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Quotes of the Day:
“The responsibility of great states is to serve and not to dominate the world.”
-Harry S. Truman, Message to Congress, April 16, 1945
“I was very struck at one point by Michel Crozier’s book—I think called The Bureaucratic Phenomenon—where he showed how different cultures lead to different kinds of organizations and different kinds of relations within organizations of superiors and subordinates. He showed how these things are very related to deeply rooted cultural things that relate, for example, specifically to this whole matter of how—right from childhood—superiors treat subordinates and so on. The whole set of relationships that are inherent in the particular culture get reproduced in many ways in the organizations. This means, among other things, that Soviet command-and control systems are Russian; the relationship of superiors and subordinates is very, very different than in the United States and most other Western countries.”
- Reflections on Net Assessment by Andrew Marshall
"In military operations other than war (MOOTW), legitimacy is a condition based on the perception by a specific audience of the legality, morality, or rightness of a set of actions. This audience may be the US public, foreign nations, the populations in the area of responsibility/joint operations area, or the participating forces. If an operation is perceived as legitimate, there is a strong impulse to support the action. If an operation is not perceived as legitimate, the actions may not be supported and may be actively resisted. In MOOTW, legitimacy is frequently a decisive element. The prudent use of psychological operations and humanitarian and civic assistance programs assists in developing a sense of legitimacy for the supported government.
Legitimacy may depend on adherence to objectives agreed to by the international community, ensuring the action is appropriate to the situation, and fairness in dealing with various factions. It may be reinforced by restraint in the use of force, the type of forces employed, and the disciplined conduct of the forces involved. The perception of legitimacy by the US public is strengthened if there are obvious national or humanitarian interests at stake, and if there is assurance that American lives are not being needlessly or carelessly risked.
Another aspect of this principle is the legitimacy bestowed upon a government through the perception of the populace which it governs. Because the populace perceives that the government has genuine authority to govern and uses proper agencies for valid purposes, they consider that government as legitimate."
- The Joint Doctrine Encyclopedia, 1997
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 20
2. TARGET RUSSIA’S CAPABILITY, NOT ITS INTENT
3. ‘We were allowed to be slaughtered’: calls by Russian forces intercepted
4. It’s Time to Worry About Deepfakes Again
5. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent
6. Zelensky's D.C. trip
7. Congress moves to ban TikTok from US government devices
8. Ukraine Situation Report: Zelensky Is Headed To Washington
9. Agents say Diplomatic Security Service riven by mismanagement and failing key missions
10. Will Congress Abandon Afghan Allies?
11. War vet Jack McCain wants Congress to help the Afghan pilots who kept him safe
12. Putin’s Last Stand
13. Kissinger’s ‘realism’ matches Biden’s policy, but not Putin’s reality
14. The Dawn of Drone Diplomacy
15. Cyber Command conducted offensive operations to protect midterm elections
16. Alabama's Auburn University has blocked TikTok for all students and faculty on campus and other publicly-funded universities may soon follow suit
17. Opinion | How the algorithm tipped the balance in Ukraine (Part 1)
18. Opinion | A ‘good’ war gave the algorithm its opening, but dangers lurk (Part 2)
19. Putin’s Cronies Turn on Russian Elite in Paranoid War Frenzy
20. The incredible shrinking Army: NDAA end strength levels are a mistake
21.Will the headwinds facing China force Xi to rethink his plans to take Taiwan?
22. 2023 Irregular Warfare Initiative Fellows Announcement
23. Taliban bar women from university education in Afghanistan
24. The AP Interview: Vermont Sen. Leahy ponders his legacy
25. No One Would Win a Long War in Ukraine
26. A Free World, If You Can Keep It
27. Zelensky Knows the Clock Is Ticking
28. The U.S.-Israel Operations-Technology Working Group Gets Busy
29. Is AI the right fit for predictive military maintenance?
30. ‘I’m about to die’ — Former Army paratrooper describes surviving a jump with a broken parachute
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 20
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-20
Key Takeaways
- Russian pressure against Belarus is degrading Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s maneuver room to avoid making concessions to the Kremlin.
- ISW continues to observe indicators consistent with the least likely but most dangerous course of action (MDCOA) of a renewed Russian invasion of northern Ukraine from Belarus.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Bakhmut undermines an ongoing Kremlin information operation to present Russian President Vladimir Putin as an involved war leader.
- Wagner financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin undercut Putin’s efforts to portray himself as a wartime leader within the Russian information space, possibly inadvertently.
- The Kremlin’s efforts to improve the reputation of the Russian MoD may have prompted Prigozhin to increase his efforts to legalize Wagner Group in Russia.
- The Kremlin will likely continue efforts to portray Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) as effective leaders when Putin holds an expanded annual Russian MoD board meeting on December 21.
- Russian forces conducted limited counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka areas.
- Russian forces are expanding defensive fortifications on the left (east) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
- A Kremlin official deflected questioning surrounding a Moscow Oblast military recruitment officer’s December 17 claim that Russian authorities will extend the service period for conscript soldiers.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that Russian security services intensify their efforts to counter pro-Ukrainian partisan activity.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 20
understandingwar.org
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 20
Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, George Barros, Madison Williams, and Frederick W. Kagan
December 20, 8 pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Intensifying Russian pressure on Belarus is degrading Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s maneuver room to avoid making concessions to the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long game to reestablish suzerainty over Belarus is making progress separate and apart from Putin’s efforts to get Belarus more actively involved in his invasion of Ukraine. Lukashenko confirmed that Russia “gave” Belarus an unspecified number of S-400 air defense systems during his meeting with Putin in Minsk on December 19, confirming ISW’s 2021 forecast that Russian-made S-400 systems would begin operating in Belarus.[1] Lukashenko had previously rejected S-400 systems operating in Belarus in 2020.[2] Lukashenko is likely delaying acceding to Putin’s larger demands - such as committing Belarusian forces to join the invasion against Ukraine - by making smaller concessions that he has stonewalled for years.
Russian military personnel will likely operate the Belarus-based S-400 systems. Russian personnel may operate the S-400 systems from the so-called joint Russian-Belarusian Air Force and Air Defense Forces training center in Grodno, Belarus – a permanent Russian military presence in Belarus that the Kremlin established in the spring of 2021.[3]
ISW continues to observe indicators consistent with the most dangerous course of action (MDCOA) of a renewed Russian invasion of northern Ukraine from Belarus.[4] Ukrainian military officials continue to warn about a growing Russian threat from Belarus. Ukrainian Joint Forces Commander Serhiy Nayev stated on December 20 that Russian elements in Belarus have military potential “currently sufficient” to create an unspecified threat to Ukraine and that these elements can conduct unspecified “tactical actions.”[5] Nayev’s statement marks an inflection in Ukrainian officials’ characterization of the growing Russian forces in Belarus; previous Ukrainian descriptions of Russian forces in Belarus did not ascribe to them tactically significant capacities.[6] Independent Belarusian sources continue to report growing Russian mechanized forces in Belarus.[7] About 30 Russian T-80 tanks were reportedly deployed to Belarus around December 20.[8]
These indicators support the MDCOA forecast, but that course of action remains unlikely at this time. A Russian invasion of northern Ukraine from Belarus is not very likely imminent. Nayev reiterated that Ukraine’s defense is prepared to defend northern Ukraine.[9] The Ukrainian General Staff reiterated that it has not observed Russian forces forming strike groups in Belarus as of December 20.[10] ISW will continue to monitor the situation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s frontline visit to Bakhmut on the 300th day of war is undermining an ongoing Kremlin information operation intended to present Russian President Vladimir Putin as an involved war leader. Zelensky made a surprise visit to Ukrainian troops serving on the intense Bakhmut front on December 20 and presented awards.[11] In contrast, Putin held a senior-level award ceremony where he celebrated Russian occupation and Kremlin officials such as proxy leaders from occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts, Russian propagandist and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, and Russian milblogger Semyon Pegov among other state officials.[12] ISW has previously assessed that Putin has intensified his efforts to extricate himself and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) from persistent criticism by making public appearances relating to various undertakings aimed at improving the Russian war effort. This award ceremony further indicates Putin‘s fixation with presenting himself as an involved wartime leader.[13] Putin likely seeks to deflect blame for Russian military failures in Ukraine by maintaining a façade that paints Putin in a positive light but absolves him of responsibility for the war.
Putin’s decision to award members of his circle who have not even been directly involved in fighting in contrast with Zelensky’s visit near the front lines in Bakhmut sparked some criticism among Russian nationalist voices. A former Russian militant commander and critical voice in the Russian information space, Igor Girkin, noted that Putin is awarding “his heroes in the Kremlin” but not Russian and proxy servicemen who are engaged in combat on the frontlines.[14] Other milbloggers speculated that the Kremlin made a secretive political decision for a Russian ceasefire, allowing Zelensky to walk around Bakhmut.[15] Another milblogger reiterated that Putin had not visited the occupied territories and stated that Russian forces would not be able to effectively conduct a precision strike in time against Zelensky.[16]Zelensky’s visit to Bakhmut upstaged Putin’s efforts to establish himself as a wartime commander-in-chief and turned Putin’s own information operation into an embarrassment even within parts of the pro-war Russian information space.
Wagner financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin further undermined Putin, possibly inadvertently, within the Russian information space by attempting to boost his standing against the backdrop of Zelensky’s visit to Bakhmut. Prigozhin published a series of videos claiming he arrived at the frontlines near Bakhmut to speak to Zelensky regarding the control of territories in the area.[17] Prigozhin’s “offers” to negotiate with Zelensky are neither serious nor authoritative, since he does not hold any official position in Russia. Prigozhin, however, continues to pose as a prominent political and military figure in Russia. Such farcical comments are likely a response to Zelensky‘s repeated offers to negotiate directly with Putin after Russia withdraws its forces from Ukraine. Prigozhin’s appearance on the frontline further weakens Putin’s presentation of himself as a wartime leader, since Putin has not even visited Russian-occupied territories, let alone gone anywhere near the front lines. Social media users additionally exposed that Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu did not actually visit the frontlines on December 17 - as he claimed - by geolocating the videos the Russian MoD posted of Shoigu‘s trip in Armyansk, Crimea.[18] While Prigozhin did not directly criticize Putin for his inability to directly address Zelensky or arrive on the frontlines, his and Zelensky’s visits to the frontlines threaten to make Putin’s posing as a wartime commander in chief humiliating rather than effective.
The Kremlin’s efforts to improve the reputation of the Russian MoD may have prompted Prigozhin to double down on his efforts to legalize Wagner in Russia. Russian state media outlet RT – likely affiliated with Wagner - published a 10-minute report on Wagner describing Prigozhin’s establishment of the paramilitary organization as an attempt to support “Russian interests” and defend the “Russian world.”[19] Such a portrayal suggests that Prigozhin is trying to rid Wagner of the mercenary stigma and instead re-introduce the group as a legitimate military formation in Russia that supports Russian national interests. RT also introduced prominent Kremlin officials like the Chairman of the Fair Russia - For Truth Party Sergey Mirnonov who criticized the Russian government for not seizing the initiative to recognize Wagner troops’ ”heroism” in Ukraine or granting Wagner official status under Russian law. Private military companies such as Wagner are notably illegal in Russia. The RT report also supported a long-standing ISW assessment that Prigozhin is strategically growing his influence on the Russian internet, noting that the newly-opened Wagner Center in St. Petersburg is a working space for “patriotic” media outlets and bloggers to resist the information war against Russia. Prigozhin will likely continue his efforts to establish himself and his Wagner Group in Russia by promoting himself on Telegram and Wagner-affiliated media, which may further diminish the Kremlin’s attempts to minimize criticism of its defense leadership.
The Kremlin will likely continue efforts to portray Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) as effective leaders of the war in Ukraine when Putin holds the Russian MoD board meeting on December 21. The Kremlin press service announced on December 20 that Putin will hold an expanded version of the Russian MoD board meeting on December 21, which will reportedly include a summary of the activities of the Russian Armed Forces in 2022 and a setting of tasks for the Russian military in 2023.[20] The Kremlin press service announced that Russian Defense Minister Shoigu will deliver the main report on the progress of the “special military operation” in Ukraine at the meeting.[21] The Kremlin press service stated that the commanders of military districts and services of the Russian Armed Forces, the heads of central military authorities, and representatives of federal executive bodies will attend the expanded meeting.[22] The Kremlin press service also stated that 15,000 Russian military officials will attend the meeting via video conference.[23] Putin is likely holding a larger-than-usual Russian MoD board meeting to present the Russian military as an organized and formidable fighting force and to demonstrate that his control over that force remains unquestioned despite its pronounced military failures in its invasion of Ukraine. Shoigu will likely deliver a main report on the war in Ukraine that minimizes the Russian MoD’s responsibility for failures at the front and offers an optimistic forecast for what Russian forces will be able to achieve operationally in Ukraine in 2023. The Kremlin will likely publicize aspects of the event to augment the Kremlin’s continuing efforts to present Putin and the Russian MoD as competent managers of the war in Ukraine and to shield Putin and the Russian MoD from the criticism of the ultra-nationalist pro-war community.[24] The event shows that Putin is taking increasing pains to surround himself with military uniforms, possibly hoping to evoke recollections of Joseph Stalin engaging with the Soviet STAVKA during World War II and to separate himself from the famous pictures of Putin separated by a very long table from Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff General Valery Gerasimov.
Key Takeaways
- Russian pressure against Belarus is degrading Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s maneuver room to avoid making concessions to the Kremlin.
- ISW continues to observe indicators consistent with the least likely but most dangerous course of action (MDCOA) of a renewed Russian invasion of northern Ukraine from Belarus.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Bakhmut undermines an ongoing Kremlin information operation to present Russian President Vladimir Putin as an involved war leader.
- Wagner financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin undercut Putin’s efforts to portray himself as a wartime leader within the Russian information space, possibly inadvertently.
- The Kremlin’s efforts to improve the reputation of the Russian MoD may have prompted Prigozhin to increase his efforts to legalize Wagner Group in Russia.
- The Kremlin will likely continue efforts to portray Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) as effective leaders when Putin holds an expanded annual Russian MoD board meeting on December 21.
- Russian forces conducted limited counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka areas.
- Russian forces are expanding defensive fortifications on the left (east) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
- A Kremlin official deflected questioning surrounding a Moscow Oblast military recruitment officer’s December 17 claim that Russian authorities will extend the service period for conscript soldiers.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that Russian security services intensify their efforts to counter pro-Ukrainian partisan activity.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
- Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)
Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)
Russian forces continued to conduct limited counterattacks to regain lost positions along the Kreminna-Svatove line on December 20. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Stelmakhivka (16km northwest of Svatove), Chervonopopivka (6km north of Kreminna), and Hryhorivka (11km south of Kreminna).[25] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also conducted assaults near Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna) and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).[26]
Ukrainian forces reportedly continued counteroffensive operations in the Kreminna area on December 20. Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai reported that Ukrainian forces have progressed a few kilometers towards Kreminna.[27] A BARS-13 (Russian Combat Reserve) affiliated source claimed that Ukrainian forces are continuously attempting to break through Russian defenses near Kreminna.[28] The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) People’s Militia claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Svatove and Novoselivka (53km southeast of Svatove) with HIMARS rockets and 155-mm artillery.[29]
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
The pace of Russian advances in the Bakhmut area has not increased in previous weeks. ISW assesses that Russian forces have gained a total of 192 sq km in the Bakhmut area between October 1 and December 20. Russian forces gained 100 sq km in the Bakhmut area between October 1 and November 1 and 92 sq km between November 1 and December 20. The pace of Russian advances in the Bakhmut area over the past 50 days is roughly equivalent to the pace of Russian advances during the month of October. Russian sources will likely continue to try to falsely assert that Russian forces are taking a notable amount of territory in the Bakhmut area.
Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on December 20. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Bakhmut, within 33km northeast of Bakhmut near Verkhnokamianske and Pidhorodne, and within 14km south of Bakhmut near Opytne and Kurdyumivka.[30] A Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner Group elements attempted to break through Ukrainian defenses northeast of Bakhmut near Bakhmutske.[31] Another Russian milblogger claimed that fierce fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces continued in the outskirts of Bakhmut.[32] The Wall Street Journal published an interview with a Ukrainian commander who stated that Russian artillery strikes on Bakhmut are less intense than what his unit experienced on the Kherson front during the Ukrainian counteroffensive there and suggested that Russian forces in the Bakhmut area may be running out of ammunition.[33] A social media source published footage of a Ukrainian soldier claiming that Ukrainian forces recaptured 500 meters of territory near Opytne on December 19.[34] Geolocated footage posted on December 20 shows Ukrainian forces patrolling in Opytne.[35] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces also conducted assaults south of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka, where Ukrainian forces have reportedly surrounded the settlement with strongholds and have turned it into a serious defensive hub.[36] One Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner Group elements plan to storm Klishchiivka and that the capture of the settlement would allow Russian forces to interdict Ukrainian forces’ ability to transfer equipment and personnel along the Bakhmut to Kostantynivka supply route (the T0504 highway).[37]
Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on December 20. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Krasnohorivka (24km southwest of Avdiivka) and Marinka (28km southwest of Avdiivka).[38] A Russian milblogger claimed that the 5th Brigade of the Donetsk People‘s Republic (DNR) Peoples Militia made marginal advances within Marinka.[39] The Russian milblogger claimed that even if Russian forces fully capture Marinka the accumulation of Ukrainian fortified areas in the vicinity of Marinka will likely continue to constrain the actions of Russian forces in the area.[40] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults near Novomykhailivka (37km southwest of Avdiivka) and Pobieda (32km southwest of Avdiivka).[41] The Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also conducted an unsuccessful assault in the direction of Oleksandropil (17km northeast of Avdiivka) in an attempt to cut off the N20 highway and encircle the Ukrainian garrison in Novbakhmutivka (14km northeast of Avdiivka).[42] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued routine indirect fire along the line of contact in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[43]
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian forces are expanding fortifications in the left-bank Kherson Oblast and are continuing to shell settlements in Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.[44] Geolocated footage demonstrated that Russian forces visibly expanded fortifications near Bekhtery (approximately 50km southwest of Kherson City) between November 15 and December 20.[45] Spokesperson for the Southern Defenses Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces are continuing to increase troops in the direction of the Kinburn Spit, but Ukrainian forces are continuing counter-battery efforts in the area.[46] Humenyuk added that Russian forces are continuing to shell Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, in an effort to provoke Ukrainian forces to retaliate with artillery fire. Ukrainian officials and social media users reported that Russian forces have shelled Kherson City and settlements on the right bank of the Dnipro River in western Kherson Oblast.[47]
Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian logistics in southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces stuck a Russian permanent deployment point in the area of Chaplynka (about 76km southeast of Kherson City) on December 18.[48] The Ukrainian General Staff also added that Ukrainian forces stuck Russian manpower and equipment concentrations in Polohy, Vasylivka, and Kaminka-Dniprovska, wounding up to 130 Russian servicemen and destroying 10 pieces of equipment.[49]
Russian outlets published a video showing a Russian truck exploding on the Crimean Isthmus near Chongar Peninsula in Kherson Oblast, but Russian sources did not comment on the cause of the explosion.[50]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
A Kremlin official deflected questioning surrounding a Moscow Oblast military recruitment officer’s December 17 claim that Russian authorities will extend the service period for conscript soldiers. ISW reported on December 17 that Moscow Oblast military commissar Colonel Alexei Astakhov claimed that Russian authorities will extend the service period for conscript soldiers from 12 months to 18 for spring 2023 conscripts and to two years for fall 2023 conscripts.[51] ISW also previously reported that Russian MoD officials have denied these claims.[52] Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov deflected a question about the claim on December 20, stating that Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu is best positioned to address any rumors surrounding a two-year extension to military service.[53]
An independent Russian investigative organization, Conflict Intelligence Team, amplified an unverified report that Russian forces have assembled a unit from mobilized personnel and convicts.[54] The report stated that the unit deployed to an unspecified settlement in the Lyman direction on the frontline where it is currently waiting for its command to issue orders.[55] ISW is unable to independently verify these claims, but if true, they would indicate that Russian forces are conducting a prisoner recruitment campaign similar to the one used by the Wagner Group to obtain cannon fodder.
The Wagner Group’s troops continue to experience extremely high mortality rates due to high casualty rates and infectious diseases.[56] A forcibly mobilized Crimean man, Volodymyr Saychuk, stated that his unit fought alongside Wagner forces in Donetsk Oblast, noting that the number of dead Wagner personnel was three times the number of wounded. Saychuk stated that many Wagner servicemen also wore white and red wristbands which indicated that they had HIV or Hepatitis C.[57] ISW previously reported on October 25 that Wagner recruited prisoners with serious infectious diseases.[58]
Kremlin officials remain unlikely to sign an end-of-mobilization decree. Deputy of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg Boris Vishnevsky shared a response letter from the Russian presidential administration, which stated that the administration requires “additional documents and materials” to consider Vishnevsky’s appeal to formally end mobilization and extended the period of consideration for his request until February.[59] The Kremlin is unlikely to declare the end of mobilization because doing so would demobilize servicemen currently operating on the frontlines or training to enter combat at a later date.[60] A Russian source reported that Russian military officials have not released volunteers from the Shaimuratov Battalion from service, despite their contracts ending in November.[61] The report stated that the wives of these service members appealed to their local military prosecutor’s office where the assistant duty officer stated there is a provision of a decree on “partial” mobilization, which states that military contracts continue in force while mobilization is in progress.
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that Russian security services intensify their efforts to counter pro-Ukrainian partisan activity amidst continuing Ukrainian partisan sabotage attempts. Putin stated on December 20 that the “extremely difficult” situation in Russian-occupied territories requires Russian security services to “severely suppress the actions of foreign intelligence services and quickly identify traitors, spies, and saboteurs.”[62] A social media source claimed on December 20 that Ukrainian partisans set fire to a building at the Mariupol Ilyich Metallurgical plant.[63] ISW assesses that Ukrainian partisan activity continues to force the Kremlin to divert resources away from frontline operations to help secure rear areas.[64] Putin’s call on Russian occupation and Russian security services to combat partisan activity indicates that these services will likely increase law enforcement crackdowns and other measures aimed at curbing partisan activity in occupied territories.
Russian occupation officials continue to enact measures aimed at the political integration of Russian-occupied territories into the Russian Federation. Russian sources claimed on December 20 that the acting heads of the Russian occupation administrations in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts appointed senators to represent the illegally annexed territories in the Russian Federation Council.[65] Russian sources did not specify when the senators would officially begin representing the occupation administrations in the Russian Federation Council.
Russian occupation officials continue to promote Russian ideology and propaganda in educational institutions and youth groups in Russian-occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on December 20 that Russian occupation officials employ propagandists in schools, children’s camps, and various youth activities in occupied territories.[66] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation officials have established a children's organization called “Movement of the First” that emphasizes ultra-nationalistic Russian propaganda.[67] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported that Russian occupation officials continue to actively recruit teenagers in the occupied territories into the militaristic Russian ultra-nationalist group “Yunarmia.”[68]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
[2] https://avia(.)pro/news/belorussiya-otkazalas-ot-pokupki-rossiyskih-s-400-zayaviv-ob-ih-bespoleznosti; https://bulgarianmilitary(.)com/2020/02/27/belarus-refused-to-buy-russian-s-400-missile-systems-because-they-are-useless/
[12] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70150
[20] http://kremlin dot ru/press/announcements/70151
[21] http://kremlin dot ru/press/announcements/70151
[22] http://kremlin dot ru/press/announcements/70151
[23] http://kremlin dot ru/press/announcements/70151
[46] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/12/20/rosijski-vijskovi-ne-prypynyayut-provokaczij-u-rajoni-zaporizkoyi-aes/
[51] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... ] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/12/17/podmoskovnyy-voenkom-zayavil-o-vozvraschenii-k-dvuhletnemu-sroku-sluzhby-po-prizyvu-minoborony-rf-eto-otritsaet; https://t.me/warfakes/10016; https://t.me/milinfolive/94488;
[53] https://www.rbc(dot)ru/politics/17/12/2022/639dacf09a79470f79988bf3; https://www.rbc(dot)ru/rbcfreenews/63a04e4a9a79472b8fa1986c
[58] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...(dot)ua/content/vahnerivtsi-masovo-rekrutuiut-viazniv-khvorykh-na-vil-ta-hepatyt.html
[62] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70146
[66] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/12/20/rosiyany-stvoryly-novyj-ruh-dlya-promyvky-mizkiv-dityam-na-tot/
[67] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/12/20/rosiyany-stvoryly-novyj-ruh-dlya-promyvky-mizkiv-dityam-na-tot/
[68] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/12/20/rosiyany-stvoryly-novyj-ruh-dlya-promyvky-mizkiv-dityam-na-tot/
understandingwar.org
2. TARGET RUSSIA’S CAPABILITY, NOT ITS INTENT
Excerpts:
None of these capability-constraining efforts are in the offensive realm—despite what some, especially the Kremlin, would claim. Helping Ukraine liberate territories that Russia illegally occupied or refusing to reward Russia for its aggression with access to Western technologies are all defensive measures.
Risks of escalation with Russia are a constant, and the United States should not self-deter—particularly while the Kremlin is relatively weaker. The escalation risks that the United States fears will always be there. The Kremlin will threaten the same escalation when it goes on the offensive next time—which will happen if the Kremlin keeps its gains in Ukraine. If the United States chooses to self-deter now, when Putin has limited leverage, it will always self-deter, including when the Kremlin is strong again.
Ukraine has crossed many of Putin’s supposed red lines, from liberating what Russia constitutionally claims to be its land to attacking the Crimean Bridge.[30] Each time, the Kremlin did not escalate but rather reshaped its narrative to explain away its losses.
There are internal and external constraints on the Kremlin’s escalation paths. Putin has very few escalation options that have any chance of achieving his objectives in Ukraine and do not imply extreme costs and risks to his regime. The United States also has ways of constraining even those—primarily through strategic deterrence.
The United States must help Ukraine liberate its territories and people through a large-scale counteroffensive or risk facing the same challenge with the same escalation risks under worse conditions in the future. A Russian military foothold in Ukraine is a threat to US interests, as it implies tremendous future military and economic requirements for the United States, NATO, and European Union and creates additional vulnerabilities while carrying the same escalation risks.
TARGET RUSSIA’S CAPABILITY, NOT ITS INTENT
understandingwar.org
Nataliya Bugayova
US policy should recognize that the Kremlin’s intent regarding Ukraine is maximalist, inflexible, and will not change in the foreseeable future. The West should stop expending resources trying to change a reality it does not control and focus on what it can shape plenty: denying Russia’s ability to wage a war against Ukraine.
Negotiations, ceasefires, and peace deals are not off-ramps but rather on-ramps for the Kremlin to renew its attack on Ukraine in the future under conditions that advantage Russia. They are means to the same ends—full control of Ukraine and eradication of Ukraine’s statehood and identity.
The vital US interest in preventing future Russian attacks on Ukraine can be best achieved by denying Russia the capability to carry out those attacks. The immediate requirement is preserving Ukraine’s momentum on the battlefield—accounting for a possible renewed offensive from Russia this winter—to ensure that Ukraine secures the most advantageous position possible. The West should also eliminate Russia’s ability to attack Ukraine in the future, including by denying Russia a military foothold in Ukraine from which to launch attacks, resisting "peace" deals that the Kremlin will use to buy time to reconstitute its forces, not empowering the Russian defense industrial complex with access to Western markets, and committing to building Ukraine's defensive capabilities over the long term.
Persistent Intent
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intent toward Ukraine has not changed and likely never will. Putin’s intent will most likely outlast him—by design. Russia will use any territory it keeps in Ukraine to stage future attacks.
Putin’s goals in Ukraine always exceeded countering NATO or forcing Ukraine into neutrality. Despite Western assumptions, Putin has never been content with the territorial gains he made in Ukraine in 2014 because control of Ukraine, not its territory, has been his goal. The Kremlin has made clear in word and action over the past 20 years that it will accept nothing less than full control over Ukraine.
Putin has tried to gain control over Ukraine in increasingly extreme ways: by trying to dominate Ukraine’s politics in the 2000s and early 2010s; via military intervention in 2014 and the manipulative peace frameworks that followed.[1] He failed. He then resorted to a full-scale invasion in 2022, including a genocidal campaign to eradicate Ukrainian identity and statehood—an effort he is unlikely to abandon. [2]
Putin is preparing Russia for a long war. He was explicit on December 7 that the “special operation” will be “lengthy.”[3] He is likely setting conditions for additional mobilization.[4] He is orienting the Russian defense industrial base to support a prolonged war effort; his success in that effort may be limited, but his intent has been clear.[5] Russian authorities plan to prepare children for military service.[6]
Putin is doubling down on his maximalist objectives in Ukraine despite battlefield setbacks. Rhetorically, Putin is balancing between the extreme and moderate elements in his power circles, but he continues to push Russian forces to pursue offensive operations at extreme cost and to spotlight ultra-nationalists in his regime, such as Wagner Group sponsor Yevgeny Prigozhin.[7]
The Kremlin's intent to control Ukraine will likely outlast Putin, by design. Putin is indoctrinating his goals into Russian formal structures, legislation, information space, and society.[8]
Russian elites largely subscribe to this intent, differing only in their approach. Some seek complete victory in Ukraine at any cost.[9] Others seek victory but not at the expense of the remainders of Russia’s power, which they seek to preserve for selfish and ideological reasons.[10]
Anti-Ukraine and anti-West sentiment within the Russian population—already significant as demonstrated by the population's explicit or tacit support of the war—will likely only grow as Kremlin propaganda intensifies, Russian battlefield losses accrue, and Russians who oppose the war attrit under growing repression.[11]
The inflexibility of the Kremlin’s intent goes beyond Ukraine. Russia’s goal to completely subordinate the Belarussian military likewise remains unchanged.[12] This effort has been impeded by Russian setbacks in Ukraine, which provided Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko room to maneuver. If Russia solidifies its gains in Ukraine, the Kremlin will most certainly try to complete the absorption of Belarus and—critically—link its military gains between Ukraine and Belarus. Moldova has been also high on the Kremlin’s list for years.[13] Over the long term, the Kremlin could try to link its territorial gains beyond Ukraine by integrating other territories that Russia illegally occupies, such as Transnistria. This would impose dramatically different military posture requirements on NATO, which would be especially challenging if the US is required to act in the Pacific.
Putin’s goals regarding the United States have not changed either. Putin made clear in a recent speech that he still intends to "collapse the Western hegemony."[14] Stabilizing Russia’s gains in Ukraine would provide the Kremlin with additional bandwidth to pursue this goal.
For these reasons, the West’s attempts to change Putin’s mind on Ukraine via negotiations and efforts to "reset" the relationship with Russia always had little chance to succeed. The West’s actions have been a factor but never the core driver in Putin’s foreign policy.[15]
Variable Capability
Fortunately, the Kremlin’s intent has never been the sole determiner of Russia's actions. Russia’s ability to act on its intent also matters. Constraining Russia’s capability to pursue its aggression is both possible and the only approach that has changed the Kremlin’s behavior in the past.
Ukraine and the West have forced Putin to accept less than his objectives many times when they actively countered Russia’s aggression. Ukraine has forced Russia to define down its military goals multiple times since the full-scale invasion in February. Russia left the Kyiv axis not because it abandoned the plan to seize Kyiv but because Russia was forced out. Russian officials declared that “Russia is in Kherson forever,”[16] but then Russia was forced out. All the ground Russia lost in 2022 was the result of forcing Russia to abandon positions; none of it was the result of persuasion. In 2014, the Kremlin planned and failed to capture six regions in Ukraine (beyond Crimea) not because Russia’s goals changed, but because Russia was stopped. The Kremlin also still cannot force Belarus —at least not yet— to fully commit its forces to Russia’s war in Ukraine, despite constant attempts to do so and years and billions invested in controlling Lukashenko.[17] Russia tried and failed to prevent Montenegro’s and North Macedonia’s accession to NATO in 2017 and 2020, also because Russia was countered.[18]
Battlefield defeats in Ukraine forced the Kremlin to reframe its goals in the information space—even as the Kremlin’s true goals remained unchanged. The Russian military had to publicly define down its objective from forcing a change of government in Ukraine and demilitarizing the whole of Ukraine to seizing Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts—an objective Russia is still failing to achieve. Russian propagandists are having to redefine their false narratives about the enemy Russia is fighting from "Nazis in Ukraine" to the "NATO and collective West” to justify Russian military failures.[19] Putin had to admit in December that the “Special Military Operation” will be a lengthy process.[20] Russian “experts” have pushed back on a leading Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s claim that Kherson Oblast is fully Russian, despite this claim being solidified in the Russian constitution.[21]
The United States, Ukraine, and Ukraine's allies should focus on denying the following Russian capabilities, which are essential to Russia’s efforts to strip Ukraine of its statehood and national identity:
- Momentum
- Territory
- Core military capabilities
- Offset capabilities/ability to pivot
Momentum. The most immediate requirement is ensuring that Ukraine preserves its momentum on the battlefield—even if Russia launches a renewed offensive in the winter of 2022-23.
- Ukraine still has momentum and is on track to liberate more of its territory and people if properly supported. Russia lost its initiative in the summer of 2022. Ukraine has been conducting effective successive operations in Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts and is preparing additional operations.
- Putin is focused on breaking Ukraine’s momentum through several efforts: a strategic bombing campaign and an offensive in Donetsk Oblast to force Ukraine into concessions; an information operation to confuse the West about the prospects of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and about the Kremlin’s intent (both are failing); and condition-setting for a potential renewed offensive in the winter of 2022-23, possibly from the territory of Belarus.[22]
- Putin is trying to break Ukraine’s momentum because Russian forces need a breather to reconstitute if Russia is to hold existing and capture new territory in Ukraine. Russia cannot fix its force generation issues in the short term. Putin invaded Ukraine with insufficient resources that Russia exhausted in pursuit of limited gains, including offensives on Mariupol and Severodonetsk. Russia’s offensive in Bakhmut follows the same pattern.[23] Putin has refused to provide a breather for the Russian troops to refit, instead ushering his forces into the field to continue offensive operations. Russia’s efforts to conduct simultaneous defensive and offensive operations while also trying to regenerate its force are preventing Russian forces from reconstituting.
- If Putin manages to freeze the frontline—which a ceasefire or otherwise slowed Ukrainian counteroffensive would provide—he will have gained the time to at least partially reconstitute capabilities to pursue his unchanged goals of controlling Ukraine. A short-term cessation of hostilities along the current lines could provide Russian forces with the opportunity to rebuild their strength. In the medium term, a premature peace deal is one of the few options the Kremlin has to reconstitute the Russian military through conscription cycles and to freeze the frontlines in the best possible configuration that Putin can hope for in this war.
- A breather would also lessen domestic pressures on Putin himself. Each battlefield setback eats at Putin’s domestic resilience, as ISW assessed in October.[24] These setbacks challenge Putin’s ability to balance his nationalistic power bases.
It is thus critical that the United States help Ukraine deny Russia a breather on the battlefield. This means properly resourcing Ukraine’s counteroffensive this winter—while accounting for a possible renewed Russian offensive—and taking advantage of Ukraine’s ongoing momentum to help Ukraine secure the most advantageous position.
Territory. A military foothold in Ukraine is a core component of the Kremlin’s capability to launch future attacks. Such a foothold constitutes a permanent threat to Ukraine’s survival. Russia will use any territory it holds—especially in the strategically vital south of Ukraine—as a launchpad for attacks. Those territories would become Russia’s military bases—likely in perpetuity—if the fighting stops prematurely.
Imagine how much further Russia could advance in future years if Russia restarts its military offensive from these forward positions within Ukraine. An expanded Russian military foothold would also impose enormous requirements on Ukraine to defend a vastly larger frontline than in the last eight years.
Core military capabilities. Putin is on a trajectory to further degrade Russia’s combat-capable manpower.
Putin will not hesitate, however, to sacrifice more of his forces in pursuit of his goals in Ukraine. This dynamic makes the question of the Russian ability to produce and maintain heavy and advanced weapons one of the most essential dynamics of this war. Denying Russia’s military-industrial complex access to global markets is essential. The West has taken some steps in this regard, but Russia continues to circumvent export controls.[25] The West must map and curb these efforts.
Russia’s ability to source technology from Iran, China, and others is another element of Russia’s capability, which the West must curb, especially given indications that Iran may have reservations about helping Russia fully. [26] China's military support has also likely been less than Putin hoped.
Another center of gravity in constraining Russia’s ability to launch future attacks on Ukraine is committing to building up Ukraine’s defenses in the long-term and reshaping NATO’s posture.
Offset capabilities. The West must deny Russia the ability to regain the offensive in the information space. Information operations have been a core offset capability for the Kremlin. Putin achieved goals beyond his means for years by simply manipulating perceptions.[27]
ISW assessed in 2020 that Putin would become increasingly reliant on his ability to shape perceptions globally and domestically as his and Russia’s real power diminished.[28] The more the Kremlin loses on the battlefield, the more Russia invests in perception manipulation—the prime example of which is the re-emergence of the ceasefire narrative.[29] The West must learn this lesson and deny the Kremlin its ability to use perception manipulation to advance its goals.
Russia is on the defensive in the information space—globally and domestically. That is a major advantage for the United States and Ukraine. If Russia gets a reprieve on the battlefield, if the fighting stops, the Kremlin will be able to pivot back to one of the few things it knows how to do well—manipulate perceptions.
None of these capability-constraining efforts are in the offensive realm—despite what some, especially the Kremlin, would claim. Helping Ukraine liberate territories that Russia illegally occupied or refusing to reward Russia for its aggression with access to Western technologies are all defensive measures.
Risks of escalation with Russia are a constant, and the United States should not self-deter—particularly while the Kremlin is relatively weaker. The escalation risks that the United States fears will always be there. The Kremlin will threaten the same escalation when it goes on the offensive next time—which will happen if the Kremlin keeps its gains in Ukraine. If the United States chooses to self-deter now, when Putin has limited leverage, it will always self-deter, including when the Kremlin is strong again.
Ukraine has crossed many of Putin’s supposed red lines, from liberating what Russia constitutionally claims to be its land to attacking the Crimean Bridge.[30] Each time, the Kremlin did not escalate but rather reshaped its narrative to explain away its losses.
There are internal and external constraints on the Kremlin’s escalation paths. Putin has very few escalation options that have any chance of achieving his objectives in Ukraine and do not imply extreme costs and risks to his regime. The United States also has ways of constraining even those—primarily through strategic deterrence.
The United States must help Ukraine liberate its territories and people through a large-scale counteroffensive or risk facing the same challenge with the same escalation risks under worse conditions in the future. A Russian military foothold in Ukraine is a threat to US interests, as it implies tremendous future military and economic requirements for the United States, NATO, and European Union and creates additional vulnerabilities while carrying the same escalation risks.
[3] https://www dot rbc dot ru/politics/09/12/2022/6393394d9a79471ae0a68d56
[6] https://t.me/mobilizationnews/5427;%C2%A0https://notes%C2%A0dot; https://don24 dot ru/rubric/obschestvo/novyy-centr-patrioticheskogo-vospitaniya-nachal-rabotu-v-donecke.html; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[8] The Kremlin’s formalization of its illegal annexation of additional Ukrainian regions: https://lenta dot ru/news/2022/10/04/herson/; the new 2022 concept of Russia’s humanitarian policy abroad - https://ria dot ru/20220905/gumpolitika-1814651715.html; indoctrination of children - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/23/how-putin-is-prepa...
[11] Russia’s new ‘foreign agents’ law: http://duma dot gov dot ru/news/55879/; Russia’s expanding counterterrorism framework - https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[12] Russia’s efforts to pressure Lukashenko: 2019: https://www.iswresearch.org/2019/05/russia-in-review-may-9-13-2019.html; 2020: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/belarus-warning-update-put... recent: https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/12/18/sergij-nayev-putin-z-kerivnycztvom-bilorusi-obgovoryuvatyme-pytannya-zaluchennya-zbrojnyh-syl-rb-do-operacziyi-proty-ukrayiny/; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[14] http://en dot kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/69465; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... ; more about persistence of the Kremlin’s intent regarding the US: https://www.understandingwar.org/report/how-we-got-here-russia-kremlins-...
[17] Russia’s efforts to pressure Lukashenko: 2019: https://www.iswresearch.org/2019/05/russia-in-review-may-9-13-2019.html ; 2020: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/belarus-warning-update-put... recent: https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/12/18/sergij-nayev-putin-z-kerivnycztvom-bilorusi-obgovoryuvatyme-pytannya-zaluchennya-zbrojnyh-syl-rb-do-operacziyi-proty-ukrayiny/; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[18] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/09/montenegro-convicts-pro-ru... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-macedonia-usa/mattis-warnsof-russian-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/global-opinions/macedonia-is-a-tiny-country-with-a-giantrussia-problem/2018/09/20/47a674d2-bb6b-11e8-a8aa-860695e7f3fc_story.html
[19] https://youtu.be/l3a5agZPt70; https://rueconomics dot ru/amp/23639870-solov_ev_pod_vidom_vsu_rossii_protivostoit_nato_s_ukrainoi_mi_zakonchili; https://m dot gazeta dot ru/amp/army/news/2022/09/21/18613117.shtml
[20] https://www dot rbc dot ru/politics/09/12/2022/6393394d9a79471ae0a68d56
understandingwar.org
3. ‘We were allowed to be slaughtered’: calls by Russian forces intercepted
I would like it if we go to war with China (or perhaps even ussia) though phone calls between our soldiers and their loved ones will be exposed. And if our soldiers use proper OPSEC techniques and do not reveal any useful information we can be certain that recordings will be manipulated through AI. We can scoff at the Russsians but we can be certain our troops will be exploited in the same way and probably worse because their call swill likely be manipulated to support our adversary's narrative.
How do we train for this and defend against this? Do we go back to letter writing and snail mail?
‘We were allowed to be slaughtered’: calls by Russian forces intercepted
Calls between Russian soldiers and their loved ones – eavesdropped by Ukraine - reveal reality of war for Kremlin’s forces
The Guardian · by Daniel Boffey · December 20, 2022
Out on the frontline, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman, on 8 November at 15.10, a Russian serviceman called Andrey decided to ignore the orders of his superiors and call his mother with an unauthorised mobile phone.
“No one feeds us anything, mum,” he complained. “Our supply is shit, to be honest. We draw water from puddles, then we strain it and drink it.”
Russian forces had been on the back foot in the Donetsk oblast for weeks. Lyman, taken by the Russians in May, was liberated by Ukrainian forces in October.
Two days before Andrey made his afternoon call back home, the Russian forces had “finally” started firing at Ukrainian positions with phosphorus bombs, he told his mother, but the promises of munitions that could turn the battle had come to nothing.
'No one feeds us anything': Russian serviceman calls mother from frontline in Ukraine – audio
“Where are the missiles that Putin boasted about?” he asked. “There is a high-rise building right in front of us. Our soldiers can’t hit it. We need one Caliber cruise missile and that’s it.”
Andrey reassured his mother, who lives in Kostroma, a city 310 miles south-east of Moscow, that he would be OK. “I always say prayers Mum,” he said. “Every morning.”
It is not known whether those prayers were met. When approached by the Guardian his mother said her son was not with her, before breaking down in tears and putting the phone down.
The content of the conversation between soldier and mother, which lasted five minutes and 26 seconds, can be heard and read today because it was intercepted by the Ukrainian military and passed to this newspaper.
Others shared with the Guardian, include a conversation on 6 November between a father and the colleagues of his son, Andrei, who had been killed serving in the 35th motorised rifle brigade, 5th company.
“Reinforcements: no; communication: no”, responded a soldier to questions from the grieving parent about the status of the men who had survived a Ukrainian onslaught. “They said we weren’t allowed to retreat. Otherwise, we may be shot.”
Father calls Russian troops on the frontline in Ukraine to hear son has been killed – audio
In a third intercept from 26 October a soldier in the Donetsk region tells his wife how he had fled with three others from the bloodshed and was contemplating surrender. “I’m in a sleeping bag, all wet, coughing, generally fucked up,” he said. “We were all allowed to be slaughtered.” The soldier’s wife declined to comment when approached by this newspaper.
They are just three of thousands of calls between soldiers in the trenches or advanced positions that Ukrainian experts have eavesdropped, pored over for snippets of intelligence and then, where there is propaganda value, made public.
Russian soldier calls wife after fleeing frontline in Ukraine – audio
In the first period of the war, such was the lack of security around Russian communications that conversations about strategy between military commanders were being picked up, even by amateurs, thanks to the military’s use of open radio frequencies.
That, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, a cyber-expert who heads the Silverado Policy Accelerator, is increasingly rare.
A raft of media articles based on intercepts chronicling human rights abuses in Bucha, the town north of Kyiv where civilians were allegedly shot, and the increasingly poor morale within the military, has resulted in Russian forces sharpening up their act – to a degree, as the Andrey call has highlighted.
“You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted over the air,” said Alperovitch. “That doesn’t pose too much difficulty for the Ukrainian security services.”
In themselves, a handful of intercepted calls offer limited value in painting a picture of the attitudes of the Russian fighting forces.
They said we weren’t allowed to retreat. Otherwise, we may be shot
The huge scale of calls being made by soldiers does, however, provide a very clear steer as to the weaknesses of the Russian military, according to one former Kremlin defence official who asked to remain anonymous.
“Security has always been a mess, both in the army and among defence officials”, the source said. “For example, in 2013 they tried to get all the staff at the ministry of defence to replace our iPhones with Russian-made Yoto smartphones.
“But everyone just kept using the iPhone as a second mobile because it was much better. We would just keep the iPhone in the car’s glove compartment for when we got back from work. In the end, the ministry gave up and stopped caring. If the top doesn’t take security very seriously, how can you expect any discipline in the regular army?”
At the end of September, Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists and “those with previous military experience”.
The former Russian official said that this would only make the security situation worse. “Soldiers get a quick crash course on how not to give away sensitive information, but it is mostly for show,” the official said. “The commanders pretend to teach [the course] and the soldiers pretend to listen.
The Kremlin has mobilised 300,000 people ‘who will be barely trained’. Photograph: Alexey Malgavko/Reuters
“Even now, we see that soldiers continue to use social media and tell their wives and mothers about the war, sometimes exposing their location.
“There is simply no discipline and it will only get worse now that they have mobilised 300,000 people who will be barely trained. Mobilised soldiers will be terrified of being in a war zone, and naturally, they will try to call home.”
The Ukrainian army, which for years has benefited from Nato-led training, has not been prone to such wide scale interception of communications.
The former Kremlin official said Putin was learning the hard way that his army was in dire need of modernisation and that the top-down Soviet style model was not fit for purpose.
“The army doctrine is based on punishment, so soldiers get penalised if they mess up, but no one is trying to prevent them from giving away information in the first place,” the source said. “Screw-ups will happen until they change the whole philosophy.”
The Guardian · by Daniel Boffey · December 20, 2022
4. It’s Time to Worry About Deepfakes Again
Excerpts:
There is still time to prevent or limit the most catastrophic deepfake scenarios. Many people favor building a robust authentication infrastructure: a log attached to every piece of media that the public can use to check where a photo or video comes from and how it has been edited. This would protect against both shallow- and deepfake propaganda, as well as the liar’s dividend. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, led by Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, the BBC, and several other stakeholders, has designed such a standard—although until that protocol achieves widespread adoption, it is most useful for honest actors seeking to prove their integrity.
Once a deepfake is in circulation, detection is only the first of many hurdles for its debunking. Computers are far better than humans at distinguishing real and fake videos, Lyu told me, but they aren’t always accurate. Automated content moderation is infamously hard, especially for video, and even an optimistic 90 percent success rate could still leave tens or hundreds of thousands of the most pernicious clips online. That software should be made widely available to journalists, who also have to be trained to interpret the results, Gregory said. But even given a high-quality detection algorithm that is both accessible and usable, convincing the public to trust the algorithm, experts, and journalists exposing fabricated media might prove near impossible. In a world saturated with propaganda and uncertainty that long ago pushed us over the edge into what Ovadya calls “reality apathy,” any solution will first need to restore people’s willingness to climb their way out.
It’s Time to Worry About Deepfakes Again
Deepfakes still might be poised to corrupt the basic ways we process reality—or what’s left of it.
By Matteo Wong
The Atlantic · by Matteo Wong · December 20, 2022
It was 2018, and the world as we knew it—or rather, how we knew it—teetered on a precipice. Against a rising drone of misinformation, The New York Times, the BBC, Good Morning America, and just about everyone else sounded the alarm over a new strain of fake but highly realistic videos. Using artificial intelligence, bad actors could manipulate someone’s voice and face in recorded footage almost like a virtual puppet and pass the product off as real. In a famous example engineered by BuzzFeed, Barack Obama seemed to say, “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.” Synthetic photos, audio, and videos, collectively dubbed “deepfakes,” threatened to destabilize society and push us into a full-blown “infocalypse.”
More than four years later, despite a growing trickle of synthetic videos, the deepfake doomsday hasn’t quite materialized. Deepfakes’ harms have certainly been seen in the realm of pornography—where individuals have had their likeness used without their consent—but there’s been “nothing like what people have been really fearing, which is the incriminating, hyperrealistic deepfake of a presidential candidate saying something which swings major voting centers,” says Henry Ajder, an expert on synthetic media and AI. Compared with 2018’s disaster scenarios, which predicted outcomes such as the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declaring nuclear war, “the state we’re at is nowhere near that,” says Sam Gregory, who studies deepfakes and directs the human-rights nonprofit Witness.
But those terrifying predictions may have just been early. The field of artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly since the 2018 deepfake panic, and synthetic media is once again the center of attention. The technology buzzword of 2022 is generative AI: models that seem to display humanlike creativity, turning text prompts into astounding images or commanding English at the level of a mediocre undergraduate. These and other advances have experts concerned that a deepfake apocalypse is still very much on the horizon. Fake video and audio might once again be poised to corrupt the most basic ways in which people process reality—or what’s left of it.
So far, deepfakes have been limited by two factors baked into their name: deep learning and fake news. The technology is complex enough—and simpler forms of disinformation are spread so easily—that synthetic media hasn’t seen widespread use.
Deep learning is an approach to AI that simulates the brain through an algorithm made up of many layers (hence, “deep”) of artificial neurons. Many of the deepfakes that sparked fear in 2018 were products of “generative adversarial networks,” which consist of two deep-learning algorithms: a generator and a discriminator. Trained on huge amounts of data—perhaps tens of thousands of human faces—the generator synthesizes an image, and the discriminator tries to tell whether it is real or fake. Based on the discriminator’s feedback, the generator “teaches” itself to produce more realistic faces, and the two continue to improve in an adversarial loop. First developed in 2014, GANs could soon produce uncannily realistic images, audio, and videos.
Yet by the 2018 and 2020 elections, and even the most recent midterms, deepfake technology still wasn’t realistic or accessible enough to be weaponized for political disinformation. Fabricating a decent synthetic video isn’t a “plug and play” process like commanding Lensa to generate artistic selfies or messing around in Photoshop, explains Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at UC Berkeley. Rather, it requires at least some knowledge of machine learning. GAN-generated images also have consistent tells, such as distortion around wisps of hair or earrings, misshapen pupils, and strange backgrounds. A high-quality product that will “fool a lot more people for a longer time … requires manual processing,” says Siewi Lyu, a deepfake expert at the University at Buffalo. “The human operator has to get involved in every aspect,” he told me: curating data, tweaking the model, cleaning up the computer’s errors by hand.
Those barriers mean deep learning certainly isn’t the most cost-effective way to spread fake news. Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene can just go on the air and lie to great effect; New York State recently elected a Republican representative whose storybook biography may be largely fiction; sporadic, cryptic text was enough for QAnon conspiracies to consume the nation; Facebook posts were more than sufficient for Russian troll farms. In terms of visual media, slowing down footage of Nancy Pelosi or mislabeling old war videos as having been shot in Ukraine already breed plenty of confusion. “It’s far more effective to use a cruder form of media manipulation, which can be done quickly and by less sophisticated actors,” Ajder told me, “than to release an expensive, hard-to-create deepfake, which actually isn’t going to be as good a quality as you had hoped.”
Read: Facebook’s big disinformation bust is cold comfort
Even if someone has the skills and resources to fabricate a persuasive video, the targets with the greatest discord-sowing potential, such as world leaders and high-profile activists, also have the greatest defenses. Software engineers, governments, and journalists work to verify footage of those people, says Renée DiResta, a disinformation expert and the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. That has proved true for fabricated videos of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the ongoing invasion; in one video, Zelensky appeared to surrender, but his oversize head and peculiar accent quickly got the clip removed from Facebook and YouTube. “Is doing the work of creating a plausible, convincing deepfake video something they need to do, or are there easier, less detectable mechanisms at their disposal?” DiResta posed to me. The pandemic is yet another misinformation hot spot that illustrates these constraints: A 2020 study of COVID-19 misinformation found some evidence of photos and videos doctored with simple techniques—such as an image edited to show a train transporting virus-filled tanks labeled COVID-19—but no AI-based manipulations.
That’s not to diminish concerns about synthetic media and disinformation. In fact, widespread anxiety has likely slowed the rise of deepfakes. “Before the alarm was raised on these issues, you had no policies by social-media companies to address this,” says Aviv Ovadya, an internet-platform and AI expert who is a prominent voice on the dangers of synthetic media. “Now you have policies and a variety of actions they take to limit the impact of malicious deepfakes”—content moderation, human and software detection methods, a wary public.
But awareness has also created an environment in which politicians can more credibly dismiss legitimate evidence as forged. Donald Trump has reportedly claimed that the infamous Access Hollywood tape was fake; a GOP candidate once promoted a conspiracy theory that the video of police murdering George Floyd was a deepfake. The law professors Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney call this the “liar’s dividend”: Awareness of synthetic media breeds skepticism of all media, which benefits liars who can brush off accusations or disparage opponents with cries of “fake news.” Those lies then become part of the sometimes deafening noise of miscontextualized media, scientific and political disinformation, and denials by powerful figures, as well as a broader crumbling of trust in more or less everything.
All of this might change in the next few years as AI-generated media becomes more advanced. Every expert I spoke with said it’s a matter of when, not if, we reach a deepfake inflection point, after which forged videos and audio spreading false information will flood the internet. The timeline is “years, not decades,” Farid told me. According to Ovadya, “it’s probably less than five years” until we can type a prompt into a program and, by giving the computer feedback—make the hair blow this way, add some audio, tweak the background—create “deeply compelling content.” Lyu, too, puts five years as the upper limit to the emergence of widely accessible software for creating highly credible deepfakes.
Celebrity deepfakes are already popping up in advertisements; more and more synthetic videos and audio are being used used for financial fraud; deepfake propaganda campaigns have been used to attack Palestinian-rights activists. This summer, a deepfake of the mayor of Kyiv briefly tricked the mayors of several European capitals during a video call.
Read: In the deepfake era, counterterrorism is harder
And various forms of deepfake-lite technology are exist all over the internet, including TikTok and Snapchat features that perform face swaps—replacing one person’s face with another’s in a video—similar to the infamous 2018 BuzzFeed deepfake that superimposed Obama’s face onto that of the filmmaker Jordan Peele. There are also easy-to-use programs such as Reface and DeepFaceLab whose explicit purpose is to produce decent-quality deepfakes. Revenge pornography has not abated. And some fear that TikTok, which is designed to create viral videos—and which is a growing source of news for American teenagers and adults—is especially susceptible to manipulated videos.
One of the biggest concerns is a new generation of powerful text-to-image software that greatly lowers the barrier to fabricating videos and other media. Generative-AI models of the sort that power DALL-E use a “diffusion” architecture, rather than GAN, to create complex imagery with a fraction of the effort. Fed hundreds of millions of captioned images, a diffusion-based model trains by changing random pixels until the image looks like static and then reversing that corruption, in the process “learning” to associate words and visual concepts. Where GANs must be trained for a specific type of image (say, a face in profile), text-to-image models can generate a wide range of images with complex interactions (two political leaders in conversation, for example). “You can now generate faces that are far more dynamic and realistic and customizable,” Ajder said. And many detection methods geared toward existing deepfakes won’t work on diffusion models.
The possibilities for deepfake propaganda are as dystopian now as they were a few years ago. At the largest scale, one can imagine fake videos of gruesome pregnancy terminations, like the saline-abortion images already used by anti-abortion activists; convincing, manipulated political speeches to feed global conspiracy theories; disparaging forgeries used against enemy nations during war—or even synthetic media that triggers conflict. Countries with fewer computer resources and talent or a less robust press will struggle even more, Gregory told me: “All of these problems are far worse when you look at Pakistan, Myanmar, Nigeria, a local news outlet in the U.S., rather than, say, The Washington Post.” And as deepfake technology improves to work with less training data, fabrications of lower-profile journalists, executives, government officials, and others could wreak havoc such that people think “there’s no new evidence coming in; there’s no new way to reason about the world,” Farid said.
Yet when deceit and propaganda feel like the air we breathe, deepfakes are at once potentially game-changing and just more of the same. In October, Gallup reported that only 34 percent of Americans trust newspapers, TV, and radio to report news fairly and accurately, and 38 percent have absolutely no confidence in mass media. Earlier this year, a Pew Research Center survey across 19 countries found that 70 percent of people think “the spread of false information online” is a major threat to their country, ranking just second behind climate change. “Deepfakes are really an evolution of existing problems,” Gregory said. He worries that focusing too heavily on sophisticated synthetic media might distract from efforts to mitigate the spread of “shallow fakes,” such as relabeled photographs and slightly doctored footage; DiResta is more concerned about text-based disinformation, which has been wreaking havoc for years, is easily generated using programs such as ChatGPT, and, unlike video or audio, has no obvious technical glitches.
Read: Sorry, I lied about fake news
The limited empirical research on the persuasiveness of synthetic video and audio is mixed. Although a few studies suggest that video and audio are a bit more convincing than text, others have found no appreciable difference; some have even found that people are better at detecting fabricated political speeches when presented with video or audio than with a transcript alone. Still, Ajder cautioned that “the deepfakes I’ve seen being used in these trials aren’t quite there; they still are on the cusp of uncanniness,” and that it’s difficult to replicate the conditions of social media—such as amplification and echo chambers—in a lab. Of course, those are the very conditions that have enabled an epistemic corrosion that will continue to advance with or without synthetic media.
Regardless of how a proliferation of deepfakes might worsen our information ecosystem—whether by adding to existing uncertainty or fundamentally changing it—experts, journalists, and internet companies are trying to prepare for it. The EU and China have both passed regulations meant to target deepfakes by mandating that tech companies take action against them. Companies could implement guardrails to stop their technology from being misused; Adobe has gone as far as to never publicly release its deepfake-audio software, Voco.
There is still time to prevent or limit the most catastrophic deepfake scenarios. Many people favor building a robust authentication infrastructure: a log attached to every piece of media that the public can use to check where a photo or video comes from and how it has been edited. This would protect against both shallow- and deepfake propaganda, as well as the liar’s dividend. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, led by Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, the BBC, and several other stakeholders, has designed such a standard—although until that protocol achieves widespread adoption, it is most useful for honest actors seeking to prove their integrity.
Once a deepfake is in circulation, detection is only the first of many hurdles for its debunking. Computers are far better than humans at distinguishing real and fake videos, Lyu told me, but they aren’t always accurate. Automated content moderation is infamously hard, especially for video, and even an optimistic 90 percent success rate could still leave tens or hundreds of thousands of the most pernicious clips online. That software should be made widely available to journalists, who also have to be trained to interpret the results, Gregory said. But even given a high-quality detection algorithm that is both accessible and usable, convincing the public to trust the algorithm, experts, and journalists exposing fabricated media might prove near impossible. In a world saturated with propaganda and uncertainty that long ago pushed us over the edge into what Ovadya calls “reality apathy,” any solution will first need to restore people’s willingness to climb their way out.
The Atlantic · by Matteo Wong · December 20, 2022
5. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent
If this is "normal" what happens when someone wants to use AI maliciously?
Excerpts:
Stability.AI, the company that developed Stable Diffusion, launched a new version of the AI model in late November. A spokesperson says that the original model was released with a safety filter, which Lensa does not appear to have used, as it would remove these outputs. One way Stable Diffusion 2.0 filters content is by removing images that are repeated often. The more often something is repeated, such as Asian women in sexually graphic scenes, the stronger the association becomes in the AI model.
Caliskan has studied CLIP (Contrastive Language Image Pretraining), which is a system that helps Stable Diffusion generate images. CLIP learns to match images in a data set to descriptive text prompts. Caliskan found that it was full of problematic gender and racial biases.
“Women are associated with sexual content, whereas men are associated with professional, career-related content in any important domain such as medicine, science, business, and so on,” Caliskan says.
Funnily enough, my Lensa avatars were more realistic when my pictures went through male content filters. I got avatars of myself wearing clothes (!) and in neutral poses. In several images, I was wearing a white coat that appeared to belong to either a chef or a doctor.
But it’s not just the training data that is to blame. The companies developing these models and apps make active choices about how they use the data, says Ryan Steed, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, who has studied biases in image-generation algorithms.
The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent
My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.
Technology Review · by Melissa Heikkiläarchive page
When I tried the new viral AI avatar app Lensa, I was hoping to get results similar to some of my colleagues at MIT Technology Review. The digital retouching app was first launched in 2018 but has recently become wildly popular thanks to the addition of Magic Avatars, an AI-powered feature which generates digital portraits of people based on their selfies.
But while Lensa generated realistic yet flattering avatars for them—think astronauts, fierce warriors, and cool cover photos for electronic music albums— I got tons of nudes. Out of 100 avatars I generated, 16 were topless, and in another 14 it had put me in extremely skimpy clothes and overtly sexualized poses.
I have Asian heritage, and that seems to be the only thing the AI model picked up on from my selfies. I got images of generic Asian women clearly modeled on anime or video-game characters. Or most likely porn, considering the sizable chunk of my avatars that were nude or showed a lot of skin. A couple of my avatars appeared to be crying. My white female colleague got significantly fewer sexualized images, with only a couple of nudes and hints of cleavage. Another colleague with Chinese heritage got results similar to mine: reams and reams of pornified avatars.
Lensa’s fetish for Asian women is so strong that I got female nudes and sexualized poses even when I directed the app to generate avatars of me as a male.
MELISSA HEIKKILä VIA LENSA
The fact that my results are so hypersexualized isn’t surprising, says Aylin Caliskan, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies biases and representation in AI systems.
Lensa generates its avatars using Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model that generates images based on text prompts. Stable Diffusion is built using LAION-5B, a massive open-source data set that has been compiled by scraping images off the internet.
And because the internet is overflowing with images of naked or barely dressed women, and pictures reflecting sexist, racist stereotypes, the data set is also skewed toward these kinds of images.
This leads to AI models that sexualize women regardless of whether they want to be depicted that way, Caliskan says—especially women with identities that have been historically disadvantaged.
AI training data is filled with racist stereotypes, pornography, and explicit images of rape, researchers Abeba Birhane, Vinay Uday Prabhu, and Emmanuel Kahembwe found after analyzing a data set similar to the one used to build Stable Diffusion. It’s notable that their findings were only possible because the LAION data set is open source. Most other popular image-making AIs, such as Google’s Imagen and OpenAI’s DALL-E, are not open but are built in a similar way, using similar sorts of training data, which suggests that this is a sector-wide problem.
As I reported in September when the first version of Stable Diffusion had just been launched, searching the model’s data set for keywords such as “Asian” brought back almost exclusively porn.
Stability.AI, the company that developed Stable Diffusion, launched a new version of the AI model in late November. A spokesperson says that the original model was released with a safety filter, which Lensa does not appear to have used, as it would remove these outputs. One way Stable Diffusion 2.0 filters content is by removing images that are repeated often. The more often something is repeated, such as Asian women in sexually graphic scenes, the stronger the association becomes in the AI model.
Caliskan has studied CLIP (Contrastive Language Image Pretraining), which is a system that helps Stable Diffusion generate images. CLIP learns to match images in a data set to descriptive text prompts. Caliskan found that it was full of problematic gender and racial biases.
“Women are associated with sexual content, whereas men are associated with professional, career-related content in any important domain such as medicine, science, business, and so on,” Caliskan says.
Funnily enough, my Lensa avatars were more realistic when my pictures went through male content filters. I got avatars of myself wearing clothes (!) and in neutral poses. In several images, I was wearing a white coat that appeared to belong to either a chef or a doctor.
But it’s not just the training data that is to blame. The companies developing these models and apps make active choices about how they use the data, says Ryan Steed, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, who has studied biases in image-generation algorithms.
“Someone has to choose the training data, decide to build the model, decide to take certain steps to mitigate those biases or not,” he says.
The app’s developers have made a choice that male avatars get to appear in space suits, while female avatars get cosmic G-strings and fairy wings.
A spokesperson for Prisma Labs says that “sporadic sexualization” of photos happens to people of all genders, but in different ways.
The company says that because Stable Diffusion is trained on unfiltered data from across the internet, neither they nor Stability.AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, “could consciously apply any representation biases or intentionally integrate conventional beauty elements.”
“The man-made, unfiltered online data introduced the model to the existing biases of humankind,” the spokesperson says.
Despite that, the company claims it is working on trying to address the problem.
In a blog post, Prisma Labs says it has adapted the relationship between certain words and images in a way that aims to reduce biases, but the spokesperson did not go into more detail. Stable Diffusion has also made it harder to generate graphic content, and the creators of the LAION database have introduced NSFW filters.
Lensa is the first hugely popular app to be developed from Stable Diffusion, and it won’t be the last. It might seem fun and innocent, but there’s nothing stopping people from using it to generate nonconsensual nude images of women based on their social media images, or to create naked images of children. The stereotypes and biases it’s helping to further embed can also be hugely detrimental to how women and girls see themselves and how others see them, Caliskan says.
“In 1,000 years, when we look back as we are generating the thumbprint of our society and culture right now through these images, is this how we want to see women?” she says.
Technology Review · by Melissa Heikkiläarchive page
6. Zelensky's D.C. trip
Zelensky's D.C. trip
Axios · by Alayna Treene
December 21, 2022
Welcome back to Sneak. Smart Brevity™ count: 988 words ... 3.5 minutes.
Situational awareness: The House Ways and Means Committee voted tonight to publicly release six years of former President Trump's tax returns, following a years-long legal battle that reached the Supreme Court.
1 big thing: Zelensky's D.C. trip
President Volodymyr Zelensky meets with Ukrainian troops defending the city of Bakhmut today. Photo: Ukrainian Presidency/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is planning to travel to Washington tomorrow — barring security issues — to address a joint session of Congress, Axios' Alayna Treene has learned.
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CNN reports President Biden is also planning to host Zelensky at the White House, and that the visit will coincide with an announcement that the U.S. is sending Patriot missile systems to Ukraine.
Why it matters: Zelensky has not left Ukraine since Russia launched its brutal invasion on Feb. 24, unleashing incalculable suffering on the Ukrainian people and triggering shock waves throughout the global economy.
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If Zelensky's first overseas travel is to Washington — 300 days after Russian hitmen parachuted into Kyiv in a failed attempt to assassinate him — it will send a powerful signal that U.S. support for Ukraine is working.
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Congress is poised to pass $45 billion in additional military and economic aid to Ukraine this week as part of its $1.7 trillion omnibus funding bill, bringing total U.S. assistance to over $100 billion.
Between the lines: The incoming House Republican majority has expressed deep reservations about continuing to send aid to Ukraine.
- Zelensky's visit would give him the chance to meet personally with some of his skeptics — or at the very least GOP leadership — to convince them that U.S. aid is vital and being used responsibly.
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With Hanukkah underway and Christmas approaching, Ukraine is suffering from massive power outages caused by Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure. An emotional appeal by Zelensky could cut through to lawmakers as they prepare to leave town for the holidays.
Flashback: When Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress virtually back in March, he summoned some of the darkest days in U.S. history — including Pearl Harbor and 9/11 — in his plea for greater assistance.
- For many Americans, the tragedy in Ukraine has receded into the background as fighting rages on with no end in sight.
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For Zelensky, nothing else matters: Just today, he made a surprise trip to the besieged city of Bakhmut to hand out awards to troops involved in one of the war's fiercest battles.
7. Congress moves to ban TikTok from US government devices
Why didn't the executive branch already simply ban this software/app from government devices by executive order? Why wasn't this done sooner? Is a law really necessary?
Congress moves to ban TikTok from US government devices
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · December 20, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — TikTok would be banned from most U.S. government devices under a spending bill Congress unveiled early Tuesday, the latest push by American lawmakers against the Chinese-owned social media app.
The $1.7 trillion package includes requirements for the Biden administration to prohibit most uses of TikTok or any other app created by its owner, ByteDance Ltd. The requirements would apply to the executive branch — with exemptions for national security, law enforcement and research purposes — and don’t appear to cover Congress, where a handful of lawmakers maintain TikTok accounts.
TikTok is consumed by two-thirds of American teens and has become the second-most popular domain in the world. But there’s long been bipartisan concern in Washington that Beijing would use legal and regulatory power to seize American user data or try to push pro-China narratives or misinformation.
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Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, called the ban “a political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests.” TikTok is developing security and data privacy plans as part of an ongoing national security review by President Joe Biden’s administration.
“These plans have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies — plans that we are well underway in implementing — to further secure our platform in the United States, and we will continue to brief lawmakers on them,” Oberwetter said in a statement.
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Speaking Friday, CIA Director William Burns said Beijing can “insist upon extracting the private data of a lot of TikTok users in this country and also to shape the content of what goes on to TikTok as well to suit the interests of the Chinese leadership.”
“I think those are real challenges and a source of real concern,” Burns told PBS. He declined to take a position on congressional efforts to limit TikTok.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was pushing to include the TikTok provision in the big year-end bill, her office said. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who authored a version of the TikTok bill that passed the Senate last week, called the government device ban “the first major strike against Big Tech enacted into law.”
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Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Hawley said users should have the right to use TikTok without having their data subject to Beijing’s control. He called for the Biden administration to force ByteDance to divest its U.S. operations. Courts blocked former President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban TikTok from U.S. smartphone app stores.
“We shouldn’t have to ban it,” Hawley said. “Put up a firewall between Beijing and TikTok.”
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., has co-sponsored legislation to prohibit TikTok from operating in the U.S. altogether. He called the government device ban an appropriate initial step and said there was a “groundswell of support” for wider action.
“We’re not just talking about Republicans and Democrats and independents,” said Krishnamoorthi, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “We’re talking about parents who are concerned broadly about social media and TikTok in particular.”
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Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · December 20, 2022
8. Ukraine Situation Report: Zelensky Is Headed To Washington
Ukraine Situation Report: Zelensky Is Headed To Washington
News of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s planned visit to D.C. came hours after he visited his troops in war-torn Bakhmut.
BY
HOWARD ALTMAN
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PUBLISHED DEC 20, 2022 8:18 PM
thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · December 21, 2022
Hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a bold and dangerous unannounced visit to the battle-scarred frontline town of Bakhmut, scene of some of the war's toughest fighting, news began circulating that he would make another potentially very notable trip - a visit to Washington D.C. to meet with President Joe Biden and Congress, according to The New York Times.
The trip will likely include a pledge by the Biden administration of a new round of military assistance — before heading to Capitol Hill for a prime-time speech, The New York Times reported, citing two people familiar with the planning. The trip will be Zelensky's first visit outside Ukraine since Russia launched its all-out invasion on Feb. 24. It will be a historic event considering the close ties that have grown between Ukraine and the U.S. and the immense backing in the form of arms, diplomatic maneuvering, and economic assistance the U.S. has provided Kyiv in its fight against Russia's invasion.
Earlier in the day Tuesday, standing inside what appeared to be a factory and outfitted in his prototypical olive drab garb, this time an army hooded winter jacket, Zelensky was depicted in an official video shaking hands with soldiers, handing out medals and giving a speech.
His visit came as Russian forces are making what the Pentagon on Tuesday told The War Zone were “very incremental gains” on the industrial city in Donetsk that has seen months of heavy attacks by Russia, reinforcements of a staunch defense by Ukraine and tremendous loss of personnel and equipment on both sides. The Liveuamap open-source intelligence site said it geolocated Zelensky to a little more than a mile away from Russian positions. The War Zone could not independently verify that.
Zelensky “made a working trip to the Donetsk region, where he met with Ukrainian soldiers defending the city of Bakhmut,” presidential spokesman Sergii Nykyforov said Tuesday on his Facebook page. “The President visited the front positions of one of the mechanized brigades, whose personnel confronts the enemy on the approaches to the city.”
Zelensky “heard the commander's report on the operational situation, material and technical support and suggestions for further action,” said Nykyforov, adding that while in the combat area, “Zelensky thanked the Ukrainian soldiers for the courage, resilience and strength they demonstrate by repelling enemy attacks.”
After handing out medals, Zelensky and the troops held a moment of silence “in memory of the heroes who remained forever on the battlefield.”
He also took an open-air stroll through a part of the war-torn city, which is remarkable considering the extreme threat from drones and artillery.
The visit to Bakhmut by Zelensky and his entourage, which included Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar, came in stark contrast to what was initially portrayed as a frontline battlefield observation by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Sunday.
While the Russian Defense Ministry published video it claimed was Shoigu flying in a helicopter over trenches on the front, open source intelligence monitoring groups later claimed they determined through geolocation that Shoigu instead was flying over Crimea, some 50 miles away from the nearest Ukrainian positions.
Not to be outdone, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin visited the front lines days before Zelensky.
"Peskov confirmed Putin's visit to the special military operation zone on December 16," according to the Telegram channel of the official Russian news agency TASS. "On this day, the President of the Russian Federation worked in the joint headquarters of the troops."
Other than saying Putin spent the day working at the joint headquarters of the Northeast Military District, Peskov offered no other details about the tip and apparently no proof that it even took place.
Yevgeny Prighozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group, also posted videos on his Telegram channel today intimating he was in Bakhmut and wanted to meet Zelensky there. It is unclear, however, exactly where or when the video was taken.
As the leader of his nation struggling against a world power, Zelensky has continued to grab and use the bright international spotlight to advocate for Ukraine, constantly seeking more weapons, economic support, and additional international actions against Russia.
The Pentagon's top spokesman on Tuesday said the Ukrainian president's leadership style has been instrumental to his nation's survival.
“Broadly speaking, we continue to see his leadership be a key aspect to Ukraine's success in their fight, but I'll let him talk to his own rationale for where he goes and why,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, told The War Zone during a Tuesday afternoon press conference.
The visit garnered jubilant reactions among Ukrainians and muted response from Moscow. Clearly intended to boost his nation's morale during difficult times, Zelensky met his goal.
As for what's taking place on the battlefield, Ryder told The War Zone that "we continue to see intense fighting in the region of Bakhmut, with Russian forces making very incremental gains, and we're talking feet. The fighting has been intense for a while there."
Prigozhin's Wagner mercenary group has led much of the heaviest fighting there for Russia and has reportedly been taking heavy casualties, like this group apparently being attacked by a Ukrainian drone.
Before we head into the latest coverage from Ukraine, The War Zone readers can get caught up on our previous rolling coverage here.
The Latest
A day after Putin visited Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to shore up relations and provide the leader of his client state with arms and military training - including nuclear-capable Iskander short-range ballistic missiles and an S-400 air defense complex - the Pentagon on Tuesday said there is no indication of a looming invasion of Ukraine from the north.
"I don't want to get into intelligence," Ryder told reporters. "But at this time, we don't have any information that would suggest that there is any type of imminent or pending cross-border activities from Belarus into Ukraine. But certainly, we'll continue to keep a close eye on that."
Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon's top spokesman, told reporters Tuesday the U.S. military sees no indication of an imminent threat of another attack on Ukraine from Belarus. (Pentagon screencap).
Though Ukraine Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhny told The Economist last week his forces were bracing for a future offensive from Russia, a State Department official on Tuesday told reporters that the U.S. is picking up mixed signals on Putin's intentions.
"Certainly, there are some (within Russia) who I think would want to pursue (new) offensives in Ukraine. There are others who have real questions about the capacity for Russia to actually do that," the State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters in Washington.
The official repeated assertions that Russia is facing ongoing ammunition shortages and continued unit cohesion problems.
"There are all sorts of things that the Russians are dealing with in terms of having the necessary equipment, having the necessary ammunition that put some constraints on what they may want to do," the official said.
As has been the case for several weeks, the situation elsewhere on the battlefield remains largely static, with little real territory changing hands. In addition to intense fighting in Donetsk, the two sides continue to trade blows in Luhansk along the P-66 Highway area running from Svatove to Kreminna.
Here are some key takeaways from the latest Institute for the Study of War assessment:
- Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko likely deflected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to coerce Belarus into Russian-Belarusian integration concessions on Dec. 19.
- Igor Girkin, a former Russian militant commander and prominent critical voice in the Russian milblogger information space, wrote a harsh critique of the Russian military’s overall performance in the war.
- The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) reportedly clashed with other Russian occupation authorities regarding basic administration procedures, suggesting tensions between the various occupation administrations in Ukraine.
- The Wagner Group has likely built its offensive model around tactical brutality in order to accommodate for and take advantage of its base of poorly trained and recently recruited convicts.
- Russian forces continued limited counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line as Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces targeted Russian rear positions in Luhansk Oblast.
- Russian forces reportedly lost positions south of Bakhmut on Dec. 18 and continued ground attacks near Bakhmut and Donetsk City.
- Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces are pulling back some elements from areas along the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.
- Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continued efforts to establish the Wagner Group as a legitimate parastatal organization by petitioning notoriously nationalist elements in the Kremlin.
- Russian occupation authorities continued to restrict movement within occupied territories and employ societal intimidation tactics.
British Defense Minister Ben Wallace on Tuesday told Parliament that Russia would send Iran advanced military equipment in return for providing it with hundreds of one-way attack drones.
“In return for having supplied more than 300 kamikaze drones, Russia now intends to provide Iran with advanced military components, undermining both Middle East and international security,” he told members of Parliament, according to The Guardian.
"No other evidence was cited in support of Wallace’s statement, which is likely to be based on British intelligence, but it is consistent with warnings made by the US nearly two weeks ago, when it said it was concerned a deal would go ahead," the newspaper reported.
After Wallace spoke, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, told MPs that while Russia remained the UK’s “No 1 foreign policy challenge” he was “increasingly concerned about Iran’s behavior,” an echo of Wallace’s comments.
Wallace's comments are the latest assertion of how Russia is trading arms to Iran for drones, something we previously covered in our story about the potential deal to send Iran Russian-made Su-35 Flanker-E fighters, something we covered here.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is apparently deploying a new use of its drones, flying in groups at different levels at night, with only one of them lit. According to a review of Russian Telegram channels by drone expert Samuel Bendett, that tactic provokes Russian air defenses to fire, allowing the unlit drones to record data about the location and types of weapons.
While Ukraine's desire for more and better air defense systems is well-known, it appears Russia too is struggling to protect the skies over its troops. Denis Pushilin, acting head of the pro-Russian so-called Donetsk People's Republic, has asked Putin for more air defenses.
As Russia continues to attack Ukraine's power grid, causing widespread electricity and water outages for millions of people entering the most frigid time of the year, the U.S. military is delivering tens of millions of dollars of equipment to help keep the energy flowing.
"The administration has been working — in partnership with the National Labs, industry, utilities, and the Ukrainian government — to locate available equipment in the U.S. that can be delivered to Ukraine for emergency support," the Pentagon said, citing Department of Energy officials.
If you ever wanted to see what it's like for a low-flying Ukrainian helicopter crew hugging the ground in an apparent on-the-fly attempt to rescue the crew of a downed helicopter, check out this video of an Mi-8 Hip carrying out such a mission in Donetsk.
Low-level flying remains a staple of operations for fixed-wing pilots of both sides as well as they seek to not provide a target for enemy air defense systems. A couple of Ukrainian fighter pilots are seen here demonstrating such skills, much to the joy of the troops on the ground.
Another staple of this conflict has been Ukraine's proclivity for operating so-called "trophy" equipment captured from the Russians. The Ukraine Weapons Tracker OSINT group shared video Tuesday of a captured Russian MT-LB armored personnel carrier slinging a ZU-23-2 23mm autocannon. Adding insult to injury, it was seen being pulled by a previously captured Russian T-72B3 tank.
Ukraine has devised several ways for Russian troops to surrender, including setting up phone hotlines for those troops to call in and give up. In what appears to be the latest twist, the Ukrainian military is using drones to guide them toward surrender.
"The program had its genesis in late November, when the Ukrainian military released footage of a Russian soldier throwing his weapon to the ground, raising his hands and nervously following a path set out by a drone overhead, leading him to soldiers from the Ukrainian army’s 54th Mechanized Brigade," The New York Times reported. "A few weeks later, the Ukrainian General Staff released an instructional video explaining how Russian soldiers can surrender to a Ukrainian drone, and it is now part of a wide-ranging effort by Ukraine to persuade Russian soldiers to give up."
And finally, this all-out war has had wide-ranging effects. Like the case of two Turkish A400M military cargo jets that finally returned home after being stuck in Kyiv for nine months, having landed there just before the war broke out.
That's it for now.
We will update this story if there is anything major to add until our next new update is posted.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · December 21, 2022
9. Agents say Diplomatic Security Service riven by mismanagement and failing key missions
It has been a long time since I have worked with DSS. This Is not what I remember. I knew some very good ones. I still know some very good ones, some of whom will read this message and article and I hope they will correct what might be inaccurate. The biggest criticism I do have is that they were sometimes too conservative (or said another way too risk averse) but on the other hand they could be quite supportive of operations and work to mitigate the risks as best as possible. If these reports are accurate I hope they can get the right leadership to solve these problems.
Agents say Diplomatic Security Service riven by mismanagement and failing key missions
Washington Examiner · December 19, 2022
A mix of five active and recently retired Diplomatic Security Service agents said that the State Department's primary security service is failing its criminal investigation mission and is beset by chronic mismanagement and poor morale. Without reform and greater resources, they said the agency and its various missions face a dark future.
The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity, referencing what the Washington Examiner believes is a credible fear of retribution.
Two sources said that as of Nov. 1, DSS's New York field office had made no arrests in 2022. They said this contrasts with the office making 100-plus arrests in previous years. This is a consequence, they said, of three factors: poor leadership, DSS's ever-expanding protection mission, and a cultural lack of interest by DSS leaders in traditional criminal investigations such as those involving visa and passport fraud.
STATE DEPARTMENT MEMO OUTLINES HIGH COST OF PROTECTING POMPEO AGAINST IRAN ASSASSINATION THREATS
When it comes to protective operations, DSS is responsible for protecting the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, U.S. diplomats abroad, and visiting foreign dignitaries other than heads of state (who are protected by the U.S. Secret Service). But as the Washington Examiner has previously reported, DSS's protection missions have grown significantly over the past two years amid Iranian government assassination plots.
All five sources said the DSS has a significant leadership problem.
One source with direct knowledge of the situation claimed that senior leadership in the New York field office only came into the office around three times a week. Two sources told the Washington Examiner that a recently serving former DSS assistant director for domestic operations improperly attempted to influence an internal investigation into a subordinate with whom he was having a romantic relationship. The agent was operating under the assistant director's chain of command. The assistant director later quietly retired, the sources said, without any apparent sanction. Three of the sources lamented what they said is a DSS management culture at ease with imposing arbitrary restrictions on lower-ranking agents who raise mission concerns.
Two sources said that another concerning leadership incident occurred in May 2019, when DSS's elite Mobile Security Deployments, or MSD, tactical unit moved to clear the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, D.C. MSD's assignment was to remove protesters loyal to Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in support of interim President Juan Guaido, who had been recognized by the Trump administration, which was then still in office.
The sources said that although the then-chief of the MSD did not attend the mission briefing or associated training, he nevertheless turned up at the mission staging point in full tactical gear. They said that this ranking agent then became separated from the rest of the MSD unit within the embassy compound, requiring the unit to alter its deliberate action plan to recover him. These circumstances represent a major breach of tactical operations procedures.
Jim Reese, a retired lieutenant colonel and former officer with the Army's elite Delta Force unit, told the Washington Examiner that "being a strategic leader in charge of an operation and not being integrated into the operational plan is a lesson learned for leaders as they climb the ladder of responsibility."
All five sources said DSS's leadership selection process is fundamentally flawed. One source bluntly described the DSS employee evaluation report system as a "b***s*** process" in which agents are judged on their ability to "shine" their resume and earn favor from higher ranks. All five sources said personal rapport with those responsible for deciding on assignments is critical. They claimed promotion is rarely based on skill or suitability but far more often on an agent's ability to secure a good "corridor reputation" with senior ranks and "not make waves." They offered repeated anecdotes of supervisory and even more senior agents sitting on selection boards for promotions, even when they had apparent conflicts of interest involving those applying for the respective roles. Some sources drew a contrast between the DSS selection/promotion process and that of the FBI, which centers on intensive interviews and experience specifically relevant to the position being applied for. All sources agreed that the DSS promotion process needs a wholesale review.
The effective fulfillment of DSS's protection mission remains another challenge.
Four sources decried a reticence among senior agents to volunteer for short-term protective assignments, such as those supporting the visit of a foreign dignitary. Supervisors often assign other agents to perform these unsociable missions to avoid participating themselves, the sources said. Four sources pointed to particular resource challenges associated with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's continued protection. This challenge is exacerbated by sustained threats against Pompeo. Two sources described an incident in which a supervisory agent was removed from front-line duties in Pompeo's detail after a Pompeo aide complained about a comment the agent had made about having to carry bags. Protection agents will sometimes assist with such bag-carrying duties but dislike doing so for fear it will reduce their protective readiness.
Three sources further suggested that DSS protective tactics and assignments are too rigid.
One source with firsthand knowledge of prior threats against a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. — the Washington Examiner is not disclosing the name — queried why their security arrangements received lower priority than others. That source and two others argued that DSS could be more flexible with its tactics. One said relying on "black suburban" vehicles and other highly visible protective measures was unhelpful when escorting less recognizable protectees. Sources also lamented a State Department perception that Regional Security Officers, DSS agents in charge of security at U.S. embassies, excessively restrict requests by State Department personnel to travel outside embassy compounds. The sources suggested that DSS leadership must be more willing to support American diplomacy even when it means more risk to diplomats in the field.
Fixing these things matters, a source said, because while the DSS is only "a small part of [the State Department mission], without us, you would have a lot more dead American diplomats. Plain and simple." The sources expressed concern that unless these issues are resolved, another Benghazi-type incident will eventually occur, and DSS may cease operation as a result.
The Diplomatic Security Service declined to comment.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Washington Examiner · December 19, 2022
10. Will Congress Abandon Afghan Allies?
Will Congress Abandon Afghan Allies?
Lawmakers fail to renew special immigrant visas for U.S. partners.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
Dec. 19, 2022 6:24 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/congress-abandons-afghan-allies-kamran-special-immigrant-visa-omnibus-state-department-taliban-11671396188?utm_source=pocket_saves
Muhammad Kamran worked for years for the U.S. military and its contractors and with the United Nations in Afghanistan. He was forced to flee in 2014 when his home was torched and his family shot at. He now lives illegally in Pakistan in fear that the Taliban will track and kill him. His opportunity to escape narrowed last week, and Congressional inaction is to blame
Lawmakers failed to renew the Afghan special immigrant visa (SIV) program as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, the standard vehicle for extending it. Established in 2009, the program provides a path to U.S. citizenship for Afghans who worked closely with the U.S. government, military and contractors, as well as their immediate family.
Only some 14,000 SIVs were available as of November, and some 63,000 Afghans have pending applications, though not all may be approved. Estimates vary, but as many as 200,000 Afghans who supported the U.S. mission remain at risk of Taliban retribution in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
No One Left Behind, a nonprofit that supports former Iraqi and Afghan interpreters and other U.S. government employees, estimates that at least 285 Afghans have been killed while waiting for SIVs. The killings were reported by the victims’ family and friends and haven’t been independently verified.
Preview
Mr. Kamran says a former colleague had his hands, feet, ears and nose cut off before he was murdered. Another SIV applicant was shot to death in September 2022, leaving behind a widow and a newborn son, according to No One Left Behind. (We agreed to withhold his name out of safety concerns for his family.) The victim’s sister-in-law was also slain in the shooting, and his brother was wounded.
Fearful of a similar fate, Mr. Kamran, his wife, four daughters and son don’t leave their house in Pakistan. A trusted friend brings them food, and Mr. Kamran is home-schooling his children and teaching them English. Mr. Kamran has applied for an SIV, but he worries he won’t get one. “When [the U.S.] needed me, I was not dangerous for them, I was not a security problem,” he tells us by phone. “But when I need their help—I am dying because I helped them. . . . They have gone and left us behind.”
Congress can address this dishonor by making the SIV program permanent in the omnibus spending bill. Expanding the number of available visas would ensure an escape route for all who supported the U.S. mission in Afghanistan with courage and loyalty.
One opponent of an extension this year is GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley. A spokesman says the Senator supports the program but there’s no urgency because it doesn’t expire until the end of 2023. “A number of lawmakers in both the House and Senate had reservations about prematurely extending a program in a manner that the State Department had not even requested and that would deny the next Congress any meaningful opportunity to review and manage the program,” the spokesman said.
But if the program isn’t extended, no additional visas will be granted. This is short-sighted because the fate of Mr. Kamran and other Afghan partners is a matter of national interest as much as a humanitarian issue. In dangerous parts of the globe, the U.S. relies on locals to translate and perform other critical tasks. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was a national disgrace, and abandoning Afghan partners will compound the shame and deter others from working with the U.S.
11. War vet Jack McCain wants Congress to help the Afghan pilots who kept him safe
A frustrating Catch 22.
Excerpts;
"[We] have such good skill, so I hope to use it. They are brave pilots. They are smart pilots. If that's not possible, we will not give up. Even if I couldn't now, in future I can study privately," he says.
Even though the U.S. trained them to fly in combat, they can't be pilots in the United States without a permanent resident visa – even as the country faces a shortage of commercial pilots and U.S. military recruits.
Jack McCain says he shares their frustration. He says he saw the Afghans take risks worthy of the highest combat medals, and they did it rescuing both Afghan and American troops under fire.
"I lost several pilots while I was there, and so they are absolutely deserving of everything we can do for them. They fought on behalf of the United States," he says. "A huge number of these pilots would want to go back to flying, but they can't. And that's difficult for them to accept because the U.S. trained them."
War vet Jack McCain wants Congress to help the Afghan pilots who kept him safe
NPR · by Quil Lawrence · December 20, 2022
Col. Salim Faqiri, 32, flew Black Hawk Helicopters for the Afghan Air Force. He and his family have been resettled in Phoenix. Adriana Zehbrauskas for NPR
PHOENIX — Veterans of the war in Afghanistan say that without passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, tens of thousands of people who helped U.S. forces during the 20-year war could be abandoned in Afghanistan, or even lose the right to stay if they're already in the U.S.
On Tuesday, Congress did propose to expand the number of Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans, but advocates say that program is not currently functioning, and the SIV program is still only open to Afghans who worked for Americans, not those who enlisted in their own armed forces.
Among those pushing to change that is Jack McCain, a Navy pilot who served in Afghanistan, and the son of the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona. The younger McCain tried to keep a low profile when he deployed to Afghanistan for one year in 2018.
"It became known to me about three quarters away through my deployment, that they knew exactly who I was," says McCain.
Any doubts disappeared when McCain took an emergency leave in August 2018 to attend his father's funeral in Arizona.
Afghan Air Force Col. Salim Faqiri with his friend Navy Lt. Jack McCain in Kandahar Afghanistan in 2018. Jack McCain
"If one of them had wanted to, or had a family member coerced, to make a high profile target out of me, they could have," says McCain. "It never happened, even when I was the lone air adviser in (Taliban-dominated) Helmand, where it would've been extremely easy.
"They protected me, or at least kept the secret. I can't overstate how important that is to me," says McCain.
Training the Afghan Eagles
As for the pilots he was training, McCain passed a key test for Afghans – courage under threat. Afghan Air Force Col. Salim Faqiri says he and McCain became friends after their first flight together ended with an emergency landing, miles outside their base in Kandahar.
"Not a safe area! I was worried about Jack and other advisers who were with me," Faqiri recalls. "But Jack was just relaxed. He was contacting other people on the ground, [saying], 'We need a helicopter. This aircraft will not fly.' And I said, OK, how brave he is!"
The Afghan pilots McCain helped train to fly American-made Black Hawk helicopters became known as the Afghan Eagles, and they played a key part in helping the Afghan government transport its elite special forces to different trouble spots around the vast country. Faqiri said McCain talked about inviting him to Arizona one day, but Faqiri wanted to stay and fight for his country's future.
Col. Salim Faqiri, 32, poses for a photo after an interview in Phoenix, on Dec. 8, 2022. Adriana Zehbrauskas for NPR
"We were the victim of terrorists for many years, and that was the big reason for me and to stand up and fight," says Faqiri.
Kabul falls
Faqiri and the Afghan Eagles were still flying missions after Kabul fell in August 2021, and U.S. forces retreated to the Kabul airport. Faqiri tried ferrying supplies to a pocket of resistance in the Panjshir Mountains, but he soon realized it was over.
"The resistance forces cannot fight against the Taliban anymore. And they asked me to come to the Kabul airport," says Faqiri.
The concern was not only to save the lives of his pilots, but to keep the Black Hawk helicopters and the only Afghans who knew how to fly them out of Taliban hands. For Faqiri, the decision to flee was jarring, after spending his adult life fighting.
"We did it for 20 years and in 24 hours everything's opposite and instead of the helping to fight, everybody was getting out," he says.
Faqiri knows he was fortunate, though. By that time, the Afghan Eagles had some friends trying to help them in the United States. Maggie Feldman-Piltch, with the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, teamed up with Jack McCain during the chaos of the Kabul Airlift.
Afghan helicopter pilot Rashid Ahmad Muslim, 25, looks out the window at home in Chandler, Ariz., on Dec. 11, 2022. Adriana Zehbrauskas for NPR
"It was a lot of trial and error. It was not pretty," says Feldman-Piltch. "It happened because of luck and sustained effort."
Sustained effort, as in two weeks of calling every connection they could, enlisting help from friends and family, and sleeping very little.
"During the day I would work on the American side to try to help gin up support. And then at night, I would start messaging all the Afghan groups to try to move them or get them across the line," says McCain.
In one of the largest airlifts in history, U.S. forces rescued more than 120,000 people as the Americans withdrew and Afghanistan fell back into the hands of the Taliban. But the vast majority still don't have legal status in the United States, says Feldman-Piltch.
"If the Afghan Adjustment Act does not pass, by no fault of their own, despite that they have followed all the rules, they will suddenly be here illegally," she says.
Despite support from American generals and diplomats and bipartisan support in Congress, the bill appeared to have been stalled Tuesday, with proponents hoping for a long-shot floor amendment in the Senate.
Afghan helicopter pilot Rashid Ahmad Muslim, 25, with his wife, Nasrin Halimi, 22, who is three months pregnant, and their son Mohammad, 14 months, in their home in Chandler, Ariz., on Dec. 11, 2022. Adriana Zehbrauskas for NPR
Resettled
Faqiri and about 300 of the Afghan Eagles and their family members have been resettled in Arizona, where they're plugging away at the difficult work of being a refugee.
"I had a skill. I had a degree. But I lost it. It's become a zero here," says one of the Afghan pilots, Rashid Ahmad Muslim, 25.
His mother and sister are taking English classes. His younger brothers have already become near fluent.
"I would like them to graduate from the school, go to college, go to university for highest degree," Muslim says.
Muslim himself is working at a coffee company to support the family. His wife gave birth to their first child last year at a U.S. base in Germany. He and many of the Afghan Eagles have asylum applications, which should allow them to stay in the U.S. But he has ambitions beyond that. Rashid says he and all the other Afghan Eagles want to fly again.
Abida Muslim, 23, during an evening English class for refugees and asylum seekers in Chandler, Ariz., on Dec. 8, 2022. Adriana Zehbrauskas
"[We] have such good skill, so I hope to use it. They are brave pilots. They are smart pilots. If that's not possible, we will not give up. Even if I couldn't now, in future I can study privately," he says.
Even though the U.S. trained them to fly in combat, they can't be pilots in the United States without a permanent resident visa – even as the country faces a shortage of commercial pilots and U.S. military recruits.
Jack McCain says he shares their frustration. He says he saw the Afghans take risks worthy of the highest combat medals, and they did it rescuing both Afghan and American troops under fire.
"I lost several pilots while I was there, and so they are absolutely deserving of everything we can do for them. They fought on behalf of the United States," he says. "A huge number of these pilots would want to go back to flying, but they can't. And that's difficult for them to accept because the U.S. trained them."
Afghan helicopter pilot Rashid Ahmad Muslim, 25, with his 14-month-old son, Mohammad, in their home in Chandler, Ariz. Mohammad was born on a U.S. military base in Germany. Adriana Zehbrauskas for NPR
McCain believes that without their honorable service, he might have never made it home.
They're earned the right to stay, he says, and to fly in the United States.
NPR · by Quil Lawrence · December 20, 2022
12. Putin’s Last Stand
Excerpts:
Despite its acts of aggression and its substantial nuclear arsenal, Russia is in no way a peer competitor of China or the United States. Putin’s overreach in Ukraine suggests that he has not grasped this important point. But because Putin has intervened in regions around the world, a defeat in Ukraine that tore apart Russia would be a resounding shock to the international system.
The defeat could, to be sure, have positive consequences for many countries in Russia’s neighborhood. Look no further than the end of the Cold War, when the demise of the Soviet Union allowed for the emergence of more than a dozen free and prosperous countries in Europe. A Russia turned inward might help foster a “Europe whole and free,” to borrow the phrase used by U.S. President George H. W. Bush to describe American ambitions for the continent after the Cold War ended. At the same time, disarray in Russia could create a vortex of instability: less great-power competition than great-power anarchy, leading to a cascade of regional wars, migrant flows, and economic uncertainty.
Russia’s collapse could also be contagious or the start of a chain reaction, in which case neither the United States nor China would profit because both would struggle to contain the fallout. In that case, the West would need to establish strategic priorities. It would be impossible to try to fill the vacuum that a disorderly Russian defeat might leave. In Central Asia and the South Caucasus, the United States and Europe would have little chance of preventing China and Turkey from moving into the void. Instead of attempting to shut them out, a more realistic U.S. strategy would be to attempt to restrain their influence and offer an alternative, especially to China’s dominance.
Whatever form Russia’s defeat took, stabilizing eastern and southeastern Europe, including the Balkans, would be a herculean task. Across Europe, the West would have to find a creative answer to the questions that were never resolved after 1991: Is Russia a part of Europe? If not, how high should the wall between Russia and Europe be, and around which countries should it run? If Russia is a part of Europe, where and how does it fit in? Where does Europe itself start and end? The incorporation of Finland and Sweden into NATO would be only the beginning of this project. Belarus and Ukraine demonstrate the difficulties of protecting Europe’s eastern flank: those countries are the last place where Russia would give up on its great-power aspirations. And even a ruined Russia would not lose all its nuclear and conventional military capacity.
Twice in the last 106 years—in 1917 and in 1991—versions of Russia have broken apart. Twice, versions of Russia have reconstituted themselves. If Russian power recedes, the West should capitalize on that opportunity to shape an environment in Europe that serves to protect NATO members, allies, and partners. A Russian defeat would furnish many opportunities and many temptations. One of these temptations would be to expect that a defeated Russia would essentially disappear from Europe. But a defeated Russia will one day reassert itself and pursue its interests on its terms. The West should be politically and intellectually equipped both for Russia’s defeat and for Russia’s return.
Putin’s Last Stand
The Promise and Peril of Russian Defeat
January/February 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage · December 20, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine was meant to be his crowning achievement, a demonstration of how far Russia had come since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. Annexing Ukraine was supposed to be a first step in reconstructing a Russian empire. Putin intended to expose the United States as a paper tiger outside Western Europe and to demonstrate that Russia, along with China, was destined for a leadership role in a new, multipolar international order.
It hasn’t turned out that way. Kyiv held strong, and the Ukrainian military has been transformed into a juggernaut, thanks in part to a close partnership with the United States and Western allies. The Russian military, in contrast, has demonstrated poor strategic thinking and organization. The political system behind it has proved unable to learn from its mistakes. With little prospect of dictating Putin’s actions, the West will have to prepare for the next stage of Russia’s disastrous war of choice.
War is inherently unpredictable. Indeed, the course of the conflict has served to invalidate widespread early prognostications that Ukraine would quickly fall; a reversal of fortunes is impossible to discount. It nevertheless appears that Russia is headed for defeat. Less certain is what form this defeat will take. Three basic scenarios exist, and each one would have different ramifications for policymakers in the West and Ukraine.
The first and least likely scenario is that Russia will agree to its defeat by accepting a negotiated settlement on Ukraine’s terms. A great deal would have to change for this scenario to materialize because any semblance of diplomatic dialogue among Russia, Ukraine, and the West has vanished. The scope of Russian aggression and the extent of Russian war crimes would make it difficult for Ukraine to accept any diplomatic settlement that amounted to anything less than a total Russian surrender.
That said, a Russian government—under Putin or a successor—could try to retain Crimea and sue for peace elsewhere. To save face domestically, the Kremlin could claim it is preparing for the long game in Ukraine, leaving open the possibility of additional military incursions. It could blame its underperformance on NATO, arguing that the alliance’s weapon deliveries, not Ukraine’s strength, impeded a Russian victory. For this approach to pass muster within the regime, hard-liners—possibly including Putin himself—would have to be marginalized. This would be difficult but not impossible. Still, under Putin this outcome is highly improbable, given that his approach to the war has been maximalist from the beginning.
A second scenario for Russian defeat would involve failure amid escalation. The Kremlin would nihilistically seek to prolong the war in Ukraine while launching a campaign of unacknowledged acts of sabotage in countries that support Kyiv and in Ukraine itself. In the worst case, Russia could opt for a nuclear attack on Ukraine. The war would then edge toward a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia. Russia would transform from a revisionist state into a rogue one, a transition that is already underway, and that would harden the West’s conviction that Russia poses a unique and unacceptable threat. Crossing the nuclear threshold could lead to NATO’s conventional involvement in the war, accelerating Russia’s defeat on the ground.
A destroyed Russian howitzer in Kharkiv region, Ukraine September 2022
Ukrainian Armed Forces / Reuters
The final scenario for the war’s end would be defeat through regime collapse, with the decisive battles taking place not in Ukraine but rather in the halls of the Kremlin or in the streets of Moscow. Putin has concentrated power rigidly in his own hands, and his obstinacy in pursuing a losing war has placed his regime on shaky ground. Russians will continue marching behind their inept tsar only to a certain point. Although Putin has brought political stability to Russia—a prized state of affairs given the ruptures of the post-Soviet years—his citizens could turn on him if the war leads to general privation. The collapse of his regime could mean an immediate end to the war, which Russia would be unable to wage amid the ensuing domestic chaos. A coup d’état followed by civil war would echo what happened after the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, which precipitated Russia’s withdrawal from World War I.
No matter how it comes about, a Russian defeat would of course be welcomed. It would free Ukraine from the terrors it has suffered since the invasion. It would reinforce the principle that an attack on another country cannot go unpunished. It might open up new opportunities for Belarus, Georgia, and Moldova, and for the West to finish ordering Europe in its image. For Belarus, a path could emerge toward the end of dictatorship and toward free and fair elections. Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine could strive together for eventual integration into the European Union and possibly NATO, following the model of Central and Eastern European governments after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Though Russia’s defeat would have many benefits, the United States and Europe should prepare for the regional and global disorder it would produce. Since 2008, Russia has been a revisionist power. It has redrawn borders, annexed territory, meddled in elections, inserted itself into various African conflicts, and altered the geopolitical dynamic of the Middle East by propping up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Were Russia to pursue radical escalation or splinter into chaos instead of accepting a defeat through negotiation, the repercussions would be felt in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Disorder could take the form of separatism and renewed conflicts in and around Russia, the world’s largest country in landmass. The transformation of Russia into a failed state riven by civil war would revive questions that Western policymakers had to grapple with in 1991: for example, who would gain control of Russia’s nuclear weapons? A disorderly Russian defeat would leave a dangerous hole in the international system.
Can’t Talk Your Way Out
Trying to sell Putin on defeat through negotiation would be difficult, perhaps impossible. (It would be much likelier under a successor.) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would demand that Moscow abandon its claim on the nominally Russian-controlled territories in Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. Putin has already celebrated the annexation of these areas with pomp and circumstance. It is doubtful he would do an about-face after this patriotic display despite Russia’s tenuous hold on this territory. Any Russian leader, whether Putin or someone else, would resist relinquishing Crimea, the part of Ukraine that Russia annexed in 2014.
Conditions on the ground in Russia would have to be conducive to compromise. A new Russian leadership would have to contend with a demoralized military and gamble on a complacent public acceding to capitulation. Russians could eventually become indifferent if the war grinds on with no clear resolution. But fighting would likely continue in parts of eastern Ukraine, and tensions between the two countries would remain high.
Still, an agreement with Ukraine could bring normalization of relations with the West. That would be a powerful incentive for a less militaristic Russian leader than Putin, and it would appeal to many Russians. Western leaders could also be enticed to push for negotiations in the interest of ending the war. The hitch here is timing. In the first two months after the February 2022 invasion, Russia had the chance to negotiate with Zelensky and capitalize on its battlefield leverage. After Ukraine’s successful counteroffensives, however, Kyiv has little reason to concede anything at all. Since invading, Russia has upped the ante and escalated hostilities instead of showing a willingness to compromise. A less intransigent leader than Putin might lead Ukraine to consider negotiating. In the face of defeat, Putin could resort to lashing out on the global stage. He has steadily expanded his framing of the war, claiming that the West is waging a proxy battle against Russia with the goal of destroying the country. His 2022 speeches were more megalomaniacal versions of his address at the Munich Security Conference 15 years earlier, in which he denounced American exceptionalism, arguing that the United States “has overstepped its national borders in every way.”
Part bluster, part nonsense, part trial balloon, Putin’s rhetoric is meant to mobilize Russians emotionally. But there is also a tactical logic behind it: although expanding the war beyond Ukraine will obviously not win Putin the territory he craves, it could prevent Ukraine and the West from winning the conflict. His bellicose language is laying the groundwork for escalation and a twenty-first-century confrontation with the West in which Russia would seek to exploit its asymmetric advantages as a rogue or terrorist state.
The consequences of a Russian nuclear attack would be catastrophic, and not just for Ukraine.
Russia’s tools for confrontation could include the use of chemical or biological weapons in or outside Ukraine. Putin could destroy energy pipelines or seabed infrastructure or mount cyberattacks on the West’s financial institutions. The use of tactical nuclear weapons could be his last resort. In a speech on September 30, Putin brought up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, offering jumbled interpretations of World War II’s end phase. The analogy is imperfect, to put it mildly. If Russia were to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, Kyiv would not surrender. For one thing, Ukrainians know that Russian occupation would equal the extinction of their country, which was not the case for Japan in 1945. In addition, Japan was losing the war at the time. As of late 2022, it was Russia, the nuclear power, that was losing.
The consequences of a nuclear attack would be catastrophic, and not just for the Ukrainian population. Yet war would go on, and nuclear weapons would not do much to assist Russian soldiers on the ground. Instead, Russia would face international outrage. For now, Brazil, China, and India have not condemned Russia’s invasion, but no country is truly supporting Moscow in its horrific war, and none would support the use of nuclear weapons. Chinese President Xi Jinping made this publicly explicit in November: after he met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he issued a statement declaring that the leaders “jointly oppose the use or threat of the use of nuclear weapons.” If Putin did defy this warning, he would be an isolated pariah, punished economically and perhaps militarily by a global coalition.
For Russia, then, threatening to use nuclear weapons is of greater utility than actually doing so. But Putin may still go down this path: after all, launching the invasion was a spectacularly ill-conceived move, and yet he did it. If he does opt for breaking the nuclear taboo, NATO is unlikely to respond in kind, so as to avoid risking an apocalyptic nuclear exchange. The alliance, however, would in all likelihood respond with conventional force to weaken Russia’s military and to prevent further nuclear attacks, risking an escalatory spiral should Russia launch conventional attacks on NATO in return.
Even if this scenario could be avoided, a Russian defeat after nuclear use would still have dangerous repercussions. It would create a world without the imperfect nuclear equilibrium of the Cold War and the 30-year post–Cold War era. It would encourage leaders around the globe to go nuclear because it would appear that their safety could only be assured by acquiring nuclear weapons and showing a willingness to use them. A helter-skelter age of proliferation would ensue, to the immense detriment of global security.
Heavy is the Head
At this point, the Russian public has not risen up to oppose the war. Russians may be skeptical of Putin and may not trust his government. But they also do not want their sons, fathers, and brothers in uniform to lose on the battlefield. Accustomed to Russia’s great-power status through the centuries and isolated from the West, most Russians would not want their country to be without any power and influence in Europe. That would be a natural consequence of a Russian defeat in Ukraine.
Still, a long war would commit Russians to a bleak future and would probably spark a revolutionary flame in the country. Russian casualties have been high, and as the Ukrainian military grows in strength, it can inflict still greater losses. The exodus of hundreds of thousands of young Russians, many of them highly skilled, has been astonishing. Over time, the combination of war, sanctions, and brain drain will take a massive toll—and Russians may eventually blame Putin, who began his presidential career as a self-proclaimed modernizer. Most Russians were insulated from his previous wars because they generally occurred far from the home front and didn’t require a mass mobilization to replenish troops. That’s not the case with the war in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian soldier writing on a Howitzer shell in Donetsk region, Ukraine November 2022
Serhii Nuzhnenko / Radio Free Europe / Reuters
Russia has a history of regime change in the aftermath of unsuccessful wars. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and World War I helped lead to the Bolshevik Revolution. The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, came two years after the end of the Soviet military’s misadventure in Afghanistan. Revolutions have occurred in Russia when the government has failed in its economic and political objectives and has been unresponsive to crises. Generally, the coup de grâce has been the puncturing of the government’s underlying ideology, such as the loss of legitimacy of Russia’s monarchy and tsardom in the midst of hunger, poverty, and a faltering war effort in 1917.
Putin is at risk in all these categories. His management of the war has been awful, and the Russian economy is contracting. In the face of these dismal trends, Putin has doubled down on his errors, all the while insisting that the war is going “according to plan.” Repression can solve some of his problems: the arrest and prosecution of dissidents can quell protest at first. But Putin’s heavy hand also runs the risk of spurring more dissatisfaction.
If Putin were deposed, it is unclear who would succeed him. For the first time since coming to power in 1999, Putin’s “power vertical”—a highly centralized government hierarchy based on loyalty to the Russian president—has been losing a degree of its verticality. Two possible contenders outside the traditional elite structures are Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, a private military contractor that has furnished mercenaries for the war on Ukraine, and Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Chechen Republic. They might be tempted to chip away at the remains of Putin’s power vertical, encouraging infighting in the regime in hopes of securing a position in the center of Russia’s new power structure after Putin’s departure. They could also try to claim power themselves. They have already put pressure on the leadership of the Russian army and the Defense Ministry in response to failures in the war and attempted to broaden their own power bases with the backing of loyal paramilitary forces. Other contenders could come from traditional elite circles, such as the presidential administration, the cabinet, or military and security forces. To suppress palace intrigue, Putin has surrounded himself with mediocrities for the past 20 years. But his unsuccessful war threatens his hold on power. If he truly believes his recent speeches, he may have convinced his subordinates that he is living in a fantasy world.
Destruction in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, December 2022
Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy / Reuters
The chances that a pro-Western democrat would become Russia’s next president are vanishingly small. Far more likely is an authoritarian leader in the Putinist mold. A leader from outside the power vertical could end the war and contemplate better relations with the West. But a leader who comes from within Putin’s Kremlin would not have this option because he would be trailed by a public record of supporting the war. The challenge of being a Putinist after Putin would be formidable.
One challenge would be the war, which would be no easier to manage for a successor, especially one who shared Putin’s dream of restoring Russia’s great-power status. Another challenge would be building legitimacy in a political system without any of its traditional sources. Russia has no constitution to speak of and no monarchy. Anyone who followed Putin would lack popular support and find it difficult to personify the neo-Soviet, neoimperial ideology that Putin has come to embody.
In the worst case, Putin’s fall could translate into civil war and Russia’s disintegration. Power would be contested at the top, and state control would fragment throughout the country. This period could be an echo of the Time of Troubles, or smuta, a 15-year crisis of succession in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries marked by rebellion, lawlessness, and foreign invasion. Russians regard that era as a period of humiliation to be avoided at all costs. Russia’s twenty-first-century troubles could see the emergence of warlords from the security services and violent separatists in the country’s economically distressed regions, many of which are home to large numbers of ethnic minorities. Although a Russia in turmoil might not formally end the war in Ukraine, it might simply be unable to conduct it, in which case Ukraine would have regained its peace and independence while Russia descended into anarchy.
Agent of Chaos
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a first step in refashioning a Russian empire has had the opposite effect. The war has diminished his ability to strong-arm Russia’s neighbors. When Azerbaijan fought a border skirmish with Armenia last year, Russia refused to intervene on Armenia’s behalf, even though it is Armenia’s formal ally.
A similar dynamic is at play in Kazakhstan. Had Kyiv capitulated, Putin might have decided to invade Kazakhstan next: the former Soviet republic has a large ethnic Russian population, and Putin has no respect for international borders. A different possibility now looms: if the Kremlin were to undergo regime change, it might free Kazakhstan from Russia’s grasp entirely, allowing the country to serve as a safe haven for Russians in exile. That would be far from the only change in the region. In the South Caucasus and in Moldova, old conflicts could revive and intensify. Ankara could continue to support its partner Azerbaijan against Armenia. Were Turkey to lose its fear of Russian opprobrium, it might urge Azerbaijan to press forward with further attacks on Armenia. In Syria, Turkey would have reason to step up its military presence if Russia were to fall back.
If Russia descended into chaos, Georgia could operate with greater latitude. The shadow of Russia’s military force, which has loomed over the country since the Russian-Georgian war in 2008, would be removed. Georgia could continue its quest to eventually become a member of the European Union, although it was bypassed as a candidate last year because of inner turmoil and a lack of domestic reforms. If the Russian military were to withdraw from the region, conflicts might again break out between Georgia and South Ossetia on the one hand and between Georgia and Abkhazia on the other. That dynamic could also emerge in Moldova and its breakaway region Transnistria, where Russian soldiers have been stationed since 1992. Moldova’s candidacy for European Union membership, announced in June 2022, might be its escape from this long-standing conflict. The European Union would surely be willing to help Moldova with conflict resolution.
Putin’s fall could translate into civil war and Russia’s disintegration.
Leadership changes in Russia would shake Belarus, where the dictator Alexander Lukashenko is propped up by Russian money and military might. Were Putin to fall, Lukashenko would in all likelihood be next. A Belarusian government in exile already exists: Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who lives in Lithuania, became the country’s opposition leader in 2020 after her husband was jailed for trying to run against Lukashenko. Free and fair elections could be held, allowing the country to rescue itself from dictatorship, if it managed to insulate itself from Russia. If Belarus could not secure its independence, Russia’s potential internal strife could spill over there, which would in turn affect neighbors such as Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine.
If Russia were to truly disintegrate and lose its influence in Eurasia, other actors, such as China, would move in. Before the war, China mostly exerted economic rather than military influence in the region. That is changing. China is on the advance in Central Asia. The South Caucasus and the Middle East could be its next areas of encroachment.
A defeated and internally destabilized Russia would demand a new paradigm of global order. The reigning liberal international order revolves around the legal management of power. It emphasizes rules and multilateral institutions. The great-power-competition model, a favorite of former U.S. President Donald Trump, was about the balance of power, tacitly or explicitly viewing spheres of influence as the source of international order. If Russia were to suffer a defeat in Ukraine, policymakers would have to take into account the presence and the absence of power, in particular the absence or severe decline of Russian power. A diminished Russia would have an impact on conflicts around the globe, including those in Africa and the Middle East, not to mention in Europe. Yet a reduced or broken Russia would not necessarily usher in a golden age of order and stability.
A defeated Russia would mark a change from the past two decades, when the country was an ascendant power. Throughout the 1990s and into the first decade of this century, Russia haphazardly aspired to integrate into Europe and partner with the United States. Russia joined the G-8 and the World Trade Organization. It assisted with U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan. In the four years when Dmitry Medvedev was Russia’s president, from 2008 to 2012, Russia appeared to be playing along with the rules-based international order, if one did not look too closely behind the curtain.
A Russia amenable to peaceful coexistence with the West may have been an illusion from the beginning. Putin projected a conciliatory air early in his presidency, although he may have harbored hatred of the West, contempt for the rules-based order, and an eagerness to dominate Ukraine all along. In any case, once he retook the presidency in 2012, Russia dropped out of the rules-based order. Putin derided the system as nothing more than camouflage for a domineering United States. Russia violently encroached on Ukraine’s sovereignty by annexing Crimea, reinserted itself in the Middle East by supporting Assad in Syria’s civil war, and erected networks of Russian military and security influence in Africa. An assertive Russia and an ascendant China contributed to a paradigm of great-power competition in Beijing, Moscow, and even a post-Trump Washington.
If Russia were to disintegrate and lose its influence in Eurasia, China would move in.
Despite its acts of aggression and its substantial nuclear arsenal, Russia is in no way a peer competitor of China or the United States. Putin’s overreach in Ukraine suggests that he has not grasped this important point. But because Putin has intervened in regions around the world, a defeat in Ukraine that tore apart Russia would be a resounding shock to the international system.
The defeat could, to be sure, have positive consequences for many countries in Russia’s neighborhood. Look no further than the end of the Cold War, when the demise of the Soviet Union allowed for the emergence of more than a dozen free and prosperous countries in Europe. A Russia turned inward might help foster a “Europe whole and free,” to borrow the phrase used by U.S. President George H. W. Bush to describe American ambitions for the continent after the Cold War ended. At the same time, disarray in Russia could create a vortex of instability: less great-power competition than great-power anarchy, leading to a cascade of regional wars, migrant flows, and economic uncertainty.
Russia’s collapse could also be contagious or the start of a chain reaction, in which case neither the United States nor China would profit because both would struggle to contain the fallout. In that case, the West would need to establish strategic priorities. It would be impossible to try to fill the vacuum that a disorderly Russian defeat might leave. In Central Asia and the South Caucasus, the United States and Europe would have little chance of preventing China and Turkey from moving into the void. Instead of attempting to shut them out, a more realistic U.S. strategy would be to attempt to restrain their influence and offer an alternative, especially to China’s dominance.
Whatever form Russia’s defeat took, stabilizing eastern and southeastern Europe, including the Balkans, would be a herculean task. Across Europe, the West would have to find a creative answer to the questions that were never resolved after 1991: Is Russia a part of Europe? If not, how high should the wall between Russia and Europe be, and around which countries should it run? If Russia is a part of Europe, where and how does it fit in? Where does Europe itself start and end? The incorporation of Finland and Sweden into NATO would be only the beginning of this project. Belarus and Ukraine demonstrate the difficulties of protecting Europe’s eastern flank: those countries are the last place where Russia would give up on its great-power aspirations. And even a ruined Russia would not lose all its nuclear and conventional military capacity.
Twice in the last 106 years—in 1917 and in 1991—versions of Russia have broken apart. Twice, versions of Russia have reconstituted themselves. If Russian power recedes, the West should capitalize on that opportunity to shape an environment in Europe that serves to protect NATO members, allies, and partners. A Russian defeat would furnish many opportunities and many temptations. One of these temptations would be to expect that a defeated Russia would essentially disappear from Europe. But a defeated Russia will one day reassert itself and pursue its interests on its terms. The West should be politically and intellectually equipped both for Russia’s defeat and for Russia’s return.
-
LIANA FIX is a Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Germany’s Role in European Russia Policy: A New German Power?
- MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State.
Foreign Affairs · by Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage · December 20, 2022
13. Kissinger’s ‘realism’ matches Biden’s policy, but not Putin’s reality
Excerpts:
Kissinger’s perspective seems to be that Kyiv and the West should just let all that go in the interest of ending the fighting. In the context of lessons from past wars, it would be as if the Allies agreed in 1942 to let Adolf Hitler keep half his conquests and remain in power with no accountability for the Nazi regime’s genocide and other crimes against humanity.
For his part, Putin sees a new path to Russian victory: keep escalating his tactics to crush the Ukrainian population’s will to resist while warning the West against escalating its support for Ukraine’s self-defense. He deters the most effective U.S. and NATO response merely by threatening even more crimes and more evil consequences, such as the use of nuclear weapons.
So far, Ukrainian resolve is not withering in the face of Putin’s targeting of the civilian population by systematically destroying the energy infrastructure essential to keep them from starving and freezing during the harsh Slavic winter. But the same cannot be said for the West’s will to continue supporting Ukraine through its ordeal, as the Kissinger article and the Biden administration’s parallel posture indicate.
Blinken’s assertion that Washington is ensuring “that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself” is demonstrably inaccurate. Putin’s latest strategy — and latest war crime — is being significantly facilitated by Washlngton’s unwillingness to provide Ukraine with critically needed air defense systems.
Washington should end what seems increasingly like a Western stalemate strategy that will prolong Ukraine’s agony and encourage Putin to continue his aggression.
Kissinger’s ‘realism’ matches Biden’s policy, but not Putin’s reality
BY JOSEPH BOSCO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 12/20/22 10:00 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3781218-kissingers-realism-matches-bidens-policy-but-not-putins-reality/?utm_source=pocket_saves
Henry KIssinger is returning to his intellectual and geostrategic roots. In a Spectator article last week, entitled “How to avoid another world war,” he recounts the origins of World War I, which was a key chapter in his early academic work at Harvard.
He repeats a point that he and many others have made over the years — that, had the governments of the warring countries known at the time what the consequences of their decisions would be, they would have decided differently: “Europe’s leaders sleepwalked … into a conflict which none of them would have entered had they foreseen the world at war’s end in 1918.”
Of course, that also could be said of World War II and other conflicts throughout history, especially from the perspective of the losing parties. And there is the reverse lesson that WWII also taught — and that the Korean War taught — about the consequences of leaders’ failure to act and to make their intentions clear to potential adversaries.
Here in Madrid, viewing Pablo Picasso’s ghastly 1937 depiction of the carnage at Guernica recalls historian Paul Preston’s statement that, had the British and other countries responded more forcefully at the time, “[T]here probably wouldn’t have been a Second World War.”
Kissinger refers to the technological advances that made World War I so bloody. In the transition to WW II, the Nazi-Fascist powers had sought the cooperation of Spain’s Generalissimo Franco in testing aerial bombardment of civilian populations and the use of propaganda as the latest advances in modern warfare. Nazi military leader Herman Goring said, “It was an opportunity to test under fire whether [war] material had been adequately developed.”
Kissinger seems bent on conjuring the horrors of the first Great War as a cautionary tale for today’s Western leaders too vigorously supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression.
But, lest anyone be tempted to accuse him of undue softness toward Vladimir Putin, he cites his earlier endorsement of U.S. and NATO arms support for Ukraine: “I have repeatedly expressed my support for the allied military effort to thwart Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. But the time is approaching to … achiev[e] peace through negotiation.”
That is also the Biden administration’s policy, but only after Russian forces are pushed back to where they were on Feb. 24 and not out of Ukraine altogether. As far as helping President Volodymyr Zelensky achieve his stated objective of a Ukraine whole and free, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said America’s commitment is to a more limited goal: “Our focus is on continuing to do what we’ve been doing, which is to make sure that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself, what it needs to push back against the Russian aggression, to take back territory that’s been seized from it since Feb. 24.”
Blinken said any further pushback of Russia — from Donbas and Crimea — would be for Ukraine to achieve in negotiations with Moscow later, but he offered no commitment for additional U.S. arms to pursue that goal. The obvious warning to Ukraine: Start preparing for negotiations sooner rather than later.
Kissinger would place an even more unpalatable constraint on Zelensky’s government: Sue for peace now without trying to push Russian forces any farther back to the pre-Feb. 24 border. He reminds us of his earlier proposed peace plan: “Last May, I recommended establishing a ceasefire line along the borders existing where the war started on 24 February. Russia would disgorge its conquests thence, but not the territory it occupied nearly a decade ago, including Crimea. That territory could be the subject of a negotiation after a ceasefire.”
But, at the same time, Kissinger offers this truism that, under present circumstances, makes even that more modest objective likely unattainable: “The quest for peace and order has two components that are sometimes treated as contradictory, the pursuit of elements of security and the requirement for acts of reconciliation. If we cannot achieve both, we will not be able to reach either.”
Kissinger does not offer an inducement for Putin to “disgorge” Ukrainian territory it has seized since February. He offers no alternative to Zelensky’s strategy of promising military defeat for the Russian leader who almost daily inflicts the equivalent of a new Guernica on Ukraine. He fails to mention the multiple war crimes committed by Russia at Putin’s direction, starting with the launching of aggressive war, the first war crime described by the Nuremberg Tribunal. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine “reconciliation” with a leader who continues to perpetrate monstrous acts and who Biden has said “should not remain in power.”
Kissinger’s perspective seems to be that Kyiv and the West should just let all that go in the interest of ending the fighting. In the context of lessons from past wars, it would be as if the Allies agreed in 1942 to let Adolf Hitler keep half his conquests and remain in power with no accountability for the Nazi regime’s genocide and other crimes against humanity.
For his part, Putin sees a new path to Russian victory: keep escalating his tactics to crush the Ukrainian population’s will to resist while warning the West against escalating its support for Ukraine’s self-defense. He deters the most effective U.S. and NATO response merely by threatening even more crimes and more evil consequences, such as the use of nuclear weapons.
So far, Ukrainian resolve is not withering in the face of Putin’s targeting of the civilian population by systematically destroying the energy infrastructure essential to keep them from starving and freezing during the harsh Slavic winter. But the same cannot be said for the West’s will to continue supporting Ukraine through its ordeal, as the Kissinger article and the Biden administration’s parallel posture indicate.
Blinken’s assertion that Washington is ensuring “that Ukraine has in its hands what it needs to defend itself” is demonstrably inaccurate. Putin’s latest strategy — and latest war crime — is being significantly facilitated by Washlngton’s unwillingness to provide Ukraine with critically needed air defense systems.
Washington should end what seems increasingly like a Western stalemate strategy that will prolong Ukraine’s agony and encourage Putin to continue his aggression.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
14. The Dawn of Drone Diplomacy
Excerpts:
As states increasingly use drones as a currency for interstate competition, policymakers will wrestle with how to respond. In some cases, supplier states will compete over the same customers. Whoever ultimately wins the contract may also secure a position as a preferred security partner, making it difficult for other states to exert influence.
In other cases, states may need to help allies and partners defend themselves against a rival’s drones. In the ongoing war in Ukraine, NATO members stepped up deliveries of air defense equipment to Kyiv after Moscow acquired Iranian drones. Many of these systems, however, involve launching costly missiles to take down drones that are far cheaper. Keeping ahead of rivals in drone diplomacy will likely require an action-reaction process involving the provision of low-cost antidrone systems to states under threat of rival drones.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted the growing significance of drones to international security. To maintain an advantage, the United States and its allies should limit rogue states such as Iran from exporting drones through sanctions and export controls. At the same time, the United States should export more drones and antidrone systems to allies to help them build their own drone programs, limiting the likelihood that these states will turn to other suppliers. Drones are no longer just a battlefield weapon but also a diplomatic tool.
The Dawn of Drone Diplomacy
Unmanned Vehicles Are Upending the Arms Trade—and the Balance of Power
December 20, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Erik Lin-Greenberg · December 20, 2022
Iranian-built drones now routinely puncture the skies over Kyiv. Elsewhere in Ukraine, Turkish- and American-manufactured drones help Ukrainian forces target Russian troops. These operations demonstrate the growing role of remote-controlled weapons in battle. The conflict also showcases how drone exports have increasingly become an instrument of diplomacy.
With drone use on the rise, states have capitalized on drone exports to increase their global clout. To be sure, this is part of an established trend: governments have long leveraged arms exports as a diplomatic tool. Beyond filling state coffers and defraying research and development costs, arms sales help states advance their foreign policy agendas. Selling or donating weapons to like-minded partners can be used to extract concessions, exert influence, counter rivals, and strengthen military ties. A new era of arms trade is emerging, in which new exporters such as Iran and Turkey are displacing traditional weapons suppliers and are using drone exports to extend influence beyond their borders. These exports threaten Washington’s influence and the security of its partners. To keep ahead, U.S. policymakers should help allies build drone programs while developing approaches to counter the threat of rival drones.
GAME OF DRONES
Drone diplomacy is on the rise because it meets a growing demand. International leaders are increasingly convinced that their defense and foreign policy ambitions hinge on possessing remote-controlled weapons. Drones have changed the character of modern conflict by allowing states to project power while minimizing risk to friendly personnel. By keeping crews far from the frontlines, drones allow governments to undertake risky attack or intelligence-gathering missions that they might not otherwise launch. Russia, for instance, frequently uses drones instead of manned attack aircraft to strike well-defended Ukrainian targets. At the same time, drones offer air support and a bird’s-eye view to ground forces, which often tips the scale during battles. Moreover, drones are commonly cheaper and easier to operate and maintain than the missiles or inhabited aircraft or they supplant, making it simpler for states to integrate drones into military operations.
Drone use in recent conflicts has proved effective advertising. Footage from Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh—a disputed territory fought over by Armenia and Azerbaijan—has showcased drones striking targets cheaply, prodding other militaries to add remotely piloted aircraft to their arsenals. Some countries have built domestic drone programs, but others have turned to international suppliers.
Traditional arms exporters such as the United States initially dominated drone production with systems including the MQ-9 Reaper. But export restrictions such as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a multilateral agreement the United States is party to, severely limited the sale of U.S.-built drones, even to Washington’s closest allies. Firms from countries that are not MTCR signatories, such as China and Israel, eagerly stepped in to fill the void and could engage in largely unregulated trade.
At the same time, other states that traditionally were not aircraft exporters ramped up drone production programs. Iran sold drones to other countries and made them available to its Hezbollah and Houthi proxies. Similarly, Turkey’s drone program—developed in part to reduce dependence on foreign arms suppliers—quickly made a name for itself with the Bayraktar TB2. Turkey first deployed the TB2 against Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria. Soon, it was on the shopping lists of nearly two dozen countries across Africa, Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
SELLERS’ MARKET
Selling drones in a time of high demand increases a supplier state’s diplomatic power in three important, and often complementary, ways. First, exporting drones deepens ties with client governments. Selling a drone entails more than transferring a piece of machinery. Exports typically come with long-term training, logistics assistance, and maintenance agreements that have lasting effects. An importing state becomes reliant on its supplier state for upgrades and replacement parts. Exporters train drone crews in importing states, building relationships that endure as personnel climb the ranks. These connections produce new pathways through which a supplier state can sway policymaking. Indeed, one Iranian news outlet affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps proclaimed that Iran’s drone exports are “deepening its strategic influence” internationally.
Supplier states are increasingly cementing these relationships by opening overseas drone factories. Iran established drone production lines in Tajikistan and Venezuela, and Turkey plans to build a TB2 factory in Ukraine. Iran’s top general described the opening of the plant in Tajikistan as a turning point in relations between the two countries. Indeed, drones may serve as a gateway export that sets the stage for broader arms transfers by demonstrating the effectiveness of a supplier’s hardware and establishing processes for future weapons transfers. Russia, for instance, is now considering buying ballistic missiles from Iran.
Second, drone exports help supplier states compete with rivals. In some cases, exporting drones allows supplier states to challenge regional foes. For example, Turkish drone transfers to Azerbaijan contributed to Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, humiliating Turkey’s long-time rival and forcing it to cede territory. Similarly, Tehran armed its proxies with drones to attack targets in Gulf Arab states, Israel, and Yemen.
Selling a drone entails more than transferring a piece of machinery.
In other cases, drone transfers enable states to engage in proxy wars farther afield. When Iran sells drones to Russia, for example, it supports attacks on Ukraine, which is backed by the United States. At the same time, it shows off capabilities that Iran could use against the United States in a future conflict. To be sure, this involves political and military risks. Tehran’s drone exports triggered new sanctions and Iranian drone use in Ukraine is helping the United States and its allies develop countermeasures. But for Tehran, cementing ties with Russia seems to outweigh these risks.
As drone suppliers diversify production through overseas factories, their drone diplomacy will become more resilient and less susceptible to disruption from rivals. Israel, for example, has bombed drone production facilities in Iran but may find it too risky to attack Iranian factories in countries with friendlier diplomatic ties, such as Tajikistan.
Finally, supplier states use drone transfers to extract concessions from clients. According to Al-Monitor, a news website, Turkey’s sale of 20 drones to the United Arab Emirates provided Ankara enough leverage to sway Emirati officials to restrict the social media access of a prominent Turkish mafia boss turned whistleblower living in Dubai. And in December 2022, U.S. government officials announced that Russia is now providing Iran an “unprecedented level” of advanced military equipment—potentially including fifth-generation Su-35 fighter jets—in part because of Iranian drone transfers.
By deepening ties with client states, countering rivals, and extracting quid pro quo concessions, drone diplomacy threatens regional stability and challenges the influence of established arms exporters such as the United States. Indeed, drone suppliers such as Iran routinely arm states such as Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela that were otherwise unable to acquire drones because of sanctions and other political roadblocks. Newly acquired drones allow these states to reignite frozen conflicts, violate human rights, and undercut internationally led conflict-resolution efforts. In recent years, activists and lawmakers criticized Turkey’s sale of TB2 drones to Ethiopia for enabling strikes that reportedly killed dozens of civilians.
MORE THAN A WEAPON
As states increasingly use drones as a currency for interstate competition, policymakers will wrestle with how to respond. In some cases, supplier states will compete over the same customers. Whoever ultimately wins the contract may also secure a position as a preferred security partner, making it difficult for other states to exert influence.
In other cases, states may need to help allies and partners defend themselves against a rival’s drones. In the ongoing war in Ukraine, NATO members stepped up deliveries of air defense equipment to Kyiv after Moscow acquired Iranian drones. Many of these systems, however, involve launching costly missiles to take down drones that are far cheaper. Keeping ahead of rivals in drone diplomacy will likely require an action-reaction process involving the provision of low-cost antidrone systems to states under threat of rival drones.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted the growing significance of drones to international security. To maintain an advantage, the United States and its allies should limit rogue states such as Iran from exporting drones through sanctions and export controls. At the same time, the United States should export more drones and antidrone systems to allies to help them build their own drone programs, limiting the likelihood that these states will turn to other suppliers. Drones are no longer just a battlefield weapon but also a diplomatic tool.
- ERIK LIN-GREENBERG is the Leo Marx Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Foreign Affairs · by Erik Lin-Greenberg · December 20, 2022
15. Cyber Command conducted offensive operations to protect midterm elections
Cyber Command conducted offensive operations to protect midterm elections
Martin Matishak
December 19, 2022
therecord.media · December 19, 2022
FORT MEADE, Md. — U.S. Cyber Command conducted both defensive and offensive operations to thwart foreign actors from interfering in the 2022 midterms, according to the digital combat unit’s chief.
Cyber Command executed so-called “full spectrum” operations to safeguard the latest U.S. election, Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, who leads both the National Security Agency and CYBERCOM, said earlier this month during a rare briefing for reporters.
He previously defined that to mean defensive and offensive actions, as well as information operations.
“We did conduct operations persistently to make sure that our foreign adversaries couldn’t utilize infrastructure to impact us,” Nakasone said. “We understood how foreign adversaries utilize infrastructure throughout the world, we had that mapped pretty well, and we wanted to make sure that we took it down at key times.”
“There was a campaign plan that we followed and it wasn’t just November 8: it covered before, during, and until the elections were certified,” he added.
The actions, which Nakasone repeatedly declined to elaborate on, marks the third consecutive cycle where CYBERCOM has undertaken steps to defend a national election, or every one since Russia’s multifaceted digital onslaught on the 2016 presidential race.
The command made election security one of its enduring missions after it was given new powers by the White House and Congress.
The Trump administration issued National Security Presidential Memoranda 13, which streamlined Pentagon authorities to conduct time-sensitive military operations in cyberspace. And language in the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act cleared the way for clandestine digital operations, categorizing them as “traditional military activity.”
The command, armed with intelligence from the NSA, launched the first offensive cyber campaign against Russia to secure the 2018 midterm elections.
It deployed “hunt forward” teams to Eastern Europe, sent direct messages to Russian disinformation operators to inform them that they had been identified, and launched a digital strike that temporarily knocked the notorious Internet Research Agency offline in the days before and after the election.
The command also took action against Iranian hackers backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. The hackers posed as a far-right group, sending threatening emails to American voters and posting a video to shake confidence in the U.S. voting process.
Nakasone said the overall degree to which foreign powers targeted last month’s election had dropped compared to years past.
“There were plenty of foreign influence operations that were ongoing and continue to be ongoing up to Election Day. But compared to previous elections, I estimate that unlike 2018 and 2020, there was a lessened degree of activity,” he said.
That dovetails with remarks made Monday by Army Maj. Gen. William Hartman, the head of the Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), which serves as CYBERCOM’s lead organization on election security.
Hartman said he was “surprised” by the lack of activity, speculating Moscow and Iran were too busy dealing with security matters.
Like Nakasone, Hartman declined to specify what defensive or offensive actions the command took to protect the latest U.S. election.
Nakasone stood by remarks he made in October that malign actors had not utilized any new tricks to launch interference or influence operations on the election.
“I didn’t [see new tactics or tools] — and I saw the same foreign adversaries that I’ve seen before, a lot of the same ones, the proxies and the elements of the Russian and Iranian governments that do this type of work,” he said.
Nakasone downplayed the importance of the command’s latest steps to protect an election.
“Rest assured, we were doing operations well before the midterms began, and we were doing operations likely on the day of the midterms. This is what persistent engagement is. This is the idea of understanding your foreign adversaries and operating outside the United States,” he said, referring to the command’s now years-old strategy.
That approach involves continually confronting the adversary and sharing information with partners. This year the command sent troops to Ukraine, Lithuania and Croatia to help strengthen their digital defenses and acquire previously undiscovered malware.
The final version of the annual defense policy, which is awaiting President Joe Biden’s signature, would authorize an additional $44 million for hunt forward operations.
Martin is a senior cybersecurity reporter for The Record. He spent the last five years at Politico, where he covered Congress, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community and was a driving force behind the publication's cybersecurity newsletter.
therecord.media · December 19, 2022
16. Alabama's Auburn University has blocked TikTok for all students and faculty on campus and other publicly-funded universities may soon follow suit
Excerpt:
Earlier this month, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said in a statement: "There may be no greater threat to our personal safety and our national security than the cyber vulnerabilities that support our daily lives. To further protect our systems, we are issuing this emergency directive against foreign actors and organizations that seek to weaken and divide us."
Alabama's Auburn University has blocked TikTok for all students and faculty on campus and other publicly-funded universities may soon follow suit
insider.com · by Tanya Chen
- Last week, students at Alabama's Auburn University were told the school is blocking TikTok access.
- The popular app will no longer be accessible on campus Wi-Fi.
- The policy is in response to a statewide ban of the app imposed by Alabama Governor Kay Ivey.
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TikTok will no longer be accessible for students and faculty at Alabama's Auburn University after school officials banned the app on campus. The policy is in response to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey's recent statewide ban of the app for all government agencies and networks.
Last week, Ivey announced that the ban was to protect the state and its private citizens from having sensitive information infiltrated by the Chinese government. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
"Protecting the state of Alabama and our citizens' right to privacy is a must, and I surely don't take a security threat from China lightly," the governor wrote in a memo to state agency leaders last Monday.
Now, Auburn, a public university, is complying, even though college-aged young adults make up a majority of TikTok users.
A spokesperson for the university told Insider students and faculty were informed last week that the popular app would be taken off all school servers and devices, and could not be accessed through the school's Wifi.
"Efforts are underway to remove TikTok from all state-owned devices provided by Auburn. Note also that the new policy recommends removing TikTok from personal devices to protect a person's privacy there as well," a memo sent from school officials to students read. "The governor's order addresses the growing risk of intrusive social media applications harvesting data totally unrelated to business use of the platform."
The last video posted by Auburn's official TikTok account was on December 7. Since then, comments about the policy have started trickling in. "Guess y'all better take this account down. With the ban on school wifi and all…" one user wrote this week.
Actions like these only add to already surmounting fears that the Chinese government may harvest American users' personal data. In June, BuzzFeed News reported off leaked audio from internal company meetings that suggested that Chinese TikTok employees have already obtained user data from the US. In July, TikTok's head of cybersecurity, Roland Cloutier, stepped down from his role, although the company denied that it had anything to do with the data privacy controversy.
TikTok has repeatedly downplayed these concerns.
"As we've publicly stated, we've brought in world-class internal and external security experts to help us strengthen our data security efforts," a spokesperson told Insider earlier this year in response to the BuzzFeed News leak. "This is standard industry practice given the complexity of data security challenges."
The company said it has created a new department called US Data Security (USDS), with US-based leadership, "to provide a greater level of focus and governance on US data security."
Auburn University did not immediately respond to further inquiries about how the block will be enforced or if it's enforceable.
The Auburn ban may mark the beginning of a trend of state-funded universities banning the app on their campuses. Other states, including Maryland, Wisconsin, South Dakota, South Carolina, Utah, and Nebraska, have all banned state employees or contractors from accessing the app on state-owned devices.
Earlier this month, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said in a statement: "There may be no greater threat to our personal safety and our national security than the cyber vulnerabilities that support our daily lives. To further protect our systems, we are issuing this emergency directive against foreign actors and organizations that seek to weaken and divide us."
insider.com · by Tanya Chen
17. Opinion | How the algorithm tipped the balance in Ukraine (Part 1)
Excerpts:
The “X factor” in this war, if you will, is this Ukrainian high-tech edge and the ability of its forces to adapt rapidly. “This is the most technologically advanced war in human history,” argues Fedorov. “It’s quite different from everything that has been seen before.”
And that’s the central fact of the extraordinary drama the world has been watching since Russia invaded so recklessly last February. This is a triumph of man and machine, together.
Opinion | How the algorithm tipped the balance in Ukraine
The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · December 19, 2022
By David Ignatius
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December 19, 2022 at 10:20 a.m. EST
December 19, 2022 at 10:20 a.m. EST
First of two parts.
KYIV — Two Ukrainian military officers peer at a laptop computer operated by a Ukrainian technician using software provided by the American technology company Palantir. On the screen are detailed digital maps of the battlefield at Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, overlaid with other targeting intelligence — most of it obtained from commercial satellites.
As we lean closer, we see can jagged trenches on the Bakhmut front, where Russian and Ukrainian forces are separated by a few hundred yards in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. A click of the computer mouse displays thermal images of Russian and Ukrainian artillery fire; another click shows a Russian tank marked with a “Z,” seen through a picket fence, an image uploaded by a Ukrainian spy on the ground.
If this were a working combat operations center, rather than a demonstration for a visiting journalist, the Ukrainian officers could use a targeting program to select a missile, artillery piece or armed drone to attack the Russian positions displayed on the screen. Then drones could confirm the strike, and a damage assessment would be fed back into the system.
This is the “wizard war” in the Ukraine conflict — a secret digital campaign that has never been reported before in detail — and it’s a big reason David is beating Goliath here. The Ukrainians are fusing their courageous fighting spirit with the most advanced intelligence and battle-management software ever seen in combat.
“Tenacity, will and harnessing the latest technology give the Ukrainians a decisive advantage,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me last week. “We are witnessing the ways wars will be fought, and won, for years to come.”
I think Milley is right about the transformational effect of technology on the Ukraine battlefield. And for me, here’s the bottom line: With these systems aiding brave Ukrainian troops, the Russians probably cannot win this war.
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“The power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems is now so great that it equates to having tactical nuclear weapons against an adversary with only conventional ones,” explains Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, in an email message. “The general public tends to underestimate this. Our adversaries no longer do.”
“For us, it’s a matter of survival,” argues “Stepan,” the senior Ukrainian officer in the Kyiv demonstration, who before the war designed software for a retail company. Now, he tells me bluntly, “Our goal is to maximize target acquisitions.” To protect his identity, he stripped his unit insignia and other markings from his camouflage uniform before he demonstrated the technology. (The names he and his colleague used were not their real ones; I agreed to their request to protect their security.)
“Lesya,” the other officer, was also a computer specialist in peacetime. As she looks at the imagery of the Russian invaders, on a day when their drones are savaging civilian targets in Odessa on Ukraine’s southern coast, she mutters a wish for revenge — and a hope that Ukraine will emerge from the war as a tech power. Although the Ukrainians now depend on technology help from America, she says, “by the end of the war, we will be selling software to Palantir.”
A new deterrent
Kyiv was cold and snowy when I arrived just over a week ago. The power was out in some places. But the capital was relatively calm. There was a traffic jam entering the city on Friday. On Saturday night, restaurants were so packed it was impossible to get a reservation at one upscale spot.
As Ukraine moves toward the new year, the spirit of resistance and resilience is visible everywhere. Roadblocks have mostly disappeared. Children play near captured Russian tanks in St. Michael’s Square. Couples take walks in the park above the Dnieper River.
I visited here at year’s end to explore what I believe is the overriding lesson of this fight — and indeed, of the past several decades of war: A motivated partner like Ukraine can win if provided with the West’s unique technology. The Afghanistan army cracked in a day because it lacked the motivation to fight. But Ukraine — and, before it, the Syrian Kurdish fighters who crushed the Islamic State with U.S. help — has succeeded because it has both the weapons and the will.
I met with a senior team from Palantir that was visiting its Kyiv office. With the approval of Karp, the CEO, they agreed to show me some of the company’s technology close to the firing line. The result is a detailed look at what may prove to be a revolution in warfare — in which a software platform allows U.S. allies to use the ubiquitous, unstoppable sensors that surround every potential battlefield to create a truly lethal “kill chain.”
Palantir, which began its corporate life working with the CIA on counterterrorism tools, has many critics. That’s partly because its biggest funder, from the start, has been co-founder Peter Thiel, a successful tech investor who has also been a strong supporter of Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans. Karp, by contrast, has supported many Democratic candidates and causes.
The critics have argued that Palantir’s powerful software has been misused by government agencies to violate privacy or serve questionable ends. For example, The Post wrote in 2019 that Palantir’s software was used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help track undocumented immigrants, which led to protests from some of the company’s employees. Tech community activists have asked whether Palantir is too close to the U.S. government and can “see too much” with its tools.
Karp responded to criticism of the company in an email to me last week: “Silicon Valley screaming at us for over a decade did not make the world any less dangerous. We built software products that made America and its allies stronger — and we are proud of that.”
And Ukraine has shifted the political landscape in Silicon Valley. For Karp and many other technology CEOs, this is “the good war” that has led many companies to use their tools aggressively. This public-private partnership is one of the keys to Ukraine’s success. But it obscures many important questions: How dependent should countries be on entrepreneurs whose policy views could change? We can applaud the use of these tools in “good” wars, but what about bad ones? And what about private tools being turned against the governments that helped create them?
We’ll be struggling with these questions about technology and warfare for the rest of this century. But after spending weeks investigating the new tools developed by Palantir and other companies, the immediate takeaway for me is about deterrence — and not just in Ukraine. Given this revolution in technology, adversaries face a much tougher challenge in attacking, say, Taiwan than they might imagine. The message for China in this emerging digital battle space is: Think twice.
Vast data battlefield
The “kill chain” that I saw demonstrated in Kyiv is replicated on a vast scale by Ukraine’s NATO partners from a command post outside the country. The system is built around the same software platform developed by Palantir that I saw in Kyiv, which can allow the United States and its allies to share information from diverse sources — ranging from commercial satellite imagery to the West’s most secret intelligence tools.
This is algorithmic warfare, as Karp says. Using a digital model of the battlefield, commanders can penetrate the notorious “fog of war.” By applying artificial intelligence to analyze sensor data, NATO advisers outside Ukraine can quickly answer the essential questions of combat: Where are allied forces? Where is the enemy? Which weapons will be most effective against enemy positions? They can then deliver precise enemy location information to Ukrainian commanders in the field. And after action, they can assess whether their intelligence was accurate and update the system.
Data powers this new engine of war — and the system is constantly updating. With each kinetic strike, the battle damage assessments are fed back into the digital network to strengthen the predictive models. It’s not an automated battlefield, and it still has layers and stovepipes. The system I saw in Kyiv uses a limited array of sensors and AI tools, some developed by Ukraine, partly because of classification limits. The bigger, outside system can process highly classified data securely, with cyber protections and restricted access, then feed enemy location data to Ukraine for action.
To envision how this works in practice, think about Ukraine’s recent success recapturing Kherson, on the Black Sea coast. The Ukrainians had precise intelligence about where the Russian were moving and the ability to strike with accurate long-range fire. This was possible because they had intelligence about the enemy’s location, processed by NATO from outside the country and then sent to commanders on the ground. Armed with that information, the Ukrainians could take the offensive — moving, communicating and adjusting quickly to Russian defensive maneuvers and counterattacks.
And when Ukrainian forces hit Russian command nodes or supply depots, it’s a near certainty that they have received enemy location data this way. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, told me that this electronic kill chain was “especially useful during the liberation of Kherson, Izium, Kharkiv and Kyiv regions.”
What makes this system truly revolutionary is that it aggregates data from commercial vendors. Using a Palantir tool called MetaConstellation, Ukraine and its allies can see what commercial data is currently available about a given battle space. The available data includes a surprisingly wide array, from traditional optical pictures to synthetic aperture radar that can see through clouds, to thermal images that can detect artillery or missile fire.
To check out the range of available data, just visit the internet. Companies selling optical and synthetic aperture radar imagery include Maxar, Airbus, ICEYE and Capella. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sells simple thermal imaging meant to detect fires but that can also register artillery explosions.
In our Kherson example, Palantir assesses that roughly 40 commercial satellites will pass over the area in a 24-hour period. Palantir normally uses fewer than a dozen commercial satellite vendors, but it can expand that range to draw imagery from a total of 306 commercial satellites that can focus to 3.3 meters. Soldiers in battle can use handheld tablets to request more coverage if they need it. According to a British official, Western military and intelligence services work closely with Ukrainians on the ground to facilitate this sharing of information.
A final essential link in this system is the mesh of broadband connectivity provided from overhead by Starlink’s array of roughly 2,500 satellites in low-earth orbit. The system, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, allows Ukrainian soldiers who want to upload intelligence or download targeting information to do so quickly.
In this wizard war, Ukraine has the upper hand. The Russians have tried to create their own electronic battlefield tools, too, but with little success. They have sought to use commercial satellite data, for example, and streaming videos from inexpensive Chinese drones. But they have had difficulty coordinating and sharing this data among units. And they lack the ability to connect with the Starlink array.
“The Russian army is not flexible,” Lesya, the Ukrainian officer, told me. She noted proudly that every Ukrainian battalion travels with its own software developer. Ukraine’s core advantage isn’t just the army’s will to fight, but also its technical prowess.
Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister, listed some of the military tech systems that Ukraine has created on its own, in a response to my written questions. These include a secure chat system, called “eVorog,” that has allowed civilians to provide 453,000 reports since the war started; a 200-strong “Army of Drones” purchased from commercial vendors for use in air reconnaissance; and a battlefield mapping system called Delta that “contains the actual data in real time, so the military can plan their actions accordingly.”
The “X factor” in this war, if you will, is this Ukrainian high-tech edge and the ability of its forces to adapt rapidly. “This is the most technologically advanced war in human history,” argues Fedorov. “It’s quite different from everything that has been seen before.”
And that’s the central fact of the extraordinary drama the world has been watching since Russia invaded so recklessly last February. This is a triumph of man and machine, together.
Next: How “algorithmic warfare” evolved over the past decade — and some very human worries.
The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · December 19, 2022
18. Opinion | A ‘good’ war gave the algorithm its opening, but dangers lurk (Part 2)
Excerpt:
And it’s as simple as that. This is a war of survival for Ukraine. But it should comfort the recruits that whatever their misery in coming months, they will have a level of technological support beyond anything the world has seen.
Opinion | A ‘good’ war gave the algorithm its opening, but dangers lurk
The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · December 20, 2022
By David Ignatius
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December 20, 2022 at 7:30 a.m. EST
December 20, 2022 at 7:30 a.m. EST
Second of two parts. Read Part 1.
NORTHEASTERN ENGLAND — To see the human face of the “algorithm war” being fought in Ukraine, visit a company of raw recruits during their five rushed weeks at a training camp here in Britain before they’re sent to the front in Ukraine.
They will soon have a battery of high-tech systems to aid them, but they must face the squalor of the trenches and the roar of unrelenting artillery fire alone. The digital battlefield has not supplanted the real one.
At the British camp, instructors have dug 300 yards of trenches across a frigid hillside. The trenches are four feet deep, girded with sandbags and planks, and slick with mud and water at the bottom. The Ukrainian recruits, who’ve never been in battle before, have to spend 48 hours in these hellholes. Sometimes, there’s simulated artillery fire overhead and rotting animal flesh nearby to prepare the trainees for the smell of death.
The recruits practice attacking the trenches and defending them. But mostly they learn to stay alive and as warm as they can, protecting their wet, freezing feet from rot and disease. “Nobody likes the trenches,” says Oleh, the Ukrainian officer who oversees the training with his British colleagues. (I’m not using his full name to respect concerns about his security.) “We tell them it will be easier in battle. If it’s hard now, that’s the goal.”
The paradox of the Ukraine conflict is that it combines the World War I nightmare of trench warfare with the most modern weapons of the 21st century.
“It’s hard to understand the brutality of contact in that front line. It’s Passchendaele in Donetsk,” explains Brigadier Justin Stenhouse, recalling one of the bloodiest battles of World War I. He oversees training for the British Ministry of Defense in Whitehall and arranged my visit to the training camp.
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Lt. Col. Jon Harris, the British commander at the camp, states his training mission bluntly: “Learn to survive and win against Russia.”
Silicon Valley Pentagon
The Ukraine war has fused the flesh-and-blood bravery of these Ukrainian troops on the ground with the stunning high-tech arsenal that I described in part one of this report. The result is a revolution in warfare. This transformation, rarely discussed in the media, has been evolving for more than a decade. It shows the lethal ability of the United States and its allies to project power — and it also raises some vexing questions about how this power will be used.
One of the leading actors in this underreported revolution has been Palantir, which originally developed its software platform after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to help the CIA integrate data that was often in different compartments and difficult to share. News reports have frequently said that Palantir software helped track al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but the company won’t confirm that.
The Pentagon’s use of these ultramodern tools was encouraged by a very old-fashioned commander, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the gruff and often profane chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When he was Army chief of staff in 2018, the service began working with Palantir and other tech companies to integrate data through a program called Army Vantage. Milley was frustrated by an antiquated data system that made it hard to gather details about what units were ready for battle. The Army, like so many government institutions, had too many separate repositories for information.
Palantir technicians showed me an unclassified version of the Army database they helped create to address that problem. You can see in an instant what units are ready, what skills and experience the soldiers in these units have, and what weapons and ammunition are available. Logistics problems like this once took weeks to solve; now there are answers in seconds.
“The U.S. military is focused on readiness today and readiness in the future,” Milley told me in an email last week. “In defense of our country, we’re pulling together a wide variety of technologies to remain number one, the most effective fighting force in the world.”
The Army began testing ideas about algorithmic warfare with individual units around that time as well. The first choice was the elite 82nd Airborne, commanded in 2020 by Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue; it was part of the XVIII Airborne Corps, then headed by Lt. Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla. These two worked with Palantir and other companies to understand how the Army could use data more effectively.
Simultaneously, the Pentagon was exploring the use of artificial intelligence to analyze sensor data and identify targets. This effort was known as Project Maven, and it initially spawned a huge controversy when it was launched in 2017. The idea was to write algorithms that could recognize, say, a Russian T-72 tank in drone surveillance images in the same way that facial recognition scans can discern a human face.
The military’s AI partnership with Silicon Valley got off to a bad start. In 2018, engineers at Google, initially the leading contractor for Maven, protested so angrily about writing targeting algorithms that the company had to withdraw from the program.
Maven has evolved. It’s now supervised by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and it generates AI models on a fast, one-month cycle. A tech executive explained to me that companies now compete to develop the most accurate models for detecting weapons — tuning their algorithms to see that hypothetical T-72 under a snowy grove of fir trees, let’s say, rather than a swampy field of brush — and each month the government selects a new digital array.
For a Pentagon that usually buys weapons that have a 30-year life span, this monthly rollover of targeting software is a revolution in itself.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, the U.S. Army had these tools in hand — and commanders with experience using them. Donahue had moved up to become head of the XVIII Airborne Corps, which transferred its forward headquarters to Wiesbaden, Germany, just after the Russian invasion. The 82nd Airborne moved to forward quarters near Rzeszow, Poland, near the Ukraine border.
Kurilla, meanwhile, became head of Central Command and began using that key theater as a test bed for new technologies. In October, Kurilla appointed Schuyler Moore, a former director of science and technology for the Defense Innovation Board, as Centcom’s first “chief technology officer.”
For the Army and other services, the impetus for this technology push isn’t just the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the looming challenge from China — America’s only real peer competitor in technology.
A tool for good and ill
In the age of algorithm warfare, when thinking machines will be so powerful, human judgment will become all the more important. Free societies have created potent technologies that, in the hands of good governments, can enable just outcomes, and not only in war. Ukrainian officials tell me they want to use Palantir software not just to repel the Russian invasion, but to repair Ukraine’s battered electrical grid, identify hidden corruption and manage the vast tasks of reconstruction.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation and vice prime minister, explained in written answers to my questions how he plans to use technology not just to beat Russia, but to become a high-tech superpower in the future.
Fedorov says Ukraine is “massively” using software platforms “to deal with power shortages and in order to ensure telecom connection.” To repair electricity cutoffs and damaged energy infrastructure, the country uses Starlink terminals, Tesla Powerwall systems, and advanced generators and lithium batteries. It backs up all its important data on cloud servers.
“For sure, I’m convinced that technologies will also allow us to build a bright and safe future,” Fedorov says. “Only the newest technologies could give us such an advantage to run and create the country we deserve as fast as possible.”
But these technologies can also create 21st-century dystopias, in the wrong hands. The targeting algorithms that allow Ukraine to spot and destroy invading Russians aren’t all that different from the facial-recognition algorithms that help China repress its citizens. We’re lucky, in a sense, that these technologies are mostly developed in the West by private companies rather than state-owned ones.
But what if an entrepreneur decides to wage a private war? What if authoritarian movements gain control of democratic societies and use technology to advance control rather than freedom? What if AI advances eventually allow the algorithms themselves to take control, making decisions for reasons they can’t explain, at speeds that humans can’t match? Democratic societies need to be constantly vigilant about this technology.
The importance of the human factor is clear with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, who illustrates the strength — and potential weakness — of America’s new way of war. If Musk decides he isn’t being paid enough for his services, or if he thinks it’s time for Ukraine to compromise, he can simply cut the line to his satellites, as he briefly threatened this fall.
Looking at the Ukraine war, we can see that our freewheeling entrepreneurial culture gives the West a big advantage over state-run autocracies such as China and Russia — so long as companies and CEOs share the same democratic values as Western governments. That’s why we need a broader public debate about the power of the technologies that are being put to noble use in Ukraine but could easily be turned to ignoble purposes in the wrong hands.
Ukraine, which has suffered so much in this war, wants to be a techno-superpower when the conflict finally ends. Fedorov, who’s overseeing Kyiv’s digital transformation, explains it this way: “Let’s plan to turn Ukraine into the world’s ‘mil-tech valley,’ to develop the most innovative security solutions, so the world will become a safer and more digital place.”
But first, the Ukrainians freezing in the filthy trenches will need to prevail.
Lt. Col. Harris, the commander of the camp in northeastern England, says he’s humbled amid the recruits there. Through five combat tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, though, he knows he has never faced anything as horrifying as many of them will see in a month or two.
On the firing range, 10 Ukrainian recruits squeeze off shots from their AK-47s. They’re on the second day of live-fire exercises, with eight more to come. They’re accountants, cooks and college students; some unsteady with their weapons, others newly bold. As they take aim at targets 50 feet away, a British sergeant commanding the range barks at them through an interpreter: “You need to kill the enemy before he kills you.”
And it’s as simple as that. This is a war of survival for Ukraine. But it should comfort the recruits that whatever their misery in coming months, they will have a level of technological support beyond anything the world has seen.
The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · December 20, 2022
19. Putin’s Cronies Turn on Russian Elite in Paranoid War Frenzy
Putin’s Cronies Turn on Russian Elite in Paranoid War Frenzy
SPIRAL
Vladimir Putin’s top cheerleaders are panicking about Russian “sellouts” in their midst.
Julia Davis
Published Dec. 19, 2022 3:42PM ET
The Daily Beast · December 19, 2022
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Poorly concealed panic has permeated Russian airwaves this week, with pro-Kremlin pundits arguing not against the war—but against any possibility of a negotiated peace. Western proposals are being treated with the utmost suspicion, and the same goes for any Russians in positions of power who might be willing to consider them.
Appearing on the state TV program Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, Professor Dmitry Evstafiev brought up a recent article by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in which he laid out his suggestions for a potential peace process. In Moscow, Kissinger’s proposals were treated as a hostile trap to ensnare Russia’s elite, while state tv pundits attempted to distance themselves from their own elite status.
“The problem with Kissinger’s article is not that he’s luring us into some kind of a trap, but that some are walking into it—which means that they want to do it,” Evstafiev argued. “It should be openly said that within our elites—and perhaps within the government—there is a considerable number of people rooting for Russia’s defeat. Yes, a shy, partial defeat, but let’s call things by their proper names.”
Evstafiev described peace-seeking articles in the Western press as “acts of manipulation” and predicted that their number will keep on growing. Resorting to conspiratorial tone about shadowy Western power brokers, Evstafiev alleged that Kissinger didn’t even read the piece, much less author it. Evstafiev described the willingness of Russian troops to fight until the end and shrieked: “Will our elites fight until the end, or will they be shown a carrot and run after it? What percentage of our elites are ready to sell out?”
Andrei Bezrukov, a Russian spy whose life story served as the inspiration for the TV show “The Americans,” likewise asserted that Kissinger and other Westerners are basing their proposals on the belief that the Russian elite are always ready to betray their country. He proposed that the Yeltsin Center, named after Russia’s former president Boris Yeltsin, be renamed into “Traitors Center,” warning those who are willing to cooperate with the West that they too would be considered traitors to the Motherland.
Host Vladimir Solovyov argued that the West is proposing negotiations solely because Russia’s strategic nuclear arms surpass their own, urging Russian leadership to use the full arsenal of weapons at its disposal. He argued that the superiority of NATO’s conventional arms is reason enough for Russia to turn to nuclear strikes as the way to victory. Andrey Sidorov, Deputy Dean of world politics at the Moscow State University, incredulously asked the host: “Would we like to experience a retaliatory strike?” With bizarre enthusiasm, Solovyov responded: “Yes! Victory starts with not fearing the consequences of your own actions!”
Sidorov cautiously asked: “Are you ready for a war with NATO, for real?” The host preached that the fear of nuclear strikes is the only thing that may stop NATO from continuing to deliver weapons and equipment to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. Deriding the elite who might consider peace proposals as the traitors to the Motherland, Solovyov extolled the troops he visited on the frontlines.
He tearfully recounted: “When you talk to them, they have no questions about whom they’re fighting and what they’re fighting for... We’ll march all the way to the big puddle and maybe we’ll have to take Washington as well... Until we drive them into the swamp, until only their hand is sticking out of it as they plead: ‘Help me, help me!’ Then we’ll decide what to do with them.”
State media’s nuclear bravado and threats against anyone who might be willing to peacefully negotiate with the West might be used to conceal a very real fear that propagandists—along with military and government officials—would be forced to answer for their war crimes, including public incitement of these actions on state television.
In recent days, multiple state TV programs have warned that Russia’s defeat in this war would lead to war crimes tribunals at the Hague or elsewhere, arguing that the only way of escaping that fate is ensuring Russia’s victory, by any means necessary. During Friday’s broadcast of NTV's program Our Own Truth, host Roman Babayan led panelists into discussions about the need for Russia’s own war crimes tribunals, which should be set in motion in anticipation of an impending victory over Ukraine.
Russian state media’s push for nuclear attacks continued on Monday’s NTV's show Meeting Place. Hosts Andrey Norkin and Ivan Trushkin played a clip from a recently released song "Sarmatushka," celebrating the Russian ballistic missile Sarmat.
Former head of Russia’s space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, took the credit for the deranged lyrics of the song, glorifying the missile’s ability to destroy the United States and NATO. After writer Valery Pecheykin dared to say he wasn’t inspired by the murderous tune, Norkin and Trushkin pounced on him, repeatedly asking whether he was proud of Sarmat. Instead, Pecheykin said: “It’s alleged that our superpower is that we can die better than anybody else... but when will we learn how to live?”
The Daily Beast · December 19, 2022
20. The incredible shrinking Army: NDAA end strength levels are a mistake
Excerpts:
This cut of 33,000 soldiers in one year could equate to the loss of as many as eight brigade combat teams, critical combat power for an Army that most of its leaders and external experts already believe is already stretched too thin for the nation’s needs. After all, last three Army Chiefs of Staff have testified to Congress that their service is too small to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy.
Maybe the recruiting crisis is indeed insolvable, and the Army and the other services must continue to shrink to the point of irrelevance. But by prematurely cutting the Army, we may never find out what was possible in 2023. A better choice would have been to start solving the problems that are impacting recruiting with the help of DoD, Congress, and the White House.
The incredible shrinking Army: NDAA end strength levels are a mistake - Breaking Defense
breakingdefense.com · by Thomas Spoehr · December 20, 2022
U.S. Army Soldiers graduating from the 7th Army Noncommissioned Officers Academy (NCOA) Basic Leader Course (BLC) class 08-22 marches through smoke during the entrance of their ceremony, Grafenwoehr Germany, July 30, 2022. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Joshua Casson)
There is a growing sense in US defense circles that recruitment and retention is becoming an existential problem for the military services. In the following op-ed, Thomas Spoehr, a retired US Army lieutenant general who now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, argues that a decision to cut Army end strength in this year’s defense policy bill will only exacerbate the situation.
The compromise version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act approved by the House Dec. 8, and by the Senate Dec. 15, is a general win for national defense: it contains additional funding for needed equipment, delays premature retirement of capable systems, and steers clear of contentious social issues. But one provision in the bill appears to be flying under the radar: the legislation precipitously shrinks [PDF] the US Army by 33,000 soldiers, a six percent decrease in just one year. The cut locks the Army into a downward spiral that will ultimately jeopardize US national security.
Maybe we should not be surprised. Last June, the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. Joseph Martin, predicted at a Congressional hearing that due to extreme recruiting challenges, the Army might be down to as few as 450,000 soldiers by the end of fiscal 2023 — well below their 2022 authorized strength of 485,000.
What is surprising is that the Army then apparently asked for the cut. A report cited a Congressional staffer saying the Army approached Capitol Hill and requested their active duty strength be cut to 452,000 soldiers in 2023.
It’s not entirely clear why. It could have been that the Army was worried about asking for pay and benefits for soldiers they feared they would not be able to recruit, and then would have to subsequently forfeit those billions of dollars. Another explanation conforms to the old axiom that it’s better to under-promise and over-deliver, rather than the opposite. By cutting their end strength now, the Army may be able to avoid the negative publicity that accompanied 2022’s failure to meet their goals.
Both explanations are likely correct, but the unfortunate results of this cut will be with the nation for years. Moving forward, the Army, already deep into its worst-ever recruiting period, will have less manpower and money to try to turn around this crisis.
In this high-tech world, there is often a temptation to rely on digital means and campaigns to attract volunteers. But most experts agree it is the personal interaction between a recruiter and a prospect that often seals the deal. With this cut in strength, the Army will have less flexibility to deploy more recruiters to America’s towns and cities. It will also have commensurately smaller recruiting goals with no incentive or ability to try to make up for lost ground.
Even more puzzling is that the Army had barely begun their efforts to try to fix the recruiting crisis. Army Sec. Christine Wormuth’s new recruiting task force hasn’t finished its work, nor has the service had time to field any new initiatives or programs. Good data on why young people aren’t attracted to the military are still hard to come by, even as there is data that shows there are real challenges with attracting able-bodied men and women to the armed forces.
Nevertheless, cutting Army end strength to only 452,000 soldiers locks in the service’s worst projections for recruiting, forestalling any possibility to achieve greater-than-predicted success.
It also increases risk for the United States.
Between 2006 and 2007, the nation needed more ground forces than were available. The Army had to scramble to increase its size. It grappled with the need for more equipment and facilities. It made painful trade-offs to grow by lowering standards. It found that it took at least two years to field brigade combat teams from scratch.
If, after this cut to the Army, the nation once again finds itself needing a larger Army, that will not be easily accomplished. As a rule, it’s always much easier to cut than to grow.
Pundits will argue that the world is different now and America would be crazy to get engaged in wars that require large amounts of ground forces. Yet the world has a way of surprising the unprepared.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates famously reminded West Point cadets the United States has a perfect record of predicting where the country would fight next — “from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more — we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.”
This cut of 33,000 soldiers in one year could equate to the loss of as many as eight brigade combat teams, critical combat power for an Army that most of its leaders and external experts already believe is already stretched too thin for the nation’s needs. After all, last three Army Chiefs of Staff have testified to Congress that their service is too small to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy.
Maybe the recruiting crisis is indeed insolvable, and the Army and the other services must continue to shrink to the point of irrelevance. But by prematurely cutting the Army, we may never find out what was possible in 2023. A better choice would have been to start solving the problems that are impacting recruiting with the help of DoD, Congress, and the White House.
A retired US Army Lieutenant General, Thomas Spoehr is the director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense.
21. Will the headwinds facing China force Xi to rethink his plans to take Taiwan?
Excerpts:
The strong pressures on the Chinese economy and Xi’s selection of loyalists to key positions suggest that the leadership won’t make a move to invade Taiwan anytime soon. Xi did stress, however, that China would not give up the right to use force to ‘reunify’ with Taiwan, though that’s entirely consistent with previous statements by Xi and Chinese leaders before him.
Taking Taiwan by force would entail significant economic costs, diplomatic isolation and, in all likelihood, a regional conflict. That would derail Xi’s 2049 centenary goal, possibly the most consequential legacy of his leadership.
Will the headwinds facing China force Xi to rethink his plans to take Taiwan? | The Strategist
aspistrategist.org.au · by Stephen Nagy · December 19, 2022
The US Navy chief recently warned that China could attack Taiwan by 2024. Others argue that an invasion of Taiwan may occur by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. Some, including the Asia Society’s Christopher K. Johnson, feel that President Xi Jinping’s China remains wedded to peaceful reunification or at least a non-kinetic approach using coercion and grey-zone tactics to compel Taiwan to become part of the People’s Republic of China. For Johnson, Xi’s new Politburo Standing Committee is not a war cabinet but a leadership team chosen to navigate the very rough geopolitical and domestic storms ahead.
Since October’s 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan, Japan, the US, Canada, Australia and others have asking themselves what the future holds for Chinese foreign policy under a third term of Xi.
There are at least five observations we can take away from the congress. First, the CCP believes that the strategic competition between the US and China is one between systems that requires a hardening of the party’s political structure at the expense of the Chinese economy.
For a regime that came to power by overthrowing the previous republican system, the CCP has perennial anxiety about insidious foreign forces supporting counter-revolution and regime change, as elaborated in Rush Doshi’s The long game and Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s Haunted by chaos. Regime change and containment are front and centre in the CCP’s understanding of US and allied motivations to not accept a China under Xi as a peer.
Comments by former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo advocating regime change and Taiwanese independence, President Joe Biden’s repeated statements that the US would defend Taiwan if China launched an unprovoked attack, and the growing chorus of countries that explicitly place peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait in their foreign policies have only reinforced Beijing’s concerns.
For Xi, ideology needs to be strengthened at home to ‘safeguard the security of China’s state power, systems and ideology by building up security capabilities in key areas’. For the CCP, ‘political security is a fundamental task’.
Second, the work report Xi presented at the congress highlighted China’s continued commitment to its Russian partner, explicitly stating that ‘no state’s security should come at the expense of another state’. This is code for Beijing’s support for Moscow’s argument that its invasion of Ukraine was a response to NATO expansion that threatened Russia’s ‘core interests’, including its security.
It is consistent with what Michal Bogusz, Jakub Jakobowski and Witold Rodkiewicz of the Centre for Eastern Studies argue in their report The Beijing–Moscow axis. They assert that relations between Moscow and Beijing have never been as close and warm as they are today:
This rapprochement has been produced by three decades of consistent efforts by the political leaderships of Russia and China to strengthen mutual ties and deepen their cooperation in politics, military affairs, economy and ideology. The relationship that has emerged can be called an informal alliance. This alliance is based on the deep conviction shared by the Chinese and Russian ruling elites of the fundamental coincidence of their strategic interests and the ideological proximity between their authoritarian regimes.
Third, China will continue to pivot to the global south in a strategy to address the perceived vulnerability Beijing feels from the economic, technological and legal dominance the US and Western allies enjoy in the global economy. The Belt and Road Initiative is the first arrow in Xi’s quiver to develop and open markets along BRI corridors to selectively disentangle participating states from the US economic hegemony and move them towards economically dependent relationships with China.
China’s ‘dual circulation’ model for economic development is the second. Beijing’s strategy involves boosting domestic consumption while at the same time pivoting the Chinese economy to developing countries.
These economic initiatives are linked to what China calls the democratisation of the international system, an effort prominent Chinese academic Yan Xue Tong explains like this:
China will work hard to shape an ideological environment conducive to its rise and counter Western values. For example, the United States defines democracy and freedom from the perspective of electoral politics and personal expression, while China defines democracy and freedom from the perspective of social security and economic development. Washington should accept these differences of opinion instead of trying to impose its own views on others.
Fourth, the CCP under Xi is enhancing its anti-Western stance by criticising democratic countries’ hegemony. It has shown that it is willing to coordinate with other authoritarian states and states that can be influenced by Chinese money and development aid. A salient example was Beijing’s recruitment of developing countries and a motley crew of countries such as North Korea, Syria and Iran to vote down a motion to discuss a UN report into China’s serious human rights violations in Xinjiang. China similarly brought together BRI members to abstain from a resolution on Russia’s ‘aggression against Ukraine’.
Last, the CCP sees very rough geopolitical and domestic seas ahead. It is challenged by the selective diversification of supply chains, the US CHIPS and Science Act (which aims to strangle Chinese access to top-tier semiconductors and technicians, and choke off China’s access to the future of artificial intelligence), the effects of its self-harming Covid-19 policy, and the increasingly severe demographic pressures on the economy. The CCP leadership wants to reach its 2049 centenary goal of ‘building a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious’.
The strong pressures on the Chinese economy and Xi’s selection of loyalists to key positions suggest that the leadership won’t make a move to invade Taiwan anytime soon. Xi did stress, however, that China would not give up the right to use force to ‘reunify’ with Taiwan, though that’s entirely consistent with previous statements by Xi and Chinese leaders before him.
Taking Taiwan by force would entail significant economic costs, diplomatic isolation and, in all likelihood, a regional conflict. That would derail Xi’s 2049 centenary goal, possibly the most consequential legacy of his leadership.
Stephen Nagy is a senior associate professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo. Image: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images.
aspistrategist.org.au · by Stephen Nagy · December 19, 2022
22. 2023 Irregular Warfare Initiative Fellows Announcement
Congratulations to a great group of fellows. The Irregular Warfare Initiative has been doing yeoman's work in advance of the IW ball on the global battlefield.
2023 Irregular Warfare Initiative Fellows Announcement
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Bridging the gap between scholars, practitioners, and
policymakers to support the community of irregular warfare professionals
Irregular Warfare Initiative 2023 Fellows Announcement
The Irregular Warfare Initiative takes great pride in announcing the selection of our 2023 Fellows. We considered an incredibly diverse range of very accomplished scholars, practitioners and policymakers from across the international community. We greatly appreciate the exceptional interest and enthusiasm from the hundreds of applicants and know that those selected will invaluably contribute to the discussion, study, and application of irregular warfare.
Paul Bailey
Paul Bailey is an active-duty U.S. Marine with more than 15 years of conventional and special operations experience across the Middle East and Western Pacific. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Naval Postgraduate School as well as the recipient of the 2020 National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC) Division’s Marine Corps Superior Achievement Award.
LinkedIn: Paul Bailey
Tim Bertocci
Tim Bertocci is the Chief of Staff to Congressman Dean Phillips (DFL-MN), who sits on the Foreign Affairs, Small Business and Ethics Committees as well as the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. In 1999 Mr. Bertocci graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and was commissioned as an Armor officer. During his nine years of service, Mr. Bertocci served in various leadership positions in the Active and Reserve Components, to include serving in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom III. Mr. Bertocci earned a Master of Arts degree from the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in 2008 and has worked in various roles to include Legislative Assistant and Legislative Director for Congressman Tim Walz, Senior Operations Advisor for the Joint IED Defeat Organization, Foreign Service Officer in Havana, Cuba, and, currently, adjunct instructor in the Political Science Department at the United States Naval Academy teaching a class on irregular warfare.
Twitter: Tim Bertocci (@TBertocci44)
LinkedIn: Tim Bertocci
Megan Biles
Megan Biles is an active duty U.S. Air Force special operations pilot with operational experience in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. She graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy, earning a bachelor of science in political science, and holds a master of public policy and administration from Northwestern and policy management from Georgetown. She is currently a student earning a master of philosophy in military strategy from the Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS).
LinkedIn: Megan Biles
Erik Davis
Lieutenant Colonel Erik Davis is an active duty Army officer with over 15 years of experience in special operations. He is also a GEN Wayne A. Downing Scholar with master’s degrees from Kings College London and the London School of Economics. His assignments have taken him from village stability operations in rural villages in Afghanistan to preparing for high end conflict in the First Island Chain
Amparo Pamela Fabe
Amparo Pamela Fabe is a faculty member of the Philippine Public Safety College and the National Police College. She received an award from the Daniel K. Inouye Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies for her contribution to Indo-Pacific security. She is a counter threat finance specialist in Southeast Asia.
Sandor Fabian
Dr. Sandor Fabian is a former Hungarian Special Forces officer with 20 years of military experience, to include heading the Assessment and Evaluation Branch at NATO Special Operations Headquarters. Dr. Fabian serves as the acting chair for Integration and Engagement at the Irregular Warfare Center, and works as an instructor, curriculum developer, and team leader at LEIDOS Inc where he supports the NATO Special Operations. Dr. Fabian is a graduate of the Miklos Zrinyi Hungarian National Defense University, holds a master`s degree in Defense Analysis from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, a graduate certificate in Intelligence Studies and a PhD in Security Studies both from the University of Central Florida. Dr. Fabian is the author of Irregular Warfare: The Future Military Strategy for Small States and published several articles in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Fabian`s research interest includes irregular warfare, Russian and Chinese approaches to conflict, U.S. foreign security assistance and special operations.
Website: SANDOR FABIAN (Ph. D.) – Ph. D. Security Studies
Twitter: Sandor Fabian (@SandorFabian2)
LinkedIn: Sandor Fabian (Ph. D.)
Marta Kepe
Marta Kepe is a Senior Defense Analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation where her work supports the U.S. Department of Defense. Marta is interested in civilian-based national resistance, national resilience building, unconventional warfare, transatlantic defense, defense capability development, and military industry and logistics, and Russian military. Her recent work includes analysis of unconventional defense of the Baltic states and Baltic resilience preparations, comparative analysis of comprehensive/total defense approaches, foreign gray-zone activities, assessing future capability needs, and developing models for multilateral through-lifecycle capability management. Her work spans the United States, Europe, Russia, the Arctic, and Africa. She previously worked for RAND Europe, and the Latvian Ministry of Defense. She holds an MA from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
Twitter: Marta Kepe (@martakepe)
Peter Lorge
Peter Lorge is an Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War (2022). An award-winning teacher, he is guest editor of the forthcoming special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies on counterinsurgency in China and India. He is currently completing an epistolary history of 11th century China.
Website: People | Department of History | Vanderbilt University
Twitter: Lorge, Peter (@LorgePeter)
Fernando Lujan
Fernando Lujan is an Assistant Professor at the National War College and PhD candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he is researching state-sponsored digital influence campaigns. A career Special Forces officer and Foreign Area specialist (via the AfPak Hands program), he most recently was assigned to the State Department as a member of the U.S. negotiating team seeking a political settlement in Afghanistan. He also previously served on the National Security Council as Director for Afghanistan, and later as the Senior Director for South and Central Asia. Fernando's writing has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and he was a CFR International Affairs Fellow at the Center for New American Security, where he published "Light Footprints: The Future of American Military Intervention." He holds a Bachelor's of Science in Physics from West Point and a Master's of Public Policy from Harvard.
Twitter: Fernando Luján (@fernandomlujan)
LinkedIn: Fernando Lujan
Jahara Matisek
Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek, PhD, is an active duty U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and a military professor in the national security affairs department at the US Naval War College and a DoD Minerva researcher on foreign military training. He has published over 80 articles and essays in peer-reviewed journals, policy relevant outlets, and edited volumes on strategy, warfare, and security assistance. A 2020 Bronze Star recipient for his time as the director of operations and commander of the 451st Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron, he is a command pilot that was a senior fellow for the Homeland Defense Institute and an associate professor in the Military and Strategic Studies Department at the US Air Force Academy. Finally, his 2022 book, Old and New Battlespaces, describes how everything is becoming weaponized as everyone becomes a combatant in the Information Age.
Twitter: FRANKY (@JaharaMatisek)
LinkedIn: Jahara "FRANKY" Matisek (PhD)
Julia McClenon
Julia McClenon is an anthropologist and interagency professional in the Naval Postgraduate School's Department of Defense Analysis where she supports U.S. and international special operations communities through education on strategic competition and irregular warfare issues from cultural and cognitive perspectives. She is the Strategic and Operationalization Coordinator for the Regional Defense Fellowship Program and Global ECCO, where her team was the recipient of an official commendation from the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. Julia was awarded Regents and Rowny Fellowships for her master of arts degree in Religious Studies specializing in cultural anthropology, cognitive science, Chinese religion and thought, sociolinguistics, and human behavior. She is a former U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer.
Instagram: the (Ad Hoc) Anthropologist (@ad_hoc_anthro)
Stanislava Mladenova
Stanislava Mladenova is a Global Fellow at Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. She recently completed her doctoral research at King’s College London, Department of War Studies, where she explored the functional relationship between SOF Civil Affairs Units, NGOs, and populations, in settings affected by low-intensity conflict and state fragility. Stanislava’s operational experience includes assignments in Afghanistan, where she served as a Political Adviser to the NATO Senior Civilian Representative on economic issues, governance, corruption, disaster management, gender, humanitarian assistance, and the recruitment of child soldiers. At the US Institute of Peace, she implemented programs that established dialogue and cooperation between the police forces, gendarmerie, and local communities in six West African countries. She holds a Master’s of Public Administration from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs at the University at Albany, New York.
LinkedIn: Stanislava Mladenova
Twitter: stanislava (@stanislava)
Facebook: Stanislava Mladenova
John Nagl
Dr. John Nagl is Associate Professor of Warfighting Studies in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the Army War College. A West Point graduate and retired Army officer, Nagl served in tank units in both Iraq wars. His Oxford University doctoral dissertation was published as Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by the University of Chicago Press. He later helped write the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War, taught at West Point, the Naval Academy, Georgetown, and George Washington Universities, and was the President of the Center for a New American Security.
LinkedIn: John Nagl
Brian Petit
Brian S. Petit teaches and consults on leadership, strategy, planning, resistance, and special operations. He is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel, serving over five years abroad in combat and conflict zones. The Petit family lives in Salida, Colorado.
LinkedIn: Brian Petit
Vlad Rauta
Dr Vladimir Rauta is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations with the School of Politics, Economics, and International Relations at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Vladimir holds a PhD in international relations from the University of Nottingham and his research explores the delegation of war to rebels. His research has been published or is forthcoming in International Security, International Studies Review, Civil Wars, International Relations, Contemporary Security Policy, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Together with Assaf Moghadam and Michel Wyss, Vladimir is the co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Proxy Wars.
Twitter: Vladimir Rauta (@VladimirRauta)
Barry Scott
Barry Scott is a prior-enlisted Naval Special Warfare officer that has deployed in various roles throughout the Middle East and Europe. His education includes a Ph.D. in Technology and Strategy from Purdue University and the Naval Postgraduate School.
Hope Hodge Seck
Hope Hodge Seck is an award-winning freelance defense reporter and the former managing editor of Military.com. A past vice president of the Military Reporters and Editors Association, her awards include the American Legion's Fourth Estate Award, MRE's annual reporting award, and multiple Marine Corps Heritage Foundation honors. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, POLITICO Magazine, Popular Mechanics, USA Today, Military Officer Magazine, and Military Times, among other publications.
Twitter: Hope Hodge Seck (@HopeSeck)
LinkedIn: Hope Hodge Seck
Alexandra Stark
Dr. Alexandra Stark is an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. She has a PhD from the government department at Georgetown University. She was previously a senior researcher at New America, a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Minerva/Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace.
Twitter: Alex Stark (@AlexMStark)
David Ucko
David H. Ucko is Professor and Department Chair at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA), National Defense University, Washington DC. He is also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and a senior visiting research fellow in the Department of War Studies, King's College London. His most recent books are Crafting Strategy for Irregular Warfare: A Framework for Assessment and Action, 2nd Edition, w/ Tom Marks (NDU Press) and The Insurgent’s Dilemma: A Struggle to Prevail (Oxford University Press, Hurst).
Twitter: David Ucko (@DavidUcko)
LinkedIn: David H. Ucko
Facebook: David Ucko
Kathleen Vogel
Kathleen M. Vogel is Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Senior Global Futures Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. She has served in the U.S. Department of State as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and as William C. Foster Fellow in the Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction in the Bureau of Nonproliferation. Vogel has also served as a Rutherford Fellow in the Defence and Security Programme at The Alan Turing Institute, UK. Vogel's overall research interests relate to the study of knowledge production on security and intelligence problems, particularly focused on weapons of mass destruction, big data, artificial intelligence, and human trafficking.
Website: Kathleen Vogel | ASU Search
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23. Taliban bar women from university education in Afghanistan
The new and improved Taliban? I think they have only improved in abusing the human rights of Afghan citizens.
Taliban bar women from university education in Afghanistan
AP · December 20, 2022
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers on Tuesday banned female students from attending universities effective immediately in the latest edict cracking down on women’s rights and freedoms.
Despite initially promising a more moderate rule respecting rights for women’s and minorities, the Taliban have widely implemented their strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia.
They have banned girls from middle school and high school, restricted women from most employment and ordered them to wear head-to-toe clothing in public. Women are also banned from parks and gyms.
The Taliban were ousted in 2001 by a U.S.-led coalition for harboring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and returned to power after America’s chaotic departure last year.
The decision was announced after a government meeting. A letter shared by the spokesman for the Ministry of Higher Education, Ziaullah Hashmi, told private and public universities to implement the ban as soon as possible and to inform the ministry once the ban is in place.
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Hashmi tweeted the letter and confirmed its contents in a message to The Associated Press without giving further details.
The decision is certain to hurt efforts by the Taliban to win recognition from potential international donors at a time when the country is mired in a worsening humanitarian crisis. The international community has urged Taliban leaders to reopen schools and give women their right to public space.
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The university ban comes weeks after Afghan girls took their high school graduation exams, even though they have been banned from classrooms since the Taliban took over the country last year.
“I can’t fulfill my dreams, my hopes. Everything is disappearing before my eyes and I can’t do anything about it,” said a third-year journalism and communication student at Nangarhar University. She did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals.
“Is being a girl a crime? If that’s the case, I wish I wasn’t a girl,” she added. “My father had dreams for me, that his daughter would become a talented journalist in the future. That is now destroyed. So, you tell me, how will a person feel in this situation?”
She added that she had not lost all hope yet.
“God willing, I will continue my studies in any way. I’m starting online studies. And, if it doesn’t work, I will have to leave the country and go to another country,” she said.
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U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the decision, calling it another “broken promise” from the Taliban and a “very troubling” move.
“It’s difficult to imagine how a country can develop, can deal with all of the challenges that it has, without the active participation of women and the education,” Guterres said.
Robert Wood, the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the Taliban cannot expect to be a legitimate member of the international community until they respect the rights of all Afghans.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the United States also condemned the move by the Taliban.
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“This deplorable decision is the latest effort by Taliban leadership to impose additional restrictions on women and girls in Afghanistan and prevent them from exercising their human rights and fundamental freedoms,” Watson said.
“As a result of this unacceptable stance to hold back half of the population of Afghanistan, the Taliban will be further alienated from the international community and denied the legitimacy they desire,” she added.
Afghanistan’s U.N. seat is still held by the previous government led by former President Ashraf Ghani, despite the Taliban’s request to represent the country at the United Nations, which was recently deferred again.
Afghanistan’s charge d’affairs Naseer Ahmed Faiq said at the U.N. that the announcement “marks a new low in violation of most fundamental and universal human rights for all of humanity.”
___
Associated Press writers Riazat Butt in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.
AP · December 20, 2022
24. The AP Interview: Vermont Sen. Leahy ponders his legacy
Everyone in the national security community might say the Leahy Amendment is one of his major legacies though it is not mentioned in this article.
The AP Interview: Vermont Sen. Leahy ponders his legacy
AP · by WILSON RING · December 21, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Patrick Leahy lingered on a narrow balcony on the west side of the U.S. Capitol, soaking in a panoramic view of the National Mall, the Washington Monument and, beyond, the Lincoln Memorial.
“Now this I will miss,” he said.
As Leahy closes out a Senate career that has spanned 48 years, the Vermont senator is saying goodbye to Washington with a mix of resignation and resolve, lamenting the hyperpartisanship that now grips Congress while expressing hope that the institution as he once knew it can someday return.
“If we don’t get back to it, this country is going to be severely damaged,” he said. “We’re the wealthiest, most powerful powerful nation on Earth. And we have over 300 million Americans. We have responsibility to the Americans. We have a responsibility to the rest of the world.”
Leahy, 82, is president pro tempore of the Senate and third in line to the presidency. He reflected on his career during a wide-ranging interview Monday with The Associated Press in his office at the Capitol, recalling how when he first joined the Senate in 1975, colleagues with starkly different views could still find ways to get things done.
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“I think then, most of (the senators) knew there were basic things the Senate should do, basic things the country needed, and we should find a way to come together,” Leahy said.
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“Now, there are too many people who think, ‘What can I say that will get me on the evening news or give me a sound bite or get me on this Twitter account,’ or something else. They don’t care about the country. They care about their political ambitions.”
The willingness to work across the aisle isn’t gone entirely. Leahy, who shapes federal spending as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, pointed to this week’s unveiling of a compromise $1.7 trillion government funding package. It’s a capstone of sorts to Leahy’s career, and one he helped negotiate largely in private.
“I never called a press conference during that time, nor did the other senators in there,” he said. “We just tried to work. There is so much legislation that doesn’t get passed but it should because everybody’s running out trying to get their spin on it, and say, ‘See, I’m the only one who knows what I’m doing.’ But you’re not.”
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Leahy will officially leave office on Jan. 3, when his successor — Vermont’s Democratic Rep. Peter Welch — will be sworn into office. After that Leahy is planning to return to Vermont and work out of an office at the University of Vermont in Burlington, which will become home to his Senate records. The first in his family to go to college, Leahy said he wants to help young people from rural areas obtain higher education.
With tearful colleagues gathered in the chamber, Leahy gave his final address to the Senate on Tuesday, exhorting his colleagues to carry on the work.
“What a journey. What an abiding hope that someday after I’ve gone, the Senate in both parties will come back together to be the conscience of the nation,” he said in his address. “Together, you can build a Senate defined not by soundbites, but one strengthened when women and men with a sense of history insist that our republic move forward.”
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During his eight terms in the Senate, Leahy racked up a lengthy list of accomplishments, chairing or serving as the top member of the opposing party on the Senate Appropriations, Judiciary and Agriculture committees, among others. He’s currently the longest-serving senator and third in line to the presidency as president pro tempore. He’s the fourth-longest serving senator in history and has cast nearly 17,000 votes.
Leahy has been active on judicial, criminal justice, gay rights, human rights, privacy and environmental issues. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he led the Senate’s negotiations with the Bush administration on the Patriot Act, the sweeping anti-terrorism bill responding to the attacks.
One of his first significant votes in 1975 was against continued funding for the Vietnam War. In 2002 he voted against authorizing the use of force in Iraq.
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He helped establish what is now the nearly $60 billion organic food industry. He helped bring about the world’s first ban on the export of antipersonnel landmines, and he’s helped bring hundreds of jobs to Vermont and millions of dollars to help clean up his beloved Lake Champlain.
Leahy took office when Vermont was still considered a largely Republican bastion. Now it’s considered by many to be among the most progressive places in the country.
“We changed. We have become more diverse and that’s better for Vermont,” he said. “What we have to do now is rely not just on rhetoric, but do the hard work to create real jobs, housing for people (so they) can stay in Vermont.”
After the 1997 shooting deaths of two New Hampshire state troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor in Colebrook, New Hampshire — violence that spilled over into Vermont — Leahy began a push to fund bulletproof vests for police officers. Since then, 1.4 million vests have been distributed nationwide under the Patrick Leahy Bulletproof Vest Partnership Act.
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Known as an accomplished photographer, Leahy has used his proximity to power to take his camera into areas where others couldn’t. He captured candid images of President George H.W. Bush in a goofy hat and Sen. Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, on a bench near the Eiffel Tower during a NATO meeting.
Among his favorite photos, which hangs in his office, is a haunting image taken in a Central American refugee camp in the 1980s. The photo shows an older man, with white hair and stubble.
“What I read in his face is, ‘You don’t know me. You can’t speak my language. I can never do anything to help you. What do you do to help people like me?’” Leahy said. “Every day I’ve looked at that conscience picture and thought, how do I make life better for Vermonters, for our country, but for the rest of the world.”
Leahy has a quirky side. He’s a lover of Batman comic books — he’s made cameo appearances in five Batman movies and did the voice for a character in an animated Batman movie — and the Grateful Dead. He could have fun in the Senate, too, remembering how he once parachuted with the Army’s Golden Knights skydiving team.
Asked how he wanted to be remembered, he responded: “I want the legacy (to be) that I kept my word,” he said, adding that he sought solutions to the problems of the nation, the world and his home state of Vermont.
Later, giving a tour of his favorite spots around the Capitol, Leahy paused in the Rotunda, with its immense domed ceiling, paintings and statues. It’s at the heart of American democracy, the place where former presidents and national heroes lay in state.
“I was in awe the first time I came in here as a teenager with my parents,” Leahy said. “Every time I walk through here I’m as lost as the tourists are, and I still am today. And I’ll walk out of here my last day looking at it again.”
AP · by WILSON RING · December 21, 2022
25. No One Would Win a Long War in Ukraine
Excerpts:
A vision for a postwar Russia should be aligned with a Western vision of a postwar Ukraine, without diluting the boundary between an aggressor and a victim. Though Western populations will take some convincing, it will be far more difficult to persuade Ukraine to agree on the map and carrots for Russia. Zelensky’s plan focuses on justice and retribution for Ukraine; it is all about coercing Russia to comply. Ukraine and its Eastern allies do not want to let Russia off the hook, and they are opposed to any security guarantees to Moscow. They will demand that peace terms be announced only after Russia accepts its defeat, and perhaps even after Putin is gone. The U.S. government and other Western powers must explain that such an absolute approach will prolong the fighting and Ukraine’s own suffering. Publicizing a map toward negotiations now, while Putin continues his barbaric war and millions of Ukrainians suffer, does not constitute appeasement of Russia or a condoning of Moscow’s aggression. On the contrary, it would be a prudent, strategic, and realist political move by the West and Ukraine to address the large and growing number of Russians who would prefer peace but abhor a choice between war and defeat.
Crimea is a problem. Ukrainians are determined to recapture the peninsula, which they regard, justifiably, as stolen Ukrainian territory and a beachhead for Russian aggression. The West, however, has serious reasons to fear that Putin would do whatever it takes to prevent the fall of Crimea. The peninsula is the greatest obstacle to any talks between Moscow and Kyiv. An explicit Western demand to return Crimea as a precondition for peace talks will only rally more Russians to the side of war. Sometimes it is a wise strategy to leave an intractable subject for future negotiations.
The longer this war continues, the worse its consequences. World War I toppled great empires and dynasties across Europe, sowed the seeds of World War II, and led directly to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. Historic feuds between Germany and France over Alsace-Lorraine, and between Serbia and Croatia over Bosnia, led to lethal consequences for both sides. The wounds of these conflicts took generations to heal.
The long-term effects of the war in Ukraine cannot be predicted with any certainty. But an awareness of the destabilizing effects of long and highly destructive wars should prompt reflection of the need for a more comprehensive strategy, one that can offer Ukraine its security and Russia its future. Rather than waiting to react to Moscow and Kyiv’s latest actions or hoping for Putin’s imminent downfall, the West must take the initiative at last.
No One Would Win a Long War in Ukraine
The West Must Avoid the Mistakes That Led to World War I
By Vladislav Zubok
December 21, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Vladislav Zubok · December 21, 2022
In November 2022, General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent shock waves through Western capitals when he declared that the war in Ukraine is unwinnable by purely military means. Milley suggested that Ukraine is now in a position of strength and that this winter might be the moment to consider peace talks with Russia. He also recalled World War I, when the adversaries’ refusal to negotiate led to millions of additional deaths, suggesting that failure to “seize” the moment could lead to greatly more human suffering. His remarks challenged not only the position of Kyiv but also that of many of its Western backers, including Poland, the Baltics, North America, and the United Kingdom, which have endorsed Ukraine’s pursuit of complete military victory. As Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas argues in Foreign Affairs, “The only path to peace is to push Russia out of Ukraine.” Russia’s defeat, Ukrainian membership in NATO, the trial of Russia’s political and military leadership for war crimes, the payment of damages—these are essential to peace, she concludes. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ten-point peace plan unveiled in November takes the same approach.
If Milley’s comments were controversial, however, they pointed to a larger problem with seeking complete victory. Complete victory could require a very long war, and it would also mean that its ultimate duration would depend on political factors beyond the West’s control. For those calling for complete victory, the West must simply keep supplying Ukraine with the weapons and resources it needs to continue fighting, and wait for Russia to lose and, ideally, for Putin to go.
But a grinding war of attrition has already been hugely damaging for Ukraine and the West, as well as for Russia. Over six million Ukrainians have been forced to flee, the Ukrainian economy is in freefall, and the widespread destruction of the country’s energy infrastructure threatens a humanitarian catastrophe this winter. Even now, Kyiv is on financial life support, maintaining its operations only through billions of dollars of aid from the United States and Europe. The costs of energy in Europe have risen dramatically due to the disruption of usual oil and gas flows. Meanwhile, despite significant setbacks, Russian forces have regrouped and have not collapsed. The best plausible outcome for Ukraine would be the retreat of Russian forces to the lines of control that existed before the February 2022 invasion. But even if the Russians are swept back to the status quo ante, many Ukrainians fear that Moscow will simply retrench and regroup, waiting for the next opportunity to invade. It is by no means clear that military deterrence would be enough to secure the resulting peace.
What is missing, then, is a coherent political plan to bring an end to the suffering, and to reassure Ukrainians that Russia will not begin a new war at the earliest opportunity, even if Putin remains in power. That will require the Russians to accept a defeat but also require the Ukrainians to accept that complete victory may be unobtainable. In order to achieve these goals, Western populations will need to accept the end of Russia’s pariah status and its “return to Europe” while at the same time providing credible security assurances to Kyiv. In other words, the West must formulate a major policy vision that obviates the desire of Ukraine and its staunchest supporters to have Russia smashed and neutralized. If the United States and its partners fail to lay out such a plan, the chances for Milley’s scenario will grow: a war of attrition, danger of escalation and catastrophe, and a troubled aftermath to the war.
RUSSIAN RESILIENCE
Although it lacks the broad and deep support that Ukraine has received from its partners and allies, Russia is stronger than many would have predicted. Its army, economy, and leader all seem stable. Though the Russian military has been dispirited by repeated defeats, it has survived. The coming winter will be a crucial test for the Russian army’s ability to endure, but military experts do not predict its collapse. Many more defeats and retreats would be needed to change this assessment.
The same is true of Russia’s economy. Many confidently predicted that Russian trade and industry would be crushed by the weight of sanctions imposed by Western governments. Such extreme economic pressure, it was suggested, could be sufficient to force Moscow to withdraw from Ukraine. But economic pressure is rarely enough to end a war. Russia’s economy has shrunk in 2022, but by just three percent, significantly less than some had predicted, and its financial system has proved sustainable and macroeconomically stable. Russia is cut off from many Western supply chains, but it has an extremely large current account surplus, which allows the country’s companies and government to find much of what they need elsewhere. During the Cold War, sanctions did not force Moscow to withdraw from Eastern Europe, and today they are unlikely to force Russia to withdraw from Ukraine. The price cap on Russian oil set by the G-7 in early December may hit Russia’s import revenues, but even Western optimists are uncertain how effective it will be. If, despite Western pressure, Russia’s war machine remains funded and equipped, the result will be a bloody stalemate.
As the main architect of this war, Putin is also aware of the potential consequences of defeat. His misreading of the history of Ukraine and Russia led him to assume that his invasion would experience quick success. But although Putin may misunderstand the origins of the Ukrainian nation, his grasp of the important lessons of the twin collapses of the Russian and Soviet states is strong. The Russian empire fell in 1917 when its ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, abdicated. The Soviet state collapsed after Mikhail Gorbachev’s military and security leaders betrayed him and he lost control of the capital. Putin has made sure that he remains in firm control of the military, the security services, and the Russian population. The capital is calm and well fed, and the Kremlin has ensured that no army of unhappy conscripts is stationed nearby, as was the case in March 1917. Those who might have led a revolution have instead fled abroad, while rebellions in Dagestan or Buryatia—poor and remote areas in the Caucasus and Siberia, respectively—could be managed.
For the moment, a majority of Russians continue to support the Russian government and are not ready to accept defeat. Many regard Crimea and its stronghold of Sevastopol as worth fighting for. And for many, Putin remains the guarantor of Russian sovereignty and stability. To elite and even many ordinary Russians, the outcome that the Ukrainians and their backers dream of—the defeat of the Russian army and the downfall of Putin—is a political nightmare, threatening economic chaos and lawlessness.
Ordinary Russians have accepted their government’s explanation that Western sanctions were imposed to crush the Russian people.
Given this complicated dynamic within Russia, it is unlikely that military defeats can be enough to make the Kremlin sue for peace. But the West’s current approach to simply let the war continue, though morally satisfying and politically popular, is risky. It subjects Ukrainians to the continual horrors of conflict. The death toll and financial cost of fighting will continue to rise. It feeds Putin’s narrative that Russia is in an existential battle with the West, and it encourages Russian nationalists’ belief that Russia must either win or perish. Western denunciations of Russia’s war crimes will not be enough to change Russian minds. Although increasing number of Russians no longer trust their own government and media, they do not trust their Western counterparts, either.
Today, those Russian elites who mistrust Western intentions as well as Putin’s may regard the prospect of peace as worse than the continuation of the war. Ordinary Russians may well agree: they have accepted their government’s explanation that Western sanctions were imposed to crush the Russian people. Western commentators have given fuel to this view by arguing that the Russians must be punished for what their country has done to Ukraine. Those Russians with access to the Western media on the Internet do not accept that Russia is a “terrorist state” or an “imperialist nation.” Russian elites and many ordinary Russians believe that it is in their best interests to rally around the flag.
Of course, political change in an autocratic system can be quick and complete. The power of Russia’s aging dictator rests on sowing and maintaining fear, apathy, cynicism, and mistrust among the country’s elites. With more Russian defeats, and further mobilization, millions of Russians may begin to blame Putin, just as their predecessors blamed Tsar Nicholas and Gorbachev. Combined with a crisis of morale, apathy, and exhaustion among the troops, such a shift in public opinion could generate a political crisis. It would be the moment when Russian political elites would have to decide whether to compromise with the West or fight to the end.
MAP AND CARROTS
In November 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points convinced Germany’s leadership that they would be fairly dealt with, and persuaded them to accept an armistice. This compromise ended World War I. The Wilson proposals’ attractiveness were increased by the weakness of the German army and its leaders’ realization that the war was lost. Rather than allow the remnants of their forces to be annihilated, and their country invaded, they accepted Wilson’s terms that promised not to punish Germany. This is the approach that the West must follow today. The West must be prepared to offer a map for the Russian elites and general population, outlining how they can end their isolation, free themselves of sanctions, and remove their pariah status.
This map should begin by explaining the risks of continuing the war. It should make clear that Russia cannot win. Ukraine’s Western-supplied military equipment is superior and its forces are determined. If Moscow keeps fighting, it will therefore sustain more defeats and casualties, and place itself in increasing danger of calamitous and violent collapse. Russia’s future, the plan must gently explain, will be one of economic degradation; it risks becoming a weakened dependent of China. By accepting that it must end the war, the Russian government will spare itself the humiliation of a larger unraveling.
Then the map must outline the gains that Russia will make if it chooses the path of de-escalation. Specific content will have to be determined through discussion, but some elements are obvious. First, a pledge that Russia’s sovereignty and integrity will be respected after a peace settlement with Ukraine. As unlikely as it may sound today, a framework, other than NATO, should be convened to ensure Russia’s place in Europe’s security architecture. Re-visiting Gorbachev’s vision of “a common European home,” marked by rapprochement rather than deterrence, and dismissed by both the West and Russia today, is a necessity. Second, the map must affirm that Western governments will recognize and respect Russia’s leadership, provided that Moscow rigorously obeys the UN Charter and international law, as well as honors Russia’s international treaties, agreements, and commitments. Third, the West should lay out a timetable for returning Russia’s frozen financial assets after demands for demilitarization and withdrawal are met. Finally, the map must declare that, after the end of the war, all international economic obstacles will be removed.
Until now, the West has used only sticks to coerce Russia to stop the war. The map must include some carrots, as well. The road to a peaceful settlement should be linked to a gradual lifting of sanctions. But perhaps the biggest carrot is international legitimacy. The West will have to grant international recognition to some people and groups that constitute part of today’s regime. The Russian side at future peace talks will not consist of democrats, antiwar activists, and leaders in exile. Members of the military and the Russian bureaucracy will inevitably sit at the negotiating table. Providing at least some Russia’s leaders, who will opt for peace, with a choice between the Hague tribunal and the chance to take part in the creation of a new peaceful Russia would be a powerful stimulus for the road to peace and an end to the war.
SELLING PEACE
A vision for a postwar Russia should be aligned with a Western vision of a postwar Ukraine, without diluting the boundary between an aggressor and a victim. Though Western populations will take some convincing, it will be far more difficult to persuade Ukraine to agree on the map and carrots for Russia. Zelensky’s plan focuses on justice and retribution for Ukraine; it is all about coercing Russia to comply. Ukraine and its Eastern allies do not want to let Russia off the hook, and they are opposed to any security guarantees to Moscow. They will demand that peace terms be announced only after Russia accepts its defeat, and perhaps even after Putin is gone. The U.S. government and other Western powers must explain that such an absolute approach will prolong the fighting and Ukraine’s own suffering. Publicizing a map toward negotiations now, while Putin continues his barbaric war and millions of Ukrainians suffer, does not constitute appeasement of Russia or a condoning of Moscow’s aggression. On the contrary, it would be a prudent, strategic, and realist political move by the West and Ukraine to address the large and growing number of Russians who would prefer peace but abhor a choice between war and defeat.
Crimea is a problem. Ukrainians are determined to recapture the peninsula, which they regard, justifiably, as stolen Ukrainian territory and a beachhead for Russian aggression. The West, however, has serious reasons to fear that Putin would do whatever it takes to prevent the fall of Crimea. The peninsula is the greatest obstacle to any talks between Moscow and Kyiv. An explicit Western demand to return Crimea as a precondition for peace talks will only rally more Russians to the side of war. Sometimes it is a wise strategy to leave an intractable subject for future negotiations.
The longer this war continues, the worse its consequences. World War I toppled great empires and dynasties across Europe, sowed the seeds of World War II, and led directly to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. Historic feuds between Germany and France over Alsace-Lorraine, and between Serbia and Croatia over Bosnia, led to lethal consequences for both sides. The wounds of these conflicts took generations to heal.
The long-term effects of the war in Ukraine cannot be predicted with any certainty. But an awareness of the destabilizing effects of long and highly destructive wars should prompt reflection of the need for a more comprehensive strategy, one that can offer Ukraine its security and Russia its future. Rather than waiting to react to Moscow and Kyiv’s latest actions or hoping for Putin’s imminent downfall, the West must take the initiative at last.
Foreign Affairs · by Vladislav Zubok · December 21, 2022
26. A Free World, If You Can Keep It
Excerpts:
The bigger question, however, has to do with what Americans want. Today, they have been roused again to defend the liberal world. It would be better if they had been roused earlier. Putin spent years probing to see what the Americans would tolerate, first in Georgia in 2008, then in Crimea in 2014, all the while building up his military capacity (not well, as it turns out). The cautious American reaction to both military operations, as well as to Russian military actions in Syria, convinced him to press forward. Are we better off today for not having taken the risks then?
“Know thyself” was the advice of the ancient philosophers. Some critics complain that Americans have not seriously debated and discussed their policies toward either Ukraine or Taiwan, that panic and outrage have drowned out dissenting voices. The critics are right. Americans should have a frank and open debate about what role they want the United States to play in the world.
The first step, however, is to recognize the stakes. The natural trajectory of history in the absence of American leadership has been perfectly apparent: it has not been toward a liberal peace, a stable balance of power, or the development of international laws and institutions. Instead, it leads to the spread of dictatorship and continual great-power conflict. That is where the world was heading in 1917 and 1941. Should the United States reduce its involvement in the world today, the consequences for Europe and Asia are not hard to predict. Great-power conflict and dictatorship have been the norm throughout human history, the liberal peace a brief aberration. Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay.
A Free World, If You Can Keep It
Ukraine and American Interests
January/February 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Robert Kagan · December 20, 2022
Before February 24, 2022, most Americans agreed that the United States had no vital interests at stake in Ukraine. “If there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “they should speak up.” Few did.
Yet the consensus shifted when Russia invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, Ukraine’s fate was important enough to justify spending billions of dollars in resources and enduring rising gas prices; enough to expand security commitments in Europe, including bringing Finland and Sweden into NATO; enough to make the United States a virtual co-belligerent in the war against Russia, with consequences yet to be seen. All these steps have so far enjoyed substantial support in both political parties and among the public. A poll in August last year found that four in ten Americans support sending U.S. troops to help defend Ukraine if necessary, although the Biden administration insists it has no intention of doing so.
Russia’s invasion has changed Americans’ views not only of Ukraine but also of the world in general and the United States’ role in it. For more than a dozen years before Russia’s invasion and under two different presidents, the country sought to pare its overseas commitments, including in Europe. A majority of Americans believed that the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” according to the Pew Research Center. As pollster Andrew Kohut put it, the American public felt “little responsibility and inclination to deal with international problems that are not seen as direct threats to the national interest.” Yet today, Americans are dealing with two international disputes that do not pose a direct threat to the “national interest” as commonly understood. The United States has joined a war against an aggressive great power in Europe and promised to defend another small democratic nation against an autocratic great power in East Asia. U.S. President Joe Biden’s commitments to defend Taiwan if it is attacked—in “another action similar to what happened in Ukraine,” as Biden described it—have grown starker since Russia’s invasion. Americans now see the world as a more dangerous place. In response, defense budgets are climbing (marginally); economic sanctions and limits on technology transfer are increasing; and alliances are being shored up and expanded.
HISTORY REPEATS
The war in Ukraine has exposed the gap between the way Americans think and talk about their national interests and the way they actually behave in times of perceived crisis. It is not the first time that Americans’ perceptions of their interests have changed in response to events. For more than a century, the country has oscillated in this way, from periods of restraint, retrenchment, indifference, and disillusion to periods of almost panicked global engagement and interventionism. Americans were determined to stay out of the European crisis after war broke out in August 1914, only to dispatch millions of troops to fight in World War I three years later. They were determined to stay out of the burgeoning crisis in Europe in the 1930s, only to send many millions to fight in the next world war after December 1941.
Then as now, Americans acted not because they faced an immediate threat to their security but to defend the liberal world beyond their shores. Imperial Germany had neither the capacity nor the intention of attacking the United States. Even Americans’ intervention in World War II was not a response to a direct threat to the homeland. In the late 1930s and right up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, military experts, strategic thinkers, and self-described “realists” agreed that the United States was invulnerable to foreign invasion, no matter what happened in Europe and Asia. Before France’s shocking collapse in June 1940, no one believed the German military could defeat the French, much less the British with their powerful navy, and the defeat of both was necessary before any attack on the United States could even be imagined. As the realist political scientist Nicholas Spykman argued, with Europe “three thousand miles away” and the Atlantic Ocean “reassuringly” in between, the United States’ “frontiers” were secure.
These assessments are ridiculed today, but the historical evidence suggests that the Germans and the Japanese did not intend to invade the United States, not in 1941 and most likely not ever. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a preemptive effort to prevent or delay an American attack on Japan; it was not a prelude to an invasion of the United States, for which the Japanese had no capacity. Adolf Hitler mused about an eventual German confrontation with the United States, but such thoughts were shelved once he became bogged down in the war with the Soviet Union after June 1941. Even if Germany and Japan ultimately triumphed in their respective regions, there is reason to doubt, as the anti-interventionists did at the time, that either would be able to consolidate control over vast new conquests any time soon, giving Americans time to build the necessary forces and defenses to deter a future invasion. Even Henry Luce, a leading interventionist, admitted that “as a pure matter of defense—defense of our homeland,” the United States “could make itself such a tough nut to crack that not all the tyrants in the world would dare to come against us.”
Americans were foreign policy realists for much of the nineteenth century.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s interventionist policies from 1937 on were not a response to an increasing threat to American security. What worried Roosevelt was the potential destruction of the broader liberal world beyond American shores. Long before either the Germans or the Japanese were in a position to harm the United States, Roosevelt began arming their opponents and declaring ideological solidarity with the democracies against the “bandit nations.” He declared the United States the “arsenal of democracy.” He deployed the U.S. Navy against Germany in the Atlantic while in the Pacific he gradually cut off Japan’s access to oil and other military necessities.
In January 1939, months before Germany invaded Poland, Roosevelt warned Americans that “there comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” In the summer of 1940, he warned not of invasion but of the United States becoming a “lone island” in a world dominated by the “philosophy of force,” “a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.” It was these concerns, the desire to defend a liberal world, that led the United States into confrontation with the two autocratic great powers well before either posed any threat to what Americans had traditionally understood as their interests. The United States, in short, was not just minding its own business when Japan decided to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet and Hitler decided to declare war in 1941. As Herbert Hoover put it at the time, if the United States insisted on “putting pins in rattlesnakes,” it should expect to get bitten.
DUTY CALLS
The traditional understanding of what makes up a country’s national interests cannot explain the actions the United States took in the 1940s or what it is doing today in Ukraine. Interests are supposed to be about territorial security and sovereignty, not about the defense of beliefs and ideologies. The West’s modern discourse on interests can be traced to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when first Machiavelli and then seventeenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, responding to the abuses of ruthless popes and to the horrors of interreligious conflict in the Thirty Years’ War, looked to excise religion and belief from the conduct of international relations. According to their theories, which still dominate our thinking today, all states share a common set of primary interests in survival and sovereignty. A just and stable peace requires that states set aside their beliefs in the conduct of international relations, respect religious or ideological differences, forbear from meddling in each other’s internal affairs, and accept a balance of power among states that alone can ensure international peace. This way of thinking about interests is often called “realism” or “neorealism,” and it suffuses all discussions of international relations.
For the first century of their country’s existence, most Americans largely followed this way of thinking about the world. Although they were a highly ideological people whose beliefs were the foundation of their nationalism, Americans were foreign policy realists for much of the nineteenth century, seeing danger in meddling in the affairs of Europe. They were conquering the continent, expanding their commerce, and as a weaker power in a world of imperial superpowers, they focused on the security of the homeland. Americans could not have supported liberalism abroad even if they had wanted to, and many did not want to. For one thing, there was no liberal world out there to support before the middle of the nineteenth century. For another, as citizens of a half-democracy and half-totalitarian-dictatorship until the Civil War, Americans could not even agree that liberalism was a good thing at home, much less in the world at large.
Then, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the United States became unified as a more coherent liberal nation and amassed the necessary wealth and influence to have an impact on the wider world, there was no apparent need to do so. From the mid-1800s on, western Europe, especially France and the United Kingdom, became increasingly liberal, and the combination of British naval hegemony and the relatively stable balance of power on the continent provided a liberal political and economic peace from which Americans benefited more than any other people. Yet they bore none of the costs or responsibilities of preserving this order. It was an idyllic existence, and although some “internationalists” believed that with growing power should come growing responsibility, most Americans preferred to remain free riders in someone else’s liberal order. Long before modern international relations theory entered the discussion, a view of the national interest as defense of the homeland made sense for a people who wanted and needed nothing more than to be left alone.
A fence painted in Ukrainian flag colors in Washington, D.C., July 2022
Tom Brenner / Reuters
Everything changed when the British-led liberal order began to collapse in the early twentieth century. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 revealed a dramatic shift in the global distribution of power. The United Kingdom could no longer sustain its naval hegemony against the rising power of Japan and the United States, along with its traditional imperial rivals, France and Russia. The balance of power in Europe collapsed with the rise of a unified Germany, and by the end of 1915, it became clear that not even the combined power of France, Russia, and the United Kingdom would be sufficient to defeat the German industrial and military machine. A balance of global power that had favored liberalism was shifting toward antiliberal forces.
The result was that the liberal world that Americans had enjoyed virtually without cost would be overrun unless the United States intervened to shift the balance of power back in favor of liberalism. It suddenly fell to the United States to defend the liberal world order that the United Kingdom could no longer sustain. And it fell to President Woodrow Wilson, who, after struggling to stay out of the war and remain neutral in traditional fashion, finally concluded that the United States had no choice but to enter the war or see liberalism in Europe crushed. American aloofness from the world was no longer “feasible” or “desirable” when world peace was at stake and when democracies were threatened by “autocratic governments backed by organized force,” he said in his war declaration to Congress in 1917. Americans agreed and supported the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” by which Wilson did not mean spreading democracy everywhere but meant defending liberalism where it already existed.
CONFLICT OF INTERESTS
Americans have ever since struggled to reconcile these contradictory interpretations of their interests—one focused on security of the homeland and one focused on defense of the liberal world beyond the United States’ shores. The first conforms to Americans’ preference to be left alone and avoid the costs, responsibilities, and moral burdens of exercising power abroad. The second reflects their anxieties as a liberal people about becoming a “lone island” in a sea of militarist dictatorships. The oscillation between these two perspectives has produced the recurring whiplash in U.S. foreign policy over the past century.
Which is more right, more moral? Which is the better description of the world, the better guide to American policy? Realists and most international theorists have consistently attacked the more expansive definition of U.S. interests as lacking in restraint and therefore likely both to exceed American capacities and to risk a horrific conflict with nuclear-armed great powers. These fears have never yet proved justified—Americans’ aggressive prosecution of the Cold War did not lead to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and even the wars in Vietnam and Iraq did not fatally undermine American power. But the core of the realist critique, ironically, has always been moral rather than practical.
In the 1920s and 1930s, critics of the broader definition of interests focused not only on the costs to the United States in terms of lives and treasure but also on what they regarded as the hegemonism and imperialism inherent in the project. What gave Americans the right to insist on the security of the liberal world abroad if their own security was not threatened? It was an imposition of American preferences, by force. However objectionable the actions of Germany and Japan might have seemed to the liberal powers, they, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy, were trying to change an Anglo-American world order that had left them as “have not” nations. The settlement reached at Versailles after World War I and the international treaties negotiated by the United States in East Asia denied Germany and Japan the empires and even the spheres of influence that the victorious powers got to enjoy. Americans and other liberals may have viewed German and Japanese aggression as immoral and destructive of “world order,” but it was, after all, a system that had been imposed on them by superior power. How else were they to change it except by wielding power of their own?
The defense of Ukraine is a defense of the liberal hegemony.
As the British realist thinker E. H. Carr argued in the late 1930s, if dissatisfied powers such as Germany were bent on changing a system that disadvantaged them, then “the responsibility for seeing that these changes take place . . . in an orderly way” rested on the upholders of the existing order. The growing power of the dissatisfied nations should be accommodated, not resisted. And that meant the sovereignty and independence of some small countries had to be sacrificed. The growth of German power, Carr argued, made it “inevitable that Czechoslovakia should lose part of its territory and eventually its independence.” George Kennan, then serving as a senior U.S. diplomat in Prague, agreed that Czechoslovakia was “after all, a central European state” and that its “fortunes must in the long run lie with—and not against—the dominant forces in this area.” The anti-interventionists warned that “German imperialism” was simply being replaced by “Anglo-American imperialism.”
Critics of American support for Ukraine have made the same arguments. Obama frequently emphasized that Ukraine was more important to Russia than to the United States, and the same could certainly be said of Taiwan and China. Critics on the left and the right have accused the United States of engaging in imperialism for refusing to rule out Ukraine’s possible future accession to NATO and encouraging Ukrainians in their desire to join the liberal world.
There is much truth in these charges. Whether or not U.S. actions deserve to be called “imperialism,” during World War I and then in the eight decades from World War II until today, the United States has used its power and influence to defend and support the hegemony of liberalism. The defense of Ukraine is a defense of the liberal hegemony. When Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and others say that the United States has a vital interest in Ukraine, they do not mean that the United States will be directly threatened if Ukraine falls. They mean that the liberal world order will be threatened if Ukraine falls.
THE RULEMAKER
Americans are fixated on the supposed moral distinction between “wars of necessity” and “wars of choice.” In their rendering of their own history, Americans remember the country being attacked on December 7, 1941, and Hitler’s declaration of war four days later but forget the American policies that led the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor and led Hitler to declare war. In the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, Americans could see the communists’ aggression and their country’s attempts to defend the “free world,” but they did not recognize that their government’s insistence on stopping communism everywhere was a form of hegemonism. Equating the defense of the “free world” with defense of their own security, Americans regarded every action they took as an act of necessity.
Only when wars have gone badly, as in Vietnam and Iraq, or ended unsatisfactorily, as in World War I, have Americans decided, retrospectively, that those wars were not necessary, that American security was not directly at risk. They forget the way the world looked to them when they first supported those wars—72 percent of Americans polled in March 2003 agreed with the decision to go to war in Iraq. They forget the fears and sense of insecurity they felt at the time and decide that they were led astray by some nefarious conspiracy.
The irony of both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq is that although in later years they were depicted as plots to promote democracy and therefore as prime examples of the dangers of the more expansive definition of U.S. interests, Americans at the time were not thinking about the liberal world order at all. They were thinking only about security. In the post-9/11 environment of fear and danger, Americans believed that both Afghanistan and Iraq posed a direct threat to American security because their governments either harbored terrorists or had weapons of mass destruction that might have ended up in terrorists’ hands. Rightly or wrongly, that was why Americans initially supported what they would later deride as the “forever wars.” As with Vietnam, it was not until the fighting dragged on with no victory in sight that Americans decided that their perceived wars of necessity were in fact wars of choice.
But all of the United States’ wars have been wars of choice, the “good” wars and the “bad” wars, the wars won and the wars lost. Not one was necessary to defend the United States’ direct security; all in one way or another were about shaping the international environment. The Gulf War in 1990–91 and the interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s and in Libya in 2011 were all about managing and defending the liberal world and enforcing its rules.
American leaders often talk about defending the rules-based international order, but Americans do not acknowledge the hegemonism inherent in such a policy. They do not realize that, as Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, the rules themselves are a form of hegemony. They are not neutral but are designed to sustain the international status quo, which for eight decades has been dominated by the American-backed liberal world. The rules-based order is an adjunct to that hegemony. If dissatisfied great powers such as Russia and China abided by these rules for as long as they did, it was not because they were converts to liberalism or because they were content with the world as it was or had inherent respect for the rules. It was because the United States and its allies wielded superior power on behalf of their vision of a desirable world order, and the dissatisfied powers had no safe choice other than acquiescence.
REALITY SETS IN
The long period of great-power peace that followed the Cold War presented a misleadingly comforting picture of the world. In times of peace, the world can appear as international theorists describe it. The leaders of China and Russia can be dealt with diplomatically at conferences of equals, enlisted in sustaining a peaceful balance of power, because, according to the reigning theory of interests, the goals of other great powers cannot be fundamentally different from the United States’ goals. All seek to maximize their security and preserve their sovereignty. All accept the rules of the imagined international order. All spurn ideology as a guide to policy.
The presumption behind all these arguments is that however objectionable Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping might be as rulers, as state actors they can be expected to behave as all leaders have always allegedly behaved. They have legitimate grievances about the way the post–Cold War peace was settled by the United States and its allies, just as Germany and Japan had legitimate grievances about the postwar settlement in 1919. The further presumption is that a reasonable effort to accommodate their legitimate grievances would lead to a more stable peace, just as the accommodation of France after Napoleon helped preserve the peace of the early nineteenth century. In this view, the alternative to the American-backed liberal hegemony is not war, autocracy, and chaos but a more civilized and equitable peace.
Americans have often convinced themselves that other states will follow their preferred rules voluntarily—in the 1920s, when Americans hailed the Kellogg-Briand Pact “outlawing” war; in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when many Americans hoped that the United Nations would take over the burden of preserving the peace; and again in the decades after the Cold War, when the world was presumed to be moving ineluctably toward both peaceful cooperation and the triumph of liberalism. The added benefit, perhaps even the motive, for such beliefs was that if they were true, the United States could cease playing the role of the world’s liberal enforcer and be relieved of all the material and moral costs that entailed.
Yet this comforting picture of the world has periodically been exploded by the brutal realities of international existence. Putin was treated as a crafty statesman, a realist, seeking only to repair the injustice done to Russia by the post–Cold War settlement and with some reasonable arguments on his side—until he launched the invasion of Ukraine, which proved not only his willingness to use force against a weaker neighbor but, in the course of the war, to use all the methods at his disposal to wreak destruction on Ukraine’s civilian population without the slightest scruple. As in the late 1930s, events have forced Americans to see the world for what it is, and it is not the neat and rational place that the theorists have posited. None of the great powers behave as the realists suggest, guided by rational judgments about maximizing security. Like great powers in the past, they act out of beliefs and passions, angers and resentments. There are no separate “state” interests, only the interests and beliefs of the people who inhabit and rule states.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi displaying a pin in Washington, D.C., March 2022
Tom Brenner / Reuters
Consider China. Beijing’s evident willingness to risk war for Taiwan makes little sense in terms of security. No reasoned assessment of the international situation should cause Beijing’s leaders to conclude that Taiwan’s independence would pose any threat of attack on the mainland. Far from maximizing Chinese security, Beijing’s policies toward Taiwan increase the possibility of a catastrophic conflict with the United States. Were China to declare tomorrow that it no longer demanded unification with Taiwan, the Taiwanese and their American backers would cease trying to arm the island to the teeth. Taiwan might even disarm considerably, just as Canada remains disarmed along its border with the United States. But such straightforward material and security considerations are not the driving force behind Chinese policies. Matters of pride, honor, and nationalism, along with the justifiable paranoia of an autocracy trying to maintain power in an age of liberal hegemony—these are the engines of Chinese policies on Taiwan and on many other issues.
Few nations have benefited more than China from the U.S.-backed international order, which has provided markets for Chinese goods, as well as the financing and the information that have allowed the Chinese to recover from the weakness and poverty of the last century. Modern China has enjoyed remarkable security during the past few decades, which was why, until a couple of decades ago, China spent little on defense. Yet this is the world China aims to upend.
Similarly, Putin’s serial invasions of neighboring states have not been driven by a desire to maximize Russia’s security. Russia never enjoyed greater security on its western frontier than during the three decades after the end of the Cold War. Russia was invaded from the west three times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, once by France and twice by Germany, and it had to prepare for the possibility of a western invasion throughout the Cold War. But at no time since the fall of the Berlin Wall has anyone in Moscow had reason to believe that Russia faced the possibility of attack by the West.
That the nations of eastern Europe wished to seek the security and prosperity of membership in the West after the Cold War may have been a blow to Moscow’s pride and a sign of Russia’s post–Cold War weakness. But it did not increase the risk to Russian security. Putin opposed the expansion of NATO not because he feared an attack on Russia but because that expansion would make it increasingly difficult for him to restore Russian control in eastern Europe. Today, as in the past, the United States is an obstacle to Russian and Chinese hegemony. It is not a threat to Russia’s and China’s existence.
Far from maximizing Russian security, Putin has damaged it—and this would have been so even if his invasion had succeeded as planned. He has done so not for reasons having to do with security or economics or any material gains but to overcome the humiliation of lost greatness, to satisfy his sense of his place in Russian history, and perhaps to defend a certain set of beliefs. Putin despises liberalism much as Stalin and Alexander I and most autocrats throughout history despised it—as a pitiful, weak, even sick ideology devoted to nothing but the petty pleasures of the individual when it is the glory of the state and the nation that should have the people’s devotion and for which they should sacrifice.
BREAKING THE CYCLE
That most Americans should regard such actors as threatening to liberalism is a sensible reading of the situation, just as it was sensible to be wary of Hitler even before he had committed any act of aggression or begun the extermination of the Jews. When great powers with a record of hostility to liberalism use armed force to achieve their aims, Americans have generally roused themselves from their inertia, abandoned their narrow definitions of interest, and adopted this broader view of what is worth their sacrifice.
This is a truer realism. Instead of treating the world as made up of impersonal states operating according to their own logic, it understands basic human motivations. It understands that every nation has a unique set of interests peculiar to its history, its geography, its experiences, and its beliefs. Nor are all interests permanent. Americans did not have the same interests in 1822 that they have two centuries later. And the day must come when the United States can no longer contain the challengers to the liberal world order. Technology may eventually make oceans and distances irrelevant. Even the United States itself could change and cease being a liberal nation.
But that day has not yet arrived. Despite frequent assertions to the contrary, the circumstances that made the United States the determining factor in world affairs a century ago persist. Just as two world wars and the Cold War confirmed that would-be autocratic hegemons could not achieve their ambitions as long as the United States was a player, so Putin has discovered the difficulty of accomplishing his goals as long as his weaker neighbors can look for virtually unlimited support from the United States and its allies. There may be reason to hope that Xi also feels the time is not right to challenge the liberal order directly and militarily.
All of the United States’ wars have been wars of choice.
The bigger question, however, has to do with what Americans want. Today, they have been roused again to defend the liberal world. It would be better if they had been roused earlier. Putin spent years probing to see what the Americans would tolerate, first in Georgia in 2008, then in Crimea in 2014, all the while building up his military capacity (not well, as it turns out). The cautious American reaction to both military operations, as well as to Russian military actions in Syria, convinced him to press forward. Are we better off today for not having taken the risks then?
“Know thyself” was the advice of the ancient philosophers. Some critics complain that Americans have not seriously debated and discussed their policies toward either Ukraine or Taiwan, that panic and outrage have drowned out dissenting voices. The critics are right. Americans should have a frank and open debate about what role they want the United States to play in the world.
The first step, however, is to recognize the stakes. The natural trajectory of history in the absence of American leadership has been perfectly apparent: it has not been toward a liberal peace, a stable balance of power, or the development of international laws and institutions. Instead, it leads to the spread of dictatorship and continual great-power conflict. That is where the world was heading in 1917 and 1941. Should the United States reduce its involvement in the world today, the consequences for Europe and Asia are not hard to predict. Great-power conflict and dictatorship have been the norm throughout human history, the liberal peace a brief aberration. Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay.
Foreign Affairs · by Robert Kagan · December 20, 2022
27. Zelensky Knows the Clock Is Ticking
Conclusion:
The war in Ukraine is not over. When the Ukrainian president speaks on Wednesday, he will be a symbol not only of one nation’s struggle against the Kremlin, but of the global fight for democracy. Unfortunately, it is a fight with multiple fronts—and that includes Capitol Hill.
Zelensky Knows the Clock Is Ticking
Ukraine’s president is rushing to the United States for good reason.
By Tom Nichols
The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · December 21, 2022
When Volodymyr Zelensky arrives in Washington—his first time leaving Ukraine since the Russian invasion last winter—he will find a city that is even more obsessed with itself than usual. The Republicans are about to take over the House with a tiny majority and a passel of empowered kooks, and a congressional committee has recommended that a former president of the United States be prosecuted for an attempt to defeat the constitutional transfer of power.
The American drama is important and the stakes for democracy are high, but President Zelensky will touch down in D.C. for a visit to the White House and a joint address to Congress after leaving a war zone where he and his compatriots are literally fighting for their lives and for the survival of their nation against a Russian dictator who intends to erase Ukraine as an independent state from the map.
Washington is already shutting down for the holidays, but the timing of Zelensky’s visit makes sense. Ukrainian cities have been bombarded by the Russians yet again over the past few days in an attempt to break the country’s will to fight. The ground war is otherwise in something like a strategic pause, as Russian President Vladimir Putin gives his forces time to regroup in advance of what will likely be another set of offensives. Putin is in Belarus—the logical jumping-off point for another run at Kyiv—where he is making a public show of giving a belly scratch to his favorite foreign sheepdog, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Franklin Foer: A prayer for Volodymyr Zelensky
In the United States, meanwhile, the Biden administration is about to send a Patriot air-defense battery to Ukraine, an important addition to Ukraine’s ability to defend against Russian air and missile attacks. This is a significant step that will require training Ukrainians to operate the Patriot system and deepen cooperation between the United States, NATO, and the Ukraine. Congress, meanwhile, is about to decide on sending billions more in aid. Ukraine needs this money not only to continue the fight, but also for its people to survive as they face a harsh winter of violence from the man who vows never to end this war until Ukraine is under his control.
It seems apparent that Zelensky decided to make the trip to Washington because he is worried about the imminent GOP takeover of the House. He should be. Many of the Republicans who are about to become members of the majority—and to chair committees—have descended into reflexive mulishness about Ukraine, opposing whatever it is that President Joe Biden wants, solely as a matter of partisan showboating. Goaded on by the trolls and contrarians in the conservative press, people who have professed to care little what was happening in Ukraine a year ago, have pledged to exercise tight “oversight” of U.S. aid to Ukraine—as though the largest war in Europe since World War II is an over-budget consulting contract in suburban Virginia.
We do not yet know what Zelensky intends to say during this visit, particularly in his address to Congress. If all goes as planned he will, of course, receive a boost in the international community from a handshake with Biden, who has done a masterful job of holding the Western alliance together in the face of Putin’s threats. (A White House meeting would also likely produce another jolt of vitriol in Moscow; the last missile barrage was almost certainly a response to the news about the Patriot missiles.) Zelensky is poised to move from being a beleaguered regional leader sending videos from a bunker to a place, well-deserved and overdue, on the world stage as a statesman more than equal to the panicking KGB officer who is trying to kill him.
Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg: Liberation without victory
The real question, though, is whether anything Zelensky can say will matter to a Republican Party that has decided to torment the ghost of Ronald Reagan by taking sides with a neo-imperial Soviet nostalgist.
Overall, of course, rank-and-file Republicans support aiding Ukraine against Russia. But the Trumpian GOP is now controlled by its fringe, the same activists and primary voters who wear the “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat” T-shirts. Although much of the aid for Ukraine (including the Patriots) is already in the pipeline, GOP grandstanding for the base could create more danger for Ukraine by encouraging Putin to believe that America’s commitment to freedom will wane over time. Indeed, the Russian president’s decision to invade Ukraine, as The New York Times reported this weekend, was predicated in part on his belief in the West’s weakness and short attention span.
Republicans performing for their base are unlikely to change their views now. But Zelensky is about to speak to all of America, and his presence in Washington will help remind people that this is not some esoteric foreign-policy tangle, but a brutal, bloody human contest between democracy and authoritarianism. His presence in front of a divided Congress might—at least, we can hope—help Americans ignore the cartoonish objections of right-wing pundits and strengthen the broader bipartisan coalition in the United States dedicated to protecting freedom in Europe and around the world.
The war in Ukraine is not over. When the Ukrainian president speaks on Wednesday, he will be a symbol not only of one nation’s struggle against the Kremlin, but of the global fight for democracy. Unfortunately, it is a fight with multiple fronts—and that includes Capitol Hill.
The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · December 21, 2022
28. The U.S.-Israel Operations-Technology Working Group Gets Busy
The U.S.-Israel Operations-Technology Working Group Gets Busy
fdd.org · by Bradley Bowman CMPP Senior Director · December 20, 2022
Leaders from the Pentagon and Israel’s Ministry of Defense convened the second meeting of the U.S.-Israel Operations-Technology Group (OTWG) in Israel last month to advance research and development (R&D) cooperation between the two militaries. If both governments continue to seize the opportunity and Congress holds the OTWG accountable for tangible results, the working group can help ensure that American and Israeli warfighters do not confront adversaries wielding more sophisticated weapons.
With bipartisan congressional leadership by Sens. Gary Peters (D-MI), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) as well as Reps. Joe Wilson (R-SC), Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), and others, Congress authorized the establishment of the OTWG in Section 1299M of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2021, which became law on January 1, 2021.
The Department of Defense and Israel’s Ministry of Defense then developed a memorandum of understanding and established the OTWG on November 1, 2021. The group convened its inaugural meeting in the United States in May 2022.
Following that meeting, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee both used their respective committee reports for the annual defense bill to applaud the establishment of the OTWG and reiterate the OTWG’s four purposes explicitly. These include:
(1) Providing a standing forum for the United States and Israel to systematically share intelligence-formed military capability requirements;
(2) Identifying military capability requirements common to the Department of Defense and the Ministry of Defense of Israel;
(3) Assisting defense suppliers in the United States and Israel by assessing recommendations from such defense suppliers with respect to joint science, technology, research, development, test, evaluation, and production efforts; and
(4) Developing, as feasible and advisable, combined United States-Israel plans to research, develop, procure, and field weapon systems and military capabilities as quickly and economically as possible to meet common capability requirements of the Department and the Ministry of Defense of Israel.
In summary, the OTWG seeks to identify vital military requirements shared by both militaries as early as possible, receive proposals from American and Israeli industry to quickly meet those requirements, and then establish combined plans to develop and field those capabilities to both militaries as quickly as possible. That process, spurred by accountability to Congress, can expedite the delivery of game-changing technologies and capabilities.
To be sure, the United States and Israel already enjoy a deep defense partnership. Nevertheless, dangerous military capability gaps continued to emerge in recent years that the OTWG can prevent going forward.
Consider, for example, that it took the Pentagon until 2019 to acquire for U.S. tanks Israeli-made active protection systems that the Israel Defense Forces has used since 2011. Consequently, U.S. soldiers deployed for years lacking this cutting-edge protection against missiles and rockets, subjecting those troops to unnecessary risk.
Given the trajectory of the U.S. competition with China, Americans may pay a higher cost for such delays in the future. The Pentagon’s annual China Military Power Report published last month makes clear that Beijing is sprinting to develop advanced capabilities designed to defeat U.S. forces. The United States often takes far too long to go from concept to fielded combat capability. Working with Israel, a country known for fielding new cutting-edge combat capabilities quickly, can help ensure American warfighters have what they need sooner so they can accomplish their missions and return home safely.
Similarly, when Israel waits for extended periods for U.S. government agencies to approve combined R&D programs, the urgency of the threats often forces Jerusalem to forge ahead on its own. When that happens, the United States misses out on Israeli agility in fielding new weapons, and Israel misses out on American innovations and economies of scale (i.e., lower unit costs based on larger purchases), depriving Israel of precious opportunities to stretch its finite defense budget. That dynamic also prevents the two militaries from fielding the same capabilities simultaneously, which would facilitate more effective combined training and operations.
If the meeting last month in Israel is any indication, the U.S. Department of Defense and Israel’s Ministry of Defense see the opportunity, take the OTWG’s four tasks seriously, and are moving with a sense of urgency. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu and her Israeli counterpart, Brig. Gen. (Res.) Dr. Daniel Gold, the head of Defense Research and Development, convened both the May and November meetings.
They have established six sub-working groups: artificial intelligence/autonomy, directed energy, counter-unmanned aerial systems, biotechnology, integrated network systems-of-systems, and hypersonic capabilities. Not surprisingly, these areas of focus mirror some of the Department of Defense’s top R&D priorities.
The OTWG’s early momentum is good news for the security of the United States and Israel. The Biden administration’s next report to Congress on the OTWG’s performance is due on March 15, 2023, according to the 2021 NDAA. Members of the armed services committees will also expect regular updates from Under Secretary Shyu on the OTWG’s progress in fulfilling its responsibilities and delivering on expected results.
Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Brad and CMPP, please subscribe HERE. Follow Brad on Twitter at @Brad_L_Bowman. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CMPP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Bradley Bowman CMPP Senior Director · December 20, 2022
29. Is AI the right fit for predictive military maintenance?
Conclusion:
The lesson we can all take from this is that computers, the Internet and AI may be the future, but not for everything and not without training, testing and analyzing of results to see where they fit in.
Is AI the right fit for predictive military maintenance?
thecipherbrief.com
Fine Print
December 20th, 2022 by Walter Pincus, |
Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.
View all articles by Walter Pincus
OPINION — The DoD is continually challenged to provide battle-ready ground combat systems, ships, submarines and aircraft to its warfighters, spending nearly $90 billion each year on weapon systems maintenance, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that was sent to Congress on December 8.
Predictive maintenance defined – is a computer-driven technique used to predict the future failure of a component of a weapon or delivery system, so that the Defense Department (DoD) and military services can plan to replace components before they fail.
As the GAO report put it, “Often used in the private sector, predictive maintenance relies on personnel to use condition-monitoring technology and data analytics to schedule maintenance based on evidence of need.”
However, the report said, “The performance of maintenance depends on having a sufficient number of skilled personnel available to perform the work, parts available to use in maintenance, and a sufficient understanding of technology and the technological resources to complete maintenance.”
I picked this rather complex subject to illustrate the problem that the Pentagon – and perhaps we all face – as we transition into a computer, Internet and Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominated world.
I’m writing about the difficulty DoD has had in adopting the most modern computer-driven techniques for maintaining weapons and their delivery systems, but this situation is applicable to other elements within the military and eventually, in most people’s private lives.
According to a DoD Inspector General report released this past June 13, DoD in 2007, issued instructions which required the military services and DoD agencies to gather data about all new and current weapons system components, and fleet conditions –“when technically feasible and beneficial” — to more accurately forecast maintenance requirements, thus enabling preventive maintenance.”
Yes, both the DoD IG and the GAO conducted overlapping studies of predictive maintenance this year. The DoD IG report pointed out that over time, there have been two main categories of DoD maintenance.
Reactive maintenance is when personnel perform maintenance “for items expected to run to failure or those items that fail in an unplanned or unscheduled manner.” Proactive or conditioned-based maintenance took place based on “inspection, assessment, prognostic testing (predicting future failures), diagnostic testing (identifying current failures), servicing, and scheduled replacement or overhaul,” according to the DoD IG report.
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Predictive maintenance starts with collected data on the condition of components whose algorithms lead into an AI system that forecasts the need for maintenance. Despite the 2007 instructions, DoD officials did not develop comprehensive policies or strategic plans and did not develop training tailored to the appropriate levels necessary to implement predictive maintenance strategies.
Each of the services carried out their own pilot projects. For example, the GAO reported in 2018, an Army unit maintaining Medium Tactical Vehicles in Hawaii used predictive maintenance techniques to adjust hours for tasks such as oil changes and saved 6,100 hours of labor. The Army exempted the unit from personnel reductions to allow maintenance personnel to address other needs, according to Army officials.
However, the GAO also found, “Officials from all four military services stated that maintenance personnel are sometimes reluctant to complete predictive maintenance due in part to skepticism about the validity of predictions. For example, according to Navy officials, during the Navy’s first demonstration of predictive maintenance aboard a ship, ship’s crew did not take action to address predictive maintenance prompts due to a variety of issues that caused skepticism among end users, such as incorrect algorithms. Officials stated a second demonstration aboard the same ship combined corrections to algorithms with coaching on predictive maintenance that resulted in a higher rate of action as the ship’s crew began to understand the validity of the concept. Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force officials also said that overburdened personnel are hesitant to conduct maintenance on something that is not broken yet, or to change parameters of preventive maintenance without understanding why.”
While the military services are not close to fully implementing predictive maintenance, they have been replacing parts periodically based on forecasts, using software and health monitoring tools to improve condition-based maintenance (preventive), or improving predictive forecasts with pilot programs, the DoD IG found.
The military services are taking steps to adapt sensors and analytics to current weapon systems as a necessary step to integrate predictive maintenance with preventive maintenance
For example, according to the DoD IG report, the Air Force has two dashboards tracking maintenance data for 16 weapon systems that feed into the enhanced Reliability-Centered Maintenance dashboard to make predictive maintenance forecast decisions and produce monthly reports of how many parts or components personnel removed due to those forecasts.
An Army official stated that the UH-60 Black Hawk platform has been “equipped with software that understands what the maintenance thresholds are and identifies whether a part is starting to see a negative trend so maintainers can replace that component,” according to the DoD IG.
A Naval Air Systems Command official told the DoD IG staff that the F/A-18 Hornet uses a tool that identifies components experiencing degradation and flags the part before failure, allowing maintainers to preventatively replace a part before the part failed. Navy officials also said that Naval Sea Systems Command has a digital modeling concept to identify potential problems with Navy maintainers to reduce the amount of manual inspections and saved hundreds of labor hours.
Marine Corps officials told DoD staff they are working to add data sensors on the Medium Tactical Vehicle replacement and Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and have worked with the contractor to validate predictive maintenance and historical data analysis to use lessons learned from these efforts.
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Both the DoD IG and GAO found the military services are developing, or have developed, training to support service-wide implementation of predictive maintenance. The GAO people observed Army personnel getting basic instructions on how to transfer data from ground combat systems and aircraft and how to use predictive maintenance dashboards. The Marine Corps and Navy also showed they had developed training at varying levels and comprehensiveness to their sustainment workforces.
The GAO report found, “The military services have not consistently adopted and tracked implementation of predictive maintenance,” and would be in a better position “to determine how, when, and where to adopt predictive maintenance” if they developed “action plans and milestones for current weapon systems.”
The military services, according to the GAO, also need “outcome-related objectives for predictive maintenance, a process for evaluating progress, and a framework to develop and track milestones of implementation…[Then] the military services will be better positioned to gauge progress and results to inform decision makers about the changes being made to support
increased readiness.”
In the end, the GAO said, “We agree that not all weapon systems may be suitable candidates for predictive maintenance, and that deliberate study and analysis will help determine which weapon systems should implement predictive maintenance.”
The lesson we can all take from this is that computers, the Internet and AI may be the future, but not for everything and not without training, testing and analyzing of results to see where they fit in.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
30. ‘I’m about to die’ — Former Army paratrooper describes surviving a jump with a broken parachute
What a story.
"I ain't gonna jump no more" as the song goes.
‘I’m about to die’ — Former Army paratrooper describes surviving a jump with a broken parachute
“I’m 21, I’m about to die; I think I’ve been living my life wrong.”
BY DAVID ROZA | PUBLISHED DEC 19, 2022 10:25 AM
taskandpurpose.com · by David Roza · December 19, 2022
It was a perfect night for jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. The moon was full and the sky was clear over Fort Bragg, North Carolina that evening in 1997 as Army Spc. Justin Connaher and the rest of his company with the 82nd Airborne Division lifted off aboard a C-141 Starlifter. Like any good paratrooper, Connaher had checked his parachute countless times that day and now looked forward to a 30-second ride back to Earth.
Instead, what Connaher got that night would not only break his body but also force him to find a new identity and sense of purpose.
The soldier’s incredible story of survival and strength was captured in a recent press release from Airman 1st Class Julia Lebens of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, where Connaher currently works as an award-winning photographer and mentor to young photojournalists.
Something supernatural appears to have been at work that day. Before the jump, Connaher and the rest of the company had taken turns shaking a broken Magic Eight Ball on the company executive officer’s desk. Each paratrooper asked the Eight Ball if they were going to “burn in” on the jump. The broken toy responded “yes” to every person, except Connaher. For some reason when he asked, the Eight Ball said “no,” the only time it had ever said so, according to the press release.
Paratroopers assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division prepare to exit an Air Force C-17 Globemaster aircraft to conduct a nighttime combat airborne operation onto Fort Bragg’s Sicily Drop Zone, Sept. 21, 2018. (Sgt. Cody Parsons/U.S. Army)
Though the response unnerved Connaher, he prepared for the jump like everybody else and stepped out the aircraft door. But he soon realized he was falling faster than his fellow soldiers, which did not make sense at his light weight of 130 pounds.
“Looking up, he realized something was seriously wrong – his parachute had collapsed, looking like a half-rolled cigarette,” according to the press release.
As the ground rose to meet him, Connaher tried his reserve chute, but it did not release. It was a complete malfunction.
“I have this coming, maybe I haven’t lived my life right,’” the soldier thought at the time. “I’m 21, I’m about to die; I think I’ve been living my life wrong.”
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Remembering what his battalion commander said before each jump, Connaher locked his feet and knees together, bent his knees slightly, covered his face with his hands and arms and awaited impact. He heard a terrible crack and woke up in a hospital with a grocery list of terrible injuries. He was partially paralyzed, unable to see. Both his knees, his right pinky, right wrist, two ribs and several teeth were broken, his skull fractured in three places and every bone in his feet and ankles was shattered. Several of the vertebrae in his neck and back were fractured, his fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae were fused, his colon and lower intestine were punctured, and he also had extensive damage to internal organs.
“The rest of his life would be spent recovering from this one day,” the press release said. “He’d have seizures, procedures, pain, Connaher had his final rites said to him twice while in the hospital because of residual effects from his accident.”
But those injuries did not spare him from the scorn of his salty Army doctor.
“I know who you are, you son of a bitch,” said the doctor, who knew Connaher from an earlier assignment at Fort Benning, Georgia. “You never came back for your appointment.”
Army Pfc. Evan Samuel, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 377th Parachute Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, U.S. Army Alaska, makes his way to a rally point after conducting a parachute jump on Malemute drop zone at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, Dec. 11, 2019. (Justin Connaher/U.S. Air Force)
A lifelong dream
Blowing off that earlier appointment was just one step of a lifelong journey where Connaher put his dream of becoming a paratrooper over everything else, including his own safety.
When he was seven years old, Connaher jumped off the roof of his home in Wausau, Wisconsin with nothing but a blanket as a parachute. He nearly broke his arm, but the pain did not sway him off course. Connaher’s father was a Vietnam-era Air Force veteran, and his grandfather served in the Army in World War II. He pored over his grandfather’s books about World War II, where the paratroopers stood out for their “different, cooler clothes … and got to fly in airplanes,” and also jump out of them, the press release said.
Within a few days of graduating high school, Connaher was on his way to Fort Benning. Boot camp provided its well-honed rude awakening, which in the early 1990s involved drill sergeants grabbing, throwing, and even punching recruits when nobody was looking. In jump school, a drill instructor even broke Connaher’s nose because he did not understand a command.
While at Fort Benning, Connaher had his first encounter with the doctor after reporting mysterious pain. It was suspected that he had a rare disease, but Connaher could not accept that diagnosis because it could endanger his dream of becoming a paratrooper. Rather than show up for a test, he ignored the pain. Connaher found out years later that he had suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy known as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a condition that makes muscles waste away, especially with the active life of a paratrooper.
The young soldier did not know that yet: instead, he was more concerned with joining an airborne unit. For a while, that seemed a distant goal, because he was first assigned to a heavy anti-armor infantry unit and then as a truck driver in “muggy, smelly Fort Stewart, Georgia,” the press release said.
Connaher was miserable there, but a noncommissioned officer gave him good advice: if the young soldier volunteered to serve in South Korea for a year, he would have a high chance of earning a slot at the storied 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. Connaher took his advice, and after a year in South Korea he finally joined the ranks of a unit he had idolized since childhood.
The soldier soon found out that the 82nd had higher standards than his previous units. Connaher “had to be fast and strong,” but he was ready for the challenge. The paratrooper rose to become a team leader, then a squad leader and soon was trusted with a staff sergeant position despite being two ranks below that as a specialist. He spent much of his free time reading regulations and field manuals, and several people told him he “had the makings of a sergeant major of the Army,” the press release said.
“I don’t know about that; there’s only one of those,” Connaher said in the press release. Still, the comments rang true with the fact that the life of an Army paratrooper was all the soldier ever wanted.
U.S. Army Paratroopers assigned to Crow Company, 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division execute a brigade-level live fire exercise at Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) Rotation 23-02 on Fort Polk, Louisiana, Nov. 14, 2022 (Sgt. Jacob Moir/U.S. Army)
‘If I don’t do this one more time, I’ll kill myself‘
Connaher’s dream life came to a terrible halt that night in 1997. Waking up the next day in Womack Army Hospital was the painful start of a new life for Connaher, one that could have ended shortly after it began if not for a risky stunt. Connaher had spent his entire life wanting to jump out of airplanes, so he could not let the last jump be a botched one. He needed one more jump to set things right.
Easier said than done: after nine months in and out of the hospital, Connaher was put on a medical profile that forbade him from running, jumping, marching, rucking or any other strenuous activity from his old life. But on some level, he was still the seven-year-old who jumped off his roof with a blanket, so one day he hid behind a tall soldier while trying to sneak on board a jump flight. It almost worked until a platoon sergeant spotted him and chased him with a flurry of expletives into the first sergeant’s office.
“What are you doing?” the first sergeant asked, not as a higher-ranked soldier but as a fellow man.
“I need to jump one more time,” said Connaher. “I’m getting out of the Army next week, and if I don’t do this one more time, I’ll kill myself. I have to do this or I’ll be afraid of this for the rest of my life until I kill myself.”
Leaning back in his chair, the first sergeant said “Okay. Grab your shit, you’re on the job. But if you die, your mom’s not getting your insurance money.”
It was not a pretty jump and Connaher nearly broke both his legs. But he only sprained an ankle and walked away, ready to put his parachuting days behind him. He was out of the Army a week later, but he did not know what to do next.
‘Here’s a way that I can be creative’
Connaher now found himself dealing with health issues, suicidal thoughts, depression, and substance abuse as he tried to figure out who he was without the Army. At one point he even “bought the supplies” to kill himself, and may have done so if not for the intervention of people who cared for him, the press release said. With their support, he went to school and double majored in photography and photojournalism, though he had to work harder than the other students due to his head injury. That injury was a double-edged sword, because he ended up reconnecting with the woman who would become his wife “over migraines, of all things,” the press release said.
Though he could no longer “be all he could be,” as a paratrooper, Connaher decided he would become the best photographer he could be as a photojournalist for the Gannett media company, which owns publications such as USA Today. He worked there for nearly a decade until he heard of an even better opportunity: working at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, which needed a photographer who could work with an airborne unit.
“I can’t jump anymore, I can’t be an infantryman anymore,” Connaher said. “But here’s a way that I can be creative, and do these new things and use these newer skills that give my life purpose, joy, and meaning. I can marry that with this thing that I had originally wanted since I was a little kid and still be a part of that. That belonging, that purpose, that mission that I had always wanted for myself.”
Justin Connaher, a 673d Air Base Wing Public Affairs photographer, poses for a portrait at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, Dec. 14, 2022. Connaher is a U.S. Army veteran who retired due to a paratrooping accident and now serves as a photographer at JBER. (Airman 1st Class Julia Lebens/U.S. Air Force)
Like he had as a paratrooper, Connaher excelled at his new position. He was named Air Force Civilian Photographer of the Year three times and Pacific Air Forces Civilian Photographer of the year three times. In January 2016, an airman at JBER claimed that a photographer’s tools are more important than their skills; in response, Connaher claimed the title of Air Force Civilian Photographer of the Year that year with nothing but a “micro 4/3ds camera and a cheap little prime lens,” the press release said.
“It was hubris, it was arrogance on my part,” he said in the press release. “But come the next year, I won again with this little cheapy camera. Some people, they hit a midlife crisis and they cheat on their spouse, or they buy a motorcycle … I went a different way with it … I had to make a change inside of myself, instead of making these external changes.”
Winning the challenge had an unexpected effect on Connaher. He realized that he no longer wanted to be the best simply to be better than others. Instead, he wanted to help others. After that, he stopped participating in competitions.
“I’m good at what I do, but I’m not the best, I’m not the greatest thing since sliced bread,” said Connaher. “I can help other people, and in that way I help the Air Force. I help the airmen that I work with, and that gives me joy.”
‘Continue to fight’
That mindset has made an impact on the young airmen who work with Connaher at JBER, where the paratrooper-turned-photographer brings not only the know-how from decades behind the camera, but also the wisdom to focus on the most important parts of the job.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned from him is that it doesn’t matter what product I bring back from an assignment, what matters is that you learned something from it,” Airman 1st Class Shelimar Rivera Rosado, a public affairs apprentice at JBER, said in the press release. “Sometimes shoots don’t go as planned, and we have to improvise, but the most important thing is how we handle the situation.”
“He strives to push us to grow and improve, and always provide valuable advice, critiques, and feedback,” said Senior Airman Patrick Sullivan, a public affairs journeyman. “He’s been an incredibly valuable mentor to me, both as a photographer and in the career as a whole, and the shop is lucky to have him on the team.”
Connaher still has to manage the pain from his accident all those years ago, but he also sips coffee from an airborne infantry coffee cup in between dealing jokes and advice with his fellow public affairs workers. Connaher made the most of the cards he was dealt, all the way from the hospital to Alaska.
“To anyone who’s dealing with a traumatic injury or a family member who’s dealing with traumatic health issues…continue to fight,” he said. “Continue to give every day the best that you can in that day because things will get better.”
If you’re thinking about suicide, are worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, the Lifeline network is available 24/7 across the United States. Reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling or texting 988 and you’ll be connected to trained counselors.
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taskandpurpose.com · by David Roza · December 19, 2022
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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