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Quotes of the Day:

“One cannot see the modern world as it is, unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist. But as a positive force, there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.”

– George Orwell.

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–Edgar Howe

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– Charles Nalin

1. U.S. Navy Shoots Down Own Plane as Fresh Strikes Target Houthi Rebels in Yemen

2. Deception and Betrayal: Inside the Final Days of the Assad Regime

3. Biden's top hostage envoy Roger Carstens travels to Syria to ask for help in finding Austin Tice

4. Biden’s international achievements are Trump’s opportunities

5. Ukraine’s Last Few M-1 Abrams Tanks Are Fighting In Kursk—And May Have Engaged North Korean Troops

6. Elon Musk’s wish list for DOGE

7. Inside the Monthlong White House Effort to Quell New Jersey Drone Frenzy

8. The Not-So-Secret Way Around U.S. Tariffs

9. Is it a Risk for America that China Holds So Much U.S. Debt?

10.What Trump's decision to wade into spending fight tells us about the next 4 years

11. Many Videos That Purport to Show Drones in New Jersey Likely Show Planes, Visual Analysis Finds

12. Talent and Tech: Fielding and Wielding New Systems Requires the Right People

13. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 21, 2024

14. Iran Update, December 21, 2024

15. The Nippon Steel Deal Is Key To U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy

16. Is China The Greatest Threat To the USA?

17. New in SpyWeek: Musk Security Worries, Fox Kennedy Dumped, CIA Torture, Syria, Israel, China, OSINT Ironies and More

1. U.S. Navy Shoots Down Own Plane as Fresh Strikes Target Houthi Rebels in Yemen

We definitely need the "Paul Harvey" on this event. Fortunately the pilots survived.

U.S. Navy Shoots Down Own Plane as Fresh Strikes Target Houthi Rebels in Yemen

Pilots safely ejected from their F/A-18 fighter aircraft after it was hit by fire from a U.S. missile cruiser

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-navy-shoots-down-own-plane-as-fresh-strikes-target-houthi-rebels-in-yemen-7b6a4d27?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Dov Lieber

Dec. 22, 2024 3:56 am ET

The jet fighter had flown off the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier. Photo: Salvatore Laporta/Zuma Press

Two U.S. Navy pilots ejected from their jet fighter over the Red Sea after being caught in “an apparent case of friendly-fire,” U.S. Central Command said Sunday, as American forces conducted a new round of attacks against the Houthi militant group in Yemen overnight.

The military said the two pilots safely ejected from their F/A-18 after it was hit by fire from the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg. The jet fighter had flown off the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier and both ships are part of the same strike group. One of the crew members sustained minor injuries and an investigation is under way, the military said.

The incident came as U.S. Central Command said its forces had conducted airstrikes against a missile storage facility and a command and control facility operated by the Houthis in Yemen. It wasn’t immediately clear if the friendly-fire incident and the U.S. attack on Houthi targets are connected.

The Iranian-backed Houthis control much of northwestern Yemen. They have snarled international trade by attacking cargo ships passing through one of the world’s most important trade routes, in what the group describes as a campaign of support for Palestinian militants fighting Israel in Gaza.

Mohamed Ali al-Houthi, a Houthi official, condemned the U.S. strikes.

“These American terrorist attacks further confirm the lawlessness and criminal actions being carried out in the region,” he said on X. “Such reckless terrorist actions against Yemen will not stop the support for Gaza.”

Deception and Betrayal: Inside the Final Days of the Assad Regime

President Bashar al-Assad, who wielded fear and force over Syria for more than two decades, fled the country under the cover of night — and a fake political address.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/world/middleeast/assad-regime-syria-final-days.html

By Ben Hubbard Farnaz Fassihi Christina Goldbaum and Hwaida Saad

Ben Hubbard, Christina Goldbaum and Hwaida Saad reported from Damascus, Syria.

Dec. 21, 2024

As rebels advanced toward the Syrian capital of Damascus on Dec. 7, the staff in the hilltop Presidential Palace prepared for a speech they hoped would lead to a peaceful end to the 13-year civil war.

Aides to President Bashar al-Assad were brainstorming messaging ideas. A film crew had set up cameras and lights nearby. Syria’s state-run television station was ready to broadcast the finished product: an address by Mr. al-Assad announcing a plan to share power with members of the political opposition, according to three people who were involved in the preparation.

Working from the palace, Mr. al-Assad, who had wielded fear and force to maintain his authoritarian rule over Syria for more than two decades, had betrayed no sense of alarm to his staff, according to a palace insider whose office was near the president’s.

The capital’s defenses had been bolstered, Mr. al-Assad’s aides were told, including by the powerful 4th Armored Division of the Syrian Army, led by the president’s brother Maher al-Assad, the insider said.

They had all been deceived.

After dusk, the president slipped out of the capital, flying covertly to a Russian military base in northern Syria and then on a Russian jet to Moscow, according to six Middle Eastern government and security officials.

Maher al-Assad fled separately that evening with other senior military officers across the desert to Iraq, according to two Iraqi officials. His current location remains unknown.

Bashar al-Assad left his country so secretively that some of his aides remained in the palace hours after he had left, waiting for a speech that never came, the insider said. After midnight, word came that the president was gone, and they fled in a panic, leaving the palace gates wide open for the rebels who would storm in a few hours later.

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Rebel forces this month in Damascus, Syria, celebrating Mr. al-Assad’s fall, which brought to a sudden end his family’s 50-year authoritarian grip on the country.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

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Damascus residents outside the Presidential Palace, which is now being guarded by rebels.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Mr. al-Assad’s fall brought to a sudden end his family’s 50-year authoritarian grip on Syria, causing jubilation among his victims and enemies, scrambling the strategic map of the Middle East and setting Syria off on a new, uncertain trajectory.

During his final days in power, Mr. al-Assad pleaded for foreign military help from Russia, Iran and Iraq to no avail as his military’s own intelligence service documented his forces’ collapse in real time, according to secret reports reviewed by The New York Times.

Diplomats from a half-dozen countries sought ways to push him from power peacefully in order to spare the ancient city of Damascus a bloody battle for control, according to four regional officials involved in the talks. One proposal, an official said, was that he pass power to his military chief, effectively submitting to a coup.

The account of Mr. al-Assad’s fall, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish officials; Damascus-based diplomats; as well as associates of Mr. al-Assad and rebels who participated in his ouster. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocols or fear of retribution from remnants of the former regime — or from the rebels who toppled it.

Now, rebels guard the Presidential Palace. Mr. al-Assad’s home has been picked clean by looters. And Syrians who remained loyal to him through years of civil war fume that he left without a word, abandoning them to their fates.

“For your own personal safety, you sacrificed all your people?” said the palace insider, who barely escaped before the rebels arrived.

Hiding from Syria’s new masters far from Damascus, he was still struggling to come to grips with Mr. al-Assad’s sudden flight.

“It is a betrayal that I cannot believe,” he said.

As Aleppo Fell, ‘Life Was Normal’

In late November, when rebels from Syria’s northwest launched an offensive aimed at pushing back Mr. al-Assad’s forces, the president was a continent away for a joyous family occasion. His elder son, Hafez al-Assad, was defending his doctoral dissertation at Moscow State University.

Gathered in a cavernous, wood-paneled auditorium on a hill overlooking the Russian capital were Mr. al-Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, and two of Hafez’s grandparents.

The 98-page dissertation — “Arithmetic Questions of Polynomials in Algebraic Number Fields” — was unlikely to attract a wide readership. But it bore a unique dedication: “To the martyrs of the Syrian Arab Army, without whose selfless sacrifices none of us would exist.”

Bashar al-Assad was in Moscow, too, though he did not attend the defense. Back at home, the army his son had lauded as heroic was crumbling before the rebel advance.

For 13 years, Mr. al-Assad had been fighting a brutal civil war against armed groups seeking his ouster. The conflict had ravaged the country, killing more than a half-million people and creating millions of refugees. Iran and its ally, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, had supported his troops, and Russia sent fighter jets whose air raids devastated rebel communities.

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A poster depicting Mr. al-Assad and the Hezbollah leader at the time, Hassan Nasrallah, in 2014 in Syria. Hezbollah had supported Mr. al-Assad’s troops during Syria’s 13-year civil war.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

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Syrians displaced by fighting during the war at an emergency shelter in 2020 in Idlib. The conflict created millions of refugees.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Around 2020, the war appeared to settle into a stalemate. Syria’s economy was trashed, and much of its territory was out of Mr. al-Assad’s hands. Still, he remained in power and was working of late to shed his status as an international pariah.

“Life was normal, and everyone was looking to the future,” recalled the palace insider, who worked down the hall from Mr. al-Assad for many years.

On Nov. 30, a rebel coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group with roots in Al Qaeda, seized the northern city of Aleppo, a major economic hub, shocking people across the Middle East. Mr. al-Assad rushed back to Damascus and found his staff uneasy, the palace insider recalled, although no one thought the capital was vulnerable.

Aware that his army had been ground down by years of battle, Mr. al-Assad sought help from the foreign powers that had helped him before.

In Tehran, senior commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps held emergency meetings to explore ways to aid Mr. al-Assad, according to three Iranian officials, including two members of the Revolutionary Guards. Two days after Aleppo fell, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, traveled there, publicly reinforcing that Damascus was stable. Television cameras filmed him posing for photographs with families on the street and eating at a popular shawarma restaurant with his Syrian counterpart. He vowed to the Iranian news media that Iran would stand with Mr. al-Assad to the end.

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The main control tower at Aleppo airport after a battle over its control.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

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A statue in Aleppo that previously depicted Bassel al-Assad, the former president’s brother, riding a horse. The Assad family ruled over Syria for half a century.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Iran’s options were limited.

Throughout the Syrian war, Iran had provided great military aid to help Mr. al-Assad, sending its own commanders and fighters from the Revolutionary Guards, as well as commandos from Hezbollah and fighters from many other countries. But Hezbollah had just emerged from its own war, with Israel, badly battered. Israel had killed or wounded thousands of its fighters, destroyed many of its munitions and killed most of its top leaders. Israel had also threatened Iranian aircraft going to Syria and any mobilization of ground forces there, leaving Iran no practical way to support Mr. al-Assad.

Mr. Araghchi told state media that he found Mr. al-Assad confused and angry that his army had failed to hold Aleppo, saying that the Syrian president “did not have an accurate read of the situation.” Mr. al-Assad told him in private, according to two Iranian officials, that his generals had described his forces’ withdrawal as a tactical move to shore up the defense of Damascus.

Mr. al-Assad’s other key champion was President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Russia maintained a military base in northern Syria and a naval base on the Mediterranean coast in Tartus that allowed Mr. Putin to project power far from Moscow.

Mr. Putin came to Mr. al-Assad’s rescue during the Syrian war in 2015, the Russian military overwhelming the rebels. He tried to broker a reconciliation between Mr. al-Assad and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who had long supported the rebels, but the effort never progressed.

In the first days of the rebels’ advance after Aleppo fell, Mr. al-Assad felt a sudden chill in his relationship with Mr. Putin, the palace insider and a Turkish official said: The Russian leader stopped taking his calls.

‘No Plan to Fight’

After taking Aleppo, the rebels continued south and seized the Assad stronghold of Hama, in another sudden shock to the regime.

The rebels’ swift march revealed the deep rot inside Mr. al-Assad’s army. Economic distress and punishing sanctions had hollowed out Syria’s currency, reducing soldiers’ salaries to less than $30 per month. So many had been killed that the army relied heavily on conscripts, who were poorly fed and equipped with outdated gear.

The rebels, too, mostly carried light arms. But they had one great advantage, drones, which they used to strike command centers, scattering regime soldiers. Syrian military intelligence reports, which were reviewed by The Times, described relentless drone attacks across the country that Mr. al-Assad’s forces had no way to counter. Many of the drones took off from a field in rebel-held Idlib Province in the northwest, next to a warehouse that housed at least 200 of them, one report read.

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A tank abandoned this month on the outskirts of Hama, Syria, an Assad stronghold that the rebels seized, shocking the regime.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

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Russian military vehicles this past week on a road west of Homs, heading toward the Mediterranean Sea from Moscow’s bases around the country.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

In Tehran, military commanders told the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that the rebels were advancing too fast for Iran to help, according to four Iranian officials.

Shocked, Mr. Khamenei sent a senior adviser, Ali Larijani, on a secret trip to Damascus to tell Mr. al-Assad to buy time by promising political overhauls and a new government that would include members of the opposition, according to four Iranian officials. Mr. Larijani also discussed the topic of defection, raising the possibility of Tehran or Moscow.

Realizing that Russia would not save him and that Iran could not, Mr. al-Assad sent his foreign minister to Baghdad. He told the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, that Mr. al-Assad’s fall would endanger Iraq, according to three regional officials with knowledge of the talks. He pleaded for Iraqi military support, but the country’s top leaders — the prime minister, the president and the speaker of Parliament — all refused.

In public, Iranian officials called for a diplomatic solution. But officials in Tehran had concluded that Mr. al-Assad would not survive, according to six Iranian officials, and Iran began quietly withdrawing its diplomatic and military staff from Damascus.

“They told us that the rebels will arrive in Damascus by Saturday and there is no plan to fight,” read an internal Revolutionary Guards memo viewed by The Times. “The people of Syria and the army are not up for another war. It’s over.”

‘No One Knew Anything’

Panic gripped Damascus as the sun rose on Dec. 7. Overnight, the rebels had advanced toward Homs, Syria’s third-largest city and the last major urban center standing between the rebels and the capital.

Residents rushed to stores to stock up on food in case street battles trapped them at home. Others fueled up their cars and fled the city.

Inside the army, it was becoming clear that Mr. al-Assad’s forces were failing, according to dozens of military intelligence reports on Dec. 6 and 7, which were reviewed by The Times.

The forces were overwhelmed, they said. Rebels disguised in army uniforms were approaching Homs in cars adorned with portraits of Mr. al-Assad, and other armed groups had seized army checkpoints in Daraa, south of Damascus. One memo said that soldiers had left behind armored vehicles and weapons that the rebels had claimed.

“They are planning to control the entire southern region and then head to the capital,” another report said. “This will happen within a few hours.”

The sense of alarm had not reached the Presidential Palace, the insider recalled. Mr. al-Assad and his staff were in their offices, trying to manage a crisis whose gravity they did not comprehend.

“People were still drawing up scenarios,” he said, “and the idea of Damascus falling was not suggested by anyone.”

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The destroyed neighborhood of Jura Ashayah this month in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city and the last major urban center that stood between the rebels and Damascus.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

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A rebel fighter in the office of a longtime senior adviser to Bashar al-Assad this month in the abandoned Presidential Palace.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Palace staff spent the day waiting for the speech that Mr. al-Assad was supposed to record, hoping that it would somehow stop the rebel advance.

“There were lots of people in the palace who said that it was time for him to appear, to support the Army, to reassure people,” the insider said.

But the filming kept getting postponed without explanation. By dusk, the staff was no longer sure where Mr. al-Assad was, the insider said.

On the other side of the Middle East, in Doha, Qatar, many of the region’s power brokers had gathered to try to find a way to stop the situation in Syria from escalating further. Many of the countries represented hated Mr. al-Assad but had come to accept that he had survived the war, and they did not trust that the rebels could hold Syria together.

Among the assembled officials, from five Arab countries plus Turkey, Russia and Iran, there were many who had concluded that it was too late for Mr. al-Assad, according to three officials from different countries who attended.

That evening, the rebels entered Homs, exacerbating fears that Damascus was next.

“After Homs fell, everything got very tense and no one knew anything, not in the palace or outside the palace,” the insider said.

‘Burn Everything’

While Mr. al-Assad had his pick of palaces to use for official business, he lived with his wife and three children in a four-story modernist villa surrounded by palm trees and fountains in the upscale Damascus neighborhood of al-Maliki.

After he was gone, his neighbors said that living near him had been a nuisance. Soldiers blocked access to the street and interrogated visitors, they said. Installing a new satellite dish or air-conditioner required complicated dealings with the intelligence service.

But at least Mr. al-Assad and his family were quiet — which is why the neighbors jumped when they heard his guards screaming hours before dawn on Dec. 8.

“‘Guys, flee, flee! They’re coming!’” one neighbor recalled them yelling. “‘May God curse him. He left us!’”

Chaos also gripped an Air Force intelligence branch elsewhere in the city, according to a soldier who gave only his first name, Mohammed, for fear of retribution from the rebels. As the rebels approached, orders came to defend the capital, he said. But on their phones, the soldiers saw images of their comrades elsewhere taking off their uniforms and running away.

After night fell, their orders changed.

“Burn everything: documents, files and hard disks,” Mohammed recalled being told. “At this moment, I and my colleagues all felt that the regime was falling.”

He, too, changed into civilian clothes and walked out of the base, he said.

Inside the palace, the hours ticked by as Mr. al-Assad’s aides waited for the speech, the insider recalled.

“The idea that he had fled never came to mind,” he said.

After midnight, they received a call telling them that the president had escaped, he said. Then the head of security for the area called to say that the guards were gone and that he was leaving, too.

Terror set in, the insider said, and he ran to his car, finding the palace empty and its gates open. He rushed into hiding, he said, concluding as he drove that there had never actually been a plan for a speech. It had, he believed, been a ploy to distract Mr. al-Assad’s staff while the president sneaked away.

“He tricked us,” the insider said. “Does he still have any popularity among his people? No. To the contrary. He betrayed us.”

North of Damascus, Bilal Shahadi, 26, was among thousands of prisoners held in the Sednaya prison, a lockup so brutal that Amnesty International called it a “human slaughterhouse.”

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Bilal Shahadi, 26, displaying scars from his recent torture in the Sednaya prison, which Amnesty International called a “human slaughterhouse.”Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

During his two years there, Mr. Shahadi’s days began with guards shouting, “Animals, come!” so that the inmates would call out their prisoner numbers one by one — a grim roll call to see if anyone had died overnight.

Before dawn on Dec. 8, he awoke to jostling in his crowded cell and the sounds of voices outside yelling, “God is Great!”

He made his way to the door and, to his surprise, pushed it open and walked out.

A prison guard, he said, had opened one cell and fled, leaving the keys behind. The first prisoners to get out unlocked the other cells.

Mr. Shahadi tore through the prison. In a guards’ office, he said, he found a poster of Mr. al-Assad, which he set on fire with a cigarette lighter. He set off on foot with thousands of others, cheering and crying as they walked home.

“It was a dream,” he recalled. “All of it felt like a dream.”

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The Sednaya prison in Damascus on Dec. 9, the day after a guard unlocked one cell and fled, leaving the keys behind.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from Berlin, Jacob Roubai from Beirut and Falih Hassan from Baghdad.

Ben Hubbard is the Istanbul bureau chief, covering Turkey and the surrounding region. More about Ben Hubbard

Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization, and also covers Iran and the shadow war between Iran and Israel. She is based in New York. More about Farnaz Fassihi

Christina Goldbaum is the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The Times, leading the coverage of the region. More about Christina Goldbaum

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 22, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Desperation and Betrayal As the Assad Dynasty Fell. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Hezbollah, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (Quds Force), Syrian Army, Bashar al-Assad, Hafez al-Assad, Vladimir Putin

3. Biden's top hostage envoy Roger Carstens travels to Syria to ask for help in finding Austin Tice

Roger is one of the very best representatives of our Special Forces Regiment. He was appointed to this job by Trump and Biden kept him and he has done great work for America and our hostages. If anyone can bring home Autin Tice Roger can. We all must pray that he is still alive and well.

Video at the link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-hostage-envoy-roger-carstens-syria-austin-tice/

Watch his full interview on Face the Nation Sunday.

Biden's top hostage envoy Roger Carstens travels to Syria to ask for help in finding Austin Tice

CBS News · by Margaret Brennan

Roger Carstens, the Biden administration's top official for freeing Americans held overseas, traveled to Damascus, Syria, on Friday for a high-risk mission: making the first known face-to-face contact with the caretaker government and asking for help finding missing American journalist Austin Tice.

Tice was kidnapped in Syria 12 years ago during the civil war and brutal reign of now-deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. For years, U.S. officials have said they do not know with certainty whether Tice is still alive, where he is being held or by whom.

Following his trip to Syria, in an exclusive interview Friday with "Face the Nation" from Amman, Jordan, Carstens disclosed that the U.S. Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs today conducted a "joint search of a facility" with Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, known as HTS — the rebel group that recently overthrew Assad's regime and is emerging as a leading power — "that we all thought would have some sort of relation to Austin Tice."

He did not disclose the details of the search or its outcome, only saying that HTS was "being helpful in the search for Austin."

"We had a lot of information over the last 12 years that pointed to a variety of facilities," Carstens said. "And in necking that down over 12 years, we came up with a priority list of about six sites. And of those six sites, we felt that this had the highest probability of having held Austin at one time."

Carstens said he was "stunned" by the number of prisons the Assad regime was operating.

"I mean, you'd almost think that if you were running a country, and you wanted to jail your enemies, you'd have one prison, and it wouldn't be secret," Carstens said. "But to have like 35 or 40 secret prisons, I find that just horrifying, disturbing, and yet in a way fascinating."

The State Department's top diplomat for the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, accompanied Carstens to Damascus as a gesture of broader outreach to HTS.

Near East Senior Adviser Daniel Rubinstein was also with the delegation. They were the first American diplomats to visit Damascus in over a decade, according to a State Department spokesperson.

They had planned to meet with HTS representatives to discuss transition principles endorsed by the U.S. and regional partners in Aqaba, Jordan, the spokesperson said. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Aqaba last week to meet with Middle East leaders and discuss the situation in Syria.

Security for the U.S. delegation was provided by DSS Mobile Security Deployments, according to a State Department official. U.S. special operations forces also provided support as they traveled by vehicle across the Jordanian border and on the road to Damascus. The convoy was given assurances by HTS that it would be granted safe passage while in Syria, but there remains a threat of attacks by other terrorist groups, including ISIS.

CBS News withheld publication of this story for security concerns at the State Department's request.

While finding and freeing Tice and other American citizens who disappeared under the Assad regime is the ultimate goal, U.S. officials downplayed expectations of a breakthrough on this trip. Multiple sources told CBS News that Carstens and Leaf's intent was to convey U.S. interests to senior HTS leaders, and learn anything they can about Tice.

Rubinstein will lead the U.S. diplomacy in Syria, engaging directly with the Syrian people and key parties in Syria, the State Department spokesperson added.

Diplomatic outreach to HTS comes in a volatile, war-torn region at an uncertain moment. Two sources even compared the potential danger to the expeditionary diplomacy practiced by the late U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who led outreach to rebels in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and was killed in a terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound and intelligence post.

Sending high-level American diplomats to Damascus represents a significant step in reopening U.S.-Syria relations following the fall of the Assad regime less than two weeks ago. Operations at the U.S. embassy in Damascus have been suspended since 2012, shortly after the Assad regime brutally repressed an uprising that became a 14-year civil war and spawned 13 million Syrians to flee the country in one of the largest humanitarian disasters in the world.

The U.S. formally designated HTS, which had ties to al Qaeda, as a foreign terrorist organization in 2018. Its leader, Mohammed al Jolani, was designated as a terrorist by the US in 2013 and prior to that served time in a US prison in Iraq.

Since toppling Assad, HTS has publicly signaled interest in a new more moderate trajectory. Al Jolani even shed his nom de guerre and now uses his legal name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

U.S. sanctions on HTS linked to those terrorist designations complicate outreach somewhat, but they haven't prevented American officials from making direct contact with HTS at the direction of President Biden. Blinken recently confirmed that U.S. officials were in touch with HTS representatives prior to Carstens and Leaf's visit.

"We've heard positive statements coming from Mr. Jolani, the leader of HTS," Blinken told Bloomberg News on Thursday. "But what everyone is focused on is what's actually happening on the ground, what are they doing? Are they working to build a transition in Syria that brings everyone in?"

In that same interview, Blinken also seemed to dangle the possibility that the U.S. could help lift sanctions on HTS and its leader imposed by the United Nations, if HTS builds what he called an inclusive nonsectarian government and eventually holds elections. The Biden administration is not expected to lift the U.S. terrorist designation before the end of the president's term on January 20th.

Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder disclosed Thursday that the U.S. currently has approximately 2,000 US troops inside of Syria as part of the mission to defeat ISIS, a far higher number than the 900 troops the Biden administration had previously acknowledged. There are at least five U.S. military bases in the north and south of the country.

The Biden administration is concerned that thousands of ISIS prisoners held at a camp known as al-Hol could be freed. It is currently guarded by the Syrian Democratic forces, Kurdish allies of the U.S. who are wary of the newly-powerful HTS. The situation on the ground is rapidly changing since Russia and Iran withdrew military support from the Assad regime, which has reset the balance of power. Turkey, which has been a sometimes problematic U.S. ally, has been a conduit to HTS and is emerging as a power broker.

A high-risk mission like this is unusual for the typically risk averse Biden administration, which has exercised consistently restrained diplomacy. Blinken approved Carstens and Leaf's trip and relevant congressional leaders were briefed on it days ago.

"I think it's important to have direct communication, it's important to speak as clearly as possible, to listen, to make sure that we understand as best we can where they're going and where they want to go," Blinken said Thursday.

At a news conference in Moscow Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had not yet met with Assad, who fled to Russia when his regime fell earlier this month. Putin added that he would ask Assad about Austin Tice when they do meet.

Tice, a Marine Corps veteran, worked for multiple news organizations including CBS News.

Margaret Brennan is moderator of "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan." She is also the Network's chief foreign affairs correspondent based in Washington, D.C. and a contributing correspondent to "60 Minutes."

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CBS News · by Margaret Brennan

4. Biden’s international achievements are Trump’s opportunities

Opinion

Fareed Zakaria

Biden’s international achievements are Trump’s opportunities

Can the incoming administration take full advantage of a set of weakened adversaries?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/20/biden-foreign-policy-trump-opportunity/

December 20, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump and President Joe Biden shake hands in the Oval Office on Nov. 13. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

As Joe Biden’s presidency enters its final month, one way to assess his foreign policy legacy is to look at how the United States’ adversaries are doing. And the answer, almost overwhelmingly, is poorly. The “axis of upheaval” — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — is in much worse shape than it was four years ago. Some of this is good luck, but some is the product of good strategy and painstaking work. In any event, this new reality offers some real opportunities for President-elect Donald Trump to make significant gains over the next year.

Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter

Iran might be in its weakest state in decades. The Islamic republic has developed a careful and complex asymmetrical strategy to undermine the U.S.-led security structure in the Middle East. Iran funded an array of militant groups — Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas — as well as the Syrian government to keep Israel, plus Saudi Arabia and other moderate Arab states, on edge. That strategy is now in tatters. Israel’s attacks have devastated Hamas and Hezbollah and weakened Iran. Without those pillars of support, and with Russia distracted, Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed.

Israel claims to have destroyed many of Iran’s air defenses and ballistic missile capabilities. Rebuilding air defenses might be difficult because the most advanced ones come from Russia, which is bogged down in Ukraine. Iran’s economy has been battered by sanctions, and inflation remains high. The supreme leader is 85 and in poor health, and the president is not trusted by regime hard-liners or the military.

Opinions on foreign policy

Opinion

Max Boot

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Gabbard’s lack of judgment and flights from reality are disqualifying

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Wars over there, please, but not over here

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Nuclear proliferation will dominate the next president’s agenda

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As Biden slips toward the edge, NATO holds its collective breath

Russia’s weakness is also increasingly clear — something I wrote about last week. Many of its sources of revenue are declining, defense production cannot replace what it is losing on the battlefield, and inflation has also remained high. It can recruit young men to the army only by offering them first-year wages that are about four times Russia’s average income. It has had to rely on North Korea for weapons and even men to keep going.

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The China story is more complicated. China is still the world’s second-largest economy, but it is clearly facing a series of huge problems: a collapsing real estate market (which has underpinned economic growth in that country for decades), a huge overall debt load, slowing productivity growth and very low levels of consumer confidence. As Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Cheng tweeted this week, “Recent trading in the country’s bond market is screaming the D word … as in depression.” Meanwhile, author and investor Ruchir Sharma notes that no country with demographic decline of the kind that China is experiencing has ever had sustained rapid growth.

China’s malaise goes beyond just economics. Its army seems rife with corruption, as the latest of many crackdowns attest. Xi Jinping’s foreign policy has been largely counterproductive, alienating countries near and far. As former U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley put it, China increasingly seems to be heading an “Axis of Losers.”

How much of this can members of the Biden team take credit for? A fair amount. They rallied the world to oppose Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and put in place sweeping sanctions. They have supplied Ukraine with weapons and encouraged Europeans to do the same on an unprecedented scale. (They could have done more, but they did a lot.)

In the Middle East, the Biden administration has supported Israel more strongly than many realize, even as officials often cautioned it to be more discriminating in its actions. The United States actively participated in the military defense of Israel against two Iranian missile attacks — a rare occurrence. It responded to the first one by also getting countries in Europe and the Arab world to join in that defense. It urged Israel to focus its attacks on Iran’s air defenses and missile facilities, leaving the Islamic republic vulnerable to further attacks.

With China, the Biden team has brought both European and Asian countries together on a converging policy toward Beijing. It’s sometimes forgotten that Europe had agreed in principle to a trade deal with China when Biden entered the presidency. The Biden administration brokered a rapprochement between Japan and South Korea, which has helped solidify the balance of power against China in Asia. And it has revitalized the domestic manufacture of high-end computer chips, making supply chains more secure in that critical area of technology.

The challenge for Trump, as Thomas Friedman recently noted, lies in handling our adversaries’ weaknesses, not their strengths. Is there a way to keep pressure on Iran but also offer it incentives to cooperate — to cap its nuclear program and lessen its support for militias? Can Russia be squeezed to take a deal that allows Ukraine to thrive as a pro-Western democracy yet allows Russia to save face? Can China be weaned off its close alliance with Russia?

These are all difficult tasks, but Biden’s achievements do provide Trump with opportunities. The president will not get a thank-you from his successor, but perhaps he will be treated better by history.

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By Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS.follow on X@FareedZakaria

5. Ukraine’s Last Few M-1 Abrams Tanks Are Fighting In Kursk—And May Have Engaged North Korean Troops

Ukraine’s Last Few M-1 Abrams Tanks Are Fighting In Kursk—And May Have Engaged North Korean Troops

Forbes · by David Axe · December 20, 2024

David Axe

Forbes Staff

David Axe writes about ships, planes, tanks, drones and missiles.

Following

Dec 20, 2024,04:53pm EST

Updated Dec 20, 2024, 04:55pm EST

A Russian drone strikes a Ukrainian M-1 in Kursk.

Russian military capture

The Ukrainian army’s 47th Mechanized Brigade is running low on M-1 Abrams tanks. But the few tanks the brigade still has left are going out fighting, engaging Russian paratroopers and marines—and potentially North Korean soldiers—along the edge of the 250-square-mile salient Ukrainian forces carved out of Kursk Oblast in western Russia back in August.

“They are performing quite well,” Ukrainian war correspondent Andrii Tsaplienko said of the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s dozen or so surviving Abrams. Ukrainian crews have praised the M-1’s thick protection and accurate fire controls.

It’s hard to say whether the 2010s-vintage tanks have clashed with any of the thousands of North Korean troops who recently reinforced the Russians in and around Kursk. “The tankers are not 100-percent sure whether the North Koreans were among the enemy units they destroyed,” Tsaplienko noted, “because the machine gun cannot see the enemy’s face.”

The 47th Mechanized Brigade defends a length of the front line just east of the village of Novoivanovka on the western side of the salient. A pair of Russian formations—the 56th Airborne Regiment and the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, apparently—has been trying to advance from Novoivanovka in order to gain control of the neighboring village, Leonidovo, a mile to the east along a country road.

That road and its branches are equally critical to both sides—and equally dangerous. Russian operators flying new fiber-optic drones recently immobilized one of the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s M-1s as the tank rolled down the road. The drones, which are jam-proof because they send and receive data via the fiber instead of the radio, repeatedly hit the 69-ton, four-person Abrams in its engine compartment.

The crew survived, according to Rob Lee, an analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia who has been in contact with the 47th Mechanized Brigade. The drones “were unable to penetrate either the turret or the hull elsewhere while we were inside,” one of the tankers told Lee. That particular M-1 was protected by locally installed anti-drone netting and reactive armor blocks as well as its factory-installed armor.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade told Lee the damaged M-1 may be recoverable. For now at least, it’s out of action—reducing by one Ukraine’s shrinking inventory of Abrams. The United States donated just 31 of the tanks despite having thousands of them in storage. In 18 months of hard fighting, the 47th Mechanized Brigade has lost at least nine of the original M-1s. Eight more have been damaged.

More M-1s are coming, but not from the United States. Australia pledged 49 surplus M-1s back in October. That’s more than enough fresh Abrams to restore the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s tank battalion back to its full strength of 31 tanks while also equipping a second battalion.

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David Axe

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Forbes · by David Axe · December 20, 2024

6. Elon Musk’s wish list for DOGE

The very last point is key - working DOGE out of a job. The ultimate success will be an end to DOGE but also inculcating a mindset of sunset clauses and a culture of working bureaucracies out of a job or at least ending regulations and functions when they have served their purpose. Of course that is anathema to bureaucracies whose prime directive is to sustain their organization and grow.

Here is the list:

Delete’ the IRS

End the Federal Reserve

Improve defense spending

End remote work and shrink the federal payroll

Slash humanitarian aid

Cancel a lot of small grants

Modernize federal tech

Privatize the mail

‘Defang’ regulators

End DEI programs in education

Make daylight saving time permanent

Delete DOGE

Elon Musk’s wish list for DOGE

Musk and co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy have yet to offer a formal agenda for their government efficiency commission. But they already seem to have plenty of ideas.

Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/12/20/elon-musk-doge-priorities/

By Faiz Siddiqui

Since President-elect Donald Trump tapped Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to streamline federal operations, questions have swirled around their initiative, dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Is it an official department? (No.) How will it be structured? (TBD.) And crucially, what will it actually do?

Through DOGE — named after a meme of a smirking Shiba Inu dog and the cryptocurrency it inspired — Musk and Ramaswamy say they aim to slash billions in federal spending and cut through a labyrinth of “smothering” federal regulations they see as stifling human potential. Musk, in particular, has been vocal about possible targets. On X, his social media platform, he has outlined priorities big and small, from cutting esoteric research studies to eliminating entire government offices.

This week, Musk demonstrated his ability to wield political power through social media, helping to kill a measure House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) negotiated with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. (Congress did pass a similar measure in time to keep the government open.) Time will tell if he can build similar momentum for some of the more complex and sweeping DOGE changes he has pitched to his more than 200 million followers on X.

“The goal of @DOGE is to speedrun fixing the Federal Government,” Musk has said. Here are some of the areas that have drawn his attention so far:

‘Delete’ the IRS

Return to menu

As Trump supporters have pushed for a broad overhaul of the Internal Revenue Service — or to eliminate the tax collector entirely — Musk polled his followers on X about the future of the agency, asking whether the IRS’s budget should be increased, maintained, decreased or “deleted.” Among more than 200,000 respondents, “deleted” won handily, though the poll didn’t exactly use rigorous methodology.

Eliminating the IRS would be a radical move. IRS tax collections are the primary source of federal funding. In fiscal 2023, when spending approached $6.2 trillion, the IRS collected nearly $4.7 trillion in gross taxes. So without the IRS, Washington would need a different source of cash. Like a lot of ideas Musk muses about, this change would need approval by Congress.

End the Federal Reserve

Return to menu

On Tuesday, Musk responded “Yes!!” to a post from former Texas congressman Ron Paul, who wrote on X: “We should wean ourselves off The Fed, like we weaned ourselves off the mainstream media.”

It wasn’t the first time Musk has criticized the country’s central bank, which has a range of critical responsibilities, including setting interest rates, managing the total amount of currency in circulation and serving as banker to the U.S. government. “We could save a lot of money by replacing the Fed with a Magic 8-Ball,” Musk posted last month.

But nearly every country in the world has a central bank. Without one, it’s unclear how America would safeguard “the intrinsic value of the money unit,” as Alexander Hamilton put it in 1791. Trump hasn’t gone anywhere near the idea — and he’s said publicly that he won’t try to replace Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell before his term expires in 2026.

Improve defense spending

Return to menu

The Pentagon spends more than any other federal agency, and defense is one of the largest categories in the federal budget outside the entitlements — such as Social Security and Medicare — and interest on the national debt.

Some Democrats have long complained about the size of the military budget, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) has said he is prepared to work with DOGE on ensuring “Americans get their money’s worth with [military] spending.”

But the devil is in the details, and Musk has not provided many. “@DOGE will improve the efficiency of Defense spending,” Musk wrote on X last month in response to a plea from Ramaswamy that said: “We need to strengthen our military by focusing on the *effectiveness* of our defense spending, rather than just reflexively increasing the magnitude.”

End remote work and shrink the federal payroll

Return to menu

Musk and Ramaswamy have repeatedly emphasized their desire to bring federal workers back to the office full-time. Musk has long been an opponent of remote work, telling employees of his companies to report to the office or resign well before pandemic telework habits ended at many firms.

“Those who farm or build or drive can’t work from home and will be very sympathetic to this requirement,” Musk posted recently.

Musk and Ramaswamy have also pledged “mass headcount reductions” in the federal workforce, saying they would work to “identify the minimum number of employees” needed to carry out essential functions.

The goal isn’t to save money, Ramaswamy recently told the Aspen Security Forum. It’s to align the size of government with its functions — which Musk and Ramaswamy hope to greatly reduce.

Slash humanitarian aid

Return to menu

Reposting a chart that shows the United States has given more than four times as much as any other country on the list of humanitarian aid-donors, Musk called for paring back aid to other countries.

“@DOGE will address this with full transparency for the American people,” he wrote.

But while foreign aid — which encompasses humanitarian aid — may seem an easy political target, cutting it would not accomplish much: The United States spent $63 billion on foreign aid in fiscal 2023 — about 1 percent of federal spending.

Cancel a lot of small grants

Return to menu

A little more than a week after the election, the New York Post highlighted what it described as a clear example of wasteful spending: National Institutes of Health money directed toward research on what it described as “transgender” monkeys.

The story caught Musk’s attention. “Looks like a lot of opportunity for @DOGE!” he said.

The official DOGE account on X has offered other examples of what it describes as absurd uses of federal funds: $1.7 million for “holograms of dead comedians.” $500,000 for a Washington, D.C., IHOP location. $2.5 million for a Super Bowl ad for the Census.

Those things may sound silly, but like foreign aid, they represent a tiny portion of the federal budget. (And some are one-time grants from years ago.)

Modernize federal tech

Return to menu

“The Federal government computers & software are in such bad shape that they often cannot verify that payments are not fraud, waste or abuse!” Musk said this month. “This is a grind & hardly glorious, but we can’t make government efficient & fix the deficit if the computers don’t work.”

Musk is hardly the first to make this observation. Former President Barack Obama made tech modernization a priority and Congress has long recognized the problem. “Of the government’s $100 billion in annual IT spending, 80 percent goes to operating and maintaining existing systems. The older the systems are, the more the upkeep costs — and, older systems are more vulnerable to hackers,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in 2023.

If Musk could figure out how to fix the problem, he would probably win applause across the political spectrum.

Privatize the mail

Return to menu

The Post reported this month that Trump is considering privatizing the U.S. Postal Service, citing concern about its finances. When an X user applauded the idea — “I say privatize it, and better yet: let us opt-out of receiving physical mail.” — Musk responded with a firm: “Yes.”

Musk has also called the cost of new electric vehicles purchased by USPS “crazy.”

‘Defang’ regulators

Return to menu

Musk has elevated a call for “defanging” the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, both of which have investigated him or his businesses. They are part of a long list of regulatory agencies Musk has tangled with and, at times, criticized.

Musk has also proposed to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog agency formed after the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers in their interactions with financial institutions. The agency has long drawn the ire of Republicans — and more recently Musk allies like the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported recently that Trump advisers have asked about eliminating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the agency that protects bank deposits up to $250,000 per depositor. The Journal reported that the idea had been floated by DOGE officials, among others.

End DEI programs in education

Return to menu

While Trump has taken aim at the Department of Education, Musk has his eye on one specific aspect of education spending: diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“The Department of Education spent over $1 Billion promoting DEI in America’s schools,” the official DOGE account posted on X, citing a report from Parents Defending Education, a conservative group that draws attention to liberal ideology in schools. “Insane,” Musk replied.

Make daylight saving time permanent

Return to menu

“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk posted last month as America set its clocks back, prompting Donald Trump Jr. to weigh in with several “100” emoji, urging “leave it daylight saving time always.”

President-elect Trump, too, has officially called for ending the practice of changing the clocks in the fall and spring. (Trump, unlike some Republicans and his son, has called for ending daylight saving time, which would leave clocks on standard time year-round.)

It’s not clear how the move would save money — nor how manipulating time itself would fit into the DOGE mandate.

Delete DOGE

Return to menu

Trump has said DOGE aims to finish its work by July 4, 2026. “Most government projects should come with a clear expiry date. That’s why we set one for @DOGE: July 4, 2026,” Ramaswamy posted.

Musk agreed: “The final step of @DOGE is to delete itself.”

379

Comments

By Faiz Siddiqui

Faiz Siddiqui is a technology reporter with The Washington Post's Business Desk covering companies such as Tesla and Twitter. His area of coverage has also included ride-hailing and the race to build autonomous cars. Prior to that, he covered the D.C. Metro and local transportation scene.follow on X@faizsays

7. Inside the Monthlong White House Effort to Quell New Jersey Drone Frenzy

Either the government does not know what is happening or the government knows and is not being transparent with the American people. Neither is good for the government or the trust of the American people in the government.

And if there is nothing to see here we need the government to do a better job of explaining the phenomenon in a way that the American people can understand and with explanations they can trust. After all homeland defense must be the first priority of the US government.

Inside the Monthlong White House Effort to Quell New Jersey Drone Frenzy

Biden called the Pentagon four times seeking information and was told the military had found nothing unusual

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/biden-drone-response-new-jersey-reactions-7084ef90?mod=latest_headlines

By Lara Seligman

, Kristina Peterson

and Gordon Lubold

Dec. 22, 2024 10:00 am ET

WASHINGTON—President Biden’s first call to the Pentagon about the drones over New Jersey came on Dec. 12, nearly a month after the initial reports of mysterious flying objects in the night sky, U.S. officials said.

In the days that followed, Biden called Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin again. And again. And again, seeking updates.

By then, the drone frenzy had escalated into a major headache for the White House, fueled by rumors about an Iranian mother ship off the coast, by videos of unknown aircraft hovering over suburban towns—and by little information from Washington except assurances that there was nothing unusual.

Though the sightings began on Nov. 18, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t brief New Jersey’s congressional delegation on what it knew until Dec. 4, and then not again until weeks later, lawmakers said. The White House didn’t address the issue publicly until the same day Biden called Austin, playing down what had become a national fixation.

“There is no known malicious activity occurring,” White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters, adding that federal authorities were investigating the sightings with New Jersey state law-enforcement agencies.

Within days of the first sightings, DHS, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies were looking for explanations and were in touch regularly with New Jersey law enforcement and officials, a senior Biden administration official said. The FBI opened a tip line on Nov. 25 and ran down “every single one” of the 6,000 tips it received, the official said.

President Biden didn’t make his first call to the Pentagon about the drone sightings until Dec. 12. Photo: nathan howard/Reuters

As concern mounted, White House aides at the National Security Council began daily check-ins with the relevant agencies, the official said, never finding any evidence of criminal activity, a national security threat or a public safety danger.

But those findings frustrated state and federal lawmakers. “I just didn’t see the commensurate type of response by the administration to meet that level of public interest,” said Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.).

The response gave President-elect Donald Trump an opening to suggest, without evidence, that the White House was withholding the truth.

“Our military knows and our president knows, and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense,” Trump told reporters this past Monday, urging that the drones be shot down.

The sightings began the night of Nov. 18, when law-enforcement officers in northern New Jersey began seeing several drones in the sky. Live Storm Chasers, a local weather-tracking group with 1.3 million Facebook followers, posted that “at least five, unknown, large drones have been flying unauthorized for over 2 hours.”

The Morris County prosecutor’s office said there was no known threat to public safety and urged skepticism about online reports. It didn’t work, and the attention might have attracted more drone pilots who made the situation worse, said Rob D’Amico, a former FBI counterdrone chief.

Members of the Skywatch Task Force in Mendham, N.J., earlier this month. The group’s mission is to figure out why so many drones are flying over its community. Photo: Tom Wilson for WSJ

“I grew up in New Jersey. If I was a teen with a drone, I’d be flying over the mayor’s house, I’d be flying over the sheriff’s house,” D’Amico said. “I’m a smartass, and there are a lot of smartasses in New Jersey.”

As the sightings continued, the FBI’s Newark office opened an investigation on Nov. 20, and the Federal Aviation Administration two days later issued a temporary prohibition on drones over the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. Days later, the agency ordered another temporary flight restriction over the Picatinny Arsenal, an Army research center, where there have been several confirmed sightings of unidentified drones entering the airspace.

Then things really took off.

Across the Atlantic, unidentified drones were spotted flying over four military bases used by the U.S. in the U.K. “Small unmanned aerial systems continue to be spotted in the vicinity of and over Royal Air Force Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Feltwell and RAF Fairford since Nov. 20,” the Air Force said in a statement, giving the names of the British bases.

The Pentagon offered no explanation, just as in New Jersey.

By Dec. 4, the state’s elected officials took matters into their own hands. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy organized a Zoom call for the delegation with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) said he asked why the U.S. government couldn’t follow one of the mysterious drones.

“We surely have the capability to follow one. He didn’t know,” Smith said.

A DHS spokesman disputed Smith’s account, saying in a statement that Mayorkas explained that the department had limited authority to track and take down drones, citing restrictions imposed by Congress.

Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.) has expressed concern over the Biden administration’s response to the drone sightings. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On Dec. 8, a Coast Guard officer at Island Beach State Park in New Jersey told Smith that one of its 47-foot vessels had been trailed by as many as 30 drones, the lawmaker said.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R., N.J.), a member of the House subcommittee on aviation, said in an appearance on Fox News that he had “high sources” telling him the drones were coming from an Iranian “mother ship” in the Atlantic. He had been alerted by three people with links to U.S. intelligence that the vessel had left its port in Iran in November, Van Drew told The Wall Street Journal

“I have not been presented a single credible, cohesive narrative except for that Iran is controlling these drones from offshore,” Van Drew said in a letter sent to Biden on Dec. 11.

Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh soon responded: “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there is no so-called mother ship launching drones toward the United States.”

Biden started calling the Pentagon for updates the next day. A few of the drones might have been operating without authorization over New Jersey military bases, Austin told Biden, but most of the objects were regular, manned aircraft or hobbyist drones. None were being flown by a foreign adversary, as far as the Pentagon knew.

That set in motion a flurry of congressional briefings and public statements repeating that there was no sign of anything amiss. “The president has directed his team to do everything possible to get to the bottom of this,” said a White House official.

The administration deployed counterdrone equipment in New Jersey. The FBI provided protection at the Dec. 14 Army-Navy football game attended by Trump, even though it was played in Maryland. DHS handled that mission at a National Football League game in New Jersey on Dec. 15. The FAA later temporarily banned drone flights over critical sites in New Jersey and New York.

Biden finally spoke publicly about the drones on Dec. 17 as he boarded a helicopter on the White House lawn: “Nothing nefarious,” he assured reporters, suggesting that the furor was a nonevent, spurred by misinformation and unfounded rumors. “Everybody wanted to get in the deal.”

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R., N.J.) cited three people who work closely with the intelligence community as saying the drones were coming from an Iranian ‘mother ship’ in the Atlantic. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Zuma Press

Michelle Hackman, Andrew Tangel and Alexander Ward contributed to this article.

Write to Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com, Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com and Gordon Lubold at gordon.lubold@wsj.com

8. The Not-So-Secret Way Around U.S. Tariffs

The Not-So-Secret Way Around U.S. Tariffs

Cabinets made in China were rerouted through Malaysia and ended up in U.S. kitchens—sparking a Customs probe and splintering an American industry

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/tariff-evasions-us-trade-c7f3cb27?mod=latest_headlines

By Inti Pacheco

Dec. 22, 2024 5:30 am ET

Photo: Emil Lendof/WSJ, iStock

U.S. agents had to climb over piles of boxes to see inside the warehouse. They had learned about the secret building after finishing their tour of cabinet production facilities in Penang, Malaysia.

The place was packed with boxes of ready-to-ship wooden cabinets that looked identical. Some were stamped as made in China and others had labels saying they were made in Malaysia, according to a Customs report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, agents were inspecting the site as part of a late 2022 inquiry into allegations that subsidiaries of Chinese company Qingdao Haiyan Group were evading tariffs. Haiyan had been accused of sending Chinese-made cabinets to the U.S. by shipping them through Malaysia, masking the origin of the goods—a scheme known as transshipping.

The investigation has splintered the kitchen cabinet industry. Haiyan has been a supplier to some of the largest cabinet makers and distributors in the U.S., such as American Woodmark AMWD -0.99%decrease; red down pointing triangle. They, in turn, supply retail giants such as Lowe’s and Home Depot. One longtime Haiyan customer, Cabinets To Go, sparked the probe and has called out larger U.S. rivals for continuing to ignore red flags.

“No one cared,” said Cabinets To Go owner Tom Sullivan, who filed a lawsuit against Haiyan and said he alerted the CBP in 2021. “They still allow them to import from those companies.”

The Malaysia factory’s general manager said he didn’t initially tell CBP agents about the finished-goods warehouse because he misunderstood what agents wanted when they asked him to list every building the business owned, the CBP report said.

Haiyan has denied that the products in Malaysia were made in China or that it controlled the day-to-day operations of its Malaysian or U.S. subsidiaries. Lawyers and representatives for Haiyan didn’t respond to requests for comment.

American Woodmark said it ensures none of its purchases are transshipped because it has teams in Asia that inspect every shipment. The cabinet maker said that most of its supply chain is sourced in the U.S. and that it canceled all its orders with Haiyan’s Malaysian subsidiary upon learning of the allegations.

Reliant on imports

Imported cabinets make up most of the $37.5 billion U.S. market. In 2018, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese-made cabinets as part of broader tariffs, rerouting the flow of those goods. In 2020, the Biden administration slapped them with up to 262% in antidumping duties, a penalty imposed on imports judged by the U.S. to be sold for below fair value.

Value of U.S. imports

of kitchen cabinets,

by trade partner

billion

All others

Indonesia

Cambodia

Italy

Thailand

Malaysia

Mexico

Canada

China

Vietnam

Source:

Census

Bureau

’18

’19

’20

’21

’22

’23

2017

In response, Haiyan and other Chinese companies have moved operations or established new facilities in countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia or Thailand, where they can send raw materials to make goods. Some companies have used these countries as temporary holding places where they can mask the origin of goods, according to CBP investigations.

The problems go beyond cabinets. In recent years, CBP has found transshipment schemes used to obscure the origin of mattresses, solar panels, nails and quartz countertops. In 2023, CBP prevented importers from evading $500 million in duties following investigations, according to an agency report. The agency declined to comment.

“It’s kind of a shell game,” said Betsy Natz, chief executive of the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association, or KCMA, a trade group of about 300 manufacturers and suppliers of residential cabinets.

Home Depot said it has systems in place to ensure that products it imports are properly declared and that necessary tariffs are paid. Regarding American Woodmark, it said “we believe all the products we buy from them are made in North America and not subject to transshipment issues.” Lowe’s didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Tracing the origins

Cabinets To Go told Haiyan in 2019 that it wouldn’t place any new orders with the company because it wanted to avoid the U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made cabinets.

Haiyan employees traveled to Lawrenceburg, Tenn., in early 2020 to mend the relationship. They said Haiyan had acquired a mill in Malaysia that complied with its customer’s non-China requirements. Cabinets To Go agreed to place monthly orders with Haiyan that averaged $1 million.

Sullivan, the Cabinets To Go owner, said that in July 2021, an inspector that he hired in Malaysia to check on his supplier saw a container full of finished wooden cabinets arriving at the facility. The boxes had labels saying that the cabinets had been manufactured in Malaysia but the inspector traced the container and found that it had just arrived from China, Sullivan said.

A shipment of finished cabinets with ‘Made in Malaysia’ labels arrived at Haiyan’s Malaysian site in 2021. An inspector later traced the origin of the container to China. Photo: Cabinets To Go

A month later, a Haiyan employee told Cabinet to Go executives that a shipment of 13 containers that was on its way from Malaysia also had cabinets or components that had been manufactured in China.

Once the shipment arrived, the U.S. retailer had to amend its customs declaration to say the origin of the goods was China. The additional cost to Cabinets To Go under the tariffs was more than $650,000. Cabinets To Go sued Haiyan for breach of contract, seeking damages. Haiyan’s lawyers sought to have the case dismissed. The case was settled in 2023.

The lawsuit prompted a subset of members of KCMA, the trade group, to bring a complaint to CBP in March 2022. The group also asked the Commerce Department to review whether cabinets made in Malaysia and Vietnam with Chinese components should be subject to antidumping fees. CBP opened its inquiry in July 2022.

Groups such as KCMA can file Enforce and Protect Act, or EAPA, complaints with CBP asking the agency to investigate alleged evasions. Natz said domestic companies lose contracts because firms importing Chinese products can offer significantly lower prices, making it hard for domestic producers to compete. “It’s a never-ending battle,” Natz said.

An industry splinters

Three of the largest U.S. cabinet companies—MasterBrand, American Woodmark and Cabinetworks Group—resigned from the trade group in October 2022. Natz said they disagreed with the KCMA’s request with the Commerce Department to expand antidumping duties.

MasterBrand said KCMA’s effort would make legitimate trade in countries such as Malaysia and Vietnam difficult and potentially punitive. “KCMA is not aligned with companies like MasterBrand who have global supply chains supporting their U.S. operations,” it said.

American Woodmark supports the antidumping duties on Chinese imports but it isn’t aligned with KCMA’s expansion of the levies, the company said. Cabinetworks didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The CBP probe into Haiyan continued and in January 2023 the agency determined that there had been transshipping. A U.S. subsidiary of Haiyan requested an administrative review. The CBP decision was reversed five months later.

KCMA took the case to the Court of International Trade, and a judge in October 2024 directed CBP to review the case a third time, saying Haiyan controlled the Malaysian and U.S. subsidiaries.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Commerce Department ruled in July 2024 that wooden cabinets that used Chinese plywood fell under the scope of the antidumping order. Malaysian or Vietnamese suppliers must certify that they aren’t using components made in China. Cabinetworks in September contested the ruling in the Court of International Trade.

Write to Inti Pacheco at inti.pacheco@wsj.com

9. Is it a Risk for America that China Holds So Much U.S. Debt?

Graphics at the link: https://chinapower.csis.org/us-debt/

Excerpts:

The biggest effect of a broad scale dump of US Treasuries by China would be that China would actually export fewer goods to the United States.

- Scott Miller

Overall, foreign countries each make up a relatively small proportion of U.S. debt-holders. Although China’s holdings have represented just under 20 percent of foreign-owned U.S. debt in the past several years, this percentage only comprises between 3 and 6 percent of total U.S. debt. China's holdings fell to $859 billion in January 2023, marking the lowest level since 2009. Moreover, Japan has at times overtaken China as the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt. This has been the case since June 2019, as China's holdings have fallen and Japan's have risen.

Internationally, this situation is common: most sovereign debt is held domestically. European financial institutions hold the majority of European sovereign bonds. Similarly, Japanese domestic financial actors hold approximately 90 percent of Japanese net sovereign debt. Thus despite international demand for U.S. sovereign debt, the United States is no exception to the global trend: U.S. domestic actors hold the majority of U.S. sovereign bonds.

Is it a Risk for America that China Holds So Much U.S. Debt?

Many worry that China’s ownership of American debt affords the Chinese economic leverage over the United States. This apprehension, however, stems from a misunderstanding of sovereign debt and of how states derive power from their economic relations. The purchasing of sovereign debt by foreign countries is a normal transaction that helps maintain openness in the global economy. Consequently, China’s stake in America’s debt has more of a binding than dividing effect on bilateral relations between the two countries.

Even if China wished to “call in” its loans, the use of credit as a coercive measure is complicated and often heavily constrained. A creditor can only dictate terms for the debtor country if that debtor has no other options. In the case of the United States, American debt is a widely-held and extremely desirable asset in the global economy. Whatever debt China does sell is simply purchased by other countries. For instance, in August 2015 China reduced its holdings of U.S. Treasuries by approximately $180 billion. Despite the scale, this selloff did not significantly affect the U.S. economy, thereby limiting the impact that such an action may have on U.S. decision-making.

Furthermore, China needs to maintain significant reserves of U.S. debt to manage the exchange rate of the renminbi. Were China to suddenly unload its reserve holdings, its currency’s exchange rate would rise, making Chinese exports more expensive in foreign markets. As such, China’s holdings of American debt do not provide China with undue economic influence over the United States.

Why do countries accumulate foreign exchange reserves?

Any country that trades openly with other countries is likely to buy foreign sovereign debt. In terms of economic policy, a country can have any two but not three of the following: a fixed exchange rate, an independent monetary policy, and free capital flows. Foreign sovereign debt provide countries with a means to pursue their economic objectives.

The first two functions are monetary policy choices performed by a country’s central bank. First, sovereign debt frequently comprises part of other countries’ foreign exchange reserves. Second, central banks buy sovereign debt as part of monetary policy to maintain the exchange rate or forestall economic instability. Third, as a low-risk store of value, sovereign debt is attractive to central banks and other financial actors alike. Each of these functions will be discussed briefly.

Foreign Reserves

Any country open to international trade or investment requires a certain amount of foreign currency on hand to pay for foreign goods or investments abroad. As a result, many countries keep foreign currency in reserve to pay for these expenses, which cushion the economy from sudden changes in international investment. Domestic economic policies often require central banks to maintain a reserve adequacy ratio of foreign exchange and other reserves for short-term external debt, and to ensure a country’s ability to service its external short-term debt in a crisis. The International Monetary Fund publishes guidelines to assist governments in calculating appropriate levels of foreign exchange reserves given their economic conditions.

Exchange rate

A fixed or pegged exchange rate is a monetary policy decision. This decision attempts to minimize the price instability that accompanies volatile capital flows. Such conditions are especially apparent in emerging markets: Argentinian import price increases of up to 30 percent in 2013 led opposition leaders to describe wages as “water running through your fingers.” Since price volatility is economically and politically destabilizing, policymakers manage exchange rates to mitigate change. Internationally, few countries’ exchange rates are completely “floating,” or determined by currency markets. To manage domestic currency rates, a country might choose to purchase foreign assets and store them for the future, when the currency might depreciate too quickly.

A low-risk store of value

As sovereign debt is government-backed, private and public financial institutions view it as a low-risk asset with a high chance of repayment. Some government bonds are seen as riskier than others. A country’s external debt may be viewed as unsustainable relative to its GDP or its reserves, or a country could otherwise default on its debt. Generally, however, sovereign debt is more likely to return value and therefore is safer relative to other forms of investment, even if earned interest is not high.

Why does China buy U.S. debt?

China buys U.S. debt for the same reasons other countries buy U.S. debt, with two caveats. The crippling 1997 Asian Financial Crisis prompted Asian economies, including China, to build up foreign exchange reserves as a safety net. More specifically, China holds large exchange reserves, which were built up over time due in part to persistent surpluses in the current account, to inhibit cash inflows from trade and investment from destabilizing the domestic economy.

China’s large U.S. Treasury holdings say as much about U.S. power in the global economy as any particularity of the Chinese economy. Broadly speaking, U.S. debt is an in-demand asset. It is safe and convenient. As the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar is extensively used in international transactions. Trade goods are priced in dollars and due to its high demand, the dollar can easily be cashed in. Furthermore, the U.S. government has never defaulted on its debt.

A Conversation with Scott Miller

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Despite U.S. debt’s attractive qualities, continued U.S. debt financing has concerned economists, who worry that a sudden stop in capital flows to the United States could spark a domestic crisis.1 Thus, U.S. reliance on debt financing would present challenges—not if demand from China were halted, but if demand from all financial actors suddenly halted.2

From a regional perspective, Asian countries hold an unusually large amount of U.S. debt in response to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. During the Asian Financial Crisis, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand saw incoming investments crash to an estimated -$12.1 billion from $93 billion, or 11 percent of their combined pre-crisis GDP.3 In response, China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asian nations maintain large precautionary rainy-day funds of foreign exchange reserves, which—for safety and convenience—include U.S. debt. These policies were vindicated post-2008, when Asian economies boasted a relatively speedy recovery.

From a national perspective, China buys U.S. debt due to its complex financial system. The central bank must purchase U.S. Treasuries and other foreign assets to keep cash inflows from causing inflation. In the case of China, this phenomenon is unusual. A country like China, which saves more than it invests domestically, is typically an international lender.4

To avoid inflation, the Chinese central bank removes this incoming foreign currency by purchasing foreign assets—including U.S. Treasury bonds—in a process called “sterilization.” This system has the disadvantage of generating unnecessarily low returns on investment: by relying on FDI, Chinese firms borrow from abroad at high interest rates, while China continues to lend to foreign entities at low interest rates.5 This system also compels China to purchase foreign assets, including safe, convenient U.S. debt.

Who owns the most U.S. debt?

Around 70 percent of U.S. debt is held by domestic financial actors and institutions in the United States. U.S. Treasuries represent a convenient, liquid, low-risk store of value. These qualities make it attractive to diverse financial actors, from central banks looking to hold money in reserve to private investors seeking a low-risk asset in a portfolio.

Of all U.S. domestic public actors, intragovernmental holdings, including Social Security, hold over a third of U.S. Treasury securities. The secretary of the treasury is legally required to invest Social Security tax revenues in U.S.-issued or guaranteed securities, stored in trust funds managed by the Treasury Department.

The Federal Reserve holds the second-largest share of U.S. Treasuries, about 13 percent of total U.S. Treasury bills. Why would a country buy its own debt? As the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve must adjust the amount of money in circulation to suit the economic environment. The central bank performs this function via open market operations—buying and selling financial assets, like Treasury bills, to add or remove money from the economy. By buying assets from banks, the Federal Reserve places new money in circulation in order to allow banks to lend more, spur business, and help economic recovery.

Excluding the Federal Reserve and Social Security, a number of other U.S. financial actors hold U.S. Treasury securities. These financial actors include state and local governments, mutual funds, insurance companies, public and private pensions, and U.S. banks. Generally speaking, they will hold U.S. Treasury securities as a low-risk asset.

The biggest effect of a broad scale dump of US Treasuries by China would be that China would actually export fewer goods to the United States.

- Scott Miller

Overall, foreign countries each make up a relatively small proportion of U.S. debt-holders. Although China’s holdings have represented just under 20 percent of foreign-owned U.S. debt in the past several years, this percentage only comprises between 3 and 6 percent of total U.S. debt. China's holdings fell to $859 billion in January 2023, marking the lowest level since 2009. Moreover, Japan has at times overtaken China as the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt. This has been the case since June 2019, as China's holdings have fallen and Japan's have risen.

Internationally, this situation is common: most sovereign debt is held domestically. European financial institutions hold the majority of European sovereign bonds. Similarly, Japanese domestic financial actors hold approximately 90 percent of Japanese net sovereign debt. Thus despite international demand for U.S. sovereign debt, the United States is no exception to the global trend: U.S. domestic actors hold the majority of U.S. sovereign bonds.

10. What Trump's decision to wade into spending fight tells us about the next 4 years

Excerpts:

A glance at Trump’s agenda shows a cascade of opportunities for similar showdowns in the years to come. He wants to extend tax cuts that he signed into law seven years ago, slash the size of government, increase tariffs on imports and crack down on illegal immigrants. Many of those efforts will need congressional buy-in.

For many of Trump’s supporters, disruption could be its own goal. Thirty-seven percent of those who voted for him this year said they wanted “complete and total upheaval,” according to AP VoteCast, a broad survey of more than 120,000 voters. An additional 56% said they wanted “substantial change.”

But the past few days made clear the difficulty Trump could face in quickly fulfilling his goals, especially with Republicans holding only thin majorities in the House and the Senate. Some lawmakers already seem weary of the apparent lack of a unified strategy.

Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said the budget battle was “a valuable lesson in how to get our act together.”

“There are no layups and it gets more complicated,” he said.

What Trump's decision to wade into spending fight tells us about the next 4 years

By CHRIS MEGERIAN, STEPHEN GROVES, JILL COLVIN and JOSH BOAK

Updated 9:06 AM EST, December 22, 2024

AP · by CHRIS MEGERIAN · December 21, 2024

CHRIS MEGERIAN

Megerian covers the White House for The Associated Press. He previously wrote about the Russia investigation, climate change, law enforcement and politics in California and New Jersey.

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STEPHEN GROVES

Groves covers Congress for The Associated Press.

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JILL COLVIN

Colvin is an Associated Press national political reporter covering the 2024 presidential campaign. She is based in New York.

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JOSH BOAK

Boak covers the White House and economic policy for The Associated Press. He joined the AP in 2013.

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AP · by CHRIS MEGERIAN · December 21, 2024

11. Many Videos That Purport to Show Drones in New Jersey Likely Show Planes, Visual Analysis Finds

Videos, maps, graphics, are at the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/video/new-jersey-drones-planes-videos.html?utm

Many Videos That Purport to Show Drones in New Jersey Likely Show Planes, Visual Analysis Finds

Here’s why it’s hard to distinguish objects in the night sky.

By Alexander Cardia Arijeta Lajka Riley Mellen Lazaro Gamio and Alyce McFadden

Dec. 19, 2024

Starting in mid-November, a mystery began to take hold in northern New Jersey, when residents of Morris County began posting videos that appeared to show brightly lit flying objects hovering or soaring across the night sky, in some cases above their homes.

Many believed they were drones, and various theories followed, with people claiming they were part of secret government programs or even alien invasions. Within weeks, residents across several states began reporting hundreds of sightings, and posting videos and photographs of their encounters.

To better understand what some New Jersey residents have likely been seeing — as well as how perceptions of objects in the night sky can be distorted — The New York Times mapped local airports, tracked air traffic patterns and, along with aviation experts, analyzed hundreds of videos of aircraft purportedly filmed in or near Morris County in November and December.

The vast majority of the videos appeared to show planes or helicopters, moving across a part of the state that brims with airports. None of the videos analyzed by The Times conclusively showed drones, though in some cases that remains a plausible explanation.

One video in particular, filmed in Somerset County, N.J. and posted on Facebook on Dec. 4, is an example of how difficult it can be to deduce what an object might be. It shows a helicopter and a second flying object, purported to be a drone; experts were unable to determine exactly what the object was, although they said it resembled a plane.

Video

A video filmed in Somerset County, N.J., posted on Facebook on Dec. 4, shows a helicopter and a second flying object.CreditCredit...Ellen Clarke, via Facebook

The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation into the wide range of purported drone sightings nationwide, and on Monday said that of the 5,000 tips they have received, many were piloted aircraft. Others were smaller planes and lawful commercial or hobbyist drones, or law enforcement drones. Only 100 tips required further examination. The F.B.I. and other federal authorities have said that the sightings do not pose a threat to public safety or homeland security.

One key factor fueling the confusion, drone and aviation experts said, is that it’s exceedingly difficult for the human eye to gauge the distance, size, and movement of flying objects at night. The red-and-green collision lights on aircraft as well as various flight tracking applications can provide observers with insights, although both have limitations.

Northern New Jersey, where the first sightings occurred, is home to especially crowded airspace.

There are dozens of airports in the area, from major airports to smaller airports and private airstrips, along with other facilities like heliports. Many planes also use air routes to cross New Jersey without stopping.

Major airports

Smaller airports

Other facilities

Air routes

LaGuardia

Lehigh Valley Int'l

Morristown

Municipal

Newark

Liberty

Teterboro

New Brunswick

New York

City

Newark

Allentown

N.J.

Pa.

N.Y.

A map that shows the locations of dozens of airports and other aviation facilities in and around northern New Jersey, along with major air routes.

Each dot here represents the positions reported by aircraft as they traversed New Jersey’s skies between sunset and sunrise on Dec. 10, Dec. 11, and Dec. 12 and Dec. 13.

Reported aircraft altitude, in feet

500

1,000

2,500

5,000

10,000

20,000

LaGuardia

Lehigh Valley Int'l

Morristown

Municipal

Newark

Liberty

Teterboro

N.J.

Pa.

N.Y.

The map changes to show the reported locations of all flights in and around northern New Jersey.

Large and medium-sized airline, cargo and private jets make up the bulk of the reported air traffic in this area. They tend to follow closely-controlled routes and fly at high altitudes until they approach their destination. They’re required to reliably report their position.

Smaller planes and helicopters, seen below, fly at lower altitudes and often have less predictable routes. In Morris County, and much of the New York metro region, aircraft are required to report their positions due to airspace regulations around the large airports. In areas of the U.S. with different regulations, small aircraft may not publicly report their positions.

LaGuardia

Lehigh Valley Int'l

Morristown

Municipal

Newark

Liberty

Teterboro

N.J.

Pa.

N.Y.

The map changes to show the reported locations of flights by small planes and helicopters in and around northern New Jersey.

Taken together, more than 2,500 flights crossed Morris County’s skies in this time period.

LaGuardia

Lehigh Valley Int'l

Morristown

Municipal

Newark

Liberty

Teterboro

New Brunswick

New York

City

Newark

Allentown

Morris

County

N.J.

Pa.

N.Y.

The map changes to show the reported locations of flights by large and medium-sized planes in and around northern New Jersey.

Data: Flightradar24, International Civil Aviation Organization and the Federal Aviation Administration. Note: Dots showing aircraft positions were reported on Dec. 10, 11 and 12 between the hours of 4 p.m. and 7 a.m. the following day. Controlled airspace depicted near New York City is Class B airspace around the area’s major airports. The controlled airspace depicted around Lehigh Valley International is Class C airspace.

Amid all of this traffic, drones represent a small fraction of airborne objects — but there are certainly drones in the sky, in New Jersey and elsewhere. Hobbyist drones are common in the U.S. and legal to fly during the day and at night, following a 2021 rule change by the Federal Aviation Administration that relaxed restrictions on night flights.

More than one million drones were registered with the F.A.A. as of Dec. 2. Hundreds of thousands are registered to hobbyists, and an approximately equal share are registered commercially, such as for film production, real estate and environmental research. Many police departments also use drones. Federal officials have said that they expect the number of drones in use to continue to rise nationwide.

It can be extremely difficult to discern whether an object in the sky at night is a plane, a helicopter, a drone or something else, experts said.

Greg Pratt, a former air traffic controller and surveillance pilot for the F.B.I., who now teaches law enforcement officers how to identify and respond to drones, said that at night “your depth perception is totally unreliable,” even for those with training in identifying drones.

For that reason, it can also be challenging to gauge a flying object’s size. Something very big that is very far away, like a plane, can easily be mistaken for something smaller flying at close range, like a drone.

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One video filmed in Morris County purportedly captured a drone flying close to the ground. In reality, it appears to be a United Airlines flight to Newark thousands of feet in the air.

Video

This object, spotted over Mendham, N.J., on Dec. 3, appears to be a passenger jet flying at about 5,000 feet, according to a Times visual and flight tracking data analysis.CreditCredit...Alessandro Mannino

Determining the direction of a flying object at night is also extremely difficult. The human eye has a harder time comparing the object to reference points, like the horizon or tree lines, at night than it does when it’s light out. “If you do not have something to compare against, you personally can’t tell it’s moving,” said Tombo Jones, director of the Virginia Tech Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership’s drone test site. Objects that seem to be hovering in place nearby might, in fact, be quite far away and moving very quickly.

Light patterns can offer clues. Planes and helicopters are subject to strict F.A.A. rules about what lights they must shine at night. Drones are required to shine just one light at night. So long as it is visible for three miles in the dark, a drone can display any type or configuration of lights, according to Scott Harrigan, the president of Harkin Aerial, a drone services company in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

Many drones flown in the U.S. have a similar look because the large majority are produced by a company called DJI. Its commonly purchased quadcopter models often feature a consistent lighting configuration — two red lights at the front and two green lights at the rear. The lights flash and are designed to help a pilot orient a drone.

Video

All crewed aircraft feature a consistent lighting pattern as prescribed by the F.A.A and seen in this video. This can be helpful in determining just what is in the sky at night.CreditCredit...Kevin Anton

The majority of videos reviewed by The Times resemble the F.A.A. standard lighting pattern for crewed aircraft like planes and helicopters. From the ground, this pattern most often appears as a bright red flashing anti-collision light, and red and green navigation lights on the left and right wingtips, respectively. They also feature white landing lights underneath the front of the aircraft when it is preparing to land or has recently taken off. The lights seen in the videos do not appear to feature the common DJI lighting configuration.

Where the naked eye fails, flight tracking applications can help determine whether an object is a drone or a plane, and government officials have encouraged residents to consult them. Local law enforcement officers have also used them to investigate the sightings, cross referencing their observations with aircraft that appear on the applications.

The vast majority of aircraft, including this U.S. Air Force C-17A Globemaster III seen over Brick Township, N.J., on Dec. 12, which was initially believed to be a drone, correctly report their position and are visible on flight tracking applications.

Video

This U.S. Air Force C-17A Globemaster III seen over Brick Township, N.J., on Dec. 12, was initially believed to be a drone.

However, flight tracking does not capture every aircraft and the challenges judging distance at night make it easy to misinterpret the data.

While most airplanes appear on flight trackers, some do not. Small and old aircraft may not be equipped with the device the programs use to monitor planes’ locations. More than 30 percent of U.S. civil aircraft are not equipped with these devices.

An F.A.A. spokesperson confirmed those numbers, and added that “aircraft equipped with ADS-B are required to transmit at all times, with limited exceptions, like sensitive government missions.”

In three videos, New Jersey residents are seen or heard checking a flying object against a flight-tracking application. When they don’t see a plane in their vicinity, they take it as confirmation that they are looking at a drone. The Times’s analysis showed that in all three cases, the objects appeared to be planes.

Senator Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, posted on social media on Dec. 13 about his recent excursion with local law enforcement officers after dark to investigate the sightings. Parked near the Round Valley Reservoir in Hunterdon County, Mr. Kim said he and the officers often saw between five and seven lights that didn’t seem to appear on flight tracking apps. He said that they appeared to be flying low and had solid white lights or flashing red and green lights, and that the experience had made him more concerned about the U.S.’s drone detection capabilities.

But, the next day, Mr. Kim posted that he had spoken with pilots and flight experts who showed him more detailed flight tracking maps. The “deeper analysis” led Mr. Kim to conclude “that most of the possible drone sightings that were pointed out to me were almost certainly planes.”

Some reports of drone sightings remain unexplained and the F.B.I. investigation is ongoing. At a briefing to state lawmakers on Dec. 11, a state police official said that an officer had flown a helicopter over a drone, according to Brian Bergen, a state assemblyman who was present. The police were unable to stay with the drone for long, eventually peeling off because of safety concerns, Mr. Bergen recounted.

The state police have not commented about the episode publicly, and a spokesman referred questions about it to the F.B.I. The F.B.I. did not respond to a request for comment.

On Wednesday, the F.A.A. issued a monthlong ban on drone flights over a large swath of New Jersey.

Reporting contributed by Josh Williams. Video production contributed by Arijeta Lajka and Alexander Cardia. Graphics by Lazaro Gamio.

Alexander Cardia is a designer, animator and graphics editor with the Visual Investigations team at The Times. He was among the recipients of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine. More about Alexander Cardia

Riley Mellen is a reporter on The Times’s visual investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with advanced digital forensics. More about Riley Mellen

Alyce McFadden is a reporter covering New York City and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Alyce McFadden

12. Talent and Tech: Fielding and Wielding New Systems Requires the Right People

Excerpt:

You Fight with What You Got

Talent management is not the be-all and end-all of technological modernization. However, given finite budgets and significant recruiting challenges, talent management is how the Army can do more with less. By leveraging talent management, the Army can maximize effectiveness with limited resources, foster a more agile force, and better prepare for the technological challenges of the twenty-first century. However, this requires a paradigm shift, including a reexamination of legacy acquisition and personnel systems to create mechanisms that rewards and retains the precise talent the Army needs. If the service fails to adapt at pace with US adversaries, America risks being unprepared for future conflicts, with a landpower service tailored for yesterday’s battles rather than tomorrow’s challenges.

Talent and Tech: Fielding and Wielding New Systems Requires the Right People - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jon Reisher · December 20, 2024

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On a cold November morning in the mountains of Utah, “A. C.” produces a surrender appeal in Russian using a standalone artificial intelligence tool kit known as the Ghost Machine. A psychological operations instructor from the PSYWAR School, part of the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, in a matter of minutes he builds, translates, and disseminates a notional message directing the opposing force to surrender via a man-portable loudspeaker. The goal is to dislodge the entrenched enemy forces by persuading them to give up, saving both lives and ammunition in a real combat scenario. It is apparent from the lessons of Ukraine that both will be at a premium should the United States find itself in a similar scenario against a peer adversary.

A. C., a combat-tested prior infantryman, is a noncommissioned officer with operational psychological operations experience in the US Southern Command area of responsibility. He is also a full-stack software developer and drone pilot. During the week of operational testing in November, A. C. integrated with like-minded, tech-savvy joint special operations forces at 19th Special Forces Group’s field experimentation training exercise (FETX) at Camp Williams, Utah. A. C. not only used generative AI tools to create and disseminate products but also leveraged his mixture of tactical and technical skills to build sensors, conduct reconnaissance, find downed pilots, and set conditions on a simulated modern battlefield. A. C. is not alone. He is one of many special operations forces at the FETX that represent a growing but underappreciated group of service members that can develop, integrate, and deliver exquisite technical capabilities faster and cheaper than existing Army and DoD systems and processes.

Talent Management: Closing the Tech Procurement Gap

DoD has processes for developing, funding, and integrating new technologies, but they are largely designed for expensive, high-end weapons and platforms. The lengthy planning, programing, budgeting, and execution (PPBE) processes are reasonably well suited for the F35 Lighting II, the M1E3 Abrams tank, or the Freedom-variant Littoral Combat Ship. The process takes years or decades to deliver—unsurprisingly, given oversight considerations, federal budgetary cycles, and the intense field testing required.

At the other end of the spectrum, Army commanders can acquire new capabilities with a government purchase card. This is used for unit-level purchases at the commander’s discretion using operational funds, though it comes with significant limitations like a $10,000 ceiling for equipment.

The problem should be apparent. With a program to marshal billions from the DoD bureaucracy to buy fighter jets and ships on one end of a spectrum and a credit card for small, unit-level purchases on the other, a chasm is left in the middle. With no middle-level acquisition process, the Army should harness the talent in its ranks to refine requirements and interface with technical experts to deliver solutions. To do so, it should adopt systematic practices that allow commanders to do nametape-level talent management for service members with the unique, requisite talents and abilities. Talent management should be understood as part of the solution to fill the technology acquisition gap, in coordination with efforts like the Army’s transform In contact initiative, which prioritizes unit-level innovation.

Modernizing Our Talent Management Processes

The problem of streamlining technological innovation and procurement is not shared by the United States’ strategic competitors. Most notably, China’s Civil-Military Fusion policy sees no line between private and state-owned enterprises. People’s Liberation Army leaders do not request funding to acquire edge technology from companies like OpenAI. They already own it. A democracy like the United States cannot, and should not, replicate a policy like Civil-Military Fusion. The only solution can be dramatic changes to our internal systems so that organizationally, the Army can rapidly absorb technology and retain the talent necessary to maximize its utility across the joint force.

Despite the doom and gloom there is hope for Western democracies. That hope lies in properly leveraging service member talent and DoD-affiliated research labs to ensure that the United States develops a cohesive counterweight to China’s growing technical advantage. The way the Army can harness this human potential is by updating talent management processes, reimagining technological acquisitions paradigms, and aligning incentives to current operational requirements. Furthermore, the Army’s 2021 Modernization Strategy provides a clear roadmap to how the service will compete with modern threats, particularly with regard to the modernization framework (see figure below).

There are several initiatives that would advance the Army’s technological warfighting capacity while also supporting the modernization framework “Who We Are” line of effort focusing on talent management. First, DoD-affiliated research labs could approximate China’s Civil-Military Fusion strategy. There are twenty-five federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) and university-affiliated reach centers (UARCs) in the United States. These organizations represent big names in tech and academia, including John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab, RAND, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Labs. Collectively, they represent a diverse academic portfolio including aerospace and space technologies, nuclear engineering, modeling, human perception, and social sciences. Unit-level teaming with FFRDCs and UARCs is a way for commanders to gain access to edge or edge-adjacent technologies geared toward their operational gaps. Remember the Ghost Machine AI tool kit that A.C. used to craft a Russian-language surrender appeal during 19th Special Forces Group’s FETX? His unit—5th Battalion, PSYWAR School—was able to scale it and rapidly deploy it not only to the FETX but also in the PSYOP Qualification Course’s data and AI instruction by working with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. These unit-level relationships are vital.

Second, the Army should establish clear guidelines for developing and scaling emerging technology to ensure US forces receive the next greatest capability quickly, rather than an irrelevant product five or more years behind our adversaries. Major procurement pipelines like planning, programming, budgeting, and execution are insufficient for AI and robotics development, which occurs on rapid and dynamic timeline. If AI and robotics capabilities are beholden to these processes, the Army—and the joint force as a whole—will never compete with an adversary like China.

Third, the Army needs unit-level technology integrators. While the chief of staff of the Army’s transformation in contact initiatives afford select brigade commanders the opportunity to innovate, the Army lacks the ability to scale and sustain rapid integration across the service. To rapidly integrate new technology, the Army must have personnel that can do so. Specifically, having unit-level talent that understands technology enables commanders to properly communicate operational gaps to product developers and translate technical jargon into doctrinal language military leaders understand.

Finally, the Army must modernize incentives to meet current requirements. The Army provides incentive pay and promotion points for things like jump status, language capability, and demolition duty. These are all vital capabilities and incentive programs that the Army should fund. However, it should also provide incentive pay for demonstrated technical expertise in AI, coding, data literacy, robotics, drones, or additive manufacturing. Furthermore, commanders at the brigade level and higher should have annual funds to reward select individuals that develop technical solutions to meet valid capability requirements. On-the-spot monetary or nonmonetary awards are a contemporary business management practice that could save the Army millions in research and development spending. Moreover, the Army should promote talented service members and not chain its talent to the traditional professional development models.

You Fight with What You Got

Talent management is not the be-all and end-all of technological modernization. However, given finite budgets and significant recruiting challenges, talent management is how the Army can do more with less. By leveraging talent management, the Army can maximize effectiveness with limited resources, foster a more agile force, and better prepare for the technological challenges of the twenty-first century. However, this requires a paradigm shift, including a reexamination of legacy acquisition and personnel systems to create mechanisms that rewards and retains the precise talent the Army needs. If the service fails to adapt at pace with US adversaries, America risks being unprepared for future conflicts, with a landpower service tailored for yesterday’s battles rather than tomorrow’s challenges.

Jon Reisher is currently the battalion operation’s officer for 5th Battalion, PSYWAR School. He holds a master’s degree in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College and has multiple deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider Middle East.

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

Image credit: Micah Wilson, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jon Reisher · December 20, 2024

13. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 21, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 21, 2024

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-21-2024

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to expand Russia's network of military-patriotic education programs for youth in Russia and occupied Ukraine ahead of the Kremlin's upcoming "Year of the Defender of the Fatherland" in 2025. Putin approved a list of four instructions for the Russian government on December 20, which include orders to: establish and develop a network of "military-sports camps" to promote enlisting in the military among young people; expand the Kremlin's "Roads of Victory" program; create an online platform to organize military-patriotic education programing for Russian youth; and transfer one children's "health camp" to year-round operations. The Kremlin's "Roads of Victory" program is aimed at "foster[ing] patriotic feelings in modern children and youth" and offers free excursions to Russian cultural and historical sites of "military glory" for Russian children and youth. The Kremlin has previously leveraged "Avangard" military and sports training camps to militarize and indoctrinate Ukrainian youth into Russian cultural and historical narratives and appears to be expanding its network of these and similar camps throughout Russia as part of its long-term force generation efforts. The Kremlin is also preparing to expand and elevate other youth military-patriotic organizations, such as Yunarmiya and Movement of the First, to militarize Russian youth. In addition, it is leveraging its "Time of Heroes" program to place veterans of the war in Ukraine into government positions and militarize Russian society writ large. Putin announced on December 20 that the Kremlin will consider 2025 as the "Year of the Defender of the Fatherland," indicating that he intends to orient Russia's political and ideological priorities for 2025 around Russian veterans and further militarizing Russian society. The Kremlin likely intends to leverage these military-political organizations to encourage and elevate the prestige of military service among Russian youth and society as the Kremlin continues to plan for its long-term war effort in Ukraine and possible future armed conflicts with Western countries.

Ukrainian forces conducted drone strikes against Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan on December 21. Footage published on December 21 shows several Ukrainian drones striking large apartment buildings and other unspecified buildings in Kazan, reportedly after Russian electronic warfare (EW) disabled the drones. Russian sources claimed that Russian forces destroyed six Ukrainian drones near Kazan and downed one drone over a nearby river and that one drone struck near an unspecified industrial enterprise in Kazan. Russian President Vladimir Putin called Republic of Tatarstan Head Rustam Minnikhanov after Minnikhanov visited damaged residential areas of Kazan. Russian opposition media suggested that Ukrainian forces were likely targeting a gunpowder production facility, an airfield, a military base, or a helicopter production facility near Kazan.

Key Takeaways:

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to expand Russia's network of military-patriotic education programs for youth in Russia and occupied Ukraine ahead of the Kremlin's upcoming "Year of the Defender of the Fatherland" in 2025.

Ukrainian forces conducted drone strikes against Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan on December 21.

Russian forces recently advanced in Kursk Oblast and near Pokrovsk and Kurakhove.

Ukrainian forces regained lost territory near Pokrovsk.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) continues to exalt its efforts to establish the Unmanned Systems Forces following Russian President Vladimir Putin's official order to establish the new combat arms branch.

14. Iran Update, December 21, 2024

Iran Update, December 21, 2024

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-december-21-2024

US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf described Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) leader Ahmed al Shara as “pragmatic” but did not specify what concrete steps Shara or the HTS-led interim government will take to combat terrorism or ensure minority rights. Leaf stated that Shara gave ”moderate” statements on issues, including women's rights and protection for minorities, when they met in Damascus on December 20. Leaf confirmed that the United States will no longer pursue the 10-million-dollar Rewards for Justice bounty on Shara due to his commitment to ensuring terrorist groups inside Syria pose no threat to the United States or its regional partners. The US readout offered no details on whether Shara agreed to any binding commitments in exchange. Leaf stated the United States supports a Syrian-led political process that results in an “inclusive and representative government” and includes Syria’s “diverse ethnic and religious communities.”

The HTS-published readout of the meeting between Leaf and Shara portrayed the United States as supporting HTS efforts to consolidate control and deprive Syrian Kurds of regional autonomy, even though the US readout gave no indication of such things. The HTS-published readout framed the United States as supporting a “unified Syrian army” that stands by the interim government “in confronting pending issues and major challenges such as the northeastern region.” This language implies US support for the HTS and Turkish effort to coerce the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) into disbanding and forfeiting their autonomy to integrate into a new state structure under HTS. Elements of the SDF would be reintegrated into the Syrian army alongside other militia groups, some of which have worked to kill and displace Kurdish communities, as CTP-ISW has previously reported. The HTS-readout further claimed that the United States “affirmed its commitment to supporting the Syrian people and the new Syrian administration,” likely to portray the United States as recognizing the HTS-led interim government as the official Syrian government, despite the United States having made no such comments. The HTS-readout — like the US one — provided no specific or binding steps that Shara or the HTS-led government will take to counter terrorist groups in Syria.

The SDF and Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) continued to clash along the lines of control in Aleppo, Hasakah, and Raqqa provinces on December 21. The Manbij Military Council — an element of the SDF—claimed to kill 52 SNA fighters in at least twelve hours of clashes near Tishreen Dam. The SDF also claimed to destroy SNA armored vehicles and seize weapons. The SDF claimed that Turkey provided air support to SNA ground forces near the dam. Local sources reported that the SNA sent reinforcements to the Tishreen Dam near Manbij, east of Aleppo on December 20. The dam has been the site of clashes since December 9 and was specifically named under a now-nullified ceasefire between the SDF and SNA. SDF elements in Tal Othman fired artillery at SNA forces near Tishreen Dam. A Turkish drone subsequently struck the SDF positions in Tal Othman. The SDF engaged the SNA in several areas of Hasakah Province near the lines of control. An SNA faction separately engaged the SDF south of Tal Abyad in Raqqa Province.

Turkish aggression has renewed toward the SDF in recent days after the failure of a ceasefire in Manbij. Turkish officials have defined one of their objectives in Syria as “eliminat[ing]” the SDF. Turkey and the SNA have built up their military presence immediately outside SDF-held territory and indicated that they may attack to seize territory.

Key Takeaways:

Syria: US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf described HTS leader Ahmed al Shara as “pragmatic” but did not specify what concrete steps Shara or the HTS-led interim government will take to combat terrorism or ensure minority rights.

Syria: HTS is trying to consolidate control over the Syrian coastal region amid reports of instability and violence there. HTS launched an effort purportedly to crack down on crime but appears also meant to counter politically motivated civil conflict.

Syria: HTS leader Ahmed al Shara is continuing to try to portray himself as pragmatic and inclusive by engaging minorities. Shara met with religious authorities who are responsible for managing a holy Shia shrine in Damascus and committed to protect it.

Yemen: The Houthis fired a Palestine-2 ballistic missile targeting the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area, injuring 16 Israelis. The IDF fired interceptors but missed the projectile. The IDF separately intercepted a likely Houthi drone that entered southern Israeli airspace.

15. The Nippon Steel Deal Is Key To U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy

Conclusion:

As CFIUS approaches a deadline of December 23 to make its recommendation, President Biden must recognize the strategic and economic merits of this acquisition and allow it to proceed. The proposal represents more than a simple business transaction. It will significantly benefit the American economy, strengthen America’s critical steel manufacturing capabilities, enhance the U.S.-Japan alliance, and bolster our national security. It will also be an important step in securing a bipartisan vision of a secure, stable, and prosperous Indo-Pacific and a vital measure in countering the economic and geopolitical challenges posed by China.

The Nippon Steel Deal Is Key To U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy

As the acquisition of U.S. Steel approaches a major hurdle, President Biden must recognize its strategic and economic merits and allow it to proceed.

The National Interest · by Daniel Bob · December 21, 2024

Recent news reports indicate that President Biden plans to block Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel based on “national security” concerns, a justification that does not hold up to scrutiny. If these reports are accurate, Biden risks not only dashing the hopes of U.S. Steel’s 22,000 American workers and the communities they sustain economically but also undermining American national security in the process.

This deal promises job security for U.S. Steel’s workers, a substantial infusion of capital and cutting-edge technology for the company, strengthened domestic American steel production, and closer ties with Japan—our most important ally in the Indo-Pacific and an important contributor to the U.S. economy.

Nippon Steel’s proposal is under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a panel comprised of representatives of key federal agencies that assesses foreign investments for potential threats they may pose to national security. It provides recommendations to the president, who has the authority to approve or block transactions.

Last week, The Financial Times reported that both the Pentagon and State Department—member agencies of CFIUS directly engaged in protecting national security—have concluded that the deal poses no national security risks. However, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, whose job is focused on international trade policy, opposes the acquisition, reportedly due to national security concerns. While Nippon Steel has repeatedly offered to take steps to address her security concerns, Tai has shown no signs of reversing her position.

Her obstinance is troubling on multiple levels. As a former CFIUS official in the Biden administration aptly put it, “Tai is playing a game that exposes the CFIUS process to becoming a permanent tool of politicians, unreasonably expands the scope of what is considered national security and will force the U.S. to put in writing that Japan is a national security threat, which is simply untrue and detrimental to American security.”

Indeed, Japan is our most important ally in the Indo-Pacific. In 2022, President Biden prioritized the U.S.-Japan alliance as the cornerstone of security and stability in the region when he launched his Indo-Pacific Strategy to address the challenges posed by China. In a rare demonstration of bipartisan consensus, the policies comprising the strategy are largely based on those implemented by the first Trump administration.

Blocking the deal would undermine the U.S.-Japan alliance. As Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba noted just before taking office, rejecting it “could undermine the trust of its allies.” And once in office, he sent a letter to President Biden asking him to reconsider his opposition.

The proposed acquisition aligns with Biden’s Indo-Pacific Strategy in a number of ways, including furthering the concept of “friendshoring” and the practice of building resilient supply chains among trusted allies to reduce reliance on potential adversaries. China’s increased use of its dominance in critical industries as a weapon underscores the importance of this strategy. Beijing, which now produces over half of the world’s crude steel, banned exports of minerals essential for the production of advanced semiconductors and military technologies to the United States just two weeks ago.

The economic benefits of the deal are equally compelling. Nippon Steel is renowned for its cutting-edge technologies that minimize emissions and produce high-quality steel efficiently and cost-effectively. Its investment in U.S. Steel would not only sustain existing jobs but also create new ones. That’s why steelworkers held rallies last week at U.S. Steel facilities in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Minnesota, and Alabama in support of the investment.

Japanese investment undergirds the U.S.-Japan alliance, linking the economies of the two countries in mutually beneficial ways. Japan already holds $800 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States—more than any other country—while the United States remains Japan’s largest direct foreign investor by far. Japanese companies in the U.S. employ almost one million Americans—more than half of whom are in the manufacturing sector—and account for $80 billion in merchandise exports.

As CFIUS approaches a deadline of December 23 to make its recommendation, President Biden must recognize the strategic and economic merits of this acquisition and allow it to proceed. The proposal represents more than a simple business transaction. It will significantly benefit the American economy, strengthen America’s critical steel manufacturing capabilities, enhance the U.S.-Japan alliance, and bolster our national security. It will also be an important step in securing a bipartisan vision of a secure, stable, and prosperous Indo-Pacific and a vital measure in countering the economic and geopolitical challenges posed by China.

Daniel Bob has worked on U.S. foreign and economic policy toward the Indo-Pacific in senior positions in the U.S. Senate and House.

Image: Evgenii Panov / Shutterstock.com.

The National Interest · by Daniel Bob · December 21, 2024

16. Is China The Greatest Threat To the USA?

Conclusion:

Without a countervailing strategy that harnesses its competitive advantages, the United States risks its forward position in the western Pacific, which will be further eroded by a narrow military view of China’s nuclear breakout. Washington should exploit its asymmetric strengths and focus on revitalizing its credibility among its allies, exacerbating Beijing’s distinct vulnerabilities, and ultimately tipping the cost-benefit balance for China’s nuclear-backed coercion campaign. Once it appreciates the subtle role that China’s nuclear buildup plays in advancing Beijing’s geopolitical agenda, the United States can shift its own policies to maintain the status quo.

Is China The Greatest Threat To the USA? – OpEd

December 22, 2024 0 Comments

By Ambassador Kazi Anwarul Masud

eurasiareview.com · December 21, 2024

One is not surprised at the position taken by China on Russian invasion of Ukraine and her stance on nuclear issue as a demonstration of China’s position to side with Russia as a revolt against Western dominated rules that have been in force for nearly fifty years.

Kyle Balzer and Dan Blumental in an article (November 2024) have beautifully portrayed the Chinese revolt against the West with an insistence for a so-called rule laid down by the Western powers for nearly fifty years. The Western powers led by the USA has been laying down the rules, for example World Bank has to be an American nominee and the IMF has to be a nominee of Europe. China along with Rusia has jointly challenged this position despite American threat to impose more tariff on countries that violated this practice. The Americans find themselves in a quandary as for the first time in the US history both the US Senate and the Congress are headed by Jews and by the Republican Party. America being democracy has to listen to institutions like AIPAC- an Israeli outfit which has the power to raise millions of dollars in favor of the candidate that support the Israeli cause, the most recent example being the defeat of Kamala Harris in the Presidential race against Donald Trump. The Foreign Affairs article referred to above has beautifully enunciated the problems and prospects of the USA and her allies in the coming days.

CHINA IDENTIFIED AS THE GREATEST THREAT TO THE U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY.

Since 2018, American defense analysts have repeatedly identified China as the greatest threat to U.S. national security. They have variously described Beijing as a “systemic challenge,” a “pacing threat,” and even a “peer adversary,” owing to China’s massive military buildup, belligerent behavior in the Asia-Pacific, and global campaign of economic coercion. These vague, buzzy phrases point to a growing consensus: that China’s ambitions greatly imperil American national interests. There is no consensus, however, on the intention behind China’s strategic moves, chief among them its rapid buildup of nuclear weapons. The U.S. defense community has largely viewed this buildup in a narrow military framework concerned with weapons capabilities and arms-race balance.

A recent essay in Foreign Affairs magazine by the researcher Tong Zhao has broadened the analysis by describing China’s nuclear arsenal not as a coercive tool to achieve well-defined military objectives but as a symbol of national strength by which Beijing can earn Washington’s respect as a major player in world affairs. But any understanding of this nuclear expansion must also account for Beijing’s revisionist intentions. China holds grand ambitions to remake the world in its image. It intends to do so by first dominating the western Pacific and then pulling much of Eurasia—a region that stretches from China’s immediate neighborhood through Central Asia and southeastern Europe—as well as Africa into its orbit. But Beijing has a geographic predicament of which it’s acutely aware: a number of states off its coastline that have signed on to U.S.-led coalitions devoted to the regional status quo, and which are galvanized by China’s own actions.

If China escalates by launching a large-scale attack along its maritime periphery, it risks a devastating and coordinated response that jeopardizes its global designs. The United States should view China’s nuclear buildup as a tool that can help Beijing resolve its continental isolation. China has initiated a short-of-war coercion campaign to dissolve the U.S. alliance system in the Pacific, and its increasingly sophisticated nuclear arsenal gives it more leverage to achieve this objective without igniting a catastrophic great-power war. Washington should be alive to the danger. It must recognize the geopolitical designs China has for its expanding nuclear arsenal and act to preserve the regional balance. As Beijing’s coercion campaign threatens U.S. allies, Washington must implement a countervailing strategy that arrays the United States’ competitive advantages against China’s distinct vulnerabilities.

Chinese President XI-JINPING believes he is leading his country into a new era of Chinese-dominated geopolitics. He believes a struggle between Chinese socialism and Western democratic capitalism is already underway and cites his country’s growing prosperity and influence as evidence that it is ready to supplant the United States and remold the world. Such an international order would more closely reflect China’s internal system than the liberal values that have shaped much of the world for decades. Xi is particularly confident that structural trends—as evidenced by the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of populist movements in the West—favor China’s ascendancy.

CAN CHINESE POORLY EXECUTED STRATEGY IGNITE NUCLEAR BOMBSHELL TO STALL WESTERN INCURSION INTO CHINESE HEARTLAND

China’s continental position—straddling a type of land-sea boundary that the twentieth-century Dutch American strategist Nicholas Spykman dubbed the Eurasian “rimland”—raises the possibility that a poorly executed Chinese strategy could ignite a cataclysmic war with the United States and its Asian allies. Beijing has thus determined that before it can pull a vast swath of Eurasia into its orbit, it must first achieve primacy on its exposed maritime periphery. Beijing protests that its maritime flank is surrounded by two concentric, crescent-shaped island chains littered with U.S. allies and military bases.

In the 1950s, the United States, in defense of its allies, even threatened China with nuclear attack. In 1996, during the third Taiwan Strait crisis, Washington humiliated Beijing when it dispatched two carrier strike groups to support Taipei. Today, the United States is promoting trilateral cooperation with Japan and South Korea to strengthen regional defenses against ballistic missiles. As Xi watches this, the searing experiences of the past are never far from his mind. And China now has in spades something it once lacked: striking power, both nuclear and conventional, of the kind that can split Washington from its Asia-Pacific allies.

China’s nuclear expansion is believed to affect how U.S. allies perceive the regional military balance. As they make their assessments, they are taking into account the stunning nature, in both quantity and quality, of China’s nuclear breakout. The United States has an active arsenal of some 3,700 nuclear warheads, though less than half of these are deployed. Beijing is quickly closing the gap, having increased its warhead inventory from about 200 to 500 between 2020 and 2023.

The Pentagon has forecast that China will boast more than 1,000 warheads by 2030 and upward of 1,500 by 2035. And China already has a formidable capacity to employ such weapons in highly accurate strikes: it has more land-based intercontinental and intermediate-range missile launchers than the United States does. What’s more, Washington retired its only regional nuclear option—a submarine-launched cruise missile—in 2013, meaning in a potential crisis it would have no regionally based nuclear capability to reassure its allies of its security guarantee. China’s nuclear geopolitics is about destabilizing the maritime barrier now set up against it.

China’s defense establishment is also exhibiting an increasing interest in coercive nuclear strategies. Chinese military theorists now routinely refer to the country’s modernized nuclear weapons as a “trump card” that can impede external intervention in regional affairs. And many Chinese defense analysts have concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear coercion in the course of Russia’s war in Ukraine has prevented NATO from deeper intervention in that conflict, suggesting that Beijing could use its arsenal to achieve similar ends.

The Chinese conception of deterrence comprises the Western notion of dissuading adversaries from taking a particular course of action, but it also includes a more expansive goal: compelling adversaries to change their behavior. And now that China has a robust missile force to conduct coercive nuclear attacks, such tactics will have more credibility in the eyes of America’s regional partners. Beijing’s improved strike capabilities could thus encourage it to publicly abandon its no-first-use nuclear policy to drive a wedge between Washington and its allies.

As the United States’ Pacific partners increasingly see or experience Chinese efforts to use nuclear-backed coercion, their view of the regional balance could shift. And seeing inaction or insufficient action from Washington in the face of this intimidation would give them justifiable cause for further alarm. Crafting an effective response to China’s overall coercive power and the nuclear buildup itself will be key to maintaining U.S. credibility in the region.

CHINA AIMS TO USE NUCLEAR THREAT TO INCREASE ITS POWER IN THE REGION.

China aims to use its nuclear breakout to pierce the rimland barrier without igniting a great-power war. Xi’s ability to dominate the conflict spectrum—from low-intensity political pressure to potential nuclear warfare—has likely emboldened him to sharpen the pressure in this region in recent months.

But China has been honing its capacity to pursue this coercive campaign for well over a decade. Japan too, has been subject to Chinese coercion since the dawn of the twenty-first century—and the pressure is rising with China’s nuclear buildup. The persistent pressure is designed to wear Tokyo down, weaken the U.S.-Japanese alliance, and normalize China’s behavior to create a new bar by which to measure future aggression.

Taiwan remains the main target of China’s short-of-war coercion campaign. In addition to its military and political intimidation of the island, Beijing attempts to marginalize Taiwan’s standing on the world stage and erode its coverage within international legal structures. But the threat of escalation is key to subjugating Taiwan without large-scale warfare. Should Beijing decide to take extreme course of action, it would likely use the threat of limited nuclear escalation to deter U.S. and Japanese intervention. Since Beijing initiated its sprawling coercive campaign, few of the countries it has targeted have grown their military capabilities.

TRANSFORMATION OF CHINESE ARMY INTO ASIA’S LARGEST MILITARY FORCE.

The Chinese army, on the other hand, has transformed into Asia’s largest military force, in both conventional and nuclear capability. For Xi, however, success is not about winning a head-to-head military clash that provokes U.S. intervention. Instead, success is defined as decoupling the United States from the region entirely by undermining Washington’s credibility there and compelling U.S. allies to shy away from confrontation. As China’s recent behavior suggests, China’s nuclear buildup has emboldened Xi to accept greater risks to achieve these objectives.

Beijing’s short-of-war coercion campaign has thrown Washington into a reactive, defensive stance that has unnerved its regional partners. U.S. officials have yet to address the regional strategic implications of China’s nuclear breakout. If these trends continue, China could find itself well positioned to dissolve the bonds that tie the United States to its Asia-Pacific allies. To blunt China’s momentum and regain the initiative, the United States needs a countervailing strategy that can demonstrate credibility to its regional partners and change Beijing’s calculus.

XI-JINPING’S VERNABILITIES

Any U.S. strategy should force Xi-Jinping to make punishing tradeoffs between his goals so that he cannot harbor the illusion of advancing on one front without jeopardizing the others. China has distinct vulnerabilities. Like all nations, it has finite resources and cannot simply spend its way out of the burden of choice. This is especially true for an emerging, relatively isolated continental power with grand ambitions, a slowing economy, and the insecurity of a Marxist-Leninist regime—namely, a deep, near-obsessive distrust of its own citizens. By contrast, the United States is an established global power with a democratic system that lends itself to far-flung alliances and the creative energies of free societies.

The economic dimension should make use of allies’ interest in American markets. By deepening trade relations in the western Pacific, Washington would convey to its partners and toBeijing that U.S. economic security is indivisible from the regional status quo. Updated bilateral trade pacts focused on sectors that China dominates—such as critical minerals and pharmaceutical supply chains—would also wean Washington and its partners off the Chinese market and harden them against Beijing’s coercion. Although American domestic politics has made the establishment of trade pacts difficult, there is an appetite in Washington for agreements that counter China’s strategy of creating economic dependencies.

BEIJING’S PRESENT POLICY IS BASED ON EXISTING RIFTS IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

The final prong of the United States’ strategy should center on politics. Beijing has been waging a largely one-sided philosophical struggle against the United States by flooding online outlets with disinformation in an attempt to exploit existing rifts within American society.

Washington has hesitated to meet this ideological challenge. But in doing so, it has forfeited the chance to exploit China’s greatest vulnerability: its political system. Beijing devotes enormous resources to controlling its 1.4 billion citizens. The United States can use this fixation to impose steep costs on China, such as by finding ways to circumvent online censorship and disseminate writing by Chinese dissidents about the government’s corruption and economic failings.

Beijing has gone to great lengths to silence individual dissidents and stamp out minor protests, suggesting it would spare no expense in countering a broader campaign. The best way to establish guardrails with China is to steer Xi’s attention away from his regional and global designs. The more he is focused at home, the less effort and fewer resources Beijing will devote to power projection.

CONCLUSION

Without a countervailing strategy that harnesses its competitive advantages, the United States risks its forward position in the western Pacific, which will be further eroded by a narrow military view of China’s nuclear breakout. Washington should exploit its asymmetric strengths and focus on revitalizing its credibility among its allies, exacerbating Beijing’s distinct vulnerabilities, and ultimately tipping the cost-benefit balance for China’s nuclear-backed coercion campaign. Once it appreciates the subtle role that China’s nuclear buildup plays in advancing Beijing’s geopolitical agenda, the United States can shift its own policies to maintain the status quo.

eurasiareview.com · December 21, 2024

17. New in SpyWeek: Musk Security Worries, Fox Kennedy Dumped, CIA Torture, Syria, Israel, China, OSINT Ironies and More

New in SpyWeek: Musk Security Worries, Fox Kennedy Dumped, CIA Torture, Syria, Israel, China, OSINT Ironies and More

Welcome to SpyWeek, our weekly newsletter, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations.

https://www.spytalk.co/p/new-in-spyweek-musk-security-worries

Seth Hettena

Dec 21, 2024

Musk smoking dope on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2018 (You Tube) The DoD inspector general and others are concerned he may be a security risk due to unreported meetings with foreign officials, plus rampant drug use that would kill a security clearance for regular federal workers.

HIGH SPYING: We’ve been wondering when Elon Musk’s antics and reported drug use would register with the authorities that review his security clearances. The New York Times reported that the U.S. Air Force recently denied the SpaceX CEO and president high-level security access, “citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.” The Wall Street Journal has chronicled Musk’s ongoing use of the hallucinatory drug ketamine and past use of LSD and other narcotics. On the Joe Rogan show in 2018, he ostentatiously smoked a blunt. The Times reports that Musk has not reported his use of ketamine, which is required even with the prescription the mercurial South African-born billionaire claims he has for it. There’s also concern about Musk’s failure to provide some details of his meetings with foreign leaders.

The Air Force, Pentagon, and Defense Department Inspector General have all initiated reviews. After the Times story was published, Musk, who also operates the Starlink satellite system critical to Ukraine’s defense, posted an ominous warning on his social media site, X. “Deep state traitors are coming after me, using their paid shills in legacy media,” he wrote. “I prefer not to start fights, but I do end them…”

While we’re talking about Musk, be sure to check out Tortoise Media’s recent podcast, Elon’s Spies, about the billionaire’s use of private intelligence firms “to target everyone from whistleblowers at his companies to online critics and people in his own life.”

THE NOC ON AMARYLLIS: You could almost hear the sighs of relief at Langley after President-elect Trump put the word out that he wasn’t going to install RFK Jr.’s daughter-in-law as CIA deputy director. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy was passed over for the No. 2 CIA job after particularly fierce lobbying from Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the incoming chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to reports. Fox Kennedy’s failure to get agency clearance for her 2019 memoir, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, didn’t sit well with Cotton, who was still mad at Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, for releasing his memoir without prior clearance. They were less bothered that several formers told SpyTalk last year that Fox’s memoir about her time as a “NOC” (under non-official cover) from 2002 to 2010 was mainly a work of fiction. The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo reported that Fox Kennedy “may have further imperiled her own nomination on Thursday by issuing a lengthy post on X that many saw as a not-so-veiled shot at Cotton and other influential figures in the intelligence community.” But we probably haven’t seen the last of Fox Kennedy. There’s a good chance she will find a home at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence working with her friend Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for DNI, should she be confirmed.

DEEP DIVE ON SLEEPER AGENTS: Remember that flurry of arrests of deep cover Russian agents in recent years—the kind fictionalized in The Americans TV spy drama a decade or so ago? Meticulously trained and documented, they masqueraded as Brazilian researchers, Argentine exiles in Slovenia and a Spanish journalist covering the Ukraine war, respectively. Well, the Wall Street Journal decided to go deep on all of there cases, from their initial deployments by the GRU and SVR to their capture by Western counterspies. “The story of how the West hunted those sleeper agents has never been told,” write WSJ reporters Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson in “The Global Hunt for Putin’s ‘Sleeper Agents.” The reporters “worked on three continents and spoke to more than 30 former and current officials in the countries where they operated: Slovenia, Argentina, Norway, Greece, Poland, Ukraine, the U.K., Canada and the U.S.” The “hundreds of court documents and personal records” they dug up “revealed painstakingly built false biographies, from a fraudulent Mexican passport to a doctored Greek birth certificate. The spies left behind a trail of confused friends, colleagues, and romantic partners, more than two dozen of whom spoke in detail about the people they thought they knew.” SpyWeek gives their compelling story five cloaks and daggers.

Wall Street Journal illustration

SYRIA SURPRISE: A man who was filmed by CNN being freed by rebels from a Damascus jail turned out to be a corrupt former Syrian Air Force intelligence officer. Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward came upon the man in a “secret” prison while hunting for U.S. journalist Austin Tice, who has been missing since 2012. In a video broadcast on CNN’s website, Ward and her crew found the man hiding under a blanket in a padlocked cell inside the headquarters of Bashar al-Assad’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate. He convincingly claimed to be a “civilian” fighter from Homs, but CNN later confirmed initial reporting by Verify-Sy, which identified the inmate as Salama Mohammad Salama, who reportedly managed the Air Force Intelligence checkpoints in Homs and was known for extorting and harassing residents. Salama was reportedly jailed in a dispute over “profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.”

MEMO TO NUNES: Donald Trump is still mad over what he calls the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax,” and he doesn’t want the U.S. intelligence community to forget it. The president-elect appointed former California Rep. Devin Nunes as chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Trump says Nunes, the CEO of his social media company, will use his experience as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2015 to 2019 to provide him with “independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities.” It was Nunes who hired Kash Patel, Trump’s pick for FBI director, to investigate the origins of the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign's connections to Russia.

Devin Nunes (Truth Social).

EVERYTHING IS CLASSIFIED: Former Army intelligence officer David Reese says he’s seen firsthand how OSINT can be a “game changer” in real-time decision-making and operational planning, particularly in the field of nuclear non-proliferation, “However, its potential is often undermined by pervasive overclassification within the U.S. Intelligence Community, which results from the tendency to consider information valuable as a matter of national security only when it has been classified—a phenomenon known informally in OSINT practitioner circles as ‘James Bond syndrome,’” Reese writes in a recent paper. That sets up a quandary Franz Kafka would love: Open-source intelligence won’t get any attention from the U.S. intelligence community unless it’s classified.

DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE: The U.S. government told senior government and political officials to immediately stop making cell phone calls and sending text messages after a Chinese intelligence-linked hacking group penetrated major American telecommunications companies. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued written guidance urging "individuals who are in senior government or senior political positions" to "immediately review and apply" a series of best practices. The No. 1 recommendation was to use only end-to-end encrypted communications such as Signal.

“Highly targeted individuals should assume that all communications between mobile devices—including government and personal devices, and Internet services—are at risk of interception or manipulation,” CISA said. The U.S. intelligence community is still trying to thwart the cyber espionage campaign carried out by the Chinese hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon, a breach that one senator called the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history — by far.” According to press reports, the hackers targeted the phones of Trump, VP-elect JD Vance, and officials in the Harris campaign. They also gained access to the “Lawful Intercept” system that the U.S. government uses to monitor communications under court-authorized wiretapping requests.

The CISA advisory comes as U.S. authorities consider banning TP-Link, a Chinese-made Internet router. The company sells the most popular router brand in the United States, and the AX3000 is the No. 1 seller on Amazon. According to the Wall Street Journal, TP-Link routers don’t appear to be involved in the Salt Typhoon hack, but numerous Chinese actors have used them to launch cyberattacks. The decision about whether to ban TP-Link routers would likely fall to the incoming Trump administration.

Beware: The Chinese-made AX3000 router

WILLOW WEEP FOR ME: Google had some remarkable things to say about Willow, its new quantum computer chip. While Willow doesn’t have any real-world applications yet, it performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers ten septillion years—a number that vastly exceeds the age of the universe. What does this have to do with espionage? Quantum computing is, in theory, a game-changer in the world of encryption, capable of smashing open most of the codes that protect today’s secrets. The National Security Agency has said that “Without effective mitigation, the impact of adversarial use of a quantum computer could be devastating to [national security systems] and our nation, especially in cases where such information needs to be protected for many decades.” Don’t panic yet. President Biden has directed all U.S. government agencies to begin transitioning to “post-quantum cryptography.” The deadline is 2035, and hopefully, it’s enough time to protect critical systems with the codes that a quantum computer can’t defeat.

TORTURE IN BLACK-AND-WHITE: The New York Times published haunting self-portraits showing how a terrorist suspect was tortured inside the CIA’s black sites. The inmate, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, was one of two Malaysian men who returned home this week after spending 21 years in U.S. custody, beginning at a CIA prison in Afghanistan in 2003. Bin Amin pleaded guilty to war crimes and expressed remorse for helping Jemaah Islamiyah, the extremist group that carried out the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, that killed 202 people. Today, 27 detainees remain at Guantanamo Bay. Seven are involved in the trials’ military commissions process. Only two have been convicted and sentenced by military commissions.

FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE: Trump’s cabinet picks continue to thrill Vladimir Putin’s mouthpieces. Julia Davis, who monitors Russia TV for The Daily Beast, reported that Margarita Simonyan, head of RT, a Kremlin-controlled global news outlet that regularly spews anti-U.S. disinformation, is a fan of Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who is reportedly a regular reader of her site. “These people who are being announced as potential members of his team certainly bring us lots of joy,” Simonyan said on the program The Right To Know. “Most of these people are constant guests of RT’s broadcasts. Until RT was shut down, they were our constant guests. For example, Tulsi Gabbard, who keeps being hounded about this right now, “Ah, you love RT, you constantly shared their clips, you constantly went there,” she said. “Well, she did come to us all the time. It’s true. It’s not something you can conceal—and she is not the only one.”

PUTIN ON THE RISKS: The Russian president, possibly rattled by the Dec. 17 Ukrainian assassination of the head of his biological weapons program, addressed employees of his “special services” on Friday, urging the FSB in particular to root out spies and traitors. “Putin, who worked for 16 years in the KGB, emphasized that the special services have always been a solid support for the country,” according to Poland’s EssaNews. “He stated that throughout the country’s ‘centuries-old history,’ agents have always acted, overcoming a ‘glorious and heroic path.’ Putting aside the amusingly garbled syntax, some path that’s been.

CARACAS CONNECTION: A federal grand jury has indicted a former Republican congressman from Miami for secretly acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Venezuela. David Rivera is accused of trying to lobby a Trump administration official between 2019 and 2020 on behalf of a wealthy Venezuelan businessman who wanted to get himself off the U.S. sanctions list. Prosecutors say sanctioned Venezuelan businessman Raul Gorrín paid Rivera, 59, more than $5.5 million, which was routed through shell companies. The companies used the names of a law firm and a government official to appear legitimate. Rivera, who served in Congress from 2011 to 2013, was previously indicted for FARA violations for allegedly negotiating on behalf of the Venezuelan government without disclosing it to the U.S. government.

EXPLOSIVE SHOW: The recently retired Mossad officers who led the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies operation against Hezbollah will appear in disguise on CBS’ 60 Minutes. The show allowed the Israeli spies to wear masks and alter their voices for the report, which airs on Sunday. The ex-Mossad officers told correspondent Lesley Stahl that they tested the devices “multiple times” to ensure damage would be kept to a minimum. “If we push the button, the only one that will get injured is the terrorist himself,” one of the former Mossad officers averred. “Even if his wife or his daughter will be just next to him, he's the only one that is going to be harmed." The attacks, which were 10 years in the making, killed 37 people, including two children, and wounded more than 3,400 others.

ISRAELI NUKES: A newly surfaced U.S. intelligence report in 1960 confirmed that Israel was developing nuclear weapons at a secret desert site, but it was kept under wraps for decades. The “recently declassified Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) report from December 1960 is the first and only known U.S. intelligence report to correctly and unequivocally state that Israel’s Dimona nuclear project would include a reprocessing plant for plutonium production and was weapons related,” the private National Security Archive reports. “All known, subsequent U.S. intelligence products treated the reprocessing issue as unsettled until the late 1960s, when Israel reached the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability and the U.S. and Israel reached a secret agreement to accommodate its status as an undeclared nuclear power.”

SECRET SANTA: Looking for a unique gift for the spy or the spy fan in your life? The gift shop at the George Bush Center for Intelligence, aka CIA headquarters, sells “Top Secret” barbecue sauce, “Don’t Spill The Beans” coffee, CIA pillows, and a $200 humidor etched with the agency’s iconic seal. The only catch, according to the Wall Street Journal, is that you either need to be a CIA employee to get in or know one. That said, we would love to get our hands on a set of “Admit Nothing. Deny Everything” shot glasses or a “Secret Squirrel” T-shirt.

Mark Wiggins, CA gift shop manager in 2019 (Bill O’Leary/Washington Post)

Pocket Litter:

The FBI has arrested a man for an attempted mass casualty terror attack against the Israeli consulate in New York City. The suspect, Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan, allegedly instructed an FBI informant to carry out the attack. (Times of Israel)
An American citizen has pleaded guilty to helping run what has been described as the first known secret police station in the United States on behalf of the Chinese government. Chen Jinping admitted opening and operating an undeclared overseas police station in lower Manhattan for China’s Ministry of Public Security. (BBC)
A former San Francisco FBI agent, Paul Raymond Flood, has been indicted for allegedly cyberstalking a law student and attempting to obstruct the subsequent investigation through witness tampering and bribery. (San Francisco Standard)
Former senior FBI executive and glass ceiling-buster Lauren Anderson is on the SpyTalk podcast this week talking about her career and changes coming for the bureau under Kash Patel and Donald Trump. (On Apple or wherever.)

Jeff Stein contributed to this story.

Is there something we missed? Or something you would like to see more of? Send your tips, corrections, and thoughts to SpyTalk@protonmail.com.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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