquarters and an under-delivery of command-and-control capabilities have left commanders without the proper tools to understand the environment and make decisions at sufficient speed.

Correcting this deficiency primarily requires two changes: Increased resourcing in the form of people and money to improve and modernize command-and-control systems; and greater agency in the development of new capabilities, including an expanded ability to experiment with new capabilities within a commander’s respective theater. Both recommendations, while achievable, will require a deliberate shift in influence away from services and towards operational commanders.

America’s adversaries are rapidly learning and evolving. To ensure commanders can make decisions at the speed of tomorrow’s war, combatant commands can no longer rely on incremental and piecemeal support from the services. The Department of Defense should prioritize the needs of the combatant commands or it will risk the continued delivery of late or incompatible solutions that limit our ability to command and control forces on the battlefield.

Become a Member

Europe’s Transformation in Contact

Command and control is not a single piece of technology. It is a complex system that spans from an organization’s structure and processes to the networks, software, and physical infrastructure that support operations. The make-up of this system, including the size and composition of the staff, the tools they use, and buildings (if any) they occupy, is intricately tied to the environment in which it operates. When that environment changes — whether through the introduction of new technologies, a shift in adversary tactics, or evolving alliance requirements — the system should adapt in response.

U.S. European Command’s current command-and-control system is a product of post-Cold War optimism. Following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, U.S. European Command divested much of its large-scale warfighting capability and shifted its focus to security cooperation, military partnership programs, and supporting the integration of new NATO members.

Since then, Russian aggression has returned and threats have become increasingly interconnected, resulting in an unpredictable and dynamic environment. In turn, U.S. European Command faces increased requirements for interoperability with NATO and growing demands for timely and accurate information, stressing limited resources. The U.S. military’s command-and-control system ought to evolve with these changing demands, or it will risk falling behind. However, U.S. European Command has struggled to keep pace and remains reliant on outdated systems that limit our ability to effectively see ourselves and the enemy, underscoring the requirement for greater agency in resourcing and capability development decisions.

An Unequal Relationship: The Warfighter-Service Disconnect

The armed services are responsible for manning, training, and equipping forces needed in conflict. Almost every piece of equipment, to include our command-and-control systems, is funded and provided by one of the military branches. However, it is the combatant commander who is legally responsible for deterring and defending against our adversaries. Despite this warfighting responsibility, the services retain greater control over capability development and military resources, leaving combatant commands little influence over how command-and-control solutions are designed or tailored to their unique operational needs.

It is here that the disconnect between a capability requirement, service-led command-and-control modernization initiatives, and the actual needs of combatant commands looms large, as demonstrated by the services’ inability to field an interoperable partner network. While developing platform- or domain-specific equipment may be more clear-cut for services to deliver, the complexity of command and control demands solutions that are interoperable across multiple systems, domains, and organizations, a capability gap ill-suited for the services to solve.

Nevertheless, services are moving out in developing their own command-and-control capabilities like Project Convergence, Overmatch, and the Advanced Battle Management System. The result is a series of siloed efforts that fail to deliver capabilities needed to synchronize and execute the joint fight in modern warfare. Each new service-specific solution increases the complexity of command-and-control problems without addressing combatant commands’ needs. This leaves the combatant command with the task of identifying, cataloging, and connecting hundreds of data sources to support the commander’s decision-making sufficiently.

More than any other battlefield capability, command and control cannot be examined and assessed in isolation and should be addressed holistically as a single system. Therefore, the combatant commands, not the services, are best positioned to deliver modernized command and control. To overcome this challenge, modernizing command and control should shift away from service-led efforts in favor of the combatant commander.

The challenge of command-and-control modernization is compounded by the slow and incremental progress of the Department of Defense’s modernization effort, Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The timeliness of service-led capability delivery, including those under this effort, is notoriously slow, often stretching for five to 10 years. By the time a capability is delivered (if ever), it is frequently outdated, ill-suited to the evolving needs of the combatant command, or significantly altered by service equities, demonstrating the fundamental flaw in fulfilling command-and-control needs.

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office has begun providing combatant commands with much needed support. However, the services regularly vote against any meaningful resourcing. Of four high-profile command-and-control capabilities — allied and partner network interoperability, data integration, joint fires, and an advanced common operating picture — U.S. European Command has only received the latter. The irony that this capability was delivered through commercial means and not through one of the services is not lost.

Despite years of experimentation and promises, the lack of workable solutions further reinforces the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the Department of Defense’s current approach within the timelines required by today’s security environment. If we accept Shyam Sankar’s recent argument that “You cannot separate the roles of creating requirements and delivering capabilities,” then combatant commands ought to be provided a greater role in developing and delivering capabilities on the battlefield.

Addressing Combatant Command Modernization Shortfalls

The space between battlefield needs, resourcing, and service solutions leaves U.S. European Command in a difficult position. The requirement for improved command and control exists today, yet the service’s efforts continue to fall short of the immediate needs of the combatant commands. We are doing what we can to address deficiencies across our people, processes, networks and data, and infrastructure within the bounds of current funding. However, without a greater voice in resourcing decisions or capability development, we will remain far behind our modernization needs.

People and Processes

Now in the third year of crisis, staffing across the headquarters and our components remains critically short. While we can improve staff officer proficiency through training and education and can shift personnel within a fixed population, we cannot resolve manpower challenges without the long lead times required by overly bureaucratic processes. For example, the Joint Staff validates our manpower requirements, but they must first be backed by costly, time-consuming, and subjective manpower studies conducted by external agencies.

In the latest study, even our manning requirements for data modernization, a priority for the Department of Defense, were rejected, demonstrating the subjective nature of this process. Even if positions are validated, the command then competes in slow resourcing processes to fund manpower requirements, where combatant commands often lose out again to service preferences. While staffing reqirements will persist in the short term, improvements in command-and-control systems and the digitization and automation of staff processes will reduce the cognitive load on the staff, enabling a significant reduction in manning.

Networks and Data

U.S. European Command’s networks, optimized for peacetime, are also outdated and struggle to meet today’s computing demands. Despite receiving advanced software tools for battle management, its potential remains limited by our hardware and networks. Yet, we currently spend much of our budget on maintaining legacy systems, leaving the command unable to invest in future capabilities central to a modern network such as cloud and zero-trust. To improve our networks, we again rely on the services and other external entities, complicating our efforts to leap the command forward technologically.

Modernizing command and control is not possible without also addressing our data deficiencies. Like other military organizations, our data is dispersed across components, siloed in service, Joint Staff, and national repositories — another consequence of leaving command and control to the services to solve. In 2024, combatant commands still count planes, tanks, and ships by phone call and email because we lack access to data, systems to integrate this information, and urgency from the services. This leaves a substantial gap for operational commanders to see the totality of their forces and make timely decisions on their use on the battlefield.

At the expense of other command priorities, we’ve invested our limited funds in data engineers to directly assist the staff in identifying and prioritizing authoritative data to integrate into our systems. Despite challenges in data interoperability, this initiative is being pursued in close coordination with U.S. Central Command to address operational problems at the seams of conflict, resulting in a joint, cross-combatant command solution capable of addressing increasingly global threats.

Facilities and Infrastructure

U.S. European Command’s headquarters operates from a 90-year-old Panzer regiment mess hall, and our data center resides in a 65-year-old office space, incapable of fully integrating advanced applications like Maven Smart Systems. As a result, senior leaders and the staff rely on analog tools and manual processes, slowing decision-making. Although we own and maintain our physical infrastructure, U.S. European Command competes with other service priorities for restoration money. Here again, the combatant command consistently loses out. To put this in context, a recent estimate to construct a modern headquarters building that would bring U.S. European Command in line with other combatant commands totaled nearly half a billion dollars — a requirement unlikely to ever be funded under the current resourcing framework.

These internal modernization efforts alone cannot deliver the command-and-control system needed in Europe. Although we’ve achieved some success, improving our common operating picture, hiring data engineers, or overhauling staff education is not enough. Command-and-control modernization at scale, including manning, networks, and infrastructure, outpaces our resourcing and capacity. Combatant commands only control around 0.7 percent of the defense budget (about $260 million per command) — the Army, Air Force, and Navy control over 80 percent of the budget. To fix our command-and-control deficiencies and ensure our ability to support the commander’s decision-making in crisis and conflict, this resourcing disparity needs to be reassessed.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: The Limits of the Single Integrator Solution

Some would prefer the Department of Defense to consolidate all command-and-control modernization resourcing under a single combatant command to solve the problem. By empowering a single integrator, vice the services or Joint Staff, a single command could pull together the various command-and-control modernization efforts more efficiently. Arguably, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is already performing this function, as demonstrated by its Joint Fires Network effort, and already receives the preponderance of combatant command resourcing based on an outdated National Defense Strategy.

However, this approach overlooks critical differences in operational requirements across commands and would sacrifice effectiveness for efficiency. A command-and-control system ought to be tailored to its environment and the task at hand, which varies significantly based on the adversary, geography, coalition demands, and other factors. In Europe, command and control is uniquely complex because of the interoperability demands in a NATO-led fight. This arrangement requires a level of integration across our plans, systems, networks, data, and processes not needed in the Pacific, dictating a different command-and-control requirement.

A European conflict would also likely be land-centric, contrasting with the Indo-Pacific’s maritime focus, underscoring fundamental differences in distances and domain that impact the design of a command-and-control system. The command-and-control system required for defeating 1000 maritime targets is not the one we need to blunt an armored cross-border attack into the Baltic countries. Likewise, our command-and-control system isn’t the one that U.S. Southern Command or U.S. Africa Command needs. Neither require a capability as robust as the Joint Fires Network. While there are areas where combatant commands can and should support each other’s modernization efforts, each organization’s unique requirements necessitate distinct solutions.

Empowering the Warfighter: Increasing Combatant Command Readiness

The security environment in Europe has fundamentally changed, with Russia emerging as a chronic and increasingly capable threat. This demands that U.S. European Command adapt swiftly to confront the complex challenges of modern warfare, beginning with a modernized command-and-control system to ensure the integration and synchronization of multi-service and multi-domain capabilities. Yet, service-driven command-and-control efforts continue to fall short of the immediate demands of combatant commands, reinforcing the need to reorient around the priorities of the warfighter.

In the aftermath of the military failures that led to the Goldwater-Nichols Act, Lt. Gen. John Cushman wrote, “The Joint Chiefs of Staff have failed to meet field commanders’ needs and allow Services to acquire command and control systems that don’t consider the operational user’s systems holistically.” Despite the defense reforms of the 1980s, the disconnect between the service and user remains.

It’s time to adopt a new approach and equip combatant commands to accomplish their mandated mission by enabling them to experiment with, develop, and field joint capabilities in their theater. This includes directly funding combatant commands to develop their own command-and-control solutions and increasing the Joint Staff’s Combatant Commander’s Initiative Fund to fully resource command-and-control modernization at the scale required for today’s challenges. Further, combatant command agency in capability development and resourcing processes should be strengthened by revising authoritative documents governing these processes. Combined, these changes should elevate and prioritize combatant command needs above the services.

The need for U.S. European Command to rapidly adapt is clear. Yet, we are not resourced sufficiently to do so. Without modernized command and control for the operational commander, forces — even those modernized by the services — cannot be effectively employed on the battlefield. Continuing to rely on service-led solutions, far removed from the areas where conflict and competition occur, risks producing solutions that do not meet the demands of modern warfare, jeopardizing success in future conflicts.

Become a Member

Maj. Gen. Peter B. Andrysiak Jr. is the chief of staff of U.S. European Command. He previously served as the director of operations of U.S. European Command, and deputy commanding general of U.S. Army Europe.

Maj. Bryan J. Quinn is a U.S. Army strategist at U.S. European Command. The views expressed in this article are not those of U.S. European Command, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Maj. Gen. Peter Andrysiak · December 10, 2024

8. Zelenskiy seeks diplomatic end to Russia's war, floats role for foreign troops

Zelenskiy seeks diplomatic end to Russia's war, floats role for foreign troops

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/zelenskiy-floats-idea-deploying-foreign-troops-ukraine-before-nato-membership-2024-12-09/

By Yuliia Dysa and Tom Balmforth

December 9, 20245:53 PM ESTUpdated 14 hours ago

The remarks came at a joint press conference with German opposition leader Friedrich Merz.

0 of 1 minute, 49 secondsVolume 0%

Summary

Zelenskiy says diplomatic resolution would save livesPublicly raises idea of foreign troops in UkraineRemarks follow meeting with Donald Trump in ParisU.S. President-elect calling for ceasefire and talksUkraine prepares key allies meeting in December

KYIV, Dec 9 (Reuters) - President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made the case on Monday for a diplomatic settlement to Russia's war in Ukraine and raised the idea of foreign troops being deployed in his country until it could join the NATO military alliance.

The remarks at a joint press conference with German opposition leader Friedrich Merz were the latest to signal Kyiv's increasing openness to war negotiations, with Donald Trump preparing to return to the White House on Jan. 20.

The U.S. president-elect, who has said he wants to end the war quickly, called on Sunday for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the "madness", after he met Zelenskiy and French President Emmanuel Macron for talks in Paris.

"Ukraine wants this war to end more than anyone else. No doubt, a diplomatic resolution would save more lives. We do seek it," Zelenskiy told reporters in Kyiv on Monday.

Zelenskiy's spokesperson Serhiy Nikiforov said later that Kyiv was preparing a December meeting of key European partners who together with the U.S. were "capable of ensuring the maximum strengthening of our state".

The aim was to develop a joint position that would hold strong both in negotiations and on the battlefield, he added.

Zelenskiy said he had discussed a "freezing" of the lines in the war when he met Macron and Trump. Russia controls nearly a fifth of Ukrainian territory after launching the 2022 invasion that unleashed the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two.

Zelenskiy said he told the two leaders that he did not believe Putin actually wanted to end the war and that the Russian president had to be forced to make peace.

"You can only exert force if Ukraine is strong. A strong Ukraine before any diplomacy means a strong (Ukraine) on the battlefield," he said, implying Kyiv needed help to become stronger.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and German opposition leader Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) meet, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine December 9, 2024. REUTERS/Stringer Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

He received a rhetorical boost from Merz, the frontrunner in the election race to become Germany's next chancellor, who used his visit to liken Berlin's current policy to making Ukraine fight with one arm tied behind its back.

FOREIGN TROOPS

Zelenskiy also returned to an idea raised in February by Macron, who floated the possibility of European nations sending troops to Ukraine. There was no consensus on the matter among the European leaders.

"We can think and work on Emmanuel's position. He suggested that some part of troops of a country be present on the territory of Ukraine, which would guarantee us security while Ukraine is not in NATO," Zelenskiy said.

"But we must have a clear understanding of when Ukraine will be in the EU and when Ukraine will be in NATO," he added.

Kyiv, which has made a concerted push to obtain an invitation to join NATO, has insisted throughout the war that it needs security guarantees to prevent Russia launching another invasion once the current hostilities are halted.

"If there is a pause while Ukraine is not in NATO, and even if we had the invitation, and we would not be in NATO, and there will be a pause, then who guarantees us any kind of security?" Zelenskiy asked at the press conference.

Russia has demanded that Ukraine abandon its NATO ambitions and sees Kyiv's membership of the alliance as an unacceptable security threat.

The Ukrainian leader told reporters he was hoping to call outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden in the coming days to discuss NATO membership.

"He is the current president and a lot rides on his opinion. And there is no point in discussing with President Trump something that is not up to him today - while he is not yet in the White House," Zelenskiy said.

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Reporting by Andreas Rinke in Kyiv and Yuliia Dysa in Gdansk; Additional reporting by Oleksandr Kozhukhar and Lidia Kelly; writing by Tom Balmforth; editing by Alex Richardson and Stephen Coates

9. In a Test of Adult Know-How, America Comes Up Short

Obviously a national security issue. How do we solve this national security weakness?

Is the culprit and the solution about screen time?

Excerpts:

During the pandemic, the gap between the skills employers need, and those that workers have, grew wider. Among the approximately 40,000 candidates taking the Fundamentals of Engineering exam for work as professional engineers, scores fell by about 10%. Test scores also fell in college entrance exams, military assessments and nursing exams, according to nonprofits and other organizations who administer the tests.

The divide in know-how among Americans predates Covid, Carr said, and is likely connected to screen time and the declining reading habits of both children and adults.

The relatively strong performance among top test takers, particularly in math, was the silver lining for the U.S. Nearly 2% of Americans scored the highest level of proficiency and were able to understand complex abstract mathematical and statistical information.

By comparison, 5.3% of Finnish test takers could manage those problems—the highest among any country.

In a Test of Adult Know-How, America Comes Up Short

The least-educated workers are falling behind on basic skills such as reading a thermometer and planning a trip

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/america-us-math-proficiency-falling-1b5ac73c?mod=latest_headlines

By Douglas Belkin

Dec. 10, 2024 4:00 am ET

Illustration: WSJ, ISTOCK

When it comes to basic skills such as creating a complex travel itinerary, reading a thermometer or finding information from a website, American workers are falling behind those in other rich countries.

That is according to a global test of adult know-how, which measures job readiness and problem-solving among workers in industrialized countries. The results, released Tuesday, largely show that the least-educated American workers between the ages of 16 and 65 are less able to make inferences from a section of text, manipulate fractions or apply spatial reasoning—even as the most-educated are getting smarter.

Students in the U.S. have been trying to regain ground lost in the pandemic, with math scores here taking a bigger hit from the pandemic than for their peers overseas. This latest result shows that adults, too, aren’t measuring up.

It also suggests that employers might have a hard time finding workers capable of basic levels of critical thinking.

“There’s a dwindling middle in the United States in terms of skills,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of a statistical agency at the Education Department. “Over time we’ve seen more adults clustered at the bottom.”

The number of U.S. test-takers whose mathematics skills didn’t surpass those expected of a primary-school student rose to 34% of the population from 29% in 2017, the last time the test was administered. Problem-solving scores were also weaker than in 2017, with the U.S. average score below the international average.

The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies was given to 31 industrialized countries or economic regions. A total of about 160,000 adults took the exam, including 4,600 in the U.S. It has been administered three times, once between 2012 and 2014, again in 2017, and this most recent iteration in 2023.

In the latest test, the U.S. ranked 14^th in literacy, 15^th in adaptive problem solving and 24^th in numeracy. The same eight countries were tops in all three categories: Finland, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Estonia, Belgium and Denmark.

Since the first test more than a decade ago, Denmark, England, Canada and Germany have surpassed the U.S. in literacy; Singapore, Ireland and France have moved ahead in numeracy skills such as calculating rates and ratios and using proportional reasoning.

During the pandemic, the gap between the skills employers need, and those that workers have, grew wider. Among the approximately 40,000 candidates taking the Fundamentals of Engineering exam for work as professional engineers, scores fell by about 10%. Test scores also fell in college entrance exams, military assessments and nursing exams, according to nonprofits and other organizations who administer the tests.

The divide in know-how among Americans predates Covid, Carr said, and is likely connected to screen time and the declining reading habits of both children and adults.

The relatively strong performance among top test takers, particularly in math, was the silver lining for the U.S. Nearly 2% of Americans scored the highest level of proficiency and were able to understand complex abstract mathematical and statistical information.

By comparison, 5.3% of Finnish test takers could manage those problems—the highest among any country.

Write to Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com

10. China Stages Largest Show of Force in Decades After U.S. Visit by Taiwan’s Lai

Excerpts:

The latest Chinese maneuvers came days after Taiwanese officials said Russian navy ships had sailed past the island. The four Russian ships—three Steregushchiy-class corvettes and a fuel-supply ship—sailed near 24 nautical miles of Taiwan, in what appeared to be drills coordinated with Chinese warships.

“Russia and China have pledged to support each other’s core interests,” said Jacob Stokes, who served on then-Vice President Biden’s national-security staff and is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. “So, China supports Russia in Ukraine, and Russian exercises near Taiwan are part of Russia reciprocating by helping to pressure Taiwan.”

China and Russia carry out regular military drills together. In December 2022 they conducted exercises in the East China Sea, just to the north of Taiwan, that analysts said were likely meant to display the sort of quarantine and blockade capabilities that might be used in a conflict over Taiwan.

China Stages Largest Show of Force in Decades After U.S. Visit by Taiwan’s Lai

Dozens of vessels deployed over vast area of the Western Pacific for apparent military drills, a warning to Taiwan and other U.S. allies

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/china-stages-largest-show-of-force-in-decades-after-u-s-visit-by-taiwans-lai-1830fa8b?mod=latest_headlines

By Joyu Wang

Follow and Austin Ramzy

Dec. 10, 2024 5:49 am ET

In Taiwan, the military said it had launched a war-preparedness drill in response to recent Chinese military activities. Photo: Ritchie b Tongo/Shutterstock

TAIPEI—China massed dozens of navy and coast guard vessels in what appears to be the largest maritime exercises targeting Taiwan and the broader Western Pacific since 1996, a potent warning to the incoming Trump administration of China’s increasingly aggressive stance in the region.

China’s military didn’t announce the start of any drills. But Taiwanese authorities said Tuesday they were seeing “major elements of a military drill” over a vast expanse of air and sea near Taiwan.

As of Tuesday morning, nearly 100 Chinese warships and vessels—involving several thousand personnel—were spotted across the South China Sea, in the waters surrounding Japan and South Korea, and around Taiwan, according to Taiwanese security officials. This is likely the first time such a large-scale maritime operation has involved multiple Chinese theater commands and its coast guard, one of the officials said.

Additionally, Russian ships were spotted near Japan and South Korea, they said.

The maneuvers come in the wake of President Lai Ching-te’s recent visit to Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam as part of his first international tour as president—a visit that China sharply criticised. However, Beijing’s larger goal was to send a signal to the incoming Trump administration that it intends to remain the dominant force in the region, the officials said.

The Chinese Communist government considers Taiwan part of China, despite having never ruled there, and has pledged to take it by force if necessary. China vehemently opposes contact between Taiwan and American officials.

Before Lai’s departure, Beijing vowed to “resolutely crush any ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists,” a label Beijing applies to Lai.

The maneuvers are “a significant security challenge to us,” said Maj. Gen. Sun Li-fang, the spokesman for Taiwan’s Defense Ministry. “The threats aren’t just aimed at Taiwan. They’re also a threat to other countries in the region.”

In an image released by Taiwan’s coast guard, a crew member monitors what authorities said was a Chinese coast guard vessel. Photo: TAIWAN COAST GUARD/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

China has deployed nearly 60 naval ships and almost 30 other coast guard vessels, a senior Taiwanese official said. It deployed forces from its northern, southern and eastern theater commands, in the waters spanning from the East Sea to South China Sea.

A senior Taiwanese security official said the Chinese military appeared to be testing its capacity to dominate the so-called first-island chain, which stretches from north of Japan to Borneo in the south and would be a key focus in any regional conflict.

The Chinese operations are potentially “more than just about Taiwan,” said Drew Thompson, former Pentagon official responsible for China and Taiwan, now a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. China is “simultaneously using military coercion to intimidate other countries in the Western Pacific, including Japan, maybe Korea, Philippines, and then maybe indirectly other countries in the South China Sea.”

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday reported 47 warplanes and 21 Chinese vessels near the island for the past 24 hours. Taiwanese military officials said the large-scale maritime presence is not only China training to enforce a blockade on Taiwan, but also an effort to implement a strategy to prevent other militaries from coming to Taiwan’s aid. Such operations also included practicing the interception of international sea lanes and attacking foreign convoys, according to Taipei’s security officials.

“To our east, there’s a wall of PLA Navy forces, and right next to our air defense identification zone, there’s another one,” Taiwan intelligence officer Lt. Gen. Hsieh Jih-sheng told reporters Tuesday. With ships to the west and east of Taiwan, “they’re sending us a pretty clear message: to turn the Taiwan Strait into their internal waters,” he added

The exercises were a pointed reminder of the potential for a conflict in the region that could involve the U.S., Taiwan’s staunchest ally.

The U.S. has traditionally maintained so-called strategic ambiguity as to whether it would intervene to help Taiwan in a conflict with China. While President Biden has said repeatedly the U.S. would intervene in a conflict, his advisers have walked back the remark, saying there had been no change to American policy.

Donald Trump said in an interview with NBC News broadcast Sunday that he would not say whether he would send U.S. forces to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.

“I’d prefer that they don’t do it,” the president-elect said. “I have a very good relationship with President Xi. We have been communicating with each other.” Trump added that Taiwan wasn’t discussed in a recent exchange with the Chinese leader.

On Sunday, China said that portions of the airspace along its coast were reserved until midday Wednesday, which would allow for restrictions on air travel. The areas include parts of the Strait of Taiwan near Fujian province and coastal regions of Zhejiang province and Shanghai. At least seven Chinese coast guard vessels were also reported near Taiwan as of Monday, including one of the world’s longest coast guard patrol ships, the Haijing 2901.

In response to recent Chinese military activities, Taiwan’s military said it had launched a war-preparedness drill, which includes air-defense and anti-landing operations. Meanwhile, the island’s coast guard said it immediately deployed patrols to match the Chinese coast guard vessels.

Lai Ching-te wore flag pins marking his first international tour as Taiwan’s president. Photo: Ritchie b Tongo/Shutterstock

Last week, Lai made several private calls with both Democratic and Republican heavyweights, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, during his Hawaii visit. Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan drew outrage from China.

He also held phone and video calls with members of Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., NY) and Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“I hope China will open its arms instead of clenching its fists. No matter how many military exercises, warships or warplanes are used to intimidate neighboring countries, it won’t earn anyone’s respect,” Lai told reporters in Palau before concluding his trip on Friday.

China previously launched drills in October following a speech by Lai and again in May, after his inauguration.

The latest Chinese maneuvers came days after Taiwanese officials said Russian navy ships had sailed past the island. The four Russian ships—three Steregushchiy-class corvettes and a fuel-supply ship—sailed near 24 nautical miles of Taiwan, in what appeared to be drills coordinated with Chinese warships.

“Russia and China have pledged to support each other’s core interests,” said Jacob Stokes, who served on then-Vice President Biden’s national-security staff and is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. “So, China supports Russia in Ukraine, and Russian exercises near Taiwan are part of Russia reciprocating by helping to pressure Taiwan.”

China and Russia carry out regular military drills together. In December 2022 they conducted exercises in the East China Sea, just to the north of Taiwan, that analysts said were likely meant to display the sort of quarantine and blockade capabilities that might be used in a conflict over Taiwan.

Write to Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com and Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com

11. If Hephaestus Doesn’t Answer: Supply Chains and Modern War

The classics remain relevant to this day.

As an aside, one of the books I continue to pick up and read parts of from time to time is Charles Hill's Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order. It is an incredible survey of the historical literature that relates to grand strategy that of course was used in Yale's Grand Strategy program. Just to go the prologue for the ultimate grand strategy bibliography.

CONTENTS

Works Discussed in This Book Prologue: Books of the Red Chamber

1 Classical Orders

2 Creative Disorder

3 Sources of Modern World Order

4 What Kind of State?

5 Enlightenment: Critique of Diplomacy, State, and System

6 America: A New Idea”

7 Disorder and War

8 The Imported State

9 The Writer and the State Epilogue: Talleyrand and Everything Else Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index

Excerpts:

As the United States seeks to maintain a rules-based international order, the supply chains that equip America’s military forces are essential—both in deterrence and in conflict. How might the epic battle between the two heroes of the Trojan War have ended if Hephaestus had not provided Achilles with his shield? The Homeric legend implies Achilles’s demise. Only after deflecting Hector’s final spear throw with the shield is Achilles able to conquer his enemy.

While Achilles was fortunate to have an immortal blacksmith, the United States military relies on its defense industrial base. Like Achilles, the United States cannot afford for its own Hephaestus and his forge to falter. The world has changed significantly since World War II, but the ability to achieve mass is still a foundational principle of war. While retaining the capability and capacity to field and sustain their forces to achieve national objectives, nations now face a world of weaponized interdependence. However, DoD’s existing structure does not elevate supply chains as a means of competition and warfare. Establishing a combatant command with the authorities to assess, plan, and act through the defense industrial base is a critical function so America’s Hephaestus will answer when its military calls.

If Hephaestus Doesn’t Answer: Supply Chains and Modern War - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Evan Hanson · December 10, 2024

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In Homer’s The Iliad, Achilles and Hector epically dueled to settle the Trojan War. Each lunged and parried, clashing together with swords and throwing spears. After several misses, the legendary Hector threw his last spear—striking the shield that Hephaestus, god of the forge, previously gifted Achilles. Recognizing his fate, Hector cried out before Achilles delivered the final blow.

Since the end of the Gulf War, the US military could count on its Hephaestus—the defense industrial base, which encompasses the companies and government organizations that design, produce, and sustain America’s military arsenal. As the United States’ predominant national security focus shifts to counter Chinese aggression, the Department of Defense must confront emerging threats that target the defense industrial base and the US military’s ability to sustain operations in conflict. Beyond strategies, policy, and investment, the US military needs to create a command to develop national contingency plans to mobilize and sustain the materiel required by the joint force and, in the event of conflict, interdict adversary supply chains through partnerships across the government.

Globalization, Complexity, and Adversaries

The need is born from several global trends. Foremost, the US economy relies heavily on imports for products today. Since 1979, domestic manufacturing employment across all sectors fell 34 percent and this trend continued into the twenty-first century. American manufacturing lost an estimated five million jobs since 2000, approximately a quarter of the country’s industrial workforce. The trend comes as many employees are retiring. To meet the increased demands of Stinger missiles in the Ukraine war, RTX’s Raytheon division president described how the company asked “retired employees that are in their 70s . . . to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger.” These global economic shifts shaped the defense industrial base’s sourcing decisions. According to a DoD report published in 2021, sixty thousand foreign companies designed, produced, and sustained US military weapons and equipment. This manufacturing exodus left US industry with a much smaller qualified workforce and fewer adequate facilities.

As the national economy globalized, US defense supply chains also grew in complexity. In a report titled “Securing Defense-Critical Supply Chains,” DoD cited work by McKinsey & Company showing how the average American aerospace company relies on two hundred tier-one suppliers—companies that directly provide materials for the manufacture of airplanes—and as many as twelve thousand tier-two (or higher) suppliers. Increasing lead times for weapons system manufacturing also indicate greater supply chain complexity. In June 2024, the Government Accountability Office found the average delivery time for a major defense acquisition program increased from eight to eleven years. The report described how DoD is “not yet well-positioned to field systems with speed”—reflecting the poor readiness of the defense industrial base to equip the joint force as America’s adversaries seek to diminish it.

China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have exploited vulnerabilities made possible by globalization and supply chain complexity. In 2012, the Senate Armed Services Committee released a report detailing 1,800 cases of Chinese-manufactured counterfeit electronic parts identified on Air Force aircraft, special operations helicopter assemblies, and a Navy surveillance platform. Alongside supply chain sabotage, China has achieved global market dominance in rare earth elements, ensuring 90 percent of processing capacity exists within China’s borders and nearly guaranteeing US dependence for minerals critical to weapons systems. Moreover, China’s efforts to erode US military readiness in the cyber domain led FBI Director Christopher Wray to describe the state-sponsored intellectual property theft as “one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history,” a strategy that China shows no sign of stopping.

Iran and North Korea have also leveraged cyberspace to target the US defense industrial base. In April 2024, the Department of the Treasury sanctioned individuals associated with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber Electronic Command based on evidence of spear phishing and malware attacks against US companies and government agencies. Aimed at the US and allied defense industrial base, North Korea’s cyber ranks are specifically target businesses that provide components for nuclear weapons and aviation systems.

Alongside China’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s employment of these tactics in the gray zone, Russia is targeting European infrastructure and the defense industrial base as part of its ongoing war in Ukraine. In May 2024, a factory that produces air-defense systems on the outskirts of Berlin mysteriously caught fire, an event that Western intelligence officials later described as arson conducted by Russian agents. An analysis published by Chatham House described the incident as part of “a much broader, and more serious Russian campaign of sabotage [that] is spanning the whole of Europe,” citing suspected Russian operations against Swedish railroads as well as GPS jamming in the Baltic Sea region.

These conditions—globalization, supply chain complexity, and adversary interdiction—threaten US national defense and economic security in ways unforeseen thirty years ago. Asymmetric aggression against the US and allied defense industrial base, whether by targeting access to critical minerals or by undercutting industry initiatives, diminish US military readiness. In a world where the United States’ ability to replace weapons systems is in question, adversaries may be more willing to take risk initiating conflict to maximize attrition at the outset. If deterrence fails, the defense industrial base’s dependence on imports, its limited specialized facilities, equipment, and qualified personnel, and the long lead times involved in producing exquisite weapons systems will aggravate industrial mobilization. The risk isn’t solely a matter of cybersecurity or counterintelligence. The competition ranges from national economic policy and intellectual property protections to the availability of a qualified workforce and access to materials and processing facilities—both in the gray zone and in conflict. This situation calls for a functional supply chain approach as America’s adversaries hone the techniques and tactics to undercut the US defense industrial base and deny the military’s access to the weapons it requires.

Overcoming the Tragedy of the Commons in Defense Supply Chains

Facing cyberattacks, supply chain sabotage, and economic strategies that underwrite adversary militaries, how prepared is the US military and the defense industrial base to respond to a potential conflict? Despite strategies, investment, policy, and the crescendo of senior defense officials describing the homeland as “no longer a sanctuary,” fundamental concerns persist as DoD seeks to solve these challenges through a trickle-down approach.

In 2022, the secretary of defense established the Office of Strategic Capital to “attract and scale investment to national security priorities.” Subsequently published in 2023, the National Defense Industrial Strategy identifies critical capabilities with a plan to implement solutions. DoD’s Industrial Base Policy also directs the program offices responsible for acquisition on behalf of the military services through rules and regulations, in addition to what is required by law.

Despite the progress of these initiatives, this approach disaggregates roles, responsibilities, authorities, and accountability. The joint force receives parts and equipment from a diaspora of service-specific sustainment organizations, the Defense Logistics Agency, and seventy-five program executive offices. All these organizations benefit from insights into industrial base capacity, but none have the purview (or incentive) to spend resources addressing whole-of-department threats. While sufficient in a permissive supply chain environment, the existing national security architecture needs reform to sense and respond because industrial capacity is contested.

Organize to Compete and Win

Industrial capacity to replenish the US military arsenal is so foundational to combat capability that it should be considered a weapons system and a command established to wield it. Reflecting supply chains, its purview should be global. The command’s perspective must also extend to the entire joint force, with focus shared between deterring US adversaries through their supply chains and leveraging America’s industrial capacity in conflict. The only way to properly elevate the function is through establishment of a supply chain combatant command.

Even if this command diverts resources from other DoD organizations and takes multiple years to realize, the scope, scale, and persisting relevance of global supply chains require it. This command should be composed of military and civilian logistics, civil engineering, acquisitions, intelligence, operations, and finance professionals from across the military services. Following the US Space Force model, the command should incorporate existing organizations such as the Defense Logistics Agency and reinstitute the Industrial Preparedness Planning Program. Until it was eliminated in a 1991 cost-cutting measure—part of the so-called peace dividend at the end of the Cold War—this DoD program had more than four hundred full-time staff, including armed services production planning officers who assessed the capacity of planned producers. Reestablishing this program with previously assigned resources is a start.

A Command on Offense . . .

Like a company seeking to corner a new market, this command should aggressively seek to deter and engage adversary military forces globally through their military supply chains. Partnering with the intelligence community, other combatant commands, and other departments across the government, this organization would assess adversary vulnerabilities and develop options for achieving global supply chain effects that support US national security interests. Through functional intelligence assessments, target development, and supply chain interdiction campaign plans, this command would provide vital expertise across DoD. Blocking access to critical materials or technology, disrupting the flow of supplies, or influencing adversary decision-making through the readiness of opposing forces can yield tremendous military advantage.

Evidence demonstrates that this approach goes beyond theory. In response to the small, low-cost drones employed by terrorist organizations in the Middle East, the US Army’s Threat Systems Management Office undertook tests to develop counterdrone technology. By purchasing drone components on the open market for its red team, the US Army “unwittingly interdicted militant weapon components,” forcing the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to redesign battlefield drones.

This approach also offers promise in great power competition. Detailed in Underground Empire by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, the United States leveraged authorities across the government to block the global expansion of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei over its ties to the People’s Liberation Army. Meng Wanzhou, the company’s CFO and daughter of the founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, was arrested in Canada on bank fraud charges given her role in selling equipment to Iran in violation of US export controls. Through the investigation, the United States gathered sufficient evidence to impose additional sanctions on Huawei and prevent the company from sourcing from TSMC—the world’s largest chip manufacturer. This example sheds light on how authorities across the Departments of Justice, State, the Treasury, Commerce, and Defense can be applied to achieve US national security interests, but differing interests across these agencies and within DoD prevent such techniques from being employed to achieve military effects at scale.

This command would operate in partnership to achieve these effects across the conflict spectrum. For example, global supply chain analysis could inform fires by a cruiser assigned to US European Command. This command could also work with US Cyber Command to exploit a vulnerability in an adversary’s military inventory system or US Special Operations Command to sabotage key logistics infrastructure. Whether developing a nonkinetic plan to exploit an adversary’s vulnerability or identifying a supply chain node for a kinetic attack in conflict, the proposed command would work across the interagency to incorporate these techniques to achieve military outcomes.

. . . And Defending America’s Industrial Capacity

This command must also better understand and integrate America’s industrial capacity. Compared to China’s defense industrial base, which is already postured for war and blurs the line between private and public sectors with state-owned enterprises, US law clearly distinguishes between the military and the contractors who support it. The American system has its advantages—including private sector innovation and specialization—but lacks the overarching coordination inherent to a centralized system like the Chinese Communist Party government. Facing a peer competitor that undercuts its suppliers, the US military must establish a command organization to deliver options for industrial base responsiveness.

Building on “directive sourcing” regulations that enable the US government to circumvent regulations regarding competitive bidding to purchase from US and allied suppliers when national security interests are served by doing so, the proposed command should be tasked to develop the civil reserve industrial base—identifying specialized industrial capacity across the country that could be mobilized and controlled by DoD in wartime. Just as US law authorizes the military to leverage transportation from American airline companies through the Civil Reserve Air Fleet or ships through the Voluntary Intermodal Sealift Agreement, an equivalent program for the industrial base would sustain necessary discussions about national capacity across the private and public sectors.

With industrial capacity assessments and planning factors provided by the joint force, the command would be positioned to evaluate the level of sustainment risk associated with war plans across all theaters, advise senior defense officials on the state of essential industrial capacity, and develop twenty-first-century options for a Graduated Mobilization Response. The US military must consider how it will respond to attrition and protraction, especially because of weapons system complexity and the limited domestic manufacturing capacity relative to the World War II era. This command must integrate reemerging requirements the US military has not recently been forced to consider, including plans and orders for the rapid integration of the organic industrial base to support other service requirements. For example, a US Air Force unit like the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex should be ready to rapidly deliver requirements for a US Navy destroyer depending on the capabilities required and global priorities.

Lastly, this command should also be tasked to work alongside allied nations to integrate military sustainment activities and respective industrial bases. The DoD 2024 Regional Sustainment Framework envisions “distributed maintenance and repair capabilities closer to the point of need,” but does not address how the department would share supply information or optimize transportation requirements—essential integration in time of war. It is time for a global integrator of industrial capacity, considering requirements from across the services and America’s allies. Offensively and defensively, DoD should wield the defense industrial base and establish a command to lead it.

As the United States seeks to maintain a rules-based international order, the supply chains that equip America’s military forces are essential—both in deterrence and in conflict. How might the epic battle between the two heroes of the Trojan War have ended if Hephaestus had not provided Achilles with his shield? The Homeric legend implies Achilles’s demise. Only after deflecting Hector’s final spear throw with the shield is Achilles able to conquer his enemy.

While Achilles was fortunate to have an immortal blacksmith, the United States military relies on its defense industrial base. Like Achilles, the United States cannot afford for its own Hephaestus and his forge to falter. The world has changed significantly since World War II, but the ability to achieve mass is still a foundational principle of war. While retaining the capability and capacity to field and sustain their forces to achieve national objectives, nations now face a world of weaponized interdependence. However, DoD’s existing structure does not elevate supply chains as a means of competition and warfare. Establishing a combatant command with the authorities to assess, plan, and act through the defense industrial base is a critical function so America’s Hephaestus will answer when its military calls.

Evan Hanson is an active duty major in the United States Air Force. A logistics readiness officer, he is currently assigned as an Air Force legislative fellow and serves as the chief information officer of the Logistics Officer Association.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Sean Dath, Naval Air Station Corpus Christi

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Evan Hanson · December 10, 2024

12. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 9, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-9-2024

The Kremlin continues to cautiously signal that it can ensure the security of Russian military bases in Syria in the short-term but notably has expressed uncertainty about the long-term future of the military bases against the backdrop of the volatile and rapidly evolving political situation in Syria. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on December 9 that the Russian military is taking all necessary precautions to ensure the security of Russian military bases in Syria and that Russia is "doing everything possible" to establish contact with those who can ensure the safety of Russian military personnel in Syria. Peskov noted that the Kremlin will host "serious discussions" with the future Syrian authorities about Russia's military bases in Khmeimim and Tartus at an unspecified future date but noted that it is currently too early to discuss maintaining these bases since such a discussion involves "those who will lead Syria." Kremlin newswire TASS reported on December 9, citing an unspecified source in Latakia Governorate, that Syrian opposition forces have full control over Latakia Governorate and Tartus City, but that Syrian opposition forces have not and do not intend to "invade" the Russian Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia City and the naval base at the Port of Tartus. The source added that both Russian bases are functioning normally. Russian state outlet RBK reported on December 9 that the Syrian National Coordination Committee's Foreign Relations Head Ahmed al Asrawi stated during a discussion about Russia's military bases in Syria that Syria would continue to uphold agreements that are in Syria's interest and would "never" take a hostile position toward Russia or any other friendly country. Russian milbloggers continued to debate the future of the Russian bases in Syria on December 8 and 9, expressing uncertainty about whether Russian forces will be able to maintain their presence in the country or will have to conduct a full evacuation. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) continues to assess that the potential loss of Russian bases in Syria will have major implications for Russia’s ability to project power in the Mediterranean Sea, threaten NATO's southern flank, and operate in Africa.

Russia has removed some vessels from the Port of Tartus to a nearby area offshore. Satellite imagery taken on December 9 shows that all Russian ships and submarines have left the Port of Tartus. OSINT analyst MT Anderson reported that satellite imagery taken on December 9 also shows that Russian vessels — likely the Admiral Gorshkov Gorskhov-class frigate, Admiral Grigorovich Grigorovich-class frigate, Novorossiysk Kilo-class submarine, and Vyazma Kaliningradneft-class oiler – are in a holding pattern in the roadstead about eight kilometers west of the port. The location of the other ships that were reportedly previously docked in the Port of Tartus, including the Admiral Golovko Gorskhov-class frigates and the Yelnya Altay-class oiler, is unclear. Syrian opposition leaders reportedly guaranteed on December 8 the security of Russian military institutions in Syria, and Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al Jalali stated on December 8 that the new Syrian authorities would make the decisions about the future of Russia's military bases in Syria. The current and future security of the Russian military bases in Syria remains unclear as Moscow continues to hold talks with the new Syrian authorities, and it is also unclear at this time if Russia is removing the vessels from the Port of Tartus as part of a wider evacuation or to better protect these military assets.

Key Takeaways:

The Kremlin continues to cautiously signal that it can ensure the security of Russian military bases in Syria in the short-term but notably has expressed uncertainty about the long-term future of the military bases against the backdrop of the volatile and rapidly evolving political situation in Syria.

Russia has removed some vessels from the Port of Tartus to a nearby area offshore.

The Syrian Embassy in Moscow confirmed to Kremlin newswire TASS on December 9 that former Syrian President Bashar al Assad is in Moscow.

Russia continues to face staggering costs required to maintain its war effort against Ukraine, with mounting economic strain, labor shortages, and systemic corruption threatening the sustainability of the Russian defense industrial base (DIB).

Russian President Vladimir Putin promoted Chechen Akhmat Spetsnaz Commander Apty Alaudinov and Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov amid ongoing Kremlin efforts to shift blame for Russia's inadequate response to Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast onto local government officials and away from the military.

The Russian government claimed to have returned the bodies of deceased Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) who were allegedly killed in the January 24 Russian Il-76 military transport aircraft crash in Belgorod Oblast.

Russian forces recently advanced near Pokrovsk and Velyka Novosilka.

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to highlight Russian officials who sponsor Russian volunteer units in Ukraine and the "Time of Heroes program," which places veterans of the war in Ukraine in leadership positions within the Russian federal and regional governments.

13. Iran Update, December 9, 2024

Iran Update, December 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-december-9-2024

Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) is establishing a transitional government and reconciling with members of the former Syrian regime and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). HTS is attempting to ensure continuity of governance to prevent widespread anarchy in Syria, which is consistent with HTS’ longstanding approach to “liberated areas.” HTS appointed HTS-led Syrian Salvation Government Prime Minister Mohammad al Bashir to lead the transitional government on December 9. HTS established the Salvation Government in northwestern Syria in 2017. Bashir met with HTS leader Abu Mohammed al Jolani and former Assad Regime Prime Minister Mohammed al Jalali on December 9 to discuss the transfer of power from the Assad regime to HTS. Jalali stated on December 8 that he and HTS agreed on “the importance of preserving government institutions and trying to return 400,000 employees to their jobs.” HTS-led Salvation Government Justice Minister Shadi al Waisi separately met with former Assad Regime Justice Minister Ahmed al Sayeh on December 9 to discuss “an efficient handover.” HTS has rapidly rolled out its own governance apparatus in areas of Syria it has liberated from the Assad Regime in the past. HTS likely correctly recognizes that it cannot rely upon its own much smaller and Idlib-focused government apparatus to govern all of Syria it has recently captured and will need to rely upon Syrian government institutions in the interim.

HTS announced on December 9 a general amnesty for all Syrian regime military personnel whom the regime conscripted under compulsory service. HTS emphasized that these individuals’ lives “are safe” and that “no assault on them is permitted.” HTS has similarly sought to integrate Syrian regime military and security personnel into civilian life in Aleppo City since it seized that city on November 30. CTP-ISW previously noted that integrating former combatants into civilian life could ensure stability and security during the post-conflict transition period.

Key Takeaways:

Syrian Transitional Government Formation: Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) is establishing a transitional government and reconciling with former Syrian regime and Syrian Arab Army (SAA) members. HTS likely attempting to improve its image among the Syrian people and international community by framing itself as an organization that is devoted to building a pluralist Syrian state.

Northeastern Syria: The Kurdish-controlled, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) may face increased challenges governing Arab areas in northeastern Syria due to the emergence of the HTS-led transitional government as a viable alternative to the SDF. The Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) is also attacking the SDF as the SDF contends with internal dissent.

Israel in Syria: The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continued to establish a buffer zone in Syria along the Golan Heights on December 9. The IDF Air Force continued conducting airstrikes targeting former SAA and Lebanese Hezbollah sites in Syria on December 9.

Iraq and Iran in Syria: The fall of the Assad regime has exposed fissures between Iran and Iraq. Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Abbas Araghchi was “surprised” during his visit to Baghdad on December 6 that the Iraqi federal government refused to send forces to Syria to defend the Assad regime.

Iranian Syria Policy: Iran is attempting to reframe its role in the Syrian Civil War to reestablish influence within the new Syrian government.

Iranian Reactions to Assad’s Collapse: Members of Iran’s armed forces and Iranian policymakers are increasingly disillusioned with Iran’s handling of the collapse of the Assad Regime.

14. South Korea's democracy held after a 6-hour power play. What does it say for democracies elsewhere?

Democracies are fragile but it is the people who can keep them strong and resilient.

We should never forget Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

South Korea's democracy held after a 6-hour power play. What does it say for democracies elsewhere?

By LAURIE KELLMAN and KIM TONG-HYUNG

Updated 6:48 AM EST, December 9, 2024

AP · by KIM TONG-HYUNG · December 8, 2024

South Korea’s democracy held after a 6-hour power play. What does it say for democracies elsewhere?

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — In an era of rising authoritarianism, at the heels of a six-hour martial law decree that unfolded while many South Koreans slept, something noteworthy happened: Democracy held.

The past week in Seoul, officials and academics warn, is what a threat to democracy looks like in 2024. It’s a democratically elected president declaring martial law over the nation he leads, asserting sweeping powers to prevent opposition demonstrations, ban political parties and control the media. It’s members of the military attempting to block lawmakers from exercising their power to vote on cancelling the power grab.

And here’s what it took to defeat President Yoon Suk Yeol ‘s lurch toward government by force:

Unified popular support for democracy. Legislators storming the National Assembly past midnight, live-streaming themselves climbing over fences. A politician grabbing at a soldier’s rifle and yelling “Aren’t you ashamed?” until he retreated. And finally, decisively, Parliament assembling a quorum and voting unanimously to cancel martial law.

It was a victory for a hard-won democracy — and for the idea that checks and balances among branches of government must work to counteract each other’s ambitions, as the American founders wrote in the Federalist Papers in 1788.

But as the drama played out in Seoul, the scaffolding of democracy rattled around the world.

It said something about the rule of law

In other countries, the grab for power might have worked. Other would-be authoritarians might have been better prepared than Yoon.

In deeply polarized societies — the United States, for example, where Republicans are staunchly loyal to president-elect Donald Trump — there might not have been decisive support from the public or the opposition. The military might have used force. And the members of the legislature might not have voted as one to snuff out the attempted takeover.

“President Yoon’s attempt to declare martial law reveals the fragility of the rule of law in divided societies, especially those with governments in which the chief executive cannot be easily dismissed by the legislature,” said Tom Pepinsky, a government professor at Cornell University who studies backsliding among democracies in Southeast Asia.

Notably, he said in an email, “No members of President Yoon’s own party were willing to defend his actions in public.”

Nevertheless, Yoon’s surprise attempt to impose martial law revealed both the fragility and resilience of the country’s democratic system.

Within three hours of his stunning announcement to impose military rule — claiming the opposition was “paralyzing” state affairs — 190 lawmakers voted to cancel his actions. In so doing, they demonstrated the strength of the country’s democratic checks and balances.

Yoon’s authoritarian push, carried out by hundreds of heavily armed troops with Blackhawk helicopters and armored vehicles sent to the National Assembly, harked back to an era of dictatorial presidents. The country’s democratic transition in the late 1980s came after years of massive protests by millions that eventually overcame violent suppressions by military rulers.

Civilian presence was again crucial in shaping the events following Yoon’s late night television announcement on Tuesday. Thousands of people flocked to the National Assembly, shouting slogans for martial law to be lifted and Yoon to step down from power. There were no reports of violent clashes with troops and police officers.

“We restored democracy without having a single casualty this time,” said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociology professor at South Korea’s Jeonbuk National University.

It’s not that easy to become a dictator

It’s virtually impossible for any leader of a democracy to pull off a transition toward martial law without a public willing to support it, or at least tolerate it.

Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, who narrowly lost to Yoon in the 2022 presidential election, attracted millions of views as he began live-streaming his journey to the National Assembly, pleading for people to converge on the parliament to help lawmakers get inside. The shaky footage later shows him exiting his car climbing over a fence to get onto the grounds.

The vote at the National Assembly was also broadcast live on the YouTube channel of Assembly Speaker Woo Won Shik, who also had to scale a fence to get in.

Yoon’s sense of crisis clearly wasn’t shared by the public, whose opinions, Seol said, were shaped predominantly by the shocking videos broadcast to their devices.

“Ultimately, democracy is all about moving public opinion,” he said. “What was most crucial in this case was that everything was broadcast live on smartphones, YouTube and countless other media.”

Opposition lawmakers are now pushing to impeach Yoon, saying he failed to meet the constitutional requirement that martial law should only be considered in wartime or a comparable severe crisis — and that he unlawfully deployed troops to the National Assembly.

On Saturday, an opposition-led impeachment motion failed after most lawmakers from Yoon’s party boycotted the vote. Yet the president’s troubles persist: The vote’s defeat is expected to intensify nationwide protests and deepen South Korea’s political turmoil, with opposition parties preparing to introduce another impeachment motion when parliament reconvenes on Wednesday.

Han Sang-hie, a law professor at Seoul’s Konkuk University, said the martial law debacle highlights what he sees as the most crucial flaw of South Korea’s democracy: that it places too much power in the hands of the president, which is easily abused and often goes unchecked.

It’s called a ‘self-coup’

Political scientists call what happened in South Korea an “autogolpe” — a “self-coup” — defined as one led by incumbent leaders themselves, in which an executive takes or sponsors illegal actions against others in the government. Yoon qualifies because he used troops to try to shut down South Korea’s legislature.

Self-coups are increasing, with a third of the 46 since 1945 occurring in the past decade, according to a study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Penn State University. About 80% of self-coups succeed, they reported.

In 2021, a power grab by Tunisian President Kais Saied raised similar concerns around the world after the country designed a democracy from scratch and won a Nobel Peace Prize after a largely bloodless revolution.

In the United States, some have expresed worry about similar situations arising during the second administration of Donald Trump. He has vowed, after all, to shake some of democracy’s pillars. He’s mused that he would be justified if he decided to pursue “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” That’s in contrast to the oath of office he took in 2017, and will again next year, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” as best he can.

Nearly half of voters in the Nov. 5 election, which Trump won, said they were “very concerned” that another Trump presidency would bring the U.S. closer to authoritarianism, according to AP Votecast survey data.

Asked before a live audience on Fox News Channel in 2023 to assure Americans that he would not abuse power or use the presidency to seek retribution against anyone, Trump replied, “except for day one,” when he’ll close the border and “drill, drill, drill.”

After that, Trump said, “I’m not a dictator.”

___

Kellman reported from London.

KIM TONG-HYUNG

Kim has been covering the Koreas for the AP since 2014. He has published widely read stories on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, the dark side of South Korea’s economic rise and international adoptions of Korean children.

twitter mailto

AP · by KIM TONG-HYUNG · December 8, 2024

15. MDA conducts first-ever ballistic missile intercept test from Guam

Excerpts:

The agency is establishing a combined command center on the island that will host all of the “major command and control systems in the missile defense business,” Collins said in an interview with Defense News this summer. Component include the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System, the Navy’s Aegis weapon system and the Aegis ground system being built for Guam, the Air Force’s C2 system and the agency’s Command Control Battle Management and Communications system, known as C2BMC.

The architecture also relies on a variety of systems still in development, mostly within the Army. The Navy will provide technology and capability from its Aegis weapon system. The land service plans to bring currently fielded capability like the Patriot system and its IBCS that connects any sensor and shooter together on the battlefield, as well as Mid-Range Capability missile launchers, which were first fielded at the end of last year.

The Army will also incorporate Patriot’s radar replacement, the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, and its Indirect Fire Protection Capability launchers currently in prototype testing and evaluation.

While the test represents a step forward, over the next year or so, the island “will look like it pretty much looks today,” Collins told Defense News. “Our first construction money to start building on the island is ‘25 so we will, by the end of ‘25, we will have begun some military construction on some of the sites.”

MDA conducts first-ever ballistic missile intercept test from Guam

Defense News · by Jen Judson · December 10, 2024

The Missile Defense Agency intercepted an incoming ballistic missile threat target in a test from Guam, according to a Tuesday agency announcement.

The test is the “first ballistic missile defense event executed from Guam,” the statement notes.

As the Pentagon works to build an integrated air and missile defense architecture on Guam, this is the first test of a portion of the future capability designed to protect the key strategic island from emerging and evolving threats.

“Within the context of homeland defense, a top priority for the Department of Defense, Guam is also a strategic location for sustaining and maintaining United States military presence, deterring adversaries, responding to crises, and maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific region,” the statement says.

In the test, an Aegis Guam System with an AN/TPY-6 radar and Vertical Launching System fired a Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor, which then took out an air-launched Medium Range Ballistic Missile target flying off the coast of Andersen Air Force Base, according to the statement.

The AN/TPY-6 radar, a new MDA system designed specifically for the Guam architecture and delivered there earlier this year, tracked the target from shortly after launch to the intercept, the statement says.

The new radar uses technology from MDA’s Long-Range Discrimination Radar positioned in Alaska at Clear Space Force Station, which will have its own test next year ahead of declaring operational capability.

“This is a tremendous group effort and provides a glimpse of how organizations within the Department of Defense have come together to defend our homeland Guam now and in the future,” Lt. Gen. Heath Collins, MDA director, said in the statement. “Collectively, we will use this to build upon and validate joint tracking architecture and integrated air and missile defense capabilities for Guam.”

The test data will feed into continued concept development, requirements validation and modeling for the future Guam Defense System, or GDS, the statement adds.

GDS will be built using a variety of components from the services. The U.S. Army was assigned in 2023 to lead the acquisition and execution plan for the Guam architecture, and the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office lead – a three-star general – was appointed to stand up a joint team for seeing it through.

MDA’s role now is focused primarily on developing the means to tie all the systems together that will be part of the GDS architecture.

The agency is establishing a combined command center on the island that will host all of the “major command and control systems in the missile defense business,” Collins said in an interview with Defense News this summer. Component include the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System, the Navy’s Aegis weapon system and the Aegis ground system being built for Guam, the Air Force’s C2 system and the agency’s Command Control Battle Management and Communications system, known as C2BMC.

The architecture also relies on a variety of systems still in development, mostly within the Army. The Navy will provide technology and capability from its Aegis weapon system. The land service plans to bring currently fielded capability like the Patriot system and its IBCS that connects any sensor and shooter together on the battlefield, as well as Mid-Range Capability missile launchers, which were first fielded at the end of last year.

The Army will also incorporate Patriot’s radar replacement, the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, and its Indirect Fire Protection Capability launchers currently in prototype testing and evaluation.

While the test represents a step forward, over the next year or so, the island “will look like it pretty much looks today,” Collins told Defense News. “Our first construction money to start building on the island is ‘25 so we will, by the end of ‘25, we will have begun some military construction on some of the sites.”

About Jen Judson

Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

16. The shallow Baltic Sea holds deep secrets about a hybrid war on NATO

Excerpts:

What exactly is going on here is hard to say. While China has an interest in undermining the West, broadly speaking, in its quest to replace the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower, it has little reason to be focused on the Baltic Sea in particular. Nor does it have a significant track record of similar actions in parts of the world more relevant to China’s immediate geopolitical ambitions, though it has used some methods that could be considered hybrid tactics in the disputed archipelagos of the South China Sea.

Several experts interviewed for this story said they considered it highly unlikely the Chinese government was directly involved. However, with Chinese shipping companies being among the few that still conduct business with Russia, they said there is a chance of their ships being employed – even unknowingly – for nefarious actions.

Both of the Chinese ships involved in the recent Baltic incidents had fairly close ties to Russia, beyond simply coming from a Russian port when the damage took place. The Economist has previously reported that the Newnew Polar Bear, linked to the damaged pipeline between Estonia and Finland, had a number of ties to Russia, including through its ownership, crew, prior voyages and shipping contracts.

While less is known so far about the 225-meter-long Yi Peng 3, reporting has emerged that suggests similar connections. Erik Kannike, an Estonia-based defense consultant, found that Russian federal port records listed the captain of the ship as being a Russian citizen. He also pointed out that the vessel’s ownership was only transferred to the current company about a month before the incident. The presence of a Russian warship near the site of ongoing investigations further suggests Russian interest in the case.

Among the unresolved questions, one thing is certain: The Baltic Sea has shaped up to be a new frontier in the geopolitical cat-and-mouse game that has engulfed Europe since the escalation of the war in Ukraine.

With surveillance technology still allowing attacks on sea floor infrastructure to go unnoticed, more incidents testing the waters may only be a matter of time.

The shallow Baltic Sea holds deep secrets about a hybrid war on NATO

Defense News · by Linus Höller · December 9, 2024

BERLIN — The shallow waters of the Baltic Sea have become a secondary arena of confrontation in the larger standoff between the East and the West. Fears of hybrid warfare, coupled with key vulnerabilities on both sides, make this narrow stretch of water one of the key areas to watch as hybrid warfare activities expand and NATO bolsters its eastern flank.

Recent events show just how seriously both sides are taking the challenge.

When two undersea cables were severed in mid-November – one connecting Germany to Finland, and one Lithuania to a Swedish island – Germany’s defense minister was quick to announce that “no one believes that these cables were cut accidentally,” hammering the point home by adding that “we have to assume … it is sabotage.”

Soon after the cables were cut, armed vessels from several Baltic Sea states, including Denmark, Sweden and Germany, approached a Chinese ship that they suspected of having been responsible for the rupture, the Yi Peng 3, making its way toward the Atlantic. Visible damage on the ship’s anchor and hull, seen by journalists from a Danish state broadcaster, suggested it may have dragged its anchor across the sea floor in an effort to cause damage.

NATO draws up plans for its own fleet of naval surveillance drones

Officials envision fielding a network of drone-based sensors for keeping tabs on vital undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic and Mediterranean seas.

Satellite-based ship tracking data implies a tense standoff with the ship stopped just a short distance outside of Danish territorial waters and being watched over by armed European vessels. A Russian warship was keeping nearby, spotted on satellite imagery. The ship’s owner, China-based Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, told the Financial Times that “the government has asked the company to cooperate with the investigation.”

It wasn’t the first time that undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea mysteriously and violently disconnected. It wasn’t even the first time that a Chinese cargo ship had dragged its anchor across a cable connecting two NATO states and caused considerable damage in doing so. In October 2023, the Newnew Polar Bear damaged a gas pipeline and data cables in the same manner.

And in September 2022, months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany exploded, leaving a gaping hole and taking them out of commission. While much blame was initially heaped on Russia, the Kremlin has denied any wrongdoing, and additional evidence has emerged since that complicates the picture. A perpetrator has not been publicly identified, although German authorities have issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man in connection with the incident.

So, what is going on in the Baltic Sea, and why is it suddenly so important?

A NATO ‘lake’?

With the recent accession of Finland and Sweden – two previously longtime neutral states – to NATO, many Western observers triumphantly declared the 386,000 square kilometer sea a “NATO lake.” Russia, whose empire once controlled roughly half the coastline here, now holds on to only about 700 kilometers around Saint Petersburg and its Kaliningrad exclave wedged between Lithuania and Poland. Both are incredibly valuable to Moscow: Kaliningrad is heavily militarized and serves as the headquarters of the Baltic fleet, while Saint Petersburg is one of the region’s most important financial centers and plays a major role in Russian foreign trade.

Kaliningrad is also Russia’s only year-round ice-free port in the Baltic. And the territory’s forward position much closer to Western Europe makes it prime real estate for stationing bombers and missiles, according to Moscow’s calculus.

For Russia, as for the other states sharing the Baltic coastline, the sea and its narrow connection to the open Atlantic through the Danish Straits is a crucial link to global trade and commerce. Things get crowded there: Around 2,000 ships are in the Baltic at any given time, and the trade volume amounts to about 15% of the global total, according to the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission HELCOM.

NATO drill sends divers, drones to sneak by underwater alarm sensors

Alliance officials are stepping up efforts to secure critical underwater infrastructure.

It’s not just what’s on the water but what lies under it that has attracted attention – wanted and unwanted. Beneath the waves stretch dozens of cables transporting power and information between the tightly interconnected European countries on either side of the straits. These pieces of undersea infrastructure crisscross through national and international waters, under shipping lanes and across the exit from the Gulf of Finland, which harbors Saint Petersburg. They are joined by other maritime infrastructure usually found closer to the shore, like liquefied natural gas terminals taking deliveries of gas from countries that Europe has better relations with than Russia, and wind farms that were developed to bolster Europe’s energy independence.

The cutting of undersea cables is not a new hybrid warfare tactic. During World War I, both the British and German navies severed the opposing side’s underwater telegraph lines. The idea of hybrid warfare likely has become attractive for Russia due to the military imbalance with the West: Moscow avoids engaging in outright war by employing plausible deniability while still having the potential to undermine Western infrastructure, resolve and cohesion, explained Sebastian Bruns, a senior researcher at the Kiel, Germany-based Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University (ISPK).

“With thousands of kilometers of cables spread across the world’s oceans, it is practically impossible to ‘protect’ them all in an efficient way,” said Basil Germond, a professor of international relations at Lancaster University who researches naval affairs and maritime security. Instead, redundancy and deterrence must be employed. If a network is redundant enough, there will be no significant impact from an attack unless it is large-scale and coordinated, he argued.

Military posturing

The crowdedness and strategic importance of the Baltic to its neighbors means that it has played a central role in these countries’ defense policies. For Russia, access to the Baltic Sea is vital to keep Kaliningrad supplied, as the exclave lacks a direct land connection to Russia and is surrounded by NATO members. To others, like Sweden, it presents the country’s longest frontier and one that is remarkably tough to guard: With archipelagos, bays and sounds, there are plenty of places for unwelcome guests to hide, which led to repeated submarine hunts during the Cold War years.

As a result, Sweden and other Baltic states have developed uniquely adapted navies and military doctrines for the Baltic littoral environment. The Swedish navy operates a fleet of five submarines designed for brown-water operations near land – and is constructing two more – in contrast to the blue-water, deep-sea navies of other NATO states, and a set of seven minesweepers and other boats designed to operate close to shore.

The Baltic Sea is a unique environment, boasting an average depth of just around 55 meters. It is also considered brackish water (an in-between level between salt- and freshwater) due to the many rivers that empty into it. Layers of varying salinity provide ideal conditions for submarines to hide, especially the smaller ones capable of operating in the Baltic in the first place.

States around the Baltic Sea have been some of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters, given their own proximity to Russia. Particularly the Baltic nations have sent outsized contributions to Kyiv’s defensive war effort: Estonia and Lithuania gave 1.8% of their GDP to Ukraine and Latvia 1.5%, according to a report by the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank.

In September, NATO announced it would open a naval command center for the Baltic Sea in the German coastal city of Rostock to “coordinate naval activities in the region” and provide NATO with a “maritime situation picture in the Baltic Sea region around the clock,” according to the German military. Staff from 11 other alliance countries will be present at the HQ.

This map, last updated Dec. 12, 2023, shows active and planned subsea cables in the European region. Cable-tracker TeleGeography estimates there were about 870,000 miles of subsea cables in service globally as of early 2023. (TeleGeography via https://www.submarinecablemap.com)

Russia decried the move as a violation of an agreement that no NATO forces would be moved to the territory of the former GDR, which the USSR had considered a precondition to agree to German reunification following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German government in 1989.

German defense minister Boris Pistorius argued the naval command center was necessary to “ensure that Putin will not have his way,” referring to Russian President Vladmir Putin.

According to experts, the quick response to the most recent case of severed cables shows that European preparation has worked. Efforts led by NATO have focused on better surveillance and operational coordination, said Christian Bueger, author of the book “Understanding Maritime Security” and professor at the University of Copenhagen. The involved governments’ reaction to the Yi Peng 3 incident “clearly indicates that the strategy and coordination on the NATO level work well now,” he said.

Simultaneously, the increased attention has galvanized scrutiny of national and international legal frameworks for protecting undersea infrastructure and interdicting ships. Some countries, such as Belgium, have moved to introduce legislation criminalizing damage to critical infrastructure. On the other side of Europe, Portugal and Italy have led the charge in coordinating with industry and conducting legal reviews on the security of maritime infrastructure, said Bueger.

How is China involved?

The part of the story that continues to perplex analysts is the China connection.

In both recent incidents, it was Chinese civilian vessels that appear to have dragged their heavy anchors along the seafloor for large distances on their way out of Russian waters and toward the open Atlantic, a pattern that has baffled marine experts. It is unlikely such a thing would happen accidentally, most say, and even less likely that it would go unnoticed by the crew for long stretches. Suspicious movement of the vessels near crucial undersea infrastructure and away from typical shipping routes further suggests intentionality rather than accidents.

In both cases last month, the Chinese government rejected any claims that it had been involved. Additionally, Chinese authorities appeared cooperative and, in the case of the damaged gas pipeline and data cables between Estonia and Finland, later even publicly stated that their ship had accidentally caused the damage.

Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on the more recent incident involving the cables around Estonia, Sweden and Finland that “China maintains communication with relevant parties, including Denmark, through diplomatic channels.” Reporting from governments involved in the investigation seemed to support this and indicate a generally constructive attitude.

What exactly is going on here is hard to say. While China has an interest in undermining the West, broadly speaking, in its quest to replace the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower, it has little reason to be focused on the Baltic Sea in particular. Nor does it have a significant track record of similar actions in parts of the world more relevant to China’s immediate geopolitical ambitions, though it has used some methods that could be considered hybrid tactics in the disputed archipelagos of the South China Sea.

Several experts interviewed for this story said they considered it highly unlikely the Chinese government was directly involved. However, with Chinese shipping companies being among the few that still conduct business with Russia, they said there is a chance of their ships being employed – even unknowingly – for nefarious actions.

Both of the Chinese ships involved in the recent Baltic incidents had fairly close ties to Russia, beyond simply coming from a Russian port when the damage took place. The Economist has previously reported that the Newnew Polar Bear, linked to the damaged pipeline between Estonia and Finland, had a number of ties to Russia, including through its ownership, crew, prior voyages and shipping contracts.

While less is known so far about the 225-meter-long Yi Peng 3, reporting has emerged that suggests similar connections. Erik Kannike, an Estonia-based defense consultant, found that Russian federal port records listed the captain of the ship as being a Russian citizen. He also pointed out that the vessel’s ownership was only transferred to the current company about a month before the incident. The presence of a Russian warship near the site of ongoing investigations further suggests Russian interest in the case.

Among the unresolved questions, one thing is certain: The Baltic Sea has shaped up to be a new frontier in the geopolitical cat-and-mouse game that has engulfed Europe since the escalation of the war in Ukraine.

With surveillance technology still allowing attacks on sea floor infrastructure to go unnoticed, more incidents testing the waters may only be a matter of time.

About Linus Höller

Linus Höller is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He covers international security and military developments across the continent. Linus holds a degree in journalism, political science and international studies, and is currently pursuing a master’s in nonproliferation and terrorism studies.

Defense News · by Linus Höller · December 9, 2024

17. Will senior enlisted troops see a targeted pay boost in 2026?

They should have seen them in 2025.

Will senior enlisted troops see a targeted pay boost in 2026?

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · December 9, 2024

Junior enlisted troops are poised to see a massive increase in base pay next year. Senior enlisted service members could be next in line.

Even as they were putting the finishing touches on service member quality of life reforms in this year’s defense authorization bill, lawmakers were already looking ahead at the next steps for improving pay and benefits for troops.

At the Reagan National Defense Forum this weekend, Virginia Republican Rep. Rob Wittman — a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee — told Military Times that leaders on the panel have already begun discussion on boosting pay for senior enlisted troops in an effort to help with recruiting and retention challenges in the ranks.

The authorization bill, which sets plans for $850 billion in Defense Department spending for fiscal 2025, is expected to be voted on by the full House this week. It includes a 4.5% pay raise for all service members in 2025 but an additional 10% pay boost for troops rank E-1 through E-4.

Congress to boost junior enlisted pay by thousands of dollars in 2025

Troops E-4 and below will see a 14.5% pay raise under a deal reached by congressional negotiators this week.

If approved, it will mean between $3,000 and $6,000 more annually for those individuals, and bring nearly every junior service member’s base pay above $30,000 annually. Improving pay for junior enlisted had been a major priority of House lawmakers this year, and Wittman said he is pleased with the final compromise.

“This [authorization bill] is for E-1 through E-4, so the next effort has to be from E-5 to E-9,” Wittman said. “I think the officer corps is in fairly good shape, too, because there was an overall salary increase in the bill. ... The next step we’ll have to take is for senior enlisted. There are folks that are committed to doing that next year.”

Wittman would not speculate on what a pay bump for senior enlisted troops would look like, or if it would approach the extra 10% boost given to the younger troops. But he said Republican leaders on both his committee and the House Appropriations Committee are focused on the idea.

The nearly 1 million enlisted personnel currently serving in the armed forces are roughly evenly split between the junior enlisted and senior enlisted ranks. A pay raise of 10% for the more senior troops would cost more than the same raise for younger troops, because of the larger base pay service members with more experience receive.

According to estimates released by the Congressional Budget Office earlier this summer, the 14.5% pay raise for all junior enlisted troops is expected to cost around $10 billion over three years. Updated estimates are expected to be released in coming days.

Getting the junior enlisted pay raise in the final compromise authorization bill took a year of negotiations between House and Senate leaders. Whether a senior enlisted pay raise could survive the same gantlet is unclear.

House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., told Military Times he is skeptical about another large targeted pay boost in 2026.

“I think it’s just wildly speculative at this point,” he said. “If you’ve got a new administration that wants to cut $2 trillion out of a $6.5 trillion budget and defense is 13% of that, that’s a bit of a math problem. That math is not going to add up.”

The 4.5% pay raise for all troops next year is below the 5.2% boost military families saw at the start of 2024, but marks the third consecutive year of salary hikes over 4%.

About Leo Shane III and Noah Robertson

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.

18. The Middle East’s Dangerous New Normal

Excerpts:

This confluence of interests is useful but hardly sufficient to achieve the outcomes Trump desires. That is where the president-elect’s volatility and ruthlessness could be an unexpected asset. If Trump reinstates meaningful economic pressure on Iran and gives Israel some additional leeway for military action, he might better demonstrate U.S. capabilities and thus force Iran to reverse its current, uncompromising policy positions. A muscular U.S. approach has paid dividends in the past with an Iranian leadership whose foremost interest is in regime survival. Such an approach would likely be an improvement over that of the Biden administration, which relied almost exclusively on conciliation that Iran saw as weak and desperate. The result of the shift could be a real deal of the century: an abatement of the multipronged conflicts raging in the Middle East, a political horizon and reconstruction for the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and some nominal concessions from Tehran on its nuclear program and regional malfeasance.

Forging this deal will still be extremely difficult to achieve. During his first term, Trump’s unconventional diplomacy with another recalcitrant nuclear power, North Korea, ultimately went nowhere, and overall his administration achieved few notable breakthroughs in dealing with adversarial powers. Even if realized, a deal would not likely endure for very long. Iran’s leadership is steeped in antagonism toward both Israel and the United States, and the regime’s investment in its nuclear program and proxy network has been key to its survival strategy. Netanyahu, for his part, has found that a maximalist military approach yields spectacular strategic dividends along with domestic political benefits. And there is no shortage of other spoilers in this combustible region.

But even an ephemeral set of understandings could reduce the temperature in the Middle East. That would, in turn, enable Washington and the world to turn their attention to more daunting challenges—especially China and Russia. And any deal that stanches some of the bloodshed and reduces some of the risks, if only temporarily, just might earn Trump his much-desired Nobel Peace Prize.

The Middle East’s Dangerous New Normal

Foreign Affairs · by More by Suzanne Maloney · December 10, 2024

Iran, Israel, and the Delicate Balance of Disorder

Suzanne Maloney

January/February 2025 Published on December 10, 2024

Adnan Abidi / Reuters

Suzanne Maloney is Vice President of the Brookings Institution and Director of its Foreign Policy Program.

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On October 3, 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addressed a large crowd of government officials and international visitors in Tehran. As he approached his conclusion, Khamenei’s remarks turned to Israel—the Islamic Republic’s self-proclaimed nemesis. Invoking a verse from the Koran, Khamenei insisted that the Jewish state would “die of [its] rage.” He reminded the audience that the Iranian theocracy’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, had described Israel as a cancer. And he ended his speech with a prediction: “This cancer will definitely be eradicated, God willing, at the hands of the Palestinian people and the resistance forces throughout the region.”

Four days later, sirens sounded as rockets flew out of Gaza and into southern Israel. More than 1,000 Palestinian militants followed, breaching the border barricade on motorcycles and jeeps, swarming from boats on the sea, and paragliding in from the air. In less than 24 hours, the militants killed 1,180 Israelis and captured 251 more. The massacre committed by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters was the deadliest act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust. It precipitated a ferocious Israeli military response that has wiped out Hamas’s leadership and eliminated thousands of the group’s fighters, while also killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and devastating Gaza’s infrastructure.

Although Tehran was not directly involved in the October 7 attack, Iran’s leaders were eager to exploit its aftermath in hopes of fulfilling Khamenei’s prophecy. At first, Iran entered the war by following its well-honed playbook: posturing diplomatically against escalation while rallying its proxy militias to assault Israel. But on April 13, Iranian leaders shifted course, launching a massive barrage of missiles and drones at Israel—the first time that Iran had directly attacked Israeli territory from Iranian territory.

Israel was spectacularly successful in working with the United States and its Arab partners to blunt those strikes. It then retaliated against Iran and its proxies without prompting more attacks, containing escalation. And the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime only strengthens Israel’s upper hand over Iran. Still, history suggests that the Islamic Republic is unlikely to be chastened. Instead, the normalization of direct military conflict between Iran and Israel is a seismic shift that creates a profoundly unstable equilibrium. By lowering the threshold for direct strikes, the tit for tat has boosted the odds that the two most powerful states in the Middle East will fight a full-scale war—one that could draw in the United States and have a devastating effect on the region and the global economy. Even if such a war does not break out, a weakened Iran may seek to insulate itself by acquiring a nuclear weapon, causing a wider wave of proliferation. Preventing such a future will thus be an essential challenge for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who must leverage his penchant for chaos to forge a regional deal.

A RISING POWER

Iran and Israel were not always mortal enemies. Under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the monarch who ruled Iran for decades until the 1979 revolution, Tehran cultivated a cooperative and mutually beneficial security and economic relationship with the Jewish state. Israeli leaders, in turn, courted Iran to ease their international isolation and counter the hostility of their Arab neighbors.

The Iranian Revolution turned that relationship on its head. Iran’s new rulers—who came from the Shiite clergy—despised Israel. Some, steeped in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, even viewed Israel as an infidel transgressor. (The ties between the shah and Israel were, in fact, one of the factors that helped galvanize religious opposition to his rule.) Before the revolution, in an infamous 1963 sermon that precipitated his expulsion from Iran, Khomeini inveighed against Israel as the enemy of Islam and the religious class in Iran. He continued to weave similar themes throughout his speeches after the revolution elevated him to head of state.

Under Khomeini’s leadership, the Islamic Republic fused this deep-seated ideological antipathy toward Israel with a determination to upend the regional order and assist oppressed peoples, especially the Palestinians. Tehran began this process by intervening in Lebanon, which was in the throes of its long civil war when Iran became a theocracy. After Israel’s 1982 invasion of the country, Iran offered Lebanese Shiite groups such as Hezbollah military and technical aid, developing a model for terrorizing its adversaries through suicide bombings, assassinations, and hostage taking. Tehran also began championing the Palestinian cause as a way to win the hearts and minds of the Middle East’s many Sunni Muslims, who otherwise had little reason to side with a fundamentalist Shiite regime.

Accustomed to dealing with the shah, Israel initially sought to forge quiet connections with Iran’s revolutionary state, which it viewed as anomalous and impermanent. Israeli officials even maintained a sizable arms pipeline to Tehran after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran, in hopes of strengthening moderate Iranian leaders and prolonging the conflict against Baghdad. (The Israelis saw Iraq as a more serious threat.) But this gambit ended badly after the involvement of U.S. officials, who sought to use the sales of American weapons to Tehran—including those sold by Israel—to induce Tehran’s help in freeing U.S. hostages in the Middle East and to covertly fund Nicaragua’s contra rebels. The result was an embarrassing scandal for the Reagan administration and a further hardening of Iran’s revolutionary regime. In this way, the Iran-contra debacle helped put to rest any Israeli illusions that revolutionary Iran was ephemeral or nonthreatening.

Iran and Israel were not always mortal enemies.

The end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, meanwhile, gave Iran the capacity to more seriously challenge Israel. The Islamic Republic may have emerged from that conflict battered and impoverished, but the fighting helped the clerical regime consolidate its grip on power. It also meant the Iranian military needed a new mission. Even as Israel and the Palestinians took hesitant steps toward conflict resolution and a two-state solution in the 1990s, Tehran expanded its investments in violent opposition to the peace process and to Israel overall. It also accelerated the revival of Iran’s pre-revolutionary nuclear program.

Events in the following decade further bolstered the Iranian regime. The U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq dethroned two of Tehran’s most proximate adversaries, the Taliban and Saddam, giving Iran more room to maneuver. Those U.S. operations also intensified paranoia in Tehran that Washington was trying to strangle the Islamic Republic, stoking the regime’s determination to drive U.S. troops out of the region. The result was an Iran both more able and more willing to arm its proxy network, including by funneling weapons to Palestinian militants.

During this same period, the full scope of Iran’s nuclear ambitions began to come into view. In 2002, an Iranian opposition group exposed previously undisclosed nuclear sites intended to produce fuels that could be used for weapons, in violation of Tehran’s obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. For Israel, Russia, the United States, and other leading powers, these revelations confirmed that the theocracy was developing the infrastructure to acquire nuclear arms and potentially transfer them to its surrogates and partners. Ultimately, the International Atomic Energy Agency referred the issue to the UN Security Council, resulting in an unprecedented suite of multinational economic sanctions on Iran.

Those restrictions hit Tehran’s pocketbook, but they did not disrupt its regional rise, which was further aided by the Arab Spring in 2010–11. At first, the spread of revolutions and civil war across the Middle East challenged the Islamic Republic, especially when the unrest threatened one of Iran’s most valuable partners—Assad. But with help from Hezbollah and Russia, Iran managed to prop up Assad for more than a decade. By improving its position in Syria, Tehran was also able to ensure that Hezbollah remained the dominant force in Lebanon, expanding the group’s arsenal of precision-guided missiles and rockets as well as the means to produce them. And Iran further seized on growing regional chaos, such as the civil war in Yemen, to expand its reach and enhance the capabilities of its partners. By the end of the 2010s, Tehran had developed the ability to project power across the Middle East and coordinate its network of militias.

PLAYING WITH FIRE

Israel watched warily as Iran grew more capable. But for years, and despite many threats, it avoided directly attacking the country. The Obama administration succeeded in dissuading Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from launching strikes on Iran’s nuclear program in 2012. Tehran, Washington, and five other world powers later inked an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program in 2015, despite ferocious lobbying from Israeli leaders.

Instead, Israel contented itself with creative and reasonably effective alternatives to direct military action. Through clandestine operations and cyberattacks, the country sabotaged key Iranian nuclear facilities. It assassinated nuclear scientists and military officers, and it stole archival records that demonstrated the true extent of Iran’s nuclear activities, which the regime had tried to hide. Perhaps most important, Israel built a potent intelligence network that kept the Iranian regime off balance.

Israel also sought to turn up the heat on Iran by directly attacking Tehran’s allies and striking its resources outside the country. What began in 2013 as opportunistic bombings of Hezbollah supply lines within Syria had transformed by 2017 into a systematic military campaign against Iranian assets and proxies across the region. This campaign scored significant successes, including a series of strikes in the summer of 2019 on Iranian weapons depots in Iraq, missile production facilities in Lebanon, and Iranian-backed fighters in Syria. But by remaining below the threshold that would provoke Iranian retaliation, Israel fell short of achieving decisive setbacks against Hezbollah or Iran.

Israel’s escalation in Iran and Syria coincided with Trump’s first term, in which Washington assumed a much harsher stance toward the Islamic Republic. Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed what he called “maximum pressure” economic sanctions on Iran in hopes of extracting far-reaching concessions. Tehran’s response offers a case study in its cagey calculus. For the first year of those sanctions, Iranian leaders exhibited remarkable restraint, only to pivot dramatically and launch a series of counterattacks, including strikes on Persian Gulf shipping and Saudi oil facilities. This was not wanton violence: Iranian leaders hoped that confrontation might change Washington’s cost-benefit analysis and force an end to maximum pressure. They did not succeed—but from Tehran’s point of view, the maneuver did not fail, either. To Tehran, the best defense is often a good offense, and its aggressive actions signaled to the world that the regime was willing to impose real costs on countries that bucked it.

Israeli tanks returning from southern Lebanon, December 2024 Stoyan Nenov / Reuters

Recent tit-for-tat exchanges between Iran and Israel betray a similar logic, and they have moved the war between the two states into new territory. After Israel bombed an Iranian consulate building in Syria in April, Iran launched its unprecedented direct attack, firing more than 350 ballistic and cruise missiles and drones straight at its enemy. This attack, like past ones, was calculated and clearly designed to send a message. Iran, after all, telegraphed the attack well in advance. And Israel, thanks in no small part to the help of neighboring Arab states, was able to repel Iran’s bombardment. But the coordinated volley of missiles and drones was not simply performative. “This wasn’t a small-scale or a chest-thumping show of force,” noted Major Benjamin Coffey, one of the U.S. Air Force pilots who helped thwart the Iranian barrage. “This was an attack designed to cause significant damage, to kill, to destroy.”

The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a May 2024 helicopter accident briefly distracted the theocracy and appeared to disrupt the escalatory spiral. But it was not long before the conflict flared again. In August, Israel assassinated the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh at an official Iranian guesthouse in Tehran, only hours after Haniyeh had met with Khamenei and attended the inauguration of the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Less than two months later, Israel escalated in Lebanon, laying waste to decades of Iranian investment in Hezbollah in an abrupt and humiliating fashion. Via remote control, Israel detonated tiny explosives it had secretly implanted in thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives, disrupting the group’s command and control. Israeli forces then killed nearly the entire upper echelon of Hezbollah’s leadership, including its longtime chief, Hassan Nasrallah, and destroyed much of the group’s weaponry.

This onslaught produced not just a much weaker Hezbollah but a much weaker Iran. For more than 40 years, Hezbollah had been Tehran’s ace in the hole: the country’s inaugural franchise and the nucleus in its loose network of partners and proxies. Its arsenal of missiles was intended to be the first line of defense for Iran. Crippling such a key asset, even if only temporarily, severely undercut Iran’s stature and power in the region. The loss of Nasrallah was especially devastating for Iran’s leadership. Nasrallah and Khamenei had known each other since Hezbollah’s earliest days. Nasrallah spoke Persian, had lived for a time in Iran, and was the only major figure in the region who considered Iran’s supreme leader to be his spiritual guide.

It was thus entirely predictable—and perhaps even inevitable—that Tehran would respond to his death with force, as it did with another salvo of missiles on October 1. Yet once again, U.S. and Israeli preparation and coordination prevented casualties and any serious physical damage. After some brief suspense, Israel undertook an elegant and effective set of strikes that significantly weakened Iran’s air defenses and its missile, drone, and nuclear program without provoking retaliation. This strike, together with the subsequent collapse of Assad’s brutal government, has shattered Iran’s existing regional strategy.

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION

For now, the direct attacks between Iran and Israel have provided the latter with the upper hand. Iran’s capabilities—defensive and offensive alike—have been degraded. Israel, after the catastrophic failure of October 7, looks stronger than ever. And by galvanizing Arab states to help repel Iran’s April attack, the Israelis have shown that Arab governments are willing to join the Jewish state in deterring Iran, despite the sympathy for the Palestinians among Arab populations.

Yet Iran and Israel—and the region as a whole—are facing a difficult predicament. Israel has achieved a significant victory, but both Iranian and Israeli leaders believe that the threat posed by the other remains existential and unyielding. In their public posture and rhetoric, both governments seek to portray the other as being on the ropes. After Israel’s October strike on Iran, Netanyahu boasted, “Israel has greater freedom of action in Iran today than ever before. We can reach anywhere in Iran as needed.” But for Khamenei, the setbacks of Iran’s proxies are meaningless; in his telling, Hamas and Hezbollah are victorious simply because they survived, and Israel’s destruction is only a matter of time. “The world and the region will see the day when the Zionist regime will be clearly defeated,” he said in early November.

Given Iran’s losses and its newly heightened vulnerability at home, this posture may be bravado. And if Tehran is serious, its leaders may be gravely miscalculating. Still, over the past 45 years, Iran’s leadership has navigated many significant setbacks with surprising agility. Two of the secrets to the regime’s success are its tendency to embrace aggression under pressure and its readiness to play the long game: to retrench or pivot as necessary, to creatively deploy its limited resources and relationships, and to engage in asymmetric attacks to achieve leverage over more powerful adversaries. It could do so again today.

For more than 40 years, Hezbollah had been Tehran’s ace in the hole.

Consider the record. In January 2020, the Trump administration assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force—the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in charge of managing relations with Iran’s allies and proxies. At first, the killing seemed like a symbolic and operational disaster for Tehran, given just how key Soleimani was to its foreign policy. Yet his death ultimately had little enduring effect on the strength, durability, or efficacy of Iran’s axis of resistance. Similarly, in 1992, when Israel killed Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s leader at the time, it paved the way for the ascension of Nasrallah, who proved to be a far more effective and deadly adversary. A month later, Hezbollah retaliated by orchestrating the deadly bombing of Israel’s embassy in Argentina.

The evisceration of Tehran’s most valuable assets, Hezbollah and the Assad regime, is a catastrophic blow for the Islamic Republic. But a weakened Iran is not necessarily a less dangerous Iran. Iran is “staring you in the eye” and “will fight you to the end,” Hossein Salami, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, declared to Israel in November. “We will not allow you to dominate the fate of Muslims. You will receive painful blows—keep awaiting revenge. ”This may be garden-variety Iranian bluster, but it would be a mistake and out of step with historical precedent to presume that even a massive strategic reversal will induce Iranian quiescence.

There is another sign that Iran may be upping the ante to counterbalance its new vulnerabilities. For the first time in two decades, important voices within the country are openly calling for Tehran to embrace nuclear weapons. In the past, several senior Iranian officials—including a previous foreign minister and a previous head of the country’s atomic energy agency—had hinted that they had achieved the ability to produce a weapon but had opted not to. In November 2024, however, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that influential officials in the regime view that restraint as self-defeating. Hard-liners in Iran’s parliament have publicly asked Khamenei to reconsider his religious decision that forbids the development of nuclear weapons. If the fundamental rules of the game have been transformed since October 7, then Iran’s defense doctrine may undergo a similar evolution. A truculent Trump administration that supports an unleashed Israel could, in particular, accelerate Iran’s nuclear timeline and prompt Tehran to openly embrace weaponization, something the Iranian regime has spent decades dodging.

CHAOS AGENT

Trump’s second administration will take office determined to get tough on Tehran, just as his first one did. His incoming team has promised to ratchet up economic pressure on the Islamic Republic. The president-elect himself warned the Iranians that he would “blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens,” if they sought to assassinate him, as multiple news outlets reported.

Meanwhile, the incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has lambasted President Joe Biden for imposing restrictions on Israel as it prosecutes its war in Gaza. Unlike the Biden administration, then, the Trump team may have little regard for the potential blowback from a sustained attempt to erode the capabilities of the Houthis in Yemen and Iraq’s Shiite militias. If so, the region could be headed for more bloodshed. Should Israel or the United States take off their gloves in Iraq and Yemen, they could destabilize Iraq and prompt the Houthis to target U.S. partners in the Middle East: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That could complicate the planned phase-down of U.S. troops in Iraq and leave a precarious power vacuum in the heart of the Arab world that Tehran and other extremists would seek to exploit. So could uncertainty regarding the future of Lebanon and Syria. Yet Trump’s policy may prove more nuanced than unwavering confrontation. For starters, the new administration will find that the tools at its disposal are less effective than when Trump deployed them during his first term. His maximum pressure sanctions, for example, succeeded in slashing Iran’s oil exports and revenues thanks to cooperation from China, which Beijing may not be willing to repeat. The smuggling networks that enable Iranian oil to reach China have become more elaborate and more difficult to counter through sanctions designations alone. Any significant new economic coercion could also face headwinds from Washington’s crucial Gulf allies, whose leaders now prefer to co-opt rather than confront Tehran.

Then there are Trump’s own views on Iran. The president-elect has suggested there is a method to his madness—and that he desires a deal. During his 2024 campaign, Trump disavowed regime change and declared that he wanted Iran “to be a very successful country.” He has recently suggested that had he won in 2020, he would have concluded an agreement with Tehran “within one week after the election.” And Trump appears to have greenlighted early engagement with Iranian officials this time around, having sent one of his closest confidants, the billionaire Elon Musk, to meet with the country’s UN ambassador in November.

A newspaper with a picture of Syrian rebel fighters, Tehran, December 2024 Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

The new administration will surely take a permissive approach to Israeli territorial ambitions. But Trump also says he wants to end the war in Gaza and to expand the Abraham Accords by adding Saudi Arabia. He wants to avoid further U.S. military commitments while lowering energy prices, creating a more docile China, and terminating Iran’s nuclear program. These aims require difficult tradeoffs, and they will necessitate a more sophisticated strategy than merely attacking Iran and its proxies.

If past is prelude, Trump’s resulting approach will likely be highly disruptive—especially since some of his goals are mutually incompatible. That may not seem like the best recipe for stability in the Middle East. Yet this may be just the moment for the unconventional, unpredictable, and unintentional chaos that appears to be on order from a Trump presidency. A dexterous Washington, unencumbered by any fidelity to principles or predictability, might just succeed by brandishing American muscle alongside a transparent infatuation with dealmaking. Trump’s grand ambitions and his transactional approach to foreign policy are surprisingly well suited to today’s Middle East, where regime interests and opportunistic investments are the lingua franca.

To succeed, Trump will have to manage the competing views and priorities of his own administration’s staffers. But an unsentimental assessment of the regional landscape offers some sense of how Trump could proceed. He might start, as he did in his first term, in the Gulf. The Gulf states desperately want an end to the war in Gaza, which would serve their own economic and security interests as well as Israel’s. The UAE has been in discussions with Washington about helping establish a postwar Palestinian government in Gaza and obtaining security and reconstruction funding. Trump could continue these conversations and use them to help end Israel’s war. The Gulf states could also help Trump forge a new deal with Iran. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have strong channels of communication with Tehran, which Trump could tap into. The Arab world would certainly welcome an agreement that prevents a full-scale war, which would have catastrophic consequences.

There is no shortage of spoilers in the Middle East.

This confluence of interests is useful but hardly sufficient to achieve the outcomes Trump desires. That is where the president-elect’s volatility and ruthlessness could be an unexpected asset. If Trump reinstates meaningful economic pressure on Iran and gives Israel some additional leeway for military action, he might better demonstrate U.S. capabilities and thus force Iran to reverse its current, uncompromising policy positions. A muscular U.S. approach has paid dividends in the past with an Iranian leadership whose foremost interest is in regime survival. Such an approach would likely be an improvement over that of the Biden administration, which relied almost exclusively on conciliation that Iran saw as weak and desperate. The result of the shift could be a real deal of the century: an abatement of the multipronged conflicts raging in the Middle East, a political horizon and reconstruction for the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and some nominal concessions from Tehran on its nuclear program and regional malfeasance.

Forging this deal will still be extremely difficult to achieve. During his first term, Trump’s unconventional diplomacy with another recalcitrant nuclear power, North Korea, ultimately went nowhere, and overall his administration achieved few notable breakthroughs in dealing with adversarial powers. Even if realized, a deal would not likely endure for very long. Iran’s leadership is steeped in antagonism toward both Israel and the United States, and the regime’s investment in its nuclear program and proxy network has been key to its survival strategy. Netanyahu, for his part, has found that a maximalist military approach yields spectacular strategic dividends along with domestic political benefits. And there is no shortage of other spoilers in this combustible region.

But even an ephemeral set of understandings could reduce the temperature in the Middle East. That would, in turn, enable Washington and the world to turn their attention to more daunting challenges—especially China and Russia. And any deal that stanches some of the bloodshed and reduces some of the risks, if only temporarily, just might earn Trump his much-desired Nobel Peace Prize.

Suzanne Maloney is Vice President of the Brookings Institution and Director of its Foreign Policy Program.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Suzanne Maloney · December 10, 2024

19. Trump's new world order

Excerpts:

It is for this reason that in many global capitals today Trump is a clarifying presence, forcing leaders to address the fundamentals of their position. Europe is weak — economically and militarily — and made weaker by the leaders it has chosen. In Paris, Macron has destroyed his presidency in his desperate and doomed attempts to save the country from the Le Pennist fate he seems only to succeed in making more likely. In Berlin, Olaf Scholz is drifting towards defeat, a listless chancellor atop a listless Germany at the heart of a listless continent. In London, meanwhile, there is the odd spectacle of an all-powerful government that already feels adrift. Can these three powers really find it in them to step into a void left by Trump in Ukraine? And if they can, at what cost to an electorate already raging against the deteriorating state of their public services.

None of this means Trump’s clarifying presence will be either good, bad or in any sense successful at finding solutions to problems that have defeated his predecessors. In an important sense, in fact, Trump represents the end to all such teleological notions of progress or decline. Power is the point.

In Syria, the fall of Assad cannot be squeezed into any such narrative of progress or decline. It is a story of order and who has the power to impose it. Trump doesn’t want it. Iran has lost it. And Turkey may find it is no more successful in its attempts to control its foreign clients than Pakistan was in controlling the Taliban. And just like Afghanistan, in Syria a gruesome regime has evaporated after being abandoned by its foreign protectors. What comes next may be just as dangerous — and far closer to home.

Syria’s new warlord Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was 20 when he joined the jihad in Iraq. Perhaps he has mellowed and forgiven — but it would be a brave analyst after the past 20 years to believe that Syria has reached its nadir: modernity may yet have some new horrors for it to endure. What comes in its place may be no better or worse than what it replaced, merely a new epoch symbolised not by the beauty of Notre-Dame but the hellish anarchy of America’s Iraq.

Trump's new world order

Global leaders are reassessing their position

unherd.com · by Tom McTague · December 10, 2024

Tom McTague

December 10, 2024 4 mins

When Donald Trump first visited Paris when President in 2017, he appeared as something of a passing curiosity; the apparent manifestation of America’s inexorable decline, captured in all its spray-tanned vulgarity. Seven years later he has returned to Paris as emperor, crowned by his client kings in none other than the spiritual home of modern Christendom: Notre-Dame. “It was a coronation,” as one European diplomat put it to me, laughing with incredulity at the spectacle.

What is so striking about this second coming of Trump is not just that the world appears to have accepted his victory this time, but to have actively embraced him as the harbinger of a new age, no longer seeking to protect the old one that has been discredited. The visual proof of this diplomatic embrace was captured in the image of Europe’s leaders in Paris, one after the other, moving to submit themselves at the feet of the new imperator.

Yet it was not the symbolism of the ceremony in Notre-Dame on Saturday which came closest to capturing the revolutionary spirit of Trump’s coming presidency, but the events unfolding at the same time thousands of miles away in Syria. While in one sense the collapse of the Assad regime in Damascus has little to do with Trump, it is impossible to understand the speed and timing of the revolution without considering the impact that his impending presidency is already having on world affairs.

Think about the events that have already since Trump’s election victory in November. First, there was the collapse of the German government and the sacking of Israel’s defence secretary, Yoav Gallant, on the day of the American election. Then came Netanyahu’s ceasefire-deal with a dazed and confused Hezbollah, followed by the authorisation of the firing of long-range American missiles into Russia, the publication of Zelensky’s peace plan, the collapse in the value of the Russian rouble under fresh American sanctions and, finally, the sudden implosion of the Syrian regime. The French government also collapsed.

“In many global capitals today Trump is a clarifying presence.”

“Everyone has taken his mantra that all is transactional and is positioning themselves to open the way for a bargain with Trump,” explained one French official reflecting on this extraordinary cascade of events. Even before taking power, then, Trump is the catalyst for a new age.

In Syria, he sparked a revolution. Frustrated with a diplomatic impasse as the clock ticked down to Trump’s inauguration and the ambitions of the American-backed Kurdish rebels in Syria’s north east, Turkey’s President Erdogan appears to have authorised the advance of his own client rebels first. Erdogan, it seems, wanted to ensure the Turkish-backed militias were in the strongest possible position to deal with Trump after January 20, only to have triggered the sudden and complete collapse of the Assad regime. Russia, meanwhile, bogged down in Ukraine and already having paid a large price for little reward in Syria, was also caught off guard and now faces the loss of key military bases on the Arab-Mediterranean coast, further entrenching Erdogan’s power in the region.

Across the Middle East, all the major powers are jockeying for position. Already, Benjamin Netanyahu has taken advantage of the vacuum of power in Syria and in Washington to grab new territory in the Golan Heights and try to impose a new political dominance at home. Saudi Arabia, too, sees opportunities under Trump. Even Iran, the great loser in world affairs since October 7 last year, may feel it now has no choice but to sue for peace and reach a deal.

For Ukraine, meanwhile, it is President Biden (or his officials) who is accelerating events by rushing to do all he can before Trump’s inauguration, with new weapons transfers and sanctions that are causing Russia fresh economic pain. Yet, once again, it is Trump who stands to gain as each side plays out their cards in expectation of his attempt to impose a new order on the world once in power.

It is striking how open so many diplomats and officials are to Trump’s approach, telling me that they see in it a degree of brutal honesty if not morality. During his first term there was a hope that his Hobbesian outlook on life would not, in the end, last. Today, there is no such hope — or even desire. Meanwhile, the comprehensive nature of Trump’s victory coupled with European rolling political and economic crises, seems to have robbed the continent’s leaders of any last delusion of superiority. Only Emmanuel Macron’s departing Prime Minister, Michael Barnier, showed any real distaste at Trump’s presence at Notre Dame, which is itself rather telling. If there was a figure who appeared out of touch in this scene, it was not Trump; Barnier’s instinct that of an older age revealing his own anachronism. In today’s world, Trump no longer represents good or bad, but simply power. He has it and Europe does not.

It is for this reason that in many global capitals today Trump is a clarifying presence, forcing leaders to address the fundamentals of their position. Europe is weak — economically and militarily — and made weaker by the leaders it has chosen. In Paris, Macron has destroyed his presidency in his desperate and doomed attempts to save the country from the Le Pennist fate he seems only to succeed in making more likely. In Berlin, Olaf Scholz is drifting towards defeat, a listless chancellor atop a listless Germany at the heart of a listless continent. In London, meanwhile, there is the odd spectacle of an all-powerful government that already feels adrift. Can these three powers really find it in them to step into a void left by Trump in Ukraine? And if they can, at what cost to an electorate already raging against the deteriorating state of their public services.

None of this means Trump’s clarifying presence will be either good, bad or in any sense successful at finding solutions to problems that have defeated his predecessors. In an important sense, in fact, Trump represents the end to all such teleological notions of progress or decline. Power is the point.

In Syria, the fall of Assad cannot be squeezed into any such narrative of progress or decline. It is a story of order and who has the power to impose it. Trump doesn’t want it. Iran has lost it. And Turkey may find it is no more successful in its attempts to control its foreign clients than Pakistan was in controlling the Taliban. And just like Afghanistan, in Syria a gruesome regime has evaporated after being abandoned by its foreign protectors. What comes next may be just as dangerous — and far closer to home.

Syria’s new warlord Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was 20 when he joined the jihad in Iraq. Perhaps he has mellowed and forgiven — but it would be a brave analyst after the past 20 years to believe that Syria has reached its nadir: modernity may yet have some new horrors for it to endure. What comes in its place may be no better or worse than what it replaced, merely a new epoch symbolised not by the beauty of Notre-Dame but the hellish anarchy of America’s Iraq.

Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

TomMcTague

unherd.com · by Tom McTague · December 10, 2024

20. Meet Trump's new National Security Council

The Quincy Institute's assessment. (of course whether there is a Republican or Democrat administration the Quincy Institute will be unhappy with it)

Excerpt:

None of these appointments bode well for advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint, let alone for those who voted for Trump hoping he would prioritize domestic problems over endless foreign wars. At best, Trump’s picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another. At worst, they will not do the former, and embroil the United States into two of the latter.None of these appointments bode well for advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint, let alone for those who voted for Trump hoping he would prioritize domestic problems over endless foreign wars. At best, Trump’s picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another. At worst, they will not do the former, and embroil the United States into two of the latter.

Meet Trump's new National Security Council

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Branko Marcetic · December 9, 2024

The president-elect is stacking this critical policy deck with hawks bent on sticking it to China and intervening in war over Taiwan

Dec 09, 2024

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised a very different foreign policy from business as usual in Washington.

He said he would prioritize peace over “victory” in the escalating war in Ukraine, pull the United States back from foreign entanglements to focus on domestic problems, and generally oversee a period of prolonged peace, instead of the cycle of endless Great Power conflict we seem trapped in.

Yet if personnel is policy, as the saying goes, then Trump’s presidency will be far more in line with his Democratic predecessor’s foreign policy than with the vision he laid out over the past year. So far, his National Security Council picks have been a series of hawks with a history of opposing diplomacy and the end of U.S. wars, as well as favoring a more aggressive posture toward China, including intervening in a possible war over Taiwan.

Take Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.). Since his selection, Waltz certainly talks in line with the more restraint-oriented vision Trump campaigned on, fretting about the Biden administration’s recent escalation in Ukraine and calling for a “responsible end” to the war there.

But until relatively recently, the Florida congressman viewed the war in very similar terms to those of his hawkish colleagues on the other side of the aisle, reacting to the Russian invasion by warning it “violates the very fabric of international norms” and threatens “our Western values,” lamenting that Biden had not been more confrontational with Russia beforehand, and calling for the United States to “support Ukrainian resistance efforts” and turn the country “into a bloody quagmire” for Russia.

Over the months that followed, Waltz backed escalating the war (“Send the damn MiGs,” he tweeted in March 2022), complained that U.S. policy on the war was a “fiddle fart” that provided just enough arms “instead of going for the kill, instead of going for the win right now,” and charged that Biden was “letting fear of escalation be the primary driver of our policy in Ukraine.”

Waltz has shifted since, but largely because he sees a U.S.-China confrontation as a bigger priority. Waltz views China as “the most threatening adversary America has ever faced,” believes that Washington is already locked in a “Cold War” with Beijing and must “curb” its power, step up military aid to Taiwan, and end the policy of “strategic ambiguity” over the island nation, which has been at the core of decades of successful U.S. policy balancing deterrence without tipping into disastrous war.

He has also disparaged diplomacy with the Chinese government, and thinks U.S. forces should have stayed in Afghanistan to hang on to Bagram Airfield for possible use as a “second front” in a future U.S.-China war.

The rest of Trump’s national security team holds similar views. Sebastian Gorka, nominated for deputy assistant to the president, sees the Ukraine war in literally indistinguishable terms from hawks in the outgoing Biden administration: it is “unprovoked Russian aggression” that is not about NATO expansion but rather enlarging Russian territory; negotiations, peace, or an off-ramp are as futile as Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler was; and the United States must continue military aid “to make the Russians bleed,” or Vladimir Putin will “take Poland and the Baltic states.”

Gorka is also a hawk on China, which he calls “the greatest threat to America.”

“We know the regime there wishes to have every nation in the world a defeated, vanquished nation, or a satrapy, a tributary nation,” Gorka said this past October, while giving a fawning interview to Gordon Chang, a discredited “China expert” who has repeatedly predicted the imminent collapse of the Chinese state.

In his 2018 book, Gorka called China’s undoubted goal of becoming a world power, and partly doing so through economic investment in the Global South, a form of “irregular warfare” (even as he admits it is little different from the actions “of the West a couple of centuries ago”). He has repeatedly suggested that China was about to invade Taiwan, including after its wayward spy balloon, gave former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy “kudos” for taking the inflammatory step of traveling to the island, and implied that U.S. lives should be expended to defend it.

Alex Wong, Trump’s pick for deputy national security adviser, agrees. Wong believes that Americans “have to be prepared for a level of tension, regional destabilization, and — yes — possible conflict [with China] that we have not seen since the end of World War II.” Wong noted he deliberately used that destructive, hot conflict as a reference point and not the Cold War.

A former foreign policy adviser for the super-hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and the merely hawkish 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, Wong served most recently as vice chair of a congressional commission that recommended training Taiwanese troops on U.S. soil — a highly provocative move to China’s leadership.

Because China is, unlike the former Soviet Union, highly integrated into the “system of the free world,” Wong has said, the U.S.-China conflict requires not just “out-competing them but extruding” — meaning, pushing out — “China from certain systems, whether economically, technologically, politically.” What that means for Wong is not just continuing the Biden administration’s economic warfare with the country, but also “an increased U.S. military presence” in the Indo-Pacific and to “seriously look at new investments in strategic nuclear forces, intermediate-range missiles, our naval fleet, and certain capabilities tuned to turning back an invasion of Taiwan,” as well as “expand[ing] the aperture of our military alliances” in the region, specifically with Japan and under AUKUS.

Wong does seem to favor extricating the United States from Ukraine, but, like Waltz, it’s because he views “Ukraine as an unfortunate diversion of U.S. attention from the Indo-Pacific” and wants to “responsibly shift U.S. military resources eastward” — in a way that, to take his words literally, will ramp up conflict with China and see the U.S. go directly to war in the case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

None of these appointments bode well for advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint, let alone for those who voted for Trump hoping he would prioritize domestic problems over endless foreign wars. At best, Trump’s picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another. At worst, they will not do the former, and embroil the United States into two of the latter.

Thanks to our readers and supporters, Responsible Statecraft has had a tremendous year. A complete website overhaul made possible in part by generous contributions to RS, along with amazing writing by staff and outside contributors, has helped to increase our monthly page views by 133%! In continuing to provide independent and sharp analysis on the major conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as the tumult of Washington politics, RS has become a go-to for readers looking for alternatives and change in the foreign policy conversation.

We hope you will consider a tax-exempt donation to RS for your end-of-the-year giving, as we plan for new ways to expand our coverage and reach in 2025. Please enjoy your holidays, and here is to a dynamic year ahead!

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Branko Marcetic · December 9, 2024

21. Assad’s Fall Shows Russia, Iran, and Hamas Made a Bad Bet

Assad’s Fall Shows Russia, Iran, and Hamas Made a Bad Bet

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/assads-fall-shows-russia-iran-and-hamas-made-a-bad-bet/

By Hal Brands

Bloomberg Opinion

December 09, 2024

A great many actors had a hand in the fall of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that led the offensive; Turkey, which nurtured and supported HTS; the myriad Syrian groups and people who gave a hated tyrant a final push. But Assad’s fall was also the work of a dead man, Yahya Sinwar.

When Sinwar ordered Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, he meant to revolutionize the Middle East. Today, the region is being remade, just not as Sinwar intended: An astonishingly successful Israeli offensive has left Hamas and the rest of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” in ruins, and has now claimed Assad as its latest victim.

The Hamas fighters who streamed into Israel on Oct. 7 were after more than an orgy of rape, kidnapping and murder. They also sought to shatter Israel’s security and start a multi-front war that would destroy the Jewish state.

For a time, it seemed to be working. Israel was sucked into a grinding, globally unpopular war in Gaza. Its northern territory was depopulated because of attacks by Lebanese Hezbollah. The Houthis of Yemen bankrupted the Israeli port of Eilat through attacks on Red Sea shipping. Iran fired missiles and drones at Israeli cities.

This was all seen, by many Israelis, as an existential challenge. But by revealing Israeli weaknesses, Sinwar ended up unleashing Israeli strengths.

Fourteen months on, Hamas has been devastated and its leaders killed, including Sinwar. Hezbollah has been badly bloodied — and forced to accept a cease-fire — by exploding pagers, airstrikes and an Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon. Iranian missiles didn’t cause much damage to Israel, but the Israeli response shredded Iran’s air defenses and deeply embarrassed the regime. Now Syria, a keystone of Iran’s regional strategy, has fallen as the indirect result of Israeli blows.

For years, support from Iran, Hezbollah and Russia sustained Assad. But Russia has been drained and distracted by war in Ukraine. Iran and Hezbollah have taken a drubbing from Israel. That opened the door for HTS to launch its decisive assault against the regime, which became another unintended casualty of Sinwar’s genocidal dream.

The result is a true revolution in Middle Eastern geopolitics. Syria was Iran’s conduit to Hezbollah and its oldest ally in the Middle East. Assad’s fall deprives Tehran of strategic depth and reach; it severely complicates the task of rebuilding a proxy network that has been badly mauled.

Assad’s departure is also a humiliation for Russia, which had claimed the intervention that saved Assad in 2015 as a great victory over the West. By imperiling Russian bases on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, it threatens Moscow’s ability to project power into Africa, as well.

This is why Israel is such a vital ally for the US: Because its victories are critical defeats for America’s enemies. And this Middle Eastern revolution may not be over yet.

Israel and the US have a chance to further squeeze Iran in the coming months. Tehran has lost its best anti-aircraft systems and the strategic insurance policy Hezbollah and other proxies were meant to provide. Now it faces an incoming US president, Donald Trump, likely to dial up the economic coercion — through sanctions meant to make Iran reverse its nuclear program, or perhaps cause the implosion of the regime. Tehran could even face a strike on its nuclear facilities, if Israeli leaders decide this is the moment to press the advantage.

That’s not to say the Middle East is entering a bright new era of peace. The collapse of Assad’s regime could cause a revival of the Islamic State, the emergence of a jihadist regime in Damascus, or a descent into chaos that affects the entire region.

The fate of Assad’s remaining chemical weapons is uncertain, which is why the Israeli air force is hunting them right now. US-Turkey relations could get very tense, if the Turks seize the opportunity to attack Syrian Kurdish groups loosely allied to Washington. And although Iran is in parlous position, it still has cards to play.

The Houthis could intensify their assault on freedom of the seas if they get anti-ship cruise missiles from Moscow. Iran could tighten its grip on Iraq through the Shiite militias that give it sway there. Or perhaps an Iran that feels cornered will make a dash for nuclear weapons, confronting the new American administration with a choice between acquiescing and starting the big Middle Eastern war Trump has pledged to avoid.

But for now, the regional balance of forces is more favorable to the US, Israel and their allies than at any time in a generation. Sinwar is likely to be remembered as the author of a murderous surprise attack that soon boomeranged in epically counterproductive ways. That’s not the legacy Sinwar sought on Oct. 7, 2023. But it’s one he richly deserves.

22. Adversarial Convergence Raises Alarm, Warns Socom General at Reagan Defense Forum

Convergence. Adversarial Convergence. An apt description I think.

Excerpt:

In his closing remarks, Fenton urged policymakers to adopt a whole-of-nation approach to security. He emphasized the importance of innovation, bipartisan support and public understanding of the threats posed by adversarial blocs. "We're in a decisive decade," he said. "The convergence of threats demands a convergence of our own capabilities."

Adversarial Convergence Raises Alarm, Warns Socom General at Reagan Defense Forum

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3992105/adversarial-convergence-raises-alarm-warns-socom-general-at-reagan-defense-forum/

Dec. 9, 2024 | By Army Maj. Wes Shinego, DOD News |

U.S. Army Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, highlighted the cooperation among adversarial nations and nonstate actors, and called for decisive action in the face of increasing complex global security threats at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California on Saturday.

Fenton detailed how partnerships between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China are reshaping the international security landscape — specifically with regard to the present conflict in Ukraine. Fenton explained how these alliances provide adversaries with a dangerous synergy. "This is not just Russia fighting Ukraine," Fenton said. "It's Russia, backed by Iranian drones, North Korean personnel and indirect Chinese contributions."

The general cited Iran's transfer of "material solutions" — like its Shahed 136 drones and Fath 360 ballistic missiles — to Russia as a prime example. The Fath 360 missiles, which can strike targets up to 75 miles away, enhance Russia's ability to sustain its war effort while preserving its long-range arsenal.

Fenton's example echoed similar concerns voiced by the Defense Department in recent months. In October, Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder confirmed that Iran has trained Russian personnel to operate its munitions, solidifying the growing military ties between the two nations.

"The concerning aspect of this," Ryder said, "is the developing relationship between Russia and Iran. It's reasonable to expect that this missile delivery will not be a one-time event." He continued, noting that Russia's partnerships with nations like Iran and North Korea often involve exchanges of intelligence and technology, further deepening their strategic alignment.

North Korea's increasing role in the conflict adds another dimension to this adversarial convergence. During a Nov. 4 press briefing, Ryder reported that more than 12,000 North Korean troops deployed to Russia's Kursk Oblast, to train in combat tactics alongside Russian forces. These troops replaced Russian personnel depleted by heavy casualties in Ukraine.

Fenton expanded on the implications of these alliances, stressing that the convergence of state and nonstate actors represents a fundamental shift in the character of warfare. He noted that Ukraine's innovative use of drones and artificial intelligence to counter these threats represents a "revolutionary" approach worth emulating. The general urged the department to scale similar technologies, emphasizing the need for affordable and scalable solutions.

"We need tools that impose costs on adversaries without draining our resources," Fenton said, pointing to Ukraine's production of millions of drones as a model for how smaller systems can effectively challenge larger forces.

Fenton also called for stronger collaboration between the military and private industry. He praised Socom's ability to quickly adapt to battlefield needs through partnerships with defense companies but emphasized the need to expand these efforts across the department. "Our modernization priorities must be clear, and we need to bring industry closer to the problem," he said.

Despite these challenges, the general expressed optimism in America's ability to counter these emerging threats through its own global partnerships. He highlighted multinational military exercises like the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, which integrates allied forces to enhance readiness and interoperability. "Our allies bring unique capabilities that, combined with ours, create a powerful force multiplier," he noted.

In his closing remarks, Fenton urged policymakers to adopt a whole-of-nation approach to security. He emphasized the importance of innovation, bipartisan support and public understanding of the threats posed by adversarial blocs. "We're in a decisive decade," he said. "The convergence of threats demands a convergence of our own capabilities."

23. ‘Shock the system’: Startups and DOGE take over Reagan forum

Excerpts:

The Pentagon, and Congress, need to ask fundamental questions about what programs and capabilities they should invest in light of this push for efficiency, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., told Defense One.

“I think people understand what's coming. How do you optimize the use of your resources? How do you make sure that the resources that you receive in a world where it's certainly not going to be more resources—how do you make best use of those?” Wittman said.

Ahead of potential cuts, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., a top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, urged the government and industry audience at Reagan to start brainstorming their own programs that could be put on the chopping block.

“I think when you look at any kind of efficiencies or cuts to any government program or any government spending, each and every one of us, each and every one of you,” Fischer said, turning to the audience, “needs to propose a program that you personally benefit from that you’d be willing to cut.” But Fischer cautioned that they need to be “very careful” about cutting, and that Congress needs to lead the effort.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle at Reagan agreed that the government needs reform. Democratic Rep. Adam Smith said that Musk could help the government move faster and cheaper.

‘Shock the system’: Startups and DOGE take over Reagan forum

But lawmakers advised caution and noted that Congress still controls the purse strings.

By Audrey Decker

Staff Writer

December 9, 2024 06:16 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

SIMI VALLEY, California—“Efficiency” was the word of the weekend at the Reagan National Defense Forum here. Defense-startup executives were giddy at the prospect of gaining comparative advantage through Trump-administration attacks on Pentagon bureaucracy, while lawmakers cautioned that substantive changes would require their review.

Defense tech firms like Palantir and Anduril believe the Department of Government Efficiency, a project led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, could make it easier for newcomers to prise defense contracts away from established prime contractors.

Software company Palantir was the top sponsor of Reagan, a conference where venture-backed sponsors were scarce just a few years ago.

Start-ups are hoping for a "revolution" where “we do hold the bureaucracy accountable, where we shock the bureaucracy and force it to do some of these things,” said Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and venture capitalist. Musk was hailed as the best person to do this by Palantir CEO Alex Karp: “I don’t know how you do better than Elon looking at these things,” he said at Reagan, citing Musk’s companies as models of efficiency. (Others have noted that government is not business, and that many Pentagon requirements exist for deadly serious reasons that may not be obvious in a hasty review.)

While there was bipartisan agreement at Reagan that the government needs to be reformed, lawmakers pushed for caution, and emphasized that Congress still controls the purse strings.

Musk doesn’t have a say in the Defense Department budget, at least not yet, said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz. And there’s still much uncertainty around what DOGE will actually be able to do, he told Defense One.

“I don't think we know what this thing is. It's not a government agency. Congress decides how we appropriate and spend money. We're gonna have to see,” Kelly said.

Some pro-defense budget Republicans, including Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., worry that the DOGE effort could lead to cuts to major weapons programs that would hurt the U.S. ability to deter China.

“Don't cut fighters, ICBMs, bombers. Typically when we cut, we're cutting programs. And I said, if you can show a wasteful program—by all means, right, I'm good to look at it. I want to maintain combat capability. We've got to counter China, and I don't want this to be an excuse to cut the force,” Bacon said in an interview.

The Pentagon, and Congress, need to ask fundamental questions about what programs and capabilities they should invest in light of this push for efficiency, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., told Defense One.

“I think people understand what's coming. How do you optimize the use of your resources? How do you make sure that the resources that you receive in a world where it's certainly not going to be more resources—how do you make best use of those?” Wittman said.

Ahead of potential cuts, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., a top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, urged the government and industry audience at Reagan to start brainstorming their own programs that could be put on the chopping block.

“I think when you look at any kind of efficiencies or cuts to any government program or any government spending, each and every one of us, each and every one of you,” Fischer said, turning to the audience, “needs to propose a program that you personally benefit from that you’d be willing to cut.” But Fischer cautioned that they need to be “very careful” about cutting, and that Congress needs to lead the effort.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle at Reagan agreed that the government needs reform. Democratic Rep. Adam Smith said that Musk could help the government move faster and cheaper.

But, Smith said, the main problem with the conversation around DOGE is that it conflates obtaining efficiency with alleviating America’s fiscal crisis. Musk’s effort might be able to save tens of billions of dollars, but to fix the deficit, there would have to be cuts to mandatory spending—Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, Smith said. No matter how efficient the government becomes, Musk is not going to save $2 trillion, he said.

“It’s just not going to happen. I hope they make the government more efficient. The fiscal conversation is a hell of a lot more difficult to have,” Smith said.

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

24. Republicans pick Mast to lead House Foreign Affairs panel

Excerpts:

Mast beat out the competition from three experienced members of the committee, winning the gavel to succeed Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), who was term-limited from running for the position again and opted against seeking a waiver. Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) and Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) also vied for the gavel.

Mast has served in the House since 2017, chairing the subcommittee on oversight and accountability. He served in the U.S. Army for more than 12 years, where he earned a Purple Heart, among other honors.

The Florida Republican will enter the high-ranking position at a tenuous moment on the world stage, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, Ukraine’s war against Russia drags on, and Syria reels from the fall of the regime led by Bashar Assad.

Republicans pick Mast to lead House Foreign Affairs panel

by: Mychael Schnell, Laura Kelly, The Hill

Posted: Dec 9, 2024 / 03:28 PM CST

Updated: Dec 9, 2024 / 04:09 PM CST

https://www.cbs42.com/hill-politics/republicans-pick-mast-to-lead-house-foreign-affairs-panel/

House Republicans selected Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the 119th Congress, sources told The Hill, as the conference works to organize its panels for the next two years of Republican-controlled Washington

Republicans also selected Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) to lead the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, sources said.

The chair picks were made by the House GOP Steering Committee, a panel of roughly 30 lawmakers that includes leadership and elected regional representatives. Their recommendations must be ratified by the whole House, which will likely take place early next year.

The Steering Committee is expected to select the remaining committee chairs this week.

Here’s more information on the committee chair selections.

House Foreign Affairs Committee

Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) addresses the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis., on Wednesday, July 17, 2024.

Mast beat out the competition from three experienced members of the committee, winning the gavel to succeed Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), who was term-limited from running for the position again and opted against seeking a waiver. Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) and Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) also vied for the gavel.

Mast has served in the House since 2017, chairing the subcommittee on oversight and accountability. He served in the U.S. Army for more than 12 years, where he earned a Purple Heart, among other honors.

The Florida Republican will enter the high-ranking position at a tenuous moment on the world stage, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, Ukraine’s war against Russia drags on, and Syria reels from the fall of the regime led by Bashar Assad.

One of the primary powers of the chair and ranking member is review of U.S. weapons sales to foreign countries, and the opportunity to exercise a hold to block such sales. Mast is unlikely to oppose any weapons sales to Israel or Middle East allies that are viewed as key partners in pushing back against Iran’s threat into the region.

Mast, a Trump ally, will also wield the gavel as President-elect Trump looks to advance his “America First” mantra through legislation.

Trump’s efforts to establish a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine; support for Israel and the plight of American hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip; the shock ousting of Assad and confronting China’s threats to U.S. security interests are just some of the top line issues the chair will face.

Foreign policy initiatives could also include legislation sanctioning officials with the International Criminal Court over issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli officials; maintaining a block on aid for UNRWA, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency; eliminating programming at the State Department that promotes LGBTQ visibility and blocking aid to any initiative that provides information on abortion access.

Mast drew headlines last year after, as a way to show his support for Israel, he wore to the Capitol his uniform for the Israeli military, which he volunteered to serve alongside after his time in the Army.

House Committee on Science, Space and Technology

Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) arrives to the House Chamber for the final vote series of the week on Wednesday, September 25, 2024.

Babin is slated to be the next chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, a source confirmed to The Hill, taking the reins from Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), who was term-limited from seeking another round atop the panel and instead seeking the gavel for the Financial Services Committee.

Babin is the chair of the subcommittee on space and aeronautics. No one challenged him for the new role.

25. Polarization: Merriam-Webster’s word of year is 2024 in a nutshell

Polarization: Merriam-Webster’s word of year is 2024 in a nutshell | CNN

CNN · by Karina Tsui · December 9, 2024

From left, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, former President Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, attend the 9/11 Memorial ceremony, in New York on September 11, 2024.

Yuki Iwamura/AP

CNN —

A word that has been used incessantly to describe the fraught state of American politics and society is Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year. That word is “polarization.”

Defined as a “division into two sharply distinct opposites,” “polarization” grew dramatically in search volume over the past year due to what the online dictionary site claims was the “desire of Americans to better understand the complex state of affairs.”

“Polarization” was widely used across the media, with MSNBC at one point declaring that “the 2024 US presidential has left our country more polarized than ever.” Forbes, meanwhile, warned that in workplaces, “cultural polarization is becoming a pressing challenge,” Merriam-Webster wrote in announcing the selection.

“The online dictionary tells us which words are being looked up, but also in what volume. And so we try to have a data driven list that explains what words sent people to the dictionary in the past year,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor at large, told the Associated Press.

“This year was a year with an important election. The elections were clearly the story of the year,” he said. “And polarization is the term that has been used by everyone.”

Other contenders for word of the year included “totality,” following an April solar eclipse that drew astronomical excitement, and “fortnight,” the primarily British word that’s also a Taylor Swift song.

Merriam-Webster is one of the final few English-language dictionary platforms to release its annual word. Earlier in December, Oxford Dictionary announced that “brain rot” was its word of the year, while Cambridge Dictionary declared “manifest” its lead word for 2024.

Meanwhile, Dictionary.com’s word of the year was “demure,” which saw a “meteoric rise in usage” this year following the release of satirical make-up videos by transgender TikToker Jools Lebron.

CNN · by Karina Tsui · December 9, 2024

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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

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

Access NSS HERE

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