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Quotes of the Day:
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Unconventional Warfare is the military and paramilitary aspect of an insurgency or other armed resistance movement and may often become a protracted politico-military activity. From the US perspective, UW may be the conduct of indirect or proxy warfare against a hostile power for the purpose of achieving US national interests in peacetime; UW may be employed when conventional military involvement is impractical or undesirable; or UW may be a complement to conventional operations in war. The focus of UW is primarily on existing or potential insurgent, secessionist, or other resistance movements. Special operations forces (SOF) provide advice, training, and assistance to existing indigenous resistance organizations. The intent of UW operations is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by advising, assisting, and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish US strategic or operational objectives.
When UW is conducted independently during military operations other than war or war, its primary focus is on political and psychological objectives. A successful effort to organize and mobilize a segment of the civil population may culminate in military action.”
⁃ The Joint Doctrine Encyclopedia, 1997
“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
- Carl Sagan
Note: I think this will be one of the great statements that will be highlighted when the history of the successful Ukraine defense is written: “Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.”
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 21
2. Hero Commander of SEAL Team 1 Found Dead in California Home
3. Russian Hackers’ Latest Target Is Cab Dispatch Line at J.F.K., U.S. Says
4. Five takeaways from Zelensky’s trip to Washington
5. Zelenskyy to America: Our Fight Is Your Fight
6. CCP: Who makes up the party
7. How Spies Spread the Myth of China’s Peaceful Rise
8. Downgrade counter-terrorism efforts at your peril
9. The Pentagon is in its AI era: 5 stories from 2022
10. Fear, Honor, and Interest in the Arctic: The Case for Realism and Transactional Balancing
11. How to Get Ahead in Washington: Lessons from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras, Part 1
12. How to Get Ahead in Washington: Lessons from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras, Part 2
13. Zelenskyy thanks 'every American,' sees 'turning point'
14. Amid a show of unity, Zelensky and Biden differ on some war needs
15. Inside the Army’s Newest Spy Plane
16. Musk Has Reduced Twitter’s Ability to Spot Foreign Disinformation, a Former Data Scientist Says
17. China’s Threat to Global Democracy
18. Volodymyr Zelensky's address to U.S. Congress (full text)
19. How Huawei is winning over the global south
20. SOF Week Replaces SOFIC In 2023
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 21
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-21
Key Takeaways
- Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu proposed a series of expansive reforms and goals for Russian force generation that Russia is highly unlikely to complete in time to be relevant to the current conflict.
- Putin and Shoigu reiterated maximalist Russian aims for the war in Ukraine.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin has intensified efforts to make peace with the critical pro-war nationalist community. Russian failures to achieve Putin’s stated goals jeopardize Kremlin efforts to regain control over the domestic narrative and to set conditions for the second year of the war.
- Russian nuclear rhetoric is most likely an attempt to appease domestic audiences and intimidate Western audiences and not an indicator of preparation to use nuclear weapons.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Washington, DC on December 21. ISW will report on the details of Zelensky’s visit and Russian reactions to the visit on December 22.
- Russian and Ukrainian forces continued counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Donetsk City areas.
- A Ukrainian official confirmed that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to establish control over the Dnipro delta islands.
- Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu boasted about the growing Russian Young Army Cadets National Movement (Yunarmia) movement.
- Russian officials intensified law enforcement crackdowns to deter partisan activities and target partisan sympathizers.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 21
understandingwar.org
George Barros, Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Angela Howard, Layne Philipson, Madison Williams, and Frederick W. Kagan
December 21, 7:00 pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu presided over a Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) Collegium in Moscow on December 21 and made significant statements pertaining to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the strategic direction of the Russian military.
The Kremlin intensified its information operation accusing NATO expansion of presenting a military threat to Russia.[1] Shoigu stated that NATO’s military expansion near Russian borders, including Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership aspirations, necessitates an "appropriate" Russian response to establish a Russian force group in northwestern Russia.[2] Senior Kremlin officials said that the accession of the Nordic states to NATO would not threaten Russia in spring 2022. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Finland and Sweden joining NATO would not present an existential threat to Russia in April 2022 and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that Finland and Sweden joining NATO would not make "much difference" in May 2022.[3]
Shoigu publicly presented a series of proposed Russian defense policy changes to significantly increase the size of the Russian military. Shoigu proposed that Russia reestablish the Moscow and Leningrad military districts, form a new army corps, and form 17 new maneuver divisions.[4] Shoigu suggested that Russia form a new army corps in Karelia, two new airborne assault divisions, three new motorized rifle divisions in occupied Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts, and expand seven existing brigades of the Northern Fleet and Western, Central, and Eastern Military districts into seven new motorized rifle divisions while expanding five existing naval infantry brigades into five naval infantry divisions. Shoigu also proposed that Russia form five artillery divisions to support military districts.[5] He proposed increasing the strength of the Russian Armed Forces to 1.5 million servicemen, including 695,000 contract servicemen (Shoigu said in spring 2021 that 380,000 Russians were contract servicemen), gradually increasing the age of conscription for military service from 18 to 21 years and raising the age limit for conscripts from 27 to 30 years. Shoigu did not specify a timeline for these measures.
This is not the first time the Russian MoD has signaled its intention to reverse the 2008 Serdyukov reforms that largely disbanded Russian ground forces divisions in favor of independent brigades. The Russian MoD has been steadily reversing the Serdyukov reforms by restoring maneuver divisions across Russian military districts since 2013.[6]
The Kremlin is very unlikely to form such a large conventional force in a timeline that is relevant for Russia’s war in Ukraine, however. Forming divisions is costly and takes time. It took the Russian military over a year to reform the 150th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army) between 2016 and 2017, for example.[7] Russia was unable to fully staff its existing brigades and regiments before the full-scale invasion and had not fully built out a new division it announced it was forming in 2020 before the start of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.[8] Russia’s economy is in recession, and its resources to generate divisions have significantly decreased since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[9] Russia’s net training capacity has likely decreased since February 24, in part because the Kremlin deployed training elements to participate in combat in Ukraine and these training elements reportedly took causalities.[10] Russia is reportedly leveraging Belarusian trainers to train mobilized forces and possibly contract soldiers and conscripts, indicating the limitations of Russian training bandwidth.[11] Russia’s officer corps has been eviscerated by casualties in this war.
Shoigu’s proposals could be an overture to placate the milblogger community who have accused the Kremlin of not conducting the war seriously or taking the measures necessary to win the war. It also sets information conditions for the Kremlin to conduct future mobilization waves under the rubric of staffing these formations and/or significantly augmenting Russia’s military strength in the long run.
The Kremlin can form a large conventional military along the lines Shoigu described that would be capable of posing a renewed and serious threat to NATO if Russian President Vladimir Putin decides to fundamentally change Russia’s strategic resource allocation over the long run. Putin directly addressed Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov stating that Russia has no financial limitations and must provide everything the Russian Armed Forces request.[12] While Russia is unlikely to reform large divisions while continuing its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s military defeats in Ukraine may persuade Putin to change Russia’s strategic resource allocation for the Russian military. Putin can decide to appropriate Russian state funds in such a manner that allows the Kremlin to field a large conventional military at the expense of economic growth and consumer comforts as the Soviets did. Such a course of action would cost resources and time but is possible. Shoigu’s "recommendations," which he certainly presented to Putin privately before describing them publicly, along with Putin’s commitment to providing the Russian military with everything it needs and a number of other indicators suggest that Putin may have already decided to reconstitute a significant conventional Russian military threat to Europe once this war ends.
Putin and Shoigu demonstrated that Russia is not interested in reducing its war efforts or its war aims, despite the growing toll on Russian society. Putin reiterated that Russia will ensure the safety of all Russian territories including illegally-annexed territories in Ukraine while at the MoD Collegium.[13] Putin and Shoigu repeatedly rejected the idea of independent Ukrainian sovereignty and emphasized Russia’s need to keep Ukraine within the Kremlin’s sphere of influence and defeat the Ukrainian "Nazi" regime.[14] Putin and Shoigu’s comments further illustrate that the Kremlin retains maximalist goals for the war in Ukraine that include: the recognition of illegally annexed territories, regime change of the Ukrainian government under the pretext of "denazification," control of Ukraine’s political and social character, and Western granting of Russia’s desired "security guarantees."
The reiteration of Putin’s February 24 goals indicates that the Kremlin is deciding to embrace the sacrifices of the war and attempt to push on to victory. The Kremlin will need to continue to ask for and justify great sacrifices from its people to pursue these unrealistic goals. Shoigu attempted to justify the societal cost of mobilization, acknowledging that mobilization was "a serious test" for Russian society necessary to defend newly acquired territories in Ukraine.[15] Putin likely believes that if he downscaled his maximalist set of goals or defined lesser short-term objectives he would incur widespread discontent from both the wider Russian public and the ultra-nationalist pro-war community for committing Russia to a costly war in pursuit of an inadequate reward. The Kremlin will likely continue to reiterate maximalist goals as it demands further sacrifices from the Russian public to support the war effort, whether through new force generation efforts, imposing the continued long-term economic impacts of international sanctions regimes, extracting from the populace the cost of rebuilding a powerful Russian military, or forcing the Russian people to continue to accept heavy Russian casualties in Ukraine.
Putin and Shoigu maintained the Kremlin’s information operation that seeks to coerce the West into pushing Ukraine to negotiate on Russia’s terms. Shoigu claimed during his speech that the Kremlin is always open to holding constructive, peaceful negotiations.[16] Putin and Shoigu likely reiterated Russian maximalist goals at the Russian MoD Collegium at a time when Ukrainian officials are discussing the possibility of a renewed Russian large-scale offensive in the winter of 2023 and voices are rising in the West calling for Ukraine to initiate negotiations with Moscow to add further pressure on Ukraine to negotiate on Russian terms.[17] The Kremlin likely believes that it will be able to exact more preemptive concessions from Ukraine the more maximalist its stated goals for the war are as it also prepares what it is presenting as another large-scale offensive operation. The Kremlin’s effort to coerce Ukraine into negotiating or offering preemptive concessions is increasingly divorced from the battlefield reality in Ukraine where Ukrainian forces retain the initiative.[18]
Putin significantly intensified his efforts to make peace with the critical pro-war community in the past 48 hours. Putin admitted at the MoD collegium meeting that Russian forces had faced challenges with mobilization, lack of drones and new equipment, and signals.[19] Shoigu acknowledged similar concerns echoing criticism from prominent Russian milbloggers for 10 months of the war.[20] Putin then asked the Russian MoD "to be attentive" to all criticism and "hear those who do not hush up the existing problems," noting that the ministry will be in constant dialogue with such critics.
Putin also established a working group on December 20 that will address issues with mobilization and offer social and legal support for participants of the "special military operation," empowering some milbloggers.[21] Putin recruited several prominent milbloggers such as Mikhail Zvinchuk from Rybar, Evgeniy Poddubny, and Alexander Sladkov among others, as well as some state officials to compile a monthly report to be delivered directly to Putin. The working group has the authority to make proposals and review mobilization concerns.
Putin is likely seeking to preempt further criticism and regain control over the domestic narrative in support of a protracted war. Putin has exhibited a pattern in which he gradually grants a level of limited authority to select milbloggers following an increase in criticism. ISW observed that Putin first interacted with milbloggers in mid-June shortly following Russia’s failed crossing of the Siverskyi Donets River and general frustrations with Russia’s slow pace in Donbas.[22] Putin has since made several public statements in support of frontline and mobilization coverage and even appointed a prominent milblogger and correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, Alexander (Sasha) Kots a member of the Russian Human Rights Council on November 20.[23] Kots previously operated in Kherson City, and his appointment followed Russia’s withdrawal from right-bank Kherson Oblast. Putin likely that Putin intended to coopt Kots following that withdrawal.
Putin remains unlikely to persecute Russian milbloggers due to his commitment to continue this war and is likely attempting instead to introduce a culture of self-censorship within the milblogger community. The Kremlin has historically allowed for "domesticated opposition" - or figures who criticized the Russian government for issues such as corruption instead of opposing the nature of the regime – and it is likely that Putin is using a similar approach with controllable milbloggers.[24] Putin is attempting to disincentivize milbloggers from eventually turning on him by integrating them into his circle.
Putin may also attempt to recruit additional milbloggers from other nationalist factions in the information space. Putin’s mobilization group notably did not include figures closely affiliated with the Wagner Group or Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and instead targeted a group that has already gained some prominence on Russian state outlets. Putin has notably refrained from giving Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin an official position within the Russian government even though Prigozhin supposedly directly reports on Russia’s military failures to Putin and is contributing his forces to Putin’s war.[25] Prigozhin remains simply the de facto head of a nominally illegal mercenary group even as milbloggers secure formal, if sometimes ad hoc, official positions.
Putin’s ability to sustain his narrative is vulnerable to his inability to deliver on his maximalist goals and promises in the long run. Putin and Shoigu assured the collegium that Russia will learn from the mistakes of the "special military operation" and promised to implement several changes to remedy problems within the war effort. Russia, however, is unlikely to efficiently address the fundamental flaws of its military structure—certainly not in any short period of time—and that failure will likely revitalize criticism. Putin will also need to continue to deflect blame from himself for failing to deliver on such promises onto the Russian MoD without destroying the credibility of the MoD and the uniformed military in the eyes of the Russian population. Putin’s consistent appeasement of the milbloggers demonstrates that he recognizes their influence on the Russian people of whom he asks such tremendous sacrifices to sustain his war effort.
Putin and Shoigu continued to use descriptions of heightened nuclear readiness to appease domestic nationalist audiences and intimidate Western audiences without enunciating new policies or any fundamental changes in Russia’s nuclear posture or capabilities.[26] Putin stated that Russian forces will continue to develop Russia’s nuclear triad as the main guarantor of Russian sovereignty and territorial integrity.[27] Putin and Shoigu claimed that modern weapons compose 91.3% of Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal, that Russian forces are fielding Avangard hypersonic warheads, and that Russian forces will soon introduce Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles into active service.[28]
Such descriptions are extremely unlikely to represent enhanced Russian willingness to use nuclear weapons. The Kremlin routinely uses nuclear rhetoric to project strength to the far-right Russian community, which has accused the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) of failing to take sufficiently aggressive steps to support the war in Ukraine and to demand that the West reduce its "escalatory" provision of aid to Ukraine and to pursue negotiations on Russian terms by hinting at the possibility of nuclear escalation. ISW has extensively reported on previous incidents in which Russian officials have referred to nuclear weapons to influence Western and domestic audiences and assessed that Russian officials have no intention of actually using nuclear weapons on the battlefield.[29]
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Washington, DC to meet with US leaders on December 21. This is Zelensky’s first trip outside Ukraine since the escalation of Russia’s war on February 24.[30] ISW will report on the details of Zelensky’s visit and Russian reactions to the visit on December 22. Russian officials, media sources, and milbloggers have continuously expressed concern over the closeness of the Ukraine-US relationship and demoralization over the effectiveness of US and Western aid to Ukraine. The recent finalization of US plans to provide Patriot missile defense systems to Ukraine sparked a flurry of Russian discussions over the likely significant effects that Patriots will have on the war and the attack opportunities that Russia missed before the US agreed to provide Patriot systems.[31] ISW has noted similar Russian responses to the US provision of HIMARS systems to Ukraine.[32]
Key Takeaways
- Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu proposed a series of expansive reforms and goals for Russian force generation that Russia is highly unlikely to complete in time to be relevant to the current conflict.
- Putin and Shoigu reiterated maximalist Russian aims for the war in Ukraine.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin has intensified efforts to make peace with the critical pro-war nationalist community. Russian failures to achieve Putin’s stated goals jeopardize Kremlin efforts to regain control over the domestic narrative and to set conditions for the second year of the war.
- Russian nuclear rhetoric is most likely an attempt to appease domestic audiences and intimidate Western audiences and not an indicator of preparation to use nuclear weapons.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Washington, DC on December 21. ISW will report on the details of Zelensky’s visit and Russian reactions to the visit on December 22.
- Russian and Ukrainian forces continued counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Donetsk City areas.
- A Ukrainian official confirmed that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to establish control over the Dnipro delta islands.
- Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu boasted about the growing Russian Young Army Cadets National Movement (Yunarmia) movement.
- Russian officials intensified law enforcement crackdowns to deter partisan activities and target partisan sympathizers.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
- Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)
Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)
Russian forces continued to conduct limited counterattacks to recapture lost territory along the Kreminna-Svatove line on December 21. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Masyutivka, Kharkiv Oblast (50km northwest of Svatove) and Pidkyuchansk, Luhansk Oblast (8km northwest of Svatove).[33] A Russian milblogger claimed that the capture of Masyutivka is a prerequisite for a Russian advance towards Kupyansk from the northeast.[34] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted an assault near Stelmakhivka (16km northwest of Svatove) and Chervonopopivka (6km north of Kreminna).[35] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna) and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).[36]
Ukrainian forces reportedly continued counteroffensive operations in the Kreminna area on December 21. Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai reported that Ukrainian forces are currently a few kilometers away from reaching Kreminna but that dense mine concentrations in the area are slowing Ukrainian advances.[37] Russian milbloggers posted footage purporting to show the aftermath of Russian forces repelling a Ukrainian assault in the vicinity of Kreminna.[38] Haidai reported that decreasing temperatures have produced conditions more conducive to fighting and that he expects current Ukrainian counteroffensive operations to experience success by the end of the year with the intensified pace of fighting.[39] The Ukrainian General Staff confirmed that Ukrainian forces destroyed Russian ammunition depots near Kadiivka (60km southeast of Kreminna) on December 15 and 16.[40]
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on December 21. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bakhmut and within 33km north of Bakhmut near Verkhnokamisnke, Vesele, Yakovlivka, and Bakhmutske.[41] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Wagner Group conducted an assault northeast of Bakhmut near Pidhorodne and that fierce fighting continues on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.[42] A Ukrainian commander reported that Russian forces do not control the industrial zone on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut, an area that has been hotly contested in recent weeks.[43] The Ukrainian commander reported that a preponderance of Ukrainian drone surveillance in Bakhmut allows Ukrainian forces to quickly neutralize small Russian units that penetrate the outskirts of the city.[44] Ukrainian social media sources claimed that Ukrainian forces completely repelled Russian forces from the outskirts of Bakhmut, although ISW cannot independently verify these claims.[45] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces storming Bakhmut have not made significant progress.[46] Russian sources continued to claim that Ukrainian forces are constructing defensive fortifications and preparing for street fighting in Bakhmut.[47] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Wagner Group also conducted an assault south of Bakhmut from the direction of Kurdyumivka and that fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces continued in Opytne.[48]
Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on December 21. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults within 37km southwest of Avdiivka near Vodyane, Pisky, Nevelske, Marinka, and Novomyhailivka.[49] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are unable to conduct a frontal assault on Avdiivka due to the lack of personnel in the Russian grouping in the area and the presence of serious Ukrainian fortifications around the settlement.[50] Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces is ongoing within Marinka and that Russian forces currently control 80 percent of the settlement.[51] Russian milbloggers described Russian advances in Marinka as slow and claimed that both Ukrainian and Russian forces in the city are suffering heavy infantry losses.[52]
Russian forces conducted a limited ground assault in western Donetsk Oblast on December 21. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault near Prechistivka, Donetsk Oblast (57km southwest of Donetsk City).[53] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces continued routine indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[54]
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian forces conducted limited assaults to regain lost positions in southern Kherson Oblast and continued shelling settlements in Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.[55] Ukrainian Spokesperson for the Southern Defenses Nataliya Humenyuk stated on December 21 that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attempts to establish control over the islands of the Dnipro delta over an unspecified time frame and that Russian forces may attempt future efforts to seize the islands.[56] The head of the Ukrainian Joint Press Center of the Tavrisk Direction Defense Forces, Yevheny Yeri, emphasized on December 21 that Russian forces are moving forces in lower Kherson Oblast to support the construction of second and third lines of defense in the direction of Zaporizhia Oblast and Kherson City and are not demonstrating signs of retreat.[57] This supports and clarifies statements made by Yeri on December 19 describing Russian withdrawals of main units along the Dnipro River from Ukrainian artillery range, on which ISW previously reported.[58] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces have been preparing for forcible evacuations of Ukrainian residents in Vasylivka, Zaporizhia Oblast, and nearby settlements of Vasyliv Raion in Zaporizhia Oblast since December 12.[59]
Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian force concentrations and rear areas of Kherson Oblast. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian force group and concentration of 30 artillery pieces at an airfield near Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast on December 20.[60] Ukrainian sources amplified reports from residents of explosions from unspecified causes near Velyka Lepetykha in Russian-occupied eastern Kherson Oblast on December 21.[61] Satellite imagery showed Russian forces in Chaplynka (16km from the border of Kherson Oblast and Crimea) attempting to obstruct satellite imagery by installing covers over revetments.[62] Separate imagery of Chaplynka taken on December 14 shows a seemingly abandoned Chaplynka airbase.[63] The Ukrainian General Staff further confirmed that Ukrainian forces struck a concentration of Russian soldiers and equipment and destroyed 8 pieces of heavy military equipment in the vicinity of Vasylivka, Kherson Oblast on December 19.[64] Russian forces are likely making renewed efforts to obscure their positions in eastern Kherson Oblast.
Russian sources continue to accuse Ukrainian forces of striking Enerhodar to fuel false rhetoric surrounding a Ukrainian threat to the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on December 21 that Ukrainian forces opened fire on Enerhodar and caused three explosions in the industrial zone and along the shore.[65] Another Russian milblogger alleged that Ukrainian forces struck Enerhodar using unspecified NATO-provided artillery.[66] Russian Ambassador to Vienna Mykhailo Ulyanov stated on December 21 that the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Raphael Grossi, is scheduled to visit Moscow to discuss the potential for the creation of a safety zone around ZNPP on December 22.[67]
Russian forces in Crimea continue to build defensive fortifications amidst discussions of potential Ukrainian attacks. The Ukraine Center for Strategic Communication and Information Security reported on December 21 that Russian forces are requiring residents with beachfront property in Mizhvodne to vacate the premises for interfering with defensive construction efforts.[68] The Ukraine Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security further noted that occupation authorities have taken steps to strengthen the military-industrial complex in Crimea.[69] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are concentrating reconnaissance efforts on searching for holes in Russian defenses in Crimea in hopes of breaking Russian morale.[70]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu boasted about the growing Russian Young Army Cadets National Movement (Yunarmia) at the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) Collegium on December 21. Shoigu claimed the Yunarmia movement presently consists of more than 1.251 million children and teenagers.[71] The Yunarmia movement provides Russian children with military and "patriotic" education and likely represents Russian attempts to invest in long-term force generation, as ISW has previously reported.[72] Shoigu alleged that Russian authorities will open 20 regional centers and 25 urban centers for military and patriotic education of "Avangard" youth by the end of 2022.[73] Shoigu claimed more than 150,000 Russian high schoolers have already trained in such centers.[74]
Russian authorities are likely unofficially mobilizing migrants for the war in Ukraine. Independent Russian media outlet SOTA reported that Moscow authorities are rounding up migrants without Russian citizenship in the city and forcing them to register as volunteers with Moscow’s military registration and enlistment offices.[75] SOTA reported that authorities threaten the migrants who refuse to comply with problems at the migrants’ places of work.[76]
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin defended his convict recruitment tactics against accusations of illegality by imprisoned opposition figure Aleksei Navalny. Navalny tweeted on December 21 that Prigozhin visited his maximum-security penal colony, IK-6, in Melekhovo on an unspecified date and offered convicts pardons for their crimes should they survive 6 months with Wagner Group forces.[77] Navalny stated that 80-90 convicts accepted Prigozhin’s offer.[78] Prigozhin responded to questioning about Navalny’s criticisms on December 21, stating that he personally sees nothing reprehensible about his recruitment tactics and that "no one can deprive a person of the right to defend his Motherland."[79]
Russian forces continue to struggle with extremely low morale resulting from horrible conditions despite promises from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu that they are actively listening and taking measures to improve conditions. An open-source intelligence aggregator amplified a report from a Russian volunteer concluding that Russian forces are completely unprepared for a winter Ukrainian counteroffensive.[80] The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) published an intercepted phone call in which a Russian soldier tells his mother that Russian friendly fire is more dangerous to Russian soldiers than Ukrainian forces.[81] A Russian source reported on December 19 that a mobilized soldier from Bratsk, Irkutsk Oblast called his sister begging her to get him away from the frontlines despite initially deciding not to resist mobilization.[82] The soldier described graphic deaths of fellow soldiers, heavy losses, a lack of food, and the generally poor emotional state of deployed soldiers.[83] An independent Russian news outlet stated on December 20 that the entirety of the Russian 127th Reconnaissance Brigade (military unit 67606) refused to participate in the war in Ukraine due to heavy losses.[84] Another Russian source claimed on December 20 that Russian soldiers within Russia continue to face poor conditions.[85] Russian authorities reportedly forced conscripts in a unit near Bryansk, Russia to live in unheated abandoned houses and to move into trenches to make room for mobilized soldiers.[86]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian officials intensified law enforcement crackdowns to deter partisan activities in occupied territories on December 21. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 21 that the Russian Duma passed a law that stipulates life imprisonment for facilitating subversive activities.[87] The law identifies facilitating subversive activities as an activity related to inciting, recruiting, or involving a person in carrying out sabotage, arming or training of others for this purpose, as well as financing sabotage.[88] The Ukrainian Resistance Center emphasized that Russian officials deem any resistance to occupation "sabotage" and that the Duma adopted this law specifically to punish residents accused of assisting saboteurs in occupied territories.[89]
Russian occupation authorities continue to consolidate administrative control of Russian-occupied territories. Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai stated on December 21 that Russian authorities transferred 15 officials from Novosibirsk, Russia, to serve as occupation officials in occupied-Bilovodsk, Luhansk Oblast.[90] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation deputy Vladimir Rogov stated on December 21 that Zaporizhia and Luhansk occupation administrations appointed new heads for Children’s Rights and amplified Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova’s statement that she works closely with occupation officials on the issues of children’s rights.[91]
Russian forces and occupation officials continue to seize and redirect civilian infrastructure to support Russian forces. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on December 21 that Russian forces converted a civilian hospital in Novotroitsky, Kherson Oblast, into a military hospital and forcibly discharged sick Ukrainian civilians to treat wounded Russian servicemen.[92] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated on December 21 that Russian occupation officials also converted a civilian hospital in Luhansk City, into a military hospital to treat wounded Russian servicemen and servicemen of Russian private military companies (PMCs).[93] Haidai also stated that Wagner PMC troops are treated in a maternity ward in Pervomaiske, Luhansk Oblast.[94] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 20 that Russian occupation officials seized four hospitals in Donetsk Oblast to treat wounded Russian servicemen, and that most of the hospital staff are Russian citizens who refuse to treat Ukrainian civilians.[95] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported on December 20 that Russian forces seized a civilian morgue in Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast, to hold deceased Russian servicemen.[96]
Russian officials are continuing efforts to deport Ukrainian civilians under the guise of medical rehabilitation and adoption schemes. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 21 that Russian officials are transporting Ukrainian children from boarding schools to remote regions in Russia, including Leningrad, Volgograd, Novosibirsk, and Tymen oblasts, for forcible adoption.[97] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported on December 21 that Russian officials are forcibly transferring Ukrainian mental hospital patients in occupied Nova Kakhovka and Oleshky, Kherson Oblast, to the "Geolog" Recreation Base in occupied- Strilkove, Kherson Oblast.[98]
Russian occupation authorities continued taking steps to consolidate economic control of occupied territories and force Ukrainian civilians to switch to the ruble on December 21. Head of the Zaporizhia Oblast occupation administration Yevheny Balitsky stated on December 21 that all financial transactions in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast will be conducted in rubles only after January 1, 2023 and that residents of occupied Zaporizhia Oblast have until December 31, 2022, to transfer hryvnias to rubles.[99]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
[2] https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/16653483
[4] https://t.me/epoddubny/14277; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/16655079
[5] https://t.me/epoddubny/14277; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/16655079
[6]https://rg dot ru/2016/04/23/reg-ufo/soedinenie-iug-pokoritel.html; https://web.archive.org/web/20190227151439/https://function.mil.ru/news_... https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Ground%20...
[7] https://rg dot ru/2016/04/23/reg-ufo/soedinenie-iug-pokoritel.html; https://web.archive.org/web/20170923032602/https://function.mil.ru/news_...
[12] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[13] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[14] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[15] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[16] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[19] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[20] https://telegra dot ph/Tezisy-vystupleniya-Ministra-oborony-Rossijskoj-Federacii-na-rasshirennom-zasedanii-Kollegii-Ministerstva-oborony-12-21; https://t.me/mod_russia/22809
[21] https://t.me/lentachold/56361; http://publication dot pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001202212200054?index=0&rangeSize=1
[24] https://www.mk dot ru/amp/politics/2020/03/17/putin-otvetil-na-kritiku-ruchnoy-oppozicii-napominaniem-ob-opyte-devyanostykh.html
[26] https://telegra dot ph/Tezisy-vystupleniya-Ministra-oborony-Rossijskoj-Federacii-na-rasshirennom-zasedanii-Kollegii-Ministerstva-oborony-12-21; https://t.me/mod_russia/22809; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[27]ttp://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[28] https://telegra dot ph/Tezisy-vystupleniya-Ministra-oborony-Rossijskoj-Federacii-na-rasshirennom-zasedanii-Kollegii-Ministerstva-oborony-12-21; https://t.me/mod_russia/22809; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70159
[31] https://t.me/vysokygovorit/10327; https://topwar dot ru/206792-neopredelennoe-buduschee-i-izvestnye-riski-sluhi-o-postavke-zrk-patriot-na-ukrainu.html; https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/16575; https://t.me/channel_elmurid/2437
[45] https://smi.pp dot ua/news/kiev/1461814-n-a.html; https://glavred dot net/ukraine/vsu-polnostyu-osvobodili-bahmut-voennye-10434860.html
[56] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2022/12/21/okupanty-probuvaly-vstanovyty-kontrol-nad-ostrovamy-v-delti-dnipra-ale-otrymaly-gidnu-vidsich/
[57] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2022/12/21/stovidsotkovyh-oznak-togo-shho-vorog-maye-namir-vidstupaty-narazi-ne-prostezhuyetsya/; https://t.me/stranaua/81635;%20https://www%20dot%20ukrinform.ru/rubric-a...
[58] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass... dot media/341234-povernenna-svitla-rosiani-ne-vipuskaut-z-okupovanih-teritorij-putin-zustrinetsa-z-lukasenkom-299-den-vijni-onlajn/
[67] https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/news-magate-moskva-vizyt-zaes/32187146.ht... dot com/defense/1553597; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/9960
[71] https://telegra dot ph/Tezisy-vystupleniya-Ministra-oborony-Rossijskoj-Federacii-na-rasshirennom-zasedanii-Kollegii-Ministerstva-oborony-12-21; https://t.me/mod_russia/22809
[72] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... dot ph/Tezisy-vystupleniya-Ministra-oborony-Rossijskoj-Federacii-na-rasshirennom-zasedanii-Kollegii-Ministerstva-oborony-12-21; https://t.me/mod_russia/22809
[73] https://telegra dot ph/Tezisy-vystupleniya-Ministra-oborony-Rossijskoj-Federacii-na-rasshirennom-zasedanii-Kollegii-Ministerstva-oborony-12-21; https://t.me/mod_russia/22809
[74] https://telegra dot ph/Tezisy-vystupleniya-Ministra-oborony-Rossijskoj-Federacii-na-rasshirennom-zasedanii-Kollegii-Ministerstva-oborony-12-21; https://t.me/mod_russia/22809
[81] https://gur dot gov dot ua/content/to-nash-tank-banul-2-raza-vystrelyl-y-20-patsanov-nakh-i-tvary-svoykh-zhe-ubyvaiut-nakh-i.html
[82] https://baikal-journal dot ru/2022/12/19/putin-govoril-chto-mobilizovannyh-na-peredovuyu-nikto-ne-kinet/; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-dec-19-20
[83] https://baikal-journal dot ru/2022/12/19/putin-govoril-chto-mobilizovannyh-na-peredovuyu-nikto-ne-kinet/; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-dec-19-20
[87] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/21/okupanty-zminyly-svoye-zakonodavstvo-zadlya-borotby-z-pidpillyam/
[88] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov.ua/2022/12/21/okupanty-zminyly-svoye-zakonodavstvo-zadlya-borotby-z-pidpillyam/
[89] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/12/21/okupanty-zminyly-svoye-zakonodavstvo-zadlya-borotby-z-pidpillyam/
[95] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/12/20/v-gorlivczi-rosiyany-obladnaly-morg-na-bazi-odnogo-z-promyslovyh-pidpryyemstv/
[96] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/12/20/v-gorlivczi-rosiyany-obladnaly-morg-na-bazi-odnogo-z-promyslovyh-pidpryyemstv/
[97] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/12/21/rosiyany-obladnaly-psyhlikarnyu-na-terytoriyi-zahoplenoyi-bazy-vidpochynku/
[98] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/12/21/rosiyany-obladnaly-psyhlikarnyu-na-terytoriyi-zahoplenoyi-bazy-vidpochynku/
understandingwar.org
2. Hero Commander of SEAL Team 1 Found Dead in California Home
Another tragedy in our ranks. May he rest in peace and his family find comfort and closure somehow.
Hero Commander of SEAL Team 1 Found Dead in California Home
coffeeordie.com · by Carl Prine · December 21, 2022
US Navy Cmdr. Robert Ramirez III, the highly decorated commander of California-based SEAL Team 1, was found deceased in his home on Monday, Dec. 19, 2022. Foul play is not suspected. Composite by Coffee or Die Magazine.
Composite by Coffee or Die Magazine.
The highly decorated commanding officer of California-based SEAL Team 1 has died, and officials are investigating whether he took his own life.
Cmdr. Robert Ramirez III was found deceased at his home on Monday, Dec. 19, and foul play isn’t suspected. He was 47.
He’d spent nearly 27 years in the Navy, rising from a recruit in Great Lakes, Illinois, to lead a SEAL team. He took command of the Coronado-based team in November.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the Ramirez family. Bobby was an outstanding leader, devoted husband and father, and a good friend to us all,” said Capt. David Abernathy, the commander of Naval Special Warfare Group 1, which manages all Coronado-based Navy SEAL teams, in a prepared statement emailed to Coffee or Die Magazine. “This is a [devastating] loss to our community and all who knew him. We will remain in support of Bobby’s family, friends, and teammates during this extremely difficult time.”
Coffee or Die is honoring the family’s wish to mourn the commander’s death in private.
Navy SEALs demonstrate winter warfare capabilities at Mammoth Lakes, California, on Dec. 9, 2014. US Navy photo.
US Navy photo.
A Virginia native, Ramirez enlisted in the Navy on Jan. 25, 1996, and graduated from the grueling Navy Special Warfare Basic Training on April 25, 1997. He was assigned to his first SEAL team three months later.
In 2001 he became a student in the Seaman-to-Admiral Program at Old Dominion University and was commissioned in 2004. He rejoined the SEALs while the commandos were waging war across the globe, nearly three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Other than a two-year stint studying at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, Ramirez worked his way up through the SEALs until 2020, when he was assigned to the US 7th in Japan, a tour that would prep him to take command of his team.
Beloved by his fellow SEALs for both his courage and long roots in the enlisted ranks, Ramirez fought in Iraq four times and deployed twice to Afghanistan.
US Navy SEALs conduct a High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) airborne operation in support of exercise Arctic Edge 2022 in Deadhorse, Alaska, on March 4, 2022. US Army photo.
US Army photo.
He was promoted to commander on Sept. 1, 2019.
His decorations include five Bronze Star Medals — two for combat valor — and the Defense Meritorious Service Medal.
He also received the Joint Service Commendation Medal, two Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medals, the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, three Combat Action Ribbons, and two Good Conduct Medals.
Editor’s note: This is a breaking story and Coffee or Die Magainze will continue to add to it.
Carl Prine
Carl came to Coffee or Die Magazine after stints at Navy Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He served in the Marine Corps and the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. His awards include the Joseph Galloway Award for Distinguished Reporting on the military, a first prize from Investigative Reporters & Editors, and the Combat Infantryman Badge.
coffeeordie.com · by Carl Prine · December 21, 2022
3. Russian Hackers’ Latest Target Is Cab Dispatch Line at J.F.K., U.S. Says
I wonder which was harder? The Pentagon or the taxi system? (apologies for the sarcasm.)
Excerpt:
“I know that the Pentagon is being hacked,” one of the defendants, Daniel Abayev, wrote. “So, can’t we hack the taxi industry?”
Russian Hackers’ Latest Target Is Cab Dispatch Line at J.F.K., U.S. Says
By Benjamin Weiser and Nate Schweber
Dec. 20, 2022
nytimes.com · by Nate Schweber · December 20, 2022
Federal prosecutors say two Queens men worked with Russians to charge cabbies $10 to jump the line at the airport. The scheme was an open secret among drivers competing for fares.
An indictment says the scheme “enabled as many as 1,000 fraudulently expedited taxi trips a day.”Credit...Gabby Jones for The New York Times
Russian hackers have carried out cyberattacks on hospitals, oil and gas companies, a presidential election and a massive fuel pipeline. But cyberwarfare reached a new battlefield on Tuesday when the authorities said that two Queens men working with Russians had been able to hack the electronic taxi dispatch system at Kennedy International Airport.
The goal? To allow taxi drivers in a holding lot waiting to pick up their next fare to jump the line — for a $10 fee.
The Queens men discussed their plans in messages to their Russian counterparts, a federal indictment charged. The defendants credited that nation’s hackers with great technical prowess.
“I know that the Pentagon is being hacked,” one of the defendants, Daniel Abayev, wrote. “So, can’t we hack the taxi industry?”
On Tuesday, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, and John Gay, the inspector general of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, announced the indictments of Mr. Abayev and another man, Peter Leyman, each 48.
“The Port Authority has zero tolerance for bad actors violating the law at our facilities,” Mr. Gay said in a statement.
The scheme “enabled as many as 1,000 fraudulently expedited taxi trips a day,” the indictment said.
Each defendant was charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. Mr. Abayev’s lawyer, Matthew Myers, said his client would plead not guilty.
“A proper investigation must be conducted before anyone jumps to conclusions about the involvement or role Mr. Abayev did or did not play in this international matter,” Mr. Myers said.
Mr. Leyman’s lawyer, Jacob Kaplan, declined to comment.
On Tuesday afternoon, drivers waiting in the airport holding lot, which was packed to capacity, suggested in interviews that the scheme had been an open secret.
Sasenarine Singh, a cabdriver since 1975, said he learned about it from indiscreet drivers waiting inside the lot.
Whenever he spotted a yellow cab sitting in a nearby gas station lot or side street, he said, he presumed the driver was part of what he called “the monkey business.”
Mr. Singh said he did not join in: “I come in the lot, I wait like a human being.”
Mr. Singh said he felt “most angry about it,” adding “they come and take a job away from you.”
Another driver, Alhousain Diallo, 34, said he knew about the scheme from other cabbies trying to recruit him in. Mr. Diallo said he turned everyone down. “It’s unfair to the other taxi drivers,” he said.
Nearly 30 years ago, the airport created a taxi dispatching system to control the mad jockeying of yellow cabs that cruised the roads surrounding the terminals in search of passengers. Drivers were directed to park in a new holding lot — now 5.4 acres — just north of the airport. Cabs would be dispatched in the order they arrived to terminals where they were needed, airport officials said at the time.
The Port Authority says that today, during peak periods, as many as 300 to 400 cabs an hour are dispatched, and that during early-morning hours, when passenger demand is lower, drivers may wait in the lot for two to three hours before being sent to a terminal to pick up a fare.
Those long waits gave the hackers an opening.
The $10 bite was a significant proportion of cabbies’ revenue: They are allowed to charge a flat fare of $52 for trips to Manhattan, plus surcharges during peak hours.
Members of the hacking scheme, including Mr. Abayev and Mr. Leyman, began exploring ways to gain access to the dispatch system in 2019, the indictment says. Eventually, they succeeded, and were able to move specific taxis to the front of the line, ahead of those that had arrived in the lot earlier.
The defendants communicated with drivers through large group chat threads, the indictment says, adding that when the conspirators gained access to the system on a particular day, a message would be sent: “Shop open.” When the hackers’ access was interrupted, another message would go out: “Shop closed.”
As the indictment describes the scheme, drivers paid the $10 fee in cash or through a mobile payment system. Sometimes, the fee was waived if the driver agreed to recruit other cabbies. To take advantage of the scheme, approaching drivers would send their taxi medallion numbers to the group chat threads and were told which terminal to go to in order to pick up a fare.
In early December 2019, just months after the scheme began, the indictment says, Mr. Abayev sent a voice message to one of the Russian hackers, saying they had charged for a record number of trips that day.
“This is exactly the level that I want to have every day,” Mr. Abayev said.
Mr. Abayev and Mr. Leyman moved more than $100,000 of their criminal proceeds to the hackers in Russia, the indictment says.
Mr. Abayev also repeatedly sent a message to large groups of drivers participating in the scheme instructing them how to avoid detection by law enforcement authorities.
“DEAR DRIVERS !!!! PLEASE !!!! Do not wait at the gas station in JFK,” the message said, listing other locations where drivers also should not wait. Drivers should be “very very” careful, the message cautioned, ending with two emojis of police officers.
At the holding lot on Tuesday, drivers who said they were unaware of the scheme expressed anger upon learning about it, lavishing their comments with profanities.
“Why did they do that?” said Ahmed Motaher, 54, a driver for more than 30 years.
He said he was relieved to learn about the arrests because he knew the many ways cabbies could be taken advantage of. “Cabdriver always get the banana,” he said.
Henry Fernandez, 50, who said he started driving only recently and that he was unaware of the hacking, added that he was not surprised to hear about “wiggles” in the industry.
“I don’t think it’s fair, I don’t think it’s nice,” he said.
However, one hour into an expected three-hour wait in the lot, he said he understood the temptation.
“I’m being honest, I’d give $10 to skip the line, I’d give $20,” he said. “I don’t blame them — they were smart.”
nytimes.com · by Nate Schweber · December 20, 2022
4. Five takeaways from Zelensky’s trip to Washington
Excerpts:
Symbolism matters
Biden’s bottom line: “As long as it takes”
The visit put skeptics of more aid in a tough political spot
Zelensky made significant overtures to Republicans
A vague outline of a peace plan
Five takeaways from Zelensky’s trip to Washington
BY NIALL STANAGE - 12/21/22 9:39 PM ET
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3784551-five-takeaways-from-zelenskys-trip-to-washington/
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered high political drama with his trip to Washington on Wednesday.
The visit, shrouded in secrecy until the last moment, was the first time Zelensky is known to have left his country since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion in February.
Zelensky arrived as the contours of the conflict are shifting.
Russia has been using drones to barrage Ukraine’s infrastructure, leaving much of the population without power or heat as the savage winter looms.
Almost 5,000 miles from Kyiv, Republicans are poised to take narrow control of the House in January — with one wing of the party deeply skeptical of the current level of U.S. aid.
A $1.7 trillion government spending package currently before Congress includes $45 billion in new aid to Ukraine.
Here are some of the big takeaways from Zelensky’s trip.
Symbolism matters
Vice President Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hold a Ukrainian flag given by President Volodymyr Zelensky as he addresses a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, December 21, 2022 at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Zelensky’s physical presence in Washington had a power of its own.
The Ukrainian leader and his allies in the Biden administration made the most of the moment, both creating and reveling in the spectacle.
Biden greeted Zelensky on the White House’s South Lawn, walked him along the edges of the Rose Garden to the Oval Office and held a press conference alongside him.
Later, before his speech to Congress, Zelensky was shown the splendor of the Capitol by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
His speech itself was punctuated by applause from members of both parties and reached its emotional crescendo as he presented a Ukrainian flag, apparently from the front lines in Donbas and signed by the troops, to the chamber.
Zelensky was dressed in his customary military-style clothing throughout.
Symbolism may not get bills passed or aid delivered on its own.
But the imagery of the day underscored U.S.-Ukraine solidarity in an immediate, emotive way.
Biden’s bottom line: “As long as it takes”
President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Some Republicans have become louder in making the case that U.S. assistance to Ukraine should not be a “blank check.”
Biden’s position is a far different. Washington is there, he insists, for “as long as it takes.”
In the closing moments of Wednesday’s news conference, Biden sought to reassure Zelensky, telling him, “You don’t have to worry. We are staying with Ukraine as long as Ukraine is there.”
The White House sees the war in Ukraine as a struggle that simply cannot be lost, for fear that such an outcome would embolden Putin and expose American weakness to rivals and adversaries such as China and Iran.
The skeptics contend that the U.S. has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine, that the gush of money toward Kyiv is excessive and likely polluted by corruption, and that the war is a distraction from the plethora of problems at home that demand attention.
Those issues are going to play out in starker contest once the GOP takes over in the House.
But there’s no question over where Biden stands — even though he still refuses to entertain the notion of American boots on the ground inside Ukraine, directly engaging the Russians.
The visit put skeptics of more aid in a tough political spot
Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) hold a Ukrainian flag as President Volodymyr Zelensky addresses a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, December 21, 2022 at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
For all the noble rhetoric, there were elements of naked politics to the visit and its timing.
The White House obliquely acknowledged as much.
The night before Zelensky arrived, a senior administration official told reporters that the visit would be “an important injection of momentum.”
The momentum has the capacity to roll over critics, at least in the short term.
Those arguing against the $45 billion in aid as part of the spending deal, for example, are in an unenviable position. They are setting their faces against a wartime leader, internationally admired, who has shown unquestionable personal bravery.
For one day at least, he became the center of the American political world and pleaded for help.
The doubters may gain political traction in the months ahead.
But Zelensky’s visit puts them on the defensive for now.
Zelensky made significant overtures to Republicans
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky holds an American flag flown at the U.S. Capitol given to him during an address to a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, December 21, 2022 at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
The Ukrainian president walked a fine line, expressing gratitude to Biden but also not tying himself so closely to the president as to make U.S. support for the war look like a Democratic-only effort.
It isn’t.
Many senior Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and the lead Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul (Texas), are strong advocates for continued American support for Ukraine.
Addressing lawmakers at the Capitol, Zelensky thanked those from both parties who had visited Kyiv and emphasized the need for “bipartisan” and “bicameral” support.
The overtures clearly weren’t going to win everyone over.
GOP firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) sat down as Zelensky received a standing ovation upon entering the House chamber for his speech. Some GOP lawmakers didn’t show up at all.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) tweeted that he was in Washington but would not be attending the address, deriding Zelensky as “the Ukrainian lobbyist.”
Still, Zelensky kept the door very wide open for other Republicans to remain supportive.
A vague outline of a peace plan
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addresses a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, December 21, 2022 at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
The question of how the war ends is self-evidently huge, given that Putin seems determined not to back down and the chances of an outright Ukrainian victory seem slim.
Zelensky’s speech to lawmakers offered a hint — but a rather vague one.
He said that Ukraine had “already offered proposals.” He did not say what they were, but he said he had discussed them with Biden, the president was supportive of them and they included 10 points for “our joint security.” There was also mention of a summit.
But if that was intriguing, it also seemed clear that peace was some distance away.
Asked at the earlier news conference with Biden about the idea of a “just peace,” the Ukrainian president expressed some perplexity, musing on what that phrase might mean for his compatriots who had lost family members to Russian aggression.
5. Zelenskyy to America: Our Fight Is Your Fight
Is the master class on strategic communications continuing?
Zelenskyy to America: Our Fight Is Your Fight
“Your money is not charity," the Ukrainian president said, but "an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.”
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
Dressed in a modest military-green pullover, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived at the joint session of Congress to sustained, standing applause. His message to Congress and to the American people: Thank you; do more; our fight is your fight; and most importantly, “Ukraine will never surrender.”
In his address, Zelenskyy drew a parallel between Ukraine’s plight and the American colonies’ fight for independence.
“Your well-being is the product of your national security. The result of your struggle for independence and your many victories,” he said. “We Ukrainians will also go through our war of independence and freedom with dignity and success.”
Earlier in the day, Zelenskyy held a joint press conference with U.S. President Joe Biden, who announced a new package of weapons and aid worth nearly $1.8 billion, including a Patriot air-defense battery, which the Ukainians had long sought.
But Biden faced pressure today from both sides. Some Republican lawmakers took aim at Washington’s aid for Ukraine, while a Ukrainian reporter asked why there was still reluctance to send the longer-range ATACMS missiles that Kyiv has been asking for since February. Since the U.S. was now sending Patriots, the reporter suggested, shouldn’t ATACMS follow?
Biden turned to Zelenskyy and dryly offered, “His answer is yes.”
To which Zelenskyy answered, “I agree.”
But Biden signaled that he was still reluctant to hand over ATACMS missiles, whose 185-mile range could allow Ukraine to strike targets deeper within Russia.
Administration officials, who are routinely asked about ATACMS, generally dodge the question and list other items that the United States has given.
Today Biden offered a bit more detail about why he has not budged: a fear of alienating Ukraine’s allies.
“There's an entire alliance that is critical to stay with Ukraine. And the idea that we would give Ukraine material that is of fundamentally different than is already going there [sic] would have a prospect of breaking up NATO and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world. We're gonna give Ukraine what it needs to be able to defend itself, to be able to succeed…on the battlefield,” he said.
Biden contrasted that with the Patriot system, which he called a “defensive system…not escalatory.”
Zelenskyy, next to him, didn’t hide the fact that as generous as the United States and allies have been, Ukraine would need more to defeat Russia.
“What's going to happen after Patriots are installed? After that, we will send another signal to President Biden that we would like to get more Patriots,” he said.
In addition to the Patriot battery, the package announced today includes GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs; High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, or HARMs; some 500 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds; and a variety of other munitions and pieces of equipment such as satellite terminals.
Last night, in a phone call with reporters, a senior administration official said the new omnibus spending bill for 2023 contains an additional $40 billion in aid for Ukraine.
Zelenskyy today answered some of the skepticism about how Ukraine is spending aid: “Your money is not charity. [It is] an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.”
The Ukrainian president’s first visit to the United States since the start of the war provided a stark contrast to Zelenskyy’s 2019 meeting with thenPresident Trump, which took place after revelations that the U.S. president had attempted to pressure his Ukrainian counterpart to refute intelligence-community findings on Russia and to announce investigations into the Biden family.
Today, during the joint press conference, Zelenskyy took a moment to address the American people, whom, he said, had values similar to those of Ukrainians.
“What I can wish you…to be together with us, jointly, because we really fight for our common victory against this tyranny,” he said. “And we will win.”
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
6. CCP: Who makes up the party
Please go to the link to view the graphics (which necessary to understand the article): https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/ccp-who-makes-party
In 2010 MacGregor published a book called the Party. I learned a lot from it. It may seem somewhat outdated but this article is a useful update with current (and future) demographics.
CCP: Who makes up the party
RICHARD MCGREGOR
Demography is destiny, as is said – and the
numbers in China make for a compelling story.
These first three charts, taken together, tell you a lot about the Chinese Communist Party.
The ones on age and gender make China an outlier compared with many other countries. In other words, the senior ranks of the party are mostly old, as in over 60 years old, and overwhelmingly male. Younger, women politicians are now commonplace in many countries. But not in China.
In some respects, the age profile of the senior echelons of the party – in the Central Committee – is similar to many east Asian political systems, or, perhaps more accurately, their bureaucracies. In such systems, promotion is tied to age and time served. In the case of China, the party bureaucracy is the political system, and you rarely rise through the ranks without serving your time outside of Beijing.
Many Chinese will argue this is a positive feature of the system. It is a meritocracy, and you have to prove yourself before being promoted. There is some truth in this. Other east Asian systems also have fewer women in their ranks than many Western countries, but none are as bad as China.
This graph represents the situation at the last Party Congress, in 2017. It may be even worse now, as for the first time in 25 years, there is not a single woman in the Politburo in the wake of the 20th Party Congress, held in October 2022.
The third graph, on professions, encapsulates one of the major reforms of the party in recent decades. Look at 1987, and the dominant professions still represent the party’s revolutionary, and rural, roots. Farmers are the largest group, followed by cadres (party and government officials) and blue-collar workers.
The years of double-digit growth are tailing off – no economy grows at ten per cent for ever – and the world economy is now slowing as well.
Fast forward to 2017 and you can see the impact of Jiang Zemin’s decision 16 years earlier to allow entrepreneurs to officially join the party. They now make up somewhere between ten to 25 per cent of the membership. From the CCP’s perspective, this was an inspired reform, and highly successful, as it merged the party’s interests with the businesses that drive the economy. But I wonder what this chart will look like in ten years hence?
Xi Jinping has shown little empathy with the private sector. A number of high-profile entrepreneurs have been targeted on his watch. Will they be so keen to join the party in the future? More to the point, will the party welcome them in?
The Chinese economy is struggling at the moment. A “Covid zero” policy and associated lockdowns have clobbered growth. A slow burn property crisis is dragging down the biggest sector of the economy, construction. On top of which the country is facing both a secular and cyclical slowdown. Put another way, the years of double-digit growth are tailing off (no economy grows at ten per cent forever), and the world economy is now slowing as well.
All of those trends, though, are to some extent reversible. China’s demographic crisis, however, is not. As this chart shows, China will lose more than 100 million workers in the next decade and a half, and it can do little to reverse that.
The one-child policy, which started in 1980, is largely to blame. But so are the same factors that are present in many economies. Women are having fewer babies. In part, this is an individual choice for many women. But it is also because Chinese couples worry that they cannot afford the cost of raising many children, and so stop at one, even though the government now allows and indeed encourages them to have more.
All is not gloom in the economy. Some of China’s investments in industry policy have paid off, in solar energy, wind turbines and electric vehicles, the supply chains of which are dominated by China. But however well China does on this front, it will have a smaller workforce and high pension costs. Not even the mighty communist party can do much about that.
lowyinstitute.org · by Richard McGregor
7. How Spies Spread the Myth of China’s Peaceful Rise
I just ordered the paperback ($8.99 on Amazon) and the Kindle version (for immediate reading).
Excerpt:
Indeed, China’s influence operations, Joske documents, are “widespread, targeted and handled with direct involvement from Party leaders.” Beijing’s most stunning success was the effort by the MSS to “convince influential foreigners that China would rise peacefully and gradually liberalize.”
...
The CCP-manufactured narrative of a “peaceful rise” was broadly accepted. The West was more than happy to believe what it wanted to believe—a key feature in an influence operation.
Can we turn the tables on the CCP? It took a long time to create the above narrative and make it work.
How Spies Spread the Myth of China’s Peaceful Rise
The National Interest · by Sean Durns · December 20, 2022
For decades, Communist China has operated under Deng Xiaoping’s famous dictum to “hide your strength and bide your time.” Now that the mask is off and the United States and its allies are belatedly waking up to the threat posed by Beijing, a question looms: how did so many experts and policymakers get China’s rise wrong? As Alex Joske highlights in his new book, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World, part of the answer can be found in Beijing’s influence operations.
Little is publicly known about China’s spies. Joske, who worked as an analyst for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, hopes to remedy this. And, in an easily digestible volume, he succeeds in offering a glimpse into little-discussed aspects of Beijing’s intelligence methods.
Many books on China’s spies focus on industrial espionage or high-profile cases like Larry Wu-tai Chin, a Chinese spy who worked for the U.S. Army and the CIA for nearly forty years. Spies and Lies, however, examines how Beijing utilizes spies to shape narratives and influence policymakers.
Joske uses a wide variety of sources, including memoirs, old court cases, interviews with retired intelligence officers, and a great deal of internet sleuthing, to highlight and expose how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has deceived the world. What emerges is a profoundly disturbing story.
China employs a dizzying number of intelligence agencies. The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and the People’s Liberation Army have intelligence components, but it is the Ministry of State Security (MSS) that tends to attract the most attention. Popular perception, Joske notes, has it that the MSS is aggressive but unsophisticated. Yet this couldn’t be more wrong.
The MSS plays the long game, identifying and courting policy and opinion makers. Direct recruitment and overt approaches are often eschewed. Rather, the MSS and its various front organizations prefer a light touch. As a result, they can often evade attention from law enforcement and counterintelligence authorities, many of which are chiefly concerned with industrial espionage and attempts to steal trade secrets. Although discreet, the MSS is stunningly bold.
Indeed, China’s influence operations, Joske documents, are “widespread, targeted and handled with direct involvement from Party leaders.” Beijing’s most stunning success was the effort by the MSS to “convince influential foreigners that China would rise peacefully and gradually liberalize.”
In November 2003, a CCP official named Zheng Bijian gave a widely disseminated speech calling for China’s “peaceful rise.” It was precisely what many foreigners wanted to hear. China wasn’t seeking great power confrontation; it didn’t want to challenge the U.S.-led liberal international order. Rather, it just needed to be accommodated. No less an authority than Henry Kissinger praised Zheng’s peaceful rise narrative as a “quasi-official policy statement.”
But as Joske illustrates, this was largely a ruse, an influence operation run by MSS-connected organizations. “The very vehicle Zheng hung his hat on, and which enabled his promotion of the narrative, [the] China Reform Forum, was simply an MSS-controlled front group that had selected him as its latest figurehead.” Indeed, the very address that the China Reform Forum used in government registration records “is the same location once used by two magazines and two front groups controlled by the MSS Social Investigation Bureau.” From its beginning in 1994, “this think tank was a staging ground for influence operations.”
The CCP-manufactured narrative of a “peaceful rise” was broadly accepted. The West was more than happy to believe what it wanted to believe—a key feature in an influence operation.
Of course, many of the luminaries associated with MSS-linked front groups and individuals didn’t know that they were being used by a Chinese intelligence service to disseminate disinformation. And, as Joske amply illustrates, such operations were pervasive, crossing political lines. Naturally, all this aided their effectiveness.
And by deceiving key Western elites, Beijing was able to build its strength and bide its time. That time, current CCP head Xi Jinping seems to believe, is now at hand. But all is not lost; there are lessons to learn.
Joske not only highlights how the West got it all wrong but also offers recommendations for what should be done.
First, there’s an inbuilt tendency for many to avoid addressing influence operations. As Joske observes, “a career minded counterspy would have to be stupid to dedicate their efforts to chase influence operations that almost never lead to prosecutions.” After all, the long-term costs of such operations are seldom immediately apparent.
Additionally, MSS influence operations often involve political and financial elites—hardly people that intelligence agencies would want to potentially embarrass in investigations. And most counterintelligence agencies are more focused on protecting state secrets or warding off industrial espionage; MSS operations at think tanks and foreign affairs conferences are, at first glance, not as damaging.
Second, there are many longstanding myths about China’s methods of spying that, while frequently employed, don’t withstand scrutiny. For example, it was long thought that China used a “thousand grains of sand” approach to intelligence gathering. “The central claim of this theory,” Joske notes, “is that China relies on ad-hoc masses of ethnic Chinese amateurs to steal huge amounts of low-grade information, with relatively little involvement by professional spies and intelligence agencies.” But as Spies and Lies documents, this assumption is false and leads to overlooking, minimizing, and misunderstanding China’s tactics.
There is also a dearth of information about China’s spy agencies and methods. Given the subject, this is to be expected. However, open-source methods can help offset this disadvantage—as Joske himself illustrates.
“Educating the public about the CCP’s political influence methods and narratives should be a priority,” he concludes. His debut book does just that. One hopes that policymakers and journalists, from Washington to Canberra and beyond, read it.
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
Image: Reuters.
The National Interest · by Sean Durns · December 20, 2022
8. Downgrade counter-terrorism efforts at your peril
Conclusion:
Any reduction in resources, therefore, must be carefully thought through. Re-evaluating the risk is fine — forgetting it entirely is not.
Downgrade counter-terrorism efforts at your peril
Financial Times · by Raffaello Pantucci · December 21, 2022
The writer is senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies
The growing consensus among the UK national security establishment is that terrorism is no longer the biggest threat. As migration, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Chinese military expansion increasingly top the list of concerns within Whitehall, terrorism has fallen out of vogue.
To some degree this is a positive thing. Al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks warped the global security apparatus, and the exaggerated response to this event, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, created their own security problems. But it is alarming how quickly the terror threat has been downgraded: capability and resources are now being reallocated towards state-based threats. For the security agencies, China, Russia and Iran are the priorities, and more attention is being paid to them. Generally this resource is reallocated (often from counter-terrorism) rather than created.
Terrorism has been a feature of human society for generations. Back in the early 2000s, the scholar David Rapoport posited the idea of this threat operating in 40-year “waves”. He traced an “Anarchist wave” (1880s to 1920), an “Anti-Colonial wave” (1920s to early 1960s), a “New Left wave” (mid-1960s to 1990s), and the current “Religious wave” that began with the siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the fall of the shah of Iran and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
By his calculations, the religious wave is now receding. The UK and Australia have both recently lowered their terror threat levels. The question is where, and when, the next wave will emerge. Polarised politics, stratified societies, growing anti-establishment sentiment, public concern about climate change or other large-scale injustices and numerous global conflicts are all potential fissures.
Tracking potential new risks while keeping an eye on existing ones requires a monitoring mechanism. The signs are there if you are alert to them. Al-Qaeda loudly and repeatedly telegraphed its intention prior to its attacks in Africa, Yemen and the US. The emergence of the al-Qaeda-linked insurgency in Iraq and the consequent expansion of terrorist threats globally was clearly signalled in reporting prior to the invasion. The over-optimistic early responses to the Arab Spring masked the clear growth of threats in Africa as Libya’s weapons stockpiles were drained.
Meanwhile, the flame of conflict was ignited in Syria. The emergence of Isis on the battlefield may have been a surprise to some, but not to those who had been watching ISI, its precursor organisation in Iraq, in the wake of the 2009 US withdrawal.
Elsewhere, the growth of the extreme right in Europe was relatively predictable given the increasing disquiet about immigration and Muslim extremism. The 2011 attack in Norway by far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik was an early indicator which has subsequently proven to have inspired a wider neo-fascist community. Breivik’s attack was directly referenced by the 2019 Christchurch attacker Brenton Tarrant.
These things tend not to come out of the blue. But trying to divine where the next hazards may emerge requires careful observation, assessment and attention. While there was clearly a need to adjust the terrorist threat response given the growing state-based threats, the concern now is whether we are going too far the other way — especially when the picture is so confusing.
The UK Home Office has created a category of threat called “mixed, unstable and unclear”, referring to extremists with no clear ideology, or those citing multiple, and sometimes conflicting, influences. And while it is unlikely that another epoch-changing event on the scale of September 11 is around the corner, even smaller-scale terrorist events can prove deadly and scar societies.
Any reduction in resources, therefore, must be carefully thought through. Re-evaluating the risk is fine — forgetting it entirely is not.
Financial Times · by Raffaello Pantucci · December 21, 2022
9. The Pentagon is in its AI era: 5 stories from 2022
The Pentagon is in its AI era: 5 stories from 2022 - Breaking Defense
In 2022, the Pentagon made pushes on AI, JADC2 and several other acronyms, while acquisition of tech came under the microscope.
breakingdefense.com · by Jaspreet Gill · December 21, 2022
The Pentagon logo, after some technical difficulties. (Graphic by Breaking Defense)
WASHINGTON — Writing about artificial intelligence, cyber and networks can be dry. But it’s a vital topic to stay on top of when the next conflict might be fought with ones and zeros as much as it is with missiles and bullets.
So, as the staid Pentagon raced to catch up to the digital age, there was plenty to write about. Below are my top five stories, that I think, as the Breaking Defense Gen-Z ambassador, slayed. [Editor’s Note: What’s that mean?]
[This article is one of many in a series in which Breaking Defense reporters look back on the most significant (and entertaining) news stories of 2022 and look forward to what 2023 may hold.]
As the title says, the Pentagon is in its AI era. Among the many investments the Defense Department is making in that area, it stood up a brand new AI office earlier this year and hired a Silicon Valley heavy hitter to lead it. In April I got the chance to exclusively interview the new Chief Digital and AI Officer Craig Martell, a former Lyft exec, on his priorities for the next year and the benefits and challenges of DoD hiring someone as technically minded as him.
Martell isn’t the stereotypical Silicon Valley tech bro though: Prior to Lyft, he was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School for over a decade studying AI for the military. He also worked as head of machine learning at Dropbox and led several AI teams at LinkedIn.
In the past few months, Martell learned that bureaucracy within DoD is real (three days into the job he revealed he still didn’t have a CAC card and had to wait in line at the visitor’s entrance to get into the building) and his priorities have slightly shifted.
“I’m convinced we’re going to be able to do some great things,” Martell told me. “But they’re going to be hard things. It’s going to be a challenge.”
This one made my list because it got people riled up and I received a few salty emails about it. But besides that point, the Anduril chief revenue officer’s comments highlight a very real issue that the Pentagon faces and is trying to mitigate: non-traditional companies/startups face long odds when trying to get in the DoD game, even if Anduril itself has found its way to lucrative deals.
It’s because DoD takes forever to award real production contracts to companies, which, unlike larger defense firms, cannot sustain such a delay financially. And DoD knows this is an issue. Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has initiated several efforts over the past year focused on funding these non-traditional companies and rapid experimentation.
Speaking of Heidi Shyu, she spoke to me and my colleague Courtney Albon, a reporter at C4ISRNET, at the sidelines of the annual Association of the US Army conference in October. Of the many things Shyu is responsible for in her role, she’s spearheading the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, a relatively new effort aimed at addressing capability gaps and emerging technologies.
At AUSA, Shyu told us the next experiment — the third “sprint” — will be focused on base defense. She’s previously said she wants to do two sprints of RDER per year focused on different areas, but not a lot has been revealed about the effort.
She also hit on another effort she’s leading called the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovation Technologies, a program established this year to bridge that dreaded valley of death. Under that effort, $100 million is allocated to 10 different program offices to procure technologies from vendors.
Shyu said the companies “are thrilled.”
Joint All Domain Command and Control lives rent free in my head, and there’s been a lot of back and forth surrounding the infamously nebulous initiative.
Some of it’s coming from inside the military services themselves, whether it’s a Navy official saying DoD hasn’t actually defined the problem it’s trying to solve with JADC2, the Army acquisition executive saying there isn’t enough coordination between the services (each service has its own JADC2-aligned effort underway) or the Air Force’s principal cyber advisor saying between all of the disparate service-specific efforts, no one is thinking about how to be interoperable.
So when the head of the JADC2 Cross-Functional Team said the services actually are aligned and that she cringes reading stories saying otherwise, it added even more confusion to the mix. There’s also the issue of defining what exactly JADC2 is and how to think about it. For the CFT director, it’s an “ecosystem.” The Pentagon earlier this year also released a public version of its JADC2 strategy which left more questions than answers as to how the military services were going to accomplish goals defined in the document.
During the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, volunteer hacktivists from all around the world formed Ukraine’s “IT Army” to fight on the cyber front. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation announced the effort in February on Twitter, linking to a Telegram channel that would give out “tasks” to people. The channel currently has over 200,000 subscribers, but it’s unclear how many of those subscribers are actually involved in the cyber operations.
There were concerns that the digital free-for-all could backfire, but Ukrainian officials have claimed that there have been some successes from the group in which people shut down a number of Russian government websites and propaganda TV channels.
breakingdefense.com · by Jaspreet Gill · December 21, 2022
10. Fear, Honor, and Interest in the Arctic: The Case for Realism and Transactional Balancing
How did we not anticipate the importance of the Arctic? When the trade route over the top opens it will be a huge game changer.
Excerpts:
Outside sovereign borders and territorial waters, untold resources exist within the global commons—the shared and ungoverned spaces of the world for all to access. To Hobbesian realists, Arctic resource competition is inevitable in an anarchic international system devoid of a central governing authority. The fear of losing military and economic advantage coupled with the perceived glory of conquering the harsh Arctic compel states further into the resource competition arena....
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For the United States, a prescription for transactional balancing has two inherent assumptions. First, it assumes that states are self-interested and thus make hollow promises to international institutions kept only until a better opportunity presents. Second, it assumes that within the scope of self-interest, states are rational actors that will seek to avoid conflict as a primary motivator of their behavior, though they will posture militarily in preparation. These assumptions inform two principal objectives of transactional balancing: promoting US national security via a secure and defended homeland, and promoting global power balance through ideologically detached reciprocal arrangements.
As the future of alliances is unclear, the transactional nature of geopolitics will prevail, thus compelling informal security arrangements focusing on access, navigation, and resource sharing in the international commons. At their core, all interactions can be reduced to transactions. Transactional balancing satisfies US Arctic interests via securing the homeland through presence, engagement, and conflict avoidance rather than ideological posturing—and should be the basis of future Arctic policy.
Fear, Honor, and Interest in the Arctic: The Case for Realism and Transactional Balancing - Modern War Institute
mwi.usma.edu · by Ryan Burke, Adrienne Hopper · December 21, 2022
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In 2013, Frank Hoffman described the “bifurcation between policy and operations” as a black hole in American strategic culture that needed to be closed. Realism, others have argued convincingly, offers the best means of doing so. No region is characterized by a greater bifurcation between policy and operations than the Arctic. Today’s Arctic policy debate generates more platitude-laden hyperbole than informed substance. Worse, opining and pontification prevail absent theoretical grounding. As such, the region is primed for a realist paradigm to demonstrate its potential contributions to US strategy. So what can it tell us about the Arctic today and what the Arctic will be tomorrow? And what should America’s Arctic security policy look like as a result?
Realism’s Take on Arctic Security Origins
The Arctic security status quo relies on international goodwill and consensus solutions, but this is a fragile system. The twentieth-century mechanisms of strategic cooperation are not fit for twenty-first-century purpose. To realists, the current Arctic security situation was predictable. Realism emphasizes the state’s pursuit of power to produce security, achieve sovereignty, and ensure survival in an anarchic world. Five states possess sovereign territory along the Arctic Ocean coastline. These same five states therefore also have national security concerns that, in the age of nuclear weapons, constitute an existential threat to survival. Their coastal borders extend territorial seas and nonterritorial exclusive economic zones into the depths of the Arctic Ocean and complicate matters of accessibility and extraction rights for increasingly apparent resource bounties. Whereas the Arctic was among the regions of focus for potential conflict during the Cold War, for most of the twenty-first century the Arctic has hewed to Mikhail Gorbachev’s call, issued amid thawing tensions in 1987, for the region to be a “zone of peace” and exceptionalism. As commercial and economic interests evolve, however, competition heightens. With that, there are competing territorial claims leading to increasingly aggressive maritime practices and a steady northward creep of military presence. Absent a consensus solution to these evolving issues, the Arctic is back in the crosshairs of international competition and potential future conflict.
Outside sovereign borders and territorial waters, untold resources exist within the global commons—the shared and ungoverned spaces of the world for all to access. To Hobbesian realists, Arctic resource competition is inevitable in an anarchic international system devoid of a central governing authority. The fear of losing military and economic advantage coupled with the perceived glory of conquering the harsh Arctic compel states further into the resource competition arena. Competition, fear (diffidence), and glory, according to Hobbes, are the three causes of quarrel. States seeking power will fight for security to achieve safety, relative gains, and reputational advantage. Each of these dynamics is at play in the power politics of the Arctic today.
Prominent realist thinkers have long told us that the state of nature is inherently violent and that because of this inclination, conflict is inevitable. The product of these forces at work in the Arctic will be an environment punctuated by resource competition, fear, and glory with a disposition for conflict that no international institution can quell. The challenge is devising a workable solution that does not leave powerful states at a relative disadvantage. To date, international institutions have been unable to achieve this.
Ignorance of Institutional Infallibility
Realists from Niccolo Machiavelli to John Mearsheimer have warned of humans’ self-interest to do and pursue what is best for themselves. At the individual level, Machiavelli asserted people are “ungrateful, fickle, [and] false,” and that their promises will be “broken at every opportunity for their advantage.” Individuals and statesmen alike cannot be bought indefinitely but only rented temporarily. Chance, uncertainty, and opportunity alter circumstances and often render commitments unfulfilled. At the institutional level, Mearsheimer quipped that “alliances are temporary marriages of convenience,” echoing E.H. Carr’s claim that the failure of the League of Nations was really the “failure of those who refused to make it work.” Given the choice, Reinhold Niebuhr insists that state interests will never harmonize enough to produce peace. Summarized, people and their promises are unreliable, statesmen seek power over partnerships, and politics is conflict at its core. Therefore, we must be skeptical of the utility of international institutions to keep and enforce promises, to quell power-hungry states and promote harmony, and to prevent conflict via consensus solutions and compliance mechanisms.
This “false promise of international institutions” Mearsheimer described is magnified in the ungoverned spaces of the world. Whereas prominent realist thinkers now recognize states need institutions to manage relations, devising a set of binding Arctic rules remains elusive in an increasingly self-interested landscape. Institutions like the Arctic Council, promising harmony in the commons based on covenants alone, are unreliable. The Arctic Council “does not and cannot implement or enforce its guidelines, assessments or recommendations.” In tempering Arctic militarization, the Arctic Council is powerless. Or as Thomas Hobbes more aptly stated: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words.”
Though there are no Arctic alliances, per se, the preponderance of Arctic states are NATO members sharing a collective security interest in the northern latitudes, with one outlier with a demonstrated recent proclivity for invading sovereign countries. Russian military buildup in the Arctic occurs within Russian territory, but remains among NATO’s concerns. In addition, there is China’s self-designation as a “near-Arctic state,” and increasing Chinese Arctic activity via the Polar Silk Road as an extension of Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative also compels attention. To date, appeals to NATO to do something about the strategic competition reemerging in the Arctic have gone unanswered save for occasional joint NATO training exercises. NATO’s existence alone is an insufficient deterrent to malign actor intent.
Arctic states ultimately can rely on neither the Arctic Council nor NATO to ensure their security in the High North and instead must safeguard their own sovereignty. If Russia or China seeks greater power in the Arctic, “There is no central authority beyond the mechanics of the balance of power, which could impose actual limits upon the manifestations of its collective desire for domination.” Ultimately, there is an emerging opportunity for states to secure resources in the Arctic and advance their relative power and security. There is a natural inclination rooted in the nature of man for states to pursue such opportunity, even as the cost to do so potentially raises the specter of conflict. As Kenneth Waltz reminds us, “Wars result from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stupidity.” Just as we are seeing evidence of power, fear, and glory driving Arctic behaviors, there is evidence of selfishness, aggressive impulses, and sheer stupidity emerging as well. From the realist perspective, the Arctic conflict scenario is predictable and preventable.
An Alternative Realist Response to Arctic Security
As idealists hope for Arctic peace and passivity, prudent states prepare for conflict. Just as realism offered predictions for the Arctic today, it offers policy prescriptions for the Arctic tomorrow. Assuming realism’s relevance, Arctic literature falls short of outlining a viable approach to ensuring Arctic security. We need a different approach recognizing the Arctic region for what it is—for the uniqueness of its opportunities, its environmental challenges, and its threats.
Waltz’s solution to anarchy is to impose controls on states. However, only a hegemon in a unipolar order can achieve such a task. Today’s multipolar order tempers the hegemonic ambition of force and submission and instead begets a more pragmatic strategy of accommodation and compensation. States increasingly seek proportional interactions and transactions rooted in opportunity over ideology. This emerging strategic competition in the Arctic looks like an unbalanced multipolar environment that Mearsheimer claims produces the greatest risk for war. To avoid this fate, states must suspend their dependence on international institutions as the solution and adopt pragmatism and realpolitik.
Consider Sebastian Rosato’s claim that “great powers cannot confidently assess the current intentions of others based on the latter’s domestic characteristics or behavior, and they are even less sure when it comes to estimating their peers’ future intentions.” The Arctic is a common space devoid of a central governing authority, teeming with valuable resources compelling increasing commercial and military activity by three competing world powers who cannot reliably assess each other’s intent. Therefore, states must make point-of-decision judgments based on present circumstance and act accordingly. This reduces most decisions to transactional dynamics. Wobbly engagements advancing immediate state interests supplant blind and indefinite alliance commitments in today’s security environment.
Transactional relations among curious partners are common today. Ongoing tensions within the World Trade Organization (WTO), as an example, lead more states to sidestep existing WTO arrangements and broken processes in favor of bilateral transactions removed from the WTO shackles. Germany and Turkey are NATO allies simultaneously transacting with Russia where it suits their economic and defense interests, respectively. The United States excluded France from AUKUS, at the risk of alienating a NATO and nuclear weapons ally. Ideologically rooted commitments cannot compete in precarious multipolar conditions where the balance of power rests on advancing one’s interests at every opportunity. Multipolarity necessitates a more opportunistic approach to foreign policy.
The United States cannot achieve regional hegemony in the Arctic. In an environment characterized by self-help, power maximization, and fear, prescriptions for Arctic hegemony via Mearsheimer’s offensive realism are impracticable. Likewise, Waltz’s call for defensive realism via reserved security policies and militarization is equally impracticable. Russian Arctic military capabilities necessitate—at least—an effective counterposture to deter and ensure US sovereignty and security along the Alaskan coastline. A Russian incursion into US territory would likely lead to World War III and is low probability. But Washington cannot afford to leave the homeland vulnerable with Russia’s ongoing international aggression. Continued Chinese Arctic activity also requires containment considerations or the United States risks a geostrategic imbalance emerging with two strategic competitors potentially at its back door. Washington’s Arctic objective must be to defend the homeland first while achieving a favorable balance of power to avoid conflict, but this requires engagement via balancing with NATO allies and against strategic competitors. Buck passing and bandwagoning implicitly mean trusting other states to act. This is not the answer.
Trust among states, as Machiavelli told us, is a false premise. We should not assume the sanctity of institutions as reliable self-binding mechanisms of establishing order. Lacking trust, states seek military and economic means to ensure survival. As more states seek expanded military postures, the Arctic security dilemma evolves. With potential conflict looming, states engage in balancing behaviors.
Balancing specific to military capabilities refers to a “state’s efforts to amass military might so as to deter another’s aggression or prevail in a conflict should deterrence fail.” Internal balancing emphasizes military spending to strengthen state security and external balancing emphasizes alliance engagement and participation toward the same ends. The result is either a unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar international balance of power. The United States has long engaged in both internal and external balancing to achieve its security ends, but neither has produced the intended outcome in the Arctic. A new balancing approach in the Arctic is necessary.
Transactional Balancing
Assuming (1) that human nature is inherently self-interested and opportunistic and (2) that institutions fail because of it, security policy prescriptions must outline approaches that leverage both assumptions. Internal balancing is too passive for the inherently violent state of things, just as external balancing is too ignorant for the inherently fragile state of things. Channeling Machiavelli and Mearsheimer—and recognizing reality—leads us to conclude that humans cannot be trusted and international institutions cannot deter conflict. In the Arctic, the absence of treaties, unratified conventions, and vast resources in ungoverned space means conditions are ripe for opportunistic aggression. Therefore, Washington should adopt a “transactional balancing” approach—at least in the Arctic—seeking to remove interactions from the confines of international institutions and capitalize on self-interested opportunism.
Transactional balancing operates on the back of a strong military, limiting engagement to existential threats to US vital interests—such as defending the homeland. This balancing construct pursues “mutually constitutive state economic and security arrangements premised on institutional fallibility and avoidance of self-binding ideology.” Transactional balancing becomes a rational system of bilateral arrangements rooted in conflict-avoidance behaviors. The world is anarchic such that the assumption of interminable institutional legitimacy is blindly rooted in the illogical logic of global good. Therefore, transactional balancing does not rely on international institutions to establish order, security, and stability and instead assumes state self-interest will generate transactional dynamics toward these ends. Transactional partnerships are more natural than not, especially in a bipolar or multipolar system where powers have, as Mearsheimer describes, “little choice but to act according to realist dictates and engage in security competition with each other” and where “ideological considerations are subordinated to security considerations in these circumstances.”
Consistent with these prescriptions, transactional balancing assumes a bilateral dynamic devoid of ideological restraint. Unlike balance of power politics that seeks to prevent hegemony, transactional balancing seeks only to advance state interests absent a larger agenda. If states do not perceive threats from a hegemon, they will not seek to balance against it. In theory, transactional balancing assumes a system of advancing reciprocal relations enabled via laissez-faire approaches allowing the system to define itself. In today’s strategic environment, no state can achieve a total victory. Attempting to do so is futile. Accepting this reality is necessary in strategic competition such that states must seek opportunistic and reciprocal transactional arrangements to advance their relative power positions. In this way, the inherent conflict of interest is mitigated by, in Hans Morgenthau’s words, the “temporary balancing of interests and the ever precarious settlement of conflicts.”
According to Joseph Nye, “The United States can influence, but not control, other parts of the world.” To influence requires power, and per Nye, there are three ways to wield power toward influence: through coercion, payment, or attraction. Transactional balancing offers an approach that can wield power in each of these ways, but based on need and interest rather than ideology and values. Transactional balancing is realist pragmatism and realpolitik rooted in the tenets of balance of power and compensation theories.
For the United States, a prescription for transactional balancing has two inherent assumptions. First, it assumes that states are self-interested and thus make hollow promises to international institutions kept only until a better opportunity presents. Second, it assumes that within the scope of self-interest, states are rational actors that will seek to avoid conflict as a primary motivator of their behavior, though they will posture militarily in preparation. These assumptions inform two principal objectives of transactional balancing: promoting US national security via a secure and defended homeland, and promoting global power balance through ideologically detached reciprocal arrangements.
As the future of alliances is unclear, the transactional nature of geopolitics will prevail, thus compelling informal security arrangements focusing on access, navigation, and resource sharing in the international commons. At their core, all interactions can be reduced to transactions. Transactional balancing satisfies US Arctic interests via securing the homeland through presence, engagement, and conflict avoidance rather than ideological posturing—and should be the basis of future Arctic policy.
Dr. Ryan Burke is a professor of military and strategic studies at the US Air Force Academy, codirector of Project 6633 at the Modern War Institute, affiliate professor at the University of Alaska’s Center for Arctic Security and Resilience, and research director for the Homeland Defense Institute at USAFA and USNORTHCOM.
Commander (Sel) Adrienne Hopper is a NOAA Corps officer with multiple sea tours sailing the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, South Pacific, and Arctic Ocean. After serving as the executive officer aboard the NOAA Ship Nancy Foster, she completed a master in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is currently assigned to NOAA’s Commissioned Personnel Center while awaiting her next assignment as executive officer, Marine Operations Center–Pacific.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or of any organization the authors are affiliated with, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce, United States Air Force Academy, and Department of the Air Force.
Image credit: Senior Airman Joseph P. LeVeille, US Air Force
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mwi.usma.edu · by Ryan Burke, Adrienne Hopper · December 21, 2022
11. How to Get Ahead in Washington: Lessons from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras, Part 1
Something to reflect upon over the holidays for all those who seek success inside the beltway. 😀
Part 2 follows.
How to Get Ahead in Washington: Lessons from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras, Part 1 - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Iskander Rehman · December 21, 2022
Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series.
In the winter of 1935, a freshman senator from Missouri arrived in the district of Columbia after having driven cross-country for over a thousand miles. With almost no legislative experience or friends in Washington, he was, in his own words, “green as grass,” and as “timid as a country boy arriving on the campus of a great university for the first year.” One day, shortly after the nervous Missourian’s arrival, J. Hamilton “Ham” Lewis of Illinois ambled across the Senate floor and sat down next to his junior colleague. The flamboyant, pink toupee-wearing Democratic Majority Whip then proceeded to dispense a welcome piece of advice: “Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” he said. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.” Truman never forgot this initial act of kindness and seems to have taken the advice to heart. He approached his positions as a senator, vice president, and then as “accidental president” with gravity and dedication, yet always managed to maintain a certain ironic detachment from the seedier aspects of domestic politics. Occasionally, the genial, bespectacled Midwesterner would startle his acquaintances, jesting that, had he not opted for politics, one of his only other options — given his atrocious eyesight — might have been to be a piano player in a Kansas City whorehouse. Maybe this would have ultimately proven to be a more rewarding profession, he would then ruefully mutter.
The thirty-third U.S. President’s mixed feelings with regard to life in Washington would no doubt be familiar to anyone who has worked in our nation’s capital — or indeed in the sphere of policy and politics more broadly. For all of its deeper meaning and sense of purpose, working in government can often be exhausting, disappointing, and unedifying. The world of politics has ever been one of muddy compromise and rugged imperfection — something of which Truman, a voracious reader of history, was well aware. Whereas Truman, like many other of his fellow Presidents, frequently turned to the writings of the Founding Fathers or Ancients for moral solace and intellectual guidance, this essay will seek to prize open another, less regularly consulted treasure trove of insights for War on the Rocks readers — the large, heterogenous body of works which fall under the “mirrors for secretaries” tradition of the late Renaissance and early modern periods. Topics discussed will range from the importance of discretion, to knowing how to balance expertise with pragmatism, guard against flattery, and deal with a difficult boss. And for those readers who remain convinced that their brilliance and relevance will shine eternal, it will relay sixteenth and seventeenth century advice on knowing when to retire. There are few richer — or more enjoyable — periods than those two event-packed centuries for contemporary policymakers to explore. Strewn across these works of darkly humorous genius, we can all recognize, to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “our own rejected thoughts, coming back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
Self-Help for Policymakers: Treasure Troves of the Post-Renaissance
The period stretching from the late Renaissance to the early Baroque era was one of enormous political, intellectual, and diplomatic upheaval. The increased sophistication of the early modern state, its growing centralization, the heightened intricacy of its bureaucratic apparatus — complete with its teetering mounds of paperwork and endless reams of epistolary exchanges — all of these developments required chronically overworked rulers to find safe and effective ways to delegate their authority, administer their newly sprawling domains and implement their increasingly far-reaching reforms. Institutionally, this led both to the mushrooming across Europe of small governing councils composed of tight cadres of ministers and royal counselors, each often operating at the heart of their own webs of patronage and clientele, and to the rise of the figure of the secretary — the discreet and dedicated public servant who acted at the heart of the sprawling new “letterocracy” which had extended its dry tendrils across the chancelleries, ministries, and embassies of the continent. Paperwork, rightly notes historian Paul Dover, had become “the demon of early modern statecraft.” Kings, Popes, and Doges — all found themselves gasping for air under a veritable deluge of memorandums and correspondence. Philip II, as Geoffrey Parker has shown in his vivid study of the Spanish monarch, was frequently driven to despair by “these devils, my papers”, with up to 16,000 separate petitions being sent to his desk over the course of a single year. Within this newly saturated information environment, the role of the secretary, ambassador, or counselor was not only to filter, distill, and interpret these incoming torrents of data, but also to provide clear and actionable guidance to their overwhelmed rulers.
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This was particularly true with regard to statecraft. The conduct of diplomacy had undergone a series of profound transformations over the course of the Renaissance, as the practice of establishing permanent embassies, which first took root in Italy in the mid-fifteenth century, progressively spread across Europe. With the generalization of these more elaborate forms of diplomatic machinery, resident ambassadors, nuncios, and intelligence officers, finely attuned to every minor geopolitical tremor or subtle shift in the balance of power, had begun to feed a continuous flow of information back to their capitals — an intensified bureaucratic process which, in turn, greatly accelerated the rhythm of state-to-state interactions. As the great twentieth century historian Garrett Mattingly notes in his landmark study of Renaissance diplomacy, the sensitivity with which these new resident ambassadors, “servants of the sacred egoism of their respective states,” monitored their continent’s fluctuating diplomatic weather patterns, both helped preserve a delicate equilibrium and induced a climate of general apprehension, one of beady-eyed “mutual watchfulness.”
Being an ambassador, secretary, or advisor in this brave new world was no easy task. All these early modern operatives understood that the preservation of their privileged positions was not only subject to the whims of their patrons — it was also contingent on their mastery of the complexities of the arcana imperii (the mysteries of state) and on their practical wisdom, or prudence in the classical, Aristotelian sense. Their political, and often physical, survival also hinged on a grubbier set of skills — how to navigate the treacherous shoals of court politics, skirt snake pits of deadly intrigue, and choose the right faction. The excitements and dangers tied to such a high-stakes existence helped spawn a new literary genre: the self-help guide for government secretaries and counselors, whether in the form of short treatises, satirical texts, neat compilations of maxims, or recommendations nested within larger, more philosophically-minded essays. Earlier generations of political theorists, from Xenophon to John of Salisbury and Christine of Pizan, had churned out “mirrors of princes,” elegantly crafted treatises which sought, by drawing on religious, philosophical, and historical lessons, to shape and guide the actions of a just monarch. These new works were different — they were aimed not so much at rulers as at those toiling underneath them, the ink-stained hands scribbling away at the frontlines of power and policy — from the impecunious young secretary to the conniving cardinal or esteemed ambassador. Less formal, more irreverent, and often deeply insightful, they constitute a veritable wellspring of worldly wisdom — albeit one that remains sadly underexplored by contemporary policymakers.
Here follows a small sampling of this wry wit and what it can teach us, with choice excerpts from Italy, France, Spain, and England, ranging from Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597) to Cardinal Richelieu’s Political Testament (published posthumously, in 1688), Giovanni Botero’s The Reason of State (1589), Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), La Rochefoucauld’s Moral Maxims and Reflections (1665), Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647), Jean de la Bruyère’s Characters (1687), Francesco Guicciardini’s Maxims and Reflections (circa 1530), Philippe de Béthune’s The Counsellor of State (1633) Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (circa 1580), and Pierre Charron’s Of Wisdom (1608). Each of these writers, having attained a certain level of prominence in their field — whether secular or religious — was intimately familiar with the trials and tribulations of public office and the vagaries of court politics.
On Balancing Expertise With Pragmatism, and Thoughtfulness with Decisiveness
For all these writers-cum-statesmen, there was little doubt, first of all, that experience and expertise were the most invaluable attributes in government; indeed only the harebrained and foolhardy would think otherwise. “Let no one trust so much in native intelligence that he believes it to be sufficient without the help of experience,” warned Francesco Guicciardini, for, “no matter what his natural endowments, any man who has been in a position of responsibility will admit that experience attains many things which natural gifts alone could never attain.” In addition to a rich and variegated life experience (which could be further enriched by travel and military service), policymakers should be able to draw on a deep reservoir of learning — one which could then irrigate their everyday decisions, helping fertilize a carefully cultivated long-term vision. As Francis Bacon observed, “expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one, but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned.” The ever-caustic Baltasar Gracián, for his part, asserted that the only opinion any practiced government hand should fret about was that of the qualified expert. “Half the world is laughing at the other half, and all are fools,” the Jesuit dismissively sneered,
Either everything is good or everything bad, depending on people’s opinions. What one pursues, another flees. Whoever wants to make their own opinion the measure of all things is an insufferable fool. Perfection doesn’t depend on one person’s approval: tastes are as plentiful as faces, and as varied. There’s not a single failing without its advocate…. The measure of true satisfaction is the approval of reputable men who are experts in the relevant field.
Yet while all these early modern commentators concurred on the value of learning and experience, they were also quick to point to the need to balance this same thoughtfulness with a capacity for pragmatism and decisiveness. Unfortunately, they remarked, the ideal scholar-practitioner was exceedingly hard to find. Instead, a whole medley of bookish attributes — from an excessive fondness for theoretical abstractions to a tendency to get lost in the weeds, or harbor a roseate belief in the power of human rationality — often proved to be ill-suited to the more fast-paced, rough-and-tumble world of policy. Bacon thus hastened to caveat his earlier observations on the importance of contemplative study with the following cautionary statement:
To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar.
In this, he was joined by Cardinal Richelieu, with the redoubtable French chief minister inveighing in his Political Testament against the risks tied to hiring scholastic pedants,
The qualifications for a [royal] counselor do not include a pedantic mind. There is nothing more dangerous for the state than those who wish to govern by maxims they have learned from books. They do, indeed, often ruin countries this way… The counselors require only goodness and firmness of mind, stable judgement, true source of wisdom, a reasonable acquaintance with literature, a general knowledge of history and of the organization of existing states around the world, especially including the home country.
Francesco Guicciardini also warned of the perils of trying to superimpose one’s idealized intellectual standards of rationality onto one’s opponent. The Florentine noted that during the fierce wars which had devastated the Italian peninsula over the course of much of his life, he had witnessed his fellow statesmen succumb to this intellectual fallacy time and time again,
In discussions of state, I have often seen men make mistakes when they judged what this or that prince will do according to reason, and not what he will do according to his nature of his character. If you want to judge, for instance, what the King of France will do, you must pay more attention to the nature and customs of a Frenchman than to how a prudent man should act.
This critique remains more than relevant — indeed it could no doubt apply today, to those who believed, according to their favored preconceptions or disembodied conceptions of rationality that Vladimir Putin could never “logically” take the fateful decision to launch a full-scale invasion of a country as large as Ukraine.
More broadly, Guicciardini suggests, even the most brilliant of counselors should retain a certain degree of intellectual humility, remaining mindful of the role of contingency, of the power of fortuna, and of the nigh-impossibility of accurately predicting certain developments. “The things of this world are so unstable, and depend upon so many accidents,” he sighs, that “it is very hard to form any judgment concerning the future,” before adding, “We see from experience that the predictions of wise men are nearly always wrong.” In some instances, history might seem to suddenly accelerate, with events unfolding at an alarming pace, outrunning a policymaker’s ability to understand them. In many other cases, however, “things destined to die not by a single blow but by gradual decay last much longer than people believe at first.” This was particularly true, he posited, when over the course of a protracted war statesmen held out hopes for an adversary state’s general collapse. Similarly, while some regimes subject to severe internal strains may, on occasion, appear on the verge of crumbling overnight, in reality — as contemporary Iranian, Venezuelan, and North Korean examples sadly show us — their dogged survival can often last far longer than anticipated.
Finally, it was possible for someone overly enamored with the snaking subtleties of their own intellect to lose themselves in trifling nuances, or to spend too much time locked in idle cogitation. Over the course of his storied career, Richelieu came to the conclusion that some temperaments, while brilliant, were simply not suited to diplomacy. Like the current, highly cerebral French President with his confusingly labyrinthine statements on Russia and the war in Ukraine, these brainiacs’ fondness for dialectic and complexity, regardless of the goodness of their intentions, ended up diluting the clarity and effectiveness of their overall message,
Just as dimwits are not good negotiators, so there are certain minds so finely drawn and delicately organized as to be even less well suited, since they become overly subtle about everything. They are, so to speak, like those who break the points of needles by trying to make them too fine.
Giovanni Botero was of the same opinion, with the Savoyard observing that when it came to the formulation of grand strategy, a certain degree of austere simplicity was to be welcomed. Needlessly intricate strategies he noted, had the disadvantage of presenting more potential points of failure:
Counsel ought not to be valued because they have more of the subtle and the shrewd; for the most part these do not succeed because inasmuch as their subtlety is greater, their execution must be more rightly on the mark. This cannot ordinarily be achieved because grand projects require for their execution many means and, as a result, meet with many unanticipated situations. And so as the more intricately a clock is put together and assembled, so much the more easily it fails to work and to tell time accurately, so designs and projects that require a minute subtlety for the most part do not succeed.
Inordinately ruminative intellects, which obsessively weighed the pros and cons of every decision, could end up pursuing foreign policies that were too reactive and cautious. After all, prudence as it was then universally understood, was the commanding virtue, at the heart of a philosophy of political action. Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his hugely influential discussion of the cardinal virtues, had argued that the act of command — which followed the acts of deliberation and judgment — was the chief raison d’etre of practical reason or prudentia. Dithering indecisiveness was a form of negligence — quite literally of not (nec) being able to choose (eligens) — and was thus a sin “belonging to imprudence.” It was therefore vital, emphasized Gracián, to learn how to balance reflection with speed of execution, primarily through a mental sorting process which he and others termed “diligence,”
Diligence carries out quickly what intelligence decides upon slowly. Fools love haste; since they never see any difficulty, they act without reflecting. In contrast, the wise are often too unhurried, for scrutiny gives rise to reflection. The ineffectiveness caused by delay can ruin the accuracy of any judgment. Promptness is the mother of good fortune. An august motto: make haste slowly.
In short, it was necessary to find individuals who could be detail-oriented while not losing sight of the big picture, who were academically trained but not overly wedded to abstraction, and who were capable of combining careful reflection with prompt decisiveness. Not an easy task, confessed La Rochefoucauld, yet “when these two qualities are united in the same mind, they raise it infinitely above others.”
On the Pitfalls of Flatter and the Dangers of Group Think
All of us are dangerously susceptible to flattery. The desire for adulation and glory, griped Montaigne, was one of the most universal and contemptible traits in his fellow man. Comparing our inner lust for approbation to the songs of the Sirens seeking to lure Odysseus to his doom, Montaigne argued that “there is nothing that so poisons princes as flattery, nor anything whereby wicked men more easily obtain credit and favor with them.” Guicciardini, for his part, admitted that he never ceased to be amazed at the ease with which his contemporaries succumbed to unctuous bootlicking. “Men should look at the substance of things and not at their appearance or surface,” he admonished, before adding,
Nevertheless it is incredible what favor you will gain among men by using gentle words and bestowing compliments. The explanation, I think, is that every man thinks he is worth more than he really is. And therefore, he will be annoyed if he thinks you are not taking the account of him that he believes he deserves.
Flattery, he cautioned, was a double-edged sword. For while honeyed words could potentially be deployed for personal gain, they could just as easily be employed against us, and especially by manipulative or exploitative superiors:
Those who deal with the great must be careful not to have their heads turned by the blandiloquence and blandishments such people generally employ to choke men with favor and make them jump when they want. The harder it is to resist, the more you must try and control yourself, to keep a cold head and not to let yourself be easily swayed.
The shallowness and desire for public approval that expose us to flattery also render us more prone to intellectual conformism, preventing us from judging things on their own merit. It can be difficult, especially in the early stages of one’s career, to go against the tide, or to openly disagree with renowned figures in the field. It might also appear simpler, in some instances, to disparage an unfashionable book without having fully read it, or to refrain from voicing an opinion on a complex foreign policy issue until some form of a fuzzy group consensus has been reached. Such craven behavior, La Bruyère complained, was rife in the gilded corridors of Versailles, and had led to a steady dilution of the quality of public debate in the France of Louis XIV:
Many people perceive the merit of a manuscript which is read to them, but will not declare themselves in its favor until they see what success it has in the world when printed, or what intelligent men will say about it. They do not like to risk their opinion, and they want to be carried away by the crowd, and dragged along by the multitude. Then they say that they were amongst the first who approved of that work, and that the general public shares their opinion.
Reason alone, “wherever she appears and from whatever side she comes”, should govern our opinions, concurred his contemporary La Rochefoucauld — and in extenso the advice any decent counselor should provide to their government.
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Iskander Rehman is an Ax:son Johnson Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, and the Senior Fellow for Strategic Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council. He is a contributing editor at War on the Rocks and can be followed on twitter @IskanderRehman .
Image: A faithful photographic reproduction of the The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Iskander Rehman · December 21, 2022
12. How to Get Ahead in Washington: Lessons from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras, Part 2
These two articles are a reading list for "applied philosophy" for life inside the beltway.
Conclusion:
So next time you are browsing through a second-hand bookstore, feeling downcast after the most recent bout of bureaucratic wrangling or professional backstabbing, veer away from the self-help and business psychology aisles, with their brazen lettering, blunt recommendations, and catchy titles. Instead, pick up a musty, dog-eared copy of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Montaigne’s Essays, or Baltasar Gracián’s Art of Wordly Wisdom. After all, as Harry Truman famously said after departing the “great white jail” of the White House, “the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”
How to Get Ahead in Washington: Lessons from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras, Part 2 - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Iskander Rehman · December 22, 2022
Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part series. The first was published yesterday.
This scenario may sound immediately familiar to War on the Rocks readers: in the midst of an animated discussion at a work function, your interlocutor’s gaze suddenly begins to wander, slowly sweeping around the room, logging faces and names, scanning for someone potentially more useful to talk to. Subtle changes begin to slowly unfold. Your colleague’s expression gradually grows more vacant, their conversational fillers increasingly robotic. And then, in the blink of an eye, they have swept with unsuspected grace and celerity across the windowless conference room to greet the tardy assistant secretary. Hovering around the visiting potentiary with a nervous grin, they nod profusely, laugh loudly, and strategically position their body in between the target of their solicitations and the closest exit. Slowly but surely, a bunch of fellow fawners begin to clot around the hapless guest, who glumly abandons one of the main objects of their visit — the complimentary stale cookies placed near the registration table.
The methods deployed in such an instance may seem hopelessly transparent, but they are also wonderfully timeless. In Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, the diplomat Federico Fregoso describes such oleaginous displays of naked careerism with bemusement, relating how, in his more sartorially-fixated era, grasping courtiers would immediately latch on to those who seemed more visibly wealthy and powerful,
There are some fools who, even if they are in the company of the best friend in the world, upon meeting with someone better dressed, attach themselves at once to him; and then, if they happen on someone better dressed, they do the same again. And if the prince should pass through the square, church or some other public place, then they elbow their way past everyone until they stand beside him; and even if they have nothing to say to him, they insist on talking, and hold forth at great length, laughing and clapping their hands to make a show of having important business, so that the crowd might see they are in favor.
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Equally, there have always been compulsive name-droppers, those who pepper every other sentence with a reference to some bigwig they are supposedly on close — nay — friendly terms with. In these instances, the individual in question should be simply mentioned by his or her first name — thus reinforcing the sense of casual familiarity and forcing dazed conversation partners to meekly seek confirmation of the illustrious contact’s identity. If a little bit of mansplaining and/or general pontificating can be sprinkled into the conversational stew, so much the better.
La Bruyère, one of the 17th century’s most brilliant satirists, famously portrayed such a pedant — whom he called Arrias — in his wildly popular and controversial Caractères — with a biting vignette that is worth quoting here in full:
Arrias has read and seen everything, at least he would lead you to think so; he is a man of universal knowledge, or pretends to be, and would rather tell a falsehood than be silent or appear to ignore anything. Some person is talking at meal-time, in the house of a man of rank, of a northern country; he interrupts and prevents him telling what he knows; he goes hither and thither in that distant state as if he were a native of it; he discourses about the habits of its court, the native women, the laws and customs of the land; he tells many little stories which happened there, thinks them very entertaining and is the first to laugh loudly at them. Somebody presumes to contradict him, and clearly proves to him that what he says is untrue. Arrias is not disconcerted; on the contrary, he grows angry at the interruption, and exclaims: “I aver and relate nothing but what I know on excellent authority; I had it from Sethon, the French ambassador at that court, who only a few days ago came back to Paris, and is a particular friend of mine; I asked him several questions, and he replied to them all without concealing anything.” He continues his story with greater confidence than he began it, till one of the company informs him that the gentleman whom he has been contradicting was Sethon himself, but lately arrived from his embassy.
We’ve all met Arrias, that fellow who has more of a comment than a question, or who derives his authoritative insights on complex foreign societies and their atavistic “ancestral hatreds” from deep discussions with local cab drivers. The eerie familiarity of La Bruyère’s character is a valuable reminder that, whether in17th century Paris or 21st century Washington, foreign policy establishments are smaller than they seem, and what goes around often comes around.
Indeed, one of the most important character traits for any secretary, innumerable Renaissance and early modern texts argued, was that of discretion. After all — the very etymology of the word — derived from the Latin secretum (meaning a secluded, hidden place), implied that the secretary’s role, first and foremost, was to be a tight-lipped custodian of state secrets. This natural predilection for discretion, it was emphasized, should ideally extend to every aspect of a high-ranking public servant’s social interactions. Thus, noted Gracián, one should constantly strive to conceal one’s ambitions and control one’s outward display of emotions:
Passions are breaches in the mind. The most practical kind of knowledge is dissimulation; whoever plays their hand openly runs the risk of losing. Let the reserve of caution compete against the scrutiny of the perceptive; against the sharp eyes of the lynx, the ink of the cuttlefish. Don’t let your desires be known so that they won’t be anticipated, either by opposition or flattery.
Moreover, he suggested, familiarity often bred contempt. One should avoid confiding in someone one doesn’t fully trust; it was often more judicious to hide the full measure of one’s capabilities and bide one’s time, “The circumspect man,” he ventured,
If he wants to be venerated by everyone, should prevent the true depths of his knowledge or his courage being plumbed. He should allow himself to be known, but not fully understood. No one should establish the limits of their abilities, because of the dangers of having their illusions shattered. He should never allow anyone to grab everything about him. Greater veneration is created by conjecture and uncertainty over the extent of our ability than by firm evidence of this, however vast this may be.
Guicciardini was less bleakly misanthropic in his outlook, but nevertheless stressed the importance of learning how to keep one’s mouth shut, especially when tempted to talk ill of other people within one’s professional network:
You should guard yourself against doing anything that can bring you harm but no profit. And so you should never speak ill of any man, absent or present, unless it be advantageous or necessary. For it is madness to make enemies without reason.
“I remind you of this,” Guicciardini hectors his reader, “because nearly everyone is guilty of this sort of levity.” The Florentine fully recognized that making enemies was sometimes simply unavoidable, especially if one was a person of principle, and that “in this world, unless you are dead, you cannot avoid doing things occasionally that will offend someone.” Nevertheless:
If either necessity or contempt induces you to speak ill of another, at least be careful to say things that will offend only him. For instance, if you want to insult a particular person, do not speak ill of his country, his family or his relatives.
On Managing Up and Working for Difficult Individuals
We are all fated, at some stage in our careers, to work under a difficult supervisor. He or she may be erratic, temperamental, or display a tendency to micromanage. They may be emotionally abusive, absent-minded, or overly susceptible to flattery. Or perhaps they have succeeded, at long last, in rising to their level of incompetence. From the tales of baroque dysfunction leaked by disenchanted congressional interns on Dear White Staffers, to the anecdotes furtively shared by wide-eyed young think tank employees nervously clutching at their happy hour pints, DC’s foreign policy trenches overflow with tales of mercurial senators, eccentric appointees, and megalomaniacal pundits. More grizzled Washingtonians have long learned the importance of “managing up,” and of working to immediately establish a stable and productive working relationship with their hierarchical superior. This issue was also at the heart of many early modern manuals of statecraft, with long-suffering advisors and secretaries readily sharing their insights on the art of providing good counsel under imperfect leadership. Of course, the stakes for them were often far higher — thankfully we no longer have to worry about banishment, destitution, summary execution, or posthumous dismemberment.
Gracián characteristically took a somewhat fatalistic approach to the issue of managing up, with the sardonic Spaniard advising that one “should get used to the bad temperaments of those you deal with, like getting used to ugly faces.” He then goes on to suggest that this is “particularly advisable in situations of dependency,” before adding,
There are horrible people you can neither live with nor live without. It’s a necessary skill, therefore, to get used to them, as to ugliness, so as you’re not surprised each time their harshness manifests itself. At first they’ll frighten you, but gradually your initial horror will disappear and caution will anticipate or tolerate the unpleasantness.
Signor Ottaviano Fregoso, a former Genoese Doge and a lead interlocutor in the fictionalized dialogue of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, is altogether less blasé. Stressing the moral responsibility of the advisor to steer their wayward or inattentive prince in the right direction, Fregoso emphasizes the need for tact and finesse — or what he somewhat patronizingly terms “salutary deception,”
The courtier will be able to lead his prince by the austere path of virtue, adorning it with shady fronds and strewing it with pretty flowers to lessen the tedium of the toilsome journey for one whose strength is slight… beguiling him with salutary deception; like shrewd doctors who often spread the edge of the cup with some sweet cordial when they wish to give a bitter-tasting medicine to sick and over-delicate children.
In short, the patriotic public servant should not hesitate to engage in a certain measure of careful edulcoration if not outright manipulation — particularly if the leader he or she serves is inattentive, inexperienced, or inadequate to the task at hand. Think, for example, of the elaborate and by now well-documented methods concocted by despondent National Security Council staff in their bids to get former President Trump to pay attention during his Presidential Daily Briefs.
Other writers, however, were less comfortable with such finespun and gently insinuating efforts. To the contrary, argues Francis Bacon in his Essays, one must avoid sterile sycophancy, and labor to constantly provide the most honest form of counsel — even if that means voicing unwelcome truths, irritating one’s superior, or momentarily forestalling a popular course of action. “The greatest truth between man and man,” he solemnly avers, “is the trust of giving counsel,” before noting that,
Things will have their first, or second agitation: if they be not tossed upon the arguments of counsel, they will be tossed upon the waves of fortune; and be full of inconstancy, doings and undoings, like the reelings of a drunken man.
The key, he adds, is not to overthink things — and mentally exhaust oneself by constantly seeking to put oneself in the advisee’s headspace. “Counselors should not be too speculative into their sovereign’s person,” he thus cautions, “The true composition of a counselor is rather to be skillful in this master’s business than in his nature; for then he is like to advise him, and not feed his humor.” Conversely, he later observes, good decision-makers should remain mindful of the fact that many of their advisors will be overeager to please them, with professional obsequiousness warping their policy prescriptions. Thus, a good king, when presiding over a council meeting, should initially hold his cards close to his chest, and let conversations between his lead advisors flow freely, taking care not to “open his inclination too much, in that which he propoundeth; for else counselors will but take the wind of him, and instead of giving him free counsel, sing him a song of placebo.”
On Knowing When to Retire
And what happens when counselors and ministers get too comfortably entrenched in government? When they begin to bloviate on issues on which they have little to no expertise, or gluttonously accumulate too many portfolios that combine great prestige with frustratingly nebulous boundaries? As world-weary operatives have long acknowledged, we are all at risk of professional hubris, of overstaying our welcome and not knowing when to retire, and of thereby tarnishing our own legacy. Gracián thus bluntly warns his readers,
Don’t hang around to be a setting sun. The sensible person’s maxim: abandon things before they abandon you. Know how to turn an ending into a triumph… Someone sharp retires a racehorse at the right time, not waiting until everyone laughs when it falls in mid-race.
Unfortunately, however, our own susceptibility to blandishments and lack of self-awareness tends to work against us. Over the course of a long and distinguished career, vernal confidence slowly calcifies into senescent self-satisfaction. And under the moist, palliative warmth of public approbation the accuracy of one’s perceptions of one’s own capabilities can easily begin to molder and crumble. As La Rochefoucauld noted, all too frequently,
We are elevated to a rank and dignity above ourselves. We are often engaged in a new profession for which nature has not adapted us. All these conditions have each an air which belong to them, but which does not always agree with our natural manner. This change of fortune often changes our air and our manner, and augments the air of dignity, which is always false when it is too marked, and when it is not united and amalgamated with that which nature has given us.
Some writers, such as the supremely capable Philippe de Béthune, who enjoyed an unusually long and distinguished career as a diplomat under three successive French rulers — Henri IV, Marie de Medici, and Louis XIII — suggested that as a matter of national policy, higher levels of administration should be age diverse. Older, more experienced ministers would thus help temper the ardor and callowness of more youthful royal council members, while the latter would keep their “colder and slower” older colleagues on their toes and prevent them from slipping into sleepy self-satisfaction. Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Youth and Age” largely came to the same conclusion, observing that ideally one should “compound employments of both” (younger and more senior officials), “because the virtues of either age may correct the defects of both.” In a characteristically eloquent passage, the Jacobean statesman observed that,
Young men, in the conduct and management of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles, which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown conveniences; use extreme remedies at first, and, that which doubleth all error, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
These observations and staffing proposals failed to address, however, the more fundamental underlying issue La Rochefoucauld alluded to — the ubiquity of what we now term the Peter Principle — i.e. the fact that individuals tend to get promoted to a level of “respective incompetence.” Moreover, as revered Roman historians such as Tacitus had long contended, power and prominence not only corrupts, it also liberates and exposes — unveiling and unleashing previously recessed character traits. Thus, lamented Ottaviano Fregoso,
The office shows the man: for just as vases that are cracked cannot readily be detected so long as they are empty, yet if liquid be put into them, show at once just where the defect lies — in like manner corrupt and depraved minds rarely disclose their defects save when they are filled with authority; because they are unable to bear the heavy weight of power, and so give way and pour out on every side greed, pride, wrath, insolence, and those tyrannical practices which they have within them.
On Not Losing One’s Sense of Self
How, then, could one ensure that one rose in the service of one’s country without succumbing to hubris, vanity, or one’s own rank ineptitude? Primarily, argued Montaigne, by engaging in an effort of continuous introspection and ruthless self-assessment. All too often, he observed, he had witnessed talented, idealistic individuals be irredeemably transformed over the course of their ascension, unable to recall the “distinction between the symbols and the office, and the ordinary man who fills it.” The earthy essayist and politician quipped that he had thus seen,
Some who transform and transubstantiate themselves into as many shapes and new beings as they undertake jobs, who carry their honored condition with them to the very privy… and who swell and puff up their souls, along with their natural way of speaking.
One should remind oneself of one’s humbler beginnings, he advised, avoid completely losing oneself in one’s work, and continue to cultivate many sources of moral and intellectual influence. Try to be more like Brutus, he offered, who, Plutarch tells us, took time to work on a study of Polybius on the eve of the battle of Philippi. This bout of intense inner reflection may not have helped him avert his tragic fate, but it did showcase his intellectual and moral worth for posterity. For only “little souls, buried under the weight of affairs,” did not know how to occasionally detach themselves from the present to look beyond the pinched horizons of their own daily existence. Engaging with the timeless beauty of art and literature helped nurture empathy and nourished the soul, while studying the lessons of history helped foster humility, put the mundane humdrum of the present into perspective, and honed political judgment. During the challenging period of his exile from Florence, a disgraced Machiavelli — who was himself desperate to reenter public life — had famously described how he found a measure of comfort in the company of great poets, authors, and historians from bygone eras,
On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.
Writing a half-century later, Montaigne could only approve of this ritualistic act of silent communion. Indeed, in one of the most famous and stirring passages of the Essays, he remarks that every human being, regardless of his or her responsibilities and/or station in life, should seek to preserve for themselves “a backshop” of the soul, “wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.” Self-reflection, he was convinced, could exert a welcome restraining effect on one’s petty ambitions, allowing one to slowly reacquaint oneself with what made a life spent in government genuinely meaningful and worthwhile: the quiet dignity of public service, the uplifting grandeur of civic patriotism, the wholesome pride tied to enacting positive change. After all, he added, greatness of the soul is “not so much in pressing upward and forward as knowing how to govern and circumscribe oneself.”
Despite its gallery of slimy sycophants and haughty hypocrites, and notwithstanding its winding maze of moral snares and personal hazards, there remained a vital, even noble, aspect to entering government service. As Montaigne’s intellectual fellow traveler and close friend, the theologian Pierre Charron stated, renouncing all participation in public life through a bloated sense of high-mindedness was simply another form of pridefulness parading as virtue, which deserved, therefore, to be “rigorously condemned.”
To flee the world and hide oneself, for whatever private or individual motive, while we have the means to profit another person, and aid the public, is to become a deserter, to bury one’s talent, to hide one’s light.
Instead, with a stoic measure of self-discipline, one must repeatedly remind oneself of one’s intellectual limitations and moral imperfections, and of the need for continuous self-improvement. “We must always know how to distinguish and separate ourselves from our public charges,” he urged, echoing his friend from Bordeaux, before reminding his readers that,
The skillful man will perform his office well but never forget to judge clearly the folly, the vice, the knavishness he finds there. He will exercise his charge because this is the practice in his country; it is useful to the public and can also be to himself; this is the way the world runs and he should do nothing to damage it. One must make use and avail oneself of the world as one finds it; but nevertheless consider it a thing alien to oneself, know how to enjoy oneself apart from it, commune confidently with one’s own inner goodness, and at the worst walk by oneself.
Pierre Charron, like all the other weathered policymakers cited in this essay, was under no illusions as to the difficulties tied to such a delicate internal balancing act. Nevertheless, he and his counterparts in early modern England, France, Italy, and Spain all deemed it necessary to put their detailed recommendations in writing, not only for the benefit of their contemporaries in government, but also for that of their successors. Their vibrant discussions of the ethics and challenges of working in policy are not just deeply soulful — they are also often mordantly witty and surprisingly relevant.
So next time you are browsing through a second-hand bookstore, feeling downcast after the most recent bout of bureaucratic wrangling or professional backstabbing, veer away from the self-help and business psychology aisles, with their brazen lettering, blunt recommendations, and catchy titles. Instead, pick up a musty, dog-eared copy of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Montaigne’s Essays, or Baltasar Gracián’s Art of Wordly Wisdom. After all, as Harry Truman famously said after departing the “great white jail” of the White House, “the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”
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Iskander Rehman is an Ax:son Johnson Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, and the Senior Fellow for Strategic Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council. He is a contributing editor at War on the Rocks and can be followed on twitter @IskanderRehman .
Image: This is a faithful photographic reproduction of Andrea Mantegna’s Court of Gonzaga, accessed via Wikimedia Commons
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warontherocks.com · by Iskander Rehman · December 22, 2022
13. Zelenskyy thanks 'every American,' sees 'turning point'
Zelenskyy thanks 'every American,' sees 'turning point'
AP · by ZEKE MILLER, LISA MASCARO and E. EDUARDO CASTILLO · December 21, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy told cheering U.S. legislators during a defiant wartime visit to the nation’s capital on Wednesday that against all odds his country still stands, thanking Americans for helping to fund the war effort with money that is “not charity,” but an “investment” in global security and democracy.
The whirlwind stop in Washington — his first known trip outside his country since Russia invaded in February — was aimed at reinvigorating support for his country in the U.S. and around the world at a time when there is concern that allies are growing weary of the costly war and its disruption to global food and energy supplies.
Zelenskyy called the tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military and economic assistance provided over the past year vital to Ukraine’s efforts to beat back Russia and appealed for even more in the future.
“Your money is not charity,” he sought to reassure both those in the room and those watching at home. “It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.”
Just before his arrival, the U.S. announced a new $1.8 billion military aid package, including for the first time Patriot surface-to-air missiles. And Congress planned to vote this week on a fresh spending package that includes about $45 billion in additional emergency assistance to Ukraine.
The speech to Congress came after President Joe Biden hosted Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for strategy consultations, saying the U.S. and Ukraine would maintain their “united defense” as Russia wages a “brutal assault on Ukraine’s right to exist as a nation.” Biden pledged to help bring about a “just peace.”
Zelenskyy told Biden that he had wanted to visit sooner and his visit now demonstrates that the “situation is under control, because of your support.”
The highly sensitive trip came after 10 months of a brutal war that has seen tens of thousands of casualties on both sides and devastation for Ukrainian civilians.
Zelenskyy traveled to Washington aboard a U.S. Air Force jet. The visit had been long sought by both sides, but the right conditions only came together in the last 10 days, U.S. officials said, after high-level discussions about the security both of Zelenskyy and of his people while he was outside of Ukraine. Zelenskyy spent less than 10 hours in Washington before beginning the journey back to Ukraine.
In his remarks to lawmakers, Zelenskky harked back to U.S. victories in the Battle of the Bulge, a turning point against Nazi Germany in World War II, and the Revolutionary War Battle of Saratoga, an American victory that helped draw France’s aid for U.S. independence. The Ukrainian leader predicted that next year would be a “turning point” in the conflict, “when Ukrainian courage and American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom — the freedom of people who stand for their values.”
Zelenskyy received thunderous applause from members of Congress and presented lawmakers with a Ukrainian flag autographed by front-line troops in Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s contested Donetsk province. The flag was displayed behind him on the rostrum by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris. Pelosi, in turn, presented Zelenskyy with an American flag that had flown over the Capitol that day, and Zelenskyy pumped it up and down as he exited the chamber.
Declaring in his speech that Ukraine “will never surrender,” Zelenskyy warned that the stakes of the conflict were greater than just the fate of his nation — that democracy worldwide is being tested.
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“This battle cannot be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide protection,” he said, speaking in English for what he had billed as a “speech to Americans.”
Earlier, in a joint news conference with Biden, Zelenskyy was pressed on how Ukraine would try to bring an end to the conflict. He rejected Biden’s framing of finding a “just peace,” saying, “For me as a president, ‘just peace’ is no compromises.” He said the war would end once Ukraine’s sovereignty, freedom and territorial integrity were restored, and Russia had paid back Ukraine for all the damage inflicted by its forces.
“There can’t be any ‘just peace’ in the war that was imposed on us,” he added.
Biden, for his part, said Russia was “trying to use winter as a weapon, but Ukrainian people continue to inspire the world.” During the news conference, he said Russian President Vladimir Putin had “no intention of stopping this cruel war.”
The two leaders appeared to share a warm rapport, laughing at each other’s comments and patting each other on the back throughout the visit, though Zelenskyy made clear he will continue to press Biden and other Western leaders for ever more support.
He said that after the Patriot system was up and running, “we will send another signal to President Biden that we would like to get more Patriots.”
“We are in the war,” Zelenskyy added with a smile, as Biden chuckled at the direct request. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Biden told Zelenskyy that it was “important for the American people, and for the world, to hear directly from you, Mr. President, about Ukraine’s fight, and the need to continue to stand together through 2023.”
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Zelenskyy had headed to Washington after making a daring and dangerous trip Tuesday to what he called the hottest spot on the 1,300-kilometer (800-mile) front line of the war, the city of Bakhmut.
Poland’s private broadcaster, TVN24, said Zelenskyy crossed into Poland early Wednesday on his way to Washington. The station showed footage of what appeared to be Zelenskyy arriving at a train station and being escorted to a motorcade of American SUVs. TVN24 said the video, partially blurred for security reasons, was shot in Przemysl, a Polish border town that has been the arrival point for many refugees fleeing the war.
Officials, citing security concerns, were cagey about Zelenskyy’s travel plans, but a U.S. official confirmed that Zelenskyy arrived on a U.S. Air Force jet that landed at Joint Base Andrews, just outside the capital, from the Polish city of Rzeszow.
Biden told Zelenskyy, who wore a combat-green sweatshirt and boots, that ”it’s an honor to be by your side.”
U.S. and Ukrainian officials have made clear they do not envision an imminent resolution to the war and are preparing for fighting to continue for some time. The latest infusion of U.S. money would be the biggest yet — and exceed Biden’s $37 billion request.
Biden repeated that while the U.S. will arm and train Ukraine, American forces will not be directly engaged in the war.
The latest U.S. military aid package includes not only a Patriot missile battery but precision guided bombs for fighter jets, U.S. officials said. It represents an expansion in the kinds of advanced weaponry intended to bolster Ukraine’s air defenses against what has been an increasing barrage of Russian missiles.
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Russia’s Foreign Ministry has said the delivery of the advanced surface-to-air missile system would be considered a provocative step and that the system and any crews accompanying it would be a legitimate target for Moscow’s military.
“It’s a defensive system,” Biden said of sending the missile system. “It’s not escalatory — it’s defensive.”
The visit comes at an important moment, with the White House bracing for greater resistance when Republicans take control of the House in January and give more scrutiny to aid for Ukraine. GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California has said his party will not write a “blank check” for Ukraine.
Zelenskky appeared well aware of political divisions in the U.S. over prolonged overseas spending, and called on the House and Senate lawmakers to ensure American leadership remains “bicameral and bipartisan.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer opened the chamber’s session on Wednesday by saying that passage of the aid package and confirmation of the new U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne M. Tracy, would send a strong signal that Americans stand “unequivocally” with Ukraine. Tracy was confirmed later on a 93-2 vote.
The Senate’s top Republican, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, said “the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests.” He said “defeating Russia’s aggression will help prevent further security crises in Europe.”
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Russia’s invasion, which began Feb. 24, has lost momentum. The illegally annexed provinces of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia remain fiercely contested.
With the fighting in the east at a stalemate, Moscow has used missiles and drones to attack Ukraine’s power equipment, hoping to leave people without electricity as freezing weather sets in.
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Castillo reported from Kyiv, Ukraine. Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri, Lolita C. Baldor, Tara Copp, Kevin Freking, Aamer Madhani, Chris Megerian and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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AP · by ZEKE MILLER, LISA MASCARO and E. EDUARDO CASTILLO · December 21, 2022
14. Amid a show of unity, Zelensky and Biden differ on some war needs
Excerpts:
But just because there’s unanimity in pushing back Moscow doesn’t mean that Washington and Kyiv are walking in lockstep.
“It was an opportunity for Biden and Zelensky to have a serious conversation about where are we going ... not to tell [Zelensky] what to do ... to make sure we’re aligned in overall objectives and understanding each other,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Biden remains worried about not pushing too far, too fast, for fear of escalation. Zelensky wants to make clear that he needs this continued support that, frankly, only the United States can provide.”
There are three different models of what a negotiated end to the war could look like, each of which has adherents within the administration. One, part of a peace plan Zelensky proposed last month, includes Russian withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory it currently occupies, including Crimea and areas of eastern Donbas it seized in 2014. Another is withdrawal to the 2014 lines. A third level of withdrawal would include Donbas, but not Crimea.
The latter two options Zelensky has made clear he will not support, noting that peace can only come when the Russian invaders have retreated from all occupied territory.
Amid a show of unity, Zelensky and Biden differ on some war needs
Behind the smiles and handshakes — and a new $1.85 billion military aid package — the Ukrainian president and his advisers continue to push Washington for advanced weaponry that Biden is reluctant to provide
By Karen DeYoung and Missy Ryan
Updated December 21, 2022 at 8:29 p.m. EST|Published December 21, 2022 at 8:13 p.m. EST
The Washington Post · by Karen DeYoung · December 22, 2022
Beyond the sincere expressions of Ukrainian gratitude and firm pledges of ongoing American support, President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Biden came together Wednesday with specific, and sometimes differing, goals for their meeting.
With a $47 billion U.S. aid package requested by Biden for 2023, both were keen to solidify support from the new, Republican-led House that takes over next month. It was important, a senior administration official said, for Zelensky to use his considerable in-person charisma in making the case to lawmakers “about how this really is a struggle for democracy.”
For Zelensky himself, the objective centered on appeals for more powerful weapons to enhance Ukraine’s ability to launch major offensives against entrenched Russian forces in the coming year. There was little indication that he succeeded, at least in the short term.
In a tweet labeled “My Christmas Wishlist,” posted earlier this month before this week’s announcement of another $1.85 billion worth of U.S. security assistance, Zelensky adviser Mykhailo Podolyak’s top five items included four that the Biden administration has declined to offer or help provide — including advanced battle tanks and long-range missiles. The fifth, the Patriot air-defense system, was included in the new aid package.
U.S. defense officials have said that Ukraine has enough tanks already, and that the U.S. M1 Abrams sought by Kyiv are too difficult to maintain and complex to operate. When asked at a joint news conference with Zelensky about the missiles, which would allow Ukrainian forces to strike targets inside Russian territory, Biden warned such weaponry could shatter NATO unity in support of Ukraine.
“They’re not looking to go to war with Russia,” he said of the alliance.
For its part, the administration was eager “to discuss [Zelensky’s] thinking about diplomacy. Where he is, and what he needs to make sure that Kyiv is in the strongest possible position so that we can accelerate the emergence of a negotiating table,” said a senior administration official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the historic visit.
The official reiterated the long-standing administration position that “it’s not for us to describe what diplomacy should look like, when it should begin, or what its red lines should be,” decisions that are for Ukraine to make.
But just because there’s unanimity in pushing back Moscow doesn’t mean that Washington and Kyiv are walking in lockstep.
“It was an opportunity for Biden and Zelensky to have a serious conversation about where are we going ... not to tell [Zelensky] what to do ... to make sure we’re aligned in overall objectives and understanding each other,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Biden remains worried about not pushing too far, too fast, for fear of escalation. Zelensky wants to make clear that he needs this continued support that, frankly, only the United States can provide.”
There are three different models of what a negotiated end to the war could look like, each of which has adherents within the administration. One, part of a peace plan Zelensky proposed last month, includes Russian withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory it currently occupies, including Crimea and areas of eastern Donbas it seized in 2014. Another is withdrawal to the 2014 lines. A third level of withdrawal would include Donbas, but not Crimea.
The latter two options Zelensky has made clear he will not support, noting that peace can only come when the Russian invaders have retreated from all occupied territory.
But in their face-to-face meeting on Wednesday, Biden sought Zelensky’s “current thoughts about what that should look like,” the senior official said, while acknowledging that “it’s sort of an academic discussion at this point,” since there are no indications that Russia is interested in talking.
“What the Russians want is a cease-fire, with time to refresh, regroup and train new forces,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Russia is trying to buy time” following its poor showing against Ukrainian counteroffensives that regained significant territory in the fall.
At Russia’s Defense Ministry end-of-the-year meeting Wednesday, both President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced new initiatives that were an indirect acknowledgment of prior failings. Shoigu proposed increasing the size of the armed forces from 1 million this year to 1.5 million, deploying 20 new divisions and changing the mobilization structure.
Putin said he approved of the changes, but noted problems in combat operations that needed “to be addressed specially,” including communications, command and control, and counter-battery warfare, according to Russia’s Tass news agency. He instructed Shoigu to provide Russian troops, many of whom have been ill-equipped, with weapons, medical kits, rations and footwear “at the most advanced and highest level,” Tass reported, because “there can be no trifles on the battlefield.”
“We have no financing constraints and the country and the government give all that the Army requests,” Putin said. “I hope that the response will be formulated accordingly and the corresponding results will be achieved.”
While Ukraine’s top military leaders have said they expect renewed Russian offensives, perhaps even against Kyiv, within the next few months, a senior State Department official said the United States believes the Kremlin is conflicted, with some Russian officials eager to capture more territory and others concerned about whether their forces are prepared to undertake major military operations.
“Certainly there are some who I think would want to pursue offensives in Ukraine,” this official said. “There are others who have real questions about the capacity for Russia to actually do that.”
Russia is facing “very significant shortages of ammunition,” which is “increasingly a problem” for Kremlin forces.
But while there may be some internal haggling over tactics, U.S. officials said, there has been no dissension detected within the Kremlin when it comes to strategy, or indication of serious proposals that the Russians should cut their losses, withdraw and pursue peace.
New U.S. and allied-supplied weapons systems, particularly the sophisticated Patriot air defense, will aid in confronting ongoing Russian airstrikes targeting Ukrainian infrastructure that have left much of the country in the dark and without heat as winter sets in. The goal, senior U.S. defense officials said, is to provide a “layered” defense against strikes by Russian cruise missiles and drones.
“This isn’t a comprehensive air defense solution for Ukraine,” one defense official said of the newly approved Patriot system. “This is another step in many steps that we have pursued. ... With this one [Patriot] battery, we will be offering a formidable capability, but the United States and allies will still be working to round out Ukraine’s air defense.”
But some senior Ukrainian officials maintain that the only way to stop the Russian air assault is to hit it where it originates. That means “combined strikes against the stationary targets of the enemy, first against the airfields of the base of the Russian strike aircraft, and the areas of the launch positions of ballistic and cruise missiles,” Mykhailo Zabrodskyi, deputy chairman of Ukraine’s National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee, wrote this week in an article for Ukrinform, the state news agency.
To do that, he wrote, Ukraine needs long-range missiles, specifically the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS — which appeared on the wish list of Podolyak, the Zelensky adviser.
The other items on his list — Leopard and Marder battle tanks from Germany, and M1 Abrams tanks from the United States — are equally unlikely in the short term.
Germany repeated Wednesday its reluctance to provide tanks until the United States does so first. While it is a German priority to “support Ukraine as much as we can,” government spokesperson Steffan Hebestreit told reporters Wednesday in Berlin, “the other is to keep NATO out of direct conflict with Russia. The third is that Germany will not go it alone. The fact is that no main battle tank of Western provenance has been delivered to Ukraine to date.”
Even without immediate success on the weapons front, the stakes for the Ukrainian president’s visit have been high. “Zelensky is trying to strengthen and thereby extend the political foundations of support for Ukraine in the United States and by extension the whole free world,” said Daniel Fried, who served as a top State Department diplomat for Europe and U.S. ambassador to Poland. “That all depends on the Americans staying the course, and he wants to put a human face on it.”
For now, that goal appears to have been achieved. “What may be different” in the new Congress “is that there will be loud voices, not particularly influential voices, but loud voices, that will make the case that this money needs to be directed elsewhere, that we’re wasting precious resources on overseas adventures,” the senior administration official said.
But “our honest expectation is that we will continue to see strong bipartisan support for Ukraine. We expect to see it in the next Congress.”
John Hudson and Loveday Morris in Berlin contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Karen DeYoung · December 22, 2022
15. Inside the Army’s Newest Spy Plane
I am surprised we want to show thsi off.
Excerpt:
Defense One was invited to see the Leidos aircraft shortly before it was put under the Army’s control and agreed not to share the location of the plane's home base. The extra aircraft will allow the Army to deploy to different locations or participate in more exercises and experiments, Chagnon said.
Inside the Army’s Newest Spy Plane
Already watching over Ukraine, Leidos’ ARTEMIS is part of the service’s growing fleet of contractor-owned intelligence aircraft.
defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber
From a distance, the all-white business jet parked neatly in a hangar underneath a giant American flag looks a lot like the other sleek, luxurious private planes arriving and departing from this Virginia airport. But inside, this plane is far more working class.
The cabin, full of server racks, looks more like an IT closet than an executive aircraft. The seats are cloth and two computer consoles are connected to a dozen or so antennas protruding from the plane’s belly.
To the U.S. Army, this plane—or something like it—is a ticket to the future of warfare, built to monitor the complex communications of an adversary nation-state from standoff distance, rather than the simpler chatter of insurgents right below.
Called ARTEMIS, the plane uses its antennas and computers to intercept and decipher enemy communications. The aircraft itself is made by Bombardier, but the specialized modifications are made by Virginia-based defense and technology firm Leidos.
“These [planes] can see very far when operating at 40,000 feet,” Mike Chagnon, deputy group president of Leidos Defense Group, said in an interview.
It’s the second Challenger 650 that Leidos has modified like this for the Army as part of a technology demonstration. L3Harris Technologies are also developing similar business jet intelligence planes, which it calls ARES.
The Leidos and L3Harris planes are helping the Army figure out its long-term plans for new, high-flying intelligence planes, an effort called High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System or HADES. Those planes will replace the turboprops heavily used to survey the battlefields over Iraq and Afghanistan for insurgents and roadside bombs.
“They want a multi-layer sensing capabilities from space to mud,” Chagnon said. “This is the airborne layer.”
Defense One was invited to see the Leidos aircraft shortly before it was put under the Army’s control and agreed not to share the location of the plane's home base. The extra aircraft will allow the Army to deploy to different locations or participate in more exercises and experiments, Chagnon said.
In November 2021, the first ARTEMIS aircraft was pulled from an Army exercise in the United States and deployed to Europe to be part of the NATO effort to monitor Russian forces near the Ukraine border. Over 10 days, the plane flew from Arizona to Virginia where it received some upgrades before flying to Europe, Chagnon said.
“It really hasn’t been home since,” he said.
As of Dec. 1, the first plane has flown more than 370 missions, racking up more than 3,200 flight hours for combatant commanders around the world, Leidos CEO Roger Krone said at the small turnover ceremony in the hangar.
“You're flying basically in...a mow-the-lawn-type pattern for 10 hours [and] you're collecting massive amounts of data,” Chagnon said.
The deployed aircraft flies an average of six days per week for nine to 10 hours per day, Chagnon said. The planes are unarmed and don’t fly in so-called “contested” airspace that’s defended by surface-to-air missiles and fighter jets.
“We're not going into the contested environment,” he said. “We're looking inside a contested environment from an altitude and a standoff, whereas our counterinsurgency aircraft were flying in, just looking down, in an uncontested environment.”
As much as the aircraft represents a new generation of conflict, it could also represent a new way of buying weapons.
The planes are owned, operated, and maintained by Leidos employees, not the Army. But, through satellites, Army officials stateside are able to connect to the plane’s sensors remotely, Chagnon said. The Army essentially pays Leidos a by-the-hour fee.
“It benefits the government and it benefits the country,” Chagnon said. “We're responsible for keeping the aircraft in the air. And they [the Army] no longer have to have that long logistics tail, which is sometimes the most expensive part of a government program.
“They can turn the spigot off on these anytime they want,” he continued. “So, we're incentivized to continue to innovate on these [planes and] make them more useful, and…find as many efficiencies as we can to keep the mission-capability rate high. The first ARTEMIS plane took Leidos about 18 months to deliver, and the second is on track to be delivered ahead of schedule in just five months, Krone said.
Krone, several times, noted that the company and the Army had put “skin in the game” to be able to buy and convert the business jets into militarized intelligence planes.
“This delivery is the culmination of a lot of really hard work [and] a lot of sharing of the risk,” he said.
The technology is open, so different types of sensors made by different companies can be installed. Some of the sensors are government-owned, others purchased by Leidos.
Leidos has also purchased two larger Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft that it intends to convert into intelligence planes for another Army spy-jet competition called ATHENA-R. It’s competing against an L3Harris and MAG Aerospace team and Sierra Nevada. Those companies are also offering modified Global 6500 aircraft. ATHENA-R aircraft will also be owned and operated by contractors and will be a bridge to the HADES program.
For Leidos, a government contractor better known for its IT and government services, ARTEMIS represents efforts to diversify its portfolio. In 2020, the company purchased Alabama-based Dynetics, a company that specializes in directed energy, space, drone, and hypersonic technology.
“We are a people company,” Krone said. “This is very unusual” that “there's something I can point to.”
defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber
16. Musk Has Reduced Twitter’s Ability to Spot Foreign Disinformation, a Former Data Scientist Says
Excerpts:
John Hultquist, head of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, told Defense One, “Operations during the midterms have never been as strong as those seen during presidential elections, but we did see efforts by all the usual suspects this year. It’s interesting that some of these actors were more interested in suggesting they’d had effects than actually trying to affect election outcomes.”
Said Hultquist of foreign disinformation efforts generally: “We expect more will emerge.”
Musk Has Reduced Twitter’s Ability to Spot Foreign Disinformation, a Former Data Scientist Says
Staff layoffs are just one way the new CEO has undermined the platform’s three-legged approach to the problem.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
It’s not clear how Twitter can filter out foreign disinformation now that CEO Elon Musk has gutted the teams meant to prevent a repeat of Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 presidential election, says one former Twitter senior data scientist.
In the wake of that election, the company took various measures to ward off threats to itself and its users. Perhaps most importantly, executives established a Trust and Safety Council to advise them on issues like harassment, stalking, doxxing, child abuse, self-harm, and foreign election interference.
Melissa Ingle—who was until November a senior data scientist at Twitter—worked closely with the council as she wrote and monitored machine-learning algorithms to detect political misinformation on Twitter.
“We tended to pay closer attention to a country when the election was approaching. For example, elections in Brazil, the U.S. midterms, etc.,” Ingle said in an interview.
By 2022, she said, foreign-political-influence detection at Twitter was “a three-legged stool,” each part reinforcing the entire structure. The first was the Trust and Safety Council and the researchers and culture and language experts who helped them understand the nuances of particular countries’ influence operations.
“I'm not an expert on politics in ANY country, and these people would help us understand what to look for,” she wrote.
Ingles and other data scientists comprised the second leg. She described her work as writing artificial-intelligence algorithms using natural language processing to flag possible influence efforts.
“The algorithms are necessary because of the volume of tweets - there were approx 30M tweets per hour. No human workforce could cover this,” she wrote.
The final leg was human moderators, who applied their judgment to internal and external reports of disinformation.
“You need all three groups,” she said, and by the 2022 U.S. midterms, they were all there.
Musk has since attacked each of those legs.
She says that Elon Musk laid off all three data scientist working on algorithms related to disinformation, about 60% of the 550 employees working on trust and safety issues are gone as well. Musk also disbanded the volunteer trust and safety council (about 100 members), and 80% of human reviewers. I'm not clear on how he intends to combat misinfo with the current staff.”
Ingle said that even though the models she created at Twitter still exist they need constant updating to remain accurate and relevant.
“As the nature of political discourse changes, a data scientist needs to be there to update the model. A machine-learning algorithm would not know to look for a term that is new, and old terms fall out of use. That's why it's important to have people to write and update these things,” she said.
But that’s not all that Musk is doing. He’s also taken a swipe at Twitter’s work with the U.S. government to track foreign influence operations. Since 2017, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, or FITF, has worked with Twitter and other social media companies to “identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.”I. Musk has leaked internal Twitter communications in a bid to to paint information sharing between the FBI and Twitter as nefarious (without actually exposing anything illegal or even, arguably, surprising).
So Twitter’s ability to spot or respond to foreign disinformation is now severely compromised. But China, Russia, Iran and other state actors have not abandoned their efforts to sway U.S. public opinion on social media. On Monday, cybersecurity company Mandiant released a new report showing that actors connected to the governments of Russia, China, and Iran, continued in their efforts to try to influence the U.S. population. But they've adapted their tactics, with a new focus on undermining trust in elections generally.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
John Hultquist, head of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, told Defense One, “Operations during the midterms have never been as strong as those seen during presidential elections, but we did see efforts by all the usual suspects this year. It’s interesting that some of these actors were more interested in suggesting they’d had effects than actually trying to affect election outcomes.”
Said Hultquist of foreign disinformation efforts generally: “We expect more will emerge.”
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
17. China’s Threat to Global Democracy
Long read. But an important one to ponder.
It reinforces my thesis: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.
China’s Threat to Global Democracy | Journal of Democracy
The Chinese Communist Party is deadly serious about its authoritarian designs, and it is bent on promoting them. It is time for the world’s democracies to get serious, too.
December 2022
By Michael Beckley and Hal Brands
journalofdemocracy.org
The Chinese Communist Party is deadly serious about its authoritarian designs, and it is bent on promoting them. It is time for the world’s democracies to get serious, too.
December 2022
By and
Since ancient times, contests among great powers have often involved contests of ideas. The Peloponnesian War was not simply a clash between a regnant Sparta and a rising Athens, but also pitted a liberal, seagoing protodemocracy that saw itself as the “school of Hellas” against a militarized, agrarian slave state. The ideological threat that revolutionary France posed to the European order was just as serious as the military one. In the run-up to the Second World War, fascist powers and democracies squared off; during the Cold War, the superpowers divided much of the world along ideological lines.
The intertwining of ideology and geopolitics should not be surprising: At root, foreign policy is how a country seeks to make the world safe for its own way of life. Many analysts accept that U.S. foreign policy is driven by ideological impulses. Even hardcore international-relations “realists” concede the importance of ideology when they bemoan the grip that liberal passions have on Washington’s statecraft. Curiously, though, there has been more resistance to the idea that there may be an ideological component to the grand strategy of America’s chief rival—the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing is not making any “grand strategic effort to undermine democracy and spread autocracy,” writes one leading Sinologist. Its foreign policy is based on “pragmatic decisions about Chinese interests.” Realists say that China plays Realpolitik while America ignores John Quincy Adams’s 1821 advice to go “not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Other analysts suggest that it is a distraction or even a “delusion” to emphasize the ideological aspects of Sino-American rivalry at the expense of Beijing’s military and economic challenge.
In fact, the reverse is true: To grasp the Chinese challenge, we must grasp its ideological dimensions. If Woodrow Wilson and his followers wanted to make the world safe for democracy, the PRC’s rulers want to do the same for autocracy. For them, autocracy is not simply a means of political control or a ticket to self-enrichment, but a set of deeply held ideas about the proper relationship between rulers and the masses. In his October 2022 keynote speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—during which he had himself installed for a third term as top leader, while on the final day having his predecessor Hu Jintao unceremoniously escorted out of the room—Xi Jinping insisted that “constantly writing a new chapter in the Sinicization of Marxism is the solemn historical responsibility of contemporary Chinese communists,” and made it clear that “the authority of the Party Central Committee” will continue to be at “the core of leadership in controlling the overall situation.” Everything in the speech hinges on the CCP remaining in sole charge of “developing socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
This belief in the superiority of an autocratic Chinese model coexists with deep insecurity: The PRC is a brutally illiberal regime in a world led by a liberal hegemon, a circumstance from which the CCP draws a sense of pervasive danger and a strong desire to refashion the world order so that the PRC’s particular form of government is not just protected but privileged. That is why a powerful but anxious Chinese regime is now engaged in an aggressive effort to make the world safe for autocracy and to corrupt and destabilize democracies. Democracy promotion may be out of style in U.S. foreign policy, but what the scholar Jason Brownlee calls “democracy prevention” is very much at the heart of Chinese strategy today.
The Sources of Chinese Conduct
In some ways, China’s bid for primacy in Asia and globally is a new chapter in the history’s oldest story: As countries grow more powerful, they become more interested in reshaping the world. Rising states seek influence, respect, and power; they discover vital interests in places that were simply beyond their reach before. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a rising Germany demanded its “place in the sun”; after the Civil War, a reunified and economically ascendant United States of America tossed its rivals out of the Western Hemisphere and began throwing its weight around globally. As the great realist scholar Nicholas Spykman wrote, “the number of cases in which a strong dynamic state has stopped expanding . . . or has set modest limits to its power aims has been very few indeed.” Given how rapidly China’s power has increased over the past four decades, it would be very odd if Beijing was not asserting itself overseas.
Yet China is moved by more than the cold logic of geopolitics. It is also reaching for glory as a matter of historical destiny. China’s leaders view themselves as heirs to a Chinese state that was a superpower for most of recorded history. A series of Chinese empires claimed “all under heaven” as their mandate and commanded deference from smaller states along the imperial periphery. In Beijing’s view, a U.S.-led world in which China is a second-tier power is not the historical norm but a profoundly galling exception. That order was created after the Second World War, at the tail end of a “century of humiliation” during which rapacious foreign powers had plundered a divided China. The CCP’s mandate is to set history aright by returning China to the top of the heap.
And then there is the ideological imperative. A strong, proud China might still pose problems for Washington even if a liberal-democratic government held sway in Beijing. That China is ruled by autocrats committed to ruthlessly suppressing liberalism at home turbocharges Chinese revisionism globally. A deeply authoritarian state can never feel secure in its own rule because it does not enjoy the freely given consent of the governed; it can never feel safe in a world dominated by democracies because liberal international norms challenge illiberal domestic practices. “Autocracies,” writes China scholar Minxin Pei, “simply are incapable of practicing liberalism abroad while maintaining authoritarianism at home.”
This is no exaggeration. The infamous Document Number 9, a political directive issued almost a decade ago at the outset of Xi’s presidency, shows that the CCP sees a liberal world order as inherently threatening. “Because China and the United States have longstanding conflicts over their different ideologies, social systems, and foreign policies,” a Chinese military document stated in the 1990s, “it will prove impossible to fundamentally improve Sino-U.S. relations.” For decades, in fact, Chinese officials have alleged that Washington has been waging a deliberate, well-orchestrated campaign—a “smokeless World War III,” in Deng Xiaoping’s words—to weaken and fatally subvert the CCP. Deng blamed the United States for being behind the “so-called democrats” who dared to protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Even when the United States has engaged China, the latter’s leaders have detected a plot to topple their regime. In 1998, Deng’s successor Jiang Zemin warned his colleagues that whether the United States was taking a stance of “containment” or “engagement” toward the PRC, Washington’s real goal was to further a “political plot” to “divide our country” and “change our country’s socialist system.” After Jiang came Hu Jintao, who spoke to his Foreign Ministry in 2003 of the “grim reality that Western hostile forces are still implementing Westernization and splittist political designs on China.”
Chinese leaders are wrong if they think that the United States is actively seeking to overthrow the CCP regime. They are not wrong, however, to think that a world rooted in liberal values is one in which their own rule must be perpetually precarious. In an international system built on respect for human rights and a preference for democracy, governments that murder their own citizens risk censure, ostracism, and punishment—as happened to Beijing after Tiananmen Square in 1989 and is happening again today in response to the brutalization of the Uyghur minority. An international system in which democracies are strong, vibrant, and globally engaged is one in which subversive tendencies will continually tempt states ruled by tyrants: In 1989, Tiananmen Square protesters erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty, while those in Hong Kong thirty years later publicly waved American flags and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In what it is and what it does, a hegemonic democracy threatens the Chinese regime.
The resulting insecurity has powerful implications for Beijing’s statecraft. Chinese leaders feel a compulsion to make international norms and institutions friendlier to illiberal rule. They seek to push dangerous liberal influences away from the PRC’s borders: In Beijing’s mind, writes Timothy Heath, a “harmonious Asia” would feature a “political order shaped by Chinese political principles.” The rulers in Beijing feel that they must wrest international authority away from a democratic superpower with a long history of bringing autocracies to ruin. And as an authoritarian China becomes powerful, it inevitably looks to strengthen the forces of illiberalism—and to weaken those of democracy—as a way to enhance its influence and bolster its own model. China is doing so, moreover, at a time when the world, and its prevailing distribution of ideological power, presents the CCP with both keen anxieties and tantalizing opportunities.
Anxiety and Opportunity
At the darkest moment of the Second World War, there were perhaps a dozen democracies in the world. As late as 1989, there were twice as many autocratic governments as democracies. Twenty years later, however, democracies outnumbered autocracies 100 to 78, and the share of the world’s population living under autocracy had fallen by half. From a U.S. perspective, democracy’s global advance was one of the most hopeful developments of the post-1945 era. From the perspective of China’s leaders, however, it was a clear sign that the liberal world order was rigged against their form of government and needed to be changed before it destroyed their regime.
According to Beijing’s narrative, the problem started at the beginning of the postwar period, when the United States exploited its dominance to inject radical liberal ideas into international institutions. For example, the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was modeled on the U.S. Bill of Rights. The UDHR states that all humans are born free and have the right to overthrow governments that fail to respect that freedom. In later decades, Beijing watched in horror as dozens of nations, including South Korea and Taiwan, evolved into prosperous democracies. The expanding global posse of democracies subsequently used military force, economic sanctions, and an array of media and human-rights organizations to undermine dozens of autocratic regimes—not just those of tin-pot dictators, but also the Soviet Union and nearly the PRC itself in 1989.
Although PRC leaders long chafed at this ideological pressure, it was bearable so long as China enjoyed a booming economy and a stable periphery. When Gross Domestic Product was growing three times faster than the democratic average during the 1990s and 2000s, it was easy for Beijing to persuade people at home and abroad that authoritarianism was best for China, if not for other countries.
But now, China’s economy is slowing, and the regime is coming under greater domestic pressure—witness the large-scale protests that broke out against Xi’s covid-zero policy in multiple cities and dozens of universities in late 2022. Beijing confronts growing international criticism and resistance on multiple fronts. Around the world, negative views of China have surged to highs not seen since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. The Taiwanese have become more determined than ever to maintain their de facto sovereignty. Japan is doubling its defense spending and explicitly preparing for war against China this decade. Under a new democratically elected government, the Philippines is bolstering its defense ties with the United States. India is massing forces on China’s western border. The European Union recently labeled China a “systemic rival” and suspended its investment treaty with Beijing. Even the UN, in which China holds numerous leadership positions, recently released a report declaring that Beijing may have committed “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang. Buffeted by growing headwinds, autocracy is no longer such an easy sell for the CCP. China’s citizens were willing to forgo political rights when their wallets and their country’s international status were swelling, but it is an open question whether they will continue to do so under harsher conditions. That question is especially pressing as regards China’s millennials, born in the 1980s and 1990s, who have known nothing but upward economic and international mobility.
China’s rulers also have long understood what political scientists have proven empirically: Autocracies often fall in waves, as revolutionary activity in one country inspires popular uprisings in others. A democratic domino effect brought down communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. The self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor in late 2010 set much of the Arab world aflame. The lesson is that revolution anywhere is a threat to autocracy everywhere. Xi Jinping knows this: Not long after the Arab Spring, he privately fretted to President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden that China was a target of “color revolutions” and vulnerable to the type of upheaval engulfing the Middle East.
The CCP has responded with stepped-up repression over the past decade—jailing dissidents, mobilizing security forces, censoring information, and preempting popular unrest. Yet China is now strong enough that it can do more than just hunker down in the face of foreign pressure. Xi believes that the CCP’s domestic power will be enhanced if authoritarianism is prevalent and democracies are dysfunctional—fellow despots will not punish China for rights abuses, and the Chinese people will not want to emulate the chaos of liberal systems. He thinks that preventing revolts against authoritarianism in other countries will lower the odds of such a revolt erupting in China. And he believes that silencing critics abroad will limit the challenges facing the CCP within China. Xi sees rolling back democracy overseas as part of his plan to secure his regime at home.
Democracy Prevention
The PRC wrote its first formal national-security strategy under Xi, in 2014. Whereas regime security used to be one of many government priorities (albeit the most important), it is now the priority. All other issues—trade, diplomacy, military modernization—are adjuncts to keeping the CCP in power. As a result, every issue is a matter of regime security. A trade war with rich democracies is no longer just an economic disagreement; it is an assault on the Chinese state and a possible prelude to a shooting war.
Whereas previous Chinese administrations espoused “stability maintenance,” the focus under Xi is on threat prevention. Chinese documents compare popular outbursts to cancerous tumors that need to be cut out quickly before they spread to vital organs of the state. Ideologies that could rival communism, including liberalism and Islamism, are seen as infectious diseases against which China’s population must be immunized. As Sheena Chestnut Greitens has shown, these medical metaphors justify targeting and “treating” people long before they display threatening symptoms. The clearest illustration is in Xinjiang, where China has extrajudicially locked up more than a million Uyghurs. But China is applying this preventive logic beyond its borders too.
Beijing spends billions of dollars annually on an “antidemocratic toolkit” of nongovernmental organizations, media outlets, diplomats, advisors, hackers, and bribes all designed to prop up autocrats and sow discord in democracies. The CCP provides fellow autocracies with guns, money, and protection from UN censure while slapping foreign human-rights advocates with sanctions. Chinese officials offer their authoritarian brethren riot-control gear and advice on building a surveillance state; PRC trade, investment, and loans allow those dictators to avoid Western conditionality regarding anticorruption or good governance.
Beijing uses its globe-spanning media organs to tout the accomplishments of illiberal rule while highlighting democratic governments’ flaws and hypocrisies. China works with fellow authoritarian regimes, such as Vladimir Putin’s in Russia, to push autocrat-friendly norms of internet management in international institutions and standards-setting bodies. Beijing also helps other illiberal regimes near or in Central Asia to hound and repress exiles and dissidents. Not least, China is waging a campaign of political and military coercion to destabilize Taiwan, a flourishing nation whose very existence disproves the CCP’s claims that Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. The fundamental problem that Taiwan poses for China, write Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, “comes from Taiwan’s simply being what it is—a modern Chinese society that is economically prosperous and politically democratic.”
It might be tempting to dismiss China’s democracy-prevention efforts as “world politics as usual.” After all, autocrats have been colluding to hold liberalism at bay ever since the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia banded together to fight Revolutionary France more than two centuries ago. But China’s ideological assault is especially threatening, for three reasons.
First, China’s global reach is more pervasive than that of any prior illiberal power. Its massive economy and 1.4 billion consumers arm it with powerful carrots and sticks to silence free speech far beyond its borders. Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Japan, Lithuania, Norway, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States—plus dozens of private companies and individuals from democratic nations—have recently experienced China’s economic wrath. In many cases, the punishment has been vastly disproportionate to the supposed crime. For example, China slapped steep tariffs on nearly all of Australia’s major exports after Canberra requested an international investigation into the origins of covid-19.
In addition to economic weapons, China holds leadership posts in the UN and other major international institutions that give Beijing chances to bend global governance in an illiberal direction. For example, when Belarus violated international norms by forcing down an airliner that was carrying a wanted dissident in 2021, China exercised its authority as head of the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization to shield the brutal Alyaksandr Lukashenka regime from censure. And if diplomacy and economic inducements fail, Beijing can use its navy, now the world’s largest, and conventional missile force to coerce countries into compliance or even to wipe democracies off the map, as China is threatening to do to Taiwan.
Second, China’s illiberal campaign capitalizes on a disturbing global trend: As Freedom House reports, authoritarianism has spread during every year since 2006, while democracy has retreated. This “democratic recession” has given China a window of ideological opportunity to promote a vision of a hierarchical and harmonious society and a critique of a disorderly and decadent West. Around the world, public faith in democratic institutions has sunk to lows not seen since the 1930s. The political soil has grown ripe for authoritarianism to take root, and China, Russia, and other authoritarian states are fertilizing this antidemocratic plant with digital disinformation that their propagandists pump into the social-media feeds of billions worldwide.
The third and most important factor supercharging China’s efforts is the ongoing digital revolution. The CCP possesses data-collection and messaging power to rival that of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. By combining artificial intelligence (AI) and “big data” with cyber, biometric, and speech- and facial-recognition technologies, Beijing is pioneering a system that will allow dictators to know everything about their subjects—what people are saying and viewing, whom they hang out with, what they like and dislike, and where they are located at any given time—and to discipline citizens instantly by restricting their access to credit, education, employment, medical care, telecommunications, and travel if not to hunt them down for more medieval forms of punishment.
This technological revolution threatens to upend the global balance between democracy and authoritarianism by making repression more affordable and effective than ever. Instead of relying on expensive and potentially rebellious armies to brutalize a resentful population, an autocrat will now have more insidious means of control. Millions of spies can be replaced with hundreds of millions of unblinking cameras. Facial-recognition technologies can rapidly sort through video feeds and identify troublemakers. Bots can deliver propaganda tailored to specific groups. Malware can be installed on computers through seemingly innocuous apps or links, and then government hackers can crash the computer networks of dissidents or gather information on their operations. That information, in turn, can be used to coopt resistance movements by bribing their leaders or meeting their more innocuous demands. Alternatively, authorities can print out an AI-assembled list of alleged activists and kill everyone on it.
The evil genius of this “digital authoritarianism” is that most people will be seemingly free to go about their daily lives. In truth, however, the state will be constantly censoring everything they see and tracking everything they do. With old-school authoritarianism, one at least knew where the oppression was coming from. But now people can be nudged and cajoled by invisible algorithms delivering personalized content to their phones. In past eras, autocrats had to make tough choices between funding death squads or economic development. Today, however, repression is not only affordable, but also profitable, because “smart-city” technologies that enable tight social control can also be used to fight crime, diagnose diseases, and make the trains run on time.
These technologies are a tyrant’s dream. Recognizing this demand, Chinese companies were already selling and operating surveillance systems in more than eighty countries as of 2020. As the CCP feels increasingly threatened at home and abroad, there is every reason to expect Beijing to export digital authoritarianism farther and wider. Many countries already want it, and China has powerful tools to compel those that do not. Want access to the vast PRC market? Let Huawei install the core components of your 5G network. Want a Chinese loan? Accept PRC surveillance technology in your capital city.
As more governments partner with Beijing, the reach of China’s surveillance state will grow. Existing autocracies will become more totalitarian, and some democracies will drift into the authoritarian camp. International conflicts will likely proliferate—not merely those of ideas but those of arms, for as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates, dictatorship often turns to blood-and-soil nationalism and violent revanchism. The liberal belief that democracy and peace are destined to spread around the world will be upended. So will the comforting myth that humanity has evolved past the point of mass atrocities, because digital authoritarianism does not displace gulags and genocide; it enables them. When dictatorships ramp up digital repression, they also engage in more torture and murder. Computers and cameras handling everyday surveillance free the regime’s foot soldiers for tasks such as ethnic cleansing and beating dissidents into submission. Xinjiang, with its smart cities and concentration camps, offers a glimpse of this dire future.
Democracy Protection
China’s ideological offensive is thus at the heart of its effort to reshape the global order. A crucial part of the democratic world’s China strategy, therefore, must involve securing democratic institutions against authoritarian assault. If democracy promotion has a bad name, democracy protection is becoming indispensable.
This ideological campaign does not entail seeking regime change in China. Democracy may eventually take hold in that country, but there is little prospect of it anytime soon, and active efforts to destabilize the CCP could be counterproductive and dangerous. During the Cold War, the United States never really tried to overthrow the Soviet government. This was out of concern that doing so might trigger the hot war that Washington hoped to avoid. The same cautionary principle ought to apply today. Democracy protection is an essentially defensive strategy, although in some cases it will require tactics that are more assertive than those which the United States and its allies have been willing to employ to date.
At its core, democracy protection requires what military planners call “defending forward”—safeguarding democratic systems by actively weakening an opponent’s ability to damage them. The United States should do whatever it can to shore up democracy at home and abroad, but the immediate priority must be to blast holes in the digital iron curtain that Beijing is drawing around large swaths of the globe. If the world is indeed at an “inflection point” in the struggle between democracy and autocracy, as Biden and Xi seem to think it is, an America that remains on the defensive will not tip the balance. Getting “America’s democratic house in order” is a wonderful idea, but it will take years, if not decades, and would lend only indirect help in halting the spread of autocracy overseas. Forming a giant alliance of democracies is a worthy objective, but might deliver endless debate instead of decisive action. In 2000, the Bill Clinton administration created the “Community of Democracies,” which ultimately included 106 countries. After years of meetings, its sole accomplishment was a bland statement criticizing the 2021 military coup in Burma.
Instead of building yet another sprawling organization or meekly patching holes in democratic defenses, the United States should take the fight to the enemy and mobilize rough-and-ready “gangs” of allies to degrade and deter China’s political-warfare initiatives. The first step would be to hack digital authoritarian systems. One redeeming quality of digital police states is that they have myriad points of failure. Any government computer or goon is a potential entry point for malware. Hackers can stealthily feed “adversarial inputs” into surveillance systems by changing a few pixels in certain images, inserting fake data points, or entering malicious code into the patches that authoritarian technicians use to fix faulty systems. Hacks can allow banned news stories to go viral, trick surveillance systems into overlooking dissident activity, and misclassify regime loyalists as enemies of the state.
Democratic governments do not even need to attack authoritarian states directly; democracies can post spoofs online and let dissidents around the world weaponize them. And defenders of democracy need not disrupt every digital authoritarian regime—a few high-profile flubs might be enough to dampen demand for Beijing’s products. Think of this as ideological cost-imposition: The time, energy, and money that China will have to devote to repairing its domestic surveillance state will be time, energy, and money that Beijing cannot spend manipulating democratic politics abroad.
A second vital task is to slow the spread of repression-enabling technology. In part, that will mean producing affordable alternatives to Chinese telecom and smart-city products. These alternatives could include low–earth-orbit satellites (such as the 3,000-plus small satellites that make up the Starlink network) to provide global broadband. More important, it will also mean barring U.S. and allied firms from transferring certain technologies—such as those for advanced speech and facial recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing—to authoritarian regimes, as well as barring foreign firms involved in authoritarian repression from raising capital in democracies’ financial markets. During the Cold War, Western governments maintained the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (Co-Com) to prevent advanced technology from being sold to the Soviet bloc. Something like the Co-Com approach is fitting as regards China. Washington and U.S. allies have already crimped PRC access to advanced semiconductors, most notably so far by means of aggressive new regulations that the U.S. Commerce Department implemented in October 2022. Similar embargos will be needed to hobble Beijing’s expanding surveillance state.
This relates to a third imperative—frustrating China’s efforts to expand the reach of its authoritarian internet. One way of doing this would be for the United States and its allies to preemptively split the global internet by creating a digital bloc in which data and products flow freely, while excluding China and other countries that refuse to respect freedom of expression or privacy rights. This may sound drastic, but it might be necessary to combat the CCP, which currently enjoys the best of both worlds: It runs a closed network at home (stopping PRC citizens from reaching foreign websites and limiting the digital access of Western companies) while also selectively going online globally to steal intellectual property, meddle in democratic elections, spread propaganda, and hack critical infrastructure. This is a digital-age version of the Soviet Union’s infamous Brezhnev Doctrine: What is mine is mine, and what is yours is up for grabs.
To counter this exploitation, Richard Clarke and Rob Knake have proposed forming an “Internet Freedom League,” an initiative that is best seen less as a sprawling multilateral alliance than as a sort of digital customs union. Under this system, countries that adhere to the vision of a free and open internet would stay connected with one another, while countries opposed to that vision would face restricted access or be shut out. All web traffic from nonmembers would not be blocked, just traffic from companies and organizations that aid and abet digital authoritarianism or cybercrime. Of course, the PRC government is one of those bad actors, so it and the entities that do its bidding—whether government institutions or nominally private companies that are deeply tied to the Chinese state—would be cut off.
Fourth, greater cooperation among democracies—economic and otherwise—will shrink China’s ability to scare them into silence by punishing one among them. China’s recent campaign against Australia underlined this. In April 2020, Canberra called for an independent international inquiry into the origins of the covid pandemic. An infuriated Beijing slapped steep tariffs on Australian coal, beef, wheat, wine, and other goods while demanding that Australia’s government stifle domestic voices “unfriendly” to the PRC.
To its credit, Canberra refused to cave, and it slowly found alternative markets, in part by launching a “fight communism, buy Australian wine” public-relations campaign. The Biden administration informed PRC officials that bilateral tensions would not subside if the CCP was beating up on U.S. allies, and Washington promised to supply Australia with nuclear technology to power cutting-edge attack submarines. Australia’s economy did suffer a blow, however—and, awkwardly, firms from other democracies grabbed some of the resulting market share. Denser economic ties among democracies and friendly nondemocracies that fear Chinese coercion, such as Vietnam and Singapore, can cut the costs of future resistance. Even better would be if rich democracies agreed to inflict reciprocal pain on Beijing through countersanctions. China could still try to censor democratic speech in foreign countries, but only at the cost of its own economic growth.
China would certainly bristle at these measures, but to some degree that is a good thing, because it provides opportunities to bait Beijing into strategic blunders. Recall what happened in March 2021, when the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada sanctioned four Chinese officials for human-rights abuses in Xinjiang. The sanctions were wrist slaps, but they triggered a self-defeating “wolf-warrior” outburst: Beijing unleashed a diplomatic fusillade and sanctioned EU officials and think tanks; the EU responded by freezing the pending China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. America and its allies can goad China in subtle ways that do not risk war but do bring on blustery overreactions through which Beijing isolates itself.
Bait-and-bleed strategies, however, require resilience. When Chinese state media threatened, in March 2020, to plunge America into “a mighty sea of coronavirus” by denying it pharmaceuticals, it underscored Beijing’s capacity for ugly retaliation against democracies that refuse to toe its line. A fifth requirement of this strategy, then, will be rapidly developing free-world production networks for critical resources that China currently dominates, including rare-earth minerals and emergency medical supplies. The alternative to developing these networks proactively is to develop them reactively, and at far greater cost, during a crisis—as Europe has found with its forced transition away from Russian energy supplies due to the war in Ukraine.
A sixth aspect of forward defense involves more actively fighting the information war. China’s strategy involves relentlessly touting the supposed benefits of its own model, while fanning the flames of political discord in democratic societies. Exposing fake civil society groups or media outfits that are tools of Chinese influence is obviously vital. Equally important, though, is to be more aggressive in turning the tables on Beijing by spreading word of its rights abuses, mounting economic and social problems, rampant corruption, predatory overseas-lending practices, and other CCP crimes and shortcomings. The United States accumulated plenty of experience with such efforts during the Cold War, when institutions such as the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency told the truth about the Soviet bloc while contesting communist lies about the free world. Today, similar messages may not resonate with kleptocratic foreign leaders who are bankrolled by Beijing—but such communications will help to make the global information environment less favorable to CCP propaganda.
Seventh, the United States and its allies must more effectively contest the institutional terrain, because those who rule the world’s international bodies write the world’s rules. Turning international organizations into tools of domestic entrenchment and global influence for authoritarian regimes is a longstanding CCP strategy. Beijing regularly buys votes from member states in these organizations, which then elect PRC-favored candidates to lead them. To halt China’s march toward institutional dominance, the United States must learn to rally shifting coalitions of democratic countries behind candidates who will stand up for the free world’s basic values. This happened in September 2022, when Doreen Bogdan-Martin was elected secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union.
Finally, the United States needs to help shield democracies that border authoritarian aggressors. Defending vulnerable nations matters not least because successful authoritarian coercion in one place may encourage dangerous actions elsewhere. The key battleground today is Ukraine, with Taiwan a close second. By bolstering Taiwan with military protection and economic lifelines, Washington can preserve a potent ideological alternative to the CCP—and fortify a free-world coalition that can keep the world safe for democracy in the decades ahead.
Michael Beckley is associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from their book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (2022).
More from the Journal of Democracy:
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Copyright © 2022 National Endowment for Democracy
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journalofdemocracy.org
18. Volodymyr Zelensky's address to U.S. Congress (full text)
A historic speech and one that will be long remembered and studied after Ukraine completes its successful defense of Ukraine. I am glad he delivered this in English. I think that will have a greater impact on Congress. Listening to him is inspiring.
Again, a cliche: he is giving us a master class in strategic communication.
Volodymyr Zelensky's address to U.S. Congress (full text)
ukrinform.net
Dear Americans, in all states, cities, and communities, all those who value freedom and justice, who cherish it as strongly as we Ukrainians, in our cities, in each and every family, I hope my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart.
Madam Vice President, I thank you for your efforts in helping Ukraine.
Madam Speaker, you bravely visited Ukraine during the full-fledged war.
Thank you very much. Great honor. Thank you.
I'm very privileged to be here. Dear members of the Congress, representatives of both parties who also visited Kyiv, esteemed congressmen and senators from both parties who will visit Ukraine, I'm sure, in the future; dear representatives of diaspora, present in this chamber, and spread across the country; dear journalists, it’s a great honor for me to be at the U.S. Congress and speak to you and all Americans.
Against all odds and doom-and-gloom scenarios, Ukraine didn’t fall. Ukraine is alive and kicking.
Thank you. And it gives me good reason to share with you our first, first joint victory: We defeated Russia in the battle for minds of the world. We have no fear, nor should anyone in the world have it.
Ukrainians gained this victory, and it gives us courage which inspires the entire world.
Americans gained this victory, and that’s why you have succeeded in uniting the global community to protect freedom and international law. Europeans gained this victory, and that’s why Europe is now stronger and more independent than ever. The Russian tyranny has lost control over us. And it will never influence our minds again.
Yet, we have to do whatever it takes to ensure that countries of the Global South also gain such victory. I know one more, I think, very important thing: the Russians will stand a chance to be free only when they defeat the Kremlin in their minds. Yet, the battle continues, and we have to defeat the Kremlin on the battlefield.
Yes, this battle is not only for the territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom, and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.
It will define whether it will be a democracy for Ukrainians and for Americans — for all. This battle cannot be frozen or postponed. It can't be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide protection. From the United States to China, from Europe to Latin America, and from Africa to Australia, the world is too interconnected and interdependent to allow someone to stay aside and at the same time feel safe when such a battle continues.
Our two nations are allies in this battle. And next year will be a turning point, I know it. The point when Ukrainian courage and American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom, the freedom of people who stand for their values.
Ladies and gentlemen... ladies and gentlemen, Americans, yesterday before coming here to Washington, D.C., I was at the front line in our Bakhmut. In our stronghold in the east of Ukraine, in the Donbas. The Russian military and mercenaries have been taking Bakhmut nonstop since May. They have been taking it day and night, but Bakhmut stands.
Last year... last year, 70,000 people lived here in Bakhmut, in this city, and now only a few civilians stay. Every inch of that land is soaked in blood; roaring guns sound every hour. Trenches in the Donbas change hands several times a day in fierce combat, and even hand-fighting. But the Ukrainian Donbas stands.
Russians... Russians use everything, everything they have against Bakhmut and other beautiful cities. The occupiers have a significant advantage in artillery. They have an advantage in ammunition. They have much more missiles and planes than we ever had. It’s true. But our defense forces stand. And... and we all are proud of them.
The Russians’ tactic is primitive. They burn down and destroy everything they see. They sent thugs to the front lines. They sent convicts to the war. They threw everything against us, similar to the other tyranny, which is in the Battle of the Bulge. Threw everything it had against the free world, just like the brave American soldiers which held their lines and fought back Hitler’s forces during the Christmas of 1944. Brave Ukrainian soldiers are doing the same to Putin’s forces this Christmas.
Ukraine... Ukraine holds its lines and will never surrender. So... so, here is the front line, the tyranny which has no lack of cruelty against the lives of free people — and your support is crucial, not just to stand in such fight but to get to the turning point to win on the battlefield.
We have artillery, yes. Thank you. We have it. Is it enough? Honestly, not really. To ensure Bakhmut is not just a stronghold that holds back the Russian Army, but for the Russian Army to completely pull out, more cannons and shells are needed. If so, just like the Battle of Saratoga, the fight for Bakhmut will change the trajectory of our war for independence and for freedom.
If your Patriots stop the Russian terror against our cities, it will let Ukrainian patriots work to the full to defend our freedom. When Russia — when Russia cannot reach our cities with its artillery, it tries to destroy them with missile attacks. More than that, Russia found an ally in this — in this genocidal policy: Iran. Iranian deadly drones sent to Russia in hundreds — in hundreds became a threat to our critical infrastructure. That is how one terrorist has found the other.
It is just a matter of time before they will strike against your other allies if we do not stop them now. We must do it. I believe there should be no taboos between us in our alliance. Ukraine never asked the American soldiers to fight on our land instead of us. I assure you that Ukrainian soldiers can perfectly operate American tanks and planes themselves.
Financial assistance is also critically important, and I would like to thank you, thank you very much, thank you for both financial packages you have already provided us with and the ones you may be willing to decide on. Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.
Russia, Russia could stop its aggression, really, if it wanted to, but you can speed up our victory. I know it. And it, it will prove to any potential aggressor that no one can succeed in breaking national borders, no one committing atrocities and reigning over people against their will. It would be naïve to wait for steps towards peace from Russia, which enjoys being a terrorist state. Russians are still poisoned by the Kremlin.
The restoration of international legal order is our joint task. We need peace, yes. Ukraine has already offered proposals, which I just discussed with President Biden, our peace formula, 10 points which should and must be implemented for our joint security, guaranteed for decades ahead, and the summit which can be held.
I’m glad to say that President Biden supported our peace initiative today. Each of you, ladies and gentlemen, can assist in the implementation to ensure that America’s leadership remains solid, bicameral and bipartisan. Thank you.
You can strengthen sanctions to make Russia feel how ruinous its aggression truly is. It is in your power, really, to help us bring to justice everyone who started this unprovoked and criminal war. Let’s do it. Let the terrorist state be held responsible for its terror and aggression and compensate all losses done by this war. Let the world see that the United States is here.
Ladies and gentlemen... ladies and gentlemen, Americans, in two days we will celebrate Christmas. Maybe candlelit. Not because it’s more romantic, no, but because there will not be, there will be no electricity. Millions will have neither heating nor running water. All of this will be the result of Russian missile and drone attacks on our energy infrastructure.
But we do not complain. We do not judge and compare whose life is easier. Your well-being is the product of your national security; the result of your struggle for independence and your many victories. We, Ukrainians, will also go through our war of independence and freedom with dignity and success.
We’ll celebrate Christmas. Celebrate Christmas and, even if there is no electricity, the light of our faith in ourselves will not be put out. If Russian — if Russian missiles attack us, we’ll do our best to protect ourselves. If they attack us with Iranian drones and our people will have to go to bomb shelters on Christmas Eve, Ukrainians will still sit down at the holiday table and cheer up each other. And we don’t, don’t have to know everyone’s wish, as we know that all of us, millions of Ukrainians, wish the same: Victory. Only victory.
We have already built strong Ukraine, with strong people, strong Army, strong institutions together with you. We developed strong security guarantees for our country and for the entire Europe and the world, together with you. And also together with you, we’ll put in place everyone who will defy freedom. Put-in.
This will be the basis to protect democracy in Europe and the world over. Now, on this special Christmastime, I want to thank you, all of you. I thank every American family which cherishes the warmth of its home and wishes the same warmth to other people. I thank President Biden and both parties, at the Senate and the House, for your invaluable assistance. I thank your cities and your citizens who supported Ukraine this year, who hosted our Ukrainians, our people, who waved our national flags, who acted to help us. Thank you all, from everyone who is now at the front line, from everyone who is awaiting victory.
Standing here today, I recall the wars of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which are I think so good for this moment. The American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory. The Ukrainian people will win, too, absolutely.
I know that everything depends on us, on the Ukrainian Armed Forces, yet so much depends on the world. So much in the world depends on you. When I was in Bakhmut yesterday, our heroes gave me the flag, the battle flag, the flag of those who defend Ukraine, Europe, and the world at the cost of their lives. They asked me to bring this flag to you, to the U.S. Congress, to members of the House of Representatives and senators whose decisions can save millions of people.
So, let these decisions be taken. Let this flag stay with you, ladies and gentlemen. This flag is a symbol of our victory in this war. We stand, we fight and we will win because we are united — Ukraine, America, and the entire free world.
Just one thing, if I may, the last thing... thank you so much, may God protect our brave troops and citizens, may God forever bless the United States of America. Merry Christmas and a happy, victorious New Year. Slava Ukraini. (Glory to Ukraine - ed.)
ukrinform.net
19. How Huawei is winning over the global south
How Huawei is winning over the global south
Nations like Indonesia, Nigeria and the Solomon Islands are eager to upgrade their networks - no matter the potential cybersecurity risks.
By Greg Noone
techmonitor.ai · by Greg Noone · December 22, 2022
The logic behind the expansion of telecoms networks is cold and remorseless. Turning a profit from such networks requires the provider to find users, most of which reside in cities. These networks are at their most sophisticated in places where demand for complex services is at its highest: financial hubs, for example, like London and New York. Conversely, telecoms companies are reluctant to route fibre optic out into the sticks, where nobody lives and demand never rises beyond a local hunger for reliable broadband.
Unless that is, you’re Huawei. One of China’s largest telecoms companies, the firm made its name in the early 2000s as the provider that would venture deep into the countryside to hook up villages and towns with next-gen networking capabilities, usually at a lower price point than its nearest competitors. This was thanks, in large part, to generous subsidies from Chinese state banks, and applied to entire countries across the global south that were otherwise excluded from the mainstream of telecommunications: places like Uganda, for example, where Huawei has made major contributions toward building the country’s ICT infrastructure since 2006. Such efforts argue foreign policy experts, help to win over new backers for China’s campaign to reshape global digital governance norms as part of its Digital Silk Road project.
Huawei does not have as many friends in the West. After murmurs from US and UK intelligence agencies in the early 2010s that the company’s involvement in their networks constituted a cybersecurity risk – thanks in part to provisions in China’s National Intelligence Law, which compels tech companies to hand over any data to the state deemed relevant to national security – the telco became a victim of the growing rivalry between Washington and Beijing, with the former campaigning hard against Huawei’s involvement in upgrading Western networks to 5G. Most recently, that animus has extended to the UK ripping out much of the company’s kit from its 5G networks and the US banning the importation and sale of any equipment from Huawei.
Ironically, many of the cyber incidents involving Huawei products have taken place in the global south. That includes CCTV footage being syphoned from the African Union headquarters in Ethiopia, as well as accusations aired in the Wall Street Journal that the telco aided and abetted efforts by the Algerian, Zambian and Ugandan governments to spy on political dissidents. Huawei denied any involvement in these incidents, and its reputation in the global south remains stronger than ever, in part because many emerging markets see the company as an essential partner in spurring the development of their digital economies, and also because of a pervasive belief that they are just as vulnerable to spying from Western technology firms. That overlooks an essential difference between the two, argues Bryce C. Barros.
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“Facebook is not acting 100% in accordance with the American government,” says Barros, China affairs analyst at the German Marshall Fund think tank. “They do have disagreements from time-to-time about things like privacy, data protection, content moderation. You won’t find that disagreement as much in places in the global south when you’re dealing with Chinese tech companies.”
A Huawei advertisement in Kampala, Uganda. Present in the country since 2006, the Chinese telecoms giant has worked closely with the Ugandan government to upgrade its mobile and broadband infrastructure. (Picture courtesy of Jose_Matheus / Shutterstock)
Huawei’s global south ambitions
Founded in 1987 in an apartment in Shenzhen, Huawei initially struggled to make a name for itself in China’s nascent telecoms industry. “We didn’t receive a single penny from the government,” its founder, Ren Zhengfei, told the makers of a promotional film about his company’s early days – an allusion, perhaps, to the intense competition Huawei faced from the collection of state-backed firms which dominated Chinese telecoms at the time.
That changed in 2002. Realising that the company could not compete effectively against China’s telecoms giants for contracts in the country’s urban centres, Huawei pivoted abroad, marketing its expertise to emerging economies yet to be hooked up to efficient telecommunication networks. The firm’s success in these two spheres convinced the China Development Bank to extend it the first of many generous lines of credit. This was a turning point for Huawei, argues Henry Tugendhat, a senior policy analyst with the United States Institute for Peace.
“Despite its narrative and mythology of being the one, lone private sector actor, it did sort of come into the fold of getting a lot of state support like the state-owned enterprises before it,” says Tugendhat.
That focus on emerging markets led Huawei to Africa. Beginning with projects in Kenya in 1998, the firm quickly expanded across the continent over the following two decades. At a basic level, its construction of first 2G, then 3G and 4G networks across the continent has given it a technical and political advantage in nations throughout Africa and the global south, explains Elisabeth Braw, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Huawei can then sell the next generation to them,” says Braw, “even as Western companies start looking at 6G.”
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Huawei’s success in Africa, says Tugendhat, is impressive – but should not be overstated. It’s impossible to verify, for example, the oft–cited claim that Huawei has built 70% of Africa’s 4G market (“It drives me crazy,” says Tugendhat). Western sanctions, meanwhile, have cratered its market share in handsets, and research from Tugendhat and other scholars suggests its claims of facilitating extensive knowledge transfers into African economies may be overstated.
One area where Huawei has clearly been successful, though, has been in managed services contracts. Riding a wave of privatisation across Africa in the early 2000s, the firm won contract after contract to effectively run large sections of national carrier networks. “It’s obviously an incredibly powerful position for a sales company to be in,” says Tugendhat, as it “then gives them a stronger position to sell [their] equipment.”
Cloud computing is also a huge potential growth area in Africa. While Huawei faces intense competition in this space across Western markets from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, it has outpaced all of these companies in its provision of data centres for African governments. “It’s building a data centre for the Senegalese government, a data centre for a state-owned carrier in Zimbabwe,” says Tugendhat, and another one in Malawi, “also nominally to support government services.”
It’s unclear whether these are also managed service contracts. For his part, Tugendhat has been unable to confirm whether these data centres are air-gapped or manned by a dedicated team of Huawei technicians (the company did not reply to a request for comment on this point from Tech Monitor.) What is clear, though, is that Huawei is at the front of the queue in a marketplace with enormous growth potential. While the cloud market in Africa now is relatively small, the continent’s digital economy is predicted to be worth some $712bn by 2050 – a consequence, in part, of national governments’ focus on leveraging growth in the digital economy to accelerate economic development more broadly.
Similar priorities are also in evidence in Indonesia, where the government has courted both US and Chinese tech companies to invest in the country’s digital services. It’s an environment that has led Huawei to become one of the most popular Chinese companies in Indonesia. This positive reception, says Gatra Priyandita, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, is partly attributable to the firm’s employment of a majority-Indonesian workforce and generally lower price point compared to other telecom providers (30% lower, on average.) But it’s also to do with the fact that the firm has played an outsized role in knitting Indonesia’s many thousands of islands together into a single, coherent telecommunications network.
“Establishing and sustaining telecom networks across the world’s biggest archipelago is simply too expensive and complex to be conducted alone,” says Priyandita. “As such, foreign firms – regardless of where they come from – have emerged as necessary partners in this pursuit.”
Laotian miners communicate hundreds of metres underground using a Huawei-installed 5G network. The Chinese firm has positioned itself as an ideal partner for global south nations looking to jumpstart the expansion of their digital economies by investing in new telecoms infrastructure (Picture courtesy of Huawei.)
Western competition issues
It also hasn’t hurt that Huawei has invested heavily in IT capacity building across Indonesia. That extends throughout both the private and public sectors, with Huawei offering free training courses to civil servants up and down the archipelago. “We do know that many other firms – from Microsoft to Cisco – provide training to Indonesian officials as well, including those in key government agencies that deal with cybersecurity like BSSN,” says Priyandita. “Having said that, I’m not aware of any other company that trains officials at the scale that Huawei has provided” – up to 7,000 since 2019, according to one Huawei report, drawing similar contributions from Western companies.
That capacity-building effort also extends to device donations. In April, Huawei was lauded by community leaders in West Papua for donating tablet computers to local primary schools. Similar gifts have been made elsewhere in the global south, including an entire ICT lab for a Tanzanian university and 300 tablets to a higher education institution in Jamaica. Intended as goodwill gestures, the extent to which Huawei’s device portfolio constitutes a cybersecurity risk is vigorously debated. At a basic level, says Priyandita, Huawei remains a risk thanks to China’s National Intelligence Law. However, Washington is unlikely to convince Jakarta of the need to blacklist the company. “Few Southeast Asian countries responded positively to the Trump administration’s call to ban Huawei technology from their network systems,” says Priyandita.
If they’re really serious about blunting Huawei’s expansion in the global south, he adds, then liberal democracies should focus on matching the company’s efforts in IT capacity building. Barros agrees. Too many Western telecoms and technology firms, he argues, remain reluctant to expand into Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, either because they think these markets lack potential or because they fear the impact political instability might have on their operations. So far, Barros hasn’t been impressed by US efforts to ramp up its IT capacity-building efforts in the global south either.
“There are initiatives that the US government and some of the other allied developed democracies have talked about, like ‘Build Back Better World,’” he says. Even so, he adds, “I’m still waiting to see a little bit more information about how they’re going to operationalise that.”
It’s highly unlikely, though, that such efforts would see Huawei’s progress halted in the global south. Indeed, the company’s reputation in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, notwithstanding US regional allies like Japan and Chinese geopolitical rivals like India, is stronger than ever. It’s even found a common cause with democracies like Nigeria and Indonesia in its promotion of more centralised modes of internet governance. It’s hard to tell whether this alignment has arisen as a result of lobbying from Chinese tech companies like Huawei, or simply because it gels with pre-existing conceptions of internet governance among select nations in the global south. In the case of Indonesia, Priyandita believes it’s the latter.
“My sense is that [its] cyber governance preferences are organic, as it relates to [a] deep sense of insecurity among officials about the potential use of cyberspace as a platform to undermine the digital economy and spread information,” says Priyandita. Viewed that way, adds Priyandita, “China’s own approach to cyber governance and its (mostly) successful attempts to control content may serve as inspiration.”
In the meantime, Huawei continues to make inroads throughout the global south, from building 161 new mobile communication masts in the Solomon Islands to installing 5G systems in mineshafts deep beneath South Africa and Laos. Inaction by the US and its allies in pushing for alternatives to the company, argues Barros, will see Western influence in emerging markets diminish and, more importantly, deprive governments and consumers in these markets of choice when it comes to building and upgrading network infrastructure: “I think it’s important to at least demonstrate to places in the global south that the United States still cares, is still trying, to engage with them on their own terms.”
Topics in this article : China , Huawei , telecoms
techmonitor.ai · by Greg Noone · December 22, 2022
20. SOF Week Replaces SOFIC In 2023
SOF Week Replaces SOFIC In 2023 | Joint Forces News
joint-forces.com · by Editor · December 21, 2022
US Special Operations Command has contacted JOINT-FORCES with the following statement informing that SOF Week replaces SOFIC in 2023.
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MacDill AFB, Florida, 20 December 2022: “We’d like to clarify that although we will not be hosting ‘SOFIC’ with our previous partner, the National Defense Industrial Association, Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and the Global SOF Foundation (GSF) will host a Special Operations Forces (SOF) Week 8-11 May.
“SOF Week is the expansion and rebranding of the annual USSOCOM industry conference. An industry conference will still be part of SOF Week, as well as the USSOCOM Annual Awards Gala, where we recognize new Bull Simons and Lambertsen awardees.
“SOF Week reflects more accurately USSOCOM’s interest not just in bringing together its community for industry collaboration, but also for professional development, internal networking, spouse association and partnerships.”
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joint-forces.com · by Editor · December 21, 2022
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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