Quotes of the Day:
"There are two ways to choke off free expression. We've already discussed one of them: clamp down on free speech and declare some topics off-limits. That strategy is straightforward enough. The other, more insidious way to limit free expression is to try to change the very language people use"
- Dennis Prager, author
How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
- Ronald Reagan
“It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations―past and present―are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.”
- Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), moral philosopher
1. Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter
2. Opinion | The Biden administration weighs backing Ukraine insurgents if Russia invades
3. On Ukraine’s front, a real war overshadows worries about a possible future one with Russia
4. The Fallen Mercenaries in Russia’s Dark Army
5. Department of Defense Releases Report on Countering Extremist Activities and Outlines Next
6. Pentagon issues rules aimed at stopping rise of extremism
7. Why Did the WTA Risk Everything for Peng Shuai?
8. The U.S. Pursued Professors Working With China. Cases Are Faltering.
9. Chinese spies have penetrated Taiwan's military, case documents reveal
10. Xi Jinping has been taking on China's capitalists. Here's why that will change in 2022
11. Vehicle for State reauthorization leaves some policy goals behind
12. China’s PLA Is a Peasant Army No More
13. Two Things the 2022 NDAA Got Wrong
14. CCP Paid DC Radio Station $4.4 Million To Broadcast Propaganda
15. Global Democracy Is Doing Fine. U.S. Democracy Is in Trouble.
16. Female ex-pilot in Afghan military surfaces in US, defying rumors that she had been killed
17. The Changing Face of Russian Counter-Irregular Warfare
18. Getting Oversight Right: Lessons from Fort Hood and West Point's Gender Integration
19. FDD | EPA Misses Mark With Proposed Cybersecurity Standard
20. Stick to status quo on Jerusalem consulate
21. The Slow Meltdown of the Chinese Economy
22. Biden's Ravens: Leaders to Watch in 2022
23. Ignore Xi Jinping’s Deceptions. China Is Struggling
1. Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter
Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter
A list of services and costs itemized in Chinese renminbi from a private contractor that won a bid to work for a branch of the Shanghai police department. • Note: English translation by The New York Times from original Chinese document text.
Flood global social media with fake accounts used to advance an authoritarian agenda. Make them look real and grow their numbers of followers. Seek out online critics of the state — and find out who they are and where they live.
China’s government has unleashed a global online campaign to burnish its image and undercut accusations of human rights abuses. Much of the effort takes place in the shadows, behind the guise of bot networks that generate automatic posts and hard-to-trace online personas.
Now, a new set of documents reviewed by The New York Times reveals in stark detail how Chinese officials tap private businesses to generate content on demand, draw followers, track critics and provide other services for information campaigns. That operation increasingly plays out on international platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which the Chinese government blocks at home.
The documents, which were part of a request for bids from contractors, offer a rare glimpse into how China’s vast bureaucracy works to spread propaganda and to sculpt opinion on global social media. They were taken offline after The Times contacted the Chinese government about them.
上海市公安局浦东分局舆论技术服务项目竞争性磋商
Shanghai Pudong Public Security Bureau Public Opinion Technology Services Project Competitive Negotiation
A notice posted online in May calling for bids from contractors.
On May 21, a branch of the Shanghai police posted a notice online seeking bids from private contractors for what is known among Chinese officialdom as public opinion management. Officials have relied on tech contractors to help them keep up with domestic social media and actively shape public opinion via censorship and the dissemination of fake posts at home. Only recently have officials and the opinion management industry turned their attention beyond China.
供应商能随时提供境外社交平台相关的账号提供给采购方。平台包括推特、脸书等，每月每个平台提供约300个账号。注：此项目内容时效性较强，需随时提供相关平台账号;
Suppliers should provide accounts on overseas social platforms to purchasers at any time. The platforms include Twitter, Facebook, etc., and the supplier should provide about 300 accounts per month on each platform. Note: Content for this project is highly time sensitive. Suppliers should be able to supply accounts at any time.
Page 14 of the bidding document detailing what services the police required.
The Shanghai police are looking to create hundreds of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other major social media platforms. The police department emphasizes that the task is time sensitive, suggesting that it wants to be ready to unleash the accounts quickly to steer discussion.
Bot-like networks of accounts such as those that the Shanghai police want to buy have driven an online surge in pro-China traffic over the past two years. Sometimes the social media posts from those networks bolster official government accounts with likes or reposts. Other times they attack social media users who are critical of government policies.
Recently, Facebook took down 500 accounts after they were used to spread comments from a Swiss biologist by the name of Wilson Edwards, who had purportedly written that the United States was interfering with the World Health Organization’s efforts to track the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The Swiss embassy in Beijing said Wilson Edwards did not exist, but the fake scientist’s accusations had already been quoted by Chinese state media.
境外社交平台账号伪装及维护。供应商将部分境外社交平台包装成精品账号，即该账号存活时间需要长久，有一定数量的粉丝，并可用于推广一些素材， 每月每个平台需要保持3个账号，并保证每月粉丝有一定的增长。注：此项目时效性中等，主要每周会统计账号发帖数及存活率，故一旦账号被冻结，需及时补救；
Disguise and maintain overseas social media accounts. Suppliers should package a portion of the overseas accounts into a group of premium accounts, that is, accounts that survive for a long period of time, have a certain number of fans, and can be used to promote information. Each month on each platform three accounts must be maintained, and an increase in fans must be guaranteed each month. Note: this project has intermediate time sensitivity. Each week, the number of posts and survival rate of accounts will be calculated. If an account is suspended, it needs to be fixed in a timely fashion.
Page 14 of the bidding document detailing what services the police required.
The Shanghai police’s social media effort is not just a numbers game, and this portion of the document underscores efforts to shift from brute-force tactics like using bot armies to something more subversive.
The police department is seeking an upgrade in sophistication and power: a series of accounts with organic followers that can be turned to government aims whenever necessary.
The request suggested that police officials understood the need for strong engagement with the public through these profiles-for-hire. The deeper engagement lends the fake personas credibility at a time when social media companies are increasingly taking down accounts that seem inauthentic or coordinated.
Bot networks that have been linked to China’s government stand out for their lack of engagement with other accounts, disinformation experts say. Though they can be used to troll others and boost the number of likes on official government posts, most of those automated accounts have little influence individually since they have few followers.
境外社交平台账号落地。供应商通过搜寻境外平台发布相关内容的账号（具体内容不定，按实际内容为准），并利用技术手段查找其境内真实信息，并获取该人境内信息。
Touch the ground for overseas social media accounts. Suppliers search for accounts on overseas platforms that publish certain content (the specific content may vary, subject to actual content). Use technological means to find an account’s real information in China and obtain the user’s information in China.
Page 14 of the bidding document detailing what services the police required.
The authorities used a phrase common among China’s internet police that refers to tracking down the actual person behind a social media account: “touching the ground.”
With growing frequency, the country’s internet police have hunted down and threatened internet users who voice their opinions. At first, its agents focused on local social media platforms. In 2018, they began a new campaign to detain users of Twitter inside China — account owners who had found ways around the government’s blocks — and force them to delete their accounts.
Now, the campaign has extended to Chinese citizens who live outside of China. The document spells out how the Shanghai police want to discover the identities of people behind certain accounts and to trace their users’ connections to the mainland. Its officers can then threaten family members in China or detain the account holders when they return to the country in order to compel online critics to delete posts or even entire accounts.
供应商通过在境外论坛上发布指定素材，并提高该帖的浏览量并保证帖子能处于论坛前端。每月需提供至少10次服务内容。
The supplier should publish designated content on overseas forums. They should increase the number of views of the post and ensure that the post appears at the top of the forum. The service should be provided at least 10 times per month.
Page 14 of the bidding document detailing what services the police required.
In previous Chinese information campaigns, bot-like accounts have been used to add an unrealistic number of likes and retweets to government and state media posts. The contrived flurry of traffic can make the posts more likely to be shown by recommendation algorithms on many social media sites and search engines.
In recent weeks, a similar pattern emerged from a network of bot-like accounts amplifying evidence that was issued by state-media journalists, purporting to show that tennis player Peng Shuai was safe, freely eating dinner in Beijing and attending a youth tennis tournament.
The Shanghai police explain very clearly the functionality that the department desires, demonstrating a familiarity with recommendation algorithms on social media. Its approach underscores something that propaganda officials know well: A cluster of junk accounts can briefly make one post from an official account appear to go viral, giving it greater exposure and lending it credibility.
供应商制作指定素材的视频，每段时间长度越2-3分钟。
The supplier should produce videos about specified content. The length of each video is about 2-3 minutes.
Page 14 of the bidding document detailing what services the police required.
As overseas Chinese propaganda campaigns have developed, they have come to rely more on visual media. Officials are looking for a company to not only maintain and deploy fake accounts, but to also generate original content. The demand for videos is high.
A separate document reviewed by The Times shows that the same local branch of Shanghai police purchased video-making services from a different company in November. The police asked the supplier to provide at least 20 videos a month and to distribute those on domestic and overseas social media. The document referred to the task as original video production that would be used to fight the “battle of public opinion.”
Earlier this year, a New York Times and ProPublica analysis showed how thousands of videos portraying members of the Uyghur ethnic minority living happy and free lives were a key part of an information campaign that Twitter ultimately attributed to the Chinese Communist Party. When Twitter took down the network behind those posts, it took down accounts linked to a contractor that it said helped shoot propaganda videos. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.
Three weeks after the Shanghai police department’s request became public, a company called Shanghai Cloud Link won the bid, the documents show. In its pitch, the company listed itself as having just 20 employees. According to the LinkedIn page of its founder, Wei Guolin, the company works with multinational firms and provides services in “digital government” and “smart cities.”
Mr. Wei did not respond to a request for comment. The Shanghai Pudong Public Security Bureau did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
Work like what Shanghai Cloud Link pitched is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Local governments and police across China have put out similar requests for services to influence overseas social media, but often in vague terms. Occasionally, specifics are revealed. In 2017, for instance, the police in Inner Mongolia purchased software that allowed government trolls to post directly to multiple social media sites, inside and outside of China, according to documents reviewed by The Times.
In another case, a contractor had downloaded hundreds of access credentials for Facebook’s public feed, allowing it to collect data about who commented on which posts and when. Facebook did not immediately comment.
Shanghai Cloud Link’s winning bid offers a window into how much some of these types of disinformation services can cost.
A pricing table from Shanghai Cloud Link’s winning bid, which lists costs in terms of Chinese renminbi. As of Sunday, 6.4 renminbi equaled $1.
In many cases, tech contractors seek to sell Chinese authorities the hardware and software outright. In this case, Shanghai Cloud Link’s proposal hinted at a new service-based model, one in which officials pay on a month-by-month basis — a sort of subscription for social media manipulation.
2. Opinion | The Biden administration weighs backing Ukraine insurgents if Russia invades
Excepts:
The weapons the United States might provide include shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. The CIA’s delivery of such weapons, known at the time as “Stingers,” had a devastating effect on Soviet forces during their 10-year war in Afghanistan, from 1979 to 1989.
The administration task force, which includes the CIA and other key agencies, has been studying how insurgencies were organized against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Russian-backed forces in Syria — and also against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s an ironic example of turning the tables, weighing whether and how to inflict harm similar to what U.S. forces have suffered in recent years.
...
A small number of U.S. Special Operations forces have been advising the Ukrainians, as part of a U.S. military team of about 150 people there now. The CIA also has a paramilitary branch with experience in organizing insurgencies in Afghanistan and Syria.
When U.S. troops were poised on the border of Iraq in 2003, U.S. officials didn’t consider the grinding, enervating war of counterinsurgency that lay ahead. The Biden administration believes that Putin may be on the verge of making a similar mistake in Ukraine. They hope he doesn’t make the wrong choice, but if he does invade, they want to make it hurt.
Opinion | The Biden administration weighs backing Ukraine insurgents if Russia invades
The Biden administration is studying whether and how the United States could support an anti-Russian insurgency inside Ukraine if President Vladimir Putin invades that country and seizes substantial territory.
The planning, described Sunday by a knowledgeable official, includes ways to provide weapons and other support to the Ukrainian military to resist invading Russian forces — and similar logistical support to insurgent groups if Russia topples the Ukrainian government and a guerrilla war begins.
The weapons the United States might provide include shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. The CIA’s delivery of such weapons, known at the time as “Stingers,” had a devastating effect on Soviet forces during their 10-year war in Afghanistan, from 1979 to 1989.
The administration task force, which includes the CIA and other key agencies, has been studying how insurgencies were organized against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Russian-backed forces in Syria — and also against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s an ironic example of turning the tables, weighing whether and how to inflict harm similar to what U.S. forces have suffered in recent years.
The task force includes a legal team that is studying how any assistance to a Ukrainian insurgency could be provided without violating U.S. or international laws.
The administration’s basic goal is to impose costs if Putin invades Ukraine, without directly involving U.S. troops — a step that President Biden has ruled out. White House officials believe that threatening direct military intervention would be a mistake because Biden isn’t willing to risk all-out war over Ukraine. Gray-zone tactics are better.
The insurgency planning supplements other Biden administration efforts to raise the stakes for Putin.U.S. officials have warned that America and its European allies would impose severe economic sanctions that could cripple the Russian economy. And NATO announced plans last week to move troops forward, toward Russia, if Putin ignores warnings. That would leave Russia more vulnerable to Western military pressure following an invasion, the opposite of what Putin hopes to achieve.
In framing these contingency plans, the administration is trying to strike a balance. The White House wants to deter an invasion, without offering the Russian president a pretext for escalating the crisis. Too much saber rattling could bring about precisely the scenario that Washington hopes to avoid.
“We are prepared to consider a number of things that we have not considered in the past, and the results will be very profound on the Russian Federation, but I’m not going to go into details,” a senior administration official told reporters Friday. The U.S. arsenal of cyberweapons is formidable, but officials haven’t discussed such options.
A delicate balancing act is also obvious in the administration’s efforts to seek a diplomatic settlement to the crisis. The United States has said it’s prepared to negotiate a settlement within the framework of the Minsk Protocols of 2014 and 2015, which would likely mean quasi-autonomy for Russian-speaking separatists in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. But Putin has demanded far more, including a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO. Biden has refused to consider such a diktat, even though Washington isn’t seeking NATO membership for Kyiv.
While rejecting Putin’s maximalist proposals for spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, the administration wants to keep negotiations open. Speaking Friday of Putin’s demands, the senior official said: “There are some things in those documents that the Russians know will be unacceptable. … But there are other things that we are prepared with work with and that merit some discussion.”
In military terms, the Ukrainian army isn’t a match for Russian troops, but it’s 50 percent larger than the force Ukraine had in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea. In addition, sources said that about 500,000 Ukrainians have had some militia training since 2014, and that at least a million weapons are in private hands. These would be among the building blocks for an insurgency. U.S. planners have discussed weapons caches and other logistical tools that could support a potent “stay-behind network” if Russia invades.
The United States has supplied Javelin antitank weapons to the Ukrainian military, initially under tight controls. Similar controls would probably apply to any antiaircraft weapons, to make sure they didn’t fall into terrorist hands. Although the United States might not supply the antiaircraft weapons directly, deliveries could be made by U.S. allies or partners.
A small number of U.S. Special Operations forces have been advising the Ukrainians, as part of a U.S. military team of about 150 people there now. The CIA also has a paramilitary branch with experience in organizing insurgencies in Afghanistan and Syria.
When U.S. troops were poised on the border of Iraq in 2003, U.S. officials didn’t consider the grinding, enervating war of counterinsurgency that lay ahead. The Biden administration believes that Putin may be on the verge of making a similar mistake in Ukraine. They hope he doesn’t make the wrong choice, but if he does invade, they want to make it hurt.
3. On Ukraine’s front, a real war overshadows worries about a possible future one with Russia
On Ukraine’s front, a real war overshadows worries about a possible future one with Russia
HRANITNE, Ukraine — On one side of the Kalmius River in Ukraine’s war-battered eastern Donbas region, a dirt road is lined with houses hit by artillery shells. On the other side are hills less than a mile away. That’s where the Russian-backed forces are posted.
Distant booms can occasionally be heard from the road — what one Ukrainian soldier described as the “enemy saying hello.”
This has been the daily, draining status quo in Ukraine’s nearly eight-year conflict with pro-Moscow militants who control two separatist enclaves along the border with Russia. Though the two sides reached a cease-fire in 2015, hostilities continue. Nearly 14,000 have died.
Now Ukrainian officials and their Western allies fear that tensions with Russia are entering a new phase with the Kremlin potentially prepared to launch an invasion. There are approximately 100,000 Russian troops and an array of military hardware massed in annexed Crimea and near Ukraine’s border, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
Moscow has also said it isn’t readying an attack on Ukraine, but has demanded written “security guarantees” from the West. On Russia’s list: A NATO pledge that the military alliance will not expand eastward and will also end all NATO activity, including training exercises, in Ukraine. NATO has said that’s a non-starter — what some analysts fear Russia could use as justification for starting a war at Europe’s eastern edge.
In Hranitne, a village on the Kalmius River that borders the territory controlled by separatists, war is already here — against forces Ukrainians say are Russian proxies. For years, the area was a relatively peaceful point along the conflict’s front line. But then October shelling damaged several civilian homes and prompted Ukrainian forces to order a drone strike.
Svetlana Haytulova, 70, cried as she described how her bedroom wall was blown apart with her inside the house. A white tarp covers the hole now, doing little to keep the cold out.
“How will my son and his wife live here for another 45 years?” Haytulova said. “There’s no end to this.”
Crossing the line
Driving through the Ukraine’s Donbas region means periodic stops at checkpoints, where armed guards from Ukraine’s Western-aided military ask where you’re going and why. The scenery outside of the window is of downed power line towers, remnants from when the fighting was at its worst in 2014 and 2015.
Also visible: an empty stretch of trenches, a sort of backup if Ukraine’s first line of defense breaks down.
“The whole world now knows that there is a war in Ukraine,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defense council.
“Before this, everyone thought that everything is fine here, but, in fact, the hot phase of war with Russia never stopped,” he added. “It’s basically been going on since February 2014.”
Since 2016, Hranitne had largely escaped the periodic shelling seen elsewhere along the front line. Then in October, Volodymyr Vesyolkin, the military civil administration head in Hranitne, crossed the Kalmius River.
There, a small settlement called Staromarivka is in what Ukrainians refer to as the “gray zone” — a kind of no man’s land that isn’t controlled by Kyiv’s forces or the separatists. For a month, the checkpoint for people in Staromarivka to visit the separatist-controlled territory was closed, and the only way for them into Hranitne was by foot over a narrow bridge. It’s a 20-minute walk for groceries.
Vesyolkin said the people who live there asked for his help delivering the 120 tons of coal to get through the winter. He decided to visit the area with eight others: four civilians who also work for the military civil administration and four Ukrainian soldiers.
“It was actually really joyful,” said Vesyolkin, who fled Horlivka, a coal-mining city about 85 miles northeast of Hranitne, when it came under the control of the pro-Russian insurgents in 2014.
“For me, as a person whose home is occupied and where I have not been for eight years, I entered this territory again as a representative of Ukraine, in an area that had not seen a civil servant in more than seven years,” he said. “And the people there did not hide their joy either.”
But the separatists saw the visit as an attempt to reclaim that territory. Moscow often says that Kyiv could try to take back the separatist Donbas regions “by force” — and that Russia could be forced to interfere to protect the Russian-speaking people who live there. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently equated the conflict with “genocide” against those living in the separatist enclaves.
Soon after Vesyolkin’s visit to Staromarivka, the separatists fired on Hranitne.
Vasylyna Nikolayeva was home when she heard the dreaded familiar sound of shells ripping through the air. She grabbed her 6-year-old daughter, Eva, and put her in the bathtub, covering her with her own body. Nikolayeva knew to count the seconds between strikes — an opportunity to run.
Elsewhere in town, Nikolayeva’s nephews were on their way to the store when the first shells started dropping. Their father told them to get down, but they were just frozen. At the home of Nikolayeva’s parents, a shell fell in the yard.
Haytulova and her neighbors who live closest to the footbridge were hit the hardest. When an artillery strike obliterated her bedroom wall, parts of the ceiling started falling, too.
“I covered my ears, I didn't know where to go,” she said. “I jumped into the street, and there is also bombing. I did not know what to do, I was standing there all frightened.”
On Oct. 26, a day after Vesyolkin had crossed the bridge, Ukrainian forces ordered a drone strike on the separatists’ D-30 howitzer — an act Putin later referred to as an escalation on the part of Kyiv. It marked the first time Ukraine had delivered a drone hit in the conflict.
A day later, the fighting subsided. Eva, Nikolayeva’s daughter, now instructs her classmates on how to act in case of more strikes. Meanwhile, Nikolayeva decided to move elsewhere in town, farther away from the front line.
Piles of cinder blocks dot Haytulova’s street now. The yards are covered in craters from where shells landed. Some residents have started rebuilding. Others don’t see the point when another onslaught can come at any minute.
“It was so quiet and then, bam, it started again,” said 63-year-old Liudmilya Kulik. “What is all this fighting for? What did we even do?”
If Haytulova could afford to leave this place, she would, she said. A Ukrainian soldier visiting her property told her not to cry, that she would move her to one of the many abandoned houses in the area. It would at least have some heating.
During a walk along the river to see the footbridge, Ukrainian soldiers suggested to move quickly.
“We’re exposed and the enemy is on the other side,” one said.
‘Ukrainian spirit’
Fifty miles north of Hranitne, whole apartment buildings are deserted. The military units posted in Krasnohorivka refer to the area as a ghost town. They recommend cars not even idle for too long by the abandoned structures. They are in firing range.
Ask the soldiers stationed here about the Russian forces accumulating along Ukraine’s eastern border, and they respond with a shrug. It’s makes them uneasy. But their day-to-day routines haven’t changed.
When the sun is up, it’s quiet. They can sit around in huts, constructed amid the trench lines, drinking coffee.
Night is more dangerous. That’s when the Ukrainians say that the Russian-backed forces will litter the area with mines, so that the Ukrainian side can’t see where they land. That makes mornings treacherous, too.
In some outposts, the distance between the two sides can be just 250 feet. The Ukrainian soldiers say they can even hear when the separatists play music. Sometimes they’re yelling something across. It’s an enemy much more present than the threat of Russia’s army, which many remain skeptical would actually invade.
“My opinion is that they won’t attack,” said Dmitry, a captain in Ukraine’s military who declined to give his surname to avoid possible reprisals from separatists. “They would suffer large losses, firstly on the economic front because there would be sanctions. And also, no matter what happens, they’ll have casualties, too.”
“If it’s a full-scale offensive, the number of deaths will be much higher,” he added. “And it all won’t go the way they want.”
Ukrainians say their army is much improved from 2014, when Russia’s invasion of Crimea blindsided Ukraine before the conflict in the east started. Much of Ukraine’s greater strength comes from U.S. military assistance, including Javelin antitank missiles that were moved to the front line earlier this year in response to the growing threat from Moscow. The weapons have not yet been used.
But Russia clearly has the advantage in firepower, particularly its missile arsenal.
“There is no doubt that the Russian army is larger than the Ukrainian army,” said Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defense council.
“But there is also a weapon called the Ukrainian spirit,” he added. “Russian soldiers definitely don’t have that. If necessary, there will be guerrilla warfare and other types of warfare so that we will definitely win this process. Moreover, I am convinced that we will win. We do not doubt it for a minute.”
Dmitry, the Ukrainian captain, has been in the military for 13 years. He has two months of service left — a span that covers the U.S. intelligence projection of when Russia might be planning an offensive. The night before, someone in his unit was wounded, taken to the hospital with shrapnel in his arm and leg.
“Everyone has fear,” he said. “The person who says he’s not afraid is an idiot.”
Serhiy Morgunov in Hranitne, Ukraine, and Mary Ilyushina in Moscow contributed to this report.
Read more:
4. The Fallen Mercenaries in Russia’s Dark Army
The Fallen Mercenaries in Russia’s Dark Army
Former Ukrainian intelligence officers spent seven years compiling a database of Russia’s notorious mercenaries. We found the parents, siblings and widows of those killed in battle
Michael Weiss is news director at New Lines
Holger Roonemaa is an investigative journalist based in Tallinn, Estonia
Mattias Carlsson is an investigative reporter based in Stockholm, Sweden
Liliana Botnariuc is a journalist at Rise Moldova, the Association of Investigative Reporters and Editorial Security.
Pierre Vaux is a researcher specializing in open-source investigations, conducting digital forensic analysis of hostile state activity, disinformation and extremism
“If you’d have come here to tell me that my son is still alive, you would have made me the happiest mom in the world.”
Svetlana Antipova opens the gate to allow us into her yard in the village of Shyryajeve.
It is a pitch-black Saturday evening, a little over an hour’s drive outside Odessa, Ukraine. The stillness is interrupted only by dogs barking in the neighbors’ yards, altered to the arrival of strangers.
Evgeny Antipov, Svetlana’s son, was a mercenary in the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious private military company. Evgeny was killed somewhere near Homs, in central Syria, four years ago last June. A little over a month before he left, Evgeny had told his mother that he was going on an unspecified work trip for the next three months. “I won’t have a phone with me,” he told her. “When I come back, I will call you.”
His call never came.
Evgeny’s friends, rather, contacted Svetlana on the Russian-language social media platform VKontakte, telling her that her son was dead.
Evgeny is one of 4,184 Wagner mercenaries that the SBU, Ukraine’s security service, and a think tank started by a number of former top SBU generals have identified. The Ukrainian Center of Analytics and Security, or UCAS, as the think tank is known, shared its data with New Lines, Estonia’s Delfi.ee and the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
The trove of information offers arguably the most comprehensive anatomy of Russia’s dark army, built and paid for by the Kremlin-backed oligarch and catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin. Coyly referred to in the press as “Putin’s chef,” Prigozhin has been serially sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for his role in Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, multiple instances of U.S. election interference, and, most recently, malign political and economic influence peddling in the Central African Republic (CAR).
Wagner’s mercenaries have been fighting on the side of the separatists in eastern Ukraine, propping up Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria and backing the warlord Gen. Khalifa Haftar in Libya, as well as fighting anti-government rebels in the CAR. They have also been deployed to Sudan, initially in support of since-ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir, and Mozambique, where they mounted a disastrous and swiftly abandoned offensive against Islamist insurgents.
On Dec. 13, the European Union sanctioned the organization along with three companies and eight people connected to it. “The Wagner Group is responsible for serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic (CAR), Sudan and Mozambique, which include torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings,” the European Council stated in its sanctions decision.
Wagner is closely intertwined with and subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, a sanctions enforcement agency, has designated Wagner a “proxy force” of that ministry. Reporting has also shown it is very close to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. One of the group’s training facilities is located in the Russian region of Krasnodar, right next to a heavily guarded GRU Spetsnaz (special forces) military base.
Further links between the mercenaries and Russian military intelligence surfaced in the course of previous investigations conducted by the forensic news outlet Bellingcat. For instance, leaked airline data for flights between Moscow and Krasnodar showed that Dmitry Utkin, the commander of the Wagner Group, and senior GRU figures such as Col. Oleg Ivannikov traveled on jointly purchased tickets. A February 2015 call between Utkin and Ivannikov intercepted by the SBU shows the GRU’s dominant role in their relationship.
The EU has also confirmed that Utkin is “a former Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer” who is “personally responsible” for atrocities committed by his men, including “the torturing to death of a Syrian deserter by four members of the Wagner Group in June 2017 in the governorate of Homs, Syria. According to a former member of the Wagner Group, Utkin personally ordered the torturing to death of the deserter as well as the filming of the act.”
In a recent investigation into Ukraine’s abortive sting operation against Wagner, Bellingcat also found evidence that before being assigned as military adviser to CAR’s military chief of staff, a senior Wagner commander received training at the GRU’s Military-Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.
Most recently, the government of Mali has tried to recruit Wagner combatants in the fight against terrorist organizations affiliated with the Islamic State group and al Qaeda, prompting concern from the French-led peacekeeping coalition in the country.
The data on Wagner that New Lines and its partners have analyzed includes the call signs and special ID numbers of mercenaries as well as the name of their units and their rankings within them. UCAS also provided photographs mined from social media of each mercenary, typically featuring the subject brandishing weapons, Wagner memorabilia or medals for service. In many instances, the entry for each fighter consists of his nationality and even home address.
Among the 4,184 individuals in the database, fighters have come from 15 different countries, and some have multiple citizenships. The majority, 2,708, unsurprisingly hail from Russia, 222 from Ukraine, 17 from Belarus, 11 from Kazakhstan, nine from Moldova, eight from Serbia, four from Armenia, four from Uzbekistan, three from Bosnia and Herzegovina, two from Kyrgyzstan, two from Tajikistan, two from Syria, two from Turkmenistan and one from Georgia. (One fighter possesses triple citizenship: Lebanese, Ukrainian and Russian, although New Lines could not confirm his country of origin.) For the remainder in the dataset, 1,188, nationalities are unknown.
From fighters with established dates of birth, New Lines was able to determine that the average age of a Wagner mercenary is 40. The oldest, born in 1950, would be around 71 today (he died in 2017); the youngest, born in 1997, is 24. Thirty-three percent were born in the 1970s, 44% in the 1980s and 11% in the 1990s.
Of the 372 confirmed dead, 75 are known to have died from 2014 to 2016, 186 in 2017 and 86 in 2018. In the past two years, 23 fighters have died either on the battlefield or in other uncertain circumstances. The country with the largest number of fatalities is Syria, with 315 dying there; 35 died in eastern Ukraine and one near Kyiv; eight in Libya; and one in St. Petersburg.
Of the 372 dead, 315 perished in Syria, including 81 as a result of attacks by U.S.-backed forces.
“Wagner is like a layered pie,” says Vasyl Hrytsak, a former chief of Ukraine’s SBU. “It consists of both former and current military personnel but also of civilians eager to earn money and criminals who have been given an option to choose between prison or becoming a mercenary.”
The former chief of SBU Vasyl Hrytsak doesn’t like to stay out on the street for long because he says there’s a bounty on his head / Anders Hansson/Dagens Nyheter
Hrytsak and Gen. Ihor Guskov, his chief of staff at the counterintelligence agency, were among the SBU officials who established UCAS upon their retirement from government. They simply migrated the work they’d been doing for years to the private sector: identifying Wagner personnel, then using open-source intelligence capabilities to dig up as much information as possible on them. In close to half the cases, they hit a trove of data, thanks to the apparent fondness Prigozhin’s soldiers of fortune have for flaunting their affiliation online.
It was Guskov, in fact, who first defined the existence of the Wagner Group while he was at the SBU. He also identified their commander, the Ukrainian-born Utkin, whose fondness for Nazi iconography furnished the name for the mercenary corps, Richard Wagner being Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer.
“Wagner mercenaries earn good money by Russian standards, but there are very few Muscovites and people from St. Petersburg in it,” Guskov says. “A lot of people come from cities such as Orenburg, Astrakhan and Chelyabinsk. These are stagnating districts with low standards of living, a lack of perspective, alcoholism and drug addiction. People are looking for a way out of there and they are willing to pay with their life to do it.”
Russians with dim prospects aren’t the only ones who’ve joined Wagner. The data set also includes more than 220 Ukrainians and many Belarussians, Serbians, Moldovans as well as those with other nationalities.
Ihor Guskov on the street by the office of the UCAS in central Kiev / Anders Hansson/Dagens NyheterLarge part of the former SBU general Ihor Guskov’s day passes tracking down Wagner mercenaries / Anders Hansson/Dagens Nyheter
New Lines set out on a trip to Ukraine to try to understand the path of becoming a mercenary. We knocked on the doors of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and wives of men who have died fighting for Wagner in President Vladimir Putin’s dirty wars.
Often the families have been left without any knowledge of how their sons or husbands perished — or even where, exactly. Sometimes they blame themselves.
Evgeny grew up in a small house tucked between a tire shop and a gas station in a worn-out area of Odessa. His father, Yuri, helped him gain admission to a prominent arts school. Later, Evgeny did his conscription service as a police officer. But then his parents divorced, and Svetlana was impoverished. Occasionally she was also homeless.
Evgeny tried to help out with money. He also stole some of it, his father admits; these were funds Yuri had set aside for much-needed personal medical expenses. That’s when Yuri threw Evgeny out of the house. They had argued and fought before, but the theft crossed a line.
That event, eight years ago, was the last time father and son spoke. A few months later, in May 2014, Evgeny was embroiled in a tragic event at the Odessa Trade Unions House. Following running street battles between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian protesters, which saw protesters killed by firearms on both sides, the pro-Russians were pushed back into the Trade Unions House. What happened next is still a subject of great controversy (both sides hurled Molotov cocktails at the building and from the roof). The building went up in flames and 42 people died from suffocation or injuries sustained in jumping from windows. An additional 174 were injured.
Evgeny, who had been on the side of the pro-Russian protesters, was arrested for his participation in the clashes. When he was released from jail pending trial, he fled to the war zone in eastern Ukraine. From that point forward, he had no way back home.
Later, when Yuri was cleaning out his son’s room, he found black ski masks known to be hidden there. He says he suspects that the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service, recruited Evgeny before the events at the Trade Unions House, although he admits he has no evidence to support that theory.
As Yuri sits behind a small, oilcloth-covered kitchen table, tears run down his cheek. Three green potted plants obscure the view through a large window to his right. “I don’t accept what he did,” he says. “But he was still my son and I love him.”
No one has told Yuri what happened in Syria when Evgeny was killed. That is all he wants to know. He has only seen a photograph of the gravesite in the Russian city of Rostov. There, the tombstone is carved with Evgeny’s image. On the top left corner there is a Wagner cross, awarded to mercenaries posthumously.
Yuri hasn’t been offered any compensation for the death of his only child — not by any of Prigozhin’s companies, much less by the Russian government. He calls it blood money and says he wouldn’t accept it in any case.
“I am for Ukraine, for my homeland, myself, and I have always been. I only want information on my son, how he ended up there,” Yuri says.
“No one can build anything on blood. Blood has never been a foundation for any construction. On the contrary, it turns into a swamp in which you drown. Why fight for strangers and kill for strangers?”
Svetlana received the news of her son’s death more than a month after it happened. She was working at the time in Poland. She says she doesn’t have any recollection of what happened next or how she traveled back to Odessa and from there to Rostov to visit the grave. In Rostov she was allowed just 24 hours to pay her respects.
“If you want to remain on good terms with us, don’t ask us any questions,” she says she was told. If she kept asking questions, she was told, she wouldn’t ever be able to cross the Russian border again to visit her son’s grave.
Evgeny was known to his Wagner comrades by his call sign Lanzheron, the name of a popular beach in Odessa. He died in Syria on June 9, 2017, a day on which at least four other Wagner mercenaries were killed there.
In the industrial city of Kharkiv, 400 miles northeast of Rostov, lives a family with a fate similar to that of the Antipovs. When we ring the bell on the top floor of a huge apartment building, Mark Bich’s sister, who can’t be more than 16 or 17 years old, answers. Mark died on the same day as Evgeny. Their tombstones in Rostov are just yards apart. At just 21 years old, Mark is the youngest fallen Wagner mercenary in our database.
His mother Natalya is a nurse. When she arrives home later that evening, she declines to meet us in person but agrees to talk over a Viber call. She says when her son died, they kept the news not only from his little sister but also from Mark’s grandparents and friends.
“For many people he might be a terrorist,” Natalya tells New Lines. “But to me, he is still my little son. My little son who was always so nice.”
Bich had moved to live in Rostov-on-Don in Russia with his wife and newborn baby, according to his VKontakte page. He wanted to earn money for his family. When he called Natalya and said he was going to work as a “peacekeeper” in Syria, she understood immediately what that really meant. “One needs to be completely nuts not to realize who is present there in Syria. Maybe I am from a different professional sphere, but I am also watching the news,” she says.
Mark didn’t have any military experience that his mother is aware of. Natalya tried to persuade him not to go, but he insisted. “I said I was against it, but he just said, ‘Mom, I love you.’ And that was it,” Natalya says.
Just a little over a month later Mark was killed. “He was just cannon fodder,” Natalya says.
The family doesn’t know what happened to Mark. Natalya says she has visited his grave, but she isn’t convinced that he’s buried there. “I suspect not,” she says.
In Ukraine, Mark Bich is still officially considered alive. Like all relatives of all other killed mercenaries whom we talked with, no one has received any formal notice of death. Getting a death certificate would mean going to court, but Natalya says she doesn’t have the strength to do so.
When asked what she would say to men considering becoming Wagner mercenaries right now, Natalya says that death is much closer than they think. “I don’t want them to die for someone else’s interest,” she says. “For your own interest, it would be heroism, but for someone else…”
There are a number of active recruitment ads looking for mercenaries on Russian job-seeking websites such as avito.ru. These vaguely worded classifieds offer roles to “security guards guarding and ensuring the security of the territory of objects abroad.”
Perks include three square meals a day, a recreation room and a free uniform. Even though the requirements stipulate that a license to carry a weapon isn’t mandatory, the ads characterize the assignments as armed. Previous experience in warzones is an advantage.
Salaries start at 150,000 rubles, roughly $2,000 a month, a competitive wage by Russian or Ukrainian standards. Additional evidence seen by New Lines suggests that people with solid military experience can easily earn twice that amount, a small fortune. But evidence also suggests that candidates are wary of being tricked; they might earn their promised pay in the first few months before their salaries either stop coming in or are less than before. These are the occupational hazards, apart from death, of joining a private military company in Russia.
“Money is an illusion for them,” an official from the Moldovan Security and Intelligence Service (SIS) tells New Lines. “They think they will sign up, go fight, earn money and support their families, but the reality differs. And when the reality sets in and they realize they are not being paid as promised, they start wanting to come home.”
A lieutenant colonel in SIS, the official agreed to talk only under the condition of anonymity because part of the official’s job in the anti-extremism and anti-terrorism unit of the service is to track down mercenaries of Moldovan descent.
The SIS official doesn’t lack for work. SIS has so far identified 114 mercenaries, of which 17 have been convicted for their participation in paramilitary organizations. A fraction of them is from Wagner; others have fought in the ranks of other private military organizations in the Donbas.
“These people are from an unstable social background,” the SIS official says. “They do not have stable jobs, stable incomes. The materialistic base is very important for these people.”
Anna Turuta, a psychologist from Moldova’s National Administration of Penitentiaries, has analyzed the profiles of convicted mercenaries. Barring certain exceptions, she has mapped patterns of demography and behavior.
Map showing where all the fighters came from
All of them are men, most lacking more than a meager education; age ranges vary between 18 and 50, but most fighters are ages 25 to 30. They come from unstable home lives in which steady or reliable role models are often absent. They prefer isolation to company and tend not to trust other people. They find it hard to create or maintain friendships or start families.
“Another unifying element is a lack of empathy,” Turuta says. “They are unable to control their emotions, and they are cold in communicating. That is the main reason why these people are able to kill.”
Such a characterization holds true in the case of perhaps the most savage Wagner mercenary identified thus far by the Moldovan authorities and independent researchers.
Vladislav Apostol spent the first part of his childhood in the hilltop village of Ciutulești, a two-hour drive north of the capital Chișinau.
In 2017, Vladislav appeared in a video circulated on the internet showing five men, four of whom are beating Muhammad Taha Ismail al Abdullah, better known as Hamadi Bouta, a deserter from the Syrian army, with a sledgehammer, slicing off his hands and head with a spade and lighting his corpse on fire. (The fifth man, his face covered by a kaffiyeh, appears to have acted as the cameraman.)
Analysts soon geolocated the events depicted to a gas plant facility near Homs, Syria, where Wagner mercenaries were then stationed. This was the horrific incident cited by the EU in its sanctions announcement, along with the claim that Utkin ordered the torture and recording of it.
Vladislav wielded the sledgehammer.
Of the quintet that took part in the manufacture of the snuff film, all took selfies in front of the charred and dismembered corpse, some still wearing uniforms with Wagner insignia.
Vladislav died in March 2018 after being wounded by a U.S. airstrike during the battle of Khasham a month earlier. The clash, near Deir ez-Zor, took place when Wagner fighters and pro-Assad forces had attacked a position held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, shelling it with tanks and artillery. Because of the presence of U.S. special forces at the site, the U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps intervened with overwhelming firepower from rocket artillery, gunships, attack helicopters, strike fighters, even B-52 strategic bombers.
It is not yet clear exactly how many died among the Russian forces; the main reasons are not only the lack of independent access to the area of the clash but also the Russian government’s secrecy regarding the bodies and their repatriation. The dataset studied by New Lines contains the names of 77 other Wagner fighters killed on that date in Syria (another four would later die of injuries they sustained from that battle), the vast majority of them Russian or Ukrainian, in addition to at least one Kazakh, one Armenian and one Moldovan. According to sources in the region, not all the bodies of the dead have been returned or identified; some have never left Syria.
The house in Ciutulești where Vladislav grew up with his brother, mother and grandmother – which was eventually sold to a neighbor – has remained untouched for years. New Lines visited the residence in November. A window is nailed shut with planks; the yard is overgrown with weeds.
Villagers still remember the Apostols. A town official says that the brothers grew up without a father, whose name was even missing on Vladislav’s birth certificate. An activity leader working at the only school in Ciutulești says he barely attended.
“It was a difficult family,” says Valentina Bugan, the school activity leader. “There was no parental control over the kids and they had no interest in studying. They just didn’t show up.”
It was the ’90s and Ciutulești had just 3,000 residents, village clerk Maria Rusu explains. Even then, the village was emptying out. Residents left in search of work, some to other European countries, others to Russia. Among the latter were the Apostols.
Even though Vladislav grew up in Russia, attended a boarding school and did army service there, he maintained contact with his home village in Moldova. One of the people he was regularly in touch with was his neighbor, Vladislav Ungureanu.
The last time the two friends talked was in January 2018, just a month before Vladislav was fatally wounded in the battle of Khasham. His call sign in Wagner was “Volk” (“Wolf” in Russian), probably because he had a tattoo of one howling on the back of his neck.
“His contract [with Wagner] was supposed to end in May,” Ungureanu says. “He told me he was ready to come home, buy a house and Hummer. I realized that if he wants all that, he has the money as well.”
Ungureanu was waiting for Vladislav to call again on Feb. 10 to congratulate his friend’s wife on her birthday. “We were waiting. We thought the phone was going to ring, but it never did.”
Vladislav may have grown up without the presence of a male role model, but it was different for the Butnarciuc brothers on the opposite side of Moldova, in the village of Cotihana. Their father, Gheorghe, was always there — and that was the problem.
Two former neighbors of the Butnarciuks and a former teacher spoke to New Lines about the family’s history of violence. Gheorghe horribly beat his wife, Tina, often in front of the sons, Alexandru and Victor. Even at a time when domestic abuse was so pervasive in Cotihana as to almost qualify as a social norm, Gheorghe’s rages were extraordinarily savage.
“I suffered a lot because of this family,” Alexandru and Victor’s former teacher says. “I was saying things when [Gheorghe] did something wrong, but he was so brutal. I was really afraid of such people.”
According to the teacher, Alexandru and Victor began skipping school and refusing to do homework. When the teacher intervened with Gheorghe and Tina, nothing changed.
Soon after graduating from the eight-classroom local school in Cotihana, Alexandru and Victor left the village and were rarely seen or heard from again. Neighbors say Victor, the younger brother, ended up in prison in Greece, and Alexandru shared a similar fate in Russia. New Lines could not independently confirm whether this was true.
The family’s house is the first one next to the village school, which now lies in ruins; a new school has been established elsewhere in the village. The family’s home is intact but abandoned. The last time Alexandru visited was in 2016, for Gheorghe’s funeral.
He told his neighbors at the time that he was working in construction in the Russian city of Tomsk. In reality Alexandru was enlisted with Wagner. His current whereabouts is unknown.
Victor is not known to have been associated with Prigozhin’s operation (his name does not appear in the data set New Lines obtained), but he did fight as a mercenary on behalf of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas. He was killed in September 2021, just as this investigation was getting underway.
Nedelcu Nelia (left) and Maria Bârlea stand on the porch of Butnarciuks’ house which now stands abandoned. Both sons of the family ended up becoming mercenaries / Anders Hansson/Dagens Nyheter
The town of Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine is just a few miles from the active front line between the Kyiv-controlled part of the country and the Russian-controlled enclaves of the Donbas. It was among the first population centers seized by pro-Russian forces, including GRU operatives, in 2014. After fierce fighting, Ukrainian government forces regained control of Slavyansk.
Aleksander Motinga, a Ukrainian citizen, was one of those who left to fight on the Russian side and then became a mercenary in Wagner. His whereabouts is unknown. His brother Oleg lives alone in their parents’ house. Oleg doesn’t know how Aleksander was recruited.
“He called mother and said that he would go to the taiga to work in the forest,” Oleg tells New Lines. “He said he would be gone for two years and that he would not have a phone.”
The house in Slavyansk is small and shabby, with a vegetable plot outside canopied by corrugated tin. Inside, brick wallpaper is overpainted with hanging vines on one wall in the kitchen, opposite another wall covered in white tile. A teapot whistles on a grimy gas stove as Oleg flips through pictures from his and Aleksander’s childhood, of happy-looking holidays on a sailboat by the Sea of Azov, off Ukraine’s southeastern coast. Such family idylls stand in sharp contrast to the selfies Aleksander took in Syria and the Donbas, repeatedly posing with weapons.
According to the Wagner database, Aleksander was killed in Syria in June 2017, under unknown circumstances.
“Mom and Dad both died shortly after the news, from grief,” Oleg says. “They could not handle it.”
He’s not convinced that his brother is dead. “I know my parents are on the other side because I buried them myself. But how do I know that he is dead? I have no death certificate or anything. One day, maybe, he will come walking here.”
“How do I know that my brother is dead? I have no death certificate or anything,” asks Oleg, the brother of a Wagner mercenary Aleksandr Motinga / Anders Hansson/Dagens NyheterOleg Motinga doesn’t have any proof of the death of his brother Aleksandr in Syria. Until he sees the proof, he doesn’t believe it happened / Anders Hansson/Dagens NyheterAleksandr (second from left) and Oleg Motinga as children with parents Raisa and Viktor on a sailboat by the Sea of Azov. Picture from family album (undated) / Anders Hansson/Dagens Nyheter
The lieutenant colonel in Moldova’s SIS tells New Lines there are generally three motives for people to sign up with private military companies such as Wagner. “First and foremost is the financial remuneration,” the officer says. “For some recruits, it is the basic element in the recruitment process.”
Second is kompromat, compromising information in their background such as a criminal past, for which they’ve eluded justice in their native countries.
“The third base is the ideological one that comes with the use of pseudo-patriotic feelings,” the officer says. “This includes a wide range of elements: social status, lack of education or geographical affiliation of people that makes it difficult for them to understand the current situation in the world.”
“They look for adventure at first but end up in big trouble. When they return, their mental health is affected because the experience they got was not so rosy.”
His parents died shortly after receiving news of the death of their mercenary son Aleksandr in Syria, leaving Oleg Motinga to take care of the family’s house alone / Anders Hansson/Dagens Nyheter
Although the former Ukrainian intelligence officers Hrytsak and Guskov believe that Wagner is already long gone from their country, they continue to map the mercenaries’ activities globally and build on their database.
The SBU has been happy to share its information with European counterparts, but, according to Hrytsak, the offers are often met by inexperience and naiveté on the part of the Europeans.
“We see a lot of pro-Russian ethnic, linguistic, cultural or sports structures popping up in countries such as Italy or Germany,” Hrytsak says. “Russia can take advantage of that to acquire visas [for those they’d like to recruit]. The European special services don’t pay nearly enough attention to this.”
Hrytsak adds that, technically speaking, there is no such thing as the Wagner Group because the entire enterprise is run by the Russian state. “Wagner is in fact Russian military intelligence,” he says.
“If they need to recruit 100 people tomorrow to do something illegal in Europe, these people will fly in dressed in civilian clothes in groups of two to five men. They will assemble, put on uniforms and take up arms. One small group can very quickly destabilize the situation in any country. That is the real danger of Wagner.”
– With additional reporting by Christo Grozev, Riin Aljas and Ruslan Trad
5. Department of Defense Releases Report on Countering Extremist Activities and Outlines Next
Department of Defense Releases Report on Countering Extremist Activities and Outlines Next Steps
Immediate Release
Dec. 20, 2021
On February 3, 2021, Secretary Austin directed a one-day stand down at all levels to hold an in-depth conversation on the values underpinning national service, the oath of office, and the importance of unit cohesion, as well as to gain a better understanding of the scope of the problem of extremist activity within the ranks.
On April 9, 2021, Secretary Austin issued a memorandum announcing immediate actions to counter extremist activity in the Department and establishing the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group (CEAWG), which build upon the lessons learned through unit stand downs.
The CEAWG was directed to oversee implementation of the immediate actions, including reviewing and updating the definition of prohibited activities in DoD Instruction 1325.06 (“Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities Among Members of the Armed Forces”). Per the Secretary’s approval as of 20 December, 2021, the revised policy is effective immediately.
The CEAWG also developed six recommendations and associated actions across four lines of effort: Military Justice and Policy, Support and Oversight of the Insider Threat Program, Investigative Processes and Screening Capability, and Education and Training. With the publication of the report, the Secretary directed implementation of the six recommendations and associated actions.
The CEAWG’s work concludes with the delivery of the report and recommendations.
The Secretary of Defense Memorandum on Countering Extremist Activities within the Department of Defense can be found here.
The Report on Countering Extremist Activity Within the Department of Defense can be found here.
The Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI) 1325.06: Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities Among Members of the Armed Forces can be found here.
6. Pentagon issues rules aimed at stopping rise of extremism
Pentagon issues rules aimed at stopping rise of extremism | AP News
AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR · December 20, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — Warning that extremism in the ranks is increasing, Pentagon officials are issuing detailed new rules prohibiting service members from actively engaging in extremist activities. The new guidelines come nearly a year after some current and former service members participated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol, triggering a broad department review.
Senior defense officials tell The Associated Press that fewer than 100 military members are known to have been involved in substantiated cases of extremist activity in the past year, but they warn that the number may grow given recent spikes in domestic violent extremism, particularly among veterans.
Officials said the new policy doesn’t largely change what is prohibited, but is more of an effort to make sure troops are clear on what they can and can’t do, while still protecting their First Amendment free speech rights. And for the first time, it is far more specific about social media.
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The new policy lays out in detail the banned activities, which range from advocating terrorism or supporting the overthrow of the government to fundraising or rallying on behalf of an extremist group or “liking” or reposting extremist views on social media. The rules also specify that commanders must determine two things in order for someone to be held accountable: that the action was an extremist activity, as defined in the rules, and that the service member “actively participated” in that prohibited activity.
Previous policies banned extremist activities but didn’t go into such great detail, and also did not specify the two step process to determine someone accountable.
What was wrong yesterday is still wrong today, said one senior defense official. But several officials said that as a study group spoke with service members this year they found that many wanted clearer definitions of what was not allowed. The officials spoke about the new rules on condition of anonymity because they have not yet been made public.
The military has long been aware of small numbers of white supremacists and other extremists among the troops. But Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other leaders launched a broader campaign to root out extremism in the force after it became clear that military veterans and some current service members were present at the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In a message to the force on Monday, Austin said the department believes that only a few service members violate their oath and participate in extremist activities. But, he added, “even the actions of a few can have an outsized impact on unit cohesion, morale and readiness - and the physical harm some of these activities can engender can undermine the safety of our people.”
The risk of extremism in the military can be more dangerous because many service members have access to classified information about sensitive military operations or other national security information that could help adversaries. And extremist groups routinely recruit former and current service members because of their familiarity with weapons and combat tactics.
Officials said that while the substantiated cases may be small, compared to the size of the military, which includes more than 2 million active duty and reserve troops. The number appears to be an increase over previous years where the totals were in the low two-digits. But they also noted that data has not been consistent so it is difficult to identify trends.
The new rules do not provide a list of extremist organizations. Instead, it is up to commanders to determine if a service member is actively conducting extremist activities based on the definitions, rather than on a list of groups that may be constantly changing, officials said.
Asked whether troops can simply be members of an extremist organization, officials said the rules effectively prohibit membership in any meaningful way — such as the payment of dues or other actions that could be considered “active participation.”
The regulations lay out six broad groups of extremist activities, and then provide 14 different definitions that constitute active participation.
Soon after taking office, Austin ordered military leaders to schedule a so-called “stand-down” day and spend time talking to their troops about extremism in the ranks.
The new rules apply to all of the military services, including the Coast Guard, which in peacetime is part of the Department of Homeland Security. They were developed through recommendations from the Countering Extremist Activities Working Group. And they make the distinction, for example, that troops may possess extremist materials, but they can’t attempt to distribute them, and while they can observe an extremist rally, they can’t participate, fund or support one.
The rules, said the officials, focus on behavior not ideology. So service members have whatever political, religious or other beliefs that they want, but their actions and behavior are governed.
In addition to the new rules, the Pentagon is expanding its screening for recruits to include a deeper look at potential extremist activities. Some activities may not totally prevent someone from joining the military, but require a closer look at the applicant.
The department also is expanding education and training for current military members, and more specifically for those leaving the service who may be suddenly subject to recruitment by extremist organizations.
More than 650 people have been charged in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, including dozens of veterans and about a half dozen active duty service members. Among them — an Army reservist who wore a Hitler mustache to his job at a Navy base.
Some of the rioters facing the most serious charges, including members of far-right extremist groups, have military backgrounds. In several of the prosecution cases already, the Justice Department has cited a rioter’s military service as a factor weighing in favor of a jail sentence or house arrest. Prosecutors have repeatedly maintained that veterans’ service, while commendable, made their actions on Jan. 6 more egregious.
AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR · December 20, 2021
7. Why Did the WTA Risk Everything for Peng Shuai?
I do not usually read Sports Illustrated for national security issues. But this is a fascinating story of how the Women's Tennis Association has handled this situation.
I hope other sports organizations and businesses can learn from the WTA.
DEC 17, 2021
Why Did the WTA Risk Everything for Peng Shuai?
It has to do with tanks in Shenzhen, mariachi bands in Guadalajara and a legacy passed down by players for 50 years.
Steve Simon didn’t start the year expecting to be in central Mexico in mid-November. But COVID-19 has made improvisers of us all, including the CEO of the WTA Tour. He anticipated closing out the 2021 season in Shenzhen, China, at the WTA Finals, the event from which the Women’s Tennis Association derives a significant share of its revenue. Just three years earlier, to much fanfare, he’d signed a deal to hold the Finals there for the next decade, doubling the tournament’s prize money purse to $14 million. But when the event was canceled in July for the second straight year on account of COVID-19, Simon resembled a tennis player caught out of position and was left scrambling.
At one point in late summer, there were discussions about holding the year-end event in L.A., in conjunction with the release of King Richard, the Will Smith star vehicle that lionized Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena. When that fell through, an unlikely substitute host emerged: Guadalajara. This wasn’t a city that had ever figured prominently on the tennis circuit. The organizers could put up only $5 million in prize money, roughly one-third of the Shenzhen haul. And the date on the calendar couldn’t move, so an entire year-end lollapalooza had to come together in a matter of weeks.
But come Nov. 10, the WTA caravan converged on the Panamerican Tennis Center in Zapopan, Mexico, and one of the great tennis stories ensued. Starting on the first night, an unmistakable energy pulsed through the stadium. While the inaugural Shenzhen event in 2019 was marked by oceans of empty seats, in Mexico, the stands were packed. (So much so that by the third night, Guadalajara had already drawn more fans than the entire week-long Shenzhen tournament.) Mariachi bands performed. The weather cooperated. Player after player gushed about the ambiance and hospitality.
Photo Illustration by Dan Larkin; Hector Vivas/LatinContent/Getty Images (racquet); Alex Grimm/Bongarts/Getty Images (tennis shoes)
But these good vibes were offset by a diplomatic crisis emanating from the country originally slated—and now apparently destined—to be the focus of the tennis world that week. When Simon wasn’t watching the matches, he was on his phone or running through a gauntlet of meetings both at the tournament venue and at the tournament hotel, the Guadalajara Hilton. At breakfast, in meetings with the WTA Board, interacting with WTA royalty such as Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, who had come for the festivities as honorary guests, the same fundamental questions surfaced: Where was Peng Shuai? And what was the WTA going to do about the 35-year-old veteran player, marooned in China, her health and her whereabouts uncertain?
Simon’s answer would plunge the WTA into direct conflict with a global superpower—the very one that figured so prominently in its finances and future growth plans. A source tells Sports Illustrated that more than one-third of the WTA’s roughly $100 annual million in revenue comes from its dealings in China. Simon’s response would also—one way or another—send a message to the global sports community, starting with his own players.
By putting, as he phrased it, “principles ahead of profit,” Simon and the Women’s Tennis Association decided to do what the NBA, Nike, Microsoft, Starbucks, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and innumerable other global businesses vastly greater in size, power and revenue have not.
How was it that the WTA stood up to China’s authoritarian regime? It owes to a swirl of factors, figures and fortune—all rooted in the specific history and legacy authored by the WTA’s players over the last five decades.
Peng, who reached the U.S. Open semifinals in 2014 and was top-ranked in the world in doubles, is one of the best tennis players to have come from China. Now her freedom is in question.
Fred Lee/Getty Images
Years in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, China made a massive national investment in sports. And in the early 2000s, it was starting to bear fruit. Around the same time that Yao Ming entered the NBA to great fanfare, going as the first pick in the ’02 draft, China was minting its first two stars in women’s tennis. Li Na was a limber athlete, an alloy of speed and power. The other prospect, Peng Shuai, was comparably talented, but her potential was complicated by her willingness to confront authority, particularly the state-run Chinese tennis system.
A prominent sports consultant in China put it to me this way more than 15 years ago: “[Peng] caused a bit of a stir last winter by effectively resigning from the Chinese Tennis Association. Peng was upset with the way the CTA was dictating her playing schedule and telling her what tournaments she could play and assigning her coaches without her input. In the West, it would be normal for the athlete to just walk away from the federation but in China, a very rare situation. But the CTA backed away after some very ugly PR moves backfired.”
Peng was 19 at the time.
Li Na would go on to win the French Open and the Australian Open, and in 2019 was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Peng Shuai had an accomplished career as well, establishing herself as a credible singles player, once reaching the semifinals of the U.S. Open. She also became a standout doubles player, reaching No. 1 in the rankings, winning Grand Slam titles including Wimbledon, and representing China at three Olympics.
As significant as her accomplishments are, though, she will be most known for the news she made off-court this fall. On Nov. 2, she posted on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, what was essentially an intimate first-person essay about feeling spurned and being a survivor of sexual assault. Her account was rich in detail and specificity, as she accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier in the Chinese Communist Party, of carrying on a years-long affair with her, before forcing her into nonconsensual sex. Her account was also rich in length—more than 1,600 words—and in literary flourish, as she compared the power imbalance to “hitting a rock with an egg, or being a moth that flies towards the flame.”
This was believed to be the first public #MeToo allegation leveled against a public figure in China, never mind a high-up in the CCP. In a country that spends more on internal surveillance than on its military—a suggestion that it perceives its biggest threat to stability and unity as coming from within—this did not go over well.
Since his rise to power in 2012, Chinese president Xi Jinping has moved aggressively to squelch dissent, both in the streets and online. The world was now getting another vivid glimpse of what Chinese censorship looks like. It took barely 20 minutes for Peng’s account to be scrubbed from the internet. Zhou Fengsuo, a Chinese human rights activist and former student leader during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, now exiled and living in U.S., says that one of the most sinister parts of life in China is knowing that the sword of censorship hangs over you. “There’s no clear line,” he says. “You live with this ambiguity: Is what I am saying—or thinking—O.K.? If not, it disappears.” One China expert, though, told SI that Peng’s essay was so full of terms and names that should have triggered the censoring algorithms, the real question is: How did it stay up for 20 minutes?
Peng followed her explosive, achingly emotional allegation with … nothing. No more posts. No interviews. No public appearances. Within days, #WhereIsPengShuai became a hashtag worldwide. Except in China. When the search term “Peng Shuai”—then simply “tennis”—was entered into Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, it yielded no reference to Peng or a story that was making worldwide news.
Peng accused Zhang Gaoli, a former top official in the Chinese Communist Party, of sexual assault.
Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
It’s easy to lapse into cliché and sentimentality, but there’s a sisterhood and lineage on the WTA Tour. Old players mentor younger players. Younger players pay homage to their forebears. This transacts in person and also on social media, where King and Navratilova and Evert will retweet teenagers. And vice versa. “It’s always been this way,” says Pam Shriver, a former player and current broadcaster for ESPN and Tennis Channel. “There’s a real sense of family.”
There’s also a real sense of activism and mission that goes beyond hitting yellow balls. When Billie Jean King founded the WTA in 1973, it launched as a breakaway tour, separate from the men, where women could control their own destiny and finances. The WTA has always nodded to social justice, and that’s extended to today when, say, a player like Naomi Osaka generates as much attention for her stance on Black Lives Matter or mental health awareness as for her four major singles titles.
Suddenly, in November, Peng Shuai, a stalwart, a member of the sisterhood, was not only making a #MeToo allegation but was being censored by an authoritarian country. And then her whereabouts became unknown, as colleagues’ attempts to reach her proved unsuccessful. Looked at one way: Had the WTA community sat silently, it would have undercut credibility and undermined activist sentiment going forward. More charitably, the spirit and culture instilled by King, Navratilova and others would come to bear and China would feel the full force of the WTA’s collective voice, starting on social media.
Alizé Cornet, a French veteran, was among the first who expressed concern on social media over Peng Shuai’s situation. Dozens of other players followed. And then the former players—starting with King, Navratilova and Evert—weighed in, posting multiple times a day. Osaka appealed to her four million Twitter and Instagram followers, specifically referencing censorship, the great third rail when discussing China. Soon, #WhereIsPengShuai? was a trending hashtag.
All this stood in stark contrast to the minor crisis that occurred two autumns before, when Daryl Morey, then a Houston Rockets executive, issued a tweet expressing support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. China responded by banning the broadcast of NBA games. Faced with potentially even greater business losses, the league tiptoed around the situation with carefully crafted statements. LeBron James—who has significant business interests in China—scolded Morey. Other players and coaches, often outspoken, seemed to suddenly misplace their tongues.
In the WTA’s case, there was consensus. From players of all levels. From the alumnae. From their agents. From the WTA Board. Navratilova notes that for years it was axiomatic that there were “three T’s” that were considered taboo to the Chinese government: Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen. “Now, we can add a fourth: tennis.”
With the Peng drama unfolding in the background, Spain’s Garbiñe Muguruza won the WTA Finals in Guadalajara. She posed with Evert, Navratilova, Conchita Martínez and King.
Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
Steve Simon, age 66, has been the CEO of the WTA since 2015, and you’d be hard-pressed to find both a more consummate tennis insider and a leader less inclined to grandstand. A former college tennis player at Long Beach State, Simon kicked around in tennis’s equivalent of the minor leagues—he once played a Wimbledon main draw match in mixed doubles—before taking a series of sales and sponsorship jobs in the sport. First with Adidas, then with the event held in Indian Wells, now owned by billionaire Larry Ellison, where Simon rose to become tournament director.
Measured and unassuming, Simon has always carried himself less like an ex-jock or slick salesperson than a cautious and thorough accountant. He began serving on the WTA Board of Directors in 2004, and colleagues say he was often the voice of reason in the room. “He’s introverted. I wouldn’t say he’s charismatic. And at the same time, he is such a strong communicator,” says Shriver, who praised the openness and transparency with which he’s piloted the tour through the pandemic.
In 2009, Larry Scott left the WTA CEO position to become commissioner of what was then the Pac-10 Conference. A board member encouraged Simon to take over. Simon demurred and suggested the WTA could use a female leader. He backed Stacey Allaster, who got the position. But when Allaster completed an unremarkable term, Simon replaced her in ’15.
Characterized by players like Victoria Azarenka as “more of a listener than a talker,” Simon was happy to let the players occupy the foreground and happy to let other WTA colleagues make the public appearances. One of his early accomplishments entailed brokering Serena and Venus Williams’s return to Indian Wells after an ugly, decades-long boycott prompted by treatment from the crowd that Serena has said had an “undercurrent of racism” that “was painful, confusing and unfair.” Simon took no victory lap. At the time, he turned down an interview on the matter, insisting this was the Williams sisters’ story to tell, not his.
Some of Simon’s close friends and colleagues say they don’t know his politics. The next person to describe him as ideological will be the first. There is, instead, a pragmatism and fidelity to the institution. “He’s one of those people,” says a former WTA Board member, “who has a knack for just looking at things calmly, clearly: I’ll analyze a problem and try to make the right choice. … He is a right-is-right and wrong-is-wrong guy.”
As CEO, Simon was tasked with putting the WTA on firmer financial footing. One of his great dilemmas: figuring out what to do about China. Under Allaster, the WTA had embarked on what it called its China Strategy. Catalyzed by the success of Li—and to a lesser extent Peng—China had taken a liking to tennis, and its government was willing to fund WTA events. Bidding against the largest government in the world, the private promoters that had been hosting tournaments were little match for the Chinese sports machine. Event after event migrated to China. Other tournaments were created from whole cloth and added to the WTA calendar. By the late 2010s—despite no longer producing top players—China hosted 11 WTA events, more than any other country in the world.
There was a central, inconvenient truth, an open secret: The players had little use for China. There was something unseemly about this nakedly transactional relationship. The events were often staged in arenas devoid of fans and in uncomfortable situations. One example: When Shenzhen held the WTA Finals event in 2019, players could see Chinese tanks positioned menacingly in the direction of adjacent Hong Kong. In the stadium parking lot, Chinese soldiers practiced riot drills, preparing to squelch pro-democracy protests.
Factor in the travel, time zone adjustment, language barrier, even the traffic, and it’s no surprise that players developed a habit of withdrawing from events in China just before a tournament’s start, often with dubious injuries. Consider: While China figured prominently in the WTA’s business model, Serena Williams hasn’t played an event in the country since 2014.
On the other hand, the money sloshing around China was undeniable. Despite the militarized setting, at that 2019 Shenzhen event, Ash Barty won the title and earned $4.4 million, the biggest purse ever conferred on a player—male or female—at one tournament. The Chinese events paid the WTA comely fees to sanction their tournaments. The Chinese events also paid millions in operating contracts to U.S.-based management firms, like Octagon and IMG, to promote and run the events. And brands such as Nike and Rolex were all too happy when the individual stars they sponsor played in a market with 1.4 billion potential consumers.
It was under Simon that the WTA signed its deal to hold its championships in Shenzhen. But, privately, multiple sources tell SI, he was never comfortable with the heavy reliance on one market and had long been looking to rebalance the portfolio. Multiple sources say the WTA’s financial concerns have intensified given that Gemdale, the company underwriting the Shenzhen tournament, is a property development firm operating amid China’s real estate debt crisis.
When, on account of COVID-19, the 2020 Chinese WTA events were canceled from the calendar, Simon could glimpse a world without China. Then, in the fall of ’21, amid a new crisis, he was really confronted with the prospect of the WTA leaving the country.
Simon may have been the one to sign the WTA’s 10-year deal to host its Finals in Shenzhen, but sources say he’d become uncomfortable with the tour's over-reliance on China.
Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
To Simon, the WTA Board and the players, the success of Guadalajara was proof that the WTA Tour was nimble. In a matter of weeks, it could switch to an entirely new venue on an entirely new continent, and a successful event could materialize. The prospect of leaving China was suddenly looking less daunting.
With the clear backing of the tour’s players—past and present—on Nov. 13, Simon aired his grievances and frustration publicly. Expressing his inability to connect with Peng directly, he demanded that the Chinese officials conduct a “full, fair and transparent investigation” into her allegations. He also demanded proof of her safety. He added that if China was not in compliance, he would have to consider taking his business elsewhere.
To some, the salvo may have seemed naive. The notion that China—an autocracy with no free press and censors that block search terms—would capitulate and suddenly issue an investigation because a women’s tennis tour based in the U.S. made a demand, was optimistic at best. But to others, it read as strategic. As Shriver says, “You don’t make a threat you’re not willing to carry out.”
China returned serve, making no reference to any investigation or willingness to take seriously Peng’s allegations. Instead, through a state-run media outlet, it released a statement attributed to Peng.
Sounding nothing like the player writing on the 1,600-word cri de coeur—or the words of a player who, 15 years ago, was already known for confronting Chinese authority—it read in part: “Hello everyone this is Peng Shuai... I’m not missing, nor am I unsafe. I’ve just been resting at home and everything is fine. Thank you again for caring about me. If the WTA publishes any more news about me, please verify it with me, and release it with my consent. As a professional tennis player, I thank you for all your companionship and consideration.”
It also walked back the allegation of sexual assault.
Simon shared the skepticism of many and reiterated his demand for an open investigation and independent proof that Peng was safe. The Chinese government did not address this request but did make Peng available to the IOC for a video chat. With just three months until the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the organization had every reason to want a story about China’s oppression of an athlete to fade from the headlines and from social media. After the call, IOC president Thomas Bach expressed satisfaction that Peng was unharmed and acting on her own accord. Few were convinced.
Simon was among those who remained unsatisfied, and on Dec.1, he followed through with his threat. Two weeks had gone by without evidence that Peng was able to speak freely or that the demands for an investigation were taken seriously, and so he announced that the WTA was suspending tournaments in China indefinitely. “None of this is acceptable nor can it become acceptable. If powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug, then the basis on which the WTA was founded—equality for women—would suffer an immense setback. I will not and cannot let that happen to the WTA and its players.”
The hypothetical had now become concrete. The WTA is out of China, at least for the foreseeable future. And—absent a considerable change in policy by China, or considerable capitulation by the WTA—this freeze isn’t thawing. And still, Simon has faced virtually no internal opposition. Says one top U.S. player, “Everybody is relieved to have it not be a choice.” Adds Shriver: “The discomfort of going, it’s been taken out of their hands.”
As Simon put it to me during an interview for Tennis Channel: “There’s been unanimous support for the direction and the approach. … More importantly, there’s [unanimous] deep concern for Peng Shuai and making sure she’s O.K.—and not just from a physical perspective.”
Prioritizing principle ahead of profit. Ceasing to do business with a country with values inconsistent to yours. Effectively standing up to a bully. … It sounds fundamental. But companies with far more leverage and far more revenue haven’t shown a fraction of this conviction.
The WTA, however, remains largely out on an island. In a repudiation of the WTA, the IOC said it preferred “quiet diplomacy” when dealing with China. Trying to save face a week after the video conference with Peng, it walked back its breezy assurances of her well-being. But it was all the typical IOC buffet of garbled statements, clumsy PR, and rank hypocrisy. The organization had shown itself to be a tool of Chinese autocracy. The Winter Games in Beijing will go on as planned.
It should be noted that Zhang Gaoli, the man that Peng says sexually assaulted her, was the face of China’s organizing efforts for those games.
For now, anyway, men’s tennis events will go on in China as well. ATP players have been supportive of their WTA counterparts. But the organization is a 50-50 partnership between players and tournaments. The tournament side–including a board member who runs the Shanghai event—has been cautious not to follow the path the WTA has blazed. Though it enraged a good many players who considered it a spineless response, the ATP issued a statement that essentially argued for a wait-and-see approach.
It remains to be seen to what extent NBC and other broadcasters address Peng Shuai during February’s Olympic coverage. It will be interesting to see what will happen when athletes interviewed in Beijing or on the medal stand will use the occasion to call attention to Peng specifically and China’s human rights abuses more generally. It will also be interesting to see whether and how Chinese events pursue action against the WTA for breach of contract.
Meanwhile, the most pressing question inside women’s tennis remains #WhereIsPengShuai? At this writing—more than six weeks after her initial post—she has not reengaged on social media, not reached out to Simon, nor to any player. (SI contacted the Chinese Embassy in Washington for comment but received no response.)
There is also the future of the tour. To maintain its growth, the WTA will need to alchemize all this goodwill and publicity into revenue—specifically the revenue it will lose by divesting from China. Sources tell SI that in recent weeks, Procter & Gamble has reached out to the WTA about potential new business. Simon is optimistic that other markets and host cities will surface to take over the Chinese sanctions. But seldom does a business self-exile from a market and jeopardize one-third of its revenue without a concrete backup plan. “This is not where we wanted to end up,” Simon told SI. “But here we are. Some things are more important than money.”
Zhou Fengsuo, the former Tiananmen Square student leader, now living in the U.S., has watched this unfold with a mix of concern and admiration: “We may not know for sure what is happening with Peng Shuai. With China you never know. But we know she is safer now than before because of the international attention. Because the WTA is standing so firm. That’s what makes her safe.”
8. The U.S. Pursued Professors Working With China. Cases Are Faltering.
The U.S. Pursued Professors Working With China. Cases Are Faltering.
MIT professor’s academic collaboration in Shenzhen led to criminal charges, but the university says such ties are ordinary practice
WSJ · by Aruna Viswanatha in Boston and Sha Hua in Hong Kong
One year later, he was arrested on charges of concealing extensive ties to China in grant applications he had made to the U.S. government. It was one of a string of attention-grabbing cases brought by the Justice Department to address suspicions that the Chinese government was exploiting academic ties to engage in technological espionage.
Since then, the government’s pursuit of academics for alleged lying about their affiliations has faltered. The first such case to go to a jury ended in an acquittal. Out of 24 other cases, nine defendants have pleaded guilty. Charges have been dropped completely in six others, five of which officials said they dismissed because the scientists involved already had been sufficiently punished by being detained or otherwise restricted for a year.
The rest are pending, including one against a professor at Harvard University who went on trial on Dec. 14. By comparison, about 92% of the Justice Department’s overall white-collar prosecutions end in convictions.
In recent weeks, Justice Department officials have discussed whether to drop additional cases against academics, including Mr. Chen, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Chen has pleaded not guilty.
Professor Gang Chen, pictured in 2012, was accused of concealing extensive ties to China in grant applications to the U.S. government.
Photo: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The allegations against Mr. Chen and others, which came amid sharp anti-China rhetoric from the Trump administration, sparked criticism from some in academia that the Justice Department was improperly targeting American scientists of Chinese descent—something the department has denied. At a minimum, the cases showed that at times what the Justice Department saw as suspicious contacts between American professors and scientists and government officials in China were something the universities regarded as ordinary academic collaboration.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, questioned by a lawmaker in October about the cases, said the new head of the Justice Department’s national security division planned to review the department’s approach to countering threats posed by the Chinese government. A spokesman said that review would be completed soon, and the agency would provide additional information in the coming weeks.
Chinese officials have called on the U.S. to halt the effort. In a written statement, Liu Pengyu, a representative of the Chinese embassy in Washington, said that China’s policies in connection with U.S. scientists “are no different from the common practice of other countries,” and that U.S. authorities should “stop stigmatizing China’s programs.” The embassy didn’t comment on the details of Mr. Chen’s case.
The U.S. effort seems to have helped Beijing attract Chinese-American scientists to China. More than half a dozen top researchers of Chinese descent said in interviews they had either moved from posts at U.S. universities to China or were looking for a chance to do so, saying they feared becoming a target of what they viewed as Justice Department overreach.
The federal government has estimated that each year more than $225 billion in intellectual property is lost to China. National-security officials have said publicly that U.S. universities are a key conduit in that loss of technology.
Beginning in about 2018, as the Trump administration criticized a variety of China’s trade and technology practices, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. agencies that sponsor much university research began flagging instances where grant recipients appeared to be trying to transfer sensitive technologies to China and to hide Chinese funding when applying for U.S. government support.
In 2019, federal prosecutors began charging academics with lying to U.S. grant-giving agencies about their China connections. In the summer of 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that the agency was opening a China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours, and warned that Americans “are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.”
On Jan. 13, days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, prosecutors charged Mr. Chen with failing to disclose some of his ties to China to the Energy Department, which funded some of his research. They alleged he had served as an adviser to the Chinese government, to a Beijing-funded development company and to the board at Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science and Technology, or SUSTech, the institution with which MIT was collaborating.
As agents investigated Mr. Chen, they suspected he had pursued the collaboration at SUSTech not to benefit MIT but to benefit China, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The allegations of the complaint imply that this was not just about greed, but about loyalty to China,” said Andrew Lelling, then the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, in announcing the case.
Andrew Lelling, then U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, announcing federal charges in connection with aiding China on Jan. 28, 2020.
Photo: katherine taylor/Reuters
In a later filing, lawyers for Mr. Chen, who became a naturalized American citizen in 2000, described Mr. Lelling’s “speculation” about Mr. Chen’s loyalty as “grossly insulting.”
In a group letter to Mr. Reif, more than 200 of Mr. Chen’s colleagues wrote: “The complaint against Gang vilifies what would be considered normal academic and research activities, including promoting MIT’s global mission.”
A lawyer for Mr. Chen, Robert Fisher, said his client was grateful for the support and “looks forward to his day in court.”
Mr. Chen was born in 1964 and grew up in China’s Hubei province, where his mother had been forced to move during the Cultural Revolution. His university assigned him to study thermal power, which his father thought meant he would become a boilermaker. Instead a Chinese-American scientist recruited him to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1993.
After stints at Duke University and the University of California, Los Angeles, he moved to MIT in 2001, assembling a large research group and churning out papers on topics such as how to use batteries to convert thermal energy into electricity. In 2013, he became head of MIT’s mechanical engineering department.
MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., has been cultivating ties with China since the mid-2010s.
Photo: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg News
By the mid-2010s, MIT was cultivating ties with China. It received $125 million from Chinese nationals and organizations between 2015 and 2019, more than any of its university peers, according to self-reported data collected by the Education Department. It also received around $11 million from now-blacklisted Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co., other Education Department data show. The U.S. government alleges that Huawei gear could be used by Beijing to spy globally, which Huawei has denied.
Chinese diplomats in New York often dropped by MIT to visit Chinese students, and they were in frequent contact with Mr. Chen, who was one of the most cited researchers in his field and was well-known in China. Those contacts, captured as the U.S. monitored Chinese diplomats, landed Mr. Chen on the U.S. government’s radar, according to people familiar with the matter.
The diplomats asked Mr. Chen to serve in various posts. Mr. Chen spurned some Chinese requests and accommodated others. In 2013, he declined to serve on an advisory panel for the Chinese government, according to people familiar with his activities. The next year, told it would involve minimal effort, he accepted the offer, but there is no record that he followed up or was paid for it, those people said.
In February 2016, China’s then vice minister of science and technology, Wang Zhigang, visited Boston and spoke to MIT officials and faculty, including Mr. Chen, both on campus and at a dinner with Chinese-American scientists. In the subsequent complaint against Mr. Chen, prosecutors cited notes he took on his phone that day as evidence of his efforts to advance China’s strategic goals.
The most recent convention of the Chinese Communist Party had “scientific innovation placed at core,” Mr. Chen had written, noting that the question was “how to promote MIT China collaborations.” Mr. Chen later said the notes merely reflected Mr. Wang’s words to him.
After the meeting, MIT’s associate provost for international affairs, Richard Lester, asked Mr. Chen how China’s science ministry could be a partner for MIT in China. “It would seem from today’s meeting that there is a possible path forward there,” Mr. Lester wrote in an email.
At MIT, officials were particularly interested in Shenzhen, a city adjacent to Hong Kong that had grown into an advanced manufacturing and technology center.
In 2016, Ma Xingrui, then-Communist Party Secretary for Shenzhen, pushed visiting U.S. professors for partnerships between the city’s institutes and U.S. universities, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and Stanford University. He suggested to Mr. Chen that he consider a collaboration between MIT and SUSTech, the university the city’s government had set up to complement the economic growth.
Former national-security officials not connected to Mr. Chen’s case said SUSTech’s recruitment of scientists with experience at labs run by the U.S. Department of Energy, including the SUSTech’s past president, had raised suspicions among government security officials.
MIT officials viewed a SUSTech collaboration favorably, given SUSTech’s Western-trained faculty and its decision to teach many classes in English. They believed Shenzhen’s manufacturing prowess would be valuable for MIT students to experience.
U.S. investigators were concerned about Mr. Chen’s continued contacts with Chinese government officials as he kept them apprised of the SUSTech-MIT plans.
Shenzhen, a city adjacent to Hong Kong, has grown into an advanced manufacturing and technology center.
Photo: bertha wang/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
In January 2017, Mr. Chen accompanied a dozen MIT faculty members to SUSTech for a workshop to discuss areas in which the two schools could cooperate.
That February, a Chinese diplomat sent Mr. Chen another note that was flagged by prosecutors. In it, Mr. Chen was told that the science ministry had launched a new area of funding for “key special projects” between China and other governments. The diplomat encouraged Mr. Chen to consider the MIT-SUSTech collaboration as such a project, provided he obtain related U.S. government funding. Mr. Chen never responded.
One month later, Mr. Chen renewed a grant he has received for more than a decade from the Energy Department, to continue his research into how atoms vibrate and carry heat in plastics.
Mr. Chen was reimbursed for his travel to speak at a California conference hosted by ZGC Capital Corp., a Silicon Valley fund affiliated with Zhongguancun Development Group, a company funded by the city of Beijing that was a member of an MIT program that connects faculty with industry. Prosecutors later alleged he hid from the Energy Department a post ZGC offered him. He turned down the post but continued to work with the Beijing company through the MIT program, people familiar with the matter said.
In the fall of 2017, Mr. Chen took a paid position to mentor students at a middle school in Chongqing, whose headmaster, Wu Xianhong, was the founder of investment company Verakin and had endowed a fellowship at MIT. Mr. Chen gave a speech there, encouraging students not to fear science. Mr. Wu’s investment company advertised the affiliation, saying it offered a talent program that had “famous exports and professors from top universities” as tutors. Prosecutors said in the indictment that Mr. Chen hid that post from the U.S. as well. Lawyers for Mr. Chen have argued he was under no obligation to disclose it.
In June 2018, MIT and SUSTech struck a deal under which SUSTech agreed to pay MIT $25 million over five years. SUSTech would send some faculty members and students to MIT each year, and MIT faculty members and students would travel to Shenzhen. That fall, Mr. Chen took a sabbatical from MIT and spent part of the semester at SUSTech.
That November, MIT continued to expand its engagement with China, hosting with the Chinese Academy of Sciences a science and technology conference in Beijing. MIT’s president and Mr. Chen introduced the event.
The event included discussions between MIT professors and the founders of technology companies iFlytek Co. Ltd. and SenseTime. The following year, the U.S. Commerce Department added both firms to its blacklist, accusing them of playing a role in Beijing’s repression of Muslim minorities in northwest China. SenseTime described the allegations as unfounded, and iFlytek has said the U.S. move wouldn’t have a serious effect on its business. MIT has since terminated a research collaboration with iFlytek.
In 2019, Congress held a hearing in which U.S. national-security officials warned about scientific interactions with China.
That April, MIT said it wouldn’t renew its contracts with Huawei, and would intensify its vetting of projects that involved China, Russia or Saudi Arabia. Apparently, it didn’t think its January 2020 visit to SUSTech—which preceded Mr. Chen being questioned at the airport—would present any problem.
MIT President Rafael Reif spoke via video to a conference at Tsinghua University in Beijing on Oct. 8.
Photo: Yi Haifei/China News Service/Getty Images
After Mr. Chen’s arrest early this year, Mr. Reif, MIT’s president, indicated that MIT and the government appeared to be construing the SUSTech collaboration very differently. “These funds are about advancing the work of a group of colleagues, and the research and educational mission of MIT,” he said. MIT has continued to pay Mr. Chen’s legal bills.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Mr. Lelling, the former Massachusetts U.S. attorney whose office charged Mr. Chen, said he thought the Justice Department should rethink its efforts to “avoid needlessly chilling scientific and business collaborations with Chinese partners.”
Meanwhile, professors at MIT and SUSTech are continuing their collaborations. University officials say they are still working to figure out how to respond to the growing calls to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies while maintaining a welcoming research environment.
At an October hearing on research security before a House subcommittee, MIT’s vice president for research, Maria Zuber, said law enforcement and the university would benefit from better understanding each other, given the differences in the ways they work and share information. “It’s a work in progress,” she said.
—Lekai Liu contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Aruna Viswanatha in Boston and Sha Hua in Hong Kong
9. Chinese spies have penetrated Taiwan's military, case documents reveal
This Is no surprise to the Taiwanese military officers and officials with whom I have spoken over the past few years.
Chinese spies have penetrated Taiwan's military, case documents reveal
TAIPEI, Taiwan – For more than 20 years, Xie Xizhang presented himself as a Hong Kong businessman on visits to Taiwan. He now stands accused of having another mission: recruiting spies for China.
On one trip in 2006, Xie met a senior retired Taiwanese navy officer, Chang Pei-ning, over a meal, according to official documents accusing the pair of espionage. Chang would become one of Xie’s agents, the documents allege, helping him penetrate Taiwan’s active military leadership as part of a long-running Chinese operation to build a spy ring among serving and retired military officers.
The Taiwanese officers and their families were allegedly lured by Xie’s offers of all-expenses-paid trips abroad, thousands of dollars in cash payments, and gifts such as silk scarves and belts for their wives. In June 2019, counter-espionage officers moved against Xie’s network, launching raids that uncovered further evidence, according to the documents, which were reviewed by Reuters. Now, Chang is facing espionage charges and a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Xie. According to a person familiar with the case, Xie is not in Taiwan.
The operation detailed in these documents shows how Beijing allegedly sought out commanders in the Taiwan military and induced them to become spies. It comes amid a series of convictions for military espionage in Taiwan in recent years.
Those cases reveal that China has mounted a broader campaign to undermine the democratic island’s military and civilian leadership, corrode its will to fight, extract details of high-tech weapons and gain insights into defense planning, according to senior retired Taiwanese military officers and current counter-espionage agents, as well as former US military and intelligence officers with experience in Taiwan.
Taiwan’s spycatchers are battling a campaign that has compromised senior officers at the heart of the island’s armed forces and government agencies, a steady stream of convictions handed down in the courts shows.
Beijing has even penetrated the security detail assigned to protect Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. A retired presidential security officer and a serving military police lieutenant colonel at the unit tasked with protecting the president had their conviction upheld earlier this year for leaking sensitive information about Tsai’s security to a Chinese intelligence agency.
The information included a hand-drawn organizational chart of the Special Service Center, the unit that protects the president, according to the ruling in the High Court. The two were also charged with leaking the names, titles and work phone numbers of senior security officers guarding the Presidential Office and Tsai’s residence in the heart of Taipei, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters and local media reports.
In the past decade, at least 21 serving or retired Taiwanese officers with the rank of captain or above have been convicted of spying for China, according to a Reuters review of court records and reports from Taiwan’s official news agencies. At least nine other serving or retired members of the armed forces are currently on trial or being investigated on suspicion of contacts with spies from China, the review shows.
The 21 convicted officers were found guilty of recruiting spies for China or passing a range of sensitive information to China, including contact details of senior Taiwanese officers and details of Taiwan’s agents in China.
The Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing did not respond to questions from Reuters about China’s espionage activities in Taiwan.
In Taipei, the Ministry of National Defense told Reuters that pro-active counter-intelligence efforts have stopped China from penetrating the military. The ministry said in a statement that it employs education campaigns to encourage and reward officers and soldiers to report initial contact with “criminals.” These contacts are immediately investigated, and when there is potential for the loss of confidential information, the military acts to block any leak, the ministry said.
This effort, the ministry said, means “there has been no infiltration.”
The Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau, Taiwan’s lead spycatching agency, said it had no comment on ongoing legal matters.
Other arms of the Taiwanese government, however, greet the spying with alarm. Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council told Reuters in a statement that China’s “unceasing expansion of espionage” is one of the “malicious political operations” that Beijing is conducting, undermining “the normal development of cross-strait relations.”
Well-placed spies in the ranks of the Taiwan military could offer a priceless advantage to China if the two sides plunge into open conflict, according to Taiwanese and US military analysts. Tensions have risen sharply this year. China’s military is intensifying its gray-zone warfare against the island, a campaign of menacing air and sea patrols that falls short of open warfare. The People’s Liberation Army is also steadily accumulating the firepower required to seize Taiwan and prevent the United States from intervening.
The ruling Communist Party in Beijing regards Taiwan as a Chinese province that must be unified with the mainland.
President Xi Jinping says China would prefer peaceful unification but refuses to rule out force. President Tsai says Taiwan is an independent country called the Republic of China, its official name, and has vowed to defend its democracy and freedom.
“China is conducting a very targeted infiltration effort towards Taiwan,” said retired Taiwanese navy Lieutenant Commander Lu Li-shih. Espionage cases, he said, show that Beijing has compromised almost all ranks, including top-level generals, despite intensive internal education campaigns in the military warning of the dangers of Beijing’s espionage efforts.
Lu, who has studied Chinese spying operations, said Beijing’s agents often begin softening their targets with offers of small gifts, drinks and meals. Handlers typically pay richly for the first piece of secret information extracted from current or retired officers, Lu said. This payment would later be used to blackmail them into supplying further intelligence at a much lower price, he said.
A powerful weapon
This year alone, Taiwanese courts have upheld the convictions of the two men who revealed secrets about President Tsai’s security and found a retired lieutenant colonel from the armaments bureau guilty of building espionage networks for China. A retired major general and three retired colonels from the Military Intelligence Bureau are on trial for allegedly recruiting spies for China. Reuters was unable to reach the defendants and their lawyers in these cases for comment.
In July, Taiwan’s Mirror Media reported that the island’s former deputy defense minister, General Chang Che-ping, was questioned in a national security investigation.
Three people familiar with the matter confirmed a probe is under way. Two of the people told Reuters that General Chang was being questioned for having had contacts with Xie Xizhang – the alleged Chinese agent who presented himself as a Hong Kong businessman. The defense ministry said Chang had been interviewed as a witness in the case.
Contacted by Reuters, Chang replied: “Inconvenient to comment. Hope you understand.”
According to the official documents reviewed by Reuters, Xie allegedly reported to an office that is part of the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence apparatus and serves as a front for China’s Central Military Commission. President Xi chairs the commission, which is China’s top military decision-making body.
General Chang, Taiwan’s highest-ranking air force general, is now head of the National Defense University. When the media reports of the probe emerged, Chang issued a statement calling them “far-fetched.” He said he had “not talked about military matters without permission.”
The Taipei district prosecutors office said it doesn’t discuss ongoing investigations.
Espionage has long been a powerful weapon for the Chinese Communist Party. In the Chinese civil war, Communist agents and sympathizers played a key role in defeating the forces of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), or nationalist party, under Chiang Kai-shek, forcing a retreat to Taiwan. In some instances, entire KMT formations were persuaded to change sides and joined the Communists under Mao Zedong, according to multiple accounts of that conflict.
The series of convictions in Taiwanese courts shows cultivating disloyalty in the military remains a high priority
for Beijing. Despite China’s vastly stronger forces and serious shortcomings in Taiwan’s military, the island remains a tough target for invasion. Even without outside assistance, Taiwan’s best-trained troops could inflict heavy losses by exploiting well-prepared positions, rugged terrain and the vulnerability of an invasion fleet crossing the Taiwan Strait, say Taiwanese and U.S. military analysts.
For Chinese invaders, advance knowledge of defensive plans, communication codes, weapons sites and troop locations would offset some of these difficulties, according to these analysts. Disloyal officers might also refuse to fight, misdirect their troops or defect to the attackers.
In a report released in September about the Chinese military, Taiwan’s defense ministry acknowledged that in an
attack, agents for China “lurking” on the island could strike at command centers to “decapitate” Taiwan’s military and political leadership and demoralize its armed forces.
Even the discovery of Chinese spies in peacetime is a potentially demoralizing blow to Taiwan. “The repeated cases of the most senior level of Taiwan armed forces officers being convicted of espionage has got to have a psychological effect on the officer corps and in the ranks,” said Grant Newsham, a retired US Marine Corps colonel who has studied the island’s defense capabilities. “And, once you can create doubt in the honesty of one’s leaders, the rot sets in and deepens.”
One retired high-ranking officer in Taiwan agreed: Colleagues lose confidence in one another, this person said, and
“you make allies lose confidence in you.”
Some Taiwanese military veterans worry that the repeated espionage cases will make the United States, the island’s main ally, unwilling to share advanced weapons or sensitive intelligence for fear of these secrets leaking to Beijing.
“We can’t blame other people. We are the cause of the problem,” said Lu, the retired navy lieutenant commander.
Asked about the potential loss of faith in Washington, Taiwan’s defense ministry said there had been no disruption to normal ties with friendly countries. The US National Security Council declined to comment for this story.
Beijing has succeeded in recruiting spies from the island’s armed forces despite strenuous efforts by the Taiwanese
military’s Counter Intelligence and Security Division to alert troops to the danger of Chinese agents. The military even produces soap operas, sometimes starring serving members of the armed forces, with scripts that echo previous spy cases. The soaps are part of an hour-long television program broadcast every Thursday afternoon that is mandatory viewing for all serving officers and soldiers.
In an episode late last year, a staff sergeant working in communications in a combat unit meets a woman in a bar who claimed to work for an investment firm in the defense industry.
They start a relationship, and the woman begins to ask for sensitive information. To impress her, the staff sergeant gives her data on missiles at air bases in northern Taiwan. Later he grows suspicious and refuses her further requests, but she threatens to blackmail him with a recording of his earlier indiscretion. The woman is later arrested.
The scene switches to a man who appears to be the woman’s spymaster. On the wall in front of him are clips from Chinese newspapers, including a photograph of Chinese President Xi. “That’s alright,” the handler says, tearing up a photograph of the woman. “We have plenty of other opportunities.”
To reinforce the message, posters and signs on bases exhort Taiwanese soldiers to remain vigilant. Stickers with the number of a hotline for reporting suspected spies have been posted above some urinals. Packs of tissues handed out to troops carry a notice promising a reward of T$5 million ($180,000) for successfully exposing a spy.
Wooing veteran commanders
While Taiwan battles Chinese espionage, it also spies on China as part of a decades-long effort to understand Beijing’s intentions, according to current and retired Taiwanese officers and official documents reviewed by Reuters. China’s official media periodically announces the discovery of Taiwanese spy networks and the arrest of alleged agents.
In October last year, China’s state television broadcaster, CCTV, reported that a Taiwanese academic arrested in China, Cheng Yu-chin, had confessed to spying. The same month, CCTVreported the arrest of Lee Meng-chu, alleging he was an active member of a Taiwan separatist group who posed as a businessman to conceal his espionage role. Lee was arrested when he entered China and was found to have photographs and videos of Chinese
military drills in the city of Shenzhen, as well as materials showing he supported the protests in Hong Kong, the report said.
Cheng and Lee could not be reached by Reuters. Asked about their arrests, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said that Chinese authorities are “arbitrarily arresting our people who engage in cross-strait exchanges” and using official media “to fabricate fictional crimes.”
In its campaign to subvert Taiwan’s military, Beijing has also mounted a longstanding operation to woo senior retired
commanders with historic ties to China. These efforts exploit political divisions that have widened in Taiwan over the past two decades between Tsai’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the main opposition KMT.
The DPP has gained ground with the support of a younger generation that increasingly identifies as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. The KMT, born in China, holds to its old dream of eventually reunifying a free and democratic country. The party also supports closer relations with Beijing, but has denounced the Communist Party’s threats against Taiwan.
Many of Taiwan’s older, retired military officers support the KMT, which ruled the island before it became a democracy and now vies with the DPP for power. Most of these veterans don’t back the Communist Party, but both the KMT and Beijing share the dream of a single China, even if they have different visions of what that means. Some have been welcomed to China to attend seminars and receptions with retired counterparts from the Chinese military.
Though no longer in uniform, these officers still retain influence over a military that is deeply hierarchical, with
long-standing networks of patronage and personal loyalty, according to current and former U.S. officials with extensive experience of the Taiwan military.
In November 2016, Beijing scored a dramatic propaganda victory when more than 30 retired Taiwanese generals were seen attending a speech by President Xi at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The visitors stood for China’s national anthem, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency reported. The event, broadcast on Chinese state television, sparked an outcry in Taiwan.
One of the retired generals in the audience was Wu Sz-huai, who is now a KMT lawmaker. He apologized in 2019, saying he was unaware that Xi was hosting the event and would have declined to attend if he had known. He said members of the delegation stood for the national anthem but did not sing. Wu declined to comment for this report.
In its statement, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council called on “retired high-ranking generals to maintain the dignity of the country and pay attention to their own words, deeds and the perceptions of society.”
In the aftermath of the visit, Taiwan’s parliament tightened the rules on retired officers’ trips to China. The new penalties include fines of up to T$10 million ($360,000) and the cancellation of pensions for retired senior officers and government officials who attend Chinese political events or “salute” Communist Party flags or symbols.
Some senior retired Taiwanese officers told Reuters that these trips to China hurt the military’s image. But they added that a younger generation of officers now rising through the ranks would not be as susceptible to appeals for a unified China that includes Taiwan.
Free trips abroad
One major challenge for Taiwan’s counter-espionage forces is light penalties for retired officers convicted of spying. Under military law, serving officers can be sentenced to death or life imprisonment for serious offenses. However, former officers who commit crimes once out of uniform can only be tried under the National Security Law, which prescribes much shorter jail terms.
Under public pressure to counter Chinese spying, parliament in June 2019 increased penalties under the security law for the most severe crimes, from a maximum of five years imprisonment to a minimum of seven years and fines of up to T$100 million (about $3.6 million).
The case of alleged Chinese spy Xie Xizhang was first reported earlier this year by local media, but the official documents seen by Reuters provide new details. Xie is accused of inviting current and retired Taiwanese military officers to drinks, banquets and sporting events in a bid to win their friendship and trust, according to the documents.
The operation also allegedly relied on enticing prospective Taiwanese spies to accept free overseas trips where they would meet their Chinese handlers and other Communist Party officials. The official documents allege that six serving and retired officers received all-expenses-paid trips to South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, as well as Chinese cities including Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau.
A key objective of the alleged operation was to recruit officers in leading combat units, according to the official
documents. In 2008, Chang Pei-ning, the retired navy officer, allegedly introduced Xie to a senior serving Taiwanese Navy officer, Captain Ho Chung-chi, and Ho’s wife, Chuang Hsiu-yun. In the years that followed, Ho and his wife, working under Xie’s guidance, allegedly recruited other officers.
Chang, Ho, and Chuang were charged under the National Security Law in November 2019 for recruiting a spy ring for China. The three are currently on trial, according to a spokesperson for the Kaohsiung District Court.
Taiwan’s defense ministry said Chang and Ho had retired before they allegedly became involved in the case. However, official documents accusing the pair of espionage allege that Ho met Xie on multiple occasions before his retirement in August 2015.
Reuters spoke to Ho at his home in Kaohsiung. He declined to comment and said his wife had no comment. Chang didn’t respond to a request for comment left at his home in Kaohsiung.
In a post on his Facebook page when he retired, Ho bid farewell to his navy comrades: “Time to say goodbye!” The post included a picture of a folded Navy uniform, officer’s hat, medals and badges.
The message generated hundreds of likes and comments. “Captain,” wrote one well-wisher. “Thank you for your years of service to the country and the navy!” – Rappler.com
10. Xi Jinping has been taking on China's capitalists. Here's why that will change in 2022
Excerpts:
At the forefront of Xi's mind is almost certainly a desire to keep the country running steadily ahead of a historic third term in office.
It's widely expected the Chinese leader will extend his reign at next year's 20th Party Congress, cementing his position as the country's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.
"Xi's message of 'stability' is aimed at the political establishment in China, which must absorb the brunt of an historic power play, in addition to the business sector," said Alex Capri, a research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation.
Xi has taken several steps to signal that he is focused more on domestic issues than on any grand international ambitions. The Chinese leader hasn't left the country since the start of the pandemic, and has taken dramatic steps to secure his country's borders and lock down entire regions to contain even a single coronavirus case — a "Covid-zero" approach abandoned by much of the world.
But Capri noted that Xi has to consider the outside world to an extent. He said Xi's message of stability is "also intended to assuage growing anxieties on Wall Street and within other corporate and financial hubs, which China relies upon far more than it cares to admit for investment, technology and trade."
That's a precarious balancing act — and one Xi will have to think carefully about in the year ahead.
Xi Jinping has been taking on China's capitalists. Here's why that will change in 2022
CNN · by Analysis by Laura He, CNN Business
A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
Hong Kong (CNN Business)One year ago, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged to spend 2021 reining in "disorderly" private businesses that were growing too powerful and taking on too much risk.
The curbs on tech, finance, real estate, education and entertainment hammered stocks and at once point wiped out trillions of dollars worth of value from Chinese companies on global markets. They also triggered huge layoffs among many companies, pressuring the job sector even as it tries to recover from the pandemic.
Further regulations on property firms that began last year have piled on the pain for major developers who were already carrying too much debt. Real estate — which accounts for nearly a third of China's GDP — is now in a deepening slump, with big players on the brink of collapse.
Add that to a handful of other problems in the world's second largest economy, and you have some serious risks for the Chinese government to contend with in 2022.
Read More
Even though China emerged from 2020 as the only major economy to grow that year, growth has slowed faster than expected in 2021, weighed down by the real estate crisis, repeated Covid-19 outbreaks, supply chain disruptions and a power crunch.
All those headaches are making Beijing reconsider its approach to policy. During a key economic meeting earlier this month, top leaders from the ruling Chinese Communist Party marked "stability" as their top priority for 2022. That's a huge pivot from last year's meeting, when "curbing the disorderly expansion of capital" ruled the day.
"The emphasis on stability suggests that top leaders are increasingly concerned about the risk of instability," said Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie Group, in a recent research note.
"A year of regulatory tightening has hurt the business confidence," he added. "Now it's the time for policymakers to back down a bit."
China is still expected to record significant growth in 2021, despite its challenges. Many economists project growth of roughly 7.8%, well above the 6% floor that Chinese authorities set as a goal earlier this year.
But 2022 is a different story. Many major banks have cut their growth forecasts to between 4.9% and 5.5%, which would be the slowest rate of growth since 1990 — a year when international sanctions following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre seriously curbed economic activity.
"The Chinese government's prior focus on regulatory and anti-monopolistic crackdowns was made possible by China's sky-high economic growth," said Craig Singleton, an adjunct China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a DC-based think tank.
"No longer, as the growth drivers of China's economy are quickly running out of steam."
Reining in, now winding down
The private sector crackdown started in late 2020 after Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma — easily the most recognizable of China's business elite — blasted the country's financial system during a controversial speech.
An initial public offering for his financial tech firm Ant Group was suspended soon after. Since then, life has gotten more difficult not just for Ant Group but for a bunch of other companies too.
Alibaba (BABA), Tencent (TCEHY) and others were fined or investigated over alleged anti-competitive behavior. China also took steps to punish firms over data collection and national security, including ride-hailing app Didi. That company was hammered by regulators shortly after going public on Wall Street, and eventually announced it would delist and move to Hong Kong.
There's rationale behind Beijing's tough stance on such companies. To Xi, reining in private enterprise is the solution to fixing longstanding concerns about consumer rights, data privacy, excess debt and economic inequality. In other words, it's about taming the excesses of capitalism and embracing the country's history of socialism.
But there's a balance that has to be reached. Now faced with the prospect of an economic hard landing, Beijing appears to be backing off the tough stance it took on the private sector. At their recent meeting, Chinese leaders praised the positive role that private capital plays in the economy — a stark shift of tone compared to how they were speaking a year ago.
"There will inevitably be various forms of capital in the socialist market economy," they said in a statement after the meeting. "Capital must play its positive role as a production factor, while its negative role must be effectively controlled."
That message suggests "the peak of regulations is behind us," according to Hu from Macquarie. "State control is important, but the Party also doesn't want to kill Capitalism," he added.
A big focus on jobs
As Chinese policymakers try to stabilize the economy in 2022, a few key factors will be front of mind.
Keeping unemployment low was listed, again, as the most important of a set of areas Beijing wants to focus on, according to the statement released after this month's meeting. (Other goals include preserving food and energy security, and stabilizing supply chains.)
The emphasis on job creation comes as the outlook for employment worsens in China. Education technology companies laid off thousands of employees after the government restricted tutoring in July. Other tech firms also reportedly plan to cut staff because of the crackdown on their businesses.
The real estate crisis is a contributor as well. Cash-strapped property developers, such as massive conglomerate Evergrande, have shed jobs and offloaded assets to stay afloat.
The notoriously stable unemployment rate, released by the government every month, has stayed flat this year, only fluctuating between 4.9% and 5.5%. But repeated calls by the top leaders on various occasions to strengthen employment suggest there might be a bigger problem than the data shows.
"I think employment is now a bigger sensitivity than GDP," said George Magnus, an associate at the China Centre at Oxford University and former chief economist for UBS.
While a slew of challenges are dragging on employment, including Covid outbreaks and the real estate crisis, Magnus said the business crackdown is a notable factor. The private sector contributes to 80% of employment, according to government statistics.
Singleton pointed out that the party "was laser focused on unemployment, fearing that mass layoffs could potentially jeopardize the party's standing."
Xi's play for power will leave him a tough road ahead
At the forefront of Xi's mind is almost certainly a desire to keep the country running steadily ahead of a historic third term in office.
"Xi's message of 'stability' is aimed at the political establishment in China, which must absorb the brunt of an historic power play, in addition to the business sector," said Alex Capri, a research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation.
Xi has taken several steps to signal that he is focused more on domestic issues than on any grand international ambitions. The Chinese leader hasn't left the country since the start of the pandemic, and has taken dramatic steps to secure his country's borders and lock down entire regions to contain even a single coronavirus case — a "Covid-zero" approach abandoned by much of the world.
But Capri noted that Xi has to consider the outside world to an extent. He said Xi's message of stability is "also intended to assuage growing anxieties on Wall Street and within other corporate and financial hubs, which China relies upon far more than it cares to admit for investment, technology and trade."
That's a precarious balancing act — and one Xi will have to think carefully about in the year ahead.
"Like other nations, China wants a future based on high levels of innovation and productivity but is politically driven to create conditions which are stymieing both," said Magnus.
"The key challenge for China is going to be, with Xi in charge for a decade, are course corrections going to be possible?" Singleton said. "And unfortunately, the historical record there is that absolute power does not usually lead to a more pragmatic, flexible attitude."
CNN · by Analysis by Laura He, CNN Business
11. Vehicle for State reauthorization leaves some policy goals behind
Perhaps we should change the paradigm. Instead of a National Defense Authorization Act we should consider a National Security Authorization Act and authorize and appropriate for all national security activities and not just defense.
Vehicle for State reauthorization leaves some policy goals behind - Roll Call
rollcall.com · by Rachel OswaldPosted December 20, 2021 at 7:00am · December 20, 2021
Tucked into a just-passed Pentagon policy measure are numerous provisions that amount to the furthest lawmakers have gotten in two decades to fulfilling their State Department authorization duties.
The provisions would tweak and modernize various operations and processes at Foggy Bottom. Many of the State Department authorization provisions included in the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act are noncontroversial updates to the State Department’s management and personnel policies.
Those changes have been in the works for the last three Congresses, but lawmakers were unable to push them across the finish line due to the precarious position that State authorization matters occupy within the hierarchy of the Capitol Hill legislative ecosystem.
The bulk of the diplomacy provisions that Congress cleared last week were ones contained in a fiscal 2022 State authorization measure introduced by House Foreign Affairs Chairman Gregory W. Meeks, D-N.Y. The House in May passed Meeks' bill under suspension of the rules, a process that allows for quick passage of measures with overwhelming bipartisan support.
“As I have made clear upon taking the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, one of my top priorities has been reasserting our committee’s role in ensuring regular authorization of the Department of State by Congress, something that has not happened in nearly two decades,” Meeks said in a statement.
But because the State authorization language was catching a ride on the defense policy measure, which lawmakers treat as a priority, reliably passing it every year for the last six decades, Senate Republicans were able to insist that multiple provisions popular with Democrats be stripped out.
“Unfortunately, several important provisions did not make it into the final language of the NDAA, including robust measures related to the brutal war in Yemen, accountability for Saudi Arabia’s actions against dissidents and civil society and provisions promoting diversity and other management reforms at the State Department,” Meeks said. “I am very disappointed that … we were unable to secure the requisite support from Senate Republicans to advance them into the final package.”
While the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations panels were able to reach agreement among themselves on which parts of the House-passed bill — as well as additional SFRC-crafted provisions — to collectively push for inclusion in the defense bill, the final decision was ultimately out of their hands, Democratic aides said in an interview.
Some titles included in the HFAC bill related to security assistance and combating corruption were broken off during conference negotiations with SFRC, which Democratic staffers, who were granted anonymity in order to discuss bill deliberations in greater detail, attributed to senators not having enough time to familiarize themselves with the provisions before they needed to present consensus text to Senate Armed Services and House Armed Services leadership.
“Those things are important but they are more thematic policy matters,” said one of the Democratic staffers in characterizing the provisions that were left on the cutting room floor. “The main thrust of this bill was to start with the obvious low-hanging fruit. The State Department needs authorizations and authorities to run itself and manage its personnel effectively and manage its embassies overseas effectively.”
The final compromise version of the defense legislation was cobbled together earlier this month over the course of a night by the four leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees. The end result was an overall bill more conservative than Democrats had been expecting — especially since Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the presidency.
What made it in
The Foggy Bottom authorization portion of the defense bill doesn’t authorize every State Department account, though there is an approval of nearly $2 billion for fiscal 2022 for embassy security, construction and maintenance activities.
“There is something meaningful about actually authorizing resources because that has not been done by the authorizers for many, many years,” the Democratic staffer said.
The measure specifies that special envoy positions are subject to Senate confirmation; makes permanent a current authority to provide incentive payments to employees for hardship posts; and requires a report on Foreign Service allowances.
“This bill provides the necessary authorities to help strengthen and rebuild the State Department so it can more effectively carry out America’s foreign policy,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said in a statement.
Following actions taken by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during his tenure that disregarded longstanding department policies on things like Senate-confirmed appointees not participating in national political conventions, lawmakers included language in the defense bill to make it explicit that the department’s Foreign Affairs Manual and Foreign Affairs Handbook do apply to the secretary position.
And after Pompeo and several of his close advisers stalled or resisted sitting for interviews for the department’s Office of the Inspector General related to various incidents of reported misconduct, lawmakers sought to prevent any repeats. The defense measure includes a provision that makes it explicit that any department personnel who do not comply with a State OIG request for documents or interviews will be administratively punished.
Lawmakers also included language that orders the department to establish a mechanism for any employee subject to an “assignment restriction” to “have the same appeal rights as provided by the department regarding denial or revocation of a security clearance.”
Assignment restrictions limit the countries that some diplomats can serve in based on their ethnicity or family connections. The practice has come under increasing criticism, especially by Democrats who argue it unfairly limits career opportunities and disproportionately impacts diplomats of color.
In 2016, Congress included a provision in the defense policy law that directed the department to improve its process for State employees’ appealing their assignment restrictions. But when the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Bureau was unresponsive to that directive, lawmakers decided they needed to be “much more prescriptive on what the appeals mechanism needs to be,” a second Democratic aide said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his top deputies have made several changes to the assignment restrictions process and are contemplating additional ones. In acknowledging that the assignment restrictions process has been ham-handed, Blinken earlier this fall announced that nearly 60 percent of all preexisting assignment restrictions had been lifted.
Diversity provisions excluded
More frustrating to Democrats was that much of the language contained in the House-passed State authorization measure related to improving diversity within the department’s workforce was stripped out by Republicans during conference negotiations.
All of the diversity-related provisions contained in the House bill were agreed to by Meeks, House Foreign Affairs ranking member Michael McCaul, R-Texas, Menendez and Senate Foreign Relations ranking member Jim Risch, R-Idaho, according to the Democratic aides.
Those provisions included things like requiring that all department internships be paid and ordering the department to collect and publish disaggregated data on the demographics of employees.
But when Senate Republicans, notably Senate Armed Services ranking member James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., pushed back on including those provisions in the defense policy bill, the Foreign Affairs committee leaders conceded. They opted to instead save the other State authorization provisions after seeing them collapse so close to the finish line in previous years, the staffers said.
Requests for comment to Inhofe’s office were not returned.
“The chairmen’s view was, ‘We need to break this curse. We need to get this State authorization,’” the first staffer said, adding: “This is the first step, not the last step” in getting back to a regular State authorization schedule.
Still, a few provisions meant to improve the department’s recruitment, retention and promotion of a diverse workforce did make it through.
They include a requirement that the department offer departing employees exit interviews and then analyze the results for implications for diversity; expand anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training and make it compulsory for senior and supervisory officials, including those with HR roles; and directing that promotion reviews consider how well officials’ have done at promoting diversity and inclusion in their current roles.
rollcall.com · by Rachel OswaldPosted December 20, 2021 at 7:00am · December 20, 2021
12. China’s PLA Is a Peasant Army No More
You cannot out spend the enemy, you must out think him. A fundamental question I have for policy makers, strategists, and planners is what dilemmas are we creating for the PLA across domains?
Conclusion:
The reason for confronting ugly realities is not to counsel defeatism, but as a call to act now to change current trendlines. China is not 10 feet tall. But in many contests it is and will be taller than we are. Thus, unlike olden days when the Defense Department’s core strategy was essentially to overwhelm challenges with resources, success will require imaginative strategies that allow us to do more with less. That will require capitalizing on our long-term strengths, exploiting asymmetric initiatives, creating operational concepts for use, and integrating disruptive technologies. The decisions that can have the greatest positive impact are the hardest to make and execute.
China’s PLA Is a Peasant Army No More
The Pentagon cannot hope to prevail merely by outspending Beijing.
In a recent interview, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley declared that the People’s Liberation Army had transformed “from a peasant-based infantry army that was very, very large in 1979 to a very capable military that covers all the domains and has global ambitions.” Indeed, just the last six months have seen Beijing make great leaps forward—from rapidly constructing hundreds of missile silos to successfully testing a nuclear-capable Fractional Orbital Bombardment System equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle. Moreover, both advancements took America’s China-watchers by surprise. While comparisons to a “Sputnik moment” are hyperbolic, the harsh reality is that for nearly three decades China has undertaken a massive military buildup to offset America’s advantages—with notable success.
The shift in the balance of military power has been so dramatic that American strategists must now ask whether, in the most likely scenario of military conflict between the U.S. and China—a hot war over Taiwan—America might actually lose. When Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and her colleagues on the National Defense Strategy Commission examined this question in 2018, they concluded: maybe. In their words, America “might struggle to win, or perhaps lose a war against China.” Indeed, if China were to launch an attack to take control of Taiwan—an island as close to the Chinese mainland as Cuba is to the U.S.—it might succeed before the arrival of U.S. forces that could make any material difference. As former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James Winnefeld and former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell wrote last year, China has the capability to deliver a fait accompli to Taiwan before Washington would be able to decide how to respond.
Former Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, who served under three secretaries before retiring in 2017, has been even more explicit. As he has acknowledged, in the most realistic war games the Pentagon has been able to design simulating war over Taiwan, the score is 18 to 0. And the 18 is not Team USA.
This scorecard might shock Americans who remember the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995-1996, when China conducted what it called “missile tests” bracketing Taiwan to deter it from a move toward independence. In response, in a show of superiority that forced Beijing to back down, the U.S. deployed two aircraft carriers to Taiwan’s adjacent waters. Today, that option is not even on the menu of responses that Chairman Milley would present to the President.
First, the era of U.S. military primacy is over. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis recognized China’s military rise and spoke bluntly about its consequences. His 2018 National Defense Strategy states directly: “For decades the U.S. has enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted.” But that was then. “Today,” Mattis warned, “every domain is contested—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.”
Second, in 2000, A2/AD—anti-access/area denial systems by which China could prevent U.S. military forces from operating at will—was just a PLA acronym on a briefing chart. Today, China’s A2/AD operational reach encompasses the First Island Chain, which includes Taiwan and Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. As a result, as President Obama’s Defense Undersecretary for Policy Michèle Flournoy put it, in this area, “the United States can no longer expect to quickly achieve air, space, or maritime superiority.” As Philip Davidson, then the leader of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, testified to Congress in March, on its current trajectory, in the next four years China’s A2/AD envelope may extend to the Second Island Chain, which includes America’s principal military installations on the U.S. territory of Guam.
Finally, in Milley’s words, when “all the cards are put on the table,” the U.S. no longer dwarfs China in defense spending. In 1996, China’s reported defense budget was one-thirtieth the size of America’s. By 2020, China’s declared defense spending was one-quarter of ours. Adjusted to include spending on military research and development and other underreported items, it approached one-third of U.S. spending. And when measured by the yardstick that both CIA and the IMF judge the best single metric for comparing national economies, it is over half as much as the U.S. spends—and on a path to parity.
The reason for confronting ugly realities is not to counsel defeatism, but as a call to act now to change current trendlines. China is not 10 feet tall. But in many contests it is and will be taller than we are. Thus, unlike olden days when the Defense Department’s core strategy was essentially to overwhelm challenges with resources, success will require imaginative strategies that allow us to do more with less. That will require capitalizing on our long-term strengths, exploiting asymmetric initiatives, creating operational concepts for use, and integrating disruptive technologies. The decisions that can have the greatest positive impact are the hardest to make and execute.
Graham Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard Kennedy School and author most recently of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
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13. Two Things the 2022 NDAA Got Wrong
These aren't the two issues I would fall on my sword over. I think the NDAA scaled back the changes to the UCMJ.
Excerpt:
But, as good as the bill is, it is not perfect. Two provisions stand out as particularly egregious: the damage wrought to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the exorbitant increase in parental leave for secondary caregivers. Future defense authorization acts should attempt to remedy these errors.
Two Things the 2022 NDAA Got Wrong
There is much to like about the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, just passed by wide margins in both houses of Congress. Foremost is the $25 billion it added to programs such as shipbuilding, facilities, and tactical training—money made even more necessary to cope with the 6.8 percent inflation rate we are now experiencing.
Other welcome features include a $2.1 billion increase to the Pacific Deterrence Fund to counter Chinese’s malign influence and provisions creating commissions to examine the war in Afghanistan and to recommend improvements to the Pentagon’s resourcing process.
But, as good as the bill is, it is not perfect. Two provisions stand out as particularly egregious: the damage wrought to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the exorbitant increase in parental leave for secondary caregivers. Future defense authorization acts should attempt to remedy these errors.
Lawmakers insisted on changing the administration of military justice without evidence of a problem with the current system. Indeed, the U.S. military justice system has proven its efficiency. The conviction rate in the military is eight times higher than that of New York, for example.
While the changes were made with the noble goal of reducing the number of sexual assaults in the military, nothing suggests that the proposed solution---substituting special lawyers for military commanders in dealing with serious crimes---will solve this problem. Indeed, putting military lawyers in charge of deciding whether to send serious crime cases to trial will result in fewer, not more, prosecutions. That’s because lawyers can charge someone with a crime only when they conclude a case has a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits, whereas a commander (a non-lawyer, not bound by bar ethics rules) needs only to meet the lower standard of probable cause.
In a review of decisions made in over 1,000 military sexual assault cases over a period of three years, an independent panel found that there was “not a systemic problem” with commanders’ decisions to prefer sexual assault charges. Indeed, the panel found that commanders were biased toward referring charges even when there wasn’t sufficient admissible evidence. In other words, given similar evidence, a commander was more likely to refer charges than a lawyer.
Based on this finding, it seems likely that fewer sexual assault charges will be preferred under the new rules in the 2022 NDAA. So much for reducing sexual assault.
While even one sexual assault is too many for the U.S. military, it’s worthy to note that female college students have a 51% greater chance of being assaulted than similarly aged women serving in the military.
Perhaps we should be grateful the final bill was missing some of the most extreme ideas contained in Sen. Kristin Gillibrand’s (D-N.Y.) “Military Justice Improvement Act.” Those provisions included taking commanders out of the loop for all crimes (not just the most serious), transferring the responsibility for selecting jurors to lawyers, and revoking commanders’ authority to grant immunity. While lawmakers thankfully omitted those provisions, the bill still creates a complex, bi-furcated system of military justice with commanders responsible for referring cases for some crimes and special prosecutors handling others. This will invite all sorts of legal challenges.
Another harmful provision in the NDAA quadruples parental leave for secondary caregivers, which rises from 3 to 12 weeks per birth or adoption. Active-duty mothers are already authorized 12 weeks of maternity leave; this provision extends that benefit to secondary caregivers.
How could more time for parents to bond with children be a bad thing? Well, in the military, it will result in the annual absence of thousands of servicemembers from formations. With over 100,000 births per year for military families, granting secondary caregivers an additional nine weeks of parental leave translates into the absence of roughly 16,000 active-duty servicemembers, the equivalent of losing an entire Army division from the force. For a U.S. military already stretched to maintain the readiness levels needed to confront China, Russia and other bad actors, this change could not have come at a worse time.
Kudos to the lawmakers who hammered out the 2022 agreement and ensured that for 61 years straight, Congress passed a defense authorization act. There is a lot to like in the new NDAA. But to ensure the military remains the best in the world, a couple of fixes should be made as quickly as possible.
LTG Thomas Spoehr (U.S. Army, Ret.) is the director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense.
14. CCP Paid DC Radio Station $4.4 Million To Broadcast Propaganda
Excerpt:
Beijing’s partnership with an AM radio station highlights the scope of its propaganda activities in the United States, which have gone into overdrive in recent years as China seeks to distract from its human rights abuses. China’s state-run media organizations aggressively promote their content to American audiences on social media and through publication deals with American newspapers and magazines. China Daily, a state-run newspaper, has paid millions of dollars to Time, Foreign Policy, and the Wall Street Journal to publish its articles online. The Chinese consulate in New York recently hired a public relations firm to recruit social media influencers to promote the Beijing Olympics.
CCP Paid DC Radio Station $4.4 Million To Broadcast Propaganda - Washington Free Beacon
The Chinese Communist Party has paid a Washington, D.C., radio station $4.4 million over the past two years to broadcast propaganda, according to new federal foreign agent disclosures.
The Virginia-based Potomac Media Group detailed its lucrative contract with the Communist Party’s International Communication Planning Bureau in filings last Thursday with the Justice Department. As part of the deal, Potomac Media’s WCRW, an AM station, airs content from China Global Television Network and a series of talk shows that portray China in a positive light.
Potomac Media’s filing with the Justice Department provides extensive details about its arrangement with the International Communication Planning Bureau, an arm of the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. The Planning Bureau can review broadcasts and verify programming, according to the contract. Potomac Media is required to provide the Planning Bureau with reports on audience reach, feedback, and "evaluation from international organizations."
Beijing’s partnership with an AM radio station highlights the scope of its propaganda activities in the United States, which have gone into overdrive in recent years as China seeks to distract from its human rights abuses. China’s state-run media organizations aggressively promote their content to American audiences on social media and through publication deals with American newspapers and magazines. China Daily, a state-run newspaper, has paid millions of dollars to Time, Foreign Policy, and the Wall Street Journal to publish its articles online. The Chinese consulate in New York recently hired a public relations firm to recruit social media influencers to promote the Beijing Olympics.
The $4.4 million in payments, which cover the period from July 2019 to August 2021, were made for broadcasting CGTN content, social media promotion, and for production of The Bridge talk show.
Potomac Media’s foreign agent registration comes as the Justice Department has ramped up enforcement of foreign agent laws in recent years, requiring state-controlled media companies in China, Russia, and Turkey to register their activities with the government. The Justice Department forced CGTN to register as a foreign agent in February 2019.
WCRW has aired content from state-run China Radio International since 1992, but had not previously registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent of China. Russia’s Sputnik news agency paid Florida-based RM Broadcasting more than $1.4 million to broadcast on AM radio in Washington, D.C., and other cities.
Potomac Media Group did not respond to a request for comment.
15. Global Democracy Is Doing Fine. U.S. Democracy Is in Trouble.
Well this is certainly provocative. But a very important conclusion. As long as we can ask the question (and criticize ourselves) then we are okay.
Excerpt:
I remain less worried about the global trends. Compared with the 1970s or 1980s, according to all the major surveys and databases, the world is a significantly more democratic place. Not only are there many more democracies (57% of all countries in 2017, compared with 25% in the mid-’70s); democracies also account for around three-quarters of global GDP. The thing we really need to worry about is not global democracy. It is American democracy.
Conclusion:
Perhaps, despite the manifest weaknesses of the two parties, the republic really is in danger. After Jan. 6, only a fool would dismiss the possibility. But worrying about a crisis of their democracy is one of the ways Americans have kept themselves vigilant ever since the founding of the U.S. This is a feature of American political culture, not a bug — something the Chinese Communist Party simply cannot grasp. It copies and pastes the criticisms we level at ourselves, even as it deletes and suppresses any criticism of its own lawless and cruel regime.
Are we the baddies? No. For if we were, we would never dare to ask such a question aloud.
Global Democracy Is Doing Fine. U.S. Democracy Is in Trouble.
Foreign rivals hypocritically echo Americans’ own fears about racism and Trumpism, but the real malaise is bipartisan.
Niall Ferguson
December 19, 2021, 3:00 AM EST
Back in 2006, the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb risked a sketch in which they played two Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II. Reflecting on the Totenkopf (death’s head) badges on their caps, Mitchell asked the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”
An increasing number of anxious American political commentators are asking themselves a version of this question. For some time, it has been a concern of political scientists such as my colleague Larry Diamond that the world is in a “democratic recession” or “regression,” which he dates from around 2006.
I remain less worried about the global trends. Compared with the 1970s or 1980s, according to all the major surveys and databases, the world is a significantly more democratic place. Not only are there many more democracies (57% of all countries in 2017, compared with 25% in the mid-’70s); democracies also account for around three-quarters of global GDP. The thing we really need to worry about is not global democracy. It is American democracy.
It is not just that, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early February, only one-fifth of U.S. adults regard the promotion of democracy as a top foreign policy objective, putting it at the bottom of a list of 20 choices. It is not just that this month’s virtual Summit for Democracy, convened by President Joe Biden, was a lukewarm mess. (As David Rothkopf and others were quick to point out, the invitations seem to have been sent out on a wholly arbitrary basis. Inside the velvet rope were Poland, the Philippines, Zambia, Pakistan, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Left standing on the sidewalk were Tunisia, Hungary, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bangladesh and Bolivia — all of which score higher on the Economist’s democracy index than Zambia, Pakistan, Niger and the DRC.)
The problem is that the world no longer sees the U.S. as a shining city on a hill — more like a festering slum on a floodplain. According to a survey of adults in 17 advanced economies published by Pew in November, “a median of just 17% say democracy in the U.S. is a good example for other [countries] to follow, while 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years,” and a quarter say it has never been a good example.
True, that average conceals a wide range of opinions. South Koreans have a far more positive view of the U.S. political system than New Zealanders, for example. But there is widespread agreement abroad that (to quote Pew) “discrimination against people based on their race or ethnicity is a serious problem in the U.S.”
Such negative perceptions tally with the various attempts to quantify the health of American democracy. In 2013, for example, the venerable nonpartisan organization Freedom House gave the U.S. a score of 93 out of 100 in its annual Freedom in the World report. Today, that figure is down to 83, meaning that the U.S. now ranks below 60 other democracies, including Argentina and Romania. This is because (according to Freedom House) America’s “democratic institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in partisan pressure on the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, harmful policies on immigration and asylum seekers, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity and political influence.”
Such self-criticism is music to the ears of this country’s strategic rivals. Earlier this month, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had the audacity to publish an essay-length critique of American democracy. It is, the authors argued, “a system fraught with deep-seated problems” — a “game of money politics” in which the theory of “one person one vote” is belied by the reality of “rule of the minority elite.” The much-vaunted constitutional system of checks and balances has degenerated into a “vetocracy” or “gridlock.”
A list of the report’s subheadings cannot do full justice to this document, but they give you a flavor:
Messy and chaotic practices of democracy
(1) The Capitol riot that shocks the world
(2) Entrenched racism
(3) Tragic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic
(4) Widening wealth gap
(5) “Freedom of speech” in name only
“Democracy in the US,” the authors state, “has become alienated and degenerated. … Problems like money politics, identity politics, wrangling between political parties, political polarization, social division, racial tension and wealth gap have become more acute.” And of course:
The gunshots and farce on Capitol Hill have completely revealed what is underneath the gorgeous appearance of the American-style democracy. The death of Black American George Floyd has laid bare the systemic racism that exists in American society for too long. … While the COVID-19 pandemic remains out of control in the US, the issue of mask-wearing and vaccination has triggered further social division and confrontation.
You may be forgiven for wondering what business a one-party totalitarian regime has scolding Americans about the defects of their democracy. Look no further for a response than last month’s letter to the National Interest by Anatoly Antonov and Qin Gang, respectively the Russian and Chinese ambassadors to the U.S., who shamelessly depicted the People’s Republic of China as “an extensive, whole-process socialist democracy [that] reflects the people’s will, suits the country’s realities, and enjoys strong support from the people [who] have the right to elections, and … can get deeply involved in national governance, exercising their power through the People's Congresses at the national and other levels.”
With critics like these, you might say, American democracy hardly needs defenders. And yet the shocking thing is how much of the Chinese critique of American democracy is copied and pasted from … Americans. No fewer than eight U.S. professors are quoted by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, notably Robert McDaniel Chesney (University of Illinois), Noam Chomsky (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Daniel Drezner (Tufts), Francis Fukuyama (Stanford), Ray La Raja (University of Massachusetts), Robert Reich (University of California, Berkeley), Emmanuel Saez (Berkeley) and Matthew Stephenson (Harvard).
You might want to blame this on the well-established tradition of American academia hating on America. But ordinary voters also seem to share the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s dim view of our democracy. According to another Pew survey (published in March but based on late 2020 data), 72% of American adults believe that their democracy “used to be a good example for others to follow but has not been recently,” while fewer than half (45%) are satisfied with the way U.S. democracy is working. Two-thirds agree that the phrase “most politicians are corrupt” describes their country well. More than a third (35%) of all those surveyed, and 57% of Republicans, believe their government does not respect personal freedoms. And three-quarters think discrimination based on race or ethnicity is a serious problem.
I repeat: Are we the baddies?
For some American political commentators, this rot has further to run. “Our constitutional crisis is already here,” wrote Robert Kagan in the Washington Post in September. “The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”
The sequence of events Kagan imagined leading to Civil War II begins with Donald Trump being the Republican nominee for the presidency in 2024. In advance of this election, there is already “an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020.” Republican officials who were unwilling to help deliver that election to Trump are being removed. Republican-controlled legislatures in 16 states have increased or intend to increase their control over the election-certification process. “A Trump victory,” Kagan concluded, “is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it.”
You like this kind of thing? There is plenty more. In the Financial Times in September, Martin Wolf foresaw “The strange death of American democracy,” warning that by 2024 “the transformation of the democratic republic into an autocracy … might be irreversible.”
“Are We Doomed?” asked George Packer in this month’s Atlantic. The answer is, of course, yes. But our doom could come in various ways. Here’s one of Packer’s scenarios:
In 2024, disputed election results in several states lead to tangled proceedings in courtrooms and legislatures. The Republican Party’s long campaign of undermining faith in elections leaves voters on both sides deeply skeptical of any outcome they don’t like. When the next president is finally chosen by the Supreme Court or Congress, half the country explodes in rage. Protests soon turn violent, and the crowds are met with lethal force by the state, while instigators firebomb government buildings. Neighborhoods organize self-defense groups, and law-enforcement officers take sides or go home. Predominantly red or blue counties turn on political minorities. A family with a Biden-Harris sign has to abandon home on a rural road and flee to the nearest town. A blue militia sacks Trump National Golf Club Bedminster; a red militia storms Oberlin College. The new president takes power in a state of siege.
I had to re-read this to make sure it wasn’t intended as satire. A blue militia sacks a New Jersey golf course? Seriously? However, Packer has other, less lurid versions of our democracy’s doom. “Following the election crisis, protests burn out. Americans lapse into acquiescence, believing that all leaders lie, all voting is rigged, all media are bought, corruption is normal, and any appeal to higher values such as freedom and equality is either fraudulent or naive. … Citizens indulge themselves in self-care and the metaverse, where politics turns into a private game. … America’s transformation into Russia is complete.”
My final exhibit in the chamber of horrors is a recent Washington Post essay by two academics, Risa Brooks and Erica De Bruin, who detail the “18 Steps to a Democratic Breakdown.” They group the steps on their lengthy stairway to hell under five headings: “limiting participation in elections; controlling election administration; legitimizing and mobilizing social support for methods to obstruct or overturn an election; using political violence to further that end; and politicizing the regular military or National Guard to delegitimize election outcomes.”
Now, I do not dismiss the political Cassandras. Much of what Brooks and De Bruin prophesy was either attempted or at least contemplated in the strange days between Nov. 5, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021. And the more we learn about what exactly happened on Jan. 6, the more like a bungled coup d’etat it appears — albeit one thwarted by the vice president and a significant number of other senior Republicans.
I do struggle a bit with some of the later steps to democratic breakdown the authors ask us to imagine. I would not expect many “active-duty military officers” to “make public statements supporting claims of election fraud or anti-democratic actions” and remain active-duty for long. I also have a hard time imagining “governors send[ing] the National Guard to state capitols for the express purpose of ‘rerunning’ elections.” There’s a little too much here of Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” for me to be entirely convinced. After all, Lewis’s book was written in 1935. And it still hasn’t happened here, because the U.S. is not Venezuela.
Nevertheless, let’s take seriously the hypothesis that the republic is on its last legs and is just three years away from dissolution. After all, a great many republics throughout history have ended like this, with a demagogue or would-be Caesar inciting the masses against a corrupt political establishment. One of the central lessons of the political theories of the ancient world, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was that republics are inherently hard to preserve and tend, after a time, to lapse into tyranny. To read any recent account of the fall of the Roman Republic — Tom Holland’s “Rubicon,” for example — is to be reminded how important civil strife was in this process. How close are we really to suffering this fate?
Those who see the danger as coming exclusively from the right like to point to polling evidence that a majority of Republicans still believe Biden did not legitimately win the presidency. In September, a University of Virginia poll showed that 84% of Trump supporters view the Democratic Party as a “clear and present threat to American democracy.” A majority of Trump voters (52%) strongly or somewhat agree that it is “time to split the country.”
The problem, as David French pointed out, is that Democrats have roughly comparable views. A collective amnesia grips liberal commentators about the sustained campaign by Hillary Clinton and her supporters to deny the legitimacy of Trump’s election victory in 2016. Eighty percent of Biden voters view the Republican Party as a “clear and present threat to American democracy.” More than two-fifths of Democrats (41%) at least somewhat agree that it is “time to split the country.”
Liberal writers fixate on electoral rules and voting rights under the assumption that the 2024 election will be close. They overlook the distinct possibility that the Republican candidate — whether it is Trump or someone else — may win by an indisputably large margin as the country vents its disgust with an administration that promised it could end the pandemic and failed to; drove inflation to its highest level since 1982; presided over an epidemic of homicide in multiple cities; lost control of the country’s southern border; ignominiously handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban; and pursued goals of “diversity, equity and inclusion” at the expense of academic standards throughout the educational system.
Liberals are so certain that it is Republicans who intend to overthrow the Constitution that they don’t even notice when their progressive wing openly discusses packing the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, conferring statehood on Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and enfranchising noncitizens. (Note that the New York City Council just voted to allow noncitizens to cast ballots in local elections.)
The republic may well be in mortal danger if each of the two major parties aspires to make fundamental changes to the political system obviously designed to entrench itself permanently in power. It is especially dangerous that each side firmly believes that only the other side is trying to do this. Democracy works only when the basic rules of the game are accepted. When changing those rules becomes the central object of politics, the stakes become too high — the price of defeat too heavy.
There is some consolation for us independent types that both major parties have serious problems that stand in the way of the kind of victory on which constitutional amendments could be based. The Republicans’ problem is simply Trump. As my Hoover Institution colleagues David Brady, Morris Fiorina and Douglas Rivers have shown in a new paper, Trump remains popular among Republicans. Over 72% approve of his handling of the presidency. Asked about his personal attributes, 82% think him authentic and 73% honest and trustworthy. Trump is miles ahead of the other potential nominees for 2024.
Yet Trump’s endorsement of other candidates is a positive in the eyes of just 45% of Republicans. Only 53% are sure they want Trump to run for president again in 2024 (20% are against and the rest are not sure). The doubters are smart. So long as Trump is wedded to the “Stop the Steal” narrative about 2020, he will struggle to win over the swing voters without whom victory in a presidential race is impossible. Harping on about stolen votes four years ago seems unlikely to give Trump the prize that has eluded all but one of the presidents who sought it: a second non-consecutive term in the White House. In short, Trump is no Grover Cleveland.
The Democrats’ problem is not personal but structural. As David Shor, head of data science at Blue Rose Research, argues, they are “on the edge of an electoral abyss” — doomed to see their Senate caucus shrink to 43 by 2024 — because “swing voters in [battleground] states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.”
Progressive types in deep blue Democratic strongholds could not resist the slogan “defund the police” last year. Voters hated it. The party’s leadership cares about climate change much more than the voters they need. The elite is out of touch on immigration, too. Above all, key voters in swing states are alienated by wokeism and its linguistic excesses: from BIPOC to Latinx to 2SLGBTQIA+. If it’s hip at Yale, it’s political suicide in Peoria.
It is not yet 20 years since political scientists were lauding “The Emerging Democratic Majority” by John Judis and Ruy Texeira. It turns out they were wrong: Hispanic immigration did not portend an era of Democratic hegemony. Earlier this month, a startling poll in the Wall Street Journal revealed Hispanic voters evenly divided between the two major parties; evenly divided if Biden and Trump were the candidates again in 2024; and leaning to the Republicans in Congress on economic issues as well as on border security. In Virginia’s gubernatorial election, one (disputed) exit poll found that the Republican victor, Glenn Youngkin, beat his Democratic rival Terry McAuliffe 55%-45% among Hispanic voters. As Eric Kaufmann put it, “the trajectory of Hispanic and Asian voters looks a lot like that of white Catholic voters after 1960 … who shifted Right each election by a few points.”
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Perhaps, despite the manifest weaknesses of the two parties, the republic really is in danger. After Jan. 6, only a fool would dismiss the possibility. But worrying about a crisis of their democracy is one of the ways Americans have kept themselves vigilant ever since the founding of the U.S. This is a feature of American political culture, not a bug — something the Chinese Communist Party simply cannot grasp. It copies and pastes the criticisms we level at ourselves, even as it deletes and suppresses any criticism of its own lawless and cruel regime.
Are we the baddies? No. For if we were, we would never dare to ask such a question aloud.
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16. Female ex-pilot in Afghan military surfaces in US, defying rumors that she had been killed
Female ex-pilot in Afghan military surfaces in US, defying rumors that she had been killed
Afghan air force Capt. Safia Ferozi gives a thumbs-up from the cockpit of her aircraft during a preflight check in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2017. (Alexander Riedel/U.S. Air Force)
An Afghan woman who was one of the few female pilots in her country’s air force quashed an online assertion that she had been stoned to death by the Taliban, saying she is alive and well on the West Coast.
Safia Ferozi spoke with Stars and Stripes by phone over the weekend about her evacuation from Afghanistan, her reaction to a viral photo purportedly showing her death and her hopes for remaking her life in the United States.
She flew out of Kabul on Aug. 15 with her husband, Jawad Najafi, and their 5-year-old daughter Nargis shortly after the capital fell to the Taliban.
An American adviser had helped the family board a U.S. military transport plane to Qatar, she said.
Meanwhile, Facebook posters named her as the woman depicted in a graphic image that was widely shared on social media. A Reuters fact check found that in fact the victim was a woman killed by a mob in 2015.
As rumors of her death spread unbeknownst to her, Ferozi was giving birth to a daughter at a U.S. military base in Qatar, she said.
Ferozi had not had access to the internet after arriving in Qatar. She found out about the viral claim only when a doctor at the hospital showed her the posts online.
Afghan air force Capt. Safia Ferozi jumps to reach the rear elevator of her aircraft during a preflight check in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2017. Ferozi was a C-208 pilot in the Afghan air force and regularly trained with U.S. instructor pilots. (Alexander Riedel/U.S. Air Force)
Afghan air force Capt. Safia Ferozi dons her headset before flight in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2017. Ferozi flew a C-208 and was one of only a few female aviators in the country. (Alexander Riedel/U.S. Air Force)
Afghan air force Capt. Safia Ferozi checks an engine on her C-208 in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2017. Ferozi was evacuated after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. (Alexander Riedel/U.S. Air Force)
The false news came as a shock, and she and her husband began trying to message relatives to reassure them that she was well.
Her fellow pilots also heard the rumors, which circulated quickly in the small community of Afghan aviators.
“I was scared,” said Abdul Rahman Rahmani, once a helicopter pilot with the American-trained special mission wing.
That fear drove Rahmani to seek answers about Ferozi’s fate. He finally learned from another pilot that she was safe, and Rahmani said he was overcome with relief.
Ferozi and her family spent three months at a military base in New Jersey and now plan to resettle somewhere in Oregon. Like many Afghan pilots, she dreams of being able to continue flying.
She named her newborn child Helen, saying she wanted a “strong” name for her daughter, who spent a week and a half in an intensive care unit.
Even before the Taliban took over Afghanistan, female pilots faced discrimination and threats in the country’s conservative society.
The pioneering aviator said she wanted to pave the way for others, but now she doubts that there will be another female pilot in Afghanistan anytime soon.
Ferozi said she cries sometimes thinking about how her old life in Afghanistan fell apart. Her world seemed to collapse in a matter of hours.
She also believes that the false assertion of her killing could have been rendered true had she stayed in the country, she said.
More than 100 former members of the Afghan security forces have been executed or forcibly disappeared by the Taliban despite a proclaimed amnesty, said a recent report by Human Rights Watch.
“If I was in Afghanistan, I’m sure it would have happened to me,” Ferozi said.
J.P. Lawrence
J.p. Lawrence reports on the U.S. military in Afghanistan and the Middle East. He served in the U.S. Army from 2008 to 2017. He graduated from Columbia Journalism School and Bard College and is a first-generation immigrant from the Philippines.
17. The Changing Face of Russian Counter-Irregular Warfare
"Counter-irregular warfare" is a new term to me. But it is interesting (and I think important) to look at Russia's efforts to counter irregular warfare.
Excerpts:
What do we even mean by “counter-irregular warfare”? We use this term to capture three types of military operations — counter-insurgency, foreign internal defense, counter-terrorism — executed by Russian forces. The Russian tradition of counter-insurgency diverges starkly from doctrinal Western concepts, with implications for Department of Defense strategists and their allies. Whereas Western counter-insurgency responses focus on bolstering governance, Russian approaches are focused on targeting and destroying guerilla forces. Counter-irregular warfare is not intended to replace counter-insurgency in the Western lexicon, but to more accurately describe Russian approaches and methodology.
In short, Russian counter-irregular warfare encapsulates how the Russian military would seek to counter a U.S.-led unconventional warfare campaign in a third country, secure vulnerable rear areas, and how it may increasingly compete for influence at the tactical and operational level.
USASOC's Counter-Unconventional Warfare White Paper from 2014 might be instructive. Part of the impetus for this White Paper was that our adversaries are conducting their own forms of modern unconventional warfare around the world and we need to be able to counter these UW threats, operations, and activities. Countering UW is not simply conducting COIN or FID. It is about countering state or non-state actors who are exploiting a resistance or the conditions that create resistance potential to achieve their own strategic ends which may or may not and most likely do not have the welfare of the indigenous population as their objective.
The Changing Face of Russian Counter-Irregular Warfare - War on the Rocks
The United States has special operators in close proximity to Russian forces on three continents. In many cases, the Russian forces on the ground are either actively countering or preparing to counter irregular threats in the event of a Russian military operation. A fixation on Russian irregular warfare and political warfare threats has obscured Russia’s other significant capability: counter-irregular warfare. Russia’s military lineage is steeped in successful counter-irregular campaigns, with Afghanistan and the First Chechen War as the exceptions proving the rule. Though the new model bears familiar trappings, with it the Russian military has adapted its force structure to counter irregular threats abroad with a robust suite of expeditionary forces. If the United States intends to seriously compete with and challenge Russia abroad, then it is time to understand the emerging capabilities of Russian counter-irregular forces. Armed with an understanding of Russian counter-irregular warfare, commanders at the tactical and operational level can better exploit Russian weaknesses and manage risk.
What Is Counter-Irregular Warfare?
What do we even mean by “counter-irregular warfare”? We use this term to capture three types of military operations — counter-insurgency, foreign internal defense, counter-terrorism — executed by Russian forces. The Russian tradition of counter-insurgency diverges starkly from doctrinal Western concepts, with implications for Department of Defense strategists and their allies. Whereas Western counter-insurgency responses focus on bolstering governance, Russian approaches are focused on targeting and destroying guerilla forces. Counter-irregular warfare is not intended to replace counter-insurgency in the Western lexicon, but to more accurately describe Russian approaches and methodology.
In short, Russian counter-irregular warfare encapsulates how the Russian military would seek to counter a U.S.-led unconventional warfare campaign in a third country, secure vulnerable rear areas, and how it may increasingly compete for influence at the tactical and operational level.
Ministry of Defence Reform Trickle-Down Effects
By pivoting away from a force reliant upon mass conscription and short terms of service, the Russian military has opened the door to increased readiness, specialization, and technical proficiency within its ranks. As of 2020, the majority of the Russian army was composed of volunteers, and a ban on service abroad for conscripts has forced recent counter-irregular warfare efforts to be executed exclusively by contract soldiers. This is not to say that Russian conscripts receive less initial-entry training, nor are they necessarily less “professional” than their contracted counterparts. They do, however, have less than 12 months of service as compared to longer-term kontraktniki. When personnel accrue experience consistently, units are more cohesive and proficient in advanced technologies at the tactical level, such as digital command and control systems or drones. Although not directly targeted at creating effective counter-irregular formations, the increase of kontraktniki in the Russian military has contributed to a marked increase in expeditionary capability and retained experience — which trickles down to counter-irregular operations.
The Shift to an Agile and Interoperable Force
Russian counter-irregular forces prior to 2015 struggled to coalesce into effective formations. Current Russian operations, such as those in Syria and Libya, demonstrate increased interoperability within the Russian defense enterprise. While Syria and Libya remain two distinctly different types of military operation, Moscow can now adeptly employ combinations of forces from across its military, intelligence and domestic security services, and the private (or, more accurately, semi-state) sector. These custom-built task forces in Syria and Libya have not yielded the egregious failures in communication and coordination seen prior to 2015. Private military contractors provide plausibly deniable maneuver elements, combat trainers, close air support (in the case of Libya), and a whole suite of specialty logistic and support services depending on the operational environment.
Russian Special Operations Command: An Eastern Facsimile
In 2013, after a four-year study of similar institutions across the globe, the Russian Ministry of Defence created the Kommadovaniye sil Spetsialnykh Operatsiy — Special Operations Forces Command. This organization represented both a capitalization of late-adopter advantage on the part of the Russian Ministry of Defence, and a shift in Russian perspective on the role of special operations forces. Historically, Russian special assignment forces (spetsnaz) functioned exclusively as light infantry augmenting regular army formations. While spetsnaz units absolutely still exist, Russian special operations forces (many recruited from spetsnaz and military intelligence directorate formations) have expanded outside of their traditional roles of direct action and special reconnaissance. Though gaining notoriety as the “polite people” of Crimean fame, Russian special operations forces in Syria demonstrated a broader mission set. Rather than carrying out unilateral missions, Russian special operations forces augmented Syrian partners and bolstered local operations by coordinating with Russian air assets. The use of indigenous forces in counter-irregular campaigns is by no means new (reference the Army of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, or the use of the kadirovtsi in Chechnya). However, the use of special operations forces as connective tissue and force multipliers to indigenous formations highlights a marked shift in Russian military organization. This is a technique — enshrined as a special operations role in NATO doctrine — that Russia has now adopted for use in counter-irregular operations abroad.
Drone Warfare as a Core Component
Drones, which rose to prominence within counter-insurgency operations led by the United States, now form a core component of the Russian counter-irregular approach. This capability is improving quickly due to significant investment and emphasis from the Kremlin. Even with unarmed drones (e.g., during the siege of Aleppo in 2016 and 2017), Russian forces successfully integrated these platforms to provide timely intelligence and enable maneuver. As of 2021, Russian forces training domestically had integrated unarmed and armed unmanned platforms with a ground maneuver force — synchronizing strikes using a Strelets-enabled command post. The Russian kill chain is getting shorter and more precise with the syncing of digital command and control and drones, an important improvement for future campaigns.
Likewise, Russian experiences in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and (by proxy) Nagorno-Karabakh, have kept the Russian military at the forefront of technologies to counter drones. As a result of these experiences, each Russian military district now has a dedicated element to counter enemy drone attacks and routinely drill against mass drone attacks in unit training scenarios. Russian counter-drone tactics rely predominately upon layered electronic warfare defenses to defeat the threat drone’s navigation and communication system. But they also include techniques for physically destroying adversarial drones with standard weapon systems. While these methods do not provide a total defense against enemy unmanned systems, they have proven effective against even U.S. and Operation for Security Cooperation in Europe drones in Syria and Ukraine, respectively.
Beyond the Traditional Military
In addition to military forces and the Rosgvardia, Russian intelligence services such as the Foreign Intelligence Service (specifically Zaslon) and Federal Security Service provide yet another capability to any campaign against insurgents or rebel groups. Russia has opaque and limited restrictions on employing these elements abroad, as evidenced by activities in Syria and Venezuela. Each of Russia’s intelligence services brings networks and finishing forces that can be used to target resistance movements. While the scale and purpose of the intelligence services’ role in recent counter-irregular campaigns remains unclear, the integration of military, Rosgvardia, and intelligence assets provides Moscow with layered options for targeting irregular threats.
Implications
Today, Russian expeditionary counter-irregular packages draw from professional volunteer brigades and battalions, including force multipliers such as special operations forces, drone forces, military police, and private military contractors. When integrated with air power, these force packages allow Moscow to conduct sustained operations abroad with a relatively small and scalable footprint on the ground. This ability to tailor force composition to create expeditionary counter-irregular task forces is new in the Russian experience, and represents a watershed in expeditionary mobility and command organization. The Russian kill chain is now shorter, its forces are more specialized and capable, and it retains the ability to rapidly scale Moscow’s investment abroad in a way new to Russia’s historical experience as a continental power.
Developing countries now have a Russian option to provide them with foreign internal defense, security force assistance, or counter-terrorism capabilities against irregular threats. Such a choice is especially appealing to authoritarian or corrupt regimes who want a military answer to an irregular threat but have limited interest in the oversight and pressure to reform that comes from Western support. This is especially relevant in Africa, where Russia continues to increase its military involvement while the United States has begun to scale down. Although training engagements and combined exercises are nothing new, the spread of Russian forces into Mozambique, Central African Republic, and the recent request for Russian mercenary support in Mali are indicative of this shift. For the past 20 years, many of these countries’ options for importing military support and security expertise consisted of the United States and U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom or France. The United States and its allies will increasingly need to assess which relationships (and therefore military access), they desire to maintain and which they are comfortable ceding to Russia, which is eager to assert its influence further abroad.
Additionally, with increased Russian counter-irregular deployments abroad come increased opportunities to apply pressure against Moscow in multiple regions, and with combinations of hard and soft power. The consistent violation of human rights by both the military, with its indiscriminate use of fires, and unaccountable private military contractors opens the regime to scrutiny in the information space. The web of private and state actors enabling the expanding Russian footprint abroad also provides potential vulnerabilities for exploitation via cyber or economic levers. Any direct involvement of uniformed Russian military personnel in small wars abroad presents a significant risk to the Kremlin, with its well-documented aversion to Russian casualties. Exploitation of these potential vulnerabilities requires a coherent international strategy between the United States and its allies. The more expansive the Russian efforts abroad, the more pressure points become available to U.S. policymakers seeking to influence behavior in Moscow.
Maj. Benjamin Arbitter and Maj. Kurt Carlson are Army Special Forces officers with operational and combat experience in the European Command and Central Command areas of responsibility. Both are from 10th Special Forces Group and have recently completed master’s degrees in defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. These views do not represent those of the 10th Special Forces Group, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
18. Getting Oversight Right: Lessons from Fort Hood and West Point's Gender Integration
Proper oversight of the military is one of the biggest challenges we have. But we have to get it right.
Getting Oversight Right: Lessons from Fort Hood and West Point's Gender Integration - Modern War Institute
In late 2020, news of Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen’s tragic death made headlines. Military leaders instantly fell under intense scrutiny from both the public and Congress. Unfortunately, stories similar to Guillen’s are not infrequent in today’s news cycle—and scrutinizing military leaders is just as commonplace. Such scrutiny is both natural and proper. But while commanders at all echelons certainly bear responsibility, there is another factor—a hallmark principle of American government—that gets less attention: civilian control of the military. Civilian oversight has an important role to play, especially given that issues like sexual assault and harassment detract from readiness, lethality, and the ability to focus solely on tackling the challenges of twenty-first-century warfare. While the ideal balance between the military and civilian officials charged with overseeing it remains the subject of an enduring debate in the minds of civil-military relations scholars, the need for proactive, effective civilian oversight is paramount and uncontested. The question remains: Whose responsibility is it to solve these issues, and how is resolution best achieved?
Without doubt, the Constitution expressly charges Congress with overseeing the military. The highest-ranking civilian leaders rely on congressional committees to provide real-time, in-touch oversight—which is often limited by busy schedules, complex agendas, and the bystander effect. These constraints are apparent in the tragedy at Fort Hood, Texas that has driven ongoing criticism of the base’s culture and command climate since last year. The incident calls for assessment and reform of current congressional oversight practices when it comes to military affairs. When civilian control and military oversight are poorly regulated and executed, the result is inhibited defense operations. Simply put, success on the battlefield relies on a healthy civil-military relationship.
Oversight and Civ-Mil Relations: What the Scholars Say
Scholars who study oversight propose three key findings: (1) oversight is innately political, (2) the agency being overseen often has a problematically large influence over how its oversight committee performs, and (3) multiple or overlapping jurisdictional issues undermine the effectiveness of oversight. The response to the Fort Hood tragedy arguably fits Walter Oleszek’s definition of “political oversight” (he distinguishes this from “programmatic” and “institutional” oversight), which “involves actions such as embarrassing an agency and its officials for their incompetence, focusing on policy scandals, or generating favorable publicity for lawmakers in the media and with their constituents.” While the recent attention given to Fort Hood by Congress is important and certainly warranted, it would have been far more favorable as a preventative measure rather than a retroactive response.
In Armed Servants, civil-military theorist Peter Feaver calls for a delicate balance of military and civilian leadership in which the former maintains the strength to execute any action demanded of it by the latter, yet is subordinate and disciplined enough to limit its actions to said civilian will. This concept seems straightforward in the context of war but is far from easy to achieve in a peacetime Army plagued by internal issues affecting cohesion. Joel Aberlach suggests that reality deviates far from Feaver’s idealistic notion because bureaucracies often develop an unhealthy influence over oversight agendas. In light of recent issues, General James McConville, the US Army chief of staff, has established three clear priorities: eradicating (1) sexual assault and harassment, (2) suicide, and (3) racism throughout the force. While this is certainly a step in the right direction, it places attention on measuring progress and detracts from current problems, thus changing the oversight agenda from identifying failures to evaluating success—just as Aberlach warns.
The third finding of scholars—about redundant jurisdictional issues—is especially important for the oversight process. Joshua David Clinton, David E. Lewis, and Jennifer Selin highlight an example of this in their discussion of the limited productivity, and consequently diminished effectiveness, of committee overlap in Congress—what they call “the irony of congressional oversight.” They note that bureaucrats self-report that their agencies are overseen by an average of three to four congressional committees. While counterproductive for the agency, this occurrence is logical from the congressional perspective. Committee membership provides several benefits to members of Congress, boosting their credibility in the eyes of their constituents and thereby improving their reelection prospects. This paradox ultimately undermines oversight, is detrimental to bureaucratic function, and reinforces Aberlach’s findings. Fundamentally, progress is implausible and productive oversight is disabled when too many players, each with competing interests, are involved.
Case Study 1: Fort Hood and Congress
After the disappearance and homicide of Specialist Guillen, Congress launched an investigation of the installation and its leadership. In a letter to then Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, Congresswoman Jackie Speier, the chairwoman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Military Personnel, and Congressman Stephen Lynch, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee for National Security, wrote of their intent “to seek justice on behalf of those in uniform, and their families, who may have been failed by a military system and culture that was ultimately responsible for their care and protection.” In the letter, Congresswoman Speier and Congressman Lynch reference six additional servicemembers who were assigned to Fort Hood. Three of the servicemembers were found deceased after being reported as missing; an additional three are currently under investigation as homicides. The legislators also cite the Army’s previously published statistic that “there were an average of 129 felonies committed annually at Fort Hood, including cases of homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, robbery, and aggravated assault” between 2014 and 2019. The numbers of violent crimes are evidence of systemic, cultural issues, rather than a problem that law enforcement can address on its own. Yet, despite the available and concerning statistics, Congress did not effectively intervene until after Guillen’s death.
While the military chain of command undoubtedly failed Guillen and other servicemembers at Fort Hood, the absence of oversight from civilian officials prior to the fall of 2020 should also be concerning. Given the cited examples in Speier and Lynch’s letter to former Secretary McCarthy, it appears likely that they were aware—and if not, should have been aware—that there were crime-related issues at Fort Hood. The inaction by military leaders at Fort Hood was wrong, but we must also consider the faults in the civilian oversight methods that failed to recognize the issue before it spiraled out of control. Guillen’s death made headlines and sparked widespread attention on social media—and it is shameful, but unsurprising, that it took the publicity of an immense tragedy to stimulate sufficient congressional attention, and subsequently oversight.
Case Study 2: The United States Military Academy Board of Visitors
A look at the United States Military Academy’s Board of Visitors (BOV) illustrates the positive impact that stems from proactive, regulatory oversight and heightened social awareness by oversight bodies. The Board of Visitors is a fifteen-person delegation charged with ensuring that West Point meets the required demands to commission Army officers and leaders of character each year. The BOV is composed of nine members of Congress, including, strategically, the chairs of both the House and Senate armed services committees (or their designees) and at least two members of each chamber’s appropriations committee, according to its charter. The remaining six positions are filled by presidential appointees conducting de facto executive oversight. The service academies’ respective BOVs have garnered unusual publicity this fall, as President Joe Biden has terminated the membership of all those appointed by former President Donald Trump. While certainly his prerogative, the move is a departure from past practice and could have implications for civil-military relations, particularly relating to American trust in the nation’s service academies and the nonpartisanship surrounding them.
While the West Point BOV’s charter specifically designates it as an “advisory” committee, in practice, it functions as a forum by which informal oversight occurs and as a pathway to formal oversight. For example, an engagement between a member of Congress on the BOV and senior academy leadership may not legally require the latter to take any reformative action, but the same member of Congress can make legally binding inquiries of the same nature while acting in his or her official capacity in committee. Information acquired while participating in BOV meetings is often the basis of formal concern during future hearings and other proceedings, which is a seemingly intentional aspect of the BOV’s functionality despite its proclamation to simply fulfill an advisory role.
On the other hand, the presidential appointees’ knowledge about West Point, in general, coupled with their rapport with senior military leaders, makes them key proponents of change in their own regard. The BOV was not necessarily designed with the intent that the presidential appointees would hold such authority, but that has certainly been the outcome. My research suggests that the congressional members retain influence by virtue of their ability to impact change in official capacities, whereas the presidential appointees possess far more direct influence as board members. For these reasons, the presidential appointees play a key role in determining the academy’s actions and effectiveness. Thus, President Biden’s recent decision will undoubtedly impact its future direction. Of course, given the generally positive and trusting relationships between presidential appointees and senior academy leaders, care must be taken to avoid the issue that Aberlach cautions against—of an agency gaining too much influence over its own oversight. If the relationship becomes so intertwined that the lines between overseer and overseen are blurred, oversight may be compromised. Thus, professionalism and a clear delineation of respective roles must endure.
When Congress first authorized the attendance of women at West Point in 1975, the BOV’s oversight was highly ineffective. I conducted interviews with several women from the first integrated classes and found that harassment and feelings of lack of acceptance were common threads among their respective experiences. Yet, a 1976 BOV statement held in the West Point library archives states: “Reports of the first year’s experience tend to confirm the Board’s confidence. This summer the entrance of the women in the Class of 1981 has been, from all reports, equally successful. The Academy has built upon the early experience and is adjusting admirably to one of the most radical changes in its history.” The BOV’s ignorance of the issues that many of the women were facing, to include sexual and other forms of physical assault, was unacceptable. One graduate I interviewed felt that most assaults went unreported due to a culture in which upper-class female cadets “educated” their younger counterparts that they should not raise gender-related issues as it would only hinder their ability to assimilate. Kris Fuhr, a 1985 graduate, echoed these sentiments when she was interviewed by the West Point Center for Oral History.
While there is still work to be done, the BOV has made significant progress toward awareness of social issues at West Point since the 1980s, in large part due to diversification of the presidential appointees and their commitment to, credibility with, and influence over the academy. BOV reports in more recent years more accurately reflect the sentiment of the Corps of Cadets and offer far more scrutiny of social issues rather than simply claiming success. In essence, the refined relationship between the BOV (particularly the presidentially appointed members) and senior academy leadership has favorably impacted the social dynamic at West Point. The increased diversity of BOV members has in turn increased the board’s awareness of and attention paid to social issues like gender integration. This enhances the degree to and methods by which they hold military leaders accountable. The relatively large influence that the presidential appointees hold as compared to their congressional counterparts also suggests the benefit of less convoluted, noncongressional oversight. This advantage is also seemingly highlighted by the work of the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee (FHIRC), which fairly quickly produced a comprehensive report on the details surrounding the events leading up to Guillen’s murder and the cultural and systemic factors that contributed to it—along with, by extension, pitfalls to be avoided in the future.
The FHIRC was formed under the directive of the secretary of the Army, and like the West Point BOV, serves as a strong example of an effective alternative civilian oversight model. While certain aspects of military relations (e.g., budget, use of force, etc.) must be managed by Congress, there are issues that can be delegated to other forms of civilian oversight. Cases of poor oversight suggest that perhaps Congress’s responsibilities are far too large to allow for effective oversight of all issues. In creating noncongressional committees or joint congressional and noncongressional bodies (such as the BOV), certain issues—like the social issues of gender integration at West Point and criminal issues like sexual assault—can be overseen with adequate attention, limited distraction, and increased objectivity. The nature of appointments to these boards (i.e., by approval from the president, Congress, or other senior civilian leaders), ensures that they still have a stake in their decisions and remain connected to the oversight process without detracting from its effectiveness.
The Future of Oversight
Since 1976, West Point has made measurable strides in its integration of female cadets and assurance of equal treatment. Yet, as the Annual Report on Sexual Harassment and Violence at the Military Service Academies highlights, the issue is still significant at the academy—as it is across in the Army. Incidents themselves, in addition to fear of reporting, remain a challenge that the Army as a whole must overcome. As the service continues to work to end unequal treatment, discrimination, and toxic behavior amid continued integration of women into combat roles, the reluctance to report incidents that once plagued West Point is paralleled in many Army units. Guillen’s sister shared that Vanessa “was afraid to report it. . . . She didn’t want to do a formal report because she was afraid of retaliation and being blackballed, and she, like most victims, just tried to deal with it herself.” While West Point, alongside its fellow service academies, is sometimes subject to oversight from Congress itself, the BOV is its most direct and frequent overseer. Rather than bearing oversight responsibility for all aspects of military operations like the congressional armed services committees, for example, the BOV is solely charged with evaluation of the academy. This smaller scope increases the board’s effectiveness. My research indicates that when the BOV became more attentive to social challenges, quality of life improved for female cadets. My subjective, personal experience as a cadet from 2016 to 2020 reinforces my view that this is the case. While issues still arise and the BOV is not unflawed, my research suggests that they are handled far better than they were in the initial integrative phases.
In comparing the evolution of the relationship between West Point and its BOV to the recent issues at Fort Hood, a few primary lessons emerge. First, military oversight bodies must be empowered to overcome the common downfalls described in the scholarly literature. They must strive to mitigate partisanship in the execution of their duties, create an effective method of dividing roles to reduce the impact of social loafing, and maintain civilian control as intended by our Founding Fathers. Second, since electoral constraints are inevitable, the creation of oversight bodies such as the BOV enables congressional involvement with overt reliance on wholly committed noncongressional members with relevant experience to carry a considerable portion of the weight. Independent assemblies and executive-appointed civilian overseers are often able to conduct better oversight by virtue of their availability, investment, and expertise. The newly created Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military appears to offer promising efforts toward rehabilitation, and reinforces the executive branch’s and DoD’s emphasis on the issue. But Congress, by law, must remain involved in military oversight operations. The BOV’s distinguishing characteristics—presidential appointees, diversity of membership, and a strong civil-military relationship—should serve as a framework for the formation of other regulatory oversight bodies that can gather information to inform future legislation. Finally, oversight committees, like more recent BOVs, should be especially conscientious of social issues in order to proactively prevent discrimination and criminal activity before it occurs.
The Army is working hard to eliminate toxicity and establish programs that foster a culture of acceptance and respect. However, effective civilian oversight surrounding these principles is a necessary accountability mechanism. Moving forward, strong, proactive civil-military relations will serve to prevent future tragedies similar in nature to the one at Fort Hood and will thereby improve military preparedness to tackle the challenges of modern warfare. Congressional oversight is and will remain vital, but its inherent limits must be acknowledged. When it comes to socially charged issues that impact defense operations, other forms of civilian oversight should be implemented that maintain equilibrium in the civil-military relationship and focus on proactive solutions instead of retroactive investigations.
Leah E. Foodman studied American politics at the United States Military Academy (USMA), where her undergraduate thesis focused on civilian oversight conducted by the USMA Board of Visitors in the context of gender integration. Leah’s work has previously been published in the Journal of Strategic Security. She currently serves as an active duty Army officer.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Tommy Gilligan, USMA (adapted by MWI)
19. FDD | EPA Misses Mark With Proposed Cybersecurity Standard
FDD | EPA Misses Mark With Proposed Cybersecurity Standard
fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · December 20, 2021
December 20, 2021 | Policy Brief
Water sector groups raised concerns earlier this month with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding the agency’s pursuit of a new cybersecurity requirement without prior consultation and collaboration with the water sector. While the EPA’s cybersecurity support for the water sector is sorely needed, the agency would greatly benefit from collaborating with water sector experts.
In a letter to Assistant Administrator for Water Radhika Fox, representatives from five water sector associations raised issues about the EPA’s proposal to add cybersecurity to state governments’ sanitation survey assessments, calling it a “top-down, one-size-fits-all” approach that will be “ineffective at improving cybersecurity at water systems.” The letter warns that the approach will likely “fail to have a decisive impact on water sector cybersecurity” and “lack[s] input by water sector subject matter experts.”
As we concluded in a November report published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the EPA is not equipped to perform the sort of cybersecurity assessment that its own directive would require. The same is true for the state government agencies responsible for sanitation surveys.
The United States has approximately 52,000 drinking water and 16,000 wastewater systems, most of which serve small- to medium-sized communities of fewer than 10,000 residents. A recent survey by the Water Sector Coordinating Council noted that 60 percent of water utilities spend less than 5 percent of their budget on information technology security. Mired in an environment of shrinking budgets and increased cyber vulnerability due to greater automation of systems, water utilities need technical assistance and financial support, not an assessment by inspectors, who would likely be ill-prepared and whose inspections could vary greatly across 50 states.
One positive element of the EPA’s proposal is its recognition that cybersecurity applies to wastewater utilities as much as to drinking water utilities. Our report called for amending the American Water Infrastructure Act of 2018 to include wastewater utilities alongside water utilities when conducting risk and resilience assessments, which include cybersecurity. However, while the EPA’s position is laudable, implementing it via a survey assessment would be problematic.
Instead, the best way to implement this and other U.S. government efforts to improve the water sector’s cybersecurity is through industry-government collaboration aimed at establishing cybersecurity standards, and by funding grant programs to support those efforts. The water associations’ letter itself pledges the sector’s commitment “to a collaborative solution” and requests a conversation with the EPA.
As we stated in the FDD report, the path forward for the U.S. government and this critical-infrastructure sector should also include properly resourcing and organizing the EPA to support the sector’s cybersecurity, creating and funding assistance programs for water and wastewater utilities (similar to those for energy utilities), and providing support to water associations to expand training and technical assistance.
Likewise, Congress should create a joint industry-government cybersecurity oversight program for the water sector. Lawmakers can apply lessons learned from other industry-led approaches to developing cybersecurity regulations, like those in the electricity subsector. Through collaborative efforts, the industry-government oversight program can provide a framework for the EPA to oversee the development and implementation of effective cybersecurity standards, while water and wastewater utilities can receive the federal support they need.
Mark Montgomery serves as senior director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) and as senior advisor to the chairmen of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Trevor Logan is a cyber research analyst at CCTI. For more analysis from the authors and CCTI, please subscribe HERE. Follow Mark and Trevor on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery and @TrevorLoganFDD. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
Issues:
fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · December 20, 2021
20. Stick to status quo on Jerusalem consulate
Excerpts:
Opening a U.S. Consulate to the Palestinians in any part of Jerusalem is not only illogical but also runs contrary to U.S. law.
...
Importantly, the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 stipulates that Jerusalem remain the “undivided” capital of Israel. This policy, spearheaded by Congress, has been reaffirmed repeatedly, with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House and Senate. Asking Israel to accept a new consulate to the Palestinians in Jerusalem would run contrary to the letter and spirit of the law.
Despite the deeply problematic and contentious nature of this issue, as recently as October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated Biden’s campaign promise to reopen the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. However, Israel would have to sign off on a new diplomatic presence and, after waiting 70 years for a U.S. president to recognize Jerusalem and move the U.S. Embassy there, Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid have both made it clear that the idea of a shared capital with the Palestinians is off the table.
There are no good moves available to the Biden administration. Upsetting America’s closest regional ally over the placement of a consulate that is both impractical and legally incoherent is a bad move. Placing the consulate in Ramallah would cause the president problems with the Palestinians and domestically. The only credible option for the administration is to maintain the status quo in Jerusalem and hope this blows over.
Stick to status quo on Jerusalem consulate
DECEMBER 20, 2021 12:00 AM
BY SHANY MOR AND ENIA KRIVINE
“There is no room for another American Consulate in Jerusalem,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said last month . The problem is that’s exactly what Joe Biden promised during his presidential campaign. But it was a misguided promise destined to aggravate tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. The smart thing for Biden to do is absolutely nothing.
In theory, an American diplomatic mission to the Palestinians makes plenty of sense. It signals American commitment to a negotiated peace and helps to shore up the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by the aged and ailing President Mahmoud Abbas, whose popularity compares unfavorably to that of Hamas. A consulate would facilitate communication to the Palestinian government and Palestinian people, crucial not just as it relates to the conflict with Israel but a range of issues, from global jihad to vaccine transfers.
The practical solution to this problem is to open a new U.S. Consulate at the center of Palestinian life in the West Bank where commerce, civil society, and government reside: Ramallah. It would not be the only such mission. More than two dozen countries have diplomatic missions in Ramallah, including China, India, and several Arab states.
However, placing the U.S. mission in Ramallah would be wildly unpopular with the Palestinians and would cause problems for Biden domestically, as the far Left would perceive the decision as ceding Jerusalem to Israel in toto. As such, the Palestinians demand an American mission in East Jerusalem, the hoped-for capital of a future Palestinian state.
The history of the U.S. diplomatic presence in Jerusalem is convoluted, to say the least. After Israel's independence in 1948, the United States placed its embassy in Tel Aviv, ignoring Israel’s determination that Jerusalem was the capital of the Jewish state and the fact that Israel’s government, including parliament, presidents, and prime ministers, was all based in Jerusalem.
After Israel’s independence and until 1967, Washington maintained two consulates in Jerusalem: one in the western part of the city, which was under Israeli control, and one in the eastern part of city, which was then under Jordanian control. Despite the reunification of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, the U.S. maintained its policy of two consulates: a consulate in the western part of the city, on Agron Road, facing Israelis, and another facility in the east of the city, on Nablus Road, ostensibly to serve the Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West bank — though in practice, both facilities service both populations at times.
In 2010, without fanfare, the Obama administration consolidated the Nablus Road mission into a Palestinian Affairs Unit in the newly expanded facility in western Jerusalem on Agron. The U.S. maintains the property on Nablus Road as an America House . Also in 2010, a new consular section was established in western Jerusalem, providing services for both populations.
While the U.S. engaged in real estate shuffles in Jerusalem, other countries, many of which recognized Palestinian statehood, opened embassies in Ramallah. This was largely a result of the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords established the PA in Ramallah and created areas of full and partial Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank (referred to as areas A, B, and C).
Ramallah, located in area A and fully governed by the PA, became the nerve center of Palestinian life. It is only logical that any U.S. representation to the Palestinians should reside there and not in Jerusalem, a city under full Israeli jurisdiction. Though geographically close, the Israeli capital is worlds apart from Ramallah and Palestinian life in the West Bank.
Opening a U.S. Consulate to the Palestinians in any part of Jerusalem is not only illogical but also runs contrary to U.S. law.
In 2018, President Donald Trump fulfilled his own campaign promise, finally enacting the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and, in the same move, tucking the existing Palestinian Affairs Unit under the authority of the new embassy. The Palestinians responded by boycotting the U.S. administration, a posture the PA maintained for the remainder of the Trump presidency.
Importantly, the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 stipulates that Jerusalem remain the “undivided” capital of Israel. This policy, spearheaded by Congress, has been reaffirmed repeatedly, with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House and Senate. Asking Israel to accept a new consulate to the Palestinians in Jerusalem would run contrary to the letter and spirit of the law.
Despite the deeply problematic and contentious nature of this issue, as recently as October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated Biden’s campaign promise to reopen the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. However, Israel would have to sign off on a new diplomatic presence and, after waiting 70 years for a U.S. president to recognize Jerusalem and move the U.S. Embassy there, Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid have both made it clear that the idea of a shared capital with the Palestinians is off the table.
There are no good moves available to the Biden administration. Upsetting America’s closest regional ally over the placement of a consulate that is both impractical and legally incoherent is a bad move. Placing the consulate in Ramallah would cause the president problems with the Palestinians and domestically. The only credible option for the administration is to maintain the status quo in Jerusalem and hope this blows over.
Shany Mor ( @ShMMor ) is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Enia Krivine ( @EKrivine ) is the senior director of the FDD's Israel Program and National Security Network.
21. The Slow Meltdown of the Chinese Economy
Excerpts:
In short, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that China’s economy is systematically weakening and that Mr. Xi’s new priorities offer little hope for a quick turnaround. The U.S. and its allies could further compound Mr. Xi’s challenges by vigorous enforcement of trade laws, limiting Chinese access to technology and financing from the West, and imposing sanctions against China’s brutal human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and in countries in the developing world that it is trying to exploit through its Belt and Road Initiative. A good example of such exploitation is the atrocious mining conditions for key battery components cobalt and lithium in Africa and South America.
A major slowdown or acute financial crisis in China would certainly have a negative impact on the global economy. But U.S. and allied policy makers do have tools that could both influence the direction of the Chinese economy and help repair some of the accumulated damage to their economies from Chinese mercantilism. A first step is to undermine the narrative of a relentless, unstoppable economic advance under Mr. Xi’s leadership.
The Slow Meltdown of the Chinese Economy
Beijing’s troubles are an opportunity for the U.S.—if Washington can recognize it.
WSJ · by Thomas J. Duesterberg
Chinese President Xi Jinping gives an address via video in Beijing, Dec. 3.
Photo: Huang Jingwen/Zuma Press
China is experiencing a slow-motion economic crisis that could undermine stability in the current regime and have serious negative consequences for the global economy. Despite the many warning signs, Western analysts and policy makers are optimistic that Xi Jinping is up to the task of managing the crisis. Such optimism is misplaced.
The U.S. and its allies have many tools to influence China’s economy and need to weigh the consequences of an acute crisis against the threat its current trajectory poses to the U.S. Policy makers should be thinking of how best to deploy these tools, instead of passively assuming the rapid growth and stability of the Chinese economy will continue.
In December real-estate developers China Evergrande and Kaisa joined several other overleveraged firms in bankruptcy, exposing hundreds of billions in yuan- and dollar-denominated debt to default. Real estate represents around 30% of the Chinese economy, nearly twice the levels that led to the financial crisis of 2008-09 in the U.S., Spain and England.
The real-estate industry has been key to keeping annual growth above 6%. Yet a debt bubble has inflated by 20% annually between 2014 and 2018. Originally intended to accommodate rapid urbanization for the industrial economy, the urban property market is now overbuilt. Some 90% of urban households own their own properties and enough vacant units are available to accommodate 10 years of urban immigrants. Sales and prices have tumbled this year, and overleveraged builders and creditors are suffering the consequences.
After a major change in how central and local governments divvy up tax revenue in 1994, Chinese local officials began to rely on land sales for the income needed for improving infrastructure and social welfare. At a minimum, one-third of local government revenues is derived from land sales. Another 10% to 15% come from related taxes on development.
But land sales fell by more than 30% in late 2021, putting local finances in jeopardy. Local governments have struggled to address other priorities such as healthcare, pensions, environmental cleanup, income inequality and education. Moreover, up to 80% of household wealth in China is in real estate holdings, a hedge against weakness of the social safety net. In other words, an economic meltdown is a potential threat to the implicit social compact in China between authoritarian rulers and a quiescent population.
In his zeal to reassert the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Xi has engineered a crackdown on some of China’s most innovative industries and the entrepreneurs building them. The party channels credit to state-owned enterprises to the detriment of the more dynamic and job-creating private industry, inserts operatives on the management committees of most enterprises, and disciplines business leaders perceived to resist Mr. Xi’s leadership. The clampdown on new industries such as ride-sharing, private education, social media and online and private healthcare, is especially damaging to growth.
Mr. Xi is privileging the less productive and less innovative components of the Chinese economy while enhancing control, limiting financing and punishing entrepreneurial leaders in many leading industries. This isn’t a recipe for maintaining strong economic growth. Despite the frequent assertions that China is catching up or moving ahead of the West in technology industries, it has a long way to go to achieve the self-sufficiency and global leadership it seeks. U.S. sanctions on advanced semiconductors, for instance, have gutted Huawei’s ability to make its own 5G phones. China’s semiconductor industry is 10 years behind world leaders, according to a recent German study.
China’s commercial aviation industry doesn’t have an internationally certified jet to compete with Boeing and Airbus, despite three decades of concentrated efforts. Its biopharmaceutical industry failed to produce an effective vaccine for Covid. Steel, batteries and high-speed rail—where China is competitive—are at risk of trade retaliation due to environmentally harmful production practices and theft of intellectual property. China’s alleged lead in artificial intelligence could be blunted by imposing the same limits on data flows into China that it imposes internally, thus sapping its monopoly on big data, and by limiting U.S. investment in Chinese AI firms.
China’s overall productivity levels also lag those of other advanced economies. Mr. Xi’s turn to state-owned enterprises and manufacturing certainly won’t improve this relative weakness.
In short, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that China’s economy is systematically weakening and that Mr. Xi’s new priorities offer little hope for a quick turnaround. The U.S. and its allies could further compound Mr. Xi’s challenges by vigorous enforcement of trade laws, limiting Chinese access to technology and financing from the West, and imposing sanctions against China’s brutal human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and in countries in the developing world that it is trying to exploit through its Belt and Road Initiative. A good example of such exploitation is the atrocious mining conditions for key battery components cobalt and lithium in Africa and South America.
A major slowdown or acute financial crisis in China would certainly have a negative impact on the global economy. But U.S. and allied policy makers do have tools that could both influence the direction of the Chinese economy and help repair some of the accumulated damage to their economies from Chinese mercantilism. A first step is to undermine the narrative of a relentless, unstoppable economic advance under Mr. Xi’s leadership.
Mr. Duesterberg is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of a new study, “Economic Cracks in the Great Wall of China: Is China’s Current Economic Model Sustainable.”
WSJ · by Thomas J. Duesterberg
22. Biden's Ravens: Leaders to Watch in 2022
Excerpt:
In his essay “A Room and A Half,” the late Russian writer Josef Brodsky wrote of how two ravens in his London backyard served as harbingers of his parents’ demise and death. The above-mentioned adversary leaders and the existential threats which they represent to western democracies – can easily lead to a type of nihilism, where any diplomatic and political engagement is seen as appeasement, or worse. Putin and Xi are in this way, akin to Biden’s ‘ravens,’ allegedly heralding the defeat of western democracy and the triumph of their respective versions of ‘democracy.’ Thankfully, the ‘old’ Cold War offers hope and valuable lessons learned. Leadership, resolve, values, and strong actions – not mere words – matter. Presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush welcomed engagement with our adversaries, but on our terms, projecting America’s best values and strengths, and yes, its exceptionalism. President Biden and other allied leaders would do well to remember these facts, as they ponder 2022’s leaders to watch.
Biden's Ravens: Leaders to Watch in 2022
Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016, and is currently Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX; and a Senior Fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
OPINION — As President Joe Biden concludes his first year in office, his administration continues to face numerous national security challenges. According to many, Biden’s vast political experience and political advantages have dimmed, and America and its western allies find themselves beset by division, rancor, and doubt. Challenges such as the ongoing COVID pandemic, climate change, laggard economies, a weakened EU, cyber-attacks upon American infrastructure by Russia and China, and our adversaries’ supreme abilities in whole of government approaches to the ‘new’ Cold War, have left America and its allies paralyzed. Biden and other allied leaders are struggling to fight the ‘new’ Cold War with the ‘old’ Cold War’s tactics, such as sanctions and weapons sales to our allies. Such approaches, without a coherent strategy, are unlikely to bear fruit.
Our key adversaries, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, have often been underestimated and misunderstood. Part of this analytic bias involves seeing them as merely tactical, when they are instead formidable, cunning, ruthless, and – ultimately – very strategic. As a senior CIA colleague once said to me, “how many battles did Genghis Khan win before one could consider him a strategic genius?” Putin and Xi are fighting the ‘new’ Cold War with 21st-century tools, utilizing a formidable array of talents, assets, and hybrid, gray zone, whole of government approaches. These strategies involve uses of military, economic, political, diplomatic, cyber, informational, and intelligence tools to win this epochal conflict, which has been painted as one between autocracy and democracy. One must never forget that our adversaries believe that time and history – and their very legitimacy and governance outcomes – are on their side. And if leaders in America and its allies don’t grasp this fact and achieve a nuanced understanding of our adversaries’ true intentions, then the latter have already achieved a great psychological victory. We struggle to play checkers, while our adversaries are playing three-dimensional Chess or Go — and winning.
Putin is by now well-recognized as a brilliant, disruptive, revanchist, and ever-powerful (even if weakened by a stalled economy and COVID-19) leader, willing to project his and Russia’s strength, even at the cost of prosperity. Putin is a hard man, even when capable of ‘charm’ diplomacy, such as in his recent contacts with Xi, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi. We still lack a key understanding of his intentions, especially with respect to Ukraine, where Russia has massed over 100,000 troops on its border, and Putin has clearly drawn his ‘red line’ – that Ukraine must never be allowed to join NATO. Unlike many recent western leaders, Putin’s ‘red lines’ are backed by resolve, force, and strength. But merely watching Russian troop buildups runs the risk of missing Putin’s truest intentions — to psychologically weaken Ukraine’s resolve, to use other weapons of war such as massive GRU-enabled cyber-attacks, corruption of Ukrainian businessmen, and the SVR’s recruitment of Ukrainian politicians to never vote for NATO accession.
Xi and Biden have met multiple times since 2011, when Xi was Vice-President and later, President of China. But their most recent virtual meeting has failed to bridge the growing diplomatic divide between America and China, where China is now seen as strategic competitor. And Xi is easily the most formidable and successful leader in the world today. He has so far achieved his goals of the China Dream and the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese People. The recent 6th plenum cemented Xi’s status among the pantheon of modern China’s other greatest leaders, Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping. Xi has successfully utilized impressive strategy in militarizing the south China Sea, cornering Taiwan (which he does not need to invade), repressing Hong Kong, Macau, and Xinjiang, and seeking to dominate the critical technologies of the 21st-century in his vaunted Made in China 2025 Program, and exporting China’s economic largess via the gargantuan Belt and Road Initiative. Paying attention to, and understanding Xi’s political psychology and leadership intentions, remains a critical national security imperative.
This month, North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong-un celebrates his 10th year in power, more powerful than ever. This very fact aline is an intelligence failure, as most American, South Korean, and other experts predicted that Kim wouldn’t last more than a few months. Kim proved them wrong, and has advanced a significant nuclear weapons program, while initially loosening the DPRK’s economy and improving the elites’ quality of life. He then parlayed his diplomatic skills on the world stage during 2018 and 2019, meeting with various world leaders such as Putin, Moon, Trump, and Xi. Russia’s former Ambassador to South Korea Gleb Ivashentsov saw Kim’s summits with President Trump as “a colossal achievement for Kim Jong Un, who surpassed his father and his grandfather by forcing the head of the largest imperialist nation to negotiate with him as an equal.” But the ongoing pandemic has – along with Kim’s complete ‘lockdown’ and further isolation of North Korea – led to severe economic decline and food insecurity. Lastly, after a likely health scare during 2020, Kim has lost a significant amount of weight during 2021 (likely due to bariatric surgery), showing a youthfulness and vigor as he embraces North Korea’s severe challenges over the next years. His health improvement sends a message to Biden and other leaders (including Putin and Xi) that he will remain a force to be reckoned with in Northeast Asia for the foreseeable future.
Other leaders to watch include Iran’s Supreme Leader and its new President, Ebrahim Raisi, who have done their best to stall diplomacy with America and the West regarding the moribund 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, while likely advancing Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Of note, Putin has also – in recent meetings with Israeli, Indian and Middle Eastern leaders – attempted to counter President Trump’s earlier diplomacy involving Israel and its Middle East neighbors, and the strategic relationship between America and India — the latter being critical as a counterweight to China’s increasing stature and strategic role in Asia. And Xi has used his diplomatic skills to reach out to Africa, a key source of trade and raw materials needed to fuel China’s projected growth.
In his essay “A Room and A Half,” the late Russian writer Josef Brodsky wrote of how two ravens in his London backyard served as harbingers of his parents’ demise and death. The above-mentioned adversary leaders and the existential threats which they represent to western democracies – can easily lead to a type of nihilism, where any diplomatic and political engagement is seen as appeasement, or worse. Putin and Xi are in this way, akin to Biden’s ‘ravens,’ allegedly heralding the defeat of western democracy and the triumph of their respective versions of ‘democracy.’ Thankfully, the ‘old’ Cold War offers hope and valuable lessons learned. Leadership, resolve, values, and strong actions – not mere words – matter. Presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush welcomed engagement with our adversaries, but on our terms, projecting America’s best values and strengths, and yes, its exceptionalism. President Biden and other allied leaders would do well to remember these facts, as they ponder 2022’s leaders to watch.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
23. Ignore Xi Jinping’s Deceptions. China Is Struggling
Ignore Xi Jinping’s Deceptions. China Is Struggling
December 20, 2021 6:30 AM
As the PRC confronts mounting challenges, its leader will do anything to prevent becoming China’s Gorbachev.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
T
he November plenary meeting of the Chinese Communist Party central committee contained no real surprises. President Xi Jinping remains on track to begin a third term as the head of the party, government, and armed forces — a true maximum leader — when the party’s 20th central committee is convened next year. By design, the November meeting was intended to airbrush Xi’s nearly ten-year reign and prospects into an arc of history reaching back to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 100 years ago.
Xi’s task at the plenary was twofold: (1) create a place for himself on that historic arc that is on par with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping; and, thereby (2) firmly establish the party’s current course as the best path forward. The meeting’s communique, issued by state news agency Xinhua, suggests those tasks were accomplished. The communique calls on the party “to adhere to ‘Mao Zedong thought’ and ‘Deng Xiaoping theory’” but “fully implement Xi Jinping’s new era” and to “grasp the times and lead the times.”
But given the profound challenges China faces, Xi is not focused on being the second Mao, the architect of the Great Leap Forward, or the second Deng, the great reformer. What Xi is desperate to avoid is being a second Gorbachev, who rose to the top in the Soviet Union at a time when the inconsistences and system fractures in the USSR were irreversible, even though much of the world didn’t realize it. Gorbachev’s attempts to embrace half-hearted reforms and win the acclaim of the West only accelerated the Soviet Union’s demise. Xi will not follow that pattern.
The conventional analysis of Xi’s tenure is that, despite his desire to cement his stature vis-à-vis previous communist-party leaders, he has broken from them in certain ways. Analyzing regimes from Deng on, many Western analysts believed those leaders were steering the People’s Republic of China (PRC) toward market liberalization and joining the community of nations through trade liberalization and other mechanisms of global integration. The emerging consensus about Xi is that he is stopping that and seeking not integration but dominance and harder-edged Party control. To some degree, characterizing Xi as an outlier from his predecessors is convenient analysis by those who were mistaken about what was transpiring in the PRC before Xi.
Though the CCP is a regime skilled in diversion and deception, there are hard truths one must discern. For example: It is now clear that Xi’s predecessors did not see the PRC as an economic powerhouse in waiting. The reality of China’s many difficulties, now Xi’s problems, was evident before he took power. Already by 2007, then-premier Wen Jiabao was acknowledging that the PRC economy was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” Yet the CCP had the world convinced that the PRC was ascendant economically. Wen was not an exception but a respected leader within the party, and he was reflecting the known reality, even if the rest of the world wasn’t listening or couldn’t pierce the opaque veil of official falsehoods.
Western governments mostly ignored Wen, and businesses accepted the alternate reality crafted by the CCP. In this world, the PRC was growing at 9 percent per year, and party leaders had supposedly found the perfect mix of market liberalization and state industrial policy necessary to sustain growth and dominance over time. In 2010, the Financial Times reported that, with the U.S. and Europe reeling from the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the world — in the words of HSBCs chief China economist — could be “on the verge of a financial revolution of truly epic proportions” and that the yuan could soon eclipse the dollar as the global reserve currency.
That didn’t happen. And if the titans of Wall Street or the global foreign-policy establishment were not paying attention to Wen, Xi was. Xi has known since taking office that Wen’s formulation was accurate, that the die was already cast well before then, and that the situation has gotten worse since.
This mirrors what Mikhail Gorbachev faced when he became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. Plenty of Western analysts who had gotten the Soviet Union wrong for decades touted Gorbachev as the leader who would take the Soviet Union into a new era. We often forget today how for much of the mid-20th century, many around the world saw the Soviet command economy as a viable alternative to the market-led western economies. Many also saw it as a fierce geostrategic military competitor to the United States and her allies. The USSR averaged better than 5 percent growth from the late 1920s to until about 1970. Through the first half of the 1970s, a period of stagflation in the U.S. and Europe, growth in the USSR was still close to 4 percent per year. Soviet military and political influence were dominant throughout eastern Europe, and Soviet client states extended Moscow’s heft throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Much contemporary foreign-policy analysis focused on how a plateauing, soon-to-decline West should contend with the rise of an assertive, confident communist counterforce. As Gorbachev was coming to power, American political theorists were writing about the “rise and fall of great powers” — seen by many in the foreign-policy elite as a how-to guide to manage America’s decline.
Yet so many missed that, by the late 1970s, the corruption and inefficiencies of the Soviet system already had taken hold, and that it was Soviet decline that was inevitable, not Western decline. Against a backdrop of perceived U.S. lack of resolve and overstretch, Moscow even then presented an image of strength and influence, including the 1978 Sandinista/communist revolution in Nicaragua and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But by the mid-1980s, following the economic and military build-up of former U.S. president Ronald Regan and a return to free-market economics in the United Kingdom, the forces that led to the USSR’s ultimate failure became obvious and irreversible. Gorbachev came to office in 1985; the USSR and Gorbachev were gone by 1991. In that sense, he was not an anomaly on the path of progress but a harbinger of failure.
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The same could well be true of Xi. The CCP in Xi’s third term will do all it can to avoid that. The PRC will not follow the same path as the USSR. But whether Mark Twain ever said that “history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” the aphorism applies. It is quite obvious that Xi is presiding over a period of relative decline after many years of expansion and growth — recognizing that Beijing’s official statistics undoubtedly overstated that growth. It is apparent that the many internal cracks in the artificial edifice of control and progress — massive public and private debt; upside-down demographics of an aging, declining population; the lack of social mobility and a social safety net for hundreds of millions trapped in poverty; ecological and natural-resources challenges; the increasing expectations of prosperity for urban, educated elite that cannot be met; large-scale human rights violations and mistreatment of minorities; and an energy shortage, to name just a few — are beyond the party’s ability to reverse.
Meanwhile, many in the West who were bullish on the PRC just a decade ago are now rethinking their own assumptions and realizing they were mistaken. To pick just one example, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon acknowledged as much in recent comments chiding the CCP by saying that he expects his company will outlast it. Dimon effectively admitted that policy-makers and the business community had gotten the PRC wrong and that, in effect, the Trump administration was right for reversing course. That Dimon was persuaded to apologize for his comments almost within the same news cycle he made them doesn’t nullify their accuracy.
The enhancement of Xi’s authority over the party that the recent plenum validated does not represent a break from the past. Rather, it is a natural continuation of CCP regime policy to try to control the narrative so the rest of the world will fall in line. This is the approach Xi and his predecessors have taken for decades. The CCP created the illusion of permanent, outsized growth based on market-led reforms that drew in western business, seduced Western governments, and made the rest of the world want to accommodate it. To try to avoid the fate of Gorbachev and the USSR, Xi and the CCP will work all the harder to sustain an edifice of perceived strength and dominance.
The practice of maintaining illusion to gain strategic advantage and to control the perceptions of adversaries is almost as old as China itself. The “Thirty-Six Strategems” (henceforth, “strategies”) is a collection of dicta on politics, diplomacy, war, and other affairs of state that dates perhaps to the 5th century BC. The collection is of uncertain provenance but has been part of oral- and written-history traditions for centuries. The dicta probably influenced Sun Tzu and other Chinese philosophers. They gained newfound attention from the CCP under Mao.
At the heart of the strategies is that deception, misdirection, disinformation, and trickery are appropriate and winning approaches to dealing with outsiders. These approaches have accelerated as an element of state control under Xi as China’s weaknesses have become more obvious and the regime gets more desperate.
This deception strategy has been well-documented. Researchers at the University of Oxford concluded in 2019 that “China has become a major player in the global disinformation order,” citing “computational propaganda” through targeted use of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The analysis helps explain how the CCP controlled global perceptions of Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, which was instrumental in ensuring that the West would do what it did in response: nothing. In another example, the EU last year declared that the PRC was engaged in a sophisticated disinformation and misdirection campaign regarding the coronavirus pandemic, with the deliberate intent to “sow divisions in European societies.”
The CCP uses means other than social media to advance its disinformation and misdirection campaigns. A recent analysis in the Wall Street Journal describes how “a new data-security law has made it harder for foreign companies and investors to get information, including about supplies and financial statements” about the true state of its economy. But this is not new; it has been obvious for years to anyone willing to look into it. It is just more obvious. Close CCP-watchers have known for years that official statements about the PRC’s economic growth and strength were overblown, if not outright lies, even if many Western investors and governments accepted them anyway.
The use of deception extends to the field of diplomacy, where Xi’s so-called wolf-warrior diplomats have been active in global capitals pushing the party’s propaganda and disinformation. Another channel is the Confucius Institutes typically affiliated with universities in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. These are nominally intended as centers of cultural awareness. This work of diplomats and other aspects of soft power reflects the priorities of a CCP United Front Work Department that has been well-documented, and includes the use of propaganda spread through academic and community-exchange programs. According to a 2018 report by the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, the strategy is “borrowed from the former Soviet Union [and] President Xi has placed a greater emphasis on United Front work . . . describing it as important for the ‘whole [Chinese Communist] Party’ and elevating its role within China’s broader foreign policy.”
In these matters as well, Xi is following a pattern established by predecessors. Beijing has long used diplomacy and United Front tactics to influence western capitals. During the George W. Bush administration, Beijing accommodationists in Taiwan found themselves out of power for the first time in the island’s history after the election in 2000 of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Chen Shui-Bian as president. Chen spoke often about the PRC military buildup across the Taiwan strait. In late 2003, he highlighted the powers in Taiwan law that were available to him, including a referendum on sovereignty as one potential remedy. While these moves were intended for domestic political consumption, Chen nonetheless created the impression that he favored Taiwan independence and a unilateral change to the status quo. This alarmed senior U.S. officials. It also was an opening for pro-Beijing forces to generate false stories that U.S. Defense Department officials and others were secretly encouraging Chen in his pro-independence tendencies. The result was tension and the perception of schism among President Bush’s senior advisers. In fact, the administration was speaking with one voice in support of the president’s policies.
All of this advanced Beijing’s objectives, in the spirit of the 36 strategies. One advises leaders to “kill with a borrowed knife,” or let someone else do your dirty work. Another dictum calls for “sowing discord in the enemy’s camp.” Both were effective. President Bush, at an Oval Office press conference with Wen Jiabao during Wen’s December 2003 visit to Washington, used the occasion to upbraid the democratically elected leader in front of the communist leader. Bush admonished Chen, noting that “the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan indicate that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose.” This gave Wen his own opportunity to highlight — in partnership with the president of the United States standing alongside him — that “Taiwan authorities, headed by Chen Shui-bian, are only using democracy as an excuse and attempt to resort to defensive referendum to split Taiwan away from China.”
The PRC’s use of such deception and misdirection will become more aggressive as the economic and geopolitical situation for Beijing gets more challenging. We will see that regarding PRC posture toward Taiwan. There is no likelihood that the PRC intends to conduct military operations to occupy or defeat Taiwan anytime soon. There are too many mainland challenges to embark on such an expedition, even if the communist government were capable of doing so now, which it is not.
Instead, we will see continued feigned intentions, such as the military overflights and other demonstrations of force. Along the way, the CCP will accept whatever fortunes it gains in the way of concessions that may be made because of its projection of strength. The 36 strategies counsel adherents to “create something from nothing” and to “take the opportunity to pilfer a goat,” or take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself on the way to a larger objective. If the world wants to make concessions to Beijing in other areas for Beijing to “avoid” conflict with Taiwan, even if Beijing knows no conflict is coming, Beijing will accept them with pleasure.
A better approach by the U.S. and her allies would be resolve and resistance to Beijing’s antics. Thus far, the Biden administration seems to be taking that general approach and is bringing allies along. The recent decision to include Taiwan in the administration’s “Democracy Summit” is one example. So, too, the administration’s decision to provide Australia with nuclear-submarine capabilities to counter Beijing’s expansion in the South China Sea. There are other positive developments. Several universities in the U.S. and elsewhere have severed their relationships with local Confucius Institutes, and Beijing’s obfuscation and lies about the pandemic and its early handling of it have been discredited.
Showing resolve and clarity toward Beijing and embracing a policy of strategic coherence toward both the PRC and Taiwan — one is an authoritarian adversary, the other is a democratic ally — is informed by the approach Reagan and former U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher took toward the Soviet Union. These leaders did not confront the USSR, but they were clear in describing its true nature, and they showed resolve in meeting the challenges the USSR presented. That approach predated Gorbachev. When Gorbachev came to power, the results were inevitable because the inconsistences of the Soviet system were irreversible.
The same is true for the PRC. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi wants the world to see it as in the ascendancy and in control of its destiny. It is neither of these. Xi is keen that the world see him as a transformational leader of the CCP like Mao or Deng, not preside over the collapse of the system as Gorbachev did. Clarity and resolve toward Beijing by the rest of the world is a better approach than the prior naivete and seeming willful avoidance of reality. The 36 strategies offer insight into Xi’s likely behavior if the world takes a more resolute stance. In the category known as the “Desperate Strategies” is this nugget: “If all else fails, flee.”
THERESE SHAHEEN is a businesswoman and CEO of US Asia International. She was the chairman of the State Department’s American Institute in Taiwan from 2002 to 2004.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
