Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing – refusing to participate in activities that make life bad."

- Leo Tolstoy

The American's Creed

"I believe in the United States of America as a government of the People, by the People, for the People; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a Democracy in a Republic, a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of Freedom, Equality, Justice, and Humanity for which American Patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my Duty to my Country to Love it, to Support its Constitution; to Obey its Laws; to Respect its Flag; and to Defend it against all enemies."

- William Tyler Page

(The Creed was written by William Tyler Page of

Friendship Heights, Maryland in the course of a

nationwide contest on the subject.

Page was a descendent of President Tyler, and

Representative John Page, who served in the

Congress from 1789-97. He began his government

career as a Congressional page in December of

1881. In 1919, he was elected Clerk of the House of

Representatives, and held that position until

December of 1931 when a new post, Emeritus

Minority Clerk, was then created for him which he

occupied until his death on October 20, 1942._

“It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honors that we are fighting, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with his life.”

- The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 19

2. Wartime Ukraine erasing Russian past from public spaces

3. The U.S. Needs to Change the Way It Does Business With China

4. Factbox: How many people might die, and why, under relaxed China COVID curbs

5. The Pentagon says it has helped Ukraine thwart Russian cyberattacks.

6. Why the Marine Corps may nix gender identifiers for drill instructors

7. New House Panel on China to Scrutinize US Investments in Country

8. Assessing “Reflections on Net Assessment” by Andrew W. Marshall, Edited by Jeffrey S. McKitrick and Robert G. Angevine

9. The Terrorist Threats and Trends to Watch Out for in 2023 and Beyond

10. US officials tried to stop Ukraine from killing high-ranking Russian general who was on a risky visit to the front lines, report says

11. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – 35 Years Later

12. The Top Ten Global Risks of 2023

13. Defending Ukraine: the World's Frontline of Freedom

14. Chinese Liaoning Carrier Strike Group Now Operating in the Philippine Sea

15. ‘Lacking Credibility, Lacking Confidence From the People … Is Xi Xinping’s Greatest Vulnerability’

16. Washington is waking up on weapons for Taiwan

17. Taiwanese Flock to Civil Defense Training Ahead of Potential Chinese Invasion

18. Barriers still prevent women from joining special ops, watchdog says

19. Partisan Bills Hurt Cybersecurity

20. Send the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb to Ukraine

21. It’s not just the EU that needs to scrutinize Qatar’s influence campaigns

22. The High Cost of American Heavy-Handedness

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 19

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-19

Key Takeaways

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko likely deflected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to coerce Belarus into Russian-Belarusian integration concessions on December 19.
Russian forces targeted Kyiv with Shahed-131 and 136 kamikaze drone strikes overnight on December 18-19.
Igor Girkin, a former Russian militant commander and prominent critical voice in the Russian milblogger information space, wrote a harsh critique of the Russian military’s overall performance in the war.
The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) reportedly clashed with other Russian occupation authorities regarding basic administration procedures, suggesting tensions between the various occupation administrations in Ukraine.
The Wagner Group has likely built its offensive model around tactical brutality in order to accommodate for and take advantage of its base of poorly trained and recently recruited convicts.
Russian forces continued limited counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line as Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces targeted Russian rear positions in Luhansk Oblast.
Russian forces reportedly lost positions south of Bakhmut on December 18 and continued ground attacks near Bakhmut and Donetsk City.
Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces are pulling back some elements from areas along the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continued efforts to establish the Wagner Group as a legitimate parastatal organization by petitioning notoriously nationalist elements in the Kremlin.
Russian occupation authorities continued to restrict movement within occupied territories and employ societal intimidation tactics.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 19

Dec 19, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 19

Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Madison Williams, and Frederick W. Kagan

December 19, 9:30pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko likely deflected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to coerce Belarus into further Russian-Belarusian integration concessions during a meeting in Minsk on December 19. Putin and Lukashenko refrained from publicly discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with both leaders noting that Belarus still faces a Western threat.[1] Putin announced that he may consider training Belarusian combat aviation crews for the use of “munitions with special warheads” due to the “escalating” situation on the Union State’s external borders.[2] ISW has previously assessed that Lukashenko uses the rhetoric of defending Belarusian borders against the West and NATO in an effort to avoid participating in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[3] Lukashenko had also used similar hints about the possible deployment of nuclear weapons in Belarus on February 17 in the context of claimed Western aggression.[4] Lukashenko noted that Russia will deliver S-400 air defense complexes and Iskander complexes, while Putin stated that both leaders discussed the formation of a united defense space.[5] ISW continues to assess that Belarus’ participation in Putin’s war against Ukraine remains unlikely. The fact that Putin appears to have accepted Lukashenko’s talking points without persuading Lukashenko to adjust them indirectly supports this assessment. Lukashenko would likely adjust his rhetoric to create some plausible explanation to his own people about why he was suddenly turning away from the fictitious NATO invasion threat he has manufactured to join Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine.

The Kremlin has also attempted to conceal Putin’s likely original intentions to pressure Lukashenko into further concessions regarding integration with the Russian Federation. Putin notably stated that “Russia is not interested in absorbing anyone,” when referring to Belarus.[6] This statement followed Lukashenko’s reiteration of Belarusian independence and full sovereignty on December 16 and appears to be a defensive reaction to Lukashenko’s comments.[7] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also stated that Putin did not go to Belarus to convince Lukashenko to join the war, noting that such speculations are unfounded and “foolish.”[8] Peskov had avidly denied Putin’s intention to invade Ukraine days before the start of offensive operation in a similar fashion, to be sure, but this denial is more likely an attempt to cover up Putin’s desperation to involve Lukashenko in the war and apparent failure—again—to do so.

Russian forces targeted Kyiv with Shahed-131 and -136 kamikaze drone strikes overnight on December 18–19. Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces shot down 30 Russian Shahed drones, including 10 over southern Ukraine and 18 over Kyiv.[9] Kyiv City Military Administration Head Serhiy Popko stated that Russian strikes did manage to hit an unspecified infrastructure object in Kyiv, and Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian strikes targeted energy infrastructure.[10] Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov assessed that Russian forces have enough missiles left to conduct three or four more rounds of strikes and then would have to acquire more missiles from Iran, which Ukraine would struggle to defend against; but he noted that Ukrainian forces know how to defend against Shahed kamikaze drones.[11] Russian milbloggers continued to criticize Russian forces for striking operationally insignificant targets that do not forward Russia’s military goals in Ukraine.[12]

Igor Girkin, a former Russian militant commander and prominent critical voice in the Russian milblogger information space, shared a Russian volunteer’s harsh critique of the Russian military’s overall performance in the war on December 19.[13] The volunteer framed his critique around Russian failures to defend against Ukrainian counteroffensives; the circumstances that led to those failures; and Russian leadership, media, and milbloggers’ failure to address the situations and decision to focus on false positivity.[14] Girkin himself has been a profound critic of the Kremlin and Russia’s military failures, especially following his claimed two-month stint fighting in Ukraine, as ISW has previously reported.[15] The volunteer forecasted that Russian forces will have to surrender more cities and even full oblasts to Ukraine as they will be unable to defend against a possible winter counteroffensive, and Girkin’s amplification of such a forecast suggests he may agree with it. Girkin’s own extremely pessimistic forecasts have been surprisingly accurate, including his critiques of the failure to effectively generate Russian military volunteers in May that has carried over to current mobilization efforts, of the disproportionately high Russian price paid for the limited gain of the capture of Lysychansk in July, and of Russian logistics lines’ continued vulnerability to HIMARS strikes across the theater.[16] Other prominent Russian milbloggers largely ignored the rant that Girkin amplified on December 19 (unlike Girkin's own December 6 rant following his return to Russia and Telegram), instead continuing to report on Russian activity around Bakhmut in the same performative nature that portrays operationally insignificant gains as huge victories—a framing that the volunteer’s rant spent hundreds of words condemning.[17]

The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) is reportedly clashing with other pro-Russian authorities about basic administrative functions, suggesting a lack of cohesion between occupation administrations throughout various areas of occupied Ukraine. Russian-backed Crimean chairman of the Association of Freight Carriers and Freight Forwarders, Anatoly Tsurkin, posted a public appeal to DNR Head Denis Pushilin on December 18 calling for Pushilin to regulate the “illegal, groundless actions that are carried out on the territory of the DNR” by employees of various DNR military, administrative, law enforcement, and bureaucratic organs.[18] Tsurkin claimed that DNR employees in the areas of Nikolske and Manhush (transport hubs west of Mariupol that have access to the M14 Mariupol-Berdyansk-Melitopol highway that leads to the E105 Melitopol-Dzankoi highway that links occupied Zaporizhia Oblast with occupied Crimea) are detaining trucks traveling from Crimea for no special reason and with tenuous justifications in order to confiscate drivers’ personal documents and illegally confiscate cars.[19] Tsurkin’s complaints likely come partially as a result of increased pressure on Russian authorities to find alternative logistics routes from Russia to Crimea due to damage to the Kerch Strait Bridge. They are additionally emblematic of growing friction between the DNR and other Russian-affiliated factions, on which ISW has previously reported.[20] The lack of administrative cohesion in Pushilin’s regime is apparently being ill-received by other Russian and Russian-backed authorities, which broadly suggests that Pushilin is not communicating effectively with other occupation organs and therefore complicating logistics between the DNR and other occupied territories.

The Wagner Group has likely built its offensive model around tactical brutality in order to accommodate for and take advantage of its base of poorly trained and recently recruited convicts. The UK Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on December 19 that the Wagner Group is continuing to play a major role in attritting Ukrainian forces around Bakhmut and that the group has developed its distinct set of tactics around the fact that its recruit base is primarily composed of former convicts with little to no training.[21] UK MoD noted that Wagner Group command takes advantage of the tendency of recruits to engage in brutal behavior because it protects high-value leadership assets at the expense of low-value recruits.[22] ISW has extensively reported on the fact that the Wagner Group uses convicts to build out its fighting force and that Wagner Group forces are serving a largely attritional role in operations near Bakhmut, failing to take significant ground but effectively pinning Ukrainian forces in the defense of surrounding territory.[23]

Key Takeaways

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko likely deflected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to coerce Belarus into Russian-Belarusian integration concessions on December 19.
Russian forces targeted Kyiv with Shahed-131 and 136 kamikaze drone strikes overnight on December 18-19.
Igor Girkin, a former Russian militant commander and prominent critical voice in the Russian milblogger information space, wrote a harsh critique of the Russian military’s overall performance in the war.
The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) reportedly clashed with other Russian occupation authorities regarding basic administration procedures, suggesting tensions between the various occupation administrations in Ukraine.
The Wagner Group has likely built its offensive model around tactical brutality in order to accommodate for and take advantage of its base of poorly trained and recently recruited convicts.
Russian forces continued limited counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line as Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces targeted Russian rear positions in Luhansk Oblast.
Russian forces reportedly lost positions south of Bakhmut on December 18 and continued ground attacks near Bakhmut and Donetsk City.
Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces are pulling back some elements from areas along the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continued efforts to establish the Wagner Group as a legitimate parastatal organization by petitioning notoriously nationalist elements in the Kremlin.
Russian occupation authorities continued to restrict movement within occupied territories and employ societal intimidation tactics.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort)
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian forces continued limited counterattacks to regain lost positions along the Svatove-Kreminna line on December 18 and 19. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks near Stelmakhivka (15km west of Svatove) between December 18 and 19.[24] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces attempted to advance on Stelmakivkha and Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove).[25] The Ukrainian General Staff also stated that Russian troops attempted to attack Ukrainian positions around Kreminna near Chervonopopivka (5km north of Kreminna), Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna), and near Hryhorivka, Serebrianka, and Bilohorivka, all about 10km south of Kreminna.[26] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that Russian artillery struck a Ukrainian force concentration near Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna), indicating that Ukrainian troops may have advanced to the area.[27] Russian milbloggers remarked on poor conditions for Russian forces along the Svatove-Kreminna line and noted that Russian soldiers deployed near Svatove are suffering from ailments associated with poor hygiene and first-aid practices in cold and wet conditions.[28] Another Russian milblogger claimed that the southern part of the Svatove-Kreminna line is “impassable” due to mud and fog.[29]

Russian sources continued to claim that Ukrainian forces struck Russian rear areas in Luhansk Oblast. The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) claimed on December 18 that Ukrainian forces fired three HIMARS rockets at Shchastia, about 15km north of Luhansk City along the H21 highway.[30] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that a December 16 strike on Shchastia eliminated 16 Russian servicemembers and destroyed 12 pieces of equipment.[31] Russian sources also claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted HIMARS strikes on Svatove as well as Novoselivka and Alchevsk (both cities southwest of Luhansk City and under LNR control since 2014) between December 18 and 19.[32]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces reportedly lost positions south of Bakhmut on December 18 and continued ground attacks in the area on December 18 and 19. A Russian military correspondent reportedly embedded in a unit fighting south of Bakhmut admitted on December 18 that Ukrainian forces managed to dislodge Russian troops from unspecified positions they fought for “all autumn.”[33] The Ukrainian Joint Forces Task Force reported that Ukrainian troops have been repelling five to seven Russian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Bakhmut per day.[34] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops continued unsuccessful ground attacks on Bakhmut itself, northeast of Bakhmut near Verkhnokamyanske (30km northeast), Vyimka (22km northeast), Vesele (16km northeast), Bakhmutske, (7km northeast) and Pidhorodne (3km northeast), and south of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka (7km southwest) and Andriivka (10km southwest) between December 18 and 19.[35] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner Group fighters are fighting south of Bakhmut and in the industrial zone of Bakhmut itself, including along Bakhmut’s southeastern outskirts.[36] Geolocated footage posted on December 19 shows Ukrainian coordinate drone reconnaissance guiding artillery strikes on Russian positions on Fedora Maksymenka street on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.[37]

Russian forces continued ground attacks along the western outskirts of Donetsk City on December 18 and 19. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks near Oleksandropil (15km north of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske, Krasnohorivka, and Nevelske (all on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City), and Marinka, Pobieda, and Novomykhailivka (all on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City) between December 18 and 19.[38] Russian milbloggers reported fighting in many of the same areas and highlighted operations of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 11th Guards Regiment and ”Somalia” Battalion in the Pisky and Pervomaiske areas northwest of Donetsk City.[39] Russian sources also widely claimed that Russian troops broke through Ukrainian defenses in Marinka’s city center on December 18 and are advancing further west on December 19.[40] Russian sources claimed that the Russian capture of Marinka will allow Russian troops the ability to bypass Vuhledar to the southwest and advance northwest towards Kurakhove, which reportedly is a major Ukrainian transportation hub and rail line.[41] A Russian milblogger notably claimed that Ukrainian troops pushed Russian units out of positions in Pobieda and established control of strongholds south of Marinka.[42] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian troops conducted limited counterattacks to regain lost positions southwest of Donetsk City on the Vuhledar area on December 18 and 19.[43] Russian forces continued routine fire in the Avdiivka–Donetsk City area and in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts on December 18 and 19.[44]

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

Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces are pulling back some elements from areas along the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast. The head of the Ukrainian Joint Press Center of the Tavrisk Direction Defense Forces, Yevheny Yeri, stated on December 19 that Russian forces continue to construct defenses in eastern Kherson Oblast and are attempting to withdraw their main units from Ukrainian artillery range along the Dnipro River.[45] Russian artillery has the same range as Ukrainian artillery, however, and pulling Russian forces out of Ukrainian artillery range will also inhibit Russian forces’ ability to strike across the Dnipro River with their existing weapons systems. Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Military Administration Advisor Serhiy Khlan stated that Russian forces reduced their presence in Nova Kakhovka but that it is unclear whether Russian forces are fully withdrawing from the settlement.[46] Yeri reiterated Ukrainian officials’ warnings on December 19 that Russian forces may be conducting an information operation to lure Ukrainian forces into a trap on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River with false claims of a withdrawal.[47] Russian forces are unlikely to successfully fake a withdrawal without Ukrainian forces detecting the deception, as ISW has previously assessed.[48] Russian forces continued to shell areas on the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River, including Kherson City and its environs, on December 18 and 19. A Ukrainian source reported explosions in Chaplynka (69km south of the Dnipro River on the T2202 Nova Kakhovka-Armiansk highway) on December 18.[49]

Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian force concentrations in rear areas of Zaporizhia Oblast as Russian forces continue to reinforce and establish defenses in the area. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on December 19 that recent Ukrainian strikes against Russian forces in Berdyansk, Tokmak, and Polohy injured over 150 military personnel and destroyed 10 pieces of equipment and an ammunition depot.[50] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Ukrainian strikes against Russian forces in unspecified areas of Zaporizhia Oblast on December 16 wounded over 150 military personnel and destroyed 10 pieces of equipment and two ammunition depots.[51] Russian Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov stated that mobilized Russian personnel arrived in Berdyansk for training and to defend occupied Zaporizhia Oblast, and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are increasing their numbers in Melitopol Raion.[52] Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov shared an image of dragon’s teeth anti-tank defenses in a residential area in Melitopol and stated that Russian forces have been placing dragon’s teeth in the city for two days in a row.[53]

Russian sources claimed that Ukraine is conducting an information operation to destabilize occupied Crimea. Russian milbloggers claimed on December 18 that the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) instructed Ukrainians to tell their families to evacuate Crimea by January 15, 2023, because “an agreement has been reached” regarding the surrender of Crimea.[54] The milbloggers called on Russians not to fall for the information operation and panic.[55] A different Russian milblogger amplified footage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on December 18, claiming that Zelensky promised an offensive against Crimea, and quoted Zelensky promising a Ukrainian offensive against Crimea and saying he would love to visit the (presumably liberated) peninsula in summer 2023.[56] Geolocated footage posted online on December 17 show the Saky Thermal Power Plant in Crimea on fire from an unknown cause, which may contribute to Russian panic over the security of Crimea if Russian sources blame Ukraine for the fire regardless of the fire’s cause.[57]

Note: ISW will report on activities in Kherson Oblast as part of the Southern Axis in this and subsequent updates. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in right-bank Kherson Oblast has accomplished its stated objectives, so ISW will not present a Southern Ukraine counteroffensive section until Ukrainian forces resume counteroffensives in southern Ukraine.

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

Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continued efforts to establish the Wagner Group as a legitimate parastatal organization by petitioning notoriously nationalist elements in the Kremlin. Prigozhin continued to demand that St. Petersburg officials bury a deceased Wagner servicemen at a Russian military cemetery by distributing identical letters to Chairman of the Russian State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the Russian Communist Party Gennadiy Zyuganov, Chairman of the New People Party Alexey Nechayev, Chairman of the Fair Russia—Patriots—For Truth Party Sergey Mironov, Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council Andrey Turchak, and Chairman of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly Valentina Matvienko.[58] Prigozhin directly reached out to prominent nationalist figures who were instrumental in setting information conditions for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war prior to February 24, likely in an effort to secure recognition from the Russian government.[59] Prigozhin also noted that a former officer and recipient of the Hero of Russia medal, Andrey Troshev, petitioned Putin regarding the honorary burial of all participants of the “special military operation.”[60] Volodin subsequently stated that deceased Wagner servicemen must receive equal recognition and rights as all participants of the military operation.[61]

Russian occupation officials are largely unsuccessful in recruiting Ukrainian civilians to join volunteer battalions in occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 19 that occupation officials are recruiting men throughout Russia into the “Sudoplatov” volunteer battalion in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast, despite originally announcing recruitment from the region.[62] Russian recruitment ads on social media corroborate Ukrainian reports, claiming that the battalion had “united” volunteers from Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts, Crimea, the Urals, and central Russia.[63]

Some Russian pro-war milbloggers are continuing to deny that Russian force-generation efforts rely on financial incentives. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Information Minister Danil Bezsonov criticized a statement that Russian men are only motivated to volunteer in the war due to poverty in Russia.[64] Bezsonov and other milbloggers accused the creator of the video of discrediting the Russian volunteer movement within the Russian Armed Forces, noting that such content aims to demoralize Russian forces.[65] Putin, however, signed a decree to allocate plots of land in Moscow Oblast, Crimea, and Sevastopol to Russian veterans who had served in the Russian “special military operation,” suggesting that the Kremlin seeks to establish explicit financial incentives for participation in the war.[66]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian occupation forces intensified efforts to restrict movement of Ukrainian citizens in occupied territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on December 18 that Russian occupation officials introduced a 24-hour curfew in Zaporizhia Oblast and plan to specifically keep the curfew in place from December 30 to January 3 in Berdyansk and Chernihivka, Zaporizhia Oblast.[67] Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov stated that Russian occupation forces began a “new regime of terror” and are actively keeping Ukrainian residents from leaving occupied territories ahead of the holidays, partially in an effort to use them as human shields against Ukrainian forces.[68] Fedorov stated that Russian occupation officials have increased filtration activities on alternative evacuation routes in occupied territories and prevented Ukrainians from exiting occupied territories since December 15.[69] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 19 that Russian occupation officials even prevented Ukrainians with exit passes from leaving occupied territories and closed the exit checkpoint at Vasylivka, Zaporizhia Oblast, to prevent Ukrainians from exiting occupied territories until further notice.[70] Advisor to the Head of Kherson Oblast Military Administration, Serhiy Khlan, also reported that Russian occupation officials have prevented Ukrainians from exiting Kherson Oblast through Vasylivka since December 17.[71]

Russian authorities are continuing to employ various schemes to transport Ukrainian children to Russia. A Russian new source reported on December 18 and 19 that children from Skadovsk, Primorsky, Henichesk, and other settlements in Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast traveled to Moscow to attend the first congress of the “Russian Movement of Children and Youth.”[72] The source reported that children will attend lectures, master classes, and discussion groups for three days.[73] ISW is unable to verify if these children are expected to return to occupied Kherson Oblast after this event.

Russian occupation forces intensified social intimidation tactics in occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 18 that Russian occupation forces have intensified searches for Ukrainian partisans and have conducted raids and searches of personal property in Berdyansk and Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast.[74] The head of Nikopol, Yevheny Yevtushenko, reported that Russian occupation forces are conducting searches of cars, personal belongings, and phones of men under 40 and that similar searches are occurring in other occupied territories.[75] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on December 19 that Russian forces have increased their presence in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast and are considering involving former police officers with allegiance to Russia against the local population.[76] Former BBC Moscow Journalist and current freelancer Leonid Ragozin shared footage on December 17 of Russian St. Petersburg riot police patrolling the center of Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast to “maintain order.”[77] Ragozin stated that many online sources, including Ukrainian Mariupol Mayor Petro Andryushchenko, reported Russian forces have swarmed Mariupol in recent days.[78]

Russian occupation forces continue to struggle with reconstruction in occupied territories. A Russian milblogger criticized the Russian government on December 18 for its inability to reconstruct occupied Luhansk Oblast quickly or effectively, stating that the “Russian bureaucratic machine is quite clumsy and some aspects of civilian life remain unresolved.”[79] The milblogger stated that much of Luhansk Oblast runs as if it were still a Ukrainian territory and that the oblast experiences difficulties with accessing certain goods, fuel, communication, and the internet; and that prices for basic goods are skyrocketing.[80] The milblogger stated that Russian telecom operators are hesitant to enter occupied territories out of fear that the war will destroy their equipment and noted that there is no way to get new communications base stations because Nokia and Ericsson pulled out of Russia.[81] The milblogger argued that “further delay in restoring the quality of life in the liberated territories may lead to a deterioration in the humanitarian situation” as well as an increase in social tension among locals.[82]

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[1] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70148; https://president dot gov dot by/ru/events/aleksandr-lukashenko-19-dekabrya-provedet-peregovory-s-prezidentom-rossiyskoy-federacii-vladimirom-putinym; https://www dot interfax dot ru/russia/877696

[2] https://www dot interfax dot ru/russia/877696

[5] https://ria dot ru/20221219/oborona-1839851433.html ; https://www dot aa dot com.tr/ru/%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80/%D0%BB%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BE-%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5-%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D1%8B-%D1%81-400-%D0%B8-%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%80-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8B-%D0%BD%D0%B0-%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B5-%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B6%D1%83%D1%80%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE/2767842

[6] https://gordonua dot com/news/worldnews/putin-zayavil-chto-rossiya-ne-zainteresovana-v-tom-chtoby-kogo-to-pogloshchat-1641540.html

[11] https://www.pravda dot com.ua/articles/2022/12/19/7381305/

[31] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/18/zavdyaky-koordynacziyi-pidpillya-ta-zsu-na-luganshhyni-znyshheno-16-okupantiv/

[45] https://suspilne dot media/341234-povernenna-svitla-rosiani-ne-vipuskaut-z-okupovanih-teritorij-putin-zustrinetsa-z-lukasenkom-299-den-vijni-onlajn/

[47] https://espreso dot tv/informatsiya-pro-vidstup-rosiyan-z-khersonshchini-mozhe-buti-pastkoyu-nachalnik-obednanogo-prestsentru-sil-oboroni-tavriyskogo-napryamku-eri

https://twitter.com/NinaWilsonStats/status/1604243501734133760

https://twitter.com/neonhandrail/status/1604333469735198721

[61] https://www dot kommersant dot ru/doc/5733551

[62] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/19/okupanty-ne-mozhut-znajty-ohochyh-vstupaty-do-lav-dobrovolchogo-bataljonu-na-tot/

[66] https://meduza [dot] io/news/2022/12/19/putin-rasporyadilsya-vydelit-uchastnikam-voyny-zemelnye-uchastki-v-podmoskovie-krymu-i-sevastopole

[70] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/19/rosiyany-zablokuvaly-propusknyj-punkt-u-vasylivczi/

[74] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/18/okupanty-provely-rejd-v-poshukah-partyzan/

[79] https://t.me/rybar/42114; http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202211210047?index=0&rangeSize=1

[80] https://t.me/rybar/42115; https://www.vedomosti dot ru/technology/articles/2022/12/13/954954-abonenti-mobilnih-operatorov-smogut-dozvonitsya-do-novih-regionov; https://www.comnews dot ru/content/222773/2022-10-26/2022-w43/novym-territoriyam-propisali-perekhodnyy-period-svyazi; https://iz dot ru/1437672/valerii-kodachigov/import-zameshcheniia-perekhod-sotovykh-operatorov-na-rossiiskoe-oborudovanie-otkladyvaetsia

[81] https://t.me/rybar/42115; https://www.vedomosti dot ru/technology/articles/2022/12/13/954954-abonenti-mobilnih-operatorov-smogut-dozvonitsya-do-novih-regionov; https://www.comnews dot ru/content/222773/2022-10-26/2022-w43/novym-territoriyam-propisali-perekhodnyy-period-svyazi; https://iz dot ru/1437672/valerii-kodachigov/import-zameshcheniia-perekhod-sotovykh-operatorov-na-rossiiskoe-oborudovanie-otkladyvaetsia

[82] https://t.me/rybar/42115; https://www.vedomosti dot ru/technology/articles/2022/12/13/954954-abonenti-mobilnih-operatorov-smogut-dozvonitsya-do-novih-regionov; https://www.comnews dot ru/content/222773/2022-10-26/2022-w43/novym-territoriyam-propisali-perekhodnyy-period-svyazi; https://iz dot ru/1437672/valerii-kodachigov/import-zameshcheniia-perekhod-sotovykh-operatorov-na-rossiiskoe-oborudovanie-otkladyvaetsia

understandingwar.org

2. Wartime Ukraine erasing Russian past from public spaces

Wartime Ukraine erasing Russian past from public spaces

AP · by JAMEY KEATEN · December 20, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — On the streets of Kyiv, Fyodor Dostoevsky is on the way out. Andy Warhol is on the way in.

Ukraine is accelerating efforts to erase the vestiges of Soviet and Russian influence from its public spaces by pulling down monuments and renaming hundreds of streets to honor its own artists, poets, soldiers, independence leaders and others — including heroes of this year’s war.

Following Moscow’s invasion on Feb. 24 that has killed or injured untold numbers of civilians and soldiers and pummeled buildings and infrastructure, Ukraine’s leaders have shifted a campaign that once focused on dismantling its Communist past into one of “de-Russification.”

Streets that honored revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin or the Bolshevik Revolution were largely already gone; now Russia, not Soviet legacy, is the enemy.

It’s part punishment for crimes meted out by Russia, and part affirmation of a national identity by honoring Ukrainian notables who have been mostly overlooked.

Russia, through the Soviet Union, is seen by many in Ukraine as having stamped its domination of its smaller southwestern neighbor for generations, consigning its artists, poets and military heroes to relative obscurity, compared with more famous Russians.

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If victors write history, as some say, Ukrainians are doing some rewriting of their own — even as their fate hangs in the balance. Their national identity is having what may be an unprecedented surge, in ways large and small.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken to wearing a black T-shirt that says: “I’m Ukrainian.”

He is among the many Ukrainians who were born speaking Russian as a first language. Now, they shun it — or at least limit their use of it. Ukrainian has traditionally been spoken more in the western part of the country — a region that early on shunned Russian and Soviet imagery.

Large parts of northern, eastern and central Ukraine are making that linguistic change. The eastern city of Dnipro on Friday pulled down a bust of Alexander Pushkin — like Dostoevsky, a giant of 19th century Russian literature. A strap from a crane was unceremoniously looped under the statue’s chin.

This month, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced about 30 more streets in the capital will be rechristened.

Volodymyr Prokopiv, deputy head of the Kyiv City Council, said Ukraine’s “de-Communization” policy since 2015 had been applied in a “soft” way so as not to offend sensitivities among the country’s Russian-speaking and even pro-Moscow population.

“With the war, everything changed. Now the Russian lobby is now powerless – in fact, it doesn’t exist,” Prokopiv said in an interview with The Associated Press in his office overlooking Khreschatik Street, the capital’s main thoroughfare. “Renaming these streets is like erasing the propaganda that the Soviet Union imposed on Ukraine.”

During the war, the Russians have also sought to stamp their culture and domination in areas they have occupied.

Andrew Wilson, a professor at University College London, cautioned about “the dangers in rewriting the periods in history where Ukrainians and Russians did cooperate and build things together: I think the whole point about de-imperializing Russian culture should be to specify where we have previously been blind — often in the West.”

Wilson noted that the Ukrainians “are taking a pretty broad-brush approach.”

He cited Pushkin, the 19th century Russian writer, who might understandably rankle some Ukrainians.

To them, for example, the Cossacks — a Slavic people in eastern Europe — “mean freedom, whereas Pushkin depicts them as cruel, barbarous, antiquated. And in need of Russian civilization,” said Wilson, whose book “The Ukrainians” was recently published in its fifth edition.

In its program, Kyiv conducted an online survey, and received 280,000 suggestions in a single day, Prokopiv said. Then, an expert group sifted through the responses, and municipal officials and street residents give a final stamp of approval.

Under the “de-Communization” program, about 200 streets were renamed in Kyiv before this year. In 2022 alone, that same number of streets have been renamed and another 100 are scheduled to get renamed soon, Prokopiv said.

A street named for philosopher Friedrich Engels will honor Ukrainian avant-garde poet Bohdan-Ihor Antonych. A boulevard whose name translates as “Friendship of Peoples” — an allusion to the diverse ethnicities under the USSR – will honor Mykola Mikhnovsky, an early proponent of Ukrainian independence.

Another street recognizes the “Heroes of Mariupol” — fighters who held out for months against a devastating Russian campaign in that Sea of Azov port city that eventually fell. A street named for the Russian city of Volgograd is now called Roman Ratushnyi Street in honor of a 24-year-old civic and environmental activist who was killed in the war.

A small street in northern Kyiv still bears Dostoevsky’s name but soon will be named for Warhol, the late Pop Art visionary from the United States whose parents had family roots in Slovakia, across Ukraine’s western border.

Valeriy Sholomitsky, who has lived on Dostoevsky Street for nearly 40 years, said he could go either way.

“We have under 20 houses here. That’s very few,” Sholomitsky said as he shoveled snow off the street in front of a fading address sign bearing the name of the Russian writer. He said Warhol was “our artist” — with heritage in eastern Europe:

Now, “it will be even better,” he said.

“Maybe it is right that we are changing many streets now, because we used to name them incorrectly,” he added.

___

Vasilisa Stepanenko and Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv contributed.

AP · by JAMEY KEATEN · December 20, 2022

3. The U.S. Needs to Change the Way It Does Business With China

Excerpts:

In the Trump administration, we began the decoupling process by imposing billions of dollars of Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports — a legal provision that allows a president to restrict foreign commerce that unfairly burdens the United States — and the expansion of export controls. We recognized the threat and acted.

That policy has been extended under President Biden: His administration kept the tariffs and further expanded export controls and is carrying out provisions of the CHIPS Act. Neither the tariffs nor the export controls have had an appreciable negative effect on our economy.

But they have begun the process of bringing manufacturing back to America and of decoupling our economies. We should do all we can to avoid a military confrontation, and we must continue to talk to and work with China in areas of mutual advantage.

But we must also act alone to begin this strategic decoupling. We cannot hide from the truth about China. Failure to act decisively now is no longer forgivable. It is dereliction.

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

The U.S. Needs to Change the Way It Does Business With China

Dec. 18, 2022

6 MIN READ

Credit...Andy Wong/Associated Press

By Robert E. Lighthizer

Mr. Lighthizer was the U.S. trade representative in the Trump administration.

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

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In a recent speech, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo suggested an incremental shift in how the United States approaches “competitiveness and the China challenge.” She recognized the serious threat from China, explaining that the United States “will continue to press China to address its nonmarket economic practices that result in an uneven playing field.” She noted, though, that “we are not seeking the decoupling of our economy from that of China’s.”

America’s China policy does need to change. The ruthless repression of its Covid-policy protesters is the latest proof of that, but the greater urgency is that the status quo has things moving to the disadvantages of the United States as well as to the benefit of China. An incremental shift is not enough.

In order to truly ensure that economic relations between the two countries continue to be beneficial to America, it is time to adopt an explicit policy of strategic decoupling of our economy from theirs — not a total decoupling, but one that should be done over time and in an organized way.

There are two fronts in any contest with China: the economic front and the national security front. They are not entirely separate. One affects the other. And for policymakers, that is the point.

We must prepare in both spheres — economic and military — because the best way to avoid a military crisis is to maintain our economic superiority.

The purpose of strategic decoupling would be to benefit America, not to punish China or to hold it back. It has become clear that China is not a friend or a partner in development, but rather an adversary bent on world dominance.

In our economic competition, China is winning. We transfer well over $300 billion to the country annually in trade deficits, and China uses it to build its military, improve its competitiveness and buy our assets — increasingly our technology companies and even our farms. A recent report concluded that Chinese firms and investors own a controlling interest in almost 2,400 U.S. companies. China engages in technology theft, espionage and mercantilism to build what Chinese leaders believe will be the world’s dominant economy.

On the national security front, China is a big and rapidly expanding military power, and its objective is to have not just the largest but also the most sophisticated military in the world in the next decade. It is arming the South China Sea at a rate not seen since the Second World War and building military outposts in Africa and elsewhere. It is vastly increasing its nuclear arsenal and asserting territorial claims in India, the Philippines and Vietnam. It is threatening Taiwan. It has executed an agreement of friendship with “no limits” with Russia and is cooperating with the invasion of Ukraine. It has a vast campaign to influence our country, and it is responsible directly or indirectly for much of the fentanyl that is destroying many of our communities.

China’s enterprises have purchased strategic assets in Asia, Europe and South America. The country is monopolizing crucial strategic materials like rare earths, lithium and cobalt.

As if China’s aggressive turn was not clear, candid translations of proceedings at the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress in October show that they de-emphasized phrases like “peace and development” and adopted phrases like “preparing for the storm” and “the spirit of struggle.”

The U.S. objective should be to continue trade and economic activity beneficial to us and to discourage any part that is not. For example, trade in agricultural products, raw material and some consumer and pharmaceutical goods can be mutually beneficial. Importing to the United States computers, automobiles and telecommunications equipment is not.

The objective of this strategic decoupling is simple — reciprocity. It is precisely what China does to us. China has always denied us equal access to its market and has for decades pursued a policy of technological independence. China’s “indigenous innovation” policy began in 2006, and “Made in China 2025” was announced in 2015. The report of the recent 20th National Congress called for China to “increase the security and resilience of China’s own industrial supply chains.”

Strategic decoupling has several aspects. First, we should progressively impose tariffs on all of China’s imports into the United States until we have balanced trade.

Second, we should disentangle our technology. Specifically, we must enhance our export controls to further limit the kinds of technology allowed to be exported and to whom it can go. We need to stop the integration of our advanced industries by discouraging U.S. high-tech manufacturing in China and enact more policies like the CHIPS Act (which authorizes billions of dollars to help companies pay for building or expanding American computer chip factories and for research and worker training) and smart tax and regulatory policies to ensure that advanced technology stays at home or with our allies.

We should support American companies that have begun to recognize the burdens of relying on Chinese manufacturing. For example, Apple has reportedly decided to shift some of its production outside China. The company said it will look to other Asian countries, particularly India and Vietnam, to assemble some Apple products. Likewise Microsoft and Google are moving some or all of their Xbox console and Pixel phone production. Amazon is getting many of its FireTV devices from India.

We should shut down TikTok and other social media platforms that mine our citizens’ data and serve as propaganda organs to influence our public discourse.

China has some of the strictest technology regulations in the world. It is impossible to invest in China at scale without government approval; the Chinese government almost certainly approves all outbound investment to the United States. The country’s policy is what the former Australian prime minister and China expert Kevin Rudd calls “decoupling with Chinese characteristics.”

Finally, we should limit U.S. investment going to China and China’s investment into our industries. Our investment there strengthens its economy and its military, and leads to offshoring of sometimes critical supply chains; its investment in the United States often leads to the loss of technology and sensitive data. This will prevent further economic integration and increase the availability of capital at home and in the West. No investment should be permitted in either direction unless it will strengthen America, not merely enrich a few Americans.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — a regulatory unit in the Treasury Department — needs to be greatly expanded so that it is not limited to national security concerns but can consider other economic consequences. Last year, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommended in its annual report to Congress that the United States pass a similar interagency review screening program for outbound investment to China. Senators Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, have introduced legislation to this effect. It is needed.

In the Trump administration, we began the decoupling process by imposing billions of dollars of Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports — a legal provision that allows a president to restrict foreign commerce that unfairly burdens the United States — and the expansion of export controls. We recognized the threat and acted.

That policy has been extended under President Biden: His administration kept the tariffs and further expanded export controls and is carrying out provisions of the CHIPS Act. Neither the tariffs nor the export controls have had an appreciable negative effect on our economy.

But they have begun the process of bringing manufacturing back to America and of decoupling our economies. We should do all we can to avoid a military confrontation, and we must continue to talk to and work with China in areas of mutual advantage.

But we must also act alone to begin this strategic decoupling. We cannot hide from the truth about China. Failure to act decisively now is no longer forgivable. It is dereliction.

Robert E. Lighthizer was the U.S. trade representative in the Trump administration and the deputy trade representative in the Reagan administration.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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4. Factbox: How many people might die, and why, under relaxed China COVID curbs

Factbox: How many people might die, and why, under relaxed China COVID curbs

Reuters · by Reuters

SHANGHAI, Dec 20 (Reuters) - China's abrupt end to its zero-COVID policy has raised concerns of widespread infections among a vulnerable, undervaccinated population with little natural immunity that would overload the health system and result in up to 2 million deaths, or more, various research groups are reporting.

New analyses by various modelling groups predict the reopening could result in as many as 2.1 million deaths.

As of Monday, China has officially reported 5,242 COVID-related deaths during the pandemic, a tiny fraction of its 1.4 billion population.

Here are some of the estimates:

MORE THAN 2 MILLION

Zhou Jiatong, head of the Center for Disease Control in southwestern Guangxi region, said last month in a paper published by the Shanghai Journal of Preventive Medicine that mainland China faces more than 2 million deaths if it loosened COVID curbs in the same way Hong Kong did this year.

Infections could rise to more than 233 million, his forecast showed.

1.55 MILLION

In May, scientists in China and the United States estimated that China risks just over 1.5 million COVID deaths if it drops its tough zero-COVID policy without any safeguards such as ramping up vaccination and access to treatments, according to research published in Nature Medicine.

They forecasted that peak demand on intensive care would be more than 15 times capacity, causing roughly 1.5 million deaths, based on worldwide data gathered about the variant's severity.

However, the researchers, the lead authors among whom were from Fudan University in China, said the death toll could be reduced sharply if there was a focus on vaccination.

UP TO 2.1 MILLION

China could see 1.3 million to 2.1 million people die if it lifts its zero-COVID policy due to low vaccination and booster rates as well as a lack of hybrid immunity, British scientific information and analytics company Airfinity said in late November.

The company said it modelled its data on Hong Kong's BA.1 wave in February, which occurred after the city eased restrictions after two years.

MORE THAN 1 MILLION

The U.S.-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), part of the University of Washington, in an updated model said on Friday it expects more than 1 million deaths through 2023. The group expects cases to peak in April, when deaths will have reached 322,000.

About a third of China's population will have been infected by then, IHME Director Christopher Murray said.

A modelling team at the University of Hong Kong estimated simultaneous reopening of all provinces in December 2022 through January 2023 would result in 684 deaths per million, according to a paper released on Wednesday on the Medrxiv preprint server that has yet to undergo peer review.

Based on China's population of 1.41 billion, and without measures such as a mass vaccination booster campaign, that amounts to 964,400 deaths.

Reporting by Brenda Goh, additional reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Tomasz Janowski

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Reuters

5. The Pentagon says it has helped Ukraine thwart Russian cyberattacks.

Sigh... everyone wants to be like JSOC. But seriously, it seems we have done a good job advising and assisting Ukraine and I imagine we are gaining important insights to apply in cyberspace.

Excerpts:

On Monday, the U.S. military elevated the force to the status of a sub-unified command, a symbolic move that could eventually help it recruit more expertise within the military and keep its members in place longer. The idea is to make the mission force the cyberspace equivalent of Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, which oversees America’s elite hunter-killer commando teams.

“We really want to build the JSOC of Cyber Command in order to tackle the nation’s most difficult missions,” General Hartman said.

The war in Ukraine has become the world’s first sustained cyberspace battle between two sophisticated militaries. Russia has struggled to penetrate Ukraine’s digital defenses or notch any sustained battlefield gains from its cyberweapons. While American officials had anticipated that Russia would seek to take down Ukraine’s electric grid with a combination of drone, missile and cyberattacks, only the physical attacks have done lasting damage.

The Pentagon says it has helped Ukraine thwart Russian cyberattacks.

Russia has struggled to see military gains from its cyberattacks in the world’s first sustained cyberspace battle between two sophisticated militaries.

By Julian E. Barnes

Published Dec. 19, 2022
Updated Dec. 20, 2022, 5:25 a.m. ET

nytimes.com · by Julian E. Barnes · December 19, 2022

FORT MEADE, Md. — The Pentagon’s Cyber National Mission force has been supporting Ukraine’s digital defense with daily consultations, a collaboration that has helped unearth thousands of warning indicators of potentially compromised Ukrainian computer networks, a top U.S. cyber commander said on Monday.

The United States had a team of nearly 40 people from the force in Ukraine to help the country shore up its defenses before all U.S. troops were withdrawn from the country ahead of the Russian invasion.

But Maj. Gen. John Hartman, the force’s commander, said on Monday that the United States had continued to conduct operations from inside the United States to assist Ukraine and stop Russian hackers.

The Cyber National Mission Force was created in 2012, as part of the U.S. Cyber Command — the nation’s cyber military organization, headquartered in the National Security Agency’s complex in Fort Meade, Md. There are 2,000 service members assigned to the force, organized into 39 teams charged with shoring up allied defenses, stopping Russian hackers, defending American elections and other operations.

On Monday, the U.S. military elevated the force to the status of a sub-unified command, a symbolic move that could eventually help it recruit more expertise within the military and keep its members in place longer. The idea is to make the mission force the cyberspace equivalent of Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, which oversees America’s elite hunter-killer commando teams.

“We really want to build the JSOC of Cyber Command in order to tackle the nation’s most difficult missions,” General Hartman said.

The war in Ukraine has become the world’s first sustained cyberspace battle between two sophisticated militaries. Russia has struggled to penetrate Ukraine’s digital defenses or notch any sustained battlefield gains from its cyberweapons. While American officials had anticipated that Russia would seek to take down Ukraine’s electric grid with a combination of drone, missile and cyberattacks, only the physical attacks have done lasting damage.

For now, Russia appears to have been deterred from direct cyberattacks on the United States or NATO. While Russian hacktivists loosely controlled by Moscow may try to attack the United States, the Russian government has not made a “deliberate decision” to attack NATO, General Hartman said.

Nevertheless, the Cyber National Mission force has teams around Europe working on strengthening computer network defenses. So far the force has deployed 38 times to 21 different countries, conducting operations that helped shore up computer networks.

nytimes.com · by Julian E. Barnes · December 19, 2022

6. Why the Marine Corps may nix gender identifiers for drill instructors

Yes, I am old school. I just find this hard to accept.

In my mind the solution to the problems in these excerpts is not to eliminate the use of Sir and Ma'am.

Excerpts:

Regarding Marine recruits’ treatment of drill instructors, anecdotes suggested female training staff members, even senior ones, were sometimes treated as less important or authoritative than male counterparts. One male drill instructor told interviewers that he saw a female chief drill instructor, who commanded an entire recruit series, standing ignored on the parade deck as other drill instructors asked for advice from a male peer.

The study’s authors suggest that dispensing with “sir” and “ma’am” in favor of the neutral “drill instructor” would help to counteract that behavior.

“Gender-neutral identifiers are an unambiguous, impartial way to circumvent these issues,” the authors write. “Employing gender-neutral identifiers eliminates the possibility of misgendering drill instructors, which can unintentionally offend or cause discord. By teaching recruits to use gender-neutral identifiers for their drill instructors, Services underscore the importance of respecting authoritative figures regardless of gender.”

Why the Marine Corps may nix gender identifiers for drill instructors

marinecorpstimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · December 20, 2022

A new academic report on efforts to integrate Marine Corps boot camp recommends dropping gender-specific salutations for drill instructors, but service leaders are not convinced they want to take that step.

The lengthy report, commissioned by the Corps from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020 and completed in 2022, points out that half of the military services already have done away with gendered identifiers for training staff.

“The Army, Navy, and Coast Guard effectively de-emphasize gender in an integrated environment,” the report states. “Instead of saying ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir,’ recruits in these Services refer to their drill instructors using their ranks or roles followed by their last names. Gendered identifiers prime recruits to think about or visually search for a drill instructor’s gender first, before their rank or role.”

The proposal was under consideration by a Marine Corps leadership team assembled to guide service efforts to integrate boot camp, Col. Howard Hall, chief of staff for Marine Corps Training and Education Command, told the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in December.

But, he said, leaders had concerns.

“That’s going to take some effort,” Hall told the committee during its quarterly public meeting Dec. 6 in Arlington, Virginia. “Honestly, that’s not a quick fix. What are inculcating in our young recruits that will or will not be reinforced when they graduate and enter the fleet Marine force? So again, we want to avoid any quick-fix solutions that introduce perturbations down the line.”

Marine boot camp study calls for mixed-gender drill instructor teams

The model recommended would keep same-gender drill instructor teams with male and female platoons only for hygiene, sleeping and overnight duty.

By Hope Hodge Seck

The University of Pittsburgh report highlights a number of ways ― subtle and not-so-subtle ― that Marine Corps boot camp centers male recruits and makes male Marines the standard. Three of the five sections of service history taught at boot camp contain no explicit mention of female Marines, and “core values” guided discussions exclusively highlight the stories of male Marines and sailors when giving examples of real-world heroism and leadership.

These examples paint a picture of a Marine Corps in transition.

The Corps still has the smallest percentage of female service members, and until 2019 all female recruits were trained in a single battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina. Women now train at both Marine Corps boot camps, but training materials have been slow to catch up to that reality.

The study found, for example, that PowerPoint slides from Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego describing service leadership traits still used all male pronouns: “A leader who is confident in his decisions instills confidence in his Marines.”

Learning sessions about marriage in the military routinely featured images of husbands in uniform and civilian wives, the study found.

Regarding Marine recruits’ treatment of drill instructors, anecdotes suggested female training staff members, even senior ones, were sometimes treated as less important or authoritative than male counterparts. One male drill instructor told interviewers that he saw a female chief drill instructor, who commanded an entire recruit series, standing ignored on the parade deck as other drill instructors asked for advice from a male peer.

The study’s authors suggest that dispensing with “sir” and “ma’am” in favor of the neutral “drill instructor” would help to counteract that behavior.

“Gender-neutral identifiers are an unambiguous, impartial way to circumvent these issues,” the authors write. “Employing gender-neutral identifiers eliminates the possibility of misgendering drill instructors, which can unintentionally offend or cause discord. By teaching recruits to use gender-neutral identifiers for their drill instructors, Services underscore the importance of respecting authoritative figures regardless of gender.”

Hall said the Marine Corps was working to change the training materials highlighted by the University of Pittsburgh study, but expressed concern about making any moves that would put boot camp practices out of step with fleet ones.

“All of a sudden, we change something at recruit training, and recruits start coming in and using a different identifier. It’s not something we would change overnight,” he told Marine Corps Times following the advisory committee meeting. “Again, we’ve got a history of ‘sir, ma’am, sir, ma’am. If we change something at the root level, how do we make the corresponding change at the Fleet Marine Force? So it’s not ours to implement alone.”

The gender identifiers proposal was one of a half-dozen recommendations the Marines’ entry-level training advisory council is now considering. It’s not clear when the service will decide which ones to pursue.

About Hope Hodge Seck

Hope Hodge Seck is an award-winning investigative and enterprise reporter covering the U.S. military and national defense. The former managing editor of Military.com, her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Politico Magazine, USA Today and Popular Mechanics.

7. New House Panel on China to Scrutinize US Investments in Country

New House Panel on China to Scrutinize US Investments in Country

Committee chairman Mike Gallagher sees bipartisan approach
He says panel’s focus will be on US investments in China

Representative Mike Gallagher Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

ByDaniel Flatley

December 19, 2022 at 5:18 PM EST

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/new-house-panel-on-china-to-scrutinize-us-china-investments?sref=hhjZtX76

The chairman of a new congressional committee on China says he plans to focus scrutiny on US investments in the country, amid broader concerns about the threat of economic warfare between the world’s two biggest financial powers.

“If the story of the last five-ish years was enhanced scrutiny of Chinese investment in the US, the next phase of this is going to be enhanced scrutiny of outbound US investment into Communist China,” said Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who has been tapped to head the House Select Committee on China.

The Biden administration and Congress are both considering proposals that would create a system for monitoring and potentially blocking US investments in China. Gallagher predicted that “some version” of such a plan is “inevitable.”

Gallagher said there’s been a tendency in the past to dismiss these efforts as overwrought or alarmist. But that’s not the case.

“Whenever I go to New York and I have this conversation, I feel like there’s a tendency to say ‘Ah, well, you’re a defense hawk, to the extent we think about a confrontation with China over Taiwan, it’s a distant tail risk,’” Gallagher said in an interview. “I don’t think that’s the case any more.”

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is running for speaker of the chamber, has announced that he plans to create the committee when his party takes over next year. McCarthy described the panel as one that would coordinate efforts across the government to counter “the greatest geopolitical threat of our lifetime.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping is “preparing his country for economic struggle and warfare,” Gallagher said, adding that he wants the Pentagon and other national security bodies to coordinate planning more closely with the US’s financial agencies.

The Chinese embassy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Gallagher’s remarks.

Gallagher has introduced legislation that would ban the TikTok social media platform in the US. He said he plans to have at least one hearing on how the Chinese government uses data and plans to ask TikTok about its algorithm.

He also said he plans to look into whether tax-advantaged pension funds, such as those offered by state and local governments and universities, should be investing in China.

Such a “dollars and data” approach will help US policymakers understand where the US system is too dependent on China, he said. That focus will also fall on rare earth minerals, pharmaceuticals and medical supplies.

“We’re not going to use this as a bomb-throwing exercise,” he said, referring to concerns that the committee will simply exist to counter or criticize the Biden administration’s approach to China. “There’s a ton of bipartisanship on China issues.”

8. Assessing “Reflections on Net Assessment” by Andrew W. Marshall, Edited by Jeffrey S. McKitrick and Robert G. Angevine

Why are so many books being published faster than I can read tem?

This is another one for my "to read pile."

Conclusion:

My biggest take away from this book is the idea that, if the U.S. competition with the Soviet Union began in 1947, the impacts of U.S. strategies began to be felt by the Soviets in 1977. These impacts set the conditions for the 1980s Cost Imposition and Competitive Strategies approaches, neither of which would have worked in the 1950s or 1960s when the Soviet economy was strong. U.S. national security personnel would do well to embrace this timeline when thinking about the People’s republic of China. Overall, I found this book to be highly interesting, extremely motivating, and very applicable to current events. While most of us never met Mr. Marshall, this book gives us the opportunity to learn an immense amount from him.

Assessing “Reflections on Net Assessment” by Andrew W. Marshall, Edited by Jeffrey S. McKitrick and Robert G. Angevine

divergentoptions.org · by Divergent Options · December 19, 2022

Phil Walter is the founder of Divergent Options. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.

Title: Assessing “Reflections on Net Assessment” by Andrew W. Marshall, Edited by Jeffrey S. McKitrick and Robert G. Angevine

Date Originally Written: October 16, 2022.

Date Originally Published: December 19, 2022.

Author and / or Article Point of View: The author is a graduate of the American Academy for Strategic Education’s Net Assessment and Competitive Strategy course. The author is fortunate to count members and alumni of the Department of Defense Office of Net Assessment as friends and mentors. Mr. Marshall’s idea regarding the Office of Net Assessment being “diagnostic but not prescriptive” is what inspired the author to start the website Divergent Options. The author was contacted by The Andrew W. Marshall Foundation[1], asked to review this book, and provided a free copy of it.

Summary: U.S. national security is recovering from over twenty years of Instant Gratification Warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. The threat posed by the People’s Republic of China requires the U.S. to think in decades instead of in deployment cycles, and develop strategies and plans in an integrated manner. “Reflection on Net Assessment” is the perfect book for someone who needs to shake off organizationally-incentivized impatience and focus on long-term threats.

Text: Andrew W. Marshall was born in 1921 and worked at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s, Henry Kissinger recruited Andy to apply his approaches in the National Security Council, where Andy worked for several years before becoming the first Director of Net Assessment, a post he held for the next 43 years. Andy retired from government service in 2015 at the age of 94 and dedicated the remaining four years of his life to supporting all those who sought his counsel and writing his own short essays on the history and practice of defense analysis[2].

The Andrew W. Marshall Foundation and the Institute for Defense Analyses[3] released “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall[4],” on October 4, 2022. The book features twelve interviews with Mr. Marshall that were conducted between 1993 and 1999 by defense analyst Kurt Guthe and others. These interviews discuss Mr. Marshall’s 25 years at the RAND Corporation, and over 40 years in the Department of Defense Office of Net Assessment. The interviews were woven together by Jeffrey S. McKitrick and Robert G. Angevine and each interview is preceded by a description of world events happening at the time. These descriptions help frame the reader’s mindset before the interview transcript begins.

For those who have not heard of the term Net Assessment, Department of Defense Directive 5111.11 defines it as “[T]he comparative analysis of military, technological, political, economic, and other factors governing the relative military capability of nations. Its purpose is to identify problems and opportunities that deserve the attention of senior defense officials.” The Secretary of Defense assigned the Director of Net Assessment the responsibility to “Develop and coordinate independent net assessments of the standing trends, and future prospects of U.S. military capabilities and national potential in comparison with those of other countries or groups of countries so as to identify emerging or future threats or opportunities for the United States, consistent with the April 14, 2017 and October 1, 2019 Secretary of Defense Memorandums. Pursuant to Section 904(b) of Public Law 113-291, these net assessments may be communicated to the Secretary of Defense, without obtaining the approval or concurrence of any other DoD official.” The net assessments include “current and projected U.S. and foreign military capabilities by theater, region, domain, function, or mission; and specific current and projected U.S. and foreign capabilities, operational concepts, doctrine, and weapon systems[5].”

We are all products of the time in which we live. In my case, I grew up during the Cold War and participated in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem U.S. national security currently faces is that the intellectual underpinnings for the U.S. strategy that won the Cold War came from a generation that won a war. The intellectual underpinnings for today’s strategies for the U.S. to compete with China and Russia come from a generation that lost two Authorizations for the Use of Military Force. In the context of U.S. national security having to re-learn Cold War techniques and determine if they are applicable to our present national security situation, this book will help immensely.

The twelve interviews in this book are an absolute treasure. These interviews illustrate Mr. Marshall’s mindset, and how this mindset evolved over time based on both external national security stimuli and internal bureaucratic friction. Someone reading this book will close the cover on the last page having not only received a class from a master of strategic thought but will have also learned how to survive and make progress in a large bureaucracy taking into account that “There is only so much stupidity one man can prevent[6].”

Mr. Marshall was highly motivated to ask the right question. He believed that “Poor, mediocre answers to good questions are more important than getting splendid answers to poor questions. That means that getting the questions right is very, very important. Most analysis spends far too little time on what the questions really are[7].” Mr. Marshall also believed that getting the right people in the room to discuss a topic was a must, even if these people were outside of his organization. He believed that “…the objective in any analysis is to do the best that this country can do, not just the best that RAND or whatever organization you’re talking about can do[8].” Mr. Marshall disliked it when organizations would “…rather die than bring in anybody else[9],” and discusses his views on how the Central Intelligence Agency became more insular and therefore less impactful over time.

Mr. Marshall believed that there were people who focused on reality and wanted to know how the world really functioned and those who focused on their models or hypotheses and barely looked at the world[10]. This reality drove him to observe that during the Cold War there was a tendency “…to treat the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance as a real alliance, rather than the situation of a major power and a bunch of protectorates[11].” Office of Net Assessment research during the Cold War reflected realities such as the Soviet Navy having more weapons than sensors to find targets and Israel and Egypt having the same number of tanks during the 1973 war but Israel’s tanks were able to get into battle three times if damaged and Egypt’s only once[12].

Imposing cost on a competitor is discussed throughout the book and Mr. Marshall even looks at health care and environmental pollution as factors that the Soviet Union may have to address ahead of military investment[13]. Regarding Soviet operations in Afghanistan, Mr. Marshall speaks to measuring costs from a Soviet perspective, and trying to determine what costs meant the most to them, instead of what costs would mean the most to the U.S. if it were in the same situation[14].

My biggest take away from this book is the idea that, if the U.S. competition with the Soviet Union began in 1947, the impacts of U.S. strategies began to be felt by the Soviets in 1977. These impacts set the conditions for the 1980s Cost Imposition and Competitive Strategies approaches, neither of which would have worked in the 1950s or 1960s when the Soviet economy was strong. U.S. national security personnel would do well to embrace this timeline when thinking about the People’s republic of China. Overall, I found this book to be highly interesting, extremely motivating, and very applicable to current events. While most of us never met Mr. Marshall, this book gives us the opportunity to learn an immense amount from him.

“So I have come away, really for the rest of my life, with the belief that what should happen is, if you have a problem, you get the very best people to work on it, and it doesn’t matter if they’re in your organization or not[15].”

Endnotes:

[1] The Andrew W. Marshall Foundation can be found at: www.andrewwmarshallfoundation.org/

[2] About Andrew W. Marshall, The Andrew W. Marshall Foundation, https://www.andrewwmarshallfoundation.org/andrew-w-marshall

[3] The Institute for Defense Analyses can be found at: http://www.ida.org/

[4] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, can be found at: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[5] DoD Directive 5111,11, “Director of Net Assessment,” April 14, 2020, can be found at: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodd/511111p.pdf

[6] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 14, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[7] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 16, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[8] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 18, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[9] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 18, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[10] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 63, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[11] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 61, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[12] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 199, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[13] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 198, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[14] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 229, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

[15] “Reflections on Net Assessment: Interviews with Andrew W. Marshall,” ISBN-13: 9780578384221, Page 65-66, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/reflections-on-net-assessment-andrew-w-marshall/1141455631

divergentoptions.org · by Divergent Options · December 19, 2022

9. The Terrorist Threats and Trends to Watch Out for in 2023 and Beyond

We also cannot take our eye off the ball of terrorism and violent extremist organziations.

Long but important read.

Excerpt:

Conclusion

The preceding analysis is not a comprehensive or complete assessment of every tactical terrorist threat. Nor is it a perfect elucidation of the predictability of each category. Instead, it provides a strategic assessment of the preeminent dangers ahead and the questions that remain unanswerable for counterterrorism scholars and practitioners alike.

As noted, perhaps the most consequential development over the last 15 years has been the relegation of terrorism and counterterrorism from the predominant concern of U.S. national security and defense planners to a mere frustration distracting from more pressing concerns including China and Russia, nuclear proliferation, climate change, and pandemics. Indeed, terrorism was ranked as the seventh sub-bullet in a list of “global priorities” in the Biden administration’s national security strategy released in October 2022.82 And yet, terrorism threats have stubbornly refused to subside. In fact, as the preceding analysis indicates, terrorism threats have actually proliferated—growing both more diverse and diffuse. Counterterrorism practitioners, then, are left with what we have termed a “counterterrorism dilemma”—an impossible situation in which threats accelerate while resources dwindle.83 As Edmund Fitton-Brown, the former United Nations Coordinator for the ISIL (Daesh)/Al-Qaida/Taliban Monitoring Team, observed in an interview published in CTC Sentinel in August 2022: “If you think about geostrategic priorities, if you think about climate change, if you think about public health, then this is a world in which counterterrorism has to fight for resources, and it will get a diminishing share of the pie … So counterterrorism is a diminishing share of a diminishing pie, and if you add complacency into that mix, you are on a short route back to a major threat.”84

But terrorist threats are intersectional, weaving through other national security concerns including near-peer competition and a broader assault on Western democracy from within, as displayed by state adversaries like Russia and Iran exploiting turmoil in the U.S. political system to their own benefit. Terrorists also thrive in times of complacency, and while a drawdown of kinetic operations is perhaps a welcome development after more than two decades of expeditionary warfare and global counterterrorism deployments, the current U.S. policy of relying on local and regional partners is likely to prolong the “forever war” it is meant to end. In its latest report, for instance, the U.N. Monitoring Team warned that ongoing conflicts provide particularly fruitful conditions for these terrorist networks. “The threat from ISIL and Al-Qaida remains relatively low in non-conflict zones, but is much higher in areas directly affected by conflict or neighbouring it,” the U.N. report declared. “Unless some of these conflicts are brought to a successful resolution, the Monitoring Team anticipates that one or more of them will incubate an external operational capability for ISIL, Al-Qaida or a related terrorist group. In this regard, the areas of most concern are Africa, Central and South Asia and the Levant, all of which include the active presence of both ISIL and Al-Qaida.”85 It is thus crucial that the United States and its allies remain engaged militarily, diplomatically, and in a humanitarian capacity to manage conflicts, ease suffering, and ensure terrorist organization remain on the defensive.

In the 15 years since its first issue, CTC Sentinel has covered al-Qa`ida’s stubborn resiliency—despite the killing of bin Ladin and almost the entirety of its original senior leadership—the meteoric rise of the Islamic State and the way in which it revolutionized terrorist radicalization and recruitment via social media, continued Iranian-sponsored violence in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as white supremacist attacks from Oslo to Christchurch and Texas to New York. The lesson, then, is that as much as we might wish that the terrorist threat to the homeland has subsided, it has not. CTC

The Terrorist Threats and Trends to Watch Out for in 2023 and Beyond – Combating Terrorism Center at West Point

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022, VOLUME 15, ISSUE 11

Authors:

BRUCE HOFFMAN, JACOB WARE

ctc.westpoint.edu · · December 19, 2022

Abstract: The terrorist threat today is growing increasingly diverse, and although counterterrorism no longer sits atop the United States’ national security hierarchy, it remains an omnipresent challenge, manifesting primarily through terrorist networks like al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State. Although questions remain over the leadership and strategy of these groups, they are nonetheless still intent on undermining the West and spreading jihadi doctrine throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Threats endure from state-sponsored terrorism as well as from domestic extremists, too, with the latter presenting a rising potential for violence during the upcoming presidential election season. The danger, now, is that in its prioritization of other national security issues, the United States becomes complacent in its counterterrorism fight. Our longstanding extremist adversaries stand prepared to strike, and eternal vigilance is essential.

Among the memorable aphorisms of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was his answer to a reporter’s question at a Pentagon briefing just a few months after America’s war on terror commenced. When asked about Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to al-Qa`ida, Rumsfeld famously explained that:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.1

It is an apt summation of the global and domestic landscape of terrorism today. There are some known knowns, such as the fact that counterterrorism is no longer the overriding national security priority for the United States that it was for nearly two decades. In addition, we have known unknowns, such as the abiding threat posed by longstanding terrorist adversaries like al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State including who will succeed Ayman al-Zawahiri as al-Qa`ida’s emir and how successful the Biden administration’s “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism strategy will prove in the long-term, as well as the resurrection of an old threat made new: state-sponsored terrorism. And, finally, there are unknown unknowns, foremost of which is the trajectory of domestic terrorism as political divisions in the United States deepen in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

This overview provides a snapshot of continuing and emergent terrorist threats and counterterrorism challenges organized around Secretary Rumsfeld’s three categories of threat analysis. Rumsfeld’s guiding paradigm is not intended to be a systematic or perfect overview of the range of terrorist threats and adversaries nor does this article explore all types of terrorist threat for each of Rumsfeld’s categories. Instead, it provides a potentially useful prism through which to assess the uncertainty of currently unfolding and future potential salient extremist and terrorist threats to the U.S. homeland and its allies abroad.

The Known Knowns: Counterterrorism is no longer the preeminent U.S. national security concern, despite terrorism remaining an enduring threat.

For nearly two decades, counterterrorism was America’s foremost defense and national security priority. That changed in 2018 with the release of the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy. As Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis explained, “We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order—creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”2

The long promised but unfulfilled “pivot to Asia,” advanced during President Obama’s first term in office,3 was the driving force behind this rebalancing of U.S. defense and national security priorities implemented by President Trump. President Biden, who had been vice president when Obama commenced this shift, has continued along this same path. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking. We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is degraded in … Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war,”4 Biden declared within months of assuming office. He made good on the pledge with the completion of the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, when he reiterated that, “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan.”5

Regardless of the merits of this decision (against which these authors argued6), the withdrawal itself was shambolic. U.S. forces, for instance, abandoned the mammoth Bagram airfield and facility without notice, thus allowing some 5,000 imprisoned al-Qa`ida, Islamic State, and Taliban terrorists to escape from both that prison and the Afghan National Detention Facility at Pul-e-Charkhi7—including, according to U.S. government sources, some three-dozen senior al-Qa`ida operatives.8

In mid-August 2021, as the Taliban advanced on Kabul and the Afghan government started to collapse, President Biden promised that the United States possessed an “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capability that “will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.”9 The effectiveness of this strategy was almost immediately called into question when tragedy struck on August 26, 2021, at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. Concealed within the crowds seeking places on the final departing flights was an Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISK) terrorist who detonated a bomb that killed over 180 people—including 13 U.S. military personnel—and injured more than 150 others.10 This prompted one unnamed U.S. intelligence official to dismiss the administration’s claims as more “over-the-rainbow” than “over-the-horizon.”11 Additional proof of the challenges of this much-touted counterterrorism strategy was also tragically provided three days later when a U.S. drone strike meant to disrupt a suspected follow-on ISK attack unintentionally killed Afghan civilians—among whom were seven children.12

The successful targeted killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri by a CIA drone on July 31, 2022, arguably provided needed proof of the viability of America’s “over-the-horizon” strategy. The al-Qa`ida leader was killed as he appeared on the balcony of a villa in Kabul’s tony Shirpur neighborhood—where he reportedly lived as a guest of long-time terrorist and Taliban Minister of the Interior Sirajuddin Haqqani.13 The fact that al-Zawahiri was living more or less openly in a house linked to Haqqani clearly revealed the falsity of Taliban assurances to the United States during the Doha negotiations that they would not allow Afghanistan again to become a terrorist safe haven.14 It also raised new questions about whether the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, rather than ending “the forever war,” in Biden’s words, may in fact extend it if indeed al-Qa`ida has re-established, and continues to consolidate, its presence.

Finally, far from validating the “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism approach, the al-Zawahiri strike perhaps underscored its challenges. Al-Zawahiri, after all, was hiding in plain sight. U.S. intelligence had reportedly tracked al-Zawahiri’s wife, daughter, and grandchildren to Kabul and eventually confirmed that the al-Qa`ida leader was living with them. In fact, al-Zawahiri felt so safe and secure that he frequently emerged onto his balcony, thus enabling confirmation.15 As some observers have noted, the success of any counterterrorist operation is predicated on on-the-ground human intelligence, which was likely relatively easily obtained in this instance. But, in less permissive, rural environments and more typically security-conscious terrorist hiding places, the United States has likely largely deprived itself of such essentials by leaving Afghanistan.16

Indeed, the other high-profile counterterrorism success of the Biden administration, the assassination of Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi in northern Syria in February 2022, was not actually a triumph of “over-the-horizon” capabilities, but a clear sign of the importance of forward basing. The raiding party had flown from a U.S. special operations forces base in Syria.17

The Known Unknowns: al-Qa`ida, the question of who will lead al-Qa`ida, the Islamic State, and Iranian state-sponsored terrorism

As we enter the third decade of the post-9/11 war on terrorism, several facts are assured: Both salafi-jihadi and state-sponsored adversaries will maintain their intentions to attack both the U.S. homeland as well as American interests and allies abroad. But the primary form and leadership of those threats remains unclear.

The Jihadi Terror Threat

Although al-Zawahiri’s elimination will likely hinder al-Qa`ida’s core operations for the time being, its affiliates remain resilient and strong. In July, in the latest of its invaluable and industry-leading biannual reports, the United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team shed new light on al-Qa`ida’s current strength. Beyond Afghanistan, the movement is thought to include 7,000 to 12,000 fighters in its al-Shabaab affiliate in Somalia; a few thousand with its Syrian wing, Hurras al-Din; a few thousand more with al-Qa`ida in the Arabian Peninsula; 180-400 with al-Qa`ida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS); and still more fighters with its expanding Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) in Mali and the Sahel.18 Although these numbers remain relatively consistent, at least since our last assessment in this publication in 2021, they indicate the global movement’s enduring relevance and continued recruitment.19 Indeed, JNIM’s gains and its opportunity to now trumpet the notion that it achieved withdrawal of French military forces from Mali is an ominous sign of the al-Qa`ida movement’s resiliency and strength.20

The threats posed by each of these affiliates are more local or cross-border than regional, much less global. But some harbor ambitions to strike internationally. Since 2016, for instance, al-Shabaab—doubtless al-Qa`ida’s least technologically proficient franchise—has sought to replicate the movement’s spectacular 9/11 attacks by training pilots and operatives to hijack commercial aircraft and crash them into buildings. In the last few years, two al-Shabaab terrorists have been arrested in the Philippines and Africa taking flying lessons.21 In May 2022, accordingly, President Biden reversed his predecessor’s decision to withdraw even the modest number of U.S. military personnel supporting the Somalian government’s campaign against al-Shabaab, a key exception to the “over-the-horizon” approach taken elsewhere that underscored the rising terrorist threat in that country and its potential spread both regionally and even internationally.22 Al-Qa`ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) also retains an external operations capability, and helped coordinate the 2019 Pensacola shooting, the only successful foreign-originated plot on U.S. soil since 9/11.23 As for Afghanistan, it admittedly remains unclear if al-Qa`ida currently plans to expand its external operations, with the U.N. Monitoring Team commenting that the group “does not currently wish to cause the Taliban international difficulty or embarrassment.”24 This is also the view of the U.S. intelligence community, which assesses that “neither the few remaining al-Qa’ida core members nor its regional affiliate are plotting to attack the Homeland, and we have no indications that these individuals are involved in external attack plotting.”25

Like al-Qa`ida, the Islamic State’s demise has often been foretold only to prove premature. Much like the killing of Usama bin Ladin in 2011 did not lead to the demise of the movement he founded—and nor will that of al-Zawahiri—the targeted killings of the Islamic State’s founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in October 2019 and his successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, this February have not precipitated that movement’s collapse either. Some 40 days (the traditional Muslim period of mourning) after al-Qurashi’s death, the Islamic State announced the appointment of a new emir—Abu Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. This leadership transition was remarkably smooth. In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid commented that “ISIS members readily accepted the new leader” and that the U.S. intelligence community saw “no signs of fissures or splintering by the branches and networks despite limitations the group faces in Iraq and Syria.” 26 However, this latest emir was also relatively quickly killed, detonating a suicide vest during a Free Syrian Army (FSA) operation in Jasem in Deraa governorate in October.27 The Islamic State announced that the new emir was Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi. This latest leadership transition, and the world’s whack-a-mole approach to Islamic State leaders, lends greater credence to the warning given by General Kenneth F. McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, in 2020: “This threat is not going away. There’s never going to be a time I believe when either ISIS or whatever follows ISIS is going to be completely absent from the global stage.”28 The prior emir’s presence in Deraa province, a government area in Syria’s southwest, may, however, indicate a shifting frontline away from Kurdish-held land in the northeast and toward other, more lucrative targets, from the terrorism threat perspective, of Israel and Jordan.

General McKenzie’s dispiriting assessment had likely been influenced by the Islamic State’s stubborn persistence in Syria and Iraq—where, until its final defeat in 2019, the group ruled eight million people in captured territory comprising 41,000 square miles (a third of Syria and about 40 percent of Iraq).29 Some 6,000 to 10,000 Islamic State fighters there prosecute an ongoing insurgency against a variety of state and non-state adversaries. They are complemented by 200 to 400 fighters with Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama‘a in Mozambique; 500 fighters with Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis in Egypt; fewer than 100 in Libya; 200 to 280 in Somalia; 200 with Islamic State East Asia in the southern Philippines; a fierce and violent Khorasan Province faction in Afghanistan; and additional fighters with the Allied Democratic Forces in Uganda, the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara in the Sahel, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and its Yemeni branch.30 The various affiliates’ pledges of allegiance despite the network’s frequent leadership transitions indicate it remains cohesive as a global movement, and retains the ability to inspire support and loyalty among affiliates around the region.

As a case study, the movement’s gains in Mozambique illustrate its continued traction. As the self-proclaimed caliphate was contracting under the weight of the large global coalition mobilized against the Islamic State, the movement was fruitfully expanding elsewhere. Starting in 2017, the Islamic State operations in Mozambique have claimed the lives of over 3,000 persons and created an internally displaced population of nearly a million.31 It has also threatened Mozambique’s liquefied natural gas resources, the third largest reserves in Africa, which have assumed new importance as a result of the disruption to Ukraine’s natural gas exports caused by Russia’s invasion.32

Indeed, despite the enduring challenges posed by the Levant, Africa continues to emerge as the world’s leading terrorism hotspot. The Global Terrorism Index’s 2022 report found that the preceding year had seen “serious deteriorations in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), especially the Sahel. Forty-eight per cent, or 3,461, of all terrorism deaths globally occurred in SSA with four of the ten countries with the largest increases in deaths from terrorism residing in SSA: Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, and Niger. Three of these countries are in the Sahel.” These numbers were actually an improvement on the previous year’s figures, largely due to counterinsurgency successes against Boko Haram in Nigeria, which has perhaps displayed the vulnerability of this network in the face of effective countermeasures.33 a Terrorist groups in the region, however, continue to benefit from poor governance exacerbated by political turmoil, such as the recent coups d’état in Burkina Faso.34 Not every Islamic State branch around the world is thriving, but in Afghanistan, the Islamic State affiliate there spread throughout the entire country and carried out 334 attacks in 2021—a 140 percent increase over the previous year.35

Like al-Qa`ida, therefore, the threat posed by the Islamic State remains mostly local and regional—and not international. However, the movement continues its longstanding efforts to inspire violent attacks in the West, through small cells and individuals radicalized online and inspired to attack their home countries.36 Meanwhile, the United States and its allies continue to struggle to resolve the legal quagmire regarding the many Islamic State fighters taken prisoner during the group’s final stands in 2019 and their families. An estimated 120,000 prisoners and dependents now reside in several camps around northeastern Syria, including 30,000 children under the age of 12. The Islamic State continues to deliberately target these minors for radicalization.37

Given the protean nature of all the above, there are several possibilities—especially pertaining to terrorist modus operandi—that could emerge. Will salafi-jihadi terrorist groups, for instance, take advantage of their newfound freedom and choose to return to the 9/11 model, featuring central coordination and directed attacks, or will they mostly continue the model of inspiring sympathetic lone actors in Western countries that proved so tactically successful during the Islamic State years? And secondly, will they use their safe havens to resume attacks against their historic “far enemy,” the United States and its allies, or will they predominantly take advantage of their geographic diversity to escalate local jihads that seek to overthrow local regimes and build caliphate micro-states?38 Of course, jihadi groups have perfected blending strategies and making adjustments based on the conditions they face. A key question, then, is just how well will the United States manage these threats, given a commitment to a still untested, sustained “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism strategy while its attention is increasingly reassigned to other national security priorities?

At least so far as al-Qa`ida is concerned, much will depend on who succeeds al-Zawahiri as that movement’s emir. A variety of sources suggest it will be long-time al-Qa`ida operative and bin Ladin loyalist Saif al-`Adl.39 Whether and when al-`Adl becomes al-Qa`ida’s new emir remains unclear. However, if he does, he will bring credibility to the leadership role given his long and variegated experiences in the movement stretching back decades. As an architect of the 2005 “Master Plan” or seven-stage strategy to victory that bin Ladin adopted,40 al-`Adl is well placed to carry on the struggle. Instead of the 852-page, didactic treatise al-Zawahiri produced,41 al-`Adl, as his entire history with al-Qa`ida suggests, would likely embrace a more practical, building-block approach to the continued prosecution of its local, regional, and international terrorism campaigns. His excellent and often deeply personal relations with many of the movement’s franchises, including in Syria, East Africa, and Afghanistan, will smooth his presumed transition into the top leadership post. It is the authors’ assessment that should this in fact materialize, al-`Adl is likely to eschew spectacular operations such as the 9/11 attacks and instead refocus al-Qa`ida on targeting embassies and consulates, tourist destinations, and commercial aviation.42

State-Sponsored Terror

In addition to these ongoing threats from the established terrorist movements of al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State and their respective branches, there are the challenges posed by state-sponsors of terrorism. As Seth Jones, who directs the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), has warned, “While conventional warfare—clashes between large military forces—defined twentieth-century power, irregular warfare will increasingly define international politics in the coming decades.”43

Foremost among those states employing irregular warfare, covert operations, and surrogate terrorism is the Islamic Republic of Iran. From the time of the 1979 revolution that deposed the Shah and brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, international terrorism has been a prominent feature of Iran’s foreign policy.44 In recent years, Iran’s use of terrorism as an instrument of its foreign policy has intensified.45 The Iranian regime, for instance, maintains an active proxy warfare program in the Middle East and beyond, dispatching its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the elite Quds Force around the region to support partner militias involved in wars and quagmires.46 Its greatest accomplishment is arguably the life support that Iran has provided to the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. A range of Iran-backed militias—including Lebanon’s Hezbollah—have intervened on the regime’s behalf. Tehran’s involvement in Syria has also presented a direct and active threat to U.S. military forces in the region, most notably through repeated missile attacks from groups such as Kataib Hezbollah—the longstanding anti-American and U.S. State Department terrorist-designated Iraqi Shi`a militia.47 Iran’s most recent effort to supply kamikaze drones and other weaponry to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is further evidence of its willingness to destabilize other regions in pursuance of its foreign policy priorities.48

More concerning from an American perspective, however, is the intensification of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in the United States itself. Iran has a long history of covertly operating in the United States to eliminate dissidents and other enemies. In 1980, for instance, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former press attaché at the Iranian Embassy before the revolution and outspoken opponent of the Khomeini regime, was murdered in suburban Washington, D.C.49 And, in 2011, an Iranian-orchestrated plot was disrupted to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States at an upscale Washington, D.C., restaurant.50 An Iranian-American living in Texas, whose cousin was serving in the Quds Force, had been enlisted to orchestrate the attack. The would-be assassin had responded “no big deal” to a suggestion the attack might kill scores of others, including prominent elected officials who frequented the restaurant.51 He is currently serving a 25-year sentence in a U.S. federal penitentiary.52

More recently, there has been an upsurge in such Iranian-backed or -inspired terrorist plotting in the United States. After President Trump began questioning the results of the 2020 presidential election, Iran uploaded a “hit list” of prominent government officials refuting his claims—thus explicitly encouraging violence on U.S. soil in direct contravention of American sovereignty.53 Then, in August 2022, an American citizen attacked author Salman Rushdie, stabbing and seriously wounding him onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989 for alleged blasphemy in his novel The Satanic Verses.54 Additionally, in one of many recently revealed Iranian plots to silence dissidents, a Brooklyn, New York-based Wall Street Journal reporter, human rights activist, and prominent critic of the Iranian regime was the target of a 2021 kidnap plot and then of an assassination attempt a year later.55 And, earlier this year, a member of the IRGC was charged by the Department of Justice for orchestrating a “murder-for-hire” plot against former National Security Advisor John Bolton as well as a “second target,” seemingly in retaliation for the January 2020 killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.56 Iranian assassination plots have also targeted dissidents and journalists in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and elsewhere.57

Finally, Russia has conducted a range of influence and information operations against its Western adversaries, including its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (and again in the 2022 midterms).58 In the years since, Russia has continued its open flirtation with violent elements of the American far-right. Perhaps the most egregious example is the case of Rinaldo Nazzaro (aka Norman Spear), the St. Petersburg, Russia-based leader of the American neo-Nazi terrorist group The Base.59 In 2020, the U.S. State Department designated a Russian violent, far-right group, the Russian Imperial Movement, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.60 As its global influence wanes in the wake of its Ukraine invasion, Russia may seek to resurrect its irregular campaigns in the United States.

Storm clouds pass over the dome of the U.S. Capitol building on January 23, 2018. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

The Unknown Unknowns: Political violence in the United States in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election—and after

Unfortunately, in the assessment of these authors, the greatest threat to the United States now comes from within its own borders. And the uncertainty of when and where the next serious act of politically motivated domestic violence will occur and against whom and what its continued trajectory will bring is the preeminent “unknown unknown.”

The most significant terrorist threat to the homeland today comes from domestic terrorism connected to the violent far-right, broadly defined here to include both white supremacist and white nationalist networks as well as anti-government extremists. The most recent annual report of the Anti-Defamation League found that almost 90 percent of extremist killings in 2021 had been perpetrated by “right-wing extremists”—continuing a trend over the past decade, with 75 percent of the almost 450 extremist-related murders in the United States since 2012 having been perpetrated by the far-right.61 The ADL data does not account for the most serious terrorist incident in 2022, a mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo in May that claimed 10 lives.62 The ADL’s data, which uses deaths as its primary unit of analysis, also fails to account for the true magnitude of 2021’s most consequential terrorism incident—the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Like many salafi-jihadi networks, the violent far-right poses a double-pronged threat. In general, the movement adheres to the “leaderless resistance” instruction given by the notorious American white-supremacist Louis Beam in 1992.63 This strategy, which encourages small cell and lone actor violence, has allowed many of the movement’s most violent acolytes to evade counterterrorism detection. But other factions of the movement still seek to organize as collective entities—among whom are the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and boogaloo bois, to cite only the most prominent.64 They are sustained largely by conspiracy theories demonizing a range of enemies. A variety of recent attacks, including Buffalo but also even more lethal incidents in Pittsburgh, El Paso, Norway, and New Zealand, were inspired by the so-called “great replacement” theory, which holds that a deliberate replacement of the white population in Western states is underway, funded and organized by Jews and other elites.65 Great replacement theory, also sometimes dubbed “white genocide” theory, allows white supremacist terrorists to portray themselves as reluctant, altruistic defenders of a white homeland—an intoxicating lie that has caused violence to erupt in places of worship across the United States and beyond.66 Other conspiracy theories similarly denigrate “cabals” of elites—including QAnon, which holds that former President Donald Trump was somehow divinely elected to expose Satan-worshipping, child sex-trafficking pedophiles.67

Yet more conspiracy theories have targeted elections—articulating the widely held view that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats and that Trump is still the rightful president. In the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, various law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, provided warnings of the threat to poll workers. In 2021, the Department of Justice established a task force to fight threats against election workers.68 There is also an escalating terrorist threat against public officials. In fact, in the six years since President Trump’s election year, threats against members of Congress have risen tenfold69—with some members of Congress now spending more than ever on their own security.70 The 2022 midterms, accordingly, were nervously watched for signs of violence, and although more serious and widespread violence was fortunately avoided, an attempted kidnapping targeting the Speaker of the House that seriously wounded her husband and threats against Jewish communities in New Jersey and New York provided an important reminder of the elevated terrorism threat that now always accompanies U.S. elections71—and will likely impact the 2024 presidential election, too.72

The violent far-right threat is likely to remain elevated as long as conspiracy theories targeting pandemics, elections, and the Democratic Party remain so widespread. We live in a febrile political climate, where new events and sociocultural developments have the potential to inspire new terrorist plots in near real-time—as displayed when a gunman attempted to enter an FBI office in Cincinnati after the Bureau raided Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago.73 Indeed, the violent far-right today is fractured, with multiple unique ideological streams producing their own calls to violence and justifications for more militant action.74 Notably, these streams often converge with one another, blurring traditionally conceptualized boundaries between extremist ideologies.

It is in the threats to politicians that one is reminded of an enduring, albeit mostly dormant, threat from the violent far-left. In June, a would-be assassin aborted an attempt on conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life while near the justice’s home.75 And in 2017, a far-left extremist opened fire at a Republican team practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game, seriously wounding House majority whip Steve Scalise before being fatally shot.76 Conservative media and politicians have focused much of their animus against antifa—an amorphous anarchist network that predominantly engages in wanton vandalism and criminal rioting—but the most dangerous violent far-left terrorists are frequently inspired by single-issue causes, from abortion rights to climate change to police killings of unarmed Black men.

The Biden administration has actively addressed these domestic terrorism threats through both new policy and legislative initiatives as well as through aggressive prosecutions. In response to the spread of domestic political violence, the White House released in June 2021 the first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. More recently, it convened a special summit titled “United We Stand” that was focused on developing effective responses to the rise of domestic terrorism.77 Proposed bipartisan legislation has sought to curb gun violence in the United States and is also expected to address electoral certification rules, the latter designed to prevent another January 6.78

More than three decades ago, the Department of Justice suffered a crippling blow in its efforts to fight the violent far-right when its attempt to prosecute 14 prominent white supremacist and anti-government extremists on seditious conspiracy charges failed at Fort Smith, Arkansas.79 Although it is among one of the most difficult federal charges to prove (prior to 2022, the last person convicted in a U.S. court of seditious conspiracy was the ‘blind sheikh,’ Omar Abdel Rahman, in 1995),b prosecutors nonetheless have brought seditious conspiracy charges against several extremist leaders over their roles in January 6. The 16 defendants include leaders and members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. On March 2, Joshua James, a leader of the Oath Keepers’ Alabama chapter, pleaded guilty—marking a transformative moment in the government’s efforts to combat violent far-right terrorism that has since been followed by additional guilty pleas, including among Proud Boys.80 On November 29, two of the defendants in the first of several seditious conspiracy trials related to January 6, including Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, were found guilty of seditious conspiracy—a legal and political watershed providing incontrovertible proof that January 6, as well as the longstanding anti-government activism that inspired it, were in fact organized and deliberate efforts to overthrow the United States government.81

Conclusion

The preceding analysis is not a comprehensive or complete assessment of every tactical terrorist threat. Nor is it a perfect elucidation of the predictability of each category. Instead, it provides a strategic assessment of the preeminent dangers ahead and the questions that remain unanswerable for counterterrorism scholars and practitioners alike.

As noted, perhaps the most consequential development over the last 15 years has been the relegation of terrorism and counterterrorism from the predominant concern of U.S. national security and defense planners to a mere frustration distracting from more pressing concerns including China and Russia, nuclear proliferation, climate change, and pandemics. Indeed, terrorism was ranked as the seventh sub-bullet in a list of “global priorities” in the Biden administration’s national security strategy released in October 2022.82 And yet, terrorism threats have stubbornly refused to subside. In fact, as the preceding analysis indicates, terrorism threats have actually proliferated—growing both more diverse and diffuse. Counterterrorism practitioners, then, are left with what we have termed a “counterterrorism dilemma”—an impossible situation in which threats accelerate while resources dwindle.83 As Edmund Fitton-Brown, the former United Nations Coordinator for the ISIL (Daesh)/Al-Qaida/Taliban Monitoring Team, observed in an interview published in CTC Sentinel in August 2022: “If you think about geostrategic priorities, if you think about climate change, if you think about public health, then this is a world in which counterterrorism has to fight for resources, and it will get a diminishing share of the pie … So counterterrorism is a diminishing share of a diminishing pie, and if you add complacency into that mix, you are on a short route back to a major threat.”84

But terrorist threats are intersectional, weaving through other national security concerns including near-peer competition and a broader assault on Western democracy from within, as displayed by state adversaries like Russia and Iran exploiting turmoil in the U.S. political system to their own benefit. Terrorists also thrive in times of complacency, and while a drawdown of kinetic operations is perhaps a welcome development after more than two decades of expeditionary warfare and global counterterrorism deployments, the current U.S. policy of relying on local and regional partners is likely to prolong the “forever war” it is meant to end. In its latest report, for instance, the U.N. Monitoring Team warned that ongoing conflicts provide particularly fruitful conditions for these terrorist networks. “The threat from ISIL and Al-Qaida remains relatively low in non-conflict zones, but is much higher in areas directly affected by conflict or neighbouring it,” the U.N. report declared. “Unless some of these conflicts are brought to a successful resolution, the Monitoring Team anticipates that one or more of them will incubate an external operational capability for ISIL, Al-Qaida or a related terrorist group. In this regard, the areas of most concern are Africa, Central and South Asia and the Levant, all of which include the active presence of both ISIL and Al-Qaida.”85 It is thus crucial that the United States and its allies remain engaged militarily, diplomatically, and in a humanitarian capacity to manage conflicts, ease suffering, and ensure terrorist organization remain on the defensive.

In the 15 years since its first issue, CTC Sentinel has covered al-Qa`ida’s stubborn resiliency—despite the killing of bin Ladin and almost the entirety of its original senior leadership—the meteoric rise of the Islamic State and the way in which it revolutionized terrorist radicalization and recruitment via social media, continued Iranian-sponsored violence in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as white supremacist attacks from Oslo to Christchurch and Texas to New York. The lesson, then, is that as much as we might wish that the terrorist threat to the homeland has subsided, it has not. CTC

Bruce Hoffman is the George H. Gilmore Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. He is also the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations and directs the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Twitter: @hoffman_bruce

Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He sits on the editorial board of the Irregular Warfare Initiative at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Twitter: @Jacob_A_Ware

Substantive Notes

[a] Recent reporting suggests human rights abuses were committed by the Nigerian government in its war against Boko Haram. Paul Carsten, Reade Levinson, David Lewis, and Libby George, “The Abortion Assault,” Reuters, December 7, 2022.

[b] Rahman was convicted for his roles in the 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center and a follow-on plot to stage a series of bombings against a variety of targets, including tunnels, bridges, the United Nations headquarters building, and the federal office building in lower Manhattan housing the FBI field office. See Carlton Larson, “Seditious Conspiracy Was the Right Charge for the January 6 Organizers,” Atlantic , January 15, 2022, and Alanna Durkin Richer and Lindsay Whitehurst, “EXPLAINER: Rare sedition charge at center of Jan. 6 trial,” Associated Press, September 28, 2022.

Citations

[1] “News Transcript: DoD News Briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers; Presenter: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld,” U.S. Department Of Defense, February 12, 2002.

[2] “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of The United States of America: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge,” U.S. Department Of Defense.

[8] A figure derived from authors’ conversations with U.S. government officials, August 2022.

[13] Lyse Doucet, “Ayman al-Zawahiri: Shock in Kabul as US kills al-Qaeda leader,” BBC, August 2, 2022; Shane Harris, “Zawahiri appeared on his balcony. The CIA was ready to kill him,” Washington Post, August 2, 2022; Matthew Lee, Nomaan Merchant, and Aamer Madhani, “Biden: Killing of al-Qaida leader is long-sought ‘justice,’” Associated Press, August 2, 2022.

[14] “The Death of Ayman al-Zawahiri: Press Statement by Anthony J. Blinken,” U.S. Department of State, August 1, 2022. See also Jake Harrington, “Zawahiri’s Death and What’s Next for al Qaeda,” CSIS, August 4, 2022, and Bruce Hoffman, “What Zawahiri’s Killing Means for al-Qaeda,” Council on Foreign Relations, August 2, 2022.

[15] “Background Press Call by a Senior Administration Official on a U.S. Counterterrorism Operation,” The White House, August 1, 2022. See also “How the CIA identified and killed Al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri,” Reuters, August 2, 2022, and “Lead Inspector General Report To The United States Congress, Operation Enduring Sentinel Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, July 1, 2022-September 30, 2022,” pp. v, 3, 8-10, 18, 24.

[18] “Thirtieth report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team submitted pursuant to resolution 2610 (2021) concerning ISIL (Da’esh), Al-Qaida and associated individuals and entities,” United Nations Security Council, July 15, 2022.

[24] “Thirtieth report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.”

[25] “Memorandum, From National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson to Interested Parties, Re: Recently Released Partisan Report on the Afghanistan Withdrawal,” Fox News, August 2022; Jeff Seldin, “Afghan Terror Groups Pose Limited Threat to US, Assessments Find,” Voice of America, November 17, 2022.

[30] “Thirtieth report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.”

[33] “Global Terrorism Index 2022: Measuring the Impact of Terrorism,” Institute for Economics & Peace, March 2022.

[36] See, for example, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Seamus Hughes, and Bennett Clifford, Homegrown: ISIS in America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020).

[37] “Thirtieth report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.”

[38] Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Thomas Joscelyn, Enemies Near & Far: How Jihadist Groups Strategize, Plot, and Learn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).

[39] Ali Soufan, “Al-Qa`ida’s Soon-To-Be Third Emir? A Profile of Saif al-`Adl,” CTC Sentinel 14:2 (2021); “Image Allegedly Showing Presumed Zawahiri Successor in Iran Intended to Sow Controversy Among Jihadists,” SITE Intelligence Group, September 2, 2022.

[40] Brian H. Fishman, The Master Plan: ISIS, Al-Qaeda, And The Jihadi Strategy For Final Victory (New Haven; Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 34-37; Yassin Musharbash, “The Future of Terrorism: What al Qaida Really Wants,” Spiegel Online International, August 12, 2005; Bill Roggio, “The Seven Phases of The Base,” FDD’s Long War Journal, August 15, 2005.

[41] “AQ Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri Authors 852-page Book on History of Political Corruption in Muslim History,” SITE Intelligence Group: Jihadist Threat—Statements, September 10, 2021; Thomas Joscelyn, “Ayman Zawahiri promotes ‘Jerusalem Will Not Be Judaized’ campaign in new video,” FDD’s Long War Journal, September 11, 2021; Joby Warrick, “As opportunity beckons in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s leader squabbles and writes ‘comically boring’ books,” Washington Post , September 21, 2021.

[42] Authors’ assessment derived from extensive discussions with U.S. government officials, August 2022.

[43] Seth G. Jones, Three Dangerous Men (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021), p. 4.

[51] Thebault.

[58] Ann M. Simmons, “Russian Businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin Appears to Admit Interference in U.S. Elections,” Wall Street Journal, November 7, 2022.

[63] See Louis Beam, “Leaderless Resistance,” Seditionist 12 Final Edition (1992). See also Klanwatch/Militia Task Force, False Patriots: The Threat Of Antigovernment Extremists (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 1996), p. 40.

[64] For profiles in this publication on the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and the boogaloo movement, respectively, see Matthew Kriner and Jon Lewis, “The Oath Keepers and Their Role in the January 6 Insurrection,” CTC Sentinel 14:10 (2021); Matthew Kriner and Jon Lewis, “Pride & Prejudice: The Violent Evolution of the Proud Boys,” CTC Sentinel 14:6 (2021); and Matthew Kriner and Jon Lewis, “The Evolution of the Boogaloo Movement,” CTC Sentinel 14:2 (2021).

[79] Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 170-183.

[82] “National Security Strategy,” The White House, October 2022.

[85] “Thirtieth report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.”

ctc.westpoint.edu · by Kristina Hummel · December 19, 2022

10. US officials tried to stop Ukraine from killing high-ranking Russian general who was on a risky visit to the front lines, report says

Military leaders are lawful and valid targets. I wonder how this impacts Ukraine-US relations and trust between our two militaries and intelligence agencies.

US officials tried to stop Ukraine from killing high-ranking Russian general who was on a risky visit to the front lines, report says

insider.com · by Kenneth Niemeyer

The US withheld from Ukraine the movements of Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov, per The New York Times.
Senior American officials told The Times that America told Ukraine not to attack Gerasimov.
"We were like, 'Hey, that's too much,'" a senior American official told The Times.

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The US tried to prevent Ukraine from killing a high-ranking Russian military official at the onset of Russia's war in Ukraine, according to an investigation published Saturday by The New York Times.

In April, Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov made plans to travel to Russia's frontlines, according to The Times. American officials found out about Gerasimov's plans but decided to keep the information from Ukraine.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022, US officials began to realize they had "vastly overestimated" the strength of the Russian military, The New York Times reported.

Russian troops have been poorly equipped, according to The Times; one soldier complained of having a helmet that is from the 1940s, another asked someone how to switch his gun to fully automatic just before running into battle, and some were told they would "never see combat" when they were drafted into the Russian military, the report says.

"Nobody is going to stay alive," Aleksandr Khodakovsky, a pro-Russian military commander told The New York Times. "One way or another, one weapon or another is going to kill you."

As months passed and poorly trained Russian soldiers continued to lose battles and territory to Ukrainian forces, Russia started moving its high-ranking generals to the front lines, according to The Times. According to The Times, many Russian generals made the "deadly mistake" of positioning themselves near antennae and communications centers, making them easier to find, and Ukrainian forces began killing them.

When Gerasimov decided to travel to the front lines in April, US officials withheld the information from Ukraine because it would "sharply escalate" the conflict. Still, Ukrainian officials got wind of Gerasimov's plans and planned to attack him, but "senior American officials" asked them to call off the assault, according to The Times.

"We told them not to do it," a senior American official told The Times. "We were like, 'Hey, that's too much.'"

Ukraine decided to continue with the attack because the message from the US arrived too late, The Times reported. The attack killed "dozens of Russians" in the attack. Gerasimov however, escaped the strike.

Following the attack, Russian generals began visiting the frontlines of the invasion less, The Times reported.

insider.com · by Kenneth Niemeyer

11. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – 35 Years Later

Conclusion:

Toward the end of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy expressed the then-controversial belief that great power wars were not a thing of the past. “Those who assume that mankind would not be so foolish as to become involved in another ruinously expensive Great Power war perhaps need reminding that that belief was also widely held for much of the nineteenth century.” For three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States thought and acted as if great power wars were behind us. It took the Trump administration’s national security strategists – especially Elbridge Colby – to redirect our national defense strategy toward great power competition. Our sleepwalk through history ended with the simultaneous challenges of China and Russia. Paul Kennedy’s great book deserves to be remembered as a warning that the “end of history” is a dream.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – 35 Years Later

By Francis P. Sempa

December 20, 2022

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/12/20/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_great_powers__35_years_later_871190.html?mc_cid=830c516bbe

Thirty-five years ago, Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was released to widespread acclaim.

It was (and is) riveting history, explaining the interaction of economics, geopolitics, and social momentum in international relations since the 16^th century. One of the main themes of Kennedy’s history was the concept of imperial overstretch – that the relative decline of great powers often resulted from an imbalance between a nation’s resources and commitments. And Kennedy opined that the United States needed to worry about its own imperial overstretch.

Kennedy summarized his historical findings with a passage that has great relevance to 21^st century global politics:

[I]t has been a common dilemma facing previous “number one”

countries that even as their economic strength is ebbing, the

growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled

them to allocate more and more of their resources into the

military sector, which in turn squeezes our productive

investment and, over time, leads to the downward spiral

of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits

overspending priorities, and a weakening capacity to bear

the burdens of defense.

The timing of Kennedy’s book was bad. It appeared in 1987, yet two years later the United States won its long Cold War victory over the Soviet Union. How could the U.S. be in decline when it just won an historic victory in what President John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight struggle?” But Paul Kennedy’s history was sound. Great power decline, as Kennedy showed in his survey of five centuries of international politics, usually takes a long time – often centuries. And “decline” in international politics is a relative term – a great power declines usually in relation to other powers. Decline does not mean collapse – though that sometimes happened–but it does signal a shift in the global balance of power.

And great power statesmen rarely appreciate that decline. President George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” after the fall of the Soviet empire. His son, President George W. Bush, after the September 11, 2001, attacks made it U.S. policy to spread democracy throughout the world. He launched the Global War on Terror and the United States fought two long wars that in the end accomplished very little. In the meantime, China was rising economically and militarily, and soon would begin to flex its geopolitical muscles in the western Pacific and across Eurasia.

Kennedy’s book took the long view of history. Unipolar moments–a term coined by Charles Krauthammer–are just that: brief moments in history that do not erase long term trends. It is arguable that America’s decline began when President Woodrow Wilson and congress made the United States a belligerent in the First World War. Wilson and his “progressive” cohorts started the U.S. on the path to globalism, which after a brief interlude in the 1920s, was continued under Franklin Roosevelt’s administration which attracted “progressives” by the thousands to Washington, D.C., and government service. “Progressives” think they can use national power to make the world a perfect place. James Burnham brilliantly captured the progressive approach when he noted that progressives like Eleanor Roosevelt treat the world as their slum.

Our victory in World War II disguised that decline – it was another unipolar moment where the United States’ power appeared unchallenged relative to other great powers. The Truman administration took imperial overstretch to new limits. As Walter Lippmann and later George Kennan pointed out, the Truman Doctrine was a globalist’s delight, and its global reach required the institutionalization of the national security state–what President Eisenhower later called the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower knew all about the military-industrial complex – he had been a part of it since the beginning of the Cold War and observed its growth and growing influence during his presidency.

It was Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy aide Henry Kissinger who recognized the existence of long-term relative decline that Paul Kennedy later wrote about in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Nixon and Kissinger understood history and the realities of international politics in Toynbeean terms. That is why they simultaneously pursued the opening to China and detente with the Soviet Union. Eurasia had to remain geopolitically pluralistic for the United States to be secure. Korea and Vietnam were symptoms of decline – wars that perhaps we should not have fought, or that we should not have had to fight, and that we refused to win, but that fed the beast of the military-industrial complex. And the roots of those wars also extended back to the Truman administration’s catastrophic “loss of China.”

Some observers in 1949 – including Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and then-congressman Richard Nixon – recognized how disastrous the communist victory in China was to future American security. Taking the long view of history, our “tie” in Korea and loss in Vietnam pale in significance to the loss of China because China’s rise in the 21^st century may end up being the proximate cause of America’s relative decline.

Toward the end of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy expressed the then-controversial belief that great power wars were not a thing of the past. “Those who assume that mankind would not be so foolish as to become involved in another ruinously expensive Great Power war perhaps need reminding that that belief was also widely held for much of the nineteenth century.” For three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States thought and acted as if great power wars were behind us. It took the Trump administration’s national security strategists – especially Elbridge Colby – to redirect our national defense strategy toward great power competition. Our sleepwalk through history ended with the simultaneous challenges of China and Russia. Paul Kennedy’s great book deserves to be remembered as a warning that the “end of history” is a dream.

Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21^stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, The American Spectator, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.

12. The Top Ten Global Risks of 2023

The Top Ten Global Risks of 2023

We have identified the top global risks in 2023 from a U.S. and global perspective.

by Mathew Burrows Robert A. Manning

The National Interest · by Mathew Burrows · December 19, 2022

Drawing on our many years of experience in forecasting global risks and trends at the U.S. Intelligence Community’s National Intelligence Council, where we were tasked with providing U.S. leaders with long-range analysis and insights, we have identified the top global risks in 2023 from a U.S. and global perspective. Our track record is pretty good based on the risks we identified for 2022. COVID variants were indeed a source of concern, particularly in China, holding down Chinese economic growth, as we also predicted. We forecasted a Russian invasion of Ukraine and oil prices reaching $100 a barrel, which occurred earlier this year, although energy prices have declined somewhat in the second half of 2022. Food shortages, economic crises, and growing debt problems among developing countries were all highlighted last year, as they are this year. Some economists anticipate the debt crisis may not be as widespread as we and others have projected, but low- and middle-income countries, such as Sri Lanka and Pakistan, are already facing this reality. Last year’s prediction about a shortfall in fighting climate change was borne out at the underwhelming COP27 gathering in Cairo, Egypt, in November; we assess this trend will continue in 2023. Finally, owing to the growing tensions surrounding Taiwan, as well as the U.S. embargo on the export of high-end semiconductor designs and equipment, Sino-U.S. differences will persist in 2023.

Each risk is assigned a probability. A medium probability means there is a 50/50 chance that the risk will play out as we anticipate this year. Making such projections has become more difficult because so many of the risks are interlocked with one another. Polycrisis is the term being used to describe the interwoven nature of one crisis embedded in others. Although polycrises have existed before, the Ukraine War has highlighted the current set of interdependent crises facing the world. The food crisis was exacerbated by Ukraine’s inability to export its grains until recently. The energy crisis is rooted in Western efforts to deny energy profits to the Russian war machine and Vladimir Putin’s retaliation in cutting gas supplies to Europe. Inflation has been boosted owing to energy- and food-price hikes, but it is also linked to supply chain disruptions resulting from the pandemic. As with debt, inflation is also rooted in the increasing prices of commodities because of the war in Ukraine, as well as the strong dollar and fiscal outlays by states to combat the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. The fact that most of the risks are interrelated means that the reduction in risk of any single one will depend on many other risks decreasing concurrently. Similarly, the severity of any single risk is linked to and often aggravates others. Nevertheless, we think it useful to examine each risk individually, keeping in mind the interlocked nature of all risks, and forecasting the direction that each will move in terms of probability—higher or lower—even though any individual risk cannot completely diminish while the others have not been resolved.

The Risks

1) Polycrisis from the Ukraine War: The endgame in Ukraine, and how and when it will occur remain a mystery. Yet the polycrisis loop cascading from the war—energy and food insecurity, inflation, economic slowdown—may be generating “Ukraine fatigue” in the West, threatening vital support. As winter sets in, and the war slows, Putin will undoubtedly step up his strategy of attrition, attacking Ukraine’s energy and water infrastructure, seeking to make Ukraine collapse as a functioning state before his losses force him to accept some degree of defeat.

Kyiv’s taking of Kherson in the south and parts of the Donbas in the northeast—more than 50% of the land that Moscow once occupied—since February 24 strengthens its hand. A negotiated resolution—or even a ceasefire and stable armistice—is still premature because both sides feel they can win. Kyiv issued a 10-point peace plan at the November G-20 meeting. It demanded that Russia withdraw from all of Ukraine’s sovereign territory and pay damages; in effect, it calls for Putin’s total surrender. Conflicting pressures are pushing and pulling: on the one hand, Kyiv is asking for U.S./NATO to send more advanced, including long-range weapons like Army tactical missile systems and missile defenses; meanwhile, some members of the U.S. Congress want to curb support for Ukraine.

The war is generating multiple interconnected risks: these include an ongoing, stalemated conflict; escalation if the U.S./NATO sends additional advanced weapons to Kyiv in response to Putin’s bombings; Russian use of nuclear weapons if Kyiv tries to take Crimea; “Ukraine fatigue” in Europe as recession sets in; and a U.S.-EU divide over the quantity and quality of military assistance to continue to provide to Kyiv.

Probability:

2) Growing Food Insecurity: The World Food Program (WFP) has highlighted a “ring of fire” of hunger and malnutrition stretching across the globe from Central America and Haiti, through North Africa, the Sahel, Ghana, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan and then eastward to the Horn of Africa, Syria, and Yemen and extending to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The number of people facing acute food insecurity has soared from 135 million to 345 million since 2019. Even if the war in Ukraine is resolved peacefully and future grain shipments from Ukraine are not in peril, food shortages will still exist. In addition to conflict, climate change—which is causing more severe droughts and changing precipitation patterns—is a major driver of food insecurity and is unlikely to be effectively mitigated in 2023. Soaring diesel fuel and fertilizer costs, exacerbated by the Ukraine war and supply chain issues (getting crops to market and meat/poultry processing), have increased costs for feeding livestock and dairy animals. Costs for humanitarian relief are increasing because of inflation: The extra amount that the WFP now spends on operating costs would have previously fed 4 million people for one month.

Probability:

3) Upheaval and Confrontation with Iran: As with the Ukraine war, the unprecedented popular uprising could turn Iran into a polycrisis. The stars are already aligned for a dangerous new U.S. and/or Israeli conflict with Tehran. The Iran nuclear deal—on the brink of success just a few months ago—is now dormant, if not dead. Iran is accelerating production of near-bomb-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU, it has 60% of the 90% required for a bomb) and is only weeks away from having enough to produce a bomb and will have a deliverable warhead in two years or less.

Iran’s provision of drones and missiles to Russia add a new dimension to the confrontation and an impetus for new sanctions. The depleted legitimacy of the theocracy and repression of the unprecedented popular uprising adds uncertainty. Iran may be one mass strike away from a political revolution—a low-probability, high-consequence event.

A new far-right government in Israel and a Republican House of Representatives in the United States will intensify pressure to bomb or sabotage Tehran’s enrichment plant at Fordow as well as Iran’s missile and drone facilities. In response, Iran could strike Saudi oil facilities or oil tankers in the Gulf of Hormuz, disrupting oil traffic as the risk of an escalatory conflict grows. Popular protests bringing down the theocracy is a low-probability, very high-consequence event that could transform the geopolitics in an already troubled Middle East.

Probability of confrontation:

4) Worsening Debt Crises in Developing World: The UN Development Program (UNDP) has warned that 54 low- and middle-income countries have “severe debt problems.” These countries account for 18% of the global population, more than 50% of people living in extreme poverty, and 28 of the world’s top-50 most climate-vulnerable countries. Historically, debt relief has come “too little too late.” Solvency problems have initially often been mistaken for liquidity problems, leading to protracted debt crises with severe economic consequences. Low-income countries, such as Somalia and Zimbabwe, are at the top of UNDP’s economically distressed countries list, but Oxford Economics assesses that many emerging market countries will weather the storm, having already cut back on expenditures early in the downward cycle. The dire fiscal circumstances of most developing states is a bad omen for reaching the UN’s sustainable development goals by 2030. Instead, the developing world is likely to experience more poverty, less educational improvement, and decreased ability to fight climate change in 2023.

Probability:

5) Spiraling Global Debt: Both the corporate debt of nonfinancial companies ($88 trillion, about 98% of global GDP), as well as combined government, corporate, and household debt ($290 trillion by the third quarter of 2022), have been increasing during the past four-to-five years according to the International Institute of Finance. Several years of low—in some cases, negative—interest rates, fueling easy money, help to explain this situation. Although the total has declined slightly, the polycrisis of heightened interest rates, a strong dollar, a recession in Europe, a weak Chinese economy, and uncertainties over Ukraine is likely to spark another regional or even global financial crisis. The magnitude of debt is substantially larger than that during the 2007-08 financial crisis, and the fiscal conditions in major OECD countries are more problematic. Still more troubling is the declining level of international cooperation, which is much less favorable than in 2008. A Republican Congress is less likely to approve expanding IMF and World Bank resources needed to prevent defaults and reschedule debt, particularly in developing countries, but also potentially in Italy. The G-20 played a key role in the 2007-08 financial crisis but judging from the November G-20 meeting in Bali, coordinating efforts to manage debt are inadequate. China, the largest creditor to developing countries, prefers to manage debt bilaterally, and fraught U.S.-China ties suggest that Beijing will be unlikely to cooperate with Washington as it did in 2008. Sparks triggering a new major financial crisis could come via default threats from one or more developing states or Italy, a Lehman Brothers-type corporate collapse, or panic if the war in Ukraine escalates to the nuclear level.

Probability: Regional crisis: Medium+; global crisis: Medium

6) Deepening Global Cooperation Deficit: Global risks, ranging from climate change and least developed countries (LDC) debt to outer space debris, are growing as increasing major-power competition is making it harder to achieve cooperation on common global problems. After the November G-20 meeting between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the two leaders agreed to resume bilateral talks on climate change. However, another clash over Taiwan will probably halt that effort. The multilateral trading system is fraying badly, as WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala recently warned, even though the costs of protectionism and self-sufficiency efforts by major powers will slow economic growth for all countries. Other institutions are proving ineffective: The G-20 has been slow to defuse growing debt crises among the hardest-hit countries, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and others, while the World Bank has come under stiff criticism by developing countries for not shifting more financing to the fight against climate change. Absent more action by multilateral institutions to confront today’s challenges, the legitimacy of the post-World-War-II Western liberal order will erode, particularly in the eyes of many Global South countries, which are now seeing their chances for rapid economic development diminish. Another consequence of economic nationalism driving a failure to cooperate in reforming and updating global institution is fragmentation of the international order into regional clusters and inefficient competing norms and standards. A breakdown in the multilateral system will only increase the risks of greater poverty, nationalism, and conflict.

Probability:

7) A Technopolarized and Fragmented System: Boston Consulting Group estimates that if major powers try to achieve full-scale self-sufficiency in semiconductors as the Biden administration wants to do, up-front investment could reach $1 trillion and chips would cost 35-to-65% more. As the Sino-U.S. tech war heats up, China will not have access to many foreign products and will need to substitute China-made items, undermining the incentive for adherence to global standards. A McKinsey Global Institute study found in an examination of 81 technologies under development that China has so far been using global standards for more than 90% of them. In many of those cases, Beijing has been relying on foreign multinational companies for 20-40% of needed inputs. Because semiconductors are playing an increasing role in all consumer goods, not just electronics or high-end technological equipment, the markets for all manufacturing goods are likely to fragment with more costs (read inflation) and less choice for consumers. Over the longer term, a decoupling of the world economy into two self-contained Western and Chinese blocs would see global GDP decrease by at least 5%—worse than the damage from the financial crisis in 2007-08, according to the WTO. IMF modeling shows “growth prospects for developing economies under that scenario would darken, with some facing double-digit welfare losses.”

Probability:

8) Worsening Impacts of Climate Change: COP27 ended with more frustration than a sense of achievement. Calls to phase out fossil fuels were blocked by oil-producing states even as limiting the temperature rise to the 1.5C was kept as a goal. Most scientists think the world will soon reach that 1.5-degree Celsius increase and that we are on track for an eventual 2.2-degree Celsius rise unless countries commit to a 43% cut in total greenhouse gas emissions. A hotter climate means more extended droughts and floods, as well as dangerous changes in precipitation patterns that are set to disrupt agricultural yields. The only semi-bright spot at COP27 was agreement on a new “loss-and-damage” fund to help developing countries cover the costs of climate-change impacts. Nevertheless, no decision was made on how much funding the industrialized world would promise to pay. Western countries are already on the hook for providing financial assistance to developing countries with their transition to a lower carbon world and have not fulfilled those promises. Republicans, now in control of the House, have already said they do not want to pay others to fight climate change. The rightward, more nationalistic shift in European politics may also endanger the funding of “loss-and-damage” in future years. Despite the growing frequency of extreme weather events -- which affect all countries, not just poor ones -- climate change is yet to be an overriding priority for the industrialized West.

Probability:

9) Deepening U.S.-China Tensions: Despite the November Biden-Xi Summit, where both leaders launched an effort to stabilize relations, fundamental differences remain over Taiwan, technology rules and standards, trade, human rights, and Beijing’s aggression based on discredited territorial claims in the South and East China Seas. An initial resumption of trade, climate, and military-to-military dialogues has begun, but volatile nationalism on both sides could disrupt any substantive achievements. Beijing’s response so far to the Biden administration’s export ban on artificial intelligence and supercomputer chips and chip-making equipment has been to file a WTO complaint against it, and plan to invest an additional $143 billion in subsidies to its semiconductor industry. The measures seek to choke off China’s development of top-end tech. While there is a bipartisan antipathy toward China, the incoming GOP-controlled House plans to undertake a still more aggressive China-bashing agenda on Taiwan, trade, and human rights, which risks undermining Biden’s agenda. Although we judge the probability of China’s trying to coerce Taiwan into unification in 2023 or several years beyond to be extremely low, the pending Taiwan Policy Act, which aims to boost military and political ties to Taiwan, would reignite the tit-for-tat shows of resolve and mutual demonization. The effort to stabilize the relationship faces serious speed bumps ahead and may be derailed.

Probability:

10) A More Dangerous Predicament on the Korean Peninsula: Pyongyang’s relentless testing of a full spectrum of ballistic missiles (86 tests in 2022); cruise missiles; tactical nuke-capable, mobile, medium-range missiles; and ICBMs is part of North Korea’s agenda to create a survivable second-strike arsenal and provide more options for coercion and possible attack. Preparations for a seventh nuclear test have been in place for months, as the U.S. and South Korean governments have been warning. A possible aid-for-restraint understanding between Pyongyang and Beijing may explain why such a test has not occurred. Nevertheless, if a seventh test occurs and Beijing vetoes UN Security Council sanctions aimed at punishing North Korea, the rift in U.S.-China ties will probably deepen. Pyongyang’s arsenal is already far more than needed for mutual deterrence with the U.S. and ROK. President Kim Jung Un may be tempted to take provocative actions based on miscalculation that could foment a crisis and/or North-South clash.

Probability:

Unknown-Unknown Risks

The risks discussed above are, in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s term, “known unknowns”—discernable developments or trends whose possible trajectories can be assessed. In addition, there are a range of “unknown unknowns”—events we cannot anticipate that would have catastrophic consequences. Among them: a supervolcano eruption (Yellowstone, Indonesia, Japan); a giant asteroid of 6 miles wide, a magnitude that killed off dinosaurs 66 million years ago; a solar storm—coronal mass injection—hurling large amounts of magnetically charged particles at Earth that could disable grids for weeks or months; and radioactive gamma ray bursts from deep space. As we have seen from the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of viruses on our planet could spark future pandemics, some more difficult to counter than COVID.

All are low-probability, very high-impact disasters.

Mathew Burrows and Robert Manning are distinguished fellows in the Stimson Center’s Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program.

Image: Reuters.

The National Interest · by Mathew Burrows · December 19, 2022

13. Defending Ukraine: the World's Frontline of Freedom

Conclusion:

As 2022 draws to a close and we approach the anniversary of Putin’s invasion, there is no more important time to express and demonstrate western resolve to the Russian dictator and the kleptocracy that supports his rule. Ukraine should be given the tools to defend Ukrainian territory, liberate occupied territory and take some level of death and destruction to the territory of the Russian Federation. History will not judge current western leaders harshly if they act with resolve and force.

Defeating Putin and Russia in this war will send an unmistakable message to the axis of totalitarianism. If we chose to hide in an alternative universe and take a path toward appeasement or a course of half-measures designed to show “restraint” to the dictator, history will judge this generation of leaders quite differently.

Defending Ukraine: the World's Frontline of Freedom

thecipherbrief.com

December 19th, 2022 by Rob Dannenberg, |

Rob Dannenberg served as chief of operations for the Counterterrorism Center, chief of the Central Eurasia Division and chief of the CIA’s Information Operations Center before retiring from the Agency. He served as managing director and head of the Office of Global Security for Goldman Sachs, and director of International Security Affairs at BP and is now an independent consultant and speaker on geopolitical and security risk.

View all articles by Rob Dannenberg

OPINION – Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin held a video meeting with the Russia Presidential Council for Human Rights and Civil Society, a group with whom he usually meets once a year. The meeting was broadcast on Russian national television and judging from that fact and the content of Putin’s remarks, the audience was the Russian people, not the Council.

Members of the Council were warned in advance not to pester the Russian President with questions about the conflict in Ukraine and his remarks were consistent with a pattern of his public remarks stretching back several years. They show a leader clearly divorced from the reality of what is happening in Ukraine, to his country, his military, and to Russia’s standing in the world. Some commentators have noted Putin seems to be living in an alternate universe.

If Putin’s remarks were a “one off” set of comments designed to boost the morale of the Russian people and solidify support for the war, that would be one thing, but Putin’s has now repeated his distorted interpretation of history and his own imperial greatness so many times, there is no alternative to believing that he means what he says and therefore, the west should act and treat him accordingly.

In his December 7 remarks, Putin noted the “Special Military Operation” (SMO) could go on for a long time. He again compared himself favorably to Peter the Great and boasted of the achievements gained thus far in the operation, including the acquisition of enough Ukrainian territory to make the Sea of Azov a “Russian lake,” which he said was always one of Peter I’s goals.

Putin of course, made no reference to the enormous casualties. According to an unverified Russian source whose reporting on Russian casualties has been in a range consistent with Ukrainian and western reports, as of December 11, Russia had lost 95,657 military-operational personnel to the conflict. Together with casualties within Private Military Companies such as the Wagner Group (29,619) and Russian National Guard (5,776) total casualties (wounded and killed) allegedly amount to 131,052.

This is a staggering figure, even if inflated and does not include losses in military material, much of which cannot be replaced in the near term hence the reliance on drones from Iran and supplies of ammunition and material from other countries.

For all the pitiful performance of the much-vaunted Russian military since the invasion began in February, the performance of the Ukrainians has been skillful and inspirational. From repelling the Russian attempt to capture Kyiv in the opening weeks of the war, to the offensives liberating significant captured territory near Kharkiv, to the recent recapture of Kherson, the Ukrainians have demonstrated strategic vision and tactical skill. Now, the Ukrainians are taking the fight to Russian soil in the form of drone attacks targeting the airbases the Russian air force is using to launch the barbaric strikes against Ukrainian civilian and energy infrastructure. The attacks show the Russian homeland is not off limits—nor should it be. We may be witnessing the 21st century equivalent of the British Royal Air Force in Second World War, when Britain stood alone. As Churchill said in 1940, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Make no doubt about it, the front line of freedom in the world is in eastern Ukraine and the stakes in this conflict are incredibly high. One wonders if enough western leaders and “influencers” realize what’s at stake.

It seems there are constant pleas and suggestions to not “provoke” or humiliate Putin, lest we risk escalation. Such suggestions show a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin, Russia, and negotiation with dictators in general. This is especially true of dictators who inhabit an alternative universe. Negotiation and a path toward compromise is the preferred course of business and statecraft for most in the west. And such an approach generally works well when the parties involved have rational leaders and represent countries where the rule of law exists. The Russian president is not rational in this sense and Russia is certainly not a country where the rule of law exists.

The sorry parade of western leaders traveling to Moscow to plead with Putin not to invade Ukraine did not prevent the war from happening and in a way, perhaps contributed to it because these visits likely reinforced Putin’s mistaken view that western leaders are feckless and weak and would not respond forcefully if he invaded. Putin was wrong on those assumptions but now seems to be preparing the information space for the Russian people and western leaders that he is in this for the long haul. We should be as well.

Putin’s strategy is clearly to bet on war weariness, fatigue and expense, to sap the strength of the western coalition supporting Ukraine. And a little bit of nuclear sable-rattling in the background to remind anyone who may have forgotten that Russia is a nuclear power.

Putin said himself this month that, “Russians will defend ourselves with all the means at our disposal.” He said the risk of nuclear war was growing, but also said, “We haven’t gone mad, we realize what nuclear weapons are. We have these means in more advanced and modern form than any other nuclear country…But we aren’t about to run around the world brandishing this weapon like a razor.”

It’s interesting that Putin decided to assert that Russia wasn’t “mad.” Despite Putin’s assertion, there are western and Ukrainian media reports that parts from Russian X55 cruise missiles have been found following Russian missile attacks as far west as Lviv, and in attacks on Kyiv. According to a Ukrainian-based media outlet, an X55 missile fragment that was found after an attack on Kyiv in mid-November, contained a screwed on block that may have served as a dummy nuclear payload. A former US general speculated that the Russian use of the nuclear-capable X55 cruise missile may have been a test of the range and accuracy of those systems for potential use in a nuclear strike on Ukraine.

Putin’s preparation of the information space for a long war and his repeated references to Russia’s nuclear status, really tell a story of the performance of the Russian military in the war thus far. Putin doesn’t have any arrows left in his quiver to escalate the conflict short of what he is already doing, except to threaten the use of weapons of mass destruction.

The Russian conventional force capability that in many western estimates, posed a credible threat to NATO prior to the February invasion and served as the “or else” behind Russian demands for “security guarantees” in the run up to the invasion, no longer exists.

The Russian air force and navy have largely been missing in the conflict except as platforms to launch missile and artillery strikes against civilian infrastructure. Whatever economic clout Russia might have had to use as geopolitical levers in the form of oil or natural gas, has been substantially neutralized. Other than Iran, the axis of totalitarian states has largely provided only rhetoric to support Putin’s war. Even at home, the latest polling suggests support for the war is finally waning. Fewer and fewer Russians believe Putin did the right thing by starting the war. According to polling by the Levada Center, 55 percent of Russian now support peace talks with Ukraine. Only about 60 percent agree with the decision to start the war and among Russians aged 18-45, about 40 percent agree.

The percentage of Russians in all demographic groups that support the decision to invade has dropped over the past six months. The number of Russians who have decided to leave the country since the start of the war, suggests even less support. Moreover, for the first time a member of the siloviki, Wagner Group chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin, seems to be posturing himself as a potential replacement for Putin.

On the strategic level, Russia’s situation is even worse, Sweden and Finland are now on a path toward NATO membership, NATO itself is re-invigorated and member states are in the process of re-arming. Support for Putin and Russia abroad is ebbing—even the Chinese have expressed reservations about Putin’s performance in invading Ukraine.

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Failure on the battlefield, economic difficulties, strategic setbacks and eroding public support suggest that now is the time for the west to show Putin that his “long game” strategy will fail.

The first step in this process is to recognize there can be no negotiated or diplomatic solution to the war, short of Russia accepting all of Ukraine’s preconditions which include the withdrawal of Russian forces to pre-2014 borders, reparations for war damage, remanding of war criminals to justice and security guarantees for Ukraine, which now almost certainly will end up in the European Union and quite possibly NATO at some point. At a minimum, the epicenter of military power in Europe will shift further to the east, to Poland and Ukraine and the Baltic States.

We would do well to pay more attention to lessons of the states proximate to Russia that have learned the bitter lessons of what Russia stands for from years of occupation and intimidation.

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas expressed this very well in her description of Russian negotiating tactics quoting Andrei Gromyko, a long-time Soviet diplomat saying, first, the Russians demand the maximum — and indeed something that they didn’t even have before. In this case, that might include a withdrawal by NATO from central and eastern Europe. Second, they present ultimatums and make outrageous threats. Witness Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. (Russia recently announced it activated three RS-24 Yars missiles with a payload 12x stronger than the US bomb that struck Hiroshima.) And third, they don’t give one inch in negotiations, because they assume that there will always be some people in the West who will offer them something. She is exactly right. We should be publicly and privately messaging Russia that the invasion of Ukraine was a mistake of historic proportions, and the price Russia must and will pay for that mistake will be high as well.

As 2022 draws to a close and we approach the anniversary of Putin’s invasion, there is no more important time to express and demonstrate western resolve to the Russian dictator and the kleptocracy that supports his rule. Ukraine should be given the tools to defend Ukrainian territory, liberate occupied territory and take some level of death and destruction to the territory of the Russian Federation. History will not judge current western leaders harshly if they act with resolve and force.

Defeating Putin and Russia in this war will send an unmistakable message to the axis of totalitarianism. If we chose to hide in an alternative universe and take a path toward appeasement or a course of half-measures designed to show “restraint” to the dictator, history will judge this generation of leaders quite differently.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

14. Chinese Liaoning Carrier Strike Group Now Operating in the Philippine Sea

Chinese Liaoning Carrier Strike Group Now Operating in the Philippine Sea - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · December 19, 2022

People’s Liberation Army Navy carrier Liaoning and its strike group are underway near the Philippine Sea. JSDF Photo

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Liaoning Carrier Strike Group is now operating in the Philippine Sea, according to Japan’s Ministry of Defense.

Meanwhile, a PLAN survey ship entered Japan’s territorial waters on Monday and two Chinese H-6 bombers flew in and out of the Pacific Ocean on Monday afternoon, according to news releases from the Joint Staff Office (JSO) in the Ministry of Defense.

At 10 a.m. on Thursday, carrier CNS Liaoning (16), accompanied by cruiser CNS Anshan (103), destroyer CNS Chengdu (120), frigate CNS Zhaozhuang (542) and fast combat support ship CNS Hulunhu (901), was sighted sailing south 440 kilometers west of Fukue Island in the East China Sea, according to a Friday release from the JSO. At 12 p.m., cruiser CNS Wuxi (104) was sighted sailing southeast in an area 420 kilometers west of Fukue Island. Wuxi then joined the Liaoning CSG and all six ships sailed south together through the Miyako Strait into the Pacific Ocean on Friday.

Liaoning launched and recovered its helicopters while in the East China Sea, according to the release from Japan’s Ministry of Defense. Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer JS Kirisame (DD-104), together with a JMSDF P-1 Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) of Fleet Air Wing 4 stationed at Naval Air Facility Atsugi, Honshu and a JMSDF P-3MPA of Fleet Air Wing 5 stationed at Naha Air Base, Okinawa, monitored the PLAN CSG.

A People’s Liberation Army Navy J-15 carrier fighter takes off from Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning in the Philippine Sea. JSDF Photo

On Saturday at 11 a.m., Liaoning – along with Wuxi, Chengdu, Zhaozhuang and Hulunhu – was sighted in an area 260 kilometers southwest of Oki Daito Island, according to a Sunday news release from the Japanese government. Oki Daito is part of the Daito Islands group, which lies southeast of Okinawa, in the Philippine Sea. Liaoning conducted flight operations of its embarked fighters and helicopters from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Destroyer Kirisame continues to shadow the group and Japan Air Self-Defense Force fighter aircraft scrambled in response to the PLAN fighter jets taking off from Liaoning, according to the release.

The Liaoning CSG last deployed in the same area in May, when it conducted drills for over two weeks. Of the seven ships that accompanied Liaoning then, only Chengdu and Hulunhu are with the current CSG. Several other PLAN ships are also operating around the Pacific Ocean, with a surface action group comprising of cruiser CNS Lhasa (102), destroyer CNS Kaifeng (124) and replenishment ship CNS Taihu (889) transiting through the Osumi Strait into the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday. Meanwhile, on Thursday, destroyer CNS Taizhou (138) transited the Miyako Strait into the Pacific Ocean. Destroyer CNS Nanjing (155) and frigate CNS Anyang (599) transited into the Pacific Ocean via the Miyako Strait on Dec. 3.

Location of Liaoning in the Philippine Sea on Dec. 18, 2022. JSDF image

On Monday at 3:20 a.m., a PLAN hydrograph survey ship was sighted sailing westwards in an area 50 kilometers south-east of Tanegashima Island, part of the Osumi Islands group which lies south of the main island of Kyushu, according to a release issued by Japan’s Ministry of Defense. The hull number provided identified the ship as CNS Chen Jingrun (26). The PLAN ship entered Japan’s contiguous zone south of Tanegashima and at 6:50 a.m. It then entered Japan’s territorial waters south of Yakushima Island and left Japan’s territorial waters west of Kuchinoerabu Island at 10:30 a.m. and sailed southwest. A JMSDF P-1 MPA of Fleet Air Wing 1 based at JMSDF Kanoya Air Base, Kyushu monitored the PLAN ship, according to the release.

On Monday afternoon, two Chinese H-6 bombers flew in from the East China Sea and passed over the Miyako Strait into the Pacific Ocean before turning back at a point southeast of Oki Daito Island and transiting over the Miyako Strait into the East China Sea, according to a JSO news release issued Monday. JASDF fighters scrambled in response.

news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · December 19, 2022

15. ‘Lacking Credibility, Lacking Confidence From the People … Is Xi Xinping’s Greatest Vulnerability’

‘Lacking Credibility, Lacking Confidence From the People … Is Xi Xinping’s Greatest Vulnerability’

Politico

Magazine

Pro-democracy activist Wei Jingsheng in conversation with Matt Pottinger on where China goes from here.

Photo illustration and videos by Renee Klahr and Meiying Wu

By Matt Pottinger

By MATT POTTINGER

12/20/2022 04:30 AM EST

Matt Pottinger is chairman of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ China Program and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was previously deputy national security adviser from 2019 to 2021.

12/20/2022 04:30 AM EST

In 1978, activist Wei Jingsheng became China’s most prominent dissident when he posted a signed essay — or “big character poster,” as they are called in China — on a wall in Beijing, arguing eloquently for democracy. He’s been imprisoned twice for his blistering criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, spending some 18 years behind bars before relocating to the United States. Interestingly, he grew up near Xi Jinping, who would become general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. Wei’s little brother knew Xi when they were both kids.

In November, I sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Wei in Washington, D.C. We discussed his indoctrination in, and then rejection of, communism as a young person, the future of political dissent in China and Xi’s reading habits, psychology, and greatest vulnerabilities, from the low-level bureaucrats who could stick gum into the party’s gears to the public’s lack of confidence in the regime.

Wei didn’t hedge on the threats to democracy growing around the globe. “If the U.S. continues to choose business interests and tolerate authoritarianism — be it Chinese Communist Party or Saudi Arabia — if they are tolerated for business profits, global democracy will inevitably wane,” he said.

Just a couple of weeks after our interview, mass demonstrations broke out against Xi’s Covid lockdowns following an apartment fire that killed 10 people; many blamed Covid restrictions for delaying the rescue effort. Protestors held up white, wordless sheets of paper as symbols of mourning and defiance of the CCP’s ruthless censorship campaign. Dubbed the “White Paper Revolution,” the protests have had a major impact, contributing to Xi’s decision to dismantle his “Zero Covid” guidelines — perhaps the biggest U-turn on a signature policy since he rose to power a decade ago.

Wei told me the movement has “far exceeded” the Democracy Wall Movement of which he was a leading figure in the late ’70s: “The White Paper Revolution severely undermined Xi Jinping’s confidence. After the 20th Party Congress, Xi Jinping had come to monopolize power at the center and was feeling smug. But the slogan for Xi Jinping to step down, put forward by the White Paper Revolution, is comparable to the question I raised at the Democracy Wall Movement: Do we want democracy or a new dictatorship?”

He added: “Now the impact and influence of the White Paper Revolution has far exceeded that of the Democracy Wall back then. I’ve added his full sentence here, since it’s a major statement.

The following interview is drawn from our November conversation. Lin Yang translated the interview into English and edited for length and clarity.

Renee Klahr and JC Whittington produced this video.

Matthew Pottinger Lao Wei, It’s good to see you again.

Wei Jingsheng Hello, hello.

Pottinger You grew up in Beijing in a leadership compound. You’re the son of revolutionaries. Your father was an official. And there was another official whose son grew up as your neighbor in the same compound, and that was Xi Jinping. He’s a few years behind you. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your recollections of Xi Jinping when you were growing up just down the street from him.

Wei My dad is not as high level as [his dad]. But although Xi Jinping did not live in the same compound as I did, he was familiar with my little brother. Because they were of the same age, they were good friends. I did not hear a lot about his doings when he was young. When he was young, he seemed rather reckless. He gave a reckless impression. And he was fairly clever, but he did not like reading. This is the impression I got from my little brother. They were relatively close.

Pottinger I know you really love reading. You’ve written about the fact that you read a lot of socialist theory and literature when you were a middle school student, right before the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. You read Marx and Engels and Lenin and Mao and Stalin, and you’ve written before that as a middle school student, you really were indoctrinated to become what you called a bona fide Maoist fanatic. But you also developed a love for philosophy in those years, and that helped equip you really for the critical skills that you applied later to go from becoming a Maoist to one of the most prominent critics of Maoism and one of the most prominent critics of the Communist Party. How did the 16-year-old Wei Jingsheng, the Maoist fanatic, become Wei Jingsheng, the lifelong dissident and pro-democracy activist?

Wei Yes, yes. You have a good memory. I do love reading. But when I was in school, I didn’t like reading books on politics and philosophy. I liked reading novels. I read so much that I was denied membership in the Young Pioneers [a communist youth organization]. I was considered a bad student who didn’t listen in class but read novels. I particularly liked the French writer Balzac, the American writer Mark Twain, etc. These are among the writers I liked. Also there was the Russian writer Chekhov. I liked these writers very much.

Later we had a political teacher, who taught political classes. This teacher was a Rightist, loved debating with students, and often preached Marxist theories. We thought what he said wasn’t necessarily true, right? So a few students started to read on Marxism and Leninism to debate with him. I borrowed these books so often from the library, the librarian got to know me. I was given access to the book depository. We read very fast and engaged in debates with our teacher.

Later the Cultural Revolution started. At the time I still believed in Marxism. I believed Chairman Mao was right, was great, and this and that. Later during the Cultural Revolution, we became the first group of Red Guards. But in just a few months, we were betrayed by Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing. Suddenly it seemed we were no longer revolutionary, but anti-revolutionary. Furthermore, the parents of many of our classmates became anti-revolutionaries.

So after the betrayal, there started a small movement among us youth, a movement to figure out if Chairman Mao was wrong, whether he strayed from the path of Marx and Lenin. So during that time, including when we were sent to the countryside, we read many more books by Marx, the collected works of Marx and Engels, works of Lenin. We read closely and thought about it carefully. That was when I realized that the mistake was not made by Mao Zedong, the mistake was rooted in Marx. You can’t use the most hideous, violent means to build a beautiful society. It is self-contradictory.

That was when I realized, that was the moment when I moved away from communism, when I no longer thought communism was good. Of course the numerous deaths of starvation I witnessed in the countryside were also a catalyst for my change of heart.

Pottinger So you mentioned reading all those novels and that had a big impact on you. I know that Xi Jinping read a novel in those days as well. It was a socialist novel from the Soviet Union called How the Steel Was Tempered. And that book, apparently, really had a big impact on him, because when he made his first trip to Russia after he became leader in 2012, he mentioned that book specifically to Vladimir Putin as a book that had a huge impact on him. I wonder why Xi Jinping drew very, very different conclusions about communism and its future than the ones that you did, given that you were neighbors, you were steeped in a lot of the same doctrine.

Wei Actually, we all loved that novel. That novel is very sensational. At the time we were all firm believers of communism. It’s so sensationalist, and we all enjoyed it. It was a common phenomenon among us young people. But after some time, as I just mentioned, I realized that communism is wrong. Then, when I thought about the novel again, I realized that the novel is also wrong. To sacrifice for a wrong ideal, it is a crime.

Speaking of Xi Jinping, perhaps his experiences as a sent-down youth were similar to mine, but he did not join the army. I later became a soldier and a worker. He was never a soldier or a worker. That said, I think his ideas in the ’80s or ’90s were probably not that different from ours. Young people of my generation took similar paths, and shared many similar ideas. Also, he probably also participated in the small movement I just mentioned, the movement to re-study Marxism and Leninism, and he did not necessarily really believe in the Communist Party. But people can change and people do change. One’s circumstances change. For example, I thought I should devote myself to democracy and freedom in China, while he chose to become an official. And being an official, his interests as an official determine his increasing support for the Communist Party, to the point of becoming the Communist Party. He also wants to change the Communist Party for the worse, to become more repulsive than the old Communist Party, because his interests require him to do so. I have embarked on a completely different path.

It’s likely our differences can be mostly attributed to our different positions. There is a Chinese saying, “Where one sits decides what one thinks.” One’s position can significantly influence one’s thinking. On the contrary, there are many young people who shared Xi Jinping’s experiences. They also became officials, bureaucrats big and small. Being in the positions they are in, they turn toward the Communist Party, because that’s where their interests lie. But now when they are being purged, being attacked, they may start to have second thoughts. The experiences of re-reading Marxism when they were young, the tendency to reject Marxism, might once again have its influence on them.

Pottinger Can you expound on Xi Jinping Thought?

Wei Xi Jinping doesn’t have much thought. Honestly, this is my little brother’s impression of him. I did not know him well. There was Liu He living upstairs from us, he is the vice premier now. Liu He lived upstairs and he was familiar [with Xi]. Those two, my little brother and Liu He, they knew Xi Jinping relatively well. So according to their description, Xi Jinping didn’t seem to like reading. Later he brags about reading this and that, but I don’t think so. Those are lies to boost his image.

I think once he became the leader of the Communist Party, he has come to recognize many of Mao Zedong’s actions were probably more effective than those of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin’s reforms brought economic growth, but what about ideology? According to them, people became confused and no longer trusted the Communist Party and Chairman Mao as much. Xi probably considered it a bad state of affairs. He wants to reestablish the kind of authority Mao Zedong enjoyed. Everyone obeys one person, everyone follows the baton. His current position is probably why he prefers it that way. His aversion to reading and thinking probably has something to do with it, too.

Pottinger I have to say, I’ve read a lot of Xi Jinping speeches. I’ve read the speeches that were not made public immediately, ones that were directed at the Communist Party Central Committee, as opposed to the ones that he’s giving when he’s talking to a crowd at Davos, for example, when he’s speaking to a foreign crowd. When you look at the internal-facing speeches, I have to say, I could still come away with the impression that he is a committed Leninist, that he is a communist, that he’s not faking it. Even if you’re right that he’s not fully immersed in the broadest sense into Marxist theory, he certainly has shown an aptitude for grasping the essence of a Leninist system of government, the essence of Stalinism, being able to purge his enemies and to climb steadily, steadily higher up that slippery pole of power. So I wonder if, you know, whether we would be underestimating him if we were to say that there really isn’t an ideology there?

Wei Speaking of his stuff, first, once you become a leader, it no longer matters if you don’t have an ideology. Your assistants will write one for you. They will invent some for you. Why does Wang Huning always come up with new sayings, new thoughts for them? That is the job for people like him, right?

On the other hand, Xi Jinping’s family has had its share of misfortunes. His father was persecuted at the end of the 1950s, badly persecuted. Given his family experience, he probably has heard a lot about, or learned a lot from the cutthroat political struggles within the party. So he thinks Stalin’s methods — Mao Zedong learned a lot from Stalin; not so much Marx and Lenin, but Stalin. Stalin’s methods of purge and oppression appeal to him more. Although his family, including himself, suffered these persecutions, perhaps, comparable to the well-known Stockholm Syndrome, their suffering leads them to believe these methods are correct, are effective. Now he’s picked it up. He started to use these methods of persecution he suffered through on others. This is a natural progression.

Yet under the same persecution, members of different families might choose different directions. My family had similar experiences. My father was persecuted too. He was persecuted in the early 1950s, before his family. But our family education, at least what my mother taught us, was not to learn from the bad, but from the good. Although both my parents were Marxists, they aspired to the good bits, the relatively positive bits in Marxism. Like lofty ideals, compassion for the people, sacrificing for the society, etc. These are the kinds of things we were mostly exposed to.

Maybe, I do not know exactly, but judging from his actions now, his family education might have mainly consisted of what persecution his family suffered during interparty struggles, why they were persecuted, and how they were persecuted. He might have been mainly exposed to such things. And being in power might have reawakened these memories.

He has been slowly practicing these methods during his long tenure as an official. Chinese call it the “Thick Black Theory.” It’s about how to deal with others, how to plot against others and how to bully others. He probably grows increasingly skilled at this with all the practice. So the political trickery he utilizes, the kind used by Stalin and Mao Zedong to oppress and persecute people, is perhaps one kind of [ideology], the kind he adopts.

Pottinger Before the 20th party congress that occurred last month, you had said in some of your interviews and tweets that it was possible that Xi Jinping might not get a third term. Here we are, we’ve now seen the outcome of that party congress. Not only did he get a third term, he hasn’t identified a successor, which implies that he’s going for a fourth term and maybe more. He has completely eliminated non-loyalists from the highest ranks of the Communist Party. Did you underestimate him, and what do you think this portends?

Wei I indeed underestimated him. I did not expect him to employ such rogue methods to instigate a small coup d'état — a palace coup. He reneged on all his promises to the other members of the leadership. In addition to the third term, he promoted his own people to surround himself. That he would use such despicable tricks to remain in power, this is something I did not expect. Judging from the impression he gave me when he was little, he should not have been such a wicked person. But like we just discussed, his family education, and his decades of experiences as an official, might have led him down the path of evil and increasingly to take after Stalin and Mao Zedong, even exceeding those two in his villainy. He persecutes others with such craft. But now, although he has achieved his goal, the outcome is very unstable, and [he] cannot win the acceptance of the public. Without true acceptance, he has little legitimacy. With hardly any legitimacy, he is going to have some very hard times ahead. The biggest conundrum for him is how to control this Communist Party.

Pottinger What are Xi Jinping’s vulnerabilities now? He looks all powerful, or as close to being all powerful as any Chinese paramount leader has been. What are his vulnerabilities, and what are the vulnerabilities of the Chinese Communist Party that maybe we don’t see very easily?

Wei On the surface, to the foreigners, Xi Jinping appears to be all powerful, with tremendous authority. To Americans, a president, having assumed the presidency, has corresponding powers. Others must put their trust in the president and obey orders issued by the president.

It is different in China. Occupying the office without credibility will not lead to obedience. Chinese officials are very skilled at disobeying without getting caught. There is a Chinese saying, “There are policies from the top, and there are countermeasures at the bottom.” They have various ways to handle it. When others do not have faith in you, when you have no credibility and receive no acceptance, you are in big trouble. Your orders might not be carried out at all. Others might have ways to have your orders vanish into thin air.

Under such circumstances, lacking credibility, lacking confidence from the people or authority among the people is Xi Jinping’s biggest vulnerability. The Communist Party shares the same biggest vulnerability as Xi Jinping. The Communist Party has no credibility either. It agrees with you, makes promises to you, but it will not deliver. When I met with [President Bill] Clinton back then, we talked about this. I told Clinton that he should not offer China favorable conditions first. You have to hold on to the favors until it delivers its promises. You can only hand over the money once you receive the goods. If you pay up front, you might never receive the goods. This is the biggest characteristic of the Communist Party’s duplicity. Of course, it can fool Americans, Europeans, people around the world. It’s easy to fool people once, but people cannot be fooled forever, right? They cannot be fooled forever. Then, once people lose their trust in you, they may not believe you even when you are telling the truth. Then you are in a bind.

Pottinger Some people can be fooled always, but not all people.

Wei Indeed.

Pottinger You spent 18 years in jail. And the first time you went to jail, it was because of your role in 1978, in what became known as the Democracy Wall Movement. You pasted a manifesto onto a public wall, and you were calling for what you called the Fifth Modernization, which hadn’t been included in Deng Xiaoping’s description of things that China needed to modernize, like science and technology and industry and national defense. You called for a fifth modernization, which was democracy. Looking back and looking at this moment right now, do you think that China felt closer to democracy in 1978, or does it feel closer to democracy now, in late 2022?

Wei At that time, we were very close. Bao Tong agreed with me too. According to him, the Communist Party at the time did not know what direction to take. Mao Zedong’s way, Stalin’s way — everyone knew that would not work. Those paths lead to the ruin of the nation. But then what instead?

At that time, Bao Tong opined, the Communist Party could have chosen the path of democracy. Because these Communist cadres, big or small, climbed up to their position under the banner of democracy when they were young. They, including Mao Zedong, never abandoned the banner of democracy, even though what was really implemented was dictatorship. But the party called it “big democracy,” which allows the people to speak their minds, post “big character posters,” etc., etc. The party could have chosen the path of democracy at the time. There was a real chance.

Unfortunately Deng Xiaoping chose otherwise. He chose the traditional Chinese road, a road where the market economy is headed by authoritarian politics. He knew a market economy is superior to a planned economy. There is no doubt about it. But the debate at the time, the biggest argument within the Communist Party, was whether we should adopt Western-style parliamentary democracy, or continue on the path of one-party dictatorship. There were many veteran Communist members with life-long faith in communism who believed that the one-party rule must be upheld. At the time Deng Xiaoping proposed the “four upholds,” with the cardinal principle being “uphold the leadership of the party.” That was how we missed the opportunity at the time. In 1989, when the people rose to demand democracy, although Zhao Ziyang was not necessarily pro-democracy, but at least he did not want to suppress the people, he, perhaps, advocated for compromises. That was another opportunity which we also missed.

Now, under Xi Jinping’s high-handed governance, there is a new opportunity. When authoritarian politics threaten not only the masses, the dissidents, but also Communist officials themselves, people might start considering, is there a different path available? At least officials in the U.S. don’t necessarily end up in prison over just any mistakes. Meanwhile, even without making mistakes, Communist Party officials can be sent to prison simply upon Xi’s displeasure. To the party officials, the American system at least provides more personal security. Given the circumstances, maybe more and more Chinese Communist Party officials would hope to choose a path to democracy. This is not my conjecture, but a conclusion based on the information I have received. Many Communist officials are in contact with me through friends. They hope we can do more outside China to bring about changes inside China. Of course we are working hard, but those inside [China] are unaware of the challenges we are faced with, while we clearly know the difficulties they are living with in China.

Although the opportunity is present, the outcome depends on what choice the international community makes. If the U.S. continues to choose business interests and tolerate authoritarianism, be it Chinese Communist Party or Saudi Arabia, if they are tolerated for business profits, global democracy will inevitably wane. The role of models is increasingly clear to all. If you are not serious about democracy, why would we fight tooth and nail for it? So I think the U.S., as a beacon of light for democracy, plays a paramount role. Examples of other models of democracy, like democratic European nations, Japan and Taiwan are also important. If these models don’t live up to their reputation, I think democracy in China will also suffer.

Pottinger Under Xi Jinping, Beijing has built a surveillance system that is probably more advanced than anything we have seen before. The exiled Central Party School official Cai Xia has described it as exquisite totalitarianism. Is there a path toward a moment, like the moment beginning with the Democracy Wall Movement, and the 1980s you just described? Is there a way for that kind of moment to return to China in light of the fact that you have pervasive, deeply intrusive surveillance through technology provided by Silicon Valley and funded by Wall Street?

Wei What Cai Xia said makes a certain kind of sense, but she is rather pessimistic. The high-tech surveillance Xi Jinping employs to control society does lead to the belief that it is increasingly difficult, even impossible, to overthrow the regime using traditional tactics. But the problem is that high tech is not only accessible to Xi Jinping. The masses can master it, too. Resisters can also make use of these high tech means. Both sides enjoy equal opportunities. The key is whether there is enough confidence to take actions to overthrow the Communist Party. But of course Cai Xia and some other friends don’t always share the same opinions. They are anti-Xi, but not anti-communism. They oppose Xi Jinping, but not the Communist Party. They think such a stance can be accepted by more people. But I believe we not only need to oppose Xi Jinping, but also the Communist Party. If we could get rid of Xi Jinping, the Communist Party won’t last long either, the end will be near. At least, when it comes to that, the Communist Party might reform itself, thus creating an opportunity for democracy. I am still relatively optimistic. I don’t believe Xi Jinping could control everything. Especially when no one trusts you and you still need people to manage the surveillance system, would they be loyal to you? So, I think there are still opportunities.

Pottinger You reminded me that in 1999, when the United States was debating whether or not to extend permanent normal trade relations to China, paving the way for China to come into the World Trade Organization, you gave a warning at the time to members of Congress. You said that China’s closed tyranny under Mao Zedong was terrible for the Chinese people. But what you termed the open tyranny that had been ushered in by Deng Xiaoping would be very, very dangerous for democracies everywhere. That was in 1999. I have to say, it looks like it was a fairly prescient warning in hindsight. Could you talk a little bit about that, the threat to democracy today as a result of Beijing’s open tyranny, and whether Xi Jinping is, perhaps, inadvertently threatening to undermine what you viewed as a very problematic form of tyranny externally?

Wei The past 20-some years have proved that an open tyranny is even better at deceiving. During these 20-some years, major Western businesses have invested in China and painted a pretty picture of China for the outside world. A lot of the American people have come to believe it, thus letting down their guard against China. A lot of academics are also advocating for China. China’s infiltration of the U.S. has led to problems in the health of the American system. Now Americans are starting to realize how serious the infiltration is. It is close to taking control of our regime, our thinking. This situation, this is exactly the result of Deng Xiaoping’s open tyranny.

On the contrary, as Xi Jinping closes up the country, more and more people might be able to see the true face of the authoritarian regime, the danger it poses to the U.S. and its neighboring countries. Also, without the support of the people, it might grow increasingly weak, and it’s paradoxically not as dangerous as that of the open society under Deng Xiaoping. Therefore right now is the best opportunity for the people to confront the Communist Party.

Pottinger I couldn’t help but to notice that Xi Jinping, at the end of this party congress, he talked about stormy seas ahead. And I couldn’t help but to think about Taiwan in that context. What do you think Beijing’s and Xi Jinping’s intentions are with respect to Taiwan in his third five-year term?

Wei According to the calculations of Xi Jinping and his clique, now perhaps presents the best opportunity to attack Taiwan. Because the attention of the U.S. and other Western countries are focusing on Ukraine, where the war is unlikely to end any time soon, and where the U.S. would invest more aid. If he launches a war against Taiwan now, he needs to consider whether the U.S. and Japan would send aid to Taiwan.

Chinese leaders have been talking about “liberating Taiwan” for years, and why did they never make the move? The U.S. is the decisive factor in the decision. They cannot defeat the U.S. Any move against Taiwan might invite fierce retribution from the U.S. But now, the United States’ attention is elsewhere. This presents an important window of opportunity to Xi Jinping. Therefore he has been desperately mobilizing for war.

Only a few days ago, when he visited the joint operations command center of the Central Military Commission, he told the army to focus on preparation for war and to be victorious. He sees a great opportunity. On the other hand, on the domestic front, we have just talked about how much he is hated and loathed. He has no credibility — not among the people or among the bureaucrats. How would you extricate yourself from this conundrum? Those in power have always resorted to a simple method — start a foreign war, which might immediately alleviate internal conflicts. Stupid as Xi Jinping is, he understands this. If he doesn’t, others will be sure to remind him. He would start a war with Taiwan if only to stabilize his regime. Therefore we must stay vigilant, we cannot drop our guard.

Pottinger Maybe we could close with some of your reflections on what is the role of a Chinese dissident today — a Chinese dissident in exile, like yourself, in particular?

Wei My thinking was formed even before I left China. Why did I agree to be sent out of China, to the U.S.? Firstly, I believe the overseas democracy movement has paramount importance. Mobilizing international pressure gives domestic dissidents some room to maneuver. The Communist Party fears global public opinion. They always have, right from the beginning. The party talks about how it fears nothing on the international stage, but it is terrified. This is a “merit” of the Communist Party — it knows it cannot alienate the whole world. So an important job for us overseas is to mobilize the international community to put pressure on the Communist Party.

Another important job is to facilitate the flow of information to the domestic audience, such as what democracy in America looks like, and why it is good. We utilize all channels. There are more and more channels nowadays, including social media. I have hundreds of thousands followers on my Twitter, and half of them are using Twitter through a VPN. They send their greetings so I know they come from within China. This is how we communicate information and discuss problems with people inside China, how we explain issues that they find perplexing. I think this is also very important to the future democratization. Because democracy in China can only be established by the people in China. It cannot depend on people overseas. The majority of those overseas are never able to return. The more the people in China know, the smoother the process of establishing democracy will be. So, this is an important part of our work. These two are our main tasks.

Pottinger Wei, I want to thank you. Thank you very much.

Wei Thank you very much.

POLITICO

Politico

16. Washington is waking up on weapons for Taiwan

Excerpts:

Accordingly, the NDAA provides explicit guidance to the Defense Department to plan and execute joint exercises to both build Taiwan’s forces readiness and increase interoperability with U.S. forces across all elements of military power. This is the most cost-effective element of the plan. Tabletop exercises, war-games, joint exercises, and rotational deployments can yield significant warfighting improvements from reasonably small investments.

The NDAA also provides direction for the conduct of extensive planning to identify and address gaps in Taiwan’s capabilities. This includes specific efforts to improve Taiwan’s domestic resilience and civil defense, another good lesson from the Ukraine experience.

Americans frustrated with inaction and partisan gridlock in Washington should look to the new defense bill for encouragement. The landmark legislation demonstrates that Americans and their representatives in Congress can still come together and act when core American interests are on the line. That’s certainly the case with Taiwan.

Washington is waking up on weapons for Taiwan

c4isrnet.com · by Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (ret.) · December 19, 2022

The U.S. Senate voted 83-11 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2023 after the U.S. House of Representatives advanced the same legislation in a resounding 350-80 vote. The annual defense bill, which now heads to President Joe Biden for his signature, includes landmark legislation related to Taiwan that can begin to close the gap between words and actions in Washington and play a decisive role in deterring Chinese aggression and avoiding great power war.

The bill includes three key elements that will: 1) strengthen Taiwan’s ability to counter an attack by Beijing; 2) improve the U.S. military’s ability to quickly surge in support of Taiwan in the event of an attack; and 3) establish long-overdue U.S.-Taiwan joint military planning and exercises. Together they represent the most consequential U.S. legislation related to Taiwan since the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.

The NDAA includes investments in and support for Taiwan’s armed forces, such as the provision of up to $2 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing for Taiwan over five years if the U.S. secretaries of defense and state can certify that Taiwan has increased its defense spending compared to the previous year. If maximized, this is effectively a 10 percent to 12 percent increase in Taiwan’s defense spending and rewards Taiwan for getting its defense spending up to about 2.3 percent of its GDP. At least 85 percent of this annual foreign military financing must be spent in the United States, which will strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base.

The legislation also includes much-needed guidance to the U.S. Defense and State Departments to prioritize the delivery of arms to Taiwan. There is a nearly $19 billion backlog of weapons intended for Taiwan thanks to a persistent combination of insufficient U.S. industrial capacity and a sluggish bureaucratic process dangerously disconnected from the serious threat the U.S. and Taiwan confront. The delay in the delivery of the Harpoon coastal defense system and associated missiles to Taiwan is a perfect example. The sale was announced in 2020, but delivery may not be complete until 2029, barring urgent intervention.

Even more embarrassing is that more than 200 Javelin missiles and launchers and 250 Stinger systems were approved for sale to Taiwan in 2015 and have not been delivered. Given the need to supply Ukraine and restock U.S. and allied inventories, it is not realistic to expect them before 2026 or 2027. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency that runs the arms sales process for the Pentagon issues world class press releases to announce sales but, despite individual staff efforts, the agency’s ability to deliver those capabilities at the speed of relevance is something less than world class. Congress’ attention and oversight can help.

The NDAA also authorizes the Pentagon to establish a regional contingency stockpile for Taiwan that consists of munitions and other defense articles. That’s essential because munitions would be depleted quickly in a conflict and traditional assumptions about the ability to resupply forces would not necessarily apply in conflict with China’s People’s Liberation Army. Demonstrating Congress’ seriousness, the section includes an increase in program authorization focusing on Taiwan contingencies of up to $300 million per fiscal year for three years.

The legislation also specifically identifies Taiwan as a participant in the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, a great tool for training individual foreign officers and senior enlisted personnel. That builds valuable connections with their American counterparts. The NDAA also provides authorization for Taiwan to benefit from both Presidential Drawdown Authorities (up to $1 billion per year) and Special Defense Acquisition Funds. As the Pentagon has demonstrated this year in Ukraine, drawdown authorities will allow the U.S. military to arm Taiwan much more rapidly in a crisis by using U.S. stocks. Finally, there is a $2 billion loan program for Taiwan’s military purchases, which could help further close the gap between the military Taipei needs and the one it currently has.

Even with these measures, Taiwan will still struggle to counter a Chinese invasion. At best, these programs are designed to strengthen Taiwan’s ability to stall Chinese progress, thereby providing the U.S. military time to surge into theater, augment U.S. forward deployed forces, and join up with other allies willing to fight.

To be clear, a successful outcome in the Taiwan Strait will require a more capable U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy. Accordingly, the NDAA looks to maximize investments in these two services’ capacity and capability to fight a high-intensity conflict against a peer adversary. Laudable steps include the accelerated and continued development and procurement of fifth generation fighters, refueling aircraft, new airborne early warning aircraft, attack submarines, and multi-mission destroyers.

The new defense bill also includes a wide range of congressional initiatives to address the U.S. military’s insufficient munitions arsenal and the associated munitions production capacity crisis in the industrial base in the short, medium, and long terms. There is specific funding for defense industrial base (DIB) production expansion, starting with the Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASM). This is much needed since it will take more than a decade to grow the current inventory of 200 or so LRASMs to a more desirable inventory of 1,200 LRASMs with current production rates of 88 missiles a year. The NDAA includes similar DIB expansion efforts for Standard Missile, Harpoon Missile, Naval Strike Missile, and the air-launched standoff land attack (JASSM) missile.

The NDAA also includes permission to establish multi-year contracts for the LRASM (up to 950 missiles), Harpoon (2,600 missiles), Naval Strike (1,250 missiles), SM-6 (1,500 missiles), and nearly 15,000 AIM-9X, AMRAAM, and Patriot air defense missiles. This provides industry much-needed predictability and encourages private sector investments that will build valuable additional capacity over time. There are also increases in specific munitions procurement for 2023, including MK 48 and MK 54 torpedoes.

Finally, Congress looked at the Defense Department’s plan for the defense of Guam (which is relevant to a Taiwan crisis) and wisely directs the Pentagon to procure and field no later than December 31, 2023, up to three shore-based vertical launch systems that can accommodate interceptors operated by the Navy.

The third line of effort in the NDAA aimed at deterring China is building U.S.-Taiwan interoperability. The warfighting integration of the U.S. and Taiwan militaries is currently at the lowest level of collaboration — deconfliction; i.e., “let’s stay out of each other’s way.” That is not an effective posture for dealing with the Chinese military. The U.S. and Taiwan militaries need to rapidly transition up to “coordinated” or even “integrated” levels of cooperation across multiple domains of warfare.

Accordingly, the NDAA provides explicit guidance to the Defense Department to plan and execute joint exercises to both build Taiwan’s forces readiness and increase interoperability with U.S. forces across all elements of military power. This is the most cost-effective element of the plan. Tabletop exercises, war-games, joint exercises, and rotational deployments can yield significant warfighting improvements from reasonably small investments.

The NDAA also provides direction for the conduct of extensive planning to identify and address gaps in Taiwan’s capabilities. This includes specific efforts to improve Taiwan’s domestic resilience and civil defense, another good lesson from the Ukraine experience.

Americans frustrated with inaction and partisan gridlock in Washington should look to the new defense bill for encouragement. The landmark legislation demonstrates that Americans and their representatives in Congress can still come together and act when core American interests are on the line. That’s certainly the case with Taiwan.

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

17. Taiwanese Flock to Civil Defense Training Ahead of Potential Chinese Invasion

Good news. Porcupine Defense. Resistance Operating Concept.

But Foreign Minister Joseph Wu's words are the right ones.

Taiwanese Flock to Civil Defense Training Ahead of Potential Chinese Invasion

“We have no right to ask others to help us if we are not prepared to defend ourselves,” Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said.

DECEMBER 19, 2022, 10:04 AM

Foreign Policy · by Margaret Simons · December 19, 2022

By Margaret Simons, a principal honorary fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne.

TAIPEI, Taiwan—“Vanessa” thinks the Chinese invasion of Taiwan has already begun. She sees it every day in the tide of disinformation on social media, messages designed to cause panic in the population and undermine faith in her country’s young democracy. “All the fake news—we must understand this as part of war conditions,” she said.

As for the physical invasion, the 30-year-old IT professional believes it is coming soon and expects it to define the rest of her life. “The tension has been there ever since I was born, but recently with China’s internal crisis, they increased the pressure,” she said. She expects the blow to land within five to 10 years.

That’s why Vanessa has given up a day of her weekend and paid about $30 to join 40 others in a classroom in an unremarkable Taipei office block to learn how to prepare. There, they learn about the different weapons available to both sides and likely invasion scenarios: attacks on infrastructure, a tide of fake news, and potentially kidnapping of political leaders. There is a heavy emphasis on the need for good information—and the dangers of dis- and misinformation. There’s also work on first aid, with an emphasis on treating catastrophic injuries. The lectures include “Contours of Modern Warfare,” “Cognitive Warfare and Information Manipulation,” and a session on emergency first aid. The students are advised to wear goggles and gloves in case of an invasion to guard against chemical and biological weapons and are taught how to triage patients and judge whether or not an area is safe. A final session, kept under wraps and barred from the media, is on “Seeking Shelter and Battlefield Preservation.”

Shaun Tai (right) fires an airsoft pistol during firearms training at Camp 66, a firing range and training facility run by two former Marines in Taipei, Taiwan, on Dec. 6.

Shaun Tai (right), a laptop salesman, fires an airsoft pistol during firearms training at Camp 66, a firing range and training facility in Taipei, Taiwan, on Dec. 6.Dave Tacon PHOTOS FOR FOREIGN POLICY

A first aid class at Kuma Academy, which provides training to civilians on a topics such as media literacy (to combat misinformation) as well as first aid Taipei, Taiwan, on Dec. 3.

A first-aid class at Kuma Academy, which provides training to civilians on a topics such as media literacy as well as first aid, in Taipei on Dec. 3.

The course is run by Kuma Academy, one of a rapidly growing number of civil defense organizations through which ordinary Taiwanese are taking preparations for a potential war into their own hands. Taiwanese businessman Robert Tsao, the founder of the United Microelectronics Corp., has donated about $20 million to Kuma, saying he wanted to see it train at least 3 million Taiwanese so that every household in the country would have someone who had been through its programs.

Vanessa was lucky to get in. Kuma Academy has a waiting list of thousands for its “basic camps.” It runs 15 one-day courses a month, soon to increase to 30. They sell out as soon as they are announced. Almost a thousand people have been trained at Kuma Academy since basic courses were launched in June. The United States has long been pressuring Taiwan to do more to prepare its own defense after years of underspending. Compulsory national service for men used to be two years and was shortened to just four months in 2017. Classes such as those at Kuma are a way to cram for the exam that may be coming.

“Robert,” a middle school teacher who, like Vanessa, did not want to give his full name for fear of what it might mean post-invasion, describes the main message as being mental preparedness, including against the “war on the internet.” Other lessons, said Kuma’s co-founder and CEO, Marco Ho, draw on the experience of the civilian population in Ukraine, including “how to take cover and how to evacuate and how to prepare stores of water and food.”

Students participate in a first-aid class at Kuma Academy in Taipei on Dec. 3.

A teacher gives instruction during a first-aid class at Kuma Academy in Taipei on Dec. 3.

Kuma Academy takes its name from the Japanese (who governed the island for half a century) word for “bear”—a reference to the Taiwanese black bear. In the folklore of the Indigenous Rukai people of Taiwan, the black bear is known as the defender of the mountains. Ho is a scholar of inter-strait relations. His co-founder, Puma Shen, is an assistant professor in criminology at National Taipei University, specializing in state crime and information warfare.

“In warfare, only about 10 percent of people are actually using weapons. Our effort is directed to the other 90 percent, who must know how to protect themselves and their families and support the military effort,” Ho said. Their youngest trainee since they began the courses was 13 years old; the oldest, a 70-year-old retired doctor. Most have been between 30 and 50 years old, with roughly equal numbers of men and women.

Ho regards inoculating the population against dis- and misinformation as the front line. Taiwan has long faced a barrage of fake news from China. Political meddling and disinformation have escalated since the election of President Tsai Ing-wen, a Taiwanese nationalist, in 2016. When U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited in August, digital signs at convenience stores were hacked to display messages criticizing the trip. Earlier, misinformation circulated suggesting the government was lying about the impact of COVID-19 on Taiwan.

A new Ministry of Digital Affairs, established in August, has created “meme engineering” teams in each government department to respond to disinformation quickly and wittily. The minister for digital affairs, Audrey Tang, has said Chinese fake news aims to incite fear and undermine faith in democracy, thus building popular support for so-called reunification with China. So far, it hasn’t worked. Opinion polls show that most Taiwanese want to maintain the status quo, in which Taiwan behaves as a sovereign state but does not formally declare independence. A poll taken just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine by the Taiwanese government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research showed that 73 percent of those polled said they would be willing to defend the country in the event of a Chinese invasion.

Civilians try out unloaded bazookas at a Military Academy recruitment drive at the MOA airsoft trade show in Taipei, Taiwan on Dec. 4.

Civilians try out unloaded bazookas at the MOA Exhibition trade show in Taipei on Dec. 4.

Special Forces soldiers at a Military Academy recruitment drive at the MOA airsoft trade show in Taipei, Taiwan on Dec. 4.

Taiwanese soldiers take part in a recruitment drive at the MOA Exhibition in Taipei on Dec. 4.

For some, Kuma Academy is not enough. While Vanessa and her classmates were tying tourniquets on one another’s arms, less than a mile away at the Taipei World Trade Center, another strand of the civil defense movement was gathering at the annual MOA (Military, Outdoor, Airsoft-Airgun) Exhibition, a trade fair centered on airsoft weapons, almost all of which are manufactured in Taiwan. Electric- or gas-powered, they look and feel like real firearms. Taiwan has some of the strictest gun controls in the world, making firearm ownership effectively impossible for most civilians, but war games with airsoft weapons have become a popular hobby. Now, they are taking on a more serious dimension.

Max Chiang, 48, a weapons instructor at the exhibition, said student numbers had quadrupled since the invasion of Ukraine, with ordinary civilians paying up to $130 for weekend weapon courses. The Taiwanese military had a recruiting stand at the exhibition that was doing a brisk trade, and a stall run by Ukrainian expatriates was selling homemade cakes and vodka flavored with cinnamon and honey to raise money for their homeland.

A member of the armed forces demonstrates an unloaded light machine gun to an elementry school aged boy at a Military Academy recruitment drive at the MOA airsoft trade show in Taipei, Taiwan on Dec. 4.

A Taiwanese soldier shows a civilian how to use an unloaded light machine gun at the MOA Exhibition in Taipei on Dec. 4.

Nearby, Ou Chia-Cheng, a 37-year-old freelance photographer, was working his way through a close-range airsoft firing drill. He completed Taiwan’s compulsory military service in 2004 and then worked for seven years in China. Now, he has returned to Taiwan and banded together with 15 friends and begun to prepare for the worst. They have been practicing with airsoft guns and storing food. He said he will fight if necessary.

One of the most organized airsoft training groups is Camp 66, founded by retired U.S. Marine Richard Limon and former Taiwanese naval officer Xiong Qisheng. Limon puts trainees through scenarios and asks them to make rapid decisions—and then throws spent shell casings at them if they hesitate because “you are dead. You have just lost a life if you fail to make decisions.” The group uses factories to prepare for urban warfare, which, Limon said, would be a “nightmare” in the close confines of a high-rise city such as Taipei. The airsoft weapons, he acknowledged, don’t have the recoil or noise of a real firearm, but “we will be better off than [Ukrainian] citizens. They had to train with fake wooden firearms at the beginning.”

Shaun Tai (left), a salesman, and Kevin Chen (right), an airline pilot are pictured at Camp 66, an airsoft firing range and training facility in Taipei, Tawain on Dec. 6.

Tai (left) and Kevin Chen (right), an airline pilot, are pictured at Camp 66 in Taipei on Dec. 6.

One of the Camp 66 trainees is 25-year-old laptop salesman Shaun Tai. He started playing video games in his teens and then graduated to airsoft training as a hobby. Now, he is preparing to defend his country. Another attendee, 34-year-old airline pilot Kevin Chen, says invasion is inevitable and the outcome uncertain, but he is learning how to use airsoft weapons because “we should at least make it hard. Don’t just give up and lie down and surrender.” Ukraine has shown, he said, “how effective you can be if you have the heart to do it.”

Among the trainees at Kuma and Camp 66, there is a consensus that invasion could come within as few as five years. Limon thinks it could be sooner than that, comparing the situation to the shock 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina. “That was because Argentina had an internal economic crisis and needed a distraction. And that’s the situation in China right now,” he said.

Hank Chen (left), a university student fires an airsoft machine gun replica as Richard Limon, a firearms instructor and former U.S. Marine watches during firearms training at Camp 66, a firing range and training facility in Taipei, Taiwan on Dec. 6.

Hank Chen (left), a university student, fires an airsoft machine gun as Richard Limon, a firearms instructor and retired U.S. Marine, watches during firearms training at Camp 66 in Taipei on Dec. 6.

It is a sentiment echoed by I-Chung Lai, the president of the Taipei-based Prospect Foundation, which specializes in cross-strait relations. The lesson of Ukraine, he said, is that dictators do not always behave rationally. The fact that China is not yet ready to mount an invasion, and that a war would be disastrous for both sides, does not necessarily mean that it won’t happen.

The Taiwanese government clearly regards the burgeoning civil defense organizations as mainly a good thing. Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu last month told journalists that the government was giving close consideration to how to involve civilians in a decentralized defense effort that would include local governments, NGOs, and “grassroots-level” organizations. “Defending Taiwan is our own responsibility, and we are determined to defend ourselves. We have no right to ask others to help us if we are not prepared to defend ourselves,” Wu said.

The government has signaled that it intends to increase compulsory national service to one year. Currently, there are just 165,000 active-duty troops and about 20,000 short-term conscripts out of a total population of nearly 24 million.

Meanwhile, there is some rivalry between the civil defense organizations and little agreement on the correct approach. Limon is careful not to disparage Kuma Academy but emphasizes that “they are quite separate from what we are doing.” His trainees are not so tactful. Tai described Kuma as “just a bunch of idiots who are pretending they are preparing for the war. They are a little bit useless. If they really want to prepare, they have to learn to use airsoft weapons.”

The civil defense movement agrees about one thing. As Kuma founder Ho said, the best chance of preventing war is to prepare. “If we send a message that we will lie down and be friendly and not resist, then the risk of invasion goes sky-high.”

Foreign Policy · by Margaret Simons · December 19, 2022

18. Barriers still prevent women from joining special ops, watchdog says

Barriers still prevent women from joining special ops, watchdog says

Yahoo · by Jonathan LehrfeldDecember 19, 2022, 10:48 AM·3 min read

Inconsistent policies to prevent gender discrimination and sexual harassment are among the barriers to why women make up less than 10% of U.S. special operations forces, according to a government watchdog report released on Dec 15.

The number of women within Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, the military’s unified combatant command that oversees the special operations components across the services, is disproportionately low compared to the rest of the armed forces.

“Women make up less than 10 percent of SOCOM service members, compared with about 19 percent DOD-wide,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office report said. “SOCOM leaders have acknowledged existing issues of gender discrimination, sexual harassment and assault, and career impediments, and the need to do more.”

While some of the last restrictions on women’s service and occupational roles in the armed forces were removed within the last decade, including the elimination in 2013 of the regulation that kept women from serving in ground combat roles, the GAO found that barriers to integration within SOCOM still exist.

In conducting their study, the GAO spoke with officials at five special operations forces headquarters and interviewed 51 women currently or formerly serving in special operations.

“[T]here is an unconscious bias in some service members who do not realize they are discriminating against women, and there is a culture in which women are not considered equal,” one woman told the GAO, according to the report. Another added that there is a mindset in the special forces community that women are weaker and that they cannot have a family and be in service at the same time.

The report explored how a divergence between DoD-wide guidelines and those of the specific services is contributing to incidents that inhibit women from joining or succeeding with special forces units.

For example, DoD guidelines state that in joint environments discrimination and harassment complaints are to be processed through the complainant’s service. However, Army, Marine Corps and Air Force policies all assign that responsibility instead to the alleged offender’s service, the GAO noted.

Some of the other barriers cited in the report include pregnancy-related policies, parental leave and access to women’s health care.

SOCOM is committing itself to attracting more women and people of color

While the report shared SOCOM is taking some steps in the right direction to identify and address its integration dilemma, it also explored the fact the command has limited access to timely, accurate and complete data on its personnel, which makes responding to incidents of discrimination or harassment a continuous challenge.

The GAO made eight recommendations, including that the military services revise their policies to align with DoD methods, that the Pentagon establish a “collaborative process” for SOCOM to access data, that DoD clarifies oversight and use of annual assessments and that it completes a comprehensive analysis of barriers to women.

DoD concurred with all the recommendations but also provided a brief comment.

Erin Logan, deputy assistant secretary of defense with special operations policy and programs, responded to the GAO report by saying she was “disappointed” with the scope of the study. She highlighted another study by the Army’s Special Operations Command that found 62% of women wanted to stay in the Army’s special operations forces and that nearly three quarters of them would support their daughters’ decision to follow in their career footsteps.

Yahoo · by Jonathan LehrfeldDecember 19, 2022, 10:48 AM·3 min read

19. Partisan Bills Hurt Cybersecurity

Partisan Bills Hurt Cybersecurity

RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery

CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow

Annie Fixler

CCTI Deputy Director and Research Fellow

fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · December 19, 2022

Congress has had a spectacular three-year run developing and passing cybersecurity legislation that both protects our national critical infrastructure and secures our federal networks. On a bipartisan, bicameral basis, hundreds of provisions to protect our national security, economic productivity and public health and safety have become law. One bill, however, undermines this record of success: the Inflation Reduction Act.

That bill, which passed via the partisan reconciliation process, did not mention cybersecurity even once in 300 pages, despite appropriating hundreds of billions of dollars to industries including electric vehicles and renewable energy that are highly vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Compare that to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. When the president signed the bill into law in November 2021, he extolled it for making “our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks.” The fingerprints of House and Senate cybersecurity committee staff and members, both Democratic and Republican, were all over the text. Investing more than a trillion dollars in the future of the U.S. economy, the statute mentions cybersecurity 277 times. The bill makes specific cybersecurity investments including a $1 billion grant program to address cybersecurity risks faced by state and local governments. For the energy sector, there are two $250 million cybersecurity-specific grant programs: one provides support to rural and municipal utilities to address known cybersecurity issues and another supports developing cybersecurity technologies in the energy sector.

Passing Congress with bipartisan support in both chambers, the bill also includes policy direction and appropriations for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) including $100 million to establish a “response and recovery” fund to provide government assistance to remediate and recover from a significant cyber incident, $35 million for CISA’s sector risk management responsibilities, and another $157 million for research and development.

The Act is not without its flaws – it misses opportunities to fund cybersecurity improvements in the water sectors, transportation sectors (like pipeline, maritime transport, and aviation) and the healthcare and public health sectors. But on balance, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act lashes cybersecurity to critical infrastructure investments.

In August 2022, the president signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act into law. This legislation provides nearly $150 billion dollars in new funding for semiconductor development and investments in science and technology funding. This law includes 76 references to cybersecurity and specific funding for science and technology education and training efforts, cybersecurity training programs, and regional technology hubs. It also provides numerous policy authorizations including increasing U.S. engagement in international standards development. Each element of this legislation was carefully developed and shaped by Republicans and Democrats across numerous congressional committees.

In stark contrast to these two bipartisan bills and the annual National Defense Authorization Act which has consistently included dozens of bipartisan cybersecurity provisions, stands the Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation had little to no committee oversight and management, and it showed.

The bill authorized nearly $400 billion in energy and climate investments, with no acknowledgement of the cybersecurity challenges inherent in these industries. The law includes a number of government-funded programs intended to spur the adoption of electric vehicles and the use of electric-vehicle charging stations (EV stations). There are no cybersecurity requirements or funding despite the fact that these stations are at serious cybersecurity risk, with a number of well-publicized attacks already occurring.

Hackers might be seeking personal and financial data, but they could also create cascading power system outages that place regional electrical grids at risk. A virus that compromises a public-facing EV station could then infect all of the vehicles it subsequently charges. The overall cybersecurity risk is amplified by the fact that the supply chain for most EV charging station equipment runs through China, a known cyber malicious actor. This bill needed cybersecurity “guardrails” all over it.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s rushed “back-room” drafting process and the paucity of involvement of professional committee staff members contributed to the failure to include necessary cybersecurity provisions in the final legislative product. Now it will take significant intervention by the Executive Branch and strong congressional oversight to reverse engineer in cybersecurity guardrails that were needed in the legislative drafting process.

The October forum hosted by the National Cyber Director Chris Inglis on cybersecurity challenges to electric vehicles and EV charging infrastructure was an important step in the right direction. Congress, for its part, would do well to return to its proven process of developing legislation in a bipartisan, committee-based manner.

Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is a senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he is also a senior fellow. He previously served as executive director of the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Annie Fixler is CCTI’s deputy director and an FDD research fellow. Follow the authors on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery and @AFixler. FDD is a nonpartisan research organization focused on foreign policy and national security issues.

fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · December 19, 2022

20. Send the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb to Ukraine

Send the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb to Ukraine - Breaking Defense

The GLSDB would allow Ukrainian forces to strike Russian military targets up to 150 km away with an accuracy of around one meter, write John Hardie and Bradley Bowman of FDD.

breakingdefense.com · by Bradley Bowman · December 19, 2022

Two GBU-39 small diameter bombs sit in the munitions storage area at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, Nov. 27, 2020. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Jordan Martin)

With the White House expected to announce the release of a Patriot battery for Ukraine’s use, there is once again a debate raging in Washington about what new equipment can, or should, be sent to Kyiv’s aid. In the following op-ed, John Hardie and Bradley Bowman argue that there is another capability the Biden administration should clear for Ukraine’s defense — a fairly cheap weapon with a long-range to strike at Russian targets.

The Kremlin on Dec. 13 rejected a Ukrainian peace proposal that called for Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine, instead insisting that Kyiv should simply accept the “new realities” and cede its occupied territories to Moscow. It’s a clear sign from Moscow: they’re not interested in this war ending anytime soon. To help Ukraine defeat Russia’s invasion and liberate its land and people, Washington needs to redouble efforts to provide Ukrainians with the weapons they need.

One way to do that, which is apparently now under consideration, is sending Kyiv the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB). This system, which integrates an existing munition and rocket at a relatively low cost, would enable the Ukrainian military to strike high-value Russian targets well beyond the range of current Western-supplied munitions. That would help Ukrainian forces further degrade Russian logistics and command and control and ultimately retake more territory. For this reason, the Pentagon should move without delay to provide Kyiv with the GLSDB.

A joint project by Saab and Boeing, the GLSDB marries two affordable, combat-proven systems: the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb, a 113 kg precision-guided munition that is relatively cheap at around $40,000 each, and the M26, a low-cost, formerly demilitarized rocket. The system could include a multi-purpose warhead tailored for fixed, hardened, low collateral damage, and moving targets.

The GLSDB would allow Ukrainian forces to strike Russian military targets up to 150 km away with an accuracy of around one meter. With integration, the GLSDB can be fired by the M142 HIMARS and M270 MLRS rocket artillery systems already supplied to Ukraine by the United States and United Kingdom, respectively.

But it can also be fired by non-traditional launchers, such as from the back of an ordinary-looking truck or from a nondescript shipping container hidden in plain sight. That would make it more difficult for Russian forces to find and destroy the system. The non-traditional launcher also makes the system a low-cost option to augment HIMARS, which US industry is currently racing to produce in order to both replace US launchers sent to Ukraine and meet demand from allies.

One of the great advantages of the GLSDB is that the munition and rocket already exist in the US arsenal. Industry would only need to integrate the munition and rocket rather than undertaking the time-consuming process of establishing a new production line. Accordingly, depending on several factors, Ukraine could receive an initial delivery of two launchers and 24 weapons in as little as nine months after the Pentagon approves the plan. If industry and the Pentagon move with a sense of urgency and Congress provides assertive oversight, a decision now by the Department of Defense could see an estimated 750 GLSDBs and 12 launchers delivered to Ukraine by the end of 2024. That dramatic ramp up in production is possible because industry simply needs to integrate existing bombs and rockets rather than build new ones.

That’s the how. Here’s the why: Providing the GLSDB would enhance Ukraine’s ability to weaken Russian forces by hitting high-value targets deep behind the front lines.

Ukraine has employed this strategy to great effect since it received its M142 and M270 systems over the summer, striking key bridges, ammunition and fuel depots, command-and-control nodes, and other high-value targets in Russia’s rear. This has helped Ukraine halt Russia’s advances and played a critical role in Ukraine’s successful counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts.

But whereas the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, or GMLRS, rockets provided for Ukraine’s M142 and M270 systems can hit targets from around 85 kilometers away, the GLSDB would enable the Ukrainian military to strike targets at almost double that range. For example, the key Russian logistics hub in Luhansk city and its environs, just out of reach of GMLRS, would be well within the GLSDB’s range. The same goes for the critical rail hub in the Crimean city of Dzhankoi, which supplies Russia’s grouping in southern Ukraine. Nearby settlements house major vehicle parks ripe for targeting.

If Ukraine had the GLSDB, Russia would be forced to move its depots even farther back from the front line, making it more difficult for Russian logistics to provide combat units with sufficient ammunition and other supplies to hold back Ukrainian forces, let alone take ground themselves. Likewise, Ukraine could strike various airbases from which Russian aircraft provide close air support to Russian troops or launch missiles targeting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. GLSDB would also help Kyiv target bases in Ukraine from which Russian forces are launching Iranian drones.

Indeed, the best form of air and missile defense includes an offensive strike capability.

The GLSDB could fulfill some of the missions that would be assigned to ATACMS missiles, which are also fired by the M142 and M270 but have a 300-kilometer range. For months, Kyiv has pleaded for ATACMS. But the White House has refused, fearing that providing these missiles could invite further provocation from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This risk is overstated when it comes to ATACMS, and the Biden administration should not let similar fears deter it from sending the GLSDB. Thus far, Moscow’s reaction to the West’s provision of military aid to Kyiv has featured lots of bark but little bite. Western materiel has enabled Ukraine to stay in the fight and eventually retake large swathes of land, including Ukrainian territory Putin has cynically labeled as part of Russia.

While Moscow has escalated attacks in Ukraine, the Kremlin has assiduously avoided attacking any NATO member, despite the Western weapons flowing into Ukraine. There’s little doubt why: Doing so would risk a direct conflict with the United States, something Putin appears keen to avoid, particularly when the bulk of his military is tied down in Ukraine — and badly battered.

As an extra precaution, the Biden administration could condition its provision of the GLSDB on a Ukrainian commitment to use the system only against targets in occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. Kyiv has honored a similar promise made with respect to HIMARS, and there’s every reason to believe the Ukrainians would keep their word with the GLSDB.

The Kremlin wants Kyiv and the West to accept “new realities” in Ukraine following Russia’s unprovoked invasion. That would be a disaster, inviting more aggression in the future from authoritarian regimes seeking to bully beleaguered democracies and seize territory by force.

In Ukraine, the United States has a partner willing to fight for our shared interests and principles. They aren’t asking Americans to do the fighting for them. They are simply asking for the means to defend their homes.

The GLSDB would provide Ukraine with a powerful tool to advance US and Ukrainian interests. Every day the Pentagon delays its decision on the GLSDB is another day Ukraine will go without this valuable capability. There is no time to waste.

John Hardie is deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Bradley Bowman is senior director of FDD’s Center on Military and Political Power.

21. It’s not just the EU that needs to scrutinize Qatar’s influence campaigns

It’s not just the EU that needs to scrutinize Qatar’s influence campaigns

There’s nothing wrong with deploying capital for economic growth — but Doha seeks to gain sway too.

BY JONATHAN SCHANZER AND HUSSAIN ABDUL-HUSSAIN

DECEMBER 19, 2022 4:02 AM CET

Politico · by Mikhail Khodorkovsky · December 19, 2022

Opinion

There’s nothing wrong with deploying capital for economic growth — but Doha seeks to gain sway too.

Last weekend, Belgian police arrested European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili. They are now investigating at least 10 other European Union employees and officials | EPA-EFE/Jalal Morchidi

December 19, 2022 4:02 am CET

Jonathan Schanzer is the senior vice president for research and Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a nonpartisan research institute. They tweet at @JSchanzer and @hahussain.

Last weekend, Belgian police arrested European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili. They are now investigating at least 10 other European Union employees and officials, and authorities have further confiscated up to €750,000 in cash, which EU officials reportedly accepted as bribes.

All this reportedly stems from efforts by the tiny Gulf emirate of Qatar to buy influence in Brussels. But this EU scandal is hardly the only indication of Qatar’s efforts to do so worldwide.

As events surrounding the Parliament continue to unfold, Qatar currently denies all wrongdoing — as does Kaili. Nevertheless, an investigation is underway, and of particular interest is a statement made by Kaili, describing Qatar as a “frontrunner in labor rights.”

The statement rang hollow amidst incontrovertible reports of gross abuse against the foreign workers who built the football stadiums for the World Cup. According to the Guardian, as many as 6,500 migrant workers from the countries of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the bid to host the tournament in 2010. Even a Qatari official recently admitted that 400 to 500 workers had died.

How Qatar came to win the World Cup bid may have foreshadowed the Kaili affair. Qatar beat other much bigger — and more qualified — competitors, such as the United States, to host the tournament. And serious allegations have since pointed to a high likelihood that the country bought the tournament with bribes.

Perhaps the most serious of these charges came from investigative journalists Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, who allege that Qatari football official Mohammed Bin Hammam conducted a massive corruption campaign to secure the bid. A recent Netflix series echoes these allegations, with witnesses alleging that Doha spent some $5 million to buy the votes of FIFA’s executive committee members.

It stands to reason that Qatar has been on its back foot from the moment the games began, with the accusations of bribery and human rights violations reaching a crescendo. And if the facts support the Belgian prosecutor’s case, this could be why Kaili and other EU officials were recruited.

However, Doha’s efforts to secure sway extend well beyond Europe and FIFA.

Since 2016, Qatar — a nation of only 300,000 citizens — has spent a whopping $198 million to buy influence inside Washington, ranking fourth behind the much bigger China, Japan and South Korea. It has sponsored the annual Congressional baseball game, and it even kept the metro running when the Washington Capitals hockey team made a successful push for the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup in 2018.

The country’s influence campaign extends into education as well. Between 2002 and 2021, Qatar spent $4.9 billion on American universities, six of which maintain campuses at Education City in Doha — where France’s HEC Paris also has a branch. Interestingly, when it faced global pressure for hosting the World Cup despite its abysmal human and labor rights record, a professor at Georgetown Qatar wrote in the New York Times that “the World Cup belongs in the Middle East.”

Meanwhile, Qatari money isn’t hard to find in Europe either. This year, the country’s sovereign wealth fund announced it plans to invest $5 billion in projects in Spain; the Qataris hold an estimated £10 billion in British real estate; and other European investment targets include Germany, France, Greece and Switzerland.

Qatar is widely known to have provided financial or material support to extremist groups like the Taliban, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and even Al-Qaeda | Karim Jaafar/AFP via Getty images

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with deploying capital for economic growth — but Doha seeks to gain influence too.

Alarmingly, some of Qatar’s most effective influence derives from its support for extremist groups in the Middle East. By now the country is widely known to have provided financial or material support to extremist groups like the Taliban, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and even Al-Qaeda. But rather than punish Qatar for this, the West consistently looks to Doha to act as an interlocutor, essentially asking the country to help solve regional problems it contributed to.

And this is to say nothing of Qatar’s massive media operation — Al Jazeera.

Originally founded as a tool to aggravate Qatar’s Gulf neighbors, over the years the news outlet has grown into a global empire. Today, it maintains operations in the U.S. And in 2020, the Department of Justice ordered AJ+ — the network’s somewhat newer social media operation, which disseminates messages in English, French, Arabic and Spanish — to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. However, the platform refused, arguing that Al Jazeera is a private organization, thus its affiliates couldn’t possibly be agents of a foreign government. Of course, the network avoids covering oppressive domestic politics, let alone the controversies surrounding Qatari influence worldwide.

Some of Qatar’s activity was well known before the World Cup — some of it wasn’t. And though originally intended to help Qatar transcend criticism, the games have now paradoxically awakened the world to Doha’s massive operation to ensure global influence.

With its massive energy wealth and tiny population, Qatar has no apparent reason to spend the colossal amounts of money it does. Nor does it have the right to violate laws and norms across the world. The EU is now grappling with this. And with the country squarely in focus in the wake of the alleged bribery scandal, the bloc’s officials are now vowing to curb its influence.

Hopefully, this is just the beginning.

Politico · by Mikhail Khodorkovsky · December 19, 2022

22. The High Cost of American Heavy-Handedness

Excerpts:

The lessons of the war on terror extend beyond the realm of great-power competition. Not all the factors that give rise to national security threats are within the control of U.S. policymakers. Natural disasters and public health threats will continue to emerge unexpectedly and fuel instability.

Neither force nor coercion provides a one-size-fits-all solution. The United States has the capacity to pursue long-term, transformative solutions to many global threats. It often resorts to military force and pressure out of a sense of urgency, but the pursuit of enduring solutions is not without cost. Political buy-in for what the public might perceive as money and resources better invested at home will not come easily, particularly in the United States’ polarized political climate.

During the early years of the Cold War, U.S. leaders’ claims about American exceptionalism were widely tolerated, even respected. But U.S. solipsism has deepened since the end of the Cold War, and the effective soft-power programs that the United States established during those years have been drastically cut back. The goodwill Washington built through educational initiatives, cultural exchanges, and other forms of public diplomacy was cost effective, especially compared with billion-dollar military programs. Moreover, that kind of slowly nurtured goodwill endures for decades. But it has been wearing thin in much of the world, and there is no longer enough of it to outweigh the kinds of grievances that can be easily fanned to fuel terrorist movements or great-power rivalries.

The High Cost of American Heavy-Handedness

Great-Power Competition Demands Persuasion, Not Coercion

By Douglas London

December 20, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Douglas London · December 20, 2022

On September 20, 2001, as rescue workers combed through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center, U.S. President George W. Bush stood before a joint session of Congress and put the world on notice. “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make,” Bush declared. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Despite the Bush administration’s subsequent attempts to frame the “war on terror” as a battle for Muslim hearts and minds, the U.S. approach to counterterrorism would, over the ensuing 20 years, increasingly default to hard power. Today, force has become so ingrained as Washington’s reflexive response to twenty-first-century threats that soft-power tools have all but disappeared from discussions of how to head off possible catastrophe.

In recent months, as the United States has realigned its resources and adjusted its strategies to defend Europe from Russian aggression and protect its Asian interests and allies from a menacing China, it has focused almost exclusively on hard power. Although Russia and China have themselves boosted their global influence through the use of soft power, U.S. policymakers have continued to underestimate such tools as development aid, public diplomacy, educational exchanges, and covert messaging. While the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, released on October 12, suggested that countries must act collectively to address “shared challenges that cross borders,” the document focused overwhelmingly on the application of military might. As Washington pivots from counterterrorism to great-power competition, it would be well advised to reexamine some of the lessons it learned during the 20-year war on terror.

At the same time, the threat of terrorism has by no means disappeared. U.S. policymakers need new tools that will help them address both terrorism and great-power competition simultaneously. As Christopher Costa, who served as the special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council during former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, argued in a February 2022 piece for The Hill, “Counterterrorism and great-power competition is not a viable either-or national security choice: The United States can do both.” Although terrorism and great-power threats affect U.S. security in quite different ways, they are perpetuated by similar grievances about perceived American arrogance and the unilateral projection of U.S. power and thus require a holistic strategy.

ALIENATING ALLIES

In my role as a senior CIA operations officer, I personally witnessed the damage that the United States’ heavy-handed approach to its dealings with allies did to its international relationships. When the agency pursued al Qaeda in Pakistan, it often had to do so without the help of officials in Islamabad—despite American threats. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president from 2001 to 2008, claimed in a 2006 CBS interview that Richard Armitage, the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, had warned Pakistan’s government after 9/11 that if it did not cooperate with the United States, it should be prepared to be bombed “back to the Stone Age.” (Although Armitage denied having threatened military force, he acknowledged in an interview with NBC that he had told Pakistani officials that they “would need to be with us or against us” in the U.S.-led effort to confront al Qaeda. But given my own experiences working with American and Pakistani officials during the war on terror, I suspect that Musharraf had the right takeaway.)

In the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when I served as CIA Director George Tenet’s back-channel emissary to Libya, I was ordered to issue a similarly explicit warning to Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s intelligence chief. In a small hotel room in the European city that provided neutral ground for our meeting, I told Qaddafi’s underling that the United States was preparing to invade Iraq. “Libya will have to decide if it is with us or against us when we do,” I said. Qaddafi, who already feared he would be Washington’s next target, spurned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s calls for Arab unity, moved quickly to cooperate with the United States on counterterrorism, and effectively ended Libya’s nuclear and chemical weapons programs.

There is a reason the CIA and its partner intelligence services don’t rely on coercion: it doesn’t work.

This example would seem to demonstrate the effectiveness of an aggressive approach, but there is a reason the CIA and its partner intelligence services don’t rely on coercion: it doesn’t work. Any wins tend to be short-lived, and in the longer term, such an approach undermines partnerships and sows lasting resentments. I found in my dealings with foreign interlocutors that the sympathy the United States enjoyed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 decreased steadily in the years that followed. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force—which Bush signed into law exactly a week after 9/11 and which authorized the use of the U.S. military to pursue those responsible for the attacks—made the entire world an arena for combat operations and eroded the goodwill of once staunch American allies. By 2016, when I was appointed to lead the agency’s counterterrorist operations in the war zones of South and Southwest Asia, the foreign officials whose cooperation I sought openly expressed their sense of offense at being pushed around.

ADDICTED TO FORCE

Force is only one aspect of a country’s power, but it is far simpler to define and to measure than diplomatic clout or cultural influence. Combat operations provide policymakers with compelling imagery and physical evidence—concrete metrics by which to validate their success. Such measures are not always immediately evident when employing the tools of soft power. Apart from imperfect international polling efforts, consider the challenge of demonstrating success in securing goodwill and how that could translate into a society’s actions.

What is more, the United States has a highly professional, exceptionally capable, and well-managed military force that generally succeeds. In the twenty-first century, however, although U.S. hard power won many a battle and bloodied its enemies, it did not always eliminate the threats against which it was applied. In retrospect, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq came with significant second- and third-order consequences. As U.S. forces hammered al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the terrorist organization decentralized and morphed into multiple adept international affiliates. The growth of the Islamic State (or ISIS) in Iraq and Syria went largely unnoticed until a caliphate had been established and innocents were dying across Europe. And the reverberations from the U.S. occupation of Iraq arguably contributed to the Arab Spring, another historic development that seemingly caught Washington by surprise.

The tools of power are being redefined by technology, science, climate, health, messaging, and intelligence. Today’s battle space is characterized by hybrid warfare that encompasses economic leverage along with cyber-operations and influence campaigns and multidomain conflicts that span land, sea, space, and information. In Ukraine, the United States has leveraged intelligence as a national instrument of power, exposing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s true designs and galvanizing international support. But having seen the reality firsthand, U.S. national security policies often come down to a reliance on wielding the biggest stick and letting it do the talking.

The growth of ISIS went largely unnoticed until a caliphate had been established and innocents were dying across Europe.

The relatively effective international effort to support Ukraine’s resistance to Putin’s illegal and brutal war is a positive example of U.S.-led collaboration, but it is more the exception than the rule. Elsewhere, the United States is still inclined to overly rely on force, preemptive and reactive, to address its national security priorities. Likewise, Washington continues to apply what some countries arguably maintain to be a coercive approach to bringing about their support. At times, it seems that the only carrot the United States offers is the absence of a stick.

At the core of the national security challenges the United States faces are devastating conditions, such as poverty and inequality, that are exploited by rivals and adversaries as grievances. Extremists, foreign or domestic, leverage such grievances to promote fear, incite sympathizers, and fracture societies. Autocratic leaders and other unscrupulous politicians do much the same, channeling victimization, nationalism, and racism to rally followers, justify the sacrifices and risks they are asked to bear, and dehumanize those depicted as enemies, all of which makes violence more tenable.

PERSUADE, DON’T COERCE

None of this is to suggest utopianism. A reliable and dominant force capability that can be projected worldwide at a moment’s notice must remain among the tools in the American kit, an instrument of power that helps lend credibility to soft-power alternatives. Rather, what is called for is a broader array of tools, ones that persuade rather than obliterate or coerce. Washington should build the strongest possible coalitions and make greater use of technology, science, microloans, health care, education, and similar incentives to persuade and influence rivals and allies.

Although it was focused on explaining how the September 11, 2001, attacks occurred, the 9/11 Commission report, released in 2004, offered important lessons for great-power competition, highlighting the need to recognize the battlefield as extending beyond the military realm and to “engage the struggle of ideas.” Social media, the Internet, and an ever-expanding galaxy of news outlets give authoritarian rivals the means to not only promote false narratives but also track and harass their enemies.

The authors of the report drew on lessons from the United States’ past deployment of soft power, suggesting, “Just as we did in the Cold War, we need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously.” Yet in the years since the report was released, the United States has largely failed to do so. Russia and China have told domestic and global audiences that great-power competition is a struggle of civilizations, values, and ideals as each country has moved aggressively to secure regional dominance. In this context, Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s intimidation of its neighbors can be seen as a new iteration of the Cold War.

The new White House strategy pledges to “pursue an affirmative agenda to advance peace and security and to promote prosperity in every region” and “support universal human rights and stand in solidarity with those beyond our shores who seek freedom and dignity.” But the United States targets adversaries such as Cuba and Iran with sanctions that appear to do more harm than good for the people it claims it wants to help and that offer their autocratic leaders a rallying point to deflect responsibility for the problems caused by their own inept rule. Soft-power tools aimed more directly at helping ordinary people around the world would bolster the United States’ efforts to undermine its adversaries and gain influence with their populations. President Biden’s pledge to commit $55 billion to Africa over the next three years, announced at the U.S. Africa summit earlier this month, offered encouraging evidence that Washington increasingly recognizes the value of soft-power tools as part of its national security strategy. But the devil, as always, is in the details; some African leaders suggested that the U.S. pledge was merely a belated attempt to counter China’s expanding economic influence on and investment in the continent, which the United States cannot easily match.

The United States targets adversaries with sanctions that seem to do more harm than good.

The 9/11 Commission Report underscored the importance of the U.S. government providing “an example of moral leadership.” It also offered practical advice to policymakers about the need for a comprehensive U.S. counterterrorism strategy, including “economic policies that encourage development, more open societies, and opportunities for people to improve the lives of their families and to enhance prospects for their children’s future.” In other words, the report advocated a combination of soft power and kinetic policies to ensure American success.

Indeed, coming on the heels of one of the United States’ most devastating losses and the ensuing trauma it inflicted, the report advocated a broad range of tools to encourage constructive international engagement to address terrorism’s root causes. It offered a remarkably long-term view of foreign policy planning, emphasizing a balanced use of hard and soft power over the course of generations. The report also cautioned U.S. policymakers against allying with autocrats, noting, “One of the lessons of the long Cold War was that short-term gains in cooperating with the most repressive and brutal governments were too often outweighed by long-term setbacks for America’s stature and interests.” I suspect that President Joe Biden might still be triggered by images of his fist bump with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. I know that I am.

NURTURING GOODWILL

The lessons of the war on terror extend beyond the realm of great-power competition. Not all the factors that give rise to national security threats are within the control of U.S. policymakers. Natural disasters and public health threats will continue to emerge unexpectedly and fuel instability.

Neither force nor coercion provides a one-size-fits-all solution. The United States has the capacity to pursue long-term, transformative solutions to many global threats. It often resorts to military force and pressure out of a sense of urgency, but the pursuit of enduring solutions is not without cost. Political buy-in for what the public might perceive as money and resources better invested at home will not come easily, particularly in the United States’ polarized political climate.

During the early years of the Cold War, U.S. leaders’ claims about American exceptionalism were widely tolerated, even respected. But U.S. solipsism has deepened since the end of the Cold War, and the effective soft-power programs that the United States established during those years have been drastically cut back. The goodwill Washington built through educational initiatives, cultural exchanges, and other forms of public diplomacy was cost effective, especially compared with billion-dollar military programs. Moreover, that kind of slowly nurtured goodwill endures for decades. But it has been wearing thin in much of the world, and there is no longer enough of it to outweigh the kinds of grievances that can be easily fanned to fuel terrorist movements or great-power rivalries.

DOUGLAS LONDON was Senior Operations Officer in the CIA’s Clandestine Service for over 34 years, assigned to the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Central Eurasia. He is the author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.

Foreign Affairs · by Douglas London · December 20, 2022

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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ALIENATING ALLIES

ADDICTED TO FORCE

PERSUADE, DON’T COERCE

NURTURING GOODWILL