Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. “Fighting stories” contend to answer such questions as “Was the French Revolution a good thing?” and many new versions challenge the established narrative. A Tale of Two Cities has been a winner in the contest to characterize the French Revolution. Dickens drew from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, but the novel, the most accessible of all Dickens’s books, and one that was put before young people for generations, has far outstripped the history book that lies behind it.”

– Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order by Charles Hill

"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."

–P. J. O'Rourke

"Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."

– Alexis de Tocqueville

1. House rejects Trump-backed plan on government shutdown, leaving next steps uncertain

2. House Rejects GOP Plan Backed by Trump as Government Barrels Toward Shutdown

3. Trump Warns Europe to Buy More U.S. Oil and Gas or Face Tariffs

4. Taiwan Is Getting Its U.S. Weaponry—but Years Behind Schedule

5. More Than Twice as Many U.S. Troops Are in Syria as Previously Disclosed

6. The Year Ahead for U.S. Foreign Policy: Navigating Changes and Challenges

7. Anticipating the Character of War: Looking Out to 2030 by Mick Ryan

8. Why the Salt Typhoon Hack Is Freaking Everyone Out

9. Trump’s transition is happening over private emails. Federal officials are nervous.

10. Necropolitics and Counterinsurgency: The Costs of Population Resettlement in Small Wars

11. Next Harding Fellows selected, program expanded

12. Swedish police board Chinese ship in probe over severed cables

13. Looming government shutdown could hurt military families, veterans

14. Senior U.S. Diplomats Arrive in Syria to Meet With Governing Militias

15. Why China Isn’t Scared of Trump

16. The Path to a Better Syria

17. How to Stop a Trade War

18. Cyber Campaign Plans and Other Fairy Tales

19. China reacts to US's military power report

20. When Gen. George Patton Called on God

1. House rejects Trump-backed plan on government shutdown, leaving next steps uncertain

Merry Christmas America.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

― H.L. Mencken, A Little Book In C Major

We are about to get it good and hard by these elected leaders (and by unelected leaders too).

House rejects Trump-backed plan on government shutdown, leaving next steps uncertain

By LISA MASCARO and KEVIN FREKING

Updated 11:55 PM EST, December 19, 2024

AP · December 19, 2024

Follow live updates on federal funding negotiations as a government shutdown looms.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A day before a potential government shutdown, the House resoundingly rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s new plan Thursday to fund operations and suspend the debt ceiling, as Democrats and dozens of Republicans refused to accommodate his sudden demands.

In a hastily convened evening vote punctuated by angry outbursts over the self-made crisis, the lawmakers failed to reach the two-thirds threshold needed for passage — but House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared determined to reassess, before Friday’s midnight deadline.

“We’re going to regroup and we will come up with another solution, so stay tuned,” Johnson said after the vote. The cobbled-together plan didn’t even get a majority, with the bill failing 174-235.

The outcome proved a massive setback for Trump and his billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who rampaged against Johnson’s bipartisan compromise, which Republicans and Democrats had reached earlier to prevent a Christmastime government shutdown.

It provides a preview of the turbulence ahead when Trump returns to the White House with Republican control of the House and Senate. During his first term, Trump led Republicans into the longest government shutdown in history during the 2018 Christmas season, and interrupted the holidays in 2020 by tanking a bipartisan COVID-relief bill and forcing a do-over.

Hours earlier Thursday, Trump announced “SUCCESS in Washington!” in coming up with the new package which would keep government running for three more months, add $100.4 billion in disaster assistance including for hurricane-hit states, and allow more borrowing through Jan. 30, 2027.

“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House have come to a very good Deal,” Trump posted.

But Republicans, who had spent 24 hours largely negotiating with themselves to cut out the extras conservatives opposed and come up with the new plan, ran into a wall of resistance from Democrats, who were in no hurry to appease demands from Trump — or Musk.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats were sticking with the original deal with Johnson and called the new one “laughable.”

“It’s not a serious proposal,” Jeffries said as he walked to Democrats’ own closed-door caucus meeting. Inside, Democrats were chanting, “Hell, no!”

All day, Johnson had been fighting to figure out how to meet Trump’s almost impossible demands — and keep his own job — while federal offices are being told to prepare to shutter operations.

The new proposal whittled the 1,500-page bill to 116 pages and dropped a number of add-ons — notably the first pay raise for lawmakers in more than a decade, which could have allowed as much as a 3.8% bump. That drew particular scorn as Musk turned his social media army against the bill.

Trump said early Thursday that Johnson will “easily remain speaker” for the next Congress if he “acts decisively and tough” in coming up with a new plan to also raise the debt limit, a stunning request just before the Christmas holidays that has put the beleaguered speaker in a bind.

And if not, the president-elect warned of trouble ahead for Johnson and Republicans in Congress.

“Anybody that supports a bill that doesn’t take care of the Democrat quicksand known as the debt ceiling should be primaried and disposed of as quickly as possible,” Trump told Fox News Digital.

The tumultuous turn of events, coming as lawmakers were preparing to head home for the holidays, sparks a familiar reminder of what it’s like in Trump-run Washington.

Musk and Vice President-elect JD Vance tried to blame Democrats, though rank-and-file Republicans helped sink Trump’s plan.

“They’ve asked for a shutdown,” Vance said of Democrats. “That’s exactly what they’re going to get.”

For Johnson, who faces his own problems ahead of a Jan. 3 House vote to remain speaker, Trump’s demands left him severely weakened, forced to abandon his word with Democrats and work into the night to broker the new approach.

Trump’s allies even floated the far-fetched idea of giving Musk the speaker’s gavel, since the speaker is not required to be a member of the Congress. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted she was “open” to the idea.

Democrats were beside themselves, seeing this as a fitting coda after one of the most unproductive congressional sessions in modern times.

“Here we are once again in chaos,” said House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, who detailed the harm a government shutdown would cause Americans. “And what for? Because Elon Musk, an unelected man, said, ‘We’re not doing this deal, and Donald Trump followed along.’”

As he left the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “Now it’s time to go back to the bipartisan agreement.”

The debate in the House chamber grew heated as lawmakers blamed each other for the mess.

At one point, Rep. Marc Molinaro, who was presiding, slammed the speaker’s gavel with such force that it broke.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Trump was publicly turning on those who opposed him.

One hardline Republican, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, drew Trump’s ire for refusing to along with the plan. Roy in turn told his own GOP colleagues they had no self-respect for piling onto the nation’s debt.

“It’s shameful!” Roy thundered, standing on the Democratic side of the aisle and pointing at his fellow Republicans.

The slimmed-down package does include federal funds to rebuild Baltimore’s collapsed Key Bridge, but dropped a separate land transfer that could have paved the way for a new Washington Commanders football stadium.

It abandons a long list of other bipartisan bills that had support as lawmakers in both parties try to wrap work for the year. It extends government funds through March 14.

Adding an increase in the debt ceiling to what had been a bipartisan package is a show-stopper for Republicans who want to slash government and routinely vote against more borrowing. Almost three dozen Republicans voted against it.

While Democrats have floated their own ideas in the past for lifting or even doing away with the debt limit caps — Sen. Elizabeth Warren had suggested as much — they appear to be in no bargaining mood to save Johnson from Trump — even before the president-elect is sworn into office.

The current debt limit expires Jan. 1, 2025, and Trump wants the problem off the table before he joins the White House.

Musk, in his new foray into politics, led the charge. The wealthiest man in the world used his social media platform X to amplify the unrest, and GOP lawmakers were besieged with phone calls to their offices telling them to oppose the plan.

Rep. Steve Womack, an Arkansas Republican and senior appropriator, said the bipartisan bill’s collapse signaled what’s ahead in the new year, “probably be a good trailer right now for the 119th Congress.”

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget had provided initial communication to agencies about possible shutdown planning last week, according to an official at the agency.

Johnson left the Capitol late Thursday night with only two words when asked about a path forward.

“We’ll see,” he replied.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Stephen Groves, Farnoush Amiri and Matt Brown contributed to this story.

AP · December 19, 2024

2. House Rejects GOP Plan Backed by Trump as Government Barrels Toward Shutdown

A helluva way to run a railroad. Or a country.

House Rejects GOP Plan Backed by Trump as Government Barrels Toward Shutdown

President-elect insisted that any stopgap deal includes raising the debt ceiling

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-government-shutdown-spending-bill-republican-plan-08ba24ad?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Lindsay Wise

, Katy Stech Ferek

and Siobhan Hughes

Updated Dec. 19, 2024 8:05 pm ET

Trump Warns Europe to Buy More U.S. Oil and Gas or Face Tariffs

The U.S. produces more crude oil than any other nation and is a major exporter of liquefied natural gas, including to Europe

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-warns-europe-to-buy-more-u-s-oil-and-gas-or-face-tariffs-1bc4d16b?mod=latest_headlines

By Joshua Kirby

Dec. 20, 2024 3:03 am ET

The E.U. must buy more American oil and gas or the new administration will impose tariffs on European imports, Donald Trump has warned. Photo: Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images

The EU must buy more American oil and gas or the new administration will impose tariffs on European imports, President-elect Donald Trump warned Friday.

“I told the European Union that they must make up their tremendous deficit with the United States by the large scale purchase of our oil and gas. Otherwise, it is TARIFFS all the way!!!” Trump said on his Truth Social microblogging site.

Trump, who won a second term at last month’s presidential elections, has made tariffs a central part of his plans when he moves back into the White House next month. He has threatened to increase import duties on China, with which the U.S. has the largest trade deficit, and has also pledged new tariffs on allies including Canada, Mexico and Europe in a bid to boost U.S. manufacturing.

The U.S. produces more crude oil than any other nation and is a major exporter of liquefied natural gas, including to Europe, with LNG exports rising rapidly in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the curtailing of Russian gas piped into Europe. The EU is the main destination for American LNG and crude oil. Still, the 27-member bloc operates a sizeable trade surplus with the U.S., with exports running about 20 billion euros ($20.72 billion) ahead of imports in October, the most recent month for which the EU has published data.

A spokesperson for the EU didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Write to Joshua Kirby at joshua.kirby@wsj.com

4. Taiwan Is Getting Its U.S. Weaponry—but Years Behind Schedule

Heel, can you say Achilles?

The warning lights on our defense industrial base must be blinking red.

Taiwan Is Getting Its U.S. Weaponry—but Years Behind Schedule

Five-year wait for 38 Abrams tanks highlights strains on U.S. industrial capacity as concerns grow over China

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/taiwan-is-getting-its-u-s-weaponrybut-years-behind-schedule-11c151b1?mod=latest_headlines

By Joyu Wang

Updated Dec. 20, 2024 12:01 am ET

Taiwanese soldiers inspect an M1A2 Abrams tank at an army training center in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Photo: Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

TAIPEI—Taiwan hailed the arrival of its first state-of-the-art American tanks this week, celebrating what it described as “the world’s greatest war machine.”

Less prominently mentioned was the long wait that preceded the arrival of the 38 Abrams tanks: Taiwan placed the order five years ago in June 2019, during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term.

According to the original plan, the Taiwanese military was to receive its first batch of cutting-edge M1A2 Abrams tanks in 2022, replacing the Vietnam War-era Patton tanks that Taiwan’s army has relied on for decades.

But the U.S. missed that timeline by two years as the Covid-19 pandemic and new wars in Ukraine and the Middle East added strains to the U.S. defense industry.

Now, as Trump prepares to return to the White House, Western and Taiwanese defense analysts say that Taiwan’s backlog of arms deliveries—including F-16V jet fighters and TOW antitank missiles—is likely to clear up somewhat.

For decades, Washington has been Taipei’s most important military backer, supplying the weapons needed to deter and defend against a potential attack by China. Beijing claims the island as its territory and hasn’t ruled out the use of force in asserting control over it.

Beijing regularly protests announcements of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, decrying them as interference in its sovereign affairs. What has proven more effective in keeping advanced American weaponry out of Taiwanese hands hasn’t been Chinese complaints, but rather U.S. supply bottlenecks.

At one point this year, the value of paid-for-but-as-yet-undelivered weapon systems to Taiwan topped $20 billion, according to calculations by Eric Gomez, a defense analyst at the Washington-based Cato Institute. “This number should start coming down,” Gomez said.

In addition to the Abrams tanks, Taiwan last month received its first batch of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or Himars. The U.S.-made long-range high-precision rocket launching system—used to great effect by Ukraine in its war against Russia—puts targets along China’s southeastern coastline within striking range.

The arrival of the Himars also brought Gomez’s estimate of the value of the undelivered weapons orders to Taiwan down to $19.17 billion in November, before the tanks’ arrival this week.

“Between now and the end of 2026, we’re going to be entering this window where, provided there’s no additional delays, a bunch of large sales should complete over these next couple years,” he said.

Taiwanese soldiers take part in an anti-infiltration exercise in Taitung, Taiwan, in January. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

By the end of this year, a shipment of TOW-2B antitank missiles is expected to arrive after delays the Taiwanese military partly attributed to strains on the U.S. defense industry. Taiwan’s air force says it is optimistic that it will receive the F-16V jet fighters by 2026.

The sale of the TOW-2B missiles was approved roughly a decade ago in 2015 under then-President Barack Obama, while the Trump administration agreed to sell 108 Abrams tanks and 66 F-16V jet fighters to Taiwan in 2019, followed by the Himars systems in 2020. The remaining 70 Abrams tanks are expected to arrive by 2026.

A spokesman for the Pentagon said it is working closely with defense contractors to expand production capacity and accelerate delivery of arms to the island. “Taiwan is prioritized to the greatest extent possible,” Maj. Pete Nguyen wrote in response to questions, adding that long delivery dates aren’t specific to Taiwan but rather a global challenge.

The approach that Trump will take to Taiwan more generally remains unclear. During the election campaign, Trump warned that Taiwan would have to significantly increase its military spending and not rely entirely on U.S. military support. Trump has also at times emphasized his close personal ties to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, while highlighting in Taiwan’s proximity to the Chinese mainland and its great distance from the U.S.

On the other hand, Trump has picked a number of prominent China hawks to lead his national security team, including Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Rep. Mike Waltz for national security adviser. Some Taiwanese analysts say the selection of traditional Republican Party skeptics of Beijing offers Taiwan an opportunity to acquire weapons it has long sought.

“In the U.S., the two parties handle arms sales to Taiwan differently. Now that we’re in the second Trump term, Taiwan should take this chance to upgrade some of the outdated platforms in its military,” said Su Tzu-yun, a Taipei-based security expert with the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is backed by Taiwan’s military.

An M1A2 Abrams tank fires at a target during an exercise. Photo: U.S. Army/Zuma Press

Taiwanese officials have talked up their commitment to improving their military capabilities and pledged to increase the island’s military spending, despite an opposition-controlled legislature whose sway over the budget has complicated such efforts.

While the specific items on Taiwan’s wish list remain unclear, a spokeswoman for President Lai Ching-te last month dismissed reports suggesting Taipei is considering purchasing F-35 jet fighters from Lockheed Martin and E-2D Advanced Hawkeye aircraft from Northrop Grumman, among other big-ticket machinery.

Whatever Taiwan decides to splurge on, any new orders “would jack up the backlog number right back way higher to where it was before. And it would also take a long time to deliver on,” said Gomez of the Cato Institute. “There’s this question of, like, do you think Taiwan buys political goodwill or does it actually buy useful military capabilities that could be delivered fast?”

The new Abrams tanks, analysts say, check both boxes, sending a splashy message to the Trump administration that Taiwan is willing to pay up to improve its defenses, while also boosting its capabilities in the event China’s military makes a landing on Taiwan.

“Taiwan, yes, purchases high-ticket items that some people might debate the utility of. But at the end of the day, I think that they have made wise decisions with their money,” said Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the Rand think tank.

The Taiwanese military’s glee at the arrival of the long-delayed machinery could be seen in the welcome it offered the Abrams tanks earlier this week. A clip released by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry showed the tanks shrouded in black cloth and carried on trucks, arriving at the island’s Armor Training Command just before dawn on Monday. The heavily armored vehicles also feature prominently in the Defense Ministry’s calendar for the coming year, hailed as “the world’s strongest tank!!”

More recently, the departing Biden administration last month approved the sale of $320 million worth of spare parts and advanced radars for F-16 jets to Taiwan.

The U.S. should “stop arming Taiwan and stop encouraging or supporting ‘Taiwan independence’ forces trying to achieve their goals through military means,” Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said Monday at a press briefing.

Write to Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com

5. More Than Twice as Many U.S. Troops Are in Syria as Previously Disclosed

Ah the dreaded troop count. Everyone wants to count the numbers.

The only number that comes under greater scrutiny than casualty figures is the deployed troop count.

Ever since 55 advisors in El Salvador we have had some kind of troop cap. Then there was the approximately 250,000 troops necessary for Iraq stabilization recommended by General Shinseki which the civilian DOD leadership pooh-poohed because they wanted to keep the numbers low.

More Than Twice as Many U.S. Troops Are in Syria as Previously Disclosed

A Pentagon spokesman said the increase was unrelated to the fall of President Bashar al-Assad to rebel forces in early December.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/us/politics/us-troops-syria.html

The Pentagon has said that the troops in Syria are scattered among several bases, including al-Tanf, on the Syria-Iraq border.Credit...Lolita Baldor/Associated Press

By Helene Cooper

Reporting from Washington

Dec. 19, 2024

The Pentagon said on Thursday that 2,000 American troops were in Syria, more than twice the number officials had cited for months.

Why the Defense Department delayed disclosing the number is unclear. Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters that he became aware of the additional troops on Thursday morning. They are in Syria on a “temporary” basis, he said, to support what he called the “core official deployed forces” participating in the Pentagon’s mission to keep Islamic State forces from reconstituting.

General Ryder said the increase in the number of troops was unrelated to the fall of President Bashar al-Assad to rebel forces in early December.

“Look, again, learned the number today, provided the number today,” he told reporters. “Part of the explanation is the sensitivity from a diplomatic and operation security standpoint. But again, given the difference in what we’ve been briefing and what the actual number is, just felt that it was important to get you that information.”

Since the Assad government’s collapse, Israel and Turkey have launched military operations in Syria. The United States, for its part, has conducted dozens of strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria to stop the militant group’s fighters from taking advantage of the shifting situation.

The Pentagon was asked repeatedly in recent days and weeks how many American troops were in Syria, and maintained that the number was 900.

The issue of American boots on the ground in Syria has something of a history. In 2019, President Donald J. Trump ordered all U.S. troops in Syria to return home, in an effort to end the American mission there. Pentagon officials balked, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked Mr. Trump into allowing a limited number of troops to remain to safeguard oil fields, Mr. Trump said.

“We’re keeping the oil,” the president said at the time. “We left troops behind, only for the oil.”

After that, Pentagon leaders said little about the U.S. presence in Syria, but when asked, replied that 800 American troops were in the country.

More recently, they have put the number at 900.

The Pentagon has said that the troops in Syria are scattered among several bases, including al-Tanf, on the Syria-Iraq border, and in northeast Syria. U.S. and partner forces in a coalition that includes the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces have been working to keep pressure on Islamic State militants and to ensure that fighters who are detained do not end up back on the battlefield.

The Pentagon says U.S. troops also have provided security for displaced women and children. Many of them are relatives of Islamic State members who died fighting or were detained and who want to be repatriated — mostly back to Iraq.

The Biden administration and the Iraqi government say people in displacement camps are vulnerable to indoctrination by the Islamic State.

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent. More about Helene Cooper

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 20, 2024, Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Estimate of U.S. Troops in Syria Is Doubled. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

6. The Year Ahead for U.S. Foreign Policy: Navigating Changes and Challenges

Excerpts:

Conclusion

The year ahead presents a complex array of potential changes in U.S. foreign policy, each with significant implications for global stability and security. As the U.S. navigates these challenges, it will need to balance its strategic interests with the realities of an evolving geopolitical landscape. The potential reduction of aid to Ukraine, increased reliance on economic instruments, a focus on transnational crime, a transactional approach to Taiwan and China, heightened pressure on Iran, and demands for NATO allies to boost defense spending all represent critical areas of focus.

Ultimately, next year, the U.S. has a unique opportunity to shape the future of its foreign policy in a way that promotes stability, security, and cooperation. By engaging in dialogue with international partners and addressing the underlying issues that drive conflict and instability, the U.S. can work toward a more peaceful and prosperous world. The coming year will be pivotal in determining how these potential changes will play out and what they will mean for the U.S. and its role on the global stage.

2 days ago4 min read

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/the-year-ahead-for-u-s-foreign-policy-navigating-changes-and-challenges

The Year Ahead for U.S. Foreign Policy: Navigating Changes and Challenges

The United States, as a key player on the global stage, faces a series of potential shifts in its foreign policy that could reshape its relationships with allies and adversaries alike. As these policies unfold, the U.S. must remain adaptable and responsive to the reactions of both allies and adversaries. The effectiveness of these strategies will depend not only on their implementation but also on the broader context of international relations, including economic conditions, public sentiment, and the actions of other global powers.This article examines some possible changes and discusses how they could affect the context of the broader strategic environment if they do in fact come to pass.

Reduced Aid to Ukraine

Since the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, the U.S. has provided substantial military and economic support to bolster the country’s defense against Russian aggression. However, discussions within U.S. political circles are growing regarding the possibility of reducing this aid. The rationale behind this shift may be to encourage negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, aiming for a diplomatic resolution to the ongoing conflict.

Reducing aid could have significant implications for Ukraine’s defense capabilities, potentially weakening its position in negotiations. Additionally, such a move may be influenced by domestic political considerations, as public opinion on foreign aid fluctuates. The response from Russia and other international stakeholders would also be critical, as it could embolden Russian aggression or prompt a reevaluation of strategies among U.S. allies.

Increased Use of the Economic Instrument of National Power

In the coming year, U.S. policy may place greater emphasis on utilizing economic instruments as a primary tool of national power. This includes sanctions, trade policies, and other economic measures aimed at both adversaries and allies. By leveraging these tools, the U.S. seeks to promote its interests and achieve foreign policy goals without resorting to military intervention.

The effectiveness of these economic measures in achieving desired outcomes will be closely monitored. However, there are inherent risks and challenges, including potential backlash from targeted nations and impacts on global economic stability. The success of this strategy will depend on the U.S.'s ability to navigate these complexities while maintaining its leadership role in the international arena.

New Focus on Transnational Criminal Organizations

Transnational criminal organizations pose a significant threat to security and stability in the Western Hemisphere. In response, the U.S. is likely to increase its focus on combating drug trafficking, human trafficking, and organized crime. This strategic shift may involve strengthening partnerships with Latin American countries and enhancing cooperation in law enforcement and intelligence sharing.

The implications for regional security could be profound, as a concerted effort to dismantle these organizations may lead to improved safety and stability in affected areas. However, it may also require a greater U.S. military or law enforcement presence, raising questions about sovereignty and the long-term effectiveness of such interventions.

A Transactional Approach to Taiwan and the PRC

U.S.-Taiwan relations have historically been characterized by a commitment to support Taiwan’s defense against potential aggression from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, there is a growing sentiment that the U.S. may adopt a more transactional approach in its dealings with Taiwan. This shift could emphasize pragmatic agreements over long-term commitments, reflecting a broader strategy of balancing relations with China.

The potential consequences of this approach are significant. It may alter the dynamics of U.S.-China relations, leading to increased tensions and uncertainty in the region. Additionally, Taiwan’s response to this shift will be crucial as it navigates its own security concerns and aspirations for international recognition.

Further Economic Pressure on Tehran

The U.S. has long maintained a policy of economic sanctions against Iran, particularly in response to its nuclear program and regional activities. In the coming year, there is a possibility of escalating this economic pressure to achieve specific diplomatic goals. By tightening sanctions and leveraging economic tools, the U.S. aims to curb Iran’s influence in the Middle East and compel compliance with international agreements.

However, this strategy is fraught with risks. Increased pressure may provoke a backlash from Iran and its allies, potentially destabilizing the region further. Additionally, the U.S. must consider the implications for its relationships with other Middle Eastern countries, many of which have their own interests and concerns regarding Iran.

Encouragement of NATO Allies to Increase Defense Spending

As global security challenges evolve, the U.S. is likely to increase pressure on NATO allies and partners to meet their defense spending commitments. Currently, many NATO member countries fall short of the alliance’s guideline of spending 2% of their GDP on defense. The U.S. argues that increased spending is essential for collective security and deterrence against potential threats.

This push for higher defense budgets may lead to increased tensions within NATO, as some allies may resist pressure to allocate more resources to defense. However, it could also strengthen the alliance’s overall capabilities and readiness in the face of emerging threats.

Conclusion

7. Anticipating the Character of War: Looking Out to 2030

The 40 page paper (which I have not yet read - this is a weekend read) can be downloaded here: https://www.scsp.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/DPS-The-Character-of-Future-War-to-2030-.pdf

Excerpts:

In our paper, Clint and I attempted to anticipate changes in the character of war. No matter how well we have done this, we cannot be fully successful. The world is changing at an accelerating pace, and new and unexpected developments will further induce changes in the character of war.

We agree with Douhet that we cannot wait to adapt, but we also know that we cannot fully predict what will happen.

The Future of War

Anticipating the Character of War: Looking Out to 2030

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/anticipating-the-charater-of-war

A new paper on the future security environment to 2030, a collaboration between Clint Hinote and myself, has just been released by the Special Competitive Studies Project.

Mick Ryan

Dec 19, 2024

Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the change in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur. Giuilo Douhet

Recently, I had the opportunity to once again to collaborate with Lieutenant General (retired) Clint Hinote to conduct an exploration of the security environment that military institutions must be prepared to face out to 2030. As with our previous collaboration, Empowering the Edge: Uncrewed Systems and the Transformation of U.S. Warfighting Capacity, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience as we both challenged and pushed each other to ensure we thought through all the key issues.

Our paper is part of a larger series of papers on future defence challenges that have just been published by the Special Competitive Studies Project in Washington DC. The full list of these papers in this series is as follows:

As we wrote our paper, it had been apparent for some time that military forces had to place an even greater emphasis on their capacity to orient, learn, and adapt to change. The U.S. military’s FOE 2035 document noted that “simply procuring superior capability will not be enough – the speed at which Defence can adapt and integrate technologies will be more important.” In response, militaries must continuously scan and reassess the strategic environment and interpret what it means.

This is not a new requirement. The pace of change, however, means that learning and adaptation are more challenging to accomplish and more critical to outcomes than in the past. The margin for error is vanishingly thin.

Several other reports in the past decade have also examined the security environment which is challenging military institutions world wide. These reports include:

U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Operating Environment 2035: The Joint Force in a Contested and Disordered World.
UK Ministry of Defence, Future Operating Environment 2035.
Special Competitive Studies Project, Offset X: Closing the Deterrence Gap and Building the Future Joint Force.
National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World.

In our collaboration, Clint and I did not attempt to replicate these previous reports' excellent work or challenge their conclusions. Instead, we identify relevant changes over the past three years and explore how they influence war's evolving character. Particular focus is placed on the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the escalation of Chinese confrontation against its neighbors in the Pacific and the United States, and how new technologies are making new military concepts possible.

The key findings in our resulting paper, The Character of Future War to 2030, are described below.

War is an enduring element of human existence, but it continuously evolves with societal, technological, and political developments. The current era is one of technological innovation and societal change, and disruptions impact human competition and conflict. Our paper addresses how recent changes, especially in the past three years, are influencing the character of war.

The accelerated pace of change is the fundamental factor influencing modern conflict. In this period of accelerated change, four additional factors are driving the security environment:

Authoritarians seeking to change the global system through violence, if necessary.
Authoritarians (and others) disrupting regional security.
The development of advanced technologies made widely available, and
The deepening impacts of climate change.

In this fluid security environment, the most relevant trends that will inform military force development in the short and medium terms (through 2030) are as follows:

A state of constant confrontation that takes advantage of rapid transition above and below the violence threshold.
An increasingly transparent understanding of the battlespace that remains imperfect and thus exploitable.
War conducted on a massive scale requiring mass for victory, which drives a need to mobilize society.
Learning and adaptation as prerequisites for victory.

These trends have serious implications for the future force. Our paper makes a total of 21 recommendations related to these trends.

In our paper, Clint and I attempted to anticipate changes in the character of war. No matter how well we have done this, we cannot be fully successful. The world is changing at an accelerating pace, and new and unexpected developments will further induce changes in the character of war.

We agree with Douhet that we cannot wait to adapt, but we also know that we cannot fully predict what will happen.

You can read our full paper at this link.

8. Why the Salt Typhoon Hack Is Freaking Everyone Out

Will the Trump team arrive at the same conclusion? It is reported that the transition team is using no-official, non-government emails.

Excerpts:

“President Trump and his national security team will almost certainly arrive at the same conclusion,” Fedasiuk said. “Hacking the personal devices of sitting U.S. officials and senior campaign staff is certainly one way to kick off a relationship with President Trump’s team—but it’s probably not the approach I would have advised.”

The fact that the majority of national cybersecurity now falls to the private sector could further muddle efforts to rein in Chinese hacking. “I think there’s going to be a lot of deregulation, and that’s not going to help our cybersecurity posture,” said Kellermann, now the senior vice president of cyberstrategy at the cybersecurity firm Contrast Security. “That being said, the Trump administration is very much attempting to marginalize and isolate the reach and power of China, and so perhaps they will appreciate the fact that the cyber is a tremendous component of that initiative.”

China has repeatedly denied carrying out cyberattacks against the United States and did so again in the wake of the Salt Typhoon revelations. “There is no evidence that supports the irrational claim of the so-called ‘cyberattacks from China,’” a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told reporters in a briefing this week. “China itself is a target of international cyberattacks and consistently opposes and combats all forms of cyberattacks.”

Kellermann said the U.S. government needs to step up its offensive cyber-operations against adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran, which “essentially want to conduct a home invasion versus a burglary.” At the same time, he understands the instinct not to overplay Washington’s hand by revealing too many details at this stage. “Metaphorically, you don’t want to shout out, ‘I’ve got a gun. I’ve called the police,’ when someone’s in your house because they could choose to set your house on fire.”

Why the Salt Typhoon Hack Is Freaking Everyone Out

Officials say hackers linked to China have unprecedented access to U.S. telecommunication networks

By Rishi Iyengar

DECEMBER 19, 2024

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/12/19/salt-typhoon-hack-explained-us-china-cyberattack/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

A car drives past a Verizon store

in Daly City, California, on Sept. 30.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Even in a year of high-profile Chinese cyberattacks, the Salt Typhoon campaign has stood out.

The attack, by a Chinese government-linked hacking group dubbed “Salt Typhoon” by investigators, was first revealed in late September. The hackers infiltrated at least eight major U.S. telecommunication networks, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, targeting the cellphones of several government officials and politicians, including President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.

The intrusion has sent alarm bells ringing among intelligence agencies and lawmakers, with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner referring to it as the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history—by far.” Sen. Marco Rubio, the committee’s ranking member and Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, went a step further. “It’s the most disturbing and widespread incursion into our telecommunication systems in the history of the world, not just the country,” he told reporters this month. “That’s about as bad as it gets.”

Even more concerning, U.S. officials said that as of early this month, they had still not been able to expel the hackers from most of the compromised systems and were unable to give a timeline for when that would be achieved.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued guidelines on mobile phone usage for “highly targeted individuals,” which CISA official Jeff Greene said refers to “senior government or senior political officials who likely possess information of interest” to China. The agency instructed those individuals to only communicate through apps, such as Signal, that are end-to-end encrypted (which means messages are only accessible to senders and recipients), use a password manager, and avoid receiving authentication codes via text for their logins.

“The targeting we’ve seen is focused on a small number of individuals, but these are still safety precautions that anyone can take to secure their communications against this or other threats,” Greene, who serves as the agency’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, told reporters on Wednesday.

But the effects of the hack threaten to be far more widespread, with CISA and its counterpart agencies in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada warning this month that Salt Typhoon’s campaign extends beyond just U.S. networks. It also likely includes more than just prominent politicians, with NBC News reporting that the hackers also accessed general phone call and text data—known as metadata—of more than a million Americans.

Greene said investigations by CISA and other U.S. government agencies into the extent of the hack are still ongoing. “This particular Salt Typhoon communications compromise is part of a broader pattern of PRC activity directed at critical infrastructure,” he said, using China’s official name. “This is ongoing PRC activity that we need both to prepare for and defend against for the long term.”

SALT TYPHOON IS THE THIRD MAJOR Chinese hacking group to be uncovered during the Biden administration.

In May 2023, Microsoft (whose systems much of the U.S. government runs on) discovered that a group it called Volt Typhoon had burrowed into critical infrastructure networks including water and transportation across the United States—as well as in Guam, home to key U.S. military bases.

The objectives of the group, which Microsoft said had been active since mid-2021, appear to go beyond the espionage and information-gathering that Chinese cyberattackers are known for: U.S. officials have said the hackers aim to sow chaos in the event of a conflict.

More recently, U.S. officials announced that they had disrupted a third group, known as Flax Typhoon, which took over hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices such as webcams. (“Typhoon” is the moniker Microsoft uses to denote groups linked to China, with state-linked hackers from Russia tagged as “Blizzard” and those from Iran called “Sandstorm”).

Together, the attacks form a picture of alarming provocation and escalation by a highly capable adversary.

“In my 25 years in cybersecurity, this is the most significant systemic cyber-intrusion to date, period,” Tom Kellermann, who served on President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity commission, said in an interview with Foreign Policy.

Compromising telecommunication networks serves as an entry point into the “backbone” of U.S. infrastructure that the Chinese could use to “island hop” into different parts of the network and launch more destructive attacks on other critical infrastructure, he added. “This is something we’re going to be dealing with for years, to identify all the back doors that have been placed in the systems.”

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION is scrambling to hit back, and its response thus far has been relatively limited. The Commerce Department this week reportedly sought to ban leading Chinese firm China Telecom from operating in the United States and may be considering a ban on another company, TP-Link, which makes Wi-Fi routers used by millions of Americans. Congress also just approved $3 billion in funding to remove all Chinese equipment from U.S. telecom networks.

“I expect the scale and severity of this attack will force the administration to reevaluate some of these measures and take a heavier hand,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, an adjunct fellow in the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security who previously served in the State Department’s China House.

Complicating those efforts is the fact that a new administration takes office just a month from now. The Biden administration has made cybersecurity and defense a major focus, and it remains an open question whether Trump will prioritize it in the same way. At the same time, much of the ongoing U.S. tech competition with China—particularly on telecommunications—began under the first Trump administration (see: Huawei).

Trump Turning More Countries in Europe Against Huawei

Robbie Gramer

Slovakia joins other Eastern European countries signing declarations with Washington aimed at keeping China out ...

“President Trump and his national security team will almost certainly arrive at the same conclusion,” Fedasiuk said. “Hacking the personal devices of sitting U.S. officials and senior campaign staff is certainly one way to kick off a relationship with President Trump’s team—but it’s probably not the approach I would have advised.”

The fact that the majority of national cybersecurity now falls to the private sector could further muddle efforts to rein in Chinese hacking. “I think there’s going to be a lot of deregulation, and that’s not going to help our cybersecurity posture,” said Kellermann, now the senior vice president of cyberstrategy at the cybersecurity firm Contrast Security. “That being said, the Trump administration is very much attempting to marginalize and isolate the reach and power of China, and so perhaps they will appreciate the fact that the cyber is a tremendous component of that initiative.”

China has repeatedly denied carrying out cyberattacks against the United States and did so again in the wake of the Salt Typhoon revelations. “There is no evidence that supports the irrational claim of the so-called ‘cyberattacks from China,’” a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told reporters in a briefing this week. “China itself is a target of international cyberattacks and consistently opposes and combats all forms of cyberattacks.”

Kellermann said the U.S. government needs to step up its offensive cyber-operations against adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran, which “essentially want to conduct a home invasion versus a burglary.” At the same time, he understands the instinct not to overplay Washington’s hand by revealing too many details at this stage. “Metaphorically, you don’t want to shout out, ‘I’ve got a gun. I’ve called the police,’ when someone’s in your house because they could choose to set your house on fire.”

FP’s Christina Lu and Lili Pike contributed reporting for this story.

9. Trump’s transition is happening over private emails. Federal officials are nervous.

Hmmm.... Is this really happening?

Transition of Power

Trump’s transition is happening over private emails. Federal officials are nervous.

Agencies are weighing in-person requirement for sensitive data.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/18/federal-officials-nervous-about-sending-data-to-trump-transition-private-emails-00195217?utm

President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance attend the 125th Army-Navy football game at Northwest Stadium on Dec. 14, 2024. | Getty Images/Kevin Dietsch

By Alice Miranda Ollstein

12/18/2024 06:06 PM EST

Federal officials say they’re worried about sharing documents via email with Donald Trump’s transition team because the incoming officials are eschewing government devices, email addresses and cybersecurity support, raising fears that they could potentially expose sensitive government data.

The private emails have agency employees considering insisting on in-person meetings and document exchanges that they otherwise would have conducted electronically, according to two federal officials granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Their anxiety is particularly high in light of recent hacking attempts from China and Iran that targeted Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and other top officials.

“I can assure you that the transition teams are targets for foreign intelligence collection,” said Michael Daniel, a former White House cyber coordinator who now leads the nonprofit online security organization Cyber Threat Alliance. “There are a lot of countries out there that want to know: What are the policy plans for the incoming administration?”

Trump — who attacked his then-opponent Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for official business during his first presidential run — is overseeing a fully privatized transition that communicates from an array of @transition47.com, @trumpvancetransition.com and @djtfp24.com accounts rather than anything ending in .gov, and uses private servers, laptops and cell phones instead of government-issued devices.

Trump, Biden emphasize 'smooth' transition at White House meeting

Play Video

This break with tradition stems from the Trump team forgoing federal funding and the ethics and transparency requirements that come with it.

While it’s unclear how the decision is impacting a transition that is already behind, with fewer than five weeks remaining until Inauguration Day, one person familiar with the collaboration between the Biden administration and the Trump transition team, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive discussions, said it is further hampering the process.

The dynamic is slowing efforts to share government materials with members of Trump’s landing teams, the person said, referring to the groups of transition officials assigned to meet with federal agencies ahead of the inauguration.

The White House has sent guidance to federal agencies to be cautious when communicating with the Trump transition, a spokesperson said, reminding them that they can elect to “only offer in person briefings and reading rooms in agency spaces” if they’re uncomfortable sending something electronically.

They also advised federal employees that they can require transition officials to “attest” that their private technology complies with government security standards.

“Because they don’t have official emails, people are really wary to share things,” said a State Department employee granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “I’m not going to send sensitive personnel information to some server that lives at Mar-a-Lago while there are so many fears of doxxing and hacking. So they have to physically come and look at the documents on campus, especially for anything with national security implications.”

The Trump transition confirmed its reliance on private emails, with spokesperson Brian Hughes saying in a statement that “all transition business is conducted on a transition-managed email server.”

“We have implemented plans to communicate information securely as necessary,” he added, but declined to say what those plans entail. In a statement in late November, transition co-chair Susie Wiles similarly cited unspecified “security and information protections” the team has in place, arguing that they replace the need for “additional government and bureaucratic oversight.”

The transition’s landing teams began arriving this week at some government agencies — more than a month later than past administrations have deployed them — to get up to speed on all of the resources and problems they will soon inherit. It’s a particularly vulnerable time for national security, stressed Daniel, adding that by rejecting government transition support, the Trump team is also opening itself up to hacking once it’s in power.

“Once someone gets access to some of their information, they can think of ways to send better phishing emails down the road, because they learn more about you,” he explained. “And if you bring that device into a government space, hook it up to a government network, and access it through that account, they’re able to steal your credentials and use that to log on and look like you — look like a legitimate user — and it becomes much harder to detect from a security standpoint.”

History is rife with examples of crises that came early in a new administration and were made worse by challenges passing information from an outgoing to an incoming president and his team, from the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in the 1960s to the Waco standoff in the 1990s.

CUNY John Jay College associate professor Heath Brown, who wrote a book about Joe Biden’s transition, said modern technology only makes that dynamic more risky and complicated.

“In 2020, it was maybe the single most important worry of the transition team, that they would be hacked, and all of this information, including intelligence information, personnel information about job applicants, the whole procedure would be threatened if there was a hack of the transition team,” Brown said. “The [General Services Administration] is in a position to help with that, but saying no to that help raises questions about whether they have put in place a secure system, as is needed in these situations.”

10. Necropolitics and Counterinsurgency: The Costs of Population Resettlement in Small Wars

As Bob Jones would admonish us: this describes Colonial era COIN. (e.g., occupation of a country by imperial forces).

To this conclusion I would add and emphasize the host nation government not the US or other occupying forces must do this. We or any occupying force cannot do this for them.

Successful COIN strategies (EXECUTED BY THE HOST NATION GOVERNMENT) should prioritize addressing grievances, and building inclusive institutions to secure lasting peace and resilience against insurgency.

Excerpts:

In conclusion, the lessons of counterinsurgency resettlement programs underscore the necessity of balancing population control with genuine efforts to foster trust, autonomy, and stability. While strategies like those in Iraq demonstrate the potential for voluntary participation and localized governance to isolate insurgents, they also highlight the risks of fragmenting national unity and over-reliance on tribal structures. Avoiding the pitfalls of necropolitics requires a commitment to the welfare of displaced populations, ensuring that security measures do not devolve into dehumanizing control. Successful COIN strategies should prioritize addressing grievances, and building inclusive institutions to secure lasting peace and resilience against insurgency.

Necropolitics and Counterinsurgency: The Costs of Population Resettlement in Small Wars

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2024/12/20/necropolitics-and-counterinsurgency/

by Matthew P. Arsenault

12.20.2024 at 06:00am

In counterinsurgency warfare, isolating insurgents from civilian populations has long been seen as essential. As Brigadier General S.B. Griffith stated, countering guerrilla warfare relies on location, isolation, and eradication (1989). In practice, this often means forcibly relocating civilians away from insurgent support networks, disrupting community life in the name of security (Bender 1972). But a deeper analysis of these strategies reveals a grim dynamic. By forcibly resettling people and controlling their basic necessities like food, water, shelter, and physical security, states impose a form of power that philosopher Achille Mbembe terms necropolitics (2019). This is a kind of rule where the state exerts dominance not only through direct violence but by controlling the conditions of life and death for entire populations.

Necropolitics explains how resettlement strategies often fail by inadvertently dehumanizing those affected. Forced into “protected villages,” communities often found themselves stripped of autonomy, unable to sustain their livelihoods through traditional means such as farming or trade. Instead, they became reliant on the state for basic necessities, including food, water, and security (Jundian 1974; Hoffman et al. 1991). This dependency reinforced the state’s control but simultaneously dehumanized the affected populations, reducing them to subjects of governance rather than active participants in society. For these populations, life becomes a matter of survival, dictated by the whims of the state, with little regard for personal well-being. By examining failed and semi-successful counterinsurgency (COIN) resettlement strategies in places like Rhodesia, Angola, and Vietnam, we can see how necropolitics shapes not only the experience of those displaced but also the effectiveness of COIN strategies themselves.

The Core of Necropolitics in Counterinsurgency

Necropolitics differs from other forms of state control by focusing on a population’s exposure to death and deprivation. As Mbembe notes, necropolitics is the “ultimate expression of sovereignty” because it allows the state to dictate life’s very terms, especially in contexts of conflict and control (2019). In COIN warfare, this manifests through resettlement programs, which are ostensibly aimed at “protecting” populations but actually control their existence in every sense. By dictating where people live, what resources they can access, and even their degree of social freedom, the state exercises a dehumanizing level of control that sustains a psychological grip over the displaced.

In counterinsurgency, this necropolitical control is rationalized as a way to cut off popular support for the insurgents. Popular support is vital for insurgent success as it provides not only resources and shelter but also a network to gather intelligence and maintain operational mobility.

However, instead of simply isolating insurgents, resettlement often punishes entire communities, putting them in precarious living conditions and deepening grievances that insurgents can exploit. Under this framework, population resettlement becomes a tool for asserting state power, not by building loyalty but by imposing fear, dependency, and social vulnerability on the population, inadvertently stoking civilian resentment.

The Necropolitics of Rhodesian Resettlement: Control and Consequences (1965-1980)

During the Rhodesian Bush War (1965-1980), the Rhodesian government implemented a population resettlement strategy as part of its counterinsurgency campaign against ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrilla forces. This policy, centered around the establishment of “protected villages,” sought to isolate civilians from insurgents by forcibly relocating rural populations. As Weinrich (1977) notes, these villages were intended to sever the logistical and moral support that guerrillas relied upon. However, the forced nature of resettlement, combined with inadequate living conditions and scarce resources found at new village sites, alienated the displaced communities. While the government publicly claimed population resettlement would improve villagers’ safety and quality of life, the reality was one of confinement, surveillance, and insecurity. The relocation effectively stripped villagers from their traditional land and livelihoods, and placed them in tightly controlled spaces that restricted freedom and access to basic needs. Instead of weakening insurgents, these policies fostered resentment and, in many cases, strengthened local support for guerrilla movements.

Wessels (2018) contextualizes these efforts within the broader counterinsurgency framework, emphasizing the disruption to rural livelihoods caused by resettlement. Farmers, often forced to abandon their land, faced economic hardship and psychological distress. This loss of autonomy further deepened grievances against the regime. Moreover, the Rhodesian government’s inability to provide adequate security and resources within resettled areas rendered these villages vulnerable to insurgent influence and attacks. The result was a population increasingly disillusioned with the state and sympathetic to the insurgents’ cause.

Without effective self-defense structures or adequate provisions, the “protected villages” isolated communities not only from insurgents but also from their cultural roots and economic independence. This reduction of the population to a state of controlled vulnerability led to resentment rather than loyalty, increasing support for insurgents. In this sense, the Rhodesian state’s necropolitical control backfired, as displaced populations, having no allegiance to their disinterested state, found common cause with insurgent groups.

White (2011) highlights how these disruptions became rallying points for grassroots mobilization, as nationalist organizations leveraged the suffering of displaced communities to build networks of resistance. Similarly, White (2009) describes how guerrilla forces adapted to resettlement by embedding themselves more deeply within rural populations, utilizing local grievances as a recruitment tool. These dynamics undermined the Rhodesian state’s strategy, transforming resettlement from a tool of control into a catalyst for insurgent support.

Ultimately, the Rhodesian government’s resettlement policies exemplified necropolitical control by rendering entire populations dependent on the state while stripping them of autonomy and agency. The failure to address basic needs or foster loyalty among displaced communities ensured the policy’s counterproductive outcomes, reinforcing insurgent resolve and further destabilizing the region.

Necropolitics of Population Resettlement in Angola and Mozambique (1962-1975)

In 1967, Portuguese colonial forces in Angola and Mozambique implemented population resettlement as a counterinsurgency measure to combat nationalist insurgencies. These programs aimed to isolate civilians from insurgents, control rural populations, and bolster colonial authority. The primary methods included the establishment of aldeamentos (strategic resettlements), reordenamento rural (rural resettlements), and colonatos de soldados (soldier settlements). While these strategies were framed as initiatives to improve security and economic conditions, they often exacerbated local grievances and fueled insurgent support (Bender 1972).

In Angola, resettlement policies achieved mixed outcomes. Bender (1972) highlights limited successes in the northern region, where pre-existing displacement due to conflict, opportunities in the coffee industry, and cultural factors eased the transition for some populations. The availability of employment and a sense of protection offered by strategic villages mitigated dissatisfaction to an extent. However, in the east and south, where populations were uprooted from traditional lands, resettlement caused severe disruptions to socio-economic and cultural structures. Poor planning and insufficient resources left many new villages impoverished, overcrowded, and lacking basic services. The lack of credible commitments from the Portuguese government led to growing resentment, with displaced populations increasingly siding with insurgents such as the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) and Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA), the two primary anti-colonial insurgent groups (Bender 1972).

Similarly, in Mozambique, Jundanian (1974) describes the Portuguese aldeamento program as a poorly funded and hastily implemented measure that often failed to meet its stated objectives. Promises of economic development and improved living conditions went unfulfilled, with many villages offering little more than basic water access. Displaced communities, removed from ancestral lands and economic stability, faced overcrowding and deprivation. The aldeamento system failed to win popular allegiance and, in many cases, created a “boomerang effect,” whereby discontented populations shifted their support to insurgents like the anti-colonial group Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), who capitalized on their grievances (Jundanian 1974).

This pattern underscores the necropolitical nature of these resettlement strategies. By removing populations from their homelands and rendering them dependent on state provisions, the Portuguese sought to exert total control over their lives. However, this dehumanizing approach not only failed to achieve its counterinsurgency goals but also alienated those it intended to subdue. The resettlement programs dismantled traditional social and economic structures, fostering conditions of discontent and resistance. In both Angola and Mozambique, insurgents leveraged these grievances to strengthen their positions, demonstrating how poorly executed population resettlement can undermine state authority and bolster opposition.

In conclusion, the Portuguese resettlement efforts in Angola and Mozambique illustrate the limitations of counterinsurgency strategies that prioritize control over community welfare. The inability to credibly commit to improving living standards and the disruption of traditional structures alienated resettled populations, allowing insurgencies to gain traction. These cases serve as critical examples of how necropolitical strategies can fail, intensifying opposition rather than suppressing it.

Necropolitics of Vietnam’s Strategic Hamlets (1958-1964)

The Strategic Hamlet Program, initiated under South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem during the Vietnam War represents a necropolitical approach to counterinsurgency, where state power manipulated life and death to control the population. The program aimed to isolate rural villagers from Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas by forcibly relocating them into fortified settlements (Halberstam 1992; Sheehan 1989; Leahy 1990). This strategy sought to sever the VC’s access to recruits, resources, and intelligence while fostering loyalty to the South Vietnamese government. However, the implementation of the program often prioritized control over the welfare of displaced communities, resulting in significant opposition (Markel 2005).

In theory, the strategic hamlets were to provide safety, social services, and economic opportunities to relocated villagers, creating conditions for allegiance to the state. Yet, as the reality was far harsher (Sallah and Weiss 2006). Villagers were frequently forced from ancestral lands, cutting them off from traditional livelihoods and community cohesion. Corruption and extortion plagued the program, with villagers coerced into building the hamlets and purchasing materials at inflated prices (Leahy 1990). Overcrowding, inadequate resources, and squalid living conditions further deepened resentment (Sheehan 1989). This necropolitical strategy reduced rural populations to a state of dependency and dehumanization, fostering widespread discontent rather than compliance.

The Viet Cong capitalized on the grievances engendered by the program, infiltrating strategic hamlets to dismantle fortifications and recruit disillusioned villagers (Bender 1972). This “boomerang effect” highlighted the failure of the program to sever the VC’s connection to rural populations, undermining its primary objective of isolating insurgents.

In contrast, the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Action Program (CAP) demonstrated an alternative to necropolitical resettlement strategies. Rather than forcibly relocating villagers, Marine units lived and worked alongside rural populations in their native environments, building trust and fostering local defense. By training and integrating local militia forces into the counterinsurgency effort, CAP avoided the dislocation and resentment characteristic of the Strategic Hamlet Program. This collaborative approach reinforced community autonomy and resilience, providing a model for counterinsurgency that prioritized engagement over coercion (West, 2000).

Ultimately, the Strategic Hamlet Program failed because it relied on necropolitical control—prioritizing domination and dependency over the well-being of displaced communities. Its disregard for civilian needs and its inability to deliver credible benefits intensified opposition and strengthened insurgent resolve. This case underscores the risks inherent in counterinsurgency strategies that dehumanize populations, demonstrating how such approaches often undermine their intended objectives.

Resettlement Without Dehumanization: The British Model in Malaya (1948-1960)

British resettlement efforts in Malaya represent one of the few effective applications of population resettlement as a counterinsurgency strategy. Developed to combat the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), the plan isolated the MCP from its primary support base—the Chinese squatter population (O’Ballance 1966). By resettling approximately 600,000 people into fortified “New Villages,” the British severed the MCP’s access to vital resources such as food, recruits, and intelligence (Barber 2004). This strategy achieved success by addressing the specific demographics, economic structures, and operational requirements of the Malayan context (Hoffman et al. 1991).

A significant factor in the British success was its focus on a small, distinct, and socially isolated minority population (Markel 2005). The Chinese squatters, largely disconnected from the indigenous Malay population and lacking long-standing ties to the land, were more susceptible to resettlement efforts (Barber 2004). Additionally, their economic reliance on the rubber industry paralleled the relatively successful resettlement programs in Angola’s northern regions, where displaced populations adapted more easily due to prior experiences as plantation laborers (Bender, 1972; Markel, 2005; Barber 2004).

A significant element of the British policy was its dual focus on improving living conditions and using psychological engagement (Hoffman et al 1991). The British established New Villages with essential amenities such as housing, schools, clinics, and utilities, which helped to raise the quality of life for many resettled communities. Additionally, they employed psychological strategies to foster collaboration and build trust, highlighting the government’s commitment to the well-being of those relocated (Barber 2004; O’Ballance 1966). This approach set the plan apart from other resettlement programs that relied heavily on coercion, as it prioritized minimizing upheaval and cultivating allegiance among the population.

Unlike other cases of population resettlement, such as those in Vietnam, Angola, and Mozambique, the British strategy was less rooted in necropolitical control and more in pragmatic governance (Markel 2006) . In Vietnam, Angola, and Mozambique, resettlement programs dehumanized populations by forcibly uprooting them, stripping them of autonomy, and placing them in conditions of dependency and neglect. These programs often prioritized state control over community welfare, fostering resentment and insurgent support as populations endured poor living conditions and broken promises.

In contrast, the British worked to minimize the necropolitical aspects of resettlement by focusing on improving living standards and fostering loyalty. While the relocation of the Chinese squatters was inherently disruptive, the British avoided total dehumanization by addressing basic needs, building infrastructure, and integrating communities into a socio-political framework (Markel 2006). The absence of coercion as a primary tool and the credible commitment to improving the lives of resettled populations helped avoid the “boomerang effect” seen in other cases, where resentment towards the state empowered insurgents.

This comparative success underscores that population resettlement, when implemented with attention to welfare and inclusion, can be an effective counterinsurgency tool, avoiding the destructive consequences typical of necropolitical strategies. By focusing on collaboration and community improvement, the British plan offers a counterpoint to the failures of resettlement programs driven primarily by control and coercion.

Conclusion: The Risks of Necropolitics in COIN Strategy

The history of resettlement programs as an element of counterinsurgency strategy reveals that necropolitics, as a tool for asserting power over life, ultimately undermines the success of counterinsurgency efforts. By reducing displaced populations to subjects of survival, stripped of autonomy and deprived of resources, states practicing necropolitics often increase the very support for insurgents they seek to eliminate. When states rely on resettlement as a means of control without genuine commitment to population welfare, they place entire communities in a state of prolonged insecurity that insurgents can exploit.

Only by recognizing the dangers of necropolitics, in its ability to undermine counterinsurgency efforts, can modern states hope to avoid the failures seen in Rhodesia, Angola, and Vietnam. Successful strategies like the British in Malaya, and the singular success of USMC CAP in Vietnam, offer a model that emphasizes credible support and community autonomy, avoiding the dehumanizing control that breeds insurgent loyalty. Therefore, the application of counterinsurgency principles within complex contemporary operating environments, such as (2003-choice) Iraq, must clearly differentiate effective population relocation and protection strategies from (counterproductive) necropolitics in order to achieve desired security and political outcomes.

According to Markel (2006), population control in Iraq focused on voluntary participation in “gated communities” that provided enhanced security and access to reconstruction aid. These communities aimed to prevent insurgent infiltration and coercion while fostering collaboration with Sunni populations. The strategy leveraged tribal structures and localized governance to build trust and align communities with the government, creating defensible zones that supported the “clear, hold, and build” counterinsurgency framework.

However, the strategy had limitations. Its success depended heavily on local buy-in, which was not guaranteed across all Sunni communities. Urbanization posed logistical challenges, making it difficult to fully isolate insurgents in densely populated cities. Additionally, the emphasis on localized solutions risked fragmenting national unity, as tribal allegiances sometimes undermined broader state-building efforts. Balancing local and national priorities remains crucial to addressing these weaknesses.

In conclusion, the lessons of counterinsurgency resettlement programs underscore the necessity of balancing population control with genuine efforts to foster trust, autonomy, and stability. While strategies like those in Iraq demonstrate the potential for voluntary participation and localized governance to isolate insurgents, they also highlight the risks of fragmenting national unity and over-reliance on tribal structures. Avoiding the pitfalls of necropolitics requires a commitment to the welfare of displaced populations, ensuring that security measures do not devolve into dehumanizing control. Successful COIN strategies should prioritize addressing grievances, and building inclusive institutions to secure lasting peace and resilience against insurgency.

Tags: counterinsurgency, Forced Relocation, Guerrilla Warfare, Necropolitics, Population Resettlement, State Control

About The Author

Matthew P. Arsenault
Matthew P. Arsenault holds a PhD in political science and has worked on issues of political violence across academia, government, and the private sector.

11. Next Harding Fellows selected, program expanded

This program could have-long lasting impact. Not just the fellows but the emphasis on soldiers writing to inform, educate, advocate, and influence. we not only have to outfight our enemies but we have to outthink them too.

“Now that we have run out of money we have to think.”

― Winston Churchill

And WRITE.

One of my favorite lines from a website and used on some memes. "Read. Think. Write. Repeat."

Next Harding Fellows selected, program expanded

By Sarah Hauck, The Army University Public Affairs OfficeDecember 17, 2024

https://www.army.mil/article/282087/next_harding_fellows_selected_program_expanded

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THE ARMY UNIVERSITY, FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kansas – The second group of Harding Fellow military editors-in-chief have been selected and will be the first to experience the expanded broadening opportunity.

This cohort’s fellow program will see them not just editing their journals, but also on the University of Kansas campus as graduate students.

A cooperative agreement with the university represents a mutually beneficial education arrangement for the Fellows to earn a Master of Science in Journalism and Mass Communications before editing their journals.

Five Army journals, Army Sustainment, Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, Special Warfare, Infantry, and Air Defense Artillery, will gain their new Fellows starting summer of 2026, following their degree program.

“The selection of the first full cohort of Harding Fellows is an important step in strengthening our Army profession. These specially selected Fellows will acquire and apply editorial skills at our Centers of Excellence to revitalize our professional journals,” Gen. Gary M. Brito, Commanding General, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. “This program not only strengthens the quality and accessibility of our military journals but also ensures that our leaders can share lessons learned and insights that drive professional discourse and discussion in support of our Army’s mission.”

The FY25 Harding Fellow Cohort includes:

Army Sustainment: Capt. Steven M. Denaro (AG)

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin: Capt. Thepnakone T. Souimaniphanh (MI)

Special Warfare: 1st Sgt. Alexander A. Conaty (CA)

Infantry: Capt. Jared G. Petersen

Air Defense Artillery Journal: Capt. Matthew A. Becker (AD)

Capt. Matthew Becker is one of the five Soldiers selected for the second group of Harding Fellows.

The program provides Becker with the chance to improve himself and his profession.

"I am always drawn to opportunities that are both challenging and rewarding,” he said. “The Harding Fellowship offers a unique platform to push my intellectual and professional boundaries while representing and promoting the Air Defense Artillery branch, highlighting its vital contributions to the Army’s mission."

Harding Fellow Program

The Maj. Gen.

Edwin Forrest Harding Fellowship was established in July 2024 as a continuation of the Harding Project’s drive for cultural change through professional writing and discourse.

The first group included 11 junior officers, hand-picked by their branch leadership, to be the first uniformed editors for their Army branch journals in almost two decades.

Paired with the talented civilian editors, the Fellows worked to renew the impact of their journals.

The first Fellows were instrumental in the increase of professional writing and publication across their respective journals, with a nearly 50% increase in submissions.

They also supported the launch of the Line of Departure website, which provides web-first, mobile-friendly professional pieces for the Army from any device and location.

The program, which is a two-year assignment, became an official broadening opportunity in August 2024.

For more information on the CSA’s Harding Project, visit Harding Project Substack | Zachary Griffiths | Substack.

12. Swedish police board Chinese ship in probe over severed cables

Swedish police board Chinese ship in probe over severed cables | CNN

CNN · December 19, 2024

The Chinese bulk carrier ship Yi Peng 3 in the Kattegat Strait near Denmark in November.

Mikkel Berg Pedersen/Ritzau Scanpix Denmark/Reuters/FILE

Reuters —

Swedish police said on Thursday they had boarded the Yi Peng 3 vessel, which is at the center of an investigation into Baltic Sea cable breaches, at the invitation of the Chinese authorities.

This picture taken on October 12, 2015 shows the C-Lion1 submarine telecommunications cable being laid to the bottom of the Baltic Sea by cable laying ship "Ile de Brehat" off the shore of Helsinki, Finland. Germany and Finland said November 18, 2024 they were "deeply concerned" that an undersea telecommunications cable linking the countries had been severed and opened a probe, at a time of high tensions with Russia. "Our European security is not only under threat from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors," the countries' foreign ministers said in a joint statement.

Heikki Saukkomaa/Lehtikuva/AFP/Getty Images/FILE

The Chinese bulk carrier is wanted in Sweden for questioning over a breach of two undersea fiber-optic cables in November, and has been stationary in waters nearby for a month while diplomats in Stockholm and Beijing discussed the matter.

Investigators quickly zeroed in on the ship, which left the Russian port of Ust-Luga on November 15, and a Reuters analysis of MarineTraffic data showed that the vessel’s coordinates corresponded to the time and place of the breaches.

Swedish police said on Thursday they participated on board the Yi Peng 3 as observers only, while Chinese authorities conducted investigations.

“In parallel, the preliminary investigation into sabotage in connection with two cable breaks in the Baltic Sea is continuing,” the police said in a statement.

The actions taken on board the ship on Thursday were not part of the Swedish-led preliminary investigation, the police added.

Danish authorities are facilitating the visit to the bulk carrier, which is anchored in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and Sweden, police said.

The Baltic Sea cables, one linking Finland and Germany and the other connecting Sweden to Lithuania, were damaged on November 17 and 18, prompting German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius to say he assumed it was caused by sabotage.

The breaches happened in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone and Swedish prosecutors are leading the investigation on suspicion of possible sabotage.

Western intelligence officials from multiple countries have said they are confident the Chinese ship caused the cuts to both cables. But they have expressed different views on whether these were accidents or could have been deliberate.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has urged the ship to return to Sweden to aid the investigation.

The was no immediate response from the Chinese foreign ministry outside of business hours on Thursday.

CNN · December 19, 2024

13. Looming government shutdown could hurt military families, veterans

Military Times should not be wasting ink on these articles because troops, families, and veterans mean nothing to Musk and Ramaswamy who seem to be the new fiscal policemen.

Looming government shutdown could hurt military families, veterans

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2024/12/19/looming-government-shutdown-could-hurt-military-families-veterans/?utm

By Leo Shane III and Karen Jowers

Dec 19, 2024, 08:45 AM

Tourists walk by a sign near the Statue of Liberty during the U.S. government shutdown in 2013. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP)

A partial government shutdown this weekend could delay troops’ paychecks at the start of the new year and shutter some base recreation activities just before Christmas, yielding a stressful holiday season for military families.

Congress has until midnight Friday to pass legislation extending the federal budget into the spring and avoiding a government shutdown. House and Senate leaders appeared to have a deal in place on Wednesday morning, but the plans were thrown into disarray when President-elect Donald Trump came out in opposition to the plan Wednesday afternoon.

With the deadline less than 48 hours away and no votes scheduled on the issue in either chamber, federal offices — including ones in the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs — are expected to begin informing employees about shutdown protocols on Thursday.

While a partial shutdown would technically begin early Saturday morning, most of the impacts would not be felt until Monday morning, when the new work week begins.

The following is a look at the most significant impacts for military families and veterans if federal offices are shuttered, based on past memos from government officials.

Military pay

Active-duty troops would be required to continue to report for duty in the event of a shutdown, but their paychecks would stop until a new funding deal is reached.

Practically, troops would not notice that delayed pay until the first week of January, when the next round of military checks is scheduled to be sent out. The 2025 pay is also the first with the 4.5% pay raise for all troops, money that they would not get until later.

During the last partial government shutdown, Defense Department funds were protected but Department of Homeland Security appropriations were not. That meant that most Coast Guard members went without paychecks for weeks, until the stalemate was settled.

A shutdown would also delay some specialty pays and stipends. In 2013, Congress passed legislation protecting military paychecks, but death gratuities for families of troops killed overseas were delayed for weeks because of the budget fight.

Civilian defense workers

Unlike troops, not all civilian defense staffers would be required to keep working in the event of a shutdown. Of the 700,000-plus Defense Department civilian employees, roughly half are considered “essential” employees who would remain on the job without pay.

As a result, some troops could find their offices half-staffed after a shutdown begins, with some key programs halted until funding disputes are settled.

In 2013, most of the 350,000 furloughed Defense Department civilians were called back to work within a week, without pay.

Back pay for civilian employees is guaranteed, thanks to a law passed in 2019. But the same does not go for contractors and subcontractors. In many cases, those workers are sent home and lose paychecks for the duration of the shutdown.

Military medical sites

Critical medical and dental care are exempted from shutdown orders, but elective surgery and other elective procedures can be postponed or cancelled during a shutdown.

Private sector health care under Tricare would not be affected by a shutdown, and specialty medical care for wounded warriors would continue. But office hours could be curtailed because of staffing issues.

Child care and MWR

In the past, Defense Department officials have said child care would be decided base-by-base, depending on installation staffing and demands. Families may not know if their facility will remain open until Monday.

Department guidance during previous shutdown threats has also specified that morale, welfare and recreation activities that receive any taxpayer funding will operate during a shutdown if they are deemed necessary to support essential operations. That includes mess halls, physical training and “child care activities required for readiness.”

Non-essential activities could be shuttered.

Activities and organizations funded entirely by nonappropriated funds, such as many MWR activities and the military exchanges, generally will not be affected. The exchanges are largely funded by sales revenue, and part of their profits go to help fund some MWR activities.

Commissaries

Military grocery stores should not be affected unless the shutdown lasts several months. Defense Working Capital Fund activities — which includes the Defense Commissary Agency — is permitted to continue to operate until cash reserves are exhausted.

Defense officials have also provided exceptions to stay open in the past for overseas commissaries and sites “determined to be in remote U.S. locations where no other sources of food are reasonably available for military personnel.”

Veterans Affairs operations

Unlike the Defense Department, most Veterans Affairs offices are funded a year in advance. That blunts the impact of a shutdown on benefits processing, medical centers and other support services, all of which will continue operating amid a partial shutdown.

Hours and appointment availability could be changed because of the budget impasse, but VA hospitals will remain open and operational.

Some department information hotlines could be shuttered during a shutdown, and some VA central office staff would be furloughed until new funding is approved. But compared to other departments, the impact on overall VA operations would be minimal.

About Leo Shane III and Karen Jowers

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

Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book "A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families." She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.

14. Senior U.S. Diplomats Arrive in Syria to Meet With Governing Militias

Excerpt:

The diplomats “will be engaging directly with the Syrian people, including members of civil society, activists, members of different communities and other Syrian voices about their vision for the future of their country and how the United States can help support them,” the State Department said in a statement.

The officials are Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs; Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs; and Daniel Rubinstein, the new special adviser on Syria.

Senior U.S. Diplomats Arrive in Syria to Meet With Governing Militias

The U.S. officials plan to look for signs of Austin Tice, a missing American journalist, as well as other U.S. citizens.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/us/politics/us-diplomats-syria.html

A rebel fighter with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the most powerful militia group in Syria, at a presidential palace in the capital, Damascus.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

By Edward Wong

Reporting from Washington

Dec. 20, 2024, 12:32 a.m. ET

The State Department said early Friday that three senior American diplomats had arrived in Damascus, the capital of Syria, to meet with leaders of the militias that have seized control of the country, and to look for signs of the journalist Austin Tice and other missing U.S. citizens.

They are the first American diplomats to enter Damascus since the crumbling of the old government. They are seeking to learn about and help shape the political landscape of Syria after the rapid fall this month of Bashar al-Assad, the longtime autocratic leader who ordered his forces to carry out mass atrocities during the civil war that grew out of an uprising in 2011. The United States broke off diplomatic ties with Syria the next year.

The visit represents a tentative step toward engagement in Syria, a nation in which U.S. involvement in recent years has usually involved the military, not diplomacy. The Biden administration has been in contact with militia leaders but has wrestled with how directly to engage, partly because the United States designated a precursor of the lead rebel group as terrorists.

The diplomats “will be engaging directly with the Syrian people, including members of civil society, activists, members of different communities and other Syrian voices about their vision for the future of their country and how the United States can help support them,” the State Department said in a statement.

The officials are Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs; Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs; and Daniel Rubinstein, the new special adviser on Syria.

The agency said the diplomats plan to discuss with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the most powerful militia, the “transition principles” that American, Arab and Turkish officials had agreed upon at a meeting last weekend in Aqaba, Jordan. American officials have emphasized that groups in Syria must build an inclusive process for governance and fairly treat ethnic and religious minorities in the country, including Christians.

“We laid out together some principles for what we expect going forward in Syria if what emerges in Syria wants to have the recognition, the support that it’s going to need from the international community,” Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said at a public talk at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday. “So I think that was a very useful exercise in kind of laying out those expectations, the principles that we put out.”

Image

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the United States and other nations “laid out together some principles for what we expect” from a new Syrian government.Credit...Jeenah Moon/Reuters

The leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has said in interviews that his group plans to have an inclusive process and does not seek to harm non-Muslims in Syria. The group is conservative and follows tenets of political Islam, but it broke from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, two militant organizations, years ago, and it has even fought them.

It is unclear how the American diplomats would engage with Mr. al-Jolani or Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of the rebel coalition that went on the offensive against Mr. al-Assad. President Barack Obama designated a precursor of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist group, though that does not make it illegal for U.S. diplomats to meet with the current group. Its leaders have urged the United States to drop the designation, while U.S. officials have said they are watching the group’s actions closely.

A main reason for the designation was the precursor group, the Nusra Front, had begun using terrorist tactics in the civil war, including setting off a pair of deadly car bombs in Damascus in December 2011. Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria at the time, pushed for the designation.

Mr. Ford said in an interview with The New York Times this month that the Biden administration should consider taking Hayat Tahrir al-Sham off the list of terrorist organizations. While governing Idlib Province in recent years, he said, the group has shown a tolerance for Christians and allowed them to rebuild churches.

The Biden administration has also found Hayat Tahrir al-Sham willing to help in the search for Mr. Tice, who was abducted in Damascus in 2012, and has given the group a list of former Assad government officials who might have knowledge of him. President Biden has said he believes Mr. Tice is still alive and in Syria.

Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department. More about Edward Wong

15. Why China Isn’t Scared of Trump

Excerpts:

Trump will also seek to avoid overt conflict with China, no matter his strident rhetoric. The issue of Taiwan’s independence has been and will remain a source of friction between Beijing and Washington, but China and the United States are unlikely to go to war over it. In the next four years, Beijing’s attention will be significantly occupied by the task of reviving the country’s slowing economy. China is not about to draw up a timetable for reunification with Taiwan when it is concerned primarily with its own GDP growth. For his part, Trump wants to go down in history as one of the greatest U.S. presidents, on par with the likes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. To that end, he will focus on domestic reforms and building a strong economy at home. He will not want to get entangled in the matter of Taiwan and risk entering a war between great powers—after all, he is very proud of not having started a single war during his first term.

Those who anticipate a darkening Cold War between China and Trump’s United States are misguided. The United States’ competition with China is not over ideology—as it was with the Soviet Union—but over technology. In the digital age, security and prosperity depend hugely on technological progress. China and the United States will battle over innovation in fields such as artificial intelligence and wrestle over markets and high-technology supply chains. They will not—and certainly not under Trump—seek to convert others to their preferred governing ideology. The Soviet Union and the United States used proxy wars to spread communism and capitalism, respectively. The global South, in particular, still feels the echoes of the devastation and upheaval these wars unleashed around the world. Today, however, proxy conflicts between the great powers serve little purpose. Beijing has no interest in changing another country’s ideology. Similarly, Trump has no interest in spreading American values, whatever he thinks them to be. He sees the war in Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia and finds the endeavor wholly objectionable. There is no reason for him to stoke a proxy war against China across the Taiwan Strait or in the South China Sea. After all, China has far more economic and military resources than does Russia.

In great power competition, foreign policy can often play second fiddle to domestic policy. Although Trump’s isolationism certainly creates opportunities for Beijing to improve its relations with U.S. allies, reforms at home will really determine the course of the competition between the two powers. Currently, both Chinese leaders and Trump’s team are preoccupied by domestic matters more than foreign ones. If Chinese leaders do a better job of implementing reforms than Trump does in the next four years, China will narrow the power gap with the United States. But if Trump does a better job than China in this aspect—and eschews damaging foreign conflicts and entanglements—the power gap between the two countries will get bigger.

Why China Isn’t Scared of Trump

Foreign Affairs · by More by Yan Xuetong · December 20, 2024

U.S.-Chinese Tensions May Rise, But Washington’s Isolationism Will Help Beijing

Yan Xuetong

December 20, 2024

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, November 2017 Damir Sagolj / Reuters

Yan Xuetong is Distinguished Professor and Honorary President of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University.

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For years, Donald Trump has inveighed against China, describing it as the root cause of all manner of ills in the United States. He has lamented Washington’s huge trade deficit with Beijing and blames China for hollowing out the American industrial heartland. He has insisted that the COVID-19 pandemic was China’s fault. More recently, he has pinned the U.S. opioid crisis on Beijing, accusing China of “attacking” the United States with fentanyl. China has appeared in Trump’s rallies and press conferences as a monstrous adversary, a foe whom only Trump can subdue. During his first term, he upended decades of U.S. policy by initiating a trade war with China. As he prepares to begin his second term, his rhetoric and his cabinet appointments suggest that he will double down on that hardline approach. The rocky relationship between the two countries is set to get rockier.

China’s leaders, however, do not look at Trump with fear. They learned a great deal from his first term. His propensity for economic protectionism will lead to further disputes and rising tensions, but Beijing believes that it can navigate such confrontations. Moreover, Trump’s dubious commitment to U.S. allies will encourage other countries to hedge their bets, building ties with Beijing to offset the unpredictability of Washington. The likelihood of military clashes with the United States is also low. Since Trump’s foreign policy has never evinced any deep ideological commitments, it seems unlikely that the competition between the two countries will take on the more destructive dimensions of the Cold War. Trump does not want to get enmeshed in wars and would much rather focus on domestic reforms. He will soon arrive in the White House with the intention of containing China, but Chinese leaders are not dreading his return.

UNFAZED BY TRUMP

Beijing does not believe that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election in the United States has much bearing on the overall trajectory of U.S. policy toward China. No matter who entered the White House, the next president of the United States would be backed by a bipartisan consensus that perceives China as a threat to U.S. global dominance and would keep trying to contain China. Of course, not everything will remain the same from one administration to another. In his second term, Trump’s China policy will not only differ from that of U.S. President Joe Biden’s but also from that of his own first term. For instance, Trump has filled important foreign policy and national security positions with right-wing extremists, some of whom are less than 50 years old, marking a departure from the kinds of senior officials he selected after the 2016 election. Unlike those figures, many of whom were military officials steeped in the experience of the late period of the Cold War when China and the United States were strategic partners, many of his new picks came of age during China’s meteoric rise on the global stage. They see China as the primary threat to the United States, and they favor more extreme and coercive policies to suppress China’s advances.

Such a hardline approach may not work all that well in a geopolitical context that has changed significantly since Trump’s first term. When Trump entered the White House in 2017, most countries thought he would behave in office much like a conventional leader, an ideologically neutral and economically rational decision-maker. Major U.S. allies hoped that Trump would commit to their security. Beijing invited Trump to visit China in the first year of his term. Despite U.S. opposition to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin invited Trump to Moscow in 2017 for Russia’s annual celebration of the victory in World War II.

This time, leaders are keen to protect their countries from the uncertainty of a second Trump term. French President Emmanuel Macron invited Trump to Paris in early December, hoping to underline to the president-elect that Europeans will be the main decision-makers when it comes to their security. Germany and Japan worry that Trump will demand more financial payments to guarantee the U.S. military presence in their countries. South Korea’s interim government fears that Trump will take advantage of its lack of authority to extract economic gains. Trump will have to grapple with the fact that Russia and the United States are now on opposite sides of the war in Ukraine. Washington’s unwavering political support and military aid for Israel’s brutal operation in Gaza—which many in the world consider an act of genocide—has further exposed the hypocrisy of U.S. claims to champion international law and human rights.

Since Trump took office eight years ago, Beijing has become more adept at managing its competition with Washington. This competition can be said to have begun in earnest in 2010 when U.S. President Barack Obama embarked upon a “pivot to Asia.” In the succeeding years, Beijing has navigated the differing strategies of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations; Obama and Biden tried to contain China through multilateral approaches while Trump took a more unilateral path. With that experience, Chinese leaders are unfazed by the prospect of another Trump term, and even publicly released strategic guidelines on how to handle the president-elect’s potential policies toward China in November. Beijing, according to the document published by China’s consulate-general in Los Angeles on November 17, will adhere to the “commitment to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation as principles for handling China-U.S. relations.” “Mutual respect” suggests that China will retaliate against any provocative actions taken by Trump; “peaceful coexistence” means that China will seek to engage Trump in dialogue on managing differences and conflicts to stabilize bilateral relations; and “win-win cooperation” refers to joint work on those global issues in which China and the United States have shared interests, such as ending the war in Ukraine and curbing the flow of illicit drugs .

TURBULENCE AHEAD

Trump seems intent on engaging in economic protectionism in his second term, particularly when it comes to China. He has indicated that he might levy further tariffs on Chinese goods, impose more restrictions on U.S. investment in China as well as on Chinese capital in the U.S. stock market, place more constraints on technological cooperation, and reduce the number of Chinese students studying in the United States. These decisions will invariably lead to more friction between Beijing and Washington. The Biden administration extended the tariffs that Trump placed on Chinese products during his first term, but it focused principally on excluding China from technological supply chains; it did not seek to comprehensively decouple the U.S. economy from China. During Biden’s tenure, trade in other sectors between China and the United States continued even as cooperation on cutting-edge technology came to a halt. In his second term, however, Trump is likely to push harder for wider decoupling and try to drastically reduce the market share of Chinese products in the United States, including goods assembled outside of China but heavily reliant on Chinese investments and components. Beijing will likely retaliate. The tit-for-tat dynamic may drive the simmering trade war between the two powers to a new peak, with damaging consequences for the global economy as many other countries scramble to adopt protectionist policies of their own.

As Trump courts an escalation in the trade war, his administration will likely ramp up military pressure on Beijing. When confronting adversaries, Trump has often turned to bullying and bluffing tactics, such as his threat to attack North Korea with “fire and fury” after Pyongyang tested midrange missiles in 2017. Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, the nominee for secretary of defense, are both considered China hawks with strong anticommunist beliefs. If the Senate approves their nominations, they may encourage Trump’s tendency to bluff when the United States seeks to address military tensions with Beijing, especially when it comes to maritime issues in the South China Sea and the conflicts about Taiwan. Through bellicose rhetoric and impulsive actions, Washington might provoke crises similar to that which followed the 2022 visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, when China responded to U.S. provocation by stepping up its military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait. It would hardly be surprising if Trump or his officials end up sparking similar incidents and causing spikes in tensions between China and the United States.

Trump’s second term will almost certainly have a chilling effect on official dialogues between Beijing and Washington. Under the Obama administration, there were more than 90 official channels for dialogue between the two governments. By the end of Trump’s first term, there were none. Trump will likely suspend the close to 20 channels with China that the Biden administration has established, and he may replace them with new channels under his direct oversight rather than through high-ranking bureaucrats. But China will exercise extreme caution when reaching out to Trump, as leaders there still remember how Trump’s visit to Beijing in November 2017 led to a precipitous deterioration in bilateral relations in the next month when Washington denied China’s status as a developing country in the World Trade Organization.

Beyond the sparring of governments, animosity between China and the United States could grow at the societal level. Populism is gaining strength in both countries, fanning the flames of jingoism. If Trump carries through with his threat of targeting China with economic measures and engages in more saber rattling, the resulting political tension between the two states will inevitably encourage hostility between their respective peoples. Both American populists and Chinese populists (a group that mainly consists of radical netizens who follow jingoist social media influencers) attribute the cause of their domestic problems to foreign malevolence, an argument that will be encouraged by those in power as it conveniently shifts blame to an outside agent. It may become harder to improve bilateral relations as cultural and social pressure keeps the countries at loggerheads.

MIND THE GAP

Trump’s second term may create rising tensions between China and the United States as he tries to use economic and military pressure to constrain Beijing. But in practice, a Trump presidency may benefit China in several ways. For one, Trump’s relative disinterest in ideological issues may soften some of the edges of the rivalry with Beijing. With his eyes firmly fixed on the bottom line, Trump has never really cared to advocate for human rights, for instance. He has no interest in shaping China’s political system to conform to its Western counterparts, and he is therefore unlikely to be keen to intervene in China’s domestic affairs. Beijing has no plan to spread its ideology internationally, with the Chinese Communist Party focused on maintaining political stability at home. Economic and strategic conflicts may increase between Beijing and Washington during Trump’s second term, but they will not escalate into ideological conflicts that place the two states on a direct collision course.

Trump’s political isolationism—the diplomatic counterpart of his economic protectionism—may lead the United States to reduce its investments in protecting traditional allies. The president-elect has long berated U.S. allies for riding on the coattails of U.S. power and largesse. These complaints may drive U.S. allies, both European and East Asian states, to see the merits of hedging between China and the United States. Consider, for example, the case of Singapore. In 2010, with the Chinese-U.S. competition growing, Singapore adopted a strategy of hedging between the two great powers. It leaned into its economic ties with China while relying on the United States for security. Many other countries followed suit, including Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the other ASEAN member states.

A Trump presidency may benefit China in several ways.

Since 2022, the war in Ukraine has shaken many Western countries and compelled them to align more closely with the United States. But if Trump reduces military aid to Ukraine, as he promised on the campaign trail, then confidence in U.S. security promises may wane. To shore up their economies so that they can better support Ukraine’s war effort, European countries may become more forthright hedgers, allowing China fresh opportunities to build economic cooperation with the United States’ traditional allies. Trump also sees himself as a peacemaker and would like to be able to say that he brought the war in Ukraine to an end. China could play a constructive role in helping Trump achieve that goal. The war has only negative consequences for the Chinese economy, and Beijing would be happy to see the back of it. China has a close relationship with Russia. It could leverage that influence in working with Trump to find an effective peace deal.

Trump will also seek to avoid overt conflict with China, no matter his strident rhetoric. The issue of Taiwan’s independence has been and will remain a source of friction between Beijing and Washington, but China and the United States are unlikely to go to war over it. In the next four years, Beijing’s attention will be significantly occupied by the task of reviving the country’s slowing economy. China is not about to draw up a timetable for reunification with Taiwan when it is concerned primarily with its own GDP growth. For his part, Trump wants to go down in history as one of the greatest U.S. presidents, on par with the likes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. To that end, he will focus on domestic reforms and building a strong economy at home. He will not want to get entangled in the matter of Taiwan and risk entering a war between great powers—after all, he is very proud of not having started a single war during his first term.

Those who anticipate a darkening Cold War between China and Trump’s United States are misguided. The United States’ competition with China is not over ideology—as it was with the Soviet Union—but over technology. In the digital age, security and prosperity depend hugely on technological progress. China and the United States will battle over innovation in fields such as artificial intelligence and wrestle over markets and high-technology supply chains. They will not—and certainly not under Trump—seek to convert others to their preferred governing ideology. The Soviet Union and the United States used proxy wars to spread communism and capitalism, respectively. The global South, in particular, still feels the echoes of the devastation and upheaval these wars unleashed around the world. Today, however, proxy conflicts between the great powers serve little purpose. Beijing has no interest in changing another country’s ideology. Similarly, Trump has no interest in spreading American values, whatever he thinks them to be. He sees the war in Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia and finds the endeavor wholly objectionable. There is no reason for him to stoke a proxy war against China across the Taiwan Strait or in the South China Sea. After all, China has far more economic and military resources than does Russia.

In great power competition, foreign policy can often play second fiddle to domestic policy. Although Trump’s isolationism certainly creates opportunities for Beijing to improve its relations with U.S. allies, reforms at home will really determine the course of the competition between the two powers. Currently, both Chinese leaders and Trump’s team are preoccupied by domestic matters more than foreign ones. If Chinese leaders do a better job of implementing reforms than Trump does in the next four years, China will narrow the power gap with the United States. But if Trump does a better job than China in this aspect—and eschews damaging foreign conflicts and entanglements—the power gap between the two countries will get bigger.

Yan Xuetong is Distinguished Professor and Honorary President of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Yan Xuetong · December 20, 2024

16. The Path to a Better Syria

Excerpts:

Meeting these urgent needs will require substantial funding from the international community, which is likely to condition reconstruction aid or the lifting of sanctions on political reform. As a recent statement by the G-7 highlighted, Syria will only be able to unlock international support by making progress toward meeting the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which in 2015 outlined a path to peace in Syria through a democratic political transition. Without these foundational steps (and the ensuing assistance from the international community), any broader recovery will remain precarious at best. The emerging government in Damascus must therefore prioritize political reform. For their part, Western policymakers must set realistic goals and outline clear steps for the new authorities in Damascus to follow. Syrians cannot afford further delays. With winter intensifying and basic commodities in short supply, action is imperative to mitigate suffering and lay the groundwork for sustainable recovery.

Syria’s economy lies in ruins—a shadow of its prewar self.

A phased easing of sanctions will also be essential to Syria’s recovery. With Assad out of the picture, the West should immediately offer unconditional sanctions relief in key sectors, such as energy, electricity, and banking, to reintegrate Syria economically and allow these critical industries to recover. Broader sanctions relief, however, relating to the removal of HTS from terrorist designation lists, should remain tied to measurable benchmarks in governance reforms, including inclusivity, respect for human rights, and commitment to a democratic transition. This approach would use existing sanctions to incentivize reform while fostering international confidence in Syria’s political and economic trajectory.

Beyond international economic relief, sustainable development will have to be led by Syrians, for Syrians, and underpinned by private-sector activity. The private sector’s revitalization will be essential for reducing poverty and fostering self-reliance. Decades of cronyism and sanctions have stifled entrepreneurship, leaving businesses hesitant to invest in a coercive and opaque environment. To restore confidence and stimulate economic activity, it is imperative to develop free-market capacities by encouraging private ownership and entrepreneurship, fostering competition, lowering barriers for new businesses, and establishing a transparent regulatory framework. The immediate reforms needed, including reversing protectionist policies on imports and dismantling exchange-rate mechanisms that prop up inefficient domestic production, are essential to creating a level playing field and encouraging economic growth.

Finally, Syria’s long-term recovery will depend on reintegration into the global economy through trade agreements, regional partnerships, and diplomatic engagement. The country’s new leaders must recognize that a failure to meet the international community’s expectations of political reform and transparency risks prolonging the country’s exclusion, deepening its instability, and exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. As the past 13 years have shown, what happens in Syria does not stay in Syria. If the new government and the international community cannot work together to carry out meaningful reforms, the Syrian people and the greater region will suffer the consequences.

The Path to a Better Syria

Foreign Affairs · by More by Karam Shaar · December 20, 2024

A Secure Peace Will Depend on Economic Revitalization

Karam Shaar and Benjamin Fève

December 20, 2024

Counting Syrian currency at a market in Damascus, December 2024 Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

Karam Shaar is Director of Karam Shaar Advisory Limited, a consultancy focused on Syria’s political economy.

BENJAMIN FÈVE is a Researcher at Karam Shaar Advisory Limited.

More by Benjamin Fève

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The dramatic collapse of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on December 8 has sparked hopes of a fresh start for a country that has endured more than a decade of war. But Syria’s recovery faces enormous hurdles. The economy lies in ruins—a shadow of its prewar self, crippled by a decade of catastrophic conflict, entrenched corruption, and punishing international sanctions. Any new leadership will inherit not just a broken state but also a thicket of challenges that defy simple solutions.

After public protests and then rebellion erupted in Syria in 2011, Assad’s regime clung to power through systemic torture and relentless military campaigns with support from Iran, Russia, and an array of allied militias. International focus on Syria waned in recent years, with many observers suggesting that Assad had “won” even as he presided over the rump of a country and the shell of a state. The world was taken aback when the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) led an offensive that in mere weeks forced the regime to implode. Assad’s departure marks the end of an era, but it also underscores the precariousness of power in a battered and brittle Syria.

HTS has now assumed the role of Syria’s central authority, overseeing a transitional period set to last until March 1, 2025. Whatever government emerges from this process will have to figure out how to revive Syria’s economy. It will take serious domestic reforms and international support to overcome years of destruction, sanctions, and fragmentation. The new Syrian leadership must address the country’s humanitarian crises and restore critical energy and housing infrastructure. But to get the kick-start it needs, it will need an initial push from the international community. To start, the United States and the European Union must ease the sanctions targeting Assad’s regime and HTS, with certain conditions, and support the new government’s efforts to restore opportunities for private investors and reconstruction.

This period will shape the contours of Syria’s future. If the country’s new leaders struggle to implement reforms and inspire confidence in their citizens and outside powers—and if those powers continue to maintain sanctions and withhold needed assistance—the country risks deeper chaos and renewed violence that will only worsen Syria’s humanitarian crises and further displace and immiserate its people.

A COUNTRY IN RUINS

Before the onset of the civil war in 2011, Syria had a relatively diverse economy, with agriculture, oil exports, manufacturing, and a growing service sector contributing to its GDP. The country was emerging as a regional hub for trade and tourism, with modest economic growth driven by market-oriented reforms introduced in the early 2000s. But after more than a decade of conflict, Syria’s transitional authorities now inherit a country in tatters. Syria’s GDP has contracted by over 80 percent since 2011, with 90 percent of the population living under the poverty line. Rampant inflation has ravaged the national currency, with the Syrian pound losing more than 99 percent of its value in little more than a decade. Unemployment rates have soared to new levels, and widespread displacement has left millions of people with little chance to return to economic stability.

The country’s infrastructure also lies shattered. The energy sector, crucial for bolstering state finances, has been decimated. Power plants, oil refineries, and distribution networks have been systematically destroyed or looted, or have fallen into disrepair. Once a net oil exporter, Syria now struggles to meet even basic domestic energy needs, providing electricity for only a few hours per day across the whole country.

Decades of international sanctions and isolation have severed Syria from the global economy. The sanctions, primarily levied by Western countries, aimed to curb the Syrian regime’s ability to fund its military operations and repress dissent, and force it to the negotiating table. But beyond targeting individuals and institutions responsible for abuses, the sanctions were extended to include broad economic sectors, such as banking and energy. These coercive measures, still in place, will compound the challenges to economic recovery. As the West conditioned reconstruction and diplomatic engagement on the regime’s striving toward a political settlement with rebel groups, something Assad was loath to do, Syria grew isolated. The Assad regime’s pariah status has precluded significant development support or loans from key regional players including the European Union and Arab states, as well as multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Elites affiliated with the regime often managed to bypass certain sanctions and restrictions, but ordinary Syrians have suffered the full effects and have been largely cut off from international financial systems. This isolation has obliterated economic opportunities, stifled private-sector activity, and curtailed the country’s exposure to global markets, all of which are vital for economic recovery. The transformation into a wartime economy also provided new opportunities for extortion and corruption, further hollowing out state structures, entrenching inefficiencies, and undermining economic resilience.

RECOVERY IN JEOPARDY

As Syria grapples with these economic problems, new obstacles are beginning to take shape that will further complicate recovery efforts and demand the urgent attention of any future leadership. Among the most pressing challenges is an anticipated influx of returnees. Over five million Syrians have been displaced abroad over the last 13 years, and many of them are now contemplating a return home. But Syria lacks the capacity to absorb even a fraction of that number. The country’s infrastructure is already stretched beyond its limits in attempting to meet the needs of the current population. A third of the housing stock is destroyed or uninhabitable, much of it having been bombed by Russian and Syrian government forces. Basic services such as health care, education, and sanitation are in shambles. Additionally, unresolved legal disputes over property ownership and the absence of robust institutional mechanisms to facilitate reintegration threaten to deepen social tensions.

Another short-term challenge will be the emerging government’s struggles to overcome extensive sanctions. Because HTS is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the EU, and the UN, among others, the sanctions and other economic restrictions that originally applied to the Assad regime and its allies have effectively extended across all of Syria. Maintaining those penalties will only intensify Syria’s isolation by severely limiting the country’s access to reconstruction aid and foreign investment. Western powers will lift sanctions only if the new rebel-led government makes a clear commitment to political reform and stability, but whether HTS can credibly do so is unclear.

The unification of Syria's fragmented economy poses another critical challenge. For nearly seven years, the country was divided into four main areas of control governed by the Assad regime; the Kurdish autonomous administration, led by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); the Turkish-backed Syrian Interim Government; and the HTS-affiliated Syrian Salvation Government. Each area had its own economic systems and policies, and their standards of living varied widely: monthly salaries for employees of the Syrian Salvation Government ranged from $80 to $110, compared with just $24 to $30 for government employees in areas held by the Assad regime. Now that HTS has taken over most of Syria’s political institutions except in areas controlled by the SDF, it must merge those fragmented economies. Forging a cohesive national framework will require reconciling different governance models and currencies—not an easy task. For example, HTS has implemented zakat, a form of taxation based on Islamic principles that may face resistance if applied across Syria. Currency usage also varies across regions, with the Syrian pound prevalent in areas formerly controlled by Assad and the Turkish lira widely used in northern regions. To lay the groundwork for recovery, the new leadership must adopt the Syrian pound as the unified national currency, reversing counterproductive protectionist policies on trade and dismantling exchange-rate supports for inefficient domestic production. Such changes will mark an abrupt shift in the status quo but are crucial to creating a stable economic environment and signaling the new government’s readiness to pursue meaningful reforms.

Complicating the unification process are the competing interests of the business elites who emerged over the course of the conflict in regions beyond Damascus’s control, particularly those from Idlib in the northwest, who have thrived under a system that resembles the crony capitalism of the Assad regime. These power players are likely to vie for a larger share of the economic pie in post-Assad Syria, creating tensions with traditional business networks in cities such as Aleppo and Damascus that were previously dominated by Assad’s cronies and that might be ostracized under the new government. Economic actors closely affiliated with the new power in Damascus may also seek to capitalize on the opportunities created by the regime’s collapse and the vacuum left by business elites close to Assad. As soon as HTS seized control of Aleppo, for example, Syria Phone, a telecommunications company affiliated with the group’s government in Idlib, began maneuvering to fill the gap left by providers in areas formerly held by Assad’s forces.

Unification must also occur at the level of territorial control. The SDF, backed by the United States, continues to control many of Syria’s natural resources, particularly its oil fields. This dynamic complicates efforts to establish a cohesive national economic framework and to reconcile competing claims. The United States, however, could use its leverage with the SDF and HTS to prevent these factions from fighting over disputed areas, ensure that the new government respects and integrates Syrian Kurds into the country’s political and economic structures, and ultimately enable an orderly withdrawal of American troops from Syria. The country’s economic recovery depends on the effective management of oil-rich areas, both to stabilize governance and to ensure that these vital resources can contribute to national reconstruction.

A PATH OUT OF THE RUBBLE

The Syrian people face monumental challenges, and after more than a decade of conflict and devastation, piecemeal solutions will not suffice. Only comprehensive and pragmatic reforms, sustained by international engagement, can pave the way forward.

The immediate focus must be on addressing the country’s humanitarian crisis. Millions of Syrians currently suffer from extreme poverty, hunger, and displacement, making large-scale relief efforts imperative. Reconstruction of critical infrastructure—particularly in the energy, housing, and transportation sectors—is urgent. Restoring electricity and fuel supplies is not just a practical necessity but also a precondition for economic activity and a semblance of normalcy. In this regard, bringing oil-rich regions, particularly those controlled by the SDF in northeast Syria, into a broader national framework will be critical to ensuring energy security, equitable distribution of revenues, and the return of international investment.

Meeting these urgent needs will require substantial funding from the international community, which is likely to condition reconstruction aid or the lifting of sanctions on political reform. As a recent statement by the G-7 highlighted, Syria will only be able to unlock international support by making progress toward meeting the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which in 2015 outlined a path to peace in Syria through a democratic political transition. Without these foundational steps (and the ensuing assistance from the international community), any broader recovery will remain precarious at best. The emerging government in Damascus must therefore prioritize political reform. For their part, Western policymakers must set realistic goals and outline clear steps for the new authorities in Damascus to follow. Syrians cannot afford further delays. With winter intensifying and basic commodities in short supply, action is imperative to mitigate suffering and lay the groundwork for sustainable recovery.

Syria’s economy lies in ruins—a shadow of its prewar self.

A phased easing of sanctions will also be essential to Syria’s recovery. With Assad out of the picture, the West should immediately offer unconditional sanctions relief in key sectors, such as energy, electricity, and banking, to reintegrate Syria economically and allow these critical industries to recover. Broader sanctions relief, however, relating to the removal of HTS from terrorist designation lists, should remain tied to measurable benchmarks in governance reforms, including inclusivity, respect for human rights, and commitment to a democratic transition. This approach would use existing sanctions to incentivize reform while fostering international confidence in Syria’s political and economic trajectory.

Beyond international economic relief, sustainable development will have to be led by Syrians, for Syrians, and underpinned by private-sector activity. The private sector’s revitalization will be essential for reducing poverty and fostering self-reliance. Decades of cronyism and sanctions have stifled entrepreneurship, leaving businesses hesitant to invest in a coercive and opaque environment. To restore confidence and stimulate economic activity, it is imperative to develop free-market capacities by encouraging private ownership and entrepreneurship, fostering competition, lowering barriers for new businesses, and establishing a transparent regulatory framework. The immediate reforms needed, including reversing protectionist policies on imports and dismantling exchange-rate mechanisms that prop up inefficient domestic production, are essential to creating a level playing field and encouraging economic growth.

Finally, Syria’s long-term recovery will depend on reintegration into the global economy through trade agreements, regional partnerships, and diplomatic engagement. The country’s new leaders must recognize that a failure to meet the international community’s expectations of political reform and transparency risks prolonging the country’s exclusion, deepening its instability, and exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. As the past 13 years have shown, what happens in Syria does not stay in Syria. If the new government and the international community cannot work together to carry out meaningful reforms, the Syrian people and the greater region will suffer the consequences.

Karam Shaar is Director of Karam Shaar Advisory Limited, a consultancy focused on Syria’s political economy.

BENJAMIN FÈVE is a Researcher at Karam Shaar Advisory Limited.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Karam Shaar · December 20, 2024

17. How to Stop a Trade War

It is going to be a whole new economic environment.

Excerpts:

Trump and his team should work to frame trade demands in ways that leverage supportive voices abroad. Many European defense officials are already urging their countries to boost defense spending and make other needed industrial investments, and a growing number of officials across the G-7 support restricting trade with China. Trump can work with these figures to push for deals. Trump should also remember that in these agreements, outcomes matter more methods. If Europe and other G-7 allies commit to reducing commercial ties with China but want to deploy their own toolkits to get there, he should not object.

But diplomacy that can achieve successful deals will not be easy, and Trump’s penchant for bombast could undermine his goals if he takes it too far. Well-managed threats can bring foreign governments to the table. If Trump gets too aggressive, however, negotiating partners facing their own domestic political pressures may have little choice but to dig in for a fight—an outcome that will force the president to follow through with tariffs he finds expensive to implement. Moreover, countries will need to know that the deals they make with Trump will stick. No one will want to make an agreement if they think he will simply come back the next day with more threats. Trump will need to consult closely with Congress and key stakeholders as he fleshes out specific trade objectives to reassure foreign partners that the agreements are likely to hold. He can also get broader buy-in by acting quickly: if Trump manages to secure several deals in rapid fashion, he will build momentum for agreements with others.

The stakes of Trump’s trade plans are high, for both the U.S. economy and its geopolitical alliances. Millions of American jobs depend on the flow of goods in and out of the country. The value of the U.S. total goods trade—exports as well as its imports—amounts to more than $5 trillion per year. And the United States needs allies in its strategic competition with China, not policies that push them away. But if Trump pulls it off, he might just drive the most consequential rewrite of global trade in decades. The result would be a United States that is both more prosperous and more secure.

How to Stop a Trade War

Foreign Affairs · by More by Peter E. Harrell · December 19, 2024

Trump, Tariffs, and the Coming Transformation of Global Commerce

Peter E. Harrell

December 19, 2024

Shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles, October 2024 Mike Blake / Reuters

Peter E. Harrell is a Nonresident Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Senior Director for International Economics and Competitiveness at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council from 2021 to 2022.

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President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of a trade war more extensive than anything Americans have seen in decades. His proposals include a new 20 percent “universal” tariff on all foreign imports and hiking tariffs on China to 60 percent. In the six weeks since he won a second term, he has used social media to threaten tariffs against Canada, Mexico, the BRICS—a nine-member bloc of countries founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—and other targets.

Yet the ultimate contours of Trump’s trade war remain opaque. In a recent television interview, Trump suggested that he sees tariffs as both a tool to expand manufacturing in the United States and as leverage for negotiations with foreign governments. And as Trump moves to turn his trade instincts into policy, he will hear conflicting advice. Fortune 100 CEOs will urge him to use the threat of tariffs to force foreign governments to give their companies better access to markets abroad. Domestic manufacturers and labor leaders will push Trump to follow through on implementing new tariffs to boost U.S. production. National security types will press Trump to strengthen trade with allies as a counterweight to China. Markets, meanwhile, may drop if Wall Street traders think Trump’s tariffs or other trade policies will drive inflation or hurt corporate profits.

Trump’s willingness to be a disruptor gives him the potential to bring about the most significant changes to the international trading order since the current liberal global system arose in the early 1990s. He could reshape trade flows in ways that advance the United States’ geopolitical position and strengthen its industrial base. But Trump’s disruptive nature is also a great source of risk. If he overplays his hand, he may blunder into tariff wars that do little more than hike costs for Americans. Success will require new paradigms for U.S. trade policy and skillful diplomacy, as foreign leaders guard their own national interests.

TARIFF MAN

Trump has long seen tariffs as a tool to serve two sets of objectives. The first is rebalancing trade—namely, closing the nearly trillion-dollar U.S. trade deficit and expanding U.S. manufacturing. The second is solving geopolitical problems, whether by threatening to impose tariffs on Mexico if it does not halt the flow of migrants crossing the border or by reducing China’s global economic influence. The president-elect has surrounded himself with people who agree with this approach. Vice President-elect JD Vance argued in July that “a million cheap, knock-off toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” Trump’s choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, meanwhile, has emerged in recent years as one of Washington’s leading China hawks.

But whether Trump’s goal is to close the trade deficit or to unwind China’s global economic influence, he will find that using tariffs primarily as leverage is more effective than adopting them as policy. Part of the reason is macroeconomic. Broad tariffs would increase costs for American consumers, especially in the short run. Studies suggest that fully implementing the tariffs that Trump threatened during his campaign would cost a typical American family $2,600 to $3,900 per year. Broad tariffs would also have counterintuitive macroeconomic impacts. They would, for example, likely spur the Federal Reserve to keep U.S. interest rates high, which would attract foreign capital to the United States and drive up the value of the dollar relative to other major currencies, partially reducing potential consumer price hikes. But this would hurt U.S. exporters and their employees.

Moreover, history suggests that strategic deals are most effective at reducing the U.S. trade deficit. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration grew concerned about the United States’ rising trade deficit, particularly with Japan. In response, it attempted to erect a host of trade barriers. But the tool that actually brought the deficit down was the 1985 Plaza Accord, through which Washington cajoled major trading partners into helping depreciate the dollar. The accord didn’t fix the bilateral trade deficit with Japan, but it did lead to an 80 percent reduction in the overall U.S. trade deficit by 1991.

Washington should start pursuing trade policies that focus less on rules and more on outcomes.

Likewise, deals will be important to strengthening Washington’s hand in its competition with Beijing. U.S. tariffs on China reduced U.S. imports from the country, but they have not contained Beijing’s global economic ambitions. China’s overall industrial trade surplus has risen sharply since 2018 and now exceeds the peak surpluses of other manufacturing powerhouses, including Japan in the 1980s. Moreover, on its current trajectory, China’s share of global manufacturing will continue to grow: a recent report by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization projected that China will account for 45 percent of global industrial production in 2030, up from six percent in 2000. The U.S. share will have declined from 25 percent to 11 percent.

This is hardly a tenable course for Washington and its allies during a period of geopolitical conflict, so Trump must pivot. He should, in particular, work with foreign countries to reduce their trade with Beijing. Here, Trump should find an increasingly receptive audience. As China’s manufacturing surplus has increased, a growing number of its trade partners outside the United States, including major emerging markets such as Brazil, Chile, and South Africa, have begun to impose tariffs and other protectionist measures of their own. Trump’s task will be to use American trade policy to coordinate and expand those nascent efforts.

Pushing trading partners to raise their own barriers to Chinese products will ultimately boost U.S. manufacturing, as well. Chinese imports to other countries not only displace those countries’ manufacturers but also undercut American workers. U.S.-made products often cannot compete with cheaper Chinese-made products on the international market. And there is evidence that as China increases sales of cars and other high-end products to industrial countries such as South Korea, those countries’ manufacturers respond to the competition by exporting more of their products to the United States—another hit to U.S. manufacturing.

This is not to say that tariffs should only be used as leverage for deals: imposing tariffs on China is an essential part of de-risking the U.S.-Chinese relationship, which is why the Biden administration continued the ones that Trump established in his first term. Targeted tariffs—even on allies—can help promote key strategic industries in which national and economic security requires more domestic production and for which “friendshoring” is insufficient. And it would be fair for Trump to push for more reciprocity in U.S. trading rates. The maximum tariff rates that Washington committed to maintaining when it joined the World Trade Organization, for example, were about 40 percent lower than the tariff rates Europe agreed to. India’s are several times as high. That may have been acceptable in the early 1990s, when India was a small economy and the United States and Europe were adapting to the post–Cold War era. But it does not make sense in today’s global economy. But Trump and his team will find that both the American economy and American security will generally be better served by striking new deals than by imposing sweeping tariffs on the 85 percent of American trade that comes from countries other than China.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Achieving the results Trump wants will require a set of paradigm shifts for U.S. trade negotiators. This starts with the fact that there is little modern precedent for Washington’s use of trade negotiations to persuade partners to raise tariffs against a third country, especially in a coordinated fashion. For decades, U.S. trade policy has instead sought to reduce barriers to trade—opening foreign markets to American products and offering foreign producers more access to the U.S. market in exchange. When in recent years, the United States has persuaded trade partners to raise barriers to China—such as, for example, the tariffs Canada imposed in October on Chinese electric vehicles and steel—Washington has done so through ad hoc diplomacy rather than as part of formal negotiations.

Under Trump, U.S. officials will need to design trade deals that get partners to reduce their own trade with China. They can start by pressing key trading partners to adopt common external tariffs, alongside the United States, on imports of agreed-on critical products from China, such as vehicles and critical minerals. In exchange, Trump would agree to exempt these partner countries from new tariffs on those targeted imports.

U.S. officials should also change the “rules of origin” that determine what country a product is from for the purposes of calculating tariffs. Current trade rules generally treat products as “made” in the country where they were assembled, overlooking those products’ components. For example, if a piece of wood furniture is made in Vietnam, it is considered Vietnamese, even if the wood came from elsewhere. China can exploit these rules by setting up manufacturing facilities in other countries that rely heavily on Chinese companies and components. Trump should push to change the rules so that such products would be tariffed at Chinese rates. Some of Washington’s partners might be wary of such a shift, but Trump should point out that the rule change will help them by creating an incentive for entire supply chains to diversify away from China.

Well-managed threats can bring foreign governments to the table.

Trump’s negotiating team will have to make another paradigm shift—one that involves integrating, rather than separating, trade and national security. During the Cold War, the United States and its allies cooperated on trade and security through mechanisms such as the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls. But since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, U.S. officials have tended to draw a line between the two, arguing that tools of economic statecraft such as export controls and sanctions should not be used to promote trade interests and that tariffs should not be used to promote security interests. In today’s era of intense geopolitical competition, Washington should consider returning to its earlier approach. That means Trump should prod U.S. trade partners to match U.S. rules in areas including export controls and foreign investment screening, especially in regard to China. In exchange, Trump could simplify the export controls and investment screenings that partners face in trading with the United States.

Finally, Washington should start pursuing trade policies that focus less on rules and more on outcomes. For the past 30 years, U.S. policymakers have developed detailed sets of rules to govern the terms of trade. These regulated tariff rates, subsidies, and nontariff barriers—including those applying to food safety, intellectual property, anticorruption policies, currency manipulation, and sectors such as banking. Rules are, of course, important to promoting cross-border trade, investment, innovation, and competition. But the types of measures needed to achieve Trump’s goals require more creativity.

Take the United States’ persistent trade deficit with Germany, which Trump has decried since at least 2017. U.S. tariffs on German car imports are lower than European tariffs on American autos, but Germany’s trade surplus persists in large part because it is driven by German macroeconomic policies that result in too little domestic investment and generate too little domestic demand. As a result, German manufacturing focuses more on the export market than on domestic consumption. German steps to boost domestic demand—for example, increasing its defense spending to three percent of GDP, boosting domestic infrastructure and investment, and beefing up spending on research and development—would be more effective at reducing trade imbalances than increased U.S. tariffs on German products. Changes in global capital flows could also be used to rebalance global trade.

Prior to the rise of the post–Cold War trading order, policymakers around the world treated macroeconomic factors as an essential aspect of trade policy. That is why the Plaza Accord focused on reducing the value of the U.S. dollar instead of establishing rules governing currency manipulation. American trade policymakers did not exactly abandon their understanding of the importance of macroeconomics over the last 30 years; the Obama administration repeatedly urged China to boost domestic demand as a way of reducing the U.S. trade deficit. But American trade officials pivoted away from using tools such as tariffs to persuade foreign governments to change their macroeconomic policies. Instead, they focused on the rules that governed the actual flow of goods and services across borders. Trump, as a politician who relishes in making threats, is well positioned to bring this tradition back. And his economic team, stacked with business executives, is well positioned to identify macroeconomic policy objectives that would reduce the U.S. trade deficit and help U.S. workers.

BALANCING ACT

Trump is not the only leader who will get a say in rewriting the trading order. Washington’s trading partners will have to decide whether to negotiate with him or to dig in for a protracted trade war. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum recently illustrated this when she responded to Trump’s tariff threats by both threatening retaliatory tariffs and calling Trump to indicate that she was prepared to talk.

Still, the president-elect’s return to the White House comes at a moment of heightened leverage. The American economy has substantially outperformed its peers in recent years—for example, growing three times as fast as the European Union since late 2019—making the United States the essential market for companies based in partner countries. Trump can use the U.S. edge in artificial intelligence, semiconductor design, and other key technologies as an additional source of clout, guaranteeing that partners that agree to his trade terms will get access to cutting-edge chips for AI and other high-tech American products.

Countries have few alternatives to dealing with Trump. Economic growth in China is slowing, making the state a less attractive trade partner. Smaller economies will continue to strike deals among themselves, such as the trade agreement that Canada and Indonesia signed in early December. But the economic stakes of such deals will generally pale in comparison with those struck with the United States, given the vastly larger scale of the U.S. market.

Trump’s penchant for bombast could undermine his goals if he takes it too far.

Trump and his team should work to frame trade demands in ways that leverage supportive voices abroad. Many European defense officials are already urging their countries to boost defense spending and make other needed industrial investments, and a growing number of officials across the G-7 support restricting trade with China. Trump can work with these figures to push for deals. Trump should also remember that in these agreements, outcomes matter more methods. If Europe and other G-7 allies commit to reducing commercial ties with China but want to deploy their own toolkits to get there, he should not object.

But diplomacy that can achieve successful deals will not be easy, and Trump’s penchant for bombast could undermine his goals if he takes it too far. Well-managed threats can bring foreign governments to the table. If Trump gets too aggressive, however, negotiating partners facing their own domestic political pressures may have little choice but to dig in for a fight—an outcome that will force the president to follow through with tariffs he finds expensive to implement. Moreover, countries will need to know that the deals they make with Trump will stick. No one will want to make an agreement if they think he will simply come back the next day with more threats. Trump will need to consult closely with Congress and key stakeholders as he fleshes out specific trade objectives to reassure foreign partners that the agreements are likely to hold. He can also get broader buy-in by acting quickly: if Trump manages to secure several deals in rapid fashion, he will build momentum for agreements with others.

The stakes of Trump’s trade plans are high, for both the U.S. economy and its geopolitical alliances. Millions of American jobs depend on the flow of goods in and out of the country. The value of the U.S. total goods trade—exports as well as its imports—amounts to more than $5 trillion per year. And the United States needs allies in its strategic competition with China, not policies that push them away. But if Trump pulls it off, he might just drive the most consequential rewrite of global trade in decades. The result would be a United States that is both more prosperous and more secure.

18. Cyber Campaign Plans and Other Fairy Tales

Operational level planning deficiency.

Do they need a SAMS equivalent - A School for Advanced Cyber Studies (SACS)

Conclusion:

As Congress and the Department of Defense consider new ways of building and structuring military cyber forces, they should include correcting this lack of effective operational-level planning in their criteria for evaluating solutions. Key steps include creating dedicated, in-depth cyber professional military education for the mid-career cyber officers and non-commissioned officers responsible for operational planning; forcing changes to the services’ talent management, career progression, and promotion practices that prevent the growth of experienced cyber professionals; and replacing the five service-run joint force headquarters with a single joint operational headquarters. Whether the solution is an independent U.S. Cyber Force, consolidating current service-run headquarters and training organizations, or realigning responsibilities among the existing services, a real solution to the Cyber Mission Force’s problems should include rationalizing command structures, maturing cyber doctrine, and — most critically — investing in building cyber officers and senior non-commissioned officers with the experience, training, and education to accurately understand the cyber domain’s complex policy, technological, and operational problems. Until the void between cyber strategy and cyber tactics is filled, Department of Defense cyber operations will be a series of disjointed pinpricks unable to effectively impact adversaries or defend the nation.

Cyber Campaign Plans and Other Fairy Tales - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by John Cobb · December 20, 2024

You might not think of military planners as the authors of fairy tales, but unfortunately many of us are. As a planner at U.S. Cyber Command (and assorted other headquarters in warmer climates), I have worked on a variety of planning teams building cyber plans and orders. Unfortunately, most of those planning efforts were divorced from the real-world capabilities of friendly forces, agnostic towards the actual vulnerabilities of enemy forces, and premised on fundamental misunderstandings of the cyber domain.

This gap between cyber planning and reality is driven by three foundational problems. A balkanized and parochial command-and-control structure for operational headquarters makes planning inconsistent and disjointed, while use of doctrine and processes not aligned to the realities of the cyber domain causes repeated problems. The most critical problem is a failure to invest in cyber professionalism among the mid-career military personnel filling those headquarters and doing the operational-level planning. These problems often prevent or distort the alignment of tactics and strategy, leaving Cyber Command and its Cyber Mission Force incapable of achieving strategic goals.

Congress and the Department of Defense are unhappy with the current state of Cyber Command and the Cyber Mission Force. In the Fiscal Year 23 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress demanded multiple reports on problem areas and directed changes to the Cyber Mission Force. The Department of Defense responded by creating “CYBERCOM 2.0” to review how the U.S. military conducts cyber operations and recommend changes to the force. However, these efforts will struggle to make an impact on cyber readiness and effectiveness until they address the Cyber Mission Force’s core problems disconnecting cyber strategy from cyber tactics.

Cyber Command has a strategy of “persistent engagement“ (actively contesting adversary cyber threats) expounded by Gen. Paul Nakasone (now retired) and other senior leaders. Cyber Command’s guidance on persistent engagement and the national-level cyber strategy documents the Department of Defense and national leaders have published add up to a robust vision of how the Department of Defense should utilize cyber forces at the strategic level. At the tactical level, there are serious grounds for concern over Cyber Mission Force training and readiness, but there is a pool of tactical and technical experts capable of executing assigned missions. At the operational level, the problems are more profound: Joint forces lack joint headquarters, doctrine is suboptimal, experience is limited, formal training and education are minimal, and few lessons are being learned effectively.

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Balkanized Command and Control

The first issue driving dysfunction at the operational level of the cyber force is the structure of operational-level headquarters. Today, the Cyber Mission Force (with fewer than 7000 personnel) has seven three-star operational headquarters between Cyber Command and the teams or task forces at the tactical level. Two of those headquarters, the Cyber National Mission Force and Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Networks, have unique missions and make sense as joint operational-level commands. The other five “joint force headquarters-cyber” have similar missions, but are not joint despite commanding joint forces (the joint force headquarters are essentially dual-hatted service cyber component headquarters).This structure was originally chosen in Cyber Command’s early days as a sub-unified command in order to minimize the number of cyber officers required to build out the Cyber Mission Force, but its continued use today is negatively impacting joint operations.

Splitting this operational planning across five service headquarters rather than one joint headquarters staff makes planning parochial based on the quirks of service cultures and limits the joint force’s ability to learn from successful and unsuccessful approaches to planning and operations. While separating operational planning from traditional service “man, train, and equip” functions at the service cyber commands will be disruptive, disruption is preferable to the current dysfunction. Policymakers should consider consolidating the five joint force headquarters to one operational cyber command, able to join the Cyber National Mission Force and Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Networks in a more rational structure. This new organizational structure would streamline command and control, with three joint operational-level commands overseeing Cyber Mission Force operations.

This restructuring of responsibilities would allow the existing service cyber components to focus on force generation (manning and training the cyber teams the services provide to the Cyber Mission Force). It would also create a truly joint operational command to plan and lead Cyber Command’s operations supporting joint forces around the globe. Even with these changes, some researchers and members of Congress have questioned if the existing services and service cyber components can solve the Cyber Mission Force’s current training and force generation problems. If those concerns prove correct, this structure could be a first step toward the creation of a cyber service to replace the current service cyber components in carrying out the “man, train, and equip” role for offensive and defensive cyber forces.

Refocusing the service cyber components on building the force risks some short-term disruption as planners and operations are shifted to a new joint headquarters, and it also risks introducing friction in some intra-service multidomain missions. Most significantly, centralizing cyber forces supporting other combatant commands under one operational headquarters removes the fiction that those combatant commands have a dedicated three-star cyber headquarters functioning as their “cyber component command.” These regional commanders are likely to have concerns about the responsiveness of a consolidated operational-level cyber headquarters. Addressing those concerns will require careful coordination, maintaining the teams of embedded Cyber Command planners at each combatant command, and applying lessons learned from the Cyber National Mission Force’s experiences coordinating operations with commanders across the world.

Doctrine and Process

The second issue degrading planning at the operational level is the immature state of cyber doctrine and planning processes. Today most operational-level planning is done at Cyber Command or the Joint Force Headquarters based on the Joint Planning Process outlined in Joint Publication 5-0 , Joint Planning, and the principles laid out in Joint Publication 3-12, Cyber Operations. The Joint Planning Process is based on simplifying operational problems down to a small number of thoroughly developed courses of action. While it can be a good way to plan ground operations and prioritize aspects of multidomain operations, it is not a good fit for cyber operations. The Joint Planning Process is a good fit for deciding which of three available roads should be the primary axis of advance for an armor brigade, or which of four available ports will be the primary logistics hub. It is much less useful for deciding how to attack a complex system of systems. This is why air operations heavily modify the Joint Planning Process: At the operational level, air planners focus heavily on targeting dependencies in the adversary system, whereas the joint planning process focuses most planning towards maneuvering the friendly force. In cyber operations, like in air operations, simplifying complex, multidimensional systems of systems into two to five courses of action erases many issues operational-level cyber planners need to remain aware of. While a knowledge of joint planning is important when integrating cyber operations into multidomain operations, rigidly following the Joint Publication 5-0 sequence in planning cyber operations is often problematic. Far too often, the resulting cyber plans and orders have represented a triumph of doctrine over reality.

This mindset (often reinforced by the cyber-specific doctrine in Joint Publication 3-12) encourages thinking simplistically about cyber operations — thinking in terms of point targets rather than achieving effects at scale, conceptually focusing on the physical layer almost to the exclusion of network and application layers, and largely thinking about cyber operations in two dimensions rather than the multidimensional reality of modern networks. Perhaps the biggest doctrine-based failing is a tendency to focus on oversimplified “centers of gravity.” While some cyber operations do find real centers of gravity and effectively target them, usually the search for centers of gravity leads to fixation on inappropriate (but easy to identify) targets and objectives: networks and functions that are difficult to reach, easily replaced, or not true system failure points; or goals too broad or vague for execution, against national policy, or not relevant to strategic objectives.

It is arguably true that an expert in both joint doctrine and cyber operations can map the principles of joint planning onto cyber reality — however, current doctrine read plainly provides a very poor map of that reality to the majority of planners who lack such expertise. Cyber Command and its operational headquarters need to reframe how planners look at cyber problems. A better paradigm is needed, emphasizing understanding and impacting (or protecting) highly complex systems of systems rather than pretending that, with enough PowerPoint panache, the domain’s inherent complexity can be wished away by enterprising staff officers.

China’s cyber forces give one example of such planning in the recently discovered “Volt Typhoon” intrusions into critical infrastructure networks across Guam, widely believed to be preparations to disrupt America’s flow of military forces toward China in case of war. Chinese doctrine on systems confrontation and systems destruction warfare guides network attack planning based on the need to disrupt enemy systems of systems in order to break critical military functions. Perhaps even more importantly, China’s creation of an independent cyber force has resulted in more professionalized and experienced cyber planners.

People

If there is a primary driver of the operational-level problems with Department of Defense cyber operations, it is the failure to build and retain experienced cyber professionals. Cyber field grade officers and senior non-commissioned officers (i.e., mid-career military personnel with 10–20 years of experience) are not being given the experience and education needed to solve these hard problems. There are many tactical training programs for junior cyber troops, and the Computer Network Operations Development Program, Air Force Institute of Technology, and Naval Postgraduate School offer excellent technical education for early-career personnel. But these options do not extend to mid-career cyber officers and non-commissioned officers — planners are not being effectively trained or educated on the operational level of cyber. This gap is even more problematic when considering the Cyber Mission Force’s issues with retention and talent management. With many cyber planners stepping into planning positions with zero cyber experience, the failure to teach staff officers the nature of the cyber domain leads to serious difficulty connecting strategic guidance and tactical execution.

Cyber training for field grade officers and other staff planners comes in several formats, but all are either too small or too cursory to solve this problem. Widely attended courses like the Army’s “Cyber Operations Planners Course” and the Air Force’s “Cyber 300” teach the basics well, but at less than a month they are too short to effectively teach cyber operations and strategy at the depth operational planners need. Some service staff colleges include courses on cyber operations or policy, but these struggle to cover topics effectively. Faculty rarely understand the cyber domain, venues rarely support appropriate discussion of classified case studies or lessons learned, and a single 1–4 credit course is still a short format for the breadth of what operational-level planners need to know about the domain. While many of these courses are good introductions to cyber strategy for non-cyber officers, they do little to address the gap in education for cyber planners. Unfortunately, even these limited offerings are shrinking — the Air Force recently cut back on cyber professional military education courses at its staff and war colleges. The closest thing the Department of Defense currently has to effective cyber professional military education for operational planners is the National Defense University College of Information and Cyber in Washington. This institution offers a year-long in-residence course focused on military information technology and cyber policy issues, but admits fewer than 30 late-career officers each year (for demographic context, the Department of Defense’s information technology to cyber workforce ratio is roughly 6:1). It also offers online programs, including one focused on cyber policy (which I am in the process of registering for), but this course is not widely advertised to the cyber community, in addition to the issues with unclassified venues that most other cyber professional military education courses share.

A more focused and in-depth cyber professional military education program is needed. Whether an expansion of current National Defense University programs, a Space Force-style partnership with a civilian university, or a new institution, mid-career cyber professionals need their own “cyber staff college.” The cyber workforce needs a school teaching joint doctrine in combination with the unique challenges of military cyber operations (a “joint professional military education level one” course, in doctrinal terms). This course should be a cyber equivalent to the existing staff colleges each service sends mid-career officers to: roughly a year long, in-person, and split between joint doctrine and cyber topics, equipping planners to design effective cyber operations and integrate cyber activities into joint operations. The course should offer classified spaces to discuss relevant case studies, and both faculty and topics should draw from a mixture of national security academia, computer science, and hands-on experience with cyber operations. It should also be more open to civilian and senior non-commissioned officer planners than existing service staff colleges.

Establishing a rigorous and in-depth staff college for experienced cyber officers is critical to improving Department of Defense cyber planning and thinking. But more flexible options are also needed, particularly for junior and non-cyber personnel serving in cyber headquarters. A broader set of short cyber operations and strategy classes like Cyber 300 should be created for the many less experienced people working as cyber planners and offered in online or remote formats where feasible.

Today, a senior cyber officer is likely to have spent six to 18 months in formal classes studying operations and strategy in their service’s primary domain — and less than six weeks formally studying cyber operations and strategy. If the Department of Defense wants to build cyber thinkers and leaders who can create the plans, doctrine, and culture to defeat increasingly capable adversaries, it ought to make serious investments in teaching those thinkers and leaders to understand the domain.

These investments mean real tradeoffs. The budget implications of adding dozens of students and faculty to an existing school (or civilian campus) are modest, and even building a new institution from scratch would require less than 2 percent of the current cyber budget, but the personnel involved are a more painful resource tradeoff. The current critical shortage of experienced cyber officers means that the people going to cyber staff college will leave significant gaps in tactical leadership and staff planning positions across the cyber force.

Why accept these tradeoffs? Because the strategic and operational costs of leaving cyber planning as a self-taught gaggle of amateurs are potentially catastrophic. The problem is not merely that many planners are inexperienced and need more study. The collective knowledge of Cyber Command is also dangerously deficient. Professionalizing the community of planners requires putting rising cyber leaders, planners, and thinkers in the same space for months of rigorous and intense study.

The collective knowledge of the force — cyber doctrine, history, and theory — is so shallow and flawed that even those who have studied it are not equipped to understand the operational level of cyber. Deep, sustained dialogue and debate among experienced cyber planners and professionals is urgently needed to fill these gaps in collective understanding, and a cyber staff college is the venue to create, sustain, and promulgate those conversations between cyber planners and thinkers. There is always a strong temptation to prioritize short-term manning needs over educating leaders and staff officers. But relegating planners’ education to two-week classes or asynchronous online courses will deprive the cyber force of the critical mass of experience and brainpower needed to fully understand the domain and guide more effective planning. The Department of Defense’s failure to invest in educating cyber leaders and planners means the status quo squanders the billions of dollars and enormous amounts of talent invested in the Cyber Mission Force’s tactical teams on missions that all too often do not add up to operational impact or strategic success. Until the Department of Defense builds better cyber professional military education for operational planners, Cyber Command will continue to see strategy disconnected from tactical execution.

These disconnects are even more problematic because of the military’s cyber retention and talent management problems. These personnel problems severely limit the experience field grade officers and senior non-commissioned officers bring to cyber staff positions. Retention of experienced cyber personnel is a well-documented problem, with low pay, poor leadership, and frustration with talent management frequently cited as important factors. In contrast, cyber talent management problems are less widely understood. Detailed data on military personnel assignment trends in the Cyber Mission Force is not yet available due to disconnects between how Cyber Command and the services define cyber roles and career fields. However, the available numbers suggest that for every Cyber Mission Force member retiring or leaving the military, two members are reassigned from military cyber units to non-cyber units. This drain of people out of cyber teams and headquarters leads to dangerously high turnover.

Resolving these issues is not simply a matter of updating service assignment policies. They reflect an entrenched combination of formal and informal career progression requirements, promotion board expectations, and ultimately failure to adapt services’ talent management priorities and processes to the needs of the cyber mission. At the operational level, this means most planners have little or no cyber operations experience. Instead, most cyber staff billets are filled by communications, all-source intelligence, or random officers and non-commissioned officers. In theory, the Department of Defense civilian workforce could provide some of the missing knowledge and continuity. In practice, civilian hiring often prioritizes joint planning experience in other domains while deemphasizing cyber experience.

Today, operational-level planners are expected to learn advanced cyber principles on the job. Planners are expected to do this without adequate education, on an operational planning team where few if any people have meaningful cyber experience, and understanding of historical lessons learned is limited or nonexistent. This is not a recipe for effective staff planning in a complex and fast-moving operational and technological environment. Nakasone noted the importance of cyber as a profession — building competent joint operational planners is a key part of creating that profession.

Conclusion

Today, Department of Defense cyber forces have a viable strategy and a growing number of competent tactical teams. However, the operational-level planners responsible for linking the two are not structured or equipped for success. A balkanized and insufficiently joint command structure leads to significant problems at the operational level; doctrine and planning practices dangerously oversimplify the cyber environment; and the people assigned to operational-level headquarters lack the education and experience required to effectively manage the policy and technological complexities inherent to military cyber operations.

As Congress and the Department of Defense consider new ways of building and structuring military cyber forces, they should include correcting this lack of effective operational-level planning in their criteria for evaluating solutions. Key steps include creating dedicated, in-depth cyber professional military education for the mid-career cyber officers and non-commissioned officers responsible for operational planning; forcing changes to the services’ talent management, career progression, and promotion practices that prevent the growth of experienced cyber professionals; and replacing the five service-run joint force headquarters with a single joint operational headquarters. Whether the solution is an independent U.S. Cyber Force, consolidating current service-run headquarters and training organizations, or realigning responsibilities among the existing services, a real solution to the Cyber Mission Force’s problems should include rationalizing command structures, maturing cyber doctrine, and — most critically — investing in building cyber officers and senior non-commissioned officers with the experience, training, and education to accurately understand the cyber domain’s complex policy, technological, and operational problems. Until the void between cyber strategy and cyber tactics is filled, Department of Defense cyber operations will be a series of disjointed pinpricks unable to effectively impact adversaries or defend the nation.

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John “Strider” Cobb is an Air Force offensive cyber officer with over a decade of experience in military and intelligence community cyber operations. He recently completed an assignment at Cyber Command working planning and readiness policy, and previous experiences have ranged from laboratory researcher to deployed special operations planner. He is a graduate of the Air Force Institute of Technology (M.S. Computer Science), Air Command and Staff College (online), and Joint Forces Staff College (in residence).

The opinions expressed are personal and do not reflect the official positions of Cyber Command, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, NATO, and/or the Patth director-general.

Image: Airman 1st Class Jade M. Caldwell via U.S. Cyber Command.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by John Cobb · December 20, 2024

19. China reacts to US's military power report

China reacts to US's military power report

Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · December 19, 2024

ByChina News Reporter

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What's New

The 2024 edition of the Pentagon's China Military Power Report, released Wednesday, has drawn fire from the Chinese embassy, with spokesperson Liu Pengyu criticizing the 166-page report's "Cold War" and "zero-sum" thinking.

Newsweek reached out to the Department of Defense via email for comment.

Why It Matters

Since 2000, Congress has required the Department of Defense to submit an annual report—classified and unclassified—on the development of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA). The latest document was released amid flaring tensions between the two powers over a range of issues and just weeks before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has pledged to raise tariffs on Chinese goods.

The United States views China, which Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin previously called the country's "pacing challenge," as the only nation capable of competing with it in the military, economic, technological and geopolitical domains.

What To Know

A major focus of the report is China's expanding nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon estimates that China had over 600 operational warheads earlier this year—about 100 more than in 2023—and is projected to surpass 1,000 by 2030.

The report also highlighted China's increasing pressure on Taiwan, the neighboring island democracy that Beijing claims as its territory. U.S. intelligence and defense officials believe President Xi Jinping has directed the PLA to be capable of moving against Taiwan by 2027.

Chinese amphibious assault ship seen in Hong Kong on November 23. The Chinese embassy criticized the Pentagon's report on China's military power as the product of a "Cold War" mentality. Chinese amphibious assault ship seen in Hong Kong on November 23. The Chinese embassy criticized the Pentagon's report on China's military power as the product of a "Cold War" mentality. Associated Press

"Throughout 2023, Beijing continued to erode longstanding norms in and around Taiwan by employing a range of pressure tactics against Taiwan: maintaining a naval presence around Taiwan, increasing crossings into Taiwan's self-declared centerline and air defense identification zone, and conducting highly publicized major military exercises near Taiwan," the report said.

The report examined China's ties with Russia, describing their relationship as a "no-limits partnership." The document said that Beijing has echoed Kremlin narratives blaming the U.S. and NATO for Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine; bolstered Russia's economy with oil and natural gas purchases and record-high trade; and exported electronics, machine tools, and other dual-use goods that fuel Moscow's war machine.

What People Are Saying

"China has always firmly adhered to a nuclear strategy of self-defense, following a policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons and maintaining its nuclear capabilities at the minimum level required for national security," Liu Pengyu said. He noted that China is the only nuclear power to have made this commitment.

Liu added that China's nuclear weapons pose no threat unless another country uses or threatens to use nuclear weapons against China. He also pointed to China's participation in multilateral arms control initiatives.

On Taiwan, Liu called the report a "blatant violation of China's internal affairs." He added: "The one-China principle is unwavering, the trend toward reunification is unstoppable, and 'Taiwan independence' is a dead end."

Beijing requires countries with diplomatic ties to China to adhere to the one-China principle, which asserts Taiwan is an inseparable part of China. The U.S. has long acknowledged China's position without endorsing it while maintaining unofficial diplomatic relations with Taiwan and providing the island with arms.

Regarding support for Russia, Liu said: "China has always taken a cautious and responsible attitude in military exports and strictly controlled the export of dual-use items." He insisted that China's relationship with Russia is "aboveboard, in line with World Trade Organization rules and market principles and not targeted at any third party."

Liu accused the U.S. of hypocrisy for sanctioning Chinese companies over alleged support for Russia's military efforts.

What Happens Next

"We hope the U.S. will objectively and rationally assess China's strategic intentions and defense construction, cease issuing irresponsible reports year after year, and take concrete actions to maintain the stable development of China-U.S. relations and military ties," Liu said.

His comments follow Xi's meeting with President Joe Biden last month in Lima, Peru. During the meeting, Xi laid down clear red lines, widely interpreted as a message for the incoming administration of President-elect Trump.

Xi urged the U.S. to "unequivocally oppose Taiwan independence" and to steer clear of human rights issues and China's territorial disputes in the South China Sea, such as those with U.S. defense treaty ally Philippines.

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About the writer

Micah McCartney

Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian security issues, and cross-strait ties between China and Taiwan. You can get in touch with Micah by emailing m.mccartney@newsweek.com.

Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian ...

Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · December 19, 2024

20. When Gen. George Patton Called on God

Padre, I want a prayer.

Excerpts:

Patton instructed his men: “Pray when driving. Pray when fighting. Pray alone. Pray with others. Pray by night and pray by day.” He believed the Third Army’s nearly 500 chaplains, representing 32 denominations, were as critical to victory as his tank commanders. “He wanted a chaplain to be above average in courage,” O’Neill recalled. “In time of battle, he wanted the chaplains up front, where the men were dying. And that’s where the Third Army chaplains went—up front. We lost more chaplains, proportionately, than any other group.”

When Gen. George Patton Called on God

The commander had 250,000 prayer cards distributed before the Battle of the Bulge.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/when-gen-george-patton-called-on-god-prayer-cards-battle-of-the-bulge-world-war-ii-057b121b?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s

By Alex Kershaw

Dec. 19, 2024 5:19 pm ET

Eighty years ago, with the Allies stalled at Germany’s western frontier, another bloody winter loomed. Even the usually ebullient Gen. George Patton, commander of the U.S. Third Army, was in a funk. His forces, which had slashed across France months earlier, were suffering and stuck in the mud.

On Dec. 8, an exasperated Patton asked his chief chaplain, James H. O’Neill, to compose a prayer for good weather. He ordered 250,000 copies to be distributed to every man in the Third Army. By Dec. 14 prayer cards were scattered among more than 20 divisions.

General George Patton in Normandy, France, Aug. 15, 1944. Photo: Keystone Press Agency/Zuma Press

The timing was perfect. Two days later, the Germans began a terrifying barrage of Allied lines in the densely forested Ardennes, marking the opening salvos of World War II’s deadliest campaign, the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler’s aim was to split Allied forces, reach the port of Antwerp, and perhaps force a negotiated end to the war on the western front.

The ensuing fight would cost the U.S. some 19,000 men and wound nearly 50,000. As they battled amid atrocious conditions, many in summer clothing, the young Americans needed something to hold on to besides a rifle or friend in a foxhole. According to surveys from the U.S. Army’s Information and Education Division, almost three-quarters of U.S. soldiers turned to prayer in especially frightening combat. Faith mattered to men confronting death.

Patton instructed his men: “Pray when driving. Pray when fighting. Pray alone. Pray with others. Pray by night and pray by day.” He believed the Third Army’s nearly 500 chaplains, representing 32 denominations, were as critical to victory as his tank commanders. “He wanted a chaplain to be above average in courage,” O’Neill recalled. “In time of battle, he wanted the chaplains up front, where the men were dying. And that’s where the Third Army chaplains went—up front. We lost more chaplains, proportionately, than any other group.”

Patton relied on his faith more than most commanders did. Brig. Gen. Harry H. Semmes wrote that Patton “always read the Bible, particularly the life of Christ and the wars of the Old Testament. He knew by heart the order of morning prayer of the Episcopal Church. His thoughts, as demonstrated daily to those close to him, repeatedly indicated that his life was dominated by a feeling of dependence on God.” Semmes added that “Patton was an unusual mixture of a profane and highly religious man.”

Gen. Omar Bradley concurred: “He was profane, but he was also reverent. He strutted imperiously as a commander, but he knelt humbly before his God.” This was certainly the case during Patton’s finest moment in the Ardennes. “Destiny sent for me in a hurry when things got tight,” he wrote at the height of the battle. “Perhaps God saved me for this effort.” He also noted: “We can and will win, God helping. . . . Give us the Victory, Lord.”

The Almighty obliged despite Patton’s frequent profanity. (The Third Army commander is said to have believed that to make his men “remember something important” it was necessary to “give it to them double dirty.”) On Dec. 23, the skies cleared, allowing a massive Allied air force to wreak havoc on German forces and supply lines. “What a glorious day for killing Germans!” Patton wrote in his diary.

By late January 1945, Hitler’s last great strike in the West had ended in abject failure. The winter combat, as Winston Churchill stressed, was “the greatest American battle of the war.” In Luxembourg, shortly after the ordeal ended, a prominent clergyman, Daniel A. Poling, encountered some of Patton’s weary soldiers with their prayer cards. In an icy hell, their faith had been strengthened or renewed and then rewarded. As Poling recalled, they “believed—firmly believed—that God stopped the rain in answer to their prayers.”

By spring 1945, Patton had crossed the Rhine with an unstoppable army. After the guns fell silent in Europe that May, Patton hoped he might be sent to the Pacific. Instead, he became the military governor of Bavaria, a role unsuited to the bellicose warlord. In September 1945, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower removed him from that position after he made one too many impolitic statements to the press. “It is rather sad to me to think that my last opportunity for earning my pay has passed,” Patton wrote. “At least, I have done my best as God gave me the chance.”

The end was nigh. Patton was injured in a car accident on Dec. 9, 1945, and died 12 days later at age 60. He was buried on Christmas Eve in the American cemetery in Luxembourg, alongside a Third Army soldier who perished in the Battle of the Bulge.

His celebrated prayer asked for good weather, but it also implored God to “crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies” and establish justice among men. All who cherish freedom should thank the Lord for righteous blasphemers like Gen. Patton and the legions of God-fearing Americans he led to victory over evil.

Mr. Kershaw is the resident historian for Friends of the National World War II Memorial and author, most recently, of “Patton’s Prayer.”