Quotes of the Day:

"Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!" 

– Anne Frank

"Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom."

 Thomas Jefferson

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, "What are you doing for others?"

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

1. Taiwan Resilience and Resistance Operating Concept (T-RROC)

2. An Information Theory of Victory

3. China Tensions Prompt U.S. Navy Race to Reload Missiles at Sea

4. Rubio’s Tough Stance on China Means Pressure on Importers

5. Russia’s war in the grey zone is chipping away at Nato

6. Opinion: Chasing the Impossible Will Be the West’s Downfall

7. The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful

8. Military Applications of Autonomy and AI by Mick Ryan

9. USS Zumwalt Will Be First Ship Armed With Hypersonic Missile

10. Why Is China Purging Some of Its Most Senior Military Leaders?

11. The Sovereignty Code

12. Army seeks 300 ground combat lieutenants to transfer to support jobs

13. Trump Can — and Should — Fully Fund Our Military

14. After U.S.-China Prisoner Swap, Scores of Americans Are Still Trapped in China

15. How Marco Rubio Can Save the State Department

16. How The Philippines Is Losing Its Way – Analysis

17. Approval of Philippines-Japan defence deal imminent as ties solidify

18. Israel’s New Approach to Tunnels: A Paradigm Shift in Underground Warfare

19. The Trump Administration’s China Challenge

1. Taiwan Resilience and Resistance Operating Concept (T-RROC)

Taiwan Resilience and Resistance Operating Concept (T-RROC)

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2024/12/02/taiwan-resilience-and-resistance-operating-concept-t-rroc/

by Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca

|

12.02.2024 at 06:00am

Introduction

Taiwan faces a persistent, dangerous, and illegal threat of invasion from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This article serves as a recommended concept for the Republic of China (Taiwan) to develop its own detailed and actionable Taiwan Resilience and Resistance Operating Concept (T-RROC), ensuring alignment of effort across all parts of society—government, military, civil, and private sectors. The T-RROC should lay the foundation for Taiwan’s deterrent, offensive, and defensive capabilities, given the island’s unique threat from Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Inspired by the Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) developed for Europe, hereafter referred to as the European ROC, the Taiwan Resilience and Resistance Operating Concept contains two complementary lines of effort: (1) resilience and (2) resistance. By asserting itself as a formidable force through T-RROC development and implementation, Taiwan will send the PRC a clear and simple message: do not invade. If the PRC fails to listen, an invasion will be met with widespread, unified, and prolonged resistance, making occupation costly and unsustainable in human, economic, diplomatic, military, and political terms.

Part One: Whole-of-Society Resilience

Resilience is defined as the will and ability to withstand external pressures and influences and/or recover from the effects of those pressures or influences. For Taiwan, resilience must involve multiple dimensions and buy-in from all parts of society. A comprehensive approach to building whole-of-society (WOS) resilience is needed to ensure continuity, stability, and security before, during, and after the outbreak of violence on the island.

Civil Defense and Community Preparedness

Promoting national identity and unity among Taiwan’s citizens is a fundamental building block for resilience. National cohesion helps establish a collective spirit of resistance, complicating PRC efforts to exploit internal divisions—something malign actors are astute at doing. In partnership with academic and civic institutions, the government must aggressively promote a shared national identity that underscores the importance of democratic values, human rights, and Taiwan’s rich cultural heritage.

Initiatives along these lines must be transparent and apolitical, which is admittedly difficult for any society today. Media organizations play a vital role in this process by practicing responsible journalism that promotes unbiased information while countering divisive narratives inserted into society by internal and external malign actors. The messages, messengers, and delivery modes must be tailored appropriately for different target generations within Taiwanese society. Civil society organizations and community leaders must initiate community-level, grassroots outreach programs to foster a sense of shared purpose, mutual respect, and solidarity.

The Civil Defense Office, a part of Taiwan’s National Police Agency, should seek creative ways to be more involved in educating communities on evacuation protocols, emergency response, and resource management. Taiwan’s military, working alongside crisis managers and first responders, should help train citizens in crisis response and understanding organizational roles. Routine civil defense exercises focused on scenarios ranging from natural disasters to outright PRC invasion cultivate a shared understanding of crisis response procedures while strengthening local leadership. These drills also help ensure community members know their roles during emergencies. Any preparation that helps prevent panic and enables more effective community response under pressure is worthwhile.

Cybersecurity, AI, and Information Management

Considering the increased sophistication, quantity, and quality of cyber threats, bolstering Taiwan’s cybersecurity and satellite infrastructure is paramount. The government must collaborate with the private sector beyond its current operating model to protect these and other networked, critical services. Cybersecurity measures must further, however, and expand beyond government networks to include essential private sector industries such as finance, energy, telecommunications, and healthcare to shield all facets of the economy.

By asserting itself as a formidable force through T-RROC development and implementation, Taiwan will send the PRC a clear and simple message: do not invade.

In conjunction with technical defense, resilience against misinformation is vital. The PRC employs disinformation and misinformation campaigns to create confusion and discord. Misinformation is pushed at increased levels, not just during conflict but also during heightened tensions. Examples of this abound during aggressive and illegal PLA and PLAN military drills around Taiwan following events that anger the CCP. Taiwan’s government and private media organizations must work together to educate the public on identifying misinformation and verifying the integrity of sources in an age of Artificial Intelligence. Public awareness campaigns emphasizing media literacy and critical thinking will cultivate a more informed citizenry. Regulatory frameworks must be adapted to encourage greater transparency in media ownership and to mitigate PRC influence over domestic media outlets to preserve the integrity of Taiwan’s information environment.

Economic Preparedness

Economic resilience is a cornerstone of Taiwan’s national stability, providing financial means to sustain operations and support citizens during crises. Despite significant disruptions, Taiwan’s economy must be robust enough to maintain production, distribution, and essential services during and after conflict. Taiwan’s policymakers must diversify energy, food, and health-related supply chains to minimize dependency on the PRC economy for critical resources. Taiwan’s partners and allies play an essential role in this endeavor.

China increasingly directs coercive economic measures toward Taiwan, like demanding shipping vessels register with the PRC before entering Taiwan, and exercising illegal blockades around Taiwan with PLAN and Coast Guard assets to limit essential resources for the island’s 23.4 million inhabitants should China cut off resupply lanes. Establishing more robust trade arrangements with like-minded partners, including the US, Japan, the EU, ASEAN, and South Korea, can enhance economic stability. Taiwan is undertaking practical steps to increase strategic reserves of essential goods, such as food and energy supplies, and incentivize local production of vital materials. However, on the community level, increased diversification is required on these fronts.

The private sector plays a crucial role in enhancing economic resilience. Businesses, particularly those in essential services such as food, healthcare, and energy, must adopt continuity plans that address supply chain vulnerabilities and potential disruptions. The Taiwan government may stimulate private sector resilience by offering tax incentives or subsidies for local production and resource diversification. Additionally, small and medium-sized enterprises—integral to Taiwan’s economy—should be encouraged to participate in training and preparedness programs that enhance their ability to withstand economic shocks.

Critical Infrastructure

Power, water, transportation, and communication networks must be safeguarded on the critical infrastructure front to ensure functionality during and after conflict. Ongoing infrastructure assessments must identify vulnerabilities that the CCP will try to exploit during conflict. For instance, in the energy sector, efforts to reduce dependence on imported energy sources and expand renewable energy infrastructure, such as solar and wind power, can increase energy independence and mitigate vulnerabilities. Implementing microgrids and distributed energy resources can enhance energy resilience by facilitating localized power generation and distribution. Communication networks must incorporate redundancies to ensure the smooth flow of information during disruptions, enabling coordinated response efforts. The government is currently increasing critical infrastructure protection measures. However, these strategic upgrades and improvements should be prioritized against a broader range of threats, from cyberattacks to elite capture to physical damage/destruction.

Part Two: Resistance

While resilience emphasizes enduring and mitigating the impacts of crises, resistance in the case of Taiwan focuses more specifically on undermining PLA and PLAN forces should they land on the island. Resistance capability is, in fact, a sub-component of whole-of-society resilience. Resistance is defined more precisely in the case of Taiwan as an organized, whole-of-society effort, encompassing the full range of activities from nonviolent to violent, led by a legally established government (potentially exiled, displaced, or shadow) to reestablish independence and autonomy within Taiwan’s sovereign territory that a foreign power has wholly or partially occupied.

Developing resistance capabilities is not a pessimistic admission that assumes occupation is a foregone conclusion. Instead, resistance preparedness serves as (a) an essential deterrent to invasion and (b) fulfills the government’s responsibility to prepare for all possible contingency scenarios – including ones that may be both politically sensitive and unpopular. Furthermore, resistance does not imply nor require total occupation. In the case of a PRC invasion of Taiwan’s sovereignty, PLA and PLAN forces may be successful in some physical or virtual locations and unsuccessful in others as time elapses. Resistance operations may be employed and effective regardless of the PRC’s success in different areas. This reality is another reason why developing resistance capability is a prudent investment.

Capacity vs. Capability

Surveys indicate a significant willingness among Taiwan’s citizens to resist a Chinese invasion. In 2016, a Duke University and National Chengchi University survey revealed that 60.4% of Taiwan’s respondents believed that “the majority of Taiwanese people will fight against China if China invaded Taiwan.” A 2024 survey in the ongoing series indicated that 67.8% of respondents would be willing to fight and defend Taiwan.

In military doctrinal terms, willingness to fight can be understood as capacity. Taiwan may have the capacity to fight in the form of the population’s willingness, just as it has other resources that could be used in conflict, but capacity does not equal capability. Civil society lacks capability without proper planning, training, organizing, and equipping. The military of Taiwan may have both capacity and capability, but the rest of the island may not.

Organizing National Resistance

Taiwan’s resistance movement requires decentralized leadership structures and well-organized networks of civilians. Collaboration between government, military, and civil society is essential for establishing a clear chain of command and communication framework. Taiwan’s military must partner with civilian organizations to facilitate training. Training may include survival skills, information collection, clandestine communication methods, and sabotage, which are but a few crucial elements of resistance. Specific elements of Taiwan’s resistance organization – including the public component (which may take various forms from overt to shadow to exile government), fighting force (often referred to as guerillas), auxiliary, and underground – are outlined here. While great attention is often paid to the fighting force, the other components require equal – if not greater – care, support, and resources since resistance is a slow, costly endeavor that needs sustainment and strong leadership to succeed.

Cell leaders serve as contact points, organizing resistance cells within local communities to ensure knowledge and resources are disseminated among trusted individuals. Each resistance cell is a “cut out” – an element that cannot be directly associated with another element should its members be captured and interrogated for information. Cells must, therefore, be able to operate independently, allowing for continuity of operations even if communication with higher leadership is severed. Distributed organization complicates the PRC invader’s ability to hold and control territory and enables ongoing Taiwanese resistance despite PLA and PLAN efforts to suppress underground leadership. It is imperative that organizational roles for resistance elements – especially among civilians – are determined before a PRC invasion.  However, it is not enough just to identify the resistance organization. Exercising these roles in a simulation of PRC occupation with restricted movement is essential. If everyday citizens and the government of Taiwan wait for PLA special forces to parachute onto Taipei-Taoyuan International Airport before they decide to (a) think about and (b) organize resistance operations, the road to freedom becomes exponentially harder – if not impossible – to navigate.

Integration with partner nation conventional and Special Operations Forces (SOF) will complement the effectiveness of Taiwan’s resistance movement. US SOF, which trains with Taiwan in peacetime, also has the specialized mission of supporting insurgency movements. Joint Publication 3-05 outlines Unconventional Warfare as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area. Also called UW.” Resistance is an internal, whole-of-society endeavor, while support for resistance comes from external actors.

Utilizing Taiwan’s Geographic and Urban Landscape

Taiwan’s natural geography and urban landscape present unique advantages for resistance operations. The island’s mountainous terrain, dense urban areas, and developed public infrastructure create conditions conducive to delaying and disrupting occupying forces. The military’s defense calculations must incorporate urban warfare training tailored to Taiwan’s terrain.

Civilians should be trained and organized to sabotage PLA and PLAN logistical and communication networks. Familiarity with local infrastructure can be leveraged to disrupt transportation, obstruct supply lines, and interrupt communication systems, complicating the PRC’s efforts to establish control. Local communities can work with the military to strategically pre-position supplies and equipment, allowing resistance cells to operate effectively after an invasion. While pre-positioning supplies and accumulating strategic reserves for resilience may include fuel and food, caching supplies for resistance includes all that, plus weapons, ammunition, cash, and communications equipment. Taiwanese citizens’ agility in navigating their own urban and rural environments gives them a clear advantage in evading detection and subverting PRC activities.

Resistance methods discussed to this point are similar to historical models of World War II resistance operations witnessed across Europe. While still relevant and effective, such models provide limited direction on how Taiwan’s resistance should organize and operate in the 21st century. Taiwan’s citizenry is among the most educated and tech-savvy in the world, but it is not enough to simply have capacity. If trained and organized before the invasion, a tech-enabled, interconnective layer to operations and intelligence can be overlaid on Taiwan’s resistance model. Emerging technologies and Taiwan’s urbanization demand an updated understanding of resistance.

Resistance demands creativity. For example, consider the effectiveness of Taiwan’s leadership telling every citizen that the government will buy each of them a new car after the war if they drive and park their current vehicles on major ground attack routes onto the island to delay PLAN amphibious landings. Before they drop off the car, individuals should put an Apple Air Tag inside to track real-time movement and alert designated officials about when and where assault operations occur. Similarly, the government might offer every amateur drone operator an attractive cash reward for configuring personal drones to drop or crash payloads onto targets in their local communities – which the drone owners know better than anyone. These are just a few examples of creative operations that account for urbanization and technological innovation in resistance for the modern era.

Leveraging Information Warfare

The information domain is as critical as the physical terrain. Taiwan’s resistance must account for controlling and disseminating information that counters narratives from occupying PRC forces. Training civilian resistance cells in information warfare techniques—such as using encrypted messaging platforms, anonymous communication methods, and social media— is essential for maintaining morale, garnering international support, and spreading accurate information about the situation on the ground. The European ROC provides a useful graphic, found immediately below, depicting communications lines and different intended audiences during resilience versus resistance.

Graphic Credit: Resistance Operating Concept, p. 34

Taiwan must work preemptively with international allies today to establish external communication channels that ensure continuity of operations (COOP) with global audiences, even if local networks are compromised. Foreign media and NGOs in Taiwan during peacetime offer a network of international observers who can amplify resistance messages, hold occupying forces accountable, and deter aggressive actions through public naming and shaming. Following the global backlash against Russia’s invasion of a sovereign Ukraine, Xi Jinping is undoubtedly concerned about similar repercussions following his illegal invasion of Taiwan, which clandestine communication networks will expose.

Maintaining International Support

The PRC is making great efforts to seduce individuals and nations around the Indo-Pacific, and the world, to counter Taiwan’s network of international supporters. Successful resistance hinges on maintaining international awareness and support. Again, Ukraine provides clear proof of this idea. Taiwan’s unique status in the international community means that foreign governments that support democratic ideals may assist Taiwanese resistance efforts. To this end, Taiwan should continue to strengthen diplomatic ties and build global support networks today that provide moral, financial, and logistical aid to any potential resistance movement tomorrow.

Taiwan should expand diplomatic efforts to establish agreements with allies, enabling critical supplies, intelligence sharing, and financial support for its resistance strategy. The Taiwanese diaspora must be recruited to advocate for independence on the global stage. This line of effort will help maintain a consistent message that draws international attention to the PRC’s dangerous and illegal occupation. As an example, Ukraine’s persistent efforts in this space, exposing the world to Russia’s illegal invasion and war crimes, was and is arguably more critical to gaining and sustaining support for the war than Ukraine’s fighting itself.

Conclusion: the T-RROC is both a Deterrent and a Defense Tool

The T-RROC blueprint outlines a dual approach that merges resilience and resistance into a modern strategy for protecting Taiwan’s sovereignty. Resilience fosters the societal strength and infrastructure readiness needed to withstand the effects of Xi’s invasion, while resistance provides contingency planning and preparation to make occupation costly and unfeasible.

Building capability after a war has started is infinitely more challenging, as seen in Ukraine. A resilient society does not just have to be about bouncing back after war. Likewise, building a resistance capability now does not mean that Taiwan is conceding defeat before the war ever starts. By developing resilience and resistance capabilities now, a signal is sent to the CCP that it would be foolish to invade in the first place.

Taiwan must, therefore, prioritize building both resilience and resistance capabilities today. This proposition and the resources required to make it a reality are tricky. With finite resources and competing agendas, it is hard to convince politicians and populations to prepare for war and appropriate the needed resources for such preparation if the threat is not right at the door. What lesson is Xi learning from Ukraine? One would hope he would learn from the global response against Russia that the PRC should not attack Taiwan. Policy and diplomacy representatives worldwide are helping to push this narrative to the CCP. Unfortunately, indications are that instead of realizing that the PRC should not invade, Xi is instead focusing on how to attack Taiwan without making the same mistakes that Russia made. For example, one specific lesson from Ukraine that Xi knows is the need to decapitate political leadership immediately. The PRC is learning to invade more effectively, or at least it thinks it is. When authoritarian actors share their future world vision, it is advisable to pay attention since they often try to make dreams a reality. Putin made no secret about his intentions in Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine. The exact timing and methods were unknown, but the Russian leader’s vision of expansion was shared. Similarly, Xi has transmitted his vision of “reunifying” Taiwan. Putting aside the argument that one cannot “reunify” something that was not previously unified, Xi has shared his beliefs, and the world should listen. This T-RROC suggests that the danger is already on its way to Taiwan’s front (or back) door. Completing, resourcing, and implementing the T-RROC is, therefore, prudent and necessary.

A final note about defensive versus offensive T-RROC activities should be shared. The majority of this document is focused on building a resilient society to bounce back from crisis and to resist occupation. Another key responsibility of government preparation involves calculated, offensive, proactive activities to undermine the CCP’s credibility and capabilities right now as they apply to an invasion of Taiwan. This concept of using offense to defend is a component of integrated deterrence. Offensive activities must be measured and non-escalatory, considering the risk of miscalculation in an era of AI that could lead to unintended conflict. Simultaneously, reacting and responding to malign actions can only be part of the larger strategic equation. Taiwan, the US, and their partners must do everything possible to deter aggression, including implementing proactive irregular measures. Offensive measures aimed specifically at the CCP’s ability to employ malign gray zone tactics can be found here and here.

It is shortsighted to think that defending Taiwan is just about helping Taiwan. Given Taiwan’s geopolitical and technological importance, the negative impact on the global economy that everyone worldwide would feel if the island fell, and the horrible cost that war imposes on humanity, defending Taiwan’s sovereignty is in the interest of all friendly nations. This T-RROC blueprint aims to guide efforts across all sectors of society to ensure Taiwan is prepared to deter, endure, and resist any threats to its sovereignty. By embracing this strategy for resilience and resistance, Taiwan sends a powerful message to the world: any aggression from the PRC will face a united response from the government and the people.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Government or Department of Defense. 

Tags: irregular warfare, Resilience, resistance, Taiwan

About The Author

• 
  
• Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca
• Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD is a retired US Army Green Beret and current professor of irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and special operations at the Department of Defense’s Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. He can be found on X/Twitter @LumpyAsia.
• 
  

2. An Information Theory of Victory

Excerpts:

With that understanding, there is an opportunity to introduce an alternative approach based on two important claims. First, a recognition that as success is currently demonstrated, career and organizational structures incentivize agent behavior that often fails to deliver the stated objective of senior leaders—the agents tend to chase the metric, not the goal. Second, a recognition that despite heroic and continuous efforts, measuring human thought, emotions, and behavior will continue to be an imprecise science. The focus on delivering objective results can prevent organizations from success as they are expected to prove that a course of action will work or did work in order to continue. This dysfunction can be corrected by adopting a theory of victory for information based on qualified assumptions concerning the effects of informational actions/activities and pairing this with an organizational incentive structure that is concerned with qualified output over tangible outcomes. Stated plainly, if organizations measured output in accordance with a theory of victory, planners and practitioners would be properly incentivized to meet the needs of the current information environment. Assessments would then be focused on ensuring the right activities are conducted in accordance with a theory of victory, instead of whether those activities can be definitively linked to tangible outcomes. Finally, information war games can explore and experiment with various criteria that are most likely to lead toward victory.

There are three important qualifications worth considering. First, for a theory of victory for information to be successful, it must be correct. Returning to the Vietnam War example, a theory of victory predicated on body counts and tonnage of bombs dropped was incorrect. That theory did not account for the totality of the dynamics at play, like the role of the American antiwar movement and domestic politics.53 While a theory of victory can be wrong, without one, planners and practitioners are left to do the next best thing in perpetuity. Second, it is possible that as technology and data collection improve, the ability to accurately measure the effectiveness of specific information efforts will also improve. The rapid advances and use cases in artificial intelligence, for example, have generated intense discussion on how new technologies might be used in future information efforts.54 However, the importance of context—especially cultural context—is often absent from this conversation, as new technologies impress stakeholders looking for the next advantage. While technological developments may enhance the ability of data collection and analysis in a data-rich environment, the same may not be the case in a denied area where information activity is taking place.55 Finally, there are cases when achieving strong measures of effectiveness remain the best assessment for determining whether an information effort was successful or not. Instances with a clear behavioral outcome, like surrender or defection, are best accomplished through classic assessment. Adopting theory of victory practices to information does not mean casting aside traditional assessment and the need to determine effectiveness—those assessments are still necessary. However, this provides an alternative framework that offers a way to measure activity that may have an effect absent of clear measures of effectiveness.

The concepts proposed in this research cut against the grain of established practice and are likely to be met with understandable skepticism. While there is a seeming consensus on the importance of information as well as an appetite for increased effectiveness, little is offered that deviates from calls to do more or do better.56 This research offers an alternative. Stakeholders who have oversight on information activity should consider the possibility that the current system as it exists may be flawed and remain open to alternatives. Planners and practitioners in information should consider the concepts described in this research as potential avenues for achieving success. Finally, experimentation—especially in the form of information war games—should be encouraged and incentivized to garner additional insight and criteria toward what winning looks like in the information environment.

An Information Theory of Victory

By ERROL MORRIS armyupress.army.mil26 min

View Original

http://armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/Nov-Dec-2024/Change-the-Incentives?utm

Maj. Don Gomez, U.S. Army

Download the PDF

Download the PDF

Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.

We’re getting our rear end handed to us in the information space.

Within the information community, it is taken as a near-article of faith that measuring effectiveness is what matters in determining whether an information activity is successful. The following discussion challenges that assertion and offers an alternative framework that could fundamentally alter how information activities are planned, executed, and assessed.

Despite increased discourse concerning the role of information and influence in achieving success in modern conflict, there remains a nagging sense among military leaders, policymakers, and the public that the United States is constantly on the back foot in this arena.1 It is routine for political and military senior leaders to claim that the United States is losing the information war against adversaries who are more nimble, shameless, and aggressive.2 How can it be the case, they openly wonder, that the strongest Nation in the world, which is also home to Hollywood and big-brand marketing talent, cannot compete with the information efforts of hypocritical autocratic regimes, low-budget nonstate actors, or lone wolves leveraging artificial intelligence to pump out cheap propaganda?

The answer to this question is both simple and dull. We are using the wrong bureaucratic incentives. First, humans are messy and do not think, feel, or behave in ways that can be neatly categorized. While this seems intuitive, it does not prevent well-meaning planners, practitioners, and theorists from positing that human activity can be optimally stratified, quantified, and measured. Second, information professionals often conceptualize and demonstrate success in ways incongruent with their senior leadership’s goals and desires; they tend to chase a metric that may be unknown to senior leaders. Changing the status quo and achieving success in the modern information environment requires a shift in thinking away from an outcomes-based model rooted in industrial-age management practices and toward an information-age model that recognizes and accepts the subjective messiness of audiences and incentivizes output in conjunction with a theory of victory.3

Informational Heresy

The notion that measuring qualified output might be preferrable to measuring desired outcomes is likely considered heretical among many information professionals.4 Achieving positive measures of effectiveness is routinely accepted as the gold standard in demonstrating success both internally and to key external stakeholders.5 However, examining how assessments intermingle with incentives within large bureaucracies reveals problems that contribute to the legitimate sense among many leaders that the United States is losing in its information efforts vis-à-vis its adversaries.

To demonstrate that a focus on achieving objective effects limits U.S. information efforts, an exploration of critical definitions is required, particularly nebulous and oft-redefined terms like information. I argue that achieving firm definitions is a distraction that stands in the way of effective operations in this realm. Additionally, a critical examination of prevailing management and assessment practices indicates that incentivizing outcomes tends toward dysfunctional incentive structures that often fail to meet stated objectives. Instead, adapting theory of victory concepts to information activities creates a pathway toward an output-based system that aligns with what many businesses and brands have discovered is critical for sustained long-term success and growth.6 These theory of victory concepts were tested in an experimental information war-game exercise in the fall of 2023 in support of building a deeper understanding of “what winning looks like” in the information space.7 Finally, this discussion concludes with important qualifications and potential recommendations for implementation.

Eternal Term Warfare

Despite rigorous intellectual effort, definitions regarding information and information activities remain nebulous and dynamic.10 Once a qualifier is affixed to information, it becomes difficult to understand where one effort begins and another ends. How is information warfare different from psychological warfare? What about influence activities or cognitive warfare?11 These terms are constantly deployed and redefined internally and externally with little thought to what they may be subsuming or excluding. This incessant defining and redefining of adjacent words is referred to some as “term warfare.”12 While defining terms is important and can clarify thought, remaining in a constant state of bureaucratic “term warfare” can inject uncertainty, skepticism, and timidity into planning and operations. Meanwhile, adversaries appear to be less interested in what a particular activity is called and more interested in what it can accomplish.

For many years, the term “information operations” was used to describe in a general sense the activities taking place and serving as the term for the coordinating function that encompassed other roles of information activity like military information support operations, electronic warfare, or public affairs.13 In recent years, this changed in Army doctrine to information advantage, which differs from joint doctrine’s emphasis on operations in the information environment.14 Further, Army doctrine describes the information efforts of adversaries as information warfare but does not use the same term to describe its own activities.15 Meanwhile, both the Navy and the Air Force have embraced the term information warfare but to different ends.16 To further muddy the waters, academics who study the same activity and journalists who report on it do not make these same distinctions, referring to related activities variably as information warfare, information operations, psychological warfare, or propaganda.17 While the activities taking place have not changed much in recent years with the important exception of the introduction and proliferation of new communication technologies, the terms used to describe them continually change, increasing confusion among both practitioners in charge of their execution and leaders responsible for providing direction and oversight.18

While some might argue that without firm definitions it can be prohibitively challenging to plan and execute effective operations, accepting the nature of these types of activities as inherently murky and arguably undefinable presents an alternative way forward. Reviewing the history of defining information, we see that shifting definitions is one of the only constants. Accepting a sufficient definition for a given time and context is likely to satisfy the needs of the day, fully knowing that as things change, so too will the definitions. Finally, the divergence of opinion on definitions should be welcomed, as this leads to additional research and thought that can advance the discourse. Considering that strong opinions and disagreements abound, to state categorically that an enduring decision has been made regarding a definition would likely hamper future efforts toward growth and innovation. The subsequent discussion accepts the vague and often changing nature of these terms and argues that the constant fight to redefine them only adds to the confusion about what constitutes success. Although unsatisfactory, planners and practitioners can move forward with an understanding that definitions will likely shift with different audiences and contexts. With that, a deeper exploration of the role that metrics and incentives play in information reveals a much larger problem.

Metrics and Incentives: A Broken Cycle of Good Intentions

Leaders expend precious resources to achieve their objectives. Stakeholders up, down, and adjacent to the chain of command want to know if those resources are employed effectively. Demonstrating success is often the key criterion within bureaucracies to gain continued support in executing a plan or course of action. In rigid bureaucracies, demonstrated success serves as a powerful career incentive and often leads to better evaluations, increased promotion potential, desired assignments, and enhanced professional prestige. This confluence of factors—the need to demonstrate success as good stewards of public resources coupled with the incentive structures of large bureaucracies—is a fundamental contributing factor to the inability to compete effectively with adversarial information efforts. This confluence leads to a broken cycle of good intentions, and at the heart of this cycle is a military culture obsessed with metrics.19

While the introduction and proliferation of performance measurement into military activity was well-intentioned, research reveals a chaotic system that often results in misguided efforts that frequently fail to achieve their objectives. At the onset of the Cold War, the U.S. military began adopting emerging business practices that emphasized hyperefficiency and performance measurement to compete with the centralized planning efforts of the Soviet Union.20 As far back as 1956, there were indications that an overreliance on metrics could lead to “dysfunctional consequences” within a system.21 A simple example of this is known as the “ratchet principle,” where workers who meet a certain quota of productivity are rewarded with an increased quota, often without an increase in the means to accomplish the additional work.22 This can lead to workers deliberately ensuring they never meet the initial quota to avoid the imposition of a higher workload.

A well-known military example of dysfunctional consequences in performance measurement is found during the Vietnam War, where the U.S. military measured success by the number of enemies killed and the tonnage of bombs dropped.23 Once measurements are introduced into a system, incentives tend to realign and reward short-term success over long-term progress, regardless of any safeguards implemented by management. In this case, incentives realigned leading to an increase in the number of enemies killed in action and tonnage of bombs dropped as that was what senior leaders valued as indicative of success. This rubric served as a theory of victory—that more enemy dead and more bombs dropped would shift the dynamics of the war toward a U.S. victory.24 Only in this case, the theory of victory was flawed, resulting in tactical efforts that undermined the war effort.25 Additionally, military leaders under both career and operational pressure to produce results may contort themselves and their data to demonstrate success, whether that success is real, exaggerated, or completely false.26

In the realm of information, some might argue that this problem simply requires identifying better metrics.27 That is, achieving certainty that the metric measured is precisely correct and its successful manipulation will deliver the objective desired. While this solution is tempting—especially in an era of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and “big data”—even when conducted flawlessly, processes that deal with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of humans are rooted in social science approaches that are limited in what they can definitively prove.28 For example, in attempting to determine how to measure the will to fight, researchers at RAND argued that while literature, doctrine, and some of the most prominent military leaders throughout history have stated that the will to fight is the most important factor in war, it remains nearly impossible to prove or measure.29 However, to satisfy the deeply ingrained military desire for objective metrics, the authors offer an impressive model that includes over twenty factors at the individual and unit levels to generate a potential model with quantifiable metrics. Despite this exhaustive and impressive work, the authors conclude that “we can quantify the will to fight in simulations but we can never accurately quantify the will to fight in the real world.”30

Further research into the effects of metrics and performance management systems on bureaucracies reveals systemic and emergent problems. Chief among these is a performance measurement concept known as Goodhart’s law, which states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”31 The classic example comes from a phenomenon during colonial British rule of India. British officials placed a bounty on the skins of cobras to curb the growing population. Local hunters quickly realized they could exploit the system by breeding cobras at scale and delivering their skins to receive the bounty rather than hunting them—a much less dangerous endeavor.32 While it may be possible to craft the perfect measure to ensure that only the specific desired behavior is enacted, evidence and history show that, in most cases, the measure becomes the target precisely because of the incentive structure built into the system. Considering the wide array of internal and external factors that comingle and interact with a specified metric, it is difficult to predict how all audiences and practitioners will behave to influence it.

In the case of information, identifying assessment criteria, often in the form of crafting measures of effectiveness, is one of the first steps in planning.33 Before deep thought or analysis begins on target audiences, susceptibility, or dissemination methods, planners are already considering what metrics might be used to determine whether the effort will be considered successful. While this may appear logical and forward-thinking, Goodhart’s law states that once the measure becomes the target, it fails to be a good measure. Additionally, practitioners under immense operational pressure to deliver results are incentivized to ensure that the measure moves in the desired direction and will likely dedicate everything they can to make that happen.34 A savvy planner or practitioner may be tempted to craft an information effort that is more likely to generate tangible, observable results rather than a potentially superior effort that is prohibitively difficult to measure.35

Researchers Leo Blanken and Jason Lepore further explore the problem of incentive structures in military operations.36 They argue that in hierarchical systems, the principals who set objectives and policy (i.e., political and military senior leaders) are often far removed from the agents that carry out the tasks (i.e., military planners and practitioners).37 Further, the principals are often unaware that the agents tend to pursue a metric that was generated as a way to demonstrate success as opposed to achieving the actual goal, which may have a distant relation to the established metric. This distance contributes to the confusion between the principal and the agent. While an information practitioner may be able to demonstrate apparent success through the attainment of positive measures of effectiveness (i.e., the desired change is achieved), achieving those metrics was never the goal of the senior leader in the first place, and thus the lingering sense of “losing” in the information environment. This cognitive disconnect between the principal and the agent occurs precisely because of the imposition of a flawed performance measurement system that does not match the task.38

The confluence of performance measurement and metrics, bureaucratic incentive structures, and the unique subjectivity of influencing thoughts, emotions, and behaviors sits at the heart of the problem of achieving success in information efforts. Effective leaders demand results and want to demonstrate that they are good stewards of public resources while also being successful at achieving the goals of their institutions. Good practitioners are diligent in demonstrating that their efforts are effective, typically through communicating the successful attainment of desired outcomes with measures of effectiveness. Unfortunately, research on the subject that stretches back nearly a century indicates that under the best conditions, metrics intermingling with bureaucracies often leads to dysfunction. Add to this the inherently difficult task of measuring abstract concepts like the emotions or thoughts of a target audience in relation to a specific message or information campaign, and it becomes clear that the current system is unlikely to satisfy the needs of all who are involved. This phenomenon is precisely what leads many to rightly conclude that the United States is losing in the information space. To overcome this, an alternative to classic assessments is needed that provides an overarching concept that demonstrates “what winning looks like” in the information environment.

The Need for an Information Theory of Victory

The joint force has recognized that its adversaries are not confined by neat categorizations between war and peace, and that these adversaries routinely engage in forms of warfare below the threshold of armed conflict.39 The shift toward competition provides a useful framework for conceptualizing and planning operations to compete for advantage in the event of war. Inherent to this shift is the important role that information and influence play in this concept.40 While the doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures concerning information remain sound, an overarching concept that attempts to conceptualize “what winning looks like” in the realm of information is lacking.41 Borrowing from theory of victory studies and identifying a potential theory of victory for information is the first step in developing an approach that stands a chance of achieving success.

Theory of victory research is a subset of war studies that attempts to fill the gap between crafting effective strategy and achieving the policy goal desired. It attempts to answer the question of how we get from the attainment of the military objective to the achievement of the policy goal. Two war studies scholars, Bradford A. Lee and J. Boone Bartholomees offer complementary approaches to conceptualizing a theory of victory that can be adopted for information. Following a summary of these approaches, they are applied to information to introduce a new model for conceptualizing victory in information.

Lee argues that a theory of victory represents “the assumptions that strategists make about how the execution of the military operations that they are planning will translate into the achievement of the political objectives that they are pursuing.”42 While lengthy, that statement captures precisely what a theory of victory is—an assumption about how friendly activity will shift the dynamics of a given system in such a way that the adversary will “give up, go away, or go down swinging.”43 Additionally, Lee recognizes that it is difficult to measure the effects of these activities, with the exception of “first-order military effects” like destroying equipment. Thus, he argues that assumptions are paramount in any theory of victory. While the word assumption often carries a negative connotation due to its ambiguity and introduction of risk, Lee argues that assumptions are essential when conceptualizing victory against a complex adversarial system.44 Furthermore, assumptions should be based on tangible qualities like expertise, experience, data, cultural acumen, etc.; they are not simply gut feelings or the absence of facts. Finally, Lee offers an important caveat for democracies. To sustain continued support toward achieving victory, relevant stakeholders, from military and political officials to the public, must see incremental dividends over time.45 Examples of incremental dividends include the raid that killed Osama bin Laden as part of the larger Global War on Terrorism, and the early disclosure of Russian deception intentions at the outset of the Russia-Ukraine War in 2022.46 These incremental dividends provided a satisfactory and tangible “win” as part of a much longer and more difficult to measure effort against an adversary.

Bartholomees takes a different approach to theory of victory studies, beginning with the claim that “victory in war is at the most basic level an assessment, not a fact or condition.”47 Importantly, he argues that this assessment is subjective, contextual, and hierarchical, and not objective, absolute, or equal among actors. He stratifies the importance of these assessments in the American context, arguing that it is (1) the American public, (2) military and political elites, (3) American partners and allies, and (4) world opinion that determine whether victory was achieved or not, in that order.48 Additional research outside of war studies identifies the concept of intersubjective belief as relevant, where the beliefs of individuals and groups are formed through interaction with one another, and these intersubjective beliefs wax and wane as new information is revealed or norms change over time.49 Altogether, Bartholomees presents the importance of subjectivity, audience, and context in achieving victory.

The combined theory of victory research of Lee and Bartholomees offers a framework toward a potential theory of victory for information. From Lee’s formula for victory, we can propose that a theory of victory for information consists of “the assumptions made about actions/activities taken to influence dynamics within the information environment to achieve a stated objective.”50 And from Bartholomees, we understand that victory is an intersubjective assessment made by various actors in specific times and contexts. This combination of factors—a concept for a theory of victory and an understanding of how victory might be assessed—opens the door for experimentation.

Testing a Theory of Victory in an Information War Game

To test this, I designed an information war game based on theory of victory research and prevailing information concepts. The war game aimed to replicate the complex dynamics inherent in information activities, the incentive structures of bureaucracies, and the subjective assessments of multiple actors. In the war game, two information professionals from opposing states compete for influence over multiple target audiences. Using cards marked with various information activities along with a corresponding value (1, 2, 3), the players attempt to influence generic target audiences to support their side. While this influence effort takes place, additional players take on the roles of political/military elite, partner and ally nations, and world opinion, each with their own ability to register assessments of the two sides. Over the course of multiple rounds players experience how the other players perceive their actions and can adjust their tactics in attempt to “win”—which in this case means maintaining a positive sentiment among a majority of players while also influencing the various target audiences to their side.

An important aspect of the war game concerns the interactions between players. While the influence professionals have full autonomy to play any cards they wish, the political/military elite are responsible for providing additional cards to them at the end of a round. Thus, the political/military elite players have influence over which cards are possible to play in the first place—a dynamic that replicates authorities and permissions in the real world.51 A failed information effort, for example, might result in negative feedback from tangential players, reducing the appetite among the political/military elite for similar activities in future rounds. These dynamics serve as a simulation for what information professionals face when trying to demonstrate success (e.g., effectively influencing a target audience) while their supervisors claim that in the grand scheme, they are “losing” based on the subjective responses of various actors who are often unseen and unaccounted for by the information professional.

While the scope of the war game was small and the results cannot be generalized outside of the context in which it was played, it provided a useful tool for experimentation. Based on previous research, I tested a hypothesis that a high volume of information activity—increased output—would likely contribute to an increased subjective assessment of “winning” among various actors. This was confirmed in the specific context of the war game.52 However, further experimentation is required to generalize and build upon these results. For example, during war-game sessions, it became clear that participants often made subjective assessments based on criteria not controlled for in the game (e.g., their level of familiarity with information concepts). Future research using similar methods could attempt to control and isolate specific criteria to generate deeper insight. Finally, the game itself proved to be a valuable educational tool for demonstrating how information and assessment work in a safe and replicable environment. At the conclusion of a given game, players can state why they thought one side was winning over the other, and with more data, trends are likely to emerge that could inform the development of new concepts.

Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted

Research informs us that understanding exactly why humans choose to think, feel, and act in certain ways is likely to remain at best an imprecise discipline. Attempts to quantify attributes that are not readily quantifiable introduces the patina of hard science and unqualified certainty. Large bureaucracies—and especially rigid hierarchical bureaucracies like the military—tend to reward short-term success often demonstrated through data manipulation. Incentive structures coalesce around a strong desire at both the individual and organizational level to prove that a course of action is successful. This incentive structure can lead to timidity among information professionals who may choose to pursue a metric that is easy to influence rather than the activity that might truly be effective but difficult to measure.

With that understanding, there is an opportunity to introduce an alternative approach based on two important claims. First, a recognition that as success is currently demonstrated, career and organizational structures incentivize agent behavior that often fails to deliver the stated objective of senior leaders—the agents tend to chase the metric, not the goal. Second, a recognition that despite heroic and continuous efforts, measuring human thought, emotions, and behavior will continue to be an imprecise science. The focus on delivering objective results can prevent organizations from success as they are expected to prove that a course of action will work or did work in order to continue. This dysfunction can be corrected by adopting a theory of victory for information based on qualified assumptions concerning the effects of informational actions/activities and pairing this with an organizational incentive structure that is concerned with qualified output over tangible outcomes. Stated plainly, if organizations measured output in accordance with a theory of victory, planners and practitioners would be properly incentivized to meet the needs of the current information environment. Assessments would then be focused on ensuring the right activities are conducted in accordance with a theory of victory, instead of whether those activities can be definitively linked to tangible outcomes. Finally, information war games can explore and experiment with various criteria that are most likely to lead toward victory.

There are three important qualifications worth considering. First, for a theory of victory for information to be successful, it must be correct. Returning to the Vietnam War example, a theory of victory predicated on body counts and tonnage of bombs dropped was incorrect. That theory did not account for the totality of the dynamics at play, like the role of the American antiwar movement and domestic politics.53 While a theory of victory can be wrong, without one, planners and practitioners are left to do the next best thing in perpetuity. Second, it is possible that as technology and data collection improve, the ability to accurately measure the effectiveness of specific information efforts will also improve. The rapid advances and use cases in artificial intelligence, for example, have generated intense discussion on how new technologies might be used in future information efforts.54 However, the importance of context—especially cultural context—is often absent from this conversation, as new technologies impress stakeholders looking for the next advantage. While technological developments may enhance the ability of data collection and analysis in a data-rich environment, the same may not be the case in a denied area where information activity is taking place.55 Finally, there are cases when achieving strong measures of effectiveness remain the best assessment for determining whether an information effort was successful or not. Instances with a clear behavioral outcome, like surrender or defection, are best accomplished through classic assessment. Adopting theory of victory practices to information does not mean casting aside traditional assessment and the need to determine effectiveness—those assessments are still necessary. However, this provides an alternative framework that offers a way to measure activity that may have an effect absent of clear measures of effectiveness.

The concepts proposed in this research cut against the grain of established practice and are likely to be met with understandable skepticism. While there is a seeming consensus on the importance of information as well as an appetite for increased effectiveness, little is offered that deviates from calls to do more or do better.56 This research offers an alternative. Stakeholders who have oversight on information activity should consider the possibility that the current system as it exists may be flawed and remain open to alternatives. Planners and practitioners in information should consider the concepts described in this research as potential avenues for achieving success. Finally, experimentation—especially in the form of information war games—should be encouraged and incentivized to garner additional insight and criteria toward what winning looks like in the information environment.

Notes

1. Mark Pomerleau, “Why Is the United States Losing the Information War?,” C4ISRNet, 5 October 2020, https://www.c4isrnet.com/information-warfare/2020/10/05/why-is-the-united-states-losing-the-information-war/.
2. “Jihad 2.0: Social Media in the Next Evolution of Terrorist Recruitment,” Hearing Before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 114 Cong. (7 May 2015), https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/jihad-20-social-media-in-the-next-evolution-of-terrorist-recruitment/.
3. This article is based on research conducted at the Naval Postgraduate School as part of a curriculum in the Department of Defense Analysis 2022–2023.
4. See, for example, Brian Horvath and Jeffrey Sharpe, “PSYOP Needs More Science: The Root Cause of the Branch’s Difficulties with Assessment” (master’s thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, December 2013). Many researchers have studied the problem of assessment in information activity and often come to a similar conclusion: the problem is inadequate assessments that result in poor or nonexistent measures of effectiveness. Within the information community, there is a prevailing narrative that dismisses measures of performance if there is no corresponding measure of effectiveness.
5. Steven Hendrickson and Riley Post, “A Blue-Collar Approach to Operational Analysis: A Special Operations Case Study,” Joint Force Quarterly 96 (1st Quarter, 2020): 50–57, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/2076070/a-blue-collar-approach-to-operational-analysis-a-special-operations-case-study/. The authors discuss this and offer an alternative.
6. See Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies (London: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, 2013). Marketers Binet and Field propose that businesses should commit to a 60:40 split between brand and performance marketing to achieve optimal success. This model emphasizes brand building over performance marketing and roughly correlates to notions of “winning” versus achieving tangible performance objectives like sales.
7. Alex Deep, “‘What Winning Looks Like:’ Narrative for Integrated Deterrence and Strategic Competition” (Tampa, FL: Joint Special Operations University, 2023).
8. To Receive Testimony on the Posture of United States Special Operations Command and United States Cyber Command in Review of the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Year 2025 and the Future Years Defense Program Before the Committee on Armed Services, 118th Cong. (10 April 2024) (statements of Christopher P. Maier, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict; and Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command), https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/20241.pdf.
9. Jill Goldenziel, “5 Things to Know About the Pentagon’s Information Strategy,” Forbes (website), 30 November 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillgoldenziel/2023/11/30/5-things-to-know-about-the-pentagons-information-strategy/.
10. Sarah P. White, “The Organizational Determinants of Military Doctrine: A History of Army Information Operations,” Texas National Security Review 6, no. 1 (Winter 2022/2023): 51–78, https://tnsr.org/2023/01/the-organizational-determinants-of-military-doctrine-a-history-of-army-information-operations/.
11. Robin Burda, Cognitive Warfare as Part of Society: Never-Ending Battle for Minds (The Hague: The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, 6 June 2023), https://hcss.nl/report/cognitive-warfare-as-part-of-society-never-ending-battle-for-minds/.
12. John Bicknell, host, Cognitive Crucible, podcast, episode 78, “Phoenix Cast Dual Release,” Information Professionals Association, 11 January 2022, https://information-professionals.org/episode/cognitive-crucible-episode-78/.
13. White, “Organizational Determinants of Military Doctrine.”
14. Field Manual (FM) 3-13, Information Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office [GPO], 2023), https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN39736-ADP_3-13-000-WEB-1.pdf; Joint Publication (JP) 3-04, Information in Joint Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2022).
15. FM 3-13, Information Operations, 1-12.
16. Greg Hadley, “16th Air Force Seeks ‘Unity of Effort’ on Information Warfare,” Air & Space Forces Magazine (website), 13 November 2023, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/information-warfare-16th-air-force-unity-of-effort/; Lauren C. Williams, “The Navy Wants to Make Info-Warfare Training Ubiquitous,” Defense One, 3 April 2024, https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2024/04/navy-wants-make-info-warfare-training-ubiquitous/395434/.
17. See, for example, the work of the Stanford Internet Observatory: Josh A Goldstein et al., Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations (Stanford, CA: Stanford Internet Observatory, January 2023), https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/publication/generative-language-models-and-automated-influence-operations-emerging-threats-and.
18. Gavin Wilde, “The Problem With Defining ‘Disinformation,’” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 10 November 2022, https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/11/10/problem-with-defining-disinformation-pub-88385.
19. Jody Daniels, “Changing Culture: Moving from Metrics to Readiness” (Fort Liberty, NC: U.S. Army Reserve, August 2022), https://www.usar.army.mil/Portals/98/Documents/CAR/Changing%20Culture%20FINAL%2004052022.pdf.
20. V. F. Ridgway, “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements,” Administrative Science Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1956): 240–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/2390989.
21. White, “Organizational Determinants of Military Doctrine.”
22. Ridgway, “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements,” 247.
23. Gregory A. Daddis, Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 7.
24. Morris, The Fog of War.
25. Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras, Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 1 February 2015), ix, https://doi.org/10.21236/ADA615274.
26. Ashley Franz Holzmann and Whitney O’Connell, “Falling Short in Measures of Effectiveness,” Small Wars Journal, 30 August 2016, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/falling-short-in-measures-of-effectiveness.
27. Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (London: Deutsch, 1972), 24.
28. Ben Connable et al., Will to Fight: Analyzing, Modeling, and Simulating the Will to Fight of Military Units (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018), https://doi.org/10.7249/RR2341.
29. Thomas M. Nichols, Winning the World: Lessons for America’s Future from the Cold War, Humanistic Perspectives on International Relations (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 161.
30. Michael Stumbord et al., “Goodhart’s Law: Recognizing and Mitigating the Manipulation of Measures in Analysis” (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 26 September 2022).
31. Ibid., 3.
32. JP 3-04, Information in Joint Operations, VI-4–VI-8.
33. Wong and Gerras, Lying to Ourselves, 7.
34. This concept has proven difficult to explain. There are some activities that may be effective but difficult to measure. The common retort is “then how do you know it’s effective,” which is admittedly a difficult question to answer. Yet, that question does not stop politicians, advertising agencies, rebel groups, or online influencers from continuing to push the boundaries in their media campaigns to find success.
35. Leo J. Blanken and Jason J. Lepore, “Performance Measurement in Military Operations: Information versus Incentives,” Defence and Peace Economics 26, no. 5 (3 September 2015): 516–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/10242694.2014.949548.
36. Ibid., 4.
37. Some might argue that the source of the principal-agent problem regarding information is not the lack of an overarching concept like a theory of victory, but it is simply the challenge of communicating complex phenomena to senior leaders in a way that is understood and actionable. While this is certainty important, it does not solve the problem of incentives within bureaucracies.
38. Andrew Milburn and Shawna Sinnot, hosts, Irregular Warfare Podcast, “Competing for Influence: Operations in the Information Environment,” Modern War Institute, 16 January 2021, https://mwi.usma.edu/competing-for-influence-operations-in-the-information-environment/.
39. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Concept for Competing (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2023 [CAC required]), iii, https://jdeis.js.mil/jdeis/jel/concepts/jcc.pdf.
40. Deep, “‘What Winning Looks Like.’”
41. Bradford A. Lee, “Theories of Victory” (presentation, Naval War College, RI, 22 November 2013).
42. Ibid.
43. JP 5-0, Joint Planning (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2020), I-6.
44. Lee, “Theories of Victory.”
45. Jake Harrington, “Intelligence Disclosures in the Ukraine Crisis and Beyond,” War on the Rocks, 1 March 2022, https://warontherocks.com/2022/03/intelligence-disclosures-in-the-ukraine-crisis-and-beyond/.
46. J. Boone Bartholomees, “Theory of Victory,” Parameters 38, no. 2 (1 May 2008): 26, https://doi.org/10.55540/0031-1723.2419.
47. Ibid., 31.
48. Vivienne Brown, “Intersubjective Belief,” Episteme 16, no. 2 (June 2019): 139–56, https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2017.29.
49. Don H. Gomez, “An Information Warfare Theory of Victory” (master’s thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, December 2023), 31.
50. FM 3-13, Information Operations, 6-7.
51. Gomez, “An Information Warfare Theory of Victory,” 55.
52. Daddis, Withdrawal, 13.
53. Kelley Jhong, “Special Operations Forces Require Greater Proficiency in Artificial Intelligence,” War on the Rocks, 23 February 2023, https://warontherocks.com/2023/02/special-operations-forces-require-greater-proficiency-in-artificial-intelligence/.
54. Julia M. McClenon, “We’re WEIRD and Our Adversaries Know It: Psychological Biases Leave the United States Vulnerable to Cognitive Domain Operations,” Irregular Warfare Initiative, 7 June 2023, https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/were-weird-and-our-adversaries-know-it-psychological-biases-leave-the-united-states-vulnerable-to-cognitive-domain-operations/.
55. U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Contested Information Environment: Actions Needed to Strengthen Education and Training for DOD Leaders, GAO-23-105608 (Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 26 January 2023), https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105608.

3. China Tensions Prompt U.S. Navy Race to Reload Missiles at Sea

See interactive graphics at the link: https://www.wsj.com/world/china-tensions-prompt-u-s-navy-race-to-reload-missiles-at-sea-70d58178?st=K5k79D&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Excerpts:

For decades, the Navy has provisioned its ships on the high seas by sending basic supplies across cables strung between them. It routinely refuels ships using hoses supported in this way. 

The connections require the ships to sail at nearly identical speeds, maintaining a constant distance. The equipment is designed so connections can be severed instantly if needed, such as if attacked. 

Loading a warship with dozens of missiles using a crane on the supply ship would be dangerously slow. TRAM is designed to make the process faster and safer.

Creating the TRAM mechanism was still challenging. To start work, Navy experts early this year pulled the mothballed 1990s prototype out of storage, disassembled it and drafted digital plans to reverse-engineer it, with help from some archived drawings. 

Putting the new plans in a computer simulation, they located the mechanism’s weakest points and added about 300 lbs. of steel reinforcement, said Ryan Hayleck, the project’s technical leader. The Chosin’s deck also needed reinforcing to handle the new load.

Technicians wired up both ships and the crane with sensors to understand how all the elements moved and what stresses they faced, all with the aim of refining designs. Navy Chief Engineer Rear Admiral Peter Small said the scads of data couldn’t have been collected through land-based tests and will guide the next steps.

“It’s safe to say that the TRAM of today is not your TRAM of yesteryear,” said Del Toro.

China Tensions Prompt U.S. Navy Race to Reload Missiles at Sea

Rearming destroyers can take them out of combat for two months. The U.S. wants to fix that.

The USS Chosin, a guided-missile cruiser, sails alongside the larger USNS Washington Chambers, during testing of a new method of resupplying ships at sea. Photo: U.S. Navy

By Daniel MichaelsFollow aboard the USNS Washington Chambers, Mike CherneyFollow aboard the USS Dewey and Tonia CowanFollow in New York

Updated Dec. 2, 2024 1:08 am ET

A U.S. Navy destroyer can fire dozens of cruise missiles within minutes. Reloading the deadly warship back in port can take two months. In a war against China, that could be a fatal weakness. 

To overcome the delay, Navy engineers pulled a 30-year-old crane out of storage, wired it up to computers, and used it to build a new prototype reloading system called the Transferrable Reload At-sea Method. TRAM, as it is known, promises to slash the time needed for missile reloading, potentially to just days.

“The ability to rearm at sea will be critical to any future conflict in the Pacific,” said Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro after a recent test of TRAM off the California coast, to which The Wall Street Journal was granted exclusive access.

Until recently, the Navy didn’t feel much need for speed in rearming its biggest missile-firing warships. They only occasionally launched large numbers of Tomahawk cruise missiles or other pricey projectiles. 

Now, Pentagon strategists worry that if fighting broke out in the western Pacific—potentially 5,000 miles from a secure Navy base—destroyers, cruisers and other big warships would run out of vital ammunition within days, or maybe hours. 

Seeking to plug that supply gap, Del Toro tasked commanders and engineers with finding ways to reload the fleet’s launch systems at remote ports or even on the high seas. Otherwise, U.S. ships might need to sail back to bases in Hawaii or California to do so—putting them out of action for weeks. 

Navy warships must travel far to reload missiles.

Approximate distances

to Taiwan

Japan

800 miles

TAIWAN

1,650 miles

Guam

2,000 miles

Calif.

TAIWAN

Darwin

AUSTRALIA

Guam

Hawaii

Pago Pago

Source: Staff reports

Camille Bressange/WSJ

Slow reloading has been causing the Navy headaches in the Red Sea. Warships deployed there to defend cargo ships from Houthi rebels in Yemen must sail through the Suez Canal and to ports in Greece or Spain to reload, leaving the fight for extended periods.

“We should have developed this capability fully decades ago,” said retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis. “Again and again, after firing a significant load of Tomahawks…I had to pull my warships off the line to rearm,” said Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 

The Navy only reloads the launchers from solid ground or in sheltered harbors because it is a delicate operation. Engineers in the 1990s proposed systems for reloading at sea, but available technology wasn’t precise enough to transfer missiles from a platform constantly in motion, such as a ship or floating dock. 

The U.S.’s inability to restock missile launchers at sea is notable because America long ago performed engineering feats such as linking spacecraft orbiting the moon. The military routinely refuels military planes soaring above the clouds. 

Engineers say that the ocean surface—while more familiar—presents uniquely vexing physics challenges due to currents, wind and the mix of air and water.

Wave and Vessel Prediction

The motion of two ships on the open sea is challenging during resupply. To predict conditions, experts analyzed reflections from radar signals pointed at the ocean surface to measure wave speed in real time.

Why ship-to-ship transfers are difficult

Winds whip up the surface, causing or amplifying waves.

Motion

Crews must account for wind speed, waves, currents and how each ship moves in three dimensions.

Radar

Pitch

Up and down movement of bow and stern

Roll

Side-to-side tilting motion

Yaw

Direction of spin around center point

Heave

Vertical movement as ship moves across waves

Surge

Forward and backward movement

Sway

Ocean currents pull a ship in different directions

Sliding motion when pushed by wind or current

Sources: U.S. Navy; FutureWaves

Now digital advances including 3-D printing, specialized radar and motion-detectors of the kind found in cellphones, have allowed the Navy to revisit the idea. Newfound urgency is speeding up work toward a solution.

“We are transforming the way we fight,” said Del Toro onboard the USNS Washington Chambers, a supply ship, during the TRAM test.

He watched as crews zip-lined a dummy missile container to the cruiser USS Chosin sailing alongside and as technicians operated the experimental crane to position the 20-foot-long box over the ship’s launch cells.

Del Toro, whose term ends with the Biden administration, wants equipment like TRAM included in ship modernization work planned over the coming years. 

Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro aboard the USNS Washington Chambers during a demonstration of the Transferrable Reload At-sea Method. Photo: U.S. Navy

Civilian mariners aboard the USNS Washington Chambers attach a missile canister to a zip-line before it is transferred to the nearby USS Chosin. Photo: U.S. Navy

Today, the only U.S. warships that can be sustained indefinitely at sea and continue fighting are its 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and nine smaller amphibious assault ships, none of which carry vertical missile silos. 

TRAM could increase that number roughly fivefold, taking the total to around 100 warships without building a single new hull.

Until then, the Navy is seeking new rearming sites at friendly ports. In September, U.S. sailors and logisticians for the first time reloaded a missile onboard the USS Dewey, a destroyer, at an allied naval base in Darwin, Australia. 

At the Dewey’s deployment base in Yokosuka, Japan, missiles are reloaded from a barge that meets the destroyer at an anchorage in the harbor, but it is a sheltered area and the waters are calm. In a war, ports the U.S. uses in Japan and Guam could be targeted by Chinese missiles, prompting the Navy to seek havens further away.

“If conflict were to erupt, or if something were to happen, being able to go to various different locations around the Indo-Pacific, it makes it much faster for us to reload,” said Cmdr. Nicholas Maruca, the Dewey’s captain.

From the South China Sea, Darwin is a roughly 4½-day journey under normal sailing conditions, compared with a roughly three-week journey to the U.S. West Coast.

U.S. sailors and logisticians reload the USS Dewey with a missile at a naval base in Darwin, Australia. Photo: Mike Cherney/WSJ

Reloading at sea could slash that downtime even further, but it would be a dicey operation. Missiles in their boxes, which resemble slender shipping containers, can weigh more than 6,000 lbs. They must slide smoothly into tightfitting launch cells because jostling could damage delicate guidance systems—or worse.

“These are supersonic rockets. There is a lot of fire and gas involved with this,” Maruca said. “If you drop the missile, that’s not good.”

For decades, the Navy has provisioned its ships on the high seas by sending basic supplies across cables strung between them. It routinely refuels ships using hoses supported in this way. 

The connections require the ships to sail at nearly identical speeds, maintaining a constant distance. The equipment is designed so connections can be severed instantly if needed, such as if attacked. 

Loading a warship with dozens of missiles using a crane on the supply ship would be dangerously slow. TRAM is designed to make the process faster and safer.

Creating the TRAM mechanism was still challenging. To start work, Navy experts early this year pulled the mothballed 1990s prototype out of storage, disassembled it and drafted digital plans to reverse-engineer it, with help from some archived drawings. 

Putting the new plans in a computer simulation, they located the mechanism’s weakest points and added about 300 lbs. of steel reinforcement, said Ryan Hayleck, the project’s technical leader. The Chosin’s deck also needed reinforcing to handle the new load.

Technicians wired up both ships and the crane with sensors to understand how all the elements moved and what stresses they faced, all with the aim of refining designs. Navy Chief Engineer Rear Admiral Peter Small said the scads of data couldn’t have been collected through land-based tests and will guide the next steps.

“It’s safe to say that the TRAM of today is not your TRAM of yesteryear,” said Del Toro.

You may also like

2:16

Paused

0:01

/

5:51

Tap For Sound

To prepare for a potential war over Taiwan, the U.S is increasing its military presence in Australia to a level not seen since World War II. Here’s a look at why Australia is becoming a strategic hub for U.S. forces. Photo Illustration: Liting Yen

Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com and Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com

4. Rubio’s Tough Stance on China Means Pressure on Importers

It seems likely that this will be one of the most bipartisan issues for the next administration.

Excerpts:

Bipartisan support for the goal of tough action on China reflects a hardening stance toward China among the American public, if not the exact nuances of how it might look. 

American views of China are at the lowest level that the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, a think tank, has measured in surveys dating back to 1978. 

A variety of groups, from textile manufacturers to human rights organizations to law enforcement, have also increasingly coalesced to demand stronger action. 

“Rubio is an excellent choice to lead a critical agency such as the State Department, both from a national economic and security standpoint,” said National Council of Textile Organizations Chief Executive Kim Glas. NCTO has said U.S. workers and businesses can’t compete with Chinese producers who rely on forced labor.

Although some trade lobby groups favor freer trade with China, momentum in Washington has tilted across both aisles toward tough trade enforcement. 

“There’s so many data points where we can see that the trade and economic policy consensus is no longer a Red Team-Blue Team issue,” said Nick Iacovella, a former Rubio staffer who now works at Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nonpartisan group representing manufacturers, farmers and workers.

Rubio’s Tough Stance on China Means Pressure on Importers

As President-elect Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Rubio could influence whether companies like Shein or Temu can continue to do business in the U.S.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rubios-tough-stance-on-china-means-pressure-on-importers-5b7bb6d6?st=e5vEce&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Richard Vanderford

Follow

Dec. 2, 2024 5:30 am ET

Sen. Marco Rubio’s tough stance on the issue could mean a headache for importers in general and a threat to e-commerce giants that rely on Chinese imports Photo: jim watson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, is a strident critic of Chinese trade abuses, including its alleged use of forced labor. 

In Trump’s cabinet, Rubio’s tough stance on the issue could mean a headache for importers in general and a threat to e-commerce giants that rely on Chinese imports such as Shein and Temu.

Trump’s early cabinet picks extend a hawkish stance toward China that was a hallmark of his first administration. During Rubio’s tenure in the Senate, he has repeatedly pushed aggressive legislation to target China and called for tough action from the Biden administration. 

He has won bipartisan plaudits for his tough approach to China. As a powerful exponent of a kind of new, cross-party trade consensus that demands tough action on China, some say Rubio could be a nightmare for companies that might have hoped for a reprieve.

‘Champion’

“He has been a champion” of efforts to tackle China-based forced labor, departing Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a recent interview, “We therefore expect our prioritization of it to continue.”

Rubio was a lead Senate sponsor behind the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bars most imports from China’s Xinjiang region, the home to the Uyghur people and other minority groups that the U.S. says are being subject to human rights abuses. China denies those claims and the U.S. stance has become a sore point in U.S.-China relations. 

The UFLPA has forced businesses to take deep looks at their supply chains. Rubio has also explicitly called out Shein and Temu over their alleged use of “slave labor.” Shein said it has zero tolerance for forced labor. Temu has denied links to forced labor.

Officers of the Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations at the Port of New York/Newark inspecting a shipment from China. Photo: handout/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Biden administration has tried to aggressively enforce the UFLPA, including by detaining an estimated $3.66 billion in shipments as of Nov. 1, but Rubio has repeatedly called for more action. 

At the State Department, Rubio won’t be the top voice on the law’s enforcement—that falls to Homeland Security, with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem currently slated to lead that department—but State forms part of an interagency task force on forced labor. The department has also in the past sought to cajole allies to match U.S. efforts.

‘Loophole’ plugger

Rubio has called for the restrictions on a trade provision known as the de minimis exemption which lets low-value shipments of packages enter the country with minimal scrutiny and no tariffs. Critics call it a loophole and say it has opened the door to shipments that might contain forced labor-tainted goods, counterfeits and contraband.

Use of the provision has in recent years surged to more than 1 billion packages annually. Some Congressional research has estimated that Shein and Temu’s shipments comprise nearly a third of all imports via this method. Around one in five purchases this holiday season are expected to be made through Shein, Temu and other Chinese shopping apps, the Alliance for American Manufacturing, an advocacy group, said in research released last month.

Shein said it is in favor of de minimis reform. Temu has said it doesn’t rely on the provision.

“Rubio gets it,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat who is retiring from Congress after the current session adjourns. Blumenauer introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives to a Rubio Senate bill that would block China’s use of the loophole. 

Proponents of the trade exemption say it helps eliminate red tape and keep goods cheaper for U.S. consumers and businesses.

China vs. Team Purple

Bipartisan support for the goal of tough action on China reflects a hardening stance toward China among the American public, if not the exact nuances of how it might look. 

American views of China are at the lowest level that the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, a think tank, has measured in surveys dating back to 1978. 

A variety of groups, from textile manufacturers to human rights organizations to law enforcement, have also increasingly coalesced to demand stronger action. 

“Rubio is an excellent choice to lead a critical agency such as the State Department, both from a national economic and security standpoint,” said National Council of Textile Organizations Chief Executive Kim Glas. NCTO has said U.S. workers and businesses can’t compete with Chinese producers who rely on forced labor.

Although some trade lobby groups favor freer trade with China, momentum in Washington has tilted across both aisles toward tough trade enforcement. 

“There’s so many data points where we can see that the trade and economic policy consensus is no longer a Red Team-Blue Team issue,” said Nick Iacovella, a former Rubio staffer who now works at Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nonpartisan group representing manufacturers, farmers and workers.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, (D., Ill.) who worked with Rubio on a bill to force TikTok’s China-based owner to sell the app, called him a champion for human rights and the Uyghur cause. Kristhnamoorthi said he expects that the next administration and Rubio would continue the U.S.’s tough approach to forced labor, along with other trade-related measures such as export controls and investment restrictions.

“Beijing should understand that the people that are coming into positions of responsibility, certainly with regard to national security and topics that would touch them, that there’s going to be a lot of continuity, and they need to seriously consider the course that they’re going to take with regard to adopting aggressive tactics,” Krishnamoorthi said. 

“We are going to stand up to bullying on all of those fronts, and it’s going to be done on a bipartisan basis,” he said.

Write to Richard Vanderford at Richard.Vanderford@wsj.com

5. Russia’s war in the grey zone is chipping away at Nato

The subtitle says it all very succinctly. And the conclusion makes the key point about changing the enemies' entrenched assumption (which means actually ensuring in reality that NATO is not weak).

Excerpts:

Our defence-lite approach rests on some big bets: one is that our allies, in the US and Europe, care more about our security than we do. That assumption looks increasingly shaky, making us more vulnerable to direct Russian attack. True, our nuclear deterrent (another bet) remains a last-ditch response. But these Trident missiles reach their targets only thanks to American technology. Would Donald Trump (or any US president) risk Armageddon in a war where the US itself was not directly threatened? To avoid this, we and our European allies must rearm, both in military and institutional terms. Nato is too big, too slow, too diverse and too divided for many of the tasks in hand. Instead, we should build coalitions of the willing, the capable and the threat-aware, of countries willing to spend money and take risks in defence of their freedom. Britain is only one potential leader for such a coalition. France is another, Poland a third.

Filling all the gaps left by the US would be a daunting and colossally expensive task, taking at least a decade. The urgent diplomatic priority is therefore to ensure that the American retreat from Europe is orderly, retaining as far and as long as possible the hardest-to-replace elements, such as intelligence, logistics and the nuclear umbrella. That will require a bargain: helping the Trump administration on issues that it regards as existential, chiefly the intense competition with China. From improving the resilience of supply chains to regaining the western technological edge, Europe’s wealth and rule-setting power can make it into a useful ally.

Closest to home is the need to arm Ukraine to win, with weapons and money to support its innovative but underused defence industry. We should seize as much as possible of the $300 billion in frozen Russian central bank assets sitting in western countries. We should spend that money, mostly in the US, on weapons for Ukraine: another deal that President Trump will understand.

At home, we need to rethink our response to the wave of sub-threshold attacks, such as the new plague of drones. The most alarming theory is that they were spotting where pilots and other personnel live. The most advanced warplanes are useless if the humans who fly them are dead.

Finland’s model of comprehensive defence, with its plans, exercises, training, reservists, fallout shelters and stockpiles, shows how a country can turn itself into a dauntingly hard target for any potential aggressor. But building anything like Finland’s system will take years. We may have only months. The most important aspect of all therefore is to create some real deterrents to further Russian (and Chinese) behaviour.

We should not leave this to the countries most immediately afflicted. Just imagine, for example, that the Nordic and Baltic countries affected by rogue Chinese merchant ships announced they would formally celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday and also boost their diplomatic presence in Taiwan. That would sharply attract Chinese attention, and perhaps encourage the authorities in Beijing to tell their friends in Moscow to cool it. We could try turning the lights out with our cyberweapons too.

Changing our enemies’ entrenched assumptions about our weakness will be hard and risky. But failing to do so will be catastrophic.

Russia’s war in the grey zone is chipping away at Nato

thetimes.com · by Edward Lucas

WEEKEND ESSAY | EDWARD LUCAS

An insidious form of conflict, far subtler than all-out combat, is on the rise. It involves hired thugs, spy drones and seabed sabotage. Such attacks are hard to attribute but they target the very essence of western defence, writes Edward Lucas

Edward Lucas

Friday November 29 2024, 5.00pm, The Times

Nerves are jangling in Whitehall, and beyond. The security of Britain and its allies feels precarious in a way unknown for decades. A seasoned security source speaks of an “apocalyptic” mood. The news is bad enough from Ukraine. But problems closer to home, in the “grey zone” between peace and war, are sparking worries too.

This week unidentified drones buzzed four US air force bases in Britain. Another one shadowed the HMS Queen Elizabeth as it visited Hamburg. In Lithuania, a DHL cargo plane crashed at Vilnius airport, killing the pilot; the disaster follows three attempts to plant incendiary devices on other DHL flights, including one to Britain. In a naval stand-off in the straits between Denmark and Sweden, Nato warships confront a Chinese freighter suspected of seabed sabotage. A Russian missile corvette lurks nearby.

Proving hostile state activity in the grey zone is hard. Sometimes ordinary criminals, hooligans, pranksters or simple carelessness may be to blame. If these attacks are hard to attribute, they are even harder to stop. Our system is based on trust and openness, easily exploited. But the escalating scope, intensity and frequency of the attacks shows that we are failing to deter them.

President Vladimir Putin and former Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu after the Victory Day military parade on May 9. Putin’s ambitions go well beyond the obliteration of Ukraine as a sovereign, sustainable state

AP

Take the current stand-off in the Baltic Sea. Its chilly waters are becoming Europe’s geopolitical hotspot. Countries there feel an existential threat from a revanchist, militarised Russia. Attacks on them by land, sea, air and online are escalating.

In the latest provocation, officials believe that on the night of November 17-18 the Chinese-flagged merchant vessel Yi Peng 3 cut two data cables, one linking Sweden and Lithuania, the other Finland and Germany, by deliberately dragging its anchor on the seabed for 100 miles. “Nobody believes that these cables were cut accidentally,” said Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister. The vessel’s transponder was switched off. Its crew includes at least one Russian. The anchor is visibly damaged.

This is not a one-off. Last year another Chinese ship with Russian connections damaged a data cable and gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia. China admits this but blames an accident in heavy weather. If the motives are unclear, so is how to respond. The Yi Peng 3 is outside Danish territorial waters. Boarding it would breach international law — which the Chinese navy would gladly use as a precedent to interfere with shipping around Taiwan.

Officials believe the Chinese-flagged merchant vessel Yi Peng 3 cut two data cables, one linking Sweden and Lithuania, the other Finland and Germany, by deliberately dragging its anchor on the seabed

REUTERS

This “sub-threshold” or “hybrid” warfare is conducted with information, money and other intangible forms of pressure, but also using physical, even lethal force, all in nominal peacetime. It involves spies, soldiers and hired thugs. The targets may be energy infrastructure, computer networks or transport systems: the nerves and arteries of modern society. While the perpetrators enjoy impunity, victims cower. A newly declassified US intelligence assessment highlights a string of murders of Kremlin critics and fugitives living in supposedly safe foreign countries.

Others are at risk right now. For the British financier-turned-campaigner Sir Bill Browder, international travel is clouded by the threat of arrest and extradition to Russia. Christo Grozev, the lead researcher for the Bellingcat open-source investigative journalism outfit, had to flee his home city of Vienna because the Austrian authorities could not protect him from Russian assassins. This week, three Britain-based Bulgarians went on trial for espionage offences, including attempts to kidnap Grozev; they plead not guilty. Last year Grozev, an award-winning filmmaker, was disinvited from the Bafta awards ceremony in London: too dangerous, said the Metropolitan Police. Tolerating this “new normal,” with all the extra cost, risk, inconvenience and humiliation it imposes, blunts our feelings and ensures that worse outrages ensue.

RAF Lakenheath, which houses a US air base, after reports of possible drone activity around the area

TERRY HARRIS FOR THE TIMES

The real target is our decision-making. Some countries understand that these attacks threaten the whole system that keeps us safe and free. Their leaders are ready to respond decisively. Others are cowardly or muddled, fearing confrontation and escalation. They want to turn a blind eye and the other cheek. That involves deceiving the public. Most of what we in Britain know about the Russian firebomb attacks on DHL cargo planes comes from a Polish prosecutor. This is not about displaying magisterial indifference. The guardians of our security do not want their cluelessness exposed.

A stark example comes from Russia’s drones, missiles and other airspace intrusions. Frontline states would like to shoot them down — over Russian territory if necessary — and ask questions later. But what I hear from these countries is that no sooner have the intruders appeared on their radar screens than the phone rings. It is Washington on the line with an urgent message: hold fire. Fear of escalation is the Biden administration’s hallmark. American policymakers do not want trigger-happy allies dragging the US into a war with Russia. But Russia understands this. It is posing dilemmas and stoking divisions to the point that we cannot defend ourselves against anything.

A DHL cargo plane crashes near Vilnius, Lithuania, killing its pilot. The disaster follows three attempts to plant incendiary devices on other DHL flights, including one to Britain

AP

These tactics — “active measures” — go back to Soviet KGB days, a cocktail of propaganda, bribery, intimidation, subversion and sabotage. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians warned us of this, and of the dangerous revanchism and imperial nostalgia that fuelled it, in the early 1990s. British and other western decision-makers patronised, belittled and ignored these voices. Ukrainians paid the price. Their resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion has bought us three precious years. We wasted that time. Now we face the gravest security crisis in our lifetimes.

What would Britain do, for example, if an attack on the seabed destroyed a gas pipeline, power line or data cable to the UK? Do we sue? Issue a cross press release? Expel a Russian diplomat? Launch a missile strike? We lack credible means to respond, and Russia knows it.

The wreckage of the DHL cargo plane is seen at the crash site near Vilnius International Airport

REUTERS

In some ways our plight is worse than in the Cold War. The old East-West conflict had its horrifying moments but Britain was part of a strong alliance, resting on shared transatlantic values and loyalties. The “West” was bigger, stronger and richer than our adversaries. We understood them clearly and had means to counter them, not least by competition. Our system broadly worked. Theirs clearly didn’t. We had ideas we believed in. And we had fought serious wars within living memory.

None of that is true now. Economic and political models in authoritarian places such as Dubai and Singapore seem to work better. Our muscle memories have faded. People who knew the dark arts of dealing with a real enemy were fired or retired. The glib official answer to any security worries is that Nato is the world’s strongest and most successful military alliance. No adversary would risk war with it. But Nato is divided and distracted, undermined by the capricious behaviour of past, present (and doubtless future) US administrations, and by decades of European stinginess and complacency. It is configured (poorly) for a war we are not going to fight, at least right now, and not for the threats we actually face.

A sign at RAF Lakenheath prohibits drones.This week unidentified drones buzzed four US air force bases in Britain.

TERRY HARRIS FOR THE TIMES

Foremost among these is defeat in Ukraine and its consequences. If the heating and power network fail under Russia’s blitz, western officials expect up to five million refugees — many more if the front line folds. A forced ceasefire would create a giant Bosnia on Europe’s eastern border, with millions of angry, traumatised people living in a failed, bankrupt state: easy prey for mischief and meddling. It also spells nuclear proliferation. Putin has proved that nuclear blackmail works. If Ukraine had kept its nuclear stockpiles in 1994 Russia would have never dared attack it. Russia’s nuclear sabre rattling stopped outsiders supporting Ukraine properly. Other countries will plan accordingly.

Putin believes he has already won the most important battle. He has tested the West and found it wanting. But his ambitions go well beyond the obliteration of Ukraine as a sovereign, sustainable state. He wants a might-is-right world of bilateral deals in which Russia’s size guarantees success. That means breaking the multilateral institutions that enforce the post-1991 world order, an arrangement he regards as profoundly unfair to Russia. He wants Europe neutralised, fragmented and pliable. That goal would have seemed fantastically unlikely only a few years ago. Now it is all too plausible.

A police officer guards the DHL cargo plane crash site near Vilnius International Airport

REUTERS

Belatedly, many in Europe are spotting the danger. Bruno Kahl, the head of the German BND foreign intelligence service, told a conference this week that Russia seeks “the failure of Nato as a defence alliance”. That would be achieved, he says, if its Article 5 collective defence clause proved ineffective in the event of an attack. It is all too easy to see how this might happen.

Imagine how Russia might test the Article 5 threshold. Imagine mercenaries or irregular soldiers crossing into one of the Baltic states, or Poland or Finland, combined with electronic warfare that grounds planes and cripples critical infrastructure. Imagine bombs going off in Riga, Tallinn or Vilnius in the name of shadowy “liberation fronts” wanting closer ties with Russia. Imagine the assassination of key military, political or business figures by hired goons. Those under attack will rightly see this as an existential threat requiring an armed response.

What will Nato do? Many countries will urge caution. Would Germany, even outside its current political paralysis, agree to the sinking of a Russian warship, to an attack on a special forces base in Kaliningrad or a drone launch site near St Petersburg? Would the White House give a green light to such responses? Almost certainly not. That raises the prospect of a Nato country or countries under attack having to cope with “allies” who try to hamper or even veto their defences.

Film-maker Christo Grozev, lead researcher for Bellingcat, had to flee his home city of Vienna because Austrian authorities could not protect him from Russian assassins

GETTY

At least some frontline states can plausibly defend themselves. Finland’s military planners, for example, assume the country may have to fight entirely alone for three to four months. Estonia is spending a quarter of its defence budget on ammunition and buying state-of-the-art long-range artillery for an immediate counterstrike if attacked. Poland is becoming Europe’s strongest military power, spending more than 4 per cent of GDP on defence — twice Britain’s puny share and with much greater effect.

We would not be so lucky. Britain, without its allies, would be out of ammunition in three or four days. We lack also spare parts, fuel, communications, logistics and reserves — almost everything we would need in a real war of any duration. Fancy weapons platforms are useless once they have nothing to fire.

Our defence-lite approach rests on some big bets: one is that our allies, in the US and Europe, care more about our security than we do. That assumption looks increasingly shaky, making us more vulnerable to direct Russian attack. True, our nuclear deterrent (another bet) remains a last-ditch response. But these Trident missiles reach their targets only thanks to American technology. Would Donald Trump (or any US president) risk Armageddon in a war where the US itself was not directly threatened? To avoid this, we and our European allies must rearm, both in military and institutional terms. Nato is too big, too slow, too diverse and too divided for many of the tasks in hand. Instead, we should build coalitions of the willing, the capable and the threat-aware, of countries willing to spend money and take risks in defence of their freedom. Britain is only one potential leader for such a coalition. France is another, Poland a third.

Filling all the gaps left by the US would be a daunting and colossally expensive task, taking at least a decade. The urgent diplomatic priority is therefore to ensure that the American retreat from Europe is orderly, retaining as far and as long as possible the hardest-to-replace elements, such as intelligence, logistics and the nuclear umbrella. That will require a bargain: helping the Trump administration on issues that it regards as existential, chiefly the intense competition with China. From improving the resilience of supply chains to regaining the western technological edge, Europe’s wealth and rule-setting power can make it into a useful ally.

Closest to home is the need to arm Ukraine to win, with weapons and money to support its innovative but underused defence industry. We should seize as much as possible of the $300 billion in frozen Russian central bank assets sitting in western countries. We should spend that money, mostly in the US, on weapons for Ukraine: another deal that President Trump will understand.

At home, we need to rethink our response to the wave of sub-threshold attacks, such as the new plague of drones. The most alarming theory is that they were spotting where pilots and other personnel live. The most advanced warplanes are useless if the humans who fly them are dead.

Finland’s model of comprehensive defence, with its plans, exercises, training, reservists, fallout shelters and stockpiles, shows how a country can turn itself into a dauntingly hard target for any potential aggressor. But building anything like Finland’s system will take years. We may have only months. The most important aspect of all therefore is to create some real deterrents to further Russian (and Chinese) behaviour.

We should not leave this to the countries most immediately afflicted. Just imagine, for example, that the Nordic and Baltic countries affected by rogue Chinese merchant ships announced they would formally celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday and also boost their diplomatic presence in Taiwan. That would sharply attract Chinese attention, and perhaps encourage the authorities in Beijing to tell their friends in Moscow to cool it. We could try turning the lights out with our cyberweapons too.

Changing our enemies’ entrenched assumptions about our weakness will be hard and risky. But failing to do so will be catastrophic.

PROMOTED CONTENT

thetimes.com · by Edward Lucas

6. Opinion: Chasing the Impossible Will Be the West’s Downfall

A response to Richard Haas' recent Foreign Affairs article.

Excerpts:

Only the determination of the West can stop them. How not to recall a quote attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “If a country chooses shame between war and disgrace, it will get both war and disgrace.”

It is not even the next generations of Europeans and Americans who will pay a much higher price for the weakness and indecision of the current politicians, but the current generation, within the next five years.

The familiar system of world security has been destroyed, as the Kremlin has unceremoniously made sure of. It is no longer possible to restore it, much less preserve it. But this does not mean that one should admit defeat.

It is necessary to build a new system based on regional defense blocs with the transfer of authority, responsibility, and expenditures to local leaders. Naturally, with the active participation of the US as a partner of these regional military alliances. And Ukraine, which has the most powerful and trained army among European countries, could become the leader of such a bloc, uniting the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, which most acutely feel threatened by Russia.

This already now requires the US to be extremely active in the spheres of diplomacy and economics. The era of the “end of history“ is over, and Western democracies are obliged to increase their defense production and military power to counter the new “axis of evil” - Russia, DPRK and Iran. Ukraine will do the rest on its own.

It is possible, of course, to choose a strategy of non-interference and turn a blind eye to the growing threats to world security. But then we must accept the fact that soon, even Mexico will be oriented towards China and Russia.

Opinion: Chasing the Impossible Will Be the West’s Downfall

It is critical for the West to face up to realities and respond resolutely or face further humiliation and debilitation.

By Oleh Dunda

December 1, 2024, 4:07 pm

kyivpost.com · by Oleh Dunda · December 1, 2024

Foreign Affairs published an article by Richard Haass “The Perfect Has Become the Enemy of the Good in Ukraine.” It describes in detail the strategy of “appeasement of the aggressor,” which is now being actively promoted in Western political circles. In broad outline, this vision echoes many proposals – from J.D. Vance to Mike Pompeo.

But these plans all have one major problem: a complete disregard for the causes and objectives of the war Russia has unleashed. And without understanding this, it is impossible to propose a workable plan to end the war in any form.

For a clearer analysis, we will leave Ukraine’s position out of the brackets. It is crystal clear. Both the Ukrainian authorities and, especially, Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines are not ready to accept defeat and capitulation to Russia in any form. Including in the form of territorial concessions to Russia. And the talk about the war fatigue of Ukrainian society is greatly exaggerated and has nothing to do with reality.

But the rest of the theses stated in the article deserve a separate careful consideration and analysis.

Ukraine’s victory and full return of its territories implies an increase in the risks of nuclear confrontation between Russia and NATO (US and EU) and therefore Ukraine’s victory is not acceptable.

The world has already gone through Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons during the Cold War. And, it turned out, they can be quelled by showing determination and resilience.

Russia, like the USSR, is fragile and can threaten only as long as it is allowed to do so. Prigozhin’s revolt proved that just 5,000 fighters can bring a regime to the brink of collapse.

At the time of Wagner’s march on Moscow, the Russian power vertical was close to paralysis and was not ready to make any decisions. The basis of Russia’s political and state elite are ordinary careerists and conformists who are not suicidal. And the Kursk operation in Ukraine showed the whole world that the notorious “red lines” of nuclear blackmail are just a bluff of the Kremlin.

The West’s main task should be to preserve Ukraine’s independence with the right to choose any alliances and Ukraine’s ability to build up its own military capabilities.

The drafts of the Istanbul Accords 2022, recently published by the New York Times, unambiguously outline Russia’s demands for “peace.” They include restrictions on Ukraine’s freedom of choice of defense alliances, and a de facto ban on its partners providing military assistance to Ukraine in the event of aggression in the form of a “unanimous consensus” procedure.

And most importantly, limiting the potential of the Ukrainian army to the lowest possible level. And Russia has not given up on these demands. In particular, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an October interview with Newsweek directly states: “The Istanbul agreements could be the basis for a settlement... They provide for Kyiv’s refusal to join NATO.”

And Russian President Vladimir Putin wants even more concessions.

“We are ready for peace talks, but only not on the basis of some ‘wishes,’ the name of which changes from month to month, but on the basis of the realities that are emerging and on the basis of the agreements that were reached in Istanbul.On the basis, but based on the realities of today,” Putin said during his speech at the Valdai Club.

And these demands, including “demilitarization,” are repeated constantly by Kremlin public speakers at every level in all public speeches. Where in these Kremlin demands are the possibilities for preserving Ukraine’s independence in the future?

Ukraine must cede territories to Russia in order to achieve peace.

These proposals were created around Moscow’s territorial claims to Ukraine. Allegedly, if we agree on the territory, the war will end. But Moscow is eager to get control, at least over all the regions of Ukraine already written in the Constitution of the Russian Federation, but not yet occupied, in particular, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

“The Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as well as the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics have become part of the Russian Federation, and there can be no talk of violating our state unity,” Putin said at a meeting with Russian Foreign Ministry officials in the summer.

And freezing the situation along the front line will be interpreted by Russia in the future as an encroachment on its territorial integrity. Unless, of course, it falls apart by then.

But this is not even about Ukrainian land. From the Munich Speech in 2007 to his speech at the Valdai Club on Nov. 7, Putin has been literally shouting: this is not a question of territories, but of restoring the Cold War world order with the division of zones of control.

Against this background, 20% of Ukraine’s territories looks like a defeat for Moscow.

The Kremlin is consistently pushing through the concept of expanding its zones of influence without backing down a step. For the last 20 years, the main and only way for Moscow to solve problems has been the strategy of “we will squeeze you, sit tight, push you down, without retreating a step.”

For some reason, Western leaders have forgotten about Moscow’s ultimatum to NATO and the United States in December 2021 with the actual demand to disarm the former Warsaw Pact countries. Let me remind you that “Putin’s ultimatum to NATO” on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine provided for the return of the Alliance to the 1997 borders, which means the exclusion of 14 countries: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and Northern Macedonia. Not to mention Sweden and Finland, which will join NATO in 2023.

Moreover, in late October in Minsk, Lavrov again reminded the West that no one has given up on this ultimatum and is not going to do so.

“Contrary to the assurances of the Soviet leadership and despite our repeated warnings over the past 20 years, the North Atlantic Alliance has been recklessly expanding eastward...This is the root cause of the crisis, which the leaders of the West today prefer not to recall,” said the Russian Foreign Minister.

And it would be short-sighted to turn a blind eye to these statements. The current pro-Russian policy of Prime Ministers Viktor Orban of Hungary and Robert Fico of Slovakia shows that the restoration of the Warsaw Bloc is quite real.

And the policy of “appeasement of the aggressor” will lead to the fact that there will be more and more such “Orbans” and “Ficos.” And this will be the end of the big European project and the North Atlantic Alliance in its current form.

We can talk about peacekeeping contingents in the demilitarized zone and freezing Ukraine’s accession to NATO for 20 years, as described in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, but even this is not part of Moscow’s plans, which it has been promoting for the past 15 years and will not lead to the desired result.

The examples of a divided Germany, Korea and Cyprus are not relevant here.

Containment of North Korea, with the Soviet Union looming behind it, required first the US entry into the war - “boots on the ground” - and then the formation of impressive military contingents: about 30,000 US soldiers are in South Korea right now.

The US contingent in Germany during the “Cold War” amounted to 200,000 soldiers. And the tranquility of Cyprus is provided by 15,000 British military. The question of sending the US army to Ukraine is not even discussed now because of the risks of a nuclear confrontation. Who will enforce the concept of the demilitarized zone?

Western democracies lack the capacity to increase military production to support Ukraine on the battlefield.

And we are not even talking about global challenges, but about war on a fairly small territory. The Haass article quotes J.D. Vance as saying, “Essentially, we don’t have the capability to produce the amount of weapons Ukraine needs to win the war.”

A very strange statement.

Let’s compare the economies of the parties. The combined gross product of the US and EU in 2023 was $44 trillion.

Russia’s gross product is only $2 trillion. It is believed that, having equal potentials, Western countries defeated the “evil empire” in the “Cold War,” mainly due to the flexibility of liberal economies.

And here it is actually suggested that these victors of the USSR recognize their defeat before the autocratic economy of Russia, which is, moreover, several times smaller. If this is true, then it is necessary to rewrite current economic theories and recognize the advantage of centralized authoritarian economies, since liberal economies are so weak.

To summarize, it should be noted that the very discussion of “appeasement of the aggressor” and related proposals for a “ceasefire” entail disastrous consequences. A careful analysis of Moscow’s public statements makes it clear that its war is not for Ukrainian territories, but for the opportunity to once again become the “gendarme of Europe,” first and foremost, and for influence in other regions of the world.

Putin confirmed this once again in his Valdai speech when he said that “the next twenty years will be not less, but more difficult.” Careful observers at this point should have shuddered and realized - Ukraine is only the beginning.

In addition, a huge number of countries in Africa, Asia, and South America are now taking a neutral stance. They are waiting to see which side the scales of confrontation will swing to in order to be next to the winner.

And statements “about appeasement of the aggressor,” “avoiding escalation,” “not entering the conflict,” “about the weakness of the Western defense industry” only lead to the expansion of potential allies for autocracies, because they confidently incorporate all weak states into their sphere of influence - from Georgia to the countries of Africa and South America.

Only the determination of the West can stop them. How not to recall a quote attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “If a country chooses shame between war and disgrace, it will get both war and disgrace.”

It is not even the next generations of Europeans and Americans who will pay a much higher price for the weakness and indecision of the current politicians, but the current generation, within the next five years.

The familiar system of world security has been destroyed, as the Kremlin has unceremoniously made sure of. It is no longer possible to restore it, much less preserve it. But this does not mean that one should admit defeat.

It is necessary to build a new system based on regional defense blocs with the transfer of authority, responsibility, and expenditures to local leaders. Naturally, with the active participation of the US as a partner of these regional military alliances. And Ukraine, which has the most powerful and trained army among European countries, could become the leader of such a bloc, uniting the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, which most acutely feel threatened by Russia.

This already now requires the US to be extremely active in the spheres of diplomacy and economics. The era of the “end of history“ is over, and Western democracies are obliged to increase their defense production and military power to counter the new “axis of evil” - Russia, DPRK and Iran. Ukraine will do the rest on its own.

It is possible, of course, to choose a strategy of non-interference and turn a blind eye to the growing threats to world security. But then we must accept the fact that soon, even Mexico will be oriented towards China and Russia.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

kyivpost.com · by Oleh Dunda · December 1, 2024

7. The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful

Eli Lake explains why Gabbard's policy preferences should be challenged but not her loyalty to the US.

Excerpts:

Indeed, Gabbard’s opposition to conflict at all costs has, in the past, put her on the wrong side of some of Trump’s best foreign policy decisions. In 2020, after Trump ordered the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s terror master general, Gabbard said the operation had “no justification whatsoever.” Soleimani had targeted American troops in Iraq for years by that point. In the run-up to the strike, Soleimani’s minions had attempted to overrun the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Other Iranian proxies in the months before had attacked international shipping lanes and launched strikes against Saudi oil facilities.

That said, there is no evidence that she came to these views because she is colluding with a foreign power or disloyal to our country. The woman is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, and she served in Iraq and the Horn of Africa.

Questioning Gabbard’s loyalty to America is not only low—the tactic is also ineffective. This innuendo campaign comes on the eve of Trump’s second term. Americans lived through his first term when MSNBC broadcast false allegations from a junk dossier to its viewers as if it were ironclad proof of presidential treason. It turned out the infamous pee tape wasn’t real and neither was the elaborate theory of Trump-Russia collusion. Meanwhile, Trump pursued an often hawkish line on Russia, such as selling arms to Ukraine when his predecessor did not.

In this light, the howls of “traitor” come off as sound and fury, signifying nothing. It’s just more Russia, Russia, Russia, as Kellyanne Conway once said. Even The New York Times, in its story about the alignment between Gabbard’s foreign policy views and Moscow, acknowledged, “No evidence has emerged that she has ever collaborated in any way with Russia’s intelligence agencies.”

So it’s both unsavory and ineffective to imply that Gabbard is a Russian asset. And unlike some of Trump’s other controversial cabinet picks, GOP insiders tell me that senators would like to find a reason to approve Gabbard’s nomination. As one Republican Senate staffer told The Free Press, “No one is looking to get into a fight right now over this; there are too many other bigger fish to fry.”

The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful

Take issue with her views on Russia and Syria, not her motives.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tulsi-gabbard-smears-russia-syria-putin-assad?utm

By Eli Lake

December 1, 2024

If one read only the legacy press and listened to Democrats, one would think that president-elect Donald Trump has just nominated a Kremlin stooge to oversee America’s intelligence community.

Trump’s choice to be his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, has been tarred as “likely a Russian asset” by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL). The New York Times last week devoted a feature-length story to how Gabbard has become a “favorite of Russia’s state media.” Hillary Clinton once claimed Moscow was “grooming” her to run for president. Former congressman Adam Kinzinger, writing in The Bulwark, called her “outright disloyal.”

Gabbard certainly has very different views than Clinton and Kinzinger on foreign policy and the intelligence community. But her neutrality on Ukraine’s war for survival and her openness to diplomacy with despots also places her out of step with the mainstream of the Republican majority (not to mention most Democrats) in the Senate. She will have some explaining to do in her nomination hearing.

I happen to think Gabbard is far too credulous when it comes to some of the world’s most despicable tyrants. Her past remarks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were horrendous. Consider her video message from February 27, 2022, three days after Russia unilaterally invaded Ukraine. “It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country.”

She uttered those words when Ukraine was at risk of extinguishment by the Russian army. There was no room for both sides at that moment. The Ukrainians were the victims; the Russians were the aggressors. And yet Gabbard believed Russia should be rewarded by preemptively closing off Ukraine’s prospect of joining NATO’s defensive alliance, even after the country had historically been invaded and starved by its powerful neighbor. No thanks.

That wasn’t the first time Gabbard displayed atrocious judgment in foreign policy. In 2017, four years after Syria’s tyrant Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his opposition, Gabbard visited him in Damascus to pursue dialogue. There’s nothing wrong with meeting an adversary in war. But as a member of Congress, she was conferring legitimacy on a regime that the first Trump administration was trying to isolate. That visit is likely to cause even more problems for her after rebel forces swept through the west and northwest of Syria over the weekend, capturing the ancient city of Aleppo—and proving once again that al-Assad does not have the support of his people.

Indeed, Gabbard’s opposition to conflict at all costs has, in the past, put her on the wrong side of some of Trump’s best foreign policy decisions. In 2020, after Trump ordered the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s terror master general, Gabbard said the operation had “no justification whatsoever.” Soleimani had targeted American troops in Iraq for years by that point. In the run-up to the strike, Soleimani’s minions had attempted to overrun the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Other Iranian proxies in the months before had attacked international shipping lanes and launched strikes against Saudi oil facilities.

That said, there is no evidence that she came to these views because she is colluding with a foreign power or disloyal to our country. The woman is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, and she served in Iraq and the Horn of Africa.

Gabbard speaks with Trump during a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on October 22, 2024. (Jabin Botsford via Getty Images)

Questioning Gabbard’s loyalty to America is not only low—the tactic is also ineffective. This innuendo campaign comes on the eve of Trump’s second term. Americans lived through his first term when MSNBC broadcast false allegations from a junk dossier to its viewers as if it were ironclad proof of presidential treason. It turned out the infamous pee tape wasn’t real and neither was the elaborate theory of Trump-Russia collusion. Meanwhile, Trump pursued an often hawkish line on Russia, such as selling arms to Ukraine when his predecessor did not.

In this light, the howls of “traitor” come off as sound and fury, signifying nothing. It’s just more Russia, Russia, Russia, as Kellyanne Conway once said. Even The New York Times, in its story about the alignment between Gabbard’s foreign policy views and Moscow, acknowledged, “No evidence has emerged that she has ever collaborated in any way with Russia’s intelligence agencies.”

So it’s both unsavory and ineffective to imply that Gabbard is a Russian asset. And unlike some of Trump’s other controversial cabinet picks, GOP insiders tell me that senators would like to find a reason to approve Gabbard’s nomination. As one Republican Senate staffer told The Free Press, “No one is looking to get into a fight right now over this; there are too many other bigger fish to fry.”

The signals from Mar-a-Lago suggest that they are looking for Gabbard to play up her commitment to curbing the kinds of abuses in the intelligence community that plagued the first Trump administration.

“Just as the Democrats and the Washington elite see President Trump as a threat to their unchecked power, they see Congresswoman Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard as a threat as well,” said Trump transition spokeswoman Alexa Henning. “As DNI director she will champion our constitutional rights and put an end to using intelligence agencies as weapons against the American people.”

That does not sound like a nominee willing to double down on the spirit of aloha when it comes to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Nonetheless, in order to be confirmed, the former Hawaii lawmaker will have to show that some of her positions have evolved. That is the normal way confirmation hearings work. A nominee’s record is reviewed and challenged, and the nominee then offers to revise and extend their remarks.

Gabbard should be pressed to explain two things: why she believed Ukraine was as much to blame for Russia for a war that Russia alone started, and her thoughts on al-Assad’s tyranny, which is now being challenged by the very Syrians he purports to rule. If she persuasively clarifies how her views have developed, then she should have the chance to serve. But if she can’t square her past positions, or she still defends them, then the Senate should reject her nomination.

Again, this is how the process is supposed to work. For those senators still concerned that Gabbard may soon oversee the U.S. intelligence community, it should also signal that Washington at the end of 2024 is not the same place as it was in 2017. In other words, criticize Gabbard for her weakness and credulity when it comes to America’s adversaries, but don’t question the loyalty of a woman who has served honorably in uniform.

Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Read his piece “Meet the People of Trump World 2.0,” and follow him on X @EliLake.

8. Military Applications of Autonomy and AI by Mick Ryan

Excerpts:

As one short sequence at the start of Revenge of the Sith demonstrates, there is more to movies than their entertainment value alone. They can provide important insights into contemporary military challenges, and sometimes, even offer some solutions. In this instance, the large space battle at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, and the intervention of Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, offers multiple insights into the potential future pathways and capabilities offered by autonomous systems and artificial intelligence in military affairs.

While films (and books) cannot provide every solution to future challenges, they do provide a useful complement to the study of military history, current affairs, and technological developments for the modern military professional.

The Future of War

How Star Wars can provide useful prompts for thinking through the challenges and opportunities

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/military-applications-of-autonomy?utm

Mick Ryan

Dec 01, 2024

Source: StarWars.com

For my regular readers, this is a slight variation on my normal topics. And this wasn’t the article I had intended to write this week. But, while watching the third chapter in the Star War prequel trilogy over the weekend, I could not help myself. Fiction, and science fiction, can help us think about contemporary challenges.

Next year, the third prequel film in the Star Wars saga, Chapter III: Revenge of the Sith, celebrates 20 years since its release. The movie, which provides the closing chapter in the prequel trilogy that explored the life of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader, was a commercial success, taking over $840 million world-wide.

Most rankings of the Star Wars films place Revenge of the Sith somewhere in the bottom half of all Star Wars movies released to date. A 2024 Buzzfeed ranking had it at eighth of 11 movies (Solo takes last place), Entertainment Weekly in 2023 ranked it in 6^th place, Space.com put it in 10^th (ouch) and the Rotten Tomatoes ‘Tomatometer’ has it in 7^th. So, it is fair to say that the film has its lovers and haters, as do the prequel and sequel trilogies more generally.

There have been hundreds of articles written about this subject in the past two decades. To get a sense of this debate, I have included some of these pieces below:

• How the Star Wars Prequels Went From Being Hated to Loved - Link
• Why I love the ‘Star Wars’ prequels (and you should too) - Link
• Explaining Why The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy Hate Disappeared - Link
• How I Forgave George Lucas and Learned to Love Star Wars Again - Link

I am sure I could write pages and pages to justify which Star Wars films I love (generally the original trilogy, Rogue One and the prequels) and the ones I don’t love as much (the rest). But that is not the aim of this piece.

Let me go back a step. Last night, I sat down to watch Revenge of the Sith As always, the movie provides outstanding visuals and a good conclusion to the Anakin Skywalker trilogy, even if the dialog is shaky at times (“no, it’s because I love YOU so much”).

Anyway, as I watched the opening sequence with Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi conducting their approach to the Separatist ship on which Count Dooku and General Grievous are holding the abducted Chancellor Palpatine, it occurred to me that the scene contained a plethora of issues with autonomous systems, as well as human-machine and human-AI teaming. Key themes in this opening sequence might be useful for current military leaders and those involved in developing new tactics, strategies and force constructs for the 21^st century.

Science fiction and speculative fiction have been used for this purpose for some time. As I explored in a recent piece for Engelsberg Ideas:

Military fiction emerged as societies and their military institutions sought to understand and adapt to the wide-ranging and rapid technological changes that occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution in the latter half of that century. With that great change came new opportunities and fears.

Militaries also recognise the virtue of fiction as a speculative tool for contemplating the future of conflict. Retired senior military officers have sought to leverage their long military experience to explore contemporary security threats through the lens of high-technology military conflict. The standard was first set by Sir John Hackett with his 1980 novel, The Third World War: August 1985 about a possible clash between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

In recent years, the concept of FICINT, an acronym for fictional intelligence, has been applied to futuristic stories that contain lessons for those facing new technologies, as well as societal and strategic challenges in the modern world. Peter Singer and August Cole, authors of the influential novel of a future war, Ghost Fleet, have coined the term Useful Fiction to describe the application of fiction to real world problems. As they note in their paper Thinking the Unthinkable With Useful Fiction:

FICINT remains ideally suited to a world not just of technologies evolving at machine speed and geopolitics undergoing systemic changes, but also in the midst of a historical crisis that tests the limits of our comprehension. It can spread research in a manner that is understandable, and more shareable, as well as foster emotional connections that make readers, in turn, more likely to drive change. FICINT can aid in answering the question of ‘what do we do next’ as timelines move forward at an unpredictable pace which every organisation has to contend with, whether it is planning for war or justifying the next budget.

So, that is the background to why I believe that fiction and science fiction can be very useful in complementing our study of current affairs, new technology and military history. The thoughtful combination of fiction and non-fiction can provide solutions and useful pathways to deal with the rapidly changing technological and geopolitical environment.

Five Key Insights

But the question remains, how is Revenge of the Sith relevant in providing insights for contemporary military leaders and planners? There are five key insights (but there are probably others) from the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith that I would like to explore in the following section.

First, the application of massed, cheap autonomous systems to protect small numbers of exquisite, highly capable crewed military platforms. As Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker thread their way through the massive space battle between Republic and Separatist ships above the galactic capital of Coruscant. As Obi Wan and Anakin progress, it becomes clear that a multitude of small drones are being used to help defend the large Separatist starships fighting in what is known as The Battle of Coruscant.

While in Ukraine we have seen drones used to help protect armoured vehicles in combat, as well as on casualty evacuation and logistics missions, these are generally operated and piloted by humans. Drones have even been used to lead some Ukrainian attacks against Russian positions. And the Russians have tested rudimentary uncrewed ground systems to accompany crewed ground vehicles to protect them from attack from Ukrainian UAVs.

In the near future, fully autonomous drones might be routinely attached to crewed platforms, be they large ships, bombers or tanks. These could be linked into digital battle command networks and have the ability to autonomously scan for threat, prioritise them and then attack threats without human intervention. This might be a much more advanced version of current capabilities such as the Trophy system mounted on armoured vehicles. However, more survivable and multi-use drones might be a future solution to the protection of expensive, crewed military platforms.

The second insight is about fully autonomous warfare where autonomous systems attack other autonomous systems. In Revenge of the Sith, this occurs several times in the opening sequence, but is most obvious when a Separatist Buzz Droid (also known as a Pistoeka Sabotage Droid) lands on Obi Wan’s Jedi interceptor and destroys the R4 droid that assists in piloting and operating the ship. Droid on droid combat is common in the Star Wars universe and in science fiction more generally. But what about in the real world?

Until the start of the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there were few if any examples of autonomous systems targeting each other in combat or in defensive scenarios (I don’t count CIWS or missiles shooting down drones). However, in the past three years there has been a steady development of autonomous or remotely operated systems that can target enemy drones.

In the air, drone on drone combat has become more common with some drone types being specifically adapted for this kind of aerial combat. There have also been instances of uncrewed aerial vehicles attacking uncrewed ground vehicles (UGV). An example of this was Russian army’s use of new grenade-armed robotic mini-tanks in an assault on Ukrainian positions west of Avdiivka in March this year. The Ukrainians destroyed the Russian UGVs using drones. The Ukrainians have also used drones to destroy Russian mine-laying UGVs.

New technologies specifically designed from the ground up to intercept enemy drones are becoming available, and some are being deployed in Ukraine. The Fortem DroneHunter F700 and Andruil drone hunting Roadrunner are two examples of what is certain to be an expanding range of drone-versus-drone combat capabilities in the coming years.

More importantly, what role does drone-on-drone combat in tactical operations? The array of missions will likely encompass defensive tasks, such as defending high value targets against loitering munitions and enemy surveillance and kamikaze drones, through to offensive missions where drones are used to destroy other drones that are defending targets so that attack drones and missiles can penetrate through to their targets. This drone-on-drone combat will increasingly spread into the maritime and ground environments, with military institutions seeking to exploit the advantages of their own autonomous systems while denying them to the enemy.

This is not just a technological challenge, however. It will require revisions of tactical doctrine as well as the evolution of military organisations and, as the Ukrainians have done, potentially the development of entirely new and novel drone institutions.

A third theme from Revenge of the Sith is the issue of autonomous systems being used to attack crewed military platforms. In Revenge of the Sith this manifests as Separatist tri-fighters attacking a squadron of clone-piloted Republic ARC-170 starfighters. Most of the crewed Republic fighters are destroyed in this engagement.

It is a situation that we have also seen from the earliest days of the Ukraine conflict as well as in the war in the Middle East. Drones, and more recently FPV drones, have been used extensively by both sides in the Ukraine war to target tanks, artillery, headquarters and even individual soldiers. This has become a normal operating method for both sides and is increasingly being included in the inventories of other nations as well. They are transforming the conduct of modern war in doing so, while also changing the character of the military institutions that employ them. As Clint Hinote and I wrote in a recent piece for War on the Rocks:

In the coming decade, military institutions may realize a situation where uncrewed systems outnumber humans. At present, the tactics, training, and leadership models of military institutions are designed for military organizations that are primarily human, and those humans exercise close control of the machines. Soon, the ratio of humans to uncrewed systems will flip.

We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in this issue in Ukraine. As the number of drones accelerates, and their missions expand, we will see a transformation of how autonomous systems are used across the air, land and sea domains. It is also likely to drive significant changes in tactics, doctrine and the fundamental organisational constructs of military forces that have dominated for the past century.

Fourth, future autonomous systems might be able to transform their shapes and operating modes to be able to function across different domains. In Revenge of the Sith, Separatist vulture droids (also known as the Variable Geometry Self-Propelled Battle Droid, Mark I) that walk across the exterior of large starships are able to change shape and function as defensive tools against Republic fighters. to missile-launching fighters.

What kind of utility might a multi-domain drone have in modern conflict? They may be useful for applications that require stealthy approaches (by sea or land) to an objective area, but then require rapid speed and manoeuvrability for the final prosecution of a target (be it for reconnaissance or more lethal missions).

Vulture droids in standing and flying configurations. Source: StarWars.com

Drones capable of operating in more than one domain are already being developed. The air-sea drones such as the Sea Dart and the TJ Flying Fish (both being produced by Chinese companies) and the Diodon amphibious drone. An even more intriguing development, presented at the 2023 International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications, is a tricopter drone capable of flying, driving on the ground and operating as a surface vessel on water. There is a clearly a future for these multi-domain autonomous systems, although there will probably be a cost element which could see these multi-domain drones being more expensive than single domain autonomous systems.

A final theme from Revenge of the Sith that is relevant in modern war is drones and their integral AI providing cognitive augmentation or the ability to offload human tasks in complex environments. During the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith, Obi Wan on several occasions speaks to his astromech droid, R4-P17. At the same time, Anakin Skywalker communicates with his droid, R2-D2 several times. Obi Wan even states at one point that “flying is for droids”, which provides an insight into the mindset of some humans about the role of non-human sentience. How might our own views on the role and functions of drones and other autonomous systems evolve?

The droids in the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith, are integral to the functioning of the Jedi interceptors being flown by Obi Wan and Anakin; they provide navigation aid, manage many of the ships systems, and provide an adaptive capacity for in-flight ship repairs when battle damage is sustained. R2-D2 even provides a basic ‘ship defence’ capacity on Anakin’s ship during the sequence when it electrocutes an attacking buzz droid. This provides a useful metaphor for how humans are beginning to use, and partner with, tools that provide cognitive augmentation.

Humans have long used different tools to aid in their ability to undertake cognitive tasks. Whether it was an abacus, a calculator, pen and paper or computers, human cognition has been assisted with tools and machines external to the human body. Newly developed algorithms, high performance computing and artificial intelligence are already demonstrating the ability to assist humans to plan and think through complex tasks. The myriad of applications for AI now extends from calendar management, food menu planning and data management through to complex systems analysis and generation of images, video, and text.

The offloading or delegation of human cognitive tasks to ‘droids and AI’ has already begun. Both Ukraine and Russia use AI in a range of tasks that extend from assisting the targeting of UAVs, catching Russian sanctions busters, cyber warfare and combating disinformation, identifying and tracking war criminals, geolocation and analysis of open-source data to identify enemy units and to provide faster imagery and intelligence analysis. The Ukrainians have even employed AI to understand how targeted military activities have a cognitive effect on the Russians.

For some further reading on the use of AI during the war in Ukraine, I have attached the links to some reports and articles below:

• CSIS: Understanding the Military AI Ecosystem of Ukraine - Link
• ICDS: Russia’s War in Ukraine: Artificial Intelligence in Defence of Ukraine - Link
• CNAS: Roles and Implications of AI in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict - Link
• CEPA: Ukraine’s Secret Weapon – Artificial Intelligence - Link
• IISS: AI’s baptism by fire in Ukraine and Gaza offers wider lessons - Link

Despite the growing use of AI during this war, it remains a niche capability and is still poorly understood by many military leaders. This will demand changes in how military personnel and their leaders are trained and educated, new ways of delivering technological literacy to military personnel and units, as well as enhanced collaborative methods with commercial entities which provide the expertise and technologies required by current and future military organisations. There is a compelling, and even existential, requirement to do this quickly. As I have written previously:

Military command and control and strategic decision-makers alike will need artificial intelligence that can process information and recommend options for making decisions faster (or of higher quality) than an adversary can…military organizations will likely contain thousands or even tens of thousands of unmanned and robotic systems, all-encompassing some form of artificial intelligence. In this environment, where all sides may possess artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, the race will go to the intellectually swift.

Revenge of the Sith: More Than Just a Movie

As one short sequence at the start of Revenge of the Sith demonstrates, there is more to movies than their entertainment value alone. They can provide important insights into contemporary military challenges, and sometimes, even offer some solutions. In this instance, the large space battle at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, and the intervention of Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, offers multiple insights into the potential future pathways and capabilities offered by autonomous systems and artificial intelligence in military affairs.

While films (and books) cannot provide every solution to future challenges, they do provide a useful complement to the study of military history, current affairs, and technological developments for the modern military professional.

9. USS Zumwalt Will Be First Ship Armed With Hypersonic Missile

USS Zumwalt Will Be First Ship Armed With Hypersonic Missile

By David Sharp

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/12/02/uss_zumwalt_will_be_first_ship_armed_with_hypersonic_missile_1075590.html?mc_cid=362eb90abf

The U.S. Navy is transforming a costly flub into a potent weapon with the first shipborne hypersonic weapon, which is being retrofitted aboard the first of its three stealthy destroyers.

The USS Zumwalt is at a Mississippi shipyard where workers have installed missile tubes that replace twin turrets from a gun system that was never activated because it was too expensive. Once the system is complete, the Zumwalt will provide a platform for conducting fast, precision strikes from greater distances, adding to the usefulness of the warship.

The USS Zumwalt is seen at the Huntington Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

“It was a costly blunder. But the Navy could take victory from the jaws of defeat here, and get some utility out of them by making them into a hypersonic platform,” said Bryan Clark, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.

The U.S. has had several types of hypersonic weapons in development for the past two decades, but recent tests by both Russia and China have added pressure to the U.S. military to hasten their production.

Hypersonic weapons travel beyond Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, with added maneuverability making them harder to shoot down.

Last year, The Washington Post reported that among the documents leaked by former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was a defense department briefing that confirmed China had recently tested an intermediate-range hypersonic weapon called the DF-27. While the Pentagon had previously acknowledged the weapon’s development, it had not recognized its testing.

One of the U.S. programs in development and planned for the Zumwalt is the “Conventional Prompt Strike.” It would launch like a ballistic missile and then release a hypersonic glide vehicle that would travel at speeds seven to eight times faster than the speed of sound before hitting the target. The weapon system is being developed jointly by the Navy and Army. Each of the Zumwalt-class destroyers would be equipped with four missile tubes, each with three of the missiles for a total of 12 hypersonic weapons per ship.

The USS Zumwalt is seen at the Huntington Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

In choosing the Zumwalt, the Navy is attempting to add to the usefulness of a $7.5 billion warship that is considered by critics to be an expensive mistake despite serving as a test platform for multiple innovations.

The Zumwalt was envisioned as providing land-attack capability with an Advanced Gun System with rocket-assisted projectiles to open the way for Marines to charge ashore. But the system featuring 155 mm guns hidden in stealthy turrets was canceled because each of the rocket-assisted projectiles cost between $800,000 and $1 million.

Despite the stain on its reputation, the three Zumwalt-class destroyers remain the Navy’s most advanced surface warship in terms of new technologies. Those innovations include electric propulsion, an angular shape to minimize radar signature, an unconventional wave-piercing hull, automated fire and damage control and a composite deckhouse that hides radar and other sensors.

The Zumwalt arrived at the Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in August 2023 and was removed from the water for the complex work of integrating the new weapon system. It is due to be undocked this week in preparation for the next round of tests and its return to the fleet, shipyard spokeswoman Kimberly Aguillard said.

The deckhouse of the future USS Zumwalt, the U.S. Navy’s newest guided-missile destroyer, stands past a member of the U.S. Navy in Baltimore, Oct. 13, 2016. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

A U.S. hypersonic weapon was successfully tested over the summer and development of the missiles is continuing. The Navy wants to begin testing the system aboard the Zumwalt in 2027 or 2028, according to the Navy.

The U.S. weapon system will come at a steep price. It would cost nearly $18 billion to buy 300 of the weapons and maintain them over 20 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Critics say there is too little bang for the buck.

“This particular missile costs more than a dozen tanks. All it gets you is a precise non-nuclear explosion, some place far far away. Is it really worth the money? The answer is most of the time the missile costs much more than any target you can destroy with it,” said Loren Thompson, a longtime military analyst in Washington, D.C.

But they provide the capability for Navy vessels to strike an enemy from a distance of thousands of kilometers — outside the range of most enemy weapons — and there is no effective defense against them, said retired Navy Rear Adm. Ray Spicer, CEO of the U.S. Naval Institute, an independent forum focusing on national security issues, and former commander of an aircraft carrier strike force.

Conventional missiles that cost less aren’t much of a bargain if they are unable to reach their targets, Spicer said, adding the U.S. military really has no choice but to pursue them.

“The adversary has them. We never want to be outdone,” he said.

The U.S. is accelerating development because hypersonics have been identified as vital to U.S. national security with “survivable and lethal capabilities,” said James Weber, principal director for hypersonics in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies.

“Fielding new capabilities that are based on hypersonic technologies is a priority for the defense department to sustain and strengthen our integrated deterrence, and to build enduring advantages,” he said.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

10. Why Is China Purging Some of Its Most Senior Military Leaders?

Excerpts:

What are Xi’s military ambitions?

Xi has vowed to transform the PLA into a world-class military power by mid-century. With more than 2.1 million active-duty troops, it has the world’s largest armed forces. It has more than 400 ships and 3,100 aircraft, according to Pentagon assessments, giving it the world’s biggest navy and the third-largest aviation force.

The latest development from China is the unveiling of its J-35 stealth fighter jet at the Zhuhai air show in November, a rival of the US F-35.

But the corruption concerns raised questions about the quality of the fighting forces and the effectiveness of the weapons on which the state has spent heavily.

And while China has made rapid progress in military hardware, building everything from aircraft carriers to hypersonic missiles, its ability to translate that into effective combat operations remains a major concern — especially if any fighting has to be sustained.

Why Is China Purging Some of Its Most Senior Military Leaders?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-27/china-military-purge-what-we-know-about-corruption-allegations-xi-s-ambitions?mc_cid=362eb90abf&sref=hhjZtX76

By Jon Herskovitz and Josh Xiao

November 27, 2024 at 4:27 AM EST

Updated on November 29, 2024 at 3:45 AM EST

Chinese President Xi Jinping has devoted billions of dollars to his aim of transforming the military into a modern force by 2027. His government has also launched sweeping purges in the upper echelons of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in response to what US intelligence believes to be widespread corruption undermining Xi’s ambitions.

A major concern for Beijing appears to be graft that has eroded the quality of the weapons and capabilities of units such as the Rocket Force, which oversees the country’s missiles and nuclear arsenal, and would be instrumental should Beijing invade Taiwan.

Who has been purged?

Unlike other parts of the Chinese system, the military doesn’t often announce its corruption investigations, so it’s difficult to determine the extent of the purges. But there are clues from the removal of officials that have been revealed to the public.

From about mid-2023 until the start of 2024, the government abruptly unseated at least 16 senior military figures — including then-Defense Minister Li Shangfu, the highest-level military leader to be ousted since 2017. At least five were linked to the secretive Rocket Force that Xi revamped in 2015, and at least two were from the equipment department in charge of arming the military.

In late November, China suspended one of its top officials on the nation’s most-powerful military body led by Xi, ramping up the graft probe that has already led to the removal of several senior security officials.

In June, the Communist Party expelled Li and another former defense minister on corruption charges. Both men took bribes, failed to cooperate with investigations and set a bad example, according to state media outlets that closely guard what China releases to the outside world.

China is also investigating its current defense minister for corruption, the Financial Times reported in late November. Admiral Dong Jun is facing the inquiry as part of a broader probe into graft, the newspaper reported, citing current and former US officials familiar with the situation that it did not name.

When asked about the report at a regular news briefing in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning simply replied: “Shadow chasing,” using an idiom that often refers to following rumors.

Dong JunPhotographer: Ore Huiying/Bloomberg

Who is conducting the graft crackdown?

Corruption probes are being conducted by the Central Military Commission’s team of graft busters. These watchdogs investigate and report corruption up to the CMC, which is chaired by Xi himself and is the top decision-making body of the army.

Apart from Xi, there are two vice chairmen who serve as the CMC’s military leaders and three other members in charge of items such as political work and discipline. This small group forms “the nucleus of military operations and oversight in China,” according to an Asia Society Policy Institute analysis.

Miao Hua, who oversees political loyalty in the armed forces for the CMC, is under investigation for “serious violations of discipline,” Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian told reporters. For the Communist Party, that language typically refers to a graft probe. Miao is seen as a close ally of the Chinese leader.

The CMC is in charge of the administration of the armed forces and its functions include strategic planning, audits and political education. It’s one of the most powerful institutions in the country, overseeing military strategy.

The defense minister’s main job is to lead military diplomacy with other countries, rather than play a direct role commanding the nation’s armed forces.

What do we know about all these corruption allegations?

Officially, not all that much. Besides the case of the two former defense ministers that has been formally wrapped up, China hasn’t revealed the details of the other removals, typically referring to offenses as “severe violations of discipline and law” — party-speak for corruption.

This is because the Chinese Communist Party does not reveal information that could damage its rule or tarnish perceptions about the country’s massive fighting force. Much of the information on the reasons for purges comes from intelligence officials in places such as the US.

What is the Rocket Force and what are its troubles?

When Xi reorganized the military in 2015 — axing 300,000 personnel to streamline operations — he renamed the Second Artillery the Rocket Force, elevating it to the same status as the army, navy and air force.

The missile unit has responsibility for China’s nuclear deterrent and is integral to the nation’s nuclear buildup. The US Defense Intelligence Agency said in 2024 that China is building out its arsenal far more quickly than previously forecast, with a goal of having at least 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. By contrast, the US currently has about 3,750 warheads.

Xi JinpingPhotographer: Manuel Orbegozo/Bloomberg

The Rocket Force is also responsible for conventional missiles. If Xi decided to invade Taiwan — the self-ruled island he’s said China needs to control by force if necessary — the PLA’s missile command would play a crucial role in an aerial assault.

When then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei in August 2023, China fired 11 ballistic missiles during military drills protesting her trip, including several that passed over the island.

But the corruption inside the Rocket Force and throughout the nation’s defense industrial base is so extensive that US officials believe Xi is less likely to contemplate major military action in the coming years, Bloomberg News reported in January, according to people familiar with the assessments.

The US evaluation cited several examples of the impact of graft, including missiles filled with water instead of fuel and vast fields of missile silos in western China with lids that don’t function in a way that would allow the missiles to launch effectively, one of the people said.

What has been happening in other parts of the military?

In April, China ordered what amounts to the biggest reorganization of its military since 2015 — replacing the Strategic Support Force, a branch of the PLA for electronic warfare, with three new branches to each focus on information support, aerospace and cyberwarfare.

The military in June amended its audit rules to step up scrutiny of its budget, resources and assets, in its first revision since 2016.

In July, the Communist Party called for changes to the military’s weapons procurement system and an acceleration of the development of strategic deterrence — which typically refers to nuclear weapons and other emerging technologies.

What are Xi’s military ambitions?

Xi has vowed to transform the PLA into a world-class military power by mid-century. With more than 2.1 million active-duty troops, it has the world’s largest armed forces. It has more than 400 ships and 3,100 aircraft, according to Pentagon assessments, giving it the world’s biggest navy and the third-largest aviation force.

The latest development from China is the unveiling of its J-35 stealth fighter jet at the Zhuhai air show in November, a rival of the US F-35.

But the corruption concerns raised questions about the quality of the fighting forces and the effectiveness of the weapons on which the state has spent heavily.

And while China has made rapid progress in military hardware, building everything from aircraft carriers to hypersonic missiles, its ability to translate that into effective combat operations remains a major concern — especially if any fighting has to be sustained.

— With assistance from Peter Martin

11.The Sovereignty Code

Recalling a book written some 13 years ago by some friends.

Here is a link to Professor Simon's 2011 essay that summarizes their book:

Sovereignty – The Ultimate States’ Rights Argument 

https://www.fpri.org/article/2011/07/sovereignty-the-ultimate-states-rights-argument/

And here is a link to another provocative essay by Professor Simons that also remains relevant today.

21st Century Cultures of War: Advantage Them 

https://www.fpri.org/article/2013/04/21st-century-cultures-of-war-advantage-them/

Excerpts:

Counterintuitively, however, limited wars fail to result in long-lasting diplomatic solutions because they are limited. The U.S. fails to make war costly enough to collapse the will of our enemies and, because the U.S. is unwilling to wage war that is sufficiently violent and destructive, war doesn’t deliver decisive outcomes.

It is time for the United States to try a different tack and, by doing so, to also put itself in the position of having to use military power less frequently. With an actual framework to help guide the application of force, the U.S. would also be able to bring greater coherence to how and when it wages war and supports allies and partners.

Anna Simons, Joe McGraw, and Duane Lauchengco published a book in 2011 called, The Sovereignty Solution, which offers a framework worthy of consideration.

The Sovereignty Solution advocates for a national security strategy based on making more, not less of sovereignty. What does this mean? It means that the U.S. responds to violations of its sovereignty forcefully and overwhelmingly in order to stop the violator from engaging in more violence. What the U.S. will not do is deploy forces to reshape or rebuild whole countries and their societies. The U.S. military exists to defend U.S. sovereignty and provide security for its people, its territories, and its national interests and treaty partners. Period. This stands in stark contrast to how the U.S. has employed its military capabilities since 9/11 or how it is addressing Iran’s near constant attacks on U.S. personnel and interests now.

...

Adopting a Sovereignty Solution approach would handle these violations of U.S. sovereignty differently. It would also lead the U.S. to stop making Israel’s war more complicated than it needs to be. The U.S. should support the legitimacy of Israel’s response, respect its decisions, and let it fight. The U.S. should also warn Iran that the next time it attacks U.S. forces directly or by proxy, the U.S. will respond with devastating force. For instance, should the Houthis fire on a U.S.-flagged vessel again, the U.S. will regard this as the act of war that it is and respond with overwhelming might.

Critics of such an approach might contend that it is overly bellicose and risks overlooking complex global interdependencies. Or they might claim that non-state actors often operate beyond state controls. However, sovereignty and security are deeply intertwined. Each reinforces the other to sustain a country’s autonomy and stability. Non-state actors wouldn’t and couldn’t exist if governments were held to account, which they would be in a sovereignty rules world as outlined in The Sovereignty Solution.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration’s submissiveness has only invited contempt from our adversaries and enemies―and many allies too. Worse, submissiveness invites further aggression. Somehow, we have erroneously come to believe that the answer to transgressions of sovereignty resides in forever war, sanctions, and capitulation masquerading as diplomacy. But, if we don’t like war, we need to remember that the real antidote to long drawn-out conflict is to accept the need for short, sharp, definitive military action when sovereignty is violated.

Ideally, President-elect Trump won’t just see the use of force this way but will prove to be the right leader at the right time to break with increasingly outdated dysfunctional post WWII conventions about the use of force. Ideally, he will implement a national security framework that approaches conflicts and security threats around the world with greater common sense, to include Iran’s threat to Israel.

The Sovereignty Code

By J.B. Books

December 02, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/12/02/the_sovereignty_code_1075605.html?mc_cid=362eb90abf

The United States needs a national security strategy reset. WWII ended 79 years ago, and the U.S. has engaged in some form of conflict for roughly 61 of those 79 years. The post-WWII era has been one of almost continual conflict and to what end? Republican and Democrat Administrations alike have made a practice of rushing into conflict absent decisive strategy and without achieving decisive outcomes.

The post-WWII rules-based order (RBO), centered around the United Nations and other international institutions, is often credited with having provided greater stability and peace in the world since WWII. But this is not true. It is an illusion. The world avoided large scale violent global conflict, but small-scale conflicts in the form of civil wars, border conflicts, regional wars, and terrorism have raged since 1945. 

False hopes regarding the rules-based order and its effectiveness have warped the West’s view of war and its understanding of why the Allies were able to achieve a durable victory in WWII.

The Allies won WWII because they broke the will of the Axis powers through the sheer magnitude of death and destruction dealt to their civilian populations, not just to their armies. But ever since then, the United States has so feared conflicts escalating into vicious interstate wars that—perversely—it has tried over and over to fight limited wars for limited objectives, believing that such wars can either achieve our objectives or bring diplomacy into focus.

Counterintuitively, however, limited wars fail to result in long-lasting diplomatic solutions because they are limited. The U.S. fails to make war costly enough to collapse the will of our enemies and, because the U.S. is unwilling to wage war that is sufficiently violent and destructive, war doesn’t deliver decisive outcomes.

It is time for the United States to try a different tack and, by doing so, to also put itself in the position of having to use military power less frequently. With an actual framework to help guide the application of force, the U.S. would also be able to bring greater coherence to how and when it wages war and supports allies and partners.

Anna Simons, Joe McGraw, and Duane Lauchengco published a book in 2011 called, The Sovereignty Solution, which offers a framework worthy of consideration.

The Sovereignty Solution advocates for a national security strategy based on making more, not less of sovereignty. What does this mean? It means that the U.S. responds to violations of its sovereignty forcefully and overwhelmingly in order to stop the violator from engaging in more violence. What the U.S. will not do is deploy forces to reshape or rebuild whole countries and their societies. The U.S. military exists to defend U.S. sovereignty and provide security for its people, its territories, and its national interests and treaty partners. Period. This stands in stark contrast to how the U.S. has employed its military capabilities since 9/11 or how it is addressing Iran’s near constant attacks on U.S. personnel and interests now.

The goal in taking sovereignty seriously is to foster a system of mutual respect among nations. The U.S. will refrain from interfering in, or with, other countries, but where and when U.S. sovereignty is violated, the U.S. will respond forcefully against the perpetrators—and their sponsors. We expect our allies and partners to do the same and will support them when they are true partners (as described in the book).

This approach diverges from traditional strategies by focusing on reducing U.S. combat missions overseas and by insisting instead on strong accountability by states for the actions of their citizens and not just their militaries; to include supporting or providing safe havens for terrorists. The Sovereignty Solution also promotes strengthening countries’ domestic social fabric, addressing vulnerabilities like political polarization, which adversaries can exploit.

There is no better example of how fecklessly the United States currently manages conflict than the Biden Administration’s response to Israel’s current war. The Biden Administration has been bi-polar in its approach to Israel’s conflict and unforgivably submissive towards Iran.

For instance, the Administration supports Israel’s right to defend itself but does so while demanding restraint. How does this make sense when Hamas’s attack on October 7^th of 2023 was the manifestation of Iran’s stated aim of annihilating Israel? The Biden Administration has worked overtime to reign in Israel while leaving Iran and its proxies unchallenged, which in effect protects Iran.

Clearly, President Biden, members of his administration, and many leading Democrats believe that Israel has gone too far in Gaza and is now over-reaching against Hezbollah in Lebanon. They seem to believe that Israel has more than gotten even and should now prioritize finding a diplomatic solution to end the fighting. The Administration believes that only a ceasefire and well-defined road map for achieving a two-state solution will lead to long-term stability, and that this will undermine Iran’s long-term goal of destroying Israel. 

But Israel’s defense of itself is not about getting even. And it is not about the Palestinians. It is about re-securing Israel’s sovereignty.

According to a sovereignty rules framework, what happened on October 7^th is that Hamas, the de facto sovereign government of Gaza, violated Israel’s sovereignty through an act of war. Israel therefore not only had the right to reciprocate with overwhelming force, but a duty to reduce Hamas’s military capability so that it can no longer present a viable threat to Israel’s security. Israel has a similar duty vis-à-vis Hezbollah. Likewise, Israel has an obligation to its citizens to strike Iran with as much force as is needed to stop Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and to halt Iran’s own direct attacks on Israel.

Israel has given peace a chance. Israel has given the two-state solution a chance. Israel has long tried trusting the rules-based order to help it protect itself. Indeed, Israel has tried everything militarily possible through overt and covert means to prevent Iran from reaching its stated goal of annihilating Israel—which is the ultimate violation of sovereignty! Yet, none of these things have been sufficient to dissuade Iran or its proxies from seeking Israel’s destruction.

Disappointingly, not only has the liberal version of the rules-based order failed to work, but the United Nations—the flagship organization for that order—has itself provided diplomatic cover for Hamas via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which ignored and may have abetted Hamas in militarizing its society and indoctrinating Palestinians to liquidate the Jews. How perverse that in his remarks at the 79^th United Nations General Assembly, President Biden said that Gazans did not ask for the war that Hamas started. Clearly, my eyes must have been lying to me when I watched footage of Gazans cheering and celebrating on October 7^th.

In a further dereliction of its duty, the UN chose to not enforce Security Council Resolution 1701, which was meant to firewall southern Lebanon from Israel and Hezbollah, and thereby prevent another war after the Second Lebanon War of 2006. Instead, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon did nothing as Hezbollah infiltrated southern Lebanon and militarized it much the same way Hamas did Gaza. 1701 was made exceedingly hollower when Iran equipped Hezbollah with sophisticated indirect fires systems and drones that could range across Israel from inside Lebanon.

Another RBO shortcoming relates to how exit strategies are conceived of these days. The idea that countries that respond to violations of their sovereignty are responsible for putting everything back together again in the violator’s territory goes hand-in-hand with the West’s fantasy that it can remake whole societies through regime change. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are proof that none of this works. Not only is it impossible to rebuild other people’s nations for them, but it is also a terrible waste of resources and time.

Equally wasteful is not destroying an entity that has attacked you, that has expressed its intent to destroy you, and that retains the capacity to destroy you.

Israel has no alternative but to give war a chance—to use sufficient force to break the back of Iran’s capability, which includes breaking the backs of Hamas and Hezbollah. Destroying them remains a work in progress given the scale of the problem. The human cost in Gaza and Lebanon is real; however, this war must be waged if peace is ever to have a chance.

People want to believe that modern countries can achieve their military goals without civilian casualties. People think that modern militaries with exquisite targeting capabilities, like those demonstrated by the Israeli Defense Forces, can defeat their enemies through selective targeting, but frequently this isn’t true. When an adversary’s entire society has been indoctrinated and mobilized, selective targeting is insufficient—by definition. Also, selective targeting can’t spare civilians when an enemy has burrowed into the civilian infrastructure as Hamas and Hezbollah have—with civilian complicity. 

The West has yet to come to grips with the fact that few of its adversaries share the West’s sensibilities. Nor does the West seem to recognize that adversaries will mold their methods to take advantage of Western sensibilities. Case in point, Hamas and Hezbollah are both more than willing to use civilians as human shields and, even more barbarously, they set up civilians to be killed in order to make Israel look bad.

During WWII, the Allies couldn’t bomb accurately enough to avoid civilian casualties. This inadvertently worked to the allies’ advantage because it necessitated total war that exhausted Germany and Japan to the point that both countries acceded to unconditional surrender. How ironic that in an era when we can target with precision and when we have come to revile total war as an option, we not only fail to exhaust our enemies, but our enemies resort to tactics and strategies that deliberately put their own populations at risk. They do so because they know that they can offset our targeting capabilities by using our sensibilities against us.

Hamas and Hezbollah have backed Israel into an unwinnable IO war by developing strategies that make it impossible for Israel to decisively crush them and extirpate them without also killing thousands of civilians. The slaughter of civilians is the doing of Hamas and Hezbollah. The only way out of this for Israel requires that Western leaders adjust their sensibilities to this fact.

Unfortunately, another reason Israel’s campaign against Hamas has been so fraught is because crushing Hamas is impossible to square with freeing the hostages. The only way Israel can get its hostages back is by letting Hamas cut a deal for a ceasefire. But Israel cutting a deal with Hamas is antithetical to Israel’s destruction of Hamas’s ability to function as a movement that will continue to pose a long-term threat to Israel’s security.

Many have speculated that Prime Minister Netanyahu is prolonging the war in Gaza out of political self-interest. Maybe. Or perhaps Bibi Netanyahu is smart enough to recognize that Hamas is toying with the Israeli population’s emotions over the hostages to preserve its ability to live to fight another day. Many critics argue that Israel should give in and agree to a ceasefire because nothing Israel does will alter Palestinians’ animosity or lead to Hamas’s dismantlement. True, the Israelis aren’t going to be able to kill the idea behind Hamas. But they can attrit the organization and degrade its capabilities until it can no longer function as a movement.

We must remember that given the fact that Israel’s enemies are committed to Israel’s eradication, there is no accommodation to be had. Israel is fighting to restore its security now and for the future. The fact that Hamas jumped the gun before Iran was ready to join in Israel’s destruction inadvertently provides Israel a unique opportunity to confront Iran now rather than wait until Iran is better armed and better prepared in the future. We can only hope that Trump will view this moment for the opportunity that it presents.

Israel’s current fight on behalf of its sovereignty has not only exposed the Biden Administration’s strategic incoherence, but also deeper flaws in how the U.S. thinks about our national security and the security of our allies.

The U.S. says Israel has the right to defend itself, but then proceeds to try to compel Israel to do things that aren’t good for Israel. What is even crazier is that the U.S. keeps trying to urge Israel to implement methods and tactics that didn’t work for us in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Americans keep scolding the Israelis regarding their use of force, chastising them for their failure to employ a counterinsurgency strategy, and berating them for not identifying a political solution to the Palestinian problem. The Administration began calling for de-escalation and a ceasefire long before Israel had achieved any military victories against Hamas, and the Administration wanted Israel to leave Rafah untouched despite its centrality to Hamas’s smuggling infrastructure, or the fact that it was where Yahya Sinwar was hiding.

The Administration has wanted to keep the conflict from escalating regionally but has striven to do this by holding Israel to account―and not Iran. Yet, Iran is who made this a regional war by attacking Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and from Iran itself.

The U.S. fails to appreciate that Hamas’s attack de-synched Iran’s strategic plans, thereby providing Israel with both the opportunity and the moral justification to thwart Iran’s long-term goal of annihilating it. The U.S. keeps pressuring Israel instead to stop short, which will only leave Iran and its hateful proxies confident that eventually they will destroy Israel because they will still possess the means to do so. This really makes no sense. But nor does it make sense given our own history with Iran.

Iran has murdered approximately 900 Americans and seized dozens of American hostages since 1979. Iranian proxies have attacked American troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan several hundred times, killed three U.S. service members, and injured scores more since October 7^th, 2023. Iranian backed Houthis repeatedly attack commercial shipping and U.S. naval assets in the Red Sea with negligible consequences. The U.S. employs what can best be called a passive defense and only occasionally responds to attacks in Syria and Iraq, all of which adds up to a weak, never-ending game of tit-for-tat.

Adopting a Sovereignty Solution approach would handle these violations of U.S. sovereignty differently. It would also lead the U.S. to stop making Israel’s war more complicated than it needs to be. The U.S. should support the legitimacy of Israel’s response, respect its decisions, and let it fight. The U.S. should also warn Iran that the next time it attacks U.S. forces directly or by proxy, the U.S. will respond with devastating force. For instance, should the Houthis fire on a U.S.-flagged vessel again, the U.S. will regard this as the act of war that it is and respond with overwhelming might. 

Critics of such an approach might contend that it is overly bellicose and risks overlooking complex global interdependencies. Or they might claim that non-state actors often operate beyond state controls. However, sovereignty and security are deeply intertwined. Each reinforces the other to sustain a country’s autonomy and stability. Non-state actors wouldn’t and couldn’t exist if governments were held to account, which they would be in a sovereignty rules world as outlined in The Sovereignty Solution.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration’s submissiveness has only invited contempt from our adversaries and enemies―and many allies too. Worse, submissiveness invites further aggression. Somehow, we have erroneously come to believe that the answer to transgressions of sovereignty resides in forever war, sanctions, and capitulation masquerading as diplomacy. But, if we don’t like war, we need to remember that the real antidote to long drawn-out conflict is to accept the need for short, sharp, definitive military action when sovereignty is violated.

Ideally, President-elect Trump won’t just see the use of force this way but will prove to be the right leader at the right time to break with increasingly outdated dysfunctional post WWII conventions about the use of force. Ideally, he will implement a national security framework that approaches conflicts and security threats around the world with greater common sense, to include Iran’s threat to Israel.

J.B. Books is an experienced expert in the region and on military matters.

Check out the Book titled "The Sovereignty Solution."

12. Army seeks 300 ground combat lieutenants to transfer to support jobs

What does this tell us? That a majority of young officers desire to serve in combat arms?

But I would think that Air Defense would be a sought after combat arms branch these days given both its high tech skills and demand for missions.

Army seeks 300 ground combat lieutenants to transfer to support jobs

militarytimes.com · by Todd South · November 29, 2024

The Army is looking for 300 lieutenants to voluntarily transfer from four ground combat arms branches to five understrength branches: adjutant general, air defense, finance, logistics and signal corps.

In January, the service sought 250 infantry or armor lieutenants to move over to adjutant general, finance or signal corps to address a misalignment between officer inventory and Army manning requirements, Army Times previously reported.

Now, facing similar challenges, the service is expanding its effort, seeking an additional 300 lieutenants from year group 2022 to transfer out of infantry, armor, artillery and engineer branches, according to a release.

RELATED

Army wants 250 infantry, armor officers to transfer to support jobs

The service needs 250 infantry or armor officers to switch to adjutant general, finance or signal corps.

“Last year’s pilot program was successful as more than 130 [year group 2021] lieutenants voluntarily transferred from the Infantry and Armor branches into the Adjutant General, Finance and Signal Corps. By offering more options this year we hope to get greater participation and have a greater impact on readiness,” said Maj. Thomas Mussmann, a readiness analyst for Army Human Resources Command’s Force Shaping Directorate.

When the Army finds a misalignment exists between manning requirements and available officer inventory, the service opens voluntary transfers to “rebalance” the active duty Army, Mussmann said.

“The Army will eventually face shortages at the battalion, brigade, division and corps level if we don’t shape the force now,” said Col. Shay O’Neal, director of HRC’s Readiness Division.

In addition to the five understrength branches, the Army is also looking for transfers into four functional area jobs, including information technology engineer, space operations, public affairs and simulations operations.

Potential volunteers for branch and functional area transfers may apply between Jan. 7 and Feb. 17, 2025, according to the release.

“The ideal candidate for this program is someone who enjoys the Army but is looking for a change from their current career field,” said Maj. Jesse Lansford, a senior marketplace analyst at Army Human Resources Command. “Maybe they’re looking for company command time but in a branch with a long wait queue or they didn’t get their initial branch of choice upon commissioning.”

No officers will be forced to change branches, officials said.

To identify themselves as interested volunteers, infantry, armor, field artillery and engineer officers from year group 2022 must log into the Integrated Personnel and Pay System portal, locate the [Talent Management] Soldier Work Center within the “Self Service” window and select “Closed Marketplace Preferences” where they will provide their preferencing input for the rebranching process, according to the release.

Officers who want to rebranch must put their desired branch above their current branch in their preference order.

The branch placement will depend on the officer’s preference and their placement on the national cadet order of merit list from the fiscal 2022 branching boards, according to the release.

In the early 2024 rebranching, for example, 57% received their first choice, while the remaining 43% received their second choice.

If an officer is transferring into one of the functional areas of need, they must put the desired functional area as their top preference.

Those approved for transfer will not incur a permanent change of station move with the transfer.

HRC is slated to release results of the transfer option in early March 2025.

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

13. Trump Can — and Should — Fully Fund Our Military

Excerpts:

Suggesting we must either cut waste or increase the defense budget is a false choice. We must do both simultaneously given the urgency of the threats we confront.

Indeed, in this geostrategic moment, prioritizing efficiency over speed would be a costly and short-sighted mistake. History reminds us that the worst waste of resources — both financial and human — are wars that could have been prevented with earlier and more concerted action to bolster deterrence.

If deterrence fails in the Taiwan Strait as it did in Ukraine, the costs for Americans will be even higher. The Trump administration plans to pursue a “peace through strength” foreign policy. If that laudable approach is to succeed, it must be based on unmatched U.S. military power. Such power is possible only if Washington invests sufficient resources in defense as Ronald Reagan did. Otherwise, such phrases will elicit little more than a shrug in adversary capitals, and Americans will confront wars of aggression sooner or later that could have been prevented.

Trump Can — and Should — Fully Fund Our Military

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/trump-can-and-should-fully-fund-our-military/

By Bradley Bowman

&

Mark Montgomery

November 29, 2024 6:30 AM

The Obama and Biden administrations failed to request from Congress sufficient resources for defense. Trump should not make the same mistake.

‘F

or almost twenty years we had all of the time and almost none of the money; today we have all of the money and no time.” That was then–Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall’s warning on July 22, 1940, a little more than a year before the Pearl Harbor attack and America’s entry into World War II.

Today, Americans find themselves in a similarly precarious geostrategic position and at risk of making the same mistake again — waiting until the last moments before a war to invest the necessary resources in defense. That undermines deterrence, invites aggression, and increases the chances that American war-fighters will not have what they need in the early months of a preventable war.

Each year, the Obama and Biden administrations failed to request from Congress sufficient resources for defense. Trump should not make the same mistake.

The bipartisan, congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy assessed in its July 2024 report that the “threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”

Consider the actions of America’s adversaries.

In preparation for potential aggression against Taiwan and a war with the United States, China is undertaking a breathtaking military modernization and expansion campaign. In March, the former top U.S. commander in the Pacific called Beijing’s military buildup “the most extensive and rapid” seen anywhere since World War II.

Russia, for its part, is waging a war of conquest against Ukraine that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. If Putin’s might-makes-right aggression succeeds, the consequences will reverberate far beyond Europe for years to come.

Iran, meanwhile, is progressing toward a nuclear weapon even as its terror proxies wage a multifront war against Israel, conduct the most significant assault on maritime shipping in decades in the Red Sea, and have launched more than 180 attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan since October 17, 2023.

And nuclear-armed North Korea is expanding its missile arsenal, honing the ability to strike the U.S. homeland with intercontinental ballistic missiles, sending combat forces to fight Ukraine, and behaving even more aggressively on and near the Korean Peninsula.

To make matters worse, these four adversaries, which are part of a new axis of aggressors, are cooperating in unprecedented ways — making each of them more capable, resilient, and effective in their respective areas of ongoing or potential aggression. The results of their diplomatic, intelligence, military, cyber, and economic cooperation are greater than the sum of its parts, presenting genuine challenges and dilemmas for the United States and its allies.

Indeed, there is a significant risk that the United States could confront simultaneous great-power wars in Europe and Asia in the coming years, and the National Defense Strategy Commission concluded that the United States is “not prepared.”

Changing that reality will require many actions by the new administration, but the first and fundamental step is addressing America’s insufficient defense budget.

Many Americans who have spent too much time listening to Senator Bernie Sanders might be surprised by such an assertion and believe that the United States is on the verge of going bankrupt due to excessive defense spending.

The truth is quite different.

The United States is projected to spend 3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the Department of Defense for 2024. Other than the years just before the 9/11 terror attacks on our country, that approximate level of spending in recent years is the lowest percentage any time since 1940 — the year before the U.S. entry into World War II.

For comparison, measured as a percent of GDP, the United States spent about 11.4 percent on the Department of Defense in 1953 (Korean War), 8.6 percent in 1968 (Vietnam War), 5.9 percent in 1986 (Reagan buildup), and 4.5 percent in 2010 (wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

If the threats the United States is confronting are the “most serious” seen since 1945, why is Washington spending so little on defense?

This is just the kind of Beltway nonsense that the next administration and its allies in Congress should correct — and fast. That’s because it can take a long time for increased defense spending to yield fielded combat capabilities, and war could come sooner than many expect.30

After all, it is fielded combat capabilities — not defense spending — that deters and wins wars.

At a minimum, President Trump should seek to increase defense spending by 3 to 5 percent above inflation each year and ensure that any such increase amounts to at least a 0.1 percent GDP increase each year, including the FY 2025 budget still under review in Congress. That would boost defense spending back to 3.5 percent of GDP by the end of Trump’s term. That may be the maximum rate of increase that the services and the U.S. defense industry could effectively absorb under current conditions.

Regardless, any such increase should be decoupled from any increases in non-defense spending, especially given the Biden administration’s inflationary domestic-spending binge in recent years.

Some might point to Pentagon waste as an excuse not to increase defense spending. To be sure, the Department of Defense should serve as a responsible steward of tax dollars, and every dollar wasted is a dollar not available to help secure our country.

But the National Defense Strategy Commission was correct when it assessed that “no feasible combination of institutional adaptation, process improvement, or waste reduction will generate defense savings of sufficient size, and with sufficient speed, to finance” all the necessary steps.

“Bigger budgets are therefore essential,” the commission concluded.

Suggesting we must either cut waste or increase the defense budget is a false choice. We must do both simultaneously given the urgency of the threats we confront.

Indeed, in this geostrategic moment, prioritizing efficiency over speed would be a costly and short-sighted mistake. History reminds us that the worst waste of resources — both financial and human — are wars that could have been prevented with earlier and more concerted action to bolster deterrence.

If deterrence fails in the Taiwan Strait as it did in Ukraine, the costs for Americans will be even higher. The Trump administration plans to pursue a “peace through strength” foreign policy. If that laudable approach is to succeed, it must be based on unmatched U.S. military power. Such power is possible only if Washington invests sufficient resources in defense as Ronald Reagan did. Otherwise, such phrases will elicit little more than a shrug in adversary capitals, and Americans will confront wars of aggression sooner or later that could have been prevented.

Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served as a national security adviser to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees and was an officer in the U.S. Army. Retired U.S. Navy rear admiral Mark Montgomery is a senior fellow at FDD. After 32 years of service in the Navy, he worked as policy director on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

14. After U.S.-China Prisoner Swap, Scores of Americans Are Still Trapped in China

After U.S.-China Prisoner Swap, Scores of Americans Are Still Trapped in China

U.S. is limited in its ability to help Americans facing exit bans from China. Some are hoping for a breakthrough.

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/after-u-s-china-prisoner-swap-scores-of-americans-are-still-trapped-in-china-11fcf09c?mod=latest_headlines&utm

By Brian Spegele

Follow and Rebecca Feng

Follow

Updated Nov. 30, 2024 12:01 am ET

Henry Cai, an American businessman from Southern California, is approaching seven years of being stuck in China. Photo: Gilles Sabrie for WSJ

BEIJING—A rare prisoner swap between China and the U.S. this week that secured the release of three Americans points to Beijing’s willingness to negotiate with Washington on high-profile cases, including ones involving charges of espionage. 

But dozens of Americans remain trapped in China under exit bans, often for more mundane causes such as business disputes. These cases show the enduring risks of getting caught in China’s murky legal system—ones that the U.S. government cannot easily solve. 

More than 200 Americans are believed to be detained or subject to other coercive measures by Chinese authorities, according to the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based human rights group. Additionally, more than 30 U.S. citizens face exit bans from China, under which they are generally free to move around the country but are barred from leaving. 

To prevent Beijing from targeting more Americans in the future as bargaining chips, President-elect Donald Trump should get ahead of the issue by sending a clear warning to China, Dui Hua’s founder John Kamm said. 

“What he should do is lay down a marker: ‘If you detain Americans like this arbitrarily, I will do X, Y, Z.’ ” Kamm said. “Don’t be reactive, be proactive.” 

At the same time, the deal also reflects continuing efforts by the U.S. and China to stabilize their volatile relationship, one increasingly defined by competition rather than compromise.

President Biden has pursued prisoner swaps globally while in office. Bringing home Americans stuck in China has been a key goal of the administration and senior officials have raised the issue in meetings with their Chinese counterparts. 

With the recent prisoner swaps, the highest-profile cases involving people that the U.S. formally labeled as unjustly detained are now over. Whether and how the White House will win the release of other Americans facing exit bans remains unknown.

Unlike the espionage allegations at the heart of much of the latest prisoner trading with China, most exit bans have more mundane causes. The bans can be imposed broadly, against both Chinese and foreign nationals, and typically have little to do with politics.

They often arise from civil disputes such as a personal loan that hasn’t been paid back. China’s legal system allows the plaintiff in a civil dispute to ask the court to impose an exit ban on the defendant. A verdict doesn’t have to be reached before the ban is enacted. Once an exit ban—which usually ranges from three to six months—is imposed, it can be automatically renewed as long as the case is outstanding. 

Exit bans can be abused by Chinese companies or individuals against foreigners who have little recourse to hit back. Once enacted, the bans are typically lifted only after foreigners accede to the demands of their Chinese counterparties, giving the latter more leverage in negotiations, scholars have said. 

Security personnel outside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. More than 200 Americans are believed to be detained or subject to other coercive measures by Chinese authorities. Photo: Mark R. Cristino/Shutterstock

Some foreign nationals who have left a company before it got involved in a business dispute and who aren’t personally liable have also been subject to exit bans, according to documents from a Chinese online court database. They can also be levied against people under, or assisting, government investigations.

From China’s point of view, allowing foreign citizens facing debts or business disputes to leave the country with no guarantee that they’ll repay what they owe risks drawing ire from its own citizens or financial institutions. Part of the problem is that China lacks a comprehensive bankruptcy system that allows bad debts to be reorganized or written off through the courts. 

Dealing with the bans is complicated for the U.S., in part because the Americans involved often haven’t been charged with crimes and aren’t held in custody. While officials can advocate for them to be allowed to return home, they are not formally labeled by the U.S. as “wrongfully detained,” a designation that commits the U.S. government to work toward their release. 

One American citizen who has been banned from leaving China described recently seeking help at a U.S. consulate. The person, who is normally based in the U.S., said she was involved in a civil lawsuit involving debt accrued by her former employer, a company based in China that has subsidiaries in the U.S. She said she was told by the consulate that cases like hers weren’t unusual and the best that the consulate could do was send a diplomatic note to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and potentially accompany her to future court hearings. 

She said she understood that the U.S. was constrained by Chinese law in how it could help. 

A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said the American ambassador in China frequently raises the issue of exit bans with senior Chinese officials. 

“The opaque nature of certain exit bans is a significant concern of the United States,” the spokesperson said in a written response to questions. 

The State Department this week met a longtime request of China and lowered a travel warning about the country, though it still flags the risk of exit bans. Previously, the agency warned Americans to reconsider travel to China. Now, it calls on Americans to increase caution when traveling there “due to arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans.” 

This week’s prisoner swap has lifted the spirits of some Americans blocked from leaving. 

“Right now I have a lot of hope,” said Henry Cai, an American businessman from Southern California, who is approaching seven years of being stuck in China and cut off from family. 

Cai’s troubles stem from an investment he made in a printed-circuit board maker in China around a decade ago. When the company ran into financial troubles and couldn’t pay back millions of dollars in debt, Cai was blocked from leaving the country. 

Cai said he hoped now that China’s government had made the decision to swap some prisoners with the U.S., it would follow up by releasing Americans subject to exit bans to clean its plate before the Trump administration takes office in January. 

Still, he said he and his family were trying not to get too excited, having had his expectations of going home raised and dashed many times since he was blocked from leaving China in 2017. 

The prisoner swap this week means that the U.S. has now secured the release of all Americans deemed “wrongfully detained” in China. Mark Swidan from Texas was held behind bars from 2012 and convicted in a drug case, though he maintained his innocence. Two others, Kai Li, a businessman from Long Island, and John Shing-wan Leung, were convicted on espionage charges. 

In September, China released David Lin, a pastor who had been detained since 2006 on accusation of fraud that his supporters rejected as retribution for his preaching. 

China’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday three Chinese citizens had been released by the U.S. and returned to China. “This once again proves that China will not abandon its compatriots at any time,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a daily press briefing. 

Mao said a fourth person, whom she described as a fugitive, had also been repatriated to China from the U.S. 

The Foreign Ministry hasn’t identified the Chinese citizens involved. On Wednesday, a U.S. federal prisons database showed that Yanjun Xu, a Chinese intelligence officer serving a 20-year sentence, and Chaoqun Ji, a man Xu had worked with, were no longer in U.S. custody. 

The ministry said in a written response to questions about exit bans that China manages issues related to entering and leaving the country in accordance with its laws. 

Dui Hua, the human rights group, considers two other Americans, Nelson Wells Jr. and Dawn Michelle Hunt, still to be wrongfully imprisoned in China. Their cases both involve drug charges they deny.

Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com and Rebecca Feng at rebecca.feng@wsj.com

15. How Marco Rubio Can Save the State Department

Quite a critique. 

Simply put, the State Department is a largely nineteenth-century construction that expanded in the 20th century, but too often appears out-of-place for the 21st century.

Interestingly no mention of Asia, but the essay focuses on the function (but spends the majority of time talking about Africa).

How Marco Rubio Can Save the State Department

19fortyfive.com · by Michael Rubin · December 1, 2024

Rubio Should Reconfigure the State Department for a 21st Century World: Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio will likely sail through his confirmation hearings and is likely to take the helm of his department long before the Senate confirms his fellow cabinet members.

Frankly, he will need the time. Not only has his predecessor Antony Blinken been perhaps the most naïve and least effective secretary of State since Frank Kellogg a century ago, but too many of his immediate predecessors have focused more on travel for travel’s sake than on managing an increasingly ossified and antiquated organization.

Simply put, the State Department is a largely nineteenth-century construction that expanded in the 20th century, but too often appears out-of-place for the 21st century.

A century ago, diplomats were not only representatives, but newsmen. They cabled back word of events to decision-makers in Washington who suddenly had a global perspective but had few sources of information. There was no CNN or MSNBC. Reuters relied on pigeon post until the mid-nineteenth century but, even after, it was primarily a wire service. Only in the 1960s, did it convert to wireless to expedite news and serve financial firms and newspapers. Within decades, cable and satellite television changed the information landscape again. Diplomats may still write and send cables, but seldom do they inform more than a common online newspaper would.

Nor do ambassadors have the same clout. The U.S. ambassadors in London, Paris, and Berlin are essentially party planners who enjoy free parking. If serious negotiations are afoot even farther afield, the secretary or president can call his counterpart in a matter of minutes.

And, yet, the imprint of U.S. embassies and consulates remains largely unchanged. The United States retains consulates in Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Rennes, and Strasbourg. Rennes has a population of 368,000, roughly the size of Cleveland, Ohio. The same pattern holds true with Canada, a neighbor and important trading partner, where the U.S. maintains consulates in Halifax (population 486,000) and Winnipeg (population 557,000), among other cities. Meanwhile, there are 46 cities in India with populations exceeding one million, only four of which have U.S. consulates.

Africa is already a battleground for influence among great powers. President Joe Biden’s final trip abroad as president will be to Angola, where he will highlight the Lobito Corridor, an attempt to reorient Africa’s trade from the Indian Ocean Basin and China to the Atlantic Ocean and the United States. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the second largest country in Africa, has 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, a critical component for lithium batteries. In theory, in terms of wealth and impact on the global economy, the DRC could be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century, if it were not for the corruption and misrule of incumbent President Félix Tshisekedi. While the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa can communicate with Tshisekedi and his cabal of cronies, consulates in Goma or Lubumbashi could better report on both regional insurgencies and Chinese penetration.

Or consider Nigeria. On November 29, 2024, Biafra, the subject of a 1967-70 genocide, redeclared its independence from Nigeria with its capital at Ebube. Its action follows decades of discrimination against the ethnic Igbo and the region’s Christian and animist population, yet the State Department maintains no presence in the region, and so relies on the perpetrators of the Biafra genocide to speak on behalf of its victims. The lack of consulates along the Gulf of Guinea coast also makes it more difficult to monitor piracy, the oil trade, and Chinese influence.

The same holds true for Somaliland, the world’s most likely new state. Briefly independent in 1960, the unrecognized country has run its own affairs since 1991. It orients itself to Taiwan while Somalia proper tilts toward Beijing, and Somaliland is a democracy while Somalia is a kleptocracy ruled over by a president selected by just a couple hundred clan elders. European and African countries maintain consulates or offices in the Somaliland capital Hargeisa, but the State Department operates blind. The same is true in Aden, the capital of the former (and perhaps future) South Yemen.

Then there is Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian Christian territory that Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed in September 2023. Satellite photos and sporadic visitors suggest that Azerbaijan is systematically erasing Armenian cultural heritage. An American consulate in Stepanakert could monitor the situation an pierce the gilded bubble that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev seeks to construct.

With Turkish proxies if not troops invading northern Syria, a more permanent American diplomatic presence in Syrian Kurdistan would provide greater bang for the buck than, for example, than the U.S. consulate in Zurich, Switzerland, one of three U.S. outposts in the country.

Rubio knows the issues but if American diplomacy is going to matter, that is only half the battle. True, many Foreign Service Officers prefer Halifax to Hargeisa or Strasbourg to Srinigar, but they serve at the pleasure of the secretary and president. Their potential contribution to American national security should be paramount. Trump seeks to be a disruptor of the broader federal bureaucracy. Rubio’s greatest contribution could be as disruptor to a State Department bureaucracy firmly rooted in an increasingly irrelevant past.

About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre- and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism, to deployed US Navy and Marine units. Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics.

19fortyfive.com · by Michael Rubin · December 1, 2024

16. How The Philippines Is Losing Its Way – Analysis

How The Philippines Is Losing Its Way – Analysis

By Dan Steinbock

Economic futures that were within reach in the Philippines just a few years ago are slipping away. 

eurasiareview.com · December 2, 2024

The ongoing political noise will not affect the performance of the economy, given the government’s “sound and sustained” economic policies, the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) said Thursday.

Unsurprisingly, NEDA Secretary Arsenio Balisacan issued the statement after meeting with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Senate President Francis Escudero and Speaker Martin Romualdez in Malacañang.

In reality, the economy is not immune to political flames.

Forget BRIC-like futures

“Political noise won’t slow down economy,” Balisacan pledged. “Our economic policies, our economic policy directions are sound and sustained.”

In the past year, the tensions in the Philippine political class have escalated dramatically, exploding in the past few weeks, coupled with renewed China friction and the effort to cement Manila’s way into the Indo-Pacific front.

The stakes are high because such alignments have already caused massive displacement and devastation in Ukraine and Gaza and could prove far more destructive in Taiwan Straits and Southeast Asia.

Judging by the headlines and debates of the political class, the primary objectives are currently political. Meanwhile, the Philippines economy is taking one hit after another. Hence, the effort to assuage constituencies that everything is fine.

In reality, the post-pandemic impoverishment and runaway inflation have undermined ordinary Filipinos’ economic prospects. No BRIC-like future is viable in the Philippines as long as the country’s focus is on personal politics and geopolitics rather than on Filipino welfare and struggle against poverty.

Economic growth: expectations vs. realities

Early in the year, US news agency Bloomberg asked President Marcos Jr whether the Philippines could achieve an 8% growth rate. “Why not?” the president replied. “Yes, I think it is, I think it is doable.”

Marcos expected the country to achieve up to 7% growth for 2024.

Yet, the GDP year-on-year growth was only 5.2% in the third quarter of 2024. In the past three quarters, household consumption has grown only by 4.8% year-on-year; the slowest in the post-pandemic quarters. In historical view, something similar occurred last time in late 2011, over 13 years ago.

Philippines GDP annual growth rate (%), 2010-2024. Source: Philippine Statistics Authority; author

The slow pace was presumably due to sustained high inflation in the past 1.5 years, weak credit gains and soft growth in durable equipment.

Moreover, unemployment peaked at 4.7% in July, even before the rainy season, due to lower job-creation in construction, services and agriculture.

Potential for negative turns

Supporting growth, investment spending reached 6% year-on-year in the first half of the year, along with net exports. The former relies on rising debt and the latter presumes a steady course.

The problem is that, in the coming months, both will become more uncertain with the impending Trump trade and technology wars.

Most analysts expect improved growth with easing inflation into 2025, which should provide relief to household purchasing power.

However, this scenario relies on the hoped-for rate cuts and continued lower inflation rate. The two are affected by US rates and inflation; particularly due to the increasing economic dependency of the Philippines on the West and the US in particular.

Philippines Interest Rate and Inflation. Source: Philippine Statistics Authority; author

President-elect Trump has pledged that under his rule, “inflation will vanish completely.” That, of course, is baloney. Trump’s policy proposals are likely to worsen inflation.

Trump’s plans to impose huge tariffs on imported goods, deport millions of migrant workers and demand a voice in the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies would likely send prices surging, as 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists warned back in June.

Trade deficit adversities

Not only has the Philippine trade deficit continued to widen, but recently it posted its largest increase in over two years. The country’s trade deficit posted a 43.4% growth in September 2024; the highest since the 81.1% growth recorded in August 2022, amid the pandemic plunge.

In September, the United States (17.3%) was the country’s top trade partners, along with Hong Kong (13.9%), Japan (13.5%), and China (13.3%). China, meanwhile, was the country’s top import source, accounting for 25% of total imports in September 2024; more than twice as much as the second-ranked Indonesia or Japan.

Here’s the problem. As Philippine friction has dramatically accelerated with China, the country’s largest trade partner – Hong Kong/China (27%) – faces long-term risks. There are alternatives but all of them will add to rather than reduce the inherent economic costs.

The spread of geopolitical friction into trade in bilateral trade would prove very costly to the Philippines because it would penalize affordable China prices and foster a return of higher costs thus contributing to inflation.

Investment and tourism from China have already plunged dramatically.

Also, Manila has a trade surplus with the US.

Misguided trade wars and geopolitics

Since most ASEAN economies are net exporters to the US, they cannot avoid consequences when Trump implements his 10%-20% tariff on imports of all goods from all countries, in addition to 60% tariff on Chinese imports. In the Philippines, additional concerns linger on heightened security risks since Manila has pledged alliance to US military ties.

Such tariffs could reduce exports from non-China Asia by 3% or more. Those ASEAN members, which hope to benefit from investment if multinationals away from China, now tout their economic and geopolitical loyalty to the US. Hence, too, the recent friction between Manila and Beijing, fueled by the effort to acquire US mid-range missiles, which China calls a “provocative.”

These geopolitical calculations have turned the Philippines an outlier in the ASEAN, as evidenced by the State of Southeast Asia 2024 survey.

Economic development can only be premised on peace and stability, not on missiles and geopolitics. Despite some political disagreements with China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and other ASEAN countries have successfully built their economic progress on this premise.

So could the Philippines.

eurasiareview.com · December 2, 2024

17. Approval of Philippines-Japan defence deal imminent as ties solidify

Excerpts:

“In particular, Japanese interests in open and stable sea lanes through the South China Sea create the conditions for stronger defence ties with the Philippines to be pursued,” Patalano said.

He also played down the idea that Beijing has dominance over the “first island chain”, a series of strategically important islands including Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines that form a barrier to military movements and influence control over the surrounding waters.

“I don’t think one can argue that China has control of the first island chain – but ties with the Philippines empower Japan with options for cooperation to ensure a strategic environment favourable to the country,” Patalano, who teaches war and strategy in East Asia at King’s College London, told This Week in Asia.

Approval of Philippines-Japan defence deal imminent as ties solidify

The Reciprocal Access Agreement is ‘not a military’ pact but could allow Japanese forces to access existing defence bases

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3288810/approval-philippines-japan-defence-deal-imminent-ties-solidify?utm_source=rss_feed

Raissa Robles

Published: 8:00am, 2 Dec 2024Updated: 8:00am, 2 Dec 2024

The Philippines is close to approving a key security pact with Japan that would deepen defence cooperation between the two sides and make it easier to deploy troops to each other’s countries.

Chief of Staff of the Japan Air Self-Defence Force (JASDF) Uchikura Hiroaki met in Manila last week the Department of National Defence’s senior undersecretary Irineo Espino, who shared with him updates on the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA), which was signed in July.

Both officials agreed it was essential for the Philippine air force and JASDF to “sustain and increase bilateral cooperative activities to achieve a higher level of interoperability”.

Senate foreign relations committee chair Imee Marcos said the RAA would be “guided by regional peace and external defence”.

“In principle, [the deal] has been endorsed already to the plenary,” Marcos told reporters last Monday following a closed-door hearing on the issue.

In September, Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero pledged to speed up the ratification by year-end or in time for next year’s Balikatan military training exercises involving the Philippines and its allies.

Why is the Philippines aligning itself with the US after years of close China ties under Duterte

Marcos, however, said some aspects of the accord, including whether Japanese forces would be allowed to use the nine sites established with the US under the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), still needed clarification.

“So we’re trying to iron out issues about jurisdiction and the privileges to be extended to the Japanese visiting forces as well as the civilian components,” she said during the hearing.

She added that other clauses like counterstrike capabilities and collective deterrence would be examined as a constitutional reinterpretation allows Japan to engage in military action if its allies come under attack.

Citing media reports, Marcos said the RAA could potentially allow Tokyo to take part in EDCA initiatives if Manila and Washington agree to it.

Alessio Patalano, a visiting professor at the Japan Maritime Command and Staff College in Tokyo, said the deal was integral to the East Asian nation’s strategy of investment in minilaterals that reinforce the US-Japan alliance.

“In particular, Japanese interests in open and stable sea lanes through the South China Sea create the conditions for stronger defence ties with the Philippines to be pursued,” Patalano said.

He also played down the idea that Beijing has dominance over the “first island chain”, a series of strategically important islands including Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines that form a barrier to military movements and influence control over the surrounding waters.

“I don’t think one can argue that China has control of the first island chain – but ties with the Philippines empower Japan with options for cooperation to ensure a strategic environment favourable to the country,” Patalano, who teaches war and strategy in East Asia at King’s College London, told This Week in Asia.

A coastguard vessel bought from Japan docks at the Manila port in 2022. Photo: AFP

Japan is expected to further help the Philippines to build up capacity, especially in the critical area of law enforcement, as Manila faces an increasingly aggressive China in the disputed waterway, he added.

With Tokyo easing its export control norms, Patalano noted that Manila can now buy armament-equipped coastguard vessels from Japan.

Underscoring the urgency to approve the agreement, Philippine defence chief Gilberto Teodoro told senators that currently the armed forces can only hold sea exercises with their Japanese counterparts outside the Philippines’ 12 nautical-mile (22km) territorial sea.

He said the pact would pave the way for the Philippine military’s mutual training, technology exchange and interoperability with the Japan Self-Defence Force.

Teodoro stressed that the treaty does not contravene the country’s constitution, saying “Article 4 of the RAA states clearly that it is not a military agreement, which is prohibited under our laws”.

A copy of the agreement, made available to This Week in Asia, specifies under Article IV that the RAA applies to “mutually determined cooperative activities conducted by the forces” on land, sea and air.

Unlike the Visiting Forces Agreement with Washington – which automatically transfers custody of American soldiers accused of non-security-related crimes, such as rape, to US military authorities while they are on trial in Manila – the RAA with Japan does not include this provision.

Teodoro said the RAA was modelled on a similar arrangement that Japan has with Australia and Britain.

US and Philippines conduct annual Balikatan drills amid rising tensions with China

Appearing for foreign minister Enrique Manalo during the hearing, the department’s assistant secretary Aileen Mendiola-Rau said the ministry fully backed the RAA’s approval, which was a “natural progression” of cooperation between the two militaries in humanitarian and disaster relief.

Last year, Japan funded projects worth US$12 billion in areas including infrastructure development, food security, education and maritime safety. The country also donated a new coastal radar system to the Philippine navy.

Mendiola-Rau highlighted Tokyo’s steadfast support for Manila’s assertion of its sovereign rights in the South China Sea.

“Our bilateral relations have become an important aspect of regional stability in the Indo-Pacific,” she said.

Senate majority leader Francis Tolentino, who plays a significant role in deciding which measures are scheduled for plenary debate and approval, said it would be beneficial for the agreement to include support for fisheries technology for Filipino fishermen, “considering the advanced stage of technology being employed by the Japanese fishing industry”.

He added that the RAA has his “full support”.

Raissa Robles

FOLLOW

Raissa Robles has written for the SCMP since 1996. A freelance journalist specialising in politics, international relations, business and Muslim rebellion, she has contributed to Reuters, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Daily Mail, Times of London, Radio Netherlands and Asiaweek. She runs the award-winning investigative and opinion blog, raissarobles.com. Her book, Marcos

18. Israel’s New Approach to Tunnels: A Paradigm Shift in Underground Warfare

I hope our South Korean allies (and US Forces Korea) are examining Israeli tunnel operations. 

Excerpts:

It is unlikely that any military will face a tunnel system like that in Gaza, where an enemy’s political-military strategy rests on the tunnels and they are deliberately placed under civilian areas. But militaries will continue to encounter subterranean environments in warfare. State actors like China, Iran, and North Korea continue to invest in thousands of miles of military tunnels and bunkers to protect everything from nuclear sites, radar installations, and runways to full military bases. It is also hard to separate urban warfare from underground warfare in major cities that have existing civil infrastructure underground for transportation, water, and other essential services.

The lessons from the IDF’s adaptations and, ultimately, transformation of culture toward underground warfare are deeply important for other militaries—especially those whose own cultures are characterized by the notion that tunnels are obstacles that should be avoided or only dealt with when required. The lessons learned by the IDF will save the lives of other soldiers in other battlefields. The IDF have also shown others that subterranean environments can be used for more than only defensive tactics. With the right culture, understanding, intelligence, technologies, and tactics, they can be used for simultaneous maneuvers on the surface and subsurface. That changes everything.

Israel’s New Approach to Tunnels: A Paradigm Shift in Underground Warfare - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by John Spencer · December 2, 2024

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

Before the war against Hamas in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces were one of the most prepared militaries in the world for underground warfare. The IDF were the only army to have a full brigade-sized unit dedicated to training, manning, equipping, researching, developing new technologies and tactics, learning, and adapting solely for underground warfare. Still, the challenges they faced early in their campaign in Gaza, many of which they struggled initially to overcome, speaks to the incredible complexity of subterranean warfare. Their responses to these challenges signal a paradigm shift in modern approaches to underground warfare.

The Long List of Underground Challenges

One of the main reasons the IDF were unprepared for Gaza’s underground spaces was simply that no military had faced anything like it in the past—not even Israeli ground forces. The IDF faced a Hamas military organization that had spent over fifteen years engineering the infrastructure of an entire region—to include over twenty major cities—for war, with the group’s political-military strategy resting on a vast and expensively constructed subterranean network under Gaza’s population centers. The Hamas underground network, often called the “Gaza metro,” includes between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels and bunkers at depths ranging from just beneath apartment complexes, mosques, schools, hospitals, and other civilian structures to over two hundred feet underground. There are estimates of over five thousand separate shafts leading down into Hamas subsurface spaces. In past wars, where underground environments were used, the tunnel networks were subordinate to the surface and were not built solely under population centers mostly to be used as massive human shields.

IDF investigations and captured Hamas documents produced reports that it took Hamas a year to dig one kilometer of standard tunnel at a per-kilometer cost of $275,000. A number of factors—size, type, and function, for examples—can raise the costs well beyond that of a standard mobility tunnel. The variety of tunnels in Gaza makes it difficult to estimate the underground network’s overall cost, but Hamas reportedly spent $90 million to build just three dozen tunnels in 2014, and some analysts place the network’s total cost at over $1 billion.

On October 7, 2023, the IDF had a brigade of special operations forces engineers, the Yahalom unit, fully equipped with technologies and tactics to accomplish the full range of underground warfare tasks, from detecting, securing, and mapping tunnels and bunkers to exploiting, clearing, neutralizing, and destroying them. This unit has spent decades researching, developing, testing, and purchasing technologies to overcome the challenge of military operations underground. This work includes a decade-long antitunnel cooperation and exchange program between Israel and the United States to jointly develop technologies and tactics that address the challenges of underground warfare. The IDF also has a robust military working dog program, the Oketz unit, that includes dogs trained for operating in subterranean spaces.

IDF units like Yahalom had plenty of work to do to prepare for underground warfare. Soldiers need special equipment to breathe, see, communicate, navigate, breach obstacles, and even shoot underground. Almost every piece of their standard military equipment designed for the surface will not work once they enter the subsurface. Line-of-sight and satellite-enabled technologies—including navigation, communication, and drones—are rendered useless. Night-vision goggles that rely solely on ambient light will not work in an environment where there is none. A blast from a weapon or explosive detonated in enclosed underground spaces can cause harmful pressures and blast injuries making it dangerous to even fire a personal weapon if the soldier is not wearing the proper protective gear.

The Culture Component

A unique challenge that all militaries face in dealing with underground warfare is one of culture. Any military force’s culture is guided by its history, priorities, and warfighting concepts. Whether that culture acknowledges and prepares for the underground challenges described above is determined by an institutional belief about whether or not underground spaces will be prominent features in future warfare. For example, the US Army’s cultural views surrounding tunnels and subterranean spaces is that they are obstacles to be dealt with when encountered. The service’s doctrine recommends that US soldiers “should avoid entering and operating in subterranean environments when possible.” If entering cannot be avoided, the doctrine describes the primary tasks as clearing and securing the subterranean environment.

The IDF have their own long history of dealing with tunnels, especially cross-border tunnels. Hamas and Hezbollah have used cross-border tunnels in the past to conduct surprise attacks on IDF outposts or small patrols in a bid to kidnap Israeli soldiers. This led to the IDF to develop advanced detection, mapping, and navigating capabilities, as well as—in an emergency such as a soldier being taken back into a tunnel—the tactics to follow an enemy underground.

The IDF also developed advanced tunnel-striking capabilities with a wide variety of bunker-busting munitions. In the 2021 Operation Guardian of the Walls, the IDF believed they had destroyed sixty miles of Hamas tunnels in Gaza. Captured documents show that after this 2021 operation, the Hamas leadership authorized $225,000 to install more blast doors in tunnel segments to protect against IDF bunker-busting munitions collapsing more of the tunnel beyond the point where the bomb directly strikes. Hamas also increased production of handbooks showing their fighters how to survive and fight in tunnels.

In general, the IDF culture before 2023 was marked by the belief that tunnels should be dealt with by specially trained forces and that regular troops should only be sent underground as a last resort.

Adapting to Tunnels

At the beginning of the IDF operations against Hamas in Gaza after the October 7 attack, the IDF targeted many bunkers and tunnels with precision-guided bunker-busting munitions. These strikes were based on intelligence regarding the locations of tunnels, their purpose and value to the enemy, their contents, considerations about the presence of hostages or civilians, and other factors.

Once the ground campaign began, the IDF knew they would be encountering a lot of tunnels. They task-organized squad-sized elements of Yahalom to as many maneuvering units as possible. The force that entered Gaza rapidly learned how to identify visual indicators of tunnel shafts, such as markings on buildings, the presence of infrastructure needed in the tunnels for power or ventilation, and other identifying features.

Once a shaft was located, it was generally secured and then Yahalom was called forward to investigate it. Even identifying a shaft was dangerous and time-consuming. The IDF lost five soldiers in early November 2023 from a booby-trapped tunnel entrance. Hamas’s use of booby traps outside and inside their tunnels was pervasive. In some cases, Hamas tunnels were built with improvised explosive devices embedded into the walls. This allowed Hamas fighters to arm and then leave their booby-trapped tunnels quickly.

If a shaft was determined to be a tunnel it was carefully interrogated, mapped, and searched. Many advanced technologies were used in this process, including drones and robotic devices designed to work underground. In some cases, military working dogs with cameras mounted on their backs were deployed, but the risk of losing dogs to booby traps made this tactic rare. During this time, Israel continued to be reluctant to send troops underground and only did so after tunnels were searched for potential dangers.

In fighting Hamas defenders, the IDF immediately faced enemy brigades, battalions, and companies that each had tunnel networks supporting their operations. In northern Gaza, the IDF had weeklong battles over single neighborhoods because of Hamas’s ability to pop in and out these networks and avoid decisive engagement.

In one attempt to combat Hamas’s use of their tunnels, the IDF procured and deployed what is to reported to be at least five industrial pumps to push thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into the tunnels to literally flush Hamas fighters out of them. The flooding had minimal impact. In one case, as one IDF officer I spoke to during a research visit told me, it took two weeks for a small Hamas tunnel to fill before the IDF finally saw Hamas fighters on the surface where they could be targeted. Due to the tunnels’ porous concrete lining, the water simply drained out of them. Some tunnels were even built with drainage holes in them, while in others blast doors complicated the process. Flooding had little impact and was too time-consuming to use as a primary method to force Hamas fighters out of their tunnels. And ultimately, flooding would not destroy a tunnel.

The more the IDF engaged with the Hamas tunnel network, the more they adapted. Stopping for every suspected tunnel shaft and waiting for Yahalom to investigate severely slowed the momentum of maneuvering forces. Many of the suspected shafts were simply wells, civilian infrastructure, or other types of tunnels. The IDF quickly realized they had to push some of the specialized knowledge of Yahalom lower and to general-purpose soldiers. The regular IDF soldiers began to become proficient at dealing at least with shaft identification, site securing, and initial investigations.

The IDF began to realize that in many areas, the tunnels were a system of systems. Each Hamas company, battalion, and brigade had its own networks of tunnels that factored into how they would fight and move around. Some of these networks connected to each other while others were separate. Once the IDF were able to focus intelligence efforts on determining the classification and architecture of a tunnel system in a specific area or neighborhood, their success in finding and dealing with tunnels significantly increased.

The IDF also developed a typology of Hamas tunnels. Some Hamas tunnels were tactical, such as small-unit tunnels that ran from building to building giving Hamas fighters the ability to hold specific terrain. Some were more operational as they connected different battalions or brigades to each other or provided operational mobility—like the mile-long tunnels running underneath the river basin of central Gaza to connect the region’s northern and southern portions. What to do about a specific tunnel and the urgency of action could be determined by proper identification of the type of tunnel that had been encountered.

Despite the IDF adaptations, a challenge remained: that of Hamas forces using the tunnels for their defensive operations as long as they could and then simply lining the tunnels with booby traps as they fell back to different tunnels. The tunnels gave Hamas the ability to control the initiative of most battles in Gaza.

Transforming to Tunnels

One Israeli commander refused to allow Hamas fighters to control the initiative by using their tunnels. When the war in Gaza began, Brigadier General Dan Goldfus—a veteran of the Shayetet 13 unit, a naval special operations unit—commanded the elite 98th Paratroopers Division. In late November 2023, with some of the IDF’s best armor, artillery, and engineer units added to its paratroopers and commandos, the division was deployed into Hamas’s strongpoint city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. The city was considered to be the “center of gravity” of Hamas’s military forces.

General Goldfus learned from what the other IDF divisions had encountered in northern Gaza but also oversaw a rapid learning initiative to study the Hamas tunnels in Khan Yunis. He had his soldiers study the details of each tunnel, traveled into the tunnels with his soldiers, and had soldiers collect on how Hamas protected certain tunnels. He also used his unique connections in the IDF and Israel’s intelligence service to develop what might be called all-source intelligence about types and locations of tunnels as well as other trends in Khan Yunis. Eventually, the division built the confidence that it understood the enemy’s tunnel network.

General Goldfus developed a plan to enter Hamas’s tunnels without Hamas knowing his soldiers were there. This was unlike any IDF unit’s approach to tunnels in Gaza yet. His plan was briefed to his superiors for approval. He was given the approval to take the calculated risks that other units had not to that point. He then started sending his special operations forces, engineers, and others into uncleared tunnels at the exact same time he was maneuvering on enemy forces on the surface.

IDF special operations forces, commandos, and others were equipped with all the specialized equipment needed to breathe, navigate, see, communicate, and shoot underground. General Goldfus’s division headquarters refined the ability to control forces moving underground with the tempo of the surface forces. Incrementally, the division refined its tactics to the point its soldiers were conducting raids with separate brigades attacking on the surface while more than one subterranean force maneuvered on the same enemy underground.

For the first time in the modern history of urban warfare, General Goldfus and his soldiers were conducting mauver warfare simultaneously incorporating the surface and subsurface in dense urban areas. They had turned tunnels from obstacles controlled by the defending enemy into maneuver corridors for the attacker.

More importantly, through General Goldfus’s leadership and his soldiers’ adaptations, innovations, and hard work, the division began to transform the IDF’s culture toward underground warfare. Its tactics were spread to other units, along with the understanding that the old culture of avoiding tunnels was no longer the IDF’s approach. The new culture of a deeper understanding of—and, in some cases, using—the enemy’s tunnels to facilitate maneuver warfare with simultaneous maneuver on the surface and subsurface is unlike that of any other military in modern history.

The Challenge That Remains

There is one subterranean challenge that even General Goldfus and his division could not overcome: destroying tunnels. Israel’s strategic goal in Gaza includes destroying Hamas’s major military capabilities. This logically requires destroying a certain percentage of the vast underground network the group has so heavily relied on.

Contrary to some reporting, removing Hamas’s ability to plan and conduct military operations does not require destroying all of Hamas’s tunnels. Not every tunnel is as important as others. The cross-border tunnels between Gaza and Egypt that served as Hamas’s strategic lines of communication—enabling vital weapons supplies—large tunnels linking northern and southern Gaza or connecting different cities or brigade areas of operations and allowing freedom of movement, and command-and-control tunnels like the data center found under a United Nations building in Gaza City do require destruction. The destruction of hundreds if not thousands of tactical tunnels that connect different buildings across the Gaza strip is not critical to achieving Israel’s military objective and may exceed any reasonable ability Israel has to remove those tunnels.

But there is a gap in military methods for destroying tunnels. Military history has generated far more knowledge about creating tunnels than destroying them. Modern bunker-busting bombs can penetrate the earth in a small area to strike at a target in a tunnel or bunker but cannot effectively destroy the full length of a tunnel.

From 2013 to 2019, Egypt used sewage and seawater to collapse primitive Hamas smuggling tunnels along its border with Gaza. As discussed earlier, however, this did not work on the more sophisticated tunnels found inside Gaza. In 2018, Israel pumped wet cement into cross-border Hezbollah tunnels along the northern border with Lebanon. The exact number of metric tons of wet cement required for a single tunnel, while not publicly reported, was substantial. This tactic may block tunnels under the right circumstances, but it is not practical where there are a lot of tunnels to address.

One of the few feasible methods to eliminate a tunnel, used historically and validated by modern case studies, is to place explosives through the full length of it. This is what Israeli forces have been doing in Gaza but they quickly ran into scaling and resourcing problems.

Israel has a couple of explosive options. One of these is injecting liquid TNT into tunnels. This involves drilling holes into the tunnel at 650-foot intervals—and requires twelve tons of explosives per kilometer. An alternative is methodically placing explosives along the inside of cleared tunnels. Reports show that to demolish just one kilometer of tunnel requires fifteen metric tons of TNT placed inside the tunnel. The amount of TNT needed for tunnels Israeli forces discovered in Gaza quickly exceeded their supplies of liquid or military-grade explosives like composition C-4. They therefore primarily relied on a field-expedient method of using both their own stockpile as well as captured Hamas explosives designed for other uses such as antitank mines to string together along tunnels.

The harsh reality is that there is likely not enough supply of explosives or enough time to destroy all the tunnels in Gaza. To find all the tunnels and then destroy them would potentially take years. The IDF seem to be focusing limited resources on destroying the tunnels that provided Hamas with the most military value to survive or conduct attacks against Israel.

The Future

The IDF have already taken their new understanding, culture, and approach to tunnels to another theater in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah also built a vast tunnel network of hundreds of miles and which is referred to as the “Land of Tunnels.” The 98th Paratroopers Division, with its pioneering and advanced underground warfare skills, was one of the first units to conduct raids into the Hezbollah tunnels found along Israel’s northern border.

It is unlikely that any military will face a tunnel system like that in Gaza, where an enemy’s political-military strategy rests on the tunnels and they are deliberately placed under civilian areas. But militaries will continue to encounter subterranean environments in warfare. State actors like China, Iran, and North Korea continue to invest in thousands of miles of military tunnels and bunkers to protect everything from nuclear sites, radar installations, and runways to full military bases. It is also hard to separate urban warfare from underground warfare in major cities that have existing civil infrastructure underground for transportation, water, and other essential services.

The lessons from the IDF’s adaptations and, ultimately, transformation of culture toward underground warfare are deeply important for other militaries—especially those whose own cultures are characterized by the notion that tunnels are obstacles that should be avoided or only dealt with when required. The lessons learned by the IDF will save the lives of other soldiers in other battlefields. The IDF have also shown others that subterranean environments can be used for more than only defensive tactics. With the right culture, understanding, intelligence, technologies, and tactics, they can be used for simultaneous maneuvers on the surface and subsurface. That changes everything.

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He is also a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.

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

Image credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

mwi.westpoint.edu · by John Spencer · December 2, 2024

19.  The Trump Administration’s China Challenge

Excerpts:

Apart from the question of bilateral diplomacy and tariffs, the Trump administration will deal with a more assertive Chinese foreign policy. The Taiwan Strait, after a period of brief de-escalation, is increasingly tense because of Beijing’s distrust of Taiwan’s new leadership and its steadily more significant military exercises around Taiwan. China’s continual harassment of Philippine vessels, including incidents in the Second Thomas Shoal that have injured several Philippine sailors and risked triggering U.S. defense commitments, have put the South China Sea on the verge of crisis. China is also supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine in more brazen ways, providing Russia with materials for its defense industrial base and, according to European intelligence services, lethal assistance.

For the incoming national security team, addressing Chinese provocations in the Indo-Pacific while managing conflicts in the Middle East and Europe will prove challenging. The administration should resist the gravitational pull of those conflicts and prioritize revitalizing the sources of American strength. National security is not just about foreign policy. Trump’s team should remember that the key to this decisive decade is not just what the United States does abroad. What it does at home to improve its competitive position may be even more important.

The Trump Administration’s China Challenge

Rebuilding American Strength Will Take Buy-In at Home and Abroad—and From Trump Himself

By Rush Doshi

November 29, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Rush Doshi · November 29, 2024

Predicting the incoming Trump administration’s China policy—and China’s likely response—is a guessing game. In his first term, President Donald Trump’s transactional approach often differed from his team’s competitive approach. Those contrasting impulses will define his second term. But despite the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s approach, the central challenge it faces is clear: positioning the United States to outcompete China as a critical window in the competition begins to close.

Early in the Biden administration, senior officials gathered together, read the intelligence, and concluded that the 2020s would be the decisive decade in U.S. competition with China. Without corrective action, the United States faced a growing risk of being surpassed by China technologically, dependent on it economically, and defeated militarily in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait.

The new Trump team will take the United States through the second half of the decisive decade. There is much to be done. Trump’s national security picks, particularly Mike Waltz as national security adviser, Marco Rubio as secretary of state, and Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations, understand the task ahead and have views consistent with a growing bipartisan consensus on the need to outcompete China. Their most significant obstacle in carrying out a competitive approach may be Trump’s own penchant for deal-making, transactionalism, and flattery toward President Xi Jinping, which sometimes undercut his staff’s more hard-line approaches, including the expansion of export controls and a vocal defense of human rights, among other measures, the first time around.

If Trump’s new team can overcome that challenge, they will have an opportunity to improve America’s competitive position. Closing the gap during the decisive decade may call for building on the work of President Joe Biden, just as the Biden team built on the work of the Trump administration. The Biden administration focused on rebuilding American strength by focusing on its foundations at home and its relationships with partners abroad, an approach summed up in its “invest, align, compete” tagline. That formula can also serve as a way to fulfill the Trump administration’s vision of “peace through strength.” But rebuilding American power will require the Trump administration to undertake new efforts, too, that depend on bipartisan congressional support and the buy-in of the American public.

STRENGTH STARTS AT HOME

Some of the most urgent questions about U.S. China policy turn on questions about domestic policy, which provides the basis for American strength. But the foundations of that strength have atrophied, especially since the end of the Cold War. The administration will need to undertake significant structural reforms to remedy these weaknesses.

The United States needs to fix its defense industrial base to rapidly deter China and, if necessary, defeat it in a potential conflict. At present, the United States would expend all its munitions within a week of sustained fighting and would struggle to rebuild surface vessels after they were sunk, with a national shipbuilding capacity less than that of one of China’s larger shipyards. The Trump administration must focus on making progress on two timelines: the two-year problem of fielding more uncrewed systems and cruise and ballistic missiles in the Indo-Pacific, as well as the five-to-ten-year problem of revitalizing the United States’ shipbuilding industry, which has been declining for decades without an adequate commercial sector to keep it viable.

Washington also needs to protect its critical infrastructure from cyberattack. China has compromised U.S. critical infrastructure upon which millions of Americans rely, including water and gas, transportation, and telecommunications systems, with the aim of inciting chaos, sowing panic, and reducing U.S. will in a conflict scenario. As it invests in offensive capabilities, the Trump administration will also need to bolster American defenses through a combination of regulatory measures, new legislation holding companies accountable for lackluster cyber defenses, and novel technical efforts that can complicate the abilities of bad actors to penetrate U.S. networks.

The United States needs to fix its defense industrial base to rapidly deter China and, if necessary, defeat it in a potential conflict.

Finally, the United States needs to invest in reindustrialization and technological leadership. China already accounts for more than 30 percent of global manufacturing, can innovate successfully, increasingly leads in the sectors of tomorrow, and is redirecting massive amounts of capital into manufacturing as its housing market stagnates. The result, a second “China shock” akin to the one that flooded U.S. markets with cheap Chinese goods at the beginning of this century, will threaten the United States’ future as an industrial power and leave it more dependent on China than China is on the United States. Addressing this problem will require not only tariffs but also industrial policies to stimulate manufacturing and high-tech industry and coordination with allies and partners. Punitive measures directed at allies, such as tariffs, will complicate the United States’ ability to enlist them in efforts to protect against China’s excess capacity.

To advance this domestic agenda, the Trump administration cannot rely only on executive branch authorities. It will need significant bipartisan congressional support. The Biden administration approached some major domestic initiatives in this fashion, including through its infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Trump administration could do the same.

The Trump administration will also need to mobilize the American public. Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, every American president has given a primetime address from the Oval Office on some aspect of Middle East policy. None have done so on China. Trump may consider an address to the nation on China policy, but how he frames the nature of the competition with China will matter more than whether he delivers such a speech. With a clear-eyed but not demagogic tone, stressing competition but not necessarily confrontation, and linking competition with China directly to the interests of Americans, Trump could rally the American public, civil society, academia, and the corporate sector behind the administration’s efforts.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

The China challenge is in part about scale. China is four times the size of the United States in population. It is the world’s leading industrial state and the largest trading partner of over 100 countries. For the United States to compete, it needs to achieve scale of its own. The best path to rivaling China’s size will run through allies and partners.

American strength flows from the country’s rich network of alliances and partnerships. In addition to fixing structural problems at home, the Trump administration will need to deepen its coordination with friendly countries in two key areas: economics and technology, and security.

To avoid a second China shock and create conditions conducive to reindustrialization, the administration will need to pool allies’ and partners’ markets and align with them on tariff and regulatory approaches that protect Western industry. And to retain leadership in technology, it will need to cooperate on export controls to prevent sensitive technology from falling into China’s hands.

To deter China’s aggression in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, the Trump administration should build on the Biden administration’s collaborative successes in the region, which included AUKUS, a trilateral security partnership to provide Australia nuclear submarine capability; the Quad, which brought the United States, Australia, India, and Japan together; and efforts to diversify the footprint of U.S. military forces across Australia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The latter measure blunted the risk China’s missile systems pose to U.S. forces near China and allowed the United States to operate more flexibly and resiliently. Deterrence also calls for providing allies and partners with asymmetric capabilities through arms sales and by positioning U.S. capabilities on their soil, as the United States recently did by deploying the Typhon missile system in the Philippines, in order to create costs for Chinese aggression. And finally, it almost certainly will require working with allies and partners to increase the economic and political costs for China’s adventurism in Asia, including through coordinated sanctions and statements in response to Chinese military activity. None of these steps are possible if the United States goes it alone.

Whether the Trump administration is able to achieve cooperation on these priorities depends on how they approach allies and partners. European leaders, for good reason, fear that Trump will levy tariffs on European countries’ economies, cut military assistance to Ukraine, pressure Europe to increase defense spending, and possibly pursue its own form of détente with Russia in the hope that increased U.S. engagement could weaken the Chinese-Russian relationship. Administration officials should use their leverage over European countries to bring about a broader realignment in the transatlantic relationship, one that ensures that Europe bolsters its defenses, increases support for Ukraine, and imposes tougher economic and technological measures on China, such as on export controls, in coordination with the United States. This approach would be wiser than pushing for a package of immediate and flashy short-term concessions that would damage alliances without realigning them meaningfully. Similarly, in Asia, Trump’s first-term threats to withdraw U.S. troops from allied countries, demand more payment for U.S. bases, or abandon U.S. defense commitments were grounded in real U.S. leverage. But they ignored the fact that American allies in the region must attend to their own domestic political situations, in which voters often react negatively to public pressure from the United States. A subtle approach to enlist them in the administration’s China strategy will be more effective.

THREATS, BLUFFS, AND PROMISES

Beijing, for its part, is already taking steps to prepare for the incoming administration. It is deeply concerned about Trump’s threat to levy 60 percent tariffs on Chinese goods and has already signaled it is prepared to retaliate with tariffs, export controls, and sanctions of its own, as well as crackdowns on U.S. companies operating in China. If Chinese officials believe retaliation will provoke further escalation from Trump, they may be restrained, mirroring their behavior in the trade war during Trump’s first term. If they believe, however, that retaliation may cause the Trump administration to back down for fear of rising inflation or risks to key American companies, then they are more likely to respond forcefully, perhaps even seeking to escalate to de-escalate, a tactic previewed by Beijing in its targeting of Micron, an American semiconductor manufacturer, and its recent use of export controls on rare earths in response to U.S. export controls. But there is a third possibility: if Trump levies a 60 percent tariff early in his presidency and shows limited interest in negotiation, and China concludes that the risks to its economy (and Xi’s reputation) are existential and intolerable, then Beijing may have no choice but to respond forcefully, regardless of the expected American response.

It’s unclear whether the Trump administration’s tariff threat is a negotiating tactic intended to achieve a change in China’s behavior, a nonnegotiable U.S. policy intended to achieve decoupling, or a mix of both. For Beijing, the best outcome may be to hope for the former and, through a mixture of retaliation and personal diplomacy, push for a bargain that might include trade, technology, and even counternarcotics measures. To increase the odds of such an outcome, Beijing may initially retaliate against companies with close ties to Trump, including Elon Musk’s Tesla, in order to incentivize de-escalation. Chinese officials may also seek to split Trump from his more hard-line staff and play to his direct self-interest, as they did in negotiations following the start of the U.S.-Chinese trade war during his first term. Their strategy resulted in Trump downplaying China’s crackdown against protesters in Hong Kong, expressing support for its internment camps in Xinjiang, offering to lift export controls on Huawei and ZTE, and even accepting a trade deal that did not address China’s industrial policy practices. Given this history, the possibility that Beijing suggests a grand bargain to Trump in which semiconductor export controls and other would-be nonnegotiable U.S. policies, potentially including U.S. Taiwan policy, are negotiated directly with Beijing should particularly concern the administration’s more competitively inclined staff. Such a proposal should be rejected.

The smartest path forward for the Trump administration on tariffs may be to “boil the frog” by gradually increasing—or threatening to increase—tariffs, rather than levying them all immediately. This approach would complicate Beijing’s ability to respond forcefully and to accuse the United States of being the sole disruptive force in the trading system. It would give U.S. and foreign companies time to adjust. And it might allow the United States to extract meaningful concessions from Beijing by giving Chinese leaders the political space to work toward a deal rather than immediately backing them into a corner and forcing them to retaliate.

Beyond the trade war, Beijing will seek to present itself as a global leader and portray the United States as a country hurtling into decline. Seven years ago, in response to Trump’s first election, Xi tried to position China as a defender of globalization at Davos, declaring that “any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries, and people between economies . . . runs counter to the historical trend.” A trade war offers another such opportunity. But this time, in addition to claiming the mantle of defender of the global economic system, Xi may aim to position China, however implausibly, as a mediating party to the current conflicts in the Middle East and Europe.

Beijing, for its part, is already taking steps to prepare for the incoming administration.

Beijing also believes that tensions with the Trump administration will require mending fences with other great powers. It has increased diplomatic engagement with Europe and Japan and pursued a border de-escalation arrangement with India. China is working to improve ties to U.S. allies and partners, not simply to reduce pressure on itself but also to provide an alternative to which these countries could turn if they consider Washington’s approach to be overly punitive. Beijing sees the United States’ network of alliances as Washington’s key advantage in geopolitical competition, and it hopes that a second Trump administration that damages those partnerships—as the first did—may create openings. Trump, then, should not to play into Beijing’s hand in this way.

How the Trump administration will structure bilateral diplomacy with China remains an open question. The most effective lines of communication are through the White House, as they were in the Biden administration, where leader-level diplomacy and the channel between the U.S. national security adviser and China’s foreign affairs commission director were critical not just to managing competition but also to communicating redlines. The Trump administration may be well served by relaunching the NSA-level channel developed by the Biden administration. But leader-level diplomacy, given Trump’s well-reported tendency to improvise and seek deals, may make sustaining a truly competitive approach more difficult.

Apart from the question of bilateral diplomacy and tariffs, the Trump administration will deal with a more assertive Chinese foreign policy. The Taiwan Strait, after a period of brief de-escalation, is increasingly tense because of Beijing’s distrust of Taiwan’s new leadership and its steadily more significant military exercises around Taiwan. China’s continual harassment of Philippine vessels, including incidents in the Second Thomas Shoal that have injured several Philippine sailors and risked triggering U.S. defense commitments, have put the South China Sea on the verge of crisis. China is also supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine in more brazen ways, providing Russia with materials for its defense industrial base and, according to European intelligence services, lethal assistance.

For the incoming national security team, addressing Chinese provocations in the Indo-Pacific while managing conflicts in the Middle East and Europe will prove challenging. The administration should resist the gravitational pull of those conflicts and prioritize revitalizing the sources of American strength. National security is not just about foreign policy. Trump’s team should remember that the key to this decisive decade is not just what the United States does abroad. What it does at home to improve its competitive position may be even more important.

• RUSH DOSHI is Director of the Initiative on China Strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He previously served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

Foreign Affairs · by Rush Doshi · November 29, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com