Quotes of the Day:
"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
- Robert H. Jackson, Supreme Court Justice
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
- Rudyard Kipling, 1935 (this quote is often misattributed to Nietzsche)
"It is a general error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare."
-Edmund Burke
1. At Every Step, Afghans Coming to America Encounter Stumbling Blocks
2. Tampa volunteers rescue 39 Americans from Afghanistan
3. The United States Can’t Afford Another Vague National Security Strategy
4. In Today’s Wars, Everything Is a Weapon
5. Perspective | The Cold War is over. Why do we still treat Russia like the Evil Empire?
6. Chinese man documents his investigation into alleged Uyghur 'concentration camps' in video
7. Wagner Group: Why the EU is alarmed by Russian mercenaries in Central Africa
8. Dozens confirmed to ambassador posts after Ted Cruz refused for months to consider them
9. Cruz ends diplomat blockade in exchange for vote on Russia pipeline, Stanley confirmed for Argentina
10. Ex-defense contractor charged with attempted espionage; sought to provide secrets to Russia
11. Train engineer admits to terrorism charges related to derailment near Navy hospital ship
12. What Ukraine Can Learn From Finland
13. Foreseeing the China-India Boundary Dispute: 2022 and Beyond
14. Chinese Army conducts nuclear, chemical, biological warfare drills in Tibet
15. Targeted cyber sabotage can bring Russia and China to their knees
16. Vets ask Pentagon leader to take new look at Niger probe after '3212 Unredacted' film
17. For US, geopolitical expediency always trumps democracy
18. Email database leak reveals dozens of military members, government employees, and academic personnel are active members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans
19. Taliban recruits flood into Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan as the group works to consolidate control
20. Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes
21. Celebrities partner with Special Forces soldiers in shooting competition
22. How a Night Stalker pilot teamed up with Delta Force in Iraq
23. From Media Bias to Outright Partisanship
24. Special Operations C-130 Hits Target With A 'Rapid Dragon' Pallet-Dropped Cruise Missile (Updated)
25. Neurowarfare
26. Putting the Special in Special Operations Forces
1. At Every Step, Afghans Coming to America Encounter Stumbling Blocks
This is going to be a long process for many Afghans and those who are supporting them. If you would like to help please contribute to the organizations that are working on this problem. Here is the one I am engaged with: Shona ba Shona (https://www.shonabashona.net/)
At Every Step, Afghans Coming to America Encounter Stumbling Blocks
The day before Thanksgiving, immigration lawyers managed to get Arian Ali and his family on an American charter flight to a U.S. military base outside Doha, Qatar.
U.S. officials concede that the system was unprepared.
The day before Thanksgiving, immigration lawyers managed to get Arian Ali and his family on an American charter flight to a U.S. military base outside Doha, Qatar.Credit...
By
- Dec. 19, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET
When he was approved for a special visa to immigrate to the United States, Arian Ali thought his luck was about to change. The Taliban had taken over Afghanistan, but he had a way out.
Instead, he remains in limbo.
Mr. Ali, 43, qualified for the visa by working with the U.S. government in a series of jobs during the 20-year war and had waited since 2014 for approval. That finally happened in October, more than a month after the Biden administration left Afghanistan in a dramatic evacuation as the Taliban seized control of Kabul, the capital.
The visa could be picked up at any American embassy. But the one in Kabul had shut down and, without the visa in hand, he was unable to enter any of the countries he deemed safe enough to visit that had open U.S. consular offices.
The day before Thanksgiving, immigration lawyers managed to get Mr. Ali and his family on an American charter flight to a U.S. military base outside Doha, Qatar. Now he is back to waiting — for word on how long he will be there, and when he will get the visa he needs stamped in his passport.
“Our life became a joke,” Mr. Ali, who agreed to be identified only by a nickname to protect family still in Afghanistan, said in a text message this week from a refugee camp at Al Udeid Air Base.
“Taliban kill and U.S. government too slow and reluctant to help,” he said.
More than 74,500 Afghans have been given permission to live in the United States, at least temporarily, in the four months since the return of Taliban rule. Though they are no longer in immediate danger, many have had trouble navigating an immigration system that U.S. officials concede was wholly unprepared to help them.
Thousands have stayed in squalid camps. Others have been threatened by security forces as they transit neighboring countries. Even those who have made it to the United States worry about how they will afford housing and food.
In interviews, more than a half-dozen Afghans in various stages of immigrating to the United States expressed profound gratitude for the help they received in leaving Afghanistan. But they also shared their frustration — echoed by immigration advocates, members of Congress and even Biden administration officials — with a process that has provided little clarity on when the United States will deliver on its promise to protect those who risked their lives to support the American government.
“There are lots of people who are trying to find that lucky break that will get them through a door, across the border, on an airplane, get a visa, whatever they need to just get out of the country and try to process themselves into some kind of new reality,” said James B. Cunningham, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan from 2012 to 2014.
“Unfortunately, that’s going to continue for a long time,” he said.
Biden administration officials say they are trying to ease the passage. But they have struggled with what Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken described last month as a situation that “is in so many ways a complicated story that I’m not sure the American people fully understood.”
Additionally, Congress and the White House have failed to resolve whether to give permanent legal status to tens of thousands of Afghans who were evacuated to the United States. That means they could, in theory, be deported in as little as two years.
“The U.S. military and diplomatic presence in Afghanistan may have ended in August,” said Sunil Varghese, the policy director for the International Refugee Assistance Project, “but U.S. government’s obligation did not.”
Mr. F., who worked with the U.S. government for years, is living in Tajikistan on a short-term visa that expires every month, with no guarantee that it will be renewed.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times
Terrified in Tajikistan
With the Taliban back in power, a 36-year-old man who had also worked with the U.S. government knew he had to get his family out of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule
With the departure of the U.S. military on Aug. 30, Afghanistan quickly fell back under control of the Taliban. Across the country, there is widespread anxiety about the future.
J.F., who agreed to be identified only by his initials for protection, spent years helping the U.S. Treasury Department prosecute money laundering and terrorism financing cases, including against the Taliban. His mother worked for the now-defunct Ministry of Women’s Affairs, counseling victims of domestic violence.
He and his family hid in Kabul for weeks in October, then fled to neighboring Iran. From there, and with a legal entry visa, they flew to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. With a prominent Afghan diaspora on the outskirts of the city, it seemed like the safest place to be while he applied for what is known as “humanitarian parole” to the United States — given that the process must be completed in a country that has a functioning U.S. embassy. Parole status allows Afghan refugees to live in the United States for a fixed period, in most cases two years.
But six days after they arrived in Dushanbe in early November, security guards knocked on the door of the family’s apartment and took their passports. When he went to the agents’ office the next day, they refused to return the documents and said the family would be sent back to Afghanistan.
Were that to happen, Mr. F. said, the Taliban “will not let us live.”
Requests for help from a group of Americans who worked with Mr. F. in Kabul have bounced between Congress, the State Department, Treasury and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services without resolution — or even much of an explanation.
“Treasury’s hands are pretty much tied,” a Treasury official said in a Nov. 5 email on the matter that was shared with The New York Times.
“Our office will be happy to assist the family once U.S.C.I.S. approves their parole request,” the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe responded in a Nov. 11 email.
In an email dated Nov. 12, an aide to Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, also suggested that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services needed to move first but noted that processing the requests would “likely take several months.”
Only about 135 of the 28,000 applications from Afghans seeking humanitarian parole have been approved since July 1, according to the agency, which usually receives fewer than 2,000 applications from around the world each year.
A spokeswoman at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would not verify Mr. F’s case, citing privacy concerns, but said in a statement that the agency was prepared to welcome more Afghans over the coming months.
Mr. F. managed to retrieve his family’s passports but is living in Dushanbe on a short-term visa that expires every month, with no guarantee that it will be renewed.
If it is not, he and his family will be deported.
“I didn’t expect to get it easily,” he said of approval to come to the United States, “but it’s too difficult.”
One of his former colleagues, John Kimbler, the chief executive of California-based Paradigm Applications, is mystified by the web of bureaucracy.
“He’s safer now than he was before, but it seems like there should be a way to move him on to secure that safety,” Mr. Kimbler said.
Mursal Nazar applied for a special immigrant visa last year as the Taliban seized territory across Afghanistan and the U.S. military prepared to leave.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
Dwindling Patience in Qatar
Mursal Nazar considered herself fortunate. She was evacuated to the camp at Al Udeid Air Base on a U.S. military flight on Aug. 25 — one day before an Islamic State suicide bomber killed scores of Afghans and 13 American troops at the same gate where she had been waiting to be let into the Kabul airport.
But the three-hour flight turned into a 11-hour ordeal as the hundreds of passengers, packed tightly in the sweltering cabin, underwent security and safety checks after they landed.
“We didn’t have proper toilets to use,” said Ms. Nazar, 31. “We didn’t have places to go and take a shower and places for women, who need privacy, to go and change their clothes. They put men and women sleeping under the same tent — different kinds of people, from different cultures and different beliefs. That was a problem for us.”
After a 10-day wait, Ms. Nazar and her husband left for the United States.
Officials said conditions had vastly improved at Al Udeid, which continues to house thousands of Afghans on their way to the United States.
During the evacuation, a dozen overseas transit hubs, or “lily pads,” housed thousands of Afghans. But concerns about a long-term strain on Pentagon resources and readiness have led to the closure of all but three of the sites: Al Udeid, one in Kosovo and a vast field of tents known as Humanitarian City in the United Arab Emirates. Officials said there were at least 2,900 Afghans — the number frequently changes — at the three bases waiting to come to the United States.
The host governments have also raised concerns about allowing in thousands of people who American officials have said may not have been fully vetted before they were flown out of Afghanistan.
Qatar recently banned Afghans who don’t have passports or other government-approved credentials, though there may be exceptions, Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, the country’s top diplomat, said in Washington last month.
For security reasons, “it’s very important to make sure that the right people are evacuated,” he said.
Mr. Ali is among at least 28,000 Afghans who have been identified as qualifying for the special immigrant visa because of their work for the U.S. government. The State Department says it has issued 8,200 of the visas since last January, and hopes to bring out at least 1,000 more from Afghanistan each month through next September, although that goal may be especially difficult to reach in the winter and with Kabul’s airport in disarray.
But a yearslong delay in processing the visas has enraged military veterans and others who served in Afghanistan, and become a rare source of unity within a Congress that has been divided to the point of paralysis on other aspects of immigration.
“The United States pledged to support those who served our mission in Afghanistan,” Senators Jim Risch of Idaho, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma and Rob Portman of Ohio, all Republicans, wrote in an Oct. 21 letter to demand an investigation into the delays. “Failing to do so would lead allies and adversaries alike to call into question our reliability and credibility as a partner in future conflicts.”
Mr. Blinken has noted that the State Department, which issues the visas after they have been vetted by the Homeland Security Department, inherited a backlog of 17,000 applications when President Biden took office in January. Consular officers were processing about 100 special immigrant visas each week last winter but about 1,000 as Mr. Biden’s deadline for ending the war approached in August.
Mr. Ali was eligible for a visa through his work since 2003 for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations, advocacy groups and the fledgling Afghan government.
“I’m proud of the work I did with the United States,” he said. “But I don’t understand how the U.S. government could abandon its allies.”
Hamid Wahidy and his family stayed at a camp at Quantico, Va., for around 40 days before moving into a small Airbnb in San Diego.Credit...Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times
Stressed in the United States
Ms. Nazar applied for a special immigrant visa last year as the Taliban seized territory across Afghanistan and the U.S. military prepared to leave. It had not been approved by the time she was evacuated to the camp in Qatar in August, however, and she entered the United States on humanitarian parole that required her to live on a National Guard base in Indiana as she waited for refugee resettlement officials to take her case.
She arrived at Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis, before dawn on Sept. 6, and was struck by the expanse of green fields and fresh air. “I was relieved that finally I was somewhere I can be relaxed,” she said.
It did not last long. The mess halls ran out of food in the early days. Base officials struggled to track the Afghans; as recently as mid-November, a military public affairs officer insisted that Ms. Nazar had already left Camp Atterbury even though she had not.
Worst of all was the nagging anxiety of when they might move them off base and into homes.
“When we asked the same question, like, ‘How long is it going to take? On what basis are you going let these families to be resettled from here?’ they say, ‘We don’t have any answer for your questions — you just have to wait for your turn, and whenever it comes, we will call you,” Ms. Nazar said last month.
Her turn finally came Thanksgiving week, when she moved into a temporary apartment in Bayonne, N.J. “Things are going well,” she said recently, although she is waiting for work authorization and other documents.
Resettlement agencies have helped place around 38,000 Afghans in American communities since August.
Tens of thousands of Afghans are still waiting on seven military bases in the United States. But a refugee camp at Fort Lee, Va., was shuttered on Nov. 17, and officials said one in Quantico, Va., would likely be next.
“The most important thing we can do is put people on the path to self-sufficiency as quickly as we can,” Jack Markell, the former governor of Delaware and the coordinator of Operation Allies Welcome, the White House resettlement process for evacuated Afghans, said in an interview last month.
As many as 4,000 Afghans are moved from the camps and resettled each week, and “this is an effort that will continue,” Mr. Markell said.
He acknowledged Afghans’ frustration, and said officials have tried to answer more of their questions in recent weeks. “If we were in their shoes, we’d want the same thing,” Mr. Markell said. “We’d all want to know, as quickly as possible, where we’re going to be building our new lives.”
Refugee agencies have been overwhelmed with caring for Afghans families who are moved into American communities. A family of 10, including a newborn baby, had no money and no benefits when they were settled outside Washington D.C. and depended on grocery deliveries from the Muslim Association of Virginia. In Houston, some Afghans have been placed in crime-ridden neighborhoods and are living in apartments with dilapidated toilets or black mold in bathrooms, and are salvaging supplies from rubbish heaps or borrowing from neighbors.
“There are pregnant women who have slept on hard floors with no blankets, no mattress,” said Shekeba Morrad, an Afghan-American community organizer in Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia, who works with a nationwide group trying to monitor the situation of the newly arrived Afghans.
Hamid Wahidy, 34, and his family made it to the camp at Quantico via a route that first took them to Qatar, Germany and Dulles International Airport outside Washington. They stayed at the camp for 40 days before moving into a small Airbnb in San Diego. The first month there was a blur of bureaucratic shuffling to receive his Social Security card, which he needed to open a bank account, obtain a driver’s license, apply for a job and enroll his kids in school.
A few weeks later, he moved into a larger home. It cost him $3,400 — for one month’s rent and a security deposit — of the $5,000 the family received from a resettlement agency. He did not immediately receive food stamps and other benefits that he had expected under a spending bill that Congress passed in September that included $6.3 billion in expanded assistance to the arriving Afghans.
The legislation also did not include an expedited process for legal residency for Mr. Wahidy and other Afghans. Without it, immigration advocates say, they could eventually be deported.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, noted that the Afghan refugees had already undergone background checks and other security screening, and suggested they could fill job vacancies created by the pandemic.
“This is not only the right thing to do — it will enrich our communities and strengthen our economy,” said Ms. Klobuchar, who is among those pushing for the Afghans to be given “a clear path to remain here as lawful permanent residents.”
Mr. Wahidy described his family’s journey out of Kabul in August — including crawling through a fetid canal to catch the attention of an American soldier standing guard at the airport — as “very difficult.”
In San Diego, he has relied on donations. He is still trying to accept that his life will never be what it was in Afghanistan before the Taliban took over — “a good life in our own country,” he said wistfully.
“We had a job there, we could handle our family, our normal life,” Mr. Wahidy said, exhaling deeply. “But here, it is 180 degrees change.”
“It’s not clear, our future,” he said. “What will happen to us, I don’t know.”
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.
2. Tampa volunteers rescue 39 Americans from Afghanistan
Tampa volunteers rescue 39 Americans from Afghanistan
Daily Mail · by Ronny Reyes For Dailymail.Com · December 19, 2021
More than three dozen American citizens and lawful residents, including an 11-month old boy, were rescued from Afghanistan through the help a civilian volunteer group.
The rescue of 39 on Friday, orchestrated by the Tampa-based Project DYNAMO, comes nearly four months after America's chaotic withdrawal from the Taliban-controlled nation in August, which left hundreds of Americans and allies behind.
'This is the first known major airlift rescue with American boots on the ground since the U.S. government abandoned the country of Afghanistan in August,' James Judge, a spokesman for Project DYNAMO, said in a statement.
The volunteer group, which has rescued more than 2,000 Americans who were left behind after U.S. troops withdrew on August 31, said those rescued were staying at a safe house in the capital city of Kabul.
Scroll down for video
Project DYNAMO rescued 39 Americans and lawful residents from Afghanistan on Saturday who were left behind after America's chaotic withdrawal in August
Among the evacuees was an 11-year-old boy who flew from Kabul to JFK airport
The volunteer group secured everyone's documents and COVID-19 tests to make the trip
Volunteers provided food, water and COVID-19 testing before transporting them to Kabul International Airport, which was once filled with desperate crowds trying to flee the nation amid the Taliban's take over.
The evacuees flew out aboard two planes and landed at JFK International Airport in New York on Friday.
'It feels amazing to bring American citizens home,' Bryan Stern, Project DYNAMO co-founder, told WTSP.
'These are our neighbors... Our countrymen.'
A third plane holding eight foreign evacuees is set to arrive Sunday morning.
Bryan Stern, Project DYNAMO co-founder, is pictured holding everyone's documents at Kabul International Airport, in Afghanistan, as he preps them for the trip
Those rescued were given food and water at a safe house before heading out
The families arrived in New York on Friday after a day long trip
Biden's decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan was widely seen as a blow to American credibility to our Allies, especially amid reports that fellow G-7 leaders tried and failed to persuade him otherwise.
It also alarmed national security experts who feared the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Afghan government and Western evacuations would be filled by Russian and Chinese influence, and become a breeding ground for terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.
And some of the most searing anger at Biden came from the president breaking a vow he made on August 18, when he pledged on ABC News that 'if there's American citizens left, we're gonna stay to get them all out.'
However on August 31, he admitted in a speech after the evacuation concluded that 'about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave.'
The president was also accused of turning away from Afghans who aided the US military during its 20-year occupation - amid reports that Taliban fighters put targets on their backs.
Thousands of former US military translators and aid workers still in the special immigrant visa pipeline were left behind.
Top Biden officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were also under fire from Congressional lawmakers during heated hearings on Capitol Hill.
A Taliban fighter stands guard at the site of the twin suicide bombs, which killed scores of people including 13 US troops on August 26, at Kabul airport on August 27
Fears are growing that crowds could try to storm the airport once civilian mercy flights stop, or that opportunistic terrorists could attack the densely-packed crowd
Biden defended the United States' widely-criticized withdrawal operation from Afghanistan this past summer, claiming that he was against the invasion 'from the beginning' in a new interview - though his past Senate voting record says otherwise.
Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, Biden chalked up the bipartisan criticism he received to failing to evacuate 'without anyone getting hurt.'
The president, 79, made the comments during a brief appearance in CBS correspondent Rita Braver's profile of First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.
While discussing the need for bipartisan unity Biden was asked if he was 'willing to lose his presidency' over 'sticking with' his beliefs.
He then launched into an unprompted defense of his record over the chaotic evacuation from Kabul in August, after the Afghan capital fell to the Taliban at unprecedented speed.
'For example, Afghanistan - well, I've been against that war in Afghanistan from the very beginning. We spent $300 million a week in Afghanistan over 20 years,' Biden said.
'Everybody says, "You could have gotten out without anybody being hurt." No one's come up with a way to indicate to me how that happens. And so, there are certain things that are just so important.'
Daily Mail · by Ronny Reyes For Dailymail.Com · December 19, 2021
3. The United States Can’t Afford Another Vague National Security Strategy
Every NSS since 1987 and Goldwater Nichols has been "vague" (and aspirational) and not a true strategy of an articulation of ends, ways, means, assumptions, opportunities, resources, restraints and constraints, and risks.
I would also peruse this publication for some insights into "doing strategy" during the Cold War for lessons and possible guidance (good and bad -and the author's bias is bad) http://www.statecraft.org/
However, I would like to call attention to Robert Worley's work on Political Warfare. I think he offers important and useful information and recommendations.
Please go to these two links:
Understanding Worley’s “United States Political Warfare Policy”
http://irregularwarrior.com/understanding-worleys-united-states-political-warfare-policy
Think Piece - Draft US Political Warfare Policy
http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/think-piece-draft-us-political-warfare.html
DRAFT U.S. POLITICAL WARFARE POLICY
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1peJYryWFb4xhlzqS05J6mYM1dtfwlTYf/view?usp=sharing
The United States Can’t Afford Another Vague National Security Strategy
Americans need the government to level with them about the need to stand up to rivals like Russia and China—and the costs of failure.
DECEMBER 19, 2021, 2:55 AM
U.S. President Joe Biden addresses U.S. Air Force personnel in Suffolk, England, ahead of the G-7 summit on June 9. Joe Giddens/WPA Pool/Getty Images
In Crimea, Russia engineered annexation through its little green men. In the South China Sea, China has used its paramilitary maritime militia, in concert with its Coast Guard and People’s Liberation Army Navy, to incrementally impose its diktat well beyond any accepted international notion of jurisdictional waters.
Why can’t the United States compete in the gray zone with China and Russia? It’s not outmoded military capabilities, intelligence gaps, or failed strategies. Fundamentally, it’s because the United States isn’t organized for modern great-power competition.
Failure to compete in the gray zone erodes deterrence, making the danger of miscalculation or adventurism greater. Just this June came reports indicating China added more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missile silos—around a 140 percent increase. In August, Beijing tested an around-the-world hypersonic missile now being called a fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS)—surprising many defense analysts.
If that doesn’t serve as a wake-up call, then ponder Russia’s adventures in Ukraine, where Russia today has amassed around 100,000 troops, along with the equipment and logistic chain needed to sustain an invasion. All the while, China has been conducting increasingly provocative military operations in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea since March and leveraging cynical debt diplomacy to acquire an airport in Uganda last month
Clearly, the U.S. unipolar moment is dead. It’s past time to reorder U.S. defenses and earnestly get on with great-power competition. The next national security strategy (NSS)—due in just the next few months—must address all these threats explicitly while providing a road map for securing U.S. interests in peace. Anything less would be unserious.
China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy conducts military drills in the South China Sea on Jan. 2, 2017. STR/AFP via Getty Images
Since the Obama administration, U.S. presidents have denied the security situation’s urgency with vague references to a geostrategic “inflection point” that is always merely “approaching.” In reality, that moment passed in 2015—when China’s navy became larger than the U.S. Navy and fortified its archipelago of human-made islands in the South China Sea. Washington just hasn’t come to grips with it because that would entail a jarring, comprehensive retooling of the levers of national power.
Rather, the powers-that-be have preferred muddling through with Cold War legacy organizational structures last updated by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act. Then-Sen. John McCain’s 2015 review of these structures was a serious effort but proved to be ahead of its time. The review died without much changing.
The latest presumptive attempt is what U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called “integrated deterrence” in an April speech. To date, there has been little official insight into his thinking on this seemingly new concept. More likely, it is simply a recognition that great-power deterrence requires action across a spectrum spanning peacetime competition through conflict and including military, economic, and diplomatic actions.
While the United States’ rivals in Beijing and Moscow gain ground, today’s diplomats and military leaders have allowed the nation to suffer several avoidable crises. These include the ignoble Afghanistan evacuation, limp preparation and action to mitigate supply chain disorders, and ill-conceived border policies amid a pandemic. U.S. President Joe Biden’s promise that “America is back” is ringing hollow among U.S. allies. The Afghanistan debacle in particular prompted sharp criticism from even Washington’s closest allies.
Merely acknowledging the China threat is no longer good enough. The American people need an action plan.
On Aug. 18, in an unusual move, British parliamentarian Tom Tugendhat scolded the U.S. president on the floor of Parliament. The politician echoed a sense of abandonment held by many as he chastised the president’s scapegoating of Afghans: “To see their commander in chief call into question the courage of men I fought with—to claim that they ran—is shameful.”
On the heels of the president’s poorly coordinated evacuation, he again undermined the trust of U.S. allies. In September, France was snubbed when the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia announced a plan to co-develop nuclear submarines (known as AUKUS), unceremoniously ending a multibillion-dollar French submarine deal.
AUKUS is a long shot that could see improvement in future allied military capabilities, but at what cost? At a time when every ally is a strategic asset—especially a major one like France, which has a substantial military presence in the Indo-Pacific—diplomacy around this deal should have been handled more carefully. If U.S. allies are to retain an asymmetric advantage over China and Russia, recent events can’t be repeated.
The long erosion of U.S. economic heft, ebbing dominance of soft power, and a slipping military edge have also contributed to where the United States is today. This changed geostrategic environment requires a fundamental rethinking of how the nation does national security. This is particularly important to confront China’s coordinated economic, political, societal, and military approaches.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Sept. 15, with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (left) and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (right). Win McNamee/Getty Images
The events of the past few months make clear that the nation needs a serious strategy that focuses on protecting Americans and the country’s prosperity. Sadly, for too long, U.S. administrations have produced an “all things to all people” national security strategy that amounts to pages of pablum. The forthcoming NSS must focus on ends, ways, and means to assure Americans’ physical security in the near term while safeguarding future national interests. And it must be politically sustainable at home and with key allies. Getting there requires an honest assessment of some basic but important questions.
Who wants to hurt Americans? And how are enemies damaging U.S. society, its economy, and its interests? The focus must necessarily be on tangible, external threats so real actions can be taken; problems such as climate change or COVID-19 warrant attention but not as part of the NSS. After all, the Marines cannot assault a virus’s beach nor can the Air Force bomb climate change to the negotiation table. Those issues merit separate strategies; the NSS must focus on providing a military positioned for strategic success against China and Russia while bolstering its ability to operate in any environment, including when challenged by a rival. (This is not to say if a future pandemic is found to be a deliberate biological assault on the United States by a rival, it wouldn’t warrant a military response.)
Unfortunately, the president’s March 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance does little to help Americans discern the threats facing them—much less outline a strategy to respond. For example, while it devotes many pages to racial equity, climate change, and labor relations, it offers no clear plan for responding to the comprehensive threat from China. Merely acknowledging the China threat (something candidate Biden was reluctant to do) is no longer good enough. The American people need an action plan.
According to the interim guidance, the administration proposes to advance U.S. national interests abroad through the appeal of U.S. democracy. Yet the administration has already undermined this effort through misplaced apologist narratives for American history. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s March 19 comments characterizing the United States as a racist nation were certainly not helpful—nor was U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s more recent characterization of European explorers’ arrival in the new world as “shameful” and ushering in “persistent inequity.” Such statements are hardly complete descriptions of the nation’s history and cut against any effort to hold up U.S. democracy as a beacon to freedom-loving people the world over.
Without adequate hard power, no measure of diplomacy or economic statecraft will convince China not to attack a democratic Taiwan or check Russian military adventures against a NATO member.
Likewise, misguided insurrectionist talk or entertaining thoughts of secession is nowhere near mainstream thinking despite the very visible and popularized events of Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol. More harmful has been the sustained amplification of those events and attempts to proscribe the views of those who hold a differing political viewpoint. The United States is stronger as a nation when its citizens embrace their differences and provide an example for how democracy functions through considered deliberation. Sadly, it appears debates about this event may be serving narrow domestic political goals while obscuring real dangers that are forming.
Just this year alone, the nation has suffered an oil crisis caused by a cyberattack and historic shipping backlogs snarling the nation’s logistics. Meanwhile, the cost of living has increased. Gas prices are up 40 percent since January. The current U.S. consumer price index is 6.8 percent higher than in November 2020 due to poor pandemic and supply system responses.
The president proposes to employ economic statecraft but has not said what that would look like—especially now, in an era when China is viewed by too many investors as a more lucrative option than investing in the United States.
Missing in action is how the levers of U.S. influence will come together, combined with military strength, in a meaningful way—one that deters bad actors like Russia, bolsters alliances, and builds the capacity to deter or fight a major war with China if need be.
When push comes to shove, a nation’s security rests on hard military power, which can be applied most effectively when combined with effective diplomacy and economic statecraft. This is nothing new and requires no new catchphrase like “integrated deterrence” to be actualized; what’s needed is a commitment to the tools of the trade.
Without adequate hard power, no measure of diplomacy or economic statecraft will convince China not to attack a democratic Taiwan or check Russian military adventures against a NATO member. Given China’s military expansion and Russia’s active military posture from Ukraine to the Pacific Ocean, a new paradigm is needed. There is urgency, as well, if Adm. Philip Davidson’s assessment is believed. In March testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he stated China is preparing for war over Taiwan by 2027. Even more pressing is the administration’s public acknowledgment that Russia is amassing troops and preparing for an invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
Given these requirements and the president’s interim guidance, the next NSS must provide a plan to counter several pressing challenges in the near term. First, it must address China’s increasingly aggressive military posture around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. It must also fill the gaps in U.S. diplomacy and military capacities to address Russia’s June naval exercise close to Hawaii, undo its annexation of Crimea, and prevent further loss of Ukraine’s territorial integrity as well as diminish its support of hostile proxies in Syria and Libya, to name a few of Moscow’s provocative adventures.
Lastly, it must explain how the military will be used to protect Americans from resurgent international terrorist threats like al Qaeda given the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan. Platitudes about “over-the-horizon” capabilities are not enough at this point.
British armed forces work with the U.S. military to evacuate civilians and their families out of Kabul on Aug. 21.Ministry of Defence via Getty Images
For too long, a national bureaucracy stove-piped and in competition with itself has not been responsive to comprehensive Chinese economic, societal, diplomatic, and military competition. Although having fully qualified and trusted nominees approved and in place quickly is important, the issue is actually foundational; the problem is the way government is organized.
Recent jockeying between the U.S. secretaries of state and defense when called to testify before Congress on the botched Afghanistan evacuation undermines confidence that coordination between the two departments is up to the task. While some progress in interagency coordination has been made in recent years, adapting the country’s institutions for today’s threats must become a priority.
The good news is the nation has adapted to a fundamentally changed security environment before, and it can do so again. The 1947 National Security Act created a stronger civilian-led military and the CIA. Both were vital to Cold War containment of the multifaceted Soviet threat.
When the Soviet Union exceeded U.S. conventional deterrence due to its overwhelming advantage in Europe-based conventional forces, Washington addressed this vulnerability by turning to long-range precision weapons and joint operations—which were put on display during the 1991 Gulf War. Then, in 1986, the Goldwater-Nichols Act restructured the military to address shortcomings in military operations that were evident in the 1983 Grenada invasion.
The structures put in place in 1986 served the United States adequately both in the unipolar moment following the Cold War and during its global war on terror. But it is increasingly evident that those Cold War structures are no longer up to the task, especially in dealing with China.
The United States has the capacity to compete and win the day-to-day competition with China and Russia while deterring lesser adversaries; it just isn’t doing it effectively or sustainably. Examples of this include the United States’ failure to anticipate and blunt Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its failure to take seriously China’s 2013 South China Sea island-building campaign before it was completed in 2015.
Both Crimea and the South China Sea have eroded the U.S. military’s positional advantage and raised doubts about its military capacity to honor treaty obligations with the Philippines and NATO. Yet, recent improvements in defense budgets and a sustained forward naval presence in the Black Sea and South China Sea have halted this trend—so far.
Moreover, despite suffering defeats, Russia’s proxies in Libya and Syria remain active. And China has reneged on a treaty with the United Kingdom without consequence, effectively subjugating Hong Kong’s autonomy before 2047. Business as usual is not tenable.
Philippine marines disembark from their landing ship as security responders during a simulation of a disaster drill as part of a joint Philippines-U.S. military exercise in Casiguran, Philippines, on May 15, 2017. TED ALJIBE/AFP via Getty Images
Rather than bold statements of ideals and objectives, the NSS must articulate new countermeasures against gray zone operations. The combination of a forward naval presence and diplomacy works. When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated in November that Washington would honor defense treaty obligations should China attack Philippine vessels conducting a resupply at the Second Thomas Shoal, there were two carrier strike groups and an amphibious ready group nearby. China backed down, and the Philippines has since conducted a resupply of its base in the South China Sea. Perhaps this is what Austin had in mind when he called for “integrated deterrence,” which must merge diplomacy with the military and, increasingly, the economic levers of power and influence.
In 2018, the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development (BUILD) Act was passed with high expectations that it would provide an alternative to Chinese Communist Party largess: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is a danger not only for its documented corrupting influence on foreign governments’ policymaking but also for its capacity to set longstanding infrastructure standards on everything from rail line gauges to 5G cellular service.
Ceding markets to standards set by Chinese state-owned industries puts in place longstanding impediments to incompatible U.S. products. In an attempt to provide an alternative to the BRI, Congress passed the BUILD Act to further U.S. foreign-policy interests. Sadly, the act has not adequately compelled the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to invest in infrastructure projects in ports and airports important to Indo-Pacific nations and the U.S. military. If this cannot be achieved unilaterally, it is hard to believe the G-7’s June commitment to a global “Build Back Better World” campaign will deliver any meaningful results relative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
For integrated deterrence to have any hope of success, it must include economic statecraft and counter Chinese information campaigns at home.
For integrated deterrence to have any hope of success, it must include economic statecraft and counter Chinese information campaigns at home. In 2017, Sarah Cook, Freedom House’s senior research analyst for East Asia, testified before Congress on U.S. media outlets’ self-censorship due to their desire for access to Chinese markets. Hence, pro-Beijing placements in U.S. media is almost unnoticeable: for example, the controversial South China Sea nine-dash line in a map in the children’s movie Abominable and the removal of an offending patch from actor Tom Cruise’s flight jacket in Top Gun: Maverick.
Then there’s the paid-for propaganda the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has inserted in mainstream news media. Its China Watch column has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. The competition for minds and market share is being lost as long as journalists in China are harassed, intimidated, and assaulted while the CCP has easy access to U.S. media.
The U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center was intended to push back on CCP propaganda. Unfortunately, with limited interagency support and funding—in 2017, it received $19.8 million to compete against the CCP’s estimated $10 billion—it’s a very uneven battle. The list of threats and acts of intimidation against those the CCP views as problematic is long and alarming.
Matthew Pottinger, who served nearly four years on the U.S. National Security Council, details a glaring gap of today’s bifurcated approach. In “Beijing’s American Hustle,” Pottinger reveals how billions of dollars in U.S. retirement accounts are funneled to China’s military via opaque listings of Chinese state-owned companies on U.S. stock exchanges.
A good first step, Pottinger argues, is the enforcement of the 2020 Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act and delisting of Chinese companies failing to meet U.S. accounting standards. Furthermore, no new Chinese stock listings should be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that do not meet U.S. standards of transparency—a fair price of entry for the proper functioning of a democratic capitalist economy.
The dangerous reality Americans now live in requires a paradigm shift in how Washington conceptualizes and acts on national security. The next NSS offers an opportunity to begin telling voters how its leaders will rise to the challenge and the cost of meeting rivals’ challenges to voters’ security, way of life, and prosperity. True leadership requires communicating this to the electorate. Another unserious NSS packed with meaningless words will only further anesthetize the public and delay action beyond any hope of deterring a disastrous war.
4. In Today’s Wars, Everything Is a Weapon
Unrestricted Warfare. I am not sure why Hastings does not mention it. It is a blueprint. Surely Mark Galeotti must describe it in his new book.
In Today’s Wars, Everything Is a Weapon
It’s not just gray zones and Putin’s little green men: Conflict is now carried out in banks, courts and even movie theaters.
December 19, 2021, 3:00 AM EST
On Sept. 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. On Dec. 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the U.S. On Aug. 8, 1945, Russia declared war on Japan. The point here is that for the best part of a thousand years, a convention prevailed that before one state waged war against another, it formally announced its intention to do so.
Belligerents’ diplomats were permitted to return unimpeded to their respective homelands — even the wartime Japanese and Germans went along with this, although they had launched surprise attacks such as that on the Day of Infamy.
The rights of prisoners under international law were sometimes respected, albeit sometimes not. Red Cross workers received at least intermittent protection. Combatants wore the uniforms of their respective nations, and it was tacitly if not always officially conceded that armies — yes, including that of Hitler — had a right to shoot prisoners who were captured using guns while wearing civilian clothes without identifying marks.
It would be absurd to suggest that the “laws of war” commanded universal respect or obedience, even sometimes by democracies, and least of all in conflicts with guerrillas. But there was a recognition that the worst effects might be tempered if some rules and conventions existed.
Today, almost all the above is out the window. If China invades Taiwan or Russia seeks to attack Ukraine, the only near-certainty is that their forces will attack without any prior declaration of intent. Moreover, if or when the shooting stops, it is unlikely that there will follow a treaty signed by both belligerents.
Instead, there will merely be a unilateral announcement of whatever new reality Beijing, or Moscow, or the rulers of any other state which has committed a successful act of aggression, deems to be appropriate.
The old explicit delineation between war and peace has been abolished. It is replaced by a new dispensation that seems almost certain to be permanent, wherein rival states compete fiercely and perilously, at a level designed to remain just below the threshold of full-blown armed conflict.
Three years ago, Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, said in a speech: “It seems that we all, East and West, are beginning to live according to the rules of wartime, when all means are good, and a reputation becomes an unaffordable luxury or, at the very least, an easily spent resource. And as a result, for example, a very important red line between politics and a special operation” — an intelligence agency mission — “is practically erased.”
Kortunov’s own country, of course, has done as much as any to create this state of affairs. Not — as was the case with the Soviet Union — for ideological reasons, but because President Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming objective is the preservation of his own power, the gangster culture over which he presides.
We should not pretend that this is entirely new. Strong states have always sought to use economic power, especially, to bully or cajole weaker ones. But every day the non-kinetic means of assault available to governments, including soft-power lawyers, bankers and cultural assets as well as the more familiar cyber-arms, become more potent and promiscuously used.
“War without warfare,” writes British academic Mark Galeotti in a new book, “non-military conflicts fought with all kinds of other means, from subversion to sanctions, memes to murder, may be becoming the new normal.”
Galeotti, author of several works related to this theme, calls his new one “The Weaponization of Everything.” Globalization has proved great for bad guys, whether states or individuals, because it has dramatically increased the range of tools available to befuddle or crush enemies.
Economic sanctions are an increasingly popular weapon against rogue states’ excesses. While these can hurt governments, however, they seldom cause them to change their ways — think Iran. By one estimate, European Union trade sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of the Crimea seizure cost that country around $15 billion — a price Putin thinks cheap. Meanwhile, the measures are reckoned to have cost EU economies … $40 billion.
Then there is law. Chinese lawyers seek to lay a smokescreen of legitimacy upon Beijing’s expansionism in the South China Sea. London has become libel capital of the world, regularly exploited by Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern potentates to silence critics, exploiting their almost limitless funds to pay for top counsel against publishers and media outlets. It is frightening to behold the power that Russian billions exert in Britain, whether in gaining access to top politicians or in acquiring a facade of social respectability.
More than a decade ago, I was shocked to hear Mervyn King, then governor of the Bank of England, remark as if stating the obvious that “London has become the money-laundering capital of the world.” Scarcely any of these vast Russian fortunes have been made through what we would call honest toil. Yet many billions that have been, in effect, stolen from the Russian people are today comfortably housed in the venerable City of London.
Successive British governments know that this mocks probity. Yet none dares to move effectively against ill-gotten wealth and its owners, because Britain’s bankers, hedge-fund managers and lawyers prosper too mightily for ministers to take the moral high road. Though our leaders make defiant statements challenging Russian military aggression or threats of it, they are too frightened to resist invasions by Russian cash. Britain likes to claim — in the past, rightly — that it has a less politically corrupt culture than the U.S. or Italy. This has become less true.
Meanwhile, Western public-relations companies and lobbyists earn large sums promoting the images and reputations of disreputable nations as well as individuals. In the wake of the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, almost certainly on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the regime spent an estimated $20 million on reputation management abroad. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron was photographed showing that he is among the shameless hosts who find nothing embarrassing about hanging out with the Saudis.
Meanwhile, great global media companies bow to the demands of Beijing, because the Chinese market is deemed too important to be expelled from. Chinese filmmakers have joined the patriot games played for so long by Hollywood through John Wayne and Rambo, and by their British counterparts through the James Bond franchise, now to produce a stream of super-nationalistic war movies, designed to condition their people for conflict with the West.
Ever-more state violence is contracted out to mercenaries, to shroud ugly action in a gossamer cloak of deniability. Russian intelligence agencies headed by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, reportedly use criminal organizations as cut-outs in assassinations, such as that of a Chechen leader in Berlin in 2019. (Germany last week expelled two Russian “diplomats” after a court ruled the Kremlin had ordered the killing.)
Mercenaries of the Wagner Group are fighting in several countries, most prominently Libya and Syria, at the behest of the Kremlin. Russia’s “little green men” — non-uniformed special forces — spearheaded the 2014 seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, the U.S. has also been paying billions to military contractors, in the past for providing support services, today ever nearer to the “sharp end.” An estimated 70% of America’s intelligence budget goes to private contracts.
Until recently, Chinese civilians were prohibited from carrying arms abroad, but today such companies as China Security & Protection, Shandong Huawei Security Group and Genghis Security Services play an increasingly active role in implementing Beijing’s policies abroad, and some of their employees have been spotted with weapons.
In September 2014, Estonian security officer Eston Kohver was on his way to a meet with an informer when he was kidnapped and bundled across the Russian border. (The Russians insist he was on their side of the frontier). In Moscow, he was charged with espionage and only released when exchanged for a jailed Russian spy. His misfortune, it later emerged, was to have incurred the anger of border smugglers who had reportedly become spies for the Russian state.
Galeotti describes North Korea’s Committee Bureau 19 as, “in effect the Hermit Kingdom’s organized crime office.” It is responsible for large-scale smuggling, the manufacture and trafficking of amphetamines and forgery of foreign banknotes. As is well known, the country organizes multimillion-dollar online frauds.
The North Koreans and Russians can claim that there is nothing new in this way of doing dirty business: Six decades ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sought to subcontract the killing of Fidel Castro to the mafia. But the links between espionage and crime have expanded exponentially, much to the advantage of big crooks.
Cyber is the towering, revolutionary instrument of conflict. A new breed of professional, the cyber-mercenary, sells his skills to any nation or criminal gang willing to pay for them. We can all understand the peril posed by attacks that paralyze banks, expose data, steal commercial and scientific secrets, shut down hospitals, stop trains. Few of even the biggest Western businesses are effectively protected against the sophistication of Chinese and Russian hackers.
Galeotti suggests, however, that cyberattacks may not be as decisive as sensationalists claim. He cites the example of the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet assault on Iran’s nuclear program. This certainly inflicted substantial damage on centrifuges and much else, set back the Iranian bomb schedule by many months. Yet the author says that if this was the best the most advanced cyberwarriors in the world could achieve, he is unconvinced that electronic assault is as conclusive a game-changer as doomsayers suggest.
I am unsure whether he is right about this. True, military systems can recover from even successful cyberattacks within hours or less. In a shootout in the South China Sea, however, a Chinese ability to disarm even for minutes U.S. Navy carrier catapults or radar systems could prove critical.
All of us have become aware of the pernicious impact of fake news, not least upon an astonishingly credulous American readership. Yet Galeotti is not entirely a pessimist about social media. This can be a force for good, he argues, especially in fingering perpetrators of wickedness, and state promoters of it.
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The brilliant Netherlands-based, pro bono website Bellingcat mobilized the public in Ukraine and around the world to pin responsibility for the 2014 shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, with the loss of 283 lives, onto the Russians who provided the deadly Buk missile. Social media users identified images of the launcher being trundled from Russia into eastern Ukraine, and found emails sent by triumphant separatists boasting about their achievement. No reasonable person could thereafter doubt Putin’s culpability.
Likewise, the citizen-journalists of Bellingcat named the Russian intelligence officers who attempted to murder the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, U.K., in 2018. They also “named and shamed” the Kremlin undercover agents who, in August 2020, sought to murder opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the same Novichok nerve agent.
Deniability is a key objective of many state attacks carried out below the threshold of war. Thus, the tools of freedom — not least exercising a right to vote in favor of sensible leaders — can be used to resist and spotlight wrongdoing.
Galeotti concludes his book with the assertion that “we are heading into an age when everyone may be in at least some kind of a state of ‘war’ with everyone else, all the time, and it is just a matter of degree.”
As I read such accounts, the phrase that echoes in my mind, though not used by Galeotti himself, is “the Great Game.” This was what the British dubbed their century-long struggle with Russia for dominance of the region bordering the North-West frontier of India, conducted through bribes to local rulers, spies, adventurers, occasional assassinations and spasmodic shootouts.
There were many absurdities about the Great Game, just as there are about its modern version. These beg the question: Does it all matter? Are not today’s conflicts in law courts, online, through the banking system, or killings of rival mercenaries whose fates need not trouble us, preferable to mass slaughters such as the 20th century’s world wars?
I submit that we would be mistaken to shrug our shoulders. All the activities sketched above impair the order and stability that are critical forces in preserving the world from self-harm. The peril posed by weapons of mass destruction has never gone away, and almost certainly never will.
In the dark days of the Cold War, we were daily reminded by politicians and the media of the threat from nuclear weapons — the balance of terror. Today, we scarcely hear such words mentioned. Yet the bombs are still there, and they are held by ever-more nations.
Our leaders need to go on being afraid, because only prudent fear can deter them from gambling recklessly upon extending the borders of conflict, as Putin and President Xi Jinping of China risk every day. The mortal peril posed by undeclared war — cyberconflict, clashes on the electronic frontiers of our societies and of our defenses — is that it can very suddenly get very hot.
5. Perspective | The Cold War is over. Why do we still treat Russia like the Evil Empire?
Because Putin is evil???
Excerpts:
What would it look like if we tried, by ourselves, to ratchet down this dangerous back and forth? We might, for example, rescind sanctions against Russia. Our government might stop making pronouncements on the Russians’ internal affairs and let them figure out their own problems without our unwelcome criticism (criticism better meted out to all countries by private individuals and organizations, not foreign governments). We could extend an olive branch by releasing Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, traitors who were directly responsible for the deaths of numerous Soviets spying for the United States and who have each spent more than two decades in American prisons. Typically, two nations in conflict try to negotiate mutual concessions along these lines, but we aren’t doing that successfully with Russia, and mutual concessions aren’t necessarily effective at addressing the roots of a conflict anyway. We’d be better off focusing on our own attitudes and policies and offering Russia some basic goodwill gestures.
I don’t know if this kind of unilateral action would prompt Russia to reciprocate. I don’t know if it would reduce tensions enough to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine — where it’s not at all clear Putin really wants to invade. Even if Russia does escalate its war in Ukraine, though, that would present the United States with an opportunity to respond differently: not with more threats and sanctions, but by honestly assessing how we have contributed over the years to Russian anxieties about encirclement and lost influence. We have played, at the very least, our own significant role in fueling the animosity between our two countries. Ultimately, we cannot control what Russia does in this long-running conflict. But we can at least try to pull back from the fight.
Perspective | The Cold War is over. Why do we still treat Russia like the Evil Empire?
By Joseph Weisberg
Joseph Weisberg is the author of “Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War” and the creator of the FX television series “The Americans.”
December 17, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. EST
As U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Russia was moving troops close to the Ukrainian border this fall, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Cold War had never ended. President Biden sternly told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a two-hour call that the United States wouldn’t tolerate an invasion, the White House reported. Debate broke out among Washington pundits over how much military equipment the United States could send to Kyiv. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) even suggested that the United States could use nuclear weapons preemptively to keep Russian soldiers from crossing the border.
It all feels depressingly, pointlessly familiar.
In 1990, during the brief window between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, I was a CIA trainee in the division responsible for espionage against the Soviets. One day, I heard a group of senior officers having a loud argument about the KGB in the hallway (they were talking outside the secure vault, which I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to do). Several were making the case that the weakened state of the Soviet Union was the opportunity we’d all been waiting for: The CIA should deal a death blow to its rival intelligence agency, should unabashedly, perhaps even gleefully, kick the KGB while it was down. The goal, of course, was to win the Cold War at last. But the Eastern Bloc was crumbling, and Mikhail Gorbachev was desperately trying to reform the Soviet Union. There was no serious geostrategic thought given to whether we should still be fighting with the barest shadow of our enemy.
Back then, I was fully on board for a one-sided brawl to the bitter end. Like so many of my colleagues at the CIA, I was dedicated to destroying the KGB and, more broadly, the Soviet goliath. That passion derived, in no small part, from the incessant anti-Soviet messages embedded in American Cold War culture. Years later, many of us are still under the influence of those messages, which now insist that modern-day Russia — an ordinary state with a typical, self-interested foreign policy — is in fact unusually aggressive and morally bankrupt.
So while the Soviet Union is gone, the fight between the United States and Russia somehow survives. It is no longer a contest between communism and democracy/freedom/capitalism, but is it a battle between an autocracy-spreading Russia and an America hanging onto democracy for dear life? A repressive oligarchical kleptocracy and a rich but possibly faltering example of extreme capitalism? A struggle between a couple of old adversaries? Yes, Russia has serious flaws. One need only look at its recent wars, its posturing with Ukraine, its harsh treatment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and its support for far-right parties in Europe to see that. Even so, the U.S.-Russia conflict has outlived virtually all of the issues that once animated it, a remarkable testament to our (and no doubt their) need to have a best enemy.
It was great to have an enemy. I could focus my intellectual and moral energy on how evil that enemy was: The Soviets didn’t allow freedom of speech! The Soviets didn’t have fair elections! The KGB force-fed dissidents psychotropic medications! If this was how my enemy behaved, there was no question that my country, and therefore I myself, was a pure embodiment of virtue. We were the good guys, and I was one of the good guys. I was not alone in seeing the world through this one-dimensional lens.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, it was impossible to avoid depictions of nefarious Soviets in movies, TV shows and spy novels (John le Carré, James Bond, “Red Dawn,” Rocky, countless anonymous villains). In school, we hid under desks to prepare for a Soviet nuclear attack and read textbooks that omitted the fact that our Cold War enemy had done the lion’s share of the work — and suffered a wildly disproportionate share of the casualties — in defeating the Nazis. And perhaps most powerfully, there was the baked-in moral certainty of most newspapers, magazines and television journalism: An invisible assumption that the Soviet Union was evil and, therefore, the United States was good. All of that was abetted by a bipartisan political consensus that we were in a fight for our very survival against the communists.
A few brave souls did challenge the consensus, pointing to the social advancement of millions of Soviet peasants in the decades after the revolution, Soviet successes in education and health care, and the broad popular support that the system long enjoyed. But these outliers were relegated to the margins of journalism and academia, where I didn’t hear their ideas — or at least encountered them so rarely it was easy to look away.
I eventually came to reckon with how simplistic my views on the “evil empire” were. I had help. After I spent a few years at the CIA in my 20s, therapy in my 30s started to loosen the grip of rigid thinking. In academia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, more complex and nuanced views of Soviet history and politics increasingly flourished. And the flood of new ideas and perspectives coming out of post-Soviet Russia profoundly challenged the old certainties about matters from Stalinism to the role of the Soviet press. After reading the memoir “Spy Handler” by the former KGB officer Victor Cherkashin, it was clear to me that the KGB was far more similar to the CIA than I had ever imagined. Among other things, the people it employed (particularly in the branch devoted to foreign espionage) seemed like me and my friends from Langley, just transported into a different political system. They were mostly bright, patriotic, fundamentally decent. This was part of what inspired me to create “The Americans,” a TV show about relatable KGB officers. Of course, Cherkashin and his friends in the KGB, like me and my friends at the CIA, also had a binary worldview. To them, they were the good guys, and we were the bad guys.
In America, we seem to be collectively stuck in the past. Just as we did during the Cold War, we see ourselves as the good-guy victims of an immoral opponent. This time, the Russian state, personified by Vladimir Putin, is the one-dimensional enemy. The common narrative begins with basic truths: Putin wants to reclaim past Soviet glory, is a politically repressive dictator and is determined to spread Russia’s autocratic system abroad. This is all accurate. But instead of adding complexity to the picture by trying to understand Putin’s point of view, we reduce him to a wholly malevolent force that is attacking our nation out of spite, using propaganda and lies to turn our citizens against one another.
Absent from this narrative, as it was in Soviet times, is our own role in the conflict. Having reappraised the two decades I spent as a stalwart cold warrior, I do not believe that Putin and his pals in the Kremlin are villainous anti-American autocrats who pose a grave danger to our stable, decent and humane democracy. Instead, I see the U.S.-Russia relationship under Putin as a back and forth, a collaboration in making enemies.
The history of this collaboration is complicated, but we are full participants in it. When Putin assumed office, he seemed somewhat open to the West. Some of the evidence for this was absence — the absence of anti-American rhetoric and activity in his first years in power. There was also a desire to strengthen Russia’s economy through trade with the West. And perhaps most convincingly, Putin was vocally supportive after 9/11, offering the United States use of Russian airspace and tacitly accepting the establishment of U.S. military bases in Central Asia. This was no doubt in part because Russia was embroiled in another war in Chechnya and wanted partners in the fight against terrorism. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t sincere.
Within a few years, though, the United States was trying to fully integrate some former Soviet republics into the West, bringing Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia into NATO, an organization specifically devoted to combating Moscow. (Some former Warsaw Pact members such as Poland and Hungary had been admitted earlier, and more were admitted later.) We began building a missile defense shield to protect Europe, placing it in countries formerly allied with the Soviet Union (the shield was ostensibly meant to protect against missiles fired from Iran, but given the sites we chose, Russia didn’t see it that way). Putin became increasingly hostile. We eventually leveled an endless series of sanctions against a broad array of Russians and Russian interests, seeing it as our role to punish Russian misbehavior, whether it related to internal corruption and political repression or military adventures abroad.
Whether you think these moves were justified or not, they were all aggressive acts that a reasonable person — or state — might consider threatening. Russia’s ongoing interference in our political system and electoral process, seen through a lens that includes not just their attacks on us but our attacks on them, starts to look more like a tit for tat. American financial support for election and human rights monitoring groups in Russia, after all, certainly constitutes a kind of interference in Russia’s internal affairs.
In recent years, the intensity of this conflict has occasionally waned, but never for long. There is just too much to fight about. We have involved ourselves heavily in Russia’s backyard, including Ukraine, where the possibility looms of another invasion we can’t do anything to prevent. Different priorities and alliances have pitted us against each other in Syria. Every U.S. election is a chance for Russia to intensify its propaganda war against us, while every act of political repression inside Russia provides an opportunity for us to attack them in the public arena.
What would it look like if we tried, by ourselves, to ratchet down this dangerous back and forth? We might, for example, rescind sanctions against Russia. Our government might stop making pronouncements on the Russians’ internal affairs and let them figure out their own problems without our unwelcome criticism (criticism better meted out to all countries by private individuals and organizations, not foreign governments). We could extend an olive branch by releasing Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, traitors who were directly responsible for the deaths of numerous Soviets spying for the United States and who have each spent more than two decades in American prisons. Typically, two nations in conflict try to negotiate mutual concessions along these lines, but we aren’t doing that successfully with Russia, and mutual concessions aren’t necessarily effective at addressing the roots of a conflict anyway. We’d be better off focusing on our own attitudes and policies and offering Russia some basic goodwill gestures.
I don’t know if this kind of unilateral action would prompt Russia to reciprocate. I don’t know if it would reduce tensions enough to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine — where it’s not at all clear Putin really wants to invade. Even if Russia does escalate its war in Ukraine, though, that would present the United States with an opportunity to respond differently: not with more threats and sanctions, but by honestly assessing how we have contributed over the years to Russian anxieties about encirclement and lost influence. We have played, at the very least, our own significant role in fueling the animosity between our two countries. Ultimately, we cannot control what Russia does in this long-running conflict. But we can at least try to pull back from the fight.
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6. Chinese man documents his investigation into alleged Uyghur 'concentration camps' in video
Yes, a brave man. I hope he can remain safe. Surely there will be crackdowns after this.
Although Buzzfeed appears to be taking some of the credit for this, please note the reference to Radio Free Asia as a source of information and influence.
Chinese man documents his investigation into alleged Uyghur 'concentration camps' in video
A Chinese man has gone viral for his bravery in investigating the alleged Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang since foreign journalists are not allowed to conduct interviews in the region.
The investigation: The man, who goes by Guanguan on YouTube, created a 20-minute documentary that shows some of the locations of the alleged Uyghur concentration camps across Xinjiang.
Guanguan visited several places in Xinjiang, including Fukang, Kazakh Autonomous County, Yunqi, Urumqi (Wulumuqi) and the outskirts of Korla (Kuerle), where the camps are located. About 1.8 million Uyghurs and other minorities are allegedly held without trials in these camps, which the government claims to be re-education and vocational training schools.
The documentary shows that most of these compounds share similar features, such as watchtowers and razor-wire walls; however, the compound in Korla appears to be a military complex with barracks and army trucks.
During his investigation, Guanguan noted that he could not give comments while filming in the locations, because he could “end up in a concentration camp if he were stopped by a police and the footage were discovered.”
He also noted that some of the locations he visited were not listed on any online maps, such as those on Baidu, a prominent search engine in China.
His method: Guanguan reportedly read a lot of international reports about the camps, and the one in particular that he used as a guide during his investigation was from BuzzFeed, Radio Free Asia (RFA) Uyghur Service Director, Alim Seytoff, said in a video about Guanguan.
“In the past couple of years BuzzFeed has been also at the forefront to report on the camps,” Seytoff said. “He traveled from mainland China to Qumul, to Turfan, to Urumchi, to Korla – these major cities, and outskirts of major cities, using the BuzzFeed report as a guide to locate the camps.”
Seytoff then noted that Guanguan managed “to find nearly 20 concentration camps throughout his travels,” and he even discovered some camps that were not mentioned in the BuzzFeed article.
Alison Killing, an architect and geospatial analyst who helped with the BuzzFeed report, applauded Guanguan’s bravery in investigating the alleged camps.
“The first thing that should be said is just how brave that guy was to head off to Xinjiang and to go and look for those camps,” Killing told RFA in November. “It’s really useful to have that ground-level imagery that helps us to corroborate what we’re seeing in the satellite images and helps us to confirm that what we thought we were looking at from above really is vast.”
Killing, along with BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan and programmer Christo Buschek, won a Pulitzer Prize for their stories that exposed “a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.”
Other details: An independent, non-government report by more than 50 international experts in genocide, international law and Xinjiang claimed the Chinese government “bears state responsibility for an ongoing genocide against the Uyghur in breach of the (UN) Genocide Convention,” CNN reported in March.
China reportedly denied all the assertions by international media about the camps and declared that the purpose of these establishments is to “reeducate” the Uyghur people to Chinese values].
Last week, the independent Uyghur Tribunal in London released their judgment that said in part: “On the basis of evidence heard in public, the tribunal is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the People’s Republic of China (PRC), by the imposition of measures to prevent births intended to destroy a significant part of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as such, has committed genocide.”
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7. Wagner Group: Why the EU is alarmed by Russian mercenaries in Central Africa
As an aside I would say that our diplomats, intelligence officers, and military personnel working in Africa need to have not only expert knowledge of the local situation in the countries in which they are stationed, they must have sufficient understanding of Chinese and Russian strategy and operations in those countries and throughout the region.
Excerpts:
Wagner operatives, as well as government forces, have raped and robbed unarmed civilians in the country's rural areas, the UN and French say.
In a report in August about human rights abuses in the CAR, the UN documented more than 500 incidents in the year from July 2020. Among those were extrajudicial killings, torture and sexual violence.
In October, a panel of UN experts said that those arrested by the Russian instructors and the national army often had no access to justice. They said that victims were reluctant to lodge official complaints meaning that impunity for the abuses continued.
Earlier in that month, CAR Justice Minister Arnaud Abazene acknowledged for the first time that some abuses had been carried out by "Russian instructors".
While he said most of the incidents were carried out by the rebels, it was the first time that the government had recognised abuses carried out by their own troops or their allies.
Wagner Group: Why the EU is alarmed by Russian mercenaries in Central Africa
Published
3 hours ago
Central African Republic forces have struggled on their own to reverse rebel advances
This week the European Union imposed sanctions on the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organisation accused of committing human rights abuses in the Central African Republic and elsewhere.
The EU has said that it will no longer train CAR government soldiers because of their links to Wagner.
In Africa, its fighters are also involved in Libya, Sudan and Mozambique and look likely to play a role in Mali.
Why is the Wagner Group in CAR?
The mercenaries are there to support President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in the fight against rebels, who still control many parts of the country despite recent government advances.
The country has been embroiled in civil unrest since President François Bozizé was overthrown in 2013. Mr Touadéra, in power since a 2016 election, had struggled to defeat rebel forces despite the presence of French troops and a UN force.
The CAR government believes the Russian mercenaries have had more success.
Wagner is believed to have started working in the CAR in 2017, after the UN Security Council approved a Russian training mission there and lifted the arms embargo imposed in 2013.
In October 2017, President Touadéra travelled to Russia to sign a number of security agreements with the Russian government.
These included a request for military support, in exchange for access to the CAR's significant deposits of diamonds, gold and uranium.
The UN had only agreed to the deployment of 175 Russian trainers for the local military.
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Russia's President Vladimir Putin welcomed President Faustin-Archange Touadéra to an Africa summit in Russia in 2019
Despite official Russian denials there are accusations, including from the EU, that there are links between Wagner and the Kremlin.
Analysts say that these ties enabled armed Wagner operatives to start working in the CAR after the deal with Russia was signed.
Since then the group's presence in the mineral-rich country has mushroomed.
The Russian government says that it has sent unarmed military instructors to CAR, and that no more than 550 of them have been in the country at any one time.
UN experts, however, believe there could be more than 2,000 instructors deployed by Russia to the CAR, including recruits from Syria and Libya, where Wagner has been active.
This is of particular concern to the UN and France who have both accused the group of inflaming the conflict by carrying out human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings of suspected rebels.
What exactly is the Wagner Group accused of doing?
Wagner operatives, as well as government forces, have raped and robbed unarmed civilians in the country's rural areas, the UN and French say.
In a report in August about human rights abuses in the CAR, the UN documented more than 500 incidents in the year from July 2020. Among those were extrajudicial killings, torture and sexual violence.
Image caption,
Last month, a monument to the Russian military was erected in CAR's capital, Bangui
In October, a panel of UN experts said that those arrested by the Russian instructors and the national army often had no access to justice. They said that victims were reluctant to lodge official complaints meaning that impunity for the abuses continued.
Earlier in that month, CAR Justice Minister Arnaud Abazene acknowledged for the first time that some abuses had been carried out by "Russian instructors".
While he said most of the incidents were carried out by the rebels, it was the first time that the government had recognised abuses carried out by their own troops or their allies.
Mr Abazene also said the Russian instructors had been repatriated to be tried in their home country.
Why has the EU decided to take action?
EU spokesperson Nabila Massrali told the BBC that Brussels was increasingly alarmed by the activities of the Wagner Group. As well as issues in the CAR, the UN has accused Wagner of carrying out war crimes in Libya.
A BBC investigation revealed Wagner operatives had killed civilians and prisoners in Libya, and planted unmarked explosives.
"Their legal status is vague, as are their modus operandi, objectives and targets," Mr Massrali said.
"It is clearly very difficult to prevent and ensure accountability for potential violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in the context of such ambiguity."
The EU was keen to stress that it has not cooperated with Wagner mercenaries.
It has now suspended its military training mission in CAR as it was concerned that those mercenaries were commanding units that the EU had trained.
The EU is one of the largest donors of humanitarian assistance to the CAR having provided more than €1.4bn (£1.2bn; $1.6bn) since 2014.
What are the Wagner Group's ties to the Russian government?
Officially there are none. But there are suspicions of close ties.
One of those sanctioned by the EU was Valery Zakharov, a former member of the Russian state security service, and a security advisor to President Touadéra.
According to the EU, Mr Zakharov is "a key figure in the Wagner Group's command structure and keeps close links with the Russian authorities".
Wagner gained prominence in 2014, when it was fighting with pro-Russian separatists in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Since then, the group has become active in the Middle East, as well as in central and southern Africa.
It is believed to be funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a rich businessman with links to President Vladimir Putin. Mr Prigozhin has always denied any connection with Wagner.
The Russian government also denies any state involvement with the group while also maintaining it does not legally exist because private military contractors are illegal in Russia.
Where else in Africa is Wagner operating?
As well as Libya, the EU also mentioned Wagner mercenary operations in Sudan and Mozambique.
In Sudan, they are thought to have been involved in training as well as the protection of officials and mining sites. In Mozambique, Wagner has supported the army in its fight against the Islamist militant insurgency in the north.
Most recently, Mali, a long-term Western ally in the fight against jihadism in the Sahel, announced it wanted to employ about 1,000 Wagner operatives to help provide security. This followed a French announcement that it would withdraw about half of its 5,000 troops from the country.
The US said it was "alarmed" by the prospect of the deployment of Wagner Group forces in Mali. It said that the mercenaries' presence would destabilise the region.
Mali's Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop said that interventions by the international community had not worked and the country had to consider new options.
Wagner's potential entry into Mali reminds many observers of the way the group started operating in the CAR.
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8. Dozens confirmed to ambassador posts after Ted Cruz refused for months to consider them
Perhaps now we will see the rest of the ambassadorial nominations from the administration.
Dozens confirmed to ambassador posts after Ted Cruz refused for months to consider them
CNN · by Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama, was confirmed early Saturday as the US ambassador to Japan. The vote was 48-21, with 31 senators not voting.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz had for months refused to allow quick confirmation on diplomatic nominations to protest the Biden administration's policy on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Cruz wants the administration to toughen its policy on the major pipeline that will deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, arguing that the pipeline would strengthen Russia and make Germany beholden to the country. Some Republican senators, however, had expressed concern that the hold up on the nominations would impact America's diplomacy and influence around the world.
Early Saturday morning, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, announced a deal that Cruz's legislation imposing sanctions would be debated and voted on by mid-January.
Emanuel and others' confirmation votes were part of a flurry of activity in the Senate in the early hours of Saturday morning before lawmakers adjourned for recess.
Mark Gitenstein, a close friend to Biden who served as chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee when Biden chaired the panel, was confirmed as the ambassador to the European Union.
Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón, who most recently served as first lady Jill Biden's chief of staff in the East Wing, was confirmed as the ambassador to Spain.
The Senate also confirmed Mary Katherine Dimke to be US District Judge for the Eastern District of Washington. Gabriel P. Sanchez, a nominee to be US Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit, and Holly A. Thomas, a nominee to be a US Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit, had their nominations advanced.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the status of Gabriel Sanchez' and Holly Thomas' nominations. They have not yet been voted on.
CNN's Andrew Millman contributed to this report.
CNN · by Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
9. Cruz ends diplomat blockade in exchange for vote on Russia pipeline, Stanley confirmed for Argentina
Cruz ends diplomat blockade in exchange for vote on Russia pipeline, Stanley confirmed for Argentina
WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed dozens of ambassadors early Saturday — including Dallas lawyer Marc Stanley’s appointment to Argentina — after Sen. Ted Cruz lifted a months-long blockade in exchange for a sanctions vote on a Russian gas pipeline.
Stanley chaired Lawyers for Biden during last year’s campaign. A prominent Democratic activist and fundraiser, he chaired a political action committee during the 2018 Senate campaign that blistered Cruz for sucking up to Donald Trump despite having deemed him a pathological liar during their presidential fight two years earlier.
Hours before the 1:30 a.m. confirmation vote, Cruz cut a deal to lift holds on 32 diplomats. In exchange, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised the Senate will vote by Jan. 14 on the Nord Stream 2 project.
President Joe Biden waived sanctions in May on the Russian company behind the pipeline, in part to improve relations with Germany, which strongly supports it as it seeks access to natural gas.
The Texas senator and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, another potential 2024 GOP presidential contender, had blocked scores of nominations since then. They warn the pipeline will give strongman Vladimir Putin a potent weapon against Western Europe.
Putin has cut energy supplies to neighboring Ukraine during past conflicts. With Russia massing troops on the border, tensions with NATO are high. Nord Stream 2 delivers gas directly to Germany, without transiting Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that wants closer ties with the west.
It will take a supermajority of 60 senators to impose sanctions, including 10 Democrats if all Republicans side with Cruz.
That’s unlikely. But forcing the vote at all gives Cruz a face-saving way to end the stalemate.
Biden nominated Stanley in August as U.S. emissary in Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America.
The confirmation was done by voice vote along with dozens of other nominations.
Moments later the Senate confirmed a more contentious nomination: Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, chief of staff to President Barack Obama and member of the House, as ambassador to Japan.
That vote was 48-21. Cruz voted no. Sen. John Cornyn was among the 31 senators not casting votes.
Presidents in both parties have sent political allies and career diplomats to Argentina, a country of 46 million people wracked lately by debt, recession and COVID-19.
It’s four times the size of Texas and Latin America’s third largest economy after Brazil and Mexico, and an important trading partner.
“I do not see this post as simply one of ceremony,” Stanley told the Foreign Affairs Committee at his Oct. 26 confirmation hearing, held virtually. “I will make it clear that America is truly back. That our presence is a positive one.”
The panel approved his nomination on Dec. 15.
Stanley is expected to be sworn in next week, with a formal ceremony after New Year’s. He’ll arrive in Buenos Aires in early January.
At his hearing, he called Argentina “a critical partner in our hemisphere” and “a truly beautiful country — a place where I’ve loved meeting the people and exploring. Walking the streets of Buenos Aires, hiking in Bariloche [in Patagonia] and getting drenched at Iguazu [Falls].”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2016, introduced Stanley at the hearing, calling him “super qualified.”
They met 15 years ago when Kaine chaired the Democratic National Committee.
Dallas lawyer Marc Stanley speaks with Joe Biden on Sept. 14, 2019, at a Dallas fundraiser at the Preston Hollow home of Drs. Lisa and David Genecov. Biden, then former vice president, was running for president in 2020. Photo by Adam Schultz / Biden for President(Photo by Adam Schultz / Biden for President)
“He is extremely well known for his devotion to his faith, Judaism, and public affairs. At every level of professional, philanthropic and public service, Marc has demonstrated excellence, character and integrity,” Kaine said.
Stanley has served on the council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and as chair of the Texas Public Finance Authority as an appointee of then-Gov. Ann Richards in the early 1990s. He’s a former president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association.
He chaired the National Jewish Democratic Council for six years. He and his wife, Wendy, have donated at least $1.5 million in the last two decades to Democratic causes, and they’ve hosted fundraising events for Biden, Obama and Hillary Clinton.
His Facebook feed is sprinkled with photos of him with them and other top-tier Democrats.
“Serving in this role would truly be the honor of a lifetime — and another humbling chapter in a family story that is truly unique to the American promise. That story finds its roots in small villages in Belarus and Ukraine and Poland …. My mother’s father fled pogroms in the early 1900s,” Stanley told senators. “Throughout my life, public service, the pursuit of justice, the desire to give back and repair the world — what in Judaism we call `tikkun olam’ — have always been a central part of my identity.”
One looming issue is that Argentina is deep in debt to the International Monetary Fund.
“Argentina is a beautiful country. It’s a beautiful tour bus that doesn’t have the wheels on working right. The IMF debt of $45 billion is huge,” he told senators. “It’s the Argentines’ leadership responsibility to come up with a macro plan to pay this back. And they have yet to do so. They say one is coming soon.”
“COVID has certainly not helped the situation at all,” he added.
At Kaine’s prompting, Stanley vowed to keep pressure on Argentina to hunt down and prosecute the terrorists behind the bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994. Hundreds were injured and 85 people were killed.
Argentina has the largest Jewish community in Latin America.
“This is a huge issue, and this is not a Jewish issue. This is an affront on Argentina. … No one’s been called to account for it,” Stanley said. “We do call on Argentines to continue to focus on this.”
Argentina has long pinned blame on Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, which Argentina declared a terrorist organization in 2019.
Stanley lauded that move and said he was “pleased” that President Alberto Fernández voiced outrage when one of the alleged co-conspirators was elevated to a senior post in the Iranian regime. But he said, that’s not enough.
“There should be a demand that this government, the judiciary, prosecute and find out who’s responsible and get justice,” he said.
Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., asked Stanley about corruption in Latin America. Stanley noted that by some estimates, corruption cuts global GDP by 5%, stifling investment and widening inequality.
“It is clear that corruption takes place in this tri-border area … between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina,” he said. “We’re doing a lot of training and delivering a lot of anti-crime fighting equipment …. The United States is fully engaged in trying to fight that there.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., secured a promise that he will work to resolve an issue involving a New Hampshire insurance company that has been unable to collect a large court judgment in Argentina.
“There’s nothing more important in our job than to represent Americans and American corporations that are trying to do business and absolutely I will investigate and see what I can do …. I will look at this immediately,” he said.
10. Ex-defense contractor charged with attempted espionage; sought to provide secrets to Russia
Excerpt:
Rowe is formally charged with attempting to communicate national defense information to aid a foreign government. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Ex-defense contractor charged with attempted espionage; sought to provide secrets to Russia
| USA TODAY
A former defense contractor was charged with attempted espionage after the South Dakota man allegedly sought to provide secret fighter jet technology to the Russian government.
John Murray Rowe Jr., 63, is expected to make his first court appearance Friday following an eight-month investigation in which Rowe repeatedly expressed interest in sharing classified information before disclosing defense systems used by U.S. fighter jets to an FBI undercover agent posing as a Russian government operative, federal prosecutors said.
According to court documents, Rowe worked for more than four decades as a test engineer for several defense contractors and held various security clearances related to assignments involving aerospace technology.
He was fired in 2018 from an un-disclosed contractor as a possible "insider threat," prosecutors said, after "committing a number of security violations and revealing a fervent interest in Russian affairs, including whether he could obtain a security clearance from the Russian government."
Seizing on that troubled work history, the FBI launched an investigation in March 2020, arranging for Rowe to meet with the undercover agent. The meeting was followed by an exchange of more than 300 emails with a second undercover in which the engineer expressed his "willingness to work for the Russian government."
In one of the emails, according to prosecutors, Rowe allegedly told his undercover handler: "If I can’t get a job here then I’ll go work for the other team.”
According to court documents, Rowe expressed an interest in aiding Russia and moving to the country after his very first meeting at a local hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota.
"I’ve been saying this to people. I said, 'I’m gonna go work for the Russians.' I’ve been saying that for the last two years," Rowe allegedly told the agent.
"And we... heard you." the undercover agent replied.
"Then you show up," Rowe said, laughing.
"We heard you," the agent said. "That's why I'm here."
Rowe allegedly reaffirmed his interest in working for Russia in a series of emails, including a July 31, 2020 contact in which he also related a fear of exposure.
"If you have any real work that needs to get done, I’m willing to do it," he told one of the undercovers. "I have to be real careful on who I talk to."
Days later, on Aug. 5, Rowe appeared more anxious.
"I think your my only hope of getting to Russia before the bottom drop out here in the United States…," he said, according court documents. "I wanted to open bank account in Russia but I need your help doing so."
A month later, during a second in-person meeting with the first FBI undercover at a South Dakota hotel, Rowe "made multiple disclosures" of secret information related to Air Force defense systems.
Rowe is formally charged with attempting to communicate national defense information to aid a foreign government. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
11. Train engineer admits to terrorism charges related to derailment near Navy hospital ship
Frist time I have seen a train\ used as a terrorist weapon. But I guess it is about as far-fetched as flying aircraft into buildings. What measures are we going to take to harden targets against train attacks? (apologies for the attempt at sarcasm)
I do not think he was "successful" in calling attention to his conspiracy theory or affecting political change through his actions. I do not recall the event.
Train engineer admits to terrorism charges related to derailment near Navy hospital ship
KTLA · by Associated Press · December 17, 2021
A train engineer who intentionally derailed a locomotive near a U.S. Navy hospital ship that was deployed in Los Angeles harbor to help during the COVID-19 pandemic pleaded guilty Thursday to committing a terrorist attack.
Eduardo Moreno, 45, who worked at the Port of Los Angeles, acknowledged in his plea agreement that on March 31, 2020, he drove a locomotive at full speed off the end of the tracks near where the Mercy was docked because he believed it might be involved in a sinister conspiracy, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement.
Nobody was hurt but the derailment caused about $700,000 in damages. The train also spilled fuel that required a hazardous-materials cleanup.
Moreno told port police that he was suspicious of the Mercy “and believed it had an alternate purpose related to COVID-19 or a government takeover,” the U.S. attorney’s office said, citing court documents.
Moreno said he knew the derailment would bring media attention and he wanted to “wake people up,” according to an affidavit filed with the criminal complaint.
The train smashed through concrete, steel and chain-link barriers and slid through a parking lot before coming to a stop about 250 yards (228 meters) from the Mercy, officials said.
Moreno said he acted alone and hadn’t planned the derailment in advance, prosecutors said.
Moreno could face up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in March. However, prosecutors said they will seek a 6 1/2-year sentence and $700,000 in restitution to the Pacific Harbor Line railroad company.
The 1,000-bed Mercy, based at Naval Base San Diego, docked at the Port of Los Angeles in March 2020 to accept non-coronavirus patients to prevent local hospitals from being overwhelmed as cases surged.
However, the initial rise in hospitalizations wasn’t as severe as expected. The Mercy’s crew treated about 80 people before departing in mid-May.
Suggest a Correction
KTLA · by Associated Press · December 17, 2021
12. What Ukraine Can Learn From Finland
Resistance is one of the most underappreciated concepts and capabilities within US national security thinking.
How many armies advance without planning for the winter? Napoleon? the German army attack into Russia and the USSR attack on Finland.
But I do not think we want to see Finlandization in Ukraine. But I agree there are lessons to be learned.
Excerpts:
Finnish soldiers’ and civilians’ commitment to their country startled the Soviets, who were so certain the young and civil war-torn nation would collapse that the Red Army didn’t even bring winter clothes.
Tolvajarvi was a Christmas miracle and a turning point in Finland’s so-called Winter War. Even though the country had to agree to a cease-fire some three months later, it never capitulated. The Soviets lost five times more soldiers than the Finns, and the Finns inflicted on the Soviet Union a humiliation so great that to this day, the Winter War is barely mentioned in Russian schools.
To be sure, throughout the Cold War, Finland was forced to maintain a delicate balance in its relations with the Soviet Union, one known to most of the world as Finlandization. Unlike its likewise neutral neighbor Sweden, Finland was not allowed to maintain auxiliary defense organizations, and its foreign policy was forced to pay more attention to Moscow’s will than Sweden or other Western European countries did.
But crucially for the Finns, they remained a free country, and despite the Soviets’ might, Finns were willing to respond with armed force should the Soviets invade again. Even at the height of the Cold War, in the early 1980s, 67 percent of Finns supported armed defense against a prospective invader. That support has remained extremely high; currently, 68 percent of Finns support armed defense.
What Ukraine Can Learn From Finland
In December 1939, a small country with a small military held off the vastly superior Soviet Red Army and avoided occupation by its larger neighbor.
DECEMBER 19, 2021, 2:28 AM
Just over 82 years ago, Finnish soldiers defending their country against the vastly superior Soviet Red Army achieved a spectacular breakthrough: They defeated the Soviet invaders in the battle for the town of Tolvajarvi in then-Ladoga Karelia. The Finnish Army’s stunning victory signaled to the Finnish population and the rest of the world that all was not lost—and for 10 more weeks, the Finns miraculously managed to keep the Soviets at bay. Today, another small country faces a similar winter war. Ukraine would do well to learn from Finland.
Red Army commanders assumed Tolvajarvi would be a cakewalk, just like former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin assumed the entire invasion of Finland would be easy. Finland was, after all, a young country with a precarious economy. Worse still, its 1917 independence from Russia was followed by a civil war between bourgeois forces known as “Whites” and socialist, in many cases Bolshevik, “Reds.” After several months of intense fighting, the Whites emerged victorious.
In 1939, the Soviets assumed they could capitalize on this. Soon after launching their invasion, they confidently attacked the border town of Tolvajarvi with a division of 20,000 men—along with tanks, cannons, and armored vehicles. The Finns had some 4,000 rudimentarily equipped men from various units at their disposal. But for 10 days, the Finns fought back—and they outsmarted the Soviets.
On Dec. 22, 1939, the attackers were forced to retreat. According to a former high ranking Finnish military official, they’d lost more than 3,000 men, and hundreds of others had been injured. The Finns, in turn, had lost 274 men, with another 445 injured and 29 lost. News of the Finns’ heroism even reached university students in the American heartland. “Destruction of an entire battalion of Russians in the bitter cold of the lake country was reported after a day in which the soviet unleashed the fury of its air armada in a series of bombing attacks on Helsinki and a score of nearby towns,” the Daily Illini—published by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—reported on Dec. 22.
Finnish soldiers’ and civilians’ commitment to their country startled the Soviets, who were so certain the young and civil war-torn nation would collapse that the Red Army didn’t even bring winter clothes.
Tolvajarvi was a Christmas miracle and a turning point in Finland’s so-called Winter War. Even though the country had to agree to a cease-fire some three months later, it never capitulated. The Soviets lost five times more soldiers than the Finns, and the Finns inflicted on the Soviet Union a humiliation so great that to this day, the Winter War is barely mentioned in Russian schools.
To be sure, throughout the Cold War, Finland was forced to maintain a delicate balance in its relations with the Soviet Union, one known to most of the world as Finlandization. Unlike its likewise neutral neighbor Sweden, Finland was not allowed to maintain auxiliary defense organizations, and its foreign policy was forced to pay more attention to Moscow’s will than Sweden or other Western European countries did.
But crucially for the Finns, they remained a free country, and despite the Soviets’ might, Finns were willing to respond with armed force should the Soviets invade again. Even at the height of the Cold War, in the early 1980s, 67 percent of Finns supported armed defense against a prospective invader. That support has remained extremely high; currently, 68 percent of Finns support armed defense.
Indeed, in the Winter War, the Finns demonstrated to the rest of the world that a small and militarily inferior country can thwart the ambitions of a large and militarily superior one. That demonstration should give Ukrainians courage as they, too, face the prospect of a winter war.
Finnish soldiers wear white to blend in with the snow during the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939. Fox Photos/Getty Images
The Finns turned the momentum in their favor at Tolvajarvi because their soldiers believed in their local commander, Col. Paavo Talvela. The whole Finnish Army was, in turn, superbly led by then-commander in chief Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. What’s more, the Finns—in uniform and without—believed in their country. “The sacrifices the troops endured would not have been possible without the support of the home front,” said retired Maj. Gen. Pekka Toveri, who was Finland’s head of military intelligence until recently.
“Soldiers knew how valued they were by society, and they knew that they were fighting for the country’s survival.” Indeed, almost all the Winter War soldiers were reservists. Countless civilians, meanwhile, provided logistical assistance.
The country’s all-female voluntary corps, the Lottas—named after their founder, Lotta Svard—provided canteen services, medical care, signal service, air surveillance service, and munitions production as other civilians kept society’s normal functions running.
This freed soldiers up for combat duty. “All the national resources were used to defend the country,” Toveri noted. “All trained and able reservists were called to service, and all the possible civilian resources were taken into use to support the defense.” Thus was born Finland’s policy of total defense, where everyone has a role to play in keeping the country safe.
Finnish soldiers’ and civilians’ commitment to their country startled the Soviets, who were so certain the young and civil war-torn nation would collapse that the Red Army didn’t even bring winter clothes. Ukrainians can learn from that unity.
Even though the Finns held diametrically opposing views on how their country should be run, even the most ardent communists among them firmly supported the Finnish armed forces and rejected the puppet regime the Soviets set up. “What most surprised Stalin was that the Reds, who had lost the civil war, didn’t receive the Red Army with open arms,” said Stefan Forss, a veteran Finnish security analyst. “Instead, they did the opposite and fought the Red Army at least as heroically as the Whites.”
Young Lottas are seen during the Winter War in 1939.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Of course, the Finns believed in their government because they knew it to be principled and incorruptible. Creating similar national unity would certainly be difficult for Ukraine, given that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was recently implicated in the Pandora Papers. The self-declared man of the people was found to own offshore companies, which his business partners had used to buy luxury properties in London.
Achieving national unity also won’t be aided by the fact that Ukrainian civil servants have somehow managed to accumulate $2.6 billion in Bitcoin, according to figures released earlier this year. Even so, Ukraine could draw inspiration from the Finns’ commitment to unity when it matters most, and Ukraine’s recent efforts to finally get a grip on corruption are bound to create at least a bit more national unity.
Everyone, including the vast part of the population not part of the armed forces, can play a role in defending their country during a conflict. They could, for example, support the armed forces by taking over responsibilities for logistics, thus freeing soldiers up for combat. To be sure, in the few weeks or even days that may remain before a prospective Russian attack on Ukraine, Zelensky’s government won’t have time to make itself as incorruptible and principled in governance as Finland was in 1939—but it had better start because this won’t be Ukraine’s last Russian scare.
Ukraine’s armed forces should regularly visit Finland to see for themselves how the Finns trained and took advantage of their terrain.
And Ukraine’s armed forces can also learn a few military lessons from Mannerheim’s men. “Small Finnish groups came skiing in our troops’ rear and cut our supply chains,” a Soviet soldier later recounted. “In the middle of December, our tanks were without fuel, the horses that pulled the artillery were without oat, and the soldiers were without food.” Many of the tanks were, at any rate, rendered useless by other white-clad Finnish soldiers on skis throwing Molotov cocktails into the tanks’ turrets.
“Readiness is extremely important,” Toveri said. “The whole Finnish Field Army [Finland’s combined armed forces] was mobilized several months before the Soviet offensive.” Such mobilization can, of course, be portrayed by the prospective invader as an escalation, but early mobilization also yields enormous benefits. Thanks to that, Finnish soldiers had time for extensive training and could build fortifications. Equally importantly, they got to know one another and their commanders, which created a spirit that would prove decisive as soldiers swarmed the invader in insurgent-like groups.
In truth, Ukraine’s armed forces should regularly visit Finland to see for themselves how the Finns trained and took advantage of their terrain, not to mention how the civilian population was given roles and willingly performed them. In the meantime, they can study how the Finns developed tactics and equipment to capitalize on their own terrain.
As Toveri notes, though, “this took almost two decades to create, so the Ukrainians are in a worse situation, especially since their terrain is much less defendable. It’s also terrain where the Russians are used to operating.” But Ukraine’s armed forces can develop at least some tools and tactics that suit their skills and terrain and turn Russia’s traditional formations into a disadvantage. The Finns’ ability to unsettle the invader by using skis and glass bottles with homemade concoctions, in fact, bodes well for Ukraine today—if it gives latitude to innovative commanders.
On March 13, 1940, the Winter War ended. Finland lost 11 percent of its territory—but it remained independent. The following day, Finland’s national radio broadcast an address by Mannerheim:
“You did not want the war. You loved peace and work, but the battle was forced upon you, and in it, you have achieved great things. More than 15,000 of you who went to battle will not see your homes again. And how many of you are there who have forever lost your ability to work? But you have also delivered heavy hits, and if a couple of hundred thousand of your enemies now lie under the frozen snow …, it is not your fault. You did not hate them; you wished no ill upon them. You only followed war’s harsh law to kill or die.”
Mannerheim would go on to become his country’s president and remains a national hero.
Today’s Ukraine has no Mannerheim, but Ukrainians surely love peace and work as much as Finns did in 1939. That, and clever planning based on Finland’s similarly dire starting point, should give them a glimmer of hope this winter.
13. Foreseeing the China-India Boundary Dispute: 2022 and Beyond
Not our war but it bears watching.
Conclusion:
The Galwan impasse is likely to continue, as it is unlikely that Beijing will give up any border claims in 2022. Diplomatic avenues will remain open but so too are the military options, even if they are used only for deterrence purposes. As both sides continue to strengthen their combat preparedness and refuse to budge an inch during the military talks, the prospect for resolution in the near future remains rather dim (South China Morning Post, November 30).
To make matters worse, both countries are governed by regimes that thrive on whipping up nationalist fervor and headed by leaders that espouse strongman personality cults. For each leader then, making a compromise on the border issues will be akin to kneeling before the “enemy,” and hence tarnish their long-held reputation. The new NPC law on the protection of land border areas amid escalating tension with India, too, highlights China’s lack of intention to solve the ongoing border dispute. As long as the deadlock continues, the best that can be hoped for is that Beijing does not utilize its new border law as a justification for renewed conflicts.
Foreseeing the China-India Boundary Dispute: 2022 and Beyond
Publication: China Brief Volume: 21 Issue: 24
December 17, 2021 04:10 PM Age: 2 days
Introduction
Over the last year, Chinese politics have been acutely driven by President Xi Jinping’s quest to further cement his leading role in the hierarchy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Xi’s drive to stamp his “strongman” image and personality-driven political ideologies on the CCP system have dominated Chinese politics, with the recently concluded Sixth Plenum only continuing this trend. The Chinese President’s efforts to capitalize on his growing power, on both the domestic and international fronts, has greatly impacted geopolitical dynamics across the Indo-Pacific region. Between nationalist policy releases—such as the new coast guard law (海警法, hai jing fa) or dual circulation strategy (双循环策略, shuang xunhuan celue) (China Daily, August 6)—and continuing disputes with regional powers over land/territorial or maritime boundaries, Xi’s focus has been on reinforcing his own legacy as he aims for an unprecedented third term in office. Thus, Xi has been stroking nationalist fervor to justify the regime’s repressive measures (e.g., Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet) and expansionist maneuvers (Taiwan, East and South China Seas and India’s Ladakh).
Xi’s “strongman” persona extends to his attempts to alter the regional geopolitical landscape, which is particularly evident in Beijing’s continued aggressive posture in the China-India boundary dispute. Even after multiple rounds of talks between China and India, the objective of complete disengagement along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh has not been achieved (Ministry of External Affairs, November 18). This impasse continued with the 13th round of border talks held on October 10, which produced no resolution over the contentious issues in eastern Ladakh. Indian representatives emphasized the importance of resolving ongoing issues along the border to improve bilateral relations (Ministry of External Affairs of India, October 11). However, constructive attempts have been met with strong resistance from the Chinese side, who have termed Indian suggestions as “unreasonable and unrealistic” (Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China, October 11). The 14th round of the Corps Commander level talks on the Galwan disengagement will likely be held soon. Though it is highly improbable that the 14th round of border talks will yield any concrete outcome, it is worth reviewing the military and political developments since the last few rounds of talks and the tone they have set for a possible resolution in 2022, particularly amidst such a precarious scenario.
Continued Aggressive Posturing and Marketing of Soft Power
The goals of China’s approach to border politics with India in 2021 have been twofold: improving military logistical support on the ground while highlighting diplomatic engagement to resolve disputes. This approach seeks to represent China as a flagbearer of peace and increase its international appeal. The next year is unlikely to reflect any change in such aims.
In late October, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s chief legislature, adopted a new law on the “protection and exploitation” of China’s land border areas. This new law, which is set to take effect on January 1, 2022, lays down several important measures pertaining to the role of the state in safeguarding the integrity of China’s land boundaries in the event of “any act that undermines territorial sovereignty” (China Daily, October 23). In seeking to “resolutely safeguard territorial sovereignty and land border security,” Beijing seems to have found a new approach toward reinforcing its desire to resolve the boundary dispute with New Delhi on its own terms (Global Times, October 24). The new law stipulates that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP) are largely responsible for resisting armed invasion and responding to intrusions (officially called as “transgressions” between China and India) along China’s border. Both institutions are under the command of the Central Military Commission (CMC), which is headed by Xi. The new legislation does not inherently change the calculus of how China handles security along its boundaries, but it does demonstrate increased resolve by the Chinese state to protect its “sacred and inviolable” sovereignty, and concurrently also serves to strengthen pursuit of the domestic objective of enhanced control over ethnic minority populations along the borders (China Daily, October 23).
Another significant aspect of the new law is its emphasis on the development of the towns along the border, which highlights the role of civilians in supporting the PLA and PAP in what can be interpreted as an extension of the CCP’s “civil-military fusion strategy” (China Brief, October 8, 2019). This aspect might be the most significant concern for Indian operational planning, as the ambiguity of involving civilian populations and integrating civilian infrastructure into military strategy and utility is seriously challenging (The Indian Express, October 27). For instance, the Chinese state is also known to pay allowances to citizens living along the China-India border in Tibet in a bid to ensure their loyalty. As a part of its “civil-military fusion strategy,” China displays and exerts superiority over the extent of development and economic stability of the villages on the Chinese versus the Indian side of the border. Moreover, subsidizing Tibetan citizens to move to border areas has also emerged as a key trend in the Chinese government’s attempts to consolidate power along the boundary regions (China Tibet Net, January 28; South China Morning Post (SCMP), December 6, 2020). China’s new land border law seeks to legitimize the use of civilian settlements to aid the Chinese territorial claims along the LAC—a move similar to China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea (SCMP, March 7).
Additionally, the PLA recently tested high-altitude conventional weapons that are designed for extreme conditions in the western sector of the border with India (SCMP, November 23). The PLA has been focusing on strengthening border infrastructure and upgrading logistics, using modern technologies to improve the living and working conditions of its soldiers along the LAC, especially during the harsh winter months (Global Times, November 9). Soon after border talks stalemated in November, the PLA tested precision weapons systems intended for use in the harsh environment, continuing China’s build-up of advanced weapon systems along the border. Beijing is reportedly also improving its air combat power along the western front of the LAC, constructing new bases while upgrading existing ones and expanding connectivity ambitions by building helipads across the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (Toutiao, November 18).
The military developments are an attempt to re-balance the status quo and undermine the border mechanism resolution processes that China and India have engaged in since the June 2020 Galwan clashes in a bid to reduce hostilities. For instance, even as the two countries held the 23rd Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) on India-China Border Affairs, which is one of the most important channels for dialogue, to “find an early resolution to the remaining issues along the LAC,” China nevertheless expanded military and civilian facilities in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR)—e.g., the number of heliports and airbases in the region doubled from 2017 to 2020 (Ministry of External Affairs of India, November 18; Hindustan Times, February 8).
Aggressive posturing by China has also increased tension in border areas overlapping with third party countries. For instance, satellite images recently revealed that four new Chinese villages have been built in Bhutanese territory near the Doklam plateau—the sensitive boundary tri-junction between India, China and Bhutan where China and India engaged in an extended standoff in 2017 (Twitter, November 17). As one of Bhutan’s oldest partners—New Delhi is especially sensitive to its Himalayan neighbor’s territorial integrity and has played a significant role in Bhutanese foreign policy. India is doubly cautious because in October, China and Bhutan signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on a Three-Step Roadmap for Expediting the Bhutan–China boundary negotiations, which has been heralded by China as “historic” (Global Times, October 15). Beijing has repeatedly disputed Bhutan’s territorial claims over Doklam, and the two states had refrained from holding boundary negotiations after the 2017 standoff at Doklam, which was seen as a major military and diplomatic victory for India. The MoU is highlighted in Chinese media as a blow to India’s efforts to contain China.
According to Chinese state media, “China-Bhutan boundary issues were used as an excuse by India to attack China during the Doklam standoff” and New Delhi is the “reason for the delay” in negotiations between China and Bhutan (Global Times, October 15). Still, the MoU works in China’s favor, particularly in terms of expanding its sway in the Himalayan region. By securing a comprehensive agreement on the border with Bhutan, Beijing would gain inroads into Bhutan in terms of investments and tourism, thereby furthering China’s objective to expand its strategic influence in the region. Nonetheless, India’s influence over Bhutan remains a key area of geopolitical focus for New Delhi. As Himalayan neighbors, India’s decades-old special relationship with Bhutan is still bound to enable close coordination between New Delhi and Thimphu on foreign policy issues. In 2022, the Bhutan-China MoU will have important ramifications for the China–India boundary issues especially considering the already tense state of relations due to the LAC standoff. That said, India’s ability to diplomatically maneuver Thimpu may ultimately give New Delhi the upper-hand.
Political–Diplomatic Responses to the Stalemate
In response to Chinese military build-up and increased infrastructure activities along the LAC, India has boosted its defense capabilities by deploying Israeli Heron drones for surveillance operations in the eastern Ladakh sector and conducting airborne drills in the area (Hindustan Times, November 30; Army Technology, November 2). Although in recent months, the two sides have disengaged from some friction points following commander-level talks, the increased military presence along the border and respective unwillingness of both sides to make concessions in negotiations will not help to break the logjam.
The growing discontent between the Asian powers was also apparent at the 18th meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Russia, India and China held via video-conference on November 26. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi indirectly referred to the Quadrilateral (Quad) initiative of India–Australia–Japan–U.S. as a “patchwork of small circles” and emphasized the need to get out of the “‘democracy trap’ of certain countries,” an obvious reference to the growing U.S. clout in the region (The Hindu, November 26; Global Times, November 27).
As U.S.-India relations continue to grow stronger, China’s insecurity about its ability to attain regional hegemony has also increased (Global Times, April 1; Global Times, November 1). Beijing has termed the U.S.-India rapprochement a “clique” orchestrated by the U.S., and Chinese media often alleges that the term “like-minded” is used as a strategy to bring together countries that are fearful of China—“an anti-China frontier” (Global Times, October 7). China’s growing insecurities and Xi’s need for absolute control will only boost its repressive tactics and expansionist maneuvers in the coming years, not just in 2022.
Foreseeing the Future of the Dispute
The Galwan impasse is likely to continue, as it is unlikely that Beijing will give up any border claims in 2022. Diplomatic avenues will remain open but so too are the military options, even if they are used only for deterrence purposes. As both sides continue to strengthen their combat preparedness and refuse to budge an inch during the military talks, the prospect for resolution in the near future remains rather dim (South China Morning Post, November 30).
To make matters worse, both countries are governed by regimes that thrive on whipping up nationalist fervor and headed by leaders that espouse strongman personality cults. For each leader then, making a compromise on the border issues will be akin to kneeling before the “enemy,” and hence tarnish their long-held reputation. The new NPC law on the protection of land border areas amid escalating tension with India, too, highlights China’s lack of intention to solve the ongoing border dispute. As long as the deadlock continues, the best that can be hoped for is that Beijing does not utilize its new border law as a justification for renewed conflicts.
14. Chinese Army conducts nuclear, chemical, biological warfare drills in Tibet
Excerpts:
According to the story, "an actual combat drill of a synthetic brigade of the Tibet Military Region took place on the snow-covered plateau in late November,' according to the story.
The article published on the official PLA news portal was headlined: "A synthetic brigade of the Tibet military region carried out a cross-day and night mobile multi-arm coordinated actual combat drill."
The drill's scene, directives, and roles of different wings and participating soldiers were all outlined in the article, which was only available in Chinese.
Chinese Army conducts nuclear, chemical, biological warfare drills in Tibet
Edited By: Nikhil Pandey WION Web Team
NEW DELHI Published: Dec 17, 2021, 01:28 PM(IST)
In the Tibet Military Region, China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) recently conducted a "actual battle drill" comprising anti-nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare.
The drill was carried out in late November by a joint military brigade of the PLA, which included commandos, armoured assault groups, and soldiers trained in chemical warfare, according to a story published on the Chinese version of an official PLA news portal on Tuesday.
The Western Theatre Command (WTC), China's largest of five commands, is in charge of the Sino-India disputed boundary from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh.
Watch | Gravitas: China's unconventional war
The news comes as India and China are locked in a long-running border standoff in eastern Ladakh.
According to the story, "an actual combat drill of a synthetic brigade of the Tibet Military Region took place on the snow-covered plateau in late November,' according to the story.
The article published on the official PLA news portal was headlined: "A synthetic brigade of the Tibet military region carried out a cross-day and night mobile multi-arm coordinated actual combat drill."
The drill's scene, directives, and roles of different wings and participating soldiers were all outlined in the article, which was only available in Chinese.
However, neither the location nor the duration of the entire drill were mentioned.
"After rockets were launched and the armoured assault group was deployed, army engineers were called in to plant explosives on the targeted "obstacle," according to a rough translation of the Chinese report.
The commanding officer then issued a threat of "nuclear, biological, and chemical attack."
"A nuclear, biological, and chemical attack has occurred!"
An instant direction command appeared out of nowhere.
The third battalion's commander, Li Qunfeng, put on gas masks and hurriedly proceeded through the poisoned zone before reporting the situation to the command post and asking assistance from the chemical defence detachment to clean."
(With inputs from agencies)
15. Targeted cyber sabotage can bring Russia and China to their knees
Excerpts:
I’m not saying less-than-lethal options can altogether replace troops, missiles, aircraft carriers, submarines and even a Space Force to defend us against conventional or future threats and forms of warfare. I’m saying the battleground has already changed, and we haven’t done nearly enough to change with it. Tactically we have rocked the world, but strategically we are lacking in vision and execution.
Over the last 20-years, we’ve sacrificed too many of our sons and daughters in battle. We’ve taken too many collateral lives because of the fallibility of our drone strike technology. It’s time we unleash our most powerful weapons in defense of our country — the brilliant young minds of our brightest students. We need to empower them with the less-than-lethal ways of dealing with threats to our nation in a manner that avoids the kind of warfare that could consume us all.
Targeted cyber sabotage can bring Russia and China to their knees
The Hill · by Robert Bishop, opinion contributor · December 18, 2021
Right now, our time and attention seem focused on the growing threat to our nation from within. The constant tearing at the fabric of our democracy that some have described as a “Cold Civil War.”
But let us not forget the alarming, relentless and emerging threat from our old “Cold War” adversary Russia.
We ignore it at our peril.
Russia recently tested a new anti-satellite missile that destroyed one of its own old, outdated satellites by shooting it and thereby creating thousands of pieces of debris. The threat that it poses to American satellites in orbit is obvious.
The missile test comes as Russian troops continue to build up along the border of Ukraine amid rising fears of an all-out invasion.
There’s also the construction of a new gas pipeline between Russia and our European allies that could make them as dependent on Russia as an addict to a drug dealer.
Are Americans aware and ready for armed conflict with Russia, and are we prepared to send our sons and daughters to fight in it? We’ve gotten terrific over the last 20-years at launching drones to rid ourselves of terrorists hiding out in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. But there’s no way for a drone to deal with rising threats in many emerging conflicts.
Is there a way to make Russia think twice about Ukraine or, for that matter, messing with our elections, pipelines, etc., without firing a shot?
I’m not a politician. I’m not a military leader. I don’t want to be second-guessing their decisions. I want to provide decision-makers with options.
I’m talking about arming our political and military leaders with “less than lethal options.” What does that mean: options tied to technology.
But even the most sophisticated technology is still controlled by computer chips, and if there’s a chip inside, it can be hacked. We know how to hack, and that’s what I mean by less than lethal.
Let me put it another way. You’re a bad guy with the intent to harm civilians to make a political point. I see you’re going into a hotel. I certainly can’t drone strike the hotel. But with a few clicks of a keyboard, I can get your credit card declined. Then, when you walk back to your car in disgust, I can prevent the engine from starting. Cars have chips too. You can’t seem to grab a taxi to the airport. If you do get there somehow, your flight reservation has been canceled. Disrupt, disorient, and disarm without firing a shot.
I’m not sending in the troops. But I’m getting the job done.
The reality of conflict has changed, and we need to adapt. The problem is we aren’t educating our next generation of thinkers to think about the next generation of conflict.
Some of the brightest young minds in the country are in our colleges and universities, studying and preparing for their future careers. But we’re not empowering them to think about this. Do we want to be teaching our engineering students how to wage war by other means, you ask? Is that ethical?
It beats the heck out of sending them to fight a war in Eastern Europe.
I’m filling a talent pipeline of innovative young engineers and computer scientists who will one day replace us, and we’re not teaching them how to engage in the new face of conflict. I propose developing talented minds who can design and implement less than lethal options that give the president and military leaders something else to consider, and it’s not a novel concept.
In 2010, Israel used a malicious computer worm, Stuxnet, to attack Iran’s nuclear program. The worm targeted the control systems of an estimated 1000 gas centrifuges crippling Iran’s nuclear program. That’s a less-than-lethal option to the genuine threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
I’m not saying less-than-lethal options can altogether replace troops, missiles, aircraft carriers, submarines and even a Space Force to defend us against conventional or future threats and forms of warfare. I’m saying the battleground has already changed, and we haven’t done nearly enough to change with it. Tactically we have rocked the world, but strategically we are lacking in vision and execution.
Over the last 20-years, we’ve sacrificed too many of our sons and daughters in battle. We’ve taken too many collateral lives because of the fallibility of our drone strike technology. It’s time we unleash our most powerful weapons in defense of our country — the brilliant young minds of our brightest students. We need to empower them with the less-than-lethal ways of dealing with threats to our nation in a manner that avoids the kind of warfare that could consume us all.
Dr. Robert Bishop is the dean of the University of South Florida School of Engineering and founder, president, & CEO of the Institute of Applied Engineering.
The Hill · by Robert Bishop, opinion contributor · December 18, 2021
16. Vets ask Pentagon leader to take new look at Niger probe after '3212 Unredacted' film
This was a powerful documentary. There are still questions that need to be answered.
Vets ask Pentagon leader to take new look at Niger probe after '3212 Unredacted' film
Two veterans groups have asked U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to order a new, independent review of the military's official investigation of a Green Beret team ambushed by ISIS in Niger four years ago; an investigation about which they say a new documentary by ABC News raises troubling questions.
3212 UN-REDACTED
Unraveling the truth behind the deaths of 4 U.S. Special Forces soldiers in Africa leads to evidence of a coverup at the highest levels of the Army.
The bipartisan request came in a letter Thursday signed by the progressive VoteVets and the conservative Concerned Veterans for America. The two post-9/11 combat veterans' groups say they are united in opposing endless wars and championing military accountability.
ABC News
Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. LaDavid Johnson, who was killed in Tongo Tongo, Niger, in 2017, appears in the ABC News/Hulu documentary "3212 UN-REDACTED."
"As you know, that ambush, which claimed the lives of four Americans, is under new scrutiny because of an in-depth documentary from ABC News, '3212 UNREDACTED.' While we would not presume to know all the facts surrounding the operation, the documentary raises disturbing new questions regarding the integrity of the investigation performed after the ambush," the letter to Austin said.
The ABC News documentary, now streaming on Hulu, was filmed over three years with the families of fallen special operations soldiers Sgt. 1st Class Jeremiah Johnson, Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, Staff Sgt. Bryan Black and Sgt. LaDavid Johnson, following them as they searched for the truth about why their loved ones were killed.
The film scrutinizes the U.S. military's core findings of the 2017-18 investigation by the Pentagon's Africa Command (AFRICOM), one of which accused Operational Detachment-Alpha 3212 from 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) -- the green beret team -- of initiating a risky mission without senior commanders' approval to "capture or kill" a top ISIS commander.
But a network of dozens of confidential sources throughout the U.S. Army chain of command, ranging from team members up to general officers overseeing Africa operations, as well as AFRICOM's own investigators and knowledgeable intelligence community officials, told ABC News in its three-year investigation that ODA 3212 was in fact carrying out orders and did not go rogue.
James Gordon Meek/ABC
After placing a chess piece on his headstone, Henry Black salutes his son, Army Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, who was killed in Tongo Tongo, Niger, in 2017.
Whistleblowers told ABC News that in an effort to shield senior commanders, AFRICOM laid blame at the feet of low-level officers and enlisted leaders for the ambush, in which more than 100 ISIS fighters massed and attacked the team of 11 Americans as they left the tiny village of Tongo Tongo, Niger, on Oct. 4, 2017.
The film reveals how, rather than going after the ISIS commander on their own, as alleged, the team's commander, Green Beret Capt. Mike Perozeni had objected multiple times to the mission but his superior officer based in Chad had overruled his concerns.
AFRICOM's then-commander Gen. Thomas Waldhauser criticized the green beret team for being poorly trained and ill-prepared for such a mission, as well as suggesting that they were trying to locate intelligence on the whereabouts of an American missionary held captive by jihadis in the Sahel region since 2016 -- aid worker Jeffery Woodke. Confidential government sources and whistleblowers on camera, such as former Assistant Secretary of Defense (Acting) Mark Mitchell, told ABC News that Waldhauser' s claim was untrue.
Pentagon officials did not immediately comment on the letter from the two veterans groups sent to Austin. In a previous statement, a Pentagon spokesperson said that the AFRICOM investigation of Tongo Tongo had been thoroughly reviewed and approved by the Trump administration, and that there were no plans to review the official record.
ABC News
3212 Unredacted
But retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, representing VoteVets, and Russ Duerstine, deputy director or Concerned Veterans for America, said Americans and the families of the fallen "deserve a new investigation, the findings of which cannot be questioned."
"A new review of the ambush is necessary and should be performed by those with no interest or responsibility in the region, and with no connection to anyone involved in the operation, at any level. Simply put, it should be completely independent," their letter said.
The veterans added that the discovery during a French military operation in Mali last August of Jeremiah Johnson's full helmet cam video -- which had only been seen in selective excerpts in an ISIS propaganda video -- should cause Pentagon officials to consider reviewing valor awards for some of the fallen soldiers.
In the footage, all four fallen soldiers are seen fighting, and Johnson appears to lead his teammates by calling out targets he has spotted. He is also seen attempting unsuccessfully to radio desperate reports that he, and Staff Sgts. Black and Wright have each been wounded, according to officials and family members who watched the full video.
Some soldiers, such as Capt. Perozeni and Sgt. Wright, had their recommended valor awards downgraded for reasons never made clear by Army officials, including the officer who downgraded them, Gen. Tony Thomas, then-commander of U.S Special Operations Command. Numerous military officials have told ABC News that such a review to upgrade medals given for the incident is underway, in light of what the unedited helmet cam video shows.
3212 UN-REDACTED
Unraveling the truth behind the deaths of 4 U.S. Special Forces soldiers in Africa leads to evidence of a coverup at the highest levels of the Army.
17. For US, geopolitical expediency always trumps democracy
An American writing for the CCP's propaganda mouthpiece. I wonder when he will will renounce his citizenship since he feels the US is so bad. But could he make the same criticism about China if became a CHinese citizen?
Conclusion:
There are other aspects of what China calls whole-process democracy that could, and should, be addressed in greater detail. Whole-of-society participation in the political process through oversight, consultation, public review, grassroots governance and many other avenues makes China a far more democratic society than the US and its hangers-on will ever give it credit for.
But that's a topic for another time. For now, I'll leave you with one quote of President Xi Jinping about democracy:
"If the people are awakened only for voting but enter a dormant period soon after, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy."
For US, geopolitical expediency always trumps democracy
By Ian Goodrum | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2021-12-18 08:19
US President Joe Biden hosted the "Summit for Democracy" last week so he and some other countries' leaders could talk about how "democratic" and great they are. Like "freedom" and "human rights", we can count "democracy" as another term that's lost its meaning after being trotted out by the country that cares least about it.
Of the 110 supposedly willing participants in the "democracy summit", many are host to US military bases and troops. Indigenous resistance to US military presence is frequently suppressed by these countries' governments, because they depend on US largesse. This inconvenient fact, among others, makes it hard to take the "democracy" charade seriously.
The assassinations of Salvador Allende of Chile and Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo show how the US treats elected leaders who dare to espouse an alternate path for their people.
The ouster of leaders, most of them socialists, by the US military-intelligence complex, didn't stop after the end of the Cold War. The US made protracted efforts to overthrow former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who survived a "coup" attempt in 2002, and Bolivia's Evo Morales, who was deposed in a coup in 2019 before returning the following year when his party won back the presidency. These anti-democratic moves were hailed by the same Western media outlets that now purport to be defenders of freedom, democracy and human rights.
Washington's game is not about US-style democracy either. Rather it's about whether a given "democracy" benefits the US economically and/or politically. For the US, geopolitical expediency trumps any commitment to principle.
There's a much deeper issue underpinning US "democracy" and all its contradictions. For example, more than 800,000 people in the US have had almost all their "rights" stripped as their democratically elected government let them die of COVID-19.
What critics of countries like China don't understand is that you can hold an election every day of the year, but they wouldn't mean squat if things didn't improve for the working majority.
China, however, has turned the election system on its head. The Communist Party of China's base of support was forged in an alliance of workers and farmers almost a century ago. Which has ensured the working majority remains the primary focus when crafting policy and allocating resources.
In countries such as the US, the affluent form interest groups to protect and expand their profits. If decisions are made in China or other countries governed by communist parties, social benefits and costs are factored in before anyone considers what the bourgeoisie will think.
There are other aspects of what China calls whole-process democracy that could, and should, be addressed in greater detail. Whole-of-society participation in the political process through oversight, consultation, public review, grassroots governance and many other avenues makes China a far more democratic society than the US and its hangers-on will ever give it credit for.
But that's a topic for another time. For now, I'll leave you with one quote of President Xi Jinping about democracy:
"If the people are awakened only for voting but enter a dormant period soon after, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy."
The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
The author is a US writer with China Daily.
18. Email database leak reveals dozens of military members, government employees, and academic personnel are active members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans
Email database leak reveals dozens of military members, government employees, and academic personnel are active members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans
In this Aug. 27, 2017 file photo, members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans kneel in front of a new monument called the "Unknown Alabama Confederate Soldiers" in the Confederate Veterans Memorial Park in Brantley, Ala. As Confederate statues across the nation get removed, covered up or vandalized, some brand new ones are being built as well.AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File
- An email database for Sons of Confederate Veterans contained 71 military and 46 government email addresses, The Nation reported.
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SCV has membership overlap with other white supremacist groups, per the Southern Poverty Law Center.
- Several SCV members were sued for their participation in the violent Unite the Right rally.
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An email database for the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) revealed dozens of military members, government employees, and academic personnel among its 32,000 active members, The Nation reported.
The database, which was leaked by an Atlanta antifascist group to The Nation, contained email addresses for individuals who had signed up to receive SCV news. It included 71 military, 46 government, and 204 school email addresses, according to The Nation.
With more than 1,000 "camps" across the country, SCV members espouse the same ideals that motivated their Confederate ancestors to fight in the Civil War, according to the group's website, with the goal of preserving their history and legacy so future generations can understand the motives that "animated the Southern Cause."
Other defendants listed in the suit, Sines v. Kessler, included neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and James Alex Fields, an avowed white supremacist who drove his car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters during the rally, killing Heyer and injuring dozens.
19. Taliban recruits flood into Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan as the group works to consolidate control
Excerpts:
Most of the Taliban fighters and supporters flowing from Pakistan into Afghanistan are Afghan, according to the Taliban member in Pakistan involved in recruitment efforts.
“Ordinary people, even my family, yes of course they criticize us [for living in Pakistan],” Quduratullah said. “But it is because they are ignorant. Personally, I am extremely opposed to Pakistan because it is not a true Islamic government.”
He said he lives part of the year there because the rest of his unit does the same. He listed dozens of instances of harassment at the hands of Pakistani police because of his Taliban ties including multiple detentions, one resulting in jail time.
The influx from Pakistan could initially deepen distrust between many Afghans and the Taliban movement, he conceded. “It will make it more difficult to convince the ordinary people [who do not already support the Taliban] that we do not just follow Pakistan’s orders, but in time they will see,” he said.
“We defeated the United States,” he said. “That is the only evidence you need to know we are a nationalist movement for Afghanistan.”
Taliban recruits flood into Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan as the group works to consolidate control
The Washington Post · by Susannah George and Haq Nawaz Khan Today at 4:41 p.m. EST · December 18, 2021
KABUL — Thousands of Taliban fighters and supporters have poured into Afghanistan from Pakistan over the past four months, answering the calls of influential clerics and commanders eager to consolidate control of the country, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former Taliban members in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Senior Taliban leadership urged fighters, Afghan refugees and madrassa students in Pakistan to come to Afghanistan to help the group maintain security as it made a string of sudden territorial advances this summer that created an urgent need for reinforcements, the current and former Taliban members said.
“Many of our mujahideen were offered permanent residences in Afghanistan if they wish to move here,” said one Pakistani Taliban fighter who aided in the recruitment effort from a madrassa in northwest Pakistan. He, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
The surge in Taliban fighters and supporters from Pakistan is bolstering ranks as the movement grapples with security threats, economic collapse and a deepening humanitarian crisis. But the source of the additional forces is also stirring long-held tensions with Pakistan at a critical time for Taliban leadership as it focuses on maintaining unity in the face of multiple crises that have the potential to undermine the group.
The movement of Taliban fighters and supporters between Afghanistan and Pakistan for education, medical treatment, training and fighting is nothing new. But this year it intensified.
The Taliban is estimated to have about 75,000 fighters in its ranks. The size of the recent influx from Pakistan is believed to range between 5,000 and 10,000, according to Taliban commanders, as much as 10 times higher than an average fighting season.
The reports compound Pakistan and Afghanistan’s already complicated relationship.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan praised the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan, saying it broke “the chains of slavery.” Pakistan’s intelligence chief traveled to Kabul in October, and Khan is one of the most vocal world leaders calling for international recognition of the Taliban.
But many Pakistanis blame instability in Afghanistan for militant attacks on their own soil, something they fear will increase with the Taliban in power. One powerful group is the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which is distinct from the Afghan Taliban but has thrown its support behind the neighboring rulers.
A senior Pakistani Foreign Ministry official said reports of thousands of Taliban fighters and supporters crossing into Afghanistan are “totally unfounded.”
“The Pakistani border has been almost completely fenced. It was a long and porous border earlier, but that’s no more the case,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly. “Yes, we have still millions of Afghan refugees and people come and go to Afghanistan. But to say that thousands of fighters cross the border, that is baseless.”
Calls by the Taliban for more fighters from Pakistan began over the summer as Afghan government-held provincial capitals fell in quick succession. But after the militants took Kabul, Taliban leaders also began calling on educated Taliban members and supporters in Pakistan to join the group’s nascent government.
“The recruiters came to mosques, training camps and the madrassas. Many of the students even left for Afghanistan before they completed their studies and had their turban ceremony,” said Quduratullah, an Afghan Taliban fighter, referring to a prestigious graduation ceremony. He spoke on the condition that only his first name be used because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
Under normal circumstances, students studying at madrassas in Pakistan — schools that teach the Koran and are often criticized as incubators of radicalism in that country — would wait to complete their studies or for scheduled breaks to fight in Afghanistan with the Taliban.
This year, clerics handed out waivers allowing students to pause their classes to serve in Afghanistan without having to begin the curriculum again from the beginning, Quduratullah said.
The 29-year-old Taliban fighter has lived between Pakistan and Afghanistan most of his life, regularly joining the Taliban’s ranks for the group’s spring fighting season. This year the atmosphere was unlike any he had experienced. “It was full of excitement and joy,” he said.
There was also a change in kinds of Taliban fighters and supporters who were making the trip to Afghanistan. He said he saw more people from madrassas and people with university educations, especially after the group took control of Kabul.
“Of course this will change the movement,” he said, referring to the influx of thousands, especially those with higher education.
“These people are planning” Afghanistan’s future, he said, “but like all revolutions in all countries this will take time.” The lack of experience among the recruits means change could take years, not months, he said.
On the heels of the rush of fighters and supporters, Islamic schools and military training centers that served as key steps along the recruitment pipeline have also begun moving into Afghanistan. The Pakistani Taliban member involved in sending fighters to Afghanistan said more and more Taliban training centers are being set up inside Afghanistan, where conditions are preferable to quickly train recruits.
“It’s easier now to get training in Afghanistan because all kinds of weapons are available there,” said the Pakistani Taliban member. He said many of the Taliban’s top trainers have also relocated to Afghanistan from Pakistan, where it’s now safer for them to operate.
After sweeping to power, the Taliban found its forces stretched thin. While the group controlled more than half of Afghanistan’s territory, its gains over the summer suddenly put its fighters in charge of securing urban centers where most of country’s population lives.
Attacks claimed by the Islamic State’s Afghanistan branch are on the rise, and after an initial plunge in crime, reports suggest the worsening economy is causing that to rise as well.
“Definitely, security is the top priority for the Emirate [Taliban leadership] right now. There are a number of security challenges including the Daesh and also keeping the crime rates under control,” said a pro-Taliban Pakistani cleric who has supported the group logistically from Pakistan for years. Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
After the fall of Kabul, the cleric said Pakistani doctors traveled to Afghanistan to support the health-care system there and advise the Taliban’s Ministry of Health.
Afghanistan is in dire need of educated, experienced bureaucrats to provide people with basic services. The massive U.S. airlift, ongoing evacuation efforts and fears among many former government employees of Taliban reprisals have gutted the country’s professional workforce.
The cleric said he is unaware of any Pakistani engineers or university-level professors traveling to Afghanistan but knows of some who are advising the Taliban remotely by phone and with messaging services.
“It’s not only about war and fighting,” said Afrasiab Khattak, a former Pakistani senator and Pashtun nationalist leader. The recruitment will also funnel people into government positions so employees of the former Afghan government can be demoted or fired, he said. “The Taliban don’t trust the old government people.”
But for many Afghans — supporters of the Taliban and not — people with ties to Pakistan are viewed with suspicion. And the Taliban’s ties to Pakistan are often cited by critics who accuse the movement of not being purely Afghan.
A former senior Taliban member called the Taliban’s massive recruitment effort from Pakistan “a mistake.”
“Priority should be given to the Taliban who are already here in Afghanistan,” he said and predicted that if the practice continued, it will only fuel opposition to the Taliban’s rule.
Quduratullah, the Afghan Taliban fighter, said there is deep suspicion of fighters like himself who have spent much of their lives in Pakistan. Millions of Afghan refugees who fled war have lived in Pakistan for decades. Many lack the rights that would allow them to work and live freely in Pakistan, putting them at an economic disadvantage and making the population ripe for radicalization or recruitment.
Most of the Taliban fighters and supporters flowing from Pakistan into Afghanistan are Afghan, according to the Taliban member in Pakistan involved in recruitment efforts.
“Ordinary people, even my family, yes of course they criticize us [for living in Pakistan],” Quduratullah said. “But it is because they are ignorant. Personally, I am extremely opposed to Pakistan because it is not a true Islamic government.”
He said he lives part of the year there because the rest of his unit does the same. He listed dozens of instances of harassment at the hands of Pakistani police because of his Taliban ties including multiple detentions, one resulting in jail time.
The influx from Pakistan could initially deepen distrust between many Afghans and the Taliban movement, he conceded. “It will make it more difficult to convince the ordinary people [who do not already support the Taliban] that we do not just follow Pakistan’s orders, but in time they will see,” he said.
“We defeated the United States,” he said. “That is the only evidence you need to know we are a nationalist movement for Afghanistan.”
Khan reported from Peshawar, Pakistan. Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Aziz Tassal in Houston contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Susannah George and Haq Nawaz Khan Today at 4:41 p.m. EST · December 18, 2021
20. Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes
A long painful read.
Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes
THE CIVILIAN CASUALTY FILES
BY AZMAT KHAN
Dec. 18, 2021
The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.
This is the first part of a series. Part 2 will examine the air war’s human toll.
Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.
In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed.
In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.
None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.
These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014.
The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.
The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”
This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.
The ISIS caliphate ultimately crumbled under the weight of American bombing. For years, American air power was crucial to the beleaguered Afghan government’s survival. And as U.S. combat deaths dwindled, the faraway wars, and their civilian tolls, receded from most Americans’ sights and minds.
On occasion, stunning revelations have pierced the silence. A Times investigation found that a Kabul drone strike in August, which American officials said had destroyed a vehicle laden with bombs, had instead killed 10 members of one Afghan family. The Times recently reported that dozens of civilians had been killed in a 2019 bombing in Syria that the military had hidden from public view. That strike was ordered by a top-secret strike cell called Talon Anvil that, according to people who worked with it, frequently sidestepped procedures meant to protect civilians. Talon Anvil executed a significant portion of the air war against ISIS in Syria.
The Pentagon regularly publishes bare-bones summaries of civilian casualty incidents, and it recently ordered a new, high-level investigation of the 2019 Syria airstrike. But in the rare cases where failings are publicly acknowledged, they tend to be characterized as unfortunate, unavoidable and uncommon.
In response to questions from The Times, Capt. Bill Urban, the spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said that “even with the best technology in the world, mistakes do happen, whether based on incomplete information or misinterpretation of the information available. And we try to learn from those mistakes.” He added: “We work diligently to avoid such harm. We investigate each credible instance. And we regret each loss of innocent life.”
He described minimizing the risk of harm to civilians as “a strategic necessity as well as a legal and moral imperative,” driven by the way these casualties are used “to feed the ideological hatred espoused by our enemies in the post 9/11 conflicts and supercharge the recruiting of the next generation of violent extremists.”
Yet what the hidden documents show is that civilians have become the regular collateral casualties of a way of war gone badly wrong.
To understand how this happened, The Times did what military officials admit they have not done: analyzed the casualty assessments in aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution. It also visited more than 100 casualty sites and interviewed scores of surviving residents and current and former American officials. In the coming days, the second part of this series will trace those journeys through the war zones of Iraq and Syria.
Taken together, the reporting offers the most sweeping, and also the most granular, portrait of how the air war was prosecuted and investigated — and of its civilian toll.
There is no way to determine that full toll, but one thing is certain: It is far higher than the Pentagon has acknowledged. According to the military’s count, 1,417 civilians have died in airstrikes in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria; since 2018 in Afghanistan, U.S. air operations have killed at least 188 civilians. But The Times’s analysis of the documents found that many allegations of civilian casualties had been summarily discounted, with scant evaluation. And the on-the-ground reporting — involving a sampling of cases dismissed, cases deemed “credible” and, in Afghanistan, cases not included in the trove of Pentagon documents — found hundreds of deaths uncounted.
The war of precision did not promise that civilians would not die. But before a strike is approved, the military must undertake elaborate protocols to estimate and avoid civilian harm; any expected civilian casualties must be proportional to the military advantage gained. And America’s precision bombs are indeed precise: They hit their targets with near-unerring accuracy.
The Civilian Casualty Files
The documents, along with The Times’s ground reporting, illustrate the many, often disastrous ways the military’s predictions of the peril to civilians turn out to be wrong. Their lessons rarely learned, these breakdowns of intelligence and surveillance occur again and again.
Repeatedly the documents point to the psychological phenomenon of “confirmation bias” — the tendency to search for and interpret information in a way that confirms a pre-existing belief. People streaming toward a fresh bombing site were assumed to be ISIS fighters, not civilian rescuers.
Men on motorcycles moving “in formation,” displaying the “signature” of an imminent attack, were just men on motorcycles.
Often, the danger to civilians is lost in the cultural gulf separating American soldiers and the local populace. “No civilian presence” was detected when, in fact, families were sleeping through the days of the Ramadan fast, sheltering inside against the midsummer swelter or gathering in a single house for protection when the fighting intensified.
In many cases, civilians were visible in surveillance footage, but their presence was either not observed by analysts or was not noted in the communications before a strike. In chat logs accompanying some assessments, soldiers can sound as if they are playing video games, in one case expressing glee over getting to fire in an area ostensibly “poppin” with ISIS fighters — without spotting the children in their midst.
The military spokesman, Captain Urban, pointed out that, “In many combat situations, where targeteers face credible threat streams and do not have the luxury of time, the fog of war can lead to decisions that tragically result in civilian harm.”
Indeed, the Pentagon records detail how in Mosul in 2016, three civilians were killed when a bomb aimed at one car instead struck three — in part because the military official approving the strike had decided to save more-precise weapons for other, imminent strikes. Yet The Times’s analysis of the documents and ground reporting showed that civilians were frequently killed in airstrikes planned well in advance.
Military officials often speak of their “over the horizon” long-range surveillance capabilities. But the documents repeatedly identify deficiencies in the quality and quantity of the video footage guiding intelligence.
Sometimes, only seconds’ worth of footage was taken before a strike, hardly enough to assess civilians’ presence. Often video shot from the air does not show people inside buildings, people under foliage, people under the aluminum or tarpaulin covers known as “quamaria” that shield cars and market stalls from the sun.
In more than half of the cases deemed credible by the military, one or two civilians were killed entering the target area after a weapon was fired. Officials often describe these as awful but inescapable accidents. But while many might have been averted through additional precautions — widening the surveillance camera’s field of view or deploying additional drones — the phenomenon continued unabated, amid the intense pace of battle and a shortage of surveillance aircraft.
Hassan Aleiwi Muhammad Sultan, now 16 and in a wheelchair, was hit by an April 29, 2016, strike in East Mosul, Iraq, aimed at an ISIS recruiter.Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
And sometimes, for reasons redacted in the documents, the weapons simply miss. In April 2016 the military reported that it had killed a notorious Australian ISIS recruiter, Neil Prakash, in a strike on a house in East Mosul. Months later, very much alive, he was arrested crossing from Syria into Turkey. Four civilians died in the strike, according to the Pentagon.
Yet despite this unrelenting toll, the military’s system for examining civilian casualties rarely functions as a tool to teach or assess blame.
Not only do the records contain no findings of wrongdoing or disciplinary action, but in only one instance is there is a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement. That stemmed from a breach in the procedure for identifying a target. Full investigations were recommended in fewer than 12 percent of the credible cases.
In many cases, the command that approved a strike was responsible for examining it, too. And those examinations were often based on incorrect or incomplete evidence. Military officials interviewed survivors or witnesses in only two cases. Civilian-casualty reports were regularly dismissed because video showed no bodies in the rubble, yet the footage was often too brief to make a true determination.
In his response to The Times, Captain Urban said, “An honest mistake, on a strike taken with the best available information and in keeping with mission requirements that results in civilian casualties, is not, in and of itself, a cause for disciplinary actions as set forth in the law of armed conflict.”
American officials had an opportunity to mine the documents for root causes and patterns of error in 2018, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Defense University undertook a study of civilian deaths. But one of the researchers who sought to analyze the documents in aggregate told The Times that almost all of his findings had been cut from the report. Another high-level study of the air campaign has never been made public.
In the end, what emerges from the more than 5,400 pages of records is an institutional acceptance of an inevitable collateral toll. In the logic of the military, a strike, however deadly to civilians, is acceptable as long as it has been properly decided and approved — the proportionality of military gain to civilian danger weighed — in accordance with the chain of command.
Lawrence Lewis, the former Pentagon and State Department adviser whose analysis for the 2018 study was quashed, said in an interview that the military’s technological prowess, and the highly bureaucratized system for assessing how it is employed, may actually serve an unspoken purpose: to create greater legal and moral space for greater risk.
“Now we can take strikes in city streets, because we have Hellfire missiles, and we have fancy things with blades,” he said. “We develop all these capabilities, but we don’t use them to buy down risk for civilians. We just use them so we can make attacks that maybe we couldn’t do before.”
The Promise of Precision
The new way of war came to fruition in the wake of the 2009 surge of American troops into Afghanistan, which brought some stability but never turned the war around.
By the end of 2014, with NATO’s mission also ending, President Obama declared America’s ground war essentially done. Henceforth, the United States would primarily provide air support and advice for Afghan forces battling the Taliban.
At roughly the same time, as Islamic State fighters swept through Mosul and massacred thousands of Yazidi Kurds at Mount Sinjar, Mr. Obama authorized a campaign of airstrikes against ISIS targets and in support of allied forces in Iraq and Syria.
The weaponry was hardly untested. This high-tech arsenal, increasingly sophisticated, had been critical to success in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, in NATO’s 1999 campaign in the Balkans, and more recently in Yemen and Somalia. By the time of the wars in the Middle East, the MQ-9 Reaper drone, outfitted with laser-guided Hellfire missiles, had become the surveillance and attack vehicle of choice.
At an ever-quickening pace over the next five years, and as the administration of Mr. Obama gave way to that of Donald J. Trump, American forces would execute more than 50,000 airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, in accordance with a rigorous approval process that prized being “discriminate,” “proportional” and in compliance with the law of armed conflict. Not only would this be the most precise air campaign ever; it would be the most transparent.
The only official accounting of that promise is the hidden Pentagon documents.
They were obtained through Freedom of Information requests beginning in March 2017 and lawsuits filed against the Defense Department and U.S. Central Command. To date, The Times has received 1,311 out of at least 2,866 reports — known as credibility assessments — examining airstrikes in Iraq and Syria between September 2014 and January 2018. Requests for records from Afghanistan are the subject of a new lawsuit.
Each report is the fruit of a review process that begins when a potential civilian-casualty incident is identified by the military or, more frequently, alleged by an outside source — a nongovernmental organization, a news outlet or social media.
Assessment experts classify allegations into two categories. A case is “credible” if it is deemed “more likely than not” that the airstrike caused civilian casualties. In the reports examined by The Times, 216 cases were deemed credible. “Noncredible” cases fail to meet that standard — often because there is no record of a strike at the place and time in question, or because the available evidence is considered insufficiently specific or simply weak.
Until now, fewer than 20 of these assessments dating to late 2014 have been made public.
To assess the military’s assessments, between late 2016 and this past June, The Times visited the sites of 60 incidents deemed credible in Iraq and Syria, as well as three dozen others deemed noncredible or not yet assessed. (It also visited dozens of strike sites in Afghanistan.) In 35 credible cases, it was possible to locate the precise impact area and find survivors and witnesses on the ground. Then the reporting included touring wreckage; collecting photo and video evidence; and verifying casualties through death certificates, government IDs and hospital records.
Frequently the reporting closely matched basic information from the documents. But the detailed accounts that ultimately emerged from the rubbled ground were often in stark contrast to what had been assessed from the air.
‘Play Time?’
this area is poppin
It was Jan. 13, 2017, and the battle for East Mosul would soon reach the neighborhood of al-Faisaliya. Iraqi forces were 120 meters away; farther back, an American ground team was helping coordinate air support.
In Erbil and in Doha, Qatar, a ground controller and aircrew members typed out messages, helping fulfill the array of combat directives and rules of the strike process:
adm in kp 9 has his rifle leaning against wall
An adult male leaned against a rooftop wall, his rifle beside him, then was seen firing south before two men joined him.
play time?
The ground controller asked how much longer the crew had in the target area. The response was redacted.
A man was seen running into a building, then out.
bldg slant redacted
The “slant” — the number of men, women and children observed — was typed into the chat. (Four men, one woman and three children in a building would be “bldg slant 4/1/3.”) This slant is redacted.
The coordinates were entered for what was now assessed as a building used by ISIS.
cleared hot
Clearance to attack was granted, and the weapon — the exact kind is redacted — fired.
splash
Five seconds to impact.
Two “squirters” — people fleeing a bomb site — were observed: one running from the building, the other heading back inside. The drone followed the men, firing on one but overshooting. It fired again, then turned to four others.
The action continued — a series of attacks on men darting through the area, until the drone returned to the building and struck again.
bldg was completely dropped
Toward the end, men were observed getting into a van.
looks like children as well
JAN. 13, 2017 — MOSUL, IRAQ
Messages between the ground controller and aircrew as they targeted a building assessed as harboring ISIS fighters. Inside were three families. Eight civilians were killed.
The war against ISIS heralded the dawn of “strike cells” — remote operations centers from which most airstrikes were directed and controlled. These war rooms synergized the myriad players — pilots, sensor operators, intelligence experts, ground forces, weaponeering specialists, civilian-casualty-mitigation analysts, lawyers, even weather officers. Strike cells boasted at times that, with their video feeds and surveillance aircraft, they could understand what was happening on the battlefield as well as if they were there themselves.
As the war intensified and ground commanders won greater authority to call in strikes, the cells expanded, with a small number of Americans embedded with allies on the battlefield. The cells were seen as so successful that they made their way to Afghanistan, too. And as the Trump administration sought to pressure the Taliban into a deal, decision-making authority for airstrikes was often pushed further down the chain of command.
The cells conducted “dynamic strikes” — identified and executed within minutes or hours in the flow of war, accounting for an overwhelming majority of the air campaign. “Deliberate” strikes, which were preplanned — extensively vetted, often filmed over weeks or months and analyzed by several working groups — decreased over time.
In both scenarios, the targeting process essentially boiled down to two questions: Could the presumed enemy target be positively identified? And would any harm to civilians be proportional, in line with the law of armed conflict — or would it exceed the “expected military advantage gained”?
For positive identification, the officer designated with strike approval needed “reasonable certainty” that the target performed a function for the adversary. That could be relatively straightforward, as when the target was a fighter firing directly on friendly forces. But a more ambiguous target, like a suspected ISIS headquarters, might require further surveillance.
To determine proportionality, analysts evaluated whether the target was used exclusively by the enemy or might also be used by civilians, then assessed civilians’ “pattern of life.” Ultimately, they would calculate how many civilians were likely to be killed or wounded.
For deliberate strikes, this generally entailed an exhaustive “collateral damage estimate,” a computer calculation of the expected civilian casualty count, based on a mix of factors: the pattern of life, the population density, the specific weapon being used, the kind of structure being targeted — a concrete building, an aluminum shed, a mud hut. The officer approving the strike would weigh that estimate with other factors, such as the potential for secondary blasts from explosive materials nearby.
For dynamic strikes, the process could be vastly compressed. Especially if there was a threat to friendly forces or some other urgency, strike cells were more likely to rely on an impromptu assessment of a video feed.
Either way, based on that calculation, the military was required to take “feasible precautions” to mitigate civilian harm. The greater the likelihood of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the more precautions taken — say, by deploying more-precise weaponry to limit the blast radius or by attacking when the fewest civilians were predicted to be present.
The military does not provide a precise definition of what is proportional. Essentially, the expected civilian toll was proportional if the officer making that determination reasonably believed it to be so, and if it did not exceed a “noncombatant cutoff value.” Otherwise, officials say, the target would be discarded.
The final official step was a legal review. But efforts to protect civilians could continue until moments before a weapon was fired. From the cockpit, pilots could select how a weapon detonated — upon impact or with a delayed fuse. Or they could call an “abort,” if, for example, a civilian was spotted walking into the target area.
Under the right circumstances, this process could result in a strike so precise that it would destroy the section of a house filled with enemy fighters and leave the rest of the building intact.
Children playing where the school sheltering Qusay Saad’s family stood before Jan. 13, 2017, when a strike hit it.Ali Al-Baroodi for The New York Times
As Iraqi forces approached Qusay Saad’s home in East Mosul on Jan. 12, 2017, ISIS forced his family to move to an area still under its control. They found refuge in his brother’s abandoned house in al-Faisaliya.
Through a night of gunfire and explosions, Mr. Saad and his wife, Zuhour, comforted their three children and prayed that Iraqi forces would reach them. Then ISIS ordered them to move again, into an abandoned school next door with two other families. That was the building observed in the chat on Jan. 13, 2017.
The first airstrike hit as the Saad family sat down to breakfast. Mr. Saad recalls concrete blocks pressing down on his head, and his wife screaming. A man from one of the other families lifted away the blocks, and he quickly wrested his 14-month-old daughter, Aisha, from the rubble and handed her to his wife.
The second strike came just as he turned to free his 7-year-old son, Muhammad.
“The strike was unbelievable,” he said. “An entire three-story house was just crushed.”
Three members of another family escaped. Mr. Saad could not find his wife, their 4-year-old son, Abdulrahman, or Aisha. But Muhammad was alive, his thigh split open. Bleeding from the head, Mr. Saad picked up the boy and fled.
It would be two months before he could recover the bodies. The Iraqi government offered no help. So the family paid to excavate the site. Mr. Saad watched as his wife and two youngest children were lifted out. Aisha’s head was missing, but her little body was in her mother’s arms.
Mr. Saad’s son Abdulrahman was killed, along with his wife and young daughter.Azmat Khan
They were buried not far from their home, which Mr. Saad has kept as it was when they all lived there. Sometimes, his brother said, he spends whole nights at the graveyard.
Last month, The Times told him of the findings of the military’s assessment. It offers this account:
The target was a building assessed as harboring four ISIS fighters. A review of the imagery revealed that after the first strike, which because of a “weapon malfunction” only partly collapsed the building, four adults and four children could be seen moving in its center. The building was hit again and fully collapsed. Later, three people emerged. The strike team did not report any civilians in the vicinity, and because of the drone’s angle, a view of the eight people in the building after the first strike “was obscured.”
The allegation was deemed credible, with eight civilians killed, but no further investigation was ordered. Eight “enemies” were also killed, the document said.
JAN. 13, 2017 — MOSUL, IRAQ
The redacted FMV clearly shows eight unarmed individuals some of whom are assessed to be children moving in the rubble after the first munition detonated on the target building.
When told of the Army’s findings, Mr. Saad could not understand how a military with such a wealth of information could have failed to see them — or how the pursuit of fighters he never saw could justify leveling a building full of families. If the Americans would show him the video, he said, he would show them Mosul.
“They have to come here and see with their own eyes,” he said, adding, “What happened wasn’t liberation. It was the destruction of humanity.”
How Deadly Failures Happen
Last May, the Pentagon’s inspector general completed a classified report evaluating the policies for ensuring that “only valid military targets are struck,” and that “damage to property and loss of civilian life is mitigated to the maximum extent possible.”
A redacted version, echoing similar studies by other agencies in recent years, declares the targeting process to be sound.
The Pentagon’s own assessments tell a far richer story.
The documents often do not articulate precise causes, and in many cases, several factors coalesced into a deadly failure. But The Times’s analysis of the 216 cases deemed credible, together with its reporting on the ground, reveals several distinct patterns of failure.
Misidentifying Civilians
Positive identification of the enemy is one of the pillars of the targeting process, yet ordinary citizens were routinely mistaken for combatants.
In a dissenting footnote to the 2018 Joint Chiefs’ study, Mr. Lewis and a colleague cited research showing that misidentification was one of the two leading causes of civilian casualties in American military operations. With few troops on the ground, they wrote, “it is reasonable to expect a systematic undercounting of misidentifications in U.S. military reports.”
Indeed, according to the Pentagon records, misidentification was involved in only 4 percent of cases. At the casualty sites visited by The Times, misidentification was a major factor in 17 percent of incidents, but accounted for nearly a third of civilian deaths and injuries.
At times, the error involved quicksilver intelligence of an imminent threat. In The Times’s ground sample, though, misidentification occurred just as frequently in strikes planned far in advance — as in a January 2017 strike on an ISIS “foreign fighter headquarters” in East Mosul that killed 16 people in what turned out to be three civilian homes. Three ISIS buildings down the street were untouched.
Yet in case after case, the misidentification appears to be less a matter of confusion than of confirmation bias.
That was what happened on Nov. 20, 2016, after a Special Operations task force received a report of an ISIS explosives factory in a Syrian village north of Raqqa. In a walled compound, operators spotted “white bags,” assessed to be ammonium nitrate. Two trucks with a dozen men departed, stopped at various ISIS checkpoints, drove to a building “associated with previous ISIS activity,” then returned to the compound. The first strike targeted one truck, which caused “secondary explosions.” On the evidence of those blasts and the “white bags,” operators received approval to strike three buildings. After impact, two “squirters” fled the westernmost building. That building and another were struck again.
The findings of the military’s review, begun after online reports that a strike in the same area had killed nine civilians and injured more than a dozen, contradicted nearly all of the original intelligence.
NOV. 20, 2016 — RAQQA, SYRIA
A military review showed that a target believed to be an ISIS explosives factory was actually a cotton gin. Nine civilians were killed. Further investigation was not recommended.
Examining scans of the compound, analysts detected no ammonium nitrate. The presumed secondary explosions were actually reflections from a nearby building, and one of the “squirters” was a child. Finally, a six-month time lapse of imagery showed that the compound was “more likely a cotton gin than a factory” for explosives. Two civilians were killed, the report said. (The task force continued to call the gin a legitimate target, citing a news report that ISIS controlled three-quarters of Syria’s cotton production.)
Several months later, in Iraq, American forces received intelligence about a suspected car bomb — a dark-colored, heavily armored vehicle moving through the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul.
Scanning a surveillance feed, an air-support coordinator quickly homed in on a possible match: a green vehicle whose windows appeared to be covered over. He did not see any signs of reinforced armor, but positively identified both the green car and a closely trailing white vehicle as car bombs.
Both vehicles traveled away from the front line and stopped at an intersection where several people were gathered on a covered section of sidewalk. The driver of the first car got out and joined the group. The target authority approved the strike.
The targeted vehicle “sustained a direct hit,” according to the military assessment. The group on the sidewalk “sustained weapons effects.”
But the review of the footage found no evidence that the vehicle was a car bomb. There was no telltale secondary explosion. Nor was the car heavily armored. And though the people on the sidewalk were visible in the footage, they were never mentioned in the pre-strike chat.
FEB. 25, 2017 — MOSUL, IRAQ
Based on a review of all available information, the CIVCAS allegation is credible. Full motion video (FMV) shows that five individuals near the target vehicle were killed or injured by the strike, and there is no information to indicate that those individuals had been or could be positively identified as combatants.
The full picture, which the targeting team involved in the strike failed to see, emerged when The Times visited Wadi Hajar earlier this year.
Ordered by ISIS to leave the neighborhood, Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and two children had piled into their blue — not green — Opel Astra station wagon. Following close behind in a white car were his brother, Firas, and his family. At an intersection where other fleeing residents had gathered, Mr. Ahmed spotted his friend Muhammad Jamaal Muhammad waving and got out to say hello. As another neighbor approached, the airstrike hit.
Abdul Hakeem Abdullah Hamash Al Aqidi, a bystander, lost an eye and had a plate implanted in his left leg.Azmat Khan
“I remember there was a big explosion, and I fainted,” recalled Abdul Hakeem Abdullah Hamash Al Aqidi, an elderly man who had been standing by his door at the intersection. He lost an eye and had to have a plate implanted in his injured left leg. His son’s left leg had to be amputated.
In all, seven local people — including the four members of the Ahmed family — were killed. Mr. Mohamed, who had waved to Mr. Ahmed, cannot banish from his mind the image of his friend’s wife, Hiba Bashir, burned into the seat, still holding her infant son in her lap.
The military spokesman, Captain Urban, acknowledged that “confirmation bias is a real concern,” citing the Kabul airstrike in August that killed the 10 members of a family. “There is more work to do on this,” he said.
Failing to Detect Civilians
If the military often mistook civilians for enemy fighters, frequently it simply failed to see or understand that they were there. That was a factor in a fifth of the cases in the Pentagon documents, and a slightly smaller fraction of the casualties. However, it accounted for 37 percent of credible cases, and nearly three-fourths of the total civilian deaths and injuries at the sites visited by The Times.
Captain Urban said the targeting process had been vastly complicated by enemies who “plan, resource and base themselves in and among local populace.”
“They do not present themselves in large formations,” he added, “do not fight coalition forces with conventional tactics, and use geography and terrain in ways not conducive in every way to easy targeting solutions. Moreover, they often and deliberately use civilians as human shields, and they do not subscribe to anything remotely like the law of armed conflict to which we subscribe.”
Even so, the documents show that frequently, instead of extended surveillance, analysts relied on brief “collateral scans” — as little as 11 seconds long — in determining that civilians were not in the area. The footage was often limited by shortages of surveillance drones, particularly during the battles to retake Mosul and Raqqa.
In a number of cases, targets that had been placed on “no-strike lists” because attacking them would violate laws of war — a school, a bakery, a civilian hospital — were removed after the military mistakenly judged that they were now used exclusively by the enemy.
In Mosul in February 2017, a hospital was taken off the list after the military concluded that civilians had left the area, and that the building was being used only as an ISIS headquarters and propaganda center. The week before the strike, according to the report, analysts had examined still images of children “interacting” with the hospital but had determined that striking at night would “alleviate collateral concerns.” Four civilians were killed and six injured.
For the military’s analysts, studying the “pattern of life” is a crucial step in predicting collateral damage. But to examine the documents and interview local people is to understand how often unseen civilians might have been seen, or their presence at least suspected, had the military had a more intimate knowledge of the war-torn fabric of everyday life.
In some documents, as evidence of no civilian presence, military officials state that people would leave their homes at the sound of approaching aircraft. The reality is starkly different: Neighbors would huddle together, seeking communal sanctuary in a house or group of houses, invisible to surveillance drones.
In July 2016, a Special Operations task force identified a large group of ISIS fighters two kilometers from where U.S.-backed forces were fighting ISIS. They observed the fighters traveling in pickups known as “bongo trucks” to three “staging areas” where no civilians were present. The fighters, they concluded, were assembling for a counterattack. Shortly before 3 a.m., they bombed the three staging sites and five vehicles, confident of killing 85 ISIS fighters.
July 19, 2016 — TOKHAR, SYRIA
A military investigation concluded that as many as 24 civilians were “intermixed” with the combatants reported killed at three ISIS “staging areas.” The Times found that the targets were houses, and that more than 120 civilians were killed.
Almost immediately, reports of a vast civilian death toll surfaced online. The task force conducted a full investigation and determined that between seven and 24 civilians “intermixed with the fighters” might have been killed.
The Times visited Tokhar in December 2018. Surviving villagers gave this account:
That night, as they had every night for a month, some 200 villagers had trekked to the outer edge of the hamlet and taken shelter in four homes at the farthest remove from the quickening battle.
There was no evidence, they said, that ISIS had been near any of the four houses. In fact, residents said drones had been flying overhead for weeks, giving them solace that coalition forces knew they were there.
Saif Saleh, who was 8 when the strike hit Tokhar and his arm was trapped under debris, had to have costly medical treatment — and still needs more.Azmat Khan
The Times documented the names of civilians killed in each of the four houses, corroborating details with open-source information, local journalists and others on the ground, and determined that more than 120 people died. There were few young men left to pull bodies from the rubble. It took nearly two weeks, and still some were never found. If the full death toll were acknowledged, Tokhar would be the largest civilian casualty incident the United States has admitted to in the air war against ISIS.
Saif Saleh, 8 years old at the time, awoke that early morning to the collapsing walls, his arm trapped under debris. His parents used up every favor to collect $6,000 for surgery to graft skin from his leg.
Asked what he would like to tell the American military, Saif’s father said, “We want to say that you should be sure the area is empty or that there are no civilians before you bomb.”
The military investigation found that there was no evidence of negligence or wrongdoing; that the “policies, procedures and practices” were “sufficient for continued operations”; and that “no further action” was necessary. No condolence payments were authorized.
Overlooking Flawed Intelligence
Often, civilians were killed in strikes executed in the face of incomplete, outdated or ambiguous intelligence. Several such factors came together in a in March 2017.
As American-backed forces prepared to recapture the city, west of Raqqa, military officials approved strikes on a group of ISIS targets: two headquarters, a police station and a weapons factory. Each strike went as planned, according to initial assessments. Then came reports of civilian casualties.
The military review found that the intelligence for both headquarters was based on single reports from months before. (The targets had been identified earlier, but for strategic advantage, commanders had decided to wait until Syrian Democratic Forces were pushing into Tabqa.) The intelligence package on the first building warned that there was “insufficient” evidence to corroborate the judgment, relied on to remove the building from a restricted-targeting list, that it was used solely by ISIS; the report said simply that an ISIS emir had frequented the site.
Similarly, the review found that the intelligence did not support the view that the second headquarters was used exclusively by ISIS. What’s more, even though both headquarters were in densely populated areas with residential structures nearby, there was insufficient footage to assess the presence of civilians — one minute of video of the first target and less than two of the second.
The review also raised serious questions about the quality of intelligence for the two other targets.
Flawed Video
Sometimes, the problem was less the quantity of video than the quality
Analysts at the military’s Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar saw this clearly when they reviewed 17 minutes of grainy footage that preceded a Nov. 13, 2015, strike on an ISIS “defensive fighting position” in Ramadi. Using the center’s 62-inch high-definition TV, they concluded that what had been identified as an “unknown heavy object” being dragged into a building was actually “a person of small stature,” “consistent with how a child would appear standing next to an adult.”
Often the overhead surveillance camera missed people simply sitting or standing under something, doing the most quotidian things.
June 15, 2016: An ISIS fighter on a motorcycle turned onto a secondary road near Mosul University. It was Ramadan; the shops and stalls were teeming with people. Among the five civilians also killed and four wounded in the strike:
Abdul Wahab Adnan Qassim, killed by shrapnel, had been standing in the tree-filled courtyard of his house.
Abdul Wahab Adnan Qassim’s ID. He was 34.Azmat Khan
Zanoun Ezzedine Mahmoud, killed by the blast, had been standing at a fruit stand covered by a blue tarp blocking the sun. The stand’s owner, Ilyas Ali Abd Ali, lost his right leg.
Ilyas Ali Abd Ali, the fruit stand owner. He is also now deaf in one ear.Azmat Khan
A father and daughter, killed by glass and shrapnel, had been sitting in a car nearby.
Nashwan Abdul Majeed Abdul Hakeem Al Radwani, killed by shrapnel, had been standing under the awning of the popular Hammurabi Ice Cream Shop.
Walking Into Danger
More than half of the cases the military deemed credible involved someone entering the target frame in the moments between a weapon’s firing and impact, as in a March 2017 strike in Mosul when shrapnel killed a man pushing a cart down a road near an ISIS mortar tube.
These deaths, which account for 10 percent of acknowledged civilian casualties, are often framed as unavoidable accidents. In the Mosul strike that killed the man with the cart, operators had already twice aborted weapons releases because civilians had entered the frame — demonstrating concerted efforts to avert danger. Yet the systematic nature of the problem suggests the military could be doing more.
Indeed, the review of a February 2017 strike on a “high value individual” at a funeral in Mosul that injured two civilians includes some recommendations. While noting that the civilians’ presence “could not be predicted to reasonable certainty,” it adds that an additional surveillance aircraft could have provided a more encompassing view. (Because of the target’s importance, two aircraft were used to zoom in, rather than out, on the wider scene.) Yet again surveillance drones were in short supply.
Secondary Explosions
In the late spring of 2015, as ISIS continued to prove resilient in carrying out attacks and retaining territory, American targeteers and weapons specialists prepared a nighttime airstrike on a car-bomb factory in the industrial district of Hawija, north of Baghdad. Occupied apartment houses ringed the area. But the nearest “collateral concern” was assessed to be a “shed.”
Not long before, dozens of displaced families, unable to afford rent, had also begun squatting in the abandoned houses scattered through the industrial zone. Among them were Khadijah Yaseen and her family, who had fled the fighting in their hometown, Yathrib.
The night of June 2 was particularly hot, so the family slept outside. They woke to screaming and the sound of the jets.
“There was fire everywhere,” Ms. Yaseen recalled when The Times met her at a displaced persons camp in October 2016. Most of those killed were from squatter families like hers. “You couldn’t count them. There were so many people that died.”
As many as 70, a military investigation found. Ms. Yaseen lost three grandchildren: 13-year-old Muhammad, 12-year-old Ahmed and a 3-year-old girl, Zahra.
June 2, 2015 — HAWIJA, IRAQ
Plans for a coalition airstrike on an ISIS car-bomb factory failed to account for the potential for secondary explosions. As many as 70 people were killed, the military investigation found.
Hawija is among the deadliest examples of the failure to predict the collateral consequences of striking weapons caches or other targets with the potential for secondary explosions. Such explosions often reached far beyond the expected blast radius; they accounted for nearly a third of all civilian casualties acknowledged by the military and half of all civilian deaths and injuries at the sites visited by The Times.
Although the American military planned the Hawija strike, the bombs were dropped by the air force of the Netherlands. There, the case became a cause célèbre after it emerged that the defense minister had worked to suppress the findings of the military investigation.
In the report of the investigation, targeteers and weapons experts describe the ultimately disastrous calculations taken to win approval for the strike. They worked and reworked the target, carefully calculating what kinds of munitions to use until their model concluded — despite the fact that they would be striking a car-bomb factory with apartment buildings nearby — that there would be no civilian deaths. (The Dutch military would only carry out strikes with an expected civilian-casualty rate of zero.)
The document describes a secondary explosion that produced a “visible shock wave” extending more than 750 feet from the target.
“That is massive, to be able to see a shock wave like that on a video,” said a former high-level official involved in the air campaign against ISIS, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The only comparable explosion he’d seen, he said, was the 2020 blast that devastated the port of Beirut.
Remnants of an ISIS car-bomb factory in Hawija, Iraq, where a nighttime strike on June 2, 2015, set off a secondary blast.Azmat Khan
Among the sites visited by The Times, at least half of the strikes with secondary explosions involved targets — like a power station or a factory for improvised explosive devices — that the military could have predicted would produce such blasts.
However, at other times it was unaware of both a weapons cache and a civilian presence. That was the case in the largest civilian casualty incident the military has admitted in the war, the March 17, 2017, airstrike on two ISIS snipers in the Mosul al-Jadida neighborhood that killed at least 103 civilians.
Failures of Accountability
On Jan. 6, 2017, Rafi Al Iraqi woke to the sound of a bomb close by. Another hit next door. Moments later, his own house was struck. He could hear his oldest son, Hamoody, screaming in the wreckage. “I just gave him to some people to take him to the hospital,” Mr. Al Iraqi recalled. “Then I went back in to find my other children.”
The ruins of Rafi Al Iraqi’s house in Mosul. Airstrikes on his neighborhood on Jan. 6, 2017, killed 16 civilians.Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
What happened next was captured on video taken by ISIS’ media agency, which often visited blast sites for propaganda.
Rescuers emerged holding limp bodies. Mr. Al Iraqi’s daughter, Nour, was alive. “I took her with my own hands to the hospital,” he recalled this past June, in his most recent interview with The Times. “But by then, she had died.” A nearby house for ISIS fighters was untouched.
Soon, via the ISIS video and news reports, word spread online that three families had been targeted in the Zerai neighborhood near Mosul’s Grand Mosque. In all, 16 civilians were killed, including three of Mr. Al Iraqi’s children and his mother-in-law. Hamoody’s leg was lacerated.
The military began a civilian-casualty assessment, which found that there had been a single strike in Zerai that day — on a house assessed to be used exclusively as an ISIS “foreign fighter headquarters” and “artillery staging location.” The strike had been preplanned, with no expected civilian casualties.
Jan. 6, 2017 — MOSUL, IRAQ
The military deemed this case noncredible, finding that the target was an ISIS site and that no civilians had been harmed. But interviews with survivors, as well as video footage and photos, showed that 16 civilians were killed.
The post-strike footage showed no civilians killed or injured. The post-strike chat did not indicate the presence of civilians, though it did mention a wounded man — judged to be an ISIS fighter — being helped from the ruins.
The footage was 1 minute and 22 seconds long. The allegation was deemed noncredible. Officially, 16 people had not died that day in Zerai. (The Pentagon finally acknowledged the casualties in September 2020, after years of follow-up by The Times.)
JAN. 6, 2017 — MOSUL, IRAQ
Pre-strike assessment of the target concluded that there were no civilians in the target facility, and there is no evidence on the face of the strike indicating that civilians were killed or injured as a consequence of the strike.
Except for the rare instances of revelation and subsequent outcry, the Pentagon’s brief published reports on the minority of cases it finds credible are the only public acknowledgment of the air war’s civilian toll.
The Times’s reporting in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan points to the broader truth.
In addition to the finding that many allegations of civilian casualties were erroneously dismissed, The Times discovered that even when civilian deaths were acknowledged, they were often significantly undercounted.
Roughly 37 percent of the allegations deemed credible stemmed from prior ground investigations by journalists or nongovernmental organizations; in those cases, the acknowledged death tolls roughly tracked outside reporting. But in the other cases, The Times’s own reporting found that the civilian toll was nearly double that acknowledged by the military. (That did not include ISIS fighters’ wives and children, whose information was difficult to verify.)
The documents identify children killed or injured in 27 percent of cases; in The Times’s ground reporting it was 62 percent. In 40 percent of the sites visited, survivors had been left with significant disabilities, which were not tracked by the military.
Beyond the casualty count, the structure and execution of the assessments do not encourage the regular examination of immediate lessons or deeper trends.
The records obtained by The Times, some significantly redacted, range from short first-impression reports to more formal credibility assessments. The reports generally contain a narrative drawn from the strike’s “target package” — including intelligence about the target, the civilian-casualty estimate, actions to mitigate civilian harm, video footage and chat logs tracking each step of the process.
Not only was there no record of disciplinary action, or full investigations in roughly 9 of every 10 cases, but only a quarter included any further review, recommendations or lessons learned. Even the architecture of the forms makes it difficult to analyze causes in aggregate; they do not have specific boxes for specific factors involved in a fatal error. There are a few places to record proximate causes or lessons learned, but those fields are mostly empty or redacted. Records are often incomplete, missing attachments or were only partially entered into shared databases.
In many cases, the unit that executed a strike also ended up investigating it; their assessments often included minimal information. For example, a Special Operations unit’s rationale for rejecting allegations that a December 2016 airstrike near Raqqa had killed as many as nine civilians consisted of a single paragraph stating that it had reviewed its strikes in the area and found “no evidence of possible civilian casualties.” There was no further information or detail from the footage.
The Times found that such omissions, as well as redactions and missing documents, were often associated with Talon Anvil, the Special Operations unit that carried out the recently revealed airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Syria in 2019.
The Video Evidence
Of the 1,311 assessments from the Pentagon, in only one did investigators visit the site of a strike. In only two did they interview witnesses or survivors.
Captain Urban, the military spokesman, said that in hostile territory, investigators might be unable to visit a blast site and interview “personnel on the ground.”
Instead, often the resounding piece of evidence studied was video recorded in the wake of a strike. Yet just as poor or insufficient footage frequently contributed to deadly targeting failures, so did it hamstring efforts to examine them.
Often, the footage was only seconds or minutes long, in many cases too brief to see rescuers carrying survivors from a collapsed building. (Frequently, rescuers would wait before approaching a bombed area, for fear of being misidentified and provoking a second strike, known in the military as a “double tap.”) Often, images were obscured by the smoke of the blast.
In an interview — speaking anonymously because of a nondisclosure agreement — an analyst who captures strike imagery said superior officers would often “tell the cameras to look somewhere else” because “they knew if they’d just hit a bad target.”
And at times, there was simply no footage for review, which became the basis for rejecting the allegation. That was often because of “equipment error,” because no aircraft had “observed or recorded the strike,” or because the unit could not or would not find the footage or had not preserved it as required.
In a number of cases, compelling allegations were dismissed because the claim’s details did not precisely match the imagery.
For example, when Airwars — the leading source of civilian casualty allegations referred to the military — reported that a strike in East Mosul in April 2015 had killed dozens of civilian rescuers, the allegation was rejected because of “discrepancies in eyewitness accounts.” Despite accurately testifying that three bombs had struck an electric substation, a witness said the third had come a quarter-hour after the second and had not exploded; the document described that as “inconsistent” with the military’s imagery and strike report. (The allegation was later deemed credible after The Times visited the site and told the military that at least 18 civilians had been killed and more than a dozen wounded.)
Even when allegations were deemed credible, the military often undercounted the toll because victims, unseen by the overhead camera before the strike, remained invisible in the aftermath. Case in point: the 2016 Ramadan bombing near Mosul University that killed five civilians and wounded four. The military reported injuries to two civilians who had been in the pre-strike footage.
Cases Closed
When the military receives an allegation of civilian casualties, it runs through a checklist to determine whether the case merits further inquiry. Most never reach the point of video review. About a quarter of the noncredible cases were summarily closed because they lacked sufficient information or detail, such as a specific location or 48-hour time frame. But more than half were rejected, in some cases erroneously, because the military could find no record of corroborating strikes in the geographic area identified in the allegation — or because there were too many potential matches, and too little detailed information.
That information would be found in official logs maintained by different strike authorities. But The Times found numerous instances in which the logs were incomplete or inaccurate: Often, records show, the coalition knew its logs were flawed.
Frequently, cases were closed because the military said it lacked the information to pinpoint the neighborhood in question. Sometimes that conclusion was rooted in misunderstandings of local custom and culture.
In January 2017, citing insufficient information, an officer quickly closed a case based on social media reports that civilians had been killed in a strike on a funeral in the al Shifaa neighborhood of West Mosul. Fruitlessly, the officer had searched logs for potentially corroborating strikes in the cemetery closest to that neighborhood.
However, as reflected in a graphic video accompanying the initial reports, the strike had not taken place at a cemetery: A thumbnail depicted the entrance to a house. In fact, Muslim funerals are rarely held at cemeteries. What’s more, Muslims bury the dead quickly, and it had been four days since this man, Col. Aziz Ahmed Aziz Sanjari, had died.
The colonel’s death had brought many members of the Sanjari family’s tribe to their home to mourn. It was a sunny afternoon, so more than a dozen people sat outside. They could hear a drone humming above, but were unworried. It was a common occurrence. A few minutes later, the bomb hit. Eleven people were killed, The Times found.
‘Sometimes Bad Things Happen’
Captain Urban acknowledged that, “In some cases our assessment of the numbers of civilian casualties does not always match that of outside groups, and we acknowledge that those numbers may change over time as well.
“We do the best we can, given the circumstances, to understand fully the effects of our operations and the harm done to innocent life. That we sometimes do not always arrive at the same conclusion of outside groups does not diminish the sincerity with which we strive to get it right.”
Several Pentagon studies, rendered in military bureaucratese, have observed some of the failures of accountability. The April 2018 Joint Chiefs of Staff examination of civilian deaths from airstrikes in the Middle East and Africa found that “feedback to subordinate commands on the cause and/or lessons learned from a civilian casualty incident is inconsistent.” The recent Pentagon Inspector General report spoke of “omissions.”
Yet for the most part, these reports do not speak to questions of how airstrikes repeatedly go wrong.
Mr. Lewis, the co-author whose efforts to analyze the assessments in aggregate were excised from the Joint Chiefs’ study, said the report instead relied primarily on interviews with assessment officers. They were able to detect certain patterns — especially casualties from secondary explosions and from people entering the target frame after a weapon’s firing — but few of the systematic reasons behind the bulk of civilian deaths.
The Times asked him why the military would develop such intricate procedures to prevent civilian casualties, and then assess them, but not prioritize documenting or studying causes and lessons learned. Not only does the system provide legitimacy for the military’s actions, he said; it also allows the United States to boast of a process that is a global model of accountability.
The former high-level American official in the campaign against ISIS said the procedures served an additional purpose — to provide a “psychological veneer” for the people involved: “We did the process. We did what we needed to do. Sometimes bad things happen.”
He said that after returning from his post, anguished by what he had seen, he had started therapy. He pointed to Raqqa, rendered a necropolis by American-led airstrikes, and compared it to the ruins of Aleppo, which was bombed by the Russians without the American military’s sophisticated considerations of proportionality — the collateral damage estimates, no-strike lists or rules of engagement.
“Eventually I stopped saying that this was the most precise bombing campaign in the history of warfare,” he said. “So what? It doesn’t matter that this was the most precise bombing campaign and the city looks like this.”
In Afghanistan
All the boys and men of Band-e-Timor knew that when the Toyota Hiluxes came, you should run for your life.
People called them wegos. At the wheel were Afghan paramilitary forces who usually set out on full-moon nights at the fork in the road before Lashkar Gah, charging through the village of Barang straddling the Kandahar-Helmand border and into other parts of Band-e-Timor, “capturing everyone: old men, young men, everyone,” said a resident named Matiullah.
U.S. officials said an Aug. 29 drone strike in Kabul destroyed a vehicle carrying bombs. The Times found that it had killed 10 members of one family.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
It did not matter if you were not Taliban, people said. If you were male, the Afghan forces would arrest you, simply to collect a bounty for your release. If you were old or feeble, the price was just over $500; a man in his prime would fetch twice that. “You would have to sell your cow or your land to get your relatives released,” said Rahmatullah, a village resident. Often, it was the poorest who would run.
On the night of Jan. 31, 2018, the moon was especially bright. The wegos, as usual, came accompanied by what villagers said were American aircraft. Hidayatullah, a driver by profession, three days from marrying, knew he could not afford the bounty and the wedding, so he drove out into the desert. Then an airstrike found him, said Matiullah, who is his cousin. Dozens of other civilians, mistaken for Taliban as they fled on foot and motorbike across Band-e-Timor, died in the raid as well.
The August drone strike in Kabul that killed an Afghan aid worker and nine of his relatives grabbed the world’s attention. But most American airstrikes in Afghanistan took place far from the cities, in remote areas where cameras were not filming, mobile lines were often cut and the internet was nonexistent.
America’s longest war was, in many ways, its least transparent. For years, these rural battlefields were largely off-limits to American reporters. But after the Taliban returned to power in August, Afghanistan’s hinterlands opened up.
The Times arrived in Barang a little over a month later, visiting 15 households in this hamlet of mud homes and farmland, and also interviewing tribal elders and others across Band-e-Timor. Most said they had never spoken to a journalist before. The accounts they gave — consistently and reliably, in hourslong interviews — help explain how America lost the country, how its war of airstrikes and support of corrupt security forces paved the way for the Taliban’s return.
On average, each household lost five civilian family members. An overwhelming majority of these deaths were caused by airstrikes, most during wego raids. Many people admitted they had relatives who were Taliban fighters, but civilians accounted for most of those lost:
A father killed in an airstrike while running for the forest. A nephew killed as he slept with his flock of sheep. An uncle shot by American soldiers as he went to the bazaar to buy okra for dinner.
At the sound of helicopters, Hajji Muhammad Ismail Agha’s sons had bounded for the desert. The “foreign helicopters” fired on them. One son, Nour Muhammad, was killed; the other, Hajji Muhammad, survived. “How could the planes tell the difference between a civilian and a Taliban?” the father asked. “He was killed just a little far from here. I watched it happen.”
None of these incidents were mentioned in Pentagon press releases. Few were tallied in United Nations counts. So isolated from the Afghan government were residents that when asked for their loved ones’ death certificates, they asked where they might obtain them. Instead, to verify deaths, The Times visited tombstones, in graveyards littered across the desert.
21. Celebrities partner with Special Forces soldiers in shooting competition
Celebrities partner with Special Forces soldiers in shooting competition
| The Fayetteville Observer
FORT BRAGG — Bullets pinged across metal, cars and targets Friday at Fort Bragg, as Green Beret soldiers coached celebrities for a tactical shooting competition.
The Special Forces Charitable Trust is a nonprofit that raises money for Green Berets and their families to create resiliency, said retired Brig. Gen. Harrison Gilliam, operations director for thetrust.
The event brings civilians together with the military, Gilliam said.
“It reinforces that people care and want to know what they do and care about what they do and our families go through,” he said. “And so as a charitable trust, our focus is on the soldier and their families and our heritage.”
Last year’s inaugural fundraiser left an impression on five returning participants and created interest for others to participate this year.
The celebrities in turn are positively promoting the Green Berets and Army to their millions of social media followers, Gilliam said.
“(They) get to do some pretty cool things, but the end of the day we’re all serving our nation and without them, we wouldn't have the Army we have today,” he said.
This year’s competition drew more celebrity participation to include more female participants, said Jodi Burns, executive director of the Special Forces Charitable Trust.
Burns said half the participants this year were new to the event, while others returned.
“They really understand the magic of this place and how special it is here, and they really forge some relationships, too, and understanding the Green Berets,” Burns said.
She said celebrities this year were more competitive than last year, as they also competed to raise funds that generated more than $210,000 and sponsorships for the event.
“The buzz is definitely out there much more,” Burns said. “We’re hoping to just incrementally keep increasing it every year.”
Wicks was one of the returning participants who’s reached out to other celebrities to participate in the event.
“This should be a million-dollar event and it’s well on it’s way,” he said.
Wicks brought his wife to this year’s event, who helped raise more than $40,000 with a three-day flash clothing sale with his sister-in-law Brittany Aldean.
This year, Wicks was paired with Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group.
Wicks said he’s connected with the soldiers, who also have families, by having lunch with them and “hanging out.”
“That’s really the part where you get to know them and the person that’s fighting for this country rather than the guy in the uniform that you don’t know,” he said. “You see them and think, ‘Wow, they’re awesome and badass,’ but you get to know these guys who are humble human beings that love this country as much as we do and it’s fun to just to get that quality time with them.”
Gabbard, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, was a new participant.
She said that in her military experience as a civil affairs officer, she doesn’t often fire a weapon.
She was paired with soldiers with the 5th Special Forces Group.
She said they were “great coaches” and are “great patriots.”
“There’s always a little rivalry in the groups, but the strongest camaraderie and brotherhood,” Gabbard said. “So they’re very experienced in their jobs, and I’m grateful to get any pointers they have to give me.”
A Special Forces operations sergeant for the range who cannot be identified because of the nature of his job said the teams were tested for weapons proficiency, accuracy and timing at four shooting ranges that included shooting at paper targets from a static position at a vehicle, shooting at a “pie rack” that has 6-inch plates, shooting from a simulated wooden barrier and from a bus, shooting at pop-up targets, shooting with a sniper rifle at moving targets and shooting in an indoor range.
One of Gabbard’s teammates, who cannot be named because of the nature of his job, said he and the other Green Beret who was part of the team were between deployments and volunteered to participate a couple of weeks ago.
“It’s just a good opportunity to get awareness and raise some money for Charitable Trust for the SF community,” he said. “They've done a lot of good work in just the years that I’ve been here. They’ve put a lot toward the soldiers when they’re in need.”
The Green Beret said that he expected a mixed-shooting event to be a challenge but said Gabbard was teachable.
Last year's champion, East, returned to this year’s event.
“This is the best part of my year — the highlight,” he said.
He said he became involved because his wife has volunteered with Special Forces retreats for more than a decade.
East said that while other participants hunt and had more of a weapons background than he did, he spent the past year using the weapon he won from last year’s event to practice.
He was paired with 3rd Special Forces Group soldiers last year and 7th Special Forces Group soldiers this year.
“If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s just how amazing these guys are — how much they sacrifice, how much they train and how they really are the most prepared and equipped team in the world,” East said. “Just to be able to be out here side-by-side doing a competition with the Green Berets is amazing.”
— RachaelRiley (@RachaelRiley85) December 16, 2021
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22. How a Night Stalker pilot teamed up with Delta Force in Iraq
How a Night Stalker pilot teamed up with Delta Force in Iraq
- The US Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment is the world's premier rotary-wing special-operations unit.
- In 2004, the "Night Stalkers" were transporting special-ops forces to counterterrorism missions in Iraq.
- Those missions, like outside Baghdad in March 2004, put the Night Stalkers in harm's way.
By 2004, US troops in Iraq knew that the success of their invasion and defeat of Saddam Hussein's forces the year prior would be short-lived.
The disbanding of the Iraqi Army, Iran's regional aspirations, and the influx of foreign fighters made Iraq a ticking bomb. It didn't take long for a sectarian civil war to break out, and in the middle of it were US and Coalition troops.
For the vast majority of their operations, they relied on an elite aviation unit.
The Night Stalkers
US Army Rangers train with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, July 19, 2018.
US Army/Staff Sgt. Iman Broady-Chin
With a motto of "Night Stalkers Don't Quit" and commitment to deliver their cargo anywhere in the world within a 30-second window, the unit introduced itself to the general public during the "Black Hawk Down" battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993.
The AH-6 Little Bird gunship conducts attack missions, and its counterpart, the MH-6, does transport and assault operations. The MH-60 Black Hawk does transport or assault operations and a gunship version, the MH-60 Direct action penetrator, conducts attack missions. The MH-47 Chinook conducts transport and assault operations.
Little Bird down!
Greg Coker's AH-6 going down after being hit. The photo was taken by US Army Rangers while on the move from the ground.
Courtesy photo
In March 2004, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Greg Coker and another Night Stalker were flying an AH-6 to support special-operations troops in Amiriyah, a suburb of Baghdad.
"We were conducting a daytime mission, the first one since the Battle of the Black Sea in Somalia, I believe," Coker told Insider, referring to the battle in Mogadishu.
A daylight mission was highly unusual, as Night Stalkers prefer to operate in the dark. As they were flying at a low level, an insurgent fired a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile, striking the Little Bird and bringing it down.
In the eight seconds it took for the Night Stalker pilots to hit the ground, Coker and his copilot performed an autorotation maneuver, which uses air flowing up through the main rotor to keep that rotor turning, allowing them to crash-land the burning chopper.
Upon impact, the AH-6 rolled end over end before coming to a halt. Fuel was leaking everywhere, and ammunition was going off, creating a recipe for disaster.
Lived to tell the tale
Greg Coker's AH-6 after it crashed and was torched by burning ammo and fuel.
Courtesy photo
Not many pilots who crash in combat survive to tell the tale. For Coker, who spent 30 years in uniform and completed 11 combat tours, the moments after getting hit were the worst.
That was "a moment of defeat. Scary as hell. Sheer terror," Coker told Insider.
"An old gun [gunship helicopter] pilot told me many years ago that 'a superior gun pilot is one that uses his superior knowledge that will keep him out of situations where he will have to use his superior skill.' Your training takes over and you go to work, focusing on the things that you can control," said Coker, author of "Death Waits in the Dark."
US forces in Iraq were aware insurgents had shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and of the danger posed by those weapons, known as man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS.
"There had been several helicopters shot down with a MANPAD in the area known as the Devil's Triangle — or at least that is what I called it. This triangle was Fallujah to Ramadi to Amiriyah," Coker said, adding that no one in the other crashed helicopters had survived.
Greg Coker on the side bench of an MH-6 Little Bird.
Courtesy photo
The standard operating procedure when an aircraft goes down is to try to rescue the pilots. Quick-reaction forces composed of units in the region and a combat-search-and-rescue element in the theater — usually Air Force Pararescuemen and other Air Commandos — would normally respond to a crash.
The Pentagon is pretty firm on that procedure and will often not approve operations that don't have a contingency plan for downed aircraft. During the initial days of the war in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense wouldn't authorize any operation, even with special-operations forces, before a combat-search-and-rescue team had been set up in Pakistan.
What is unique about Coker's experience is that moments after being shot down, and his copilot were back in the fight and going after the insurgents who almost killed them.
A reconnaissance element of Delta Force's B Squadron had quickly arrived on the scene, and in true Hollywood fashion, the dazed Night Stalkers joined them in a raid on the house from where the missile had been launched.
In the ensuing firefight, Coker killed the man who shot him down in what must be one of the war's unique moments.
"I was very angry after I was shot down. I had just lost an AH-6, and I wanted some payback. I wanted to find them and kill them. That's it," Coker said. "I also wanted to see if we could find some evidence to confirm or deny the type of system that shot us down. It felt good."
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
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23. From Media Bias to Outright Partisanship
Quite a critique that I know many will agree with.
As an aside I wonder if the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, and other conservative papers have been banned from social media?
Conclusion:
Basically, complaining about media bias today is like being a soldier in an ancient army, seeing a phalanx of enemy soldiers lined up across a field, preparing to advance, and saying “Those guys are biased against us!” We left what to do about this state of affairs for the question and answer session.
From Media Bias to Outright Partisanship
I wrote here about participating in the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend last month. I was on a panel on the media with The Hill’s Joe Concha, moderated by Daniel Greenfield. I thought our readers might be interested in my comments, so I typed up the notes for my talk in narrative form. Here they are:
The issue of media bias has evolved considerably over the last 20 years, and I have had a front row seat. I think a simple way to see how much the landscape has changed is to compare two well-known incidents.
We started the web site Power Line in 2002, and media bias was a major focus of our writing. In those days, reporters for news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post were pretty freely available, and we had many email exchanges with them, which sometimes resulted in corrections to news stories—usually sub silentio, but still. Reporters in those days wanted to be seen as objective and fair, even though they often fell short of that ideal.
In 2004, in an episode that became known as Rathergate, 60 Minutes tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents intended to put President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, back in the early 1970s, in a bad light. The fraud unraveled quickly as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy fakes that were full of substantive errors.
In less than 24 hours after the internet critique of the 60 Minutes story began, CBS News announced that it would conduct an investigation into what had happened. And it did. CBS News hired a former Attorney General of the U.S. to lead the investigation, and the report that he and others authored, the Thornburgh Report, was a devastating account of the dishonesty at CBS. Dan Rather was already gone by the time the report came out, and thereafter CBS fired Mary Mapes, the producer of the 60 Minutes segment, and several other employees.
The key point is that back in 2004, CBS News was seriously embarrassed that it had produced a false news report. It really did want, at least, to be seen as a fair and unbiased news source. And when the fraud was exposed, it took decisive action against the employees who had perpetrated it.
But over the next decade, that changed. Major news organizations have gone from being biased against conservatives to engaging in open warfare against conservatives. In 2016, Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the New York Times, publicly stated that the Times’ approach to covering the news had changed when it came to Donald Trump. No more neutrality, no more objectivity, the Times would openly attack Trump not just in its editorials, but in its news stories.
Shortly after Baquet made that announcement, the Russia collusion story hit the news, and it continued to dominate the news for the next two or three years.
We know now that the so-called Steele dossier was a complete fraud, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. And who promoted that fraud? It wasn’t fringe news sources on the Left, it was, more than anyone else, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC. I would submit that the collusion hoax never had any plausibility, let alone any proof, and the journalists who promoted it knew that in all likelihood they were reporting lies. But they didn’t care. Their mission was to help Hillary Clinton win the election, and failing that, to hamstring the incoming Trump administration. They succeeded in that last goal to a remarkable degree.
The Russia collusion story has long been known to be a hoax. Bob Mueller and his team of partisan zealots couldn’t find a shred of evidence to support it, and the investigations of Devin Nunes and John Durham have shed plenty of light on how the fraud was perpetrated.
But here is the point: has any liberal news organization launched an internal investigation, as in the Rathergate case, to determine how they could have been so wrong? No. Have any reporters or editors been fired? No. Have any Pulitzer prizes been returned? No.
As best I can tell, liberal reporters and editors are not in the least embarrassed that the story they promoted so heavily turned out to be a clumsy fraud perpetrated by the Democratic Party. I think they are proud of what they did. Their mission was to bring down Donald Trump, and the Russia collusion hoax played a major role in what eventually was a successful effort.
So I think those two stories illustrate how we have gone from liberal media bias in the early years of the 21st century to the open warfare on conservatism that we see today.
The only other thing I would add is that the dominant social media platforms now play an important role in amplifying the left-wing propaganda that is produced by the Washington Post, the NY Times, and so on. The social media giants view these left-wing outlets as mainstream media sources and feature them prominently on, for example, Facebook and Apple News, and no news story from those outlets is ever banned on Twitter. So social media companies perpetuate the outdated idea that liberal media are merely biased, not overtly partisan.
Basically, complaining about media bias today is like being a soldier in an ancient army, seeing a phalanx of enemy soldiers lined up across a field, preparing to advance, and saying “Those guys are biased against us!” We left what to do about this state of affairs for the question and answer session.
24. Special Operations C-130 Hits Target With A 'Rapid Dragon' Pallet-Dropped Cruise Missile (Updated)
Learn, adapt, and anticipate.
Special Operations C-130 Hits Target With A 'Rapid Dragon' Pallet-Dropped Cruise Missile (Updated)
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The U.S. Air Force says it has conducted the first successful end-to-end test of its Rapid Dragon air-launched palletized munitions concept. An MC-130J Commando II special operations transport released an unspecified live cruise missile using the prototype system, which subsequently hit a target floating in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), which is leading the Rapid Dragon program through its Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation (SDPE) office, announced the completion of this test today. The Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), the Air Force's Standoff Munitions Application Center, and the U.S. Navy's Naval Surface Warfare Center-Dahlgren Division (NSWC-Dahlgren), as well as private contractors Lockheed Martin, Systima Technologies, Safran Electronics & Defense, Parachutes USA, and R4 Integration, Inc., were also involved in this demonstration.
The video below shows a montage of earlier Rapid Dragon flight testing.
"During the December test, an MC-130J flown by an Air Force Special Operations Command operational flight crew, received new targeting data while in flight which was then routed to the cruise missile flight test vehicle (FTV)," according to an Air Force release. "The aircraft agnostic Battle Management System’s inflight receipt and upload of the new targeting data into the FTV was a first-time achievement with a live cruise missile."
"Once inside the drop zone over the Gulf of Mexico, the MC-130J aircrew airdropped a four-cell Rapid Dragon deployment system containing the FTV and three mass simulants, which were sequentially released from the palletized deployment box while under parachute," the release continued. "Safe separation from the deployment box and weapon deconfliction was demonstrated using an unconventional deployment method (nose-down vertical orientation). Immediately after the vertical release, the FTV deployed its wings and tail, achieved aerodynamic control, ignited its engine, performed a powered pull-up maneuver, and proceeded toward its newly assigned target. The cruise missile successfully destroyed its target upon impact."
It is not clear why, but the Air Force has not yet disclosed what actual "current inventory cruise missile armed with a live warhead" it employed this test. Previous tests have involved surrogates meant to represent variants of the stealthy AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) family, which includes the AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), as well as a novel design called the Cargo Launch Expendable Air Vehicles with Extended Range, or CLEAVER.
It's also unclear what the actual target was, beyond that it was afloat in the Gulf of Mexico. The Air Force provided no details, but Lockheed Martin described it as a "vessel." This might point to the use of a LRASM, which would also mean this test has demonstrated the ability to employ the Rapid Dragon system in an anti-ship role, a general area of growing interest to the Air Force as well as the rest of the U.S. military.
It has certainly been widely reported in the past that a JASSM variant of some kind would be used for live-firing testing as part of Rapid Dragon. Pictures the Air Force released of a test in November that involved the release of an actual cruise missile, albeit one without an engine or a warhead, from this palletized munitions system clearly showed that it was a missile from the JASSM family. Concept art the service has released of this system has depicted it loaded with JASSM-type missiles, as have models of it that have been displayed publicly.
Joseph Trevithick
An official model of the Rapid Dragon air-launched palletized munitions system.
The core idea behind the Rapid Dragon concept is the development of a roll-on/roll-off package to transform various types of airlifters into additional strike platforms, as required. This would give the Air Force a potentially more cost-effective and scalable way to quickly increase its overall stand-off strike capacity, especially during a future major conflict, such as one against China or Russia. The palletized launcher could also be configured to carry other types of munitions or payloads, such as swarms of small drones, as well. Questions have been raised about how viable all of this might be given that U.S. Air Force airlifters would likely be in high demand to perform their primary missions during any similar conflict scenario. You can read more about the overall concept of operations envisioned for this system, and the potential pitfalls, here.
"The program name is derived from a thousand-year-old Chinese military designed crossbow catapult that launched multiple crossbow bolts with the pull of a single trigger, raining destruction down on armies from tremendous ranges," the Air Force's release regarding this latest test disclosed, for what appears to be the first time. "These lethal devices were called Ji Long Che—Rapid Dragon Carts. Today, the Rapid Dragon concept is changing the game again, this time as an airborne delivery system for U.S. Air Force weapons. And like its namesake, these palletized munitions promise to unleash mighty salvos en masse on distant adversaries."
Yprpyqp via Wikimedia
An illustration of a triple bed crossbow, a static multi-round design that first emerged in China around the 4th century BC. Carriage or cart-mounted designs, referred to in contemporary sources as Ji Long Che, or Rapid Dragon Carts, are understood to have appeared around the same general time.
AFRL says that this latest test over the Gulf of Mexico marks the culmination of the current Rapid Dragon test campaign, which started two years ago, but says that it already is planning to conduct another end-to-end live-fire flight test using a C-17A Globemaster III aircraft next year. Air Mobility Command (AMC) C-17As, as well as AFSOC EC-130J Super Js, have been used in previous Rapid Dragon testing.
“Rapid Dragon was able to accelerate development by building a broad and strong team. We were committed to a ’test often/learn-fast’ culture, dedicated to experimenting frequently and taking calculated risks," Dr. Dean Evans, SDPE’s Rapid Dragon Program Manager, said in a statement. "Collaboration from the onset streamlined the process and accelerated development, involving groups from the program inception that are not normally included at the very early stages, and that has made all the difference."
With the successful completion of the current round of Rapid Dragon testing and plans to continue this work in the coming year, the Air Force looks set to keep pushing this concept toward an operational capability, one that could expand its long-range strike options in any future contingency.
Update 12/17/2021:
The U.S. Air Force has finally released some pictures, seen below, from this latest Rapid Dragon test, showing the palletized munitions being loaded onto the MC-130J. It is still not possible to tell exactly what type of missile was launched, but we can now clearly see that it was a member of the JASSM family.
USAF
USAF
USAF
Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com
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25. Neurowarfare
Neurowarfare
SOF operators do not currently receive any direct training on neurowarfare (indeed, most are unfamiliar with the concept entirely), and published research is strikingly limited. Of the small number of academic publications on the topic, only a handful directly address neurowarfare. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are uniquely positioned to confront the complex and dynamic threats neurowarfare poses but is currently under-prepared to take up the challenge. Part of the reason is a lack of general awareness. Although US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) prioritizes neuroscience research and innovation, especially for cognitive enhancement, comparatively less is known about neuroweapons that cause cognitive degradation.
CHANGING HEARTS AND BRAINS: SOF MUST PREPARE NOW FOR NEUROWARFARE
Admittedly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term “neurowarfare” before, but I understand the concept. This is how the authors define it:
Neurowarfare is the strategic takedown of a competitor through the use of neuroweapons that remotely “target the brain or central nervous system to affect the targeted person’s mental state, mental capacity and ultimately the person’s behavior in a specific and predictable way.
Ok, but wait a minute, isn’t this kind of like psychological operations?
Psychological operations share similar goals but achieve them through communication, typically over the long-term. Neuroweapons physically manipulate the brain and achieve immediate effects.
Right – these are the things that physically affect the brain. This is tough stuff. Ouch.
It’s an interesting article and I agree with the authors that we need to be accounting for this. Our adversaries do not share the same ethical concerns regarding the use of new technology to gain advantage. This is not a domain that we want to show up blind in.
The authors make three key recommendations:
- Train and educate the SOF enterprise on neurowarfare
- Conduct research (cognitive degredation research)
- Develop doctrine
The authors rightfully acknowledge the biggest challenge we face in this realm regards the ethics of it all.
The most difficult—and likely to be the most contentious—are the serious moral and ethical concerns of whether the United States should consider pursuing offensive neuroweapons. Should the United States pursue an offensive capability, even if only discovered accidentally through private sector research? If so, what sort of weapons would be morally acceptable to use and how should they be employed? Should these weapons be reserved for high-priority targets or will we get to a point where neuroweapons are routinely employed in conjunction with more traditional forms of warfare?
I have two chief concerns with this. One, anything “neuro” will likely be thought similarly as “psychological,” which people tend to treat as a “dirty word.” Second, when we “split” instead of “lump” the work becomes so specialized so as to be difficult to explain – or use.
And as always, Small Wars Journal continues to publish interesting things that remain on the margins of debate. This is another one that deserves discussion.
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26. Putting the Special in Special Operations Forces
A short and long article below. I am proud to have served with Leo Casiple in 1st SFG and in the Philippines.
Putting the Special in Special Operations Forces
By: Leonard Casiple, PSYOP/SF; Gary Harrington, USMC/SF/CIA; and Ben Gilad, PhD
Recently, China tested a hypersonic ballistic missile. The Russians sent a satellite-destroying missile to space. These are big news about the future of wars with heavy reliance on expensive technology. With the defense and intelligence analyst community’s heavy focus on these (perhaps) game-changing weaponry, the role of Special Forces – small, agile, highly trained forces used in irregular warfare - might take a back seat.
Yet most of the deployments today by the US Army around the globe rely on Special Operations Forces.
They are the masters of transitions - taking over where government fails against insurgents and transferring control back when the environment is stable enough for the host to regain control.
The US Army Special Operations consists of three “tribes”- Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations. They operate in ambiguous environments that escape the predictability of a fixed architecture, and face, as per the Civil Affairs Operations’ guide, “competing global and regional influences; urbanization; failed, failing, or recovering governance apparatus; non-state actors; and other state actors; degraded economic conditions; pandemics; and other health crises.”
Sounds complex?
It is.
And it starts with the goal.
In wars, the (simplified) goal is destroying the enemy and conquering territory. But Special Operations have a special goal. One way to look at it is as bringing peace to a troubled area. Sure, this is a broad goal and not well specified, but it highlights one element common among Special Forces and business (unlike conventional armies): the central focus is on competition.
We propose that the competition is both internal and external: Internally, Special Operations Tribes compete with other US agencies (e.g., State Department).
More importantly, the Tribes compete with other armed groups – insurgents, terror alliances, militias, renegade military units for the hearts and minds of the civilian population.
Shifting the focus from war to competition will raise some eyebrows in the military.
Yet an unconventional approach befits low-intensity conflicts and unconventional Special Forces’ Modus Operandi. And just like businesses’ approach to contested markets, Special Operations can benefit from adopting some of the global, Fortune 500 enterprises’ planning models of competing.
Specifically, if we place competition for hearts/minds of civilians as a service industry (peace or stability- creating services) in the center, and look at external factors affecting this service, the model looks very familiar to strategy practitioners in business: it’s Michael Porter’s Five Forces model of competition.
The Five Forces model looks at varying pressures brought about by a myriad of other players on an industry's performance.
Adapting it to Special Operations’ planning yields the following possible categories of external forces: New entrants (new armed groups), Suppliers (foreign governments and interests supplying the competition), Buyers (civilians or civilians and local authorities), and Substitutes (or disruptors) such as unarmed groups- UN aid groups, NGOs, religious institutions, business investments.
The mechanism behind a field application of the Five Forces model is using modified war games. Wargames were introduced to US corporations back in the 90s, and accelerated adoption followed the publication of Business War Games (B. Gilad, Career Press, 2003).
Today, almost all major Global companies use war games as a planning tool to pressure-test strategic options.
The benefit of a Five-Forces type wargaming is that it is cheap, quick (a day), doesn’t require computers or expensive software and large consulting fees, and involves no physical movements of assets. The challenge is to think like third parties, some of which are quite foreign (pun intended) to the US culture, customs, and Western reasoning.
Porter’s model calls for a behavioral-economic approach to assessing and predicting third parties’ moves. It demands the examination of economic, psychological, sociological, cultural, and any other factor affecting behavior. Companies using the model in a war game for the first time are astounded at its power.
Maybe the military can learn a thing or two about competing where sheer force may not yield the best results.
What’s Special about Special Forces is that thinking unconventionally shouldn’t be a tall order for them. On the contrary, thinking like Big Army is the end of the “Special” in for Special Operations.
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Are the Special Forces losing their “special” designation? - Academy of Competitive Intelligence
Enhancing US Army SOF Transitions During Unconventional Warfare
By Leonard Casiple, PSYOP/SF, Gary Harrington, USMC/SF/CIA and Benjamin Gilad, PhD
Introduction
The three tribes of US Army Special Operations (Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations) operate in ambiguous environments that escape the predictability of a fixed architecture. Although few in numbers, “advantages [,] … are not a numerical superiority, but include intangible factors such as morale, security, speed, surprise, and level of training” (Special Forces Detachment Mission Planning Guide, 2020). “As masters of Irregular Warfare … our role in competition will be crucial to set the conditions for success” (1st Special Forces Command – Airborne, 2021, italics added).
Viewing UW as competition rather than war changes the concept of “winning.” Placing competition as a central issue, SOF competes for the minds of the civilian population against a myriad of forces, including pro-government and anti-government groups (guerrilla, terrorist, militias, etc).
This view is radically different than a conventional perspective on low-intensity conflict via military lens only. It will force SOF to think “outside the box”. Being unconventional requires first and foremost thinking unconventionally.
The UW Competitive Space
By nature, unconventional warfare and low-intensity conflict scenarios are segmented as the “gray zone [, ]… characterized by intense political, economic, informational, and military competition” (Votel, et al., 2016). Categorically, the intersection of opaque conditions within the “gray zones” of the continuum of conflict calls for the unique capabilities of SOF elements. The triad becomes the key component that brings clarity to foreign internal defense and transition operations, preventing civil wars that Thomas Hobbes defined as “the greatest threat to governments, for it represents the dissolution of ‘sovereign power’” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2020).
While the 1st Special Forces Command – Airborne, 2021’s vision states that “To expand our competitive advantage, we must embrace revolutionary changed need to compete, deter and win against the near-peer adversaries in an increasingly complex environment,” viewing UW as competition first and foremost suggests adversaries need not be peer-level at all. To again look at the business world’s use of competitive strategies, disruptions are most often not from near-peers.
Existing dogma: US National Policy and USMIL Directives for Transitions
Source: FM 3-57, Civil Affairs Operations
During critical periods of transition, the “National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 44– Management of Interagency Efforts Concerning Reconstruction and Stabilization [,] …the Secretary of State is the designated lead of U.S. Government (USG) efforts to prepare, plan for, and conduct SSTR activities” (Department of Defense, 2006). “Army forces provide sustainment and security for civilian organizations [,] …Departments of State, Justice, Transportation, and Agriculture” (ADP 3-0 Operations, 2019). Upon approval, “military commanders are responsible for integrating civil affairs into military operations, programs, and activities” (Department of Defense Directive, Civil Affairs, 2017).
As a rule, “the actions of the military alone are insufficient to achieve success in SSTR operations” (Department of Defense, 2006). Transitions from major combat operations require a balance between short-term, transactional security measures and long-term, relational political continuity that “enable civil authority” (Department of Defense, 2006).
Unlike “armed conflict” against a known enemy where tactical objectives are clearly defined, SOF that “provide (capabilities) for the initial establishment of a military government pending transfer [,]…to other authority” (DOD Directive 5100.01, 2020) must navigate the competing requirements of US Agencies and Departments, local resources and capabilities, and the effects of external forces that influence transitions from beyond the host country’s borders. When competing for peace during transitions “several factors impact each AO, such as competing global and regional influences; urbanization; failed, failing, or recovering governance apparatus; non-state actors; and other state actors; degraded economic conditions; pandemics; and other health crises” (FM 3-47, Civil Affairs Operations, 2021).
Well Planned Transitions Reduce Friction
While the current dogma uses the term competing and competition in several places, military organizations do not often understand competition (unlike armed conflict.) The transfer of authority from combat units to public administrators creates interpersonal and inter-organizational friction. If not managed correctly, transitions risk failure. Even at the unit level, the best laid operational plans quickly fall apart during haphazard transitions, hand-offs, and relief-in-place operations. Missteps can lead to a temporary loss of confidence and disruption of interpersonal communications.
Woodrow Wilson in “The Study of Administration” said “We can never learn either on our own weaknesses or our own virtues by comparing ourselves with ourselves” (Shafritz & Hyde, 2017, p. 46). The same philosophy exists in business strategy, where planning must take place across functional areas to overcome silos’ risk creating implementation failure. To overcome “fractured” planning, major corporations started adopting business wargaming following the publication of the book Business War games (2003). Just like corporate silos, when the three SOF tribes wargame independently, the siloed learning (and planning) can reduce effective implementation.
In 1st Special Forces Command – Airborne’s vision, proposed innovation, including concepts applicable to Unconventional Warfare transitions, “enables Convergence, Force Development, and CONUS-Based Operational Support [,] …to be the First to Observe, First to Influence, and first to Compete in 2021 and beyond” (1st Special Forces Command – Airborne, 2021). This paper suggests adopting wargaming methodology of competitive spaces from the business world as one such innovation.
How UW Wargaming Is Done Today
The environmental complexities could be better addressed at the lowest-level, skill-specific tactical planning guidance found in the Special Forces Detachment Mission Planning Guide (GTA 31-01-003), the Civil Affairs Planning and Execution Guide (GTA 41-01-001), and the Psychological Operations Leaders Planning Guide (GTA 33-01-001).
Used individually, the guides serve the specialized purpose of each tribe. However, if molded together – and enhanced with business wargaming methodology- the synergies would minimize blindspots. Following a collaborative war game, the information collected at ground level is less likely to be delayed due to the need to coordinate, approve, and deploy resources. As documented by past experience, “rapid technological and organizational advancements that changed the character of warfare also created ambiguous conditions where military, political, informational, and economic realms overlap and where all domains can be contested simultaneously” (1st Special Forces Command – Airborne, 2021).
Where to Start- Three Tribe Wargaming
Changing focus. Step 1- Using Porter’s Five Force model
In 1979, Michael Porter modeled competition as the interaction (often adversarial) of five forces, namely: 1) The Rivalry inside the competitive space, 2) Threat from New Entrants, 3) Threat of Substitute Products or Services, 4) Bargaining Power of Suppliers, and 5) the Bargaining Power of Customers. These five forces compete for the “profit pool” of the industry, where each force attempts to “grab” a bigger share.
Porter’s model is aimed at explaining the differential profitability of industries due to competitive (broadly defined) pressures. For example, the high profitability of the Pharmaceutical industry vs the low profitability of airlines. Individual companies’ “goal is to find a position in the industry where his or her company can best defend itself against these forces or can influence them in its favor” (Porter, 1979). Furthermore, in industry, “competition is not manifested only in the other players [,] … competition in an industry is rooted in its underlying economics, and competitive forces exist that go well beyond the established combatants in a particular industry” (Porter, 1979).
In UW, the goal is not profitability, and therefore competition is for a different goal. One way to look at the competition (though not the sole perspective) is as competing for peace (however defined). Then the 3 Tribes collectively shape USMIL actions and influence competitor trajectory to win the transition game towards peace. Adding the Five Forces component to team, staff, and echelon level wargaming should support US strategic goals.
Furthermore, Michael Porter stipulates that the “essence of strategy formulation is coping with competition [,] … yet [,] … view competition too narrowly or too pessimistically” (Porter, 1979). In some cases, after a successive string of victories that set the conditions for the transition from armed conflict to stabilization, USMIL can view the capabilities of the competition too lightly. A wargame focusing on understanding the competition broadly defined can help avoid some of these mishaps.
How to Win the Transition Rivalry? Step 2 – Collaborative wargaming
In UW, the fight for a stable footprint (competing for peace) manifests not only in observable enemy actions, but also in the hidden external factors such as foreign financing of insurgents, underground political influence beyond borders, and a lack of recognizability of veiled, new “transition combatants.” Since the three SOF elements frequently work together, a collaborative war game based on viewing competitive forces holistically could uncover strategies countering threats to peace.
When to Implement? Step 3 – Pre-Test, Deliberate Planning Phase of MDMP
Phase 1:
Pre-Test, Fictional Wargaming (Training), Not During MDMP, No Time Constraints
To refine the concept, SOF could conduct a pre-test to confirm the effectiveness of a collaborative, tripartite (CA-PSYOP-SF Tribes, or DoS-USMIL-SOF Tribes) wargaming concept into a fictional scenario without mission time constraints.
Phase 2:
Pre-Test, Wargaming (Training), During MDMP, Under Time Constraints
Once the format has been refined, SOF advances the project while observing the scaled benefits of SOF organizational agility, operator flexibility, and a more comprehensive awareness of the “gray battlefield.”
Phase 3:
UW Application (Real World), During MDMP, Under Time Constraints
The innovative and collaborative approach to UW wargaming would make information gathering and mission planning more efficient. This scalable mechanism can quickly consolidate SF, CA, and PSYOP information that will result in a more effective USMIL, USDoS, and US NGO positioning within the competitive “UW Rivalry” space.
Conclusion
SOF professionals are “masters of the indigenous approach, and leaders who are uniquely educated and trained as regional and cultural experts to successfully operate in complex, austere, and politically sensitive environments” (1st Special Forces Command – Airborne, 2021). Borrowing a competitive model from some of the world’s most advanced global corporations working across various cultures, customs, stakeholders and political conditions can enhance the “special” in Special Forces. A war game simulates rivalry for the populace’s hearts and minds (the “buyers”) as a competition between the SF and other armed groups, affected by suppliers (e.g., foreign governments), substitutes (NGOs), new entrants (new insurgencies) and buyers’ preferences (local officials and the civilians). As practiced in corporations, it is an agile, human-based (no need for computers or big consulting firms), low-cost exercise that separates Special Forces from Big Army’s conventional thinking. With tripartite wargaming, SOF will harness synergies not available individually and stand to unveil competitive blind spots in all domains.
References
Department of Defense. (2020). Functions of the Department of Defense and Its Major Components (Number 5100.01). Civil-Military Operations (CMO)
Gilad, B. (2021). The opposite of noise: The power of competitive intelligence. ACI Press.
Gilad, B. (2003). Business War Games. Career Press.
Shafritz, J. M., & Hyde, A. C. (2017). Classics of public administration (8th ed.). Cengage Learning.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
